Forgotten Wars (60 page)

Britain’s old Malaya hands tended to see the Malay
kampong
as a timeless, rather idyllic world, and the Malays as an easygoing people whom it was their duty to protect from the rapacity of the commercial economy. But now Malays were moving to towns at a larger rate than
any other community, working for wages and starting businesses. Since the 1930s much of the energy of Malay intellectuals had been directed at understanding the root causes of Malay poverty. As in Burma, the stock villain was the Chettiyar moneylender or the Chinese shopkeeper. After the war Malay newspapers carried reports that in rice-growing areas such as Kedah much of the land was mortgaged to them.
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But it was also the case – although the British tended to keep it quiet – that in the same area the most ‘ruthless ejections’ of tenant farmers were by local Malay aristocrats.
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As they toured the
kampongs
, the Malay radicals targeted the feudal class and argued that the stultifying impact of colonial protection was holding back the Malays. ‘Do you know what I saw in London?’ Rashid Maidin asked a Perak crowd on his return from the Empire Communists’ Conference. ‘At the Malaya House, I saw two paintings on exhibit. One showed the Malays as an uncivilised group of people; mere farmers of rubber, resin and
rotan
. The other one depicted a beach scene, where Malay fishermen were being received by their family members with their sarongs so high up it almost revealed their private parts. The Malay fishermen were seen eating bananas. If I had a grenade in my hand then, I would have thrown it at the paintings. How dare the imperialists portray us Malays in that manner!’
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At the centre of these debates was a religious school in the Krian area of Perak, the al-Ihya Asshariff at Gunong Semanggol. Founded in 1934 by Ustaz Abu Bakar al-Baqir, it was one of a network of modern
madrasahs
which had revitalized the curriculum of religious education in Malaya by including new secular subjects such as history, geography and even accounting. Many of the leading political personalities of the era had studied in these schools; Shamsiah Fakeh was one outstanding example, and Dr Burhanuddin had taught in the most renowned school, Masyhur al-Islamiah in Penang. There was a constant traffic of scholars between the
madrasahs
, and they forged strong links with the local community. Al-Ihya’s school journal circulated in the surrounding villages and its students were encouraged to take part in traditional community projects such as weeding padi fields or building bridges. The region was home to politically conscious Banjarese settlers and it was a bastion of Malay Nationalist Party support. Ustaz Abu Bakar was a close friend of Dr Burhanuddin. They
shared a conviction that, in the words of
Pelita Malaya
, the
ulama
were ‘not free agents to give real benefit to the people. They are under the influence of the Rulers above them, who claim to be “The Shadow of God on Earth” and “The Protector of Islam”, these learned men are simply as ornaments to the Royal court.’
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On 23 March 1947 al-Ihya hosted a national conference in economics and religion. It was without precedent, and drew around 2,000 visitors to the small town of Gunong Semanggol: politicians and
ulama
, and visitors from Egypt, India and Indonesia. Welcomed by demonstrations of Malay martial arts, the delegates then reviewed the progress of the Muslim community. Two path-breaking initiatives were launched. The first was the formation of a Supreme Religious Council, which promptly demanded that the Malay rulers surrender their authority over religious matters to an elected body of
ulama
. For the first time, Islamic revival in Malaya had a tangible institutional centre. The second initiative was the creation at Gunong Semanggol of a ‘Centre of Malay Economy’. It demanded ‘special protective rights’ for the Malays in the economy, and perhaps marked the origins of what was to be the central platform of Malaysia’s post-colonial economic development.
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A host of other, often local, initiatives sprang from this, such as ‘people’s schools’ built by villagers, and commercial and co-operative ventures. This kind of activity was, to Dr Burhanuddin, ‘the stirring of dormant Malay soul’.
¹⁰⁸
It was also fertile ground for the Malay communists, who were well represented in these debates. A peasants’ front, or
barisian tani
, was founded and led by a graduate of Masyhur al-Islamiah in Penang, Musa Ahmad. He was later to become the chairman of the MCP. The communists involved were instructed to conceal their political leanings; it was now Party policy to ‘show its respect for the Malay race by giving them concessions’.
¹⁰⁹

