WRITER Uthaya Sankar SB inhabits an intriguing position in the realm of Malay arts and letters.
For a start, Uthaya, 54, who hails from Aulong in Taiping, writes in what he calls “Bahasa Malaysia”, preferring to use that term instead of Bahasa Melayu, the coinage of recent and lamentably sectarian times.
He justifies the use of the former appellation on the grounds that the language was promulgated in 1970 as the language of the Malaysian people and intended to unify a polyglot nation.
Uthaya steers away from engaging in the potential polemics that could stem from the positions he stakes out in the domain of Malay arts and letters.
With two novels and several compilations of short stories under his belt, Uthaya knows that polemical purpose will vitiate his goal, which is, essentially, to portray the position of minorities in his fiction and essays on Malaysian society.
An upcoming compilation of 17 short stories, to be published next month, is set to deepen the groove he has been burrowing for more than three decades since he decided to become a writer while an undergraduate at University Malaya.
His corpus has drawn the attention of National Literary Laureate A Samad Said, who wrote the preface to a collection of Uthaya’s essays entitled Malaiur Manikam, published in 2015.
Samad, himself the disseminator of subversive ripples of resonance aimed at Malaysian politics, hailed Uthaya as a voice for those inhabiting the underside of what is now the extant Malaysian reality: Malay dominance and Islamic hegemony.
Uthaya’s essays in Malaiur Manikam attempt to explain the plethora of cultural practices and beliefs that compose the Malaysian mosaic.
His tenor eschews polemics, although the topics he brings up and dwells on can tempt an expositor into that zone.
His tone is as if he’s gently tugging at his audience’s sleeve rather than getting into its face.
At PORT, a state-sponsored NGO that promotes the arts in Ipoh, Uthaya held forth on his work and aims in a talk last February 12.
Perak Academy, another NGO keen to expose and promote the work of artistes and other luminaries, had recommended that PORT give him an airing.
To a multi-racial audience of some 20 arts enthusiasts, Uthaya spoke of how he started out in his writing career while being raised in Aulong village.
He played a brief video he had made of the poor residents of the village, simple Indian folk talking about their lives and the work they do eking out a living — people of a quiet, albeit penurious dignity.
He fielded questions on his work and his goals with an aplomb that confirmed what Samad Said was of him, that he is a writer not afraid to tell things like they are, plain and unvarnished.
To understand the flavour of Uthaya’s conversation, it is necessary to appreciate he does not raise his voice and his gestures are minimal.
But that day at PORT, the size and gravity of the scenes captured on video and the issues discussed are all the better understood by his understated manner.
It was a vivid demonstration of what the writerly calling can achieve. – March 8, 2025