“FOR THE PROMOTION OF TAMIL ON THIS ISLAND”: Penang Muslims and Tamil Vernacular Publics across the Bay of Bengal, 1880-1914 by Torsten Tschacher

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About Penang Story Lectures

The Penang Story Lecture Series aims to create awareness about Penang’s history and heritage. The theme this year is “Penang in Global History” focusing on the role the people of Penang played in local, regional and global histories. Equally fascinating is Penang as a place, a refuge and centre for knowledge development and intellectual movements.

The lecture series also aims to explore Penang’s unique “place-identity” and strengthen the enabling factors that continue to make Penang attractive to talent. These public lectures examine a particular theme from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

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5Foreword

The Penang Story Initiative: Local, Regional and Global Histories

With UNESCO World Heritage Site Inscription in 2008 and the growing awareness about cultural heritage issues, this new chapter of the Penang Story not only continues to celebrate cultural diversity but expands to include a re-discovery of Penang’s place in local, regional and global history. There will be a special emphasis on Penang as a place of “conjunctures, confluences and contestations”; highlighting the cosmopolitan society that contributed to the making of Penang’s “spirit of place”; and all this by concentrating on Penang’s multi-ethnic community and their contribution to local, regional and global histories.

The Penang Story is an open platform for all those with an interest in Penang from different parts of the world to contribute towards “deepening” the story. The project’s focus is not only on events and people but also on other intangible heritage involving foodways, economic activities, values and beliefs, education and all other aspects related to George Town’s “Outstanding Universal Values”.

The Penang Story will build a greater sense of solidarity amongst locals particularly stakeholders in George Town. It will also deepen the public’s understanding of Penang’s role as a place attractive to talent and a home where ideas germinate and return to influence world affairs. This will boost the sense of possibility so important to Penang’s civil society movement. Lastly, we hope that Penang Story will encourage communities to become proud of their own heritage whilst engendering great respect for the traditions and history of other communities. Ultimately, all communities will become aware of having contributed to Penang’s development and progress.

Dato’ Anwar FazalChairmanPenang Story

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About the Speaker6

TORSTEN TSCHACHER is Lecturer for Tamil Language and Culture at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany. He holds degrees from the National University of Singapore and the University of Cologne, Germany. His research focuses on the history, literature and society of Tamil-speaking Muslim communities and their ties with Southeast Asia. He is currently engaged in completing a manuscript on the engagements of Tamil Muslims with the public sphere in colonial Singapore.

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Moderator

Dato’ Dr. K. Anbalakan is a senior lecturer in History at the School of Humanities, University of Science Malaysia, Penang. He has a MA degree in Indian Political and Constitutional History and a PhD in Political Science. His research areas include: Indian nationalism; Social, political and economic history of Malaysia; Identity construction among Malaysian Indians, and Ethnic studies.

Some of his published works are: Pelopor Persuratkhabaran India di Malaysia: Pemikiran dan Wawasan (2011), Tamadun India: Sejarah, Falsafah, Sumbangan dan Pengaruh (2009), Identiti India di Malaysia, 2008, Socio-economic Self-help Among Indians in Malaysia (2008), The New Economic Policy and Further Marginalisation of the Indians (2005), The Role of Indians in the Malaysian Constitutional Struggle, 1946-1948: A Reassessment (1999), Literacy in Mother-Tongue for the Linguistic Minorities: The Case of the Indians in Malaysia (1996), Politik Pemisahan dan Pembentukan Pakistan (1994).

He was awarded the DJN in 2009 and DSPN, that carries the title Dato’, in 2011 by the Penang State government.

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Abstract

Programme

7.45pm: Registration

8.00pm: Introduction by Moderator

8.15pm: Public Lecture

9.30pm: Q & A

10.00pm: End

The final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial expansion of vernacular publishing and literary production in Penang and elsewhere in the Straits Settlements. Tamil publishing was no exception to this: Tamil printing presses not only published poetry composed by Penang-based authors, they also issued the first Tamil newspapers on the island, widening the scope of public participation for Indians in the Straits Settlements.

