Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives 9813345675, 9789813345676

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Asia in Transition 13

Zawawi Ibrahim Gareth Richards Victor T. King   Editors

Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia Critical Perspectives

Asia in Transition Volume 13

Editor-in-Chief Bruno Jetin, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei Darussalam Series Editors Victor T. King, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei Darussalam Lian Kwen Fee, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei Darussalam Noor Hasharina Binti Pg Hj Hassan, Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei Darussalam Jonathan Rigg, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom Zawawi Ibrahim, Taylor’s University, Subang Jaya, Malaysia

This book series, indexed in Scopus, is an initiative in conjunction with Springer under the auspices of the Universiti Brunei Darussalam – Institute of Asian Studies (http://ias.ubd.edu.bn/). It addresses the interplay of local, national, regional and global influences in Southeast, South and East Asia and the processes of translation and exchange across boundaries and borders. The series explores a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Submission and Peer Review: Proposal submissions are to be sent to the Series Editor, Dr Bruno Jetin: [email protected] and Springer Publishing Editor Alex Westcott Campbell: [email protected] using the Book Proposal Form available in the sidebar. All proposals will undergo peer review by the editorial board members. If accepted, the final manuscript will be peer reviewed internally by the editorial board as well as externally (single blind) by Springer ahead of acceptance and publication.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13611

Zawawi Ibrahim · Gareth Richards · Victor T. King Editors

Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia Critical Perspectives

Editors Zawawi Ibrahim School of Liberal Arts and Sciences Taylor’s University Subang Jaya, Malaysia

Gareth Richards Impress Creative and Editorial George Town, Penang, Malaysia

Victor T. King Institute of Asian Studies Universiti Brunei Darussalam Gadong, Brunei Darussalam

ISSN 2364-8252 ISSN 2364-8260 (electronic) Asia in Transition ISBN 978-981-33-4567-6 ISBN 978-981-33-4568-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Praise for Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives

“Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of ‘Malay’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’, with which colonialism bound Malaysia’s plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities—Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more—finds expression and offers hope for liberation.” —Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge “This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world.” —Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia “This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like.” —Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore

v

In memory of Salleh Ben Joned (1941–2020) a fearless writer and public intellectual

Foreword

In 2003 Sumit Mandal coined the term ‘transethnic solidarities’ to refer to a variety of participatory experiences that Malaysians are engaged in without naturally referring to the primordial identifications of race and ethnicity, which have so dominated the politics and everyday lives of its citizens since independence. These include the activities of arts groups, religious communities, civic and business associations, and many others. Scholars, on the other hand, he noted, have been slow to pay attention to and document this important facet of Malaysian society and life. Nearly two decades later, this volume is a significant step in bringing together scholars, both local and from abroad, and who have written and reflected on the incredible diversity of postcolonial Malaysia so often silenced by the politics of race, contestation and confrontation. In doing so, the editors have given voice to and excavated the multicultural foundation of Malaysian society. The contributions capture a richness and complexity of issues which are normally subsumed in mainstream social science as gender, class, migration, media, environment and popular culture. They are revealing. The range is breathtaking: documenting a vibrant translation culture in the context of a cosmopolitanism in precolonial and colonial Malaya that is underappreciated; rewriting the gender narrative by privileging complementarity over equality in Malay Muslim society; understanding youth activism against the background of the Reformasi movement of the late 1990s; drawing attention to the enduring presence of refugee migrants in the local landscape; examining the Kelantanese perspective of the Malaysian story through film; and many more. The contributions also include work from Sabah and Sarawak: the Kelabit perspective of what constitutes the good life within Malaysian developmentalism; the Bajau search for identity through nonterritorial claims; and the evolution of Iban popular music as a reflection of their contemporary condition. Giving voices to the many in their everyday lives does not mean overlooking the political discourses that inhere in such engagements. Indeed they constitute what I call the ‘micropolitics of a culturally complex society’—borne by both cultural and transethnic solidarities—that from time to time pushes back against the dominant and often racialised narratives.

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Foreword

This will not be the last word, but it is an exciting start to an important conversation on how we make sense of a society that is so multilayered in its origins, as it comes to terms with modernity and globalisation. Lian Kwen Fee Professor of Sociology Institute of Asian Studies Universiti Brunei Darussalam

Preface and Acknowledgements

Over the past few years Malaysia has experienced unprecedented political turbulence. The defeat of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition in the 2018 general election was truly epoch-making—signalling the first change of government since independence more than six decades before. This moment has not ushered a new era of change, however. Unsustainable political alliances and backdoor deals soon saw a return to the status quo ante. A key element underpinning this resilient political hegemony has been an enduring public discourse, much of it inherited from the colonial era, captured by the notion of ‘race thinking’, the privileging of essentialised racial categories as the basis for politics and policy. The language of race in Malaysia has not gone away: it has been kept alive even as the country became mired in staggering levels of corruption at the highest levels, the rise of religious intolerance, the curbing of civil liberties and a widespread antipathy to the political class as a whole. This book was originally conceived some time ago by Zawawi Ibrahim in an effort to offer an alternative reading of Malaysian cultural politics, interrogating areas of social life that are all too often overlooked in mainstream narratives. Joined later by Gareth Richards and Victor T. King, the editors sought contributions—notably from younger Malaysian scholars—that addressed questions of discourse, agency and identity formation in a critical, interdisciplinary and expansive way. The result is what we hope is a groundbreaking collection of essays. The contributions reveal, in our view, the extent to which the critical agency of different social actors has been able to challenge the prevailing normative discourse. At the same time, the analyses presented here offer the possibility that another Malaysia—freed from the fetters of narrow-minded and reactionary postures—is both necessary and possible. The editors owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people. We wish to thank all the contributors for their patience and willingness to respond to our demands. We are grateful to Bruno Jetin of the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, for agreeing to include the volume in Springer’s Asia in Transition series, and who provided financial assistance for editing and the eventual publication of the book. Two anonymous reviewers offered extended commentaries on drafts of the text and we hope we have done justice to their insightful comments. Rachel Leow, Sumit Mandal and Syed Farid Alatas—exemplary critical scholars in their own right—all xi

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Preface and Acknowledgements

responded in a timely fashion to our request for endorsements. Helena Dodge-Wan undertook the copy-editing with her customary good humour and attention to detail, while Eryn Tan proofread the whole book and prepared the index. The book is dedicated to the memory of Salleh Ben Joned, who died not long before we were due to go to press. For many years he was one of Malaysia’s most fearless writers and organic intellectuals, and his untimely passing leaves an enormous gap in the world of critical discourse—a gap we hope a younger generation will fill. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Penang, Malaysia Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam May 2021

Zawawi Ibrahim Gareth Richards Victor T. King

Contents

1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Victor T. King, Gareth Richards, and Zawawi Ibrahim

Part I 2

3

1

Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities

Culture and Identity on the Move: Malaysian Nationhood in Southeast Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Victor T. King

23

The Travelling Text: Manuscripts, Print Culture and Translation in the Making of the Malay World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gareth Richards

59

4

In Body and Spirit: Redefining Gender Complementarity in Muslim Southeast Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Wazir Jahan B. Karim

5

Our People and the Life of Government: The Quest for the Good Life in the Kelabit Highlands at the Edge of Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Valerie Mashman

6

Positioning Bajau Identities as Bumiputera: Challenges and Potentials of Leveraging Environmental Justice and Espousal of Islam in Sabah, Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Fadzilah Majid Cooke and Greg Acciaioli

7

Sustaining Local Food Cultures and Identities in Malaysia with the Disruptive Power of Tourism and Social Media . . . . . . . . . . 183 Sally Everett

8

Negotiating Sinful Self and Desire: Agency and Identities of Non-Heteronormative Malay Muslim Men in Malaysia . . . . . . . . . 207 Chua Hang-Kuen xiii

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Contents

Part II 9

Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses

Antiblackness in Malaysia, the Bandung Spirit and African– Asian Decolonial Critique in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Mohan Ambikaipaker

10 The Emergence of a New Social Movement in Malaysia: A Case Study of Malaysian Youth Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Haris Zuan 11 Islam and the Environment: The Challenge of Developmental Politics in Malaysia with Special Reference to PAS’s Rule in Kelantan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid and Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib 12 Alternative or Mainstream? Malay Independent Book Publishing in Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Muhammad Febriansyah and Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar Part III Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media 13 Fear and Loathing in Legal Limbo: Reimagining the Refugee in Malaysian Public Discourse and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Gerhard Hoffstaedter and Nicole Lamb 14 Belonging and Identity in the Narratives of Two Second-Generation Refugee Youths in Malaysia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Charity Lee and Zuraidah Mohd Don 15 Expressing Alternative Modernities in a New Nation through Iban Popular Music, 1960s–1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 Connie Lim Keh Nie and Made Mantle Hood 16 Reframing the National Culture Narrative of P. Ramlee . . . . . . . . . . . 367 Adil Johan 17 Genre, Gender and Temporal Critique in Budak Kelantan and Bunohan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 Norman Yusoff 18 Left of the Dial: BFM 89.9 Independent Radio Station and Its Indie Rock-friendly Midnight Programming as a Site of Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413 Azmyl Yusof 19 Postcolonial Indigenous Storytellers and the Making of a Counter-discourse to the ‘Civilising Process’ in Malaysia . . . . . 429 Zawawi Ibrahim

Contents

xv

20 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 Victor T. King, Gareth Richards, and Zawawi Ibrahim Glossary of Non-English Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Zawawi Ibrahim is a visiting professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Malaysia. He was most recently Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. Working within the field of anthropology broadly understood, his wide-ranging current research interests include youth, popular culture, storytelling and narratives, religious diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of The Malay labourer (1995), and coeditor of Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016) and Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017). He is a member of the EU-funded research project Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion: Bringing together European and Asian Perspectives (2019–2021). Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller. He previously taught at Manchester University, UK, the University of the Philippines and Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. He is the director of the editorial company Impress Creative and Editorial, the owner of Gerakbudaya Bookshop, Penang, and cofounded the arts space Hikayat. He is the coauthor/editor of Asia–Europe interregionalism: Critical perspectives (1999), the writer of the texts for two books of photography: Portraits of Penang: Little India (2011) and Panicrama (2016) as well as numerous articles on film, dance, literature and music. He is currently writing a book on the artist Ch’ng Kiah Kiean. Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei, and Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He has long-standing interests in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia. His recent publications are UNESCO in Southeast Asia: World Heritage Sites in comparative perspective (ed., 2016), coedited books on Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016), Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017), Tourism and ethnodevelopment (2018), Tourism in East and Southeast Asia (2018, 4-volume reader), Tourism in South-East Asia (2020), Indigenous Amazonia, regional development and territorial dynamics: Contentious xvii

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Editors and Contributors

issues (2020), Continuity and change in Brunei Darussalam (2021) and Origins, history and social structure in Brunei Darussalam (2021).

Contributors Greg Acciaioli Anthropology and Sociology, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Australia Adil Johan Institute for Ethnic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Mohan Ambikaipaker Department of Communication, Tulane University, USA Azmyl Yusof School of Arts, Sunway University Malaysia, Malaysia Chua Hang-Kuen Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Sally Everett King’s Business School, King’s College London, United Kingdom Haris Zuan Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia Gerhard Hoffstaedter School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Australia Made Mantle Hood Research Centre for Asia-Pacific Music, Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan Wazir Jahan B. Karim Independent scholar, George Town, Penang, Malaysia Nicole Lamb Independent scholar, Brisbane, Australia Charity Lee Department of Asian and European Languages, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia Connie Lim Keh Nie Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia Fadzilah Majid Cooke Institute of Tropical Biodiversity and Sustainable Development, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Malaysia Valerie Mashman Institute of Borneo Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib School of Languages, Civilisation and Philosophy, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Malaysia

Editors and Contributors

xix

Muhammad Febriansyah School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia Norman Yusoff Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia Zuraidah Mohd Don Language Academy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ABIM API APU ASAS ’50 ASEAN BB1M BBC BERJASA Bersih BFM BN CAP CHAMPSEA CMIO CTI-CFF DANIDA DAP DARA DIY EIA EPSM ETP eWOM GDP GERAK GERAM

Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia) Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (Movement of Aware Youth) Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah (People’s Unity Front) Angkatan Sasterawan ’50 (Writers’ Movement ’50) Association of Southeast Asian Nations Baucer Buku 1Malaysia (1Malaysia book voucher) British Broadcasting Corporation Barisan Jemaah Islamiah Se-Malaysia (Islamic Congregation Front of Malaysia) Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections Business FM Barisan Nasional (National Front) Consumers’ Association of Penang Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia Chinese, Malays, Indians and others Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security Danish International Development Agency Democratic Action Party Pahang Tenggara Regional Development Authority do-it-yourself environmental impact assessment Environmental Protection Society Malaysia Economic Transformation Programme online word-of-mouth gross domestic product Gerakan Alam Sekitar Rakyat Malaysia (Environmental Movement of Malaysians) Gerakan Rakyat Hentikan Pencemaran Bauksit (People’s Movement to Stop Bauxite Pollution) xxi

xxii

GPMS GTP HAMIM ISA ITBM JAIS JAKOA JHEOA JKOAK JKOAP JOAS KB1M KDM KECAP KLIBF KMM Kowani KUASA LGBT MBM MENGO MISPI MNS MP MPBN MUDA MyKad NAM NCP NDP NEM NEP NGO NMP PAS

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Gabungan Pelajar Melayu Semenanjung (Federation of Malay Students in the Peninsula) Government Transformation Programme Hizb al-Muslimun (Party of Muslims) Internal Security Act Institut Terjemahan dan Buku Malaysia (Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books) Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (Department of Islamic Affairs Selangor) Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli (Department of Orang Asli Development) Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli (Department of Orang Asli Affairs) Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Kelantan (Network of Orang Asli Villages of Kelantan) Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Pahang (Network of Orang Asli Villages of Pahang) Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia (Indigenous Peoples’ Network of Malaysia) Kedai Buku 1Malaysia (1Malaysia Bookshop) Kadazan-Dusun-Murut, KadazanDusun and Murut Persatuan Kelip-Kelip (Firefly Association) Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair Kesatuan Melayu Muda (Young Malays Union) Badan Kongres Wanita Indonesia (Congress of Indonesian Women) Persatuan Aktivis Sahabat Alam (Friends of the Earth Activist Association) lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual Majlis Belia Malaysia (Youth Council of Malaysia) Malaysian Environmental NGOs Mistra Sejati Perempuan Indonesia (The True Partner of Indonesian Women) Malaysian Nature Society member of parliament Majlis Perundingan Belia Negara (National Youth Consultative Council) Malaysian United Democratic Alliance Kad Pengenalan Malaysia (Malaysian identity card) Non-Aligned Movement National Culture Policy National Development Policy New Economic Model New Economic Policy non-governmental organisation National Mission Policy Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party)

Abbreviations and Acronyms

PATI PBMUM PEA PEKA Petronas PIUM PKBM PKMM PKPM PKR PLU PMIUM PN PPBM PPII PSM RCOMM REACH RM RPS RTM S46 SAM SoCoMo SUARAM UBU UMNO UMSU UN UNDRIP UNESCO UNHCR UPKO USD UUCA WWF

xxiii

pendatang asing tanpa izin, lit. ‘foreign visitors without permission’ Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya (Universiti Malaya Malay Language Society) Penang Eurasian Association Pertubuhan Pelindung Khazanah Alam Malaysia (Malaysian Society for the Protection of Malaysia’s Treasures of the Earth) Petroliam Nasional Berhad Persatuan Islam (Islamic Society) Pasukan Kadet Bersatu Malaysia (Malaysian United Cadet Corps) Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (Malay Nationalist Party) Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar-Pelajar Malaysia (National Union of Malaysian Students) Parti Keadilan Rakyat (People’s Justice Party) people like us Persatuan Mahasiswa Islam Universiti Malaya (University of Malaya Islamic Students’ Society) Perikatan Nasional (National Alliance) Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Malaysian United Indigenous Party) Perikatan Perhimpunan Istri Indonesia (Federation of Indonesian Women’s Associations) Parti Sosialis Malaysia (Socialist Party of Malaysia) Recycle Community Malaysia Regional Environmental Awareness Cameron Highlands Malaysian ringgit rancangan penempatan semula (regroupment or resettlement programme) Radio Televisyen Malaysia Semangat 46 (Spirit of 46) Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth of Malaysia) social context mobile Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Voice of the Citizens) Universiti Bangsar Utama United Malays National Organisation University of Malaya Student’s Union (Persatuan Mahasiswa Universiti Malaya) United Nations United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusun Murut Organisation United States dollar University and University Colleges Act World Wide Fund for Nature

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3

Fig. 19.1 Fig. 19.2 Fig. 19.3 Fig. 19.4

Malian Tepun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Long Peluan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Long Peluan and its environs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kalabit country in Ulu Baram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kelabit women wearing bead caps and necklaces in Bario . . . . . Sharing stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Megalithic stone grave at Long Peluan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bungan Lian, who married Ngau Langat, a direct descendant of Aping Nyipa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tai Iwan’s journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Presentation of flag at installation of Penghulu Freddie Abun, Long Lellang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tama Pasang whose Kenyah blood brother was Tama Ubong Ose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selon Buling who married a Kenyah Badeng from Lio Mato . . . The fort at Lio Mato . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tun Mustapha Park in northwestern Sabah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tun Sakaran Marine Park in southeastern Sabah . . . . . . . . . . . . . Temiar people protesting in front of the Pos Gob blockade, 2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blockade torn down by the Forestry Department, 29 November 2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Gua Musang Orang Asli issue garnered global attention, as in the Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific meeting in Lampung, Indonesia, December 2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mak Minah by Andy Maguire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The death cage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bujal and Engku Wati as lovers stumbled upon by Bulan in the wee hours of the morning near the well . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The burial ground of Bujal on Engku Kahar’s land by the banks of Sungai Bidor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129 130 130 132 133 136 136 140 141 142 144 145 146 163 164 286 287

287 445 462 467 469 xxv

List of Tables

Table 6.1 Table 7.1 Table 10.1

Total population by ethnic group, Sabah, 2010 . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of sample population: Interviewees and blog sites . . . . . . . Breakdown of Malaysian parliamentarians based on age cohort and political coalitions after the 2008, 2013 and 2018 general elections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

155 192

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Chapter 1

Introduction Victor T. King, Gareth Richards, and Zawawi Ibrahim

Abstract This introduction demonstrates how this volume seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. In conceiving the volume, we are advancing an inclusive cultural studies perspective that addresses central issues that, in a Malaysian context, necessarily deal with ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as the dominant ideological narrative to explain societal conflicts, cleavages and contestations. How have hegemonic discourses of identity been rationalised, naturalised and legitimated in the name of certain forms of political power? How far has the critical agency of different social actors been able to challenge and escape from these normative foundations? In addressing these questions, the contributions provide a truly interdisciplinary and critical method to understanding changing meanings of identities ‘on the move’, at both national and subnational levels. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. Part I, ‘Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities’, takes a range of empirical studies—dealing, inter alia, with literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation—to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. In doing so the chapters posit a more complex, nuanced notion of hybridity and discuss whether this adequately captures these moving identities. This then opens up an examination in Part II, ‘Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses’, in which contributors deal with what can be described as counter-hegemonic social movements and discourses—of antiracism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing—that explicitly seek to claim greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. Part III, ‘Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media’, then provides a close (textual) reading of some exemplars of new (and not V. T. King (B) Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei e-mail: [email protected] G. Richards Impress Creative and Editorial, George Town, Penang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Zawawi Ibrahim School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Subang Jaya, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_1

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so new) cultural practices found in personal (oral) testimony, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. Keywords Malaysia · Cultural studies · Discourses · Identity · Narratives · Agency · Chapter summaries This volume provides an empirical and conceptual revisiting and rethinking of agency and identity in Malaysia. In the initial conception of the volume, the editors decided to adopt an inclusive cultural studies perspective in seeking to address key discourses, issues and questions that, in a Malaysian context, necessarily deal with issues of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as the dominant approach in explaining societal interactions, conflicts, cleavages, contestations and ideologies. The volume aims to provide a forum for scholars and cultural practitioners to contemplate the multiple identities contained in a nation-state which, from its colonial legacy, has had the impulse to think, imagine and represent its citizens in terms of fixed and primordial ‘racial’ categories. Official renderings of the Malaysian government and its agencies, such as Tourism Malaysia, present to the world beyond a multiracial country which is straightforwardly categorised into ‘Malays’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indians’, with the brief and occasional reference to ‘Others’ (the exotic, marginal populations of interior peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah). In this volume we present substantial empirical evidence that this is not the case. Malaysia, in terms of its identities and how these are negotiated, is endlessly complex and provides an ideal laboratory for the investigation of what identity means in our globalised world. The focus on race and ethnicity as the main means to express and sustain identity in Malaysia is, if nothing else, obsessive. The book seeks to contribute to an interdisciplinary and critical dialogue about changing meanings of identity in Malaysia which have both national and transnational significance. However, our concept of identity is not confined to ethnicity and race but also encompasses issues of gender, socioeconomic class and age (particularly youth activism and politics), and identities which are generated through the medium of popular culture, a medium which lends itself to the emergence and development of ‘alternative discourses’. More specifically we also address matters of religion, particularly and obviously Islam, as an identifier, and though a major sociocultural element in ethnic definition, it is also a vitally important mode of identification and orientation in Malaysian national and local life. What we have tried to capture, then, are those alternative narratives—from the perspectives of minorities, populations at the margins of the nation-state, youth, migrants, refugees, cultural practitioners—that are removed from the dominant, and what we consider to be the rather tedious, politically driven discussions of ‘race’ and ‘primordialism’ in Malaysia. Taking note of the fact that Malaysia’s preoccupations in the nation-building process are not to do with race at all, if we conceive of race in an appropriately technical anthropological-archaeological sense, we focus on ethnic identities. Our volume reveals that some alternative narratives have enjoyed some success in disseminating their views, interests and aspirations. But there are others in

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such fields as environmental activism, sexual identities and independent publishing which, in effect, have been incorporated into mainstream or dominant discourses or at least have struggled to claim and maintain an independent and recognised voice. The essays in this volume also have significance beyond Malaysia, even though it is not comparative in scope. We are conscious of the fact that many of the themes which we address have relevance for the wider Southeast Asia. In particular, there are chapters that have resonance with other neighbouring Muslim communities in the region (in Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, southern Thailand and the southern Philippines) in relation to gender, identities, youth, the environment and development. Such issues as refugees, minority identities and popular culture find parallels with neighbouring countries such as Thailand and, again, Indonesia. However, in order to provide an intellectual and analytical intensity and an empirical richness to our concern with discourses, agency and representation we have chosen to focus on Malaysia although we contextualise our case material not only within the nation-state but also within Southeast Asia.

1.1 The Main Themes We have organised and divided the contributions into three broad themes or sections on the ways that identities have been understood in everyday discourse and understandings in Malaysia and in officially sanctioned exchanges based principally on government decisions about identities, constitutional definitions and categories, and politically and religiously driven ideologies—and how these have been debated and contested. We recognise that these themes are permeable and open-ended. We could have organised the chapters in different ways since there is overlap between the themes and connections between chapters across the three sections. Nevertheless, we suggest that the themes are reasonably coherent, provisionally productive and enable us to direct ourselves to future research agendas. Our first section is entitled ‘Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities’. It embraces a range of empirical studies of different forms and expressions of identity—addressing, inter alia, literary translation, religion, gender, age, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation—in the context of preconceived, or what we might term ‘primordial’, notions of fixed identities. However, fixity is not a characteristic which we can apply easily and straightforwardly to our research on ethnic identities, interactions and transformations. Identities are generated in the realm of ideas and subjective understandings and perceptions, and then ‘fixed’ in political, constitutional, legal and ideological terms in Malaysia. In this regard, we have to recognise that some identities, particularly those of majority populations (in this case Muslim Malays), are more stable, fixed and enduring (though subject to challenge). And at the same time, these forces are constantly at work, successfully or unsuccessfully, to bring minority populations into their concept of identity, which is usually one based on some notion of a homogeneous, culturally defined nation-state which has its origins in an imagined past, in Benedict Anderson’s terms. It is a macro-level

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identity with certain key defining elements giving shape and form to an overarching conception of what is thought to constitute ‘Malaysian-ness’. Nevertheless, identities at a subnational level, particularly among minorities who feel themselves to be excluded from an ‘essentialised’ and primordial Malaysia, constantly negotiate and construct their identities in an uneasy and seemingly never-ending relationship of adaptation and contention. In some respects, our first section on identities in contestation could have embraced the whole volume. Identities are always contested and in the process of (re)formation, though we recognise that, depending on political, economic, historical and cultural circumstances, room for manoeuvre and flexibility varies. Therefore, side by side with complexity and hybridity, we emphasise firmly, in the second section of the volume, the possibilities of agency and alternatives. The several chapters in this section on ‘Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses’ present a complex, nuanced notion of movement and movements, in which contributors deal with what can be described as counter-hegemonic discourses and ideas—of antiracism, youth activism, environmentalism and independent publishing—which engage with issues concerning the need for greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. Here we address the organisational dimensions of alternative narratives. Then the third section, ‘Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media’, provides a close (textual) reading of some exemplars of new (and not so new) cultural practices found in personal testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This is where our cultural studies preoccupations exhibit themselves to the full.

1.2 The National Context in Identity Formation, Flux and Hybridity As a nation-state moves through its era of postcolonialism it has to meet both the internal and global challenges of nation-building, economic development and all the attendant processes of modernisation and transformation. Malaysia, in this national and global context, is no different. Since Malaya’s independence in 1957 to the 13 May 1969 ‘racial riots’ tragedy, and then through to the New Economic Policy (NEP) period from the 1970s until the current post-NEP phase and globalisation, including the embrace of the Mahathir Mohamad-inspired Vision 2020, the country’s preoccupation with ‘development’—in its broadest economic, social, cultural and political senses—has always been its political raison d’être and the anchor of its ruling classes. We should also remind ourselves of the fact that the British colonial ‘plural society’ legacy of Malaya from 1957 and then the wider Federation of Malaysia from 1963 (which, with the Malaysian Borneo territories, added further complexities to ethnic/racial politics) has also been a critical factor in driving home the urgency of redressing the problems of the economy, in particular the economic

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imbalance between the Malays and other indigenous populations (or Bumiputera) and the non-Malay components of the populace (especially the Chinese). Mediated through the rationale of a Malay-dominated polity, the economic basis of its postcolonial nationalism was transparent from 1957 onwards. However, what is often forgotten is that these are also processes of contestation involving the state apparatus, institutions, and various socially and culturally defined actors. These include those defined by gender and transgender, refugees, immigrants, indigenous minorities, artists and musicians, popular culture practitioners, youth activists, and representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and socioeconomic classes in which identities are continuously being constructed and reconstructed, and negotiated and renegotiated. At the empirical, on-the-ground level, it is apparent that changes are occurring in the arena of political and sociocultural contestation, and particularly in the shifting discourse of meanings attached to identities, and continuously reconstituted by state policies, globalisation, and the ever-changing and locally situated political and lived social processes of transformation. It is therefore crucial that questions of identities are examined and understood in the context of the rapidly changing and modernising nation-state of Malaysia, and that as spaces open up for debate and discussion we turn our attention to alternative ways of framing identities. In terms of conceptual framework and perspective, it is equally pertinent that existing analyses of identities move on from the conventional ‘plural society’ or ‘race relations’ concepts. It is essential to incorporate, in our current analyses, reference to the changing dynamics of Malaysian nationhood and political economy without being entrapped in the increasingly old-fashioned ‘modernisation’ or ‘dependency’ approaches, or a Marxist view of society which sees contestation purely in terms of ‘class struggle’ and identities as a manifestation of that struggle, or in a neo-Marxism which cannot adequately grapple with the question of identity or other superstructural themes. Therefore, we propose that, in adopting a cultural studies approach that is situated in an Asian and more specifically a Southeast Asian context, we can then present, in this volume, a challenge to the dominant discourses which have hitherto dictated the understanding of identity formation and transformation. In this exercise we explore the concept of culture, its complex relationships to ‘social forms’, and what we might refer to as ‘sociocultures’. In examining the relationships between the ‘cultural’ and the ‘social’ and their expressions in ‘identities’, we are hopeful that we have been able to embrace processes of hybridisation, syncretism, the definition, maintenance and (possible) shifting of boundaries, and indigenisation, situated in the context of national projects which promote dominant discourses or, in Gramscian terms, cultural hegemony. The general acceptance of these dominant discourses, exemplified in the Foucauldian ‘regimes of truth’, gives testimony to the correlations in cultural studies between meaning, power and knowledge. In short, it refers to the power to define and interpret in a certain discursive field, the outcome of which will have far-reaching implications for both the scholarly and public understanding of certain critical issues in society and its transformations. Power is exercised through the state apparatus which deploys a range of agencies: constitutional, politico-ideological, legal. In

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practical terms, these embrace rewards and punishments, advantages and disadvantages, positive and negative images of good and not-so-good citizens. While public understanding and interpretation may often be easily swayed by such persuasion (for instance, the all-too-familiar pronouncement which correlates Islam with terrorism), the task of scholars, though some are more independent than others, is based generally on a more privileged position. In this excursion into a multiplicity of Malaysian identities we endeavour to engage in critical scholarship, to contest, and provide as evidence a credible empirical record. We have attempted, insofar as our empirical research allows, to deconstruct these knowledges and narratives that have been elevated as ‘dominant discourses’ or ‘regimes of truth’ in understanding post-independence Malaysia. Ultimately, through critical research, detailed empirical inquiry, a set of perspectives which uses elements of a cultural studies approach, and with the utilisation of appropriate methodological tools, we seek to unravel alternative ways of ‘seeing the world’, specifically the ‘Malaysian world’, and to uncover the subjugated discourses that have remained hidden in the ongoing struggle over meanings with a view ultimately to develop alternative narratives.

1.3 The Structure and Content of the Volume 1.3.1 Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities We commence our excursion with a collection of essays on identities in contestation. In their several ways, they suggest how and in what contexts identities are constructed and transformed. Victor T. King, in ‘Culture and Identity on the Move’, addresses the dynamism and transformational quality of culture and identity, its complex interrelationship with social forms, and the relevance of this conceptual fluidity to the experiences of Malaysia and its place within Southeast Asia. This chapter focuses on images of cultural identity in Malaysia and their modes of representation and classification at different levels or scales of magnitude. This in turn requires an examination of expressions of nationhood, in the context of nation-building, in interaction and engagement with identities at the subnational level which comprise what he refers to as ethnic groups and categories. Identity in its specific expression in ethnicity is a form of social cleavage, and a means of boundary-setting and organising social and cultural relations in terms of similarity and difference. It is argued that identity cannot exist apart from the establishment and maintenance of cultural difference and the construction and operation of boundaries, and is generated and sustained in relationships, both at the level of ideas and in practice with others who are perceived to be and categorised as ‘not us’ or ‘other’. In other words, the ways in which identity operates is relational. The Malaysian case is situated in a Southeast Asian context in which the ethnic paradigm has played an important role in the modern social science of the region, and particularly in historical, social, cultural,

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economic and political studies. The challenge to dominant discourses in relation to race and ethnicity is exemplified in case material taken from the experiences of two categories of Malaysian ‘indigenes’ outside the Malay states: non-Malay indigenous populations in Sarawak and Portuguese Eurasians in Penang. King’s main concern is to understand how and under what circumstances identities are formed and transformed, an issue which is brought into sharp focus in the context of post-independent nation-building. The next three chapters add historical depth to questions of identity formation and its accommodations and contestations. In ‘The Travelling Text’ Gareth Richards focuses on the plural, multiethnic and multilingual Malay world. While much of the discussion is on the nineteenth-century port cities of the Straits Settlements, notably Penang, he adopts a much longer historical view to identify the antecedents to the making of this world. His analysis draws on Edward Said’s notion of ‘travelling theory’ and the histories of the production, dissemination and reception of knowledge and ideas, as well as the analogous concept of the ‘travelling text’ which comprises the cross-fertilisation, retelling, grafting, borrowing and imitation of the written word across space and time. In doing so, the discussion poses the question of how and why ideas circulate and knowledge is constructed. The analysis proposes that linguistic transmission and translation over the longue durée, and the absorption, localisation and indigenisation of world languages and texts, created deeply sedimented cultural norms and a sense of a hybrid identity in the Malay world. Richards deploys the notion of ‘cosmopolises of language’ to show how Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian in particular, and to a different extent Chinese, fashioned networks of ideas, elaborated through language, and diffused by borrowing, translation and adaptation that resulted in a syncretic, mutable and plural culture in Southeast Asia. These networks were extended, and not erased, by the imposition of colonial rule, especially from the eighteenth century onwards. The worlds that emerged from the history of cultural exchange and translation—a discourse often reduced to the trope of European Orientalism—contained important continuities even across the ruptures created by colonialism. This provides a corrective to the notion that colonial knowledge and cosmopolitanism were constructed by Europeans alone. Instead, it is argued that ‘Oriental’ knowledge has been both a European and an Asian invention. Richards illustrates these processes through a close reading of some exemplary travelling or world texts that circulated the globe and settled and were indigenised in the Malay world. He then describes the ways the British, under the sponsorship of the East India Company and Evangelical missionaries, made concerted efforts to grapple with the translation of texts. While most historical analyses privilege the role of Europeans— Orientalists—in these processes, Richards seeks to rescue indigenous translators and writers from the margins of the archival record and to emphasise their relative autonomy and agency. In the context of the cosmopolitan Straits Settlements, hybrid translators, scribes and writers such as Ibrahim Kandu, Ahmad Rijaluddin, Siami and Munshi Abdullah bridged cultural boundaries and helped write new kinds of texts for new kinds of readers. In this effort, they were abetted by the print revolution that fundamentally altered the dissemination of texts in the Malay world and beyond. In

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turn, they would help lay the foundations for a new print culture that would generate the means to write back to empire and to write a new society. In her chapter ‘In Body and Spirit’ Wazir Jahan B. Karim provides an encouraging message to all Muslim women across Southeast Asia. She explores the implications of an ‘indigenous feminism’, the challenge that it presents to their status as a ‘biological category’ that is assigned, in primordial mode terms, to a ‘pristine domesticity’. It further challenges the ‘masculine voice’ and examines the intensely debated issue of sexual complementarity, but Karim does so here in relation to formal Islamic discourses. She also compares these formal discourses to cultural perspectives on sexual equality in the Malay world of Southeast Asia based on adat or custom. It argues that Islam does not advocate sexual equality, since it highlights differences of biology, sex and function between men and women. In other words, Islam advocates gender complementarity more than equality, with differences in status and function located in political, jural and domestic leadership. However, the extent to which ideas of complementarity negate or promote women’s empowerment is the crucial issue. A dominant indigenous view in Malay society, based on adat, is that the complementarity of sex and gender provides women with their own sphere of influence and dominance, which can be just as empowering and balanced as the public and political roles granted to men through both adat and Islam. This indigenous view opposes mainstream Western feminist theory which advocates gender equality as a necessary universal in modern society. Rather, the argument supports an alternative view that women are significantly empowered provided they are able to interpret these differences to their advantage and build innovative trends in leadership, economic activities and social life. What is a poignant reminder of the ways in which Southeast Asian peoples have addressed their everyday lives is that ‘practical culture challenges faith’. But not only this—it challenges a universal interpretation of religion and faith. Karim leaves us with one of the main motivations for embarking on this volume, in this case specific to Muslim women in Malaysia, that they ‘can elude, negotiate, ignore, oppose and challenge biological categories’. We might add that all kinds of categories (biological-gender-race, cultural-ethnic, politico-ideological) which are imposed by dominant political elites can be challenged. We then move from gender to ethnic minorities in Sarawak and Sabah. Valerie Mashman, on behalf of the Kelabit of Sarawak, is in search of their perceptions of ‘the good life at the edge of Malaysia’. She proposes that the oral history of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak has remained a muted component in the discourse of national history. This comes as no surprise with the demise of the Borneo Literature Bureau some years ago and its championing of indigenous languages, which was then incorporated into Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka with a mission to promote a Malaybased national language policy. Yet, as her case study of the narratives of the headman of Long Peluan longhouse in the Kelabit highlands on the margins of the Malaysian nation-state reveals, it can be a source of insight into the perceptions and aspirations of its multiethnic populations. The study conveys how crucial the inclusive identity lun tauh (our people) was for the ancestors as they migrated with their allies to find a safe place to live. The narrative then moves forward to a time that the Kelabit refer to as ulun perintah (life of government), describing their quest for assistance from

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the agent of the Brunei sultanate in putting down their enemies who lived in Dutch Borneo. In the aftermath, the agency of the ancestor hero Tai Iwan is revealed as he gives (and not pays) tax in the form of wild rubber and leads in peace-making rituals to encourage the populations living in the headwaters to settle on the main river, within the reach of perintah (government). A common thread that runs through the history is the quest for a good life, ulun nuk doo’, which motivates the migrations of lun tauh to find fertile soils for abundant rice harvests, the search for the ‘life of government’, with consensus in the community, reinforced by the values of peacemaking. This is history gathered through the value which indigenous people give to their experiences and affirms their agency and their role in history. It contrasts with national and postcolonial histories which inevitably represent marginal populations as the helpless victims of colonial and post-independent nation-state power. It also demonstrates that, in addressing local narratives, the importance of formation, flux and fusion in the negotiation of identities, rather than fixity, is an urgent and primary concern. If we wanted an example of the complexities of the negotiation of identity, we might choose the Bajau of Sabah, bearing in mind that the Bajau are not ‘a homogeneous [ethnic] category’. Moving from Sarawak, Fadzilah Majid Cooke and Greg Acciaioli’s chapter examines Bajau identity in Sabah, a vexed topic in that, though they have been historically viewed as ‘native’, Bajau have acted as a minority with respect to other dominant groups. The Bajau case demonstrates the complications in Malaysian Borneo of negotiating identities at the state level and then engaging with Kuala Lumpur-generated national-level identities. Aware of the scholarly tendency to treat Kadazan-Dusun-Murut (KDM) as the defining element of contemporary political and cultural life in Sabah, this chapter addresses KDM nationalism as background to the positioning of discourses and practices of the relatively smaller groupings of Bajau, though they are now the second largest ethnic grouping in Sabah (while we should recognise that there are internal divisions). Important to the background are the gains (although small) made by KDM of attaching identity to place as ‘natives’, disrupting dominant views about being Bumiputera to include non-Muslim as well as Muslim ‘natives’ of Sabah (and Sarawak). Worldwide, such claims to place are often a response to state programmes of territorialisation, providing an avenue for the redress of past injustices, albeit limited. For Bajau, redress through claims to an identity based upon place (a key achievement in the global environmental justice and indigenous rights movements) is difficult to establish over marine territories as opposed to land-based ones. Expanding on the standpoint that identity claims via the environmental justice movement might be limited for sea-oriented communities, the analysis explores how Bajau (including the Bajau Laut of eastern Sabah) have acquired other social symbols, in this instance religion, to position their identities. A major question is posed: can the minority communities of the Bajau leverage ‘the bureaucratisation of Islam’ to their advantage and manage to claim and assert a status as a Sabah version of Malay? The position of the Bajau (divided as they are internally) is intriguing. Given the ‘national imaginary’ based on the categorical constructions of ‘Malay’, ‘Islam’ and ‘Bumiputera’ as the dominant national prerogatives, and the concept of primordial

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and fixed racial categories in the interest of positive discrimination on behalf of Malays and associated Bumiputera, where would we place the Bajau? Majid Cooke and Acciaioli capture this dilemma in that the Bajau as mobile Muslim populations, and seeking a place in Sabah and the wider Malaysia rather than in the southern Philippines, create major problems for a Malaysia which holds to ‘the criteria of attributing indigeneity as primordial’. Sally Everett’s chapter gives us an interesting and engaging notion to contemplate: food is ‘a polysemic cultural artefact able to characterise place and identity’. She therefore establishes connections between food, identity and Malaysian tourism and ponders the problem of sustaining local food cultures and identities. She then situates these processes in the context of tourism, but also in the competitive international environment of selling food. Tourism is the third largest contributor to Malaysia’s economy (at least it was pre-Covid-19), and food tourism is a major aspect of the industry, though we would suggest it is an adjunct to tourism promotion in Malaysia; it is a complementary bonus not a major attraction. Most decidedly, international tourists would not travel to Malaysia for food alone. Instead much of the growth of tourism in Malaysia has been driven by large-scale Asian and Western corporate interests which control key services (airlines, cruise ships, travel agencies, tour companies, accommodation, and food and beverage outlets), promoting culture, heritage, beaches, sun, sea and shopping, and something that is wrapped up in ‘the exotic’ and the ‘Malaysia truly Asia’ promotional tag line. This is not about food alone. And we suspect that most international tourists who visit Malaysia are already familiar with Asian food. But the corporatisation of tourism does pose dangers for local providers who are potentially marginalised, including producers of traditional foods. In this regard, the consumer-generated international media are powerful vehicles for destination and sector-specific marketing. They challenge and disrupt traditional approaches to tourism promotion. On the other hand, given that access to social media and the internet is relatively inexpensive, Everett poses the question: are they empowering tools for small-scale providers to enable them to compete in tourism markets? This chapter examines the role of social media in the development of Malaysian tourism, and its relationship with championing local food cultures and strengthening projections of identity. The discussion draws on concepts of ‘creative resistance’ and the ‘transcendence of third spaces’ to situate local producers servicing tourism and the ways in which social media are being used to transcend core/peripheral spaces. It is argued that strengthening product marketing—and creating ‘digital capital’—is a potentially useful way for local food producers to benefit from consumer-driven tourism and sustain local identities and ways of life. Chua Hang-Kuen, in his investigation of ‘sinful self and desire’ among gay and bisexual men, addresses the ways in which marginalised sexual identities in non-heteronormative contexts are negotiated in Malaysia where dominant Islamic prescriptions and discourse emphasise the normality and naturalness of the sex– gender binary and the importance of monogamous, one-to-one male–female relationships. Then, how do non-heteronormative Malaysian men manage their Muslim identities alongside their sexual identities? Chua argues that these men redefine,

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reframe, bargain and compartmentalise their religious beliefs and practices, on the one hand, and their sexual desires and preferences, on the other, and, in certain situations, while not achieving the full integration of their religion and their sexuality, temporarily bring these contradictions together and make sense of them in their own terms including in terms of their sense of self, identity and experience. What is clear is that Islamic prescriptions about appropriate sexual behaviour and relations play a significant part in non-heteronormative identities in orienting them to make sense of their sexualities and to assert their agency. However, interestingly in a dominant Islamic context, their agency does not aim to create ‘affirmative discourses’ or ‘alternative social realities’, but to sustain, however this is made possible, their conflicting identities. It is through this expedient and apolitical resistance that their sexual practices and identities become diversified. It is an alternative discourse but not one which will make much difference to the government-approved dominant views of sexuality. It is a discourse which gives a certain rationality to the position of a continuing marginality.

1.3.2 Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses The second section addresses issues which are embodied in counter-hegemonic social movements and ideas (antiracism, youth, environmentalism and independent publishing) which engage with issues concerning the greater critical, democratic space that has opened up within the Malaysian polity during the past decade or so. Mohan Ambikaipaker, in his examination of antiblackness in Malaysia, and the ‘Bandung spirit’, which emerged from the coming together of non-Western peoples at the Bandung conference in Indonesia organised by President Sukarno in 1955, proposes that African–Asian harmony is far from being realised. It is instructive that, in his opening address on 18 April 1955, Sukarno said the following: ‘As I survey this hall and the distinguished guests gathered here, my heart is filled with emotion. This is the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind! I am proud that my country is your host.’ This was a major international gathering that proclaimed that there would be no barriers, antipathies or prejudices between Asian and African peoples. And yet, in today’s Malaysia, Ambikaipaker reveals antiblack, racialist discourses which have been generated, in part at least, by the presence of African students and migrant workers in the country. The ‘Bandung spirit’ is then situated ‘within a larger history and trajectory of what it means to be Black and Asian in the modern world’, and the contradictions between an internationalist vision of non-European solidarity and nation-state-based ideologies and images. These issues are examined through a critical reading of The color curtain (1956), a report on the Bandung conference by the African American author Richard Wright (1908–1960), and the work of the Malaysian poet, playwright and novelist Usman Awang (1929–2001). A

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major issue is then posed: do the primordial perspectives and ethnic classifications of the Malaysian government, developed constitutionally and ideologically from its colonial legacy, and those of the population who subscribe to these interpretations lend themselves to racialist views of other migrant populations, Africans and others, who arrive in Malaysia in search of a livelihood? Haris Zuan examines the emergence of youth activism in Malaysia, which has hitherto been a rather neglected field of study, particularly outside of formal and official political activity. Since the emergence of the Reformasi movement in the late 1990s and the dramatic and unprecedented outcome of the 2008 election, when the Barisan Nasional coalition government led by the United Malays National Organisation failed, for the first time, to secure a two-thirds majority in parliament, Malaysia has witnessed an unrealised political dynamic and the emergence of new social movements in which social media have played a significant role. Haris Zuan’s analysis proposes that contemporary political postures and forms of advocacy of young people have to be understood in relation to the long-term process of depoliticisation that has taken place since the 1970s, which, in turn, has been the result of restrictive laws limiting youth activism, both within and beyond student campuses. Concerted calls for Reformasi from 1998 onwards, as well as demands for electoral reform orchestrated by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) since 2007, and the high degree of internet penetration have combined to rekindle the salience of youth activism. The recent forms and patterns of youth advocacy differ from those of the 1970s in terms of ideologies, networking and impact on politics in general. The political culture of young people was routinely associated by government authorities with ‘deviance’ and ‘delinquency’ so that this social group needed to be ‘disciplined’ through the law and the demands of the market economy. But the combined political and economic crises of the late 1990s fundamentally altered the terrain on which politics came to be fought. While the dynamism of the Reformasi movement did not translate into significant electoral gains for a decade, many young people were drawn into a new kind of politics, and this momentum continued with the Bersih rallies and beyond. In these ways, and through community-based cultural and social activism, young people were able to assert their agency and navigate between the dominant political structures. In many ways, they did not need rigid structures but instead organised themselves as loose networks. And most importantly, they utilised the power of popular culture and the new social media to good effect. For young people the politics of vote-buying, patronage and racial categorisation had to be replaced with concerns for the quality of their education, employment opportunities and affordable housing, among other issues. The past decade has seen the major political parties catching up with these forms of youth activism. All political parties have made youth one of the main foci for engagement. Given the youthfulness of Malaysia’s population, this shift is expedient as much as anything else. Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid and Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib outline the environmental impact of Malaysia’s previous and current developmental policies and examine the issues arising from NGO-driven environmentalist activism in Malaysia, specifically in the state of Kelantan, the role of which is to ensure that government and

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private sector development projects observe the core principles of sustainable development. Environmentalist movements in Malaysia exhibit more universal and allencompassing characteristics, transcending defined communal actions which, from the perspective of those who continue to pursue a race-based image of the nation, seem to be less effective and relevant for nation-building. The major question posed is whether or not Islamic discourse in state administration (and Islamist civil society by extension) translates into any significant or effective environmental action on the ground, in particular in addressing issues of marginalised communities. They provide a somewhat sombre conclusion in their case study of Kelantan. The discourse on Islam in Malaysia has been unduly dominated by politico-legal issues such that environmental decline, which arguably reflects also a general spiritual malaise, hardly figures among Islamist actors in both the state and civil society. Worse still, in states where Islamists control the government, such as Kelantan, those championing Islam are seen as colluding with capitalist interests to the detriment of marginalised communities that Islam, by right, should be defending.

In their interrogation of ‘the manifest failure of Islamism as a political ideology in addressing worsening environmental standards’, Ahmad Fauzi and Mohamad Faizal suggest that ‘contrary to oft-cited claims of Islam being a solution to all problems … [a] lack of spirituality in the programme of activists and parties that purportedly champion Islam is identified as a bane that urgently needs addressing, especially if elements of the Malaysian state are adamant in maintaining Islam as a partner and contributor to development.’ From environmental activism, which, in spite of its possibilities, provides a rather depressing view of Malaysian politico-ideological perspectives on the importance of the environment and its importance in the identities of rural-based minority populations like the Orang Asli, we return to issues and expressions of popular culture. Muhammad Febriansyah and Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Anuar, in their chapter on Malay-language independent book publishing in Malaysia, capture the importance of alternative cultural discourses, in music, fashion, activism and lifestyles. But they reach a rather startling and depressing conclusion, and one which suggests incorporation rather than independence. Independent Malay publishing supposedly challenges the dominant and increasingly mundane and predictable expressions of mainstream and approved publishers, exemplified, among others, by the government agency Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. The chapter engages with the concepts of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’, and develops ideas articulated by theorists of counterculture and resistance. Their analysis argues that independent publishing is simply a new form of competition within the existing dynamics of capitalism that strategically targets the youth market. As such, measures such as effective marketing and sales are the key to success, with independent publishers wielding these strategies more efficiently than mainstream publishers. It appears that the novelty of the discourse and the critical messages and resistance conveyed in these publications are of secondary importance. In other words, independent publishers ‘have become a part of what they themselves claim to oppose’ as this once ‘alternative’ counterculture becomes commodified.

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The authors’ thought-provoking conclusion is to posit whether the ‘indie moment’ in publishing is in fact already a thing of the past.

1.3.3 Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media We now turn to the third section—focusing on contested identities and alternative narratives—and enter the problematical issue of refugees in Malaysia in Gerhard Hoffstaedter and Nicole Lamb’s ‘fear and loathing’. It resonates with Mohan Ambikaipaker’s examination of antiblack and racialist discourse in Malaysia, and provides further evidence of a troubling attitude towards race and multiculturalism among many Malaysians, possibly prompted by their preoccupation with racial issues within their own country and the problems that they have experienced in dealing with a colonial legacy which resulted in the construction, control and institutionalisation of ethnic diversity. In the event, the ability and willingness to accept multiculturalism seem to be highly problematical, though Malaysia has managed through its national alliance of ethnic-based political parties to secure, apart from the Kuala Lumpur ‘racial riots’ of 1969, a level of stability in dealing with its own issues of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity. Nevertheless, in Hoffstaedter and Lamb’s chapter, the dominant public discourse on refugees in Malaysia is characterised by their portrayal as illegal, burdensome and a threat to national security. In this connection, under British colonialism, Malaysia was not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention or its related 1967 Protocol, but it has allowed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to process and resettle refugees. Therefore, it does not provide legal recognition to those who claim refugee status. However, the reality is that Malaysia is host to hundreds of thousands of refugees, both registered and unregistered, who live in mainly urbanbased communities. Refugees from Myanmar constitute the vast majority of the refugee population while smaller, though still demographically significant communities comprise those who originate from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. The situation which Malaysia faces has to be conceptualised in terms of what is understood by a ‘refugee’ and how the dominant discourses, or what Foucault’s calls ‘regimes of truth’ (again), construct refugees and then link them to the pervasive notion of ‘illegality’. Refugees are excluded from these debates on the conceptualisation of refugees and the major issues that they face. ‘Hesitant to appear ungrateful to their temporary hosts, narratives of everyday life in Malaysia often downplay incidents of discrimination and hostility from ordinary Malaysians.’ Current discourses about refugees are reproduced and shaped by a range of institutions and agencies: the UNHCR, the Malaysian government, civil society, the traditional media and other information systems. Hoffstaedter and Lamb challenge these representations and definitions by examining alternative narratives and readings on refugees. In recent years stories of Malaysia’s refugee population have begun to emerge in the mainstream media and elsewhere, and these accounts have played an important role in

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bringing the issues faced by refugees to the national consciousness. Personal refugee stories are explored to demonstrate how their narratives are shaped by and then insert themselves into public discourses. The analysis suggests that the portrayal of refugees as either victims or agents fails to capture the full multifaceted range of refugee experiences. The issues surrounding refugee status in Malaysia are then pursued further by Charity Lee and Zuraidah Mohd Don in exploring the ways in which two secondgeneration refugee Myanmar youths, born and brought up in Malaysia, negotiate their identities. Myanmar communities have resided in Malaysia for a considerable period of time which has resulted in the emergence of a whole generation of stateless children who were born there. The narratives of Prince, a Rohingya, and John, a Bamar, present examples of their agency in strategically choosing identities which enable them to achieve their particular goals, using their embodied cultural capital to address the conflicts and tensions which they face in everyday life. The narratives reveal a complex interweaving of two main identities: refugee and Malaysian. But importantly, as refugees with no legal status and no formal structure of support in Malaysia, their experiences and their negotiation of identities were not ones of silence and helplessness. Common representations of refugees as illegals, foreigners, burdens and criminals were contested or even manipulated by the respondents as strategic moves, and drawing on the resources and subjectivities available to them in their everyday social interactions, that were integral to their efforts for day-to-day survival and integration. We then move from refugees to minorities, in our theme of marginalisation and how these communities address that status. Connie Lim Keh Nie and Made Mantle Hood address the issues that the Iban of Sarawak face in moving from the rather bizarre British colonial umbrella of the Brooke Raj, and then as a minor segment in a much more formal and official British Crown colony and then ultimately incorporated into the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. And yet from these changing politicoadministrative circumstances the Iban have met these challenges in recent times. One of their responses to change has been their expression in identity terms of popular music which offered a poetic and expressive narrative of what being Iban and what an alternative modernity mean in a postcolonial world. (This theme is also explored later in the volume by Zawawi Ibrahim and his investigation of marginal storytellers.) The corpus of Iban popular songs created in the 1960s and 1970s has reflected and helped shape the history of Sarawak in that era and the identity of the Iban within a modernising Malaysian nation-state and in the era of globalisation and international communication. Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by Iban-language programming on Radio Sarawak and the establishment of recording companies, popular music lyrics, based on a fusion of Malay, Indonesian, Indian and Western genres, carried messages for the Iban which commented on modernity, the changing relationship of indigenous communities to ancestral lands, the impact of agricultural development, the rapid acceleration of internal migration and rural–urban movements, and the place of Sarawak in the broader nation-state of the federation. We carry on the theme of popular culture in Adil Johan’s investigation of the work of the celebrated P. Ramlee and his 1950s and 1960s films, addressing his dominant

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ethnonationalist narrative as a national icon through an account of his music, films and ideas. While his film music is a canonical symbol of artistic excellence, it has rarely been analysed in conjunction with its meaning for postcolonial nation-building and the immediate historical context in which it was created. The analysis demonstrates that P. Ramlee’s film music was modern, hybrid and cosmopolitan, drawing on both global and local sources. Ironically and unexpectedly, he then openly criticised British-American rock ’n’ roll music and culture which had found a ready audience among young people, including Malaysians, in the mid- to late 1960s. His reactionary posture, along with his declining commercial popularity, led him to adopt a strident voice for the preservation of local traditional music. Subsequently, his views were used by the Malaysian government to support a narrow, homogeneous version of national culture. P. Ramlee’s conservative turn has been remarkably resilient. His current cultural positioning is best exemplified in Shuhaimi Baba’s full-length documentary film. Here P. Ramlee’s life is dramatically reframed as a tragedy, and used as a vehicle to propagate his conservative reaction to foreign music and his rhetoric of cultural preservation. This in effect undermines the uniquely cosmopolitan contribution of his films and music, which exemplified fluid and heterogenous forms of nationmaking. These are aspects of Malaysia’s cultural history that are often forgotten in official national narratives and the collective memory of citizens. They, in turn, demonstrate the complexities and contradictions in identity-making. P. Ramlee’s life and work expressed ‘fusion’, but one which generates all kinds of tensions, in relation to his own life, and the life of Malaysia as a nation-state. And then we delve into more Malaysian popular culture. Norman Yusoff examines representations of masculinity in relation to notions of temporality in two feature films, Budak Kelantan (2008) and Bunohan (2011), which are both set in the east coast state of Kelantan. Budak Kelantan is about the reunion of two childhood friends in Kuala Lumpur who have taken different paths in life. One is highly moralistic while the other has strayed from the ‘right path’, and much of the plot is driven by the former trying to help the latter regain his integrity. Bunohan, which draws on elements from kickboxing, gangster and fantastic films and family melodramas, depicts the homecoming of three estranged brothers who inevitably become trapped in a tangled web of greed, vengeance and violence. In their critique of modernity and the representation of marginalised working-class youth masculinities, both films utilise and invoke Kelantan’s traditional art forms. Budak Kelantan deploys dikir barat as a stylistic element to accentuate moments of masculine emotional anxiety and nostalgic desire for the simpler traditional kampung life. Bunohan intricately interweaves Kelantan’s art forms with traditional magic, healing and mystical folklore. In this respect, both films induce a nostalgic longing for a place that has been lost due to migration. Through a close reading of the two films, Norman Yusoff argues that they offer forms of counternarrative through their representations of troubled and anxious masculinities (and the women onto which they are projected or who are forced to mediate them) while at the same time reflecting on and critiquing the reified gender binaries born of Malaysia’s Islamisation, Western modernity and linear, homogeneous time.

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In the chapter on Malaysia’s only independent radio station, Business FM (BFM 89.9), which has developed an audience among urban, middle-class English-speaking residents of the Greater Kuala Lumpur region, Azmyl Yusof examines its role in promoting indie rock music in its night-time and midnight programming. Although its main focus is on business and economics, the chapter considers the station’s position in original music programming, the discourse of ‘indie-ness’ in Malaysia and BFM’s role in opening up opportunities and possibilities for independent musicians and listeners in what is a nationally highly regulated and state-directed media industry. We have to pose the question, what does it say about identity? Depending on your reading of the chapter, it says very little or it says a great deal. In the final case study, Zawawi Ibrahim explores the counter-discourse and knowledge creation of two postcolonial indigenous storytellers from minority communities: Mak Minah, a Temuan (Orang Asli) woman who joined with nonindigenous musicians to form a fusion band, Akar Umbi, as a means of disseminating her worldview; and Akiya, a contemporary peninsular Orang Asli writer and author of Tuntut (Claiming), Hamba (Slave) and Perang sangkil (The slave-raiders’ war). Zawawi situates their cultural interventions in the wider context of the long-term marginalisation of indigenous communities in Malaysia by both the colonial and postcolonial states. This subjugation has most often been articulated as part of a ‘necessary’ statedirected ‘civilising process’ or ‘civilising offensive’, in Norbert Elias’s terms, driven by egregious forms of developmentalism. These concerted efforts have forced indigenous peoples to the very margins of society—certainly in socioeconomic terms, but also, Zawawi argues, in terms of denying their existential being and place in the wider society. In this context, then, the creative works, performances and discursive practices of indigenous storytellers, situated at the margins of the nation-state, are remaking a postcolonial discourse, reaffirming agency and are engaged in subverting the ‘civilising process’. For her part, Mak Minah’s personal biography is presented as intricately interwoven with the evolving history of the Malaysian nation-state, a life frequently turned upside down, shattered by the imposition of crude and cruel developmental projects. Making use of emerging cultural technologies, such as recordings and television, and working with sympathetic nonindigenous performers, Mak Minah proved remarkably successful in speaking truth to power. Akiya’s life story also provides the basis for his personal journey as a chronicler of Orang Asli lives. Though deeply rooted in the oral traditions and culture of the Semai people, he also received a formal education which introduced him to the world of literature and written storytelling. For Akiya, ‘literature became a tool to tell the story of his people to the world from his people’s own perspective’, and he uses his narrative skills in particular to retell one of the most brutal episodes in Orang Asli history, the terror of slave-raiding and the institutionalisation of slavery in the late nineteenth century. Taken together, the voices of indigenous storytellers like Mak Minah and Akiya directly confront the dominant discourses of the Malaysian nation-state and its homogenous representation of indigenous peoples. In Zawawi’s terms, they are attempting to ‘civilise the centre’ and construct a new form of indigenous identity

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and ontology from the periphery. Perhaps in this volume we are also endeavouring to civilise the centre and expose it to alternatives. At least we are encouraging dialogue.

1.4 Final Remarks The Malaysian government, in its dominant discourses, has been agile in its policy transformations, but in these ideological manoeuvres there is a persistent and constant primordial message. Perhaps this signals its downfall. It has moved from the New Economic Policy to the National Development Policy and on to the National Vision Policy then to the New Economic Model. It moved from the National Culture Policy to Bangsa Malaysia, ‘Negaraku’/Rukun Negara and under Najib Razak (2009–2018) to 1Malaysia. Under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (2003–2009) the focus was on human capital development and Islam Hadhari. Much of this ‘imagining’ now appears to be an anguished attempt to find a way towards national unity while still recognising the special position of the Malays and the need to promote and support their development in a system which has been referred to as ‘coercive consociationalism’. Helpfully, as a public intellectual, Abdul Rahman Embong has proposed several models to enable us to think about the future of Malaysia, to address the ethnic pluralism of Malaysia, its attempts to grapple with multiculturalism, and the tensions between national unity, class and ethnicity. We are faced with, in Abdul Rahman’s terms, the pessimistic ‘fractured plural society’ concept; the optimistic and triumphalist ‘unity in diversity’ template; the paradoxical ‘stable tension’ framework promoted by Shamsul A.B., which recognises long-run stability and ‘moments of unity’ with underlying tensions and conflicts; and the ‘divide and dissent’ model which captures the ideology and political economy of ‘division’ imposed from a political elite above and ‘dissent’ generated from below. The conflicts and paradoxes, and the ethnic divisions and cross-cultural interactions in Malaysia in the context of the pursuit of national unity, but with the continuing dominance of the race/ethnic paradigm, on the one hand, and the increasing importance in a modernising Malaysia of a social model based on class have led Abdul Rahman to suggest that ‘Malaysia today seems stuck in a cul-de-sac, a stalemate of sorts’. It hovers between race, ethnicity and class, and it continues to struggle with a move towards repression and reaction against one which embraces reform and change.

Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei, and Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He has long-standing interests in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia. His recent publications are UNESCO in Southeast Asia: World Heritage Sites in comparative perspective (ed., 2016), and coedited books on Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016), Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017), Tourism and ethnodevelopment (2018), Tourism in

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East and Southeast Asia (2018, 4-volume reader), Tourism in South-East Asia (2020), Indigenous Amazonia, regional development and territorial dynamics: Contentious issues (2020), Continuity and change in Brunei Darussalam (2021) and Origins, history and social structure in Brunei Darussalam (2021). Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller. He previously taught at Manchester University, UK, the University of the Philippines and Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. He is the director of the editorial company Impress Creative and Editorial, the owner of Gerakbudaya Bookshop, Penang, and cofounded the arts space Hikayat. He is the coauthor/editor of Asia–Europe interregionalism: Critical perspectives (1999), the writer of the texts for two books of photography: Portraits of Penang: Little India (2011) and Panicrama (2016) as well as numerous articles on film, dance, literature and music. He is currently writing a book on the artist Ch’ng Kiah Kiean. Zawawi Ibrahim is a visiting professor at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. He was most recently Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. Working within the field of anthropology broadly understood, his wide-ranging current research interests include youth, popular culture, storytelling and narratives, religious diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of The Malay labourer (1995), and coeditor of Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016) and Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017). He is a member of the EU-funded research project Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion: Bringing together European and Asian Perspectives (2019–2021).

Part I

Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexity and Hybridities

Chapter 2

Culture and Identity on the Move: Malaysian Nationhood in Southeast Asia Victor T. King

Abstract This chapter focuses on images of cultural identity in Malaysia and their modes of representation and classification at different levels or scales of magnitude. This requires an examination of expressions of nationhood, in the context of nation-building, in interaction with identities at the subnational level which comprise what are usually referred to as ethnic groups and categories. Identity and its specific expression in ‘ethnicity’ are forms of social cleavage and a means of organising social and cultural relations and encounters in terms of similarity and difference. It is argued that identity cannot exist apart from the establishment and maintenance of cultural difference and the construction and operation of boundaries, and is generated and sustained in relationships, both at the level of ideas and in practice with others who are perceived to be and categorised as ‘not us’ or ‘other’. In other words, the ways in which identity operates is relational. The Malaysian case is situated in a Southeast Asian context in which the ethnic paradigm has played an important role in the modern social science of the region. Keywords Malaysia · Southeast Asia · Culture · Identity · Nationhood · Ethnicity

2.1 The Concept of Culture Ethnicity is deeply embedded within the concept of culture. Ethnicity is a cultural phenomenon. But we need to examine the concept of culture before entering the realm of ethnicity. ‘Culture’ is one of the most crucial, though ‘complex’, ‘controversial’ and ‘divergent’ concepts in the social sciences and, given its status as a focal point of interest, it has quite naturally been the subject of the most intense debates and disagreements (Jenks 1993: 1). Culture (and its expression in language) is usually presented as embodying and expressing our humanity and identity, and what distinguishes us from the rest of creation (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 63; Vervoorn 2002: 41). It does not help that it is a term that is also used in a multitude of different ways in V. T. King (B) Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_2

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popular discourse and that it occurs with confusing regularity in discussions within and across a range of disciplines. In these debates, culture is (or more specifically elements of it are) produced or constructed, deconstructed, invented, reinvented, reproduced, modified, discarded, contemplated, inherited, disseminated, adopted, assimilated, absorbed, deployed, manipulated, elaborated, displayed, commoditised, exchanged and transformed (Kahn 1991, 1995). It is impossible to rehearse these debates and divergences in the detail that would be necessary to provide a comprehensive philosophical and analytical history of the development of the concept of culture in social scientific enquiry. In any case there are numerous large and weighty volumes which have attempted to set down what culture comprises (see, for example, Geertz 1973; Alexander 1990; Alexander and Seidman 1990; Salzmann et al. 2011). One such attempt, if at times somewhat tortuous and dense, is that by Chris Jenks in the Routledge Key Ideas series. He writes: ‘The idea of culture embraces a range of topics, processes, differences and even paradoxes such that only a confident and wise person would begin to pontificate about it and perhaps only a fool would attempt to write a book about it’ (Jenks 1993: 1). In that ‘foolish’ spirit I shall merely provide some indication of what I think culture is and how it relates to identity and ethnicity, and what features of it we might usefully emphasise in our exploration of its position and changing role in Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asia and in its interrelationship with shifting and changing ethnic identities. Stuart Hall’s (1980: 7) explanation of and case for the emergence of cultural studies in breaking with ‘previous conceptualizations’ of culture, and ‘moving the argument into the wider field of social practices and historical processes’ and away from the preserve of any one ‘disciplinary empire’, have always seemed to me to be unexceptional and based on a highly selective reading of analyses of culture, and with not much reference to some of the anthropological and sociological debates at the time. But perhaps it was innovative in its multi- and interdisciplinary endeavours and in the rather more narrow context of sociology and anthropology as they were practised then, embracing as it did ethnography, history, media studies, and English language and literary studies, in its attempts to address ‘long-term shifts taking place in British society and culture within the framework of a long, retrospective, historical glance’ and from the vantage point of what had been happening in Britain through the early post-war period (ibid.: 4). Of course, it also speaks to us of the experiences and perceptions of the marginalised, decentred, migrant, hybrid communities which emerged out of the processes of decolonisation and migrated to and settled in Britain and which provided a particular perspective on issues of identity and belongingness (Morley and Chen 1996: 13–15, 17–18; Hall and Sakai 1998: 363). There has also been an important stream of writing within the cultural studies framework focusing on issues of decolonisation in the former colonialised and colonised parts of the world, including Malaysia (Chen 1998a, 1998b).

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2.2 Culture and the Social Returning to Jenks, I view culture as primarily a sociological and historical issue, located in and implicated in societies, social contexts and social relations, though it is not generated directly through social organisation and social processes in some determined way. Therefore, we should not hold to a rigorously ‘social’ and mechanistic explanation of and origin for culture; neither should we argue that culture is totally dependent on or a mere reflection of society nor, in some way, reducible to it, nor that it simply and straightforwardly ‘reproduces’ society. As Jeffrey Alexander (1990: 25) says in examining certain dimensions of ‘the cultural’, ‘[t]he meaning of an ideology or belief system cannot be read from social behaviour’. In my view, culture is in some degree autonomous and interacts with social relations in dialectical and dynamic ways. It therefore has the capacity to condition and motivate forms of social action and to generate social and economic change. As John Clammer (2002: 16) suggests in his discussion of ‘subjectivities’, individuals engage in change subjectively; they have an ‘inner relationship’ with it, negotiate ‘new understandings of reality and of relationships and expanding or changing conceptions of the self’. Culture quite obviously lends behavioural quality, content and meaning to social relationships, as Raymond Firth (1951) proposed many years ago. It has an imaginative and creative dimension because it is also clearly a product of our mental processes and is expressed and embodied in our language. And as Nirmala PuruShotam (1998a: vii) observes, even though we know that everyday social constructs are indeed ‘constructed’, we cannot but be ‘emotionally connected’ to them. However, culture is not a free-floating, detached agent and it tends to adhere to particular social forms, including ethnic identities. In this connection, I think my views are close to Boike Rehbein’s (2007: 1) notion of ‘sociocultures’, though for him the cultural dimension appears to be closely implicated in what he calls ‘the division of work’. What needs to be emphasised is that cultural regularities and certain cultural elements are given more significance, relevance and meaning in the context of and through the demands generated by the imperative of living and surviving together. They are also brought into the field of identity formation. In other words, ‘[i]ndividuals interacting together impose their constructions upon reality’ (Douglas and Isherwood 1979: 63). Nevertheless, those constructions are not set in stone; they are malleable and they feed back on social encounters in various ways, particularly in the context of late modernity with the emergence of groups of specialists whose professional roles and responsibilities are to produce, reproduce and disseminate knowledge, symbols and material expressions of culture (Featherstone 2000: 15–16). Jenks attempts to capture this problematic between what Alexander (1990: 1–3) calls ‘mechanistic’ and ‘subjective’ approaches to culture in his discussion of Max Weber’s sociological methodology and particularly in his concept of an ‘ideal type’. In attempting to grasp and analyse culture, Jenks (1993: 53) proposes, on Weber’s behalf, that

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Culture, like the social order, also has certain biological and psychophysical interconnections, which suggests that each (the cultural and the social) is not derived from or dependent on the other in any direct cause-and-effect sense. Social orders (which include both economic and political relations) present opportunities, constraints and pressures. Cultural expressions or representations are also used to legitimise, symbolically express and assign values to particular sets of social relations, differences and reciprocities, for example with regard to ethnic interaction, social class hierarchies or the gender division of labour or the relations between generations or residential arrangements (Alexander 1990: 1–27; Vervoorn 2002: 42–44). They do so through the formulation of ideologies or at least sets of ideas, which serve to generalise the specific interests of those who formulate them. Yet culture does more than this because it is embedded in and is an essential part, indeed both a motor and expression, of social actions and the choices made in acting, ‘all of which are subjective, intersubjective and volatile—but real, tangible and material in their consequences’ (Jenks 1993: 57; Clammer 2002: 16–17). The overriding fact is that people ostensibly act and choose as individuals (human beings are defined by the ability and capacity to make choices) and they do so subjectively and in terms of cultural meanings and understandings, but they do so in a collective environment in relation to others, and they do so in pursuing their livelihoods and interests and in engaging in economic, political and social activities and in formulating strategies of action and engagement. Moreover, culture is a concept. It is, as Kahn (1992: 161) proposes, an ‘intellectual construct’. Culture is taught, learned, shared and transmitted as a part of collective life; this is purely Parsonian (1951) and also derives from Edward Tylor’s (1871) notion of culture as a ‘complex whole’. It comprises the ideational, conceptual, conscious dimension of human life and the ideas, accumulated skills and expertise embodied in material objects (art and artefacts) and carried and given expression most vitally in language. It encompasses the symbolic, meaningful, evaluative, interpretative, motivated, cognitive and classificatory dimensions of humanity (Geertz 1973). It refers in its more popular connotations to ‘ways of life’ and ‘ways of behaving’; it is therefore pervasive. It has to be understood in terms of form, content and process and, although there are cultural regularities and continuities which are easily detected, there are also quite obviously alterations, modifications, transformations and contestations. In some ways, though not as neatly bounded as was once originally supposed, it is patterned and has a certain systematic quality so that someone who has not been socialised into a particular culture can—when he or she has discovered its ethical judgments, values, standards, beliefs and views of the world, the connections which it makes between cause and effect, and the explanations which it provides for the place and function of humans within the natural world and for the bases of human

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interaction, organisation and behaviour—make sense of it even without necessarily approving of its underlying principles. Having said this, I accept that there may be events and behaviour which are beyond culture or constitute a ‘counterpoint’ to it which is not ‘meaningful’ or ‘comprehensible’ (Daniel 1991). We should also take note of what culture is not. It is not, in ‘essentialist’ mode, firmly bounded, closed and delineated (Mackerras et al. 1998). It is not a totality; rather it is open-ended and constantly in process. In this connection, social science analyses also need to adopt comparative perspectives, examine several sites, and move across disciplines and time. Culture is not homogeneous, integrated and agreed, rather it is contested, dialectical and is part of systems of power and privilege, as well as generated, sustained and transformed in strategies, discourses and practices. These contests and struggles operate at different levels and in different arenas. Although those who have power and control economic resources can more easily impose their cultural visions and values on others, this imposition, or in Antonio Gramsci’s terms ‘cultural hegemony’, is never complete (Gramsci 1990: 47–54, 1978; and see Béteille 1990: 16–17; Hall 1996; Winter and Ollier 2006: 11). This perspective is close to Michel Foucault’s (1977, 1980) concept of ‘discourse’ and the role of knowledge, ideas, images and cultural categories in exercising control, regulation and domination over others. In short, people deal in cultural capital and use it in social and political strategies. Indeed, in a Southeast Asian context, debates about the appropriateness of Western-derived poststructuralist and postcolonialist frames have reached a high level of intensity in Thai cultural studies during the past couple of decades (Morris 1994, 2000; Jackson 2004, 2005). It was here that essentialist and modernisation readings of the uniqueness of Thai culture and its non-colonial status provoked reactions which sought for an understanding of Thai culture in a qualified, modified, nuanced comparative, poststructuralist analysis of the relationship between power, knowledge and meaning (Jackson 2004, 2005). In rather more straightforward terms, Goh Beng-Lan (2002a: 37) attempts to summarise these various strands of analysis when she says, in relation to conscious and ‘purposeful’ actors, that the cultural system possesses ‘very powerful and determining effects on people, yet there are always emergent and residual possibilities located in people’s experiences, passions, and aspirations to effect changes in society’.

2.3 Culture and Identity The concept of culture is very closely implicated in the concept of identity or ethnicity (Kahn 1981; King and Wilder 1982; Leach 1982; King 2016, 2017). It is not a matter of ‘race’ in a physiological sense, although in political ideologies formulated in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia and Singapore, and created in the context of nation-building, ‘race’ is often used in place of ethnicity. Mistakenly, we have to address not ethnic issues but racial ones (Kahn 1992: 160–163, 2006; Kahn and Loh 1992; PuruShotam 1995, 1998a, 1998b). Indeed, some social scientists talk about

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‘ethnicity’ and ‘cultural identity’ in the same breath because the main elements of ethnicity and identity are cultural ones: they comprise values, beliefs and behaviour, and the meanings which are given or attached to these as well as differences (and similarities) in language and material culture. Zawawi Ibrahim, in his work on Sarawak, has captured these issues in ‘the discourse of representation, identity and multiculturalism’ (Zawawi 2008, 2017: 35–55; and see Kahn 1998a, 1998b). However, ethnicity has increasingly come to be seen as a specific kind of identity attached to particular groups, communities, majorities or minorities generating different scales and forms of allegiance and loyalty (Hitchcock and King 1997a, 1997b). Of course, there are other kinds of identity based on certain organisational principles, including gender, age or generation, and social class (Du Gay et al. 2000a, 2000b). In its specifically ethnic dimension, identity is what distinguishes a particular group (or category) of individuals from others. It is frequently expressed as unifying and differentiating people at varying levels of contrast. This is especially the case when majority or dominant populations in nation-states classify and talk about the minorities which they control and wish to incorporate into a modern, national project as ‘marginal’ and ‘unsophisticated’. In this connection one of the major concerns of political scientists working on Southeast Asia has been processes of constructing national identities and the associated tensions and conflicts between attempts by political elites to ‘imagine’ the nation, and the responses of the constituent communities of the state which often wish to retain separate and viable identities (Anderson 1991). State action may also involve processes of exclusion, avoidance, non-recognition or hostility, the latter sometimes resulting in political subjugation, economic exploitation, forced acculturation or, in extreme cases, genocide. Boundary definition and maintenance are also rendered much more problematical in situations of ‘cultural hybridization and syncretism’ (Chua 1995: 1). A relatively neglected field of research has been the ways in which the media and communications technology have been deployed in the construction of national identities and the effects of the globalised media and other cultural flows on both national and local identities (see, for example, Postill 2006 and Barlocco 2014 on ethnic minorities in Sarawak and Sabah). These concerns focus on the multidimensional and shifting qualities of the concept of cultural identity, or as I refer to it here in the Malaysian context ‘culture and identity on the move’ (and see Clammer 1980, 1985, 1998, 2002; Goh 2002a, 2002b). As Fredrik Barth (1969) observed many years ago in what has become a seminal statement in the study of ‘ethnic groups’, cultural similarities and differences entail the establishment and maintenance of boundaries generated and transformed in encounters and interactions across boundaries. Indeed, identities are constructed and sustained in relationships, both at the level of ideas and in practice, with others who are perceived to be and categorised as ‘not us’ or ‘other’. In other words, the way in which ethnicity operates is ‘relational’, as Clare Boulanger (2009: 19) demonstrates in her study of ethnic relations in Kuching, Sarawak.

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2.3.1 Classifications, Stereotypes, Hybridity Classifications of people and the bases on which categories are formulated can be quite arbitrary and comprise what we might term ‘folk models’, ‘stereotypes’ or ‘typifications’ (PuruShotam 1998a: 19). Identities can be relatively ‘contingent, fragile and incomplete’ (Du Gay et al. 2000b: 2), although some identities are more viable and enduring than others. Folk models of identity are usually relatively straightforward cultural shorthands to facilitate navigation through everyday life. Nevertheless, cultural and social life is not as simple as this in that processes of cultural exchange, intermarriage, physical resettlement and absorption generate hybrid communities. These bridge boundaries, partaking of elements from more than one category or group; they also generate multiple identities which coexist, but which may be invoked according to circumstances (Leach 1954). In this regard, it is important to examine the ways in which these mixed communities establish and express their identities and how political elites define and address them in policy and administrative terms for purposes of nation-building (Chua 1995: 1–3). A particular set of debates in Malaysia, for example, has been whether or not to include certain hybrid communities, which have some claim to Malay antecedents, in the constitutionally important and politically dominant category of ‘indigenes’ (Bumiputera, literally sons of the soil) (Goh 2002b). It is sometimes difficult to anticipate what elements will be given significance in establishing similarity and difference, but the processes of identifying and differentiating are deeply cultural (Kahn 1992: 159). Those who study ethnicity and identity have to address the criteria which are used to unite and differentiate people and select those which make sense and are most appropriate and useful in their analyses. These may or may not correspond with the criteria that the people under study themselves use, the so-called ‘subjective’ dimension of identity, though it is unlikely that a serious scholar would ignore the perceptions and views of local people (Nagata 1975: 3). But an outside observer, in attempting to construct wider-ranging classifications for comparative purposes, might well choose to emphasise certain criteria, say language, at the expense of others, or perhaps cuisine and costume. In the context of classification, a useful distinction is that between a ‘category’ (which is the ideational or conceptual dimension of identity by which individuals are assigned or assign themselves to a particular unit within a system of units) and ‘group’ (which pertains to the dimension of social interaction and communication). Categories may not therefore acquire the characteristics of a group in which people actively realise their identity and unite to express and promote it (King 2001; King and Wilder 2003: 197).

2.3.2 Primordialism and Instrumentalism It was argued some time ago that ‘essentialist’ approaches to the understanding of ethnicity and identity, usually glossed in Geertzian terms as ‘primordialism’ or

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the ‘basic givens’ of a community, which place emphasis on the strong sentiments attached to shared origins, descent and traditions (Geertz 1963), should be replaced with a perspective, usually referred to as ‘constructivist’ or ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘situational’, which focuses on the ways in which identities are actively constructed, maintained and transformed, and, at times, used strategically for the accumulation of wealth, status and power (Nagata 1974; Dentan 1975, 1976; and see Kahn 1992: 170– 171; Mackerras 2003: 12). In this connection, Clive Kessler has argued, following Eric Hobsbawm and others (1983), that in a fast-changing and modernising present, ‘tradition’ or ‘the past’, rather than ‘an unchanged residue … becomes a resource now capable of being consciously used to fashion and legitimate a form of life that exists only in a problematic and contingent present’ (Kessler 1992: 134–135). Nevertheless, however fluid and contingent ‘identities’ are, they do take on a real and more solid and fixed quality, for most if not all of us. We desire to make them more ‘natural’ and ‘embedded’ than they actually are. Interestingly, in building a sense of national identity and in developing a modern society and economy the governments of Singapore and Malaysia have chosen to emphasise and institutionalise primordialism and the divisions or differences between ethnic categories and groups rather than attempt to reduce, rethink or eliminate them. As far back as the 1970s in Southeast Asia anthropologists were examining the ways in which identities (using such alternative terms as ‘tribal’, ‘indigenous’, ‘native’, ‘minority’) are not straightforwardly carried unchanging from the past and anchored reassuringly in some distant ancestral time and space, but they are instead constructed. Indeed, as a ‘resource’ they can be ‘switched’, ‘manipulated’, ‘deployed’ and ‘used’, and many anthropological studies in the region focused on the fluid and strategic ways in which particular communities adopt and discard identities, and the role-playing and behaviour associated with them, according to circumstances, needs and interests (Leach 1954; Nagata 1975, 1979; Dentan 1975, 1976). Individuals can also carry multiple identities and deploy these as different situations and interactions demand (King and Wilder 2003: 196–200). This is especially so in situations where minority populations are having to come to terms with more powerful majorities as in the case of the minority Semai and the majority, politically dominant Malays in Malaysia (Dentan 1975). Well before this important work on minorities in Southeast Asia, Edmund Leach had already developed the argument that identity had to be examined as a historical process; he demonstrated this with regard to interactions between the Kachin and Shan of Highland Burma and the fact that social forms and identities of the upland-dwelling tribal Kachin were forged and transformed in relation to the valley-dwelling Shan who were organised into hierarchical states. This gave rise to a whole series of studies on the relations between upland and lowland populations in Southeast Asia and the ways in which identities were developed and changed (see King and Wilder 2003: 193–230). Therefore, Hall’s later declarations about identity from the perspective of cultural studies, though well taken, are rather predictable and unexceptional. However, the strength of Hall’s argument is precisely because it is underpinned by his own personal experiences and his contemplation of his own, in many respects, problematic identity. That is why he focuses on the ways in which one’s ‘position’ or ‘identity’ generate

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meaning, but which can never be final or closed (Hall and Sakai 1998: 373). Hall sets aside an ‘essentialist’, ‘naturalist’ concept of identity in favour of a ‘discursive’, ‘strategic’, ‘positional’ one. Cultural identities are therefore ‘never unified … never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting discourses, practices and positions’ (Hall 2000: 17). He points to constant transformations in identity, their processual nature and their incompleteness; the contextualisation of identity historically; the construction of identity in relation to ‘the play of power’ and in relation to the exclusion of ‘the Other’ (ibid.: 17–18; and see Hall 1990). Creating ‘otherness’ is a crucial process in the study of identity, and it is an activity in which anthropologists, in constructing ‘other cultures’, have developed particular analytical skills (Béteille 1990: 8–11).

2.4 National Identities Returning to the theme of national identities, as a form of ethnicity on a wider scale, these are constructed and presented by those in power in independent, politically and territorially defined units which we refer to as ‘nations’, ‘states’ or ‘nation-states’. As Thongchai Winichakul (1994: 1) says, [I]t is generally supposed that a nation is a collective body to which individuals must belong … that … [it] … has essential traits commonly imbued in its members, who, moreover, have the same national interest. Patriotism, loyalty, and other affiliations in terms of ideas, sentiments, and practices appear to be natural relationships.

However, as we have seen, nation-states are constructed or ‘imagined’. Political elites engage in nation-building to promote collective solidarity, unity and cohesion and, hopefully, to maintain political stability and in so doing keep themselves in power. And with political stability (most of them at least) attempt to promote economic and social development. Political leaders are usually assisted in this mythmaking enterprise to ‘make’ citizens and ‘construct’ a national community by senior bureaucrats and by intellectuals (including historians, novelists, poets, painters and musicians) (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 41). Indeed, as a sense of national identity becomes embedded it is frequently ‘intellectuals’, ‘artists’ of various kinds and more generally ‘cultural intermediaries’ who continuously contest, reproduce and renegotiate national culture and convert cultural products into forms which can be disseminated and consumed by the populace (Zawawi 2009: 85–86). Therefore, in spite of the forces and pressures of globalisation, nation-states are still vitally important units in the organisation of people and space, and for nationalist historians like Renato Constantino (1998: 62– 63), in his reflections on Philippine history, nationalism provides ‘the only defense’ against the globalising and homogenising pressures emanating from the West, and particularly the United States. Territories, though in some sense constructed, are also real. Lines drawn on maps and what is contained within them usually matter and have consequences for those who are considered on the one hand to belong to a particular nation-state (they are ‘citizens’ or recognised ‘legal residents’) and those

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non-members who have to secure permission to reside or work there for a period (Clammer 2002: 22; Thongchai 1994; Vervoorn 2002: 38–40). However difficult it might be in a mobile, globalised world, governments attempt to police and monitor their borders, allowing some people in under certain conditions and excluding or deporting others. The political leaders’ vision of what defines a nation-state is backed by ‘agents of law enforcement’ (PuruShotam 1998a: 5). The building of a state and a nation with specific borders also requires the development of a physical infrastructure—housing, schools, industrial estates, and a communication network along with national monuments and public buildings—which serves to underpin the process of constructing a sense of national identity and belongingness among the citizenry (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 39–41). Interestingly, in addition to the realities imposed by territorial boundaries, some observers have noted that there is a ‘realness’ even in the ‘imagined’ realms of national identity. In the late 1990s Joel Kahn (1998a: 17–26), for example, although he suggested that the relationship between state and nation (or the ‘blood-territory equation of classical nationalist … movements’) was at that time, and in his view, becoming attenuated, indeed ‘breaking down’ under the impact of globalisation among other things, he nevertheless recognised ‘the very real power’ of the beliefs which underpin nationalism. I have already argued elsewhere in relation to what I preferred to call ‘ethnicity’ then that it is not merely an ideological expression or an idiom or reflection of something which is considered to be more concrete. This concreteness is usually sought in the economic realm and in social class terms, and as Kahn has proposed the attempts to reduce ethnic identity to social class relations ‘must still take ethnic attachment as a given’ (Kahn 1992: 172, 1981; King 2008a). What is patently clear is that sharing an identity, however constructed, can provide ‘a powerful means to mobilize people to take a particular course of action’ (King 2008b: 130). In the extreme case, people are willing to kill or be killed in the process of projecting and defending their identity. A nation-state claims identity, separateness and autonomy on the basis of defined boundaries which separate it from like units and within which its citizens are assumed, encouraged or coerced to share a common nationhood which comprises such cultural elements as a language, history, origins and a sense of belonging, expressed in symbolic terms in anthems, flags and national rituals (Thongchai 1994: 1–19). Ethnic designations are often conflated with the concept of the nation so that the boundaries of the state are seen as coterminous with the ethnically defined nation (Evans 1999a: 7). This modern cartographic device framing a shared ethnicity is very different from the pre-European, religiously based conceptions of a polity as part of a cosmic or celestial order, identified with a ruler who was divine or semi-divine, in which there were spheres of influence and domains of sacred space which were not precisely defined in territorial terms (Thongchai 1994: 20–36, 55, 133–135). In political terms, boundaries were rather zones, corridors or margins which were ‘not determined or sanctioned by the central authority’ (ibid.: 75). Importantly in a colonial context the constituents of a dependent state and those who governed and were governed were also often framed and conceptualised in terms of racial difference, though this was not usually a matter of race at all but

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one of ethnicity or cultural identity (PuruShotam 1998a: 6–7). There were dominant races, native or indigenous races, and immigrant races; racial differences and racial purity were central ideas in European colonialism and were frequently used to explain behaviour, motivation, socioeconomic position and much more besides (Evans 1999a: 16, 1999b). However, it is this very notion of a ‘nation’, a realisation and acceptance of oneness, rather than that of an objectively defined and legally and territorially recognised ‘state’, which usually requires construction and continuous reinforcement through political action and its use of the media and national educational systems—in the creation of national symbols, myths, histories, events and institutions. A shared ancestry or common origin, designed to build a ‘sense of belonging’, is often claimed to be associated with physical or territorial connectedness, cultural commonalities and various symbolic elements (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 2–3; Mackerras 2003: 11). An important arena of construction is that of language and its use in relation to identity, and what language or languages are privileged in the formation and construction of a nation (PuruShotam 1998a: 8–9). More than this it is a political search in order to control daily life and manage social responsibilities and roles (Silverstone 1994: 1). In comparative terms, I remain attracted to David Brown’s (1994, 2000) ambitious comparative studies of the relations between the state and ethnicity and the analytical framework which he develops (see King 2008b: 134–154). It is an approach which Michael Barr and Zlatko Skrbiš (2008: 3–5) have elaborated in their examination of the construction of the Singapore nation-state. Using Brown’s ‘conceptual categories’ (which provide a rough-and-ready formulation) Barr and Skrbiš arrange the nation-building strategies of Southeast Asian governments on a continuum from ‘ethnoculturalism’ in Myanmar, based on lowland Buddhist-Burman identity; then to a lesser extent Thailand with its emphasis on lowland Thai language, religion and kingship as the core of nationhood; to ‘multiculturalism’ in Malaysia, though with non-Malay and non-Muslim communities excluded from ‘full identification with the aspirational nation’ (in this sense the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ needs to be heavily qualified); then to a multicultural and ‘civic’ Singapore, combining ‘a modern concept of citizenship’ but with an emphasis on racial categorisation and racial harmony and equality; and finally to the other ‘civic’ end of the spectrum with Indonesian nationalism based on ‘thoroughly modern concepts of citizenship’ in which race and ethnicity are not recognised ‘as legitimate forms of identification’ and the national language is not the language of the majority population, the Javanese. These analytical categories should not disguise the fact that government policies change and that they may be based on shifting combinations of modern/secular/civic and traditional/primordial/ethnoreligious ideologies. We should also acknowledge that globalisation, as well as having homogenising influence on cultures, has also led to fragmentation, hybridisation and heterogeneity in identities. However, in whatever form national images and ideologies are constructed, these do not eliminate or override regional and local identities or ethnicities. In a compendium on ethnicity in Asia, Colin Mackerras and his colleagues (1998), like Brown before them, explore the various strategies which political elites have

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used to build the nation and the interactions between politically dominant populations (usually comprising majorities in their respective states) and minorities. The attempts to construct nationhood on the basis of ‘essentialising’ the identity of the majority and the responses to this on the part of various of the constituent communities, usually minorities, has been termed ‘ethnonationalism’; there is then a political struggle or in current jargon ‘contestation’ over identities and what should be given precedence and what should be marginalised, reconfigured or eliminated. Struggles also turn on human rights issues, injustice and inequality (Mackerras 2003: 3–7). But nowhere in Southeast Asia have national projects remained uncontested, nor can they be all-embracing and all-consuming (Gomes 1994). Whether or not these projects will succumb to other competing identities at the supra- or subnational level is a moot point. What is clear at the moment is that in certain cases government-constructed images of the nation do manage to assert and maintain themselves while in others they are rather more unstable and subject to dispute and reformulation. The Singapore government, for example, has been rather more successful in convincing its citizens of the appropriateness of its image of the nation than say Malaysia (where Bumiputera privilege and the role and position of Islam, the Malay language and the sultans have been the subject of dispute at one time or another). On the other hand, the kingdom of Thailand was not subject to colonialism, and on that basis did not have to construct a national culture in opposition to alien dominance or to build a viable identity in a state created and bequeathed by foreigners. But even for the Thai political elite their nationalism was ‘framed’ by colonialism and the nation progressively constructed by the Thai elite from the encounter with the British and the French from the mid-nineteenth century, though they could be ‘more selective and open to Western and European influence’ than the colonised dependencies which surrounded them (Van Esterik 2000: 96). In all cases, and irrespective of specific historical circumstances, the relevance of the nation-state continues to be strongly felt in the arena of identity and ethnicity, not just by the political elite but by large sections of the citizenry of these countries as well. Let us now turn to Malaysia as a case study where ethnicity, or in Malaysian terms ‘race’, has been an obsession.

2.5 Malaysia Post-war social science in Malaysia has been preoccupied with the ethnicity (and identity) paradigm (Syed Husin 1984, 2015; Shamsul 1998a, 2008; Lee 2000; Suryadinata 2004; Kessler 2012; Milner et al. 2014; Abdul Rahman 2015, 2018), though there has also been attention to issues of class, the state and political economy (see Jomo 1986 for one of the best examples). Tan Chee-Beng (2004: 320) has said pertinently: ‘On the whole anthropology and sociology in Malaysia do have some common concerns, including ethnic relations, ethnic identities, and development.’ Malaysian identity, expressed primarily in racial terms, is premised on ethnic difference and diversity but also on overarching symbols of nationhood, most of which are drawn from Malay Muslim symbolism. The closest comparative case is

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Singapore, but with obvious differences. Probably nowhere else in Southeast Asia has nation-building been so meticulously micromanaged and elite-created and -driven than in Singapore (Barr and Skrbiš 2008: 8–9). While the Singapore government set itself the task of constructing racial categories and neutralising them in the interest of a greater national–Asian identity, the Malaysian government, though it too operates with clearly ideologically defined racial (or more properly ‘ethnic’) categories, not altogether dissimilar from those in Singapore, privileges those who are categorised as ‘indigenes’ (Bumiputera). This category and its attributes are specified in constitutional terms. The special recognition and privileges attached to indigenous status and the more general claims of equality of citizenship irrespective of ethnic identity were at the heart of the dispute between political leaders in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore from 1963 when Malaysia was formed and which led to Singapore’s abrupt departure from the federation in 1965 to create its own independent republic (see Lian 2020). In contrast to Malaysia, the Singapore elite under the prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, continuing the policy of his predecessor as the chief minister David Marshall, promoted a multiracial, multicultural and multilingual policy which presented a nation comprising ‘equal’, ‘harmonious’, ‘racially defined’, ‘Asian’ communities which, in a meritocratic environment would, in theory at least, enjoy equal opportunities to succeed without favour being given to one or the other (Chua 1998: 191–192). What it also did was to draw attention away from increasing social inequality and class divisions—indeed the social hierarchies which Lee’s elitism and his educationdriven meritocracy served to generate—and towards a national Singaporean–Asian identity, and a set of constituent ethnic or ‘racial’ identities which cut across social classes (Velayutham 2007). Brunei Darussalam, too, as a near neighbour, emphasises an indigenous identity. It is based on Malay Islamic monarchy (Melayu Islam beraja), but there, though the categories of Malay and Chinese are prominent (Indians are a category wrapped up in a more general designation ‘Others’), the constitutional privileges and status of being a Malay citizen are overwhelming. Malay identity is so important that, embedded in the Brunei Nationality Act of 1961, and through the process of Malayisation by means of conversion to Islam, the incorporation of the younger generations into the Malay language as a medium of instruction in schools, and the constant reinforcement of the national ideology of Malay monarchy, it recognises but progressively absorbs other identities. Indeed, constitutionally and institutionally, most of the main non-Malay indigenous communities in Brunei are designated ‘Malay’ (King 2021). The broad racial categories which were constructed in Malaysia are also found in Singapore (that is, Chinese, Malays, Indians and others [CMIO], though in a different order), but Malaysia has a more diffuse category of ‘indigenes’ embracing Malays and the native ‘Dayak’ and indigenous populations of East Malaysia as well as the constitutionally problematic category of Orang Asli (aborigines), the ‘original population’ of peninsular or West Malaysia. As Kessler has indicated, ethnic identities are untidy in Malaysia and cannot easily be shoehorned into the major racial categories; this is not to say that they are not a problem in Singapore as well. This is what makes ethnic and cultural politics in Malaysia particularly interesting and complex. Although they appear relatively straightforward to delimit, the politically

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dominant Malays, defined primarily in terms of religion, language and custom and their claim to be ‘indigenous’, are a case in point in illustrating this untidiness. Kessler (1992: 139, 2012) notes, for example, that if one takes two criteria (that is, being Muslim and being Bumiputera) which are used to define Malays, then one confronts populations that are ‘anomalous’. These comprise Muslims who are neither Malay nor Bumiputera; Malays who are neither Muslims nor Bumiputera; Malay Bumiputera who are not Muslims; Muslim Malays who are not Bumiputera; Bumiputera Muslims who are not Malays; and Bumiputera who are neither Malays nor Muslims (ibid.). There are also Malaysians who are neither Malays nor Muslims, nor Bumiputera, but because of hybridisation with Malay culture and society make claims for Bumiputera status. Kahn (1992: 161) makes the point, made many times before, that it is ‘impossible, particularly in the modern world, to define discrete cultures except in a totally arbitrary way’. This does not, of course, deter governments from constructing identities to both shape the nation-state and govern and control it. The post-independence policy of rationalisation and simplification in Malaysia, as in Singapore, carried forward the processes which were initiated during the colonial period, though prior to independence the territories which came together eventually to form Malaysia contained a much more complex ethnic mosaic, complicated, in political terms, by the partial coincidence or overlapping nature of ethnic identity, social class, wealth, occupational position and residential location (Brown 1994: 213). Malaysia, unlike Singapore, which was very much a colonial creation, also had historical antecedents which, though transformed by the British, particularly in a process of the ‘ceremonialisation’ of royalty in the Malay states, were not eliminated; these were embodied in the sultans and their symbolic expression of Malay identity and its privileged status (Kessler 1992: 143–146). Following Abdul Rahman Embong (2018: 281), the Malaysian nation-state was ‘crafted’ and ‘envisioned’ in the period from 1946 to 1948. Moreover, leading Malay nationalist figures and intellectuals, in the process of creating the post-independent Malaysian nation-state, projected a particular image of the Malays in contrast to the Chinese and Indians which confirmed and reinforced the compartmentalised racial–occupational and cultural–psychological stereotypes which were created by the British (Kahn 2006: 57–71). This interpretation of ethnic or racial types, and particularly the distinction and contrast between the values, attitudes, perspectives, psychologies and biologies of the Malays and Chinese, was expressed most forcefully, popularly and politically in Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay dilemma (1970). Mahathir presents a sharp contrast between the stereotypical urban-based, aggressive, hard-working, resilient and entrepreneurial Chinese and the Malays, depicted as a rural-based, contented, easy-going, non-risk-taking, less economically developed, communalistic, spiritually and aesthetically motivated, subsistence-orientated peasantry, an image which deliberately or unconsciously marginalised the more dynamic, migratory, entrepreneurial elements of what came to be defined as Malay society, or in Kahn’s terms ‘the other Malays’ (2006). This stereotype emerged out of the colonial experience in the Straits Settlements and the Malay states in particular and the creation of a plural society in J.S. Furnivall’s

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(1948) terms, but it was subsequently used in rather different circumstances to help justify a set of postcolonial policies which needed to address what was for the young Malaysian nation-state a most traumatic event. The ‘race riots’ of 1969 marked a watershed in Malaysian postcolonial history. These and the implementation and consequences of the 20-year New Economic Policy (NEP) from 1971 to 1990, which was a radical response to the problems raised by racial disharmony and the economic inequalities between the races, have been so amply debated, dissected and analysed that they do not need rehearsing here (but see Abdul Rahman 2018). Following the declaration of a state of emergency, an affirmative action policy was formulated by the Malay-dominated government and instituted in particular by the then deputy prime minister, Abdul Razak Hussein (Goh 2002a: 39–68; and see various chapters in Kahn and Loh 1992, including Crouch 1992: 21–43; Khoo 1992: 44–76; Loh and Kahn 1992: 1–17). Along with this a national ideology (Rukun Negara) was formulated and a Malay-centred National Culture Policy. The NEP was designed through state-led development and targeted government support, particularly in education and training, the government takeover of companies (on behalf of Malays) and the promotion of Malay-owned and managed firms to bring a rapidly increasing number of Malays into the urban-based, modern sector as businesspeople and professionals (Saravanamuttu 1987; Gomez and Jomo 1999; Gomez and Saravanamuttu 2012). As we have seen, these actions were justified in terms of a policy which argued that the Malay community, in the terms defined by the racial stereotypes or ethnicities, needed protection and support. This was Mahathir’s view to a point, but this special attention for him was designed not to perpetuate traditionalism through protection and subsidy but to help encourage the emergence of what came to be referred to popularly and in academic analysis as ‘new Malays’ (Melayu baru). Mahathir recognised the dangers of the development of a welfare mentality and overdependence on government and, as prime minister, argued for the need for Malays not only to embrace new values and ways of thinking, initially with government support, but also to do this on the basis of hard work, selfreliance and confidence and the sustained development of these desirable characteristics. His vision also saw a major role for Islam, but one which was closely integrated into and supportive of economic development, modernisation and resilience, reminiscent of Max Weber’s thesis on the relations between the ‘Protestant ethic’ and the ‘spirit of capitalism’ (Khoo 1992: 58–59). Mahathir wanted, then, a new, Asianbased modernity. Nevertheless, he also acknowledged that Malaysia had to be and become a multiethnic developed nation-state through his Vision 2020, and one that recognised the contribution of others (Abdul Rahman 2018). The primordial image of a more economically backward sector requiring protection and support and the intervention of government to address this unequal and uneven system served Malay political leaders well, and it provided a very direct means of garnering and sustaining the political support of the majority of Malays, many of them still rural-based when the NEP was implemented, who were in receipt of state assistance and support and who benefited from government largesse. The dominant Malay party, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), depended especially on the support of rural Malays (including importantly prominent village

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leaders and rural schoolteachers) and those who had felt themselves marginalised economically in their own homeland. It was inevitable that the pattern of politics in the Federation of Malaya from 1957, and then, despite the greater ethnic complexity in Sarawak and Sabah (formerly British North Borneo), in the wider Malaysia from 1963, would be one of primarily ethnic- or racial-based political parties. This political configuration and the incessant analysis in ethnic terms of Malaysian social, economic and cultural life, and of the historical development of Malaysia, served to further cement and emphasise ethnic differences. However, the NEP, if it was to work as the government intended, required an ever-closer relationship between politics and business. The old pre-1969 arrangement in which government kept private capital and business at arm’s length and provided some assistance, largely piecemeal and uncoordinated, to the Malays was abandoned in favour of direct and comprehensive planned state intervention in the control, ownership, management, financing and development of business (Gomez 1990; Khoo 1992: 49–50). It is no surprise that, with the development of an increasingly politically determined and controlled economy, patronage and ‘money politics’ flourished with ever-closer relations developing between Malay political leaders and senior bureaucrats and newly created Malay businesspeople. This also came to characterise the operations of other ethnic groups, though perhaps less noticeably so, given that the Malays were politically dominant; the Chinese, Malays, Indians, Dayaks and the indigenes of Sabah were also drawn into this highly politicised and ethnically defined economy (Gomez 1990; Loh and Kahn 1992: 2; Gomez and Jomo 1999). Of necessity the government became increasingly authoritarian in style, particularly under Mahathir, because of the need to ‘engineer’ greater racial equality through redistribution in which some were favoured and others not on the basis of ethnicity. To ensure that there would be no more open racial conflict what was required was close control of the political process and very swift action against any actual or potential opposition and dissent (Crouch 1992: 21–41, 1996; Jesudason 1996; Khoo 2001). Clearly this set of policies also accentuated the divisions between the different ethnic or racial groups in that, for example, quotas were placed on certain kinds of employment by ethnicity, non-Malay companies had to restructure their shareholding to include the required proportion of Malay-owned shares, various forms of joint venture, and contracting and licensing systems were deployed to include Malay participation, companies opened up their boardrooms to senior Malay bureaucrats and retired politicians, and government support through scholarships and quotas in higher education favoured Bumiputera students (Crouch 1996; Searle 1999; Gomez and Jomo 1999; Gomez and Saravanamuttu 2012). In Southeast Asia considerable attention is paid to minority populations in debates about ethnicity in that these usually have to develop and defend their identities in response to and in interaction with the majority communities; as those defined as ‘others’ they shape their identities in opposition to the majority. However, it needs to be kept in mind that all identities are forged in contexts of social interaction and, as an important book edited by Dru C. Gladney (1998) proposes, majorities are just as much constructed as are minorities. The Malays, or more precisely the

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overlapping category of Bumiputera in Malaysia as currently constituted, are the majority, politically dominant population, but they have been gradually distilled as a definable category from a whole set of political, social, cultural and economic processes and discourses which began to be set in train principally from the second half of the nineteenth century (Milner 1998, 2008, 2016; Shamsul 1998b). Be that as it may, since the implementation of the NEP the Malay political elite has worked at translating elements of Malay identity into something which stands for the nation as well. In Singapore it was CMIO and a pan-Asian identity, expressed in terms of ‘invented’ Asian values contrasted with Western ones. In Malaysia the emphasis on the autochthonous Malays and more broadly the Bumiputera as the rightful heirs of the amalgam of territories which were carved out of ‘the Malay world’ by the British, symbolised in such institutions as the sultanates, the ‘rotating kingship’ (though it was an institution created only from independence in 1957), and in the position accorded their customs and Islam it meant that a political ideology based on balanced and equal multiracialism and multiculturalism and on an ethnically neutral meritocracy were unlikely policy paths for the Malay political elite to take. Instead, Malay culture had to be given a privileged position in the development of a national identity and, as Kessler (1992: 139) notes, Islam is an especially effective mechanism for maintaining boundaries because of its various restrictions placed on such matters as food and gender relations. There were attempts to introduce a Malay-derived National Culture Policy from the early 1970s. This met with considerable resistance from representatives of other ethnic groups and had not been wholly successful (see, for example, Goh 2002a: 40; Loh and Kahn 1992: 13). It is not unexpected that the efforts both to maintain a Malay-defined political realm underpinned by the fact that, as Kessler argues, Malay culture is ‘inherently political’ and increasingly strongly Muslim, and at least to address the fact that that culture exists side by side with other non-Malay, nonMuslim cultures in Malaysia have produced all kinds of tensions and contradictions (Kessler 1992: 136–138). Nevertheless, the main ingredients of national identity, at least those which are presented in the international arena and for certain domestic purposes, are Muslim Malay (in language, religion, history and political institutions). We should note, however, that even in Malay circles these elements of ethnic and national identity do not go unchallenged; they are even more subject to dispute and opposition from members of the non-Malay middle class and, as we shall see, there are those who make a claim to Bumiputera status because of the problems of drawing boundaries in practice around the category (Crouch 1992: 40–41). Kahn and Loh’s (1992) volume pointed to a fragmentation of Malaysian images and visions and it drew attention to processes of socioeconomic differentiation and the emergence of new cultural activities as long ago as the early 1990s, and the process within the Malay community of reworking elements of Malay ethnic identity (see Loh and Kahn 1992: 14–15). The fracturing of the Malay political community and the emergence of a relatively strong Malay opposition during the 1980s also made it important for the pool of Malay supporters to be increased and this was done by drawing selected minorities like the Portuguese Eurasians into the category Bumiputera (Goh 2002a: 134–137). Malay identity became a focus of debate and disagreement. For example,

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debates have been taking place among Malays on matters to do with the position, role and character of Islam in Malaysia and whether or not an Islamic state should be introduced and ‘a more universalistic conception of Muslim brotherhood/sisterhood’; the relationships between a narrow conception of Malay nationalism and Islam have also been the subject of disputation; similarly the status of the Malay language and the need to improve proficiency in English have also generated heated discussions (Leow 2016). There is also the debate about the importance of Islam in defining the Malays as against shared history and tradition (ibid.: 45, 133–137; Hussin 1990; Jomo and Ahmad 1992). What should be noted here are the ways in which ‘traditional’ images of Malayness rather than an Islamic identity, which are derived from a precolonial village and feudal order, are resurrected and contested in the attempts of elements of the middle class to address modernity and the place of the Malays within this process in a multiethnic society (Kahn 1992: 133–155; and see Goh 2002a: 45–46; Amoroso 2014). As Kessler indicates, with reference to Kahn’s work: As the former (‘traditional’) Malay peasant cultural order declines or is eroded, the Malay middle class becomes increasingly involved in and committed to what is now seen as ‘traditional Malay culture’: a simulacrum, a hyper-realisation even, of Malay tradition that, since it goes far beyond whatever existed in the past, is nothing if not modern. (Kessler 1992: 146)

Another arena of this debate is the relationship between the postcolonial and postmodern consumer and citizen in Malaysia, particularly with the rise of a relatively affluent middle class, and the colonial past and its classification of its dependent subjects (Watson 1996; Fischer 2008; Fischer and Jammes 2020; and see Lee 1992). The differences of view over culture and identity have emerged much more obviously and vigorously since the 1980s, and the espousal of different visions for Malaysia and what it means to be Malay. These have been primarily the result of profound changes in social and economic structures, associated with changing lifestyles, resulting in the creation of a wealthy Malay business or capitalist class, a grouping of middle and small businesspeople dependent on state patronage, and an educated middle class of urban-based professionals, administrators and technocrats, many of them exposed to the West through their pursuit of higher education overseas and their interaction with the globalised media (Crouch 1992: 31–32, 40–41; Khoo 1992: 62–63; Searle 1999: 58–102). These changes also signalled shifts in government policy away from the NEP, which, though it had not achieved everything expected of it, certainly provided substantial benefits for the Malays. Malaysia had enjoyed significant economic growth in the 1980s. Ethnic preoccupations and affirmative action at the heart of the NEP were softened from 1991 and replaced by the National Development Policy (NDP) and Vision 2020 (Wawasan 2020) which were directed to achieving fully developed and industrialised status for Malaysia within a 20-year timeframe (Goh 2002a: 42; Abdul Rahman 2018). The focus was on addressing hard-core poverty, developing an industrial community, including a substantial component of Bumiputera, relying more on private sector involvement, embracing technological development, and building a Malaysian rather than a MalayMalaysian nation, based on cultural and moral excellence. Government propaganda in the 1990s was designed to enliven the resolve and commitment of the Malaysian

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citizenry to work towards national goals, to instil in them a growing sense of national pride and to warn them against the perils of adopting undesirable Western values. What is demanded is an Asian, specifically a Malaysian modernity, arising from local ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ and Islam (Goh 2002a: 53–54). Expressions of this modernity were to be seen in the urban landscapes of Malaysia, especially in the high-rise buildings, expanding infrastructure and postmodern icons of Kuala Lumpur (ibid.: 58–61). But this was combined with a concern for local heritage with the conservation of vernacular buildings and the inclusion of local cultural and architectural elements in new buildings (ibid.). The political dominance of Muslim Malays, nation-building and disruptive and painful processes of modernisation and urbanisation in Malaysia have led to a number of arenas of cultural debates, ethnic accommodation and conflict. I have chosen two such cases: that of the Ibans of Sarawak, and more broadly the non-Malay Bumiputera or Dayaks (Jayum and King 2004); and that of the Portuguese Eurasians of Penang (Goh 1998, 2002a, 2002b; Jenkins 2008, 2019).

2.5.1 Sarawak The complexity of ethnicity in Sarawak and more widely in Borneo is well known (King 1993; Zawawi 2008; Boulanger 2009). Nevertheless, the ethnic classifications which emerged in peninsular Malaysia during the colonial period (specifically the division between Muslim Malays and Chinese and the broad categories of identification which were gradually formulated by the British and then underwent postcolonial institutionalisation there) became influential in the Malaysian Borneo states where the local populations increasingly orientated themselves to these externally imposed stereotypes. Yet they could never be adopted in any thoroughgoing fashion primarily because there were two major categories of Bumiputera in Malaysian Borneo: the Muslim Malays and the non-Muslim Dayaks (used here to embrace the indigenous populations of Sabah and Sarawak, though there is dispute about whether or not they should be so designated). The situation was also complicated by the presence of such ‘liminal’ groups as the Melanau who were primarily Muslim, though with a minority of Christians and what we might refer to as ‘animists’, but were not Malay and in various of their traditional beliefs and practices were closer to Dayak cultures (Boulanger 2009: 19). A further complexity is that, although the ‘supraethnic’ term ‘Dayak’ has been adopted in various contexts by most of the local populations, particularly in political encounters where it is important to build and maintain wider solidarities in interaction with Muslims (mainly Malays) and Chinese, there are enduring and strong subethnic identities like Iban and to a lesser extent Bidayuh (even though these categories are also constructions and are not without their problems). The Brooke Raj in Sarawak, like the British administration in peninsular Malaysia, operating within the requirements of a colonial political economy, formulated ethnic classifications and usually ascribed the groups thus delineated with particular and generalised personalities and habits. James Brooke’s ‘Sea Dayaks’, later to become

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known as ‘Iban’, were, from his perspective, truculent and war-like seagoing headhunters and pirates, though led astray by the Malays; they were ideal as ‘military conscripts when the need arose’. The ‘Land Dayaks’, on the other hand, he saw as oppressed, exploited, timid and quiet people who had been forced to retreat from mainly Malay domination and Iban raiding to the interior uplands; they required the protection of a paternal Raj (ibid.: 29, 34). The Land Dayaks were a relatively culturally and linguistically diverse complex of peoples which eventually came to be designated as ‘Bidayuh’. The Brooke Raj, through the first rajah, James, and his successor nephew Charles, set about defining ethnic boundaries. Given their assessment of Malay–Dayak relations, and the Raj’s need to control and administer a culturally plural society, the decision was taken to separate the Malays, some of whom were recruited into the lower echelons of the administration, socially and politically from their Dayak charges. The Chinese were assigned the role of petty traders, miners and small-scale cash crop farmers. Restrictions were also placed on intermarriage and interaction between different Dayak groups (ibid.: 35; Pringle 1970: 90–91, 282–288, 299–302, 310). In addition, the imposition of a Westernstyle administrative structure, the pacification of those who were former enemies (even though they were culturally similar) and improvements in communications also served to connect previously isolated and divided populations and helped create a consciousness of and identification with larger-scale ethnic-cultural units. In comparison with the ‘Sea’ and ‘Land Dayaks’, who, although not culturally homogeneous, were at least rather more easily demarcated, the scatter of minority indigenous communities in interior Sarawak defied any simple description. It was this miscellany which, in the immediate post-Raj period, Edmund Leach (1950) divided into three major subcategories: Kayan, Kenyah and Kajang, the Kajang being exceedingly problematic and something of a ‘leftover’ hotchpotch in relation to Kayan and Kenyah. Another residual category was that of the small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers usually referred to as either Punan or Penan, though even here there were other nomads who were referred to by other names and did not accept the terms ‘Punan’ or ‘Penan’. There were still other categories including the Lun Bawang/Lun Dayeh, Kelabit and Bisaya which also did not fit easily into any larger designation. Nevertheless, in post-independent Sarawak the umbrella term ‘Orang Ulu’ (or ‘Upriver People’) has been increasingly adopted by the government and by the people themselves to classify this indigenous ethnic mosaic outside the more easily delineated Iban and Bidayuh (Boulanger 2009: 19–20). As we have seen, the grand catch-all term ‘Dayak’ has also entered into public discourse to embrace most indigenes who are not Malay or more broadly not Muslim, though again the term does not demarcate a precisely delineated category and it is disputed by some indigenous communities in Sabah, particularly the Kadazan-Dusun, who are themselves a constructed ethnic category. Therefore, what were once relatively fluid, more localised communities which were not neatly bounded became much more clearly delineated, initially under the Brookes, into larger-scale categories and groupings that were much more administratively manageable. These were consolidated further during the post-war British colonial period from 1946 until the merger with the Federation of Malaya in 1963,

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when for census, administrative and development purposes the incoming colonial government required an even more precise, state-wide ethnic classification system (ibid.: 40–43). John Postill (2006: 46–50) provides an interesting analysis of the development of Radio Sarawak during the colonial period and its effects on ethnic identity with the decision to establish four sections based on language: Malay, Chinese, Iban and English. In September 1958 the Borneo Literature Bureau was also founded to publish in the four major language categories with some attention to other indigenous languages as well (ibid.: 51–58). This process of ethnic rationalisation, standardisation and simplification was given a further stimulus when political parties were formed in the run up to independence within Malaysia in 1963. In Sarawak these also tended to coalesce around emerging ethnic identities (Chinese and Malay-Melanau-Muslim in particular) although they were less clear cut than in peninsular Malaysia. In fact, there was a greater tolerance of multiethnic parties, and the Ibans in particular joined several different parties dominated by either Chinese or Malay-Melanau-Muslims, even though specifically Dayak parties were also formed. The interesting dimension of ethnic politics in Sarawak following the formation of the Federation of Malaysia was that the dominant model of ethnic relations in peninsular Malaysia was relatively quickly superimposed on a rather different ethnic mosaic in a marginal state (Jayum and King 2004). Malaysian politicians in Kuala Lumpur were as assiduous as their former colonial masters in using ethnicity for their own purposes of establishing control and order. In political terms what happened, as in the peninsula, was that a Muslim political elite entered into an alliance with and was supported by a subordinate Chinese elite. It turned out that in Sarawak Dayak access to power and influence was far less than their demographic importance. It was clear from the outset, in spite of the safeguards written into the documents which underpinned the new federation, that ultimately a Muslim hegemony would be established at the expense of viable representation for the Dayak population (King 1990; Leigh 1974, 1979, 2018). Malay politicians at the centre of power in Kuala Lumpur and with control of the federal apparatus had the means to engineer a suitable political configuration in Sarawak by both direct and indirect intervention in the political, economic and financial affairs of the state. However, what was not predicted was that a minority non-Malay, primarily Muslim group, the Melanau would be able to gain control of the state and establish a ‘dynasty’ that has survived for half a century (through the chief ministerships and governorships of Abdul Rahman Ya’kub [chief minister, 1970–1981, governor, 1981–1985] and his nephew Abdul Taib Mahmud [chief minister, 1981–2014, governor, 2014–to date]). Abdul Taib Mahmud was then succeeded as chief minister by his former brother-in-law Adenan Satem (2014– 2017). Although the Dayaks, and particularly the Iban, provided the first two chief ministers of Sarawak from 1963 to 1970, they have been governed and dominated since then by a small group of Muslim Melanau and Malays, and coopted Dayaks. This situation was made possible by the direct intervention of the ruling elite in Kuala Lumpur in Sarawak affairs and, for example, the removal of the recalcitrant Iban chief minister, Stephen Kalong Ningkan, in 1966 and the installation of a ‘puppet’ successor, Tawi Sli, as an interim measure until a Muslim chief minister could come to power (Boulanger 2009: 84). For those who govern from Kuala Lumpur, the fact that

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the ruling dynasty is not Malay has not been a problem. It is after all a Muslim dynasty and has delivered faithfully the necessary support to the ruling coalition (ibid.: 71). Rahman Ya’kub in particular was a strong champion of the Malay language and its use as the medium of instruction in schools (at the expense of the use of English, Iban and Chinese) and of Islam and its importance as a unifying symbol and expression of Malayness (ibid.: 75). Although his nephew successor played down the Malay agenda and deliberately sought to appeal to various Dayak constituencies, as well as developing a stronger sense of Melanau identity, he too continued to keep the Malay leadership in UMNO contented by delivering majority support to the ruling coalition. Moreover, Taib Mahmud promoted the same kind of development-obsessed ideology as that embraced by federal politicians (Postill 2006: 92–93). In the event he managed to conduct a delicate political balancing act with the senior politicians in Kuala Lumpur ensuring that he had some room for manoeuvre in Sarawak but recognising that he also had to play a subordinate and supportive role at the federal level. In her study of ethnic identity among Dayaks in Kuching, the state capital of Sarawak, in the context of urbanisation and modernisation, Boulanger (2009: 84) investigates whether or not ethnic identities are being ‘destroyed, renewed, [or] created’. Interestingly, what she found were certain defining features of a Dayak identity which had emerged only in recent times and which still competes with other identities; but it also drew on ethnic stereotypes which had been constructed during the colonial period and then reinforced during political independence. These are not based on specific cultural, linguistic or physical characteristics but rather on perceptions of where they are situated in the Sarawak and Malaysian scheme of things and on the attitudes of others towards them. On the negative side, her urban informants saw Dayaks as ‘left behind’ in socioeconomic terms as a result of shortcomings within their culture and personality which could be remedied by striving hard and proving oneself; they were ‘second-class Bumiputera’ primarily because of the advantages afforded to the Malays and Melanau through their adherence to Islam and their dominance in political and public life; Dayaks were still considered to be ‘primitive’ by certain members of other ethnic groups. On the positive side, urban Dayaks emphasised education, conversion to Christianity, the importance of establishing and celebrating their origins as the truly indigenous people of this part of Malaysia, and especially those traditions expressed in material culture, dance, music, storytelling, myths, sagas, chants and in a robust and cohesive longhousebased social life which can lay claim to the status of a civilisation or at least a culture that should be valued (ibid.: 103–141). However, overall the designation ‘Dayak’, especially for urban, educated people, is seen in ‘instrumentalist’ terms ‘as a political tool lacking in cultural depth’ (Postill 2006: 44; and see Boulanger 2009: 54). The process of presenting and sustaining an identity in an urban environment can be a profoundly ambiguous experience and the statements of Boulanger’s informants demonstrate this in abundance. But her conclusions show the problem which an ethnically driven agenda presents, usually to minorities but also to those who should be at least capable of representing their ethnic constituencies, but for various reasons seem unable to do so. She says that in the political arena ‘it appears that Dayaks must

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always be divided against each other, salted out to a variety of parties that are either ineffectual or become dominated by their non-Dayak component’ (Boulanger 2009: 144). Some of us reached this conclusion many years ago (Jayum and King 2004). Given the way in which Malaysia came into being for larger reasons than giving the Dayaks a prominent place in the federation, it has always seemed that the nonMalay indigenous minorities would struggle to have their voice heard (Zawawi 2008). What the Sarawak case demonstrates is that ethnicity and the way in which it is used politically is a powerful social force. It gives advantage to some and disadvantage to others even though in this case the advantaged and disadvantaged are classified together as ‘indigenous’, an ethnic category that is given special status and support. Nevertheless, the minority populations in Sarawak (and Sabah) and the Orang Asli in peninsular Malaysia have a voice. In the national political context and the domination of federal politicians this might be muted in Malaysian Borneo, but it has a presence and will not disappear. Zawawi Ibrahim (1996, 2013) has documented these ‘new subjectivities’ and the emergence of ‘subaltern discourses’ among the indigenous populations in detail. They have been generated in a context of economic and political insecurity, but also with the realisation that identities are under threat and this insecure situation demands and has received a response (Zawawi 2016). In this regard, Zawawi provides substantial empirical material which supports W.F. Wertheim’s (1974) thesis that society (and culture) is a ‘composite of conflicting value systems’.

2.5.2 Penang Turning now to a minority group in Penang, what is striking about the Portuguese Eurasian community in Kampung Serani, as Goh (2002a: 12) explains, is that the conflict there comprised in part the local residents’ resistance against the state’s conception of modernity and its definition of cultural identities; the residents were from the poorer sections of the Eurasian Pulau Tikus community. On the other hand, Pulau Tikus, which is outside the former rent-controlled districts of central George Town, had become a focus of urban modernisation and the development of uppermiddle and middle-class apartments and condominiums. The Portuguese Eurasians (though the Eurasian community shared its origins with other European nationalities besides the Portuguese) fought a long battle to prevent their eviction from their historic urban kampung (village) in the Pulau Tikus district. Their protagonist was their landlord, the local Roman Catholic Church which, in partnership with a private property developer, wished to realise its assets in case they were subject to compulsory land acquisition, and transform a piece of undeveloped urban real estate, seen as out of step with the city’s aspirations for modernity, into a profitable and modern condominium and commercial complex (ibid.: 69). This was firmly within the context of the boom in property development in Penang and the Malaysian political elite’s promotion of high-rise urban modernity (Jenkins 2019: 118–139). It was combined

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with the desire to push forward the modernisation of the Malays and their participation in the urban economy. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the church establishment was by no means in agreement about the decision to redevelop Kampung Serani and evict the residents. The case, which Goh recorded between 1980 and 1994, demonstrates the complexity of discourses about nation, identity, social class and socioeconomic development in the process of modernisation and cultural politics in Malaysia and the interaction of culture, power and resistance in the case of the attempts by representatives of the nation-state to reshape the urban landscape in this part of Penang (Goh 2002a: 37–38). Changing representations of Portuguese Eurasian identity must also be understood in relation to debates within Malay communities about their identity and the status of being indigenous (ibid.: 49–50). As Goh notes, the shifts in conceptions of Malaysian identity ‘implies a concomitant relaxation of the definition of Malay identity, since the nation and Malayness are interrelated categories’ (ibid.: 52). It was from the early 1990s that the Portuguese Eurasians of Melaka, and the hybrid Straits Chinese there, began to make claims for the recognition of their Bumiputera status, supported by the argument that they had been long-established in Melaka, the cradle of Malay civilisation and had interacted and indeed intermixed with the Malay community there (ibid.: 57). The Portuguese Eurasians were also given some comfort in the prospects for this bid when in 1984 they were allowed to participate in the Amanah Saham Nasional (National Unit Trust) scheme reserved for Bumiputera (ibid.: 74–75). The Kampung Serani Eurasians in Penang traced their settlement in George Town back to the early nineteenth century and so were relatively long-settled and based their case against eviction or at least eviction with the provision of alternative low-cost accommodation as compensation on the basis of this pioneer heritage status in Penang and the fact that they were long-established, legal tenants (ibid.: 72, 77–78). Putative links were made between the original Eurasian communities in Melaka and the later settlement of Penang. The mediator in the church–Eurasian dispute was the Penang Eurasian Association (PEA) whose leaders were drawn from the Eurasian elite. The association, as the guardians of the heritage of their community, had been busy from the mid-1980s constructing a homogeneous Portuguese Eurasian identity out of a heterogeneous collection of peoples of diverse origins and one which claimed close affinities with the Malays (ibid.: 75). It had a much wider agenda than the local residents in representing all Portuguese Eurasians and their heritage. In its role in the dispute the PEA also made a request for a clubhouse on the site with the support of the local residents, then shifted the terms of the debate and asked for a heritage house to be built on the site or elsewhere to display wider Portuguese Eurasian heritage as part of the compensation package from the developers. Initially, the PEA asked for the preservation of what was claimed to be the first school building in Pulau Tikus (referred to locally as Noah’s Ark), as an example of early Eurasian heritage (ibid.: 84–85). Significantly, the medium of instruction in the school was Malay. It then argued for Noah’s Ark to be rebuilt, since the developer wished to demolish it, as a Eurasian heritage house.

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The PEA argument was seen as a means of serving the whole Eurasian community and not something confined to the more locally focused heritage of Kampung Serani residents and it was also a claim for the indigenous status of Portuguese Eurasians. Eviction notices were served in 1992, some residents had accepted compensation packages and had moved out; others carried on their resistance and some residences were bulldozed by the developer (ibid.). Goh takes us through the details of the conflict and the complex and shifting relations between local residents, the PEA, the property developer and a competing developer, the Consumers’ Association of Penang (which provided legal representation for some of the residents) and the Catholic Church (ibid.: 69–122). She also examines the dispute through the eyes of nine resident Catholic families of Kampung Serani, five Eurasian and four nonEurasian (one Chinese and three Indian). What materialised was that the agendas of the PEA and the remaining local residents also increasingly diverged and the association focused on its argument for a new heritage house with a museum to serve all Eurasians rather than argue for compensation for Kampung Serani residents and the recognition of their local Eurasian heritage and their long connections with the site. In spite of the local residents’ active articulation of cultural discourses based on their claim to be the descendants of the pioneer settlement of Eurasians in Pulau Tikus they ultimately lost out, but the PEA, adopting a wider Eurasian discourse, got its heritage house in compensation. The PEA had adopted a regional and national discourse arguing that the original Portuguese Eurasian community of Melaka, its links with the centre of ‘Malaydom’ and its claim to be descended from Portuguese– Malay intermarriage and cultural exchange gave it a rightful claim to indigenous status and to a certain kind of Malay cultural identity. It provided the spokespeople for the Melaka and wider Portuguese Eurasian community, who had adopted the position of guardians of Eurasian culture and identity, and through their administrative role in managing Portuguese Eurasian access to the Amanah Saham Nasional scheme and Bumiputera status, an important level of political leverage in their negotiations with the property developer and the Catholic Church (ibid.: 123–143). In the context of urban redevelopment, the PEA wished to stake its claim to a specially constructed heritage presence in what was the oldest Portuguese Eurasian kampung area in Penang (ibid.: 200). This case is but a small element of the contestation over urban space and identity which has engulfed Penang since the 1980s. These tensions have since been documented by Gwynn Jenkins (2008, 2019) and they comprise those which have been generated between the state and the private sector in pushing forward a modernisation agenda qualified by the need to promote tourism and therefore sustain local heritage and culture for the tourist gaze; the various ethnic communities which reside in Penang and have established distinctive architectural, social and cultural enclaves; the aspiring multiethnic middle class which demands a certain lifestyle that expresses their status as well-to-do consumers and that demands certain kinds of residential area with associated commercial, service and leisure facilities; and the national and international bodies which argue for the importance of maintaining the architectural and cultural heritage of George Town against unrestrained urban redevelopment.

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2.6 Current Issues The Malaysian government has moved from the NEP to the NDP and on to the National Mission Policy (NMP) then to the New Economic Model (NEM). It moved from the National Culture Policy to Bangsa Malaysia, Rukun Negara and under Najib Razak (2009–2018) to 1Malaysia. Under Abdullah Ahmad Badawi (2003– 2009) the focus was on human capital development and Islam Hadhari. Much of this was to find a way towards national unity while still recognising the special position of the Malays and the need to promote and support their development in a system which has been referred to as ‘coercive consociationalism’ (Mauzy 1993). Abdul Rahman (2018: 282–283) posits several models to address the plurality of Malaysia and the tensions between national unity, class and ethnicity: the pessimistic ‘fractured plural society’ concept; the optimistic and triumphalist ‘unity in diversity’ template; the paradoxical ‘stable tension’ framework from Shamsul (1998a) which recognises long-run stability and ‘moments of unity’ with underlying tensions and conflicts; and the ‘divides and dissent’ model which captures the ideology and political economy of ‘division’ imposed from a political elite above and ‘dissent’ generated from below. Abdul Rahman (2018) examines what he calls the post-2008 ‘transition trap’ in which those who argue for a new multicultural Malaysia face the forces of ethnonationalism and the demands for a strengthening of Malay supremacy (ketuanan Melayu) and those who argue for compromise and reform. The ethnic paradigm is still paramount, although he argues for the recognition of the complex interrelationships between ethnicity and class. The conflicts and paradoxes, and the ethnic divisions and cross-cultural interactions in Malaysia in the context of the pursuit of national unity, but with the continuing dominance of the ethnic paradigm on the one hand and the increasing importance in a modernising Malaysia of a social model based on class on the other have led Abdul Rahman (ibid.: 302) to suggest that ‘Malaysia today seems stuck in a culde-sac, a stalemate of sorts’; it hovers between both ethnicity and class, as well as moves towards repression and reaction as against reform and change. In an analysis of several public opinion and attitude surveys in Malaysia, Lee Hwok Aun (2017: 5) reveals these tensions and contradictions; there are contrasting images of Malaysia widely articulated in popular and academic discourses, of a country enjoying broad social cohesion, with neither open animosity nor close integration, where people interact but do not necessarily embrace, and where society is animated by enmity on some issues and conviviality on others.

There is ‘surface serenity and underlying tensions’ (ibid.). Syed Husin Ali, as a public intellectual and in activist mode, captures the Malaysian dilemma which crystallised around the 1969 Kuala Lumpur ‘race riots’. He says:

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We know that conflicts and killings occur when one group tries to use race or ethnicity in order to perpetrate its racial or ethnic superiority and control over economic and political power. But we do not know of any easy solutions to these problems. Nevertheless, in the context of Malaysia … the establishment of social justice and democracy can go a long way towards improving the situation. By social justice I mean a more equitable distribution of wealth. By democracy I mean broader civil liberties, greater freedom and more popular participation in decision making. (Syed Husin 2015: 201)

In the spirit of promoting interethnic harmony, and following Syed Husin Ali’s engagement with the issues of social justice and democracy in Malaysia, Sumit Mandal has coined the term ‘transethnic solidarities’ and has proposed that ‘[r]ace is not as totalising as it would appear’ (Mandal 2004: 49). His work on cross-cultural relations and hybridisation in Malaysia demonstrates the possibilities and opportunities of the coming together and the realisation of common interests and motivations between ethnic groups (see Mandal 2017).

2.7 Conclusions The main objective of this chapter is to provide a comparative context for the understanding of ethnicity and ethnic relations in Malaysia, though it attempts to do so in the context of the study of ethnicity in Southeast Asia. It holds to the well-established ‘constructivist’ view of the formation of ethnic identities in the context of the creation and development of nation-states in Southeast Asia. As Lian Kwen Fee (2001: 861) stated two decades ago, in his comparative studies of ethnicity in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and more widely in Southeast Asia: ‘In recent years there has been a shift in emphasis, from viewing ethnicity as an aspect of social organization and political mobilization to regarding it as the consciousness and social construction of identities’ (see also Lian 2006). His view expressed then has not changed. The building of national consciousness and national unity is also a profoundly ‘ethnic’ project and one which sits within territorially defined parameters. Yet it is also a project which contains and generates within itself conflicts and contradictions in that subnational identities or ethnicities continually assert or reassert themselves (Kusuma and Thompson 2005). Lian (2001: 873–878) also draws attention to the importance of comparative studies. In his analysis of the construction of ‘Malayness’ or Malay identity, he traces the different trajectories of the ‘ethnicisation’ of communities and the ‘different models of ethnic integration’ which have been pursued by the post-independent governments of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This chapter suggests that great advantage can be had from extending these comparisons to other parts of Southeast Asia. It also proposes that a shift from the concept of the ‘social’ and ‘social construction’ of race and ethnicity towards an exploration of the concepts of culture and identity and the interrelationships between them might also provide a way forward in the study of the complexities of identity construction and transformation in Southeast Asia. This proposal is prefigured in Hans Vermeulen and Cora Govers’s re-evaluation

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of the work of Fredrik Barth on ethnic groups and boundaries. They argue for a recognition of the fact that ethnicity, as it is expressed, constructed and deployed, is ‘a part of culture’; it is embedded in consciousness, ideology and cognitive systems, and is subjective, symbolic and emblematic. Indeed, because ethnic identity is contemplated and is a constant subject of discursive engagement, it has the status of being ‘meta-cultural’ (Vermeulen and Govers 1994: 3–4). Vermeulen and Govers also make the interesting observation that Barth’s edited book on ethnic boundaries marked not just a shift from a static to an interactionist view of ethnicity but also that it ‘implies a similar shift in the study of culture’ (ibid.: 3). This might have alarmed Barth, but it also suggests that his book verged on the postmodern. Subsequently Barth, in the tradition of British social (and not cultural) anthropology, accepted, in part at least, Vermeulen and Govers’ interpretation of his work, but suggested that ethnicity should not be reduced to ‘a nebulous expression of culture’ (Barth 1994: 12). I hope that in the re-examination of culture and identity in this chapter, and the consideration of the relationship between ‘the cultural’ and ‘the social’, that it has addressed the issue of cultural nebulousness and the ways in which a perspective orientated to the dialectical relationship between culture and social organisation might provide insights into the complex phenomenon of ethnicity.

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Jenkins, Gwynn. 2008. Contested space: Cultural heritage and identity reconstructions: Conservation strategies within a developing Asian city. Zurich: LIT Verlag Münster, Freiburg Studies in Social Anthropology, 20. ———. 2019. Contested space revisited: George Town, Penang, before and after UNESCO world heritage listing. Penang: Areca Books. Jenks, Chris. 1993. Culture. London: Routledge. Jesudason, James V. 1996. The syncretic state and the structuring of oppositional politics in Malaysia. In Political oppositions in industrialising Asia, ed. Garry Rodan, 128–160. London: Routledge. Jomo Kwame Sundaram. 1986. A question of class: Capital, the state and uneven development. Singapore: Oxford University Press. ———, and Ahmad Shabery Cheek. 1992. Malaysia’s Islamic movements. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah, 79–106. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Kahn, Joel S. 1981. Explaining ethnicity: A review article. Critique of Anthropology 4(1): 43–52. ———. 1991. Constructing culture: Towards an anthropology of the middle classes in Southeast Asia. Asian Studies Review 15(2): 50–56. ———. 1992. Class, ethnicity and diversity: Some remarks on Malay culture in Malaysia. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah, 158–178. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Asian Studies Association of Australia. ———. 1995. Culture, multiculture, postculture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ———. 1998a. Southeast Asian identities: Introduction. In Southeast Asian identities: Culture and the politics of representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, Joel S. Kahn, 1–27. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. ———, ed. 1998b. Southeast Asian identities: Culture and the politics of representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. ———. 2006. Other Malays: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern Malay world. Singapore: NUS Press. ———, and Francis Loh Kok Wah, eds. 1992. Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Kessler, Clive S. 1992. Archaism and modernity: Contemporary Malay political culture. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah, 133–157. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Asian Studies Association of Australia. ———. 2012. Globalisation: familiar issues but a new-fangled discourse—or ‘déjà vu all over again’? In Social science and knowledge in a globalising world, ed. Zawawi Ibrahim, 23–50. Kajang: Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia. Khoo Kay Jin. 1992. The grand vision: Mahathir and modernisation. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah, 44–76. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Khoo Boo Teik. 2001. The state and the market in Malaysian political economy. In The political economy of South-East Asia: Conflicts, crises and change, ed. Garry Rodan, Kevin Hewison, and Richard Robison, 178–205, 2nd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. King, Victor T. 1990. Why is Sarawak peripheral? In Margins and minorities: The peripheral areas and peoples of Malaysia, ed. Victor T. King and Michael J.G. Parnwell, 110–129. Hull: Hull University Press. ———. 1993. The peoples of Borneo. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2001. A question of identity: Names, societies, and ethnic groups in interior Kalimantan and Brunei Darussalam. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 16(1): 1–37. ———. 2008a. The middle class in Southeast Asia: Diversities, identities, comparisons and the Vietnamese case. International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 4(2): 73–109. ———. 2008b. The sociology of Southeast Asia: Transformations in a developing region. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.

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Mandal, Sumit K. 2004. Transethnic solidarities, racialization and social equality. In The state of Malaysia: Ethnicity, equity and reform, ed. Edmund Terence Gomez, 49–78. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ———. 2017. Becoming Arab: Creole histories and modern identity in the Malay world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milner, Anthony. 1998. Ideological work in constructing the Malay majority. In Making majorities: Constituting the nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States, ed. Dru C. Gladney, 151–172. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. The Malays. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2016. Kerajaan: Malay political culture on the eve of colonial rule, 2nd ed. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. ———, Abdul Rahman Embong, and Tham Siew Yean, eds. 2014. Transforming Malaysia: Dominant and competing paradigms. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Morley, David, and Kuan-Hsing Chen. 1996. Introduction. In Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 1–22. London: Routledge. Morris, Rosalind C. 1994. Three sexes and four sexualities: Redressing the discourses on gender and sexuality in contemporary Thailand. Positions 2(1): 15–43. ———. 2000. In the place of origins: Modernity and its mediums in northern Thailand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nagata, Judith A. 1974. What is a Malay? Situational selection of ethnic identity in a plural society. American Ethnologist 1(2): 331–350. ———. 1975. Introduction. In Pluralism in Malaysia: Myth and reality, ed. Judith A. Nagata, 1–16. Leiden: E.J. Brill. ———. 1979. Malaysian mosaic: Perspectives from a poly-ethnic society. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The social system. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Postill, John. 2006. Media and nation building: How the Iban became Malaysian. New York: Berghahn Books. Pringle, Robert.1970. Rajahs and rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak under Brooke rule, 1841–1941. London: Macmillan. PuruShotam, Nirmala (Srirekam). 1995. Disciplining differences: ‘Race in Singapore’. National University of Singapore: Department of Sociology, Working Paper No. 126. ———. 1998a. Negotiating language, constructing race: Disciplining difference in Singapore. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 1998b. Disciplining difference: ‘Race’ in Singapore. In Southeast Asian identities: Culture and the politics of representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, ed. Joel. S Kahn, 51–94. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Rehbein, Boike. 2007. Globalization, culture and society in Laos. London: Routledge. Salzmann, Zdenek, James Stanlaw, and Nobuko Adachi. 2011. Language, culture and society: An introduction to linguistic anthropology, 5th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Saravanamuttu, Johan. 1987. The state, authoritarianism and industrialisation: Reflections on the Malaysian case. Kajian Malaysia 5(2): 43–75. Searle, Peter. 1999. The riddle of Malaysian capitalism: Rent-seekers or real capitalists? St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Shamsul A.B. 1998a. Ethnicity, class, culture or identity? Competing paradigms in Malaysian studies. Akademika 53(1): 33–59. ———. 1998b. Bureaucratic management of identity in a modern state: ‘Malayness’ in postwar Malaysia. In Making majorities: Constituting the nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States, ed. Dru C. Gladney, 135–150. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. Many ethnicities, many cultures, one nation: The Malaysian experience. Bangi: UKM Ethnic Studies Paper, No. 2. Silverstone, Roger. 1994. Television and everyday life. London: Routledge.

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Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei, and Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He has long-standing interests in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia. His recent publications are UNESCO in Southeast Asia: World Heritage Sites in comparative perspective (ed., 2016), and coedited books on Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016), Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017), Tourism and ethnodevelopment (2018), Tourism in East and Southeast Asia (2018, 4-volume reader), Tourism in South-East Asia (2020), Indigenous Amazonia, regional development and territorial dynamics: Contentious issues (2020), Continuity and change in Brunei Darussalam (2021) and Origins, history and social structure in Brunei Darussalam (2021).

Chapter 3

The Travelling Text: Manuscripts, Print Culture and Translation in the Making of the Malay World Gareth Richards

Abstract The principal focus for this study is the historic role of linguistic translation in the creation of a multiethnic, multilingual Malay world. Adopting a longue durée approach, it seeks to understand the ways that translators have been deeply implicated in the movement and adaptation of various kinds of knowledge. The analysis makes use of Edward Said’s notion of ‘travelling theory’—and the analogous concept of the ‘travelling text’—to unpack histories of how and why ideas circulated, from situation to situation and from one period to another. The discussion is organised in four main sections. First, the ‘cosmopolises of language’ interprets the significance of long-established, premodern Asian translation traditions, and the impact of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Sinographic linguistic cosmopolises on the cultural geographies of knowledge in Southeast Asia. Second, ‘in the company of translators’ examines early European forays into the Indian Ocean world and the hybrid forms of ‘useful knowledge’ that were acquired to buttress the quest for spices and souls. Trade and translation went hand in hand. Third, ‘transmitting history’ deals with the carving out of a British Empire in Asia in the eighteenth century and the specific role of Penang, Melaka and Singapore—the Straits Settlements—in this process of imperial expansion. This period gave rise to a discourse we now name as Orientalism as well as the beginnings of the comparative method in linguistics. Fourth, the introduction of the nineteenth-century ‘print revolution’ explores how texts were newly constituted and transmitted, and what effects this had on language, literature and the technology of translation. This history of translation practices is illustrated by the stories attached to exemplary travelling or world texts that circulated the globe and settled and were indigenised in the Malay world. Particular attention is paid to the agency of local writers and translators who acted as traffickers or brokers of the information order that emerged during the colonial period. The concluding argument suggests that the worlds that emerged from the history of translation contained important continuities even across the ruptures created by colonial capitalism. These worlds are inherently plural, cosmopolitan and hybrid—in terms of the cultural geographies of knowledge covered, the identities of the actors involved and the types of knowledge assembled. G. Richards (B) Impress Creative and Editorial, George Town, Penang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_3

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Keywords Malay world · Travelling texts · Translation · Orientalism · Print culture · Literature The Orient, in modernity, is not only a European invention, but also an Oriental one. —Amit Chaudhuri (2008: 91) Multiple languages circulated in the Malay world borne on the lips of people and the pages of manuscripts and printed works, and constituted transregional links with distant parts of the world. —Sumit K. Mandal (2013a: 4) parroting our master’s style and voice, we make his language ours —Derek Walcott, ‘Crusoe’s Journal’ (1969)

3.1 Obstinate Clerks and the Writing Machine In the summer of 1853 the London correspondent of the New-York Daily Tribune sat in the Reading Room of the British Library penning his latest diatribe against the East India Company—its patronage, its plunder, its profiteering. At the heart of Karl Marx’s piece is a striking paragraph in which he lacerates the ‘permanent and irresponsible Company bureaucracy’. In doing so, he places writing at the centre of his historical account of the ‘fiction’ of principles, politics and policy that underpinned the British Empire in Asia. Mustering his familiar and formidable polemical gifts, Marx describes the government of India as ‘one immense writing-machine’, ruled over by ‘obstinate old clerks, and the like odd fellows’ (Marx 1853). He was referring here to the pen-pushers just down the road, the ‘superannuated men’ seated in the fashionable Palladian splendour of East India House, the Company’s miniature empire on Leadenhall Street. But this writing machine was no parochial enterprise. It was the principal hub of a vast bureaucracy that bridged half the globe, connecting London with the Indian presidencies of Madras, Bombay, Calcutta and Penang, and beyond. This type of ‘government by writing’ derived from the singular form of ‘corporate sovereignty’ enjoyed by the Company. In the words of Bhavani Raman (2012: 8–9), From its very inception in the seventeenth century, the British East India Company’s political dominance was forged by the sword, built on the spine of the accountant’s ledger, and held together by written correspondence…. Paper assuaged the anxieties of distance felt by the Company’s board in London while serving to sustain the geography of empire in the metropolitan imagination.

Today the charters and correspondence, despatches and deeds, minutes, memoranda and maps, transcripts, treaties and translations comprise more than 14 km of shelving at the new British Library, covering the Company’s mercantile, military and judicial operations as it navigated the transition from trade to imperial governance. Its most

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durable legacy is the pervasive bureaucratic form of the modern nation-state (Harlow and Carter 2003; Bowen 2005; British Library n.d.). Marx certainly recognised the significance of the development of unaccountable bureaucracies within capitalist corporations—‘a large stuff of irresponsible secretaries, examiners and clerks’. More importantly for this discussion, he understood intimately how the very methods of writing and documentation prescribed the ways various forms of colonial knowledge, both prosaic and profound, were produced, shared, circulated and consumed. His insights offer an early point of departure for what is today a commonplace observation: that knowledge is power and that colonial knowledge played a critical role in the consolidation of colonial rule. Unsurprisingly, Marx’s focus was on the writers who were at work at the metropolitan end of the British colonial project, whether obscure time-serving clerks or grandees such as the political philosopher J.S. Mill. What he paid much less attention to were the people in the territories where the Company operated, who were themselves also integral to the vast writing machine. These included, of course, Company officials of all stations dutifully penning their despatches and sending them by sea to reach London several months later, the men for whom ‘The East is a career’ in Benjamin Disraeli’s pithy aphorism, quoted as an epigraph to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). But many others, not all directly in the Company’s service, contributed to this vast corpus of written materials—diplomats, country traders, Christian missionaries and soldiers, and not least their Asian interlocutors, including scribes, officials, traders, translators, teachers and intellectuals. Taken as a whole, the writing machine created what Christopher Bayly (1996: 4) calls the ‘information order’: ‘the generators of knowledge, the institutions of information collection and diffusion and the discourses to which they give rise as autonomous forces for economic and social change’. Equally important, and the central concern of this chapter, is how communication and the movement of knowledge—how all kinds of written texts—travelled and helped shape colonial society itself and the relations between coloniser and colonised. At the heart of this enterprise of generating knowledge and bridging societies was the translation of texts. Vast resources were expended in the work of translation in colonial contexts to surmount linguistic obstacles and construct some semblance of mutual intelligibility or equivalence. Indeed, Eric Cheyfitz (1997: 104) has gone so far as to claim that translation was ‘the central act of European colonization and imperialism’, the key to ‘figuring out’ the colonial subject, the civilisational ‘other’. This echoes Bernard Cohn’s well-known argument in Colonialism and its forms of knowledge (1997: 16, 21) that the codification and transmission of non-European languages—through interpretation and translation—enabled what he calls the ‘invasion of epistemological space’ and the ‘conquest of knowledge’. Translation as a colonial praxis conjoined ‘the command of language and the language of command’. A great deal of scholarly work has been undertaken in the past two decades on the centrality of translation within European colonialism and in the construction of authority—whether the practical authority considered useful for the extension of the structures of rule or as a kind of cultural authority for the effective representation of

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the colonised as somehow ‘other’ (Dodson 2005: 810; Rangarajan 2014). But relatively little of this work focuses on the colonial project in the Malay Peninsula, due in no little part to the relative dearth of studies in the idiom of the history of ideas or intellectual history (cf. Milner 1995, 2016; Pannu 2009; Abdul Rahman 2015; Leow 2016; Mandal 2018). The principal focus for this study, then, is the practice of translation that centred mainly—though not exclusively—on the port city of Penang (and later Singapore) and the multiethnic, multilingual ‘Malay world’.1 There are a number of reasons why Penang affords some interesting comparative insights, and these have to do with how it became a local site of global encounter and exchange (Green 2015). First, intraEuropean conflicts—the ‘stately quadrille’ of unstable alliances—became wars of global significance in the second half of the eighteenth century and came to be played out in South Asia and then Southeast Asia. As the British and their European rivals, principally the French and the Dutch, were expanding their empires, the Malay Peninsula and wider archipelago became a focal point of regional instability and contestation, and this extended to indigenous conflicts as well. Second, after years of trying, the British East India Company established a settlement on Penang in 1786, partly in the hope of creating a shipbuilding facility but, in time, as an important entrepot linking trade between India and China and then with its peninsular hinterland. The island initially came under the political control of the Company’s linchpin of Bengal until its status was raised to that of the fourth presidency of India and thus answerable in writing to the Court of Directors in London. Third, as John Darwin (2020) points out, a sign of success of any port city was the size and variety of its foreign population, since this was a dependable indicator of the range of its commerce. Within a decade or so of the founding of the Company settlement, and driven by its free port status as the British sought to realign trade in Asian waters, Penang had attracted a quite astonishing and varied number of permanent and transient settlers, both Asian and European. It was this that prompted Governor George Leith’s famous observation in 1801: ‘There is not, probably, any part of the world, where, in so small a space, so many different people are assembled together, or so great a variety of languages spoken’ (Leith 1804: 25). And fourth, this was a polyglot, diverse world whose raison d’être was trade and exchange, and where people had to learn to communicate with each other. Both by design and by coincidence, Penang became a part of the larger writing machine, producing handwritten and printed texts of all types. Indigenous and European translators and interpreters were of central importance, active partners in the creation of a hybrid colonial knowledge, and some of the best known were based, at least for a while, in Penang. As we shall see, translation involved not the simple transfer of words and texts from one language to another or even straightforwardly bridging language differences between people. The command of language and translation was always for someone and for some purpose. It was crucial as a site of cultural transformation and for the consolidation of new communities and 1

Sumit K. Mandal (2016) has an excellent discussion on the notion of the ‘Malay world’, not captured by territory or boundedness, but a larger, more mutable cultural geography, which is both complex and diverse. See also Tim Harper (2013).

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identities. As Doris Jedamski (2014: 243) observes, translation and adaption in the Malay world, of which Penang was a part, ‘served varied objectives, depending on the ethnic, political or social background of translator and publisher’ and, we could add, the reader. It involved processes of dialogue, conversation, collaboration and transmission that fundamentally altered the way in which colonial society was represented, and which was, we suggest, both a European and an Asian invention. The dynamics that saw Penang inserted as a local site of global interaction in the late eighteenth century did not take place in a historical vacuum, of course. These were episodes in a much longer history. Located where the monsoons meet, the Malay Peninsula had long been at the heart of global history and long-distance connections and networks (Reid 1998; Lockard 2009; Andaya and Andaya 2015; Bowring 2018). Initially the peninsula was a meeting point for seamen and sojourners, troops and traders, scholars and saints, migrants and magnates, arriving (and departing) from the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea and beyond. Maritime trade created Asian markets and networks, and these in turn stimulated still other networks of exchange and interaction—of economic opportunities, to be sure, but also recalibrated cultural, linguistic, literary and political relations. By the sixteenth century European states and their armed chartered companies were also expanding into Asian waters, acquiring footholds and establishing factories around the rim of the Indian Ocean. The peninsula and the wider archipelago became a crucial arena for competition and, sometimes, cooperation. As a result, the port cities of Southeast Asia—and in addition to Penang, we should include the other Straits Settlements centres of Melaka and Singapore—were ‘as plural as any on earth’ at that time, enabling a ‘rich exchange of ideas and language [which] was the result of transient encounters or cross-cultural relationships’ (Amrith 2013: 3; see also Lewis 2016). This was the established world in which modern, colonial Penang was born. And the word in this world—spoken, in manuscripts and printed—played a vital role in absorbing a wide range of cultural influences, acquiring new languages and spreading novel ideas. How was this critical command of language exercised in the precolonial period that lay the basis of a pluralistic and mutable Malay world? To answer this question, we engage with ideas proposed by two foundational thinkers of critical historiography: Edward Said and Fernand Braudel. Said’s contribution to our understanding of how the Western Orientalist project created representations of the colonised—objects without history—needs no introduction, and we engage critically with some of those ideas later. Here we highlight a different intervention, one that analyses the locations and the displacements of ideas—their journeys, their travels. In the essay ‘Traveling theory’ (1983) (and later ‘Traveling theory reconsidered’ [2000]), Said seeks to understand what kinds of knowledge, stories and theories are produced when people travel, how we can map these movements, and how they are received and made use of. ‘[I]deas and theories’, Said suggests, ‘travel—from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another’. He continues:

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Said identifies four ‘stages’ of travel—an origin, the distance traversed, a set of conditions for acceptance, resistance or rejection, and finally a transformed (incorporated) idea occupying ‘a new position in a new time and place’ (ibid.: 226–227). This seems to be a helpful starting place for understanding how the languages and the texts they expressed moved into and out of historically connected spaces. The value of reading Braudel here lies in his placing of the movement of ideas—and attendant ‘mentalities’—in the longue durée, in the sense originally proposed by him: ‘the history of the long, even of the very long time span’ (Braudel 1980: 27). This is a sense of time made up of embedded structures, overlaps, new beginnings, sometimes abrupt innovations and episodic ruptures, drawing on long-term cultural foundations. The insights of Said and Braudel specifically inform the interpretation offered in the following two sections. The next examines how different cultural/linguistic cosmopolises of deep historical provenance travelled and helped transform the Malay world. This is followed by a consideration of the history of European engagements with Asian texts in the early modern period. This suggests the importance of a formative period that long precedes the eighteenth century and a corrective to the view that Asia–Europe cultural and textual engagements only began in earnest with the formal empire of the East India Company.

3.2 Cosmopolises of Language: Travels of the Wise Parrot and Other Tales In fact Asian translation traditions were already established long before the various East India companies gained footholds and fortresses on Southeast Asia’s littorals (Hung and Wakabayashi 2014; Ricci and van der Putten 2014). After all, translation was vital in this world of strangers. Countless translations left their traces in one way or another, from the outside but equally importantly within the region itself. Four languages in particular illustrate this fecund transmission and absorption of languages into the region—Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Chinese—and demonstrate the intricate ways that they became indigenised in new parts of the world. Without entering into the longstanding debate about the ‘Indianisation’ of Southeast Asia—about which there is a huge literature—there is no doubt that Sanskrit was enormously important in shaping core aspects of these societies from approximately 300 ce onwards (Andaya 2017). Johannes Bronkhorst (2011: 263) describes it as ‘the inscriptional language par excellence in … much of Southeast Asia. For almost a thousand years Sanskrit “rules” in this enormous domain.’ It is important to

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highlight what Sanskrit was not. It was not a lingua franca or bridge language, still less the medium of everyday communication or trade: it was ‘not the language of the market, the army, the kitchen, of childhood, friendship, or love’ (Pollock 1996: 231). It was fundamentally ‘concerned with defining and preserving moral and social order’ (Eaton 2020: 11). By positing the notion of a ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, characterised not by religion but by normative ideas and values elaborated in these texts, Sheldon Pollock (1996: 197–198) highlights the political dimensions of the language in Southeast Asia: ‘the premiere instrument of political expression in the polities that comprised it, [including] those … of much of Southeast Asia’ (see also Pollock 2006). Pollock goes on to outline Sanskrit’s ‘complicated contests with regional languages’ and argues persuasively that by the fourteenth century it had lost these contests in most places and cannot even be regarded as the language of ‘practical imperium’, of political rule, of the state. Rather its staying power lies in its creation of a ‘common aesthetics of political culture, a kind of poetry of politics’ which ‘helped create a new kind of vast zone of cultural interaction’ (Pollock 1996: 199). After a detailed account of how the Sanskrit cosmopolis became embedded in South Asia as a result of cultural imitation and borrowing, Pollock then turns to a consideration of how this was imported into Southeast Asia, of how Sanskrit’s ‘incomparably complex mode of literary expression comes to be used in the … Malayo-Polynesian-speaking worlds’ (ibid.: 218). Three interim conclusions emerge. First, Sanskrit was almost everywhere completely indigenised, so that vernacular literacy was thoroughly mediated by Sanskrit literacy. The enormous number of words of Sanskrit origin in Malay, for example, is testimony to this (Winstedt 1957). And it speaks to the adaption and sometimes translation of Sanskrit texts over an extended period, including lexicons, grammars, the regulation of society and other didactic works. As Richard Eaton (2019: 65) suggests, ‘Because these texts were considered to be normative, their circulation through geographical space—the Sanskrit cosmopolis—created an enduring network of shared idioms, cultural styles, values, and sensibilities.’ Second, in Pollock’s account, the idea of the Sanskrit cosmopolis raises important questions that have a decidedly modern significance, echoing down the millennia. How does this language and its attendant ‘meaning-system’ ‘become the means by which a whole world gave voice to a political vision? How are we to grasp the power of such cultural forms … in relation to questions of social identity and political formation as these came to be embodied in cultural—and above all, in literary—expression?’ (Pollock 1996: 231). And third, as we shall see, the translation of Sanskrit texts, and especially political-philosophical treatises, became the fountainhead of Orientalist research sponsored by the East India Company in India and, by extension, deeply inscribed the later translations of texts from the Malay world. The idea of a language/cultural cosmopolis as a heuristic device has more recently been taken up by Ronit Ricci in Islam translated (2011) in relation to Arabic. She explicitly follows the path set out by Pollock in arguing for the emergence of an ‘Arabic cosmopolis’ in the same geographical region he studied: ‘both Sanskrit and Arabic have served, in closely parallel ways, as generative cultural nodes operating historically in conflated multilingual, diglossic, and “hyperglossic” environments’ (ibid.: 14). In some senses, then, Arabic inherited parts of the Sanskrit cosmopolis.

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The importance of language to the Arabic cultural cosmopolis cannot be overstated. In his magisterial study Arabs: A 3,000-year history of peoples, tribes and empires, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (2019: xxiii) makes the point time and time again: that force that … has, more than anything, defined Arabs across a history of shifting and regrouping identities: the Arabic language…. Language is the thread that all would-be Arab leaders have tried to grasp: their aim has always been to create ’asabiyyah, that ‘bindedness’ or unanimity—to ‘gather the word’ of their peoples and tribes…. That thread is the only bond that has ever been able to keep Arabs together, to give them identity and unity; even the unity brought about by Islam was based, ultimately, on words.

This mastery of language was not a parochial affair. As Mackintosh-Smith (ibid.: 14) says: ‘The greatest achievement of Arabs has not been the brief gathering of their own word, but its dispersal.’ The spread of Arabic into the Indian Ocean world and Southeast Asia was, of course, accompanied by the advance of Islam which engendered the circulation of texts of many kinds—the Qur’an above all, but also other forms such as jurisprudence, poetry, scientific writing and voyagers’ stories. For example, one of the oldest Arabic travel books, Ab¯u Zayd al-S¯ır¯af¯ı’s Accounts of India and China, dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, compiles fragments from many journeys made by travellers, mainly anonymous merchants, and offers a panoramic vision of a ‘world on the road to globalisation’ that was then reworked by other writers (al-S¯ır¯af¯ı and Fad.l¯an 2014: 4). The processes of literary transmission, translation and conversion were bound up with each other and created all kinds of networks that fundamentally reordered the Southeast Asian region. As Ricci (2011: 12) neatly puts it, Conversion brings about large translation projects, while widely disseminated translated texts encourage further conversion. When stories and ideas are translated, a familiar language— including its vocabulary, idioms, syntax—is converted in the process into something that is somewhat foreign. A certain balance arises between what is translated and what remains untranslatable.

Produced and reproduced locally and brought to the region from elsewhere in the Islamic world, notably via Hadhrami diasporic connections from the seventeenth century onwards, Arabic carried a range of ideas and stories and became incorporated—in many different ways—into vernaculars, combining with rather than replacing them. Translation and localisation went hand in hand as Arabs became, for a while, the ‘masters of the monsoon’ (Mackintosh-Smith 2019: 381ff.; Mandal 2018: 36, 2013b). This revered and authoritative language was studied, adopted in terms of scripts, borrowed from for religious rites, used for prayer, and encompassed in literary and historical narratives. And translation was one of its ‘foundational practices’ (Ricci 2011: 14). One of the core languages that became converted in this way was Malay which became the mediating language of Islamic devotion, and indeed a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ that connected people across peninsular and insular Southeast Asia (Pollock 1998; Green 2019a: 29). At the same time, while Ricci is careful not to overplay the parallels between the Sanskrit and Arabic cosmopolises,

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the idea of a transregional home for the two languages, and the cultures they carried, is persuasive. In both cases, the ‘two-way connections’ between a larger world and local communities ‘made them dynamic sites of interaction, contestation, and the negotiation of boundaries’ (Ricci 2011: 3–4). There has long been a debate about the relative importance of Arabic vis-à-vis Persian as the language of Islam’s expansion into Southeast Asia. The interpretative power of Pollock’s notion of the extended Sanskritic world has found purchase with regard to a putative Persian counterpart. Two recent books carrying the same title, The Persianate world, explore the ways that the language and culture decoupled from their Indo-Iranian moorings embraced a much wider world in all its dynamism and multiplicity (Green 2019b; Amanat and Ashraf 2019). For his part, Eaton (2020: 10– 18) presents an extended discussion of how, in India, the ‘prolonged and multifaceted interaction’ of Sanskrit and Persianate transregional worlds shaped history over the course of many centuries. There are some empirical problems in making this kind assertion with regard to Persian in Southeast Asia. Although Persian manuscripts originating in modern-day Iran and India circulated in the region between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading to locally produced Malay translations for example, there is no strong sense that Persian became a lingua franca or ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ the way that Arabic and, later, Malay did. The relatively few Persian loanwords in classical Malay is evidence of that (Pollock 1998; Green 2019a: 28– 29). Nonetheless, in a more general sense the striking parallels between the cultural mobility of Sanskrit and Arabic, on the one hand, and that of Persian, on the other, do suggest that the idea of a cosmopolis has historical value. In each case, the cultural cosmopolis expanded over such vast territories that it gave them a transborder, ‘placeless’ quality. Each was based in a prestigious language and literature which conferred high status on their users. And it was not just the circulation of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian languages and literature that mattered but also the translation of canonical texts into vernacular languages (Eaton 2019: 66, 71). Through a process of localisation, then, Persian texts, mostly from Mughal India, did influence the form and content of classical Malay literature. They had a significant impact on the production of court and religious literature in Malay during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, mainly through the efforts of itinerant religious teachers and often accessed via Arabic texts. As Vladimir Braginsky (2015: 6) notes: ‘Combinations of motifs from translated Indo-Persian texts with indigenously Malay and Hindu-Javanese ones brought about a constellation of original compositions in prose and verse, romantic, didactic and religious-mystical’ (see also Green 2019a: 28, 38; d’Hubert 2019: 85). What emerges from this consideration of Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian and the processes of their transmission into and out of Southeast Asia is a sense of a more protean and fluid world, of expansion and contraction, of linguistic melding and literary synthesis. One striking example of this kind of diffusion is how the Persian hikayat—a narrative or tale, typically historical but encompassing almost every possible topic—laid the foundations for the model Malay (and transregional) prose genre of the same name (Ricci 2011: 3; Mandal 2013a; Green 2019a: 28). This exchange eloquently demonstrates how significant texts were transmitted over time

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and between languages, an exemplar of what Marina Warner (2008) calls a ‘travelling text’. The classical Malay text Hikayat bayan budiman (Tale of the wise parrot) is one ´ such travelling text, belonging originally to a tradition that begins with Sukasaptati (Seventy tales of the parrot), a collection of stories written in Sanskrit. Versions of these tales were then transported from Sanskrit into the Persian Tuti-nama (Book of the parrot), whose best-known translation was by Ziya’ al-Din Nakshabi, a fourteenth-century physician and Sufi living in India, who integrated new material from various Persian sources. From one of these adaptions the Malay text was composed, probably in the fifteenth century or earlier, incorporating Persian idioms into the Malay. Hikayat bayan budiman is the earliest example of a Malay ‘framed narrative’—a set of 24 diverse individual stories included within the architecture of a larger story (not unlike The Arabian nights)—in which the translator-compiler has referenced 12 counterparts from the Persian while the others may have been added, including some Turkic inserted tales (Liaw 2013: 279–280; Braginsky 2015: 28). Taken together, the stories ‘represent a genuine encyclopaedia of everyday life and state wisdom’ (Braginsky 2004: 418). Hikayat bayan budiman came to be regarded highly in the sixteenth-century Melaka court, and in the following century a manuscript from Borneo came to the collection of the early Oxford Orientalist Edward Pococke, another example of the traffic in books and knowledge (Ng 2019). The text’s journey was by no means over. Turkish and abbreviated Persian versions of Tuti-nama were produced in the seventeenth century, and it was translated into vernacular Arabic in the nineteenth century. Goethe, as an advocate of world literature and open enquiry, is known to have been an admirer of Nakshabi’s version. Meanwhile, two of the best-preserved manuscripts of Hikayat bayan budiman were copied in Penang, by the same scribe, within five days of each other in August 1808, almost certainly on behalf of Stamford Raffles (Gallop 2015b). And much later it would be translated into modern Malay with English synopses by the colonial scholar-administrator R.O. Winstedt (1920) from the Raffles collection (see also ´ Braginsky 2015: 28). As noted, Sukasaptati–Tuti-nama–Hikayat bayan budiman is an eminent example of the travelling text, a vibrant case of telling and retelling, adapting and grafting, borrowing and imitating, and eventual dissemination back and forth between Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Malay, Turkish, Egypt and European languages over several centuries.2 As Warner (2008) puts it with reference to The Arabian nights, an insight that could equally well apply to Hikayat bayan budiman and its variants, ‘Narrative sequences of this sort interlaced … became nomadic, camping and settling until they were indigenous throughout the world.’ Simultaneously, it spurred the importation of Asian manuscripts to fill the shelves of English libraries and came to transform English literary works.

2

Mandal (2013a) offers an insightful analysis of the much later transregional text Hikayat Mareskalek (The story of Mareskalek), written by Abdullah al-Misri in the nineteenth century. The text interposes and translates Malay and Arabic seamlessly, and there are also Javanese, Chinese and Dutch words.

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The claims of a similar cultural cosmopolis extending to Southeast Asia through Chinese languages have been rather more tangential, though not completely absent. China has of course had economic, political and social connections with Southeast Asia for millennia, ‘tied by human movement, commercial interactions and political aspirations, and been woven together through technological and cultural interflows’ (Wade and Chin 2019: 2; see also Wang and Ng 2004). Most attention has been given to economic encounters between the two regions and above all trade relations. This is no surprise. Chinese merchants traded with and sometimes settled in Southeast Asia for centuries and created distinctive ethnicised networks. The ‘total trajectory of commodities’ that was involved in production, exchange and distribution, and the merchant connections that drove them, certainly helped create interregional linkages over the longue durée (Chang and Tagliacozzo 2011: 2). At the same time, the increase in migration and the presence of Chinese settled communities, especially from the fifteenth century onwards, helped to create distinctly mixed societies especially in Southeast Asia’s port cities. What is much more difficult to ascertain, however, is the scope of the changes to Southeast Asia’s cultural topography as a result of the Chinese presence. Geoff Wade (2019: 120), for instance, writes of ‘hybrid SinoSoutheast Asian societies’ emerging from the fifteenth century onwards, citing food, language and cultural expressions as examples of this phenomenon, and he notes the borrowing of Chinese lexical terms in Malay. Elsewhere, Wade (1997) has examined Chinese texts in relation to Melaka dating from 1403 (the oldest extant reference to Melaka in any text) to the mid-seventeenth century. These texts were mainly chronologically precise despatches, annals and memorials, collated and compiled as records of successive Ming emperors. What is not so evident is the extent to which such Chinese texts were translated and absorbed into the indigenous literary or textual corpus. It is this absence that distinguishes the impact of Chinese compared to that of Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian. Is it possible then to speak of a Chinese cosmopolis existing in Southeast Asia and in particular in the Malay world? The evidence appears thin. Anthony Reid (2015b: 34) does use the term ‘Chinese cosmopolis’ in relation to a more generalised extension of Han power, but historically only in relation to Northeast Asia, and more tentatively in relation to contemporary Chinese writing (Reid 2015a: 123).3 Zev Handel (2019: 10) offers a more precise definition for those areas under strong Chinese cultural, linguistic and political influence—the ‘Sinographic cosmopolis’—to denote only those areas where Chinese writing was significant, though not making any claim about a broader cultural influence beyond the use of writing itself. As a consequence, he limits the absorption and use of what he terms ‘literary Sinitic’—possessing an intimate knowledge of the vast Chinese literary tradition—to the educated elites of Japan, Korea and Vietnam. It is thus difficult to press into service the idea of a Chinese cosmopolis in Southeast Asia (aside from Vietnam) in the sense of a network of ideas,

3

In contrast to Pollock, Reid tends to use ‘cosmopolis’ in a looser, more descriptive formulation. He also prefers the idea of an ‘Islamic cosmopolis’ to either Arabic or Persian models, shifting the emphasis from language and texts to religious beliefs.

