From Plantations to Precarity: Education, Neoliberalism, and Malaysian Indian Marginalisation in Shanjey Kumar Perumal's Jagat (2015)

2.1 The Malaysian Indian Community: Colonial origins and structural marginalisation

The Indian presence in Malaya was a deliberate construction of colonial capitalism. British plantation interests required a reliable, controllable, and cheap supply of labour, and from the 1880s onward they engineered large-scale migration from South India to serve that purpose.^2,16 Recruiters operated through the kangani system, a form of chain migration in which existing workers were recruited from their home villages and, in earlier periods, through indenture. The majority of migrants were lower-caste Tamils, whose social vulnerability in India rendered them susceptible to recruitment and, upon arrival, to exploitation.¹⁷ Plantation conditions, while providing a minimum material floor, housing, rudimentary schools, temples, and medical clinics, were characterised by low wages, racial hierarchy, and extreme social isolation. The plantation was a total institution in the sociological sense: it structured every dimension of workers’ lives while simultaneously insulating them from the broader society and economy of Malaya.²

British colonial rule systematised ethnic division as a mechanism of governance. The policy of assigning different economic roles to different ethnic communities, Malays to subsistence agriculture, Chinese to mining and commerce, Indians to plantation labour, created what Hirschman¹⁸ describes as a racialised labour regime, in which ethnic identity and economic function became mutually reinforcing categories. These divisions were not pre-existing cultural facts but political constructions, produced through colonial law and administrative practice.¹⁹ Their legacy, however, proved far more durable than the colonial order that created them.

Independence in 1957 did not resolve these inherited inequalities. The political compromise that produced independent Malaya, granting citizenship to non-Malays in exchange for constitutional guarantees of Malay special rights, effectively institutionalised the ethnic differentiation of the colonial period within the postcolonial state.^20,21 The pro-capitalist economic policies of the first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, failed to address the concentrated poverty of the plantation Indian community, whose income remained significantly below both Malay and Chinese averages throughout the 1960s²² (see Table 1).

The May 13, 1969, ethnic riots, which erupted against a backdrop of deep interethnic economic inequality, prompted the government to introduce the New Economic Policy in 1971. The NEP’s stated objectives were poverty eradication and economic restructuring to reduce the identification of race with economic function.²³ However, as Gomez and Saravanamuttu⁴ demonstrate, the NEP’s primary beneficiaries were Bumiputera elites and their politically connected allies; the plantation Indian community experienced little structural improvement. The NEP, far from resolving the Indian community’s marginalisation, effectively institutionalised the priority of Malay economic advancement while leaving Indian workers concentrated in the lowest economic strata.

2.2 The Malaysian education system: Policy, language, and ethnic exclusion

Education in postcolonial Malaysia has been a central site of ethnic contestation and policy-driven inequality. The Razak Report (1956) and the subsequent Education Act (1961) established a national education system premised on Bahasa Malaysia as the medium of instruction and the standardisation of curriculum across all school types. While nominally inclusive, these policies placed Tamil-medium and Chinese-medium schools in a subordinate position relative to national schools, restricting access to government resources and limiting the language-of-instruction options available to non-Malay communities.²⁴ The NEP’s extension into education introduced formal quota systems in public university enrolment and scholarship allocation, privileging Bumiputera students.²⁵ For Tamil Malaysian students, already concentrated in under-resourced Tamil primary schools with limited post-primary Tamil-medium options, this structural disadvantage is compounded over successive educational transitions. The National Education Philosophy (1988), while articulating goals of holistic development aligned with the Rukun Negara, did little to address the accumulated disadvantages facing Indian students in practice.²⁶

The result, as the film Jagat makes viscerally apparent, was an educational system that formally promised social mobility while functionally reproducing exclusion. The high-stakes UPSR primary school examination functioned as a sorting mechanism that, for students from resource-poor families and poorly equipped Tamil schools, operated less as an opportunity than as a premature ceiling. The pedagogy of examination preparation, rote memorisation, punitive discipline, and rigid conformity that dominates the film’s school scenes is not a distortion of the Malaysian education system but an accurate representation of the systemic pressures it generated for marginalised students in the 1990s.^27,28