This bred hostility and reaction. Conspicuous by their absence at Gunong Semanggol were the leaders of UMNO. They urged the more conservative
ulama
to boycott the conference. Dato Onn launched a stinging attack on it in a speech at Tangkak in his home state of Johore: ‘We have seen the danger that came out from the jungle in 1945, and today we are going to see the danger descending from the mountain [
gunong
] under the cloak of religion.’ His audience was in no doubt that he was referring in one breath to Gunong Semanggol
and to the MPAJA. He would repeat this warning several times in the coming months.
¹¹⁰
During this period the British and UMNO worked in concert to shore up their influence in the
kampongs
, particularly through the appointment of trained and steady men as village headmen who would be a mainstay of government control. Headmen possessed considerable influence over the lives of peasants, and API complained of their obstructionism. Fearing that, after the defeat of the Malayan Union, UMNO would disintegrate, Onn began to convert it into a national institution; but only in 1949 did the leadership agree to a single direct membership, and even then some affiliates opted out of it. UMNO was run from Onn’s office as chief minister of Johore, to the sultan’s increasing annoyance, and from the legal practice in Ipoh of its general secretary, Haji Abdul Wahab. UMNO was, throughout its history, to rely heavily on such personal and family networks.
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It was continually short of money, not least to meet the fees of its British legal adviser, Sir Roland Braddell. In May the Sultan of Johore bailed it out with a donation of $5,000.
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Perhaps the strongest grass-roots movement within UMNO was its women’s organization, but it struggled for recognition within the party. Dato Onn’s son, Captain Hussein bin Onn, recently demobbed from the British Indian Army, led the youth wing. A painstaking, conscientious man who would serve as the third prime minister of independent Malaysia, he lacked his father’s charisma. UMNO struggled to compete with API and AWAS to capture the imagination of the young. Instead, it relied on its power base in the State administrations to advance its cause.

In 1947, an empire was lost, and an empire regained by the British. But there remained powerful challengers to colonial authority in Southeast Asia. And whilst opposition forces seemed to be travelling different paths, by the end of the year the British and their Malay allies were haunted by the prospect that they might, against all expectations, converge. The search by ethnic minorities for belonging; the demand of trade unionists for material progress; the Malayan Communist
Party’s need for allies, and the drive by the Malays for economic advancement all seemed to come together in the question of the new constitution for Malaya. A blueprint for a new Federation of Malaya had been agreed by the British, UMNO and the Malay rulers in secret talks throughout the second half of 1946. Although Malay leaders remained bitter about the Malayan Union episode – none more so than Dato Onn himself – they had defeated its most objectionable aspects. The Federation guaranteed the special rights of the Malay people. It was a return to indirect rule: new treaties with the Malay rulers, as Onn repeatedly emphasized, were an endorsement of Malay sovereignty. The new legal entity was to be termed the Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, a federation of Malay lands. The constitution enshrined a stringent legal definition of a ‘Malay’, but none for a ‘Malayan’. There was to be no ‘Malayan’ nationality.
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The constitution conceded citizenship rights to non-Malays, but whereas under the Malayan Union these would have extended to 83 per cent of the Chinese and 75 per cent of the Indians, far fewer people would now qualify.
¹¹⁴
For the British this was a major retreat from the idealism of the Malayan Union. But when the final proposals went to the cabinet in July, the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, viewed the future with some complacency. He believed that 90 per cent of the original strategic objectives of the Union had been secured, particularly the creation of a stronger, more cohesive central government and a common citizenship. Singapore remained outside the Federation, but this was the price of Anglo-Malay accord, and the growing divisions in policy between the two territories made the prospect of union in the future increasingly unlikely. Creech Jones reassured colleagues that the new constitution was opposed only by a ‘noisy minority’.
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The proposals were put to a consultative committee of local dignitaries. Up until this point the British had assumed that non-Malays were, at best, indifferent to constitutional change. Support for the Malayan Union had been muted. Many non-Malays still thought in terms of dual citizenship with their country of birth; they were alienated by the exclusion of Singapore, and the left had argued that the Union was undemocratic, negotiated with ‘feudal remnants’ and not the people. But, as the Anglo-Malay entente deepened after mid-1946, Chinese associations mobilized to defend the Union’s more liberal
provisions for citizenship. It was clear that the status of non-Malays was more insecure than ever; the gateway to citizenship had narrowed and the prospects for a democratic Malaya, of which Singapore was seen as an indivisible part, had receded.
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Leaders were incensed at the limited nature of the consultation. The two leading Chinese members of the consultative committee were H. S. Lee and a leading Perak Chinese, Leong Yew Koh, both of whom held Kuomintang military rank. As John Eber of the Malayan Democratic Union observed bitterly, ‘What right have colonels in the Chinese army, owing presumably their undivided loyalty to China, to adjudicate or speak on behalf of the people of Malaya?’ In late 1946, to speak for Malaya, the Malayan Democratic Union took a central role in the formation of the Pan-Malayan Council of Joint Action (later the All-Malayan Council of Joint Action, AMCJA). At its inaugural meeting in Kuala Lumpur on 19 November it rejected all existing Anglo-Malay agreements; it boycotted the consultative committee and demanded recognition as ‘the
only
body that speaks for all Asiatic communities’.