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elaborated in a single language, which was diffused by a process of borrowing, translation and adaptation to create a syncretic cosmopolitan culture. To be sure, a large number of Chinese texts were produced in and about the region, but these were largely for imperial consumption, or else produced as reportage on society, natural history and trade (Wade 1997: 56). But in no sense was most of Southeast Asia an obvious component of the Chinese or Sinographic cosmopolis. Part of the issue is the relative paucity of Chinese printed materials in the region before the nineteenth century. For example, in the comprehensive study of commodities and networks in Southeast Asia, Chinese circulations (Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011), only one chapter deals in any detail with texts, and the assessment is unequivocal. While pointing to the introduction of many elements of Chinese culture into Southeast Asia, as well as a variety of social organisations and practices, Lucille Chia (2011: 259) notes: ‘What is striking is that so little of Chinese culture was introduced through print. Indeed, of the myriad commodities carried by Chinese junks in the Nanyang trade, books may have been the one item that was largely missing.’ This would change only with the large-scale arrival of immigrants in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century when a major local publishing and translation practice did emerge (Salmon 2013). The examination of what we can call, as a kind of shorthand, premodern Asian translation traditions is interesting in and of itself, since it obviously shows that these practices long predated the European presence and colonial discourses. It also casts light on the importance of cultural and historical contextualisation when thinking about how languages—and texts, ideas and literary forms—circulate. The specific value of the idea of overlapping cultural/linguistic cosmopolises (or perhaps hybridity in the case of Chinese) is that it also replaces the shortcomings of a generic notion of an ‘Indian Ocean world’ or, more recently, a ‘South China Sea world’, which often seem in thrall to a kind of environmental determinism—with a more evidencebased and nuanced understanding of changing cultural geographies of knowledge (Kratoska et al. 2005; Mandal 2016; Wade 2019). There is a further consequence and that has to do with the debate over the nature of the creation of colonial knowledge itself. Broadly speaking, one perspective, which has been claimed as postcolonialist and gathered momentum after the publication of Said’s Orientalism (1978: 3), proposes that the colonial project imported predefined European forms of knowledge which ignored and then forcibly displaced wholesale indigenous forms of knowledge, or, as Said famously put it, ‘the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient’. This was nothing less than an invasive ‘conquest of knowledge’ in Cohn’s terms (1997: 16). An entire apparatus of translation, interpretation and classification was developed to master indigenous languages and (mis-)represent them in European terms. In other words, colonial knowledge was produced by the active agents of the colonising society, while indigenous carriers of knowledge were ‘converted into instruments of colonial rule’. This loss of agency induced a ‘rupture’ in the historical development of colonised societies. As Phillip Wagoner (2003: 784) summarises this perspective, ‘There can be no significant continuities across the great rift generated by colonial knowledge, for all indigenous forms of knowledge and bodies of cultural practice are effectively superceded and displaced through the

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imposition of new, imported epistemes.’ Conquest, domination and colonial rule ushered in a fundamental cultural rupture. This invigorating way of understanding how colonial knowledge was created has nonetheless met with some powerful criticisms. Was colonial knowledge simply a question of European power and domination? Could the conjunction of ‘colonialism’ and ‘knowledge’ be approached differently, with different interpretative outcomes? A second, revisionist account would seem to suggest so. While recognising that knowledge creation did indeed play a crucial part in the consolidation of colonial rule, this alternative approach departs from the assumption that colonial subjects were simply ‘informants’ for or bystanders in the process, without any significant active agency. Noting links from the precolonial past—‘continuities even across the ruptures created by the coming of colonial capitalism’ (Bayly 1998: 319)— it suggests that there are deep and powerful imprints carried forward by colonised cultures in the making of colonial knowledge. Instead, there were those who engaged in intellectual exchange, dialogue or conversation with colonial knowledge-makers— ‘collaborators’, if that is not too loaded a term—to the extent that ‘one would expect to find the impress of indigenous conceptual categories and even forms of thought on the final form and content of the resultant knowledge’ (Wagoner 2003: 785). Perhaps the most important contribution to this fresh and provocative perspective is Bayly’s Empire and information (1996), whose fine-grained study of the production of an ‘information order’ and social communication in northern India over the course of nearly a century of British rule opened up a historical and sociological approach to a field that had narrowly employed postcolonial textual methods. In doing so, Bayly engages in suggestive ways with nothing less than ‘deconstructing the notion of orientalism’ (ibid.: 370). Given the enormous significance of the deeply sedimented linguistic and cultural linkages associated with the Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian cosmopolises—and the emergence of Chinese hybridity—this suggests that the local, vernacular and indigenous world of Southeast Asia did play an integral, necessary and active part in the making of colonial processes of knowledge and information. As Bayly (ibid.: 7) argues, ‘colonial knowledge was derived to a considerable extent from indigenous knowledge, albeit torn out of context and distorted by fear and prejudice’. It is to this account of how different knowledge worlds engaged in the context of the British presence in the Malay world that we now turn.

3.3 In the Company of Translators: Gabbling Parrots As the lingua franca or more precisely a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ across peninsular and insular Southeast Asia, the role of translations from and into the Malay language has a central place in the history of the circulation of texts, ideas and literary (including oral) forms. This history has been well served in modern scholarship in the work of Amin Sweeney (1980, 1987), Annabel Teh Gallop (1990, 2015c), Vladimir Braginsky (2004, 2015), Henri Chambert-Loir (2005, 2009), Liaw Yock

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Fang (2013) and Anna Winterbottom (2016) for the precolonial period, and R. Roolvink (1967), Ibrahim bin Ismail (1982), Md. Sidin Ahmad Ishak (1992), Ian Proudfoot (1993), John Bastin (2002, 2008, 2019), Holger Warnk (2007, 2009, 2010), Sumit K. Mandal (2013a, 2013b, 2016, 2018) and Rachel Leow (2016) for the colonial period, among others. An analysis of translation efforts in the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is important for at least two reasons. It was during the initial European forays into the Indian Ocean world that hybrid forms of ‘useful knowledge’ began to emerge. In this context, from being a marginal economic and political force, the British East India Company expended considerable energy and resources in building networks of patronage and influence both at home and in Asia in its struggle for supremacy. This also suggests that, in contrast to Cohn’s (1997: 20) claim that few Company officials learned local languages until the 1740s and 1750s, the will to command language began much earlier. Further, this effort was produced and deployed within multidirectional and cross-cultural encounters. The information order that eventually emerged was, then, a product of the collation and transplantation of hybrid ideas and the linguistic knowledge that carried them. The collection of manuscripts in Malay and other Asian languages by Europeans and their study and translation in Europe date back to the very first voyages to the region and these texts were much sought after. Trade was not just in spices, silks and silver but also in manuscripts. As Su Fang Ng (2016) says, ‘Literary journeys took circuitous paths along trade routes.’ For example, one of the earliest manuscripts was obtained from an Amsterdam-based shipowner, van Dulmen, by Leiden University in 1597. This is a text on Islamic mysticism written on palm leaf in Javanese script, and also containing Malay and Arabic elements. As Farouk Yahya (2016: 43–44) notes, this ‘suggests that similar texts in Malay were also in circulation within the region during the late sixteenth century’. It is clear that linguistic hybridisation was already well established in the regional manuscript tradition, and manuscripts also made the journey across the globe to European collections. The earliest Malaylanguage materials in England included royal correspondence from 1602 onwards, and famously a copy of Hikayat Sri Rama—a Malay version of the Ramayana—in the possession of Archbishop Laud and presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1633, and later a copy of Hikayat bayan budiman presented to the same library in 1693 (Winterbottom 2016: 56; Aveling 2019). Translations in print from Malay quickly followed as did diplomatic visitors to England from the Malay world. As Annabel Teh Gallop (2015c)—who as lead curator for Southeast Asia at the British Library has done more than anyone else in recovering and interpreting early manuscripts—says, command of languages ‘was an essential business tool for both merchants in search of spices and missionaries in search of souls’. She has detailed the early printing of Malay books in Europe, dating to the early seventeenth century. It is striking that they were all grammars, vocabularies or phrasebooks or else translations of the Bible and other Christian tracts, presented in a romanised script, which then travelled across the continent. In this respect, the Dutch led and the British followed. A Malay–Dutch phrasebook by Frederik de Houtman, future governor of Ambon and the Moluccas (Maluku), was published in Amsterdam in 1603, which then generated numerous editions and translations in other European languages. An

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English version of this Dutch work, translated via Latin by Augustine Spalding (also Spaulding), became the first Malay book printed in Britain, Dialogues in the English and Malaiane languages (1614). Spalding himself, who had been an interpreter for the English factory at Banten, was clear about the ‘useful learning’ fostered by the study of the language, ‘that most needfull art’. In his dedication to Sir Thomas Smith (also Smythe), governor of the East India Company, Spalding states that he has ‘Caused these Dialogues of the … Malaian tongues … to be set forth in our English tongue: because of the speciall vse and benefit which your Factors and seruants, residing in all the Southeast Islands of the world, may reape thereby’ (quoted in Wright 1931: 346–347). Spalding’s book is, according to Gallop (1990: 86), a veritable guidebook for the early seventeenth-century spice traders, consisting as it does of charming topical ‘sample’ conversations in Malay and Dutch on requesting trading rights from the local ruler, purchasing provisions, overseeing the weighing of pepper, attempting to recover funds for a recalcitrant debtor and all the most colourful and wily phrases needed for driving a hard bargain.

The dialogues are practical phrases for predictable scenarios. Copies were sent out with East India Company fleets, establishing ‘a precedent for collaborations between merchants and scholars to produce linguistic materials’ (Winterbottom 2016: 60). Trade and translations were soon followed by religious texts, and once again the Company was a major source of patronage for these works, even though it tended to rely on Dutch scholarship. The first Christian work in Malay printed in England, Jang ampat evangelia, dates from 1677, published by Thomas Hyde and the philologist Thomas Marshall. Marshall was the source of materials—matrices, types and punches—for Oxford University Press, allowing it to print in Asian languages, including Arabic and Persian. Hyde and Marshall continued their collaboration. There is an advertisement from 1680 listing a ‘Grammar of the Malaian Tongue’, even though it was never published. Winterbottom (ibid.: 60–63) provides further examples of efforts to translate Malay into English, including the making of a set of types with supplements to Arabic to accommodate the Malay Jawi script. These seventeenth-century developments helped establish the rudiments of a new translational technology, endeavouring to find linguistic equivalents and focusing specifically on spices and souls. Driven by the need to compete with the Dutch and to ingratiate themselves with local rulers for protection, the directors of the English East India Company were, for their part, ‘equally aware of the need for its servants to acquire competency in languages spoken in Asia, particularly regional lingua francas like Arabic, Persian, Malay, and Portuguese’ (ibid.: 60). The first original Malay–English dictionary was printed in London in 1701, compiled by Thomas Bowrey (c.1655–1713), an East India Company sea captain, and also the first complete dictionary in English and an Asian language (Bowrey 1701; Winterbottom 2016: 54). He had spent many years ‘in Navigation and Trading’ widely in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and in addition to his interest in languages he was also a cartographer. While he held stock in the Company and maintained close relations with its employees, he made his money as a private ‘country’ trader.

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In fact, it would be such country traders, rather than Company officials, who were at the forefront of acquiring local knowledge of the Malay archipelago until well into the nineteenth century (Miller 2011). Bowrey (1701) explains in the preface to the Dictionary the urgent practical need for such a publication: ‘I finding so very few English Men that have attained any tollerable Knowledge in the Malayo Tongue, so absolutely necessary to Trade in those Southern Seas, and that there is no Book of this kind published in English, to help the attaining of that Language; These Considerations, I say, has imboldened me to Publish the insuing Dictionary’ (see also Gallop 2015c). Bowrey clearly had help with compiling the dictionary, acknowledged and otherwise, formal and informal. His main source of help in England was Hyde, with whom he corresponded frequently and who provided a list of Jawi words that were included in the Dictionary. He also derived entries from wordlists compiled by travellers as well as earlier printed materials. The unacknowledged assistance came, of course, from his local interlocutors. In fact, Bowrey was hypocritical about this, and for a reason. At one point in the preface, he claims to have ‘had very little help to assist me, and not having had the opportunity of Conversation with any Malayo, since I begun this Work’. Yet elsewhere he states that ‘much of that time in the Malayo Countries, Sumatra, Borneo, Bantam, Batavia, and other parts of Java, by my Conversation and Trading with the Inhabitants of which places, I did Furnish my self with so much of the Malayo Language as did enable me to Negociate my Affairs, and Converse with those people’. The rationale for the dictionary then follows in plain sight—that it would enable traders to dispense with ‘the assistance of a Prevaricating Interpreter, as they commonly are’. The creation of books like Bowrey’s offers an interesting historical example of how Europeans entering the Malay world saw a clear and obvious need for a translational technology, in the form of grammars and dictionaries, that would enable the gathering of useful knowledge and the effective communication of commands. There was an additional hope (if not realistic expectation), in Bowrey’s indignant phrase, that linguistic facility would do away with dependence on Asian interlocutors of perceived dubious reliability. As we shall see, this would never become a reality. By modern standards, the methods of collection and collation were haphazard. The grammars and dictionaries were not products of a single time or place but were put together from scraps of information obtained from different sites over the course of a century and more. Beyond grammar, etymology and vocabulary, the making of these early translations also provides insights into deeper philosophical debates that lay behind linguistics and philology at that time, or what Winterbottom (2016: 68) calls ‘language as a mental mirror’. She quotes William Mainstone, who had compiled a Malay grammar manuscript, proposing that the real aim of such work was to discover the ‘secret rule’ of all languages, since ‘without it, men may gabble (like parrots) but can prescribe no true rule for speech’ (ibid.: 69). Partly this was about imposing order on an unruly language (to European ears and eyes), including on the large number of regional variations, as well as so-called ‘classical’ and ‘everyday’ or ‘true’ and ‘trade’ forms. These efforts to create rules were not confined to language itself. They were also a conduit to understanding perceived ‘civilisational’ development and ‘civility’. Those who spoke Malay well—and engaged in trade—were considered superior to

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those who did not, with Melaka’s Muslim ‘Indians’ considered the personification of the ‘politer sort’. These debates, Winterbottom (ibid.: 71) suggests, ‘pointed the way towards comparative and historical studies of linguistics…. demonstrating an understanding that an analysis of the development of language and the inclusion of particular loanwords might be used to map the historical movements and interactions of people’. In the event, while the East India Company maintained settlements on Sumatra for most of the eighteenth century, its attention largely turned away from the Malay world and was drawn more and more towards India, in both commercial and linguistic terms. After Bowrey’s pioneering work, it was not until the early nineteenth century that British studies of Malay developed in earnest, through the efforts of colonial scholaradministrators and their Asian interlocutors, and much of that took place in Penang.

3.4 Transmitting History: The Parrot in a Cage The philosophy and practice of translation in Penang after the founding of the British settlement in 1786 were inevitably and deeply influenced by developments in India. The decisive victory of the East India Company at Plassey in 1757 was the catalyst that effectively secured Bengal. Conquest required communication, and this hastened the project of ‘knowing the country’—the building of an information order and a complex cultural project that remade indigenous societies, but not unilaterally and certainly not always as originally intended (Bayly 1993, 1996). The creation of colonial knowledge in this context, as noted earlier, depended on both pre-existing indigenous knowledge, on local agency, as well as novel European approaches to the study of language and culture. Taken together, it gave birth to a discourse we now name as Orientalism as well as the beginnings of the comparative method in linguistics, with competing ideas on what constitutes language as well as how language is shaped by and in turn also shapes history and society. As we have seen, the processes of producing a colonial apparatus of linguistic study had been in train for some time. What was new, as Cohn (1997: 21) rightly suggests, was that more Company officials were learning the ‘classical’ languages—Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic of India and beyond—and the sheer volume of grammars, dictionaries, treatises, class books and translations about and from Asian languages that was produced. This was nothing less than ‘a project to make available a working knowledge of these languages to those who were to be part of the ruling groups of India’. And not just in India. These dynamics also found a forceful presence in Britain’s colonial enterprise in Southeast Asia in the late eighteenth century as Company scholar-administrators turned their hand both to major translation projects and broader speculations about the languages prevalent in this region, the peoples who spoke them and their cultural histories. As Martin Müller (2020: 1) proposes, ‘these ideas on language and society indirectly contributed to the framing of the policies devised to colonize and govern the region, as well as provided a conceptual heritage that continues to resonate even in our present approaches to these scholarly and cultural issues’.

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This endeavour had a direct connection with Penang through the efforts of John Leyden, Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd, who worked for the East India Company and first met on the island, and elsewhere William Marsden, a major figure of the new philology. The identification of these four men as pioneers of translation from Malay is quite conventional. They were, after all, responsible for the translation into English of some of the urtexts of Malay history and culture, for creating a foundational discourse of Malayness (Müller 2014). Leyden compiled a comparative vocabulary of Malay and other languages and was responsible for the translation of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu as Malay annals based on Raffles’s manuscript recension. For his part, Raffles collected vocabularies from all over the archipelago, including a Malay wordlist, and Malay legal texts, and translated a version of Undang-undang laut. Crawfurd also collected legal texts, and made his mark as the author of dictionaries and grammars (Knapman 2017; Müller 2020). Marsden, author of The history of Sumatra, was above all a philologist of the first rank and pioneer of comparative linguistics (Carroll 2019). Despite the presence of so many languages in this small polyglot site, it is clear British translation efforts focused almost exclusively on Malay. They never came to terms with incredible diversity of Chinese languages and in Penang simply devolved the issue through a system of indirect rule, with appointed leaders of each language community acting as intermediaries between the state and the governed. And while there was considerable effort by the East India Company to encourage knowledge of Tamil among its officials in India this was almost completely absent in Penang and elsewhere in the Malay world (Raman 2012). By contrast, as Rachel Leow (2016: 56) archly notes, ‘The British attitude to the Malay language was far more proprietary…. When it came to Malay, the technocratic colonial states did something that it was never able to for Chinese languages: it claimed to know Malay better than those who spoke it.’ This conceit points to what, or rather who, is obviously missing from this orthodox summary of the early colonial ‘knowledge producers’ of Malay: the local writers, scribes, interpreters, teachers and translators who made the entire project possible in the first place. The reason is equally obvious. Archives reflect inequalities. While written records on the part of indigenous protagonists are scarce—‘ephemera, pamphlets, such as rarely survive the momentum of the moment even today’— accounts from Company officials and their supporters in Britain are plentiful, as are modern academic studies (Proudfoot 2007: 2; Andaya 2017: 10). Too many historians have taken such sources at their word, and it requires considerable excavation to find the traces of indigenous agency in fragmentary archives or to reinterpret the better-known primary sources or hypothesise intelligently about what has been left out. Only in this way do Penang-based translation collaborators like Ibrahim Kandu, Ahmad Rijaluddin and Siami, or language teachers like Abdul Kadir, emerge from the near-invisible margins. Of all the Malay-language collaborators of the nineteenth century only the great man of letters, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (Munshi Abdullah), has received the kind of attention befitting his status. In understanding how these foundational texts were produced, the agency of both colonised and coloniser needs to be taken seriously. The British translators did not work in a vacuum, and neither did colonial knowledge operate on a tabula rasa. The British writers simply could not

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have carried out their research without the help they received from local collaborators, and without their help could not have gained access to many Malay manuscripts and translated them. As we have suggested, men like Leyden, Raffles, Crawfurd and Marsden were not merely translators of texts. It was never only about language. Rather, the transposed language of legal texts, genealogies and historical narratives was also, and at the same time, a conduit to a past, whether real or imagined, and a gateway to governing colonial relationships in the future. For the officials of the East India Company, the annexation of Penang by Francis Light was presented explicitly as an extension of its Indian empire. India and the Malay world were intimately connected in conceptual, institutional and personal levels, forming part of a commonly held idea of a ‘Greater India’. This entailed, among other things, grappling with the linguistic and cultural manifestations of the Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian cosmopolises, and understanding their relationship to indigenous languages, and cultural and historical development. Leyden, Raffles, Crawfurd and Marsden (and most of the other scholaradministrators) felt well placed to make such judgments. Each had spent time in India before reaching Southeast Asia. And each had been steeped in the Orientalist philological tradition pioneered by William Jones in Bengal: ‘the experience, background knowledge, and epistemological inclinations they brought with them doubtlessly prefigured the ways in which Southeast Asia and its inhabitants were approached, analysed, and assessed’ (Müller 2014: 177; see also Dodson 2007: 118ff.). Here we look at how one major translation project informed their understandings of history and contributed to the manufacture of colonial knowledge in Penang. As noted, Leyden is best known for his translation of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu as Malay annals (1821), and he also produced a comparative vocabulary. John Bastin (2002, 2019) has done more than anyone to unpack fact from fiction in Leyden’s life, no easy task given that his publications were few in number, not all his papers and manuscripts have survived, as well as ‘his unfortunate habit of boasting about his own achievements, and inevitably exaggerating them’. Not content to be merely part of the Company writing machine, he was, in short, a ‘one-man selfpublicity machine’ (Trautmann 2006: 86). He made the scarcely believable claim that he had mastered 17 languages before he left Scotland for India in 1803, and a further 10 by the time he reached Penang in 1805. As Bastin (2002: 101) dryly notes: ‘These statements have been taken by subsequent writers as fact.’ Yet, as Bastin (2019: 27) also reports, in a letter written less than six months before he departed for India, Leyden claimed only that he could read most of the Oriental languages to which he had access with the help of a dictionary, and that he had never attempted to speak any of them. A generous assessment might suggest that Leyden was more interested in the ‘grand features’ of languages—in comparative philology—rather than a mastery of specific languages. He certainly did not lack in base ambition. He travelled to India with the explicit intention of establishing himself as an Oriental scholar of the first rank. In Madras, he took up Tamil, was able to buy Indian manuscripts and employ a number of munshis to work on English translations (Trautmann 2006: 86ff.). He was not shy about his achievements, asserting ‘I think I may venture to say that no person whatever has out-stripped me in the acquisition of country Languages’, and

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‘I have acquired a superior knowledge of Indian literature[,] manner[,] mythology[,] religion and laws to any man in the Madras Presidency very decidedly and … have established my reputation as an Orientalist beyond all contradiction’ (quoted in Bastin 2019: 23). In his correspondence and introductions to published work, Leyden often comes across as the embodiment of a very striking metaphor he used in translating a poem by one of his ‘servants’, Emir Muhammed Peishaweri, originally written in Pashto: ‘The parrot pent in wiry cage / Its fluttering pinions beats in vain’ (Morton 1819: 272). His soaring ambition and vanity, with dozens of projects underway at any given time, did frequently seem to collide with the material constraints of the cage in which he found himself. Leyden arrived in Penang in 1805—accompanied by Malay, Persian and Arab ‘servants’, most likely munshis and scribes—and began studying Malay assiduously, ‘like a dragon’ and with typical arrogance declared the language to be ‘childishly easy’ (Bastin 2019: 34). It was in Penang that Leyden met Raffles, and although Leyden would stay on the island for only a few months he had a profound influence on Raffles’s ideas and later career. It was also during this period that Leyden embarked on his English translation of Sejarah Melayu, completed a draft to his study ‘On the language and literature of the Indo-Chinese nations’ and put the finishing touches to his A comparative vocabulary of the Barma, Maláyu and Thái languages, published in Serampore in 1810. These texts were just part of a hugely ambitious, unfinished four-part project of ‘mapping the languages of South and Southeast Asia—of blanketing them, as it were, with grammars and dictionaries’ (Trautmann 2006: 86). Here we focus on two key aspects of Leyden’s work: his translation of Sejarah Melayu, based on the manuscript known as ‘Raffles 18’, edited by Raffles and published posthumously, and his more general position in his nations and languages project. Relating to the cosmopolitan sultanate of Melaka, a handbook of statecraft and statement of the idealised relationship between ruler and ruled, Sejarah Melayu has long been considered the most important Malay historical work, and in some ways it has come to be regarded as the founding text of a Malay nation. So what was Leyden actually translating? In every aspect, it is a pre-eminent travelling text, freighted with complexity, promiscuity and ambiguity at almost every turn. Even the title of the manuscript used by Leyden is problematic: both Sejarah Melayu and Malay annals are misleading, since the unambiguous original title in Arabic is Sulalat al-Salatin (Genealogy of kings). Although the earliest existing manuscript is from the seventeenth century, it is likely to have been copied from texts dating back to the sixteenth century. More than 30 manuscripts are known and housed today in libraries around the world, with so-called long versions and shorter versions, and with single copies often created by different scribes; there are four recensions of the text printed in both Jawi and romanised Malay, with some versions blending more than one recension; the Raffles 18 manuscript itself has been edited three times—by R.O. Winstedt (1938), Muhammad Haji Salleh (1997) and Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail (1998)—with successive additions and remodellings, but without the sources and mode of composition being seriously taken in account; there have been 18 editions published since the middle of the nineteenth century, and, besides English, it has been translated into

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Chinese, Dutch, French, Indonesian, Japanese and other languages (Chambert-Loir 2005, 2017a, 2017b; Liaw 2013: 350–356). As Jan van der Putten (2018: 13) notes: As each manuscript copy is unique, copied by hand from a previous copy, or, in exceptional cases, directly from the original, the differences between copies is inherent to chirographic practices. Further, as many copies have not survived, it is difficult—if not impossible—to decide which copy is closest to the original and, therefore, which version may be considered the most authoritative.

In an early attempt to trace the genealogy of the genealogy, R. Roolvink (1967: 301) was of the opinion that ‘[I]t goes without saying that not all of these manuscripts have the same value; some are fragmentary or otherwise incomplete; others are just copies of existing manuscripts, and some are even copies of the printed text.’ This does not even take into account that the text would have been read aloud and listened to as part of a rich oral performative tradition, explicitly part of a collective memory, and ‘early writing practices were substantially influenced by oral delivery’ (van der Putten 2018: 13–14; see also Sweeney 1987). To the modern way of thinking, books are objects used silently. But this was not the usual way of doing things for much of history, anywhere. The reading aloud of and listening to the text was, for most people, a fundamentally social act. The stories travelled by word of mouth before making the leap into the world as a manuscript and then a printed book. In the most thorough analysis of what he calls the ‘political myth’ of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu, Henri Chambert-Loir (2005: 132–133) argues that the result of two centuries of academic work on the text—starting with Leyden’s translation—has been ‘rather disappointing’ and handicapped by being based on faulty editions. So Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu and its manifestations are a story of complex attention, formed by different historical and social interests, from the Penang-based Orientalists to today’s Malaysian counterparts. So to return to the questions of what this travelling text was, why it was selected as the first full-length Malay text to be translated into English, and what it has become in its extraordinary retellings, borrowings and imitations. First, it bears emphasising that the manuscript text, in its many iterations including the Raffles 18 version, was not a European invention, as some postcolonialists would have it. Sulalat alSalatin/Sejarah Melayu is the Malay world’s representation of itself, a spoken and then written text based on collective memory, drawing on narrative elements, structures and linguistic usages both familiar and foreign. The functional purpose is set out clearly in its introduction: to generate a genealogy of Malay kings and their customs for the benefit of future generations (ibid.: 134). If we return to Wagoner’s (2003: 785) insight—that we should find ‘the impress of indigenous conceptual categories and even forms of thought’—then this is clearly the case. The historical, mythical and literary elements coalesce in ways that must have made eminent sense to the audiences of the text(s). Oliver Wolters (1970: 82), for example, shows that the early part of the text is the work of a historian with a particular goal in mind: to show the dynastic continuity and sovereignty exercised by the Malay royal family: ‘His assertions should not be regarded as entertaining fairytales but as statements of grave political relevance in Malay history.’ In highly suggestive readings of the text, Engseng Ho

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(2013) and Mandal (2016) pay particular attention to an aspect not often commented on: how local sovereignty also and at the same time consolidated its legitimacy in relation to a powerful outsider, Alexander the Great (Raja Secander Zulkarneini in Leyden’s translation, Iskandar Zulkarnain elsewhere). Ho demonstrates how Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu pays close attention to the idea of a foreign and ‘universal’ royal lineage, embodied in Alexander/Iskandar, which is incorporated into a specifically Malay language of sovereignty. In this respect, then, this ‘world text’ offers what Ho (2013: 146) calls a ‘diarchic’ model of sovereignty, one, he suggests, that was particularly suited to those Malay polities that were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries located at the crossroads of international trade and already cosmopolitan. In this regard, the text is a normative account of ‘a means of negotiating the world’ (Mandal 2016: 384). This conclusion directly echoes Anthony Reid’s (2001: 300) argument that the development of Melaka went in two complementary directions after the fall of the sultanate to the Portuguese in 1511: a continuation of the royal lineage and prestige of the court, and as a place whose merchants spread throughout Southeast Asia in search for ports sympathetic to their trade. For his part, in his close reading of ‘echoes, predictions, correspondences’, Chambert-Loir (2005: 144, 160) pays particular attention to the mythical aspects of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu. He shows that by analysing the structure of the text it is possible to uncover ‘political myths in the sense that they are deliberately used in order to give a certain vision of history’. Again, the relevance and power of myth—and above all the myth of origin—are not to be minimised: ‘Myth, as history, is a story of the past, but a past imaginary, idealized, constructed as a means of providing the ruling dynasty with the sacral basis of its power’ (ibid.: 139). Taken together, the historical and mythical elements combine to create what can best be described as a political ideology. And it may be in this sense that the text has its greatest resonance down the ages, appropriated and adapted till today. The literary imaginings contained in Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu are also crucial to understanding the cross-cultural importance of the text. This has nothing to do with the idea of the text being regarded as ‘a paragon of “good Malay”’, for as Chambert-Loir (2005: 132) asks, ‘what do we actually know … of sixteenth-century literary Malay?’ Those who have analysed the text from a literary point of view have pointed to the ‘liveliness of style, the humor, the art of the portrait’, and we could add magic, metamorphoses, catastrophes and coincidences. The composition shows that the many stories of the text borrowed from other narratives. It is here that we return to the idea of how the Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian cultural/linguistic cosmopolises, and indeed other languages such as Tamil and Old Javanese, became indigenised in the Malay world text and how precolonial Asian traditions of translation became manifest. Each of these great cosmopolises helped shape the sphere of imagination of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu: ‘Tamilised’ Sanskrit coronation formulas sit alongside Persian genealogies and Arabic invocations to prayer. For his part, Leyden recognised these influences, and he followed William Jones’s argument that these ‘outside’ languages (though not really ‘outside’ at all) were the essential ‘sources of higher concepts’ in Malay, as opposed to Marsden’s theory of an autonomous

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Malayo-Polynesian language family (Hooker and Hooker 2001: 28; Gallop et al. 2015; Carroll 2019). One way to illustrate this cultural/linguistic promiscuity is to explore how the Alexander legend comes into its own, as an exemplar of the translatability of a travelling story that alights on an iconic Malay text. In the West, the life and reputation of Alexander was canonised in the European imagination through Latin and vernacular rewritings, eulogising not only his life as a military strategist and ruler but also as ‘a witness to geographical, ethnographic and zoological wonders … and many other “marvels” of the eastern parts of the world’ (Stock 2016: 3). Based largely on the transmission of the much-translated Ancient Greek Alexander romance, tales of Alexander spread from the Mediterranean to Ethiopia, Persia, India, Mongolia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, in fluid retellings and rewritings that nonetheless maintain the echoes and imprints of the original. The tales attained a remarkable significance in very different cultural, political and religious contexts. The Indian Alexander, for example, became associated with the Hindu deity Skanda (K¯arttikeya, known as Murugan in south India and Sri Lanka), the god of war, upheld as an ideal of male beauty (Boardman 2019: 99). As Markus Stock (2016: 4, 6) notes, it is an example of a world text that has become localised: ‘In very concrete ways, the Alexander material appears at once transculturally relevant and bound to particular local activities of retelling, reappropriating, and transmitting… [They are also] documents of migration, translation, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora.’ As already noted, Alexander entered the Malay world as a universal emblem of sovereignty, which he and his descendants used to create a ‘dynastic space’ which was linked to the great powers of the wider world (Braginsky 2013). The texts and stories about him arrived in the region, with Islam, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—as Iskandar Zulkarnain, the ‘two-horned’, an Islamic Alexander, a Muslim conqueror, the ‘king of Asia’, the greatest monarch of East or West. And what an appropriate subject for a classical travelling text. For not only did the historical Alexander travel overland to the ends of the known world, but the legendary version conquered the unknown elements as he took flight on a basket drawn by griffins and explored beneath the sea in a diving bell. A man of adventure, wonders and miracles, he was a most welcomed stranger (Andaya 2019). A new book by Su Fang Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia (2019), brilliantly shows how the Alexander legend entered the literary canons of divergent cultures, and especially those of the Malay world (see also Ng 2016). The most obvious Malay analogue is, of course, the romance Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain. Its origins speak, once again, of local connections to the great cultural/linguistic cosmopolises since it derives from a Central Asian adaption of a Persian text, with sources such as the Qur’an, the Persian Sh¯ah-n¯ama (Book of kings), Islamic legends and hadith, and corresponds most closely to an Arabic Alexander romance of al-S.u¯ r¯ı’s Sirat al-Iskandar. There are also two recensions of the text, from northern Sumatra and Melaka, while similar versions of the Alexander tale also influenced Javanese and Buginese literature (Ng 2016: 105–106, 2019). It is not the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain version that interests us most here. The Malay world also produced court chronicles that adopted the myth for their own

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genealogies, all claiming descent from Alexander. The Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu was the foremost—a ‘paradigmatic reading’—of these in political and cultural importance. The text is advancing two principal claims. In the first place, Ng argues that the reception and appropriation of an Islamic Iskandar Zulkarnain by Melaka (and other polities) was a response to Portuguese intrusion into this world—as a constructed identity in counterpoint to a belligerent foreign conquest (Ng 2016: 107). This view affirms Ho’s (2013) and Mandal’s (2016) reading of the text as being both internal and external, local and global, or in Ng’s (2016: 107) words, ‘simultaneously inward-looking and outward-looking’. The consolidation of a ‘Melakan’ or ‘Malay’ identity turns inwards, ‘as any vernacular translation necessarily has a bounded and limited audience compared to the original cosmopolitan language’, that is, Persian or Arabic. And the claiming of Alexander/Iskandar, and his fame and aura, by his purported descendants turns the Malay world outwards to embrace the knowledge of a wider world. This links to the second claim, that Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu is an explicitly assimilated Islamic text, and that as the people who owe allegiance to Iskandar/Alexander’s descendants, ‘they become kin in a common religion’ through conversion (ibid.: 113). Both Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain and Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu were, therefore, examples of what Pollock (1998) and Green (2019a) call the ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, rendered in oral retellings and authoritative texts. They contained knowledge of the wider, known world which was then translated for local consumption. And in that embrace, the Malay world underwent religious, political and linguistic conversions. This extended analysis of the cultural and linguistic provenance of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu allows us to better understand what the early British translators, knowledge producers, were actually dealing with. The text that so occupied Leyden as translator and Raffles as editor and then seeing to its publication was a repository of pre-existing indigenous knowledge dealing with critical issues of identity, religion and international relations, at once cosmopolitan and local. Texts circulated via far-reaching and complex networks of exchange, with new materials being incorporated, translated, popularised, reproduced, and disseminated through oral storytelling and manuscript copies. If Said is right that the great desideratum of European colonial knowledge was the ‘managing’ of the Orient, it emphatically did not produce it in a vacuum. The agency of local translators did not merely belong to the past. The transition between the knowledge and information orders of the precolonial and colonial systems was mediated by local scribes, writers and translators possessing a keen grasp of the chief languages in circulation. As in India, ‘the real interlocutor for the Company official … was the mediator and spokesman’, the munshi (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2004: 61). As already noted, Leyden was ‘assisted’ in his translation work by ‘Malay scribes’. To rescue them from the margins of this account it is worth examining more deeply their role as indigenous knowledge producers working in a colonial milieu. The three assistants for whom we have sufficient documentary evidence to construct at least partial biographies are Ibrahim Kandu, his older brother Ahmad Rijaluddin bin Kandu, and Siami, each representative of a particular kind of Straits hybridity and cosmopolitanism.

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Ibrahim was born in Kedah, the younger son of Hakim Long Fakir Kandu, a prominent merchant from the long-established south Indian Chulia (that is, Tamil Muslim) community and major property owner, and a Malay mother (Skinner 1976: 197–198). Ibrahim is fairly well known as Raffles’s scribe in Penang, and worked with Leyden on the translation of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu. There are at least four copies of Malay manuscripts that were in Raffles’s possession from 1805 and 1806 that bear Ibrahim’s name as scribe—with his distinctive ‘small, neat, round, and upright’ handwriting. Ibrahim is also known to have copied two manuscripts of Sejarah Melayu, dated January 1808 and March 1812 (Gallop 2015a). There is an account of Ibrahim on a visit to Calcutta in 1810 where this ‘singular figure’ accompanied Leyden to an event. A note made some 40 years later by James Low offers a rather startling insight into Leyden’s methodology: Ibrahim the Mooshee made a copy of the Salelata Salatin (Malay Annals) at Malacca, and took it with him to Bengal, where he was in the service of Dr. Leyden. Ibrahim read the book to the Doctor and explained the meaning to him, and he wrote down what he seems to have considered as worthy of notice. This is the account Ibrahim gives me. It would indeed be tedious to translate all the prolixity and repetitions of a Malayan author, but this translation is tolerably faithful. (quoted in Hooker and Hooker 2001: 33; see also Skinner 1976: 201; Bastin 2002: 107)

A close line-by-line translation it was not. Ibrahim disappears from the archival record in 1811. We know rather more about Ahmad Rijaluddin, Ibrahim’s older brother and another of Raffles’s scribes who also worked as an interpreter for Penang’s European traders. He is primarily known for his impressions of a visit to Calcutta, the leading city of the East India Company, coincidentally at the same time as his brother in 1810, with the Penang trader Robert Scott. His narrative Hikayat perintah negeri Benggala (An account of the state of Bengal) is in the form of a travel diary or travelogue which Cyril Skinner (1982: 1) designates as an example of a literature in transition between a ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ style. Amrith (2013: 6) calls it the ‘first modern account published by an Asian traveler of crossing the Bay of Bengal’. What is new in Malay writing here is the eyewitness account, with detailed descriptions of the sights and life of the city, but the traditional literary conventions of the hikayat form also permeate the text (see also Skinner 1978; Gallop 2014; Andaya 2017). Equally striking is the way that Ahmad, a man from one of the Bay of Bengal’s emerging port cities, Penang, describes the diverse population—‘English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Chinese, Bengali, Burmese, Tamil and Malay’—he encountered in vast, cosmopolitan, imperial Calcutta (Amrith 2013: 7, 64). Some scholars, notably the Javanese linguist J.J. Ras (1985: 341), have criticised these claims of the novelty of what authors like Ahmad produced—‘there was nothing strikingly “new” in his prose’. More damningly, and in an entirely essentialising vein, Ras argues forcefully that as ‘Tamil or Arabic’ these writers ‘cannot be classed as Malays…. They were marginal men, both culturally and linguistically…. [they] should rather be considered peripheral than transitional’. This is an astonishing conclusion to draw and entirely misses the point. It is predicated on a narrow view of what the fluid Malay world or indeed

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‘classical’ Malay literature consisted of, shaped, as we have seen, by its embrace of a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’. In our view, the precise opposite argument is more persuasive: that men like Ibrahim Kandu, Ahmad Rijaluddin and Siami, and later Munshi Abdullah, made for ‘ideal’ munshis in the context of early nineteenth-century Straits society. They were multilingual, carrying knowledge of the cultures of the different societies that had helped (re)make literary Malay, and comfortably straddled different literary heritages. Their employment required them to travel with peripatetic patrons from the elite colonial class such as Leyden and Raffles and merchants like Scott. In this regard, they were representative of what Aihwa Ong (1999: 19–20) calls ‘travelling subjects’—crucial mobile actors in the making of cultural economies, and helping texts to move over vast distances. In short, they were positioned at the centre of and identified with a cosmopolitan and ‘creole’ Malay world already long in the making, and were patently writing for Malay audiences as well as European ones (Harper 2013; Andaya 2017: 22; Mandal 2018). The third scribe associated with Raffles and Leyden during the preparations for the translation of Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu was Siami, as his name suggests a native of Siam. He was the longest-serving of Raffles’s scribes, who came to his notice because of his facility in both Thai and Malay, as it is ‘almost certain that Siami was the first to give [Raffles] live instruction in Malay’. ‘Being a good Linguist’, Raffles seconded Siami to help Leyden with the translation. Bastin (2008: 1–2) suggests that Siami was almost certainly the person who provided Leyden with Malay and Thai words for his A comparative vocabulary of the Barma, Maláyu and Thái languages and helped him with other linguistic studies (see also Bastin 2019: 376–377). The relationship between the Scots translator and Malay-Siamese assistant appears to have been unusually close: ‘He was clearly regarded as something more than an assistant by Leyden, who seems to have adopted him, possibly de facto rather than de jure, allowing Siami thereafter to call himself John Leyden Siami or, simply, J.L. Siami’ (Bastin 2008: 2). As with Ahmad Rijaluddin, Siami’s peripatetic responsibilities with Raffles then took him to Melaka, Bengkulu, Java, Calcutta and England, as variously a Malay, Chinese and Thai writer, translator and interpreter. He is likely to have been with Raffles during the negotiations with Temenggong Abdul Rahman and Sultan Hussein Mahomed in 1819 over the East India Company’s acquisition of Singapore, and then settled there, first assisting in creating an archive of Malay documents, as an instructor in Thai at Singapore Institution, and then as a customs official in the master attendant’s office. Finally, in a severe cost-cutting exercise, Siami was dismissed from the Company’s service in 1830, and likely survived by working as a private Malay and Thai translator (ibid.: 4–5). This might be all we know of Siami’s life if he had not also left to posterity two remarkable texts from the year of his dismissal that provide a contemporary indigenous insight into justice and trade in Singapore, standing apart from and offsetting the ‘rose-coloured picture of trade in the port projected by other accounts’ (Frost and Balasingamchow 2009: 108). Writing for an audience of other Malay speakers—‘we Bugis and Malays’— Siami’s pamphlets are written in rhymed verse, ‘the medium of choice for expressions of personal feelings or conviction, and also the form of communication most easily consumed by the nineteenth-century Malay listening public’. Focusing on the

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conduct of cases in Singapore’s courts in one of his pamphlets titled ‘Market forces’, and ‘impelled by anger and resentment’, Siami emerges as a stringent critic of European rule in general and of the conduct of ‘free trade’ in particular (Proudfoot 2007: 3, 6). He offers this stinging rebuke of the hyper-competitive system of exchange which put Asian traders (Bugis, Chinese, Indian, Malay) at a disadvantage: To all engaged in trade, I wish to pass on one last piece of advice: whether you are on board ship or in the market-place, never hand over your goods first. This is because all the merchandise available is actually the property of the white man…. Whenever a dispute arises, it is the white man to whom it is referred. And he, with matchless skill and tact, ensures his clients never come to harm. (ibid.: 9; this is Proudfoot’s own translation from Siami’s manuscript)

This is a credible and penetrating critique of how European patronage operated, based on first-hand observation, of how ‘the legal process [was] dependent upon connections’ (ibid.: 10). Siami’s other pamphlet is an angry lament about the hardship that former East India Company employees suffered as a result of the same retrenchments that had seen him lose his job. The language is direct and anguished, and draws on metaphors of a storm at sea. Identifying the role of the governor general in Bengal, Siami writes: Now he has transmitted orders from Bengal that affect us all like a flaming fire that continuously consumes our spirit. We have been scorched right through to our inner hearts, pounded into rice bran and flour, unbearable oppressed, as we sit around in stunned contemplation…. It hits us like a raging storm accompanied by thunder and lightning, that blows ships and prows adrift in all directions, most with broken rudders and splintered oars, stays and halliards sliced through, rigging snapped and left dangling, with only the fore-mast and main-mast remaining. Ah! Alas, it is truly pitiable. We, ships at anchor that have dragged their moorings, can now find no safe haven. We feel utterly desolated. (ibid.: 13)

Deeply wounded by a sense of betrayal, Siami bemoans that ‘Our long and trusty service has been valued at a gob of spittle.’ In the final analysis, he starkly affirms that ‘[t]he Company has been clever at practising deceit’ (ibid.: 13, 14). These are powerful words, and speak to a judgment beyond personal disillusionment and to a sharp rebuke to the amorality of colonial legal and commercial practices. The three men who worked alongside Leyden and Raffles—Ibrahim Kandu, Ahmad Rijaluddin and Siami—were emphatically not ‘marginal men’ in cultural and linguistic terms, even if as local ‘scribes’, ‘copyists’ or ‘writers’ they were the most junior employees of the East India Company. Rather, they were innovative authors in their own right, as Ahmad Rijaluddin’s travelogue demonstrates, and fierce critics of the colonial system once the ties of patronage were cut and opportunity arose. Above all, and in the context that concerns us here, they were the teachers of Leyden and Raffles. It was through the skills and contacts of these ‘language masters’ that the Penang-based Orientalists (as they had in India) came to understand the culture, knowledge and texts that informed the history of the Malay world. They fully deserved their title munshi, adepts in ‘mastering the mystique of writing’, in Bayly’s (1996: 73) felicitous phrase, and were integral to the East India Company writing machine.

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When Malay annals was published in 1821 it quickly assumed its place as the indispensable guide to an ‘authentic’ Malay history and Leyden’s reputation was posthumously secured for posterity. From today’s vantage point, it may seem difficult to fathom why. His basic approach to the Malay language was quixotic and his technical command was, at the very least, questionable. Marsden, for example, ‘censured’ Leyden’s knowledge of Malay orthography and stated baldly that he simply had not stayed long enough in the region ‘to give him a competent knowledge’ (quoted in Bastin 2002: 107). Leyden seems to have had very little positive to say about Malay literature in general, ‘finding it unoriginal and monotonous’. And though often overlooked, it is clear that he relied to a very great extent on the particular skills of Ibrahim as the critical reader of and guide through the text, and on Siami as his language teacher and provider of ‘particular information’ (Hooker and Hooker 2001: 29, 42; Bastin 2008: 2). In light of these observations, Virginia Matheson Hooker and M.B. Hooker (2001: 49) suggest that Leyden’s translation strategy was based on a ‘creative re-creation’ when dealing with material from the distant past, as he had done much earlier in his career in collecting Scottish ballads with the celebrated writer Walter Scott. (The image of Leyden as Scott’s munshi is too difficult to resist.) This also involved ‘improving’ the original texts, concerned as he was ‘not only for the style of language in his translation, but also with a view to capturing the attention of his readers.’ In this latter regard, he undoubtedly succeeded. As van der Putten (2007: 158) says: For many nineteenth-century colonial scholars this [Leyden’s] translation was their introduction to traditional Malay literature; its role was so encompassing it even eclipsed its Malay original as well as a Malay version that was published 20 years later [Munshi Abdullah’s]. Only at the end of the nineteenth century did Leyden’s version give way to William Shellebear’s well-known Malay edition, which is another example of creative manipulation of textual material.

The final journey of the manuscript produced by Leyden and its belated publication by Longman’s in London took many years, and Bastin (2002) has covered the story of indecision, personal pride, family conflict and publishers’ rivalries in considerable detail. In 1825 the directors of the East India Company finally bought the whole of Leyden’s collection of books and manuscripts, which became valuable additions to the resources of the writing machine.

3.5 The Print Revolution: Parroting Our Master’s Style and Voice The publication of Malay annals marked one kind of end point for the voyage of an oral narrative that was heard in the form of public readings or performances of dramatic episodes to multiple manuscript versions scattered across the Malay world to a compromised English-language translation in print. What should be clear is that the bringing into existence of Malay annals was not a European invented

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tradition ex nihilo—invented in both senses as ‘creative’ and ‘fraudulent’—or a mere misrepresentation of indigenous worlds. To be sure, the final form of the text (though it is never truly the final form as subsequent versions show) is an instance of the construction of elite colonial knowledge, and a ‘divergent version’ in van der Putten’s assessment (ibid.: 159). But it is at the same time a text in which the voices of these worlds come to our attention, even if distorted or inaccurately registered. The process was not so much an ‘invasion of epistemological space’ as a collaborative effort—permeated by real inequalities as it was—in which indigenous agency must be taken into consideration as a constituent of the colonial knowledge that emerged. This is surely the significance of Amit Chaudhuri’s (2008: 91) retort to Edward Said that ‘the Orient, in modernity, is not only a European invention but also an Oriental one’. What was novel about Malay annals was that it was printed and that printed copies circulated widely both in the metropole and the Malay world. If the early efforts at translation belonged largely to Asian oral and manuscript traditions, and the long history of printing Malay books in Europe, colonialism helped create print centres in Southeast Asia itself. This raises the question of the critical significance of print culture and all that it entails—publishing, the trade in printed matter, literary culture, the movement of ideas—and its impact on indigenous and colonial and hybrid forms of knowledge. Information and knowledge could certainly circulate more easily in printed form (Bayly 1996: 239; see also Anderson 2006: 39ff.). How did the advent of printing alter how texts were constituted and transmitted, and what effects did this have on language, literature and the technology of translation? British efforts with regard to printing were relatively late. The first recorded case in Southeast Asia of an imprint (in Dutch) in Batavia (Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies dates from 1669 while a Malay dictionary was printed there in 1677 (Gallop 1990: 87, 92). Given the linguistic diversity found in Penang, it is not surprising that the first print centre on the Malay Peninsula emerged there, more or less at the same time as in Melaka. The first printing facility was set up by Andrew Burchet Bone, who in 1806 brought his own press and a limited range of types to Penang after a peripatetic career as a commercial printer in India that had taken him to Calcutta and then as the printer for the Madras Gazette (Byrd 1970; Bloomfield 1979; Md. Sidin 1992). The timing was not coincidental. The East India Company had not long initiated a major push to set up presses in India, with much of the output directed at disseminating official governmental and mercantile records, Orientalist scholarship, materials for Christian evangelisation and textbooks for students, and Madras had emerged as a leading locus of the new print culture (Hall 2016). The elevation of Penang as the fourth presidency of India, giving it a modicum of institutional autonomy from Calcutta, was clearly a catalyst for the wholesale importation of a print culture. Raffles had just been appointed as assistant secretary to the Penang (Prince of Wales Island) government and he undoubtedly supported such a development. Despite the presence on the island of men like Raffles and Leyden who were deeply engaged in translation work, the entire output of printed matter was in English, with the exception of a small bilingual book by John Shaw on the Malay language issued in 1807. This was intended for ‘the use of the civil servants of the East India Company and European

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gentlemen and settlers there’, though it is unclear how it was distributed (Md. Sidin 1992: 22). Bone was essentially a jobbing printer. His most enduring legacy was the publication of Penang’s first newspaper, the Government Gazette (later retitled the Prince of Wales Island Gazette), which carried official announcements, news and advertisements (Gallop 1990: 96; Md. Sidin 1992: 4, 21; Leow 2016: 30, 61). As in India, the East India Company ran a tight censorship regime, and the Gazette was eventually closed down (‘crushed’) at the insistence of the Bengal government in 1827 after publishing an article critical of the Anglo-Siamese (Burney) treaty of the previous year (Buckingham 1828: 555). The Penang government then established its own press. Aside from Bone’s single publication, it would be left to the various Protestant missionary groups—most importantly the nondenominational London Missionary Society operating through its Ultra-Ganges Mission—to harness the new print culture to the longer-established work of translation, initially in Melaka in 1817 and in Penang not until 1832.4 The pivotal moment was the renewal of the East India Company charter in 1813, in which the so-called ‘pious clause’ repealed its ban on Christian missionaries from entering Company territories in Asia, and even required the Company to help fund their work. Through this ‘great evangelical enterprise’, they produced a large quantity of ‘useful knowledge’: religious tracts, excerpts from scripture, catechisms, an edition of the Bible in Malay, books for use in mission schools and some scholarly work (Gallop 1990: 95–96; Proudfoot 1993: 7, 9; DeBernardi 2020: 16). These developments were historic: ‘they marked the first printing in the Malay language in Southeast Asia outside Batavia, and heralded the first wave of mission printing in Malay which was to spread throughout the archipelago’ (Gallop 1990: 95). Chinese-language translation, printing and publishing were also undertaken by the missions alongside similar work in Malay. With permission from the East India Company authorities in Penang, the energetic missionary pioneer William Milne of the London Missionary Society established the Anglo-Chinese College in Melaka in 1819, and brought in Chinese-speaking teachers from Canton and Chinese books, and printing equipment from Bengal, and published a monthly proselytising magazine in Chinese, produced by xylography and distributed for free (Harrison 1979: 34; O’Sullivan 1984: 66–67, 70; Rubenstein 2010). The volume of printing in Chinese far outstripped that in Malay. The latter work was supervised by Claudius Thomsen, who was taught Malay by Munshi Abdullah, and resulted in two religious tracts in Malay with small print runs, followed by a Malay spelling book (in Jawi) and Malay–English vocabulary. The Jawi types and matrices had been obtained from Serampore, the main type foundry in Asia, renowned for its exquisite Arabic, Persian and Indian-language fonts. Thomsen also published a quarterly bilingual periodical with the Malay title Bustan Arifin and the corresponding English title The Malay Magazine. Malay printing virtually ceased by 1826 (O’Sullivan 1984: 65; Md. Sidin 1992: 25–28; van der Putten 2006: 410–411; Leow 2016: 63). 4

For an account of early Catholic imprints and translation in Penang, pioneered by Fr Mathurin Pierre Pécot, see Anthony Reid (2009).

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Missionary printing and publishing in Penang, meanwhile, took longer to get going, even though the London Missionary Society had been founded there in 1819. Materials for printing were routinely sent to Melaka. By 1827 the Chinese department came under the direction of Samuel Dyer, who had made preliminary studies of Chinese in Britain and who then learned Hokkien, and stayed in Penang for eight years. With astonishing diligence, Dyer revolutionised typefounding and thus printing in Chinese, preparing a glossary to calculate the number of characters required, reckoned to be 3,000, and then personally undertaking the cutting of punches and matrices for moveable metal types. He then applied those techniques to the missionary printing presses in Melaka and Singapore (Ibrahim 1984; O’Sullivan 1984: 57; Leow 2016: 63–64; DeBernardi 2020: 83).5 The Malay section of the Penang Mission Press was under the direction of Thomas Beighton. A small wooden press arrived from Singapore in 1832 and then an iron press from Calcutta with Malay fonts. The usual range of Christian tracts were translated and printed, but Beighton was particularly noted for his explicit criticisms of Islam which caused offence in the local Muslim community whose leaders made representations to the governor. He also translated John Bunyan’s classic The pilgrim’s progress, taking liberties with the text in a ‘free translation’ to persuade Muslim readers of the errors of their religion (DeBernardi 2020: 90–91). But perhaps the single most interesting publication from the press was Malay poems, written by a Penang-based scribe named Ahmad who worked with Beighton (Md. Sidin 1992: 33, 47). This account of the advent of missionary translation, printing and publishing in Penang and Melaka must seem, on the surface, terribly parochial, a story of earnest evangelicals working in a largely indifferent milieu. But this was not at all the case. The evangelical enterprise criss-crossed the globe. As we have seen, printing equipment was imported from India and Singapore; artisans and teachers came from India and China; titles printed in one mission were adapted and reprinted by others; printing was outsourced when necessary, and not just between the Straits Settlements since devotional texts in Malay were printed in Hong Kong, Serampore, Madras, Cairo, Paris and London; the missionaries themselves were from Europe and the United States and would in time be joined by indigenous converts; and substantial funding was forthcoming from Britain. Perhaps most intriguingly, the London Missionary Society’s main target for proselytisation was not the Straits Settlements at all—they were ‘waiting for China’, in Brian Harrison’s (1990) phrase, a forlorn hope given the tense relations between China and foreign countries before the onset of the Opium Wars but successful thereafter. Ian Proudfoot (1993: 10) summarises this global network succinctly:

5

Typefounding refers to the process in which hot metal is poured by hand into a mould closed by a matrix to produce letters or characters. It is more flexible than xylography, which consists of making engravings on wood for printing.

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Religion had historically always been a major catalyst for the travelling text (and travelling subject) and in the early nineteenth century it found a new champion brokering knowledge through evangelical Christianity. A recent study by Jean DeBernardi (2020) characterises how these processes played out in Penang and Singapore as part of a ‘transnational social movement’, an integral part of what she deftly calls ‘Christian circulations’. These British-controlled port cities, she argues, offered particularly propitious sites for the ‘everyday practices, travels, and network relationships’ that fostered the evangelical project (ibid.: 14). One particularly interesting aspect of these circulations binding the metropolitan Church and local missions in the context of colonialism was ‘evangelical Orientalism’, an important (if overlooked) institutionalised means through which Britain’s Asian empire was advanced in the early nineteenth century (Green 2012, 2015). Rather than the secularised, rationalised and scientific forms of post-Enlightenment Orientalism emphasised by Said (1978), evangelical Orientalism suggests an antisecular and therefore contested view of empire. Here we return to Green’s (2015) notion of the local sites of global encounter and exchange, and his model of the ‘religious economy’, a metaphor for the way that a globally expanding brand of missionary Christianity influenced the societies which it encountered. The Evangelical movement in Britain was associated with religious revivalism in the 1790s and had important roots in Oxbridge Orientalism—drawing together men who combined the production of ‘Oriental knowledge’ and a commitment to Christian evangelism, and who had institutional connections to the heart of the establishment, in Calcutta no less than in London. In this respect, it is not only that knowledge is power; this was not simply a discursive or ideological movement. Evangelical Orientalists acquired social power, created an institutional base and had direct access to imperial networks (Green 2015). Overseas missions were the centrepiece of their project to convert Asia to Christianity, and many of the missionaries who were engaged in Penang and elsewhere in the Straits Settlements were deeply influenced by these ideas and practices. As Green suggests, religious societies became ‘firms’ and the missionaries themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ exporting the true faith. One of the key approaches to advancing this project was the spread of printing operations and the attendant translation of religious texts to distribute their works and in particular to refute their main ‘competitor’, Islam—precisely the rationale behind the efforts in this direction in Penang and elsewhere. One of the most striking and ironic insights of Green’s far-ranging account is the extent to which evangelical efforts relied on Muslim middlemen who knew the languages and religious traditions that were the subject of much of this printed matter (and in the Straits Settlements, Chinese middlemen too). They were eager recipients of the print culture that originated in the metropole and, in turn, would use the missionaries’ organisational approaches and technologies in the name of Islam. In this respect, the towering figure in the context of the Straits Settlements

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was Munshi Abdullah. The son of a writer, and with a command of Malay, Arabic, Tamil, Hindustani and English, Abdullah was a scribe, copyist and translator in the employ of East India Company officials, notably as Raffles’s secretary and interpreter; translated for Chinese and British merchants; taught Malay to Indian soldiers of the Melaka garrison and a whole generation of British and American missionaries; and became a skilled printer and consultant on the Malay language with the Melaka Mission Press and later with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Singapore. In Melaka, for example, he helped prepare Christian tracts for press as well as an English–Malay vocabulary. Gallop (1990: 98) offers a neat summation of Abdullah’s all-round skills: apart from actually operating the press, Abdullah—who deserves the epithet ‘Father of Malay Printing’—was involved with almost every single stage of the printing process, from the initial translating of tracts into Malay and checking the Malay translations of the missionaries; casting metal types; possibly even preparing woodcuts for printing covers of publications; and composing original creative works which were then printed at the mission presses.

He was not averse to criticising the translation efforts of some of the European missionaries. On Thomsen’s translation of the Gospels, Abdullah noted: ‘It was full of mistakes. It contained incorrect renderings of the original meaning and its style was poor. These defects had arisen because of Mr. Thomsen’s obstinacy and lack of understanding’ (Abdullah 1970: 256). If Thomsen could be obstinate, well so could Abdullah. One relatively small example of Abdullah’s translation work gives us a sense of just how much a part he was in relation to the constellation of languages that made the Malay world and how he deployed the cosmopolitan vernacular. In 1835 he translated and published Hikayat Galilah dan Daminah, drawn from a collection of Hindu animal fables called Pañcatantra, originally written in Sanskrit from oral traditions, or Pancha Tand eran ˘ in the Tamil version from which he worked. These tales had found their way into Persian, Syriac and Arabic—Ibn Muqaffa’s version is considered a masterpiece of Arabic literary prose—and were then translated into Hebrew and Latin, and this latter version entered European vernaculars. The tales were popular in Europe as The fables of Pilpay or Bidpai, and provided the source materials for some of Jean de La Fontaine’s celebrated fables, as well as being the origins of several stories in The Arabian nights. In this small way, then, Abdullah was one of the hands who worked this classical travelling text. As with Hikayat bayan budiman, it was a text of multiple transformations, nomadic until it became indigenous, helping to create world literature before ‘world literature’ (Hill 1970: 21; Salahuddin et al. 2013; Taylor 2020). As we have seen, Abdullah worked closely over an extended period with evangelical Christian missionaries, notably the American Alfred North, who encouraged Abdullah to write an account of his own life, and Benjamin Keasberry of the London Missionary Society. Abdullah is best known for three major publications, all written while he was in Singapore. Though overshadowed by Leyden’s version, he produced a translation of a ‘short’ recension of Sejarah Melayu in Jawi, first printed in 1841 and again in 1884 (Abdullah 1841; see Ibrahim 1986; Chambert-Loir 2005). Kisah

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pelayaran Abdullah ke Kelantan (The story of Abdullah’s voyage to Kelantan) was written in 1838 and based on his travels to east coast states. This contained his remarkable and excoriating attack on what he termed ‘Malay feudalism’ which concluded with a prediction of its downfall: ‘their dynasties and customs … will perish … they cannot last, given those conditions … they do not adhere at all … to God’s injunctions and laws but merely follow the dictates of their desires’ (Abdullah 1960: 107; see also Skinner 1966; Shaharuddin 2014: 29–50). Abdullah’s most famous publication was Hikayat Abdullah (The story of Abdullah), written between 1840 and 1843 and first printed in Jawi in 1849, and this version became the prototype for future editions and translations (Abdullah 1849, 1970; Hill 1970: 24).6 This text, above all others, marked out Abdullah’s radical break with pre-existing Malay literary style. A mix of autobiography, history, journalism and reflection, it is lively, colloquial and deeply personal, experimental even. It is also earnestly self-reflexive, implanting his own authorial voice into the text. Among other things, he has plenty to say about the elusive depths and the inner poetry of Malay (making use of proverbs and metaphors to illustrate his arguments, the impress of indigenous forms of thought), the issues that confront the translator, and the sense of achievement and frustration when teaching the language to Europeans. Perhaps with a sly little nod to Leyden, he grumbles at the way foreigners ‘come to this country copying and picking up a smattering here and there, and then they become assertive, saying that Malay is easy to learn and that they can understand it. Is not such talk an outrage to one’s intelligence?’ (Abdullah 1970: 227). In the estimation of his translator, A.H. Hill (1970: 26), Abdullah was the pioneering exemplar of modernity in the Straits Settlements: Abdullah was the first writer in Malay to bring realism to this art, to see events of everyday life from the standpoint of the common experience of mankind and not through the tinted spectacles of legend and romance. His contemporary world was a large one, peopled by a strange and somewhat ill-assorted conglomerate of races. New techniques of living were being demonstrated and standards of conduct and belief unquestioned from the dawn of Malayan history were being freely debated.

Abdullah (1970: 63) himself knew he was living through an era of profound transformation and eloquently expressed this sense of living on the cusp of something unaccustomed: ‘The old order is destroyed, a new world is created and all around us is change.’ The echoes with Marx and Engels’s (1998: 38) famous dictum written just a handful of years later are all too obvious: ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’

6

A fairly recent, and remarkable, journey of Hikayat Abdullah can be found in Anthony Burgess’s sprawling masterpiece Earthly powers (1980), whose protagonist Kenneth Toomey—allegedly W. Somerset Maugham—decides to write a novel based on it. He puts the following words in the fictional Abdullah’s mouth: ‘I, who am called Abdullah and am by trade a munshi or teacher of language, sit here pen in hand remembering. The ink dries on my penpoint but tears remoisten it’ (ibid.: 248).

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Despite his undoubted achievements, not all assessments of Abdullah have been as sanguine as that of Hill and others, including his European patrons. Abdullah’s legacy was contentious, and remains so. The most common criticism, often expressed in crude ethnonationalist terms, is that Abdullah was little more than a mouthpiece for British values and thus a willing apologist in the imposition of colonial rule. Here the idea of his ‘collaboration’ with East India Company officials, Christian missionaries and European merchants is read in its other sense, not as working together but as colluding with the enemy. As Shaharuddin Maaruf (2014: 29) puts it, ‘Abdullah is regarded by many as a traitor to the Malays and a slave of Western imperialism’ (see also Milner 1995: 31ff.; van der Putten 2006). His denunciation of the Malay elite and ‘the injustices of the rajas’, his sweeping assertion of the Malays’ ‘inability to change or modernise their ideas’, and his support for British ‘reformism’ are seen to be beyond the pale in some quarters. Abdullah himself anticipated such attacks. In typically self-confident terms, he dismissed Malay critics in Melaka who looked on the introduction of schooling with fear and loathing: ‘They reviled me because I stood in well with the white people, and considered it a sin that I should teach these men our language. All this abuse and jealousy was, I suppose, because they were ignorant and I was well-informed’ (Abdullah 1970: 128). Much has been written on Abdullah’s mixed legacy, but that is not our main concern here. Rather, it is more fruitful to pursue a line of argument first suggested by Amin Sweeney, who has made a profound study of his role as an organic intellectual. Sweeney (2006) proposes that in amplifying his own self-image and stature, especially in his autobiography (of sorts), Abdullah was in possession of his own agenda, despite the constraints he worked under and not wanting to alienate his patrons: ‘he devised ways to air views critical of the powerful’. His stark criticisms of Malay elites were not an end in themselves. They were, it appears, part of a larger project to make use of the power of vernacular language, and its dissemination through print, to advance a message of individual liberty and justice, the creation of a new ‘public sphere’ in civil society and self-empowerment (imitating his own). The style of writing in Hikayat Abdullah may indeed have been jarring in comparison to the mellifluous tone and paratactic style of traditional hikayat, too ‘foreign’ (Milner 1995: 35). But his text needs to be read precisely in the context of an old world being destroyed and a new one created, and in the epilogue in particular as Abdullah advances a political argument and not just a memoir. In a highly suggestive study, Sanjay Krishnan (2007: 51) argues that Abdullah was self-consciously reading nineteenth-century globalisation from the margins. Hikayat Abdullah is, then, above all an act of persuasion, a search for a rhetorical form ‘commensurate with the way of seeing inaugurated by the era of modern knowledge production’. And it is here that the great insight and skill of Abdullah truly come to the fore. Krishnan suggests that Abdullah was seeking a ‘universal equivalent’ for his worldview. He was looking to provide a realistic and objective account of his life and the modernising forces he encountered, and, at the same time, wished to draw historical and political lessons from this account. In order to capture a time when ‘all around us is change’, to find a language of mutual intelligibility or equivalence, he created a hybrid form— connecting his own personal reinvention as a cultural intermediary with the West

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and the skilful use of a linguistic idiom that demonstrates time and time again his familiarity with Malay culture and a readership which he surely intended to address and influence (Milner 1995: 38). It is also in this sense that Abdullah was an example of the class of transcultural Asian agents—‘journeymen’ or ‘working travellers’— whose ‘self-transformation aimed at rendering them middlemen equipped to move between not only different knowledge systems but also distinct social circles in which this knowledge circulated’ (Green 2009: 205). The commonplace charge levelled at Abdullah—that he was some kind of colonial stooge, that he was merely a copyist (in both senses of the word), that he indulged in ‘literary servility’—obviously strips him of autonomous agency. In fact, we suggest that a kind of mimicry (if that is what it is) and creolisation provided the very means by which writers such as Abdullah (and Ahmad Rijaluddin and Siami before him) ‘answered back’ to the dominant colonial system within which their own work is implicated. Derek Walcott, one of the great poets of hybridity in the English language, in his poem ‘Crusoe’s Journal’, his counter-text to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, writes of the danger to the colonial subject of ‘parroting our master’s / style and voice’. However, Walcott also holds that through mastery ‘we make his language ours’ (Walcott 1969). Something of this order was taking place with Abdullah. The parrot here may serve as a metaphor for colonial cultural supremacy. Yet, it may also serve—in a latter-day spirit of the tale of the wise parrot—as a metaphor for the way indigenous writers answered back to their European patrons, for the construction of something new (see Huggan 1994). Munshi Abdullah was far, far more than an obstinate old clerk, but in the context of early nineteenth-century colonialism he was certainly an ‘odd fellow’.

3.6 Conclusion Translators have usually been the unsung champions of the literary world. Their work is widely enjoyed and consumed but their names are, perhaps for obvious reasons, less renowned than those of writers. And yet literary translators help write the world’s texts for new readers. They do not simply transfer words and texts from one language to another or bridge language differences of peoples from different parts of the world—though these tasks in themselves require great knowledge, skill and sensitivity. Rather, translation is better understood as an act of transmitting cultural material writ large. It is a complex act of communication and, in the process, translation has come to engage ideas, institutions and interests that connect and move human civilisations. This chapter has presented a longue durée account of the role of translation of travelling texts in the making of the multiethnic, multilingual Malay world. It deliberately shifts its analytical focus to early historical epochs in order to demonstrate how cultural/linguistic cosmopolises associated with Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian (in particular) created enduring networks of linguistic borrowing and literary styles, generating far-reaching cultural nodes. The processes of translation and localisation

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went hand in hand, deeply influencing the production of literary forms in the Malay world itself in protean and fluid ways. This was already the cosmopolitan world that existed when the first European intrusions took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In its turn, new interconnections between Asia and Europe spurred the further circulation of texts, as Asian manuscripts found a ready market in Europe and the rudiments of a new translation technology began to take shape. To our mind, both Asian traditions of translation and those that emerged in Europe were the necessary precursors of the quest to create forms of colonial knowledge associated with the extension of formal empire, and in particular under the aegis of the East India Company. Here, Bayly’s notion of ‘continuities even across the ruptures created by the coming of colonial capitalism’ is the keystone of the analysis. In this context, the Straits Settlements of Penang and later Singapore and Melaka emerged as polyglot centres of translation and a new print culture, sponsored both by the Company and by Christian missionary enterprises, as the colonial order generated a novel textual habitus. The history presented here has been illustrated by the stories attached to exemplary ´ travelling or world texts: the anonymous Sukasaptati–Tuti-nama–Hikayat bayan budiman, Bowrey’s Dictionary, Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu and Leyden’s translated Malay annals carrying within it the Alexander/Iskandar legend, and Abdullah’s Hikayat Abdullah, self-consciously reaching to imagine and understand new worlds. These stories also serve to rescue the agency of local writers who were integral to the translation process, and acted as traffickers or brokers of information in helping to make the colonial knowledge apparatus. It is clear from the biographies of translators like Ibrahim Kandu, Ahmad Rijaluddin, Siami and Munshi Abdullah that they were people with a deep kinship with the culture of the Malay world, yet were also located somehow between cultures in the hybrid settings of the Straits Settlements. As travelling subjects, as go-betweens, they undoubtedly carried within them mutable identities capable of mediating across disparate milieus. Their agency was essential in moving ideas and texts across social, cultural and ethnic boundaries. And yet this agency was always constrained, perhaps compromised. Inequalities of power in the colonial state were real, shaped by fickle sources of patronage as much as anything else. The simultaneous feeling of indispensability and exclusion must have been latent, and yet they too were the inventors of a modern Orient. Beyond the attention to these particular texts and individuals, thinking about literary and translation networks also requires exploring the long-term and episodic histories of contacts, selection, borrowing, interpretation and incorporation, the histories of travel—‘from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another’, as Said puts it—and thus the ‘matrix of interaction and exchange’ that emerged over time (Ricci 2011: 2). The worlds that emerge from the stories presented are inherently plural, cosmopolitan and hybrid—in terms of the cultural geographies of knowledge covered, the identities of the actors involved and the types of knowledge assembled. Just four years after Marx wrote about the vast writing machine in London the East India Company would be gone. The shiploads of correspondence destined for the Leadenhall clerks would continue to be transferred elsewhere in the British state

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bureaucracy. All that once seemed solid did indeed melt into air, to be replaced by more intense forms of imperial rule. Before the end of the nineteenth century, a flourishing print culture would take hold in Penang and Singapore, and more slowly in the Malay states. It manifested itself in the rise of literacy, the impulse to standardise language and translate, compulsory schooling, the emergence of enterprising local publishers and a growing literary marketplace. At the same time, this print culture would fashion anew—from indigenous, colonial and international sources— a language and means of framing the narrative of the fin de siècle Malay world as it came to be transformed by the rise of nationalist aspirations, including linguistic nationalism. Drawing on the example of the longue durée of the travelling text, the new print culture would create the means to write back to empire and to write a new society (Hooker 2000; Harper 2013). Acknowledgements I would like to thank Tim Mackintosh-Smith for his reflections on the chapter, and notably for highlighting the Hindu Alexander/Skanda connection and for drawing my attention to Anthony Burgess’s reference to Munshi Abdullah in Earthly powers, and especially for the quip about John Leyden acting like Walter Scott’s munshi. I am also grateful to Muhammad Haji Salleh, Preeta Samarasan, Sandeep Ray and Ooi Kee Beng for helpful insights, and to Helena Dodge-Wan for her meticulous comments and exemplary editing.

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———. 2007. Review: Between iron formalism and playful relativism: Five recent studies in Malay writing. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38(1): 147–163. ———. 2018. Introduction: Surfing the literary waves of insular Southeast Asia. In Tales of the Malay world: Manuscripts and early books, text by Tan Huism, 9–23. Singapore: National Library Board. Raman, Bhavani. 2012. Document Raj: Writing and scribes in early colonial south India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rangarajan, Padma. 2014. Imperial Babel: Translation, exoticism, and the long nineteenth century. New York: Fordham University Press. Ras, J.J. 1985. Review of Ahmad Rijaluddin’s Hikayat perintah negeri Benggala. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 16(2): 341–342. Reid, Anthony. 1998. Southeast Asia in the age of commerce, 1450–1680. Vol. 1: The lands below the winds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2001. Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32(3): 295–313. ———. 2009. Fr Pécot and the earliest Catholic imprints in Malay. In Lost times and untold tales from the Malay world, ed. Jan van der Putten and Mary Kilcline Cody, 177–185. Singapore: NUS Press. ———. 2015a. Early modernity as cosmopolis: Some suggestions from Southeast Asia. In Delimiting modernities: Conceptual challenges and regional responses, ed. Sven Trakulhun and Ralph Weber, 123–142. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2015b. A history of Southeast Asia: Critical crossroads. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Ricci, Ronit. 2011. Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, and Jan van der Putten, eds. 2014. Translation in Asia: Theories, practices, histories. London: Routledge. Roolvink, R. 1967. The variant versions of the Malay Annals. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 123(3): 301–324. Rubenstein, Murray A. 2010. The Protestant missionary enterprise, 1807–1860. In Handbook of Christianity in China. Vol. 2: 1800 to the present, ed. R.G. Tiedemann, 133–174. Leiden: Brill. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 1983. Traveling theory. In The world, the text, and the critic, 226–247. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. Traveling theory reconsidered. In Reflections on exile and other essays, 436–452. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salahuddin Mohd. Shamsuddin, Zuraidah Mohd. Don, Mohd. Zaki b. Abd Rahman, and Sheena Kaur. 2013. Place of ‘Panchatantra’ in the world of literatures. British Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 10(2): 1–11. http://www.ajournal.co.uk/HSpdfs/HSvolume10(2)/HSVol. 10%20(2)%20Article%201.pdf. Accessed 25 Nov 2020. Salmon, Claudine. 2013. Writings in romanized Malay by the Chinese of Malaya—a preliminary inquiry. In Literary migrations: Traditional Chinese fiction in Asia (17th–20th centuries), ed. Claudine Salmon, 277–314. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Shaharuddin Maaruf. 2014. Malay ideas on development: From feudal lord to capitalist. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Skinner, Cyril. 1966. Abdullah’s voyage to the east coast, seen through contemporary eyes. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 39(2)(210): 23–33. ———. 1976. The author of the ‘Hikayat Perintah Negeri Benggala’. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 132(2/3): 195–206. ———. 1978. Transitional Malay literature: Part 1. Ahmad Rijaluddin and Munshi Abdullah. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 134(4): 466–487. ———, ed. and trans. 1982. Ahmad Rijaluddin’s Hikayat perintah negeri Benggala. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller. He previously taught at Manchester University, UK, the University of the Philippines and Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. He is the director of the editorial company Impress Creative and Editorial, the owner of Gerakbudaya Bookshop,

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Penang, and cofounded the arts space Hikayat. He is the coauthor/editor of Asia–Europe interregionalism: Critical perspectives (1999), the writer of the texts for two books of photography: Portraits of Penang: Little India (2011) and Panicrama (2016) as well as numerous articles on film, dance, literature and music. He is currently writing a book on the artist Ch’ng Kiah Kiean.

Chapter 4

In Body and Spirit: Redefining Gender Complementarity in Muslim Southeast Asia Wazir Jahan B. Karim

Abstract This chapter examines ideas of sexual complementarity in formal Islamic discourses, and compares them to cultural perspectives of sexual equality in the Malay world of Southeast Asia based on adat or custom. It argues that Islam does not advocate sexual equality, since it highlights differences of biology, sex and function between men and women. In other words, Islam advocates gender complementarity more than equality, with differences in status and function based in political, jural and domestic leadership. However, the extent to which ideas of complementarity negate or promote women’s empowerment is a more important issue. A predominant indigenous view in Malay society, based on adat, is that the complementarity of sex and gender renders women their own sphere of influence and dominance, which can be as empowering as the public and political roles granted to men through both adat and Islam. This indigenous view opposes mainstream Western feminist theory which advocates gender equality as a necessary universal in modern society. Rather, the argument supports an alternative view that women are significantly empowered as long as they are able to interpret these differences to their advantage by continuing to innovate and take on greater roles in leadership, the economy, their communities and social life. Keywords Malaysia · Southeast Asia · Islam · Gender relations · Indigenous feminism · Cultural discourses

4.1 From Universal to Plural Feminism A prevailing popular view of women in Islam accommodates a universal trajectory in early or first wave feminist theory which emphasises that women’s biology will always make her the ‘weaker sex’, unequal to men and hence of lesser social value. However, persuasive arguments against such universalisms in second wave feminist theory have been made by anthropologists employing cultural perspectives of Wazir Jahan B. Karim (B) Independent scholar, George Town, Penang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_4

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gender (Strathern 1987; Moore 1988; Errington 1990; Karim 1995). These writers are further challenged by third wave feminists who define feminist philosophy through the consciousness of ‘being women’ and ‘taking charge’ of their own sexuality. Culture is ‘within’ rather than ‘without’ the body, and women have to free themselves from the thought that they have been essentially compromised by the masculine gender (Grosz 1994; Stone 2007; Butler 2006). In this chapter, I take a cue from discourses of anti-essentialist feminism, which directly or indirectly support the idea of an indigenous feminism, whether addressing cultural diversities or the physical consciousness of ‘being woman’. This approach challenges discourses of Muslim women’s ‘pristine domesticity’. In Islamic discourses, women are further silenced by the masculine voice which claims authority over the text of the Qur’an. The emphasis on biological differences in Islamic discourses, both formal and popular, may suggest gender complementarity, but they do not necessarily produce a common ‘weaker sex’ nor negate women’s plural and active role in society. Active resistance to these discourses merges practical culture with faith as a vibrant consciousness of being different, yet wholly autonomous and stronger in capacity and productivity than generally assumed. In indigenous feminism, the struggle to reclaim autonomy, credibility and power is supported by a pervasive intellectual movement of feminist activism through reinterpretations of the text of bilateral cultures and the Qur’an, and in day-to-day practices of adat (custom) and Islam. In Muslim island Southeast Asia, local cultural discourses based on practical considerations of women’s work and productivity provide a formal platform for a more complex engagement of women’s empowerment through economic autonomy in an environment where public leadership in religion and politics is largely occupied by men. This enables men to interpret both customary and Islamic laws in their favour, challenging complementarity to mean gender equality—of ‘equal value’. However, although public leadership provides a venue for the assertion of power, it does not diminish or oppress productive women whose control over and management of food production and essential resources, both domestic and commercial, provide them with significant economic autonomy (Karim 1992; Brenner 1998; Blackwood 2008). The discussion in this chapter focuses on cultural discourses and the rise of an emancipatory consciousness in Muslim Southeast Asia which promotes gender equality through practical interpretations of bilateral kinship and marriage. This is predicated on an ideology of bilateralism in synchronicity with practical Islam (Karim 1992, 1995). In farm-based or working-class communities, the practical realities of providing for the family make women indispensable. This trumps male supremacist arguments that faith makes men even more indispensable, for only they are answerable to Allah for the well-being, protection and morality of women. For one, Southeast Asian social systems place equal value on production and reproduction (Peletz 1988; Karim 1992, 1995; Forde and Parker 2008). In farm-based communities, where labour is an essential factor of production, the value placed on reproduction is often higher than the value placed on local-level political leadership and authority. Furthermore, predefinitions of male power through politics and Islam are imaginary macronarratives of gender, generally imported through fundamentalist websites or social

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media where quotes from the Qur’an or hadith are taken out of context. Many of the sources are questionable, based on sermons of travelling gurus who make an income by deriding the sanctity of women in Islam. When individual and family priorities are considered, women have equal or greater capacity to provide basic resources and services for the family. As farmers, petty traders, migrant workers or professionals, they contribute a fair share of the needs of the family in terms of food, shelter, health care, education and logistics. In Muslim Southeast Asia, predefinitions of male superiority are in reality ignored, except in regions of Islamic revivalism such as Aceh which has assumed a new-found patriarchy in sharia, equivalent to customary patriarchy in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India (Mernissi 1975; Sabbah 1988; Roy 1990; Siapno 2002; Parvanova 2012; Kloos 2018). These differences can work against Muslim women who are subjected to male definitions of what they are or what they can be. In Muslim Southeast Asia, practical culture challenges faith and seeks to restore a more balanced or complementary non-universal discourse of gender relations. Malay adat traditions provide informal definitions of social equality by incorporating Islamic ideas that are less ‘essentialist’ or primordial. Using Cressida J. Heyes’s (2000) clarification that essentialism can be metaphysical, biological, linguistic and methodological, essentialist Islam is primarily concerned with the biological. But in Muslim Southeast Asia, these biological differences may provide women with more channels for self-empowerment—offering choices and setting priorities for what they can do best or what they are best for. These choices do not necessarily revolve around reproduction, child-rearing or domesticity but can be channelled into economic productivity (Forde and Parker 2008). However, granted that some forms of work done in the formal and informal sectors are loaded with uncertainties of an often debasing kind, women choose to decide, through local community networks of working women, what they can best do in the context of their disadvantaged socioeconomic and political environment. For example, Minangkabau farmers in West Sumatra, Indonesia, hold onto secured economic livelihoods in rice farming (Blackwood 2008) in contrast to sex workers in the Riau Islands, Indonesia (Forde and Lyons 2008). Productivity is often linked to securing economic stability for families which also facilitates personal wealth and power. The constant search for new opportunities in the modern work sector is both emancipatory and challenging where traditional moral values based in adat and Islam may need to be temporarily cast aside. Ideally an emancipated woman should not engage in laborious work or provide sexual services for money, but necessity may require practical choices to be made. Femininity, chasteness and virtue do not bring in money. Rather, productive work enables women to be financially independent and geographically mobile. The women engaging in this work also share a common worldview in that they ultimately work to obtain their own financial autonomy and to hold their families together, with family stability being a core value in adat. Women and men constantly renegotiate the boundaries of gender relations and morality while conciliatory negotiations are necessary regardless of gender or age. Women or men may migrate to look for work, an elder daughter or son may quit school to provide for younger siblings, and elderly grandparents may become caregivers once again as

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younger parents leave in search of better livelihoods. For the working woman, there is some optimism that this kind of personal autonomy, which extends into the modern work sector, provides further opportunities for education, training, personal development, career advancement and professionalisation. This, in turn, in the decades to come, gives them access to leadership in the public sphere through membership in political parties, engagement in civil society movements, farming and business associations, rural cooperatives or community leadership. Women’s economic autonomy in farming, manufacturing, services and social enterprise has placed family incomes in their hands. In countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, essentialist views of women’s domesticity have not found ground simply because men are dependent on women to harvest crops, process and cook food, market produce, and manage the education and health care of their families. To do this successfully, women have developed extensive networks of workers, caregivers and providers through cooperative principles of sharing and distribution which remain unrivalled in the era of extreme modernity and postindustrialisation (Blackwood 2008). This has led to a different kind of semantics in gender relations, towards the incorporation of more progressive gender-sensitive views. Admittedly, it does not eradicate ideas of male dominance in Islam, but it does contain them and weakens the push towards extreme essentialism.

4.2 Islamic Essentialism and Equality Even if one agrees that Islam advocates essentialist views on women and gender relations, the hermeneutics of Islam provides contextual references regarding male superiority to mean responsibility and not dominance or brute force (Siddiqi 1980; Engineer 1992). Inherent contradictions between ideology and practice exist at several levels of conceptualisation: equality before God; equality within the ummah (whole community of Muslims bound together by ties of religion); and equality between men and women. Of these, equality before God reveals the most easily verifiable manifestation of social and gender equality. Writers like Amina Wadud (1999, 2006) propose that equality before God is the most important manifestation of equality for women, suggesting that it is in the context of the interpretation of the whole of the Qur’an that Islamic essentialism is to be defeated. Equality before God is synonymous with social justice and human rights. It overrides the idea that ‘women are born from men’, the Adam and Hawa (Eve) controversy that women are created from the rib of Adam and are lesser than men.1 The Qur’an describes Hawa as a legitimate partner to Adam rather than a sexual companion (Sarwar 1946). In

1

The logic of human creation in the Qur’an, as stated by Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar (1946), the first Sunni translator of the Qur’an into English, contradicts somewhat the more mystical Christian explanation of Eve as originating from the rib of Adam. All quotations for the Qur’an are taken from Sarwar’s translation, unless otherwise stated.

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Surah Al-Hajj (The Pilgrimage, Qur’an 22:5), a more scientific explanation of human creation is provided: O ye mankind! if you be in doubt as to the rising up again Then surely we have made you from dust Then from a sperm Then from a dot of blood Then from a lump of flesh symmetrical in shape and asymmetrical in shape That we may explain it to you And we cause to stay in the wombs What we please till an appointed term Then we bring you forth as children

This rendition is taken from Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar’s English translation of the Qur’an (1946: 190), which differs from Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s (1954: 242) translation where the word ‘seed’ is used instead of ‘sperm’, and ‘symmetrical’ and ‘asymmetrical’ are substituted by ‘shapely’ and ‘shapeless’. Of the two translations, Sarwar seems to be less influenced by English grammatical rules of gender for he makes a careful distinction between Adam as ‘man’ (biological man) and Adam as ‘mankind’ (humankind). Pickthall appears to equate the two to mean ‘man’ as in the masculine gender. Sarwar translates section 34 as ‘bow down to Man’, while Pickthall has ‘bow down to Adam’. The process of human creation is also repeated in Surah Al-Anbiya (The Prophets, Qur’an 21:116, 117, 121) and Surah Al-Mu’minun (The Believers, Qur’an 23:14). Wadud (1999: 7) states that Qur’anic Arabic grammar can lead to a confusion with respect to male–female representation in Islam. She confirms Sarwar’s earlier argument that ‘although each word in Arabic is designated as masculine or feminine, it does not follow that each use of masculine or feminine persons is necessarily restricted to the mentioned gender’. The language of Surah An-Nisa (The Woman, Qur’an 4) is addressed to men, which explains the reformist message in Islam to rectify the customary practices of Arabs which were cruel to women and children. In Muslim Southeast Asia, customary practices of bilateral adat are closer to the more humanitarian reformist principles of gender relations unlike those in the Middle East, India or Pakistan. Verse 3 of Surah An-Nisa on polygyny is directly addressed to men, so is verse 12 on inheritance and verse 19 on forceful marriage to widows of deceased kin. The controversial verse 34 on wife-beating through a single strike is also addressed to men. The lack of female representation in the surah, then, must be contextually interpreted to suggest that if men are guilty of these acts then it is the guilty party who must be addressed rather than the victims. Since male dominance and institutions of patriarchy have led to various forms of abuse, including sexual abuse, this can only be rectified if men are made aware of the abuses they have committed. That the emotional and psychological disposition of women is not addressed is only correct insofar as the Prophet Muhammad was unable to completely remove institutional barriers to women’s emancipation.

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It is in the context of Islamic jural relations in marriage and inheritance that most doubts are raised on defining complementarity to mean equality. In Muslim societies, institutions of polygyny, inheritance and legal testimony are calculated to such precise mathematical ratios of 1:4, 1:3 and 1:2 respectively that any attempt to define its logic in Southeast Asian adat defeats practical reason. These precise mathematical rules are particularly baffling when Malay, Sumatran and Javanese adat rules of marriage, equal inheritance, matrilocal residence, and equal preference for daughters and sons continue to be practised in everyday life. It is possibly to bridge the holistic hermeneutics of sexual equality before God and the less holistic hermeneutics of sexual equality before ‘man’ that sharia law in Islamic countries like Indonesia (with the exception of the province of Aceh) and Malaysia have sought to impose stringent rules on polygyny and to encourage pakat (muafakat, joint decision-making or cooperation) in relation to faraid, the law of succession in property. Yet another reading of gender relations in Islam is to state that the complementarity of roles—whether biological, economic or social—does not necessarily imply that there is status differentiation. A woman’s reproductive function and her roles as a mother and nurturer to her community are as important as a man’s function to assume economic responsibility and public leadership (Mernissi 1975; Sabbah 1988). Indeed, she should not see herself as equal to men because, as the procreator of humankind, she is inherently superior. Intersexual competition in reproduction is most unlikely. In support of the traditional methodology of human reproduction upheld in the three Abrahamic religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity), the masculine construction of human intellectual history may be flawed. As Michel Foucault (1978) has argued, the discourse on human intellectual history can be challenged through the discourse that women cannot be equated to men in their contribution to humankind since they are the essential element to its future.

4.3 Muslim Southeast Asian and Adat in Practical Life The discussion here focuses on how Muslim women in Muslim Southeast Asia, including regions which are subject to Islamic law like Aceh, can elude, negotiate, ignore, oppose and challenge biological categories which unreasonably define them as women of a preformatted type (Butler 2006). Cultural and historical differences are relevant to their refusal to be confined into domesticity. In order to illustrate this argument, we look at how Malay customary adat has grappled with gender relations, and illustrate this in three ways: in the guiding principles and socialisation that govern everyday relations; in the historical emergence of women’s civil society organisations in the context of the Indonesian struggle for self-rule; and, more briefly, in an assessment of women’s and men’s roles in economic relations. The discussion demonstrates that a Nietzschean worldview, in which dissimilarities are insignificant, may be unacceptable in Muslim Southeast Asia (Geuss 1999: 167–169; Heyes 2000). Malay adat and Islam have been structurally linked for nearly a millennium. The way to understand essential similarities and differences between the practical activity

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of culture and religion is to observe contextual interpretations of social behaviour outside legalistic jural explanations of the ‘acceptable’ and ‘proper’. Adat codes of acceptable and proper behaviour are synonymous with customs (upacara amal) or culture (budaya) and, on the highest level of meaning, suggest group cohesion and social identity pertaining to notions of ethnic exclusiveness and unity (Karim 1992). Generally, to think and do things in a correct or proper way is to act and behave according to adat. A Malay is beradat (with adat) if he or she possesses the most important intimate norms of Malay culture. Adat both symbolically and in a real sense reaffirms identity, culture and civilisation, while modernity enables Malays to be more innovative. Adat is usually nurtured in individuals through informal forces of socialisation— family, elders, kin, neighbours, patrons, leaders—and for this reason rests more comfortably on women who practise it in everyday life. The formal practice of Islam, however, remains a male domain and stands in sharp contrast to the powerful role of women in communal and ritual life. In Muslim Southeast Asia, from as early as the fifteenth century, adat law began to be differentiated by two guiding systems of administration known as adat perpatih and adat temenggung. While adat perpatih was based on an elaborate code of written law, derived from Minangkabau matrilineal principles which enabled women to maintain control over rights of succession to land and other forms of immovable property, adat temenggung was more closely associated with bilateral rules of social organisation, practised by peninsular and Sumatran Malays and Javanese (Peletz 1988; Karim 1992, 1995). The set of adat temenggung was patrilineally structured in its provisions for kinship, but in all other matters significantly bilateral, in principle and content. To date, Malay customary land law, which is an important component of adat, gives recognition to the rights of occupation and cultivation of land, regardless of gender or other kinship principles of ordering relationships according to age, seniority or marital status. This right is pre-Islamic and is transmissible from one generation to another. In land inheritance, adat temenggung provides equal opportunities for men and women to control and inherit land, as long as the person is actively involved in cultivation and economic production. The law also provides for property inheritance for social reasons and pre-emptive wishes through pakat and muafakat (consensual agreement) principles and hebah (gifts distributed before death).This facility has become an adat tradition, commonly utilised by parents to protect daughters, to ensure that land and other forms of immovable property can be distributed more fairly. In marriage, rules of incest are much more strictly defined than in Islam and even more rigorously applied when it involves polygynous intergenerational marriages.2 Marriage among first cousins, cross or parallel, is generally avoided, unlike in the Muslim Middle East where it is encouraged. However, marriage among second cousins is allowed and was common in the past when most marriages were arranged (kahwin kira). Marriage rules for second cousins generally avoid references to ‘cross 2

The only kind of marriage that is customarily allowed among co-siblings is what is popularly known as bisan sebantal—co-parents-in-law ‘sharing the same pillow’. This involves a marriage between the child of a woman’s previous marriage and the child of her husband’s previous marriage.

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or parallel’ since the sex of a cognate of the upper generation is insignificant in the choice of a marriage partner. Marriage to an adopted or foster orphan child is frowned upon in adat and amounts to incest. Marriage to a sister of a wife is prohibited in Islam and adat unless the first wife is divorced. Siblingships are an integral feature of Malay kinship relations and such marriages are believed to disrupt the social fabric of family and society (McKinley 1979; Karim 1992). Other kinds of marriages which are permitted in Islam but frowned upon in adat are intergenerational marriages when the man or woman is significantly older. Even if a man wins over a much younger woman, he has to readily compensate this arrangement with wealth and status. Preferential marriages are between those who are well-suited for each other, have a high degree of compatibility or just look/act similarly; as the saying goes, ‘macam pinang dibelah dua’ (like a betel nut cut into two). One can conclude from Malay adat norms for marriage that equality of age, stature and status seems to be the preferred rule. One symbolic test of sexual equality in marriage is the terms of address or references given to a married pair by close kin and friends (Karim 1992). Whatever term of address a man is given and addressed by before his marriage is transferred to his wife. If he is known as Pak Tam (Uncle Tam) his wife will be addressed and referred to as Mak Tam (Aunt Tam). Similarly, whatever kin name a woman obtains before her marriage is transferred to her husband even if it is a feminine form. If she is known as Mak Rose (Aunt Rose), he will be referred to and addressed as Pak Rose (Uncle Rose). The choice of kin name will depend on whichever group of kin they are with at a particular time—Mak Tam will be her term of address and reference when she is with her husband’s kin and Pak Rose when he is with hers. At wedding ceremonies and other rituals when both sets of kin may be present, a person is called Pak Tam and Pak Rose alternatively, rendering some confusion to observers outside the classificatory kinship network. The maintenance of equal roles and duties in a Malay marriage furthers the ideology of bilateralism—of mutual responsibility, rights and respect between men and women in domestic and communal activity (Wilder 1970; Karim 1992, 1995). The traditionally strong economic position of Malay women is reflected in courtship and marriage where they play a significant role in decision-making concerning choices of partnerships, domicile, management of joint incomes and household expenditure. William Wilder (1970) defines complementarity as equality in marriage with role differentiation that does not denigrate women to a lesser or inferior position in marriage. Southeast Asian Muslim marriages generally provide comparable codes of social and moral behaviour, rendering roles to be more balanced than assumed. Clearly, adat as a powerful agent of socialisation does not encourage radical gender differences. With modernity and access to tertiary education and wage employment, young men and women are equally free to select the kind of lifestyle they desire. Commonly preferred is a practical combination of faith with modernity—patronage of neighbourhood mosques, religious congregations, the theatre, cultural festivals and modern consumption habits.

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When careers are stabilised, marriage is a definite option for both men and women and while men may opt for polygyny at a latter phase in marriage, women are also free to opt out if they are economically independent and can win custody of their children. Decisions are dominated by economic practicality and affordability rather than religiosity. The bilateralism of Malay adat addresses women as an active subject in marriage and family relations and contrasts with the diminished status of women as the passive object of male desire and sexuality in Arabic Muslim culture. Fatema Mernissi (1975), Fatna Aït Sabbah (1988) and Asim Roy (1990) have consistently critiqued Middle Eastern norms of marriage in terms of procreation, sexual gratification and housekeeping, with men extending responsibility over their wife or wives and children. This highlights the male as the object person and the female as the subject. However, adat among Malays, Minangkabau and Javanese advocates more public and multifaceted roles for women. Domesticity is merely a stepping stone for other more productive and public roles which are equally or more empowering. This relationship between public civility and gender was clearly demonstrated in the colonial Dutch East Indies and in the vital contribution of women to the Islamic reform project (Kartini 1920; Katjasungkana 2008; Anwar 2018). The rise of anti-Dutch nationalist ideology over several decades, from the turn of the twentieth century to 1945, revealed a vibrant movement of awareness and conscientisation that rose in tangent with the ideology of bilateralism. Women focused on liberation as both a gendered and nationalist ideology. Emancipation from pristine customs and the practice of pristine Islam became a national struggle which eventually led to the emergence of a women-centred civil society. Positive adat traditions—of civility, neighbourliness, cooperation, family stability and knowledge accumulation—were upheld along with an emancipatory Islam. The first women’s journals advocating change were Poetri-Hindia, founded in Bogor in 1908, and Soenting Melajoe (Malay Ornament), published from 1912 and described as the ‘first feminist magazine in Sumatra’ (Taufik 1972: 217). PoetriHindia became a journal of the well-connected ‘isteri Hindia’ (wives of the Indies), and the women who contributed to it were mostly students, teachers or the wives of teachers in the extensive network of ‘native schools’ (Hadler 2013). The argument that ‘women’s problems had a political solution’ was put forth by Poetri Merdeka (Poetri Mardika) from 1914 and would grow to find expression in the formation of nationalist women’s associations (Cribb and Kahin 2004: 457–458). Meanwhile, one of the founders of Soenting Melajoe was Rohana Kudus (1884–1972), a Minangkabau, who in the tradition of Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879–1904) advocated formal Western education and literacy for women as well as Islamic education (ibid.: 457). Matrilineal values in Minangkabau society promoted the establishment of the first school for women. Diniyah Putri in Padang Panjang was founded by Rahmah El Yunusiyah (1900–1969), a Minangkabau activist. Among the first students were the daughters of future Indonesian and Malaysian nationalists. Diniyah Putri developed its own modern and Qur’anic syllabus, and taught in Dutch, Indonesian and Arabic. The late Aishah Ghani (1923–2013) was a secondary school student at Diniyah Puteri and rose to become Malaysia’s first social welfare minister. In an interview with

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the writer in 1991 she said that this school housed ‘anak-anak kebuangan nasionalis Indonesia dan Malaya’ (children of detained nationalists from Indonesia and Malaya). Riding on this progressive educational movement, from 1928 to 1932 four women’s conferences were held in the East Indies and resulted in the founding of Perikatan Perhimpunan Istri Indonesia (PPII, Federation of Indonesian Women’s Associations) in 1932. Among the causes championed by PPII was the establishment of scholarships for female students and the discouragement of home schooling for girls as well as opposition to polygamy, prostitution and child marriage. In 1932 Isteri Indonesia (Indonesian Women) was also formed with the merger of Istri Sedar (Women Aware) with other women’s groups. After its founding in 1930 in Bandung, Istri Sedar had previously come into conflict with Muslimah Aisyiyah, the women’s wing of Muhammadiyah, which was founded in 1917 and was one of the oldest Muslim women’s organisations. The vibrancy of women’s organisations continued after the Second World War and the final push towards Indonesian independence. While women’s organisations overlapped in their goals and strategies, they tended to formulate their goals within their own groups, which could create ideological divisions (Anwar 2018). After initially failing to create a national organisation bringing together all women’s groups regardless of religion, social and ethnic differences, a single coordinating body was founded in 1946. Badan Kongres Wanita Indonesia (Kowani, Congress of Indonesian Women) was dedicated to the Indonesian revolution against Dutch rule. Putri Mardika was another movement that merged nationalism with gender equality. It challenged the subjugation of Muslim women and questioned the view that spiritual fulfilment and oneness with God necessitated the public segregation, seclusion, exclusion and concealment of women. In 1946, a book entitled Ilmu ketjantikan dan kesehatan sedjati, composed by a writer who assumed the name of Putery Merdeka, echoed the spirit of the movement in her arguments that femininity and womanhood should begin with an ideology of political consciousness (Karim 2020: 242). In her statements is a prevailing Southeast Asian ideology—which is women-centred and relevant to the present times—of the unitary relationship between civility, spirituality and freedom. Although a Javanese, she echoes the thoughts of peninsular and Sumatran Malays on the complementarity of men and women, where difference is not equated with inequality (Putery Merdeka 1946). God is omnipotent but humans have culture The culture of exchange, cooperation and sharing The strong can never be weakened by the weak And the weak can never be weakened further by the strong The strength of men is in the body And the strength of women in the spirit When separated in body and spirit The nation dies The freedom of a nation is dependent upon a unitary vision A weak nation fights for independence and recognition

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Through the spirit of freedom it treasures And only when men and women are free In body and spirit Can a nation be set free From the oppression of the strong.3

Hence women’s emancipation was imperative for liberation from colonial rule, and the fusion of the reformist spirit of Islam with adat created an indigenous ideology in opposition to oppression and injustice—an indigenous feminism and consciousness of being ‘Indonesian’ against the Dutch ‘Other’. The rise of indigenous feminism is also related to male dependency upon women’s farming skills and entrepreneurial acumen. A woman’s longer work hours for farming, harvesting and marketing economic produce for her family evidently increase her partial provision of family finances; the generation of surplus income as savings for festivals and contingencies also have become a part of her multiple responsibilities. Economic productivity and procreation make women essential resources of the farm family and household. But one can similarly argue that Muslim men have also been typecast through biology to be superior humans in society, to the point that women believe them to be. Outside the family, due to their greater access to positions in tertiary education, politics and religion, men may dominate, but only because they have been released from the major share of responsibility in childcare, children’s health and education, financial management, income generation and, for an increasing number of households, professional and managerial responsibilities. Even so, the remarkable rise in tertiary education among second-generation rural women, daughters of female farmers and traders, has made them less dependent on marriage and on male earnings (Devasahayam 2009; Jones 2009). Migrant women depend on their networks of reliable women caregivers (sisters, aunts, grandmothers, neighbours) to nurture their children in their absence.4 A baseline study in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam of the health of children under 12 years old who have migrant parents demonstrates a high dependency on maternal kin and altered male roles towards caregiving (Hoang et al. 2015).5 For ‘left-behind children’, the mother-surrogate system in Southeast Asia enables women to seek work overseas with more ease, compared to migrant women of other regions in Latin America or Asia. Notably, issues of child neglect, arising from women’s diasporas, have not been resolved by ‘left-behind men’ who have made far fewer adjustments than women in providing stable family environments. 3

The first few verses have been omitted. They refer to happiness and peace of the ummah. Translated by the writer from the original text in Indonesian. 4 Female siblingship has been given greater importance with the increasing tendency for women to join the formal labour force. 5 The Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia (CHAMPSEA) study is a collaborative research project aimed at ‘examining both the reconfiguration of familial support systems after parental migration’ and the subsequent effects of these migrations over time on child health in Southeast Asia (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 2020).

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4.4 Popular Islam and Practical Realities Muslim men in Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern Philippines and Thailand acquire popular knowledge on male advantages in Islam in order to legitimise their authority and leadership over women.6 For those who practise orthodoxy, this may be their last bastion of power as they strive to keep women out of the text of the Qur’an which they claim was written exclusively for men. Mernissi (1991) explains this semantic censorship as embedded in Arabic culture, stemming from a prevalent traditional male elitism. By ‘owning’ the text, they have absolute rights over its interpretation and implementation. However, outside the Middle East and South Asia, textual claims of authority and leadership seldom meet social realities on the ground as ‘left-behind men’ come to terms with the exodus of their wives, sisters and mothers to seek work abroad. The significance of monetary earnings and financial autonomy outweighs the rules of seclusion, gender segregation and domesticity. Husbands, fathers and brothers have remained silent on Muslim women’s absence from the household in search of legitimate work, whether locally or abroad. Male clerics, expounding variants of hell for wanton women who ignore the needs of their husbands, have been even more muted on this subject. Women have managed to gain for themselves a significant increase in their economic and financial autonomy and revitalised adat constructs, to their favour, through autonomous or shared economic livelihoods. In adat, hard work and industry are applauded, even if women are required to leave the confinements of the house to seek income, profit and gain. It is common to hear men condemning politicians for spiralling inflation while singing praises of their hard-working wives as they drink coffee for hours on end in the local coffee shop. In comparison, Arabic Muslim values (in contrast to the Southeast Asian situation) introduced a jural interpretation of sexual morality through misogyny. Mernissi (1975) highlights misogynistic ideas in Arab society which perceives female sexuality as an energy which has dire consequences for men. It is both distracting and destructive and prevents them from devoting their energies to the practical and spiritual concerns of Islam. Mernissi argues that this ‘femme fatale’ image of women in early Arab society is paradigmatically reconstructed in Islam through institutions of aurat or modesty, female seclusion, domesticity and polygyny, and so continues to reinforce tradition in modernity. Men ill-versed in Islam continue to interpret these rules through these pristine definitions of the female. Hence, the social value of women in Arab society has not been advanced in any significant way. The confusion among Muslims that men have more rights and that culture is subservient to religion gives increasing weight to rules of interpretation of a more patriarchal Islam and is indicative of an underlying tension in the theory and practice of gender relations. Malay, Acehnese, Javanese and Batak Mandailing women work out their roles through visibility rather than invisibility, mobility rather than domesticity, inclusion rather than seclusion—with the educated middle and upper classes accentuating these roles through academic competitiveness and professional achievement. For example, Tapi Omas Ihromi (1994) states that Batak laws that denied 6

Social media have become important sources of popular information.

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women inheritance over immovable property, such as land and housing, were being challenged by educated Batak women. Similarly, Dina Afrianty (2015) observes that in Aceh non-governmental organisations like Mistra Sejati Perempuan Indonesia (MISPI, The True Partner of Indonesian Women) uses citations from relevant surah to prove gender justice in the Qur’an. In Malaysia, Sisters of Islam (1991) advocates legal literacy to challenge the emergence of pristine versions of male supremacy in Islam. If legal literacy in Islam is the only way to go in future relations of gender then the rule of sharia will move towards a more inclusive definition of gender equality, rendering complementarity to be synonymous to equality in status if not in function. This seems to be the dominant trend today, as demanded by Muslim women to claim their rights to wage work and a career, independent sources of income, access to land, rights over movable property and custody over children. However, while the Qur’an clearly formulates gender complementarity through biology, sex and function, it remains unclear if this implies sexual equality. Scholars such as Muhammad Mazheruddin Siddiqi (1980), Ali Shariati (1980), Fazlur Rahman (1982) and Amina Wadud (1999) have shown how a historical hermeneutical perspective of early Islam would tend to encourage an interpretation based on status similarity or equality while acknowledging differences in biological sex and function. In other words, biological and sexual complementarity did not necessarily equate to inequality. They argue that Islam was primarily a reformist movement concerned with ending social injustices linked to slavery, destitution and patriarchy. The Islamisation of the Arabs was intrinsically linked to ideas of justice—the liberation of men, women and children from slavery, and the liberation of women from the cruelties of men, expressed in slavery, unrestricted polygyny, divorce at will, concubinage, abuse of female orphans in marriage, rape, domestic violence and bondage.7 Principles of equity and justice also prevailed in other economic and social institutions. Islam supported the caliphate based on principles of good leadership rather than patrilineage. The Sunni–Shia conflict, which favoured an electorate based on capability and wisdom versus one based on ascent or patrilineage respectively, led to a permanent split among followers of both schools of thought. Hence, even as essentialism prevails in patriarchal Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian Muslim societies which practise kinship and marriage systems under Islamic law, the essentialised woman in Islam as a universal biological being is a methodological and theoretical error. It can be disputed, both intellectually and popularly, to be too simplistic and naive a view. In meaning, content and application of methodology, feminist politics provides anti-essentialist pragmatics that the ‘differences within’ can lead to spectacular gains in power. Significant results of these ‘differences within’ have been seen in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh where antiessentialist movements, brought on by decades of violence, mismanagement and corruption among male leaders, have debunked patriarchy to be the absolute rule for 7

Hafiz Ghulam Sarwar’s introduction to Muhammad: The holy prophet (1949: 28–29) describes how slaves were captured from wars or obtained from unpaid debts. ‘If loans were not paid, the creditor sometimes took possession of the borrower’s wife and children, or sometimes the wife and children themselves became the subject of a mortgage’ (29). Hence usury (riba) at heavy rates of interest was closely linked to slavery and debt bondage.

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political leadership. Both Muslim and Hindu women have been welcomed as leaders. Indira Gandhi of India (1917–1984) and Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan (1953–2007) were both assassinated in office and while campaigning, but were legendary heads of state in challenging Hindu and Muslim patriarchy. Khaleda Zia and Sheik Hasina of Bangladesh, along with millions of voters, have challenged decades of patriarchy, but have also faced the darker side of politics, political opposition to one another and to other political contenders in a system tainted with corruption and violence. There are examples in fundamentalist states such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen where women are not appointed national leaders because of conservative interpretations of the rule of the sharia rather than women being unable to lead men in public life. Yet in business, commerce and entrepreneurship, Muslim women have made extraordinary gains as corporate managers, directors and owners of global enterprises. The informal then becomes formalised as codes of practice to ensure women equal participation in economic and public life. Malay and Southeast Asian adat as a matrifocal nexus of cultural activity contains systemic institutions of gender complementarity allied to social equality and may eventually influence a more emancipatory Islam to emerge. Elsewhere I have referred to the process of the ‘adatisation’ of Islam (Karim 1992, 1994). It is a view shared by other Southeast Asian feminists that in Southeast Asia hierarchical and socially unequal definitions of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in Islam have become unacceptable through the practice of bilateral gender relations. Religious interventions have not been seen even as women make spectacular gains in formal tertiary education, employment and career development (Errington 1990; Karim 1995).

4.5 Economic Dependence, Fair Distribution and Inheritance The text of the Qur’an endorses the dominant role of Muslim men as the main economic providers and heads of households, making regular decisions over family affairs, in particular over wives and daughters. Ideally, it freed women from income generation to engage in other material, domestic and spiritual pursuits. Fortunately or unfortunately, this did not materialise in Southeast Asia, not only because men were dependent on women’s labour in farming but also because women themselves, in disadvantaged families, sought economic self-reliance to secure safe livelihoods. The norms of adat did not prevent women from being self-reliant; rather they encouraged them to buffer their families from long-term poverty. Women developed social safety nets for their families by drawing upon community-based resources (Karim 2007). They mastered labour-saving techniques in farming and instituted cooperative labour schemes like berderau in rice-growing areas of northern Malaysia and gotong-royong in Java.8 In food preparation, they instituted food exchanges among 8

A group of women would work in different rice fields over a period of two weeks, in rotation, to ensure that every household completed planting and harvesting in individual plots within a day.

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neighbours so households did not have to cook every day during the planting and harvesting seasons. In childcare, women who specialised in traditional midwifery were employed during confinement periods in the postpartum phase.9 The care of infants and elderly women was communal, with nonworking women looking out for and feeding children who played around the neighbourhoods. Although much of this has broken down with rapid urbanisation, displacement of villages and formal education and employment, and the tendency to live close to places of work, many of these institutional practices are still practised among women during marriage, birth, circumcision, pilgrimage and death ceremonies. Indeed, in urbanised townships in Malaysia when these ceremonies are held, cost-saving methods of sharing compounds, parking spaces and contributions of food are extremely common among Malay women. If raw food ingredients were once provided to emphasise communal participation, today a household donates a food stall to provide a specific item like pancakes (apom manis), fried noodles (mee goreng) and sherbet (air bandung). If women previously cooperated through the institution of bentara, voluntary cooking and serving, today they offer monetary contributions to cover the costs of the caterer. Even as the forms changed, the spirit of cooperation, sharing and exchange remain a part of the urban landscape of Malay neighbourhoods. It is interesting to note that Islamic prayers of thanksgiving in recitations of doa and marhaban (songs in praise of the Prophet Muhammad) may be conducted entirely by women in urban areas when permanent female marhaban congregations go from house to house to provide religious services of this kind. They are much sought after for akikah ceremonies when a goat or lamb is sacrificed at a child’s birth. They are rewarded only with food and small gifts and are seldom given monetary payments.10 Islamic rules of inheritance clearly give men a more privileged position in the family and society, but the rule of men obtaining double the share of women is based on their role as absolute economic providers for their unmarried female siblings.11 A woman can always resort to adat pakat-muafakat or equitable sharing of assets if she is an economic provider for the family, although this is subject to agreement by her brothers.12 But more advantageous is her right to claim half her husband’s property accumulated in the course of the marriage (harta sepencarian) should she be divorced or seek divorce. This balances his advantage in inheritance against his 9 Traditional midwives, known as bidan kampung, help during the period known as dalam pantang for 44 days. 10 These congregations are paid a small honorarium and are welcomed as guests when they are invited by wealthy urban families. 11 Compare adat inheritance laws which enable men and women to inherit equally with Surah 4:11: ‘to the male the equivalent of the portion of two females, and if there be women more than two, then theirs is two thirds of the inheritance, and if there be one (only) then the half. And to his parents, a sixth of the inheritance, if he has a son, and if he has no son and his parents are his heirs, then to his mother a sixth, after any legacy he may have bequeathed, or debt (hath been paid).’ Similarly Surah 4:12 enables a man without issue to inherit half of what his wife (or wives) leaves. 12 Notably, this places women at a disadvantage as she still has to negotiate her terms—if any of her brothers disagrees, the agreement will remain a stalemate. Hence, Muslim parents increasingly resort to legal transfers (hebah) of assets and landed property to daughters before death.

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disadvantage in divorce, should he initiate it. But then again Muslim women do not receive alimony. Other than receiving monetary compensation for a hundred days after divorce (iddah), she can claim mutaah or monetary compensation but he is not obliged to give this to her. The complexities of negotiation of rights and responsibilities depend on other factors such as access to good sharia lawyers who are sympathetic to women and prevailing codes of justice in the courts where hakim or judges may be very sympathetic or, alternatively, prejudicial to women. For these reasons and many others, an essentialist view of women in Islam is simplistic and unjustified. Among the middle classes in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, trends of division of property based on hebah or gifts before death are on the rise.13 Malay families tend to see the division of property by faraid as unjust to women. They generally prefer a fairer distribution under adat in which sons and daughters can inherit equally or where daughters can inherit more when they have additional family responsibilities. This view may grow in strength as professional working women accumulate fixed assets and place equal importance on their daughters’ futures.

4.6 Domestic Violence and Why Islam Addresses This Issue Wife-beating in Surah An-Nisa (Qur’an 4:34) is mentioned in the context of adl (Malay: adil) or justice and the role of men as economic providers for wives and children.14 Hence the hermeneutics of ‘wife-beating’ relates to uncivil or disobedient women who are unappreciative of husbands who provide for the family. In response to some of these perplexing and frustrating enquires of women in Islam (from both Muslims and non-Muslims, academic or non-academic), Wadud (1999) argues that patriarchal structures existing in the Arabian Peninsula at that time may not have been completely wiped out through Islam, but at least here we have the possibility of men respecting the dignity of the institution of marriage and the family. She states that the ‘way to believe in the whole of the book’ is to recognise the ‘“spirit” of the book and accept its worldview, vision and ultimate intent’ (Wadud 1999: 81). If wife-beating was permitted, at a time when domestic violence was rampant, it may have been to control and limit rather than encourage domestic violence in men who assumed brute force to be a norm in a marriage. The verse also reminds Muslim men that marital conflict cannot be arbitrarily resolved through violence. The occurrence 13

In Malaysia, Muslim women who have acquired their own assets transfer their property to their daughters before their death to ensure they will be cared for and this is done through wills (wasiat) or public trusts such as Amanah Raya. 14 ‘Wife-beating’ is generally interpreted as an act of cruelty in Islamic family law. A brochure produced by Sisters in Islam (1991: 6–7) explains the Qur’anic inclusion of wife-beating (single strike or daraba) as a last resort, after reconciliation (through consultation or a cooling off period of at least a night) fails. If discipline and self-control are exercised, a single strike would not be necessary.

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of gendered essentialism in the Qur’an and hadith, however, does not support more severe forms of domestic violence, including female infanticide, a rampant practice at the time (Surah Al-Israh, Qur’an 17:31). Islam recognises that discipline and reason do not come easily to men, so there must be laws to restrict those who are vindictive and violent to women without reason. Islamic law, if implemented properly, acts as a system of redress against abuses of women and children in Muslim society. Indeed Malay women have sought divorce over minor quarrels, verbal abuse and threats to beat them (Karim 1992). Ideally, women can enjoy gender complementarity equivalent to sexual equality if reason is preferred to emotion. However, emotion is both positive and negative energy, negated by an overindulgence in passion but enhanced by its transformation into spirituality. Similarly, the rejection of polygyny by Malaysian and Indonesian Muslim women is not opposed by jurors since the arguments for justice for all four wives is hard to achieve. Even if all four wives are equally beautiful, talented, productive and faithful, it is impossible to practise equal treatment for all since equal devotion of time, money, gifts and emotions may be hard to sustain. The strict rule of equal justice in polygyny clearly prevents it from being a logical extension of monogamy. Verse 129 of Surah An-Nisa clearly states: ‘Ye will not be able to deal equally between your wives, however much you wish to do so.’ It is impossible to be equally fair to all women. It challenges the Kantian logic of the separation of reason from emotion, since polygyny more likely describes situations of men being impatient with passion rather than impassioned with reason (Kant 1999). Hence, in reality the Qur’an poses an impossible human situation and advocates monogamy. If gender justice in polygamous marriages cannot prevail, a Muslim woman can make an argument for mental cruelty if she feels she has been neglected financially or emotionally (zahir batin). The revelations of the Prophet Muhammad on issues of justice in marriage directly and indirectly addressed the psychological and mental traumas of women living under patriarchy and polygyny. Yet many would say that this empathy which Islam has for women is not enough. Why allow polygyny at all? Why include a provision for ‘wife-beating’ restrictive as it is? Why allow men to inherit more than women? The hermeneutical context of Islam often gives way to the more populist sentiment that ‘women’s rights are human rights’. Why does Islam provide for greater male representation? Why does it accommodate to the psychological virtues of men living under polygyny? Why is it sympathetic to those who cannot enjoy the virtues of life with one woman? Why should it even legitimise men to extend their amorous attentions to other women? And knowing how difficult it is for men to be fair, how can a woman possibly feel well treated when she is told that she has to share her husband with another woman, or two or three? Consider the mathematical errors in this logic. Theoretically, a man’s access to four women and his wives’ access to one fourth of a man can never be equal or just by any formula. Hence this provision is probably another way of saying, logically speaking, that polygyny cannot bring justice to women, so should not even be tried. But the woman’s position in polygyny and her rights to decide on the kind of marriage she prefers remained unstated (Surah An-Nisa, Qur’an 4:129). All these queries, usually raised by literate Muslim women and increasingly by Muslim feminists, suggest that

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a strong anti-essentialist sentiment runs through popular and public discourses of women living under Islamic law (Mernissi 1975, 1991; Sabbah 1988; Wadud 1999; Siraj 1993, 1994; Karim 1993). The endocentric bias, a problematic and controversial area of discussion in Islam, ignores the reformist ideology of the Qur’an as a doctrine of social equality which forbids pristine laws derived from Arab lineages and clans. The rampant practice of female slavery, female infanticide, multiple or serial marriages and divorces, marriage to young orphans, abuse of the property and inheritance of orphans, and domestic violence and abuse of young women and children in slavery and marriage are all prohibited in Islam, and are referred to as the dark ages of barbarism or ignorance (jahiliyyah). These pre-Islamic practices may continue but are severely condemned by governments that have instituted just Islamic laws. If women and children are abused in Muslim Southeast Asian societies, it is not so much a manifestation of an intrinsic male advantage which allows this to happen as a breakdown of Muslim women’s voices to claim representation, credibility and power. Spheres to be heard remain limited but the male advantage is evoked in asymmetrical discontinuity with women’s increasing activism, legal literacy, economic empowerment and ability to support their families with minimal assistance from men. Divergent views on the practice of the law of Islam and adat reflect an anti-essentialist pluralistic system. The volatility and fluidity of gender relations in Southeast Asian Muslim societies enable women to make meaningful changes in cognitive and legal interpretations while the exercise to transcend boundaries in search for sources of empowerment runs through everyday life.

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Peletz, Michael Gates. 1988. A share of the harvest: Kinship, property, and social history among the Malays of Rembau. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pickthall, Muhammad Marmaduke. 1954. The meaning of the glorious Koran: An explanatory translation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Putery Merdeka. 1946. Ilmu ketjantikan dan kesehatan sedjati. Jakarta: Gunung Agung. Rahman, Fazlur. 1982. Islam and modernity: Transformation of an intellectual tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, Asim. 1990. Sexuality—an Islamic historical perspective with special reference to South Asia. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 13(2): 17–43. Sabbah, Fatna Aït. 1988. Women in the Muslim unconscious. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press. Sarwar, Hafiz Ghulam. 1946. Translation of the Holy Qur-an. Woking: SMS Faruque. ———. 1949. Muhammad: The holy prophet. Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf. Shariati, Ali. 1980. Fatima is Fatima, trans. Laleh Bakhtiar. Tehran: Shariati Foundation. Siapno, Jacqueline Aquino. 2002. Gender, Islam, nationalism and the state in Aceh: The paradox of power, co-optation and resistance. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Siddiqi, Muhammad Mazheruddin. 1980. Women in Islam. Delhi: Adam. Siraj, Mehrun. 1993. Women under syariah law in Malaysia, ed. Wazir Jahan Karim. Penang: Women and Human Resources Studies Unit, Universiti Sains Malaysia. ———. 1994. Women and the law: Significant developments in Malaysia. Law & Society Review 28(3): 561–572. Sisters in Islam. 1991. Are Muslim men allowed to beat their wives? Kuala Lumpur: Sisters in Islam. Stone, Alison. 2007. On the genealogy of women: A defence of anti-essentialism. In Third wave feminism: A critical exploration, ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, 16–29. London: Palgrave. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 1987. Dealing with inequality: Analysing gender relations in Melanesia and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taufik Abdullah. 1972. Modernization in the Minangkabau world: West Sumatra in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Culture and politics in Indonesia, eds. Claire Holt, Benedict Anderson, and James Siegel, 179–245. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wadud, Amina. 1999. Qur’an and woman: Rereading the sacred text from a woman’s perspective. 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Inside the gender jihad: Women’s reform in Islam. London: Oneworld Academic. Wilder, William. 1970. Socialization and social structure in a Malay Village. In Socialization: The approach from social anthropology, ed. Philip Mayer, 215–268. London: Tavistock, Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth (ASA) Monograph 8.

Interview Tan Sri Aishah Ghani. Interview: Kuala Lumpur, 12 March 1991.

Wazir Jahan B. Karim is Professor Emerita at Universiti Sains Malaysia. With a background in anthropology, she has written extensively on minorities including indigenous Orang Asli, gender relations, globalisation, conservation and heritage. Her notable publications as sole author include: Ma’ Betisék concepts of living things (1981), Women and culture: Between Malay adat and Islam (1992), Feasts of Penang: Muslim culinary heritage (2013), Boria: From passion play to MalayJawi Peranakan parody (2018) and The global nexus: Political economies, connectivity, and the social sciences (2020). She has edited or coedited Emotions of culture: A Malay perspective (1990), Gendered fields: Women, men, and ethnography (1993),‘Male’ and ‘female’ in developing Southeast Asia (1995), Cultural minorities of peninsular Malaysia: Survivals of indigenous

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heritage (2002) and Straits Muslims: Diasporas of the northern passage of the Straits of Malacca (2009). She is the founding director of the Women’s Development Research Centre at Universiti Sains Malaysia, founding president of the Southeast Asian Association for Gender Studies, and founder of the Academy of Socio-Economic Research and Analysis. She is writing a memoir to be entitled Being a woman: A personal journey to feminism.

Chapter 5

Our People and the Life of Government: The Quest for the Good Life in the Kelabit Highlands at the Edge of Malaysia Valerie Mashman Abstract The oral history of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak, Malaysia, has remained a muted component of the discourse of national history. Yet, as this case study reveals, it can be a source of insight into the perceptions and aspirations of its multiethnic populations. An oral history collected at a longhouse in the Kelabit highlands of Sarawak, at the margins of the Malaysian nation-state, conveys how crucial the inclusive identity lun tauh (our people) was for the ancestors as they migrated with their allies to find a safe place to live. The history moves on to a time that is called ulun perintah (life of government), which describes their quest for assistance from the agent of the Brunei sultanate in putting down their enemies who lived in Dutch Borneo. In the aftermath, the agency of the ancestor hero Tai Iwan is revealed as he gives (and not pays) tax in the form of wild rubber and leads in peacemaking rituals to encourage the tribes living in the headwaters to come down and settle on the main river, within the reach of perintah (government). A common thread that runs through the history is the quest for a good life, ulun nuk doo’. This mission motivates the migrations of lun tauh to find fertile soils for abundant rice harvests, the search for the life of government, with consensus in the community, reinforced by the values of peace-making. This is history garnered through the value indigenous people give to their experiences, which is unlike national and postcolonial histories that represent people on the margins as the helpless victims of colonial and state power. This affirms their agency and their capacity to have an impact on episodes of history. Keywords Malaysia · Sarawak · Indigenous people · Oral history · Migration · Agency

V. Mashman (B) Institute of Borneo Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Kota Samarahan, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_5

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5.1 Introduction The oral history of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak has remained a muted component of the discourse of national history, yet, as this case study reveals, it can be a source of insight into the perceptions and aspirations of its multiethnic populations. An oral history collected at a longhouse on the edge of Malaysia, in the Kelabit highlands of northeastern Sarawak, conveys how crucial the inclusive identity lun tauh (our people) was for the ancestors as they migrated with their allies to find a safe place to live. The history moves onto a time called ulun perintah (the life of government) which describes their quest to seek assistance from the agent of the Brunei sultanate in putting down their enemies who lived in Dutch-controlled Borneo. In the aftermath, the agency of the ancestor hero, Tai Iwan, is revealed as he gives (and not pays) tax in the form of wild rubber and leads in peace-making rituals to encourage the tribes living in the headwaters to come down and settle on the main river, within the reach of perintah (government). In addition, Tai Iwan and his allies established the fort at Lio Mato, bringing government into their own realm. A common thread running through the history is the quest for a good life, ulun nuk doo’. This is what motivates the migrations of lun tauh to find fertile soil for abundant rice harvests, the search for the life of government, with consensus in the community, reinforced by the values of peace-making.

5.2 History and Oral History on the Margins The voices of minority groups have been overlooked in the body of colonial and nationalist history in many places, including the documentation of minority voices, and this is certainly the case in Malaysia. Since the 1960s, history has been instrumentalised as a political tool for uniting in nationhood the component parts of Sabah, Sarawak and peninsular Malaysia, despite the very different experiences of colonialism in each region (Khoo 1979: 311). One consequence in Sarawak is that indigenous ethnic groups have remained identified by the idiosyncrasies of Brooke era administrators’ ideas of bounded homogenous categories. There was no historical understanding of the fluidity of peoples’ movements and relationships facilitated by extensive river systems, which gave rise to heterogeneous ethnic identities across a landscape devoid of political borders. Groups became stereotyped and labelled with fixed identities to better facilitate the government’s policies for social control through pacification and taxation. This situation has been highlighted by those such as Farish A. Noor (2009: 79) who observes that history written in the post-independence era has been uncritical of the notion of the fixed racial categories introduced in the colonial era. These texts often negate the heritage of a racially mixed Malaysia, composed of heterogeneous rather than homogenous communities. To establish a balance, Farish points out the need to re-evaluate this situation and to take a multivalent view of history: ‘Till today, Southeast Asia does not have a popular history of its peoples

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even though much of what remains of the ancient history of the region was built by the people themselves’ (Farish 2009: 131). Lee Kam Hing (2005: 181) takes this argument further, identifying the need for ‘retrieving the history of indigenous society and people … integrating the story of immigrant communities and of new regions such as Sabah and Sarawak into the Malaysian story’. This chapter contributes to this endeavour by using the discipline of anthropology to interpret oral history and uncover underlying concepts. The oral history method considers the experiences of marginal people who have been ignored in the past as significant as documents and records. At the same time new and different information is provided from the margins (Lai 1998: 101). This discussion is based on an oral history of the Kelabit longhouse of Long Peluan. This was told as three narratives by the headman, Malian Tepun, in 2010 (Mashman 2018) (Fig. 5.1). The recording of these narratives at this time is significant to the community as claims on land by various parties, ranging from logging companies and road-building projects to their Penan neighbours and recent newcomers to the community, had created a need for the community to understand their rights to land, and these issues recur as themes in the narratives. The first part of the Long Peluan history recalls shared alliances across river systems and across borders uniting listeners in stories of warfare against enemies, with episodes of survival, and migratory journeys across the landscape in precolonial times. The vital knowledge of land and territory circulated through the narrative acts as a means to negotiate contemporary government policy, which does not readily acknowledge the existence of customary lands. While dominant national history overlooks marginal minorities on the borders, this narrative provides very relevant insights into the social cohesion created by the acceptance of mixed identities that has enabled the survival of multiethnic communities for millennia in Borneo. Long Peluan is a Kelabit longhouse in the headwaters of the Baram River, which is known locally as the Kelapang River, in northern Sarawak (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). Fig. 5.1 Malian Tepun. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2016)

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Fig. 5.2 Long Peluan. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2011). Note The main longhouse burned down in 2018

Fig. 5.3 Long Peluan and its environs (Map drawn by Lee Guan Heng)

Long Peluan is remote; the area is served by a twice-weekly rural air service. The alternative is to hazard an eight-hour journey along the logging road. Before the arrival of the road, the journey took three days trekking across mountainous country and a six-day journey by motorised longboat. Close to Long Peluan is Long Banga, the home of Sa’ban, Kenyah and Lepo’ Keh communities, and Long Beruang, a Penan settlement. Downriver, just beyond Lio Mato, live the Ngurek at Long Semeyang, who are recognised as the first people to settle on the main Baram River in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries (Sellato 1995: 28). They have oral histories relating to stone monuments, places, alliances and ancestors living in the area of Long

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Peluan (Jalong 1989). The heterogeneous nature of the Long Peluan community is typical of central Borneo where it is possible to find several different language groups such as Kelabit, Sa’ban and Lepo’ Keh in the same longhouse and where everyone can speak and understand the others’ languages. This is because newcomers entering the community through kinship, marriage and adoption become easily assimilated.

5.3 Heterogeneity in Malaysia: A Review The openness and fluidity of the notion of lun tauh reflects a lack of concern for ethnic categories in daily life, which is more generally characteristic of Sarawak. For example, Tom Harrisson, the curator of the Sarawak Museum from 1947 to 1966, challenged the legacy of the Brooke administrators’ systems of classification of ethnic groups, as he maintained that people in Borneo do not see themselves in this way: ‘they cannot think of themselves as named, tabbed, static, classified groups’ (Harrisson 1958: 295). At this juncture, it is useful to consider what is meant by ethnicity. In the Malaysian context, ‘authority-defined ethnicity’ originates from colonial censuses and is imposed by the state for the purpose of governance; it often differs from how people actually identify themselves on an everyday basis, which derives from processes of interaction, as suggested above (Shamsul 2004: 147). Ethnicity here is not the same as a broader concept of cultural identity. Identity is related to processes of cultural construction and transformation and the various forms and levels of identity can never be taken to be complete and firmly established. They are always in the process of ‘becoming’ (King 2013: 6). This notion of identity as a process is linked to shared experience, which comes from close coexistence, and the sharing of food, water, histories and knowledge (Linnekin and Poyer 1990: 8). This is explored as the inclusive notion of lun tauh through the longhouse narrative. At the same time, it is set against the exclusive reified ethnic construct of ‘the Kelabit’. These contrasting ideas of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, flux and fixity and definitions such as everydaydefined ethnicity and authority-defined ethnicity, which are imposed by the state, feature in analyses of ethnicity in Sarawak and Malaysia (Shamsul 2004; Chua 2007; Thambiah 2009). These terms are reworked in this analysis of the first Long Peluan narrative, which shows how both of these shifting views, fluctuating between fluid identities and fixed ethnicities, are underpinned by the pursuit of standing (doo’). To begin with, it is important to describe how the Kelabit came to be so defined as a consequence of contact with the Brooke state and how they embraced their fixed ethnic label, which contrasts with the fluid relational identity of lun tauh.

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5.4 Kelabit Ethnicity and the Kelabit Highlands The truth of Geoffrey Benjamin’s (2002: 8) adage that tribes came into being with the formation of the state is supported by the case of the Kelabit whose name was given by Charles Hose, a Brooke colonial administrator. It is said that when a group of visitors told him through an interpreter they were ‘Lun Pa Labid’ he mistakenly heard ‘Kalabit’. Thus, they became labelled as ‘Kalabit’ with the Brookes’ policy of identifying the tribes under their rule (Lian-Saging 1976/77: 4). As a consequence, when Kelabit leaders came to Marudi to seek the protection of the Brooke government, they began to accept being classified as ‘Kalabit’. The Kelabit represented groups of different mutually intelligible dialects, speaking a common language, from different river systems in the highland plateau, identified as ‘Kalabit Country’ in an early map by R.S. Douglas (1912a) (Fig. 5.4). For the Kelabit, the act of being so named by a British administrator was not a colonial imposition but something prestigious.

Fig. 5.4 Kalabit country in Ulu Baram. Source Douglas (1912a)

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Fig. 5.5 Kelabit women wearing bead caps and necklaces in Bario. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2011)

The Kelabit thus define themselves against the outside world and their neighbours through their own ethnic classification, as Kelabit. This assumes an authoritydefined and fixed reality. The term authority-defined, which conveniently contrasts with everyday-defined, describes the way the ethnic label is officially prescribed by the Malaysian government through its policy of classifying its population (Shamsul 2004: 147) and is perceived as one of the ‘hegemonic tools’ that is utilised for the purposes of governance (Gomes 2013: 11). This idea of ethnicity is linked to primordial and essentialising indicators of identity that are associated with attachment to place, genealogy and objectified culture. More specifically, these relate to the Kelabit language, location in the highlands, stone monuments, Bario rice, the bead culture, the tradition of name-changing on the birth of children and grandchildren, and descent through belonging to a particular longhouse (Fig. 5.5).

5.5 Our People, Migrations and the Search for Fertile Land The first narrative describes the migrations of lun tauh with the Ngurek in the Bahau River basin at a time before the political border was established. From there, under the leadership of a charismatic leader Telen Sang, they eventually moved to Long Moyo’ in the upper Kelapang where they left signs of their sojourn in the form of stone graves, menhirs and dolmens along the river system. They fought together to ward off an attack by the Lepo’ Tepu. This incident reinforced the identity of lun tauh but they had to separate to flee their enemies, with the Kelabit going upriver into the headwaters and the Ngurek moving downriver. The Kelabit group split again across a watershed, with the majority going to the Bahau River, and others came to a place near Long Di’it where land was very fertile as many tuar (Bischofia javanica) trees grew there. This explains how lun tauh separated and are now scattered across the

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tributaries of the Bahau and Krayan rivers in Kalimantan, and in the Kelapang in the upper Baram River of Sarawak. Megaliths and fruit trees are identified as evidence of the occupation of territory in the upper Baram. The narrative concludes that the stone culture on the landscape belongs to the Kelabit. The narrative indicates a dynamic and heterogeneous history of population in the Kelabit highlands. It recalls a time when there was a close and fluid relationship between the people on the Kelapang River and those on the Bahau due to the absence of the territorial borders, and it uses the inclusive idea of lun tauh to denote this unity. The story recounts the migrations of the Ngurek to Long Upun on the Bahau in Dutch Borneo, where they lived with the Sa’ban of Pa’ Nar, who according to the narrative ‘are considered as lun tauh’. Today lun tauh is an inclusive term, which conveys the idea of ‘us’—the Kelabit, the Ngurek and the Sa’ban as a group of people, each with their own identity, but related to each other. Lun tauh is used today in everyday life by Kelabit themselves to denote relationships within the Kelabit community and their neighbours and this can include, depending on the context, a church district or daerah, fictitious kin who are related through adoption and ties created through marriage. The context for the use of the term is relational and inclusive, and its features are fluid and flexible. It is often used today when addressing bigger groups, such as mixed church congregations or big political events in the highlands, or weddings, name-changing ceremonies and funerals. The use of the inclusive lun tauh identity has been passed down from a time when the Kelabit, Ngurek and Sa’ban were neighbouring groups forming alliances against common enemies on a river system, sharing kinship, resources, cultures and languages. In order to survive, they needed to keep their populations at a viable level to form work parties for farming, hunting groups and trading expeditions. The cognatic kinship system, which acknowledges descent on both male and female sides, enables wide kinship networks. Thus new members to the community are assimilated, not just through marriage but also through arrangements of fictive kinship, adoption and blood brotherhood. In this way, longhouses survived over time through these open relationships and their identities were often elusive to outsiders (see Scott 2009: 266). So lun tauh relates to people who have come together in multiethnic villages and settled with heterogeneous families and relatives as lun ruyung. After the attack by the Lepo’ Tepu, it was clear that the allied groups of lun tauh had to move as they were under threat of counter-attack. Under such circumstances, Southeast Asian upland groups often split up and ‘moved out of the way’ (ibid.: 209). The Ngurek, Sa’ban and Kelabit separated in different directions. Thus the Kelabit became identified as highlanders, occupying the niche of the highlands in the narrative, and their identity became shaped by their territory. Moreover, Malian Tepun’s second narrative (discussed below) outlines how the allegiance with the Ngurek continued in future generations as the Ngurek transported the Kelabit by boat to the administrative centre of Marudi. The episode of the attack of the Lepo’ Tepu shows that the Ngurek and Kelabit had lived together as allies against a common enemy, yet when their lives were under threat they each decided to separate according to their skills for survival in differing terrains. The resolutions made about whether to stay put or move on, retreat to the

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hills or go downriver, are examples of choices they made at times when security was paramount. Accordingly, the communities further split and were identified with two separate territories in the upper Baram and Long Di’it on the Kelapang River. This is an example of the continuously changing nature of longhouse communities, which are often rebuilt with slightly different hybrid populations, a process aptly described by Peter Metcalf (2010: 313): ‘Whatever categories colonialists thought they had discovered, longhouse communities were founded, grew, went into decline, and dispersed, in a process of formation and reformation that paid no attention to ethnic “boundaries”.’

5.6 Lun Tauh and Doo’ (Standing) At this point, it is useful to explore the relationship between the idea of lun tauh and the indices of doo’ (standing) which maintain and create sociality. This is because the migrations of lun tauh that are described in the narrative were fuelled by the desire to have a better life (miyuk) and the quest for doo’. People sought land that would yield greater surpluses of rice or provide better protection from enemies. At times chiefs competed against each other for followers when groups separated. People would have followed the chiefs with better standing, and this would have also implied the ability to protect their followers. Even when groups separated they were bound to those they had lived with and would be able to seek those kin and allies when needed. Chiefs such as Telen Sang represented the martial qualities (inan lalud) that were necessary to lead followers into battle and to survive in warfare. To mobilise followers, chiefs had to demonstrate their standing, which was assessed by how they related to people, such as the ability to provide for others through self-discipline and hard work, hospitality and generosity, the sharing of food, the repayment of loans and good manners. These qualities are measured comparatively by the community, sometimes openly, sometimes obliquely. The unarticulated purpose behind creating, maintaining and increasing standing is to give rise to bigger social groupings as lun tauh, crucial for survival. The way people subsist and survive is by coming together as lun tauh. The system of values maintains the relationships needed for this, through the prestige associated with being good at hunting and rice farming and the importance attached to the sharing of food and participating in reciprocal labour.

5.7 Lun Tauh: Land and Ethnicity Malian Tepun, the narrator, outlines places within the territory of Long Peluan and Pa Di’it, sharing his knowledge and indicating his authority and standing. The description of places in the landscape passes on knowledge of where the ancestors previously cleared land, and the identification of rows of fruit trees further implies tenure

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to be claimed by the descendants of those who planted them. The narrative is thus a vehicle for the mental mapping of territory for the community, at a time that has become particularly urgent because of dramatic changes in the landscape caused by road building and logging, and because the young are away earning their living offshore or in coastal cities. Opportunities for different generations sitting down by the hearth to talk to each other are becoming few and far between (Fig. 5.6). The narrator emphasises the cemeteries and stone mounds in the area are signs of previous Kelabit settlement: ‘In every place where the Kelabit have lived, there are standing stones and stone slab graves where human bones are buried … this land in the headwaters of Kelapang belongs to … the Kelabit people’ (Fig. 5.7). The narrative is thus not only about the kinship between the Kelabit and the Ngurek, who together with the Sa’ban share the history of lun tauh, but it is also about passing on the significant features of the landscape along the upper Kelapang Fig. 5.6 Sharing stories. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2016)

Fig. 5.7 Megalithic stone grave at Long Peluan. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2013)

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River, with its tributaries, pools, paths and stone culture. The narrative declares that this is the territory of the Kelabit, while it also contradictorily suggests that the Ngurek and the Kelabit together were the first people in the area. Significantly, what the narrative does not consider is the association of the Ngurek with the stone culture, which has now become an important feature of Kelabit claims to customary land. The Ngurek have their own versions of their time of occupation in the area which I have described and analysed elsewhere (Mashman 2017). The narrative presents a paradox: it recounts an inclusive history of lun tauh, set during a period of alliances in warfare, and at the same time it makes an assertion of sole tenure of land. This denotes the land is defined as belonging to the Kelabit and this is explicitly an exclusive notion. As a result, there are two models of identity conveyed through the narrative. The first consists of the fluid everyday reality of the heterogeneous lun tauh, who had shared histories, were interrelated and had an inclusive mixed identity. The second is ‘the Kelabit’, the fixed authority-defined ethnic group, which derived its identity from the classification of peoples by the Brooke administration, carrying with it an exclusive claim to territory. This is reminiscent of another example of a claim to tenure of land which is narrated by the Kelabit elsewhere: These cultural landmarks are revisited as indications and proof of the occupation of the highlands by the Kelabits.… Quite clearly they lived and exclusively occupied the highlands as part of their ancestral homeland for generations from time immemorial. (Bulan 2003: 45)

These assertions of Kelabit sovereignty over their neighbours overlook histories of those such as the Sa’ban and Ngurek who also have narratives relating to building stone monuments and the time they spent together as lun tauh with the Kelabit. This argument negates the idea that anyone else could have lived in the highlands before them and ignores that their ancestors in a previous time may have assimilated a people who were there earlier (Ingold 2000: 132). In order to unravel this contradiction, it is useful to consider the purpose of the headman-narrator, which is both to evoke a wider social world and to assert his power and knowledge of the domain as a means for affirming his own standing. He recounted this narrative at a time when land available for the community was very much reduced to a limited area of community forest due to the effects of forest fires a decade earlier as well as logging activities. In addition, the people of Long Peluan are facing conflicting land claims with the Penan upriver at Long Beruang who settled in the early 1960s with the consent of the Long Peluan community. In time the Penan started to farm on land that had been previously cleared by Long Peluan farmers, with an informal agreement that this land was on loan to them. The memory of this understanding has become lost in time, and in Long Peluan there is resentment that the younger generation of Penan and new Penan migrants to Long Beruang do not recognise the previous history of the land. For this reason, the Kelabit are uncertain about their future sovereignty over their own territory. Therefore, the narrative concludes by reinforcing their claims on their customary land through the stone culture—through the association with a fixed notion of Kelabit identity which is exclusive.

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5.8 Summing Up Identities The first Long Peluan narrative recounts that in earlier times the ancestors of the southern Kelabit were heterogeneous, related to and allied with the Ngurek and the Sa’ban whom they regarded as lun tauh. The Ngurek are recognised as the first people on the Baram River and their migration story is shared with the Kelabit. This is an inclusive fluid model of identity based on past alliances, which contributed to the survival of the longhouse. Moreover, this fluid concept is used today contextually to embrace inclusive groupings at kinship, longhouse or wider multiethnic levels. It is a relational concept and part of the everyday-defined reality of daily life, which enables day-to-day transactions to take place. On the other hand, a more fixed model of homogenous ethnicity comes with the message that the land in the Kelapang belongs to the Kelabit people, despite the parallel history of coexistence with the Ngurek and the fact that the Ngurek also had a stone culture. This fixed notion of Kelabit identity can be interpreted as a reaction to the contestation of territory, and excludes other people with whom identity and allegiances were shared. The ethnic construct of ‘the Kelabit’ has become a bounded, political identity represented by its own leaders, much in the same way as other ethnic groups in the nation-state. For example, for the Malays, it has meant the forgetting of earlier histories of migrations and the identification with a specific domain. Malays are ‘assigned a more or less fixed, stable modern identity anchored in a particular territory through the suppression of the possibility of alternative narratives’ (Kahn 2006: xxiii). James Scott (2009: 263) outlines the process of the adoption of fixed ethnicities with the rise of the state in the following terms: The creation of … ethnicities in this sense might be termed the standard mode of claimmaking by stateless people who interact with states.… Those who successfully stake a claim to resources on this basis acquire a powerful reason for embracing the new identity. By the same token, they exclude others from access to these same resources. Those thereby excluded and forced into a less desirable niche are often reciprocally ethnicized.

Identity works at two levels for Long Peluan. At one level, the institutional identity of being Kelabit has been embraced with great enthusiasm out of a desire for recognition as a minority indigenous group by the Malaysian nation-state (Amster 1998: 28). At another level, there is the history of lun tauh which recalls alliances and migrations of a people who are a ‘consciousness of kind’, who come together through kinship, marriage and transnational economic networks, and who represent the value of the potential relationships and the social world of the narrator. This sociality is rooted in and generated by a value system. The epic journeys of lun tauh that are described in the narrative were motivated by the desire for improving well-being and the quest for a better life. People wanted to live in a place that was protected and where land was fertile enough to provide surpluses of rice needed for the big feasts that lubricated both social and political life. At certain times when groups separated, potential leaders competed against each other for followers. The leaders received support based on their effectiveness in warfare and their skills in uniting people. Even when groups separated, people were

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loyal to their kin and allies as lun tauh when needed. So the objective of maintaining the standing of leaders was to increase the size of groups of lun tauh, essential for survival. This is because the value of standing comes into actuality ‘as part of some larger social whole’ (Graeber 2001: 70). On the one hand, lun tauh reflects a complex history of relationships with other ethnic groups tracing back to migrations across precolonial Borneo. On the other hand, the formation of the ethnic label ‘Kelabit’ dates back to interactions with the Brooke government, the precursor to the modern Sarawak state. Each view also reflects a longer history of interaction with different parties. Nonetheless, this may have inspired both of the divergent views of ethnicity and identity evoked in the narrative, as different ways of negotiating relationships with the state, neighbours and fellow community members of multiethnic descent. From this, it is possible to argue that the idea of lun tauh serves a significant role in mitigating conflict and discord within the community and with their neighbours. This theme continues to the next phase in the history with the continuing story of the alliance with the Ngurek and the era of government and peace-making.

5.9 The Quest for Ulun Perintah, the Life of Government The second narrative, entitled ‘The quest for the life of government’, deals with Tai Iwan, an ancestor hero, and his alliance with the Ngurek chief Aping Nyipa, and his mission to end warfare emanating from across the border. This came about by seeking the intervention of both the Brunei and Brooke authorities. The latter eventually supported an expedition to raid Tai Iwan’s enemies at Pa Ibang. This led to Tai Iwan engaging in peace-making, giving taxes to the government and summoning lun tauh from over the border to build a fort and a government office at Lio Mato. Around this time, his descendants and other family members set about moving downriver to be closer to the fort, and Long Peluan began to be established as a longhouse settlement.

5.10 The Journey to Meet the Government In the second narrative, the grandfather of the headman-narrator, Tai Iwan, emerges as the ancestor hero accompanied by Aping Nyipa, the Ngurek chief and a significant ally, as they made a journey, symbolically taking a new route on foot across the headwaters and by boat downriver to seek ulun perintah (life of government) with the representatives of the Brunei government. Both leaders featured in the official reports of the Sarawak Gazette, as did some of the episodes described in the narrative. This journey marked the beginning of a new era and was the first of several visits made to the centre of power as they engaged with ending warfare and the processes of the formation of the Brooke state. Ulun perintah was a period characterised by peace-making, not only by the colonial authorities but also by the ancestor hero of

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the narrative, reflecting his autonomy and agency. Ulun carries a wider connotation than just the biological idea of ‘life’; it conveys provision, protection, well-being and peace. It is only used in the context of human lives. The relationship between Tai Iwan and Aping Nyipa and the journey to Marudi are significant. They demonstrate what it meant to have allies embraced by the term lun tauh. In fact, Aping Nyipa was related to the Kelabit through his marriage to Dayang Ubong from Pa Butong and he created a network of alliances through kinship for the Kelabit and the Ngurek, so much so that outsiders deemed the Ngurek to be ‘Kelabitic’ (Rousseau 1990: 20). This illustrates the significance of marital alliances that meant that communities were politically interlinked and leaders’ status was augmented. As Metcalf (2010: 62) observes: ‘the prestige of particular leaders often extended beyond their own communities, so that their precedence might be admitted by leaders in other houses.’ The alliance not only increased the combined political strength of the Kelabit and the Ngurek but also boosted the role of Aping Nyipa as an interlocutor between the Brooke administrators and the Kelabit which was acknowledged in the reports of the resident (Douglas 1905: 130). This relationship is also important for the Long Peluan audience, almost all of whom are related to the Ngurek either through one of the founders of the longhouse, Araya Ajin, whose father was Ngurek, or through Aping Nyipa’s descendant Ngau Langgat, who married Bungan Lian of Long Peluan, or through the descendants of Olo and Jangin of Pa Di’it (Fig. 5.8). The journey follows a route on foot rather than following the main Baram River (Fig. 5.9). This is because the narrative is set at a time when there were no settlements Fig. 5.8 Bungan Lian, who married Ngau Langat, a direct descendant of Aping Nyipa. (Photograph: Osart Jallong 2016)

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Fig. 5.9 Tai Iwan’s journey (Map drawn by Lee Guan Heng)

that could provide shelter. Indeed, the Penan word for the river is Ba’ Kusan which means ‘empty river’. Travelling by boat on the main river presented the risks of unknown enemies lurking in the tributaries and the natural perils of the eddies of the many rapids. Nonetheless, the Kelabit, like other upriver groups who negotiated the mountainous country of the headwaters, were able to challenge the political and military control pursued by downriver groups by their territorial flexibility (Walker 2002: 4). The Ngurek were very important to the Kelabit as they provided access to the alo’, Brunei Malays, in Marudi (Jalong 1989: 165). Brunei traders possessed prestige items, such as beads, gongs and jars, that were greatly desired by the Kelabit. In turn, the Kelabit supplied them with the commodities that were crucial for the economic prominence of Brunei as a trading centre with China, such as camphor, rhinoceros horn, resins and bezoar stones.1 These transactions may have taken place directly or indirectly through intermediaries, such as upriver chiefs, who were often bestowed with the title of raja, including Malian’s own ancestor Raja Ubong, who served as the agent of the Brunei traders and court officials. This indicated that trade created a locus of power and the currency of such titles enhanced the prestige and standing of upriver chiefs and contributed to the establishment of local hierarchies (Walker 2002: 13). 1 Camphor was a significant item of trade for the Brunei sultanate (Horton 1995: 353). Although botanical studies have not identified camphor-producing trees in the highlands, camphor trees (kayu kapan, kayu buda) are found in the forests of Long Peluan. People from Pa Di’it and the highlands used to collect camphor and take it down to Marudi to trade until the 1940s (Christiansen 2002; Pearce 2006).

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Fig. 5.10 Presentation of flag at installation of Penghulu Freddie Abun, Long Lellang. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2013)

Tai Iwan was given the flag by the representative of the Brunei government to take back as a potent symbol of his allegiance to perintah. The flag guaranteed a safe passage through the areas where communities were loyal to the government. This is an example of use of the symbolism of law and order to signify the locus of authority. Local tradition has it that the Kelabit looked on the Brooke flag with reverence and awe and children were not allowed to touch it.2 The flag is still used during the ceremony of installation of new community leaders in the highlands (Fig. 5.10). Tai Iwan is portrayed as the local big man or ‘man of prowess’, a man of action. In order to solve the problems of incursions into his territory, he readily went on another journey to seek the assistance of the government. It is not clear which government was in power and this is not relevant, as the narrator’s intention is to focus on the agency of Tai Iwan, who conveys the message that his followers accept government as they want peace. He is seeking the protection of government to deal with these attacks from his enemies, as there is an implicit understanding that his people should not retaliate against their enemies. He arranges with the centre of power in Marudi for an expedition to attack Pa Ibang, where their enemies are causing a lot of trouble, and although his role is that of a coordinator rather than an actual war leader it boosts his standing in a time-honoured manner. The events in the narrative are supported by official reports of a meeting between Tai Iwan and the resident Charles Hose in June 1903 when Tai Iwan came to Marudi to pay tax and to report that they had suffered four attacks with three people killed by people from the Krayan in the previous four years. The purpose of the visit was to seek permission to attack after the harvest with help of Baram Kenyah ‘under a responsible chief’ (Hose 1903: 171). The expedition did not take place until 1905 because it took time for the Brooke officials to negotiate the conditions of government support for an expedition to the Krayan with the Kelabit. Acting as a go-between, the Ngurek chief Aping Nyipa reported problems in establishing the terms of engagement in battle (Douglas 1905: 130). 2

Ramy Bulan, Personal communication.

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5.11 Peace-making and the Life of Government The theme of Tai Iwan’s journeys to meet government recurs as a motif in the narrative and is a reflection of the narrator’s own motivation as a headman to act as a link between his village and government. The ‘life of government’ came about with the end of warfare and peace-making and it is widely recognised that this was an era of considerable change. The narrative recounts that Tai Iwan requested that the tribes living in the headwaters come down to the main river so the Kelabit could catch boats from one settlement to the next with greater ease, as they were dependent on others to take them along the main Baram River. He set about peace-making on the Baram despite the fact that there were disparaging voices speaking against him. He did this by distributing his home-grown tobacco and partaking in rites of blood brotherhood. The nature of the blood brotherhood rituals varied with the reciprocal licking, sucking and the swallowing of blood. Blood was also extracted by making a cut on the hands or forearms of the parties involved. The blood was placed on tobacco which was then rolled into a cigarette, and invocations were on occasion made to ‘their god and all the spirits of good and evil to be witness of this tie of brotherhood’ (St. John 1974: 107). Then the parties inhaled the smoke of the tobacco that had been dipped in blood of each party, accompanied by invocations to the spirits, or the sprinkling of the blood of fowls and pigs on the parties. Such a pact was supernaturally binding, and betrayal incurred supernatural sanctions (Rousseau 1990: 100). For the Kelabit, who wanted to travel to Marudi or to visit relatives in the Krayan, the making of blood brothers meant becoming adopted as brothers into a community (palap dinganak, sebila’). Once this ritual had been undertaken, the whole longhouse would provide shelter, protection and the means for safe journeys. After these rituals, which took place between individuals on their own terms, as the narrative explains, people lived peacefully. Relationships forged between families of blood brothers continued for subsequent generations, as many Kelabit testify. For example, in the 1950s Tama Pasang, the headman of Long Peluan, had a blood brother, Tama Ubong Ose, the headman of Long Apu. Subsequently, Tama Pasang called his son Ose in honour of his blood brother, and the families continue to say in touch (Fig. 5.11). This demonstrates how blood brotherhood created crucial social networks, adding a further layer to the invisible threads of lun tauh, and thereby increasing the standing of chiefs. Trade flourished with peace-making and this encouraged settlement on the main Baram River in the manner that Tai Iwan had requested. However, moving down to the main rivers from the tributaries and headwaters took time. Douglas (1910: 17) observed in 1910 that people were moving down the Akah and the Silat: ‘All these people are moving towards the main river and building fine new houses.’ Two years later he reported: ‘Information was received from Penghulu Tama Lawai Jau that he and his people were all moving out of the Pata River into the Ulu Baram and that they had already reached Long Pata’ (Douglas 1912b: 101). The following year, Kenyah Penghulu Oyong Jau reported: ‘The Kenyahs are gradually moving out of

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Fig. 5.11 Tama Pasang whose Kenyah blood brother was Tama Ubong Ose. (Photograph: Nicholas Kusing 1972)

smaller rivers into the main river below Lio Mato’ (Douglas 1913: 7). Eventually, as the Kenyah Badang settled at Lio Mato, alliances were made through adoptions and marriages to people in Long Peluan. For example, Malian Tepun’s mother, Keling, was adopted by a Kenyah family and returned to Long Peluan when she married, and Selon Buling married a Kenyah Badeng, Seling Ngau, and lived at Lio Mato (Fig. 5.12). The narrative states that Tai Iwan returned to the fort at Marudi to give taxes voluntarily rather than to pay taxes in the form of wild rubber (wang asin). The Kelabit were the last tribe to submit to Brooke rule on the Baram, as by 1891 the Kayan and the Kenyah had accepted colonial authority (Rousseau 1990: 32). In 1898 some 26 chiefs and a couple of thousand Kelabit came to a peace-making ceremony in Marudi (Hose 1898: 121). Being very much in a minority, they had no choice but to accept the terms of Brooke rule. If households did not have the means to pay tax immediately there was no pressure; payment was accepted later and in the meantime tokens were accepted: ‘Most of them have paid in their tax and those who could not this year paid $2 each a house as a “tanda” and have promised to pay in full next year.’ The giving of tax was incorporated into adat and the rituals of peace-making: ‘Native oaths to ensure peace were performed according to their customs in my presence by the killing of pigs. And after the tax had been paid in and they had expressed their wish to be loyal to the government’ (ibid.). In addition, the Kelabit managed to sell rubber in Marudi. Hose ‘helped them sell their rubbers in the bazaar for the unusually high price of $ 105 a picul, which greatly surprised them when they found out what they could buy with the money’ (ibid.). So the incentives to harvest wild rubber were not merely to secure the protection of

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Fig. 5.12 Selon Buling who married a Kenyah Badeng from Lio Mato. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2013)

government through giving tax but also as a means of entering the cash economy. The government thus succeeded in aligning its own interests of increasing rubber exports to meet the needs of the world economy with the interests of the upriver communities who needed prestige ritual items such as jars, gongs and beads to maintain the standing of their chiefs and practical objects such as cloth, knives and axes. The ‘giving’ of taxes to the Brooke administration continued a tradition of offering rice or jungle produce to the representatives of the Brunei sultanate as a symbol of loyalty to their authority decades previously (Pringle 1970: 162). The representatives of the Kelabit community continue the custom today of giving rice at the end of Ramadan to those at the head of government, such as the chief minister or the governor; as one informant explained, ‘not to curry favour, but to make them part of us’. The concept of taxation, which was given and not paid, was undertaken to include others within their sphere of lun tauh. While the government used this act as a sign of submission and acceptance of authority, and many other groups such as the Iban rebelled against paying taxes, the Kelabit perception of this was different. It was understood as means of incorporating government into their world. Eventually, whenever government servants visited the highlands, they became part of the inclusive sociality that characterises the nature of Kelabit hospitality. This is reinforced by a custom which continues to today, the conferral of Kelabit names and ethnic dress on visiting dignitaries and to those holding the highest offices in the state. To the Kelabit, this is a means of bringing such people into their own realm, creating great access and opportunities.

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Fig. 5.13 The fort at Lio Mato. (Photograph: Valerie Mashman 2011). Note The fort at Lio Mato stands on its original site with some of the original adze-hewn planks used for the walls of the first storey. It is possible to view the lock-up and the store on the ground floor, and the office space and the area used for the market tamu on the first floor. It is the site of the local agriculture office.

5.12 The Building of the Fort at Lio Mato The narrative continues with the exploits of Tai Iwan. As the return journey to Marudi from the highlands to pay tax would have taken at least two months, he moved to build a fort at Lio Mato, the furthest navigable point on the Baram River, together with his allies and kin, lun tauh from upriver and Dutch Borneo. His power was boosted by the active support of those identified as ‘border tribes’ by the Brooke administrators. The building of the fort symbolised the agency of Tai Iwan and upriver peoples in bringing a centre into their own domain (Fig. 5.13). Tai Iwan is on record as having asked for the fort, as a request to build a fort at Lio Mato was received in 1908 ‘from the Kalabit chiefs Tingang, Tuai Iwan and Galih Ballang in the head of the Bram, and the chiefs of the Leppu Asing and Saban tribes who live on the border line’ (Douglas 1908a: 156). The building of the fort by the people of the upper Baram and the Krayan over the border was a consequence of a series of peace-making ceremonies between the tribes over the border and the Kelabit. Douglas (1908b: 172) received a report in May 1908 that ‘all Kalabits in Ulu Baram and the Leppu Asing and Saban tribes had held a meeting at the house of Tingang, the Kalabit chief and the Leppu Asing and the Sabans wished to tender allegiance to the Sarawak Government and they asked a fort to be built at Lio Mato’. This had come about through delicate negotiations in the Krayan by a Ngurek chief, Sawa Lawi (also known as Maping Kuleh), and Wan Bayar, a Kayan chief (Clayre and Usat 1997:19).3 In August 1908 the Sa’ban and the Krayan leaders went 3

Beatrice Clayre and Balan Usat (1997) do not attempt to link the transcription of their oral account within a time frame. I am estimating that their account relates to the 1908 peace-making in Marudi rather than the 1898 event. This is because the Sa’ban began paying their taxes for three years until the Dutch arrived as they thought they were part of Sarawak. This is in keeping with the narrative

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down to Marudi where they were joined by some three thousand Kayan and Kenyah for major peace-making ceremonies (Douglas 1908c: 263).4 It is said that the Krayan group and the Sa’ban continued to ‘give’ tax for two years and then when the Dutch came they stopped and sent their money to the Dutch instead (Clayre and Usat 1997: 19). In this way they would enjoy protection when they brought forest products to trade in Marudi. The Sa’ban remember that it was at this time that they started to use iron axes for cutting wood. The acquisition of these tools was possibly an outcome of the ease of trade which peace-making had brought about. In fact, the fort was built under the supervision of Bua Hassan, a Brunei Malay trader, who was contracted to build it for $500 on the understanding that the Kayan and Kenyah would supply the timber (Douglas 1909a: 89). In June 1909 all the able-bodied men were working on the fort (Douglas 1909b:158). The official date for its completion is gazetted as 1911. The fort was rebuilt in 1918, using much of the original building material (Leh and Datan 1997: 4). The building of the fort was undertaken on condition that the Kelabit move downriver. They ‘have promised to move downriver if the fort is built to within a day’s walk from it and the Kenyahs in the Upper Baram have arranged to move out of the tributaries’ (Douglas 1908a: 156). This was the time when Tai Iwan’s relatives from Long Di’it founded Long Peluan. The narrator’s message is that the life of government should be accepted rather than challenged. The narrator asserts the value of ulun perintah in longhouse communities where survival depends on consensus and unity. Perintah is a powerful force to be partnered with rather than contested. The opposites of consensus—disagreement and discord—prevent people from working together and lead to people leaving the longhouse. The ultimate goal of peace means maintaining ‘the social unity of the community’ which ensures the survival of the longhouse (Bulan 2008: 157).

5.13 Conclusion Long Peluan’s first narrative conveys two versions of identity. One version is inherent in the history of lun tauh, which evokes the alliances and migrations of a heterogeneous people who are a ‘consciousness of kind’ (Rousseau 1990: 117) and who stand for the value of the potential relationships and the social world of the headmannarrator. Moreover, this fluid identity is used today to embrace inclusive groupings, at kinship, longhouse or wider multiethnic levels. It is a relational concept and part of the everyday-defined reality of daily life, enabling day-to-day transactions to take above and other sources (Topp and Eghenter 2005: 77). The Dutch established a military post at Long Nawang in 1911 for the whole of the vast Balungan area (King 1990: 17), and there was a report of a Dutch military presence ‘on the borders of Kalabit Country’ under Captain van Gusderen Stort (Douglas 1912b: 101). 4 According to entries in the Sarawak Gazette this took place on 6 August 1908, a month or so after the peace-making held at Tingang’s house.

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place. The other version is the authority-defined ethnic identity of being Kelabit associated with the stone culture on the river system and the land that, in the words of the headman-narrator, ‘belongs to the Kelabit people’. This is despite the narration of a corresponding history of living with the Ngurek and the fact that the Ngurek had a stone culture. This reified notion of Kelabit ethnicity can be comprehended as a reaction to claims on land by different parties, such as transnational corporations for logging and road building, recent migrants and the Penan, which have created a need to validate rights to land. This issue is underlying and not openly discussed, due to its potential to arouse conflict within the community. The process of becoming Kelabit has meant overlooking other narratives in their history, which leads to the view that no one else may have lived in the highlands before them. It overlooks the possibility that their ancestors in a previous era may have assimilated an earlier people. This process has led to the establishment of the niche of the Kelabit highlands whose physical and metaphorical borders are maintained by the Kelabit. This creation of ‘the Kelabit’ has been embraced with great enthusiasm out of a desire for recognition, which creates a position for themselves as a minority group. The Long Peluan history expresses a common theme of migrations in search for new fertile land through journeys to the centre of government in Marudi, in order to obtain for the good life (ulun nuk doo’). In the first narrative, it is found at Long Di’it where lun tauh can live together in a place that is protected from enemies and where the soil is fertile for growing rice in abundance. In the second narrative, it is identified as living the life of government, in consensus. In addition, the term ulun ‘life’ conveys the living of the ‘life of government’ through agency and participation, rather than succumbing to the imposition of colonial rule or missionary influence. This is history that is garnered through the value that indigenous people assign to their experiences, which is different from national and postcolonial histories that portray people on the margins of society as helpless victims of colonial or state power. Such an approach is realised by using oral histories that show how indigenous peoples manage their lives through their value system and how their own perceptions account for their actions (Walker 2002). Most significantly, this reinforces ‘why the Kelabit have been active agents and subjects of their own history’ (Bala 2008: 83) and the wider view that ‘that people may be able to affect the course of history in some sort of way’ (Graeber 2001: xii). It also represents what is meaningful to the narrator and his audience, and this is how he creates his world through the narratives. Acknowledgements I have been associated with Long Peluan and the Kelabit community for nearly 40 years through marriage. This chapter is adapted from part of my PhD thesis in social anthropology (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 2018). Fieldwork took place through participant observation and unstructured interviews during visits to the Long Peluan area and related settlements from 1984 to 2000 and from 2010 to the present. In 2012 the award of a Dana Principal Investigator grant through UNIMAS and a Zamala scholarship assisted this study. Many thanks to Poline Bala and Peter Nwanesi Karubi and to friends who have supported and encouraged my work, including Jennifer Alexander, Ann Appleton, Oliver Claycamp, Jayl Langub, Louise Macul, Stephanie Morgan, Katharine Pearce, Oliver Venz and John Walker. I also acknowledge my debt to headman-narrator Malian Tepun, and not least to my husband Ose Murang and daughter Alena Murang who accompanied me on this research journey.

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Khoo Kay Kim. 1979. Local historians and the writing of Malaysian history in the twentieth century. In Perceptions of the past in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid and David G. Marr, 299–311. Singapore: Published for the Asian Studies Association of Australia by Heinemann Educational Books. King, Victor T. 1990. Introduction. In A journey among the peoples of Central Borneo in word and picture, H.F. Tillema, ed. Victor T. King, 1–27. Singapore: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Culture and identity: Some Borneo comparisons. Universiti Brunei Darussalam: Institute of Asian Studies, Working Paper Series No 1. Lai Ah Eng. 1998. Some experiences and issues of cross-cultural fieldwork in Singapore. In Oral history in Southeast Asia: Theory and method, ed. P. Lim Pui Huen, James H. Morrison, and Kwa Chong Guan, 98–115. Singapore: National Archives of Singapore and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Lee Kam Hing. 2005. Writing Malaysia’s contemporary history. In Nation-building: Five Southeast Asian histories, ed. Wang Gungwu, 163–190. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Leh, Charles, and Ipoi Datan. 1997. A guide to Baram Regional Museum, Fort Hose, Marudi, Sarawak. Kuching: Sarawak Museum. Lian-Saging, Robert. 1976/77. An ethno-history of the Kelabit tribe of Sarawak: A brief look at the Kelabit tribe before World War II and after. BA graduation exercise, Universiti Malaya. Linnekin, Jocelyn, and Lin Poyer. 1990. Introduction. In Cultural identity and ethnicity in the Pacific, ed. Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer, 1–16. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Mashman, Valerie. 2017. Stones and power in the Kelapang: Indigeneity and Kelabit and Ngurek narratives. In Borneo studies in history, society and culture, ed. Victor T. King, Zawawi Ibrahim, and Noor Hasharina Hassan, 405–425. Singapore: Springer. ———. 2018. A history of lun tauh our people at the borders of the Kelabit highlands: From warfare to the life of government and to the life of Christianity. PhD dissertation, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. Metcalf, Peter. 2010. The life of the longhouse: An archaeology of ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearce, Katharine G. 2006. The flora of Pulong Tau National Park. Kuching: Sarawak Forest Department and Yokohama: International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO). Pringle, Robert. 1970. Rajahs and rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak under Brooke rule, 1841–1941. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rousseau, Jérôme. 1990. Central Borneo: Ethnic identity and social life in a stratified society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scott, James C. 2009. The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sellato. Bernard. 1995. The Ngorek: Lithic and megalithic traditions in the Bahau area and an interdisciplinary sketch of regional history. Unpublished report. Shamsul A.B. 2004. A history of identity, an identity of a history: The idea and practice of ‘Malayness’ in Malaysia reconsidered. In Contesting Malayness: Malay identity across boundaries, ed. Timothy P. Barnard, 135–148. Singapore: Singapore University Press. St. John, Spenser. 1974. Life in the forests of the Far East: Travels in Sabah and Sarawak in the 1860s, vol. 1. Singapore: Oxford University Press. (Orig. publ. 1862). Thambiah, Shanthi. 2009. The paradoxes of diversity and commonality in identity formation: The ethnicisation of the Bhuket of Sarawak. In Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, present and future, ed. Lim Teck Ghee, Alberto Gomes, and Azly Rahman, 323–345. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Topp, Lene, and Cristina Eghenter, eds. 2005. Kayan Mentarang National Park: In the heart of Borneo. Jakarta: World Wide Fund for Nature Denmark with World Wide Fund for Nature Indonesia. Walker, John H. 2002. Power and prowess: The origins of Brooke rule in Sarawak. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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Valerie Mashman is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Borneo Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. She was previously a research fellow at the Sarawak Museum. Her research interests in the field of anthropology examine issues of oral history and narratives, values and social change, indigeneity, gender and material culture with a particular focus on indigenous peoples of Borneo. Her recent publications include: Gender analysis: Shifting cultivation and indigenous people. In Shifting cultivation and environmental change: Indigenous people, agriculture and forest conservation, ed. Malcom F. Cairns (2015, as coauthor); Stones and power in the Kelapang: Indigeneity and Kelabit and Ngurek narratives. In Borneo studies in history, society and culture, ed. Victor T. King et al. (2017); ‘Looted in an expedition against the Madangs’: Decolonizing history for the museum. Volkskunde 120(3) (2019).

