Novel
The Return
K. S. Maniam · 1981
Synopsis
Ravi, son of an Indian family settled in the Malay peninsula for three generations, grows up in Bedong, between the hospital laundry and the family home, where his grandmother Periathai, a pedlar who came from India, rules. Torn between the culture of his forebears and what society expects of him, he takes refuge in the English school, whose language, manners and ideas he learns, and gradually drifts away from his own people.
Context
The author's first novel, largely autobiographical, the book appeared in 1981 from Heinemann Asia in Kuala Lumpur; the grandmother in the story is inspired by his own, a hunchbacked pedlar who had arrived from India around 1916. It shows a community of immigrants on the peninsula before and after independence in 1957, and raises the question of cultural identity that will run through the whole body of his work. The Indian writer Raja Rao, who read it in 1987, judged its writing to have a poetic precision.
Who it is for
A short novel, in English, in a sober language; it does not exist in French and can be read without knowing Malaysia.
Prizes and reception
On the syllabus of the final-year secondary classes in Malaysia, as the set novel in English; it is the book that made its author known.