It was during a holiday visit to Penang that we chanced across the story of Sybil Kathigsu displayed at old Assumption Catholic Cathedral. It was a fascinating and a sad story but one that ought to broaden our understanding of the anti-Japanese resistance beyond the Chinese community, onto a frail woman who sacrificed her life for something she believed was right, not for ideology or in defence of a narrow community. Purely because she believed it was right.
She was born Sybil Medan Daly in the dying months of the 19th century, in the city of her middle name and into the Eurasian community. Technically speaking, Eurasians are the offspring of a union of European and Asian parentage. In Malaysia, though it refers to a specific community forming less than 0.1% of the population but generally distinct from those of mixed parentage who got subsumed into the Malay label on conversion to Islam and those who identify as Portuguese. In a sense they are a type of Peranakan, migrant men from centuries ago who married into the local Asian community, and retained their heritage which in this case is European-based. In most individual cases I know, the European lineage is quite well documented with names and sometimes ancestry in Europe, while the Asian lineage may not be that well identified. The European lineage often includes Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, the colonial powers in the region in those days while the Asian lineage is usually Chinese, Indian, Siamese and Indonesians. Logically, there should be some Malay blood mixed in there but for unknown reasons, they are often not acknowledged. Some of the sub-communities have limited Bumiputera status even though most are Catholics while most of the remainder are Protestants. Features-wise, they could range from very fair-skinned Europeans to very dark-skinned Indians. In Malay, they are known as Serani, a variant of the Arab term Nasrani, named after the Nazarenes, an extinct heretical Christian sect who took refuge in Arabia.
Sybil’s life before the war was pretty much uneventful, other than a few family disruptions. She had trained as a midwife & a nurse and wanted to marry a Ceylonese doctor. The family initially objected to his religion, but he eventually converted to Catholicism and they got married at St John's Cathedral when she took on the name Kartigasu. Her first born son died of birth complications and she adopted a boy as a replacement. Eventually, she had two healthy daughters and the small family moved to Ipoh where they opened a clinic. Days before the Japanese occupation of Ipoh, they moved to a small town of Papan an hour drive away, where they operated a clinic to serve the local Chinese community with Sybil’s fluent Cantonese.
The Kartigasu’s kept in touch with what was going on during the war through the BBC on their shortwave radio, which illegal under the Japanese. In addition to serving the local community, the Kartigasu’s were also providing medicine, treatment and BBC reports of the war to anti-Japanese resistance forces of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. They were eventually found out and Sybil’s husband was arrested in July 1943 and Sybil herself a month later. They were both tortured, including by the infamous water torture, with Sybil suffering damage to her spine and her head. More traumatically for a wife and a mother, she watched her husband being tortured and youngest daughter being hung from a tree. As a father, I choke on writing this. And yet the woman did not break and only admitted to treating MPAJA fighters without knowing who they were. Eventually, the Kartigasu’s were jailed in Batu Gajah prison, from where they were released after the Japanese surrender.
Sybil’s injuries were severe and she was sent to Britain for treatment after release but unfortunately she succumbed to her injuries in June 1948, when an old torture wound on her jaw became septic. Her body was returned to Malaya the following year to be buried at St Michael’s Church, Ipoh. Just a few months before she died, she was awarded the George Cross, the highest award for bravery that a civilian in the British Empire could receive. She was the only Malayan woman to have received the George Cross. Today, there is a road in Fair Park Ipoh to commemorate her name. In 2010, Astro made a ten-part TV series of Sybil’s life, with the lead role played by Elaine Daly, Sybil’s own grand-niece.
While in Britain, she managed to complete her autobiography No Dram of Mercy, published by a British publisher in 1954. It is however was only able to find a Malaysian publisher in 2006. And that, sadly, was very much her legacy in Malaysia today, fading slowly from public memory. When I was in school, she merited a sentence in my school history books and even that has disappeared today.
Their clinic in Papan Main Street still stands but is pretty much derelict. There is a man who converted it into a museum to remember her life and her contribution to our history. He tried to keep it looking much as it did during the Kathigasu’s lifetime, including the hole in the stairs, where their shortwave radio may have hidden. But, funded only by himself and some donations, there is only so much one man can do in a museum that doesn't look much as a museum. Much like the life it commemorates, the museum lies largely forgotten by the nation growing up around it and the community lured by other more shiny legacies.
Sybil Karthigasu's life is an integral part of our history. It is a story of an English-speaking Eurasian Catholic born in Indonesia married to a Ceylonese Tamil, and whose family could therefore converse in all the four languages of pre-war Malaya. It is a story that denied the Malayan anti-Japanese resistance as the sole preserve of the gun-carrying Chinese guerrilla in the jungle, and enrich that story with one of a very ordinary woman who gave her life doing what she believed was right and for a people that she loves, even though the nation was nothing more than glint in the eye in those days. Hers was a story that should be preserved for the pride of our people and our nation and not be allowed to fade from our communal memories out of ignorance or worse, out of ideological embarrassment.
In the next article, we see how Malaya got plunged into Malayan Union - the Malay response, a political crisis of the British own making.
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