A Letter From The Tamils In Malacca From 1527

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Allow me to begin with a blast from our past set in Malaysian time, not to the ancient Hindu-Buddhist time of Quedarram, Kedah, and the Bujang Valley.
We won’t be talking about the times of the Cholas, the Chulans either, when that redoubtable Tamil dynasty ruled these parts in the 10th and 11th centuries, but to the relatively recent time of Portuguese Malacca after its fall in 1511 to Afonso de Albuquerque.
Shunned by the rulers and traders of the Nusantara and further west by merchants in Cairo, Jeddah, Aden and Oman, Portuguese Malacca quickly descended into a shadow of her former self.
Her once-crowded port saw the arrival of no more than a handful of neutral trading ships each year.
ADSThe Gujarati and local merchants had largely fled the port but the tough and thriving Tamils stayed on.
Enterprising Tamils
The Suma Oriental (1514-15) of Tome Pires makes ample reference to the powerful Keling, Quelin, merchants of Malacca.
Two of them, Nina Chatu, also known as Setu Nayinar, and Suryadeva, were men of immense wealth and power. Initially, they found the Portuguese difficult but being old hands in these parts, they held their own, winning them over. Nina Chatu briefly even held the high office of “Bendahara”.
Using Malacca as his base, Nina Chatu focused largely on the textile and rice trade of the littoral ports and regions of the Bay of Bengal as far as Pegu, while Suryadeva dealt in cloves, nutmeg, and mace, securing his supplies from distant Ternate and Tidore and the Banda islands.
Malacca’s flagging fortunes as an emporium were being revived, albeit slowly, by these Tamil magnates and merchants.
They sent ships fitted out at their own expense or in partnership with the Portuguese Crown to various ports in Siam, Tavoy, Pegu, the Nusantara, the Coromandel Coast, and eventually to China.
They also carried Portuguese goods, receiving artillery pieces on loan from the armoury in the A Famosa for protection. Portuguese Malacca was rebuilding her old trade networks and establishing new ones.
But all was not rosy for the Tamil merchants, traders, and shippers of Old Malacca. In 1527, they wrote a letter to the Portuguese king, John III, in Lisbon.
That lengthy missive ends in 11 lines of Tamil names and formulaic phrases to indicate freewill and volition like “en ellatu” and “ippati ariven”. The latter translates to: “I thus make it known”. 
What were they making known?
They made it known they were the backbone of Malacca’s trade and economy; that they were often called upon to extend loans to meet shortfalls in colonial expenditure; that barring exceptions, the actions of the Crown’s servants were oppressive and demeaning; and they expressed unhappiness at the proselytising activities of the Catholic priests among their own household staff and servants.
ADSA dramatic change in fortunes 
The more some things change, the more they remain the same. But we must move on, fast-forwarding to the 19th century. Malacca, Penang, and Singapore were now British colonies.
For centuries past, a leading merchant community in these parts, the Tamils in their thousands, were now coolies in these British colonies building roads, railways, bridges, ports, gardens and civic buildings for a pittance.
How did this proud race of people who trace the glory of their language and culture to the “Sangam period” and the Thirukkural going back some two millenia, be reduced to being coolies in these parts?
The painful answer: the depredations of two centuries of East India Company rule had all but destroyed a self-sufficient society known for its textiles, wootz steel, temples, arts, music, dancing, and drama. 
But the worst was yet to come. The rise of the plantation industry, first sugar cane and coffee and later rubber, saw the arrival of millions of men, women, and children as indentured labour from the broken and impoverished parts of South India.
International capitalism working under the aegis of empire had cunningly circumvented the practice of slavery, abolished decades earlier in most parts of the world.
First a trickle and then a flood, they were shipped here under horrific conditions and put to work draining swamps, terracing hills, and clearing jungles.
Before long, there was not an acre of plantation land in this country that had not been drenched by the blood, sweat, and tears of largely Tamil labour. It was by any account the most brutal and exploitative chapter in European colonialism in the East.
And what sustained these poor folk, cut off from their larger society? It was their faith and their culture! The temples and Tamil schools that dot the remotest corners of this land bear testimony to this fact.
“Without a temple, our lives are incomplete,” insisted the elders among them. Steadfastly holding on to the faith of their forefathers, they built temples to house the deities they had left behind.
And in these temples, built against great odds and to their everlasting credit, generations of indentured labour kept alive the soul-sustaining rituals and traditions of their ancient culture and their faith.
Why should anyone be surprised when their descendants bristle with anger and disgust at those who deride their faith in a most vile manner or threaten to destroy their temples? But that is another story.
A picture can paint a thousand words but it can miss the story. Here are some old photographs to paint the picture.
And here is a quick synopsis of the missing story: Condemned to a harsh life and left in isolation, estate labourers soon found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder and were often accused of bringing this misfortune upon their own heads by their own sins. Imagine that!
Conveniently disregarded was the fact that indentured labour in the urban centres fared a whole lot better than those toiling in rubber estates and that freely recruited South Indian clerks, technicians and teachers played a key role in turning British Malaya and the Straits Settlements into a modern colony.
Their children, in turn, made a name for themselves in the professions and the civil service, pre-Merdeka.
