The Autochthonous Malay-educated Intelligentsia
The most influential study of Malay colonial society is Roff ’s The Origins of Malay Nationalism, published in 1967. A largely retrospective examination of Malay identities and cultural milieus in the colonial era, Roff gathered an impressive amount of Malay literature from periodicals, pamphlets, books and other materials published between the late nineteenth century and the Japanese occupation in order to trace the slow growth of communal, ethnic and national feeling among the Peninsula Malays. According to Roff, although the 1946 rejection of the Malayan Union lent a sense of urgency to the struggle for the Malay soul, the sources of Malay nationalism were certainly diverse. There was the religious-oriented such as the radical Al-Imam (The Leader) periodical first published in 1906 that galvanized younger reformists who became known as Kaum Muda (Young Faction) against the Kaum Tua (Old Faction), and also voluntary organizations and sports clubs formed by the small aspiring Malay middle class. In their diversity, however, a common strand was the rising tide of anti-colonial sentiment within the Malay community. Arabic education in the early twentieth century produced “a small but challenging group of religio-social reformists” but they were too far located in the periphery cities to make any headway (Roff 1967, p. 126). Meanwhile English-educated Malays, not a large group, were pro-British and too comfortably ensconced in the colonial administration to engage in nationalism.
Malay nationalism, according to Roff, arose almost by chance. The seminal Report on Vernacular Education (1917) by Richard Winstedt, the Director of Education of Malaya, was a profound influence on Malay education for a quarter of a century. The report was notable for “the absence of any thoughtful reflection on the aims and effects of vernacular education (such as had been demonstrated by Wilkinson [his predecessor]), or of any concern at all beyond the practical aims of British colonial rule” (Roff 1967, p. 139). In fact,
Winstedt’s report laid the foundation for the perpetuation of Malaya’s “agricultural peasantry”, thus famously introducing his “rural bias”. “In his way, he did more to circumscribe Malay educational progress, and to ensure that the Malay peasant did not get ideas above his station, than anyone else before or since” (ibid.). And yet, it was from this circumscribed vernacular education that the “autochthonous Malay-educated intelligentsia” arose.
At the core of this autochthonous Malay-educated intelligentsia were journalists and teachers of the 1920s. This intelligentsia became known for their strong Malay (and Indonesian) literary and political orientation, as well as their cultural vigour. Previously impoverished, Malay education underwent reformation when the Sultan Idris Training College (SITC), a facility for teacher-training, began to emphasize the study, use and development of the Malay language, history and literature. SITC also became responsible for the “rationalizing” of Malay history where the syllabi steered clear of myths and folk stories, and turned to logical arguments in the education of Malay teachers (Mohd Hazim Shah 2007). Students received something akin to a liberal arts education where all lessons were conducted exclusively in the Malay language. Textbooks were imported from the Netherland East Indies, a fact that opened later Malay literary groups to the influence of Indonesian political ideology.
All this resulted in Malay access to higher education and awareness of a Malay literary tradition that brought about the belief that the state should yield to ethnic loyalties. This belief came at a time in the 1920s when there was enough self-confidence amongst the autochthonous Malay intelligentsia to focus political change and discussion on the redefinition of the relationship between the Malays and the British. The ideological fermentation of this Malay intelligentsia continued without contributing much to the public sphere until 1934. On March of that year, the twice-weekly newspaper Saudara, published in Penang by religious reformists introduced a new column — Pa’ Dollah — in its back page, usually reserved for children’s stories and educational articles. The
young Kedah Malay journalist Arifin Ishak, assuming the Pa’ Dollah pseudonym, modelled his new column after Lembaga Malaya’s widely popular ‘Pa’ Pandir’ which indulged in wry and often insightful socio- political commentary on Malayan society. Arifin’s first Pa’ Dollah article appeared on 31 March 1934, “and from this small beginning grew, beyond all the expectations of its sponsors, the first and one of the largest pan-Malayan Malay organizations to appear before the Second World War” (Roff 1967, p. 212).
For Roff, there is little doubt that the Malay-educated intelligentsia was the epicenter from which anti-colonial and nationalist awareness arose. The religious ulamas were too peripheral to be of much influence while the English-educated Malays were seen as ineffectual and too comfortably positioned within colonial state. Roff ’s contribution to the understanding of Malay nationalism was to provide the intellectual trajectory and literary materials from which today’s conceptions of the Malay world could be formed. His decision to focus on Malay literary materials to describe the Malay identity that was struggling with the impulses of traditionalism, modernity and brotherhood from a specific agricultural-economic position pre- dates Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling” whereby ethnicity and class narratives bring into sharp focus the historicity, mental and emotional organization of the lived experience as explanation of social life. In the same way “structures of feeling” was a methodological device to describe “a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives us the sense of a generation or of a period” (Williams 1977, p. 131), Roff, through the study of Malay literature, managed to articulate the character and tenor of the Malay identity as shaped under and in response to the colonial state.
The criticism of Roff, however, has been one of functionalism. Written soon after Malaysia’s independence in 1957, the retrospective excavation for evidence and clues to explain the present was perhaps understandable. Milner (2002, pp. 4–5) hints at this functionalist approach by describing Origins as “one of those works concerned to identify unifying elements and processes in colonial Malay society” and
tells of the need to re-read Roff in order to “tease out wherever possible elements not of cohesion and agreement but of division and debate”. For scholars like Milner, the task is not to present a coherent Malay narrative which Roff sought to do by looking at the Malay-educated intelligentsia of teachers and journalists who later, on 6 August
1950, established the literary movement Angkatan Sasterawan 50 (Literary Generation of 1950), or ASAS 50. The establishment of ASAS 50, a nod to the Indonesian literary movement Angkatan
1945 (Generation 1945), signaled the first time Malay literature and the arts were harnessed to express Malay identity and nationalism, something which the political elites and aristocracy took little interest in (Tham 1981). Instead, the contemporary literature is less keen to present a singular narrative of nationalism. As Milner (2002, p. 6) goes on to note, “nationalism never achieves hegemony as a defined and widely acknowledged doctrine. Even in the last years of the British presence, the character and value of nationalism continued to be a matter of debate”.
It is not a criticism to argue that the strength of Origins is not its definitive or hegemonic presentation of Malay nationalism but its detailed histories of Malay socio-cultural groups in a shifting political landscape. His rich gathering of Malay literary materials allows the emergence of several spheres of Malay identities from the Malayo- Muslim world of Singapore, the Al-Imam and the reformists as well as the politicization of the Kuam Muda, all of which set the scene for the emergence of the autochthonous Malay intelligentsia. Origins remains a key text not only for its compelling historical perspective of nationalism but also for its heterogeneous presentation of the Malay identity.