‘Maybe he worked hard,’ one white student says.

I explain that, according to me, this man could possibly be the illegitimate son of the governor: it explains his position, his dress, his colour. I tell him that, though this governor is English, the practice of white men fathering children of colour – ‘enfants naturels’, they are called, ‘bastard-born’ – is common in Mauritius, from French colonial times to today.

I tell them how much of Creole blood is the result of sexual violence: that this is probably not a happy story of a governor falling in love with his maid. How, two hundred years ago, people of African and sometimes of Indian descent were considered as property, bien meuble, to be used however white owners saw fit. That such violence is a legacy that we carry in our bodies.

A boy raises his hand to speak. He tells me he disagrees with this idea of violence as legacy. ‘She was raped,’ shoots Chloe in his direction. The boy struggles to find a rebuttal. He is worked up now, and I am unbearable to him.

I turn to Ananda Devi and the 2016 state of the nation novel she presents in Eve Out of Her Ruins. I speak of poverty, abuse. I tell them how lucky they are to have such a wonderful school and pristine education, because most Mauritians don’t have that luxury. The boy interrupts. He says he completely disagrees with me. He is French and has lived here for a while, believes I am too pessimistic in my outlook. He says racism exists, but if everyone works hard they’ll get to the place they deserve in life. I understand immediately; I ask him if he is white. He tells me his mother is white but his father is darker than I am. ‘Maybe you should talk to your father tonight, ask him about the racism he faced in France.’ The boy is adamant that his father has suffered from no racism at all. I talk of microaggressions. He says his father is checked by the police in France ‘as often as everyone else’. That he is a brilliant man, an entrepreneur. I said I have no doubt about that. He says I propound an ideology of the victim. I’d have recommended Light in August if he were older, but even then Faulkner would slip through his fingers. He has bleached himself into oblivion.

I hear ‘Hey, my n–’ over and over again in the class next door, everyone does. Their teacher must be very late. The teacher in my classroom is unconcerned; she shuffles some papers in front of her, marks them. My fingers can’t find the extracts I want to read. I tell the students how Maya is used by her lover, Dave, a Brahmin who knows he’ll never marry her but sleeps with her anyway. She finds out that Dave is married when she reads the newspaper: there’s an announcement of his wedding to another rich Indo-Mauritian heir, an august union of two Indo-Mauritian sugar barons. Maya lies comatose in her bed for a few days, rises, monstrous, to seek her vengeance. She murders Dave’s wife then plunges into the sea, lets her body be carried by the waves.

There’s some nervous chuckling at ‘Indo-Mauritian sugar baron’. The students think the term’s an oxymoron. In my experience, Mauritians tend to believe that cane fields, mountains, the private sector mostly belong to the whites. It is often stated that 80 per cent of our economic production is tied to companies built on colonial sugar wealth; an approximate percentage, since essential documents that would allow historians to trace the history of white sugar capital are either private, lost or destroyed. I wonder if the students assume Indo-Mauritians are only to be found in politics and the civil service, not sugar, not the conglomerates that emerged from sugar.

"There have been many Dravidian forums in Malaysia before, where overseas speakers were invited, but nothing this severe has ever happened before,” Nagenteran observed. Harassment and deliberate sabotage were inflicted on both organisers and speakers. On the day of the event, while the speakers were in their hotels, they received suspicious calls from people pretending to be the organisers, asking them to come down to the lobby. “I told them to stay in their rooms until I called them and not to pick up calls from unknown numbers,” Nagenteran said.

The entire forum took place under the vigilant presence of the Malaysian police and immigration department. Seven police officers, including the Dang Wangi Special Branch, Bukit Aman Special Branch, and the Kuala Lumpur Contingent Headquarters, along with nine immigration officers, surveyed the forum. There were several other events organised after the main event with constant police presence throughout the day.

In addition, about ten representatives from various Hindu NGOs attended the event. One representative, Rishikumar Vadivelu, vice president of the NGO Hindhudharma Maamandram, refused to stand up for the Malaysian Tamil Thai Vaazhtu (Tamil Anthem), penned by Malaysian Tamil writer Seeni Naina Mohamed. Secretary Ponvaasagam of Malaysia Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) and several other MDK members noted his behaviour and approached Rishi to firmly advise him to stand up, but he refused.

