The Other Malaysia

To sum up the discussion from last week and this week’s lecture, let us remind ourselves of the following:

1. The pre-modern, pre-colonial polities of Southeast Asia were by and large maritime or riverine polities where power was centralised in the form of the king, who in turn was not as powerful as he may have wished to be due to the fluid nature of these polities (migration being the best and common mode of resistance) and the absence of standing armies to defend the ruling elite.

2. Power was thus personalised in the ruler who in turn depended heavily upon a discourse of legitimation that was initially provided via the selective appropriation of Hindu-Buddhist ideas, values and symbols of power (via the symbiotic relationship between local elites and the Brahminical elites of South Asia) and later by the selective appropriation of Muslim ideas, values and symbols of power too.

3. As such, the coming of Islam during the initial stages of Islamisation (12th to 16th centuries) did not lead to a radical change of the ruling system or the culture of power and its normative praxis in many of these newly Islamised politics. The rulers simply added one more layer of legitimation to their modes of rule and governance and adapted themselves from Dewarajas to Sultans, but tried nonetheless to maintain power among themselves and the aristocratic elite. The Brahminical elite had by then been replaced by Muslim missionary elites who likewise installed themselves in the courts of Malacca, etc.

4. The early Hindu-Buddhist and early Islamic cosmological worldview was thus one that tried to explain and justify the social hierarchies and divisions of power between the rulers and the ruled by appealing to some transcendental moral order or cosmological worldview that posited such social hierarchies as natural and good. Society was meant to mirror the ‘natural order’ as ordained by God, etc.

5. Early contact with the first Europeans did not radically alter this either, for the first Europeans who came to Southeast Asia were also driven by both religio-cultural as well as economic-political goals and ambitions. (For the Portuguese and Spanish, this was part of their religious campaign from Europe, transposed to Asia.)

For further readings on this period of transition from Hindu-Buddhism to early Islam, see:

K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750’. Cambridge University Press. 1990.
And Michael Edwardes, ‘Asia in the European Age’. Thames and Hudson, London. 1961.

What is important in both Chauduri and Edwardes’ work is the picture of Southeast Asia they depict before the arrival of modern colonial capitalism and how much more cosmopolitan and globalised Asia was during the height of the trading networks across the region. This only begins to change with the arrival of modern modes of colonial capitalism that introduces contractual relationships to the polities of the region.

For an account of the religious nature of the first Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to Southeast Asia, see: ‘Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Navigation’, by Antonio Pigafetta. Folio Society, London. 1969. (It is clear that the expedition of Megallan to the region was as much a religious enterprise as it was a political one, unlike the later commercial expeditions from Europe by the Dutch, English and French.)

Question: How come the arrival of Islam did not radically alter the established social and political praxis of the region and the conduct of politics, governance and power in the polities of Southeast Asia?

One possible explanation may lie in the fact that up to the advent of modern colonial capitalism the nature of Southeast Asian polities was that of centralised states where power and authority was personalised in the leadership cult of the Dewarajas/Sultans. As such the function of governance and power was to maintain society as a mirror image of some idealised cosmic order, and not to allow any disruption of that social space. But at the same time the undifferentiated nature of these polities meant that there was no room for internal critique and resistance to the hegemony of the rulers. This only comes about by the 17th century with the appearance of modern modes of colonial capitalism bringing with it contractual bonds to society that (1) divide society along social-economic functions, (2) supercede the power of the traditional elite by posing the Western colonial companies (The East India Company, VOC, etc) as the real powers, (3) desacralise politics by placing contractual bonds before and above any cosmological worldview of the universe and society.

Note the following:

1. The East India company (EIC), Dutch East Indies Company (VOC), Companie des Indes (CdI) were modern, impersonal abstract entities that were bound by contractual bonds and relatively autonomous in their dealings. Many of these companies acquired their initial territorial possessions in Asia via trade rather than conquest.

2. In the proto-Malayan polities of the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Penang and Singapore, the contractual law of the EIC meant that traditional notions of kingship, divine right to rule, moral obligation to obey etc were superceded by contractual bonds of loyalty and obligation instead. In short, in these colonial settings, politics had been de-sacralised, and society internally differentiated by the creation of specific economic roles and functions.

3. This can perhaps be seen as the initial stages of the creation of internally-differentiated spaces and the beginnings of what would later emerge as independent society, freed from tradition and traditional notions of identity based on loyalties. The Malaccan subject was not subject to a king, but a company, and his/her loyalty bound and guaranteed by a contract backed up by company law. Thus the traditional world of the feudal polities had been changed radically.

Reading:

For an account of the changes in the worldview of the colonial subjects of proto-Malaya, see the writings of Munshi Abdullah Abdul Kadir, notably the The Hikayat Abdullah. (Malay Literature Series 4. Malay Publishing House Limited. Singapore. 1947) and his ‘Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah’, (Malay Publishing House, Singapore. 1961.)

Abdullah writes as one of the first modern colonial subjects whose identity as a man of Malacca is based upon contractual bonds to the company he serves. In many ways his writings are the first modern critique of the pre-modern feudal social system of the region. See also his other writings that criticised many of the traditional practices of the people of the region, such as his essay: Munshi Abdullah, Kebodohan Puji-pujian yang tersebut dalam surat-surat kiriman orang Melayu, in ‘Warisan Warkah Melayu/The Legacy of the Malay Letter’. Arkib Negara Malaysia/The British Library. London. 1994

For an account of how some of the feudal/traditional kingdoms of the region tried to deal with the challenges of modernity that came via the enterprise of colonial capitalism, seek out the following:

For Kedah (Malayan Peninsula): R. Bonney, ‘Kedah 1771-1821: The Search for Security and Independence’. Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1971 and Sherard Osborn, ‘The Blockade of Kedah in 1838: A Midshipman’s Exploits in Malayan Waters’. Oxford In Asia, London. 1987

For Aceh (North Sumatra): Lee Kam Hing, ‘The Sultanate of Aceh: Relations with the British 1760-1824. Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1995.

A good place to start when looking at the early introduction of modern contractual politics and governance in early Malaya would be: A. C. Milner: ‘The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya’. Cambridge University Press. 1994.

NOTE: Note that we have come to the time of Munshi Abdullah, which is the mid-19th century, and the concept of Malaya/Malaysia did not exist then. (Likewise there was no such thing as Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam etc)- This should remind us of how NEW the nation-state is in the Southeast Asian region, and should make you think harder about the question: ‘What is Malaysia?’

A Bertuis map, dated 1618. Melaka features prominently as the most important state in the Malay Peninsula, though it should be noted that by then Perak, Kedah and Patani are already mentioned and were recognised by the european powers. Siam and Pegu refer to the Thai and Burmese kingdoms of Ayutthaya and Pegu respectively. I love these ancient maps as they often depict the geography of the region in a fanciful manner. This happens to be one of the oldest maps in my collection, though my oldest map is a Munster, dated 1540.