From Plantations to Precarity: Education, Neoliberalism, and Malaysian Indian Marginalisation in Shanjey Kumar Perumal's Jagat (2015)

<ns5:p> Background The structural marginalisation of Malaysian Indians is a persistent and underexplored consequence of colonial labour regimes, ethnically differentiated postcolonial policies, and the neoliberal economic restructuring of the 1990s. This paper examines the intersection of neoliberal displacement, precarity, and educational exclusion in Shanjey Kumar Perumal’s Tamil-language film <ns5:italic>Jagat</ns5:italic> (2015), set against Malaysia’s accelerated era of privatisation under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Methods This study employs qualitative textual analysis of <ns5:italic>Jagat</ns5:italic> , drawing on Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model. Scenes were selected on the basis of three criteria: direct representation of the four central characters, institutional interaction sequences, and dialogue-rich scenes articulating social position. The analysis is grounded in precarity theory, Gramscian educational theory, Foucauldian disciplinary analysis, and postcolonial subaltern studies. Results Close reading of four central characters, Maniam, Bala, Durai, and Manggai, demonstrates that <ns5:italic>Jagat</ns5:italic> does not merely depict poverty but exposes the structural logics by which education systems, familial institutions, and state policies systematically foreclose social mobility for marginalised Tamil Malaysian youth. The film’s representation of educational violence, manifest in punitive disciplinary regimes, curricular conformity, and the suppression of creative agency, mirrors the broader biopolitical governance of the Malaysian Indian precariat during the Mahathir era. All four character analyses converge on a single structural argument: the film refuses individual escape across every available pathway, including meritocratic education, philosophical withdrawal, criminality, and domesticity. Conclusions By situating <ns5:italic>Jagat</ns5:italic> within Malaysia’s post-2000 independent cinema turn and the wider landscape of postcolonial Tamil diasporic film, this paper challenges dominant developmental narratives that frame education as a universal pathway to emancipation and demonstrates the enduring value of cultural cinema as a site for theorising lived precarity in the Global South. </ns5:p>