2.3 Neoliberal Malaysia: Privatisation, displacement, and the making of a precariat

Malaysia’s neoliberal turn under Mahathir Mohamad’s prime ministership (1981–2003) constituted a fundamental reorganisation of the relationship between the state, capital, and ethnic communities. Driven by a combination of global market pressures and domestic political imperatives, Mahathir’s administration embarked on an ambitious programme of privatisation, industrialisation, and economic modernisation. His Look East Policy, modelled on the developmental states of South Korea and Japan, and the heavy-industry investments in petrochemicals, iron and steel, and transport equipment represented a decisive shift from an agricultural and extraction-based economy toward industrial capitalism. Under Mahathir, privatisation was articulated as a strategy to reduce state expenditure, improve efficiency, promote private-sector investment, and advance the NEP’s Bumiputera ownership targets.²⁹ However, as Gomez and Jomo²⁹ critically demonstrate, privatisation was, in practice, deeply entangled with political patronage: the primary beneficiaries were not the broadly defined Bumiputera communities but a narrow class of politically connected businessmen who used non-Bumiputera proxies to consolidate corporate ownership. The consequence for the Indian estate community was devastating. When rubber plantations were corporatised, sold to developers, or converted to palm oil production, the estate population that had lived and worked on that land for generations was displaced without adequate compensation, resettlement support, or skills transition programmes.

Forced into urban centres without adequate education, language proficiency in Bahasa Malaysia or English, or transferable industrial skills, Tamil-speaking estate workers found themselves at the very bottom of the urban labour market.² The urban squatter settlements and low-income neighbourhoods they inhabited were characterised by overcrowding, poor infrastructure, and proximity to criminal networks, conditions which Ghani³⁰ links to elevated risks of gang involvement, substance dependency, and economic criminalisation. Durairaja, Mat Saat, and Kamaluddin³¹ further document the strong correlation between the structural exclusion of young Indian men and gang recruitment in Malaysian urban settings. This is the social world that Jagat depicts.

2.4 Precarity theory: A framework for subaltern vulnerability

The conceptual framework of precarity provides this paper’s central analytical lens. Guy Standing⁵ defines the precariat as a distinct social class, distinct from the traditional working class, characterised by labour market insecurity, the absence of stable occupational identity, chronic vulnerability to risk, and exclusion from the social and political entitlements associated with citizenship. Standing identifies seven forms of labour-related security that the precariat systematically lacks: labour market security, employment security, job security, work security, skill reproduction security, income security, and representation security. This multi-dimensional framing is particularly generative for the Malaysian Indian context, in which estate displacement deprived workers of all seven forms simultaneously: stripping them of stable employment, occupational identity, transferable skills, adequate income, and, given their exclusion from Bumiputera-targeted welfare, effective political representation. Furthermore, Standing conceptualises the precariat as a class that has been denied the status of denizens, those with diminished citizenship rights relative to the full entitlements nominally available to citizens, a condition that resonates sharply with the Indian community’s experience of formal citizenship alongside substantive social and political exclusion.

Judith Butler⁶ offers a complementary and philosophically deeper theorisation of precarity. For Butler, precarity is not merely an economic condition but a fundamental dimension of human vulnerability that is differentially distributed across bodies, communities, and populations. Some lives, Butler argues, are rendered ungrievable; they are not recognised as lives that matter by the political and cultural frameworks through which their precarity is produced and sustained. This concept of ungrievability is analytically powerful for reading Jagat: the film’s Tamil Malaysian characters occupy precisely this position, their suffering and their deaths do not register within dominant Malaysian national discourse as losses that demand mourning, political redress, or institutional accountability. The plantation Indian community, rendered invisible by the developmental narrative of the Mahathir era, inhabits the condition Butler describes, present within the nation but not fully recognised by it.

