A lifelong love of history has led me here — to begin writing and to honour the stories that built our past. I remember watching Roots, the 1977 television series based on Alex Haley’s book — the story of Kunta Kinte, the African man torn from his homeland and chained into slavery. His pain, his pride, his longing for home — all of it seared into my mind. It made me wonder about our own histories here in Malaya: who were the ones who toiled, who wept and who built the land we inherited?

When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833 through the Slavery Abolition Act, it freed bodies but not its hunger for cheap labour. The empire’s vast machinery still needed hands to mine tin, clear jungles, plant tropical crops and lay railways across its colonies.

In Malaya, where the local Malay population largely remained tied to village life, the British turned to large-scale imported labour from India and China — a system less visible than slavery, yet no less binding.

South Indian Tamils arrived through kangani recruitment, bound by contracts that promised meagre pay and tied them to planters through debt and dependency. In the mines, thousands of Chinese “coolies” toiled under the tropical sun, drawn or deceived into hard labour by brokers from Guangdong and Fujian.

The indentured labour system became the British Empire’s moral camouflage — slavery by another name, dressed in the language of contracts. It kept the estates productive, the mines humming, and the treasury full. The British divided labour by race: Indians for plantations, Chinese for mines and trade, and Malays for rural administration — an order that sustained both profit and control.

From these movements of people and toil arose modern Malaya — its railways, towns, and industries built on the backs of those who came not as conquerors, but as survivors. Their sweat and sorrow seeded the multicultural nation we now call home.

I remember my late maternal grandmother speaking of them in half-whispers and in remembrance. Sitting by the window of our wooden house in Jenjarom, she would murmur, “You don’t know how those people suffered — the Chinese coolies in the mines, the Indian labourers in the rubber estates. Both toiled till their bones ached and their tears dried under the same sun.” Her words, soft as sighs, carried the weight of lives bent to build a land not yet their own.

The word keling — once a neutral reference to an ancient South Indian kingdom — gradually changed over time, acquiring harsher tones and misuse. Yet in my grandmother’s day, it was spoken more as a description than with disdain: a rural shorthand for the Tamil labourers who filled the estates, railway camps and road gangs of British Malaya.

Of them, she often said gently, “They worked until their backs bent like old rubber trees. Even the rain could not wash away their sorrow.” Through her eyes, I began to see history not as policy or profit but as people. People like Ravi — a name she mentioned once — a Tamil man who lived behind the estate line-houses, who left his village and never saw it again.

By the late 1800s, the British realised that tin and coffee alone could not sustain their ambitions. Rubber — that miraculous sap feeding the world’s hunger for tyres — became their new gold.

The demand for labour was immense. Following the Indian Immigration Ordinance of 1884, British planters and recruiters spread across South India — particularly the drought-prone districts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala — promising steady wages and a better life in Malaya. From the parched fields of Madurai and Tirunelveli, thousands boarded steamships bound for Penang, Port Dickson, Teluk Anson and Port Swettenham, crossing the Bay of Bengal in search not of fortune, but of rain, rice and survival.

Many came under the indenture system; others through the kangani network — a chain of obligation that bound entire families to a single estate through debt and kinship. Though the official indenture system was abolished in 1917, kangani recruitment continued. But when they arrived, they found not paradise but the relentless rhythm of colonial profit.

Ravi would rise before dawn. He lived in a narrow wooden cubicle, a single oil lamp flickering against the wall. Barefoot, he walked into the mist, tapping knife in hand, cutting the bark of rubber trees with the precision of desperation. The white latex bled slowly into cups — drop by drop, like the measured tears of a forest.

He might have earned twenty Straits cents a day — but after deductions for rice, salt, oil, rent and advances, what he actually took home was scarcely half that. Even the doctor’s quinine could be charged to his account. To put this in perspective: twenty cents in 1910 equated roughly to RM12 today — barely enough for a bowl of rice and salt.

The British planters called the Tamil labourers “industrious and docile”. My grandmother had two words: kělián (pitiful) and terpaksa (no choice).

She remembered them lining up at dusk, returning from the fields with their backs slick with sweat, their eyes empty. Some sang softly in Tamil hymns of home. Others sat in silence, their dreams folded away like the small cloth bundles they had carried from India.

Among them was a young girl named Lakshmi. She planted seedlings in the nursery and often shared her cooked rice with Ravi. By the river, they would talk and laugh in that shy, fleeting way only youth knows. But joy was short-lived on the estates. Lakshmi fell ill — dysentery, they said. There was an estate hospital, but care was rudimentary, and medicine scarce. When she failed to recover, the kangani quietly announced that she had been “sent home”. No one ever heard from her again. Ravi grew silent after that. He still rose before dawn to tap the trees but his songs faded; the forest seemed to absorb them, as if the jungle itself had taken his grief.

To my grandmother, the echo of Ravi’s song, the cough of the sickly Lakshmi, and the cries of children born in the line-houses were sounds she never forgot. She had known some of these people — not as “others” but as neighbours, fellow souls caught in the same machinery of an empire.

