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The Lost Tribes of Malaysia: The Construction of Race Politics from the Colonial Era to the Present: Part One
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By Dr. Farish Ahmad-Noor
A Note To Readers: This paper was first presented at the Central Market Annexe as part of The Other Malaysia’s Public Lecture Series (Number 2). Due to its length, the team at Project Malaysia will publish it in two parts. This is Part One.
I. The fallacy of Racial difference and race-relations:
‘More than rubber and tin, the legacy of colonialism in Malaya was racial ideology’
Charles Hirshmann,
The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya1
Let us begin with two rather simple, and I believe, self-evident premises:
The first premise is this: That there is no such thing as racial differences, for the simple reason that there is only one race, and that happens to be the human race. To suggest that racial differences exist on the basis that there are real genetic, biological distinctions and differences between different communities would be akin to comparing Asians, Africans, Arabs and Europeans to different species of animals, and that - as we should know by now - is clearly false.
The term ‘racial difference’ is therefore in itself a misnomer and from a logical, positivist point of view is literally nonsensical. In fact the term has no empirical referent, cannot be positively justified or empirically verified, and works only within the context of a specific language-game and discursive economy that takes for granted a host of other equally mistaken assumptions as its false premises. Racial difference, as an idea and a value, has its origins in the politics of early colonialism and emerged at the same time as other pseudo-scientific theories of paltry worth such as social Darwinism, the idea of ‘masculine and feminine’ races (as put forward by the likes of Count Gobineau et. al.), the theory of native ‘auto-genocide’ and other ideological devices and instruments that served the ends of racialised colonial-capitalism and the logic of Empire in the past. And that’s where it belongs: in the past.
The second premise appears to contradict the first, but serves as a premise for our discussion today and it is this: That despite the illogical and nonsensical status of the concept of racial difference, Malaysian politics, from the late-19th century all the way to the post-colonial present, has been shaped and determined by the logic of racial differences nonetheless.
Malaysians today are witness to a host of oddities that pass for the conduct of ordinary politics in our country. Practically every single Malaysian born after 1957 has grown used to the rather peculiar political landscape of the country, which has been ruled by the same ruling coalition of right-of-centre, ethno-nationalist conservative parties that are ideologically similar to each other but which remain differentiated by virtue of the ethnic and religious backgrounds of their respective constituents and supporters. Odd that this should be the norm in Malaysia; for we would look askance at similar practices if they were put to work elsewhere: Imagine, if you will, an American political landscape where there was not one Democratic party but rather several, divided and differentiated along the lines of race and culture. One would be puzzled by such an equation, and would wonder why there needed to be a Democratic party for white Anglo-Saxons, another for African-Americans, yet another for Latinos and of course yet another for Asian-Americans.
Yet this is precisely the situation that we have in Malaysia today; a differentiated political landscape where the frontiers of political difference are not delineated by ideological differences but rather racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious particularities instead. A cursory overview of the national day parades that are held annually every 31st August would testify to the enduring legacy of racialised politics in Malaysia, as every single ethnic-racial group that has been identified by the national census will be invited to come out and parade its ethnic-racial identity in fancy dress. Once a year Malaysians from all walks of life are asked to put on what amounts to their specific ethnic-racial ‘dress’ and wear their ethnic-racial identities - literally - on their sleeve, in an affirmation of how ‘different’ we are meant to be from each other.
How this bizarre (and we would argue, unstable) state of affairs came into being will be the subject of this lecture, as we hope to take a walk back down the beaten paths of history to uncover the emergence and workings of racialised politics in the country and to answer the question why does it persist until today?
One of the problems that we encounter when trying to do this sort of deconstructive reading of post-colonial Malaysian history, however, is the fact that almost all of our own history books written post-1957 have internalised and accepted the logic of race and racial differences uncritically as well. This in itself is a testimony to the extent to which the logic of racial difference has come to be hegemonised and sedimented in the daily life and political culture of our country. To make things worse, even in other areas such as political economy, anthropology, sociology and political theory, racial categories abound and remain predominant; yet again uninterrogated. What is therefore required is to go back as far as possible to trace the earliest moments in our nation’s history when the very idea of ‘race’ - a concept that was novel to Southeast Asia and which had no equivalent in any of the local languages of the Nusantara region - was brought into play in the first place.
It is here, through a careful reading and re-reading of our convoluted past, that we will first encounter the earliest moments when the notion of racial difference was introduced in the setting of colonial Malaya, Indo-China and the East Indies. And as we shall see below, it took quite a lot of work to persuade the natives of Southeast Asia that there was such a thing as racial difference and that they were racially different from each other. So let us begin with a short stop in Kuala Kangsar, while Sultan Idris is standing in the hot sun waiting to be decorated by his colonial master, the King of England…
II. The introduction of ‘race’ and racial differences as a means of arresting the native Other.
‘An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of fixity in the ideological construction of Otherness.’
