Abstract
K. S. (Krishnan Subramaniam) Maniam, a leading literary voice in English in Malaysia, died on 19 February 2020 after a brief battle with cancer. He was 78. Maniam was a highly respected figure in Malaysian literature, earning a central — and now also enduring — place in it, not only for a body of work that spanned five decades, but also because of its fierce commitment to the shaping of a “new diaspora” (Maniam, 1997) aesthetic of desire and attachment. His writings explored the multifarious forces at work within the construction of “Malaysian” identity, and rejected insularity and dogmatism. In a present conjuncture when the best of Malaysian literature in English is implicitly assumed to be that produced by a prize-winning cohort who live abroad, but who continue to mine the country for their raw material, Maniam belonged to an earlier, path-breaking generation of writers whose works are distinguished not only by the quality of their literary vision but also by their commitment to writing from within what he called the “particular soil and climate” (Gabriel, 2018: 148) of the Malaysian nation, and facing its difficult consequences.
Maniam’s repertoire of works comprised the novels The Return (1981), In a Far Country (1993) and Between Lives (2003); numerous collections of short stories, including Plot, The Aborting, Parablames and Other Stories (1989), Arriving… and Other Stories (1995), Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary Stories from Malaysia (1996), The Loved Flaw (2001), Faced Out: Six Stories (2004), and A Stranger to Love (2018); two plays, The Cord (1983) and The Sandpit (1992); a collection of poetry, Two Heartbeats Away (2020), published just before his death; and several nonfictional essays that also served as much-referenced cultural commentary.
The son of a hospital dhobi (laundryman) and a mother who also toiled in the plantations to supplement the family income, Maniam was born in the rubber-estate town of Bedong in the largely rural, northwestern Malaysian state of Kedah in 1942, fifteen years before the country declared itself Merdeka (“Free”) from Britain. In 1916, his paternal grandmother had left her ancestral village in Coimbatore, in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu in India, and travelled aboard a ship overrun by hundreds of thousands of other impoverished peasants to cross the Bay of Bengal and stand in the long labour line of Malaya’s burgeoning colonial economy. That hazardous voyage by sea from Ur (Tamil for “the Big Country”) to the “new world” of “Ma-la-ya”, which he was to document in his fiction, was for Maniam a metaphor for the boundary-breaking cultural experience that was vital for personal and social regeneration.
Along with her three young sons and her tin trunks, pots, and ritual vessels, by which she also eked out a living as a pedlar, tinker, and healer, his grandmother — memorialized in the character of “the redoubtable” Periathai (“Big Mother”) in his first extended published work, the autobiographical novel The Return — brought her steely will to drive a stake of belonging into the new country. Carrying on her battle for rootedness in “the fresh, green land” (Maniam, 1996: 38) of Malaysia, and congruent with the larger processes of generational and adaptive cultural change at work, the author’s father, as dramatized in the novel, puts away his mother’s made-in-India religious artefacts to fashion his own gods from clumps of grass and river clay. Knocking poles shaped out of jungle trees deep into the ground to erect his house, he tells his son: “We can make all the money, get all the learning. But these are useless if our house pillars don’t sink into the clay of the land” (Maniam, 1981: 167). That originary desire to possess the spirit of the land, so raw and visceral in its ambition, remained a vital shaping force in all of Maniam’s works.
Maniam attended the estate Tamil school for a year before leaving it — and servitude to colonial–caste and community dictates — to continue his education at the Ibrahim English School in the state capital of Sungai Petani. This deeply transgressive move was to change the course of his life, for it allowed him to break away from the fiercely limited opportunity and what he described as “the Ramayana of want” (Gabriel, 2018: 139) for food, space, and individual privacy he was born into, and pursue upward mobility. It also made it possible for a young man who grew up in the cloistered and intensified cultural atmosphere of a plantation estate in a far-flung British colony to dream of a literary career in English.
