ABSTRACT
The release of the British feature film, Windom’s Way, coincided with independence for the Federation of Malaya in 1957. It is the story of a remote, post-colonial Malayan village. Based on the novel by James Ramsay Ullman and scripted by Jill Craigie, wife of left-wing British Labour MP Michael Foot, the film suggests that Malaya’s decolonisation has its definite downside. The villagers depicted tap rubber on a British-owned plantation, but they also wish to grow their own rice. The British manager of the plantation, however, quashes this legitimate aspiration on the grounds that food production will be a distraction from rubber tapping. The villagers strike, and the reactionary planter enlists the support of the post-colonial authorities in the form of a brutal local police chief, a Malay district commissioner, and finally a detachment of the Malayan army. The strike is suppressed, forcing the labourers into the arms of a band of ruthless and unsavoury communist guerrillas, encamped in the highlands. In Windom’s Way, the postcolonial state is inclined to suppress its own populace rather than challenge the demands of long-established British capital, and those sympathetic to the tappers —notably Windom, the heroic, liberal English medic-are castigated and dubbed ‘fellow travellers’ by the Malayan authorities.