Together, Standing’s structural-economic and Butler’s biopolitical-philosophical frameworks illuminate the condition that Jagat represents. It is important to note, however, that these frameworks were developed primarily in the context of advanced Western capitalist economies and require some translation for the Malaysian postcolonial context. In particular, Standing’s assumption of a welfare state that is being dismantled must be modified: for Malaysian plantation Indians, state welfare provision was always partial and ethnically differentiated rather than universally provided and then withdrawn. Butler’s formulation of grievability similarly operates against a background of liberal democratic recognition politics that did not fully obtain in Mahathir’s Malaysia. These contextual qualifications notwithstanding, both frameworks retain substantial explanatory power when applied with appropriate attention to the specificity of the Malaysian Indian situation. The characters Maniam, Bala, Durai, and Manggai are not merely individuals making bad choices in difficult circumstances; they are subjects constituted by precarity, whose life trajectories are shaped by forces systematically beyond their control. The film’s power lies precisely in its refusal to individuate blame: it insists, through every narrative choice, that what is happening to this family is structural.

2.5 Postcolonial Tamil cinema and Malaysian independent film

Situating Jagat within the landscape of postcolonial Tamil and Malaysian cinema is essential to understanding its critical significance. Tamil cinema has a long tradition of engaging with questions of caste, class, and communal marginalisation.⁹ In the diasporic context, Tamil films produced outside South India have increasingly served as vehicles for articulating the specific experiences of Tamil communities displaced by colonial and postcolonial migrations, navigating what Pillai¹⁰ describes as the tension between preserving Tamil cultural identity and the pressures of assimilation into host-nation formations. Specifically, within Malaysian Tamil cultural production, Pillai’s¹⁰ work on language, identity, and the Tamil community in Malaysia provides a foundational account of the cultural politics within which Jagat intervenes.

The emergence of digital and independent cinema in Malaysia from the early 2000s enabled filmmakers to challenge the dominant modes of national cinema, which had historically prioritised consensual representations of multiethnic harmony in favour of more critical, ethnically specific, and socially realist narratives.⁸ This independent turn created space for films that could address the experiences of minority communities without the constraints of state-funded or commercially risk-averse production.⁷ Social realism as a cinematic mode characterised by location shooting, non-professional actors, episodic narrative structures, and an attention to the quotidian textures of marginalised life^32,33 provided Jagat’s filmmaker with a formal vocabulary adequate to the social content he sought to represent. Within this context, Jagat (2015, Skyzen Studios, Tamil-language, 109 minutes) stands as a landmark work. Directed by Shanjey Kumar Perumal, it is widely regarded as the first serious cinematic engagement with Malaysian Indian urban precarity, and it achieved the rare distinction of both critical acclaim and broad audience resonance within the Tamil Malaysian community. The film’s use of social realist aesthetics, non-professional actors, location shooting in actual Indian urban settlements, minimal musical scoring, and hand-held camerawork that closes the distance between viewer and subject positions it within a mode of postcolonial filmmaking that, as Hall³⁴ argues in his foundational work on encoding and decoding, invites multiple readings from differently positioned audiences. For Tamil Malaysian viewers, the film encodes lived experience; for broader audiences, it functions as a form of cultural testimony to a marginalisation that dominant Malaysian cinema had systematically rendered invisible.

3.1 Researcher positionality

Reflexive acknowledgement of researcher positionality is a foundational requirement of rigorous qualitative inquiry.¹¹ The research team for this paper consists of scholars based in Malaysia and the UAE, as well as in Malaysian university contexts, with professional expertise in media studies, film studies, and postcolonial cultural analysis. The lead author has an established research record in Malaysian cinema and media politics. While not all members of the team are Tamil Malaysian by background, all have sustained scholarly and, in several cases, personal familiarity with the social contexts represented in the film. This positionality shapes the analytical approach in the following ways: the preferred reading adopted in this paper, a critical postcolonial reading that foregrounds structural causation, is not presented as the only possible reading of Jagat but as the reading most adequately supported by the film’s formal and narrative choices and by the sociohistorical literature. The analysis acknowledges, particularly in its discussion of Manggai, the limitations of reading subaltern subjectivity from an academic position and draws on Spivak’s¹⁵ methodological cautions in this regard.

