Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [202]
It was difficult to see how the cycle of isolation and neglect could be ended. The links between the tappers and the management were the labour conductors and the estate clerks. Often of different ethnicity from the Tamil labourers – usually Malayalam-speaking southern Indians – they were both the natural leaders of these communities and potentially their worst oppressors. Their power had grown during the war in the absence of the European managers, and it was often abused. Clerks, it was said, had manipulated recruitment for the Japanese railway projects so as to send away the husbands and fathers of attractive women, leaving them prey to their attentions. Such abuses, the festering atmosphere of shame and vendetta, cast a long shadow over these small, insular communities. But to protest was to invite victimization or risk being turned off the estate.35 The only focus of community life outside this hierarchy were the small Hindu temples that labourers built for themselves. Even here, the manager often acted as patron of the temple, and his clerk and conductor would sit on its management committee. But it was to a reformed Hinduism – particularly the Dravidian movement for Tamil reawakening – that many labourers turned for an improvement of their status. Its secularized ‘reform marriage’ was, by 1947, very popular on estates. It was a simple ceremony that did not devour the resources of the poor and, presided over by Dravidian leaders or trade unionists, it provided a rare opportunity for political speeches.36 But the burning issue was the campaign against toddy, the wine of the palm tree and the coolie’s comfort. Planters, who often ran the estate toddy shops, argued that a moderate intake of toddy kept labourers biddable. But to reformers, it was the root of all moral and social decay.
The largest movement was led by A. M. Samy, a lorry driver on the large Harvard estate in central Kedah. On the eve of the Japanese invasion, the European manager had set up a self-defence force on the estate, and in the interregnum Samy revived it as a thondar pedai, or labourers’ militia. The origins of his influence are obscure. It was said that he killed a Ceylonese clerk in the war, but escaped punishment by denouncing him as pro-British. He was certainly influenced by the INA, but was not a veteran of standing, although other leaders of the movement were. His thondar pedai acted as stewards at religious processions, such as the parade of penitents at Thaipusam, but then began to demonstrate in the towns against liquor and to picket toddy shops. When, in May 1946, the workers of Harvard estate stopped work in protest at the re-opening of the estate toddy shop, the thondar pedai enforced the strike. By now Samy possessed a rag-tag army of around 1,500 young men; they dressed in old INA forage caps and tattered khaki shorts and trained by pole-fighting in mock battles. Samy branched out to form trade unions on neighbouring estates. They dispensed a rough justice through kangaroo courts: drunks were tied to trees or made to perform physical jerks; strike-breakers were fined or beaten. The rule of the unions could be every bit as arbitrary as that of the clerks and conductors, but it broke their monopoly on power. By early 1947 around 13,000 labourers in central Kedah were under Samy’s sway, and he based his organization in the small town of Bedong, out of the reach of the trespass laws.37
On 28 February, a crowd