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theSunday Special IV ON SUNDAY MAY 3, 2026 O n a wall of the Sri Ramar Temple in Solok York, George Town, a highlighted paragraph from The Handbook of British India quietly sits among the temple’s daily rhythms. It mentions a woman known as Rani Dhobi who was granted land in 1802 by George Leith, the successor to Francis Light. BY T.C. KHOR newsdesk@thesundaily.com

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Most visitors pass it without stopping. Jayaram Menon did not. And from that moment, a footnote began to grow into a play. “It looks like a minor story, almost a footnote,” said the playwright and director, who has been with The Penang Players Music and Drama Society for over 20 years and is currently its vice-chairman. “But I think footnotes are very, very powerful constraints to actually write an interesting play, which develops on the pillars of what is already available.” Penang, 1800 – a contested world The result is The Legend of Rani Dhobi , staged as part of the Penang Heritage Arts Festival and set in Penang circa 1800, when the island was still a fledgling British trading post. The Straits were unsettled – piracy shadowed the Penang-Kedah coastline, while Siam pressed its claims over the northern Malay sultanates. At the centre of that shifting world was a laundry matron negotiating with the British for her stretch of riverbank while quietly harbouring ambitions to build a temple for her community. Opposite her stood a British lieutenant-governor intent on securing a strategic port. Their interests, and their obstacles, occasionally intersect. Swarna Naidu, a Kuala Lumpur-based actress who has performed at The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre and won multiple awards at the Short+Sweet Festival, plays Rani Dhobi. Peter Mills takes on the role of Lt-Governor Leith, focused on securing Penang’s position as a major port amid threats along the Straits. Ronald Pereira plays Capt Caunter, Leith’s right-hand man. Fiction built around fact Jayaram is frank about the distance between recorded history and dramatic truth. Three characters in the play are historically documented – Rani Dhobi, Lt-Governor Leith and Capt Caunter. Around them, he builds fictional figures to fill gaps where history is silent. “The playwright has an advantage. All he needs is to really look at the human condition, human nature, and that will fill in the blanks pretty close,” he said. One such figure is Jairam, a mercenary information-gatherer who moves between the British, the Kedah sultanate and Siam. He reads the direction of power early and aligns himself with the rising British influence. Jairam spies, runs errands and slips through Penang’s back lanes, Kedah’s court and the Siamese frontier – spaces beyond the reach of colonial officers. The role is played by Arunen Thiruvarul, a USM acting student making his Penang Players debut after The Murder Game . Another fictional presence is Badang, a pirate portrayed by Zylan Madex. “Wherever there is trade, there are pirates, even to this day in the Straits of Malacca,” Jayaram added. Badang is loosely tied to the Kedah sultanate, linking trade, regional politics and conflict into what Jayaram calls “a

Jayaram (right) with Cape Poetics Circle director Himanshu Bhatt at the confluence of two rivers beside Dhoby Ghaut in Penang. From footnotes to stage: The legend of Rani Dhobi

A forgotten line in a colonial-era handbook on a George Town temple wall inspires a stage production revisiting Penang’s early history through the story of a little-known woman

play into a lecture. “East-west, man-woman, trade, piracy, property by small business, property by big corporations... no. “Everybody has a voice in it. It is up to the audience to root for one or the other, or not at all, but just to enjoy the period for its own sake, and how things were, and possibly are,” he said. The play emerged from a Penang Heritage Arts Festival commission, which provided the deadline that turned an idea into action. “It was in my mind for some time, but since there was no pressure to stage it, I let it wait on the page,” Jayaram said. Once committed, the script was completed within two months. For him, the production is also about recognition – of ordinary lives that rarely enter official records, but helped shape a complex society. “It gives us a glimpse of what we should appreciate about normal, average people in the past but through their efforts, how they built our society, which is an extremely complicated set of relationships between so many people, so many traditions, coming from all over the place, yet created modern Penang. “Which is to me a thing to be totally appreciated.”

firm skeleton”. Whose history is it anyway? Yet the production is careful about its historical grounding. Nothing in the period context is invented – British treaty negotiations with the Dutch, dhobi guild migrations from India, land disputes and even shamanic forest rituals all existed in some form between 1800 and 1815. Jayaram uses this lived history as scaffolding for fiction, drawing also on historian Hayden White’s argument in Metahistory (1973) that history itself is a narrative construction and that even archives are shaped stories. He said the approach carries a Brechtian spirit. German playwright Bertolt Brecht often asked audiences not to lose themselves in illusion, but to think critically about what they were watching. Here, viewers are not asked to believe history as fixed truth, but to question whether it could have happened this way. “And whose facts are these anyway? There is no way to exactly know,” Jayaram said. That uncertainty sits at the heart of the production. The people behind the margins What he is careful to avoid is turning the

Bringing Rani Dhobi to the stage A woman remembered as the laundry queen, whose descendants still carry her name. A paragraph on a temple wall. A play. The Legend of Rani Dhobi , written and directed by Jayaram Menon and staged by The Penang Players, runs on May 9 and 10 at 4pm and 8pm at Bangunan UAB, Gat Lebuh China in George Town, as part of the Penang Heritage Arts Festival, co-presented by Yayasan Hasanah. Tickets from RM40 at cloudjoi.com. Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. Poster of The Legend of Rani Dhobi , a stage production inspired by a little-known figure from Penang’s colonial past.