3.2 Textual analysis as qualitative method

This paper employs textual analysis as its primary qualitative research methodology. As Rose¹¹ defines it, textual analysis involves the systematic and critical interpretation of cultural texts to understand the ideological work they perform, how they construct social subjects, naturalise worldviews, and negotiate relations of power. Textual analysis is distinct from content analysis in its interpretive orientation: rather than counting surface features, it attends to the depth structures of meaning-making: how texts mobilise ideological frameworks, construct subject positions, and negotiate social contradictions. McKee¹² further clarifies that textual analysis is fundamentally concerned with understanding the way researchers gather information about how other human beings make sense of the world. For the purposes of film analysis specifically, this paper draws on Hall’s³⁴ encoding/decoding model, which recognises that films are produced within ideological frameworks that encode preferred meanings, while also acknowledging that audiences decode these meanings from positions shaped by their own social locations. Hall’s model is significant because it refuses both a purely intentionalist reading (the film means what the director intended) and a purely structuralist one (the film’s meaning is entirely determined by its formal codes). In the case of Jagat, the preferred reading encoded by the film is broadly aligned with a critical postcolonial perspective: the film’s narrative structure, character development, cinematographic choices, and dialogue systematically invite readings that implicate structural forces of neoliberal policy, ethnic discrimination, and educational violence in the production of the Tamil Malaysian precariat. This paper reads Jagat in that preferred register, while acknowledging that negotiated and oppositional readings are possible and that different audiences, including audiences who identify with the dominant national developmental narrative, may decode the film’s representations quite differently.

3.3 Scene selection and analytical procedure

Scenes and sequences for analysis were selected based on three criteria. First, scenes that directly represent the four central characters, Maniam, Bala, Durai, and Manggai, in ways that illuminate their relationship to precarity, displacement, and social constraint. Second, sequences that stage interactions between characters and institutions, particularly the school and the family, in ways that expose the exercise of structural power. Third, dialogue-rich scenes in which characters articulate, explicitly or implicitly, their understanding of their own social position. For Maniam: the scenes of domestic confrontation over Appoy’s schoolwork, and the sequence depicting his factory workplace. For Bala: the evening conversation sequences and the scenes depicting his relapse and death. For Durai: the street sequences that establish his gang affiliation and the scenes of economic transaction. For Manggai: the domestic scenes that define her spatial and relational confinement. For Appoy: the art class scene, the mathematics classroom confrontation, and the Michael Jackson costume construction sequence. The full film, Jagat, ³⁵ was repeatedly viewed prior to analysis. The analytical procedure followed a process of close reading: first establishing the narrative and visual context of each selected scene, then identifying the ideological frameworks through which meaning is constructed, including attention to camerawork, framing, spatial positioning, dialogue, and finally situating those frameworks within the sociohistorical and theoretical contexts established in the literature review.

3.4 Film synopsis

Set in the 1990s, Jagat follows Appoy (Shankar), a twelve-year-old Tamil Malaysian boy living in a low-income urban Indian neighbourhood in Malaysia. His family, father Maniam, mother Manggai, and uncle-by-marriage Durai, have recently been displaced from a rubber plantation estate and are struggling to adapt to urban working-class life. Maniam works at a Chinese-owned wood factory; his economic failure weighs heavily on the family and manifests as authoritarian pressure on Appoy to succeed academically. Manggai, Appoy’s mother, is largely confined to the domestic sphere. Appoy’s uncle Bala is a former gangster recovering from drug addiction; his philosophical reflections and tragic arc provide the film’s moral counterweight. Durai (known by his gang name, Mexico) represents the pathway of criminal survivability. Appoy himself is a creative, artistically inclined child who finds the rigidity of his school environment stifling and incompatible with his sensibility. The narrative traces the disintegration of family bonds, the foreclosure of Appoy’s creative potential by the educational system, and the eventual absorption of vulnerable young men into gang culture. The film ends tragically, underscoring its refusal of redemptive developmental narratives.