Later, when a photo of Rishi’s antics went viral on social media, he declared that he didn't want to, nor should he have to, stand for a Tamil anthem written by a Muslim. He insinuated that the Tamil literary icon Seeni Naina Mohamed was a “Muslim missionary” trying to proselytise Tamil-Hindus for Islam.

Hindhudharma Maamandram's President, Radhakrishnan Alagamalai, sent a letter to Deputy National Unity Minister SaraswathyKandasami reiterating that the forum was in direct opposition to the Malaysian national ideology. Saraswathy, an opportunistic caste-Hindu politician with strong ties to caste-Hindu associations, sent a letter to the home ministry emphasising the much speculated threat of atheism. She also mentioned that one of the speakers had a speech titled “Periyar from a Marxist Perspective,” fueling the anti-communist sentiment already present in the state.

The ten years of imprisonment shortened his life. The body was destroyed inside. Even the basic things that should be given to disabled people were denied. He described his daily life in prison to us in minute detail. Prison officials would give them a chance to come out of the cell only in the morning. The inmates would complete their routines and wait for that time as they did not want to miss those hours. He said that even if there were any quarrels between the fellow prisoners, they were all friendly with him, and perhaps his physical condition also contributed to that. Writing petitions for fellow prisoners and teaching them, he remembered the things that kept him alive there.

When I mentioned that I had translated Bhasha Singh's Unseen, a book on manual scavenging, into Telugu under the title Asuddha Bharath, he shared that in prison too, work was divided along caste lines. Safai (cleaning) work was done entirely by Dalits, and caste universalism was strictly enforced in prisons. We were not surprised to hear that. We continue to see how caste intertwines with inequality in different ways in our everyday lives.

In Europe, Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher of the slave-owners and the nobility, talked about the “immortality of the spirit,” declaring that man had gained all his knowledge in a “world of ideas” before he was born, and that learning was only the recollection of knowledge possessed in a previous existence. Although the bourgeois German philosopher Kant admitted that experience was also a source of knowledge, he held that “we find existing in the mind a priori, the pure form of sensuous intuitions in general” before getting to know a thing. All these idealist philosophers throughout history, though they put it differently, without exception deemed knowledge to be a priori, denying that it originates from practice and is a reflection of the outside world.

There can be no differentiation without contrast. In the contemporary epoch, political swindlers like Liu Shao-chi also completely denied the role of practice in man’s cognition, raving that certain men were born “geniuses.” All this talk is simply a repetition of history’s antiquated idealist apriorism. What is different is that they tried to sell it under a Marxist signboard, unscrupulously quoting out of context in order to overawe people. By studying some books on the history of philosophy and learning about the struggles between the two lines in philosophy and what forms they took in different periods, we can link past struggles with present ones and learn to distinguish between the materialist theory of reflection and idealist apriorism and be better able to see through the lies and sophistry of all such sham Marxists.

On Studying Some History of Philosophy, by Tang Hsiao-wen

In the estate, Thangamaal, despite not knowing how to read or write, raised her son, Neelavanan, with stories from the Mahabaratham, Ramayanam, as well as Tamil Bhakti songs. In spite of her devotion towards Hinduism, she was a woman who liked eating beef, a meat often seen as ‘impure’ by caste-Hindus.

“Once, my mother bought beef from the town, and when the neighbours asked her what she was cooking, she said mutton. When I asked my akka (sister) why amma (mother) said that, she told me that people [Hindus] who pray can’t eat beef,” recalled Neelavanan.

As Neelavanan grew up, he understood that Hindu religiosity surrounding beef was a weapon against Dalits who consume it. “People around me eat mutton, chicken, water monitors, pork—they eat everything,” he said. “But when it comes to beef, they say that it is god. They brand [Hindus] who eat beef as coming from a certain caste. We are buying [beef] with our own money; we did not steal or beg for it. Yes, I eat beef, so what?”

Please Share Or Replog Or Donate For My Family 🙏

https://gofund.me/0511f253

Please Donate & Share!

Safaa, her husband and two young children urgently need funds to evacuate safely from the ongoing genocide in Gaza to Egypt. She is currently seeking the funds to cover the entry fees and expanses required to move to Egypt.

