Forgotten Wars (55 page)

The Second World War showed us that we are Jews and we were pushed aside as a Jewish community by the Japanese. And we were considered enemies. When the war was over we saw and couldn’t believe what had happened in Europe, the crematoriums and Auschwitz, and about Hitler and what he did to the Jewish people, which were unbelievable to us, because we’d never experienced any of these.

With this came the realization that disaster could strike anywhere, as it did in Iraq in 1948 when, in the wake of the partition of Palestine, the Jews were expelled from Baghdad.
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Still seeking security, they dispersed again: to Sydney, Los Angeles, London and Israel. The Jews of Singapore diminished in number, but survived: Alfred Lelah re-established a booming business in Singapore’s legendary travellers’ bazaar, Change Alley. The community would achieve brief prominence with the rise of David Marshall, a charismatic lawyer and politician. He had been sent in the later part of the war to a coal mine in northern Japan, and on his return had busied himself in the causes of ex-prisoners of war and Jewish welfare – ‘I am’, he was to declare, ‘both a Jew and an Asian’ – and proved that it was possible for a Jew to win the political support of Chinese and other communities.
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His spell in 1955 and 1956 as the first chief minister of Singapore was one of the final flourishes of the city’s pre-war cosmopolitanism.

Between 1945 and 1950 a substantial number of the Eurasian communities of India and Burma, including many technicians, teachers and railway workers, left Asia. During the days of nationalist agitation they had identified themselves closely with the continuation of the British presence. They hoped that, at the very least, India, Pakistan and Burma would continue as dominions within the Commonwealth. As this possibility receded and ethnic conflict deepened across the crescent, they were increasingly uncomfortable. They felt
betrayed by the British and suspicious of the exclusive nationalism of the incoming independent governments. Some of this anxiety was captured in fiction by John Masters’ powerful novel
Bhowani Junction
, filmed in 1956 with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger, as Hollywood’s first retrospective of the Raj. Some Eurasian families packed for ‘home’, a mythical Britain which their ancestors had left as long as a century and a half before. But the cannier or less sentimental members of the community had sensed that racial and class prejudices were still deeply ingrained in the United Kingdom. They too left, but for Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Though these countries still maintained discriminatory immigration laws, they seemed more open and friendly and their cheerful citizen soldiery had made a positive impression in India and Burma during the war. Some ‘Britasians’ tried to enlist the support of Eurasians in Malaya for a colony in the Nicobar Islands, just as some of the Dutch had looked to New Guinea as a new frontier.
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But the leaders of Malaya’s 10,000 or so Eurasians saw a role for their community, perhaps above all others, in defining a new ‘Malayan’ nationalism. In Singapore, Gerald de Cruz and John Eber, founders of the Eurasian Progressive Association, were two of the main sponsors of the Malayan Democratic Union. De Cruz’s anti-colonialism and embrace of communism was spurred by his rejection of his Indian-Irish father’s slavish attachment to a colonial culture and ‘an alien patriotism’.
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The Eurasians of Malacca traced their roots to the Portuguese conquest of 1511. They petitioned the Malay sultans to be recognized as their non-Muslim subjects and as co-claimants of the status of ‘sons of the soil’.
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But two generations later, this claim had yet to be acknowledged.