4.1 Maniam and the ideology of educational salvation

Maniam, Appoy’s father, is the film’s most complex and, in many ways, most tragic figure. Displaced from the plantation that provided his family’s economic foundation and social identity, he now works as a low-wage labourer in a Chinese-owned wood factory, a detail that is itself politically charged, positioning Maniam within a racialised labour hierarchy in which Indian manual workers remain subordinate to Chinese-owned capital even in the post-plantation urban context. The film renders this hierarchy visible through its spatial staging: Maniam moves through environments, the factory floor, the cramped family home, the neighbourhood street, which all mark the limits of his mobility and his diminished standing relative to other men in the community. Maniam’s displacement has stripped him of the minimal sense of agency and dignity that estate life, for all its exploitative character, provided. What remains is a man whose personal resentment at his own failure is transmuted into an oppressive faith in his son’s educational achievement as the family’s sole pathway to redemption.

This dynamic, the displacement of a father’s frustrated ambitions onto a child’s educational performance, is not merely a psychological phenomenon but a structural one. In Standing’s⁵ terms, Maniam exemplifies the precariat’s internalisation of meritocratic narratives: the ideological formation in which individual educational achievement is positioned as the solution to structurally produced disadvantage. This narrative displaces collective political consciousness, the recognition that the community’s position is produced by identifiable policy decisions that could be challenged collectively, with individual striving that leaves the structural conditions undisturbed. The burden placed on Appoy is, in this sense, the burden of an entire community’s thwarted aspirations, a burden the educational system has convinced the precariat to carry individually rather than address collectively. Standing’s framework further illuminates why Maniam cannot release this burden even when its effects on his son are clearly destructive: the precariat, denied occupational identity and economic security, invests its residual dignity in whatever aspirational narrative is culturally available.

The film stages this dynamic through scenes of domestic confrontation in which Maniam’s anger at Appoy’s artistic inclinations and apparent academic indifference is visceral and physical. Cinematographically, these scenes are characterised by tight framing that compresses the domestic space. The cramped interior of the family home serves as both a social realist detail and a visual metaphor for the constriction of possibility that defines the family’s situation. These scenes do not invite us to simply condemn Maniam; the film’s social realist commitment insists on the structural conditions that produce his behaviour. As Butler⁶ argues, when precarity is unaddressed at the structural level, it generates what might be called a cascade of violence: the violence of displacement cascades downward through the family, becoming domestic authority, then domestic aggression, as those with some residual power exercise it over those with less. Maniam is simultaneously victim and perpetrator within this cascade, a position the film captures with considerable moral nuance. His life is, in Butler’s⁶ terms, a life rendered ungrievable by the national developmental narrative, present in Malaysia but not recognised as worthy of the state’s protective attention.

4.2 Bala and the refusal of capitalist subjectivity

Bala, Appoy’s uncle, functions in Jagat as the film’s philosophical conscience and its most melancholy figure. Unlike Maniam, who has internalised the meritocratic ideology of educational salvation, and Durai, who has embraced the criminal economy as an alternative pathway to mobility, Bala occupies a position of deliberate refusal. He is a former gangster who has undergone rehabilitation, and the film presents him as a man who has, through the experience of addiction and recovery, arrived at a form of minimalist philosophical detachment from both materialist aspiration and gang-coded masculine identity.