Exposed to Indian mythology and the Hindu epics through the stories told by his grandmother, neighbours, and the itinerant uduku (folk drum) player, Maniam also immersed himself in the Western classics he encountered in his English-medium school. He grew up speaking equally the English of the classroom and the localized English of everyday Malaysian life, with its rich multicultural rhythms and inflections. He was also fluent in Malay and Tamil. Attuned to the sensibility of his working-class characters, none of whom would have spoken English in real life and for whom in fact it was the language of elite class and caste subordination, Maniam devised an idiom that would conjure the interiority of their consciousness. This distinctive prose, which often took the form of his characters’ taut and cryptic dialogue or their dramatic monologue, is evident in all of his works and is particularly conspicuous in his plays.
After completing secondary school in 1960, and succumbing to what he called “the spell of popular imagination” (Gabriel, 2018: 140), Maniam left to pursue pre-medical studies in Bombay (now Mumbai). Once there, in that story-familiarized “Big Country”, he made two discoveries: that he was “Malaysian”, and not “Indian”, in cultural belonging; and that he was unsuited to becoming a doctor. From 1962 to 1964, he attended the Malayan Teachers College in Wolverhampton, England. His walking tours of the land once hymned by the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge intensified Maniam’s feelings of affinity with and allegiance to his own country and of wanting to contribute to its then nascent literary tradition in English. This period’s other highlight was Maniam’s realization, when teaching Shakespeare to British grammar school students, that English was no longer the language of colonial mastery. Much of his experience as a young man in England and as a boy growing up in the Malaya of the 1940s and 1950s was filtered into the constitution of Ravi, the narrating protagonist of his first novel.
The sudden death of his best friend from childhood (they were known as “the inseparables”) drove him to seek catharsis in poetry. In the prescribed structure and restraints of the Shakespearean sonnet, Maniam found a means to both give vent to and come to terms with his bereavement. Though he had begun writing poems in his teenage years, the 44 sonnets he composed as a requiem for his dead friend helped him hone his creative voice.
After returning from England, Maniam taught in various local schools before being accepted into the University of Malaya (UM), the country’s oldest university, where he studied English literature from 1970 to 1973. At the time, UM’s Department of English held a reputation as an esteemed centre for the study of language and literature in the region, due primarily to the leadership and mentoring activities provided by the department head and the first Malaysian Professor of English, Lloyd Fernando, who was himself a creative writer. It was Fernando who edited and anthologized four of Maniam’s early short stories in Malaysian Short Stories, published by Heinemann Asia in 1981.
But the 1970s were also a time when reading and writing in English was construed as anti-national by the ruling elite who, capitalizing on the political disturbances of 13 May 1969, instituted sweeping economic and cultural reforms to redefine the nation in Malay-dominant terms. The Department of English, following Fernando’s pragmatic stance of acceding to the status of Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) as the national language but also vigorously championing English proficiency through English–Malay bilingualism, continued its literary activities and academic programmes. Maniam completed his BA and went on to read for a master’s degree, producing a thesis on the history of Malaysian and Singaporean poetry in English. In 1980, he was appointed as a lecturer at UM, which he served until 1997 when he retired as an Associate Professor of English. The “Malaysian Literature in English” and “Play and Short Story Writing” courses that he developed continue to be taught, the latter of which is now offered as “Creative Writing”. During the course of his academic career, Maniam held several fellowships and residencies abroad — in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and several other locations.
The Return, his most celebrated work, was published just after Maniam joined UM as a member of staff. Regarded as a Malaysian classic by the scholarly and literary community, the novel is a story of personal awakening that traverses three generations of a family through the decades that saw colonial Malaya transition into postcolonial Malaysia. The book was also Maniam’s way of working through his cultural history and elucidating its value for himself and his nation. It was a prescribed text for the Literature in English component in Malaysian secondary schools for several years, and helped advance Maniam’s name and reputation on a wider, public level. Along with his other works, it is taught in schools and universities in Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and Switzerland.