The AMCJA was an attempt to draw together the various
aliran
, or flows of consciousness, within radical politics in Malaya, and all of them, at one time or another, would claim to have been its inspiration. The Malayan Communist Party, sensing that here there was political capital to be made, encouraged the initiative. Its open representative, the journalist Liew Yit Fan, attended the inaugural meeting, and although the Party never joined the AMCJA, its main satellite organizations, the New Democratic Youth League and the Federations of Trade Unions, were its largest components.
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But equally prominent, and entirely unprecedented, was the presence of leaders of the Malay Nationalist Party. With UMNO increasingly allied to the colonial government, the Malay radicals saw that they could not go it alone: ‘we shall safeguard our special rights’, it announced, ‘but we cannot carry on an isolated fight – isolation means defeat’. It now sought a common front against feudalism and for the popular will; in joining the AMCJA, it made an alliance of a kind that UMNO could not match.
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This was a bold and a dangerous political undertaking: the Malay Nationalist Party immediately faced charges that it had sold out the Malay people. To counter this, it withdrew from the
AMCJA to form its own parallel coalition, the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat – Centre of People’s Power – or PUTERA. The man charged with leading it was Ishak Haji Muhammad, a celebrated novelist and journalist. He took the view that the party should give the experiment ‘a fair trial for one or two years’. In the course of 1947 Dr Burhanuddin lost support. The leftists within the Malay Nationalist Party were wary of his religiosity, and impatient with his caution.
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At the end of the year, in a delicately arranged coup, he was replaced as party leader by Ishak, although he remained its special adviser. Ishak represented a different stream of Malay radicalism, more secular and socialist in outlook. He was fluent in English, which Dr Burhanuddin was not, and as both an intellectual and a Bohemian he was more than a match for the leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union.

The chairman of the PUTERA–AMCJA was a 63-year-old Straits Chinese notable, Tan Cheng Lock. At first glance he appeared an unlikely choice to lead an alliance of young radicals. He lived a world apart from most of them, in a sprawling, antique-cluttered Chinese mansion at 111 Heeren St, Malacca. Before the war he had been the leading Asian on the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements, but had retired from public affairs, in a state of some disillusion, to Switzerland. He spent the war in India, far removed from the social upheaval at home. But he was remembered by the younger men of Malayan Democratic Union as one of the first advocates of a ‘Malayan’ nationalism. He commanded influence within the powerful Chinese business community, and on his return to Malaya in 1946 had been one of the first of its leaders to argue that the Union was a first step towards self-government and that the Chinese should act in concert to defend their position.
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But equally important was his status as a Straits Chinese, a member of a long-domiciled community that had absorbed Malay culture and habitually spoke the Malay language. As John Eber flattered him: ‘the Council needs an individual who is a Malayan as a focus… As it is you represent
all
interests.’ Tan Cheng Lock traced his local roots to 1771 – as ‘a true
anak Malaka
[son of Malacca]’ – and to a generation he would hold mythic status as one of the first true Malayan patriots. His multiracialism was rooted in a utopian cast of mind. His writings and speeches had a philosophical, somewhat mystical flavour, and were peppered with
references to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, alongside the classic Chinese philosophy he had absorbed in English translation (like many Straits Chinese, Tan Cheng Lock could neither read nor write Chinese). He shared the spiritual cosmopolitanism of many Asian thinkers of the pre-war era; like Tagore, he searched for the underlying commonalties of Asia’s civilizations. But his nationalism was based on a modern democratic citizenship.
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