Diaspora and Catholic Mobility Talk

Dr Tneh presenting a token of appreciation to Assoc Prof Shanthini (right)

The Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre for Social and Policy Studies organised a talk at Sungai Long Campus on 15 March 2018. The talk was conducted by Assoc Prof Dr Shanthini Pillai from the National University of Malaysia (UKM) Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also an Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (KITA).

She explained her research paper which investigates the evidence of diasporic mobilities within the Roman Catholic context, which occurred between the 1850s and the early 1900s. Missionaries from The Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (M.E.P) established more than 20 churches which catered to the Tamil and Chinese communities in the Straits Settlement and the northern Malay Peninsula.

In her paper, she focused on the journey of the Tamil Catholic community in Peninsular Malaysia, from the formation of the first parish for Tamil speaking parishioners in 1875 by MEP priest Francois Hab to the rise of the Tamil Catholic as an elite of the Roman Catholic church of Malaysia in 1955. Assoc Prof Shanthini also explored the Tamil Catholic anthological mobilities in the nineteenth century as Tamil parishioners began to establish a sense of localised individual and communal identity.

Her research discussed the selected samples from a French missionary memoir as well as the correspondence between Tamil Catholics and selected French missionaries. She interrogated the various aspects of Tamil diasporic mobilities especially as they intersect with individuals, communal and institutional structures and imaginaries.

She further elaborated on the dialectics of the changes in the hierarchical trajectories between missionary and convert as French Catholic hierarchy encounters the flows from various tributaries of Tamil Catholics individual imagination. She shared on how these and other everyday aspirations of the nineteenth century Tamil Catholic community traced in the memoirs and letters can be seen as the seeds of the change that eventually culminated in the rise of the Tamil Catholic as elite with the ordination of the first local Malaysian Bishop of ethnic Tamil heritage in the year of 1955.

Assoc Prof Shanthini delivering her talk 

Assoc Prof Shanthini’s research interest primarily focuses on ethnic diversity, diaspora and transnationalism in literary and cultural texts with particular reference to the global South Asian diaspora. Assoc Prof Shanthini has held Research Fellowships at the University of Queensland, Australia and the Asia Research Institute, Singapore and is currently heading a research project on Malaysian Catholics and Transcultural Adaptability in collaboration with the Catholic Research Centre of the Archdiocese of Kuala Lumpur. She is also the author of Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions: Images of the Indian diaspora of Malaysia (2017) as well as numerous articles in various journals of Literary and Cultural Studies.