Maniam’s winning in 2000 of the inaugural Raja Rao Award, which was established to honour writers from across the globe who had made a major contribution to the literature of the South Asian diaspora, brought his works international visibility. Later recipients included Edwin Thumboo of Singapore, Yasmine Gooneratne of Australia, and Guyana-born David Dabydeen. The accolades from abroad threw into sharp relief the fact that his own country, which was the source of Maniam’s imaginative genius, had no place for him in its literary canon. Though significantly contributing to the expansion and enrichment of his nation’s literary traditions, his works, along with other deserving writings in English, are excluded from the body of writing conferred with the status of “national literature”. As this category was introduced in the service of Malay hegemony in the period of nationalistic reform, and because its terms have yet to be reformulated since 1971, “national literature” continues to be reserved exclusively for writing in Malay, the national language. Instead, writings in English, along with those in the nation’s other main languages of Chinese and Tamil, are classified as “sectional literature”, foreclosing the possibility of their authors being recognized as full and deserving participants in Malaysia’s literary landscape.
When asked about the implications of this for his writing, Maniam argued that to call a literature “national literature” is to delimit its potential as the very goal of literature is to destroy boundaries and question concepts, including “the national” itself, which is a label often designed to enable governments to exclude or discriminate between citizens. He further felt that all labels were external to human nature, describing them as intrusions into our “being human”, which to him was what the double helix of “human being” was fundamentally about. For Maniam, the greater question was not whether any literature was “national” or not, but whether it was faithful to the spirit of writing. He felt that rather than answer to the expectations of others, literature had to respond to the writer’s inner voice and promptings, what he called “the creative intelligence” (Gabriel, 2018: 145).
To his detractors, Maniam was too immersed in the ethnic Indian perspective and failed to draw attention to Malaysia’s multicultural realities. Responding to such criticism, Maniam asserted that writing works best when it draws from the writer’s primal awareness of the world. This to him meant a worldview that was shaped by the place and time into which the writer was born. For Maniam, that place and time was the small towns and rubber estates in the north of Malaysia in the decades leading up to and just after Independence, when both the individual and his nation stood on the brink of momentous change. As Malaysia’s rubber estates were among the earliest places where immigrant populations from India were concentrated, it is to the then still untold story of these communities and the psychologies they had created for themselves — their dreams, prejudices, fears, yearnings, aspirations, and political vision — that Maniam gravitated towards in his fiction. In a sense, then, Maniam believed that his subject matter as it related to his imagining of his world was already chosen for him.
Besides, his argument was that having characters from the various communities does not make a novel less insular — or more “Malaysian”, for that matter. That pluralist conception of Malaysia’s diversity was to him a superficial understanding of multiculturalism. He also made it clear that he was not stuck in the “ethnic perspective”. Rather, he wanted to harness the insights from his particular background and social and historical experience to open up new frames of reference for his readers. If he was conscious of his intellectual commitment as a writer to shape society’s vision of itself, Maniam was equally mindful of the role played by the reader in the quest for a multicultural society. His point was that just as he wrote to be read by all Malaysians, the reader should also allow himself or herself to enter other worlds and engage vicariously with other experiences so that both writer and reader could together imaginatively create a multicultural society. That is what multiculturalism meant to him — that literature should expand the perspectives and worldviews we are able to hold in our minds, and reveal an awareness of issues we might not have first-hand experience of but still have a responsibility to understand.