As Britain’s Asian empire broke apart, India came to play a much reduced role in the affairs of Southeast Asia. In the wake of Nehru’s visit, Congress sent a medical mission to relieve the sufferings of local Indians: its ability to defend its own was an important test of its new authority. But, after this, the diaspora dropped out of vision. In 1942 and 1943 the Indians of Southeast Asia had been the vanguard of the freedom struggle, but these epic days soon passed into legend. INA veterans still paraded in their tattered uniforms and clung to the memory of Subhas Chandra Bose. Around this time stories first appeared in the Malayan press – rumours which would never be
dispelled entirely – that he was alive and somewhere in Tibet. The British witch-hunts against the INA cast a long shadow. Many of its civilian leaders left Southeast Asia to become ambassadors for the new Indian republic, and as pre-war figureheads resurfaced, many reaffirmed their loyalty to the British Empire.
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The community was effectively leaderless. In August 1946, on Nehru’s advice, a former minister of Bose’s provisional government, John Thivy, who had recently been released from a British jail, founded a Malayan Indian Congress. In its early days the new party remained firmly anchored to the subcontinent. ‘Indians in East Asia’, Thivy argued, ‘are the Ambassadors of India.’ He promoted Hindi, although the language had virtually no native speakers among Indians in Malaya, and opposed the proposals for a Malayan Union citizenship in order to safeguard dual-citizenship rights for Malaya’s Indians. But as they watched the death throes of the Raj, Indian leaders in Singapore and Malaya realized they could no longer trust New Delhi. In early 1947 Thivy took further advice from Congress in India and conceded that Indians should seek their Swaraj in Malaya and adopt local citizenship. He allied the Malayan Indian Congress with the Malayan Democratic Union and other parties of the left. But Indians remained ambivalent about Malayan politics. Thivy himself stepped down as party leader in July to take up a diplomatic appointment as agent of the government of India, and the party continued to attend Congress meetings in India until 1950.
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The labouring masses were disenchanted with an elite who claimed to speak for them, yet ignored their immediate concerns. It was an article of faith of the Penang shop and municipal workers that they would trust no man who wore trousers or spoke English.
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The independence of India was not an occasion for celebration in Malaya, and it left the Indian community more divided than ever and anxious about their future. The Sikhs and other minorities revived their separate associations; Indian Muslims supported a local branch of the Muslim League. At the time of the Calcutta killings there was communal violence in Singapore. The British slapped censorship on publications from India, and attributed the trouble to local gang rivalry. But on Penang, the largest centre of Indian Muslim settlement, there were protracted tensions between Hindu and Muslim workers in rival trade unions.
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The island was home to a distinctive community
of Straits-born Hindustani Muslims, or Jawi Peranakan, and many of them lent spiritual support to Pakistan. Yet Lahore was far away, and offered little hope of protection. The majority chose to identify more closely with their fellow-Muslims, the Malays. But relations between them had a history of tension. Malay nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s had asserted the precedence of Malays of ‘full blood’ over those of Indian or other Muslim descent. But facing bigger political challenges after the war, the Malay community was now more willing to absorb resourceful co-religionists. Jawi Peranakan leaders joined the conservative United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and, in time, became a distinct network within it. In 1947, the son of a Jawi Peranakan headmaster from neighbouring Kedah began to write a lively and acerbic column on Malay affairs for the
Straits Times
, under an Anglicized
nom de plume
, ‘Che Dat’. It showed an unwavering identification with the Malay people, and an unsentimental view of the challenges they faced; Mahathir Mohamad would later become one of the Malay community’s strongest defenders and most astringent critics, Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister and ‘father of modernization’.
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For the British in Southeast Asia the loss of the Raj also meant the loss of its cheap labour. Under pressure from Thivy and others in Malaya, Nehru refused to allow any more recruitment from India. When Japanese surrendered personnel were finally shipped home in early 1947, the military despaired of finding manpower to rebuild its camps and airfields. It considered looking to Mauritius, to 30,000 Maltese workers who had washed up in Cairo, and even fresh levies from Japan. In the event, around 10,000 volunteers from Ceylon were hurriedly enlisted under strict military discipline.
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They were lured by the promise of good pay and conditions, but found themselves earning less than locals for heavy labour. On 17 September 1947 a large contingent of Ceylonese in Singapore mutinied. They refused to eat the ‘coolie’s food’ they were given and pelted their officers with stones: 416 men were arrested. There was another revolt in April of the following year, and brawls with local Malays and Tamils in Sungei Patani and Kuala Lumpur. To local trade unionists, the use of the Ceylonese was another blatant attempt to exploit non-unionized labour: their principal employer – the RAF in Singapore – had dismissed over a
thousand local workers earlier in the year.
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Migration now was subject to new political pressures. After the Malayan Union debacle, Malay politicians refused to countenance fresh arrivals from China. In the constitutional negotiations, control over immigration policy was, Sir Edward Gent told Arthur Creech Jones, ‘a matter of life and death to the Malay people’.
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The only acceptable alternative was fellow Muslims from Java, but the British feared that they would bring with them the politics of the Indonesian revolution. For the first time, the workforce of the future would be born in Malaya itself.