Chapter 6

Positioning Bajau Identities as Bumiputera: Challenges and Potentials of Leveraging Environmental Justice and Espousal of Islam in Sabah, Malaysia Fadzilah Majid Cooke and Greg Acciaioli Abstract Bajau identity in Sabah, Malaysia, has been a vexed topic because, despite having historically been viewed as a ‘native’ group, Bajau have operated as a minority with respect to other more dominant groups. Aware of the scholarly tendency to treat Kadazan-Dusun-Murut (KDM) as the defining element of contemporary political and cultural life in Sabah, this study treats KDM nationalism as the background to the positioning of discourses and practices of the relatively smaller groupings of Bajau, primarily the coastal sea-oriented Bajau. Important to the background are the gains (although small) made by KDM of attaching identity to place as ‘natives’, disrupting dominant views about being Bumiputera to include non-Muslim as well as Muslim ‘natives’ of Sabah (and Sarawak). Worldwide, such claims to place are often a response to state programmes of territorialisation, providing an avenue for redress of past injustices, albeit limited. For Bajau, identity claims based upon place (a key achievement in the global environmental justice and indigenous rights movements) are difficult to establish over ‘maritories’ (marine territories) as opposed to land-based territories. Expanding on the standpoint that identity claims via the environmental justice movement might be limited for sea-oriented communities, this analysis explores how Bajau (including the Bajau Laut of eastern Sabah) have resorted to other social symbols, in this instance religion, to position their identities. In this regard, this chapter evaluates the view that has been advocated by some scholars, especially Kazufumi Nagatsu, that the bureaucratisation of Islam, via the Bumiputera policy, could provide a potential avenue for Bajau identity positioning and status as Bumiputera. Keywords Malaysia · Sabah · Bajau · Indigenous identity · Environmental justice · Islam F. Majid Cooke (B) Institute of Tropical Biodiversity and Sustainable Development, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] G. Acciaioli Anthropology and Sociology, School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_6

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6.1 Introduction Much Malaysian scholarship about Sabah’s contemporary nationalism and identity formation has been geared towards highlighting the claims of the KadazanDusun and Murut peoples (henceforth KDM) in resisting federalist (read: West Malaysiancentred) perceived encroachment into the KDM’s politico-cultural space through (agro-) industrial development and Malay Muslim religious dominance.1 KDM aspirations towards recognition of their rights through affirmative action—indeed, their claim to be the ‘distinctive’ Sabahans, in analogy with Mahathir Mohamad’s earlier claim that the Malays were the ‘distinctive’ people of peninsular Malaysia—as reflected in their invocation of Bumiputera policy constitute an important dimension of cultural politics in Sabah (Loh 1996; Shamsul 1996; Barlocco 2007, 2010, 2014). In this chapter, KDM nationalism forms the background for highlighting contrasting discourses and practices of identity positioning of the second largest group of indigenous peoples of Sabah, the Bajau (see Table 6.1). As with Ian Baird’s (2016) discussion of whether ethnic Lao people in Cambodia should be considered indigenous, our case study of the positioning of the Bajau in the ethnoscape of Sabahan indigenous peoples problematises the criteria of attributing indigeneity as primordial (Shils 1957).2 Our analysis contextualises this positioning with regard to first, the problematics of making conservation more inclusive via the environmental justice approach for a people primarily oriented to the sea rather than the land, and second, attempts to assert a more Islamic identity as a marker of belonging in Sabah. The movement of some mobile, sea-oriented Bajau Laut of Sabah, whose social capital includes networks with other ‘Bajau’ groups across the sea in other territorial or neighbouring waters (in this instance the Sulu Sea, largely under the Philippines, and the Celebes Sea and the Strait of Makassar, largely under Indonesian jurisdiction), often disrupts ideas about national territory and sovereignty (Acciaioli et al. 2017). Despite border controls, Bajau Laut still largely neglect such borders in pursuing their marine itineraries, engaging in creative strategies of border transcendence. Even for many sedentarised groups, social and cultural links across borders remain (Trocki 2000). Hence, our focus on the different Bajau groups, especially those who reside in the Tun Mustapha Park and Tun Sakaran Marine Park, further falls within the literature of ‘borderwork’, focused on how a wide range of players, 1

Although KadazanDusun have often put forward their claims for recognition as the ‘distinctive’ people of Sabah separately from the Murut, there is warrant for considering these groups together from such evidence as the formation of a joint political party, United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusun Murut Organisation (UPKO, now United Progressive Kinabalu Organisation) (Lim 2013: 177). 2 Following Fredrik Barth (1969), we regard ethnicity and other identifications as contingent, contextually defined and invoked, often in contexts involving various types of boundary-making behaviour between groups, such as in multicultural Sabah. By extension, Barth’s approach requires paying attention to first, the agency of group members in their strategies to position themselves with regard to other groups; and second, to their active negotiation of the process of Othering within the framework of majority–minority relations.

2000.5

2,406.4

3,260.0 (3.5 million by 2015)

Total

568.7

224.0

Total

KadazanDusun

Malay

Bumiputera

Malaysian Citizens (’000)

Total

2010

450.2

Bajau 102.5

Murut 655.1

Other Bumiputera 295.7

Chinese

9.5

Indians

100.7

Others

853.6 (870.4 by 2015)

Non-Malaysian citizens (’000)

Table 6.1 Total population by ethnic group, Sabah, 2010. Source Adapted from Table 2.5 Total population by ethnic group and religion, Sabah and the Federal Territory of Labuan 2010, Department of Statistics (2016: 10) and Allerton (2017)

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including government institutions, businesses, long-term residents, newcomers and humanitarian and conservation non-governmental organisations (NGOs), engage in the doing or undoing of borders of various sorts (Horstmann 2002). Some land-based KDM communities have found leverage in countering state territorialisation through claims to ‘native customary rights’ over land. In brief, territorialisation amounts to the appropriation of decentralised community management of natural resources by centralised control through a range of mechanisms, especially via introduced legislation and ‘expert knowledge’ pertaining to forestry, land, water and fisheries (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). Such leverage in the regaining of community control has been found through protest via the global environmental justice and indigenous rights movements which, in sum, has enabled identity claims based on links to place especially through the court system (Aiken and Leigh 2011, 2015; Majid Cooke and Sofia 2019). Many in the Bajau communities now have Malaysian identity cards. By contrast, many among the Bajau Laut who remain sea-oriented do not have a basis on which to make customary claims to land. In addition, the Malaysian government does not recognise local claims to marine areas, which have been subjected to ‘maritorialisation’, as the Malaysian state claims to own all areas below mean high tide, including the seabed. Such authority has been intensified through such mechanisms as the establishment of marine parks (Acciaioli 2018). Consequently, we argue that, at least for now, Bajau might have to explore other mechanisms for establishing identity claims. Towards the end of the chapter we explore how religion, specifically adherence to Islam, serves this purpose in some contexts. This chapter thus focuses upon constraints and opportunities for Bajau identity positioning. It first investigates the extent to which claims based upon environmental justice could be used for articulating Bajau identity in Sabah. We argue that exploring claims via participation within environmental justice remains a challenge for peoples who cannot establish identity markers recognisable to the state, but provides some leverage for sea-oriented peoples through participation in externally induced diversification of livelihoods via seaweed cultivation and aquaculture production. However, given the limitations of this approach, especially for the Bajau Laut who tend not to have the basic credential of citizenship for participation, we then examine the way in which some Bajau have used the espousal and practice of a more Islamic identity to assert their place in the Sabah polity in relation to national cultural politics, particularly changing definitions of Bumiputera identity, in line with an idealised Islamic identity. In this regard, we consider how the state as a privileged agent in the politics of religion in Malaysia could be seen as providing a synchronised fit for Bajau identity aspirations (Nagatsu 2001; Gusni Saat 2008).

6.2 Methods The first author, Fadzilah Majid Cooke, has worked with sedentarised and semisedentarised Bajau communities in the western coast of Sabah, in the Banggi Island chain

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and at Marudu Bay in the Tun Mustapha Park, as well as at Mengkabong in Tuaran district, in phases from 2002 until 2018. The second author, Greg Acciaioli, has worked among the sedentarised Bajau and relatively mobile Bajau Laut of Sabah in Darvel Bay (Teluk Lahad Datu), largely within the Tun Sakaran Marine Park in 2013 and 2014, as well as with the first author in Marudu Bay in 2018. For both, interest in communities of the Sulu and Sulawesi seas is continuing (Majid Cooke 2003, 2004; Majid Cooke and Rosazman 2014; Majid Cooke and Sofia 2019; Acciaioli 2018; Acciaioli et al. 2017; Acciaioli and Majid Cooke forthcoming; Stacey et al. 2017a, 2017b). In our endeavour to understand the socio-ecological changes affecting Bajau everyday lives, we tend to use such methods of ethnographic research as semistructured interviews, participant observation and documentation, as well as analysis of relevant secondary data and unpublished sources such as reports.

6.3 Bajau Self-identification The Bajau of Sabah cannot be presented as a homogeneous category (Sather 1993).3 Bajau was originally an externally imposed name (an exonym), most likely used by Brunei Malays in the first instance, as the people called themselves Sama (an endonym), though over time Bajau has come to be adopted for self-labelling as well (Nagatsu 2001; Saidatul 2014). One subgroup of Bajau in western Sabah has adopted a land-based way of life, with wet rice and cash crop agriculture and livestock raising as their primary livelihoods (Miller 2011), in addition to the horsemanship they exhibit for tourists as the ‘cowboys of the East’ on such occasions as the annual Tamu Besar in Kota Belud (Obon 1999). Appropriately, they are often now labelled Bajau Darat (Land Bajau). The Bajau Darat of Kota Belud and those of the coastal areas, including Mengkabong and Marudu Bay, refer to themselves by locality (that is, toponymically) as Bajau Kota Belud or Bajau Mengkabong. However, western Sabah also includes Bajau who still orient to the sea, engaging in fishing in locales such as Marudu Bay, Mengkabong and the Banggi Island chain (henceforth Banggi). Those

3

We recognise that the more generic term for this ethnic group when considering their entire range of inhabitation is Sama-Bajau (Stacey et al. 2017a). However, different ethnonyms, usually based upon local usage (that is, the people’s own endonyms), are used in different regions. For example, the current term of choice for this marine mobile group in the southern Philippines is Sama Dilaut (Nimmo 2001), although older sources and some more recent sources do use such terms as Bajao (Tokoro 2003). In eastern Indonesia, stretching from Sulawesi to Papua through Nusa Tenggara Timur and North Maluku, the term Bajo is most commonly used (see Nagatsu 2001; Gusni Saat 2010), though the spelling Bajau is also used. In Sabah, the region of our focus, the term Bajau has become the term of choice for the wider ethnic category, so we use it here (Nagatsu 2001: 213; Saidatul 2014: 299). Although the semisedentarised mobile marine communities have in the past used the endonym Sama Dilaut in self-reference (Nagatsu 2001; Sather 2004), our own recent fieldwork indicates that even they are transitioning to using the term Bajau Laut in their own discourses, so we will follow that usage, while recognising that the term Sama Dilaut still has some currency as an endonym in Sabah.

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at Mengkabong and Marudu Bay have adopted aquaculture production in addition to being artisanal fishers (Majid Cooke 2008; Sofia et al. 2017; Tamothran et al. 2017). Many of the people who inhabit the islands fringing western Sabah also adopt the Bajau identity, even though their ancestors in the Sulu Archipelago would not have identified themselves as Bajau. So the Ubian people of that region become Bajau Ubian when they cross the border into Sabah, as they do in Kudat district or in Banggi off Kudat, as well as in Semporna district in eastern Sabah. However, the settled Bajau firmly distinguish themselves from the mobile maritime Bajau Laut. As one informant from Marudu Bay stated during fieldwork the authors conducted in 2018, when asked if there were any Bajau Laut in the vicinity, ‘We are all emplaced people [orang tempatan] here.’ At Mengkabong (Tuaran district), Bajau informed the first author that they were ‘dari sini sini saja [we are local]’ (Fieldnotes 2006). Both Bajau Ubian and local Bajau regard Bajau Laut as exotic strangers. In Banggi, Bajau Laut were sometimes invited to perform at Bajau Ubian weddings because of their perceived traditional dance skills, after which performances the young people present could get on with their preferred beats in contemporary music (Fieldnotes, Tanjung Malawali 2002). The eastern coastline region along what is now officially known as Teluk Lahad Datu (named Darvel Bay by the British) has long constituted the home region of many Bajau Laut, who harvested marine products and traded with coastal and inland peoples for forest products to provide to intermediate marketers linked to the Sulu Zone centred upon the sultanate in Jolo (Warren 1981). However, the North Borneo Chartered Company’s imposition in 1878 of immigration regulations to eliminate piracy and encourage permanent settlement of groups, such as the Bajau Laut, whom they considered as pirates, along with the establishment of Semporna as a trade centre in 1887, changed the pattern of settlement (Warren 1971). This policy of sedentarisation transformed what had been a pattern of sporadic settlement into permanent land occupation along the coasts and offshore islands. The descendants of those settled at this time have become the Bajau Tempatan (‘emplaced Bajau’), who are now the dominant population in this region of southeastern Sabah. Although this ethnonym is sometimes heard, they tend to refer to themselves simply now as Bajau, or, when wishing to identify themselves more specifically, toponymically as the ‘Bajau + [name of their island or village]’, for example, the Bajau Omadal as Bajau who live on the island of Omadal or the Bajau Semporna, Bajau inhabiting Semporna town. Identifying with their new places of habitation, these Bajau Tempatan have oriented themselves to terrestrial livelihoods, including government (as civil service officials), commerce (as marketers and entrepreneurs) and agriculture (for example cocoa cultivation and subsequently oil palm smallholdings). However, unlike the settled agriculturalists of western Sabah, but like the coastal Bajau found there, many of them also persist in maintaining an orientation to the sea, including both seaweed cultivation as a livelihood or an investment and fishing as an occupational or recreational pursuit. As noted, sedentarised Bajau of east and west coast Sabah particularly distinguish themselves from the peoples who have continued to ply the seas, at least for part of the year, in their houseboats (lepa), that is, the Bajau Laut (‘Sea Bajau’). While some

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of these Bajau Laut do reside for much of the year in established ‘water villages’ (kampung air) on the fringes of Semporna town and in the intertidal zones between the islands in Darvel Bay and beyond, many have remained only semisedentarised, living part of the year in their lepa to search for marine products, engage in trade and visit relatives.4 These boatholds (that is, marine households), travelling singly or in flotillas (anchorage groups), still move along Sabah’s eastern coast between Kudat and Semporna, sometimes venturing further afield, depending upon fishing opportunities or the demands of patrons (Pauwelussen 2015), extending into the Sulu Archipelago to the east, Palawan to the northwest, or to North and East Kalimantan (for example, Berau) to the south. Thus, these still mobile Bajau Laut, who continue to straddle the boundaries of the southern Philippines and Sabah in the Sulu Sea, and southeastern Sabah in the Sulawesi Sea bordering eastern Indonesia, are often considered newcomers, especially by state agents as well as by the more established, settled Bajau groups in east and west Sabah (Nagatsu 2001). However, even many fully and semisedentarised groups maintain social and cultural links across borders (Trocki 2000), risking Othering from non-Bajau landed groups, as is sometimes also apparent in assertions of KDM Sabahan nationalism. Most sedentary Bajau (Tempatan), like the Bajau Darat and other settled Bajau of western Sabah, are now Malaysian citizens holding a MyKad (Kad Pengenalan Malaysia), the compulsory identity document for Malaysian citizens. In contrast, many Bajau Laut of the region, despite considering Sabah their home, are not citizens of Malaysia, nor are they recognised as citizens by the Philippines or Indonesia. That is, they are ‘stateless’, in accordance with article 1(1) of the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which defines a ‘stateless’ person as ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’ (United Nations 2014: 6). In Malaysia, stateless people are aggregated with refugees and asylum seekers, being categorised collectively by national and local media as ‘illegal [im]migrants’ (Petcharamesree 2016: 179).5 Such people are excluded from such state services as public education and affordable health care. Regarded as being in Malaysia ‘illegally’, such groups as the Bajau Laut, however salient in the context of securitisation, are invisible for the provision of state services (Acciaioli et al. 2017). As discussed below, this invisibility provides major obstacles for Bajau Laut participation in conservation efforts based upon environmental justice. Environmental justice in approach and practice is an attempt to make conservation more inclusive. Some principles of environmental justice have been captured in several United Nations conventions or declarations, including the Convention on

4

According to a survey, Bajau Laut still living part of the year in houseboats constitute just over 21% of the population living on or around the islands of Tun Sakaran Marine Park (Wood and Habibah 2014: 14). 5 Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, nor to the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. Among ASEAN member states, only the Philippines is a state party to the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and there are no states that are parties to the 1961 UN Convention relating to the Reduction of Statelessness within the Southeast Asian region.

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Biological Diversity (Naughton-Treves et al. 2005) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (Henderson 2013), although the latter declaration has been encumbered by the resistance of many states to treat indigenous peoples as sovereign nations and, worse, to refuse to accept their difference.6 A key aspect of practice in environmental justice is the participation of local communities in decision-making about developmental and environmental change of their areas, as seen in a two-pronged strategy of asserting enhanced participation through community-based management of natural resources (Kellert et al. 2000) and in the promotion of sustainable alternative livelihoods (Naughton-Treves et al. 2005).

6.4 Bajau as an ‘Accomodative Identity’ within Official Categorisations We acknowledge that there is relative openness to religious and cross-cultural marriages among the multitude of ethnic groups in Sabah, so that state categorisation of ethnicities does not capture the significant number of individuals with mixed parentage such as Bajau/Suluk, or Tidung/Suluk/Bajau, or Bajau/Dusun or Orang Sungei/Chinese/Bajau mixes (Personal observation, Fieldwork 2003, 2007, 2013, 2017). In view of such combined ethnicities, for administrative convenience and other reasons (such as affirmative action privileges), it is useful to discuss the official representation of Sabah’s demographic make-up by looking at governmental ethnic categorisation. Official categorisation of ethnicity, such as in Table 6.1, fixes identities into neat categories that do not reflect these continual processes of differentiation and aggregation. Making sense of this diversity is a complex task because there are an estimated 132 distinct languages and close to as many dialects among the Dusunic, Murutic and Paitanic language families of Sabah. In everyday life, self-identification of ethnicity is much more fluid (switching) than state categorisation of it, because the frequency of interethnic and, to some extent, interreligious marriages promotes the formation of new hybrid identities, such as Sino-Kadazan, an officially accepted category (Wong 2012). For the initiated, Table 6.1 shows key concerns with regard to identity politics. First, despite the clear categorisation into ethnic groups, namely KadazanDusun together with Murut (just over 670,000), Bajau (450,000) and Malay (224,000), categories on the ground, based on self-identification, are often not fixed. A survey of 300 respondents in 2006 identified 40 self-labelled categories and subcategories (such as Dusun Lotud in the KadazanDusun category and the Bajau/Suluk/Dusun mix), leading to the reminder that KDM is a political category (Brown 2010). Second, Table 6.1 further shows that there is a myriad of population groups whose members 6

The UNDRIP was encumbered to accept a state-centred position on indigenous peoples, which views the latter as an interest group to be managed, not autonomous peoples with rights (Henderson 2013).

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do not identify themselves as KDM or Bajau who are officially categorised as ‘Other Bumiputera’ (655,000). Third, the highest single category is of the non-Malaysian citizens which stood at 854,000 in 2010, rapidly increasing by almost 17,000 by 2015. Unofficially, the increase of non-Malaysian citizens in 2015 might have been higher (Allerton 2017). In the Bajau category there would be many who might be otherwise categorised as ‘Other Bumiputera’ (some of whom include Tidung, Bonggi or mixed Bajau/Suluk as examples, as well as other similar combinations) who would prefer to be linked to the larger group which is Bajau. Conversely, the official Bajau category could overlook some immigrant Bajau (for example from Sulawesi), who sometimes prefer to be known as Bugis once they cross into Sabah for various reasons (Gusni Saat 2010). Historically, naming and categorisation of indigenous characteristics and identities were mostly prescribed by outsiders depending on colonial geopolitical and economic interests and often fed by the needs of local elites and patrons, among whom some were themselves indigenous, a pattern that has continued today (Couillard 1984; Sather 2004). The term Bajau as it is used by such groups as the sedentary Samal in the Philippines refers in a pejorative way to the mobile Sama-speaking peoples who still reside on boats (Horvatich 2003). This is not the case in contemporary Sabah, as the Bajau presence is increasingly being felt in the political and educational arenas (Gusni Saat 2010; Miller 2011). As a result, for smaller Muslim groups, self-referencing as Bajau could have its attraction by identifying themselves with the second largest ethnic group in Sabah and specifically the group carrying the banner of Muslim Bumiputera in the state. The smaller groups categorised officially under ‘Other Bumiputera’, including Tidung, Bonggi, Bisaya, Kagayan and Orang Sungei, could easily have been grouped with the official Bajau category because of what could be helpfully understood as the process of ‘becoming’. For example, the first author has personally met Bonggi of Banggi Island who resided in Kudat referring to themselves as Bajau. Some Tidung individuals from Kalimantan call themselves Bajau once they have crossed the border into Sabah or when they married into Bajau families (Fieldnotes, Lower Kinabatangan 2011). In addition, Kinabatangan residents of mixed Orang Sungei, Chinese and Bajau heritage could identify themselves as Bajau even when living among Orang Sungei. Assuming a Bajau identity in Sabah is quite common for a variety of motivations, especially among those who marry, live or work with, or are exposed to, Bajau individuals or families, or who tend to speak a Bajau dialect of whatever location under the Sama-Bajau label. Kazufumi Nagatsu (2017: 58) has explained this process of ‘becoming Bajau’ as a way of (re)constructing identity through a process that is more ‘accommodative’ than ‘assimilative’. In other words, Bajau in the sites he studied across Indonesia share ‘an accommodative ethnic identity’ so that Bajau may be better understood as an overall label in the process of becoming. One performs Bajau-ness through such choices as one’s livelihood and social relations (from living and interacting with Bajau) rather than being born Bajau exclusively through filiation or descent. This ‘accommodative’ ethnic identity can also be reversed. The reverse happens when some Bajau who have migrated from Sulawesi to Sabah adopt a Bugis identity

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(including language and cultural markers of food and dress) because of their familiarity with Bugis groups as neighbours, traders or financial partners in Sulawesi prior to departure. By extension, some Bajau migrants feel better placed in the new country and better received by the Bugis diaspora in Sabah, if they identify more as Bugis than Bajau (Gusni Saat 2010). This could be one reason for Nagatsu’s (2017) finding in his research that the link of the Sama Semporna (the ethnonym he employed) with the Indonesian Bajau/Bajo is not as well developed as the former’s link with Sama Sulu in recent times because he could not find in Sabah as many Sama who have migrated from Sulawesi in comparison to those originating from the Sulu or Tawi-Tawi Island chain of the Philippines. That the language of the Sama Sulu used by the Semporna speakers is relatively unintelligible to the Sama Sulawesi could be another driver for this form of identity positioning (Miller 2011). The converse process occurs further when Bajau Laut who have only recently taken up residence in east coast Sabah claim not to understand or speak their own language/s (Interview, Bajau Laut at Kota Kinabalu, October 2018).

6.5 Conservation Dilemmas and Environmental Justice: Bajau Transitions and Transformations in Marine Parks For some decades now, environmental justice concerns have broadened conservation’s vision of preservation of pristine areas to include areas ‘where we live, work and play’, namely such landscapes that have been used by indigenous peoples for their livelihoods and for meeting the needs of their cultural life (Schlosberg 1999; Majid Cooke and Sofia 2019). In Sabah, the two-pronged strategy of environmental justice embracing the enhancement of community participation and promoting sustainable alternative livelihoods has gained some community support, particularly from those living in designated terrestrial community-conserved areas, such as the KDM communities living around Mount Kinabalu. However, such progressive programmes have not been as advanced in littoral and sea areas, where the main focus of conservation has been the creation of marine parks by the Sabah state government, including some procedures for community participation in these processes. Sabah is located at the western edge of the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security (CTI-CFF, in short CTI), a multilateral partnership of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste cooperating to sustain a band of high marine biodiversity along the equator. Nested within the CTI is the Sulu Sulawesi Marine Ecosystem, for which Sabah’s eastern coast provides the western boundary, an initiative pioneered by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Malaysia to provide a framework for a network of marine protected areas. Figure 6.1 shows the location of the largest marine protected area in Sabah, the Tun Mustapha Park, established to manage the resources in the region extending from

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Fig. 6.1 Tun Mustapha Park in northwestern Sabah. Source Adapted from WWF Malaysia (http://mamengstories.blogspot.com/2017/11/memorandum-of-understanding-signed. html, used with permission)

Marudu Bay up to the Straits of Balabac in the southern Philippines where the Sulu and South China seas meet northern Sabah. Proposed in 2003 and finally gazetted in 2016, the Tun Mustapha Park covers 898,762.76 ha and embraces a population of 80,000 (Jumin et al. 2018), consisting largely of Bajau, Bajau Ubian, Bannaran or Bannaden (a Bajau subgroup) and others in smaller numbers. The park stretches over three administrative districts—Kudat, Pitas and Kota Marudu—and the islands within them. Further to the southeast, nestled within the Semporna Priority Conservation Area, lies Tun Sakaran Marine Park, covering the islands of Bodgaya, Boheydulang, Sebangkat and Selakan, the sand cays of Maiga, Sibuan and Mantabuan, and the patch reefs of Church and Kapikan in its 35,000 ha area. The population of the park has fluctuated between approximately 2500 and 1400 across the last two decades,7 though any number can only be an estimate, since the Bajau Laut component of its population is ever shifting, as families move in or out on their houseboats (lepa), and the number of Suluk engaged in seaweed farming changes, depending upon environmental and market conditions for that crop. With a management plan formulated by the Semporna Islands Project under the auspices of the Marine Conservation Society in Britain, assisted by consultations with local communities and stakeholders (user groups, government ministries and agencies),8 in 2004 the Tun Sakaran Marine 7 8

Elizabeth Wood, Personal communication, 27 October 2020. Elizabeth Wood, Personal communication, 27 October 2020.

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Fig. 6.2 Tun Sakaran Marine Park in southeastern Sabah. Source Elizabeth M. Wood of the Semporna Islands Project (used with permission)

Park became the seventh gazetted area under Sabah Parks, which also manages it in cooperation with the Semporna Islands Project (Fig. 6.2). Thus, for both marine protected areas environmental NGOs have formed the bridge between official conservation and encompassed local communities (Sofia et al. 2017).9

6.5.1 Tun Mustapha Park Almost half of the inhabitants living in and around the Tun Mustapha Park depend on marine resources for their livelihood and well-being, with fishing in the region contributing 22% of total marine fisheries production in Sabah in 2008 (Jumin et al. 2018). Bajau or Bajau Ubian fishing communities living in the park are to be found mostly (but not exclusively) in the villages that dot Marudu Bay in Marudu and Pitas, coastal settlements around Kudat town, and in the Banggi Island chain off the coast of Kudat district (see Fig. 6.1).10 9

As Malaysia’s major realisations of the CTI-CFF, these two marine protected areas together contribute towards meeting the recommendation as advocated by the Convention on Biological Diversity, Aichi Target 11 which calls for at least 10% of coastal and marine areas to be protected (IUCN 2017). 10 Kudat is the name of the district as well as its capital.

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In order to address overfishing from trawl and purse seine fishing, illegal fishing, unsustainable coastal land uses and illegal harvest of sea turtles/eggs (ibid.), a technical approach was adopted in management, despite the socio-ecological roots of the problem including livelihood insecurity from ecological damage and reckless profiteering (Lim and Jumin 2013). Consequently, bureaucratisation appeared in the form of ‘expert knowledge’ used for drawing up no-take zones, buffer zones, community use zones and general use zones where applicable, helped by complex computer software, resulting in the production of natural resource maps and the drawing up of special rules and regulations for proscribed and prescribed livelihood activities. Full local community involvement was difficult to obtain. Members from local communities were not in the steering committee formed to advise the Tun Mustapha Park management, but only in the advisory committee, whose role has little substantive power, confined only to commenting upon such issues as sustainable fisheries, sustainable development, ecotourism and recreation, coastal safety and security, communication, education and public awareness as well as community use zones (Sofia et al. 2017). In order to promote more substantive participation by local artisanal fishing community representatives, among whom were Bajau or Bajau Ubian fishers, in their role as one of a number of stakeholders, much longer exposure and time were needed to explain concepts and objectives that were not available nor thought about. On a field trip to a Marudu Bay village in 2018, a Bajau fisher who was an advisory committee member confirmed that he was still in the dark about the boundaries of the no-take zones in the Tun Mustapha Park. By contrast, the steering committee, with power to influence management decisions, consisted of ‘experts’ from state natural resource and development agencies, internationally funded NGOs (such as the WWF), district administration offices, universities and private sector interests on a rotational basis. The community use zones are fishing grounds utilised by local communities and were originally located near the villages. A scoring system was used to establish these based on field data collected, including village use, village population, sensitivity of the ecosystem, and the presence of corals, mangroves, shipwrecks, sacred areas and fish aggregation areas. The no-take zones that are of interest to conservation were characterised by having good reefs considered important to the marine ecosystem, but at the same time were also good fishing grounds for local fishing communities. So in this instance the interests of these communities could come into conflict with those of conservation. Although the draft plan of the park envisioned management by consensus through committees, the establishment of the no-take zones could be fraught with internal and intercommunity rivalry. At Berungus village it was suggested that the sea in front of that village be regarded as a no-take zone because it is like a family-owned reef. Berungus village, composed of Bajau Ubian fishers, has been protecting this reef from damaging fishing methods for more than 10 years before NGOs intervened on the scene. Further, the reef area was in a good condition, considered by management as worth protecting; it thus made sense for management to work with the villagers in establishing a model village for community-managed natural resources (Sofia et al. 2017). However, the Berungus no-take zone was opposed by other neighbouring

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communities that did not consider the Berungus area as a ‘private commons’ to be looked after by Bajau Ubian. With support from Sabah Parks and the Fisheries Department, local wardens were appointed to monitor the area. As in many cases of attempted ‘community conservation’, agencies depended upon a homogenised conceptualisation of ‘community’ that overlooked the cleavages within and among communities (Agrawal and Gibson 1999). Nevertheless, despite a flawed consultation process, the fact remains that the Tun Mustapha Park does present opportunities for local communities. For example, partly because of community needs, many zones initially marked as community use zones within the park were extricated from the jurisdiction of park management (Majid Cooke and Sofia 2019). Such processes have facilitated the retention, even if more constricted than before, of the fishing and marine product harvesting livelihoods that are central to the continuing assertion of Bajau identity in littoral and island contexts (Nagatsu 2017). However, there is a difference between obtaining community participation and getting community support (Steenbergen and Warren 2018). As noted by Natasha Stacey et al. (2017b: 122): While access to prime fishing grounds is imperative for the most fishery-dependent households, their lack of direct involvement in discussions around [no-take zone] allocations means contestation over claims to access (and related non-compliance) will necessarily continue.

This critique is grounded on the findings of studies on protected areas that reveal that while zoning may sound bland when used in project documents, it is a highly political process at the implementation level. To date, lack of participation in all but a peripheral advisory capacity and a subsequent lack of dissemination of information have led to considerable insecurity among local Bajau and Bajau Ubian around Marudu Bay and Banggi, as to whether they will be able to continue their identitydefining livelihoods. Alternative livelihoods could offer a possible route to participation in the local economy, but the record has been uneven. An earlier study by Fadzilah Majid Cooke (2004) in the park revealed seaweed was a labour-intensive activity for a relatively low return compared to fishing in the open sea. In the village of Kaligau in Banggi, despite labour-intensive seaweed farming becoming an activity for women, it was popular because seaweed carried with it the intangible value of respect and social status from neighbouring groups, which had so far eluded Bajau at Kaligau, who had been identified by other groups as lacking in Islamic credentials. As the seaweed project was sponsored by a local university and a government agency, the tacit support Bajau gave to the project was partly grounded on the potential for enhancing their status among local communities, especially when such support was rewarded with the building of a surau (prayer house). Unfortunately, the pilot project collapsed after two years when the project leader was transferred to Semporna (ibid.). A few years later some Bajau in villages around Marudu Bay, who had moved from Kota Belud, also reacted positively to the introduction of aquaculture as an alternative livelihood given the relatively high returns on their labour (Tamothran et al. 2017; Fieldnotes 2018).

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Clearly, the environmental justice principles of participation and more equal sharing through livelihood diversification pose a challenge for some Bajau in the Tun Mustapha Park. The problems experienced by the different stakeholders in the formation of the park reinforces Dirk Steenbergen and Carol Warren’s (2018) observation that in the management of marine protected areas the greater difficulty lies in understanding and managing social, economic and political relations, less so the science. For Bajau living in the park, implementation of the no-take zone and the community use zone was a learning process about trust among neighbours (or lack of it) and about the strategic adoption of new livelihoods. By extension, for the Bajau Laut in the Tun Sakaran Marine Park in southeastern Sabah the dilemma lies in the bureaucratisation of conservation, as well as a widespread, intense practice of ‘Othering’ that affects their chance of livelihood participation in seaweed cultivation.

6.5.2 Tun Sakaran Marine Park As in the case of the Tun Mustapha Park, the fluctuating composition of the population of the Tun Sakaran Marine Park is complex, but the dynamics of relations among Bajau populations are central. According to the population survey conducted in 2001 for the draft management plan (Wood 2001), 25% of the park’s residents were settled Bajau (Bajau Tempatan or ‘emplaced’ Bajau). They practised fishing, cultivation (for example fruit trees, including coconuts), as well as some seaweed cultivation, and most were Malaysian citizens who have settled in the islands for some generations. Approximately 18% of the population were Bajau Laut, who are now largely semisedentary, living either in stilted houses offshore of the main islands—the volcanic remnants Boheydulang, Bodgaya and Tetagan and the raised limestone platforms Selakan and Sebangkat—or in huts on the beaches or in stilted houses offshore of the sand cays—Maiga, Sibuan and occasionally Mantabuan (see Fig. 6.2)—but using their houseboats for regular travel within and beyond the park. Almost all the Bajau Laut in the park are stateless, being neither Malaysian nor Philippine citizens. Much of the remainder of the population is Suluk, whose ancestors are originally from the Sulu Archipelago, where they are known as Tausug; they are engaged in seaweed cultivation in the general use zone north of Sebangkat Island and fishing, fish marketing and gardening in Bodgaya. In many ways the Bajau Tempatan have been empowered by Sabah Parks’ management approach. Although Sabah Parks has legal authority over the land area of all the islands within the boundary of the Tun Sakaran Marine Park, Sabah Parks has continued to respect the claims of Bajau Tempatan to their land plots within the park; the park management plan recognises continuing rights of native title holders. Sabah Parks maintains a register of land claims for parcels in the islands contained within the Tun Sakaran Marine Park of all these Bajau Tempatan ‘inheritors’ (pewaris) and has, in fact, attempted to mediate some of the conflicting claims. Indeed, it has opted to pay rent to some of these landowners for the land used for park ranger stations, in one case locating its ranger station over the sea adjacent to the beach on Mantabuan

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when the land rent demanded was too expensive. This recognition of the terrestrial part of the park as land ‘where we [Bajau Tempatan] live, work and play’, in accord with Sabah Parks’ own understanding of environmental justice, has allowed these Bajau to retain their residences on the islands and continue their identity-defining livelihood practices. Bajau Tempatan, both those still resident on the islands and those who have moved to Semporna, Tawau and other localities outside the park, reinvigorate these claims annually by conducting a kenduri (Malay) or pagkanduli (Sama) celebration near the graves of their ancestors on Selakan and Tetagan islands, in which they dance the igal (Sama) and present food offerings to local ancestral spirits (Acciaioli and Majid Cooke forthcoming). Their claim to their land is validated when an officiant is possessed by an ancestral spirit and then is able to heal other participants who present themselves with various maladies by offering them sanctified water and brushing the affected body parts with a frond whisk. Culmination in successful possession indicates the continuing communion with the ancestors who earlier occupied these islands, both sustaining ‘their shared realization that ritual in a significant way informs their pusaka or heritage of identity that sets them apart from others’ (Jubilado 2010: 98) and signifying their continuing ownership of the land of the islands. However, the Bajau Laut within the Tun Sakaran Marine Park are excluded from exercising similar claims. Although Sabah Parks has adopted a permissive attitude to their remaining within the park, Bajau Tempatan regard Bajau Laut as squatters who should be excluded from occupying the island land that the former claim to own. When one Bajau Tempatan teamed up in 2013 with a Chinese partner in planning to build a dive resort on Sibuan, he sent his clients to burn down the huts that had been erected by the Bajau Laut on the strand. Most of the Bajau Laut fled to the island of Timbun Mata outside the Tun Sakaran Marine Park, where they erected temporary huts; few have returned to Sibuan since that time, even though the Timbun Mata settlement was unsustainable due to being located at the edge of protected forest on the island. Bajau Laut can only continue to reside on the islands of the park with permission, often reluctantly given by Bajau Tempatan claimants. Zoning in the Tun Sakaran Marine Park has also contributed to increasing marginalisation of Bajau Laut. According to one survey, over 90% of Bajau Laut respondents cited reef fish as a ‘very important’ or ‘fairly important’ component of their diet, with octopus, cuttlefish, sea cucumbers, snails, clams, horseshoe crab, mangrove crab and sea urchins ranked as less important (Wood and Habibah 2014: 19), both for subsistence and trade (Sather 1997: 109). However, many of the reefs extending from the islands and sand cays in the Tun Sakaran Marine Park were designated either ‘preservation [i.e. fish spawning] zones’ or ‘conservation zones’ in 2009, although some of the reef zones around the most populated islands were included in ‘general use zones’. Both conservation and preservation zones prohibit all resource extraction, thereby rendering them equivalent to no-take zones and effectively barring the Bajau Laut from harvesting these areas formerly providing many of their foods. Male Bajau Laut have responded by fishing further afield, extending

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to the pelagic zones at the edges of the park and beyond into the Sulu Sea;11 in this survey, 44% of the Bajau Laut reported travelling afield to catch fish (Wood and Habibah 2014: 21). Seaweed farming had been practised in this locale long before the formation of the park, and this activity now continues to be carried out in shallow water above sea grass in the general use zones of the park. Because of past experiences of seaweed lines being fouled, seaweed cultivators, predominantly the Suluk, threaten any fishers they find in the vicinity of their seaweed lines, thus effectively barring the Bajau Laut and others from fishing in these sections of the general use zones. Small-scale seaweed cultivation by families has been an alternative livelihood promoted within the general use zone of the Tun Sakaran Marine Park (Stacey et al. 2017b). However, a major impediment to pursuing this option is the requirement of Malaysian citizenship to gain a licence for seaweed cultivation. As a result, many Bajau Laut have only been able to gain rights to glean what has dropped to the seabed from the seaweed lines during harvesting. Bajau Laut women have turned to drying this gleaned seaweed for sale, though only on a very small scale. Of course, for Bajau Tempatan, who do have citizenship, obtaining the cultivation licence is not a problem. However, those Bajau Tempatan resident in the park complain about the annual cost of obtaining and renewing this licence, especially since the permissive attitude of Sabah Parks, partially in the hope of fostering better compliance with fishing restrictions, has meant that some Bajau Laut and some Suluk without a MyKad have been able to begin cultivation of seaweed without such licences.12 However, that toleration has not been extended by the wider community of Bajau Tempatan located around Darvel Bay outside the park. Led by a prominent Sempornaborn Bajau (Tempatan), local fishermen have joined in a cooperative, registered as a business and also as one of the persatuan nelayan (fishers’ associations) organised in a national network under the auspices of Lembaga Kemajuan Ikan Malaysia (National Fisheries Development Authority), one of whose priorities, as the second author learned in an interview with the cooperative’s director, is to eliminate seaweed cultivation by the noncitizen Suluk and Bajau Laut in the general use zone of the Tun Sakaran Marine Park. By banding together in a cooperative, these recognised citizen fishers can gain a permit extending well beyond the 1 ha limitation for individual 11

The park’s zonation has specifically eroded the livelihood contribution of Bajau Laut women even further. They have traditionally contributed to household subsistence and market production by gathering various types of shellfish and other marine species found in mudflats and intertidal flats, as well as from shallow water in reef areas. With many of these areas now encompassed within the no-take zones, women’s ability to sustain these contributions has declined. While some Bajau Laut women have reoriented themselves to other activities, including basket, mat and other handicraft production, there is a very small market for such products due to limited marine tourism in the park to date. Thus, they earn little cash to exchange for such foodstuffs as their staple cassava flour. 12 The increasing incidence of ice-ice disease accompanying intensification of seaweed cultivation in the region, in part as a result of increasing surface sea temperature and light intensity, as well as changing salination levels, all exacerbated by climate change, has led to declines in the harvests and of the proportion of the highest quality of seaweed, reducing the potential of this activity as an alternative livelihood.

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licensees and thus take over seaweed cultivation in this zone. Such an action garners widespread support from the general populace and the governmental apparatus of eastern Sabah, as such an officialising strategy resonates with pronouncements of local officials. For example, the Lahad Datu district officer declared in 2013, ‘Their [the sea gypsies, as Bajau Laut are referred to in the local press] presence here can tarnish the image of our district. We will therefore reactivate the committee and investigate as we take stern action to completely solve this problem [by expulsion]’ (quoted in Brunt 2019). Thus, attempts at exclusion of stateless Bajau Laut and Suluk from the park have extended well beyond the Bajau Tempatan pewaris to the wider Bajau Tempatan community around Darvel Bay. The full effect of the limitations imposed upon Bajau Laut livelihoods by the conservation initiatives in the eastern Sabah region can only be understood in the context of the wider political restrictions imposed on them as stateless inhabitants of Sabah. After the ‘invasion’ of eastern Sabah in February 2013 by followers of a claimant to the Sulu sultanate seeking to enforce claims on this region (Franco 2013), the Malaysian government declared the Eastern Sabah Security Zone. Given their knowledge of the Sulu Sea and the movements of security forces, the Bajau Laut have been targeted within this security regime as potential facilitators of foreign incursions, in part due to their lack of Malaysian citizenship. Not only have the Bajau Laut rounded up in and around Semporna been subject to deportation, but those continuing to reside in the area have been severely restricted in their fishing activities by the imposition of a dusk-to-dawn maritime curfew. The number of illegal Bajau Laut migrants to East and North Kalimantan, areas that have long harboured Bajau Laut populations (Pauwelussen 2015), began to increase shortly after the curfew was imposed, indicating that its effect on subsistence pursuits (for example, nocturnal fishing) was forcing the Bajau Laut to flee to areas of (imagined) less restriction. However, this strategy has not mitigated their situation due to the subsequent deportation of many of the Bajau Laut apprehended by Indonesian security forces, as ‘citizens of a foreign country’ (warganegara asing), back across the border to Sabah, where they are subject to a second stage of deportation.

6.6 Islamisation and the Positioning of Bajau among Sabahans Consideration of the impact of marine parks in Sabah has shown how these conservation interventions indirectly emphasised inherent cleavages among subgroups of Bajau. However, it is important to consider also how Bajau have been situated with regard to other ethnic groups in Sabah and Malaysia more widely. Such positioning has occurred in the larger context of national policies imposed across the board, including in Sabah since its incorporation within the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. In the lead-up to federation, the drafting of the ‘Twenty Points’ document was intended to allay Sabahan concerns over such issues as freedom of religion, given a

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federal constitution that positioned Islam as the national religion (Lim 2013: 167– 168). Subsequent to the 1969 riots when the New Economy Policy (NEP) declared the privileges to be accorded to the newly emphasised category of Bumiputera (literally sons of the soil) as the autochthonous citizens of the federation, another concern emerged as to how the ‘native’ populations of Sarawak and Sabah, especially the non-Muslim Bumiputera, would be positioned with respect to the Muslim Malays in this category. Much writing on the NEP and its bureaucratisation through the Bumiputera policy in Sabah has focused on KDM responses to the process of Othering by ‘Malaya’ (i.e. West Malaysia), particularly perceived Malay politico-cultural dominance and Islamic bureaucratisation (Loh 1996; Shamsul 1998b; Barlocco 2007; Lim 2013). The bureaucratisation of the Bumiputera policy has been interpreted by many non-Muslim native Bumiputera (including KDM) as privileging Muslim Malays from Malaya, simultaneously treating Christian ‘natives’ of Sabah and Sarawak and the smaller group of non-Malay Orang Asli of West Malaysia as second-class Bumiputera, as well as creating a chasm that was not originally there between Muslim and non-Muslim natives in Sabah (Sintang 2014). However, for the Bajau, the largest ‘native’ Muslim population in Sabah, this chasm has presented an opportunity. Similar to KDM groups, ethnic categorisation for both the Bajau Darat of western Sabah and the Bajau Tempatan of eastern Sabah as ‘native’, though not the Bajau Laut, has, until recently, carried with it some privileges of citizenship. Important among these privileges are the rights to partial or full state sponsorship of primary, secondary and/or tertiary education and to relatively easy access to public service employment. Increased educational opportunities and state-level employment are prime sites for exposure to bureaucratised Bumiputeraism (read ‘Malayness’). Exposure carries with it unintended consequences. Among KDM groups exposure to bureaucratised Bumiputeraism promotes a shared awareness of who KDM are not (not Malay, not Muslim and not the same as those from ‘Malaya’) (Barlocco 2014).13 Coupled with bureaucratised Islamisation in Sabah’s social body, the feeling of being swamped by ‘immigrant’ Bajau (and Suluk) (Frank 2006; Barlocco 2007) strengthened nascent nationalism among ‘Muruts and Dusun … the largest single racial group’, who before the formation of the federation constituted 37% of the population (Roff 1969: 327). The nascent nationalism among non-Muslim groups in the 1950s was of concern to the Muslim coastal groups, including the Bajau and Suluk, because of their being considered ‘immigrant’ by the former. This perception of Bajau (and Suluk) as ‘immigrant’ or as Filipino tends to be understated in polite society, but erupts at key moments. One such moment appeared prior to the fourteenth general election in 2018 when, in an effort to garner votes, the newly formed party headed by the Bajau politician Shafie Apdal, Parti Warisan Sabah (Sabah Heritage Party), was tagged 13

‘Malayness’ in local KDM identity parlance could be derogatory, associated with perceived arrogance, intolerance of cultural and religious difference largely attributed to a superiority complex deemed characteristic of early cohorts of administrators and bureaucrats sent from West Malaysia by Kuala Lumpur to Sabah in the early years of formation of the federation. Such characterisation has persisted until today despite greater and more varied social encounters, because of the politicisation of ethnicity at both federal and state levels.

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by insecure incumbents as a party of ‘immigrants’, a label at odds with interpretations made by historical observers.14 In retaliation, Shafie warned rival politicians not to underestimate his Bajau followers, who are citizens of Malaysia, and threatened to sue those who doubted his citizenship because of being Bajau (Borneo Today 2018a, 2018b). After the elections in May 2018, Shafie became the chief minister of Sabah. However, in the campaigns leading up to the 26 September 2020 state election, Shafie’s Warisan Plus alliance was still labelled a ‘migrant’ party in many social media postings due to ‘the party’s strong affiliation to Sabah East Coast indigenous groups (which are closely related to Filipino indigenous groups)’ (Loh and Zhang 2020: 3), arguably a significant factor in the alliance’s election loss. An earlier occurrence of such division happened at the formation of Malaysia when Bajau and other smaller Muslim groups in Sabah initially felt uncomfortable with the KDM sentiment of opposing the securing of independence from the British through the vehicle of Malaysia. By contrast, an additional motive among Bajau for supporting independence through Malaysia was for relaxing Brunei Malay dominance because of the generalised view that Bajau Islamic knowledge was inferior to the orthodoxy of Brunei or Malaya Malays at that time (Yamamoto 2004; Gusni Saat 2008). However, later when political winds changed, the Muslim groups shared the general notion of autonomy within Malaysia as upheld by the KDM groups (Gusni Saat 2008). The idea of keeping a balance by teaming up with a Muslim-dominant Malaya, and through it a link with international Islam via Singapore and Indonesia, appeared a viable option for Bajau Islamic transformation (Yamamoto 2004; Ahmad Fauzi 2013). Later, subsequent to the federal government’s introduction and implementation of the Bumiputera policy in the 1970s, the Bajau reputation as Muslim Bumiputera provided traction because the federal government held favourable views about the Bajau as the bearers of Islam in a state that was deemed in need of Islamisation (Nagatsu 2001).15 Indeed, the actions of Bajau as leading politicians within Sabah have often indicated their eagerness to realise this role. After Muhammad Fuad (Donald) Stephens, originally a Christian who converted to Islam in 1971 and who served as Sabah’s first chief minister, was effectively replaced for challenging the constitutional grounds of Singapore’s expulsion from the federation (Lim 2013: 168), the position was assumed by the Chinese politician Peter Lo Su Yin.16 Lo served only two years in this position 14

The British traveller Thomas Forrest noted that ‘boat people’ were seen off the coast of Celebes (Sulawesi) and eastern Borneo in the 1770s (Nimmo 1968: 33). Spenser St. John (1863) noted their presence in western Sabah in the 1850s. The linguist Alfred Kemp Pallesen (1985) suggests that Bajau groups may have reached the northeast coast of Borneo as early as 1100 ce. 15 Images of Bajau as Muslim Bumiputera were expressed through many channels, one of which was the history textbooks provided to schoolchildren in the early 2000s which changed colonial descriptions of Bajau as unreliable and shiftless characters (because of their independence at sea) to stalwart bearers of Islam on land (Nagatsu 2001). 16 Lim (2013: 169) argues that the conversion of elite politicians such as Stephens to Islam was one of the ways in which the United Sabah Islam Association sought to realise the aims of Islamic dakwah.

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before being succeeded by the Bajau/Suluk politician Mustapha Harun.17 During his nine-year tenure Mustapha pursued an active programme of Islamisation, including not only conversion programmes for hitherto non-Muslim ‘natives’, but also the expulsion, as well as arrests in some cases when resistance was shown, of Catholic priests and nuns who had not obtained permanent residency when they had extended their visas. He was instrumental in sponsoring the creation of the United Sabah Islam Association as a vehicle for facilitating conversion to Islam in an effort to achieve unity through imposition of a common religion (Islam) and language (Malay) and evaluated by some as having succeeded in making Islam the main religion of Sabah (Nair 2013). While some might argue that Mustapha’s role in the Islamisation of Sabah was idiosyncratic, as subsequent Sabah chief ministers of Bajau origin—Sakaran Dandai,18 Salleh Said Keruak, Osu Sukam and Shafie Apdal—have been less aggressively involved in Islamic proselytisation, it is arguable that the Bajau have seen and proclaimed themselves as carrying the banner of Muslim Bumiputera in Sabah. In his examination of the historical dynamics of Bajau ethnic identification in Sabah, Nagatsu (2001: 217) argues that as a response to past images of them as ‘lawless, kidnapping, pirating races’ used to justify colonialism, Bajau began to regard themselves as analogous to the Malays of peninsular Malaysia, even considering themselves as a type of Malay (semacam Melayu). Indeed, after integration into the federation many began to identify themselves in some contexts, including the decennial censuses, as Malay (Melayu). Given the centrality of the observance of Islam to the definition of a Malay, as mandated in clause 2 of article 160 of the Federal Constitution (Brown 2010: 31), Bajau have emphasised the centrality of Islam to their own identity to the extent that conversion to Islam in Sabah could be termed by the phrase ‘masuk Bajau’, in analogy to ‘masuk Melayu’. Hiroyuki Yamamoto (2004) has further elaborated this dynamic by delineating how reacting to the claims of superiority in the practice of Islam by Brunei Malays before independence, Bajau harnessed the notions of Sabah nationhood and assumed leadership of government in order to secure the position of Islam in support of the international Islamic reformist calls of Sufi intellectualism (Ahmad Fauzi 2013). Although such reform did not find initial support, the forging of a political identity as the majority group practising Islam in the region was achieved by leading the call to join the Malaysian federation through which an alliance with Muslim Malays of Malaya could be used to achieve the dominant position of local Islamic leadership. In essence, this was the programme that Bajau leaders such as Mustapha endeavoured to realise. The political deployment of Bajau identity was thus the vehicle by which the Islamisation of Sabah was to be accomplished. Interestingly, she ignores that conversion in her table of chief ministers of Sabah, labelling Stephens as Kadazan/Christian in her ethnicity/religion column and as Kadazan-Dusun in her column on party representation (ibid.: 172). 17 Although actually of mixed Bajau-Suluk ancestry, he has been identified as Bajau Kudat or Bajau Bannaran. 18 Although he also has Tidung ancestry, in Sabah he is identified as Bajau (Interviews, Kota Kinabalu, Lower Kinabatangan 2012, 2016).

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The policy of containment of philosophical Islam which began in the 1980s has continued the process of bureaucratisation until today (ibid.; Maznah 2013). Measures taken to contain pressure from Islamists who ultimately wanted Malaysia to be an Islamic state ranged from intimidation, cooptation and strategic manoeuvring to the reframing of the Islamists’ demands and international (middle-class) links. Legitimacy depended on who could be seen to be ‘more Islamic’ (Ahmad Fauzi 2007). This state of doubt exists because the proclaimed standards of Islam’s purity are almost unreachable even if someone behaves as a ‘good Muslim’; the best that believers can do is to aspire to be relatively more Islamic in their conduct. The results of containment measures have amounted to the institutionalisation of the administration’s brand of acceptable Islam, comprising the injection of selected ideas on Islam in school curricula, in public conduct, in civil service promotions and much more (ibid.). During the 1980s the Islamisation programme in Sabah added an additional layer to the experience of bureaucratised Islam that first visited the region in the 1960s through the politicisation of religious awakening among Muslim populations expressed through Muslim/non-Muslim political parties (Lim 2013; Gusni Saat 2008). Continued exposure to bureaucratised Islam among some Bajau, however, does not necessarily create a generalised understanding or acceptance of it. Among Bajau who work in middle-class jobs in government bureaucracies and higher education institutions identification with state-defined Islam has to be curbed somewhat in view of the ‘Sabah for the Sabahans sentiment’ which some Bajau simultaneously share with non-Muslim Sabahan groups (Sintang 2014; Romzi et al. 2018). One example of the ‘Sabah for Sabahans’ sentiment surfaced in the choice of a new vice chancellor for Universiti Malaysia Sabah to replace the incumbent whose term was ending in 2017. The campaign for a Sabahan academic among the middleclass public proceeded for months, culminating in the Sabah chief minister and other senior ministers expressing the view that ‘there are ample qualified Sabahans’ (Santos 2017). Finally, the appointee was a Sabahan who fitted the few unwritten rules: specifically being Sabahan, preferably Muslim, in addition to the formalities of having the required academic qualifications. Ultimately, the appointee was a Muslim of Bajau background from Kota Belud. In 2019, however, the federal interest successfully exercised its controlling power by appointing subsequently a local ethnic Sabahan Chinese. The bone of contention in Sabah was not that he was not a ‘native’ Sabahan but that it was done, reportedly, without formal consultations with the authorities in Sabah (Fong 2019).

6.7 Conclusion More than two decades ago Zawawi Ibrahim (1998: 11), in the introduction to Cultural contestations: Mediating identities in a changing Malaysian society, emphasised how mediating identities constituted ‘a crucial process in the whole phenomenon of the emergence, consolidation and sustainability of the modern

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nation-state’. While the essays in that volume did much to advance understanding of the processes of development of Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian nationhood), Zawawi (ibid.: 12) admitted that its coverage did not do justice to the entire range of the Malaysian nation-state, particularly pointing to the inadequate consideration of East Malaysia. In this chapter we have endeavoured to address that gap by analysing historically and ethnographically how Bajau identities have been formulated, recognised and transformed in Sabah. We admit, too, that we have not done justice to the full range of expressions of Bajau identities, for example largely ignoring performances of identities in expressive arts (Jubilado 2010). However, our coverage of the dynamics of Bajau identities in the contexts of environmental justice in conservation initiatives and processes of Islamisation has, we hope, revealed important dimensions of diversity and transformation of these identities that have been central to Bajau securing of recognition in the sociopolitical context of Sabah. The case study of marine parks has revealed how the dynamics of claim-making among settled or emplaced Bajau have depended in part upon their distancing themselves from an internal Other, the still mobile Bajau Laut, often pejoratively labelled ‘Bajau Palauh’, many of whom are not Malaysian citizens despite having inhabited the coastal seas of eastern Sabah for generations. The context of Islamisation has shown how Bajau have positioned themselves with regard to external Others, within Sabah, particularly non-Muslim Bumiputera such as the KDM, but also the Malays of West Malaysia and, in earlier decades, Brunei Malays. Bajau intensification of their Islamic practice and identity served as a strategy to position themselves as the ‘distinctive’ Muslim Bumiputera of Sabah, even ‘as a Sabah version of Malay’ (Nagatsu 2001: 221; Gusni Saat 2008), and assume a prominent role in the state (and sometimes even federal) government, as indicated by the number of chief ministers of Sabah who have been of Bajau descent. However, their claims to iconic Islamic identity at the state level have been constrained since, in view of the bureaucratisation of Islam, contemporary Malays from West Malaysia, following in the footsteps of Brunei Malays in an earlier period, have continued to cast doubt on the ‘purity’ of Bajau practice of Islam and hence their Islamic identity (Syamsul and Mohd Anuar 2017). In his earlier study of Bajau identifications, Nagatsu (2001) found great analytical traction in harnessing Shamsul A.B.’s (1998a) differentiation of ‘two social realities’: authority-defined and everyday-defined discourses. Shamsul’s chapter, included in the same volume as Zawawi’s introduction, concentrated upon four main challenges—conceptual, descriptive, analytical and authorial—in studying identity issues through discourses that he used to analyse such foci as ‘ethnicised knowledge’ and ‘nations of intent’. His analysis, while largely focused on peninsular Malaysia, did encompass attention to the dynamics of Bumiputera recognition and assertion of claims in Sarawak and Sabah, particularly in regard to the operation of the United Malays National Organisation and the Barisan Nasional coalition in those

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states. What our analysis adds is consideration of how strategies of Bajau identitypositioning can bridge these ‘two social realities’, demonstrating how everyday practices can transform into claims to defining authoritatively the parameters of state development. Bajau livelihood practices of seaweed and aquaculture cultivation in the Tun Mustapha Park and their claiming of precedential rights in seaweed cultivation and land ownership in the Tun Sakaran Marine Park, the latter effected in part through continuing kenduri performances on their ancestral lands (Acciaioli and Majid Cooke forthcoming), may be everyday practices bolstered by vernacular discourses. However, Bajau have been able to translate their marine livelihoods and their Islamic practice and knowledge into warrants for recognition of sociopolitical leadership and hence the capacity to produce authority-defined discourses as chief ministers and other officials. It is indicative of Bajau politico-ecological prominence in Sabah that the state’s two marine parks are named after past Bajau or Bajau/Suluk chief ministers, Mustapha and Sakaran respectively, who were actually of mixed descent (with Suluk, Tidung and Murut). Yet it is also important to recognise how such assertions of authority in Sabah remain constrained by Malaysian federal bureaucratisation, operating not only through legal and policy channels but also through religion and political parties (Lim 2013). Despite such constraints, the agency of Bajau actors, whether as local pewaris in everyday contexts or politicians in authority (and often the two coincide), will continue to transform the positioning of Bajau within the Sabahan and federal ethnoscape and polity. Acknowledgements The first author is grateful to the Bajau and Bajau Ubian communities of the Banggi Island chain, Marudu Bay and Mengkabong for giving their time and assistance throughout the 10 years of continuing fieldwork and the various grant-making bodies, the latest being the Ministry of Education Malaysia for the Niche Research Grant NRGS 0007 for 2013–2017 channelled through Universiti Malaysia Sabah. The second author acknowledges the cooperation of the Bajau communities of Tun Sakaran Marine Park in his two periods of research, as well as the assistance given by Sabah Parks, the Semporna Islands Project and the Malaysian government in facilitating that research, which was funded by a University of Western Australia–University of Queensland cooperative research grant. We would also like to thank Dr Elizabeth M. Wood of the Semporna Islands Project for fact-checking the section on Tun Sakaran Marine Park and suggesting valuable revisions and updates.

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Fadzilah Majid Cooke is a research associate at the Institute for Tropical Biodiversity and Sustainable Development, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Malaysia. She is an environmental sociologist specialising in environmental justice, indigeneity, customary land and marine resources. She led the Sabah team for the Malaysian Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry into Land Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2011–2012), and she is an international steering committee member for the Sustainability Initiative in the Marginal Seas of South and East Asia. Her most recent publications, as coauthor, include: The limits of social protection: The case of hydropower dams and Indigenous peoples’ land. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies 4(3) (2017); and Positioning of Murut and Bajau identities in state forest reserves and marine parks. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 50(1) (2019). Greg Acciaioli is a senior honorary research fellow in anthropology and sociology, the University of Western Australia, and is currently a principal investigator in the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Food security and the governance of local knowledge in agriculture in India and Indonesia’. He has written on resource contestations in protected area settings, indigeneity in Indonesia, statelessness in Sabah and marginal communities in Indonesia. His most recent publication is: From subjugation to local sovereignty: The dynamics of frontierisation and refrontierisation in Lindu, Central Sulawesi (Indonesia). Paideuma (2020). He has coedited several special issues of journals, most recently, Masyarakat pinggiran di Indonesia masa sekarang. Jurnal Masyarakat dan Budaya [LIPI], 22(1) (2020), and several volumes, including Biodiversity and human livelihoods in protected areas: Case studies from the Malay Archipelago (2008).

Chapter 7

Sustaining Local Food Cultures and Identities in Malaysia with the Disruptive Power of Tourism and Social Media Sally Everett Abstract Measured by both the number of arrivals and revenues, the direct and indirect contribution of the travel, tourism and hospitality industry has grown exponentially over the past two decades, interrupted only by the coronavirus pandemic, and accounted for over 10% of global GDP in 2019. Tourism is the third biggest contributor to Malaysia’s economy, and food tourism is a major aspect of this; many people travel for a taste of a place. Much of the massification of tourism in Malaysia has been driven by large-scale corporate interests—both Asian and Western—who control key services such as airlines, cruise ships, travel agencies, tour companies, accommodation, and food and beverage outlets. This poses a danger of squeezing local providers out of the lucrative tourism market, including producers of traditional foods. In this context, consumer-generated media are widely recognised as powerful vehicles for destination and sector-specific marketing. They are challenging and disrupting traditional approaches to tourism promotion. Given that access to social media and the internet is relatively inexpensive, are they empowering tools for smallscale local providers to compete in tourism markets? This chapter examines social media’s role in the development of the Malaysian tourism sector, and its relationship with local food cultures and projections of identity. The discussion draws on concepts of ‘creative resistance’ and the ‘transcendence of third spaces’ to situate local producers servicing tourism. It then presents findings from a study of small-scale food providers, coupled with an analysis of websites/blogs/social media platforms which draws out qualitative data from tourists and producers. The data help to establish how social media are being used to transcend core/peripheral spaces. The analysis shows that strengthening product marketing—and creating ‘digital capital’—is a potentially useful way for local food producers to benefit from consumer-driven tourism and sustain local identities and ways of life. In doing so, social media can help disrupt powerful, hegemonic economic forces and globalisation associated with mass tourism.

S. Everett (B) King’s Business School, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_7

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Keywords Malaysia · Tourism · Social media · Food culture · Identity · Creative resistance

7.1 Introduction This chapter is based on the premise that food is an emblem of identity formation (Caplan 1997), and tourism is often regarded as an effective vehicle to promote and strengthen the identity and heritage of a destination (Frew and White 2011). In terms of tourism, a location’s culinary offering is undoubtedly a key factor in the selection and growth of any destination (Beerli and Martín 2004). Certainly, for Malaysia, its multicultural and vibrant food and drink image has been central in its tourism promotion (Muhammad Shahrim et al. 2009; Siti Radhiah et al. 2020). Consequently, the analysis here looks at the relationship between identity and foodmotivated travel, with a specific exploration of the emergent role of social media in the evolution of the Malaysian offer, and how it is strengthening local (informal) marketing links. The discussion explores how local identities and food traditions are being sustained and strengthened through food tourism activity and social media activity. Consumer-generated media are widely recognised as a powerful vehicle for destination marketing and are now challenging and disrupting traditional approaches to tourism promotion and destination development (Xiang and Gretzel 2010). Given that social media and the internet are relatively inexpensive compared with other traditional forms of advertising media, they are proving empowering tools for small food providers to compete with global firms. It is argued here that the interactive nature of social media has the potential to offer a new ‘resistance’ dimension to Malaysia’s tourism product, presenting local food providers with an accessible vehicle of counter-narration which may in turn help to sustain local cultures, identities and flavours. This chapter explores the increasingly important role of social media in marketing alternative food providers and for generating business for local communities, and thereby establishing Malaysia’s identity as a country with a rich food heritage and identity. Findings are presented from a study of providers on the outskirts of the capital Kuala Lumpur, coupled with an analysis of popular food/travel blogs. Overall, it finds that local food providers in Malaysia are aware of the need to use social media to disrupt ‘core’ food and drink offerings to help counter dominant hegemonic economic forces and ultimately ensure food remains at the heart of cultural identity. This analysis is in contrast to Siti Radhiah et al. (2020) who argue that there is an increasingly negative impact of globalisation, through which ‘Malaysian heritage food’ could be losing its cultural values within a ‘glocalised’ local food offering. Given that identity discourses are expressions of complex power geometries and require in-depth critical analysis, this chapter presents empirical data to theorise how social media are being used to transcend core/peripheral spaces (Soja 1996). It draws

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on the concept of ‘creative resistance’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and the transcendence of ‘third spaces’ to explain the situation for small local food outlet owners in Malaysia. Social media are increasingly being employed to overcome weaker economic positions and resist the power of commercial interests (the rise of global multinationals) that increasingly prevent many of the participants from engaging with the core of tourism provision in Kuala Lumpur. Although local networks are strong, in order to enable tourism to provide a force for good in terms of protecting traditional methods of cooking or production there needs to be social media engagement—helping to solidify existing networks, while providing alternative events that small businesses can benefit from, and ultimately sustain the culturally rich and identity-infused cuisines that characterise Malaysia.

7.2 Food Tourism Food and beverage constitute up to one-third of total tourist expenditure globally (Meler and Cerovi´c 2003) and has become a distinct sector in the tourism industry. Travelling to destinations to taste and experience the food or drink of a particular region or culture is certainly not a new phenomenon. However, there has been a significant rise in forms of tourism consumption that intimately engage with the gastronomic landscape (Hjalager and Richards 2002; Everett 2016). As part of a rise in new consumption patterns (one might argue of ‘new’ forms of post-Fordist tourism) and niche tourism activities, food-motivated travel is gathering momentum. Within the past 20 years, food and drink have become significant ‘pull’ factors in their own right (Okumus et al. 2007), and provide a touristic framework on which to construct a destination’s overall marketing strategy. Local foods are now serving as an attraction for tourists and a reason to return to the same destination (Ryu and Jang 2006; Everett 2016). The growth of new forms of post-Fordist tourism experience has been fuelled by reconfigured consumption patterns and a desire for less packaged, niche, more individual modes of tourism consumption (Poon 1993). As John Beynon and David Dunkerley (2000: 26) suggest, ‘all over the globe there has been an indigenisation of music, art, architecture, film and food’. A desire for ‘tasting the world’ (Franklin 2003: 244) and placing the ‘world on a plate’ (Cook and Crang 1996) has become a popular pursuit. Food has become an essential source of identity in tourism, and therefore is worthy of critical investigation in terms of its potential to strengthen peoples’ livelihoods and cultural awareness and offer destinations a vehicle for growth and development. Food tourism is an eclectic term, if not a phenomenon, and covers a myriad of different aspects of the touristic experience. It has been defined by C. Michael Hall and Richard Mitchell (2001: 308) as the ‘visitation to primary and secondary food producers, food festivals, restaurants and specific locations for which food tasting and/or experiencing the attributes of specialist food production regions are the primary motivating factors for travel’. Lucy M. Long (2004) later defined culinary tourism as a way of experiencing other cultures through food. It is the desire

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to experience a particular type of food or the produce of a specific region. Some argue that this increasingly popular touristic activity has been ‘simply ignored or taken for granted’ (Quan and Wang 2004: 299). Despite an increasing role as a catalyst in enhancing the tourism experience in certain places, academic work has been surprisingly slow to acknowledge the theoretical potential in examining this phenomenon and has failed to undertake much in the way of social theorising that interrogates the complexities of food as a social, cultural, material and symbolic signifier and resource. Although the body of food tourism literature has been slow to develop beyond economic appraisals and quantitative business-focused research (Everett and Aitchison 2008; Everett 2019), the last few years have seen an explosion of academic enquiry and research focused on food tourism experiences (Hjalager and Richards 2002; Boniface 2003; Hall et al. 2003; Long 2004; Getz et al. 2014; Everett 2016).

7.3 Food, Tourism and Identity in Malaysia The total indirect and direct contribution of the travel, tourism and hospitality industry has grown exponentially over the past two decades, interrupted only by the coronavirus pandemic, and accounted for over 10% of global GDP in 2019. Tourism is a significant contributor to Malaysia’s economy, and food tourism is a major aspect of this given Malaysia’s increasing identity as a food tourism location. Malaysia recorded RM86.14 billion (USD20.59 billion) in tourist receipts from the expenditure of 26.1 million international tourists in 2019 (Tourism Malaysia 2019), which helped make tourism the country’s third largest income source. Given that Malaysia’s gastronomy is regarded as having an important role in promoting its identity and is closely related to tourist consumption and experience, it is an area of cultural and economic activity that should not be overlooked. In the past 10 years, research on food and Malaysia has rapidly increased in line with policy development and government initiatives. It was the Ninth Malaysia Plan (2006–2010) that set out innovative food trails and activities based on the distinct specialties of its states, regions and communities to attract tourists to savour local delicacies. The Tenth Malaysia Plan (2011–2015) built on the value of tourism initiatives and cultural events, while the Eleventh Malaysia Plan (2016–2020) has further identified the value of attracting international tourism where growth can be ‘anchored’ to people, sustainability and local projects. Projects that have promoted local food to tourists have helped support local economies, sustain skills, raise employment and ensure the tourist spend circulates for longer in the local economy. For example, the city of Ipoh spent RM22,000 (USD5,260) on the publication of a new food guide to support Malaysia’s plan to generate RM30 billion (USD7.17 billion) from tourism by 2020 (Yeoh 2013). The success of similar projects is testament to the impact of tourists when they choose to support local producers. These consumer habits are driven by a belief that ‘local’ produces quality, but also that it helps sustain local economies and ways of life.

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Food tourism research is unlocking ways to understand emerging identities and capture identity transitions in rapidly modernising multiethnic countries. Food and identity in Malaysia have always been closely linked. Although more is needed in their research to assess how food is shaping peoples’ understanding of their identities and their relationships with each other, Jean Duruz and Gaik Cheng Khoo (2014) helpfully bring these concepts together by assessing how the ‘everyday’ and ‘creative’ ethnicity are lived out at food stalls in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Further, in their study of slow food events in Bario, Sarawak, Samuel Folorunso Adeyinka-Ojo and Catheryn Khoo-Lattimore (2013) argue that tourism is being used as a means of sustaining Malaysia’s rural economy, providing valuable sources of economic diversification, particularly in regions where traditional sources of income such as agriculture are no longer sufficient. Their work highlights the need to build linkages from the local economy to tourism supply chains and, in this way, industries related to tourism can grow, become more competitive, and contribute to a more equitable and healthier economy. Increasing investigation into food and tourism as a high-yield strategy for rural tourism destinations has shown that it has the potential to bring about economic gains and financial sustainability. For example, Joan C. Henderson’s (2016) study of food in relation to halal tourism in Malaysia highlights its intrinsic link to its peoples’ identity and emphasises that food can support other tourism sectors, as well as foster and celebrate cultural differences and overcome challenges. This is echoed by Adeyinka-Ojo and Khoo-Lattimore (2013) who suggest food (gastronomy) and culture need to be adopted by tourism destinations in Malaysia to effectively compete. Asunciòn Beerli and Josefa D. Martín (2004) find that food attracts tourists already in the area, but it is also good for the community, acting as a catalyst for the provision of infrastructural development and identity. Malaysia’s identity is synonymous with its food. One only has to think about durian, nasi lemak, satay, rendang, rojak and laksa and one is immediately drawn into the rich cultural identity and culinary history of the country. Christina Chi et al. (2013: 116) claim ‘Malaysia is rich with gastronomy products and Malaysian food boasts intoxicating combinations of flavours and sheer variety, which gives plenty of opportunities for tourists to savour different local food’. Their study of food image and tourism adds further theorisation, exploring the role of food in image formation and in influencing tourists’ behavioural intentions. By examining how food image can positively influence food satisfaction, they have gone some way in explaining the mutually beneficial relationships between food image, food satisfaction and behavioural intentions. Chi et al. further claim that Malaysia needs to develop more attractions to enable tourists to gain knowledge about the culture and the meaning behind different food. Through consumption of different local food, tourists are able to experience its beliefs, norms, cultures and traditions. Leong Quee Ling et al. (2010: 164) suggest that ethnic assimilation formed a unique Malaysian culture. This ‘multiculturalism’ among the different races produced a distinctive cuisine of Malaysia is described as ‘Asia’s greatest cuisines meet and mingle’ that have been the bedrock in forming and shaping the dishes which are apparently accepted by people from all walks of life in the country.

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However, it is still not straightforward to secure Malaysia’s position as a world-class food tourism destination (Chi et al. 2013: 116). With the ubiquity of social media and the internet, many decisions are now made before tourists arrive. Social media have transformed the way people interact with places and how decisions are made. In terms of social media and food in Malaysia, Jalal Hanaysha (2016) argues that global food brands already recognise their power and influence on consumers to create a stable customer base and facilitate strong interaction and communication. He strongly emphasises the value of using social media by restaurant owners to build consumer loyalty. In looking at the effect of social media in the fast-food restaurant industry, Jalal finds ‘social media programs reinforce the market visibility which would ultimately lead to greater chances of negotiation for customers’ (ibid.: 47). He goes on to suggest that ‘consumers usually prefer to buy from brands that advertise their products and services through social media’ (ibid.: 49). This rapid adoption of social media by large corporations is perhaps less true of smaller-scale local offerings.

7.4 Social Media for Disruption and Resistance Few products or destinations will survive in today’s world without a positive and impactful web presence and continuous investment in social media tools and online communications (Yang et al. 2016). An effective website and social media presence can help products reach global audiences, allowing them to be accessible all day and from anywhere in the world. DataReportal (2020) finds that more than half of the world now uses social media, with 4.57 billion people globally using the internet (comprising almost 60% of the world’s total population) and, of those users, 346 million new users have come online within the last 12 months. With 5.15 billion unique mobile users and 3.96 billion active social media users (up 10.5% since 2019), social media have become the most powerful vehicle for destination marketing, and, in turn, are disrupting traditional approaches to place promotion (Buhalis and Foerste 2015). Statista finds that in January 2020 about 81% of the Malaysian population were active social media users, reflecting a one-third increase compared to 2016, in which the social media users amounted to approximately 60% of the total population (Statista 2020). Given that social media and the internet are relatively inexpensive compared with other advertising media (Standing and Vasudavan 2000), social media are said to differ considerably from other media in that they resemble dynamic, interconnected, egalitarian and interactive organisms beyond the control of any organisation (Peters et al. 2013), changing the business landscape and redefining how businesses communicate across their channels of distribution and with their customers (Rapp et al. 2013). It is what Marie Pechrová et al. (2015) regard as a new form of communication which enables niche markets to be served and to emerge. Consequently, social media disrupt traditional rules of communication with customers by allowing companies and so-called social media influencers to engage in direct end consumer

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contact at a relatively low cost and at higher efficiency levels than previous communication tools. By allowing for a two-way interactive experience between organisations and stakeholders, social media have replaced previous models of media outlets that broadcast information to the masses with no direct reaction or response (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010; Martini et al. 2014). The academic community has begun to theorise social media’s role in challenging traditional knowledge, providing alternative discourses and disrupting approaches to marketing and consumer engagement. Research highlights that brands need to be active on social media, but it is difficult to quantify how much social media influence purchase decisions (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). Recognising that social media are a long game focused on relationship-building, John Heggestuen and Tony Danova (2013) found that two-thirds of large companies were regularly using social media and blogs to communicate, although rates in some countries are significantly higher, as in the United States at 91% (Statista 2017). Statista (2019) reports that 55% of Malaysian companies working in the services sector were using social media to publish information about themselves and the usage is rising exponentially. There is little surprise, therefore, that academics are increasingly unanimous that social media ‘are sociological and little short of revolutionary in their implications for business’, and given social media’s low cost and ability to reach consumers worldwide it has become the marketing tool of choice for many small businesses (Berthon et al. 2012: 262). Social media have been found to be the way to engage in a timely and direct fashion with end consumers, offering contact at a lower cost and with higher efficiency than with more traditional communication tools. They shorten the distance between a company and its users, thereby increasing and strengthening user involvement and engagement in the innovation process (Piller et al. 2012). Social media tools now play an important role in transforming business, changing its boundaries and knowledge distances, and making it more efficient and effective in certain circumstances (Bogers et al. 2010; Afuah and Tucci 2012). Filled with platforms involving billions of users (for example, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat), social media create a large virtual ecosystem in which smaller businesses and their customers can occupy spaces that were once the domain of those with large marketing budgets, and therefore engage in a common and equal creative effort. This approach reflects what Roberta Sassatelli and Federica Davolio (2010: 205) call ‘critical consumption’, where consumers ‘use their power of choice to modify market relations, in order to make them fairer and more conducive to a good life for all’.

7.5 Marketing Food, Place and Tourism In terms of tourism, social media have undoubtedly revolutionised approaches to place advertising. In their study of online travel information, Zheng Xiang and Ulrike Gretzel (2010) confirm the growing importance of social media in the online tourism domain, while work by Dimitrios Buhalis and Rob Law (2008) confirms that social

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media are the key broadcasting medium for any business seeking to attract visitors and later Buhalis and Marie Foerste (2015) confirm social context mobile (SoCoMo) marketing enables marketers to significantly increase value for all stakeholders at the destination. Stephen W. Litvin et al. (2008) suggest that we only have to see the explosion of online word-of-mouth (eWOM) activity to appreciate that consumergenerated media have a role in challenging and disrupting traditional approaches to place marketing. Niels Frederik Lund et al. (2018: 271) find there is a new reality ‘where destination brands are increasingly the product of people’s shared tourism experiences and storytelling in social networks, rather than marketing strategies’, adding that in destination promotion, social media are facilitating ‘a democratisation of media production and a power shift towards consumers who can now produce content and publish via communication channels where marketers are not invited’ (ibid.: 272). It is this ‘democratisation’ that facilitates a situation where consumers no longer seek out the physical word, but increasingly rely on online reviews and blogs to determine what experiences to pursue. Although there is some concern over the negative aspect of information technology development in the hospitality industry (for example, negative online reviews, and purchased search engine optimisation), S. Maitel (2002: 22) insists that regardless of its flaws it is accepted that the ‘internet is the greatest force of commoditisation known to man, both goods and service’. Among many, Alistair Williams (2006) was quick to point out that only those that develop customer-valued web-based experiences will be successful in the era of e-commerce. Indeed, the online experience economy has been applied as a marketing strategy and encourages innovative entrepreneurs to engage with a new type of business model. Pechrová et al.’s (2015) study of farmers and adoption of social media found that social media afforded opportunities to build a wider consumer market, but also discovered that producers were either unaware of social media tools or lacked the competency to use them effectively. In a similar way, Luisa Sturiale and Alessandro Scuderi (2013) found a growing need for new managerial capacities and better awareness of how to harness the evolution of knowledge and competence systems. They found that communication between producer and customer was not always being advanced on the three key levels they described as connection, conversation and construction (co-production). Antonella Martini et al. (2014) suggested that companies were starting to adopt social media to develop co-creation initiatives (where value is jointly developed with customers and an experience can be personalised to individual needs) and challenge the dominance of large players in the marketplace (Bughin et al. 2011). Therefore, the importance for businesses to develop knowledge and skills with this new form of marketing is key, and it is this ‘digital capital’ which is fundamental in building social and economic capital, offering knowledge and fostering relationship-based currency (Tapscott et al. 2000). Leila Essoussi and Mehdi Zahaf (2008: 95) suggest that traditional marketing approaches and consumer marketing theory are not appropriate to explore consumers of alternative food offerings because they are looking for more than a product. There needs to a clearer understanding of perceptions of benefits and the added value pursued in its consumption (Beaudreault 2009).

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In terms of linking alternative food and destination identity, Irma Tikkanen (2007) insisted that food and culinary products had to be placed at the centre of destination product offerings, echoing Beerli and Martín (2004) and the author (Everett 2015), who emphasise how crucial a positive food image is in destination promotion. Given that food is said to be the one of the most important attributes in how tourists perceive a destination—after climate, accommodation and scenery (Hu and Ritchie 1993)— literature on the use of alternative food and drink in destination promotion remains embryonic (Okumus et al. 2007; Stanley and Stanley 2014). It is, however, now rare to find new destination marketing materials without some reference to a culinary offer (Kim et al. 2009; Getz et al. 2014; Everett 2015, 2016). Young H. Kim et al. (2009) have further stated that it is difficult for tourists to form a clear image of a destination without the actual experience, and therefore the interactive nature of social media is now fundamental, adding a new dimension to destination marketing. This is particularly the case if the food offer is not within the tourist centre of a destination; social media can be used to entice consumers out of the centre and raise awareness of the periphery. In what has been theorised as a new geometry of knowledge in thinking through spatialities (Pile and Keith 1997), we have to wonder whether social media offer a way for smaller businesses to take advantage of an increasingly fragmented, fractured, incomplete and uncertain marketplace, thereby creating new sites of struggle for identity, meaning and representation. Given that marketers and institutions no longer have ultimate control over the image of their destination or product (Hays et al. 2013), the power of social media has come into its own and marks a shift to users rather than organisations taking charge of the internet and using it to (re)claim market territory from those with generous marketing budgets (Schegg and Fux 2010).

7.6 Methodology To interrogate issues of identity and discourse in Malaysia relating to food and tourism, a qualitative approach was adopted, built on a constructivist form of grounded theory to capture the complex nature of food tourism. In-depth examination of concepts relating to food tourism required a methodology that could capture the richness and diversity of this multifaceted research area. Research was multi-method (in-depth interviews and social media analysis) and engaged with several sources to generate empirical narratives and relevant data. Being sensitive to the social context, qualitative research can unearth more ‘meaningful elements in a complex—possibly multi-layered—social world’ (Mason 1996: 4), providing a ‘source of well-grounded, rich descriptions and explanations of processes in identifiable local contexts’ (Miles and Huberman 1994: 1). In line with the constructivist grounded theory approach (Goulding 1998), a process of purposive and theoretical sampling was undertaken (Silverman 2000). A list of small food providers located on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur and with a social media presence was generated using an internet search and 20 were randomly

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contacted to undertake a face-to-face interview. In total, 12 food providers (small restaurants and cafes) agreed to be interviewed within the timeframe using a topic guide which focused on their products, consumers, tourism development, social media and marketing. Most of the interviews were conducted in English, although two were undertaken in Malay and two in Chinese (Mandarin). Translations were completed by a bilingual research assistant residing in Malaysia. In adherence with ethical procedures, code names were developed for each business to protect their identity and offer anonymity and the language of the interview is noted (Table 7.1). The websites and social media links of the interviewed sample were analysed. Additionally, the mostly widely read food blogs (based on hits) which focus on food in Malaysia were analysed using the search terms ‘tourism’, ‘identity’, ‘local’ and ‘culture’ (limited terms to keep the research manageable and focused) to explore similar themes and to assist in triangulating the empirical primary data. The key strength of pursuing a constructivist grounded theory approach is in its provision of analytic tools which allow for systematic data collection where each stage and element informs and builds the next in order to theorise a phenomenon such as food tourism and identity. The guiding analytic process of constructivist grounded theory rests on locating key conceptual categories and accounting for relationships, and is achieved through the standard grounded theory stages of ‘open’, ‘axial’ and ‘selective’ coding. To effectively manage the data being generated, the software Table 7.1 List of sample population: Interviewees and blog sites Interviewee business name and language of interview (pseudonym code used)

Blogs http://www.bangsarbabe.com/

AC (English)

http://www.vkeong.com/

BN (English)

http://kyspeaks.com/

BO (Malay)

http://www.eatdrink.my/kl/

CM (English)

http://www.rebeccasaw.com/

CW (English)

http://theyumlist.net/

CC (Malay)

http://www.malaysianflavours.com/

KS (English)

http://www.placesandfoods.com/

MC (English)

https://foodeverywhere.net/

OC (Chinese)

http://followmetoeatla.com/

SK (English)

http://jkdrooling.blogspot.my/1

SN (English)

https://www.malaysianfoodie.com/

TY (Chinese)

http://kampungboycitygal.com/ http://www.applefoodees.com/ http://www.spicysharon.com/ http://www.taufulou.com/

1 The

blog is no longer available online

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NVivo was employed to help identify common themes (Bazeley and Jackson 2013). The data were translated into English (where required) first then interrogated in phases to formulate connections which offered an appreciation of concepts in terms of their dynamic relationships. After open coding of categories, ‘selective’ coding allowed categories with explanatory power to emerge as the central ‘storyline’ that pulled categories together including NVivo codes which coded the words of participants verbatim. The coding procedure in NVivo was intuitive and flexible, proving effective in being able to combine general themes and concepts such as ‘the food offer’, ‘location’, ‘culture’, ‘competition’ and ‘social media’. The codes generated were then placed within a wider framework of axial coding which was supported by hierarchical code structures and subsequently re-examined within the selective coding stage. The three most coded themes to emerge from the data form the basis of the findings presented here.

7.7 Findings and Discussion First, it is clear that respondents regarded food tourism as a powerful vehicle to promote Malaysia’s food, and findings highlighted its importance in sustaining local identities, heritage and traditions. Second, local food businesses felt they had a personal responsibility to resist multinational chains and ensure Malaysia’s food heritage is promoted and championed. Food providers seemed to foster a sense of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) call ‘creative resistance’. Through their use of local food, and collaboration with local people and traditions, they are strengthening a food movement which is supported by tourist interests and consumption patterns. Finally, the data indicated that interviewees regarded social media as the key media for supporting a process of strengthening identities and food identities, although the power seems to lie with social media influencers (bloggers). However, the research found that despite social media being regarded as a powerful vehicle in sustaining identity, they are not being used extensively by local food providers. Where they were employed, social media provided a long-term relationship-builder between producer and consumer, offering a kind of ‘third space’ (Soja 1996) that helps producers build links from their peripheral locations to the city’s ‘core’, and thus attract consumers to their peripheral locations.

7.8 Sustaining Identity and Culture with Food and Tourism Malaysia is regarded as a food tourism destination, and the benefits this is bringing to local people are being acknowledged. Every interviewee was adamant that tourism was good for their business, but also for sustaining identities and cultures. For example, one respondent said:

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Food is essential to everyone and many people love to eat. Whenever someone goes to another country, it’s inevitable for them to try out their local food. With a strong food identity, tourists will be able to relate the food to a country. As for the small local businesses that offer local food, this helps to grow their business. (CC)

They claimed through tourism that they were able to work with local (Orang Asli) communities as tourists wanted to experience something associated with indigenous Malaysian heritage: Apart from this, unlike most cafes, we have a simple and limited menu offering local dishes, instead of Western food. Also, we collaborate with the Orang Asli community in sourcing our ingredients … from the ingredients that we sourced from the Orang Asli community, people are able to know/try our local produce. (CC)

This was echoed by OC: ‘Through tourism, we get to bring out our food and culture to others. At the same time, local and/or small producers will get their income through the purchase and consumption of the tourists.’ What was clear from the interviewees and blog posts based on local Malaysian offerings was a desire to help people engage with something authentic and support its continuation: ‘This is one of the very few that retains the home-made traditional rice dumplings done the way our grannies used to make them.… Let’s keep the tradition strong!’ (Saw 2016). The responsibility of tourism to help with this was expressed by all, with the owner of SK saying: Tourists can easily relate to a country when they talk about the food, and this might encourage them to visit the country. By them visiting the country, there will be purchasing and consumption which will contribute to the country’s economy and also help improve the business of the local businesses.

Interviewee data supported findings by Artinah et al. (2010) who found that tourists’ quest for ‘authentic’ tastes (in Ning Wang’s [1999] sense of ‘existential’ authenticity which takes the individual feelings and perceptions of each tourist into account as opposed to a cuisine frozen in time) and experiences provides a fundamental thrust to ensure tourism destinations develop their own distinctive and unique identities. All respondents felt that tourism offered a way to build and develop their businesses. AC said: ‘As the cafe is located quite near to tourists spot, we notice that many tourists are coming in and they are enjoying our local food.’ CM added: ‘Yes. When people talk about certain food they will think about that country. When they visit the country they will surely purchase and consume the food, and this can help the local businesses to earn more money.’ Comments focused on tourism providing a vehicle that can strengthen local identities, echoing earlier work by the author and Cara Aitchison (Everett and Aitchison 2008) and Sims (2009). One respondent, SN, said: If our tourism is strong, we can introduce our local culture and heritage to the tourists. At the same time, with more tourists buying local products it can profit the small producers too.… A strong food identity can help to easily set countries apart from each other, and also educate outsider on the locals’ culture. At the same time, if more people are willing to visit a country for its food, then the local businesses can profit from there too.

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Several blogs acknowledged Malaysia’s food identity could be confusing to some: I’ve done lots of tours around the UK, and Malaysian food can be quite confusing because it’s so diverse. Malaysia has Indian and Chinese influences as well, so when I tried to raise the visibility of our cuisine…. We have to be careful that these dishes represent the varied ethnic background of Malaysia as well. (Willmore 2016)

The economic returns of projecting a clear Malaysian identity to the food were clear. AC stated: More purchase and consumption from tourists help these small producers to get more publicity and reach out to others.… It is important to show the locals and tourists where our food comes from. This is one way to educate them our way of life and local culture.

A similar sentiment was shared by BN, who suggested tourism allowed local foods to gain a profile: ‘Through purchase and consumption, local produce will get some publicity and awareness to a bigger pool of consumers from the world.’ Another provider, TY, said: ‘You can learn or know about a culture through food, and we can educate not only tourists but also the young people in our country about some of our long-lost culture or history through the food.’ The role of tourism in supporting and sustaining identity was clear, but there were inevitable challenges outlined by respondents, including their out-of-town location and limited marketing budgets compared to multinational companies.

7.9 Fostering ‘Creative Resistance’ against International Global Brands A second theme to emerge echoed Manuel Castells’s (1997) work and the research by Siti Radhiah et al. (2020) on Malaysia’s food heritage, with many interviewees suggesting that food can be used to resist the centrifugal force of capitalist globalisation. This emergent discourse within the interview data could be conceptualised as a form of resistance, providing a counter-narrative to globalised food offerings. Interviewees suggested that local producers felt they had a role in resisting multinational chains and ensuring Malaysian (regional) food is promoted to visitors. Tourism was regarded as central in this endeavour to sustain culture and identity, but they needed to find innovative ways to reach tourists. For example, KS said: ‘Is good because this can help in getting more tourists. With more purchase and consumption by the tourists, this can improve the country’s economy and also help the local businesses, and also lead to better earning of the people.’ OC said: ‘Yes, because as many people visiting the country for the food, it will help with the economy which can help the small local businesses too and help them compete with larger multinationals.’ He added: ‘The major challenge would be against the chain restaurants or a bigger group. Also, youngsters nowadays are keener to dine in cafes than in restaurants that serve local food.’ Such comments seem to characterise a fear expressed by some that locally produced foods are under threat. Moreover, fast-food outlets and international

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chains have become regarded as the antithesis of a local food tourism offer (Hall and Mitchell 2001). Local food outlet owners were keen to disrupt markets and offer an alternative to what could be described as a pervasive neoliberal desire for rapid economic development in Malaysia. Although economic prosperity and profit are necessary, producers believed their work was symbolic of a wider tactical struggle against the hegemony of capital, where noneconomic factors such as ‘integrity’ and ‘values’ should be prioritised above economic rationalism. Despite economic restrictions and expectations, many producers claimed they were resisting wider global and economic processes to retain their products’ qualities and heritage. This frustration about power lying with large corporations was expressed by SK: ‘Since we import our coconuts from Thailand, the cost is also higher too and the increase of price in our local ingredients is also making it hard for the local food providers to compete with international eateries.’ Yet places like CW claim their major challenges for the business, and for local food and food tourism development in Malaysia over the coming years, are competition from chains: ‘Competition against the cafes and international chain restaurants coming into Malaysia,’ and added, ‘Tourism offers us new and more opportunities to showcase the unique side of local food and drink.’ Rather than adhere to the Frankfurt School approach that overlooked the possibility of consumer resistance where such societal pressure will reduce individuals to an amorphous and malleable mass (Adorno and Horkheimer 1999), interviewees felt they could use tourism to openly challenge power structures and develop social spaces and mechanisms that resisted the negative impact of mass production. For instance, AC expressed concern about the challenge from ‘the bigger and international chain restaurants. Also, the increased price of the local produce every year,’ and was determined to ‘overcome this … tourism offers this’. Many interviewees felt that food tourism is characterised by an enhanced social interaction between them and visitors, fuelled by a desire to counteract the perceived impacts of standardisation, mass production and identity loss. Specifically, a plethora of tactics (for example, local cooperatives, marketing messages, use of social media for direct contact) has been developed to counteract concerns over the perceived power of commercial bodies and strategies of global brands that strangle rather than promote local and individualised food development. Like CW, the owner of BN admitted they were always in ‘competition against international chains of restaurants and also the international cuisine’. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau (1984: xxiv) theorising the employment of tactics in the everyday, their responses could be conceptualised as wanting to pursue ‘tactics of resistance’, seeking ‘an art of manipulating and enjoying’ within a spectrum of innumerable ways of playing and foiling. Social media emerged as a key vehicle which can promote discourses of local purchasing and pro-local tourism that would help support local food providers. This aligns with work by Lund et al. (2018: 274) who argued that social media now ‘afford every user the opportunity to produce power’. Respondents suggested that social media have the power to support the local and are effective in reaching new markets, but their use is seen as embryonic by most respondents. SN said: ‘We consider

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social media important, but we don’t update our Facebook and Instagram too often.’ However, it is clear from the blogs that there was an apparent tension given that many blog authors claimed to be promoting good local food, yet many of the advertising images and endorsements were clearly multinational brands. Unfortunately, what was apparent was that many of the blogs would comment at length on large global firms and mass-produced foodstuffs as opposed to focusing on local producers. For example, a search for the word ‘identity’ on the blog ‘Malaysian Flavours’ returned only three posts, and these focused on Genting casino, Coca-Cola in Singapore and an article on Thailand (www.malaysianflavours.com). An analysis of the websites of the participating food outlets indicated some engagement with social media and user-populated content, but much was out of date and they were generally embryonic and lacked engagement with a wide range of social media tools and vehicles. Tourists and owners are encouraged to engage with local food as a micro-political act and tactical manoeuvre that work beyond centralised powers. TY explained social media can be used now as ‘you can learn or know about a culture through food, and we can educate not only tourists but also the young people in our country about some of our long-lost culture or history through the food’. TY added: ‘We definitely try to resist standardisation, since we actually source the recipes from local famous and popular street food.’ What is strikingly absent from the blogs is the explicit link between tourism, food and identity. Many of the blog sites provided articles on food and travel, but food tourism as a concept was rarely made explicit. The discourse of identity and heritage was subtle, but will need to become explicit if Malaysia is to truly capitalise on the relationship between local and (international) social media.

7.10 Social Media and Influencers The role of social media and influencers emerged as a dominant discourse throughout the data. It has been said that people and social media can never be detached from each other (Zhuo et al. 2011). Merlyna Lim (2012: 234) suggests that ‘social media may be viewed both as technology and space for expanding and sustaining the networks upon which social movements depend’. Data from our study indicate that social media were strengthening the emergence of an alternative food movement in Malaysia, providing a marketing reach that was previously absent. TY said: ‘We rely heavily on social media and having blogger events.’ What became increasingly apparent was they saw the adoption of social media as a way they could resist global chains and large international brands, despite the obvious irony that most social media platforms are run by the largest, most powerful and most pervasive global companies on the planet (Anderson 2020). Bloggers noted that local producers often provided much better food, yet were not always recognised for this: the best of the hawkers are worshipped as kings and queens: mad scientists who have found the perfect blend of flavours to satisfy the deepest desires of our appetites. From the plates of noodles to strips of roast duck atop a heaping portion of flavourful rice, diverse dishes

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abound on every street corner. There’s a creativity here that would make a Michelin-starred chef weep. (EatDrink 2014)

MC said: ‘With the advancement of social media, local foods have more opportunities to be showcase on international platform. This also helps to ease in creating awareness of food tourism in Malaysia.’ Social media offer a useful mechanism to transcend from a location outside the city (periphery), but attract tourists from the core (Kuala Lumpur) as it provides a bridge or ‘third space’. CC said: ‘The cafe is located within a neighbourhood area and not at the city centre. Sometimes it can be challenging to reach out to people out of the neighbourhood. At the same time, the cost is increasing every year.’ MC said: ‘We are located among the neighbourhood and during off-office hours the business is not doing too well as we are on the outside.’ Social media seemed to offer our respondents a way to overcome their location outside of the city, allowing them to traverse this ‘third space’, or what Soja (1996: 2) calls a space for ‘transgressive discourse and self-affirmative resistance’. This was echoed throughout the data, with OC claiming that social media ‘have been very helpful, because the restaurant is not located anywhere near the tourist spot or main road in KL centre … we are finding ways to reach them now’. Respondents’ views seem to link well with Soja’s concept of the ‘third space’— a concept developed to capture the shifting and changing range of ideas, events, appearances, and meanings of life and is prevalent in accounts of power and resistance in cultural studies (Moore 1997). Responses were indicative of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 33) call the ‘rhizomatic multiplicities of interactions, relations and acts of becoming’, creating unexpected networks, connections and possibilities, and specifically notions of ‘creative resistance’. In a similar vein, Henry Giroux (2003) describes such responses as cultural struggles within sites of the everyday. Interviewees all commented in some way on their ability to secure new opportunities through their social media channels, links to social influencers and online networks. When asked about who are the main players for pushing the agenda of food tourism forward in Malaysia, all respondents were unanimous in stating the power of the social media influencers. MC said: ‘Social media influencers can reach out to more people in a shorter period of time.’ BO said: ‘The celebrities and social influencers’. Others concurred: First is the government. Second, the social media influencers. (CM) Educate more people on Johor food by raising awareness on our social media and engage with bloggers/media company. (KS) Social media influencers can reach out to more people in a shorter period of time. (MC) I think government and social influencers play a slightly more important role in pushing the agenda of food tourism forward. (OC)

Social media influencers seem to help local food businesses reach core markets and tourists because many interviewees were not in the main city centre but outside. Although the power, ethics and authenticity of social influencers has increasingly come under the spotlight as a consequence of not always being open with who might be paying them for posts (Goanta and Ranchordás 2020). Respondents frequently

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explained that bloggers were a highly effective way to promote local food to both local people and tourists, which echoes a tourism study by Mariah L. Wellman et al. (2020) which finds that influencers use the highly contested concept of ‘authenticity’ as an ethical framework when producing sponsored content. Interviewee comments seem to reflect Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) work which introduced the concept of ‘new cultural intermediaries’. Producers of social media content are engaging in activities as a way of formulating ‘distinction’ for local food outlets and Malaysia’s food identity. Bourdieu has helped fuse cultural studies and sociology in examining the development of new cultures and the rise of new cultural intermediaries (food tourism brokers) as bearers of new forms of cultural capital. Certainly Bourdieu argued there was a need to look beyond economic theory, urging a theorisation of the complicated nature of social status and class and how taste is expressed in its various guises. It might be argued that social media intermediaries represent the bearers of new forms of cultural capital. However, and importantly, this begs the question of whether the power to disrupt and influence is perhaps with the social media influencers rather than the food providers, or even the tourists who read their blogs and reviews. As alluded to in the literature, many local businesses felt that they did not have the experience or social media knowledge themselves to provide an effective campaign of marketing and destination promotion although most used Facebook and Instagram. Many of the responses echoed the work by Adeyinka-Ojo and Khoo-Lattimore (2013) who found that the organisers struggled to communicate effectively with local food vendors in Sarawak. While the organisers were busy serving local food, the restaurants were serving Western food, finding ‘marketing and promotional efforts need to be intensified among the current and potential rural tourists’ (ibid.: 362). They find that ‘more needs to be done by the community, organizers and other tourism stakeholders in ensuring that this event is effectively utilized to help Bario become a high yield rural tourism destination’ (ibid.: 363). Likewise, analysis of the interview data and blogs reveals that social media and online influencers were key to attracting tourists and supporting alternative marketing channels, but this might prove problematic when many of the blogs did not make explicit links to tourism, or indeed focus enough on bringing tourists from their city centre hotels to the outskirts of the city and to the outlets interviewed.

7.11 Conclusion This chapter has sought to explore the role of social media and influencers in strengthening the relationship between food, identity and tourism in Malaysia. By drawing on blogs and empirical data generated from interviews I have adopted concepts including resistance, cultural intermediaries and third space to expand knowledge in this multifaceted area of research. The argument suggests that in connecting the digital with the physical, food tourism can help foster connections that nurture immediate and longer-term engagements between producers and consumers.

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The discussion highlighted the explicit links between food, tourism and identity in Malaysia. Food is a polysemic cultural artefact able to characterise place and identity, and its role in the development of the country is clear and well regarded. Interviewees were convinced of the disruptive power of tourism, and indeed tourists, to support and develop their businesses and in turn contribute to the continuation of traditional methods, dishes and culinary icons associated with Malaysia. What was problematic was the emergence of powerful, standardised (city centre) restaurants. Yet strategies seem to be in place—approaches that are amenable to those disempowered from the core locations of the city, where spaces are reconstructed on blogs and in social media sites in ways that allow local food producers to be productive and exert influence. Drawing on subtle discourses of resistance, it is suggested that city/outside spaces are traversed and overcome when local food providers, social media intermediaries and consumers come together as active participants in the promotion of food which resembles Malaysia’s many heritages and identities. A key way has been through an online presence which provides globally accessible responses to the potential fragmentation of local food (and place identity) by global companies. By drawing on concepts of resistance, this chapter has explored the adoption of the social media channels afforded to producers and found that local producers can challenge dominant economic orthodoxies. The review of literature, in addition to the empirical investigation, found that social media are increasingly being used as a crucial education vehicle and a facilitator of what Soja (1996) calls a third space positionality. It has been said that ‘tourism is one of the engines which manufactures and structures relationships between centres and peripheries’ (Selwyn 1996: 9). We find that social media and influencers as cultural intermediaries offer a parallel digital and virtual space, providing small-scale food providers with an opportunity to attract customers and therefore bridge from their location outside of the city. Our data show that respondents valued social media and felt they have a key role to play in their marketing campaigns. However, despite acknowledgement that social media can help local food producers resist the influence of powerful commercial interests and global brands, a more explicit digital narrative is needed in Malaysia (and by the social influencers) to truly capitalise on this to support its local producers and culinary identity. Future research should seek to explore tourist views on the power and influence of social media in Malaysia, and it would be advisable to extend the methodology to more blogs, a wider exploration of different social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and therefore build a more comprehensive picture of the way social media and tourism are working together to disrupt traditional marketing approaches and strengthening culture and identity by bolstering Malaysia’s local food tourism offers.

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Sally Everett is professor of business education and vice dean (education) at King’s Business School, King’s College London, UK. She was previously the deputy dean for the Business School at Anglia Ruskin University (2013–2018) and prior to that head of the Department for Tourism and Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire. She is a national teaching fellow and a principal

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fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research interests cover social and cultural tourism and inclusive curriculum. Recent publications examine food tourism, innovative methodologies, community resistance and inclusive teaching, and include: Theoretical turns through tourism tastescapes: The evolution of food tourism research. Research in Hospitality Management 9 (2019); The ‘summer of discontent’: Exclusion and communal resistance at the London 2012 Olympics. Tourism Management 70 (2018); and Leveraging digital and physical spaces to ‘de-risk’ and access Rio’s favela communities. Tourism Geographies (2019).

Chapter 8

Negotiating Sinful Self and Desire: Agency and Identities of Non-Heteronormative Malay Muslim Men in Malaysia Chua Hang-Kuen Abstract This chapter investigates the sexualities of non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men under the influences of hegemonic Islamic heteronormativity in contemporary peninsular Malaysia. Drawing from the testimonies of 34 nonheteronormative Malay Muslim men gathered through semi-structured interviews, the analysis examines how their sexual practices and identities are intersected by Islamic heteronormative discourses. The findings indicate that their diverse sexualities are the outcomes of their tactful negotiations and navigations through Islamic heteronormative discourses. For these men, Islam is not only an integral aspect of their sense of self; it is also one of the main references for their sexualities apart from popular gay culture. In order to sustain the contradictions, they actively redefine, reframe, bargain and compartmentalise their faith and desire; capitalise on the ironies within Islamic heteronormativity to realise their non-heteronormativity; and, under certain circumstances, bring together the contradicting identities. However, none of these negotiations results in the integration of their faith and desire. The analysis suggests that the sexualities of non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men lie between conforming to and resisting Islamic heteronormativity. Keywords Malaysia · Malays · Islam · Sexuality · Heteronormative discourse · Gay culture

Chua H. K. (B) School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, George Town, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_8

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8.1 The Dominant Discourse: The Islamic Heteronormative Social Contract On 10 December 2010 Seksualiti Merdeka launched the first episode of a series of 15 ‘It Gets Better in Malaysia’ videos on YouTube.1 The first video featured a local Chinese gay singer. It did not get much attention from the public because there have been other Chinese gay men coming out in the local Chinese media over the years. Even then, their coming out only caught the attention of the Chinese community while the rest of the country remained indifferent. However, it was the second video, launched on 15 December 2010, that excited many, particularly the Malay Muslim public and the ethnoreligious nationalist state. Such excitement was generated because a Malay Muslim man—32 year-old Azwan Ismail—proclaimed ‘I am gay, I am okay’ [M] in a public video.2 It was a first in the country’s history. Within days the video elicited an overwhelming response from Malaysian netizens and the state. According to a statement on Seksualiti Merdeka’s official website, the video garnered more than 150,000 views and 3,400 comments in just five days (WAO 2010). The video also became the top news story in newspapers and television networks, featured along with comments from state spokespersons. It is not surprising that most of the responses from netizens and all the responses from the state were negative and homophobic. For example, the minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Jamil Khir Baharom, commented: ‘We want this unhealthy activity to be monitored closely by the authorities. Also appropriate actions should be taken to prevent it from spreading because it could hurt Islam’s image’ [M] (Azmi Md 2010). And a Malay Muslim netizen commented on the video on YouTube: Proud man, we can’t follow whatever we want … that’s why we have laws. You can be gay, but don’t live in Malaysia. It’s a shame [malu] for Malay people … and change your name as well. For your information, Islam prohibits homosexuality. [M]

At some point the negative and homophobic responses escalated into violence. It was reported that some Malay Muslim netizens had issued death threats against Azwan (The Star 2010). Out of concern for his own safety, Azwan laid low and Seksualiti Merdeka also took the video down from YouTube and stopped releasing the rest of the videos after having released five. It did not take long for the incident to subside after the video was taken down. Azwan’s coming out exemplifies perfectly the classic contest between the dominant structure/discourse and agency. Azwan is decidedly an agent who makes choices and takes control concerning his religious convictions, body, sexuality, identities and course of action despite the dominant homophobic discourse (cf. Duff 2012).

1

Seksualiti Merdeka is a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) advocacy group and festival in Kuala Lumpur. The group was banned in 2011 by the police. 2 The original languages of the quotations are indicated by: [E] for English; [M] for Malay; and [E/M] for a combination of English and Malay.

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The homophobic discourse or, as I propose elsewhere, the ethno-Islamic heteronormative social contract is a confluence of three interconnected and mutually reinforcing discursive social forces—Islamic heteronormativity, new Malay masculinity and Malay malu/maruah (shame/pride) sensitivity (Chua 2014).3 The social contract is culturally embedded and it governs the expressions of religiosity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality among Malay Muslim men in general and non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men in particular. Within this social contract, Islamic heteronormativity dictates the conceptualisations, expressions and moralities of masculinity and male sexuality (and their feminine counterparts) (cf. Bouhdiba 1998). This has eroded Malay gender bilateralism through the dakwah (proselytisation) movement (Karim 1992, 1995; Peletz 2009) and become the core reference for the operation of malu/maruah sensitivity concerning Malays’ gendered and sociosexual etiquette and behaviour in public (cf. Goddard 1996, 1997; Collins and Bahar 2000; Chua 2019).4 In addition to Islamic heteronormativity is the new Malay masculinity,5 which is a conflation of the United Malays National Organisation’s (UMNO) ethnoreligious nationalism (Mohd. Aris 1983; Shamsul 1998; Spaan et al. 2002; Abbott and Franks 2007; Balasubramaniam 2007; Milner 2008), Islamic male entitlements and responsibilities (Maznah 2010), UMNO-style patriarchy and machoism (Shamsul and Mohamad Fauzi 2006), and global market capitalism and financial success (Shamsul 1999; Chong 2005). Similar to Islamic heteronormativity, the new Malay masculinity also informs Malay Muslim men’s gender role and social etiquette (Thompson 2003). Fundamentally malu/maruah sensitivity is the vehicle for the predominant ideologies to demand social conformity by evoking shame or loss of pride in transgressors, which, at a larger scale, also constitutes and maintains communal consensus among the Malay Muslim community (Maeda 1975; Goddard 1997). Therefore it is a form of social contract to maintain ‘Malay-Muslim [men’s] dominance in a continuous centrifugal grip on a nation that must be kept “normatively heterosexual” at all cost’ (Goh 2015: 13). On the one hand, this heterosexist, ethnoreligious, nationalist social contract sees ethnic, religious and cultural others as outsiders, hence the coming out by nonMalays and non-Muslims in the same video project did not receive similar attention as Azwan’s video. On the other hand, the social contract marginalises religious groups with alternative Islamic ideology and practices (Nagata 1980, 2004; Stivens 1998) and Malay Muslim women (Ong 1995; Stivens 1998; Maznah 2010); alienates rural and working-class Malays (Khoo 1995; Shamsul 1997; Stivens 1998), particularly rural and working-class Malay Muslim men (Thompson 2002, 2003); and, of course, it marginalises and criminalises non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men (Teh 2001, 3

The concept of the ethno-Islamic heteronormative social contract bears much similarity to Monique Wittig’s (1989) ‘heterosexual social contract’, which encapsulates the (hetero)sexist social order experienced by women in Western societies. 4 Heteronormativity is an assumption that people fit naturally into distinctive and complementary gender/sex roles and sexual attraction happens naturally between the opposite gender/sex. In this case, the assumption follows the Islamic teachings of gender/sex roles and sexual morality. 5 ‘New Malay masculinity’ resembles Maznah Mohamad’s (2010) ‘new Malay-Muslim masculinity’ except Maznah’s concept is mainly defined by male entitlements conferred by sharia laws.

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2008; Peletz 2009; Goh 2012, 2015; Shah 2018) and women (Wong 2012; Shah 2018), as confirmed in Azwan’s coming out described above.

8.2 Contesting the Islamic Heteronormative Social Contract As a discursive social force, the social contract is subject to contestations from the marginalised. The most prominent contestation comes from Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) over Islam and UMNO’s ethnoreligious nationalism (Nagata 1980; Hussin 1990; Jomo and Ahmad 1992; Martinez 2001; Farish 2003). However, both parties unanimously uphold Islamic heteronormativity to denounce gender and sexual diversities (Goh 2015). Regardless of their achievements, Malay Muslim women of varied backgrounds have also tried to assert their agency and reclaim their status, rights and bodies from the sexist social contract (see Ong 1995; Maznah 2004; Norani 2006 for examples); so have the rural and working-class Malay Muslim men (Thompson 2003; Lim 2006); and non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men and women (Teh 2001, 2008; Jerome 2011, 2013; Wong 2012; Goh 2015; Shah 2018). While many scholars have contributed significantly to the understanding of non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men’s resistance to the Islamic heteronormative social contract, most studies are set in fictional representations of nonheteronormative Malay Muslim men in literature, on the internet and/or in the diaspora (Khoo 2001; Lim 2006; Jerome 2011, 2013). In a recent publication, Shanon Shah (2018) compares the ways gay Muslim men and women in Malaysia and Britain negotiate the contradiction of Islam and homosexuality. Shah’s comparative approach successfully demonstrates the constructive and contingent nature of faith and sexuality through different historical, political and social contexts. However, unlike his treatment of Britain, he silences the ethnic identities of gay Muslims in Malaysia. This means there are still gaps in gender- and culture-specific empirical knowledge about Malay Muslim men’s agency against the homophobic social contract. In view of these omissions, this chapter explores how non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men counter the Islamic heteronormative discourse in their lived experiences and the implications of these counter-discourses for their identities.

8.3 Research Method and Informants The data for this analysis were collected using semi-structured in-depth interviews with 34 non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men (cf. Minichiello et al. 1995). These men were recruited from Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru and Kota Bharu through gay dating websites. The interviews took place from March 2010 to January 2011. Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) was used to analyse the data. Ethical

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clearance for this study was granted by the La Trobe University human ethics committee prior to the commencement of informant recruitment and interviews. All of them had given their written consent to be interviewed and to allow their stories to be published anonymously. Therefore the names used in the discussion are pseudonyms. All informants identify themselves as Malay Muslim men. They have fairly diverse demographic backgrounds. Their ages range from 18 to 59 years, but most of them are in their twenties and thirties. In terms of their educational attainment, four have a master’s degree, 16 have a bachelor’s degree, 11 have some form of diploma qualification, and three have secondary education qualifications. In terms of occupation, there are two professional consultants, six managers, four educators, three businessmen, 11 sales and services providers, three office administrators, one care giver, three fulltime postgraduate students and a secondary student who just completed his studies. Apart from having diverse backgrounds, these men also have very different gender and sexual practices and identifications. All informants identify themselves as men, but they have distinctive conceptions and representations of masculinity. It is worth noting that one of them had previously practised transgenderism. In terms of sexual attraction, 16 of the informants report having an exclusive sexual attraction to men, 14 report having stronger attraction to men than women in varying degrees, and four report having equal sexual attraction to both sexes. Despite their sexual attraction to men, five are married to women (two admitted having no sexual attraction to their wives), three have nonsexual relationships with their girlfriends (they all report having stronger attraction to men than women), and one bisexual man has had casual sexual encounters with women. Several had had sexual and/or romantic relationships with women. There is one bisexual divorcee, three used to have nonsexual relationships with women, and another three had had casual sexual relationships with women and had stopped. Despite their relationships with women, all of them, except one single exclusive homosexual who claims to be abstinent, are having sexual and/or romantic relationships with men. Five have live-in male partners (two of the informants are a couple but interviewed separately), six have long-distance relationships with their male partners, and the rest are dating men or are single but have casual sexual and/or romantic encounters with men. Adding to the diversity of their sexualities are their sexual identifications. While some have sexual identifications consistent with their reported sexual attractions and practices, others do not. Half identify as gay and/or ‘people like us’ (PLU).6 But several are not comfortable using these labels. Seven identify themselves as bisexual or PLU, and the remaining 10 either refuse these identity labels or remain ambiguous about their sexual identification. It is essential to admit that this is an oversimplified attempt to present the complexity and fluidity of the informants’ sexualities and sexual identities within 6

The term ‘people like us’ originated from the LGBT rights movement in Singapore in 1993 and later became popular among non-heteronormative people in Malaysia (Offord 2003). Its popularity can be attributed to its unobtrusiveness and inclusiveness compared to labels like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’.

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a limited space. This limitation reflects precisely queer theorists’ criticism of sexual identity categories (see Butler 1996).

8.4 Countering Islamic Heteronormative Discourses Given the prevalence of Islam as the largest religion, the censure of nonheteronormativity permeates major Malaysian social institutions. According to some, the inculcation of this censure starts at a young age. The majority tend to take this censure for granted and are quick to reiterate it. Ariz says: ‘It is definitely wrong in religious terms, it is 100% wrong. You cannot love men, cannot have sex with men.… I knew this since I started learning the Qur’an as a kid. It is also stated in newspapers and also taught in school’ [M]. Following the stories of these men, the Islamic discourse against nonheteronormativity can be discerned from three major aspects of Islamic teaching on sexuality and sexual morality: the divine order of sexuality; sin and punishment in the afterlife; and repentance and behavioural change. There are numerous ways these men negotiate their sexualities and sexual identities against these elements of Islamic heteronormativity. These include the classic ways of adjusting found in role theory such as choosing, compromising, negotiating, redefining, segregating and avoiding the contradicting social expectations, except for abandoning either of the conflicting identities (cf. Biddle 1979, 1986; Vliert 1981; Harrison and Minor 1982; Siegall and Cummings 1995). While these adjustment strategies can be considered as part of their agency, this discussion is more interested in their counter-discourses against the Islamic heteronormative discourse.

8.4.1 Counter-discourses against the Divine Order According to Abdelwahab Bouhdiba in Sexuality in Islam (1998: 30), the order of the world in Islam as intended in God’s creation rests on the strict separation of the two ‘orders’, the feminine and the masculine. The unity of the world can be achieved only in the harmony of the sexes … the man to assume his masculinity and for a woman to assume her full femininity.

This ontology forms the very foundation of Islamic heteronormative discourse, which expects Muslim men to actualise their divine fitrah (human natural disposition) by being masculine and to unify with their feminine counterparts through nikah (marriage) in order to procreate. In the course of interviewing the informants, the causes of their non-heteronormativity were a recurring theme. However, by taking their testimonies on these causes merely as an aspect of their intellectual curiosity, one would run the risk of missing the significance of these supposed causes in their strategic counter-discourses.

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Inborn Traits: Jiwa and Naluri

Most of the informants with exclusive homosexuality tend to counter the Islamic heteronormative discourse by claiming their homosexuality as an inborn trait. Instead of referring to ‘sexual orientation’, which is the norm in the international gay rights discourse, the terms naluri (instinct) or jiwa (soul) are commonly used. In Malay, naluri refers to human instinctual inclinations such as eating, sleeping and so on. When framing their homosexuality as naluri, the informants consider their exclusive homosexuality as innate, natural and enduring as their need to eat. In Iemad’s testimony, for instance, he frames his exclusive homosexuality as ‘gay naluri’: I was born gay, my naluri is the naluri of gay. It’s only that we weren’t brought up according to our naluri. It wasn’t because I broke up with my girlfriend; or because I stayed in the dormitory and was raped by my friend! That’s all nonsense! [M]

Similarly, referring to jiwa or soul is to claim their homosexuality as an intrinsic part of their being and identity. As Iskandar, a married man with exclusive homosexuality, says: ‘My jiwa is as a man and I love and adore men’ [M]. Despite his exclusive homosexuality, Iskandar gave in to social pressure and got married. By countering the divine order with naluri or jiwa, these men are able to straddle the contradictions and sustain their homosexuality along with other adjustment strategies.

8.4.1.2

God’s Alternative Creation and Intervention

There are also other ways to frame informants’ counter-discourses based on their innate homosexuality. One is through the scientific concept of genetics. Sabdil, for example, refers to genes to explain his homosexuality. However, by essentialising his homosexuality he realises the risk of compromising his religious belief in God’s creation. He thus adds that nature is the creation of God and justifies God’s alternative creation: God is the upmost Supreme Being. He is the creator. He can change His creation if He wants; but He wants us to change ourselves. So I have to accept the way He created me, although I am disappointed with myself. I have to accept what God has given to me. Then again, I need to have the initiative to change. [M]

In addition to Sabdil’s creation discourse, there is a similar alternative discourse— takdir or fated by God. By referring to takdir, informants’ homosexuality is understood as an inescapable and compelling condition preordained by God. Hence their religious and sexual identities can be sustained. However, similar to making scientific claims, the informants referencing takdir still need to reconcile it with their religious identity. In the case of Aidif, for instance, he attributes his homosexuality to takdir, but asserts the need to taubat or repent in order to maintain his religious identity: As I said, it’s a nafsu [self-indulgence or lust] and it has been fated.… We have been created this way. I don’t want it; but it has been bestowed on me. So I just have to thank God for

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what I have. I do not regret it. Of course not that I think I am innocent, maybe one day I’ll taubat, but it takes time. [E/M]

Given the potential risk in compromising their religious identity by claiming God’s creation or predestination of their homosexuality, some informants try other less problematic alternative discourses. Unlike takdir that has no apparent purpose under the divine order, some conceptualise an alternative divine intervention with a noble purpose, for which they use two other concepts—cabaran (challenge) and dugaan (test or trial)—to controvert the prevalent discourse. By framing homosexuality as a challenge or test of their faith, they are not only able to sustain their nonheteronormativity they also manage to avoid compromising their religious identity. Therefore, men like Iskandar prefer the concept of a test to predestination. He says: ‘To consider it as a takdir is like blaming God. For me I think it is a dugaan from God’ [M]. Iskandar even pushes this further to signify God’s attention to the person endowed with the challenge or test: ‘In Islam, God bestows greater love on the person with greater dugaan’ [M]. By referring to God’s alternative intervention, these informants are able to maintain both their non-heteronormativity and faith. However, they are still required to repent in order to overcome the challenge or pass the test from God.

8.4.1.3

The Mischief of the Devil

Bouhdiba (1998) also notes that in Islamic theology on sexuality it is the devil’s temptation rather than men’s own intention to violate the divine order and morality that is responsible for transgressions. According to Bouhdiba, the devil is a nongendered and rebellious angel who is jealous of human sexuality endowed by God. Therefore the devil takes advantage of humans’ will to entice them into disobeying God and transgressing sexual prohibitions. A few informants’ testimonies frame their non-heteronormativity as an act of the devil, in which the devil either seduces men or possesses them to make them sin. For instance, Zachary vividly describes the encouragement from the devil for him to commit sin as we talked. He says: Ya, Satan, he’s here watching us. Uh … frankly speaking, I think you are cute, ok, so the Satan says, ‘Why don’t you kiss him afterwards?’ You know Satan will always be here and ask me to do the sin. [E]

Zachary’s excerpt implies the devil is acting on his perception of me, which echoes Zachary’s explanation of the devil’s limitations, that is, he can only act on humans’ desires by seducing them to sin. In addition, Zachary also mentions another trick of the devil—the power to possess and make humans to commit sin. The testimonies of Syah and Haqim use the word ‘dirasuk’ (being possessed) to express such a condition. Unlike seduction, possession seems to be a more potent counter-discourse. This is because many Malays do believe in spirit possession; they also concede that

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when someone is being possessed the person is entirely subject to the control of the possessing spirit (see Ong 1988). However, the discourses of the devil’s seduction and possession have different implications. As the devil is only supposed to act upon humans’ desires, there has to be homosexual desire within the individual concerned for it to act upon. Therefore only Zachary, who claims to be exclusively homosexual, refers to the devil’s seduction. Syah and Haqim, who are ambiguous about their sexuality, refer to the devil’s possession. For them, and for Syah in particular, a non-heteronormative sexual urge, though recurring, is only momentary like being possessed temporarily by the devil. They do not regard their non-heteronormativity in a positive way. Nevertheless, despite the acts of the devil, they are not excused from transgressing sexual prohibitions and corresponding punishments.

8.4.2 Countering Sin and Punishment for Non-heteronormativity According to Bouhdiba (1998), Islam sees sexual union and pleasure positively. But the only legitimate access to sexual union and pleasure is through heteronormative marriage. Furthermore, following this heteronormative morality, sexuality is not just a private matter but also an obligation towards God, Islam and the ummah (collective Muslim community) through marriage and family. Given the emphasis on heteronormativity and the sanctification of reproductive sex within marriage, anything that is deemed to violate this morality is considered a source of evil and anarchy. That is why zina or fornication, transgenderism, homosexuality, autoeroticism, zoophilia and the like are condemned and punishable in Islam. However, compared to zina, the others are considered worse forms of violation. This is because, in a sense, zina remains within the order of heteronormativity. It does not violate the binary of gender/sex; it only violates the morality of sex within marriage. The other practices incur stronger condemnation because they violate the divine order of sexuality and morality (ibid.). All the informants acknowledge that homosexuality is sinful and punishable according to Islam. They commonly quote the Qur’anic story of the Prophet Lot as the validation for it being a sin and for the punishment that ensues. Though none of them envisages a rain of burning rocks in the present day, they anticipate punishment in the afterlife, which concerns many of them. Despite the previous counter-discourses, they believe they will be judged and punished accordingly by the all-knowing God. The belief in burning in hell is common among the informants who bring up the subject of punishment. Ariz says: ‘Everyone will die, so I do fear for the retribution of my sin … in the afterlife, we will be judged, good people will go to heaven, and bad people will be burned in fire’ [M]. Given their acceptance of this Islamic discourse, their counter-discourses have to be framed within the premise that homosexuality is sinful. The question then is, what aspect of homosexuality is considered sinful? Islamic laws in Malaysia only make

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provision for the offenders of liwat (anal sex) and public indecency (Jawi 2010). There is no clear provision for the offence of non-penetrative sex and nonsexual activities. The informants thus formulate their counter-discourses based on same-sex affection and non-penetrative sexual activities.

8.4.2.1

Love Is Not a Sin

Some informants propose that affection towards the same sex is not sinful compared to having sex. Farhan says: If you ask me personally, to have feelings for or liking someone is natural, I think it’s universal. Of course to have sexual intercourse is totally haram [forbidden]. But just to have feelings, I think it’s fine. [E]

Another informant, Yan, who observes abstinence, takes it further and states that two men can even live together as a couple and remain innocent as long as there is no sexual contact between them. He says: Uh … if you live in the same house as friends that’s not a problem. Unless you do something against the nature, that will make it sinful.… That’s something I am seeking, a relationship as a friend, nothing sexual. More like living in an old folks home! [Laughs] [M]

8.4.2.2

Light and Heavy Sex (Sin)

Apart from countering with platonic love, a few informants suggest that some forms of intimate contact between men transcending carnal desire are permitted in Islam. For instance, Razman refers to the Arabic social etiquettes between men: ‘If you look at Arabic culture, the men hug and kiss each other’s cheeks when greeting each other. There’s also a culture of kissing the forehead between men, it’s a norm. But of course when it involves sexual desire, it is sinful’ [E/M]. However, as the majority of informants are sexually active with men, how then do they counter the sinfulness of homosexual behaviour? Two dichotomous concepts, seks ringan (literally light sex) and seks berat (literally heavy sex), are used frequently. Light sex includes non-penetrative sexual activities including touching, hugging, kissing, fondling, masturbation and oral sex; heavy sex is anal sex. The informants construct this dichotomy based on the perceived sinfulness of these sexual activities. Since anal sex is officially sanctioned as a sinful act, the informants consider anal sex to be subject to harsh punishment; hence ‘heavy sex’. In comparison, there is no specific sanction for other forms of non-penetrative sex, but they are not considered totally devoid of sin. Therefore the informants classify all forms of non-penetrative sex as ‘light sex’. The discourse of light–heavy sex is crucial for these informants to express their sexualities according to their capacity to bear the supposed consequences. As noted previously, only one of them is able to remain abstinent. For the rest, they either

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resort to light sex only or risk harsh punishment in the afterlife. For example, Ikmal who only engages in light sex, says: Because there are heavy and light sins in Islam. No one is free from sinning; it’s a matter of extent. So my stand is, when I am presented with sins, heavy and light, it’s better for me to commit the light sin than the heavy one. Just try to avoid the heavy one. [M]

Unlike Ikmal, some informants disregard the heavy sin and continue having anal sex. This is especially true for those identify themselves as either ‘top’, ‘versatile’ or ‘bottom’.7 For them, their sex roles in anal sex are important defining factors of their sexual identities. For instance, Wan, who changed his sex role from bottom to versatile, says: ‘I don’t want to think about it. I know this is sinful, but I seldom think about it. If I keep thinking about it, I’ll become tense’ [M]. Since the sin, whether light or heavy, is inevitable for them unless they remain abstinent, it becomes crucial for them to counter the supposed sins they commit.

8.4.3 Countering the Sinfulness of Non-heteronormativity Based on the testimonies of these informants, there are three common counterdiscourses—offsetable sins, bearing one’s own sin and a forgiving God.

8.4.3.1

Offsetable Sins

In relation to offsetable sins, informants conceptualise a ‘merit–sin balance sheet’ in which their merits and sins from respective good and bad deeds are being recorded. Like many Muslims, they believe that, when entering the afterlife, a person will either go to heaven or hell depending on the merit and sin gathered throughout their life. God will be the ultimate judge for one’s final destination and his judgment will be based on the balance of one’s merit and sin. A person will enter heaven when his or her merits outweigh their sins and vice versa for hell. Therefore it becomes crucial for these men to make sure their merit–sin balance sheet is in the black, so to speak. To achieve this, one has to do more good deeds, and these include performing daily prayers and giving alms to the poor. This encourages the informants to continue their religious practices, hence sustaining their religious identity in spite of their non-heteronormativity.

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A ‘top’ is the person who usually assumes the penetrative role during anal sex, a ‘bottom’ assumes the receiving role and a ‘versatile’ assumes both roles.

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Bearing One’s Own Sins

This is a radical counter-discourse that is only engaged by one man, Fareezuan. Taking ownership of his sin allows him to embrace both his sexual and religious identities in a radical way, that is, to embrace his sexuality and also his belief in the sinfulness of non-heteronormativity. Although this stance does not resolve the contradicting identities, it somehow enables a sense of self-empowerment and selfdetermination of his sexual and religious identities. Fareezuan says: ‘We all will be buried in our own grave. If you do good, you’ll get good rewards and vice versa.… I’ll bear my own sin. Why do people want to meddle in others’ matters? Do they think they have no sin?’ [M]. Nevertheless, Fareezuan also hopes for the forgiveness from God.

8.4.3.3

Forgiveness from God

To counter the religious censure of non-heteronormativity, some informants try to emphasise the compassionate and forgiving nature of God. In contrast to claiming homosexuality as the creation of God, emphasising God as ever forgiving does not compromise their religious identity. However, the seeming contradiction between the religious censure of homosexuality and the forgiving nature of God results in some sense of uncertainty regarding God’s stand on homosexuality and his nature. Will God ever forgive non-heteronormative people? This sense of uncertainty is clear in Fareezuan’s testimony: ‘Maybe God will forgive me, because it wasn’t something I asked for, it’s natural. So maybe God will understand and forgive me or be lenient about it. Just maybe’ [M]. Nevertheless, this counter-discourse may not be effective because it leads its advocates back to the dominant Islamic discourse, since, according to some, God will only forgive their sins on one condition—taubat or repentance.

8.4.4 Countering Taubat The concept of taubat is a recurring topic when it concerns informants’ religious identity. Taubat is the only legitimate way to salvage their perceived sin and to restore their Muslim identity. Though the closest English gloss for taubat is ‘repent’, this does not reflect the informants’ understanding of this concept. For them, taubat is not only a matter of feeling contrite for misconduct against God’s will; it also demands asking forgiveness from God and a return to the fold of Islamic heteronormativity. Unlike the other Islamic heteronormative discourses, the majority of the informants do not counter taubat with an alternative discourse. This is perhaps because, unlike the discourses of divine order and sin, taubat is practical and measurable. Therefore many negotiate the behavioural change required and bargain the timing of it after failing to repent. The alternative behavioural changes include abstinence, moderating same-sex activities (light sex and less sex) and bisexuality (getting

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married and leading a bisexual lifestyle). In terms of timing, some informants specify that the deadline for taubat is 40 years of age because it was at this age when Muhammad received the first divine messages and gained his status as a prophet. But the ultimate deadline is before one’s death.

8.4.4.1

Monogamous Same-sex Relationships as a Counter-discourse to Taubat

A few informants propose a monogamous and committed same-sex relationship parallel to heterosexual marriage as an alternative for behavioural change. Although they do fantasise about gay marriage, they believe it will not be possible in the context of Malaysia. For these men, a monogamous same-sex relationship offers a sense of legitimacy to the prohibited sexual behaviours. For example, Irwan even turned his advocacy of monogamous same-sex relationships into a small social movement among his circle of PLU friends. He says: After my scandal,8 I stopped everything. I reflected on my own behaviours and I changed. After I changed, to my surprise, my friends around me followed suit. Now we have a group called Fuck Love Crew, FLC.9 What we are trying to do is to … you know, many PLU they practise one-night stands or they tend to fall in love at first sight, that’s what we fuck, we don’t want that…. We want to change that attitude; we want to change society’s perception that PLU cannot have long-lasting relationship. We can, why not? [E/M]

Despite Irwan’s advocacy and having an alternative family with his male partner, he does not rule out the possibility of him getting married and having children. After all, marriage and procreation are considered the ultimate way to restore their otherwise compromised faith and masculinity (Chua 2014). Further, marriage and children also mean social security in old age, which is one of the major concerns apart from taubat.

8.5 The Ironies of Islamic Heteronormativity Thus far it looks as though Islamic heteronormative discourses have a repressive impact on the informants’ non-heteronormativity. However, in some contexts heteronormative morality not only facilitates the expression of their nonheteronormativity, but to a certain extent it encourages it.

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His nude pictures with another man were leaked. Original name of the group.

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8.5.1 Sex Segregation as the Alibi for Non-heteronormativity Islam prohibits close proximity between men and women who are not related by family ties or marriage; however, such prohibitions are not applicable between members of the same sex. This sex segregation imposed by the religion allows same-sex relationships to pass unnoticed. In the testimonies of the married men, this segregation enables them to socialise freely with their PLU friends without causing suspicion among their wives and the people around them. Ariz, for example, is able to hang out and go travelling with his PLU ‘special friends’ (his words) without protest from his wife. Such concessions would not be possible if Ariz were to hang out and travel with his female friends. Furthermore, sex segregation also allows men to mingle freely and share living spaces without attracting formal and informal surveillance compared to unwedded heterosexual couples. However, sex segregation may not provide such immunity for effeminate men. In Malaysia, effeminate men tend to be associated with homosexuality and transgenderism. Therefore, when effeminate men hang out together or when masculine men hang out with effeminate men, such immunity dissipates.

8.5.2 Institutionalisation of Women’s Sexuality Under Islamic heteronormativity, premarital sex with women is prohibited; the only legitimate sex with women is within marriage. Similar to sex segregation, the institutionalisation of women’s sexuality allows some non-heteronormative men to sustain their presumably heteronormative Muslim identity. For example, Saiful maintains two long-distance relationships with a man and a woman living in the same city. Despite being in the relationship for over six years, Saiful and his girlfriend never have any physical intimacy. He only does normal dating activities with his girlfriend and spends the night with his boyfriend. According to him, the platonic relationship is appreciated by his pious girlfriend and she never questions his sexuality; and he has no qualms about not having physical intimacy because he is not sexually attracted to her. Similar to the effect of sex segregation, the institutionalisation of women’s sexuality by Islam also indirectly encourages homosexuality among some men. Based on the testimonies of some informants, particularly among the bisexual-identified men, sexual gratification from women is very difficult to attain unless they manage to enter the institution of marriage. Given this limitation, some report they have to turn to men for sex. This decision is evident in the excerpt of the youngest informant, Haqim: For women, they tend to be offended if we want to get physical with them. Unlike men, especially if we both know what we are into, it’s easier [to get physical] with them.… For now, if I choose to befriend with a girl, there won’t be anything [physical] between us; but if I choose to be with a man, at least I get to enjoy the romantic feeling and physical pleasure from him. [M]

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Another bisexual-identified man, Mazlan, the eldest informant, echoes this: ‘Sex with women is legal; but having sex with men is fun’ [E].

8.6 Convergence of Sexual and Religious Identities Despite the contradictions that clearly exist in the claims and counterclaims, it is possible for informants to bring their sexual and religious identities together. This is particularly apparent when they take their religious practices into their socialisation with their non-heteronormative friends. It is not possible the other way round. In the case of Fareezuan, he consciously chooses Malay Muslim PLU friends who adhere to their prayers. They remind each other about prayers through phone calls or text messages. Another instance is when some of them take fast breaking during Ramadan as an opportunity to socialise and forge new connections with other Muslim men. Tengku shares his excitement during such gatherings: During the fasting month, we have an annual gathering at … last year was held in Danga Bay promenade. We gathered all the gay people and break fast together. [Tengku re-enacts the conversation during the gathering.] ‘Oh! Really, I don’t know him, but my friend knows him.’ ‘Oh! This is a small PLU world after all in Johor Bahru!’[E]

In the case of Nizam, he and his Chinese male partner organise an annual open house to celebrate the end of the fasting month. Unlike the more exclusive prayer group and dinner gatherings Fareezuan and Tengku have with PLU friends, Nizam invites his straight and PLU friends, relatives of both families and neighbours to their open house. It is at this gathering of people of diverse backgrounds, religious convictions and sexualities that Nizam brings together his sexual and religious identities. The instances described above seem to suggest the integration of sexual and religious identities. However, this is not what these men are trying to achieve, nor is it possible under the hegemonic religious prescriptions. In these cases, the contradictory identities merely coexist and there is no attempt to integrate one with another. In Fareezuan’s case, the prayer reminders among his friends serve mainly as a reinforcement of their religious identity despite their non-heteronormativity. Their practices do not result in LGBT-friendly or affirmative religious networks or counter-discourses. Similarly, Tengku’s and Nizam’s gatherings do not subvert the religious occasions to assert their Malay Muslim gay identity like Azwan did in the video. Their sexual and religious identities run in parallel, without compromising one or the other. As Iemad says: ‘Homosexuality is strictly prohibited in Islam! Then again, it’s our life. Religion is religion, but we must still get on with life’ [M]. Therefore, despite the domineering Islamic heteronormative discourse in public, these non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men get on with their lives by engaging in one or more form of the counter-discourses together with other adjustment strategies.

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8.7 Good or Bad Muslim Men? Between Faith and Desire As is clear from the informants’ testimonies, non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men are actively engaged in counter-discourses against Islamic heteronormativity. These counter-discourses are, by and large, dictated by claims of the dominant Islamic discourses of divine and devilish interventions, the sinfulness of deviance and repentance. None of the informants has proposed any LGBT-friendly or affirmative religious discourse or counter-discourse that may threaten their Muslim identity, and hence their Malay identity (cf. Lian 2001; Shamsul 2001a, 2001b; Syed Husin 2008). Even their advocacy of monogamous same-sex relationships follows the logic of Islamic heteronormativity. There is also a noticeable absence of a human rights discourse. This is mainly because claiming personal rights over one’s body and sexuality is against the sexual moral obligation towards God, Islam and the collective Muslim community and the Islamic heteronormative social contract (Bouhdiba 1998). Hence, informants have to tiptoe along the edge of the dominant Islamic discourses in order to sustain both their Muslim identity and non-heteronormativity. In turn, it diversifies or, in postmodern terms, ‘queers’ their Muslim and sexual practices and identities. In addition, informants’ counter-discourses are only applied within the personal sphere and close social circles. None of them has taken their non-heteronormativity and counter-discourses out into the public realm either as an individual or a group. This is because they know it will breach the Islamic heteronormative social contract and result in negative social sanctions from the state and the Malay Muslim community as demonstrated in Azwan’s coming out. As a result, their non-heteronormative identities are apolitical.

8.7.1 Are Non-heteronormative Malay Muslim Men Bad Muslims? Given the religious censure of homosexuality, it is common for Muslims in Malaysia to stigmatise non-heteronormative men as sinners (cf. Ramakrishnan 2000). However, the findings of this study suggest the possibility of a more objective attitude towards the piety of men such as the informants. Despite their deviant sexualities according to Islam, they do adhere to their religious identity and practices. Moreover, they are all negotiating their non-heteronormativity in order to observe Islamic heteronormativity, as much as possible. Even their counter-discourses are fundamentally aimed at sustaining their religious identity, while continuing their nonheteronormativity in one way or another. Furthermore, none of them has committed apostasy. Although the motivations to sustain their religious identity may be driven by practical and expedient considerations, such as the continuation of their ethnicity, the desire for heaven and the fear of hell, rather than for some altruistic and benevolent

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aspiration, this does not render them impious Muslims. This is because their expedient considerations are strongly associated with the existing Islamic discourses embedded within the heteronormative social contract, which is vested with strategic and prudent interests.

8.7.2 Are Non-heteronormative Malay Muslim Men Bad Boyfriends/Husbands? Apart from querying the informants’ piety, another question that may be raised is the faithfulness of female-partnered or married men towards their girlfriends or wives. As indicated in the findings, some men consider bisexuality a possible solution to their predicament and this approach seems to be using women to their advantage. No doubt they appear to be dishonest or hypocritical. However, their dishonesty is fundamentally the result of attempts to adhere to the patriarchal social contract. Under this social contract, these men can only establish the expected masculinity and male sexuality through Islamic heteronormativity. Hence, some are compelled to get married even though they have no sexual or romantic interest in women. It is not a surprise that these married men continue to have affairs with men after marrying. In such instances, women partnered with or married to non-heteronormative men are doubly jeopardised by the Islamic heteronormative social contract through their male partners.

8.8 Conclusion Islamic heteronormativity plays a crucial part in the identities of the informants whose testimonies are reported here. For them, it is not only an integral aspect of their sense of self and existence in the present as well as in the afterlife, it is also one of the main references, either as a direct or contrasting reference, for their sexualities. This becomes evident when informants rely significantly on the dominant Islamic heteronormative discourse to make sense of their sexualities and to assert their agency. However, their agency is not aimed at creating affirmative discourses or alternative social realities, but to sustain in one way or another their conflicting identities. It is through this expedient and apolitical resistance that their sexual practices and identities become diversified. Though expediency and the apolitical nature of their agency do not seem a promising basis for structural change, the fact that they stepped out from the comfort of their privacy to voice their positions demonstrates that they do not subject themselves blindly to the dominant structure/discourses and they want to be heard. They may not be saying ‘I am gay, I am okay’, like Azwan. But they do say, ‘I’m here and hear me out.’

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Jerome, Collin. 2011. Queer Melayu: Queer sexualities and the politics of Malay identity and nationalism in contemporary Malaysian literature and culture. DPhil thesis, University of Sussex. ———. 2013. Queer Malay identity formation. Indonesia and the Malay World 41(119): 97–115. Jomo K.S., and Ahmad Shabery Cheek. 1992. Malaysia’s Islamic movements. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel S. Kahn and Francis Loh Kok Wah, 79–106. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Karim, Wazir Jahan. 1992. Women and culture: Between Malay adat and Islam. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ———. 1995. Bilateralism and gender in Southeast Asia. In ‘Male’ and ‘female’ in developing Southeast Asia, ed. Wazir Jahan Karim, 35–74. Oxford: Berg. Khoo Boo Teik. 1995. Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An intellectual biography of Mahathir Mohamad. New York: Oxford University Press. Khoo Gaik Cheng. 2001. Nationalism and homoeroticism: A feminist reading of the Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat debate. In Risking Malaysia: Culture, politics, and identity, ed. Maznah Mohamad and Wong Soak Koon, 45–72. Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Lian Kwen Fee. 2001. The construction of Malay identity across nations: Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 157(4): 861–879. Lim, David C.L. 2006. Cruising Mat Motor: Malay biker masculinity and queer desire in/through KL Menjerit. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7(1): 62–80. Maeda, Narifumi. 1975. Family circle, community, and nation in Malaysia. Current Anthropology 16(1): 163–166. Martinez, Patricia A. 2001. The Islamic state or the state of Islam in Malaysia. Contemporary Southeast Asia 23(3): 474–503. Maznah Mohamad. 2004. Women’s engagement with political Islam in Malaysia. Global Change, Peace & Security 16(2): 133–149. ———. 2010. Making majority, undoing family: Law, religion and the Islamization of the state in Malaysia. Economy and Society 39(3): 360–384. Milner, Anthony. 2008. The Malays. Oxford: Blackwell. Minichiello, Victor, Rosalie Aroni, Eric Timewell, and Loris Alexender. 1995. In-depth interviewing: Researching people. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. Mohd. Aris Hj. Othman. 1983. The dynamics of Malay identity. Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Fakulti Sains Kemasyarakatan dan Kemanusiaan Monograf 7. Nagata, Judith. 1980. Religious ideology and social change: The Islamic revival in Malaysia. Pacific Affairs 53(3): 405–439. ———. 2004. Alternative models of Islamic governance in Southeast Asia: Neo-Sufism and the Arqam experiment in Malaysia. Global Change, Peace & Security 16(2): 99–114. Norani Othman. 2006. Muslim women and the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism/extremism: An overview of Southeast Asian Muslim women’s struggle for human rights and gender equality. Women’s Studies International Forum 29(4): 339–353. Offord, Baden. 2003. Homosexual rights as human rights: Activism in Indonesia, Singapore, and Australia. Oxford: Peter Lang. Ong, Aihwa. 1988. The production of possession: Spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia. American Ethnologist 15(1): 28–42. ———. 1995. State versus Islam: Malay families, women’s bodies, and the body politic in Malaysia. In Bewitching women, pious men: Gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, ed. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, 159–194. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peletz, Michael G. 2009. Gender pluralism: Southeast Asia since early modern times. New York: Routledge. Ramakrishnan, Mageswary. 2000. Homosexuality is a crime worse than murder: An interview with Malaysia’s morality police. TIME Asia, 26 September. http://edition.cnn.com/ASIANOW/time/ features/interviews/2000/09/26/int.malay.gay2.html. Accessed 15 Oct 2020.

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Shah, Shanon. 2018. The making of a gay Muslim: Religion, sexuality and identity in Malaysia and Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shamsul A.B. 1997. The economic dimension of Malay nationalism: The socio-historical roots of the New Economic Policy and its contemporary implications. The Developing Economies 35(3): 240–261. ———. 1998. Bureaucratic management of identity in a modern state: ‘Malayness’ in postwar Malaysia. In Making majorities: Constituting the nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States, ed. Dru C. Gladney, 135–150. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1999. From orang kaya baru to Melayu baru: Cultural construction of the Malay ‘new rich’. In Culture and privilege in capitalist Asia, ed. Michael Pinches, 86–110. London: Routledge. ———. 2001a. A history of an identity, an identity of a history: The idea and practice of ‘Malayness’ in Malaysia reconsidered. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32(3): 355–366. ———. 2001b. ‘Malay’ and ‘Malayness’ in Malaysia reconsidered: A critical review. Communal/Plural 9(1): 69–80. ———, and Mohamad Fauzi bin Sukimi. 2006. Making sense of Malay sexuality: An exploration. Sari 24: 59–72. Siegall, Marc, and L.L. Cummings. 1995. Stress and organizational role conflict. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs 121(1): 65–93. Spaan, Ernst, Ton Van Naerssen, and Gerard Kohl. 2002. Re-imagining borders: Malay identity and Indonesian migrants in Malaysia. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93(2): 160–172. Star, The. 2010. Gay man fears for his life after exposing his sexuality on Net. 23 December. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2010/12/23/gay-man-fears-for-his-lifeafter-exposing-his-sexuality-on-net. Accessed 15 Oct 2020. Stivens, Maila. 1998. Sex, gender and the making of the New Malay middle classes. In Gender and power in affluent Asia, ed. Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens, 87–126. London: Routledge. Syed Husin Ali. 2008. The Malays: Their problems and future. Kuala Lumpur: The Other Press. Teh Yik Koon. 2001. Mak nyahs (male transsexuals) in Malaysia: The influence of culture and religion on their identity. International Journal of Transgenderism 5(3). ———. 2008. Politics and Islam: Factors determining identity and the status of male-to-female transsexuals in Malaysia. In AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking genders and sexualities, ed. Fran Martin, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, 85–98. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, Eric C. 2002. Migrant subjectivities and narratives of the kampung in Malaysia. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 17(1): 52–75. ———. 2003. Malay male migrants: Negotiating contested identities in Malaysia. American Ethnologist 30(3): 418–438. Vliert, Evert van de. 1981. A three-step theory of role conflict resolution. Journal of Social Psychology 113(1): 77–83. Wittig, Monique. 1989. On the social contract. Feminist Issues 9(1): 3–12. Wong Yuenmei. 2012. Islam, sexuality, and the marginal positioning of Pengkids and their girlfriends in Malaysia. Journal of Lesbian Studies 16(4): 435–448. Women’s Aid Organisation [WAO]. 2010. Seksualiti Merdeka: Receiving death threats for giving hope. 29 December. https://wao.org.my/seksualiti-merdeka-receiving-death-threats-for-givinghope/. Accessed 15 Oct 2020.

Chua Hang-Kuen is a senior lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. His current research interests in cultural studies include identity, gender, sexuality and the body. His most recent publication

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is: Malu sensitivity and the identities of non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men in peninsular Malaysia, Kajian Malaysia 37(1) (2019), which offers a cultural perspective on the identities of the same group of men discussed in this volume. He is currently writing on the intimate citizenship of Malay non-heteronormative men in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Part II

Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses

Chapter 9

Antiblackness in Malaysia, the Bandung Spirit and African–Asian Decolonial Critique in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain Mohan Ambikaipaker Abstract In 1955 the African American writer Richard Wright attended the landmark conference of recently liberated Asian and African nations in Bandung, Indonesia. Arguably, the Bandung conference marked the first conscious gathering of non-European peoples in the modern era that attempted to reshape the worldsystem of nation-states and economic relations. Today the conference has become an idiom for the desires of African–Asian and Global South solidarity, sometimes referred to as the ‘Bandung spirit’. And yet alongside this stated ideal, there are many racialist contradictions between people of African and Asian descent, both at the level of state-to-state relations as well as in everyday social dynamics. In contemporary Malaysia, the cultural discourse that has emerged concerning the presence of African students and immigrants has been steeped in virulent antiblack racism and violence. These deeply absorbed and redeployed antiblack discourses help to situate Malaysia and Malaysians as complicit in reproducing globalised racial hierarchies based on the tacit acceptance of the deep structures of racist thinking and hierarchies as the basis for social organisation. They plainly go against any putative sense of a Bandung spirit. This chapter reassesses Bandung neither to memorialise or destroy it, but rather to situate it within a larger history and trajectory of modernity’s construction of blackness and postcolonial Asian identity formations. It does so by examining Wright’s search for connection with Third World and Asian anticolonial struggles through a critical reading of his report on Bandung, The color curtain, and drawing parallels with the Malaysian internationalist-oriented writer Usman Awang. Wright’s account of the potential and pitfalls of the Bandung moment of African– Asian solidarity can illuminate how the scourge of antiblack racism has become virulent in Malaysia today. The analysis presented here proposes that the apparent tension between the discourses of antiblack racism in Malaysia and the Bandung internationalist imaginary is amenable to a tense but productive cultural critique. Keywords Malaysia · African–Asian critique · Bandung conference · Richard Wright · Usman Awang · Antiblackness M. Ambikaipaker (B) Department of Communication, Tulane University, New Orleans, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_9

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9.1 Introduction In 1955, upon hearing from a newspaper report of the upcoming conference of recently liberated Asian and African nations in Bandung, Indonesia, the African American writer Richard Wright, internationally recognised author of famous twentieth-century literary classics such as Native son and Black boy, became determined that he ‘had to go to that meeting’ and that he must report on the significance of this historic event (Wright 1994: 14). Wright’s interest in making contact with the Bandung conference would result in his attendance as well as an extended threeweek sojourn among Indonesian intellectuals, journalists and writers. His journey to Southeast Asia and Bandung was long and protracted in many respects. In the travel conditions of the time, it involved a train ride from Andalucía to Madrid; and a flight that began in Madrid and stopped in Rome, Cairo, Baghdad, Calcutta and Bangkok before finally crossing the ‘jungles of Malaya’ (ibid.: 81) and arriving in Jakarta, Indonesia. The account of his explorations and encounters was published in 1956 as The color curtain: A report on the Bandung conference. This insurgent desire of racially oppressed and colonised peoples to politically connect is continuous with early twentieth-century struggles that sought to organise transnational resistance to European colonialism and white supremacy. As President Sukarno of Indonesia, who opened the gathering, stated, the Bandung conference’s genealogy lies in previous left-wing transnational efforts such as the League against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression conference in Belgium in 1927 and other preceding conferences that conjoined anticolonial forces across the globe (Sukarno 1955). Arguably, the African–Asian conference of 29 newly independent nationstates marked the first conscious gathering of non-European peoples in the modern era that attempted to reshape the world-system of nation-states and economic relations and to reorient cultural exchange in ways that were not mediated by the terms set up by Eurocentric epistemes and the interests of colonial powers. Today Bandung has become an idiom for the desires of African–Asian and Global South solidarity, sometimes referred to as the ‘Bandung spirit’ (Khudori 2006; Prashad 2007). And yet alongside this stated ideal, there are many racialist contradictions between people of African and Asian descent, both at the level of state-to-state relations as well as in everyday social dynamics. As the forces of globalisation and the neoliberalisation of Global South economies have taken place since the 1990s, there has also been a greater movement of people across borders, and hence African–Asian encounters and daily social relations have grown from the abstract to the concrete. Today, for example, there are significant African communities in Malaysia. Over 25,000 African students, lured by Malaysia’s drive to develop its for-profit private higher education sector, and almost 120,000 African tourists, expatriates and business people routinely visit the country each year (The Star 2019; UNWTO 2019). However, the cultural discourse that has emerged in Malaysia concerning the presence of African students and immigrants has been steeped in antiblack racism and violence. Insertion into the circuits of European territorial and cultural colonisation—beginning with the Portuguese conquest of Melaka in 1511 that introduced Lusophone

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racial imaginaries, followed by the more recent historical impact of British colonial education based on Anglophone raciological epistemologies—shaped postcolonial Malaysian aspirational tendencies to identify with whiteness and concomitant alignments with antiblack colonialist images of people of African descent as ‘savage’, primitive, hypersexualised and criminally inclined. These ressentiments of global racial hierarchies and Eurocentric antiblack discourses situate modern Malaysia and Malaysians as complicit in reproducing modernity’s raciology beyond internal and citizenship-based ethnoracial politics. In the contemporary period, racialised animus and presumption of social superiority vis-à-vis Black Africans is very much in evidence in postcolonial self-making and identity formation strategies in Malaysia. The social practices of discriminating against African students and immigrants in housing, criminalisation and police violence, and the promotion of sexualised hysteria about Malaysian–African interracial relationships, as well as the deployment of new racial caricatures such as the archetype of ‘awang hitam’ or ‘pak hitam’ (loosely translatable as a pejorative term signifying a criminalised/over-sexualised trope of the ‘black fellow’) in the media, have all been significant and horrific developments in the everyday landscape of Malaysia’s racial politics (see Malay Mail 2014 for an example of routine antiblack editorial writing in the Malay-language press). The registers of racism can no longer be conceptualised as confined to the long-standing Malay–Chinese–Indian–Other configuration. For example, in response to growing moral panics about crime in the country, a senator in the Dewan Negara (upper house of Parliament), Paul Kong Sing Chu, proclaimed that best approach to dealing with African students is ‘to totally avoid them’ (Lai 2011). Collectivised suspicion and demonisation of a heterogeneous group of people coming from numerous cultures and countries have condensed themselves into the stereotype of an essentialised Black African criminal type. Here is but one rabid example of anti-African and antiblack animus, penned by a Malay academic in an op-ed in Utusan Malaysia: Just hearing the term ‘African’ or ‘black fellow’ is sufficient to make one afraid, let alone falling into a romantic trap with them. This topic is one that strikes the greatest fear in the hearts of women in this country. Even as the media helps to expose these dangers, there are many who do not pay attention.… These naive attitudes create many a victim of the black man’s treachery. Whether you would care to believe this or not, it is the truth that these citizens of Africa are in fact trained in a ‘special school’ to carry out trickery before they are sent forth to specific countries in order to engage in immoral behaviour. (Nor Sobah 2012, my translation)1 1

The original reads: ‘Mendengarkan nama “Awang Hitam” sahaja sudah cukup membuatkan kita berasa gerun apatah lagi terjebak ke dalam permainan “cinta alam maya” mereka. Inilah perkara yang paling ditakuti oleh wanita di negara ini. Sememangnya perkara begini seringkali dikhabarkan di media-media massa namun masih ramai yang tidak mengambil iktibar daripadanya.… Sikap terlalu mudah percaya menjerumuskan mangsa-mangsa ke dalam kancah penipuan Awang Hitam. Malah, percaya atau tidak, warga-warga Afrika ini sebenarnya dilatih di “sekolah khas” untuk mendalami ilmu memperdaya mangsa-mangsa mereka sebelum mereka dihantar ke negara-negara tertentu untuk menjalankan kegiatan tidak bermoral ini.’ The example cited here provides one paradigmatic instance of the sensationalised discourse of antiblackness in Malaysia. To provide a

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Malaysian xenophobic racism extends now to include Africans, ‘Banglas’, Rohingya Burmese and many other non-white and non-Western immigrant groups who are not situated in proximity to whiteness. Accordingly, there is still social prestige and high status conferred on white expatriates, tourists and other immigrants who are residents in the country. These contradictory social currents plainly go against any putative sense of a Bandung spirit, even as the Malaysian state continues to propagate concepts such as South–South cooperation and anti-Western imperialism in regional and pan-Islamic world affairs. Wright’s search for connection with Third World and Asian anticolonial struggles during the mid-twentieth century is a valuable counterpoint to present-day affairs, and a critical reference point in thinking through the question of antiblackness in Malaysia and the state of the Bandung spirit today. As a diasporic African American intellectual, Wright’s travel to the original Bandung conference and his encounters with Asian decolonisation show a deep willingness to engage simultaneously in the redefinition of racial sovereignty and identity within a global framework of anticolonial struggle that centres the need to decolonise from globalised antiblack racism. In the 1960s and 1970s the anticolonial consciousness that was shaped by the Bandung moment also influenced the Malaysian internationalist-oriented writer Usman Awang to write the poem ‘Salji Hitam’ (Black Snow). Arriving in Wright’s United States in 1970, Usman conjoined his anticolonial consciousness in an expression of political empathy and solidarity with the unfolding liberation struggles of African Americans at the time. In what ways, then, can a revisiting and rereading of these prior references and labours of constructing African–Asian solidarity help inaugurate a new field of social critique against emergent, virulent and solidifying forms of Malaysian antiblack racism? It is in this dangerous contemporary context of resurgent Malaysian antiblack racism that the earlier Bandung moment, and the counter-hegemonic affiliations attempted by Usman and Wright, offer different cultural-political routes, agendas and itineraries.

9.2 Bandung Redux In the period following Merdeka (independence), it is arguable that the Bandung spirit was influential to some degree in shaping Malaysian anticolonial and antiracist consciousness, both on an interstate level and on the level of artistic and cultural exchange. Two years following the Bandung conference, Malaya secured independence from the British Empire and, despite initial obstruction by Indonesia during the Konfrontasi period (1963–1966), Malaysia would eventually become a leading player in the newly formed Non-Aligned Movement. The country’s first prime minister, full historical account of the development of antiblack racism in Malaysia is beyond the scope of this chapter. But this essay is also part of a longer-term project to map the contours of antiblack racism in postcolonial Malaysia.

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Tunku Abdul Rahman, played a key role in the 1960 Commonwealth Prime Minister’s conference in condemning the white supremacist regime in South Africa and for years provided support for the anti-apartheid struggle (The Leader-Post 1960). Malaysian independence was understood in these early decades as part of a global movement to reorder the world away from the racialist and exploitative socioeconomic structures imposed on African and Asian societies through centuries of European territorial colonialism and cultural erasure. Solidarity with racially oppressed minorities, in particular, was one of the issues that the original conference had raised. While not a major conference item, leaders in Bandung, including the Indian prime minister Jawarharlal Nehru and the People’s Republic of China’s head of government Zhou Enlai (Chou En-Lai), raised the question of the oppression of African Americans in the United States as a solidarity issue and as part of the agenda of left-wing internationalism. For his part, Usman’s transnational antiracist consciousness or Bandung spirit was very much in evidence when he arrived in the United States. Instead of embracing the notion of Asians as the ‘model minority’, wedged as an intermediate group between whites and Blacks (Wu 2002), Usman’s political affiliation was aligned with the minority struggles of African Americans in the United States. Exposed to the civil rights movement, Usman’s (1986) poem ‘Salji Hitam’ attempts to connect with the counter-hegemonic spirit of Black Power aesthetics and he takes it upon himself to translate and transmit an African American politics of questioning white supremacy into the Malay language and the Malay-speaking world. warna paling gagah itulah warnanya tidak gugur dari bintang bukan turun dari langit mengalir dari arus sejarah tulang-tulang HITAM membajai ladang-ladang subur amerika makmur salji hitam HITAM hitam sekali warna gaung gema WE SHALL OVERCOME di selatan di utara di mana saja mengusapi luka-luka sejarah nenek-moyang hari ini sekarang ini paling gemilang salji hitam.

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Black the most formidable colour a colour Not from the stars Nor from the sky But flowing from the stream of history Where the bones are Black that fertilize the plantation soil and the American Dream The black snow is Black As a rumble and an echo We shall overcome In the north, in the south Everywhere It heals the wounds of ancestors Today In this moment Of grace and glory Black snow2 The significance of this poem and its construction of a Malaysian internationalism and affinity with revalorisation of blackness is an important facet of the aesthetic and epistemic dimension of the African–Asian decolonisation project. This remembered moment in Malaysian anticolonial and antiracist struggles represents an important intervention against the reifications of ethnoracial and ethnoreligious nationalism that has occurred with the decline of the left-wing tradition that figures such as Usman Awang represented (Mustapha 2005; Poh 2015). These writers, whether Wright who sojourned to Indonesia or Usman who went to the United States, shared a common understanding of the need to intertwine the processes of decolonisation at the epistemological, aesthetic and interstate political levels.

9.3 Between the Bandung Myth and Reality In the context of Richard Wright’s account of his experiences at the Bandung conference, we can also identify an alternative radical tradition that is invested in the idea of a transnational horizon of politics (Robinson 2005). As Michelle Stephens (1998: 592–593) notes, ‘transnationalism’ is a process by which individuals become ‘social actors with allegiances, loyalties and networks that go beyond their citizenship in one nation-state’. The most common forms of Black transnational agency have been 2

The creative translation of the quoted section into English is mine.

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pan-African and diasporic, and, as Kevin Gaines (2001: 76) argues, the meaning of ‘diaspora’ is not located in a sense of ethnic kinship or a shared set of cultural practices but more as a ‘mobilization of black modernity toward a transnational, transracial community of struggle’ (see also Gilroy 2000). Transnational, transracial and internationalist collaborations with Asians, therefore, can be seen as one form of historical agency alongside other forms of mobilisation that people of African descent have made in order to politically recompose their shared experiences under structures of racist oppression into globalised modes of resistance. As Marc Matera (2015: 3) also notes, these political imaginaries in the archives of African internationalism are not reducible to ‘a nationalist teleology’ where the ‘ideal of racial sovereignty’ and the ‘pursuit of an independent nationstate’ erase other decolonial imperatives such as liberation from deeply embedded raciological thinking and antiblackness. The ‘colour conscious internationalism’ (Rosenberg 2006; Von Eschen 1997) of Bandung, energised as it was by the Third World nationalist liberation struggles, has come to occupy a certain mythic place in imagining the possibilities of an interracial and Global South confraternal resistance to Western states’ geopolitical dominance, as well as Western-derived forms of knowledge production that are based on racialism. The character and challenge of this ‘polycultural’ (Prashad 2002) political project is best surmised by the incredulous question that is posed to Wright concerning the Bandung conference: ‘What on earth have African Negroes and Burmese Buddhists in common?’ (Wright 1994: 17). In many ways, this question guides Wright’s inquiry and reportage as he seeks to find the answer. The task of constructing multiethnic coexistence, of unity in diversity and the search to inaugurate nonexploitative and non-conflictual interdependence between peoples, cultures and nation-states were some of the prominent ideals articulated at Bandung. For example, on the subject of the religious diversity of newly independent Asian and African countries, Sukarno (1955) was prescient in his observations. I know that in Asia and Africa there is greater diversity of religions, faiths, and beliefs, than in the other continents of the world. But that is only natural! Asia and Africa are the classic birthplaces of faiths and ideas, which have spread all over the world. Therefore, it behooves us to take particular care to ensure that the principle which is usually called the ‘Live and let live’ principle—mark, I do not say the principle of ‘Laissez faire, laissez passer’ of Liberalism which is obsolete—is first of all applied by us most completely within our own Asian and African frontiers.… Must we be divided by the multiformity of our religious life? It is true, each religion has its own history, its own individuality, its own ‘raison d’être’, its special pride in its own beliefs, its own mission, its special truths which it desires to propagate. But unless we realise that all great religions are one in their message of tolerance and in their insistence on the observance of the principle of ‘Live and let live’, unless the followers of each religion are prepared to give the same consideration to the rights of others everywhere, unless every State does its duty to ensure that the same rights are given to the followers of all faiths—unless these things are done, religion is debased, and its true purpose perverted.

On an ideational level, the incipient principles articulated at Bandung were promising and represented a marked contrast with colonial logics such as the practices of ‘divide

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and rule’. But as the unfolding of post-Bandung ethnoracial and religious tensions in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia illustrate, actual post-independence policy and practice have not adhered closely to these decolonial ideals, either domestically or in terms of international relations. The postcolonial heroism and sentimentalised mythology of the Bandung moment has been critiqued from a number of important standpoints, including this gap between stated ideals and actually lived histories (see Vitalis 2013; Roberts and Foulcher 2016). There are concerns, for example, of how South–South cooperation today is tied up with fears about ‘recolonisation’, as Asian capital moves into the African continent to carry out land grabs and resource extraction (Moyo 2016). Additionally, there are also social questions such as the treatment of Black Africans and African Americans in Asian countries. As Tamara Nopper (2015) argues: Overall, then, Bandung may be an event that was largely a gathering of good intentions on the surface and a developing albeit highly fractured pan-Asian nationalism. Asian nations controlled the planning and the proceedings and dominated in both numbers and importance. Africa was hardly present. And the African American presence was limited to observers and journalists. While the US government was indeed threatened by the rise of Asian selfdetermination and racially opposed to it, there was recognition from the White House that Asian nations may actually be capable of self-rule and that this possibility could change the tides of history or at least seriously challenge the status of the west. As such, white supremacists begrudgingly negotiated with Asia as a partner of sorts—albeit in a hierarchical relationship—in a larger movement towards modernity and actualisation of Enlightenment ideology. The same cannot be said for Africa or African America. While some will suggest that I am looking at Bandung pessimistically, I am really attempting to interrogate it and not enshrine it in history without examination and reflection.… We cannot look at Black-Asian coalition today or the obvious imbalance in power, prestige, wealth, authority, and value between Africa and Asia, between African Americans and Asian Americans, unless we trace the trajectory of that imbalance. And this requires looking critically and honestly at gatherings such as Bandung and the subsequent NAM [Non-Aligned Movement] while simultaneously attempting to appreciate what Bandung meant to the world.… Thus, I look at Bandung neither to memorialise or destroy it but rather to situate it within a larger history and trajectory of what it means to be Black and Asian in the modern world.

Nopper’s critique is largely based on revealing the foundational imbalance between African and Asian nations in the original conference. Out of the 29 countries that attended, only six were from Africa, and among those there were only three from the sub-Saharan and non-Arab regions. Furthermore, as Robert Vitalis (2013) argues, there is also a persistent and widely believed myth that Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of independent Ghana (then the Gold Coast), lent his participation to the conference, when in fact he was not present. He had sent a close associate to be an observer due to concerns about the potentially negative impact on Ghana’s pending independence. These discrepancies support Nopper’s (2015) contention that ‘despite its emphasis on “Afro-Asian” solidarity, the majority of sub-Saharan Africa was not present at Bandung’. This is a point that Wright (1994: 128) also noted when he pointed out: ‘About the Gold Coast, Liberia and Ethiopia nobody had any real notions; indeed, it

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was rapidly becoming evident that Negro Africa was the weakest part of the conference.’ Additionally, Wright wrote in a later passage that there was bias towards ‘Asianism’ at the conference, and the question of reviving the prestige and power of colonised religion (specifically pan-Islamism), for example, eclipsed other decolonial issues including the legacies of slavery (ibid.: 161). It is conceivable that the lack of representation has resulted in the relative subordination of the question of antiblack racism against people of African descent within the Bandung imaginary. But in 2015, during the sixtieth anniversary conference, there were 46 African countries along with 54 Asian countries in attendance (Paik 2016). However, the broader participation of African countries alone does not obviate the question of the manifestations of antiblack racism and social discrimination that continue to contradict the African–Asian decolonisation project and the projected ideals of the Bandung spirit. The Bandung spirit at the interstate level has become defined by the exigencies of African–Asian international business, trade and economic development issues (Nigam 2016). This dominant and elite appropriation of the Bandung spirit contrasts with the cultural and epistemological concerns of decolonisation and antiracism advanced by Richard Wright and Usman Awang.