The idea of “cultural multiplicity”, which was the term he preferred over “multiculturalism”, was one that energized Maniam’s fiction and non-fiction. In a seminal essay “The New Diaspora” (1997), Maniam offers two ways of thinking about cultural identity — the tiger and the chameleon. The tiger, a creature associated with the nationalist ethos, prefers to keep to its traditional abode, the jungle, where it reigns supreme. But because it keeps itself confined to its discrete milieu and boundaries, the jungle-bound tiger is also entrapped, lacking the imagination to re-invent itself in the face of change. The chameleon, on the other hand, with its ability to “inhabit, simultaneously, different intellectual, cultural and imaginative spaces” (Maniam, 1997: 8) is a creature capable of transformation. Because it is mobile and receptive to new environments and challenges, the chameleon is able to “make that leap” (Maniam, 1996: 45) across boundaries and enter multiple locations where it not only survives but thrives. Constituted by “multiplicity”, it is always open to translation, which for Maniam was imperative for cultural regeneration. He had given fictional treatment to some of these ideas in his second novel In a Far Country (1993) and the short story “Haunting the Tiger” (1996).
Indeed, Maniam’s abiding interest, as well as particular gift, was in telling the story of Malaysia from the minoritized perspective, a telling that in his later years he came to regard as a sadhana, or a spiritual practice. In his debut novel and early short fiction such as “Ratnamuni”, “Pelanduk”, and “The Eagles”, Maniam created a distinctive literary topography from the world he had known so intimately — the red dust of the laterite roads, the wooden bungalows of the New Resettlement villages, the rows of estate houses leading off the main tar road, the lone sundry shop in town. His characters’ conflicts are located within the palpable historical and social contexts and the carefully delineated details of these remote hinterlands, be they physical spaces or territories of the mind. In his subsequent novels, In a Far Country (1993) and Between Lives (2003), and notably in his last collection of short stories, A Stranger to Love (2018), the ground of struggle shifts to an urban setting, and is imbued with newer challenges and complexities. His characters, who have now worked themselves up to the professional or middle class, confront a dislocation of another kind — the displacement of their spiritual life force by their materialistic drives and other shallow pursuits. Though outwardly successful, their inner disintegration sends them spiralling into deceit and duplicity, turning them into “strangers” to themselves.
In his last published work, Two Heartbeats Away (2020), Maniam comes full circle by returning to his first love of poetry. He was at work on his fourth novel, Light at the Window, when he fell ill.
I first met Maniam in the early 1980s, when I entered UM’s Department of English as an undergraduate and when he was at the beginning of a career that would see him become a revered name in Malaysian literature. In person, he was reserved, with a quiet, unobtrusive air about him. I got to know him a little better when he supervised my MA thesis on the novel, Kanthapura, by Raja Rao, who had visited the department in 1987; Maniam had spent an afternoon driving Rao past oil palm and rubber plantations as the great Indian novelist had finished reading a copy of The Return given to him by Maniam the day before and, finding the novel to be “precise and poetic” (Gabriel, 2018: 144), had asked if he could see a rubber estate. Maniam became a colleague when I joined the department as a lecturer in 1990. After his retirement, the next time I saw him was when he accepted my invitation to participate in a workshop on Southeast Asian creative cultures in English that I was helping a colleague from the UK organize at UM in December 2017. Maniam was in good health, which he attributed to the three kilometres of walking he did every day without fail. I also interviewed him for a journal in late 2018, in which he revealed a still-searching and expansive mind. His capacity for wonder at the “magical plentifulness” (Maniam, 2003: 108) and accommodative malleability of Malaysia’s “resinous soil” (Maniam, 1996: 38) had clearly not flagged. But what was also clear was his indignation at governing systems of identification. He denounced them — and their artificial divisions and hierarchies predicated on race and ethnonationalism — for getting in the way of that chameleon, which is our human fullness.
“A human being”, he reflected in that final interview, is “an organic bundle of limitless possibilities, of life itself. Nationalism, globalism, culturalism will all seem restrictive and trivial pursuits in the face of these unlimited possibilities” (Gabriel, 2018: 159).
Indeed, Maniam wanted to tell the story of who we are, the boundless potentialities of being human, beyond ready-made labels and identities. In time, that will be seen as his most fitting epitaph.