Category Archives: Malaysia

by | 31 July 2004 · 7:52 pm

Naipaul on Malay Chinese Muslims

On a hill overlooking the Perak River, and almost at the entrance to the royal enclave, was the house of Raja Shahriman, a sculptor and a prince, distantly related to the royal family. It was an airy house of the late 1940s, and it was furnished in the Malay style, with rattan chairs, brightly colored fabrics, and cloth flowers.

The sculptor was small, five feet six inches, and very thin, in the pared-down Malay way. There was little expression on his face; the nature of his work didn’t show there. He worked with found metal; there was a forge in the yard at the back of the house. He created martial figures of great ferocity, two to three feet high, in clean flowing lines; and the effect of the black-metal figures in that house, with the pacific, restful views, was unsettling.

The sculptor, in fact, lived in a world of spirits. He also made krises, Malay daggers; it was part of his fascination with metal. Krises found out their true possessors, the sculptor said; they rejected people who didn’t truly own them. He had a spiritual adviser, and would have liked me to meet him; but there wasn’t time. The world of Indonesian animism felt close again. In more ways than one we were close here to the beginning of things, before the crossover to the revealed religions.

The sculptor had a middle-aged Chinese housekeeper. She would have been given away by her family as a child, because at that time Chinese families got rid of girls whom they didn’t want. Malays usually adopted those girls. The sculptor’s housekeeper was the second Malay-adopted Chinese woman I had seen that day. It gave a new slant to the relationship between the two communities; and it made me think of the Chinese in a new way.

In 1979 I had been looking mainly for Islam, and I had seen the Chinese in Malaysia only from the outside, as the energetic immigrant people the Malays were reacting to. Now, considering these two gracious women, and their fairy-tale adoption into another culture, I began to have some idea how little the Chinese were protected in the last century and the early part of this, with a crumbling empire and civil wars at home and rejection outside: spilling out, trying to find a footing wherever they could, always foreign, insulated by language and culture, surviving only through blind energy. Once self-awareness had begun to come, once blindness had begun to go, they would have needed philosophical or religious certainties just as much as the Malays.

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1998), pp. 369

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Filed under China, Islam, Malaysia

by | 25 July 2004 · 6:09 pm

Naipaul on the Japanese in Malaysia, 1942-45

The Japanese were in Malaysia for three years and eight months. Until they came, Syed Alwi had not seen violent death. Now, near the market in Taiping, where his old English-language school was, he would see staked heads. He was told that they were the heads of Chinese people.

Syed Alwi said, “After the first year things became bad. Food became very short–the basic necessities, rice, sugar. The life in the kampung began to go very bad when disease became rampant. We didn’t have much nourishment. So you got ulcers, skin diseases. We had lost our knowledge of local herbs. We had grown used to hospitals and Western medicine. We couldn’t cope with the breakdown of society.

“Besides, the Japanese had promised that everything was going to be all right, and that there would be abundance of everything. They specifically mentioned that a lot of rice would be coming, because in Japan they grew a lot of rice. Whenever they took anything from us they would say it would be repaid many times over. They would say, ‘I take your bicycle now. I will repay it with five bicycles or more.’ And they would add, ‘Not only bicycles, but other things as well. ‘They mentioned silk. And for months and months the community waited. The Japanese kept that promise alive by circulating rumors that shipments of rice had arrived and people in certain kampungs had already received theirs.

“At the beginning of newsreels, in the mobile cinemas and the theaters, they would say in Japanese, Malay, and English: ‘Thank God Asia has been given back to Asians.’ What followed were images of the greatness of Japan: bundles and bundles of silk and other luxury goods. This had an effect. The first Hari Raya–the festival after the fasting month–we were talking about how everybody would be dressed in Japanese silk.”

But things just went from bad to worse….

Syed Alwi said, “A new way of life, a decayed way of life, began to develop. Right and wrong began to be decided not by any moral or religious or spiritual standard, but by what was good for the self and survival. If moral values were applied you couldn’t survive. What was normal life then? Pain and suffering and starvation and deprivation and disease. If those were things of normal life, why should morality be the deciding factor? What was of value would be what could alleviate your pain. Or what you could find to keep yourself some self-esteem. What was normal was that you saw Japanese soldiers beating up people. You saw people being snatched in all kinds of ways. You saw people being destroyed by torture, or escaping torture or worse by jumping in the river.”

SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1998), pp. 404-405

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Filed under Japan, Malaysia, war

by | 2 May 2004 · 4:39 pm

The Oldest Malay Manuscript Ever Discovered

Uli Kozok, assistant professor of Indonesian language at the University of Hawai‘i, is studying the oldest Malay manuscript ever discovered. It appears to date from before the advent of Islam.

In 2001 I received a Research Relation grant to study the Kerinci script of central Sumatran as part of my work on the palaeography of Southeast Asia. The grant was used for the mapping of existent variants of the central Sumatran scripts that provided us with new insights into the internal relationship between the two closely related scripts. [See map.]

In 2002 I received a second Research Relation grant that resulted in the spectacular discovery of what I believed was the oldest extant Malay manuscripts. This manuscript, a legal code of 34 pages that I found in the village of Tanjung Tanah, contains two texts, one in the old Malayu script, and one in an ancient form of the Kerinci script, which is very likely the missing link in the development of the Kerinci and other South Sumatran scripts from an earlier version of the Sumatran version of the kawi script [Indic-derived and used to write Old Javanese].

The research was continued in 2003, again supported by a Research Relation grant. In the meanwhile my assertion that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript is the oldest extant Malay manuscript came under attack by scholars of Javanese palaeography who argued that, on palaeographic grounds, the manuscript is not older than 200 years. As an expert in Sumatran script I immediately knew that such a late age was impossible, and also the textual evidence (e.g. the absence of any Arabic loanwords) ruled out a date as recent as the 18th century. Since I was unable to challenge their conclusion (I am not in expert of the Javanese script to which the Sumatran Malayu script is closely related), I decided to support my claim with scientific evidence and asked the owner to provide me with a small sample of the manuscript that I sent to the Rafter laboratory in Wellington, New Zealand. The result corroborated my hypothesis which was based on philological and historical evidence unanimously.

This manuscript is now beyond any doubt the oldest Malay manuscript in the world (most likely 2nd half of the 14th century) predating the hitherto oldest manuscript by nearly 200 years! …

My research on the Tanjung Tanah manuscript (which is the only Malay manuscript in a pre-Islamic script) is significant in that it makes a number of theories on early Malay literacy obsolete, and forces us to entirely rethink the intellectual history of the pre-Islamic Malay world.

If it can be established that the Tanjung Tanah manuscript is palaeographically related to the 13th century Adityawarman inscriptions, we will not [only] have convincing proof that the manuscript dates to the 14th century, but it is also very likely that the manuscript will force us to entirely rethink Sumatran palaeography that hitherto had been closely linked to Java with its abundance of stone inscriptions and (from the 14th century onwards) manuscripts [in Arabic-derived Jawi script].

The translation of the manuscript, and the analysis of the language it is written in will give us new insights into the early Malay legal system, the political relationship between the coastal Malay maritime kingdoms with the upriver communities in the Bukit Barisan mountain range, but also into the development of the Malay language since this is the oldest existing substantial body of text in the Malay language.

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Filed under language, Malaysia

by | 7 January 2004 · 9:02 pm

The Hikayat Abdullah on the Englishmen in Old Malacca

‘At that time [c. 1810], there were not yet many English in the town of Malacca and to see an Englishman was like seeing a tiger, because they were so mischievous and violent. If one or two English ships called in at Malacca, all the Malacca people would keep the doors of their houses shut, for all round the streets there would be a lot of sailors, some of whom would break in the doors of people’s houses, and some would chase the women on the streets, and others would fight amongst themselves and cut one another’s heads open … Moreover, a great number were killed owing to their falling in the river, owing to their being drunk; and all this made people afraid. At that time, I never met an Englishman who had a white face, for all of them had “mounted the green horse,” that is to say, were drunk. So much so, that when children cried, their mothers would say, “Be quiet, the drunken Englishman is coming,” and the children would be scared and keep quiet.’

SOURCE: The Hikayat Abdullah, as quoted in Nigel Barley, The Duke of Puddledock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles (Henry Holt, 1992).

More extracts from the Hikayat Abdullah are available on the National University of Singapore‘s Resources for Literary Study website.

The author of the Hikayat Abdullah, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, grew up in Malacca at a time of British Imperial expansion into the Malay world, and was present in Singapore from the time of Raffles’ arrival in the 1820s onwards. A prolific writer and translator, he is also known as the author of Kesah Pelayaran Abdullah (The Story of the Voyage of Abdullah), an account of a voyage up the east coast of the peninsular in 1837. Abdullah finished his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah, in 1843.

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Filed under Britain, Malaysia