9.4 Reading The Color Curtain as African–Asian Critique In the following analysis of Wright’s text The color curtain, I propose that the apparent tension between the discourses of antiblack racism in Malaysia and the amorphous Bandung imaginary is productive because the question of solidarity no longer rests on the premises of direct territorial colonialism and nation-state independence struggles. Rather, in responding to the call of the African American and global African diasporic revolt that was triggered by the police killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, what is salient and necessary for the present historical moment is the reconnection to the founding moment’s incipient cultural critique that aimed at dismantling the structures of antiblackness and racial hierarchies between Asian and Black African-descended peoples. Following Nopper, I do not propose to read The color curtain as a document about shared nation-state independence struggles. My argument hopes to build on subaltern currents in the early Bandung moment, which finds an archive and fraternal expression in Wright’s The color curtain and Usman’s ‘Salji Hitam’. The alternative decolonisation politics of these two writers engages ‘the improvisational possibilities’ that are present in encounters with ‘Black culture’s collisions with its own parameters and those prescribed by the market forces and labour demands of capitalism and by a racialist culture’ (Robinson 2005: 315, emphasis mine). Or as Paul Gilroy (2000: 342) argues, these models of political critique and agency encapsulate the ‘desire to find a new political and ethical code in which the contradictory demands for blackness on one side and postracial utopia on the other could be articulated together’. This jazz-like improvisational politics is not the same as an abstract notion of colour-blindness or limited to expressing decolonisation through the register of

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nation-state modes of self-determination. Rather, it is a more complex and dynamic political position that confronts modernity’s protocols of racialisation, domination and subordination that are entangled within anticolonial political imaginaries. Some scholars have argued that the question of colour-based racism as a focus of anticolonial struggle was firmly rejected at the original Bandung conference in favour of a more race-neutral discourse (Vitalis 2013). Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher (2016) point to the critique made by Mochtar Lubis, one of Wright’s hosts, about the overemphasis on racial issues in his account. Lubis’s allegiance to universal humanism contrasted with other Indonesian voices that were more sympathetic to Wright’s interest in confronting antiblackness and racial hierarchies, principally the left-wing writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Utami 2016). It is undeniable, however, that the participants at Bandung were critical of the European raciological system they had inherited from colonial rule, and they were also cognisant of the fact that they were engaged in trying to reconstruct their societies along different lines. The meaning and character of the African–Asian response to European colonial racialism, however, was something that Wright sought to scrutinise and critique. In the opening of the book, Wright uses an excerpt from Hart Crane’s poem ‘The Bridge’ to provide a complex emblem for the potential power of transnationalism. The idea of the bridge is noted to be something that is created and endowed with moral force. When Wright situates this epigraph at the beginning of his report, he metaphorically suggests that bridges between people and nations of colour are not immediate, but nonetheless felt as immanent structures waiting to be articulated with full force. This implicit metaphorical power that is crucial to the rhetorical structures of the book aim to enable a project of linking the experiences and struggles of African Americans with the struggles of African and Asian people in the former colonies of Western empires. The text of The color curtain itself is organised into five chapters or, perhaps more aptly, into five movements entitled ‘Bandung: Beyond Left and Right’, ‘Race and Religion at Bandung’, ‘Communism at Bandung’, ‘Racial Shame at Bandung’ and ‘The Western World at Bandung’. Wright’s own trajectory through this historical event is, I think, the basis for his representation of the formation of transnational consciousness which he witnesses as occurring among the African–Asian participants as they undergo the process of ‘coming to voice’—speaking, sharing similar historical experiences and collectively negotiating differences at the conference (Sudbury 1998: 30). The feat of 29 newly independent African and Asian countries gathering together to discuss ‘racialism and colonialism’ opens the book and Wright records that he feels excited and puzzled when he first hears about the conference (Wright 1994: 11). He is unable to make sense of the logic of a conference between such different and varied peoples except on the basis of their shared experience of European colonialism. It is interesting that Wright’s first strategy as a writer is to stage a sense of disbelief at the idea of race and raciological thinking as a natural and rational organising principle. He is staggered by the idea of such vast cultural diversity and complexity of human life, and that the ‘outer layers of disparate social and political and cultural facts’ could have been reduced and standardised to the ‘bare brute residues of human existence:

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races and religions and continents’ (ibid.: 13–14). The framework of racialisation, therefore, had become globally hegemonic, even among the colonised who now reappropriated its logics. By positing from the very beginning a suspicion about the naturalness of race as a basis for political sovereignty or political struggle, Wright therefore moves towards a cautious use of racial identity that is conscious of its socially constructed and volatile nature. Race, in Wright’s view, is a historicised fiction and an effect of colonialism that become naturalised: ‘The agenda and subject matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants. The conditions under which these men had lived had become their tradition, their culture, their raison d’être’ (ibid.). It is a consciousness that is incomprehensible to Wright’s white and Western friends and he records their incredulous and fearful responses: ‘But is not this Asian-African Conference merely racism in reverse?’ (ibid.: 16, emphasis mine). It is along these racial fault lines that the call to conference had been made and, as Wright emphatically notes, it is also an explicit rejection of the reigning Cold War binary (capitalism versus communism): ‘the call for the meeting had not been sounded in terms of ideology’ (ibid.: 14). The conference’s premise arose not from a sense of anticapitalism, but rather derived from the logic of racism and colonialism where ‘the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed’ who had nothing in common ‘but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel’ were now expressing the need to meet, speak and organise (ibid.: 12). Once Wright grasped the historicised character of the event, and the premise of a racialised common ground between the disparate nations, he resolved that this was a meeting that he had to attend. When questioned by his wife about whom he could possibly be writing this report for and why, Wright (ibid.: 15) provided the following answer: I feel that my life has given me some keys to what they would say or do. I’m an American Negro; as such, I’ve had a burden of race consciousness. So have these people. I worked in my youth as a common laborer, and I’ve class consciousness. So have these people. I grew up in the Methodist and Seventh Day Adventist churches and I saw and observed religion in my childhood; and these people are religious. I was a member of the Communist Party for twelve years and I know something of the politics and psychology of rebellion. These people have had as their daily existence such politics. These emotions are my instruments. They are emotions, but I’m conscious of them as emotions. I want to use these emotions to try to find out what these people think and feel and why.

Through his own experience as a racialised and oppressed African American, Wright identifies the structures of race, religion and class, which have produced a ‘double consciousness’ of difference within him. It is this awareness of the dialectics of negative self-consciousness and the urge to turn these negative constructions into a positive expression that Wright recognises as the common ground of the struggle for subjectivity between himself and the African–Asian participants at Bandung that he is about to meet. Wright’s participatory observation of the Bandung conference exemplifies the role of independent critique in forming transnational antiracist consciousness. Wright was guided by a sense that his mission was not to lead or direct the energies that were going to be present at Bandung, but to explain and provide meaningful structures to

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endow the meeting with significance for his readership. And ‘for whom’ he performs this translation was also somewhat of a mystery to Wright himself: ‘for somebody,’ he states (ibid.: 15). Ideal readers of the book are hence not an immediately apparent audience that Wright can refer to; rather, they are readers who have yet to manifest. His text therefore is conceived as a bridge-making tool to be taken up by future readers who can develop the project of making linkages between themselves and others. Jeffrey Folks (1994: 78) notes that Wright was drawn to the conference because of the ways in which the colonised histories of the newly independent African and Asian nations resonated with Wright’s own ‘psychological ambivalence’ with regard to Western civilisation and its impact on non-Western people. Wright’s psychological identification with the struggles of African and Asian people against the injuries of colonialism was most salient in the understanding of their struggles with an internalised sense of racial inferiority, or what he termed as ‘racial shame’. Wright’s racial identity was in tension with an unquestioned belief also in the superiority of Western modernity, with its cultural emphasis on individualistic personality, scientific objectivity and technology. Folks concludes that this tension in Wright leads him to construct a textual narrative, ‘projecting into the minds of characters his own inner divisions and of entire cultures’ (ibid.: 85). As such, the narrative emphasis in the text is less on the geopolitical intrigues between nation-states than on the intimate and internal psychological drama of the coloniser and colonised (Fanon 1967; Nandy 1983). In some ways the narrator’s tone in The color curtain is complicit with the codes of Orientalism, in the manner that Edward Said critiqued the Western colonial authoritative voice for self-constructing itself as an agent for rational progress against ‘irrational customs and traditions’ of the colonised world (Wright 1994: 53). Wright’s terrible unease with his perceptions of Third World squalor, as well as religious and racial ‘emotionalism’, is present throughout the course of his encounters before and during the Bandung conference (ibid.: 115). Critics have noted Wright’s unquestioned endorsement of a Eurocentric civilisational superiority in The color curtain. Gaines (2001: 75) attributes this contradictory cultural position to Wright’s ‘teleology of modernization’, common to Western-educated minorities, while Gilroy (2000) argues that Wright wrote as a hybrid Westerner, a Black Atlantic subject aiming to reform Enlightenment rationality in an inclusive and non-white-centric manner. It must be kept in view that, as Folks (1994: 86) notes, Wright was writing at a moment in history when the recent cultural studies discrediting Western epistemological frameworks, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), were not available to him. The language that Wright had available to him at that point was not informed by postcolonial critique and he was also negotiating a Cold War quagmire as an African American exile in Europe and as a former communist who had grown disenchanted with the ideological factionalism and totalitarianism of the movement that he had left in 1944. Hence, I believe that a certain amount of reading against the grain is justified to suggest the ways that Wright’s ambivalent interventions propose something other than what the registers of available discourse enabled him to say.

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Another complicating factor, however, is the fact that Wright and other African American participants in Bandung such as the congressman Adam Clayton Powell and journalist Ethel Payne were also a part of American anti-communist cultural diplomacy. The strategy of promoting African American culture in US foreign policy was developed in response to a growing concern in the 1950s that the Soviet Union and the communist bloc had been successful in discrediting American capitalism and superpower influence on account of its racist and white supremacist culture, as evidenced by growing global awareness of the brutal suppression of African American civil rights and extrajudicial white violence against Blacks, including racial lynchings in the US South (Bell 2005). The US State Department therefore started a cultural diplomacy programme through which leading African American musicians and writers were dispatched to promote a more egalitarian image of US race relations, especially in the Third World. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was one of these CIA-linked anti-communist cultural organisations, and they were also the sponsors of Wright’s participation at Bandung (Roberts and Foulcher 2016: 17; Saunders 2013). This is not to say that Wright was a mere mouthpiece for these interests, but he, like many other intellectuals, was also constrained by the prevailing geopolitical pressures. Containing the spread of communism in the Third World through international aid, educational opportunities, technical assistance and capitalist investments was a key US foreign policy strategy. The hegemony of the ideology of capitalist developmentalism has arguably made a lasting impact in shaping the contours and foci of the African–Asian decolonisation project. Decolonisation has largely been prioritised as a matter of playing ‘catch-up’ with the already established industrialised models and standards of living in the West (Nigam 2016). While Wright (1994: 217) expressed some scepticism about the viability of the scope and scale of Western international aid to address the conditions of the masses in the colonised world, he nonetheless warned the West that substantial international aid and economic development for the Third World was necessary if they were not to lose the Cold War: It is far preferable that the Western world willingly aid … Asians’ and Africans’ processing their own raw materials, which would necessitate a radical adjustment of the West’s own systems of society and economics, than to face militant hordes buoyed and sustained by racial and religious passions.… If Asians and Africans can sink their national and religious differences for what they feel to be a common defence of their vital interests, as they did in Bandung, then that same process of unity can serve for other ends, for a rapid industrialisation of the lives of people of Asia and Africa, for a shaking loose of the Asian-African masses from a static past.

Wright’s earlier observation that the communist or universal class-based ideologies were not the platform of this meeting is reinforced later when he notes that the importance of ideological differences also began to decline at the conference among people who had experienced similar processes of Western imperialism and racism. It has been suggested that Wright’s perception of Cold War ideological divisions as a surface phenomenon is proof of his inclination towards Western humanistic traditions (Folks 1994: 87). But Wright’s disavowal of the importance of Cold War

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ideological divisions may have come from his awareness of the insufficiency of reductive economistic analysis to account for the African and Asian forms of racial and religious political consciousness emergent at Bandung. Wright’s journey to Bandung was motivated by the search to link his struggles as an African American to a transnational or global framework of antiracism. It is this quest that creates both an impulse towards identification with African–Asian decolonisation and at the same time endows him a watchfulness and scepticism towards communal foreclosures, including among the African and Asian participants at Bandung themselves. It must be added, however, that the purpose for going beyond the pre-existing structures of raciological thinking that Wright undertakes in The color curtain by constructing an affective understanding of the bitterness of the colonial experiences of African and Asian peoples does not arise from an abstract, idealistic or transcendental sense of a liberal humanism. Instead, it is an imagining of a critical political community at a global level, which can contest the deeply embedded reflexes and structures of a raciological world. Wright was searching primarily for a critical political community and this was a desire that initially drew him into the fold of the global communist movement, where he felt the possibilities of belonging and overcoming his experiences as a racial ‘outcast’ within the US social order. As Wright (1944) wrote: It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of the experiences of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole. It seemed to me that here at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression, Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role.

The complex reasons and history of Wright’s falling out with communism are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Von Eschen 1997: 96–121), but suffice to say that in 1955 Wright was still searching for a collective political community beyond the US nation-state. Bandung, despite its shortcomings in terms of African nation-state and diasporic participation, seemed like that possibility. Before leaving for his trip to Bandung, this consciousness of a broader planetary platform moved Wright to first seek out available interlocutors of the Asian colonial experience who were living in Europe. Travelling from Andalucía in Spain, itself a territory marked by the foundational moment of European expansionism, Wright managed to meet an Indonesian-born Dutch journalist, a Eurasian Malayan journalist living in exile in Spain, an Indonesian educationist, an Indonesian sociology student and a Pakistani journalist. By interviewing these individuals, Wright tried to get a sense of the social psychology of colonised Asian elites. Through these informants, and later through listening to speeches by the leaders of newly independent African and Asian nations and travelling with Mochtar Lubis, Wright began to form his overall impressions about what was coming into being at Bandung. One of the main dangers that Wright noted at Bandung were class contradictions that threatened to destabilise the politics of racial and religious identity in the colonised world. Wright viewed the volatility of a postcolonial politics based on mass identities that were organised around race and religion to be a process that

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could backfire on the newly independent nations themselves. Throughout The color curtain, Wright documents how centuries of European raciological conditioning had altered the frameworks of identity, and shows that this would surely impact on the construction of newly independent nation-states (Wright 1994: 56). One concrete example of this is when Wright discovers through his Eurasian Malayan interlocutor how the Japanese Empire, a non-white and non-Western global power, had also ‘exploited’ and ‘organised’ racialism between different racial groups during its occupation of Malaya in the Second World War (ibid.: 39). Wright notes the prevalence of racial stereotypes that the colonised had of other colonised groups. His shock at the comments of the Eurasian Malayan journalist’s stereotype of ethnic Malayan Chinese as immigrant ‘counter-jumpers’ and ‘slum dwellers’ is typical of the many ironies and contradictions of the race consciousness of the colonised that Wright documented (ibid.). On a more chilling level, he also spoke with an Indonesian student who went so far as to express genocidal hatred towards the ethnic minority Chinese within his country, while at the same time expressing international solidarity and left-wing ideological alignment with communist China (ibid.: 59).

9.5 Reassessing Bandung Richard Wright’s analysis of the potential and pitfalls of the Bandung moment of African–Asian solidarity can perhaps illuminate how the dynamics of antiblack racism and the reproduction of global racial hierarchies have become salient in the everyday social processes of Malaysia today. While elites at Bandung moved the question of African–Asian solidarity towards the framework of interstate cooperation and ‘catch-up’ capitalist developmentalism, the bases of support for these elites rested on mobilising defensive racialised and religious identities that had been altered through the cultural humiliations enacted by European colonial rule. However, these anticolonial reconstructions of Asian postcolonial identities did not seek to scrutinise colour-based and global racial hierarchies that were dependent on the protocols of antiblackness. This articulation of capitalist developmentalism with the idioms of Asian racial nationalism and religious-based nationalism was therefore contradictory to the broader epistemological and aesthetic decolonisation that Wright sought to affirm in Bandung. Through the passage of time, nationalistic Asian racialism was not only pitted against former colonial rulers. Instead, as the case of Malaysia shows, communalbased racial-religious idioms became increasingly institutionalised as the basis of organising the contestations of electoral politics. More contemporary forms of outsider racialisation further target noncitizen African immigrants and other nonwhite migrant groups for everyday discrimination, symbolic and physical violence. Antiblackness sits at the nexus of all of these facets of postcolonial racial and religious identity formation. While globalisation might have opened borders to African immigrants and students to reside in Malaysia and become a part of its everyday social relations, antiblackness is needed to guard against perceived libidinal-sexual threats

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(Wilderson 2010) to postcolonial and nationalistic Malaysian identities represented by the presence of Black Africans in daily life. The racist construction of Black Africans as sexualised and criminalised threats in Malaysia—‘mangsa yang mabuk cinta si awang hitam’ (victims of the black fellow’s love) (Nor Sabah 2012)—connects with the discourses of developmental triumphalism and masculinist nationalism. The construction of blackness as an abject identity to be avoided is made through aspirational identifications with capitalist developmentalism as well as defending dominant ethnic Malay and internally subordinated non-Malay Malaysian identities. In this multifaceted structure, the socialsexual disciplining of blackness is necessary to avoid a gendered denigration of dominant Malay ethnoracial nationalism and unified Malaysian (Malay–Chinese– Indian–Other) nationalism as a whole. The pursuit of ‘progress’ and economic growth (which invites the inflow of African students, tourists and workers, as well as the outflow of Malaysian investments to Africa) is simultaneously hostile to egalitarian social relationships with people who are imagined occupying the bottom of globalised racial hierarchies. Proximity to and equality with blackness represents a detraction and backwards movement to the postcolonial ascendance of Malaysian identities and drives the subordination and violent mistreatment of African immigrants at the intimate local levels. This new dimension in Malaysian everyday racial politics is not resolvable through a simple call for unity among the oppressed and formerly colonised. And yet, if there is something egalitarian and rehumanising in the Bandung spirit and history that can be resurrected, it is perhaps to pick up the field of African–Asian decolonial critique from where Richard Wright and Usman Awang left off. African–Asian decolonial critique signifies the development of a hermeneutics of decolonisation that goes beyond loyalties to the postcolonial nation-state and especially its parameters of Malay racial nationalism and the Malay–non-Malay contestations of citizenship. Such a critique thinks about the excluded, subordinated and noncitizen identities that Malaysian postcolonial nationalism depends upon to reinscribe its triumphalistic, masculinist and white Western proximity projects. As the incipient transnational examples of Usman Awang and Richard Wright demonstrate, there are other commitments and itineraries to be embarked upon, and new political communities to inaugurate.

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Mohan Ambikaipaker is an associate professor in critical race theory and postcolonial studies in the Department of Communication, Tulane University, USA. His research and teaching comprise three strands (Britain, the United States and Malaysia) and aim to theorise interconnections between different forms of globalised racisms. He is the author of Political blackness in multiracial Britain (2018), an ethnographic study of the experiences of racial and state violence as well as resistance among minorities in London. He has published in journals such as Communication, Culture and Critique, Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal for Intercultural Studies and Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. His expertise has resulted in international media appearances, including as a featured speaker on the Emmynominated PBS programme, Blackademics.

Chapter 10

The Emergence of a New Social Movement in Malaysia: A Case Study of Malaysian Youth Activism Haris Zuan

Abstract Much has been written about the emergence of new political dynamics in Malaysia since the watershed 2008 general election. This commentary has focused on the growing role of social movements, the significance of social media, and the form and values of what has been labelled the ‘new politics’. This chapter suggests that there is a gap in the understanding of contemporary youth activism as it contributes to political competition and discourse. Even though there are some studies acknowledging the role of young people in street protests, social media advocacy and cultural activism, few really focus on the youth as their prime subject matter and fewer still deal with youth activism outside formal politics. This chapter examines the actual and potential impact of youth activism on Malaysia’s long-standing consociational politics. The discussion suggests that contemporary political postures and forms of advocacy of young people have to be understood in relation to the long-term process of depoliticisation that has taken place since the 1970s. This depoliticisation was certainly the result of restrictive laws that limited the avenues open to youth activism, both within and beyond student campuses. Concerted calls for Reformasi from 1998 onwards, as well as demands for electoral reform orchestrated by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) since 2007 and the high degree of internet penetration have combined to rekindle the salience of youth activism. This has resulted in attempts by mainstream political parties to highlight youth issues and to encourage their participation in formal politics, with mixed results. The argument contends that recent forms and patterns of youth advocacy differ from those of the 1970s in terms of ideologies, networking and impact on politics in general. Keywords Malaysia · Politics · Youth activism · Depoliticisation · Social movements · Social media

Haris Zuan (B) Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_10

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10.1 Introduction Over the last two decades, young people have become a significant political force around the world, reflecting their engagement with issues such as climate justice, environmental degradation, poverty and human rights, and organised on the basis of what have been called new social movements. In 2011, the year of the Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement, Time magazine named ‘The Protester’, by which the magazine largely referred to young people, as its person of the year (Anderson 2011). It is equally true that young people have come to play a more visible role in Malaysian politics since the late 1990s, notably with the emergence of the Reformasi movement, and then with the series of political rallies organised by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) from 2007 to 2016. This youth activism has coincided with a period of unprecedented volatility in electoral politics that saw a significant challenge to the long-standing hegemony of the Barisan Nasional (BN, National Front) coalition, which finally lost power for the first time since the country’s independence at the 2018 general election. As a result, Malaysia can be said to have undergone a political transition, though subsequent events in 2020 and 2021—with the return to power through manoeuvring of many factions of the old regime—call into question how sustainable this transition really is. For this reason, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the role of youth and how this has impacted on the trajectory of Malaysian politics and political culture. Unfortunately, with the exception of few important studies by the likes of Joel S. Kahn (1992), Zawawi Ibrahim (1995, 1998, 2008), Meredith L. Weiss (2005, 2006, 2012), Andrew N. Weintraub (2011), Bart Barendregt (2011), Sumit K. Mandal (2012) and Soon Chuan Yean (2012), cultural politics has been one of the most neglected components of research on civil society, along with youth activism. In fact, studies of youth activism have stagnated since the 1970s, a decade that is usually referred to as the high point of student movements, as though trapped in a kind of romanticism for the past (Weiss 2005, 2012; see also Muhammad Abu Bakar 1973; Hassan 1984; Hussain 1986; Junaidi 1993). A number of surveys have been carried out with respect to youth and politics (Merdeka Centre 2006, 2007, 2008; Asia Foundation 2012). In general, the surveys show that youths are becoming more critical and better informed. Yet, at the same time, political parties and student associations still largely lack independent youth participation. Most current studies have not yet been able to sufficiently explain this phenomenon. While some studies acknowledge the contributions of young people towards political transition (Adil Johan 2013; Mohd Azizuddin 2014; Afif Pasuni 2014), few focus specifically on youth as their subject matter, choosing instead to limit their analysis to formal political participation (Parnwell et al. 2010; Dzuhailmi et al. 2012; Yang Razali 2014; Nga et al. 2015). Little attention has been paid to the submerged, latent and temporary networks of youth activism, or to new developments in informal politics and their advocacy such as the new social media, ideologies, networking and their impact on mainstream politics (Weiss 2014).

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To better understand the current and contemporary youth-led political positions and forms of advocacy, the process of depoliticisation which occurred in the 1970s and beyond must first be considered. Depoliticisation then was not limited to the introduction of restrictive laws circumscribing the avenues of youth activism both within and beyond campuses, but also found expression via various forms of popular culture such as music, films and concerts. In recent decades, beginning with the Reformasi movement in the late 1990s, followed by demands for electoral reforms led by Bersih since 2007 and the proliferation of internet access, interest in youth activism has been rekindled, albeit in different forms and patterns of advocacy from those of the 1970s.

10.2 The ‘Old’ Youth Activism We first discuss the ‘old’ Malaysian youth movements in order to then understand the ‘new’ social movement of youth activism. There are eminent criticisms of the way the mainstream writing of national history has generally undermined or marginalised the contributions by different sociopolitical groups such as leftists (Firdaus 1985; Rustam 2011), trade unions (Rohana 1988; Dass 1991) and women (Rashila and Saliha 1998; Ng and Chee 2006). The same goes for contributions by young people. History is replete with examples of youths being at the forefront of many political movements during the nationalist era of the first half of the twentieth century. Among the earliest groups was Kaum Muda (Young Faction), who founded a magazine called Al-Imam (The Leader) in 1906 in an effort to introduce a socially progressive discourse that challenged traditional Malay Islamic authorities and induce an anticolonial perspective in society. For instance, Al-Imam wrote scathingly on colonial education policy, claiming that the aim was to produce mere ‘clerks and postmen’ with enough quality to ‘receive orders from the colonial masters’ (Abdul Aziz 2001: 230–233). Despite a lifespan of only two years (its last issue came out on 25 December 1908), its monthly circulation of 5,000 copies was impressive, reaching many parts of the Malay Peninsula. This is a testament to the longer-term influence of this magazine and the ideas it espoused (Roff 1967). Other examples of the involvement of young people in early nationalist politics are associated with Sultan Idris Training College, founded in 1922, and Maahad Il-Ehya Assyarif Gunung Semanggul, founded in 1934, tertiary educational institutions that produced frontliners in some of the first political parties in Malaya, such as Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya (PKMM, Malay Nationalist Party) which emerged after the end of the Second World War (Roff 1967; Firdaus 1985) from its predecessor, Kesatuan Melayu Muda (KMM, Young Malays Union), which was established in 1938 and dissolved in 1945. At the time of KKM’s founding its main leaders were themselves youthful: Ibrahim Yaakob was 27 years old when PKMM was founded, Ishak Haji Muhammad was 29 and Ahmad Boestamam was 18 (Ahmad Boestamam 1971; Rustam Sani 2011: 47). PKMM had an official and radical youth wing, Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API, Movement of Aware Youth), which in time

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decided to go its separate way and seceded from PKMM during the party’s second congress in Melaka in December 1946 (Firdaus 1985: 98). API went on to become the first political organisation to be outlawed by the British colonial government during the 1948–1960 Malayan Emergency. The Emergency declared by the British to restrict radical nationalist movements failed to stem the entire youth political movement, despite the demise of many organisations. Politicised youths who were not arrested either chose to join the Malayan Communist Party as it pursued a guerrilla warfare strategy or the newly formed conservative political party, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which was not banned by the British (Keris Mas 1979: 60; Firdaus 1985). The onset of the Emergency also saw the dawn of modern Malay literature, as a number of youths were inspired by the dynamics of the conflict and began to focus on literary works. Keris Mas (born Kamaluddin Muhammad) himself was a PKMM committee member in Pahang while also the editor for the party organs Suluh Malaya and Pelita Malaya (Keris Mas 1979: 29). Around 20 young writers—among them Keris Mas, MAS (Muhammad Ariff Ahmad), Hamzah Hussein (Abdul Majid Husain) and Rosmera (Munir Ali), all linked to outlawed leftist political organisations including PKMM—convened, cooperated and later founded Angkatan Sasterawan ’50 (ASAS ’50, Writers’ Movement ’50) in Singapore as a means to utilise literature to advance the cause of independence (ASAS ’50 2020). Among the most prominent members of ASAS ’50, Usman Awang (Tongkat Warrant) was only 21 years old in 1950 and Keris Mas was 28. In the 1950s University of Malaya in Singapore undergraduates began to develop close ties with ASAS ’50. Among those who were closest to Samad Ismail, Keris Mas and Usman Awang was a literature student, Syed Husin Ali, who would become a leading organic intellectual of the new youth movement. At university, he was president of Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya (PBMUM, University of Malaya Malay Language Society); secretary general and vice president of Gabungan Pelajar Melayu Semenanjung (GPMS, Federation of Malay Students in the Peninsula) and treasurer of Persatuan Islam (PIUM, Islamic Society). According to Syed Husin (2012: 27–34), he was introduced to leftist Singapore-based activists such as Lim Chin Siong, James Puthucheary and Sidney Woodhull through his ties with ASAS ’50. University education in Malaya only began in 1949, when King Edward VII College of Medicine (1905) and Raffles College (1929), both founded in Singapore, were merged with the University of Malaya. The Kuala Lumpur campus was ready by 1959. During the early years—the late 1950s and 1960s—enrolling as an undergraduate was a prestigious affair as only a few were afforded the opportunity. Students were trained to obey rules and focus on shaping a stable career in the spirit of nationbuilding. At the same time, the University of Malaya still retained academic freedom. The University Socialist Club in Singapore dominated campus politics from its foundation in 1953, advancing a left-wing anticolonial agenda through its magazine Fajar (Dawn), which circulated both within and outside the campus, and was the subject of a famous sedition trial in 1954 in which all the accused were acquitted. Prominent members of the club included Wang Gungwu, Abdullah Majid, M.K. Rajakumar,

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Ungku Omar, Agoes Salim, Kassim Ahmad, Lim Hock Siew, Poh Soo Kai and S.R. Nathan (Poh et al. 2010; Syed Husin 2012: 33). Other student organisations also began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1958 the University of Malaya Student’s Union (UMSU, Persatuan Mahasiswa Universiti Malaya) branch in Kuala Lumpur was founded. The organisation was not active or critical during its early years, with activities primarily being devoted to sports and recreation. This is not surprising, given that when it opened its doors the University of Malaya only had around 300 students, rising to 1,341 in 1962. But the purpose of these student associations was beginning to change. In 1964 students began to flex their muscles when around a thousand gathered to demand readmittance for five of their own who had been expelled for ‘ragging’. The same goes for PBMUM. In its early years, it only focused on activities around Malay culture and language. However, by 1967—the ‘year of transition’—PBMUM started to become more vocal and broadened its definition of culture to include politics, education, social change, the economy and the problems faced by rural communities. PBMUM organised a series of forums on topics such as the Bumiputera economy, nationalism, the role of Malay intellectuals and the national educational policy, anticipating the emergence of a radical Malay ethnonationalist agenda in federal politics (Muhammad Abu Bakar 1973: 36–37). In December 1967 the Socialist Club of the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur was established, the first overtly political club on campus. Students began to take political ideologies more seriously and involved themselves by giving out leaflets. Student involvement in national politics increased ahead of the May 1969 general election, representing a new direction for student activism in Malaysia. The zenith came when UMSU, which was heavily influenced by the Socialist Club, became more directly involved in national politics and decided to participate in the election campaign of that year. Its intention was to provide the public with a picture of current political issues without resorting to racial appeals. A Manifesto pelajar (Student manifesto) was published calling on people to only vote for candidates who would fight for the principles contained in it, with a focus on democracy, freedom and justice. Among the demands were ‘the right of the people to participate in the political process without considering skin colour, ideology and race’; ‘urging the government to release political detainees and try them in court’; ‘lift the Malays out from poverty by developing the economy’; ‘land reforms for farmers’; and ‘remove all foreign military presence in the country’. The demands were popular, resulting in 13 rallies attended by over 100,000 people. UMSU organisers travelled the whole length of the peninsula from north to south, and the government was sufficiently disconcerted to forbid the students from holding rallies in some towns, especially on the east coast (Muhammad Abu Bakar 1973: 80–81; Hassan 1984: 7; Weiss 2005). As is well known, the Alliance coalition of Tunku Abdul Rahman performed badly in the 1969 general election, securing less than half the popular vote and a significantly reduced parliamentary majority. The outcome was the tragedy of the 13 May ‘race riots’ in the aftermath of which the government assumed emergency powers and suspended parliament. This serious conflict, however, did not stop students from continuing to be critical of and confrontational against the establishment and they

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quickly targeted the Tunku and his administration. This culminated in a series of demonstrations being held on the University of Malaya campus, with Syed Hamid Ali leading UMSU and Anwar Ibrahim leading PBMUM. Though both leaders had different political rationales, they were united in their opposition to the Tunku and played important roles in the campaign against him (Weiss 2005). The issue gained traction when the Tunku made a media statement accusing Syed Hamid as the person who applied for a police permit to hold a rally parading the body of a Chinese youth who was shot dead by the police before the election. Syed Hamid denied the accusation (Muhammad Abu Bakar 1973; Hassan 1984: 8). In the event, the Tunku’s position was also undermined by rivals within UMNO and his powers as prime minister were severely curtailed, before he was forced to resign in favour of Abdul Razak Hussein in September 1970. Among the raft of policy innovations introduced in this period was a review into higher education— and the key question of university autonomy—and a vigorous effort to reform the education system. One important initiative was the commissioning by the National Operations Council of a committee to study student life at the University of Malaya, whose recommendations came to be known as the Majid Report (1971). In effect, the work of the committee paved the way for a major shift in thinking about the use of Malay as the national language and the pressing need for a standardised national education policy. It also became clear that the conflicts of May 1969 and the question of framing a new direction for language and education policies also widened racial divides both on and off campus. The Majid Report found that there was a tendency for Malay undergraduates to be aligned with PBMUM ‘as the main body which is seen to be more loyal to political issues of national interest’, while non-Malay students preferred UMSU. The two organisations with predominantly Malay membership—PBMUM and Persatuan Mahasiswa Islam Universiti Malaya (PMIUM, University of Malaya Islamic Students’ Society)—did not merge or align themselves with UMSU, and neither did the smaller clubs with the same membership composition. The committee was informed that PBMUM chose not to ally itself with the rest as it felt superior and preferred to maintain its distinct identity and autonomy. It was also claimed that UMSU ‘only showed a little, if any, leadership and initiative in popularising the use of the national language in campus’. As Hassan Karim (1984: 6) notes, the promotion of the Malay language became synonymous with opposition to the Anglophile Tunku. At the same time, the new government also feared potential student protest and opposition to its new policies. The National Operations Council formed a campus investigative committee in 1970, and its findings formed the grounds of the University and University Colleges Act (UUCA), passed by parliament on 18 March 1971 and which was intended to govern relations between the state and higher education institutions. Initially, the UUCA provisions related mainly to the establishment of two new public universities, Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in Bangi. However, one of the intentions of the act was to control campus activities, and this provoked vigorous anti-UUCA student opposition. UMSU was among the most vocal opponents of the new law, carrying out protests and submitting memoranda of opposition.

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But this student unity in the face of new forms of control and the undermining of university autonomy did not last, and student politics became caught up in infighting. The most serious conflict saw the left-wing Socialist Club lose control of both UMSU and Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar-Pelajar Malaysia (PKPM, National Union of Malaysian Students). In 1973 the Socialist Club underwent a reshuffle and managed to install its candidate, Hishamuddin Rais, as the UMSU secretary general. But the government was also intent on coming down hard on the student movement with the banning of the monthly journal Truth after less than a year of circulation, citing issues of national security (Weiss 2005: 306). The following year, 1974, proved pivotal in the history of student politics. In the absence of an effective opposition in parliament, students seemed to fill the vacuum. Prominent student protests focused on two major incidents: at Tasik Utara in Johor and at Baling in Kedah. The first incident concerned the attempt of mainly Malay squatters to prevent eviction from the settlement they had created in Tasik Utara. The squatters made an appeal to UMSU for support. A wide range of student organisations came out in solidarity, issuing press statements, appealing to the authorities and collecting donations, culminating in a demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s Department in Kuala Lumpur. This resulted in the arrest of a number of students leaders from various organisations (Mohd Shuhaimi 1995; Weiss 2005). Despite the apparent unanimity of purpose, the aftermath of the Tasik Utara events highlighted major divisions within the student movement, and in particular between UMSU and the newly formed Majlis Tertinggi Sementara (Temporary Executive Council). The government had been looking for an excuse to confront the troublesome UMSU and, as the education minister, Mahathir Mohamad closed the University of Malaya campus in September 1974 and then suspended UMSU. Not long after, in November and December 1974, student support for the peasants of Baling proved to be the final climax of post-1969 student activism. More than a thousand rubber smallholders held a three-day rally to protest against soaring prices and a fall in the price of rubber. On 3 December 1974 around 5,000 students demonstrated in front of the Royal Selangor Club in solidarity with the Baling smallholders. The government ignored the demands and arrested 1,128 students. With demonstrations carrying on after the arrests, the police entered the University of Malaya campus on 9 December, invoked the Internal Security Act (ISA), and arrested many student leaders and lecturers (Hassan 1984). Demonstrations continued after the arrests, but this final crackdown marked the end of the most politically significant era of student protest in Malaysia and the end to campus autonomy (Hassan 1984: 16; Mohd Shuhaimi 1995; Weiss 2005, 2012). In 1975 a set of stringent amendments were made to the UUCA. All student organisations were dissolved and student unions were replaced by relatively powerless and dependent student representative councils. Section 15 of the act states that no student ‘shall be a member of, or shall in any manner associate with, any society, political party, trade union or any other organisation … whether it is in the University or outside the University … in Malaysia or outside Malaysia … except as may be approved … by the Vice-Chancellor’ (Weiss 2005). The same constraints on associating with political parties also applied to student organisations. Students organisations and

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their members were likewise prohibited to ‘express or do anything which may be construed as expressing support, sympathy or opposition to any political party or trade union or as expressing support or sympathy with any unlawful organisation, body or group of persons’ (ibid.). Mahathir himself tried to tie the need for the muzzling of student activism with the opportunities afforded by the New Economic Policy (NEP) and affirmative action. Speaking in parliament on 8 April 1975, he said: Education enables the economic and social mobility which could change the fortunes of a person or a race for the better. If there exists too many undergraduate activities such as participation in elections and demonstrations, they would not be able to focus on their studies.

The amendments to the UUCA disconnected the campus-attending youths from the outside world. The lesson was clear: the state would apply the power of the law to curb students whenever it felt challenged by them. This account of early student activism questions the prevailing perception that students in particular and young people in general have historically been politically apathetic, unpatriotic and lacking in confidence. This was certainly not the case in the period from the early twentieth century to the mid-1970s. If this perception of young people is partially true in the period after the mid-1970s, however, then it raises the question of what was the turning point of youth activism. Could it be that their participation in the public domain has taken new forms and approaches that would require a different way of understanding political and social change? To understand this transformation, an appreciation of the economic and sociopolitical dynamics from the 1970s onwards helps to explain the process of depoliticisation among young people.

10.3 Socioeconomic Transformation and Depoliticisation Over the last four decades, far-reaching economic and social changes have helped shape the political attitudes of Malaysians, and in particular those aged 40 and below. Briefly, the economy has transformed from an agricultural one exporting primary products up to the 1970s to one based on services and industry. The period of upheaval and the May 1969 events also saw the implementation of a long-term affirmative action policy, with a specific focus on the Malays, encompassed in the provisions of the NEP. As the economy shifted to focus on industry, urbanisation took place as a result of a massive rural–urban migration, with young people making up the majority of newcomers to the urban centres. For instance, in the 1970s only 26.7% of the population lived in urban centres; by 2010 this figure has grown to 70%, and the numbers are even higher in industrialised states such as Penang and Selangor. Industrialisation and urbanisation both contributed to the formation and development of a new middle class and working class (Abdul Rahman 2000a: 91, 2000b). An appreciation of this new middle class and its aspirations is vital to placing it within the context

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of national development and social mobility. The new middle class was the product of rapid social mobility that occurred since the 1970s with this first generation of that middle class generally coming from families who were farmers and labourers. According to Abdul Rahman Embong (1999, 2001), at least three factors affected this social mobility: class background, education and the availability of government scholarships. The middle class was also highly dependent on loans and debts for consumables such as cars, homes and so on. Given the high levels of consumerism its fortunes were also highly susceptible to economic fluctuations. A key aspect of the emergence of the new middle class was the expansion of the number of higher education institutions, either by establishing new universities or upgrading existing colleges. This obviously increased enrolment rates in higher education. For example, in 1970 there were only 8,500 new student enrolments and this increased to 38,000 in 1985 (Weiss 2012: 188). At the same time, there was an increase in enrolments for degrees compared to diplomas. In 1970 only 35% of higher education students received a degree; within a decade this had increased to 64% (Saravanamuttu and Maznah 1991: 103–104). The rapid increase in the number of students explicitly aimed to drive and support economic growth based on export-led industrialisation and services. The educational orientation began to emphasise the applied sciences as opposed to pure science, and catered to industrial needs. At the end of the 1980s, there were criticisms of this industrialised orientation, among them from Rustam Sani, but these were generally ignored. The Sixth Malaysia Plan (1991–1995), for example, explicitly called for universities to tailor their research and education for the benefit of industry and this was reinforced by a new raft of legislation aimed to cement the ‘developmental’ role of higher education. In 1995, 11% of high school graduates went on to higher education. Almost half of this number went to public universities, 35% went to private colleges (along with 40,000 foreign students) and 15% went overseas for tertiary education (Weiss 2012: 190). Five parliamentary acts were amended in 1996 to achieve enough human resources for development, while at the same time lessening the country’s financial burden, to improve science and technology, and target 40% enrolment of high school graduates by 2020. Initially restricted to public institutions, the growth in student numbers was further boosted when a significant number of private universities began to enter the scene from the 1990s onwards. The role of the new legal framework was to establish, register, manage, monitor and maintain quality control, while private participation in the higher education sector became more pronounced. The mushrooming of private institutions prompted the idea of corporatising public universities, with the government claiming that the move would propel them to world standard and boost competitiveness while lessening the state’s financial burden. Subsidies were gradually decreased and universities were encouraged to look for their own revenues. As such, universities began to offer consulting services, increase the number of new programmes, and rent facilities for corporate or public use. However, when the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 hit Malaysia, this development was put on hold, resulting in corporatisation only in image, administration and physical development. Meanwhile, student fees have continued to skyrocket, both for first

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degrees and also for master’s degrees and PhD programmes. The remuneration for lecturers, however, did not increase similarly, while the Public Service Department and the Higher Education Ministry continued to monitor the universities (Sufean 2002: 171–230). By 2002, some 15 private universities have been established by corporations and political parties, including Universiti Multimedia (Telekom Malaysia Berhad), Universiti Teknologi Petronas (Petroliam Nasional Berhad), Universiti Tenaga Nasional (Tenaga Nasional Berhad), the Asian Institute of Science, Technology and Medicine (Malaysian Indian Congress) and Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (Malaysian Chinese Association). Branches of international universities were also established in anticipation of new market opportunities, including Monash, Curtin, Swinburne and Nottingham universities, with several new medical research centres including the International Medical University and Melaka-Manipal Medical College (Weiss 2012: 191). The impact on young people, especially university-attending youths, was obvious. First, to hasten entry of ‘human resources’ into the workforce, the government replaced the term system with the semester system, and shortened the awarding of most certificates from four to three years (Sato 2005: 82). This shortened the time youths spent on campus. In addition, the semester system meant that there were no more long holidays to plan for activities off campus. Undergraduates also faced rocketing fees, while also paying for other expenses such as transportation, university newsletters, college residences, exam fees and so on (Sufean 2002: 230). To contain the ballooning cost of education, the government introduced legislation to assist students with their loans. Through this approach, part of the education costs was shifted to students themselves. As such, those who did not have financial assistance or a scholarship would bear an average debt from RM20,000 (public universities) to RM80,000 (private universities) upon graduation. If youths before felt there was more room for activism, youths today carry a heavy financial burden which they must consider in the event something goes wrong. Not only was the space for youth activism reduced, issues of identity and culture pertaining to the young people also came under regimes of control and discipline (Haris Zuan 2013; Zawawi 2016). These moves were not new, but were intensified during the period of higher education expansion. The government had made previous interventions, with the banning of rock groups from appearing on Radio Televisyen Malaysia, as a reaction to the widening appeal of this music, on the basis that rock music did not gel with the moral norms of Malaysian society. Other attempts at social engineering aimed at young people were also to the fore. In 1994 the government introduced the Rakan Muda programme to (re)foster volunteerism among youths and aimed to improve unity, character and mental strength in Malaysian youth. With the slogan ‘Rakan muda—Yakin boleh!’ (Young friends—Sure you can!), the nine lifestyle elements and habits that were introduced to youths aged between 15 and 25 years targeted rekreasi (recreation), wajadiri (self-defence), sukan (sports), cinta alam (love of nature), kecergasan (fitness), masyarakat (community), senibudaya (cultural arts), rekacipta (design), and wirausaha/wiramahir (entrepreneurialism and

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entrepreneurs) (Rakan Muda 2003). After clamping down on the space for participation on and off campus, the government seemed to be opening up an ‘official space’ for young people where it could give a set of prescribed identities which it desired the youths to inculcate. At the same time, the Rakan Muda programme had the purpose of steering youths away from activities the government claimed to be ‘socially problematic’. Yet there has been no effort to look into the effectiveness of this programme. At the same time, research on young people focused more and more on perceived social problems—they were often dubbed ‘deviants’ and ‘delinquents’—which led to misunderstanding and confusion regarding the political stances of young people (Haris Zuan 2012, 2013). Going through Inventori penyelidikan sains sosial 1980– 2000 (Social science research inventory 1980–2000), one finds 7,877 research projects covering many themes within the social sciences and humanities over a 20-year period (Abdul Rahman and Nor Hayati 2003). Nevertheless, only a small number of studies focus on youth groups. The lack of interest among researchers is paradoxical, taking into account the fact that youths form the largest component of those affected by socioeconomic transformation as well as those affected by fluctuations in the job and education markets. In the following inventory, covering the period from 2001 to 2005, not only did the lack of focus on youth persist, but the social category of ‘youth/adolescents/juveniles’ was arbitrarily placed in a chapter titled ‘Gejala sosial’ (Social maladies) (Abdul Rahman and Nor Hayati 2009). Overall, there were 123 studies conducted on various aspects of youth-related social afflictions, for example disciplinary problems at school, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, bullying at school and consumption of banned substances. Before the introduction of the Rakan Muda programme, the space for youth volunteerism had long been under the thumb of the government, including in terms of membership. For example, Majlis Belia Malaysia (MBM, Youth Council of Malaysia) is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which serves as the main body to coordinate youth and student organisations in the country. As of 2012, a total of 38 national and state youth councils were associated with MBM with over three million members (Majlis Belia Malaysia 2013). There are four categories of national youth organisations: common youth organisations, uniformed youth organisations, religious youth organisations and student youth organisations. MBM not only coordinates youth organisations, it also serves to channel funds from the Ministry of Youth and Sports. MBM had always had a close relationship with the ruling party, especially UMNO, going back to the early period after independence. The role of politicians heading MBM can be understood in two senses. First, they are involved in the administration of youth organisations. Second, there are a number of politicians who were first active in youth groups before joining political parties and the government. Anwar Ibrahim, for example, was an MBM president who did not hold any position in a political party during his time in office (1972–1976) before later joining UMNO. He was also active in campus politics, acting as president of Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM, Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia) from 1974 to 1982. Other politicians also first created a political base through organisations such as Pasukan Kadet Bersatu Malaysia (PKBM, Malaysian United Cadet Corps) or the

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Malaysian Association of Youth Clubs (Hussain 1986: 230). Other than MBM, Majlis Perundingan Belia Negara (MPBN, National Youth Consultative Council) was also among the first youth organisations to be founded by the government in 1971. The idea came from the future prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who was then its first director. Over the years, MPBN has had a major role in planning, monitoring, implementing and evaluating the youth programmes sponsored by successive governments, which gives it an influential voice in determining the direction of youth development along with guidance from the Ministry of Youth and Sports. At one time or another, almost all leading politicians from UMNO have been MPBN executive committee members (Haris Zuan 2013). From the examples provided, it is apparent that the official government-sanctioned youth groups do not actually represent young people from all segments of society. They were never set up to do so. The dominance of politicians and civil servants prevents these organisations from playing a role as effective interest groups for youths, and in reality they have largely been coopted by successive governments.

10.4 The ‘New’ Youth Activism The 1998 Reformasi movement was an important political process which inspired civil society organisations, including young people. Despite originating from the Anwar Ibrahim saga—in which the former deputy prime minister fell out with Mahathir and was eventually imprisoned—Reformasi soon spread quickly to address other matters of substance, such as human rights, democracy, freedom of assembly and speech, freedom of information and so on. While the analytical focus has been on civil society actors such as women’s rights NGOs and environmental groups, the significance of youths has been largely ignored, despite being the group arguably most affected by Reformasi. The Reformasi movement certainly inspired the desire to seek political change. Nevertheless, the results of the 1999 general election also showed that the Barisan Nasional coalition, dominated by UMNO, was still able to comfortably hold on to power, following which it actually enjoyed unparalleled electoral success in 2004. While the energy and activism associated with Reformasi did not immediately translate into electoral success there was a palpable sense that Malaysia had entered into an era of the ‘new politics’ (Loh and Saravanamuttu 2003; Loh 2009). What this suggested was that Reformasi and other developments had impacted on politics at the national, state and local levels in such a way that politics could no longer return to the old consociational bargains that had governed Malaysia since independence. In particular, studies of the phenomenon pointed to the ongoing process of fragmentation and contestation involving civil society in non-formal realms (Loh 2003). At the same time, while it is true that some youths joined political parties representing the ‘old politics’, others began to focus their attention on cultural and community activities located in civil society and the non-formal realm of the new politics. At

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this juncture, university students began to organise their political activities outside campus grounds as the institutions of higher education remained firmly under the control of the ruling parties. At first sight, it seems that young people were barely interested in political change. For example, voter turnout for some campus elections was very low, with fewer than half of all students voting. Outside campus, the number of young people joining formal youth organisations was also minimal. It was reported that of some 6,000 registered youth organisations fewer than half were active with the overwhelming majority of young people having not registered with any youth organisation (Haslinda et al. 2012). But it is not accurate to say that youths (including university students) are no longer interested in politics only by looking at the membership of formal youth organisations and campus elections, because they have been channelling their activism outside of the formal organisations. For instance, Universiti Bangsar Utama (UBU), of which many students and staff pride themselves on adopting the principle of ‘Universiti Bukan Universiti’ (nonuniversity university), has held many theatre shows. Among its most popular is Tok ampoo (2000), directed by the veteran activist Hishamuddin Rais, which looks at the justice system and national politics. Other groups that performed plays included Teater Bukan Teater which produced Bilik sulit (Confidential room, 2008) about detention without trial and the ISA. This was followed by Rumah Anak Teater which produced Banduan akhir di sel akhir (Final prisoner in the last cell, 2010) directed by Moizzis R. Cong, who was part of the anti-death penalty campaign, and Beng Hock (2012), directed by Hariry Jalil, which was about death in custody. Other youths also carried out community programmes such as distributing free food on a weekly basis to those living on the streets of Kuala Lumpur. Among these are Food Not Bombs, Dapur Jalanan Kuala Lumpur (Kuala Lumpur Street Kitchen) and the Nasi Lemak project. Each of these initiatives collects donations from the public to buy ingredients with volunteers cooking, packing and distributing food throughout Kuala Lumpur. They also encourage people to bring their own food for distribution or clothes as well. Groups such as these have a clear principle on the homelessness issue—they reject terms like ‘homeless’, preferring to identify people as the displaced and the urban poor. According to Hadi Khalid, a coordinator for Dapur Jalanan Kuala Lumpur, the homeless are victims of flawed economic distribution and the failure of national social security, and the public should not view them as people who choose to live a homeless life because they are lazy. There are also pockets of youths who provide free tuition classes in the Klang Valley, notably Teach for the Needs. They target areas with low-cost flats around Kuala Lumpur, and undergraduates from nearby campuses often support such initiatives as volunteer educators. The same group of youths also conducts weekly and monthly discussions and forums featuring activists from among and outside their ranks. Academics are also invited to elaborate on current issues, philosophy, and political and social theory. Diskopi, which is based at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, is one such active group. They organised an essay and short-story writing competition along with the publishing company Strategic Information and Research Development Centre during the Bersih 2.0 protests in 2011 in favour of free and fair elections and political reform. Other groups like Universiti Terbuka Anak Muda also frequently

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hold academic seminars and symposiums featuring activists and academics. They host online lectures which are then uploaded on YouTube. In addition, a group of youths calling themselves Buku Jalanan (Street Books, not to be confused with Buku Jalanan Chow Kit, another NGO that provides stateless children with free tuition classes) collects academic and semi-academic books which are deemed critical and subversive to be shared with the public in public spaces, beginning in Taman Tasik Shah Alam. The group aims to promote a book-sharing culture and hold book discussions. At the same time, there are youths who are active in producing films, songs and poetry. Among the videos was Hak anda & kuasa polis [Your rights and police powers] which was produced together with the human rights organisations Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM), Pusat KOMAS, Rumah Anak Teater, Amnesty International (Malaysia) and Lim Lian Geok Cultural Development Centre (SUARAM 2011). The short documentary aims to educate the public on their civil rights and the limits of police power. Meanwhile, activists like Fahmi Reza produced the popular documentary Sepuluh tahun sebelum merdeka (Ten years before independence, 2007) about the history of the leftist movement in Malaysia which is ignored in official history texts. Pusat KOMAS sponsored the short film, which was screened in many universities and followed by discussions, although its screening was banned in many institutions. How can we explain the difference between the new and old social movements? First, there is the inaccessibility to formal participatory politics for most youths due to resource constraints. Second, the form of advocacy by the cultural community is seen as less radical. Watching theatre shows and films and listening to songs are not as radical as street demonstrations, which are an easier way to approach young people who are important actors in any political change. In addition, popular culture is the culture of the young. Youths are recipients and users of new technologies and social media such as smart phones and livestreaming videos. As such, communities like those at UBU take the pop culture form and replace its content with their own political messages. Free tuition classes and free food are not efforts to make sure all students receive an equal education or that hunger in Kuala Lumpur is eliminated. Such goals are unrealistic in the absence of political power. The point of these initiatives is to acquaint youths and students with the rest of society and to deal with societal realities. They are also used to inspire volunteerism. The ethos is that they should learn to return part of the fruits of the privilege they have enjoyed back into the society they occupy. It is of utmost importance for them to learn self-management and how to face problems and come up with new solutions. For the graphic artist and film-maker Fahmi Reza, creativity and talent came to the fore when he completed his documentary Sepuluh tahun sebelum merdeka. He has no formal training in film-making and learned through experimentation and friends. His film tries to portray the story of the struggle for independence with an emphasis on contributions by the left, serving as a counter-hegemonic narrative to the version offered by the Barisan Nasional government. Along with Syed Husin Ali and other writers and activists, Fahmi Reza also contributed to a volume of essays on

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the ‘People’s Constitution’ of 1947 which were alternative proposals to those being put forth by UMNO and the British government (Syed Husin et al. 2017). In short, the cultural community prefers advocacy that utilises pop culture and especially the new social media. Where once the government quite easily reduced and controlled the space for youth activism, imposing regimes of discipline, the new form of youth politics is able to escape such constraints (to an extent) and carve out a relatively autonomous space and give voice for contesting state authority. The role of cyberspace and social media cannot be underestimated. As Weiss (2014: 91) notes: ‘Cyberspace offers the promise of platforms for free engagement, particularly where the public sphere is constrained or controlled.… the creation and use of cyberspace complements or contests physical public space as a terrain for mobilisation.’ In a similar vein, Pauline Leong Pooi Yin’s recent study, Malaysian politics in the new media age (2020), highlights how the internet and social media played a pivotal role in influencing the country’s political climate. She argues that the internet has been ‘transformative’ for political actors and the citizenry. So who uses, shapes and controls cyberspace and the new media has been a core means by which young people have engaged with politics and social activism in the broadest sense. After a long process of depoliticisation, the urban youth of Malaysia are beginning to reconsider their position in society and are using pop culture, community services and social media to reorganise themselves in order to be involved in the public domain.

10.5 The Impact of Youth Activism on Mainstream Politics The ‘new’ youth activism has had an impact on mainstream or formal politics in two major ways: the approaches and strategies pursued by political parties to gain youth support; and the content of the political discourse or messaging delivered by political parties. Discourses relating to political culture and youth activism were for a long time viewed with suspicion and often regarded as an unhealthy development, and then subjected to close control as with the Rakan Muda programmes of the 1990s. Successive Barisan Nasional governments from the 1970s to 2000s even tried to discipline and control youth activist groups. However, in the period after Reformasi, and specifically after the 2008 general election, young people came to be understood as an essential social group and much effort was spent on courting them. One of the catalysts for this was the inaugural Bersih rally in 2007 which attracted a large crowd demanding clean and fair elections. Even though none of its demands was met, it is arguable that one of the consequences of the Bersih rally was the loss by Barisan Nasional of its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority in the 2008 general election; in addition, the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance) coalition won five of the 12 contested state legislatures, an increase of four since the previous general election. Further Bersih rallies were held in July 2011, April 2012, August 2015 and November 2016, all of which saw increased levels of youth participation. The significance of Bersih in galvanising civil society cannot be overstated. They were the largest demonstrations held in the country after Reformasi in

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1998, spawned a social movement that grew organically, created a shared memory of political activism, and arguably helped to usher into power the short-lived Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) government in May 2018. The Bersih rallies were also important for a new generation of youths, those in their twenties who did not participate directly in the Reformasi experience and who came of voting age in the late 2000s and the 2010s (Haris Zuan 2014, 2020). At the same time, ripples from the Occupy movement began to spread worldwide in 2011—in Europe, in North America and subsequently as a truly global movement expressing opposition to economic and social inequality and calling for ‘real democracy’. Such demands were also felt in Malaysia. The first Occupy Dataran assembly at Dataran Square on 30 July 2011 actually happened earlier than Occupy Wall Street which had its first protest later that year. The demand to create an alternative to the established system of representative democracy by promoting the principles of participatory democracy found resonance with young people in particular. Even though the Occupy moment did not last very long, it did offer a sense both of connection with popular struggles elsewhere in the world and further confirmation that social movements for political change are anchored by young people (Haris Zuan 2014). Despite the vibrancy of these social movements, youth participation in partisan politics remained low. Most youths were rather critical of political parties on both sides of the divide and showed little interest in signing up as party members. Only a small minority of young people participated in activities held by political parties such as rallies, fundraising dinners and social events (Haris Zuan 2014, 2020). In other words, aside from the high-profile Bersih demonstrations and, briefly, Occupy Dataran, most socially engaged young people, including university students, preferred to participate in off-campus programmes that were more relaxed, without strict hierarchies, and more cultural or social in nature. This trend of students taking their activism out of the campus and abandoning campus politics was a product of what Meredith Weiss (2012) calls ‘intellectual containment’—the suppression of academic freedom and institutional autonomy—and I call ‘depoliticisation’, which removes students’ ability to organise themselves collectively and disconnects them from the historical narrative of student activism (Haris Zuan 2013, 2020). Seen in this light, it is little wonder that the Barisan Nasional government, led by Najib Razak, was keen to coopt young people into mainstream politics and at the same time to be viewed as ‘progressive’. His administration started giving expression to the aspirations of the youth by talking up a reform agenda through the concept of ‘transformation’. It is clear that this notion of transformation was positioned as a response or antithesis to the Reformasi concept popularised by Anwar Ibrahim. Najib’s transformation agenda focused on legal reform, with the abolition of the notorious Internal Security Act (ISA), the Banishment Act 1959 and the Restricted Residence Act 1933. However, the ISA was replaced with the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012. The Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 and the Police Act 1967 were also amended to become more democratic. In addition to the introduction of the Peaceful Assembly Act in 2011, the UUCA was also altered to allow students to legally participate in politics on campus grounds and in higher educational institutions for the first time in over 40 years. These reforms culminated

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in claims that Barisan Nasional spent a record sum in wooing young voters. The coalition not only became active on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it also published a series of short videos on current issues and criticising the Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition. Barisan Nasional also organised concerts nationwide, dubbed Jelajah janji ditepati (Promises fulfilled tour), which featured famous local artists and the Korean sensation Psy in Penang (Haris Zuan 2014). The youth were also one of the most important target groups for political parties in the historic 2018 general election. In the run-up to the election, Pakatan Harapan Youth came out with Tawaran anak muda (Offer to the youth), a 10-point platform focused on rights to decent employment, quality education, lower costs of living, affordable housing, and sports and recreation. Pakatan Harapan’s election manifesto offered 60 promises across four main categories, including a list of 10 promises it vowed to fulfil within the first hundred days in office and included five ‘special commitment[s] for youths’ in its manifesto (Pakatan Harapan 2018). Meanwhile, Barisan Nasional also introduced a youth-specific manifesto, called Jaminan orang muda (Youth guarantee), with themes encompassing better economic and educational opportunities. For its part, the loose Islamist coalition Gagasan Sejahtera, led by Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party), also emphasised youth issues such as job creation, home ownership, private vehicles, improved cost of living and education (Haris Zuan 2020). One narrow, but signficant, measure of the role of the impact of youth on mainstream politics is the number of young people running as candidates for election. As we have seen, parties from both major coalitions made distinctive efforts to woo young voters via a slew of methods such as political education programmes and internships, the establishment of student wings, and an emphasis on the rejuvenation of political parties. How then did this affect the composition of law makers at the decision-making level, specifically in parliament? Table 10.1 shows that since the watershed general election of 2008 up to today there has been no significant shift towards a parliament comprising younger members; in fact over the last decade, the total number of members of parliament aged 35 and below has decreased with the overwhelming majority (over 88% of the total) aged 36 and older. Most MPs under the age of 40 have been from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) or Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, People’s Justice Party), leading Table 10.1 Breakdown of Malaysian parliamentarians based on age cohort and political coalitions after the 2008, 2013 and 2018 general elections. Source Personal communication, 15 January 2019 2008

2013 Total

BN

2018

Age

BN

PR

Others

PR

Others

Total

BN

PH

Others

Total

21–30

0

2

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

2

0

31–35

2

9

0

11

0

8

0

8

0

5

0

5

36–40

8

7

0

15

5

14

0

19

3

16

1

20

2

41 >

194

195

195

Total

222

222

222

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components of the Pakatan Rakyat or Pakatan Harapan coalitions. Another feature of many younger MPs is that they come from long-standing elite political families. For example, Zairil Khir Johari (born 1982) is the son of a former education minister under Tunku Adbul Rahman; Nurul Izzah Anwar (born 1980) is the daughter of Anwar Ibrahim; and Khairy Jamaluddin (born 1976) is the son-in-law of the former prime minister Abdullah Badawi. It was only really with the 2018 election that a significant number of younger MPs did not have this privileged background, such as the former minister of youth and sports Syed Saddiq bin Syed Abdul Rahman (born 1992). With Malaysia’s first-ever change of government resulting from the 2018 general election, and with the victorious Pakatan Harapan coalition articulating the need for change and the overthrow of the old politics, how did this play out in terms of youth representation in the new cabinet? If Pakatan Harapan had consistently taken the lead in bringing in younger MPs surely this would be reflected in the composition of the cabinet being younger. However, the average age of Mahathir’s Pakatan Harapan cabinet, at 53 years, was exactly the same as the previous Najib Razak cabinet. While Najib’s cabinet had just two members who were under 40 years old, Mahathir’s cabinet had six members under that age, four from the DAP, one from Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM) and one from Parti Warisan Sabah. Four of these were women. This shift to more youthful representation in the cabinet was historically unprecedented. With the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government in February 2020 and the return to power of some elements of the old order—notably UMNO—in the subsequent governments it is too early to say what this means for youth representation in formal politics. But extra-parliamentary youth activism appears alive and well if a number of recent initiatives are anything to go by. First, as early as 2017, a new youth-based NGO, Undi18, was launched, having started off as a student movement under the umbrella of the Malaysian Students’ Global Alliance. Its main focus is on lowering the minimum age for voters in both federal and state elections to 18 years as well as promoting automatic voter registration. In its own words, Undi18 ‘aims to bridge the gap between politicians, policymakers, and youth’ (Undi18 2020). Second, in July 2020 a group of youth associations successfully organised a virtual mock parliament, dubbed Parlimen Digital, which saw 222 young people representing actual constituencies coming together online to debate a range of topics, from economic challenges to the state of the country’s education system. As Crystal Teoh (2020) notes: ‘The initiative was born of the dissatisfaction about the government’s decision not to hold a virtual parliament sitting, despite the urgent need for debate over a number of pressing issues, not least how the country can best recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.’ More than 200,000 people tuned in as participants debated. And third, many of these dynamics reached a kind of logical culmination when Syed Saddiq formally sought to register a new political movement know as the Malaysian United Democratic Alliance (MUDA) in September 2020 (Mazwin 2020). Each of these initiatives is an example of young people creating new types of platform to engage directly in politics. They mark both a frustration with and a direct

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criticism of what many see as the failure of the political elite, with its backroom manoeuvring and endless horse-trading.

10.6 Conclusion It is clear that the past two decades have witnessed a realignment in youth activism and political engagement in Malaysia. For a long time, from the authoritarian turn in the early 1970s, the state sought to curtail student-led activism in particular by implementing draconian restrictive laws. The political culture of young people was routinely associated with ‘deviance’ and ‘delinquency’ so that this social group needed to be ‘disciplined’ through the law and the demands of the market economy. But the combined political and economic crises of the late 1990s fundamentally altered the terrain on which politics came to be fought. While the dynamism of the Reformasi movement did not translate into significant electoral gains for a decade, many young people were drawn into a new kind of politics, and this momentum continued with the Bersih rallies and beyond. In these ways, and through communitybased cultural and social activism, young people were able to assert their agency and navigate between the dominant political structures in an improvisatory way. In many ways, they did not need rigid structures but organised themselves as loose networks. And most importantly, they utilised the power of popular culture and the new social media to good effect. The past decade has seen the major political parties catching up with these forms of youth activism. All political parties have made the youth one of the main focuses for engagement. This is expedient as much as anything else. The median age of the Malaysian population is just 29 years, and the voting age was reduced in 2019 from 21 to 18 years (Tantau 2019). Any mainstream party that ignores young people does so at its own peril. And all parties have become expert at mobilising young people’s platform of choice: social media. It remains to be seen whether mainstream politics is capable of using these new realities to truly address long-term problems facing the youth, such as the quality of education, employment opportunities and affordable housing. But with the vitality of youth activism to the fore, the old politics of vote buying, patronage and race-based policies is likely to come under greater scrutiny than ever before. Acknowledgements I would like to express my special thanks to Helena Dodge-Wan for her editorial work on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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———. 2008. National youth survey 2008, 13th Nov– 9th Dec 2008. http://www.merdeka.org/v4/ index.php/downloads/category/2-researches?download=94:national-youth-survey-2008-presen tation-slides-adjusted&start=20. Accessed 30 Aug 2020. Mohd Azizuddin Mohd Sani. 2014. The social media election in Malaysia: The 13th general election in 2013. Kajian Malaysia 32(Supp. 2): 123–147. Mohd Shuhaimi Al-Maniri. 1995. Politik kampus: Di sebalik tabir [Campus politics: Behind the scenes]. Bandar Baru Bangi: Pustaka Generasi Baru. Muhammad Abu Bakar. 1973. Mahasiswa menggugat: Suatu analisa dan peninjauan dari dalam terhadap kegiatan mahasiswa-mahasiswa negeri ini [Students accuse: An analysis and internal review of the activities of students in this country]. Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara. Ng, Cecilia, and Chee Heng Leng. 1996. Women in Malaysia: Present struggles and future directions. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 2(1): 192–210. Nga, Janice L.H., Li Min Liao, and Victor T. King. 2015. Internet, youth and democracy: Political participation of Malaysian youth. Paper presented at the 11th International Conference of the International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR): ‘Civil Society and the Citizen’, Munster, Germany, 22–25 July. Pakatan Harapan. 2018. Buku harapan: Rebuilding our nation, fulfilling our hopes [Book of hope: Rebuilding our nation, fulfilling our hopes]. Kuala Lumpur: Pakatan Harapan. https://kempen.s3. amazonaws.com/manifesto/Manifesto_text/Manifesto_PH_EN.pdf. Accessed 20 Oct 2020. Parnwell, Michael J.G., Janice L.H. Nga, and Victor T. King. 2010. Youth organisations as a starting point to formal politics: A case of Malaysia. Nepalese Journal of Public Policy and Governance 27(2): 33–48. Poh Soo Kai, Tan Jing Quee, and Koh Kay Yew, eds. 2010. The Fajar generation: The University Socialist Club and the politics of postwar Malaya and Singapore. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Devlopment Centre. Rakan Muda. 2003. Rekabentuk modul aktiviti gaya hidup rakan muda [Lifestyle activity design for youth]. https://web.archive.org/web/20070914062339/http://www.rakanmuda.org.my/gayahi dup.cfm. Accessed 20 Oct 2020. Rashila Ramli, and Saliha Hj Hassan. 1998. Trends and forms of women’s participation in politics. In Malaysian women in the wake of change, ed. Sharifah Zaleha Syed Hassan, 88–104. Kuala Lumpur: Gender Studies Programme, Universiti Malaya. Roff, William, R. 1967. Origins of Malay nationalism. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press. Rohana Ariffin. 1988. Malaysian women’s participation in trade unions. In Daughters in industry: Work, skills and consciousness of women workers in Asia, ed. Noeleen Heyzer, 239–265. Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre. Rustam A. Sani. 2011. Tinta Rustam A. Sani [Writings of Rustam A. Sani]. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Saravanamuttu, Johan, and Maznah Mohamad. 1991. Pendidikan tinggi: Krisis pedemokrasian [Higher education: Crises of democratisation]. In Akademia menjelang tahun 2000 [Academics approaching the year 2000], ed. Wan Abdul Manan Wan Muda and Haris Md Jadi. Penang: Persatuan Kakitangan Akademik dan Pentadbiran USM. Sato, Machi. 2005. Education, ethnicity and economics: Higher education reforms in Malaysia 1957– 2003. NUCB Journal of Language, Culture and Communication 7(1): 73–88. Soon Chuan Yean. 2012. Persaingan politik moral: Satu penganalisian politik budaya kumpulan seni di Malaysia [Contest for moral politics: An analysis of the cultural politics of the arts community in Malaysia]. In Wacana baru politik Malaysia: Perspektif ruang awam, budaya, dan institusi [The new discourse in Malaysian politics: From the perspective of the public sphere, culture and institutions], ed. Haris Zuan and Rizal Hamdan, 25–50. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Suara Rakyat Malaysia [SUARAM]. 2011. Hak anda & kuasa polis. SUARAM Media, 12 October. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iExMSubmOiw. Accessed 20 Oct 2020. Sufean Hussin. 2002. Dasar pembangunan pendidikan Malaysia: Teori dan analisis. [Malaysian education development policy: Theory and analysis]. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

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Syed Husin Ali. 2012. Memoir perjuangan politik Syed Husin Ali [Memoirs of Syed Husin Ali’s political struggles]. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. ———, Ariffin Omar, Jeyakumar Devaraj, and Fahmi Reza. 2017. The People’s constitutional proposals for Malaya. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Tantau, Marcus. 2019. Malaysia changes its voting age. The Diplomat, 19 July. https://thediplomat. com/2019/07/malaysia-changes-its-voting-age/. Accessed 20 Oct 2020. Teoh, Crystal. 2020. Youth moving to the forefront of Malaysian politics. The Diplomat, 15 September. https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/youth-moving-to-the-forefront-of-malaysianpolitics/. Accessed 20 Oct 2020. Undi18. 2020. Our story. https://undi18.org/about-us. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Weiss, Meredith L. 2005. Still with the people? The chequered path of student activism in Malaysia. South East Asia Research 13(3): 287–332. ———. 2006. Protest and possibilities: Civil society and coalitions for political change in Malaysia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2012. Student activism in Malaysia: Crucible, mirror, sideshow. Singapore: NUS Press. ———. 2014. New media, new activism: Trends and trajectories in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. International Development Planning Review 36(1): 91–109. Weintraub, Andrew N., ed. 2011. Islam and popular culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. London: Routledge. Yang Razali Kassim. 2014. Malaysia at the crossroads: ‘New politics’ or old politics in new clothing. In The 13th Malaysia elections: Issues, trends and future trajectories, ed. Mohamed Nawab Bin Mohamed Osman, 85–103. Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, RSIS Monograph No. 30. Zawawi Ibrahim. 1995. Popular culture at the crossroads: Malay contemporary music: An analysis of creativity and the industry. Kuala Lumpur: Academy of Malay Studies, Universiti Malaya. ———. 1998. The making of a subaltern discourse in the Malaysian nation- state: New subjectivities and the poetics of Orang Asli dispossession and identity. In Cultural contestations: Mediating identities in a changing Malaysian society, ed. Zawawi Ibrahim, 145–194. London: ASEAN Academic Press. ———. 2008. Development and alternative representations: Narrating a deterritorialised Penan landscape. In Representation, identity and multiculturalism in Sarawak, ed. Zawawi Ibrahim, 75–89. Kuching: Dayak Cultural Foundation and Kajang: Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia. ———. 2016. Disciplining rock and identity contestations: Hybridization, Islam and new musical genres in contemporary Malaysian popular music. Situations 9(1): 21–47.

Haris Zuan is a junior research fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and currently pursuing a PhD degree at Cranfield University, United Kingdom. His research interests lie within the field of youth, social movements and political identities in Southeast Asia. His recent publications include: Nusantara in contemporary popular culture. In Connecting oceans: Malaysia as a Nusantara civilisation, vol. 2, ed. HansDieter Evers et al. (2020); Youth in the politics of transition in Malaysia. In Towards a new Malaysia? The 2018 election and its aftermath, ed. Meredith L. Weiss and Faisal S. Hazis (2020); and Transformasi sosial dan politik belia (Social transformation and youth politics, 2020).

Chapter 11

Islam and the Environment: The Challenge of Developmental Politics in Malaysia with Special Reference to PAS’s Rule in Kelantan Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid and Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib Abstract The standard of living of a particular country is commonly measured by looking at its national income, which has been widely accepted as being broadly indicative of citizens’ material well-being. Progress in the attainment of such wellbeing reflects in turn the stage of development which that country is currently in. However, since the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992, global concern over environmental damage has somewhat overshadowed national policy makers’ obsession with economic growth. Within the context of Malaysia’s politics of development, environmental problems associated with such phenomena as landslides, floods and haze have become more serious throughout the years. Unfortunately, in Malaysia, only non-governmental organisations (NGOs) openly linked to environmental causes are seen to exhibit any genuine concern over the rapidly depleting natural habitat and flora and fauna, and rising levels of pollution. Entities of the Malaysian state, belying its moderate and even Islamic pretensions, have hesitated to address environmental issues for fear of ruffling feathers that are potentially damaging to political and economic support of the powers at the federal or state levels of government. This is ironic considering that Islam, viewed in comprehensive terms as many Islamists would like to, supposedly abhors neglect or even pillage of the environment. Despite the increasing vociferousness of Islamist civil society in recent years, their response to environmental issues has been surprisingly muted. The discourse on Islam in Malaysia has been unduly dominated by politico-legal issues such that environmental decline, which arguably reflects also a general spiritual malaise, hardly figures among Islamist actors in both the state and civil society. Worse still, in states where Islamists control the government, such as Kelantan, those championing Islam are seen as colluding with capitalist interests to the detriment of marginalised communities that Islam, by right, should be defending. Using empirical data from Kelantan, this chapter seeks to interrogate the manifest failure of Islamism as a political ideology in Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid (B) School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, George Town, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib School of Languages, Civilisation and Philosophy, Universiti Utara Malaysia, Sintok, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_11

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addressing worsening environmental standards, contrary to oft-cited claims of Islam being a solution to all problems. A lack of spirituality in the programme of activists and parties that purportedly champion Islam is identified as a bane that urgently needs addressing, especially if elements of the Malaysian state are adamant in maintaining Islam as a partner and contributor to development. Keywords Malaysia · Environment · Islam · Kelantan · Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) · Politics of development · Non-governmental organisations

11.1 Introduction Malaysia’s developmental policies have undergone momentous changes since its independence from Britain on 31 August 1957 as the Federation of Malaya and its later incorporation of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore on 16 September 1963 to form the nation-state of Malaysia. From the formative years of nationhood, beset with ethnic and communal problems that at times threatened to tear apart the fledgling country, Malaysia chose to navigate through a developmental path via careful planning while still largely operating within the broad capitalist framework. Beginning with Malaya’s Draft Development Plan (1950–1955), conscious efforts were made by the political authorities to steer economic development in a direction that reflected the politico-economic biases of the ruling classes. Hence, early emphases on protecting colonial plantation and mining interests gradually shifted into more nationalist priorities that involved, among other things, a bold venture into industrialisation while at the same time dealing with externalities that arose out of the ensuing process of capital accumulation (Jomo 1999). Accompanying phenomena of rising urban poverty, crime and social dislocation were among the harmful side effects of Malaysia’s race towards becoming a newly industrialising economy and a highincome nation—a self-proclaimed target of successive governments (The Star 2016). Material development was never in danger of being dislodged as the government’s utmost priority as it guided the state through the First Malayan Plan (1956–1960) until the present Eleventh Malaysia Plan (2016–2020). Over a period of more than 60 years of Malaysia’s developmental planning regime, the erection of a modern physical infrastructure counts among its proudest achievements. Among the notable accomplishments are the relatively quick appearance of new towns and cities, housing estates, airports, ports, roads, schools, dams, parks and hospitals, all of which significantly altered the country’s physical landscape. While improvements in the quality of life were gradually transforming the demographic profile and economic structures, environmental awareness suffered a benign neglect as far as official policy was concerned. This is not to say that the state completely ignored environmental concerns, for Malaysian delegates regularly featured in historic meetings to arrest environmental degradation such as the Stockholm Conference of 1972, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 and

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the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2002 (Jamaluddin 2010). Despite Malaysia’s token participation in these international initiatives, Malaysians’ own environmental awareness was slow in coming. It was only from the late 1990s, when the country became seasonally affected by haze, blamed on forest fires in Sumatra, that many people were jolted from their slumber. Truth had finally dawned on them that in the state’s determination to drive economic development and arrest Malaysia’s perennial ethnic problems, scant attention had been given to the concomitant issues of loss of biodiversity, deterioration of natural resources, global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, deforestation, increasing occurrences of landslides and flash floods, and numerous other instances of declining environmental standards that were threatening the sustainability of the development path. Malaysians’ environmental consciousness has also risen in recent years as a result of the country being at the receiving end of a number of fatal natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 and the Mount Kinabalu earthquake of 5 June 2015. Environmental policy has admittedly improved over the years. Since 1 April 1988, for example, it has been mandatory for developers to submit environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports to the director-general of environmental quality at the Department of Environment, Ministry of Environment and Water (and its predecessors), before particular projects could take off. The EIA requirement was intended to ‘identify, predict, evaluate and communicate information about the impacts on the environment of a proposed project and to detail out the mitigating measures prior to project approval and implementation’ (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment 2007: 1). Indeed, over 30 years on, certain projects are known to have been issued a stop-work order until they satisfy such environmental requirements (cf. Randhawa 2017). However, at the societal level, the struggle to protect the environment from increasingly intrusive forms of development is associated not with the state but with civil society, as represented by a slew of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Already deprived of substantive state support, the discourse of environmental NGOs also failed to galvanise society at large, making them lone causes which other NGOs and social movements do not find worth backing. This includes Islamic organisations and bodies whose devotion to religio-political activism has been the most palpable feature of the Islamic resurgence that has shaped Malaysia in various ways since the 1970s (Jomo and Ahmad Shabery 1992). This is ironic in the sense that Islamists—that is, proponents of political Islam, as members of such Islamic entities are—often insist on the superiority of Islam as a universal and comprehensive way of life rather than a religion of faith and rituals per se, thus presumably incorporating environmental concerns. On the contrary, environmental discourses are almost devoid from Islamist programmes, which were adopted in time by the state-supported Islamic administrations. Minor exceptions notwithstanding (cf. Fadil 1992), Islamist figures and movements are not known to have championed environmental causes. This is more clearly demonstrated when we discuss some policies and actions of the state government of Kelantan, which has since 1990 been

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helmed by the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party), the de facto embodiment of political party-based Islamism in Malaysia.

11.2 The Transformation of Malaysia’s Economic Terrain under Official Developmental Policies Developmental planning in Malaysia has undergone three major phases that brought about a gamut of structural changes (Abdul Rahman 2003). The first phase, from the 1950s to 1960s, saw developmental priorities gradually shifting from the colonial concerns of plantation agriculture and mineral resource extraction to import substitution industrialisation (Mohd Haflah 1987; Chamhuri 2001). Malaysia nonetheless remained reliant on its natural resources for economic survival, which was boosted by capital injections from international financial institutions. The second phase, from 1971 to 1990, witnessed the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) which ensued from the postelection racial troubles that engulfed Kuala Lumpur in May 1969. Undergirded by its twin objectives of poverty eradication irrespective of race and economic restructuring designed to alter the ethnically slanted imbalance of income distribution and occupational category identification, the NEP period coincided with the discovery of oil off the country’s shores, leading to the establishment of the national oil company Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas) in 1974. Oil swiftly supplanted the traditional resources of tin and rubber as the country’s main source of income, as the increasingly export-oriented economy diversified into manufacturing and services, establishing niche areas in electrical and electronic goods and Islamic financial services. In the plantation sector, rubber gradually gave way as the main crop to the more profitable palm oil, whose production also resulted in a drastic decline of forest cover. Ishak Yussof and Nor Aini Haji Idris (2009) further subdivide the first two phases of the developmental planning strategy into three chronological periods, comprising the late colonial, early post-independence and post-NEP stages. NEP-based policies integrated the political priority of national unity based on the ‘national pillars’ (Rukun Negara)—belief in God, loyalty to the king and country, supremacy of the constitution, the rule of law and good behaviour and morality—with affirmative action designed to prevent the indigenous Bumiputera (sons of the soil, as the supposedly original inhabitants of Malaya were called) from being left behind in economic development. Expansion of human capital was effected through large-scale educational and training programmes of the youth as the country progressed through the Second Malaysia Plan (1971–1975), Third Malaysia Plan (1976–1980) and Fourth Malaysia Plan (1981–1985) (Anuwar 1995). In 1991 the National Development Policy (NDP) purportedly replaced the NEP, but in reality maintained a huge chunk of the NEP’s objectives, especially in relation to the 30% target of the Bumiputera share in the economy. National unity remained

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the crux of developmental planning under the NDP, whose strategy rested on a more integrated approach towards ethnic and regional redistributive priorities (Ishak and Nor Aini 2009). Operated in line with the Second Outline Perspective Plan (1991– 2000), the NDP oversaw the implementation of the Sixth Malaysia Plan (1991–1995) and Seventh Malaysia Plan (1996–2000) within the parallel context of a National Vision Policy better known as Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020). Wawasan 2020 outlined nine strategic challenges that citizens had to overcome in their effort to transform Malaysia into a fully developed country by 2020 as one united Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian nation) (Mahathir 1991; Ooi 2006). While ostensibly professing a holistic remit, to the extent of incorporating morality and ethics as fundamentals of a progressive and prosperous society, Wawasan 2020 lacked any specific mention of environmental awareness as part of traits to be possessed by citizens. Recognition was given, however, to the goal of ‘pursuing environmentally sustainable development to reinforce long-term growth’ (Economic Planning Unit 2001: 8). The notion of sustainable development eventually made it as one of the development thrusts of the Eighth Malaysia Plan (2001–2005), implemented as part of the Third Outline Perspective Plan (2001–2010), with emphasis being placed on ‘addressing environmental and resource issues in an integrated and holistic manner’ (ibid.: 28). On the whole, the NDP’s rural development strategy, while short of prioritising environmental issues, was a significant step in adopting a human-centred approach towards development. Sustainability issues began to be given due importance besides the conventional focus on equity distribution, poverty eradication, provision of basic infrastructure, utilisation of technology appropriate to local population needs and decentralisation of authority between the government and local communities (Ishak and Nor Aini 2009). On 30 March 2010 the New Economic Model (NEM) was launched by the prime minister Najib Razak, who had succeeded Mahathir’s successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi a year earlier following pressure from elements within the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) who were growing restless over the latter’s failure to reform the party in the wake of staggering setbacks it suffered during the twelfth general election of March 2008. Abdullah’s forcible resignation as UMNO president-cum-prime minister marked the effective eclipse of his ambitious vision of Islam Hadhari (civilisational Islam) which, amid glaring weaknesses in its conceptualisation and implementation, had acknowledged the safeguarding of natural resources and the environment as one of its precepts (Ahmad Fauzi and Muhamad Takiyuddin 2014). Although its actual roots remain unclear, Islam Hadhari was reputedly sourced from the sociological tenets of the medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) (Chong 2006), who is regarded as one of the pioneers of environmental determinism—the school of thought that believes that man’s physical environment directly influences his social behaviour and cultural development (Ergin 2008). The NEM, while not discarding altogether the civilisational approach of Islam Hadhari, was driven by an essentially neoliberal bias that mandated the nationstate to bring to fruition capitalist-based economic liberalisation, industrial growth and technological advancement without neglecting notions of inclusivity and issues

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of sustainability (Nik Mustapha 2010). Seven strategic approaches were outlined towards achieving these lofty goals: productivity-led growth, private sector-driven growth, local autonomy in decision-making, corridor-based economic activity, priority on technologically capable industries and firms, an Asian orientation, and the preservation of white-collar professionals in the labour market. Upon scrutiny, the NEM does not evince any novel philosophy underlying economic development and related issues of redistribution, equity and ultimately justice. Its rural development strategy, for instance, continues to harp on ways to raise the incomes of the poor and enhance the quality of life of local communities while simultaneously taking into account questions of inclusivity, sustainability and creative income-generation (Shamsulbahriah and Norma 2013). Modernisation remains the cardinal feature of public policy appraisal and the achievement of national integrity. Four pillars introduced in the NEM—the 1Malaysia concept, the Government Transformation Programme (GTP), the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP) and the Tenth Malaysia Plan—were intended to boost Wawasan 2020’s targets which seemed to be in danger of being derailed in the wake of wild economic fluctuations and increasing disparity of wealth among different segments of the population. The Malaysian Indian community, for example, is identified as having been cruelly left behind in economic progress within the context of the pro-Bumiputera policies, leading to wide discontentment that spilled into street demonstrations in 2007 and prompted the Najib administration’s launching of a Malaysian Indian Blueprint in April 2017 (The Star 2017). In any event, the political turmoil that ensued after the ousting of Najib from power in the 2018 general election, and the ongoing consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, have thrown into stark focus the shortfalls in the NEM’s strategic thinking. In any case, the environment remains on the margins of the developmental paradigm, short of lip service paid to it by politicians when problems crop up in the public domain. To all intents and purposes, the environmentalist cause is left in the hands of environmental NGOs.

11.3 NGOs in the Environmentalist Movement In a politically mature society, civil society plays a number of important roles. Among other things, as voices of conscience speaking on behalf of marginalised sections of society, civil society organisations raise awareness of human rights, serve as intermediaries between the public and the government, provide a cushion against intrusive state powers, demand reforms of public policies so as to truly benefit the people’s welfare and oversee the direction of the government in general (Saliha 2000). As for the environmentalist movement, NGOs play an indispensable role of highlighting environmental issues at a time when the state’s pursuit of capitalist-oriented economic development towards accomplishing the aim of becoming a high-income nation is wont to push environmental concerns to the periphery of policy-making, being an afterthought at best. In Jamaluddin Md. Jahi’s (1996) view, the stronger environmental NGOs are in a particular country the greater the chances that the quality of

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the country’s environment will improve. It is the vocality of environmental NGOs that in many cases prods governments to establish institutions that pay serious attention to such environmental issues as air, water and noise pollution, the dumping of toxic waste, flora and fauna species extinction, deforestation and illegal exploitation of land supposedly protected under conservation laws. If a government is serious in protecting the environment, it is necessary to remove any obstacle against the empowerment of environmental NGOs whose members are more than willing to go to the ground on a round-the-clock basis to investigate cases of transgression of environmental laws, unlike office-based environmental functionaries liable for transfers at different stages of their careers. In Malaysia, activities of environmental NGOs share a lengthy history and contributed significantly to the watershed decision to enact the Environment Act of 1974 (Adnan 2016). In the 1970s, such NGOs as the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS), Consumers’ Association of Penang (CAP), Environmental Protection Society Malaysia (EPSM), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Friends of the Earth of Malaysia (Sahabat Alam Malaysia, SAM) were already speaking out against environmental degradation. In the next two decades, more environmental NGOs were founded. By 2001, 18 environmental NGOs, encouraged by support from the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), coalesced under the aegis of an umbrella organisation known as Malaysian Environmental NGOs (MENGO). The inauguration of MENGO was a breakthrough in Malaysia’s environmentalist movement. As a pressure bloc to be reckoned with, today comprising 31 diverse members working on green issues, MENGO is considered a significant partner of the state in ensuring that development policies, projects and planning adhere to conditions conducive to sustainable development (Abdul Hamid and Fatimah 2009; Schreurs and Papadakis 2020: 214–215). Following a seminar themed ‘Sustainability of Treasures of the Earth: Roots of the Problem, Sharing and Solution’ (Kelestarian Khazanah Alam: Punca Permasalahan, Perkongsian dan Penyelesaian) in Tanah Aina Fahad, Raub, Pahang, during which the idea of the formation of a more activist-oriented coalition of both NGO-based and individual environmentalists was mooted, Gerakan Alam Sekitar Rakyat Malaysia (GERAK, Environmental Movement of Malaysians) was founded in October 2016 (Kosmo 2016b). Collating the strength of 50 NGOs, the rationale for GERAK lay in the erstwhile lack of unity and in fact hidden rivalry discernible within the family of non-state environmentalists spurred by competition for funds from external sponsors, among other reasons. The latent bad blood in such intergroup relations was doing more harm than good for the long-term future of environmentalism as a whole. Among prominent NGOs that agreed to become constituent founding members of GERAK were Pertubuhan Pelindung Khazanah Alam Malaysia (PEKA, Malaysian Society for the Protection of Malaysia’s Treasures of the Earth), Gerakan Rakyat Hentikan Pencemaran Bauksit (GERAM, People’s Movement to Stop Bauxite Pollution), Himpunan Hijau (Green Assembly), MNS Pahang branch, Persatuan Kelip-Kelip (KECAP, Firefly Association), Persatuan Aktivis Sahabat Alam (KUASA, Friends of the Earth Activist Association), Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Pahang (JKOAP, Network of Orang Asli Villages of Pahang), Jaringan Kampung

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Orang Asli Kelantan (JKOAK, Network of Orang Asli Villages of Kelantan), the Recycle Community Malaysia (RCOMM), Kuala Sepetang Eco-Tourism Association, Taman Negara Bird Group, Federation to Save the Teluk Muroh Heritage Beach, Teluk Senangin Community, Regional Environmental Awareness Cameron Highlands (REACH), the Turtle Conservation Society of Malaysia and some interested individuals with various professional backgrounds. Maketab Mohamed assumed the position of president while Shariffa Sabrina Syed Akil, president of PEKA, was appointed as vice president of the inaugural GERAK committee. The overall network of environmental NGOs remains limited, nevertheless, in addition to its weak linkages with the grassroots population who are unable to fathom connections between environmental standards and the bread and butter issues they are primarily concerned with. Malaysia’s environmentalist movement has a golden opportunity to break racial barriers in their pursuit of a universal cause via an ethnically blind discourse. Overlapping membership of activists with other larger advocacy causes points to the plausibility of smuggling environmental concerns into the programme of other sociopolitical movements, but this has so far not transpired. As happened with the Green Assembly chairman Wong Tack, who contested the Bentong parliamentary seat in the 2013 and 2018 general elections representing the Democratic Action Party (DAP), environmentalists are left with little choice but to latch onto the larger mainstream parties if they want to bring out their voices to a bigger audience. However, in doing so, they risk jeopardising their image as true-blue, authentic environmentalists (cf. Malaysia Today 2013). Their environmentalist message ended up being overshadowed by the ethnoreligious pretensions of Malaysia’s established political entities, especially during electoral campaigning. The environmentalist cause continues to be marginalised within the overall political culture, and this holds true even for the larger Islamist movement comprising a host of parties, NGOs, activists and bureaucrats, for all their claims of Islamic comprehensiveness and global reach.

11.4 Islam and the Environment Many educated Muslims and Islamists are in agreement that Islam encompasses a complete way of life that prescribes distinctive ways in ordering relations between man—used in a gender-neutral manner—and God, between man and man, between man and other living creatures, and between man and the environment (Mohd Zuhdi and Amer Saifude 2002). As adherents to the ideology of political Islam, Islamists go a step further in demanding that such relations be operationalised within the rubric of a so-called Islamic state—an entity presided over by a caliph or his representative who rules according to the sharia (Islamic law) as guided by scriptures, especially the Qur’an and the Sunna (oral and behavioural traditions of the Prophet Muhammad). In addition, Islamist theoreticians, deducing from Islam’s missionary character, assign expansionist qualities to the Islamic state, mandating maximum use of the state apparatus in applying Islamic principles onto the real lives of its citizens. In other

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words, an Islamic state more often than not is, in theory at least, both expansionist and interventionist, in contrast to the minimalist state espoused in the liberal democratic tradition. In carrying out the command of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil (amr ma’ruf wa nahy an al-munkar), the Islamic state, its advocates claim, ‘is entrusted with a higher degree of responsibility to maintain moral standards in comparison with the “limited authority” to regulate an individual’s rights in human rights law’ (Shahrul Mizan 2016). Islam’s environmental consciousness can be gleaned from the Prophet Muhammad’s prohibition on cutting down trees and damaging the physical surroundings upon the Muslims’ liberation of Mecca from its polytheist masters in 630 ce (Chandra 1993). Since then, it has been part of the Muslim code of warfare that flora and fauna and non-combatants, including women, children and non-Muslim religious leaders, are left unharmed on the fringes of battlefields. This of course does not deny that there were occasions when ill-disciplined Muslim armies flouted such rules out of ignorance, greed or simply moral failure. Muslim scholars stress that the environment is essentially a responsibility which God entrusted to mankind, hence subjecting it to rape and pillage, whether in war or peaceful times, is going against God’s injunction. Protecting the environment becomes as much a spiritual as an ethical act. In other words, it affects Muslims’ relationship with God. As outlined by Abdul Rahman Aziz (2003: 149–150), any development scheme that claims the Islamic mantle cannot afford to ignore certain philosophical tenets. 1. 2.

3.

4.

Tawhid (unity of God): the belief that man’s actions and wants are determined and bound to be judged by God as the ultimate Creator and Ruler of the universe. Rububiyyah (lordship): the norm that governs the whole cosmos as one divine unit which acts according to God’s will in all His perfection and wisdom, but at the same time intends the best for mankind as His chosen vicegerent to develop the Earth. If humans in their greed and depravity fail to honour God’s trust of the environment in their hands, they are liable to divine punishment either in this world or the hereafter. Khalifah (vicegerency): the responsibility placed on man to develop the Earth in accordance with living principles that honour notions of justice, trustworthiness, accountability and ultimately integrity. Tazkiyah (purification): the continuous process of cleansing of the heart and reform of governance and infrastructure so as to render on mankind the highest quality of life which functions as a field to harvest rewards in preparation for eternal life in the hereafter.

Islam’s Holy Book, the Qur’an, clearly states the nature of man’s relationship with his surrounding environment, and the severe retribution that will befall those who go against such guidelines. Some of these verses are as follows: • Mischief has appeared on land and sea because of (the meed) that the hands of men have earned, that (Allah) may give them a taste of some of their deeds: in order that they may turn back (from evil) (Qur’an, ar-Rum 30:41).

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• But seek, with the (wealth) which Allah has bestowed on thee, the Home of the Hereafter, nor forget thy portion in this world: but do thou good, as Allah has been good to thee, and seek not (occasions for) mischief in the land: for Allah loves not those who do mischief (Qur’an, al-Qasas 28:77) • Do not mischief on the earth, after it hath been set in order, but call on Him with fear and longing (in your hearts): for the Mercy of Allah is (always) near to those who do good (Qur’an, al-A’raf 7:56).1

11.5 PAS in Kelantan: A Reflection of the Separation between Religion and the Environment Founded in 1951 as an offshoot of UMNO’s Religious Bureau, PAS has distinguished itself since independence as the major Malay Muslim party which has demonstrated resolve and resilience in mounting a credible challenge against the UMNOled hegemony, as materialised through the nationwide coalitions of the Alliance (Perikatan) (1957–1969) and, since 1974, Barisan Nasional (BN, National Front). Overall, PAS’s performance at the federal level, notwithstanding its partaking in the Perikatan Nasional (PN, National Alliance) federal government led by prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin (March 2020–August 2021), has been short-lived and leaves much to be desired. Its foray into state-level electoral politics, however, has delivered it state governments which it led either on its own or as a leading member of a coalition whose constituent parties opposed BN in the federal parliament. PAS chief ministers helmed the states of Kelantan (1959–1977, 1990–present), Terengganu (1959–1961, 1999–2004, 2018–present), Perak (2008–2009) and Kedah (2008– 2013, 2020–present), and its state assemblymen participated at one time or another in the governments of Selangor (2008–2018) and Penang (2008–2018). Although its participation in opposition coalitions has not been consistent due to capricious stances on tahalluf siyasi (political cooperation) espoused by its central leadership, PAS has showcased an unwavering devotion to democratic politics whether externally in fighting elections at the national and state levels or internally when electing its central executive committee members and other leadership echelons (Case and Liew 2006). PAS’s most long-lasting experience of state administration has been in the northeastern state of Kelantan, which it wrested from BN in the 1990 general election after a 12-year hiatus. Its triumph was made possible by its helming of Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah (APU, People’s Unity Front) that collated forces from disgruntled UMNO renegades who had formed Semangat 46 (S46, Spirit of 46), and PAS’s own splinter parties Barisan Jemaah Islamiah Se-Malaysia (BERJASA, Islamic Congregation Front of Malaysia) and Hizb al-Muslimun (HAMIM, Party of Muslims). In the 1990 election, APU unexpectedly won all 39 state assembly seats, with PAS, S46 and 1

All Qur’anic references are from Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur’an: English translation of the meanings and commentary, Madinah: King Fahd Holy Qur’an Printing Complex, 1991.

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HAMIM controlling 24, 14 and one constituencies respectively (Mohd Izani 2005). Since then, PAS has repeated its electoral victories in 1995, 1999, 2004, 2008, 2013 and 2018, albeit with fluctuating majorities that were registered within the context of shifting coalitions. Today, PAS is a junior member of the loose coalition that controls the federal government. From its outset, PAS has envisioned the erection of an Islamic state with sharia as a core tenet as its overriding goal. Sharia is regarded as the core feature of an Islamic society and administration in its struggle to exalt God’s injunctions towards achieving the ultimate aim of gaining His pleasure. As an Islamist party operating within Malaysia, PAS takes upon itself the responsibility of upholding Islam’s integrity while at the same time defending the country’s sovereignty (PAS 2011). Unfazed by its continuous failure to capture the state at the federal level, PAS has persistently called for the piecemeal introduction of the hudud code, which mandates sharia courts to impose criminal punishments instituted by the Qur’an and Sunna following conviction under the due process of law. In the PAS mindset, installing Islamic law as the principal source of legislation has been fetishised as the be all and end all of a Muslim administration that deserves to be called ‘Islamic’, if at all. In the words of Haron Din (1940–2016), the PAS mursyid al-‘am (general guide) in 2015–2016 and a former professor of Islamic studies at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, hudud was and will always be PAS’s lifeline (Mohd Asron 2014). For example, when PAS declares ‘Membangun Bersama Islam’ (Developing with Islam) to be its theme in administering Kelantan as a state that practises Islamic values, the implementation of hudud is automatically understood to occupy an unassailable component of such a state. PAS’s rule since 1990 has therefore been plagued by never-ending attempts to enable the Kelantan government to put into practice a hudud enactment originally passed by the state legislature in 1993, but whose implementation was blocked by the intricacies of Malaysia’s federal system which assigns criminal penalties to the jurisdiction of federal-level civil courts, with the exception of specific sharia offences (Ahmad Fauzi 2009, 2015). Beyond its rhetoric of practising comprehensive Islamic development based on human capital development and strategic planning (Warjio 2012), the fact of the matter is that environmental concerns hardly matter in the Kelantan government’s list of priorities for realising the ideals of Islamic statecraft. An examination of PAS’s sitting presidents’ keynote speeches during the party’s annual general assemblies reveals hardly anything of substance related to the environment being discussed (Yusof and Fadzil 1995). For example, in spite of warnings by environmental consultants that the infamous Pergau dam project cemented between the Malaysian government and the British government in the early 1990s would incur serious costs to the environment (Moseley 1994), PAS’s criticism of the deal dealt only with the graft-ridden implications of the ‘arms for aid’ economic package and its political discrimination against the Kelantan government, the federal government giving merely perfunctory recognition that Pergau was located in Kelantan (Fadzil 1995; Kershaw 2004). Besides rhetorical statements pertaining to PAS’s upholding the Qur’an and Sunna—statements so generic that no right-minded Muslim would argue against

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them—the party’s approach to environmental problems besetting Kelantan betray a mixture of fatalism and steadfast adherence to laws which are advantageous to capitalist interests and consequently sideline marginalised communities such as the Orang Asli—indigenous communities who populate parts of the Kelantan hinterland. None of the nine pledges in the Kelantan PAS manifesto for the 2013 general election, themed ‘Keberkatan, Kemakmuran dan Kebajikan’ (Blessings, Prosperity and Welfare), for instance, directly concerned the environment. They were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Empowering spiritual development in the quest for God’s blessings and pleasure; Implementing justice for all Kelantanese; Raising the people’s economic prosperity in a just and equitable manner; Advancing sociocultural aspects of life based on faith, knowledge and practice; Pursuing urban and regional development towards popularising products of Kelantan; Improving standards of living along the concept of civil society; Pursuing prosperous, harmonious and beneficial lives; Developing Kelantanese women and youth; Struggling for the people’s rights in demanding oil and gas royalties. (Iwan 2013)

Large floods that befell the district of Gua Musang in southern Kelantan in late 2014 exposed the state government’s long-term neglect of the sustainability of forests in the face of capitalists’ ruthless exploitation of virgin land, which in the long run contributed significantly to massive deforestation and ensuing environmental catastrophe. In truth, environmental activists from such organisations as SAM, KUASA, Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM, Socialist Party of Malaysia) and Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia (JOAS, Indigenous Peoples’ Network of Malaysia) had been highlighting the issue of indiscriminate logging in Gua Musang since 2012, only to be spurned by the state government (Affandi 2017). When the inevitable deluge ultimately took place, the Kelantan chief minister Ahmad Yakob preferred to describe it dismissively as an act of God, effectively shirking responsibility. As his media statement of 4 January 2015 spells out: It is in the infinite power of Allah the Almighty to have showered rainfall in a huge volume within a very short period. Allah’s power is over and above every single thing. Man’s effort can only be realised through His consent. Allah has given us this test so that we contemplate upon His prowess. I hereby call upon all citizens of this state to introspectively accept such signs from Allah. Treat this trial as reason for us to accumulate divine rewards, not to add to our sins.2 (Ahmad Yakob 2015)

With such an attitude, it is small wonder that the Kelantan state government’s response to the floods was widely perceived to be lacklustre if responsive at all (Mariam 2015). 2

Authors’ translation. The original reads: Ini adalah kekuasaan Allah Taala yang telah menurunkan hujan pada kadar jumlah yang amat banyak dalam jangka waktu yang amat singkat. Kekuasaan Allah mengatasi segala sesuatu. Upaya manusia hanyalah melalui izin-Nya. Allah menurunkan ujian ini kepada kita semua untuk kita merenung akan kekuasaan-Nya. Saya dengan ini menyeru seluruh rakyat [n]egeri ini agar menginsafi isyarat daripada Allah ini. Jadikanlah ujian banjir ini sebagai penyebab untuk kita menambah pahala, bukannya penyebab untuk kita menambah dosa.

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Sadly for the Kelantanese, the PAS versus UMNO rivalry comes into play even during emergency times such as during this ‘yellow flood’ (bah kuning) episode in 2014. As a result, more than three years on from the natural disaster some of the flood victims were still being denied proper shelter (Yasmin 2017). An almost identical situation arose with the equally disastrous floods in Kelantan in December 2019 (Sharifah 2019). As Serina Abdul Rahman (2019) notes, ‘With lucrative revenue streams at stake, the state government has little incentive to do more to stop perennial floods.’ Testimony gathered from environmentalists who were on the ground during natural disasters exposes the extent of the Kelantan state government’s neglect of environmental issues and the resulting wide ramifications. Meor Razak Meor Abdul Rahman (2017), a KUASA adviser and SAM research officer, for instance, observed first hand large-scale uncontrolled logging for the purpose of opening monoculture farms in the supposedly reserved jungle areas of Gua Musang, covering the Sungai Berok forest reserve, Batu Papan permanent forest reserve, Hulu Galas permanent forest reserve and Gunung Rabong permanent forest reserve. Similar unrestrained logging for the purpose of mining was seen in the Sungai Betis permanent forest reserve and the Nenggiri permanent forest reserve. All these permanent forests had been categorised as sensitive environmental areas stages 1 and 2 in the Second National Physical Plan, yet they still fell victim to unbridled logging. As a result, the livelihoods of the Orang Asli in Gua Musang, hitherto based on the jungle and rivers, were severely threatened, involving 13,000 residents in 17 villages (Faiz 2016). Parts of their residential lands, cemeteries and orchards situated within Orang Asli customary land (tanah adat) area were also exploited. According to the KUASA president Hafizuddin Nasarudin (2017), not only does such inconsiderate logging endanger the livelihood of the Orang Asli by contaminating the rivers but it also threatens biodiversity. Such brazen flouting of logging guidelines constitutes a serious offence in any EIA exercise. The Orang Asli rose in protest. At the beginning, they used diplomatic channels by sending letters of protest against logging activities in Gua Musang to the Kelantan chief minister’s office and the state Forestry Department. The state responded by defending logging as a legitimate economic activity which had obtained the necessary permit from the authorities (Kosmo 2016a). In solidarity with the Orang Asli, environmental NGOs stepped in to help mediate the conflict. PEKA Malaysia, for instance, galvanised help from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and other local environmental NGOs in a public demonstration of support for the Orang Asli in October 2016, to which the Kelantan state government reacted negatively by labelling the protest as tantamount to incitement (Harbinson 2017). Encouraged by such support, the Orang Asli of Gua Musang resorted to building blockades along major logging routes in the Perias, Balah and Stong Selatan forest reserves. The first blockade was erected on 27 March 2016 in the Orang Asli village at Pos Gob (Fig. 11.1). Six months later, on 27 September 2016, a second blockade appeared at a new location in compartment 245, Balah permanent forest reserve. According to the JKOAK secretary Mustafa Along, setting up blockades was the only resort left to them following the state government’s refusal to negotiate over the matter (ibid.). The Kelantan state government subsequently relented, freezing all logging activity

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Fig. 11.1 Temiar people protesting in front of the Pos Gob blockade, 2016. Source KUASA

on 3 October 2016 and agreeing to resolve matters over the negotiating table. The ensuing negotiations, however, failed to break the deadlock as both sides adamantly defended their rights. The Orang Asli not only refused to dismantle the existing blockades, they also built new ones, involving new areas in Matau in compartment 260, Perias permanent forest reserve and in compartment 27, Gunung Stong Selatan permanent forest reserve (Malaysiakini 2016). The escalation of conflict prompted the Kelantan Forestry Department to resort to legal action by invoking section 47 of the National Forestry Act, which compels any individual who wants to enter permanent forest reserves to obtain a special permit or written permission beforehand from the state forestry director. At the same time, the Forestry Department issued an evacuation order authorising the opening of the blockade on 6 November 2016. Following the Orang Asli’s noncompliance with the order, on 29 November 2016 the Forestry Department assisted by Pasukan Gerakan Am (General Operations Force) carried out the order, forcibly tearing down the huts and barricades previously built by the Orang Asli, 47 of whom were consequently detained (Salmah 2017) (Fig. 11.2). The heavy-handedness of the authorities invited a barrage of criticism from various parties inside and outside Malaysia. Malaysia’s reconstituted opposition bloc, Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), issued a stinging critique of the government’s repressive reaction to the Orang Asli’s grouses via its leadership council. At the international level, Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific activists who were congregating in Lampung, Indonesia, on 2 December 2016 voiced official support for the Orang Asli of Gua Musang (Fig. 11.3). And the protests are not going away. In February 2018, for example, another large demonstration by Orang Asli protestors set up three blockades in the Gunung Stong Selatan forest reserve to protest against unceasing

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Fig. 11.2 Blockade torn down by the Forestry Department, 29 November 2016. Source KUASA

Fig. 11.3 The Gua Musang Orang Asli issue garnered global attention, as in the Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific meeting in Lampung, Indonesia, December 2016. Source KUASA and SAM

logging activities. As Mustafa Along noted: ‘We want the state government as well as the relevant authorities to stop overly exploiting the forest’ (Sharifah 2018). The PAS-led Kelantan government’s failure to handle the dissatisfaction expressed by the Orang Asli of Gua Musang diplomatically reflects the failure of the party, notwithstanding its Islamic pretensions, to handle complaints in a humane and environment-friendly manner. Backed by resources of the state, PAS applied an overly legalistic approach in solving problems between humans, and in this case

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pitting a Malay-dominated government against marginalised Orang Asli Bumiputera, many of whom were still animist although some had converted to Islam and Christianity. PAS missed a golden opportunity to evince Islam’s claim of being ‘Rahmatan Lil ‘Alamin’ (a blessing to all), not just to Muslims. In uncompromisingly enforcing land laws which disrespected Orang Asli’s unwritten claims to the customary land of their forbears, PAS was being imprisoned by the same capitalistic landholding biases that it seeks to castigate in its wider anti-establishment discourse.

11.6 Concluding Remarks In the context of Malaysia’s politics of development, environmental issues that have arisen in recent times have become more alarming, exposing glaring weaknesses in the country’s developmental policies. These have systematically sidelined to the periphery any concerns that might be seen as hampering material progress in its obsession to accomplish the status of a high-income nation. Notwithstanding its oft-trumpeted claims of being a ‘moderate’ Muslim nation, Malaysia under the BNUMNO administration—and today under its successors—has marginalised environmental issues. This poses significant questions about the sincerity of its devotion to the notion of Islam as an all-encompassing faith. Unfortunately, in the state of Kelantan helmed by the overtly Islamist PAS, treatment of the environment does not markedly differ from that meted out in UMNO-led states. Entrapped by its own legalism, PAS has failed to showcase exemplary qualities of an administration that compassionately tries its best to avoid physical confrontation that employs the coercive apparatus of the state.

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Interviews Affandi Mohamad. Interview: Ipoh, Perak, 17 February 2017. Hafizuddin Nasarudin. Interview: Ipoh, Perak, 15 March 2017. Meor Razak Meor Abdul Rahman. Interview: Segari, Perak, 1 April 2017.

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Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid is Professor of Political Science, School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and a member of the Political Futures Experts Group, International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation, International Islamic University Malaysia. In October–December 2020 he was a visiting research fellow at the Southeast Asia Regional Centre for Counter-Terrorism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Malaysia. His research interests lie within the field of political Islam in Southeast Asia. His recent publications include: Injecting God into politics: Modelling Asma’ul Husna as a Sufi-based panacea to political conflict in contemporary Malaysia. In Cultural fusion of Sufi Islam: Alternative paths to mystical faith, ed. Sarwar Alam (2020); Regaining the Islamic centre? A Malaysian chronicle of moderation and its discontents. In Pathways to contemporary Islam: New trends in critical engagement, ed. Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman (2020); and Islam and its racial dynamics in Malaysia’s 14th general election. In Towards a new Malaysia? The 2018 election and its aftermath, ed. Meredith L. Weiss and Faisal S. Hazis (2020). Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib is a PhD candidate in political science at the School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. His research interests lie in the areas of new social movements in Malaysia, environmental movements, and environmental politics and policy. His most recent publication is: Perubahan kepimpinan dan pelaksanaan Dasar Pandang ke Timur [Leadership change and implementation of the Look East Policy]. In Dasar Pandang ke Timur: Pencapaian adaptasi dan cabaran [Look East Policy: Adaptational achievement and challenges], ed. Kartini Aboo Talib @ Khalid (2017).

Chapter 12

Alternative or Mainstream? Malay Independent Book Publishing in Malaysia Muhammad Febriansyah and Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar

Abstract The emergence of a significant number of Malay-language independent publishers in Malaysia in recent years coincided with the spread of ‘alternative’ cultural discourses in relation to music, fashion, activism and lifestyle. Defining terms such as ‘scene’, ‘cool’, ‘hipster’ and ‘rebel’ have been used by official agencies, the media and scholars seeking to describe this cultural phenomenon. At its core, independent publishing positions itself in opposition to the domination of mainstream publishers and the institutionalisation of language and literature championed by the government agency Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. In a self-proclaimed spirit of freedom and celebrating diversity, those involved in independent publishing aim to provide fresh alternatives to the products already in the market while seeking to revolutionise old ways of publishing along the way. The chapter begins with a theoretical discussion on the concepts of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’, developing ideas first articulated by theorists of the counterculture and resistance. Based on participant observation and interviews with key informants, the analysis then critically interrogates the claims made by and on behalf of independent publishers. We argue that independent publishing is merely a new form of competition within the dynamics of capitalism that strategically targets the youth market. Thus the main focus is on commonplace measures such as effective marketing strategies and increased sales as they remain the key measures of success; as such, these strategies are little different from those of larger and more mainstream publishers. The novelty of the discourse or critical messages or resistance conveyed in publications are of secondary or peripheral importance. In short, we suggest that Malay-language independent publishers have become a part of what they themselves claim to oppose. Given the recent downturn in the fortunes of the Malaysian book industry as a whole, the indie moment in publishing may already be a thing of the past.

Muhammad Febriansyah (B) School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, George Town, Penang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_12

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Keywords Malaysia · Independent publishing · Malay language · Discourse · Counterculture · Capitalism

12.1 Introduction One of the most prominent cultural phenomena in Malaysia since the late 2000s has been the rapid development of the Malay-language independent book publishing industry. In contrast to mainstream publishers, which are commercially engaged with the support of corporate capital or enjoy the benefits of government subsidies, indie book publishers have managed to attract specific groups of young Malay readers without relying on established companies. Their popularity in terms of sales and readership continues to expand, and they have managed to challenge the established book market whose local fiction lists were previously dominated by romance and religious-themed novels, especially for Malay-language books. Indie publishers like Buku Fixi, DuBook Press, Thukul Cetak, Lejen Press, Terfaktab, Merpati Jingga and others all made significant inroads and have created a real presence via physical bookshops, online sales and at showpiece occasions such as the annual Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair (KLIBF), the largest book fair in Malaysia. As one example, DuBook managed to sell 40,000 copies of 40 titles within 10 days at one edition of the KLIBF, an unprecedented figure (Faisal 2015b; Ali Imran 2015). Apart from engaging in big annual events like the government-sponsored KLIBF, indie publishers also hold and take part in more ‘alternative’ activities such as the Kuala Lumpur Alternative Bookfest, KotaKata, Eksotikata, Art for Grabs, road shows and many other initiatives. For publishers, the main purpose of these events is to push book sales and marketing. But they are always complemented with other activities such as readings, discussions, film screenings, art exhibitions and performances, which, taken together, are a means of attracting and engaging young people and students in urban communities. These events form a space for young people to express themselves, and share their opinions and experiences with peers who have similar interests. The majority of those involved with these initiatives are from Generation Y, born in the 1980s and 1990s, who are seen as being discerning consumers and dissatisfied with the establishment and the mainstream. Most of the so-called urban ‘hipsters’ or ‘coolhunters’ are drawn from young people in this age range. The burgeoning indie scene that reshaped local creative practices, at least in cosmopolitan Kuala Lumpur, followed on from the turbulent political reform period—Reformasi—of the late 1990s. These new circumstances proved to be a fertile environment for fostering the development of the creative industries. The independent creative community in Kuala Lumpur manifests a great deal of crossdisciplinary support, involvement and engagement from writers, musicians, artists, actors, academics, journalists, film-makers and social activists, all working collaboratively in support of local creative practice (McKay 2011: 93–94). Reformasi and the subsequent Bersih (Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections) interventions from 2007

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to 2016 also encouraged culture as an arena for creative protests against what was perceived as the corruption of political power or even as a space for radical gestures, especially in the performing arts (Mandal 2003; Rahmat 2013). This period also spawned an indie film scene whose intention was to provoke critical engagement from its audience by way of its social and political content or form (Khoo 2007). By the late 2000s the emergence and then flourishing of the Malay-language indie book scene coincided with this spread of alternative cultural discourses and practices among young people in many fields. Terms such as ‘alternative’, ‘scene’, ‘cool’, ‘hipster’ and ‘rebel’ were appropriated by the media and scholars—and in fact by a number of practitioners themselves—to explain this cultural phenomenon. In relation to the emergence of a new segment of the book industry, some believed that this represented a form of resistance to the erstwhile monopoly of mainstream publishers and the institutionalisation of language and literature by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature), the government agency that has largely dominated Malaysian publishing since its founding in 1956. In the spirit of freedom and a celebration of diversity, indie publishers aimed to provide an alternative to the cheap books with little to no literary value that dominated the book market as well as to counter the formal publishing process. As a result, they managed to attract not only young readers but also new writers who had not previously been given opportunities or attention by the mainstream book industry. In addition to acknowledging indie publishers’ idealism and the public discourse which tend to see this phenomenon as a form of cultural resistance, we argue that the indie publishing scene is a form of competition to exploit a specific portion of the local youth market that was previously untapped by mainstream publishers. Indies identify effective marketing strategies and sales as measures of success against the dominance of mainstream publishers, and do so by emphasising the novelty of the discourse, and new ideas or messages conveyed in their books. Paradoxically, the market mechanism, which is the backbone of capitalist accumulation, has encouraged the presence of indie alternatives for the survival of the system itself. This means that so-called indie publishers are actually a part of what they seek to challenge. To discuss these issues, this chapter is organised in four parts. The next section examines the notion of indie within the framework of popular culture and as a part of a critical counterculture. This is followed by an account of the reasons for the emergence of indie publishing, the actors involved and their activities. The discussion then goes into the impact and the reaction of those who support and those who are sceptical of this phenomenon, their influence in the publishing world, among young people and in relation to the government. The conclusion assesses whether the indie book phenomenon is a form of resistance or merely another form of competition in the capitalist market to entice young people, and paints a rather sombre picture of the state of Malaysia’s book industry, including indie publishing.

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12.2 Being Indie in Popular Culture and Counterculture Discussions of indie book publishing are helpfully interrogated within the framework of popular culture. John Storey (2018: 5) offers six definitions of popular culture, in which he cautions that ‘any definition of popular culture will bring into play a complex combination of the different meanings of the term “culture” with the different meanings of the term “popular”’. For Storey, whichever term used— whether widely favoured culture, mass-produced commercial culture, mass culture, culture of the people, culture as a site of resistance or postmodern culture—all emerge from certain structural processes, the most important being industrialisation, urbanisation, modernisation and the existence of a capitalist market economy (ibid.: 12– 13). By contrast, Chua Beng Huat (2010) uses the term ‘pop’ to mean a ‘commercially produced, profit-driven cultural product meant for mass entertainment’ while employing the term ‘popular’ in reference to nonelite and everyday members of society. In his study of Indonesian identity politics as played out in screen culture, and echoing Storey, Ariel Heryanto (2014: 16) explains the role of industrialisation in giving impetus to pop or popular culture. It is ‘a product of an industrialized society and relies on technologies of mass production, distribution, and duplication’. We agree with the notion that there is no single element in cultural products or practices that can determine whether they should belong to the category of popular culture (ibid.; Storey 2018). What is now considered popular can be understood differently in other contexts. However, there are common features that enable certain works or social behaviours to be regarded as a manifestation of popular culture. According to Heryanto, popular culture is relatively easily accessible and attracts the attention of many people—it is ‘popular’ in the everyday sense of the word— but is generally denied recognition from the elite. Nonetheless, there is a tension here since ‘the political and economic elite can never fully dictate or control how texts, sounds, and images are disseminated, received, understood and responded to across this remarkably diverse population’ (Heryanto 2014: 12). Additionally, there is a consensus among scholars that popular culture, in whatever form, is created for mass consumption and is therefore an integral part of the business or commercial world. This, of course, contradicts the basic spirit of ‘indie-ness’ that in some instances claims to reject the practice of large-scale production and does not prioritise profitability above all else. This is because some of the major Malay-language indie publishers still want to maintain an image of being outside the mainstream scene or counterculture while at the same time they are very clearly commercially engaged in the market. To grapple with these apparent contradictions, we use a critical analysis of the countercultural movement and its relation to consumerism. Indie books are classified as popular culture because of their wide availability in society at large. Some books issued by Malay-language indie publishers have sold well, performing even better than books from established commercial publishers. This reality seems to be contrary to the original meaning of indie, one that not only highlights independence but also aims for limited public consumption. Therefore, not all cultural products that are indie can be discussed within the framework of popular

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culture. For instance, the emergence of the indie film scene in Malaysia during the 2000s is not considered to be a part of popular culture, meaning ‘mass’ or ‘of the people’ in Storey’s terms. Despite the number of indie films that were produced at the time they were consumed in limited circles. Khoo Gaik Cheng (2007: 228) defines the indie film scene as an ‘underground’ movement—one that is low budget, non-profitable and adopts a ‘guerrilla’ style to create films not intended to be shown in mainstream cinemas which routinely censor all materials heavily. This example is very different to that of indie books which can be obtained easily and are widely circulated, thus coming close to the notion of ‘mass culture’. In addition, the nature of film-making itself, although undertaken independently, still demands certain basic technical expertise to create the final product, requires special equipment and a budget (however small) and is the result of collective work involving multiple people. This contrasts with the process of writing a book which is more individualised and needs only the most basic equipment to produce. In the indie publishing scene, the claim that now everyone can write and publish their own books has become a well-known mantra. However, this notion does not fully reflect the actual state of the indie publishing world because there is a significant difference between publishing one’s work independently and engaging with publishers— whether indie or not—who take a book from its initial stages as a manuscript all the way through to mass-market retail and distribution. When the very idea of indie itself has become a brand, coupled with effective marketing techniques, indie publishers are able to sell whatever books are labelled as such. They contribute to a new trend that has never been seen before in Malaysia— an increase in the publication of poetry or short notes about everyday experiences on writers’ blogs or social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which are then compiled into books. This means that one does not have to be a ‘writer’ per se to produce a book. This phenomenon is also one of the potential causes behind a major issue that has been a source of criticism, that is the actual quality and content of indie book publishing. In a forum held in Kuala Lumpur in 2016, the writer Hasmi Hashim said that the quality of books published by indie publishers was not better than the cheap substandard novels with romantic themes which had been the target of criticism from indie publishers themselves.1 This criticism must be placed in the context that Hasmi views indie-published works as part of a popular reading culture that follows market demand. This is nothing strange in view of the conformity of popular literature to market trends, something that can be observed clearly over the past few decades. The 1960s, for example, saw a high demand for erotic novels; similarly with those romantic novels of the early 2000s which elevated the names of writers like Ahadiat Akashah, Norhayati Berahim and Aisyah Sofea (Mohd Zariat 2013). Since around 2008 Islamic novels began to dominate the popular reading market, followed by the emergence of indie works of various genres. Indie publishers do not only publish 1

The informal forum ‘Indie menuju jalan mati?’ [Indie headed towards a dead end?] was organised by a discussion group, Kuliah Buku (KUBU), on 26 October 2016. A few months earlier, a Facebook post of Hasmi Hashim which criticised the content of some indie books (Hasmi 2016) went viral and became the source of a heated discussion among the young followers on social media.

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novels or poetry but also include a variety of creative writing and a small number of semi-academic works such as translations of classics. Although indie is a popular term in the world of book publishing and among youth today, the substantive meaning of the term is not static and can change according to the particular context in which it is used. It is therefore open to many interpretations and debate. It first became widely known in the field of popular music in the 1970s and was later used for other cultural activities such as films, sports, games, apparel and lifestyle. Being indie is commonly associated with the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos in order to create, promote and sell work independently (Jube 2008: 34). In short, indie is generically used as a counterpoint to the mainstream and the latter’s domination of cultural space. If the mainstream is synonymous with big capital or government subsidies, indie by contrast operates at a low cost. If the mainstream is engaged in business and entertainment, indie emphasises idealism, artistic goals and edginess (Ortner 2012). The contrast, then, is supposedly between mainstream entertainment and its antithesis, the indie’s desire to be political, critical and different, and located outside the consumer society. However, in most cases there is only a fine line between the so-called alternative and the mainstream. In their important book, The rebel sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (2006: 16) firmly argue that the difference between the two is only an illusion; they shatter the central myth of so-called radical political, economic and cultural thinking. According to them, there is no mainstream or alternative, but only those who produce and those who consume cultural products. If a writer produces a good book, people will want to read it. The idea of the ‘alternative’ derived from the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which was, from its very inception, intensely entrepreneurial. In other words, the very practice of the alternative or indie is in fact a force for market-driven consumerism, because for the counterculture movement rebelling is a cool act. Malaysia exhibits all the hallmarks of this kind of positioning. In an interview, Aisamuddin Md Asri (Aisa Linglung), who established the leading indie publishing company Lejen Press, said that many young people buy indie books so they can hold them in public and look cool (Alyaa 2015). If having an indie book is viewed as cool because it goes against the domination of the mainstream, then the book is considered to be a signifier of ‘resistance’. Naomi Klein (1999) calls this object a commodity of anti-consumerism or, in the context of this discussion, an antimainstream commodity. As a commodity, it has to be sold. This is why the title of Heath and Potter’s book—The rebel sell—is so apposite in explaining how the so-called resistance that exists in the counterculture in the end merely promotes the consumer culture. This suggests that the indie world is not free from the logic of capital accumulation. On the contrary, it is an integral part of market-driven capitalism and exists to make a profit. This can be seen as part of a global phenomenon: in the 1980s to sell a product people had to have a large enough budget to hire marketers and advertisers; since the 1990s they have had only to be ‘cool’ (ibid.: 73). If a product is considered too mainstream and loses its cool, then corporations will simply change their marketing strategy by entering indie territory. They then create a more indie version of the product to compete with their own mainstream

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products. Moreover, slogans with anti-establishment slants became the hallmark of big businesses interested in promoting themselves by supposedly empowering youth with the DIY ethic (Mason 2009: 22). A sportswear company like Nike has long made use of the ‘Just Do It’ slogan for its products; similarly with Burger King’s ‘Have It Your Way’ and Apple’s ‘Think Different’. These examples show that all actors in the capitalist economic system always encourage people to consume—the counterculture, indie, DIY, cool, rebel, hip or alternative all sell.

12.3 From Indie to Mainstream The fine line between indie and mainstream makes it difficult for us to determine which publishers can be classified as indies. For example, DuBook Press, the publisher that initially reaped the most commercial advantage from the indie book phenomenon, has openly stated on its website that it is only interested in doing business. In each copy of the books published by Fixi Novo, an imprint of Buku Fixi, there is a manifesto that includes the statement ‘we like making money’. This shows that despite the idealism and image of resistance which are usually attached to them, indies are no different from commercial publishers who seek profit. However, the media and public discourse tend to classify them as icons of a different, alternative sort. A stark contrast is with the leading political cartoonist Zunar, who has had his entire book collection banned, had to print and sell his books independently, and yet in public discourse he is hardly regarded as indie. While the true meaning of indie is still contested, the starting point of the indie book publishing phenomenon in Malaysia is also difficult to determine. A contentious leaked report from Biro Tatanegara (National Civics Bureau) in 2015 mentions that the indie book phenomenon began in 2000, but does not specify the basis for this statement (Biro Tatanegara 2015). Another report in 2016 published by Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (JAIS, Department of Islamic Affairs Selangor), an official government religious agency, notes that indie publishing and literature has been present in Malaysia since the 1990s but was not so noticeable before the widespread use of the internet since access to the internet was still limited and they were not given wide coverage by the government-controlled mainstream media (Muhammad Rashidi and Siti Nur Hidayah 2016). However, neither of these reports is supported by strong evidence. Indeed, Gerakbudaya and Silverfish, who can be considered pioneers of alternative publishing, were established in 1998 and 2002 respectively (Tan 2015). Although both continue to publish alternative books—titles not produced by mainstream publishers—they have never been classified as indies. The novelist Faisal Tehrani also published his earliest works—Cerpen2 underground (with Azman Hussin 2000, republished in Faisal 2015a by Thukul Cetak) and Lagi-lagi cerpen underground (with Saharil Hasrin Sanin 2002)—independently. The word ‘underground’ in the titles refers to short stories and other works that were rejected by major publishers such as Utusan Publications, Creative Enterprise and

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Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. They considered these short stories unsuitable for publication because they contain political elements criticising the rulers, a defence of the rights of minorities, sex scenes and a general rejection of the elites (Faisal Tehrani 2015a). The same fate befell the manuscript of Faisal’s first novel, Perempuan politikus Melayu; although it was completed in 1997 the book was only published independently three years later (Faisal 2000, republished by DuBook in 2016). Faisal explains the reason for this delay in the following terms: Some of the ‘big publishers’ returned this manuscript due to its ‘insensitivity towards certain parties’, or in the words of an editor at other publishing company, ‘only if the people in power change then this manuscript could become a novel’. I turned to two small publishers but both were facing financial problems. Another publisher cheated me and I was left with nothing but hurt. I was almost frustrated to make this manuscript a reality. (Faisal 2016: 6)

The situation left Faisal with no choice but to publish it on his own. Although the method and spirit of bringing out Cerpen2 underground, Lagi-lagi cerpen underground and Perempuan politikus Melayu are in line with basic indie principles (Faisal Tehrani, Interview, September 2016), these sporadic efforts did not spawn an indie publishing scene as such until almost a decade later. Thus, although a handful of writers consciously committed themselves to what can be described as an indie practice, this was not understood as such by the general public. Gradually, alternative publishers such as Sindiket Sol-Jah, SeLUT Press and others did appear. But it was really only after publishers such as Lejen Press, DuBook Press, Buku Fixi, Terfaktab and Merpati Jingga began operating in 2010–2011 and in a short time managed to create a niche market for their books that an indie scene became widely known. After achieving commercial success, being indie was no longer an obstacle in the publishing industry; in fact, quite the opposite was true since market trends offered the new indies certain advantages over their mainstream counterparts. Although still wanting to maintain their status as indie publishers, some companies are clearly run commercially and oriented towards making profits. DuBook Press, for instance, overtly declares that the company is headed by a chief executive officer; similarly, Thukul Cetak is run by an executive director. As we have seen in the case of Faisal Tehrani, prior to the emergence of indie publishers new writers tended to publish their works themselves in limited print runs. The process has changed in the new world of indie publishers; writers need only submit their manuscripts to them without having to think about the technical arrangements—editing, design, printing, warehousing, distribution—since they are handled by the publishers. How indie publishers take on these tasks so that their books can be widely distributed and sold in bookshops is not so different from how commercial publishers do it. When Amir Muhammad was still working solely with Matahari Books (founded in 2007), he informed fans at the company’s Facebook page that they were in the process of collecting submissions to be published as novels by a new Malay-language publishing company. In this way, Buku Fixi, the new imprint, received several manuscripts and successfully launched three novels in 2011—Pecah by Khairulnizam Bakeri, Cekik by Ridhwan Saidi and Kougar by Shaz Johar—each of which received an encouraging response in the market. Since

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then, Buku Fixi came to be known as one of Malaysia’s foremost indie publishers. In the early years, Buku Fixi received 10 to 20 manuscripts monthly. Several books published by Fixi have been highly marketable and reprinted multiple times and its urban contemporary novels are now often found on local bestsellers’ lists (Toh 2014; Ooi 2015). Fdaus Ahmad’s book Dari Tanjung Malim ke KLCC, published by DuBook Press (2012), is a perfect example of how a book can be transformed from indie to mainstream. At first the writer himself printed 300 copies of a book titled Sembang kencang, a collection of writings from his blog narrating his experience of everyday life living in Tanjung Malim, Perak, while working at Petronas Twin Towers in the heart of Kuala Lumpur. Relying solely on personal promotion via his blog and social media, Sembang kencang sold out in a few months. The following year Sembang kencang 2 was published in a print run of 500 copies using the same method. Mutalib Uthman, the CEO of the then newly founded DuBook, suggested Sembang kencang should be distributed into the mainstream market and have it retitled as Dari Tanjung Malim ke KLCC. When this suggestion was made, there was no objection from the writer and an agreement was easily reached. The writer’s biggest concern at the time was that the move might create losses for the publisher and not because he wanted to remain indie and self-published. Within two months of being republished by DuBook Press, Dari Tanjung Malim ke KLCC was the number one bestseller at Kinokuniya, the largest bookshop in the country, and was also placed in the ‘privileged display’ sections of other bookshops. A follow-up book published in 2014, Proletar dua menara, also achieved the same success, and topped the charts for weeks at Kinokuniya (Fdaus Ahmad 2014: 21). As noted earlier, the vibrancy of the creative industries in Malaysia cannot be separated from social and political factors that underwent many changes after the Reformasi movement of the late 1990s. More specifically, the rise of the indie publishing industry was also motivated by the political upheaval that occurred in 2008. In the general election of that year, the opposition parties, working as a new coalition, managed to defeat the ruling Barisan Nasional in five states, including Selangor and Penang, the main cultural hubs and centres of indie activities of young people. In Selangor, the new Pakatan Rakyat state government wanted to show that it was friendlier to young people by supporting their activities. One of the main youth activities the state sponsored from 2009 onwards was Pekan Frinjan.2 This monthly event, held on weekends at Dataran Shah Alam, was filled with stage music, poetry readings, political speeches by young people, book fairs and art activities of all types. Pekan Frinjan played a role in the spread of indie ideas and practices among the youth, especially in the fields of music and publishing (Muhammad Febriansyah and Muhamad Takiyuddin 2016). Small publishers, who some years later would become known as indie publishers, rented booths at Pekan Frinjan to sell their books. They were also present at events organised by political parties, especially Parti Keadilan 2

‘Frinjan’ is derived from the English word ‘fringe’, to be on the edge. Pekan Frinjan was set up in 2009 as a regularly organised space for artistic expression and the work of young people who would rather move independently without the control of the authorities.

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Rakyat and the Democratic Action Party, because they put on more youth-based events compared to component parties of the ruling Barisan Nasional. A variety of activities that celebrate the creativity and ideas of the youth have been held in the Klang Valley, whether organised by independent groups or others. This provides more opportunities for indie publishers to sell their books. Founded in 2007, Art for Grabs was a festival held every six months at the Annexe Gallery, Central Market, in Kuala Lumpur that combined elements of art exhibitions, musical performances, film screenings, intellectual discussions and an alternative book fair. Organisation of the book fair (Kuala Lumpur Alternative Bookfest) involved many key players from the indie publishing scene including Zulhabri Supian, founder of Pekan Frinjan, along with Amir Muhammad of Buku Fixi with other indies holding book launches during the event. From October 2011 onwards a group of students from Universiti Teknologi MARA in Shah Alam organised an event called Buku Jalanan every two weeks (not to be confused with the educational charity Buku Jalanan Chow Kit). Their main objective was to encourage everyone to read and borrow books which they provided for free and to return them within two weeks. They held a book exchange at a recreational lake park in Shah Alam with accompanying activities such as discussions, book readings, poetry readings, workshops and drawing classes for children. The Buku Jalanan idea then quickly spread to other states, even going overseas in some instances. In less than a year, there were dozens of similar events throughout the country driven by young people. They describe their activities as ‘books, arts, culture, activism’. Although their main purpose is to promote a culture of reading among the public, preference is given to reading and discussing books that stimulate intellectual discourse (Muhammad Febriansyah and Muhamad Takiyuddin 2016). From this initiative, a variety of similar events have proliferated, and it is easy to see the interest and enthusiasm of young people for the ideas and forms of alternative arts, including poetry, short stories and novels. Those who frequented such programmes established a new niche in society. Books that had long dominated the market published by well-established imprints such as Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and other popular publishers could not meet the expectations of young people who were more attracted to these alternatives. In the 1990s the most popular nonacademic titles were generally religious books. By the 2010s novels were the most popular choice, but instead of erotic romance novels that had previously led the market the new indie publishers promoted edgy, urban-based titles. These were followed by motivational, cooking, interior decoration and health-themed books, though in recent years public interest has returned to religious books once again (Norden Mohamed 2014). The next bestselling trend was therefore predictable—the 2000s and 2010s saw the emergence of a new publishing phenomenon, popular Islamic novels, especially romances (Mohd Zariat 2014). Influenced by the success of the Indonesian novel Ayat-ayat cinta by Habiburrahman El Shirazy (2007), this genre quickly found a

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market in Malaysia.3 Since 2008 local Islamic novels began to enter into the list of bestsellers. The first Islamic novel published by PTS Millennia, Salju Sakinah by Zaid Akhtar (2008), was reprinted eight times within a year and sold over 30,000 copies. This success was followed by other Islamic romance-themed novels: Ilham Hamdani’s Hidayah cinta (2008), A. Ubaidillah Alias’s Warkah cinta berbau syurga (2008), Sheila Wani’s Rona-rona cinta Damascus (2009) and S. Rafidah H. Basri’s Hijab cinta (2011). The success of PTS in particular encouraged other publishers such as Prima, Telaga Biru, Alaf 21 and Creative Enterprise to join the trend (Mohd Zariat 2014: 420; Koh and Ummi Hani 2015; Ummi Hani 2016). The popularity of Islamic novels did not overwhelm the romance-themed novels that were still in demand and found new forms to satisfy the market. Fauziah Ashari’s Ombak rindu (2002), which tells the story of a woman who is raped and then willingly marries her rapist, was adapted into a film in 2011, which was quite successful judging by the nominations and awards received and proceeds from ticket sales. After the film adaptation Ombak rindu’s book sales continued to soar, selling over 500,000 copies (Norehan 2016: 8). Since 2010 many soap opera adaptations of popular novels have filled television drama series aired by Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM), TV3 and Astro.4 The adaptation of novels has unsurprisingly increased book sales of popular novels (Mohamed Nazreen 2016: 12). For some indie enthusiasts, this development symbolises a diminished set of expectations because consumers are presented with poor quality reading and viewing materials. Major publishers are viewed as only publishing according to market demand without considering the negative impact on the thinking of young people. In addition, according to Amir Muhammad of Buku Fixi many consider the period of the 1990s and 2000s, when Islamic popular novels dominated the market, as disastrous since the literature itself was little more than preaching (Ng 2016). Some indie writers and publishers suggest that the lack of alternatives, especially in the form of fiction, was a major motivation for them to publish their own work. Nami Cob Nobbler (2012), writer of the bestselling indie book Awek Chuck Taylor (Lejen Press 2011), says that he published his debut novel, Bau semangat anak muda (Lu Punya Ass 2010, Lejen Press 2012), independently because he felt that Malaysian readers needed a novel about a band and the local music scene and to attract the interest of grunge music followers. The motive is similar with Amir Muhammad, who says that his favourite reading material—horror, crime, noir and thrillers— was not easily available in languages other than English. This prompted him to establish what Buku Fixi does indeed focus on—novels and short stories in Malay in these genres and styles (Toh 2015; Ooi 2015). Meanwhile, DuBook Press was more assertive in its reasons for entering the publishing industry, namely to fight what it saw as the institutionalisation of language and literature, mainly by Dewan 3

Ayat-ayat cinta was reprinted more than 30 times. In 2008 the film adaptation of the novel broke all box office records in Indonesia (Heryanto 2014: 83). 4 In 2014 an entertainment blog—http://kle-peq.blogspot.my—listed more than 40 novels that had been adapted into popular drama series on television. On average, four out of five television drama series with the highest viewing figures were adapted from popular novels (Mohamed Nazreen 2016: 12).

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Bahasa dan Pustaka (Faisal Tehrani 2015b). DuBook Press viewed Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, under the patronage of the government, as having failed to increase public interest in reading. Most indie publishers did not mince their words when it came to criticising Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka as despite generous government subsidies and luxurious facilities provided by taxpayers’ money, the institution still failed to publish books that interested readers (Alyaa 2015). In an interview with the executive director of Thukul Cetak, Zul Fikri Zamir, in 2016, he said that although it is undeniable that Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka publishes some fine literature, it fails to promote books to readers. Many books published by government-related entities end up languishing in warehouses or depots. This accusation is well grounded, especially as Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka had faced many problems after working with a subcontractor, Dawama. Although the company was awarded a 12-year contract worth RM120 million a year for handling pre-press, design, printing, distribution and marketing of books published by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Dawama consistently caused problems for customers, printers and distributors for more than a decade. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka was forced to absorb and cover the cost of these losses (Muhammad Musoddiq 2015). This problem had an impact on the quality of the publications themselves. This can be seen clearly from the quality of the designs of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka book covers which are usually deemed unattractive and uninspiring. Viewed from this aspect alone, indie books are far superior because of the interesting and pop-themed graphic design used by publishers. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka’s real weakness can be clearly seen when Lejen Press reissued the novel Langit petang by the national laureate A. Samad Said in 2016; in just three months the new edition managed to match the entire sales of the original edition since 1980 (Amirul 2016). This is because indie publishers were smarter in reading market opportunities in terms of promotion and employed better marketing and more attractive visual branding, giving them an edge to break the monopoly of the major publishers. Although there are indie books listed as bestsellers in bookshops, many indie publishers consider bookshops to be oppressive for taking a very large discount, up to 55% of the retail price in some cases according to Mutalib Uthman (Ali Imran 2015).5 This is why in the early stages of the emergence of indie books writers preferred to publish their own books. Nami Cob Nobbler (also known as Nomy Nozwir) originally published Bau semangat anak muda on the basis of preorders from prospective readers. Through his personal blog and social media platforms, he announced that he had a novel manuscript and appealed to anyone who wanted to read it to send money to cover printing costs. Once there were enough subscribers, he printed the appropriate amount and sent the books out to the buyers. It was only when the number of orders grew too large for him that Nami submitted the manuscript to Lejen Press. This submission came a year after Lejen Press published his best-selling Awek Chuck Taylor which sold over 30,000 copies and was reprinted 11 times (Tan 2015). Aisa Linglung also published a book titled Sperma cinta (2011) of short stories 5

This figure is more likely the percentage taken by major distributors, such as Pansing and MPH Distributors, rather than bookshops themselves, which typically get a discount of 30–35% off the retail price of a book (Gareth Richards, Personal communication, 8 October 2020).

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derived from a personal blog using a similar method. A year after its launch, the book sold more than 2,500 copies. The founder of SeLUT Press, Aloy Paradoks, printed only 30 copies of his first books but he has since become one of the most successful indie writers and publishers. DuBook Press also started by printing, publishing and selling their own materials. The internet became the most important tool for selling indie books. Prior to the advent of widespread social media, indies used blogs as a starting place to learn to write and to sell their works. Social media and the internet now offer a low-cost but highly effective means for marketing and promoting indie books and also as a way to increase sales through online orders. Social media are also utilised to build the publisher’s brand and image via direct interaction with potential consumers, sometimes even posting controversial content to generate heated discussions so that they become the centre of attention among social media users. As a result, their social media sites have large followings. As of 2020, across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Buku Fixi has a total of over 271,000 followers, Terfaktab has more than 112,000, and Lejen Press has over 287,00 followers. Thus generating online sales via social media channels is an important source of revenue for these indie publishers. The success of the leading independent publishers like DuBook and Fixi that have been able to build brands and increase sales shows that they understand the techniques of marketing. Amir Muhammad believes that a good marketing technique is when a product (an indie book) becomes material for gossip among readers. Due to this personalised effect of the book, people are prompted to buy not only through advertisements but even more so due to the recommendations of friends (Ali Imran 2015). As an analogy, a similar marketing technique between friends has long existed in various forms and has been successfully used by cosmetics companies such as Mary Kay and Avon (Quart 2003). Other methods that contribute to reducing the cost of advertising and marketing include roadshows at a variety of events which involve young people. For Buku Fixi, this method contributes to about 30% of their book sales (Ali Imran 2015). Annual events such as the KLIBF are a goldmine for every indie publisher, especially those who increase their sales every year along with those that have managed to leverage their large social media followings. DuBook Press successfully sold 15,000 copies of Terima kasih si babi hutan by Ismail Arifin @ Lepat in only 10 days at the KLIBF in 2015, a record for the highest sales in a short period of any book in Malaysia.6 The former managing publisher of Terfaktab, Syazrul Aqram, views the success of indie publishers as being due to their effective marketing strategies when compared to mainstream publishers. This has also contributed to a significant increase in reading, especially among youths. A study by the National Library of Malaysia in 2005 showed that Malaysians only read two books a year on average. This number had increased to eight books a year by 2010. The 2014 Malaysian reading habits interim studies survey showed a significant increase to an average of 15 books a year (Syazrul 6

However, indie books sales as a whole have not been able to match that of popular novels such as Ombak rindu by Fauziah Ashari, which sold half a million copies, or Damya Hanna’s novels which are routinely reprinted many times (Mohamed Nazreen 2016: 12).

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Aqram 2018: 3). In addition, the distribution of Baucer Buku 1Malaysia (BB1M, 1Malaysia book vouchers) amounting to RM250 per person, and given to 1.3 million university and tertiary education students, also helped the increase of indie book sales. It came as no surprise when the government’s decision in 2014 to limit the use of BB1M vouchers to only academic books, educational journals and magazines received widespread criticism from indie publishers (Syafique Shuib 2014). The development of indie books in Malaysia was also affected by the influx of similar books from Indonesia imported by the likes of Merpati Jingga and DuBook (via DuBook Indo). Poetry books by Chairil Anwar and M. Aan Mansyur and novels by Eka Kurniawan, Okky Madasari and Tere Liye are regularly sold at indie publishers’ booths at roadshows though none of these authors are generally regarded as indie writers in Indonesia. Previously, it was difficult to get hold of such books in the Malaysian market. Thus this shortage was an opportunity for local indie book publishers to make a profit by bringing in books from Indonesia, and this has no doubt contributed to the upturn of interest in reading Indonesian literary works. This is in addition to the commercial success of the film Ada apa dengan cinta? 2 in 2016 which garnered a cult following among young people in both Indonesia and Malaysia. Being featured in the film made M. Aan Mansyur’s poetry collection Tidak ada New York hari ini (2016) a big hit in Malaysia. Consequently, DuBook Indo has taken steps to work with Gramedia, a major mainstream publisher in Indonesia, to republish Aan Mansyur’s book in Malaysia. In the Indonesian publishing industry discourse, Gramedia is frequently criticised for exploiting smaller or indie publishers by taking a lion’s share of the proceeds from sales. This is ironic since the main reason DuBook and many indie publishers in Malaysia chose an independent path was to counter the monopolistic and oppressive practices carried out by large players in the book industry.

12.4 From Mainstream to Indie Despite the success of indie publishers in attracting readers among Malay-speaking youths, there are also many who disagree with their approach—from both conservative quarters and from progressives. In 2015, for example, Biro Tatanegara released a report recommending that the government ban indie books due to their ‘obscene’ content which would impact negatively on the government and society (Biro Tatanegara 2015). Some well-known bookshops refused to sell certain books due to the implication that indies are considered incompatible with the supposed societal norms of decency. The government has also banned some indie titles for the same reason. These negative reactions towards indie literature seem to indicate that they are seen as a threat, whether in moral or political terms, or even as a competitor in the market. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka was also offended by the indie phenomena as it claimed that both the writers and publishers tend to ignore proper language, identity and intellect. There are even demands that indie publications should be banned. The existing situation is feared by many as an assault that will negatively affect other

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writers, especially among young people (Bernama 2016). However, these concerns do not appear to concern Institut Terjemahan dan Buku Malaysia (ITBM, Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books). As a government-linked corporation, ITBM has similar objectives and responsibilities to those of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in the publishing industry, especially in the fields of language and literature. But ITBM has been willing to establish cooperation with indie publishers in an effort to promote the work of local writers. In fact, this cooperation was evident at the Indonesia International Book Fair in 2016 where ITBM, as the Malaysia Pavilion coordinator, carried titles by some indie publishers like Thukul Cetak. At the same event, ITBM also held a forum entitled ‘Penerbitan indie di Nusantara’ (Indie publishing in the Nusantara) accompanied by several publishers such as Marjin Kiri (Indonesia), Thukul Cetak and DuBook Press. Although indie publications have been accused of featuring vulgar material and lacking accountability, it cannot be denied that this group has also produced politically motivated and critical literature. This has caused the government to perceive indie publications as a threat. Put simply, indie publications are much more likely to criticise Malaysian politics and politicians than mainstream publishers. Examples of such criticism include Agong tanpa tengkolok by Fathi Aris Omar (Thukul Cetak 2014), Kuliah-kuliah terakhir by Malik Hussin (Thukul Cetak 2016), Media = setan by Ismail Hashim Yahaya (DuBook Press 2015), Molotov koktel by Adam Adli (Merpati Jingga 2014) and Sudahlah politikus by Farhan Zulkefly (Merpati Jingga 2015). This shows that indie publishers are aware that Malaysian readers want open and critical writing as opposed to the conformist writing of the mainstream. Thukul Cetak even started publishing translated classics of important works in philosophy and politics such as Machiavelli’s The prince (Sang penguasa, translated by Zamir Mohyedin, 2016), Hitler’s Mein Kampf (2016) and Marx and Engels’s The communist manifesto (Manifesto komunis, 2016). The criticism of indies is not only expressed by the government and conservatives but also from some who consider themselves to be progressives. For example, Maryam Lee, a feminist activist, argues that many indie books contain a lot of pretentiousness and dishonesty, with an overinflated tendency by some writers to pose as rebels merely by representing ‘pornographic’ materials in their books. She also urges such publishers not to label themselves ‘indie’ because substantively they are mainstream as well as highlighting the fact that these books should not normalise misogyny by ‘repetitively publishing books that condone gratuitous sexual violence against girls’ (Maryam 2013). For its part, the ‘Indie menuju jalan mati?’ forum organised by Kuliah Buku (noted earlier) severely criticised indie publishers, especially DuBook and Fixi, who are considered to be selling the sentiment of struggle in youth for personal profit. Despite triggering the occasional moral panic, indie publishing has also undoubtedly changed the landscape of the book trade in Malaysia. The large and wellestablished publishers who had previously remained comfortable with their market share have been challenged. Many mainstream publishers responded by creating subsidiary imprints to give them an indie image. For example, PTS operates its Puteh Press imprint, Karangkraf has Buku Pojok, while Utusan Karya set up Cakcibor

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Creative (Nik Mohd Iznan 2016: 9). The senior editor of the magazine unit at Utusan Karya, Zulkarnain Zakaria, says that indie writing uses language that violates norms and narrative themes that are often attractive to young writers and readers. As a result, Cakcibor Creative welcomes pop and indie works, while not forgetting its commercial writers (Utusan Malaysia 2015). In fact, this opportunity has not been wasted by some Islamic publishers either as they have put an even greater focus on proselytising imprints such as Kopi Press (which is associated with the ultraconservative non-governmental organisation Ikatan Muslim Malaysia) and Sentap Press. They have published books such as Nurul Hajjar Atan, Sharifah Abdul Samad and Sabrina Zaifulizan’s Wanita songsang: Kumpulan pengarang anti feminis (Kopi Press 2016), Raghib Al-Sirjani’s Shiite: Membongkar kesesatan Syiah (translated by Assidiq Fauzan, Kopi Press 2016) and Adnin Roslan’s Tarbiah sentap 2 (Sentap Press 2015). However, their author profiles seem to dissociate their publications from the indie label and claim they only want to offer diversity in books about Islamic affairs in a less formal manner. This denial is most likely due to the indie reputation which is usually deemed ‘liberal’ and ‘misguided’. Therefore, it is not strange if there is competition between the two ideas in the mainstream market. However, the publisher Penerbitan Wahai does not reject the indie label and even declares that it is one of the earliest pioneers of the Islamic indie genre. In fact, Barisan Nasional governments have taken advantage of the indie phenomenon to attract support from the youth. Festival Belia Putrajaya, an annual event organised by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, is an example of how government agencies are also looking to use new approaches and tap into popular trends to attract more young people. At first the festival was known as the Himpunan Sejuta Belia. However, after a major rebranding, particularly after Khairy Jamaluddin, who always portrays himself as being in touch with young people, was appointed as the minister of youth and sports (2013–2018), the indie idea was foregrounded as an approach to young people. This can be clearly seen with the incorporation of Pekan Frinjan, Buku Fixi, Rantai Art and others as the main draw. In addition, some local indie bands such as the Venopian Solitude, Pesawat and MonoloQue have also performed at the festival. In an interview with Utusan Malaysia (2014), Khairy said that the local indie scene was given an opportunity in the festival because they did not receive much mainstream attention. Despite the clear success of the Malay-language indie publishing sector— measured in terms of sales—recent trends seem to suggest that it may well have already reached its peak. Indie books are, after all, part of the wider popular culture and there are signs that the sector is under strain. The apparent decline of the indie book trend since around 2017 has forced many major indie publishers to close shop. Thukul Cetak, for example, had to launch a flash sale called #SelamatkanThukul in a bid to settle its overdue printing debt amounting to RM134,955 (Thukul Cetak 2017). Thukul Cetak eventually stopped operating in February 2020. Similarly, DuBook has had several flash sales since 2017 as well as closing down its own store and all sales and publishing activities to ‘reset’. This came after its reputation was muddied by the issue of late royalty payments to authors, which sparked heavy criticism on social media (DuBook Press 2020a). As a consequence, all contracts with authors were

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terminated and copyright returned to them (DuBook 2020b). Fixi, which is generally considered to be the most successful indie publisher, had to close its Shah Alam shop in 2019 after operating from only December 2017 to February 2019. It also suffered huge losses when the government-owned Kedai Buku 1Malaysia (KB1M, 1Malaysia Bookshop) chain ceased operating in 2017 and was unable to pay Fixi for sales amounting to RM105,000 (N. Faizal 2017). KB1M, established in 2012 and managed by ITBM, aimed to provide reading materials at affordable prices. After six years of operation, however, KB1M closed all its branches, carrying a debt of RM3 million which was supposed to be paid to publishers that supplied their books. KB1M did not do so (Lucius Maximus 2019). The book industry suffered another blow after the unprecedented change of government in May 2018 when Barisan Nasional lost power for the first time. Several policy changes were made by the new Pakatan Harapan government, including the abolition of the BB1M scheme. A lack of support from the government further contributed to the decline of book industry in general, affecting mainstream and indie publishers alike. With a steady decline in the number of new titles published, there have been calls for a complete reform of the book industry (Ishak 2018). More recently, the situation for the book industry took a major blow due to the economic slump caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to the closure of a large number of bricks-and-mortar bookshops, including many branches of the leading MPH chain. The current prospects of the book industry look decidedly difficult.

12.5 Conclusion This chapter is the first attempt to explain the phenomenon of Malay-language indie book publishing in Malaysia. Somewhat surprisingly, there are no serious academic studies to examine what is after all a significant social and cultural phenomenon over the past two decades. Many important issues, such as content and genre, ideological debates and the nuances that arise among indie publishers themselves, are not discussed here and need further investigation. Based on the material presented here, it can be seen that the vibrancy of the many alternative cultures that have emerged were influenced by both political and social factors. The effect of the Reformasi movement of the late 1990s and subsequent opening up of political space by civil society organisations is undeniable, since cultural expression appeared as a means to articulate new and challenging aspirations, and even resistance to elements of the establishment, whether towards the old political structures or cultural conservatism. However, as we have shown, the very notion of what constitutes ‘indie’ is contested. Many recent sociological studies show that youth are not just attracted to ideas associated with the image of resistance; they are also, and at the same time, most susceptible to market-driven consumerism. The combination of these two elements, resistance and consumption, has produced a niche among young people who always want to be seen in contrast to the norms of society. As a result, they look for an alternative to the dominant culture. Indie books provide an alternative to the romance

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or religious-themed titles that were most readily available. However, as Heath and Potter (2006) demonstrate, alternative cultural ideas are not somehow divorced from the market; they are equally able to provide a new impetus to capitalism which at one level will inevitably lead to a situation of stagnation or a saturated market. Thus indie books and publishing are best understood not so much as an alternative but rather an integral part of the dominant culture. Although resistance towards the mainstream is said to be a factor behind the rise of indie publishing, it can also be viewed as a manifestation of competition for previously untapped shares of the Malaysian youth market. In the end, the indies tend to produce the same materials, but are packaged in different genres and styles in order to reach groups of consumers who have a variety of tastes when it comes to reading. The indie publishing scene creates differences in form, though their essence remains the same. This then explains why indie books can rather easily be transformed into the mainstream, to the extent that it is no longer possible to distinguish between the two. Elsewhere we have further highlighted and explored this tendency of indie publications to become mainstream and exposed the false consciousness of the counterculture (Muhammad Febriansyah 2016a, 2016b). Although the actual practice of indies is based on idealism as a form of cultural resistance, our empirical study has found that the driving force of most indie publishers in Malaysia is a competition for youthful markets that were previously untapped by mainstream publishers. They make effective marketing and sales the key measures of success. This reality overwhelms the novelty of the discourse, ideas or social messages conveyed by indie books. After the positive response from young people, many mainstream and commercial publishers are also trying to replicate indie methods and approaches to adjust to the reading trend among the youth. This happened early on when PTS got a windfall from Islamic-themed popular novels, while many other commercial publishers followed suit. This shows that market mechanisms, which are the backbone of capitalism, have encouraged the presence of indies and alternatives for the survival of the system itself. This echoes what Naomi Klein (1999) demonstrated on the global stage—that the so-called counterculture is deeply implicated in the service of corporate profits. In the case of Malaysia, indie publishers operate within the same logic and market disciplines. In effect, they are not so different from the mainstream. Given the difficulties faced by the entire Malaysian book industry in recent years, it may well be that the Malay-language indie publishing wave will prove to be short-lived.

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Aisa Linglung. 2011. Sperma cinta [Love sperm]. Kuala Lumpur: DuBook Press. Ali Imran Mohd Noordin. 2015. Strategi penerbit buku indie terokai pasaran [Indie book publishers’ marketing strategy]. 1 June. https://koding-kn.blogspot.com/2015/06/strategi-pen erbit-buku-indie-terokai.html. Accessed 3 Oct 2020. Alyaa Azhar. 2015. How the Malay indie publishing mafia sparked a reading renaissance. Malaysiakini, 11 October. https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/315350. Accessed 5 Oct 2020. Amirul. 2016. Karya indie bukan main-main [Serious indie works]. Utusan Malaysia, 21 May. https://web.archive.org/web/20160522123653/. http://www.utusan.com.my/pendidikan/sastera/ karya-indie-bukan-main-main-1.332800. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Azman Hussin, and Faisal Tehrani. 2000. Cerpen2 underground [Underground short stories]. Kota Bharu: Pustaka Pemikir. Bernama. 2016. DBP bimbang penulis muda terpengaruh karya indie [DBP worried young writers influenced by indies]. Astro Awani, 20 March. https://www.astroawani.com/berita-hiburan/dbpbimbang-penulis-muda-terpengaruh-karya-indie-99160. Accessed 6 Oct 2020. Biro Tatanegara, Bahagian Penyelidikan dan Penerbitan. 2015. Gerakan indie di Malaysia [Indie movement in Malaysia]. Putrajaya: Biro Tatanegara. Chua Beng Huat. 2010. Engendering an East Asia pop culture research community. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11(2): 202–206. DuBook Press. 2020a. Kenyataan rasmi [Official statement]. Facebook, 10 September. https:// www.facebook.com/storedubook/posts/kenyataan-rasmi-dari-dubook-press/206560920023 7711/. Accessed 17 Oct 2020. ———. 2020b. DuBook mula semula [DuBook restarts]. Facebook, 22 October. https://www.fac ebook.com/dubook/photos/a.707134035972375/3623568184328931/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. El Shirazy, Habiburrahman. 2007. Ayat-ayat cinta [Verses of love]. Jakarta: Republika-Basmala. Faisal Tehrani. 2000. Perempuan politikus Melayu [Malay woman politician]. Kuala Lumpur: Penerbitan Pemuda. ———. 2015a. Cerpen2 underground [Underground short stories]. Bandar Baru Bangi: Thukul Cetak. ———. 2015b. Dubook, tokong baharu orang muda [DuBook, new idol of the youth]. Malaysiakini, 13 May. https://www.malaysiakini.com/columns/ 298191. Accessed 3 Oct 2020. ———. 2016. Perempuan politikus Melayu [Malay woman politician]. Bandar Baru Bangi: DuBook Press. Farhan Zulkefly. 2015. Sudahlah politikus [Enough, politicians]. Kuala Lumpur: Merpati Jingga. Fathi Aris Omar. 2014. Agong tanpa tengkolok [Agong without a hat]. Kuala Lumpur: Thukul Cetak. Fauziah Ashari. 2002. Ombak rindu [Waves of longing]. Kuala Lumpur: Alaf 21. Fdaus Ahmad. 2012. Dari Tanjung Malim ke KLCC [From Tanjung Malim to KLCC]. Bandar Baru Bangi: DuBook Press. ———. 2014. Proletar Dua Menara [Twin Towers proletarian]. Bandar Baru Bangi: DuBook Press. Hasmi Hashim. 2016. Sebuah makian untuk pelacur dan babi buku indie [Indie books: An insult to prostitutes and pigs]. Facebook, 5 May. https://www.facebook.com/notes/hasmi-hashim/sebuahmakian-untuk-pelacur-dan-babi-buku-indie/10154028489995726/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. 2006. The rebel sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture. Chichester: Capstone. Heryanto, Ariel. 2014. Identity and pleasure: The politics of Indonesian screen culture. Singapore: NUS Press. Hitler, Adolf. 2016. Mein Kampf [My struggle]. Kuala Lumpur: Thukul Cetak. Ilham Hamdani. 2008. Hidayah cinta [Love guidance]. Kuala Lumpur: PTS Litera. Ishak Hamzah. 2018. Reformasi segera industri buku Malaysia [Malaysian book industry needs to be reformed]. Berita Harian, 23 May. https://www.bharian.com.my/rencana/sastera/2018/05/ 429376/reformasi-segera-industri-buku-malaysia. Accessed 11 Oct 2020. Ismail Ariffin @ Lepat. 2015. Terima kasih si babi hutan [Thank you wild boar]. Kuala Lumpur: DuBook Press.

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Ismail Hashim Yahaya. 2015. Media = setan [Media = devil]. Kuala Lumpur: DuBook Press. Jube. 2008. Revolusi indie label: Musik underground Indonesia [Indie label revolution: Indonesian underground music]. Yogyakarta: Harmoni. Khairulnizam Bakeri. 2011. Pecah [Break]. Petaling Jaya: Buku Fixi. Khoo Gaik Cheng. 2007. Just-do-it-(yourself): Independent filmmaking in Malaysia. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8(2): 227–247. Klein, Naomi. 1999. No logo. London: Picador. Koh Young Hun, and Ummi Hani Abu Hassan. 2015. Fenomena novel popular Islam di Malaysia dan Indonesia: Bacaan khusus tehadap novel Ayat-ayat cinta dan Salju Sakinah [The phenomenon of popular Islamic novels in Malaysia and Indonesia: A special reading of the novels Ayat-ayat cinta and Salju Sakinah]. Jurnal Melayu 14(1): 92–102. Lucius Maximus. 2019. Melihat ITBM bekerja [Seeing how ITBM works]. Solidaritas, 19 November. https://solidaritas.my/melihat-itbm-bekerja. Accessed 15 Oct 2020. M. Aan Mansyur. 2016. Tidak ada New York hari ini [There is no New York today]. Jakarta: Gramedia. Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2016. Sang penguasa [The prince], trans. Zamir Mohyedin. Kuala Lumpur: Thukul Cetak. Malik Hussin. 2016. Kuliah-kuliah terakhir [The last lectures]. Kuala Lumpur: Thukul Cetak. Mandal, Sumit K. 2003. Creativity in protest: Arts workers and the recasting of politics and society in Indonesia and Malaysia. In Challenging authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal, 178–210. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2016. Manifesto komunis [The communist manifesto]. Kuala Lumpur: Thukul Cetak. Maryam Ramli Lee. 2013. My take on the scene of local indie books. Truleeunique, 16 February. https://maryamlee.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/my-take-on-the-scene-oflocal-indie-books/. Accessed 6 Oct 2020. Mason, Matt. 2009. The pirate’s dilemma: How youth culture is reinventing capitalism. New York: Free Press. McKay, Benjamin. 2011. Fringe benefits: Essays and reflections on Malaysian arts and cinema, ed. Yeoh Seng Guan and Julian C.H. Lee. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Mohamed Nazreen Shahul Hamid. 2016. Kompleksiti Cinderella dalam penulisan novel popular [Cinderella complex in popular novel writing]. Tunas Cipta, April: 12–15. Mohd Zariat Abdul Rani. 2013. Materialisme, Islam dan nilai kesasteraan: Satu penelitian terhadap novel-novel popular Islami terbitan PTS Sdn. Bhd. berdasarkan persuratan baru [Materialism, Islam and literature value: A study of PTS Sdn Bhd Islamic popular novels using a new literature approach]. Jurnal e-Utama 4: 1–34. ———. 2014. The conflict of love and Islam: The main ingredients in the popular Islamic novels of Malaysia. South East Asia Research 22(3): 417–433. Muhammad Febriansyah. 2016a. Penerbit indie dan idea palsu penentangan budaya [Indie publishers and the false idea of counterculture]. In Lastik! Lontaran batu-batu kerikil [Catapult! Throwing pebbles], ed. H. Muhammad and Haris Zuan, 37–44. Petaling Jaya: Gerakbudaya Enterprise. ———. 2016b. Penerbit buku indie: Benarkah antiarus perdana? [Indie book publishers: Are they really anti-mainstream?]. Dewan Sastera 46(November): 54–56. ———, and Muhamad Takiyuddin Ismail. 2016. Anak muda dan partisipasi politik tidak formal dalam piliharaya umum ke-13 [Youth and informal political participation in the 13th general election]. In Pilihan raya umum ke-13: Refleksi politik perubahan [13th general election: Political reflections on change], ed. Muhamad Takiyuddin Ismail and Sity Daud, 59–77. Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

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Muhammad Musoddiq Jaafar. 2015. Sisi gelap DBP dan penerbit indie yang ‘kasar’ [The dark side of DBP and the rough of indie]. Roketkini, 20 October. https://www.roketkini.com/2015/10/20/ sisi-gelap-dbp-dan-penerbit-indie-yang-kasar/. Accessed 6 Oct 2020. Muhammad Rashidi Wahab, and Siti Nur Hidayah Kusnin. 2016. Laporan awal: Sorotan fenomena buku indie di Malaysia [Preliminary report: Highlight on the indie book phenomenon in Malaysia]. Selangor: Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor. http://web-old.archive.org/web/201612 13094616/http://www.jais.gov.my/sites/default/files/Laporan%20awal_Fenomena%20Buku% 20Indie.pdf. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. N. Faizal Ghazali. 2017. Kedai Buku 1Malaysia dah ‘tutup kedai’? [Kedai Buku 1Malaysia has ‘closed shop’?]. Malaysiakini, 14 December. https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/405466. Accessed 15 Oct 2020. Nami Cob Nobbler. 2010. Bau semangat anak muda [The smell of teen spirit]. Kuala Lumpur: Lu Punya Ass. (Republished by Lejen Press 2012). ———. 2011. Awek Chuck Taylor [Girlfriend of Chuck Taylor]. Kuala Lumpur: Lejen Press. ———. 2012. Bau semangat anak muda, sinopsis dan background [Smells like teen spirit, synopsis and background]. 24 November. https://tehtarikgelasbesar.tumblr.com/post/36420286485/bausemangat-anak-muda-sinopsis-dan-background. Accessed 6 Oct 2020. Ng Su Ann. 2016. The big read: KL’s local publishing scene. Time Out Kuala Lumpur, 2 June. http://www.timeout.com/kuala-lumpur/things-to-do/the-big-read-kls-local-publishingscene. Accessed 6 Oct 2020. Nik Mohd Iznan Tuan Yaakub. 2016. Penerbit indie pilihan penulis muda [Young writers choose indie publishers]. Tunas Cipta, August: 8–11. Norden Mohamed. 2014. Pesta buku & budaya membaca [Book fair and reading culture]. Sinar Harian, 23 April. https://www.sinarharian.com.my/mobile/politik/pesta-buku-budayamembaca-1.273376. Accessed 5 Oct 2020. Norehan Mohamad. 2016. Stereotaip gender dalam penulisan novel popular [Gender stereotype in popular novels writing]. Tunas Cipta, April: 8–11. Nurul Hajjar Atan, Sharifah Abdul Samad, and Sabrina Zaifulizan. 2016. Wanita songsang: Kumpulan pengarang anti feminis [Reverse women: A group of anti-feminist authors]. Kuala Lumpur: Kopi Press. Ooi Kok Hin. 2015. Amir Muhammad, don buku dan filem indie Malaysia [Amir Muhammad, don of books and indie films in Malaysia]. The KL Review, 31 May. Ortner, Sherry B. 2012. Against Hollywood: American independent film as a critical cultural movement. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(2): 1–21. Quart, Alissa. 2003. Branded: The buying and selling of teenagers. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Raghib Al-Sirjani. 2016. Shiite: Membongkar kesesatan Syiah [Shiite: Revealing the Shiite heresy], trans. Assidiq Fauzan. Kuala Lumpur: Kopi Press. Rahmat Haron. 2013. Radical gestures in Malaysian performance art. In Reactions: New critical strategies. Narratives in Malaysian art, vol. 2, ed. Nur Hanim Khairuddin and Beverly Yong, with T.K. Sabapathy, 272–288. Kuala Lumpur: RogueArt. Ridhwan Saidi. 2011. Cekik [Strangle]. Petaling Jaya: Buku Fixi. S. Rafidah H. Basri. 2011. Hijab cinta [Hijab of love]. Kuala Lumpur: PTS Litera. Saharil Hasrin Sanin, and Faisal Tehrani. 2002. Lagi-lagi cerpen underground [More underground short stories]. Kuala Lumpur: Book Antiqua. Shaz Johar. 2011. Kougar [Cougar]. Petaling Jaya: Buku Fixi. Syazrul Aqram. 2018. Penerbit indie dalam industri perbukuan di Malaysia: Sastera dan perlawanan persepsi [Indie publishers in the Malaysian book industry: Literature and contestation of perception]. Paper presented at Seminar Sehari Isu-Isu Mutakhir Kesusasteraan Melayu Moden [Seminar on Current Issues of Malay Modern Literature], Kuala Lumpur, 4 September. http://eseminar.dbp. gov.my/mkmm/kertaskerjamkmm.php. Accessed 17 Oct 2020. Sheila Wani. 2009. Rona-rona cinta Damascus [The hues of Damascus love]. Kuala Lumpur: Telaga Biru.

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Storey, John. 2018. Cultural theory and popular culture: An introduction, 8th ed. London: Routledge. Syafique Shuib. 2014. Penerbit buku ‘indie’ tidak setuju dengan garis panduan BB1M baru [‘Indie’ book publishers are against the new BB1M guidelines]. Astro Awani, 30 April. https://www. astroawani.com/berita-malaysia/penerbit-buku-indie-tidak-setuju-dengan-garis-panduan-bb1mbaru-34922. Accessed 17 Oct 2020. Tan, Teri. 2015. Country spotlight: Malaysia: A flourishing alternative scene. Publishers Weekly, 18 September. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-booknews/article/68102-country-spotlight-malaysia-a-flourishing-alternative-scene.html. Accessed 5 Oct 2020. Toh, Terence. 2014. Fixi forward. Poskod.my, 6 August. https://poskod.my/features/fixi-forward/. Accessed 5 Oct 2020. ———. 2015. Indie publishers Buku Fixi opens first bricks-and-mortar store, Kedai Fixi. The Star, 14 April. http://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/books/news/2015/04/14/indie-publishersbuku-fixi-opens-first-bricks-and-mortar-store-kedai-fixi/. Accessed 5 Oct 2020. Thukul Cetak. 2017. Facebook, 13 September. https://www.facebook.com/ThukulCetak/photos/a. 1592649594286025/1949079825309665/. Accessed 22 Oct 2020. Ummi Hani Abu Hassan. 2016. Novel popular Islam Melayu: Antara komoditi dengan agama [Popular Malay Islamic novels: Between commodity and religion]. Dewan Sastera, May: 8–15. Utusan Malaysia. 2014. Mempamer kreativiti anak muda [Showcase the creativity of the young people]. Utusan Malaysia, 19 May. https://belia.org.my/wp/2014/05/19/mempamer-kreativitianak-muda/. Accessed 6 Oct 2020. ———. 2015. Cakcibor Creative platform penulis baharu berkarya [Cakcibor Creative new writers’ platform]. Utusan Malaysia, 13 August. Zaid Akhtar. 2008. Salju Sakinah [Sakinah snow]. Kuala Lumpur: PTS Litera.

