Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness

By Maznah Mohamad

People within the Malay world hold strong but diverse opinions about the meaning of the word Melayu, which can be loosely translated as Malayness. Questions of whether the Filipinos are properly called "Malay", or the Mon-Khmer speaking Orang Asli in Malaysia, can generate heated debates. So too can the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of a kebangsaan Melayu (Malay as nationality) as the basis of membership within an aspiring postcolonial nation-state, a political rather than a cultural community embracing all residents of the Malay states, including the immigrant Chinese and Indian population.


In Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness, the contributors examine the checkered, wavering and changeable understanding of the word Melayu by considering hitherto unexplored case studies dealing with use of the term in connection with origins, nations, minority-majority politics, Filipino Malays, Riau Malays, Orang Asli, Straits Chinese literature, women's veiling, vernacular television, social dissent, literary women, and modern Sufism. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a creative approach to the study of Malayness while providing new perspectives to the studies of identity formation and politics of ethnicity that have wider implications beyond the Southeast Asian region.

• Language: English
• Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789971697303

Book preview

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Chapter 1

Boundaries of Malayness: We Have Made Malaysia: Now It is Time to (Re)Make the Malays but Who Interprets the History?

Judith Nagata

Introduction: Looking Backward from the Modern Malaysian State

In the heyday of European nationalism, 19th-century Italian historian Giuseppe Mazzini, observed the role of the state in creating and shaping a people: We have made Italy: now we have to make Italians (ch’e fatto l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani). The subtitle of this chapter paraphrases a similar observation. In Mazzini’s day, the task of the state was political, to assimilate the assorted inhabitants of the newly unified Italian peninsula into a nation with a sense of common identity and destiny, and fidelity to a single state authority. For Mazzini and his followers, shared cultural, linguistic and religious heritage were deemed necessary, but not sufficient for the emergence of a sense of nationalism; it remained for the state to build the nation and sense of national consciousness.

Later, Benedict Anderson came to the same conclusion.¹ Other observers, in the European Romantic tradition, envisaged a reverse process, whereby ethnic peoples and cultures were nations-in-waiting, waiting to be consummated by their own state. These were European questions, concepts and terms, but as they were carried by colonial and academic elites to the world beyond, they became a procrustean frame which denied the fluidity and diversity of peoples where such ideas did not prevail. Colonialism promoted the ideal of the nation-state as the endpoint of a teleological political process, whereby other political and cultural formations were constructed as ethnic, racial, minority, pre- or sub-national groups. This has resonance for the task of tracking and interpreting the evolution of Malay identities over time, and the role of the present Malaysian state on the identities of those within and outside its borders. Recent observations by writers seeking to evade the colonial trap² depict the premodern Malays in cultural, linguistic or civilizational, but not ethnic or national terms, as mobile peoples with flexible and constantly changing boundaries.

It was the task of freshly independent Malaya/Malaysia in 1957 to create a new Malay national citizen, an ethnic community or race (see Maznah Mohamad, this volume) in a plural state, when Malayness was distilled into constitutional and legal formulae, and subject to being remade by the Malaysian constitution (discussed below) and ensuing political policies. As a manufactured political majority in a multicultural state, official Malay status has evolved from one of primus inter pares to national dominance (ketuanan) with special rights, protected by tightening ethnic boundaries. Over time, the Malaysian state has steadily narrowed its vision to one based on conformity to a political party and agenda, and the official range of expression of Malayness is now one of the narrowest in history.

Since Malaysia is the first and only state nation named for Malays, it tends to serve as reference for the modern Malay, and has set a standard by which to measure Malayness by other self-identified Malays in Southeast Asia. By this very fact, other stateless Malays (some non-Muslim), in parts of Indonesia or the Philippines, as described by Curaming in this volume, are either not recognized, or have become marginalized as minorities in other peoples’ states.