As of now only €5,617 out of their €50,000 goal has been raised. If you cannot donate, please atleast share the donation link!

Government is proposing to expand the scope of the LPF and to give national guidelines a more pro-Islamic stance.

Section 2.1.1 of the new LPF religious guidelines mean that films touching on “teaching that promotes anti-God [beliefs], atheism, agnosticism, scientology, religious pluralism, liberalism, blasphemy, supporting fanatical beliefs, criticising, denouncing or discrediting any religion” will be subject to more scrutiny.

“It is clear and important to me to see the story of the Muslim refugees because the Philippines was not a Christian country before the Spanish colonisation. Our ancestors were forced to convert to Christianity so they cannot be seen as enemies of the colonisers. Our ancestors who once owned the land and their identity eventually became lost in their own land stripped away of their own name. In a way, this is my way of telling that tragic, part of our history through our characters who lost their home and are in  search of their identities.” – Eve Baswel

The siege of Marawi, one of the oldest Islamic cities in Mindanao, happened in 2017 when ISIS collapsed the local government, occupied the city, and was warring against the Filipino government for nearly 5 months. Due to the violent conflict, many of the city’s residents had to evacuate, displacing nearly 300,000 people from their ancestral soil. Even after the reclamation of Marawi by the government, the Maranao Muslim refugees who had returned to their native land had been met with many bureaucratic difficulties. Till today, nearly 7 years after the conflict, many Maranao Muslims have not been properly relocated by the government. Due to the strong anti-colonial history that the Mindanao region has in fighting against the imperial subjugations of the Spanish, the Maranao people also refuse to bow to the hegemonic reign of the Catholic-dominated Filipino government, which is aggressively trying to centralise the Filipino landscape against the will of the masses. A way in which the government tries to claim power over the land is by demanding registered land permits from the residents of Marawi, who, in defiance of this neocolonial bureaucracy, refuse to abide by the self-made rules that the puppet government imposes on their rightful native land, a revolutionary spirit they have critically carried on since struggling against the violence of Spanish and American colonialism.

“Displacement is not new to us,” says Gogu, referring to how, as a descant of indentured Tamils who at first faced uprooting from their ancestral land in Tamil Nadu, and once again during the aftermath of colonialism, from the plantations, he too can understand the struggles of displacement, but he states that to him, the uprooting that Maranao Muslims have faced is far worse than the displacement of Plantation Tamils, for the Maranao Muslims had been made landless in their own land while the Plantation Tamils had been made landless on alien soil.

The Manjolai tea estate, once under the control of the Singambatti Zamin before independence, was leased to The Bombay Burma Trading Corporation in 1929 for 99 years. Despite numerous changes in government administration, this lease prevented the forest department from taking control of the dense forest area of Manjolai.

The people of Pondicherry are not stateless. They are within state territories. But they basically have no agency. None of the people in power is listening to them. So what does it mean to look at this minor space that has been dismissed, even when you have this intense division of territory that truly affects people’s lives?”

Last year, I discovered a two-hour-long, twenty-year-old video of my old longhouse. It was like looking at a ghost, like seeing a place from a dream you had a long time ago. It was posted on my cousin’s Facebook page and, as it turns out, was filmed by my father. I was shocked, but at the same time, not shocked at all. He never offers up information unless explicitly asked, and I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing, or a generational thing. Perhaps, as is often the case, it’s a little bit of both. My father was documenting the days leading up to our exodus. He was walking up and down my old longhouse’s wooden verandah, recording the old doors, the old walls, the old land, the old river, the old trees, because that would be the last time any of us would ever see them.

In one scene, a pui ake’ (grandfather) was performing a ritual. He was saying goodbye to the land. The video was pixelated and the audio was muffled, but I heard him saying, “We are leaving this place…” and someone from off-screen interjected, yelling: “We’re not leaving, we are running away! We are running away.”

It must have been one of my uncles, but I couldn’t recognize his voice, twisted by pain and anger and defeat. The same pain and anger and defeat that has haunted me since I was old enough to understand how things are done in Malaysia.

Decades later, my father, along with quite a few of my relatives, returned to Bakun and built floating houses, homestays, and lodges. I guess we got tired of running away.