Interviews Faisal Tehrani. Interview: Bangi, 30 September 2016. Zul Fikri Zamir. Interview: Bangi, 26 September 2016.

Muhammad Febriansyah is a lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. His research interests include cultural politics, democratisation and social movements, mainly focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia. He previously taught at the School of History, Politics and Strategic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and was also a visiting fellow at the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute-Malaysia. He is a coauthor of Punk, Penentangan dan politik transnasionalisme (2016). Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar is a lecturer in the political science programme, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Her research interests focus on cultural politics, subcultures and labour movements. She is the coauthor of two books, Punk, penentangan dan politik transnasionalisme (2016) and Hallyu: Kimchi, budaya popular dan kuasa lunak Korea Selatan (2018), and two journal articles: Punk dan budaya penentangan: Kajian kes Rumah Api, Kuala Lumpur, Kajian Malaysia 34(1) (2016) and Raver dan hipster: Ekspresi subbudaya remaja di Kuala Lumpur, Jurnal Komunikasi 34(1) (2018).

Part III

Identities and Narratives: Culture and Media

Chapter 13

Fear and Loathing in Legal Limbo: Reimagining the Refugee in Malaysian Public Discourse and History Gerhard Hoffstaedter and Nicole Lamb

Abstract The dominant public discourse on refugees in Malaysia is characterised by portrayals of refugees as illegal, burdensome and a threat to the nation’s security. Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its related 1967 Protocol and therefore does not provide legal recognition to those who claim refugee status. Nonetheless, Malaysia is host to hundreds of thousands of refugees who live not in camp settings but in the community, most in urban environments. Refugees from Myanmar form the vast majority of Malaysia’s refugee population while smaller, though still substantial, communities are made up of refugees who originate from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. This chapter interrogates key discourses around what a refugee is in Malaysia and how the dominant discourses, or what Michel Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’, construct refugees and link them above all to the pervasive notion of ‘illegality’. The prevailing discourses pertaining to the refugee population are reiterated and shaped by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Malaysian state and its institutions, civil society, the traditional media and other consumable information systems. Here, these depictions are challenged through an exploration of alternative narratives and readings. In recent years stories of Malaysia’s refugee population have begun to emerge in the mainstream media and elsewhere. These accounts have played an important role in developing the refugee as a figure in the national consciousness. Personal stories recorded with refugees living in Malaysia are explored to demonstrate how refugee narratives are shaped by and speak back to the public discourse. The analysis suggests that the binary portrayals of refugees as either victims or agents fail to capture the multiplicity of the refugee experience. Keywords Malaysia · Refugees · Discourse · Media · Alternative narratives · Illegality G. Hoffstaedter (B) School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] N. Lamb Independent scholar, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_13

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13.1 Introduction I am praying to quickly depart from Malaysia because I cannot be legal here. If I cannot be legal, how can this place be my home? I am just wasting my life here, waiting. —Su Mawi, 26, Chin refugee Malaysia should deport all of these lawless people back to their country. They are ungrateful. They are causing nuisances for all of us. This is bad economy right now. We can save a lot of burden. Let their own country take care of them. —Audrey, resident of Kuala Lumpur

The dominant public discourse on refugees in Malaysia is characterised by portrayals of refugees as illegal, burdensome and a threat to the nation’s security. Malaysia is not a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention or its related 1967 Protocol and therefore does not provide legal recognition to those who claim refugee status. Nonetheless, Malaysia is host to hundreds of thousands of refugees who live not in camp settings but in the community, most in urban environments. In 2020 approximately 180,000 refugees and asylum seekers were registered with, and recognised by, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kuala Lumpur while an unknown, yet significant, number remain unregistered. Refugees from Myanmar form the vast majority of Malaysia’s refugee population while smaller, though still substantial, communities are made up of refugees who originate from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Some 68% of refugees are men, while 32% are women. There are some 46,450 children below the age of 18 (UNHCR Malaysia 2020). Malaysia has become a key destination for many refugees from the region and beyond because the UNHCR actively registers and resettles refugees and refugees know that there is much employment in Malaysia’s informal sector. Often young men are sent ahead of their families to explore the passage for safety and to earn and remit money to those left behind in refugee camps or their home. This chapter interrogates key discourses around what a refugee is in Malaysia and how the dominant discourses, or regimes of truth, construct refugees. The prevailing discourses pertaining to Malaysia’s refugee population will be challenged through the exploration of alternative narratives and readings. Malaysia’s refugee population relies on the UNHCR to assess and recognise claims to refugee status and on the Malaysian authorities to tolerate them in the meantime. The Malaysian government commonly points to the UNHCR as the protector and carer of refugees. Allowing the UNHCR to maintain a local presence, in the eyes of the Malaysian government, absolves the government of any responsibility and care towards the country’s refugee population. Yet the UNHCR’s budget is inadequate to provide support to the significant numbers of refugees in Malaysia. Instead, local implementing partners, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), service providers

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and refugee advocates are relied upon to support the most vulnerable refugees, while the vast majority sustain themselves and their families by working illegally in the shadow economy. The meagre wages they earn must pay their rent, buy food and pay for secondary and tertiary healthcare (Hoffstaedter 2016). ‘We all tell stories about our lives, if only to ourselves,’ Roxana Waterson (2007: 3) argues. Our narrated lives form a rich tapestry. Some threads unravel over time, well worn by many tellings, while others are shining new threads, newly constructed versions of our lives. These stories allow us to make sense of our lives and to ascribe meaning to individual experiences. Ethnographic and oral history work with refugees in Malaysia provides an insight into the lives of refugees through stories of everyday life. The virtue of oral sources, Alessandro Portelli (1981: 99–100) explains, is that ‘they tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, what they now think they did’. Narratives recorded with refugees living in Malaysia are explored in this chapter to demonstrate how refugee narratives are shaped by and speak back to the public discourse. In recent years stories of Malaysia’s refugee population have begun to emerge in the Malaysian mainstream media. These accounts have played an important role in developing the refugee as a figure in the national consciousness. While refugees have a long history in Malaysia, the lives and experiences of its refugee population have been obscured within the greater population of irregular migrants traversing the country’s borders. Refugees have hitherto formed part of a long-established cohort of people from the surrounding regions making a place for themselves in Malaysia. The claims of those who may be eligible for refugee status have previously remained firmly outside of the national Malaysian political purview.

13.2 The Dominant Discourses of the Refugee in Malaysia It’s like this. The refugees are categorised as PATI (illegal immigrants), so there is no double standard. The enforcement agencies just do their job. Whatever in the law needs to be enforced. […] Yes, because they are enforcement agencies. Enforcement is harsh duty. So, I think they only do their job. —Interview with Rohingya refugee community leader (2015)

For Michel Foucault a regime of truth is inextricably linked to the way he sees power operating in society. Foucault saw that power was not unilateral, monodirectional or even identifiable in particular actions. Foucault (1977: 13) thus writes of power/knowledge and regimes of truth that operate in sophisticated ways to pervade society: Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse it harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques

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and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

The general politics and regimes of truth are reiterated and shaped by the state and its institutions, civil society, the media, other consumable information systems we interact with, such as the internet, and a myriad of discourses and institutions we engage with. The refugee discourse in Malaysia is informed by two primary sources: the UNHCR and the government-controlled media. How do we know a refugee? In Malaysia the answer is to point to the UNHCR as the ultimate arbiter of refugee status. The UNHCR in Malaysia decides who is and who is not a refugee through a process of refugee status determination. The process to distinguish between these categories can mean someone is on course towards resettlement in an affluent Western country or remains in legal limbo in Malaysia. Life-changing trajectories are tied to the outcome of refugee status determination and yet most refugees never give it much thought in their reflections on life in Malaysia. Refugee status determination is a crucial tool to determine inclusion in the refugee identity and the services that entails. First and foremost, that is inclusion in the resettlement quota, which provides several thousand refugees in Malaysia a pathway to citizenship in a safe third country, mostly the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe. All those left behind in Malaysia have to contend with how they are perceived by Malaysians and the country’s authorities. Refugees are often perceived as illegal, threats or victims, and in Malaysia this is no different (Azizah 2009; Zuraidah and Lee 2014). Charity Lee (2016: 351) has undertaken an extensive investigation into the media representation of refugees in Malaysia, which finds that refugees are either framed as a problem or as victims. Where refugees are represented as problems, the discourse focuses on the need to address the said problem. Where refugees are represented as victims, their vulnerability and helplessness are highlighted. The term ‘refugee’ is today used to define a person who is outside their country of origin and unwilling to return to it due to a reasonable fear of persecution. An individual is considered an official refugee once they have successfully participated in the formal identification and validation processes of the UNHCR and/or receiving countries. Those undergoing this process are now predominantly termed ‘asylum seekers’, that is, those seeking refuge in another country. The act of seeking refuge is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states in article 14 that ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution’ (United Nations 1948). This right, like those enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, is often in contradiction with increased border security measures operating globally to stop, hinder and interdict the flow of people across borders. Malaysia’s borders, set within dense jungle in sparsely populated hinterlands, are porous and poorly policed. The Thai–Malaysian border has been the subject of debate in recent years as it is the main conduit for refugees from Myanmar to enter Malaysia. In early 2015 authorities in both Malaysia and Thailand discovered trafficking camps along the border. Several bodies were exhumed and harrowing tales emerged about the treatment of refugees by traffickers (OECD 2016: 83–84;

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SUHAKAM and Fortify Rights 2019). It is not uncommon for refugees fleeing Myanmar or their dire situation in Bangladeshi refugee camps to receive offers of cheap or even free passage to Malaysia. The offer is, sadly, too good to be true. After an arduous boat journey to a southern Thai port and a trek inland to a camp, refugees are imprisoned and forced to call relatives and friends who must pay a ransom for their release. The discovery of these camps triggered wide reporting of rape, imprisonment and abuse of refugees and migrants who had traversed these border camps (The Star 2015b; Menon 2015). The Malaysian government’s reaction was reminiscent of recent Western approaches to refugee crises, namely to increase border security in order to stop people crossing the border. The then deputy home minister reiterated an earlier plan to build a wall along the Thai–Malaysian border to create a physical barrier to people seeking asylum (The Star 2015a). At the time, he stated that the government was determined to send the ‘right message’ to would-be asylum seekers. ‘We don’t want them to come here,’ he announced. ‘We are not prepared to accept that number coming into our shores and those people who are already in, we are sending them home anyway’ (Beh 2015). Since Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, refugees do not have any legal protection in the country. They are subject to the same penalties as undocumented migrants and illegal immigrants under the Immigration Act 1959/63 (Malaysia 2006). This makes refugees extremely vulnerable to raids conducted by immigration and the police in known refugee neighbourhoods and workplaces— particularly shopping malls and construction sites. Asylum seekers and refugees arrested by the authorities are held in immigration detention centres and may be subject to physical punishments such as caning. The government promotes a discourse of illegality that presents refugees as active agents in the process of transgressing borders that in turn makes them illegal. This discourse does not recognise situations of forced flight from one’s homeland. In search of protection, national borders matter little to those fleeing persecution, violence and conflict. Yet the lack of a legal distinction between refugees and other noncitizens in Malaysia has a profound impact on how refugees see themselves and understand their lives. The discourse of illegality has been internalised by many refugees; regularly reinforced by interactions with the police, immigration officials and ordinary Malaysians who tell them that they are pendatang asing tanpa izin or PATI—‘foreign visitors without permission’, but usually translated as and used synonymously with the term ‘illegal immigrant’. The term pendatang is laden with meaning in Malaysia, where ethnonationalist Malay political leaders have invoked the term to designate non-Malay Malaysians as sojourners or newcomers more broadly. This term, then, draws refugees (and other noncitizens) into a definitional conflict over whose country Malaysia is and should be. Rohingya refugees, due to their appearance and language, are usually placed within the Bangladeshi migrant worker category and may find a temporary place within society as marginalised undocumented workers alongside those often called by the derogatory ‘Bangla’. Chin refugees, meanwhile, because of their appearance, can find refuge in Chinese neighbourhoods where they are able to blend in. Here, they often rent rooms from Chinese landlords and find work with Chinese employers,

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commonly in restaurants. This places them inside the contested nation and makes them subject to questions of who belongs in Malaysia and who is welcome there, often marred by the politicisation of ethnicity and religion in Malaysia more broadly (see Frith 2000; Gabriel 2005; Norani et al. 2008; Hoffstaedter 2011). The refugee thus also functions as an internal Other, much like other undocumented migrants, as potential scapegoat and one that does not disturb the fragile domestic power balances between government and opposition, between Malay, Chinese and Indian ethnic groups, and between rich Malaysians and poor Malaysians. Refugees are Other to all Malaysians equally: without legal status, without an ethnic comradeship and without sufficient financial means to secure a place in the Malaysian nation. This also highlights that refugees, their status in Malaysia and their acceptance are always linked to domestic discourses and politics. There are few alternative sources that illuminate the lives of refugees in Malaysia. The UNHCR has tried to fill this void with stories and articles published on their website. Local activists and charity organisations have similarly attempted to dispel myths surrounding refugees by sharing stories on their Facebook pages, often accompanied by an appeal for funds. A small number of projects have sought to bring refugee stories to a Malaysian audience through innovative approaches. One project brought together Malaysian writers and illustrators to tell the stories of young refugees in a storybook format (Williams 2016). Funds were raised on a crowdfunding platform to publish a modest run of the book. Another project, which produced a smartphone application that allows users to experience a refugee’s journey, sought to engage the public with the refugee issue (UNHCR 2017). The reach of these alternative storytelling formats in Malaysia, however, is limited. The most influential source of information regarding Malaysia’s refugee population is the traditional media. Malaysia’s major media outlets are government owned or government linked and are therefore tightly controlled. Reporting on contentious issues is left to web-based alternative media. Conventional media outlets often republish UNHCR press releases, usually verbatim or with minimal reportage about the larger issue at hand. Other stories published concerning refugees tend to focus on their illegality, depicting them as a threat to national security. Online news sources have shown themselves to be more adept and interested in refugee issues, but their readership remains limited. According to Lee (2016: 355), the alternative media have shown more empathy towards refugees, because they portray them as victims of both circumstance and the Malaysian government’s policies towards them. Local NGOs and activists, both refugee and local, working with refugee communities represent the most outspoken narrators on refugee issues. Reports from the independent human rights organisation Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) focus on rights and mistreatment of refugees in detention, reports from health NGOs like Health Equity Initiatives deal with the mental health effects of living as a refugee in Malaysia, and reports from the labour rights NGO Tenaganita highlight the effects of refugees’ lack of rights in the workplace as well as other forms of discrimination and maltreatment. Lawyers for Liberty, the Malaysian Bar Council and organisations such as Asylum Access and Amnesty International focus on the legal aspects of life as a refugee and intervene in cases of detention and rights-based education

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initiatives. Yet there are few spaces for refugees themselves to give voice to their experiences beyond the relatively small and highly controlled civil society space that the UNHCR, local NGOs and refugee community organisations inhabit.

13.3 Alternative Malaysian Refugee Histories Malaysia has a significant history of providing sanctuary to those who have fled their homelands. The language used to speak about forced migration today has changed, and the definition of a refugee has developed over time, yet Malaysia has undeniably provided sanctuary to those who, by today’s standards, we would consider refugees. Alternative readings of Malaysia’s past reveal a history of accommodation of traditions, culture and religions in the multicultural polity that continues to the present day. Raja Iskandar Shah, the ‘refugee king’, is perhaps the most notable asylum seeker to arrive on the country’s shores. He is named in Sejarah Melayu (Malay annals), which documents the birth of Melaka, as the prince who founded an empire (Leyden 2001). Iskandar Shah, or Parameswara as he was known before his conversion to Islam, is widely referred to in historical accounts as a ‘rebel prince’ who originated from Palembang in Sumatra. The circumstances in which he fled from Singapore to Melaka in the early fifteenth century have been the subject of much historical enquiry (Kwa 1998). Today, Iskandar Shah’s fame rests on the contribution he made to the founding of Melaka and its subsequent Malay polities. This means that while his origins continue to be debated the refugee king’s legacy as a state builder remains steadfast. In Malaysia, however, this history is seldom discussed in these terms (see Lo 2016). Raja Iskandar Shah created in Melaka a cosmopolitan polity by negotiation (and tribute) to local ethnic groups such as the Orang Laut (sea nomads) and major powers, like the Chinese. This example of displacement made good, of the creation of a new, prosperous and open polity in spite, and perhaps because, of having fled could be a rallying cry for the inclusion of refugees in Malaysian society. The founding of Melaka marks the early beginnings of the important role of migrants and refugees to Malaysia. Soon after its founding, Cham political refugees who fled the Vietnamese invasion of the kingdom of Champa made the coastal port their home. They were welcomed in Melaka and given important posts in the trading entrepot (Wong 2008). The Malay world was, and indeed continues to be, marked by the movement of people due to political and social displacement and resource competition. Which of these people might accurately be characterised as refugees is a contentious point. But it is important to acknowledge the scale of displacement of peoples and their ability to find new homes elsewhere in the archipelago historically, as well as the readiness of others to welcome strangers, or at least tolerate their presence in the first instance. It is clear that Malaysia has, throughout history, served as a place of refuge. In more recent times, it has provided sanctuary to diverse peoples including Moro refugees from the Philippines, Cham Muslims from Cambodia and Bosniaks from the former Yugoslavia. The Malaysian government has, on occasion, also given work rights to

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refugees. The large Acehnese diaspora resident in West Malaysia in the early 2000s was granted legal status, including work rights. There is considerable debate about which refugee communities have qualified for such privileges and why. Cultural affinity, including religion, may be seen to be a crucial factor in the provision of protection (Hoffstaedter 2017). The government’s approach to providing sanctuary has been inconsistent and remains based on what the government calls ‘humanitarian action on a case-by-case basis’. This is advantageous to the government on two fronts: ‘the use of the term “humanitarianism” appropriates a noble role for the Malaysian government while simultaneously distancing itself from the language of human rights or the rights of refugees and any obligation that the language of rights invokes’ (Lego 2012: 92). Alternative refugee histories of Malaysia have rarely been invoked and remain what Ghassan Hage (2011) calls ‘minor realities’—where reality is merely the dominant reality while we are also inhabiting minor realities. These minor realities may haunt the major one and ultimately provide ways to destabilise it (see Baudrillard 1993). They thus offer opportunities and afford potential spaces to engage these alternatives or minor realities more fully in the future.

13.4 Unvoiced Narratives of Everyday Life I am really grateful to the Malaysian government and the Malaysian people; I really thank them for allow[ing] us to stay here. —Pi Zopuii, 56, Chin refugee

Appreciation for their temporary hosts was a common refrain heard in interviews with refugees living in Malaysia. In-depth interviews, and multiple interviews with the same individuals over time, however, reveal much more complex and less cohesive narratives of everyday life. Such accounts often began with a profession of gratitude, a disclaimer, perhaps, for the narrative that was to follow. Life in Malaysia was and is, for many refugees, a delicate tapestry composed of seemingly contradictory parts. Refuge in Malaysia meant freedom to practise one’s religion, access to advanced medical care, employment opportunities and a modern lifestyle. Yet it also meant instability, insecurity, discrimination and the lack of protections that would be provided by legal residence documents or citizenship. The want of any legal status undermined many of the advantages of sanctuary in Malaysia, because it meant a lack of rights in everyday life. Refugee narratives reveal the pervasiveness of illegality and how that public discourse is interwoven in their stories of life in Malaysia. Seldom do refugees suggest work rights or temporary or permanent visas as a solution, but rather resettlement in a safe third country that would recognise their plight with the gift of legal status and pathways to citizenship. Refugees from a range of ethnic backgrounds, interviewed in 2015, narrated a vast catalogue of everyday encounters and incidents that underlined their inferiority

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in Malaysian society. Confrontations with police and authorities have been well documented, but conflicts with ordinary Malaysians, which figured significantly in the recorded stories of refugees, are seldom documented (Nah 2010; Hoffstaedter 2014). Ram, a 35-year-old Chin refugee who had been living in Kuala Lumpur for five years, despaired at the lowly status he endured in Malaysia. ‘There are times when people look down on us because we are refugees,’ he explained. ‘Even if we are right, sometimes we have no chance to say anything, to fight for ourselves.… There is one coworker, whatever his mistakes, he will blame it on us. I cannot say anything to the boss.’ Being an ‘illegal’ in Malaysia, Ram’s account demonstrates, means being without a voice. Despite enduring periods of hopelessness, Ram believes that ‘by praying, I think I can go to a third country. I believe in Jesus.’ The lack of a voice in Malaysia was a frustration felt by many refugees. In 2015 Biak had been in Malaysia for 10 years. His experiences had taught him to be wary of Malaysians and to avoid interactions with local people wherever possible. He explained that the unequal status between himself and Malaysians would inevitably lead to conflict. ‘Say I had a Malaysian neighbour or friend, and there was a disagreement between us, for example religion or anything else, if they feel unhappy with me they might report me to the police and I will go to jail.’ It is better—safer—he rationalised, to keep a distance from Malaysians. The constant anxiety of being illegal was a recurrent theme in refugees’ narratives of living in the country. Even those who were registered and possessed a valid UNHCR card, which in theory should provide protection from arbitrary arrest or detention, felt that their presence in Malaysia was illegal and they could be detained or deported at any time. Khadija, a Rohingya refugee, described a series of incidents with her neighbours who shouted insults at her and her children. She recounted an episode that had left her feeling saddened. Her husband had purchased some fish from the market that she had laid out to dry outside the apartment building. One of her neighbours, a Malaysian man, threw the fish over the fence, onto the ground. The fish stank, he said, when she went to investigate, and she and her children also stank. ‘Then he just walked away laughing, “stinky, stinky”, he kept shouting.’ Khadija shook her head, ‘What can I do? This is their place. I do not have IC [identity card]. I just stayed quiet.’ The public discourse in Malaysia that invalidates refugees’ protection claims empowers everyday citizens to consider the refugees who work and live in their communities as interlopers and criminals. The lowly status of refugees is directly linked to their lack of a legal status in the country. A number of refugees made a deliberate connection between their negative experiences in Malaysia and their lack of a legal standing. Salai, a Chin refugee, explained: In here Malaysia, even when we go to clinic or hospital, we queue in the line but some Malaysians come and they just enter. [Also] the charges are different. It also may be because we don’t pay tax. But sometimes we feel very upset. But we could not do anything. We are angry but we could not do anything. We stand in the line for one hour but they just come and enter. They just get what they want. When they come [back] we are still in the line sometimes. Because we are not legal at UN.

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Many refugees are aware that the UNHCR does not have the power to grant refugees in Malaysia any legal status. The public discourse of illegality thus trumps the understanding of cooperation between the Malaysian government and the UNHCR.

13.5 Conclusion Refugees in Malaysia remain trapped by portrayals of their identity that are largely governed outside of their purview or regime of influence. This means that they are excluded from the processes that determine who is a refugee and what that means in society at large. Given that their refuge is at the mercy of the Malaysian government and people, there is little space for stories of the indignities suffered by refugees in their neighbourhoods and workplaces. Hesitant to appear ungrateful to their temporary hosts, narratives of everyday life in Malaysia often downplay incidents of discrimination and hostility from ordinary Malaysians. In fact, the negative public discourse is often borne out in the everyday experiences of refugees negotiating work and life in legal limbo. The binary portrayals of refugees in Malaysia as either victims or agents fail to capture the multiplicity of the refugee experience. Those deemed agents are seen to leave their countries in pursuit of a better life, either as economic migrants or persecuted but having come through what may be considered safe third countries, which seems to delegitimise their protection claim. They are judged to have made dubious and largely self-centred choices for themselves or their family to the perceived detriment of Malaysians. Labels such as ‘illegal’ are so powerful because they exploit the public’s concern for their own interests. In such portrayals of refugees, we see no real connection to their plight, their decisions and ultimately their claims for asylum. Victims, on the other hand, are portrayed as powerless to resist the violent actions of their governments, their stories are deemed genuine, in short, they are innocents persecuted and forced to flee. They seemingly have no choice or control and so must be helped because they cannot help themselves. They thus fall into the charity category, in which they cannot speak for themselves or act on their own. Refugees exist beyond these two categories. Efforts by the UNHCR and civil society to inform the discourse surrounding refugees and change the narrative are worthy. The Malaysian people, however, need only look to their own history of accommodating those in need of sanctuary from the surrounding regions to see that the refugee is not a new figure in the political landscape. Acknowledgement Gerhard Hoffstaedter was the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE140100052) funded by the Australian Research Council.

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References Azizah Kassim. 2009. Filipino refugees in Sabah: State responses, public stereotypes and the dilemma over their future. Southeast Asia Studies 47(1): 52–88. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomena, trans. James Benedict. London: Verso. Beh Lih Yi. 2015. Malaysia tells thousands of Rohingya refugees to ‘go back to your country’. The Guardian, 13 May. Foucault, Michel. 1977. The political function of the intellectual. Radical Philosophy 17(13): 12–14. Frith, Tabitha. 2000. Ethno-religious identity and urban Malays in Malaysia. Asian Ethnicity 1(2): 117–129. Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia. 2005. Nation and contestation in Malaysia: Diaspora and myths of belonging in the narratives of K.S. Maniam. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 36(2): 235–248. Hage, Ghassan. 2011. Dwelling in the reality of utopian thought. Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review 23(1): 7–13. Hoffstaedter, Gerhard. 2011. Modern Muslim identities: Negotiating religion and ethnicity in Malaysia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. ———. 2014. Place-making: Chin refugees, citizenship and the state in Malaysia. Citizenship Studies 18(8): 871–884. ———. 2016. Limits of compassion: Gerhard Hoffstaedter speaks with refugees in limbo in Malaysia. Overland 224: 79–84. ———. 2017. Refugees, Islam and the state: The role of religion in providing sanctuary in Malaysia. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 15(3): 287–304. Human Rights Commission of Malaysia [SUHAKAM], and Fortify Rights. 2019. ‘Sold like fish’: Crimes against humanity, mass graves, and human trafficking from Myanmar and Bangladesh to Malaysia from 2012 to 2015. Kuala Lumpur: SUHAKAM. https://www.fortifyrights.org/reginv-rep-2019-03-27/. Accessed 14 Jun 2020. Kwa Chong Guan. 1998. The value of oral testimony: Text and orality in the reconstruction of the past. In Oral history in Southeast Asia: Theory and method, ed. Patricia Lim Pui Huen, James H. Morrison, and Kwa Chong Guan, 19–32. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Lee, Charity Chin Ai. 2016. Refugee Representation in Malaysia: A Study of Media Representations and Personal Narratives. PhD dissertation, Universiti Malaya. Lego, Jera Beah H. 2012. Protecting and assisting refugees and asylum-seekers in Malaysia: The role of the UNHCR, informal mechanisms, and the ‘humanitarian exception’. Journal of Political Science and Sociology 17: 75–99. Leyden, John. 2001. John Leyden’s Malay Annals. Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. (Orig. publ. 1821). Lo, Daniel. 2016. Compassion for refugees. New Straits Times, 5 August. https://www.nst.com.my/ news/2016/08/163222/compassion-refugees. Accessed 16 Oct 2020. Malaysia, Government of. 2006. Act 155: Immigration Act 1959/63, incorporating all amendments up to 1 January 2006. The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia. http://www.agc.gov.my/ agcportal/uploads/files/Publications/LOM/EN/Act%20155.pdf. Accessed 1 Jun 2020. Menon, Praveen. 2015. Malaysia finds 139 graves in ‘cruel’ jungle trafficking camps. Reuters World News, 25 May. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-asia-migrants-idUSKBN0OA06W20150525. Accessed 1 Jun 2020. Nah, Alice M. 2010. Refugees and space in urban areas in Malaysia. Forced Migration Review 34: 29–31. Norani Othman, Mavis C. Puthucheary, and Clive S. Kessler. 2008. Sharing the nation: Faith, difference, power and the state 50 years after merdeka. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. 2016. Trafficking in persons and corruption: Breaking the chains. Paris: OECD Publishing. Portelli, Alessandro. 1981. The peculiarities of oral history. History Workshop 12(1): 96–107.

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Star, The. 2015a. Wan Junaidi: Government plans to wall parts of Malaysia-Thailand border. 30 May. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2015/05/30/wan-junaidi-wall-border/. Accessed 15 Oct 2020. ———. 2015b. Rohingya women raped at transit camps. 1 June. https://www.thestar.com.my/News/ Nation/2015/06/01/Wang-Kelian-women-migrants/?style=biz. Accessed 15 Oct 2020. United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. General Assembly resolution 217 (III), 10 December. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] Malaysia. 2017. Grey Malaysia and UNHCR launch unique smartphone application to experience a Rohingya refugee’s journey. 25 April. https://www.unhcr.org/en-my/news/latest/2017/4/59128c487/grey-malaysiaand-unhcr-launch-unique-smartphone-application-to-experience.html. Accessed 1 Jun 2020. ———. 2020. Figures at a glance in Malaysia. https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance-in-mal aysia.html. Accessed 1 Jun 2020. Waterson, Roxana. 2007. Introduction: analysing personal narratives. In Southeast Asian lives: Personal narratives and historical experience, ed. Roxana Waterson, 1–37. Singapore: NUS Press. Williams, Simon, ed. 2016. Dawn of a new sky: Unsung stories of refugees in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Stories from. Wong, Danny. 2008. Research on Cham history in Malaysia. Asian Research Trends n.s. 3: 25–44. Zuraidah Mohd Don, and Charity Lee. 2014. Representing immigrants as illegals, threats and victims in Malaysia: Elite voices in the media. Discourse & Society 25(6): 687–705.

Gerhard Hoffstaedter is an associate professor in anthropology at the University of Queensland, Australia. He conducts research with refugees in Southeast Asia, on refugee and immigration policy, and on religion and the state. He is a regular commentator in newspapers, radio and online media on topics of his research. He is the author of Modern Muslim identities: Negotiating religion and ethnicity in Malaysia (2011) and several recent journal articles on refugee resettlement, and is a coeditor of Urban refugees: Challenges in protection, services and policy (2015). He is the course director for the social anthropology Massive Open Online Course ‘World101x: The Anthropology of Current World Issues’ that has taught thousands of students how to think more anthropologically. Nicole Lamb is an oral historian with research interests in memory, colonialism and labour migration. Her recent publications include: A time of normalcy: Javanese ‘coolies’ remember the colonial estate, Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 170(4) (2014); and Remembering the season of suffering: Cloth and memory, Textile: Cloth and Culture 14(3) (2016). She has worked in research and advocacy in refugee settlement services in Australia.

Chapter 14

Belonging and Identity in the Narratives of Two Second-Generation Refugee Youths in Malaysia Charity Lee and Zuraidah Mohd Don

Abstract Myanmar refugee communities living in Malaysia have produced a whole generation of stateless children born and brought up in the country. In this chapter we explore the lived experiences of two second-generation Myanmar refugee youths— Prince, a Rohingya boy, and John, a Bamar boy—through their narratives on belonging and identity. Selected excerpts are examined using positioning analysis. A salient aspect in their narratives is the agency to choose for themselves the identities that best enable them to achieve particular goals. There is a complex weaving of two main identities: refugee and Malaysian. The respondents’ experiences and negotiation of identities are not defined by silence and helplessness, as commonly represented in the wider discourses concerning refugees. Common representations of refugees such as ‘illegals’, ‘foreigners’, ‘burdens’ and ‘criminals’ are contested or even manipulated by the respondents as strategic moves that are integral to their efforts for everyday survival and integration. Keywords Malaysia · Myanmar · Refugees · Identity · Agency · Integration

14.1 Introduction Refugees from Myanmar (Burma) have been seeking refuge in Malaysia for decades. Muslim Rohingya have fled from the northwestern Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state in waves since the 1970s, while Bamar and other minority groups have fled domestic persecution since the late 1990s. Although Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, it has allowed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to process and C. Lee (B) Department of Asian and European Languages, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Zuraidah Mohd Don Language Academy, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_14

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resettle refugees since the mid-1970s. Malaysia remains an important destination for asylum seekers. Over what the UNHCR (2020b) calls ‘a decade of displacement’, Malaysia has consistently ranked near the top of countries worldwide with the highest number of registered asylum claims. As of August 2020, there are a reported 178,140 asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia registered with the UNHCR, most of whom come from Myanmar (UNHCR 2020a) as well as an estimated over ‘half a million unregistered refugees’ (Sukhani 2020). However, annual resettlement rates globally are extremely low due to the stringent selection criteria set by receiving countries, resulting in increasing refugee populations in transit countries such as Malaysia.1 Since Malaysia is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, there is no established system or legal structure to oversee the protection of refugees. Although Malaysia does not provide protection against refoulement (expulsion), it usually does not deport individuals recognised as persons of concern by the UNHCR. Malaysian law distinguishes only two kinds of migrant—‘legal’ migrants who have official work permits, and ‘illegal’ migrants who arrive in the country without any documents (Amarjit Kaur 2007). Despite the lack of legal structures and formal protection for refugees and asylum seekers, those who are officially recognised by the UNHCR receive a basic ‘de facto status’ at the national level (FIDH-SUARAM 2008: 9). Recognised under international law, this allows them limited protection from the enforcement of immigration authorities, but as noted in the mission report jointly published more than a decade ago by the International Federation for Human Rights and Suara Rakyat Malaysia there exists a great degree of ambiguity in how authorities should conduct themselves with regard to refugees and asylum seekers, especially since the revisions made to the Immigration Act in 2002 (ibid.). This ambiguity remains. Media coverage on refugees in Malaysia has been noted to be negative, with refugees mainly being included in the category of ‘illegal immigrants’ and represented as the threatening Other (Kiranjit Kaur 2007; Zuraidah and Lee 2014). Elsewhere, we have noted a slight change in the tone of reporting on asylum seekers and refugees, and through a general observation of the media coverage we have identified a greater breadth of reporting on refugee-related issues that also includes positive feature articles on individual refugees (Zuraidah and Lee 2014). Despite this improvement, refugees rarely appear in popular discourse, and are instead relegated into narratives of invisibility, silence and limbo (Hoffstaedter 2014; Hoffstaedter and Perrodin 2017). Dawn Chatty (2007: 266) notes a general lack of studies on refugee youths and older children in forced migration despite the fact that this group often represents a sizable percentage of the total refugee population. Most studies have focused on general populations or communities of forced migrants, particularly adults, but there have been some studies conducted among migrant and refugee children and youths 1

In its 2019 Global trends report, the UNHCR reported that by the end of 2019 globally there was a total of 79.5 million forcibly displaced people, including 26 million refugees and 4.2 million asylum seekers, of whom only 107,800 were accepted for resettlement across 26 countries (UNHCR 2020b).

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in anthropology (Chatty and Lewando Hundt 2001, 2005; Berry et al. 2003; Boyden and Berry 2004) and interdisciplinary studies (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2010). Today, the UNHCR (2020a) reports that there are some 46,500 children under 18 living in Malaysia, making up over a quarter of the total population of refugees and asylum seekers.

14.2 Data and Methodology This chapter explores the experiences of two Malaysian-born Myanmar refugee youths—Prince, a Rohingya boy, and John, a Bamar boy (both pseudonyms)— through a discourse analysis of their narratives on belonging and identity. The two youths were interviewed as part of a study on the representation of refugees in Malaysia. At the time of the interviews, both respondents were completing form five, the final year of Malaysian secondary schooling, and had been recommended to the interviewer through a social worker dealing with refugees. The interviews were conducted in English with some switching between English and Malay by both the interviewer and the youths. Both interviews were transcribed into English using the basic transcription conventions by Gail Jefferson (1984, 2004) with back-translation into English for the Malay and bilingual portions. In the excerpts quoted in this chapter, the interlocutors are the interviewer (I), Prince (P) and John (J). The respondents’ narratives were coded using the qualitative software NVivo 10 for salient themes, and analysed using the positioning analysis perspective within narrative analysis (Bamberg 1997, 2003, 2005). Narrative analysis, an approach within the discourse analysis perspective, views narratives as any kind of text in a ‘storied form’ (Riessman 2005). Narratives enable the speakers or authors to present their lives and experiences as they interpret or reimagine them rather than as actual reality, thus giving researchers an insight to how identities are constructed. Within the positioning analysis perspective, we understand ‘positions’ to be ‘identity-relevant effects of the way speakers order conversational devices and discursive activities’ (Korobov and Bamberg 2007: 256), which emerge during the course of a performance of a narrative or its delivery. The focus on positioning is useful for understanding not only how identities are created but also how speakers take up existing ones through ‘narrating-in-interaction’ (Bamberg 2004: 336) vis-à-vis master or metanarratives. Anikó Hatoss (2012) advocates the use of positioning as an appropriate analytical concept in the study of identity in narrative because it aims to capture both the narrated event (the story) as well as the narrating event (the interview). The three levels of positioning are: a) positioning level 1, which analyses how characters are linguistically established within a narrated event and how they relate to one another to bring about the ‘story’; b) positioning level 2, which focuses on how identities emerge through the interaction between the participants involved in the ‘telling’ of the story, whose perspective is brought in and why; and c) positioning level 3, which looks at how speakers create ‘a sense of (them as) selves’ that is embedded into the story and interaction levels and leads to the question, ‘Who

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am I?’ (Bamberg 2004: 336). It is only when speakers have established ‘subject positions’ that they can go on to develop a sense of continuity and self. Through this process, they position themselves vis-à-vis social roles and wider cultural discourses by either resisting, embracing or displaying neutrality. At the storyworld level of this approach (positioning level 1), the characters mentioned in the narrative are identified and described, particularly through the way the narrator chooses to present and evaluate them. The analysis looks at nouns, adjectives and phrases used to describe characters and also how these characters are voiced through direct or indirect quotations. It also analyses how characters in the narrative refer to and evaluate other characters. The interactional level (positioning level 2) in the context of this study focuses on what questions and answers are given as part of ‘turn-taking’ within the interview (Sacks et al. 1974), whose perspective becomes the point of focus and how these exchanges shape the narrative. The final positioning level looks at the recurring references to specific themes or metadiscourses that narrators use to establish their sense of self and justify this representation of themselves.

14.2.1 Respondent Profiles Both respondents are registered refugees with the UNHCR and both had applied for resettlement. At the time of the interview, Prince was an 18-year-old Rohingya refugee living in Kuala Lumpur. He was born in Malaysia after his parents arrived in the country over 20 years ago and had spent most of his schooling at the community school in the city set up by an organisation that served the urban poor, including refugees. He has never been to Myanmar. The interviewer met him at a sports event for refugee schools put on by the organisation in collaboration with the UNHCR. The interview was conducted some weeks later at his school after school hours. John was introduced to the interviewer by his mother, May, who was the principal at a refugee learning centre in the Klang Valley. May, a political refugee, had lived in Malaysia for over 20 years and her son John was born and grew up in Malaysia. May and her husband are Bamar, the majority ethnic group in Myanmar, often referred to as Burmese. At the time of the interview, John was 19 years old and had recently completed his O-level examinations at a local international school. He was then pursuing his A levels. The school he was attending is a privately funded school that usually caters for students from affluent families or children of expatriates. Like Prince, John has never been to Myanmar.

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14.3 Negotiating Dual Identities A salient aspect in the narratives of both respondents is agency to choose for themselves identities that would enable them to achieve particular goals. Two main identities emerge in the narratives presented here: refugee and Malaysian. While identifying with both the Malaysian and refugee communities, they also struggle with issues of belonging fully to either community. Both respondents negotiate a dual identity of being refugee and Malaysian.

14.3.1 Cultural Capital In the narratives of both respondents, linguistic skills and cultural practices are used as the main means of attaining ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu 1986, 2004), which is expressed through an understanding of the dominant culture in a particular society. This understanding includes a variety of cultural elements such as languages, accents, credentials, mannerisms, clothing and so on, which can be attained through association with a particular social class or social group. Cultural capital is desirable because it enables an individual to attain acceptance into a particular collective identity and a sense of belonging. Pierre Bourdieu identifies three forms of cultural capital— embodied (inherited traits), objectified (physical and material possessions) and institutionalised (credentials, titles, status)—which would allow an individual to succeed in society. Prince and John frequently make reference to their Malaysian identity throughout their narratives, giving the reason that it is because they were born in Malaysia and know the local language and culture. Thus, culture and language, particularly the Malay language, are an important part of their local identity. John reinforces his ‘born in Malaysia’ identity by telling some stories about his interactions with his local friends and the use of Malay and knowledge of local idiomatic expressions and cultural references. In Excerpt 1, John explains the difference between being identified as Malaysian and from Myanmar using a story about a friend from school. Excerpt 1 1 2

3 4 5

I will always emphasise I was born in Malaysia. My parents are from Myanmar. Yeah that … Malaysia part I would really emphasise because … it would give them the wrong idea lah I mean from Myanmar … if you say as … I’m from Myanmar then they’ll be like, ‘Ohh … so … do you … ((laughs)). Do you know nasi lemak, do you know teh ta((hh))rik?’ Like … ‘Yes, I know these stuff you know.’ I even had once, I had a friend … when I was in year 10, he was new to the school …

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and we were in the canteen eating together. I was … I was there f- I mean I was there for Mawar International (pseudonym) for more than one year already and … waiting in the canteen and then … one day this guy asked me, ‘Eh John, do you know this … this Chinese uh … this dish called bak … kut… teh?’ ((I laughs)) Then I just looked at him and I’m like … ((laughs)) ‘YES.’ ((laughs)) And he realised, ‘Oh you actually … you’re familiar with((hh)) it?’ Then he just laughed and then … he embarrassed himself lah so((hh)) …

In this excerpt, John positions himself as an insider by illustrating the difference between identifying himself as being from Myanmar and being ‘born in Malaysia’, and he describes how Malaysian people speak to him when they know he is from Myanmar. He voices the Malaysians in line 3, speaking to him like he is a foreigner unfamiliar with the local cuisine, such as the rice dish nasi lemak and teh tarik (frothy milk tea). He voices his own response in such situations in line 4, ‘Yes, I know these stuff you know’, including the use of the discourse marker ‘you know’ with falling intonation at the end of the phrase to point out that the other person is stating the obvious. The implied meaning is that he would obviously know these dishes because he is in a sense Malaysian himself. He then continues to tell a story about one friend he had in school during year 10. This friend is described as ‘new to the school’ (5), whereas John describes himself as having been at the school ‘for more than one year’ at that point (7). In the orientation clauses, John and this friend are described doing the same thing—‘in the canteen eating together’ (6) and ‘waiting in the canteen’ (8)—when the friend asks John the question, ‘Eh John, do you know this … this Chinese uh … this dish called bak … kut … teh?’ John utters the name of the local Chinese pork dish bak kut teh slowly and deliberately, as someone might say to a foreigner less familiar with the dish. John’s incredulous response to that question, recorded in the next line, ‘YES’ with a rising tone, also functions to demonstrate his rejection of being considered a foreigner in the story. The friend’s response in line 10, ‘Oh you actually … you’re familiar with((hh)) it?’, is evaluated by John in the coda in the next line, ‘… he embarrassed himself lah’, to emphasise the outcome of the friend’s ignorant question. Several observations can be made concerning John’s narrative in this excerpt. First, the story about being mistaken for someone who came from Myanmar or a foreigner is significant because it allows him to demonstrate his strong and negative reaction to this mistake. Second, the story helps support John’s argument at the start of the excerpt that it is important to emphasise that he does not come from Myanmar. He was born in Malaysia and is very familiar with the local cuisine, such as nasi lemak, teh tarik and bak kut teh. Third, it explains why he calls himself a Malaysian and legitimises his claim for a Malaysian identity. In fact, John notes his ability to move between different social groups by adjusting his accent and choice of linguistic expressions as something that helps him assimilate into the local school context. He differentiates between one group of friends, who are ‘Western influenced’, and another group, who are Chinese-speaking people from East

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Malaysia. For the former group, John says, ‘most of them [are] from international school so they are very Western influenced, grew up in that culture so … they have that … American slangs and will say … or British slang. They don’t speak how normal people speak and I guess … I adapt a bit to them’, whereas about the latter group he says, ‘my church is basically a local, a very Chinese church. Most of them are Chinese and they’re from Sabah, Sarawak, students all coming here to study, to do their degrees … then I speak differently.’ The ability to speak multiple languages is also identified by Prince as a skill he picked up in Malaysia that helps him fit in to other social groups. Excerpt 2 1

Whereas, sometimes I say I’m Punjabi and they like, because I can speak six languages, 2 so it’s not a big deal for me to say I’m Malay. 3 When I‘m say Malay, I speak Malay. When I’m Indian, I can speak= 4 I: =Tamil? 5 P: A bit of Tamil. So, when I say I’m Punjabi, I can speak Punjabi. And sometimes I say I’m Pakistani. 6 ((I laughs)) Yeah, I can speak Hindi. So I like, I interact in Hindi. 7 Actually mostly I say [I’m Pakistani. 8 I: [Learn yourself or just interact with your friends? 9 P: Um, I learn from my, uh watching movies. I interact with my friends. 10 So, when I’m with my friends, actually when I’m with my Pakistani friends, when they ask me where am I from, I say I’m Pakistani too. I’m also a Pakistani. 11 So I speak in their language. 12 So they won’t like, I just camouflage, I just camouflage with them. Prince recounts here occasions when he successfully hides his identity and ‘camouflages’ with other people. The means is choice of language, of which he claims he speaks six (1) to support his various identity claims: ‘When I‘m say Malay, I speak Malay’ (3), and ‘So, when I say I’m Punjabi, I can speak Punjabi. And sometimes I say I’m Pakistani’ (5); ‘Yeah, I can speak Hindi. So I like, I interact in Hindi’ (6); ‘Actually mostly I say I’m Pakistani’ (7). In line 10, he positions himself within the narrative as assuming a Pakistani identity when asked by Pakistani friends where he comes from. He calls this behaviour ‘camouflage’ in line 12. Prince justifies his Malaysian status based on his ability to speak Malay, the official language, sing the national anthem and follows the country’s laws, as well as the fact that he practises the local culture. Despite this, Prince acknowledges his awareness that the Rohingya identity is not something he can ignore, even if the Malaysian identity is preferable, as seen in Excerpt 3.

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Excerpt 3 1

I:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

P: I: P: I: P: I: P:

9 10 I: 11 12 13 P: 14 I: 15 P: 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

What does being Malaysian mean? When you say you’re a Malaysian, what does that mean? Is it because you’re born here? Yea, I’m born here. Any other reason why you call yourself Malaysian? I speak the language and I (.) I follow the law and… the culture over here. Which culture? ((laughs)) Yea, follow… All the cultures? Yea, all the cultures. I have to yea, I respect so, I have to follow=I mean since I am (.) been here for a while. I, I have adapted (to) the culture, so yeah, that’s why I call myself, consider [myself a Malaysian. [So, if let’s say one day you got a, a permanent, you got citizenship, Malaysian citizenship, would you still prefer to be called Malaysian or Rohingya? [If let’s say you [Rohingya Malaysian. Okay, why with the Rohingya? Because I, I don’t want them to know like my half identity, you know. When I say I’m Malaysian, I’m like half. It’s like not complete. I’m hiding the other half of myself. When I say the other half, then they will ask, ‘Then what is Rohingya?’. This and that. Then I don’t know what to answer. But once I get like (.) um, Malaysian, perm=um, like real citizen, then I can say Rohingya. I’m not sure whether I will become (.) really become citizen here or not. So, how if I say I’m Rohingya and then later oh, I don’t have it. I mean, I’m Malaysian now then later, Malaysian now because when I say later, I don’t have an IC, then what would it be? I’ll be back to where I was.

In this excerpt, which is a continuation of the discussion with the interviewer on Prince’s preference for referring to himself as a Malaysian, he provides the justification for his legitimacy as a Malaysian in lines 2–8. Besides being born in Malaysia, he speaks the language and follows the local laws and ‘all the cultures’. When the interviewer asks him to choose between being known as a Malaysian or a Rohingya (11), Prince resists being forced into either category, preferring instead to introduce a third option and what he considers to be his complete identity, ‘Rohingya Malaysian’ (13). In reality, this identity is not a viable or valid identity as Rohingyas have not been legally recognised as citizens in both Myanmar and Bangladesh, who have both been trying to push them back into each other’s territories for years, and are merely given permission for a temporary stay in Malaysia (Amnesty International 2016; Human

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Rights Watch 2020; Hoelzl 2020). The reason Prince provides for this new identity is because merely taking up either the Malaysian or the Rohingya identity would mean that he was ‘hiding’ part of himself or existing as ‘half’ a person: ‘Because I, I don’t want them to know like my half identity, you know. When I say I’m Malaysian, I’m like half. It’s like not complete. I’m hiding the other half of myself.’ From line 10, beginning with the interviewer’s question, both she and Prince play out a hypothetical situation in which he can choose his identity freely. He rejects the choice to ‘hide’ half of his identity as either Malaysian with no Rohingya identity or a Rohingya that exists as an illegal or non-Malaysian. In line 18, ‘they’, presumably Malaysians, are voiced asking him to explain what a Rohingya is, and here, Prince’s response—‘Then I don’t know what to answer’—alludes to the conflicting metanarratives on and uncertainty surrounding the identity and origins of the Rohingya people (Ahmed 2010). Prince then moves the focus onto the subject of citizenship and the temporary ‘IC’ (identification card), explaining that he would only feel comfortable publicly calling himself a Rohingya if he secured Malaysian citizenship. Prince returns to the subject of citizenship and the IC numerous times during his interview, discussing at length his parents’ protracted stay in Malaysia without any sign of obtaining citizenship and expressing the frustration he feels at being stuck in this stateless position. This lack of access to institutionalised cultural capital explains Prince’s reliance on linguistic and cultural knowledge to secure cultural capital.

14.3.2 Malaysian Identity For Prince and John, taking up Malaysian identity or the emphasis on their Malaysianness are strategic and intentional moves to attain a sense of belonging. Prince explains that he often told other people that he is a Malaysian to avoid awkward questions and make his ‘life easier’: Yeah, I do consider myself as a Malaysian. I mean even if I don’t say myself as Malaysian then I’ll be recognised as a refugee. And if they ask why, what is a refugee? I hate to answer that question. Because I have to go in detail, what is refugee, where did they came from, what is this, what is that? UNHCR … I have to explain all these kinds of things, so to make my life easy and the person life easier, I just said ‘Malaysian’. They won’t ask me any more questions. Boom. Finish. Easier.

John also makes the connection between belonging and living life without ‘too many hindrances’. Belonging means uh to me … to be able to … perform little everyday tasks you know, just … to … to be able to enjoy the things that … in a particular place without too many hindrances. And to be able to identify with the people … and the environment.

The ability to assimilate successfully into the local community is an important theme in both respondents’ narratives, and for Prince the key to achieving that lies in assuming a public Malaysian identity. He discusses this through the description of hypothetical situations in Excerpts 4 and 5.

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Excerpt 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

P: People here very warm, very nice. Yeah, they’re very nice. It’s just some people, some obviously like the minority of the… will assume we are just um, like people who are staying here without, aimless, I mean like chicken with no heads. ((laughs)) They – I don’t know how to, how to really describe us. But they don’t look us in a positive way. Yeah, they don’t look at us in a good way. I: So, you don’t feel part of the Malaysian community at all lah? P: No. Not really. I: Unless you put on your fake self, right?= P: =Yeah. [Then, yeah I: [Then, P: They’ll like, they’ll like accept me. I: So, if you, one day you go out and you say, ‘Yeah, actually I’m Indian’, so then you feel Malaysian? More, [treated like a Malaysian? P: [Yeah, kinda. Yeah, they treat me differently actually.

In Excerpt 4, Prince is responding to the interviewer’s question about what he thinks about the Malaysian people in general. After saying Malaysians are nice, he then singles out the minority (‘some people’), who ‘will assume … people who are staying here (refugees) … aimless, I mean like chicken with no heads’ (3) and who ‘don’t look us in a positive way’ (5). The interviewer then presents her assumption in the form of a question in lines 6 and 8: ‘So, you don’t feel part of the Malaysian community at all lah? … Unless you put on your fake self, right?’ Prince agrees and offers the reason in line 11: ‘they’ll like accept me’. The interviewer then offers a hypothetical situation of her own to Prince in the next two lines: ‘So, if you, one day you go out and you say, “Yeah, actually I’m Indian”, so then you feel Malaysian? More, treated like a Malaysian?’ Prince corroborates this conclusion with ‘Yeah, they treat me differently actually’ (14), with the use of ‘actually’ to support this statement as fact. His narrative continues into Excerpt 5: Excerpt 5 1 P: Yeah, actually it how, that’s how it works. When you hide your true identity, they’ll be like so different to you. 2 I: When you say different, what do you mean? Besides the look and the things they say about you or to you, what [else? 3 P: [They will say that, okay, first they will say, 4 if I say I am a Rohingya, then they will say, they will never, not ever, ever say good thing about Rohingya.

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They will say, ‘You know, last week ah what happened in the duh-duhduh-dah, in this place, you know I saw in news, you know the Rohingya people, they’ve been doing this nonsense, this and that.’ ‘Oh! Yeah. You are right.’ I just say like, ‘Oh yeah, mmm okay. (.) Oh, I see.’ That’s how my reaction and I try to avoid them and try to go away and they keep the conversation on and on and (.) it goes on my head. I just can’t do anything.

His assertion in line 1 that the people he speaks to will change their behaviour based on the identity he has assumed—‘When you hide your true identity, they’ll be like so different to you’—prompts the interviewer to ask for clarification as to what he means by ‘different’, and she mentions some possible ways people might display their differing behaviour towards him, ‘Besides the look and the things they say about you or to you, what else’ (2). He then proceeds to mention some negative things ‘they’ usually say about Rohingya in lines 3–6. Here, ‘they’ are positioned as active speakers and voiced accordingly (‘They will say …’), while Prince is positioned in the narrative as a passive listener. He voices himself in line 7 concurring (‘“Oh! Yeah. You are right”’) but being noncommittal about it (‘I just say like, “Oh yeah, mmm okay. (.) Oh, I see”’). Lines 8–9 again emphasise his positioning within the narrative as not being in control (‘I just can’t do anything’) of the conversation that is described going ‘on and on … it goes on [sic] my head’. In contrast, John presents his Malaysian identity as something quite natural, describing himself in some aspects as ‘more Malaysian’ than other Malaysian school friends because he speaks like a Malaysian as he does here in Excerpt 6. Excerpt 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

I: So, how much of Myanmar culture do you retain in terms of maybe festivals, food… anything? J: I think the only thing I retain is food. Apart from that, from my music that I listen to, from the– way I dress to the way I… talk… to my perception of… everything I guess I’m more Malaysian than… than Myanmar. I: OK. [So then–] J: [In FACT I think] I’m more Malaysian than some people in my school. (I laughs) Like… for example, like in terms of speaking Malay right… my class particularly, there’s this one guy who… has been to international (school) his whole life… his whole life just been in Cempaka for his whole life…

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9 10

so… when he speaks Malay right… he speaks as if it was written. Like, ((laughs)) goreng pisang’ (I want to buy fried banana) 11 like– he will speak with– yea… [it’s just weird] 12 I: [Like a . . .] child lah or learning to read, right. 13 J: And I would– ((hh)) I’m better than him in– in Malay definitely.

In lines 2–6, John talks about which culture he most subscribes to, which is the Malaysian culture. Apart from Myanmar food (2), he is very Malaysian in other ways, such as dressing, speaking and perception (3–4). The use of ‘in fact’ in line 6 in a loud tone signals the start of the story that explains how he is ‘more Malaysian than some people’ in his school, which centres on ‘this one guy’ in his class in lines 8–11. The classmate is described as having spent ‘his whole life’ in the international school (8). The effect of that is ‘he speaks Malay … as if it was written’ (9) and John then voices his friend in line 10, imitating his friend’s Malay by speaking slowly and deliberately: ‘Saya mau beli…. ((laughs)) goreng pisang’. The basic Malay sentence and the deliberate way in which John says it functions to illustrate to the interviewer his friend’s lack of proficiency in Malay. His laughter in the middle of the sentence indicates that he finds this funny and then evaluates it in line 11 as ‘weird’. The coda to the story in line 13—‘I’m better than him in … in Malay definitely’—is also evaluative in nature as he makes a direct comparison between himself and his classmate to support his initial claim in line 6 that he is more Malaysian than some Malaysian people. This statement is also used to justify why he chooses to tell this story in answer to the interviewer’s question. The story allows John to qualify what he means by being a Malaysian and how he is able to support the claim that he is Malaysian. He compares himself to someone who is a Malaysian citizen, yet does not exhibit the Malaysian quality of being able to speak the national language. The implication for John’s negotiation of identity is that nationality alone may not be enough for someone to qualify as truly Malaysian. This story serves to reinforce that idea of John’s Malaysian-ness despite him not being a citizen of the country.

14.3.3 Refugee Identity Despite repeatedly emphasising their Malaysian-ness, both respondents also frequently take up the identity of the refugee. While speaking about the plight of the Rohingya, Prince uses the pronoun ‘we’ to include himself into the larger Rohingya community: But here, can do a job, even though it’s kind of illegal, it IS illegal for us, for Rohingyas to do job. But that is the only way for us to survive, I mean what else can we do? I mean we cannot indulge in robbery and those kind of criminal thing [sic]. So, even though it’s illegal, to support ourselves, our family, we have to do this, we have do a job even though it’s illegal.

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However, as can be seen in Excerpt 7, Prince’s understanding of the Rohingya is second-hand knowledge based on things he has seen in pictures and what his parents have told him. Excerpt 7 1

I:

So, I mean, you have, do you feel any=do you have any emotions about your home country? 2 P: I do have an emotion, I do, I do have. 3 When I see the pictures, people who are staying, Rohingyas who are still staying there, 4 compared to myself and them, they’re really in need. They really need help. 5 It really a shattering experience when you see those kids over there, 6 running around naked, some of them having all sort of diseases and stuff. 7 My own people, Rohingya, over there. 8 I: Um, do your parents tell you anything, any stories about Myanmar? 9 P: Wait, let me remember. 10 I: Cultural stuff, anything. 11 P: Cultural… not really. 12 But they, but they always tell that people over there are terrorised, they’re being killed, they’re being slaughtered. 13 And when they try to escape, they like… bombed. 14 So yeah, most of them is like more of, more on violence, which I can’t=I don’t really listen to those things. 15 Sometimes I have to listen because they will=they’re saying in front of me and I can’t close my ears and yeah, try to not listen, I try not to listen to them but I have no choice. When asked about his feelings about his home country, Prince talks exclusively about the Rohingya being victims of the violence in Myanmar. The Rohingya identity that Prince supposedly embraces here is somewhat problematic. The description he provides about his people is based on pictures he has seen of diseased and naked children (3, 5–6), which is consistent with the type of images and representations common in discourse among humanitarian agencies of the refugee as a mute and helpless victim (Rajaram 2002; Johnson 2011). In this view, the refugee is a victim of violence and is most often represented by a woman or a child. Prince does not have any actual personal experience of the Rohingya with which to form his own opinion and understanding. He has, however, taken advantage of his refugee status by applying for resettlement. John admits to not revealing his refugee identity to people he meets from the start but stresses that he does not conceal it when the conversation demands it. He explains that unlike other refugees he appears Malaysian to other Malaysians, and therefore

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has the reverse experience of having to convince people that he was a refugee, not a Malaysian citizen. Personally for me particularly right, at first even the first time they see me … they see me as a Malaysian. So, I don’t have to play that role you know. It’s like, they see me … I think for me it’s … I’m the opposite to the people that you’ve actually met ’cause those people they … people don’t see them as Malaysians. But for me they see me as Malaysian but because I’m not, I have to change the way they think about me. So that they know that I’m uh … I’m culturally Malaysian but not Malaysian like fundamentally and just … yeah ((laughs)) yeah.

Here, John takes on the refugee identity but still differentiates himself from other refugees (‘those people’) who are not seen as Malaysians. He represents himself as a refugee who is ‘culturally Malaysian’ though not ‘fundamentally’, acknowledging his bicultural upbringing and constructing a kind of dual identity that incorporates Malaysian-ness into the refugee identity.

14.4 Belonging, Identity and the Process of Becoming The multiplicity of identities and subjectivities found in the narratives of John and Prince is also a common theme found in research among youths and secondgeneration refugees and migrants. Chatty (2007) observes in accounts of refugee youths living in North Africa and the Middle East that efforts to belong exist alongside the acute awareness of their exclusion. Refugee youths, like many secondgeneration migrants, must also constantly choose between embracing the ethnic and cultural identity of their parents and the identity of the host country (Portes and Zhou 1993; Jodeyr 2003). But unlike essentialist views of belonging, that it is something predetermined and binding, the findings in this study complement the social constructionist perspective that identity and belonging are constantly moving in the social space as the self moves through the process of becoming and being as well as simultaneous ‘identification and disidentification’ with a multitude of available identities (Kumsa 2006: 246). Both Prince and John rely heavily on embodied cultural capital to gain access into the local community because they have no access to objectified cultural capital (material possessions) and little claim to institutionalised cultural capital (credentials and status). Their reliance on linguistic capital can be seen in their mastery of the local language and use of the Malaysian accent and slang. For John, his linguistic capital allows him to assimilate into Malaysian society and overtly reject being positioned as an outsider. Prince uses his ability to converse in multiple languages to conceal his Rohingya identity in order to avoid hostile situations. Social capital can be understood as resources or value obtained through a network of institutionalised or more informal mutual relationships (Coleman 1988). Both Prince and John refer to the social networks that they associate with most often in their narratives that allow them to legitimise their claim for particular identities.

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Prince retains more salient links to the Rohingya community, so he has access to being Rohingya and frequently positions himself within the collective Rohingya identity. However, he also speaks about occasions when he prefers to assume other identities when interacting with people from other social groups to avoid social exclusion. John prefers the company of different groups of Malaysian friends over Myanmar people but maintains his Bamar heritage through his interaction with his parents. Close social networks have been identified in research among refugees to provide them with emotional and social support, but more importantly to reduce their sense of exclusion from society (Zetter and Pearl 2000; Sales 2002; Spicer 2008). Prince frames his narratives within larger or metanarratives frequently found among Rohingya refugees, who despite having spent decades living in Malaysia still struggle to establish a concrete sense of self and identity due to the temporal and uncertain nature of their situation. The issue of the IC and proper legal documentation has been discussed in research among the Rohingya as a salient issue and a source of frustration in the community (Azis 2014). This lack of legal documentation stifles the Rohingya’s social and financial mobility as they are perennially trapped in the space usually occupied by low-skilled migrant workers, who are seen as ‘temporary and expendable’ (ibid.: 843). Although John appears more comfortable with his refugee identity compared to Prince, he repeatedly distinguishes himself from other refugees in his narratives, stating that his assimilation into society enables him to take up this dual identity. At the time of the interview, John was pursuing his A levels having won a scholarship due to his outstanding grades in secondary school. Numerous studies from education and psychology note that a bicultural orientation had a positive impact on the educational, psychological and social outcomes of migrant and refugee youth (White and Glick 2000; Zhou and Bankston 1998; Portes and Macleod 1996) and John’s situation seems to correspond to the findings of those studies.

14.5 Conclusion This chapter has shown that the process of negotiating multiple identities in secondgeneration refugee experiences involves conflicts and tensions. Malaysia’s refusal to recognise refugees creates a tension for refugee youths between not having an official or institutional Malaysian identity yet requiring them to function successfully in society. While refugees in the West are observed to rely frequently on their institutional refugee identities in third countries because they bring them many benefits, refugees in Malaysia are legally unable to do so. However, the two youths discussed in this chapter navigated this tension by drawing on other resources and subjectivities available to them during social interactions, which have helped them to cope with their liminal situation to some degree. Resources such as linguistic skills and social networks with local communities that are available, especially to long-term or second-generation refugees living in transit in Malaysia, would significantly improve the quality of their lives and reduce their

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sense of alienation from the host communities. Studies have shown that refugees who isolate themselves from local communities risk increasing the discrimination they face because to others they seem unwilling to integrate (Zetter et al. 2005). Better and deeper relationships with local communities could lead to more employment and economic opportunities for refugees in countries such as Malaysia where there is no formal system for managing and caring for them. This is crucial as downward mobility, especially for second-generation migrants including refugees, has been primarily attributed to decreasing educational and occupational attainments (Gans 2009; Haller et al. 2011). The effects of downward mobility on migrant communities are far reaching and negatively impact them socially, mentally and economically (Gans 2009). Finally, it is hoped that this chapter has provided some insights into the importance of offering refugees means to negotiate their identity or refugeeness by taking up multiple ways of being, rather than repeatedly portraying them as passive subjects without agency (Kallio et al. 2019) and in need of constant external assistance (Pupavac 2006; Rajaram 2002). Acknowledgements This study was funded by the University of Malaya Bantuan Kecil Penyelidikan Research Grant (BK053-2017).

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Charity Lee is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. Her main areas of research include narrative analysis and discourse analysis, particularly involving social practices surrounding migrant and vulnerable groups, as well as narrative methodology. Her ongoing research projects include arts-based narrative research among refugees, doctor–patient communication in primary health care consultations, and communication practices of journalists relating to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Her recent publications include: Media representation of online maid hiring system (SMO): A critical discourse analysis. Media Education (Mediaobrazovanie), 60(3) (2020, coauthor); Representing migration in ASEAN: Challenges to regional integration. In ASEAN post-50: Emerging issues and challenges,

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ed. Aida Idris and Nurliana Kamaruddin (2019); Translation technology adoption: evidence from a postgraduate programme for student translators in China. Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 28(2) (2019, coauthor); and the coedited book, Discursive approaches to politics in Malaysia (forthcoming). Zuraidah Mohd Don was senior professor of linguistics and English language at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, and also served as dean (2009–2015). After her retirement, she was appointed adjunct professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. She set up the Council of Language Deans at the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education, and became its founding chair. She was and remains the first chair of the English Language Standards and Quality Council. Her research covers a wide field centred on the study of language, ranging from discourse analysis to applied linguistics. She is the editor of a language-in-education policy and planning document which is currently being implemented throughout Malaysia.

Chapter 15

Expressing Alternative Modernities in a New Nation through Iban Popular Music, 1960s–1970s Connie Lim Keh Nie and Made Mantle Hood

Abstract The Iban are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Sarawak, Malaysia, constituting nearly a third of the state’s total population. They have experienced various forms of modernity since the Brooke Raj established the British colonial presence in 1841, through to its status as a British Crown colony, and then under the auspices of the Malaysian nation-state from 1963 onwards, all of which further incorporated indigenous peoples into national, regional and global relations. Under these different forms of governance—and the far-reaching social, economic, political and cultural transformations they unleashed—the Iban, as a self-defined ethnic group, have both adopted and adapted in recent decades to meet demanding challenges, most notably of nation-building and the idea of ‘independence through Malaysia’. Drawing on a vast cultural heritage, one of the most vital means of projecting Iban responses to change has been popular music. This chapter examines a selection of Iban popular songs composed in the 1960s and 1970s which, we argue, reflected and helped shape the history of Sarawak in that era. Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by Iban-language programming on Radio Sarawak, popular music lyrics carried messages commenting on modernity: the changing relationship to ancestral lands, the impact of development, the rapid acceleration of internal migration and Sarawak’s place in the broader nation-state. In doing so, popular music lyrics offered a historical narrative of Iban people in Sarawak and what an ‘alternative modernity’ meant in a postcolonial world. Keywords Malaysia · Sarawak · Iban · Modernity · Postcolonialism · Popular music

C. Lim (B) Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Kota Samarahan, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] M. M. Hood Research Centre for Asia-Pacific Music, Tainan National University of the Arts, Tainan City, Taiwan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_15

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15.1 Introduction Sarawak was granted self-governance on 22 July 1963 and membership of the newly formed Federation of Malaysia on 16 September the same year. The new state faced many challenges, including overcoming the legacy of economic underdevelopment and the bringing together of an ethnically diverse population. The Iban are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Sarawak, both at the time of independence and today, constituting nearly a third of the state’s total population. Iban songs written during this period, part of a vibrant popular culture, were seen as a response to national development in which the lyrics depicted Sarawak as an integral part of the postcolonial realities of the new nation-state of Malaysia. Songs such as ‘Tanda Merdeka’ (Symbol of Independence), ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’ (My Motherland) and ‘Pasar Simunjan’ (Simunjan Town) articulated Iban responses to a rapidly emerging national identity. These songs cannot be viewed as purely commercial products because they were recorded solely for radio broadcast. Although they were undoubtedly a form of entertainment used to fill airtime between programmes, they were also the sounds of modernity that played an interesting role among the Iban as a popular expression in support of nation-building. Through the lens of modernity, this chapter examines how Iban popular music in the 1960s and 1970s articulated sentiments of nationalism as Sarawak began to negotiate its space and voice in the new nation. In order to make the link between nation-building and Iban popular music, and the correlation between song lyrics and modernity, it is necessary to provide an account of what the trajectory of the modern means in this particular context. In social science theory, the word ‘modern’ describes a recognisable historical rupture and is often used in chronologically locating and establishing historical records in a society (Hall 1995). Using modern as a heuristic marker, as an ongoing argument approaching what modernity means analytically—economically and also politically (Habermas 1991; Wagner 2006)—is essential in understanding the extension of the modern West into a non-Western periphery by rejecting the Western approach based on a Euro-American model of modernity. Born in the West, modernity has travelled across the world with the identifiable social values and practices, forms of culture as well as institutional organisations which helped form the concept used in the present (Gaonkar 1999). Modernity can be viewed as ‘a set of transformations’ that happen anywhere in any particular culture (Bhambra 2007: 7). The term modernity focuses on how approaches and conditions of life are conveyed and communicated through experience. From a social organisation point of view, Anthony Giddens (1990: 5) sees modernity as the ‘results of historical transition’. Stressing this historical transition, it involves processes of transformation, through which people experience changes in social institutions and development from the premodern to the modern in various historical phases. Antecedent relations between time, space and place contribute to the development of social relations. Concurrently, defining the ‘threshold of modernity’, Michel Foucault (1980: 143) says the results of the development of ‘bio-power’—the new power over life—were utilised on a daily basis in social institutions. While analysing the discourse of development within a

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culture, power relations and social institutions are integrated. This is when ‘multiple power’ occurs and when politics, economics and culture are intertwined. Instead of escaping from the legacy of the Western modernity discourse, we need to think of modernity as a discursive concept for emergent social formations throughout the Southeast Asian region. The binary between the ‘West’ and the ‘Rest’ is problematic considering the complexity of the time and space modernity occupies. Indeed, the modern has many identical features with the West. Progress and development in Sarawak, Malaysia or elsewhere in a non-Western cultural setting exhibit the nature of mimicry, an act of ‘imitation’, ‘replication’ or ‘catch up’ (Ong 1996). In this manner, tracking the development of Sarawak optimistically, changes in the landscape towards modernity and the expansion of urban spaces demonstrate that social relations there are already inclined towards a modern Western trajectory.

15.2 Alternative Modernity as a Non-Western Concept With regard to alternative modernity as a non-Western concept, let us consider how ‘alternative’ and ‘modernity’ fit together to form a framework for this chapter. Western modernity has a long historical provenance. Defining modernity through occidental achievements, the triumph of modernity is seen, for example, through the establishment of educational institutions, the formation of democratic governments, or providing better amenities and the building of material infrastructure. Alternative as an adjective for modernity suggests a multiplicity of peripheral views, positionings and interpretations that simultaneously mirror mainstream or dominant views. Modernity can be ambiguous, manifold with multiple interpretations. ‘Multiple modernities’ or ‘alternative modernities’, as expressed by S.N. Eisenstadt (2000: 2), mean that non-Western societies have developed ‘distinctly modern dynamics and modes of interpretation’. Relating modernity to the globalisation of mass societies, Robert W. Hefner (1998) sees modernity as multiple and distinct from tradition. Defending multiple modernities, Peter Wagner (2012) analyses the multiplicity of modernities, developing a platform where the sociology of modernity could be understood and applied. Alternative modernity comprises the dynamic field of practices and the ambivalent understandings of progress, social development and changes, novelty, technology and human agency. Resisting the singularity of meaning of modernity from the West, alternative modernity is used to establish the local, seeking a new way of studying the relationship between the two, and to focus on a nation-state as it grapples with a developing and modernising world. In this case study, it refers to Sarawak’s development towards modernisation within the postcolonial Malaysian nation-state. Modernisation on its own does not account for the complexity of factors or the processes involved in establishing a new Sarawak government while simultaneously balancing power among an ethnically diverse population comprising Iban, Chinese, Malay, Bidayuh, Melanau, Orang Ulu and other indigenous groups.

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Versions of re-presented modernity constantly undergo change, continuously generating new modernities from the past, present and future. As suggested by Raymond Williams (1981: 203–205) on the subject of cultural change, the power and influence of modernity towards other cultures are conditioned by interchange between the residual and the emergent. According to Aihwa Ong (1999: 35) there are kinds of modernity that are (1) constituted by different sets of relations between the developmental or postdevelopmental state, its population, and global capital; and (2) constructed by political and social elites who appropriate ‘Western’ knowledges and re-present them as truth claims about their own countries.

Apart from using the original Western modernity as a yardstick, other modernities from the past to the present may be employed as points of reference in alternative modernities. Perceptions about the residual and emergent, between cultural practices and people’s subjectivities are controversial, and this includes the creation of a secular world that may deny the spiritual and religious (Taylor 2001). By the same token, Charles Taylor understands culture as ‘alternative modernities’, a new practice to be taken on as it reflects each other in different significant ways (Taylor 1999a: 233). What is proposed by Taylor (1999a, 1999b, 2001) is not totally new as it evokes dualities such as sacred/secular, local/global and modern/traditional. These dualities further suggest ‘persistent mutualisms’ in performing arts where music and dance are not easily separated into distinct categories (cf. Hood 2017). To think holistically along the suggested proposal of alternative modernities, it is necessary to discuss the notions of convergence and divergence, junctures and departures in the process of modernity. As proposed by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (1999: 16), ‘an alternative modernities perspective complicates this neat dichotomy by foregrounding that narrow but critical band of variations consisting of site-specific “creative adaptations” on the axis of convergence (or societal modernization)’. It is in this context that alternative modernities takes place. This double relationship between convergence and divergence, with their counterintuitive dialectic between similarity and difference, makes the site of alternative modernities also the site of double negotiations—between societal modernization and cultural modernity and between hidden capacities for the production of similarity and difference. Thus, alternative modernities produce combinations and recombinations that are endlessly surprising. (ibid.: 18)

Themes covered in convergence include the bureaucratic state, market economy and institutional arrangements, whereas divergence centres on life experience and cultural expression on the road towards alternative modernities. Considering these recombinations in the production of difference, Malaysian modernity is not determined and derived from Western modernity without interrogation and negotiation to make it more appropriate in the context of national and cultural aspirations (Kahn 2001). Societies situated in Southeast Asia have cultural legacies that call for different trajectories of modernity than those of Europe and

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North America. Navigating the course of modernity as a ‘cultural turn’ demands a closer analysis of its substantive content. Problematising radical differences between an East–West dichotomy requires engaging with theoretical concepts that see Western modernity negotiated on the ground. As noted by Wendy Mee and Joel S. Kahn (2012: 1), ‘Indonesian and Malaysian modernities cannot be viewed as merely derivative of a European/Western modernity.’ Instead we encounter enduring social and cultural affinities while traversing the geographic expanse between Borneo, Java, Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia. These affinities bind peoples across space and time as much as modernity does. Differences are seen in the classification of the people of this region into ethnic groups, racial categories and national identities. Yet despite overlapping forms and characteristics of ethnic groups, there are also intersecting ties of language, religion, migration and commerce, essentially ‘leaves of the same tree’ (Andaya 2008). In Southeast Asia, the major effects of colonial rule have been the catalyst for urban development. Heightening the scope of urban life for Southeast Asian peoples, an interlocking network of ethnically heterogeneous cities, towns, and small trading bazaars emerged to serve the political, administrative, industrial, and economic needs of the colonial regimes. Old settlements were transformed into modern towns and new urban settlements were founded around forts and bays; along rivers, roads, or railroad lines; and adjacent to newly opened mines or plantations. (Lockard 1987: ix)

Rapid urbanisation has significantly contributed to the modern aspects of Southeast Asian history. Arguments positioned within time-bounded debates hastily merge modernisation and what it stands for in alternative modernities (Geschiere et al. 2008). On the other hand, ‘alternative conceptions of modernity’ are also proposed by Bart Barendregt to problematise nation-centred narratives about the history of popular musics in Southeast Asia. Barendregt (2014: 6) observes modernity as the production of new fashions, markets and lifestyles that offer ‘a glimpse of how and why people have taken up ideas of the modern, how it is made, unmade and remade, paying ample attention to how such reconfigurations may serve various claims and are constantly haunted by yet others’. Kahn (2001, 2003), for his part, suggests that while the concept of modernity is different from the West as an exemplary modernity, it nonetheless remains tied as a formulation in intellectual debates as well as government agendas. Adopting a synchronic approach, the history of popular music can be reconstructed through historical documentation and related developments over the past decades (Hamm 2004). In terms of musical style and vocal expression, modernity has the power to transform popular aesthetic expression, often to the detriment of indigenous vocal styles (Hood 2014). Following Kahn (2001, 2003), Mee and Kahn (2012) and Barendregt (2014) in their conceptualisations of ‘alternative modernity’ in the Southeast Asian context, the next section takes into account the historical and cultural background of the Iban who have undergone a myriad of experiences while expressing themselves through popular music and song lyrics under the rubric of a rapidly transitioning Malaysian nation-state.

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15.3 Alternative Modernity Positioning among the Iban in Sarawak It was the Brooke Raj, in a little over a century from 1841 to 1946, that paved the way for the administration, control and regulation of the Iban as a sociocultural group within Sarawak society. The unusual political context of close partnerships between the Brooke rajahs and Christian missionaries brought the Iban to the road of modernity. At the same time, the Brooke Raj altered Iban institutions in order to prepare them to meet the challenges and demands of a modern economy (Kedit 1980). Mohd. Taib Osman (1989: 18) notes: The longhouse way of life may remain with the Iban for some time yet to come but the modernizing process will surely overtake it. If the roads do not come to the longhouse, the traditional water-ways will be channelled which will bring change.

Modernisation has penetrated the lifeworlds of the Iban since the Brooke Raj was established in the mid-nineteenth century. The Iban were introduced to modern infrastructure and facilities in conjunction with the development plans of the government. For example, agents of change along the path to modernity included the creation of an extensive road system, the establishment of institutions such as schools and hospitals, radio and television stations, and the construction of hydroelectric dams for power generation. Such changes affected processes like the spread of Christianity and education, the status of the Iban language, economic transformation, cultural representation, urbanisation and political administration. As detailed in this chapter, agents of change extended to expressions of Iban identity through modernity and its reflection in the creation of popular music. One of the Iban responses to their changed surroundings and experiences is through song lyrics. Using a historical method, this discussion looks at a small selection of the lyrics of songs recorded for Radio Sarawak and the testimony of some Iban cultural bearers who were actively involved in the Iban popular music scene.

15.4 Radio Sarawak and the Rise of Popular Music The establishment of the Iban section of Radio Sarawak in 1954 played a vital role in amplifying and disseminating modernity and popular culture to the Iban people. In the early days, the Iban section broadcast for an hour per day, from 7.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. Radio quickly penetrated the Iban soundscape, eventually inspiring them to record their own popular music for broadcast. The station became a decisive tool in information dissemination for communities residing in both rural and urban areas. During the early years of Radio Sarawak (working with the assistance of the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC]), Malay, Indonesian, American and European popular music was the station’s staple. The broadcasts also served as a platform for news and information on subjects such as farming and animal husbandry,

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while there was room for some Iban folklore (Postill 2006: 46–47). As a governmentbacked radio station all programmes were strictly vetted prior to broadcast. As noted, imported music and song lyrics infiltrated Iban soundscapes and contributed to the construction of notions of modernity during the 1950s and especially the 1960s and 1970s. This music must have been something ‘strange’ or perhaps ‘exotic’, and at the same time something new and exciting for Iban ears, hearts and minds. The radio was affordable for people living in longhouses, which allowed them to be connected to a wider world. When compared to Iban folklore and oral tradition, which were presented in the form of epic sung poems such as renong, timang and pantun, Western music had dance rhythms, unusual harmonies and covered a broad spectrum of styles from swing and ballads to rock and pop. It was a period when Iban youth were grappling with multiple identity markers and aspiring to be acquainted with a new world of popular culture disseminated from the world of the radio. Catching the wave of trendy pop music, Iban desired to be modern and initially mimicked popular forms. However, some quickly created their own popular music style. For example, singers from the Linang family—Senorita Linang and Pauline Linang—were brought up listening to Western popular music. As an Iban beauty pageant winner, Senorita Linang was ‘seen in the public eye as a central icon’ (Lim 2017: 245). Among her favourite artists were Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. She often appropriated their tunes and wrote Iban lyrics for them. By doing this, she was able to express ideas in their own language while using the melodies of modern popular culture. As a leading institution of the state media, Radio Sarawak played an important role in the modernisation of Malaysia. Right from the establishment of the Iban section, its broadcasts were a platform for sustaining the Iban language. The radio bore witness to how ‘the uniqueness of a reinvented culture heritage’ took new forms in the creation of popular music (Postill 2008: 214). In a series of important studies, John Postill (1998, 2006, 2008) has shown how ‘little by little, a national subculture is made’ through the creative interaction between various forms of media— radio, television, language publications—and nation-building. In this manner, the Iban negotiated and reconstructed their identity and cultural politics during a period of far-reaching Malaysianisation. During the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), official news and information were broadcast by the government-controlled Radio Malaya (O’Ballance 1966). This was during the intensified psychological warfare period instigated by the Information Services in Malaya when information was spread through radio transmission. It was a time when psywar tactics were enlisted by the Iban section to fight against the insurgents. A similar role was played by the radio during the Indonesia– Malaysia Konfrontasi which only ended in 1965. At the same time, Radio Sarawak put an emphasis on producing Iban-language programmes for secondary school students. This was part of a shift from war propaganda to a ‘mental revolution of the people’, with the aim of educating people with health and agricultural knowledge and economic development information (Postill 2006: 49). With independence through Malaysia in 1963, Radio Sarawak became Radio Malaysia Sarawak. The overall thrust of programming highlighted the new political

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circumstances and the aspirations that accompanied the dawning of a new epoch, and the Iban community found its place in this historic moment. Similar to the case of Indonesia, Iban popular music was created to cater to political changes and this continued to expedite government agendas in the coming decades (Barendregt and van Zanten 2002). Due to increased demand, the need for popular music as a form of leisure entertainment sung in the Iban language increased. Iban popular music was thus written in response to the needs of the time, and recorded and broadcast for entertainment. At the same time, it was also used as a modern form of media in nation-building among the dispersed Iban communities.

15.5 Songs about Sarawak as a Part of the Federation of Malaysia Singers and songwriters showed their interest in proclaiming Sarawak as a state within the federation. Reflections on a newly found independence for the people of Sarawak featured strongly in Iban popular songs from the 1960s and 1970s. It is evident from song lyrics that independence gave Sarawak a new postcolonial reality. Songs such as ‘Menua Sarawak’ (My Country Sarawak), ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’ (My Motherland), ‘Malaysia Baru’ (A New Malaysia), ‘Oh Sarawak’ and ‘Tanda Merdeka’ (Symbol of Independence) written in the 1960s and 1970s contain lyrics that reflect this. At the same time, these songs represented the aspirations of Iban people who witnessed an awakening of political consciousness and marked their experience of significant national developments. The Iban recording artist, Christopher Kelly, responded to independence by portraying Sarawak’s new status in songs such as ‘Agi Idup Agi Ngelaban’ (As Long as I Live, I Will Fight) and ‘Tanda Merdeka’. His lyrics highlight the tension between the hopes brought about by independence and the realities of the ongoing conflict with Indonesia. The first verse of ‘Agi Idup Agi Ngelaban’ is as follows: Diatu kitai udah Merdeka Pegai perintah serakup Malaysia Anang sekali bebagi ati Ngetan ke menua sereta enggau negeri

Now that we are independent Governed through the formation of Malaysia Don’t ever be disunited Defending the country and state

The lyrics are straightforward—proclaiming the fact of independence while calling for unity in the face of a foreign enemy. Active during the 1960s, Kelly negotiated an alternative modernity, merging the past achievements of Iban fighters with contemporary developments under a new system of governance. His ‘Tanda Merdeka’ was written in the early 1970s in the Malay pantun style. He likens Bukit Sadok and Rentap—a historic Iban warrior— with the United States launch of the Apollo 11 spaceflight that first landed humans on the moon. There is a direct suggestion that this great scientific achievement is

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similar to the goal of attaining the development of Sarawak. He is merging a striking image of world events with local priorities. Bukit Sadok ti tampak rita Palan Rentap dulu kelia Sakumbang Sarawak udah merdeka Mayoh pemansang udah di-peda

Mount Sadok is famous A place where Rentap’s fort stood Since Sarawak achieved its independence We have seen a lot of development

Palan Rentap dulu kelia Tang diatu nyau nadai agi Mayoh pemansang udah di-peda Rumah baru ti beringkat tinggi

A place where Rentap’s fort stood But now the fort is no longer there We have seen a lot of development New buildings which are many storeys high

Apollo 11 ka terubah iya Nyangkai ka diri ba atas bulan Perintah manah megai menua Semua bansa diau meruan

Apollo 11 is the first To land on the moon The government governs well All the races living well

Nyangkai ka diri ba atas bulan Batu di bai nyadi ka tanda Semua bansa diau meruan Ngerja pengawa enggau ati gaga

The astronaut had landed on the moon Bringing back a rock as proof All the races living well Happy to do their work

Aram meh kitai sama besampi Minta berkat ari petara Pemansang endang deka di beri Ngagai semua pupu raban bansa

Let us all pray together To seek the blessing from God Development surely will be given To all the races in Sarawak

During an interview with Kelly conducted in 2017, he spoke about the inspiration for writing the lyrics of ‘Tanda Merdeka’. Bukit Sadok is famous. It is where a fort is built by an Iban hero named Rentap to fight against James Brooke. This song is like a pantun. I learned about Apollo 11 when it first landed on the moon and brought back a stone from the radio and newspapers. I was thinking, how did he get to the moon? Then I started to write a song. After independence, Sarawak had gone through a stage when I saw many development projects. I saw houses were built of brick, buildings were built of many storeys. If the government is good, our country’s economy will be stable, all the people from different races will have a good life and we will live in peace. (Christopher Kelly, Interview, 28 August 2017)

When Kelly started working in Kuching in 1963 he was a labourer in the construction industry. He personally witnessed and participated in the construction of new buildings such as Electra House, Fata Hotel and Borneo Hotel, providing him with direct inspiration for writing songs. Capturing the process of development in Sarawak, he observed how the popular terraced houses were built after they were introduced in the early 1960s as well as a rapid increase in the number of vehicles, both factors influencing town-planning decisions. Responding to these urban developments, Kelly wrote, ‘Mayoh pemansang udah di-peda / Rumah baru ti beringkat tinggi’ (We have seen a lot of development /

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New buildings which are many storeys high). He articulates his appreciation and acknowledgement of the new government in this regard: ‘Perintah manah megai menua / Semua bansa diau meruan’ (The government governs well / All the races living well), and expresses the hope that people from different races can live together. As a sensitive songwriter who was keenly aware of his surroundings, Kelly closely observed the development of social welfare services. He remarked that the government provided financial aid to the people, as reported by the state government: ‘The ministry also gives direct cash assistance to individuals or families in want, to tide them over a difficult period or situation, and dispenses emergency relief to larger groups affected by civil disasters such as flood, fire, storm, drought, by rice shortage due to crop failure, or by security operations’ (Sarawak State Government 1973: 65). Kelly lived through a time of conflict but also a time when the state government worked vigorously for a peaceful and prosperous life for the people. He urges people to unite and pray to God: ‘Aram meh kitai sama besampi / Minta berkat ari petara’ (Let us all pray together / To seek the blessing from God). In this context, songwriters and singers are mediators between the people and the government. Songs were tools for the dissemination of ideas, spreading both the ideological and real-world aspirations of the people of Sarawak. Oriented towards prosperous development within Malaysia, modernity was closely related to the development pursued by the Sarawak state government. Even before Sarawak became independent, political awareness was gradually developing. In time, this political consciousness found expression in the formation of political parties to ensure that there would be a fully democratic legislature and a ministerial system of government. Therefore, in the process of preparing for independence, constitutional changes were carried out. In other words, songs signalled the sociocultural and socioeconomic changes in motion during the development and modernisation of the political landscape.

15.6 Expressing Love for Sarawak through Song Singing for and about Sarawak during the early period of its integration into Malaysia aroused patriotism and captured the hearts of Iban towards political development in a new nation. Clear and meaningful sentiments of nationalism were articulated in popular songs. ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’, written and sung by Vida Bayang, is one example of Iban expressions of loyalty and love of country with strong sentiments of nationalism towards Sarawak. Articulating modernity through transformation, Vida Bayang embraces the progressive development of Sarawak under the formation of government in a new nation in the following words.

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Tanah ai menua aku Tanah besai sereta sunyi Rumah panjai jarang empuru Tang diau sama seati

My land, my country This land is big, large and peaceful Longhouse residents rarely meet But still live in unity

Maioh sekula udah digaga Endor ngajar kitai bansa Dayak Ngambi kitai semua nemu gawa Bulih pengidup ti menyana

Lots of schools have been built Places where Dayak people are taught In order to master a skill To earn a decent living

Seratus taun ti udah lalu Menoa tu nyau mansang maju Maioh utai udah digaga Kena ngemansang ka kitai bansa Dayak

One hundred years have gone The country is progressing well Lots of development has taken place For the advancement of the Dayak race

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These sentiments are echoed in the lyrics of ‘Menua Sarawak’ sung by Rosana Bichu: ‘Menua Sarawak menua ti baru / Ngiga pemansang enggau pemaju’ (Sarawak is a young country / Still looking forward to development and progress). Again, this signals the sociocultural and socioeconomic changes in motion during this period. These visible spaces expressed by the songwriter were the new territories of governance. They helped open up a symbolic space enticing the diverse peoples of Sarawak into a homeland which was inherited from their ancestors. ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’ was a song learned by school students during the 1960s and 1970s. For example, it was the only Iban song selected for Malaysia sings: Book 2 (Smith 1965). This songbook, compiled by Gloria M. Smith, was used as a reference by all music teachers in Sarawak schools.1 Apart from one Iban song, the songbook contains Melanau, Bidayuh and Kayan songs as well as folk songs from various countries. The memory of singing ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’ was still vivid during an interview with Janet Rata Noel in 2017: ‘I remembered singing the song “Tanah Ai Menua Aku” with the Sarakup Indu choir during my schooldays in Sri Aman. It is a patriotic song and the wordings of the song are still relevant until today’ (Janet Rata Noel, Interview, 24 August 2017).2 The lyrics draw a scene of a sparsely populated Sarawak of the 1960s, and although longhouse-dwellers ‘rarely meet’, the people were living in harmony. The songwriter stresses the agenda of development and especially education, leading to the advance of the Iban (referred to here as Dayak). Iban popular music, then, was one way that nationalism and the nation-building project were merged during the first phase of media production from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Regular motifs included the realities of living in a new state, people adapting themselves and acquiring modernity’s skills and knowledge, and preparing 1

Gloria M. Smith was a Canadian Colombo Plan adviser to Sarawak from 1960 to 1963; she edited the full music teaching syllabus for junior secondary schools (Smith 1964; Yong 2003). 2 Janet Rata Noel is a curator with the Tun Jugah Foundation, which preserves and promotes Iban culture and arts. She is also the curator of Fort Sylvia Museum in Kapit.

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to meet the requirements of the job market while living in a state where the goals of nation-building are critical. Nation-building is a major goal of modernity. The three selected songs—‘Agi Idup Agi Ngelaban’, ‘Tanda Merdeka’ and ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’—suggest that the Iban are in the process of becoming ethnically self-confident, Malaysian and modern all at once (cf. Chua 2007). The field of modernity is determined by the cultural, economic and political necessities given to individuals in relation to the necessities of the system (Parladir and Özkan 2014). Here, the spirit of nationalism in Sarawak is seen through song lyric analysis. Within the Iban territories, song lyrics served as a medium broadcast on the Iban section of Radio Sarawak that portrayed modernity and sentiments about nation-building. ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’ shows clearly that the Iban participated in the conversation about modernity, asserting their connection to Sarawak, expressing a love of country and of their ancestral land. For its part, ‘Tanda Merdeka’ reveals a broader, more inclusive perspective on the formation of a new nation. Its lyrics remind listeners that the nation can only be realised with love towards it and fellow citizens while working together for its continuous progress and development.

15.7 Articulating New Spaces through Song after Independence Directly and indirectly, Iban popular songs also served as ‘propaganda pop’ pushing the government’s urgent but costly agenda towards the development of Sarawak and reflecting on how modernity played a role in new spaces. The lyrics of the Iban song ‘Pasar Simunjan’, sung by Steward Tinggie, describe the situation in Simunjan town in the early 1970s, portraying everyday scenes of shops and markets. The song also proclaims the urgent need for infrastructural development like new roads connecting different places. It also hints at the connections that need to be made among a diversity of ethnicities living in and around the town—‘a lot of people’—comprising mainly Malays, Chinese and Iban. The lyrics convey the simple fact that there was a very minimal road network. In 1958 the government had embarked on a road construction programme and by 1963 the total road length of roads in Sarawak amounted to just 378 miles, with the new Serian–Simanggang road opened to restricted traffic in 1962 (Sarawak State Government 1973: 48).

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Pasar Simunjan chukup rami Maioh kedai, market ikan mega bisi Semina nadai kereta enggau lori Laban jalai raya lalu apin nyadi

Simunjan town, a lot of people A lot of shops, even with a fish market No vehicles, cars or lorries Because there’s no road

Sekumbang kitai udah merdeka Pasar Simunjan diatu jauh mansang Rumah batu maioh digaga Rumah prubat, rumah sekula bisi magang

Since we are independent There is development in Simunjan town A number of concrete houses have been built There are health care providers (hospitals, clinics) and schools

Rakyat diau enggau senang ati Maioh pemansang nyau udah diberi Skim nyior enggau sawah umai Serta bisi enggau subsidi tolong bukai

People are living happily Recipients of many developments There’s a coconut and paddy scheme With subsidy as other aids

Kampong puang endang agi maioh Nyamai alai orang ngaga kepemansang Anang enggai mansut kepeloh Dudi hari kitai idup senang lantang

There’s still lots of jungle and forest Places which can be developed Do not be afraid to work hard In the future we will live pleasantly

Singing about modern roads and buildings does not seem like a very marketable way to sell a pop song. But in the era prior to the construction of the Kuching–Sri Aman road, communication between Sri Aman and other locales, especially Kuching and Sibu, was mostly by riverine or coastal transport (Chang 1999). Radio audiences would have remembered that at one time ships took about two weeks to travel from Sri Aman to Kuching and even after the introduction of steamships it still took two days. Before the completion of the Kuching–Sri Aman road a vehicle would have to travel a gruelling six hours along the gravel and muddy roads to reach Kuching; after the road was tarmacked the journey took just three hours. Music and song celebrated the spectacular progress of road construction once Sarawak joined Malaysia. For example, pride is expressed in the lyrics of ‘Pasar Simunjan’—‘Sekumbang kitai udah merdeka / Pasar Simunjan diatu jauh mansang’ (Since we are independent / There is development in Simunjan town). During the first seven years of independence (1963–1970), more than 710 miles of new roads were constructed, while the Second Malaysia Plan (1971–1975) envisaged the total mileage being increased to 1,500 miles, nearly four times the mileage in 1963 (Sarawak State Government 1973: 50). Building roads linking one town to another led to urban development in rural areas. Houses and buildings were constructed of concrete and stone. Education, medical and health care services were provided by the government. The significance of modernising these sectors is expressed by the songwriter in the lyrics ‘Rumah batu maioh digaga / Rumah prubat, rumah sekula bisi magang’ (A number of concrete houses have been built / There are health care providers [hospitals, clinics] and schools). By the 1970s, in addition to the three general

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hospitals in Kuching, Sibu and Miri, there were smaller hospitals in Simanggang, Limbang and Sarikei as well as local hospitals at five other centres offering basic patient care services.3 The establishment of a housing and development commission was the fulfilment of a pledge by the Sarawak government to work for the welfare and improvement of the everyday living conditions of the people and to raise their quality of life. Through the commission, the government fulfilled its objectives and implemented various low-cost housing schemes throughout much of rural Sarawak. Since the 1960s, Sarawak progressively moved towards a larger, more robust economy. The government took unprecedented steps in developing the state during the early 1970s. More roads were built. Land schemes were opened up to turn the countryside into a productive resource for work. The lyrics of ‘Pasar Simunjan’— ‘Rakyat diau enggau senang ati / Maioh pemansang nyau udah diberi / Skim nyior enggau sawah umai / Serta bisi enggau subsidi tolong bukai’ (People are living happily / Recipients of many developments / There’s a coconut and paddy scheme / With subsidy as other aids)—represent the fact that a major share of public development expenditure since independence was allocated to agriculture. In response, people worked towards higher crop yields through schemes for paddy as a staple food. Farmers were trained to increase their productivity with tested methods and to make use of modern tools and machines at farmers’ training centres or at settlement schemes aimed at realising better harvests. At the same time, diversification led to the introduction of crops like oil palm. Singing about planting coconuts needs to be considered in the context of a modernising Iban community. The Iban were negotiating their place during the rapid ascent of a modern and increasingly urbanised state. They made sense of the state government’s need for increased efficiency and productivity and the transformation of the agricultural sector into an attractive source of livelihoods for Sarawakians. Singing about it was one way of sense-making. Under the coconut-planting scheme, a total of 7720 ha were planted from 1959 to 1963 (Sarawak State Government 1973: 55). Since the formation of Malaysia, a total of 30,550 ha were planted under the scheme.4 Also mentioned in the lyrics of ‘Pasar Simunjan’ are the transformation of agricultural land and government assistance to modernise rice farming methods. It is not surprising that lyrics about agriculture show up as regular motifs in Iban popular music. Significant developments in Sarawak are also featured in the lyrics ‘Kampong puang endang agi maioh / Nyamai alai orang ngaga kepemansang / Anang enggai mansut kepeloh / Dudi hari kitai idup senang lantang’ (There’s still lots of jungle and forest / Places which can be developed / Do not be afraid to work hard / In the 3

Each of the five divisions’ main centres had a dental clinic, and a total of 49 school dental clinics were established to offer dental care and hygiene instruction to primary schoolchildren. In addition, four new health subcentres, as part of the new system of rural health care services, were completed during the first half of the Second Malaysia Plan (Sarawak State Government 1973: 64). 4 For example, two major coconut schemes were established in the coastal fringes at Kabong in the Second Division and Mid-Sadong in the First Division. From 1963 to 1982, the annual export earnings from coconuts and coconut products averaged about $4 million, with total export earnings of more than $70 million (Malaysian Information Services 1984: 69).

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future we will live pleasantly). The songwriter juxtaposes the traditional/modern and urban/rural binaries in the minds of the listener with lyrics that mention the jungle and forest. He urges the people to look forward, as it takes determination and hard work to achieve success. In order to have a pleasant life in the future, there is a need for sacrifices and perseverance in the present. From this song, we can conclude that since Sarawak joined Malaysia in 1963 modernising the agricultural sector has not only been important economically, it has made a lasting impression culturally as well.

15.8 Conclusion Analysing and interpreting Iban popular music lyrics from the 1960s and 1970s reveal a myriad of meanings constructed around the theme of a rapidly modernising Sarawak. Since the mid-twentieth century, the airwaves have echoed with popular songs that have since been taken on as emblems of identity. These musical badges were worn to demonstrate Iban participation in and allegiance to the state. At the same time these song lyrics reflect peripheral views, positionings and interpretations that simultaneously mirror mainstream or dominant views. Iban singers and songwriters responded to modernity by expressing the dramatic changes in migration, cultural transformations, infrastructural development of rural areas and the economic engine of growth. The Iban progressed remarkably over the few decades after independence and made every attempt to fully integrate themselves into the Malaysian nation-state. Radio broadcasts of popular music during this time constitute a historical rupture between earlier modernities and the modernity of the current era. The 1960s and 1970s saw the mass migration of Iban from rural to urban settings, combined with increasing access to electronic media and popular culture. With the emergence of the Iban section of Radio Sarawak and then Radio Malaysia Sarawak, the foundations were laid not for a simple mimicry of mainstream popular culture, but for Ibans’ own alternative modernity. Compared to the popular music broadcast in peninsular Malaysia, Iban popular music was situated very much at the nation’s periphery. However, a desire to be modern saw a paradoxical process that involved the adaptation of modern Western musical forms and structures in order to assert a ‘progressive’ identity. Articulating alternative modernities in popular music, the appearance of being modern and the appeal of modernity itself are often connected with the changing lifestyles of postcolonial Southeast Asia. Encountering modernity, the Iban have traversed periods of institutional change from the pre-Brooke era (before 1841) through the Brooke Raj (1841–1946) to the period as a British Crown colony (1946– 1963) and as part of Malaysia (from 16 September 1963 onwards). As demonstrated in this chapter, Iban popular music lyrics are closely linked to the historical changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s.

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Looking at Sarawak as a state under the Federation of Malaysia, songwriters expressed their personal understanding of the new country together with its relationship to modernity. Analysis of Iban popular songs broadcast on the radio was conducted through the lens of an alternative modernity as lyrics referenced historical and developmental accounts of Sarawak. Song lyrics represent site-specific ‘creative adaptations’ that complicate the binary between tradition and modern (Gaonkar 1999). The spirit of nationalism penetrated the airwaves in songs proclaiming Sarawak as an integral part of the new nation. These lyrics reveal modernity but also the local sentiments of Iban songwriters towards nation-building. At the same time, the radio became a symbol of modernity for the Iban who lived in longhouses, while the radio and record player became the emblem of modernity for urban Iban, as crucial accessories in their creative adaptations for a new mass-mediated culture of consumption. Popular music lyrics contained messages about modernity and changing relationships to ancestral lands, the rapid acceleration of internal migration and Sarawak’s place in the broader nation-state. The musicians who sang Iban popular music offered their listeners a narrative of Iban people in Sarawak—and an alternative modernity in a postcolonial world. Acknowledgements The authors would like to express their gratitude to Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and the Ministry of Higher Education for Grant No.: F03/SpGS/1411/16/12 of the Special Grant Scheme to carry out this research. Thanks also go to the Department of Broadcasting, Sarawak for access to its audio archive.

References Andaya, Leonard Y. 2008. Leaves of the same tree: Trade and ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Barendregt, Bart. 2014. Sonic histories in a Southeast Asian context. In Sonic modernities in the Malay world: A history of popular music, social distinction and novel lifestyles (1930s–2000s), ed. Bart Barendregt, 1–43. Leiden: Brill. ———, and Wim van Zanten. 2002. Popular music in Indonesia since 1998, in particular fusion, indie and Islamic music on video compact discs and the internet. Yearbook for Traditional Music 34: 67–114. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. Rethinking modernity: Postcolonialism and the sociological imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chang Pat Foh. 1999. Legends and history of Sarawak. Kuching: Chang Pat Foh. Chua, Liana. 2007. Fixity and flux: Bidayuh (dis)engagements with the Malaysian ethnic system. Ethnos 72(2): 262–288. Eisenstadt, S.N. 2000. Multiple modernities. Daedalus 129(1): 1–29. Foucault, Michel. 1980. The history of sexuality. Vol. 1: An introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. 1999. On alternative modernities. Public Culture 11(1): 1–18. Geschiere, Peter, Birgit Meyer, and Peter Pels, eds. 2008. Readings in modernity in Africa. London: International African Institute. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hall, Stuart. 1995. Introduction. In Modernity: An introduction to modern societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 1–18. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hamm, Charles. 2004. Popular music and historiography. Popular Music History 1(1): 9–14. Hefner, Robert W. 1998. Multiple modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a globalizing age. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 83–104. Hood, Made Mantle. 2014. Voicing the nation, negotiating the tradition: Popular music influences on traditional Balinese vocal styles. Mudra 29(3): 342–347. ———. 2017. Persistent mutualisms: Energizing the symbiotic relationship between Balinese dancer and drummer. In Sounding the dance, moving the music: Choreomusicological perspectives on maritime Southeast Asian performing arts, ed. Mohd Anis Md Nor and Kendra Stepputat, 42–56. London: Routledge. Kahn, Joel S. 2001. Modernity and exclusion. London: Sage. ———. 2003. Islam, modernity, and the popular in Malaysia. In Malaysia: Islam, society and politics, ed. Virginia Hooker and Noraini Othman, 147–166. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Kedit, Peter Mulok. 1980. Modernization among the Iban of Sarawak. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Lim, Connie Keh Nie. 2017. Negotiating modernity in the history of Iban popular music. In Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia, ed. Tan Sooi Beng, Jacqueline Pugh-Kitingan, and Desiree A. Quintero, 244–249. Penang: School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Lockard, Craig A. 1987. From kampung to city: A social history of Kuching Malaysia, 1820–1970. Athens: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series No. 75. Malaysian Information Services. 1984. Sarawak report 1963–1983. Kuching: Malaysian Information Services, Sarawak. Mee, Wendy, and Joel S. Kahn. 2012. Introduction. In Questioning modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Wendy Mee and Joel S. Kahn, 1–18. Singapore: NUS Press. Mohd. Taib Osman. 1989. Iban cultural heritage in the context of present day Malaysia. Sarawak Museum Journal 40(61): 15–19. Special issue 4, part IV, Iban, Chinese and Indian Cultural Heritage Seminars held in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of independence. O’Ballance, Edgar. 1966. Malaya: The communist insurgent war, 1948–60. London: Faber. Ong, Aihwa. 1996. Anthropology, China and modernities: The geopolitics of cultural knowledge. In The future of anthropological knowledge, ed. Henrietta L. Moore, 60–92. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parladir, Halil Saim, and Devrim Özkan. 2014. Diaspora studies in social sciences: Modernity, power and identity. Journal of Süleyman Demirel University Institute of Social Sciences 20(2): 101–124. Postill, John. 1998. Little by little, a national subculture is made: The role of modern media in the institutional transformation of Iban society. Borneo Research Bulletin 29: 95–128. ———. 2006. Media and nation building: How the Iban became Malaysian. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2008. The mediated production of ethnicity and nationalism among the Iban of Sarawak, 1954–1976. In Representation, identity and multiculturalism in Sarawak, ed. Zawawi Ibrahim, 195–228. Kajang: Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia and Kuching: Dayak Cultural Foundation. Sarawak State Government. 1973. Sarawak maju sejak Merdeka. Kuching: Sarawak State Government and the Sarawak Foundation. Smith, Gloria M., ed. 1964. Music: The full teaching syllabus for junior secondary schools. Kuching: Borneo Literature Bureau.

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———, ed. 1965. Malaysia sings: Book 2. Kuching: Borneo Literature Bureau. Taylor, Charles. 1999a. Nationalism and modernity. In Theorizing nationalism, ed. Ronald Beiner, 219–245. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1999b. Two theories of modernity. Public Culture 11(1): 153–174. ———. 2001. Two theories of modernity. In Alternative modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 172–196. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wagner, Peter. 2006. Introduction. In The languages of civil society, ed. Peter Wagner, 1–6. New York: Berghahn Books. ———. 2012. Modernity: Understanding the present. Cambridge: Polity Press. Williams, Raymond. 1981. The sociology of culture. New York: Schocken Books. Yong, John Lah Boh. 2003. The roles of the Malaysian government and private sectors in the development of music education. Master of Music thesis, University of Florida.

Interviews Christopher Kelly. Interview: Kuching, Sarawak, 24 August 2017. Janet Rata Noel. Interview: Kuching, Sarawak, 24 August 2017.

Connie Lim Keh Nie is a senior lecturer in the Music Programme, Faculty of Applied and Creative Arts, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. She completed her PhD in 2019 with a thesis entitled ‘Alternative modernities in the history of Iban popular music from 1950s to 1970s’. In addition to popular music, her research also looks at Lun Bawang traditional music. She is the main author of Sape, alat muzik tradisional Sarawak (Sape, a traditional musical instrument of Sarawak, 2016). In 2017 she was appointed as a panel member for the Intangible Culture Heritage (Performing Arts) committee under the Department of National Heritage, Malaysia. Made Mantle Hood is professor of ethnomusicology and director of the Research Centre for Asia-Pacific Music, Tainan National University of the Arts, Taiwan. His previous posts were at Universiti Putra Malaysia (2012–2018), Melbourne University, Australia (2011–2012) and Monash University, Australia (2005–2011). His current research interests include ontologies of sounded movement, endangered forms of vocalisation, tuning systems, as well as music and social justice. He is currently the lead researcher in the Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technologyfunded project, Towards the Sustainability of Vocal Heritage in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia (2019–2021). He is the author of Triguna: A Hindu-Balinese philosophy for gamelan gong gede music (2010) and coeditor of Music: Ethics and the community (2015).

Chapter 16

Reframing the National Culture Narrative of P. Ramlee Adil Johan

Abstract The multitalented musician, composer, actor and film director P. Ramlee was immortalised as a Malaysian national icon following his death in 1973. Since then local television stations have frequently broadcast his films from the 1950s and 1960s, numerous hagiographical books about him have been published and memorial museums remind visitors of his artistic achievements. This chapter unpacks the dominant ethnonationalist narrative of P. Ramlee as a national icon through an account of his music, films and ideas. While his film music is a canonical symbol of artistic excellence, it is rarely analysed in conjunction with the immediate historical context in which it was created: postcolonial nation-making. The analysis here shows that his film music was modern, hybrid and cosmopolitan, drawing on various global and local sources. Ironically, P. Ramlee then openly criticised British-American rock ’n’ roll music and culture which had found a ready audience among young people in the mid- to late 1960s. His reactionary posture, along with his declining commercial popularity, led P. Ramlee to become a strident voice for the preservation of local traditional music. His views were then used by the government to support a narrow, homogenous version of national culture. P. Ramlee’s conservative turn has been remarkably resilient. His current cultural positioning is best exemplified in Shuhaimi Baba’s full-length documentary film about him. Here P. Ramlee’s life is dramatically reframed as a tragedy, and used as a vehicle to propagate his conservative reaction to foreign music and his rhetoric of cultural preservation. This in effect undermines the uniquely cosmopolitan contribution of P. Ramlee’s films and music, which exemplifies fluid and heterogenous forms of nation-making, aspects of Malaysia’s cultural history that are often forgotten in official national narratives and the collective memory of citizens. Keywords Malaysia · P. Ramlee · Film · Music · Nation-making · Cultural policy

This chapter draws on material from my book Cosmopolitan intimacies: Malay film music of the independence era. Singapore: NUS Press, 2018. Adil Johan (B) Institute of Ethnic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_16

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16.1 Introduction The multitalented musician, composer, actor and director P. Ramlee was immortalised as a Malaysian national icon following his death in 1973. Local television stations broadcast his films from the 1950s and 1960s in tribute, numerous hagiographical books have been written about him, and memorial museums remind visitors of his artistic achievements. This chapter aims to unpack the ethnonationalist narrative of P. Ramlee as a national icon through an account of his music, films and ideas. As a canonical symbol of artistic excellence in national culture, P. Ramlee’s film music is rarely analysed critically in line with the history of postcolonial nationmaking in Malaysia. The discussion here reveals that his music was modern, hybrid and cosmopolitan, drawing from various global and local musical sources in the 1950s and 1960s. He also incorporated pop yeh yeh in his films, a style of music performed and recorded by Malay youths of the mid- to late 1960s, directly influenced by British-American rock ’n’ roll bands such as the Shadows, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Ironically, shortly after moving from Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions studio in Singapore to Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka Film Productions studio in 1964, P. Ramlee reacted critically towards pop yeh yeh and associated foreign music. This public reaction, along with his declining popularity among young people, led him to become a voice for the preservation of local traditional music which was then used by the state to support the propagation of a homogenous national music culture in 1971. The nationalist narrative of P. Ramlee’s life is best exemplified in Shuhaimi Baba’s 2010 documentary film about him made for History Channel Asia. This documentary dramatically frames his life as a tragedy, centred on the emotional theme of kasihan (pity), reminding viewers that his conservative reaction to foreign music and his rhetoric of cultural preservation should be heeded. I argue that the narrative of P. Ramlee presented in the film perpetuates a conservative and homogenous understanding of national culture that actually undermines the uniquely cosmopolitan contribution of his films and music. While he appeared to be a reactionary in relation to cultural change, his films and music exemplify through culturally intimate articulations the fluid, heterogenous and essentially cosmopolitan history of nationmaking in the Malay Peninsula. This aspect of Malaysia’s cultural history is often forgotten in official national narratives.

16.2 The Paradoxical Omnipresence of P. Ramlee An unavoidable topic for any discussion on nation-making and music in the Malay Peninsula is the aesthetic agency of P. Ramlee, an undeniably cosmopolitan figure whose music and films articulated and continue to reflect the aspirations,

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contestations and paradoxes of emergent and current Malay(sian) nationhood. P. Ramlee was and remains a central icon of the Malay world of film and music. Aside from being the first Malay to direct a commercially successful film, Penarek Becha (Trishaw Puller, 1955), he was a prolific singer, songwriter and actor.1 He acted in 62 films, directing 33 of them, all of which involved him composing and performing his own songs (Ahmad Sarji 2011: 63). Altogether he recorded a cumulative total of 359 songs for films and records (ibid.: 133–145). P. Ramlee was born in Penang on 13 March 1929 as Tueku Zakaria bin Teuku Nyak Puteh, but had his name changed to ‘the more fashionable and enigmatic sounding P. Ramlee at the dawn of his foray into music and show business’ (Uhde and Uhde 2010: 30).2 He was born of a Malay Penangite mother and an Acehnese father with cultural links to the latter evident in his name. This modern self-fashioning of his name obscures his Acehnese lineage. Undoubtedly, the source of his success in the entertainment industry was his musical talent. At the age of 19, already composing his own songs and actively playing the violin in keroncong bands, he joined an annual singing competition hosted by Radio Malaya in Penang for the third time and won (Ahmad Sarji 2011: 264). It was there that he was spotted by the Shaw Brothers’ director B.S. Rajhans who was scouting young Malay talent for his films. Following that, P. Ramlee moved to Singapore to begin his singing and acting career. By 1951 he was recording his film songs for the HMV record label in Singapore alongside popular Malay singers (ibid.: 265–266). Up to his death in 1973, P. Ramlee had composed a repertoire of songs that would be definitive of both modern and ‘authentic’ Malay music. This standard narrative is embraced by most authors who write about P. Ramlee. Ahmad Sarji notes that ‘the rhythms [rentak, rhythmic stylings] of P. Ramlee’s singing and compositions are at one with the heart and soul of Malay peoples’,3 specifically in his use of Malay genres such as ‘inang, zapin, masri, asli, joget and boria’ (ibid.: 275). He also states that ‘P. Ramlee was ingenious in arranging and adapting foreign musics with Malay songs’,4 mentioning as examples the waltz, Middle Eastern rhythms, samba, beguine, bolero, rhumba, slow beguine, slow rhumba, twist and mambo (ibid.). While P. Ramlee was adept at interpreting a plethora of musical styles for a Malay audience, he eventually encountered obstacles to his creative omnipotence. In 1964 he left Singapore for the soon to be separate nationstate of Malaysia,5 continuing his film career at the newly set-up, underfunded and 1

Haji Mahadi was the first Malay to direct a Malay film, Permata di Perlimbahan (Jewel in the Slum, 1952), but it was a commercial failure (see Hassan 2013: 56). 2 P. Ramlee’s actual birth date is still disputed (Adil 2018: 21). 3 The original reads: ‘Rentak lagu-lagu gubahan dan nyanyian P. Ramlee adalah sejiwa dengan orang-orang Melayu’ (my translation). 4 ‘P. Ramlee amat bijak dalam mengadun dan menyesuaikan muzik-muzik asing dengan lagu-lagu Melayu’ (my translation). 5 Singapore separated from the Federation of Malaysia on 9 August 1965.

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inexperienced Merdeka Film Productions studio in Kuala Lumpur (Uhde and Uhde 2010: 33–34; Lockard 1996: 5). Towards the end of the 1960s he found his popularity waning due to the changing musical tastes of Malaysian youth. In keeping up with the Beatlemania craze and the rise of kugiran bands,6 P. Ramlee would use the new ‘twist’ style for the song ‘Bunyi Gitar’ (Sound of the Guitar) in the film Tiga Abdul (The Three Abduls, 1964, dir. P. Ramlee) and ‘Ai Ai Twist’ in the film Masam-Masam Manis (Sweet and Sour, 1965, dir. P. Ramlee) (Ahmad Sarji 2011: 277). However, despite being ‘closely attuned to the sociocultural changes of the time’ (Lockard 1996: 5), he was critical of the new popular music prevalent in the mid-1960s: Pop songs and music that are not of quality will give birth to a wild generation in the future. Youths that sing self-indulgently, play music self-indulgently, (and) dress self-indulgently, will be exposed to qualities that are disagreeable and out of that will be born a generation that is without discipline. (Ahmad Sarji 2011: 276–277, citing an interview of P. Ramlee in Utusan Zaman [n.d.])

In 1971 P. Ramlee also presented a landmark paper at the National Cultural Congress in Kuala Lumpur, where he denounced similar pop music cultures, pointed out a decline of traditional music in Malaysia and proposed solutions for this ‘problem’. He lamented the encroachment of Hindustani music from India (of which he was an ardent fan), popular music from the West and the influx of youth culture such as long-haired males, miniskirted women and marijuana smoking (P. Ramlee 1973: 205). He then stated that the government must take aggressive measures to encourage and sponsor the education, performance and presentation of ‘Malaysian traditional’ and ‘asli’ music in the media, schools, and even ‘night-clubs, hotels and restaurants’ (ibid.: 206–207). P. Ramlee’s views actually mirrored the moral policing of youths in Singapore and Malaysia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with his reactionary comments contributing to a homogenising conception of Malaysian national culture that endures until the present (Adil 2014). Such reactionary statements suggest that P. Ramlee was experiencing a decline in commercial success as well. His music and films, once considered cosmopolitan and new, were being overshadowed and, in effect, antiquated by an influx of commoditised trends disseminated by more rapid technologies of global capitalism, such as the pervasive international distribution of music recordings, the increased output of foreign films and rising television consumption. However, also due to these changes, his music was acquiring an ‘indisputable’ Malay indigeneity that was compatible with Malay cultural-nationalist rhetoric. Yusnor Ef (2011: xix), a staunch advocate and disciple of P. Ramlee, considers his impact on Malay music in the following terms: Malay songs are an integral part of a Malay person’s identity, in which external influences can be accepted while Malayness must be central, just like the music or songs of P. Ramlee; the foundations are Malay, but Western, latin [sic] and Indian elements are absorbed subconsciously [internalised]. Elements from jazz, bossa nova, mambo and cha-cha are found in his songs, but his soul [enduringly] remains a Malay soul. 6

An abbreviation of ‘kumpulan gitar rancak’, meaning ‘upbeat guitar group’.

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Regardless of how ‘Malay’ or cosmopolitan P. Ramlee’s songs actually were, his music has provided the basis for an ethnonational discourse of homogeneity or indigeneity, in which Malayness in music is perceived to be rooted in the ‘soul’ and ‘heart’, and therefore identifiers of Malayness—elements that are actually difficult to discern musically—become more ideological and political terms than descriptive markers in musical form, structure or style. In effect, discourses about Malayness in music mainly act to articulate debates over cultural nationalism. Andrew McGraw (2009: 46–47) provides some useful observations concerning the impact of P. Ramlee’s film music on conceptions of modernity and indigenous identity in Malaysia. If, in his early films, Ramlee suggests that modern, Westernised living is corrupt and potentially dangerous to Malay society and culture, then his use of music presents a significantly more complex image, one that suggests that certain aspects of Western culture and modernity fit well with Malaysian aesthetics and values, and indeed can be hybridised and adopted as Malaysian. Furthermore, any attempt to neatly categorise and evaluate instances of Malay (or, in this case Ramlee’s) music as either Western/modern or Malay/traditional is to grossly oversimplify the case. Musics in Ramlee’s films that might otherwise be identified as ‘western’ (especially jazz, Hawaiian, and Latin music) have a long lineage in Malaysia, having been performed and transformed in the colony within contexts such as bangsawan since before Ramlee’s birth. Furthermore, later generations of Malaysian viewers have come to understand Ramlee’s rumbas and jazz and rock (’n’ roll) tunes as distinctly Malaysian, sometimes unaware of their global roots.

McGraw further states that the realm of musical taste in P. Ramlee’s music goes beyond the polarised dichotomy of degenerate modernity in contestation with pure indigeneity but instead reflects ‘a spirit of aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ (ibid.: 47). While this idealistic aesthetic may have been expressed in earlier film songs by P. Ramlee, McGraw still leaves much to be discussed with regard to the politics of national culturalism and the changing discourses of nation-making evident in a continuum of nationhood. While such aesthetic cosmopolitanism cannot be denied in P. Ramlee’s film music, an unravelling of the nationalist narrative framed by his conservative opinions on defending and preserving Malay music expose a far less inclusive conception of national culture in Malaysia.

16.3 Pop Yeh Yeh and Youth Culture P. Ramlee’s national narrative, as already indicated, is intertwined with the cultural politics of youth music in the late 1960s. P. Ramlee’s decline, and by extension that of the Malay film industry, is commonly associated with the rise of Malay rock ’n’ roll bands known as kumpulan gitar rancak (kugiran, upbeat guitar bands) who performed and recorded a genre termed pop yeh yeh, derived from the Beatles’ song lyrics, ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah yeah’ (Lockard 1998: 226). It is difficult to ascertain

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whether pop yeh yeh directly affected the decline of Malay cinema. However, there are many instances of pop yeh yeh or rock ’n’ roll in Malay films from the mid-1960s. Contrary to Craig Lockard’s view, Burhanuddin Bin Buang (2001: 11–12) suggests that the popularity of pop yeh yeh actually waned alongside the Malay film studio system’s demise. I further argue that pop yeh yeh and Malay films had more of a symbiotic and intimate relationship than the contested one suggested by the conservative reactions to youth culture voiced by P. Ramlee. By the early 1970s there was, as noted above, increased policing of youth cultures and fewer avenues for performing. Also, the craze for kugiran had subsided as local youths gravitated towards ‘foreign artists who were much more radical’ such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix (ibid.: 12). However, many of the singers from pop yeh yeh bands would successfully go on to record commercial albums beyond the 1970s (ibid.). Pop yeh yeh and youth culture, while treated dismissively by the state, permeated Malay films in the mid-1960s, even though they tended to include such music as frivolous, parodic or secondary to the films’ main narratives. As the following film analysis reveals, the inclusion of Malay youth music was a cautious way for film producers to retain the viewership of the older generation while simultaneously appealing to a younger audience, whose musical tastes were radically different from the musical styles common to Malay films in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. Suggesting a shift in the musical tastes of Malay youth in the mid-1960s, the keyboardist Shah Sarip of the Rhythmn Boys says: ‘At that time, people didn’t want to hear traditional music anymore. Everybody wanted to hear pop yeh yeh songs. Even at wedding functions, pop yeh yeh bands dominated’ (quoted in ibid.: 22).7 Whether the cosmopolitan music of Malay films prior to the mid-1960s was considered ‘traditional’ is unclear, but the reactionary comments from P. Ramlee are indicative. On the contrary, some of the earliest inclusions of rock ’n’ roll can be found in his films.

16.4 Cosmopolitan Intimacies of P. Ramlee’s Guitar One of the earliest musical scenes featuring a rock ’n’ roll-style guitar-driven song happens to be one of P. Ramlee’s most famous songs, ‘Bunyi Gitar’. This song has been reinterpreted by numerous Malaysian artists since the 1980s, by Sheila Majid and Siti Nurhaliza as well as by the rock band Blues Gang, among others. More recently, the song was covered by Subculture for the Indiepretasi P. Ramlee tribute album and Kyoto Protocol for the second season of the band competition show Versus broadcast on TV9. From the canon of Malay film music, ‘Bunyi Gitar’ is the quintessential song of reference for the pop yeh yeh era. 7

This interview was conducted by Burhanuddin Bin Buang on 28 January 2001.

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The song was featured in the comedy film Tiga Abdul, P. Ramlee’s last film produced in Singapore before his move to Kuala Lumpur. The film is set in a fictional Turkey-like nation named ‘Isketambola’, where men wear fezzes reminiscent of the pre-Atatürk era.8 As one of the three Abdul brothers who have amassed a wealthy inheritance, P. Ramlee’s character, Abdul Wahub, owns a musical instrument shop, which forms a suitable setting for his performance of ‘Bunyi Gitar’. The manner in which the song is presented in the film is pedagogical, as if P. Ramlee is introducing the audience to a new musical genre. A group of musicians—two electric guitarists and a drummer—are trying out musical instruments in his shop. Abdul Wahub walks up to the band and asks if he can assist them. One of the guitarists (Kassim Masdor) invites Abdul Wahub to join their band. Abdul Wahub then asks each of the musicians which musical parts and instruments they play and they take turns to play three bars of their parts unaccompanied: rhythm guitar followed by ‘bass’ guitar followed by drums.9 Abdul Wahub then determines that they need a lead guitar to complete the band, picks up an electric guitar on display and begins to play the opening riff of the song. During the instrumental interlude following Abdul Wahub’s singing, a group of customers dance a choreographed twist that could have been considered unruly by a conservative Malay audience; this is quite unlike the traditional or cabaret ballroom-style dancing featured in earlier films. Abdul Wahub’s shop becomes a vibrant cosmopolitan space for the introduction of rock ’n’ roll to a film audience. It was perhaps deemed possible to present this new style of music because the film is a comedy. Older or more musically conservative members of the audience would have been able to accept the song as a parody of the ‘wild’ youth culture that pervaded the Malay Peninsula in the mid-1960s.10 Another reason why P. Ramlee composed a song in this style could have been due to his need to demonstrate his skill in adapting to a new music genre. In a 1967 magazine article titled ‘Nasihat P. Ramlee’ (P. Ramlee’s Advice), he expresses his concerns about the young guitar bands or pop musicians who were rapidly gaining success but did not have the formal musical knowledge that his generation had had to acquire. One matter that is disappointing is that, based on what I know, many pop [yeh yeh] singers and musicians cannot read musical notes. For me, this is a weakness that needs to be fixed.… Because, if it is not [addressed] … I worry that the future of pop [yeh yeh] singers cannot be brought to the centre or to the side [lacking direction], like a ship sailing with a ruined sail. (quoted in Noor As Ahmad 1967: 31)

Despite P. Ramlee’s tongue-in-cheek performance of the song, the inclusion of this style of music also reflects the immense popularity of the genre in 1964. ‘Bunyi Gitar’ thus has the dual function of being a cynical musical take on youth music while also appealing to the younger and hipper generation of Malay viewers. 8

Isketambola is a comic play on words that morphs the Turkish capital, Istanbul, with the Malay word for crabmeat balls (bebola ketam). 9 Here, as was common with many early pop yeh yeh bands, the bass guitar part was a running bass line played on an electric six-string guitar. 10 Mohamad Nor Khalid (Lat) with Syed Nadzri (2016: 108) note that P. Ramlee specifically referred to his comedies as ‘parody films’.

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Oh bunyi gitar irama twist tidak sabar si gadis manis dengar lagu rancak gembira hatinya rindu tergoda ingin dapat teman menari suka ria

Oh the sound of a guitar in the rhythm of the twist they cannot wait the sweet girls listen to an upbeat and happy song their hearts aroused with longing to find a partner dance and party

Oh sungguh merdu lagu ini siapa mahu boleh menari pilih satu teman sendiri ataukah si hitam manis kalau sudi mari kita menari twist

Oh so melodious this song anyone who wants can dance choose your own partner or a dark sultry beauty if you feel like coming we will dance the twist

Oh gitar berbunyi menawan hati sedang berahi Oh rancaknya irama dapat mikat sukma gadis dan teruna mahu cari teman gembira

Oh the guitar sounds attracting hearts in passion Oh how lively this rhythm is able to attract youths young ladies and bachelors let’s find a happy partner

Oh gitar solo dan melodi ikut tempo kalau menari

Oh the guitar plays the solo and melody following the tempo if you’re dancing

Sila adik sila cik abang marilah kita berdendang irama gembira hati jadi riang11

Young ladies and gents Let us sing together A happy rhythm begets a joyful heart

The lyrics of the song present the stereotypically carefree, party-going, love-seeking and laidback attitude of mid-1960s Malay youths. As noted by Zam Zam, a popular singer from that period, pop yeh yeh lyrics

11

Lyrics by Sudarmaji Bin Abdullah, published by EMI Music Publishing Malaysia Sdn. Bhd.

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were mostly about love, love relationships and partying because those were the concerns of the youth at that time … pop yeh yeh was a music that catered for the young people of that time, of course the lyrics must be something that touch on their liking and activities. (quoted in Burhanuddin 2001: 22)12

Indeed such inclinations towards ‘love, love relationships and partying’ are prominent in the lyrics. However, while it is not possible to ascertain definitively whether P. Ramlee’s approach to this song was one of detached parody or stylistic assimilation, the themes of romance and interpersonal intimacy feature in most of his songs, regardless of genre or period. It is the intimate articulations of P. Ramlee’s songs and films that grant his works and persona such a lasting potency in the Malaysian conception of national culture. A coupling of this sentimental and commercially popular aesthetic of his work made during a crucial period of nation-making (1950s–1960s) cements him as a distinctly Malaysian national icon. In line with this, Martin Stokes’s (2010: 193) study on cultural intimacy in Turkish popular music draws attention ‘to a sustained and consequential imagination of public life in affectionate terms, and to popular music as the vehicle of this imagination’. Similarly, the music of P. Ramlee’s films articulated such intimacies to form affectionate imaginings of Malay society, weaved through the emotional discourses of their films’ narratives. Tiga Abdul represents a phase of emerging national consciousness—one that embraces the modernity and affectations of Western culture, through an Orientalist projection of Middle Eastern Muslim culture. However, this Orientalist representation is complicated by the intimate knowledge of Islamic cultural practices internalised in Malay society that preceded the encroachment of Western colonialism. The film and its music express a cosmopolitan intimacy that encapsulates the interactivities, contradictions and negotiations of many layers of cultural identities— complex layers that make Malaysian culture distinct. Retrospectively, the youth and their music of the pop yeh yeh era, as imagined through the fantastical Isketambola, are representative of this complex and unique postcolonial Malaysian identity in formation. They are not in the context of the film imagined as a threat to Malaysian national culture or P. Ramlee’s artistic greatness. Pop yeh yeh youth and P. Ramlee in fact shared a symbiotic relationship that now feeds into the nostalgic imaginings of a Malaysian nation-state in the making. This historically symbiotic relationship is often obfuscated or ignored to accommodate a more conservative nationalist narrative of P. Ramlee as a national artistic icon.

16.5 Memorialising P. Ramlee as National Culture In the historical narrative of Malaysia, the death of P. Ramlee in 1973 is marked as a moment that stirred the national cultural consciousness from a stupor of decadent, 12

This interview was conducted by Burhanuddin Bin Buang on 6 December 2000.

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long-haired and sexually depraved pop and rock bands who were shunning local musical practices. This grand narrative of P. Ramlee’s resurgence immediately after his death is actually misleading as his pre-eminence as a nationalist icon would only be truly cemented in 1986 with the establishment of Pustaka Peringatan P. Ramlee (P. Ramlee Memorial Museum) by the National Archives Board (Hanisah Selamat 2019). The memorial functions as a museum for the artist and his third and last wife Salmah Ismail, better known by her stage and screen name Saloma. Its exhibition of memorabilia presents a grand narrative that casts P. Ramlee and Saloma as virtually undisputed in their artistic greatness as national film and music icons. At the same time, beyond the peculiar diorama of life-sized and miniaturised film sets alongside Saloma and P. Ramlee attire rentals,13 there is a sense of ‘homeliness’ that lends an intimacy to the museum. This is mainly because it is located in and built out of the interior of the actual home rented by the couple when they moved from Singapore to Malaysia. The National Archives Board bought the house from its original owners in 1986. There is also a small section that approximates the couple’s original study replete with, among other items, P. Ramlee’s typewriter and piano—two iconic objects that symbolise the convergence of his auteurship and musicality. Despite the display of personal effects, P. Ramlee and Saloma are ultimately objectified and idealised by this exhibition of personal possessions that outlived them: Saloma’s sunglasses collection, P. Ramlee’s film trophies and his record player. These objects are now material artefacts that form assemblages of a national cultural narrative based on the undeniable artistic pre-eminence of P. Ramlee as a film-maker, musician and patriot. Memorials such as these indicate how the authority of the state permeates the cultural authority of P. Ramlee’s works and words as an unchallenged benchmark of greatness. Such memorials also articulate how the musical, film and cultural iconicity of P. Ramlee is mobilised and appropriated by the Malaysian nation-state to perpetuate an ethnonational discourse of Malay artistic greatness through the grand narrative of his tumultuous life that paralleled the history of the Malaysian nation in the making. The adoption of P. Ramlee as a national icon was due to his artistic career that was synchronous to Malaysia’s era of independence. It was, however, his death, or rather the memorialisation of his death, that sparked the national cultural narrative. By the 1970s the state was already in place, but there was a sense of its national identity eroding and falling sway to cultural influences from the West. This sentiment also parallels the New Economic Policy (NEP) implemented in 1971, a controversial affirmative action policy to give Malays a larger stake in the nation’s wealth in response to the increasing economic disparity between the Malay and Chinese communities (see Gomez and Saravanamuttu 2012).14 Concomitant 13

During my visit in July 2013 I was informed that the clothes made available for guests to wear and take photos with onsite were the actual possessions of the couple. The clothes rentals were no longer available when I visited again in 2015. 14 There has not been much analysis of the impact of the NEP on music and popular culture. The ethnomusicologists Tan Sooi Beng (1992, 1993) and Mohd Anis Md Nor (1993) consider music in light of the National Culture Policy (NCP). Terence Edmund Gomez and Johan Saravanamuttu’s (2012) comprehensive and multidisciplinary volume on the impact of the NEP does not contain any studies on popular culture, music or the arts.

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with this economic policy was the need to cement a stronger Malay presence in local cultural practices such as music, which led among other things to the National Culture Policy. The reactionary discourses and subsequent implementation of policies aimed at raising the presence of Malay culture also resulted in defensive and reactionary views regarding non-Malay cultures, and particularly the popular music of the West that was ardently being consumed by local youths. This tension between P. Ramlee’s supposed traditional and preservationist stance on local music against the encroachment of foreign music cultures is fully mobilised in the construction of him as a Malay nationalist icon. His strong reactionary sentiments towards foreign music made him an icon for the Malay-majority state to rally around in championing a distinctly Malay national culture. Moreover, it is the public narrative of his life as a Malaysian citizen—and not as a resident of Singapore where he made his best-regarded films and music—that is utilised to relay his national cultural iconicity. In the following section, I analyse the narrative of P. Ramlee’s nationalist iconicity in the documentary titled P. Ramlee: A Biography that aired regionally in 2010 on History Channel Asia, produced by the director Shuhaimi Baba. In my view, this documentary is a particularly explicit national cultural text in its presentation of P. Ramlee as a national icon, and hence relays the potency of the state-centred narrative that has emanated from the period of his death to the present.

16.6 The ‘Kasihan’ Narrative of P. Ramlee’s Demise When P. Ramlee’s films and music are screened and heard in the current period of nationhood, culturally intimate expressions contained within these works recall the nostalgic imaginings of the nation’s paradoxical … longing for an age before that state, for the primordial and self-regulating birthright that the state continually invokes—that citizens can turn against the authority of the state itself, along with all the other similarly vulnerable symbols of official fixity. (Herzfeld 2005: 22)

In the case of P. Ramlee as a national icon, I am interested in the cultural intimacies expressed in the narrative of his decline. This narrative is used by both official and independent actors, from state officials to state-friendly film-makers, from opposition politicians to independent music producers. The overarching sentiment expressed about P. Ramlee is ‘kasihan’, that is—for lack of a better translation of a culturally specific Malay word—an immense empathetic pity for his tragic circumstances. Wazir Jahan Karim’s (1990: 29) important anthropological study of Malay emotion explains that the word kasihan is semantically linked to the word ‘kasih’, which means love, forming ‘a common lexical item with two sets of semantic references’. She elaborates that the word for pity, kasihan, is generally used to indicate or express sympathy or compassion for a particular person suffering from a misfortune. It is sometimes substituted for sayang

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which may be taken to mean ‘what a pity’ or ‘the pity of it all’. It is significant that in the Malay language, ‘love’ and ‘pity’… [may express] both the participant’s condition [when confronted with this emotion] and the observer’s perception of this condition, particularly when such experiences are unsettling, personally traumatic, or require sacrifices, compromises, and resolutions that are difficult to meet. (ibid.: 28–29)

P. Ramlee’s narrative of decline and resultant nationalist iconicity is fuelled by this culturally potent sentiment of pity. This emotionally charged remembrance is then deeply embedded as an articulation of ‘structural nostalgia’ (Herzfeld 2005). It can be argued that the creative peak of P. Ramlee’s art was achieved in the transitional period of post-war state formation, between colonial rule and independence. More interestingly, many Malaysians’ best or arguably clearest memories of him are during his time in Singapore, when Singapore was still not officially a part of the Federation of Malaysia but was the centre for producing the most vivid imaginings of a Malayan nation through the silver screen. P. Ramlee’s face, voice, music and directorial decisions were the spotlight of this nation-making on celluloid. This is the reason Malaysia and its citizens are unable to escape the memory of P. Ramlee. This is why any notion of Malaysian-ness in the arts, especially music and film, nostalgically recalls not the ‘era of independence’ but the ‘era of P. Ramlee’. The efficacy of this national narrative perpetuated in Shuhaimi Baba’s documentary is due to the emotional and intimate framing of P. Ramlee’s biography. The film conveys his life story melodramatically as one that ends in tragedy. Then it plays on generating the emotional response of kasihan, as described above. The narrated script depicts the death of P. Ramlee as inducing a sense of ‘guilt’ that ‘begins to prick the nation’s collective conscience’ resulting in ‘regret coming in large doses’ that lead to a ‘clamour for his songs and movies and frenzied calls to have him honoured and remembered’. The script and narration play on this emotion to considerable effect, drawing on interview footage of subjects who include P. Ramlee’s family members, close friends and colleagues, interspersed with historical photographs and scenes from his films, and backgrounded by an instrumental score that uses the melodies of his well-known film songs. Most of the emotional weight of the film centres on the years leading up to his death, emphasising how P. Ramlee died ‘broke and broken’. The narrative is best summarised by the opening lines of the film: Conquering every medium of the entertainment spectrum, P. Ramlee had an infinite charm laced with a healthy dose of humour, warmth and humility that endeared him to many. But his phenomenal rise from stagehand to screen sensation had ill-prepared him for the downward spiral to rejection and obscurity.… But after death, his popularity soared to incredible heights.

These lines capture the general public perception in Malaysia of P. Ramlee’s life that sets up the nationalist narrative to ensue. The film then explores his life from his childhood and schooling in Penang to his rise to film and music stardom in Singapore during the 1950s and 1960s. The film then takes a tragic turn, outlining the struggles and hardships faced by P. Ramlee after his move to Kuala Lumpur in 1964. Aside from the complex relationship he had with his oldest and only biological son, Nasir, the narrative highlights how unappreciated

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he was in Malaysia for the 10 years he lived in Kuala Lumpur up to his death. The film explicitly attributes his decline in popularity to the onslaught of 1960s popular music culture from the West. It was the era of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and the world(wide) invasion of rock, soul, pop, reggae and blues music. The Bee Gees, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Supremes all became household names displacing P. Ramlee’s brand of music and singing style. And while local pop singers struggled to compete with the new musical craze, P. Ramlee remained true to his music. The consequences were disastrous.

Ironically, this narration is backgrounded by the original recording of ‘Bunyi Gitar’. The intertextual implications of this scene in the documentary are manifold. As noted earlier, ‘Bunyi Gitar’ was included in one of the last films that P. Ramlee made with Shaw Brothers in Singapore. My view is that the song was made as a parody to the rising popularity of guitar band music, a style that P. Ramlee was apparently opposed to, at least based on his presentation at the National Cultural Congress in 1971. Even more so, the relationship between pop yeh yeh music culture and P. Ramlee’s films was a mutually beneficial one, if rather complicated. Further, ‘Bunyi Gitar’ is used in the documentary to denote the era that led to his musical ‘demise’. The use of the song contradicts the statement that P. Ramlee ‘remained true to his music’, while the film hardly attempts to demonstrate the kind of music that he was actually making in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His music in all periods of his career was cosmopolitan and diverse, utilising a plethora of styles, both local and foreign. Thus, contrary to the documentary’s narration, it is actually difficult to specify what cultural style or aesthetic could be considered ‘true to his music’. This narration is remarkably similar to the arguments advanced in the paper P. Ramlee presented in 1971. This moment in the documentary is particularly explicit in its espousal of his views on the role of Western pop culture in eroding local music in the 1970s. His reactionary views are then easily taken on to perpetuate a nationalist narrative based on ‘racial purity’ or ‘Malay homogeneity’ in Malaysian music. The viewer is made to empathise with the rejection of P. Ramlee’s music in an era of wayward Malay youth who had no love for their own culture. A desire to deepen this sense of kasihan for P. Ramlee is evident in an interview in the documentary with Ramli Kecik (better known as Ramli Ismail), his friend and personal assistant, who relates how P. Ramlee was openly rejected by young Malaysian music fans in 1971. P. Ramlee has been ‘booed’ on stage. At Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature). It was the ‘Night of Three Ramlees’: P. Ramlee, A. Ramlie and L. Ramli. I was the cameraman. So when P. Ramlee came out to sing, everyone ‘booed’. I noticed … [in] pop [concerts] held in stadiums that had singers from Singapore and Malaysia, when Malaysian singers come out, people had to ‘boo’. So at the time, [Malaysian] people did not like local singers. (see also Berita Harian 1971)

Ramli Kecik’s observations of the general rejection of local artists actually points to a general sentiment among music fans that favoured Singaporean artists over Malaysian artists. The Singaporean, A. Ramlie, was a particularly popular pop yeh yeh singer at the time, while the Malaysian L. Ramli was also a pop yeh yeh singer. P.

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Ramlee, by contrast to the other two ‘Ramlees’, was associated with an older era of music. Ramli Kecik’s anecdote, while generating a shocking sense of kasihan from the retrospective position of P. Ramlee’s elevated status in the national narrative, conveniently frames the documentary’s positioning of P. Ramlee as an advocate for local traditional music. Discursively, pop yeh yeh youth music is cast as foreign, external and deviant, grouped with the other impure musical ‘invaders’ from the West. In the documentary’s revisionist narrative, P. Ramlee is portrayed as a champion for a national music that was not appreciated by rebellious and wayward Malay youths. Following the infamous ‘booing’ incident, the film shows footage of an interview with P. Ramlee in the early 1970s, in which he talks about the importance of preserving traditional music. Songs [or musical styles] such as joget, orkes-orkes combo [Malay orchestras] … asli songs, ghazal and … dondang sayang have never been put in competitions or presented. If these songs are not encouraged, hence in less than ten or twenty years to come these songs will be fully forgotten and music from the West … will be representative of our music.

Here, P. Ramlee is cast as a visionary sage who few paid attention to in his lifetime, foretelling the erosion of local musical cultures amid the onslaught of foreign and decadent music. The juxtaposition of his public rejection (youths ‘booing’) against his ‘wise’ and ominous statement draws on the viewer’s pity for him and perhaps even arouses anger towards the rowdy youth who did not appreciate him while he was still alive. The icon’s credibility is thus cemented further in this narrative of rejection and struggle—a potent reminder of why P. Ramlee’s vision on cultural preservation in music needs to be championed. The melodramatic narrative for preserving national culture is set and overtly articulated. Following this, the emotional climax of the film culminates in an interview with Aziz Sattar, P. Ramlee’s acting colleague.15 Aziz remained in Singapore when P. Ramlee left for Kuala Lumpur. He relates P. Ramlee’s sad state when he went to visit him in Kuala Lumpur before his death. In this scene, his outburst of tears is the most emotional moment of all the interviews in the film: His life was burdensome. [I felt much] pity [for him]. The last time I went to his home in Kuala Lumpur. I saw [tears welling up in his eyes, and looking down], he was eating rice with [fried] egg [holding back sobs]. His name was big. People [used to] know who P. Ramlee was. But his life was burdensome.

Aziz’s interview encapsulates P. Ramlee’s tragic final year as somehow being reduced to the humble but demeaning act of eating plain rice with fried eggs, implying the lowest level of poverty for a man that was once the wealthiest and most popular Malay entertainer in the region. The sincerity of Aziz’s interview was put into question in my interview with Ahmad Nawab Khan (12 June 2013), who was a close friend of P. Ramlee and composed music for his films made in Kuala Lumpur. 15

Aziz Sattar was Ramlee’s co-star in the famous quartet of comedies produced by Shaw Brothers in Singapore (all directed by P. Ramlee): Bujang Lapok (Ne’er Do Well Bachelors, 1957); Pendekar Bujang Lapok (Ne’er Do Well Bachelor Warriors, 1959); Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (Ali Baba Ne’er Do Well Bachelors, 1960); and Seniman Bujang Lapok (Ne’er Do Well Bachelor Actors, 1961).

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[In the] Shuhaimi Baba [documentary] there are … many things that are not that perfect. She interviewed me, too.… [In] that interview, I was not very satisfied because there are [certain] people … especially Aziz (Sattar); I don’t want to defame him. He said a story that was not right. He [tells] stories. So when you seek him [for information], he wants to make a name for himself. It is like he wants to occupy a position whereby everything that you want to know about P. Ramlee, ‘you must come to me’. Ah, it’s like that. People like him. However, there are other people that are knowledgeable about P. Ramlee that they [the film-makers] do not … go to meet [and interview]. And then [the people] they [do] meet, they create a story. Today [the story is] different. Tomorrow [the story is] different. If [they were] not [fabricating stories] they would say the same story. They only know P. Ramlee at Jalan Ampas [Shaw Brothers’ studio in Singapore]. When P. Ramlee came to Kuala Lumpur [in 1964] they were not around anymore.

While Ahmad Nawab was also interviewed for the documentary, it is evident that he was not satisfied with the way the documentary framed P. Ramlee’s life, highlighting the testimonies of certain individuals over others. Though contentious, Ahmad Nawab implies that some of P. Ramlee’s colleagues who only worked with him as actors, as opposed to musicians, were not privy to his private life outside the film studio. Ahmad Nawab thus feels that these studio colleagues do not have the authority or credibility to speak of him in such personal terms. Ahmad Nawab, a musician and film composer, who had known P. Ramlee since his primary school days in Penang, also related to me that P. Ramlee was closer with his musician friends in comparison with his studio or actor friends. What is important to note is Ahmad Nawab’s misgivings of Aziz as an actor who positions himself as an authority on P. Ramlee, while also being able to solicit a suspiciously melodramatic ‘performance’ on camera. Of course, it is impossible to ascertain the validity of Aziz Sattar’s emotions and credibility but it is significant how conveniently his melodramatic moment fits into the tragic narrative of the documentary. I must admit that in my initial viewing of the documentary I, too, was deeply moved by Aziz’s tears and the documentary in general. These emotional responses are instrumental in rallying a sense of anguish and sadness concerning the tragedy of P. Ramlee’s last days while instilling a sense of national pride in the need to champion his views on local music. Later in the film, footage from the same video interview with P. Ramlee cited earlier highlights his views on instilling local music among local youths: If we do not cultivate traditional and asli music into the chests of our children, our young children … one day other musics will occupy that space because the inside of their chests are empty. There is nothing. The same goes for when we teach our children to learn religion. However far s/he goes, s/he will rarely change religion because the religion that is taught by her/his parents are kept in the chest. It is the same [with] music … so that other musics cannot fill their soul.

P. Ramlee’s statement here indicates his passion for local music, even comparing it to religious identity. The statement on how local traditional music can be likened to a connection with the soul also functions to evoke a nationalistic sentiment among the documentary’s Malaysian viewers. The film seeks to solicit empathy with P. Ramlee’s passion for local music and covertly relate it to a strong nationalistic sentiment. National culture is discursively and emotively linked to faith and the soul,

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designating local traditional music with an untouchable and unquestionable position of purity. By extension, P. Ramlee is the embodiment of that cultural purity, the national musical image of irreplaceability that cannot be overtaken by outside forces. Thus the melodramatic act of remembering in this documentary evokes a nationalistic sentiment of wanting to preserve national cultural practices that are at risk of being forgotten or replaced by new or foreign cultures. Far from the cautionary warnings expressed in this documentary, P. Ramlee’s actual omnipresent iconic status as a bastion of Malaysian national culture makes it impossible to forget him. Further, this mythical status grants him an unquestioned irreplaceability. Fittingly, this notion of irreplaceability is intertextually linked to the theme of one of his most famous songs, ‘Di Mana Kan Ku Cari Ganti’ (Where Will I Find a Replacement), from one of his most popular films, Ibu Mertua-ku (My Mother-in-Law, 1962, dir. P. Ramlee). These melodramatic remembrances of P. Ramlee signal the mythical status of his personal narrative that parallels the making of the nation (see Mahyuddin and Lee 2015: 417). The ease with which P. Ramlee’s biography has been appropriated is best expressed in conceptual terms by Bishnupriya Ghosh (2011: 48). Myths are comfortable; they reassure. They encourage passive consumption in habitual encounters that cause little discomfort. But when we come across icons that attract a great deal of affective intensity of the sort … [found] in … mass-media biographs … we might assume that the message communicated through the iconic sign is highly contested.

As easily as such a potent nationalist icon like P. Ramlee can take on the status of myth and reinforce a nation’s identity it can conversely challenge such a rigid conception of nationhood. Ghosh suggests that it is the ‘affective intensity’ of such ‘bio-icons’ that leads to such contestations. Such an affective narrative of remembering P. Ramlee has galvanised a sense of national pride in his music, but a deeper reading reveals disjunctures and contradictions that expose the contested nature of constituting a homogenous national culture through a complex and affectively intense individual and artistic icon.

16.7 Conclusion Mohammad Nor Khalid aka Lat (2016: 106–109), the acclaimed cartoonist and another of Malaysia’s great national arts icons, published an autobiography in which he reveals an interview he conducted as a young cub reporter with P. Ramlee in 1970. His reflections on this encounter provide a nuanced counter-narrative to the one presented in Shuhaimi Baba’s film.

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At the time, P. Ramlee’s star had really waned in the eyes of much of the public. But how he himself felt at that time is hard to say. Was he really down? I can’t know. In later years, when his talent was reassessed and valued, people mentioned how unfair things were for him in his later life. Yet in the 1950s he had been paid tens of thousands of dollars, a lot of money at the time. At the end of the day, it is his legacy that is the most important thing.

In Malaysia, P. Ramlee’s artistic and cultural legacy is unquestioned. Consequently, despite his eclectic and cosmopolitan life and music, the nation-state promotes his iconicity to instil a rigid notion of Malay(sian) artistry and national culture. Potently evoked in state-sponsored institutions like the P. Ramlee Memorial Museum and documentary films like P. Ramlee: A Biography is the affective narrative of his irreplaceability. Fuelling this melodramatic sentiment of tragic irreplaceability is the culturally intimate trope of kasihan, linked to his life narrative and articulated as an allegory of underappreciated local traditions and state-sanctioned national cultures in need of safeguarding from decadent outside cultures. This chapter has outlined the history of discourses about P. Ramlee that encompass the narrative of his iconicity. As a prominent creative individual who lived and produced artistic works in film and music, concurrent with the transitional period of nation-making in the Malay Peninsula, he was immortalised as a dominant but also highly contested national icon. The state-endorsed narrative sees him as a bastion of Malay ethnonational purity and greatness in the arts, effectively benchmarking standards of what constitute ‘authentic’ Malaysian film and music. However, a cultural history of P. Ramlee that illuminates his cosmopolitan affectations and artistic practices unearth a more complex (counter-)narrative. His national narrative is thus paradoxical, characterised by a simultaneous embrace and rejection of new cultures, an international outlook that seeks to cement a national identity, a cosmopolitan aesthetic that wants to preserve traditional practices. It is precisely these contradictions that form the national narrative of Malaysia, a region once cosmopolitan and fluid prior to European colonialism that then perpetuated independence through an ethnonationalist, capitalist ideology sourced in post-war imperialism. Despite attempts to confine P. Ramlee’s narrative to a homogenous vision of national culture, the cosmopolitan intimacies of his music and film will continue to emerge, allowing new interpretations and (re)definitions of autonomous and diverse Malaysian identities to be expressed for generations to come. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Ahmad Nawab Khan for an interview that was instrumental to the main arguments made in this chapter. Research conducted for this study was made possible by the King’s College London Continuation Scholarship (2012–2014) and a period of fieldwork from July to August 2013 hosted by the National University of Singapore, funded by the King’s College London Partnership Grant.

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References Adil Johan. 2014. Disquieting degeneracy: Policing Malaysian and Singaporean popular music culture from the mid-1960s to early-1970s. In Sonic modernities in the Malay world: A history of popular music, social distinction and novel lifestyles (1930s–2000s), ed. Bart Barendregt, 135–161. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2018. Cosmopolitan intimacies: Malay film music of the independence era. Singapore: NUS Press. Ahmad Sarji. 2011. P. Ramlee: Erti yang sakti, 2nd ed. Petaling Jaya: MPH Group Publishing. (Orig. pub. 1999). Berita Harian. 1971. Tiga Ramlee di malam amal banjir ’71 [Three Ramlees in evening flood relief concert 1971]. 10 March. Burhanuddin Bin Buang. 2001. Pop yeh yeh music in Singapore, 1963–1971. BA thesis, National University of Singapore. Ghosh, Bishnupriya. 2011. Global icons: Apertures to the popular. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gomez, Terence Edmund, and Johan Saravanamuttu, eds. 2012. The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative action, ethnic inequalities and social justice. Singapore: NUS Press. Hanisah Selamat. 2019. Eksklusif Siri Satu: Laporan khas Pustaka Peringatan P Ramlee— Memori legasi seni seniman agung [Siri Satu exclusive: P. Ramlee Memorial Museum special report: Memory of the artistic legacy of the great artist]. Berita Harian, 22 April. https://www.bharian.com.my/hiburan/selebriti/2019/04/555897/eksklusif-siri-satu-lap oran-khas-pustaka-peringatan-p-ramlee-memori. Accessed 23 Oct 2020. Hassan Muthalib. 2013. Malaysian cinema in a bottle: A century (and a bit more) of wayang. Kuala Lumpur: Merpati Jingga. Herzfeld, Michael. 2005. Cultural intimacy: Social poetics in the nation-state, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Karim, Wazir Jahan, ed. 1990. Emotions of culture: A Malay perspective. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Lockard, Craig A. 1996. From folk to computer songs: The evolution of Malaysian popular music, 1930–1990. Journal of Popular Culture 30(3): 1–26. ———. 1998. Dance of life: Popular music and politics in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Mahyuddin Ahmad, and Lee Yuen Beng. 2015. Negotiating class, ethnicity and modernity: The ‘Malaynisation’ of P. Ramlee and his films. Asian Journal of Communication 25(4): 408–421. McGraw, Andrew Clay. 2009. Music and meaning in the independence-era Malaysian films of P. Ramlee. Asian Cinema 20(1): 35–59. Mohammad Nor Khalid, with Syed Nadzri Syed Harun. 2016. Lat: My life and cartoons. Kuala Lumpur: Editions Didier Millet. Mohd Anis Md Nor. 1993. Zapin: Folk dance of the Malay world. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Noor As Ahmad. 1967. Nasihat P. Ramlee [P. Ramlee’s advice]. Mastika Filem 62: 30–31. P. Ramlee. 1973. Cara-cara meninggikan mutu dan memperkayakan muzik jenis asli dan tradisional Malaysia demi kepentingan negara [Ways to elevate and enrich the indigenous and traditional music of Malaysia for the benefit of the nation]. In Asas kebudayaan kebangsaan [The basis of national culture], 205–207. Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan Belia dan Sukan Malaysia. Stokes, Martin. 2010. The republic of love: Cultural intimacy in Turkish popular music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tan Sooi Beng. 1992. Counterpoints in the performing arts of Malaysia. In Fragmented vision: Culture and politics in contemporary Malaysia, ed. Joel S. Kahn and Francis Kok Wah Loh, 282–305. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ———. 1993. Bangsawan: A social and stylistic history of popular Malay opera. Singapore: Oxford University Press.

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Uhde, Jan, and Yvonne Ng Uhde. 2010. Latent images: Film in Singapore, 2nd ed. Singapore: NUS Press. (Orig. pub. 2000). Yusnor Ef. 2011. Muzik Melayu sejak 1940-an [Malay music since the 1940s]. Kuala Lumpur: YKNA Network.

Adil Johan is a research fellow, who heads the Cluster on Arts and Social Integration at the Institute of Ethnic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. His research analyses aspects of popular music in the mass media that intersects with issues of interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, intimacy, affect and gender. His recent publications include: Cosmopolitan intimacies: Malay film music of the independence era (2018); Cosmopolitan intimacies in Malay performing arts and literature: An introduction. Journal of Intercultural Studies 40(4) (2019); and Malaysian popular music and social cohesion: A focus group study conducted in Kuching, Kota Kinabalu and Klang Valley. Kajian Malaysia 37(2) (2019). He is also coeditor of Made in Nusantara: Studies in Popular Music (2021).

Chapter 17

Genre, Gender and Temporal Critique in Budak Kelantan and Bunohan Norman Yusoff

Abstract This chapter examines representations of masculinity in relation to notions of temporality in two Malaysian feature films, Budak Kelantan (dir. Wan Azli Wan Jusoh, 2008) and Bunohan (dir. Dain Said, 2011), which are both set in the east coast state of Kelantan. Budak Kelantan is about the reunion of two childhood friends in Kuala Lumpur who have taken different paths in life. One is highly moralistic while the other has strayed from the ‘right path’, and much of the plot is driven by the former trying to help the latter regain his integrity. Bunohan, which draws on elements from kickboxing, gangster and fantastic films, and family melodramas, depicts the homecoming of three estranged brothers who inevitably become trapped in a tangled web of greed, vengeance and violence. In their critique of modernity and representation of marginalised working-class youth masculinities, both films utilise and invoke Kelantan’s traditional art forms. Budak Kelantan deploys dikir barat (a traditional musical form) as a stylistic element to accentuate moments of masculine emotional anxiety and nostalgic desire for traditional kampung life. Bunohan intricately interweaves Kelantan’s art forms with traditional magic and healing and mystical folklore. In this respect, both films induce a nostalgic longing for a place that has been lost due to rural–urban migration. Through a close reading of the two films, I argue that both offer forms of counter-narrative through their representations of troubled and anxious masculinities (and the women onto whom they are projected or who are forced to mediate them), while at the same time reflecting on and critiquing the reified gender binaries born of Malaysia’s Islamisation, Western modernity and linear, homogeneous time. Keywords Malaysia · Kelantan · Film · Modernity · Masculinity · Budak Kelantan · Bunohan

This chapter is based on a part of my PhD thesis, ‘Moral tale or fin-de-siècle tragedy? Budak Kelantan and Bunohan’. See Norman Yusoff (2013: 160–204). Norman Yusoff (B) Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_17

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17.1 Introduction In 2011 the former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad expressed the view that the proliferation of Malaysian horror films was counterproductive to building a progressive and developed modern society (Satiman 2011). Mahathir’s claim spawned a flurry of reactions by film-makers, academics, critics and clerics, some of whom concurred with his view while others refuted it. He maintained that horror films threatened to instil backward modes of thinking and behaviour among Malaysian audiences, who were already entrenched in superstition and the supernatural. Mahathir’s criticism of Malaysian horror films and their promulgation of society’s belief in superstition was linked to his modernising project Vision 2020, which aimed to see Malaysia achieve the status of a fully developed nation by 2020. Genres such as horror were seen as having the potential to promote a critical and contesting view of this official discourse of progress and development, one that was primitive and outdated. The concept of development derives its power not only by positing a particular idea of the future but also by providing a dialogue with an imagined past. Development reimagines the past to accommodate a teleological vision of the future. The past then manifests itself in traditional, ostensibly archaic representations of national culture. By promoting so-called primitive and superstitious thinking, these representations are seen as obstacles to nation-building efforts that strive towards a modern future. Therefore, development legitimises Malaysia’s political elites such as Mahathir by placing them in the position of mediating the past and the future, as makers of history (see Brosius 2003). The idea of development as progressive, following the Western mode of capitalism, builds on and reinforces the linear conception of time which has been critiqued by cultural scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. Temporally, Mahathir’s assertion implied a tension between the general secular time of history and the spiritual time of gods and spirits. The continued, albeit wavering, belief among modern-day viewers in the existence of the supernatural serves as a threat to the apparent coherence of what is now understood as the present. This is particularly relevant to Malaysia’s adoption and adaptation of the construction of historicised time, or a universal, rational mode of timekeeping that ensures the country’s international recognition as a ‘modern’ nation-state. When Mahathir came to power in the early 1980s, he initiated a standard Malaysian time for peninsular Malaysia and East Malaysia (comprising Sabah and Sarawak) (Au 2012). In effect, the previous heterogeneous time-worlds (Chakrabarty 1996) were now confined to one time and one space, that is to the homogeneous and unified nation-state of present-day Malaysia. Any attempts to ‘de-modernise’ society, such as by resorting to ancient, archaic practices and beliefs (often invoked in Malaysian horror films), were seen as a threat to nation-building. What is at stake in Mahathir’s criticism of horror films can be further discerned by looking at the relations between cinematic genres and notions of temporality. In contemporary Malaysian cinema, such relations can be witnessed in other genres

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too, in particular films such as Budak Kelantan (dir. Wan Azli Wan Jusoh, 2008) and Bunohan (dir. Dain Said, 2011), which utilise hybrid genre elements and draw on local folklore and traditional art forms. Both films generally articulate some expression of fractured, diverse forms of temporality, a tendency that resonates well with the films’ temporal themes that offer a strident critique of Malaysia’s modernity. This chapter examines two films—Budak Kelantan and Bunohan—both of which centre on the peoples and cultures of the northeastern state of Kelantan. Budak Kelantan is about the reunion of two childhood friends in Kuala Lumpur who have taken different paths in life. One is highly moralistic while the other has strayed from the ‘right path’, and much of the action of the film revolves around the former trying to help the latter regain his integrity. In this respect, the film is a unique buddy movie insofar as its melodramatic masculine sensibility is closer to that of the classical narrative of the mytho-historical warriors Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat than to that of quintessential American buddy films such as Midnight Cowboy (1969) or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). It is also the directorial debut of the theatre director and actor Wan Azli Wan Jusoh who is himself originally from Kelantan. Dain Said, the director of Bunohan, studied film and photography in Britain before embarking on broadcasting, advertising and film-making. His debut film, a horror thriller titled Dukun (Shaman, 2007), which was only released in 2018, was inspired by a sensational murder case involving a female shaman who brutally murdered a politician. Bunohan, which draws on elements from kickboxing fight films, gangster and fantastic films, and family melodramas, depicts the homecoming of three estranged brothers who inevitably become trapped in a tangled web of greed, vengeance and violence. Generally marketed and promoted as an action film, Bunohan was bought by the Los Angeles-based company Traction Media (with rights pre-sold to Universal Pictures) in 2011. Prior to this, the film was screened in a number of international film festivals including in Toronto and Rotterdam (The Star 2011). Here, I argue that both films draw on hybrid genres and temporalities to destabilise and complicate representations of masculinity, a strategy employed to facilitate their critique of Malaysia’s dialectical forms of modernity. In Budak Kelantan, Wan Azli references and reworks particular conventions of the buddy/gangster action genre to expose and blur gender lines around issues of religion and morality. I argue that the film’s depiction of religious morality is predicated on Sufi-influenced Islam which is more humanist and inclusive.1 I further argue that these religious and moral themes are reinforced formally through the use of a mobile, hand-held camera and scenes in which dikir barat, a traditional musical form consisting of group singing, is featured both as background music and diegetic performance. In my reading of Bunohan, I examine how Dain Said’s utilisation of hybrid genres unravels the film’s complex articulation of masculinity and morality. In particular, the 1

Although Sufism is the earliest version of Islam that arrived in the Malay Archipelago in the fourteenth century, this representation may now be seen as contesting the dominant version of Islam practised by the Malaysian state—a form of ‘legalist Islam’ promoted through scripturalist orthodoxy. Sufism tends to be censured by the Islamic bureaucracy in Malaysia. For further discussion of this, see Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid (2011).

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director’s incorporation of generic elements from kickboxing, gangster and fantasy films is intricately threaded with traditional art forms from Kelantan such as wayang kulit (shadow play), mak yong (court dance drama) and main peteri (therapeutic dance ritual). This particular strategy, as I show, underpins the film’s dense expression of temporality. More specifically, it ruptures the linear narratives that characterise much of mainstream Malaysian genre cinema and, in the process, makes a statement about the mixed temporality of modern Malaysia. I further demonstrate that both films’ presentation of unstable masculine subjectivities is informed by the cultural mode of melodrama. This specific mode dates back to the old literary tradition of texts that often featured a world or milieu saturated with melancholy and sorrow. In order to gain a general picture of Kelantan and its peoples, and to understand both films better, I now provide a brief description of this state, looking particularly at its demographics, traditional arts and cinematic representations.

17.2 ‘Corridor of Mecca’ versus ‘Cradle of Malay Culture’ Specifically focusing on Kelantanese youth, Budak Kelantan is set in Kuala Lumpur whereas Bunohan is set in one of Kelantan’s remote small towns (named ‘Bunohan’, literally meaning ‘murder’) located along the Thai–Malaysian border. Although both films deal with regional culture and identity, they depict Kelantan and the Kelantanese in a somewhat different light. For example, Kelantan in Bunohan is not the regional state—governed by Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) since 1990—with which many Malaysians are familiar. This is the state that the government and political demagogues promote as ‘Serambi Mekah’ (Corridor of Mecca), identifying it as a centre for Islamic learning and scholarship. Although its population is predominantly Malay and Muslim, Kelantan is also known for pockets of Thai settlements in rural areas, particularly in districts located close to the border. These settlements have developed because the state is located in the northeast of peninsular Malaysia which is bordered by Narathiwat province of Thailand to the north.2 From the early 1970s onwards, many Kelantanese youths have migrated out of the state for economic and educational reasons. Some have settled in other states and bigger cities such as Kuala Lumpur; others have moved to neighbouring countries such as Singapore and Brunei (Ishak 1994; Saw 2007). As Kelantan remains by far the poorest and least developed state in peninsular Malaysia and the second-poorest state in the country (Geraldine 2020), PAS has been criticised by the federal government, particularly during Mahathir’s first tenure as prime minister (1981–2003), for the 2

Kelantan’s Thai (Siamese) community (mostly Buddhist) previously constituted 1% of the state’s population (Mohamed Yusoff 1987). As oral traditions indicate, many of the Thai settlements are over 100 years old. In fact, in some places, Thai villagers are known to predate their Malay neighbours.

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state’s failed economic development. PAS’s image has thus become tarnished, and the party is commonly seen as outdated and unable to govern (Farish 2007: 60– 61). To furnish one example of the kind of criticism faced by the Kelantan state government, the former deputy international trade and industry minister, Mukhriz Mahathir, refuted the PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang’s claim that the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) had been campaigning to discourage foreign investors from investing in Kelantan due to PAS’s intention to implement hudud.3 Mukhriz responded by saying that Kelantan’s failure to attract foreign investors was mainly due to the state’s lack of good infrastructure (New Straits Times 2012). Despite such criticism, which is widespread and persistent, PAS has maintained a political stranglehold over Kelantan for 30 years and is today represented in the federal government (Ahmad Fauzi 2018).4 This discourse of development is clearly temporalised, equating the rural sector with poverty and retrogression, a common official perspective that invokes Kelantan’s status of being ‘behind’ other states even as its ‘potential’ is reiterated. Notions of development legitimise the political elites and may impel one to think about political legitimacy in this country, and in Southeast Asia in general, in terms of the centre/ periphery dichotomy (Brosius 2003). While generally associated with ‘underdevelopment’, Kelantan—known as the most rustic of the east coast states—also has been heralded as the bastion of Malay culture. This state has been blessed with indigenous art forms that exemplify its cultural richness and hybridity, including dikir barat, wayang kulit, mak yong, menora and main peteri, some of which have been promoted at the national level as part of Malaysia’s cultural heritage. Mak yong, a court dance drama, was originally proclaimed in 2005 and officially inscribed in 2008 on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (UNESCO) list of artforms considered intangible cultural heritage (UNESCO n.d.). However, since PAS came to power in 1990, there has been a sustained campaign to ban all forms of art, culture and entertainment deemed ‘un-Islamic’ and ‘immoral’, including a ban on cinemas. This ban has been imposed not only on modern forms of popular culture like Western pop music, but also on traditional arts that date back to the pre-Islamic era. In effect, traditional cultural practices such as wayang kulit, mak yong and menora have been restricted, if not curtailed altogether, due to the fact that many of these art forms entail mystical spiritualism that evinces strong animistic, Hindu and Buddhist influences (Farish 2004). Consider, for example, mak yong which originated from Pattani in southern Thailand. Performed mainly by women’s troupes and accompanied by male musicians, the 3

One of the biggest and longest-running controversies that PAS has been involved in is the question of sharia law and the party’s stated aim of implementing hudud punishments should it ever come to power in the country. PAS’s critics and opponents claim that the form and content of PAS’s hudud laws are problematic and questionable to say the least, and that hudud punishments (which include cutting off hands, whipping and stoning to death) are barbaric and cruel and go against the fundamental principle of justice within Islam. See Helen Ting Mu Hung (2016). 4 Together with UMNO, PAS joined the Perikatan Nasional government (2020–2021), following the collapse of the Pakatan Harapan government.

