Minorities, Rights and the Law in Malaysia (Routledge Contemporary Asia Series) - Softcover

Kananatu, Thaatchaayini

Softcover

ISBN 10: 103240048X ISBN 13: 9781032400488

Publisher: Routledge, 2022

Synopsis

This book analyses the mobilisation of race, rights and the law in Malaysia. It examines the Indian community in Malaysia, a quiet minority which consists of the former Indian Tamil plantation labour community and the urban Indian middle-class.

The first part of the book explores the role played by British colonial laws and policies during the British colonial period in Malaya, from the 1890s to 1956, in the construction of an Indian "race" in Malaya, the racialization of labour laws and policies and labour-based mobilisation culminated in the 1940s. The second part investigates the mobilisation trends of the Indian community from 1957 (at the onset of Independent Malaya) to 2018. It shows a gradual shift in the Indian community from a "quiet minority" into a mass mobilising collective or social movement, known as the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF), in 2007. The author shows that activist lawyers and Indian mobilisers played a crucial part in organizing a civil disobedience strategy of framing grievances as political rights and using the law as a site of contention in order to claim legal rights through strategic litigation.

Highly interdisciplinary in nature, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers examining the role of the law and rights in areas such as sociolegal studies, law and society scholarship, law and the postcolonial, social movement studies, migration and labour studies, Asian law and Southeast Asian Studies.

About this title

About the Author

Thaatchaayini Kananatu is a Lecturer in Law at the School of Business, Monash University Malaysia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 103240048X
• ISBN 13: 9781032400488
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224