Homi K. Bhabha,
The Other Question
In the month of September of the year 1913, the Imperial government of the British Empire decided to honour Sultan Idris Shah of the Sultanate of Perak who was regarded by the colonial authorities at that time as the most amiable, accommodating and progressive among his brother-rulers.2 It was decided that an investiture ceremony ought to be held to commemorate the event whereby the Sultan would be awarded the honour of the Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order (GCVO), the highest award ever conferred upon a Malay Sultan at that time. When told of this momentous decision, the British administrators who manned the helm of the colony and the protectorates went about orchestrating what was perhaps one of the most elaborate, overwrought and overstated spectacles played out during Malaya’s colonial era.
The editor of the Times of Malaya, Thomas Fox, was present throughout the sensational ordeal and he recorded the planning and organisation that preceded the event. In his report he states that:
‘The idea broadly was to convey the impression that the insignia (GCVO) had come direct from the King of England to the Sultan in his palace at Kuala Kangsar’3.
To achieve the desired theatrical effect it was decided that the insignia should be transported over both sea (represented in this case by the Perak river) as well as land. Added to this were a cast of several hundred Malay warriors (swordsmen, spearmen, and the royal bodyguard), palace officials, flag bearers, Ulama, Qadhis and hajis (religious functionaries), actors and other entertainers, schoolchildren, several dozen buffaloes and a host of seventy huge elephants.
Of even greater interest is the manner in which the procession was choreographed and the symbolic ideological message encoded within it that was meant to be communicated to the Sultan and his people. For as Fox was to note in his commentary of events:
‘It was first intended to make the celebrations more elaborate… (After the riverside landing) the original suggestions allowed for an attack by rebel spearmen on the party bearing the insignia (led by the Colonial High Commissioner), this being an acknowledgement of past fighting days, before the peaceful settlement of the country when life was held cheap and death (was) faced every hour of the day, when rapine and murder were rife and progress stifled… Days of semi-barbarism. (Italics ours)‘.4
The procession thus attempted to reactivate the trace of the initial moment of intrusion and imposition of colonial order (’an acknowledgement of past fighting days, before the peaceful settlement‘). The GCVO thus symbolically embodied the very idea of order, peace and progress itself, while the High Commissioner and his army of colonial administrators were the deliverers of that order. The Sultan and his people were in turn portrayed as the grateful recipients of this externally-imposed arrangement, rescued by the timely intervention of colonial rule which delivered them from the state of war of all against all ‘when life was held cheap and death faced every hour of the day‘.
But the ceremony also demonstrated the fact that within the Empire there were no longer private, localised spaces that existed outside the all-encompassing grasp of its Imperialist logic, its order of knowledge, its Orientalist discourse and its construction of the native Other. Indeed, the entire ritual showed that even as far as the banks of the Perak River, amidst the lush, green tropical environs of Kuala Kangsar, the imperial presence could still be felt and that it could produce an immediate and direct effect upon the natives. So effective and absolute was this civilising influence of rationalised, ordered, modern colonial rule that Fox noted how ‘even the elephants behaved themselves with the utmost propriety‘.5
Long before he was deemed worthy of such an honour the Sultan had already demonstrated signs of awe and respect for the British Empire which the colonial authorities noted with approval: As heir-apparent to the Perak throne he had visited the Metropole of the Empire, London, in 1884 and was ‘favourably impressed’ by the military and economic might of the global power.6 He had proven his usefulness by hosting the first royal Durbar in Kuala Kangsar in 1897, when the Malay Sultans of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang were brought together in a spectacular assembly so that they could discuss matters relevant to their interests while being lectured on the basics of sound British forms of government in turn. The Sultan had also been awarded the Grand Cross of St. Michael and St. George by none other than the Prince of Wales himself in Singapore in 1901. And a year later he was invited to London as one of the more exotic foreign potentates who added a touch of colour to the imperial tableau that served as the backdrop to the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902. The spectacle of Sultan Idris Shah’s investiture thus graphically illustrates the manner in which the native Other was being repeatedly brought into the discursive economy of the colonial Order, albeit in terms which the subjugated native Other could not refuse.
However this incorporation of the native colonial subject was also a clearly violent one for it required that the colonised native subject be first reduced to an instrumental fiction, to suit the ideological needs of a dominant discourse that was about to reconfigure him. It was, in short, a spectacle, which incorporated the native while disabling him at the same time by reducing him to the status of the passive recipient. Thus the anglophile Sultan Idris stood inert, seemingly paralysed in his exotic native splendour, to receive his knighthood from a global power that had descended upon the native land and civilised it in turn. As he stood to receive the GCVO, Sultan Idris Shah was undoubtedly aware of the fact that he was receiving an award from a superior political power, which he could neither match nor resist.
