005 Malays becoming a minority

The decennial census

A rapid economic expansion, especially during the Great European War of 1914-18, was brought about by the heavy demand for rubber (think rubber tyres for military vehicles) and tin (think canned food for soldiers on frontlines). This in turn, fuelled the demand for Indian and Chinese labour respectively. This is reflected in the steady increase of the non-Malay population in the census held every ten years since 1900.

Despite having had fair warning, the results of the 1930 census came as a shock to the British and the Malay ruling classes when it showed Malays dipping below the 50% mark for the first time and never to recover its majority in the enlarged Malaysian population until 2010, when Malays reached 50.1%. It should be noted that the 1930 census included Penang, Malacca and the Malay States, excluding Singapore. This is particularly skewed in the west coast Malay states outside of the northern Malay belt states, which encountered lower migration with its lower economic integration into the world economy and more recent incorporation into the British Malaya.

The British response

It should be noted that the British heavily favoured the Malays in the political system. British High Commissioner in Malaya, Hugh Clifford was reminded British administrators that they were in Malaya at the invitation of the Malay sultans and so therefore are there at the service of the sultans whereas the Chinese and Indians were temporary migrants whom the British brought in for commercial reasons.

After getting over the shock of the 1930 census, the British were quick in their response in restricting Chinese migration with the Aliens Ordinance in 1933. In any case, demand for Chinese labour fell in 1930s with the global depression at that time. The internal turmoil in China of the civil war period as well as the war with Japan later in the decade very much closed many of its ports to Chinese outward migration and Chinese immigration slowed to a trickle.

The landmark British legislation of 1933 was the Malay Reserve Land Enactment, where certain state lands were reserved exclusively for Malays, to protect Malay interests from encroachment from Chinese commercial interests. While there are provisions for flexibility to deregister Malay reserve status for specific plots of land, another plot of at least equal size has to be registered as Malay land, thus maintaining Malay interests.

Views the races have of each other, their communities and their politics

With the lack of integration of 'temporary migrants' into the Malay political system, much of the social interactions between the races were limited to the commercial arena, much of it in the markets. You can see this in the accompanying chart of the low number of non-Malay Malayans able to read and write in the Malay language, even though a high proportion of the communities were born in Malaya. As a result, the common views that the races have of each other (and often of themselves as well) are very much based on ignorance and received prejudice & stereotyping.

British views

The British were impressed by the good manners and hospitality of Malays at the royal courts, which the British upper class views as reflecting good upbringing. The British aimed to develop the Malay aristocratic class into good Englishmen and up to today the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, the premier education institution for boys of the Malay upper class, remains based on the British boarding school model. Sultans were sometimes sent on tours of Europe and the mother country to strengthen their ties and loyalty to the Crown: legend had it, it was on one such trip to Italy that Sultan Abu Bakar fell in love with Italian spaghetti and returned to his native Johor with the suggestion to use spaghetti in local dishes, and the Johor laksa with its unique use of spaghetti was born.

Outside of the Straits Settlements, which were directly ruled by the British Colonial Office, the civil services of the Malay States technically belonged to the sultans of the respective state, albeit acting under British 'advice'. As a result, below the senior ranks of the civil service, which were staffed by British officers, the civil service was Malay and the few non-Malays who became naturalised Malays taking a personal allegiance to the sultan. Other than these naturalised Malays, the only non-Malays allowed in the civil service of the Malay states under their agreement with the British were appointed only in situations where there was no qualified Malay or British officer available to take that position. The civil service in the Straits Settlement was more cosmopolitan, comprising senior British officers; English-educated Indians brought over from India, largely Keralans, Telugu and Punjabis; the few Malays who completed their Cambridge exams (for a school leaving certificate, not the Cambridge University degree) and a few Straits Chinese (more about them later).

The British were less partial to Chinese migrants, who tends to be from the lower income group in China and so, were seen as brusque & rude. In order to minimise the cost of running Malaya, the British tend to allow the 'temporary' Chinese community a great deal of autonomy in various internal affairs, including

• Internal policing - British authorities allowed Chinese gangs to police their respective areas, with the understanding that the gangs do not operate outside of those areas, contravention of which would threaten to bring British law onto them. To a certain extent, this was the model of policing of Chinatowns in Britain and America, probably up until today.

• Education - The British allowed a Chinese-medium, community-funded education system at no cost to themselves. Medium of instruction remains in Chinese and the curriculum was Chinese as it was intended to educate people who would eventually 'return to their home country of China'. Only at the secondary level was English the medium of instruction and the curriculum was British, preparing students for their Cambridge school leaving certificates. At this level, there was an expectation that the student is being prepared for a role outside of the Chinese community.

• Social security - The social safety net in the Chinese community was provided by the Chinese clan house system and Chinese trade associations. This again had no cost to the British administration.