Bala’s philosophical reflections, delivered in layered, cryptic Tamil dialogue, constitute one of the film’s most distinctive aesthetic and ideological features. He speaks of life in terms that resist the instrumental rationality of capitalist subjectivity: he is content with what he has, uninterested in the markers of success that drive both Maniam and Durai, and possessed of a meditative awareness of the social world’s cruelty that his less reflective counterparts lack. In Gramscian terms, Bala might be read as an organic intellectual in the making: a member of the subaltern class who, through lived experience rather than formal education, has developed a critical consciousness of the ideological structures that govern his community. Gramsci¹³ argues that all men are intellectuals in the sense that all human beings engage in forms of practical reasoning about their social world. The question is whether that reasoning acquires organised form and political direction. Bala’s consciousness is genuine; it grasps the structural character of the community’s subordination, but it lacks precisely the organised collective form that, for Gramsci, enables counter-hegemonic action. Morais et al.¹⁴ develop this Gramscian insight in the educational context, arguing that critical consciousness, which remains individual and privatised, cannot challenge hegemonic structures; it requires institutional embodiment to function as a genuine counterforce. Bala’s tragedy is precisely this: his consciousness has no institutional or collective outlet.

Bala’s death from drug relapse is, in this reading, not merely a personal tragedy but a structural one. The film implicates the availability of drugs in his neighbourhood itself, a consequence of the social conditions produced by plantation displacement and urban poverty, as the material condition of his relapse. The ease of access to narcotics within the community is not accidental; it reflects the abandonment of marginalised urban populations by state social welfare, health services, and community infrastructure. The film does not show Bala’s relapse as a moral failure of will; it is staged, through a sequence of quiet, unhurried shots of the neighbourhood’s physical environment, as an almost inevitable outcome of the material conditions that surround him. Bala’s death figures the impossibility, within the existing social order, of sustaining critical consciousness and philosophical resistance against the material weight of precarity.

4.3 Durai and the criminal economy as precarious mobility

Durai, known by his gang name Mexico, represents the pathway that the film presents as structurally available to young Malaysian Indian men for whom formal economic and educational mobility has been foreclosed. His turn to gangsterism is not represented in Jagat as a moral failure but as a rational, if ultimately self-destructive, response to structural constraints. The criminal economy offers what the formal economy denies: immediate income, social status, masculine dignity, and a form of collective belonging. As Durairaja, Mat Saat, and Kamaluddin³¹ document in their sociological study of gang recruitment among Malaysian Indians, the pathways from plantation displacement to urban poverty to gang involvement are not random; they are produced by identifiable structural conditions, chief among them educational exclusion, labour market discrimination, and the absence of state social protection.

Durai’s arc thus illuminates a dimension of precarity that Standing⁵ identifies as particularly dangerous: the precariat’s susceptibility to what he terms the politics of inferno, the turn toward primitive forms of social belonging, including ethnic chauvinism, criminal fraternity, and political extremism, as substitutes for the civic and occupational identities that stable social positions provide. For Malaysian Indian youth in the 1990s, gang culture offered precisely this substitute: a form of community, identity, and economic participation that the formal social order had denied them. Crucially, the gang also offers what Standing identifies as a form of work security, the physical protection and enforceable claims that the formal labour market denied estate workers, even though this security comes at the cost of exposure to criminal violence and legal jeopardy.

It is significant, moreover, that the violence through which Durai and his associates pursue economic and social power mimics the structural violence to which they have been subjected. The film is acutely aware of this mimetic logic: the gang’s violence reproduces the violence of the state and the plantation, displacing it from the abstract registers of policy and law onto the immediate, embodied register of street confrontation. Cinematographically, the film frames these scenes of gang violence without glamorisation. The hand-held camera and ambient lighting of the social realist mode refuse the stylised slow-motion aesthetics that have historically romanticised gang culture in Tamil popular cinema. This is not to romanticise gang violence but to insist, as the film does, on its structural intelligibility within the logic of precarity.

4.4 Manggai and the subaltern condition

Manggai, Appoy’s mother, occupies the most silenced position in the film’s social landscape. Her screen presence is defined by domestic labour, quiet endurance, and the subordination of her own needs and agency to the demands of the male members of the family, Maniam, Appoy, and Durai. She performs the full weight of domestic reproduction: cooking, cleaning, managing household logistics, mediating between family members, and she does so with little recognition, no economic compensation, and no institutional support. Her interactions are largely instrumental: reminding Maniam that the sugar has run out, attending to Appoy’s physical needs, absorbing Maniam’s anger as its primary domestic target.

