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By Root 4621 0

become ambassadors for the new Indian republic, and as pre-war figureheads resurfaced, many reaffirmed their loyalty to the British Empire.11 The community was effectively leaderless. In August 1946, on Nehru’s advice, a former minister of Bose’s provisional government, John Thivy, who had recently been released from a British jail, founded a Malayan Indian Congress. In its early days the new party remained firmly anchored to the subcontinent. ‘Indians in East Asia’, Thivy argued, ‘are the Ambassadors of India.’ He promoted Hindi, although the language had virtually no native speakers among Indians in Malaya, and opposed the proposals for a Malayan Union citizenship in order to safeguard dual-citizenship rights for Malaya’s Indians. But as they watched the death throes of the Raj, Indian leaders in Singapore and Malaya realized they could no longer trust New Delhi. In early 1947 Thivy took further advice from Congress in India and conceded that Indians should seek their Swaraj in Malaya and adopt local citizenship. He allied the Malayan Indian Congress with the Malayan Democratic Union and other parties of the left. But Indians remained ambivalent about Malayan politics. Thivy himself stepped down as party leader in July to take up a diplomatic appointment as agent of the government of India, and the party continued to attend Congress meetings in India until 1950.12 The labouring masses were disenchanted with an elite who claimed to speak for them, yet ignored their immediate concerns. It was an article of faith of the Penang shop and municipal workers that they would trust no man who wore trousers or spoke English.13

The independence of India was not an occasion for celebration in Malaya, and it left the Indian community more divided than ever and anxious about their future. The Sikhs and other minorities revived their separate associations; Indian Muslims supported a local branch of the Muslim League. At the time of the Calcutta killings there was communal violence in Singapore. The British slapped censorship on publications from India, and attributed the trouble to local gang rivalry. But on Penang, the largest centre of Indian Muslim settlement, there were protracted tensions between Hindu and Muslim workers in rival trade unions.14 The island was home to a distinctive community of Straits-born Hindustani Muslims, or Jawi Peranakan, and many of them lent spiritual support to Pakistan. Yet Lahore was far away, and offered little hope of protection. The majority chose to identify more closely with their fellow-Muslims, the Malays. But relations between them had a history of tension. Malay nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s had asserted the precedence of Malays of ‘full blood’ over those of Indian or other Muslim descent. But facing bigger political challenges after the war, the Malay community was now more willing to absorb resourceful co-religionists. Jawi Peranakan leaders joined the conservative United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and, in time, became a distinct network within it. In 1947, the son of a Jawi Peranakan headmaster from neighbouring Kedah began to write a lively and acerbic column on Malay affairs for the Straits Times, under an Anglicized nom de plume, ‘Che Dat’. It showed an unwavering identification with the Malay people, and an unsentimental view of the challenges they faced; Mahathir Mohamad would later become one of the Malay community’s strongest defenders and most astringent critics, Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister and ‘father of modernization’.15

For the British in Southeast Asia the loss of the Raj also meant the loss of its cheap labour. Under pressure from Thivy and others in Malaya, Nehru refused to allow any more recruitment from India. When Japanese surrendered personnel were finally shipped home in early 1947, the military despaired of finding manpower to rebuild its camps and airfields. It considered looking to Mauritius, to 30,000 Maltese workers who had washed up in Cairo, and even fresh levies from Japan. In the event, around 10,000 volunteers from Ceylon were hurriedly