The British administration of plantation Indians was rather much simplified as the entire social and economic system is provided by the plantations, for whom the imported Indians had to work off their transportation costs from their meagre wages. Social services were rudimentary often funded by the plantations at low costs. The British view the urban Indians a bit betters they are English speaking and work white collar jobs in government offices or on the plantations.

The British view themselves as agents to economically develop and socially civilise the colonies and, to a lesser extent than in Africa, to Christianise the population. In Asia, Christianisation efforts were always with a subtext of respecting local cultures and religions except where they conflict with Christian social values, which is rather rare. Of course, underpinning all these social progress is the more cold pragmatic goal of exploitation of resources of the Empire, in order to maintain its imperial domains and British influence in world affairs, and much of the social services supplied - education, health and social security - were intended to maintain a labour force able to contribute to the Empire.

Malays

The understanding that the Malay elite (this includes the sultans, the civil service and the English-educated Malays) had of the Chinese and Indian labourers were that they were intended to be temporary and they would return to their respective native countries on making their wealt. Until 1930, Malays have always considered themselves open and tolerant to trade and economic development by any outsiders, continuing on the entrepôt policies of the Malaccan empire.

With the realisation that they have become a minority in the Malay states, the until-then alien idea of xenophobia starting entering the Malay consciousness, particularly among the educated younger generation of leaders. This growing consciousness was in part also inspired by the Indian independence movement in the 30s, with conversations being initiated among English-educated Malays on self-determination of the Malay states, which gave rise to frictions with the Malay sultans, whom the British had successfully conditioned to support the British imperial polity.

Malays tend to think of themselves as the only nationals of the country, being the ones who have pledged allegiance to the local Malay sultan. This is evidenced by the term, the Malay states. In addition to being tied to the land, Malay identity is very much based on Islam and tolerance is a very much a part of the religion as understood by Malays at that time. It should be remembered that Islam entered South East Asia peacefully, being spread largely by traders. So, Malays of those times view themselves as tolerant as to allow outsiders to enter their country to trade and better themselves, very much in line with the Islamic tradition of South East Asia.

While they do view Chinese and non-Muslim Indians as infidels, this is more in the sense that they are non-Muslim, and not so much with the view that non-Muslims are enemies to be eradicated, as the term often implies. The British model of autonomous communities is a model that Malays as Muslims are not unfamiliar with. The early Islamic conquerors from Arabia were very much minorities in the lands that they conquered and pragmatically did not damage the economy by allowing the conquered Christians to stay, provided they acknowledge the overlordship of Muslims and pay the appropriate tax levied on non-Muslims.

This was a great advance on common practice at that time to give an option to conquered peoples to convert or to be expelled, as has happened during the Christian reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century. Ottoman Turks formalised this practice further into the milieu system of governance, where their respective conquered communities were internally self-governing to a certain extent, and was responsible to sultan for a tax calculated based on their population, who are largely excluded from government and the military. On top of this tradition of Muslim tolerance, progressive when seen within the context of their respective eras, Malays welcomed traders to their ports to make their fortune, but making a distinction between the transient traders who do not owe them any allegiance and home-born and naturalised Malays who swear loyalty to the sultan.

The Malay society is not ethnically a homogeneous one. This is reflected in the official name of Umno - United Malays National Organisation - implying there are many different Malay peoples. Malays then categorised themselves as 'Melayu Jati' (natural Malays) and 'Melayu Dagang' (trader Malays). The former are home-born while the latter came to Malaya to trade and eventually settled here. Many of the latter were not identified as Malays in their birth communities but speak Malay as the lingua franca of the region. Some communities within the current Malay umbrella resisted identifying as Malays, prime among them being the Arabs, who while integrating well and contributed much to the Malay culture, some resisted classification as Malays into the 70s. In Singapore, where Arabs at one point became the largest private landowners, were understandably reluctant to be identified with the poorer Malays.

One consequence of this multiplicity of Malayness, is that while Malays historically had strong identification to their local state, ie to their sultan, and to the regional identity of the Nusantara, which was alternatively known as Malaysia, Malays of the British era has little identification to the peninsular as a whole. Effectively, Malays were either Johoreans (or whichever state) or Malaysians but not Malayans. It should be remembered that Malaya was more a geographical expression and a shorthand for that part of the British Empire in the Malay Peninsular. As a result, Malaya to Malays, was very much a British construct and therefore, Malayans refer to Chinese and Indians, who were there in Malaya as a result of British policies.

Chinese

The Chinese are generally attached to their millennia-old culture even in foreign lands. Much of China was replicated in Malaya, not just the education curriculum as earlier mentioned. Many towns in Malaya were built by Chinese, either as a development of an existing Malay village or from scratch to house an entirely Chinese workforce. It is not implausible for a Chinese person born in British Malaya to live out their life without having to speak another language.

