KITA Discourse Series 13/2017

The foundation of the Tamil Catholic community in Malaysia is linked to two flows of “corporeal mobilities” (Urry 2000) that date back to the nineteenth century. The first of these is the colonial migrant network that introduced Tamils into the Straits Settlements and the Federated States of Malaya. They arrived from South India via ships over the Bay of Bengal to the port of Penang and thenceforth via inland travel over river to various plantations as well as other settlements all over the Malay peninsular. The second is the network of French Catholic missionaries who played a key role in founding the early Catholic Tamil parishes in these very places, many of whom travelled overland from Thailand and Vietnam as well as on ships directly from France. This paper investigates the trajectories of the encounter between members from both these communities by focusing on one of the earliest known Tamil Catholic settlements in Malaysia, St. Joseph’s Camp. Using the memoir of its founder, French Missionary, Rene Marie Michel Fee, of the Société des Missions étrangères de Paris (M.E.P), I interrogate the complex and competing set of dialogics that emerge as these two forms of nineteenth century Tamil and French mobilities come into contact. As scholars (Bayly 1989; Mosse 1994; Zupanov 2004) have argued, colonial missionaries played a key role in providing essential ethnographic material of their encounters and subsequent engagement with local converts. Fee’s memoir is no exception. However, what interests me is the dialectical interplay between Catholic institutional mobilities and Tamil individual mobilities that abound in the text. Each anecdotal episode, relayed through Fee’s personal reflections of his own mission activities, reveals a progressive reterritorialization of the initial missionary vision as Catholic institutional precepts are caught up in the currents of diaspora, that powerful phenomenon of circulation, movement of individuals, communities and cultures. Significant too are the references to layworkers from the Tamil community who assist the missionary in general duties such as conversion, baptism and funeral arrangements as well as other daily pastoral activities. I argue that these and other subtle changes to the Catholic religious network evident in the narrative progression indicate the beginnings of a localized Malaysian Tamil Catholic identity. I end by suggesting that the diverse mobilities that took shape in the 19th Century have been largely responsible for the creation of a new Tamil Catholic religious sphere in diaspora that is steeped in movement and mobility rather than stasis and “structured scapes” (Urry 2000) and these have ultimately impacted on contemporary Malaysian Tamil Catholic identity.

Shanthini Pillai (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, and Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA), National University of Malaysia (UKM). Her research interests are anchored primarily in ethnic diversity, diaspora and transnationalism in literary and cultural texts with particular reference to the global South Asian diaspora. An emergent interest is in the cultural consciousness of Catholic diasporic Indians in Malaysia. She has held Research Fellowships at the University of Queensland, Australia and the Asia Research Institute, Singapore and is currently heading a research project on Malaysian Catholics and Transcultural Adapatibility, in collaboration with the Catholic Research Centre of the Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She is author of Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions: Images of the Indian Diaspora of Malaysia (2007) as well as numerous articles in various journals of Literary and Cultural Studies.