But Penang-based publishing remained no isolated enterprise confined to a corner of the Indian Ocean. Both the producers and consumers of Tamil newspapers in Penang engaged with the wider networks of Tamil publishing in India, Ceylon, and other parts of Southeast Asia through correspondence and news-coverage. A substantial number of the early authors, editors, printers, and readers in Penang’s Tamil media revolution were Muslims, a fact that shaped the contents of the Tamil presses’ output as much as it impacted the wider networks of information the Penang Tamil press participated in. This lecture will outline the rise of Tamil publishing in Penang and aims to demonstrate the important role played by Tamil publishing in Penang and the Straits Settlements in shaping Muslim concerns and publics across the Bay of Bengal.

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“They have gained renown as innumerable scholars and authors, standing in the tradition of those desirous of education and suitable knowledge. Even though they pay much attention to the Arabic language, they have taken many efforts in creating and promoting books also in the Tamil language”. With these words, the Penang-based Tamil bi-monthly Hindu Nasen (‘The Hindu Friend’) praised the Indian Muslim community in February 1888. The editor of Hindu Nasen knew what he was writing about: while his was already the ninth Tamil newspaper founded in the Straits Settlements, it was in all likelihood the first that was not run by a Muslim. From the late nineteenth century onwards, printing presses in Penang and Singapore had begun to produce Tamil-language publications – newspapers, literature, and schoolbooks – that serviced the steadily growing numbers of Tamil-speakers in the Straits Settlements. Yet from the beginnings in the 1870s onwards until the First World War, the majority of these printing-

PENANG MUSLIMS and

TAMIL VERNACULAR PUBLICS

by Torsten Tschacher

ACROSS THE BAY OF BENGAL, 1880-1914

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10presses were run by Muslims, Muslims formed a sizeable proportion of the audiences, and topics of particular interest to Muslims formed the staple of poems as much as of newspaper articles.

The importance of Muslims in the rise of Tamil publishing in the Straits Settlements in general and Penang in particular was rather unusual in the Tamil-speaking world. Muslims had for centuries participated in Tamil letters and had created a substantial religious literature in the language, but in South India and Sri Lanka, it had been mostly Hindus and Christians who had adopted the new technology of printing and set up printing presses. In the Straits Settlements, on the other hand, South Indian Muslims had some decisive advantages as far as printing was concerned. Firstly, at least during the better part of the nineteenth century, Muslims formed a sizeable proportion (and for a long period even the majority) of the Indian population in the Straits Settlements. Secondly, their close connections to their Malay coreligionists allowed them to tap simultaneously into the Malay- and the Tamil-language markets for print-products. That made it possible for them to support their Tamil publishing ventures, which represented a certain amount of risk due to the constrained market, by gains from the larger and more stable market for Malay-language print products. Thirdly, Indians had had a longer and more thoroughgoing exposure to newspapers. In the late nineteenth century, the number of Tamil newspapers seems to have

11been far larger than that of Malay or even Chinese newspapers.

In Penang, an auspicious coincidence aided the development of Tamil publishing in the city. This was the presence of the most important Muslim poet in Tamil of his times, V. Ghulam Kadir Navalar of Nagore (1833-1908), in Penang in the 1880s. Navalar in fact founded the first Tamil newspaper of Penang, Vidya Vicharini, of which, unfortunately, no copies seem to remain, and he taught and guided a new generation of Muslim poets in Tamil who contributed with their works to Tamil publishing in Penang in the decades to come. He also maintained contact with the island, and wrote poetic prefaces to the works of other poets published in Penang until a few years before his death. His sojourn in Penang greatly helped to place the island on the map of Tamil letters even after he had returned to India.

