There is this collection of photographs that I have regretted discovering a little too late for inclusion in the Bayangnya Itu Timbul Tenggelam: Photographic Cultures in Malaysia that I co-curated with Fanchon and Azril last year at Ilham Gallery. These photographs were explored in Dinesh Sathisan’s MA thesis on the Tamil presses’ formative role in shaping Tamil cultural identity during the interwar period. They were published in the newspaper Tamil Murasu in 1936.
In other contexts, these photographs would have been classed under the genre of wedding portraits, taken to commemorate a matrimonial rite of passage. But remediated through the printing press, these conjugal performances sought to redefine the institution of marriage. Here, the portrait was repurposed as testimonies for love’s seldom discussed political power.
In this sense, Self-Respect marriages was a conjugal challenge against fate. Included under this larger umbrella were reform marriages (dispensing the services of the Brahmin priest) and widow remarriages. The movement also promoted inter-caste marriages, advocating ‘kalappumaṇattāl jāti oḻiyum’ (intermarriage destroys caste).
Self-Respect (cuyamariyatai iyakkam) was first espoused by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, who crossed the kalapani to attend the All-Malaya Tamils Conference (Akila Malaya Tamiḻar Mānāṭu) in 1929. It was here that he found an ally in newspaperman Sarangapany, who used his press Tamil Murasu to promote Self-Respect ideals and practice in Malaya.
Self-Respect Marriages can also be seen as an Anti-Brahmin endeavour, resisting against the increasing presence and assertions of a growing Brahmin population. By establishing Brahmin-owned hotels and temples, the newer and more exclusive community sought to perpetuate the historically oppressive varna social order that accorded them greater social privileges owing to caste-centric concept about the purity of their birthright. In addition, as a favoured comprador class groomed into professional and economic respectability within the colonial social order, the Brahmin community were regarded as natural-born leaders of the ‘Indian community’ by the British.
For the Tamil majority who came to Malaya as indentured labourers in the plantation estates, the recently arrived Brahmin population therefore posed the risk of introducing an oppressive social structure that many workers thought they have escaped from by coming to Malaya. Also, it was felt that if the Brahmins were to assume leadership amongst the Indian community, this would have set back the struggle for political enfranchisement of the estate workers.
In other words, photographs found in the newspaper exist as a paradox. They appear and circulate in the medium of print capitalism that prizes transience and topicality, yet the very technology used to reproduce the likenesses of actual living humans has since the invention of photography operated on a desire for permanence.
That this was not contradiction meant to be resolved suggest that the photographs served an allegorical purpose. After all, belonging to a world in flux, many of us simply want to cling on to anything that resembles endurance, and in the idea of an enduring love, we hope to come out on the side, reborn, self-made, conscious.
Wedding portraits testifying to self-respect can therefore be thought of as didactic fables of the modern age. Small lives can now be writ large. The choice one makes at the most personal level, of who to love has larger historical ramification, where the attainment of true love also promises theological liberation, from a life dictated by the stars and the tyranny of Brahminical determinism.
Photographs in the presses magnified the forcefulness of such a claim, not by increasing the audibility of its political message but by holding out a vision of truth’s supposed timelessness. Marriage portraits stage a world outside of present time, inhabiting a past present future in which freedom is a given and transcendent. In turn, it returns the newspaper readers’ gaze, bestowing its darshan, as reciprocation of consolation and prophecy.