Politics beyond the local level, ie the local city or district, was very much China politics. Sun Yat Sen was known to have come to Malaya to raise funds among the Chinese communities here but met with strong royalist opposition. Still, he managed to set up a local Kuomintang party in 1912, a year after the successful Chinese Republican Revolution. The Communist Party followed in 1930, not long after the start of the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists in China.

While Chinese do participate in politics at a local level to ensure Chinese interests are protected, identification as Malayans took a long time in coming among a people identifying as Chinese, living in a replication of China in Malaya. We perpetuate this identification even today, when we referred to someone as a Malaysian Chinese instead of a Chinese Malaysian (ditto for Indians). While the Chinese community is also not homogeneous, having its multiple dialect groups and clans, there is a greater sense of being Chinese beyond the clan level, which lends greater cohesion to Chinese identity in Malaya.

Within this context, the Chinese community generally has little interaction with the British, having little dependance on authorities, whom they mistrust anyway both as migrants and due to their experience with the British in China. There is also little interaction with the local Malay community outside of the market place, as they still see themselves as sons of the Yellow Emperor rather than having any allegiance to a Muslim sultan. As a result, stereotyping abound with much of the Malay's agricultural lifestyle, where much of the work is visible only during planting and harvesting seasons and their prioritisation of religion over development, being characterised as laziness.

The one exception are the Straits Chinese. These are members of the Chinese communities in Malacca who have been there since the sixteenth century or in Penang, whom the British brought in to help develop the settlement from 1786. When the British set up Singapore and shifted their focus there, many Chinese in Penang and Malacca were invited to help develop Singapore but sizeable communities remain in Penang and Malacca. By the early twentieth century, many Straits Chinese had been British educated for generations, speak Malay fluently, are effectively Englishmen in thinking and do not share the antipathy towards the British that the more recent migrants from China had. Within this Chinese culture, many of whom were also known in Malaysia as the Peranakans, identity as Malayans is much stronger and by the early twentieth century, there was pressure from the Straits Chinese for more autonomy and a multi-ethnic legislature with at least some elected members. Unsurprisingly, they were sometimes called the King's Chinese.

Indians

Other than lower-caste Tamils brought in to work in the rubber estates, about a sizeable portion of Indian workers was English speaking: Malayalees from Kerala and Telugus from Karnataka, 10% each, who were brought in as civil servants, although there were some lower caste Keralans and Telugus in the plantations; middle-class Tamils; Sri Lankan Tamils, who were brought in to supervise estate workers, being speakers of both English and Tamil and were colloquially referred to as Ceylonese; and the Punjabi Sikhs, who were brought in for the police force and were confusingly colloquially referred to as Bengalis until the recent influx of Bangladeshi labour made Malaysians aware of who the real Bengalis were (A colourful story had it that a Sikh on disembarking in Malaya was asked where he came from and misunderstanding the question to mean where he embarked, replied Calcutta, which is the capital of Bengal province.)

Tamils in the plantations were underdeveloped as much of their education system came from poorly funded plantation Tamil primary schools. There was little identification as Malayans as many of them lived in a replication of their poverty stricken villages in India: at times, entire villages in Tamil Nadu were transplanted to Malaya. It was common to meet Indians who have never left the plantations up until the 70s, when the British plantation companies were forced to Malaysianise and eventually were taken over by the government (Sime Darby, Guthries) or Chinese-owned concerns (Harrisons & Crossfield, Highlands & Lowlands).

The community took some time to settle as the Indian population in Malaya fluctuated with the demand for labour, with labourers repatriated when plantation downsized or were closed (This happened occasionally when British planters' experimentation with crops failed, as has happened with coffee). Wives were only available if female labour was imported and as a result, the sex ratio in the Indian community remained highly skewed (1.48 males per female in 1947). Social mobility only became a possibility, but still extremely challenging, with the abolishment of indentured labour in 1910.

The English speakers brought in as civil servants and supervisors were able to source their wives from India and had their children educated in English schools, and as a result, have higher identification as Malayans. Many became active in politics and dominated the trade unions up until today. Political awareness was very much influenced by the Indian independence struggles and following the much-publicised 1946 visit to Malaya by the Indian Congress Party leader, Pandit Nehru, who became the first prime minister of an independent India the following year, the first political party from the Indian community was set up, just months after the founding of Umno and a year before that of MCA.

This therefore was the socio-political landscape of Colonial Malaya just before the Japanese invasion, a divided country with differing identification with a country which did not even exist. It was this divided country that had to face the rigours of war and its equally traumatic aftermath.

The next article takes a look at A most colourful Malayan, who probably did more than anyone to keep the communists out of power.