Malayan rubber, a key commodity in colonial racial capitalism and, specifically, the bourgeoning automobile industry in America and Europe, was grown and harvested by South Indian indentured migrant laborers, “coolies,” largely hailing form the Adi Dravida (Dalit) castes of the Madras Presidency. Nearly 150,000 Tamil Dalit coolies boarded ships from Madras bound for Malaya’s British-owned rubber plantations between 1880-1950, most of them never to return.
Conditions on the rubber plantations were deplorable, with Adi Dravida laborers exploited by
middle-caste kanganys (contractors), moneylenders, and Chinese and British overseers—and malaria, malnutrition, and indebtedness running rampant. In effect, the caste hierarchy in British India was reformulated as a racial pyramid in British Malaya. Drawing on original archival research on Adi Dravida migrations both within South India (to industrial Bangalore) and to the plantations of British Malaya, this paper will narrate an underrecognized history of caste-race intersections in a historically connected yet under-researched part of the world, namely the Indian Ocean World. It shows that casted debt-bondage relations and drought conditions pushed Adi Dravidas to migrate, and also ensnared them in further racialized and casted debt-bondage relations overseas. It also argues that Periyar’s self-respect movement, which traveled through radical newspapers such as Tamil Morasu and through Periyar’s own visit to Malaya in 1929, shaped the anti-caste consciousness of Malayan Tamil laborers and their association leaders, as well as their anti-colonial and anti-racist articulations. Via the transoceanic migration of liberatory ideas, then, this laboring diaspora forged new hybrid identities and radical politics across caste, race, and colonial geographies.
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