By the time that the staging of such spectacular events had become part of colonial life in Malaya, the British colonial authorities had learnt their lesson well. For direct intervention into Malay affairs had led to costly resistance in the past. Furthermore the unpleasant memory of their conflict with Sultan Idris’s recently-exiled predecessor, Sultan Abdullah reminded them that gunboat diplomacy was not always the best of ways to win the hearts and minds of the Malays. British intervention and expansion into the Malay lands had to be conducted by different means and justified on other grounds. As with the rest of the Empire, the colonial authorities in the Malay lands learnt that the most effective means of forceful intervention was that which was sweetened with gifts, be it in the form of opium and weapons or titles and trinkets. The most effective of these tools, however, was the glib and self-effacing rhetoric of the colonial authorities themselves, who would dress their policies of intervention, exploitation and domination with the unctuous platitudes of moral duty and the white man’s burden.7
Overall, however, the religiopolitical environment of the Malay world had changed drastically by the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Malay political discourse, which was always linked to the developments in the Malay world and beyond, would change accordingly as well. From the 1870s to the 1950s, the Malay powers were on the defensive. The more sophisticated Western imperialists of the late nineteenth and twentieth century were about to become benefactors to the native Other, bearing gifts which they could not refuse. And for this ideological fiction to work, a conception of the native with a particularly disabling deficiency had to be constructed.
1Charles Hirshman, ‘The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology‘, in Sociological Forum (SF), Cornell University Press . Vol. 1. no.2. 1986. pg. 357.
2Sultan Idris Shah was installed to the throne of Perak in 1887. A few years before that the British colonial forces had deposed the previous monarch, Sultan Abdullah. Before the time of Sultan Idris, Perak was in a state of conflict as three different contenders for power were engaged in conflict against each other: Sultan Abdullah, Sultan Ismail and Raja Yusuf. Sultan Abdullah was originally supported by the British who attempted to use him as a pliable Malay ruler. But eventually Sultan Abdullah himself chose to rise against the British after his ill-fated decision to sign the Pangkor treaty of 1874. It was this treaty that introduced the Residential system of indirect British rule to the Federated Malay States. Sultan Abdullah’s chieftains revolted against the conditions of the treaty and one of his chieftains, the Datuk Maharaja Lela, was held responsible for the killing of the first British resident J. W. Birch. Datuk Maharaja Lela and a few of his followers were caught and hung by the British while Sultan Abdullah was forced to abdicate his throne. While Sultan Abdullah was sent to exile in Seychelles, Raja Yusuf was made the Regent, and eventually Sultan, by the British, despite his unpopularity with the people. In 1887 the regalia of state was passed on to Raja Dris. He then assumed the title of Sultan Idris Shah. Sultan Idris was very much indebted to the British and was much better disposed towards the ‘reforms’ brought by British rule.
3Thomas Fox: ‘The GCVO week: Accounts of the celebrations at Kuala Kangsar from the 21st to the 28th of September, 1913‘. The Times of Malaya, pub. Ipoh, 1914. pg. 41. (Reprinted in ‘They came to Malaya: A Travellers’ Anthology‘, compiled by J.M. Gullick, (Oxford in Asia, 1993)).
4Thankfully the practical exigencies of planning and co-ordination won over bad taste, amateur theatricals and vainglorious imperialist propaganda. In the end, this part of the day’s entertainment was dropped out altogether. (Ibid. pg. 237)
5Ibid., pg. 238.
6Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya, ‘A History of Malaysia‘, MacMillan Press, London, 1982. (pg. 227).
7Foremost amongst the more sophisticated colonial ideologues and architects of indirect rule in Malaya was Frank Swettenham, who rose from the station of Colonial Resident to become the High Commissioner of the Malay states in his career. His general account of the process of British intervention in the Malay world is aptly summed up in his work ‘British Malaya’ (1906), where he states that ‘when you take the Malay- Sultan, Raja, Chief or simple village head-man- into your confidence, when you consult him on all questions affecting his country, you can carry him with you, secure his keen interest and co-operation, and he will travel quite as fast as is expedient along the path of progress’. (pg. 344). Contemporary scholarship will show, however, that while he served as colonial Resident and High Commissioner, Swettenham was less inclined to consult the Malay rulers (much less the Malay masses) about anything. Andaya and Andaya have noted, for instance, that when he went about creating the Federated Malay States in 1896, Swettenham was curt and economical with the truth and the facts in all his dealings with the Malay rulers. They conclude that ‘it seems fair to say that the implications of this scheme were never fully explained to them (the Sultans). The longest discussion that Swettenham had with a Malay ruler took only four hours, and there was no consultation with the leading chiefs and princes’. (Andaya, pp. 182-183).
Dr. Farish Ahmad-Noor is a Senior Fellow at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technical University (NTU), Singapore where he is Director of Research for the Research Cluster on Transnational Religion in Southeast Asia. He is also guest affiliated Professor at both Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta (UMS) and Sunan Kalijaga Islamic University, Jogjakarta. He is the author of ‘Writings on the War on Terror’ (2006), ‘From Majapahit to Putrajaya’ (2005) and ‘Islam Embedded: The Historical Development of PAS’ (2004). He is also the co-founder of the Other Malaysia research website (http://www.othermalaysia.org), and an advisor to Project Malaysia.
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