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court dance drama is often enacted during occasions of thanksgiving such as after a paddy harvest to placate spirits, and to celebrate important days such as the sultan’s birthday (Mohd. Ghouse 1995: 15). Incorporating shamanism, spirit-feasting and theatrical performances, the dance drama serves as a conduit to the spiritual world (Ghulam-Sarwar 2004, 2019). Another art form, main peteri, is a traditional dance performed to invoke healing. The patient is actively cajoled into taking part in the dance, guided by a tok peteri (spiritual teacher), so that he is engaged in his own healing and reintegration into society (Wright 1980: 8; A.S. Hardy Shafii et al. 2017). During the performance its practitioners usually fall into a trance or perform a séance (Mohd. Taib 1989: 63). The better-known wayang kulit, a traditional shadow puppet play, is believed to have come to the Malay Peninsula from Hindu Java during or soon after the Majapahit period. The dalang or puppet master enthrals his audience with the larger-than-life stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the ancient texts of the Hindu world. The artistic form that has appealed most to the masses is dikir barat, which entails solo and group singing, hand-clapping, and synchronised body and hand movements accompanied by percussion instruments. This is due to the fact that the lyrics often focus on everyday subject matter or mundane objects in a witty and humorous way (Brennan 2001; Zaharan 2008; Matusky and Tan 2017: 333–335). From its humble origins in the kampung of Kelantan, the form has been pushed into the limelight and become popularised nationwide. In Kelantan, this art form has been reshaped under the PAS state government in its efforts to promote an all-encompassing Islamic cultural identity. Since stage shows are rare due to the strict entertainment rulings imposed by the state government, dikir barat provides an alternative for Muslim youths looking for entertainment and social gatherings, and an avenue through which they can express themselves in a creative way. It remains one of the few legal forms of live entertainment left for the general public to enjoy in Kelantan (Farish 2004). The former chief minister of Kelantan, Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, said that ‘dikir barat should not only be regarded as a form of entertainment, but also [as] a means to disseminate information’ (New Straits Times 1996). Although subject to temporary proscription in May 1998 on the grounds that organisers turned concerts into ‘a form of entertainment incorporating immoral elements like indecently dressed female performers and free mixing of both sexes’, dikir barat was allowed to be performed provided that certain guidelines were met (Brennan 2001: 308). In an interview in the Economist in 1995, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a Kelantan prince and major political figure for many decades in UMNO, claimed that ‘in Malaysia’s quest for industrialisation, those in power accept any development, whatever the cost to the environment. In Kelantan we resist’ (Fauwaz 1995). This form of resistance has become evident in some Malaysian film-makers’ thematic preoccupation with Kelantan and its people. In these films, the theme of resistance is mediated through the creative incorporation of traditional art forms. For example, in Hatta Azad Khan’s Wayang (Shadows, 2008), which is set in Kelantan, wayang kulit becomes the subject. The film centres on a clash of idealism between a puppet master and his blind apprentice when the latter attempts to innovate and modernise some aspects of wayang kulit. This film serves as a pretext for Hatta to promote the country’s fading

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traditional arts. This pretext also informs one of Bunohan’s central themes, mourning the loss of the traditional to critique the negative aspects of modernity. The internationally acclaimed director U-Wei Haji Saari’s Jogho (The Champion, 1999), set in a Kelantanese Malay community in southern Thailand, tells of bullfighter Mamat’s attempt to avenge the death of his elder brother, who was killed by a bullfighting rival. Adhering to blood feud traditions, Mamat and his young kinsmen feel compelled to preserve the honour of the village. With the help of his friend in Kelantan, Mamat embarks upon his vengeful journey to find and kill the perpetrators. Jogho depicts the ‘transcultural border of the old Malay world which, in pre-colonial times had no political boundaries but was a mediator of strong cultural and political exchanges between the traditional Malay and Siamese “states”’ (Zawawi 2003: 151). Dain Said revisits this theme of the border in Bunohan, which is set in the small town of Bunohan along the Thai–Malaysian border; the actual real-life Kampung Bunohan is located less than 10 km from the nearest border crossing to Thailand. Significantly, all of these films about Kelantan and the Kelantanese feature rich and complex representations of masculinity. For example, Wayang critiques traditional patriarchy while dealing with the issue of polygamy and of maintaining patriliny. The portrayal of rural kampung masculinity in Jogho gives rise to questions of morality and notions of violence. Following the diverse and hybrid cultural traditions of the state, representations and performances of masculinity are fluid and complicated. Images of Kelantanese masculinity associated with pastoral kampung traits, habits and mindsets contest the category of the ‘new Malay man’. Such cinematic depictions of Kelantanese men also do not conform to the Islamist ethos espoused by the PAS-led state government. In the next section, I provide readings of these films through which I argue that depictions of instabilities of masculine subjectivity resonate with their critique of Malaysia’s dialectical modernity. It is to Budak Kelantan that I now turn.

17.3 Budak Kelantan: A Moral Tale? Budak Kelantan revolves around two childhood friends from Kelantan, Jaha and Buchek, who cross paths in Kuala Lumpur after many years of separation. Jaha is a deviant young man, involved in crime and violence, in contrast to Buchek who is a pious, unemployed university graduate. Jaha lives in a low-cost flat with a group of Kelantanese friends. Buchek helps a friend run a roadside burger stall while looking for a professional job. Following their accidental reunion, Buchek becomes drawn into Jaha’s violent, explosive lifestyle which includes gang beatings, drug use and kidnapping. Jaha targets a runaway teenage girl to rape, with the assistance of his housemates, and to sell her into prostitution. Buchek incurs Jaha’s wrath when he rescues one of his potential rape victims, an ethnically Chinese girl named Lee Chen Chen with whom he becomes close. Jaha attempts to woo a hijab-clad girl named Che Noor only to discover that she is actually Buchek’s girlfriend. Jaha’s encounter with Che Noor prompts him to

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contemplate a new lifestyle and try to extricate himself from the vicious world in which he has become ensnared. Unable to confront Buchek directly, Jaha writes him a letter telling him how he feels about Che Noor and, determined to help Jaha change, Buchek makes a personal sacrifice by persuading his girlfriend to reciprocate Jaha’s feelings. The girl refuses, devastated and baffled by her boyfriend’s proposition. Che Noor’s refusal to accept him fills Jaha with melancholic sadness and longing, culminating in a violent fight during which he stabs a stranger. The next day, while attempting to escape the police, Jaha dies in a tragic road accident. Although a low-budget effort and the director’s feature debut, Budak Kelantan generally received positive reviews in Malaysia. Critics praised the film for its bold and refreshing take on the crises facing urban youth. They point to the film’s raw and realist aesthetics (its grainy picture quality) and its theme of immorality among urban Kelantanese youth. Wahiduzzaman (2008) describes it as ‘a gritty urban action-drama … the movie depicts the paths taken by Kelantanese youngsters in Kuala Lumpur— one of righteousness and one of decadence’. Praising Wan Azli for successfully getting his message across, Radin Sri Ghazali (2008) writes: ‘[The director] is also sensitive to the culture and the lifestyle of Kelantanese youth in Kuala Lumpur…. Budak Kelantan proves to be raw and honest.’ The Malay-language critic A. Wahab Hamzah (2008), who reviewed the film from the perspective of cinematic representation of teenagers or youth, writes that Budak Kelantan is about the struggle and survival of adolescents in the big city. Fadli Al-Akiti (2008) observes that on the surface the film is reminiscent of an old Hindi melodrama highlighting Manichean morality or of a religious-themed film known for its tendency to preach about and proselytise morality. But, according to Fadli, in the hands of the director Wan Azli, such subjects are executed in a more engaging and realistic manner. In my reading of this film, I consider how these critics’ assertions regarding its realist representations of troubled youth link to the film’s generic hybridity. Budak Kelantan blends together elements of gangster, crime, youth, social problems and teen romance films, most of which deal with social reality. This strategy also informs many American buddy movies which have invariably been hybridised with other genres, such as road movies, westerns, comedies and action films featuring cops (Carroll 2003). I further show how this strategy informs the film’s blurring of masculinity and morality. For example, in dealing with morality, Budak Kelantan reworks the American and Hong Kong gangster genre that depicts religious motifs by foregrounding Sufi Islam as mediated through the character Buchek. One of the conventions of buddy films is to highlight two male characters with different personalities (ibid.: 73–75; Goldstein 2001). Usually their friendship is challenged by events in the film. The opening sequence of Budak Kelantan illustrates this pattern: Wan Azli’s mobile hand-held camera floats wildly through the untidy interior space of Jaha’s low-cost rumah bujang (bachelor pad). Accompanied by boisterous sounds emanating from a wrestling show on television, it captures Jaha and his housemates playing cards. The shaky camera moves closer, highlighting the wrestling show and revealing Jaha’s two shirtless housemates, who are mimicking some of the wrestling moves, a tendency that prefigures Jaha’s and his housemates’ aggressive masculinity and proclivity for violence. This scene is juxtaposed with a

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back shot of Buchek performing his solat (ritual prayer) in the dark, quiet stillness of the night, as his voice-over proclaims the idea that life is a test and that every human being is born pure, clean and free from contamination by sin. These introductory shots featuring Buchek configure him as the locus of positive, moral rectitude, with his masculinity defined by the traditional virtues of decency, innocence, modesty and fear of God. The stylistic approach of the sequence, with its grainy and restrained aesthetics, conveys an impression of things and people in a drab and unobtrusive manner, similar to the banal, fragmented nature of the youths’ lives. Wan Azli draws on some general conventions of the gangster genre when—as the film unfolds—the Manichean moral structure is complicated (Leitch 2002). Although implicated in a wide range of deviant behaviour and sexual depravity, Jaha is depicted as morally ambiguous. In one particular scene, Buchek pleads with Jaha and Libokbong to drop him at the nearest mosque because he wants to perform his solat asar (evening prayer). When Libokbong, who is driving, seems reluctant to oblige, Jaha bursts into a paroxysm of anger, and reminds him that although they are personally committing some bad deeds, they should not dissuade others from doing good. Immediately after Buchek leaves them and heads for the mosque, Libokbong tells Jaha that he is perplexed by his inclination to befriend someone pious like Buchek. Jaha’s housemates are also portrayed as morally ambiguous. For example, although they help him to rape the teenage girl mentioned earlier, most of them reject his invitation to rape her after he has finished with her. One of them even cynically admits that he is willing to commit other forms of sin but not rape, implying that rape is the most vicious form of sin and greatest crime. This ambiguity is also enunciated visually; immediately after Jaha rapes the girl, Wan Azli’s camera reveals some holy scriptures pasted on the walls of the room, reinforced by the hand-held camera’s restless mobility. Wan Azli’s camera does not show the girl when she is being raped, but focuses instead on the physiognomy and gestures of Jaha and his housemates. By not employing the reaction shot, the scene eschews the gendered spectatorial divide between male/aggressor/active (holder of the gaze) and female/victim/passive (the object of male desire). However, the scene elicits a sense of unease and disorientation, reinforced as it is by diegetic sounds of the girl in agony, juxtaposed against the non-diegetic jarring sound of a traditional musical instrument, the rebab. In another scene—after the kidnapping incident—although Jaha questions Buchek’s rationale for rescuing Lee Chen Chen when she was left in his trust, his moral stance wavers when he finally agrees that what Buchek has done is actually right. He tells Libokbong that Buchek was not supposed to be with them in the first place (implying that his moral standards are different from theirs). It is interesting to note that Fadli Al-Akiti (2008) claims that Buchek epitomises a more outrageous form of chauvinism than his friend due to his willingness to ‘trade’ his girlfriend.5 According to this reading, Buchek’s seemingly unalloyed morality 5

Fadli Al-Akiti’s claim that Kelantanese men are sexist or chauvinist appears to have been based upon popular everyday discourse in Malaysia. To date, I have not been able to locate any research or studies conducted on this particular topic.

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is based on the same patriarchal assumptions that inform Jaha’s rape and sexual trafficking of women. On the other hand, Buchek’s earnest intention to see his friend turn over a new leaf leads him to sacrifice the woman he loves. In this sense, his noble gesture is comparable to the Prophet Ibrahim’s (Abraham) willingness to sacrifice his son Isma‘il (Ishmael) in order to obey God’s command, as narrated in his voice-over earlier. In one scene, Buchek confides in his housemate that although he loves Che Noor, ‘we have to love God more than we love a person, right?’ This being the case, Budak Kelantan offers a Sufi version of Islam that accommodates ‘Others’ in its vision of love for humanity.6 The opening of Budak Kelantan implies this tendency when Buchek’s voice-over mentions that the ideal human being is the one who is most useful and helpful to others. However, as I indicate below, Wan Azli does not provide a clear-cut resolution pertaining to Buchek and Che Noor’s relationship, as Buchek makes sacrifices at the expense of Che Noor. The film’s portrayal of Buchek as a virtuous and wise young man challenges the Muslim identity proffered by the state or PAS in legislating and enforcing the morality of the nation. In his attempt to guide Jaha back onto the right path, he never appears holier-than-thou, nor does he preach that people like Jaha should be tormented and condemned to neraka (hell).7 The film’s emphasis on religion parallels many American and Hong Kong gangster films such as The Godfather trilogy and John Woo’s films, which tend to present several religious leitmotifs and iconographies pertaining to Catholicism (Williams 1996; Fordham 2005). However, in Budak Kelantan Wan Azli extends the representation of religion beyond the symbolic mise en scène in offering Islam as a route to redemption for men who have strayed into the criminal world. The director-screenwriter portrays one of the male protagonists as someone explicitly pious who spiritually saves his best friend while entering into a deeper personal intimacy with his creator, a point I discuss further below. The film’s representations of the morality and masculinity of Kelantanese youth allude to tensions between the centre (Kuala Lumpur, urban) and the regional (Kelantan, rural) brought about by migration from the country to the city. Like hundreds of thousands of youth from distant kampung, Jaha and Buchek are drawn to Kuala Lumpur, captivated by the allure and promise of this capital city of 3 million inhabitants. As a graduate from the Henry Gurney School for juvenile offenders, Jaha represents the city’s underclass youth. He is depicted as lacking the education and skills valued by the country’s capitalist economy. However, when it comes to specific modes of youth lifestyles, he is inclined to adopt anything modern which is equated with Western consumer products, styles and images. In many scenes, the film portrays Jaha’s housemate Libokbong, who lampoons his friend by using the 6

Sufism is a branch of Islam associated with spirituality and mysticism and the expression of Islam’s inner essence and esoteric aspects as distinguished from its external and exoteric aspects, as manifested in absolute love of the divine. See Tanvir Anjum (2006). 7 Malaysia’s Islamisation race (which features UMNO and PAS, and lately Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia) has led to the development of a vast array of laws and institutions set up with the aim of ‘caring’ for the welfare of society; however this has largely resulted in the holier-than-thou moral policing of the lives of both Muslim and non-Muslim citizens.

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phrase ‘Tak Amerika-lah’ (literally ‘Un-American, eh?’). In one scene, Libokbong sarcastically comments that Jaha is somewhat ‘Americanised’, saying, You’re different. You’re an American gangster. His clothes … Nike … his pants are Levi’s from a bundle sale … it doesn’t matter that it’s second-hand … as long as it’s made in America. And that’s not enough … smoking Marlboro, drinking Coca-Cola and watching MTV. You’re definitely an American.

In many ways, his references to certain consumer products such as jeans and cigarettes define Jaha’s masculinity. Modernity is critiqued explicitly here as a form of Westernisation that is consumed superficially through fashion, food and styles. A deeper and more nuanced critique occurs in the depiction of Buchek as a struggling university graduate whose higher degree amounts to little more than working at a burger stall. The ambivalence towards capitalism is a common theme in many American gangster films, which explore the tensions between the economic disadvantage of a marginal group and their desire for the illusory promises of the ‘American Dream’. This ambivalence is transposed here to Kuala Lumpur in which the fantasy of the American Dream is even less accessible, let alone attainable. Although depicted as embracing the American consumer culture and the city’s modern cosmopolitanism, Kelantanese youth are portrayed as still entrenched in their cultural roots. In the opening scene, Libokbong urges one of the housemates to switch off the television and to play dikir barat music instead. In this respect, the film further highlights the country’s contradictory notions of modernity through the director’s incorporation of the regional performing art form. Employed both as musical background and diegetic performance, dikir barat functions as a cultural signifier and recurrent motif. With its use of the Kelantanese dialect in its lyrics, this particular cultural artefact serves as ‘a central component of ethnolinguistic formation for the people of Kelantan, … in the process of … maintaining membership of being Kelantanese’ (Zuraidah 2003: 55). In one particular scene in which Jaha and Libokbong are taking Buchek on an excursion, viewers share the characters’ points of view, observing images of everyday Kuala Lumpur rendered in pseudo-documentary mode; the strains of dikir barat infuse the scene with a sense of melancholy as Fadli Al-Akiti notes. The resonance of the well-known dikir barat performer Halim Yazid’s ‘monumental’ vocals, according to Fadli (2008), works effectively as a strategy that may remind the Kelantanese migrants of ‘home’ (their origins and identity) and—in the course of the film’s portrayal of Kelantanese youth—of what they may have lost as a result of migration. These examples imply that dikir barat is an anachronism, something belonging to another period, something conspicuously old-fashioned. In addition to the consistent aural presence of dikir barat, the film’s chronological inconsistency is also anachronistic. The film’s organisation of time disrupts the chronology of events. For example, shots of the present are ruptured by a succession of flashback shots, future shots and imagined, atemporal shots. In the early scenes that depict the two friends’ accidental reunion, Wan Azli not only incorporates some brief flashbacks but also inserts a future shot featuring Buchek who is reading Jaha’s letter, which, chronologically, is

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a final event that appears again at the end of the film. In the meantime, while viewers are following the narrative, they are also provided with atemporal shots of Buchek performing his prayers, occasionally juxtaposed against his voice-over. This sense of anachronism in Wan Azli’s presentation of his narrative structure registers a certain cognitive and epistemic shift. Viewers are led to understand the world not only through direct sensory motor movements but also through temporally mediated events. This narrative anachronism defies the linear chronology we expect in much the same way that the incongruity of the displaced protagonists critiques the speeded-up time of rapid development that characterises cities like Kuala Lumpur. These forms of aural, narrative and embodied anachronism contribute to the sense of melancholy that permeates the entire film. Budak Kelantan intensifies this melancholy, in a nostalgic register, during the earlier scene in which the two friends are reunited in the city and reminisce over their halcyon days in their kampung home. In this conversation, Wan Azli periodically inserts a series of brief flashbacks, juxtaposing their present, late adolescent selves against their childhood ones. The first shot, set against the present shot of Jaha recognising Buchek, shows one of them inside a car gazing out at the other (who is walking) as the car passes him. Subsequent shots are juxtaposed against the present shots of Jaha and Buchek going to a food court to have drinks. The second shot shows one of them jumping down from a tree to pursue the other. The third shows them attending a Qur’an reading lesson, with one of them attempting to escape. And the final shot shows one of them hiding behind some shrubs before confronting the other, leading them to wrestle. These brief flashback shots, which are accompanied by mellow sentimental music, not only augment the sense of distance that accompanies the childhood memories of these two friends but also articulate their transition from the traditional rural past to the modern urban present. The whole sequence implies an imagined past characterised by communal values and cohesive ties which sharply contrasts with the individualistic and materialistic values of the present. Wan Azli’s invocation of dikir barat, and his inclusion of the flashbacks, give rise to a feeling of nostalgic melancholy that seeps through the film’s narrative of the protagonists’ lost innocence as they are corrupted by the materialistic influences of the city. All of this may be read as a form of Kelantanese collective cultural anxiety, subtly expressed in the lyrics of the slow-tempo dikir barat song which urges its audiences (the Kelantanese?) to stand united and to uphold their traditions. The melodramatic mode of the film complicates and destabilises traditional notions of masculinity. This is evident, for instance, in the film’s extolling of the virtues of male comradeship while relegating male–female relationships to a subsidiary position. Jaha’s letter expressing his innermost feelings conforms to dominant social conventions in which men are not supposed to express their emotions openly with each other. This expression is only realised through the pursuit of women, a tendency referred to as ‘homosocial desire’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985: 1), a form of male bonding that relies on gender triangulation in which women are used to affirm the ostensible heterosexuality of the men. Through letter writing, Jaha, who plays a more dominant, masculinised role in his friendship with Buchek, switches to a feminised role when he expresses his intention to change his lifestyle in his

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pursuit of Che Noor. In this respect, Buchek manages to domesticate not only Jaha’s aggressive masculinity but also his depraved behaviour. Jaha’s encounter with Che Noor triggers moments of soul-searching, as his melancholic sadness undermines his sense of rugged physicality, sexual virility and brutal masculinity. Expressing a desire to atone for his misdeeds, in his letter he bemoans his evil destructive self while at the same time admitting that he has never experienced love in his life. In this respect, the viewers’ disapprobation of Jaha’s deviance may not simply impel them to regard his tragic death as the morally correct outcome. The character’s suffering further puts his sense of manhood to the test. Che Noor’s rejection of Jaha depreciates the egocentric machismo that he customarily uses to attract girls and woman and that underlies his explicitly violent and heartless misogyny. Jaha’s melancholic sadness and longing fuel his violent hypermasculinity, evident in a scene towards the end when he runs amok and commits violence. While having a drink with his friends in a food court, he notices a man from a different gang staring at him. Fuelled by his failed attempts to win Che Noor, an exasperated Jaha stands up and starts yelling at him. When the latter retaliates, Jaha hits him and after chasing him down with his friends plunges a knife into his stomach. The sequence is reinforced by Wan Azli’s shaky, oblique Dutch tilts which generate a sense of irresolution—a visual anxiety that reflects Jaha’s sense of unease and emasculation. The camera goes berserk and becomes more restless when it follows the chasing and stabbing incident, completely tipping the viewers off balance. This particular effect is amplified by the jarring and discordant shrieking of the rebab that similarly reverberates in the earlier rape scene. Jaha’s hypermasculinity may be attributed to the sense of lack or loss he is both recuperating from and concealing, and that stems from his feeling of being emasculated by a woman. In this context, masculine subjects complicate the binary positions of victims and victimisers, further reflecting what R.W. Connell (2005) terms ‘plural masculinities’.8 Jaha’s sense of emasculation can be attributed to the underlying domestication of his masculinity by the feminine and traditional elements of Buchek and Che Noor, which informs the notion of cyclicality that Buchek mentions in his voiceover narration, and that shapes an individual, explaining why some human beings act badly or destructively. Somewhat significantly, when Buchek mentions ‘jamal, kamal, yin and yang’, he may conceive of things in the universe as a reflection of these divine names and attributes. The Taoist principles of yin and yang, which can be envisaged—in Islam—as jalal and jamal (the majesty and beauty of God) and kamal (the perfection or non-duality of this pair), all allude to a human being’s fitrah (primordial perfection) when she or he reflects both feminine and masculine qualities or majesty, beauty, rigour and mercy (Murata 1990). This can be discerned not only in the narrative’s pairing of Jaha (masculine, rigour) and Buchek (feminine, mercy), paralleling the complementary dichotomy of yin–yang, but also in Jaha’s eventual encounter with Che Noor. Wan Azli’s representation of Islam imbued with 8

As Raewyn Connell notes, the term ‘masculinity’ is used more in its plural form ‘masculinities’ because the inference is that there is not one but many socially constructed definitions of being a man.

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Sufi undertones transcends and blurs the divisions between physical and spiritual love, the sacred and the profane (Buchek and Jaha), and Muslim and non-Muslim (Buchek and Lee Chen Chen).9 The subplot featuring Chen Chen contributes significantly to the film’s undercurrent of Sufi Islam. Consider the quiet dream sequence in which Chen Chen is practising ballet in a dark hall and falls suddenly to the floor. Soon after, Buchek appears wearing a traditional Malay costume to lend her a helping hand; here we see Chen Chen transformed into a girl wearing a Chinese opera-like costume. When they meet later in a department store, Chen Chen tells Buchek that she experienced something like a dream in which she was kidnapped then saved by a prince, implying that he is a source of salvation and redemption; this is later reflected in his attempt to save Jaha spiritually. In the final scene, in which Buchek is reading Jaha’s letter, Chen Chen again approaches him. Buchek gets up, faces her, and together they walk slowly out of the film’s frame. This final image appears somewhat ambiguous and may be read on several levels. Is this scene in fact part of a fantasy, that is the dream-like incident that Chen Chen told Buchek about, which, according to her, is like a fairy tale that repeats itself, a conjuring up of something that never happened? Or can it be read as Buchek leaving Che Noor to enter into a relationship with Chen Chen? Do the portrayals of the strained relationship between Buchek and Che Noor, or of Jaha and Buchek’s friendship, hint at the film’s critique of the Kelantanese people who are well-known for their strong sense of statehood? If Buchek reconciles with Chen Chen, can the film be read as an attempt to situate the Kelantanese within a wider national imaginary in the form of an ‘other’ time, an otherworldly existence? Does it allude to the possibility of national integration? Such evocative questions are raised in this fantastic liminal scene in which Buchek romantically unites with someone who is not only from a different regional state but also a different ethnocultural group and background. In the department store scene, Chen Chen tells Buchek that ‘we have lived together for quite a long time, but it feels like we don’t know each other’, hinting at the reality of ethnic division in contemporary Malaysia. Whether it is Buchek’s relationship with Chen Chen or with Che Nor, Budak Kelantan positions women at the periphery, a typical case of buddy films or gangster films that offer relationships with women as a secondary narrative layer or as a subplot. Such representations resonate with Dain Said’s Bunohan—a film I discuss in the next section—which likewise foregrounds men.

9

I borrow Khoo Gaik Cheng’s (2007: 56) idea when she discusses Yasmin Ahmad’s Gubra in relation to Sufi philosophy.

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17.4 Bunohan: A Fin de siècle Tragedy? The storyline of Bunohan revolves around three brothers—Ilham (a hired killer), Adil (a tomoi kickboxer) and Bakar (a schoolteacher)—and their ailing father, Pok Eng (a shadow play puppeteer). The three siblings, who had earlier parted ways, return home to the kampung of Bunohan only to be caught in a tangled web of greed, vengeance and violence upon discovering certain family secrets and mysteries. Encumbered by debt, and after nearly losing his life at the hands of a cheating opponent in Thailand, Adil comes home with the help of his childhood friend Muski and attempts to find out more about his family while being supported by his kickboxing mentor Pok Wah. His merciless and lonely older brother Ilham arrives on assignment and faces the most difficult ordeal of his life when he learns that his next victim is to be Adil. Bakar, the only educated son and a teacher-turned-businessman, is home from the city, ostensibly to look after his ill father. However, Bakar has nefarious intentions: he plans to deceive his father into selling their ancestral land to property developers for a huge sum of money. While they are in Bunohan, Adil and Ilham both experience a dream or hallucination in which the latter’s mother, Mek Yah, is seen prowling through the palm forest as a were-crocodile. Ilham neglects his assignment as he attempts to find his mother’s grave. Together with a horde of Thai gangsters, who have been sent to finish Ilham’s job, Adil hides out with Pok Wah and gets embroiled in efforts to save his mentor’s old kickboxing club. Pok Eng, a patriarch now in his twilight years, is steeped in regret over the polygamous arrangement that has torn the whole family apart. However, he is determined to keep his promise to Adil’s mother to give his property to Adil one day. This worries Bakar, who is under financial pressure due to a questionable deal he has made with some businessmen in the city. When Adil finds out about his father’s pledge regarding him, Bakar insinuates that they are hardly brothers, leading Adil to discover eventually that he and Ilham are Pok Eng’s sons from a different mother, that is from Mek Yah and not from Bakar’s mother, Mek Ani. Ilham’s search for Mek Yah’s missing grave—supposedly located in burial grounds within the coveted 30 acres of land—leads him to discover that the graves have been surreptitiously relocated by Bakar to make way for his planned project. When Ilham fails to fulfil his original task, the Thais send a new assassin named Deng, who murders Ilham. Adil collapses after he defeats his rival in a final fight to save his mentor’s fight club. Through a shadow play screen, viewers see Pok Eng being assaulted by Bakar in the form of silhouettes. Generally promoted as an action film, through the plot summary one may discern the film’s incorporation of elements from gangster and kickboxing fight films, thrillers, melodramas and fantasy films. The critic Jon Chew (2012) states that the film’s trailer also ‘slightly misleads you to think we’re seeing Ong Bak in a Malaysian kampung setting. Instead, Bunohan is, at its heart, a family drama that intertwines competing principles and philosophies about life’. Karim Raslan states: ‘Bunohan is stunningly fast-paced (with a brutal murder every few minutes or so)—and action-packed—balletic fight scenes that make you wince with every blow.’

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The film’s international critical reception affirms its successful integration of various genres. After its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival the Hollywood Reporter labelled Bunohan a ‘kickboxing movie [that] focuses more on a family and social environment than violence’ (Hollywood Reporter 2011), noting that it was ‘artful’ and was ‘closer to the realm of arthouse meditation’ than a typical martial arts film. Meanwhile, John Anderson (2011) of Variety observes: ‘Bunohan serves up a feast of archetypes and violence amid a story that twines like a basketful of cobras to deliver a movie that’s ripe as a mango … it’s a fight film with echoes of King Lear, and a ghost story about living people who occupy the edge of existence.’ When taking into account the hybrid genres and cultures that this film offers, as noted by the critics, I would add that Bunohan also presents hybrid dimensions of temporality which help illuminate the contradictions in Malaysia’s dialectical modernity. The opening sequence of the film hints at the coexistence of different temporalities. In a dark night in Kelantan, two elderly characters discuss the funerary ritual they will have to perform the following day on their way to a rustic kampung cafe. Viewers also see some television correspondents arrive from the city to film the ritual. When the two characters enter the cafe, Dain Said’s camera gazes voyeuristically into the interior space of the cafe, moving closer to a television set which is broadcasting an interview with the leading characters of the film Bunohan. The image on the television screen cuts to an extreme long shot of bright blue sky above a beach, as the camera slowly tilts downward to reveal the coexistence of different temporalities. Two elderly people focus on their traditional arts rites in the background. Two corporate figures walk along the beach approaching Bakar in the middle ground. A small boy, coming from behind, rushes into the scene and, moving towards the camera (in the foreground), falls suddenly to the ground, leaping out of frame for a minute. When the child gets up and jumps back, we see his chest soaked with blood. Leaving the scene in a hurry, the camera slowly pans right to capture a shadow play screen marred by a small tear through which the child runs as he exits the scene. The scene—which is actually a flash-forward to the story’s end—is repeated at the film’s ending from different points of view. The fracture of cinema’s spatialised time is evident in the film’s opening and ending with the appearance of the shadow play screen and the small television screen through which viewers see some of the film’s characters. For example, the silhouettes of Pok Eng and Bakar cast on the shadow play screen towards the film’s ending appear somewhat surrealistic as they are obviously larger than the actual image size that fits the screen. Such images heighten the viewers’ perceptions, hinting at the notion that the actual world is a contraction of the virtual. This form of image—or what Gilles Deleuze (1985) refers to as the time-image—is a transcendental analysis of the real as it explores all those virtual planes and differences from which actual worlds are possible.10 In fact, the natural and supernatural commingle in many scenes in the film as do images from 10

The ‘time-image’, which refers to some forms of film-making that emerged after the Second World War, describes films that are capable of producing an image of pure time, liberated from movement, that is, a direct image of time. This term normally encompasses films in which the passing of time cannot be accurately measured and in which images of the past—especially in the

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the past and future which disrupt the reality of the present. Examples include the reincarnation of Pok Eng’s dead first wife Mek Yah in the form of a were-crocodile; the talking bird that communicates with Ilham; and the mysterious little boy who, at times, speaks in Pok Eng’s voice, suggesting to viewers that he may have died some years earlier and been reincarnated. The coexistence of different temporalities, which can be understood as ‘timeimage’, works in tandem with the film’s ambiguous moral stance, a common feature of gangster and crime action films. According to Deleuze, this time-image presents a direct image of time which normally aims to depict characters as unable to act in ways that might lead to a result. In other words, divisions of good and evil are no longer clear cut. Therefore, characters no longer know how to act in ways that might lead to a triumph of the good (ibid.: 68–97). This may explain the director’s construction of a seemingly impenetrable world, a milieu which can no longer be judged in terms of the good or evil it holds for the finite self, or—in the words of Dennis Chua (2012)—‘a no-nonsense tale of good-in-evil and evil-in-good’. Responding to this representation, Ana Balqis has questioned the absence of any ‘positive’ religious message in the film in that there is no foregrounding of Islam in its denouement.11 Ana’s commentary, I suggest, does not take into account the film’s configuration of different temporalities. According to Deleuze (1985: 68–97), this time-image inflicts change upon characters, as it does not feature characters acting to cause change. This means that characters do not act or react immediately to circumstances in which Deleuze regards as the breakdown of the sensory motor system, as a result of the depiction of ‘out-of-joint’ cinematic time. Having said this, I read this representation and the absence of Islam as being in tandem with the film’s critique of Malaysia’s contradictory aspects of modernity, including Islamisation that can be regarded as a new, modern phenomenon. This alludes to the film’s foregrounding of more archaic and premodern modes of traditional arts that entail spiritual mysticism, magic and healing considered by some today as ‘un-Islamic’. The film reverses moral expectations of the viewers: a schoolteacher like Bakar is no longer considered noble, while a hitman like Ilham is no longer considered vicious. This type of film with such cinematic time normally explores, to a great extent, characters’ subjective depictions of themselves as caught up in circumstances not only beyond their control but also devoid of hope. Much like the humanised gangsters who rise and fall in American action films, Ilham longs profoundly for acceptance in the straight official world of his family and kampung community even as his work keeps him outside that world. Ilham attempts to act in the name of good when he searches for his mother’s missing grave and form of memories—are not clearly distinguishable from images of the present or of the future. See Gilles Deleuze (1985: 275). 11 When interviewed by a local daily, Ana Balqis and her colleague Abu Hassan Hasbullah (both academics from Universiti Malaya at the time) responded to the film by making some unsound commentaries. They questioned the film as ‘puzzling, confusing and torturous’ to viewers. Ana further commented on the film’s inaccurate depiction of the sociocultural reality of Kelantan, which seemed in contrast with her own experience and worldview (as a Kelantanese). See Wahiduzzaman (2012).

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refuses to kill his brother Adil. Yet, ironically, his turning over a new leaf results in the loss of his ability to act and ultimately in his death at the hands of another assassin. He discovers that the good is not always what he thinks it is, and as a result of this revelation loses his ability to act. Towards the end, he is murdered by another assassin named Deng from southern Thailand. This blurring helps to provide the film’s moral underpinning of the rise-and-fall narrative characteristic of a gangster film. The film opens with crosscut shots of Adil and Ilham in typical masculine activities. Adil is fighting in a boxing match in Thailand; Ilham is receiving an ‘inner spirit’ massage to revitalise male virility and stamina. Both activities are immediately followed by violence: a group of men invades the boxing ring, disrupting the match, and Ilham proceeds to murder a target after the massage. The male characters’ struggle for power and their powerlessness within the larger economic and social forces of their occupations are manifested through the physical display of the male body in both activities. Drawing on the central themes of the boxing narrative, this struggle is representative of enclosed arenas of masculine performance as well as of enactment and reclamation of a ritualistic and idealised form of masculine potency (cf. Krutnik 1991). Such themes of struggles and desires can be discerned when Adil succumbs to his own position of powerlessness when he has to flee Thailand. This tendency may be read as ‘a resistance to exploitation, a desire for freedom’, as envisioned through kickboxing, massaging or brutal murder (Cook 2005: 176). It represents part of the film’s working through ‘the loss of male power’ elucidated by images of ‘the powerful male body as an object of desire and identification’ (ibid.: 177). In the boxing scene, this struggle for power by powerless men is reinforced by the disorienting movement of the camera and editing style that continually cut movement and impede continuity. In this respect, the camerawork robs the viewer of a stable point of view: it invites her/him to adopt a camera consciousness that is both subjective and objective. By undermining a stable human subjectivity in favour of a decentred cinematic perception, the aesthetic style connects with an understanding of life and individuality as a series of connections and relative speeds. Such an aesthetic approach resonates with Deleuze’s (1983) notion of ‘perception-image’, which is antithetical to an ego-centred identity because it engenders a camera consciousness that accommodates multiple perspectives at the same time.12 This disposition, which is nonjudgmental and exists beyond good and evil, helps to convey the notion of the masculine character Adil’s simultaneous struggle for power and powerlessness. In the film, masculine authority is performed not only through physical display and force as exemplified by Adil and Ilham, but also through less overt desires to play the ‘father figure’ as exemplified by Bakar who embodies the state-created ‘new Malay man’. Possessing the capitalist markers of manhood such as wealth, greed, 12

The cinematic consciousness that emerges from this dynamic is very different from the transcendental subject of the cinematic apparatus, which is always the same and is predicated on one type of perception. In this respect, a cinematic consciousness that accommodates multiple perspectives at the same time challenges binary thinking. See Deleuze (1983: 76).

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power and status, he is always depicted as an Americanised, clean-cut ‘yuppie’, or, in the words of John Anderson (2011), he ‘constantly has … a polo shirt tucked into his Dockers’. Bakar’s desire for patriarchal power can be discerned when he tries to overrule his ailing father’s decision regarding the selling of their ancestral land. His power in the family is based on the performance of the role of a dutiful son who returns home to take care of his ailing father. Bakar’s enactment of this father figure role foreshadows his gradual replacement of his ill father Pok Eng. Metaphorically, Bakar is replacing his own father—a fact noted by several critics including Karim Raslan (2012)—as a dalang, a manipulator of the puppets, usurping his father’s authority as he designates events and initiates tragedy in his rapacious quest to seize their ancestral land. All this being the case, the film’s depiction of Bakar offers a critique of the ‘new Malay man’ in the sense that the ideal image of this category also considers, in line with the country’s Islamisation, an individual’s moral dimensions. The film’s destabilisation of masculinity is also conveyed through its mediation of the female as a peripheral figure. In this respect, the film incorporates the mother character, reminiscent of Malay folktales that foreground the mother figure archetype in the form of a dead mother who returns as a guardian spirit. In Malay folk belief, were-crocodiles like Mek Yah are seen as a form of penunggu or keramat (guardian spirits) steeped in animism and religious mysticism (cf. Mohd. Taib 1989: 116–151). There is a scene immediately after Ilham is brutally murdered in which the supernatural Mek Yah appears to meet Pok Eng, who we believe is already dead and has been reincarnated as a little boy. Infused with semangat (spirit or vital energy), Mek Yah urges Pok Eng to follow her and regales him with tales of her indestructible endurance and immortality. She plaintively tells him of her intention to help heal this catastrophic land, saying: ‘Healing needs time. And time needs healing, too.’ Her lines gesture toward a need to relive the past by returning to spiritual, mythic heterogeneous time (perhaps of ancient matriarchy?), given that the notion of modern homogeneous time—and its particular articulations of patriarchy—has only precipitated chaos and destruction. Mek Yah’s return ‘pulls away from the notion of chronologically ordered, separate times and tends towards a plural understanding of temporal cohabitation and co-implication’ (Lim 2009: 159). I read Mek Yah’s ghostly return as a form of reconciliation, a restoring of equilibrium and order to the universe. We deduce from the lines she delivers to her husband that the destructive power of the masculine is in dire need of being domesticated by the feminine.13 The film’s concern with hybrid temporalities and cultures echoes its depiction of society living in and at the crossroads of time and place—both the geographical border of Malaysia and Thailand and the temporal border of tradition and modern. Dain Said (2011), in his directorial statement, writes: The modern Malaysian state has long tried to define this place by its borders. But how the communities there see themselves—borders don’t mean anything. This swathe of land from the northern fringes of Terengganu, through Kelantan, and across the border to Pattani in southern Thailand is the Malay heartland that defies sovereign boundaries. 13

This is implied by the director Dain Said in the video, ‘BUNOHAN “Di Sebalik Tabir | The Making Of” FULL’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbIBYOojWyM. Accessed 30 Sep 2020.

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In a scene shot in the kampung cafe, Bakar’s helper Jolok says to Deng (from southern Thailand): ‘We’re practically brothers. We speak the same language. Only our dialect is slightly different. Today, you are here on this side of the border. Tomorrow, my people will be over there, on your side.’ Symptomatically, these boundary-related notions of space, time and place are also linked with the film’s invocation of Kelantan’s traditional performing arts, all of which serve as signifiers of cultural hybridity (some of which were derived from Thailand, Indonesia and India), further contesting the notion of Kelantanese-ness/Malayness/ Malaysian-ness as fixed, absolute and exclusive boundaries. As with Budak Kelantan, Bunohan’s representation of unstable forms of masculinity is also underpinned by the Malaysian cultural mode of melodrama. Daniel Walber (2011) notes the film’s melodramatic elements, which, according to him, ‘come through gradually, as these men pick up unexpected information about their family’s past. Their relationships complicate and their memories seem to intertwine, bringing us the occasional dreamlike flashback of Ilham’s mother, now having moved on into a spiritual afterlife.’ When Mek Yah confronts Pok Eng, raising the issue of polygamy, one can detect an undercurrent of rajuk, the form of sulking that characterises so many female characters in Malay cinema and culture. Here, rajuk does not simply mean sullen or sulky, but connotes a more serious disposition: ‘to grieve in silence’.14 Mek Yah returns to redress a past grievance attributable to her husband’s infidelity. She admits that she left Pok Eng when he married another woman, Mek Ani, because she could predict the fate that was to befall her family. It is here that Bunohan draws on melodrama. The film oscillates between scenes of melancholic sadness and longing and those scenes of physical action and violence. Its male characters, including Adil and Ilham, are depicted as physical and emotional victims due to being deprived of familial and especially paternal love. Take, for example, Adil’s fragile feelings which stand in direct contrast to his rugged physicality and macho penchant for kickboxing. The display of graphic violence and physical action may be read as ‘a special form of displaced, external expression of inner suffering’ (Coulthard 1999: 17). Dain Said’s construction of masculinity is to a certain extent similar to that of Budak Kelantan in the sense that external violence and inner feeling do not represent an antithesis, but are always implicated with each other. The film’s melodramatic mode corresponds to its temporal expression, evident in Adil’s rajuk, which helps destabilise his masculine subjectivity. This is evident in the scene in which Adil refuses his father’s offer to 14

Rajuk is a form of sulking that can be seen as a melodramatic emotional expression. Traditionally, it is quite acceptable for a person to feel hurt by the tiniest slight, real or imagined, effected by someone close. The physical response of the hurt party is to look mortally wounded and withdraw from the person who has erred. This person will then show due remorse and proceed to pujuk (coax) the rajuk person to forgive and forget. This emotive mode, which is often found in old Malay literary genres, for example in poems (pantun) and epics (hikayat), is also evident in early Malay films. According to Anuar Nor Arai (2002), rajuk is an important phenomenon in the sociopolitical lives of Malays, both male and female. Culturally speaking, this disposition is often regarded as feminine, but in reality both men and women may express rajuk. See Anuar Nor Arai (2002); Muhammad Haji Salleh (2011: 36–37).

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talk to him because his father and his stepmother Mek Ani have neglected him since he was small. He says to his father: ‘I know all about time. Whether I live or die it’s decided in three minutes…. Nobody can force 23 years into three minutes.’ The characters’ melancholic longing and grief are expressed through formal elements such as the mise en scène. In one scene, after Pok Wah reveals to Adil that his biological mother is Mek Yah, not Mek Ani, Adil is captured in a medium close-up shot, moaning and weeping bitterly. He is seated in a moving boat that rocks gently against a backdrop of a moody cloudy sky. The scene cuts to an extreme long shot that shows his boat floundering in the middle of the river against a similar backdrop of sky. Recurring shots of dusky, muddy mangrove swamps, and seemingly barren deserted beaches scattered with leafless trees and gravestones, further endow the film with elegiac and haunting tones. At the same time, the film is steeped in a wider cosmology of belief, affirming most of the characters as loyal and sensitive inhabitants of nature.15 In the scene in which Adil’s friend Muski expresses his curiosity over Adil’s quick recovery from physical pain, Pok Wah tells him that he resorts to traditional healing and medicine. He further asserts: ‘It’s not easy to find these things anymore because mankind is bent on destroying nature.’ This resonates with the film’s foregrounding of the issue of land ownership or preservation as crucial to defining the essence of Malayness. The film depicts the land, along with the kampung, as a purportedly nostalgic and virtuous space in which the country’s traditions remain. It is here that the film asserts its strident critique of Malaysia’s modernity as leading to the loss of the traditional. This echoes the film’s final image featuring a notice board that reads: ‘Proposed Development for Marina and Resort Complex of 200 Chalets and Golf Course’.

17.5 Conclusion As the analyses have shown, Budak Kelantan and Bunohan destabilise dominant notions of masculinity through rich and ambivalent representations of men in the contemporary genre cinema. In Budak Kelantan, Wan Azli offers the seemingly binary forms of morality in exposing two differing types of masculinity: one endowed with religio-moral rectitude and the other shaped by the corrupting and brutal urban milieu. Among other strategies, the film’s deployment of the cultural mode of melodrama reveals the masculine figure in crisis and reverses the binary pattern of male as aggressor and female as victim. In addition, the film’s representation of religion through its foregrounding of a more humanist and inclusive form of Islam 15

This tendency parallels those of many Malay literary texts and genres in which elements of duka nestapa (woe) seem to be omnipresent in the jungles, villages and also in the palaces. The emphasis on healing (particularly towards the end) is reminiscent of the literary texts, which hardly evoke, according to Muhammad Haji Salleh (2008: 198), ‘a Greek catharsis but a deep nestapa that brings along an insight into human existence. As conclusions end with positive episodes, the dark tales are enlightened with therapy and consolation.’

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contributes to the instabilities of masculine subjectivities, particularly those bound up with questions of morality. In Bunohan, Dain Said inventively utilises an amalgam of genres from kickboxing films to fantastic films in order to complicate reified categories of masculinity such as ‘old Malay man’ (traditional patriarchy, kampung, physical performativity) and ‘new Malay man’ (urban capitalism). In the process, the director employs the cultural mode of melodrama when drawing some parallels between physical pain (through violence) and emotional suffering (through familial disintegration). In their critique of modernity and representation of marginalised working-class youth masculinities, both films utilise and invoke Kelantan’s traditional art forms. Budak Kelantan deploys dikir barat as a stylistic element to accentuate moments of masculine emotional anxiety and nostalgic desire for traditional kampung life. Bunohan intricately interweaves Kelantan’s traditional art forms with traditional magic and healing and mystical folklore, resulting in the film’s fracturing of the normalised cinematic timeline. In this respect, both films induce a nostalgic longing for a place that has been lost due to migration from the country to the city. From these analyses, I have demonstrated the ways in which genres affirm gendered identities, at the same time mobilising identifications and desires that undermine the stability of such categories. In response to anxieties assailed by modernity, such masculine instabilities are mediated through the peripheral female characters. In Bunohan, the peripheral female attempts to recuperate troubled masculinity through magic and healing. In Budak Kelantan, the feminised male character attempts to recover destructive forms of masculinity through religious modes that emphasise love, humanity and sacrifice. Ultimately, both films, through their representations of troubled and anxious masculinities (and the women onto which they are projected or who are forced to mediate them), reflect on and critique the reified gender binaries born of Malaysia’s Islamisation, Western modernity and linear, homogeneous time.

References A. Wahab Hamzah. 2008. Sisi gelap Kuala Lumpur [Dark side of Kuala Lumpur]. Utusan Malaysia, 2 November. A.S. Hardy Shafii, Solehah Ishak, and Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah. 2017. The mystical gathering between the supernatural, physical and the nether world of main teri among the Malay community. In Locating the soul of healing performance in Malaysia, ed. A.S. Hardy Shafii, Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah, and Mumtaz Begum Aboo Backer. Penang: Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia. Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid. 2011. Malay racialism and the Sufi alternative. In Melayu: The politics, poetics and paradoxes of Malayness, ed. Maznah Mohamad and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, 68–100. Singapore: NUS Press. ———. 2018. The Islamist factor in Malaysia’s fourteenth general election. The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 107(6): 683–701. Anderson, John. 2011. Bunohan. Variety, 11 September. https://variety.com/2011/film/markets-fes tivals/bunohan-1117946050/. Accessed 30 Sep 2020. Anjum, Tanvir. 2006. Sufism in history and its relationship with power. Islamic Studies 45(2): 221–268.

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Anuar Nor Arai. 2002. Rajuk, pujuk, kasih, kempunan, resah gelisah dan air mata: Mengenai intelligensi budaya dalam filem Melayu [Sulking, coaxing, loving, yearning, anxiety and tears: On cultural intelligence in Malay film]. Jurnal Pengajian Melayu 2: 145–181. Au, Eunice. 2012. When time was standardised. New Straits Times, 1 January. http://web.archive. org/web/20130715045835/http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/when-timewas-standardised-1.26231. Accessed 26 Oct 2020. Brennan, Carolyn. 2001. Religion, cultural identity, and Kelantan’s dikir barat. Australian Journal of Anthropology 12(3): 302–311. Brosius, J. Peter. 2003. The forest and the nation: Negotiating citizenship in Sarawak, East Malaysia. In Cultural citizenship in island Southeast Asia: Nation and belonging in the hinterlands, ed. Renato Rosaldo, 76–133. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carroll, Bret E., ed. 2003. American masculinities: A historical encyclopedia. London: Sage. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1996. Marx after Marxism: History, subalternity, and difference. In Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, 55–70. Routledge: London. Chew, Jon. 2012. Bunohan: The review. Esquire Malaysia, 7 March. https://web.archive.org/ web/20120405230617/http://www.esquire.my/Entertainment/Film/article/Bunohan-the-review. Accessed 26 Oct 2020. Chua, Dennis. 2012. Compelling drama. New Straits Times, 18 March. Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cook, Pam. 2005. Screening the past: Memory and nostalgia in cinema. London: Routledge. Coulthard, Lisa. 1999. The open wound and the world’s end in John Woo’s Face/Off. In Bang, bang, shoot, shoot! Essays on guns and popular culture, ed. Murray Pomerance and John Sakeris, 11–21. Needham Heights, MA: Simon and Schuster. Dain Said. 2011. Director’s statement. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Cinema 1: The movement-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. ———. 1985. Cinema 2: The time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone Press. Fadli Al-Akiti. 2008. Budak Kelantan (2008)—Realisme getir [Budak Kelantan (2008)—Gritty realism]. Tontonfilem, 6 November. https://tontonfilem3.blogspot.com/2008/11/budak-kelantan2 008-realisme-getir.html. Accessed 27 Oct 2020. Farish A. Noor. 2004. Modernity, Islam and tradition: The struggle for the heart and soul of art and culture in Malaysia. Contemporary Art from the Islamic World 9: 1–3. ———. 2007. Malaysia. In Islamist opposition parties and the potential for EU engagement, ed. Toby Archer and Heidi Huuhtanen, 57–63. Helsinki: The Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Fauwaz Abdul Aziz. 1995. Thank God it’s Friday. The Economist 336(7921): 28–30. Fordham, Geoff. 2005. A study in ambiguity: The Godfather and the American gangster movie tradition. CrimeCulture. Reprinted in The gangster film reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 165–182. Pompton Plains, NJ: Limelight Editions, 2007. Geraldine, Avila. 2020. Sabah ranks as Malaysia’s poorest state, again. New Straits Times, 19 September. https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2020/09/625711/sabah-ranks-malaysiaspoorest-state-again. Accessed 27 Oct 2020. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof. 2004. Mak Yong as ritual. In The encyclopedia of Malaysia: Performing arts, vol. 8, ed. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof, 64–65. Singapore: Archipelago Press. ———. 2019. Mak yong: World heritage theatre. Penang: Areca Books. Goldstein, Patrick. 2001. It’s still a guy thing: The evolution of buddy movies. Los Angeles Times, 9 October. Hollywood Reporter, The. 2011. Bunohan: Toronto review. 15 September. https://www.hollywood reporter.com/review/bunohan-toronto-review-236173. Accessed 20 Oct 2020. Ishak Shari. 1994. Rural development and rural poverty in Malaysia: The experience during the New Economic Policy (1971–1990) period. In Poverty amidst plenty: Research findings in the gender dimension in Malaysia, ed. Jamilah Ariffin. Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk.

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Karim Raslan. 2012. Bunohan makes a killing. The Star, 24 July. https://www.thestar.com.my/opi nion/columnists/ceritalah/2012/07/24/bunohan-makes-a-killing. Accessed 30 Sep 2020. Khoo Gaik Cheng. 2007. The politics of love: Malaysia’s Yasmin Ahmad. Metro 155: 52–57. Krutnik, Frank. 1991. In a lonely street: Film noir, genre, masculinity. London: Routledge. Leitch, Thomas. 2002. Crime films. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lim, Bliss Cua. 2009. Translating time: Cinema, the fantastic, and temporal critique. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. Matusky, Patricia, and Tan Sooi Beng. 2017. The music of Malaysia: The classical, folk and syncretic traditions, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Mohamed Yusoff Ismail. 1987. Buddhism and ethnicity: The case of the Siamese of Kelantan. Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 2(2): 231–254. Mohd. Ghouse Nasuruddin. 1995. The Malay dance. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Mohd. Taib Osman. 1989. Malay folk beliefs: An integration of disparate elements. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Muhammad Haji Salleh. 2008. The poetics of Malay literature. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. ———. 2011. In search of literary love in Malay literature: The early stages of relationship. Asiatic 5(2): 17–39. Murata, Sachiko. 1990. The Tao of Islam. Sufi 5. http://sufism.ru/eng/txts/a_tao_of_islam.htm. Accessed 29 Sep 2020. New Straits Times. 1996. Traditional plays must abide by Islam. 7 March. ———. 2012. ‘Poor infrastructure in Kelantan puts off investors’. 28 August. Norman Yusoff. 2013. Contemporary Malaysian cinema: Genre, gender and temporality. PhD thesis, University of Sydney. https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/9925/yusoff_ n_thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed 25 Oct 2020. Radin Sri Ghazali. 2008. A study in contrasts. New Straits Times, 30 October. Satiman Jamin. 2011. Dr M: Ghost films hurt society. New Straits Times. 2 October. Saw Swee-Hock. 2007. The population of peninsular Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Star, The. 2011. Bunohan picks up Netpac Award. 24 November. Ting, Helen Mu Hung. 2016. The politics of hudud law implementation in Malaysia. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute: ISEAS Working Paper Series No. 04. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation [UNESCO], Intangible Cultural Heritage. n.d. Mak Yong theatre. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/mak-yong-theatre-00167. Accessed 25 Oct 2020. Wahiduzzaman. 2008. Made in Kelantan. Cinema Online, 1 November. http://www.cinema.com. my/news/news.aspx?search=2008.made_in_kelantan_2984. Accessed 28 Sep 2020. ———. 2012. Bunohan ketepikan sosiobudaya & ‘berpecah-belah’ [Bunohan disregards socioculture and is ‘messy’]. MStar Online, 16 March. https://www.mstar.com.my/spotlight/hiburan/ 2012/03/16/bunohan-ketepikan-sosiobudaya--berpecahbelah. Accessed 30 Sep 2020. Walber, Daniel. 2011. TIFF11: Bunohan balances mystical spirituality and gritty violence in an enigmatic borderland. IndieWire, 23 September. https://www.indiewire.com/2011/09/tiff11-bun ohan-balances-mystical-spirituality-and-gritty-violence-in-an-enigmatic-borderland-226650/. Accessed 30 Sep 2020. Williams, Tony. 1996. To live and die in Hong Kong: The crisis cinema of John Woo. CineAction 36: 42–52. Wright, Barbara S. 1980. Dance is the cure: The arts as metaphor for healing in Kelantanese Malay spirit exorcisms. Dance Research Journal 12(2): 3–10. Zaharan Razak. 2008. The many-splendored appeal of dikir barat. Zveloyak, 29 December. https://web.archive.org/web/20090824062658/http://zveloyak.blogspot.com/2008/12/many-spl endored-appeal-of-dikir-barat.html. Accessed 26 Oct 2020.

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Zawawi Ibrahim. 2003. The search for a ‘new cinema’ in post-colonial Malaysia: The films of U-Wei bin Haji Saari as counter-narrations of national identity. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4(1): 145–154. Zuraidah Mohd Don. 2003. Kelantanese in a new ethnolinguistic environment. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 161: 55–79.

Norman Yusoff is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, where he teaches film theory and appreciation. His research interests cover film theory, history and criticism, genre studies, and Malaysian and Southeast Asian cinemas. His publications include: Sepet, Mukhsin, and Talentime: Yasmin Ahmad’s melodrama of the melancholic boy-in-love. Asian Cinema 22(2) (2011); and Indonesian film culture in 1970s and 1980s Malaysia. Cinema Poetica (2019). He was a film columnist with the newspaper Mingguan Malaysia (2016–2019). He has a chapter on recent Malaysian films in the edited volume Film in Southeast Asia: Views from the region (forthcoming).

Chapter 18

Left of the Dial: BFM 89.9 Independent Radio Station and Its Indie Rock-friendly Midnight Programming as a Site of Sustainability Azmyl Yusof Abstract Since its inception in 2009, Business FM (more popularly known as BFM 89.9) has been gaining traction and found an audience among urban, middle-class and English-speaking residents of the Klang Valley (Greater Kuala Lumpur region), Malaysia. This demographic is what could also be defined as the core group of indie production and consumption. While the station’s main content and programming are focused on business and economics (as the name suggests), being Malaysia’s sole independent radio station also allows it to practise and adhere to journalistic standards and incisive radio journalism sorely lacking in other commercial radio stations. BFM 89.9’s indie status has played a vital role in challenging the standard notion of what a radio station should be in Malaysia’s tightly regulated media industry. Although adopting a classic rock playlist format, the station has also become an important platform for indie music (indie rock in particular) in almost all of its local permutations in its night-time and midnight programming. This chapter explores the discourse of ‘indie-ness’ in the Malaysian context and how BFM 89.9’s original local music programming serves as a site of rock sustainability that contests and opens up on-air space for independent musicians and listeners alike. Keywords Malaysia · Media · Radio · BFM 89.9 · Music · Indie-ness Where’s your guts And will to survive And don’t you want to Keep rock ’n’ roll music alive? Mr Programmer I got my hammer And I am going to

Azmyl Yusof is also known by his stage name Azmyl Yunor. Azmyl Yusof (B) School of Arts, Sunway University Malaysia, Bandar Sunway, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_18

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Smash my Smash my Radio We want the airwaves We want the airwaves We want the airwaves, baby If rock is gonna stay alive The Ramones—‘We want the airwaves’

18.1 Introduction This chapter explores the notion of sustainability within the context of indie rock on the Malaysian radio airwaves, and how rock music history and culture inform the social and musical practice of being a so-called indie musician. The discussion also examines how independent radio station music programming can still potentially be read as a site of symbolic sustainability if it is treated as a text within the context of indie rock sense-making and meaning-making. I make use of an autobiographical account as an active musician for the past 20 years in illustrating emerging trends I have encountered in the scene in the context of music-making, performance and meaning-making. General do-it-yourself (DIY) production and consumption in the Malaysian case are discussed in my autobiographical account, which also attempts to chart how the cultural and musical landscape has (or has not) changed. The argument suggests that radio still plays an important role in the increasingly narrow public media space where musical works attain the symbolic validation of being heard over the airwaves. In the face of the claim that ‘rock is dead’, rock music has always had a strong connection with and the ability to regenerate through the mass media and the production and reproduction of images and myths. With this in mind, there also seems to be a dearth of documented accounts by and about former and active rock musicians beyond promotion or the occasional feature article marketing a new album or release. The reason for choosing Business FM (more popularly known as BFM 89.9) and its night-time and midnight indie/original local music programming as an object of discussion hinges on the following criteria: its status as an independent radio station; its classic rock programming/playlist; and its programmes that feature Malaysian musicians and interviews. These three criteria provide evidence for my argument that BFM 89.9’s night-time and midnight programming serves as a site for rock’s sustainability in the Malaysian mediascape. My first-hand autobiographical account of being an artist in the indie rock/underground scene helps elucidate some key ideas that I feel (from a practitioner’s and listener’s perspective) are often overlooked in the discourse of ‘indie-ness’ to articulate the meaning-making relationship of rock’s radio audiences in the wider scope of popular journalism. This provides the methodological basis for an alternative approach to exploring how indie rock sense-making is created

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via the field of journalism as opposed to the usual advanced discourses that centre on material and cultural production and consumption. Radio remains a popular medium. As of 2019, some 20.6 million listeners in peninsular Malaysia (almost 80% of the total population of peninsular Malaysia) tuned into the radio per week, at home, in the car or at work, with the highest listenership being for weekday breakfast shows and drive-time shows (Asia Radio Today 2019). With regard to the historical value of radio and its relationship to popular music and meaning-making more generally, Roy Shuker (2016: 137) notes that the organisation of radio broadcasting and its music formatting practices have been crucial in shaping the nature of what constitutes the main public face of much of popular music, particularly rock and pop and their associated genres.

18.2 What and Why Indie? The indie discourse has the potential to be a vital space in Malaysian cultural politics, as decisions about which music genres or trends become popular are no longer exclusively in the hands of media or politico-religious gatekeepers as a result of greater access to the internet and globalisation. While cases of moral panic may occur from time to time (and sometimes they are not music related), indie rock, unlike other subcultures such as punk and metal, is often less closely scrutinised by the authorities or regulators due to its vague categorisation and the absence of outrageous symbols and specific music and visual styles that may cause ‘offence’ (Azmyl 2010). Any attempts by indie musicians or producers who reckon themselves to be the arbiters of taste in the many different music scenes have also fallen flat since the nature of the indie scene is ultimately fragmented. This fragmentation is the result of the spread of the DIY ethos and culture which go beyond just the production, distribution and consumption of music (Luvaas 2012). For the sake of clarity, indie in the context of this chapter is taken to be a style of production and distribution outside mainstream commercial channels (ibid.: 14). As Wendy Fonarow (2006: 26) puts it: Indie music has been considered by insiders to be: (1) a type of musical production affiliated with small independent record labels with a distinctive mode of independent distribution; (2) a genre of music that has a particular sound and stylistic conventions; (3) music that communicates a particular ethos; (4) a category of critical assessment; and (5) music that can be contrasted with other genres, such as mainstream pop, dance, blues, country, or classical.

Before discussing further the current state of rock music and the radio station’s place in the general music scene, it is helpful to elucidate how I became an indie/underground musician and my own role in the larger scheme of things, as I find such insider knowledge and information sorely lacking in the majority of academic research on indie music in general. I have also been accosted by senior academics about my access as an insider of the scene, and I have often found it difficult to separate my musician self from my academic self in writing without losing valuable

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insight. I use the term rock music not solely as a generic category but as a sensibility or affect in the production and consumption of music. The tendency to study rock music ‘objectively’ by assuming the role of the nonintrusive observer and researcher is problematic. This is especially true with regard to the notion of indie-ness, since it is ultimately a futile exercise as participants or practitioners in the indie sphere are not homogenous—in fact its strength is its heterogeneity. Nor do they necessarily share similar values that inform their production and/or consumption of all things indie. A first-person account of an active practitioner may spell out the values and meanings they associate with indie or DIY music production and consumption in Malaysia (Greater Kuala Lumpur or the Klang Valley in this discussion) and reveal that a study of all things indie may in all eventuality be a purely academic exercise.

18.3 So You Want to Be an Indie Rock Musician? As an independent musician in Malaysia, being on the radio still means a lot. My own experience of listening to music began by tuning into radio programmes such as Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and the like on whatever the public broadcaster Radio Televisyen Malaysia offered in the 1980s. In the mid- to late 1990s, the radio station to discover alternative music was Time Highway Radio which presented a programme aptly called The Alternative Rock Show hosted by Kamil Othman, the unofficial ‘Malaysian John Peel’ to many indie and underground music fans. My first band, Damnweather, had ceased to be active due to my sojourn abroad for studies and we had barely performed anywhere save for a few competitions (under different monikers). We had recorded a demo in a studio but the experience was underwhelming, and we continued to just record our jamming sessions on cassette with a Walkman. The thrill of listening back to these sessions on the car tape deck was, to me at least, one of the greatest pleasures of being in a band in college. While I may have harboured the usual desire of being ‘discovered’ and landing a recording deal (although I never made any attempt to send a demo to any recording labels), my own generic inclinations (and consequently the band’s) were far from what was de rigueur in that era: grunge. My songwriting skills were just being developed and I did not have much of a stage presence or distinct style to begin with. College life and culture in the suburb of Subang Jaya in Selangor (where my college and friends/bandmates were from) were new to me and I had the commute from my hometown in Bandar Baru Bangi. It is worth noting that my hometown is also a college town where many of its residents are academics from the surrounding public universities (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, later renamed Universiti Putra Malaysia) and smaller training institutions. The contrast between these two towns could not be greater as my hometown tends to be more conservative compared to the more urbane and plural demographic make-up of Subang Jaya—the binary that defines these traits can be linked to the tertiary institutions: Bandar Baru Bangi’s government-funded public institutions (with the Malay language as the norm) versus Subang Jaya’s private institutions (with English as the norm).

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As with many middle-class urban youths, the opportunity to study abroad came calling and the band with my friends eventually dissolved, although I still produced and later released several DIY cassettes of our studio jamming recordings with only a limited number of copies circulating in the Kuala Lumpur underground music scene. While abroad in Perth, Australia, my remaining bandmates in Malaysia took up with another sonic auteur from Klang named Yeoh Yin Pin and formed a freeform avant-rock band called Amid the Mimic. Yin Pin would later form his own DIY label and release seminal albums and compilations that marked the beginnings of the Kuala Lumpur experimental music scene before he migrated permanently to Melbourne. During my sojourn, I received in the mail the band’s latest releases—lo-fi live recordings mixed by Yin Pin on his double-deck stereo boombox at home and possibly on a computer. Meanwhile, I ruminated on what to do with the vast number of songs I had already written for my ill-fated band which I felt needed a full studio recording or production as I had envisioned through my love of American indie rock bands. I had yet to discover punk rock or the American music underground of the 1980s, although I was very well informed about my favourite band, R.E.M. As far as I could tell through the biographies I pored over, the band began as an independent act signed to a small label and the first few albums were very much indie releases with I.R.S. Records in the United States. I was still completely oblivious to the fact R.E.M. themselves were larger-than-life figures who would help define college rock, which would be labelled alternative rock in my teens, and ultimately all things indie later on, an inescapable label if you grew up in the 1990s. My former bandmates’ recordings, however, marked a shift in my belief about what a ‘legitimate’ recording was and opened up the possibilities of what I could do with the songs I had written. I was introduced to a slew of lo-fi indie rock bands such as Guided by Voices, Smog, Pavement and Polvo courtesy of mixed tapes given to me by my friend Alex Lam (who played drums and sang in my former band and sported an assorted array of Green Day T-shirts in college) and Yin Pin (whom my friends jokingly called Zero—owing to the black Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt he wore during their ‘audition’). Sonically, these albums would be considered demos by the mainstream industry—cheaply recorded, possibly a single microphone or basic fourtrack recorders, with little engineering or mastering. The songs were ragged, short and furious, but melodious. The lo-fi recording gave them an intimate edge to my ears; every little vocal inflection seemed exaggerated and grainy, not unlike that of certain black-and-white photographs. The fact that these were officially released on independent record labels in the United States and the bands themselves inhabited a parallel universe, a universe my ilk could potentially inhabit and flourish in creatively, gave some hope that I could eventually pursue a recording and performing career. An important event happened in November 1996, while I was away, which furthered my sense of isolation in terms of shared indie intimacy with my peers: the American straight-edge punk band Fugazi performed in Kuala Lumpur. This event had an impact on my friends and, to a certain extent, everyone in the Kuala Lumpur underground music scene, and is still recalled with great excitement by those who attended the concert. Their newly discovered sense of creative independence spilled over to me whenever we exchanged emails and when I returned to Malaysia

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for holidays and to jam. Our outlook as musicians had moved from being very structured (such as coming into the studio with new songs and lyrics) to being more free form and improvisational. I often felt frustrated with the direction as I did not see any potential in my already written songs fitting into this exciting new configuration, which for all intents and purposes was very organic, a mode of development a lot of musicians treasure. But with this new musical direction and alliances, I was introduced to the Kuala Lumpur underground music scene, the punk scene in particular, and to the punk doyen Joe Kidd, band leader and guitarist of the seminal band Carburetor Dung. He was also a journalist and music writer with The Sun newspaper, briefly hosted an alternative rock music show on television, and had a website that featured all things underground called ‘Blasting Concepts’. The Kuala Lumpur punk scene, I noticed, was made up mainly of Malay youths from Terengganu and Kelantan who had moved to the capital for work or studies, or were just in transit. It was at this juncture that I realised my own Malayness differed, shaded by my sheltered middleclass and urban upbringing. By the time this first meeting took place in 1998, I was already informed about most of the methods of DIY production, but not indie-ness: I had just released my second solo DIY cassette album (entitled Folk) complete with photocopied sleeve inlays (which I had designed and cut by hand) and dubbed the original master recordings (recorded on my Walkman) using the double-deck stereo in my family home. This initial meeting was essentially a listening session (to my new cassette album) and a casual chat in an apartment, a commonplace ritual whenever anyone had a new song or recording they would like Joe Kidd to check out or to seek a seal of approval. I also designed the swansong release for Damnweather: a four-song cassette EP in the same approach to production I had employed for Folk but with a punk aesthetic. I had used the cut-and-paste method to form the lettering on the album cover from newspaper articles, with the only difference being that I was still oblivious to this apparent punk aesthetic (I only saw and listened to the Sex Pistols’ first album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, sometime in 1999). From then on, I would be inextricably linked to the punk underground scene (even though I played lo-fi folk and my friends played free-form improvised rock), and my experience and worldview of observing and experiencing the Malaysian music scene would be informed by the binary of resistance and incorporation to the mainstream and the larger parent culture. I was not particularly drawn by punk’s purist ideals, but I saw greater value in it than the careerist path of ‘breaking through’ and making it into the mainstream. The punk underground was probably the friendliest in opening its doors to a wide variety of music subgenres compared to the larger underground music scene which was predominantly metal. My own cultural values changed too through my fledging career as a performing musician in the music underground—I composed, produced and consumed based in my own universe (which added to the ‘outsider’ appeal and which I would later latch on to). Kuala Lumpur in 1999 lacked a centre, as there was no equivalent of New York’s CBGB club as a cultural mecca for underground music, and most of the legendary music concerts (including Fugazi’s) were in nightclubs or pubs.

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Things changed in this little corner of the Kuala Lumpur underground universe at the turn of the century when a new jazz club called No Black Tie opened its doors. Coopted by the singer-songwriter Rafique Rashid (who would become a big influence on me) and the classically trained pianist Evelyn Hii, I played my first paying gig in its subterranean belly for an acoustic series called Unclogged organised by Joe Kidd. The venue operated until the end of 2019 and during its heyday was important in galvanising local musicians. This is where I noticed the underground form of distribution being practised—merchandise tables at the side of the entrance where musicians would spread their wares for sale. By this time I had returned from a second sojourn in Melbourne and had formed an avant-rock/improv band, the Maharajah Commission, with the remaining friends from Amid the Mimic. On the radio (and among the general public), local independent rock music was still defined by the ‘alternative’ or ‘grunge’ tags, with popular 1990s bands such as OAG, Butterfingers, the Pilgrims and Spiral Kinetic Circus all originally from the underground music circuit before crossing over. These bands were signed to major labels and were a fixture at a lot of gigs; they were very popular and their music videos featured on music shows on radio and television and in magazines. On the radio, Kamil Othman’s show had also become an important avenue to get featured on the airwaves—a space once unavailable to young bands not in the mainstream. The Alternative Rock Show also played another role: it showcased a wider variety of rock music genres and subgenres that mainstream radio programmers or DJs did not feature. Amid the Mimic and their music managed to be featured on the show with Yin Pin and Alex being interviewed by Kamil Othman live on radio. As was the norm, I recorded their appearance on radio and it was in some ways a validation of the band’s body of work. From this perspective, what is lacking in the Malaysian context is a sense of musical ‘curation’—with regard to indie rock, a record label, a record store and radio station programming—which highlights particular genres or movements and mediates the body of work produced by indie artists. With the internet as the new platform, The Wknd Sessions was one of the first online YouTube channels to feature local indie musicians (albeit in a stripped-down acoustic mode, at least for the first few seasons) and proved popular enough to spawn other channels which did exactly the same—featuring the same newish up-and-coming artists with little focus on established veterans or otai (the slang for ‘old-timers’). However, as time passed, all these channels ended up competing as tastemakers—the first to feature or highlight a potentially successful artist—rather than functioning as curators of the scene. The likes of The Alternative Rock Show were instrumental in sowing the seeds in some local musicians’ minds about how radio programming could play and still plays an important role in curating content in whatever programmes that are available on the mass media. The internet essentially dispersed the previous forms of programming as curation as YouTube, Spotify and the like put the power of playlists in the hands of listeners. This left a big gap as music fans now operated in silos of their own scenes, without some form (or someone) bringing to the attention of listeners parts of the scene or strains of music that would otherwise be completely sidelined. This gap,

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I argue, was ripe to be filled by radio programming curated by independent radio stations—and in this case BFM 89.9 stepped into the void. Granted, there are other radio stations that also champion local and indie rock music. The government-owned iM4U FM (107.9, 2014–2018) was noted for championing a broad range of Malaysian music (including indie rock), although it was officially set up to ‘help and nurture volunteerism plus social activism among Malaysian youth’ (Ong 2015). Up to 2012, the Astro Radio-owned XFM primarily featured a similar focus as iM4U until its frequency was taken up by another Astro Radio channel, Melody FM (ibid.). It should be noted that while these stations did indeed champion local original music, the term ‘indie’ came to encompass genres beyond rock and was often used as a mere branding exercise. Herein lies my insistence on reclaiming the so-called spirit of rock music (via rock ’n’ roll) which is inherently missing in the discourse of indie-ness.

18.4 BFM: Radio Free Malaysia? Here we consider how a station decides its music programming in order to identify whether these decisions are hierarchical or nonhierarchical. Independent radio stations with hard news and features as their focus, such as BFM, potentially treat music as fillers and as a branding method or to attract listeners with their new and trendy playlist of latest hits. Antoine Hennion and Cecile Meadel (1986: 286) suggest several questions when it comes to deciding on music radio programming and the identity of a radio station. How does this selection process operate? How does radio transform an external product into a radio product that meets its needs? According to what criteria and by what means does it make its choices and ensure that they resonate with those of an audience?

In most commercial radio stations, record companies have a large and more active role in soliciting airplay. In short, music programming is the reconstruction of its own catalogue by the radio, starting with the ready-made catalogue that record companies would like to see broadcast over the air (ibid.). BFM’s core audience comprises urban, middle-class and English-speaking Klang Valley residents, and could be defined as the core group with close involvement in indie production and consumption. The station’s main content and programming revolve around business and economics (as the name suggests), being a station known for its incisive journalistic standards sorely lacking in other commercial radio stations. More importantly, as Shuker (2016: 137) reminds us, radio has also played a central role at particular historical moments in popularising or marginalising music genres. The station’s general music programming can be described as classic rock and is not limited by the genre itself as artists and genres tied to the rock ’n’ roll movement, as well as styles such as reggae and country, are often featured on its daytime and night-time playlists. As an independent radio station, it has played a vital role in challenging the standard notion of what a radio station should be in Malaysia’s tightly

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regulated media industry which often lacks journalistic rigour. Although adopting a classic rock playlist, the station has also become an important platform for indie music in almost all its local permutations in its night-time and midnight programming. While there are other radio stations that do their part in highlighting local indie music, BFM’s bias towards a rock-oriented playlist is also uncommon for most local stations. From an indie rock musician’s perspective, there is also a sense of territorial reclamation of the airwaves, not just of its musical form but also of the ideals that rock stood for that were lost in mainstream and commercial radio programming. This reclamation also makes rock personal again (which is the essence of its textual appeal), as opposed to the increasingly corporatised world of pop music. As Michael Azerrad (2001: 10) points out in relation to early indie rock in the United States: The indie movement was a reclamation of what rock was always about. Rock & roll hinged on a strong, personal connection to favorite bands, but that connection had been stretched to the limit by pop’s lowest common denominator approach, not to mention things like impersonal stadium concerts and the unreality of MTV. Indie bands proved you didn’t need those things to make a connection with an audience. In fact, you could make a better connection with your audience without them.

Ali Johan, who joined BFM in 2009 as an intern, is now a producer and music lead, and the weekend music programmer since early 2016. A former presenter, he has been instrumental in getting local music on the airwaves and the programmes he hosted in the past (which are still running with new presenters) have done so. An active musician in the local circuit (he plays drums for the rock bands No Good and Killeur Calculateur and also DJs on the side) and avid record collector, he thinks it is vital that radio stations play more local music (Ong 2015). While BFM plays an average of about 30% local music, mostly in the late night slots from 11.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m., it is believed that less than 5% of the total estimated 300,000 listeners tune in regularly to the station when local content is being played. Influenced by the likes of The Alternative Rock Show, one of his programmes, Wavelength, focuses on local and regional music. His programming is informed by music he discovers from the local indie scene and by the knowledge that bands and musicians look forward to being on radio (ibid.). BFM’s longest running music programme is 33RPM hosted by Zack Yusof who is, like Ali Johan, an active musician in the circuit as the former frontman of the rock outfit Free Deserters and his current project Mystery Tapes. The programme, which began airing in 2009, is notable because the playlist, featuring indie rock songs and bands such as INXS, the Jam and the Ramones, was popular enough to be in the regular rotation, and this eventually opened up the station’s programming to include a bit of country, blues, alt-rock and other subgenres. According to Ali Johan, the station’s licence allows it to feature English content from 6.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. and Malay content from 11.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m. (weekdays) and 11.00 p.m. to 7.00 a.m. (weekends) to comply with Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission regulatory requirements of 30% Malay-language content per 24-hour programming cycle (5% of which also consists of three Malay-language news reports). The selection of bands and songs in Malay is not so much about it

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being the national language as Indonesian or Singaporean bands and songs are also often included. Ironically, international Malaysian acts such Yuna and Zee Avi, who do receive a fair amount of airtime on mainstream and commercial radio stations, only feature on the basis of the availability of their Malay-language songs despite their obvious drawing power. Although Ali Johan took over the music director’s role after the incumbent retired, he did not assume the role of music director as the station’s founder Malek Ali did not deem the designation apt. Instead, Ali Johan’s position was unofficially the ‘music lead’ who heads a ‘music committee’ comprising himself, the popular presenter Ezra Zaid (until early 2020) and the producer Lawrence Graham. The committee is tasked with reconsidering the ideal time of the day for songs that were already on the playlist (as programmed by the previous music director) and to decide when they should be played instead. The approach taken is to consider the vibe of the songs to suit the time, the day and the context of what most listeners would be doing in their daily activities in that given period. Decisions are not made about specific songs. For example, the previous music director had a selection of songs and some did not suit the time of day (Aerosmith’s ‘Livin’ on the Edge’ at 8.00 a.m. or Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ at 8 p.m.). They decided to profile the different kinds of people who were listening to the station on the road at various times of the day and then cater the playlist to that gear or the tempo of sounds. The profile loosely looks as follows. • 8.00–9.00 a.m. and 7.30–9.30 a.m.: white-collar workers who clock in at 8.00 a.m., listening to the business and current affairs Q&A programme The Breakfast Grille; no music played during breaks in the programme. • 10.00 a.m. onwards: programmes focusing on small- and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurship-driven content—the time of the day when someone tends to be on their way to do something such as meetings and errands. – The gear during these hours features upbeat songs—very driving friendly— such as Deep Purple’s ‘Hush’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Tangerine’ and modern bands like the Strokes. – 10.00 a.m.–2.00 p.m. are also the ‘hustle hours’—freelancers, people on their way to their first meeting of the day. • 2.00–5.00 p.m.: most listeners are going back home from lunch, school, college— topics on the radio tend to revolve around human interest, sociology, psychology and health issues. – The gear tends to be slower tempo: playlist ranges from African American and 1960s counterculture artists such as Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan to soft pop rock such as the Manic Street Preachers and Oasis ballads. • 5.00–8.00 p.m.: drive-time, talk radio—songs need brevity, under three minutes, a lot of talk, a recap of the day’s news stories, short and snappy, not so much focus on sound as on genre, with artists like the Ramones and Elvis Presley.

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– The gear is up-tempo but with the following consideration: the two driving blocks or rush hours, 6.00–7.00 a.m. and 5.30–7.30 p.m., have to be straight-up hits from those artists mentioned earlier (not current pop chart hits). This tends to be the standard weekday working-hour profile that the music committee plans with the profiles for other hours and weekends differing slightly. Preferences and attention from listeners during week nights and weekends are usually much lower than in the daytime or rush hour, so brooding and slow music aimed at a more relaxed vibe tends to dictate the playlist decisions. The night-time and midnight programming initially comprised local pop classics before evolving into programming that highlights local indie releases. Ali Johan’s main point is that the historical values of the music and its legacy and influence on modern culture should also be complemented with the best curation to play with the psyche of the listener. The watchword is that they must ensure the songs fit the programmes. The informal mission statement for producers revolves around the desire to ‘educate, enlighten, entertain and resonate’, and for those with a greater knowledge of music history (as most indie rock musicians have) the textual meanings of selected playlists resonate further than just the music. While Ali Johan’s familiarity with contemporary Malaysian material gives him an edge in curation, the music committee’s general knowledge of the larger history of songs also plays a part in creating playlists to fit local sociopolitical contexts, something BFM’s middle-class audience may appreciate and relish in reading between the lines. One such example took place during a rally in 2012 organised by Bersih, the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections: the music committee made a conscious decision to play ‘revolution songs’ and songs with the words like ‘yellow’ (Bersih’s symbolic colour), and feature socially conscious singers like Bob Marley and John Lennon. The station owner Malek Ali sees the value of the subtle hat-tipping that plays on the songs’ creative value rather than purely political content which might alert the regulators. This form of curation can also be considered a symbolic process of sustaining the value of historical meaning-making of the songs and aligning them with contemporary sociopolitical contexts. This informs the discourse of sustainability in relation to rock’s meaning-making process within the broader realm of popular culture.

18.5 Rock, Journalism and the Discourse of Sustainability While there are various ways to theorise indie rock, here I bring the focus back to its parent genre: rock. The myths associated with rock still pervade a lot of musicmaking and image-making in indie rock, and while this may seem like stating the obvious it needs to be addressed bluntly. Some practitioners contend that the modes of production and consumption of indie rock are sometimes considered a ‘transient’ space where there is an intended move from being indie into the mainstream in terms of ‘making it’. From my own experience, it is uncommon for an indie artist

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to treat their indie-ness as a stepping stone to incorporation into the music market. The arguments raised by Brent Luvaas (2012) problematise the supposed distinctions between DIY, indie, the underground and the hipster. However, the cultural resistance offered by being indie may differ that from being an underground musician, since on the ground the distinction between what is underground and what is indie tends to crop up, notably with the punk scene in Malaysia, where anticapitalistic idealism (no matter how facetious some may argue it is) and countercultural affinities are still practised and actively communicated. In relation to the cultural strategies of sustainability, Davide Brocchi (2008: 27) notes: Every culture needs cultural media that communicate values or knowledge to people. The first cultural medium are people itself, for example tourists or soldiers, who carry values and lifestyles through foreign countries. Another cultural medium are those social institutions that are responsible for socialisation (i.e. family, church and school). Other examples of cultural media are the newspapers and television commercials, Hollywood-movies and literature.

Indie rock musicians themselves therefore serve as a cultural medium and embody shared values and lifestyles through their travels and experiences. The values espoused through indie rock, while transnational, can be considered ‘foreign’ in origin but nevertheless adapted to local needs. The combination of social institutions—in which local values are internalised and cultural media impart competing ideologies—influences indie rock musicians’ decisions on the direction of their own musical production, consumption and meaning-making processes. A big part of this discussion that needs to be addressed is the listeners of this form of music, encompassing not just fans of particular bands but also the band members and individual artists themselves who are more often than not fans of other bands or artists. Since it has been established that BFM’s approach and philosophy are more rooted in journalism rather than entertainment, the station’s night-time and midnight programming can be analysed for its textuality as a site of meaning-making. In this regard, it is more instructive to study BFM’s programming as a form of journalism rather than indie-ness and to treat it in the context of the Malaysian mediasphere in modernity. John Hartley’s (1996) concept of ‘popular reality’ articulates this tendency by focusing on the readership/audienceship in the study of popular journalism by paying closer attention to texts and is concerned with the communication of ideas. As texts are the objective traces of dialogue, relationships, meaning and communication, which are recoverable for analysis and can be argued over, radio programming may also serve as an arena for indie rock musicians to articulate a sense of sustainability as a cultural practice. While there are indie rock musicians who have a sufficient number of fans for them to pursue a full-time career as an artist, the fact remains that, unlike in Indonesia for example, indie rock still retains a distinction between being a ‘legitimate’ professional musician and a semi-professional or amateur, although this distinction is slowly eroding. Unlike the musical distinctions often described by American and British scholars on what specifically denotes indie rock, I believe such definitions

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and distinctions in the Malaysian case are far looser and more arbitrary. Even comparisons with Indonesia seem premature as the listener base and number of performance venues for indie rock music in Malaysia are minuscule. Some bands or artists who identify as indie may in fact be close replicas of popular mainstream rock bands from the United States, Britain or Indonesia. Discussing indie-ness in the context of rock is important because treating rock as a site of contestation allows the marking of the possible transformations of the musical and critical terrain, as noted by Roger Beebe et al. (2002). There is also the issue of the influence and values of American indie rock on the practice of musicmaking. Azerrad (2001: 6), for example, argues that the key principle of American indie rock in the 1980s was not a circumscribed musical style; it was the punk ethos of DIY. The equation was that if punk was rebellious and DIY was rebellious, then doing it yourself was punk. This notion is important for some indie or underground musicians—the fact that embracing rock also means enabling a symbolic ‘giving the finger’. Some indie rock musicians do prefer to work within the various imposed power dynamics and constraints that denote whether something is rock or not. Hence, there is a degree of idealism and meaning that operates in the practice of being an indie rock musician, and in the Malaysian context getting your music heard over the radio without being signed to a recording company was unheard of. Azerrad (ibid.: 10) observes that radio was one of the key arenas for the rebellion against the tightly controlled FM format programmed by consulting firms in the United States in the 1980s, against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s conservative backlash, and in this context college radio provided a valuable conduit. In the absence of college radio in Malaysia, there has been virtually no space for indie rock music to be heard. In his study of idealism and meaning in local indie rock music, Frank Ong (2014) notes that the perceived alienation from the music industry finds expression in shaping indie music’s sound and business practices, which are informed by past incidents involving hegemonic and moral authorities (such as crackdowns and negative media perceptions) and by its own desire to sustain music-making and its associated practices (such as producing albums and gigging). The perceived alienation and the need to go about business in a different mode do dictate (and sometimes limit) the reach of most indie acts in Malaysia. In addition, and from my own observations, race, class and politics also loom large over these decisions, which I read as the ‘adjusted cultural practice’ noted by Ong (ibid.). Indie rock musicians tend to consciously adjust themselves in their works and image as apolitical or align themselves with the status quo in order to avoid being seen as ‘radical’ or ‘controversial’ in spite of having agency in deciding on the degree of these adjustments. This is markedly different from musicians in Indonesia, for example, who tend to be more expressive of their political stance and often articulate this in their songs, albums, artwork and merchandise. While on the surface Malaysian indie rock musicians seem unwilling to make public their political stance, little is known of their personal politics as there is scant literature on the personal politics of musicians generally. Malay male indie rock musicians tend to be less edgy in this instance, since Malay women indie rock musicians already have to contend with broader political issues, most notably gender politics. They are often scrutinised by the patriarchal religious and moralising order

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(including the family unit) which leads to greater self-awareness of everyday politics. This may explain why Malaysian indie rock musicians focus on specific niches— targeted at particular audiences—as a safer and more meaningful route to practise in a relatively small market. In a similar way, David Shumway (2013: 350) also notes the decline of a genuine mass audience has meant that it is harder and harder for a performer to attain recognition beyond her or his niche. Ultimately, BFM’s night-time and midnight programming is a form of symbolic sustainability rather than an economic one, as the ability to retain the presence of a body of work (in this case songs) on the airwaves is a meaningful endeavour from an indie rock musician’s point of view. Further, BFM’s programming is made more meaningful by its listeners, who also tend to be indie rock musicians themselves, whether avid listeners or just casual listeners tuning in during their late-night drive home from a local gig. These encounters, while seemingly random, may also form the basis of a steady audienceship in the long run. This process of meaning-making is an important part of the notion of sustainability, and, as noted earlier, Hartley’s (1996: 3) concept of ‘popular reality’ articulates the relationship of textuality from the point of view of readership/audienceship in his study of journalism. Journalism is in fact a gigantic archive of textuality, a huge store of human sense-making, unselfconsciously generated by and documenting the social, personal, cultural and political interactions of contemporary life, while at the same time displaying its own particular properties and characteristics, its own patterns, histories, quirks and accidents. It is therefore a resource which has to be studied and understood in its own terms, but which can also be used to pursue questions about matters outside of itself; questions about meanings, for instance.

It can be argued that it is this ‘archive of textuality’ that contributed to how indie rock meaning-making gained traction in the United States and how punk rock achieved notoriety in Britain with Malcolm McLaren’s savvy public relations stunts. The music press, in tandem with other mass media, have an important role in meaning-making not only for fans but also for musicians. This combination of meaning-making works as a kind of road map from which indie rock musicians navigate their values and make sense of their own place in the larger scene. In this vein, the earlier autobiographical section of this discussion serves as an example of how indie rock musicians articulate their sense-making and also potentially create a narrative form of sustainability to explain the cultural values which may or may not help navigate their creative decision-making. It is important to note that the Malaysian mediascape has changed significantly from the late 1990s when The Alternative Rock Show was still on-air, and this has affected how indie rock musicians find their niche cultural space in the larger mediascape, in the form of music journalism. In the past decade or so, dedicated indie rock-friendly English-language music magazines such as such as Tone and KLue have ceased publication and this has had implications for the visibility of indie rock bands in the public sphere. BFM’s music programming (including its dedicated music shows outside the night-time and midnight slots) fills in the gap left by the developments described above. An interesting fact is that a lot of the music writers from the magazines that have shut down and music writers from mainstream newspapers such as The Star

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and the Malay Mail were themselves indie rock musicians and acquaintances of musicians, with access to more insider information and cultural capital to articulate the textual sense-making of being indie and to help indie rock bands negotiate a cultural space in the print media. This is also the case with some of the music staff who are in charge of BFM’s music programming. ‘Who you know’ is just as important a maxim in the DIY realm as in any other cultural endeavour. It is with such actors that an informed sustainability can be exercised in the Malaysian mediascape. BFM’s reputation for maintaining journalistic standards for hard news and current affairs informs its music programming and, as a result, the night-time and midnight music programming can be seen as a symbolic cultural space—nocturnal, subterranean—in which some artistic contestation is still allowed on-air due to the default nature of its timing. Yet this timing is also potentially the most intimate and personal of listening experiences someone may partake in. Along with the station’s livestreaming, the programming reach goes well beyond its current limited transmission in selected urban centres, since this is circumvented by the fact that BFM is also an online radio situated at the convergence of the analogue and digital worlds (Tamby 2014).

18.6 Conclusion The discussion and observations in this chapter are far from conclusive as there is much more to be explored in identifying how the changes in Malaysia’s mediascape have affected (and continue to affect) indie rock musicians and listeners. Most studies tend to be fixated on perspectives derived from musicology or market-based readings of indie rock. While Malaysia has emerged as a choice destination for both indie and mainstream touring bands, and there is a healthy growth in the number of sponsored music concerts, radio’s role in facilitating indie rock’s sustainability is also vital. It lies in the willingness of programmers to look beyond the confines of popular playlists and to curate knowledgeable experiences in which audiences may help foster a sustainable arena for indie rock ideas and ideals to be passed down to successive generations.

References Asia Radio Today. 2019. GfK: 20.6 million Malaysians listen to the radio weekly. 24 December. http://www.asiaradiotoday.com/news/gfk-206-million-malaysians-listen-radioweekly. Accessed 26 Oct 2020. Azerrad, Michael. 2001. Our band could be your life: Scenes from the American indie underground 1981–1991. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Azmyl Md Yusof. 2010. Facing the music: Music subcultures and ‘morality’ in Malaysia. In Media, culture and society in Malaysia, ed. Yeoh Seng Guan, 179–196. London: Routledge. Beebe, Roger, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders, eds. 2002. Rock over the edge: Transformations in popular music culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Brocchi, Davide. 2008. The cultural dimension of sustainability. In Sustainability: A new frontier for the arts and cultures, ed. Sacha Kagan and Volker Kirchberg, 26–58. Frankfurt: VAS (Verlag für akademische Schriften). Fonarow, Wendy. 2006. Empire of dirt: The aesthetics and rituals of British indie music. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hartley, John. 1996. Popular reality: Journalism, modernity, popular culture. London: Arnold. Hennion, Antoine, and Cecile Meadel. 1986. Programming music: Radio as mediator. Media, Culture and Society 8(3): 281–303. Luvaas, Brent. 2012. DIY style: Fashion, music and global digital cultures. London: Berg. Ong, Frank. 2014. Idealism and meaning in local indie rock music. In Music & mind, ed. Gisa Jähnichen, Made Mantle Hood, and Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegoda, 133–142. Serdang: UPM Press. Ong, Lyn. 2015. Malaysian radio: Time to tune. Poskod.my. http://poskod.my/features/malaysianradio-time-tune/. Accessed 2 Oct 2020. Shumway, David. 2013. Where have all the rock stars gone? In The rock history reader, ed. Theo Cateforis, 349–352, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Shuker, Roy. 2016. Understanding popular music culture, 5th ed. London: Routledge. Tamby, T.K. 2014. Meet Malaysia’s radio star. Business Circle, 14 April. http://www.businesscircle. com.my/meet-malaysias-radio-star/. Accessed 3 Oct 2020.

Interview Ali Johan. Interview: Petaling Jaya, 17 November 2016.

Azmyl Yusof (also more popularly known by his stage name Azmyl Yunor) is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts, Sunway University Malaysia, and a recording and touring underground singer-songwriter. His research interest parallels his artistic practice, which includes music subcultures and the cultural politics of identity in Malaysia. A gig organiser, occasional radio host and the cofounder of several punk and experimental rock bands, he has released 16 albums independently since 1997, collaborates with film-makers on projects, and writes a weekly column for an online publication. His publications include: Facing the music: Music subculture and ‘morality’ in Malaysia. In Media, culture and society in Malaysia, ed. Yeoh Seng Guan (2010). He is currently writing a memoir which includes a compilation of his lyrics and photographs from the road as well as book chapters on music-making in Malaysia and the region.

Chapter 19

Postcolonial Indigenous Storytellers and the Making of a Counter-discourse to the ‘Civilising Process’ in Malaysia Zawawi Ibrahim

Abstract This chapter explores two postcolonial indigenous storytellers from the historic margins of the Malaysian nation-state. The first is the late Mak Minah (Menah Anak Kuntom), a Temuan woman who learned songs of the forest from her husband and kin, and later joined forces with non-Orang Asli musicians to form a fusion band, Akar Umbi, and became the first Orang Asli storyteller to sing to a wider public. In contrast, Akiya (Mahat Anak China), the author of Tuntut (Claiming), Perang sangkil (The slave-raiders’ war) and Hamba (Slave), comes from a younger and better educated generation of Orang Asli. The analysis presented here suggests that through their creative works, performance and discursive practice, indigenous storytellers are subverting what Norbert Elias calls ‘the civilising process’. In both the anthropological literature and the practices of indigenous governance of the British colonial state and the postcolonial nation-state, ‘civilising the margins’ has generally been identified with policies that assumed the state’s role as bearers of progress (read: ‘civilisation’, ‘development’) towards the allegedly ‘backward’ (‘primitive’) Orang Asli communities. These two variants of the ‘civilising process’ are examined to demonstrate how they further marginalised the Orang Asli and ruptured their sense of identity, dignity and social worth. The critical subtext of Mak Minah’s and Akiya’s storytelling interventions is that they represent indigenous people’s assertion of agency, empowering a sense of identity and ontology, which embodies their rights to humanity and self-esteem, their desire for participatory development and, most of all, their historical pursuit of peace and love. In the context of an evolving Malaysian nation-state, its grand narratives and dominant discourse have constantly denied the Orang Asli these rights. This chapter argues that the narratives and discursive content of storytelling as articulated by Mak Minah and Akiya constitute a remaking of an indigenous postcolonial discourse aimed at ‘civilising the centre’. Keywords Malaysia · Civilising process · Indigenous people · Orang Asli · Storytelling · Mak Minah · Akiya

Zawawi Ibrahim (B) School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Subang Jaya, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_19

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Deeply embedded within development discourse, therefore, was a set of recurrent images of ‘the traditional’ which were fundamentally ahistorical and space-sensitive. Collectivities (groups, societies, territories, tribes, classes, communities) were assigned a set of characteristics which suggested not only a low place in the hierarchy of achievement but a terminal condition of stasis, forever becalmed until the healing winds of modernity and development began to blow. —Jonathan Crush (1995: 9) ‘Local’, ‘traditional or ‘folk’ knowledge is no longer the irrelevant vestige of ‘backward’ people who have not yet made the transition to modernity, but the vital well springs and resource bank from which alternative futures might be built. —David Marsden (1994: 44)

19.1 Introduction In my journey as an anthropologist, I have never ceased to be amazed by the eloquence of indigenes, whose narrations I have been diligently recording in celebration of a postmodernist ethnography which embraces these subjects as partners and not objects in research (Fontana 1994: 218–220; Zawawi 2008; Zawawi and NoorShah 2012). In many ways, the task of the anthropologist is made easier by the presence of these articulate storytellers in their midst, for what they express are not only the facts but also the wisdom and knowledge of their landscape. Indeed, the more I listen to their stories, the more I believe that it is these ‘subjects’ rather than anthropologists who have been the true bearers of knowledge from the field (Zawawi 2015, 2021). This misrepresentation has been a part of the baggage of ‘Orientalism’ and the colonising methodologies that have trapped Western anthropology since its birth when dealing with indigenous people and in its representations of ‘the Other’ (Smith 1999; Hallam and Street 2000). Within postcolonial anthropology, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, representing the new imaginings of indigenous-based anthropology, has launched a vehement critique against colonial modes of epistemology and methodology that have rendered the indigenous as mere objects of research. The ‘calling’ by Smith is to move the ‘indigenous’ as ‘agency’ and ‘subjects’ in their own right, thereby empowering them to determine their own indigenous research agenda through ‘decolonizing methodologies’ (Smith 1999). In this context, I believe that Smith has moved her methodology beyond postmodernist ethnography, not least because the indigenous projects that she advocates include ‘storytelling’, ‘claiming’, ‘remembering’, ‘indigenising’, ‘writing’ and ‘sharing’. It is with a view to deconstructing the ‘civilising process’ discourse that has for a long time dictated our understanding of these so-called ‘backward’ people, and to embrace what David Marsden (1994: 44) calls ‘the vital well springs and resource bank from which alternative futures might be built’ that this chapter addresses. My narration here focuses on indigenous storytellers drawn from the historic margins of the Malaysian nation-state. They represent the older and younger generations of indigenous Orang Asli who have been ‘socialised’ into both the colonial state and

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the postcolonial nation-state’s ‘civilising’ forms of governance. Our first storyteller is the late Mak Minah (Menah Anak Kuntom), a Temuan woman who learned songs of the forest from her husband and kin, and later joined forces with non-Orang Asli musicians from metropolitan Kuala Lumpur to form a fusion band called Akar Umbi. As a result, Mak Minah became the first Orang Asli storyteller to sing to a wider public, both nationally and internationally. The second storyteller, Akiya (Mahat Anak China), comes from a younger and better educated generation of Orang Asli and renders his storytelling through writing—in the medium of prose—as the author of a short-story collection Tuntut (Claiming), and two novels, Hamba (Slave) and Perang sangkil (The slave-raiders’ war).

19.2 The Civilising Process as the Genesis of ‘Civilising the Margins’ and Developmentalism in Malaysia The genesis of these storytellers and their stories must be contextualised in Malaysia’s historical past and their own indigenous communities’ evolving life experiences and struggles with regard to the different phases of their relationship with the changing state polity. For the stories that they tell, the changing identity of who they were before and who they are now are the outcome of the different phases of the ‘civilising process’ to which their communities have been subjected in the past and may arguably still be so in the present. Most indigenous ethnic minorities living on the periphery of postcolonial Southeast Asian society have been subjected to the ‘civilising the margins’ policies of their respective nation-states. This process is primarily driven by a unilinear evolutionistbased modernisation theory which embeds ‘the notion of development as a civilizing project’, in a belief that ‘certain levels of “social development” are intrinsically better than those deemed more “primitive” and “traditional”’ (Duncan 2008: 3). As a longstanding state planning and social engineering project, development here has as its ultimate goal the economic transformation of its agrarian base to an industrial one, hence exploiting all its natural resources as commodities for exchange value and profit-making. In the process, it also incorporates ‘[p]olicies aimed at fully exploiting the capacity of the land [which] had a direct effect on the indigenous ethnic minorities who inhabited this same landscape’ (ibid.: 4). But the intended or unintended consequences from this developmental trajectory may be more far-reaching than only economic transformation, with radical ramifications for indigenous people’s culture and identity. The history of indigenous Orang Asli in peninsular Malaysia requires a broader understanding of their evolving subjugation to the imperatives of both the colonial and postcolonial states in their respective phases and timeframes. The civilising process during colonialism was mediated by an externally imposed colonial state exercising domination over the authority of a declining ‘feudal’ Malay kerajaan (polity, literally the condition of having a raja). In the postcolonial period, it is the

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civilising process engendered by the rise of the Malaysian ‘developmentalist state’ unleashed by the state-engineered New Economic Policy (NEP), which was adopted in 1971, that is most salient (Abdul Rahman 2008; Zawawi 2013). This economic project was soon complemented by an attendant state ideological apparatus, the National Culture Policy (Dasar Kebudayaan Kebangsaan), launched at the same time, which dictated the nation-state’s national cultural policy and identity in Malay ethnonationalist terms. One outcome of this ‘civilising offensive’ in both colonial and postcolonial timeframes has been Orang Asli marginalisation and the inevitable rupturing of their indigenous cultural identity. Writing on not dissimilar processes unleashed in Latin America, one of the leading scholars of the relations between indigenous peoples and states, Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1992: 92–93), sees the process as a holistic package in which the nationstate unleashes its tyranny of ‘civilisation’ through both ‘economic ethnocide’ and ‘cultural ethnocide’. By economic ethnocide he means that ‘all pre-modern forms of economic organization must necessarily disappear to make way for either private or multinational capitalism or state-planned socialism’, while cultural ethnocide suggests that ‘all sub-national ethnic units must disappear to make way for an overarching nation-state’, in which ‘[d]evelopment and nation-building have become the major economic and political ideologies’ (ibid.: 93). Thus for Stavenhagen, both economic and cultural ethnocide ‘have been ethnocidal in that they imply the destruction and/or disappearance of non-integrated, separate ethnic units. This is frequently carried out in the name of national unity and integration, progress and of course development’ (ibid.: 93, emphasis mine).

19.2.1 The European Connection The genesis of this ‘civilising process’ was hatched in Europe, and came to prominence especially in the writings of Norbert Elias’s famous book of the same title, first published in German in 1939. Elias (2000) uses the term ‘civilisation’ and related concepts such as ‘civilised’ in two different ways: one refers to a historical European understanding of what constitutes standards of civilised behaviour—‘good manners’—and the other as a ‘civilising process’—the unplanned and unintended changes in ‘habitus’, which result in ‘greater internalised impulse control, foresight and rationality’, and without recourse to violence (see also Whitt 2010: 137). In the context of European history, this was a process which began with the transition from feudalism into what Elias calls ‘the court society’. In Hugh Whitt’s (2010: 137) analysis, it continued with the growth of market society, gradual historical changes in social organization such as an increasing division of labor, urbanization, population increase, and the growth of trade in a money economy were accompanied by shifting configurations of intergroup competition for power, prestige, and honor, the growth of social differentiation, widening chains of interdependence, and the concentration of monopolies of violence and taxation in the hands of the absolutist state.

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Scholars also agree on the compatibility between Elias’s emphasis on state formation (especially its monopoly over the use of violence) and the notion of ‘internal colonialism’ as advanced by Michael Hechter (1999: 17) who describes this as ‘characterized by sectional, or otherwise competing economies, polities, and cultures, within a given territory’ being ‘transformed into a society composed of a single, all-pervasive … “national” economy, polity, and culture’. An additional component is that internal colonialism also incorporates the ‘civilising offensive’ (Mitzman 1987). In this phenomenon, some powerful groups intentionally set out to civilise social life, including ‘the imposition of bureaucratic rules and conscious efforts by schools, Christian missionaries and urban reformers to inculcate “civilized” behaviour’ (Whitt 2010: 142; van Krieken 1989). However, while Elias is said to assign ‘lesser importance than do internal colonialism models to these intentional civilizing initiatives’ in dealing with early socialisation and meanings of civilisation to colonialism (Whitt 2010: 142), he does consider the idea of ‘conscious and deliberate civilizing processes’ (Elias 2000: 60). Both notions of the civilising process and internal colonialism have been combined and utilised by various scholars in a now classic example of the discourse on francisation (‘Frenchification’) and the mission civilisatrice. This was the civilising mission pursued systematically by the French state during the nineteenth century, legitimised by the doctrine of ‘progress’ and an ideology based on an attitude of superiority (Whitt 2010: 144ff.). Two important aspects of this process need highlighting. Though initially targeted at the more ‘backward’ or ‘peripheral’ parts of France, as an example of internal colonialism, the French state would also make the civilising process integral to its colonial strategy overseas. And second, the imposition of ‘civilisation’ also engendered its own resistance and violence both within France and in the colonies. At the level of discourse, French advocates of the civilising process (and their British counterparts) began consciously to use the term ‘civilisation’ as an antithesis to ‘barbarism’ (Elias 2000: 41). And in the colonial context, this was the beginning of the we–they dichotomy which epitomised the perceived superiority of the West over ‘earlier societies’ (or ‘more primitive’ contemporary ones) in terms of technology, science, manners, religion, literacy and much more. Indeed, by the turn of the nineteenth century, Elias (ibid.: 43) remarks that French colonial expansion in bringing the ‘benefits’ of civilisation to ‘uncivilised’ people—whether they wanted this or not—was staunchly mediated by a rallying cry which pitched the dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism. With hindsight, we now know that the French extension of their civilising mission as a form of internal and external colonialism generated contradictory responses among its colonised subjects, ranging from violent resistance to nativistic identitymaking. For Frantz Fanon in The wretched of the earth (1965), the violence unleashed by French colonialism on its colonised subjects was so deep-seated that it left an unrepairable mark in the psyche, such that the only way out for their liberation must be through violence. At another level, as in the case of the négritude movement, new forms of identity-making were an unintended consequence of the French education system that aimed to assimilate black colonised subjects to be ‘French’ both in culture and language. It was a scenario in which educated black intellectuals who had

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successfully become ‘French’ to earn their ‘white masks’ suddenly found themselves totally denied by their ‘mother country’ France because of their ‘black skins’ (Fanon 1967). Such rejection unleashed a sudden reverse identity turn among black colonised intellectuals who began to seek out their black roots and culture. It was this act of redeeming their lost black identity, engendered by their assimilation into the colonial culture and language, which consequently led to the rise of négritude poetry, associated with leading intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas. The movement was a reaction against European colonisation and its legacy of cultural racism, which later also gave inspiration to the ‘Black is beautiful’ civil rights’ battle cry in the United States (King and Anthony 1972).

19.2.2 The Civilising Process and Orang Asli: The Colonial Phase Orang Asli (a Malay term which means ‘original people’) is the current official and acceptable term to describe the ‘aboriginal’ peoples of peninsular Malaysia. Orang Asli are by no means a homogenous ethnic entity. They are divided into three different ethnic groups—Negritos, Senoi and Proto-Malays—which can be further subdivided into different ‘tribal’ groups (Nicholas 2000). They are among the country’s poorest and most politically marginalised Bumiputera communities. The figures on basic socioeconomic indicators have not improved over many decades and by some measures things have got worse. For example, an official profile of the Orang Asli in 1973, just two years after the NEP was launched, provides the following details on monthly income to reflect their undeveloped status: 3.5% had no income, 30.2% had less than RM100 per month, 39.3% had between RM100 and RM200, 11.5% had more that RM350 (Unit Penyelarasan Pelaksanaan 1994). According to the Department of Orang Asli Affairs, in 2008 half of the Orang Asli population lived below the poverty line and more than a third were classified as the ‘hardcore poor’. Another estimate cited a poverty rate of 77% (Rusaslina 2013: 269), while a recent report of the Center for Orang Asli Concerns shows that ‘almost all of Malaysia’s Orang Asli are locked into poverty’ (Wong 2020). Other socioeconomic indicators— such as infant mortality rates, life expectancy, access to water and electricity, and school attendance—are equally shocking, pointing to a picture of deep-rooted and systemic marginalisation. Orang Asli’s current marginality is historically rooted in the precolonial relations of Malay feudal society. In the traditional political economy of the Malay kerajaan, Orang Asli were essential mediating links in the precolonial trading networks, especially those which spread to extract sought-after jungle products to connect with the long-distance trading nexus of the Malay world (see Dunn 1975; Dodge 1981; Endicott 1983; Couillard 1984; Benjamin 2002). Though they enjoyed a certain degree of freedom in the jungle habitat, and were therefore subjected to less formal control from the feudal state as compared to the Malay peasantry, Orang Asli were also

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incorporated into the precolonial class system and polity as slaves (hamba abdi) (Endicott 1983; Couillard 1984). Relegated to the very bottom rung of the traditional status system, their marginal position, both ethnically and culturally, was further compounded by their equally peripheralised location vis-à-vis the ‘little’ and ‘great’ tradition of the Malay world, as presided over by Islam which excluded the Orang Asli, although this marginalisation was also shared to some extent by Malay subjects (rakyat), including debt slaves, in relation to the ruling class. Under colonial rule, the Orang Asli were subjected to the British imperial version of the ‘civilising process’ and the ‘civilising offensive’. The first imperative of the colonial state was to ensure that it served the interest of British capital at home and abroad. This was achieved through different stages, which eventually culminated in formal colonial political and administrative control of the traditional Malay kerajaan from the 1870s onwards in order to secure its tin mining and later plantation production of raw materials for the reproduction of British industrial capitalism at home (Zawawi 2004: 120). For its labour requirements, through the agency of the colonial state, and mediated by the ‘lazy native’ mythology, capital was not forced to pry loose the indigenous Malay peasantry from the subsistence sector (Alatas 1977; Lim 1977). In the tin mines, there was already a pool of newcomer Chinese labour (sinkeh) organised by Chinese middlemen capitalists, while the relatively easy access to and control of immigrant labour from British India also supported ‘the logic of plantation production’ (Bach 1976: 470–471). Both these ethnic fractions of labour became the proletarians of colonial capitalism in Malaya (Zawawi 1998c, 2004). In the field of education, the British institutionalised an elitist type of English-medium education for the children of the Malay aristocratic class but further marginalised the children of the Malay peasantry by providing them with a rudimentary vernacular education suitable only for them to become ‘good peasants’ (Roff 1967). As is well known, British imperialism, pioneered by an earlier pursuit of mercantile capitalism through the East India Company, had initially controlled Penang, Singapore and Melaka—the Straits Settlements—which by 1867 had become Crown colonies. In the peninsula, Perak had been a major tin producer throughout the nineteenth century, leading Britain to annex the state after the destabilising Larut Wars (1861–1874) disrupted tin supplies. The Pangkor Treaty of 1874 is significant as it heralded the beginning of formal British control over the Malay rulers and paved the way for Malaya to become a British colony through an elaborate system of socalled ‘indirect rule’. In time, the formation of the Federated Malay States (Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang) and Unfederated Malay States (Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis and Terengganu) cemented effective British control over political and economic matters, while the Malay sultans maintained residual authority over Islam and Malay customs. These final elements of Malay traditional prerogatives, including the preservation of the traditional institution of sultanship, deemed ‘sacred’ to Malay cultural identity to provide the symbolism of sovereignty (kedaulatan), were left alone by the British. One other area of social relations was left untouched in the early decades of colonial rule: the traditional practice of slavery. In the precolonial Malay world, slavery contributed to prestige, and was perceived ‘as important to the status of rulers and the chiefly class as revenue itself’ (Andaya and

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Andaya 2017: 168; see also Reid 1983). Since Islam forbids the enslaving of Muslims, a ‘freer’ and more flexible version of slavery—debt bondage (hamba berhutang)— was retained to bind ‘dependent’ Malay subjects to their ruling chiefs (Sullivan 1982). As Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya (2017: 168–169) describe it, Debt slavery usually occurred when an individual voluntarily ‘mortgaged’ himself in return for some financial assistance from his creditor, frequently his ruler or chief.… Through debt bondage members of the ruling class gained followers that increased their status and comprised an economic asset which could be transferred, if need be, to some other creditor.

But there was at the same time another form of slavery, and by the logic of the traditional Malay social hierarchy, bought slaves (hamba abdi) were almost exclusively Orang Asli, who had not adopted Islam and were deemed Kaffir or infidels (Endicott 1983; Dentan et al. 1997: 55; Akiya 2013). The British also had their own reason for prolonging slavery. Colonial policy wanted to turn rural Malaya into a wet ricegrowing area in order to feed the immigrant labour force working in the tin mines and rubber plantations—their labour reproduction was perceived as being equally indispensable to the sustenance of both ‘peripheral’ and ‘central capitalism’. The initial intensification of tin mining and cultivation of gambier and black pepper in the Malay world had already made ‘owning slaves more profitable’ for Malay chiefs (Dentan et al. 1997: 55–56; Dentan 2008: 21). Adhering to its policy of reserving Malays to the village subsistence base, the British turned instead to immigrants such as the Rawa and the Mandailing from Sumatra to cultivate wet rice and encouraged their incursions into Orang Asli territory by giving them tax breaks and titles to land from which they had driven indigenous people. Most of these immigrants were young single men and represented ‘the most violent and irresponsible cohort’. The colonial government which was already ‘hesitant to oppose slavery’ as ‘it would sour relations with the Malay ruling class’ thus ‘turned a blind eye to the brutality of Rawas warfare’ and their slave-raiding (Dentan et al. 1997: 58, 2008: 22). Robert Knox Dentan (2008: 22), for example, offers an account where ‘Rawas exterminated one group of Malaysian indigenes, the Mantra, and drove three others—TemuanBelandas, Semelai, and Btsisi’ (“Mah Meri”)—far from their native lands with great loss of life’. Even after settling down around Gopeng in Perak, the Rawa still maintained their ethnic identity even though both the government and Semai categorised them as ‘Malays’. According to Dentan (ibid.: 15) they apparently ‘despised and terrorized neighboring peoples the same way they despised and tried to terrorize Semai’. These brutal encounters mark the first colonial act of ‘deterritorialisation’ of the original indigenous people under early British rule in Malaya (Magnaghi 2000, 2005; Zawawi 2016). It was one that was based on an initial land-grabbing policy legitimised by colonial rulers which unleashed a historical timeframe of ‘overwhelming terror’ upon the indigenous Orang Asli, in which they were mercilessly driven from their lands through violence, killing and capture carried out by immigrant Malay slave-raiders (sangkil) (Dentan 2008). It was only in 1883, nine years after the Pangkor Treaty, that the British, bowing to the pressure of abolitionist organisations in Britain, finally ended slavery in Perak, and only in 1920 that slavery was abolished in all of the Malay states under British control (Dentan et al. 1997: 58).

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In terms of the British ‘colonial gaze’ towards Orang Asli, the following observation by Adela Baer (2012) is interesting in terms of their sense of ‘detachment’ while at the same time highlighting the fact that ‘British rule relentlessly robbed Orang Asli of land and autonomy’: If the British stereotyped Malays as ‘lazy natives,’ they certainly did not consider Orang Asli as lazy, or natives, or lazy natives. Since the Orang Asli were not Malays—not Moslem and lacking rajas or sultans with whom the British could palaver—they were deemed insignificant or, at times, quaint museum specimens. That is, Orang Asli were the ultimate strangers (and vice versa), in a long line of strangers. Since the minority Orang Asli were not an impediment to self-serving colonial goals—they fled instead of fought—the British could view them with some detachment. Although British rule relentlessly robbed Orang Asli of land and autonomy, British writers tended to applaud Orang Asli ecological knowledge, as well as their traits of independence, honesty, and tolerance (Baer 2012: 1, emphasis mine).

And as Dentan (2008: 22) also reminds us: Colonial policy thus transformed a relatively static frontier between the expanding Malay Muslim population and the indigenous pagan Mon-Khmer speaking peoples into an encroaching European-style one of the sort that devastated the indigenes of the Americas.

It was only after the Second World War that events during the so-called Emergency (1948–1960) brought Orang Asli into the scheme of modern government and control (Nicholas 2003). For the second time, the autonomy of Orang Asli in managing their own affairs in their natural habitat was transgressed, this time by Gerald Templer’s anti-insurgency policy of ‘displacement, resettlement and the jungle forts [which] represented a massive enlargement of scale which threatened to rapidly transform their lifestyle and material culture’ (Harper 1999: 270). This later period of Emergency rule saw the beginning of another radical phase of Orang Asli deterritorialisation as the British faced guerrilla warfare led by insurgents from the Communist Party of Malaya. In the context of the Cold War, the British were resolute in their efforts to confront communism in order to protect their investments and interests in the plantation economy and tin mines. Being mainly inhabitants of the jungle and the fringes of rural villages, Orang Asli were caught in the middle of this conflict, and were seen by the British as potential sympathisers and suppliers of food to the guerrillas. The British resorted to a strategy of a systematic large-scale relocation of Orang Asli to various selective ‘forts’ on which were imposed strict policing and control by security forces. They were forced to live in an enclosed and structured environment with many strangers, far away from their natural jungle habitat. As a result, in the initial stage, many Orang Asli became victims of new diseases and perished. It was only later that the situation began to improve when the management of the colonial warfare strategy against the guerrillas took a different turn (Carey 1976, 1979; Talalla 1984; Leary 1995). While they eventually abolished slavery, British rule was paternalistic at best, and its policies and laws pertaining to Orang Asli, though proclaimed with the most ‘noble’ intention of ‘protecting’ them, only served to further accentuate their existing

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stigma and marginality. In 1950 the Department of Aborigines was set up to be the ‘custodian’ of Orang Asli, that is, to ‘protect’ them, but in fact its aim was to control Orang Asli movements as they were seen as a ‘security risk’ in the context of the ongoing conflict. Some early colonial Orang Asli ‘protectors’, such as the anthropologist Peter Williams-Hunt, were concerned with their ‘detribalisation’, especially in the context of the traumatic effects engendered by the policy of forced relocation in forts. In a telling confidential memo, he echoed his concern about the threatened survival of Orang Asli culture and way of life: They themselves only wish to be left alone and to be allowed to develop in their traditional way of life with the minimum of outside interference. They ask for protection for their lands, freedom from religious interference of which there is a considerable and growing amount and a gradual development of standards of living and education. These people are the original inhabitants of the country and have largely contributed to the Malay population. They have a right to special consideration for their protection and preservation above all other peoples of the country. (quoted in Harper 1999: 270)

However, after Williams-Hunt’s death in 1953, his replacement Richard Noone pursued a more ‘pragmatic’ policy, expressed in the Aboriginal People’s Ordinance of 1954. The key aim was to finally break the bond between Orang Asli and communist guerrillas and also to effectively drive them into a poorer environment (Kathirithamby-Wells 2005: 249). It is interesting to note that while the official government policy regarding Orang Asli ‘integration’ into a Malay way of life was only passed after independence—articulated in the ‘Statement of policy regarding the administration of the aborigine peoples of the Federation of Malaya’—this ‘new orthodoxy’, to all intents and purposes, was already envisioned and hatched among the colonial authorities from 1954 to 1957 (Harper 1999: 270). Harper (ibid.: 272), for instance, cites a 1957 Perak State Aborigines Advisory Board memorandum from which he concludes that ‘it was the duty of government not to preserve a lifestyle disruptive to production and to “alter the aboriginal way of life—by force, if necessary”. The Malay smallholder was the ideal. “The choice,” it was suggested, “was between settlement and extinction”.’ The conviction, as Harper suggests, was that Malay life was the destiny of the Orang Asli…. The logic of late colonial state-building was towards assimilation. To Malay indiginism—based on the absolute rights of the bumiputera—the claims of the Orang Asli were an embarrassment. The pressure … was to make the development of the Orang Asli congruent to that of the Malays. Malay was defined by the habitual use of the Malay language and by Islam. (ibid.: 272)

It is interesting to note that colonial and postcolonial modes of Orang Asli governance shared almost the same sets of legislation. As noted, in 1954, three years before Malayan independence, the colonial government bureaucratised Orang Asli governance by passing the Aboriginal People’s Ordinance, which was renewed with only minor revisions in 1974 by the postcolonial government (see Sothi Rachagan 1990; Hooker 1996; Rusaslina 2011). Act 134 of the ordinance defines Orang Asli and recognises their ‘rights’ to movement and ‘occupancy’, and to ‘Aboriginal areas’ and ‘reserves’. The act also stipulates terms of land compensation. Thus, in the case

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of Orang Asli ‘occupied’ land, including ancestral land or tanah saka, being taken over for development purposes they would be compensated not for the value of the land but only for the ‘trees’ that grow on the land. This would continue to be a contested issue for Orang Asli. Nonetheless, the act does provide for the rights of Orang Asli children to education. It is interesting to note that the act stipulates that they are not obliged to attend religious classes at school unless consent is provided by parents or guardians (which may be the commissioner of Orang Asli affairs). In sum, despite their later designation of so-called Bumiputera status, Orang Asli claims to indigenity with regard to land ownership rights are effectively nullified by the law governing them. Even their status on gazetted Orang Asli ‘reserves’ merely describes them as ‘tenants-at-will’. This is because the act does not provide them with rights to individual titles even on Orang Asli reserves (as Malays have on Malay reserves). Moreover, as is evident in the postcolonial period, many suggested gazetted areas for Orang Asli reserves have remained as mere proposals, while even officially gazetted Orang Asli land can also be degazetted. It is obvious that the limitations of the act, especially in times of rapid development in the era of postcolonial developmentalism, have remained a constant source of human insecurity for Orang Asli (Hasan 1994; Romeli 1996; Nicholas 2000; Zawawi 2000b: 115). As Baer (2012: 21) succinctly summarises the legacy of colonial rule for Orang Asli: the largest lingering colonial effect on Orang Asli today is their condition of virtual landlessness—a condition not imposed on others in West Malaysia. They are still considered ‘tenants-at-will’ in law. One group or another is dispossessed of their ancestral lands almost weekly, to make way for dams, golf courses, roads, timber concessions, gambling casinos, airports, or whatever else rich and powerful outsiders wish to use their land for. The Orang Asli encounter the past in the painful present.

19.2.3 The Civilising Process and Orang Asli: Postcolonial Malaysia The postcolonial independent Malaysian nation-state formed in 1963 has introduced more radical changes into the ‘civilising process’ of Orang Asli. The creation of Malaysia heralded two interconnected transformations—the NEP (1970–1990) and the rise of the developmentalist state—both with far-reaching implications towards Orang Asli economic marginalisation and sense of identity. For Orang Asli, the emergence of a new nation-state largely meant a shift from a form of colonialism generated from outside to one of ‘internal colonialism’ (Dentan 1997, 2008: 9), an institutionalised form of ‘governmentality’ (after Foucault) systemised with its own logic and ‘rules of the game’, the genesis of which, as we have seen, had already been laid out by British policy during colonial rule (Hopkins 2020). As noted above, the Ministry of the Interior of the newly independent government published a ‘Statement of policy regarding the administration of the aborigine peoples of the Federation of Malaya’ in 1961. Among other things, it reiterated the earlier colonial vision of the ‘ultimate integration [of Orang Asli] with the Malay section of

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the community’, but also that ‘special measures should be adopted for the protection of the institutions, customs, modes of life, person, property and labour of the aborigine people’ (Department of Information 1961: 3–5). This policy further compelled the drive towards the assimilation of Orang Asli into Malay society. Geoffrey Benjamin (2002: 51) makes a pertinent observation that ‘the Orang Asli are included within the “Malay” figures in the published versions of the national censuses’. It took less than a decade after the formation of Malaysia in 1963 before the nationstate began to embark on its own postcolonial civilising project with the emergence of a developmentalist state (Abdul Rahman 2008; see also Zawawi and Sharifah Zarina 2009: 48). Ideologically inspired by Mahathir Mohamad’s treatise The Malay dilemma (1970), and triggered by the 13 May 1969 racial riots, the NEP was launched with the double-pronged objectives of eradicating poverty irrespective of race or ethnicity and creating a Bumiputera capitalist class in order to catch up with the nonMalays, especially the Chinese (Gomez and Jomo 1999). At the implementation level, the policy took on a momentum of its own, ushering in the beginning of a commodified landscape and instilling a political culture which began to legitimise both ‘money politics’ and the accumulation of wealth for those Bumiputera (and some non-Bumiputera and their corporate groups) who have long been strategically connected to the immediate ruling political circle and others who had become a crucial part of the patronage politics network, both at the centre or periphery of the nation-state (Shamsul 1986: 237–244). The NEP ‘spirit of accumulation’ via its developmentalist state was one forged by statism, and hybridised by the likes of rentier capitalism, political patronage and cronyism (see Gomez and Jomo 1999). The NEP came as a comprehensive development package. Overnight, a new identity came into vogue—Bumiputera or ‘sons of the soil’. While the origins of the term are not rooted in any constitutional charter of the nation, and its initial definition was fraught with ‘official indecisiveness’ (Maznah 2009: 123), the final outcome was a conception of identity which includes ‘three groups [who] are socially, politically and legally recognized as being “indigenous” to the land … the politically powerful majority “Malays” (all of whom, by constitutional legal definition are Muslims), the natives of Sabah and Sarawak, and the Orang Asli’ (Nah 2008: 214). While the constitution which came with the formation of Malaysia in 1963 accorded Bumiputera status to Orang Asli, there is still controversy as to the legality of such status since ‘they are not given special privileges in Article 153 of the Federal Constitution, the way the Malays and natives of Sabah and Sarawak are’ (ibid.: 214n3). In this new dispensation, Cheah Boon Kheng (2004: 46) alludes to the dominance of Malay ethnonationalism (that includes Islam) as the grand narrative of the Malaysian nation and identity, and notes that after the 1970s Malay ethnonationalism came to be articulated as ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy). The articulation of the dominance of Malayness in the nation-state discourse could also be gauged by the National Culture Policy which was approved in mid1971. This came about from deliberations by an earlier National Cultural Congress (Kongres Kebudayaan Melayu) which agreed to make Malay a suitable (sesuai) base for the national culture of the independent country (Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports 1973; Aziz 1992: 112; Zawawi 2000b). After the expulsion of Singapore from

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Malaysia in 1965, Malaysia witnessed bloody racial riots on 13 May 1969. This was followed by emergency rule and a temporary suspension of parliament. Then in 1970 came the declaration of the NEP with the intended objectives to redress the root causes of the 13 May racial riots, specifically the economic imbalance between Malays/Bumiputera and the Chinese and other non-Malays. The National Culture Policy that officially came in 1971 could be seen as a ‘state ideological apparatus’ (after Althusser) to manage what the political authorities felt was ‘unregulated multiculturalism’. While the core of the national culture is supposed to be based on the cultures of the ‘original people’ (orang asal) of ‘the region’, in terms of its authoritydefined interpretation the reference is primarily to the Malay civilisational cultural nexus of the Malay world (dunia Melayu). In addition, Islam is also included as a definer of the national culture, while ‘tribal’ (puak) culture is located at the lower rung of the cultural hierarchy. But a particular clause of the National Culture Policy also observes that elements from ‘other cultures’ could be elevated to that of national culture if they are deemed ‘appropriate’ (Aziz 1992; Zawawi 2000b). In the 1970s and 1980s ‘there was a strong push for the integration and assimilation of the Orang Asli with Malay communities through an Islamisation policy’ (Rusaslina 2011: 66). This development was the outcome of events occurring at both national and global levels. In 1971 an Islamic religious sect, Darul Arqam, was founded by the charismatic leader Ashaari Mohammad. By 1975 this urban-based movement, attracting 10,000 to 12,000 middle-class followers, was already operating its own Islamic village commune Kampong Arqam in Sungai Penchala near Kuala Lumpur. In 1979 the Iranian Revolution caught the imagination of many Muslim countries including Malaysia, and in particular the new Islamic model of governance and way of life. This ushered in the beginning of ‘political Islam’ in Malaysia when in 1981 religious clerics from Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) went to Iran to support the revolution (Mohammad Nawab 2011). After Mahathir became prime minister in 1981, he developed a policy of instilling Islamic values (penerapan nilai-nilai Islam) as a way to counter PAS’s brand of Islam as well as to accelerate the cooptation and mainstreaming of the dakwah (Islamic proselytisation) movement prevalent at universities, led by organisations such as Persatuan Belia Islam Nasional (National Islamic Youth Association) (Frisk 2009: 47–48). It was also under Mahathir that Darul Arqam was banned on the charge that it was a deviant religious sect (Ahmad Fauzi 2005). In this context, whereas the government’s official policy of 1961 was based on the principle of an ‘“open-ended” integration that recognises the rights of the Orang Asli to assimilate themselves, only if they wish to do so’, on the ground the situation was quite different (Mohd Tap 1990: 461). There were reports that those who converted to Islam were more likely to gain favours and economic benefits from Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli (JHEOA, Department of Orang Asli Affairs, renamed Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli [JAKOA, Department of Orang Asli Development] since 2011), while personal (racialised) biases among individual Malay officials also created ‘“discrepancies” in the promotion of the official policy (of integration)’ (ibid.; Nobuta 2009). Based on my own research among the Jakun Orang Asli community

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and JHEOA in the Pahang Tenggara region, I observed that while there was an official ‘documentation’ policy towards integrating Orang Asli through Islam, on the ground it was one of ‘negotiation’ rather than ‘superimposition’ (Zawawi 2000a). I detected a reluctance on the part of Malay JHEOA officials to push the issue as they considered it a ‘sensitive’ one. Orang Asli, at least the ones whom I talked to, were quite ‘liberal’ and ‘open-minded’ in their views on religion. To them all religions were ‘good’ and they did not show animosity to Islam or any other religion as long as they were able to exercise personal choice when it came to their own affiliation. In the case of Orang Asli conversion to Islam, it is true that there were expectations of an economic gain on their part. At Kampong Gadak, for instance, the initial Islamic conversion efforts by JHEOA and the Ministry of Land and Regional Development went sour as the promised economic benefits were not forthcoming. The ministry had to salvage the situation by allocating a new budget. There were also ‘conversion failures’ due to the fact that there was no real follow-up after a certain Orang Asli community was ‘converted’ and showcased in the media. Some Orang Asli also expressed to me their distaste for some JHEOA officials who tarnished the image of Islam by deliberately eating (not fasting) in the vicinity of Orang Asli villages during Ramadan. I noted that Bukit Serdang was perhaps the only ‘successful’ Islamisation of Orang Asli in the whole of the Pahang Tenggara region. The imam who led the prayers was himself an Orang Asli and had gone for the lesser pilgrimage made by Muslims to Mecca (‘umrah), and involved households being granted personal titles to their land. But as a general rule, I found that most Jakun Orang Asli were not Muslim although culturally they were quite similar to the Malays in terms of their physical appearance and language. On the question of identity and education, until 1995 JHEOA had ‘used education as a key mechanism to assimilate Orang Asli into the Malay ethnic group, improve their standard of living and give them new occupational opportunities’ (Thambiah et al. 2016: 450). A critical reminder of JHEOA’s role in Orang Asli’s absorption into Malay identity can be gauged from the following: Malaysian social and economic policies often enacted through the Jabatan Had [sic] Ehwal Orang Asli (JHEOA) ... [necessitate] the integration, or rather assimilation, of the Orang Asli into mainstream society. This effectively means the adoption of a Malay identity via conversion to Islam and the embracing [of] the ideology of the mainstream market economy. Thus removing implicit contradictions represented by the unique Orang Asli identity to enable Malay people to be fully legitimized as the indigenous peoples of the new Malaysia. (Parker and Crabtree 2014)

19.2.4 Developmentalism and Postcolonial Deterritorialisation of Orang Asli Communitas The unleashing of the NEP in the name of Bumiputeraism from the centre to the periphery of the nation-state simultaneously meant the mediation of developmentalism from the federal centre to the different states, including those which are rich

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in natural resources. Spearheaded by the governing coalition that has dominated politics since independence, Barisan Nasional, and its dominant party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the Malaysian version of the civilising process saw the emergence of collusion between centre and periphery, in which the latter has by and large been subordinate to the power of the former (Loh 1997; Koninck et al. 2011; Ooi 2013). But each state also has its own corporations and bureaucracy, and its own replica of patronage politics and stakeholders, representing both elite Bumiputera economic interests as well as non-Bumiputera ethnic fractions of capital (Leigh 1998; Majid Cooke 1999, 2006; Kua 2001; Bissonnette 2011). Capitalist developmentalism and globalisation further deepened the site of exploitation by exogenes, those who view land (including its resources) as a commodity for its exchange value and profit-making rather than indigenes who view land as a ‘subject of labour’ for its use value, such as for livelihoods, spiritual purposes and identity consumption (see Benjamin 1995; Zawawi 1998a; Uda 2012). Given a political economic landscape that is riven with authoritarianism, corruption, cronyism, rent-seeking and a lack of transparency, it is the real indigenes who have become the most marginalised groups on the land within the grand narratives of nation-state developmentalism and the civilising process (Gomez and Jomo 1999). This phenomenon has been well documented in the form of concrete development projects engendering different forms of deterritorialisation towards indigenous communities on the margins of both West and East Malaysia, ranging from logging to building dams which dislocate natives, to the creation of large-scale plantations which infringe on native customary rights and autonomy (INSAN 1996; Romeli 1996; Brosius 1997; Zawawi 1998b, 2008, 2016; Kua 2001; Ngidang 2005; Aeria 2005; Majid Cooke 2006; Colchester et al. 2007; Bissonnette 2011; Cramb 2011; Straumann 2014; Crabtree et al. 2016; Jehom 2017). These are projects of modernisation via civilising the margins undertaken by both federal and state authorities at the expense of indigenous livelihoods and their customary rights aided by political patronage and poor legislation. In the case of peninsular Orang Asli, it was under the rubric of ‘regional development’ and modernisation, and formulated by the federal government as part of the NEP in Pahang, that rancangan penempatan semula (RPS, regroupment) programmes were conceived and implemented. In this new thinking, the proposed scenario would be one in which most, if not all, Orang Asli ‘scattered’ in their traditional villages in Pahang Tenggara, the southeastern region of the state, were eventually resettled in the RPS centres. These centres, in turn, would be the focus of development and infrastructural inputs, built around oil palm plantations as the economic mainstay. Altogether nine RPS centres were planned for southeastern Pahang. The Pahang Tenggara Regional Development Authority (DARA), formed in 1972 and representing the bureaucratic arm of the federal government, was empowered to develop about 1 million ha of virgin forest in the area. In effect, DARA, together with other state agencies, coordinated the penetration of capital—private (including foreign), public and state capital—into the region, and was entrusted to radically reorganise both the natural and human resources into oil palm plantations, industries and urban centres, complete with new roads and infrastructure. From the point of view of DARA and state planners, RPS centres were seen as their way of ensuring

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that around 5,000 Orang Asli were ‘integrated’ into this mega development project. In the early 1970s there had been about 60 or so traditional Orang Asli villages in the region, consisting of an indigenous communitas that had for generations subsisted on ancestral land and forests (tanah saka). The RPS centres represented the final nail in the coffin of postcolonial Orang Asli deterritorialisation on the part of the developmentalist state, eliminating for good any potential for indigenous sustainable development among Orang Asli on their own land and on their own terms (see Zawawi 2000a). Other case studies have also shown that the postcolonial state’s developmentalism and its desire to embrace globalisation and newly industrialised country status have resulted in an ongoing crisis in the everyday life and identity of indigenous populations and a process of profound dispossession which shows no signs of abating (Zawawi 1998b, 2016). Dispossession in this context refers not only to a loss of land due to encroachment (some of which is always justified as ‘legal’ when such appropriation is conducted by the state) but, more than that, it strikes deep into the soul of Orang Asli as the original indigenous people of the country. It conveys a sense of denied belonging—of being dislocated from ‘indigenousness’, of a longterm revelation of being ‘othered’. Today the poetics of such ‘otherness’ has become the everyday lament of a subjugated Orang Asli discourse. And two of the most important voices that have risen above the lament are the singer Mak Minah and the writer Akiya.

19.3 Mak Minah: Singing the Forest to the Nation Mak Minah was perhaps the earliest Orang Asli storyteller to present her songs of the forest to the nation (Fig. 19.1). She hailed from the Temuan indigenous forest people, whose traditional life revolved around the hills and mountains crossed with flowing rivers and streams, the most sacred landmark being Gunung Raja (Royal Mountain) bordering Selangor and Pahang. The Temuan believe that their ancestors are the human manifestations of God, who survived the Great Flood by ascending an agarwood (gaharu) tree on the mountain, and subsequently, after the flood, came down to create the race of human beings (manusia) on earth. The richness of the Temuan people’s culture and beliefs has been passed down across the generations through stories and songs (Tan 2014: 356–357). But the Second World War and the subsequent communist insurgency began to rupture this rich oral tradition, especially after the Temuan were moved to the proximity of towns, such as their present home in Pertak, near Kuala Kubu Bharu in Selangor. For the new generation of Orang Asli who were born and raised in this urbanising culturescape, the connection with the old traditions through storytelling had been cut loose, and only elders like Mak Minah were able to tell stories of the old way of life related to an identity rooted in their belief system, ceremonial rituals and the forest. Mak Minah was born in 1930 and her personal biography, it seems, was intricately interwoven in the evolving history of the nation-state as it moved from the

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Fig. 19.1 Mak Minah by Andy Maguire. Courtesy of Antares

Japanese occupation to postcolonial Malaysia. It was also a journey that was intermittently ruptured by the deterritorialisation and developmentalist forces of the civilising process even as she found fame towards the end of her life before she finally left to join her ancestors. She narrated her life story in the following terms, transcribed by Antares Kit Lee, as she ‘whispered’ her words from ‘the realm of the spirit’. Her testimony begins with the powerful statement of rebuke for the sins of the desecration of the natural world, and with a sense of her legacy as a singer. My bones now lie buried on top of a hill overlooking the saddest sight you can imagine. Majestic hills stripped of trees, mountains blown up to make a dam. I may be dead but my spirit lives on in my songs, and in the sacred (and now badly scarred) landscape I love so dearly. One day my songs will be heard and they will soften the hardened hearts of the greedy ones who destroy more than they construct. (Antares 2019; see also Antares 2007)

Mak Minah then goes on to outline her own life story from a ‘carefree’ childhood through the hardships caused by the ruptures induced by the outside world. The only education I received was from my grandmother, who enjoyed telling us stories. She explained how human beings were seeded on Tanah Tujuh (which is what we call this physical world) by Mamak and Inak Bongsu, a brother and sister who survived the Great Flood by clinging to the top of a gaharu tree on Gunung Raja. My grandmother was full of wonderful tales about the beautiful eleven races (Orang Halus) who left the planet for the higher heavens when the Difficult Times began. Some chose to remain, because they had grown to love the earth, but they gradually became invisible to human eyes…. When I was 12 the world turned upside down. Planes dropped bombs in the jungle to destroy bridges and railway tracks. We had to hide in caves on the slopes of mountains. For

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many years my family stayed hidden deep in the forest, for fear that we may be captured or killed by the invaders.… After the war life became even worse for us. The government put us all in detention camps, surrounded by barbed wire, and guarded by soldiers. They said it was to protect us from the communist guerrillas. Unused to suddenly being confined in a small space so close to town, many of our people became depressed, fell sick, and died. This is how I lost both my parents.… I found myself married to a man I hardly knew. At least he could take me away from the confines of the resettlement camp. We ran back to our beloved jungle and built a hut along the river, along with many others who could no longer bear living within a fence. My first marriage was a tragedy. I was too young to be a dutiful mother. My children died of illness and my husband left me. For a while, I flirted with the idea of becoming a white man’s mistress. Then I met Angong who had recently become the Batin (headman) of Kampong Gerachi. He was a patient man with great wisdom. It was he who taught me the ceremonial songs passed down to him by his ancestors. Angong taught me to be proud of my noble naga (dragon) lineage. Not every family has an animal totem. Only those with some knowledge of jungle medicine (jampi) or who possess magical powers (dukun) have special allies in the animal kingdom. I bore Angong five children and greatly missed him when he returned to Pulau Buah, where souls go after they drop their physical bodies…. When my children grew up and started their own families, I moved to Kampong Pertak to live with my younger sister Indah and her husband Rasid. My elder brothers, Diap and Utat, lived nearby…. It was fated that my life would begin to change in 1992. I met a few people from the big city who happened to be musicians. They heard me singing and decided to record my voice, adding musical instruments to give my traditional sawai (healing) songs a modern sound. The first song we created together was called ‘Burung Meniyun’. I was asked to sing it on stage during a performance by a famous dancer named Chandrabhanu who lived in Australia. I was surprised and touched that people in the big city would receive my humble song with such open hearts. Never before had I sung for so many strangers in such a large hall…. I found it exciting to meet so many new friends who were delighted to hear my ancient songs. It all happened so quickly. One moment I was just an Orang Asli widow gathering firewood and tapioca leaves in the forest and going fishing with my sister. Then suddenly I was on national TV singing for thousands of people in a huge stadium! I shall never forget the pleasure of hearing the loud applause and shaking hands with everybody afterwards. I felt proud to be able to please so many people with my simple songs. For once I could feel that no one was looking down on me, or ignoring me, for being an uneducated Orang Asli. (Antares 2019)

The story of how Mak Minah became a well-known indigenous ceremonial singer and a voice for her people with the ethnically diverse fusion band, Akar Umbi (meaning ‘Tap Root’), is worth recalling in detail. The idea for the band was spearheaded by the two independent musicians—Antares and Rafique Rashid—who settled in Kuala Kubu Bharu to escape the hustle and bustle of Kuala Lumpur. In 1992 Antares moved to the Pertak forest reserve and Rafique set up a studio in Kuala Kubu Bharu. Through their connections, other musicians, writers and filmmakers and non-governmental organisations also began to interact with the Temuan community, and subsequently came to support them against the worst excesses of developmentalism. Antares himself became a member of Mak Minah’s family by marriage. Antares and Rafique

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experimented by fusing Mak Minah’s ancient songs and Orang Asli bamboo percussion with contemporary instrumentation. The group’s public debut as Akar Umbi— televised live on RTM2 and in front of a 42,000-strong audience at a concert for Bosnia staged at the Shah Alam stadium in September 1994—saw Mak Minah and Akar Umbi sharing the stage with popular names in the music industry such as M. Nasir, Sharifah Aini, Amy Search, Sahara Yaacob and Jamal Abdillah. After his move to Kuala Kubu Bharu, I visited Antares to meet with Mak Minah and later also invited her to sing on an environmental song called ‘Dayung’ for my debut album Dayung (1996). Subsequently, Mak Minah, Antares and Rafique were guest performers for concerts I organised at universities and music festivals. I was involved in the organising committee of the first Sarawak Rainforest World Music Festival in 1998, and that year I invited all three to perform with my band, Anak Dayung, at the festival (Antares 1998). The following year Mak Minah was officially invited to perform at the festival with Akar Umbi. That year I noticed she took her time to bid farewell to her enthusiastic fans attending the festival. Three weeks after she came home to Pertak from Sarawak, she passed away on 21 September 1999. On 9 August 2002 Akar Umbi’s first CD of 11 tracks, Songs of the dragon, used material that had been recorded at rehearsals and performances, and was released by Magick River in conjunction with the United Nations’ International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The dragon refers to the totem of Mak Minah’s clan lineage. On the album, Mak Minah is joined by other Temuan musicians—Mak Awa, Mak Nai and Mak Indah—to perform their traditional sacred songs on ‘buluh limbong, pairs of bamboo instruments struck on a long block of wood’ (Tan 2014: 357). With Mak Minah at the helm, Akar Umbi was truly Malaysian in a genuinely multicultural sense, because apart from showcasing Temuan sacred songs it also comprised a multiracial group of musicians from diverse ethnic backgrounds— Malay, Chinese, Indian and Eurasian. More importantly for the esteem and dignity of these original people, throughout Mak Minah’s musical journey there was a clear demonstration of appreciation and support for Orang Asli culture and traditions from non-Orang Asli people from both Malaysia and the outside world. The new generation of Temuan too have been able to access and connect to Mak Minah’s songs of healing and the forest from Songs of the dragon (ibid.: 360). In addition to being a cultural representative of Temuan autonomy, and presenting songs that resonate indigenous people’s love of the forest, river and mountains, Mak Minah also embodied a spirit of resistance to the baleful effects of developmentalism. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than in the protests when two Temuan villages comprising 360 Orang Asli inhabitants were relocated and sacred sites flooded to make way for the Selangor dam across Sungai Selangor. It was a development ‘which will kill their culture and thus … kill the community itself’ (Rosli 2001: 91; Tan 2014: 358). Mak Minah fiercely opposed the building of the dam, and a number of tracks on Songs of the dragon speak to her forceful criticism of the environmental problems associated with flooding and the destruction of the forests. Her testimony remains one of the most powerful statements and a damning indictment of the destructive outcome of misplaced development.

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During my lifetime I saw how people became blinded by ambition and greed. They began to mine the earth for metals and log the forest for wood. With each passing year the land became hotter and the rivers became dirtier, so we could no longer drink the water without boiling it first. With each passing year we had to walk farther and farther to find some bamboo or catch some fish because people would come into the forest and take out more than they needed. And with each passing year we saw more and more wilderness cleared so that towns could be built…. Even as I felt the pleasure of being applauded, I could feel the pain of losing our past and future. The dam project would soon destroy Kampong Gerachi and its durian orchards. A man-made lake would fill the Selangor River Valley, drowning a once-beautiful forest, along with our ancestral graves. I could not imagine anyone so foolish as to declare war against the forces of nature. Did they have no understanding of, or respect for, our deep love of the land? Were they totally unaware that destroying the land would mean the end of our livelihood and future? We are the land. If the land dies, we die. My sister Indah and brothers Diap and Utat felt the same way that I did. We cherished our traditions and would never lose our heart connection to the land, even if we were offered vast amounts of money. The Temuan tribe has lived here for many thousands of years; the hills and valleys and rivers are much, much older than that. Our fruit trees can live for over a hundred years and as long as we keep planting new ones, our great-great-grandchildren will never starve. But if they destroy the wilderness and put our people in housing estates and make us work in factories, our tribe will be disappear within a generation. Our nenek-moyang (ancestors) told us: ‘When Orang Asli are no longer visible on this earth, the sea will rise, the sky will fall, and everything will perish.’ It all seemed hopeless…. But there were thousands of voices raised against the dam, and I was glad that we had so many friends, people who knew the true value of the rainforest and fought hard to stop the destruction. I was interviewed by many reporters and I told them how I felt about seeing our way of life being taken from us. One reporter asked me: ‘Don’t you want to see your grandchildren getting a good education, which they can only get when development reaches the rural areas?’ I replied: ‘All those who cut down the trees and make the hills bare, causing landslides and floods, aren’t they educated too? If that’s what being educated means, then we Orang Asli don’t want to be educated!’ The reporter had nothing to say to that. In a way, I’m glad I didn’t live to see the bulldozers and excavators arrive. Three weeks after I performed in Sarawak, I fell ill and surrendered my body to the earth. It has become part of the sacred landscape of my ancestors. But my spirit is reunited at last with the Great Spirit That Dwells In Everything and I am happy. (Antares 2019)

Mak Minah was one of the most remarkable voices to emerge from the indigenous community—deeply rooted in the traditions of the Temuan people—who, thanks to an unprecedented cultural collaboration, was able to offer both a celebration of a way of life she valued and a critique of all that was and is wrong with Malaysia’s development priorities and civilising process.

19.4 Akiya: Writing Culture Akiya is the pen name of Mahat Anak China who hails from the Semai Orang Asli community in Perak. Akiya was born in 1953 and, as with other Orang Asli children, he was rooted in the tradition of his people, listening to stories that were passed

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through the generations by his elders. These stories were memories of Orang Asli struggles told and retold in the oral tradition, ranging from tales about the condition of slavery (including the period of ‘overwhelming terror’ instigated by the sangkil slave raids of the late period of Malay kerajaan and early colonialism) to the end of British colonial rule and the period of independence. He was able to experience, at first hand, a young Orang Asli’s journey of being socialised into the Malaysian version of the civilising process. Akiya’s father apparently gave him little choice but to attend the basic schooling provided for Orang Asli by the colonial and Malayan authorities of that time. Perhaps his father did not want to see his son ‘trapped’ in the old ways of the elders, and though he was still unclear as to where education was going to lead his son, he was nevertheless adamant that Akiya must acquire the ‘new knowledge’. So unlike many other Orang Asli children who dropped out from regular schooling and settled into the familiar ways of being ‘free’ in their natural habitat, Akiya, loyal to his father’s wishes, persisted until 1973 when he succeeded in completing his form five secondary education at Sekolah Menengah Abdul Hamid Khan in Tapah, Perak. Like other Orang Asli youth who managed to be accepted into mainstream education, Akiya admitted to ‘a feeling of humbleness [rendah diri] and a lack of confidence [hilang keyakinan diri] always thickening in my guts’, even though deep down he was determined (berazam) and motivated (bertekad) to seek new changes (Zawawi 2001: xi).1 In contrast to other young Orang Asli in school, Akiya fell in love with literature—a world of knowledge in which he found refuge and a sense of escape (menyeronokkan, melekakan). He was inspired especially by the novels of the Malaysian laureate A. Samad Said, known for Salina (1961), a controversial but acclaimed novel about an antiheroine from the Malay underclass. In addition, Akiya also embraced the writing of the legendary leftist Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Under the mentorship of his literature teacher, Akiya began to appreciate (menghayati) the intricacies of Malay literature and the skills of writing and creativity. Gradually, according to Akiya, a feeling of love and deep-seated attachment for literature began to grow and take root (bersemadi) in his heart. As part of an unintended consequence of this new consciousness, he became obsessed with reading any published literature on Orang Asli that he could lay his hands on. He desperately wanted to learn what non-Orang Asli people wrote about his people. He was always envious ‘whenever there was an author or writer who chose to write on the theme of Orang Asli, from a non-Orang Asli perspective’ (Zawawi 2001: xi). For Akiya, literature became a tool to tell the story of his people to the world from his people’s own perspective and a medium to convey history that was passed down from his ancestors. Already the knowledge that he gained from studying literature had equipped him with the necessary imagination to write—to empower him to translate the stories of real life struggles and experiences, past and present, into prose. In this discourse, social realism, fiction and imagination became fused together to motivate the young Akiya to use literature in his new-found identity as an Orang Asli storyteller to narrate to the world at large. He was very aware that understandings of his people 1

All translations from Malay to English from Akiya’s work are mine.

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had been mediated through stereotypes and prejudices, the outcome of ignorance and indifference. And so as Akiya began to hone his writing skills, he also found himself working as a broadcaster at the Orang Asli radio station of Radio Televisyen Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. In time, he found that his workplace was most conducive to furthering his creative and communication skills. It was in 1996, when I attended the National Conference on Pan-Malaysia Indigenous Peoples Land Rights and Cultural Identity at Universiti Malaya, that I first came across Akiya. As an anthropologist who had been involved in Orang Asli research, I was invited to make an observation on the issues that had been discussed and, in doing so, I emphasised that while the issue of land rights was crucial for identity I also pointed out that for young indigenous people who were educated it would be equally important for them to also evolve other means of asserting their identity. I mentioned in particular the arts—literature, poetry, theatre, cinema—making reference to what other oppressed minorities, such as the African American community, had resorted to in order to empower their identity. I cited the work of writers like James Baldwin and the power of the blues in the United States, and the négritude poetry that challenged and revitalised so-called ‘Black French’ identity. I was not aware of Akiya’s presence in the audience, but a few days later I received a phone call from him requesting a meeting. So when we finally met, he brought with him a surprise gift—an almost faded typewritten manuscript of eight short stories. He told me that after listening to my commentary at the conference he felt he needed to tell me he had been writing on Orang Asli all the while. I went through the manuscript and was moved by the originality of both the characters and the narratives. I felt that they could only be written by someone who had intimate knowledge of Orang Asli from the inside—what in anthropology we call an emic perspective. I made contact with Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the national literary publishing house. The commissioning editor was impressed by the quality of the writing and of its status as an Orang Asli literary contribution in the national language. The editor gave me a free hand in editing and writing an introduction to the book. The manuscript became the first publication of the storyteller Akiya.

19.4.1 Tuntut Akiya’s collection of eight short stories was published in 2001 under the title Tuntut: Kumpulan cerpen Orang Asli (Claiming: A collection of Orang Asli short stories). As part of my introduction, I included a message from Akiya: Literature is beauty, literature is satire. Satire is literature. Literature is ego, and is also fiction. I feel that my involvement in the world of literature is only by chance, after I found what I really want to be, after going through our nation’s literary works, from the most major to the least known … but that is literature. I have always dreamed of writing my own short stories of Orang Asli. Most of these stories that I write are based on fiction. But there are also stories that are based on real life. There is no justice in this world if these stories are not told. Their themes touch on aspects of

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Orang Asli’s life and their struggles of today and tomorrow. For tomorrow there is still hope. Themes of love and identity are what I portray in this collection through its main and minor characters…. Most of the names of places, main characters or social actors in this collection are those who have been most meaningful in my life.… I want to call this collection of Orang Asli short stories Tuntut. 1.

Claiming [tuntut] Orang Asli identity [jatidiri]

2.

Claiming Orang Asli culture [budaya]

3.

Claiming Orang Asli dignity [maruah]

4.

Claiming Orang Asli knowledge [ilmu]. (ibid.: xxxiii)

The stories in Tuntut introduce us to characters who give life to the themes of everyday Orang Asli struggles in the context of social change. As a storyteller from within Akiya knows his characters inside out, who blend naturally with the cultural landscape that foregrounds the stories which unfold. The social realism portrayed comes across most effectively—honest and authentic. His main characters are also strongly principled in their integrity on issues of identity in their respective life struggles. To an extent, such idealism may reflect the thinking and predisposition of the storyteller himself. In the title story, ‘Tuntut’, Wah Tipah is an educated Orang Asli woman who aspires to be independent and free from being a wife to her deceased husband’s siblings as is demanded by her tribal custom (adat). In ‘Air mata di perbatasan’ (Tears from the frontier) and ‘Keresahan’ (Restlessness), the protagonists of these two stories decide to take out their respective lives for the sake of ‘upholding their dignity’ (menegakkan maruah) and social worth (harga diri): Constable Long Panjang, because of unrequited love, and Adi, a choice that he makes in order to redeem the shame (malu) that has befallen his parents and relatives even though he is free to marry his lover, Wah Kalsom. In ‘Tanah’ (Land), the hero, Jantan, represents the determination of a younger Orang Asli man in redeeming his ancestral land (tanah saka) with his own money. The idealism of young, educated Orang Asli in dealing with social change and societal issues faced by their community is portrayed in the character of the teacher Cik Gu Uda in ‘Hutang’ (Indebtedness). He comes to the rescue of Wah Itam and her family after her husband, Menik Alang, suffers an accident while searching for petai beans in order to earn cash to support his family. However, Penghulu Udang, the appointed head of the village, opposes the move by Uda and his group of ‘noble’ young friends. In the end, for the sake of defending his principles and idealism, Uda is willing to make a personal sacrifice by letting go of his love for the headman’s daughter. In this story, Akiya demonstrates the ideals of the younger generation in refusing to compromise with the old order leaders who are cronies and care only about their own self-interest. The same spirit (semangat) is portrayed in the character of Bah Ngah in ‘Penghulu’ (Headman) when he and his young peers almost fail to convince the conservative Penghulu Pandak to form a village development and security committee (jawatankuasa kemajuan dan keselamatan kampung) in order to facilitate the progress of the community.

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In Tuntut, Akiya not only empowers characters of the younger generation with integrity and a sense of strength or purpose, but in ‘Gingong’ the storyteller is in full respect and admiration for Atuk Bait, the veteran woodwind instrument (gingong) player. Though ageing, he is still active and relishes playing this ancient instrument. In this heartwarming narrative, the storyteller elevates Atuk Bait’s character to represent the older generation who are able to hold steadfast to Orang Asli cultural identity, without being ‘swallowed by time’ (ditelan zaman). Akiya contrasts his character with the younger generation who have been totally compromised by modern pop music and have forgotten their cultural roots. ‘Gingong’ is the last story in Akiya’s collection and he ends it on an optimistic note—Atuk Bait falls asleep with the hope that his gingong will be given recognition on the global stage—a promise he is holding on to, which was apparently made by the American ethnomusicologist Marina Roseman who interviewed him. As Akiya (2001: 124) writes: That night Atuk Bait sleeps like a log. His gingong will be exhibited at Cornell University, United States of America, and its jungle rhythm [irama rimbanya] will surely greet every city member throughout the American continent. Atuk Bait falls asleep, clutching tightly to the gingong that he played that evening.

As a storyteller in Tuntut, Akiya attempts to confront some critical issues facing his people in the context of the evolving Malaysian nation-state. These are familiar problems of indigenous minorities living on the margins—the depredations of the land, the monopoly of middlemen over his people, indebtedness, the bankruptcy of the old order leadership, the voices of young educated Orang Asli including women, the values of dignity, identity and social worth, including love, and the black comedy around pig-hunting. The wider Malaysian society’s perception of Orang Asli is normally mediated via stereotypes—as ‘backward’, ‘uneducated’ or simply as nomads who like to ‘shift around’ (pindah randah). To this end, Akiya’s storytelling ruptures the dominant discourse and its homogenous representation of Orang Asli, to reconstruct and reveal an alternative narrative which is truer to their everyday social reality (Shamsul 1998).

19.4.2 Background to Akiya’s Two Novels The background to Akiya’s two historical novels Perang sangkil (2007) and Hamba (2013) is the state of Perak in the 1880s where, as noted earlier, slavery was still a rampant practice among Malay chiefs, who basked in the prestige of having Orang Asli slaves they bought from sangkil raiders. Orang Asli today remember this period as a time of being under attack (zaman pelanggar)—their years of ‘living dangerously’ in which they were driven further into the interior of the peninsula to escape the violence committed by the sangkil raiders. In both these novels, Akiya takes on the mammoth task of narrating Orang Asli history, not as a historian but as a storyteller. Akiya concurs with Dentan’s (2008: 327) view when he refers to these terrorising sangkil as ‘Malays who originate from the Indonesian archipelago, specifically the

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Rawas and the Mandailing tribes who are said to be responsible for ambushing [sengrak sangkil] Orang Asli to turn them into slaves [hamba abdi]’. Orang Asli had a name for them—gob—denoting a stranger, an outsider. As narratives, Perang sangkil and Hamba are intricately interrelated. Young Orang Asli captured by sangkil were sold to the big Malay chiefs who turned males into slave labour to undertake all kinds of work, from everyday household chores of chopping firewood and fetching water to panning tin ore or tending gambier and pepper plantations. Meanwhile, young females were forced to become concubines (gundik) to provide sexual services for their masters and their associates, including Chinese business partners who supplied opium. While Perang sangkil is about the experience of sangkil terror and strategising the options of making peace or escape, their actual enslavement in a ‘total institution’ is told in the story of Hamba. In Perang sangkil, Akiya locates his Orang Asli characters as residents of Cangkat Rimau, a traditional Semai territory surrounded by serak (the Semai term for jungle) which is the basis of their livelihood and spiritual world. Here, at the borders of Perak, Selangor and Pahang, flows Sungai Bernam, the medium of communication to facilitate Orang Asli barter trade with the outside world. This trade is mediated by Leman, a local gob who is an essential interlocutor for the community, supplying salt and other necessities for them in exchange for jungle products such as damar resin, rattan, agarwood, hill rice and medicinal roots (akar-akar kayu ubatan). Dato’ Panglima Hitam is the appointed Malay chief in charge of the territory around Sungai Bernam, including Cangkat Rimau, although in Perang sangkil he is already ageing and unable to protect Orang Asli anymore. Needless to say, in Hamba we learn that he is a shady and ambitious character who aspires to acquire many slaves and leads a group of violent followers who are cruel to the slaves under their charge. In Hamba, the location is the domain or feudal estate belonging to the Malay chief Engku Kahar (assisted by his son, Engku Berahim) who is given a royal seal (surat kuasa) to control the district area along Sungai Bidor (about 60 km from the Cangkat Rimau area) by the Perak ruler, Raja Muda Abdullah. Accordingly, Engku Kahar is also entitled to collect taxes, amounting to one tenth of all products produced or gathered by the inhabitants along Sungai Bidor. Here, in the residence and estate of Engku Kahar, Akiya inserts his enslaved characters who had been captured by sangkil, the main character being Bujal, supported by other male and female slaves and concubines. Engku Kahar’s daughter, Engku Wati, who falls in love with Bujal, is also an essential part of the narrative of Hamba. It is interesting to note that the character of a younger Panglima Hitam—the Malay chief of Sungai Bernam from Perang sangkil—figures quite prominently in Hamba as a scheming chief, who is Engku Kahar’s subordinate but envious of his position as his chief. In neither novel does Akiya refer to his characters as ‘Orang Asli’ since the term was neither emic or official at the time when the novels are set. Some of his protagonists are identified with their tribal identity, such as Semai, Temuan or Jahai. But Akiya refers to most of the Orang Asli characters in the text by their familiar names as they were ‘called’ (dipanggil) or ‘known’ (gelaran) in the public domain, utilising terms such as orang dalam (people of the interior), orang hutan (jungle people),

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orang bukit (hill people), orang hulu (headriver people), orang darat (hinterland people) and orang liar (wild people) rather than their tribal names.

19.4.3 Perang Sangkil We turn now to a more detailed consideration of Perang sangkil. We have already established that the story is set in a time of marauding attacks by immigrant Malay sangkil and that local Malay chiefs who once ‘protected’ Orang Asli have ‘become the protectors [pelindung] of sangkil’ (Akiya 2007: 4). The novel presents these new circumstances in stark terms: ‘with the protection provided by the gob chiefs, sangkil could now act as they please [bertindak sesuka hati]. No one would dare oppose them’ (ibid.: 5). Such protection, given ‘by the greedy and gluttonous gob chiefs had encouraged sangkil to be relentless in their rampage to hunt, kill, capture and rape the orang dalam, orang asal, orang bukit, orang liar and orang hulu, who were weak, poor and powerless.’ (ibid.). The contrast with the pre-sangkil days is also clear; they were peaceful (aman) and Orang Asli were free (bebas) as reflected by Dirik when reminiscing of the earlier times: at that time, orang dalam, orang bukit, orang darat, orang hutan, orang asal and orang hulu were free to roam here and there, from hill to hill, from stream to stream, from ridge to ridge, from swidden to swidden. Nobody would disturb us…. It was a time of peace, before the arrival of foreigners.… That era would not come again. (ibid.: 13)

Akiya’s Cangkat Rimau is essentially a village that came together through a union of disparate Orang Asli individuals from various groups and geographical locations seeking refuge from sangkil violence and terror. Dentan (2008: 8) astutely observes that given a ‘geographical transformation’ which had ‘affected people’s sense of who they were … [r]efugee populations often became mixed, accepting fugitives from all ethnicities and all walks of life’. Similarly, Juli Edo, a Semai anthropologist, suggests that ‘this period has caused [Orang Asli] society to be scattered all across the country in small groups … individuals have to save their own lives by taking different paths so as not to be tracked down by gob sangkil’ (1990: 124, emphasis mine).2 (A similar intergroup mix is also observed among the slave community under Engku Kahar’s captivity in Hamba.) Perang sangkil features a number of main characters. As noted, Dirik, the adat chief, is a Temuan and a leader who knows the gob language and customs. He is revered as a man of knowledge and spirit-medium (halak), who is protected by a good spirit (gunik) and who is also familiar with the state of the art (petua) of leadership governance and local knowledge. Balun, in contrast, represents the antihero, a thorn in the flesh but also a rebel with a cause, who is spontaneous, vocal, distrustful of outsiders, especially of Leman, the Malay salt supplier (gob empoj, Melayu garam), and prone to violence. During this time of turbulence, the villagers of Cangkat Rimau 2

All translations from Malay to English from Juli Edo’s work are mine.

