K.S Maniam and diasporic issues
In this week’s column, I examine the literary productions of
Malaysian writer K.S Maniam and the prominent issues featured in works
in general and in his novels in particular.
K. S. Maniam was known as Subramaniam Krishnan, was born into an
Indian family in Bedong/Kedah, Malaysia, in 1942. His childhood bore the
mark of the everyday life of the Indian minority group in Malaysia.
Following his father’s wish that he should have an education that would
fit his cultural background, he attended a Tamil school. After a year,
however his father gave into his pleas and let him attend an English
school so that during his adolescence K. S. Maniam was strongly
influenced by British and Western culture.
Following a distinguished academic career at the University of
Malaya, where he served as an Associate Professor of Literature and
Creative Writing until 1997, inspired by the new postcolonial
literature, he began to write fulltime. K. S. Maniam writes in English.
His first short story, The Eagles, appeared in 1976. He wrote his
first novel The Return’in 1981. The Return is largely an
autobiographical novel. The young Ravi, from a third-generation Indian
immigrant family in Malaya, feels lost in the conflict between cultures.
In an effort to avoid demands to preserve his grandparent’s ancestral
culture, as well as the expectations of the Malaysian society for
cultural and linguistic assimilation, Ravi flees to an English school.
There he learns not only the language, but also the mindset and
customs of the former colonial power, and this increasingly distances
him from his family. The question of cultural identity in an immigrant
society prevails in other works by K. S. Maniam. In addition to numerous
stories and three novels, the other two being In a Far Country (1993)
and Between Lives (2003), he has written a number of plays. He received
the Raja Rao Award for his Outstanding Contribution to the Literature of
the South Asian Diaspora in New Delhi in 2000. In 2004, he wrote a
volume of short stories entitled Faced Out.
The Return fictionalises Maniam’s experiences of fleeing away from
communal enclosures within colonialism to become a professional in a new
nation facing isolation from the family and getting rid of roots.
Maniam’s later works depict ‘ the brittle lives of such professionals
trapped in an anti-intellectual society and limited by communal
differences , unable to effect significant changes but aware of the need
for human dignity and some sustaining cultural and spiritual system.’
Prominent themes
In an academic article entitled ‘Alienation, Self-Realisation, and
Community in K.S Maniam’, Paul Sharrad observes that ‘Maniam’s short
stories fall into four broader groups: the specifically Indian
plantation stories, the teacher stories, women and men stories, and
futuristic critiques of totalitarian regimes and social breakdown.”
Paul observes that in his early stories, the prominent thematic motif
is ‘a generally bleak portrayal of an enclosed community doomed to
subaltern dysfunction for lack of any sustaining culture’. Although it
is not fair to compare such stories with the typical conditions existed
in the Sri Lankan plantation sector, these stories depict similar social
situations in the immediate aftermath of independence.
Analysing the novel, Paul Harrad states, “ The Return sits alongside
other commonwealth or postcolonial works such as Oliver Schreiner’s
Story of an African Farm (1883), Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career
(1901) and George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1970) as an
account of the awakening of a creative mind under the oppressive
conditions of provincial colonial life. Its depiction of colonial
classroom is a fine demonstration of the institutional and discursive
interpellation of the colonial subject. The novel has been read mostly
as autobiographical and sociological realism….”
“The English language gives protagonist Ravi a new centre that allows
upward social mobility and overseas travel. C.W Watson notes that the
return of the title is not just physical return to Malaysia but also
Ravi’s return in memory to childhood and perhaps, the return he is now
equipped to make to his family. We can add the return to his cultural
roots from which he has been so eager to distance himself. The nature of
the return, however, is ambiguous. ”
What is obvious is that Maniam explores predominant themes of
diasporic literature such as cultural identity, selfhood, belonging and
memo-realisation.
Diasporic quest
Paul pints out that ‘Margaret Yong and Mohammad A. Quayum give
detailed analysis of the novel as a diasporic quest for selfhood,
belonging and social advancement. Quayum and David Lim take issues with
Tang Soo Ping’s argument that Ravi is a failure, alienated from his
idealised Indian roots; Quayum, in “ Traversing Borders, Negotiating
Identity,” sees Ravi as a representative of his community and the
general path towards empowerment. Lim argues for a more complicated
reading : the autobiography is Ravi’s and not Maniam’s. Ravi’s return to
portable skills is a realistic response to the impossibility of
recreating a mythic India in Malaya or of transplanting identity through
ownership of land and Ravi is to be admired for facing up to his
shortcomings and the cost of his limited success. ”
In Maniam’s novel In a Far Country, the story is narrated by a
Malaysian Indian who has escaped the rubber estate to become a land
developer. However, now in his middle age, he experiences a sense of
emptiness and impending revelation, and he retreats from the world to
reassess his life. The novel, among other things, deals with the theme
of identity. Identity is an important theme in diasporic literature. For
instance, a migrant would shed his former identity (deterritorisation)
and regain a new one.
In considering Maniam’s position among postcolonial diasporic
writers, Paul observes, “Maniam does not so much address an
international sophisticated readership as tell his own story and map the
angst of his ethnic experience and communal disjunctions. His characters
are inclined to fatalism rather than irony but nonetheless struggle to
escape from their pasts or what they see as unsatisfactory in their
future.”
One of the prominent characteristic of Maniam is that “he is not
ashamed to invoke the words ‘human’ and ‘universal’.” Paul observes, “It
is because, in his own situation, he is a prisoner of difference and
must envision something that overrides communal, linguistic, and
political barriers to find hope of the cultural liberation that
postcolonial theory carries as its goal.”
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