Manggai’s characterisation directly engages the theoretical problematic articulated by Spivak¹⁵ in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak argues that the subaltern, and particularly the female subaltern, occupies a position of double subordination: marginalised both by the dominant social order and by the patriarchal structures of her own community. Manggai is subaltern in precisely this sense. She is marginalised as an Indian woman within a Malaysian social order that discriminates along ethnic and class lines, and she is subaltern within the family structure as a woman subordinated to male authority. Her silence in the film is not a personal attribute but a structural condition, the product of a gender order that has systematically denied her voice, agency, and economic subjectivity. Spivak¹⁵ cautions, however, that the academic recuperation of subaltern voices risks becoming a form of representation that speaks on behalf of the subaltern rather than creating conditions for genuine self-expression. The film itself enacts this caution: Manggai is not given a redemptive narrative arc or a scene in which she articulates her own subject position. Her silence is preserved as silence, which is perhaps the most honest formal choice available.

Notably, Manggai’s exclusion from economic life outside the household is itself a consequence of plantation displacement. On the estate, Indian women commonly contributed to plantation labour alongside men, forming part of the family’s collective economic unit, a fact documented by Kaur¹⁶ in her analysis of plantation labour regimes. Displacement into the urban informal economy disrupted this arrangement: men entered wage labour (however inadequately compensated), while women were pushed back into the domestic sphere, their economic contribution made invisible, and their social world shrank to the household. This gendered trajectory of displacement is not incidental to the precarity thesis; it demonstrates that precarity is not gender-neutral in either its production or its effects. In Butler’s⁶ terms, Manggai’s life is perhaps the most ungrievable of all the characters’: invisible to state policy, absent from dominant cultural representation, and silenced even within the domestic space that is presented as her domain. The film registers this with quiet precision, refusing to make her suffering spectacular while insisting on its systematic character.

4.5 Education as institutional violence: Appoy’s foreclosed creativity

If Maniam, Bala, Durai, and Manggai represent the adult dimensions of precarity in Jagat, then Appoy is its future and the film’s most direct engagement with educational violence. Appoy is a child of remarkable creative sensibility: he draws, constructs, and imagines with a facility that the film consistently presents as genuine artistic intelligence. His creation of a Michael Jackson-inspired costume from recycled materials is one of the film’s most striking images, a spontaneous act of aesthetic repurposing that transforms the materials of poverty into an expression of cultural aspiration. The scene is shot in close-up, with attention to the tactility of Appoy’s hands and the improvised materials he works with, establishing a visual register of creativity that the subsequent school scenes will systematically negate. This creativity, the film insists, is not frivolous: it is the form through which a structurally silenced subject asserts his humanity.

The educational institution, as represented in Jagat, systematically destroys this creativity through disciplinary mechanisms that Foucault³⁶ would recognise as characteristic of the modern disciplinary apparatus: the examination, the hierarchical observation, the normalising judgement, and the corrective sanction. Two scenes in particular enact this destruction with analytical precision. In the first, Appoy’s art class requires students to draw vegetable shapes according to specified instructions. Appoy departs from the brief, drawing instead a form inspired by his mother’s saree, an act of imaginative translation that, objectively, produces a more interesting and aesthetically accomplished drawing than those of his compliant peers. The teacher awards him a lower grade for disobedience. The shot composition in this scene is significant: the teacher is framed from below, emphasising institutional authority, while Appoy’s drawing, shown in close-up, is presented to the viewer as visually superior, creating an ironic disjunction between the institutional judgement and the visual evidence available to the audience. The lesson the film makes unmistakable is not about art; it is about obedience. The school produces not creative individuals but disciplined subjects.