Whereas the rise of the independent state is an important punctuation mark in Malay history, it was only the beginning. Ever since, Malaya/Malaysia has been engaged in tidying up loose ends and reinforcing its own authority. Since the beginning in the 1970s, it has been shaken by religious challenges to its moral authority, often by the nation’s youth. Whereas Malays have professed Islam for over six centuries, religious practice and intensity of commitment have oscillated in different places and times. With the exception of the Filipino Malays described in this volume, it is normal for Malays to be culturally Muslim where once Islam was a sufficient portal to Malayness, in the form of masuk Melayu. In the modern Malayan/Malaysian constitution, Islam has become normative, a condition of Malay ethnic status. In the latest generation, numbers of young Malays have embraced a renewed global form of transcendent Islam, transcending ethnic Malayness and state political authority.

Tracking the ebbs and flows of Malay societies before the rise of a modern state, some important continuities emerge in any profile of Malayness.³ Looking backward from the present, I begin with a dissection of Malay kinship, as a foundational principle underpinning familial, ethnic, political, migration, trade, religious and other intergroup relations throughout history.

Kinship beyond Biology: The Infrastructure of Malay Social Relations

Kinship is a system for classifying and organizing social relations, and creating normative expectations for behavior. Metaphors of blood may not always correspond to observed biological reality. In the Malay system, beyond the immediate three-generation family, kinship terms of address and reference may be used for individuals with whom no blood ties can be traced, or even created in order to bring outsiders into a community. Kinship behavior is considered a branch of game or transaction theory by some anthropologists:⁴ kinship is less a primordial or irreducible principle than a variable in a constructed nexus of optional relations in which a wide range of political, prestige and economic interests are transacted, using a kinship idiom. It allows an easy slide into fictive kinship, whether by adoption, or as a strategy for personal benefit, as in relationships of patronage. Who, in the Malay world, does not have fictive pak cik or mak cik among close friends in a senior generation, or an assortment of abang among friends or colleagues? Kinship not only determines relations, but may be created to suit social reality.

But where does kinship end? What rules and practices exist for setting boundaries between kin and non-kin? In societies defined by bounded kin groups, such as Chinese clans, with strict rules of inclusion and exclusion, the situation is unambiguous. In loosely structured cognatic kinship systems⁵ such as that of the Malays and other peoples in Southeast Asia, however, boundaries are less easily defined.

In these societies, the kin relations of every individual theoretically extend indefinitely in all directions from both parents equally, fading from dekat to jauh, to the distant "smell of the mango (bau bau bacang), without any necessary correlation between blood and sentiment.⁶ The most important distinctions in Malay kinship terminology and classification are based on generation, relative age and sex. Collateral relatives are recognized equally on both maternal and paternal sides, but due to shallow genealogical records and absence of inherited surnames, can usually only be specified biologically to a few degrees; thus, the descendants of common grandparents and great grandparents (English first and second cousins) are all recognized by the generic term, sepupu, equally with more distant cousins, and sometimes also with neighbors or business partners regardless of blood connection. When demands of professional or personal life require contact or cooperation with an official or business colleague, it is helpful to discover that the individual may be some kind of pupu, without specifying a precise genealogical link. This can be invented, selecting a term appropriate to generation, relative age and gender rules.

Conversely, in situations of ambiguity, growing social distance between kin can generate social tension leading to subtle changes in behavior. Take the case of a poorer relative who is a live-in houseworker for richer kin. Her remuneration may be called a saguhati, implying that her services are a favor with a kin-like quality, while on other occasions, her payment may be referred to as gaji (wages), suggesting a non-kin status as a servant, although she continues to be addressed throughout, depending on age, as mak or adek. When social inequality, patronage, rank and wealth intersect with kinship, they may be reflected in change or lack of consistency between behavior and kinship address used.⁷ Kinship idiom is remarkably resilient, as in its metaphorical use to refer to respected or political figures, such as former Prime Minister Pak Lah, or when attached to a title of merit, such as Tok guru or Pak haji, common in systems of rank or pangkat.⁸

When kinship intersects with hierarchy, it endows social rank with qualities of distance and familiarity simultaneously. This style was characteristic of relations with the traditional rulers of the Melayu kerajaan, where hierarchical relations were more personal and ceremonial, based more on status and rank than class.⁹ Likewise, economic and trading ties in the premodern era were often face-to-face personal partnerships, with a mitigating effect on potential business conflict. I suggest here that these usages may be a measure (though emphatically not a cause) of the relative weakness of class imagery in Malay society until the present, and the need for recourse to a foreign term, kelas, when required in academic and international