A Flutter in the Colony
Sandeep Ray
HarperCollins: 2019
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In the early 1930s, my paternal grandfather, then a fifteen-year-old boy, boarded a train in his drought-stricken village, near the town of Raghuana, Punjab, and made his way to New Delhi and on to Calcutta, the bustling former capital of British-ruled India. The boy was then to board a ship — the only time he would ever do so in his life — to Penang, via Rangoon. As he walked to the vessel, he paused to take in the view. Until that point, he had known only the rivers of his beloved province. What would be his fate in that strange, distant land called Malaya?

This was once a common tale in multiracial Malaysia, the seeds of which were sown as various communities emigrated from the Malay archipelago and China to the Malay Peninsula. From the 1500s onwards, the conquest of the strategic entrepôt Malacca by European powers such as the Portuguese and, later, the Dutch, created the mixed communities that exist today. The British didn’t arrive on the peninsula until 1786, when Captain Francis Light raised the Union Jack in Penang. What followed was a slow but steady subjugation of the nearby territories and kingdoms, resulting in the addition of another colony to the growing British Empire.

• Tags: Ashvinder Singh, Issue 18, Malaysia, Sandeep Ray