But before all that came Henry Ford and his mass-produced motor car with rubber tyres. World demand for rubber shot through the roof.
The “Rubber Boom” was followed by the “Rubber Mania”. On a single day, March 1, 1910, nine rubber companies were listed on the London Stock Exchange even as estate workers were dying in the thousands through malnutrition, disease and overwork.
The success of rubber also fuelled a growing arrogance among colonial officials, who now took to maligning the very community that was the source of this newfound wealth.
The historical word “Keling”, referring to the people of the Coromandel coast, had now become a racial epithet. The noted orientalist and colonial official, Richard Windstedt, thought the Tamil language was used in Hell.
To add insult to the injuries of the past, revisionist historians and political stalwarts, in “anticipatory obedience” to their party bosses in the corridors of power now insist on the fiction that our history in this land began with the plantation industry; that we should be ever grateful citizens for being given work and three meagre meals a day, our past services rendered to this country all but ignored.
What is to be done now?
Our conscience is clear: we have stood by this country through thick and thin, including the Malayan Emergency. Yet we feel cheated out of our just rewards in the civil service, in academia, in tertiary education, in the professions, in the uniformed services, in business and in politics.
And not for us the sumptuous dinner table with two groups of people seated around it - one politically powerful and the other, an economic giant. Are we to feed on the crumbs, sandwiched between these two groups?
Make no mistake, this paper is not a lament or a cry for justice or a call for redress. The time for that has come and gone. Properly understood, the past should never be turned into a begging bowl or a donation bin.
Surely, we must have noticed that handouts and freebies erode the resilience and strength of a people and a society. Look all around us! We must never take that route and instead reaffirm our faith in our own manifest talents and abilities.
So, in the manner of Lenin, we must ask ourselves, “What is to be done now?” By that, we mean, “What can we do to help ourselves?”
We are an ancient people and we understand perfectly that history, like time, marches on; that its flow cannot be reversed; that any attempt to re-enact the ancient past is both futile and foolhardy; that no people on earth have prospered by wanting to live in a bygone era, whether glorious or imagined.
The future and the world beckon us all in ways we can scarcely imagine!
And we are also keenly aware that some five decades ago, our hopes and expectations were raised that some form of redress would soon be forthcoming; that three generations of past sacrifices and relentless toil would soon be recognised and rewarded.
But these hopes and expectations were dashed by “leaders” who have fallen well short of being true nation-builders and statespersons. As a consequence, there is now only distrust and disillusionment between us and our politicians.
So again we ask, “What can we do to help ourselves?” Our course of action must be both redemptive and restorative.
The stakes have never been higher. If nothing is done, there is every danger we will become a permanently marginalised people, a “rump” people with neither economic power nor political clout.
There is no clearer sign of this “rumpness” than when some among us take much pride and pleasure in denouncing their own ethnicity. But thankfully, the rest of us are made of sterner stuff!
Through our blood, sweat, and tears
Which brings us to this important question: how can our actions be both restorative and redemptive?
Once again we turn to history for answers and in particular to “A Note on the Polish Problem”, a paper written in 1918 by the novelist, Joseph Conrad, whose novella “The Heart Of Darkness”, based on his experiences in the Belgian Congo, makes out the case that at the centre of any colonial enterprise is an evil mind if not a dark heart.
Conrad was a naturalised British citizen born in what is now Poland. He had never forgotten his roots or the fact that after two centuries of war and repeated partitions by two powerful neighbours, Russia and Prussia, the Poles had ended up as a rump people within a rump state, hence the choice of “A Note on the Indian Problem” as part of the title of this paper.
Here are some excerpts from Conrad’s paper that bear a strange and uncanny resemblance to our present plight:
“... for at that time, Poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in humanitarian illusions…”
“The strength arrayed against her was just overwhelming.”
“Thus, even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the course of history. Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure. It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise, the victims do not count.”
“... the claim of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of an uneasy conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction, were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the crime.”
“What was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact the nation, stabbed to the heart, refused to grow miserable and cold.”
“Since that time, we have come to be regarded simply as a nuisance. It’s very disagreeable.”
“Therein lies the strength and the future of the thing so strictly forbidden… It comes into the world morally free, not in virtue of its sufferings but in virtue of its miraculous rebirth and of its ancient claims for services rendered...”
We can and we must redeem ourselves through our own blood, sweat and tears! There is no better way. And then we too can say, like Conrad, contemplating the rebirth of a Poland:
“And it’s just as well! Providence in its inscrutable way has been merciful; for had it been otherwise, the load of gratitude would be too great, the sense of obligation too crushing, the joy of deliverance too fearful for mortals!”
I must now leave you with some tantalising questions with regards to the letter sent by the Tamils to King John III, written in Portuguese by a junior chamberlain and scribe, escrivo, then serving in Malacca, one Manuel Gomez.
What was the shared common language of Manuel Gomez and the Tamil merchants, without which that letter could not have been written? Was it Malay? Was it Tamil? Or was it possibly Portuguese? - Mkini
MR Chandran is a former national chairperson and director of the Incorporated Society of Planters (ISP) and the founding chief executive of the Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA).
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.

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