03/05/2026

theSunday Special II ON SUNDAY MAY 3, 2026

Final resting place of Rani Dhobi at Sri Ramar Temple, where the queen of the dhobi community lives on in Penang’s memory. – T.C KHOR/THESUN Her legacy endures not in portraits or monuments, but in land grants, oral history and a temple that still stands today. From Calcutta to Penang’s colonial frontier Many of the early migrants were part of what Premilla Mohanlall, a fifth generation descendant of Rani, describes as a “bazaar contingent”, labourers brought in to support the British administration. They are believed to have left Calcutta for Penang, then the first British settlement in Southeast Asia, on journeys that were often one-way. Most dhobis of that era remained invisible in records. But Rani’s presence persists across fragmented colonial documentation and oral tradition.

Unforgettable power broker dhobi queen A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. The same may be said of Rani Dhobi, the washerwoman of Dhoby Ghaut who arrived from India and quietly carved out a place in Penang’s colonial history. Suffolk House, one of Penang’s most prominent colonial residences, stands on land that was once part of the wider estate linked to early Dhoby Ghaut history. – HIMANSHU BHATT/THESUN While most early migrants remain unnamed in official records, one woman stands apart, a washerwoman who came from Calcutta under the patronage of Captain Francis Light BY T.C. KHOR from the Hindi dhobi (washerman) and gha (stone steps leading to water). In Tamil, it was referred to as Vannan Thora Tedal . Here, laundry from British households, colonial officers and military quarters was brought in, washed in the river, beaten clean on stones, dried along the banks and returned. It was a functional and vital cog in the machinery of colonial domestic life. A migrant named Lukia

Known variously as Rani or Ranee, and recorded in some accounts as Lukia or Luckia, she is remembered as a figure woven into the early development of George Town. Her legacy endures not in portraits or monuments, but in land grants, oral history and a temple that still stands today. The washermen of the riverbank At the confluence of Sungai Air Itam and Sungai Air Terjun, where Sungai Pinang begins, once pulsed a community of Indian washermen. The area was known as Dhoby Ghaut,

Most of the early migrants remain unnamed in official records. Yet one woman stands apart. Her name, preserved in family memory as Lukia Devi, finds corroboration in J.H. Stocqueler’s Hand Book of British India (1854), which records a washerwoman named Luckia, who came from Calcutta under the patronage of Captain Francis Light, alongside others of the same trade. Across the river stood Suffolk House, the estate associated with Light and his common-law wife, Martina Rozells.

Suffolk House overlooks a landscape that includes Dhoby Ghaut, where washerfolk once laboured along the riverbanks. – T.C KHOR/THESUN