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are caught in a situation of panic, fear and uncertainty. Should they flee (lari) to a safer place or should they stay? The idea of lari is a familiar option for them. In the past, whenever they were attacked by sangkil, Orang Asli would flee to a safer haven. To stay and resist means they would lose out as there is too much at stake. It is not just their own lives that are at stake, but those with children have a genuine fear of their capture as slaves or concubines. All around, rumours are rife that ‘Cangkat Rimau is not safe anymore!’ There is talk that a suitable place to seek shelter is Cangkat Sulung—an original swidden site located deep in the interior that was once opened up by their own people, and which had since then been left fallow. But Dirik, as the leader, feels the burden of starting anew and leaving the comfort of the familiar. As the narratives states: Dirik agreed with the proposal of his kinsmen. They must migrate to a new place, flee and hide in a new place, start rice cultivation [huma] in a new place, move to Cangkat Sulung even though deep down, Dirik felt that it would be such a loss to leave their present home. He felt so much at home with the interior [serak] of Cangkat Rimau, as its sacred sites [keramat] and he are now smelling the same [kerana keramat tempat itu sudah sebau dengannya]. (Akiya 2007: 11)

Instead of bowing to the relentless pressure from his peers, especially Balun, Dirik decides to bide his time and wait for the oncoming rice harvest. He knows that his people are running short. With the harvest, he also wants the community to welcome the rituals of the new rice feast (kenduri beras baru) to be celebrated together with a ritual feast expressing gratitude (kenduri kesyukuran) and prayers so as to ward off future misfortune (tolak bala) and to bring sustenance (rezeki) for the new year. But at the back of everyone’s mind, the lurking terror of sangkil, of the past and present, never ceases. Akiya offers a rich backstory to each of his Orang Asli characters. Dirik hails from the jungles of Selangor, and is married to Kuna from upriver Bidor in Perak. They lost their 12-year-old daughter, Bulat, to sangkil when they were moving to settle in Batang Padang, Perak, before coming to Cangkat Rimau. One of their most anxious moments on the journey takes place when they accidentally stumble upon a group of gob who had lost their way while trying to find damar. Sidang, the healer, is from Pertak, is married to Rinja and has two teenage boys. He is originally from the Bertam Valley in Tanah Tinggi district, Pahang. His old village had been attacked by sangkil several times and many young people who had resisted were killed. Those who were still alive were captured, tied and dragged on the ground, and later sold off as slaves. Sidang and his family had had to flee from his old village, and eventually sought refuge in Cangkat Rimau. Balun comes from Dakok, located far in the interior of Sungai Jelai in Pahang. He is a Jahai, but is called by many names—orang darat, orang hulu, orang hutan, orang bukit and orang suku Jelai (ibid.: 57). Living in Cangkat Rimau, Balun never forgets the tragedy that struck him when he was 18 years old. His village was attacked by sangkil but he managed to escape by hiding in the hills, though his father was ruthlessly killed while defending himself. His sister Temah, who is 15, was captured by two sangkil who broke into her home while she was cooking tapioca in the kitchen: ‘They were fierce [bengis] and looked like gob

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but they spoke in a foreign [asing] language.’ Balun is sure that Temah ‘would be turned over to some gob chief as a new concubine for him, a new addition to the many that he already had’ (ibid.: 16). Balun’s 16-year-old friend Sireh is also captured by two sangkil just as he arrives home from a hunt. They tie him up, then drag him around before beating him up. An old man tries to help him but is killed with a dagger (keris), a spear and machete (parang). Six more of Balun’s friends are also captured: ‘They will be sold and if they try to escape, they will meet their death by dagger, spears or they will be beheaded with a long machete’ (ibid.: 17). Four young girls, including Temah, are also captured and their hands and legs bound. The saddest part for Balun ‘is to watch his father being left so undignified, dead and bloody, with his private parts cut off and forced into his own mouth’ (ibid.: 18). Since Balun left Dakok, he has hardly heard anything from his kinsmen or relatives. He flees Dakok with three other young friends, each ‘resolving not to give up’ (tak mengaku kalah) but to push themselves ‘to climb and cross the Titiwangsa mountain range’ towards Perak. Akiya describes their survival march in the following terms: By following the paths of animals, river streams and climbing hilltops, they spent five nights sleeping under the shelter of the wild sago [bertam] canopy in the dense jungle heartland bordering Pahang and Perak. They survived by living off roots of the bayas palm and eating wild sago in order to avoid hunger pains. They had to learn to cook in bamboo stems and adapt themselves to living in the heartland of the rainforest. They became immune to poisoned snakes, centipedes or scorpions—their only fears were of sangkil. Indeed they even got used to the presence of wild animals. (ibid.: 49–50)

The narrative continues: ‘even wild beasts smell the same as we do!’ Finally, after two months on the run, ‘guided by the direction of sunrise and sunset’, Balun and his friends reach Perak (ibid.: 50). The sangkil reign of terror leaves an indelible scar in the memory of those such as Balun and others who had experienced those moments of overwhelming terror. Sometimes these recur as bad dreams and nightmares. Such terror and fright are evident in the following reflections: Sidang grew hot and cold just thinking of their present harsh life, a life of always living in fear, fear of sangkil. They are no longer scared of wild beasts nor even ghosts or the supernatural guardian [penunggu] of the jungle.… But just mention the name sangkil and everyone will cringe. Everyone will be petrified … for sangkil are the most evil, more violent than any wild beast: they will ambush, capture, kidnap, rape and kill. Even the supernatural guardian of Cangkat Selarung is never as violent, nor tigers that roam wild in the Cangkat Selarung jungle. (ibid.: 51)

Yet for all their fears, when it comes to a point of no return, most would not hesitate to go for the kill to defend their lives and their loved ones; hence ‘Balun is resolved to do anything as a last resort. He is ready to kill, or be killed’ (ibid.: 46). Araah, Balun’s friend, feels the same way: ‘Araah will not be hesitant to use his blowpipe [belau], even though he knows fully well that to take another human life is a sin.… Araah wants to also contribute to the well-being of his friends in Cangkat Rimau. Araah is not a coward unlike what most people think. Even if he were to perish, he

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is willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his people’ (ibid.: 196). Yok Tamat, his friend, relishes carrying his ancestral spear (tarok pusaka, lembing). A weapon bequeathed to him by his late father, he uses it against wild animals in the jungle and has killed many boars and monkeys. Even though tigers are said to roam in the jungles of Selarung, Araah is aware of the expertise and knowledge among orang dalam in dealing with them. Araah, who was born and grew up in the area, feels at home (serasi) in the Cangkat Selarung jungle—it is ‘his playground since he was a kid’ and he knows all the streams that flow through the area and remembers the number of petai and kempas trees growing in the area. Even the guardian spirit of the sacred sites are ‘familiar’ with Araah: ‘We smell the same.’ As the story unfolds, Balun and his companions find signs of outsiders trespassing in the jungle. Initially they hear the sound of voices coming, then they stumble upon an animal trap that is not appropriately placed and which slightly injures Araah. They also find a human skull. Another time, they spot Leman escorting some Chinese at the edge of the jungle. Every time they come across something untoward they immediately report to Dirik and urge him to start organising the community to leave Cangkat Rimau. Balun is constantly frustrated and impatient with Dirik’s lack of empathy with regard to their fears and publicly speaks out about his suspicions of Dirik’s delaying tactics and intent. Dirik’s obvious closeness to Leman makes Balun uncertain of Dirik’s loyalty and he expresses his uneasiness over Dirik’s apparent trust in Leman to Sidang and Araah. For Balun, ‘Leman gob is bad. Leman is a sangkil. Balun really hates Leman. Balun feels revengeful towards Leman’ (ibid.: 24). With the sighting of Leman in the company of the Chinese, Balun is adamant that Leman is in collusion with sangkil to capture people and sell them as slaves. Of late, Cangkat Rimau had been receiving refugees from two neighbouring villages after they were attacked by sangkil; they were told that Leman was seen trading in one of the villages a few days before the attack. Balun’s suspicion of Leman heightens from day to day, and he even tells Dirik that he will kill him the next time they meet. Time and time again Dirik defends Leman as a good and honest gob whose sole interest is to trade, and he appeals to the ‘good sense’ of Balun and his friends that he will investigate further. The situation climaxes with the news that the Chinese intruders have made the Cangkat Selarung jungle their new ‘hunting ground’. In one foray with Sidang and Araah, Balun almost loses his head after stumbling upon a temporary shack built by the Chinese who had been tapping and collecting latex from jelutong (bedok) trees. Balun almost runs amok and rushes to hit one of the Chinese with a wooden club which almost breaks his arm. Balun is adamant that ‘Cangkat Selarung jungle belongs to orang dalam. The rights of orang darat. The rights of orang hulu. The rights of orang hutan. It cannot be shared with outsiders, not even the size of the palm’ (ibid.: 218). ‘This is the mistake of orang dalam, we have been too soft,’ continues Balun. ‘We must not give face to outsiders’ (ibid.: 219). And Sidang concurs: ‘Everyone has rights but we all must be considerate [bertimbang rasa], and should not exploit orang dalam’ (ibid.). Unknown to Balun and his companions, Leman, who first brought the Chinese group to the bedok trees, has already sought permission from Dato’ Berangan, the Malay chief in charge of the district, who subsequently allowed the

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Chinese to tap the trees. Sent by Berangan, Leman personally briefs Dirik to the effect that as the leader of Orang Asli in the area it is his duty to take charge and be responsible for their safety. In despair, Dirik realises that ‘now Cangkat Selarung jungle no longer belongs to orang dalam, orang bukit, orang asal, orang hulu, orang darat, orang hutan and orang liar, but is now owned by outsiders who are smarter and braver than orang dalam. Cangkat Selarung now belongs to all races’ (ibid.: 208). For Dirik, the Chinese are ‘rude’ (biadab) and ‘without manners’ (tidak bersopan). For his part, the Chinese leader (kapitan Cina) reminds Dirik that since Berangan has already permitted them to tap the rubber in exchange for taxes, all the products in the area should now belong to the Chinese. He also warns Dirik that if any member of the Cangkat Rimau indigenous community were caught wandering in the jungle they would be captured and sold to sangkil. Dirik soon receives reports that the Chinese are making similar threats to other kin pursuing their livelihoods in the jungle. Dirik agrees that even though the Chinese have been given the right to tap trees ‘they forget that the Cangkat Rimau people also have rights over the jungle of Cangkat Selarung’ (ibid.: 225). It is apparent that Dirik’s community is now facing a new threat—not from sangkil but from the Chinese. Dirik resolves to settle their differences by meeting up with the Chinese leader again so that the two sides would not be in continuous conflict. Some of his followers are thinking of fleeing from Cangkat Selarung to a place where they could open up land for rice-growing, while other older members of the community remain sentimental and attached ‘to the peace [kedamian] of the Cangkat Rimau jungle’, and, if possible, they want to remain. But behind the scenes, some are already thinking of alternative plans to teach the intruders a lesson, with violence if necessary, if they persist with their selfishness. Balun has already shown the way and he is ready to do it again. The road to peace with the Chinese takes its own twists and turns. Yok Tamat, a member of community, suddenly realises that his daughter Halilon has gone missing while coming back home from the jungle. So Yok Tamat, Balun and their companion report it to Dirik, only to find that their chief is hosting the Chinese. It seems that the Chinese had found the lost girl and taken care of her, and she apparently spent the night at their shack and was brought back safe and sound to Cangkat Rimau. Kapitan Cina and his men also come bearing gifts of salt and tobacco as a peace offering, and Halilon is given a batik cloth. The unplanned meeting creates a new optimistic start for initiating peace in Cangkat Rimau, with Dirik playing the role as a mediator. Dirik explains that the misunderstanding arose because his people could not converse in the gob language nor understand the customs of the Chinese. Similarly, the tension was the result of the unwarranted suspicion on the part of the Chinese in assuming that it was orang dalam who had killed their relative with the blow dart and left his skull to rot in the jungle. Dirik promises that his people would escort the Chinese to the site of the skull so that they can retrieve it. He is also gracious in promising to get his orang dalam to assist the newcomers in ‘settling down’ in their new ‘home’ in the jungle. Balun is not impressed. He is dismayed that Dirik and his friends have given the Chinese total trust just because they saved Yok Tamat’s daughter’s life. He wants

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to tell the Chinese: ‘Don’t be arrogant [sombong] and selfish [mementingkan diri sendiri]. The serak is for everybody. Jenang [the Semai god] has created serak for all races in the world, not just for one tribe only’ (ibid.: 245–246). As for the gift of salt, Balun says: ‘Cangkat Rimau people can eat salt from any shoots. Cangkat Rimau people can eat salt from tapioca. They can also eat salt from the meat of squirrels … monkeys, deer and wild boars’ (ibid.: 250). But his friends are already taken by the diplomacy of the Chinese, and feel that they too could be a source of barter exchange for salt in the future. Yok Tamat is happy and relieved that his daughter is safe and echoes the sentiments of most in appreciation of Dirik’s leadership. He muses: ‘Cangkat Rimau people are lucky to have a leader like Dirik.… Had it been someone else, our people here at Cangkat Rimau would have been broken up long ago. We would have fled, not settled down but shifted from one huma to another, being always on the move. Dirik is most qualified to be our leader!’ (ibid.: 260). Many feel that Balun has gone overboard with his constant criticisms of Dirik and Leman, and some reckon that Balun’s attitude is divisive, that he is thinking more of his self-interest and personal grievances rather than the community. Balun’s latest complaint against Leman occurs when his young son Anggo goes missing. A few days later he suddenly reappears at home, safe and sound, but Balun is enraged after finding out that Anggo has spent those ‘missing’ days in Leman’s home. Leman harbours the idea of adopting Anggo and, on the quiet, had persuaded Anggo to spend some time with his family. Anggo returns to Cangkat Rimau transformed: he is no longer wearing a bark loincloth (cawat) but trousers; he has also been taught how to count and to wash himself before eating. Anggo brings back with him two sets of Malay poems (pantun), taught to him by Leman’s family, which he tries to memorise before sleeping at night. For Leman, ‘even though Anggo and the wild people [orang liar] of Cangkat Rimau are still without religion [agama], they are ordinary people whom he respects’ (ibid.: 270). Balun accuses Anggo of being a defiant son but is consoled by his wife, who points out that Leman did no harm to Anggo nor had he sold their son to sangkil, as Balun had expected. Anggo also came back bearing gifts of salt and cloth from Leman; the cloth was meant to replace their loincloths. Balun is caught in a dilemma, but finally ends the household crisis by telling Anggo to discard the trousers and put on his loincloth. Meanwhile, a new development has taken place that would radically transform Cangkat Rimau. Leman comes to see Dirik on behalf of the district chief Berangan. It seems that the Malay chief, in his official capacity representing the Sultan of Perak, wants to meet Dirik whom Leman had always respected as a fitting Orang Asli leader. Dirik immediately summons the Cangkat Rimau community for a meeting in order to discuss the news with his followers. But many are unhappy as he is not able to enlighten them on the actual purpose of the impending meeting. Feelings of distrust begin to re-emerge after they see that Dirik and his whole family are wearing loincloths made of the soft black cloth given as a present by Leman to Dirik. To them, this is an inappropriate show of status and ‘luxury’ (kemewahan) on their leader’s part. They are both disappointed and critical of Dirik’s attitude and wonder whether he had been conspiring with Leman to betray them to the gob or sangkil.

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The historic meeting takes place at the jetty of Sungai Bernam. Most of the Cangkat Rimau community are early to wait for Berangan’s entourage which arrives in three boats (perahu) carrying officials, escorts and guards. Berangan comes bearing a royal seal from the Sultan of Perak appointing Dirik with the title Dato’ Batin Lela Perkasa. Dirik is then gifted a keris, which he has to kiss to take his oath during the ceremony. He is also given the right to collect taxes along Sungai Bernam on behalf of the Malay chief, as well as the authority to put any three wrongdoers to death without consulting his chief. Berangan himself is also promised the title Dato’ Indera Orang Kaya Diraja while Sidang is bestowed the title Pawang Diraja. Leman would in time receive the title of Dato’ Penghulu and a new boat, including his own guards who would be his permanent escort. During the meeting, Berangan assures the Cangkat Rimau community that ‘sangkil will not disturb you anymore’ (ibid.: 343). He also convinces the people that the ‘white men’ have made a law which would make both buying and selling of human beings and the keeping of slaves crimes. After Dirik translates the moot points of the meeting to the orang dalam in their own language, everyone is relieved and welcomes the long-awaited peace. Thus begins the dawn of a new era for Orang Asli. Leman and Berangan promise to come back to Cangkat Rimau to teach the residents how to live a sedentary life as agricultural cultivators. They feel they would benefit from the new knowledge to be passed to Orang Asli from the Malays. Gradually, as time passes, those from the neighbouring villages who had fled from sangkil also start to return home. They and many others are now free from the sangkil threat and can move around without fear of being captured. The latest trend among the Cangkat Rimau community is to follow the new fashion set by Dirik, which is to replace their traditional bark loincloths with cloth loincloths. There is also happy news: Anggo, Balun’s son, is to be betrothed to Bulan, Araah’s daughter. Meanwhile, Balun is still musing: ‘Why does Leman want to take Anggo as his adopted child? What is his motive?’ (ibid.: 315). As it turns out, Leman is still the one chosen by the community to be their empoj gob—the Malay who would barter salt with them, even though the Chinese are now also doing so. And every time Balun encounters Leman he just smiles.

19.4.4 Hamba Hamba brings to life the real conditions of being a slave in the context of feudal Malay society. Akiya renders this condition through the character of Bujal, a Semai who is caught in the Ulu Jelai jungle by three orang dalam, the followers of Ngah Bukit. According to Bujal, they are ‘our own people’ (bangsa sendiri) who had become ‘stooges’ (tali barut) of sangkil by putting up a pretence of siding with sangkil in order to protect their own people from the sangkil’s wrath. Bujal is then sold to Raja Mandak, the head of a sangkil group in Perak who hails from Negeri Sembilan and is a descendant of a Javanese royal lineage. For two and a half months, Bujal is detained by sangkil before being sold for RM10 to his present master, Engku Kahar.

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Engku Kahar’s home is part of a feudal estate. At the main entrance stands his residence where he lives with his immediate family members: his wife Cik Puan Zahariah, his son Engku Berahim and daughter Engku Wati. A large part of the estate incorporates a compound housing slaves and concubines. Further afield is a tributary stream of Sungai Bidor where slave labourers pan for tin ore. On the downstream part of the river is a farm of cultivated gambier and black pepper under the charge of Engku Berahim and assisted by Panglima Hitam and his men. The area also houses a hut especially built by the slave Yok Iba for his family. Engku Kahar is obliged to protect Yok Iba and his family as this was the last wish of his late father, Dato’ Tengku Perang, who had promised to take care of the descendants of Yok Rinja. As a micropolitical system, the estate replicates the politics of the wider feudal Malay world of the time. There is a continuous undercurrent of rivalry between Engku Kahar and his subordinate chief, Panglima Hitam. The latter is ambitious and violent; he also has his own followers who move freely in the settlement and he is scheming to undermine Engku Kahar’s authority by trying to influence the latter’s followers to obey him. His ultimate goal is to take over his position as chief. In the past, Panglima Hitam had tried to buy more slaves in order to elevate his prestige, but Engku Kahar had been a constant obstacle. In the end, Engku Kahar gifts one of his favourite concubines, Miah, to Panglima Hitam. Engku Kahar is wary and distrustful of his chief and has to be politically crafty in order to gain the upper hand and keep him at bay. In his new ‘home’, Bujal is housed in a shack for male slaves (bangsal hamba) built from wood cut from small jungle trees with roofing made of nipah leaves, able to accommodate about 30 slaves. Separated by a wall made of the same material is a smaller shack for female slaves. The special house for concubines (rumah babu) is a separate residence which houses Engku Kahar’s favourites and his chosen concubine of the day, with the whole setup supervised by the chief maid, the elderly Mak Itam, who is also a slave. After a day’s work, food is brought to their shack. The whole area is under continual guard day and night. Bujal’s fellow slaves are Orang Asli. Most, including Bujal, Pandak, Anjang, Kunyit, Kundur and Tabaa, are slaves who have been bought. As slaves, there are basic rules that must be obeyed. First, their legs are shackled in iron chains at all times even when they are working in the fields or sleeping. As Engku Kahar’s slaves, they have to discard their bark loincloths and put on trousers. They are not allowed to take anything that belongs to the chief, including fruits from his trees. They are also not permitted to raise their voices when talking to the guards or superiors. Male slaves are not allowed to be close or intimate with female slaves. For concubines, the unwritten rule is that they have no right to procreate, so that in cases of pregnancy they have no choice but to abort the foetus. Engku Kahar has many followers and guards under him. In controlling the male slaves, he employs Malays who are debt slaves, such as Majid and Kassim. Unlike Orang Asli slaves who are Kaffirs, these Muslim Malay guards are empowered with authority to control the slaves and even use violence against them. Theoretically, when the debts owed to Engku Kahar by these debt slaves or their parents are settled,

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Fig. 19.2 The death cage. Source Akiya (2013: 276), used with permission of the author

they can be set free. Apart from household chores, slaves also have to work in the fields, to pan tin ore in the streams or to tend to the gambier or black pepper trees. For Bujal and his companions, injustice, beatings and injuries inflicted upon them by these guards are commonplace. In his time as a slave under Engku Kahar, Bujal sees many of his friends suffer or die. He is witness to his friend Anjang being punished by caning for ‘stealing’ a mango from a tree, after which he is thrown into a bamboo ‘death cage’ (kendang mati) for three days and nights without food and water (Fig. 19.2). The cage is the ultimate punishment for the slaves. The prisoner has no choice but to remain standing all the time, even when sleeping or responding to the call of nature. Another incident involves Kunyit, a Jahai from Ulu Gerik, whose ‘crime’ is to steal a banana ripening on a tree, and despite Bujal’s persistent efforts to dissuade him he is adamant in his principle: ‘This banana belongs to God. It is not the property of the big Tuan. Anyone can take it!’ (Akiya 2013: 20). A guard shouts: ‘Just kill the Kaffir!’ (ibid.: 22). Engku Kahar, enraged by the whole episode, shouts: ‘Listen everyone. I want all slaves to be loyal to me. Let this be a lesson to all of you.… You Majid! You Kassim! Drag Kunyit to the death cage. It’ll be his cage for three days and nights. Don’t give him food or drink. This is a fitting punishment for a slave who steals from me!’ (ibid.: 23). Three days later, Majid goes to the death cage to wake Kunyit only to find that his body is already stiff and lifeless. As the narration says: ‘This is the fate of slaves, who are too often treated like dogs. It’s as if they are not humans who have the right to live’ (ibid.). The night before, Bujal had dreamed that Kunyit was preparing to go off somewhere, and told him excitedly: ‘Bujal, I’m going back to my village. I am now a free man.… The big Tuan has given me permission to go back to the jungle. I am now a free man, Bujal!’ (ibid.: 25).

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Kundur is another slave who is determined to be a free man, the alternative to which is total surrender: by becoming a ‘living corpse’ (bangkai bernyawa)—someone who is strapped with iron shackles on his legs, and who will just keep being a subservient slave to deny himself all human emotions and feelings, until the day he dies. Instead, Kundur is willing to take the risk to escape and firmly believes that he will succeed in his quest. Unfortunately, his escape leads him to a gang of Chinese miners and despite his pleas for help he is captured and detained. Four days after his escape, he is brought back by Engku Kahar’s men and punished in the usual way in the death cage. That night in the shack, he takes his own life by hanging. Then there is a recent arrival, Tabaa, an 18 year old who is one of the four newcomers sold by sangkil to Engku Kahar. Soon after his arrival, he is caught disobeying orders by refusing to change into trousers. At that time, he could not converse in or understand the gob language. He is immediately punished and imprisoned in the death cage for three days and nights without food or water. After that experience, Tabaa is transformed into a subservient ‘domesticated animal’ (binatang piaraan), ‘like a buffalo that could be shepherded into the middle of the padi field in all weathers’ (ibid.: 67). For Bujal, Tabaa is the worst kind of slave who relishes being enslaved for the simple reason that he ‘enjoys eating rice’. ‘If I live in the jungle, I am not sure I can have rice,’ says Tabaa (ibid.: 75). Bujal, enraged by Tabaa’s total surrender, calls him ‘frightened’ and ‘stupid’. When he sees that Tabaa is going out of his way to be friendly with Kassim and Majid, he calls him a ‘sycophant’ (kaki ampu). In an ensuing argument, Bujal has had enough of Tabaa’s irrationality and kicks him to the ground. Bujal becomes more determined to escape from the clutches of his master and to become a free man. His companion, Anjang, has already been sold to an English plantation employer, Tuan Smith. He is chosen by Engku Kahar because he is the most ‘disobedient’ among the slaves. The first thing Smith does before taking him away from Engku Kahar’s settlement is to have his iron shackles removed. Anjang leaves as if he were a free man. As a person, Bujal is someone who wears his heart on his sleeve. He is aware of his capacity to love even though as a slave he is threatened and warned by his captors that he is not entitled to have these feelings. He is not allowed to feel or express his feelings either of love or hate. He is defined without possessing any humanity. But in his own personal journey, he refuses to allow himself to lose or deny his humanity, especially love. Initially there is Miah, a Semai, also an orang dalam from Sungai Bidor whom Engku Kahar bought from sangkil for RM8 when she was a young girl. Bujal sees how Miah has to gradually come to terms with becoming a ‘sex slave’ for Engku Kahar. But ultimately, a concubine is still a slave. Miah twice becomes pregnant, and while she would dearly love to be a mother and give birth to her own children Engku Kahar would have none of it: he refuses to have any illegitimate children (anak haram jadah) in his life. But Bujal has feelings and desires Miah to be his lover and wife. In the end both Miah and Bujal have to be constantly reminded of the rules that govern their lives as slaves. Miah has feelings for Bujal too, but does not want to be caught with him and face the consequences for transgression. She remembers Puteh, a concubine who was caught being intimate with a male slave and how both were severely punished. Puteh was raped in turn by Engku Kahar’s

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men. The male slave was flogged until he fainted and lost his mind. Bujal realises that a concubine is never indispensable. Among Engku Kahar’s social circle are his Chinese business partners who provide him with a supply of opium and who also pay to have sex with his concubines. One of his concubines refuses to entertain his Chinese partner and Engku Kahar goes into a rage and instructs his followers to rape her. Engku Kahar also catches Kassim flirting with one of his concubines; but instead of punishing him, he merely reassigns him from being a guard in the compound to another position assisting his son at his gambier and pepper farms. Bujal is deeply saddened by Miah being pawned to Panglima Hitam by Engku Kahar. But after Miah there are other concubines who are attracted to him. There is Bunga and then Bulan, and it is really Bulan who begins to capture Bujal’s heart. Three months after Miah’s departure, Bulan is called forth from her group of concubines to be the next offering and Mak Itam is instructed by Engku Kahar to prepare her for the rite of passage—Bulan has to be bathed in fragrant water and don fine clothes before joining the master. In a chance meeting with Bujal, Bulan whispers that her new life now also includes being a ‘whore’ (perempuan sundal) for Engku Kahar’s business partners. Bujal wants to scream, run amok and even kill so as to avenge Bulan’s misfortune. For a while, he has visions of being a free man by Bulan’s side till his death. Bujal holds on to these thoughts until Engku Wati, the beautiful daughter of his master, begins to make her presence felt in his life. Bujal is known among his slave companions to be attractive, sturdy, obedient, hardworking and intelligent. Likewise, Engku Wati also finds Bujal attractive and gradually develops a soft spot for him. She likes watching him doing household chores for Mak Itam. Unlike the rest of her family, Engku Wati has a kind heart and never looks down on Bujal as a slave. She is also close to Mak Itam and loves spending time with her. It is during these moments of being able to watch Bujal from close quarters that she grows fond of him and pines for him. In contrast, Engku Kahar is fierce most of the time. He is a typical slave master and maintains his class-based distance. But on rare occasions he can be benevolent: there are some moments when he shows some empathy for Bujal and instructs Mak Itam to feed him with leftover food. Engku Wati also pleads with him to allow Mak Itam to dispense their leftover food to the ‘needy’, such as Bujal, rather than simply wasting it, a practice which Engku Wati reminds her father is encouraged in Islamic teachings. But instead of Mak Itam bringing the food to Bujal, Engku Wati volunteers to do so. These occasions later become stolen moments that Bujal cherishes, but they also complicate his life as a slave. Engku Wati normally finds a private spot where she sits next to Bujal to wait for him to finish his food. In these face-to-face encounters, Bujal is always respectful of Engku Wati’s higher status. He is humbled by her kindness and never once attempts to take advantage of her friendship. The iron shackles are a constant reminder of his downtrodden position in life. Bujal wants to embrace this gift from God purely as a friendship. As the narration says: ‘Bujal is not the son of a chief. Bujal is a slave. Bujal is attractive but not complete. His legs are always strapped with iron chains. That’s enough for people to know what his status is. Bujal is a slave. Slaves have no rights. Bujal could never be a free man in his own land’ (ibid.: 127). Even though he has recently been appointed by Engku Kahar as the supervisor for

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all his slaves in the settlement, Bujal is not empowered with authority. He is simply a puppet (boneka) for Engku Kahar. But with Engku Wati, Bujal is accepted as a person, a real human being. What initially starts as a friendship suddenly blossoms into love, as Engku Wati confesses to the confused Bujal that he has stolen her heart. It did not take long for Bujal to be transformed from a slave of a master to a slave of love (hamba cinta). Exactly four years after Bujal had been put in chains a ‘little freedom’ finally comes. Pressured by the news that slaves working for the British are being freed from their shackles, Engku Kahar decides to be ‘benevolent’ and become the first Malay chief in the district to do the same for his slaves. But he warns them: ‘Just because your legs are no longer in chains, don’t you try to escape or I will make you suffer even worse’ (ibid.: 157). For the slaves, this is a moment to savour, a small step to full-fledged freedom. Bujal and his companions, including Pandak, weep tears of joy. All this time Pandak has been making plans to escape and wants Bujal to join him. The ‘little freedom’ provides him just the right impetus for this move. But given his newly found love, ‘Bujal has forgotten how to break free. Bujal has forgotten that he wants to be a free man. Bujal wants to be a real man. Every time Engku Wati meets him, they are loving and whispering sweet music to each other.’ Engku Wati has assured him: ‘Believe me Bujal, everything will change if you love me with all your heart.’ As the narration describes the situation: Bujal has lost it. Bujal has forgotten his origins because of women. Bujal is willing to be a slave all his life as long as Engku Wati is the owner and mistress. Bujal has forgotten how to break free, how to be a free man even though he has already made detailed plans. It’s only a matter of waiting for the right moment and time. Now Bujal is a prisoner of Engku Wati. Bujal has become a slave of love. (ibid.: 173)

Meanwhile, since the removal of his shackles, Tabaa has become arrogant and is mixing freely with Engku Kahar’s followers. They are becoming addicted to opium. Tabaa is then caught stealing food and jewellery from Engku Kahar’s concubines. In his current state of mind, Tabaa is easily manipulated by the two-faced Majid who has come under Panglima Hitam’s influence. Fearing Panglima Hitam’s unpredictable moves against him, Engku Kahar has enlisted Majid to keep an eye on his rival. But Majid is outsmarted and the situation plays into the hands of the scheming Panglima Hitam and ends up being a part of his manipulative plan to undermine Engku Kahar. Majid is also witness to the rape and murder of Yok Iba’s wife and children by Panglima Hitam’s men, which ends with Yok Iba taking his own life after carrying a sense of shame. Majid also keeps an eye on Bujal and Engku Wati as Panglima Hitam wants to reveal their illicit relationship to the public as way of undermining Engku Kahar’s status in the eyes of Malay society. It is another ruse through which Majid manipulates the unstable and naive Tabaa to steal the jewellery with a promise that they would share the wealth and become rich. In this incident, however, Engku Kahar is alerted by his concubines and manages to kill one of the guards who is high on opium. Tabaa is caught red-handed and tries to defend himself by arguing that it is Majid who has masterminded the whole thing. Engku Kahar is not convinced and

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sends Tabaa to the death cage. After he is released three days later, Tabaa is like a walking corpse. He refuses to wear his new trousers which Engku Kahar recently gifted to all the slaves and instead drapes them around his neck. He is then kicked and beaten by the guards who try to control him, and he ends up wandering naked in the compound. Finally, he goes missing. Panglima Hitam initiates the move to communicate with Engku Kahar about Bujal’s meetings with Engku Wati. Engku Kahar immediately summons his daughter and Engku Berahim but Engku Wati is adamant that they are just friends and insinuates that Panglima Hitam is deliberately trying to smear her father’s name. Engku Kahar is taken by his daughter’s explanation and merely advises her to be more discreet. Engku Berahim is dissatisfied and wants to teach Bujal a lesson. He calls for Bujal and after physically assaulting him he warns him not to see his sister again, chastising him for his lowly status as a slave, unfit to be in his sister’s company. Engku Berahim tells Bujal that his sister will be engaged to somebody of high standing. Meanwhile, Panglima Hitam also plans to punish Bujal. He rounds up three of his men, including a Chinese, and instructs them to attack Bujal while he is asleep. When news of the assault on Bujal gets to Engku Kahar, Panglima Hitam pretends to investigate and concludes that it is the work of outsiders. Bujal is hurt and his wounds are tended to by Mak Itam. He thinks that the whole world including Engku Wati has deserted him. But through Mak Itam’s goodwill and wits, Engku Wati is able to arrange a reunion with Bujal. Bujal had been taken aback as he heard that Engku Wati is engaged to someone else. He is elated to learn that Engku Wati has not deserted him and is not engaged to anyone. He is happy to face anything knowing that Engku Wati has never given up her love for him. For one last time, they are able to swear their undying love to each other. Bujal is ready to face anything. However, their secret rendezvous by the well when they embrace is spotted by Bulan (Fig. 19.3). Though Bulan is Engku Kahar’s latest concubine, Bulan still has feelings for Bujal. She feels that because of circumstances beyond their control, their love affair is yet incomplete. She feels madly jealous after witnessing the loving couple in embrace and immediately rushes to inform Engku Kahar. Engku Wati is summoned by the family again and for the first time in front of her family she confesses her undying love for Bujal and that nothing will change her feelings for him. Both parents chastise the daughter for her choice of someone of such lowly status. Engku Berahim reminds his father that he has warned him to intervene while Bujal and his sister were just ‘friends’, but his father has ignored his advice. As Engku Wati weeps with remorse, an argument ensues between Engku Kahar and his wife after he admonishes her for not having spent more time with their daughter, and that she is always going back and forth to her old village in Ulu Selangor. His wife in turn retorts by questioning his addiction to opium in the company of the concubines. In the end, it is Panglima Hitam who is called forth by Engku Kahar to intervene and resolve their problem with Bujal. On their side, Engku Kahar and his family decide it is best for Engku Berahim to take Engku Wati to her mother’s village in Ulu Selangor. Meanwhile, news of Pandak’s escape is rife. Engku Kahar is enraged by Majid’s incompetence and instructs him to continue tracking Pandak. Majid is already in a

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Fig. 19.3 Bujal and Engku Wati as lovers stumbled upon by Bulan in the wee hours of the morning near the well. Source Akiya (2013: 253), used with permission of the author

predicament. Panglima Hitam had earlier instructed him to obtain a package of opium from the Chinese towkay in the tin mines as a way of cutting out Engku Kahar’s role as the sole distributor of the drug. On his way back, he is spotted by Engku Berahim who, after interrogating him, gets him to confess. Earlier, Engku Kahar had also reminded Panglima Hitam of his duty to protect Yok Iba and his family, that no harm should come to them while they were under his watch. Yok Iba himself had come forward to inform him of Panglima Hitam’s marauders constantly threatening his family. Panglima Hitam suspects that Majid is playing a two-faced game and has betrayed him to Engku Kahar. Indeed even as he answers Engku Kahar’s call to help resolve Bujal’s case, he has already conspired with his men to kill Majid and place the blame on Bujal. Bujal is summoned by Panglima Hitam and is accused of helping Pandak to escape. During the interrogation he questions Bujal about Pandak’s whereabouts and when Bujal denies the charge he is punched in the face and falls to the ground. His two men are waiting to retaliate if Bujal decides to fight back. In the nick of time Mak Itam intervenes to stop the beating and rescues Bujal from further harm. As they withdraw, Panglima Hitam warns Bujal not to be seen with Engku Wati again or there will be repercussions. Mak Itam nurses Bujal’s wounds again. When confronted by Engku

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Kahar, she confesses that she has been the go-between for Engku Wati all along, but explains that she could not refuse as Engku Wati always insisted on wanting to be with Bujal. One day Bujal is taken to work outside Engku Kahar’s settlement at the gambier and black pepper farms belonging to Engku Berahim located in Teluk Intan in Perak. By chance, he stumbles upon Pandak who is already a free man. Pandak had apparently tried to escape along Sungai Bidor but landed among a group of British officers who came to his rescue. He and some other slaves were taken to Tuan Birch, the British resident, where the slaves were given shelter in his residence. As this was the time when the British were under increasing pressure to abolish slavery in colonial Malaya, Pandak was soon released as a free man. Pandak also tells Bujal that Anjang is still with Smith and will be a free man soon. Back at Engku Kahar’s settlement, Bujal is escorted to work at Engku Berahim’s gambier farm. As he goes to collect water from the river, he catches sight of a floating corpse. There are stab marks on the chest and stomach. It is certified later that the victim is Majid. It was the work of three of Panglima Hitam’s men who ambushed Majid by the river. Before this, Tabaa’s corpse is also found by the same river bank and Bujal is called to identify the body. He is then ordered to bury Tabaa. Panglima Hitam is scheming to spread the news that it is Bujal who is responsible for both deaths. Apparently his men had found Majid’s killer’s weapon in Bujal’s shack. Panglima Hitam proceeds to call for a ‘trial’ but Bujal is never given the opportunity to defend himself. The weapon, which has been planted by Panglima Hitam’s men in Bujal’s residence, is produced as evidence. He is again accused by Panglima Hitam of aiding Pandak’s escape. Bujal is subsequently found guilty and sentenced to a public flogging and imprisonment in the death cage. Bujal survives the flogging but not the death cage. He dies alone and is buried among the bushes growing on Engku Kahar’s land by the banks of Sungai Bidor (Fig. 19.4). Far way in Ulu Selangor, Engku Wati weeps on hearing of Bujal’s death and pleads with her mother to allow her to attend Bujal’s burial. Her request is gently refused. In her reflective moments, she regrets not teaching Bujal the Muslim declaration of faith, the shahada. Meanwhile, Miah also hears news of Bujal’s death and sobs unashamedly in the embrace of Panglima Hitam. In the concubines’ quarters, Bulan also learns of the news and buries her sorrows by getting high on opium with Engku Kahar who is already lost in a world of his own. In one lightning move of her right hand, Bulan snatches a curved knife from her master’s waist and plunges it deeply into his neck. Then in another swift move she plunges the same knife into her own stomach. In the meantime, Mak Itam is saying her prayers for Bujal. Engku Wati is softly touching her stomach to feel the life from the seed that was planted by Bujal’s love. At last, and only in death, Bujal finally becomes a free man.

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Fig. 19.4 The burial ground of Bujal on Engku Kahar’s land by the banks of Sungai Bidor. Source Akiya (2013: 279), used with permission of the author

19.5 Orang Asli Humanity as a Counter-narration The Temuan people of Mak Minah profess that they are a core component of humanity or manusia on earth that was created in Tanah Tujuh (our present physical world) after the Great Flood by their ancestors whom they believe are the manifestations of God (Antares 2007, 2019). Their ancestors tell them that ‘When Orang Asli are no longer visible on this earth, the sea will rise, the sky will fall, and everything will perish.’ Mak Minah sang songs and narrated stories from the ancient rainforests passed to her by her kin and husband. These songs and stories epitomise the spiritual relationship that her people had for millennia with the land, the mountains, hills and forests criss-crossed by flowing streams. After witnessing how ‘development’ ravaged the earth in the name of civilisation, she delivered a powerful reminder and message to those at the centre of this civilisation: I could not imagine anyone so foolish as to declare war against the forces of nature. Did they have no understanding of, or respect for, our deep love of the land? Were they totally unaware that destroying the land would mean the end of our livelihood and future? We are the land. If the land dies, we die. (Antares 2019)

And her final words leave us with the legacy of her songs: ‘One day my songs will be heard and they will soften the hardened hearts of the greedy ones who destroy more than they construct’ (Antares 2019).

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Akiya, a writer from a later generation, celebrates the Orang Asli facility for change, especially through education. Tuntut revels in the idealism of youth in promoting a new order of progressive leadership, and the sacrifices his characters are willing to make to defend their rights to land, human dignity and social worth, even if it means taking their own lives. But Akiya not only focuses on the capacities of the young; he also takes pride in the elders with regard to their artistic legacy and cultural identity. In Perang sangkil, for example, Akiya dwells on the Orang Asli aptitude for both peace and violence. There are some interesting views on this among scholars of Semai society. Dentan, for instance, refers to the sangkil period as one of ‘overwhelming terror’ waged by the marauding slave-raiders towards Orang Asli, which drives them to flee. But he also twists the equation around by arguing, with evidence from other stories, that Semai also ‘overwhelmed terror’ (Dentan 2008: 248). He refers to a version of sangkil in which the ‘Semai leader … repeatedly outwits the violent and stupid “Malays”. In more widespread oral versions, Semai (sometimes led by Malays) overwhelm attacking “Malay” forces by magic or guerrilla warfare’ (ibid.: 15). Dentan further argues that, as opposed to waging war or violence, Orang Asli prefer peace, and their response to sangkil terror would be to flee to seek a safer haven for their loved ones. He insists that: Semai in this story aren’t against war because of ‘cultural values’. They just don’t have the weapons or cultural experience to wage one. So they need cleverness or magic. But once committed to violence, they become dangerous. The mindless, no-holds-barred style of guerrilla warfare—‘like spotted doves’—suits people who, lacking a tradition of war, have no rules for how to conduct one. Their inexperience with organized violence may in part account for the extreme brutality of Semai at war when they say they suffer blnuul bhiib, ‘intoxication by blood’, and become ruthless killers of anyone they encounter. (ibid.: 28)

Juli Edo (1990: 50–54, 125–126) cites other stories of sangkil, which also demonstrate the Orang Asli capacity for inflicting violence, planned in advance of their enemies whom they were told by a Malay sympathiser were coming to attack their village. He emphasises that in most instances, this society is more oriented towards give and take and avoids confronting or being confronted by any violence. These non-violent attributes among its members are reflected in their whole way of life expressed through their taboos [pantang-larang], customs [adat resam], belief systems [sistem kepercayaan] and others. But it should be noted that this society always has the propensity for inflicting violence if it is really under real pressure. (ibid.: 126)

In this respect, Edo contends that he disagrees with Dentan whom he feels prioritises the peaceful attributes as the ‘dominant’ aspect of the Semai character. ‘Hence the character [sifat] of not resorting to violence as stated by Dentan is not the dominant character of Semai society’ (ibid.: 126). My reading of both Dentan’s and Edo’s discussion leads me to conclude that Semai or Orang Asli in general have both these capacities—peace and violence. It is simply a question of which one is more strategic or pragmatic given a particular situation and context. In Akiya’s Perang sangkil, for instance, both attributes are present. Hence we

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have Dirik representing the Orang Asli capacity and desire for peace and diplomacy, while Balun represents their propensity to violence. As portrayed by Akiya, Balun is almost a Fanon-like ‘wretched of the earth’ character in the story, who has suffered and experienced the most extreme form of overwhelming terror from sangkil, to the extent that it haunts his dreams and nightmares. Give him an excuse and he will retaliate spontaneously, as in the case when he inflicts injury on one of the Chinese. He harbours both suspicion and a sense of vengeance against outsiders like Leman and is ready to pounce if the limits of his tolerance are transgressed. What prevents his capacity for violence from being fully realised is because it is constantly mitigated by another Orang Asli attribute, their propensity towards the long-term gains of peaceful living and security, and their decision to side with Dirik. Again the narrator has to assure the community that Dirik’s qualities as a leader are intact—that he is a man of knowledge, speaks the gob language and understands the customs of other cultures beyond his own. He is also a balancer: he always attempts to weigh the pros and cons rationally before making a decision, such as not migrating from Cangkat Rimau to Cangkat Sulung in order to escape the impending sangkil attack. Even in the face of Balun’s criticism, Dirik remains calm and allows him room to express his discontent. But deep down, most of them share the same capacity for violence as Balun. As emphasised by both Dentan and Edo, and as constantly expressed by Balun’s companions in Cangkat Rimau, including Dirik, if they are pushed to the limit they are also capable of retaliating violently to protect their loved ones or their jungle space even if they die in the process. Dentan (2008: 6) concludes that this is ‘the peaceful way of life that emerges from a fear of violence and fosters “positive peaceability”, a peaceful way of life based on love and mutual respect’. In the literature on precolonial indigenous communities, there is much on how these societies constantly have to evolve a balancing act between the two extremes of peace and violence. Marcel Mauss, in his famous book The gift (1966), empirically documents various forms of reciprocity evolved by these communities which highlight the triumph of ‘primitive reason’—the ‘make gifts, not war’ principle that prevails between groups that are always in competition with each other, and which can easily erupt into violence or warfare. Since the risk of violence and warfare is always there, various forms of gift-giving have become institutionalised as a continuous commitment to create peace among these traditional societies. Dentan, as noted, mentions the inexperience of Orang Asli in ‘organised violence’. Organised violence is normally something that is most successfully empowered by a state-based framework which can systematically provide a continuous supply of weaponry, technology and manpower to support it. As a nondominant indigenous society (unlike the dominant Malays), it is ‘without its own political shell, the state’ (Postill 2008: 217), or as Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2010: 153) argues, Indigenous peoples nonetheless stand in a potentially conflictual relationship to the nationstate as an institution. Their main political project is often presented as an attempt to survive as a culture-bearing group, but they rarely envision the formation of their own nation-state. They are non-state peoples.

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Similarly, James Scott (2009), in an important study of Zomia uplanders in mainland Southeast Asia, argues how stateless indigenous communities have quite successfully resorted to ‘state avoidance’ in order to maintain their autonomy and to prevent their rights over resources from being annexed by the centralised power and hegemony of state governance that dominates the lowlands. In the same way, for Orang Asli, any long-term conflictful engagement against organised violence which is backed by the state will not elicit a favourable outcome for their livelihood and security. In this context, it is interesting to observe that both sangkil-organised violence and slavery had the backing of the state—a declining feudal Malay kerajaan and then the colonial state. Hence the decision of Dirik to accept the peace offering is a rational decision rather than the alternatives of violent confrontation or flight as espoused by Balun. Indeed it is the state—the colonial state—which finally brings an end to slavery and the sangkil reign of terror. Perang sangkil also introduces us to the capacity of Orang Asli for openness, multiethnic relations and sharing. The Cangkat Rimau community represents the former two qualities, in their flexibility and willingness to accept Orang Asli refugees from different tribal groups and regions even though the area is considered Semai territory. At the same time, while asserting that the jungle is their source of livelihood and economic life, and hence belongs to them, they find a way to share it with others, such as the Chinese who have paid taxes to the Malay chiefs to obtain rights to use the jungle. Even Balun recognises the graciousness and generosity of their God, Jenang, in allowing the jungle to be shared by ‘all races’. In Hamba Akiya introduces us to the Orang Asli capacity for love as an antidote for their inability to actualise their vision of freedom: to be a free people. Bujal represents the struggle between various options—ranging from total surrender to being a sycophant, from torture in the death cage or escape and possible freedom. Akiya presents us with various characters who represent these different possibilities. Some, like Kunyit, who ‘steals’ a banana, stand for the fundamental principle with which the indigenous people have been raised on the land: ‘This banana belongs to God!’ There is also Pandak who never gives up his quest for escape and freedom, and, in the end, he succeeds. But Kundur gets caught after his attempt to escape and ends up taking his own life in order to redeem his dignity. In the final analysis, he opts for another way of becoming a free man—through death. In Hamba Akiya develops further the Orang Asli slave’s propensity to love and be loved. In contrast to the demands made by the authorities for slaves to deny their emotions, the character of Bujal becomes someone who wears his heart on his sleeve and embraces these denied feelings to negate the official definition of what a slave is and should be. From externalising his love to Miah and Bulan, the concubines of his own ethnic and class status, Bujal finds love in the heart of Engku Wati, a Malay who professes Islam and is the daughter of his master, Engku Kahar. The love that ensues is a struggle between two contrasting class positions as well as a struggle of a shared humanity between two souls against the status quo and the cultural sensibilities of Malay ruling-class culture. The facts of class status and ethnic or religious difference are never once brought up or uttered by Engku Wati. Throughout, Akiya portrays Engku Wati as someone who is above class, ethnic and

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religious differences. It is a reunion of mutual respect, anchored in the universal language of human beingness—innocent perhaps to some extent, but it is love in its purest and most honest form. But as fate would have it, the odds are against them right from the beginning. The intrigues and scheming that characterise Malay feudal politics, the hegemony of a Malay aristocratic ideology, the powerlessness of the downtrodden—all these elements contribute to the demise of Bujal who finally also finds his freedom in death. Bujal’s death also takes the life of the slave master at the hand of his favourite concubine, Bulan, who also kills herself after learning of Bujal’s death. For Bulan, it is a love that is left unfulfilled after Engku Wati appears on the scene and after Bulan becomes owned by a master. Hamba is Akiya’s exploration of the fragmented facets of the Orang Asli capacity and propensities as slaves and as human beings. Hamba brings to light another ontological aspect of Orang Asli humanity, which is love. At the end of Hamba, Akiya indicates that Bujal’s legacy of humanity and love may perhaps live on in the world of the mother of his child. In the final analysis, it is these universal qualities of human beingness that are at the core of Orang Asli identity as unravelled by these storytellers, Mak Minah and Akiya, in their multifaceted capacities gravitating around their relationship with nature or the spirits, love, peace, freedom, dignity, openness and sharing, including all the other qualities such as violence, fear, withdrawal and humility, each of which contributes to what they are, as part of humanity on earth.

19.6 Conclusion The first part of this chapter discussed the increasing marginalisation of indigenous people under the forces of the ‘civilising process’. This phrase is not one that does justice to the sacrifices that Orang Asli made in the project of nation-building, which include their deep suffering and widespread death at the hands of sangkil or the Malay chiefs who owned them, all of which occurred with the knowledge, and even endorsement, of the colonial authorities. This process was accompanied by a deterritorialising directive under colonial rule, by which Orang Asli were expunged from their lands to make way for wet rice-growing by Malay immigrants. Then during the Emergency period, there was another major dislocation and detribalisation of Orang Asli from their natural habitat to make way for protecting the interests and security of British capital and investment. This was followed by legislation and the formation of a government department exclusively for managing Orang Asli affairs. Taken together, the legal and bureaucratic provisions function to control Orang Asli movements, their way of life, who they should be assimilated to and their rights to land. With the pursuit of the NEP and postcolonial developmentalism, we see more state-sponsored projects that continued to deterritorialise and marginalise the Orang Asli culturescape and communitas, and which eventually ruptured their sense of identity and human beingness. In light of these historical processes, a postcolonial reading of the precarious position of Orang Asli and how they are represented by indigenous storytellers raises

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a number of questions. Is Dirik’s goodwill diplomacy in Perang sangkil worth it? Is Orang Asli generosity in sharing their jungle with outsiders compensated by the benefits that they reap after the peace-making? Are their trust and good faith in Leman, the salt gob, justified? Is Balun totally wrong in his distrust of outsiders? Is Balun totally misplaced in his passion and commitment to defending his people’s rights, even if it is through violence? There are no definitive answers. But perhaps the most important aspect is that the stories themselves are told and then shared. As Akiya puts it when introducing Tuntut: ‘There is no justice in this world if these stories are not told. Their themes touch on aspects of Orang Asli’s life and their struggles of today and tomorrow. For tomorrow there is still hope’ (Zawawi 2001: xxxiii). This bold proclamation finds an echo in the words of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999: 34–35) where she foregrounds the potency of indigenous testimonies in the process of decolonising knowledge. To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges.… Telling our stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony of the injustices of the past are all strategies which are commonly employed by indigenous peoples struggling for justice … it is extremely rare and unusual when indigenous accounts are accepted and acknowledged as valid interpretations of what has taken place. And yet, the need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance.

In the end, these stories serve as a counter-narration to the ‘civilising process’, a representation of alternative micro-histories from the historical margins of the nationstate, and which, in the process, also civilises the centre. Acknowledgements In writing this chapter, I am thankful for the kind assistance and cooperation of Antares and Akiya. I also am grateful for being able to share those privileged moments on stage and in the studio with the late Mak Minah. May she forever rest in peace in her beloved realm and that her songs will continue to ‘soften the hardened hearts of the greedy ones who destroy more than they construct’.

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———. 2008. Development and alternative representations: Narrating a deterritorialised Penan landscape. In Representation, identity and multiculturalism in Sarawak, ed. Zawawi Ibrahim, 75–89. Kuching: Dayak Cultural Foundation and Kajang: Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia. ———. 2013. The New Economic Policy and the identity question of the indigenous peoples of Sabah and Sarawak. In The New Economic Policy in Malaysia: Affirmative action, ethnic inequalities and social justice, ed. Edmund Terence Gomez and Johan Saravanamuttu, 293–313. Singapore: NUS Press. ———. 2015. From island to nation-state formations and developmentalism: Penan story-telling as narratives of ‘territorialising space’ and reclaiming stewardship. International Journal Advances in Social Science and Humanities 3(3): 1–15. ———. 2016. ‘Anthropologizing human insecurities’: Narrating the subjugated discourse of indigenes on the deterritorialized landscapes of the Malaysian nation-state. In Human insecurities in Southeast Asia, ed. Paul Carnegie, Victor T. King, and Zawawi Ibrahim, 21–51. Singapore: Springer. ———, and Sharifah Zarina Syed Zakaria. 2009. Environment and social science perspectives in Malaysia. Akademika 76(1): 43–66. ———, and NoorShah M.S., eds. 2012. Masyarakat Penan dan impian pembangunan: Satu himpunan naratif keterpinggiran dan jatidiri [Penan society and development dreams: A collection of narratives of marginalisation and identity]. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. ———, and Hong Xuan. 2021. Penan storytelling as indigenous counter-narrations of Malaysian state developmentalism. Positions: asia critique 29(1).

Zawawi Ibrahim is a visiting professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Malaysia. He was most recently Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. Working within the field of anthropology broadly understood, his wide-ranging current research interests include youth, popular culture, storytelling and narratives, religious diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of The Malay labourer (1995), and coeditor of Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016) and Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017). He is a member of the EU-funded research project Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion: Bringing together European and Asian Perspectives (2019–2021).

Chapter 20

Conclusion Victor T. King, Gareth Richards, and Zawawi Ibrahim

Abstract The conclusion emphasises the Malaysian preoccupation with race and ethnicity, but also provides a reminder that there is a range of other identities and actors or agents oriented to issues of gender, youth, environmentalism, migrant workers, refugees, marginalised subcultures, artistic productions and the media. It presents a rehearsal of the concept of discourse and its relationship to narrative, and the distinctions between self and identity, primordialism and constructivism, and between analytical models of and for sociocultural and political organisation. As for the future, there is a return to Abdul Rahman Embong’s quartet of concepts, and an expression of the hope that, in the short term, Malaysia remains in ‘stable tension’. Keywords Malaysia · Nation-state · Identity · Ethnicity · Narratives · Discourses In the first instance identity, in a multiracial Malaysian context, seems much more clearly defined, homogeneous and ‘real’ than it is in practice because it is presented by the government as a kind of national ideological primordialism and is supported by the armoury and agents of authority that wish to employ ‘fixed’ and historically established categories. This volume is particularly concerned with the interactions between nationally generated identities and those that act at various subnational levels in the context of a globalising world. These encounters are a primary site where contention and transformation can take place and where identities are constructed and debated.

V. T. King (B) Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei e-mail: [email protected] G. Richards Impress Creative and Editorial, George Town, Penang, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Zawawi Ibrahim School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Subang Jaya, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3_20

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Since the British colonial period, the states that now constitute Malaysia have been preoccupied with ethnicity. This preoccupation gradually crystallised into major ethnic or what came to be referred to as ‘racial’ categories, primarily comprising the classification ‘Malays’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Indians’, along with the overarching post-independence category of ‘Bumiputera’ embracing Malays and other indigenous populations in Sarawak and Sabah, the latter approaching up to 50 named ethnic subgroupings. The ‘Orang Asli’ in peninsular Malaysia occupy a somewhat ambiguous position, given their separate status in the colonial period and the early years of independence as an aboriginal population requiring special attention and protection. There are also hybrid groupings such as the Portuguese Eurasians of Melaka which have claimed indigenous status. Finally, for census purposes there is a residual and diverse category of ‘Others’. Although the Malaysian government operates a broad classification for censustaking and other policy and national purposes, the complexity of ethnicity in the country cuts across these categories. Discourses about what constitutes ‘Malayness’ are a case in point (see, for example, Milner 1998, 2008; Lian 2001, 2021; Barnard 2004; Kahn 2006). Moreover, and as this volume addresses, there are other forms of identity-making which are given expression in Malaysia based on such criteria as gender (male, female and non-heteronormative), age (youth), socioeconomic class, marginalised subcultures, and certain cultural practitioners who present various media forms for consumption and identity construction. In this connection, national-level representations and discourses have to engage with alternative ways of representing and giving meaning to the world that have emerged from a range of actors including representatives of ethnic minorities, youth, women, gays and bisexuals, environmental movements, migrant workers and refugees. A major development in the social sciences from the 1970s was the gradual move away from primordialism as an analytical approach in the understanding of ethnicity and representation to constructivist, situationalist and instrumentalist perspectives. In other words, ethnicity came to be seen as constructed rather than inherited, original and shared from some distant past. In short, ethnic identities were increasingly conceived as created, situated, renegotiated, redefined and transformed. Ethnic identities, in particular, were seen as cognitive rather than real or essential, although they are obviously practised and have daily and long-term consequences. Increasingly, borders and boundaries were also seen as malleable and permeable, and movement across them more common than had hitherto been realised, giving rise to hybridisation, multiple identities and ethnic change. It is this set of perspectives that has dominated the literature. What is more, externally created analytical classifications may be different from those which are constructed from self-identifications, from shared networks within ethnic communities and from everyday practices and behaviours. On this point, Rogers Brubaker (2004, 2010) draws attention to the distinction between the nationstate (and we could think of identity/ethnicity in the same terms) as an ‘analytical model’ of sociocultural and political organisation and as a ‘normative model’ for sociocultural and political organisation. The first attempts to make sense of what is being analysed and the second deals with practices which constitute our social

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world and which include narratives and discourses (see also Brubaker and Cooper 2000). This distinction relates back to Clifford Geertz’s conceptualisation in his The interpretation of cultures (1973) and Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion in Language and symbolic power (1991). Yet there are those who suggest that constructivism has been exaggerated and there is much less fluidity and change than this perspective suggests and that, in some cases, primordialism can explain ethnic phenomena (Bayar 2009). We indicate some of the bases of primordialism in this volume: continuity or persistence in a shared language and culture, particularly religion, and such specific markers as food; heritage and ancestry; assumed kinship and origin; and a sense of shared space. However, we would not wish to contemplate the issues in these terms and continue to give weight to constructivist approaches (see, for example, Chandra 2012). Indeed, certain identities do persist, but it is problematic to conceptualise these in terms of primordialism. All identities require contextualisation. They need to be situated in time and space, which is especially complex in the era of globalisation in which transnational communication and media systems operate, and diasporas, migration for work and refugee movements expose supposedly fixed identities to other possibilities, opportunities and risks. And those which persist also do so because of their relationship to power and the instruments which support certain identities and their prominence as against others. In this volume the focus has been on narratives and discourses. Yet we have recognised that there is no sharp distinction between the two analytical constructs. Lian Kwen Fee (2021) has explored the concept of relational and historical narrative in the work of Margaret Somers (1994) and her ‘narrative constitution of society’ (see also Szlachcicowa 2017). Somers examines the potential for a narrative analytical framework which was something that had previously been denied it, in that it was commonly seen as merely descriptive rather than conceptual. The main, though still problematic, distinction between narrative and discourse is that the former primarily, though not exclusively, comprises text, content, a story of events, actions and experiences. Nevertheless, we have chosen to emphasise discourse, addressing speech, discussion, analysis, manipulation, interpretation, context, repertoire and process. However, we recognise that narrative and discourse are closely intertwined and they also map on to a complementary distinction between self and identity. A substantial body of research has explored the self as ‘speaker/narrator’, ‘knower’, ‘decision-maker’, ‘translator’ and ‘doer’. The self is an ‘agent’ in both knowing/talking and practising; the self is the narrator of daily life, autobiography, events and actions; these can be in written and/or oral forms. The self reflects on and expresses identities, giving meaning and understanding to experiences and behaviours past and present. Identity, however, is more than the self in that it embodies the general realisation of collective selves; it examines selves at the categorical level expressed in discursive repertoires; it analyses, tests and manipulates narratives of the self and interrogates accounts of the past and the present, and possibly the future (Bamberg et al. 2007). And yet individual narrative accounts and their agency require conceptualisation and are essential for understanding the ways in which collective identities are constructed and transformed. So important has this research

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field become that it has its own scholarly association, the International Society for Self and Identity, with its own journal, Self and Identity, published by Taylor and Francis. As we see in this volume, cultural practitioners (authors, translators, musicians, film-makers, publishers, radio presenters) express individual narratives, but at the same time help form, sustain and change collective identities. Members of the political elite are enabled to reinforce their visions of national collective identities through the exercise of power and their control of important agencies (particularly the media and educational institutions). Lian (2021) refers to the fact that ‘public narratives’ have ‘cultural and institutional significance’. In the Malaysian case they are ‘racialised discourses’. He also draws attention to the important work of Nira Yuval-Davis (2010) on the ‘politics of identity’ or, as she phrases it, the ‘politics of belonging’ (see also 2011, 2016). Yuval-Davis also explores nation-state citizenship issues in her work, as does Somers (2008), the interactions between different sections or segments of the nation-state, and the problems of inclusion, minorities and exclusion (see, for example, Yuval-Davis et al. 2019; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992). As Lian argues, following Yuval-Davis, this in turn entails the analytical investigation of three separate yet, in practice, overlapping dimensions of identity formation: maintenance, contestation and transformation. These comprise, as we have indicated already, ‘narratives’; non-verbal performances or rather, in sociological terms, ‘performativity’ (repetitive acts such as rituals and ritualised displays, expressive interactions, artistic renderings and exhibitions which can also embody innovation); and the ‘dialogical’, which addresses agency, intentionality and meaning, and assumes the open-endedness of identity formation in regard to the innovations which emerge from the interactions between those who bring different narratives to the encounter. What is clear is that ‘racialised discourse’ will continue in Malaysia for some considerable time. It has become embedded in the Malaysian national psyche. We have also seen how dominant discourses discriminate and exclude others, and how those others contest their marginalisation and present other discourses. Some provide alternatives and the realisation of self-worth, self-respect and the promotion of their interests, perspectives and identities; others, while still providing an alternative voice, find themselves incorporated or at least muted (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019). They hover between self-realisation and continued dominance. We return to and end with Abdul Rahman Embong’s (2015, 2018) four perspectives on Malaysia and its future. Analysis of Malaysia and its history was once firmly situated in a Furnivallian ‘plural society’ framework. Rahman Embong suggests that this no longer applies and that we should now think of Malaysia as ‘fractured’ and a possible concept that could currently be applied is one of a ‘fractured plural society’. A second possibility is ‘unity in diversity’, a theme which overlaps with that of a plural society, and one which seems to us to provide little in the way of analytical purchase. Third, there is the concept of ‘stable tension’ which seems to us to mark the future for Malaysia, at least in the short term, but how can we read whether or not a particular discourse disturbs this tense stability? What seems to be undesirable is the realisation of a persistent ‘divide and dissent’ environment with increasing

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repression and reaction and the hardening of alternative discourses. Providing space and accommodating other discourses and the narratives that give rise to them, and promoting reform and liberalisation, however difficult, seem to provide a manageable future.

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———. 2016. Power, intersectionality and the politics of belonging. In The Palgrave handbook of gender and development, ed. Wendy Harcourt, 367–381. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———, Georgie Wemyss, and Kathryn Cassidy. 2019. Bordering. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Victor T. King is Professor of Borneo Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei, and Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He has long-standing interests in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia. His recent publications are UNESCO in Southeast Asia: World Heritage Sites in comparative perspective (ed., 2016), and coedited books on Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016), Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017), Tourism and ethnodevelopment (2018), Tourism in East and Southeast Asia (2018, 4-volume reader), Tourism in South-East Asia (2020), Indigenous Amazonia, regional development and territorial dynamics: Contentious issues (2020), Continuity and change in Brunei Darussalam (2021) and Origins, history and social structure in Brunei Darussalam (2021). Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller. He previously taught at Manchester University, UK, the University of the Philippines and Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. He is the director of the editorial company Impress Creative & Editorial, the owner of Gerakbudaya Bookshop, Penang, and cofounded the arts space Hikayat. He is the coauthor/editor of Asia–Europe interregionalism: Critical perspectives (1999), the writer of the texts for two books of photography: Portraits of Penang: Little India (2011) and Panicrama (2016) as well as numerous articles on film, dance, literature and music. He is currently writing a book on the artist Ch’ng Kiah Kiean. Zawawi Ibrahim is a visiting professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Malaysia. He was most recently Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei. Working within the field of anthropology broadly understood, his wide-ranging current research interests include youth, popular culture, storytelling and narratives, religious diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of The Malay labourer (1995), and coeditor of Human insecurities in Southeast Asia (2016) and Borneo studies in history, society and culture (2017). He is a member of the EU-funded research project Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion: Bringing together European and Asian Perspectives (2019–2021).

Glossary of Non-English Terms

adat custom, customary law adat perpatih code of written law associated with Minangkabau matrilineal principles adat resam custom, tradition adat temenggung code of written law associated with bilateral rules of social organisation adil, adl justice agama religion air bandung sherbet akar-akar kayu ubatan medicinal roots akikah Islamic ceremony of animal sacrifice for a child’s birth alo’ Brunei Malays aman peace, tranquility amr ma’ruf wa nahy an al-munkar Qur’anic teaching of enjoining good and forbidding evil anak haram jadah illegitimate child apom manis sweet pancake asing foreign asli original, type of traditional Malay song aurat modesty, lit. intimate parts of the body awang hitam, pak hitam pejorative term for the ‘black fellow’ trope bak kut teh Chinese dish of pork cooked in broth bangkai bernyawa living corpse Bangsa Malaysia Malaysian nation, ‘race’ bangsa sendiri our own people bangsal hamba shack for slaves bayas type of palm tree bebas free, unrestrained bebola ketam crabmeat balls bedok jelutong tree © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3

487

488

Glossary of Non-English Terms

belau blowpipe bengis fierce bentara voluntary labour in cooking and serving beradat with custom berazam determined berderau cooperative labour scheme, cultural labour bersemadi take root bertam wild sago bertekad motivated bertimbang rasa considerate bertindak sesuka hati act as one pleases biadab rude bidan kampung village midwife binatang piaraan domesticated animal bisan sebantal marriage between co-siblings, lit. co-parents-in-law ‘sharing the same pillow’ blnuul bhiib intoxication by blood boneka puppet boria form of Malay theatre of Indian/Persian origin budaya culture buluh limbong bamboo instrument struck on a long block of wood Bumiputera indigenous people, lit. sons of the soil cabaran challenge cawat bark loincloth cinta alam love of nature daerah district dakwah proselytisation of Islam dalam pantang postpartum confinement period dalang puppet master daraba Qur’anic inclusion of a single strike against one’s wife dari sini sini saja we are local, lit. just from here dikir barat traditional musical form of group singing dipanggil called dirasuk being possessed ditelan zaman swallowed by time doa Muslim prayer dondang sayang form of traditional music, lit. love ballad doo’ standing in the community dugaan test, trial duka nestapa woe, great sorrow dukun shaman with magical powers dunia Melayu Malay world faraid Islamic law of succession in property fitrah natural human disposition, primordial perfection francisation Frenchification

Glossary of Non-English Terms

489

gaharu agarwood gelaran title ghazal form of love poem, ode, originating in Arabic poetry gingong Orang Asli woodwind instrument gob stranger, outsider gob empoj, Melayu garam Malay salt supplier gob sangkil stranger who is a slave-raider gotong-royong mutual assistance gundik concubine gunik good, protective spirit hadith teachings or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad hakim Islamic judge halak spirit-medium hamba abdi bought slave hamba berhutang debt bondage, slavery hamba cinta slave of love haram forbidden by Islamic law harga diri social worth harta sepencarian matrimonial property hebah gift or donation distributed before death hijab head covering for Muslim women hikayat epic narrative, royal chronicle hilang keyakinan diri lack of confidence hudud mandated punishments under Islamic law huma rice cultivation iddah period of waiting a woman must observe after the death of her husband or after a divorce, during which she may not marry another man igal Sama dance form ilmu knowledge inan lalud martial qualities inang form of Malay dance usually performed at social functions irama rimbanya jungle rhythm Islam Hadhari civilisational Islam jahiliyyah era of barbarism or ignorance before Islam jalal majesty of God in Islam jamal beauty of God in Islam jampi herbal medicine jatidiri identity jawatankuasa kemajuan dan keselamatan kampung village development and security committee jiwa soul joget dance Kaffir nonbeliever in Islam kahwin kira arranged marriage kaki ampu sycophant

490

Glossary of Non-English Terms

kamal perfection and excellence kampung village kampung air water village kapitan Cina Chinese leader kasih love kasihan pity kayu kapan, kayu buda camphor tree Keberkatan, Kemakmuran dan Kebajikan blessings, prosperity and welfare kecergasan fitness kedamian peace kedaulatan sovereignty kemewahan luxury kempas rainforest tree (Koompassia malaccensis) kendang mati death cage kenduri feast, celebration kenduri beras baru new rice feast kenduri kesyukuran ritual feast expressing gratitude kerajaan polity, state, lit. the condition of having a raja keramat guardian spirit, sacred site keris traditional Malay dagger keroncong form of music, adapted from Portuguese musical tradition ketuanan Melayu Malay supremacy khalifah vicegerency kugiran kumpulan gitar rancak, meaning upbeat guitar group laksa coconut milk-based soup eaten with egg noodles or rice vermicelli lari flee, run lepa houseboat liwat anal sex lun ruyung families and relatives lun tauh our people macam pinang dibelah dua compatibility, looking/acting similarly, lit. like a betel nut cut into two main peteri dance ritual, healing performance mak yong court dance drama malu shame mangsa yang mabuk cinta si awang hitam victims of the black fellow’s love manusia human beings, humankind marhaban song in praise of the Prophet Muhammad maruah pride¸ dignity masri traditional Malay music and dance form masuk Bajau becoming Bajau masuk Melayu becoming Malay masyarakat community mee goreng fried noodles Melayu baru new Malays

Glossary of Non-English Terms

491

Melayu Islam beraja Malay Islamic monarchy Membangun Bersama Islam developing with Islam mementingkan diri sendiri selfish menegakkan maruah upholding dignity menghayati appreciate menora form of dance drama menyeronokkan, melekakan sense of escape mission civilisatrice civilising mission miyuk better life munshi interpreter, language instructor, writer or secretary mursyid al-‘am general guide mutaah consolatory gift from a husband to his divorced wife in Islam nafsu self-indulgence, lust naga dragon naluri instinct nasi lemak fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk¸ and served with sambal, anchovies, cucumber and various side dishes nenek-moyang ancestors neraka hell nikah marriage nipah palm tree orang asal original people orang bukit hill people orang dalam people of the interior orang darat hinterland people orang hulu headriver people orang hutan jungle people Orang Laut sea nomads orang liar wild people orang suku Jelai Jelai people orang tempatan emplaced people orkes-orkes combo Malay orchestras, bands otai slang for old-timers pagkanduli Sama feast, celebration pakat, muafakat joint decision-making, cooperation palap dinganak, sebila’ adoption of brothers into a community pantang-larang taboo pantun form of Malay poetry¸ quatrain parang machete pelindung protector pendatang asing tanpa izin undocumented immigrants, lit. ‘foreign visitors without permission’ penerapan nilai-nilai Islam instilling Islamic values penghulu village headman penunggu guardian spirit

492

Glossary of Non-English Terms

perahu boat perang war perempuan sundal whore perintah government persatuan nelayan fishers’ association petai stinky bean petua state of the art pewaris inheritor pindah randah pursue a nomadic life pop yeh yeh genre of Malay pop music in the 1960s and 1970s puak tribal name pujuk coax Rahmatan Lil ‘Alamin a blessing to all raja king, ruler rajuk form of sulking Rakan Muda Young friends programme Rakan muda—Yakin boleh! Young friends—Sure you can! rakyat subjects, people, citizens Ramadan fasting month for Muslims rebab bowed string instrument rekacipta design rekreasi recreation rendah diri humbleness rendang slowly cooked spicy meat dish renong song for preparing for war or beginning a journey rentak rhythmic stylings rezeki sustenance riba usury rojak fruit and vegetable salad, lit. mixture rububiyyah lordship Rukun Negara national ideology of Malaysia rumah babu house for concubines rumah bujang bachelor pad sangkil slave-raider satay seasoned, skewered and grilled meat served with spicy peanut sauce sawai healing sayang love, what a pity seks berat heavy sex seks ringan light sex semacam Melayu like being Malay semangat spirit, vital energy sengrak sangkil slave-raiding ambush senibudaya cultural arts serak Semai term for jungle Serambi Mekah Corridor of Mecca

Glossary of Non-English Terms

493

serasi feel at home sesuai suitable shahada Muslim declaration of faith sharia Islamic law sifat character sinkeh Chinese newcomer sistem kepercayaan belief systems solat ritual prayer in Islam solat asar evening prayer in Islam sombong arrogant sukan sports Sunna body of traditional social and legal custom and practice of the Islamic community surah chapter of the Qur’an surat kuasa royal seal surau prayer house, room tahalluf siyasi political cooperation tak mengaku kalah not giving up takdir fated by God in Islam tali barut stooge tamu market tanah adat customary land tanah saka Orang Asli ancestral land tarok pusaka, lembing spear taubat repent, repentance tawhid unity of God in Islam tazkiyah purification teh tarik pulled tea tidak bersopan without manners timang song of praise or invocation poem tok peteri spiritual teacher tolak bala ritual to ward off misfortune tomoi form of kickboxing towkay business owner, master Tuan sir, master tuar lentil tree tuntut claim ulun human life and its well-being ulun nuk doo’ good life ulun perintah life of government ummah collective Muslim community ‘umrah lesser pilgrimage made by Muslims to Mecca upacara amal customs wajadiri self-defence wang asin pay taxes

494

Glossary of Non-English Terms

warganegara asing foreigner wasiat will Wawasan 2020 Vision 2020 wayang kulit shadow puppet play wirausaha dan wiramahir entrepreneurialism and entrepreneurs yang philosophical principle of the male force of the universe yin philosophical principle of the female force of the universe zahir batin action of an individual, intention of the heart zaman pelanggar time of being under attack zapin Malay music and dance form zina fornication

Index

A A comparative vocabulary of the Barma, Maláyu and Thái languages (Leyden), 78, 84 A. Ramlie, 379 A. Samad Said, 304 A. Ubaidillah Alias, 303 A. Wahab Hamzah, 394 Aan Mansyur, M., 306 Abdul Hadi Awang, 391 Abdul Kadir, 76 Abdul Majid Husain, see Hamzah Hussein Abdul Rahman Aziz, 281 Abdul Rahman Embong, 18, 48, 257, 481, 484 Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail, 78 Abdul Rahman, Temenggong, 84 Abdul Rahman, Tunku, 235, 253–254, 266; administration, 254 Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, 43 Abdul Razak Hussein, 37, 254 Abdul Taib Mahmud, 43–44 Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, 18, 48, 260, 266, 277 Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, see Abdullah, Munshi Abdullah Majid, 252 Abdullah, Munshi, 7, 76, 84; agency of, 94; and British colonialism, 92, 94; as language teacher, 88, 91; legacy, 93; and missionaries, 91, 93; and modernity, 92–93; and print culture, 91; as translator, 7, 86, 91, 94; as writer, 91–92, 92n6, 94 ABIM, see Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia Abolition of slavery, 437, 468, 472

Abolitionist organisations, 436 Aboriginal People’s Ordinance, 438 Abrahamic religions, 110 Absolutist state, 432 Abu Hassan Hasbullah, 403n11 Abun, Penghulu Freddie, 142 Acciaioli, Greg, 9–10, 153–181 Accounts of India and China (al-S¯ır¯af¯ı), 66 Accumulation, capital, 274, 298; capitalist, 295; knowledge, 113; of wealth, 30, 440 Aceh, 110; non-governmental organisations in, 117; and sharia, 110; and Islamic revivalism, 107 Acehnese, 369; diaspora, 324; women, 116 Action, environmental, 13; humanitarian, 324 Activism, 293, 302; cultural, 12–13, 249, 260, 267; environmental, 3, 12–13; feminist, 106; political, 264, 275; religio-political, 275; social, 12, 263, 267, 420; student, 253, 255–256, 264, 267; women’s, 122; youth, 2, 4, 12, 249–251, 253, 256, 258, 260–261, 263, 266–267, 420 Activist(s), 48, 261–262, 322; environmental, 279–280, 284, 286; feminist, 307; Islamic, 13, 274; leftist, 252; Minangkabau, 113; social, 294; youth, 5, 263 Actor(s), Islamist, 13, 273 Ada apa dengan cinta? 2, 306 Adam Adli, 307 Adat (custom), 106, 109–112, 115–116, 118–119, 119n11, 120, 122; and gender, 111; inheritance, 119n11; and Islam, 8, 105–106, 110, 112, 118, 122;

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Zawawi Ibrahim et al. (eds.), Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia, Asia in Transition 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4568-3

495

496 Javanese, 110, 113; and kinship, 111; law, 111; Malay, 8, 105, 107, 110–113, 118; marriage, 110, 112; norms, 112, 118; Orang Asli, 451, 454, 470; in Sarawak, 144; Southeast Asian, 110, 118; Sumatran, 110; tradition, 111, 113; and women, 105, 107, 110–111, 113, 118, 119n11 Adenan Satem, 43 Adeyinka-Ojo, Samuel Folorunso, 187, 199 Adil Johan, 15, 367–385 Administration(s), 257; Barisan Nasional, 288; British, 41; Brooke, 42, 131, 137, 140, 145–146, 354; Islamic, 275, 283; Kelabit, 282–283; Kelantan, 282–283; Muslim, 111, 283; Najib Razak, 264, 278; of Orang Asli, 438–439; political, 354; state, 13; Tunku Abdul Rahman, 254; United Malays National Organisation, 288; of youth organisations, 259 Adnin Roslan, 308 Advertising, 189, 197, 305, 389; media, 184, 188 Aerosmith, 422 Aesthetic(s), 353, 371, 395, 404; agency, 368; Black Power, 235; cosmopolitanism, 371, 383; decolonisation, 236, 245; P. Ramlee, 368, 371, 375, 379, 383; of political culture, 65; punk, 418; realist, 394 Affinity, cultural, 324, 353 Affirmative action, government, 37; and Kadazan-Dusun-Murut, 154; and New Economic Policy, 40, 256, 276, 376; policy, 37, 256, 376; privileges, 160; in Sabah, 160, see also Bumiputera policy Afghanistan, 107; women in, 118 Afrianty, Dina, 117 African(s), 11, 231–233, 237–240, 242–244, 246; diaspora, 236, 239; immigrants, 12, 231–233, 245–246; internationalism, 237; migrant workers, 11; nation-state, 231–232, 237–240, 242, 244; societies, 235; students, 11, 231–233, 245–246; tourists, 232, 246; workers, 246 African American(s), 235, 239, 241, 244, 450; in Asia, 238; and Asian Americans, 238; at Bandung conference, 238; culture, 243; intellectual, 234; liberation struggles, 234; musicians, 243, 422; politics, 235;

Index writers, 11, 231–232, 243, see also American(s) African–Asian, decolonisation, 236, 239, 243–244, 246; response to colonialism, 240; solidarity, 11, 231–232, 234, 238, 245, see also Bandung conference Agency, 1–4, 70, 208, 483–484; aesthetics, 368; Bajau, 176; Black transnational, 236–237; and colonialism, 71, 435; constitutional, 5; critical, 1; development, 165; human, 351; humanitarian, 341; indigenous, 9, 76, 87, 127, 429–430; of indigenous translators, 82, 95; of indigenous writers, 7, 59, 95; Kelabit, 127–128, 140, 142, 146, 148; local, 75, 82; Malay Muslim, 210, 212, 223; of migrants, 15; of Munshi Abdullah, 94; of musicians, 425; Orang Asli, 17, 429; of P. Ramlee, 368; political, 239; of refugees, 329, 333, 344; sexual, 11, 212, 223; women’s, 210; of young people, 12, 267 ‘Agi Idup Agi Ngelaban’ (As Long as I Live, I Will Fight), 356 Agoes Salim, 253 Agong tanpa tengkolok (Fathi), 307 Agricultural, cultivators, 460; development, 15; economy, 256; knowledge, 355; land, 362; livelihoods, 262; sectors, 362–363; transformation, 362 Agriculture, 187, 362; Bajau, 157–158; Iban, 362; plantation, 276, see also Farming Ahadiat Akashah, 297 Ahmad (scribe), 89 Ahmad Boestamam, 251 Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, 12–13, 273–292 Ahmad Nawab Khan, 380–381 Ahmad Rijaluddin, 7, 76, 82–85, 94–95 Ahmad Sarji, 369 Ahmad Yakob, 284 ‘Ai Ai Twist’, 370 Aid, international, 243 ‘Air mata di perbatasan’ (Tears from the frontier), 451 Aisa Linglung, see Aisamuddin Md Asri Aisamuddin Md Asri, 298 Aishah Ghani, 113 Aisyah Sofea, 297 Aït Sabbah, Fatna, 113 Aitchison, Cara, 194 Akah River, 143

Index Akar Umbi, 17, 429, 431, 446–447 Akiya, 17, 429, 431, 444, 448–456, 460, 470–474 Al-Imam (The Leader), 251 Al-S¯ır¯af¯ı, Ab¯u Zayd, 66 Al-S.u¯ r¯ı, 81 Alaf, 21, 303 Alexander, Jeffrey, 25 Alexander the Great, 80–82; legend, 81, 95; in Malay world, 81–82, see also Iskandar Zulkarnain Alexander romance, 81 Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia (Ng), 81 Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (Ali Baba Ne’er Do Well Bachelors), 280n15 Ali Johan, 421–423 Alliance (Perikatan) coalition, 253, 282 Alliance of Hope, see Pakatan Harapan Aloy Paradoks, 305 Alternative, arts, 302; discourses, 1–2, 4, 11, 189, 213–214, 218, 485; modernity, 15, 349, 351, 353–354, 356, 363–364; narratives, 2, 4, 6, 14, 138, 317–318, 452 Amanah Saham Nasional, 46–47 Ambikaipaker, Mohan, 11, 14, 231–248 Ambon, 72 American(s), 91, 335, 397, 424, 452; bands, 368, 417; capitalism, 243; cultural diplomacy, 243; culture, 16, 397; films, 389, 394, 397, 403; indie rock, 417, 421, 425; missionaries, 91; modernity, 350; music, 354, 368, 417; popular music, 354; rock ’n’ roll, 16, 367–368; scholars, 424, see also African American(s) American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 91 American Top 40, 416 Amid the Mimic, 417, 419 Amir Muhammad, 300, 302–303, 305 Amnesty International, 322 Amnesty International (Malaysia), 262 Amrith, Sunil, 83 Amsterdam, 72 Amy Search, 447 Ana Balqis, 403, 403n11 Ancestral land(s), 401, 405; Bajau, 176; Iban, 349, 360, 364; indigenous, 15, 364, 444; Orang Asli, 439, 444, 451 Ancestry, 33, 483; Bajau-Suluk, 173n17 Andalucía, 232, 244

497 Andaya, Barbara Watson, 436 Andaya, Leonard, 436 Anderson, Benedict, 3 Anderson, John, 402, 405 Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia, 259 Angkatan Pemuda Insaf, 251–252 Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah, 282 Angkatan Sasterawan ’50, 252 Anglo-Chinese College, 88 Anglo-Siamese (Burney) treaty, 88 Angong, 446 Animism, 405 Annexe Gallery, 302 Anthropological studies, 30, 377 Anthropology, 24, 34, 129, 331, 450; cultural, 50; indigenous, 430; postcolonial, 430; social, 50; Western, 430 Antiblack, discourses, 11, 14, 231, 233, 233n1, 239; racism, 231–232, 234, 234n1, 239, 245; violence, 231–232, 245 Antiblackness, 11, 14, 231–234, 234n1, 237, 239–240, 245 Anticolonial struggle(s), 231–232, 234, 236, 240, 242; Asian, 231, 234; Third World, 231, 234, 237 Anti-consumerism, 298 Anti-Dutch, nationalist ideology, 113 Anti-imperialism, 234 Antiracism, 1, 4, 11, 239, 244; transnational, 244 Antiracist, struggles, 236, 242 Anti-Western imperialism, 234 Anuar Nor Arai, 406n14 Anwar Ibrahim, 254, 259–260, 264, 266 Anwar, Chairil, 306 API, see Angkatan Pemuda Insaf Aping Nyipa, 139–140, 142 Apollo 11, 356–357 Apostasy, 222 Apparatus, colonial, 75, 95; federal, 43; ideological, 5, 432, 441; knowledge, 95; state, 5, 280, 288, 432, 441 Apple, 299 APU, see Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah Aquaculture production, 156, 158 Arab(s), 66, 109, 122; history, 66; identity, 66; Islamisation of, 117; leaders, 66; tribes, 66; unity, 66; women, 116–117 Arab society, 116; women in, 116 Arab Spring, 250 Arabian Peninsula, 120

498 Arabic, cosmopolis, 7, 59, 65–67, 69n3, 71, 77, 80, 94; culture, 113, 116, 216; Muslims, 113, 116 Arabic language, 64–69, 72–73, 75, 78, 81–83, 88, 91, 109, 113; books, 66; and Islam, 66; as lingua franca, 73; literature, 67; scribes, 78; in Southeast Asia, 66–67; texts, 67, 68n2; translation, 67–68, 68n2; vernacular, 68; writers, 66; writing, 66 Arabs (Mackintosh-Smith), 66 Arakan, see Rakhine Art, indigenisation of, 185; indigenous, 391 Art for Grabs, 294, 302 Artist(s), 5, 31, 262, 265, 294, 372, 376, 379, 420, 423–424; countercultural, 422; foreign, 372; indie, 414, 419, 423, 425; Singaporean, 379 ASAS ’50, see Angkatan Sasterawan ’50 Ashaari Mohammad, 441 Asia, 10, 72–73, 81, 88, 115, 237–238, 243; African Americans in, 238; British Empire in, 59–60, 90; Christianity in, 90; East India Company in, 88; ethnicity in, 33; and Europe, 64, 95; languages, 73 Asian(s), 5, 7, 11, 61, 74, 83, 94, 231–232, 235, 237, 239–240, 242–244; anticolonial struggles, 231, 234; capital, 238; communities, 35; and colonial society, 63; corporate interests, 10, 183; elites, 244; financial crisis, 257; food, 10; identity, 35, 39, 231, 245; languages, 72–73, 75; markets, 63; manuscripts, 68, 72, 87, 95; middlemen, 94; modernity, 37, 41; nationalism, 245; nation-states, 231, 232, 237–240, 242, 244; networks, 63; racialism, 245; societies, 235; trade, 62; traders, 85; translation traditions, 59, 64, 70, 80, 95; translators, 61; values, 39 Asian Americans, and African Americans, 238 Asian empire, and Britain, 90 Asian Institute of Science, Technology and Medicine, 258 Asian texts, 64, 72; European and, 64, 72, 79, 86 Asianism, 239 Assidiq Fauzan, 308 Assimilation, 243, 434, 438; ethnic, 187; of Orang Asli, 440–442 Associations, business, 108

Index Astro Radio, 420 Astro, 303 Asylum Access, 322 Asylum seeker(s), 159, 318, 321, 323, 330, 330n1, 331, see also Refugee(s) Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 373 Australia, 320, 417, 446 Authoritarianism, 443 Authority, cultural, 61, 376; hegemonic, 425; Islamic, 251; political, 274, 441 Autonomy, economic, 106, 108, 116; local, 278; university, 254–255 Avon, 305 Awareness, environmental, 274–275, 281 Awek Chuck Taylor (Nami), 303–304 Ayat-ayat cinta (El Shirazy), 302, 303n3 Azerrad, Michael, 421, 425 Aziz Sattar, 380, 380n15 Azmyl Yusof, 17, 413–428 Azwan Ismail, 208–210, 221–223

B Ba’ Kusan, 141, see also Baram River Badan Kongres Wanita Indonesia, 114 Baer, Adela, 437, 439 Baghdad, 232 Bahau River, 133–134 Baird, Ian, 154 Bajau, 9, 153–154, 157, 157n3, 158–159, 161–163, 166–168, 170, 172, 172n14, 173, 173n18, 175–176; agency, 176; agriculture, 157–158; ancestral land, 176; immigrant(s), 161, 171; and borders, 156, 159, 161, 170; colonialism, 173; dances, 158, 168; discourses, 157n3; and economy, 166; and education, 171; as Filipinos, 171; fishing, 157–159, 164–165; and government, 158; history, 172; identity, 9, 153, 156, 158, 160–161, 166, 168, 173, 175–176; in Indonesia, 159, 161; insecurity, 165–166; and Islam, 9–10, 156, 166, 171–172, 172n15, 173–176; Islamisation of, 172, 175; labour, 166; lands, 157–158, 167–168, 176; leaders, 173, 176; leadership, 176; livelihoods, 156–158, 161, 166–169, 169n11, 170, 176; middle class, 174; migrant(s), 162, 170–171; as minority, 9, 153; Muslim(s), 10, 161, 171–172, 172n15, 173–174; as natives, 9, 153; networks, 154; official(s), 158, 176; in

Index Philippines, 157n3, 159, 161–162; politicians, 171–173, 176; population, 155, 159n4, 160–161, 163, 167, 170; and religions, 153, 155–156, 170, 176 Bajau-ness, 161 Bajau Darat, 157, 159, 171 Bajau Kota Belud, 157 Bajau Laut, 9, 153–154, 156–157, 157n3, 158–159, 159n4, 162–163, 167–170; marginalisation of, 168; maritime, 158; markets, 169n11; stateless, 170; stateless people, 167, 170; trades, 159, 168; women, 166, 169, 169n11 Bajau Mengkabong, 157 Bajau Omadal, 158 Bajau Semporna, 158 Bajau-Suluk, ancestry, 173n17 Bajau Tempatan, 158, 167–168, 170–171 Bajau Ubian, 158, 163–166 Balah forest reserve, 285 Baldwin, James, 450 Baling, 255 Bamar, 15, 329, 332 Ban(s), on books, 306; on Christian missionaries, 88; on cinema, 391; on culture, 391 Band(s), 303, 373, 379, 416–419, 421, 424, 447; American, 368, 417; British, 368; fusion, 17, 429, 446; indie, 308, 417, 421, 426–427; Indonesian, 422; keroncong, 369; kugiran, 370–371; Malay, 371; pop yeh yeh, 372, 373n9; punk, 417; rock ’n’ roll, 368, 371, 376, 417, 421, 425–427; Singaporean, 422 Bandar Baru Bangi, 416 Banduan akhir di sel akhir (Final prisoner in the last cell), 261 Bandung, 114 Bandung conference, 11, 231, 232–234, 236–245; African Americans at, 238, 243; history of, 246; leaders at, 235; as myth, 237; spirit, 11, 231–232, 234–235, 239, 246, see also African–Asian Banggi Island, 156–158, 161, 164, 166 Bangi, 254 Bangkok, 232 Bangladesh, 117–118, 336 Bangladeshi, migrant workers, 321; refugee camps, 321 Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian nation), 48, 175, 277 Banishment Act, 264

499 Bannaran (Bannaden), 163 Bantam, 74 Baram River, 129–130, 134–135, 138, 140, 143–144, 146–147, see also Ba’ Kusan Barendregt, Bart, 250, 353 Bario, 133, 187, 199 Barisan Jemaah Islamiah Se-Malaysia, 282 Barisan Nasional, 175, 250, 260, 265, 282, 288, 301–302; administration, 288; government, 12, 262–264, 308; hegemony of, 250 Barr, Michael, 33 Barriers, racial, 280 Barter exchange, 459 Barth, Fredrik, 28, 50, 154n2 Bastin, John, 72, 77, 84, 86 Batak, inheritance, 117; law, 116 Batak Mandailing, women, 116–117 Batavia, 74, 87, 88, see also Jakarta Batu Papan forest reserve, 285 Bau semangat anak muda (Nami), 303, 304 Baucer Buku 1Malaysia, 306 Bay of Bengal, 63, 83; port city, 83 Bayang, Vida, 358 Bayly, Christopher, 61, 71, 85, 95 BB1M, see Baucer Buku 1Malaysia Beatlemania, 370 Beatles, The, 368, 371, 379 Bee Gees, The, 379 Beebe, Roger, 425 Beerli, Asunciòn, 187, 191 Beighton, Thomas, 89 Belgium, 232 Belief(s), folk, 405; religious, 69n3, 213; systems, 25, 444, 470 Belonging, 32–33, 154, 333, 337, 342; denied, 444; narratives of, 329, 331; politics of, 484 Belongingness, 24, 32 Beng Hock, 261 Bengal, 62, 75, 77, 83, 85; government, 88; printing equipment, 88 Bengali, 83 Bengkulu, 84 Benjamin, Geoffrey, 132, 440 Benjamin, Walter, 388 Bentong, 280 Berau, 159 Bergson, Henri, 388 BERJASA, see Barisan Jemaah Islamiah Se-Malaysia

500 Bersih, 12, 249–251, 261, 263, 294; protests, 261; rallies, 12, 263–264, 267, 423; and youths, 263–264 Bertam Valley, 455 Berungus, 165–166 Beynon, John, 185 BFM, see Business FM Bhutto, Benazir, 118 Bible, Malay, 88; translations, 72 Bichu, Rosana, 359 Bidayuh, 41–42, 351, 359; identity, 41, see also Land Dayak(s) Bilateral kinship, 106 Bilik sulit (Confidential room), 261 Biodiversity, 285; loss of, 275; marine, 162 Biological category, 110 Bio-power, 350 Biro Tatanegara, 299, 306 Bisaya, 42, 161 Bisexual(s), 208n1, 211, 211n6; lifestyle, 219; men, 10, 211, 220–221 Bisexuality, 218, 223, 482, see also Sexuality Black(s), 11, 235, 243; and Asians, 238; culture, 239, 434; French, 450; identity, 434; intellectual(s), 433–434; modernity, 237; transnational agency, 236–237 Black African, stereotypes, 233 Black Atlantic, 242 Black boy (Wright), 232 Black Lives Matter, 239 Black Power, aesthetics, 235 Black Sabbath, 372 ‘Blasting Concepts’, 418 Blood brotherhood rituals, 143 Blues, 379, 415, 421, 450 Blues Gang, 372 BN, see Barisan Nasional Bodgaya, 163, 167 Bodleian Library, 72 Bogor, 113 Boheydulang, 163, 167 Bombay presidency, 60 Bone, Andrew Burchet, 87–88 Bonggi, 161 Book(s), 74, 79, 86, 262, 301–302; Arabic, 66; ban on, 306; Chinese, 88; English, 74; exchange, 302; indie, 295–299, 302–305, 305n6, 306–310; Indonesian, 306; industry, 293–295, 306, 309–310; Malay, 72–73, 87–88, 294–295; market, 294–295, 300, 302–304,

Index 306–308, 310; marketing, 13, 293–295, 297–298, 304–305, 310; Orientalist, 68; and printing, 79, 300, 304–305; religious, 302, 310; trade in, 70, 307 Border(s), 1, 3, 6, 32, 129, 139, 232, 245, 321, 482; and Bajau, 156, 159, 161, 170; controls, 154; Kelabit, 148; and migrants, 319; political, 128, 133; and refugees, 320–321; security, 320–321; territorial, 134; Thai–Malaysian, 320–321, 390, 405–406; transcultural, 393; tribes, 146, see also Boundary Borderwork, 154 Borneo, 4, 9, 41, 45, 74, 131, 171n14, 353; Dutch, 9, 127–128, 134, 146; ethnicity in, 41, 129; manuscript from, 68; multiethnic, 129; precolonial, 139 Borneo Hotel, 357 Borneo Literature Bureau, 8, 43 Bosnia, 447 Bosniak, refugees, 323 Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab, 212, 214–215 Boulanger, Clare, 28, 44 Boundary, 406; contestation of, 67; cultural, 7, 95; ethnic, 42, 50, 95, 135; interaction across, 28; maintenance, 5, 28; -making, 154n2; and nation, 32; political, 90, 393; Sabah, 162; -setting, 6, see also Border(s) Bourdieu, Pierre, 199, 333, 483 Bowrey, Thomas, 73–75, 95 Braginsky, Vladimir, 67, 71 Brands, multinational, 197 Braudel, Fernand, 63–64 Brazil, 274 Britain, 24, 89, 163, 274, 389, 425–426; abolitionist organisations in, 436; and Asian empire, 90; and East India Company, 76; Evangelical movement in, 90; gays in, 210; and Malaya, 435; and missionaries, 89; printing in, 73; in Southeast Asia, 75 British, 36, 62, 90, 172, 252, 433, 435, 437, 465; administration, 41; bands, 368; bureaucracy, 96; capital, 435, 473; colonial state, 429; colonial legacy, 4; culture, 16, 24; education, 233, 435; and ethnic classification, 41; government, 252, 263, 283; imperialism, 435; in India, 71, 435; industrial capitalism, 435; and Kelabit, 132; and Malays, 435; and Malay language, 75–76; and Malay states, 436; in Malay world, 39, 71;

Index merchants, 91; missionaries, 91; music, 368; and Orang Asli, 437, 439, 449, 468; in Penang, 62, 75; and printing, 87; rock ’n’ roll, 16, 367–368; rule, 71, 436–437, 449; in Sarawak, 349; scholars, 424; and slavery, 435–437, 468; society, 24; state, 95; and Thailand, 34; trade, 62; and translation, 7, 72, 76; translators, 76–77, 82; values, 93; writers, 76, 437 British colonialism, 14–15, 42, 61, 349, 482; and Munshi Abdullah, 92, 94 British Crown colony, 15, 349, 363 British Empire, 59–60, 77, 90, 234; in Asia, 59–60, 90; policy, 37; politics of, 60; principles of, 60 British Library, 60, 72 British North Borneo, 38, see also Sabah Brocchi, Davide, 424 Bronkhorst, Johannes, 64 Brooke Raj, 9, 15, 41–42, 128, 142, 144, 349, 354, 363; administration, 42, 131, 137, 140, 145–146, 354; government, 132, 139; and Iban, 15, 354, 363; officials, 142; policy, 132; state, 131, 139 Brooke, Charles, 42 Brooke, James, 41, 357 Brown, David, 33 Brubaker, Rogers, 482 Brunei, 3, 35, 139, 390; government, 139, 142, 145; Malayisation, 35; Muslims in, 3; non-Malay in, 35; sultanate, 9, 127–128, 141n1, 145; trade, 141, 141n1; traders, 141, 147 Brunei court officials, 141 Brunei Malays, 141, 157, 172–173, 175; and Islam, 173 Brunei Nationality Act, 35 Btsisi (Mah Meri), 436 Bua Hassan, 147 Budak Kelantan, 16, 387, 389–390, 393–394, 396, 398, 406–408 Buddhist(s), 390n2, 391; Burmese, 237 Buddhist-Burman, identity, 33 Buddy film(s), 389, 394, 400 Buffer zones, 165 Buginese, literature, 81 Bugis, 84–85, 161–162; diaspora, 162; identity, 161; traders, 162 Buhalis, Dimitrios, 189–190 Buildings, vernacular, 41

501 Bujang Lapok (Ne’er Do Well Bachelors), 380n15 Bukit Sadok, 356–357 Buku Fixi, 294, 299–303, 305, 308 Buku Jalanan Chow Kit, 262, 302 Buku Jalanan, 262, 302 Buku Pojok, 307 Bumiputera, 5, 9–10, 29, 34–36, 39–40, 46–47, 153, 171, 172n15, 276, 440–441, 482; capitalist class, 440; economy, 253, 276, 443; and education, 38; elites, 443; and hybridisation, 36; identity, 156, 440; interests, 443; Muslim(s), 36, 153, 161, 171–172, 172n15, 173, 175; and New Economic Policy, 171, 276, 440–442; non-Malay, 36, 41, 161, 171, 175; non-Muslim, 153, 171, 175; Orang Asli as, 288, 434, 439; policy, 153–154, 171; poverty, 40; privileges, 35, 171; in Sabah, 153, 155, 161, 171, 173, 175; in Sarawak, 41, 44, 175; students, 38 Bumiputera policy, 153, 154, 172, 278; bureaucratisation of, 171, see also Affirmative action Bumiputeraism, 171, 442; and Malayness, 171 Bungan Lian, 140 Bunohan, 16, 387, 389–390, 393, 400–402, 406–408 Bunyan, John, 89 ‘Bunyi Gitar’ (Sound of the Guitar), 370, 372–373, 379 Bureaucracy, 433; British, 96; East India Company, 60; and government, 174; Islamic, 389n1 Bureaucrat(s), 31, 38, 171n13, 280; Malay, 38 Bureaucratisation, 165, 176; of conservation, 167; of Bumiputera policy, 171; federal, 176; of Islam, 9, 153, 171, 174–175; Islamic, 171; New Economic Policy, 171 Burger King, 299 Burhanuddin Bin Buang, 372 Burmese, 83, 234, 331–333; Buddhists, 237; heritage, 343 ‘Burung Meniyun’, 446 Business, 72, 118, 156, 184–186, 188–196, 198–200, 296, 298–299; associations, 108; Chinese, 453, 464; food, 193, 198; and government, 38; international, 239; Malay, 40; music, 369; and politics, 38

502 Business FM, 17, 413, 414, 420–427 Bustan Arifin, 88 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 389 Butterfingers, 419 C Cairo, 232; printing in, 89 Cakcibor Creative, 308 Calcutta, 83–84, 87–90; cosmopolitan, 83; East India Company in, 83; population, 83; presidency, 60 Cambodia, 154, 323; refugees from, 323 Canada, refugees in, 320 Canton, 88 CAP, see Consumers’ Association of Penang Capital, 38, 196, 298, 443; accumulation, 274, 298; Asian, 238; British, 435, 473; corporate, 294; cultural, 15, 27, 199, 333, 337, 342, 427; digital, 10, 183, 190; economic, 190; foreign, 443; global, 352; hegemony of, 196; human, 18, 48, 276, 283; linguistic, 342; social, 154, 190, 342 Capitalism, 13, 241, 293, 310, 397, 408, 436; American, 243; colonial, 59, 71, 95, 435; developmentalism, 245–246, 443; global, 209, 370; industrial, 435; mercantile, 435; multinational, 432; rentier, 440; spirit of, 37; urban, 408; Western, 388 Capitalist(s), 13, 243, 273–274, 277–278, 284, 299; accumulation, 295; Chinese, 435; corporations, 61; developmentalism, 245–246, 443; economy, 396; globalisation, 195; hegemony, 243; ideology, 243, 383; interests, 13, 273, 284; Malay, 40; market, 295–296, 404 Capitalist class, Bumiputera, 440; Malay, 40 Carburetor Dung, 418 Cash, economy, 145 Cash crop, farmers, 42 Castells, Manuel, 195 Categorisation(s), 415; racial, 160–161 Category, 3, 29, 41, 157; biological, 110; constitutional, 3; cultural, 8, 27; ethnic, 9, 23, 28, 30, 35, 42, 45, 131, 135, 157n3, 160–161, 171, 436, 482; gender, 8; identity, 6, 29, 46, 160; ideological, 8, 35; indigenous, 7, 29, 35, 39, 41–42, 71, 79, 171; language, 43; occupational,

Index 276; political, 160; primordial, 2, 8, 9–10; racial, 2, 8, 10, 12, 33, 35, 128, 353, 482; race as, 8; refugee, 326, 336; sexual identity, 212; social, 259 Catholic church, 45, 47; priests, 173; translations, 88n4 Catholicism, 396 CBGB club, 418 Cekik (Ridhwan), 300 Celebes Sea, 154 Censorship, 116; East India Company, 88; government, 306 Central Intelligence Agency, 243 Central Market, 302 Ceremonial rituals, 444 Cerpen2 underground (Faisal and Azman Hussin), 300 Certeau, Michel de, 196 Césaire, Aimé, 434 Chains, multinational, 193, 195 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 388 Cham, refugees, 323; Muslims, 323 Chambert-Loir, Henri, 71, 79–80 Champa, Vietnamese invasion of, 323 CHAMPSEA, see Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia Chandrabhanu, 446 Change(s), constitutional, 358; cultural, 352, 368; economic, 25, 61, 256, 349, 354, 359, 431; political, 256, 260–262, 264, 356; social, 61, 253, 256, 451; sociocultural, 358–359, 370; socioeconomic, 359 Chatty, Dawn, 330, 342 Chaudhuri, Amit, 60, 87 Cheah Boon Kheng, 440 Chew, Jon, 401 Cheyfitz, Eric, 61 Chi, Christina, 187 Chia, Lucille, 70 Chief(s), indigenous, 141; Kayan, 146; Kelabit, 135, 143–146; Malay, 436, 452–454, 459–461, 465, 472–473; Ngurek, 139, 142, 146; Orang Asli, 454, 458 Chief ministers, Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 282 Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia, 115n5 Child marriage, 114 Chin, refugees, 318, 321, 324–325

Index China, 89; communist, 245; government, 235; and missionaries, 89; trade, 62, 141 Chinese, 2, 5, 35–36, 38, 47, 83, 168, 172, 195, 208, 221, 245, 321–324, 335, 376, 393, 400, 453, 458–459, 463–464, 466, 471, 482; books, 88; business, 453, 464; capitalists, 435; church, 335; cosmopolis, 69–70; culture, 70; elite, 43; diversity, 76; heritage, 161; hybridity, 70–71; identity, 41, 43; as immigrants, 245; labour, 435; language, 43–44, 64, 68n2, 69, 76, 79, 88–89, 192; leaders, 458; literary tradition, 69; Malayan, 245; media, 208; merchants, 69, 91, 467; middlemen, 90, 435; migrations, 69; musicians, 447; networks, 69–70; and New Economic Policy, 440–441; politicians, 172; printing, 88–89; publishing, 70, 88; Sabahan, 160–161, 174; in Sarawak, 351, 360; singers, 208; and Southeast Asia, 69–70; teachers, 88–89; texts, 68n2, 69–70; trade, 70; traders, 42, 85, 457–458, 460; translation, 88; translators, 84; urban, 36; values, 36; writer, 84; writing, 69; youth, 254 Chinese circulations (Tagliacozzo and Chang), 70 ‘Chinese, Malays, Indians and others’, 35, 38–39 Christian(s), 108n1, 172, 173n16; evangelisation, 87; evangelism, 90; and Iban, 354; indigenous, 171; magazine, 88; proselytisation, 89; publications, 73; tracts, 72, 88–89, 91 Christian missionaries, 61, 88, 93, 95, 354, 433; ban on, 88; and East India Company, 7, 88, 93, 95; and Islam, 90; soldiers, 61 Christianity, in Asia, 90; conversion to, 44, 90; evangelical, 90; and Iban, 354 Chronicles, court, 81 Chua Beng Huat, 296 Chua, Dennis, 403 Chua Hang-Kuen, 10, 207–227 Chulia, 83; merchants, 83, see also Tamil Muslim Church, 46, 424; Catholic, 45, 47; Chinese, 335; congregations, 134; Methodist, 241; metropolitan, 90; Seventh Day Adventist, 241 Church reef, 163

503 CIA, see Central Intelligence Agency Cinema(s), 297, 388, 390, 402, 407, 450; ban on, 391; Malay, 372, 406 Cinematic, representation, 390 Circulation, of texts, 66, 70–71, 82, 95 Citizen(s), 2, 6, 16, 31–32, 40, 155, 159, 167, 171–172, 175, 273, 277, 280, 284, 325, 340, 342, 367, 377–378; Malay, 35; non-Muslim, 396n7; Philippine, 167; Singapore, 34 Citizenship(s), 33, 35, 169–170, 233, 236, 246, 320, 324, 336–337, 484; and Bajau, 156, 159, 161, 167, 169, 171–172; contestation of, 246; and ethnicity, 33; equality, 35; and nation-state, 236, 484; privileges, 171; and race, 33; refugees, 337 Civic nationalism, 33 Civil court, 283 Civil rights, 262; movement, 235; in United States, 235, 243, 434 Civil society, 14, 93, 250, 260, 263, 278, 284, 317, 320, 323; Islamist, 13, 273; movement, 108; organisations, 110, 260, 278, 309; and refugees, 326; and women, 108, 110, 113, 260 Civilisation, European, 432; Western, 242 Civilisational Islam, see Islam Hadhari Civilising process, 17, 429–435, 439, 443, 448–449, 473–474 Clammer, John, 25 Class, 18, 34, 48, 199, 241, 425, 435, 464, 472; capitalist, 40, 440; colonial, 84; contradictions, 244; divisions, 35; elite, 84; and ethnicity, 48; ideology, 243; middle, 17, 39–40, 45, 47, 116, 120, 174, 256–257, 413, 417–418, 420, 423, 441; precolonial, 435; relations, 32; ruling, 4, 274; social, 26, 28, 32, 35–36, 46, 333, 435–436, 472; socioeconomic, 2, 5; struggles, 5; systems, 435; working, 16, 106, 209–210, 256, 287, 408 Classification(s), ethnic, 12, 41, 43, 133, 137, 353, 482; primordial, 12 Clerics, religious, 441 Climate justice, 250 CMIO, see ‘Chinese, Malays, Indians and others’ Coalition, Islamist, 265 Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, see Bersih Coca-Cola, 197, 397

504 Coexistence, multiethnic, 237 Cohn, Bernard, 61, 70, 72, 75 Cold War, 243, 437 Collaboration, cultural, 448 Collective solidarity, 31 Colonial, 15, 32, 36, 40–44, 59, 72, 75, 77, 85, 96, 113, 132, 139, 144, 161, 244, 251, 349, 430, 432–433, 482; apparatus, 75, 95; capitalism, 59, 71, 95, 435; culture, 434; discourses, 61, 70; economy, 274, 276; education, 233, 251; elites, 84; government, 43, 252, 436, 438; history, 128; language, 434; Malaya, 468; methodology, 430; patronage, 95; plantation, 274; policy, 436–437, 439; political economy, 41; power, 9, 90, 95, 127, 148, 232; powers, 90, 232; racialism, 240; rulers, 245, 436; scholars, 86; subject, 61, 71, 94; systems, 82, 85, 94; violence, 433; warfare, 437 Colonial expansion, French, 433 Colonial knowledge, 7, 61–62, 70–71, 75–77, 82, 87, 95; and East India Company, 95; European and, 7, 70, 82; Penang and, 77 Colonial legacy, 2, 4, 12, 14, 434, 439; British, 4 Colonial rule, 7, 61, 70–71, 93, 115, 148, 240, 245, 353, 378, 435, 439, 449, 473; European, 245; in Southeast Asia, 353 Colonial society, 61; Asian, 63 Colonial state, 17, 76, 95, 148, 429–431, 435, 438, 472; British, 429 Colonialism, 7, 34, 71, 94, 239–240, 242, 431, 433, 449; agency, 71, 435; African–Asian response to, 240; and Bajau, 173; British, 14–15, 42, 61, 349, 482; European, 33, 61, 232, 235, 240, 244, 383; French, 433; internal, 433, 439; and nation, 34; and printing, 87; and Orientalism, 90; and racism, 241; resistance to, 232, 433; and translations, 61; Western, 375 Colonialism and its forms of knowledge (Cohn), 61 Colonisation, cultural, 232; European, 232, 434 Colonised, culture, 71; representation of, 63 Commercial, interaction, 69; interests, 185, 200; radio stations, 420, 422; writers, 308 Commodity exchange, 69, 431

Index Communal, 13, 111–112, 119, 244–245; consensus, 209; privileges, 274; problems, 274; values, 398 Communication, 29, 42, 64–65, 74–75, 84, 94, 165, 188–190, 424, 450, 453; international, 15; networks, 32; social, 71; technology, 28; transnational, 483 Communism, 240–241, 244; Third World, 243 Communist, 242–243; China, 245; guerrillas, 437–438, 446; insurgencies, 444; movement, 244 Communist Party of Malaya, 252, 437 Communist Party (United States), 241 Community, Asian, 35; consensus, 9, 127–128, 147–148; conservation, 166; cultural, 262–263; ethnic, 47, 482; forest, 137; Iban, 356, 362; immigrant, 129; Indian, 278; indigenous, 15, 17, 35, 42, 284, 431, 443, 448, 458, 471–472; industrial, 40; Kadazan-Dusun-Murut, 156, 162; leadership, 108; local, 67, 89, 107, 160, 163–166, 277–278, 337, 342–344; Long Peluan, 131, 137; Malay, 37, 39, 46, 376, 393, 441; marine, 157n3; migrant, 24, 344; minority, 17; multiethnic, 129, 139; Muslim, 89, 215, 222; Myanmar, 14, 329; national, 31; non-Malay, 33, 35; non-Muslim, 33; political, 39, 244, 246; resources, 118; Rohingya, 340, 343; rural, 253, 354; slave, 454; Temuan, 446; urban, 14, 294; working-class, 106 Community management, natural resources, 156, 160, 165 Community use zones, 165–166 Company, global, 197, 200; logging, 129; multinational, 195; non-Malay, 38; recording, 425 Complementarity, 112; gender, 8, 105–106, 110, 114, 117–118, 121; sexual, 8, 105, 117 Complexity, 3–4, 6, 46; ethnic, 38, 41, 482; and hybridity, 4; of modernity, 351; of sexuality, 211 Concept(s), of culture, 5, 23–27, 49–50, 296 Concubine(s), female, 453 Conflict(s), 18, 47–48, 139, 358, 471; environmental, 285–286; ethnic, 2, 18, 41, 48–49; European, 62; identity, 11, 28, 212, 223, 337; indigenous, 62; Kelabit, 148; and Orang Asli, 437–438,

Index 458, 472; racial, 2, 38, 49, 254; and refugees, 321, 325, 343; societal, 1–2; in Southeast Asia, 62; student, 253, 255; Sunni–Shia, 117 Conformist writing, 307 Cong, Moizzis R., 261 Congregation(s), church, 134; religious, 112 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 243 Congress of Indonesian Women, see Badan Kongres Wanita Indonesia Connell, Raewyn, 399, 399n8 Conquest(s), foreign, 82; of Melaka, 232 Consciousness, national, 15, 49, 317, 319, 375; political, 114, 356, 358; race, 241, 244–245; religious, 244; transnational, 240–241 Consensus, 165; communal, 209; community, 9, 127–128, 147–148 Conservation, bureaucratisation of, 167; community, 166; environmental, 154, 156, 159, 162–166, 168, 170, 175, 279; zones, 168 Conservatism, cultural, 309 Consociational politics, 249, 260 Consociationalism, 18, 48 Constantino, Renato, 31 Constitutional, 440; agencies, 5; categories, 3; changes, 358; cultural, 131; privileges, 35 Construction, identity, 49, 482 Constructivism, 481, 483 Constructivist theory, 30, 49, 191–192, 482–483 Consultancy, environmental, 283 Consumer(s), 10, 40, 47, 183–184, 186, 188–193, 195, 199–200, 294, 303, 305, 310; culture, 298, 397; market, 190; power, 190; resistance, 196; society, 298 Consumers’ Association of Penang, 47, 279 Consumerism, 257, 296, 298, 309 Consumption, 189–190; cultural, 296, 364, 370, 415, 482; food, 187; identity, 443; imperial, 70; local, 82; modern, 112; of music, 309, 413–416, 420, 423–424; tourism, 185–186, 194–195 Containment, intellectual, 264 Contestation(s), 5, 166, 371, 382; of boundaries, 67; of citizenship, 246; cultural, 427; identities, 4, 6–7, 34, 47, 484; and Islam, 210; of nationhood, 369; political, 34, 245, 260; rock music,

505 425; of territory, 138; societal, 1–2; sociocultural, 5 Contradictions, class, 244 Control(s), border, 154; political, 62, 141, 435 Convention on Biological Diversity, 159–160, 164n9 Conventions, literary, 83 Conversion(s), to Christianity, 44, 90; to Islam, 35, 172n16, 173, 223, 288, 323, 442; Islamic, 442; religious, 82; and translation, 66, 82 Cooperation(s), political, 282; South–South, 234, 238 Cooperative principles, 108 Cooperatives, rural, 108 Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security, 162, 164n9 Cornell University, 452 Corporate, capital, 29; sovereignty, 60 Corporate interest(s), Asian, 10, 183; Western, 10, 183 Corporation(s), capitalist, 61; and political parties, 258; transnational, 148 Corpus, literary, 69 Corruption, 117–118, 295, 443 Cosmopolis, Arabic, 7, 59, 65–67, 69n3, 71, 77, 80, 94; Chinese, 69–70; cultural, 64–67, 69–70, 80–81, 94; Islamic, 69n3; of language, 7, 59, 64–65, 70, 80–81, 94; linguistic, 59, 64, 70, 77, 80–81, 94; Persian, 7, 59, 67, 69n3, 71, 77, 80, 94; Sanskrit, 7, 59, 65–66, 71, 77, 80, 94; Sinographic, 59, 69–70 Cosmopolitan, 59; Calcutta, 83; culture, 70; film music, 16, 367, 370, 372, 375; identity, 59, 95; intimacy, 375; Kuala Lumpur, 294; language, 82; Malay polities, 80; Malay world, 84, 95, 383; Melaka, 78, 323; music, 16, 368, 372–373, 383; P. Ramlee as, 368, 370–371, 375, 379, 383; polity, 323; Straits Settlements, 7; vernacular, 66–67, 71, 82, 84, 91 Cosmopolitanism, 7, 81–82, 397; aesthetic, 371, 383 Countercultural, artists, 422; movement, 296, 298 Counterculture, 13, 293, 295–296, 298–299, 310; ideas, 13, 293 Counter-hegemonic, 234–235; discourses, 1, 4; ideas, 4, 11; movement, 11;

506 narrative, 195, 262, 382, 387; social movements, 1, 11 Country trader(s), 61, 73–74 Court(s), Brunei, 141; chronicles, 81; civil, 283; literature, 67; Melaka, 68, 80; sharia, 283; society, 432 Court of Directors (East India Company), 62 Covid-19 pandemic, 10, 266, 278, 309 Crane, Hart, 240 Crawfurd, John, 76–77 Creative Enterprise, 299, 303 Creative industries, development of, 294 Creative resistance, 10, 183, 185, 193, 195, 198 Crime action, films, 303, 403 Crises, economic, 12, 267 Critical, agency, 1; writing, 307 Critique, cultural, 239; postcolonial, 242 Cronyism, 440, 443 Cross-cultural marriage, 160 Crown colony, Sarawak as, 15, 349, 363 Crush, Jonathan, 430 ‘Crusoe’s Journal’ (Walcott), 60, 94 CTI-CFF, see Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security Culinary history, 187 Cultivators, agricultural, 460 Cultural, 5, 9, 25–26, 28–29, 32, 38–42, 44, 48, 50, 65, 69–72, 81–82, 85, 94, 118, 137, 159, 162, 186, 209, 301, 351, 360, 369–370, 390, 397, 414, 441; activism, 12–13, 249, 260, 267; affinity, 324, 353; anthropology, 50; authority, 61, 376; boundaries, 7, 95; capital, 15, 27, 199, 333, 337, 342, 427; category, 8, 27; change, 352, 368; collaboration, 448; colonisation, 232; community, 262–263; conservatism, 309; construction, 131; consumption, 296, 364, 370, 415, 482; contestation, 427; cosmopolis, 64–67, 69–70, 80–81, 94; critique, 239; development, 4, 77, 277; difference, 6, 23, 110, 171n13, 187; discourses, 13, 24, 27, 31, 39, 47, 105–106, 231–232, 293, 295, 332; diversity, 106, 240; dominance, 171; economy, 84; erasure, 235; ethnocide, 432; exchange, 7, 29, 47, 232, 234, 393; festivals, 112; geography, 59, 62n1, 70, 95; hegemony, 5, 27; heritage, 47, 349, 391; history, 7, 16, 75, 367–368, 383;

Index hybridisation, 28; hybridity, 406; ideas, 310; identity, 6, 23, 28, 31, 33, 45, 47, 131, 184, 187, 342, 375, 392, 432, 435, 452, 470; imitation, 65; interaction, 46, 65, 426; intermediary, 31, 93, 199–200; intimacy, 375; knowledge, 26, 59, 337; legacy, 352, 383; media, 424; mobility, 67; modernity, 352; narrative, 376; nationalism, 371; norms, 7; organisations, 243; politics, 35, 46, 154, 156, 250, 355, 371, 415; policy, 18, 37, 39–40, 376n14, 377, 432, 440–441; power, 65; practices, 2, 4, 237, 352, 375, 377, 382, 391, 424–425; practitioners, 2, 482, 484; preservation, 16, 367–368, 380; products, 31, 296, 298; production, 415; racism, 434; relations, 6, 23, 49, 63; representation, 6, 23, 26, 354; resistance, 295–296, 310, 424; scholars, 388; stereotypes, 36; struggles, 198; sustainability, 424; symbols of, 25; system, 27; technology, 17; text, 377; traditions, 393; transformation, 6, 26, 62, 131, 349, 363; values, 26–28, 184, 415, 418, 426, 470 Cultural contestations (Zawawi), 174 Cultural diplomacy, American, 243 Cultural identity, 6, 23, 28, 33, 131, 392; and food, 184, 187; indigenous, 432; Islamic, 392; Malay, 47, 435; Orang Asli, 432, 452, 470; and refugees, 342 Cultural policy, 432 Cultural studies, 1–2, 4–6, 24, 198–199, 242; and knowledge, 5; Thai, 27 Culture(s), 1, 4, 6, 31, 45–46, 106, 192–193, 233, 237, 241–242, 302, 309–310, 333, 335–336, 340, 350–352, 405, 423–424, 433, 471; African American, 243; American, 16, 397; Arabic, 113, 116, 216; ban on, 391; black, 239, 434; British, 16, 24; Chinese, 70; colonial, 434; colonised, 71; concept of, 5, 23–27, 49–50, 296; consumer, 298, 397; cosmopolitan, 70; Dayak, 41; economy, 84; and ethnicity, 23; Eurasian, 47; European, 70; food, 10, 183, 185–187, 194–195, 197, 199–200; foreign, 382; gay, 207, 210; and government, 16, 367, 370; history of, 24; hybrid, 402; Iban, 354–355, 359n2, 363–364; and ideas, 26; and identity, 6, 23, 27–28, 40, 50, 111, 195, 200, 258, 390; indigenous, 431–432;

Index and Islam, 107, 111, 114; Kelabit, 133–134, 137–138, 148; Kelantan, 389, 394; knowledge of, 25, 84, 187; and language, 23, 25–26, 28, 67, 75, 333, 433–434, 483; literary, 87; local, 41, 184, 194–195, 333, 335; Malay, 36, 39–40, 76, 84–85, 94–95, 111, 253, 371, 377, 390–391, 406, 440, 472; Malay world, 95; mass, 296–297; material, 28, 44, 437; Middle Eastern, 375; modernity, 352; multicultural, 323; music, 380, 414–415; Muslim, 113, 116, 375; Myanmar, 339; national, 16, 31, 34, 367–368, 370–371, 375, 377, 379–383, 388, 433, 440–441; national music, 368; Ngurek, 137–138, 148; non-Malay, 39, 377; non-Muslim, 39; Orang Asli, 438, 447, 451, 473; P. Ramlee, 367, 375; plural, 7; political, 12, 65, 250, 263, 267, 280, 295, 440; popular, 2–3, 5, 12–13, 15–16, 251, 262–263, 267, 295–297, 308, 350, 354–355, 363–364, 370, 376n14, 379, 391, 423; postmodern, 296; and power, 27, 46; print, 8, 87–88, 90, 95–96; and race, 27; racialist, 239; reading, 297, 302; and religions, 111; Semai, 17; in Southeast Asia, 6–7; Temuan, 444; Thai, 27; un-Islamic, 391; Western, 371, 375, 379; writing, 448; youth, 12, 262, 370–373, 379, 394 Curtin University, 258 Customary land(s), 129, 137, 285, 288; law, 111 Customary rights, native, 156, 443 D Dain Said, 387, 389, 393, 400, 402, 405, 405n13, 406, 408 Damas, Léon, 434 Damnweather, 416, 418 Damya Hanna, 305n6 Dance(s), 44, 352, 355, 373–374; Bajau, 158, 168; music, 415; rituals, 390; traditional, 158 Dance drama(s), 390–392 DANIDA, see Danish International Development Agency Danish International Development Agency, 279 Danova, Tony, 189 DAP, see Democratic Action Party Dapur Jalanan Kuala Lumpur, 261

507 DARA, see Pahang Tenggara Regional Development Authority Dari Tanjung Malim ke KLCC (Fdaus), 301 Darul Arqam, 441 Darvel Bay (Teluk Lahad Datu), 157–159, 170 Darwin, John, 62 Dataran Shah Alam, 301 Dataran Square, 264 Davolio, Federica, 189 Dawama, 304 Dayak, 35, 38, 41–42, 44–45, 359; conversion to Christianity, 44; culture, 41; education, 44; identity, 44; and modernisation, 44; myths, 44; as native, 35; non-Muslim, 41; political parties, 43; population, 43; representation of, 43; tradition, 44; urban, 44; and urbanisation, 44 Dayak–Malay relations, 42 Dayang Ubong, 140 Dayung, 447 ‘Dayung’, 447 DeBernardi, Jean, 90 Debt slave(s), 435–436, 461 Debt, slavery, 117n7, 436 Decline, environmental, 13 Decolonisation, aesthetics, 236, 245; African–Asian, 236, 239, 243–244, 246; politics of, 239 Decolonising knowledge, 474 Deep Purple, 372 Definition, ethnic, 2 Defoe, Daniel, 94 Deforestation, 275, 279, 284, 447, see also Forest(s) Degradation(s), environmental, 250, 274, 279 Deleuze, Gilles, 193, 198, 402–404 Democracy, 49, 253, 260, 264 Democratic, 264; government, 351; legislature, 358; liberal, 281; politics, 282; space, 1, 4, 11 Democratic Action Party, 265–266, 280, 302 Democratic government, modernity, 351 Democratisation, 190 Dentan, Robert Knox, 436–437, 452, 454, 470–471 Department of Aborigines, 438 Department of Environment, 275 Department of Islamic Affairs Selangor, see Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor

508 Department of Orang Asli Affairs, see Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli Department of Orang Asli Development, see Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli Dependence, economic, 118 Dependency, 5; male, 115 Depoliticisation, 12, 249, 251, 256, 263–264 Detainees, political, 253 Deterioration, of natural resources, 275 Deterritorialisation, Orang Asli, 436, 442–445 Detribalisation, 438, 473 Development(s), 3, 34, 37, 200, 273, 275, 350, 388, 398, 429, 431–432; agencies, 165; agricultural, 15; of creative industries, 294; cultural, 4, 77, 277; of discourses, 2, 350, 388, 391, 430; economic, 4, 31, 37, 239, 243, 274, 278, 355, 391; human capital, 18, 48, 257, 283; and Iban, 354–363; ideology, 44; indigenous, 444; industrial, 154; and Islam, 13, 274, 283; Islamic, 283; Kelantan, 391–392; and Malays, 18; and nation-building, 432; national, 257, 350, 356; of national identity, 39; and New Economic Policy, 4, 37, 432, 440, 473; and Orang Asli, 429, 438–439, 441, 444, 447–448, 469; participatory, 429; philosophy, 278; policy, 12, 186, 274, 276–277, 279, 288, 354; political, 4, 358; politics of, 273, 288; policy, 12, 18, 40, 186, 274, 276–277, 279, 288, 354; private sector, 13; property, 45; rural, 277–278, 363, 391; in Sarawak, 349, 351, 357–364; social, 4, 31, 351, 431; socioeconomic, 46; state-led, 37, 176; sustainable, 165, 275, 277, 279; technological, 40, 190; tourism, 183–185, 192, 196; urban, 47, 284, 353, 357, 361 Developmental, planning, 274, 276–277, 279, 283 Developmentalism, 17, 431, 444; capitalist, 245–246, 443; and Orang Asli, 442–443, 446, 473; postcolonial, 439, 444, 473 Developmentalist state, 432, 439–440, 444 Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 8, 13, 293, 295, 300, 302, 304, 306–307, 379, 450 Dewan Negara, 233 ‘Di Mana Kan Ku Cari Ganti’ (Where Will I Find a Replacement), 382

Index Diap, 446, 448 Diaspora(s), 81, 237, 483; Acehnese, 324; African, 236, 239; Bugis, 162; Hadhrami, 66; women, 115 Dictionary, English, 73 Dictionary (Bowrey), 74, 95 Difference(s), cultural, 6, 23, 110, 171n13, 187; ethnic, 34, 38, 114, 472; gender, 112; language, 62, 94; production of, 352; racial, 32–33; religious, 171, 243, 472–473; social, 26; socioeconomic, 39 Digital, capital, 10, 183, 190; narrative, 200 Dikir barat, 387, 389, 391–392, 397–398, 408; music, 397; performer(s), 397 Diniyah Putri, 113 Disadvantage, economic, 397 Discourse(s), 2–3, 6–7, 18, 198, 208, 214–218, 242, 302, 310, 481, 483; alternative, 1–2, 4, 11, 189, 213–214, 218, 485; antiblack, 11, 14, 231, 233, 233n1, 239; Bajau, 157n3; colonial, 61, 70; counter-hegemonic, 1, 4; cultural, 13, 24, 27, 31, 39, 47, 105–106, 231–232, 293, 295, 332; development, 2, 350, 388, 391, 430; economic, 39; environmental, 275; on ethnicity, 7; ethnonational, 371, 376–377; Eurasian, 47; Eurocentric, 233; European, 70; feminist, 106; gay rights, 213; gender, 107, 110, 122; hegemonic, 1; heritage, 197; heteronormative, 207, 210, 212–213, 218–219, 221–223; of history, 8, 128; homophobic, 208–209; human rights, 222; of identity, 1, 3, 5, 28, 31, 46, 154, 175–176, 184, 191, 197; of indie-ness, 17, 413–415, 420; indigenous, 429; intellectual, 302; on Islam, 13, 273; Islamic, 8, 10, 13, 105–106, 207, 210, 212–213, 215, 218, 222–223, 273; of knowledge, 27; of Malayness, 76, 371, 440; modernity, 351; multiculturalism, 28; music, 13, 293; and narratives, 481, 483, 485; of nation, 47, 175, 371, 440; of nation-making, 371; of nation-state, 17, 440; national, 47, 482; of nationalism, 9, 46, 153; and Orang Asli, 429, 444, 452; of Orientalism, 7, 59, 75; political, 39, 249, 263; postcolonial, 17, 429; and power, 184; public, 14–15, 42, 295, 299, 317–319, 324–326; of race, 7, 240; racialised, 484; racialist, 11, 14, 231; racism, 239; on refugees, 14–15,

Index 317–322, 324–326, 329–331, 341; religious, 222; of resistance, 198, 200; social, 39; subaltern, 45; vernacular, 176 Discrimination, against immigrants, 245; positive, 10; against refugees, 14, 322, 324, 326, 344 Diskopi, 261 Disraeli, Benjamin, 61 Distribution, economic, 261; of wealth, 49 Diversification, livelihood, 167 Diversity, 293, 295; Chinese, 76; cultural, 106, 240; ethnic, 14, 34, 160, 175, 237, 360; gender, 210; linguistic, 87; in publishing, 308; religious, 237; of sexuality, 211; unity in, 18, 48, 237, 484 Divide and dissent, 18, 484 Divine, 296n6; messages, 219; names, 399; order, 212–215, 218; punishment, 281; reward, 284; ruler, 32 Division(s), class, 35; ethnic, 18, 30, 38, 48, 400; ideological, 114, 243–244; racial, 38 Division, ideology of, 18, 48 Division of labour, gender, 26 Document(s), migration, 81 Documentary film, 262, 367–368, 377, 379–383 Domestic violence, 117, 120–122 Dominance, cultural, 171; male, 108–109 Douglas, R.S., 132, 143, 146 Downward mobility, 344 Draft Development Plan, 274 DuBook Indo, 306 DuBook Press, 294, 299–301, 303–308 Dukun (Shaman), 389 Dulmen, van, 72 Dunkerley, David, 185 Duruz, Jean, 187 Dusun Lotud, 160 Dusunic, language, 160 Dutch, 62, 68n2, 72, 83, 113, 115, 146n3, 147, 147n3; East Indies, 87, 113; empire, 62; journalist, 244; language, 72–73, 79, 87, 113; rule, 114; scholarship, 73; texts, 68n2 Dutch Borneo, 9, 127–128, 134, 146 Dutch East Indies, 87, 113 Dyer, Samuel, 89 Dylan, Bob, 422 E Earth Summit, 273–274

509 East India Company, 60–61, 72–73, 86, 95; in Asia, 88; bureaucracy, 60; and Britain, 76; in Calcutta, 83; and censorship, 88; and Christian missionaries, 7, 88, 93, 95; and colonial knowledge, 95; empire, 60, 64, 95; employees, 85; fleets, 73; in India, 65, 75, 87; legacy, 61; officials, 61, 72, 74–77, 82, 91, 93; patronage, 60, 72–73; in Penang, 62, 76, 88, 435; and Siami, 84–85; and Singapore, 84, 435; in Southeast Asia, 65; and Straits Settlements, 435; in Sumatra, 75; trade, 60; and translations, 75; writers, 61, 85, 91; and writing, 60–62, 77, 85–86, 95 East India House, 60 East Indies, Dutch, 87, 113 East Kalimantan, 159, 170 East Malaysia, 388; indigenous population, 35, 443 Eastern Sabah Security Zone, 170 Eaton, Richard, 65, 67 Economic, 4, 7–8, 32, 38, 43, 69, 72, 110, 112–113, 119–120, 183–187, 195, 266, 276, 284–285, 298, 344, 390, 404, 426, 435–436, 441–443, 472; capital, 190; change, 25, 61, 256, 349, 354, 359, 431; crises, 12, 267; dependence, 118; development, 4, 31, 37, 239, 243, 274, 278, 355, 391; disadvantage, 397; discourses, 39; distribution, 261; elites, 296; ethnocide, 432; exploitation, 28; growth, 40, 246, 257, 273, 363; ideology, 432; insecurity, 45; interests, 161, 443; institutions, 117; interests, 161; liberalisation, 277; marginalisation, 439; migrants, 326; mobility, 256; modernisation, 37; policy, 4, 18, 37, 171–172, 256, 276, 376–377, 432, 442; power, 49, 122, 351; produce, 115; production, 111; productivity, 107, 115; rationalism, 196; relations, 26, 110, 167, 231; resources, 27; stability, 107; structures, 40, 235, 274, 276; system, 299; theory, 199; transformation, 4, 349, 354, 431 Economic autonomy, 106, 108, 116; and women, 106, 108 Economic force(s), hegemonic, 183–184 Economic inequality, 37, 264; and New Economic Policy, 37 Economic networks, transnational, 138 Economic Transformation Programme, 278

510 Economic underdevelopment, Sarawak, 350 Economist, The, 392 Economy, 4, 10, 30, 38, 183, 186, 194–195, 253, 256, 318, 354, 357, 432; agricultural, 256; and Bajau, 166; Bumiputera, 253, 276, 443; capitalist, 396; cash, 145; colonial, 274, 276; cultural, 84; and ethnicity, 38; export-oriented, 276; local, 166, 186–187; market, 12, 267, 296, 352, 442; national, 433; newly industrialising, 274; Orang Asli, 434; plantation, 437; political, 5, 18, 34, 41, 48, 434; religious, 90; rural, 187, 253; Sarawak, 357, 362; shadow, 319; Singapore, 30; urban, 46; and women, 105; world, 145 Ecosystem, 165, 189; marine, 165 Ecotourism, 165 Edo, Juli, 454, 470–471 Education, 253, 258, 262, 265, 267, 306; and Bajau, 171; British, 233, 435; and Bumiputera, 38; colonial, 233, 251; Dayak, 44; English, 435; French, 433; and Iban, 354, 359; institutions, 351; Islamic, 113; Malay, 40; markets, 259; national, 254; and New Economic Policy, 37; Orang Asli, 17, 439, 442, 445, 448–449, 470; policy, 251, 253–254; and refugees, 322, 343–344; in Sabah, 165; Sarawak, 361; and social mobility, 256–257; and stateless people, 159; systems, 33, 254, 266, 433; university, 252; vernacular, 435; Western, 113; and women, 107–108, 112–113, 115, 118–119; and young people, 12 Educational, movement, 114; reform, 254 EIA, see Environmental impact assessment Eighth Malaysia Plan, 277 Eisenstadt, S.N., 351 Eksotikata, 294 El Shirazy, Habiburrahman, 302 El Yunusiyah, Rahmah, 113 Election(s), federal, 266; general (1969), 253–254, 276; general (1990), 282; general (1999), 260; general (2008), 12, 249, 263, 265, 277, 301; general (2013), 280, 284; general (2018), 171–172, 250, 265–266, 278, 280; Sabah state (2020), 172; state, 172; voting age, 266 Election manifesto, Pakatan Harapan, 265; Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 284

Index Electoral, politics, 245, 250, 282; reforms, 12, 249 Electra House, 357 Eleventh Malaysia Plan, 274 Elias, Norbert, 429, 432–433 Elite(s), Asian, 244; Bumiputera, 443; Chinese, 43; colonial class, 84; economic, 296; Eurasian, 46; local, 161; Malay, 39, 93; Muslim, 43; political, 18, 34, 39, 43, 48, 266–267, 296, 484; Sabah, 172n16; Singapore, 35; Thai, 34 Elitism, male, 116 Emergency, 252, 355, 437, 473 Emperor(s), Ming, 69 Empire(s), 8, 24, 96; British, 59–60, 77, 90, 234; Dutch, 62; East India Company, 60, 64, 95; French, 62; in India, 77; Japanese, 245; Melaka, 323; Western, 240 Empire and information (Bayly), 71 Employees, East India Company, 85 Employment, 84, 186, 196; informal, 318; quotas, 38; and refugees, 324, 344; state, 171; wage, 112; and women, 118–119; youth, 265, 267 Empowerment, environmental, 279; self-, 93, 107, 218; and women, 8, 105–107, 122 Engels, Friedrich, 92, 307 England, 73–74, 84; Malay manuscripts in, 72 English, 83, 463; books, 74; dictionary, 73; education, 435; interpreters, 73; language, 17, 24, 40, 43–44, 68, 73–74, 76–79, 86–88, 91, 94, 108n1, 109, 192–193, 208n2, 218, 236n2, 301n2, 303, 331, 413, 416, 420–421, 426, 435, 449n1, 454n2; libraries, 68; literary studies, 24; literary works, 68; translations, 73, 76–79, 86–87, 109, 193, 236n2, 449n1, 454n2 Enlightenment, ideology, 238; post-, 90; rationality, 242 Enterprise(s), global, 118; social, 108 Entertainment industry, 369 Environment, 3, 13, 273, 275, 278–279, 392; and Islam, 277, 280–281, 283–284, 287–288; and spirituality, 13, 274; urban, 317–318 Environmental, 163, 274, 277–278, 283, 285, 288; action, 13; activism, 3, 12–13; activists, 279–280, 284, 286; awareness, 274–275, 281; conflicts, 285–286;

Index conservation, 154, 156, 159, 162–166, 168, 170, 175, 279; consultancy, 283; decline, 13; degradation, 250, 274, 279; discourses, 275; empowerment, 279; movements, 482; problems, 273, 447; policy, 274–275; privileges, 273, 447; social movements, 275; standards, 13, 274–275, 280 Environmental impact assessment, 275, 285 Environmental justice, 156, 159–160, 162, 167–168, 175; global, 9, 153, 156; and indigenous people, 162; movements, 9, 153; principles of, 167 Environmental Movement of Malaysians, see Gerakan Alam Sekitar Rakyat Malaysia Environmental non-governmental organisation, 164, 260, 275, 278–280, 285; networks, 280 Environmental Protection Society Malaysia, 279 Environmental protest(s), 156; Orang Asli, 285–286 Environmentalism, 1, 4, 11, 481 Environmentalist, 278; activism, 12; movements, 13, 278–280 Epistemes, 71; Eurocentric, 232 EPSM, see Environmental Protection Society Malaysia Equality, citizenship, 35; gender, 8, 105–106, 108, 114, 117; racial, 33, 38; sexual, 8, 105, 110, 112, 117, 121; social, 107, 118, 122; and women, 108 Erasure, cultural, 235 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 471 Essentialism, Islamic, 108; linguistic, 107 Essoussi, Leila, 190 Estates, industrial, 32 Ethical values, 26 Ethiopia, 81, 238 Ethnic, 27, 40, 42, 63, 209, 274–275, 324, 434, 447, 472, 483; assimilation, 187; boundaries, 42, 50, 95, 135; category, 9, 23, 28, 30, 35, 42, 45, 131, 135, 157n3, 160–161, 171, 436, 482; community, 47, 482; complexity, 38, 41, 482; conflicts, 2, 18, 41, 48–49; definition, 2; difference, 34, 38, 114, 472; diversity, 14, 34, 160, 175, 237, 360; divisions, 18, 30, 38, 48, 400; groups, 6, 9, 23, 28, 38–39, 44, 49–50, 128, 131, 137–139, 155, 157n3, 160–161, 170, 322–323, 332, 349–350, 353, 434, 442, 482;

511 harmony, 49; identity, 2–3, 24–25, 28, 32, 34–36, 39, 43–44, 49–50, 128, 148, 161, 173, 210, 342, 436, 482; integration, 49; interaction, 3, 26; kinship, 237; minority, 8, 28, 245, 431, 482; paradigm, 6, 18, 23, 48; pluralism, 18; political parties, 14, 38; politics, 4, 35, 43; policy, 133, 482; primordialism, 482–483; relations, 28, 34, 43, 49; stereotypes, 41, 44, 245; superiority, 49; systems, 43; transformation, 3; unity, 111 Ethnic classification(s), 12, 41, 43, 133, 137, 353, 482; British, 41 Ethnicity, 1–2, 18, 23, 28, 32–33, 37–38, 43, 48–50, 131, 138, 154n2, 171n13, 187, 209, 222, 481–482; in Asia, 33; in Borneo, 41, 129; and citizenship, 33; and class, 48; and culture, 23; discourse on, 7; and economy, 38; and government, 12, 30, 35, 42–43, 49, 133, 160, 482; and identity, 3, 6, 24, 27–29, 31, 33–34, 38, 139, 482; ideology of, 50; in Indonesia, 49; and Islam, 2; Kelabit, 131–133, 137–139, 148; and New Economic Policy, 440; and Orang Asli, 454; politicisation of, 171n13, 322; relational, 28, 138, 147; in Sabah, 160, 173n16; in Sarawak, 41, 45, 131, 139, 360; in Singapore, 33, 36, 49; in Southeast Asia, 49; and state, 33; and tradition, 30, see also Race Ethnocide, cultural, 432; economic, 432 Ethnoculturalism, in Myanmar, 33 Ethnography, 24; postmodernist, 430 Ethnonational discourses, 371, 376–377 Ethnonationalism, 34, 48; Malay, 440, see also Nationalism Ethnonationalist(s), 93; Malay, 253, 321, 432; narratives, 16, 367–368 Ethnoracial, nationalism, 236, 246; politics, 233; tensions, 237 Ethnoreligious, 280; ideology, 33 Ethnoreligious nationalism, 208–210, 236; United Malays National Organisation, 209–210 Ethnoscape, federal, 176 ETP, see Economic Transformation Programme Eurasian(s), 447; culture, 47; discourse, 47; elite, 46; heritage, 46–47; identity, 47; journalist, 244–245; in Melaka, 46; Portuguese, 7, 39, 45–47, 482

512 Euro-American modernity, 350 Eurocentric, 242; discourses, 233; epistemes, 232 Europe, 91, 242, 244, 432; and Asia, 64, 95; Malay books in, 72, 87; modernity in, 352; Occupy movement in, 264; refugees in, 320; translation in, 72, 95 European(s), 7, 81, 90, 92; and Asian texts, 64, 72, 79, 86; civilisation, 432; and colonial knowledge, 7, 70, 82; colonial rule, 245; colonialism, 33, 61, 232, 235, 240, 244, 383; colonisation, 232, 434; conflicts, 62; culture, 70; discourse, 70; history, 432; in Indian Ocean, 59, 72; interpreters, 62; knowledge, 70; languages, 68, 72, 75, 91; in Malay world, 74, 84, 95; merchants, 93; missionaries, 91; modernity, 353; music, 354; nationalities, 45; Orientalism, 7, 87; patronage, 85, 93–94; in Penang, 62, 83; popular music, 354; power, 71; racism, 240, 245; rule, 85, 245; states, 63; and Thailand, 34; traders, 83; and translation, 63; translators, 62; vernacular, 91 Evangelical, 88–89; Christianity, 90; missionaries, 7; Orientalism, 90; orientalist, 90 Evangelical movement, in Britain, 90 Evangelisation, Christian, 87 Evangelism, Christian, 90 Everett, Sally, 10, 183–205 Exchange(s), 3, 119; barter, 459; book, 302; commodity, 69, 431; cultural, 7, 29, 47, 232, 234, 393; food, 118, 169n11; global, 62, 90; of ideas, 63; intellectual, 71; interaction and, 95; of language, 63, 67; networks of, 63, 82; political, 393; value, 443 Expansion, imperial, 59 Expert knowledge, 156, 165 Exploitation(s), 404, 443; economic, 28; of land, 279, 284 Export-led industrialisation, 257 Export-oriented economy, 276 Expression(s), linguistic, 334; literary, 65 Ezra Zaid, 422 F Facebook, 189, 197, 199–200, 265, 297, 297n1, 300, 305, 322 Factionalism, ideological, 242

Index Fadli Al-Akiti, 394–395, 395n5, 397 Fahmi Reza, as film-maker, 262 Faisal Tehrani, 299–300 Fajar (Dawn), 252 Fanon, Frantz, 433, 471 Fantastic film(s), 16, 387, 389, 408 Farhan Zulkefly, 307 Farish A. Noor, 128 Farmer(s), 190, 253, 257; cash crop, 42; female, 115; Long Peluan, 137; Minangkabau, 107; productivity, 362; Sarawak, 362; women, 107, 115 Farming, livelihood(s), 107; rice, 107, 135, 362; in Sarawak, 134–135, 354, 362; seaweed, 163, 166, 169; and women, 108, 115, 118, 166, see also Agriculture Farouk Yahya, 72 Fashion, 13, 293, 353, 397 Fata Hotel, 357 Fathi Aris Omar, 307 Fauziah Ashari, 303, 305n6 Fdaus Ahmad, 301 Federal, apparatus, 43; bureaucratisation, 176; elections, 266; ethnoscape, 176; governments, 172, 175, 273, 282–283, 390–391, 443; politicians, 43–45; politics, 253; system, 283 Federal Constitution, 171, 173, 440 Federated Malay States, 435 Federation of Indonesian Women’s Associations, see Perikatan Perhimpunan Istri Indonesia Federation of Malay Students in the Peninsula, see Gabungan Pelajar Melayu Semenanjung Federation to Save the Teluk Muroh Heritage Beach, 280 Female(s), 117, 220, 223, 395, 405, 407, 482; concubines, 453; farmers, 115; infanticide, 121–122; in Islam, 109, 113, 118–119; kinship, 134; in Malay cinema, 406, 408; Orang Asli, 453; performers, 392; representation, 109; sexuality, 116; shaman, 389; siblings, 115, 119; slaves, 453, 461; slavery, 117, 122; students, 113–114; traders, 115 Feminism, indigenous, 8, 105–106, 115; plural, 105 Feminist(s), activism, 106; activists, 307; discourses, 106; magazine, 113; methodology, 117; Muslim, 121; philosophy, 106; politics, 117; Southeast Asian, 118; third wave, 106

Index Feminist theory, first wave, 105; second wave, 105; Western, 8, 105 Festival Belia Putrajaya, 308 Festival(s), 115, 208n1, 302, 308; cultural, 112; film, 389, 402; food, 185; music, 447 Feudal, Malay polities, 431, 434, 460, 472–473; Malay world, 461; order, 40; politics, 461, 473; state, 434 Feudal society, Malay, 40, 431, 434, 460–461, 472–473 Feudalism, 432; Malay, 92 Filipino(s), Bajau as, 171; indigenous peoples, 172 Film(s), American, 389, 394, 397, 403; buddy, 389, 394, 400; crime action, 303, 403; documentary, 262, 367–368, 377, 379–383; fantastic, 16, 387, 389, 408; festivals, 389, 402; foreign, 370; gangster, 16, 387, 389–390, 395–397, 400–401, 403–404; horror, 388–389; indie, 295; indigenisation of, 185; industry, 371; kickboxing, 16, 387, 389–390, 401–402, 408; and Mahathir Mohamad, 388; Malay, 369n1, 371–372, 406n14; Malay world, 369; masculinity in, 16, 387, 389, 394–395, 397–399, 405–408; producers, 372; religious, 394, 396, 403, 408; in Singapore, 368, 381; and women, 400; and young people, 306 Film genre(s), hybrid, 389, 394, 402 Film-maker(s), 294, 377, 381, 388, 392, 484; Fahmi Reza as, 262; P. Ramlee as, 376 Film music, 16, 367, 370–372, 375, 389; cosmopolitan, 16, 367, 370, 372, 375; hybrid, 367, 371; Malay, 372; P. Ramlee, 16, 367, 371–372 Financial crisis, Asian, 257 Financial institutions, international, 276 Firefly Association, see Persatuan Kelip-Kelip Fires, forest, 275 Firms, global, 184, 197 First Malayan Plan, 274 First wave, feminist theory, 105 Firth, Raymond, 25 Fisheries, 156, 164; sustainable, 165 Fisheries Department (Sabah), 166 Fishing, Bajau, 157–159, 164–165 Fixi Novo, 299 Fleets, East India Company, 73

513 Flooding, Kelantan, 285 Floyd, George, 239 Foerste, Marie, 190 Folk, beliefs, 405; knowledge, 430; songss, 359 Folk, 418 Folk models, of identity, 29 Folklore, Iban, 355; Kelabit, 16, 387, 389, 408; Kelantan, 16, 387, 389, 408 Folks, Jeffrey, 242 Folktales, Malay, 405 Fonarow, Wendy, 415 Fontaine, Jean de La, 91 Food, 10, 39, 69, 107–108, 118–119, 131, 135, 162, 168, 183, 190, 197, 261–262, 319, 339, 362, 397, 437, 461–465, 483; Asian, 10; business, 193, 198; consumption, 187; and cultural identity, 184, 187; culture, 10, 183, 185–187, 194–195, 197, 199–200; exchange, 118, 169n11; festivals, 185; global brands, 188, 196–197, 200; heritage, 184, 193, 195, 200; history of, 191, 197; and identity, 10, 184–185, 187, 191–195, 197, 199–200; indigenisation of, 185; industry, 188; local, 10, 183–187, 193–200; marketing, 184–185, 189, 197; Myanmar, 340; Penang, 187; policy, 186; producers, 10, 183, 185, 200; production, 106, 185; provider, 184, 191–193, 196, 199–200; and social media, 188, 192–193, 196, 198–200; tourism, 10, 183–188, 191–200; tradition, 184; traditional, 10, 183–184, 194, 200; Western, 194, 199 Food Not Bombs, 261 Forced migrants, 330 Foreign, 170; artists, 372; capital, 443; conquest, 82; cultures, 382; films, 370; investors, 391; language, 456; music, 16, 367–369, 377, 380, 424; policy, 243; population, 62; refugees as, 15, 329, 334; royal lineage, 80; students, 257 Foreign policy, United States, 243 Forest(s), 168, 276, 456; community, 137; destruction, 447; fires, 275; indigenous people and, 444, 447; Kelabit, 137, 141n1; Kelantan, 285–287, 401; Long Peluan, 141n1; and Orang Asli, 429, 431, 444, 446–448, 469; Pahang, 443; products, 147, 158; Sarawak, 361–363;

514 sustainability of, 284, see also Deforestation Forest reserve(s), 285–286, 446; Balah, 285; Batu Papan, 285; Gunung Rabong, 285; Hulu Galas, 285; Nenggiri, 285; Perias, 285–286; Pertak, 446; Stong Selatan, 285–286; Sungai Berok, 285; Sungai Betis, 285 Forestry Department (Kelantan), 285–287 Formation, identity, 1, 4–5, 7, 25, 184, 231, 233, 245, 484 Forrest, Thomas, 172n14 Foucauldian, 5 Foucault, Michel, 14, 27, 110, 317, 319, 350, 439 Foulcher, Keith, 240 Foundations, normative, 1 Fourth Malaysia Plan, 276 Fractured plural society, 18, 48, 484 Francisation (Frenchification), 433 Frankfurt School, 196 Franklin, Aretha, 422 Free Deserters, 421 Free speech, 260 Freedom of assembly, 260 Freedom of information, 260 French, 34, 62, 83, 433–434; Black, 450; colonial expansion, 433; colonialism, 433; education, 433; empire, 62; language, 79; state, 433 Friends of the Earth Activist Association, see Persatuan Aktivis Sahabat Alam Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific, 286–287 Friends of the Earth of Malaysia, see Sahabat Alam Malaysia Fugazi, 417–418, 484 Funerary rituals, 402 Furnivall, J.S., 36 Fusion band(s), 17, 429, 446 G Gabungan Pelajar Melayu Semenanjung, 252 Gagasan Sejahtera, 265 Gaines, Kevin, 237, 242 Galih Ballang, 146 Gallop, Annabel The, 71–73, 91 Gandhi, Indira, 118 Gangster film(s), 16, 387, 389–390, 395–397, 400–401, 403–404 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 352 Gay(s), in Britain, 210; culture, 207, 210; marriage, 219

Index Gay identity, Malay Muslim, 221 Gay rights discourses, 213 GDP, see Gross domestic product Geertz, Clifford, 29, 483 Gender(s), 1–3, 5, 8, 10, 16, 28, 106, 109, 113, 209, 209n4, 215, 387, 389, 395, 398, 481–482; and adat, 111; category, 8; complementarity, 8, 105–106, 110, 114, 117–118, 121; differences, 112; discourses, 107, 110, 122; diversity, 210; division of labour, 26; equality, 8, 105–106, 108, 114, 117; and identity, 3, 211, 408; in India, 109; inequality, 117; and Islam, 8, 39, 105–106, 108–110, 117–118, 121, 209; justice, 117, 121; and morality, 107; narratives, 106; and nationalism, 114; in Pakistan, 109, 117; politics, 425; relations, 39, 107–110, 116–118, 122; segregation, 116; and sharia, 117 General Operations Force, see Pasukan Gerakan Am General use zones, 165, 168–169 Generation Y, 294 Genocide, 28 Genting casino, 197 Geography, cultural, 59, 62n1, 70, 95 Geographies of knowledge, 59, 70, 95 George Town, 46–47 GERAK, see Gerakan Alam Sekitar Rakyat Malaysia Gerakan Alam Sekitar Rakyat Malaysia, 279–280 Gerakan Rakyat Hentikan Pencemaran Bauksit, 279 Gerakbudaya, 299 GERAM, see Gerakan Rakyat Hentikan Pencemaran Bauksit Ghana, 238 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 382 Giddens, Anthony, 350 Gilroy, Paul, 239, 242 ‘Gingong’, 452 Giroux, Henry, 198 Gladney, Dru C., 38 Global, 4; capital, 352; capitalism, 209, 370; companies, 197, 200; enterprises, 118; environmental justice, 9, 153, 156; exchange, 62, 90; firms, 184, 197; food brands, 188, 196–197, 200; history, 63; interaction, 63; markets, 209; multinationals, 185; music, 368;

Index networks, 9, 89; racial hierarchies, 233, 245–246; relations, 349; warming, 275 Global power, non-Western, 245 Global South, 237; neoliberalisation of, 232; solidarity, 231 Globalisation, 4–5, 15, 31–33, 66, 93, 183–184, 232, 245, 351, 415, 443–444, 483; capitalist, 195 Globalised, media, 28, 40 Gob (stranger, outsider), 453–460, 463, 471, 474 Goethe, J. W. von, 68 Goh Beng-Lan, 27, 45–47 Gold Coast, see Ghana Gomez, Terence Edmund, 376n14 Gopeng, 436 Governance, 131, 133, 349, 431; imperial, 60; indigenous, 429; Islamic, 441; Orang Asli, 438, 454; reform, 281; Sarawak, 349–350, 356; state, 472; systems, 356 Government(s), 2, 13, 18, 32, 48, 156, 170, 172, 198, 262, 273–274, 277–279, 282–283, 293, 306–309, 390–391, 481; and affirmative action, 37; and Bajau, 158; Barisan Nasional, 12, 262–264, 308; Bengal, 88; British, 252, 263, 283; Brooke, 132, 139; Brunei, 139, 142, 145; bureaucracy, 174; and business, 38; censorship, 306; China, 235; colonial, 43, 252, 436, 438; and culture, 16, 367, 370; democratic, 351; and ethnicity, 12, 30, 35, 42–43, 49, 133, 160, 482; federal, 172, 175, 273, 282–283, 390–391, 443; and identity, 3, 34, 36, 128; India, 60; Indonesia, 49; institutions, 156; and Islam, 122; Islamist, 13, 273; Kedah state, 282; and Kelabit, 8–9, 127–128, 139, 142–145, 147–148; Kelantan state, 12–13, 273, 275, 282–285, 287, 391–393; and Malays, 37–38; media, 299, 320, 322, 420; and New Economic Policy, 37–38, 40, 48, 133, 443; and Orang Asli, 286, 288, 436–439, 441, 443, 446, 473; Pakatan Harapan, 266, 309, 391n4; patronage, 304; Penang, 87–88, 282; Perak state, 282; Perikatan Nasional, 282, 391n4; policies, 33, 129, 186, 322; postcolonial, 438; propaganda, 40; radio stations, 355, 420; records, 87; and refugees, 14, 318, 320–324, 326; Sabah state, 160, 162, 166, 170,

515 173–175; Sarawak, 146, 351, 354–358, 360–362; Selangor state, 282, 301; and sexuality, 11; Singapore, 30, 34–35, 49; Southeast Asia, 33; Southeast Asian, 33; and students, 253–255, 257–258; subsidies, 294, 298, 304; Terengganu state, 282; United States, 238; by writing, 60; and young people, 12, 258–260, 263–264, 266, 295 Government Gazette, 88, see also Prince of Wales Island Gazette Government Transformation Programme, 278 Governmentality, 439 Govers, Cora, 49–50 GPMS, see Gabungan Pelajar Melayu Semenanjung Graham, Lawrence, 422 Gramedia, 306 ‘Grammar of the Malaian Tongue’, 73 Gramsci, Antonio, 27 Gramscian, 5 Great Flood, 444, 469 Greater India, 77 Greek, 81, 407n15 Green Assembly, 279–280 Green Day, 417 Green, Nile, 82, 90 Gretzel, Ulrike, 189 Gross domestic product, 183, 186 Growth, economic, 40, 246, 257, 273, 363; industrial, 277 Grunge, 303, 416, 419 GTP, see Government Transformation Programme Gua Musang, 284–287 Guattari, Félix, 193, 198 Gubra, 400n9 Guerrilla(s), communist, 437–438, 446; warfare, 252, 437, 470 Guided by Voices, 417 Gunung Rabong forest reserve, 285 Gunung Raja (Royal Mountain), 444–445 H Hadhrami, diaspora, 66 Hadi Khalid, 261 Hadith, 81, 107, 121 Hafizuddin Nasarudin, 285 Hage, Ghassan, 324 Haji Mahadi, 369n1 Hak anda & kuasa polis (Your rights and police powers), 262

516 Halal tourism, 187 Halim Yazid, 397 Hall, C. Michael, 185 Hall, Stuart, 24, 30–31 Hamba (Slave) (Akiya), 17, 429, 431, 452–454, 460, 472–473 HAMIM, see Hizb al-Muslimun Hamzah Hussein, 252 Han power, 69 Handel, Zev, 69 Hang Jebat, 389 Hang Tuah, 389 Hariry Jalil, 261 Haris Zuan, 12, 249–271 Harmony, ethnic, 49; racial, 33 Haron Din, 283 Harper, Tim, 438 Harrison, Brian, 89 Harrisson, Tom, 131 Hartley, John, 424, 426 Hasina, Sheik, 118 Hasmi Hashim, 297, 297n1 Hassan Karim, 254 Hatoss, Anikó, 331 Hatta Azad Khan, 392 Hawaiian, music, 371 Headman, Long Peluan, 143 Healing, 16, 387, 392, 403, 405, 407–408, 446–447 Health care, 107–108, 159; rural, 362n3; in Sarawak, 361, 362n3 Health Equity Initiatives, 322 Heath, Joseph, 298, 310 Hebrew, 91 Hechter, Michael, 433 Hegemonic, 133, 241; authorities, 425; discourses, 1; economic forces, 183–184 Hegemony, of Barisan Nasional, 250; of capital, 196; of capitalist developmentalism, 243; cultural, 5, 27; Malay, 473; Muslim, 43; national, 5; state, 472; United Malays National Organisation, 282 Heggestuen, John, 189 Henderson, Joan C., 187 Hendrix, Jimi, 372 Hennion, Antoine, 420 Henry Gurney School, 396 Heritage, 10, 128, 168, 196, 483; Bajau, 161; Burmese, 343; Chinese, 161; cultural, 47, 349, 391; discourse, 197; food, 184, 193, 195, 200; indigenous,

Index 194; literary, 84; local, 41, 47; Penang, 46; Portuguese Eurasian, 46–47; tourism, 184 Heryanto, Ariel, 296 Heteronormative, discourses, 207, 210, 212–213, 218–219, 221–223; identity, 220; marriage, 215, 220; morality, 215, 219; sexuality, 215; social contract, 208, 209n3, 222–223 Heteronormativity, 207, 209n4; Islamic, 207, 209–210, 212, 215, 218–220, 222–223 Heterosexual(s), 209; marriage, 219 Heterosexuality, 398, see also Sexuality Heyes, Cressida J., 107 Hidayah cinta (Ilham), 303 Higher education, quotas, 38; sector, 232, 257, see also University Higher Education Ministry, 258 Highland Burma, 30 Hii, Evelyn, 419 Hijab cinta (Rafidah), 303 Hikayat, Malay, 83, 93; Persian, 67 Hikayat Abdullah (Munshi Abdullah), 92, 92n6, 93, 95 Hikayat bayan budiman (Tale of the wise parrot), 68, 72, 95 Hikayat Galilah dan Daminah (The story of Galilah and Daminah), 91 Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain, 81–82 Hikayat Mareskalek (The story of Mareskalek), 68n2 Hikayat perintah negeri Benggala (An account of the state of Bengal), 83 Hikayat Sri Rama, 72 Hill, A.H., 92–93 Himpunan Sejuta Belia, 308 Hindi, 335, 394; melodrama, 394 Hindu, patriarchy, 118; texts, 392 Hindu-Javanese, texts, 67 Hindustani, language, 91; music, 370 Hishamuddin Rais, 255, 261 Historian(s), 31, 79; nationalist, 31 Historical, narratives, 77, 264, 349, 375, 483; transition, 350; values, 423 Historiography, 63 History, 11, 24, 63–64, 67, 77, 79–80, 92, 95, 129, 236, 238, 242, 326, 388, 484; of Arabs, 66; Bajau, 172; Bandung conference, 246; colonial, 128; culinary, 187; cultural, 16, 75, 367–368, 383; of cultural exchange, 7; of culture, 24; discourses of, 8, 128; European, 432; of

Index food, 191, 197; global, 63; of ideas, 62, 71; indigenous, 8–9, 127–129, 431, 449, 452; intellectual, 62, 110; Kelabit, 9, 127–129, 134, 136–139, 147–148; and language, 75; of leftist movement, 262; Long Peluan, 129, 148; Malay, 39–40, 76, 79, 86; Malay world, 85; Malayan, 92; of modernity, 231; music, 414, 423; and myth, 80; national, 8–9, 17, 32, 39, 127–129, 148, 251, 368, 376, 444; nationalist, 128; natural, 70; Ngurek, 137; oral, 8, 71, 127–129, 319; Orang Asli, 17, 431, 449, 452; Philippine, 31; printing, 87; of popular music, 353; postcolonial, 9, 37, 127, 148; of refugees, 319, 323; of religion, 237; of translation, 7, 59; Sarawak, 8–9, 15, 127–128, 134, 136–139, 147–148, 349; Southeast Asian, 353; of student politics, 255; texts, 262 History Channel Asia, 368, 377 Hitler, Adolf, 307 Hizb al-Muslimun, 282 HMV, 369 Ho, Engseng, 79–80 Hobsbawm, Eric, 30 Hoffstaedter, Gerhard, 14, 317–328 Hokkien, 89 Hollywood, 424 Hollywood Reporter, 402 Homelessness, 261 Homophobic, discourses, 208–209; social contract, 210; violence, 208 Homosexuality, 220; and Islam, 208, 210, 213–215, 218, 220–222, see also Sexuality Hong Kong, gangster films, 394, 396; printing, 89 Hood, Made Mantle, 15, 349–366 Hooker, M.B., 86 Hooker, Virginia Matheson, 86 Horror film(s), 388–389 Hose, Charles, 132, 142, 144 Hospitality industry, 183, 186, 190 Household subsistence, 169n11 Housing, 12, 32, 117, 233, 265, 267, 274, 448; in Sarawak, 362 Houtman, Frederik de, 72 Hudud, 283, 391, 391n3 Hulu Galas forest reserve, 285 Human, agency, 351; capital, 18, 48, 276, 283; interaction, 26–27; movement (circulation), 69

517 Human insecurity, and Orang Asli, 439 Human rights, 34, 108, 121, 222, 250, 260, 262, 278, 324; discourses, 222; law, 281; organisation, 262, 322; struggles, 34 Humanism, liberal, 244 Humanitarian, action, 324; agencies, 341; non-governmental organisations, 156; principles, 109 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 355 Hunter-gatherers, 42 ‘Hush’, 422 Hussein Mahomed, Sultan, 84 ‘Hutang’ (Indebtedness), 451 Hybrid, community, 24, 29; cultural traditions, 393; culture, 402; film genres, 389, 394, 402; film music, 367, 371; groups, 482; ideas, 72; identity, 7, 59, 95, 160; knowledge, 59, 62, 87; language, 93; music, 16, 368; populations, 135; societies, 69; Straits Chinese, 46; translators, 7 Hybridisation, 49, 482; and Bumiputera, 36; cultural, 28; and identity, 5, 33; linguistic, 72 Hybridity, 1, 3; Chinese, 70–71; and complexity, 4; cultural, 406; in Kelantan, 391, 393; poet of, 94; Straits Settlements, 82, 95 Hyde, Thomas, 73–74 I Iban, 15, 41, 145, 349–351, 353–354, 357–358, 360; agriculture, 362; ancestral land, 349, 360, 364; and Brooke Raj, 15, 354, 363; and Christianity, 354; community, 356, 362; culture, 354–355, 359n2, 363–364; and development, 354–363; and education, 354, 359; folklore, 355; identity, 15, 41–42, 350, 354–355, 363; institutions, 354; land, 360; language, 15, 43–44, 349, 354–356; migrations, 363; as minority, 15; and missionaries, 354; and modernisation, 354; and modernity, 15, 350, 354–355, 360, 363–364; music, 349–350, 354–356, 359, 361–364; musicians, 364; and music scene, 354; narratives, 15, 349, 364; nation-building, 349–350, 355–356, 359–360, 364; and nation-state, 15, 349; and nationalism, 359, 364; oral tradition, 355; and political parties, 43;

518 politics, 355; popular culture, 350, 354–355, 363–364; popular music, 15, 349–350, 354–356, 359, 363–364; Radio Sarawak, 354–355, 360, 363; singers, 363; songs, 15, 349–350, 353–361, 363–364; songwriters, 359, 361, 363–364; urban, 364; and urbanisation, 354; youth, 355, see also Sea Dayak(s) Ibn Khaldun, 277 Ibn Muqaffa, 91 Ibrahim, Prophet (Abraham), 396 Ibrahim bin Ismail, 72 Ibrahim Kandu, 7, 76, 82–85, 95 Ibrahim Yaakob, 251 Ibu Mertua-ku (My Mother-in-Law), 382 Icon, nationalist, 376–377, 382 Idea(s), 26–27, 63, 93–94, 424; counter-hegemonic, 4, 11; counterculture, 13, 293; cultural, 310; and culture, 26; exchange of, 63; history of, 62, 71; hybrid, 72; and identity, 3, 6, 23, 28; indie, 301, 310, 427; Islamic, 107, 174; linguistic, 75; misogynistic, 116; movement (circulation) of, 7, 59, 64, 70–71, 87, 95; and nations, 31; networks, 7, 69; normative, 65; of P. Ramlee, 367–368; production of, 7; and race, 33; of resistance, 309; of sexual complementarity, 105; and songs, 358; of sovereignty, 154; translation of, 66; youth, 302 Identity, 481, 483; Arab, 66; Asian, 35, 39, 231, 245; Bajau, 9, 153, 156, 158, 160–161, 166, 168, 173, 175–176; Bidayuh, 41; black, 434; Buddhist-Burman, 33; Bugis, 161; Bumiputera, 156, 440; category, 6, 29, 46, 160; Chinese, 41, 43; conflicts, 11, 28, 212, 223, 337; construction, 49, 482; consumption, 443; contestation, 4, 6–7, 34, 47, 484; cosmopolitan, 59, 95; cultural, 6, 23, 28, 31, 33, 45, 47, 131, 184, 187, 342, 375, 392, 432, 435, 452, 470; and culture, 6, 23, 27–28, 40, 50, 111, 195, 200, 258, 390; Dayak, 44; discourse(s) of, 1, 3, 5, 28, 31, 46, 154, 175–176, 184, 191, 197; ethnic, 2–3, 24–25, 28, 32, 34–36, 39, 43–44, 49–50, 128, 148, 161, 173, 210, 342, 436, 482; and ethnicity, 3, 6, 24, 27–29, 31, 33–34, 38, 139, 482; Eurasian, 47; folk models of, 29; and food, 10,

Index 184–185, 187, 191–195, 197, 199–200; formation, 1, 4–5, 7, 25, 184, 231, 233, 245, 484; and gender, 3, 211, 408; and government, 3, 34, 36, 128; and heterogeneity, 33; heteronormative, 220; hybrid, 7, 59, 95, 160; and hybridisation, 5, 33; Iban, 15, 41–42, 350, 354–355, 363; and ideas, 3, 6, 23, 28; ideological, 3; indigenous, 17, 30, 33, 35, 45, 161, 371, 429, 431–432, 444; Indonesian, 296; integration of, 221; interaction with, 23, 38, 481; and Islam, 173; Islamic, 40, 154, 156, 175, 392; Jahai, 453; Kacin, 30; Kadazan-Dusun-Murut, 9, 154, 171n13; Kelabit, 8, 127–128, 131, 133–134, 137–139, 147–148; Kelantanese, 397; and knowledge, 131; and language, 29, 32–33, 306; local, 10, 28, 33, 82, 171n13, 183–184, 333; maintenance, 484; Malay, 35–36, 39, 46–47, 82, 160, 222, 370, 435, 440, 442; in Malay world, 7; Melaka, 82; Melanau, 44; minority, 3, 30; and modernity, 231; Muslim, 10, 218, 220–222, 396; Muslim Malay, 221; and narratives, 14, 16, 139, 147, 331, 333, 335, 337, 342, 440, 484; and nation, 39, 46, 440; national, 1–2, 9, 28, 30–32, 35, 39, 350, 353, 376, 383, 484; nationalist, 246; nationhood, 34; native, 9, 30; Ngurek, 134; non-heteronormative, 10–11, 222; non-Malay, 246; Orang Asli, 13, 429, 432, 439, 442, 444, 449–452, 470, 473; and Otherness, 31; pan-Asian, 39; political, 3–5, 36, 138, 173, 371; and political elites, 34; politics, 160, 244, 296, 484; and popular culture, 2–3; and popular music, 15; Portuguese Eurasian, 46–47; postcolonial, 231, 233, 245–246, 375; and power, 30–31, 483–484; primordial, 3–4; and primordialism, 483; principles of, 28; and race, 244; racial, 34–35, 234, 241–242, 244–245; Rawa, 436; refugee, 15, 320, 326, 329, 331, 333, 335, 339–344; relational, 23, 131; religious, 213–214, 217–218, 221–222, 244–245, 381; representation of, 46; Rohingya, 335–337, 341–343; Semai, 453; sexual, 3, 10–11, 207–208, 211–213, 217–218, 221–223; Shan, 30; Singapore, 35, 39; Singaporean, 35; social, 65, 111; in

Index Southeast Asia, 6, 28; subnational, 49; Temuan, 453; and tourism, 184, 192, 195, 197, 200; and tradition, 30; transformation, 5–6, 31, 49, 481, 484; transition, 187; transnational, 2; urban, 47; and young people, 258–259 Ideological, apparatus, 5, 432, 441; categories, 8, 35; divisions, 114, 243–244; factionalism, 242; identity, 3; narrative, 1; primordialism, 18, 481 Ideology, 25; capitalist, 243, 383; class, 243; development, 44; of division, 18, 48; economic, 432; Enlightenment, 238; of ethnicity, 50; ethnoreligious, 33; indigenous, 115; Islamic, 106, 108, 115, 122, 209, 280; Islamism as, 13, 273; Malay, 35, 112, 473; market, 442; nation-state, 11; national, 33, 35, 37; nationalist, 113; political, 13, 39, 80, 114, 273, 280; primordial, 33; reformist, 122; religious, 33; societal, 2; Southeast Asian, 114; traditional, 33 Ihromi, Tapi Omas, 116 Ikatan Muslim Malaysia, 308 Ilham Hamdani, 303 Illegality, and refugees, 14, 317, 321–322, 324, 326 Ilmu ketjantikan dan kesehatan sedjati (Putery Merdeka), 114 iM4U FM, 420 Imagination, metropolitan, 60 Imagined nation, 28 Imitation, cultural, 65 Immigrant(s), 5, 33, 172, 234, 319, 321, 330, 436; African, 12, 231–233, 245–246; Bajau, 161, 171; Chinese as, 245; community, 129; discrimination against, 245; from India, 435; labour, 435–436; Malay(s), 436, 454, 473; Mandailing, 436; non-Western, 234; Sabah, 158; in Southeast Asia, 70; Suluk, 171, see also Migrant(s) Immigration, 321; authorities, 330; detention centres, 321; officials, 321 Immigration Act, 321, 330 Imperial, consumption, 70; expansion, 59; governance, 60; networks, 90; rule, 96 Imperialism, 383; anti-, 234; British, 435; and translation, 61; Western, 93, 243 Import substitution industrialisation, 276 Inak Bongsu, 445 Indah, Mak, 446–448 Independence, Malayan, 438; political, 44

