VIII - The Road to Chandibole (1994)

Summary

In The Road to Chandibole (1994), Marie Gerrina Louis' first novel, the writer uses the apparent romantic portrayal of a strong Tamil woman in love with a strong Chinese man to make a serious comment on the marginalized Tamil women living in the rubber estates. What the novel suggests then are two levels of reading: one type of reader might read it as an autobiographical account of a romance, while the second would construct quite a different meaning altogether. Louis, by setting the narrative in the turbulent years between 1945 and 1960 in the Malay peninsula, portrays an historical period when the lives of Tamil women living in the rubber estates were brutalized by Hindu customs, their male counterparts, and other women. Hence it is “a serious novel which deals with various post-colonial and Marxist-feminist concerns” (Manaf and Quayum 2001, p. 411).

Using an autobiographical narrative mode, the writer has created a female protagonist, Saras, who lives in the periphery of the Chandibole Estate with six other families: two Tamil, one Chinese, one Malay, one Eurasian, and one European, the manager of the estate. The tension and suspense in the narrative is engendered by the portrayal of a strong woman amidst the turbulence of the Emergency, fighting her private battles, and at the same time, wrestling for the rights of the marginalized women in her environment.

The writer presents the plight of the marginalized women through the observations of the protagonist who is the first person narrator. The reader is given an insight into the brutality that is inherent in one of the traditional Hindu customs. This brutality is captured by the lexical borrowings from Tamil. The narrator uses untranslated Tamil words to “seize the language, re-place it in a specific cultural location, and yet maintain the integrity of that Otherness” (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 77). This brutal custom is witnessed by Saras:

Two old women got up and went to her. One held Ponni tightly down while the other pulled the flowers out of her hair — practically ripped them out. Ponni wailed all the time but the determined women raked the girl' hair free of every single bud. Then, using the sweat on Ponni' forehead, the woman wiped off the pottu. Next, they broke all the bangles on her arms forcibly, even drawing blood in some places …