II - The Return (1981)

Summary

Alienation, the theme, is central to K.S. Maniam' first novel, The Return (1981), a retrospective narrative from the protagonist Ravi' point of view, and limited to what he hears and sees. In an essay, “The Malaysian Novelist: Detachment or Spiritual Transcendence”, Maniam says The Return “in fact, sets out to explore how Indian religious belief can be modified to suit new lands, people and customs” (Maniam, p. 168). The religious belief that Ravi wants to modify is the caste system, which deprives a human being of his dignity. As the title implies, the return is to his Tamil-speaking family after being alienated from them throughout his years of learning English. The adult Ravi, returning to his country after two years of teacher training in England, needs to understand how his colonial education constructed his sense of self before he can challenge the caste system, the Indian religious belief he wants to modify.

Young Ravi' alienation begins when he masters the English language and learns to escape into the world created by the words of fairy tales and comics. Through Miss Nancy, his English teacher, who once accidently called him “Ernie”, Ravi identifies himself with the English boy in his English reader. However, while in England, he discovers that the snow “wasn' as white” (p. 155) as he had imagined it to be and “Ernie appeared among the many faces” he saw in the “midland town or in London (p. 155)”. Ravi can only determine what he is by what he has become, by the story of how he got there, for according to Charles Taylor, the philosopher and political scientist, one “basic condition of making sense of ourselves” is that “we grasp our lives in a narrative” (Taylor 1989, p. 47). The quest in the novel, therefore, is to understand how his alienation takes place so that reconciliation with his Tamil-speaking family in a multilingual environment becomes possible.

Juxtaposed with Standard English are dialogues in mimetic translation which suggest that there are diverse linguistic groups living in the same environment. Take for instance the conversation between Ravi' Tamil-speaking father and a Chinese-dialect speaking shopkeeper: The phrase “My son, he goes” has a similar structure to that of a Malay sentence.