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.”