In 2024, I began to ask questions about my grandparents. I had only ever met one, my father’s mother, and I decided to finally turn my historian’s eye to my own family. I asked questions of my mother, through Whatsapp, and received more answers than I would have had I asked in person. It seemed safer that way for us all as, upon me asking, it became obvious how little both my parents knew about their own parents and they might have been embarrassed. In my family, history is not sacred; the details of our family’s past are not kept and remembered as something precious to be preserved.

It took time for my parents to hunt down some basic details. I would be reminded of its meagerness compared to the individuals I study in my own work, such as on Ivor Evans, the British anthropologist who spent most of his life in Malaya and North Borneo. Him, I knew plenty about, enough to fill chapters and articles. When it came to my grandfather, the opposite was true. The details were: his name was Manickam (மாணிக்கம் in Tamil script. Some explanation: that was his given name. In many Tamil names, the given name is followed by the father’s name, but the person is addressed by their given name. When my brothers and I were born, my father changed this and made Manickam our family name). When was my grandfather born? My parents had to calculate:

Girlnee [my mother’s pet name for me, a variation on “girl”], some of the dates below are just calculations from the grand parents date of death. I'll start with pa's parents. Grand father died in 1965 aged 65. So he was born in the year 1900. He came to Malaysia around 1918-1920 (between 18-20 years old, guessing) those days they came by ship, port of entry is Penang. No idea when he came to Ipoh, he landed in Penang first.

Where did my grandfather come from? I was always told “Tamil Nadu” which is a state in the southern part of India. My father had assumed that he came from the city, Madras, but upon asking other relatives in 2024, this was not so. He apparently came from a village called Konalai, which is today in the Tiruchirappalli District of Tamil Nadu, so Google Search tells me. That he came from a village, and that my father’s mother came from another village nearby, drastically changes the associations surrounding them for me. I thought they were urbanites, but it turns out they were from the countryside. I knew so little about them, and the little I did know turned out to be wrong.

When I discovered these precious details (the name “Manickam” means precious jewel in Tamil, by the way) I wrote the following:

I imagine my grandfather getting on a boat from Tamil Nadu (did he leave from Madras, I wonder?) headed for Penang on Malaya’s west coast. I think of him on the deck of a ship, maybe with hundreds of others like him. Did he travel with anyone he knew? It must’ve been cold out at sea, maybe he looked out at the water, felt the spray on his young handsome face while standing on the deck of the ship.

I miss him. That doesn’t make any sense. I have never met him, and I only found out where he came from a few days ago. And yet, I do. I conjure up an image of a young man on a ship heading towards a new land far away, and I feel that I miss him.

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Story by Sandra Khor Manickam.

Sandra is a Malaysian historian based in the Netherlands. She researches the history of anthropology, race and medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this contribution, she turns her historical eye inward to look at one member of her family.