Mertle, Thawi and the Kilat Club Men: Class and Southeast Asia’s Ceylonese Tamils

Abstract

While Singapore and Malaysia’s Ceylonese Tamils have long been considered as ‘Indian’ in its census statistics, the Ceylonese Tamil community has long seen themselves as apart from the region’s Indians. It is an uncontroversial that colonial labour patterns shaped South Asian migration into Southeast Asia. Within Southeast Asia, the import of English-educated Ceylonese Tamils to become new members of the colonial civil service created a new communal identity which privileged an anglophile education, wealth and class over caste. Using oral interviews and newspaper sources, I demonstrate how the Ceylonese used their communal networks, and their English-inspired manners to define themselves against the rest, both fellow South Indians and other Southeast Asian migrants. As civil servants, the Ceylonese attempted to appropriate hallmarks of colonial gentility – joining civil service clubs (such as the ‘kilat’ club’), employing Tamil ‘angamas’ (or servants), and enrolling their children in the colonies’ anglophone schools. However, they remained intent on retaining their distinctive status as Ceylonese Tamils. They maintained their familial connections in Jaffna, set-up their own specific communal clubs and Tamils. Nevertheless, as a diasporic community, they maintained their distance from Jaffna, recognising that their new Southeast Asian manners and class set them apart from those back ‘home’.