Preface

Summary

When I embarked on this research in December 2002 after doing a coursebook in Advanced Research Methodology, it was not without a certain amount of trepidation since there are very few critical writings on Singaporean and Malaysian novels in English.

I have been interested in the novels of this region since the fifties when Han Suyin' And the Rain My Drink first appeared in 1956. The fact that the author lived in my hometown, Johor Bahru, was exciting for a teenager whose greatest enjoyment was reading. I used to see her, Dr Elizabeth Comber, who had become famous after her first novel, Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing, was made into a movie, at our convent school where her daughter studied.

In 1972, when I had to do an academic exercise as part of fulfilment of the requirement for my Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours in English, I opted to look into for the question on novels about the Japanese Occupation of this region. In order to explore the theme, “Two Dominant Themes in the English Literature of Japanese Occupation: A Study of Modern Response to War”, I read all the memoirs and novels by both European and non-European writers that I could lay my hands on. In those days I could only find one novel by a non-European. Sold for Silver by Janet Lim, an autobiographical novel, was discovered in a second-hand bookshop by chance. It was an old battered paperback.

But by 2002, there were many novels by non-European writers on the shelves of air-conditioned bookshops. In 2001, while formulating the proposal, I decided to concentrate on novels written between 1950 and 1980. After reading them I prepared a questionnaire and set about gathering empirical data. In 2002 I abandoned this idea and decided to focus on the novels that were published between 1980 and 2002. There weren' that many to make this task impossible, but there were enough for me to have to make a selection.

My interest in this area of research was also spurred on by the fact that I had started writing a novel in 1996. My chief concern while I was writing was how to represent my mother' speech and the dialogues with my grandmother which were in Malayalam.