In the second scene, Appoy challenges his mathematics teacher by questioning the logic of memorising multiplication tables when calculators can perform the computation instantly and effortlessly. This is not an act of laziness but of genuine intellectual curiosity, the question of a mind that is actually engaged with the material rather than merely complying with its memorisation. The teacher’s response is not to engage the question but to punish it: Appoy is made to kneel for challenging authority. As Wyness²⁷ argues, disciplinary practices of this kind function not primarily as pedagogical tools but as technologies of power, reinforcing children’s subordinate position within the social structure through the embodied imposition of submission. Craft²⁸ further demonstrates, in her analysis of creativity in education, that schooling systems premised on standardised assessment and rote learning systematically marginalise the divergent thinking that characterises genuinely creative intelligence, precisely the kind of intelligence that Appoy demonstrates.

The school’s punitive pedagogy is not arbitrary; it reflects a specific configuration of disciplinary power that Foucault³⁶ analyses as the transformation of the school into a machine for learning in which the pupil is produced as a docile body trained to respond to institutional commands, to submit to examination, and to reproduce rather than question the knowledge presented to them. In the context of 1990s Malaysia, this disciplinary logic had a specific political valence: it was congruent with, and partially produced by, the authoritarian culture of Mahathir’s administration, in which criticism of state power, whether by politicians, academics, or schoolchildren, carried real risks of punishment.

The parallel that Jagat draws between school discipline and the Internal Security Act is among its most politically bold interpretive gestures. Operation Lalang (1987), in which 106 individuals were detained without trial under the ISA for political dissent, created a culture of enforced silence that the film maps onto the school’s punitive treatment of Appoy’s intellectual and creative questioning.³⁷ Both the state and the school, the film suggests, operate through the same logic: discipline through fear, conformity through punishment, silence through the threat of pain. Appoy’s kneeling before his mathematics teacher is thus not merely a scene of classroom discipline but a miniature allegory of authoritarian governance.

The consequence of this institutional violence is the systematic extinguishing of Appoy’s creative and intellectual potential. The educational system that was supposed to liberate him from poverty instead functions as an additional mechanism of precarity: it denies him recognition of his genuine capacities, disciplines his nonconformity out of him, and ultimately pushes him toward the same foreclosed social position as the adults around him. The film refuses to offer a redemptive arc, Appoy’s trajectory ends in absorption into the very world of violence and gang culture that the education system was supposedly offering an alternative to. This is the film’s most devastating structural argument: the educational institution, far from being a ladder out of precarity, is one of its primary mechanisms of reproduction.

4.6 Convergence: Four characters, one structural argument

The four-character analyses presented above converge on a single structural argument that Jagat makes with sustained analytical force: that precarity, as experienced by the Malaysian Indian community in the 1990s, is not a collection of individual misfortunes but a systematically produced social condition that forecloses possibility across every available pathway. Maniam’s faith in education, the only formally available institutional pathway, is shown to be an ideology that reproduces the precariat’s subordination rather than challenging it. Bala’s philosophical consciousness, the only form of critical reflection the film presents, is shown to be structurally unviable without a collective institutional form. Durai’s criminality, the only available form of economic agency that offers immediate material return, is shown to reproduce the violence of the structures that produced it. Manggai’s domesticity, the only space the gender order makes available to her, is shown to be a domain of invisibility and unrecognised labour rather than a sanctuary.

What the film refuses, across all four characters, is the possibility of individual escape. This is a significant formal and ideological choice: social realist cinema has a tradition of offering at least partial redemptive narratives of the exceptional individual who transcends structural constraint. Jagat explicitly refuses this convention. None of its characters achieves upward mobility; none is presented as a model to be emulated; the film’s tragic ending forecloses even the retrospective consolation of meaningful sacrifice. This formal refusal of individual redemption is, in theoretical terms, the film’s most powerful assertion of structural causation: it insists that what happened to this family cannot be attributed to individual failure and can only be understood through the analytical frameworks of precarity, colonial inheritance, and neoliberal displacement that this paper has brought to bear.