In September 1947 the colonial government took a census of Malaya and Singapore, the first since 1931. It was a sign of the consolidation of boundaries and the revival of bureaucratic power. But for most people, the sudden appearance of over 13,000 enumerators with clipboards, interrogating households and placing chalk marks on dwellings, was deeply ominous. There were rumours of mass evictions and conscription, and flashbacks to Japanese screenings and massacres. The census drove home the new importance of ethnic definition and status. Where earlier censuses had made multiple distinctions in recording people’s origins, the categories were now consolidated into rigid ethnic blocs: ‘Chinese’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Malays’. Some sub-categories were used, but they were arbitrary and contentious. The census divided the Chinese along dialect group lines, but it made no distinction between the locally born and the China-born, which was seen as the most pertinent divide by the community itself. For official purposes, the ‘Straits Chinese’ did not exist. There was, for the first time, no subdivision of the category ‘Malays (Indigenous Malaysians)’, and it stood in sharp antithesis to ‘Other Malaysians’, that is people of Indonesian origin. These categories were the subject of anxious debate, and because census enumerators tallied individuals in the way they described themselves, there were choices to be made.
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Utusan Melayu
waged a campaign for Indonesians to identify themselves as ‘Malays’: the census category ‘Other Malaysians’ was a specious ploy to ‘disunite the Malays’.
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Malaya’s political arithmetic hung in the balance: Malays now comprised 50 per cent of the peninsula’s population, Chinese 38 per cent, and Indians 11 per cent. The census also showed that the Chinese community was reproducing at a far faster rate than the Malays. Women speakers from UMNO
toured to remind Malay women of their duty: ‘if we want to retain our identity as Malays we must have more babies’.
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In this Malthusian mood, Malay leaders entered the final negotiations for a constitutional settlement.

The numbers game dealt a blow to those who were attempting to build non-communal solidarities. It also obscured another vitally important change: the growth in the number of women, particularly in the towns. On the peninsula, the ratio of Chinese women to men rose from 486/1000 in 1931 to 815/1000 in 1947. Malaya had evolved from being a land of pioneering males to one of rapidly extending families. For many Indians and Chinese, a land of sojourn had become a place of permanent settlement. The elderly, too, were now less likely to return to their country of origin, and most would die in Malaya. Many had no kin locally, and care for them became a pressing social need: ‘We shall not forget’, vowed the manifesto of the Malayan Democratic Union, ‘those who in the vigour and strength of their youth played their part in Malaya.’
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The census was a reminder that through all the tumultuous high-political watersheds of the end of empire, in the
kampongs
, mines and rubber estates, in the dockyards, factories and on the streets, the overriding need was to stabilize family life and income, to fulfil social obligations and to live with dignity. And as old and new elites jostled for position, as borders were drawn and constitutions made, the voices of the
rakyat jelita
, the common man and woman, were struggling to be heard.

Among the forsaken of empire were the vast regiments of labourers on the rubber plantations of Malaya. In the words of Selangor trade unionist C. V. S. Krishnamoorthi:

Ours is a life of meek suffering toiling from the sunrise to sunset like an automaton day in and day out leading a life squalid, poverty-stricken, starving, without education, joy or any ray of hope to better ourselves and those who you consider as our dependants for whose advancement in life we are bound to God. What to do? We toil draining our life blood to produce
that alluring commodity LATEX Rubber for the whole world and for the enhancement of our country’s wealth, suffering mosquito and leech bites, withered by malaria, and our bones and skinny skeletons shivering in cold lack of clothing and nourishing food we lead on this existence.
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