519 Independence struggles, and nation-state, 239 Independent, human rights organisation, 322; music producers, 377; musicians, 17, 294, 413, 415–416, 419, 446; publishers, 13, 293–314; publishing, 1, 3–4, 11, 13–14, 293–314; radio station, 17, 413–414, 420; record labels, 415, 417; Sarawak, 358, 361, see also Indie India, 67–68, 75–77, 81–82, 85, 88, 107, 117–118, 406; British in, 71, 435; East India Company in, 65, 75, 87; gender relations in, 109; government, 60; immigrant labour from, 435; and Malay world, 77; manuscripts, 77; Mughal, 67; music from, 370; Muslims in, 107; Persian manuscripts from, 67; presidencies, 60; printing in, 87, 89; texts from, 67; trade, 62 Indian(s), 2, 35–36, 38, 47, 83, 195, 233, 235, 246, 322, 335, 338, 482; community, 278; language, 88; law, 78; literature, 78; manuscripts, 77; Melaka, 75, 91; music, 15, 370; musicians, 447; religions, 78; Sabah, 155; soldiers, 91; teachers, 89; traders, 85 Indian Ocean, Europeans in, 59, 72; Melaka, 75, 91; tsunami, 275; world, 59, 66, 70, 72 Indian presidency, Penang as, 60, 87 Indianisation, of Southeast Asia, 64 Indie, 14, 293; artists, 414, 419, 423, 425; bands, 308, 417, 419, 421, 426–427; books, 295–299, 302–305, 305n6, 306–310; films, 295, 297; ideas, 301, 310, 427; intimacy, 417; literature, 306; movement, 421; music, 413, 415, 421, 425; practitioners, 416, 423; principles, 300; production, 413, 416, 420, 423–424; values, 416, 424–426; writers, 303–306; writing, 308, see also Independent Indie-ness, 296, 416, 418, 424–425; discourses of, 17, 413–415, 420 Indie publishing, 1, 3–4, 11, 13–14, 293–314; and young people, 294–295, 298, 305, 307, 310; and youths, 307 Indie rock, 17, 413–415, 420, 423–427; American, 417, 421, 425; bands, 417, 419, 426–427; Indonesia, 424–425; musician, 414, 421, 423–427 Indiepretasi, 372

520 Indigeneity, 1, 3, 10, 154, 371; Malay, 370; as primordial, 10, 154 Indigenisation, 5; of art, 185; of film, 185; of food, 185; of languages, 7; of music, 185; of texts, 7 Indigenous, agency, 9, 76, 87, 127, 429–430; anthropology, 430; art forms, 391; category, 7, 29, 35, 39, 41–42, 71, 79, 171; chiefs, 141; Christian, 171; conflicts, 62; cultural identity, 432; culture, 431–432; development, 444; discourse, 429; feminism, 8, 105–106, 115; governance, 429; heritage, 194; history, 8–9, 127–129, 431, 449, 452; identity, 17, 30, 33, 35, 45, 161, 371, 429, 431–432, 444; ideology, 115; interpreters, 74, 76, 83–84, 91, 132; knowledge, 70–71, 75, 82, 87, 474; land, 15, 364, 440, 443–444, 472; languages, 8, 43, 70, 77, 131; literature, 91; livelihoods, 443; Malays as, 36, 46, 435; minority, 5, 17, 42, 138, 431, 452; music, 353; non-Malay, 7, 35; Portuguese Eurasians as, 47, 482; print culture, 96; privileges, 35; resistance, 474; singer, 446; society, 75, 129, 471; storytellers, 17, 429–431, 473; storytelling, 430; texts, 69; translators, 7, 62, 82, 95; world, 87; writers, 7, 59, 94 Indigenous community, 15, 17, 35, 42, 284, 431, 443, 448, 458, 471–472; precolonial, 471 Indigenous group(s), Filipino, 172; Kelabit, 138; Sabah, 172; Sarawak, 351 Indigenous people(s), 148, 160, 447, 474; culture, 431; and development, 443; of East Malaysia, 35, 443; and environmental justice, 162; Filipino, 172; and forests, 444, 447; identity, 431; marginalisation of, 472–473; and nation-state, 471; oral history, 8–9, 127–128; Orang Asli, 436, 442, 444, 450, 472; representation of, 17, 429–430; of Sabah, 41–42, 154, 156, 161, 172, 482; of Sarawak, 8–9, 41–42, 44–45, 127–128, 138, 148, 349–351, 482; and states, 17, 349, 432, 471 Indigenous Peoples’ Network of Malaysia, see Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia Indigenous rights, 9, 153, 156, 160; movements, 9, 153, 156 Indirect rule, 76, 435

Index Indo-Persian, texts, 67 Indonesia International Book Fair, 307 Indonesia, 3, 11, 107–108, 115, 157n3, 162, 231–232, 234, 236, 238, 286–287, 303n3; Bajau in, 159, 161; ethnicity in, 49; government, 49; indie rock, 424–425; Islam in, 172; Konfrontasi, 355; mainstream publishers in, 306; middle class, 120; musicians from, 425; Muslims in, 3, 116; nationalists, 114; performing arts, 406; popular music, 356; publisher, 306; writers from, 306 Indonesian(s), 115, 154, 170, 240, 244; Bajau, 162; bands, 422; books, 306; identity, 296; intellectuals, 232; journalist, 232; language, 79, 113, 115n3; literary works, 366; modernity, 353; music, 354; nationalism, 33; nationalists, 113–114; novel, 302, 306; politics, 296; popular music, 15, 354, 422; publishing, 306; revolution, 114; self-rule, 110; student, 244–245; texts, 115n3; women, 113–114, 117, 121; writers, 232, 449 Indonesian Women, see Isteri Indonesia Industrial, 431; capitalism, 435; community, 40; development, 154; estates, 32; growth, 277 Industrialisation, 243, 296, 392; export-led, 257; import substitution, 276; post-, 108 Industrialised society, 296 Industry, 256–257; book, 293–295, 306, 309–310; entertainment, 369; film, 371; food, 188; media, 17, 413, 421; music, 425, 447; publishing, 300–301, 303, 306–307; tourism, 10, 183, 185–186 Inequality, 34; economic, 37, 264; gender, 117; social, 35, 264 Infanticide, female, 121–122 Informal, employment, 318; politics, 250; sector, 107, 318 Information order(s), 59, 61, 71–72, 75, 82; production of, 71 Information system(s), 14, 317, 320 Infrastructure(s), 32, 41, 274, 277, 281, 351, 391, 443 Inheritance(s), adat, 119n11; Batak, 117; Islamic, 109–110, 119, 122; land, 111, 117; law, 119n11; and women, 111, 117, 119, 119n11, 120n13 Insecurity, Bajau, 165–166; economic, 45; livelihood, 165; Orang Asli, 439; political, 45; refugee, 324

Index Instagram, 189, 197, 199–200, 305 Institut Terjemahan dan Buku Malaysia, 307 Institute of Language and Literature, see Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Institution(s), 94; economic, 117; educational, 351; government, 156; Iban, 354; international financial, 276; national, 33; Orang Asli, 440; of patriarchy, 109; political, 39; of polygyny, 110; refugee, 14, 317, 320; social, 117, 212, 350–351, 424; state, 5, 383, 471 Insurgency, communist, 444 Integration, 11, 207; ethnic, 49; of identity, 221; national, 400, 432; Orang Asli, 438–439, 441–442; refugee, 15, 329 Intellectual(s), 61, 64, 243; African American, 234; black, 433–434; containment, 264; discourse, 302; exchange, 71; history, 62, 110; Indonesian, 232; Malay, 36, 253; movement, 106; national identity, 31; organic, 252; public, 18, 48 Intellectualism, Sufi, 173 Interaction(s), 67, 198, 331–332, 484; across boundaries, 28; commercial, 69; cultural, 46, 65, 426; ethnic, 3, 26; and exchange, 95; global, 63; human, 26–27; with identity, 23, 38, 481; political, 426; refugee, 321, 325; social, 15, 29, 38, 343; societal, 2 Interest(s), Bumiputera, 443; capitalist, 13, 273, 284; commercial, 185, 200; corporate, 183; economic, 161, 443; social, 79 Intermarriage(s), 29, 42; Portuguese–Malay, 47 Intermediary, 141; cultural, 31, 93, 199–200; social media, 199–200 Internal colonialism, 433, 439 Internal migrations, 349 Internal Security Act, 255, 261, 264 International, aid, 243; business, 239; communication, 15; financial institutions, 276; Islam, 172–173; law, 330; media, 10; organisations, 90; relations, 82, 238; solidarity, 245; tourism, 186; tourists, 10, 186–188, 191, 193–195, 197–200; trade, 80, 239 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, 447

521 International Federation for Human Rights, 330 International Medical University, 258 International Society for Self and Identity, 484 International Union for Conservation of Nature, 285 Internationalism, 236; African, 237; left-wing, 235 Interpreter(s), English, 73; European, 62; indigenous, 74, 76, 83–84, 91, 132 Interreligious marriage, 160 Intimacy, cosmopolitan, 375; cultural, 375; indie, 417 Inventori Penyelidikan Sains Sosial 1980–2000 (Abdul Rahman and Nor Hayati), 259 Investors, foreign, 391 INXS, 421 Ipoh, 186 Iran, 441; manuscripts from, 67 Iranian Revolution, 441 Iraq, refugees from, 14, 317–318 I.R.S. Records, 417 ISA, see Internal Security Act Ishak Haji Muhammad, 251 Ishak Yussof, 276 Iskandar Shah, Raja, 323, see also Parameswara Iskandar Zulkarnain, 80–82, see also Alexander the Great and Secander Zulkarneini Islam, 6, 34, 40–41, 81, 90, 107, 110, 113, 171, 174, 207, 212, 273, 389, 396, 399, 403, 407, 438, 472; and adat, 8, 105–106, 110, 112, 118, 122; and Arabic language, 66; Bajau, 9–10, 156, 166, 171–172, 172n15, 173–176; and Brunei Malays, 173; bureaucratisation of, 9, 153, 171, 174–175; and Christian missionaries, 90; and contestation, 210; conversion to, 35, 172n16, 173, 223, 288, 323, 442; and culture, 107, 111, 114; and development, 13, 274, 283; discourse on, 13, 273; and environment, 277, 280–281, 283–284, 287–288; and ethnicity, 2; females in, 109, 113, 118–119; and gender, 8, 39, 105–106, 108–110, 117–118, 121, 209; and government, 122; and homosexuality, 208, 210, 213–215, 218, 220–222; and identity, 173; in Indonesia, 172; international, 172–173; in Kelantan, 13;

522 knowledge of, 116; and land, 281–282; and Mahathir Mohamad, 37, 441; and Malay ethnonationalism, 440; Malay nationalism, 40; Malayness, 44; male in, 118, 119n11, 209, 209n5; and marriage, 111–112, 122, 220; and national culture, 441; and Orang Asli, 435–436, 441–442; and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 210, 276, 283, 288, 391n3, 441; patriarchal, 116; political, 275, 280, 441; political ideology, 39; and politics, 106; reformist, 109, 115, 117, 122; representation of, 399, 403; in Sabah, 153, 172n16, 173; in Sarawak, 44; and sexuality, 8, 210, 212, 214–217, 220, 222; and Singapore, 172; slaves, 117n7; and slavery, 117, 122; in Southeast Asia, 67; and students, 252, 254; and Sufi, 389, 394, 396, 396n6, 400; and United Malays National Organisation, 210; and university, 441; women in, 105–109, 111, 116–117, 120–121, 220; and youths, 259 Islam Hadhari, 18, 48, 277 Islam translated (Ricci), 65 Islamic, 11, 110, 166, 273, 375, 392; activists, 13, 274; administration, 275, 283; authorities, 251; bureaucracy, 389n1; bureaucratisation, 171; conversion, 442; cosmopolis, 69n3; cultural identity, 392; development, 283; discourses, 8, 10, 13, 105–106, 207, 210, 212–213, 215, 218, 221–223, 273; education, 113; essentialism, 108; governance, 441; heteronormativity, 207, 209–210, 212, 215, 218–220, 222–223; ideas, 107, 174; identity, 40, 154, 156, 175, 392; ideology, 106, 108, 115, 122, 209, 280; inheritance, 109–110, 119, 122; justice, 281, 284, 391n3; knowledge, 172, 176, 284, 375; leaders, 441; leadership, 117, 173; legends, 81; monarchy, 35; movement, 441; mysticism, 72; norms, 281; novels, 297, 302–303, 310; organisations, 275; revivalism, 107; Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 441; poetry, 66; principles, 280–281; proselytisation, 173, 209, 441; publishers, 308; reform, 113; reformist, 173; scholar, 277; scholarship, 390; sect, 441; and sexuality, 214; society, 283; songs, 119; standards, 174, 284; state, 40, 174,

Index 280–281, 283; statecraft, 283; texts, 72, 82; transformation, 172; values, 283, 441; world, 66 Islamic law(s), 106, 110, 117, 120n14, 121–122, 215, 280, 283, see also Sharia Islamic Society, see Persatuan Islam Islamisation, 16, 387, 396n6, 403, 405, 408; of Arabs, 117; of Bajau, 172, 175; and Orang Asli, 441–442; and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 396n7; policy, 441; in Sabah, 171–175; and United Malays National Organisation, 396n7 Islamism, 276; as ideology, 13, 273; pan-, 239; and political parties, 276; as political ideology, 13, 273 Islamist(s), 174, 275, 280, 393; actors, 13, 273; civil society, 13, 273; coalition, 265; government, 13, 273; middle class, 174, 441; movement, 275, 280; political party, 283, 288 Isma‘il (Ishmael), 396 Ismail Arifin @ Lepat, 305 Ismail Hashim Yahaya, 307 Isteri Indonesia, 114 Istri Sedar, 114 ‘It Gets Better in Malaysia’, 208 ITBM, see Institut Terjemahan dan Buku Malaysia

J Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor, 299 Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli, 441–442 Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli, 441 Jahai, 453, 455, 462; identity, 453 JAIS, see Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor Jakarta, 87, 232, see also Batavia JAKOA, see Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli Jakun, 441–442 Jalal Hanaysha, 188 Jalan Ampas, 381 Jam, The, 421 Jamal Abdillah, 447 Jamaluddin Md. Jahi, 278 Jamil Khir Baharom, 208 Jaminan orang muda (Youth guarantee), 265 Jang ampat evangelia, 73 Jangin, 140 Japan, 69 Japanese Empire, 245 Japanese language, 79 Japanese occupation, 445; Malaya, 245

Index Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Kelantan, 279–280, 285 Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Pahang, 279 Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia, 284 Java, 74, 84, 118, 353, 392 Javanese, 33, 111, 114; adat, 110, 113; language, 68n2, 72, 80; linguist, 83; literature, 81; royal lineage, 460; texts, 67, 68n2; women, 116 Jawi script(s), 73–74, 78, 88, 91–92 Jazz, 239, 370–371, 419 Jedamski, Doris, 63 Jefferson, Gail, 331 Jelajah janji ditepati (Promises fulfilled tour), 265 Jenkins, Gwynn, 47 Jenks, Chris, 24–25 JHEOA, see Jabatan Hal Ehwal Orang Asli JKOAK, see Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Kelantan JKOAP, see Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Pahang JOAS, see Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia Jogho (The Champion), 393 Johannesburg, 275 Johor, 255, 435 Johor Bahru, 210, 221 Jolo sultanate, 158 Jones, Tom, 355 Jones, William, 77, 80 Journalism, 92, 426; music, 426; radio, 413–415, 424 Journalist(s), 238, 243, 294, 418; Dutch, 244; Eurasian, 244–245; Indonesian, 232; Pakistani, 244 Justice, 34, 84, 93, 117, 120, 253, 278, 450, 474; climate, 250; environmental, 9, 153, 156, 159–160, 162, 167–168, 175; gender, 117, 121; Islamic, 281, 284, 391n3; principles of, 117, 281; social, 49, 108; system, 261 K Kachin, identity, 30 Kad Pengenalan Malaysia, 159 KadazanDusun, 154, 154n1, 155, 160, see also Kadazan-Dusun-Murut Kadazan-Dusun-Murut, 9, 153–154, 160–161, 171–172, 175; and affirmative action, 154; communities, 156, 162; groups, 171–172; identity, 9, 154, 171n13; nationalism, 9, 153–154, 159, see also KadazanDusun and Murut

523 Kagayan, 161 Kahn, Joel S., 26, 32, 36, 39–40, 250, 353 Kajang, 42 Kaligau, 166 Kalimantan, 134, 161 Kamaluddin Muhammad, see Keris Mas Kamil Othman, 416, 419 Kampong Arqam, 441 Kampong Gadak, 442 Kampong Gerachi, 446, 448 Kampong Pertak, 446 Kampung Bunohan, 393 Kampung Serani, 45–47 Kant, Immanuel, 121 Kapikan reef, 163 Karangkraf, 307 Karim, Wazir Jahan B., 8, 105–125, 377 Karim Raslan, 401, 405 Kartini, Raden Adjeng, 113 Kasem, Casey, 416 Kassim Ahmad, 253 Kassim Masdor, 373 Kaum Muda (Young Faction), 251 Kayan, 42, 144, 147; chief, 146; songs, 359 KB1M, see Kedai Buku 1Malaysia KDM, see Kadazan-Dusun-Murut and KadazanDusun and Murut Keasberry, Benjamin, 91 ‘Keberkatan, Kemakmuran dan Kebajikan’ (Blessings, Prosperity and Welfare), 284 KECAP, see Persatuan Kelip-Kelip Kedah, 83, 255, 435; state government, 282 Kedai Buku 1Malaysia, 309 Kelabit, 8, 42, 129, 136, 140–143, 145–148; administration, 282–283; agency, 127–128, 140, 142, 146, 148; and British, 132; borders, 148; chiefs, 135, 143–146; conflicts, 148; culture, 133–134, 137–138, 148; ethnicity, 131–133, 137–139, 148; folklore, 16, 387, 389, 408; forests, 137, 141n1; history, 9, 127–129, 134, 136–139, 147–148; and government, 8–9, 127–128, 139, 142–145, 147–148; identity, 8, 127–128, 131, 133–134, 137–139, 147–148; as indigenous group, 138; kinship, 131, 134, 136, 138, 140, 147; land, 129, 133, 135–138, 148; language, 131–133; leaders, 132–133, 138–139, 142; markets, 146; marriage, 131, 134, 138, 140; migrations, 9, 127–128, 133, 135, 138–139, 147–148;

524 as minority, 144, 148; narratives, 8–9, 129, 131, 133–140, 142–144, 146–148; and Ngurek, 134, 136–141, 148; oral history, 127–129; peace-making, 127–128, 139, 143–144, 147, 147n4; sovereignty, 137; and taxation, 9, 127–128, 142, 144–145, 147; trade, 143; tradition, 142; warfare, 129, 135, 137–138, 143; women, 133 Kelabit highlands, 8, 127, 132, 134, 148; population, 134 Kelantan, 13, 92, 273, 284, 288, 387, 389–393, 396–397, 402, 403n11, 405, 435; culture, 389, 394; development, 391–392; flooding, 285; forests, 285–287, 401; hybridity in, 391, 393; Islam in, 13; Orang Asli in, 284; Parti Islam Se-Malaysia in, 276, 282–283, 287, 390–393; performing arts, 406; population, 390, 390n2; sharia in, 280, 283; state government, 12–13, 273, 275, 282–285, 287, 390–393; Thai community in, 390, 390n2; traditional arts, 16, 387–393, 402–403, 406, 408; and underdevelopment, 391; youths, 418 Kelantanese, 284–285, 390, 393, 395n5, 397–398, 400, 403n11; identity, 397; language, 397; masculinity, 393, 396; migrants, 397; in Thailand, 393; women, 284; youths, 284, 390, 394, 396–397 Kelantanese-ness, 406 Kelapang River, 129, 133–136, 138 Keling, 144 Kelly, Christopher, 356–358 Kenyah, 42, 130, 142–145, 147 Kerajaan (polity), Malay, 431, 434, 449, 472 Keramat (guardian spirit), 405, 455 ‘Keresahan’ (Restlessness), 451 Keris Mas, 252 Keroncong band(s), 369 Kesatuan Melayu Muda, 251 Kessler, Clive, 30, 35–36, 39–40 Ketuanan Melayu, see Malay supremacy Khairulnizam Bakeri, 300 Khairy Jamaluddin, 266, 308 Khoo Gaik Cheng, 297, 400n9 Khoo-Lattimore, Catheryn, 187, 199 Kickboxing film(s), 16, 387, 389–390, 401–402, 408 Kidd, Joe, 418–419

Index Killeur Calculateur, 421 Kim, Young H., 191 King, Victor T., 1–19, 23–57, 481–486 King Edward VII College of Medicine, 252 King Lear, 402 Kingship, Malay, 39; Thai, 33 Kinokuniya, 301 Kinship(s), 111, 483; and adat, 111; bilateral, 106; female, 134; ethnic, 237; Kelabit, 131, 134, 136, 138, 140, 147; Malay, 112; in Malay world, 95; networks, 112, 134, 140; Ngurek, 136; principles of, 111; and sharia, 117; systems, 117, 134 Kisah pelayaran Abdullah ke Kelantan (Munshi Abdullah), 91–92 Klang Valley, 261, 302, 332, 413, 416, 420 Klein, Naomi, 298, 310 KLIBF, see Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair KLue, 426 KMM, see Kesatuan Melayu Muda Knowledge, 7, 59, 68, 82, 90, 93, 95, 113, 190–191, 423–424; accumulation, 113; agricultural, 355; apparatus, 95; colonial, 7, 61–62, 70–71, 75–77, 82, 87, 95; of culture, 25, 84, 187; cultural, 26, 59, 337; and cultural studies, 5; decolonising, 474; discourses of, 27; European, 70; expert, 156, 165; folk, 430; geographies of, 59, 70, 95; hybrid, 59, 62, 87; and identity, 131; indigenous, 70–71, 75, 82, 87, 474; and Islam, 116; Islamic, 172, 176, 284, 375; of land, 129, 135, 156; linguistic, 72, 337; local, 74, 333, 430, 454; of Malay, 86; of Malay world, 85; and modernity, 359; movement of, 59, 61, 63; Orang Asli, 437, 446, 449–451, 454, 457, 460, 471; Oriental, 7, 90; and power, 5, 27, 61, 90, 137, 319; precolonial, 82; producers, 76, 82; production, 7, 90, 93, 237; and racialism, 237; and regimes of truth, 6; social media, 199; in Southeast Asia, 59; systems, 94, 190; traditional, 189, 430; useful, 59, 72, 74, 88; Western, 237, 352 Konfrontasi, 234, 355 Kong, Paul Sing Chu, 233 Kongres Kebudayaan Melayu, see National Cultural Congress Kopi Press, 308 Korea, 69

Index Korean, 265 Kota Belud, 157, 166, 174 Kota Bharu, 210 Kota Marudu, 163 KotaKata, 294 Kougar (Shaz), 300 Kowani, see Badan Kongres Wanita Indonesia Krayan River, 134, 142–143, 146–147 Krishnan, Sanjay, 93 Kuala Kubu Bharu, 444, 447 Kuala Lumpur, cosmopolitan, 294; music scene, 417–418; postmodern, 41; racial riots, 14, 48, 276; refugees in, 325, 332; tourism in, 185, 198; urban poor, 261 Kuala Lumpur Alternative Bookfest, 294, 302 Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair, 294 Kuala Lumpur Street Kitchen, see Dapur Jalanan Kuala Lumpur Kuala Sepetang Eco-Tourism Association, 280 KUASA, see Persatuan Aktivis Sahabat Alam Kuching, 28, 44, 357, 361–362 Kudat, district, 158, 163–164; town, 159, 161, 164 Kudus, Rohana, 113 Kugiran band(s), 370–371 Kuliah Buku, 297n1, 307 Kuliah-kuliah terakhir (Malik), 307 Kurniawan, Eka, 306 Kyoto Protocol, 372

L L. Ramli, 379 La Trobe University, 211 Labour, 106, 239, 435, 443; Bajau, 166; Chinese, 435; gender division of, 26; immigrant, 435–436; market, 278; migrant, 435; Orang Asli, 440; reciprocal, 135; reproduction, 436; rights, 322; schemes, 118; slave, 453, 461; women, 115n4, 118 Lagi-lagi cerpen underground (Faisal and Saharil), 299–300 Lam, Alex, 417, 419 Lamb, Nicole, 14, 317–328 Lampung, 286–287 Land(s), agricultural, 362; ancestral, 401, 405, 444, 451; Bajau, 157–158, 167–168, 176; exploitation of, 279,

525 284; Iban, 360; indigenous, 15, 364, 440, 443–444, 472; inheritance, 111, 117; and Islam, 281–282; Kelabit, 129, 133, 135–138, 148; knowledge of, 129, 135, 156; law, 111, 288, 439; native, 436; Orang Asli, 285, 436–440, 442, 444, 448, 450, 452, 469–470, 472; ownership, 407, 439; policy, 129, 431; reform, 253; rights, 9, 111, 117, 129, 148, 153, 156, 439, 450, 470, 473–474; and women, 111, 117 Land Dayak(s), 42, see also Bidayuh Land-grabbing policy, 436 Land law(s), customary, 111; and Orang Asli, 288 Langit petang (A. Samad), 304 Language(s), 61, 353; Arabic, 64–69, 72–73, 75, 78, 81–83, 88, 91, 109, 113; in Asia, 73; Asian, 72–73, 75; category, 43; Chinese, 43–44, 64, 68n2, 69, 76, 79, 88–89, 192; colonial, 434; cosmopolis, 7, 59, 64–65, 70, 80–81, 94; cosmopolitan, 82; and culture, 23, 25–26, 28, 67, 75, 333, 433–434, 483; differences, 62, 94; Dusunic, 160; Dutch, 72–73, 79, 87, 113; English, 17, 24, 40, 43–44, 68, 73–74, 76–79, 86–88, 91, 94, 108n1, 109, 192–193, 208n2, 218, 236n2, 301n2, 303, 331, 413, 416, 420–421, 426, 435, 449n1, 454n2; European, 68, 72, 75, 91; of exchange, 63, 67; foreign, 456; French, 79; Hindi, 335, 394; Hindustani, 91; and history, 75; Hokkien, 89; hybrid, 93; Iban, 15, 43–44, 349, 354–356; and identity, 29, 32–33, 306; Indian, 88; indigenisation of, 7; indigenous, 8, 43, 70, 77, 131; Indonesian, 79, 113, 115n3; Japanese, 79; Javanese, 68n2, 72, 80; Jawi, 73–74, 78, 88, 91–92; Kelabit, 131–133; Kelantanese, 397; Latin, 73, 81, 91; local, 72, 333, 342; localisation of, 7, 66, 94; Malay, 13, 40, 43–44, 46, 65–68, 68n2, 71–74, 76, 78–81, 83–84, 86–89, 91–92, 173, 192, 208n2, 233, 235, 254, 293–295, 300, 303, 306, 308–310, 331, 333, 335, 339–340, 378, 394, 416, 421–422, 438; Malay world, 91; Malayo-Polynesian, 65, 81; Mon-Khmer, 437; Murutic, 160; national, 8, 33, 254, 340, 422, 450; Old Javanese, 80; oriental, 77; Penan, 141; Persian, 7, 59, 64, 67–69, 71, 73, 75,

526 77, 80, 82, 88, 91, 94; Paitanic, 160; policy, 8; Portuguese, 73; Punjabi, 335; Sama, 161; Sama Sulu, 162; Sanskrit, 7, 59, 64–65, 67, 69, 75, 80, 91, 94; of Southeast Asia, 65, 78; Syriac, 91; Tamil, 76–77, 80, 91, 335; Thai, 33, 84; transmission, 61, 64, 67, 87; Turkic, 68; Turkish, 68; vernacular, 66–67, 71, 93, see also Translation and Philology Language and symbolic power (Bourdieu), 483 Language family, Dusunic, 160; Malayo-Polynesian, 81; Murutic, 160; Paitanic, 160 Language teacher(s), 76, 85–86, 92n6; Abdul Kadir as, 76; Munshi Abdullah as, 88, 91; Siami as, 86 Lao, 154 Larut Wars, 435 Lat, see Mohammad Nor Khalid Latin, language, 73, 81, 91; music, 371 Latin America, 115, 432 Laud, Archbishop, 72 Law(s), 32, 142, 276, 336; adat, 111; Batak, 116; customary land, 111; human rights, 281; Indian, 78; inheritance, 119n11; international, 330; Islamic, 106, 110, 117, 120n14, 121–122, 215, 280, 283; land, 111, 288, 439; and migrants, 330; and Orang Asli, 439; property, 110–111; rule of, 276; sharia, 110, 280, 391n3; and students, 254, 256; and young people, 12, 267 Law, Rob, 189 Lawyers for Liberty, 322 Leach, Edmund, 30, 42 Leadenhall Street, 60, 95 Leader(s), 76, 111, 140; Arab, 66; at Bandung conference, 235; Bajau, 173, 176; Chinese, 458; Islamic, 441; Kelabit, 132–133, 138–139, 142; Malay, 37–38, 321; male, 117; Muslim, 89; national, 118; non-Muslim, 281; Orang Asli, 454–455, 458–459, 471; political, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 140, 251, 254, 321; refugee, 319; religious, 281; Rohingya, 319; Semai, 470; student, 254–255; women, 118; youth, 251 Leadership, 452; Bajau, 176; community, 108; Islamic, 117, 173; Malay, 44; Muslim, 116; Orang Asli, 470; Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 282; political, 8, 105–106, 118; principles, 117; in

Index religions, 106; student, 254; United Malays National Organisation, 44; and women, 105–106, 108, 110, 118 League against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression, 232 Led Zeppelin, 372 Lee, Antares Kit, 445–447 Lee, Charity, 15, 320, 329–347 Lee Hwok Aun, 48 Lee Kuan Yew, 35 Left-wing internationalism, 235 Leftist, activists, 252; movement, 262; political organisations, 252; writer, 449 Legacy, colonial, 2, 4, 12, 14, 434, 439; cultural, 352, 383; East India Company, 61; Mak Minah, 445, 469; Munshi Abdullah, 93; of slavery, 239; of underdevelopment, 350; of Western modernity, 351 Legal, literacy, 117, 122; reform, 264; texts, 76–77 Legal status, of refugees, 15, 322, 324–326 Legend(s), Alexander the Great, 81, 95; Islamic, 81 Legislature(s), democratic, 358; state, 263, 283 Legitimacy, political, 391 Leiden University, 72 Leith, George, 62 Lejen Press, 294, 298, 300, 304–305 Lembaga Kemajuan Ikan Malaysia, 169 Lennon, John, 423 Leong, Pauline Pooi Yin, 263 Leong Quee Ling, 187 Leow, Rachel, 72, 76 Lepo’ Keh, 130–131 Lepo’ Tepu, 133–134 Leppu Asing, 146 Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual, 208n1, 211n6, 221–222; rights movement, 211n6 Leyden, John, 76–80, 82–87, 91–92, 95 LGBT, see Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual Lian Kwen Fee, 49, 483–484 Liaw Yock Fang, 71–72 Liberal, 308, 442; democratic, 281; humanism, 244 Liberal democratic, tradition, 281 Liberalisation, 485; economic, 277 Liberation struggles, African American, 234; nationalist, 237 Liberia, 238

Index Library, 78; English, 68 Lifestyle(s), 13, 40, 47, 112, 293, 298, 324, 353, 363, 393–394, 424, 437–438; bisexual, 219; youth, 258, 394, 396 Light, Francis, 77 Lim Chin Siong, 252 Lim, Connie Keh Nie, 15, 349–366 Lim Hock Siew, 253 Lim Lian Geok Cultural Development Centre, 262 Lim, Merlyna, 197 Limbang, 362 Linang family, 355 Linang, Pauline, 355 Linang, Senorita, 355 Lingua franca, 65; Arabic as, 73; Malay as, 71, 73; Persian as, 67, 73; Portuguese as, 73 Linguist(s), 172n14; Javanese, 83; Siami as, 84 Linguistic, 44, 61, 67, 69, 73, 79, 82, 85, 94, 333; capital, 342; cosmopolises, 59, 64, 70, 77, 80–81, 94; diversity, 87; essentialism, 107; expressions, 334; hybridisation, 72; ideas, 75; knowledge, 72, 337; nationalism, 96; networks, 94; relations, 63, 71; skills, 343; translation, 59; transmission, 7 Linguistics, 59, 74–76 LinkedIn, 189 Lio Mato, 128, 130, 144–146 Literacy, 96, 433; legal, 117, 122; Sanskrit, 65; vernacular, 65; for women, 113 Literary, 71, 79–80, 252, 306; conventions, 83; corpus, 69; culture, 87; expression, 65; heritage, 84; Malay, 80, 84, 92, 95, 406n14, 407n15; markets, 96; narratives, 66; networks, 95; publishing, 450; relations, 63; synthesis, 67; texts, 390, 407n15; translation, 1, 3, 95; translators, 94; transmission, 66, 81; world, 94 Literary conventions, traditional, 83 Literary studies, English, 24 Literary tradition(s), 390; Chinese, 69 Literary work(s), 450; English, 68; Indonesian, 366 Literature, 17, 67, 83, 299, 303–304, 307, 449–450; Arabic, 67; Buginese, 81; court, 67; Indian, 78; indie, 306; indigenous, 91; Javanese, 81; Malay, 67, 84, 86, 252, 293, 295, 449; Orang Asli, 17, 449–450; Persian, 67; popular,

527 297; religious, 67; Sanskrit, 67; teachers, 449; and translation, 59, 87; world, 91 Litvin, Stephen W., 190 Livelihood(s), 26, 107–108, 162, 164, 166, 185, 443; agricultural, 262; Bajau, 156–158, 161, 166–169, 169n11, 170, 176; diversification, 167; farming, 107; indigenous, 443; insecurity, 165; marine, 176; migrant, 12; Orang Asli, 285, 448, 453, 458, 469, 472; sustainable, 160, 162; women, 116, 118 ‘Livin’ on the Edge’, 422 Liye, Tere, 306 Lo, Peter Su Yin, 172 Local, 352; agency, 75, 82; autonomy, 278; communities, 67, 89, 107, 160, 163–166, 277–278, 337, 342–344; consumption, 82; culture, 41, 184, 194–195, 333, 335; economy, 166, 186–187; elites, 161; food, 10, 183–187, 193–200; heritage, 41, 47; identity, 10, 28, 33, 82, 171n13, 183–184, 333; knowledge, 74, 333, 430, 454; languages, 72, 333, 342; missionaries, 90; music, 16, 367–368, 376–377, 379–381, 389, 414, 419–421, 425; narratives, 9; officials, 170; politics, 260; publishers, 96; publishing, 70; rulers, 73; scribes, 82, 85; sovereignty, 80; tradition, 41, 142, 383; translators, 59, 76, 82; writers, 59, 76, 82, 85, 95, 307 Localisation of language, 7, 66, 94 Lockard, Craig, 372 Logging, 136–137, 148, 284–285, 287, 443; companies, 129; protests against, 285 London, 60–62, 73, 86, 89–90, 95; printing in, 89 London Missionary Society, 88–89, 91 Long Apu, 143 Long Banga, 130 Long Beruang, 137 Long Di’it, 133, 135, 147 Long Fakir Kandu, Hakim, 83 Long Lellang, 142 Long Moyo’, 133 Long Pata, 143 Long Peluan, 8, 130, 135–136, 139–140, 144, 147; community, 131, 137; farmers, 137; forests, 141n1; headman, 143; history, 129, 148; narratives, 129, 131, 133–140, 142–144, 146–148

528 Long Semeyang, 130 Long Upun, 134 Long, Lucy M., 185 Longman’s, 86 Los Angeles, 389 Loss of biodiversity, 275 Low, James, 83 Lubis, Mochtar, 240, 244 Lun Bawang (Lun Dayeh), 42 Lund, Niels Frederik, 190, 196 Luvaas, Brent, 424

M M. Nasir, 447 Maahad Il-Ehya Assyarif Gunung Semanggul, 251 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 307 Mackerras, Colin, 33 Mackintosh-Smith, Tim, 66 Madasari, Okky, 306 Madras Gazette, 87 Madras, 60, 77–78; presidency, 78; print culture, 87, 89 Madrid, 232 Magazine(s), 251–252, 306, 308, 373; Christian, 88; feminist, 113; music, 419, 426 Magic, 16, 80, 387, 403, 408, 446, 470 Magick River, 447 Mahabharata, 392 Maharajah Commission, 419 Mahat Anak China, see Akiya Mahathir Mohamad, 154, 266, 277, 388; and films, 388; and Islam, 37, 441; and modernity, 37; and race, 36; and reformasi, 260; and student activism, 255–256 Maiga, 163, 167 Main peteri (therapeutic dance ritual), 390–392 Mainstone, William, 74 Mainstream media, 299, 317, 319 Mainstream publisher(s), 13, 294–295, 299, 305–307, 310; in Indonesia, 306 Maintenance, boundary, 5, 28; identity, 484 Maitel, S., 190 Majapahit, 392 Majid Cooke, Fadzilah, 9–10, 153–181 Majid Report, 254 Majlis Belia Malaysia, 259–260 Majlis Perundingan Belia Negara, 260 Majlis Tertinggi Sementara, 255

Index Mak Awa, 447 Mak Indah, 446–448 Mak Minah, 17, 429, 445–446; legacy, 445, 469; as singer, 444–448; as storyteller, 17, 431, 444, 473 Mak Nai, 447 Mak yong (court dance drama), 390–391 Malay(s), 9, 29; adat, 8, 105, 107, 110–113, 118; bands, 371; Bible, 88; book publishing, 294; and British, 435; Brunei, 141, 157, 172–173, 175; bureaucrats, 38; business, 40; capitalist, 40; capitalist class, 40; chiefs, 436, 452–454, 459–461, 465, 472–473; citizens, 35; community, 37, 39, 46, 376, 393, 441; cultural identity, 47, 435; and development, 18; education, 40; elites, 39, 93; ethnonationalist, 253, 321, 432; feudal society, 40, 431, 434, 460–461, 472–473; feudalism, 92; film music, 372; films, 369n1, 371–372, 406n14; folktales, 405; and government, 37–38; hegemony, 473; hikayat, 83, 93; history, 39–40, 76, 79, 86; ideology, 35, 112, 473; immigrants, 436, 454, 473; indigeneity, 370; as indigenous, 36, 46, 435; intellectuals, 36, 253; kerajaan, 431, 434, 449, 472; kingship, 39; kinship, 112; knowledge of, 86; leaders, 37–38, 321; leadership, 44; as lingua franca, 71, 73; literary, 80, 84, 92, 95, 406n14, 407n15; marriage, 112; masculinity, 209, 209n5, 211–212, 219, 223; middle class, 39–40; modernisation of, 46; and modernity, 111; monarchy, 35; music, 354, 368–372; narratives, 68; nation, 40, 78; nationalists, 36, 377; national culture, 377, 440; nationhood, 369; New Economic Policy, 256; norms, 112; officials, 441; peasantry, 36, 434–435; poetry, 92; political elites, 39; politicians, 38, 43; population, 437–438; poverty, 253; printing, 72, 87, 88; publishers, 293–314; publishing, 13, 88, 293–314; readers, 294–295, 306; reserves, 439; and religions, 36, 39; royalty, 36; rulers, 300, 435–436; ruling class, 436, 472; rural, 36–37, 209–210; in Sabah, 155, 160; scribes, 78, 82; singers, 369; slave-raiders, 436, 449, 452–460, 463, 470–473; songs, 369–370, 421–422; sovereignty, 79–81;

Index special position of, 18, 48; stereotypes of, 437; students, 211, 254; Sumatran, 111, 114; teachers, 76; texts, 68, 68n2, 72, 76, 78–84, 87, 92–93, 407n15; traders, 85, 147; tradition, 40, 435; translations, 67, 71–72, 74, 76–80, 82–84, 86–87, 91–92; translators, 84; urban, 37; values, 36–37; women, 116, 119, 121, 209–210, 425; working class, 209–210; writers, 83–84, 92, 252, 262; writing, 79, 83–84, 449; youths, 252, 306, 368, 372, 374, 379–380, 418 Malay annals, see Sulalat al-Salatin/Sejarah Melayu Malay book(s), 72–73, 87–88, 294–295; in Europe, 72, 87; printing of, 72, 87 Malay–Chinese–Indian–Other, 233 Malay cinema, 372, 406; females in, 406, 408 Malay culture, 36, 39–40, 76, 84–85, 94–95, 111, 253, 371, 377, 390–391, 406, 440, 472; norms of, 111 Malay–Dayak relations, 42 Malay-dominated, polity, 5 Malay ethnonationalism, and Islam, 440 Malay Film Productions, 368, 370 Malay identity, 35–36, 39, 46–47, 82, 160, 222, 370, 435, 440, 442; New Economic Policy, 39 Malay Islamic monarchy (Melayu Islam beraja), 35 Malay language(s), 13, 40, 43–44, 46, 65–68, 68n2, 71–74, 76, 78–81, 83–84, 86–89, 91–92, 173, 192, 208n2, 233, 235, 254, 293–295, 300, 303, 306, 308–310, 331, 333, 335, 339–340, 378, 394, 416, 421–422, 438; and British, 75–76; printing, 88; and Sanskrit, 65 Malay literature, 67, 84, 86, 252, 293, 295, 449; production of, 67; traditional, 86 Malay Magazine, The, 88 Malay Mail, 427 Malay manuscript(s), 72, 74, 77, 83; in England, 72 Malay-Melanau-Muslims, 43 Malay Muslim(s), 207–210, 221–223; agency, 210, 212, 223; gay identity, 221; masculinity, 209n5; symbolism, 34 Malay nationalism, 40, 246, 253; Islam, 40 Malay Nationalist Party, see Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya Malay Peninsula, 62, 87, 251, 368, 373, 383, 392; networks, 63

529 Malay poems (Ahmad), 89 Malay polity, 5, 80, 323, 431; cosmopolitan, 80; feudal, 431, 434, 460, 472–473 Malay society, 8, 36, 105, 371, 375, 440, 460, 465; precolonial, 434 Malay state(s), 4, 7, 36, 96, 436; and British, 436; royalty in, 36; slavery in, 4 Malay supremacy, 48, 440 Malay world, 62n1, 69, 76–77, 83, 96, 323, 393, 434–435, 441; Alexander the Great in, 81–82; British in, 39, 71; cosmopolitan, 84, 95, 383; culture, 95; Europeans in, 74, 84, 95; feudal, 461; film, 369; history, 85; identity in, 7; and India, 77; kinship, 95; knowledge of, 85; languages, 91; multiethnic, 7, 59, 94; multilingual, 7, 59, 62, 94; music, 369; plural, 7, 63; precolonial, 63, 435; sexual equality in, 8, 105; slavery, 435; texts in, 7, 59, 65, 79–80, 85, 87; trade, 436; tradition, 455; translation in, 63, 65, 72 Malaya, 4, 171–173, 232, 252, 355, 435–436; and Britain, 435; British rule, 436; colonial, 468; Japanese occupation, 245; political parties, 251–252 Malaya, Federation of, 38, 42, 274, 438–439 Malayan, 245; Chinese, 245; history, 92; independence, 438; nation, 378; writer, 83 Malayisation, Brunei, 35 Malayness, 40, 44, 46, 49, 370, 406–407, 418; and Bumiputeraism, 171; discourses of, 76, 371, 440; in music, 371; and nation, 46; in Sabah, 171n13; symbols of, 44 Malayo-Polynesian, language, 65, 81 ‘Malaysia Baru’ (A New Malaysia), 356 Malaysia sings: Book 2 (Smith), 359 Malaysia, Federation of, 4, 15, 43, 170, 350, 364, 369n5 Malaysian Bar Council, 322 Malaysian Borneo, 9, 41, 45 Malaysian Chinese Association, 258 Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, 421 ‘Malaysian Flavours’, 197 Malaysian identity card, see Kad Pengenalan Malaysia Malaysian Indian Blueprint, 278

530 Malaysian Indian Congress, 258 Malaysian Institute of Translation and Books, see Institut Terjemahan dan Buku Malaysia Malaysian Nature Society, 279 Malaysian politics in the new media age (Leong), 263 Malaysian Society for the Protection of Malaysia’s Treasures of the Earth, see Pertubuhan Pelindung Khazanah Alam Malaysia Malaysian Students’ Global Alliance, 266 Malaysian United Cadet Corps, see Pasukan Kadet Bersatu Malaysia Malaysian United Democratic Alliance, 266 Malaysian United Indigenous Party, see Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia Malaysianisation, 355 Malaysian-ness, 4, 340, 342, 378, 406 Male(s), dependency, 115; dominance, 108–109; elitism, 116; in Islam, 118, 119n11, 209, 209n5; leaders, 117; power, 106, 116, 404; sexuality, 223; slaves, 453, 461, 463–464; superiority, 107–108 Malek Ali, 423 Malian Tepun, 129, 134–135, 144 Malik Hussin, 307 Mamak, 445 Mandailing, 453; immigrants, 436; women, 11 Mandal, Sumit K., 49, 60, 62n1, 72, 250 Manic Street Preachers, 422 Manifesto komunis (Marx and Engels), 307 Manifesto pelajar (Student manifesto), 253 Mantabuan, 163, 167 Mantra, 436 Manufacturing, 108 Manuscript(s), 60, 63, 78–79, 82, 86, 297, 300–301, 304, 450; Asian, 68, 72, 87, 95; from Borneo, 68; India, 77; Persian (Iran), 67; Malay, 72, 74, 77, 83; markets, 95; trade, 72; tradition, 72, 87 Margin(s), of nation-state, 429–430 Marginal, population, 2, 9 Marginalisation, 15, 484; of Bajau Laut, 168; economic, 439; of indigenous peoples, 472–473; Orang Asli, 432, 434–435, 439 Marine, biodiversity, 162; community, 157n3; ecosystem, 165; livelihoods, 176; parks, 156, 162, 170, 175–176;

Index production, 164; products, 158–159, 166; protected areas, 162, 164n9, 166–167; resources, 164; territories, 9, 153; tourism, 169n11 Marine Conservation Society, 163 Maritime, Bajau Laut, 158; trade, 63 Marjin Kiri, 307 Market(s), 353; Asian, 63; Bajau Laut, 169n11; book, 294–295, 300, 302–304, 306–308, 310; capitalist, 295–296, 404; consumer, 190; economy, 12, 267, 296, 352, 442; education, 259; global, 209; ideology, 442; Kelabit, 146; labour, 278; literary, 96; manuscript, 95; music, 424; relations, 189; society, 432; tourism, 10, 183, 188, 191, 196; youth, 13, 293, 295, 310 Marketing, 189–191, 195–196, 199–200; book, 13, 293–295, 297–298, 304–305, 310; food, 184–185, 189, 197; product, 10, 115, 183 Marley, Bob, 423 Marriage(s), 117, 212, 446; adat, 110, 112; child, 114; cross-cultural, 160; gay, 219; heteronormative, 215, 220; heterosexual, 219; interreligious, 160; and Islam, 111–112, 122, 220; Kelabit, 131, 134, 138, 140; Malay, 112; Middle Eastern, 113, 117; Muslim, 106, 109, 111, 111n2, 112–113, 117, 119–122; norms of, 113, 120; religious, 160; and women, 112–113, 119–121 Marsden, David, 430 Marsden, William, 76–77, 80, 86 Marshall, David, 35 Marshall, Thomas, 73 Martín, Josefa D., 187, 191 Martini, Antonella, 190 Marudi, 132, 134, 140–141, 141n1, 142–144, 146–148 Marudu Bay, 157–158, 163–166 Marx, Karl, 60–61, 92, 95, 307 Marxist, 5 Mary Kay, 305 Maryam Lee, 307 MAS, see Muhammad Ariff Ahmad Masam-Masam Manis (Sweet and Sour), 370 Masculinity, 399n8; in films, 16, 387, 389, 394–395, 397–399, 405–408; Kelantanese, 393, 396; Malay, 209, 209n5, 211–212, 219, 223; Malay Muslim, 209n5; and morality, 389;

Index plural, 399, 399n8; representation of, 16, 211, 387, 389, 393, 396, 406–408; and violence, 394; and women, 16, 387, 408; youth, 16, 387, 408 Mashman, Valerie, 8, 127–151 Mass culture, 296–297 Mass media, 382, 414, 419, 426 Matahari Books, 300 Matau, 286 Matera, Marc, 237 Material culture, 28, 44, 437 Matrilineal principles, 111 Mauss, Marcel, 471 MBM, see Majlis Belia Malaysia McGraw, Andrew, 371 McLaren, Malcolm, 426 Md. Sidin Ahmad Ishak, 72 Meadel, Cecile, 420 Mecca, 281, 390, 442 Media, 1, 4; advertising, 184, 188; Chinese, 208; cultural, 424; globalised, 28, 40; and government, 299, 320, 322, 420; industry, 17, 413, 421; international, 10; mass, 382, 414, 419, 426; mainstream, 299, 317, 319; print, 427; production, 190, 359; traditional, 14, 317, 322 Media = setan (Ismail), 307 Media studies, 24 Mediascape(s), 414, 426–427 Mediterranean, 81 Mee, Wendy, 353 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 307 Melaka, 59, 63, 82, 84, 87, 93, 252, 323, 435; conquest of, 232; cosmopolitan, 78, 323; Chinese texts on, 69; court, 68, 80; empire, 323; Eurasian, 46; identity, 82; Indian, 75, 91; migrants in, 323; Muslims, 75; Portuguese Eurasian, 46–47, 482; print culture, 88–89, 91, 95; printing in, 89; publishing, 89; refugees in, 323; statecraft, 78; sultanate, 78, 80; texts, 69, 81, 89; translation in, 88–89, 95 Melaka-Manipal Medical College, 258 Melaka Mission Press, 91 Melanau, 41, 43–44, 351; identity, 44; songs, 359 Melayu baru (new Malays), 37 Melbourne, 417, 419 Melodrama, 16, 387, 389–390, 401, 406, 408; Hindi, 394 Melody FM, 420 Menah Anak Kuntom, see Mak Minah

531 Mengkabong, 157–158 MENGO, see Malaysian Environmental NGOs Menora, 391 ‘Menua Sarawak’ (My Country Sarawak), 356, 359 Meor Razak Meor Abdul Rahman, 285 Mercantile, 60; capitalism, 435; records, 87 Merchant(s), 66, 73, 80, 84; British, 91; Chinese, 69, 91, 467; Chulia, 83; European, 93; Southeast Asia, 80; spice, 72 Merdeka (independence), 234 Merdeka Film Productions studio, 368, 370 Mernissi, Fatema, 113, 116 Merpati Jingga, 294, 300, 306 Metal, 415, 418 Metcalf, Peter, 135, 140 Methodist, church, 241 Methodology, colonial, 430; feminist, 117; sociological, 25 Metropolitan, Church, 90; imagination, 60 Middle class, 17, 39–40, 45, 47, 116, 120, 174, 256–257, 413, 417–418, 420, 423, 441; Bajau, 174; Indonesia, 120; Islamist, 174, 441; Malay, 39–40; multiethnic, 47; non-Malay, 39; Singapore, 120; urban, 17, 40, 413, 420; youth, 417 Middle East, 107, 111; refugee youths in, 342 Middle Eastern, culture, 375; marriage, 113, 117; music, 369; norms, 113; society, 117 Middlemen, 452; Asian, 94; Chinese, 90, 435; Muslim, 90 Midnight Cowboy, 389 Migrant(s), 2, 63, 159, 172, 245, 319, 321, 330; agency, 15; Bajau, 162, 170–171; Bangladeshi, 321; and borders, 319; communities, 24, 344; economic, 326; forced, 330; Indian, 435; Kelantanese, 397; labour, 435; and law, 330; livelihoods, 12; in Melaka, 323; Penan, 137; populations, 12; in Sarawak, 148; second-generation, 342, 344; undocumented, 321–322, 330; women, 115; workers, 11, 107, 321, 343, 481–482; youths, 343, see also Immigrant(s) Migrant worker(s), 343, 482; African, 11; Bangladeshi, 321; women, 107

532 Migration(s), 16, 115n5, 323, 330, 353, 483; Chinese, 69; documents, 81; Iban, 363; internal, 349; Kelabit, 9, 127–128, 133, 135, 138–139, 147–148; Ngurek, 133–134, 138; rural–urban, 15, 256, 387, 396–397, 408 Mill, J.S., 61 Milne, William, 88 Minangkabau, 111; activists, 113; farmers, 107; society, 113 Ming emperors, 69 Mining, tin, 274, 285, 435, 436 Ministry of Environment and Water, 275 Ministry of Land and Regional Development, 442 Ministry of the Interior, 439 Ministry of Youth and Sports, 259, 308 Minority, 2, 4, 28, 34, 39, 44, 128–129, 154n2, 235, 242, 450, 484; Bajau as, 9, 153; communities, 17; ethnic, 8, 28, 245, 431, 482; Iban as, 15; identity, 3, 30; indigenous, 5, 17, 42, 138, 431, 452; Kelabit as, 144, 148; non-Malay, 45; Myanmar, 329; and nation-state, 2, 138; Orang Asli as, 437; populations, 3, 30, 38, 45; Portuguese Eurasians as, 39, 45; rights, 300; rural, 13; in Sabah, 28, 45, 153; in Sarawak, 8, 28, 42, 45; Semai as, 30; in Southeast Asia, 30, 38 Misogynistic ideas, 116 Misogyny, 116, 307, 399 MISPI, see Mistra Sejati Perempuan Indonesia Mission civilisatrice (civilising mission), 433 Missionaries, 72, 90, 148; American, 91; and Britain, 89; British, 91; and China, 89; Christian, 61, 88, 93, 95, 354, 433; European, 91; Evangelical, 7; and Iban, 354; and Kelabit, 148; local, 90; and Munshi Abdullah, 91, 93; and Orientalism, 90; in Penang, 89–90; printing, 88–91; Protestant, 88; publishing, 89; in Singapore, 90–91; in Straits Settlements, 90; and translation, 7, 88–89, 91; United States, 89 Mistra Sejati Perempuan Indonesia, 117 Mitchell, Richard, 185 MNS, see Malaysian Nature Society Mobilisation, political, 49 Mobility, cultural, 67; downward, 344; economic, 256; of Sanskrit, 67; social, 256–257, 343; women, 116

Index Model, normative, 482 Modernisation, 4, 27, 41, 46, 278, 296, 353, 433; and Dayaks, 44; economic, 37; and Iban, 354; of Malays, 46; policy, 278; and Radio Sarawak, 355; in Sarawak, 351, 358; societal, 352; theory, 5, 431; urban, 45 Modernity, 15–16, 25, 40–41, 45, 60, 87, 108, 238, 240, 349–353, 359–360, 363, 375, 387, 389, 393, 402–403, 407–408, 424, 430; alternative, 15, 349, 351, 353–354, 356, 363–364; American, 350; Asian, 37, 41; black, 237; complexity, 351; cultural, 352; culture, 352; and democratic government, 351; discourses, 351; in Europe, 352; European, 353; Euro-American, 350; and history, 231; and Iban, 15, 350, 354–355, 360, 363–364; and identity, 231; Indonesian, 353; and knowledge, 359; and Mahathir Mohamad, 37; and Malays, 111; and Munshi Abdullah, 92–93; and nation-building, 360, 364; and nation-state, 351; non-Western, 351; and P. Ramlee, 371; and popular music, 354, 363; political, 350; and power, 352; and race, 233; Sarawak, 349, 358, 360, 364; sociology of, 351; Southeast Asian, 353; Straits Settlements, 92; symbols of, 364; and tradition, 116, 352, 363–364, 405; urban, 45; Western, Western, 16, 242, 350–353, 371, 387, 397, 408; and women, 112 Mohamad Faizal Abd Matalib, 12–13, 273–292 Mohammad Nor Khalid (Lat), 373n10, 382 Mohd Anis Md Nor, 376n14 Mohd. Taib Osman, 354 Molotov koktel (Adam), 307 Moluccas (Maluku), 72 Mon-Khmer, language, 437 Monarchy, Islamic, 35; Malay, 35 Monash University, 258 Money, economy, 432; politics, 440 Mongolia, 81 MonoloQue, 308 Monument(s), national, 32; stone, 130, 133, 137 Moral, norms, 258; structures, 395; values, 107 Morality, 214, 276–277, 393–396, 407–408; and gender, 107;

Index heteronormative, 215, 219; masculinity, 389; religious, 389; sexual, 116, 209n4, 212, 215; of women, 106 Moro refugees, 323 Mount Kinabalu, 162, 275 Movement(s), 1, 4; civil rights, 235; civil society, 108; communist, 244; countercultural, 296, 298; counter-hegemonic, 11; educational, 114; environmental, 482; environmental justice, 9, 153; environmentalist, 13, 278–280; Evangelical, 90; indie, 421; indigenous rights, 9, 156; intellectual, 106; Islamic, 441; Islamist, 275, 280; leftist, 262; Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual rights, 211n6; nationalist, 32, 252; négritude, 433–434; political, 251–252, 266; Reformasi, 12, 250–251, 260, 267, 301, 309; refugee, 483; rock ’n’ roll, 420; social, 1, 11, 90, 197, 219, 249–251, 262, 264, 275; student, 250, 255, 266; women, 114; youth, 251–252 Movement(s) (circulation), human, 69; of ideas, 7, 59, 64, 70–71, 87, 95; of knowledge, 59, 61, 63; Orang Asli, 438, 473; rural–urban, 15 Movement of Aware Youth, see Angkatan Pemuda Insaf MPBN, see Majlis Perundingan Belia Negara MPH Distributors, 304n5 MTV, 397, 421 MUDA, see Malaysian United Democratic Alliance Mughal India, 67 Muhammad, Prophet, 109, 119, 121, 219, 280–281 Muhammad Ariff Ahmad, 252 Muhammad Febriansyah, 13, 293–314 Muhammad Haji Salleh, 407n15 Muhammadiyah, 114 Muhyiddin Yassin, 282 Mukhriz Mahathir, 391 M¨uller, Martin, 75 Multicultural, culture, 323; policy, 35; polity, 323; Sabah, 154; Singapore, 33, 35 Multiculturalism, 14, 18, 33, 187; discourses, 28; and race, 14 Multiethnic, 187; Borneo, 129; coexistence, 237; community, 129, 139; Malay world, 7, 59, 94; middle class, 47; nation-state, 37; Orang Asli, 472;

533 political parties, 43; populations, 8, 127–128; relations, 472; Sarawak, 127–128, 134, 138, 139, 147; society, 40 Multilingual, 65; Malay world, 7, 59, 62, 94; policy, 35; Singapore, 35, 62; translators, 84 Multinational, brands, 197; capitalism, 432; companies, 195; chains, 193, 195; global, 185 Multiracial policy, Singapore, 35 Multiracialism, 39 Munir Ali, see Rosmera Murugan, 81 Murut, 154, 154n1, 155, 160, 171, 176, see also Kadazan-Dusun-Murut Murutic language family, 160 Music, 158, 251, 301, 339, 352, 415, 422–424, 427; American, 354, 368, 417; British, 368; business, 369; consumption, 309, 413–416, 420, 423–424; cosmopolitan, 16, 368, 372–373, 383; culture, 380, 414–415; dance, 415; dikir barat, 397; discourses, 13, 293; European, 354; festivals, 447; film, 16, 367, 370–372, 375, 389; foreign, 16, 367–369, 377, 380, 424; global, 368; Hawaiian, 371; Hindustani, 370; history, 414, 423; hybrid, 16, 368; Iban, 349–350, 354–356, 359, 361–364; indigenous, 353; Indonesian, 354; from India, 370; Indian, 15, 370; indie, 413, 415, 421, 425; indigenisation of, 185; industry, 425, 447; journalism, 426; Latin, 371; local, 16, 367–368, 376–377, 379–381, 389, 414, 419–421, 425; magazine, 419, 426; Malay, 354, 368–372; Malay world, 369; and Malayness, 371; markets, 424; Middle Eastern, 369; and nation-making, 368; national, 368, 376, 380; and New Economic Policy, 376n14; of P. Ramlee, 367–373, 375–383; popular, 2, 4, 15, 349–350, 353–356, 359, 363–364, 370, 375, 377, 415, 452; producers, 377, 415; production, 415–416, 418; rock, 16, 258, 368, 413–416, 418–420, 425; of Sarawak, 359, 359n1, 361, 364; Southeast Asian, 353; teachers, 359; traditional, 16, 44, 368, 370–372, 377, 380–382, 389, 395; Turkish, 375; underground, 415–420, 424; Western,

534 355, 363, 377, 379, 391; writers, 418, 426; youth, 371–373, 375, 380 Music scene, 415, 418; Iban, 354; Kuala Lumpur, 417–418 Musician(s), 5, 31, 373, 381, 418–419, 421, 446, 484; African American, 243, 422; agency of, 425; Chinese, 447; Iban, 364; independent, 17, 294, 413, 415–416, 419, 446; indie rock, 414, 421, 423–427; Indian, 447; from Indonesia, 425; Temuan, 447; women, 391, 425 Muslim(s), 40, 44, 81, 119n12, 174, 212, 217, 280–281, 283, 288, 390, 396n7, 400, 441–442, 468; administration, 111, 283; Arabic, 113, 116; Bajau, 10, 161, 171–172, 172n15, 173–174; in Brunei, 3; Bumiputera, 36, 153, 161, 171–172, 172n15, 173, 175; Cham, 323; communities, 89, 215, 222; culture, 113, 116, 375; elites, 43; feminists, 121; hegemony, 43; identity, 10, 218, 220–222, 396; in India, 107; in Indonesia, 3, 116; leaders, 89; leadership, 116; marriage, 106, 109, 111, 111n2, 112–113, 117, 119–122; Melaka, 75; middlemen, 90; nation, 288; non-Malay, 36, 43; patriarchy, 118; in Philippines, 3, 10, 116; political elite, 43; population, 10, 171, 437; print culture, 90; readers, 89; and religions, 108, 116; Rohingya, 321, 329; in Sabah, 9, 153, 171–175; in Sarawak, 9; scholars, 281; in Singapore, 3; in Southeast Asia, 3, 8, 106–107, 109–112, 117, 122; Tamil, 83; in Thailand, 3, 116; values, 116; youths, 392 Muslim Malay(s), 3, 36, 171, 173, 207–210, 221–222, 461; identity, 221; masculinity, 209n5; and nation-building, 41; political dominance of, 41; Sabah, 41; in Sarawak, 41; symbolism, 34; women, 209–210 Muslim society, 107, 110, 117, 121–122; Southeast Asian, 122 Muslim women, 8, 106–108, 110, 114, 116–118, 120, 120n13, 121–122, 209–210, 281; subjugation of, 114 Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, see Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia Muslimah Aisyiyah, 114 Mustafa Along, 285, 287 Mustapha Harun, 173

Index Mutalib Uthman, 301, 304 Myanmar, 332–334, 336, 341, 343; community, 14, 329; culture, 339; ethnoculturalism in, 33; food, 340; minorities from, 329; refugees from, 14–15, 317–318, 320–321, 329–333; violence in, 341; youths, 15, 329, 331 MyKad, see Kad Pengenalan Malaysia Mystery Tapes, 421 Mysticism, Islamic, 72; religious, 405; Sufi, 396n6; as un-Islamic, 403 Myth(s), 81, 382; Bandung conference, 237; Dayak, 44; and history, 80; national, 33, 382; political, 79–80; power of, 80; and refugees, 322; rock music, 414, 423 Mythmaking, 31 N Nagatsu, Kazufumi, 153, 161–162, 173, 175 Najib Razak, 18, 48, 277; administration, 264, 278; cabinet, 266 Nakshabi, Ziya’ al-Din, 68 NAM, see Non-Aligned Movement Nami Cob Nobbler, 303–304 Nanyang, trade, 70 Narathiwat, 390 Narrative(s), 6, 67, 79–80, 83, 96, 191, 242, 353, 429, 440, 443; alternative, 2, 4, 6, 14, 138, 317–318, 452; of belonging, 329, 331; counter-, 195, 382, 387; counter-hegemonic, 262; cultural, 376; digital, 200; and discourse, 481, 483, 485; ethnonationalist, 16, 367–368; gender, 106; historical, 77, 264, 349, 375, 483; Iban, 15, 349, 364; and identity, 14, 16, 139, 147, 331, 333, 335, 337, 342, 440, 484; ideological, 1; Kelabit, 8–9, 129, 131, 133–140, 142–144, 146–148; literary, 66; Long Peluan, 129, 131, 133–140, 142–144, 146–148; Malay, 68; national, 2, 4, 16, 367–368, 371, 376, 378, 380, 383; nationalist, 368, 371, 375, 378–379; oral, 86; Orang Asli, 17; refugee, 14–15, 317–319, 324–326, 329–335, 337–339, 342–343 Nasi Lemak project, 261 ‘Nasihat P. Ramlee’ (P. Ramlee’s Advice), 373 Nasir P. Ramlee, 378 Nathan, S.R., 253

Index Nation(s), 114–115, 396; and boundaries, 32; and colonialism, 34; discourses of, 47, 175, 371, 440; ideas of, 31–34; and identity, 39, 46, 440; imagined, 28; Malay, 40, 78; Malayan, 378; and Malayness, 46; Muslim, 288; and race, 13; and refugees, 322, see also Nation-building and Nation-making and Nation-state Nation-building, 2, 4, 6–7, 23, 29, 388; and development, 432; and Iban, 349–350, 355–356, 359–360, 364; and modernity, 360, 364; and Muslim Malays, 41; and Orang Asli, 473; and political elites, 31, 33–34; policy, 29; postcolonial, 16; and radio Sarawak, 360; and race, 16, 27; and Sarawak, 349, 360; Singapore, 35; in Southeast Asia, 33, see also Nation(s) Nation-making, discourses of, 371; and music, 368; and P. Ramlee, 367–368, 371, 375, 378, 383; postcolonial, 367–368, see also Nation(s) Nation-state(s), 3–5, 16, 31, 34, 36–37, 46, 127, 175, 240, 274, 349, 353, 363, 375, 388, 440, 444, 452; African, 231–232, 237–240, 242, 244; Asian, 231, 232, 237–240, 242, 244; and citizenship, 236, 484; discourses of, 17, 440; and Iban, 15, 349; and identity, 2, 32, 36; ideology, 11; and independence struggles, 239; and indigenous people, 471; margins of, 429–430; and minorities, 2, 138; and modernity, 351; multiethnic, 37; and P. Ramlee, 376, 383; periphery of, 362, 440, 442; postcolonial, 246, 350–351, 429, 431, 439; and power, 9, 46; and Sarawak, 15, 127, 349, 364; Singapore, 33, see also Nation(s) National, community, 31; consciousness, 15, 49, 317, 319, 375; cultural politics, 156; culture, 16, 31, 34, 367–368, 370–371, 375, 377, 379–383, 388, 433, 440–441; development, 257, 350, 356; discourse, 47, 482; economy, 433; education, 254; hegemony, 5; history, 8–9, 17, 32, 39, 127–129, 148, 251, 368, 376, 444; identity, 1–2, 9, 28, 30–32, 35, 39, 350, 353, 376, 383, 484; ideology, 33, 35, 37; institutions, 33; integration, 400, 432; language, 8, 33, 254, 340, 422, 450; leaders, 118; monuments, 32; music, 368, 376, 380;

535 myths, 33, 382; narratives, 2, 4, 16, 367–368, 371, 376, 378, 380, 383; organisation, 114; policies, 170; politics, 253, 261; primordialism, 481; religions, 171; rituals, 32; security, 14, 255, 322; sovereignty, 154; symbols, 33; territory, 154; unity, 18, 31, 48–49, 276, 432 National culture, 31, 370–371, 375, 381, 388, 433, 440–441; and Islam, 441; Malay, 377, 440; and P. Ramlee, 16, 367–368, 370–371, 375, 377, 379–383; representation, 388; in Thailand, 34 National icon(s), P. Ramlee, 16, 367–368, 375–377, 383 National identity, 31–32, 39, 376, 383; development of, 39; and intellectuals, 31 National liberation struggle(s), 110, 234, 239 National Alliance, see Perikatan Nasional National Archives Board, 376 National Civics Bureau, see Biro Tatanegara National Conference on Pan-Malaysia Indigenous Peoples Land Rights and Cultural Identity, 450 National Cultural Congress, 370, 379, 440 National Culture Policy, 18, 39, 48, 376n14, 432, 440–441, see also Policy National Development Policy, 18, 40, 276, see also Policy National Fisheries Development Authority, see Lembaga Kemajuan Ikan Malaysia National Forestry Act, 286 National Front, see Barisan Nasional National Islamic Youth Association, see Persatuan Belia Islam Nasional National Library of Malaysia, 305 National Mission Policy, 48, see also Policy National Operations Council, 254 National Union of Malaysian Students, see Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar-Pelajar Malaysia National Unit Trust, see Amanah Saham Nasional National Vision Policy, see Wawasan 2020 National Youth Consultative Council, see Majlis Perundingan Belia Negara Nationalism, 32; Asian, 245; civic, 33; cultural, 371; discourses of, 9, 46, 153; ethnoracial, 236, 246; ethnoreligious, 208–210, 236; and gender, 114; and

536 Iban, 359, 364; Indonesian, 33; Kadazan-Dusun-Murut, 9, 153–154, 159; linguistic, 96; Malay, 40, 246, 253; non-Muslim, 171; pan-Asian, 238; Philippine, 31; postcolonial, 5, 246; power of, 32; racial, 246; religious, 245; in Sabah, 154, 159, 171; in Sarawak, 358, 360, 364; Thai, 34, see also Ethnonationalism Nationalist, 96, 113, 209, 237; historians, 31; history, 128; icon, 376–377, 382; identity, 246; ideology, 113; Indonesian, 113–114; liberation struggles, 237; Malay, 36, 377; movements, 32, 252; narratives, 368, 371, 375, 378–379; politics, 251; racialism, 245; state, 208; women’s associations, 113 Nationality, 340; European, 45 Nationhood, 5–6, 23, 32, 128, 175, 274, 371, 377, 382; contestation of, 369; and identity, 34; Malay, 369; Sabah, 173; symbols of, 34; Thai, 33 Native(s), 33; Bajau as, 9, 153; customary rights, 156, 443; Dayak as, 35; identity, 9, 30; lands, 436; populations, 171; of Sabah, 171, 174; of Sarawak, 171; schools, 113; title holders, 167 Native son (Wright), 232 Natural history, 70 Natural resources, 275–277, 431, 443; community management, 156, 160, 165; deterioration of, 275 NDP, see National Development Policy ‘Negaraku’, 18 Negeri Sembilan, 435, 460 Negrito(s), 434 Négritude, movement, 433–434; poetry, 434, 45 Nehru, Jawarharlal, 235 NEM, see New Economic Model Nenggiri forest reserve, 285 Neoliberal, 196, 277 Neoliberalisation, of Global South, 232 Neo-Marxism, 5 NEP, see New Economic Policy Network(s), Asian, 63; Bajau, 154; Chinese, 69–70; communication, 32; economic, 138; environmental non-governmental organisations, 280; of exchange, 63, 82; global, 9, 89; of ideas, 7, 69; imperial, 90; kinship, 112, 134, 140; linguistic, 94; literary, 95;

Index Malay Peninsula, 63; online, 198; Orang Asli, 434; patronage, 72, 440; religious, 221; Sanskrit, 65; social, 143, 190, 197, 342–343; television, 208; trading, 434; translation, 66, 95; women, 107–108, 115; youth, 12, 250, 267 Network of Orang Asli Villages of Kelantan, see Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Kelantan Network of Orang Asli Villages of Pahang, see Jaringan Kampung Orang Asli Pahang Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, 418 New Economic Model, 48, 277–278 New Economic Policy, 40, 48, 276; and affirmative action, 40, 256, 276, 376; and Bumiputera, 171, 276, 440–442; bureaucratisation, 171; and Chinese, 440–441; and development, 4, 37, 432, 440, 473; and economic inequality, 37; and education, 37; and ethnicity, 440; and government, 37–38, 40, 48, 133, 443; and Malays, 256; and Malay identity, 39; and music, 376n14; and Orang Asli, 434, 439, 443; in Pahang, 443; and popular culture, 376n14; and poverty, 276, 440; and race, 37, 276, 440; and state intervention, 38, see also Policy New politics, 249, 260 New-York Daily Tribune, 60 Newly industrialising economy, 274 Ng, Su Fang, 72, 81–82 Ngau Langgat, 140 NGO, see Non-governmental organisation Ngurek, 130, 133, 140; chiefs, 139, 142, 146; culture, 137–138, 148; history, 137; identity, 134; and Kelabit, 134, 136–141, 148; kinship, 136, 140; migrations, 133–134, 138 Nietzschean world view, 110 ‘Night of Three Ramlees’, 379 Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, 392 Nike, 299, 397 Ningkan, Stephen Kalong, 43 Ninth Malaysia Plan, 186 Nkrumah, Kwame, 238 NMP, see National Mission Policy No Black Tie, 419 No Good, 421 No-take zones, 165, 168, 169n11

Index Noah’s Ark, 46 Noel, Janet Rata, 359, 359n2 Nomy Nozwir, see Nami Cob Nobbler Non-Aligned Movement, 234, 238 Non-European solidarity, 11 Non-governmental organisation(s), in Aceh, 117; environmental, 164, 260, 275, 278–280, 285; humanitarian, 156; and women, 260, see also Organisation(s) Non-heteronormative, 207, 209–210, 211n6, 215, 218, 220–223, 482; identity, 10–11, 222 Non-Malay(s), 5, 321, 441; in Brunei, 35; Bumiputera, 36, 41, 161, 171, 175; community, 33, 35; companies, 38; culture, 39, 377; identity, 246; indigenous, 7, 35; middle class, 39; minority, 45; Muslim, 36, 43; Orang Asli, 171; students, 254 Non-Muslim(s), 9, 120, 173, 209, 400; Bumiputera, 153, 171, 175; citizens, 396n7; community, 33; culture, 39; Dayaks, 41; leaders, 281; nationalism, 171; political parties, 174; in Sabah, 171, 173–175 Non-Western, 11, 242, 350; global power, 245; immigrants, 234; modernity, 351; society, 351 Noone, Richard, 438 Nopper, Tamara, 238–239 Nor Aini Haji Idris, 276 Norhayati Berahim, 297 Norm(s), 187, 308; adat, 112, 118; cultural, 7; Islamic, 281; Malay, 112; of Malay culture, 111; of marriage, 113, 120; Middle Eastern, 113; moral, 258; societal, 306, 309 Norman Yusoff, 16, 387–411 Normative, foundations, 1; ideas, 65; model, 482; values, 65 North, Alfred, 91 North Africa, youths in, 342 North America, 264, 353 North Borneo Chartered Company, 158 North Kalimantan, 159, 170 North Maluku, 157n3 Northeast Asia, 69 Nostalgia, structural, 378 Nottingham University Malaysia, 258 Novel(s), 92n6, 297–298, 300–303, 303n3, 303n4, 304, 305n6, 449; Indonesian, 302, 306; Islamic, 297, 302–303, 310;

537 Orang Asli, 431, 452–454; religious, 294 Novelist(s), 11, 31, 299 Nurul Hajjar Atan, 308 Nurul Izzah Anwar, 266

O OAG, 419 Oasis, 422 Occupation, Japanese, 445 Occupational, category, 276; position, 36; stereotypes, 36 Occupy movement, 250, 264; in Europe, 264 Occupy Dataran, 264 Occupy Wall Street, 264 Official(s), Bajau, 158, 176; Brooke, 142; Brunei court, 141; East India Company, 61, 72, 74–77, 82, 91, 93; immigration, 321; local, 170; Malay, 441; state, 377 ‘Oh Sarawak’, 356 Oil palm, plantation, 443 Old Javanese, 80 Olo, 140 Ombak rindu (Fauziah), 303, 305n6 1Malaysia, 18, 48, 278 1Malaysia book voucher, see Baucer Buku 1Malaysia 1Malaysia Bookshop, see Kedai Buku 1Malaysia Ong, Aihwa, 352 Ong, Frank, 425 Ong Bak, 401 Online networks, 198 Opium, 453, 464–468 Opium Wars, 89 Opposition, political, 118; politicians, 377 Oral history, 8, 71, 129, 319; indigenous people, 8–9, 127–128; Kelabit, 127–129 Oral narratives, 86 Oral storytelling, 82 Oral tradition(s), 17, 79, 87, 91, 390n2, 444, 449; Iban, 355; Orang Asli, 449; Temuan, 444 Orang Asli, adat, 451, 454, 470; administration, 438–439; agency, 17, 429; ancestral land, 439, 444, 451; assimilation of, 440–442; and British, 437, 439, 449, 468; as Bumiputera, 288, 434, 439; chiefs, 454, 458; conflicts, 437–438, 458, 472; cultural identity, 432, 452, 470; culture, 438, 447, 451,

538

Index 473; deterritorialisation, 436, 442–445; and development, 429, 438–439, 441, 444, 447–448, 469; and developmentalism, 442–443, 446, 473; and discourses, 429, 444, 452; economy, 434; education, 17, 439, 442, 445, 448–449, 470; environmental protests, 285–286; and ethnicity, 454; female, 453; forests, 429, 431, 444, 446–448, 469; governance, 438, 454; and government, 286, 288, 436–439, 441, 443, 446, 473; history, 17, 431, 449, 452; and human insecurity, 439; identity, 13, 429, 432, 439, 442, 444, 449–452, 470, 473; indigenous people, 436, 442, 444, 450, 472; insecurity, 439; institutions, 440; integration, 438–439, 441–442; and Islam, 435–436, 441–442; Islamisation of, 441–442; in Kelantan, 284; knowledge, 437, 446, 449–451, 454, 457, 460, 471; labour, 440; land, 285, 436–440, 442, 444, 448, 450, 452, 469–470, 472; and law, 439; leaders, 454–455, 458–459, 471; leadership, 470; literature, 17, 449–450; livelihoods, 285, 448, 453, 458, 469, 472; marginalisation, 432, 434–435, 439; as minority, 437; movement (circulation), 438, 473; multiethnic, 472; narratives, 17; and nation-building, 473; networks, 434; and New Economic Policy, 434, 439, 443; non-Malay, 171; novels, 431, 452–454; oral tradition, 449; and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 287–288; Perak, 448, 453, 455–456, 468; policy, 438–442; population, 434, 482; poverty, 434; protests, 285–286, 447; radio stations, 450; and religions, 442, 459; representation of, 452; reserves, 438–439; resistance, 447; rights, 286, 429, 438–439, 441, 450, 457–458, 470, 473; slave labour, 453; slave-raiding of, 17, 436; slavery of, 17, 437, 449, 452, 472; society, 454; solidarity with, 285; songs, 429, 431, 444–447, 469; stereotypes of, 450, 452; storytellers, 17, 429, 431, 444, 449–452, 473; storytelling, 17, 429, 431, 444, 452; struggles, 449, 451, 474; subjugation, 431; trade, 453; tradition, 438, 447–449; and violence, 436, 452, 454, 458, 461, 470–474; women, 452;

writers, 17, 444, 470; writing, 450; young people, 455; youth, 449, 470 Orang Laut (sea nomads), 323 Orang Sungei, 160–161 Orang Ulu, 42, 351 Order(s), divine, 212–215, 218; feudal, 40; social, 26, 209n3, 244 Organic intellectuals, 252 Organisation(s), abolitionist, 436; civil society, 110, 260, 278, 309; cultural, 243; human rights, 262, 322; international, 90; Islamic, 275; national, 114; political, 252, 481–482; refugee, 323; social, 25, 50, 70, 111, 231, 350; sociocultural, 481–482; student, 253–255, 259; urban poor, 332; women, 114; youth, 259–261, see also Non-governmental organisation(s) Oriental, knowledge, 7, 90; languages, 77; scholar, 77 Orientalism, 59, 71, 75, 90, 242, 430; colonialism, 90; discourse(s) of, 7, 59, 75; European, 7, 87; evangelical, 90; and missionaries, 90; Oxbridge, 90; Western, 63 Orientalism(Said), 70, 242 Orientalist, 7, 78, 375; books, 68; evangelical, 90; Oxford, 72; Penang, 79, 85; philology, 77; project, 63; representation, 375; research, 65; scholarship, 87; Southeast Asia, 77; tradition, 77 Osu Sukam, 173 Otherness, 444; and identity, 31 Ownership, land, 407, 439 Oxbridge, Orientalism, 90 Oxford, 72; Orientalist, 68 Oxford University Press, 73 Oyong Jau, Penghulu, 143 P P. Ramlee, aesthetics, 368, 371, 375, 379, 383; agency of, 368; as cosmopolitan, 368, 370–371, 375, 379, 383; culture, 367, 375; as film-maker, 376; film music, 16, 367, 371–372; ideas, 367–368; and modernity, 371; music of, 367–373, 375–383; and nation-making, 367–368, 371, 375, 378, 383; and nation-state, 376, 383; and national culture, 16, 367–368, 370–371, 375, 377, 379–383; as national icon, 16, 367–368, 375–377, 383; and pop yeh

Index yeh, 368, 371–372, 375, 379; and popular culture, 15; in Singapore, 369–370, 373, 378–379; songs, 369–373, 375, 378–380, 382; as songwriter, 369; and young people, 368; and young people, 368, 380–381 P. Ramlee Memorial Museum, see Pustaka Peringatan P. Ramlee Pa Butong, 140 Pa Ibang, 139, 142 Pa’ Nar, 134 Padang Panjang, 113 Pahang, 252, 279, 435, 443–444, 453, 455–456; forests, 443; New Economic Policy in, 443 Pahang Tenggara, 442–443 Pahang Tenggara Regional Development Authority, 443 Painters, 31 Paitanic language family, 160 Pakatan Harapan, 266, 286; cabinet, 266; election manifesto, 265; government, 266, 309, 391n4 Pakatan Rakyat, 263, 266; Selangor state government, 301 Pakistan, 118; gender relations in, 109, 117; patriarchy in, 107; refugees from, 14, 317–318; women in, 188 Pakistani, 335; journalist, 244 Palawan, 159 Palembang, 323 Pallesen, Alfred Kemp, 172n14 Palm oil production, 276 Pan-Asian, identity, 39; nationalism, 238 Pan-Islamic world affairs, 234 Pan-Islamism, 239 Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, see Parti Islam Se-Malaysia Pañcatantra, 91 Pancha Tand˘eran, 91 Pangkor Treaty, 435–436 Pansing, 304n5 Papua New Guinea, 157n3, 162 Paradigm(s), developmental, 278; ethnic, 6, 18, 23, 48 Parameswara, see Iskandar Shah Paris, printing in, 89 Park(s), 274; marine, 156, 162, 170, 175–176 Parsons, Talcott, 26 Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, 251–252

539 Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 265, 285, 391n4, 396; chief ministers, 282; electoral manifesto, 284; and Islam, 210, 276, 283, 288, 391n3, 441; and Islamisation, 396n7; and Kelantan state government, 276, 282–283, 287, 390–393; leadership, 282; and Orang Asli, 287–288; and political Islam, 441; rule, 283; and sharia, 283, 391n3 Parti Keadilan Rakyat, 265 Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, 266, 396n7 Parti Sosialis Malaysia, 284 Parti Warisan Sabah, 171, 266 Participation, political, 250 Participatory, democracy, 264; development, 429; politics, 262 Party of Muslims, see Hizb al-Muslimun PAS, see Parti Islam Se-Malaysia ‘Pasar Simunjan’ (Simunjan Town), 350, 360–362 Pashto, 78 Pasukan Gerakan Am, 286 Pasukan Kadet Bersatu Malaysia, 259 Pata River, 143 Patriarchal, 396; Islam, 116; order, 425; power, 405; social contract, 223; society, 117; structures, 120 Patriarchy, 109, 117, 121, 393, 405, 408; Hindu, 118; institutions of, 109; Muslim, 118; in Pakistan, 107; in sharia, 107; and United Malays National Organisation, 209 Patriotism, 31, 358 Patronage, 112; colonial, 95; East India Company, 60, 72–73; European, 85, 93–94; government, 304; networks, 72, 440; political, 440, 443; politics, 12, 38, 267, 440, 443; state, 40 Pattani, 391, 405 Pavement, 417 Payne, Ethel, 243 PBMUM, see Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya PEA, see Penang Eurasian Association Peace-making, Kelabit, 127–128, 139, 143–144, 147, 147n4; ritual(s), 9, 127–128, 144; values, 9, 127–128 Peaceful Assembly Act, 264 Peasantry, Malay, 36, 434–435; subsistence, 36 Pecah (Khairulnizam), 300 Pechrová, Marie, 188, 190 Peel, John, 416

540 Peishaweri, Emir Muhammed, 78 PEKA, see Pertubuhan Pelindung Khazanah Alam Malaysia Pekan Frinjan, 301, 301n2, 302, 308 Pelita Malaya, 252 Penan, 42, 129–130, 137, 148; language, 141; migrant(s), 137, see also Punan Penang, 59, 77, 254, 265, 301, 369, 378, 381; British in, 62, 75; and colonial knowledge, 77; East India Company in, 62, 76, 88, 435; Europeans in, 62, 83; food, 187; government, 87–88, 282; heritage, 46; as Indian presidency, 60, 62, 87; missionaries in, 89–90; Orientalists, 79, 85; as port city, 7, 62–63, 83; Portuguese Eurasians, 7, 41, 45–47; print culture, 87, 95–96; printing in, 87, 89; publishing in, 89; scribes, 78, 8268, 83–84, 89; traders, 83; and translation, 62–63, 68, 75–78, 83, 87–88, 88n4, 89, 95; urbanisation, 256 Penang Eurasian Association, 46 Penang Mission Press, 89 Penarek Becha (Trishaw Puller), 369 Pendekar Bujang Lapok (Ne’er Do Well Bachelor Warriors), 380n15 Penerbitan Wahai, 308 People’s Alliance, see Pakatan Rakyat People’s Constitution, 363 People’s Justice Party, see Parti Keadilan Rakyat People’s Movement to Stop Bauxite Pollution, see Gerakan Rakyat Hentikan Pencemaran Bauksit People’s Unity Front, see Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah Pepper plantation, 453 Perak, 301, 435–436, 449, 460; Orang Asli, 448, 453, 455–456, 468; ruler, 453; slavery in, 436, 452; state government, 282 Perak State Aborigines Advisory Board, 438 Perak, Sultan of, 459–460 Perang sangkil (The slave-raiders’ war) (Akiya), 17, 429, 431, 452–460, 470, 472, 474 Perempuan politikus Melayu (Faisal), 300 ‘Perfect Day’, 422 Performative tradition, 79 Performativity, 408, 484 Performer(s), 17, 447; dikir barat, 397; female, 392

Index Performing arts, 295, 352; Indonesia, 406; Kelantan, 406 Pergau dam, 283 Perias forest reserve, 285–286 Perikatan Nasional, government, 282, 391n4 Perikatan Perhimpunan Istri Indonesia, 114 Periphery, 18, 191, 198, 278, 288, 350, 391, 400, 431, 443; of nation-state, 362, 440, 442 Perlis, 435 Permata di Perlimbahan (Jewel in the Slum), 369n1 Persatuan Aktivis Sahabat Alam, 279, 284–285 Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya, 252–254 Persatuan Belia Islam Nasional, 441 Persatuan Islam, 252 Persatuan Kelip-Kelip, 279 Persatuan Mahasiswa Islam Universiti Malaya, 254 Persatuan Mahasiswa Universiti Malaya, see University of Malaya Student’s Union Persia, 81 Persian, cosmopolis, 7, 59, 67, 69n3, 71, 77, 80, 94; hikayat, 67; language, 7, 59, 64, 67–69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 80, 82, 88, 91, 94; as lingua franca, 67, 73; literature, 67; scribes, 78; in Southeast Asia, 67; texts, 67, 81; translation, 67–68, 91 Persian manuscripts, from India, 67 Pertak, 444, 446 Pertak forest reserve, 446–447, 455 Perth, 417 Pertubuhan Pelindung Khazanah Alam Malaysia, 279–280, 285 Pesawat, 308 Petroliam Nasional Berhad, 258, 276 Petronas, see Petroliam Nasional Berhad Petronas Twin Towers, 301 Philippine, citizens, 167; history, 31; nationalism, 31 Philippines, The, 115, 159n5, 163; Bajau in, 157n3, 159, 161–162; Muslims in, 3, 10, 116; refugees from, 323; women in, 108 Philological tradition, 77 Philology, 74, 76; Orientalist, 77, see also Language(s)

Index Philosophy, 261, 307; development, 278; feminist, 106; Sufi, 400n9; of translation, 75 Pickthall, Muhammad Marmaduke, 109 Pilgrims, The, 419 Pitas, 163–164 PIUM, see Persatuan Islam PKBM, see Pasukan Kadet Bersatu Malaysia PKMM, see Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya PKPM, see Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar-Pelajar Malaysia PKR, see Parti Keadilan Rakyat Planning, developmental, 274, 276–277, 279, 283; town, 35 Plantation(s), 236, 353, 435, 443, 463; agriculture, 276; colonial, 274; economy, 437; oil palm, 443; pepper, 453; production, 435; rubber, 436; sector, 276 Plassey, Battle of, 75 PLU, see People like us Plural, 59, 95; culture, 7; feminism, 105; Malay world, 7, 63; masculinities, 399, 399n8 Plural society, 4–5, 36, 42, 484; fractured, 18, 48, 484 Pluralism, ethnic, 18 PMIUM, see Persatuan Mahasiswa Islam Universiti Malaya PN, see Perikatan Nasional Pococke, Edward, 68 Poet(s), 11, 31; of hybridity, 94 Poetri-Hindia, 113 Poetri Merdeka (Poetri Mardika), 113 Poetry, 262, 297–298, 301–302, 306, 450; Islamic, 66; Malay, 92; négritude, 434, 450; of politics, 65 Poh Soo Kai, 253 Police Act, 264 Police violence, 233 Policy, affirmative action, 37, 256, 376; British Empire, 60; Brooke, 132; Bumiputera, 153–154, 171; colonial, 436–437, 439; cultural, 18, 37, 39–40, 376n14, 377, 432, 440–441; development, 12, 18, 40, 186, 274, 276–277, 279, 288, 354; economic, 4, 18, 37, 171–172, 256, 276, 376–377, 432, 442; education, 251, 253–254; environmental, 274–275; ethnic, 133, 482; food, 186; foreign, 243;

541 government, 33, 129, 186, 322; Islamisation, 441; land, 129, 431; land-grabbing, 436; language, 8; modernisation, 278; multicultural, 35; multilingual, 35; multiracial, 35; and nation-building, 29; national, 170; Orang Asli, 438–442; postcolonial, 37; Sabah, 176; Sarawak, 129, 132; Singapore, 35; transformation, 18, see also National Culture Policy and National Development Policy and National Mission Policy and New Economic Policy Political, 9, 26–27, 33, 38–39, 43–44, 65, 69, 72, 81–82, 93, 107, 113, 153, 160–161, 166, 219, 236–237, 239–240, 253–254, 259, 278, 298, 300–301, 306, 310, 326, 353, 360, 392, 425–426, 471; activism, 264, 275; administration, 354; agency, 239; authorities, 274, 441; borders, 128, 133; boundaries, 90, 393; category, 160; change, 256, 260–262, 264, 356; community, 39, 244, 246; consciousness, 114, 356, 358; contestation, 34, 245, 260; control, 62, 141, 435; cooperation, 282; detainees, 253; development, 4, 358; discourses, 39, 249, 263; exchange, 393; identity, 3–5, 36, 138, 173, 371; independence, 44; insecurity, 45; institutions, 39; interaction, 426; leaders, 31–32, 35, 37–38, 140, 251, 254, 321; leadership, 8, 105–106, 118; legitimacy, 391; mobilisation, 49; modernity, 350; movements, 251–252, 266; myths, 79–80; opposition, 118; participation, 250; patronage, 440, 443; power, 1, 43, 49, 142, 250, 260, 262, 295, 309; reform, 261, 294; refugees, 323, 332; relations, 26, 63, 167; rule, 65; solidarity, 234; songs, 425, 433; sovereignty, 241; stability, 31; structures, 12, 267, 309; struggles, 34, 241; subjugation, 28; systems, 461; theory, 261; transformation, 264, 349; transition, 250; unity, 276; values, 249 Political culture, 12, 65, 250, 263, 267, 280, 295, 440; aesthetic(s), 65; and power, 65; and young people, 12, 263, 267; and youth, 250 Political dominance, of Muslim Malays, 41, 60

542 Political economy, 5, 18, 34, 41, 48, 434; colonial, 41; traditional, 434 Political elite(s), 8, 18, 28–29, 31, 34, 39, 43, 45, 48, 266–267, 296, 352, 388, 391, 484; and identity, 34; Malay, 39; Muslim, 43; and nation-building, 31, 33–34; Thai, 34 Political ideology, 8, 13, 27, 39, 80, 114, 273, 280, 432; Islam, 39; Islamism as, 13, 273; in Southeast Asia, 27; and students, 253 Political Islam, 275, 280, 441; and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 441 Political organisation(s), 252, 481–482; leftist, 252; in Singapore, 252 Political party, 108, 249, 251–252, 301; and corporations, 258; Dayak, 43; ethnic, 14, 38; Iban, 43; and Islamism, 276; Islamist, 283, 288; Malaya, 251–252; multiethnic, 43; non-Muslim, 174; racial, 38; Sabah, 154n1, 174; Sarawak, 358; and social media, 172, 267; students, 255–256, 265; and young people, 264, 267, 301, 308; and youth, 12, 250, 259–260, 263–265, 267 Political scientists, 28 Politician(s), 116, 259–260, 266, 278, 307, 389; Bajau, 171–173, 176; Chinese, 172; federal, 43–45; Malay, 38, 43; opposition, 377; Sabah, 172n16; Suluk, 173, 176; women, 266 Politicisation, of ethnicity, 171n13, 322; of religion, 174, 322 Politics, 12, 38, 118, 241, 244, 307, 319–320, 351, 425–426; African American, 235; of belonging, 484; of British Empire, 60; and business, 38; consociational, 249, 260; cultural, 35, 46, 154, 156, 250, 355, 371, 415; decolonisation, 239; democratic, 282; of development, 273, 288; electoral, 245, 250, 282; ethnic, 4, 35, 43; ethnoracial, 233; federal, 253; feminist, 117; feudal, 461, 473; gender, 425; Iban, 355; identity, 160, 244, 296, 484; Indonesian, 296; informal, 250; and Islam, 106; local, 260; money, 440; national, 253, 261; nationalist, 251; new, 249, 260; participatory, 262; patronage, 12, 38, 267, 440, 443; poetry of, 65; postcolonial, 244; racial, 4, 233, 244, 246; and refugees, 322; and religion, 106, 115; of religion, 156;

Index Sabah, 154, 156, 160; Sarawak, 43; and social media, 249–250, 263; and students, 252–253, 255, 259, 261, 264; transnational, 236; and women, 251; and young people, 12, 250–251, 256, 259, 261, 263–267, 308; and youths, 249–250, 261–266, 371; and youth activism, 2, 263 Polity, 1, 4, 11, 32, 82, 431, 433; cosmopolitan, 323; Malay, 5, 80, 323, 431; Malay-dominated, 5; multicultural, 323; precolonial, 435; Sabah, 156, 176; in Southeast Asia, 65 Pollock, Sheldon, 65, 67, 69n3, 82 Polvo, 417 Polygamy, 114, 393, 406 Polygyny, 109–110, 113, 116–117, 121; institutions of, 110 Pop yeh yeh, 374; bands, 372, 373n9; and P. Ramlee, 368, 371–372, 375, 379; and young people, 375; and youth culture, 372, 375, 380 Popular culture, 5, 12–13, 15–16, 251, 263, 295–297, 308, 370, 379, 391, 423; Iban, 350, 354–355, 363–364; and identity, 2–3; and New Economic Policy, 376n14; and P. Ramlee, 15; power of, 12, 267; practitioners, 416, 423; and social media, 267; and young people, 262; and youths, 262–263 Popular literature, 297 Popular music, 2, 4, 15, 349–350, 353–356, 359, 363–364, 370, 375, 377, 415, 452; American, 354; European, 354; history, 353; Iban, 15, 349–350, 354–356, 359, 363–364; and identity, 15; Indonesia, 356; Indonesian, 15, 354, 422; and modernity, 354, 363; Turkish, 375; Western, 15, 355, 370, 376 Population(s), 188, 267, 415; Bajau, 155, 159n4, 160–161, 163, 167, 170; Calcutta, 83; Dayak, 43; foreign, 62; hybrid, 135; indigenous, 5, 7, 35, 41, 171, 482; Kelabit highlands, 134; Kelantan, 390, 390n2; Malay, 437–438; marginal, 2, 9; migrant, 12; minority, 3, 30, 38, 45; multiethnic, 8, 127–128; Muslim, 10, 171, 437; native, 171; Orang Asli, 434, 482; refugee, 14, 317–319, 330–331, 454; Sabah, 2, 41, 45, 155, 158, 160, 163, 165, 171, 482; Sarawak, 2, 7, 9, 41–42, 45, 127–128,

Index 171, 349–351, 482; in Southeast Asia, 30; Suluk, 167 Port city, 62, 90; Bay of Bengal, 83; Penang as, 7, 62–63, 83; Singapore as, 63; Southeast Asia, 63, 69; Straits Settlements, 7, 63 Portelli, Alessandro, 319 Portuguese, 45, 80, 82–83, 232; as lingua franca, 73 Portuguese Eurasian(s), 7, 39, 45–47, 482; heritage, 46–47; identity, 46–47; as indigenous, 47, 482; Melaka, 46–47, 482; as minority, 39, 45; Penang, 7, 41, 45–47 Portuguese–Malay intermarriage, 47 Pos Gob, 286 Positive discrimination, 10 Postcolonial, 71, 238, 432; anthropology, 430; critique, 242; developmentalism, 439, 444, 473; discourses, 17, 429; government, 438; history, 9, 37, 127, 148; identity, 231, 233, 245–246, 375; nation-building, 16; nation-making, 367–368; nation-state, 246, 350–351, 429, 431, 439; nationalism, 5, 246; policies, 37; politics, 244; Southeast Asia, 363; state, 17; storytellers, 17, 429; world, 15, 249, 364 Postcolonialism, 4 Postcolonialist, 27, 70, 79 Post-Enlightenment Orientalism, 90 Post-Fordist tourism, 185 Post-industrialisation, 108 Postill, John, 43, 355 Postmodern, 50, 222; culture, 296; Kuala Lumpur, 41 Postmodernist, ethnography, 430 Poststructuralist, 27 Potter, Andrew, 298, 310 Poverty, 250, 277; Bumiputera, 40; Malay, 253; and New Economic Policy, 276, 440; Orang Asli, 434; rural, 391; urban, 274; and women, 118 Powell, Adam Clayton, 243 Power(s), 238, 240, 388, 432; bio-, 350; colonial, 9, 90, 95, 127, 148, 232; and culture, 27, 46; cultural, 65; consumer, 190; and discourses, 184; economic, 49, 122, 351; European, 71; global, 245; Han, 69; and identity, 30–31, 483–484; and knowledge, 5, 27, 61, 90, 137, 319; male, 106, 116, 404; of modernity, 352; of myth, 80; and nation-state, 9, 46; of

543 nationalism, 32; patriarchal, 405; political, 1, 43, 49, 142, 250, 260, 262, 295, 309; and political culture, 65; of popular culture, 12, 267; relations, 351; of religion, 239; social, 90; of social media, 191, 193, 196, 198–200; state, 5, 9, 95, 127, 148, 472; structures, 196; struggles, 404; systems of, 27; of tourism, 200; and trade, 141; and women, 117, 122 PPBM, see Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia PPII, see Perikatan Perhimpunan Istri Indonesia Practice(s), religious, 11, 217, 221 Practitioner(s), cultural, 2, 295, 482, 484; indie, 416, 423; popular culture, 5 Precolonial, 40, 71; Borneo, 139; class system, 435; indigenous communities, 471; knowledge, 82; Malay society, 434; Malay world, 63, 435; polity, 435; Southeast Asia, 72; trading networks, 434; translation, 80 Preservation, cultural, 16, 367–368, 380 Presidency, Bombay, 60; Calcutta, 60; India, 60; Madras, 78 Presley, Elvis, 422 Priests, Catholic, 173 Prima, 303 Prime Minister’s Department, 208 Primordial, 18, 37, 10, 37, 377, 399; category, 2, 8, 9–10; classification, 12; identity, 3–4; ideology, 33; indigenity as, 10, 154 Primordialism, 2, 29–30, 483; ethnic, 482–483; and identity, 483; ideological, 18, 481; national, 481; and race, 2; and religions, 483 Prince of Wales Island, see Penang Prince of Wales Island Gazette, 88, see also Government Gazette Principle(s), of British Empire, 60; cooperative, 108; of environmental justice, 167; humanitarian, 109; of identity, 28; indie, 300; Islamic, 280–281; of justice, 117, 281; kinship, 111; leadership, 117; matrilineal, 111; of participatory democracy, 264; of sustainable development, 13; Taoist, 399 Print centres, in Southeast Asia, 87 Print culture, 8, 87–88, 90, 95–96; indigenous, 96; Madras, 87, 89; Melaka, 88–89, 91, 95; and Munshi

544 Abdullah, 91; and Muslim middlemen, 90; Penang, 87, 95–96; and publishing, 87; Singapore, 95–96; Straits Settlements, 95 Print media, 427 Print revolution, 59, 86; and texts, 59 Printing, and books, 79, 300, 304–305; in Britain, 73; British and, 87; in Cairo, 89; in Chinese, 88–89; and colonialism, 87; history, 87; in Hong Kong, 89; in India, 87, 89; in London, 89; in Madras, 89; Malay books, 72, 87; in Malay, 88; in Melaka, 89; missionary, 88–91; and Munshi Abdullah, 91; in Paris, 89; in Penang, 87, 89; in Serampore, 88–89; in Singapore, 89; Southeast Asia, 88; in Straits Settlements, 89–90; and texts, 87; and translation, 87, 89 Printing Presses and Publications Act, 264 Private sector(s), 13, 40, 47, 165, 278; development, 13 Private university, 257–258 Privilege(s), affirmative action, 160; Bumiputera, 35, 171; citizenship, 171; constitutional, 35; communal, 274; environmental, 273, 447; indigenous, 35 Produce, economic, 115 Producer(s), film, 372; food, 10, 183, 185, 200; knowledge, 76, 82; music, 377, 415; social media, 199 Product(s), cultural, 31, 296, 298; forest, 147, 158; marine, 158–159, 166; marketing, 10, 115, 183 Production, aquaculture, 156, 158; cultural, 415; of difference, 352; economic, 111; food, 106, 185; of ideas, 7; indie, 413, 416, 420, 423–424; of information order, 71; knowledge, 7, 90, 93, 237; of Malay literature, 67; marine, 164; media, 190, 359; music, 415–416, 418; palm oil, 276; plantation, 435; subsistence, 169n11 Productivity, economic, 107, 115; farmers’, 362; women, 106 Programming, radio, 2, 4, 15, 17, 349, 355, 413–414, 419–421, 423–424, 426–427; radio stations, 419 Proletar dua menara (Fdaus), 301 Propaganda, government, 40; war, 355 Property, development, 45; law, 110–111 Proselytisation, Christian, 89; Islamic, 173, 209, 441

Index Protected area(s), marine, 162, 164n9, 166–167 Protest(s), Bersih, 261; environmental, 156; against logging, 285; Orang Asli, 285–286, 447; student, 254–255; and young people, 249; youth, 249 Protestant(s), ethic, 37; missionaries, 88 Proto-Malays, 434 Proudfoot, Ian, 72, 89 Provider(s), food, 184, 191–193, 196, 199–200 PSM, see Parti Sosialis Malaysia Psy, 265 PTS Millennia, 303, 307, 310 Public, discourse(s), 14–15, 42, 295, 299, 317–319, 324–326; intellectual(s), 18, 48; university, 254, 257–258, 416 Public Service Department, 258 Publisher(s), 86, 484; independent (indie), 13, 293–314; Indonesia, 306; Islamic, 308; local, 96; mainstream, 13, 294–295, 299, 305–307, 310; Malay, 293–314; and translation, 63; and young people, 303 Publishing, 261; Chinese, 70, 88; diversity, 308; independent, 1, 3–4, 11, 13–14, 293–314; Indonesian, 306; industry, 300–301, 303, 306–307; literary, 450; local, 70; Malay, 13, 88, 293–314; Melaka, 89; and missionaries, 89; in Penang, 89; and print culture, 87; social media, 304–305; and translation, 70 Pulau Buah, 446 Pulau Tikus, 45–46 Punan, 42, see also Penan Punjabi, 335; language, 335 Punk, 415, 425; aesthetics, 418; bands, 417; ethos, 425; rock, 417, 426; scene, 418, 424 Purity, racial, 33, 379 PuruShotam, Nirmala, 25 Pusat KOMAS, 262 Pustaka Peringatan P. Ramlee, 376 Puteh Press, 307 Putery Merdeka, 114 Puthucheary, James, 252 Putri Mardika, 114 Putten, Jan van der, 79, 86–87

Q Quota(s), employment, 38; higher education, 38; refugee resettlement, 320

Index Qur’an, 66, 81, 106–108, 108n1, 109, 116–118, 120–122, 212, 215, 280–283, 398; translations of, 109; translators of, 108n1

R Race, 1–2, 13, 18, 32, 34, 49, 240–241, 253, 256, 267, 425, 481; as category, 8; and citizenship, 33; consciousness, 241, 244–245; and culture, 27; discourses of, 7, 240; ideas of, 33; and identity, 244; and Mahathir Mohamad, 36; and modernity, 233; and multiculturalism, 14; and nation, 13; and nation-building, 16, 27; and New Economic Policy, 37, 276, 440; and primordialism, 2; relations, 5, 243; and Singapore, 27, 35, see also Ethnicity Racial, 253–254; barriers, 280; categorisation, 160–161; category, 2, 8, 10, 12, 33, 35, 128, 353, 482; conflicts, 2, 38, 49, 254; difference, 32–33; divisions, 38; equality, 33, 38; harmony, 33; identity, 34–35, 234, 241–242, 244–245; nationalism, 246; political parties, 38; politics, 4, 233, 244, 246; purity, 33, 379; reform, 48; sovereignty, 234, 237; stereotypes, 36–37, 245; superiority, 49 Racial hierarchy, 240; global, 233, 245–246 Racial riot(s), 13 May 1969, 4, 253, 441; Kuala Lumpur, 14, 48, 276 Racialised discourses, 484 Racialism, Asian, 245; colonial, 240; and knowledge, 237; nationalist, 245 Racialist, 12, 232; culture, 239; discourses, 11, 14, 231; structures, 231, 235, 237, 244 Racism, 233, 240, 243; antiblack, 231–232, 234, 234n1, 239, 245; and colonialism, 241; cultural, 434; discourses, 239; European, 240, 245; xenophobic, 234 Radin Sri Ghazali, 394 Radio, journalism, 413–415, 424; programming, 2, 4, 15, 17, 349, 355, 413–414, 419–421, 423–424, 426–427 Radio station(s), 415, 421; commercial, 420, 422; government, 355, 420; independent, 17, 413–414, 420; Orang Asli, 450; programming, 419 Radio Malaya, 355, 369 Radio Malaysia Sarawak, 363

545 Radio Sarawak, Iban section, 354–355, 360, 363; and modernisation, 355; and nation-building, 360 Radio Televisyen Malaysia, 258, 303, 416, 450 Raffles, Stamford, 68, 79, 82–85, 87, 91; and translation, 76, 87; as translator, 76–78 Raffles College, 252 Rafique Rashid, 419, 446–447 Raghib Al-Sirjani, 308 Rahman, Fazlur, 117 Rainforest World Music Festival, 447 Raja Ubong, 141 Rajakumar, M.K., 252 Rajhans, B.S., 369 Rakan Muda, 258–259, 263 Rakhine, 329 Rallies, Bersih, 12, 263–264, 267, 423 Ramadan, 145, 221, 442 Raman, Bhavani, 60 Ramayana, 72, 392 Ramli Ismail, see Ramli Kecik Ramli Kecik, 379–380 Ramones, The, 414, 421–422 Rancangan penempatan semula (regroupment), 443 Rantai Art, 308 Ras, J.J., 83 Rasid, 446 Rationalism, economic, 196 Rationality, 11, 432; Enlightenment, 242 Raub, 279 Rawa, 436, 453; identity, 436 Razaleigh Hamzah, Tengku, 392 RCOMM, see Recycle Community Malaysia REACH, see Regional Environmental Awareness Cameron Highlands Reader(s), 7, 242, 303–304, 307–308; Malay, 294–295, 306; Muslim, 89; and translation, 86, 94 Reading culture, 297, 302 Reagan, Ronald, 425 Realism, social, 449, 451 Realist aesthetics, 394 Reciprocal labour, 135 Record(s), government, 87; mercantile, 87 Record label(s), independent, 415, 417 Recording company, 425 Recycle Community Malaysia, 280 Reed, Lou, 422

546 Reform(s), 18; educational, 254; electoral, 12, 249; governance, 281; Islamic, 113; land, 253; legal, 264; political, 261, 294; racial, 48 Reformasi, 12, 249–251, 260, 263–264, 267, 294, 301, 309; and Mahathir Mohamad, 260; and young people, 260 Reformist, ideology, 122; Islam, 109, 115, 117, 122; Islamic, 173 Refugee(s), agency of, 329, 333, 344; and borders, 320–321; Bosniak, 323; from Cambodia, 323; in Canada, 320; category, 326, 336; Cham, 323; Chin, 318, 321, 324–325; citizenship, 337; and civil society, 326; conflicts, 321, 325, 343; and cultural identity, 342; discourses on, 14–15, 317–322, 324–326, 329–331, 341; discrimination against, 14, 322, 324, 326, 344; and education, 322, 343–344; employment, 324, 344; in Europe, 320; as foreign, 15, 329, 334; and government, 14, 318, 320–324, 326; history, 319, 323; identity, 15, 320, 326, 329, 331, 333, 335, 339–344; and illegality, 14, 317, 321–322, 324, 326; insecurity, 324; institutions, 14, 317, 320; integration, 15, 329; interaction, 321, 325; from Iraq, 14, 317–318; in Kuala Lumpur, 325, 332; leaders, 319; in Melaka, 323; in Middle East, 342; legal status of, 15, 322, 324–326; Moro, 323; movement, 483; from Myanmar, 14–15, 317–318, 320–321, 329–333; myths about, 322; organisations, 323; narratives, 14–15, 317–319, 324–326, 329–335, 337–339, 342–343; and nation, 322; from Pakistan, 14, 317–318; and politics, 322; population, 14, 317–319, 330–331, 454; political, 323, 332; from Philippines, 323; regimes of truth, 318–320; and religions, 324–325; representation of, 14–15, 320, 329, 331, 341; rights, 322–324; Rohingya, 319, 321, 325, 329, 331–332, 343; second-generation, 329, 343–344; from Somalia, 14, 317–318; from Sri Lanka, 14, 317; storytelling, 322; from Syria, 14, 317–318; in United States, 320; violence against, 321, 341; women, 318; and writers, 322; from Yemen, 14, 317–318; youths, 329–330, 342–343, see also Asylum seeker(s)

Index Refugee camp(s), 318; Bangladeshi, 321 Refugee resettlement(s), 320, 324, 330, 330n1, 332, 341; quotas, 320 Refugee Convention, 14, 159n5, 317–318, 320–321 Refugee Protocol, 14, 159n5, 317–318, 320, 330 Regimes of truth, 5, 14, 317; and knowledge, 6; and refugees, 318–320 Regional Environmental Awareness Cameron Highlands, 280 Regroupment or resettlement programme, see Rancangan penempatan semula Rehbein, Boike, 25 Reid, Anthony, 69, 69n3, 80 Relation(s), class, 32; cultural, 6, 23, 49, 63; economic, 26, 110, 167, 231; ethnic, 28, 34, 43, 49; gender, 39, 107–110, 116–118, 122; global, 349; international, 82, 238; linguistic, 63, 71; literary, 63; market, 189; multiethnic, 472; political, 26, 63, 167; power, 351; race, 5, 243; sexual, 11; social, 6, 23, 25–26, 161, 167, 232, 245–246, 350–351, 435; trade, 69 Relational, ethnicity, 28, 138, 147; identity, 23, 131 Religio-political, activism, 275 Religion(s), 1–3, 8–9, 65, 82, 90, 212, 237, 239, 241, 244, 275, 323, 353, 381, 389, 396, 433; Abrahamic, 110; and Bajau, 153, 155–156, 170, 176; and culture, 111; history of, 237; Indian, 78; leadership in, 106; and Malays, 36, 39; and Muslims, 108, 116; national, 171; and Orang Asli, 442, 459; politicisation of, 174, 322; and politics, 106, 115; politics of, 156; and power, 239; and primordialism, 483; and refugees, 324–325; representation of 396, 407; in Sabah, 170, 173, 176; and sexuality, 11, 208, 220–221; Thai, 33; and translation, 89; and women, 114–115 Religious, 208–209, 212, 241–243, 352, 438–439; beliefs, 69n3, 213; books, 302, 310; clerics, 441; congregations, 112; consciousness, 244; conversion, 82; differences, 171, 243, 472–473; discourses, 222; diversity, 237; economy, 90; film, 394, 396, 403, 408; identity, 213–214, 217–218, 221–222, 244–245, 381; ideology, 33; leaders, 281; literature, 67; marriages, 160;

Index morality, 389; mysticism, 405; nationalism, 245; networks, 221; novels, 294; practices, 11, 217, 221; revivalism, 90; sect, 441; services, 119; students, 259; teachers, 67; texts, 73, 90; tracts, 88; traditions, 90; youth organisations, 259 R.E.M., 417 Remembering, 382, 430 Rent-seeking, 443 Rentap, 356–357 Rentier capitalism, 440 Representation(s), 3, 28, 482; cinematic, 390; of colonised, 63; cultural, 6, 23, 26, 354; of Dayak, 43; female, 109; of identity, 46; of indigenous people, 17, 429–430; of Islam, 399, 403; of masculinity, 16, 211, 387, 389, 393, 396, 406–408; national culture, 388; of Orang Asli, 452; Orientalist, 375; of refugees, 14–15, 320, 329, 331, 341; of religion, 396, 407; of youths, 266, 394, 396, 408 Reproduction(s), 106–107, 110; labour, 436 Reserve(s), forest, 285–286, 446; Malay, 439; Orang Asli, 438–439 Resettlement(s), refugee, 320, 324, 330, 330n1, 332, 341 Residential location, 36 Resistance(s), 7, 13, 46, 196, 198–199, 293, 298–299, 309–310, 392, 404, 418; to colonialism, 232, 433; consumer, 196; creative, 10, 183–185, 193, 195, 198; cultural, 295–296, 310, 424; discourses of, 198, 200; ideas of, 309; indigenous, 474; Orang Asli, 447; transnational, 232; to violence, 433; women, 106 Resource(s), community, 118; economic, 27; marine, 164; natural, 156, 160, 165, 275–277, 431, 443 Restricted Residence Act, 264 Revivalism, Islamic, 107; religious, 90 Revolution(s), 355; Indonesian, 114; Iranian, 441; print, 59; songs, 423 Rhythmn Boys, 372 Riau Islands, 107 Ricci, Ronit, 65–66 Rice, farming, 107, 135, 362; rituals, 455 Richards, Gareth, 1–19, 59–103, 304n5, 481–486 Ridhwan Saidi, 300 Rights, civil, 235, 243, 262, 434; gay, 213; human, 34, 108, 121, 222, 250, 260,

547 262, 278, 281, 320, 322, 324, 330, 336–337; indigenous, 9, 153, 156, 160; labour, 322; land, 9, 111, 117, 129, 148, 153, 156, 439, 450, 470, 473–474; minority, 300; native customary, 156, 443; Orang Asli, 286, 429, 438–439, 441, 450, 457–458, 470, 473; refugee, 322–324; women’s, 117, 120–121, 210, 260 Rio de Janeiro, 273–274 Ritual(s), 484; blood brotherhood, 143; ceremonial, 444; dance, 390; funerary, 402; national, 32; peace-making, 9, 127–128, 144; rice, 455 Roberts, Brian Russell, 240 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 94 Rock music, 16, 258, 368, 413–416, 418–420, 425 Rock ’n’ roll, 372–373, 413, 420; American, 16, 367–368; bands, 368, 371, 376, 417, 421, 425–427; British, 16, 367–368; contestation, 425; movement, 420; myths, 414, 423; and women, 425; and young people, 16, 367 Rohingya, 15, 234, 336, 338–341; community, 340, 343; identity, 335–337, 341–343; leaders, 319; Muslim(s), 321, 329; refugees, 319, 321, 325, 329, 331–332, 343 Rolling Stones, The, 379 Roman Catholic Church, 45 Rome, 232 Rona-rona cinta Damascus (Sheila), 303 Roolvink, R., 72, 79 Roseman, Marina, 452 Rosmera, 252 Rotterdam, 389 Roy, Asim, 113 Royal lineage, foreign, 80; Javanese, 460 Royal Selangor Club, 255 Royalty, in Malay states, 36 RPS, see rancangan penempatan semula RTM, see Radio Televisyen Malaysia RTM2, 447 Rubber plantation(s), 436 Rukun Negara, 18, 37, 48 Rule, British, 71, 436–437, 449; Brooke, 144; colonial, 7, 61, 70–71, 93, 115, 148, 240, 245, 353, 378, 435, 439, 449, 473; Dutch, 114; European, 85, 245; imperial, 96; indirect, 76, 435; of law, 276; Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 283; political, 65

548 Ruler(s), colonial, 245, 436; divine, 32; local, 73; Malay, 300, 435–436; Perak, 453 Ruling class, 4, 274, 435–436; Malay, 436, 472 Rumah Anak Teater, 261–262 Rural, communities, 253, 354; cooperatives, 108; development, 277–278, 363, 391; economy, 187, 253; health care, 362n3; Malays, 36–37, 209–210; minority, 13; poverty, 391; sector, 391; tourism, 187, 199; women, 115 Rural–urban, migrations, 15, 256, 387, 396–397, 408; movement, 15 Rustam Sani, 257 S S. Rafidah H. Basri, 303 S46, see Semangat 46 Sa’ban, 130–131, 134, 136–138, 146, 146n3, 147 Sabah, affirmative action in, 160; boundary, 162; Bumiputera in, 153, 155, 161, 171, 173, 175; education in, 165; elites, 172n16; ethnicity in, 160, 173n16; immigrants, 158; Indians in, 155; indigenous peoples of, 41–42, 154, 156, 161, 172, 482; Islam in, 153, 172n16, 173; Islamisation in, 171–175; Malays in, 155, 160; Malayness, 171n13; minority in, 28, 45, 153; multicultural, 154; Muslims in, 9, 153, 171–175; Muslim Malays in, 41; nationalism in, 154, 159, 171; nationhood, 173; natives of, 171, 174; non-Muslims in, 171, 173–175; political parties, 154n1, 174; politicians, 172n16; politics, 154, 156, 160; policy, 176; polity, 156, 176; population, 2, 41, 45, 155, 158, 160, 163, 165, 171, 482; religions in, 170, 173, 176; state election (2020), 172; state government, 160, 162, 166, 170, 173–175; stateless people of, 170, see also British North Borneo ‘Sabah for Sabahans’, 174 Sabah Heritage Party, see Parti Warisan Sabah Sabah Parks, 164, 166–168, 176 Sabahan, Chinese, 160–161, 174 Saban, see Sa’ban Sabrina Zaifulizan, 308 Sahabat Alam Malaysia, 279, 284–285

Index Sahara Yaacob, 447 Saharil Hasrin Sanin, 299 Said, Edward, 63–64, 70, 82, 87, 90, 95, 242 Sakaran Dandai, 173 Salina (A. Samad Said), 449 ‘Salji Hitam’ (Black Snow) (Usman), 234–235, 239 Salju Sakinah (Zaid), 303 Salleh Said Keruak, 173 Salmah Ismail, see Saloma Saloma, 376 SAM, see Sahabat Alam Malaysia Sama, 157, 162, 168; language, 161 Sama-Bajau, 157n3, 161 Sama Dilaut, 157n3 Sama Semporna, 162 Sama Sulawesi, 162 Sama Sulu, 162; language, 162 Samad Ismail, 252 Samal, 161 Sang penguasa (Machiavelli), 307 Sangkil (slave-raiders), 436, 449, 452–460, 463, 470–473 Sanskrit, cosmopolis, 7, 59, 65–66, 71, 77, 80, 94; language, 7, 59, 64–65, 67, 69, 75, 80, 91, 94; literacy, 65; literature, 67; and Malay, 65; mobility of, 67; networks, 65; in Southeast Asia, 65, 67; texts, 65, 68; translation, 65, 67–68, 91 Saravanamuttu, Johan, 376n14 Sarawak, adat, 144; Bumiputera in, 41, 44, 175; British in, 349; Chinese, 351, 360; as Crown colony, 15, 349, 363; development in, 349, 351, 357–364; economic underdevelopment, 350; economy, 357, 362; education, 361; ethnicity in, 41, 45, 131, 139, 360; farmers, 362; farming, 134–135, 354, 362; forests, 361–363; governance, 349–350, 356; government, 146, 351, 354–358, 360–362; health care in, 361, 362n3; history, 8–9, 15, 127–128, 134, 136–139, 147–148, 349; housing in, 362; independent, 358, 361; indigenous peoples of, 8–9, 41–42, 44–45, 127–128, 138, 148, 349–351, 482; Islam in, 44; and nation-building, 349, 360; and nation-state, 15, 127, 349, 364; nationalism in, 358, 360, 364; migrants, 148; minority in, 8, 28, 42, 45; modernisation of, 351, 358; modernity, 349, 358, 360, 364;

Index multiethnic, 127–128, 134, 138, 139, 147; music of, 359, 359n1, 361, 364; Muslim Malays in, 41; Muslims in, 9; nationalism in, 358, 360, 364; native of, 171; political parties, 358; politics, 43; policy, 129, 132; population, 2, 7, 9, 41–42, 45, 127–128, 171, 349–351, 482; society, 354; state government, 358; trade, 147; tribes, 127–128, 132, 143–144; warfare, 139 Sarawak Gazette, 147n4 Sarawak Museum, 131 Sarikei, 362 Sarwar, Hafiz Ghulam, 108n1, 109, 117n7 Sassatelli, Roberta, 189 Saudi Arabia, women in, 119 Sawa Lawi (Maping Kuleh), 146 Schemes, labour, 118 Scholar(s), 2, 6, 63, 73; -administrators, 68, 75; American, 424; British, 424; colonial, 86; cultural, 388; Islamic, 277; Muslim, 281; Oriental, 77 Scholarship, critical, 6; Dutch, 73; Islamic, 390; Orientalist, 87 Schools, native, 113 Scotland, 77 Scott, James, 138, 472 Scott, Robert, 83–84 Scott, Walter, 86 Scottish ballads, 86 Scribe(s), 91, 61, 76, 82, 85; Arabic, 78; local, 82, 85; Malay, 78, 82; Penang, 68, 83–84, 89; Persian, 78; in Straits Settlements, 7 Scuderi, Alessandro, 190 Sea Dayak(s), 41, see also Iban Seaweed cultivation, 156, 158, 163, 166–167, 169, 169n12, 170, 176 Sebangkat Island, 167 Sebangkat, 163, 167 Secander Zulkarneini, see Iskandar Zulkarnain Second-generation, migrants, 342, 344; refugees, 329, 343–344 Second Malaysia Plan, 361, 362n3 Second National Physical Plan, 285 Second Outline Perspective Plan, 277 Second wave feminist theory, 105 Second World War, 114, 245, 251, 402n10, 437, 444 Sects, Islamic religious, 441 Sector(s), agricultural, 362–363; higher education, 232, 257; informal, 107,

549 318; plantation, 276; private, 13, 40, 47, 165, 278; rural, 391; services, 189; subsistence, 435; tourism, 183, 187 Security, borders, 320–321; national, 14, 255, 322 Security Offences (Special Measures) Act, 264 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 398 Segregation, gender, 116; sex, 220; of women, 114 Sejarah Melayu, 76, 78–80, 82–84, 91, 95, 323, see also Sulalat al-Salatin Sekolah Menengah Abdul Hamid Khan, 449 Seksualiti Merdeka, 208, 208n1 Selakan, 163, 167–168 Selangor, 256, 416, 435, 444, 453, 455; dam, 447; state government, 282, 301; urbanisation, 256 Self and Identity, 484 Self-empowerment, 93, 107, 218 Self-rule, 238; Indonesian, 110 Seling Ngau, 144 Selon Buling, 144–145 SeLUT Press, 300, 305 Semai, 30, 436, 453–454, 460, 463, 472; culture, 17; identity, 453; leader, 470; as minority, 30; relations with Malays, 436; society, 470 Semangat 46, 282 Sembang kencang (Fdaus), 301 Sembang kencang 2 (Fdaus), 301 Semelai, 436 Semporna, 158–159, 166, 168–170; district, 158; language, 162 Semporna Islands Project, 163–164 Semporna Priority Conservation Area, 163 Senghor, Léopold, 434 Seniman Bujang Lapok (Ne’er Do Well Bachelor Actors), 380n15 Senoi, 434 Sentap Press, 308 Sepuluh tahun sebelum merdeka (Ten years before independence), 262 Serampore, 78; printing in, 88–89 Serina Abdul Rahman, 285 Services, religious, 119 Services sector, 189 Seventh Day Adventist church, 241 Seventh Malaysia Plan, 277 Sex Pistols, 418 Sex segregation, 220 Sexist, social contract, 210

550 Sexual, agency, 11, 212, 223; identity, 3, 10–11, 207–208, 211–213, 217–218, 221–223; morality, 116, 209n4, 212, 215; orientation, 3, 213; practices, 11, 207, 211, 223; relations, 11; violence, 307 Sexual complementarity, 8, 105, 117; ideas of, 105 Sexual equality, 8, 105, 110, 112, 117, 121; in Malay world, 8, 105; and sharia, 110; in Southeast Asia, 8, 105 Sexuality, complexity, 211; diversity, 211; female, 116; government, 11; heteronormative, 215; and Islam, 8, 210, 212, 214–217, 220, 222; male, 223; and religion, 11, 208, 220–221; and women, 106, 113, 211, 220–221, 223, 398, see also Bisexuality and Heterosexuality and Homosexuality Sexuality in Islam (Bouhdiba), 212 Shadow economy, 319 Shadows, The, 368 Shafie Apdal, 171–173 Shah Alam, 262, 301–302, 309, 447 Shah Sarip, 372 Shaharuddin Maaruf, 93 Shaman, female, 389 Shamanism, 392 Shamsul A.B., 18, 48, 175 Shan, 30; identity, 30 Shanon Shah, 210 Sharia, 118, 209n5; in Aceh, 110; court, 283; and gender, 117; in Kelantan, 280, 283; and kinship, 117; law, 110, 280, 391n3; and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, 283, 391n3; patriarchy in, 107; and sexual equality, 110; and women, 118, 120, see also Islamic law(s) Shariati, Ali, 177 Sharifah Abdul Samad, 308 Sharifah Aini, 447 Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Anuar, 13, 293–314 Shariffa Sabrina Syed Akil, 280 Shaw Brothers, 368–369, 379, 380n15, 381 Shaw, John, 87 Shaz Johar, 300 ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah yeah’, 371 Sheila Majid, 372 Sheila Wani, 303 Shiite: Membongkar kesesatan Syiah (Raghib), 308 Shuhaimi Baba, 16, 367, 377–378, 381–382

Index Shuker, Roy, 415, 420 Shumway, David, 426 Siamese, states, 393; translator, 84 Siami, 82, 84, 86; and East India Company, 84–85; as language teacher, 86; as linguist, 84; as translator, 7, 76, 84–85, 95; as writer, 85, 94 Sibling(s), 19, 107, 111n2, 401; female, 115, 119 Sibu, 361–362 Sibuan, 163, 167–168 Siddiqi, Muhammad Mazheruddin, 117 Silat River, 143 Silverfish, 299 Simanggang, 360, 362 Simunjan, 360–361 Sindiket Sol-Jah, 300 Singapore, 187, 197, 274, 323, 380, 390, 440; citizens, 34, 59; East India Company in, 84, 435; economy, 30; elites, 35; ethnicity in, 33, 36, 49; film in, 368, 381; government, 30, 34–35, 49; identity, 35, 39; and Islam, 172; middle class, 120; missionaries in, 90–91; multicultural, 33, 35; multilingual, 35, 62; Muslims in, 3; nation-building, 35; nation-state, 33; P. Ramlee in, 369–370, 373, 378–379; political organisations in, 252; policy, 35; as port city, 63; print culture, 95–96; printing in, 89; and race, 27, 35; students, 252; trade, 84–85; and translation, 62, 95; youths, 370 Singapore Institution, 84 Singaporean, artists, 379; bands, 422; identity, 35 Singers(s), 358, 372–374, 379, 419, 423; Chinese, 208; Iban, 355–356, 363; indigenous, 446; Mak Minah as, 444–448; Malay, 369 Sinitic, 69 Sinographic, cosmopolis, 59, 69–70 Sino-Kadazan, 160 Sirat al-Iskandar (al-S.u¯ r¯ı), 81 Siti Nurhaliza, 372 Siti Radhiah, 184, 195 Sixth Malaysia Plan, 257, 277 Skanda (K¯arttikeya), 81 Skinner, Cyril, 83 Skrbiš, Zlatko, 33 Slave(s), 93, 436, 452–453, 455, 457, 460–466, 468, 472–473; community,

Index 454; debt, 435; female, 453, 461; and Islam, 117n7 Slave labour, 461; Orang Asli, 453 Slave-raider(s), 436, 449, 452–460, 463, 470–473 Slave-raiding, of Orang Asli, 17, 436 Slavery, abolition of, 437, 468, 472; and British, 435–437, 468; debt, 117n7, 436; female, 117, 122; and Islam, 117, 122; legacy of, 239; in Malay states, 436; Malay world, 435; male, 453, 461, 463–464; of Orang Asli, 17, 437, 449, 452, 472; in Perak, 436, 452 Smashing Pumpkins, 417 Smith, Gloria M., 359, 359n1 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 430, 474 Smith (Smythe), Thomas, 73 Smog, 417 Snapchat, 189 Social, activism, 12, 263, 267, 420; activists, 294; capital, 154, 190, 342; category, 259; change, 61, 253, 256, 451; class, 26, 28, 32, 35–36, 46, 333, 435–436, 472; communication, 71; development, 4, 31, 351, 431; difference, 26; discourses, 39; enterprise, 108; equality, 107, 118, 122; identity, 65, 111; inequality, 35, 264; institutions, 117, 212, 350–351, 424; interaction, 15, 29, 38, 343; interests, 79; justice, 49, 108; mobility, 256–257, 343; movement, 1, 11, 90, 197, 219, 249–251, 262, 264, 275; networks, 143, 190, 197, 342–343; order, 26, 209n3, 244; organisations, 25, 50, 70, 111, 231, 350; power, 90; realism, 449, 451; relations, 6, 23, 25–26, 161, 167, 232, 245–246, 350–351, 435; structures, 40; symbols, 9, 153; systems, 106; theory, 261; transformation, 5, 349; unity, 147; values, 350 Social anthropology, 50 Social contract(s), heteronormative, 208, 209n3, 222–223; homophobic, 210; patriarchal, 223; sexist, 210 Social media, 10, 12, 183–185, 188–191, 193–194, 197–200, 249, 297, 305; and food, 188, 192–193, 196, 198–200; intermediary, 199–200; knowledge, 199; and political parties, 172, 267; and politics, 249–250, 263; and popular culture, 267; power of, 191, 193, 196, 198–200; producers, 199; publishing,

551 304–305; and tourism, 189–190, 196, 200; United States, 189; and young people, 12, 262, 297n1; and youths, 262 Social mobility, and education, 256–257 Social movement(s), 219, 249–250, 262, 264; counter-hegemonic, 1, 11; environmental, 275; transnational, 90; and young people, 1, 251; and youths, 11, 264 Social science, 6, 23, 27, 34, 259, 482; theory, 350 Socialisation, 110–112, 221, 424, 433 Socialist Club (University of Malaya), 252, 255 Socialist Party of Malaysia, see Parti Sosialis Malaysia Societal, conflicts, 1–2; contestation, 1–2; ideology, 2; interaction, 2; modernisation, 352; norms, 306, 309 Society, African, 235; Asian, 235; Arab, 116; British, 24; civil, 14, 93, 250, 260, 263, 278, 284, 317, 320, 323; colonial, 61, 63; consumer, 298; court, 432; feudal, 434, 460; hybrid, 69; indigenous, 75, 129, 471; industrialised, 296; Islamic, 283; Malay, 8, 36, 105, 371, 375, 440, 460, 465; market, 432; Middle Eastern, 117; Minangkabau, 113; multiethnic, 40; Muslim, 107, 110, 117, 121–122; non-Western, 351; Orang Asli, 454; patriarchal, 117; plural, 4–5, 18, 36, 42, 48, 484; Sarawak, 354; Semai, 470; Southeast Asian, 69, 431; Straits Settlements, 84; traditional, 471; Western, 209n3; women in, 106 Sociocultural, 2, 284, 354; change, 358–359, 370; contestation, 5; organisations, 481–482 Socioculture(s), 5, 25 Socioeconomic, 17, 33, 44, 107, 434; class, 2, 5; change, 359; development, 46; differences, 39; structures, 235; transformation, 256, 259 Sociological, 24, 71, 277, 309, 484; methodology, 25 Sociology, 24, 34, 199, 244, 422; of modernity, 351 Soenting Melajoe (Malay Ornament), 113 Soja, 198, 200 Soldier(s), 424, 446; Christian, 61; Indian, 91 Solidarity, 235, 239; African–Asian, 11, 231–232, 234, 238, 245; collective, 31;

552 Global South, 231; international, 245; non-European, 11; political, 234; with Orang Asli, 285; student, 255 Solomon Islands, 162 Somalia, refugees from, 14, 317–318 Somers, Margaret, 483–484 Song(s), 262, 417–418; folk, 359, 422–423; Iban, 15, 349–350, 353–361, 363–364; and ideas, 358; Islamic, 119; Kayan, 359; Malay, 369–370, 421–422; Melanau, 359; Orang Asli, 429, 431, 444–447, 469; P. Ramlee, 369–373, 375, 378–380, 382; political, 425, 433; revolution, 423; Temuan, 447; traditional, 446–447 Songs of the dragon, 447 Songwriter(s), 356, 358–359, 419; Iban, 359, 361, 363–364; P. Ramlee as, 369 Soon Chuan Yean, 250 South Africa, 275 South Asia, 62, 65 South China Sea, 63, 70, 163 South–South, cooperation, 234, 238 Southeast Asia, 3, 5, 23–24, 27, 72, 81, 115n5, 128, 232, 352, 391; Arabic in, 66–67; and Britain, 75; and Chinese, 69–70; colonial rule in, 353; conflicts in, 62; culture in, 6–7; East India Company in, 65; ethnicity in, 49; governments, 33; identity in, 6, 28; immigrants in, 70; Indianisation of, 64; Islam in, 67; knowledge in, 59; languages of, 65, 78; merchants, 80; minority in, 30, 38; Muslims in, 3, 8, 106–107, 109–112, 117, 122; nation-building in, 33; Orientalists, 77; Persian in, 67; political ideology in, 27; polity in, 65; populations in, 30; port city of, 63, 69; postcolonial, 363; precolonial, 72; print centres in, 87; printing, 88; Sanskrit in, 65, 67; sexual equality in, 8, 105; translation in, 7, 64, 66, 70–71; women in, 8, 110, 118, 122 Southeast Asian, 5, 23, 27, 66, 116, 134; adat, 110, 118; feminists, 118; governments, 33; history, 353; ideology, 114; modernity, 353; music, 353; Muslim society, 122; society, 69, 431; statelessness, 159n5; trade, 80 Sovereignty, 283; corporate, 60; ideas of, 154; Kelabit, 137; local, 80; Malay, 79–81; national, 154; political, 241; racial, 234, 237; symbolism of, 435

Index Space(s), democratic, 1, 4, 11 Spalding (Spaulding), Augustine, 73 Special position of Malays, 18, 48 Sperma cinta (Aisa), 304 Spice(s), 59, 72; merchants, 72; traders, 73 Spiral Kinetic Circus, 419 Spirit, Bandung, 11, 231–232, 234–235, 239, 246; of capitalism, 37 Spirit-feasting, 392 Spirit of 46, see Semangat 46 Spiritual teachers, 392 Spirituality, 114, 121; and environment, 13, 274; Sufi, 396n6 Sri Aman, 359, 361 Sri Lanka, 81; refugees from, 14, 317 St. John, Spenser, 172n14 Stability, economic, 107; political, 31 Stable tension, 18, 48, 481, 484 Stacey, Natasha, 166 Standard(s), environmental, 13, 274–275, 280; Islamic, 174, 284 Star, The, 426 State(s), absolutist, 432; administration, 13; apparatus, 5, 280, 288, 432, 441; British, 95; Brooke, 131, 139; colonial, 17, 76, 95, 148, 429–431, 435, 438, 472; developmental, 432, 439–440, 444; elections, 172; employment, 171; and ethnicity, 33; European, 63; feudal, 434; French, 433; governance, 472; hegemony, 472; and indigenous people, 17, 349, 432, 471; institutions, 5, 383, 471; Islamic, 40, 174, 280–281, 283; legislature, 263, 283; Malay, 4, 7, 36, 96, 436; nationalist, 208; officials, 377; patronage, 40; postcolonial, 17; power, 5, 9, 95, 127, 148, 472; Siamese, 393; violence, 433; Western, 237 State Department (United States), 243 State government(s), Kedah, 282; Kelantan, 12–13, 273, 275, 282–285, 287, 390–393; Perak, 282; Sabah, 160, 162, 166, 170, 173–175; Sarawak, 358; Selangor, 282, 301; Terengganu, 282 State intervention, New Economic Policy, 38 State-led development, 37, 176 Statecraft, Islamic, 283; Melaka, 78 Stateless people(s), 15, 138, 159, 159n5, 262, 329, 337, 472; Bajau Laut, 167, 170; and education, 159; of Sabah, 170; Southeast Asian, 159n5

Index Station(s), radio, 17, 415, 420–422, 355, 413–414, 419–420, 450; television, 354, 367–368 Statista, 188 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, 432 Steenbergen, Dirk, 167 Stephens, Michelle, 236 Stephens, Muhammad Fuad (Donald), 172, 172n16, 173n16 Stereotype(s), 29; Black African, 233; cultural, 36; ethnic, 41, 44, 245; of Malays, 437; occupational, 36; of Orang Asli, 450, 452; racial, 36–37, 245 Stock, Markus, 81 Stockholm Conference, 274 Stokes, Martin, 375 Stone monument(s), 130, 133, 137 Stong Selatan forest reserve, 285–286 Storey, John, 296–297 Storyteller(s), 15; indigenous, 17, 429–431, 473; Mak Minah as, 17, 431, 444, 473; Orang Asli, 17, 429, 431, 444, 449–452, 473; postcolonial, 17, 429; Temuan, 17, 429, 431, 444 Storytelling, 2, 4, 44; indigenous, 430; oral, 82; Orang Asli, 17, 429, 431, 444, 452; refugee, 322 Strait of Makassar, 154 Straits of Balabac, 163 Straits Chinese, hybrid, 46 Straits Settlements, 36, 59; cosmopolitan, 7; East India Company in, 435; hybridity, 82, 95; missionaries in, 90; modernity, 92; port cities, 7, 63; print culture, 95; printing in, 89–90; scribes in, 78, 827; society, 84; and translation, 95 Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 261 Strokes, The, 422 Structural nostalgia, 378 Structure(s), economic, 40, 235, 274, 276; moral, 395; patriarchal, 120; political, 12, 267, 309; power, 196; racialist, 231, 235, 237, 244; social, 40; socioeconomic, 235 Struggle(s), anticolonial, 231–232, 234, 236, 240, 242; antiracist, 236, 242; class, 5; cultural, 198; human rights, 34; national liberation, 110, 234, 239; Orang Asli, 449, 451, 474; political, 34, 241; power, 404 Student(s), 252, 257–258, 261–262, 294, 302, 306, 332, 335, 355; activism, 253,

553 255–256, 264, 267; African, 11, 231–233, 245–246; Bumiputera, 38; conflicts, 253, 255; female, 113–114; foreign, 257; and government, 253–255, 257–258; Indonesian, 244–245; and Islam, 252, 254; and law, 254, 256; leaders, 254–255; leadership, 254; Malay, 211, 254; movement, 250, 255, 266; non-Malay, 254; organisations, 253–255, 259; politics, 252–253, 255, 259, 261, 264; and political ideology, 253; political parties, 255–256, 265; protests, 254–255; religious, 259; Singapore, 252; solidarity, 255; unity, 255; university, 261, 264, 306; women, 113, see also Young People and Youth(s) Student activism, 253, 255–256, 264; and Mahathir Mohamad, 255–256 Student politics, 255; history of, 255 Sturiale, Luisa, 190 Suara Rakyat Malaysia, 322, 330 SUARAM, see Suara Rakyat Malaysia Subaltern, 239; discourses, 45 Subang Jaya, 416 Subculture(s), 415, 481–482 Subculture (band), 372 Subject(s), colonial, 61, 71, 94 Subjugation, 17; of Muslim women, 114; Orang Asli, 431; political, 28 Subnational identity, 49 Subsidy, government, 294, 298, 304; university, 257 Subsistence, 168, 436; household, 169n11; peasantry, 36; production, 169n11; sector, 435 Sudahlah politikus (Farhan), 307 Sufi, intellectualism, 173; and Islam, 389, 394, 396, 396n6, 400; mysticism, 396n6; philosophy, 400n9; spirituality, 396n6; translator, 68 Sufism, 389n1 Sukarno, 11, 232, 237 ´ Sukasaptati (Seventy tales of the parrot), 68, 95 Sulalat al-Salatin (Genealogy of Kings), 76–80, 82–84, 95, see also Sejarah Melayu Sulawesi, 157n3, 161–162, 172n14 Sulawesi Sea, 157, 159 Sultan Idris Training College, 251

554 Sultanate(s), Brunei, 9, 127–128, 141n1, 145; Jolo, 158; Melaka, 78, 80; Sulu, 170 Sulu sultanate, 170 Sulu Archipelago, 158–159, 167 Sulu Sea, 154, 157, 159, 163, 169–170 Sulu Zone, 158 Suluh Malaya, 252 Suluk, 160–161, 163, 169–171, 173n17; immigrants, 171; politician, 173, 176; population, 167 Sumatra, 74, 81, 113, 323, 353, 436; East India Company in, 75; forest fires, 275 Sumatran, adat, 110; Malays, 111, 114 Sun, The, 418 Sungai Berok forest reserve, 285 Sungai Betis forest reserve, 285 Sungai Penchala, 441 Sungai Selangor, 447–448 Sunna, 280, 283 Sunni, –Shia conflicts, 117; translators, 108n1 Superiority, ethnic, 49; male, 107–108; racial, 49 Supremes, The, 379 Sustainability, 186, 277–278, 426–427; cultural, 424; of forests, 284 Sustainable, fisheries, 165; livelihoods, 160, 162 Sustainable development, 165, 275, 277, 279; principles of, 13 Sweeney, Amin, 71, 93 Swinburne University, 258 Syazrul Aqram, 305 Syed Hamid Ali, 254 Syed Husin Ali, 48–49, 252, 262 Syed Saddiq bin Syed Abdul Rahman, 266 Symbol(s), of culture, 25; of Malayness, 44; of modernity, 364; national, 33; of nationhood, 34; social, 9, 153 Symbolism, Malay Muslim, 34; of sovereignty, 435 Syncretism, 5, 28 Synthesis, literary, 67 Syria, refugee(s) from, 14, 317–318 Syriac, language, 91 System(s), belief, 25, 444, 470; class, 435; colonial, 82, 85, 94; cultural, 27; economic, 299; education, 33, 254, 266, 433; ethnic, 43; federal, 283; governance, 356; information, 14, 317, 320; justice, 261; kinship, 117, 134;

Index knowledge, 94, 190; political, 461; of power, 27; social, 106

T Tai Iwan, 9, 127–128, 139–144, 146–147 Tama Lawai Jau, Penghulu, 143 Tama Pasang, 143–144 Tama Ubong Ose, 143–144 Taman Negara Bird Group, 280 Taman Tasik Shah Alam, 262 Tamil, 83; language, 76–77, 80, 91, 335; translation, 91 Tamil Muslim, 83, see also Chulia Tamu Besar, 157 Tan Chee-Beng, 34 Tan Sooi Beng, 376n14 ‘Tanah’ (Land), 451 ‘Tanah Ai Menua Aku’ (My Motherland), 350, 356, 358–360 Tanah Aina Fahad, 279 Tanah Tinggi, 455 Tanah Tujuh, 445, 469 ‘Tanda Merdeka’ (Symbol of Independence), 356–357 ‘Tangerine’, 422 Tanjung Malim, 301 Taoist principles, 399 Tapah, 449 Tarbiah sentap 2 (Adnin), 308 Tasik Utara, 255 Tausug, 167 Tawaran anak muda (Offer to the youth), 265 Tawau, 168 Tawi Sli, 43 Taxation, and Kelabit, 9, 127–128, 142, 144–145, 147 Taylor, Charles, 352 Teach for the Needs, 261 Teacher(s), 61, 92n6, 401, 403, 451; Chinese, 88–89; Indian, 89; language, 76, 85–86, 92n6; literature, 449; Malay, 76; music, 359; religious, 67; spiritual, 392; and United Malays National Organisation, 38; women, 113 Teater Bukan Teater, 261 Technological development, 40, 190 Technology, communication, 28; cultural, 17 Telaga Biru, 303 Telekom Malaysia Berhad, 258 Telen Sang, 133, 135

Index Television, 17, 303, 303n4, 355, 370, 394, 397, 402, 418–419, 424; networks, 208; stations, 354, 367–368 TV9, 372 TV3, 303 Teluk Senangin Community, 280 Templer, Gerald, 437 Temporary Executive Council, see Majlis Tertinggi Sementara Temuan, 17, 444, 447–448, 454, 469; community, 446; culture, 444; identity, 453; musicians, 447; oral tradition, 444; songs, 447; storytellers, 17, 429, 431, 444; tradition, 448; women, 429, 431 Temuan-Belandas, 436 Tenaga Nasional Berhad, 258 Tenaganita, 322 Tensions, ethnoracial, 237 Tenth Malaysia Plan, 186, 278 Teoh, Crystal, 266 Terengganu, 405, 435; state government, 282; youths, 418 Terfaktab, 294, 300, 305 Terima kasih si babi hutan (Ismail), 305 Territory, 31–32; contestation of, 138; marine, 9, 153; national, 154 Tetagan, 167–168 Text(s), 61, 64, 78, 81–82; Arabic, 67, 68n2; Asian, 64, 72; Chinese, 68n2, 69–70; circulation of, 66, 70–71, 82, 95; cultural, 377; Dutch, 68n2; Hindu, 392; Hindu-Javanese, 67; history, 262; Javanese, 67, 68n2; from India, 67; indigenisation of, 7; indigenous, 69; Indo-Persian, 67; Indonesian, 115n3; Islamic, 72, 82; legal, 76–77; literary, 390, 407n15; Malay, 68, 68n2, 72, 76, 78–84, 87, 92–93, 407n15; in Malay world, 7, 59, 65, 79–80, 85, 87; Melaka, 69, 81, 89; Persian, 67, 81; and print revolution, 59; and printing, 87; religious, 73, 90; Sanskrit, 65, 68; translation of, 7, 61–62, 65–67, 77, 86, 94; travelling, 7, 59, 68, 78–79, 81, 90–91, 94, 96; world, 7, 59, 80–81, 94–95 Textuality, 424, 426 Thai, 401; cultural studies, 27; culture, 27; elites, 34; kingship, 33; language, 33, 84; nationalism, 34; nationhood, 33; political elites, 34; religions, 33; translator, 84; writer, 84 Thai community, in Kelantan, 390, 390n2

555 Thai–Malaysian border, 320–321, 390, 405–406 Thailand, 3, 33–34, 115, 196–197, 390–391, 393, 401, 404, 406; British, 34; European, 34; Kelantanese in, 393; Muslims in, 3, 116; national culture in, 34; trafficking in, 320 The Alternative Rock Show, 416, 419, 421, 426 The Arabian nights, 68, 91 The Breakfast Grille, 422 ‘The Bridge’ (Crane), 240 The color curtain (Wright), 11, 231–232, 239–240, 242, 244 The fables of Pilpay or Bidpai, 91 The gift (Mauss), 471 The Godfather, 396 The history of Sumatra (Marsden), 76 The interpretation of cultures (Geertz), 483 The Malay dilemma (Mahathir), 36 The Persianate world (Amanat and Ashraf), 67 The Persianate world (Green), 67 The pilgrim’s progress (Bunyan), 89 The rebel sell (Heath and Potter), 298 The True Partner of Indonesian Women, see Mistra Sejati Perempuan Indonesia The wretched of the earth (Fanon), 433 Theatrical performances, 392 Theory, constructivist, 30, 49, 191–192, 482–483; economic, 199; feminist, 8, 105; modernisation, 5, 431; political, 261; social, 261; social science, 350; travelling, 7, 59 Third Malaysia Plan, 276 Third Outline Perspective Plan, 277 Third wave feminists, 106 Third World, 242–243; anticolonial struggles, 231, 234, 237; communism, 243 13 May 1969, racial riots, 4, 253, 441 33RPM, 421 Thomsen, Claudius, 88, 91 Thongchai Winichakul, 31 Thukul Cetak, 294, 299–300, 304, 307–308 Tidak ada New York hari ini (Ann Mansyur), 306 Tidung, 160–161, 173n18, 176 Tiga Abdul (The Three Abduls), 370, 373, 375 Tikkanen, Irma, 191 Timbun Mata, 168 Time, 250

556 Time Highway Radio, 416 Timor-Leste, 162 Tin mining, 435–436 Tingang, 146, 147n4 Tinggie, Steward, 160 Title holders, native, 167 Toer, Pramoedya Ananta, 240, 449 Tok ampoo, 261 Tok peteri (spiritual teacher), 392 Tone, 426 Tongkat Warrant, see Usman Awang Toronto International Film Festival, 389, 402 Tourism, 10, 47, 183, 189–190, 194, 196; consumption, 185–186, 194–195; development, 183–185, 192, 196; food, 10, 183–188, 191–200; halal, 187; heritage, 184; and identity, 184, 192, 195, 197, 200; industry, 10, 183, 185–186; international, 186; in Kuala Lumpur, 185, 198; marine, 169n11; market(s), 10, 183, 188, 191, 196; post-Fordist, 185; power of, 200; rural, 187, 199; sector, 183, 187; and social media, 189–190, 196, 200; and tradition, 187, 193 Tourism Malaysia, 2, 186 Tourist(s), 47, 157, 183, 185, 234, 424; African, 232, 246; international, 10, 186–188, 191, 193–195, 197–200 Town planning, 357 Toxic waste, 279 Tract(s), Christian, 72, 88–89, 91 Trade(s), 65, 74, 239, 432; Asian, 62–63; Bajau Laut, 159, 168; book, 70, 307; British, 62; Brunei, 141, 141n1; and China, 62, 141; Chinese, 70; East India Company, 60; India, 62; international, 80, 239; Kelabit, 143; Malay world, 436; manuscript, 72; maritime, 63; Nanyang, 70; Orang Asli, 453; and power, 141; relations, 69; Sarawak, 147; Singapore, 84–85; Southeast Asian, 80; and translation, 59, 73 Trade union(s), 244, 251, 255–256 Trader(s), Asian, 85, 107; Brunei, 141, 147; Bugis, 162; Chinese, 42, 85, 457–458, 460; country, 61, 73–74; European, 83; female, 115; Indian, 85; Malay, 85, 147; Penang, 83; spice, 73; and translation, 74 Trading network(s), precolonial, 434

Index Tradition(s), 241–242, 398, 407; adat, 111, 113; Chinese literary, 69; cultural, 393; Dayak, 44; and ethnicity, 30; food, 184; and identity, 30; Kelabit, 142; liberal democratic, 281; literary, 390; local, 41, 142, 383; Malay, 40, 435; of Malay world, 455; manuscript, 72, 87; and modernity, 116, 352, 363–364, 405; oral, 17, 79, 87, 91, 390n2, 444, 449; Orang Asli, 438, 447–449; Orientalist, 77; performative, 79; philological, 77; religious, 90; Temuan, 448; and tourism, 187, 193; translation, 59, 64, 70, 80, 95; Western, 243 Traditional, 430–431; beliefs, 41; dance, 158; food, 10, 183–184, 194, 200; ideology, 33; knowledge, 189, 430; literary conventions, 83; Malay literature, 86; media, 14, 317, 322; music, 16, 44, 368, 370–372, 377, 380–382, 389, 395; political economy, 434; society, 471; songs, 446–447; values, 107 Traditional arts, Kelantan, 16, 387–393, 402–403, 406, 408 Traditionalism, 37 Trafficking, in Thailand, 320; of women, 396 Transcultural border, 393 Transethnic solidarities, 49 Transformation(s), agricultural, 362; cultural, 6, 26, 62, 131, 349, 363; economic, 4, 349, 354, 431; ethnic, 3; identity, 5–6, 31, 49, 481, 484; Islamic, 172; policy, 18; political, 264, 349; social, 5, 349; socioeconomic, 256, 259; youth activism, 256 Transgender, 5 Transgenderism, 211, 215 Transition(s), historical, 350; identity, 187; political, 250 Translation(s), 7, 60, 64, 66, 80–81, 94; Arabic, 67–68, 68n2; Bible, 72; and British, 7, 72, 76; Catholic, 88n4; Chinese, 88; and colonialism, 61; and conversion, 66, 82; and East India Company, 75; English, 73, 76–79, 86–87, 109, 193, 236n2, 449n1, 454n2; and Europeans, 63; history, 7, 59; of ideas, 66; imperialism, 61; linguistic, 59; literary, 1, 3, 95; and literature, 59, 87; Malay, 67, 71–72, 74, 76–80, 82–84, 86–87, 91–92; in Malay world,

Index 63, 65, 72; in Melaka, 88–89, 95; and missionaries, 7, 88–89, 91; networks, 66, 95; and Penang, 62–63, 68, 75–78, 83, 87–88, 88n4, 89, 95; Persian, 67–68, 91; philosophy of, 75; and printing, 87, 89; and publishers, 63; and publishing, 70; of Qur’an, 109; and readers, 86, 94; Sanskrit, 65, 67–68, 91; and Singapore, 62, 95; in Southeast Asia, 7, 64, 66, 70–71; and Stamford Raffles, 76, 87; Tamil, 91; of texts, 7, 61–62, 65–67, 77, 86, 94; and trade, 59, 73; and traders, 74; and transmission, 63; vernacular, 82; Western, 243, see also Language(s) Translation tradition(s), Asian, 59, 64, 70, 80, 95; and religions, 89; and Singapore, 62, 95; in Southeast Asia, 64, 66, 71; and Straits Settlements, 95 Translator(s), 59, 63, 68, 92, 94, 483–484; Asian, 61; British, 76–77, 82; Chinese, 84; European, 62; hybrid, 7; indigenous, 7, 62; literary, 94; local, 59, 76, 82; Malay, 84; Munshi Abdullah as, 7, 86, 91, 94–95; multilingual, 84; of Qur’an, 108n1; Siami as, 7, 76, 84–85, 95; Stamford Raffles as, 76–78; Sufi, 68; Sunni, 108n1; Thai, 84 Transmission(s), linguistic, 7; language, 61, 64, 67, 87; literary, 66, 81; and translation, 63 Transnational, 237; antiracism, 244; communication, 483; consciousness, 240–241; corporations, 148; economic networks, 138; identity, 2; politics, 236; resistance, 232; social movements, 90 Transnationalism, 236, 240 ‘Traveling theory’ (Said), 63 ‘Traveling theory reconsidered’ (Said), 63 Travelling text(s), 7, 59, 68, 78–79, 81, 90–91, 94, 96 Travelling theory, 7, 59 Tribe(s), 430, 453, 459; Arab, 66; border, 146; Sarawak, 127–128, 132, 143–144 Truth, 255 Tsunami, Indian Ocean, 275 Tuai Iwan, see Tai Iwan Tuaran district, 157–158 Tueku Zakaria bin Teuku Nyak Puteh, see P. Ramlee Tun Mustapha Park, 154, 163–165, 167 Tun Sakaran Marine Park, 154, 157, 159n4, 163–164, 167–169, 176 ‘Tuntut’, 451

557 Tuntut (Claiming) (Akiya), 17, 429, 431, 450–452, 474 Turkic, 68 Turkish, language, 68; popular music, 375 Turtle Conservation Society of Malaysia, 280 Tuti-nama (Book of the parrot), 68, 95 ‘Twenty Points’, 170 Twitter, 189, 200, 265, 297, 305 Tylor, Edward, 26 U U-Wei Haji Saari, 393 UBU, see Universiti Bangsar Utama Ultra-Ganges Mission, 88 Ulu Baram, 132, 143, 146 Ulun perintah (life of government), 8, 127–128, 139, 147 Ummah (collective Muslim community), 108, 115n3, 215 UMNO, see United Malays National Organisation UMSU, see University of Malaya Student’s Union UN, see United Nations Unclogged, 419 Undang-undang laut, 76 Underclass youths, 396 Underdevelopment, economic, 350; Kelantan, 391; legacy of, 350 Underground music, 415–420, 424 Undi18, 266 Undocumented migrant(s), 321–322, 330 UNDRIP, see United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples UNESCO, see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Unfederated Malay States, 435 Ungku Omar, 253 UNHCR, see United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Un-Islamic, culture, 391; mysticism as, 403 United Malays National Organisation, 37, 252, 254, 260, 263, 266, 277, 285, 391–392, 443; administration, 288; ethnoreligious nationalism, 209–210; hegemony, 282; and Islam, 210; and Islamisation, 396n7; leadership, 44; and patriarchy, 209; and teachers, 38; and youths, 259–260 United Nations, 159 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 160, 160n6

558 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, 391 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 14, 317–318, 320, 322–323, 325–326, 329–330, 330n1, 331–332, 337 United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusun Murut Organisation, 154n1 United Sabah Islam Association, 172n16 United States, 31, 234–236, 356, 417, 421, 425–426, 452; African Americans in, 235; civil rights in, 235, 243, 434; foreign policy, 243; government, 238; missionaries, 89; refugees in, 320; social media, 189; State Department, 243 Unity, Arab, 66; in diversity, 18, 48, 237, 484; ethnic, 111; national, 18, 31, 48–49, 276, 432; political, 276; social, 147; student, 255 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 320 Universal Pictures, 389 Universalism, 105 Universiti Bangsar Utama, 261–262 Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 261, 283 Universiti Malaya, 403n11, see also University of Malaya Universiti Malaya Malay Language Society, see Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya Universiti Malaysia Sabah, 174 Universiti Multimedia, 258 Universiti Pertanian Malaysia, see Universiti Putra Malaysia Universiti Putra Malaysia, 416 Universiti Sains Malaysia, 254 Universiti Teknologi MARA, 302 Universiti Teknologi Petronas, 258 Universiti Tenaga Nasional, 258 Universiti Terbuka Anak Muda, 261 Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, 258 University, 165–166, 255, 257, 262, 393, 397, 447; autonomy, 254–255; education, 252; and Islam, 441; private, 257–258; public, 254, 257–258, 416; students, 261, 264, 306; subsidies, 257, see also Higher education University and University Colleges Act, 254, 256, 264 University of Malaya, 254–255, see also Universiti Malaya University of Malaya in Singapore, 252

Index University of Malaya Islamic Students’ Society, see Persatuan Mahasiswa Islam Universiti Malaya University of Malaya Student’s Union, 253–255 University Socialist Club, 252 UPKO, see United Pasokmomogun Kadazandusun Murut Organisation Urban, 119, 256, 363, 396, 407, 427, 443; capitalism, 408; Chinese, 36; community, 14, 294; Dayaks, 44; development, 47, 284, 353, 357, 361; economy, 46; environment, 317–318; Iban, 364; identity, 47; Malays, 37; middle class, 17, 40, 413, 420; modernisation, 45; modernity, 45; poverty, 274; youth, 263, 394, 417 Urban poor, Kuala Lumpur, 261; organisations, 332 Urbanisation, 41, 353; and Dayaks, 44; and Iban, 354; Penang, 256; Selangor, 256; and women, 119 Useful knowledge, 59, 72, 74, 88 Usman Awang, 11, 231, 234–236, 239, 246, 252 Utat, 446, 448 Utusan Karya, 307 Utusan Malaysia, 233, 308 Utusan Publications, 299 UUCA, see University and University Colleges Act

V Values, 196, 371; Asian, 39; British, 93; Chinese, 36; communal, 398; cultural, 26–28, 184, 415, 418, 426, 470; ethical, 26; exchange, 443; historical, 423; indie, 416, 424–426; Islamic, 283, 441; Malay, 36–37; moral, 107; Muslim, 116; normative, 65; peace-making, 9, 127–128; political, 249; social, 350; traditional, 107; Western, 39, 41 Variety, 402 Venopian Solitude, 308 Vermeulen, Hans, 49–50 Vernacular, Arabic, 68; buildings, 41; cosmopolitan, 66–67, 71, 82, 84, 91; discourses, 176; education, 435; European, 91; language, 66–67, 71, 93; literacy, 65; translations, 82 Vietnam, 69, 115 Vietnamese, invasion of Champa, 323

Index Violence, 16, 118, 387, 389, 393, 399, 401–402, 404, 406, 408, 432; antiblack, 231–232, 245; colonial, 433; domestic, 117, 120–122; homophobic, 208; and masculinity, 394; in Myanmar, 341; and Orang Asli, 436, 452, 454, 458, 461, 470–474; police, 233; against refugees, 321, 341; resistance to, 433; sexual, 307; state, 433; white, 243 Vision 2020, 4, 37, 40, 388, see also Wawasan 2020 Vitalis, Robert, 238 Voice of the Citizens, see Suara Rakyat Malaysia Vote-buying, 12

W Wade, Geoff, 69 Wadud, Amina, 108–109, 117, 120 Wage employment, 112 Wagner, Peter, 351 Wagoner, Phillip, 70, 79 Wahiduzzaman, 394 Walber, Daniel, 406 Walcott, Derek, 60, 94 Wan Azli Wan Jusoh, 387, 389, 394–399, 407 Wan Bayar, 146 Wang Gungwu, 252 Wanita songsang: Kumpulan pengarang anti feminis (Nurul et al.), 308 War propaganda, 355 Warfare, 471; colonial, 437; guerrilla, 252, 437, 470; Kelabit, 129, 135, 137–138, 143; Sarawak, 139 Warisan, see Parti Warisan Sabah Warisan Plus, 172 Warkah cinta berbau syurga (Ubaidillah), 303 Warming, global, 275 Warner, Marina, 68 Warnk, Holger, 72 Warren, Carol, 167 Waterson, Roxana, 319 Wavelength, 421 Wawasan 2020, 277–278, see also Vision 2020 Wayang (Shadows), 392–393 Wayang kulit (shadow play), 390–392 Wealth, 36, 107, 112, 238, 404, 465; accumulation, 30, 440; disparity, 278; distribution, 49

559 Weber, Max, 25, 37 Weintraub, Andrew N., 250 Weiss, Meredith L., 250, 263–264 Wellman, Mariah L., 199 Wertheim, W.F., 45 West Malaysia, 154, 171, 439; Acehnese diaspora in, 324; Malays, 175 West Sumatra, 107 Western, anthropology, 430; capitalism, 388; civilisation, 242; colonialism, 375; corporate interests, 10, 183; culture, 371, 375, 379; education, 113; empires, 240; feminist theory, 8, 105; food, 194, 199; imperialism, 93, 243; international aid, 243; knowledge, 237, 352; modernity, 16, 242, 350–353, 371, 387, 397, 408; music, 355, 363, 377, 379, 391; Orientalism, 63; popular music, 15, 355, 370, 376; societies, 209n3; states, 237; values, 39, 41; women, 209n3; world, 241 Westernisation, 397 White violence, 243 Whitt, Hugh, 432 Wilder, William, 112 Williams, Alistair, 190 Williams, Raymond, 352 Williams-Hunt, Peter, 438 Winstedt, R.O., 68, 78 Winterbottom, Anna, 72–75 Wittig, Monique, 209n3 Wknd Sessions, 419 Wolters, Oliver, 79 Women, 482; Acehnese, 116; activism, 122; and adat, 105, 107, 110–111, 113, 118, 119n11; in Afghanistan, 118; agency of, 210; Arab, 116–117; Bajau Laut, 166, 169, 169n11; Batak Mandailing, 116–117; and civil society, 108, 110, 113, 260; diaspora, 115; and economic autonomy, 106, 108; and economy, 105; and education, 107–108, 112–113, 115, 118–119; and employment, 118–119; and empowerment, 8, 105–107, 122; and equality, 108; farmers, 107, 115; and farming, 108, 115, 118, 166; and films, 400; Indonesian, 113–114, 117, 121; and inheritance, 111, 117, 119, 119n11, 120n13; in Islam, 105–109, 111, 116–117, 120–121, 220; Javanese, 116; Kelabit, 133; Kelantanese, 284; labour, 115n4, 118; and land, 111, 117; leaders,

560 118; and leadership, 105–106, 108, 110, 118; literacy for, 113; livelihoods, 116, 118; Malay, 116, 119, 121, 209–210, 425; Mandailing, 116; and marriage, 112–113, 119–121; and masculinity, 16, 387, 408; migrant workers, 107; migrant, 115; mobility, 116; modernity, 112; and morality, 106; movement, 114; musicians, 391, 425; Muslim, 8, 106–108, 110, 114, 116–118, 120, 120n13, 121–122, 209–210, 281; networks, 107–108, 115; non-governmental organisations, 260; Orang Asli, 452; organisations, 114; in Pakistan, 188; performing troupes, 391; in the Philippines, 108; politicians, 266; and politics, 251; and poverty, 118; and power, 117, 122; productivity, 106; refugees, 318; and religions, 114–115; resistance, 106; rights, 117, 120–121, 210, 260; rural, 115; rock musicians, 425; in Saudi Arabia, 119; segregation of, 114; and sexuality, 106, 113, 211, 220–221, 223, 398; and sharia, 118, 120; in society, 106; in Southeast Asia, 8, 110, 118, 122; students, 113; teachers, 113; Temuan, 429, 431; trafficking of, 396; and urbanisation, 119; Western, 209n3; and work, 106–108, 115, 115n4, 116, 118, 166, 169, 169n11; in Yemen, 118; young, 122 Women Aware, see Istri Sedar Women’s associations, nationalist, 113 Wong Tack, 280 Woo, John, 396 Woodhull, Sidney, 252 Work, and women, 106–108, 115, 115n4, 116, 118, 166, 169, 169n11 Worker(s), African, 246; migrant, 11, 107, 321, 343, 481–482 Working class, 16, 256, 287; communities, 106; Malays, 209–210; youths, 16, 387, 408 World, economy, 145; indigenous, 87; Islamic, 66; literary, 94; literature, 91; postcolonial, 15, 249, 364; texts, 7, 59, 80–81, 94–95; Western, 241 World Summit on Sustainable Development, 275 World Wide Fund for Nature, 162–163, 165, 279

Index Wright, Richard, 11, 231–232, 234, 236–246 Writer(s), 236, 239–240, 294–295, 297–298, 301, 446; African American, 11, 231–232, 243; Arabic, 66; British, 76, 437; Chinese, 84; commercial, 308; East India Company, 61, 85, 91; indie, 303–306; indigenous, 7, 94; from Indonesia, 306; Indonesian, 232, 449; leftist, 449; local, 59, 76, 82, 85, 95, 307; Malay, 83–84, 92, 252, 262; Malayan, 83; Munshi Abdullah as, 91–92, 92n6, 94; music, 418, 426; Orang Asli, 17, 444, 470; and refugees, 322; Siami as, 85, 94; Thai, 84; young, 308 Writers’ Movement ’50, see Angkatan Sasterawan ’50 Writing, 85, 430–431; Arabic, 66; Chinese, 69; conformist, 307; critical, 307; culture, 448; and East India Company, 60–62, 77, 85–86, 95; government by, 60; indie, 308; Malay, 79, 83–84, 449; Orang Asli, 450 WWF, see World Wide Fund for Nature X Xenophobic racism, 234 XFM, 420 Y Yamamoto, Hiroyuki, 173 Yasmin Ahmad, 400n9 Yemen, refugees, 14, 317–318; women in, 118 Yeoh Yin Pin, 417 Young Faction, see Kaum Muda Young Malays Union, see Kesatuan Melayu Muda Young people, agency of, 12, 267; and alternative arts, 302; depoliticisation of, 256, 258; and education, 12; and films, 306; and government, 12, 258–260, 263–264, 266, 295; and identity, 258–259; and indie publishing, 294–295, 298, 305, 307, 310; and law, 12, 267; Orang Asli, 455; and P. Ramlee, 368, 380–381; political culture of, 12, 263, 267; and political parties, 264, 267, 301, 308; and popular culture, 262; and politics, 12, 250–251, 256, 259, 261, 263–267, 308; and pop yeh

Index yeh, 375; and protests, 249; and publishers, 303; and Reformasi, 260; and rock ’n’ roll, 16, 367; and social media, 12, 262, 297n1; social movements, 1, 251, see also Student(s) and Youth(s) Youth(s), 3, 276, 302, 308–309, 481–482; activism, 2, 4, 12, 249–251, 253, 256, 258, 260–261, 263, 266–267, 420; activists, 5, 263; and Bersih, 263–264; Chinese, 254; culture, 12, 262, 370–373, 379, 394; employment, 265, 267; Iban, 355; and indie publishing, 307; and Islam, 259; Kelantan, 418; Kelantanese, 284, 390, 394, 396–397; leaders, 251; Malay, 252, 306, 368, 372, 374, 379–380, 418; lifestyles, 258, 394, 396; markets, 13, 293, 295, 310; masculinities, 16, 387, 408; middle class, 417; in Middle East, 342; migrant, 343; movements, 251–252; music, 371–373, 375, 380; Muslim, 392; Myanmar, 15, 329, 331; networks, 12, 250, 267; in North Africa, 342; Orang Asli, 449, 470; organisations, 259–261; and political culture, 250; and political parties, 12, 250, 259–260, 263–265, 267; and politics, 2, 249–250, 261–266, 371; and popular culture, 262–263; protests, 249; refugee, 329–330, 342–343; representation of, 266, 394, 396, 408; Singapore, 370; and social media, 262; and social movements, 11, 264; underclass, 396; and United Malays National Organisation, 259–260; urban, 263,

561 394, 417; working class, 16, 387, 408, see also Student(s) and Young people Youth organisation(s), administration of, 259; religious, 259 Youth Council of Malaysia, see Majlis Belia Malaysia YouTube, 208, 262, 419 Yugoslavia, 323 Yuna, 422 Yusnor Ef, 370 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 484

Z Zack Yusof, 421 Zahaf, Mehdi, 190 Zaid Akhtar, 303 Zairil Khir Johari, 266 Zam Zam, 374 Zamir Mohyedin, 307 Zawawi Ibrahim, 1–19, 28, 45, 174–175, 250, 429–480, 481–486 Zee Avi, 422 Zheng Xiang, 189 Zhou Enlai, 235 Zia, Khaleda, 118 Zomia, 472 Zone(s), buffer, 165; conservation, 168; community use, 165–166; general use, 165, 168–169; no-take, 165, 168, 169n11 Zul Fikri Zamir, 304 Zulhabri Supian, 302 Zulkarnain Zakaria, 308 Zunar, 299 Zuraidah Mohd Don, 15, 329–347