Religious poetry was one of the main products of the early Tamil printing presses in Penang as elsewhere in the Straits Settlements. Collections of hymns addressed to God, the Prophet Muhammad, and various Walis formed the bulk of literary production. While these hymns remained highly traditional in form, they at times addressed rather unusual subjects. The best example of such poetry is Kosha Marican’s Penang Orchavam Thiru Alangara Sinthoo of 1895. In more than seven hundred lines, Kosha Marican describes the route, participants, and sights of the annual procession conducted by

12the Nagore Dargah in Penang. The decorations of the Dargah, the cosmopolitan crowd jostling along the route, and the most important Indian Muslim merchants of his time, all find a place in Kosha Marican’s poem. But not only Tamil literature in traditional forms was produced in Penang at that time. S.P.S.K. Kader Sahib’s Hasia Mansari (‘Humorous Collection’) was a collection of short amusing stories, essentially a small anthology of jokes, a novelty in the world of nineteenth-century Tamil letters.

Of greater importance for historians, though, are the Tamil newspapers edited by Indian Muslims in Penang. While little remains of the earliest of these newspapers, such as Vidya Vicharini, the situation changes in 1887, as according to the new Book Registration Ordinance, newspapers had to be registered and copies submitted to the colonial government. By 1914, Penang had become the first place in British Malaya where a Tamil daily newspaper could operate with a certain amount of security. More than the actual information about events and persons that can be gleaned from these newspapers, they are interesting as they allow us to understand the concerns and matters of contention among Indian Muslims in Penang, as well as the audiences that the newspapers were reaching. Readers contested each other’s (and the newspaper’s) views in letters to the editor, forming an incipient public sphere of Tamil readers on the island.

Early Tamil newspapers from Penang are not only of importance for the history of Penang alone. Rather, from the very beginning, Indian Muslims in Penang and their newspapers formed part of a larger network of Tamil journals. Correspondents from Penang supplied Tamil newspapers in Sri Lanka and India with information and comments on events Southeast Asia, such as the Dutch invasion of Aceh, while they simultaneously drew on South Asian Tamil newspapers for information on events in India and the Middle East. Newspapers across the Indian Ocean could also serve as a platform for readers to voice criticism of their local Penang newspapers when these refused to publish their views and letters. Penang was from the beginning part of a wider Indian Muslim public that spanned the Bay of Bengal.

13The ‘golden age’ of Indian Muslim involvement in Tamil publishing came to an end with the First World War. Not only did owners of printing presses face paper shortage due to the war, the colonial government had become particularly suspicious of the support Indian Muslims in Penang had extended to the Ottoman Empire in the years before the war, and the government now closely monitored the products of Penang’s Tamil printing presses. Nowadays, the pioneering role of Indian Muslims in the establishment of Tamil publishing in Penang has largely been forgotten. Yet the literature and journals they produced still speak from the dust of the archives, telling their own part of the Penang Story to anyone willing to listen.

14 Joint Organisers

THINK CITY SDN BHD (TCSB) is a subsidiary of Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the investment arm of the Malaysian government, and an urban regeneration agency operating in the historic city of George Town. It manages the George Town Grants Programme (GTGP), which is a public grants programme designed to protect and preserve George Town’s Outstanding Universal Values. These include the city’s multi-ethnic and multi-cultural living heritage, architectural legacy and intangible heritage as a historic port city in the Straits of Malacca. Think City’s involvement in this project provides focus on the cultural mapping process (documentation and outreach activities involving local histories and heritage) and the intangible heritage of the city.

THE PENANG HERITAGE TRUST (PHT) is one of Malaysia’s most successful non-governmental organizations championing the heritage conservation with special emphasis on Penang and George Town. The PHT played a pivotal role in the nomination of George Town as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was also a key partner in the 2001/02 Penang Story Project bringing together local communities through a celebration of cultural diversity.

Knowledge Partners

GEORGE TOWN WORLD HERITAGE INCORPORATED (GTWHI) is the area manager of the George Town UNESCO World Heritage Site. It provides consultation and public awareness regarding the World Heritage Site. GTWHI also provides advice to the State and Local governments regarding heritage conservation issues and assists private property owners about best practices in conservation.

UNIVERSITI SAINS MALAYSIA (USM) is Malaysia’s Apex University with wide-ranging research programmes. USM initiated several projects directly related to heritage conservation work in Penang and elsewhere.

Joint Organisers