By the early 1900s, Indian labour had become the backbone of the Malayan plantation economy. They built roads, railways and estates. The kangani was recruiter and enforcer — controlling wages, advances and punishments. The estates became miniature kingdoms: the planter the ruler, the kangani his steward and the workers his subjects.

When rubber prices rose, quotas increased. When prices fell, wages dropped. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, daily pay fell to barely twenty cents. Families starved quietly in their cubicles while latex still dripped faithfully from the trees. Estate records were meticulous: pounds of rubber produced, cost per acre, yield per tapper but there was no column for broken hearts.

After the Second World War, many Tamil families chose to remain in Malaya, for they had known no other home. The estates gradually evolved into close-knit communities; their temples stood as small sanctuaries of faith amid Malayan soil. Their children attended Tamil primary schools established under the colonial education system — later incorporated into the national framework — while their grandchildren grew up speaking Malay and English.

Over time, they became teachers, clerks, soldiers and civil servants — no longer “coolies” but citizens of a nation in the making. In the decades that followed, many from these line-house beginnings rose even higher — as doctors, lawyers, engineers, academics, entrepreneurs — and beyond. Yet the shadow of their ancestors’ toil still lingers in the red earth of the plantations.

Even today, if you walk through an old rubber estate at dawn, you can almost hear it — the tap of a knife, the drip of latex, the hum of a distant song in a language that carried both prayer and pain.

In my years of discernment, I’ve often thought about how we in the plantation industry speak easily of yield, mechanisation, and sustainability — but seldom of the ghosts beneath the trees. Those workers were the invisible roots of the plantation world. Without them, Malaya’s economic miracle would never have taken shape.

They were not slaves, yet not free; not citizens, yet indispensable. Their story, like Kunta Kinte’s, is one of dislocation — of people uprooted from their soil and planted elsewhere for the benefit of others.

Years later, I visited an old estate near Banting. The rubber trees stood like ageing sentinels, their bark scarred from decades of tapping. The line houses had been replaced by concrete quarters. A Tamil woman swept the yard. I asked if there was a cemetery nearby. She nodded and led me to a clearing by the stream. There, among the ferns, lay small mounds of earth — unmarked, forgotten. She whispered, “My great-grandfather was from Madras. He died here. Never went home.”

I stood there in silence, thinking of Ravi, of Lakshmi, of all the nameless thousands who came with nothing but faith and hunger. The estate was quiet, save for the faint drip of latex — steady, mournful, eternal.

In that sound, I heard both Roots and our own roots — the stories of Indians, Chinese and countless others who came to this land; tales of bondage and resilience, cruelty and grace, exile and endurance. These were not merely migrant journeys but human odysseys — of men and women who crossed seas, planted hope in foreign soil and built the foundations of a nation long before we called it home.

To remember them is not to dwell on sorrow, but to recognise that Malaysia’s story — like Roots — is born of pain and persistence, suffering and solidarity, and the quiet, enduring faith that from hardship, dignity can still grow. As my grandmother once said, “Remember — this land drank many tears before it bore fruit.”

I thought of Ravi and Lakshmi when watching Roots. They were not enslaved in chains but bound by contracts and hunger — their freedom mortgaged to the Empire’s need for rubber. Their story, like so many others, lies buried beneath our plantations, whispered only by the wind through old railway lines and rows of rubber trees.

I recently read about two brothers — Kumanavannan and Gogularaajan Rajendran — who are giving those forgotten voices new life. Their visual documentary, to be released in 2026, revisits Malaysian plantation life through 500 Tamil folk songs painstakingly collected by the late Prof R Dhandayutham. These songs — of command and confession, humour and heartache, sorrow and courtship — echo the resilience of Indian estate labourers who built a nation with calloused hands and steadfast hearts.

A recently released memoir, Along the Railway Line in Labu by Gopalan Sellan, captures the heartbeat of that bygone world — the kinship of neighbours in estate lines, the temple festivities and the quiet heroism of young women who left their homes in India to toil beside their husbands in a strange new land and never returned. His words remind us that the road to Malaya’s prosperity was paved not by fortune, but by faith, fellowship and endurance.

Together, these works — in film, song and story — help us remember what history too easily forgets: that our nation was built not only by pioneers and planters but also by the countless Ravis and Lakshmis whose sweat turned soil into homeland.

A line from a song of yesteryears still echoes through time:
“To tap rubber trees, we boarded an old ship.
For forty-five cents, they broke my back.
For thirty-five cents, they bent my joints.”

When Malaya gained independence in 1957, the young nation inherited more than roads, railways, and estates from its colonial master — it inherited the labour of millions who had built them. Beneath every tin mine, mile of road and track, and row of rubber trees lie the untold stories of those whose sweat once powered an empire and later sustained a nation.

History may no longer remember their names, but the earth still holds their footsteps — silent testaments to endurance, dignity and belonging. They helped shape the nation we became.

And so, we must remember them.

Joseph Tek Choon Yee is a former president of the Malaysian Estate Owners’ Association (MEOA) and past chief executive of the Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA)