Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities 9811514933, 9789811514937

Table of contents :
Foreword
Heritage Action in Transforming Malaysia
Making Heritage
“Malaysia”
Purposes: Identity Politics
Subverting the Current Social Formation
Heritage: Towards a New Paradigm?
References
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Part I: Introduction
Chapter 1: Postcolonialising Heritage and the Idea of “Malaysia”
Postcolonialism and Heritage
Heritagising History and the Nation: The Museum and the Ministry
Preserving Heritage
Un-pack(ag)ing Multiculturalism as Heritage
Heritage-Making in Malaysia
(Re)telling Museum and Community Stories
(Re)mapping Multicultural and Folklore Heritage
Heritagising the Small Town, Nostalgia and the Environment
Imagined, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Heritage
The Limits of Heritage
Conclusion
References
Part II: (Re)Telling Museum and Community Stories
Chapter 2: Negotiating Museum Narratives: The Sarawak Museum, the Brooke State and the Construction of Cultural Heritage, 1886–1963
Introduction
Southeast Asian Museums and the Colonial State
Promoting and Preserving: Competing Visions from the Top
Personal Engagement: Museum Careers in the Brooke Era
A Museum for the People?
Beyond the Brookes: The Harrisson Years
A Brooke Legacy?: Museumising Sarawak in the Twenty-First Century
Conclusions
References
Chapter 3: The Serdang Folk Museum and the Performance of Heritage: Community Museums as an Alternative to National Heritage
Introduction
Museums and Communities: Negotiations of Past, Present and Future
National Heritage Versus People’s Heritage
The Serdang New Village and Folk Museum
Concluding Thoughts
References
Chapter 4: Dual Triumphalist Heritage Narrative and the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement
Introduction
Genesis and Evolution of the SBLS Heritage Movement
Shifting SBLS Heritage Discourses and Un-decolonised Subaltern History
Remaking SBLS and Destigmatisation
Concluding Thoughts
References
Part III: (Re)Mapping Multicultural and Folklore Heritage
Chapter 5: Cultural Mapping and the Making of Heritage
Introduction
Cultural Heritage in Malaysia
Cultural Mapping
Mapping George Town and Balik Pulau, Penang
Conclusion
References
George Town and Balik Pulau Projects
Chapter 6: Re(con)figuring the Nenek Kebayan Through Folktale Adaptation: Malaysian Folktales as Literary and Cultural Heritage
Introduction
The Nenek Kebayan and the Female Traditional Healer in Malaysian Folklore
The Nenek Kebayan in Selected Adaptations of Malaysian Folktales for Children
Conclusion
References
Part IV: The Small Town, Nostalgia, and the Environment
Chapter 7: The Small Town as Heritage in the Writings of Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow
Introduction
UNESCO and Intangible Heritage
Place as Intangible Heritage
Malaysian Politics and Place-Identity
Journeying Through Malaysia
Other Small Towns of Malaysia
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: “The Unmovable Self Situated in the Quicksand of Memory”: Nostalgia and Intangible Natural Heritage in the Weather Poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Introduction
Weather and Dwelling as Intangible Natural Heritage: Lim’s Weather Poems
References
Part V: Imagined and Cosmopolitan Heritage
Chapter 9: Imagined Heritage: Ee Tiang Hong’s “Eternal” Melaka
Introduction
Exile and Victimhood
Ee Tiang Hong’s Eternal Melaka
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10: Add Place and Stir: Origins, Authenticity and the “Malaysian” Kari Kapitan
Introduction
Conceptual Frameworks: “Broken Mirrors”, Indigenisation and Transnational Boundaries
Myths of Origin
The Latter-Day Kari Kapitan
Conclusions
References
Chapter 11: “Boria Everywhere in the World”: A Penang Burlesque and the Politics of Heritage
Introduction
Boria’s Agon
A Question of Origins
Boria-Futurism
Minstrel Country: Another Historical Method
“Main”: Playing Artful Politics
References
Index

Citation preview

Making Heritage in Malaysia Sites, Histories, Identities Edited by Sharmani Patricia Gabriel

Making Heritage in Malaysia

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel Editor

Making Heritage in Malaysia Sites, Histories, Identities

Editor Sharmani Patricia Gabriel Universiti Malaya Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

ISBN 978-981-15-1493-7    ISBN 978-981-15-1494-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For my mother and for my T and for our Evie, Eric and Eshward

Foreword

Heritage Action in Transforming Malaysia This is an ambitious, subversive book. Apart from tackling the post-1971 “narrative of Malay hegemony”, it also joins the project of dismantling the great three-bloc race architecture which has long defined Malaysian society. The book certainly foregrounds “heritage as a more inclusive and expansive inventory of the nation’s cultural meanings” (47)—as the editor, Sharmani Patricia Gabriel, claims. But one question that the book also raises is—how might heritage work help eventually to unite Malaysian society around some new social paradigm?

Making Heritage Apart from its Malaysian concerns, the book tells us much about heritage itself—about “making heritage”. It points to the many and varied places in which we can address heritage concerns—ranging from street theatre, to poetry, to small-village memories and, of course, to museums of numerous types. The editor immediately rejects the idea that heritage is “a consensual, already-fixed and received narrative” (3) and stresses the “agential activity of making heritage”  (4, emphasis in original). Heritage is often employed in the process of nation-building—but it is the contest over heritage that the book highlights. It stresses heritage as a “site of play—of struggle—over meaning rather than heritage as a material artefact”  (5), and there are plenty of examples of such struggle in the Malaysian context.

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One problematic dimension of heritage, discussed by Simon Soon, is the way in which standards set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) introduce an “alien category”, tending to “commodify and heritagise traditions, folklore, and local customs”  (276). Soon notes also the difficulty of cultural heritage claims which cross state borders. The growing number of joint—transboundary—nominations for the UNESCO World Heritage List amount to a “shift in discourse and a willingness to challenge” UNESCO’s previously “nation-centred framework” (299). In another chapter, Susan Philip mentions the danger of “intangible heritage” (performing arts, rituals, crafts, among others) becoming “ossified and museumised” (142) in the stateendorsed heritage process. She is also concerned about just “who decides” on “what makes heritage” (143). Malaysia is distinctive in the “top-down way in which culture and heritage are presented or even imposed” (148)— and Philip writes of the need, for instance, to give young people agency. When food is examined as a site for heritage, the issue of authenticity is strongly apparent. Thus, what is sometimes seen today as a quintessentially Straits Chinese dish, Kari Kapitan, may have entirely different origins— reaching back to the diet of Anglo-Indian colonial officers. Despite mythmaking about origins, however, such myths can provide “a sense of stability in a rapidly changing global world” (268). They help to “foster and create ideas of cultural identity for a particular community”  (269). The part played by nostalgia in heritage is another theme in the book—discussed by Agnes Yeow, who suggests it is “a way of coming to terms with the impossibility of a return to the past”. The literature of nostalgia has its own power as a communal legacy and can involve “an ambivalent and ironic relation with the past” (216), including environmental memories.

“Malaysia” In these different ways, this book is a meditation on theoretical issues. What does it say specifically about the idea of “Malaysia”, as the editor asks in her Introduction? It certainly reports how heritage, assisted by UNESCO, plays a role in “affirming the legitimacy of the nation-state, and indirectly its existing power-structure and discrimination model” (to use Soon’s words, 300). We see this taking place, as the book also argues, in the Malay-promoting 1971 National Culture Policy and in the National Museum in Kuala Lumpur—the latter taking pains as well to portray the

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country’s ruling party (until 2018), the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), as the key driver in the creation of the nation. Jennifer Morris’s essay on Sarawak reminds us of the state-building role of heritage at an earlier time, when a network of museums—centred on the Raffles Museum in Singapore—helped to shape the emerging colonial state of British Malaya. As to the role of heritage in advancing non-state or anti-state programmes, some essays resist the National Museum agenda explicitly. Sunitha Janamohanan worries about its “gradual erasure of non-Muslim and non-Malay cultural aspects”  (95). Morris explains that the Sarawak Museum was designed to promote “greater harmony amongst the people” (77) of the state and to be a “manifestation of Borneo culture” (77), presumably as distinct from the culture of West Malaysia. Janamohanan explains what can be achieved at an even more local level, citing a small ‘Folk Museum’ in Serdang (Selangor), which presents the counter-­narrative of a marginalised group—a community of Chinese (mainly Hakka) established in the 1950s. The settlement was the initiative of the British colonial government, which created such policed “New Villages” as a way of countering the Communist insurgency. Small or provincial towns, as Carol Leon explains, can in general be “a source of heritage … where identity is formed” (205)—and where it is possible, as in the case of Kuala Kubu Baru in Selangor, to encounter “Malaysia’s rich multi-layered heritage” (205) rather than merely the rigidities of the current racial architecture. The poet, Ee Tiang Hong, as Siew-Teip Looi  points out, offers an “imagined heritage” of Melaka—which counters in an emotionally powerful manner the “official and Malay definition of the Malaysian nation” (235), envisaged in the National Culture Policy. The essence of Melaka, so Ee conveys, is “a confused multicultural soup that is greater than the sum of its ingredients”  (248). In the case of that other old colonial settlement, Penang, Susan Philip writes about “cultural mapping projects”—which offer young people the opportunity to learn not so much about the origins or roots of the different people who came there, but rather about the routes or passages they took in settling. It is better, Philip suggests, to focus on the “history of settlement” and to speak of “settlers” not ‘immigrants” (157). Penang is also reputed for its street theatre (Boria), which has its own heritage value—though the precise value is confusing. One historical t­rajectory embeds Boria in the Penang Malay community, another with Indian troops and convicts brought to Penang from South Asia. Gender cross-dressers also

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found a place in the Boria nation—and, in addition, the Chinese lion dance was appropriated at one point. The Boria’s origins—like those of Kari Kapitan—have been the subject of debate. Nevertheless, Boria has been used to assist the process of “racial stereotyping” (300) since the colonial era and has even been promoted in more recent times by the ruling UMNO leadership—to help communicate a “developmentalist ethos” (292) to Malay youth. What the Boria heritage should really do, in Soon’s view, is “recognise the complex urban cultural  web”  (300)—and affirm that “the paradox of modern life is not something we should iron out of history” (301).

Purposes: Identity Politics Reading these chapters raises questions about the purposes of heritage action. It is often employed on behalf of some specific interest—and we see interests advanced from all directions in this book. Several chapters seek to resist hegemonic Malay influence, explicitly or implicitly enhancing the claims of other ethnic groups. In a different sphere, Heong-Hong Por’s chapter is concerned with the destigmatising of a disease. The Valley of Hope at Sungai Buloh (Selangor) does this by seeking to conserve a place that was once a site for the forced isolation of people suffering from leprosy. In a further interest area, Sharifah Aishah Osman examines how the Nenek Kebayan tale in Malay folklore has been used as intangible heritage. Nenek Kebayan has been presented as a “frightening, hunchbacked crone” (167)—but Sharifah puts the case for a heritage “rescue”, celebrating her “as a figure of progressive womanhood” (165) possessing “agency, resourcefulness and wisdom” (167). At one point Janamohanan writes of heritage action as “claims for recognition”  (92), which brings to mind Francis Fukuyama’s recent book, Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition (2018). Fukuyama sees “identity politics” as the new framing concept that “unifies much of what is going on in world politics today” (xv). With the faltering of the liberal world order, he says, politics has begun to be “defined by identity” (6)—with an emphasis on promoting the interests of such groups as “blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like” (6). These groups, argues Fukuyama, seek “recognition”—but there is something empty about the way he portrays this ambition. Drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, he suggests that all human beings “crave positive judgements about their worth or dignity”. But is this all that is craved?

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In this essay collection Janamohanan gives “claims for recognition” more substance by linking them to “calls for restorative justice, social inclusion and greater equity […] in the distribution of resources” (92). Also, the philosopher Charles Taylor, in Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1992)—whom Fukuyama cites but does not seem to have read in depth—argues that merely to give a “favourable judgement on demand” can be seen as “an act of breathtaking condescension”. For Taylor, ‘recognition’ means being willing to tackle viewpoints that are “strange and unfamiliar to us”—viewpoints that might require “transforming” our own “standards”. Thinking about Taylor’s message, I respond to some of the essays here by wanting an even closer understanding of the worldview of the Hakka of Serdang or the disappointed poet of Melaka. I want to know even more as well about the operations of nostalgia.

Subverting the Current Social Formation What the essays in this volume also do—authored as they are by specialists in literary studies, cultural studies and history—is subvert the current MalayChinese-Indian social formation of Malaysia. They insist the country is more complex than official formulations allow. Moving from Melaka to Penang to Kuala Kubu Baru, and then to Sarawak, we are presented with a striking degree of ethnic complexity. The different identities encountered—Ee’s Baba heritage from Melaka; Tamil Muslims important in the history of the Boria; Jawi Peranakan in Penang (who would today call themselves just ‘Malay’); what Janamohanan calls “the performance of being Hakka” (110) in Serdang—are more specific and mobile than today’s normal three-band branding. Being Baba, Ee suggests, involved “harmonising the tongues and ways” (244); it was “being Malayan … beyond the swoop of edict” (245). This book adds to the body of academic work of recent years written against Malaysia’s totalising race narrative (see, for instance Pillai 2015; and Yeoh 2017). My own research has sought to identify cultural fault-­ lines not between ethnicities but within the so-called Malay community (Milner 2011). Also, a project at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia has examined the constituting of Malaysia’s three-race architecture as an ideological creation rather than as demographic fact—profiling the ­ European colonial input and examining ways in which this race paradigm has been and could be resisted (Milner et al. 2014). With respect to the particular role of heritage, Abu Talib Ahmad (2014), as the book also makes us aware, has pointed to ways in which state

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­ useums, royal museums, Islamic museums and Peranakan Chinese musem ums offer narratives that differ from those of the National Museum. The Penang State Museum showcases not ‘Indians’, but Tamils, Telegus, Malayalees, Gujaratis and Sikhs; it also portrays divisions within the ‘Chinese’ community, including between the long-settled Peranakan community and different immigrant groups from China. History writing is also a critical arena for contest over heritage. Even seemingly commonplace school textbooks compete with one another in the way they construct the national past—giving prominence to one ethnic or class group or another in a national narrative, or insisting the Malaysian experience might better be framed in a colonial or religious narrative, or even around local narratives based on the country’s constituent monarchies (Milner 2005).

Heritage: Towards a New Paradigm? Time and again, the essays suggest heritage work may help in formulating some new, unifying vision or charter for the future—and the vision tends to be amply multicultural. While the National Museum is concerned with the building of the UMNO-led nation, the Kari Kapitan narrative in this book is intended to invoke a “rich multi-layered heritage” (205). Also, the manner in which various towns are portrayed in the chapters that follow— not just Melaka and Penang but also Kuala Kubu Baru and a number of other smaller towns—suggests a yearning to restore the organic hybridity of an earlier (and perhaps imagined) era. Patrick Pillai’s book is also concerned about how to hold a community together while highlighting “diversity, interaction and acculturation”. He wonders if people are bonded by a widespread “yearning to belong”, to achieve some form of “indigenous identity”. He would probably approve of Susan Philip’s insistence on the word ‘settler’. Looking to the future, Pillai hopes for a society in which people seek an understanding of one another’s backgrounds and are held together on the basis of “the oneness of mankind rather than the colonial burden of race” (210). Carol Leon, I suspect, would support such an aspiration. She also takes the past ­seriously—and is attracted to a historian’s portrayal of the pre-colonial Malay Archipelago as “a vibrant world, rich in cultural borrowings and cross-fertilisations” (191). But does that past offer only rich but formless complexity—and a narrative of settlement? The European colonial period gave Southeast Asia the full-blown concept of race as well as the construct of the nation-state.

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Arguably, the special contribution of modern Japan has been to promote the idea of regionalism, which eventually prospered with the development of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—and has not yet run its course. But what was there before the European colonial period? The Archipelago was a galaxy of small monarchies, and these were indeed multi-ethnic—or at least not shaped by hard racial categories. In one way only did it matter greatly how the member of a royal polity defined him/ herself—and that was in being subject to a ruler. Has this concept any usefulness today? Of course, the idea of subjecthood—of being a member of the rakyat—has developed over time into the transracial concept of ‘the people’, so that Ketuanan Rakyat conveys ‘People’s Sovereignty’. In this sense, as Abdul Rahman Embong has argued, the old monarchies could be said to have provided an historical memory resonating into the present—a social charter capable of countering the divisive race-based paradigm, inherited largely from the British. Some influential groups in Malaysia may find rakyat tainted as a unifying concept precisely because of its feudal past—or feel that it simply does not for them possess enough emotive substance. The idea, for instance, of a religious bond—of a community or umat held together by ‘the rope of God’ (to use a phrase made famous in anthropological writings by James Siegel)—is not explored in this book, but for many Malaysians has deep appeal. In terms of heritage, it may be significant that an Islamic version of religion-based unity was being advocated with increasing determination on the very eve of British and Dutch expansion across the Archipelago. Whether or not heritage work will help develop an alternative paradigm for a ‘New Malaysia’, what Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities conveys without question is the vision of a nation bursting with identity politics, bolstered by multiple heritage claims and contesting historical narratives. As Gabriel hopes in her Introduction, the different chapters “break down, shake up, agitate, and unsettle prevailing frameworks” (5)—and this, it must be said, is in itself the first and vital step in any attempt to implement the comprehensive transformation of a society. Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Anthony Milner University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

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References Abu Talib Ahmad. 2014. Museums, History and Culture in Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. Fukuyama, F. 2018. Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile. Milner, Anthony. 2005. Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests. In Nation-Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Wang Gungwu, 117–161. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Milner, Anthony. 2011. The Malays. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Milner, Anthony, Abdul Rahman Embong, and Tham Siew Yean, eds. 2014. Transforming Malaysia: Dominant and Competing Paradigms. Singapore: ISEAS. Pillai, Patrick. 2015. Yearning to Belong: Malaysia’s Indian Muslims, Chitties, Portuguese Eurasians, Peranakan Chinese, and Baweanese. Singapore: ISEAS. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’. Princeton University Press. Yeoh Seng Guan, ed. 2017. Malaysians and Their Identities. Petaling Jaya: SIRD.

Acknowledgements

This volume emerged out of a research project (UMRP054-17SBS) supported by the Equitable Society Research Cluster (ESRC) of Universiti Malaya. The chapters by Sunitha Janamohanan, Jennifer R.  Morris, Heong-Hong Por and Simon Soon were not part of this project and were solicited for this collection through personal invitation. All the essays in this volume constitute original and previously unpublished work. I would like to first thank the anonymous peer reviewers who read the manuscript at its proposal stage and offered very helpful thinking points. I am very grateful to Sara Crowley-Vigneau, Senior Commissioning Editor, and Connie Li, Senior Editorial Assistant, at Palgrave Macmillan for their efficiency as well as assistance from the start and most especially for their patience when deadlines loomed. Institutionally, as I have noted above, I would like to thank Universiti Malaya for providing practical and financial assistance for the project. My warm thanks are also due to Professor Anthony Milner for his gracious and unhesitating acceptance of my invitation to write the book’s Foreword. I am indebted to the book’s contributors for making the exchange of views, ideas and knowledge an enriching, productive and, as importantly, an enjoyable experience. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Department of English for stepping beyond the comfort of their disciplinary boundaries to take on a broader, more interdisciplinary approach to heritage. While I am not claiming that important work is not being done in the field of critical heritage studies, it would not be wide of the mark to say that ways of talking about and “doing” heritage in academic as well as xv

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

state and public discourse in Malaysia are largely dominated by perspectives that do not sufficiently engage with the cultural complexities and sociopolitical implications of heritage. This warrants intervention. Indeed, this is the first time that researchers and academics have come together in this form to critically explore the politics and dynamics of heritage production in Malaysia in their common interest to contest “Malaysian heritage” as a stable narrative, exploring both its cogency and contingency. I hope the resulting conversations provide engaging ideas for reflection and potentially instructive first steps for further research on heritage work and on how heritage works in Malaysia. My hope also is that this volume communicates to the reader something of the excitement, and privilege, I felt when bringing together scholarly perspectives that build on a deep engagement with a non-Western society in the service of “provincialising” critical heritage studies and with the broader goal of contributing to Malaysian studies. Kuala Lumpur August 2019

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 Postcolonialising Heritage and the Idea of “Malaysia”  3 Sharmani Patricia Gabriel

Part II (Re)Telling Museum and Community Stories  53 2 Negotiating Museum Narratives: The Sarawak Museum, the Brooke State and the Construction of Cultural Heritage, 1886–1963  55 Jennifer R. Morris 3 The Serdang Folk Museum and the Performance of Heritage: Community Museums as an Alternative to National Heritage 87 Sunitha Janamohanan 4 Dual Triumphalist Heritage Narrative and the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement119 Heong-Hong Por

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Part III (Re)Mapping Multicultural and Folklore Heritage 137 5 Cultural Mapping and the Making of Heritage139 Susan Philip 6 Re(con)figuring the Nenek Kebayan Through Folktale Adaptation: Malaysian Folktales as Literary and Cultural Heritage163 Sharifah Aishah Osman

Part IV The Small Town, Nostalgia, and the Environment 185 7 The Small Town as Heritage in the Writings of Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow187 Carol Leon 8 “The Unmovable Self Situated in the Quicksand of Memory”: Nostalgia and Intangible Natural Heritage in the Weather Poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim209 Agnes S. K. Yeow

Part V Imagined and Cosmopolitan Heritage 229 9 Imagined Heritage: Ee Tiang Hong’s “Eternal” Melaka231 Siew-Teip Looi 10 Add Place and Stir: Origins, Authenticity and the “Malaysian” Kari Kapitan257 Leonard Jeyam

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11 “Boria Everywhere in the World”: A Penang Burlesque and the Politics of Heritage275 Simon Soon Index311

Notes on Contributors

Sharmani Patricia Gabriel  is Professor of English and former Head of the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Her work speaks to critical issues in the study of culture, politics and society, and draws from perspectives ranging from postcolonial theory to  decolonial thinking. She is a recipient of the Commonwealth Academic Staff and Fulbright Scholar Awards. Her coedited publications include the interdisciplinary collection of essays, Cosmopolitan Asia: Littoral Epistemologies of the Global South (Routledge, 2016) and Literature, Memory, Hegemony: East/West Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which proposes literature as a mobile form of culture that dismantles oppositional cross-cultural thinking. Sharmani is Editorin-Chief of SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English and also serves on the advisory and editorial boards of several other international peer-reviewed journals and book series. She is working on several new projects, including a monograph on Malaysian literature and an edited volume on children’s film and literature from across Asia. Sunitha Janamohanan  has been working in the arts since 1999, with a portfolio that covers a range of art forms and creative industries. She has been an arts manager, curator, producer, venue manager and heritage manager. She has an MA in Arts Administration from Columbia University, USA, and is now teaching in the Programme in Arts and Cultural Management at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, where she acts as coordinator of ANCER, the Asia-Pacific Network of Cultural Education and Research. She is also co-administrator of Community xxi

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Engaged Arts Asia, a resource and network website to connect community-­ engaged arts practitioners in the Asian region. Sunitha is serving a two-­ year term on an advisory panel to the National Heritage Board of Singapore, sitting on a sub-committee for Intangible Cultural Heritage. Her research interests include community and socially engaged arts practice and local arts management models in developing Southeast Asia. Leonard Jeyam  is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, where he teaches literature and creative writing. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent, UK. Carol Leon  is Associate Professor of English at Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Her areas of research relate to postcolonialism and travel literature. She has publications, both journal articles and book chapters, in her areas of specialisation and has presented papers at national and international conferences. She is also the author of Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel (Peter Lang, 2009). Siew-Teip  Looi  is a lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya. His research interests are in medieval English literature and Malaysian poetry in English. He previously worked as a journalist and music critic in Singapore. Jennifer R. Morris  is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore, specialising in the history of museums and scientific collecting in colonial Southeast Asia. She received her undergraduate degree and MPhil in History from the University of Cambridge, UK.  She also holds an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK, which focused on museums in Singapore. In 2017–2018, she completed a research fellowship at the Sarawak Museum Campus Project in Kuching, exploring the history of the Sarawak Museum and its collections. Sharifah  Aishah  Osman is a senior lecturer in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya. She received her PhD in English Literature from Boston University, USA. Her research interests are nineteenth-century British literature and children’s literature. She has published on Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans and Isabella Bird, and is involved in another research project on the role of the betel nut and betel quid in Malay society. She has contributed

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a book chapter on “Recent trends and themes in Malaysian children’s fiction” to The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (2018). She is also co-editor of The Principal Girl: Feminist Tales from Asia (Gerakbudaya, 2019). Susan  Philip  is an associate professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya. Her main area of interest is the evolving Malaysian identity, a topic she has approached through her research on Malaysian English-language theatre. She has several publications in this field, in journals such as the Asian Theatre Journal, World Literature Written in English, Australasian Drama Studies and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is moving towards expanding her research to other creative fields such as crime fiction, digital media and community theatre, as well as looking at ideas of culture and heritage. She has published on digital media in Asiatic, and on community theatre in Kajian Malaysia, and on crime fiction in SARE and International Journal of Indonesian Studies. Heong-Hong Por  is a lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. Prior to this appointment, she was a research fellow at the Malaysian Chinese Research Center, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Her research interests lie at the convergence of cultural studies and postcolonial inquiries into issues of health, illness, medicine, bodies, gender, nationalism and modernity. Her recent interests include the politics of memory and critical heritage studies. Simon Soon  is a senior lecturer at the Visual Art Programme, Cultural Centre, Universiti Malaya, where he teaches the art histories of Southeast Asia. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in the art, the built environment and art historiography. He has written on various topics related to twentieth-century art across Asia and occasionally curates exhibitions, which have included “Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond”. He is also an editorial member of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and a team member of the Malaysia Design Archive, a repository as well as educational and research platform on visual cultures of the twentieth century. Agnes  S.  K.  Yeow  is a senior lecturer at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya. Her areas of research interest encompass twentieth-century fiction and environmental

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literary criticism. She is the author of Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). She has also contributed scholarly essays to journals such as Conradiana, Textual Practice, The Conradian and Kunapipi.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6

Killer whale (Orcinus orca) skeleton, prepared by Chang Jee Koo in 1912, on display in the Sarawak Museum’s old building in 2017. (Photograph by author) Two of the four Lepo’ Tau murals in the upper gallery of the Sarawak Museum building. The murals were commissioned by Tom Harrisson in 1960. (Photograph by author) Wall display of the Emergency Period at the National Museum, Gallery D, “Malaysia Today”. (Photograph by author) Mannequins in ethnic costume in the “Malaysian Culture” section of the National Museum. (Photograph by author) Gallery display featuring rifles and semiautomatic weapons against a background of photographs, in a section on the Emergency Period at the Sultan Alam Shah Museum, Selangor. An image of New Village residents lining up for food rations is shown in the top right corner, in the black and white image second from the right. (Photograph by author) A section of the original wall display of the Serdang Folk Museum. (Photograph by author) A recreation in the Serdang Folk Museum of a traditional wooden house typical of dwellings in the 1950s and 1960s. (Photograph by author) Updated display, in a section devoted to “Education in Serdang—from 1920 to the present”. The photos include images of graduating students, teachers and a copy of a primary school certificate from 1953

67 75 96 97

100 103 104

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Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

A propagandistic photo of the drug trial, framed in terms of a “before-­after treatment” trope, taken in the 1930s Contradictory messages at the entrance of the Valley of Hope Story Gallery. Left: An introduction to a section which documents the residents’ everyday lives in the SBLS. Right: An introduction to the origins of the SBLS

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PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Postcolonialising Heritage and the Idea of “Malaysia” Sharmani Patricia Gabriel

Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities is an attempt to understand the socio-political issues and cultural complexities of contemporary Malaysia by “pluralising” three concepts or tropes—sites, histories and identities—integral to the politics of appropriation of the past and examining the intricate and complex links between them and heritage production. It makes a conscious effort to move away from the practical matters that attend to conservation discourse. Although matters of the preservation and restoration of buildings, manuscripts and artefacts remain important, it is also necessary to adopt a critical perspective to these matters by engaging with the complex socio-cultural and political issues that are implicated in heritage and heritage conservation. This in turn has implications for how we approach the study of heritage. As Tim Winter asserts, “[u]nderstanding the economic, political and social relations that weave in and through and constitute heritage is crucial to thinking about how we analyse it” (Winter 2013, 540). To this end, this book rejects the notion that heritage is a consensual, already-fixed or received narrative and directs attention instead to multiple discourses and understandings of

S. P. Gabriel (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_1

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­ eritage and to the idea that heritage is lived and produced; the book’s h title draws attention to the agential activity of making heritage. In so doing, the book seeks to contribute to critical heritage studies by bringing to the fore a range of actors and stakeholders—individual, communal, institutional and non-governmental—who possess different forms of social and cultural capital, and agency, as well as their different discursive practices and strategies in the political and cultural construction of heritage in Malaysia. It also approaches heritage as a lived experience, a concept and a field of knowledge. Though a burgeoning area of academic research and inquiry in the West and other parts of Asia, specifically in the past ten years or so, the critical exploration of heritage remains an under-­ explored field in the Malaysian context. If heritage is constructed, then it is also contestable. In endorsing this stance, the book demonstrates how heritage is a contingent matrix of agendas, forces and interests involving complex interactions of past and present, and contestations of both authoritative and institutionally defined discourses and practices and informal or personal, locally grounded efforts. In drawing attention to heritage as a dynamic process involving state-­society tensions and contestations, the goal is to foreground the relationship to heritage of marginalised social groups and their practices and expressions of identity in ways that appropriate, run counter to or enter into negotiation with dominant views. Iain Robertson posits the idea of a “heritage from below” as comprising anti-hegemonic and vernacular manifestations of heritage that can be distinguished from mainstream, dominant or “top-down” forms of heritage (2012, 1). Indeed, the book’s main impetus is to open up a space for the exploration of new interpretations and forms of engagement with heritage by marginalised and localised perspectives and practices. The attention that the book draws to avenues and constructions of “heritage from below” has significant implications not only for theorisations of and for heritage but also for how we understand the cultural meanings of nationhood in the articulation of identity, history and belonging.1 Differentiating between theories in, of and for heritage, Christina Maags and Marina Svensson, drawing from recent scholarship in critical heritage studies, elaborate: While theories in heritage focus more on the objects of heritage and matters of authenticity, conservation, interpretation, and visitors to heritage sites, theories of heritage study heritage as a system of production and combine representational theory with discursive analysis in order to understand the political nexus of heritage. Theories for heritage focus on ‘the role played by

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the personal, the ordinary and the everyday, within spaces of heritage, whether they are physical, discursive or affective. (Waterton and Watson 2013, 551, Cited in Maags and Svensson 2018, 12)

In prioritising case studies with the potential to contribute to theorisings of and for heritage, the book’s agenda is to emphasise the political nexus of heritage analysis and practice. Indeed, heritage is the “inherently political and discordant” terrain (Smith 2006, 38) where the contest for hegemony over a nation’s values and priorities—its “meaning”—is played out between competing social groups. My use of the term “played out” is deliberate and draws from Jacques Derrida’s conception of “play” in the meaning-making domain of language. For Derrida, meaning does not inhere in the word (or signifier) itself, but exists in a network of signifiers, in relation to other words (1982, 3–27). The point here is that the “play” of difference is integral to meaning-­making for, by resisting fixity or closure, it allows new interpretations to emerge. Again and again, Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities (re)inscribes heritage as a site of play—of struggle— over meaning rather than heritage as a material artefact. Although sites, histories and identities as heritage tropes do not explicitly frame the discussions in the chapters that follow, and of their organisation in this book, and should in the first instance be thought of as being intertwined with one another, the pluralities that their form signifies underpin the critical approach to heritage analysis adopted by this collection. While their preoccupations and methodologies may differ, what the chapters in this collection share is their underlying concern to break down, shake up, agitate and unsettle dominant frameworks, discourses and understandings of heritage so that through this process of making and remaking, we may re-access history, re-archive it to meet contemporary needs and paradigms and re-interpret the meaning of heritage—and of “Malaysia” and “Malaysianness”—as cultural formations. Furthermore, by serving as a tool with which various marginalised ethnic and other cultural groups recall the past for the present, in order to negotiate a place for themselves and their history within the larger Malaysian story, heritage dynamics can offer us insights into society in that we may read a people’s attitudes to their past and to their historical identities and narratives as constitutive of broader shifts in contemporary political and social life. “Sites” refers to the diverse objects and artefacts, monuments or buildings and other material phenomena around which claims to authenticity, conservation and preservation—the central tenets of traditional theories

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in heritage—coalesce for the production of heritage. In this book, however, sites also refers to other than the material world to encompass natural objects and intangible phenomena, such as the climate, place, landscape and the environment. In so doing, this book moves us beyond the object itself to the abstract ideas and processes behind it so that sites also refers more expansively to the implicit texts and intangible ways in which heritage lives with us, in the form of memory or memorialising, imaginings, nostalgia, desires, practices, longings, aspirations, whether they be physical, discursive, performative or affective, and the relationship between people and their surroundings and local environment. Histories refers to narratives of the past that are invoked to serve the present, including official or other narratives, elite or subaltern, canonised or everyday, written or oral, personal or collective and communal. Histories also holds within it stories, told or struggling to be told, whether as representational medium, method or as object of analysis, of the ways in which individuals and communities navigate their relationship with their nation and its pasts in the context of unequal power relations. Indeed, the question of power determines not only who tells the story of what is and is not worth preserving but also what story is told and how that story is told. Not recognised as being of much empirical value in Malaysian studies, stories and storytelling—exemplified by the novel, poetry, syair (Malay metrical poem), travelogue or the folktale, all of which are explored in this collection—can serve as valuable analytical or rhetorical devices to help us think with, through and against heritage in order to imagine new interpretations and understandings of the past for new imagined futures. The literary text, like the other cultural practices and art forms examined in this book, is the product of a particular complex of socio-historical conditions and is thus deeply implicated in the power struggles and contexts of its time. That is to say, literature is not some body of writings that exists separately from, and merely reflective of, relations of power within societies and discourses but is constituted by and constitutive of them. The literary is also the political. Identities refers to historical as well as contemporary identities, both personal and collective, and to their modes of analysis and representation. It includes considerations of gender, class, ethnic and cultural identity, the latter two especially of which in Malaysia pivot on the “national-ised” conception of “race” and its essentialist lexicon of cultural belonging. Broadly conceived, then, Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities explores what purposes various sites serve in their capacity to make or interpret heritage, to which (hi)stories these sites are meant to

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connect the present community and the function of these sites and (hi) stories as ideological markers of inclusivity and exclusivity, of belonging and non-belonging in the ongoing construction of “Malaysian” identities. Rather than thinking of them in singular terms, the pluralising of these tropes serves to bring into view heritage’s multiple uses and significations, including the myriad ways in which heritage functions as a site of contestation over identities and histories and the heterogeneity of approaches that inform and that are capable of informing the study of heritage. In bringing to visibility challenges to state narratives of heritage and in uncovering new strategies of resistance and survival from the experiential, everyday contexts of the margins, the book also hopes to open up a space in heritage studies that recognises possibilities for the articulation of more inclusive meanings of cultural heritage. The idea of “multicultural heritage” it puts forth moves us away from the tidy, institutionalised and bureaucratic semantics embedded in the label and descriptor of “cultural heritage” endorsed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and towards a needful confrontation with the Malaysian nation’s multiple, messy and entangled pasts in order to ask if a more equitable and participatory and less exclusionary relationship to culture through heritage-making is possible. Eschewing a “finished” or settled understanding of heritage, this book takes as its starting point a flexible definition of heritage as a range of “sites”, both tangible and intangible as explained earlier on, that individuals, communities and societies engage with to enter into a negotiation with a past that has been constructed to meet contemporary needs and desires. In so doing, the book recognises that although heritage is not history, in that the writing of history and the making of heritage are different practices, they are intimately intertwined through the appeals made to the past by individuals or communities or institutions, to legitimise or to give weight and substance to present needs. If heritage is an instrument or narrative of historical appropriation to legitimise contemporary needs and claims, then the act(ivity) of giving meaning to particular objects and texts as historically valuable or significant, which is also the ability to select what is to count and what is left out as heritage, is inextricably tied to the prevailing modes of governance, policy imperatives, economic plans and programmes of the nation-state. This selectivity in the choice of values and practices elevated to the status of heritage, together with the production of knowledge about what

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c­onstitutes heritage, is thus a power exercise, involving interpretative frameworks and relations of authority and privilege. As Michel Foucault asserted, “there is no power relation without the relative constitution of a field of knowledge nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute […] power relations” (Foucault 1977). This approach to the study of heritage, which highlights issues of power relations, and the negotiations and resistance constitutive of them, in the Malay-dominant Malaysian nation-state’s use of heritage to legitimise various fictions about the nation’s past to allow for its ongoing hegemony, leads us not simply to the question of “governance” but also to the broader and more urgent concept of “governmentality”—the distinctive means by which the state shapes, guides and regulates the conduct of the people and solicits appropriate attitudes from them, not by force or coercion but by persuasion and consent (Foucault 1977). In Malaysia, the state project of governmentality can be seen in its efforts to subsume the cultural diversities within the nation—and the associated cultural and heritage practices of marginalised ethnic communities—into an overarching, unifying and unitary narrative of history and culture in the service of the “national”, which in Malaysia is a highly hierarchical concept. I shall return to this point later. Indeed, with heritage discourse becoming steadily politicised from the 1980s, with state practices and narratives reflecting the assimilationist tenets of the National Cultural Policy (NCP) of 1971, the explicit political use of heritage in policy and programmes can be viewed as just another means at the disposal of the state to shape the principles that underpin inclusion—and validate “otherisation”. This raises important questions as to what stakes are involved and what kinds of implications there are for the nation and its histories in heritage production. Recognising its immense social, economic, political and ideological value and the role it can play in nation-making, this volume thus finds it necessary to place “heritage” under scrutiny. The book, therefore, finds it useful to keep these questions at the forefront of its analysis: What is at stake and who is empowered when heritage is invoked? Whose past is complicit with which politics? Whose past gets to count as “Malaysian heritage”? How far might heritage be a necessary fiction in the service of those who create it? How and in what ways might it be epistemically unjust? What might be the inherent dangers of people-based heritage discourses? If this book does not provide us with answers to these questions, it will, I hope, at least provide useful thinking points.

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As importantly, it needs to be emphasised that in addition to its pointed critiques of dominant discourses and practices of heritage, Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities does more by also bringing into view some of the critical challenges that face Malaysia today. After all, the “critical” in critical heritage studies, as Winter reminds us, must go beyond the ideological task of criticising heritage policy or practice by also focusing on “the larger issues that bear upon and extend outward from heritage […] such as cultural and environmental sustainability, economic inequalities, conflict resolution, social cohesion and the future of cities” (Winter 2013, 533). In this vein, although the chapters in this book criticise both national and international discourses of heritage, they do so not as an end in itself but as a means of addressing the critical issues that “bear upon and extend outward from heritage” such as social inequality, environmental and ecological degradation, the decline of the small town, the commodifying of cities, the rural/urban divide, the lack of social and cultural cohesion, and the continuing ethnic, gender and class inequalities. The book’s larger intellectual goal, expressed implicitly, if not explicitly in the chapters that follow, over and above meeting Winter’s call mentioned earlier, is to seek to contribute to critical heritage studies by rethinking dominant interpretative frameworks of culture so that new possibilities for what heritage “can do” will emerge. It is vital to examine the ramifications of this relationship by opening out the concept of heritage beyond a given or ready-made template and problematising it as a complex constellation of ideological and political practices, strategies and performances and therefore subject to an active process of construction, mediation and negotiation involving perspectives and experiences from below. Heritage, the book collectively suggests, is a thing in the making.

Postcolonialism and Heritage Before proceeding, it is necessary to explain how this chapter considers the term “postcolonialising” in its title as an outlook that broadly informs the book’s perspectives on heritage. The word derives from “postcolonialism” and is used in an expansive sense here to gesture to the book’s awareness of the Anglo-American legacy of heritage studies (Smith 2017) and critiques of its Eurocentric bias and underpinnings (Winter 2013). A main concern in the book is therefore to localise heritage production such that a new and more relevant configuration of heritage rooted in Malaysian

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cultural specificities, practices and historical details and one that is shaped by intellectual concerns, perspectives and priorities on and from Malaysia can develop. This, it is hoped, will enable the emergence of a Malaysian dynamic with reference to knowledge production in the field of critical heritage studies. A postcolonialising approach to heritage studies also asks for the adoption of context-based perspectives to “Malaysian heritage” that draw attention to the issue of power relations and that offer rearticulations of identity, place, gender, ethnicity and “race” from the margins. I use the term “Malaysian heritage” here with caution; it is worth keeping in mind that because global and local forces and processes interact with each other and are enmeshed (Harrell 2013, 287), it would be difficult to disentangle local or “Malaysian” characteristics of heritage from global influences. Neither is there a uniform nor, at any time, stable understanding of what “Malaysia” itself might mean given the multiple sites of struggle generated by its social and cultural diversities. Not only internal heterogeneities but also shifting economic and political goals and modes of governance shape how sites and cultural practices are imagined, remembered, experienced or interpreted as “Malaysian”. Indeed, the ongoing interpretation of “Malaysia”, as evidenced in the negotiations and resistance among different individuals and communities in the face of the political use of heritage, constitutes a salient aspect of this book and directs our attention to the socially and politically constructed, and contested, nature of heritage. Just as importantly and related to the foregoing discussion, the “post” in postcolonialism is not to suggest that colonialism is now “post”, over and done with, that the categories of exclusion and hierarchies of domination inherent in its system of meaning-making are no longer in operation. On the contrary, the prefix, along with the term as a whole, confronts us with the “‘neocoloniality” of our present times’” and for the need to account for it (Huggan 1997, 22, emphasis in original). Indeed, to postcolonialise heritage is to remind us of the postcolonial nation-state’s complicity with the forms of inequities and value systems of contemporary globalisation and its constitutive partner, capitalism, that also inform and influence the nation-state’s heritage discourses and constructions. The UNESCO-institutionalised categories of “universal” and “local”, for example, derive from imperial binary-making understandings of human life and society, which in turn shape the relationship between the “national” and “international” and mask a neocolonial or neoliberal developmental agenda that can ignore local meanings and uses of heritage. To

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­ ostcolonialise heritage is therefore to be cognisant of the dangers of such p universalising dichotomies. Recognising postcolonialism’s capacity for continuing cultural critique in the neocolonial and neoliberal constitution of the present, to postcolonialise heritage is to acknowledge imperial legacies and the relevance of decolonising imperatives in Malaysia’s post-Independence trajectory, while seeking to move beyond a colonial determinism in the meaning of heritage. That is to say, the book is aware that “[w]hat is maintained as—or turned into—heritage today was not necessarily defined by colonialism, nor is it necessarily a representation of the colonial past” (Legêne and Nordholt 2015, 8). Of interest, then, to the book is not the colonial past by or in itself, but local strategies and intellectual concerns “after Empire” that exemplify new heritage perspectives and interpretative paradigms, which can lead us to new understandings of the colonial past and new readings of art forms and other cultural practices that might have had their genesis in the colonial period. In short, a postcolonialising perspective throws new light on the social relations of the colonial past and the cultural politics of colonial governmentality from the perspective and vantage point of the present. As importantly, to postcolonialise heritage is to address the “politics of recognition” involved in heritage processes and in doing so to signal a shift away from a preoccupation with identity politics—with its sole emphasis on issues of difference on the basis of race, religion, class, gender, sexual orientation and so forth—to issues of cultural equality and inclusion, social justice, democracy and the need to hold our cultural institutions to account. In a context such as Malaysia’s, where hegemonic notions of cultural supremacy prevail, heritage can and does function as a domain for exclusionary forms of identity construction, where misrecognition and disidentification can occur in the cultural realm of the nation. In keeping with the book’s emphasis on the politics of recognition, issues of governmentality and everyday or informal processes of negotiation, resistance and heritage-making from the nation’s margins, to postcolonialise heritage is to re-orient attention to the centrality of culture in the construction and representation of national identity. Towards this end, the book makes a concerted effort to link heritage to the concept of “cultural citizenship” (Rosaldo 1994; Ong et al. 1996). Standard understandings of citizenship, embedded within most political systems, frame membership of the national community in terms of formal rights and legal obligations, overlooking or leaving unaddressed the more informal negotiations by

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which individuals and communities also become subjects of a nation-state. With escalating global processes, including immigration and other population movements, especially following World War II, the rise in discourses of diversity, difference and multiculturalism in formerly homogeneous Western nation-states, paralleled with the rise of neoliberalism, the discourse on citizenship took on a cultural turn (Legêne and Nordholt 2015, 18). To contest the bounded idea of culture implicit in the normative nation-state framework of citizenship, attention was drawn to the concept of cultural citizenship, defined as “cultural practices and beliefs produced out of negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the state and its hegemonic forms that establish criteria of belonging, within a national population or territory. Cultural citizenship is a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-­ state” (Ong et al. 1996, 738, emphasis mine). Although, unlike Western nation-states—such as Britain whose multiculturalism narrative is largely a post-World War II phenomenon and the United States, which has its own multicultural complexities stemming from its own immigration dynamics—Malaysia was already highly culturally diversified, long before its inception as a nation-state in 1957. Thus what is at issue is that state multiculturalism is built on hegemonic notions of belonging and non-belonging that in turn are predicated on ideas about the racial and cultural otherness of non-Malay ethnic communities, a point I have expanded on elsewhere (Gabriel 2014). Although these communities today culturally identify themselves as Malaysian (and not as Chinese or Indian and so on), the state’s framework of multicultural governmentality, based on the consociational model of political accommodation and the rhetoric of “tolerance”, is predicated on the conception that primary identities involve a cultural orientation and reference point to the ancestral, and not the present, homeland. Such essentialist conceptions of race and culture continue to allow minority ethnic communities to be pushed out of the cultural sphere of the nation/al whilst being simultaneously recognised as citizens of the state. This book argues that it is imperative that informal cultural processes of “self-making” are worked into updated policy constructions of Malaysian multiculturalism via its heritage discourses. As of now, the state-endorsed narrative of multiculturalism and constructions of the “national” are inextricably tied to the “nation-­ building” agenda of the state, which can be traced back to the National Culture Policy of 1971, a point taken up later here and elaborated in a number of the chapters that follow. The conception of the national that

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operates in cultural citizenship thus unravels as false and illusory the guarantee of multicultural inclusivity touted in mottos and slogans of governmentality such as Bangsa Malaysia and 1Malaysia.2 The more inclusive conception of citizenship of the national community, wherein processes of “self-making” and “being-made” are incorporated and enmeshed, calls for internal transformations in national identity constructions and representations so that a more participatory, egalitarian and democratic cultural public sphere can be created. Cultural heritage is indeed a central leitmotif in the concept of cultural citizenship, for in acknowledging what aspect of an individual’s or community’s historical contribution or connection to the past has been identified as being important to itself and also acceptable by the state, the latter ensures the rights of full national membership to its citizens irrespective of their ethnic identity. In short, the idea of cultural citizenship, which is implicit in the discussions and analyses that follow, acknowledges citizens’ right to belong to the cultural space of the nation. Together, then, to postcolonialise heritage is to approach heritage “from below”, so as to analyse power relations, issues of governmentality, negotiations, agency and resistance. The larger goal is to unsettle the hegemonic meanings of heritage, that is, to unfix heritage as a sign whose meaning is determined by normative national imaginaries. Through a consideration of the various conceptual, methodological and discursive underpinnings of heritage and of the myriad uses to which heritage has been put, continues to be put and can be put, this book hopes to point to the fraught and conflictual status of heritage as a cultural record of the nation. It is hoped that the forms of contemplative critique, reflective analyses and speculative engagement of humanities and social science perspectives, knowledge practices and methodologies (historical, archival, ethnographic, textual criticism, conceptual analysis), privileged in this book but placed in the shadow of the more scientific disciplines and their materialist approaches, are accorded their due explanatory power in Malaysian studies. Emphasis on the cultural aspects of heritage will also help re-orient the focus away from the current tendency and preoccupation in policy discourse on heritage that is articulated mainly in economic terms. I also hope that the book’s emphasis on “intangible” cultural heritage—equally important but neglected texts of heritage—will serve as a necessary complement, and corrective, to the prioritising both in public discourse and academic inquiry in Malaysia of the conservation of monuments, buildings, objects, archaeological sites and their material artefacts,

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what is known today as “tangible heritage”. As heritage conservation practices in Malaysia primarily remain a material-centred process, this area of heritage conservation is also what is prioritised in the state’s research-­ funding agenda, accentuating the long neglect meted out to humanities and social science scholarship.

Heritagising History and the Nation: The Museum and the Ministry “The past is a foreign country” (1991, 9) remarked the novelist Salman Rushdie in his book of essays, Imaginary Homelands, invoking the opening line from L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between, to lament the disjunctures of history and geography that had left him, an immigrant then in Britain, a stranger in the nation of others. Rushdie then extends this idea to suggest a broader understanding of “common humanity” in that we are all immigrants in a sense as “the past is a country from which we have all emigrated” (1991, 12). The suggestion here is that our past can be an unfamiliar place, a product of fabrication and invention. Indeed, the past that heritage references is not history but rather the selective appropriation of history. Many of the traditions that we think of as being ancient in their origins and integral to the creation of national culture were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were, as pointed out by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their book The Invention of Tradition (1992), invented comparatively recently. Like tradition, heritage is an invention—but it also invents its own past. In Malaysia, as in other nation-states established in the decolonising period following World War II, the state plays a major role as the guardian of heritage. Scholars have pointed to how heritage provides a focal, and potent, point for decolonising nations, to look back to the past to legitimise their ancestry and provide social cohesion, stability and common identification, an especially urgent concern in the immediate post-­ Independence period (Anthony Smith 1991). Even in non-colonised contexts, nation-states often appropriate events or symbols of the “deep past” for inventing a sense of a shared or common consciousness and for representing the socially constructed “kind of imagined community that is the nation” (Anderson 2006, 25). In the twenty-first century, heritage plays the additional role of offering nation-states of the Global South a retreat into the past and the comforts of familiarity and authenticity as a

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­ ulwark against increasing globalisation, consumerism and Westernisation. b In Mythical Past, Elusive Future, for example, Frank Furedi argues that “anxiety about the direction of the future has stimulated a scramble to appropriate the past” (1992, 3). While governments may treat heritage as a public good and use it for the consolidation of national self-image (Henderson 2002), and in the process provide funding in the public interest, there are also exclusions and excisions that occur when heritage is tied to constructions of the national. The telling of the national story as a common resource of cultural meaning is in Malaysia heavily inflected by the interests of the nation-­ state. This authoritative meaning of heritage, undergirded by notions of the national, has emerged dominant with the coming into effect, under the Ninth Malaysia Plan, of the National Heritage Act 2005 (which replaced the Antiquities Act 1976 and Treasure Trove Act 1957), to provide for “the conservation and preservation of the national heritage, natural heritage, cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, underwater cultural heritage and treasures as well as related matters” (http://www.heritage. gov.my/index.php/en/about-us/national-heritage-act-2005, accessed 5 June 2019, my emphasis). Indeed, like other state narratives aimed at social cohesion, heritage often sits alongside a “national-ised” conception of culture and history. The chapters that follow explore some of the issues that arise when the affective, discursive and other connotations of heritage are harnessed for telling the “national story” and upholding a nationally based cultural authenticity. A main driver and key institution behind heritage ascriptions in the country is the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture. The official website describes the ministry’s vision in the following terms: “Developing Malaysia as a world class tourist and cultural destination by year 2020, as well as building the national identity based on arts, culture and heritage”. Its stated mission is: “To drive the tourism and culture sectors as the catalyst for a sustainable socioeconomic growth, as well as to strengthen, conserve and preserve national arts, culture and heritage” (http://www. motac.gov.my/en/profile/history, accessed 5 June 2019, my emphases). The shifts in the ministry’s nomenclature reflect the state’s changing emphases and attitudes to matters of tourism and culture, and the close imbrications between them and heritage. They also reveal the government of the day’s perceptions of the tourism sector and its strategic importance to the national economy. The Ministry of Tourism and Culture was established in 1987, from a merger between the Culture Division of the

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Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports and the Tourism Development Corporation of Malaysia, which was itself first set up as the Department of Tourism under the Ministry of Trade in 1959. In 1992, the Ministry of Tourism and Culture was reorganised and renamed the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism. In 2004, the latter was split to facilitate the establishment of two separate ministries: the Ministry of Tourism (with its agency, the Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board, or Tourism Malaysia) and the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage. In 2013, the Ministry of Tourism returned to being known as the Ministry of Tourism and Culture after the 13th General Election of that year. Heritage and arts were dropped from the ministerial portfolio. In July 2018, the Ministry of Tourism and Culture was recalibrated into the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, Malaysia, by which name it is still known today. Following the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition’s victory in the 14th general elections (GE14) in May that year, members of the Malaysian arts and culture community, which included a number of this book’s contributors, had petitioned the new PH government to reinstate a dedicated Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage (NST, 19 May 2018). The call was to disassociate the “critical thinking, openness to diversity and participatory engagement” signified by the nation’s creative arts and other cultural expressions, that which constitute cultural heritage, from the neoliberal logic of the tourism industry (“Statement from Members of the Malaysian Arts and Culture Community”). As it turned out, the absence of a separate ministerial portfolio on heritage could be because the government felt there already was a National Heritage Act to see to all matters concerning heritage. This also lends credence to the view that the government was more interested in furthering or promoting a “national-ised” conception of heritage. What these frequent organisational adjustments also suggest is how the government is quick to respond to shifting economic conditions and to any benefits or possibilities accruing from them, but has yet to acknowledge, leave alone address, the shifting cultural ground. Indeed, from the 1990s onwards, the Malaysian state adopted concerted strategies and ­allocated significant funds towards cultural or heritage tourism. Revenue from tourism has become a major initiative for government policy, and it is now the third highest contributor to the country’s foreign exchange receipts, after manufacturing and commodities. Thus, the prominence of the tourism industry in (especially neoliberal) economic empowerment strategies cannot be overstated. So deeply imbricated is

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heritage in tourism that heritage is now recognised as a subfield of tourism studies (Ashworth 2000). Another primary driver behind practices and initiatives institutionalised within Malaysia’s heritage infrastructure is the National Museum (Muzium Negara). As a public heritage institution that collects, conserves, documents, preserves and researches, the National Museum constitutes a major component in the making of public culture through its constructions of the national. Like other public museums elsewhere, it functions today as a key player in the culture and heritage industries. The fact that the National Museum was established in 1963, not long after the dissolution of “British Malaya” and the year of the formation of “Malaysia”,3 and that a significant number of state museums were established soon after 1971—the year when the National Culture Policy was formulated—attest to the core nation-building agenda of the museum. The complicity of the National Museum narrative of history in the nationalistic ideology that is espoused by the state and instilled in the nation’s educational system, chiefly through the school history textbook,4 is a primary means by which history is regulated and taught authoritatively. This attests to the representational significance of the public museum in the cultural life of the nation. In line with strategies to augment its nation-building aspect, the National Museum was renovated in 2007 and selected exhibits from the smaller National History Museum, which was shut down under government directive that same year, were shifted to the former (Thompson 2012, 57). Although both museums emphasised an ethnic Malay origin story, focusing on the ancestry and migration of Malay peoples and the achievements of Malay sultanates, the National History Museum had at least noted the arrival in Malaya of Indian and Chinese groups during the colonial period, a historical fact that is missing in the National Museum’s representation of history. The subsuming of a history museum under a general museum, thus, saw a gradual silencing of the historical narrative of non-Malay communities, suggesting a gradual displacement of the more inclusive principles of the pre-NCP period (Abu Talib 2014). Going by the latest statistics, there are 210 museums and galleries in the country as of February 2019. Of this figure, 13 are private museums, 22 are run by the federal government and 111 run by state governments or local authorities, with the rest being galleries (Malaysiakini, 4 April 2019, accessed 6 May 2019). As the majority of the museums in the country are under the control of either the federal or state governments or their respective agencies, this raises the important question, as noted by Abu

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Talib Ahmad (2014, 257), of the autonomy of museums and the prospects for a more inclusive public culture and representation of heritage. The implications of this are addressed in Chap. 3 by Sunitha Janamohanan.

Preserving Heritage As can be seen from their vision and mission statements, the emphasis for both the National Heritage Act and the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture is the nation-building agenda of heritage. With specific reference to the former, what is distinct, but perhaps not unique, about the Malaysian discourse of heritage is the idea not only that heritage preserves, but that heritage itself is to be preserved. The objects and artefacts that heritage has validated as being of historical worth are “of value” to the present precisely because they represent the “unmovable” past, for which heritage provides the archive. From this perspective, heritage is a “finished” product of or from the past. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the dominant discourse of cultural heritage in Malaysia, informed by traditional theories in heritage, places inordinate emphasis on object-centred forms or embodiments of culture, on monuments, images and artefacts, along with the other symbolic contents of state-sponsored museums, whose very materiality—or essence—supports the retrospective conception of an already-­ fixed and stable cultural identity. The implications of a strong insistence on preservation in the discourse of heritage in Malaysia are explicated in Susan Philip’s chapter, which argues that the focus on heritage as it was then forecloses an engagement with what heritage might since have become or is in the process of becoming. Stuart Hall reminds us that “what the nation ‘means’ is an on-going project, under constant reconstruction. We come to know its meaning partly through the objects and artefacts which have been made to stand for and symbolise its essential values. Its meaning is constructed within, not above or outside representation. It is through identifying with these ­representations that [we] come to be its ‘subjects’—by ‘subjecting’ ourselves to its dominant meanings” (Hall 2000, 5, emphasis in original). Drawing from Hall, it then becomes possible to speculate that what “Malaysia” means is to a great extent dependent on the dominant meanings associated with Melaka, the keris, the kampung, batik, the legendary warrior, Hang Tuah—and the “raced” bodies of the four smiling young women in sarong kebaya, cheongsam, saree and ceremonial East Malaysian dress, side by side and together-in-their-apartness in the “Malaysia, Truly Asia”

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advertisement, with the phallic splendour of the Petronas Twin Towers looming in the background. I shall return to the advertising campaign shortly, but it is significant that all of these icons of Malaysianness are also readily and primarily recognised as symbols of Malayness. While what Melaka’s status as a heritage site might mean is explored in a number of the chapters that follow, my invoking of the batik (a wax-­ resistant, traditional dyeing technique) as a ready signifier of Malaysianness is to emphasise that the question of the management of the nation’s past, through heritage production, is a site of contestation not only within the internal boundaries of the nation but also outside of the national imaginary. From 2009 to 2011, neighbouring Indonesia waged a series of “culture wars” with Malaysia over what it alleged was the latter’s (mis) appropriation of various arts and artefacts, such as the temple dance, the Pendet, the shadow puppet theatre,  the wayang  kulit, the traditional ensemble music, the gamelan, the bamboo musical instrument, the angklung, the beef curry dish, the rendang, and even the melody of its national anthem “Negaraku” (“My Country”), all of which it claims is of Indonesian provenance and therefore to be regarded as emblems of Indonesianness. While Indonesia’s antagonistic stance harks back to an earlier moment of political crisis—its Konfrontasi (Confrontation) with Malaysia from 1963 to 1966, when President Sukarno had viewed the creation in 1963 of an expanded “Malaysia” as a neocolonial conspiracy— the more recent episode of “strident anti-Malaysianism” (Clark 2013, 400) exemplified by the spate of culture wars stems overtly from the cultural politics of heritage. UNESCO’s ratification in 2009 of batik as a distinctly Indonesian form of intangible cultural heritage fuelled further assertions of ownership via Indonesia’s lodging of multiple claims with UNESCO over a whole gamut of cultural forms it previously had no qualms about “sharing” with Malaysia. It was speculated that Indonesia’s economic envy of Malaysia’s  well-funded state museums and galleries, which employ state-of-the-art curatorial practices and technologies that have contributed to its place among the front runners for heritage-­ advocacy work in Southeast Asia, was behind its flurry of applications for UNESCO’s acknowledgement of its cultural forms (Clark 2013, 400). Similar cross-border disputes and resentments between Southeast Asian countries clamouring to leave their mark on the global heritage regime were ignited in early 2019, this time involving Malaysia and Singapore,5 when the latter nominated its “hawker culture” for recognition on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. The “heritage war” was over

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the provenance and right to ownership of street food such as the cendol, satay, chicken rice and rojak. Conscious of claims made by heritage conservationists across the Causeway of Malaysia’s ostensibly older hawker culture and “much richer and more authentic” culinary history and traditions, when announcing at a press conference that Singapore’s nomination had been officially submitted, a senior National Heritage Board official clarified that Singapore’s UNESCO bid was “not about countries trying to prove that their cultural practices are better, unique, or that it originated from the country […]. What the nomination is about is whether the cultural practice is valued by the community within that country, and whether they are committed to safeguarding these practices within their countries” (The Star, 29 March 2019, accessed 5 June 2019). What is implied here is that it is not necessary for a cuisine, or any other cultural form or practice, to have its origins in a particular country for that country to be able to claim ownership of it as “heritage”. Rather, as in this case, what qualifies the city-state  of Singapore to stake a claim for UNESCO recognition, it is suggested, is its economic ability to “value” and “safeguard these practices”. Although hawker food is still available on the streets of Singapore, many foodstalls have been moved indoors, into the “sanitised” spaces of air-conditioned “food courts”, where “street food” is sold alongside other “hygienic” food products such as pre-packaged snacks and beverages. The statement by the National Heritage Board official thus, by implication, alludes to Malaysia’s humbler iterations of hawker food culture, with its arguably less sanitary, open-air night stalls and pushcarts, and therefore indicative of why Singapore, with its superior economy, infrastructure and resources, all of which will allow it to “safeguard” its heritage, is more deserving of the UNESCO nomination. The economic impetus behind understandings of heritage has re-oriented the framework within which cultural heritage operates and led to “new cultural economies of heritage” (Winter 2013, 536), where, as in this instance, Singapore is able to promote on the global stage what it has appropriated and hopes to legitimate as its own past in the efforts to attract tourists and business travellers as well as its huge expatriate population. These competing narratives of national-cultural sovereignty attest to the fact that the nation is both a political or territorial unit and a cultural formation. They also point to the fictive status of heritage. Indeed, though the cultural idea of Malaysia and Indonesia, and of the wider Nusantara (Archipelago) of which they were part, may be ancient, with origins that are lost in the mists of time, as nation-states they are relatively recent ­historical constructs, products of the twentieth century. The contestations

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over objects and art forms as icons of distinct and discrete cultures also point to the parochial insiderisms of national heritage. These objects and art forms have been subjected to dominant meanings of Malaysian—or Indonesian, or Singaporean, for that matter—national culture, one which contains, and constrains, the meaning of heritage within the geographical and historical grid—and bound social memory—of the modern nation-­ state, when such objects and arts extend back to a time when a more inclusive logic—of flows, reciprocity and “planetarity” (Spivak 2003, 77)—might have reigned. This non-territorialised logic, which exceeds the boundaries of today’s nation-state, is one whose ideological borders are coterminous with the idea of “Tanah Air”, literally “land of water”, the Malay translation for “homeland”, and it is gestured at in the idea of Nusantara or archipelagic identities in Chap. 3 by Janamohanan and at the water-lapped “peninsular” (as opposed to “insular”) idea of “greater Malaysia” celebrated in Carol Leon’s consideration of the small town in Chap. 7. Simon Soon’s exploration of the “many beginnings” (278) of the Boria as an art form in Chap. 11 points to a similarly less bounded or circumscribed and more dialogic and dynamic representation of heritage, appropriate to Malaysia’s entangled, palimpsestic pasts, which he suggests can offer scholars a model for acknowledging the cosmopolitan orientation to Malaysian identity and for the hybrid national culture that can emerge from an acknowledgement of these entanglements. As anxieties about race, identity and belonging continue to undergird the modern nation-state, the notion of keeping intact, coherent and inviolable through heritage-making that whose meaning is already fixed in the inventory of culture and history exists in tension and conflict with the dynamic, fluid and also often messy ambiguities of everyday life. The tendency thus is for heritage policy to subsume these ambiguities neatly into the national narrative. This means, for example, that the kampung (village)  is not intended to evolve and develop but to remain fixed in its ­position, as a symbol of authenticity, so that it can be appropriated whenever necessary to transcribe an unchanging Malayness, which then is made the bedrock of a stable Malaysianness. Indeed, as the foregoing discussion makes clear, heritage is not history but the selective appropriation or interpretation of history for the needs of the present. In a context as discussed earlier, where more broadly encompassing, transboundary processes are subsumed under a nation(al)-centred perspective, the state constructs history and culture as narratives that progress, teleologically, from periods of patchwork diversity to national integration

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and unity (Thompson 2012, 78). This teleological representation of the nation’s past and its cultural practices and artefacts as emblems of linear progress dictated by conventional historiography is echoed in its museums, the primary custodians of the nation’s past, and in representations of its art forms, as will be explicated in Chaps. 3 and 11, by Sunitha Janamohanan and Simon Soon, respectively.

Un-pack(ag)ing Multiculturalism as Heritage The symbolic cultural and economic capital of race embedded in Malaysia’s NCP-driven narrative of multiculturalism has since 2004 also served the state’s public culture-mandated tourism agenda through the racial paradigm embedded in the award-winning “Malaysia, Truly Asia” series of television and print advertisements launched by the Ministry of Tourism as part of its “Visit Malaysia” campaign. This “heritagised” (Gonzalez 2018, 4) paradigm of Malaysian “multiracialism”, as opposed to the local distinctiveness of its everyday multiculturalism, is an invaluable device that allows the state to display a benevolent agenda of multiculturalism on the global stage on the one hand, whilst endorsing, on the other, a racialised representation of Malaysia’s ethnic groups within the domain of the national. In short, “Malaysia, Truly Asia” as a framework for the celebratory—and profitable—potential of cultural heritage that the state and its cultural institutions manufacture and market for global consumption serves double duty as the framework for the production of cultural and racial othernesses within the national community. The state’s heritagised narrative of race artificially compartmentalises the intricacies of the postcolonial nation’s palimpsestic history by binding minority ethnic communities to their “traditions of origin”, as if nothing fundamentally cultural has changed about these communities and their traditions in the past hundred years. This approach not only reinforces stereotypes about the ­cultural loyalty and identification of ethnic groups but also effaces the transgressive potential of new Malaysian ethnicities in the becoming with a politically safe and anodyne conjuring of diasporic nostalgia, of the kind taken up in another critical context in the chapter by Agnes S.K. Yeow. Similar exclusionary processes deriving from heritage’s potential to privilege one group over others in a multicultural context are evident in the efforts undertaken by the Malaysian state to reconstitute the urban landscape of Kuala Lumpur into “nationalised” spaces as part of its ambitious “Vision 2020” nation-building project. Begun in the NCP-inspired decades of the 1970s–1990s, such initiatives to “nationalise” urban spaces

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transmuted into concerted efforts to “ethnicise” such spaces in the period following the implementation of the National Heritage Act 2005. In 2011, in a move that paralleled the “beautification” project first mooted in the early 1990s, the historical Chinese quarter of the city surrounding Ci Chang Street, popularly known as “Petaling Street”, experienced a series of redevelopment measures ostensibly aimed at enhancing the conservation of the area’s “Chinatown”, causing consternation both among its denizens and the larger public. The grievances were directed  at the commercialisation of the area and the lack of concern for its historical character. In a letter to The Star, a major English language daily, a reader criticised the government’s move to turn Petaling Street into an ethnicised enclave for the express purpose of tourism development when “the thriving community of that area […] is in reality a cosmopolitan mix of all things Malaysian (The Star, “Letters”, 29 September 2015, accessed 5 April 2019). This perspective was in response to and support of a letter that was carried in the same newspaper the day before, which had rejected the state’s view of Petaling Street as a symbol of Chineseness, choosing to describe it instead as “a conglomeration of Chinese, Indians, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepalese and even Malays” (The Star, “Letters”, 28 September 2015, accessed 6 April 2019). The public felt very strongly that the state-­ proposed view of Petaling Street as a Chinese enclave was a false or misleading representation when the matrix of everyday life in Petaling Street was a microcosm that exemplified both the nation’s transnational histories, reflected in the mix of languages from Southeast Asia, China and India spoken in the area, and its contemporary dynamics and changing demographics signalled by the influx of migrant workers and international students. As significantly, the government’s professed move to preserve heritage was read by Chinese community groups as an attempt in effect to destroy heritage by erasing Chinese urban memory and “minoritising” Chinese ethnicity in the spatial and cultural contexts of the postcolonial nation (Loo 2012, 848). The argument also was that to emphasise the cultural credentials of Petaling Street, which was the place of the origins of Kuala Lumpur as a mining town in the late nineteenth century, as a Chinatown—a space of racial segregation and otherness, as well as containment, that recalled its colonial-era, plural-society roots—was to subjugate to the mythicised past, rather than to foreground in their localised present, the significant historical and cultural contributions of ethnic Chinese to the making of Kuala Lumpur and modern Malaysia. The ­chapter by Susan Philip references a cultural mapping project in the Chow

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Kit area of Kuala Lumpur, another urban space that is perceived to be racially Chinese in the dominant imagination but which, as her chapter argues, is actually a living amalgam of the nation’s everyday multiculturalism. The making of Chinatown as a state project of commodifying ethnicity and constructing racial otherness in the name of heritage is not an isolated example. In 2009, then Prime Minister Najib Razak announced the relocation of Malaysia’s “Little India” quarter from Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, with its concentration of Indian Muslim restaurants, textile shops and family-run businesses as well as its prominent landmark of Masjid Jamek (the main street is known as Jalan Masjid India), to its current location at Brickfields—one of the oldest ethnic Indian settlements in the country, with its roots in late nineteenth-century colonial labour policies that saw immigrants from Southern India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) recruited as labour for British Malaya’s brick manufacturing and later railway industries. The official re-siting of Little India from its original, predominantly Muslim, neighbourhood to another pioneering Indian but mainly Hindu quarter of Kuala Lumpur city can be viewed as an astute move by the then ruling Barisan Nasional government to appease the nation’s disenfranchised ethnic Indian community, the majority of whom are Hindu Tamils. What is also significant is that it marked a manoeuvre by the government to profit from the cultural capital accruing from the township’s tourism potential, paralleled by its identification as a heritage conservation area by the state’s Heritage Department under the Kuala Lumpur City Plan 2020. Since then, after undergoing a series of aggressive redevelopment and “beautification” measures, Brickfields has metamorphosed from a colonial settlement into a bustling residential, commercial and modern leisure hub where international tourists jostle with local visitors to sample “exotic” food and shop for silk, saris, spices and other wares, in colourful boulevards lined by sprawling shopping malls, street stalls and outdoor markets, while absorbing the “cultural vibes” of a minority ethnic community. Together with its Hindu temples, the surau, churches of various denominations and Buddhist shrines are packaged and represented as signs of the state’s beneficent multiculturalism, which allows such a distinct ethnic-based space to thrive and prosper. The location’s proximity to the country’s largest integrated rail transit hub of KL Sentral (built on the site of British Malaya’s rail depot and flanked today by luxury as well as business-budget hotels and restaurants) is ­indicative of the close imbrications of heritage and tourism that repackage,

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“brand” and “sell” Brickfields for profit as a destination for tourism, leisure and entertainment, based on the economic value of cultural otherness. Indeed, co-opted by the power imbalances and logic of exclusion that undergird the state’s heritage agenda, Little India has been commodified by acts of governmentality into a cultural product worthy of global tourist consumption. The state’s depiction of Little India as a heritagised space for the performance of ancestral traditions and allegiance to India as the point of origin was powerfully illustrated at its official launch in 2010. Officiating together with Malaysian premier Najib at the inauguration was then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. More recently, in 2015, the Torana Gateway, erected at the entrance to Little India and adorned by stone pillars hand carved by craftsmen in India to India-inspired designs—serving as a visible icon to all who enter that this is a community constituted of traditions having its racial and cultural origins “elsewhere”—was jointly launched to great fanfare by India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In addition to exploiting the symbolic cultural and racial otherness of Brickfields through the rubric of heritage, the state was well aware of the gains that could be made by partnering with India, specifically in terms of the opportunities that would open up with India’s escalating economic clout and increasingly important global role in the twenty-first century. The point made is that rather than understanding cultural heritage as a phenomenon that emanates from local contexts and as being rooted in people’s everyday experiences, the state imposes a heritage narrative from above that seeks to market Chinese and Indian ethnicity through notions of racial otherness to meet the needs and expectations of international visitors and tourists. The argument here is that Little India and Chinatown as culturally stable and coherent constructs under the sign of heritage are artificial configurations that exist in tension with the real and robust everyday dynamics, practices and processes that underlie the development of Brickfields and Petaling Street as Malaysian(ising) spatial and cultural formations.

Heritage-Making in Malaysia The book’s interlocutors on heritage are all scholars and researchers who bring to heritage-making their backgrounds in literary studies, cultural studies, arts management, political science, social history and art history, reflecting both the “interdisciplinarity” of heritage studies as a field of

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critical endeavour and the principle of “entanglement” privileged by this book. They also bring to their critical approach to heritage their expertise and interests in colonial, twentieth-century and modern Southeast Asian historiography, contemporary and classical Malaysian literature, the cultural politics of disease and healthcare, community-engaged arts practice and local arts management models. Among them is an arts practitioner who has worked and researched on museums and now teaches an undergraduate course in heritage-management and sits on the committee on Intangible Heritage for Singapore’s National Heritage Board; an art historian with expertise in visual cultural modernities who also curates exhibitions; a cultural activist engaged in grassroots community and social movements (including the one she analyses in her chapter for this book); literary studies scholars who also take a keen interest in issues of ethnic and  gender representation,  community history and social engagement; and a doctoral student who is completing her study on museum history in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Their theoretical, analytical and, in a number of cases, reflexive perspectives and methodologies are brought to bear on a range of critical issues—from explorations of museums, as well as the frameworks used to study them, as sites of public culture, including analyses of their curatorial practices, to community memory projects, to literary representations of heritage and heritage sites, to analyses of art forms and culinary practices—so as to offer insights into the complexities of contemporary debates on heritage, memory, culture and identity in Malaysia. They look at government policy—principally the state-endorsed National Cultural Policy of 1971, which provides the implicit template for the state’s management of cultural diversity, and the National Heritage Act 2005—and also at  international heritage discourse and raise a series of questions about heritage in society, the role it plays, has played and can play, from the colonial period to the present, and of its function also in community and identity creation. Collectively, they approach heritage not only as discourse but also as a concept, method and lived experience. My organisation of the chapters in the order that follows is oriented around certain key points of focus. However, it bears emphasising that the chapters are linked to one another in more ways than my somewhat schematic organisation of them might suggest. I would also like to point out that the valency of each chapter also exceeds the concerns that might be implied by their section title.

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(Re)telling Museum and Community Stories The late modern European tradition of museums—the collection, taxonomy and display of objects deemed curious or significant—was congruent, along with the census and the map, with imperial ideologies of power, particularly in the effort to render the natural and human environment of colonial states “knowable” (Anderson 2006, 163–185). Thus, in Malaysia, as in other countries in Asia, the promotion of the study and preservation of heritage by the colonial institution of the museum functioned to legitimise the European government as custodian of local history and “tradition”. This colonial legacy of the museum as a key tool of governmentality, rather than dissipating with Independence, fed the new national impulse to reclaim an “indigenous” heritage that would consolidate a contemporary cultural and political identity. In addition, the chapters in this section postcolonialise heritage by re-telling not only the stories told by museums but also the stories told about them. Jennifer R.  Morris turns our attention to configurations of cultural heritage in the East Malaysian context by focusing on an aspect of Sarawak’s museum-making history that is itself a part of its heritage— British rule. Her central argument is that we need to change the way we think about the colonial institution of the museum as an “institution of power” (Anderson 2006, 163). Towards this end, Chap. 2 delineates the complex legacies of the state Museum of Sarawak, which was founded by Charles Brooke, the second “White Rajah” of Sarawak, and the historical contexts around its development from the time of its origins in 1886 until 1963, when it was transformed into a government department, the Jabatan Muzium Sarawak. It invites us to consider the implications of these developments for contemporary perspectives on heritage-making. The Sarawak Museum, as Morris observes, continues to play a central role in the state’s heritage narratives today. While processes of heritage formation in Sarawak have their genesis in the period of high imperialism in Asia as part of the development of colonial power structures, Morris, however, fissures dominant conceptions of the role played by the museum in colonial governmentality. She does so by firmly situating the colonial institution of the museum in its social, cultural and political contexts and exploring the impact of those local contexts on the museum’s development. Her contention is that while there has been much interest in showing how museums functioned as apparatuses of colonial power and knowledge-gathering, little to no attention has been paid to

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the role played by local actors, agendas and interests in “museumising” practices. This insight on her part arises in the main from her moving away from existing conceptualisations of museums in Southeast Asia as a source of power-knowledge. Morris argues that the relationship between the Sarawak Museum, the Brooke state and Sarawak’s cultural heritage is much  more complex than suggested by Benedict Anderson’s thesis on museums as tools of the colonial project of knowledge production and by the work of other museum scholars influenced by the Foucauldian framework of power relations. Her contention is that this framework of analysis discounts the wide range of local actors and the role they play(ed) in influencing curatorial content, even if not intent, and the array of forces that impinge upon the museum as a cultural institution. Instead, Morris localises her study of heritage-making in Sarawak by drawing from new approaches to the study of colonial museum-making historiography. One of them is the network study, which privileges local contexts over universally applicable models in the study of the museum and its politics of display and representation. Morris’ use of the analytical framework of the distributed museum allows her to demonstrate how the Sarawak Museum as a cultural system was the product of a complex series of human interactions and networks forged through personal and professional alliances that straddled the British Empire. She approaches its exhibitions and curatorial practices and collections as the materialised referents of the people who accumulated, collected and curated for the museum as well as of those who visited it. She shows how the museum’s European curators worked with, and depended on, the museum’s local employees as well as the wider community, including a close network of local actors. This local network included Iban collectors, who were not only a source of ethnographic knowledge but also felt a strong investment in the museum and helped build and shape its collections. The collections included gifts and donations not only from members of the European community in Sarawak but also from the local population itself—the Iban, Kelabit and Chinese and even from the state’s tiny Japanese community. She thus amply demonstrates that the locals were not passive observers and recipients of European knowledge but active participants involved in interpreting their cultural heritage. Morris argues that the Sarawak Museum, as a distributed institution with community involvement, continued under its first “colonial” curator, Tom Harrisson, when Sarawak was ceded to the British Empire in 1946.

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This intriguing insight allows Morris to conclude that the museum was the site where colonial ideas about science and culture became enmeshed with local perspectives and worldviews, forming a space of cross-cultural interaction. In fact, it was “localised” enough to become a site of socialising for Sarawak’s culturally diverse community—becoming in fact a “museum for the people” (69), and not an imposed institution. In Chap. 3, Sunitha Janamohanan similarly focuses on the role played by local actors in museum-making practices, but she does so by centring her discussion on the issue of the postcolonial nation-state’s hegemony in the politics of classification, display and representation, a situation which has led to the production of new forms of museum-making from the margins, which, as in her case study, derive from community-driven and grassroots initiatives. She not only situates her analysis within local activities and practices of alternative heritage production in Malaysia that have emerged since the 1990s as a response to national hegemonies but also speaks to global conversations on the relationship between multiculturalism, public culture and social inclusiveness. Public heritage institutions such as national museums are sites of public culture and memory and function as arenas of cultural representation. Although they have an important role to play in civic life by serving as a forum for exploring contemporary social issues and concerns, this responsibility is fraught with contradictions. For the telling of the national story is embedded in complex issues of power relations—the nation’s desire to remember is often in contestation with the state’s proclivities to forget. At issue, as Janamohanan implies, is the Malay-hegemonic state of a multiethnic nation. Such power asymmetries have thus led to the National Museum becoming the custodian of Malayness rather than of Malaysianness. Focusing on the phenomenon of the community museum as a site of resistance, Janamohanan illustrates the ways in which the Serdang Folk Museum in the township of Serdang Baru (now known as Seri Kembangan) in Selangor functions as a “living memory” (110) project. Set up in 2012 through the initiatives and activities of community leaders, the folk museum and its practices of memory-making exemplify a “people’s heritage” (92), which Janamohanan argues offers an alternative narrative to mainstream accounts of heritage, or what she refers to as “Heritage,” with a capital H, “to distinguish it from heritage as a general concept” (89). Towards this end, she juxtaposes this localised and “performative” discourse of heritage  with the unitary and homogenising pedagogical ­

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­ arratives generated by Muzium Negara, the National Museum, and the n state museum of Selangor, the Sultan Alam Shah Museum. The community under study is one whose roots in Malaysia are associated with (but which predate) the New Villages that were created in the early 1950s during the Emergency period in Malayan history (1948–1960), when thousands of villagers had to be relocated and segregated or had their existing settlements fenced off as part of the measures taken to contain the communist insurgency. The community’s link with the Emergency invokes yet another vexed memory—that of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP)—which, although an ethnically mixed party (alternative accounts show that ethnic Malays had also taken up arms and joined the MCP’s anti-colonial struggle), continues to be “othered” by official history as a racially distinct “Chinese” organisation. Both the Emergency and the MCP, mobilised and politicised as anti-national to fit present needs and narratives, have been disavowed, displaced and deferred by national memory. They have also, argues Janamohanan, yet to receive sustained and serious scholarly attention. This “other” memory is picked up from the nation’s recesses and salvaged and restored in the Serdang Folk Museum. Symbolically housed in the basement of a Chinese language-medium primary school, with objects of everyday life from the past on display, this memory project, Janamohanan elaborates, constitutes the effort to insert the community’s evolution into the larger narrative of Malaysia’s historical development. The community’s forced relocation to the New Villages recalls their earlier trajectory of journeying to Malaya from their villages in Southern China in the early years of the twentieth century in order to escape poverty and find a better life. This doubled dispersal and inflection of their “otherness” has pushed them further to the peripheries of the national archive and imagination. Yet, their diasporic experiences of departure, arrival and relocation, as well as their attendant hopes and ensuing hardships, are an integral aspect of their intangible cultural heritage and their story of becoming Malaysian. The walk-through experience past the photos, memorabilia and accoutrements of daily life on display in the folk museum, which includes a reassembled structure of a wooden house typical of New Village dwellings of the mid-twentieth century, now demolished to give way to development and modernisation, are attempts to provide visitors with evidence of a place and a way of life not documented in the state’s master narratives of heritage, history and memory. A map of the village, the result of a cultural mapping activity carried out by students (an alternative heritage practice that will be

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explained in further detail in Chap. 5 by Susan Philip), reaffirms, restores and re-enacts in the eyes of the township’s residents and those who visit their museum the community’s century-long stake in Serdang’s past and their belonging to its, and their nation’s, cultural geography. Janamohanan illustrates that the cultural power of this community lies not just in their staging of exhibitions or their collecting of artefacts. Rather, it is  in the very processes of coming together, pooling their resources and their experience of actively remembering that  they “perform” their Chineseness as well as insert this “forgotten” narrative of Malaysia’s cultural diversities into the formal or pedagogical narrative of the state. This performative dimension of heritage experiences invokes a temporality and visuality that disturbs the “silent” dioramas of the National Museum and the Sultan Alam Shah Museum. In so doing, Chap. 3 demonstrates how the community museum functions as a locus of community commemoration and contestation, agency and resistance. As a site for conjuring the past in and for the present, it constitutes a space for the performance of history and identity, of being Hakka and Malaysian. To further illustrate the diversity of heritage discourses in Malaysia, Heong-Hong Por in Chap. 4 focuses on a marginal community, comprising residents, mostly former patients or descendants of patients, of a former leprosy commune in Selangor state. The history of this community also recalls segregation, but on a much more visceral level, and although a majority of its members are ethnic Chinese, Por makes it clear from the outset that the strategies for heritage-making appropriated by this community are not ethnic-based but a place-based preservation discourse that transcends ethnicity in its orientation. What is also significant is that this community’s shared experience of the past derives from what Por describes as a “subaltern history” (125) of trauma and suffering, constitutive of what has also been conceptualised as a “dark heritage” (Magee and Gilmore 2015, 1). The Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement (SBLS) in Selangor state, now a tiny, close-knit community of about 100 residents, was at the time of its completion in 1930 the largest leprosarium in the British Empire and the second largest in the world. Por argues that the self-sustained township envisioned as a model for the leprosy sanatorium by the British administrators was, as a colonial medical institution, also a place of shame and social stigma, segregation and suffering as a result of the repressive practices of colonial rule and the exclusions that followed. She explores how such a place has today become a heritage site and what it represents as a heritage site for the many actors who are involved in its preservation movement.

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She extends her range of concerns to pose this intriguing question—what are the implications for heritage when heritage discourse is associated with a nation’s dark past? She delineates how, after effective treatment for leprosy was discovered in the 1980s, new threats to the survival of the community came in the form of commercial horticultural activities, followed by plans for the acquisition of the land for redevelopment in the early 2000s. She analyses the mutating discourses of the Sungai Buloh preservation movement as a response to these shifting challenges and the role that heritage came to play in it as the movement began gaining momentum. She argues that heritage as a strategy for the survival of the community only emerged in the preservation movement’s discourse in 2007 after a section of the settlement was demolished to make way for a state-funded university’s expansion programme. Today, she asserts, the settlement’s preservation discourse is a complex concatenation of hopes, interests, strategies—and understandings of the uses of heritage. Por’s chapter also demonstrates how different heritage actors in the SBLS preservation movement—ranging from residents to researchers to activists to the settlement’s management to members of the public—possess different levels of power and bargaining skills as well as different modes of appropriating the past as heritage. Their social and cultural capital, discursive strategies and ability to use the media also influence whether their voices are heard. For example, while the residents were more interested in asserting their right to a livelihood and to the everyday life of the settlement they had become accustomed to over generations, the non-­ resident members of the movement, including researchers and architects, were more focused on highlighting the settlement’s historical and architectural significance. Protesting the demolition work that had been carried out, a non-resident member of the public, in stressing the settlement’s status as one of the earliest centres for the treatment of leprosy in the early twentieth century, in a “letter” to the Malaysiakini news portal in 2007, called for the settlement to be deemed a national as well as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Por records that the SBLS’s multiethnic demography and the “Garden City” principle emulated by its colonial town planners (after the nineteenth-century English residential concept) were also highlighted as “significant values” (122)  that merited the settlement’s heritage status. Por observes how the preservation discourse on tangible heritage became enmeshed with that of intangible heritage when members of the

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movement began reclaiming the oral testimonies of the residents as fears of further demolition mounted. In addition to these oral history accounts, visual culture was also deployed, in the form of photographs of the commune’s patients that were put on display in the Story Gallery that was opened in 2018. The heroism of the residents in the face of adversity, and the positive visions of their accomplishment and resilience, actively contributed to the discourse on intangible cultural heritage. In tandem with these efforts, a range of other activities—including guided tours of the site, the production of books, DVDs and television documentaries, online petitions, campaigns and crowdfunding practices to mobilise support and funding—demonstrate how a people-led presentist discourse of heritage can bolster a community’s efforts to negotiate a secure position for themselves and a space from which to establish their rights to survival in the cultural space of the nation.

(Re)mapping Multicultural and Folklore Heritage The idea of heritage as a discursive construction obscures the materiality or the physical-ity of location around which notions of belonging and identity, deeply implicated with heritage, are also built. By treating place as a cultural entity and by exploring heritage-making in relation to place as a lived and experienced domain, Susan Philip brings attention back to physical space as an aspect of heritage discourse and practice that has not been sufficiently explored in Malaysia. Indeed, the linking of identity and belonging with one’s presence within a physical space though cultural mapping has not been adequately addressed within the Malaysian context. Philip’s chapter demonstrates how the activity of cultural mapping postcolonialises heritage production by embedding the past in the present in ways that are responsive to local needs, issues and concerns and by a­ nchoring cultural heritage to lived experience and practice within physical space. Its case studies involve two cultural mapping projects carried out by volunteers in George Town (begun in 2001) and Balik Pulau (begun in 2005), both of which are locations on Penang island. The legacy of maps as a tool of hegemonic power with which to order place as a fixed point and divide populations has been foregrounded in postcolonial scholarship (Said 1993) and literary narratives (Ghosh 1988). Cultural mapping, on the other hand,  as demonstrated in Chap. 5,  is a performative activity and bottom-up strategy that can unsettle the rigidities

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and fixities associated with place-based heritage—and by extension with history, race and culture. As a collaborative and participatory effort, cultural mapping disrupts ready-made cultural assumptions by unleashing alternative stories and the otherwise invisible workings and hidden resources of a place. Philip shows how heritage as an explorative activity of storytelling links physical location and place-ness to the more intangible resources of culture. The production of heritage as process not only brings place and the cultural significance of place and its resources—its physical structures, food, trades and traditional activities—alive but also restores, as vital, the connection between place and people and the “situatedness” (148) of people in their cultural heritage. Like other practices of alternative heritage-making explored in the other chapters, Philip demonstrates how cultural mapping subverts binaries—such as indigenous/immigrant, outsider/insider—that deny minority ethnic communities a “presentness” (141) in their nation. One of the reasons for this, as mentioned earlier and as Chap. 5 argues, is the inordinate emphasis placed on the notion of preservation in heritage discourse in Malaysia. The grassroots, community-led efforts involved in cultural mapping interrogate the narrative of preservation by carrying out activities that point to the “pastness” but also “presentness” of heritage. Such activities keep heritage alive and relevant to the present. Philip’s argument is that dominant understandings of heritage mythicise minority ethnic communities, keeping them at a distance, in the past. The dynamism, however, of location-specific renewal of heritage (re)roots them in the present and allows them to understand and appreciate not only the roots but also routes of identity construction, thus giving individuals and communities new insights into their heritage. By exploring heritage as a progression of the past into the present rather than keeping to national history’s dominant political frame of periodisation, in which time is divided into past and present, cultural mapping becomes a resource by which marginalised ­communities can insert themselves into the nationalised narrative of heritage. It is the praxis of mapping that provides the lived experiential content that undermines the commodified heritage propagated by state narratives of identity. To “map” heritage is to interrogate governmentality and unpack(age) heritage. Like Por’s alternative heritage discourse that transcends ethnicity and speaks of cross-cultural sharing and empathy, Philip also gestures at a people-led construction of  “multicultural  heritage” (150) through cultural mapping.

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Continuing the book’s postcolonialising cultural work, Sharifah Aishah Osman turns our attention in Chap. 6 to alternative ways of reading the figure of the nenek kebayan in folktale adaptations from East and West Malaysia of the “Puteri Gunung Ledang” (Princess of Gunung Ledang), a classical fable from a canonical text of Malaysian history, the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals). Drawing from UNESCO- and Malaysia’s National Heritage Act 2005-endorsed definitions of the folktale as a form of intangible or “living” cultural heritage (164), and therefore meriting preservation, Sharifah argues, however, that the bonds within a culture that are preserved in the generic form of the folktale and passed down from generation to generation are just another tradition-sanctified way of repressing women by silencing their agency. The potency of the institutionalised figure of the nenek kebayan of traditional Malay folklore, which has for generations bound the cultural imagination of the Malays as an ethnic community, observes Sharifah, derives mainly from the character’s representation in the fable popularly known as the “Legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang”. As the mythicised figure of the nenek kebayan is one that is associated with the fall of the Melaka sultanate in the sixteenth century, it has through the ages come to be associated with the affective excesses of the past and the dramatic dangers that can befall a culture when it deviates from adat (custom) and convention. Sharifah thus argues that the folktale’s more didactic emphasis on the nenek kebayan’s manifestation as a distant figure of cautionary admonishment and as an unerring exemplar of tradition, has served to obscure her multiple other guises as spiritual healer, children’s counsellor, therapist and respected community elder. She asserts how contemporary folktale practitioners (be they writers or scholars), like the penglipur lara (itinerant storytellers) of times past who adapted their stories to the needs of their audience, bring the folktale closer to the real lives of modern Malaysian women, and the complexities and contradictions they grapple with. She also argues that storytellers can function as “heritage crusaders” (166)  through their critical appropriations of the folktale, helping to keep the genre not just alive but also relevant to a rapidly transforming Malaysian nation, especially in relation to its changing gender and other cultural realities. In taking on the role of a heritage crusader herself and seeking to perform an “act of courage” (180) by contesting canonical interpretations, Sharifah constructs the folktale, the revered site for transmitting knowledge from the past and a culture’s collective value system, as the very locus for the articulation of contemporary

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gender and cultural politics. By disrupting conventional representations of race, class and gender identities conflated on the body of the nenek kebayan, Sharifah pluralises the genre of the folktale as well as the figure of the nenek kebayan, opening both up to multiple significations. She also suggests how, in the transmission from its “original” oral storytelling tradition to its adaptation in the written form, the figure of the nenek kebayan undergoes several transformations of cultural meaning. In demonstrating how new and more “agitatorial” (181) meanings enter the folktale through the process of re-telling that adaptation makes possible, Sharifah thus foregrounds the capacity of the folktale to salvage as well as subvert heritage. In these ways, Sharifah contests the notions of femininity, tradition and racial imagination that have contributed to the heritagisation of the figure of the nenek kebayan. Furthermore, although it is commonly assumed that the timelessness of folktales can provide a mythic balm to social fluidities, the chapter by Sharifah instead demonstrates how folktales themselves, like heritage, are permeable and dynamic forms that reflect the culture and specific needs of the present moment. Stories evolve as society evolves.

Heritagising the Small Town, Nostalgia and the Environment Chapter 7 explores small-town rurality as an alternative source of heritage-­ making. Although a distinctive feature of Malaysia’s landscape and history, and an important component of intangible heritage linked to territory, the small town remains in the shadow of the city in the state’s heritage discourses. Yet, the small town, Carol Leon argues, offers possibilities to draw attention to the corporeal and cognitive dynamism of place, which in turn articulates heritage as process and a “living” cultural phenomenon. The former mining town of Kuala Kubu Baru (KKB) whose forgotten history is resurrected in Rehman Rashid’s Small Town (2016), like the myriad other small towns that are celebrated in his other works, along with the fictional small town in semi-rural Perak state in Shih-Li Kow’s debut novel, The Sum of Our Follies (2014), are shown to be spaces of multiethnic conviviality. The townspeople’s transethnic identifications and solidarities, in repudiation of state-sanctioned identities, are built on the camaraderie between neighbours and other residents. Their solidarities  construct a “human meaning” (204)—of trust, familiarity, acceptance and respect—that

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gives the lie to the state’s dichotomising of race and culture. They also recall for Leon the historical idea of a “greater Malaysia” (205). The small town is also often just as historical as the city. With its starting point as a planned township in the early twentieth-century world of colonial Malaya, KKB, for example, was a place characterised by migrations, circulations, movements and interconnections across vast geographical regions, seen as characteristics of today’s society, but already a feature of the colonial-era small towns established across Malaya that have been kept alive until today. The question thus for Leon, as for her authors, is—Why then has the city been privileged over the small town in heritage discourse? It is significant that what is foregrounded in the context of Leon’s exploration of Rehman’s writings is the representational power of the hybrid literary genre of the travelogue itself—part fiction, part essay, part poetry. This is also a genre where the mediating consciousness that charts the journey is that quintessential figure on the move—the traveller. The figure of the traveller, moving from place to place, and the concomitant trope of the journey itself, the essential text of the human experience, emphasise movement and the processuality that, for Leon, unsettle stasis and the stable place-ness of natural heritage, long viewed and appropriated as a reliable marker of cultural heritage and identity. The Malaysian government’s successful bid to the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites includes Melaka and George Town, historic cities of the Straits of Melaka, as protected heritage sites. Indeed, the palimpsestic history of Melaka and George Town, as attested to in this chapter by Leon, and in the ones by Siew-Teip Looi and Simon Soon that follow, implicates these cities in complex issues of ethnicity, race, religion and nation-making, in addition to the political contestations that are as relevant to the present as to the past. Thus, it is problematic that Melaka is only re-presented as the place of the historical origins and arrival of Islam and its Malayness made preeminent over other ethnicities, which have also shaped and continue to shape its character. The potential of Melaka to subvert received notions of race and clear ethnocultural identity is thus ignored. Furthermore, the focus is on the commodification of the city’s heritage in relation to the prioritisation of “cultural tourism” (Prideaux 2003). This form of tourism offers a “staged authenticity” (MacCannell 1973, 595–596), an aspect of heritage discourse where Melaka’s historical landmarks are, paradoxically, denuded of their intrinsic qualities of historical significance and uniqueness in the contrived effort to stage local culture to create an impression of authenticity for tourist consumption. In

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this “heritagised Melaka” that has been produced by the state’s privileging of heritage-making in the service of the capitalist agenda of cultural tourism, historical monuments are “fetishised” (Gonzalez 2018) to serve as icons of national heritage. In such instances, just as national heritage is trivialised or reduced to commercialisation rather than harnessed to serve genuine unifying goals, “World Heritage” sites too have often just been used for place-marketing, city branding and national tourism promotion to meet local economic imperatives and objectives. In articulating this critique, Leon explores the ways in which, in their representations and re-valorisations of the small towns as exemplars of intangible cultural heritage, the texts she examines move away from the material place-ness of sites to focus on human interaction and activity, and other community-led practices and people-inspired initiatives that preserve as unique and distinctive the experiential basis and character of the small town. In contrast to the grand narratives of the city, Chap. 7 demonstrates how small-town heritage is played out through the everyday and the ordinary. In Chap. 8, Agnes S.K. Yeow draws from the nostalgic turn in literary and critical studies as her way of contributing to heritage studies and in a parallel move deftly addresses the environmental urgencies of our third millennium. She does this firstly by unsettling the relationship between nostalgia and heritage, a nexus that has not been interrogated sufficiently. Like heritage, nostalgia seeks a past of its own invention. However, in a move that signals a radical “ethical, ontological and epistemic shift” (210), Yeow eschews this mode of idealised nostalgia, the kind that is an end in itself and invoked, for example, in the heritage industry’s drive to cater to the exoticised expectations of the “timeless” (209) past of heritage-­hungry tourists. She offers instead the quite intriguing concept of “critical nostalgia” (225). This “rehabilitated” form of nostalgia, she asserts, necessitates our coming to terms with the impossibility of a return to the past. It is also an agential configuration that can serve as a technique and method to explore the workings of memory in a variety of contexts, including the postcolonial. It is this critical form of nostalgia, as a postcolonialising tool that can retrieve new acts of memory and mediate new forms of heritage-­ making, that Yeow adopts in her analysis of what she calls the “environmental memories” (210)  implicit in the “weather poems” (217) of Malaysia-born Asian-American writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim. As significantly, Chap. 8 stresses that intangible natural heritage, such as the weather and dwelling, should be viewed as the environmental equivalent of intangible cultural heritage. To understand how intangible natural

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phenomena become an indispensable part of individual and communal pasts through new processes of memory-making uncovered by the workings of critical nostalgia, Yeow argues, is to displace the very core of our anthropocentric understanding of heritage. This novel line of inquiry introduces notions of heritage that interrogate the binary oppositions that have been built into the nature-culture pairing and seeks to re-establish, as of paramount importance, the interdependence of human-environment relationships. Nostalgia, in Yeow’s analysis, functions as an alternative site of individual as well as communal commemoration and heritage production.

Imagined, Transnational and Cosmopolitan Heritage Siew-Teip Looi contextualises his examination in Chap. 9 of poet Ee Tiang Hong’s representations of his birthplace of Melaka within David Lowenthal’s idea of the emotional “triggers” for heritage-making. He reads Ee’s perceived victimhood as a member of a marginalised cultural community in Malaysia and the poet’s forced exile to Australia as catalysts for the production of “imagined heritage” (231). Looi argues that “imagined heritage” as an act of production from a location in the margins and in exile away from the homeland should be seen to constitute productive heritage discourse. Making the case that Ee’s poetry should itself be recognised as part of Malaysia’s heritage on account of its inclusive vision, Looi also documents the challenges that were involved in getting Melaka listed on the World Heritage List in 2008 after two unsuccessful earlier attempts. Rejecting the National Cultural Policy of 1971 as too insular, some hope, for Looi, comes in the form of the National Heritage Act 2005, which not only leaves the definition of “national heritage” open but also leans in the direction of acknowledging, on a rhetorical level at least, the multicultural realities on the ground. The definition of “intangible cultural heritage” in the Act explicitly mentions poetry, along with a host of other arts and cultural expressions, “that may have existed or exist in relation to the heritage of Malaysia or any part of Malaysia or in relation to the heritage of a Malaysian community”. Looi takes this as a sign that national heritage has the potential, with the proper political will behind it, to acknowledge the mutual “implicatedness” or entanglements among Malaysia’s cultural communities. Looi’s choice of Ee as a literary figure who could speak with authority for a multicultural Malaysian heritage derives mainly from the significance

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he attaches to the poet’s cultural identity as a Peranakan, a member of a community with a history that extends back to the fifteenth century and whose identity, on a literal level, is constituted of the intermixing between immigrants from China and local inhabitants (the name “Peranakan”, a conjugated word derived from “anak”, the Malay word for “child”, hints at the community’s localised identity constructions). Those among them who settled in what eventually became the British Straits Settlements of Penang, Singapore and Melaka were also known as the Straits Chinese; baba was the term used for their men and nyonyas for the women. Their cultural practices, from language to religion to dress to food, was an indigenised amalgam of Chinese, Malay, English and other local influences. Ee’s “eternal city”  (250)—his centuries-old ancestral home as well as birthplace—of Melaka, then, is, for Looi, a trope that rises above the inbuilt separatednesses of national culture and the inwardness of state-­ driven heritage constructions. The contingent and inclusive cultural thinking exemplified in Ee’s poems is evinced, for example, in what Looi calls the “subversive” (246)  thinking in “Tranquerah Road”, which contains the exhortation that as Peranakan identity is cultural rather than genetic or biological, even a sinkeh (“newly arrived” Chinese male) could become a baba if he stopped “lapsing into ‘China-born’ behaviour” (246). In relation to its exploration of the heritage-inducing “triggers” behind Ee’s emigration, Chap. 9 also raises the pertinent matter of the implications of the NCP’s nation-building goals on literary productions, specifically on how notions of the “national” have impacted the formation of the literary canon. The Malaysian state’s displacement, and disavowal, of English, as reflected in the language’s diminished status in models of nation-building since 1971, has positioned English in effective opposition to the national language, Bahasa Malaysia (Malay), which is perceived to be the only language that can be imbued with a decolonising or nationalist politics. Thus, in Malaysia, where it is only Malay that is identified as a carrier of national culture, literary writings in English have been accorded the marginal status of “sectional” literature. In contemporary postcolonialising Malaysia, however, the cultural politics of language, particularly for the urban generation and middle classes, has transitioned away from perspectives that uphold English as a linguistic legacy of colonialism or merely as a global language to a view of English as an assimilated, familiar and deeply intimate tongue—in short, as having become a Malaysian language based on its ability to both interpret and convey, as well as shape, local maps of meanings, grounded experiences and vantage points.

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Writing in his first language of English in the fractious and hostile climate of the NCP-inspired 1970s, Ee, however, was caught in the crossfire of nationalistic cultural politics, which effectually rendered his writings non-national, or worse anti-national, although it is Melaka, and by extension, Malaysia, that is celebrated as the poet’s cultural homeland. The choice to keep writing in English, then, amounted to self-exile, but this, for Ee, meant exile not only from the state paradigm of the national but also, physically, from his homeland. In also considering the role heritage can play in strengthening local identity and circumventing the narrow inscriptions of the national, Leonard Jeyam demonstrates in Chap. 10  how food functions to bind people together through space and time, assimilate them to their new surroundings and shape the notion of group or community identity. He uses as his starting point the heritage status of the kari kapitan, a ubiquitous curry dish in Southeast Asia and one that is commonly associated with the Peranakan communities of the region. The Peranakan, as mentioned earlier, are an historically important community whose entangled origins fall between the cracks of the Malaysian state’s rigid racial categorisations. Since the 1970s, when the state adopted a cultural, economic and political agenda that moved to solidify the boundaries between the nation’s ethnic groups, Peranakan culture, which exemplifies mixedness as its very core, has been put under threat. This could explain why the community has held on more tightly to the kari kapitan as a marker of their group identity, history and heritage. That the kari kapitan has been given heritage status not by an official body but by the community itself as an act of ownership over it reveals the community’s underlying anxieties about its place in society. Jeyam compares food and the oral histories associated with it and its preparation with Salman Rushdie’s “broken mirror” analogy; stories told about the past will inevitably be “told in pieces with some parts missing, some parts altered and some pieces added on” (Quoting Rushdie, 258). The point made is that you will never be able to access the “original” recipe, which can only be recreated or reconstructed from bits and pieces from “here” and “there”, from the broken mirror’s shards and fragments. There is no possibility of a whole or unmediated return to the past. This is also in a sense the chapter’s methodology. Jeyam traces the origins of the kari kapitan through its nomenclature, by the various names by which it has been known in its past, a strategy which also allows him to problematise notions of authenticity associated with culinary heritage. The “many origins” of the kari kapitan—in colonial India, British Malaya

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and Dutch Indonesia—unsettle the claims of ownership made over it by the Peranakan communities of present-day Malaysia and Singapore. Furthermore, by recreating the origins of the kari kapitan, Jeyam’s use of the concept of “culinary heritage” (261) to expound the intricacies of the routes travelled by the dish through its recipes is a way of interrogating nationally based notions of cultural authenticity. The story of origins becomes a story of amalgamation, assimilation and adaptation. In relation to the issues raised implicitly in Chap. 10, and earlier on in this chapter, it is significant that yet again heritage, as a state-endorsed project, has worked to domesticate the cosmopolitics of past cultural practices and to truncate the entangled histories and experiences of the communities to which they belong. In her analysis of selected heritage projects on Straits Chinese history in twentieth-century Malaysia and Singapore, Karen Teoh cogently observes that in “co-opting the Straits Chinese experience in service of national unity and state-approved multiculturalism”, state-sponsored heritage projects have instead “opened up nation-based divides within an originally transnational community” (Teoh 2015, 79–80). Simon Soon unpacks another origin story to question the foundations of heritage discourse and practice in the book’s closing chapter. Speaking to the issue of heritage from the margins, he explores the cultural history and artistic as well as political form of the Boria (whose early performers were recognised as social misfits by the colonial and postcolonial state), to contest the template of culture and “nationness” endorsed by Empire, the nation-state and UNESCO, all of which, he argues, are predicated on a “bounded” (279) approach to place, race and cultural identity that forestall other ways of thinking about culture. Boria is a unique form of street theatre and a combination of comedy sketch, dance and song that emerged in the colonial port city of Penang, prompting initiatives in early 2019 by the state’s Jawi Peranakan Society to have it accorded recognition on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. Departing from the conventions of academic historiography, which he asserts continue to frame and dictate much of international and national heritage discourse, Soon calls for the Boria to be viewed not just as the cultural history of a particular community but as an “historical method” (278) that considers origins not so much in terms of place, and its fixities, but as a palimpsest of various worlds. In his alternative telling of its history, Soon observes how Boria was introduced into colonial Penang by the Indian Sepoys as part of Muharram festival practices, iterations of which were also

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found in other parts of the British Empire. He highlights Boria’s productive potential not only as a historical method but also as a cultural performance, offering new and illuminating readings of its form (the Boria was also composed of syair, Malay metrical poems) and performative configurations. Thus, for Soon, what is of value and significance about the Boria is not its institutionally “imposed”, or “top-down”, meaning as heritage, but the intrinsically entangled nature of the art form itself, which connects multiple geographies and cultures, and the role that such a form can play as a repository of local cultural meaning and knowledge. Chapter 11 also tracks the shifting discourses on the Boria over the hundred years or so of its evolution from the late nineteenth-century Malaya of its origins, when it played a role as a burlesque of colonial power and its racially stratified order, through the course of the twentieth century, when it was appropriated as a “Malay art form” (286) by a nationalist trajectory intent on silencing the creolised aspects of Malay cultural identity for a more fixed and singular understanding of Malayness, to the current historical conjuncture, by which time it had become “respectable and safe enough to be appropriated as heritage” (278). By detailing the Boria’s eventual domestication, Soon’s chapter points to the losses that have accrued to the genre as an agitational cultural practice and to understandings of heritage as a concept. The subversive agency of the art form itself, argues Soon, derived from the idea of the carnivalesque rooted in a concept from Malay ritual theatre called “main” (284), which translates as “play” in English, invoking the unmissable resonances of Derrida’s “play” of difference that I mentioned earlier. In the Boria, this critical element of play was to be found in its representation of the self’s “agglutinative” (299) relation to, including recognition of, its other in the Malay world, a time when, as Soon asserts, the current Sunni-Shi’ite divisions so integral to our understanding of Boria’s past would have been anachronistic. However, caught between strict colonial gender and racial differentiation on the one hand and rising Malay nationalism and religious discourse on the other, the subversive cultural work performed by Boria all but dissipated in the twentieth century. By mobilising the Boria as a historical method, a “playful” cultural performance and as a political theatre that interrogates the consociational model of power sharing in Malaysia, Soon’s chapter engages critically with the meanings—and reveries—of nationhood through the articulation of more cosmopolitan accounts of heritage.

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The Limits of Heritage In providing a critical appraisal of the value of heritage within the domain of public culture and national identity, the chapters in this book interrogate state discourse on heritage preservation. They also demonstrate how heritage can provide disenfranchised ethnic communities, women, socially stigmatised and other cultural groups that have been excluded from nationalised constructions of heritage a tool with which to access the archive and participate in its interpretations. By revealing both the gap and tensions between local needs or aspirations and universalising frameworks as well as government-defined meanings of heritage, the book opens up a space to contemplate how heritage can function as a more equitable narrative of cultural inclusion in Malaysia. The book’s emphasis on the strengths of bottom-up perspectives and participatory initiatives on heritage, however, does not preclude censure about the limitations or drawbacks of heritage as a discourse and practice from below. Asserting that “heritage credos are by their very nature manipulative”, Lowenthal reminds us, quite provocatively, that we should “learn to control heritage lest it control us” (Lowenthal 1997, 2–3). Thus, while the book as a whole calls attention to the array of exclusions that occur when the state manipulates and fabricates history for heritage production, Chaps. 3, 4 and 11 by Sunitha Janamohanan, Heong-Hong Por and Simon Soon, respectively, explicate, in particular, the potential pitfalls and dangers when heritage is invoked by or yoked to the activity of marginalised groups or collectivities. Janamohanan cautions that “living memory” (110) projects of marginalised groups might not be capable of building shared pasts or fostering the cultural connectedness necessary for such cultures to work towards becoming part of the national. She elaborates that although small-scale, community-initiated museum or history projects for heritage production are an important political and symbolic resource and offer alternative images and narratives that contest the mainstream discourse of national identity and cultural citizenship through their memorialising of non-elite presence and history, there is an inherent danger of such discourses creating a sense of the community’s separateness. She argues that such a discourse of heritage-making can run the risk of becoming “overwhelmingly ethnocentric in its engagement with its present and its past” (113). By emphasising difference at the expense of shared experience, beleaguered ethnic identities open themselves to the dangers of reification as well as insularism, curtailing possibilities not only for inter-ethnic dialogue but

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also for the type of thinking and attitude to others in their nation that is necessary to foster more inclusive identifications. Por suggests how a presentist trajectory of heritage, where a marginalised community’s past is tailored to meet present-day purposes, though strategically useful, can end up being as false and as distorting as authoritative versions of heritage. It is also manifestly unfaithful to history, she argues. Por points to the epistemic implications or consequences, especially for knowledge production about the past, of the selective understanding of subaltern history to suit present needs and priorities. She elaborates that the presentist narrative of heritage interprets Western medicine as benevolent, thus suppressing the fact that the leprosariums that were built in increasing numbers across Empire functioned as theatres for the performance and experimentation of colonial medical methods. The very photos that were used as tools to document and display the diseased body of the racial other, specifically to set off notions of the lack of hygiene in the colonies to justify Western medical intervention, are now deployed in heritage discourse to represent colonial benevolence by exhibiting the rehabilitative effects of colonial medicine on the contaminated body. Also missing from this “positive narrative” (126) of heritage is the significant fact, argues Por, that compulsory segregation was a contested idea and practice up to the early 1930s as leprosy was already then being proven to be only a mildly contagious disease. Not only does it exonerate colonial culpability in the suffering of the patients, the presentist narrative of ­heritage also silences the agency of those who had tried to escape their life of quarantine or who resisted colonial authority in other ways. Thus, although turning a past of pain and shame into a site of hope and restorative healing is a necessary strategy of survival for a community with a dark heritage, to offer an interpretation of the past through heritage-­ making that elides the everyday injustices of life under colonial governmentality and overlooks the self-serving agenda of the colonial enterprise so as to meet present-day interests in the face of an unsympathetic post-­ Independence state is to commit “epistemic injustice” (132), she asserts. Simon Soon articulates the shortcomings of heritage discourse when the authorised discourse and practice of heritage of professional institutions such as UNESCO, along with their  categories of tangible and intangible heritage, inform local heritage discourse. UNESCO’s efforts at designating “World Heritage Sites” may be cosmopolitan in their intent but in practice represent an externalised idea of heritage that Soon rejects in favour of approaching “heritage as habitus”  to  call  up the

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t­otality of discursive and non-discursive factors, including affective dimensions and social practices, experiences and memory that impinge on what heritage means. The regime of cultural memory embedded in UNESCO’s bureaucratic, top-down, expert-led discourse of intangible cultural heritage does not fully capture the meaning-making of a heritage site or practice as habitus, which, for Simon, the “street theatre” art form of Boria’s past exemplifies. In short, Soon asks—what happens to heritage when “bounded” (279) conceptions of cultural history and memory impinge on transnational cultural practices? His chapter implies that rather than taking up the challenge posed by history to our present identities, it is the reification of ethnic, cultural and national identities, sanctioned by the authorised vocabulary of heritage, that is often the result. Soon also demonstrates how in Penang from the late 1980s to the present, heritage transformed from being a tool of political contestation into an “untameable  discourse”  (276) when the state also began mobilising heritage in earnest. The solution to attract interest as well as the revenue that was needed to account for state spending was tourism. This resulted, he argues, in the “industrialisation of a selective understanding of the past” (277) by the “heritage machinery” (287) of the state. It also led, he asserts, to the transmutation of social and cultural life—of sites, histories and identities, including the Boria as an art form that emerged from the margins of empire—into a “street  spectacle” (285)  for outsiders, that which we have mainly come to recognise as heritage today.

Conclusion Globalisation and its related processes have made our experience of our world grow evermore complex and our newer local histories uncovered by scholars and researchers have expanded our understanding of ourselves in relation to our nation and its pasts. This book is a reminder that we need to engage with that complexity in order to circumvent the limited imaginings of governmentality in the service of heritage. Indeed, when the “national” becomes reducible to essentialist notions of racial or cultural authenticity and purity, the discourse and practice of heritage, to which the category of the national often aligns itself, is generally geared towards delivering political objectives. Thus, official strategies to articulate a Malaysian national identity and culture in terms of its continuities with the nation’s traditions and past—its “heritage”—authorise certain cultural practices or values as signifiers of a “legitimate” or

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­ authentic” Malaysianness, with the corollary premise that certain “other” “ attributes lie outside the state-sanctioned “cultural” sphere of the nation’s history and traditions. The book’s central argument is that although practices and discourses of state work to fix the meaning of heritage in the public imagination, heritage is not an inert narrative but an outcome of a complex matrix of formal and informal forces and of ways of remembering, visualising and narrativising so that new forms of heritage that are more participatory and performative can emerge. The exploration of this relationship of tension and conflict between authorised constructions of heritage and people-­ centred experiences and discursive processes serves to highlight the socio-­ political contestation of the heritage status of sites and objects and of the meanings given to them. The book demonstrates how dominant conceptions of heritage, and the ideas of identity and culture concomitant to them, are contested by those whose presence and contributions have been erased from their nation’s history, by both their experiences of marginalisation and their assertions to the right to cultural as well as political equality. This book also brings into view those whose negotiations with power also contributed to heritage-making but whose participation and agency in heritage formation processes have been occluded by analytical frameworks and research paradigms that overemphasise the effects of technologies of power on the subjection of peoples, overlooking the resistance and negotiations that always inhabit power relations. The official “cultural imagineering” of Malaysia’s heritage—embedded in national policies, advertising campaigns,  mainstream academic work, education, the scientific historiography of museum work and other state-­ sponsored heritage projects—is a counterpoint to the “cultural imaginings” of heritage that derive from grassroots movements, independent initiatives, vernacular memory and experiences of remembering, oral histories, readings and interpretations from below in a range of arenas so that new understandings, uses and functions of and for heritage can emerge from the gaps between heritage-management and heritage-making. The goal is to foreground heritage as a more inclusive and expansive inventory of the nation’s cultural meanings. The call to postcolonialise heritage then is also a call for the reinvention of national identity through a more participatory and inclusive discourse and narrative of culture. Whether interpreted as a strategy for survival or the struggle for the continued relevance to the nation of a community, or

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a group or a cultural site or form, each of the chapters in this book points to the capacity of the marginalised or overlooked to re-access the past through heritage to generate new tellings of their story. A postcolonialised heritage practice, one that is focused on a more participatory form of governance and cultural citizenship, runs into thorny issues in Malaysian governmentality, raising the following questions: What happens when the concept of “indigeneity” does not (only) equate with “Malayness”? Can hegemonic meanings of museums ever enter into negotiation with more personal, community-inflected ones when a huge percentage of the country’s museums are under the control of either the federal or state governments or their departments? Won’t the exclusionary notion of “Malay supremacy” that continues to hold sway lead to a further silencing of the nation’s real pasts? What is the continued relevance to the state of the National Culture policy of the 1970s for a transformed and rapidly transforming Malaysian society? Indeed, that these are still difficult times is clearly in evidence in Malaysia, with the escalating tensions, populist discourses and fractious race politics, which continue to permeate the language of contemporary party politics even in this era of the “New Malaysia”.6 Societies across the globe are also retreating into the comforts of ethnonationalism and other narrow-minded imagined communities and resorting to mass violence as a reaction to immigration and the perceived threat posed by cultural otherness. All this is indicative of the urgency of this  book’s scholarly and ideological call for cultural empathy and recognition of a shared past of entanglements for heritage to work as a narrative of cultural inclusion, social cohesion and community well-being. The call for a more democratic narrative and discourse of heritage is also an invitation to reject all oppositional dualisms. Indeed, the book argues that the discourse of heritage is as intellectually necessary as it is politically strategic and that heritage is also theoretically a process that can help us imagine new communities and break down divisions in existing ones. Thus, to postcolonialise heritage is to be alert to the need to unsettle prevailing frameworks in heritage discourse that rest on the binaries drawn between the self and other, the universal and local, the national and international, the human and non-human environment, nature and culture and to be more responsive and sensitive to the complex interplay and interdependence of these categories. Indeed, to postcolonialise heritage is to be profoundly aware of what Stuart Hall has described as “the palimpsest of [our] postcolonial world” (Hall 2000, 10). A more inclusive heritage

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practice is thus one that dismantles dichotomised ways of thinking. The question then is, how is Malaysian identity being transformed and how should Malaysian identity be re-transformed as a result of this new thinking? In attempting to secure other pasts for present lives, Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities invokes possible new meanings for heritage as a site of alternative histories, public debate and minority representation. I hope the book’s critical articulations of heritage, whether as discursive practice, lived experience or concept, will contribute to more empowering as well as emancipatory understandings of national pasts as we move towards our post-racial futures.

Notes 1. Malaysia is a multiethnic society with a population of about 32.6 million. Malays constitute the majority ethnic community, both numerically and politically. According to government statistics, 62.5% of Malaysians are Bumiputera (“indigenous”), a category which mostly includes Malay Muslims but also indigenous peoples of the peninsula and of Sabah and Sarawak in East Malaysia, 20.5% are Chinese, 6.2% Indian and about 1% Others; 9.8% of the population is made up of non-citizens (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2019). 2. The Bangsa Malaysia (“Malaysian Nation”) policy was introduced by Mahathir Mohamad in 1990, during his first term as prime minister from 1981 to 2003, to create an inclusive national identity for all inhabitants of Malaysia. Mahathir described it as Malaysians “being able to identify themselves with the country, speak Bahasa Malaysia (the Malay language) and accept the Constitution”. His aspiration, at least on a rhetorical level, was for Malaysians to identify as Malaysians first and not by their ethnic, religious or regional identities. 1Malaysia (or One Malaysia) was coined during the premiership of Najib Razak in 2010 as “a concept that encapsulates the very idea of unity in diversity, and […] the importance of national unity regardless of race, background, or religious belief” (1Malaysia website). 3. Malaya attained Independence from British rule in 1957 and was renamed “Malaysia” in 1963 with the amalgamation of the Federation of Malaya, the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak, and Singapore. 4. For a fuller discussion, see Ting, Helen. 2013. The Battle Over the Memory of the Nation: Whose National History? In Controversial History Education in Asian Contexts, ed. Mark Baildon, Kah Seng Loh, Ivy Maria Lim, Gül ̇ Inanç, and Junaidah Jaffar, 41–57, Routledge: London. 5. Peninsular Malaya and Singapore were loosely united under British colonialism from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965.

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6. In early August 2019, the government announced that it would introduce khat (Malay-Arabic calligraphy) to the Malay language syllabus for all schools, upsetting non-Malay groups and stirring fears of growing Islamisation. Political analysts also saw the move as a bid by the ruling Pakatan Harapan government to court the Malay vote. The Malaysian education minister subsequently announced that while the government will proceed with introducing khat in Chinese and Tamil primary schools, it will be an optional lesson and one that will not be tested in exams.

References Abu Talib Ahmad. 2014. Museums, History and Culture in Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ashworth, G.J. 2000. Heritage, Tourism and Places. Tourism Recreation Research 25 (1): 19–29. Clark, Marshall. 2013. The Politics of Heritage. Indonesia and the Malay World 41 (121): 396–417. https://doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2013.804979. Department of Statistics Malaysia. 2019. Official Portal. Accessed October 20, 2019. https://www.dosm.gov.my/v1/index.php?r=column/ctwoByCat& parent_id=115&menu_id=L0pheU43NWJwRWVSZklWdzQ4TlhUUT09. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. London: Tavistock. Furedi, Frank. 1992. Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age. London: Pluto Press. Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia. 2014. ‘After the Break’: Reconceptualizing Ethnicity, National Identity and ‘Malaysian–Chinese’ Identities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (7): 1211–1224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014. 859286. Ghosh, Amitav. 1988. The Shadow Lines. London: Black Swan. Gonzalez, Pablo Alonso. 2018. The Heritage Machine: Fetishism and Domination in Maragateria, Spain. London: Pluto Press. Hall, Stuart. 2000. Whose Heritage?: Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-imagining the Post-Nation. Third Text 49: 3–13. Harrell, Stevan. 2013. China’s Tangled Web of Heritage. In Cultural Heritage Politics in China, ed. T. Blumenfield and H. Silverman, 285–294. New York, NY: Springer. Henderson, J.C. 2002. Heritage Attractions and Tourism Development in Asia: A Comparative Study of Hong Kong and Singapore. International Journal of Tourism Research 4: 337–344.

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Hobsbawm, E.J., and Terence Ranger. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huggan, Graham. 1997. The Neocolonialism of Postcolonialism: A Cautionary Note. Links & Letters 4: 19–24. Legêne, Susan, and Henk Schulte Nordholt. 2015. Introduction: Imagining Heritage and Heritage as Imagined History. In Sites, Bodies and Stories: Imagining Indonesian History, ed. Susan Legêne, Bambang Purwanto, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, 1–30. Singapore: NUS Press. Loo, Yat-Ming. 2012. ‘No Chinatown, Please!’: Contesting Race, Identity and Postcolonial Memory in Kuala Lumpur. The Journal of Architecture 17 (6): 847–870. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2012.746025. Lowenthal, David. 1997. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maags, Christina, and Marina Svensson, eds. 2018. Chinese Heritage in the Making: Experiences, Negotiations and Contestations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. MacCannell, Dean. 1973. Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings. American Journal of Sociology 79 (3): 589–603. Magee, Roxanna, and Audrey Gilmore. 2015. Heritage Site Management: From Dark Tourism to Transformative Service Experience? The Service Industries Journal 35 (15): 1–20. Ong, Aihwa, Virginia R.  Dominguez, Jonathan Friedman, Nina Glick Schiller, Verena Stolcke, David Y.H. Wu, and Hu Ying. 1996. Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology 37 (5): 737–762. Prideaux, Bruce. 2003. Commodifying Heritage: Loss of Authenticity and Meaning or an Appropriate Response to Difficult Circumstances? International Journal of Tourism Sciences 3 (1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/15980634 .2003.11434537. Robertson, Ian J.M. 2012. Heritage from Below. Farnham: Ashgate. Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. Cultural Citizenship in San Jose, California. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 17 (2): 57–64. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books. Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London, UK: Chatto & Windus. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. Nevada, USA: University of Nevada Press. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2017. Heritage, Identity and Power. In Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-Making in Asia, ed. Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Hui Yew-Foong, and Philippe Peycam, 15–39. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New  York: Columbia University Press. Teoh, Karen M. 2015. Domesticating Hybridity: Straits Chinese Cultural Heritage Projects in Malaysia and Singapore. Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, E-Journal 17 (December): 58–85. http://cross-currents. berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-17. Thompson, Eric. 2012. The World Beyond the Nation in Southeast Asian Museums. SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 27 (1): 54–83. Winter, Tim. 2013. Clarifying the Critical in Critical Heritage Studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies 19 (6): 532–545.

PART II

(Re)Telling Museum and Community Stories

CHAPTER 2

Negotiating Museum Narratives: The Sarawak Museum, the Brooke State and the Construction of Cultural Heritage, 1886–1963 Jennifer R. Morris Introduction From the outset, it was clear that the museum’s activities were exclusively limited to Borneo, and its task was primarily to showcase Sarawak’s distinctive objects. ‘Sarawak for Sarawak’ has always been the slogan, and they have always tried to show the sons and daughters of the country its various items and products.1 The museum grew slowly maintaining the indigenous pride, identity and tradition of our people, Sarawakians […]. It is a keeper of the rich culture and history of Sarawak and the first class repository of Borneo culture.

These two quotations, despite their similarity in content, were written ninety years apart. The first is an extract from the 1927 memoir of erstwhile Sarawak Museum curator Eric Mjöberg, a Swedish naturalist steeped in European colonial culture (200). The second was written by the public

J. R. Morris (*) National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_2

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relations team at the Jabatan Muzium Sarawak in the 2010s, as the ‘introduction’ to the Museum Department’s official website. Together, they give the impression of a remarkable uniformity of purpose behind the development of Sarawak’s state museum from its nineteenth-century origins to the present. Has the Museum always been aimed at showcasing Sarawak’s heritage to Sarawakians, and, if so, how did the role of its state founders and funders fit in with this goal? How might we square these claims with the Museum’s genesis during the period of ‘High Imperialism’ in Southeast Asia and the existing historiography of colonial museum-making? Founded by the second ‘White Rajah’ of Sarawak, Charles Brooke, in 1886, the Sarawak Museum presents a compelling case study for the development of Southeast Asian state museums founded during the European museum-making craze of the late nineteenth century. While the Sarawak Museum still functions in much the same format as it began—as an ‘encyclopaedic’ collection covering Borneo’s natural and cultural heritage—the unique political and cultural situation of the polity during this period provides the opportunity to examine the impact of local context on the Museum’s development. The nature of the Brooke state and the extensive survival of source material related to the period also allow a detailed exploration of the relationship between the Museum, the government and perceptions of museums and ‘heritage’ in Sarawak. This reveals that existing frameworks conceptualising museums in Southeast Asia as tools of the ‘colonial project’ of knowledge-gathering, via their stewardship of Asian cultural heritage, are far too simplistic to encompass the wide range of actors and agendas at play in the development of the Sarawak Museum. The relationship between the Sarawak state and the wider community in attempts to preserve and showcase Sarawak’s cultural heritage via museums does show evidence of the legacy of colonial worldviews but also of the influence of the unique Sarawak political, cultural and social context, and of local participation in heritage-making narratives from an early stage.

Southeast Asian Museums and the Colonial State Much of the existing scholarship on museums in Southeast Asia has focused either on their contemporary role in postcolonial nation-building or on their function as organs of the colonial state.2 In the historical context, Benedict Anderson, in the second edition of his seminal Imagined

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Communities (2006), associated the museum with the colonial knowledge-­ gathering processes of cartography and census-taking (163–185). Anderson interpreted these institutions as tools by which European colonisers strove to make entire Asian societies visible and therefore controllable. He conflated the museum and census with the cartographic phenomenon as defined by Thongchai Winichakul (1994)—three European concepts apparently imposed upon Asian populations, fundamentally altering the way such communities perceived and structured the world around them, with consequences that persist to this day. The museum formed a space in which this colonial project of classification could be publicly displayed, facilitating the drive to fit Southeast Asian populations and landscapes into a “totalising classificatory grid”, thus bringing them within state control (Anderson 2006, 184). With reference to Indonesian archaeological research, Anderson argued that the promotion of the study and preservation of Southeast Asian ‘heritage’ by the colonial state functioned to legitimise the European government as guardian of local history and ‘tradition’. This guardianship could be promoted publicly through the “logoisation” of heritage sites and ancient ruins in print (181–182). Similar ideas, prioritising the museum’s role in the establishment and maintenance of European power, have been promulgated in relation to museums in Malaya and Singapore. Shamsul A. B. (2001) drew on Bernard Cohn’s 1996 framework of “investigative modalities” to analyse the colonial origins of contemporary Malay identity, identifying museological knowledge-gathering as a key component of the colonial project which, he argues, has shaped contemporary ideas about national and ethnic identity in Malaysia. In his discussion of the natural history collection at the Raffles Museum in Singapore, Timothy P.  Barnard (2014) focuses on the Museum’s symbolic role, concluding that: “the Raffles Museum was clearly one of the great symbols of British colonial rule in Singapore and the Straits Settlements […] the Museum commemorated the natural environment of Singapore and the region, allowing everyone to see it on display, reflecting the glory of knowledge and empire” (194). Trends in museum history elsewhere, however, have recently seen the emergence of new approaches to the study of colonial-era museum-­ making, which have important implications for Southeast Asia too. Scholars have criticised the Foucauldian framework in which the museum functioned as a tool of the colonial state, imposed by governors and administrators upon passive local populations. Today, historiography is

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beginning to lean towards new approaches, such as the network study, to understand the ways museums functioned during the high imperial period and privileging local context over universally applicable models (MacKenzie 2009; Longair and McAleer 2012; Gosden and Larson 2007). In particular, the “distributed museum” framework, as envisaged by Chris Gosden and Frances Larson (2007) and Kate Hill (2016, 5–6), provides a useful starting point for utilising these new perspectives. In their study of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK, Gosden and Larson re-conceptualise the museum of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the collective product of an array of forces, interests and agendas, acting on the institution via the vast network of actors who participated in its work. Museums, they conclude, have ‘multiple authors’ who are all connected through material culture, from politicians, museum staff and scientists to philanthropists, visitors, object donors, vendors and collectors (5). Exploring the Sarawak Museum as a “distributed” institution and acknowledging the impact of its unique local context bring valuable insights into its perceived role during the pre-Malaysian period and the impact of that role on the Museum’s place in the community today. The structure of the Brooke government privileged the personal influence of a number of powerful individuals, including the Rajah himself and his government officers. These men exerted a great deal of control over the production of knowledge about Sarawak’s cultures and history. The Museum, nonetheless, provided a public space in which the agendas of these men came into contact with myriad alternative worldviews and perceptions of the institution and the objects within it. Unable to function without its community, the shape that the Museum took was inevitably a product of these wide-ranging influences.

Promoting and Preserving: Competing Visions from the Top I consider that every Country worthy of being called a Country should have a museum and I hope that ours will be equal, at any rate in time, to that of any other Country in the East, including India. —Rajah Charles Brooke, quoted in Sarawak Gazette, 1891.

At first glance, the Sarawak Museum during the pre-Malaysian period seems to represent a typically colonial scientific institution. Taking a ­top-­down vantage point, the Museum’s founder, Rajah Charles Brooke,

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and its curators over its first century can certainly be interpreted as nurturing intentions similar to those delineated by Anderson et al. The Sarawak Museum was very much the brainchild of Rajah Charles, who, from the start, planned an institution that would concentrate on collecting and exhibiting only the island of Borneo. The Government of Sarawak under the Brooke Rajahs was a highly personal one, particularly during Charles’ reign; it was the Rajah himself who made employment decisions, signed off on significant public works projects and planned military activities. The upriver districts of Sarawak were each administered by a handful of European staff, comprising a resident and one or two assistants, who answered directly to the Rajah. In keeping with this style of governance, the Museum was a personal project in which Brooke was heavily invested. He was closely involved with the design of the Museum building and its early galleries, keeping in close correspondence with his curators right up to the end of his life (Morris 2019a; Ting 2011).3 This stands in contrast to similar state institutions in neighbouring British territories, whose decision-­making was mired in colonial bureaucracy: the running of the Malay States’ museums was brought together under a government department in the early 1900s, while the curator of the Raffles Museum was answerable to a committee selected from the great and good of Singapore’s colonial society (Tan 2015, 13, 83). For Brooke, the Museum was a public declaration of his authority as independent ruler of Sarawak to both a local and an international audience. Its foundation came at a time when Brooke was struggling to establish his legitimacy both at home, having recently usurped his brother as the first Rajah’s heir, and abroad. Charles spent years striving to receive recognition from the British state as an independent monarch. This context, combined with the fact that the Museum’s foundation coincided almost exactly with similar developments in the Malay States and Singapore, suggests that Brooke saw his Museum as a demonstration of the ‘modernity’ of Kuching and of his polity.4 Brooke’s championing of scientific research in Borneo also seems to have been motivated by a desire to put Sarawak ‘on the map’ in this area of international endeavour. His speech at the opening of the Museum’s permanent building in 1891, quoted earlier, is a clear statement of these sentiments. He reiterated them in writing a number of times, expressing his hopes that scientists would discover something in Sarawak sufficient to “astonish the world”.5 In the planning stages for the permanent Museum building, Brooke worked to ensure that the displays inside would be equal to any other

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institution in the region. He sourced display cases from the British Museum and sent key natural history exhibits to London to be mounted by renowned taxidermist Edward Gerrard (Harrisson 1961).6 Many of the objects he contributed personally to the Museum collections seem designed to foreground certain narratives of Brooke power. For example, in the 1880s he donated a number of objects attributed to the Sultanate of Sulu, notorious for their piratical activities in the seas around Borneo (‘Museum’ 1889a, e). These contributions functioned to emphasise the role of the first Rajah, James Brooke, in the suppression of piracy, a key, yet controversial, element in the Brooke family’s claim to legitimate power in Sarawak. Charles was also keen for his government officers to study the cultures and environments they worked in closely—indeed, this was all but essential for a successful career in the isolated outstations of upriver Sarawak—so the Museum was potentially a useful tool in this regard (Brooke 1907, 4). The men to whom Brooke entrusted the day-to-day running of his Museum were, as was the norm in Brooke Sarawak, chosen personally by the Rajah. Brooke drew on his networks of friends and associates in England to source men with scientific training to helm the institution. Since anthropology was still a fledgling discipline at this time, all the pre-­ war curators were zoologists by training, and most were sourced via contacts at either Cambridge or Oxford Universities or the British Museum.7 For these young men, Sarawak was a remote posting far from the comforts of home, usually viewed as a first step on the ladder of a scientific career. As a result, the Museum had a high curatorial turnover—no fewer than eight individuals held the post between 1886 (when the first temporary museum opened) and the Japanese Occupation (1941–1945). It is difficult to assign a general motivation to the work of all these individuals. Frequently, though, Museum reports and archives reveal the influence of one particular trend in late imperial Western scientific thinking: so-called salvage ethnography. This term, coined by Jacob Gruber in 1970, refers to the Western concern with the destruction and transformation of non-Western cultures in response to globalisation and industrialisation, which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pioneers of the discipline of anthropology, such as Alfred Court Haddon of the University of Cambridge in England and Franz Boas of Columbia University in New York, bemoaned the rapid loss of ‘traditional’ culture, both material and intangible, and urged fellow scientists to study and collect vigorously ‘against the clock’. Physical anthropologists, too, warned

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of the imminent extinction of indigenous ‘races’, either through disease and violence or through miscegenation (Manickam 2015, 154–155). As Paul Peppis (2014) notes in relation to Haddon, calls for the preservation of knowledge and objects from these apparently perishing cultures were inherently paradoxical. While anthropologists decried the destruction of indigenous cultures, they benefitted from the legitimisation of their new discipline: “[salvage ethnography] aims to save savagery from modernity’s conquest, yet modernity’s conquest provides its purpose and justification” (35). In Sarawak, evidence of this perspective abounds in source material from the Museum’s first decades. Rajah Charles’ early pronouncements on the Museum project in the local newspaper, the Sarawak Gazette, make clear that his priority for the institution was as a largely ethnographic repository, unlike its cousins in neighbouring colonial centres that focused primarily on zoology. Brooke first broached the idea in 1878, requesting that his government officers begin collecting for a Museum “all specimens of interest in this country” (‘Notice’ 1878a). In the same article, he listed the sorts of objects he would particularly like them to collect: “Arms; boats; cloths; woods; horns and skulls of deer, and other animals; old fashioned gold work; old China or pottery; paddles; minerals; fibres; oil; carving; ornaments; and the relics of any superstition, either in wood or stone.” This emphasis is also reflected in the first major collection acquired by the fledging institution. As few government officers had heeded the call to collect for the planned Museum, the Rajah decided instead to purchase the existing private collection of Hugh Brooke Low, who was at that time serving in the Rajah’s government as Resident of the Rejang district. At the time of its purchase by the Museum in 1886, Low’s collection comprised more than 500 ethnographic objects, half of which had been loaned to the South Kensington Museum in London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in 1884, while the other half remained with Low in Sarawak (Catalogue of the Brooke Low Collection in Borneo 1884).8 These objects formed a ‘ready-made’ foundational collection for the new Museum, including basketry, ceramics, textiles and weapons. Within weeks of the transaction with Low, the first temporary public gallery was opened, even though the half of the collection stored in London would not arrive back in Kuching for a number of months. An anonymous contributor to the Gazette described the objects on display at the opening:

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The patterns of some of the Dyak-made blankets and cloths are very handsome, and high art, which makes one wonder where they originally got them from, or if there might not at some earlier period have been a more civilised state among them. The baskets are of very pretty designs, also the bead work. The pottery though limited is worthy of notice too, being very old, and we are told the making of is fast dying out. (‘Our notes’ 1886)

This European observer demonstrates adherence to the worldview behind ‘salvage ethnography’ in his experience of the gallery. The comments on the artistic merits of local crafts echo the idea of the decline of previously ‘civilised’ cultures. This was a recurrent theme in archaeological writings about colonial territories from India to Java, containing implicit judgement of the peoples whose past glories had been lost. It positioned colonial governments as the saviours and protectors of these ‘forgotten’ glories, as well as the providers of the means to return to such cultural heights (Cohn 1996; Tiffin 2016). The final sentiment regarding pottery-­ making is also telling, as it assumes that such skills were already vanishing in Brooke Sarawak, and it implies that this scarcity was emphasised in the Museum display. A number of the Museum’s curators were similarly invested in this project of gathering cultural heritage before time ran out, a concept that was tightly bound up with British scholarly discourse at the turn of the century. Haddon himself visited Sarawak in 1898–1899, travelling in the Baram district and maintaining a close correspondence with Museum curator Robert Shelford (1897–1905), both during and after his trip. Shelford, a zoologist by training, saw Haddon as a mentor for the ethnographic side of his work at the Museum and was heavily influenced by his approach to collecting (Shelford 1901, 5). A few years later, in 1911, John Moulton (curator 1908–1915), described his vision for the newly inaugurated Sarawak Museum Journal in terms heavy with the influence of the British school of imperial anthropology: “I need only draw the attention of those resident in Sarawak once more to the pressing need for recording, without further loss of precious time, notes on the customs and life of these fast-vanishing races of man” (1912, 5). While his mostly British-trained curators, unsurprisingly, drew much of their approach to collecting from trends disseminated from the lecture halls of their metropolitan alma maters, Charles Brooke himself did not allude directly to this conception of the Museum’s purpose. Indeed, to subscribe to such a worldview of the institution as guardian of the vestiges

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of vanishing cultures would have been inimical to Brooke’s professed goals in governing Sarawak. Brooke maintained that one of his polity’s primary purposes was to protect the indigenous people of Sarawak from external exploitation and to effect only gradual change. An editorial piece in the 1872 Sarawak Gazette, which has been attributed to Brooke, warns of the potential damage which might be caused to the ‘Dayak’ people if Western ‘civilisation’ and Christianity should be imposed too quickly: “while the Dyaks of many tribes are known to be increasing in number under their own customs, as yet unremoved, it will be exceedingly unfortunate if it is found under a new and more civilised regime that they are to die out” (‘Untitled’). This ideal was used, among other things, to justify both the continued absence of a cohesive educational policy in Brooke Sarawak and the maintenance of close state control over the exploitation of natural resources such as antimony (Ooi 1996, 13; Baring-Gould and Bampfylde 2007, 471). Of course, in reality, Brooke’s economic policies were not nearly as conservative as he publicly claimed. Some commentators have suggested that the social and cultural changes wrought in Brooke Sarawak were largely unintentional consequences of Brooke’s policies, while others suggest that the outward claims of both James and Charles Brooke masked an intense interest in financial gain (Pringle 1971; Kaur 1995). For Brooke to champion the salvage ethnographer’s thesis in his Museum would nevertheless be to openly contradict a central tenet of his own government’s official narrative, however much that tenet itself was steeped in colonial assumptions about the ‘noble savage’. A potential rhetorical solution to this sticking point between the mythology driving colonial knowledge-gathering and that propping up Brooke’s government is presented by an anonymous writer in an 1899 issue of the Sarawak Gazette. The article, written as the Sarawak Public Works Department was in the process of erecting a permanent museum building, details plans for the institution’s new home. Likely the work of then acting curator, a government administrator (who worked closely with Brooke for many years) and amateur entomologist named John Lewis, it drew again on the familiar themes of salvaging ethnographic material in changing times. In this instance, though, the author attributed these changes specifically to non-Western influences: Owing to the manner in which Chinese and Malay are becoming familiar to these tribes, many of their own ways have become modified and several of the articles in the Museum are now hardly obtainable. Thus in future the

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collection will be of great value and interest as showing the changes which have taken place in the ways of the different tribes whose lives are portrayed by the articles which they used. (‘Notes’ 1889b, 34)

Of course, the growing prevalence of Chinese and Malay cultures in both Kuching and upriver locations was prompted, at least in part, by the Brooke state’s economic and political policies, which facilitated large-scale population movement among many ethnic groups during this period. This attribution of cultural mixing to the introduction of other Asian influences, however, rather than Western-led ‘modernity’, allowed the Brooke government to maintain and extend its official stance as protector of indigenous heritage using the galleries of the Museum. Charles Brooke died in 1917, passing the Kingdom of Sarawak to his eldest son, Charles Vyner. Rajah Vyner took a very different approach to government, stepping back from direct involvement in the day-to-day business of rule and instead relying on a rapidly expanding bureaucracy (Talib 1999, 58). Vyner also showed far less interest in museumising than his father, placing greater value on display as it pertained to international commercial exhibitions than to museums. Such exhibitions had the potential to further the economic needs of the state during a period of international uncertainty. Mjöberg (1927), the first curator during Vyner’s reign, lamented that “year after year passes without any sign of interest or understanding from the country’s current ruler for the beautiful institution that seemed to be the apple of his father’s eye” (203). The exhibitions that travelled overseas from Sarawak during this time presented indigenous cultures not as relics on the verge of disappearance, but as both a demonstration of the ‘civilising’ and peace-making influence of Brooke’s rule and an untapped economic resource. The Malaya-Borneo Exhibition in Singapore in 1922 showcased traditional architecture, music and dance and saw a lively trade in a range of Sarawakian ‘handicrafts’. Stocks of textiles, basketry, weapons and carvings had been specially commissioned for the event, including traditional Kenyah dance masks and Iban kenyalang (carved wooden effigies representing hornbills, used in a number of religious rituals) (‘Sarawak’ 1922). The two curators who served under Vyner also seem to have moved away from the ‘salvage ethnography’ narrative. This was presumably a consequence not only of the Rajah’s reduced interest in funding museum projects but also of shifting trends in Western anthropological science, which were beginning to privilege field research and participant observa-

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tion over material collections. Edward Banks (curator 1925–1945), in fact, went so far as to declare in 1932 that the Museum’s ethnology collection was now almost complete: “it is hard to find anything really new, and one cannot in these hard times afford the purchase of objects of but little interest” (1933, 17). Banks perceived the Museum’s function as primarily educational, prioritising the improvement of the exhibitions; labelling; and the facilitation of school visits to the galleries during his tenure. He also maintained the institution’s role as a resource for visiting scientists but viewed this as one dependent on the wider network of colonial museums in the region, describing it as “functionally one of a number of museums grouped round a parent museum in Singapore—the Raffles Museum—which deals with Malaysia as a whole” (1935, 465). Scientific ties with British imperial networks remained strong, even as scholarly discourses shifted. Already, then, the relationship between the Sarawak Museum, the Brooke state and Sarawak’s cultural heritage appears more complex than the frameworks of Anderson et al. might suggest. The individuals exercising the strongest influence over the shape of the institution were indeed steeped in colonial ideologies and approaches. They used the Museum as a repository of salvage ethnography and a demonstration of political power through the collection and preservation of Borneo’s culture, both material and intangible (the latter through the Museum’s role in facilitating research and publication). Their motivations and priorities, however, were diverse and shifted over time.

Personal Engagement: Museum Careers in the Brooke Era I am old now and it is best that when I die, I am buried in the museum and stowed away with the other objects. —Chang Jee Koo, Sarawak Museum clerk, c.1923 (quoted in: Mjöberg 1927, 205).

Of course, no Museum curator, a lone European responsible for the management of the building, collections and the grounds, could complete this task alone. He relied both on a team of employees within the Museum and the assistance of the wider community to help build the collections and, of course, to frequent the galleries. With such a high turnover of curators, how did these men, usually arriving fresh from university with no

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prior experience of life in Asia, navigate the trials and tribulations of museum and scientific work in such a remote tropical destination? It seems likely that much of the ‘orientation’ around the Museum’s work, and guidance up the steep learning curve necessary for new arrivals in Sarawak, was carried out by a stalwart of the Museum staff. Chang Jee Koo was Hakka Chinese, born and educated in Kuching.9 Shortly after his graduation from the Catholic Mission School, in August 1891, Chang was employed as Museum clerk, just two weeks after the permanent Museum building had been opened to the public. Chang would remain in the post for thirty-six years, seeing seven curators come and go and developing skills in taxonomy, taxidermy, photography and many other skills useful for the day-to-day management of the Museum and its collections. In 1898, the anthropologist Haddon described Chang in his journal as “a capital museum zoologist”.10 Eric Mjöberg (curator 1922–1924), meeting Chang more than twenty years later, agreed that “he has a warm mind for nature and loves his work” (1927, 205). The clerk’s neat handwriting can be seen throughout the Museum’s acquisition books, recording accessions, noting changes to classification or display and conducting collection audits. Chang made many of his own contributions to the Museum collections, largely zoological, and also led a number of collecting expeditions when the curator was otherwise engaged.11 Notably, in 1912, he travelled to Miri with two assistants to disassemble the carcass of a beached killer whale and to transport the skeleton back to Kuching (Moulton 1913, 4). The skeleton, shown in Fig.  2.1, remained on display in the Museum’s public galleries until they closed for renovation in 2017 and was one of the Museum’s most well-known specimens.12 In 1915, then-curator John Moulton left his post to join the British Army and was not replaced for seven years, partly due to the disruption of the First World War and partly due to the death of Rajah Charles in 1917. During these curator-less years, the bulk of the staff was dismissed and “all inner work was put on Jee Koo’s subsiding shoulders” (Mjöberg 1927, 207). In the later years of his career, Chang took photographs of animals in captivity in the Museum grounds, to illustrate publications penned by Edward Banks, just one of many examples of ways in which the clerk’s work influenced the Museum’s research output (Banks 1931). Unfortunately, little direct evidence of Chang’s own thoughts on museumising has survived, although the quote at the start of this section, made when he was in his fifties, suggests he felt a strong investment in the institution and its collections. His experience and steadfast commitment

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Fig. 2.1  Killer whale (Orcinus orca) skeleton, prepared by Chang Jee Koo in 1912, on display in the Sarawak Museum’s old building in 2017. (Photograph by author)

to the Museum was surely an important factor in the acclimatisation of each successive curator. Of those who wrote of him, all spoke fondly, and Moulton remained in correspondence with his former employee for a number of years after the former had left Sarawak.13 Chang’s hand must be acknowledged in the development and maintenance of the collections and exhibitions throughout the Brooke period, and for ensuring the survival of the Museum during the disruption of the 1910s. At Chang’s retirement in 1927, Banks himself admitted the significance of his role: “it is safe to say that the exertions of Mr C.  Jee Koo have been responsible for the nucleus of the collections for which the Museum is justly well-known” (1928, 1). With Chang as second in command, the curator also presided over a staff, which usually amounted to around ten men. These comprised a team of gallery attendants who worked within the Museum building, setting up

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exhibits and supervising visitors. There was also a staff of zoological collectors, who spent most of their time working in the field, either alongside the curator, accompanying visiting scientists or alone. The collectors were all indigenous Sarawakians, and most were Iban (the majority ethnic group in Sarawak, known during the Brooke era as ‘Sea Dayaks’). I have written elsewhere of the British perception of the Iban as being particularly well suited to the role of natural history collector, and the Sarawak Museum’s collectors consequently formed the centre of a network of Iban zoological collectors, linked by culture and kinship, which spread across the region during the first half of the twentieth century (Morris 2019b). These men had an enormous influence on the development of natural history collections in both Sarawak and further afield, and also on the interpretation of ethnographic collections. As one might expect, curators—zoologists with minimal experience of Sarawak culture—drew on sources close at hand for ethnographic knowledge, including their museum staff. For example, one Sarawak Museum collector named Ketit, who worked for the Museum from 1906 to 1916, is referenced in notes added to an old entry in the ethnography acquisition book. The object, a jacket originally recorded as made by the Kayan people, was reclassified as Iban because: “Ketit suggest ‘baju sampang’ for this Sea Dayak coat [sic]”.14 Ketit, too, remained in contact with John Moulton, under whom he worked for eight years, after Moulton moved to work at the Raffles Museum in Singapore.15 Their relationship was sufficiently strong to motivate Ketit’s family members to engage with museums too. In 1921, Moulton returned to Kuching on a diplomatic visit, accompanying the Governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Laurence Guillemard, whom he brought on a tour of his old workplace (‘Visit of His Excellency…’ 1921). During this Museum visit, Moulton was presented with a beautiful pua kumbu, or Iban ritual textile, by none other than Ketit’s wife. This pua can be found in the collection of fine textiles from Borneo at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore today.16 The staff of a museum, at all levels, inevitably play a highly significant role in an institution’s historical development. Although their names are often difficult to find in the archives, the case of the Sarawak Museum demonstrates how important men like Chang Jee Koo and Ketit were in this regard. Reconstructing their personal perceptions of the Museum and its functions is not straightforward, but the extent of their involvement in the collections suggests a notable level of personal engagement in the process of museumising Sarawak’s natural and cultural heritage. For the curator, working alongside and relying upon these individuals in the isolated

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and unfamiliar working environment of Brooke Sarawak or, indeed, on expedition into the even more remote ulu, the cross-cultural sharing of knowledge was inevitably transformative. That these ties were strong is evidenced in the relationships between curators and the men they worked with in Sarawak which endured long after their terms of government service ended. These relationships, and the resulting collections and interpretations, continue to shape our understanding of Sarawak’s natural and cultural heritage today.

A Museum for the People? The Trojans of old distrusted the Greeks when they came bearing gifts. The museum administrator must be on his guard against everyone who proffers gifts.

The above advice was penned by the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr George Brown Goode, in 1895 (1901b, 254). He went on to warn fellow museum administrators that “the random, thoughtless acceptance of proffered gifts […] may modify the plan of a museum in a most radical manner” (1901a, 203). Goode’s assertions of the significance of museum donations in influencing the development of museum collections certainly have relevance for the Sarawak Museum. With minimal budget and only a handful of staff, curators in Kuching relied heavily on the assistance of the wider community to help build the collections, through trade, exchange and gift-giving. In almost immediate fulfilment of Goode’s prophecy, it seems that early gifts of natural history specimens helped to shift the Museum’s focus to include zoology and botany as well as the ethnographic collections that the Rajah had originally planned. Specimens of a flying squirrel and a marine cnidarian were included in the very first recorded donation to the Museum, given by Claude de Crespigny, one of the few government officers who heeded the Rajah’s initial call for collections in 1878 (‘Items’ 1878b). Despite this sluggish beginning, the opening of the first Museum prompted an outpouring of enthusiasm from the Kuching community and from outstation government officers. Robert Shelford (curator 1897– 1905) records in his memoir that by the time he arrived at the Museum “the officials of the Sarawak Government vied with each other in presenting specimens, so that a constant stream of material flowed into the Museum” (1999, xxiv). Many government officers were keen amateur

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collectors themselves, finding the study of the natural and cultural environments of Sarawak of great benefit to their work, as well as a fulfilling diversion from day-to-day life in an isolated outstation. One such officer in particular, Charles Hose, came to dominate collections and understandings of Sarawak, particularly the northern districts, over the turn of the century. Hose’s engagement with the Sarawak Museum reveals an intensely personal agenda governing his interactions with both this institution and others around the world. Having dropped out of Cambridge University to join the Sarawak service, Hose had no academic qualifications but had a strong ambition to insert himself into professional scientific networks in the UK (Durrans 1993). As Resident of the Baram district, a remote region in the far north of Sarawak which saw few European visitors, Hose was able to exercise a high level of control over the distribution of knowledge and specimens from the region. Throwing himself into collecting, Hose made strategic connections with academics in England, particularly at Cambridge. He went so far as to invite A. C. Haddon to visit him in the Baram when the Cambridge-based anthropologist was travelling back from a University expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898. Through this connection with Haddon, Hose strove to donate sufficient material to Cambridge to elevate his position in the eyes of his alma mater. These efforts were rewarded: in recognition of his extensive contributions to both the University zoology and ethnographic museums, the University granted him an honorary doctorate in 1900 (University of Cambridge 2018). Hose also courted curators at the British Museum, as well as Baron Rothschild, renowned collector and founder of a private museum at Tring in Hertfordshire.17 Viewed alongside these international endeavours, Hose’s contributions to the Sarawak Museum were clearly strategic. He made a number of significant gifts to the Museum in the early years of his career, shortly after he was promoted to Officer in Charge in the Baram in 1888—seemingly a gesture of gratitude to the Rajah and exercise of obligations expected of the officer class (‘The Museum’ 1888). In the years immediately following, he gave a number of large and valuable collections, including the natural history specimens that would form the nucleus of the first displays in the permanent Museum building, and some precious stones discovered in the Baram (‘Untitled’ 1889c; ‘Museum’ 1889d). After this, however, Hose’s donations, while remaining regular, became less significant. As his international scientific networks grew in strength, these took priority over

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the local scientific community, and the Sarawak Museum received only everyday objects and those it would be politically inexpedient to withhold. For example, after the Great Peacemaking of 1899, a politically significant event for the Brooke government that Hose had largely orchestrated, he sent one large carved hornbill effigy used in the ceremony to Kuching, while simultaneously directing a number of other objects to Cambridge (‘The Museum’ 1900). Although Hose viewed the Kuching Museum as a lower priority for patronage than metropolitan institutions, he was not opposed to mining its collections for his own benefit. He organised a number of object exchanges with the Museum, again using his access to the Baram district to provide desirable objects, which he exchanged for items from ethnic groups in other regions of Sarawak.18 This only enhanced his authority as a scholar of Sarawak in the UK. By the time Hose had retired from Brooke service in 1905, he had established a position for himself in Britain as a respected professional zoologist and ethnologist, which he maintained for many years afterwards through publications and public appearances (Hose 1926, 1927). The European community in Sarawak were, of course, familiar with the museumising process and the social and cultural capital it could bestow on those who engaged with it, but contributions to the Museum collections did not only come from Western residents. At the opening of the first temporary exhibition in 1886, Rajah Charles reportedly “explained to the natives the object of a Museum, and hoped that they would assist in adding to it” (‘Our notes’ 1886). The evidence suggests they did. Donors to the Museum in the pre-war years included a significant proportion of Sarawakians from all walks of life (Morris 2019b). Kuching elites participated in the social ritual of donation for apparently similar reasons to the European officers—Chinese and Malay leaders chose valuable items that reflected either their business interests or their own cultures. Others strove to ensure their own cultures were represented in the collections: a member of the tiny Japanese community in Kuching, for example, contributed a set of bamboo arrows from Japan in 1910.19 The Museum archives also record numerous gifts from individuals whose biographical information is sparse, recorded as traders, mariners or sometimes only as ‘a Chinese boy’ or ‘a Kelabit woman’. The Museum’s draw extended beyond Kuching, with contributions coming from communities across Sarawak. Some of these were from

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i­ndividuals whose travels took them within circles in which the Museum’s work must have been familiar. A renowned crocodile catcher from the Sadong River who was often employed on behalf of the government, for example, donated a talisman made of a crocodile’s tongue in 1917 (Mjöberg 1924, 37). Other donations occurred in the context of Museum expeditions into the interior, when curators and their staff relied on local hospitality and assistance as they travelled to remote locations to collect. The circumstances of these ‘gifts’, and the cultural interactions that preceded them, are far more difficult to reconstruct. We can, nonetheless, conclude that a large and diverse community of both Asians and Europeans were actively engaged with the Museum at some point during their lives, whether as a one-off or on a regular basis. These cross-cultural contributions, from myriad motivations and perspectives, formed a substantial part of the collections, which still form the valuable ‘old collection’ on which the Museum’s curators are reliant in interpreting Sarawak’s natural and cultural heritage today. Of course, the most important way in which the local community engaged with the Museum was as visitors. Unfortunately, this is the most difficult aspect of museum history to explore, given the sparsity of sources to tell us who visited and how they reacted to the exhibitions inside. What we do know, however, is that the Sarawak Museum’s audience was always almost exclusively Asian. The tiny European community during the Brooke era, and the rarity of Western visitors passing through Kuching, meant that Western visitor numbers remained largely static throughout the period, never exceeding 300 visits per year before the Japanese Occupation. Local visitors, though, never dropped below 10,000 per year from the beginning of record-keeping in 1910, reaching a peak of 45,000 in 1939 which was attributed by then-curator Edward Banks to an increase in interest from local schools (Banks 1940, 1–2).20 While we have an idea of the numbers of people visiting the Museum, it is less easy to reconstruct their experiences once they got there. As Keith Hudson noted in his 1975 Social history of museums, “the great majority of men, women, boys and girls who have ever entered a museum […] have been interested or bored, stupefied or invigorated, without anybody but themselves or their friends knowing about it” (7). Taking inspiration from the work of museum historian Kate Hill (2005) on visitors to institutions in England, however, we can attempt to establish some of the context of these visits by observing the social and cultural circumstances that sur-

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rounded them. Visitor numbers were highest on public holidays and during special events, such as the annual Kuching Regatta, an event instigated by the Brooke government which saw thousands of upriver residents travel to the city to trade, socialise and participate in the river races (Moulton 1912, 8, 1914, 6). They also rose when events were held in the Museum gardens, such as fairs and performances by the Sarawak Rangers Band (Banks 1925, 3, 1932, 3). This suggests that the Museum was viewed as a place for socialising during one’s leisure time, providing a cool space for families to escape the tropical climate. Most of the Museum curators made no record of audience reactions to their exhibits, but Mjöberg and Banks penned a number of brief descriptions of visitor interactions with the displays during the 1920s and 1930s. According to Mjöberg (1927), “every afternoon, the natives flow in flocks up to the museum located on a small hill and consider, admire and discuss the exhibited objects in a childlike manner” (200). Banks (1925) elaborated further on the attitude of the ‘Dayak’ visitor, who “appears to take a thorough interest in what he sees, even to the extent of taking a seat on the floor (let us hope from interest rather than fatigue) in front of any exhibit which catches his fancy” (3). He also noted “that wilder element, clad in some long hair and a loin cloth, who occasionally invade the place in swarms and make the rooms resound with the cry of gibbon and successive animals as they meet them” (1935, 465). Although crude generalisations, these descriptions reveal that visitors were taking a close interest in the exhibits, discussing them with their companions and drawing on their own experiences of the natural environment to interpret the zoological displays. Banks (1935) also writes of numerous visitors who insisted on engaging him in conversation about the cultural materials in the galleries: “a Curator can learn a lot from the courtly Malay Haji, native officer or trader, who often has a more intimate knowledge than he of custom and use relating to ethnological objects. […] Though one’s Dyak visitors are always ready to tell what they think you ought to know, the Curator who does not mix with them misses a lot” (465). These glimpses of the Museum’s Sarawakian visitors through the eyes of European scientists may be frustratingly insubstantial, but they make clear that these visitors were not simply passive observers, uncritically viewing and taking in European interpretations of their cultural heritage. Indeed, many were active participants in the museumising process.

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Beyond the Brookes: The Harrisson Years From a wide variety of outside and inside queries and ideas, a museum lives. It must be a two-way, in and out breathing affair—not just a dump of dead corpses, dusty china and sleepy attendants. —Tom Harrisson, Sarawak Museum Curator, 1947 (189)

In February 1946, as Borneo recovered from the four years of Japanese Occupation, the third Rajah, Vyner Brooke, ceded the state of Sarawak to the British Empire. In the face of a fervent anti-cession movement, the mechanisms of the colonial state moved into northwest Borneo. For the Museum, which had been left relatively undisturbed by the Japanese, this heralded a new regime under a new, ‘colonial’ curator. This was to be a man who is celebrated today as a pioneer of museology in Borneo, feted in the current Sarawak Museum ‘Urang Sarawak’ gallery for having put the Museum on the world map: Tom Harrisson. While, arguably, this assessment negates the work of his predecessors, Harrisson’s work was certainly unique and, often, ground-breaking. It would take far greater space than this chapter allows to analyse Harrisson’s tenure at the Museum in depth, but his work certainly chimed with both the colonial motivations of the Brooke-era Museum and the tradition of local community participation in this ‘distributed’ institution. Harrisson first encountered Sarawak in the 1930s, as a young ornithologist on the Cambridge University Expedition, whose behaviour scandalised the European community of Kuching and frustrated then-curator Edward Banks. Harrisson returned during the Second World War as part of Operation Semut, parachuting into the Kelabit Highlands to carry out reconnaissance for resistance against the Japanese. It was during these trips that Harrisson developed feelings of affinity for the people of Sarawak, particularly those he had met in the Highlands. In 1947, he returned to Sarawak, eagerly accepting the posts of both Museum curator and government ethnographer (Heimann 1998). The latter title, of course, carries heavy overtones of Anderson’s colonial project, and, indeed, Harrisson’s first task in the role was to conduct a census of the Kelabit population. His work at the Museum also hints at recurring themes of salvage ethnography. In 1954, he wrote of establishing a special collection programme to address: “the general decline in the old customs of the native peoples, and with this, the decline in arts and crafts intimately associated with belief and conduct, particularly concerns the Sarawak Museum […] the good things are becoming few and far between” (1956, 179).

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Unlike his Brooke-era predecessors, Harrisson did not restrict this work to collecting and preserving, but combined this with a concerted effort to revitalise local crafts, which he described as “some of the finest” (1954, 167). This involved commissioning pieces to be showcased at various international exhibitions at which the colony was represented; calls for a network of craft shops to market local products to tourists and other overseas buyers; and commissioning new pieces for the Museum collection too (1953, 133). As part of the latter drive, Harrisson famously persuaded a group of artists to travel to Kuching from the remote Long Nawang, a settlement deep in the heart of Borneo, in what is now Kalimantan. These men, Lepo’ Tau Kenyahs, painted the four arresting murals that adorn the inner walls of the old Sarawak Museum’s upper floor, some of which are pictured in Fig.  2.2. While there has been much debate over the years regarding the meaning and ‘authenticity’ of these paintings (being expressions of ‘Orang Ulu’ culture commissioned by a European ‘salvage ethnographer’), the murals quickly became iconic images of Kuching (Macul 2018). Today, they are much-loved representations of the Museum as a piece of Sarawak heritage in itself. Due to his own experiences in Sarawak during the war years, and perhaps also his struggles to penetrate European scientific circles (being largely self-trained in both zoology and anthropology), Harrisson’s focus was very much on the Museum’s local role. Reading his seven prerequisites for “an all-round museum in a small country”, published in the Sarawak Museum Journal in 1959, one is struck by their relevance to

Fig. 2.2  Two of the four Lepo’ Tau murals in the upper gallery of the Sarawak Museum building. The murals were commissioned by Tom Harrisson in 1960. (Photograph by author)

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contemporary museological discourse on outreach and access. Harrisson defined the seven priorities of the Museum as: presenting well-selected displays that even illiterate visitors can enjoy; keeping the atmosphere informal so that even those from the far interior feel relaxed; changing exhibits and organising special exhibitions regularly so that the Museum never feels “stale”; explaining the Museum’s work and collections widely through popular media and publications; keeping a separate reference collection for the use of specialist researchers and students; encouraging “outside persons” to visit and study the collections, “and at the same time get these outsiders to talk, teach and interest local people in their special subjects”; and “at all times to interpret the Museum’s functions liberally, alertly, avoiding complacency and pedantry” (249–251). This focus on widening access and promoting the Museum’s work to all Sarawakians extended into Harrisson’s employment policies and research work. He strove to employ locals wherever possible and brought young men personally known to him from his time in the Kelabit Highlands to Kuching to work at the Museum. Those who impressed him were given opportunities to receive professional training overseas in the UK or Australia. According to his biographer, Judith Heimann (1998): He … would push his staff to do new things. He was particularly good at getting his subordinates, many of whose written English was poor, to note down what they knew about birds or animals or people or customs or legends; he would then edit or rewrite or get translated what they had written and have it published in the [Sarawak Museum] Journal with the staff member named as author or co-author. (273)

Western scientists thus rub shoulders with numerous Sarawakians in the contents pages of the Sarawak Museum Journal issues published during Harrisson’s tenure. One such young man, Benedict Sandin, would later become the first Sarawakian Director of the Museum, renowned for his own ethnographic research. Harrisson himself viewed his tenure at the Museum as a continuation of the legacy of the Brookes. In a 1963 article for the international journal Museum, he observed that the mid-century museological trend towards “affirmation of national identity and racial tradition” as new postcolonial states were formed in Asia often met “a sad and widespread lack of know-­ how and experience to meet these needs”. In Sarawak, though, “we have an all-round museum, as an integral part of the life of a large and varied

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tropical country”, thanks to the policies of the Brookes who had, he believed, seen “the essential role of local pride and group tradition. They saw how these must not be replaced or destroyed from the West; only redirected and recanalized” (240). Again, the sentiments of a ‘Museum for the people’ were reiterated in a new political age and were, at least partly, justified by Museum policy under its eccentric and charismatic leader.

A Brooke Legacy?: Museumising Sarawak in the Twenty-First Century It was ultimately the people of Sarawak who embraced what was a most unconventional form of government and made it a success. This is something very special, unique, tangible and powerful. … Today, it feels like the work of the [Brooke Heritage] Trust is helping reflect the evolution of James Brooke’s grand plan. We hope he would approve. —The Brooke Heritage Trust, 2019.

Unfortunately, little formal research has yet been carried out on the role of the Sarawak Museum since 1963, when the institution was transformed into a government department. Since the federation of Malaysia, the Jabatan Muzium Sarawak has taken over responsibility for heritage buildings and sites, as well as other state museums throughout Sarawak. This includes eleven additional state museums both within and outside Kuching; all the surviving Brooke-era forts; and the Niah Caves archaeological site, which was first studied by Harrisson in 1954 and extensively excavated, under the auspices of the Museum, over the decades since (Sarawak Museum Department 2019). Harrisson’s efforts at reviving local art and craft have, meanwhile, been largely taken up by a range of voluntary bodies and non-governmental organisations. Initiatives such as Kuching’s Society Atelier and the Helping Hands Penan project have flourished in recent years (Chua 2018; Eris 2018). As of 2016, the Museum Department’s stated mission is: “Repositioning Sarawak Museum as a manifestation of Borneo culture, heritage and tourism by 2025”. The Department’s website also includes the aim: “To be the custodian of antiques, monuments and cultural landmarks, ­archaeological sites, arts, architectural, religious relics and other materials which have high traditional significance and value for the benefit of the State and national heritage in order to bring about perpetual understanding and greater harmony amongst the people of Sarawak”. The Museum’s

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role as custodian of heritage for the local community sits slightly uneasily alongside its function in increasing Sarawak’s tourism income. This dual role has gained more attention, and acquired the weight of greater expectation, since the announcement in 2014 of a new RM308 million project, funded by the state government (‘S’wak Museum Campus open to public…’ 2019). This will comprise a 6500-square-metre new museum building, as well as the renovation of the historic 1891 structure. The new building, whose construction was completed in mid-2019, includes five levels of gallery space, plus offices, a library and archive, collection stores and conservation laboratories. These new galleries will house the ethnographic, archaeological and historical displays, plus an interactive children’s gallery championing ecological messages. The 1891 building is to be devoted to the natural history collections. At a recent public presentation, the State Minister for Tourism, Arts, Culture, Youth and Sport expressed his ambition for the new Museum, the second largest in Southeast Asia, to be “the pride of all Sarawakians”. He elaborated: “we will not be selling Sarawak as a shopping paradise, but we will sell Sarawak for its heritage, environment and all that” (‘S’wak Museum Campus open to public…’ 2019). It remains to be seen how far this new project will focus on outreach in the local context, in addition to its much-hyped role as a tourism draw and its stated aim to “revive the international status of the Sarawak Museum” as a research hub for Borneo (Sarawak Museum Campus 2019). Plans for the new galleries, though, suggest that the Museum’s roots in a European colonial conception of the ‘salvage’ and preservation of heritage continue to lie heavy on the institution’s shoulders. Various repatriation projects have been set in motion in collaboration with institutions in Europe and the US, surrounded by much publicity (‘Borneo artefacts…’ 2017; Tan 2018). That the project is, however, struggling to break free of the echoes of ‘salvage ethnography’ is suggested by persistent allusions to an idealised Sarawakian past “in harmony with nature” in the new gallery designs (Sarawak Museum Campus 2016, 29). The designers and curators must also contend with the fact that the Museum itself, both its physical buildings and collections and the public memory of the institution in its Harrisson-era heyday, is now ‘heritage’ itself, the focus of intense nostalgia from the Kuching community. While the state Museum grapples with the increased prominence of its multiple roles, museological representations of Sarawak’s history have expanded into the private sphere. The Brooke Heritage Trust, a charitable

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organisation headed by the grandson of the last Rajah Muda (heir to the throne), has opened two museums in Kuching since 2016. The first, located in the historic Fort Margherita on the bank of the Sarawak River (the building itself is still under the auspices of the Museum Department), gives visitors an introduction to the Brooke period. The second, housed in a wing of the Brooke-era Courthouse, presents a biography of Ranee Margaret Brooke, wife of the second Rajah, Charles. The Brooke Trust defines its mission as: “to transform a unique historical legacy into socially responsible outcomes for communities in Sarawak and around the world” and makes an overt connection between this goal and the agenda of the Rajahs themselves (2019). The quote that opens this section is taken from the Trust’s website, where the organisation’s work is described in emotive terms as a continuation of the romantic aspirations of the first Rajah, James Brooke. It attributes “the State of Sarawak with a complex ethnography made up of many distinct cultures living together in peace with one another as good neighbours” to the collaborative achievement of the local community and the Brookes, stating that the Trust’s various projects, including its museums, are continuing this legacy. While the state Museum’s contemporary focus on tourism and research excellence echoes Charles Brooke’s original goals of placing Sarawak on the map, a new generation of Brookes has taken up the familiar refrain of the ‘museum for the people’.

Conclusions As Charles Brooke’s brainchild, the Sarawak Museum was the physical manifestation of the Rajah’s political ambitions for the state, a public declaration of power, but also a forum in which myriad agendas, worldviews and cultures jostled for attention. Considering the Museum as a “distributed” entity reveals that, while it represented colonial ideas about science and culture, it simultaneously formed a space for cross-cultural interaction. The formation of a public collection of Borneo’s natural and cultural heritage provided a tool for the fulfilment of the diverse personal agendas of both European and Asian actors; a meeting place for the diverse Sarawak community; and the potential for that community to negotiate its own representation in the eyes of the state. The short-lived British colonial period saw many of these themes expanded upon by Tom Harrisson, whose personal agendas were also many-faceted, too complex to be summed up by a Foucauldian framework of colonial power dynamics.

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At the time of writing, the state Museum of Sarawak lies dormant under renovation, grappling with these complex legacies as it seeks to balance the demands of tourism, research and local outreach. Meanwhile, a new generation of the Brooke family follows in the second Rajah’s footsteps, utilising the medium of the museum gallery to promote its own narrative of Sarawak’s past to the Kuching community. While the state Museum’s future remains to be seen, Charles Brooke’s museum-making legacy certainly remains a powerful force shaping engagement with heritage, on the part of both the Sarawak state and the wider community.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Lindsay Lloyd-Smith for his generous assistance with the translation of this source from the original Swedish, in this passage and all following. 2. For a recent example of the former in the Malaysian context, see Abu Talib Ahmad. 2015. Museums, History and Culture in Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. 3. Copious evidence of Charles Brooke’s continued involvement in the Museum in his later years can be found in the correspondence archive of curator J.  C. Moulton, the last curator to serve in Charles’ lifetime: 4186/3A/4/3-5, Moulton Family Papers, Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, UK. 4. I address this theme in detail in Jennifer R. Morris. “Second to None in the East”: Reassessing the Birth of the Sarawak Museum. Sarawak Museum Journal, Special Issue (2019) [in press]. 5. Charles Brooke to Odoardo Beccari, 23 December 1869, Papers of Odoardo Beccari, Biblioteca Botanica, University degli Studi, Florence, Italy. 6. Charles Brooke to Edward Gerrard and Sons, 17 February 1891, 20 May 1891, CBLB.4.168 and 211, Brooke Trust Archive Online. 7. See, for example, Charles Brooke to Richard Bowdler Sharpe, 16 January 1904, Brooke Trust Archive Online, CBLB.8.143b; Anon. 1958. Obituary: Sir Guy Marshall. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 1 (12): 753–754. 8. Loans Register F, MA/31/6, Victoria & Albert Museum Archive, London, UK, 177–181. 9. ‘Chinese and native employees roll book 1880–1909’, Sarawak Museum Archive, Kuching, Malaysia, 25. 10. Haddon, ‘Expedition journal’, Haddon Papers, MSS 1030, Cambridge University Library, UK, 294.

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11. See ‘Ethnology Registration Book Vol. 1’ and ‘Zoology Catalogues’, Sarawak Museum Archive; Reports on the Sarawak Museum 1901–1927 (Kuching: Sarawak Gazette Office/Government Printing Office, 1902–1928). 12. This popularity was sometimes to the specimen’s detriment, with visitors reportedly stealing the whale’s teeth: Chan, Zora. Teething Problems at Sarawak Museum. The Star Online, October 12, 2012. 13. Chang Jee Koo to J.  C. Moulton, 13 November 1917, 4186/3A/4/3, Moulton Family Papers, Wiltshire and Swindon Archive. 14. ‘Ethnology Registration Book 1’, Sarawak Museum Archive, 39. 15. Moulton hired Ketit as collector when he returned to Sarawak for a collecting expedition in 1920: Raffles Museum collections records, obtained through Marcus Chua, Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, pers. comm., October 2017. 16. Raffles Museum records from Sharon Lim, National Museum of Singapore, pers. comm. June 2017; object Number T-0035, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore. 17. See, for example, Charles Hose to Ernst Hartert, 1893, TM/1/2/18/169, Natural History Museum Archive, London, UK, 171, 173 and 176. 18. For example, ‘Ethnology Registration Book 1’, Sarawak Museum Archive, 59, 100, 121, 134–151. 19. Ibid., 180. 20. Visitor numbers were recorded in annually in the Sarawak Museum reports from 1910 onwards.

References Abu Talib Ahmad. 2015. Museums, History and Culture in Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anon. 1872. Untitled. Sarawak Gazette, September 2. ———. 1878a. Notice. Sarawak Gazette, March 29. ———. 1878b. Items. Sarawak Gazette, June 24. ———. 1884. Catalogue of the Brooke Low Collection in Borneo. Kuching: Sarawak Gazette Office. ———. 1886. Our Notes. Sarawak Gazette, November 1. ———. 1888. The Museum. Sarawak Gazette, August 1. ———. 1889a. Museum. Sarawak Gazette, January 1. ———. 1889b. Notes. Sarawak Gazette, March 1. ———. 1889c. Untitled. Sarawak Gazette, August 1. ———. 1889d. Museum. Sarawak Gazette, September 2.

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———. 1889e. Museum. Sarawak Gazette, November 1. ———. 1891. Opening of the New Museum. Sarawak Gazette, September 1. ———. 1900. The Museum. Sarawak Gazette, January 2. ———. 1921. Visit of His Excellency Sir Laurence Guillemard K. C. B. Sarawak Gazette, July 1. ———. 1922. Sarawak. Sarawak Gazette, May 1. ———. 1958. Obituary: Sir Guy Marshall. Annals and Magazine of Natural History 1 (12): 753–754. ———. 2017. Borneo Artefacts in European Museums to be Returned to Sarawak. Dayak Daily, November 25. ———. 2019. Sarawak Museum Campus Open to Public Sept 2020—Abd Karim. Borneo Post, February 21. Banks, Edward. 1925. Fifteenth Report on the Sarawak Museum, 1924. Kuching: Sarawak Government Printing Office. ———. 1928. Eighteenth Report on the Sarawak Museum, 1927. Kuching: Government Printing Office. ———. 1931. A Popular Account of the Mammals of Borneo. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 9 (2): 1–139. ———. 1932. Twenty-second Report on the Sarawak Museum, 1931. Kuching: Sarawak Government Printing Office. ———. 1933. Twenty-third Report on the Sarawak Museum, 1932. Kuching: Sarawak Government Printing Office. ———. 1935. The Sarawak Museum. The Museums Journal 34: 462–465. ———. 1940. Thirtieth Report on the Sarawak Museum 1939. Kuching: Government Printing Office. Baring-Gould, S., and C.A. Bampfylde. 2007. A History of Sarawak Under its Two White Rajahs 1839–1908. Kuala Lumpur: Synergy Media. Barnard, Timothy P. 2014. The Raffles Museum and the Fate of Natural History in Singapore. In Nature Contained: Environmental Histories of Singapore, ed. Timothy P. Barnard, 184–211. Singapore: NUS Press. Brooke, Charles. 1907. Queries: Past, Present and Future. London: The Planet Offices. Brooke Heritage Trust. 2019. Accessed March 2, 2019. https://www.brooketrust.org/. Chan, Zora. 2012. Teething Problems at Sarawak Museum. The Star Online, October 12. Chua, Sam. 2018. S’wak Crafts Receive Overwhelming Demand Due to Their Uniqueness, Creativity. Borneo Post, October 9. Cohn, Bernard. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Durrans, Brian. 1993. Introduction. In The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, ed. Charles Hose and William McDougall, vii–xli. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Eris. 2018. Helping Hands Penan: Weaving a Future. Going Places Magazine, September 21. Goode, George Brown. 1901a. The Principles of Museum Administration. In A Memorial of George Brown Goode, Together with a Selection of His Papers on Museums and the History of Science in America, ed. W.L. Wilson et al., 193–240. Washington: Government Printing Office. ———. 1901b. The Museums of the Future. In A Memorial of George Brown Goode, Together with a Selection of His Papers on Museums and the History of Science in America, ed. W.L. Wilson et al., 241–262. Washington: Government Printing Office. Gosden, Chris, and Frances Larson. 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gruber, Jacob W. 1970. Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology. American Anthropologist 72 (6): 1289–1299. Harrisson, Tom. 1947. The Two-way Job of Our Museum. Sarawak Gazette, October 1. ———. 1953. Science and the Arts. In Colonial Reports: Sarawak, 1952, 126–134. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. ———. 1954. Science and the Arts. In Colonial Reports: Sarawak, 1953, 163–167. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. ———. 1956. Science and the Arts. In Colonial Reports: Sarawak, 1954, 177–183. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. ———. 1959. An All-round Museum in a Small Country. Sarawak Museum Journal 9 (13–14): 249–251. ———. 1961. “Second to None”: Our First Curator (and others). Sarawak Museum Journal 17–18: 17–29. ———. 1963. The Sarawak Museum: A Living Centre in a Far Country. Museum XVI (4): 239–246. Heimann, Judith M. 1998. The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Hill, Kate. 2005. Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2016. Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hose, Charles. 1926. The Contributions to Science of Charles Hose, Hon. Sc.D. (Cantab) 1887–1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1927. Fifty Years of Romance and Research, or a Jungle-Wallah at Large. London: Hutchinson and Co. Hudson, Kenneth. 1975. A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

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Kaur, Amarjit. 1995. The Babbling Brookes: Economic Change in Sarawak 1841–1941. Modern Asian Studies 29 (1): 65–109. Longair, Sarah, and John McAleer, eds. 2012. Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacKenzie, John M. 2009. Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macul, Louise. 2018, 6–8 August. Meaning-making and Interpretation of the 1960 Lepo’ Tau Murals of the Sarawak Museum. In Paper Presented at the 14th International Borneo Research Council Conference, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia [unpublished]. Manickam, Sandra Khor. 2015. Taming the Wild: Aborigines and Racial Knowledge in Colonial Malaya. Singapore: NUS Press. Mjöberg, Eric. 1924. Fourteenth Report on the Sarawak Museum 1915–1923. Kuching: Government Printing Office. ———. 1927. Borneo: het land der koppensneller. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. Morris, Jennifer R. 2019a. ‘Second to None in the East’: Reassessing the Birth of the Sarawak Museum. Sarawak Museum Journal, Special Issue [in press]. ———. 2019b. Museumising Sarawak: Objects, Collectors and Scientific Knowledge-Production Under the Brooke State, C.1840–1940. PhD thesis, National University of Singapore [unpublished]. Moulton, J.C. 1912. Tenth Report on the Sarawak Museum 1911. Kuching: Government Printing Office. ———. 1913. Report on the Sarawak Museum 1912. Kuching: Sarawak Government Printing Office. ———. 1914. Twelfth Report on the Sarawak Museum, 1913. Kuching: Sarawak Government Printing Office. Ooi Keat Gin. 1996. World Beyond the Rivers: Education in Sarawak from Brooke Rule to Colonial Office Education, 1841–1963. Hull: Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hull. Peppis, Paul. 2014. Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology and Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pringle, Robert. 1971. The Brookes of Sarawak: Reformers In Spite of Themselves. Sarawak Museum Journal. 19 (38–39): 53–76. Sarawak Museum Campus. 2016. Interpretive Plan: Permanent Exhibitions, New Sarawak Museum. Kuching: Sarawak Museum Department. ———. 2019. Accessed February 25, 2019. www.facebook.com/pg/ SarawakMuseum/. Sarawak Museum Department. 2019. Official Website of Sarawak Museum Department. Accessed March 2, 2019. https://museum.sarawak.gov.my/. Shamsul, A.B. 2001. A History of an Identity, an Identity of a History: The Idea and Practice of ‘Malayness’ in Malaysia Reconsidered. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 32 (3): 355–366.

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Shelford, R.W.C. 1901. Report on the Sarawak Museum. Kuching: Sarawak Gazette Office. ———. 1999. A Naturalist in Borneo. Kota Kinabalu: Natural History Publications Borneo. Talib, Naimah S. 1999. Administrators and Their Service: The Sarawak Administrative Service under the Brooke Rajahs and British Colonial Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tan, Kevin Y.L. 2015. Of Whales and Dinosaurs: The Story of Singapore’s Natural History Museum. Singapore: NUS Press. Tan, Georgette. 2018. Treasures from Nusantara Opens at Textile Museum. Borneo Post, May 17. Tiffin, Sarah. 2016. Southeast Asia in Ruins: Art and Empire in the Early 19th Century. Singapore: NUS Press. Ting, John. 2011. Notes on the Architecture of the Sarawak Museum. Sarawak Heritage Society Newsletter, 5. University of Cambridge. 2018. A Cambridge Alumni Database (ACAD). Accessed February 16, 2019. http://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/Documents/ acad/2018/search-2018.html. Winichakul, Thongchai. 1994. Siam Mapped: a History of the Geo-body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Serdang Folk Museum and the Performance of Heritage: Community Museums as an Alternative to National Heritage Sunitha Janamohanan

Introduction The community museum is a new type of institution that we have seen emerge in the past few decades, gaining momentum in the 1990s, as a strategy for community empowerment. By 2010, a community-based approach to museums and cultural heritage management had become recognised by agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as vital for sustainable development and for the realisation and enactment of cultural diversity (Denis, 2010). In tandem with these global developments, we see in Malaysia the emergence of community-based cultural initiatives, from the children-­oriented heritage activities of Penang-based arts and culture organisation, Arts-ED (founded in 1999), to the community- or place-based activism of artist collectives such as Lost Gens protesting the destruction of heritage in the S. Janamohanan (*) LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_3

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Petaling Street area of Kuala Lumpur in the 2010s and the continuous work of Ranau-based Pangrok Sulap, a collective that uses woodblock printmaking as a tool for cultural expression and to build solidarity amongst local Sabah communities through collaborative art-making workshops. Heritage and cultural resistance are key themes of these collectives and also central to the work of other groups such as Rakan Mantin, led by painter Victor Chin, and the Kajang Heritage Centre in Kajang, initiated in 2000 by “Cikgu” (Teacher) Lee Kim Sin. The former focuses on shining a strong spotlight on a 200-year-old Hakka village in the one-street town of Mantin, Negri Sembilan, as a strategy against forced displacement. The latter is less urgency driven, focused on highlighting the built and cultural heritage of Kajang and its history as a mining town, but similar in terms of the tools it employs. Both organise cultural activities such as walking or bicycling tours, designed for cultural encounters between visitors and local residents and the presentation of oral histories. Both have also initiated and, in the case of Kajang, upgraded interpretive centres in their respective locales to showcase artefacts, photographs, maps and stories of their respective communities. While neither are “museums” by name, these efforts illustrate a growing practice of using material and traditional culture to make visible the stories and lived experiences of ordinary people and to reassert personal histories within larger national narratives that often suppress or erase such stories. Such activities are strategies of cultural resistance, as well as strategies of active, grassroots heritage-making. This chapter takes the concept of “heritage” beyond the notions of property and inheritance in a material sense; neither is heritage understood within the parameters of the UNESCO categories of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, which have been gaining national interest in countries like Malaysia that are increasingly recognising the economic potential of the heritage industries. Drawing on critical heritage studies, heritage is discussed here as “an embodied cultural performative practice that individuals, communities and societies engage in to negotiate both the meaning of the past, and the way in which that past is used to legitimize or to remake cultural and political values and narratives in, and for, the needs of the present” (Smith 2017b, 71). Heritage is also viewed as a process and not a product of the past, and, specifically, community heritage is viewed as being embedded within local specificity and significance (Stephens and Tiwari 2015). Meanwhile, museums globally are in a state of transition from being collections-based institutions to spaces for engagement and interrogation,

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and have been recognised both by communities themselves and museum scholars as a vital tool for groups who occupy a marginalised status in society (Watson, ed. 2007; Karp 1992). The latter often encompass those who are categorised as minorities within a larger heterogeneous population, and the museum becomes for them a space to challenge hegemony through the presentation of alternative narratives to the dominant state discourse. This chapter focuses on the Serdang Folk Museum (SFM) in the New Village of Serdang, Selangor, as a study of a community museum and an example of the performance of heritage by a community with a specific history, defined by time and geography as members of a “shared symbolic estate” (Robertson and Hall 2007 cited in Stephens and Tiwari 2015). The Serdang Folk Museum asserts a narrative of history parallel to and distinct from the official historical narrative presented by museums of the state, upholders and propagators of “National Heritage”, which is referred to as a special noun to distinguish it from “heritage” as a general concept and to give it its political and social implications. Referencing Stuart Hall, “The National Heritage is a powerful source of [cultural meanings, which bind each member individually into the larger national story]. It follows that those who cannot see themselves reflected in its mirror cannot properly ‘belong’” (2000, 4). Thus, the Serdang Folk Museum will be discussed against a backdrop of National Heritage via the institutions of the National Museum, Muzium Negara, and the state museum of Selangor, the Sultan Alam Shah Museum. It is also examined within a framework of global community museum discourse and critiques of National Heritage.

Museums and Communities: Negotiations of Past, Present and Future In any discussion of museums and heritage, the European and Anglophone legacy of heritage studies should be acknowledged, with its emphasis on the protection of material objects or places designated as having historical or inheritable value, and also with its implications of nationalism and concepts of National Heritage (Smith 2017a, 16–17). The museum is also inherently political, from its origins as a colonial institution of power that permitted the colonial state to imagine its colonised zones and subjects, to the modern era where the post-independent state has inherited this form of “political museumising” and continues a legacy of classifying, ordering and erasing (Anderson 1991, 183).

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While the Eurocentric origins of the institution of the museum and collecting practices, and their socio-political implications, have been studied extensively (Bennett 1990; Hooper-Greenhill 1989; Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett 1991; Duncan 1991), I would argue that in Malaysia the institutional model that is inherently a colonial legacy has yet to be fully interrogated. Instead, the state institutions continue to perpetuate antiquated methods of classification and display and, ultimately, of control. The museum as an institution is part of a nation’s heritage project, presenting to the public artefacts deemed to be of historical and national importance and managed by state authorities alongside historical monuments and sites. National collections convey decisions of who and what matters, whose stories are worthy of being told and present constructs of identities which the state legitimises through its institutional authority. In spite of the limitations and legacies of the museum institution, communities in various parts of the world strive to redress and reclaim the museum for their own intents and purposes. Such a reclamation is not without its complexities as it is bound by specific histories of displacement—often of migration, whether forced or voluntary—and the struggle for cultural survival in newly forged nations of diverse ethnic populations and competing heritage narratives. Heritage in all forms is in constant process of being made and remade and is, thus, a discursive practice (Hall 2000). The museum acts as a discursive tool in this process: an archive and medium for memory presentation, a space for the sharing of stories and of reflection and a space where heritage can be enacted and re-enacted. The term “community” itself has gained currency in the field of heritage and cultural management, but requires definition. In the drafting of UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage Convention—a key text that elevates the status of communities in terms of the role they can play in recognising and safeguarding cultural heritage—“community” is defined as a people who share a self-ascribed sense of connectedness, which may be manifested in a feeling of identity of common behaviour, as well as in activities and territory (Blake 2009, 61). In their study of community museums in Oaxaca, Mexico, Camarena and Morales (2006) define community as: a group that shares a territory, a common history, and a memory of its history. Its constituents have a common experience of constructing meaning and a way of life. It is a group capable of collective action in the interest of its members, capable of developing initiatives and struggles to contest those who act against its interests. (327)

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The agency implied in the term “community” in this context is of particular note and one which I adopt in my discussion of community museums in Malaysia. The concept of a community museum builds on the idea of community itself as a site for contestation and struggle. The museum is adapted as an instrument to resist the imposition of cultural practices and values by either external parties or the forces of globalisation, and is wielded as a strategy for cultural survival. The community museum as a site of resistance is also vividly seen in post-apartheid South Africa, where it has been instrumental as a strategy for continual social transformation. In his detailed study, Ciraj Rassool (2006) traces the genealogies of Cape Town’s District 6 Museum to examine how it functions as a project of memorialising and identity making, and explores the notion of a “museum-as-collection as a space for the performance of history” (303). He also highlights how community museums tend to fall outside the structure of national museums and national heritage, elaborating that they: thus exist outside the official circuits of national funding for arts, culture and heritage […]. [T]he exclusion of these new and fledgling museums from the structures and national heritage priorities of the state has also created a sense of an independent cultural platform and has had the unintended consequence of enhancing the possibilities of constituting a vibrant, independent, contested public culture. (288)

This independence is a significant factor in such institutions, and is a defining characteristic of community agency. Whether as institutions contributing to civic life in functioning democratic states or as sites of resistance, the community museum fulfils a crucial role in a nation’s cultural landscape. As heritage and history are used to construct, reconstruct and negotiate a range of identities and social and cultural values and meanings in the present (Smith 2006), the independence as well as agency of community museums enables the making public of dissenting or alternative histories and identity constructions. The negotiation of past, present and future is of profound importance for communities which have hitherto felt themselves to be marginalised in official discourse or whose stories and representation in popular culture have been controlled and manipulated through a system of othering and/ or erasure. The Chinatown History Museum Experiment in New York’s Chinatown, founded in 1980 as the NY Chinatown History Project,

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employed dialogic and community-based approaches to historical research and public programming, with a profound impact on the participants and members of the community in contesting the way the Chinese immigrant experience in America is remembered and represented in mainstream history. As historian and co-founder John Kuo Wei Tchen (1992) describes: [T]he past becomes a touchstone against which the present and future are interpreted and understood […]. [A]cts of self-discovery shape and reshape individual and collective identities […] how people want to think of themselves in the present necessarily influences what they will remember about the past, and conversely, what they remember about themselves in the past influences how they think about themselves in the present. (292–293)

The museum, thus, poses strategies for collective remembering and becomes a medium for the re-presentation and validation of personal histories and individual memories. The Chinatown History Museum also creates a tangible presence that stakes the community’s claim in the larger narrative of American history, an act which demands respect and acknowledgement from wider society. This is relevant here not to draw direct parallels with the Serdang Folk Museum—although like the Chinese communities in America, Malaysian Chinese too have a history of migration, diaspora and struggle but also success—but to raise questions of how a migrant community might claim their position in the wider historical narrative of a nation and how a minority ethno-linguistic group might safeguard and transmit their cultural practices. The Chinatown History Museum Experiment also highlights the impact that such memory projects can have—that its role is not merely in the realm of memory, but in how it affects the sense of self a community has of themselves in both the present and future.

National Heritage Versus People’s Heritage The contrast between community heritage and history and National Heritage and History reveals the politics of recognition at play in heritage-­ making. Distinct from identity politics, the politics of recognition refers to claims for recognition that are linked to demands and calls for restorative justice, social inclusion and greater equity in policy negotiations in the distribution of resources (Fraser 1995, 2000; Young 2000, cited in Smith 2017b). In a country like Malaysia where Bumiputera1 preferential

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e­ conomic and cultural policies dictate access to resources from education to housing and more, it is not surprising that any claims to equity made by minority groups would be viewed with trepidation, if not outright hostility. Heritage is implicated in this struggle, for as Smith asserts “heritage also becomes an arena where misrecognition may occur and be further propagated, as the ways in which hegemonic groups construct understandings of both themselves and ‘the other’ are significant potential acts of recognition and misrecognition” (26). The National Heritage discourse in Malaysia can be viewed as an extension of the preservation of Malay hegemony, requiring a selective process of labelling and describing that, it is argued here, deliberately misrepresents rather than truly reflects the diverse ethnic make-up of the nation. The National Museum and Sultan Alam Shah Museum are both implicated in this project of misrecognition. As the Serdang Folk Museum is discussed in this chapter as offering an alternative narrative to National Heritage and state-endorsed history and identity construction, I turn now to the state institutions to provide a basis for comparison. As public institutions, they assume to hold a responsibility to present official notions of both history and Malaysian identity. More critically, they are also spaces that summon people to imagine themselves as citizens of a nation-state, as Sharon J. Macdonald (2003) sums up: Public museums […] invited people to conceptualise a sense of national or racial difference from others; and to experience their own worlds as relatively and reassuringly governed ones. They helped to convey senses of both stability and progress. They helped to instantiate a ‘scientific’, ‘objective’ way of seeing—a gaze which could ‘forget’ its own positionedness. They helped to think identities as bounded and coherent. (5)

The supposed coherence presented by such displays in a national museum is highly problematic when the official discourse in Malaysia is one that is characterised by the politicisation of ethnicity and religion and institutional efforts to maintain Malay hegemony in a post-colonial, multiethnic nation. The country’s early history is one of fluid boundaries, the legacies of mainland Southeast Asian and maritime empires and of rather more cosmopolitan nusantara or archipelagic identities. It is also one of colonialism and colossal migration. The large influxes of Chinese and Indian migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a multiethnic populace proud to call themselves Malaysian today, as annual

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independence day celebrations and frequent national unity campaigns attest to, but whose cultural rights and position as equal citizens have been in a constant state of contestation (Kua 1990; Mandal 2008; Gabriel 2011, 2014; Rowland 2015). The community that is the focus of this chapter is one formed by a specific era in Malaysia’s history known as the Emergency Period, which lasted from 1948 to 1960 and which resulted in the forced relocation of mostly Chinese settlers as an effort to contain the communist insurgency in Malaya. Following the end of World War II, the returning British had found themselves having to contend with ever-stronger stirrings of nationalism in various forms, of which the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was a particular threat. Chinese villagers were perceived to be sympathetic to the communist cause; therefore, as an attempt to manage this threat and cut off communist access to resources, hundreds of New Villages (Kampung Baru, to give them their Malay terminology) were set up between 1950 and 1952, a programme that saw the relocation of about half a million, predominantly Chinese, settlers, although the creation of Malay New Villages has also been documented. This is the particular history of the Serdang Folk Museum and its community, to which I will return later. In my examination that follows of the exhibitions of the National Museum and Sultan Alam Shah Museum, I will focus on how the Emergency Period is recounted, while also looking at how Malaysian society is represented within their galleries. It is reiterated here how museums, as official heritage institutions, are also places for the articulation of social ideas, organised in terms that legitimise and dictate identities, and, thus, as places that define relationships with communities (Karp 1992). The messages and images that they transmit are meanings that shape their audiences’ understandings of self in relation to others and to the nation. The National Museum, opened in 1963 to much fanfare as an emblem of Malaysian modernity and independence, has undergone a number of changes since its inception, and is also often influenced by a tourism agenda as it sits under the purview of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism. Managed by the Department of Museums Malaysia (Jabatan Muzium Malaysia, JMM, previously known as the Department of Museums and Antiquities), the stated objectives of the JMM are: to preserve, conserve and disseminate knowledge about the country’s historical, cultural and natural heritage; to create public awareness of the

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c­ ountry’s rich heritage history, its multiracial culture and its natural environment; to foster a harmonious society with high moral standards and to assist the efforts of the government to promote and develop the tourism industry. (Department of Museums Malaysia)

However, in 2007, the National Museum became essentially a history museum after the closure of the National History Museum, which Abu Talib Ahmad (2015) describes as a “convenient excuse for the removal of non-Islamic cultural elements”, rendering it more acceptable to Islamic purists and presenting a new arrangement complementing the history textbooks of the new curriculum, revised in 2001 to include an element of patriotism (16–20). The National Museum has always been defined by its nation-building agenda, but, over time, the ideals of multiculturalism, a founding objective, seem to have faded in a project of gradual erasure of non-Muslim and non-Malay cultural aspects. The National Museum is divided into four galleries: (1) Early History; (2) the Malay Kingdoms; (3) the Colonial Era and (4) the ‘Malaysia Today’ gallery, which focuses on the country following its independence in 1957. For the purpose of this chapter, I focus on only two of these sections to draw parallels with Serdang: the Colonial Era and Malaysia Today. Designed as a series of dioramas and displays of artefacts comprising mainly weaponry, the Colonial Era gallery takes visitors through a brisk history with touch points on Melaka and the coming of the Portuguese and the Dutch, select acts of resistance and negotiations with the British and a section on Japanese rule. The overarching narrative is of conquest and resistance, with a brief inclusion of the industries of tin mining and rubber. In his assessment of the gallery, Abu Talib highlights the absence of any mention of Malaysia’s plural society and its evolution, suggesting the discomfort amongst contemporary (non-Malay) Malaysians of being associated with the term ‘immigrant’ as being a possible reason for the downplaying of this fact of their historical origins in Malaysia and that “the disappearance of the term ‘migrant’ from the museum is politically correct but historically flawed” (24). This proposition of political correctness is debatable, however, as there are numerous ways this fact of history may be presented that take into consideration peoples’ sensitivities, yet is able to offer a more multifaceted and inclusive dimension to the story of the nation’s development. The Emergency Period is one of eight sections in the final gallery of  modern and contemporary Malaysia. A wall case presents two

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­ annequins—one dressed in the uniform of the Malayan Army and the m other in the outfit of the Malayan Communist Party—while a wall presents a timeline of key events (Fig. 3.1). The language employed is predictably biased, with the communists described as mounting an “armed and violent resistance”, bringing social, political and economic instability, and that the “country’s infrastructure was destroyed by the terrorists and people lived in fear”. We are told under the heading “Destruction and Pain” that “day to day activities and movements of the people were curtailed as a result of these [communist] attacks”, and the creation of New Villages is mentioned in just one line under the heading “Communist Fighting Strategies”. As with the Colonial gallery, the emphasis in modern Malaysia is on treaties, nationalism and the road to nation-state status. The human element and socio-cultural impact on actual people does not seem to be a consideration worthy of representation. Throughout the exhibitions,

Fig. 3.1  Wall display of the Emergency Period at the National Museum, Gallery D, “Malaysia Today”. (Photograph by author)

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there is an absence of the voices of ordinary citizens and nothing that brings home the realities of life for actual people and of the impact on actual society of the events being chronicled. As one moves on through the gallery, glimpses of Malaysia’s plural societies can be seen in the founding of the modern political parties and, of course, the infamous May 1969 riots.2 Racial cooperation and ethnic balance is significantly emphasised. Finally, the visitor arrives at the only section of the museum to touch on cultural aspects. Under the heading “Malaysian Culture”, the museum features a display of mannequins in “ethnic” costumes (Fig. 3.2), and a poster display of information about each of the major ethnic groups in Malaysia.3 This method of showcasing “culture” has seen little change over the decades, and is a gross and essentialising simplification where cultural identity is reduced to costumes and descriptions of customs or celebrations. For example, the “Chinese” woman is always depicted in a cheongsam, usually red, an auspicious colour

Fig. 3.2  Mannequins in ethnic costume in the “Malaysian Culture” section of the National Museum. (Photograph by author)

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in Chinese culture; the “Iban” man of Sarawak always appears in his feathered headdress and loincloth, clutching a shield; and the “Eurasian” woman wears the traditional folk dress of the Portuguese, which members of the Kristang community of Melaka don for cultural performances, but this does not represent Eurasians of non-Portuguese descent, misleadingly and inaccurately grouping them as one monolithic and antiquated cultural community. Standing in for the representation of Malay culture, at least, is a smaller museum in the museum complex, the Museum of Malay Customs, Muzium Adat Melayu. Its exhibits include an overview of various aspects of Malay cultural life: performing arts and music, traditional dress, cooking and leisure. Other than the single section of the Malaysia Today gallery mentioned in the preceding paragraph, nowhere in the official museum narrative of Malaysia are the country’s ethnic, cultural and religious diversities, and the myriad ways in which they exist in both the past and the present, depicted. The Selangor state museum, the Muzium Sultan Alam Shah, is described by Abu Talib more favourably, who claims that state museums feature Malaysia’s plural society “in a big way”, though he acknowledges that they still present a Malay dominance in their narratives (256). However, this was not found to be the case by this author. The Shah Alam museum orients visitors as soon as they enter the galleries with an overview of the work of the Malay Custom and Heritage Corporation of Selangor (Perbadanan Adat Melayu dan Warisan Negeri Selangor, PADAT), an organisation that has taken over the administration of the museum from the Selangor Museum Board, and whose mission is explicitly stated as being to “memperkasakan adat Melayu dan warisan negeri Selangor”, to empower Malay customs and the heritage of the state of Selangor, with the responsibility of maintenance, preservation and empowerment (memelihara, memulihara dan memperkasa) of those customs. The word “empowering”, memperkasakan, is a curious choice of terminology, suggesting that Malay customs have been disempowered or are under threat. Although more conventional terms such as preservation are also used, and in its statement on the history of the institution we see the phrase “ennobling Malay culture”, it is “empower” that is used in both its mission statement and the museum’s organisational objectives. Unlike the way we see empowerment discussed in the context of marginalised communities, when used in the context of the museum of the state (emphasis added), the term suggests a need to assert and establish the dominance or supremacy of Malay culture.

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Not vastly different from the National Museum, the first-floor gallery is devoted to history—a Selangor-centric history but one, nonetheless, where its major events, findings and narratives mirror the national narrative of evolution and development. We see the familiar mechanisms in the display of dioramas and painted impressions of battles and the imagination of events in history; archaeological findings; and artefacts dominated by weaponry and miscellaneous paraphernalia that speak of the development of the state from a mainly political, militaristic and economic standpoint. One major difference, though, is the royal presence, as the state museum falls under the patronage of the sultan, the ruler of the state. A section on royal regalia confronts the visitor at the very start of the gallery, while further royal artefacts appear occasionally at various points in the unfolding chronology of events. Overall, the historical exhibitions prioritise incidents and events over society, and culture is mainly represented through objects placed in vitrines, devoid of context. The cultural galleries showcase craft objects, ceramics, cooking utensils, clothes, as well as displays of marriage, birth and burial customs. Almost all of these, however, are artefacts of a sort of pan-Malay culture. Once again, we do not see any representation of the other ethnic groups of Malaysia, though the indigenous Orang Asli get a brief mention. The seemingly deliberate erasure of Malaysia’s plural society and their histories and stories deserves further attention but is not the focus of this chapter. While acknowledging that it is absolutely vital that the museums undergo serious reassessment, the point is made here to underscore the significance of alternative, independent spaces where other stories can be told—a people’s history and heritage versus the national. The history section devoted to the Emergency Period continues the official national narrative about communism and the measures taken to combat it, though it adopts a somewhat more neutral tone. One image in a montage of mostly soldiers depicts villagers lining up for food rations, but apart from this, there is, once again, nothing to convey a sense of life during this period (Fig. 3.3). It is precisely these aspects of life that the Serdang Folk Museum, however, offers to its visitors.

The Serdang New Village and Folk Museum The New Village programme from 1950 to 1952 significantly changed the social landscape of Chinese communities across the country. Some existing settlements were grouped together and fenced off, while others

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Fig. 3.3  Gallery display featuring rifles and semiautomatic weapons against a background of photographs, in a section on the Emergency Period at the Sultan Alam Shah Museum, Selangor. An image of New Village residents lining up for food rations is shown in the top right corner, in the black and white image second from the right. (Photograph by author)

saw relocations over considerably large distances. Lasting twelve years, the Emergency Period changed not just the composition of domestic settlements but also the livelihoods of its residents and their access to resources, and had an irrevocable impact on their social structures. The influence of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), and its wartime movement, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), is said to have been considerable at the time, “fir[ing] the imagination of the rural Chinese and giv[ing] them a sense of solidarity” (Sandhu 1973, xxxiii). However, the resettlement is also described not just as a programme of detention camps or of segregation but also as providing settled communities facilities such as water and infrastructure that would help provide incentives to them to cooperate with the authorities, while also cultivating a sense of loyalty to their benefactors. This forging of a “stake in the country” (Strauch 1981, 129) was, therefore, also a battle for the hearts and minds of the villagers. Facilities in the standard New Village, as documented by Kernial Singh Sandhu in his 1964 article “The Saga of the ‘Squatter’ in Malaya” and in the introduction chapter to Ray Nyce’s 1973 study for the Malaysian Sociological Institute, included

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a police post with adjacent quarters; a dispensary; a school; administration-­ cum-­community hall and staff quarters; cooking and bathing facilities for police, administration, and […] communal kitchens in New Villages which were under severe food restriction. A wire fence enclosed the public building(s) and the settlers’ houses, pigsties, and domestic gardens. (162–163)

The villages are also described as being little more than densely packed shanty towns, comprising simple wooden houses with atap (thatch) or zinc roofs, all fenced in by barbed-wire fences. The New Village of Serdang, Serdang Baru, was one of forty-nine New Villages set up in the state of Selangor. Today, known as Seri Kembangan, the original New Village is now part of a thriving township of over 20,000 inhabitants, located less than half an hour’s drive from the capital city centre of Kuala Lumpur. It is also the largest New Village in the state of Selangor and the second largest in the country. Though the barbed-wire fences are long gone and later-day rows of shophouses confront you when you turn off the Bukit Jalil Expressway to reach the settlement, vestiges of the original New Village remain in the higgledy-piggledy short streets and distribution of houses. The architecture of the New Village is in itself a display of the waves of development of the past seventy years, with the last few original wooden shanty houses of the 1950s dotted amongst modern, concrete houses that bear the aesthetic and material evidence of the ensuing decades through their grillwork, pillars, roof tiles and ornamentation. The Serdang Folk Museum (SFM) would not easily be recognised as a professional museum by international standards, with its implications of professionalism and expert knowledge; neither does it fit the appearance of the type of institution one normally associates with the title of museum. Located in a basement below the school hall stage of the SRK(C) Serdang primary school, the folk museum was set up in 2012 as the result of local community leaders feeling there should be a physical space to commemorate their history. A large rectangular room, it displays a mixture of objects and photographs to convey the history of the Serdang New Village. The room also includes a small, flat-screen TV for audio-visual displays or screenings with a few rows of chairs and benches, and the rearmost end of the room used as a storage area. The SFM is managed by volunteers and its rent and utilities are wholly underwritten by the school. The idea for the museum was first mooted during the “Serdang Community Art Carnival” of 2012, a community festival led by Chinese

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theatre practitioner and educator, Soon Choon Mee. Soon had been the initiator and organiser of such festivals since 2008, the first of which was held in Kajang, and subsequent ones in the nearby townships of Hulu Langat Batu 14 and Batu 11 Cheras,4 all townships within an approximate 10 km radius from where Soon herself resides in Cheras. Inspired by community festivals in Taiwan combined with an early desire to bridge the gap between arts practitioners and residents who do not typically attend arts events, Soon devised the carnivals as taking place in community spaces such as school halls and public streets, and as involving the participation of local schoolchildren. The success of her efforts is attributed to the collaboration between the Parent-Teacher Associations of the local schools in the districts and of the enthusiasm of residents and local shopkeepers to participate in these very localised and community-driven celebrations of culture.5 The museum project was spearheaded by the then chairman of the Parent-Teacher Association of the school, Ho Hwong Fock. The impetus for the project is also attributed to a particular activity in the carnival that highlighted the declining trades in the area. According to Chan Yan Keong, who has acted as curator of the museum since its inception, this particular activity triggered an awareness about the loss of knowledge and heritage that was taking place in the community, leading to the idea to make the engagement between both residents and schoolchildren more permanent and to have a centre that acts as a repository of memories and stories. Chan has been a driving force behind the creation and continued operation of the museum, a role he performs on a completely voluntary basis, and one that encompasses the traditional meaning of “curator” as a custodian and caretaker of artefacts. The role of custodian is currently shared with Goh Seng Guat, the former vice-principal of the school, and who, since 2017, is meant to be assuming more of a curatorial role, though Chan is still very much active. Chan has been the primary informant for this case study, and has a personal and close relationship with both the school and the village of Serdang. A former “old boy” of the school himself and lifelong Serdang resident whose children were also pupils of the school, he has been a member of both the Parent-Teacher Association and the school board, and his wife worked as an administrator in the school for thirty-seven years until her retirement. He describes himself as “actively involved”, and it should be mentioned that Chan has also been an equally committed supporter of Serdang artists and is the Founder-Chairman of the Serdang Art Gallery established in 2015.

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The museum project is described in an introductory text, at the start of the exhibition, as a community-led activity called “Discovering Serdang”, initiated by the SJK(C) Serdang Baru 1 and in collaboration with SJK(C) Serdang Baru 2, SMK Seri Kembangan, the Serdang Baru Christian Church and Serdang Buddhist Association. Translated from the Chinese, it reads: Thus, an exhibition entitled “Serdang: The People’s Story” was formed. “Serdang: The People’s Story” showcases various items from the past and historical photographs that tell the lives of those who call Serdang their home. Through this exhibition, SJK(C) Serdang 1 hopes to revive the rich history of Serdang and its people, reminiscing on the forgotten past and preserving its values and memories for generations to come.

Until late 2018, the displays of the Serdang Folk Museum remained little changed from the latter’s inception in 2012. The left wall originally depicted a map of the village made by local schoolchildren through a cultural mapping activity held during the carnival, while running along the length of the left side of the room was a red band with photographs and various cultural artefacts and memorabilia arranged around it, giving the impression of a timeline (Fig. 3.4). Dominating the right side of the room

Fig. 3.4  A section of the original wall display of the Serdang Folk Museum. (Photograph by author)

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Fig. 3.5  A recreation in the Serdang Folk Museum of a traditional wooden house typical of dwellings in the 1950s and 1960s. (Photograph by author)

is a reconstruction of an old wooden house, filled with objects and paraphernalia to recreate a dwelling that would have been typical of the settlement in the 1950s and 1960s (Fig. 3.5). Also on the right wall, soon after you enter the museum, is a map and typology of buildings within the boundaries of the original village made by visiting Taiwanese university students. While the right side of the museum remains the same, the other sections of the museum have undergone a revision and the museum now boasts a new wall-mounting system that allows for the easy changing of display materials.6 For the purpose of this chapter, the current display will be described in greater detail, with a caveat that the displays are intended to be updated periodically; therefore, the information that follows only pertains to the current exhibition. Nevertheless, frequent major changes to its content is not anticipated, given the informal way in which the museum operates and the limitations in resources. The current display mainly makes use of the same artefacts and many of the same photographs, and still follows a chronological arrangement, except that now the photographs are shown in new frames and in a more conventional gallery hang (Fig. 3.6). None of the people involved in both its founding and current operations have any professional training or experience in the setting up or

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Fig. 3.6  Updated display, in a section devoted to “Education in Serdang—from 1920 to the present”. The photos include images of graduating students, teachers and a copy of a primary school certificate from 1953

r­ unning of a museum, though the community leaders do demonstrate an understanding of what a museum entails: exhibitions of artefacts and images with captions and labels. They make use of rudimentary and inexpensive methods of display, and artefacts are arranged according to theme and type. They open the museum when there is a need, either for their own activities or for scheduled visits. The SFM is neither a registered ­society nor company, and there does not seem to be any intention to make it a more formal organisation. The artefacts in the museum are mementoes from the past collected through an open call to members of the community. Notices and letters were sent to schoolchildren’s parents for the donation of old objects and photographs—“anything their grandparents used” as Chan describes— with the committee looking specifically for objects that could illustrate the founding of the New Village or life in the early years, preferably nothing

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after the 1980s. The resulting collection of objects was organised and arranged through a collective effort that included members of the project committee, local residents and carnival volunteers made up of young people in their twenties, mostly design and art students from local colleges. The old house exhibit was constructed out of salvaged parts of a house that was demolished to make way for a modern bungalow, and obtained from its owners for the explicit purpose of display in the museum. The objectives of the Serdang Folk Museum, as described by Chan, are, first, to have students remember the era of their grandparents and, second, for them to become involved in art and cultural activities. A third objective evolved following the museum’s establishment and positive reception from the public, especially scholars from Taiwan and scholars of Chinese culture and history in Malaysia, and this was of its role in upholding Hakka culture. Approximately 90% of the residents of the village are said to be of Hakka descent, and aspects of Hakka culture and the Hakka language have been incorporated into their activities with the museum becoming the location and organising nucleus for occasional cultural celebrations and programmes that have featured Hakka food or the performance of Hakka poetry and songs. To date, the museum has appeared in Mandarin news programmes on national television, and has also been the subject of various forms of video documentations and studies by ethnic Chinese and Chinese-speaking groups and individuals outside of Serdang.7 The museum also plays host to visiting school groups in addition to regularly being used as a learning tool for the pupils of the SRK(C) Serdang. As the SFM is privately managed and located within the school grounds, to which the public does not have access, it is not technically a “public” museum, but visits can be easily arranged by appointment through Facebook, and there is no admission fee to enter. The contents of the main exhibition are divided into five sections: 1. “A Brief History”—the name of the village is attributed to the Serdang Tree (Pokok Serdang Cina in Malay, scientific name Livistona chinensis); it is further described as having seen a name change from Serdang Lama to Serdang Bharu, with its origins linked to a railway line of 1897, which was significant for the transporting of tin and rubber. The plaque in this section proclaims that the name “Serdang” has existed for “more than one hundred years”, very clearly situating it as pre-dating the New Village.

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2. “The Early Days”—from 1948 to 1960, including the 1950–1952 resettlement and establishing of Serdang Bharu (old spelling, later changed to Baru). 3. “Development of Serdang”—with key milestones being the founding of the SMJK (Inggeris) Serdang Bharu, later renamed as SMK Seri Kembangan in 1965; the building of Taman Seri Serdang in 1976; and the Serdang Market, now known as Pasar Seri Kembangan, erected in 1977. 4. “Education in Serdang”—from 1920 to the present. 5. “The Economy of Serdang”—rubber tapping and tin mining. In addition to each section heading, there are also two larger panels of text, presented in the form of printed and hung banners. The first, mentioned earlier, acts as an introductory panel, describing the early settlement of Serdang, known as Serdang Lama (Old Serdang), through its occupation by the Japanese in 1941 and the Emergency-enforced relocations, listing by name each settlement brought under the new jurisdiction of the New Village, Serdang Bharu. The second details the Tham Gong Temple, a nearby temple and local landmark. Originally built in Pandan in 1896 as a temple for mining workers in Sungai Besi and for residents of the various villages who were later relocated to Serdang Bharu, the temple itself was relocated in 1950, and has continued to be an important religious node for the New Village community. According to Chan, a second display that commemorates the history of the local church, the Serdang Baru Christian Church, is in the works. The Serdang Baru Christian Church was founded by missionaries in 1952 and ran a clinic which Chan mentions as having been especially important to the community as it was the sole provider of medical services at a time when no one in the village could afford medical care.8 Elements of the villagers’ spiritual beliefs are thus presented, while also capturing the role religious institutions played in the secular and community life of the village. It is not possible to describe in detail every photograph and accompanying caption, but they are summarised here to construct an image of the overarching narrative that is presented at the SFM.  From the start, the history of Serdang is established as pre-dating the New Village, giving the community a link to a past of almost a hundred years and to a time when the earliest settlers were free agents. Especially notable photographs of the Emergency Period include one that shows villagers heading to work and “waiting for the gates to be opened”, and an “Anti-Bandit Procession

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against the Malayan Communist Party” described as led by British Superintendent F. A. S. Caldwell and a local congressman. There are also images that portray life in the village—sundry shops, a local resident posing with his motorcycle or a group embarking on an excursion to Melaka. Also shown are select incidents that hint at the community’s political life— an “evening of entertainment” in conjunction with the Parti Rakyat Malaysia’s (Malaysian People’s Party) second anniversary celebrations in 1956. Throughout we see evidence of life under the Emergency Period but in images that are of ordinary people going to work, going to market, in social units and engaging in various aspects of everyday life. While it is true that in such a display these figures can appear disjointed in the absence of a narrative thread binding them together in a tightly structured story frame, the viewer with a sense of history should be able to make these links—this, in fact, being how exhibitions function, the displays are only half the work, with it being the viewer’s job to fill in the blanks. Given the lack of professional expertise, the contextualisation of the information presented could certainly be improved and the artefacts also more effectively incorporated into the displays; however, compared to the exhibitions of the National Museum and the Sultan Alam Shah Museum, the photographs of the Serdang Folk Museum and their brief captions are able to convey a wealth of information on a community of people and how larger historical events shaped their lives. They also help towards tracing the evolution of a town that mirrors the experience of a significant portion of ethnic Chinese communities across the country. The exhibition also firmly seeks to demonstrate Serdang’s importance, not just to the local community, but to the development of the nation. This is both implied and explicitly stated, as in the description under Section 3 of the exhibition, ‘Development of Serdang’, for instance: “Due to its strategic location, Serdang was a high point of interest for the federal government and was visited by multiple leaders in the country which led to its development”. This is also conveyed through photographs of visits on separate occasions by the highest officials: Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, and the then Deputy Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak bin Hussein, and in the 1970s and 1980s, of visits by the Selangor chief ministers of the time. The importance of education and Serdang’s contribution to the nation’s economic development are major themes. The title panel in the education section states the founding of the first school in 1920, of the Serdang

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School of Agriculture in 1932, and mentions that the opening ceremony of SJK(C) Serdang Baru 1 on 20 September 1952 was attended by Sir Henry Gurney, British High Commissioner of Malaya. It also includes a statement that he was assassinated sixteen days later. The exhibition thus establishes links to major figures in national history, both by bringing them into the narrative of Serdang, while also framing the community’s experience within a narrative of the nation, drawing a compelling line from the village to national events. Displays such as these clearly situate Serdang within the historical development of Malaya and Malaysia. This is not a community in isolation but a community that is very much part of the development of a new nation— and, furthermore, not a passive one but one that actively contributed and continues to contribute to its construction. The word “hardships” is mentioned in the introductory text—“In the early twentieth century, Chinese immigrants from Southern China left their homes in search of a better life. Having arrived in Serdang, the predominantly Hakka community built their lives in a foreign land amidst hardships and stayed until this very day”—and was also used by Chan in our conversation when explaining to me what he hopes young people will gain from the exhibition—a sense of the hardships experienced by their grandparents. It is clear that the struggles of the community are an integral part of their memory-making. Their evolution is not to be romanticised, but their experience is also not presented as one of tragedy or persecution. Information is presented in a factual tone with little embellishment but also without censorship. An excerpt from the introductory panel that sums up the Emergency Period is shown below: In 1949, the British Administration declared the Malayan Emergency in an effort to establish control over the Communist Party. Residents from Kampung Pisang (opposite Serdang Railway Station), Port Heng, Heng Street, Prang Besar (now Putrajaya), Pandan and Pantai (Sri Petaling area), Kuyoh, Sungai Besi and similar areas were forcibly relocated to a settlement in the old Puchong area, three kilometres away from Serdang Lama. In just three years, there were almost 1,800 families in the settlement. The living conditions of the settlement were harsh due to stringent curfew measures used by the British Administration, and it was surrounded by barbed wires. Within this period, the 500 acres of guarded camp was named Serdang Bharu (Serdang New Village). In 1952, the Malayan Emergency was brought to an end.9

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The Serdang Folk Museum, thus, presents a mix of artefacts from ordinary people’s lives that tell a history of poverty and hardship, and also of industry and development, and a series of photographic records places them squarely within the politics of the country. While the quaintness of the “old house” display and the valorisation of “dying trades” in the media and on public blogs and social media sites tend to often be couched in sentimental nostalgia, which can obscure underlying tensions, such nostalgia is markedly absent in the SFM with little reminiscing evident in the factual retelling of history through curated photographs and captions. Furthermore, as observed in New York’s Chinatown History Museum Project: the more the activities of reflecting and remembering are made public, the more individuals will become active in identifying the differences and similarities in their experiences with one another and with people who have not lived their experience. At this point more critical insights begin to challenge simple nostalgia. People can begin to bridge the differences between their experiences and others’, and feelings of mutual respect begin to surface. (Kuo 1992, 293)

The act of museum-making is a means of claiming space and validating the position of a community in a society in which their particular histories are not evident, a society where ethnicity and cultural heritage are deliberately and systematically erased from national narratives. This is a society which still feels the legacy of the National Cultural Policy of 1971 and its contested principles that continue to uphold the primacy of Malay culture at the expense of Malaysia’s other ethnic and cultural groups. The process of villagers coming together, drawing from individual memories and participating in an act of collective remembering through the sorting and organising of their artefacts and records, enables them to engage in an act of heritage-making. Heritage is not simply the objects in the museum or the wooden house, but the living memory that is activated in this process of remembering, as well as the performance of being Hakka. Heritage is bound indelibly to the landscape which it inhabits, and which defines the community with its particular history and context.

Concluding Thoughts The Serdang Folk Museum is an example of a community museum that is conceived, developed and run by community members. It receives no funding support from the government and has not relied on professional

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museum experts in its construction and production of exhibits, nor in their interpretation. Its exhibitions were not designed with an outside audience in mind but as meant to be serving its own community. Due to the “appointment only” nature of the visits to the SFM, the visitor experience is very much mediated through volunteers such as Chan. All the display text is in Chinese, which also makes it accessible to a very specific demographic. The experience is, therefore, one that brings you into direct and close contact with the originators and community custodians of these memories, supported further by oral accounts delivered as part of one’s guided experience of the museum. The museum can be significantly empowering to both the Serdang community and also to any visitor with a shared past, whether of Hakka descent or who have lived or live in a New Village. This history surfaces and gives prominence to a shared heritage that has for the most part gone undocumented in the public eye. The community museum is a platform for both individual and collective voices to be heard, for shared remembering and the staging of memories and the practice of culture. It is a strategy for organisation and community empowerment. Its power lies not just in the staging and output of exhibitions, but in the very processes of organising, gathering, remembering, arguing and resolving conflict. By a community coming together to do this, it can strengthen bonds and build solidarity amongst its members; it fosters respect for self and each other and allows for a community to be seen in ways they want to be seen by other members of society. It also enables collective claims for recognition with its socio-political implications and potential for political action. Through the comparison of the narratives presented in the state institutions and those of the SFM, the omissions and gaps in the construct of National Heritage, which emphasises a nation-building theme over the many subjective lived experiences of the populace, clearly emerge, ­alongside a more problematic reduction or erasure of community identities. However, what is also evident is that grassroots agents are claiming spaces for themselves, and that alternative forms of archiving, research and documentation are taking place. The story of modern Malaysia is incomplete without the more sensitive episodes in the nation’s history that have thus far been downplayed in school history curricula and in the official institutional representations. By eliminating social history from official accounts, the state is able to present a more black and white reading of the past, without the shades of grey that inevitably arise when the human

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f­actor is foregrounded. It also enables the (mis)representation and misrecognition of communities according to state agendas. In the case of the Emergency Period, scholarly attention has taken place in waves, as highlighted by Judith Strauch in the introduction to her 1981 case study of a New Village in Perak: “though the new villages received some notoriety in the war literature of the ‘Emergency’ and were the focus of more serious studies in the 1960s, they have not been singled out for much scholarly attention (since)” (126). The Emergency Period may be over, but it seems that the struggle for the hearts and minds of Malaysians continues. Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad’s film Lelaki Komunis Terakhir (The Last Communist) was famously banned in 2006 on account of its “sensitive” subject matter, a ban that is still in effect today (“Censorship Board: Ban on Amir Muhammad’s Lelaki Komunis Terakhir still on”, The Star, 6 October 2018, accessed 13 April 2019). There is much to suggest that communism is the trigger here,10 and the possibility that communism may be presented in favourable or sympathetic terms seems to be a fear within sections of the government; this is a fear that results in outright suppression rather than dialogue. More recently, in April 2019, the news portal Malaysiakini reported a call by an opposition party lawmaker for new or amended museum regulations to monitor the artefacts and contents displayed in private museums because of claims that activist groups were “attempting to distort history, particularly with regard to the Communist insurgency” (Kow Gah Chie, “Gov’t urged to regulate private museums to prevent ‘distortions’ of history”, Malaysiakini, 4 April 2019, accessed 7 April 2019). Barisan Nasional lawmaker Mastura Mohd Yazid is quoted as saying that “they (the communists) were not (freedom) fighters. The real (freedom) fighters were the security forces who fought the Communists” and that “recently, there was a group of activists who worked hard to change these historical facts”, clearly indicating that for certain political officers, any aspect of history other than the official government-­sanctioned version is impermissible. In recent years, we have, in fact, seen an increase in a new type of researcher: artists, culture workers and enthusiasts of history, initiating and participating in activities that seek to engage with the past in ways that are rooted in the present. Projects like Soon Choon Mee’s art carnivals and the 2009 participatory arts project Entry Points by Serdang-born and now Singapore-based artist Chu Chu Yuan have sought to create engagements between artists and residents of Serdang. Independent archive and research initiatives like the Malaysia Design Archive and the Rumah Attap

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Library and Collective 84, both located in the Zhongshan building in Jalan Kampung Attap, Kuala Lumpur, a sort of commune of creative businesses and nonprofit entities, are both contemporary initiatives where academics, researchers and history buffs are able to gather, organise educational talks and workshops, and develop a network of critical, socially minded, independent advocates of heritage. Such efforts contribute to a groundswell of a people’s history and community heritage movement. In conclusion, however, I wish to strike a cautionary note. There is a risk that community-specific efforts could become closed to the rest of society in the bid to take control of their own cultural interpretations and representations, something exacerbated by the language divides that mark Malaysia’s socio-cultural landscape—seen most often between dialect-­ speaking and Mandarin Chinese, Malay-speaking communities and English-speaking urban and suburban middle-class communities, but not excluding Tamil-speaking communities and the diverse groups of Borneo with their many languages and accompanying politics. Just as the state museums’ National Heritage discourse is overwhelmingly Malay-centric (Abu Talib 2015), community heritage can easily become overwhelmingly ethnocentric in its engagement with its present and its past. It must be mentioned that this investigation was conducted entirely in English and the texts which I was able to draw from were also written in English with the exception of a few translated works. There are scholars writing in Chinese on the topic of new villages or Malaysian history, to whose works I do not have access, but who would be well known to the custodians of the Serdang Folk Museum. It is evident that there is also a large network of ethnic Chinese artists and people engaged in various cultural work in or from Serdang. While the act of validation that the folk museum brings to the Chinese community, both of Serdang and beyond, mainly owing to its media reach, is important, it is a delicate balance between community pride and a potential ethnocentric communalism. As Kuo (1992) cautions in his discussion of the Chinatown History Project: (While) a more integrative and inclusive community history can help to counter the sense of marginalization and disempowerment vis-à-vis the large society […] this type of community history can also be limiting and claustrophobic. For example, the celebration of Chinatown’s history can become too narrow-minded and overly culturally nationalist […]. Chineseness can easily be overemphasized, becoming an essentialist and quasi-genetic characteristic untouchable by comparisons with other experiences. (294)

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These complexities are ones that cannot be ignored and must be addressed with sensitivity and commitment. Community museums such as the Serdang Folk Museum do play a vital role for both the community of origin but also for the rest of society as an opportunity for intercultural dialogue. They can empower through acts of community-led agency and redress imbalances in the National Heritage narrative. However, for the community museum to be of most value to the community, it also needs to be self-reflective and to engage more directly with other segments of society. This will allow for the mutual exchange of experiences of being Malaysian and the intermingling of both shared and distinctly different heritages. Only then can we see the museum become truly discursive in enabling conversations to take place within and between communities and to facilitate mutual understanding and empathy. Only then do we also see the museum achieve its value as a site and process of heritage-making and for the enactment of public culture.

Notes 1. The term Bumiputera roughly translates to “sons of the soil” and is the official term used by the Malaysian government for ethnic Malays and those considered indigenous to the Malay lands. Controversial affirmative action policies for those categorised as Bumiputera were implemented, following the 1970 New Economic Policy, and continue to be in effect despite various calls for reform of what is perceived as an outdated ethnicbased policy that leaves itself open to abuse and which has not necessarily yielded the desired results. 2. The Federal Elections of 1969 were marked by ethnic-based protectionism and the election result, which saw large wins by ethnic Chinese parties, led to victory celebrations and counter-rallies by supporters of the ethnicMalay party the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), that deteriorated in communal violence on 13 May 1969. This incident is widely framed as the darkest period in Malaysia’s history and although firmly recognised in official accounts of history, the dissection of the incident has been avoided in school history books and only in recent years has the experiences of individuals who lived through this period being given more attention in the media. 3. This is the standard for official representations of Malaysian multiculturalism, completely disregarding the vast diversity of Borneo and the many different ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups within Indian and Chinese

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communities. It has also consistently grouped Nusantara cultures—Bugis, Javanese, Mandailing, among others—under the heading of “Malay”. 4. Cheras is a suburban township about fifteen minutes from Kuala Lumpur city centre. Kajang and Serdang are neighbouring townships in the state of Selangor, more or less located within a 10 km radius of each other. 5. For further details of Soon Choon Mee’s Community Art Carnivals, see the case study commissioned by Arts-ED in 2014, available at https:// www.communityarts.my/case-studies. Around the same time, various networks of artists and cultural practitioners have been organising similar community-­centred activities, such as Lost Gens in Kuala Lumpur, Aisyah Baharuddin in Shah Alam, Arts-ED in Penang, the Pangkor Festival in Pahang and the Kuala Sepetang Festival in Perak, to name a few. 6. This is explained by Chan as a new system that permits updates to the museum displays, while also accommodating the needs of the Serdang Art Gallery, an independent organisation that he also oversees, which is now going to be sharing the museum space. The new system is, therefore, both seen as an upgrade and also a strategy for how to manage both needs moving forward. 7. Many of these are documented on the Serdang Folk Museum (沙登民间故 事馆) Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Serdangfolkmuseum/ 8. A brief but fascinating account of the Serdang missionaries can be found in Chap. 1, “Long Live the Missionaries”, of Ong Hwee Keng’s More Ordinary Man’s Stories (2009), now out of print but available online at http://deargoldie.com/2016/07/12/an-ordinar y-mans-storiesbook-2/. The website also reproduces the chapter along with photographs, including one of the old clinic. 9. The dates presented in the SFM are factually inaccurate: 1949 is described as the start of the Malayan Emergency, whereas, in actual fact, it began in 1948 and lasted till 1960. The panel describes the Emergency as ending in 1952, but 1952 was the year that the New Village relocation projects ended. All textual information presented in the museum is written in Chinese and was translated into English with a professional translation service and ­verified by two additional readers, after the interviews with Chan. At the time of writing, it was not possible to revisit these with the curator, Chan, as he has been in recuperation from a series of operations. It is the author’s speculation that the dates speak directly to the period of the creation of the village within the time frame of the Emergency. 10. A detailed discussion from the filmmaker’s point of view is available on the official film blog: http://lastcommunist.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-islelaki-komunis-terakhir-banned.html

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References Abu Talib Ahmad. 2015. Museums, History and Culture in Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso. Bennett, Tony. 1990. The Political Rationality of the Museum. Continuum 3 (1): 35–55. Blake, Janet. 2009. UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Implications of Community Involvement in ‘Safeguarding. In Intangible Heritage, ed. Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, 45–73. London and New York: Routledge. Camarena, Cuauhtemoc, and Teresa Morales. 2006. Community Museums and Global Connections: The Union of Community Museums of Oaxaca. In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, 322–344. Durham: Duke University Press. Denis, Nao Hayashi, Ed. 2010. Community-Based Approach to Museum Development in Asia and the Pacific for Culture and Sustainable Development. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Department of Museums Malaysia. 2019. Department of Museums Malaysia. http://www.jmm.gov.my/en/content/about-department-museums-malaysia Duncan, Carol. 1991. Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 88–103. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia. 2011. Diasporic Translocation and ‘The Multicultural Question’ in Malaysia. MOSAIC: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 44 (2): 19–34. ———. 2014. ‘After the Break’: Re-Conceptualizing Ethnicity, National Identity and ‘Malaysian-Chinese’ Identities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37 (7): 1211–1224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.859286. Hall, Stuart. 2000. Whose Heritage?: Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-imagining the Post-nation. Third Text 49: 3–13. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1989. The Museum in the Disciplinary Society. In Museum Studies in Material Culture, ed. Susan M. Pearce, 61–72. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Karp, Ivan. 1992. Introduction: Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. In Museums and Communities, ed. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D.  Lavine, 1–17. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1991. Objects of Ethnography. In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, 386–443. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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Kua, Kia Soong, ed. 1990. Malaysian Cultural Policy and Democracy. Kuala Lumpur: Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. Kuo, John Wei Tchen. 1992. Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment. In Museums and Communities, ed. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D.  Lavine, 285–326. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Macdonald, Sharon J. 2003. Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities. Museum and Society 1 (1): 1–16. Mandal, Sumit K. 2008. The National Culture Policy and Contestation Over Malaysian Identity. In Globalisation and National Autonomy: The Experience of Malaysia, ed. Joan M. Nelson, Jacob Meerman, and Abdul Embong, 274–300. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Perbadanan Adat Melayu dan Warisan Negeri Selangor. n.d. Perbadanan Adat Melayu dan Warisan Negeri Selangor (PADAT). Shah Alam. Rassool, Ciraj. 2006. Community Museums, Memory Politics, and Social Transformations in South Africa. In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, 287–321. Durham: Duke University Press. Rowland, Kathy. 2015. Culture and the Arts in Malaysia: Playing to Multiple Galleries. In Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Malaysia, ed. Meredith L. Weis, 337–346. London and New York: Routledge. Sandhu, Kernial Singh. 1964. The Saga of the ‘Squatter’ in Malaya: A Preliminary Survey of the Causes, Characteristics and Consequences of the Resettlement of Rural Dwellers during the Emergency between 1948 and 1960. Journal of Southeast Asian History 5 (1, Mar.): 143–177. ———. 1973. Introduction. In Chinese New Villages in Malaya: A Community Study, ed. Ray Nyce. Singapore: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. The Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2017a. Heritage, Identity, Power. In Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-­ Making in Asia, 15–39. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. ———. 2017b. ‘We Are… We Are Everything’: The Politics of Recognition and Misrecognition at Immigration Museums. Museum & Society 15 (1): 69–86. Stephens, John, and Reena Tiwari. 2015. Symbolic Estates: Community Identity and Empowerment Through Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (1): 99–11. Strauch, Judith. 1981. “Chinese New Villages of the Malayan Emergency, A Generation Later: A Case Study”. Contemporary Southeast Asia 3 (2): 126–139. Watson, Sheila, ed. 2007. Museums and their Communities. London and New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Dual Triumphalist Heritage Narrative and the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement Heong-Hong Por

Introduction Unlike other heritage movements in Malaysia, which are largely ethnic-­ based and culture obsessed (Cartier 1996; Worden 2001), the preservation movement of the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement (SBLS thereafter), also widely referred to as the “Valley of Hope”,1 is concerned with the conservation of a site that is associated with a socially stigmatised disease. Built at a jungle fringe in Selangor in 1930, SBLS was constructed as a place for the treatment, and forced isolation from wider society, of people suffering from leprosy. Although leprosy knows no racial boundaries as people of any background can be afflicted with the disease, nearly eighty per cent of the patients admitted to SBLS have been ethnic Chinese. Of the rest, about fifteen per cent were ethnic Malays with ethnic Indians making up five per cent. Former patients who were  cured but left with differing degrees of disfigurement and disability are also residents of the SBLS today.2 SBLS’s population reached its peak with 2400 people in 1958, but today their number is just slightly over one hundred (Joshua-­ Raghavar 1983; Wong and Phang 2006). The demographic structure of the settlement remains more or less the same as in the old days but this

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does not reflect the prevalence of leprosy because the disease is now curable, with newly detected cases being treated on an  outpatient  basis. However, the over representation of ethnic Chinese in the settlement consolidates the myth that leprosy is a “Chinese disease”.3 Nonetheless, the SBLS movement is the first of its kind to show an interest in a place of historic significance that transcends ethnicity, representing a departure from mainstream heritage discourses in Malaysia. What is so unique about the SBLS that it deserves heritage status? Who are those at the forefront of the movement to preserve SBLS as a heritage site? What purpose and whose interests do the calls for preservation serve? Different people would give different answers to this set of questions. It needs to be stated that this chapter is not interested to argue whether or not SBLS deserves the status of heritage, but rather to investigate how it has become a site for heritage-making and what it represents as a heritage site in the discourses of the conservation movement. Informed by the work of social constructionists, I take the view that heritage is not static but rather subject to a process of negotiation that is influenced by various historical factors and actors (Harvey 2001; Lowenthal 1997). Presentism— the adherence to present-day concepts, concerns, values and attitudes in interpreting past events—undoubtedly underpins SBLS’s heritage discourse. However, this chapter moves beyond merely proving the influence of presentism to also examine why presentism persists in the movement. As activists have argued, the SBLS heritage movement is important for future generations. I would further argue that how the movement conceptualises SBLS as a heritage site is equally significant. As importantly, heritage discourses simultaneously highlight and obscure different aspects of a site with complicated pasts (MacCannall 2011; Smith 2006; Walsh 1992). Reading or attributing qualities to a heritage site or obscuring certain aspects about it or its past can have epistemic implications as both can shape popular perception and the symbolic meanings of the site (Lowenthal 1997, 2015). This chapter draws on newspaper articles, newsletters and book publications on the SBLS to put together a picture of its preservation movement. It is divided into three parts. The first part chronicles the genesis and evolution of the movement, the second deals with its shifting preservation discourses and the final section provides an evaluation of the impact of the movement from the perspective of a descendant of sufferers of the disease. Before proceeding, I would like to bring two points to the readers’ attention. First, I am one of the members of the “Save Valley of Hope

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Solidarity Group”. I share my peers’ desire for SBLS to be made a heritage site but with a slightly different vision, as will be elaborated later. Second, I wish to emphasise that the community concerned with the preservation of the SBLS is not a homogenous one. Differences exist not just between residents and non-residents but also within and between the groups in the movement. Every member influences and contributes to the movement in different ways. This chapter is a contemplation of the SBLS movement with the aim of opening up a discursive space that engages in depth and critically with a heritage that has a “dark” or ostracised past.

Genesis and Evolution of the SBLS Heritage Movement The history of the leprosarium in Malaysia extends further than that of the SBLS, in both a temporal and geographical sense. Pulau Serimbun in Melaka, Pulau Jerejak in Penang and the Setapak Camp in Selangor are among the sites for the segregation of leprosy patients built much earlier than the SBLS. Thus, the SBLS became a starting point for the leprosy heritage movement in Malaysia by contingency. The cessation of their operations is one of the main reasons that the older leprosariums  have fallen out of popular attention. SBLS, too, faded out of public memory for several decades, as leprosy was no longer seen as a public health threat after effective treatment was discovered in the early 1980s. It was not until 2006 that SBLS came under the media limelight, with the publication of a book by Joyce Wong Chau Yin and Phang Siew Sia titled Valley of Hope: Sungai Buloh National Leprosy Control Center. The settlement again drew public attention later that year, when parts of the cemetery for its deceased residents were badly damaged by commercial horticultural activities in the settlement. Responding to the call by Tang Ah Chye, who was then Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall (KLSCAH) and a cemetery preservationist, a group of volunteers, myself included, went forward to the SBLS to map and document the seven-decade-old cemetery.4 The cemetery itself constitutes an important archive of the history of leprosy and of the SBLS. In the meantime, residents had been informed that the land on the East Section had been acquired by Universiti Teknologi Mara for the construction of a medical school. Over fifty elderly residents, who were also former leprosy patients, through the Sungai Buloh Settlement Council (previously known as the

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Patients’ Council), openly petitioned against the land acquisition and urged the authorities to protect their welfare and their livelihood as operators of plant nurseries in the SBLS.5 The settlement, once a colony of compulsory quarantine, was now a living space that was home to many former leprosy patients. Despite the opposition put up by the residents, a bulldozer was sent by the developer; it reduced the old prison to rubble in early September 2007. Over the span of a year, rapid changes in the SBLS, in addition to the demolition of the prison, included the fencing up of the East Section and the erection of “no trespass” signs near the purported construction site. This eventually caught the attention of non-residents who were concerned with the fate that had befallen what they considered to be a site that marked a significant phase in Malaysian history. Responding to the demolition of the prison in the settlement, Lim Yong Long, a researcher specialising in the architectural history of leprosariums, penned an article for Malaysiakini (7 September 2007) on the reasons for preserving the SBLS.  Unlike the residents’ petition, which had focused on the former patients’ right to a livelihood in the settlement, Lim’s statement drew attention to six “significant values” for which SBLS should be considered a heritage site, all of which, he argued, were in line with the criteria set by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) and the 2005 National Heritage Act.6 The six heritage values he invoked  touched on several broad areas, including architectural aesthetics, the achievements made by the drug trials, the humane design and the multiethnic environment of the SBLS.  Both the residents and Lim shared the view of the importance of preserving the site but for different reasons. Equally dismayed and angered by the demolition activities was a group of urban-based architects, academics and activists, among whom were volunteers who had participated in the mapping of the SBLS cemetery a year earlier. They came together to form the “Save Valley of Hope Solidarity Group” (SVHSG thereafter) later that year, marking the beginning of a non-resident community-led heritage preservation movement. Up to this point, SVHSG as a non-resident community was in the process of understanding the disease and picking up historical fragments of the SBLS from any available source, while working with the residents on the settlement’s preservation. Given the paucity of historical research on the SBLS, the late resident Anthony Joshua-Raghavar’s book, Leprosy in Malaysia: Past, Present and Future (1983), documented important glimpses into the past; Wong and Phang’s 2006 book offered clues about daily life in the

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s­ ettlement; and Lim’s architectural expertise proposed a direction for the preservation movement. With the involvement of non-resident preservationists, the movement began to incorporate aspects on architectural aesthetics and the medical significance of the settlement, with the architectural experts and activists framing their heritage discourse on SBLS in terms of its status as a self-supporting “Garden City”.7 As the heritage movement gained momentum, several internal conversations began to take place among SVHSG members. Should the movement engage the wider public or should it take the form of lobbying and negotiating with the authorities through formal channels hidden from public attention? Should the protest be confrontational, similar to the movement to preserve the Losheng Sanatorium in Taipei County,8 or should it be a peaceful negotiation? While many of them  admired the strength and scale of the confrontational resistance shown in the Losheng case, SBLS residents also  expressed their concern that they risked jeopardising their welfare if the resistance were to turn antagonistic. Their anxieties were not entirely baseless, given the authoritarian nature of Malaysia’s ruling regime. Taking the residents’ concerns into account, SVHSG opted for a non-confrontational approach to educate the public about the historical and heritage value of the SBLS without giving up lobbying through formal channels. Regular community activities were held to engage both residents and non-residents and to attract media coverage. In addition to organising festivals like community activities, members of the SVHSG began to work on documentaries and collect oral histories. I worked with two TV producers, Joshua Wong and Tan Ean Nee, and contributed as a coordinator of a documentary titled “The Everlasting Valley of Hope” in 2008. Despite the resistance put up by the SVHSG, the East Section of the SBLS was completely demolished in 2008, and its residents relocated to other parts of the settlement. Undeterred by this, a few members continued with their preservation efforts, this time employing oral history for “community building” (Chou and Loh 2012; Chou and Ho 2013), while others used the same approach to document the emotional world of the sufferers and that of their children who were forced to separate from them (Tan and Wong 2012). Fears of a demolition of a grander scale lingered with rumours surfacing in 2016 that a second demolition was on its way for the construction of a federal infectious disease control centre. The SVHSG initiated an online petition to seek public support against the demolition, reassert the significance of the SBLS as a heritage site by highlighting it as “the second

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largest leprosarium in the world”, and to pressure the authorities to preserve the place.9 Meanwhile, Tan Ean Nee, a former NTV7 Mandarin newsreader and a long-time volunteer at the SBLS, joined the Sungai Buloh Settlement Council as a non-resident member and formed a new group called “Care & Share Circle” (CSC thereafter). The CSC under Tan’s leadership has so far produced at least three DVDs and two books10 in multiple languages, mainly stories about the reunion between sent-away children and their parents, and it has also conducted guided tours of the site. Under CSC’s intensive efforts at crowdfunding and mobilisation, the preservation movement culminated in the launch in February 2018 of an on-site initiative, the “Valley of Hope Story Gallery”. The theme for both the fundraising campaign and the launching ceremony was “You Are the Hero”. The idea was to view as heroic not only the leprosy patients, and their extreme pain and suffering, but also all those who sponsored the gallery and had contributed to the campaign. The gallery highlighted the contributions made by leprosy sufferers who had participated in the medical trials. It also  emphasised the positive aspects of the colonial legacy and called attention to the natural, Arcadian beauty of the site. A day after the launch, the SBLS management, for the first time, openly agreed to work with the activists and to jointly call for the leprosy sanatorium to be deemed a national as well as a UNESCO world heritage site. How committed they are to this goal remains to be seen. In the meantime, the management was also repurposing several blocks of old buildings into on-site history galleries, with a focus on showcasing medical and clinical artefacts and framing the development of the treatment of leprosy in terms of a triumphalist account of medical modernity. Not wanting to appear to the public as being indifferent to the cause of heritage preservation, yet also not wanting to oppose the Ministry of Health’s decision to demolish SBLS for the construction of a federal infectious disease control centre, the management wanted to convey the impression that “we too care about the heritage of SBLS” through the setting up of these official galleries. Ironically, despite enjoying institutional support, the official galleries are hardly ever open to the public and not as popular as their community-operated counterpart. I will now turn to examine the evolution of the SBLS heritage preservation discourse.

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Shifting SBLS Heritage Discourses and Un-decolonised Subaltern History In the residents’ very first petition against the acquisition of their land for redevelopment in 2006, the SBLS was presented as a living commune, a home for aged residents who had spent decades of their lives in the settlement. In a deferential tone, the petition expressed the residents’ simple wish to be allowed a livelihood and spend the rest of their old age in the settlement. The SBLS was not viewed as a heritage site then. On 22 October 2007, the SBS Council issued a second statement, following the demolition of the prison. This time, the SBS Council began to consider the value of the place beyond the mere protection of the residents’ livelihood, urging the authorities to also appreciate and value the site’s architectural significance. Fusing two different discourses, on the SBLS as home and the SBLS as heritage, was of strategic importance. A sole emphasis on home and livelihood could be met with relocation to a new shelter or with financial compensation. However, relocation would be a displacement too drastic and inconvenient for many of the community’s elderly and disabled residents. Appropriating the discourse of the site’s architectural significance, which although it was external to them and their personal interests, made it more likely for the residents to keep both their livelihood and the buildings they called home. Without this local context and interests, the SBLS  discourse of architectural and aesthetic value would have reinforced what Laurajane Smith (2006, 11) has identified as “international authorized heritage discourse” (IAHD), which refers to officially recognised and expert-defined concepts of heritage that privilege monumentality, grand-scale artefacts and sites of great historical value. In his analysis of the international heritage discourse employed by the activists, social historian Loh Kah Seng (2011) observes that most of the residents were largely passive in preserving the place as a heritage site due to their sense of impending mortality (237). Nonetheless, he notes that Lee Chor Seng, who was the most vocal of the residents and the then Chairman of the SBS Council, and who had been very vocal in defending his community, had consciously merged two different discourses, the international heritage discourse and the desire for keeping SBLS as home (Loh 2011, 238). Though rare among the residents, Lee’s voice does represent the agency of his community. Leading up to the setting up of the community-run, on-site Story Gallery ten years later, the preservation discourse shifted again, with the

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heritage narrative taking on a physical and material form when the gallery was finally launched in 2018. Perhaps, it is easier to promote a site associated with positive stories than one with a stigmatised and dark past. “[The] story gallery will revolve around the inmates’ stories and the positive values of the cultural heritage, which is intangible, because what truly moves people are the meaningful and touching stories”, said the founder Tan Ean Nee during the fundraising campaign.11 This time the notion of “positive values” takes centre stage. It was hoped that, by sanitising a place of pain and shame into a place of positivity, the preservation movement would move closer to its primary goal to destigmatise the disease. The gallery’s preservation discourse of tangible heritage, which references the settlement’s physical architecture, is fused with the intangible stories of the heroism of leprosy sufferers and that also of the doctors who treated them. Not only are the buildings endowed with aesthetic values, the medical treatment of the patients is also painted with a celebratory brush. This new heritage narrative interprets the official colonial narrative in relation to the SBLS as an “enlightened policy”, hailing its medical doctors as heroes, and differentiates it from the pre-SBLS, “uncivilised” treatment of leprosy in the Setapak Camp. It is silent on the negative aspects of colonialism, such as the unequal power relations, police brutality, racialisation, paternalism and criminalisation that characterised this period of SBLS history.12 The activists also repeatedly highlight SBLS as “the second largest leprosarium in the world”, resurrecting the tagline used by the colonial authorities themselves to advertise and glorify their achievements in public health. The historical context where medical scientists in different parts of the colonial empire viewed the leprosariums they were building in increasing numbers as a theatre for the performance and experimentation of their methods is completely erased.13 Also missing from this “positive narrative” is the significant fact that compulsory segregation was a greatly contested idea and practice up to the early 1930s, when a few colonial administrators and medical doctors pushed it through despite leprosy already being proven to be only a mildly contagious disease (Joshua-Raghavar 1983, 64; Loh 2009; Por 2018).14 The on-site Story Gallery also accords a central place to visual culture, which was a prime aspect of the “great colonial medicine” trope. Photographs of different genres feature prominently in the gallery, but are re-framed in terms of a positive narrative to make an “intangible” culture visible. The very photos that were used by colonial medical authorities to construct the pathogenic body of the racial Other are now used to i­ llustrate

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colonial benevolence and display the dramatic effects of colonial medicine on the diseased body (Burke 2001; Hattori 2011; Imada 2017; Por 2018; Stepen 2001). These photos vindicate both the medical and heritage significance of the SBLS (Fig. 4.1). As the SBLS is represented as an enlightened and benevolent colonial legacy, the implications are that it is the duty of present-day Malaysians to inherit and then bequeath such a legacy as a “national heritage” to future generations. As succinctly argued by Watson and Waterton, heritage-making is “a process of selection and display, and the ascription of meaning to the objects concerned” (2010, 89). On the other hand, the rich oral history accounts of the leprosarium’s residents, which once might have served to document the emotional trauma of forced segregation, are now presented as testimonies of victory over bodily suffering and of  human resilience. Former leprosy patients have rightly been recognised by the preservationists for their sacrifice and contributions to the medical trials. Without their participation in the ­trials,

Fig. 4.1  A propagandistic photo of the drug trial, framed in terms of a “before-­ after treatment” trope, taken in the 1930s

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there would be no effective drugs for the disease today. Indeed, they endured hardship and survived intense discrimination. But drawing attention to the heroism and resilience of the patients is not tantamount to effacing the discrimination and injustices they experienced as pathogenic subjects living under compulsory quarantine and separation from their family and society. This is to ignore or, worse, mitigate the repressive nature of the colonial regime. This is not to say that representing the disease in positive terms is not a laudable move. On the contrary, reinterpreting the residents’ social ostracism is instrumental in destigmatising the disease and returning justice and dignity to people afflicted by it. However, this can be done without romanticising colonial rule, which had played a key role in reinforcing fear of the disease by imposing compulsory segregation with the help of the police force and by ignoring humane calls for voluntary segregation. But as correctly observed by Loh (2011, 2018), the SBLS activists utilised oral histories for the express purpose of heritage preservation. Their agenda in reinterpreting these stories positively was not to counter official and colonial narratives. Interrogating the “heroic” narrative of subaltern colonial subjects is to bring out the epistemic implications of the preservation movement’s dual triumphalist narrative, which tells us not only about the past, albeit selectively, but also about the dangers of a depoliticised discourse of the SBLS as a heritage site. A depoliticised account of SBLS not only creates the false impression that colonialism was benevolent and benign but also the notion that compulsory isolation was necessary and inevitable. Indeed, there is no lack of stories about patients who had exercised their agency against their harsh regime of quarantine. For example, there are accounts of patients who made their own rice wine and of others who furtively left the settlement to get a glimpse of the outside world, activities which were banned by the settlement’s administrators (Loh 2009; Wong and Phang 2006). In the early 1970s, a few radicalised residents even organised a demonstration to protest against the discharging of recovered patients for fear of the discrimination they would face in the world beyond the gates of the SBLS. The demonstration was deemed disrespectful of the authorities; a pictorial history book published by CSC labelled the demonstration’s organisers as “ringleaders” (Care & Share Circle 2015, 247–248). While a decontextualised account of the past elides the hierarchy and power relations that operated in the settlement, reading along the grain robs the patients of their agency and reduces them to passive objects of ­governmentality. As

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pointed out by Loh (2011, 237), the activists “negated the active role of the residents in unmaking and remaking the leprosarium from initially a prison into a genuine community”. Viewing heritage as a process, rather than as a fixed, ready-made narrative, reveals the preservation movement’s selective appropriations of the past. Nonetheless, the pasts of SBLS are saturated with complexities and contradictions, which defy harmonisation and sanitisation for any singular narrative or purpose. As one enters the Valley of Hope Story Gallery, one is immediately greeted with dissonant messages. On the right hand side of the entrance, a section that chronicles the contribution of medical and health officers, the narrative starts by describing Dr E.A.O. Travers as the progenitor of an “enlightened policy”, whose proposal of “a leprosarium without barbed wires or high walls, and more like a home away from home” resulted in the establishment of the leprosarium in Sungai Buloh in 1930. On the left hand side is a different section that documents the  everyday lives  of patients in the settlement; the section’s short introduction announces that “the policy of forced segregation brought a group of leprosy patients to the edge of despair” (Fig. 4.2). There is a missing link between these two contradictory messages. The inclusion into the heritage narrative of the workings of colonial ideology, such as the legitimisation of the highly contested practice of segregation, would likely have introduced cognitive dissonance into that narrative. Understandably, the well-meaning activists were constructing a positive past for the SBLS to market a place with a dark history to the wider public. As Loh (2011, 237) puts it, the activities to gloss over the negative aspects of colonial rule “reveal the underlying tensions between history and heritage”. In contrast to the debates on colonialism in Singapore, where colonial rule is painted as a positive and benevolent force in dominant or state narratives (Huang 2018), a similar view of colonialism is propagated in Malaysia but from bottom-up perspectives in the SBLS. The move by SBLS activists to draw attention to the gains introduced by the colonial administration could also serve as an indirect critique of the present-day regime for its lack of interest to preserve the place. In the eyes of a section of the SBLS activists, the destruction of SBLS is a symbol of the dissolution of British medical modernity and philanthropy by the excesses of the present-day, authoritarian, Malay-­ dominant regime.

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Fig. 4.2  Contradictory messages at the entrance of the Valley of Hope Story Gallery. Left: An introduction to a section which documents the residents’ everyday lives in the SBLS. Right: An introduction to the origins of the SBLS

Remaking SBLS and Destigmatisation Heritage is a powerful medium of representation that selects, frames and sacralises its chosen subjects and objects (Walsh 1992; Watson and Waterton 2010). If leprosy was once under the colonial medical gaze, it has now come under the gaze of heritage preservationists and tourists. Heritage is a particularly effective platform to engage the wider public to relearn their past. Preserving the SBLS as a heritage site with the objective of destigmatising leprosy is an especially laudable move. Despite the problems inherent in a presentist interpretation of the past, the preservation movement has reshaped not only public perception of the disease but also the self-perception of the sufferers themselves. Joyce Wong, the co-author of Valley of Hope: The Sungai Buloh National Leprosy Control Center and a descendant of sufferers who grew up in SBLS, acknowledged in an interview the contributions made by the preservation movement:

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People from outside are so much more passionate than the residents in preserving the place. Not that preserving the buildings is not good, but it is more important to de-stigmatise the disease. We have to ask: What is the preservation for? How is it going to benefit the residents? You can see that the residents are not really active in the preservation, they just play along so long as it does not cause any troubles. What they care most is the safety and peacefulness of the place, and that their welfare is well taken care of. But this preservation movement does spark something among the residents, for example my own parents, they never thought this place deserves preserving until the outsiders came to care so much about it and see the values of preserving it. The movement and the publicity it gets give a lot of exposure for the residents who used to remain anonymous. They were not comfortable being seen in public due to their unpleasant experience when leprosy was still highly stigmatised. But the genuine concern and interest shown by the people who came in to get to know them have given them their sense of self-­ worth. I’ll say it, give them back the dignity they deserve. Many descendants of ex-leprosy sufferers are [however] not passionate about preserving the place. Because many of them were sent away for adoption and never grew up in the place like I did, hence [they are] not sentimental about the place. Some still feel uncomfortable about coming out to the public to defend the place, because they [have] never got rid of the phobia they have internalised.15

Before the SBLS was opened to the public, there were three security gates that residents had to pass through to leave the commune. The security restrictions also hampered outsiders from entering the settlement. Surrounded by hills and forests, the SBLS has always been a place of scenic beauty. The removal of the gates in the late 1970s exposed the place to outsiders, and many may now enter freely to experience its beauty. Some SBLS activists argue that heritage, unlike history, allows people to experience and appreciate a place. But experiencing a place is not equivalent to educating and enlightening themselves about its pasts. The display of the residents’ stories in the gallery might even feed the illusion that just reading these accounts is enough to know about the settlement’s past. Furthermore, the phobia experienced and internalised by some ­descendants, as mentioned by Wong, is another indication that heritage per se is insufficient to rid the disease of its social stigma.

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Nonetheless, the SBLS as a heritage site can serve as an on-site facilitator or a catalyst that invites people to explore and engage more deeply and critically with the past. As argued by Dean MacCannall (2011, 178), “every effective memorial depends on narration both on- and offsite”.

Concluding Thoughts Existing critical heritage studies scholarship tends to assume the topdown influence of heritage discourse, but the case of the SBLS indicates otherwise. Years after the movement began, the official website of the Ministry of Tourism, Art and Culture now has an entry on the SBLS, albeit with a focus on its architecture, indicating the power of a community-led heritage movement in shaping how society and the state could think about place.16 At the time of writing this chapter, SBLS is  on UNESCO’s tentative list as a potential nominee for UNESCO’s World Heritage site listing. As David Harvey (2001, 327) puts it, heritagemaking is “an instrument of cultural power”. Yet, the movement’s selective remembering of the past has epistemic implications. By highlighting the positive pasts of SBLS and obscuring its dark aspects, the movement creates a false impression that colonialism was benign and good, and that compulsory segregation was inevitable. Seeing SBLS in a positive lens may do no harm to the residents and the place, but nevertheless constitutes a form of epistemic injustice. As a place of complicated pasts and contradictions, the SBLS as a heritage site can be made more meaningful by scholars and activists engaging in conversations about the production of knowledge, identity, power and authority. This can be done by taking a more conscious and conscientious attempt to understand and represent the settlement’s history, instead of adopting or ensuring official interpretations which whitewash the site with a positive and paternalistic brush. Acknowledging the dark past of SBLS will do no harm to its status as a heritage site. Instead, it will enrich our understanding of the nation’s history, of human society and of the colonial state’s mechanisms of power and control. I have demonstrated how the SBLS movement evolved over the years and how its  preservation discourse shifted. Despite its present-centred reading of the past, the movement has effected an important shift in public perceptions of the disease and the settlement. The movement is also the first of its kind to depart from mainstream, ethnocentric heritage d ­ iscourses

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in Malaysia. As heritage, the SBLS can be a facilitator for a deeper exploration of the nation’s difficult and entangled pasts.

Notes 1. The term “Valley of Hope” was coined by a 1955 documentary produced by the Malayan Film Unit about the SBLS.  It was also the title of the documentary. 2. “Patients” and “residents” will be used interchangeably throughout this chapter. 3. For detailed accounts of how Europeans used leprosy to pathologise the colonial “racial Other” they encountered in the colonies from the nineteenth century, see Leung, A.  K. 2009. Leprosy in China: A History. New York: Columbia University Press; and Mawani, R. 2003. ‘The Island of the Unclean’: Race, Colonialism and ‘Chinese Leprosy’ in British Columbia, 1891–1924. Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal (LGD) 1: 1–21. 4. The report of the mapping can be found in the Dewan Perhimpunan Cina Kuala Lumpur dan Selangor (February 2007). A Field Report on the Cemetery in Sungai Buloh’s National Leprosy Control Center. Berita DPCKLS, February 2007, pp. 136–156. 5. “Residents of the East Section of Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement Petition Against Land Acquisition”, China Press, 1 September 2006, pp. C2; “Valley of Hope Seeks Preservation”, Nanyang Siang Pau, 3 September 2006, pp. G10. 6. Lim Yong Long’s statement is available at https://www.malaysiakini. com/rentakini/72118 [accessed: 2 February 2019]. 7. The “Garden City” is a method of urban planning, characterised by self-­ supporting communities surrounded by greenbelts, containing proportionate areas of residences, industry and agriculture. The method was promoted by British elites in England during the late nineteenth century. The design for SBLS was clearly influenced by the notion of the English Garden City, even though there is no archival record to suggest that SBLS set up by the colonial government in the early twentieth century was based on the idea of the Garden City. 8. The Losheng Sanatorium was built in Xinzhuang District in 1929 during the Japanese Occupation. In 2002, Taipei Mass Rapid Transit demolished seventy per cent of the sanatorium to make way for the construction of Xinzhuang MRT Depot. The demolition sparked a strong wave of ­confrontational resistance and a preservation movement throughout the 2000s and had inspired SBLS activists.

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9. “Save Valley of Hope Solidarity Group Protests Against Demolition of SBLS”, Kwong Wah Yit Poh, 28 May 2016; “Preserving Leprosy Settlement History”, The Star, 4 October 2016. 10. The book titles are: Mohamed, N., and E. N. Tan. 2015. Reunion at the Graveyard: A True Story of a Lady Who Was Determined to Search for the Truth of Her Origins. Subang Jaya: Care & Share Circle; Care & Share Circle. 2015. Valley of Hope: Pictorial History Book. Subang Jaya: Care & Share Circle. 11. The fundraising campaign is available at: https://www.valleyofhope.my/ the-sungai-buloh-settlement-council/ [accessed: 2 February 2019]. 12. The vision of SBLS as a heritage as advanced by CSC is available at https:// www.mystartr.com/projects/valleyofhopestorymuseum [accessed: 2 February 2019]. 13. For more detailed accounts of inter-empire competition in the field of public health and medical science, read Planta, M. M. 2016. Hansen’s Disease and International Public Health in the Philippines. In Hidden Lives, Concealed Narratives: A History of Leprosy in the Philippines, ed. M.  S. Diokno, 193–221. Manila: National Historical Commission of the Philippines; Bashford, A. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. 14. See the correspondence between Frank Oldrieve, secretary of the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association and several medical officers in the Straits Settlement and Federated Malay States in 1924, as recorded in Arkib Negara’s file, accession no.: 1957/0233954. 15. Interviewed by the author on 5 March 2019. 16. The entry on the SBLS in the official website of the Heritage Department of Ministry of Tourism, Art and Culture. Accessed 2 March 2019. http:// www.heritage.gov.my/index.php/ms/konservasi/konservasi-tapak-warisan/pusat-kawalan-kusta-negara

References Bashford, A. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Burke, P. 2001. Eyewitnessing: The Use of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion Books. Care & Share Circle. 2015. The Valley of Hope: Pictorial History Book. Subang Jaya: Care & Share Circle. Cartier, C.L. 1996. Conserving the Built Environment and Generating Heritage Tourism in Peninsular Malaysia. Tourism Recreation Research 21 (1): 45–53.

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Chou, W.L., and S.F. Ho. 2013. Oral History, Heritage Conservation, and the Leprosy Settlement: The Sungai Buloh Community in Malaysia. In Oral History in Southeast Asia: Memories and Fragments, ed. K.S.  Loh, S.  Dobbs, and E. Koh, 159–175. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Chou, W.L., and C.M. Loh. 2012. Stories of Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement: A Valley Where Birds and Insects Sing for Hope. Kuala Lumpur: Save Valley of Hope Solidarity Group. Dewan Perhimpunan Cina Kuala Lumpur dan Selangor. 2007. A Field Report on the Cemetery in Sungai Buloh’s National Leprosy Control Center. Berita DPCKLS, February 2007, pp. 136–156. Harvey, D.C. 2001. Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies 7 (4): 319–338. Hattori, A.P. 2011. Re-membering the Past: Photography, Leprosy and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898–1924. The Journal of Pacific History 46 (3): 293–318. Huang, J. 2018. Stamford Raffles and the ‘Founding’ of Singapore: The Politics of Commemoration and Dilemmas of History. Journal of Malaysian Branch of Royal Asiatic Society 91 (Part 2, no. 315): 103–122. Imada, A.L. 2017. Promiscuous Signification: Leprosy Suspects in a Photographic Archive of Skin. Representations 138 (1): 1–36. Joshua-Raghavar, A. 1983. Leprosy in Malaysia: Past, Present and Future. Sungai Buloh: A. Joshua-Raghavar. Leung, A.K. 2009. Leprosy in China: A History. New  York: Columbia University Press. Lim, Y.  L. 2007. Preserve the Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement, September 7. Accessed March 4, 2019. https://www.malaysiakini.com/rentakini/72118 Loh, K.S. 2009. Making and Unmaking the Asylum: Leprosy and Modernity in Singapore and Malaysia. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Center. ———. 2011. ‘No More Road to Walk’: Cultures of Heritage and Leprosariums in Singapore and Malaysia. International Journal of Heritage Studies 17 (3): 230–244. Loh, K. S. 2018. Post-histories of Leprosy in Singapore. In Hansen’s Disease in Southeast Asia: Narratives of the Past and Present. Ho Chi Minh: SEASREP. Lowenthal, D. 1997. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. The Past is A Foreign Country: Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacCannall, D. 2011. The Ethics of Sightseeing. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Mawani, R. 2003. ‘The Island of the Unclean’: Race, Colonialism and ‘Chinese Leprosy’ in British Columbia, 1891–1924. Law, Social Justice and Global Development Journal, 1–21. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/elj/ lgd/2003_1/mawani/ Mohamed, N., and E.N. Tan. 2015. Reunion at the Graveyard: A True Story of A Lady Who Was Determined To Search for the Truth of Her Origins. Subang Jaya: Care & Share Circle. Planta, M.M. 2016. Hansen’s Disease and International Public Health in the Philippines. In Hidden Lives, Concealed Narratives: A History of Leprosy in the Philippines, ed. M.S.  Diokno, 193–221. Manila: National Historical Commission of the Philippines. Por, H. H. 2018. Re-Picturing Colonial Benevolence: Portraits of Persons Afflicted with Leprosy in British Malaya. In Hansen’s Disease in Southeast Asia: Narratives of the Past and Present. Ho Chih Minh: SEASREP. Smith, L. 2006. The Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. Stepen, N.L. 2001. Picturing Tropical Nature. London: Reaktion Books. Tan, E.N., and J. Wong. 2012. The Way Home: The Isolated Emotional World of Former Leprosy Patients and Their Descendants. Pulau Pinang: Tan Ean Nee & Joshua Wong. Walsh, K. 1992. The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-­ modern World. New York: Routledge. Watson, S., and E.  Waterton. 2010. Reading the Visual: Representation and Narrative in the Construction of Heritage. Material Culture Review 71: 84–97. Wong, C.Y., and S.S.  Phang. 2006. Valley of Hope: The Sungai Buloh National Leprosy Control Center. Petaling Jaya: Malaysian Chinese Association Subang Division. Worden, N. 2001. Where It All Began’: The Representation of Malaysian Heritage in Melaka. International Journal of Heritage Studies 7 (3): 199–218.

PART III

(Re)Mapping Multicultural and Folklore Heritage

CHAPTER 5

Cultural Mapping and the Making of Heritage Susan Philip

Introduction At a forum on heritage held at Universiti Malaya in 2018, Ho Kong Chong of the National University of Singapore made a comment about the value and utility of some aspects of tangible heritage, when he spoke of “mosquito buildings”—old buildings in Singapore that had been extensively restored, but had failed to become a part of the everyday life of the area, leaving them to be inhabited almost exclusively by mosquitos (Malaysia-Singapore Forum, 20–21 September 2018). Broadly, the comment asks us to think about what gets restored, as well as how and why. Who decides what needs preservation and for what purpose? Should preservation and restoration be about literally maintaining the façade to reflect the past as it was, or about the building or site then becoming a useful or popular part of the cultural life and identity of its environment, rather than just an empty monument? Are aspects of heritage selected for restoration and preservation, so that they can be frozen in amber and museumised? Carolyon Cartier ties this question more closely to the Malaysian situation:

S. Philip (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_5

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The issue of historic conservation without community preservation may be a question that Malaysia’s conservation planners will want to visit more carefully. The conservation of built structures alone runs the risk of yielding a material world where the absence of local people neutralises the soul of heritage that is ostensibly conserved. (1996, 50)

The importance of “soul” to heritage was also stressed by Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, when he pointed out that “the question of heritage is often a question of knowing ourselves, our landscape, our built environment, our involvement in customs and cultures and our inner strivings” (qtd. in Cartier 1996, 49)—clearly suggesting that heritage involves both external (“built environment”) and internal (“inner strivings”) aspects. This debate resonates strongly with the discourse about cultural heritage in Malaysia. There is tension between official definitions of culture (the preserved building, so to speak) and the everyday lived experience of it (i.e. whether that building is used). At the authoritative level, the state imposes narrow definitions of culture based on rigid ideas of “race”, ethnicity and belonging. Race is officially divided into four categories (Malay, Chinese, Indian, Other), specifically in order to be able to officially identify Malays, for the variety of special rights which are available to them as the authoritatively named bumiputra or “sons of the soil” (implying indigenous status in Malaysia). Official definitions of race are also tied to specific ideas about related cultures, and, in official terms, individuals are tied to quite restricted ideas about their heritage. For example, people identified as Indian or Chinese are assumed to embrace an “Indian” or “Chinese” heritage. These labels are problematic from the outset, because they fail to acknowledge the diversity inherent in Chinese and Indian cultures within the original homeland, let alone the added complexity that comes with being a Malaysian Chinese or Indian. Is cultural heritage, thus narrowly and restrictively defined by the Malaysian state, something of a “mosquito building”, in that it is packaged and trotted out when necessary, whether for flashy tourism extravaganzas, or for the purpose of reminding people where they “belong”, but is not “inhabited” in any meaningful sense by the people? Does it reflect lived experience, or does it ignore deep roots in a place, in favour of a narrative of recent immigration and close connections with “original” homelands? These questions are compounded by the insistence on preservation, which demands that there be a strong focus on cultural heritage as it was

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“then”, rather than looking at what it might have since become, or is in the process of becoming. Take, for example, the statement that “The Department of National Heritage will strive to preserve and protect Malaysia’s natural and cultural heritage as a legacy for future generations” (ICHC Courier Online). The phrasing situates heritage as something very much of the past, which is to be handed down intact to future generations, rather than being part of their everyday lived experience. Most attempts to counter the narrative of preservation, and to perhaps rewrite it, currently come from the grassroots level, through community projects often led by arts collectives and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Badan Warisan Malaysia. Badan Warisan put forward a more inclusive response towards the use and value of heritage: “to promote education so as to develop an understanding of our built heritage as an expression of our history and identity” (https://badanwarisanmalaysia. org/about-us-2/our-work/)—this statement acknowledges both the pastness and the presentness of heritage. The work they do is vital because it is important to rethink ways of dealing with both tangible and intangible heritage so that they do not lose their relevance within society as it develops. In this chapter, I intend to examine how a deep engagement with aspects of tangible heritage has the potential to also connect people with their intangible cultural heritage, so that they see it as part of a continuum of past, present and future. Importantly, this can work to counter the dominant rhetoric about culture and heritage within Malaysia and open avenues of discussion about how culture is developing and being experienced at the grassroots level. I will approach the idea through an analysis of two cultural mapping projects carried out by young people in Malaysia.

Cultural Heritage in Malaysia To begin, I would like to look at some ideas of what constitutes cultural heritage, and how it relates to individual and community lives. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) divides cultural heritage into the tangible and intangible: “Tangible cultural heritage includes movable items such as paintings, sculptures, coins, and manuscripts, and immovable items such as monuments and archaeological sites” (Salvatore and Lizama 2018, 4). Despite the physicality of tangible heritage, there can be arguments and controversy over what deserves to be included, and such decisions are generally made at a much higher authoritative level, even if public reactions are sought. What is

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­ fficially declared as tangible heritage is not necessarily what people within o the community respond to as being part of their lives. One good example of this can be seen in the argument over the 2006 demolition of Bok House, in Jalan Ampang, a main road in Kuala Lumpur and one of the oldest roads in the Klang Valley. Bok House was a mansion built in 1929 by an automotive tycoon and philanthropist; it “was occupied by the Yokohama Specie Bank in 1942” (Gill 2006), and then became a French fine-dining restaurant, Le Coq d’Or, from 1958 to 2001. Many private individuals and concerned NGOs protested and petitioned against the demolition of the building, saying, for example, that it was important because it “shows the lifestyle of olden days” (“Historian” 2006); eminent historian Khoo Kay Kim said that the house “was significant to KL history as well as the whole development of Ampang” (“Historian”). However, the then Minister of Culture, Arts and Heritage, Rais Yatim, dismissed it as just being the home of a rich man, issuing a challenge to those who disagreed: “If anyone can come forward to show the historic significance of the building, I would like to see him right in the eye” (“Historian”). Halimah Mohd Said, billed as a “heritage enthusiast”, meanwhile, asked “Besides its architectural splendour, what historical value is there?” (“Historian”). Khoo countered that the house could be considered to be of historical value by virtue of the fact that its builder was a significant figure in the development of Kuala Lumpur. The official refusal to acknowledge this raises the question of “who decides” on what is or is not significant. Bok House also had personal significance for many individuals because of its second life as a popular restaurant, but this clearly did not come into consideration at all. Even more fraught, though, is the notion of intangible cultural heritage, which includes “(1) oral traditions and expressions; (2) performing arts, widely defined; (3) social practices, rituals, and festive events; (4) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and (5) traditional craftsmanship” (Salvatore and Lizama 2018, 5). UNESCO’s definition of intangible cultural heritage emphasises that it is “Traditional, contemporary and living at the same time” (“Intangible Cultural Heritage” 4), as well as being inclusive, representative and community based. Being broadly inclusive, these definitions are also vague and open to interpretation by governments and individuals. Who, for example, decides what social practices and rituals represent part of the intangible heritage of the whole country? What happens when these practices, having been acknowledged as intangible heritage, become ossified and museumised?

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The issue of “who decides” on what makes heritage becomes clear in relation to Malaysia. The National Heritage Act of 2005 (NHA) confines its definition of national heritage to any “heritage site, heritage object, underwater cultural heritage or any living person declared as a National Heritage under section 67” (NHA 16). The focus seems to be very much on the tangible. Cultural heritage, meanwhile, is defined as follows: ‘cultural heritage’ includes tangible or intangible form of cultural property, structure or artefact and may include a heritage matter, object, item, artefact, formation structure, performance, dance, song, music that is pertinent to the historical or contemporary way of life of Malaysians, on or in land or underwater cultural heritage of tangible form but excluding natural heritage. (NHA 16)

While it includes both the tangible and the intangible, certain lived, social practices (rituals, festivals) are excluded from the definition, and therefore from national recognition. Is the Lunar New Year, for example, not a part of the intangible culture of the whole country? This practice of selectivity is also evident in the articulation of the National Cultural Policy, which states that: 1. Malaysia’s national culture must be based on the indigenous culture of the people of this region. 2. Elements of other cultures which are suitable and appropriate can be incorporated into the national culture. 3. Islam is an important element in the formation of the national culture (Hassan 1973, vii; translation mine). This policy suggests a deliberate picking and choosing of cultural elements, geared towards the politically expedient creation of a culture which falls in line with specific ideas of what constitutes the nation. Lim Teck Ghee and Alberto Gomes state that the National Cultural Policy of Malaysia “is based on the premise that national unity can only be achieved through cultural homogenisation and that cultural pluralism is a source of instability” (2009, 232). However, this homogenisation, it would appear, is to take place through the deliberate inclusion and/or exclusion of certain specific elements, rather than through the organic hybridisation of culture over time. This reflects David Lowenthal’s contention that “The heritage fashioner, however historically scrupulous, seeks to design a past

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that will fix the identity and enhance the well-being of some chosen individual or folk” (1968, xi). More recent attempts at definition by the government might be tied to its promotion of culture under the Eighth Malaysia Plan (running from 2001 to 2005), “to offer a myriad of products and services that supported the growth of the tourism industry” (Nurulhuda and Nuraisyah 2013, 407); here, cultural heritage is something to be packaged and monetised, rather than to reflect individual or community lived experience. Lowenthal has said that “most heritage comes already packaged by precursors. But to secure the past to our present lives, we must feel that its legacies have become our very own” (1968, 23). In Malaysia, heritage has been “packaged” by the state, for political reasons, as well as the economic consideration mentioned above—as Cartier notes, “some of the debate [in Malaysia] over how to handle historic conservation has been about the word heritage itself, and the role of heritage in building nationalism” (1996, 46). Given that indigeneity and belonging to/ownership of the land are claimed for the Malay population of Malaysia, “heritage” is a loaded term. Does something count as part of Malaysian heritage if its roots are elsewhere? This has long been a sensitive issue, with, for example, the then Minister for Home Affairs in 1979 declaring that “the lion dance (widely held as a positive Chinese contribution to Malaysian culture) could not be considered Malaysian because ‘the dance originated from China where it is not extinct and, as such ... could not develop further’”. (qtd. In Lo 2004, 15–16). This comment seems to assume that all further development in the form must come from China; why is there no recognition that, given time, this Chinese cultural art form could morph into something Malaysian? More recently, in 2017, a Malaysian school garnered considerable criticism for issuing a dress code for students attending a Hari Raya celebration. Non-Muslim students were allowed to wear traditional clothes—except for the saree which, along with jeans, was explicitly banned. This followed a similar ban in 2016, by the Ipoh City Council (Aedi 2017). In both cases, the bans were swiftly retracted and apologies issued—but the two incidents demand that we ask questions about how decisions are made as to what constitutes cultural heritage, and why certain traditions are deemed “less than” Malaysian, or are seen as fit to be banned. How can edicts be sent out banning a garment such as the saree, which is a familiar and widely accepted part of lived Malaysian culture? Do these bans effectively say that a specific culture, or element thereof, does

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not form part of the nation’s heritage? What, then, is the place of that cultural or ethnic group itself, within the nation? The notion of securing not just the past to present lives, but also the linking of identity and belonging with presence within a physical space, has not been adequately explored within the Malaysian context. This is because the past has been fixed into a specific narrative which supports the racial/cultural divide, focusing very strongly on the immigrant past of certain segments of the Malaysian populace (vs the indigenous status of the dominant Malay race), without also acknowledging their “presentness” within Malaysian society. This discourse could be countered by increasing the individual’s awareness of how they fit not only into that mythologised past but also into the developing present. Part of this must involve anchoring the self within the physical space of the nation, as well as its conceptual spaces. However, in order for the state to maintain politically motivated categories of race, it continues to divide the populace of Malaysia into specific and separate “racial” categories, which are in turn tied to specific languages, cultural practices, religions and, crucially, to physical space, through the idea of an “original” homeland. Ethnic politics here go against UNESCO’s notions of inclusiveness and representation (there is little official space for cultural hybridity or for national community that transcends ethnicity). Where, we have to wonder, is the space for culture which lives and changes? Where is the acknowledgment that new forms of culture are emerging, which will in turn form the basis of the cultural heritage of future generations? In this regard, we should take note of Ooi Kee Beng’s contention that our understanding of the dynamism of identity “involves a prescriptive understanding of where one came from, an aesthetic notion of where one is at and a pragmatic feel for the spaces that exist between where one is at and where others seem to be” (2009, 449). In other words, the individual needs some awareness of his or her past (where they came from) and present (where one is at); equally important is to understand the in-between spaces, which I would say encompass not just the experiences of other individuals but also an understanding of how these various experiences accede to, negotiate with or challenge authoritatively imposed notions of where they came from and where they are at. All this is necessarily encompassed within the overarching discourse of physical space—who owns this space, who belongs within it and who controls it. Given that the physical space of the nation is claimed as belonging to the Malays, it is deeply

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­ ecessary for other Malaysians to find spaces which accommodate them, as n well as to create spaces within the broad national narrative. It is from these spaces that a hybrid and inclusive Malaysian cultural heritage might emerge. Positioning within a physical space must inevitably have an influence on how culture emerges, or how it is practised. Krister Olsson, for example, notes that “the urban environment has the potential to function as a carrier of meaning and identity” (2008, 373), suggesting strongly that identity cannot be divorced from the individual’s surroundings. He goes on to quote John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth: Each individual assembles his own heritage from his own life experiences, within a unique life space containing reference points of memory, and providing anchors of personal values and stability, which are not identical to those of anyone else. (2008, 373)

In Malaysia, the advantage of such thinking is that it situates the individual very strongly in his or her current environment as well as in memories and environments experienced in the past. It does not solely foreground the sense of belonging to a past homeland, although this is also not necessarily completely discarded. In other words, the understanding that heritage arises from physical location as well as other experiences and influences, both past and present, situates the Malaysian individual as belonging within Malaysia, rather than only to the past homeland as suggested by the notion of adherence to “traditional” cultures. It also highlights culture and heritage as living and changing, rather than “preserved”, as the urban environment also inevitably lives and changes. Franco Bianchini and Lia Ghilardi, quoting Chris Murray, note “the importance of an interdisciplinary and creative approach to understanding places as complex and multi-­ faceted cultural entities” (2007, 280). The acknowledgment of the undeniably multi-faceted socio-cultural background of Malaysia, while it does not happen at the official level, can happen through the process of cultural mapping. Cultural mapping is one way of situating the past within the present and linking both to lived experience within a physical space.

Cultural Mapping While map-making is, traditionally, about locating and fixing geographical and geopolitical spaces, often on a very large scale, cultural mapping focuses on different aspects of culture, usually on a very small, local scale:

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‘[C]ultural mapping’ is used in both a literal and a metaphorical senses [sic], where it goes beyond strict cartography to include other cultural resources than land, ‘anthropological, sociological, archaeological, genealogical, linguistic, topographical, musicological and botanical’, which would be recorded by other appropriate techniques and equipment than maps. (Poole 2003, 12)

Janet Pillai says that cultural mapping “is a systematic approach to recording and presenting information that provides an integrated picture of the cultural character, significance, and workings of a place” (2013, 1). She suggests that the point is not merely to map cultural artefacts and practices within an area, but to understand how they work together to create a place. Veronica Strang defines cultural mapping as follows: “Cultural mapping explores people’s history and contemporary relationships with local environments. It entails ‘going walkabout’ with informants in the places that they consider to be important, and collecting social, historical and ecological data in situ” (2010, 132). The necessity of “going walkabout” is what necessitates the smaller scale of these projects. The other important point Strang makes is that these projects are done in collaboration with local informants. Pillai also emphasises this point, noting that the practice “is a sensitive and sustainable perspective on urban planning that responds to the culturally distinctive assets and resources of locality as well as to local needs, aspirations and perceptions of place” (2013, 1).The attention paid to what is small and local allows for minority voices to be heard. Nigel Crawhall defines cultural mapping as “the exercise of representing a previously unrepresented world view or knowledge system in a tangible and understandable geo-referenced medium” (qtd. in Duxbury et al. 2015, 4). They go on to emphasise this point by stating that it works “in the service of articulating marginalized voices and perspectives in society”. Cultural mapping, then, is active and participatory, seeking to some extent to embed those involved in the project, within the areas and communities they are mapping. Depending on the goals of the project, the participants not only map the physical environment, they also make choices (either as inhabitants of the area or in consultation with inhabitants) about what constitutes culture and heritage within that area, as well as what is interesting and useful, or worth including in the map. These decisions are, of course, dependent on how individuals engage with these places and things. The overall objective of a cultural mapping project “is

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to gain an in-depth, holistic view of people’s engagements with the places that they inhabit, and to illuminate particular cultural and ethnohistorical landscapes” (Strang 133). Raquel Freitas notes that “worldviews and intentions affect the very structure, type of information collected, conclusions and further uses of the cultural mapping exercise” (2016, 1). This emphasises the idea that mapping can never be value-free or neutral. But because it is participatory, the values being brought to the project tend to come from those most closely connected with the location, and thus most closely concerned with the project. Within the Malaysian context, this is important because of the top-­ down way in which culture and heritage are presented or even imposed, allowing little room for individual negotiation—an approach which has the potential to distance people from their pasts. To counter this, cultural mapping encourages everyone, “be it a tribe, organization, community, group, school, association, business or an individual”: to find your unique assets and strengths. Culture can, in this case, be defined as your intellectual property, your special way of being or doing, the purpose of your existence, the business you are in (or would like to be in) or the special story that you have to tell, such as your reason for doing what you do. (Pillai 2013, 17)

Cultural mapping, then, probes the relationship between the individual and his or her environment, taking an approach that “may also make the invisible (knowledge, people, history and heritage) become visible” (Pillai 2013, 17). It is noteworthy that cultural mapping seeks to minimise the imposition of purely “outsider” views about an area—researchers or project members are either from the area being mapped or work closely with locals. This view serves to place the intangible within the tangible—people’s engagements (intangible) as they occur within places (tangible)— thus highlighting the situatedness of cultural heritage. Because it is tied to individual experience and personal stories, this approach to heritage refuses the homogenisation and museumisation of culture and heritage. Linking experience with physical place means that culture and heritage are rooted and specific, and will therefore not take on any vague, overly broad definition that seeks to divorce the individual from his or her roots within that place. Notions of culture can be debated and negotiated within the community.

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Freitas underscores the potential for negotiation within the practice of cultural mapping, noting that there are five main trajectories, namely “community empowerment and counter-mapping; cultural policy; municipal governance; mapping as artistic practice and academic inquiry” (2016, 2). Counter-mapping is deeply significant, as it implies a challenge to hegemonic notions of what constitutes the culture of an area; the act of making this kind of statement can be empowering to the community. If cultural heritage is articulated at the state level by a board of some kind, and regulated by an Act (such as the NHA), there is often little real space for individual voices. Strang points out that authoritatively produced cultural landscapes “reproduce the norms and values of dominant groups” (134). Lim Teck Ghee and Alberto Gomes stress the need for organic, grassroots development of culture: “Any government can try to play the role of catalyst in the formation of culture but to be able to do this harmoniously and in accordance with democratic norms, it should not impose its own conception of national culture on the people” (2009, 233). Cultural mapping projects can provide a counter-narrative, a contesting voice, and (through cooperation with governmental bodies) can also potentially help to influence policy. Cultural mapping is not just about pinpointing locations, it is also about telling the stories of a place. This is important because “Foucault’s observation that words, stories, narratives, discourses and texts ‘form the objects of which they speak’ (1972, 54) is readily applied to the making of places through both narrative and graphic representations” (Strang 2010, 134). There is, then, something of a potentially performative dimension to cultural mapping, as the telling and recording of these often untold stories in map form can help bring them into being. Duxbury et. al. have pointed out that “mapping is ‘both a way of thinking about the world, offering a framework for knowledge, and a set of assertions about the world itself’” (2015, 3). It is important in this context that these stories should come from the inhabitants of an area, as it means that they are asserting an identity which might otherwise be unacknowledged, or which runs counter to hegemonic discourse.

Mapping George Town and Balik Pulau, Penang My focus in this chapter will be on two cultural mapping projects run by volunteers: in George Town (begun in 2001) and in Balik Pulau (begun in 2005), both locations on Penang island. Both projects were run by Arts-ED, “a non-formal educational endeavour to provide more

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­ eaningful and varied arts instruction for school children in the state of m Penang, Malaysia” (Pillai in Vatsyayan 2011, 84). The projects were run specifically to engage with young people living in these two locations, to help them to look at the area differently and to reconnect them with a sense of pride in the area. In the case of Balik Pulau, Pillai states that “long term intervention was required with the input of the local community to turn around young residents’ perceptions of Balik Pulau” (2013, 25), implying a strong negative perception on the part of younger residents. In relation to George Town, Pillai notes that “In this particular site, cultural life and physical heritage had become disenfranchised and fragmented” (2010, 240). The cost of urbanisation, reflected in increased rental rates, forced many long-­term residents of the city to move out, and this in turn led to loss in terms of cultural heritage: ‘Heritage values’ were embedded among this [sic] second generation settlers, in their practices, trade skills and artefacts. Buildings (family homes, religious institutions, schools etc.) once imbibed [sic] with historical, cultural and social significance fell to disuse. With the physical exodus, a crucial cultural link to the past was broken. (Pillai 2010, 241)

It is clear from the statements relating to both sites that the main issue is a lack of connection among younger people, both with the physical sites and therefore the tangible heritage, and with the intangible heritage represented by trades, crafts and so on within these spaces. It is for this reason that Arts-ED initiated a programme named Anak-anak Kota, as Pillai explains: Anak-anak Kota […] is a young people’s heritage education program launched in 2000 to complement the conservation efforts taken up by the concerned citizens and heritage groups. Its object is to help younger residents retrace the lost narrative of their multicultural heritage and to encourage them to take social responsibility for the sustainability of their cultural assets. (2010, 242)

The programme goes beyond the mere rhetoric of conservation and preservation, emphasising the need to reconnect people with a “multicultural heritage”, and to sustain cultural assets into the future. The idea that the narrative of multiculturality has been lost can be tied back to the racialised rhetoric propounded at the state level, which highlights plural cultures on

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parallel tracks, rather than putting forward ideas of hybridity. The aim of the work done with Anak-anak Kota is to highlight what is common, rather than what is distinct, as Pillai explains: “In the context of AAK, making art collectively becomes a means of developing and communicating a new culture with a distinct, intercommunal vocabulary of materials, images, aesthetics and themes” (2010, 247). The phrase “new culture” here suggests something which emerges from dialogue and negotiation between different cultures and ethnicities, and even generations, and develops into something shared across communities and cultures. An analysis of the projects and the artefacts produced from them will allow us to see how individuals first seek to embed themselves within a possibly endangered cultural environment, and then from that, seek connections with their lives in the present. As Pillai points out, through these projects, the participants “quickly began to recognise the role and significance of arts in living culture and in built heritage, and how these impacted on their own identity” (2011, 88). The projects used a variety of methods to engage participants with culture, history and the heritage of their environments. For a programme carried out in George Town in 2001, the aim was to recover the lost religious and philosophical meanings of the decorative elements in Chinese temples and clan houses, which are among the many “outstanding examples of heritage buildings that reflect the multicultural backgrounds of the migrant population who settled there” (Pillai 2014, 18). This was done by visiting traditional granite carvers, examining how stories and legends are depicted on granite panels, discussing the significance of these stories to contemporary society and retelling the stories based on their own imaginations. For a second programme in 2006, “participants were set with the task of collecting oral stories or folktales related to the locale or community and perform one of the stories using the creative art of shadow puppetry” (Pillai 2014, 11). In both these cases, the aim is to revitalise heritage so that participants are able to see it as current and contemporary, as well as being part of the past. The George Town projects came up with a series of newsletters, self-guided walking tours and pamphlets on popular food as well as endangered trades. One pamphlet for a self-guided walking tour is entitled “Perjalanan Harmoni” or “Harmonious Journey”. The tour highlights a short walk which encompasses two mosques, a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple and an Anglican church. In addition to giving the history of each place of worship, as well as a floor plan, the pamphlet focuses on four elements which

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are common to all religions—water, light, the moon and flora. The pamphlet is careful to show that each of these elements holds a different significance, or is used in different ways, depending on the religion, but the intent is to highlight commonality rather than difference. The introductory paragraph states that the area “is where many generations of immigrant families lived and worked”1 (my translation). The phrasing here serves to challenge the discourse of indigeneity versus immigrant status, while at the same time highlighting harmony: “It is an example of the cultural co-existence of the various communities in George Town”2 (my translation). While, as Lim and Gomes (2009) state, the government seeks cultural homogeneity, this pamphlet suggests the value of respecting difference as well. One of the other products of the George Town project was a series of simple illustrated pamphlets detailing food and endangered trades. The food pamphlets help to show how hybrid Malaysian food culture is. For example, one pamphlet highlights ais tingkap (translated as “window sherbet”), a cold drink which has been sold from the same spot in the Chowrasta Market area for seventy-five years. It is important to highlight that length of time, as well as the fact that it has been a family business for three generations, handed down from grandfather to grandson, thus giving the business deep roots in George Town. While the pamphlet is clear about the fact that this drink originates in India, it also highlights how it has since been adapted to local conditions—from the twenty-five herbs and other constituents originally used by the grandfather, the ingredient list has been shortened to include what is available locally. Another pamphlet about Yu Char Kuih (“dough fritters”) looks at the business run by Auntie Chew; started by her father, who learned the trade in China, the business is now seventy years old. The pamphlet provides the legend of why Yu Char Kuih first came to be made in China, but a small throwaway comment at the end of the pamphlet shows how it has been absorbed into Malaysian culture—we are told that among other things, the Yu Char Kuih can be eaten with curry, which is not part of “pure” Chinese heritage. Another food item highlighted in these pamphlets is the Poh Piah or spring roll. While the poh piah is acknowledged to be of Chinese (Hokkien) origin, the pamphlet also highlights the fact that some form of the spring roll can be found all over Southeast Asia. It also shows that even within what is nominally known as the Chinese community, the fillings have been adapted from the traditional late winter bamboo shoots, to the Nyonya-­ inspired boiled turnip. This is significant because the Nyonya community

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is uniquely Southeast Asian, springing from the hybridisation of Malay and Chinese cultures. Aside from that, Indian and Malay vendors have also adapted the poh piah with different fillings. The vendor whose business is highlighted in this pamphlet suggests using the wrappers for fillings such as “bananas, jackfruits, durians and even fried rice and bee hoon”. What all these examples emphasise is the way in which foodstuffs with their origins in China or India have been adapted to local tastes, at least partly because of a history of multiple generations trading within the same space and coming to understand what the community wants. This is not just the food heritage of the “original” homeland but an adaptation to the new homeland. This link to the “original” homeland is also visible in the pamphlets looking at endangered trades such as songkok making, signboard engraving, rattan chair weaving and running ottukedai or small shops. The pamphlet on songkok making, for example, specifies that songkok is a Malay word for the “stiff, oval headgear worn over the brow by Muslim males only”. But it goes on to specify that “Muslim headgear like the ‘kopiah’, the ‘tarbus’ and the ‘songkok’ were brought by traders and migrants from various Muslim countries”, and further notes that the songkok maker they focus on adapted his design from Aceh, an Indonesian province, “probably to cater for the large [sic] Acehnese settlers and Haj pilgrims in Penang at the time”. The pamphlet on tombstone engravers focuses on a family business that has its roots in China, but has lasted more than fifty years in Penang, running over three generations. The ottukedai pamphlet looks at very small shops “attached to the walls of shophouses or along corridors of big buildings”.3 Historically, these shops originated in port towns in India; in Penang, they were originally opened by South Indian fishermen. The shop owner that the pamphlet focuses on is a first-generation immigrant, having arrived in Penang at the age of four. However, his roots in Penang are marked by his easy multilinguality, as he speaks “English, Malay, Mandarin, Hokkien and of course Tamil”. Interestingly, he bought over the ottukedai only in 2001, indicating that despite the presence of convenience stores and mini-markets, such tiny businesses, with their long heritage, still have a place in a modern city. What these pamphlets have in common is that they highlight the immigrant roots of these trades, foods and even religions, but then situate them squarely within the Malaysian context, so that their position as part of the fabric of Malaysian life is clear. This certainly challenges the state rhetoric of “selected” elements being accepted as part of Malaysian culture. The

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rhetoric of common immigrant heritage coming together to create a unique Malaysian culture was pushed further in the Balik Pulau project. The Balik Pulau project, known as MyBalikPulau, was helmed by artist Kungyu Liew. It took a somewhat stronger stance than did the George Town project in terms of situating those of “immigrant” stock on the same level as those labelled as “indigenous”. The project worked by getting participants to move “away from stereotypical images and consider new ways of viewing the three themes: mySELF, myFAMILY and myTOWN”. This helped them to move from considering “personal space”, to focus on “their entire family unit”; some of the participants “went on to research their family tree and to interview the older generation on their migration history”. And finally, they moved on to looking at their community and environment, and the “cultural assets” contained therein (Pillai 2014, 28). The project thus engaged young people in collecting and documenting oral histories from the residents of Balik Pulau and then producing maps and newsletters based on their work with the residents. The purpose was to find a way of rooting the young people within the heritage of the area, in a lively and interactive way, opening them up to their history, heritage, crafts and skills. Also important is the insistence on moving away from stereotypes; thinking in deeper terms about “routes” and “roots” (to quote from Paul Gilroy) complicates the otherwise simplistic way in which labels such as race and culture are applied and unsettles the rhetoric of ownership and belonging. Official cultural identities in Malaysia focus on the idea of “routes” by emphasising the fact that certain segments of the population have come from elsewhere; their “roots” in that place are also emphasised. It is possible, however, to counter that discourse with an understanding of “routes” as referring to the passages that bridge “there” and “here”, past and present, in order to show how roots have grown “here” (for a fuller discussion, see Gabriel 2011). Pillai also points to the necessity for projects such as MyBalikPulau, for more immediate and urgent needs such as revitalisation, or resistance against encroaching urbanisation: Balik Pulau is an agrarian district south of Penang Island, with historical town centre. The rural environment and its traditional economy are under threat by indiscriminate development and out-migration of young people. The project was aimed at helping young residents connect with and develop appreciation for their rapidly vanishing built and living heritage. (http:// www.dramabox.org/newsletter/vol1_issue2/guest_column.html)

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The project used primarily visual media such as photography and map-­ making in order to produce a multilingual newsletter which could connect with a broad range of Malaysians. An important aspect of the project was its hands-on quality: Activities were designed and coordinated by the Arts-ED facilitators but scheduled and conducted by the children themselves, working in pairs or groups, on foot or on bicycles. The opportunity for independent exploration opened up their world to the culture, history, geography and economics of their locality. (ibid.)

Active engagement with the minutiae of the daily life of the area meant that the children who participated were better able “to relate to history, geography and environmental studies as a part of their lives” (ibid.), rather than looking at history and heritage as parts of some grand narrative as presented in history textbooks. An impassioned letter declares that: Art-Ed [sic] is a remarkable effort to educate youths about our history, and gives us a sense of identity. Something that formal history education and our school culture failed to do for years, Art-Ed [sic] achieves in a span of a few months. I have been working with Arts-Ed since 2003. At the age of 13, Arts-Ed gave me a reason to be proud of my culture, my state and my country. I knew nothing about history. All I learned from schools was how to memorise history, not understand my history. (Khanum 2011)

This response speaks to Pillai’s contention that the important point is to shift the style of thinking about culture and heritage “from ‘How can we get the public to understand the site’s OUV?’ to ‘How can we understand what the site means to the public and what its value is to them?’” (2015, 157). The experience of cultural mapping ties the participant far more meaningfully and closely to the area being mapped. The Balik Pulau project produced a newsletter entitled “Discover Balik Pulau”, as well as a pamphlet for a self-guided tour of Balik Pulau. Much of the information from the newsletter is condensed and reproduced in the pamphlet, which also includes maps detailing various places of interest, both in town and in the more rural areas. The content of both newsletter and pamphlet comes from the cultural mapping project, which involved doing research, going into the area, walking around and observing closely the kinds of architecture extant in the area, the trades and crafts still being

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carried out as well as talking to both younger and older residents to establish a sense of the continuum of culture and history. In an article entitled “A Refuge from the Start”, the newsletter details the “waves” of settlement by which Balik Pulau came to be inhabited. The article is based on historical research, which is part of the cultural mapping process. Immersion in such research adds levels of awareness not provided by the more nationalistic, politicised history taught in the school syllabus. This is clear from an analysis of the content of the article. The use of the word “settlers” rather than “immigrants” is important in countering the official discourse of indigeneity and immigration. This is then emphasised by the way in which the settlement is described: First Wave of Settlers. The earliest settlers in Balik Pulau are thought to be refugees escaping from the protracted wars involving Siam and Burma in the [sic] 1786 where an estimated 70 refugees—including Hakka Chinese from Ujung Salang (Phuket) and Malays from the southern Thai provinces, are said to have fled southwards via sea to Penang Island, some of them landing on the shores of Balik Pulau. (2)

This narrative positions both Chinese and Malays as having arrived at the same time; both communities are also shown as having fled troubles in what is now considered Thailand. The state rhetoric about immigrants and indigenes is complicated by the references to Siam and Thailand, as it positions both Malays and Chinese as refugees; it also unsettles the idea by highlighting the fact that at that time, large parts of what is now considered Malaysia, were vassal states of Siam. The article then goes on to talk about Chinese and Tamil labour brought in by the British, stating that “Many of these early workers stayed behind and took up residence in Balik Pulau”—the emphasis here is on commitment to the new home, rather than to their status as sojourners or immigrants. This foray into history is then tied to the present, through the narratives of three younger Malaysians—one Malay, one Indian and one Chinese—to reflect the usual formula of the three main “races” in Malaysia. Interestingly, it is the Indian and Chinese narratives which emphasise long-standing residence in Balik Pulau. The Malay story focuses on the narrator’s grandmother and her go-getting entrepreneurial spirit. The narrator of the Indian story talks about her maternal greatgreat ­ grandmother’s arrival in Malaya, while the Chinese narrator unequivocally positions himself as “fourth generation Hakka Chinese

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from Balik Pulau” (3). In neither story is there any sense of the ancestors wishing to return “home”; indeed, the Chinese narrator states that “my great-grandfather had no intention of returning to China”. This kind of narrative again disrupts and challenges the notion of non-Malays in Malaysia as being immigrants or recent arrivals, instead giving them a long history of settlement. Sadly, this was one of the points which led to the project quickly becoming mired in controversy upon the publication of the newsletter. An assembly person in Penang complained that the newsletter insulted Malays by (among other things) suggesting that they were not the original inhabitants of the area. The complaint went viral, and the issue became politicised, with various police reports being lodged against Arts-ED and the Penang State government (“mybalikpulau memo: Latest news on the mybalikpulau issue”), indicating the extent to which the state discourse of indigeneity, ownership and belonging has been internalised. Marion D’Cruz, responding to the furore on behalf of the Five Arts Centre, declared that “It is the arts that teach us how to think beyond boundaries and will continue to play a critical role in building a nation of Malaysians” (D’Cruz 2011)—suggesting that those who chose to politicise this arts project were doing so in order to maintain these authority-­ defined boundaries of race and culture. Other examinations of history also focused on the multiracial nature of the area. Oral histories of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya (1941–1945) collected from older residents, as well as research based on books written by locals, gave the participants an understanding of how the Occupation affected individuals in terms of how they lived their lives, rather than looking at political issues or military strategy. The newsletter details the stories of Eurasian Penangite Stanley Stewart and his wife Therese (a Eurasian from Singapore), who suffered under the Japanese, but were also somewhat protected because of a personal relationship with a Japanese District Officer; Chinese journalist Han Kok Foo, who wrote about the experience of living under Japanese Occupation; and Indian newspaper editor M. Saravanamuttu, who “gathered local citizens and formed the interim Penang Services Committee (PSC) that helped to maintain a semblance of law and order” (10). This chapter goes on to give a list of individuals from various backgrounds who helped locals through the ordeal by keeping in touch with the PSC. These less-politicised, more personal accounts of the Occupation help to bring history to life, as Pillai notes:

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Participants documented the oral history of the Japanese occupation in the same locality from residents of different ethnicities. Through these different narratives they attempted to map conflicts/issues that occurred in the locality, the level of trust and nature of social interactions during the conflict, or how the residents and their activities are connected over historical time and geographical space. (2010, 246)

This connection over time and space is significant because it allows the participants to situate themselves within this continuum through an understanding of personal experiences. The history of the area then has the potential to become a part of the cultural heritage of the younger generation, rather than merely being a series of dates in a textbook. The newsletter also sought to give a balanced idea of the different cultures and religions in Balik Pulau, with the section on “Historical Worship Places” giving the background of early examples of a mosque, a Taoist temple, a Catholic church and a Hindu temple. All these places of worship date back to roughly the same time frame (mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century). While the fact of contemporaneity cannot unseat the prime place of Islam within Malaysia’s national framework, it does serve to embed the other religions as also having deep roots within the area, and thus forming an unquestionable part of its heritage.

Conclusion It is clear that cultural mapping projects have enormous potential to problematise and delve into issues of culture and heritage which are, at the official level, erased or ignored. An important question to ask, however, is the extent to which this kind of complex thinking will penetrate to the more official levels at which culture and heritage are administered. The main problem to be faced would be political resistance to officially supporting a hybrid culture and an idea of heritage which partakes of the multiple avenues open to it. However, these types of projects continue to shine a light on a largely unacknowledged reality. There is a certain urgency to confront and discuss these issues, since currently, the definition of who is an immigrant in Malaysia is changing and developing, given the influx of migrant workers, international students and so on from non-traditional sources. A cultural mapping project in the Chow Kit area of Kuala Lumpur, held in 2013, highlighted this idea. The participants found during their walks in the area that there is a

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strong migrant presence there, with many of the shops being run by migrant workers, rather than by locals. The presence of these migrants was not treated as any kind of dilution of Malaysia’s heritage. Rather, it was seen as adding to the multicultural flavour of the place. This was highlighted in some of the brochures produced, which noted the presence of eateries which “not only offer local dishes, but also authentic foreign flavours such as Thai, Indonesian, Southern Indian, Iranian and also Pakistani food”. An interesting point here is that the Thai, Indonesian, Southern Indian and Pakistani cultures have all fed into Malaysian culture in the past. What they are referring to here is the presence of new migrants from these places, as well as from non-traditional origins such as Iran. At the same time, the reference to “interesting places” they found, such as “The oldest Chinese settlement in KL” (Lew), importantly highlights the long history of Chinese settlement in Malaysia, refuting the rhetoric of their recent immigration. The participants were able, through this exercise, to understand these various cultures as part of a continuum of immigration and cultural adaptation and appropriation. What these projects do is to highlight how people live and work in the area—again, emphasising the idea of a living, growing heritage, rooted in the past. To go back to “Foucault’s observation that words, stories, narratives, discourses and texts ‘form the objects of which they speak’” (Strang 2010, 134), we can see that through the exploration and subsequent narration of the highly personalised journeys undertaken during this cultural mapping project, the participants are able to articulate, and perhaps “form”, places and identities which counter the hegemonic discourse of what is and is not “heritage”.

Notes 1. “Jalan ini merupakan rumah dan tempat kerja banyak generasi keluarga pendatang”. 2. “Ia merupakan contoh keberadaan bersama kebudayaan yang dimiliki oleh pelbagai masyarakat di George Town”. 3. The word comes from Tamil, and literally means ‘shop that is stuck (to another surface)’.

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References Aedi Asri. 2017. School Apologises for Saree Ban. Accessed April 28, 2019. https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/categor y/nation/2017/07/13/ school-apologises-for-saree-ban. Badan Warisan Malaysia. n.d. Accessed April 28, 2019. https://badanwarisanmalaysia.org/about-us-2/our-work/. Bianchini, Franco, and Lia Ghilardi. 2007. Thinking Culturally About Place. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy 3 (4): 280–286. Cartier, Carolyon L. 1996. Conserving the Built Environment and Generating Heritage Tourism in Peninsular Malaysia. Tourism Recreation Research 21 (1): 45–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.1996.11014762. D’Cruz, Marion. 2011. Alarmed by Over-reaction to MyBalikPulau. Accessed April 28, 2019. http://visitpenang.com.my/alarmed-by-over-reaction-tomybalikpulau/ Duxbury, Nancy, W.F.  Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan. 2015. Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry: Introduction to an Emerging Field of Practice. In Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan, 1–42. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Freitas, Raquel. 2016. Cultural Mapping as a Development Tool. City, Culture and Society 7: 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2015.10.002. Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia. 2011. ‘It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re Born’: Re-Theorizing Diaspora and Homeland in Postcolonial Malaysia. Inter-­ Asia Cultural Studies 12 (3): 341–357. Gill, Parveen. 2006. Move to Keep Bok House. Accessed April 28, 2019. https://www. thestar.com.my/news/nation/2006/06/16/move-to-keep-bok-house/. Hassan, Mohd. Affandi. 1973. Asas Kebudayaan Kebangsaan. Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Belia dan Sukan. Historian: Bok House Important Part of KL’s History. 2006. Accessed April 28, 2019. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2006/12/23/historianbok-house-important-part-of-kls-history/. ICHC Courier Online: Intangible Cultural Heritage Courier of Asia and the Pacific.n.d..http://ichcourier.ichcap.org/article/department-of-national-heritagein-malaysia-the-role-of-conservation-and-preservation-of-heritage/ Khanum, Natasha. 2011. Speaking Up for Arts-Ed. Accessed April 28, 2019. http://www.thenutgraph.com/speaking-up-for-arts-ed/. Lew, P.S.  Theme Research #1—General Walkabout. Accessed November 14, 2015. http://www.chowkitkita.com.

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Lim, Teck Ghee, and Alberto Gomes. 2009. Culture and Development in Malaysia. In Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present and Future, ed. Lim Teck Ghee, Alberto Gomes, and Azly Rahman, 231–252. Petaling Jaya: SIRD. Lo, Jacqueline. 2004. Staging Nation: Postcolonial English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP. Lowenthal, David. 1968. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. mybalikpulau Memo: Latest News on the mybalikpulau Issue. 13 March 2011. Accessed April 28, 2019. http://arts-ed.blogspot.com/2011/02/chronology-of-disputes-over.html. National Heritage Act. 2005. Laws of Malaysia Act 645. Kuala Lumpur: The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia. Nurulhuda Adabiah Mustafa and Nuraisyah Chua Abdullah. 2013. Preservation of Cultural Heritage in Malaysia: An Insight of the National Heritage Act 2005. In Proceedings of International Conference on Tourism Development, 407–415. Olsson, K. 2008. Citizen Input in Urban Heritage Management and Planning: A Quantitative Approach to Citizen Participation. The Town Planning Review 79 (4): 371–394. Ooi, Kee Beng. 2009. Beyond Ethnocentrism: Malaysia and the Affirmation of Hybridisation. In Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present and Future, ed. Lim Teck Ghee, Alberto Gomes, and Azly Rahman, 447–462. Petaling Jaya: SIRD. Pillai, Janet. 2010. Teater Muda: Social and Cultural Engagement Through the Arts. In Building Bridges, Crossing Boundaries: Everyday Forms of Inter-Ethnic Peace Building in Malaysia, ed. Francis Loh Kok Wah, 237–254. Malaysia: Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia. ———. 2011. ARTS-ED and Heritage Education in George Town, Malaysia: A Case Study. In Transmissions and Transformations: Learning Through the Arts in Asia, ed. Kapila Vatsyayan, 83–88. Delhi: Primus Books. ———. 2013. Cultural Mapping: A Guide to Understanding Place, Community and Continuity. Petaling Jaya: SIRD. ———. 2014. Community-based Arts and Culture Education: A Resource Kit. Petaling Jaya: SIRD. ———. 2015. Engaging Public, Professionals, and Policy-Makers in the Mapping Process. In Cultural Mapping as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Nancy Duxbury, W.F. Garrett-Petts, and David MacLennan, 153–169. New York: Routledge. ———. n.d. Accessed April 28, 2019. http://www.dramabox.org/newsletter/ vol1_issue2/guest_column.html. Poole, Peter. 2003. Cultural Mapping and Indigenous Peoples: A Report for UNESCO.  UNESDOC Digital Library. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ ark:/48223/pf0000159090.

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Salvatore, Cecilia Lizama, and John T.  Lizama. 2018. Cultural Heritage Components. In Cultural Heritage Care and Management: Theory and Practice, ed. Cecilia Lizama Salvatore, 3–16. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Strang, Veronica. 2010. Mapping Histories: Cultural Landscapes and Walkabout Methods. In Environmental Social Sciences: Methods and Research Design, ed. I.  Vaccaro, E.A.  Smith, and S.  Aswani, 132–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNESCO. n.d. What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?

George Town and Balik Pulau Projects “Perjalanan Harmoni: Satu Lawatan Teroka-Sendiri.” (2015). Think City and ARTS-ED. “Yu Char Kuih: Dough Fritters” “Poh Piah Wrappers” “Ais Tingkap: Window Sherbet” “The Tomb Stone Engravers” “The Ottukedai ‘Stuck-on’ Sundry Store” “Songkok: Local Islamic Headgear” “myBALIKPulau: Discover Balik Pulau”. Issue no 1

CHAPTER 6

Re(con)figuring the Nenek Kebayan Through Folktale Adaptation: Malaysian Folktales as Literary and Cultural Heritage Sharifah Aishah Osman

Introduction Much of the credence attributed to the figure of the Nenek Kebayan in the popular imagination of the Malays as an ethnic community originates in her link to the legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang (Princess of Gunung Ledang) from Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), a canonical text of classical Malay literature that is noted by scholars and historians alike as a source that chronicles the golden age of Malay power and glory in the fifteenth century. In Sejarah Melayu, Sultan Mahmud of Melaka was so enamored of the beautiful fairy princess who lived on the legendary mountain that he was moved to betroth her at all costs (“what we desire is that which no other raja possesses”), an irrational obsession that drove him close to the murder of his own son and heir, Raja Ahmad. Puteri Gunung Ledang was said to be immortal, attended to by tigers, and endowed with the supernatural ability to transform her age and appearance—one of her guises being that of an old, hunchbacked woman (popularly known as the Nenek S. A. Osman (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_6

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Kebayan). It is in her manifestation as the Nenek Kebayan that the princess duly declares her bizarre and apparently impossible seven conditions for the Sultan to fulfill before she will accede to his proposal, including that of providing “a cup of the blood of the prince named Raja Ahmad”, all of which he manages to accomplish but the last. In connecting her with the mythical story of Puteri Gunung Ledang, one which eventually came to be associated with the fall of the Melaka Sultanate through its portrayal of the lust and folly of Sultan Mahmud, the figure of the Nenek Kebayan has come to be saddled with the concomitant baggage of the past. While the portrayal of the Nenek Kebayan in Sejarah Melayu is memorable and dramatic, and firmly establishes her role as a figure linked implicitly to the history and heritage of Melaka (Hijjas 2010, 251), it is also one that has tended to overshadow her other equally significant roles and guises in Malay folklore, namely that of an elderly wise woman and spiritual healer, and thus has obscured the extent of her influence on ideas of active womanhood in the formation of Malay culture, identity, and society. It is in this context that this chapter aims to reexamine the role of the Nenek Kebayan in the Malay folktale as an aspect of the literary culture and heritage of Malaysia, and as based on the definition of “intangible cultural heritage” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the General Conference of 2003, which includes “traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts”. Likewise, the Malaysian National Heritage Act 2005, in defining “cultural heritage” as “tangible or intangible form of cultural property, structure, or artefact, and may include a heritage matter, object, item, artefact, formation structure, performance, dance, song, music that is pertinent to the historical or contemporary way of life of Malaysians”, clearly attests to the significance of folktales as a form of “living” heritage. Both definitions thus not only assert the importance of folktales as didactic repositories of heritage that convey moral and spiritual meaning but also regard them as evolving and dynamic cultural forms in the construction and negotiation of such meanings. Crucial to my argument is the notion of the conservation and stewardship of intangible cultural heritage, and its link to the transmission of the folktale from its traditional oral form to the more widely available written form of folk literature, as represented in the selected contemporary

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a­ daptations aimed at children and young adults that are the focus of my discussion in this chapter. My emphasis on folktale adaptation acknowledges the definitive view of “conservation” provided in the National Heritage Act 2005, which lists “preservation, restoration, reconstruction, rehabilitation, and adaptation” as the various means of conserving the different forms of living heritage in Malaysia. My approach to folktale adaptation is also influenced by theorists of adaptation studies like Linda Hutcheon, whose work on artistic adaptation can be applied to the rereadings and retellings of the Malaysian folktale, especially in viewing the adaptive process as central to heritage conservation and transmission, and a means of drawing attention to the subversive qualities of the folktale. As she argues, “adaptation is an act of appropriating or salvaging, and this is always a double process of interpreting and then creating something new” (2006, 20). By appropriating modern feminist approaches to the retelling of the Malaysian folktale through my focus on the figure of the Nenek Kebayan as a symbol of progressive womanhood, this chapter reinforces the view that adaptation can be a useful strategy to create new interpretations of traditional narratives, and to enable our folktales to evolve and retain their relevance in contemporary Malaysian culture and society by addressing younger audiences through the medium of children’s literature. In his assessment of the historical development of the folktale in Europe, Jack Zipes notes how as a form of oral tradition, the folktale of the seventeenth century was not specifically aimed at children, but was regarded as an “inclusive” genre, in which “stories were told around the hearth” and catered to the entire community—adults and children alike—from all social classes. With its key concerns of class struggle, power, and oppression, the folktale was particularly popular with the peasantry, who became its “prime carriers” (2012, 8). However, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, “educated writers purposely appropriated the oral folktale and converted it into a type of literary discourse about mores, values, and manners so that children and adults would become civilized according to the social code of that time” (3), and especially to reflect “the social power, prestige, and hierarchy of the ruling classes” (9). Citing French fairy-tale writers like Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Marie-­ Catherine D’Aulnoy, and Charles Perrault as popular examples, Zipes argues that these were among many who transformed “the common folktale into ‘high’ art” as a means to educate “children of breeding” (30–31). As Maria Tatar (1992) observes, once folktales were adapted for the entertainment and moral instruction of children and became assimilated and

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institutionalised into the official canon of children’s literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of their original “subversive edge” was lost (5). The didacticism inherent in such adaptations thus resulted in the prevalence of cautionary tales and exemplary stories as two main models available for writers who adapted folktales into stories for children of the time (8). Similarly, the folk literature of Malaysia, apart from providing entertainment for both young and old, also functioned to “educate and inculcate good moral values in the people”, and to an extent, reflects “the ideology of the existing ruling class” (Selat et al. 2010, 53). Mohd. Taib Osman attributes the pivotal role of the penglipur lara,1 itinerant storytellers or wandering minstrels of the past, as “active carriers of tradition”, regarding them as masters of folktale adaptation that embellished and adapted their oral narratives according to the needs and interests of their audience and environment. Such stories were also transmitted to younger audiences, both orally and in written form, by storytellers who were “passive carriers of tradition”—grandparents, parents, and elder siblings—and were thus subject to change and adaptation in the process (Osman cited in Selat 52). As Lowenthal reminds us, “To receive and transmit a legacy is not enough; it must be refurbished and given new resonance while in our care. Heritage must be durable, yet pliable” (171). Folktale adaptation as such is part of the process of “breathing new life” into these tales “for ourselves and our inheritors by fabricating heritage anew” (Lowenthal 1998, xvi). Like the skilled penglipur lara, folktale practitioners (whether anthologists, writers, or scholars) can function as “heritage crusaders” through the critical reassessment and revision of the folktale, helping to keep the genre not just alive but continually relevant as a collective legacy of contemporary Malaysian society. Furthermore, as “sites for the construction of appropriate gendered behavior”, folktales play a significant role in the reproduction of patriarchal values (Parsons 2004, 135–137). Indeed, as John Stephens and Robyn McCallum note, “one of the more recalcitrant elements of folktale [is] gender bias and its effect on the representation of female roles” (1988, 201). This observation holds true especially in relation to feudalistic Malay culture and society, both in the past and present, given the largely collectivist and conformist nature of its social structure and relationships (Mohd Noor 2017). In a similar vein, Lowenthal concedes that “heritage is traditionally a man’s world”, given that “inheritance in most societies, traditional and modern, has been patrilineal” (48). Modern feminism is thus “a

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means to begin to rectify these gender inequities” in the monopolisation of the transmission of heritage by men due to their dominant presence in “most positions of power and prominence” (51). As a form of intangible cultural heritage, folktales as such can provide illuminating views of the construction of gender identity among the Malay community, and the extent to which the dynamics of power between men and women in traditional Malay society have influenced (and continues to influence) gender politics in Malaysia. By providing a more nuanced discussion of representations of the figure of the Nenek Kebayan in selected adaptations of Malaysian folktales aimed at children and young adults, namely Cik Siti Tanah Masyor and Puteri Bunga Tanjung (from Johor and Penang), Miyah and the Forest Demon, Rigih and the Witch of Moon Lake (known collectively as The Jugra Chronicles), as well as Dewi Labu Kundur (from Sarawak and Sabah, respectively), this chapter aims to emphasise alternative views of these older women as figures of authority in the transmission of moral and/or family values and as preservers or custodians of adat (customs and traditions), over superficial categories like physical beauty, docility, and passivity that are often associated with the younger heroines in such tales. Knowledgeable, skilled, and nurturing, yet endowed with punitive supernatural powers to cast curses and magical spells, the Nenek Kebayan is both feared and respected by the people in her role as a healer, and in her connection to the spiritual world. In privileging the agency, resourcefulness, and wisdom of the Nenek Kebayan as a figure of progressive womanhood in these tales, this chapter thus revises and interrogates the definitive image of the Nenek Kebayan as the frightening, hunchbacked crone associated with the legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang in Sejarah Melayu, one that has tended to dominate the depiction of this figure in Malay culture and society due to the prominence of the latter in the official construction of tangible heritage in Malaysia, both as a means of sanctifying the rule of the early Malay sultans of Melaka and promulgating Islamic values (Worden 2003, 35). In reassessing the role of the Nenek Kebayan in selected textual adaptations of Malaysian folktales aimed at young audiences, this chapter not only affirms the significance of the folktale as a dynamic form of intangible cultural heritage by imparting new insights on the genre through the reconfiguration of a familiar literary character but also enriches present discussions on the construction and negotiation of gender identity in Malaysia.

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The Nenek Kebayan and the Female Traditional Healer in Malaysian Folklore The Nenek Kebayan is a familiar and much-recognised character in Malaysian folk literature, and appears in various classical Malay texts known as “cerita pelipur lara” (folk epics or romances) such as Hikayat Raja Muda, Hikayat Indraputra, Hikayat Si-Miskin, and Hikayat Malim Deman (Liaw 2013). The Kamus Dewan (2017) describes her as “an old woman who likes to help others suffering hardship (usually in folklore)” or “a messenger”,2 while the Panduan kepada Bunga Rampai Melayu Kuno (Guide to an Anthology of Classical Malay Literature) defines her as “a rescuer, a helper of young people and princesses facing difficulties or obstacles due to betrayal, injustice, or oppression, and enabling their eventual reunion” (Ahmad 1967, 12). Likewise, Lalitha Sinha and Md. Salleh Yaapar (2014) characterise the Nenek Kebayan as “a pre-eminent mythical aged female persona with magical and spiritual powers, which is the equivalent of the western fairy-godmother”, as well as “a helpful hermit” (89). Meanwhile, Hidayah Amin, in her guide to Malay culture and heritage, highlights the Nenek Kebayan as a figure who incites both respect and fear: It is believed that Nenek Kebayan was an old woman with a slight hunchback. She was knowledgeable about nature and its wonders, and often used herbs to cure illnesses. She sometimes served as a midwife in the remote village where she lived. Her knowledge of black magic and the occult made many people believe that she was a witch who kidnapped children and used them as ingredients in her magic potions. (2014, 186)

The most recent discussion of this character appears in Lioubov V. Goriaeva’s (2002) study in which she compares the figures of the Nenek Kebayan and Baba-Yaga in Malay and Russian narrative traditions, viewing them as representative examples of the figure of the “old woman mediatrix” or “magic assistant” (92). Despite developments in Malay narrative traditions, she notes the common features associated with the Nenek Kebayan: being female, old, her “limited assistance to the hero, to wit: the function of mediation between him and his beloved”, her link to “the boundary between the worlds [of the dead and the living]”, and her relation to “the garden, to the [sacred banyan] tree, and to the flowers” (95–96). For Goriaeva, the most significant role of the Nenek Kebayan throughout the various episodes in these classical Malay folk epics and

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romances is that of “old procuress” and “go-between” (101), assisting the hero “through the boundary between ‘his’ world and the ‘alien’ one, where he can join his promised bride”, a journey that serves as “a reflection of the initiation rite”, that of “the preparation of a youth for marriage” (93). Other than these disparate studies that emphasise the supporting role of the Nenek Kebayan in Malay folklore, and despite her presence as a familiar figure in many of the tales, the character does not appear to have received much scholarly attention. In this regard, the lack of scholarship on the Nenek Kebayan as a literary character appears to reflect the corresponding marginalisation of the female healer in traditional Malay society, despite her distinctive role in communal life. While previous studies like Walter Skeat’s Malay Magic (1967), Richard Winstedt’s The Malay Magician (1961), and Kirk Endicott’s An Analysis of Malay Magic (1970) discuss the role of the bomoh3 as a healer and spirit medium in the Malay world, hardly any attention has been given to the place of women healers in particular. Similarly, Mohammad Taib Osman’s study of the bomoh in Bunga Rampai: Aspects of Malay Culture (1984, 147–178) and Roland Werner’s Bomoh/Dukun: The Practices and Philosophies of the Traditional Malay Healer (1986, 17–20) do not consider the implications of gender in assessing the role of the traditional healer and his or her influence on the world view of the Malays as a people. While such works provide impressive contextual information on the function of the bomoh, due to the intrinsically patriarchal structure of traditional Malay society, this role is perceived, if not taken for granted, as exclusively male. Women are mentioned only in their capacity as midwives, or assistants to the bomoh (Osman 149). Thus, the role of the bomoh, while integral to the well-being and existence of Malay communal life, is also perceived as predominantly, if not fundamentally, masculine. In contrast, the numerous studies that have examined the role of the female shaman or bobohizan in the Kadazan community of Sabah, East Malaysia, illustrate how such a gendered view of spiritual healing cannot be extended to all of Malaysia, as these elderly women healers occupy a privileged position in Kadazan culture and society. According to Rita Lasimbang, The Bobohizan is indeed the main resource for indigenous information and knowledge. She leads in spiritual matters and cultural affairs; bearing a great influence in the political system in the traditional Kadazan community. A ritual specialist, herbalist, therapist, consultant to the Village Head

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c­ ommittee, a teacher of culture and adat (customs), and champion of women’s rights and needs, the Bobohizan is a pillar of cultural and customary truth. (cited in Hussin 2003, 16)

Similarly, Hanafi Hussin affirms the significance of the bobohizans among the Penampang Kadazan community, and notes that these elderly female shamans are glorified for their function as the link between the human and the spirit world, one best seen through their performance of various sacred rituals meant to maintain the delicate balance between the two, most evidently those associated with rice planting (known as monogit), conducted not only to “protect humans from various illness and disasters” but also to ensure “that the rice plant will grow abundantly and yield good crops” (2008, 177). Indeed, it is being female that imparts the bobohizan with the unique abilities to perform as a spirit medium, since women were regarded as particularly susceptible to spirit possession, enabling them to fulfill these performative acts of sacred ritual more effectively, as reflected in the traditional beliefs of the Kadazan in the Pampang myths of origin.4 The marginalisation of the role of the Nenek Kebayan in Malay traditional healing in comparison to the acknowledgment of the shamanistic prowess of the bobohizan among the Kadazan peoples of Sabah demonstrates the dichotomous and problematic status of the female healer in Malay culture and society, and her subsequent depiction in Malaysian folklore. Significantly, the ambivalent position of the Nenek Kebayan and bobohizan as female healers in the Malaysian folktale, as wise, elderly women who were both feared and respected for their skills and knowledge, is emphasised through the linking of their “magical” skills and curative powers with sorcery and their engagement in elements of the supernatural and the occult, a perception that bears correspondence to the abjection and persecution of witches and the suppression of women healers in medieval Europe, a period marked not just by misogyny but also political and class struggles. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English argue in Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1973), a newly developing male medical profession from the thirteenth century onward was not only built upon, but also profited economically, from the demonisation and elimination of female healers and midwives through witch hunts that spanned four centuries,5 a lasting effect of which was the “aura of contamination that has remained, especially around the midwife and other women healers” (4). The skills and successes of these older, assertive, knowledgeable, and authoritative women in the healing of the ill

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and impoverished peasantry (who often had no recourse but to turn to such “wise women”, or subject themselves to the acceptance of death) were clearly regarded as threats to male power and authority in the medical establishment. As a result of these witch hunts, centuries of knowledge of healing based on observation and empirical study by such women and transmitted through the generations were thus discredited and dismissed as “female superstition” or “old wives’ tales” (2) through institutional sexism. Likewise, Heidi Breuer notes in Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England that, writers of Arthurian literature used various strategies “to gender particular kinds of magic as masculine or feminine, a process which results in the villainization of feminine magic, especially as exemplified by the figure of the witch” (2009, 10). The stigmatization of the role of the Nenek Kebayan in Malaysian folklore, in which her skills and expertise are perceived as being linked to witchcraft, sorcery, and the occult, as opposed to the received knowledge or “ilmu” acquired by the male bomoh from a mentor/guru through blessings known as peturun (Osman 1989, 72) can thus be regarded as a reflection of the suppression of women’s knowledge and abilities as traditional healers due to the highly collectivist and conformist structure of traditional Malay society. This also explains why in much of Malay folklore, the Nenek Kebayan, although frequently depicted as a “helpful hermit”, also leads a solitary and secluded life, her hut situated far beyond the village and deep in the forest, “an uninhabited and mysterious sphere, full of dangers for the hero” (Goriaeva 97). Her isolation and physical distance from communal life mirrors her marginalised state as an outsider, one that also reinforces her status as a liminal figure who lives close to nature, a guardian of the boundary between the human and the spirit world. As a means of “fabricating heritage anew”, to invoke Lowenthal’s clarion call, an appreciation and reassessment of the figure of the Nenek Kebayan in contemporary adaptations of Malaysian folktales also needs to consider the development of this character in relation to her particular function in Malaysian children’s literature. The fluidity of the roles with which the figure of the Nenek Kebayan is cast in the various folktales selected for analysis in this chapter suggests that, for the young Malaysian audience, she is more than just a “witch”, “fairy godmother”, “healer”, or “magic assistant”; her role is much more complex and defies easy categorisation. Unlike the witches that appear in Western fairytales and other forms of children’s stories, she is neither “a black-hearted queen, an evil sorceress”, nor “a vindictive stepmother”, and does not pose a lethal threat

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to the hero or heroine of the story (Cashdan 1999, 17). Similarly, to liken her to the benevolent figure of the Western “fairy godmother”, who is always waiting in the wings to lend a helping hand, provides only a partial description of her function. For in the stories that are structured as “reward-and-punishment” tales,6 the Nenek Kebayan is empowered with certain magical qualities meant to ensure the preservation of order or balance between the human and the spirit world, especially through the emphasis on virtue over vice, choosing, for instance, to either bless or curse the protagonist, depending on whether their actions befitted one or the other. Furthermore, her role as both “healer” and “magic assistant” transcends that of merely attending to the physical wounds and afflictions of these young protagonists, as they venture out into the world in the attempt to vanquish evil (in whatever form this evil may appear). Often, she will also serve as a confidante and counselor to these children or young adults, being able to perceive the aim of their quests immediately and instinctively, while also tending to their emotional pains, fears, and anguish, sheltering and caring for them while they are lost, kidnapped, or abandoned, until they have accomplished their mission in the story and are ready to be reintegrated into society.7 Most significantly, she is “a master of the initiation rite” (Goriaeva 8) in that, through her wisdom, help, and guidance, the protagonist (and by implication, the young audience) is able to resolve the “psychological mission” of the tale. As an important feature of children’s literature, the depiction of the young protagonist undergoing “the struggles between the positive and negative forces in the self” (Cashdan 1999, 15) while combatting “sloth, envy, greed, and other troublesome tendencies” (19) suggests the essential role of the Nenek Kebayan in folktales written for Malaysian children and young adults, for without her presence and gentle influence in these stories, such a transformative process would not be possible.

The Nenek Kebayan in Selected Adaptations of Malaysian Folktales for Children The first folktale in this discussion, Cik Siti Tanah Masyor, is a legend from Kota Tinggi, Johor, and tells the story of Siti Wan Kemboja, who was stricken by a horrible disease as a young child, and whose face and body are covered with ugly scars. As she developed into a young woman, her appearance bothered her even more, as she felt “lonely and unwanted”,

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and was among all her childhood friends “the only one who remained unwed” (Dutta 2016, 96). She learns of a Nenek Kebayan who lives “on the foothill of Bukit Panti” and is reputed to commune with “the orang halus, the sprites and fairies who inhabit the hill”, and who, more importantly, has “real magical powers and can restore the beauty of young maidens” (97). With the blessings of her mother, the desperate Siti seeks after and finds the Nenek Kebayan after a long and exhausting journey into the forest, and informs her of her quest. The Nenek Kebayan takes pity on the young girl, and agrees to heal her scars, provided Siti makes her “a binding promise in return”: she must promise never to break her mother’s heart, or she will be “inflicted with a terrible curse” (100). Siti agrees to this condition, and after 99 days, and with the skilled ministrations of the Nenek Kebayan, with her special ointments and spells, transforms into a striking beauty. She thanks the Nenek Kebayan “with tears in her eyes” and returns to the village, unrecognizable even to her own astonished mother. However, as time passes, the beautiful Siti becomes increasingly arrogant and conceited, and, reveling in her power over men, turns into “a notorious flirt” (102). Despite being admonished many times by her mother, she persists in her behavior, eventually breaking her mother’s heart, “as the kind woman could not bear the pain of watching her beloved daughter turn into this monster” (103). Before Siti could seek her mother’s forgiveness, the latter falls seriously ill and dies. After her mother’s death, Siti mends her ways and marries a man named Awang. However, the morning after the wedding, he is found dead, apparently bitten by either a spider or a scorpion. When the same thing happens with her second and third husbands, Siti realizes that she is cursed. She remembers what the Nenek Kebayan warned her of years ago, and knows that she only has herself to blame. Shunned by the people of Kota Tinggi, she moves to a smaller village, and marries Pak Kulim, the village headman who is “well versed in arcane knowledge” (106). On their wedding night, as his wife sleeps, he is horrified to see scorpions and spiders crawling out of her mouth. He manages to smash all these poisonous creatures into bits, and eventually expiates the spell from Siti, after which they then lived “a happy and perfectly ordinary life” (107). The Nenek Kebayan’s role in this legendary tale of “reward and punishment” is clear. With Nenek Kebayan’s knowledge of “spells and the herbal lore needed to make potions” (100), Siti is able to achieve her heart’s desire and is rewarded by being transformed into the village beauty. Conversely, her disobedience and transgression of the Nenek Kebayan’s

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“binding promise” (meant both to discipline and socialise her into gratitude and humility) through her blatant disregard for her mother’s feelings results in her being punished: not only does she lose her mother, but she is herself unable to experience marital relations and family life as a result of this curse. The folktale thus reflects how the Nenek Kebayan functions simultaneously as the “fairy godmother”, “healer”, and “magic assistant”, but also “sorcerer”, empowered both to reward and punish the protagonist. The story of the Nenek Kebayan’s curse on the beautiful Cik Siti Wan Kemboja, revolving as it does on the issue of physical appearance, desirability, and the need for belonging, thus becomes a cautionary tale on the dangers of pride, arrogance, ingratitude, and parental disobedience (the various “troublesome tendencies” that Cashdan notes), made particularly didactic and impactful through “the spectacle of punishment” that Siti experiences (69). The next tale Puteri Bunga Tanjung is a legend from Penang that tells of seven faerie sisters, princesses from the land of Kayangan, who visit Earth every month during the full moon. The focus of the tale is on the youngest faerie princess who loses her magical selendang (scarf) one moonlit night, and as a result is unable to return to Kayangan before sunrise. Left behind, the young princess is forced to wander in the forest, where she “wept inconsolably” (Dutta 2016, 35), lonely and afraid until she is rescued by Nenek Kebayan, who shelters and cares for her. The princess wanders every night, searching desperately for her lost scarf but ends up in tears, falling asleep exhausted until daybreak when she returns to Nenek’s hut. While the princess sleeps, her teardrops magically transform into piles of fragrant pale yellow tanjung blossoms, a connection that Nenek Kebayan is only able to make by secretly following the princess and observing her one night. Although sad and homesick, the faerie princess agrees to help the kind old woman turn these fragrant blossoms into garlands, which Nenek Kebayan is then able to sell at the village market for lots of money. During this time, the pair forms a strong bond, and the princess even discovers an entrepreneurial side, suggesting cleverly to Nenek that the dried blossoms be turned into perfumed oil and sold for even more. Their combined skills afford Nenek Kebayan a form of financial stability that she had never been able to enjoy before, and she is grateful to the young girl, whom she calls “Puteri Bunga Tanjung”, after the magical flowers from Kayangan. Finally, with the help of Nenek Kebayan, the princess finds her missing magical scarf and returns to the realm of the faeries, but not before reassuring the old woman that she would return

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every month to visit, bringing along more tanjung blossoms that could be sold so that Nenek Kebayan would never be in need again. The tale highlights the unique relationship between Nenek Kebayan and Puteri Bunga Tanjung, one that is able to occur and develop due to the Nenek Kebayan’s status as a liminal figure who resides on the boundary between the human and the spirit world. In this story, the Nenek Kebayan fills the classical role of “a rescuer and helper of young people”, and appears as very much an ordinary old woman, lacking any supernatural attributes (except perhaps her ability to commune with the spirits of the faerie world). Nenek Kebayan, with her characteristic kindness and compassion, as well as her wisdom and resourcefulness, cares for the lost Puteri Bunga Tanjung, who pines for her family and longs to be reunited with them in Kayangan. After all, to be abandoned, as Sheldon Cashdan reminds us, is “the most dreaded fear of childhood”, and “to be left on your own when you cannot fend for yourself, is a terrifying prospect for the very young” (14). By guiding and counseling Puteri Bunga Tanjung, and providing her with the safety and security that she needs at such a vulnerable time, both physically and emotionally, Nenek Kebayan earns the trust of the young princess, who in time, is able to overcome her fears and anxieties over her abandonment. Thus, despite her sadness, she is able to fill her time on Earth productively, helping Nenek Kebayan with her tasks of garland-making and flower-selling, while never giving up the search for her scarf, which the Nenek helps her find eventually, and that enables her return to Kayangan. The departure of the princess thus denotes the restoration of balance between the human and the spirit world, one that could not have happened without the presence and involvement of the Nenek Kebayan. Furthermore, the tale emphasises not only the assistive nature of the Nenek Kebayan but, more importantly, how her nurturing and supportive traits are crucial to the development of the young Puteri Bunga Tanjung’s agency and emerging sense of self, despite her initial struggles with grief and homesickness. More than just a “fairy godmother”, “mediatrix”, or “magic assistant”, the Nenek Kebayan is a sensitive and compassionate individual who, in acknowledging the humanity of the princess, creates the bond between the two, one that sees her being rewarded in turn for her virtue. If Puteri Bunga Tanjung reflects the instrumental role of the Nenek Kebayan in the young protagonist’s overcoming of obstacles and resolution of conflict—whether internal or external—in the journey from inno­cence to experience, the two tales that make up Tutu Dutta’s The Jugra

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Chronicles, namely Miyah and the Forest Demon (2011) and Rigih and the Witch of Moon Lake (2013), establish this connection even more clearly. Both are “historical fantasy novellas set in seventeenth century Borneo” (Dutta 2013, 150) aimed at young adult readers, and depict the Nenek Kebayan as the benevolent “wise woman of the forest” (Dutta 2011, 101) in a far more engaging manner than previously seen in other examples of Malaysian children’s literature published in English. In the first novella, 12-year-old Miyah (the daughter of Mayang, the village midwife, and Manang Raseh, the village shaman) and her cousin Rigih set out on a quest to find her younger brother Bongsu, who has mysteriously disappeared. The children seek the help and guidance of the kindly Nenek Kebayan, who “did not seem surprised to see them, as if she had already known that they were coming” (107). From her, they discover that Bongsu has been kidnapped by the evil Hantu Rimba (the forest demon, a creature from Bidayuh and Malay folklore), and with her advice and assistance (as well as the help of Sang Kancil, the mouse deer, and Nenek Kebayan’s Gura bird, who lead them to the demon’s lair), they embark on a mission to rescue the little boy. As terrified as they are of the dangers that await them, Miyah and Rigih are reminded by Nenek Kebayan that “we need stealth and cunning to defeat the demon, not brute force. Two children may well succeed where strong warriors fail” (112). Despite all the odds stacked against them, they succeed in rescuing Bongsu, but before they can all escape, Miyah is unfortunately cursed by the forest demon and transformed into a Gura bird. With Miyah enslaved by the Hantu Rimba and forced to carry out his dark deeds, the scene is thus set for the sequel of the novella, Rigih and the Witch of Moon Lake, which takes place three years later. In this sequel, Bongsu and Rigih, with the help of Nenek Kebayan and a new character, the bobohizan Dayang Sulong (the witch in question), set out to look for another missing young girl, Malidi, as well as to destroy the forest demon, and hopefully also free Miyah from her curse. The sequel also reveals the secret lineage that binds Bongsu, Miyah, and Rigih together with Nenek Kebayan and Dayang Sulong: they are all descendants of Jugra, a legendary bobolian (male shaman) who first tried to destroy the demon, and hence it is their combined power and teamwork that enables them to vanquish it at last—with each contributing drops of their own blood to make the magic potion that finally annihilates the demon. In featuring both the Nenek Kebayan and the bobohizan of Moon Lake in this sequel, the story merges aspects of the traditional knowledge and

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skills of the Kadazan/Dusun female shamanic healers with those from Malay folklore to powerful effect, channeling their collective wisdom, energy, and intelligence to guide their young charges with patience, kindness, and compassion as they attempt to fulfill their mission. If as Perry Nodelman (1988) says, “children’s literature focuses on the lives of people without power; children both male or female who must cope with a hierarchy that places them at the bottom” (33), then through their relationship with these two wise women, the children learn empowering messages about their own identities; all attain moral and psychological growth through their heightened appreciation of the bravery and sacrifice of their ancestors, and an understanding of their value not only as individuals but as members of a community with a similar ancestral heritage. By the end of the story, thanks to the collective efforts of the children, as well as the healing powers of the bobohizan and Nenek Kebayan, order is restored between the human and the spirit world: Malidi is found, the forest demon is vanquished, and Miyah rescued and the curse lifted, returning her to her original human state. More importantly, from their trials and tribulations, the children come to realize that they are all equally significant in accomplishing this endeavour as they share the same Jugra bloodline. As Nenek Kebayan, in her all-knowing wisdom, states: “I had divined that among the three of you, Miyah was the most suited to withstand the Hantu’s schemes and manipulations. She is stronger than you think. You have remarkable speed, strength, and courage, Rigih, while Bongsu has his gift of inner sight!” (60). As a narrative that clearly prioritises the child’s viewpoint, the novella reflects how the Nenek Kebayan’s greatest impact on the lives of these children is to endow them with a sense of agency and an understanding of their own value and uniqueness as human beings, and how such virtues can be channeled to battle evil and help others. Far from being an outsider who merely provides cursory assistance to lost children, as in the early folk epics, both novellas depict the Nenek Kebayan as taking an active interest in the moral and psychological development of children, and as respected and appreciated by them in return.8 The final folktale discussed here, Dewi Labu Kundur, or The Gift of the Winter Melon, is from Tambunan, Sabah, and also features a respected bobohizan. Anak, “a kind-hearted and diligent” young man, encounters the bobohizan in the forest while out hunting. Intrigued by her promise that she would be able to find him a wife who would make him “the envy of every man in the land” (Dutta 2016, 121), he agrees to carry out the tasks that she sets for him: to look after her children and her farm while she

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is away. He accomplishes these tasks admirably, and as a reward for his hard work, kindness, and wisdom, he receives a winter melon from the bobohizan that transforms magically into a beautiful woman, whom he later marries and who brings him good fortune and bountiful harvests. This raises the envy of Bongkoron, a lazy and scheming young man who wishes for a similar life. Inspired by Anak’s story, he seeks out the same bobohizan in the forest, whom he manages to meet, and who assigns him the same tasks. However, unlike the diligent Anak, Bongkoron fails miserably by literally falling asleep on the job, caning the children until they weep, destroying the bobohizan’s farm, and finishing up all the food that he finds by himself. To punish him for his selfishness and laziness, the bobohizan provides him with a withered winter melon, which changes to his horror into a Nenek Kebayan.9 The foolish Bongkoron runs as fast as he can to escape her embrace, and, fortunately for him, discovers that she has vanished upon reaching his village. The tale is unique in its privileging of a distinctly “feminine” worldview that corresponds with the family values that form the basis of an agrarian egalitarian society, much like traditional Kadazan society itself (Hussin 2008, 176). Significantly, although the story revolves around Anak, it is the bobohizan who wields power and agency in this tale of “reward and punishment”. The domestic tasks that she sets for Anak and Bongkoron also overturn conventional gender roles. In her absence, Anak is instructed to care for her five children, tend to her farm, and feed the family, and when he manages to achieve this through kindness, hard work, and good judgment, he is amply rewarded. In doing so, the tale implicitly demonstrates the endorsement of family values that Anak displays through his handling of the various tasks the bobohizan sets for him: first, by arriving punctually at her home and caring patiently for her children without resorting to anger and violence; second, by laboriously and carefully removing all the weeds from her vegetable farm by hand instead of just burning them as he was instructed to do; and finally, resourcefully preparing a meal of roasted tapioca and rice for dinner for the whole family despite not being told to do so. Anak’s diligence, patience, and wisdom pleases the bobohizan when she returns, and she praises him for earning her trust and thus keeps to her promise of helping him find a very special wife by bestowing him with the gift of the magical winter melon maiden. Additionally, the bobohizan’s approval of Anak’s behavior also depicts an interesting take on the care and management of the family and household, one which emphasises how both men and women work together in

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a collaborative spirit of mutual respect. Rather than reinforcing stereotypical gender roles in which the male goes out to hunt while the female stays home to care for the family, the tale suggests that such tasks are the result of cultural conditioning rather than instinctively or naturally assigned. Left on his own, Anak appears more than capable of caring for the bobohizan’s children, and handles them with patience and kindness, knowing that they are mischievous yet innocent. Additionally, upon observing the bobohizan’s well-tended farm, he is impressed by “how much work it took to create a farm like this” (124) and hence cannot bring himself to burn the weeds growing among the plants out of respect for her and for fear that it would destroy months of her hard labor. Finally, when the bobohizan returns with the fish that she has caught, she cooks these, and together they partake of the dinner of rice and vegetables that Anak had thoughtfully prepared in her absence. Thus, the ease with which Anak adapts to these domestic roles implies the untenability of such stereotypes in the first place. In contrast, the bobohizan’s punitive treatment of Bongkoron reflects the rejection of the values the latter represents: laziness, impatience, selfishness, and greed, all vices that hinder the progress of civilisation. As the foil to the virtuous Anak, Bongkoron arrives late “when the sun had already risen” (129), much to the bobohizan’s annoyance. He also takes a nap as soon as she leaves, waking up in a foul temper, and proceeds to scold and cane her children. Having never done “an honest day’s work in his life” (128), he goes on to inspect the bobohizan’s garden but takes the easy way out by setting all the weeds on fire, thus destroying the preciously tended farm. After greedily eating some roasted tapioca all by himself, he sits and waits impatiently for the bobohizan to return, ignoring her scared and hungry children, instead of making himself useful around the house. In highlighting these two different versions of male behavior in the characters of Anak and Bongkoron, the tale not only suggests that those displayed and practiced by Anak are social values respected and admired in the Kadazan community, but also that within this society, the bobohizan, more than just a healer and herbalist, is “a teacher of culture and adat (customs), and champion of women’s rights and needs”—a “pillar of cultural and customary truth” indeed (Lasimbang cited in Hussin 2003, 16). Much like the Nenek Kebayan, who is “a master of the initiation rite” (Goriaeva 8), the bobohizan in this tale appears to prepare Anak for adulthood by cultivating in him the various qualities that will make him an ideal spouse and helpmate in running a household and raising a family, and

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deems him ready for marriage only once he passes all her tests. Conversely, the lazy Bongkoron is implied to be unsuited for marital relations until he learns to acquire these virtues.

Conclusion Folktales and their adaptations, when viewed, written, and appreciated as part of the canon of children’s literature by heritage crusaders like folklore collectors, anthologists, writers, and researchers, function not only as influential representations of race, class, and gender identity but also reflect the reception and transmission of a form of the intangible heritage of a nation. As such, they offer a variety of subject positions that provide multiple perspectives of femininity, rather than risk irrelevance and neglect through the perpetuation and reinforcement of gender stereotypes. The marginalisation of the Nenek Kebayan in Malay folklore and folklore scholarship reflects one of the ways that the folktale is in danger of stagnation due to the lack of understanding and appreciation of the value of the genre itself, and with this, the role of the traditional female healer as she appears in such stories. By providing a more diverse representation of the figure of the Nenek Kebayan in my discussion of selected adaptations of Malaysian folktales in the various examples above, this chapter argues that the authoritative image of the Nenek Kebayan as the frightening, hunchbacked crone in Sejarah Melayu, transmitted through centuries of oral storytelling, is not necessarily singular, or even accurate. In privileging the agency, resourcefulness, and wisdom of the Nenek Kebayan as a figure of progressive womanhood in the selected folktale adaptations discussed, and in examining the multiple roles that this familiar figure plays in such folktales written for Malaysian children and young adults, this essay suggests that such revisions are essential to the survival of the folktale as a form of intangible cultural heritage. In adopting the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, UNESCO asserts that safeguarding measures of identified forms of national living heritage aim at “ensuring its viability, its continuous recreation, and its transmission” and might include “revitalizing various aspects of it” (2011, 8). The re-evaluation of the depiction of female characters like the Nenek Kebayan in Malay folklore is part and parcel of the “rescue work” that is required to ensure the viability and revitalisation of the folktale, an act of courage that Marina Warner likens to “snatching (the stories) out of the jaws of misogyny itself” (Yolen 1998 cited in Ragan xviii).

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Likewise, as Zipes argues, “folk tales and fairy tales per se have no actual emancipatory power unless they are used actively to build a social bond through oral communication, social interaction, dramatic adaptation, and agitatorial cultural work” (1979, 18). As a means of reassessing the capacity of the folktale to perform such “agitatorial cultural work”, the highly recognisable yet much-maligned figure of the Nenek Kebayan offers a meaningful beginning for challenging received narratives about Malay womanhood in Malaysian folklore. The multiplicity of roles performed by the Nenek Kebayan in the folktale adaptations discussed in this chapter— as the wise woman of the forest, traditional healer, herbalist, therapist, and counselor to children—represents the significance she imparts to the folktale as a form of “living” cultural heritage, one that demonstrates both its “durability” and “pliability” (to quote Lowenthal) through the active process of adaptation.

Notes 1. Under the National Heritage Act 2005, only one individual, Ali Badron Sabor, has been identified and listed under the category of “penglipur lara” as a National Heritage Living Person, or Warisan Kebangsaan Orang Hidup (Wakoh), a reflection of the state of oral storytelling as a form of intangible cultural heritage at risk of becoming lost. According to Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Datuk Mohamaddin Ketapi, the title is “a special acknowledgment” and is meant to preserve the heritage embodied in the traditional creative arts upheld by these figures. “The idea to give recognition to these figures sparked from the realisation that there are now fewer and fewer of these cultural art practitioners”. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/ nation/2019/03/10/its-national-heritage-personified-special-govtawards-are-also-given-to-individuals-considered-as-tr/. Accessed 30 April 2019. 2. http://prpm.dbp.gov.my/Cari1?keyword=nenek+kebayan 3. The terms “bomoh” and “pawang” are often used interchangeably by the Malays as an ethnic community. However, as Md. Taib Osman explains, in most places in Malaysia, “bomoh” refers to “the specialist whose main vocation is healing”, while “pawang” refers to “a more versatile practitioner of magic endowed with many talents” (1989, 60). For Farouk Yahya (2016), bomohs serve more as spirit mediums, whose task is to communicate with or command the “semangat” (soul, emotions, meaning, desire, or spirit). See full translation from Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka http://prpm.dbp.gov.

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my/cari1?keyword=semangat. Further details on the use of these two terms can also be found in Norruddin (2018). 4. Pampang myths of origin refer to basic traditional beliefs of the Kadazan Penampang community. According to Hanafi Hussin, rice-farming rituals are manifestations of such beliefs and serve as a marker of ethnic identity. Pampang myths tell the story of Kinoingan as a creator, his wife Suminundu, and their daughter Puninzuvung, who was sacrificed by her mother as a replacement for food. Puninzuvung later became the rice spirit Bambaazon, who is highly respected by the Kadazan. The community performs a number of rituals to commemorate her kindness and act of sacrifice, which are meant to “stabilize the relationship between the seen and unseen world” and to enable humans and spirits to live in balance (2008, 189). 5. The age of witch hunting in Europe spanned from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in its sweep from Germany to England. Its essential character was that of “a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population” (Ehrenreich and English 5). 6. According to Tatar, reward-and-punishment tales teach “not only through the power of words and deeds, but also through the spectacle of punishment”. Such folktales also tended to be heavily gendered in their depiction of the characters. Heroines were faced with tasks of demonstrating domestic competence, while heroes were challenged with tasks and missions that led them “on the road to high adventure” (69). The tale of Dewi Labu Kundur, as I argue, appears to overturn this convention, given the egalitarian view of household management upheld by the bobohizan as community leaders, and the Kadazan in general. 7. A famous example appears in the folk romance Hikayat Indraputra which tells the story of the young prince Indraputra who was captured by a golden peacock, but fell into Nenek Kebayan’s garden, and was raised by the kindly old woman (Liaw 159). 8. Trites refers to this as the nurturing of “human interdependency” in which the child or adolescent protagonist is “likely to assume a subject position that allows her or him to value community without sacrificing his or her selfhood” (1997, 84). 9. Goriaeva notes how the Nenek Kebayan can also serve as a comic figure and source of humor in classical Malay literature. She states how “Nenek Kebayan often provokes and welcomes laughter and joking at herself”, and cites the Hikayat Si-Miskin where “she sends away the Raja’s messengers coming to invite the hero to the court, telling them that the young man has diarrhea. At the hero’s wedding Nenek Kebayan is dressed up and powdered like a bride, becoming a comic double of the princess” (99).

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References Ahmad, Ismail. 1967. Panduan kepada Bunga Rampai Melayu Kuno. Melaka: Penerbitan Abbas Bandong. Amin, Hidayah. 2014. Malay Weddings Don’t Cost $50 And Other Facts About Malay Culture. Singapore: Helang Books. Breuer, Heidi. 2009. Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England. New York: Routledge. Cashdan, Sheldon. 1999. The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books. Dutta, Tutu. 2011. Miyah and the Forest Demon. Petaling Jaya: MPH Publishing. ———. 2013. Rigih and the Witch of Moon Lake. Petaling Jaya: MPH Publishing. ———. 2016. The Magic Urn and Other Timeless Tales of Malaysia. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. 1973 (reprinted 2010). Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. New York: Feminist Press. Endicott, Kirk Michael. 1970. An Analysis of Malay Magic. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goriaeva, Lioubov V. 2002. The Character of the Old Woman-Mediatrix in Malay and Russian Narrative Traditions: Nenek Kebayan and Baba-Yaga. Malay-­ Indonesian Studies 15: 92–101. Hijjas, Mulaika. 2010. ‘The Legend You Thought You Knew’: Text and Screen Representations of Puteri Gunung Ledang. South East Asia Research 18 (2): 245–270. Hussin, Hanafi. 2003. Bobohizan dan Peranannya di Kalangan Masyarakat Kadazan Daerah Penampang, Sabah. Jati: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 8: 15–40. ———. 2008. Performing Rice Farming Rituals by Penampang Kadazan of East Malaysia: Between Sacred Ritual and Secular Performance. Jati: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 13: 173–190. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Liaw Yock Fang. 2013. A History of Classical Malay Literature. Translated by Razif Bahari and Harry Aveling. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mohd. Noor, Noorafifah Salihah. 2017. Lemah Semangat: Rethinking Traditional Responses to Mental Illness Among Malay Muslims. In Transgressions, Tradition, and Modernity: Contemporary Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and Beyond Colloquium. Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. Nodelman, Perry. 1988. Children’s Literature as Women’s Writing. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 13: 31–34. Norruddin, Nadirah. 2018. Magic or Medicine?: Malay Healing Practices. Accessed June 20, 2019. http://www.nlb.gov.sg/biblioasia/2018/10/16/ magic-or-medicine-malay-healing-practices/?fbclid=IwAR1CMKoV1tmKs2z E0E-1-47YxgwHVVWCWG3YWYTH6rbpsIJrFBB-I-lpdks.

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Osman, Mohd. Taib. 1984. Bunga Rampai: Aspects of Malay Culture. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. ———. Taib. 1989. Malay Folk Beliefs: An Integration of Disparate Elements. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Parsons, Linda T. 2004. Ella Evolving: Cinderella Stories and the Construction of Gender-Appropriate Behaviour. Children’s Literature in Education 35: 135–154. Selat, Norazit, Yaacob Harun, and Lynne Khadijah Norazit. 2010. The Folk Literature of Malaysia. In ASEAN Folk Literature: An Anthology. Vol. 1. General Introduction, ed. Nicanor G. Tiongson, 52–54. Vientiane: ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information. Sinha, Lalitha, and Md Salleh Yaapar. 2014. The World Forest and Spiritual Revival: Unveiling Secrets of the Classics. In Reengineering Local Knowledge: Current Issues and Practices, ed. Mohamad Rashidi Pakri, Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah, and Salasiah Che Lah, 80–93. Pulau Pinang: Penerbit USM. Skeat, Walter William. 1967. Malay Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula. New York: Dover. Stephens, John, and Robyn McCallum. 1988. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York: Garland. Tatar, Maria. 1992. Off With Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. 1997. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Werner, Roland. 1986. Bomoh/Dukun: The Practices and Philosophies of the Traditional Malay Healer. Berne: The University of Berne. What is Intangible Cultural Heritage? Infokit. 2011. Accessed April 30, 2019. https://ich.unesco.org/doc/src/01851-EN.pdf. Winstedt, Richard. 1961. The Malays: A Cultural History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Worden, Nigel. 2003. National Identity and Heritage Tourism in Melaka. Indonesia and the Malay World 31: 31–43. Yahya, Farouk. 2016. Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts. Leiden: Brill. Yolen, Jane. 1998. Foreword: The Female Hero and the Women Who Wait. In Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World, ed. Kathleen Ragan, xvii–xxix. New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company. Zipes, Jack. 1979. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. London: Heinemann. ———. 2012. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. London and New York: Routledge.

PART IV

The Small Town, Nostalgia, and the Environment

CHAPTER 7

The Small Town as Heritage in the Writings of Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow Carol Leon

Introduction Increasingly, theories of heritage acknowledge its complex, heterogeneous nature. There are many players in the creation and management of heritage. As pointed out by the authors of A Geography of Heritage (2000), the stakes get higher when it comes to the conceptualisation of a political state and nurturing of a national identity. Here the contested nature of heritage becomes even more pronounced because in the consolidation of national identity, the process of “absorbing and neutralizing competing heritages” takes on an urgency (Graham et al. 2000, 12). Given that, the fostering of national heritage has for a long time been the responsibility of governments. It is the inherent power within heritage, a “[mechanism] by which meaning is produced and reproduced” (Graham et  al. 2000, 2), which enables it to legitimise power structures and define meanings of culture and identity. However, heritage is “essential for social identity and collective purpose” (Lowenthal 2000, 18) and engaging with history is imperative to understand ourselves. “Living as we necessarily do in the immediate

C. Leon (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_7

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­ resent, we turn to the past to remind us of who we were and what we p could have been, and how we managed to get to where we are today” (Farish 2009, 9). David Lowenthal talks about humanity’s “deeply felt need” (2005, 82) to preserve the past. He classifies heritage broadly: “The legacies we inherit stem both from nature and from culture” (2005, 81). In “Natural and Cultural Heritage,” he describes their similar as well as differing modes of communication and preservation, elaborating that, increasingly, nature and culture have come to be viewed “as interconnected” (2005, 85). One significant difference, however, is the spatiality of natural heritage. Natural heritage, asserts Lowenthal, “cannot be exported, its value inheres almost wholly in its local” (2005, 87). It is no wonder then that the natural heritage of a nation is viewed as a marker of its identity and a cultural measure that contributes to the formulation of public policies.

UNESCO and Intangible Heritage The Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage was adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on 16 November 1972. The most significant feature of the Convention was that it linked together in a single document the concepts of nature conservation and the preservation of cultural properties. These included cultural landscapes and landscapes with combined “natural” and “cultural” features. This conceptualisation has since had “an extensive and defining impact” on heritage policies and practices (Smith and Akagawa 2009, 1). Underlying this initiative was the need to embody heritage as meaning rather than artefact and to address the safeguarding of intangible heritage. This revision in the way of thinking about heritage also highlighted “the centrality of the community (group or individual)” and “their sense of identity” (Blake 2009, 47). Embedded in this definition of cultural heritage is the sense that heritage does not end with monuments and collections of objects but also includes traditions and living expressions inherited from our ancestors. Intangible heritage recognises cultural diversity in the face of growing globalisation, and the need for intercultural dialogue. This additional emphasis on heritage as something that is alive and not to be passively experienced was applauded by the global community. But it also seemed that the World Heritage List put forth by UNESCO happened to favour mainly Western heritages, triggering dissenting voices which felt

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that UNESCO had too tight a grip on what was considered to be ­heritage-­worthy. The authors of Heritage in Action report an especially interesting challenge to this monopoly in 2000 “when Canadian-Swiss cultural entrepreneur, Bernard Weber, launched the ‘New 7 Wonders of the World’ campaign, generating the opportunity for citizens and tourists around the world to vote for their favourite sites (http://world.new7wonders.com; http://www.new7wonders.com). A total of 77 nominations were received by the New 7 Wonders Foundation from around the world” (Silverman et al. 2017, 4). Conflicting views about heritage attest to the polyvocality of heritage interpretations and the huge stakes tied to heritage-making. In Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (1996), Tunbridge and Ashworth conceptualise the contestation of heritage and its repercussions as “dissonance,” a condition where there is hardly any consistency in the meaning of heritage. They argue that by its very nature, heritage has always been dissonant but that the more complex constructions of identity today have accentuated this dissonance.

Place as Intangible Heritage As pointed out by scholars, place plays a pivotal role in the representational politics of cultural, class and ethnic identities (see, for instance, Graham et al. 2000). Laurajane Smith concurs with this in her observation that “Heritage is about a sense of place. Not simply in constructing a sense of abstract identity, but also in helping us position ourselves as a nation, community or individual and our ‘place’ in our cultural, social and physical world” (2006, 75). Place then is powerful as it gives physical reality and dimension to abstractions and ideologies. Discussing space and society, David Harvey posits social relations as spatial and goes on to show how these relations exist within places embedded in social meanings (1996, 122). The idea of place also invokes the all-important sense of belonging, providing an anchor of shared experiences between people. “Places are distinguished from each other by many attributes that contribute to their identity and to the identification of individuals and groups within them. Heritage is one of these attributes” (Graham et al. 2000, 4). Indeed, place and heritage are formidable entities in the formation of personal and community identities. The foregoing discussion is succinctly summarised by Smith when she says: “In a very real sense heritage becomes a cultural tool that nations,

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societies, communities, and individuals use to express, facilitate and construct a sense of identity, self and belonging in which the ‘power of place’ is invoked in its representational sense to give physical reality to these expressions and experiences” (2006, 75). She also accurately observes that though “site” was often used in heritage discourse, increasingly “place” has replaced the earlier term. Site carries connotations of being restrictive and invokes a sense of a well-defined location, whereas place “invokes a sense of belonging” (2006, 75–76). Another interesting idea put forward by Tadhg O’Keeffe is that place is “a touchstone for remembering both the visual-factual and the sensual-emotional” (2007, 6). The affective dimension is indeed integral to the definition of place. More and more, place is seen as vital in identity formation: “the sense of belonging to place” is fundamental to identity (Graham et al. 2000, 40).

Malaysian Politics and Place-Identity In Malaysia, politicians have chosen to play the race card to secure their positions of power within the government. Indeed, the “politics of race and ethnicity have been sedulously nurtured and permeates every level and sector of society” (Syed Husin 2008, 198). In his book Yearning to Belong (2015), Patrick Pillai discusses the way the concept of race was used by the British colonisers to undergird their divide and rule method of governance. One particularly effective way was to spatially segregate the three major ethnic communities: Malays, Chinese and Indians. The Malays were mainly involved in agriculture, planting rice and tapping rubber. They were also enlisted to aid in administrative work. The Chinese worked in the tin mines and the Indians were needed to tap rubber. This kind of division of labour, which entailed living and working in separate spaces, meant that there was limited interaction between the various ethnic communities. Farish Noor also talks about European racial theory, which constructed a social and economic order governed by race (2009, 72) and “served only to keep the communities apart” (2009, 73). Farish observes that colonial-era planning paid little attention “to the need for open, inclusive public spaces where all the communities would come together” (2009, 74). The colonial heritage of racial segregation and stereotyping continues to haunt Malaysia; the demographic and occupational distribution of the ethnic groups has persisted with the Malays being the least urbanised, with less than a fifth of the community living in towns. Half the Chinese population reside in the towns while ethnic

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Indians are “in between,” with a third of them living in the towns (Syed Husin 2008, 32). However, Malaysia’s early history runs counter to today’s racialised politics. In this context, local historian Ahmad Murad Merican has discussed how prior to colonisation, the Malay Archipelago was a vibrant world, rich in cultural borrowings and cross-fertilisations (2018). Sumit Mandal discusses this perspective at length in his book Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (2018). He describes the Malay world, areas which “fall within the present-day borders of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Timor-Leste and the Philippines” (2018, 13), as having a “culturally complex character” (2018, 3), a result of dynamic interconnections between these countries “before, during and after colonial rule” (2018, 15). Farish Noor has also spoken about the strong historical links Malaya had with South Asia (2009), and Joel Kahn has done a study on the cosmopolitan narrative of Malay-ness, showing how, historically, people originating from Arab, Chinese, Indonesian and other sub-ethnic groupings were included in the overarching “Malay” category. Kahn calls them the “other Malays” (2006). As pointed out by Farish and Kahn, modern representations of Malay-ness do not take into account these transregional connections. However, the construction of a Malay-dominant nation has been paramount in the constitution of a Malaysian national identity. Though Malay identity has always been associated with cultural, political and linguistic structures that were wider than the state of Malaysia that emerged in the 1960s, it appears that since then, the Malaysian state has promoted a national heritage which not only excludes a wider notion of the Malay but also of non-Malay ethnicities. The National Cultural Policy of 1971 is a good example of this kind of monocultural policy. This and other state policies, in resurrecting colonialist forms of governance (Gabriel 2015), promote a territorially defined notion of national identity. Certainly, these kinds of policies, which separate and confine individuals and groups, have had far-reaching consequences on Malaysia’s multiethnic and multicultural community. Indeed, racial segregation continues to threaten the core of Malaysian society. Syed Husin Ali asserts that “[i]n a country where heterogeneity is the rule rather than the exception, forging unity among the diverse ethnic groups is more than a passing need […]. Inter-ethnic harmony lies at the very heart of its survival” (50). One can almost detect the anguish in Farish Noor’s question as to why “we Malaysians have not transcended the logic of racial difference?” (2009, 79).

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Many Malaysian writers have tried to answer this question.1 It is noteworthy that Malaysian writers, both old and new, always seem to return to the past in their novels, trying to understand the historical happenings which have shaped Malaysian society and which explain its current state. Even the younger generation of Malaysian authors, such as Tan Twan Eng, Tash Aw and Preeta Samarasan, who are internationally recognised writers, harken back to the past with their novels revolving around both World Wars, British rule in Malaya, the Japanese Occupation, the Emergency and the 13 May 1969 episode that saw a bloody confrontation between ethnic Chinese and Malays. Invariably, history, race, identity and notions of home and belonging are pervasive themes in Malaysian literature. It is also significant that in many Malaysian novels, there is a vivid sense of the nation’s places and spaces. In the very first paragraph of Evening is the Whole Day, Samarasan plunges the reader into an evocative description of Peninsular Malaysia: “There is, stretching delicate as a bird’s head from the thin neck of the Kra Isthmus, a land that makes up half of the country called Malaysia. Where it dips its beak into the South China Sea, Singapore hovers like a bubble escaped from its throat” (2008, 1). The novel proceeds to locate its story of the Indian diaspora within a dynamic, localised space. A short story by Lee Kok Liang, of an earlier generation of Malaysian writers, foregrounds the importance of place in finding identity. In “Return to Malaya,” a popular story which has found its way into every anthology of Malaysian short stories in English, the unnamed protagonist returns to his homeland after a long sojourn abroad and finds it impossible to interact with his family and the community in general. He loses his bicycle and is forced to use public transport to move around and this, inadvertently, compels him to travel longer distances and engage with the community. When he opens himself to the land and the people, he is able to acquire a sense of identity and belonging. This is when he truly “returns” to Malaya. In A Map of Trengganu, Awang Goneng textually creates the spaces of Terengganu. In its descriptions of the food, customs, architecture and language of its people, the text invokes the rich heritage of the state of Terengganu. Che Husna Azhari does the same with her collection of stories entitled Melor in Perspective, which captures the particular place-identity of the Kelantanese people. These are just a few of the many Malaysian authors who foreground the place-­identity nexus in their work. For the purpose of my chapter, however, I have selected two authors, vastly different in terms of style and choice of genre but whose writings bring to the fore themes of identity, history and place and compel the

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reader to view Malaysian heritage in ways that counter authorised narratives of heritage. Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow’s texts attest to the salience of place where, to quote Yeoh and Kong, the geographical imagination and the historical mind are “simultaneously engaged by means of a focus on the concept of place” [emphasis in original] (1996, 52). Both writers portray the small town as a place of natural and cultural heritage, reflecting the cosmopolitan narrative of Malaysian history.

Journeying Through Malaysia The works of Rehman Rashid engage with ideas about place as intangible heritage, as discussed above, at a nuanced level. If read chronologically, starting from A Malaysian Journey (1993), then Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia (2016a) and lastly Small Town (2016b), they encapsulate Rehman’s personal journey of self-discovery, graphically imaging his growing understanding of Malaysia through its places and people. The title of Rehman’s first book, A Malaysian Journey, part memoir, part novel, and part travelogue, is self-explanatory; Rehman charts his journey through every state in Malaysia and, at the same time, explores the journey his home country has undertaken since its independence in 1957. Rehman’s candour and his courage to delve into topics, especially on religion and politics, in ways which veered away from official depictions, caught the public’s attention. Rehman’s story of Malaysia is also built on his own personal history, a mixed lineage that he frequently alludes to in all three books. It is evident that he is proud of his multicultural heritage and talks about the challenges his ethnic Malay father and Indian mother faced when they decided to marry. Intermarriage was frowned upon, although, as Rehman asserts, “there can be few Malaysians whose family trees do not resemble a banyan, the single tree that looks like a self-­ contained forest, with its superabundance of roots, each indistinguishable from a trunk” (1993, 42). Multiculturalism and the idea of migrancy and diaspora implicit in it are also central themes in his later works. Hence, it is to Rehman’s great dismay that when he embarks on his excursion of the 13 states of Malaysia, one of his first exchanges with a fellow Malaysian is about race. Before starting his journey by train, he goes for a drink at the station canteen and is soon joined by Shafie, a Malay government officer. The pleasant man is chatty and regales Rehman with stories of Malaysia’s growing prosperity, specifically with regard to the Malay community. Clearly, Shafie’s conversation evokes the racial categories which still ­govern

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Malaysian society. Rehman writes: “I wished he had said: We u ­ nderstand each other better now. But it was still, in this Malaysia I had not seen for so long, in the Malaysia of this hot and sunny April afternoon in 1992, a matter of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (1993, 10). Rehman’s own history is reflective of the diverse cultures that shape and define Malaysia’s heritage and this explains why he interrogates the issue of race with particular urgency in his writings. This journey and the places he visits have an affective influence on him. He is deeply distressed by society’s reluctance to embrace a transcultural heritage although Malaysia is “a confluence of destinies; history’s intertidal zone” (1993, 42). An integral feature of A Malaysian Journey is its evocations of place. Rehman starts his journey from Perlis, the northernmost state of Peninsular Malaysia, and as he travels through the country, he proceeds to describe the places he visits. Each of the 13 states which constitute Malaysia is depicted in ways which convey its own tenor and particular spirit of place: Penang is touristy, an entertainment hub; Johor is growing dirty in tandem with an escalating local population and increasing numbers of Singaporean tourists; Kuala Lumpur is a modern metropolis, its progress juxtaposed with its destruction of nature; and Sabah is chaotic and crowded. Rehman is indeed a cynical observer, keenly aware of the underbelly of rapid, thoughtless development and earnest in revealing what he sees as hypocritical and corrupt elements in society. He is disheartened that “Malaysian politics [has]continued to evolve along distinctly racial lines” (1993, 261) and queries the need for campaigns like “Visit Malaysia Year 1990,” which he feels capitalise on Malaysia’s multicultural realities for tourist consumption rather than as a privileged feature of Malaysian society. The early 1990s saw a boom in the country’s economy and an influx of foreign investments engendered an inordinate emphasis on tourism. In 1989, tourist revenue amounted to two billion ringgit which was “gratifying recompense for having adjusted history to enable important anniversaries to fall in the same year” (1993, 256). He explains that to add significance to the “Visit Malaysia” programme, government officials thought it “plausible” that Melaka was founded in 1490 and, because Kuala Lumpur’s sanitation department was set up in 1890, deemed it “legitimate” that this was also the birthdate of the capital city as an administrative centre! (1993, 256). He calls Melaka, a popular tourist destination in Malaysia, “hysterically historical,” “the Latest Greatest Tourist Trap in a country now veritably crevassed with them” (215). The UNESCO list of World Heritage sites includes Melaka and George Town,

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historic cities of the Straits of Melaka, as places of heritage. But for Rehman, Melaka’s much-visited famous landmarks are sterile manifestations of Malaysian heritage as they merely emphasise a history which is government sanctioned. At this point, it would be useful to turn to Nigel Worden’s article “National Identity and Heritage Tourism in Melaka” as it underlines Rehman’s views on designated historical cities. Worden uses Melaka as a case study to call attention to the paradoxes in authorised versions of cultural heritage. Describing Melaka as “a classic example of heritage creation and promotion” (2003, 31), he demonstrates how the city has become an icon in the construction of a “highly contested contemporary Malaysian identity” (2003, 31). Locating his argument within an economic-socio-­ historical context, he highlights the particular “tourist experience of Melaka’s heritage” (2003, 32) with its colonial-era-built environment (Portuguese fortress, Dutch Stadthuys, British clubhouse) reclaimed by a Malay-dominant construction of heritage, with various museums dedicated to Malay literature, culture, ethnography and history. In creating such a heritage, with the aim of associating Melaka with Malay-ness, a non-Malay heritage is deemed of “lesser significance” (2003, 37). This goes against other tourist promotional narratives, which foreground the city’s unique cultures, such as the Peranakan (or Straits Chinese) and the Casados (descendants of Portuguese-Malay marriages), as part of Malaysia’s rich cultural composition (Worden 2003, 37–38). Worden concludes that such heritage representations are a product of cultural policies, state-endorsed constructions from the time the Ministry of Tourism and Culture was established in Malaysia in the 1980s. The underlying, and critical, observation made by Worden is that Melaka’s heritage is “a critical part of the reinvention of Malaysia’s history” (2003, 32). Rehman makes similar observations in A Malaysian Journey. He wonders why the “500-year-old buildings” in Melaka are touted as “the oldest extant structures in Malaysia” (1993, 215) when there are the “1000-year-­ old Hindu and Buddhist temples of the Bujang Valley?” (1993, 215). His rhetorical question criticises not only the need to “package” heritage so that it appeals to tourists but also the more insidious attempt to reflect history in ways which negate the presence of certain communities. By evoking the precolonial history of the country, we are called to envision the transnational interactions and mobilities that have historically shaped Malaysia. Rehman finds it farcical that the revered Malay warrior, Hang Tuah, is buried “in at least half-a-dozen places here and in Indonesia”

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(1993, 217). He questions the legends and myths inspired by Gunung Ledang as they seem to go hand in hand with official narratives of heritage. Gunung Ledang, “barely a knoll, really, a thousand metres high” (1993, 194), has many stories woven around it, all of which highlight the supremacy of the Malay sultanate. On this fabled mountain, Hang Tuah and his friends were said to have acquired the “mystic martial arts” that made them peerless warriors (1993, 194). This mountain was favoured by the sultans and “a fabulous magical princess” (1993, 194). Rehman suggests that these tales are better off as the stuff of “blockbuster movies,” rather than material for heritage construction (1993, 194). For Rehman, then, Melaka and Gunung Ledang exemplify the concept of “dissonance in heritage” referred to earlier. The content projected for public, specifically tourist, consumption reflects the dominance of Malay ethnicity. While this kind of heritage-making is common in international tourism, “the world’s largest service industry” (Graham et al. 2000, 26), it is certainly misleading. In A Malaysian Journey, as in his other books, Rehman asserts how the manufacture and preservation of history in the interest of politics and economics ultimately provide a reductive account of Malaysian history, one that dismisses the country’s rich heritage. Indeed, Farish Noor comments that “any Malaysian who wishes to retain or emphasise his or her sense of a plural, hybrid past and cultural heritage would have a hard time getting recognised as someone whose identity is as complex and mixed as the region we live in” (2009, 79). In Rehman’s own travels in Malaysia, there are hardly any references to grand monuments and iconic landmarks, something one would expect from a book entitled A Malaysian Journey. Instead, the focus seems to be on smaller places like the villages and the more remote towns, which showcase a vital local identity complemented by feelings of belonging. His first stop on the train journey is Padang Besar, a small border town in the northern part of the state of Perlis. Rehman is immediately “deep in the thrill of being home in Malaysia, in the so-familiar surroundings of a small-­ town railway station” (1993, 8). The humble station is described in close, almost indulgent, detail, and Rehman is swept by a feeling of belonging. In contrast, he feels alienated by the rapid development engulfing much of the country and is aghast at the increasing disappearance of the Malaysian small town. Indeed, though Rehman’s journeyings produce astute observations of what has happened and is happening in Malaysia, his most telling and personally felt depictions are of the smaller towns and the villages or kampungs, which for him embody the lived experiences of the people.

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He is utterly relieved when he finds Taiping, his hometown, still “recognizable” (1993, 31). The small town had settled into a “gentle dotage” (1993, 31). The people’s pride in the town’s history meant that its old buildings and its famed botanical gardens were well maintained. Rehman ends his homage to his hometown by describing Taiping as “the Nicest Hometown in Malaysia” (1993, 32). He admits that the unique features of the town are intact because of the efforts of the community that are proud of its history. Rehman’s observations find an echo in an article, “Mechanisms for protecting the identity of small towns in Malaysia,” which discusses the threat of dilapidation, exhaustion and disappearance felt by small-scale towns in Malaysia today. The authors state that apart from formal legal processes, another effective mechanism to safeguard the heritage of the small town is the “community-based system,” that is, practices and initiatives carried out by the inhabitants of the small town to preserve the past. The notion of living heritage is also recalled in Rehman’s story of Nizamuddin, a talented graphic designer, who left the city to return to his quiet village of Kampung Gajah in Negeri Sembilan. His decision to leave was considered a “shame” (1993, 175) by his friends, but the unhappy young man felt his search for identity and belonging necessitated a return to his kampung. Back home, living among people who cherish tradition and community living, Nizamuddin finds personal fulfilment but is still riddled with doubts about his choice to return to the village. He asks Rehman if his impulsive behaviour made him a bohemian, to which Rehman replies: “A bohemian is a rebel of some sort, a defier of convention [….] but I think you’re much closer to your heritage than you think. It’s just that, these days, for a Malay to be true to his heritage is itself almost an act of rebellion” (1993, 178). The suggestion here is that to know one’s heritage is to know the real history of the nation. The people of Kampung Gajah live out their heritage in their simple day-to-day routine, which upholds tradition and a reverence for nature. The built heritage in the kampung has not altered much. Rehman assures Nizamuddin that he will find his identity and calling in his hometown. The conflation of the spaces of the smaller town and the village with notions of Malaysian identity and belonging permeates A Malaysian Journey. For Rehman, heritage does not involve monuments or national symbols. Instead, human interaction and activity inscribe his renditions of place, which in turn articulate heritage as process and as lived reality. Disillusioned by Malaysian politics and the haphazard development sweeping through the country in the name of progress, changes which he

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feels are alienating people from the places they inhabit, Rehman finds respite in nature, in “the banks of the Perak River in Parit […] Taiping’s Lake Gardens […] the foothills of the Main Range” (1993, 266), places which seem to be outside official jurisdiction. In these places, one feels an organic attachment to the land and a sense of belonging. In the Epilogue to the book, Rehman tells us about his decision to spend the last months finishing his manuscript in the small town of Kuala Kubu Baru. He vividly captures life lived in this “spruce little place” where there is a “tacit understanding” among its various ethnic communities (1993, 281) to allow each other to live their own lives without outside interference. Indeed, the Epilogue reads like a tribute to Kuala Kubu Baru: “it has been instructive for me to learn that many people still spend all their lives in the town where they were born, attending to the family shop, taking it over from their parents, and passing it on to their children. Such continuity is reassuring in a country that is changing so rapidly, so profoundly. I have found this town to be a restful place; a place it would be easy to imagine as home” (1993, 282). In Kuala Kubu Baru, multiethnic and multi-religious communities live together, accepting their differences, their daily routine displaying a respect for the past and their natural surroundings. For Rehman, this is “home,” a place reflective of Malaysia’s manifold histories. Identity and belonging, A Malaysian Journey asserts, can be found in places like Kuala Kubu Baru, places which cherish a multicultural heritage. In his next work, Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia, Rehman returns to the past and evokes the colonial heritage of Malaysia, calling “19th-century Malaya” a “Polyglot Mess” (2016a, 78) with its ethnic communities compartmentalised according to occupational and geographical spaces, as mentioned earlier. “21st century Malaysia,” he later adds, continues with “separate education systems” and “the separate economies arising from them” (2016a, 84), the outcome of politics configured along divisive communitarian lines. This kind of thinking extends to the way the government has favoured progress in the form of “prefabricated and artificial Malaysian habitats” (2016a, 104) over the preservation of small towns and kampungs. When Rehman proceeds to paint the historical landscape of Malaysia, he deliberately foregrounds its interface of identity, history and heritage, highlighting the diversity of the archipelago and its rich mix of cultures since the earliest of times (2016a, 178–179). He devotes one chapter to the indigenous communities, whom he describes as “Lost Tribes,” a people largely ignored and forgotten by the nation. “Mankind has been in Malaysia a very long time. Some modern Malays remain

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­ iscomfited by the thousands of years they were preceded here by the d Asli” (2016a, 179). Rehman reminds us that the Orang Asli, or indigenous people, “provide a baseline of millennia from which to measure the 600-­ year history” of the Malay sultanate and yet were only gazetted “Bumiputra” in 1970 when the distinction between “indigene” and “immigrant” became fundamental to the national social order (2016a, 178). The Orang Asli remain a marginalised community in Malaysia and most of them continue to live in poverty. Again, in this same chapter, Rehman evokes other historical sites in Malaysia, which are often not mentioned, even forgotten: the eleventhand twelfth-century Buddhist figurines in Kinta Valley, Perak, the lost Hindu kingdom of Gangga Negara in the Beruas and Manjong districts of Perak dating back to the second century, and the Hindu stupas in Kedah’s Bujang Valley built more than 2000 years ago. The Asli community and these locations bear testimony to the “river of humanity” which has flowed through the Peninsula “since the Ice Ages” (2016a, 178–179). Peninsula repeatedly registers its author’s frustration, even pain, that Malaysians have failed to acknowledge their complex histories. Towards the close of the book, he describes Kuala Kubu Baru, his new home, which is located in the state of Selangor and is about an hour’s drive from Kuala Lumpur. The very location of this town, “enfolded” into the hills, seems to resist the snare of modernisation and needless change; “anything imposed upon it from above” was “infused by what lies beneath” (2016a, 269). The town lies at the foothills of the Main Range of Peninsular Malaysia, at the intersections of the states of Selangor, Perak and Pahang; “a place between places, rooted in times between times” (2016b, 9). Apart from the scenic beauty of its surroundings, the community’s initiatives to preserve the old ways of life and their multicultural aspect make this town a living heritage: “In fact, the demographics of Kuala Kubu Baru and its surrounding districts so match their national medians, including the Orang Asli, that I consider this place a living showcase of this peninsula in its better aspects, from geography and history to society and politics” (2016a, 269). Indeed, in 2010, the state government of Selangor gazetted the town for development as a heritage and ecotourism site because of its built heritage2 and the town’s environs (Kamalruddin 2013). Rehman’s depictions of the town highlight these very things as well as the way the mixed community live in harmony with each other: a living heritage of Malaysian history. The descriptions of Kuala Kubu Baru resonate with the notion of place as “both an input and an output of the process of heritage creation” (Graham

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et  al. 2000, 4). Interestingly, in A Malaysian Journey and Peninsula, Rehman suggests that if we revisit Malaysian history, we would know that its heritage is complicated and not as linear and unitary as in mainstream and official narratives. Merely privileging certain sites (such as Melaka and Gunung Ledang) as heritage spaces does not necessarily reflect the rich, layered history of Malaysia. He asks us to look at the multiple connections between places and communities. The place he finally calls home, Kuala Kubu Baru, is a location which insists on diversity and compels one to acknowledge the cross-fertilisation which inheres in Malaysian culture. Rehman’s last work, Small Town (2016b), pays tribute to his newly adopted home of Kuala Kubu Baru. Designed by a colonial town planner, Charles Reade, it was the first planned township in the Peninsula (2016b, 25–26). This place saw the coming together of many people and cultures, which in turn created complicated and complex relationships between them and the monarchs, colonisers, Malays and diasporic groups that found their way to this region rich in tin ore. Small Town is a treasure trove of information on the history of Kuala Kubu Baru. In this town, surrounded by lush greenery, Rehman lived in an ancestral home, a “traditional shophouse descended from the eighteenth century Lingnan style of Quangdong” (2016b, 31) that was adapted for this part of the world. Kuala Kubu Baru is recognised for its built heritage and this ancestral building following Lingnan or Cantonese culture had a “five-foot way,” a covered public passage in front which was an innovation introduced by Stamford Raffles when he was in Singapore in the nineteenth century (2016b, 31). The town, though of “ancient provenance,” is still youthful and fecund (2016b, 62), and the author remarks that it was “heartening [that] the kids who had gone away to grow up had begun coming home” (2016b, 35). For Rehman, a way of life which reveres nature and upholds diversity is one that all Malaysians should adopt. Kuala Kubu Baru and Kampung Gajah underscore the important idea that place is historic but must also be thought of as process, an active and living entity. Rehman opens up the space of the small town to represent Malaysian heritage and to encapsulate belonging—a space which counters racialised politics and captures the transnational aspect of Malaysian history.

Other Small Towns of Malaysia The notion that small towns are to be considered important heritage spaces is manifestly expressed in The Sum of Our Follies (2014)3 by Shih-Li Kow. In her novel, Kow creates a very vivid sense of place which contrib-

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utes to the distinctly local flavour of her narrative. To a large extent, and perhaps because of the deliberate focus on things local, issues of Malaysian identity, history and heritage figure prominently in this text. Unlike Rehman who deals with the political and socio-economic contexts of Malaysia in a strident, cynical tone, Kow’s voice is more muted and often also humorous. She herself describes her style in an interview as “light but substantial” and that she admires the writer Annie Proulx for her “place settings” (Tan 2019, 10). Like the opening scene in Evening is the Whole Day, The Sum of Our Follies begins with a dramatic description of place: Lubok Sayong has a problem with water; there’s simply too much of it. Our town sits in a saucer-shaped depression, sunk into a valley with the Perak River on one side and a tributary of the Sayong on another. The rivers hug Lubok Sayong against the foothills of a mountain range that runs like a spine along the peninsula. This unfortunate topography and conspiracy of bends in the rivers ensure that Lubok Sayong always floods. When it rains, our valley fills up like a plugged basin under a running tape. (2014, 6)

The fictional town is described with so much detail and physical specificity that many readers were convinced that Lubok Sayong actually existed. Right from the start, the novel sets up a dichotomy between the small town and the city. A big flood threatens to wipe out the whole town, and though city dwellers come in droves to help, their presence is burdensome to the residents: “In truth, many of us preferred the lazy help of the police and fire department” (2014, 16). On their part, the people from the city do not understand “the quirks of small town folk” (2014, 15). The inhabitants of Lubok Sayong want to be self-reliant and do not care for outside interference; this is also seen when groups of politicians come by at different times to campaign for their parties, the town folk do not care for their rhetoric. The tourists who visit are necessary income generators but they too cannot, must not, change the spirit of Lubok Sayong. This small town, “a pin on the map” (2014, 84), is also an old town that has been given different names over the years but it is the people living there who ultimately decide on the town’s name. Lubok Sayong is just like any small town in Peninsular Malaysia, “a one-of-everything type of town”: one main street, one set of traffic lights, one post office, one supermarket and one school for each, the Chinese, Malay and Indian children (2014, 22). Similar to other small towns, there is the beautiful, extensive natural beauty surrounding it. Two narrators—an elderly, ethnic Chinese man, Auyong, and an 11-year-old girl called Mary Anne, an orphan of

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­ ndetermined ethnicity—tell the story of the town and the happenings u there. Both are in search of a home, and they do find what they are looking for in Lubok Sayong. Both Auyong and Mary Anne arrive in Lubok Sayong under different circumstances. The former leaves Kuala Lumpur and his job as a hypermarket manager to take up work as a retiree manager of a canning factory. Mary Anne is adopted by the sister of Mami Beevi, one of the main characters in the novel; the sister dies suddenly and Beevi takes charge of the young child. The book is divided into different sections, each section narrated, alternatively, by Auyong and Mary Anne, both outsiders who come to love the town as time passes. Auyong sums up their feelings for the town: “there was much comfort in being addressed by name by familiar faces” (2014, 91). But the narrative moves beyond nostalgia for a more traditional way of living, to explore themes of belonging and home in a multicultural context. Just like Rehman evokes the complex cultural mix of Kuala Kubu Baru, as a metaphor for the Malaysian nation, Kow also highlights Lubok Sayong’s mixed community. Apart from Auyong and Mary Anne, there is Ismet, the charming Malay potter, and Mami Beevi whose extended family is a mix of cultures. During the floods, when their livelihood is threatened, the town folk assist one other. When Miss Boonsidik, a transgender who comes to live with Mami Beevi and is warmly accepted by the town community, is violently assaulted, her friends come together and apprehend the perpetrators. The presence of Boonsidik, “half-Thai-half-Malay” (2014, 127), is interesting as it opens up even more the demographics of this small town. This is a liberal, generous space, honouring the rights of everyone living there; a place that understands and embraces difference. Here, there is no stereotyping of race and gender. Mary Anne guides us in our understanding of the people in the town: “every now and then, I want to tell you what people looked like, just to set you right before it becomes impossible to change the image you have made up for yourself” (2014, 73). Auyong even finds it necessary to apologise for the way he used to evaluate people when he lived in the big city, my “limited imagination was only good for stereotypes” (2014, 58). The inhabitants of the small town of Lubok Sayong move away from the practice of placing people in rigid categories. The chapter “Potters and Politicians” in The Sum of Our Follies powerfully brings together notions of heritage and authority to demonstrate the hollowness of heritage when it is artificially imposed on communities. The rivers which run through Lubok Sayong provide clay for the town’s thriv-

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ing pottery business, which goes downhill with the advent of direct-selling pyramid schemes that replace the clay water pitches with water filters. When there is a proposal to rename the town’s roundabout, the importance of the clay container is resurrected and a 50-foot water pitcher is erected in cement and installed in the middle of the roundabout. When the dignitary responsible for officiating the ceremony fails to turn up, the roundabout retains its old name of Edinburgh Circus! Soon after, the same dignitary abandons promoting pottery for “the much sexier batik textile from elsewhere, a fabric that was recently declared a national treasure by the prime minister’s wife” (2014, 88). In due time, the three academies established for the purpose of promoting batik collapse and become “in the tradition of other failed institutions, minor museums and centres for research and development for something vaguely important. The Sayong pottery trade carried on pretty much as it did” (2014, 89). The whole chapter demonstrates how fickle and unscrupulous the process of heritage-making can be. Though the pottery industry formed the livelihood of most of the townspeople for generations and was part of their common history, government officials encouraged the community to adopt another cottage industry, namely the making of textiles, because they now wanted to promote batik as heritage. The sense here is that actual heritage—place, people and their attendant activities—is ignored. The novel suggests that heritage-making by the powers that be is a politically advantageous and potentially lucrative act. Ultimately, what The Sum of Our Follies demonstrates is the dynamism of living heritage and the cognitive and corporeal experiences of the material places which shape identity. All the inhabitants of the town share a special camaraderie; they occupy a place which shuns racialised notions of belonging. Beneath the story of the everyday goings-on of a small town is a critique of official narratives of race and heritage and their attendant themes of identity and belonging. Heritage here is process, the lived experience of the local community, and this, Kow asserts, is far more important than static, official interpretations of history. The novel resonates with what Laurajane Smith calls the “multi-layered performance” of heritage, that is, that apart from the normal practices of visiting, managing and conservation associated with heritage, there are also the other heritage-­ making practices of “constructing a sense of place, belonging and understanding the present” (2006, 3). The Sum of Our Follies is replete with these “other” performances. It is the cultural processes and activities undertaken in a place which make it valuable. The folk who live in Lubok

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Sayong are a multicultural community who live close to the land, embrace each other’s differences and share a strong kinship. Their solidarity is weaved into their daily lives and the novel ends with the younger generation taking over from the older people and continuing to live in this small town in a spirit of acceptance and generosity. Though Lubok Sayong is enveloped by a few mythical tales, amongst them, one about a gigantic flesh-eating fish lurking in its lake, Auyong complains: “had the forefathers […] been prescient enough to leave behind some physical evidence to support our legend, even if romanticised with half-truths and superstitions, travel guidebooks today would have listed us in their itineraries” (2014, 7). But the town’s identity and ultimately its survival undergird the idea that “a national landscape myth is not an essential heritage prerequisite” (Graham et al. 2000, 61). Heritage is cultivated in the everyday and, in this novel, is a conflation of rurality with the holus-bolus of the ordinary. Kow demonstrates that in times of heightened exclusionary discourses, ordinary people “can be active participants in the historically contingent process of the making of place. Within the context of their times they construct places by inventing them with human meaning” (Yeoh and Kong 1996, 53). The people of Lubok Sayong, by being inclusive of other cultures and ethnicities, transgress state-sanctioned identities and move away from staid stereotypes of racial difference. They create a place where they can be true to their Malaysian history and heritage.

Conclusion Tadhg O’Keeffe makes the astute observation that all landscape qualifies as somebody’s heritage even if the term “heritage” seldom allows such a liberal application (2007, 10). Yet, as rightly observed by Paul Claval in “Changing Conceptions of Heritage and Landscape,” the notion of heritage today is necessarily broader than before and “this has profound spatial implications” (2007, 88). He goes on to say that spaces that did not have particular significance in the past over time have new values and meanings ascribed to them. However, heritage remains a highly contested domain because of its ability to construct identity, to reinvent history, to marginalise, to erase—activities embedded in power relations. In “Know the Past” (2018), historian Ahmad Murad Merican discusses the dangers of not knowing one’s history. He draws a link between knowledge of the past and the formulation of public policies, citing policies on

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kampung, heritage, ethnicity and identity as examples. Using the island of Penang as a case study, he bemoans the “destruction of [the] kampung” along the coast in the northeast district of Penang Island, the willy-nilly change in place names, the lack of interest in and even ignorance about spaces steeped in history, which are slowly but systematically being destroyed. He goes on further to talk about the rich diversity of Malaysia’s history and a need to be aware of a “greater Malaysia.” Writers like Rehman Rashid and Shih-Li Kow, as I have demonstrated, are aware of this “greater Malaysia.” The places they evoke in their writings move away from the static, fixed interpretations of historical places and spaces offered by official narratives, which have for the longest time subsumed diversity, an important characteristic of Malaysian society. Both writers resurrect the small town as a source of heritage, as a place where identity is formed and a sense of cultural belonging is acquired. Just like the all-important kampung discussed by Murad, the small town is a unique feature of Malaysian history. These are places which have witnessed migrancy and diaspora and so are palimpsests of history, portraying Malaysia’s rich multi-layered heritage.

Notes 1. In this chapter, I focus on Malaysian literature in English. 2. Goh Ban Lee discusses Kuala Kubu Baru’s unique built heritage in “Local Counsel-KKB a legacy of Charles Reade.” 3. The Sum of Our Follies was translated into French and won a top French literature award, the Prix du Premier Roman etranger (the First Novel Prize in the Foreign Category) in 2018.

References Awang Goneng. 2011. A Map of Trengganu. Singapore: Monsoon Books. Blake, Janet. 2009. UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Implications of Community Involvement in ‘Safeguarding. In Intangible Heritage, ed. Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, 45–73. London and New York: Routledge. Che Husna Azhari. 1993. Melor in Perspective. Bandar Baru Bangi: Furada Publishing House. Claval, Paul. 2007. Changing Conceptions of Heritage and Landscape. In Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity: New Perspectives on the Cultural Landscape, ed. Niamh Moore and Yvonne Whelan, 85–93. Hampshire: Ashgate.

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Farish A.  Noor. 2009. What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You. Petaling Jaya: Matahari Books. Gabriel, Sharmani P. 2015. The Meaning of Race in Malaysia: Colonial, Post-­ colonial and Possible New Conjunctures. Ethnicities 15 (6): 782–809. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1468796815570347. Goh Ban Lee. 2015. Local Counsel-KKB a Legacy of Charles Reade, August 31. https://www.thesundaily.my/archive/1538294-GSARCH326826. Graham, Brian, G.J.  Ashworth, and J.E.  Tunbridge. 2000. A Geography of Heritage. London: Hodder Headline Group. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Kahn, Joel S. 2006. Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World. Singapore: National University Press. Kamalruddin Shamsudin. 2013. Highlight Town’s Heritage Value, August 1. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e s t a r. c o m . m y / n e w s / c o m m u n i t y / 2 0 1 3 / 0 8 / 0 1 / highlight-towns-heritage-value-kuala-kubu-baru-originally-planned-alonglines-of-garden-city-in-lon/. Kow, Shih-Li. 2008. Ripples and Other Stories. Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books Sdn Bhd. ———. 2014. The Sum of Our Follies. Kuala Lumpur: Silverfish Books Sdn Bhd. Lowenthal, David. 2000. Stewarding the Past in a Perplexing Present. In Values and Heritage Conservation: Research Report, ed. Erica Avrami and Randall Mason, 18–25. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. ———. 2005. Natural and Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies 11 (1): 81–92. Mandal, Sumit K. 2018. Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World. London: Cambridge University Press. Merican, Ahmad Murad. 2018. Know the Past. New Sunday Times, 20, September 2. Nur Farhana Azmi, Faizah Ahmad, and Azlan Shah Ali. 2016. Mechanisms for Protecting the Identity of Small Towns in Malaysia. In MATEC Web of Conference 66, 00113, 1–8. O’Keeffe, Tadhg. 2007. Landscape and Memory: Historiography, Theory, Methodology. In Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity: New Perspectives on the Cultural Landscape, ed. Niamh Moore and Yvonne Whelan, 3–18. Hampshire: Ashgate. Pillai, Patrick. 2015. Yearning to Belong: Malaysia’s Indian Muslims, Chitties, Portuguese Eurasians, Peranakan Chinese, and Baweanese. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Rehman Rashid. 1993. A Malaysian Journey. Kuala Lumpur: Academe Art & Printing Services Sdn Bhd.

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———. 2016a. Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Fergana Art Sdn Bhd. ———. 2016b. Small Town: A Personal Tribute to Kuala Kubu Baru, Hulu Selangor, Malaysia. Kuala Kubu Baru: Persatuan Sejarah Kuala Kubu. Samarasan, Preeta. 2008. Evening Is the Whole Day. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Silverman, Helaine, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, eds. 2017. Heritage in Action: Making the Past in the Present. Cham: Springer. Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa, eds. 2009. Intangible Heritage. London: Routledge. Syed Husin Ali. 2008. Ethnic Relations in Malaysia: Harmony & Conflict. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Tan, Gim Ean. 2019. Shih-Li’s Story. Options in Pursuit of Pleasure. The Edge Malaysia, 8–10, March 4. Tunbridge, J.E., and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: John Wiley. Worden, Nigel. 2003. National Identity and Heritage Tourism in Melaka. Indonesia and the Malay World 31 (89): 31–43. Yeoh, Brenda S.A., and Lily Kong. 1996. The Notion of Place in the Construction of History, Nostalgia and Heritage in Singapore. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 17 (1): 52–65.

CHAPTER 8

“The Unmovable Self Situated in the Quicksand of Memory”: Nostalgia and Intangible Natural Heritage in the Weather Poems of Shirley Geok-lin Lim Agnes S. K. Yeow

Introduction For better or worse, nostalgia and heritage are inseparable bedfellows: their uneasy alliance is attributed to the pejorative sense that nostalgia as a social and emotional construct tends to attract to itself. Unlike memory which is deemed a positive force, nostalgia is largely scorned upon and perhaps not without good reason. Commenting on the relation between nostalgia and the heritage industry, Graham Huggan describes nostalgia as “one of exoticism’s most powerful myths” and argues that it “enacts a complex dialectic of desire—it seeks a past of its own invention it knows in advance to be impossible” (2001, 179). Idealised nostalgia, or the desire to salvage both the cultures of the “timeless,” exotic other and the p ­ astoral A. S. K. Yeow (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_8

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“Golden Ages,” provides the impetus for uncritical ideas of heritage which are then sold to heritage-seeking tourists. However, since the turn of the new millennium, perceptions about nostalgia and heritage—and the memory or historical remembrance that underpins both—have been changing as demonstrated in heritage, literary and cultural discourses. Scholars like Svetlana Boym, Simon Schama, Glenn Albrecht, Dennis Walder, Sean Scanlan, Susan Stewart, Jennifer Ladino, Scott Slovic and Jason F Lambacher—representing multiple disciplines—have contributed significantly to what can be described as the nostalgic turn in critical studies from the late 1990s into the new millennium: an ethical, ontological and epistemic shift in our thinking about nostalgia and the memory and acts of remembrance that drive it. As Scanlan asserts: “Now, nostalgia may be a style or design or narrative that serves to comment on how memory works. Rather than an end reaction to yearning, it is understood as a technique for provoking a secondary reaction” (2004, 4). Generally, nostalgia is being reclaimed, reconsidered and re-deployed by writers, scholars and heritage practitioners in productive and strategic ways—as a trope, construct, phenomenon or neuropsychological experience—in order to address a variety of issues ranging from postcolonial and diasporic to psychological and ecological concerns. The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which individual and communal histories and, through them, notions of heritage are mediated through what I describe as the “environmental memories” of Asian-American writer Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Lim’s lifelong navigation of the intricate workings of memory and nostalgia is evident in both her early and later poems like “Monsoon History,” “Crossing the Peninsula,” “When,” “I Remember,” “Bukit China,” “Visiting Malacca,” “Horizon,” “Bogie Hole” and “Again,” to name just a few. These memories pertain to largely non-material phenomena including events, processes and relations like the weather and notions of dwelling: legacies that can be understood as intangible natural heritage, an emerging heritage concept and field of knowledge which goes beyond material objects to focus on environmental domains such as landscapes, soundscapes, taphonomy, global climate, the conservation movement, evolutionary processes (like natural selection) and environmental practices or attitudes. To this list, I could add environmental colonisation or imperialism as a historical process that has undermined the very ecological balance of colonised regions through resource exploitation, human (re)settlement and the introduction of non-­ native species of plants and animals as well as disease.

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Eric Dorfman, an advocate for natural and cultural heritage and president of the ICOM (International Council of Museums) Committee for Museums and Collections of Natural History (ICOM NATHIST), states that intangible natural heritage, the environmental equivalent of intangible cultural heritage, “is concerned with processes, moving the viewer’s attention beyond the (natural) object itself, to an abstract idea—a springboard for understanding process” (Dorfman 2012, 11). Intangible natural heritage essentially challenges the view that culture and nature are dualistically opposed—a dichotomy that Upamanyu Mukherjee argues belies the “indivisibility of humans and environment, the interpenetration of nature and history, the dynamic relation between the two established via human labour” (2010, 61). Amareswar Galla notes that the former president of ICOM NATHIST Dr Gerhard Winter—who inspired Dorfman’s edited collection of essays Intangible Natural Heritage: New Perspectives on Natural Objects—was “one of the first ICOM leaders to respect and recognise that the nature/culture dichotomy in museological discourse is hegemonic and Eurocentric, and that ICOM as an inclusive organisation must promote multiple discourses” (2014, 180). Underpinning the discourse of intangible natural heritage is the recognition that nature is the catalyst for culture itself. As Mukherjee also notes: “the environment (understood in its properly expansive sense of being always interpenetrated with history) and cultural forms shape and enable each other” (2010, 59). Drawing from as well as contributing to these debates, this chapter offers an exploration of the intangible natural heritage of Lim’s birthplace of Malacca represented through her memories of the weather and the self-­ in-­place or dwelling—as well as the implications of her nostalgic environmental imagination. Malacca—or its local spelling variant “Melaka” as officially sanctioned and standardised by the Melaka state government in 2017—is the historical city which gives its name to the state and the Sultanate. Strategically located on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula along the shipping route linking China to the West, it was a key transshipment port in the precolonial and colonial era. In this chapter, I will keep to the Anglicised spelling “Malacca” to emphasise the city’s long, pre-­ independence history and to invoke its heritage values. I show how Lim’s memories of her Malaccan-cum-Malaysian home space foreground the entanglement of culture and nature and serve as an indirect commentary on how the ecological crisis—both local and global— has impacted ideas of home as heritage, thus confirming, not least because of environmental degradation, the post-nostalgic idea that “[h]ome is not

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something one can hold on to” (Simine 2013, 183). Lim’s centuries-old, inherited peranakan1 traditions and lifeways do not occur in a vacuum but are shaped and re-shaped by changing environmental realities and circumstances over time. Unsurprisingly, the encoded and stored memories in Lim’s poetry are mainly triggered by environmental, place-based cues and give rise to a nostalgia for a past climate, dwelling and landscape, all of which are threatened by anthropogenic factors. The nostalgia that is called forth is of a variety of environmental nostalgia Scott Slovic calls nostalgia loci; he describes it as “a complex emotional response to the sense of deep history as it attaches itself to specific places in the world—it is a nostalgia that is part of the emotional fabric of place itself” (2014, 11). It’s not farfetched to say that nostalgia is being mobilised to save the planet or at least to raise awareness of the real effects of humanity’s domination of the world including the legacies of colonialism. No longer summarily dismissed, nostalgia—when seen through the lens of postcolonialism—has been reincarnated as “a complex form of representation for writers concerned to express their relationship with the recalled or remembered pasts they identify with; in particular, those whose pasts have been shaped by empire and/or colonisation” (Walder 2011, 3). Before turning to Lim’s work and by way of framing my argument, it is important to note at the outset that heritage practitioners and scholars themselves have tacitly acknowledged the nostalgic turn in creative expression and critical discourse. This perspectival shift is vital because the “old” nostalgia continues to perpetuate heritage myths that evoke a false sense of national continuity and stability in the face of changes like globalisation and the widespread cross-border dispersal of peoples and cultures all over the world. It is imperative that newer notions of nostalgia are not merely updated versions of the old nostalgia but that they offer a productive way to reflect on the past in order to navigate the present and the future. New approaches to nostalgia are intimated in, for example, Mediating Memory in the Museum, where Silke Arnold-de Simine argues that the re-invention of the museum is a response to changing perceptions of memory, nostalgia and heritage; re-inventing museums entails transforming exhibition and heritage sites into dynamic spaces of memory where forgotten stories are excavated and told and memories are performed (2013, 2–3). In her study of heritage buildings in the Asian enclaves of London, she asserts: If nostalgia is the desire for a home configured both spatially and temporally, then in order to explore nostalgia one has to investigate the triadic

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r­ elationship between people, places and memory and the varying constellations in which this dynamic is played out in different contexts. (182)

Far from being trivialised as a myopic, sentimental and uncritical yearning for a golden age or idealised version of the past, nostalgia as grounded in the complex and changing interactions between people, places and memory is gaining traction as a legitimate element in mainstream heritage practice. More crucially, Simine writes about how new museum practices are “[probing] the limits of their epistemological structures and representational paradigms” by “including the narratives of formerly marginalised or silent memory communities” (2013, 2). In pushing the boundaries of traditional exhibiting practices, the aim is to focus on “everyday life, personal stories and individual biographies, in order to present diversified memories” (2013, 2; my emphasis). To be sure, the notion of “memory diversity” is crucial in contesting and challenging the skewed master narratives and narrow nationalist agenda that traditional museums and conservation projects often stand accused of. As importantly, museum and heritage professionals realise that they will have to evolve with the ways in which communities recall the past by incorporating new technologies and other media into their exhibitions and narratives. Given these changing dynamics, I propose that the literature of nostalgia produced by the “silent memory communities” of storytellers/poets is as significant a communal legacy as any tangible museum/heritage artefact or intangible cultural practice. Recognising that the assessment of heritage is problematic given the diverse and conflicting nature of heritage values, Randall Mason asserts: [M]ultivalence is an essential quality of heritage and […] logically suggests a pluralistic, eclectic approach to value assessment. […] A second important insight about heritage values is that they are contingent, not objectively given. The values of heritage are not simply “found” and fixed and unchanging, as was traditionally theorised in the conservation field (i.e., the notion of heritage values being intrinsic). Values are produced out of the interaction of an artifact and its contexts; they don’t emanate from the artifact itself. Values can thus only be understood with reference to social, historical, and even spatial contexts—through the lens of who is defining and articulating the value, why now, and why here? (2002, 8)

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In view of the “memory diversity” and multivalent, fluid and contingent nature of heritage values, I propose that literary works such as the “environmental memory” writings of Shirley Geok-lin Lim, which dwell on how individual history interacts with the larger communal history, may have a stake in the heritage conservation of the community that is being written about. As a cultural artefact, a literary work’s heritage values may potentially be derived from the key role it plays as an alternative repository of memory capable of mediating time and space and bridging the past with the present, especially when the past in question—historical Malacca— is itself the subject of much heritagisation. Indeed, nostalgic literature has the potential to critique the loss and displacement felt by both individuals and communities without descending into a wistful, self-indulgent longing for a rosy, romanticised past. Svetlana Boym asserts: “Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (2001, xvi). She also notes that “for many displaced people from all over the world, creative rethinking of nostalgia was not merely an artistic device but a strategy of survival, a way of making sense of the impossibility of homecoming” (2001, xvii). This notion is certainly discernible in Shirley Lim’s poems of homecoming as, having resided in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA, she reflects on the idea of home from a transnational perspective and underscores the “complexities and contradictions of being a diasporic writer, for whom the question of home is fraught with ambiguity and ambivalence” (Boey 2015, 13). Incidentally, in a 2016 interview, Lim highlights the notion of writing as a means of survival: “Survival—to keep writing—is to be in a present, where the past is bone and memory in the present body” (2018, 8). Lim’s nostalgic writings help her to survive and reflect on past personal and communal agonies by grounding her firmly in the present and future. As Boey Kim Cheng notes, for Lim: “Memory is an act of crossing, or rather, recrossing, and seeing what was invisible or not seen before, the routes and roots uncovered now with the benefit of retrospect […] [T]he work of memory is also forward-looking, providing the necessary reference points as she negotiates the liminal zone between past and present” (2014, 75). A nostalgia which is likened to the act of crossing and re-crossing—the subject of poems like “Crossing the Peninsula”—suggests a dynamic movement and not a stagnant clinging on to what was and what could have been.

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It can be argued that Lim’s critical longing for home echoes Boym’s concept of “reflective nostalgia,” which she elaborates: cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalises space […] [and] reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection. Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; […]. (2001, 49)

I posit that reflective nostalgia is an apt description of Lim’s critical engagement with her Malaccan material as seen in her preoccupation with diasporic and postcolonial identities and in the way in which her nostalgic narrative maintains a sense of distance and open-endedness while eschewing absolute notions of home/homeland/homecoming. As the remembering subject in the poem “I Remember” notes: “Where she had been / Then, there is no recognition.” The child—who with great effort “thought to remember the sea” by “[holding] steady the blue motion” in her eye— becomes a distinctly distant and receding, albeit important figure: “I see her, now, the scene of a scene, / Planted eminent as the sky, / As sea she had enclosed in eye” (1994, 35). In “Visiting Malacca,” the pensively nostalgic persona acknowledges—not without a pang—a growing feeling of alienation from the childhood house: “I dream of the old house. / The dreams leak slowly like sap / Welling from a wound: I am losing / Ability to make myself at home.” However, this incites a sense not so much of loss or regret but relief: “I have dreamed of ruined meaning, / And am glad to find none” (1994, 32). Perhaps Lim’s metaphor for the remembering subject in her memoir Among the White Moon Faces, the “unmovable self situated in the quicksand of memory,” best reveals her insights about the nostalgic impulse. The self, although bogged down by memories, is “unmovable” in the sense of intact, grounded and critical: “a fugitive presence which has not yet fossilised” (2004, 20). Lim’s peranakan or Straits Chinese heritage on her mother’s side is at the forefront of her childhood reminiscences of Malacca: a city which makes up “the cardinal point on her compass, the primal, originary scene in her work” (Boey 2015, 11). As such, her memory-inflected works and their author can rightly be regarded as an inherent part of the peranakan memory community of the historical city. Complicating this picture is the

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writer’s own recognition that her status as an Asian-American immigrant of Malaysian Straits Chinese descent poses a challenge when it comes to representing her past, specifically her Malaccan Peranakan, experiences. In disavowing an exoticised past, a trope which is patently complicit in the heritage industry, Lim’s writings reveal an ambivalence towards nostalgia, ranging from disdain and mistrust to acceptance and accommodation, while acknowledging that the personal and cultural memories on which nostalgia is predicated are unassailable aspects of her present-day, transnational persona. Within this trajectory, however, there is a sense that the writer is seeking more critical approaches to memory, nostalgia and heritage. In the poem “Grandmother’s Batiks,” dedicated to the Peranakan Museum, Singapore, the persona laments the museumisation of nyonya clothing and the way in which the vibrancy of peranakan culture has been reduced to staged, inert trappings of heritage. Artefacts and cultural practices relentlessly paraded as dead and forgotten relics for nostalgic consumption seem to confirm the demise of a way of life that was an integral part of the persona’s own childhood not too long ago: “Grandmother’s batiks, / from before the war (which war?): / still gleaming relics, / … lace and bold / Indian cotton wraps. / Flora, fauna and plumaged / now extinct as laps / of grannies long gone: / Nyonyas, like these waxed species / … costumed in museums, / honoring the dead.” The poet-persona suggests that the cultural dress has become a kitschy collectible on par with rock and roll memorabilia: “past stacked up in folds, / stashed with Hard Rock Café tees” (2015, 33). Similarly, in “A History of Aunties,” the formidable nyonyas who “ruled once in their kingdoms / by the sea” are “gone / to museums, visages softened / by silence, kebayas displayed, / as if just ironed, for approval.” However, if it is nostalgia that these exhibits inspire, it is not in the form of an unqualified yearning to return to the past—as an uncritical valorisation of it or as a melancholic sense of loss— but rather of an ambivalent and ironic relation with the past where it is escape—not return—that is the dominant theme, as expressed in the ensuing lines of the same poem: “and daughters, pinch-faced, fearful / of scorching, sliding the coal- / heated irons over lacy / tatting, disappeared, like nieces / run off with sailors, worlds away / from Aunties’ Nyonya kingdoms” (2015, 18). Implicit in these lines too is a critique of how heritage objects can become fetishised and commodified in the nostalgic scramble to conserve a certain idea of the past. Additionally, in her memoir, Lim writes about how “[giving] up the struggle for a memorialised homeland may be the most forgiving act I can do” (2004, 341), not only

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because of the painful memories of childhood misery and the angst of absence that accompanies departures but also because of how a ­“memorialised homeland” may just end up objectified, like Grandmothers’ and Aunties’ dresses.

Weather and Dwelling as Intangible Natural Heritage: Lim’s Weather Poems In his seminal essay “Living with the Weather”—an innovative study of Romantic weather poetry—Jonathan Bate writes that “The weather is the primary sign of the inextricability of culture and nature” (1996, 439). The course of human history is tied to the history of weather patterns (i.e. climate) and, in the age of the Anthropocene, the reverse is tragically true as well. Bate argues that, for the Romantics, the weather linked time and space and ultimately shaped identity. In appraising Keats’ ode “To Autumn,” he refers to the word temps, which in French denotes both time and the weather, thus indicating a connection between the two concepts. He argues that: “To Autumn” is a poem of both time and the weather. In this respect, it mediates between exterior and interior ecologies. Ecosystems evolve in time through the operation of weather; the ecology of the human mind is equally dependent on the two senses of temps. Our moods are affected by the weather. Our identities are constituted in both time and place, are always shaped by both memory and environment. Romantic poetry is especially concerned with these two constitutions. It is both a mnemonic and an ecologic. Weather is a prime means of linking spatiality and temporality—this, I suggest, is why so many major romantic poems are weather poems. A romantic poem is a model of a certain kind of being and of dwelling; whilst always at several removes from the actual moment of being and place of dwelling in which it is thought and written, the poem itself is an image of ecological wholeness which may grant to the attentive and receptive reader a sense of being-at-home-in-the-world. (1996, 444)

Bate’s insights into the ways in which memory and environment create “a sense of being-at-home-in-the world” for the Romantics shed light on Lim’s own weather and climate-related poems because early poems like “Monsoon History” and “Crossing the Peninsula” and later poems like “Greenhouse Effect in New York” and “Horizon” express a nostalgia for a past time and place intimately bound to memories of tropical monsoons

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and a tropical sense of dwelling as it were. The Romantics like Blake, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth—who Lim acknowledges have ­influenced her own poetics (2018, 5)—wrote poetry which foregrounded the ecology of the home space/time, calling to mind the prefix “eco” and its Greek root “ecos” from oikos, meaning household, home and community, dwelling. “Dwelling” as a trope refers to constructions of people’s relationship with their natural environment. Broadly speaking, dwelling literatures “explore the possibility of coming to dwell on the earth in a relation of duty and responsibility. ‘Dwelling’ is not a transient state; rather, it implies the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work” (Garrard 2004, 108). A phenomenological concept attributed to Heidegger, “dwelling involves the process by which a place in which we exist becomes a personal world and home. Dwelling incorporates environments and places but extends beyond them, signifying our inescapable immersion in the present world as well as the possibility of reaching beyond to new places, experiences and ideas” (Seamon and Mugerauer 1985, 8). This spatio-temporal qualification of dwelling suggests that dwelling is not confined by the idea of location or duration but can range across space and time: a point which resonates especially with the displaced diasporic self for whom the originary “dwelling” has been disrupted and can only be accessed through memories, dreams, emotional links and occasional homecomings. Lim views her ancestral dwelling as a mode of being that lies submerged within her current life: “Buried in the details of an American career, my life as a non-­American persists, a parallel universe played out in dreams, in journeys home to Malaysia and Singapore, and in a continuous undercurrent of feelings directed to people I have known, feared, loved, and deserted for this American success” (2004, 20–21). Notions of dwelling, through the tropes of “being-at-home-in-the world” or the “self-in-place,” are central themes in “Monsoon History.” The ambiguous title of the poem, which melds weather and time/history, can firstly be read as the history of the tropical monsoon and how it has evolved over time; secondly, it can be taken to mean the history of the family, community, nation and home space and how this history is modified and moulded by the weather. The juxtaposition and fusion of weather and time relayed in “Monsoon History” bring time and space into alignment, the trade winds along the Straits of Malacca being an obvious example of how weather played a vital role in enabling maritime trade and the spread of civilisation in littoral Southeast Asia from the early modern

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period until the advent of steam power in the early nineteenth century. Crucially, the poem depicts the ecology of a Malaccan household where human and more-than-human inhabitants co-habit to the extent that cultural and natural spaces are indistinguishable and intermingled and the interior domestic space is saturated by the exterior, “glare / Of tropical water.” In the first stanza, the atmospheric dampness that permeates the home is evoked with the use of densely metaphorical language:      The air is wet, soaks      Into mattresses, and curls      In apparitions of smoke.      Like fat white slugs furled      Among the timber,      Or silver fish tunnelling      The damp linen covers      Of schoolbooks, or walking      Quietly like centipedes,      The air walking everywhere      On its hundred feet      Is filled with the glare      Of tropical water.              (1994, 17)

Neil Evernden theorises that “[m]etaphoric language is an indicator of ‘place’—an indication that the speaker has a place, feels part of a place” and that the “subversive nature of Ecology rests on its assumption of literal interrelatedness, not just interdependence. […] There is no such thing as an individual, only an individual-in-context, individual as a component of place, defined by place” (1996, 101–103). The notion of the self-in-­ place—an intrinsic aspect of the concept of dwelling—is implied in the stanzas that follow which reinforce the easy intermingling of the cultural and natural as animal and human dwellers take shelter together from the “down-pour-/ ing rain:” snails “[Clash] their timid horns” and “Nyonya and baba sit at home” counting “Silver paper for the dead,” the Chinese ritual of ancestor worship. The “we” in “Again we are taken over / By clouds and rolling darkness” (1994, 17–18; my emphasis) is strongly suggestive of a cohesive household, and the tactile, visual and auditory imagery conjures a picture of “ecological wholeness” (Bate 1996, 444) teeming with resident insect life—“the air ticks / With gnats, black spiders fly, / Moths sweep out of our rooms / Where termites built / Their hills of

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eggs and queens zoom / In heat”—and accentuated by the childhood memories of “Reading Tennyson,” watching mother “uncoil / Her snake hair” and “Waiting for father pacing / The sand as fishers pull / From the Straits after monsoon” (1994, 17–18). Silvia Schultermandl points out that the “juxtaposition of Tennyson’s poetry with the reality of everyday life in the comfort of home and the contrast between the dead white poet and the living signs of nature, position the lyrical I at the intersection of literature and material realities. […] [The poem acknowledges] a specific politics of location of the lyrical I’s reading practice” (2014, 48). Schultermandl argues that the subjects/ identities in Lim’s work “gain agency” through the tension between Western aesthetics and “particular circumstances of lived experience” (2014, 49). In my view, this lived experience and the “living signs of nature” are permeated by the weather and its space/time corollary. The poet-persona’s identity is forged within this heady matrix of literature, weather and dwelling. Overall, the tropical-monsoonal sense of dwelling culminating with the lines “The air is still, silent / Like sleepers rocked in the pantun, / Sheltered by Malacca” constitutes an intangible oikos first experienced by the poet-persona “forty years ago, / When nyonya married baba” (1994, 18). In all, the poem memorialises the weather as an intangible natural heritage indivisible from cultural heritage as seen in the image of a union embedded as it were in the midst of tropical storms and ubiquitous water: a Baba-Nyonya union which begets not only the poet-persona’s family but also—symbolically—the larger peranakan community, history and way of life passed down through the generations within the protective shelter of Malacca. In Lim’s other early weather poem “Crossing the Peninsula,” images of the sea, the shore, the sky, the rains, marine creatures and the fishers evoke “that childhood twelve thousand miles and four decades away” (2004, 20). Once again, it is the weather that collapses time and space:      First, the sea, blue heart pulsing,     […]     […] Then sky      With swift light changing to rain.      The humming breakers push by,     Recede, run in again      Through days, through years. It is monsoon

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    Climate, the migrating season      When nets and boats come home to shelter.      And all night the water beats heavily.                   (1994, 20)

The shelter provided by home and “the migrating season” allude to the poet-persona who has left home and can only dream of the homeland “like grey gulls blown inland, / Or as one-eyed ships, blown, espying / The bright-shelled peninsula” (1994, 20). However, as I will discuss shortly, weather events and conditions continue to transport her, spatially and temporally, back to the peninsula that she has crossed time and again, both in real life and in the imagination. If heritage and nostalgia are “the desire for a home configured both spatially and temporally” (Simine 2013, 182), then Lim’s weather poetics are a medium for this configuration. What I wish to highlight is that Lim’s nostalgic musings about home and identity are filtered through her environmental memories and—by extension—her thoughts on environmental issues faced by the world, thus underscoring the notion of environment as a network of relations rather than an ahistorical domain divorced from human existence. In this way, she engages with the harmful environmental legacies that humanity has inherited from its forebears, including global climate change. Scott Slovic asserts that “[n]ostalgia is one of the most potent emotions linked to our environmental experience. Environmental nostalgia is a concept that can be harnessed both to explore the meaning of human relationships to specific places and the entire planet and to inspire environmental activism” (2014, 12). Although not an eco-activist writer, Lim implicitly demonstrates a keen awareness of eco-injustice and degradation in poems critical of damaging environmental attitudes like “Shells,” “After Fall-out,” “Greenhouse Effect in New  York,” “Oranges,” “Capitalism” and “Christmas in November.” In “Crossing the Peninsula,” the reference to days and years and “monsoon/Climate” reveals Lim’s climate-­ consciousness, for we know that the weather indicates the day-to-day, short-term meteorological conditions while climate denotes the long-­ term, accumulative weather patterns of a place. If nostalgia is a “strategy of survival” (Boym 2001, xvii), Lim’s environmental nostalgia indirectly comments on the survival of humanity as a species and the fate of the planet as humanity’s only home. To be sure, having left the Malaysian weather and climate only to find it “two oceans away” (“Father from Asia”

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2007, 91) in America raises troubling questions about “home” and its well-being. The Malaccan weather poem finds its American counterpart in “Greenhouse Effect in New York,” but this time the experience of actual weather conditions incites the memory process and transports the poet-­ persona back in time and space to the tropical homeland. Also, the extreme, unseasonal heat and humidity in the eastern seaboard of North America, which bears comparison with the Malaccan/Southeast Asian heat, serves as a barometer of changing climatic conditions. Ironically, global warming recalls the tropical weather which—as we have seen—is a mnemonic device providing retrieval cues for memories of home. This autobiographical memory is stirred when there is “similarity between the context of encoding and conditions of retrieval” (Nalbantian 2003, 136). Once again, weather—in this case, the potentially catastrophic outcome of human activities—links time and space:      Today I wake up and it’s      already eighty-two in the shade.     The weathercable bleats:     humidity is near tropical;      dew point set at seventy-eight.      It is too hot for coffee      but I make it anyway.     […]      My husband is away in Finland.     He is eating cloudberries      and reindeer steak; he will grow     even more Caucasian cool,      a Slav from remote winters      with a meaty manly texture     evolved for frigid conditions.      My coffee is instant. Its vapor     rises saturated with berries      from Sumatra, whose mountains lie      visible on the sharply strung      horizon of the Malacca Straits:     my Malacca Straits where     it is always eighty-two     and childhood’s a fermented     dew point of denials

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     and tears. I breathe the roasted     berry smog. It covers my cheeks      with the sweat of plantations,      a brown aroma from Southeast     Asia like sun-dried anchovies      just this side of rotten.               This is      my usual heat. I am my     usual self – husbandless for      two weeks – returned to normalcy,     to rain-forest torpor      whose water swells and swells      in cumulus clumps. The sky      rumbles all day and night, like      vague threats a child overhears.     Her unnourished eyelids tremble,      pull down in spite of herself.      She is so hungry that sleep must      fill her full of dew which is wet     but never cool.     […]            (1998, 54-55)

The oppressive heat, dew point and humidity as well as the gathering storm clouds are retrieval cues of childhood and the homeland as well as the emotions associated with them. The dew point is an example of associative memory at work in expressions like “dew point of denials / and tears” and the “dew which is wet / but never cool” that fills the hungry, sleeping child. The “Greenhouse Effect in New York” provides the sensory triggers for remembering a former climate where heat and humidity are normal: “This is / my usual heat. I am my / usual self […] returned to normalcy.” It is safe to say that one of the themes of this poem is global warming and how it relates to identity and how the past and present, the old home and the new, are linked by the weather, but this weather in New York is uncanny, unheimlich. These extreme conditions—also hinted at in the lines about the husband who, in stark contrast to the poet-­ persona, “will grow / even more Caucasian cool” as someone “evolved for frigid conditions”—ultimately unsettle the nostalgic speaker who would rather remain in her “usual” element despite the painful childhood memories, but who knows that inevitably the frigid cold will return.

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Resigned and despondent, she drinks her coffee bitter because “Sugar / is no good for someone like me / who hoards sullen solitudes / against the approaching front” (1998, 55). It is important to consider the poet-­ persona’s climatic reflections in this poem within the broader context of environmental memories given the integral role that weather and dwelling play in articulating personal and communal heritage. Precipitated by the “Great Acceleration”2 of human industrial and commercial activity, environmental systemic change—in this poem exemplified by the greenhouse effect and the ensuing erratic weather patterns and conditions—is occurring at alarming rates compared with previous geological eras. Lim’s temporal trope for the past is “forty years ago”: a pliable time span which modulates from short personal history to long communal history, and further, to epochal time in which “equatorial / living on the fat zero line” (“No Seasons” 2015, 40) is no longer confined to the equator. In the Malaccan weather poems of a time and space “four decades away” (2004, 20), there is nothing obviously amiss, but, as Rob Nixon notes, environmental devastation can occur in subtle, insidious ways: By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. (2011, 2)

The imperceptible violence of phenomena like climate change (consider the boiled frog syndrome,3 for instance) and environmental imperialism is reflected in the adverse environmental legacies that Lim also references in “Greenhouse Effect in New York,” a poem where historical, geographical and economic contexts matter in that the First World megacity calls to mind the eco-injustices afflicted on countries of the global south by developed countries of the north in the long-standing quest for coveted commodities such as coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar and bananas. The references to coffee, Sumatran berries and “the sweat of plantations, / a brown aroma

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from Southeast / Asia” in this poem are significant. The plantation ­economy of single cash crops inherited by postcolonial countries around the world has profoundly impacted societies and the environment with its “attritional violence” of unfair trade, biodiversity loss, soil deterioration and environmental illness. Although the colonial states built their economic bases on the older, precolonial networks of trade and resource use, “the sheer scale and intensity of resource exploitation marked out the colonial era from earlier periods”; as a result, Southeast Asia became “dependent on large-scale resource exploitation for its economic well-­ being” (Bryant 1998, 31). For environmental historians, the global green crises “have their roots in the economic policies of the industrial and imperial ages” and postcolonial countries have inherited “the most insidious legacy of the extract-consume-pollute policies of the past: externalizing pollution onto nature and vulnerable people, and racism as an ideology justifying brutality and privilege” (Collin 2006, 3–4). Colonial environmental legacies have enduring, contemporary consequences not only in the form of global inequalities and environmental degradation but also in the persistent racialisation and exoticisation of the Orient. The image “sweat of plantations,” the synaesthesia “brown aroma” and the pointed mockery of the exotic in the simile “like sun-dried anchovies / just this side of rotten” reveal a critical nostalgia that highlights injustice, both racial and environmental. As an outcome of colonialism, the accumulative anthropogenic degradation of the environment due to monocrop plantation economy has to be confronted as a nation’s heritage—no matter how unsettling or dubious—within the context of “agricultural memory, the earth becoming a palimpsest” (Besson 2014, 3) on which a nation’s history is inscribed. Ursula Heise points out that “climate change poses a challenge for narrative and lyrical forms that have conventionally focussed above all on individuals, families, or nations, since it requires the articulation of connections between events at vastly different scales” (2008, 205). Lim’s weather poems go some way towards plotting these connections and emphasising the ways in which peoples themselves are the lived embodiment of collective memory and therefore of heritage: “the past is bone and memory in the present body” (2018, 8). As shown in this chapter, the poet habitually engages with personal and communal memories by means of environmental consciousness. Lim’s nostalgia for the weather and dwelling is not prompted by an unexamined yearning for an ostensible, unitary past. Rather, it highlights the importance of conserving the

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memories stored in the intangible natural heritage of the weather and dwelling.

Notes 1. The term peranakan means “local-born,” and in the context of Malaccan history refers to the distinct culture and community that was created out of the union between Chinese immigrants and local Malays. Lim’s ancestors are also known as the Straits born or the Straits Chinese due to their being domiciled in the Straits Settlements, a former British crown colony on the Straits of Malacca which was established in 1867. In the peranakan community, the male is referred to as Baba and the female as Nyonya. 2. The “Great Acceleration” refers to the exponential rise in energy use and the world’s population since 1945 which led to dramatic changes in the planet’s biogeochemical and socio-economic systems. 3. The boiled frog syndrome is a metaphor used to illustrate how people are unaware of environmental dangers until it is too late. Scientists point to how a frog sits in a pot of water which is gradually heating up but doesn’t move until the temperature reaches boiling point and the frog dies. It has not evolved to detect high temperatures and therefore is oblivious to the threat. Likewise, human beings may end up in a similar situation.

References Bate, Jonathan. 1996. Living with the Weather. Studies in Romanticism 35 (3, Fall): 431–447. Accessed January 19, 2016, 21:29. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/25601183. Besson, Françoise. 2014. Introduction to Part 1: “Nature and the Memory of the World”. In The Memory of Nature in Aboriginal, Canadian and American Contexts, ed. Françoise Besson, Claire Omhovère, and Héliane Ventura, 2–10. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Boey, Kim Cheng. 2014. Walking Between Land and Water: Pedestrian Poetics in the Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Asiatic 8 (1, June): 72–84. ———. 2015. Foreword to Ars Poetica for the Day, 9–19. By Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Singapore: Ethos Books. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bryant, Raymond L. 1998. Resource Politics in Colonial South-East Asia: A Conceptual Analysis. In Environmental Challenges in South-East Asia, ed. Victor T. King, 29–51. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. Collin, Robin Morris. 2006. The Apocalyptic Vision, Environmentalism, and a Wider Embrace. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 13 (1, Winter): 1–11.

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Dorfman, Eric. 2012. Intangible Natural Heritage: An Introduction. In Intangible Natural Heritage: New Perspectives on Natural Objects, Routledge Studies in Heritage, ed. Eric Dorfman, 1–15. London: Routledge. Evernden, Neil. 1996. Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 92–104. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Galla, Amareswar. 2014. Review of Intangible Natural Heritage: New Perspectives on Natural Objects. Edited by Eric Dorfman. International Journal of Intangible Heritage 9: 180–181. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism, The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge. Heise, Ursula. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Global: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. 1994. Monsoon History: Selected Poems. London: Skoob Books. ———. 1998. What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say. Albuquerque, NM: West End Press. ———. 2004. Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of an Asian American Woman. 1996. Singapore: Times Editions-Marshall Cavendish. ———. 2007. Listening to the Singer. Petaling Jaya: Maya Press. ———. 2015. Do You Live In? Singapore: Ethos Books. ———. 2018. Interview by Joe Upton. “Survival—to keep writing:” An Interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (4): 1–9. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1418411. Mason, Randall. 2002. Assessing Values in Conservation Planning: Methodological Issues and Choices. In Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage: Research Report, ed. Marta de la Torre, 5–30. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. 2010. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Nalbantian, Suzanne. 2003. Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scanlan, Sean. 2004. Introduction: Nostalgia. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (1): 3–9. Schultermandl, Silvia. 2014. ‘Imagination is a Tricky Power:’ Transnationalism and Aesthetic Education in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Work. Asiatic 8 (1, June): 40–54.

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Seamon, David, and Robert Mugerauer. 1985. Dwelling, Place and Environment: An Introduction. In Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, ed. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, 1–12. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Simine, Silke Arnold-de. 2013. Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Slovic, Scott. 2014. Varieties of Environmental Nostalgia. In The Memory of Nature in Aboriginal, Canadian and American Contexts, ed. Françoise Besson, Claire Omhovère, and Héliane Ventura, 11–30. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Walder, Dennis. 2011. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory. London: Routledge.

PART V

Imagined and Cosmopolitan Heritage

CHAPTER 9

Imagined Heritage: Ee Tiang Hong’s “Eternal” Melaka Siew-Teip Looi

Introduction Heritage is an important marker of identity for the nation, and is, like the nation, an imagined social construct, as demonstrated by Benedict Anderson (2006) in his seminal work Imagined Communities. For many newer nation-states, especially those that came into being in the wake of the process of decolonisation in the twentieth century, the concept of heritage also became an important tool of nationalism and nation-building. The process of negotiating a national identity in the face of the complexities and contradictions of many of these multilingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural postcolonial societies often resulted in fraught contestations over heritage as a marker of this identity. In Malaysia, the tacit acknowledgement of the multicultural realities on the ground of the early years of the postcolonial period gave way in the 1970s to an assertive Malay nationalism that culminated in the introduction of the National Culture Policy in 1971, which defined Malaysian culture in terms of the centrality of Malay culture and of Islam as an important marker of Malaysian identity.1 Elements from other communities were to

S.-T. Looi (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_9

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be incorporated into the national culture only if they were deemed “suitable” and did not conflict with Malay culture and with Islam. Prior to this, the National Language Acts of 1963/1967 had already removed the position of English as a co-official language and consolidated the role of Malay as the national language.2 The immediate impact of the National Culture Policy and the National Language Acts on Ee Tiang Hong and other writers like him who wrote in English was the marginalisation of literary works in languages other than the national language, Malay. Literature in Malay was now the “national literature,” whilst writings in other languages were relegated to the category of “sectional literature.”3 The National Culture Policy, conceived during the Congress on National Culture held in August 1971, is notable for the absence of any substantive representation from any other than the Malay community (Kua 1990, 3; Lim and Gomes 2009, 236; Saravanamuttu 2004, 103). Vehement opposition came from the Chinese and Indian ethnic communities, who feared that they were going to be denied the right to their own traditional cultural expressions.4 Lim and Gomes (2009) cite official interpretations of the National Culture Policy, which clearly show the underlying agenda of advancing a monocultural expression of Malaysian identity at the expense of the multicultural realities on the ground. They cite an article in the New Straits Times (20 May 1979) in which the Home and Information Minister Ghazali Shafie speaks, condescendingly and disparagingly, of the assimilation of non-Malay cultural elements: Not only are these elements incongruous to the environment here but their propagation is a hindrance to the emergence of a national culture. Their proper place is in the museum where they can be exhibited as manifestations of an archaic culture and perhaps also serve as materials for anthropological and sociological research. They are no longer functional in their present context and serve as emotional crutches for the sentimental few. (cited in Lim and Gomes 2009, 235)

They also invoke a circular, reported in the News Straits Times (9 August 1984), issued by the director-general of education, laying down ground rules for cultural performances in schools. School children are enjoined to perform “traditional dances” such as inang, zapin, joget and kuda kepang, all Malay genres. The circular goes on to list the gamelan and the kompang as “traditional musical instruments” that pupils “must be encouraged” to perform on, as well as “traditional hobbies” which they should take up:

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“gasing, congkak and wau.” Examples of “traditional theatre” sanctioned by the circular are makyong, bangsawan and boria (cited in Lim and Gomes 2009, 237). The only non-Malay cultural expression adduced in the circular is ballet, on the basis that “foreign dances may only be included if they are suitable and conform to the principles of the National Culture Policy.” The rich irony of how this sits with the then already growing Islamist pressure on Muslim women to cover their bodies seems to have completely escaped the director-general. The poet Ee Tiang Hong’s response to this debate on national culture may be found in the essay, “The Price of Freedom,” where he sets out his views quite clearly and persuasively, but in his poetry, he expresses his disenchantment and alienation in a muted, oblique fashion: “he could not explicate/his more than petty grievances” (“Exile,” Tranquerah). It is the central argument of this chapter that in his poetry, Ee offers a counter-­ narrative to the official stance of Malay hegemony by representing his beloved native Melaka5 as the locus of a multicultural society. The chapter argues that in so doing, Ee creates a body of heritage from the workings of his imagination, an “imagined heritage” brought into being by some of the very same processes that led to the rise of the modern preoccupation with heritage which David Lowenthal dates to “about 1980” (1998, 4). In The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Lowenthal argues that the trigger for the rise of the heritage industry was a cluster of trends of a global scale that effected massive social change. According to Lowenthal, the resulting dislocation engendered a sense of loss and change that drove people to cling to “remnants of stability” (1998, 6). He identifies some of the triggers that motivate people to seek out and preserve the legacy of their past and artefacts of their present material culture—a sense of the fragility of this legacy, more particularly a sense of the threat to this legacy posed by technology and the media; a sense of victimhood engendered by the dislocation of change and persecution; and the sense of displacement created by migration (1998, 7–9). In Ee’s case, it would be productive for this discussion to look at two of these triggers: migration leading to exile and victimhood.

Exile and Victimhood When Ee emigrated to Australia in 1975, he suggests in a poem that it was to make a clean break:

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cut this rope straight through in one brave stroke; don’t fiddle, don’t hesitate; and don’t regret - what else is there, what’s left to see?     (“Lesson from Childhood,” Nearing a Horizon)

In another poem from the same volume, he makes it very clear that though he was compelled to leave his homeland, he does not regret his decision: With distance and hindsight, looking back and forth, I have no doubt our decision to leave was a correct one; we had no choice.     (“Done,” Nearing a Horizon)

The idea of compulsion is expressed also at the end of “Tranquerah Road,” a long poem which, together with its equally long companion piece “Heeren Street” from the same volume Tranquerah, is central to any account of Ee’s poetic representation of Melaka. If there was to be no regret over the decision to leave, the sense of regret at what Ee and his family “were compelled to leave” is palpable in “Tranquerah Road.” The last lines of the poem highlight what they had to leave behind, and the sense of loss expressed here is both poignant and all-encompassing: But only it, there, here, not some remote village in China once upon a time was all the earth and sea and sky and rainbow, golden dream we owned, and were compelled to leave.     (“Tranquerah Road,” Tranquerah)

In an essay, “The Price of Freedom,” Ee sets out the reason why he felt he had no choice but to emigrate:

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I left Malaysia then when I could no longer accept, intellectually or emotionally, the official and Malay definition of the Malaysian nation and culture. And because the gap in our perceptions was so wide as to make negotiation impossible, I was convinced that I had no place in the new order of things, and not just as a writer but even as an ordinary citizen. Quite apart from citizenship having lost its meaning for me, the demands that were being made by the powers-that-be came close to being insulting. (1988, 36)

He then quotes one of his own poems to explain why he felt “insulted”: Surely by the time one reaches The seventh generation, The seventh heaven, One is no longer subject To all these? (“Patriotism,” Myths for a Wilderness)

What he complains about being subjected to here is the questioning of his loyalty to Malaysia in the “new order” defined by a nationalistic Malay hegemony, and the notion that people who are not from the Malay community should be “grateful for what [they] have got” (“Patriotism”). The poet states quite categorically that the choice made “generations ago” by his ancestors to “cross the seas” was irrevocable, in spite of calls to “go back to where we came from.” The insinuation here that it is by the grace and favour of the Malay community that the other communities have their place in the sun in Malaysia would have particularly rankled Ee. It is important to remember that he was a member of the Peranakan6 community in Melaka, and that he was proud of his Baba heritage, which goes back to the early wave of Chinese settlement in Melaka in the fifteenth century. As he explains in a very personal account of his upbringing in the same essay, he grew up speaking not a Chinese dialect, or English, but Baba Malay, his mother tongue. This was a language which he says linked him to the Malay world, “not in a mechanistic or strictly functional way, but as an umbilical cord to my motherland—its natural landscape, its folk mythology, and ways and mores that I took in as a matter of course, without ever wondering where they came from” (1988, 26–27). It is clear from this that Ee’s sense of belonging to Malaysia was deep-rooted, and that to have this questioned and devalued was deeply wounding and insulting.

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In “Patriotism,” Ee proclaims that having made the irrevocable decision to emigrate, “the journey is over” for the early immigrants and their descendants. The irony for Ee of course is that he had to make another journey. Ee ends the poem with two key words that sum up what he sought in this journey into exile: How shall I breathe with dignity What air of freedom there is Here in my motherland?

In a poem which makes use of the metaphor of an excursion to represent the process of nation-building, Ee suggests that the reasons for this process faltering were: the repeated changing of the rules upset - the new conditions of membership for the remainder of the trip, the broadening sanctions, the restricted privileges       (“Excursion,” Tranquerah)

Looking back at the agreement between the different communities in Malaya, which paved the way for independence from the British in 1957, Ee suggests that “the terms seemed reasonable,” and that “everyone agreed” even though there were “minor ambiguities.” “A certain amount of trust” was necessary in such a situation, the poet suggests. Ee, however, represents the process of nation-building as taking on an oddly retrograde course in the poem, for the excursion begins in the city, and moves through the kampung, the rubber estate, and then travels uphill, into the interior, into the jungle, into the dark heart of the Malay Peninsula.7 There is more than a faint echo here of the movement into the atavistic, tribal and primeval core of an entire continent in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For Ee, the course of nation-building took the fledgling nation-state into the irrational, dark recesses of tribalism and nationalism and took a course that was contrary to the spirit of the original agreement between the different communities as they negotiated for statehood from the colonial power. One of the ways in which the Malaysian government tried to implement a Malay-dominant agenda was to replace the colonial-era names of streets and other aspects of the urban landscape with local, largely Malay,

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names. This is an undertaking followed through by many postcolonial governments and not something unique to Malaysia. Ee, however, found it highly symbolic of the attempt to impose a monocultural Malay identity, and wrote about it in a striking poem: They have succeeded in changing the names of things and places as they pleased streets, bridges, monuments, buildings, parks, playing fields, whatever they deemed alien to our nationalism, as they defined it.

He records his reaction to this in two terse lines at the end of the poem. I, too, could only watch, dumbfounded. (“New Order,” Tranquerah)

The most interesting aspect of this poem is the way Ee juxtaposes his own reaction with that of Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who in his nineteenth-­ century account of his life in Melaka and Singapore, the Hikayat Abdullah, expresses his dismay as he watches the British blow up the formidable A Famosa, the Portuguese-era fortifications of Melaka, when they replaced the Dutch, and the Portuguese before them, as the colonial masters. The following sentence from the Hikayat Abdullah appears as the epigraph to Ee’s poem: Yang ada tidakkan dan yang tidak di-adakan; berubah-ubah ada-nya (The old order is destroyed, a new world is created and all around us is change).8 The epigraph very aptly captures the idea of overwhelming change, the sort of change that causes deep unease in the poet as he sees his very identity as a native of Melaka and his indigeneity to his nation shaken to the core by the new political dispensation. In the Hikayat Abdullah, immediately preceding the sentence used by Ee as the epigraph to his poem, Abdullah uses a striking metaphor to express a deep sense of loss: “For the Fort was the pride of Malacca and after its destruction the place lost its glory, like a woman bereaved of her husband, the lustre gone from her face” (Hill 1955, 62–63). It must surely have been very similar sentiments that prompted Ee to write this poem.

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The deep irony running through this poem lies in the suggestion that the Malay nationalists are now but the latest in a series of rulers who have sought to impose their will on the city. Just as Abdullah, like Ee, a native of Melaka, watches dumbstruck as the British demolish “our Fort,” behind whose walls the Portuguese and subsequently the Dutch ruled over the city, Ee is now just as struck to the core by the action of the nationalistic Malay establishment to erase the names that bear witness to a few centuries of colonial history. Names are just as potent bearers of heritage as any solid piece of wall. An important topic in “The Price of Freedom” is the centrality of the English language to Ee’s identity as a writer. He asserts that the language was an “inalienable” (1988, 34) part of his identity, and that the devaluation of writing in English to the status of a “sectional literature” convinced him that “those involved in manipulating the organs of the state were bent on putting down any non-Malay who wrote in English” (1988, 35). Ee suggests that the Malaysian government was not seeking to suppress English as such; instead, he writes: “The cause of the antagonism appears to be that non-Malays writing in English are seen to threaten Malay interests based on the status and prospects of the Malay culture and the Malay language which in turn are held to be critical to the national culture and identity” (1988, 36). In “The Price of Freedom,” Ee points out the contradiction which lies at the heart of the attempt to forge a national identity in Malaysia based solely on that of one community: “The picture of Malaysia today is one of Malay hegemony in every major sphere of life. Every ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Althusser) has been utilised to impose an exclusively Malay identity on a society that is in reality multi-ethnic” (1988, 18). He holds up his own community as an exemplar of multiculturalism: “the Baba is a prototype of the multicultural Malaysian” (1988, 28). In an article examining the representations of Melaka by three poets from the city, Dennis Haskell hails Ee himself as a “genuine multiculturalist” (2008, 27). Melaka itself began life as a multicultural entrepôt that dominated the trade route through the Straits of Malacca soon after its founding by Parameswara, a fugitive Srivijayan prince from Palembang, in 1402. Gulliver (2009, 8) uses the term “proto-multiculturalism” to describe an account of Melaka’s early years found in a seventeenth-century French source:9

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The originarie or first inhabitants of this place report, that the beginning came of six or seven fishermen, which came to dwell there, but their number increased, by the arrivall of other fishermen of Siam, Pegu, and Bengola, who built a towne, and framed a particular language, taking all the best kind of speech from other nations.

Writing soon after the Portuguese capture of Melaka in 1511, Tomé Pires, in his wide-ranging description of the Malay Archipelago in the Suma Oriental, gives the number of languages spoken in Melaka as “eightyfour” (Cortesão 1944, 269) and lists the nationalities of the merchants who have set up bases there: Many Kling merchants; some Javanese, Parsees and Bengalees; some from Pase and Pahang, Chinese and other nationalities; Luções and people from Brunei. The people are very mixed and are increasing. (283)

According to Andaya and Andaya (1982, 49–50), the population of Melaka also included the indigenous Orang Asli communities of the Jakun, the Temuan and the Orang Laut who were incorporated into the administrative structure of the Sultanate. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Melaka had, in the travel accounts of British visitors such as Isabella Bird, evolved from being a predominantly Malay city with a large multicultural population of merchants,10 and a small ruling class comprising in turn the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British, to being “to most intents and purposes a Chinese city,” with a “queerly mixed population of Chinese, Portuguese, half-breeds, Malays, Confucianists, Buddhists, Tauists, Romanists, and Mohammedans” (Bird 1967, 132). Writing closer to Ee’s own time, John Clammer (1986, 53) describes Melaka as “a mainly Chinese town—in terms of its population, its architecture, and its economic activities—with a smaller number of Indian shopkeepers, stall holders, and food hawkers,” and a Malay population from the rural hinterland that throngs the city during the weekends. Ee therefore finds himself in the position of a victim in many ways. As a member of a community with multicultural roots that has flourished in a multicultural society, he finds himself forced to accept a hegemonic, monocultural ideology. As a writer whose identity has been shaped largely by the English language and the legacy of British and American literature in English, he is now told that his writing has only a marginal place in

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Malaysian literature, if at all. As a member of a community that traces its roots in Melaka to Chinese traders who settled there beginning in the fifteenth century, a community which has assimilated many elements of Malay culture including the language, dress and cuisine, he is now told that he does not really belong and should go back to where his ancestors came from if he did not wish to accept a hegemonic Malay polity. As a native of a city with a long history and a rich heritage, he sees not just a superficial changing of the names attached to bits of the urban landscape, he sees a threat to the multicultural soul of his beloved hometown.

Ee Tiang Hong’s Eternal Melaka Three short whimsical pieces open Ee’s third volume of poetry, Myths for a Wilderness, with the titles “Heeren Street, Malacca,” “Portuguese Hamlet, Malacca” and “Tranquerah, Malacca,” respectively, forming a triptych which depicts different facets of the city. “Portuguese Hamlet, Malacca” focuses on the Portuguese community in Melaka, descendants of the early Portuguese colonialists who intermarried with the local inhabitants. The main idea of the poem is the ironic contrast between the Portuguese colonial masters who arrived in Melaka in the sixteenth century as “conquistadores” and their descendants who are now humble fishermen, “old men in loose striped pyjamas.” The irony here is nuanced because the conquerors themselves are likened to the mudskippers, “head visored like soldadu”11 that scurry across the mudflats fronting the Portuguese settlement. The one thing that binds the conquerors and their fisher-folk descendants is the sea, and the prayer for safe passage at sea that ends the poem could have been uttered by either party. “Heeren Street, Malacca” focuses on the heritage of the Peranakan by locating it in a street lined by the mansions of the Baba elite, a street where the Babas once “paved/A legend on the landscape.” The glory of that period is now gone, “and the memories/Grave as a museum.” In place of the wealthy members of that community walking down the street, the poem asks the reader to consider another spectacle: Newcomer urchin strides the gutter Reeking cockroach, rat and faeces. On charpoy jaga fast asleep.

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The jaga (watchman) is fast asleep on the job, oblivious to the “newcomer urchin” striding over his master’s domain, which, long past its glory, now reeks of the fetid smells of the gutter. The Babas in the present day of the poem are here seen sitting “comfortable on old benches” under “antique lanterns,” enveloped as it were in a nostalgic haze that connects them to the “gharry and palanquin” of the first line of the poem. These two modes of transportation of a bygone age are now “silent” in contrast to the “Fords and Mercedes”—representing a mode of transportation that very much shaped the modern age—which form the subject of the Babas’ present gaze. The poem ends with a timeless symbol of migration and exile:     While swallows shrill     Shriek in the twilight      Stealing over the obscurity of eaves.

The swallows here can be seen either as foreshadowing Ee’s own eventual emigration,12 or more generally pointing to the descendants of the Babas of old who have dispersed from the Peranakan heartland to the four corners of the Earth. This image of the contented Babas, when read together with the fifth and sixth stanzas of the poem, which express the wish that the children of the Babas would follow in their footsteps and “blaze another myth,” hints at a muted reproach, the idea that the Babas have stood by watching the world go by whilst their community slipped into a long, slow decline.13 The idea of emigration is also present in “Tranquerah, Malacca,” which focuses on the continuation of Heeren Street, Tranquerah Road, and the sub-district through which it runs, which carried the same name. In the poem, this becomes a source of confusion for the postman, resulting in letters going astray. When the postman does deliver a letter to the right address, he brings news from     A friend gone overseas,      And now reluctant to return     After a wonderful time.

Street names appear to be significant bearers of meaning for Ee and if the wholesale change of street names can be an act of neo-colonialism, they can also be a source of confusion, broken promises and ­“misrepresentations”

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if they are not judiciously given. In the midst of this confusion, and the changes in the neighbourhood through which it runs, the physical tarmac of the street itself is an unchanging constant. By contrast, men of flesh and blood      Lack the forbearance to accept      The days that fail to deliver     Their stock of promises.

The poem ends very pessimistically with the idea that after a life dealing with broken promises, we look back and see that life itself has not lived up to its promise and “we at last retire,/Empty handed.” These three poems then give us a view of Melaka that is not only so quintessentially characteristic of Ee’s ironic voice,14 but that  also represents Melaka as the locus of a deeply pessimistic view of life, one that is dominated by a trajectory of decline—a decline from conqueror to fisherman, a decline from the dynamic, wealthy elite of the city to a community that is now merely content to watch the world go by, oblivious to upstart newcomers—and a realisation at the end of a life full of broken promises that life itself was a disappointment. After his emigration in 1975, Ee revisited two of these three poems and transformed them into something else altogether and they appear side by side at the end of Tranquerah, published in 1985. Exile would appear to have focused his vision on what has been lost, both through the general ravages of time and change, as well as the particular politics of Malaysia in the 1970s, and out of this loss, a Melaka now emerges that is transformed into a vision of what could have been. The two poems in Tranquerah are vastly expanded versions of “Heeren Street, Malacca” and “Tranquerah, Malacca” from the earlier collection. There is a distinct shift away from the preoccupation with the abstract and general in the two earlier poems towards the representation of concrete particularities. We see this in the first 27 lines of “Heeren Street” from the Tranquerah volume, which reproduces all 27 lines of the earlier poem from Myths for a Wilderness word for word, save for two exceptions. The “obscurity of eaves” of the earlier poem becomes the more concrete “obscure eaves” of the later poem. The “antique lanterns” of the earlier poem are now “tattered lanterns.” “Antique” here suggests either some abstract value placed on the lanterns or the slightly more concrete idea of

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age. “Tattered,” however, gives the reader an immediate, concrete sense of what the lanterns look like. The abstract faceless Baba of the earlier poem is transformed into individuals with names either hinted at or actually stated in the text. Section Five of the poem hints at two famous Babas: Tan Cheng Lock, after whose name Heeren Street is now known, as well as his son, Tan Siew Sin, whom the poet suggests should also be similarly recognised somewhere else. In Section Seven, a Baba familiarly referred to as “Wawa chai” is said to have moved from Heeren Street to another part of town, whilst his sons and daughters are all married and have dispersed to “all the four corners” bringing with them “their profile and their patois.” The poem goes on to give us a snippet of this patois, Baba Malay:     Opochok mak china bapak melayu     eh mak melayu bapak china     bibik ni merepek saja chakap terbalek     baik jaga mulut jangan sebarang chakap.     (Opochok15 mother Chinese, father Malay      eh, mother Malay father Chinese     bibik,16 you’ve got it the wrong way round      better watch your mouth and say nothing.)

In this conversation, a bibik is sharply corrected by her interlocutor about the details of a mixed marriage. The poet’s comment on this colourful exchange is delivered in colloquial Malaysian English: True, world is upside down, confused, everything not sure.

This is not so much a comment on Peranakan society as it is an observation about multicultural societies in general, where “everything [is] not sure,” where identity is fluid and often “confused,” and where things can appear to be “upside down.” The rest of Section Seven of the poem continues in this colloquial register, making reference to watchmen who “sleep more than they jaga (keep watch),” maidservants who are suspected of selling the family china to Kutty, a long-established antique dealer in Melaka, and Abdul, a stereotype of the Malay chauffeur. Abdul is portrayed here as having grown “really proud” in the new political dispensation in which he finds himself:

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Want uniform, big salary, big talk, But lazy, unreliable. Like that too dare to be driver. Only bring shame to Company name. And everything want Malay. Where got meaning?

In a few unnervingly deft strokes here, Ee has captured the stereotypical attitude of the urban Chinese, including the Peranakan, towards the Malays. Ee clearly does not aim at giving us a romanticised view of multiculturalism in this poem. What he gives the reader here is a picture of a multicultural society with all its imperfections. Further down in this section of the poem, the poet refers to a society which wears its multiculturalism less grudgingly. Singapore is where the “Malacca boys … do quite well,” because there is “real justice, no racial nonsense.” This section in colloquial Malaysian English ends on a personal note with a rumination on what it means to be a Baba:      Once I thought and felt     Being a baba      Was being Malayan, or Malaysian,     …      A piece of the landscape      Harmonising the tongues and ways      Of home, neighbourhood and school,     Mixing, mediating, more than     Chinese or Malay.

The Baba is here viewed as a thoroughly indigenised individual, a distillation of the multicultural realities of the land, a person greater than the sum total of the two communities that contributed to his evolution. Set against the new political dispensation, however, this ideal is nothing more than a “rundown melody.” In the last section, the poet gives us his motivation for creating this unparalleled vision of the Peranakan community of Melaka: Meanwhile, you have retrieved, not least, some memories people, relationships,

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homes and belongings I recognise, and for another age, a pride to resurrect beyond the swoop of edict.

These lines clearly suggest that the heritage so vividly brought to life in an imaginative medium is not a mere exercise in nostalgia. Ee expresses the hope that the “people, relationships,/homes and belongings” which he has brought together into a poetic vision of his native Melaka will endure as “memories” that another age will “resurrect.” Resurrect as what? The “edict” of the last line can only refer to the National Culture Policy of 1971. Did Ee have in mind a community of Melakans recreating their heritage in exile? Is he here expressing the hope of a time when the “edict” itself will be revoked? Hopes for the latter have certainly risen with the general elections of 2018, when the long-incumbent Barisan Nasional coalition which was responsible for instituting the National Culture Policy, finally lost power after 61 years in government.17 The companion poem to “Heeren Street” in the Tranquerah volume is “Tranquerah Road.” Like the former, it expands vastly on its predecessor, “Tranquerah, Malacca,” in Myths for a Wilderness. The original 24 lines of “Tranquerah, Malacca” form the fifth section of the poem “Tranquerah Road.” There is the same evolution here from the abstract and the general to the concrete and the particular that we find in “Heeren Street, Malacca” and its later incarnation as “Heeren Street.” Sections 2–4 of “Tranquerah Road” are an evocation of the people and places that formed a part of the poet’s childhood. The poem then does not just give us the concrete and the particular, but also the personal. After a short first section that establishes the location of Tranquerah Road as a continuation of Heeren Street, Section Two of the poem begins with a reference to Kampong Serani, “Serani” being the Malay term for Eurasian, a term that in the context of Melaka primarily refers to the descendants of the early Portuguese settlers in Melaka.18 The Portuguese Eurasians are, like the Babas, a community which arose out of the unique multicultural history of Melaka and this reference to them at the beginning of the poem serves as a fitting bridge between it and the earlier poem that gives us a compelling vision of the Peranakan community, but it is also an apt introduction to all the people in the poem who span the whole spectrum of Melakan society.

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The fourth section of the poem zooms in on the section of Tranquerah where Ee grew up, “our playground,” and we get a list of names: Baba, Bachik, Bulat, Momok, Dollah, Joe, Robert, Geok Inn these all Baba and Anak Peh, Ban Seng, Ah Tien (those not yet Baba because still China-born at times), Brahim, Duraman, Jaapar, Said, Sman, Snin, Jaya Ceylon, Tamby Chik -

The reader will ascertain from a superficial scan of the names in this list that all the major communities in Melaka are represented here. The one exception are the Portuguese Eurasians, but they have already been represented by Max Gomes, who is introduced in the second section of the poem as an erstwhile resident of Kampong Serani, and a classmate of the poet. There is, however, more than meets the eye in this list. The two lines of Baba names include two that are clearly colourful Baba Malay nicknames: Bulat (“round”) and Momok (“spook,” “bogey”), but they also include the quintessentially Malay name, Dollah, a diminutive form of Abdullah. This fluidness of identity is reinforced by the poet’s comment on the list of three Chinese names: and Anak Peh, Ban Seng, Ah Tien (those not yet Baba Because still China-born at times)

The subversive implication here is that a Baba identity is cultural rather than biological, and that even a sinkeh19 could take on a Baba identity if only he could stop himself from lapsing into “China-born” behaviour. The third section of the poem offers an atmospheric evocation of a night-time scene along Tranquerah road, full of the sound of mosquitoes, the sea and the rustle of foliage in the wind. We are told that this is the haunt of a pontianak, the bloodthirsty female ghost of Malay folklore. The wind stirs something up and a flash of white that disappears into a Malay cemetery fills the poet’s mind with images of a horse and “a jinn raving free.” The fear of the unknown and the supernatural prompts the young poet to recite Psalm 23, but he also recalls his mother’s advice to recite the

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name of the Amitabha Buddha (here rendered in Hokkien pronunciation as Omitohood). This heady mix of a concrete description of a Melakan streetscape, evocation of atmosphere, Malay folklore, Christian prayer and Buddhist chant is surely another manifestation of a multicultural world which is “upside down,/confused, everything not sure.” Section Six takes us from the poet’s childhood back to the present and confronts us with three people who after an interval of 30 years, are still there practising the same trades:      Jantan is washing dishes beside his ketupat stall,      in a corner of a bicycle shop Ho Mia is fixing a wheel,      Supra, under trishaw hood, sits waiting for a fare –

This appears on the surface to be nothing more than a tired, clichéd family photo bringing together representatives of each of the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia, each matched with occupations that are so stereotypically identified with their respective communities. The poet however walks into this photo and talks to the people in it. He toys with the idea of talking to them about the political situation of the country—“to rouse them”—but checks himself and asks if this will really “improve their lot, their worth,/assure their happiness.” Ee here is wondering what legitimacy he has, given his diasporic state, to question the cliché, to rock the boat and to deconstruct the official narrative spun by the political elite, “the makers of their meagre years.” Ee ends the poem with the following poignant lines: But only it, there, here, not some remote village in China once upon a time was all the earth and sea and sky and rainbow, golden dream we owned, and were compelled to leave.

In spite of his “mangled heritage,” in spite of the disappointments, in spite of the political situation leaving him “heartsick,” this was the only home he knew. In spite of having presented us with two very concrete and detailed portraits of different aspects of Melaka, warts and all, he now looks back at the Melaka he has left behind as a “golden dream” which he

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and his family were compelled to leave. Speaking a decade after his self-­ imposed exile to Australia, Ee asserted in an interview with The Straits Times: “My birthright, memories and heritage is something no one can take from me.”20 This assertion very clearly suggests what the Melaka of his poems meant to him.

Conclusion Ee Tiang Hong’s poetic representations of the material and intangible heritage of the historic city of Melaka constitute an attempt to realise an “imagined heritage” for his Malaysian homeland. The motivation behind this enterprise fits the trajectory outlined in Lowenthal (1998), who discussed both exile and a sense of victimhood as triggers for heritage-­making. Both these triggers can be seen as important motivations underlying much of Ee’s career as a poet. We may interpret Ee’s representations of Melaka as a response to the official narrative of Malay hegemony that underpins the National Culture Policy of 1971. The “eternal” Melaka of his poems is a multicultural city that is the very antithesis of this official narrative. In a real sense, this can also be seen as a prescient act because Melaka has remained at heart a multicultural city in spite of all official attempts to advance an official view of the city as the centre of a preeminent Malay polity, with a Malay ruling class whose power was underwritten by culture heroes like Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat. When the Malaysian government lodged a proposal to have George Town and Melaka jointly inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008, it is telling that it was the latter city’s multicultural character that was emphasised as one of its most important selling points.21 In The Past is a Foreign Country Revisited, Lowenthal discusses the relationship between historical fiction—with particular reference to the role of Walter Scott’s novels in shaping Scottish identity in the nineteenth century—and the narrative of history itself, and concludes that “fiction not history expressed a people’s true unique essence devoid of dross. Like landscape gardeners, novelists smoothed away history’s rough contours and unified past incongruities” (2015, 370). Likewise, one may say, poetry expresses above all the essence of what it depicts, rather than mere outward forms. In his poetry, and specifically in his representation of Melaka, Ee has distilled for the reader the essence of what the city is: a confused multicultural soup that is greater than the sum total of its individual ­ingredients. Just like the Baba, who is “more than/Chinese or Malay”

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(“Heeren Street,” Tranquerah), the city that has been his cradle and his home these past 500 years is greater than the sum total of the distinct communities which call it home. This multicultural heritage challenges the official monocultural definition of what it means to be Malaysian and is a more honest and accurate account of the realities on the ground, especially in relation to Melaka, whose identity has been shaped by a rich mosaic of the different cultures which have left their mark on the city. Literature is an important part of a nation’s heritage, and the intellectual, moral and spiritual worth of its intangible aspect is matched by the economic value of its tangible aspects. Buildings and other places associated with writers and their works have become important elements in the heritage of many nations and many of these monuments also have a significant monetary value in the heritage industry, drawing crowds of visitors eager to connect with this heritage. This is something that could well happen with Ee and other Malaysian writers if the political and cultural space were opened up to embrace a truly multicultural heritage. Some hope comes in the form of the National Heritage Act 2005,22 which not only very much leaves the definition of “national heritage” open, it even leans in the direction of acknowledging the multicultural realities on the ground by defining “cultural heritage” in Section 2 of the Act in terms of cultural artefacts that are “pertinent to the historical or contemporary way of life of Malaysians.” The definition of “intangible cultural heritage” in the same section of the Act explicitly mentions poetry along with a host of other arts and cultural expressions, “that may have existed or exist in relation to the heritage of Malaysia or any part of Malaysia or in relation to the heritage of a Malaysian community.” This clearly acknowledges the existence of a multiplicity of cultural communities in Malaysia. The National Culture Policy has had the effect of stultifying the development not just of literature in English, Chinese and Tamil but also that of literature in Malay. In his most damning criticism yet of the National Culture Policy, the Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam argues that it has resulted in the production of a body of literature in Malay that is inward looking and wholly parochial. Though claiming to be “national”, they have nothing to say on the human condition as we live it as Malaysians. […] Theirs, a National Literature coloured by a sentimental valorisation of the kampong as against the city, religiosity, self-indulgent

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nostalgia for a pre-colonial Malay past, and so on, is largely irrelevant in national terms. (2011, 92)

It is all too easy to focus on Ee’s sense of victimhood and see a sectarian outlook in his poetry. Woon-Ping Chin Holaday, for example, sets Ee against Malaysian National Laureate Muhammad Haji Salleh, whom she suggests speaks for the Malay point of view. She argues that Ee’s poetry on the other hand expresses “the displaced, threatened minority position of the non-Malay” (1983, 35). This however belies the fact that the Melaka that Ee represents in his poetry speaks about and for everyone who has shaped its history. In “Melaka” from the volume Nearing a Horizon, Ee recites the names of people who have contributed to the Melaka that he knew, beginning with Parameswara,23 the founder of the Malay Sultanate in the fifteenth century, and then running through a short list of some of the Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial adventurers who have left their mark on the city. He ends the list with the contemporary citizens of Melaka, and those who will come after them, and describes them all as “makers of my eternal city” (Nearing a Horizon: “Melaka”). This all-­ inclusive vision is a direct challenge to the official narrative of a national culture defined in terms of the culture of the Malay community. The Malaysian government has made use of Melaka’s multicultural heritage to support its application to have the city, as well as its sister city of George  Town, inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. On UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention website, Melaka’s and George Town’s multicultural heritage is clearly spelled out: Both towns bear testimony to a living multicultural heritage and tradition of Asia, where the many religions and cultures met and coexisted. They reflect the coming together of cultural elements from the Malay Archipelago, India and China with those of Europe, to create a unique architecture, culture and townscape. (UNESCO)

Melaka’s inscription on the World Heritage List in 2008 came after two unsuccessful earlier attempts. It is significant that the second attempt in the late 1990s was rejected due to criticism from UNESCO “that local communities, notably Chinese residents, were being neglected” (Worden 2010, 216). In spite of this formal acknowledgement of multiculturalism, wrong-­ headed ideology and politics have prevented all aspects of Melaka’s

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­ ulticultural heritage from being acknowledged and celebrated to the m full. It is arguable that no one has given us representations of Melaka as compelling and as poignant as Ee’s poetic vision of the city. Ee speaks not only for the Peranakan community, but also for the wider Chinese community in Malaysia, many of whom have emigrated for the same reasons that prompted Ee’s own emigration. This diaspora is part of the history of Malaysia, and the story of their hopes, their disappointments, their inner struggles and their journey are all cogently represented in Ee’s poetry, which needs to find its rightful recognition as part of the heritage of this country. In his study of state-sanctioned representations of heritage in Melaka, Nigel Worden (2010) demonstrates how the Malay and Islamic heritage of the city have been emphasised at the expense of other aspects of the city’s history and heritage, ignoring in particular the fact that modern-day Melaka is overwhelmingly Chinese in population as well as in its urban landscape. The present study has argued that Ee’s poetic representations of a multicultural Melaka offer a more truthful account of the facts on the ground than this official narrative. By framing Ee’s vision of Melaka in terms of an “imagined heritage,” this chapter proposes that heritage, and heritage-making, can be studied in terms of an act of artistic production triggered by the same push factors and socio-political circumstances that underlie the construction of heritage around cultural monuments, natural and urban landscapes and the performing arts. Ee’s vision of a multicultural “eternal” Melaka that directly challenges the official stance of a monocultural identity is, in spite of his own self-deprecating protestation to the contrary, an eloquent contribution to the debate about national identity, culture and heritage that continues to this day. Melaka after all, as Clammer suggests, is “in many ways a microcosm of Malaysian society, a city where the effects of history continue to work themselves out in day-to-day interaction and community structure” (1986, 47). The multifarious layers of history that continue to live on in today’s Melaka are celebrated in Ee’s poetry as part of his own as well as the city’s rich heritage. His poems as a whole, and in particular his representations of his beloved city, far from being “sectional literature,” need to be recognised as an integral aspect of Melaka’s and, by extension, Malaysia’s heritage.

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Notes 1. The text of the Policy may be accessed from the website of the Department for Culture and Arts. URL: http://www.jkkn.gov.my/en/ national-culture-policy. 2. A copy of the act may be downloaded from the official portal of the Attorney General’s Chambers. URL: http://www.agc.gov.my/agcportal/ uploads/files/Publications/LOM/EN/Act%2032.pdf. 3. For a comprehensive account of the politicisation of literature in Malaysia, see Tham Seong Chee’s chapter, The Politics of Literary Development in Malaysia. In Malaysian Literature in English: A Critical Reader, ed. Mohammad A.  Quayum and Peter C.  Wicks, 38–66. Petaling Jaya: Longman, 2001. See also Wong Phui Nam’s discussion in Towards a National Literature. In Writing a Nation: Essays on Malaysian Literature, ed. Mohammad A. Quayum and Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf, 49–68. Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic University of Malaysia Press, 2009. 4. For an account of this, see Lim and Gomes (2009, 233–241) and Saravanamuttu (2004, 102–104). See also Mandal, S.K. 2008. The National Culture Policy and Contestation Over Malaysian Identity. In Globalization and National Autonomy: The Experience of Malaysia, 273– 300. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. For an overview of how Malaysian writers in English responded to this, see Raihannah Mohd. Mydin. 2009. Malaysia and the Author: Face-to-Face with the Challenges of Multiculturalism. International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 5 (2): 43–63. 5. The official Malay name for the city, Melaka, is used consistently in this chapter, except when quoting verbatim from sources which use the anglicised form “Malacca.” 6. The term Peranakan refers to the Straits Chinese communities, with origins mainly in the Straits Settlements of Melaka, Penang and Singapore, as well as parts of Sumatra, Java and southern Thailand. Baba refers to the men of the community while the term Nyonya refers to the women. For an account of this community, see Khoo Joo Ee. 1998. The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: The Pepin Press. 7. For a different reading of this poem, see Agnes Yeow. 2011. Reading Place and Identity: An Ecocritical Approach to the Poetry of Ee Tiang Hong. Foreign Literature Studies (外国文学研究) 33 (4): 18–26. Yeow sees the dichotomy between the pristine jungle and the “city, kampong, rubber estate” as representing “progress”, rather than in terms of a political trajectory. 8. Translation by Hill (1955, 63). In his note lamenting the inadequacy of the English language to capture the exact nuance of this sentence, Hill

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cites the Malay text with the ‘di’ prefix mistakenly left out before “tidakkan,” the same way it appears in Ee’s epigraph. This, together with Hill’s use of the phrase ‘old order’ as a rather free rendering of the Malay “yang ada” (literally, “that which exists”) which is echoed in the title of Ee’s poem, “New Order,” strongly suggests that this was Ee’s source text for the epigraph. The text in the Jawi (Arabic script) lithograph of the Hikayat Abdullah ­prepared by Abdullah himself (reprinted in Hikayat Abdullah. Jakarta: Djambatan and Gunung Agung, no date. p.  62) has “di-tidakkan”, and this is also how it appears in W.G. Shellabear’s edition of the text in Rumi (Latin script) (Hikayat Abdullah. Singapore: Methodist Publishing House, 1916. p. 34). Shellabear’s own translation of the text is much more literal: “… the things which exist are brought to naught, and the things which are not are created, and everything changes.” (The Autobiography of Munshi Abdullah. Singapore: Methodist Publishing House, 1918. p. 38). 9. Pierre d’ Avity. 1615. The Estates, Empires, & Principalities of the World. Translated by Edward Grimston, 184. London: Mathewe Lownes and John Bill. 10. The sources cited above and others are summarised by Wheatley as follows: “Malays were always by far the most numerous, but from the very earliest years foreign merchants resided in the town.” (Paul Wheatley. 1961. The Golden Khersonese, 312. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press). 11. Soldadu is a loanword from Portuguese meaning ‘soldier’ in Malay. 12. Myths for a Wilderness was published in 1976, the year after Ee emigrated to Australia. It is assumed here that the poems in this volume were written prior to his emigration, or that they at the very least give us a pre-diasporic perspective. 13. This decline was largely due to resinification, the process by which the Peranakan community were absorbed into the broader Chinese community, losing their identity as a distinct cultural group. For a comprehensive account of this process, see Clammer, John. 1975. Overseas Chinese Assimilation and Resinification: A Malaysian Case Study. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 3 (2): 9–23. 14. Merican et  al. (2004) for example, speak of Ee’s “restrained, quizzical, ironic native voice” (p.  26). Holaday (1983) speaks of the “controlled irony that characterizes much of his work.” (p. 33) 15. An interjection. 16. A married woman; used as a term of address. 17. In the wake of the change of government, social commentator Kua Kia Soong made the call yet again for the policy to be revoked in an article published by an online news portal. “Time for Malaysia to ditch its narrow National Culture Policy.” Free Malaysia Today, 23 November 2018. URL:

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https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2018/11/23/ time-for-malaysia-to-ditch-its-narrow-national-culture-policy/. 18. See Fernandis, Gerard. 2000. Papia, Relijang e Tradisang. The Portuguese Eurasians in Malaysia: Bumiquest, A Search for Self Identity. Lusotopie: 262, for an explanation of the use of the terms “Serani” and “Eurasian.” 19. A term commonly used by the Peranakan in the Straits Settlements to refer to more recent Chinese immigrants who were often of a lower socio-­ economic status and who retained a more pronounced Chinese identity. From the Hokkien pronunciation of 新客 (xin ke ‘new guest’). 20. Chua, C. 1986. The Poet as a Full Person: Interview with Ee Tiang Hong. The Straits Times, 5 July (Section 2): 1. 21. See the UNESCO website, “Melaka and George Town, Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca.” URL: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1223. 22. A copy of the Act may be downloaded here: http://www.gtwhi.com.my/ images/stories/files/NATIONAL%20HERITAGE%20ACT%202005. pdf. 23. The poem does not highlight this, but Parameswara’s origin in the HinduBuddhist empire of Srivijaya adds yet one more layer to Melaka’s rich multicultural heritage. For an account of Parameswara’s role in the founding of the Melakan Sultanate, see Andaya and Andaya (1982, 31–36).

References Andaya, Barbara Watson, and Leonard Andaya. 1982. A History of Malaysia. London: Macmillan. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso. Bird, Isabella. 1967. The Golden Chersonese. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Clammer, John. 1986. Ethnic Processes in Urban Melaka. In Ethnicity and Ethnic Relations in Malaysia, ed. Raymond Lee, 47–72. Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University. Cortesão, Armando, ed. 1944. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires. Vol. 2. London: The Hakluyt Society. Ee, Tiang Hong. 1988. The Price of Freedom. In Literature and Liberation: Five Essays from Southeast Asia, ed. E.  Thumboo, 11–41. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House. Gulliver, Katrina. 2009. European Perceptions of Malacca in the Early Modern Period. Biblioasia 5 (3): 8–11. Haskell, Dennis. 2008. The Meanings of Malacca: Identity and Exile in the Writings of Ee Tiang Hong, Shirley Lim and Simone Lazaroo. Asiatic 2: 21–31. Hill, A.H. 1955. The Hikayat Abdullah: An Annotated Translation. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 28 (3): 3–354.

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Holaday, Woon-Ping Chin. 1983. Singing in a Second Tongue: Recent Malaysian and Singaporean Poetry in English. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 18: 27–41. Kua, Kia Soong, ed. 1990. Malaysian Cultural Policy and Democracy. Kuala Lumpur: The Resource and Research Centre. Lim, Teck Ghee, and Alberto Gomes. 2009. Culture and Development in Malaysia. In Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Lim Teck Ghee, Alberto Gomes, and Azly Rahman, 231–251. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. Lowenthal, David. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merican, Fadillah, et  al. 2004. Voices of Many Worlds: Malaysian Literature in English. Shah Alam: Times Editions. Saravanamuttu, Johan. 2004. Malaysian Multicultural Policy and Practices: Between Communalism and Consociationalism. In The Challenge of Ethnicity: Building a Nation in Malaysia, ed. Cheah Boon Kheng. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. UNESCO. 2008. Melaka and George Town, Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1223. Wong Phui Nam. 2011. On Malaysian National Literature. In Imagined Communities Revisited: Critical Essays on Asia-Pacific Literatures and Cultures, ed. Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf and Mohammad A.  Quayum, 88–92. Kuala Lumpur: International Islamic University of Malaysia Press. Worden, Nigel. 2010. ‘Where it all Began’: The Representation of Malaysian Heritage in Melaka. International Journal of Heritage Studies 7 (3): 199–218.

CHAPTER 10

Add Place and Stir: Origins, Authenticity and the “Malaysian” Kari Kapitan Leonard Jeyam

Introduction The story of the Kari Kapitan (or Curry Kapitan) is one that must include notions of travel, adaptation and reinvention. It begins amidst the humblest of origins in colonial India and then, out of political necessity, travels southeast a few thousand miles away to British Malaya and Dutch Indonesia. For reasons of practicality, the curry retains its name but drops its Indian baggage in the process and culturally ameliorates, or remakes itself, to become a dish that many in Southeast Asia today would presume to be wholly native in origin. So pervasive is the Kari  Kapitan today in Malaysia and Singapore, in particular, that it seems to have taken on a heritage status. This chapter therefore intends to trace the historical routes of the different culinary recipes attributed as historical versions of the contemporary curry dish today, showing that the recipes of the Kari Kapitan were themselves given to various changes in terms of geography, memory and the very practicality involved in the sourcing of local ingredients. But while the various recipes and the curry changed and assimilated different flavours over time, the irony is that the “unintended” heritage value of the

L. Jeyam (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_10

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dish itself did not undergo a significant change save for its adaptation into the local languages, depending on whose heritage it is said to belong to, of Southeast Asia today.

Conceptual Frameworks: “Broken Mirrors”, Indigenisation and Transnational Boundaries We could begin this chapter in the way Razia Parveen does in “Food to Remember: Culinary Practice and Diasporic Identity”, which explores the communal identity of immigrant Punjabis and Mirpuris in the inner city of Lockwood in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. While collecting their oral histories and recipes, Parveen discovers that the community’s ethnic and diasporic identity is fragmented, in that her female respondents build a narrative of their community via their traditional recipes as well as through the stories of their everyday lives, which are told sometimes out of sheer nostalgia, as a means of just wanting to remember the past. In the process what happens is that they, the female community of mostly first- and second-­generation immigrants, create a new narrative of meaning and identity which is “told in pieces with some parts missing, some parts altered and some pieces added on” (2016, 50). Thus, it does not come as any surprise that Parveen employs Salman Rushdie’s well-known “broken mirrors” analogy from his essay in Imaginary Homelands, which attempts to capture the complex negotiations involved in the construction of diasporic identity. That is to say, the immigrant must negotiate between his or her memory of the past and the present, between fragments of identity that are irretrievably lost and that which still remain. Both Parveen and Rushdie ultimately read the cracked mirror as something that is positive; “[t]he broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” (2016, 50; Rushdie 1991, 10). It is its “brokenness” that allows it to be adaptable in the face of change. Such a process of remembering the past while adapting to the present is important to this chapter because the very nature of diasporic cooking often has to transform itself at some point, especially when the original or the memory of the original recipe has been irretrievably lost or simply forgotten. As we shall see, the story of the Kari Kapitan displays notions of a similar diasporic nature and reaches a point where it is forced to confront what the doyen of Philippine culinary writing Doreen Fernandez proposes as the concept of “indigenisation” (2003, 61). This will allow us to ­traverse

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over, and come to some understanding of, the vast alimentary ­landscape of the curry’s multiple histories of borrowing and adaptation. The cultural origins as well as process of syncretism are obscured, however, when a dish has taken root long enough in a place and then is termed native or traditional cuisine. Fernandez explains that this cultural process is prevalent in Filipino cooking, but I will demonstrate that it is to be found elsewhere in Southeast Asia too: The process seems to start with a foreign dish in its original form, brought in by foreigners (Chinese traders, Spanish missionaries). It is then taught to a native cook, who naturally adapts it to the tastes he knows and the ingredients he can get, thus both borrowing and adapting. Eventually, he improvises on it, thus creating a new dish that in time becomes so entrenched in the native cuisine and lifestyle that its origins are practically forgotten. That is indigenization, and in the Philippines the process starts with a foreign element and ends with a dish that can truly be called part of Philippine cuisine. (2003, 62)1

Within this process of indigenisation, Fernandez employs a nomenclative approach that traces the origins of a dish by its very name: “Semantic analysis of the names of food would thus reveal origin, something of the nature of the change and also further information” (2003, 63). In essence, what she proposes is that to understand the richness of the culture associated with a dish we first have to consider its origins through the rich semantic possibilities of the very name of the dish. She begins her search for the roots of Philippine cuisine from the point where “names indicate the origin” (2003, 63). As we shall see, the nomenclative processes of the Kari Kapitan are not unlike those of other dishes in Southeast Asia, which point to different ethnic and cultural origins such as “Chinese”, “Indian” or “Malay”, which most Malaysians today would recognise as simply “Malaysian”. Another way of negotiating historical origins in the alimentary context is how Chan Yuk Wah highlights the problem that arises when drawing “cultural boundaries in line with national boundaries” (2011, 157). In her chapter, “Banh Cuon and Cheung Fan: Searching for the Identity of the ‘Steamed Rice-flour Roll’”, Chan asserts that to trace the history of the breakfast rice flour rolls of the Vietnamese banh cuon and the Cantonese cheung fan, he had to first disregard the idea of national boundaries, which governed the identities of these two localised versions of a very similar

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breakfast dish. The problem with comparing two dishes that are similar to each other carries with it the danger of assuming that the Vietnamese version would always be regarded as a local version of the Chinese original. The assumption here is that, to the layman outside Vietnam, such a dish would have had to have originated from mainland southern China, a country with which Vietnam shares its borders and one with an ostensibly richer culinary history. Thus, what Chan did was to propose the collapsing of national borders so as to dismantle such a ready-made assumption. The outcome of such a strategy is indeed remarkable as his study concludes that both dishes not only have their own culinary histories, which go back to the nineteenth century, but also that it is the Vietnamese version which is the older of the two. Such a strategy will be useful in this chapter as the very nature of a curry dish like the Kari Kapitan will also have various national and regional borders to circumvent first, and thus treating the dish as something distinctly “Malaysian” (or “Singaporean”) would pose the danger of negating the intersections of foodways. By collapsing local, regional and national borders, our ideas about the origins of the Kari Kapitan will be forced to confront the larger ideas of imperialism, colonialism, migration, race and identity. Such a method will also help in demystifying the myth-making possibilities surrounding the local stories and origins of the Kari Kapitan. Hence, this chapter favours the concept of the “translocal”, which questions the global/local dichotomy that frames much of our understanding of culture these days. With the translocal, we are able to investigate the historical and also contemporary notions of the history of the Kari Kapitan by eschewing received notions of geographical and cultural belonging. The point here is that the notion of nation-state borders and identity needs to be forgotten momentarily so as to ascertain the many iterations of the Kari found within a more multicultural and hybrid space before situating the dish back within the contemporary context of identity and place. In other words, the idea of physical, geographical place is de-­emphasised while an alternative, translocal notion of space is explored to inform our understanding of food culture within the boundaries of the nation-state.

Myths of Origin Just as the recipes of the Kari Kapitan are numerous, so are its originary myths. Some are even being created as I write this. Most of the stories of origin I encountered in my research were those remembered and retold by

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various cooks as well as cookbook writers. These myths of origin, in general, try to deal with the rather perplexing “Captain (or Kapitan)” present in the name of the dish and, as a result, employ various myth-making strategies to imagine, as well as romanticise about, the possible worlds in which the “Kapitan” could have been at home. When I first began actively searching for these originary myths, both online and in printed cookbooks, I noticed that the name “Kari Kapitan” only existed within the alimentary realms of Malaysia and Singapore. There are various versions of the name: “Curry Captain”, “Captain Curry” or “Curry Kapitan”. Chicken is always listed as the main meat ingredient, although a few cookbook writers mention that other stewing cuts of meat, such as pork and beef, could also be used. In terms of the printed cookbooks, these different names surface in all sorts of ethnic cuisine. “Curry/Kari Kapitan/ Captain” is often found in Eurasian cookbooks (Hutton 1984, 157; Pereira 2012, 88),2 whereas the Peranakan (Straits Chinese) or Nyonya cookbooks generally do not include a dish with such a name.3 Only Terry Tan’s Straits Chinese Cookbook, Sylvia Tan’s Singapore Heritage Food and Florence Tan’s Timeless Peranakan Recipes (the last of which includes a Kari Kapitan recipe made with prawns) mention it. There were also many online sites which list the curry dish as being part of Malay cuisine or as simply Malaysian cuisine. It is from all these various cookbooks and online sources that I was able to deduce that no one could establish where this recipe originated from, or if it was even “Malayan” or “Malaysian” or “Singaporean” in the first place. However, coming back to the myths of its origin, I was able to group various stories and fables according to the following strands or versions: Myth 1: A domestic servant was once asked by his British sea captain as to what was on the menu for dinner that night. The servant replies: “Curry, captain”. And the name for the dish caught on and history was created (Tan 1981, 84; Hutton 2007, 123). A slightly different version of the myth is included in the collection Food from the Heart: Malaysia’s Culinary Heritage: “Many years ago, a ship sailed into harbour and its captain liked the place so much he opened a restaurant. One day a number of people came to the restaurant and ordered Curry Chicken. Not having the ingredients for the traditional Indian curry, the captain scrounged around for anything he could find. All he had were some local herbs and plants and the usual garlic, onions and ginger. He put them together and a new dish was born.

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The customers enjoyed it so much they asked its name. In a flash the captain said ‘Curry Kapitan’ and the name has stuck ever since” (Henry 2004, 119). Myth 2: The Malay word “Kapitan” is derived from the Portuguese “Capitão”, meaning Captain. And henceforth, it became a well-known title that was used by the Portuguese and later the Dutch as well as British colonial masters for the various leaders of the local communities under their jurisdiction. The “Kapitan China” in Malacca (Melaka), for example, was in charge of the social welfare of the local Chinese communities, whereas the “Kapitan Keling” in Penang would have attended to the sociocultural and economic needs of the Indian communities in the Straits Settlements. When confronted with the name of the Kari Kapitan dish, many still assume that it must be of local Chinese origin, and specifically as belonging to the Peranakan community, since no other local community seems to have claimed ownership of the curry dish.4 Julia de Bierre in her book Penang: Through Gilded Doors is of the opposing opinion. She asserts that the name of the curry is a reference to the British colonial Kapitan of Penang, who was the head of its Indian Muslim community. She contends that the word Kapitan “endures in the form of ‘curry Kapitan,’ a delicious Nyonya dish made with lashings of coconut milk and tamarind” (2006, 53). This myth is a little more problematic in its concoction as de Bierre confuses the Indian Peranakan (or Jawi Peranakan) with the Nyonya, the latter of whom are part of the Chinese Peranakan community in Penang. Myth 3: Even today, there exist stories in cookbooks and online blogs and pages about the curry being created by and for sea captains in boats and ships in Southeast Asia, but no mention is made as to who the cooks were on those boats and why the curry came to have a seafaring significance. Be that as it may, I did light upon a number of colonial recipes from the British Raj that were titled “Country Captain”. This dish, mentioned in a few online blogs, allowed me to identify various allusions to such a chicken dish and its connections to the riverboats and steamers in various parts of rural India. A typical example is Bridget White-Kumar’s account of Anglo-Indian cuisine that includes a dish called “(Grandma’s) Country Captain Chicken”. She speculates that versions of this very popular colonial dish were prepared “on Country River steamers plying between Bengal and Chittagong and other parts

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of Burma. It was purported to be served as a special dish at the Captain’s table for his special guests” (White-Kumar). White-Kumar herself admits to surmising about the dish’s origins. Even Lizzie Collingham, possibly the most authoritative cultural historian on the colonial Indian curry, admits to speculating about the name Country Captain, which she believes is “one of the best-known Anglo-Indian curries”, and according to her, the “country” in the dish’s name refers to the Indian country boat as the dish was invented by its captains (2006, 124). This eventually led me to look for such a Country Captain recipe in colonial Malayan cuisine. The only local cookbook which had such a recipe name was Ellice Handy’s My Favourite Recipes, published in 1954, which was a bestseller in various editions in every decade following the 1950s (Handy 2012, 150). Although listed under the section “Malayan and Indonesian Dishes”, Handy’s Country Captain recipe looks nothing like most Malay(si)an or Indonesian recipes, although the use of familiar herbs and spices such as garlic cloves, peppercorns and dry turmeric plus the coconut milk suggests why the recipe could have been appropriated as a local one. In fact, the recipe could be thought of as a version of a typical “dak bungalow” recipe from colonial India, which made use of the simplest of ingredients or simply whatever was available in a kitchen at any given time and place (we only have to remove the coconut milk here). Jennifer Brennan in Curries and Bugles: A Memoir and Cookbook of the British Raj describes the “dak bungalow” as a somewhat unpleasant but indispensable institution that helped Anglo-Indian officers and travellers tour the great lengths of the subcontinent. The “dak”, or postal stops, were rest stops set every ten miles or so apart which the mail runners ran to and from. The weary British officer or traveller would find repose at these stops and would inevitably order a meal, which the cooks at these stops would whip up with as few ingredients as possible and often under a time constraint. This simple country fare would almost always include a simple chicken or water fowl dish seasoned and flavoured with peppercorns, turmeric and clarified butter at the very least (2000, 149–153). Looking at the dak bungalow chicken and meat recipes in Brennan’s nostalgic memoir and comparing them with the Country Captain recipes of Lizzie Collingham (124) and Ellice Handy (150), it is not hard to deduce that these chicken stews or curries had one maxim or rule in

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c­ ommon: use whatever ingredients were available, even if that meant a pared down stew for a largely tired and undiscerning crowd. Thus, because of the popularity or the very necessity of such colonial stews and curries made popular by the dak bungalow cooks, the taste for such “pleasing” and popular curries amongst the Anglo-Indians5 in the subcontinent was relocated to the Malay-speaking world, namely Malaya and Singapore, by way of familiarity or just sheer nostalgia. The Country Captain dish then took on the simpler Curry Captain name, possibly because the roots of the meaning of the original country river steamers were either lost to history or simply too foreign to the new colonial bureaucrats who arrived later in Southeast Asia. It is not difficult to notice that the original Country Captain looks almost identical to its new sibling, the Curry Captain, which in essence is more of a simple stew than a curry. The basic ingredients remain the same, consisting of the typical Indian ingredients of peppercorns, onions and turmeric, but the ghee was probably replaced with vegetable oil and the inclusion of coconut milk would have signified the stew as typically Malay/Malayan or Indonesian. Collingham’s Country Captain recipe is almost identical to Handy’s version except that the latter’s also allows for chilies to be used as a substitute for peppercorns. And, if that is not proof enough, Handy even calls the same stew or curry by its combined subcontinental Indian and Malayan names. Her new Malayan Kapitan recipe looks like this (notice the utter simplicity of its ingredients and cooking technique): Country Captain (Curry Capitan) 1 teaspoon peppercorns ½ inch dry turmeric 1 chicken, cut into pieces 1½ teacups coconut milk ½ teacup small onions, sliced and fried 2 cloves garlic Juice of 1 lime Method Rub ground peppercorn and turmeric over chicken, add coconut milk, season with salt, and let simmer gently till chicken is tender and somewhat dry. Sprinkle over chicken fried onions, garlic and lime juice.

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The Latter-Day Kari Kapitan Most Thai, Indian, Malay and Sumatran curries are well known for their use of the fiery local red and green chilies. The Kari Kapitan as we know it today, however, tends to have a milder aspect; using fewer Indian or Southeast Asian spices, it instead makes use of various local herbs which are easily found in any wet or fresh market in the region. In terms of appearance, the dish using chicken meat looks like just about any other chicken curry or curried stew from contemporary Southeast Asia. It usually has a deep yellowish-brown colour due to the use of the ubiquitous turmeric root (fresh or dry), which is also an essential ingredient in practically all curries or stews from the region. Today, a typical recipe for the Kari Kapitan would look like this (I have created a composite recipe): Chicken Kari Kapitan Ingredients Chicken Cooking oil Coconut milk Water Kaffir lime leaves Tamarind pulp Salt, pepper

1 kg, cut into large pieces 4 tbsp 250 ml (made from squeezing freshly grated coconut with water) 1 cup 5 30 g (mixed with ½ cup warm water and strained) according to taste

Spice blend (rempah) Candlenuts Turmeric Lemongrass Galangal Young ginger Red chillies, fresh Shallots Garlic Shrimp paste (belacan)

6 small thumb-sized knob 2 stalks, bruised 4 slices small thumb-sized knob 4 10–15 2 cloves 20 g, lightly toasted

Method 1. Pound or process all ingredients in the spice blend to a fine paste. Use a little water if necessary. Mix well with the chicken pieces and marinate for up to an hour in the fridge.

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2. Add cooking oil to a wok and when smoking slightly fry the spice paste for a few minutes till it becomes slightly brown. Some of the oil would be seen to have risen to the top at this point. 3. Add 200  ml of the coconut milk to the wok and stir the water. Ensure that all the ingredients are stirred properly. 4. Add the tamarind juice and lime leaves to the mixture and stir well. Stew for about 20–30 minutes, or till the chicken is cooked. Now stir in the final portion of coconut milk and season to taste. 5. Remove from the heat and serve with white rice. The curry develops an even better taste when left for a few hours to allow the rich flavours to mingle. The method of preparing this curry is similar in just about wherever it is cooked and served. It is recognisably Southeast Asian in terms of appearance and even aroma. It could be Thai in terms of origin if we were to think about their red and yellow curry recipes (kaeng khiaw waan and kaeng phet), respectively.6 But amongst the many versions of this curry found in Malaysia and Singapore today, most tend to be variations of the Indonesian or Malay gulai,7 a rich, slightly spicy, yellowish stew cooked with much of the same herb and spice blend as the recipe above. Often, but not always, the gulai has a fragrant and rich use of turmeric, coriander, ginger, garlic, shallots, lemongrass and so forth. The Minangkabau, Achenese and Malay gulai tend to have a thicker sauce compared with its Javanese counterpart. In fact, the gulai is an indispensable or classic recipe of the vast Indonesian archipelago. The very authoritative heritage cookbook Mustikarasa: Resep Masakan Indonesia Warisan Sukarno, published in 1967, collects important Indonesian recipes from all over the archipelago during the Sukarno Era (Komunitas Bambu  2016, 221–255). In this 1200-page volume, there are vegetarian gulai recipes made with daun singkong (cassava leaf), tempeh, young jackfruit, local pumpkin and even banana; whereas the meat-rich gulai are made with all sorts of meat and offal permissible in the Islamic diet. The less common main ingredient used by cooks outside Indonesia would be meat like beef tendon and poultry like duck and the various local fish including tuna (ikan tongkol). There is even one version from Madiun which calls for a local green frog (Gulai Katak). Unsurprisingly, the first gulai listed in the volume is the Gulai Ajam (Chicken Gulai). And it does not require one to stretch one’s imagination too much to discover that this recipe is just about identical to any contemporary Nyonya Chicken Curry,

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Ayam Lemak Nonya and the just as popular Chicken Kari Kapitan recipe. Hence, it follows that the contemporary version of the latter is simply an Indonesian gulai recipe but with a recipe name that is wrapped around a pan-Indian imaginary. According to Cecilia Leong-Salobir, in her fascinating account of colonial curry in Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire, “curry is the single most important dish that defines the culinary history of British imperialism” and in fact, she asserts, curry was to be found on every Anglo-Indian table and even in Malaya in the Straits Settlements (2011, 39–40). If this were true, then it would logically follow that the later British administrators who arrived in Southeast Asia would have brought with them their memory of the dishes avidly consumed during their Anglo-Indian days or that upon arrival in the newer colonies, their fond memories of Indian curry ensured the popularity of the curry would continue (but of course in different versions, with different aromas). Local Southeast Asian  cooks were, like in some of the originary myths of the Kari Kapitan mentioned earlier, forced to figure out for themselves how to satisfy their colonial masters’ taste buds by only using local cooking techniques, recipes and of course ingredients at hand. Adaptation was the order of the day in any local colonial kitchen, and readjusting a Madras curry, for instance, meant that the initial scarcity of the Indian spices was overcome by making using use of coconut milk, candlenuts, galangal and lemongrass, which were always readily available. Leong-Salobir would go so far as to say that the curry dish is “a stubborn relic of the Raj and a defining dish that helped to form culinary links between British colonies” (2011, 39–40). The popular Anglo-Indian Country Captain then made its appearance in the Straits Settlement imaginary amongst the local Anglo-Indians first (who later became the local Eurasian community). The appearance of the Country Captain recipe in their cookbooks and the just as similar Curry Captain recipe proves the link between the two. With the expansion of Empire, these colonial household recipes began to take on hybrid forms, incorporating techniques and ingredients from various local communities. From the dak bungalow to the country riverboats’ chicken curry recipes of the British Raj which spoke of ingenious ways of overcoming problems of the scarcity of ingredients, we later see the continued indigenisation of similar recipes in the Malay-speaking worlds, where rice and curry was said to be consumed at least once a day by the British, although some accounts put it at three times a day.8 So popular

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were curries that it is unsurprising that local communities other than the Anglo-Indians and Eurasian ones were compelled into preparing them for their household masters and for themselves.9 There is also an interesting Penang Hainanese connection which could explain why this Anglo-Indian curry began to take on Peranakan roots. Ong Jin Teong, in his article “The Hainanese Influence in Penang’s Cuisine”, writes that it was not uncommon for rich Peranakan households on the island to employ Hainanese cooks. This was the reason why this Chinese linguistic community began to cook Peranakan or Nyonya dishes, and in the process become closely identified with them. Ong adds that the Hainanese were edged into the cooking business as a result of having come much later to Malaya: “The Hainanese were among the last Chinese language groups to arrive in Malaya, when other language groups had monopolised most of the trades. They ended up working for the British in their households and kitchens” as well as in holiday bungalows in the hill stations, rest houses, military mess halls, government canteens, recreational clubs, railway stations, hotels and restaurants.10 In the same way that the dak bungalow cooks of the British Raj invented a hybrid, pan-­ Indian cuisine out of sheer practicality and necessity, these Hainanese chefs cooked Western food for their British employers but by using local cooking techniques and ingredients. They also obviously remade the Indian curries their employers were fond of by using local versions of whatever type of curry they knew—and this is where the Peranakan (as well as Hainanese) connection could be discerned as playing a role in the making of the local Kari Kapitan as a popular dish in the Malayan alimentary imaginary.

Conclusions I have tried to suggest that the search for the historical origins of a heritage dish would also entail a consideration of the poetics of “authenticity” which eschews the realities of cultural heterogeneity, hybridity and borrowing. Such myth-making strategies are helpful up to a certain point in that they can provide us with a sense of stability in a rapidly changing global world. However, there is only so much of gazing into our idealised, “unbroken” mirrors of our past—that myth of heritage as a linear, closed and continuous narrative—that we can do before realising that taking in essentialist views of the world and our histories can lead us to the world of

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unreliable fictions, of a past that is whole and can be returned to, not unlike the broken mirrors analogy of Salman Rushdie. The point of this chapter is to ultimately ask the pointed question: Is the Kari Kapitan part of an “unintended” heritage, in that its current status as a Nyonya curry dish is actually a case of mistaken identity, even of mistaken cultural appropriation, as I have shown in this chapter? Even though its contemporary prevalence derives from its gaining ground as a genuine, bona fide Straits Chinese or Peranakan dish, the short answer is a simple yes. But the longer answer is more complex. It would have to take into account the fact that recipes and culinary narratives are today an important part of the process of helping to foster and create ideas of cultural identity for a particular community, ethnic group and so forth. Wenying Xu goes so far as to say that “food operates as one of the key cultural signs that structure people’s identities and their concepts of others” (2008, 2). And according to the sociologist Claude Fischler, “Food not only nourishes but also signifies” (cited in Xu 2008, 2). Of course there is Roland Barthes who says that food goes beyond being a product of statistics and nutrition but is also “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour” (1997, 21). Food then plays a very important role in the construction of the identity of a particular ethnic group. Even though neither the name of the dish nor the Kari Kapitan recipe itself, as demonstrated in this chapter, originates from an older or even a contemporary Straits Chinese tradition of cooking, we nevertheless have to remember that most recipes often originate from somewhere outside a given culinary tradition. Curries, according to food writers and historians such as Collingham and Leong-Salobir, attest to the act of cultural “osmosis”, a process in which foods and recipes are appropriated and adapted for reasons such as the availability of ingredients, the enhancement of flavours particular to a place, a desire to remember, a longing for a different time and place or simply out of sheer nostalgia. Pan-Indian curries, as I have shown, function as an open signifier of heritage, in that they have become part of a larger gastronomic imaginary that works by way of continuing the old while creating newer cultural memories. In this light, the Kari Kapitan, in re-emerging in a different colonial land, has had to assimilate ideas of new pathways, transforming itself from the “original” Country Captain to the Straits-born Curry Captain to finally the more localised curry dish we know today in Malaysia and Singapore as the Kari Kapitan.

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Notes 1. Fernandez’s article is mostly concerned with the evolution of traditional Filipino cuisine with regards to its rich cultural borrowings from the Spanish and Chinese cultures in terms of the names of dishes, ingredients, cooking processes, flavourings and the social position accorded to foreign foods after being assimilated into native cooking. 2. The latter was first published in Australia by Ure Smith. Nunis, Melba. 2014. A Kristang Family Cookbook, 82. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. 3. The books I consulted include: Leong Yee Soo. 2005. Nyonya Specialties. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish; Philip Chia. 2012. Peranakan Heritage Cooking. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. 4. I formally interviewed a number of families in the Portuguese Settlement in Melaka, Malaysia, in June 2012 as a co-investigator for a project for which I was collecting data for the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) funded by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. What I discovered was that none of the Portuguese-­ Eurasian cooks and housewives in the Settlement considered the Kari Kapitan as belonging to their culinary tradition. All of them believed it to be of Peranakan provenance. 5. Lizzie Collingham, Curry, 110: “East Indian Company officials referred to themselves as Indians, East Indians, or Anglo-Indians. The latter name stuck” and so Collingham uses “Anglo-Indians” to mean the British in India. However, she qualifies this by adding, “It was only in 1911 that the meaning of the term changed and it was used to describe the people of mixed British and Indian parentage, who until then were known as Eurasians”. The term “Anglo-Indian” was rarely used later in the Straits Settlements and Malaya due to the fact the Eurasian community there did not wish to refer to themselves as “Indian” (many of them were obviously not) and so preferred the term “Eurasian”, which is still used as an identity marker today. The term “Kristang” (from the early Portuguese to mean “Christian”) is also sometimes used by and for them, although it also refers to the Portuguese dialect/creole still spoken by some members of the community. 6. There is no standard Romanisation of the spelling of these Thai cooking terms and recipes. I have used the most common ones found online. 7. Strictly speaking, the gulai is not a real curry, although many of its essential ingredients as well as its cooking technique resemble that which go into making curry sauce in Southeast Asia. The term “curry” and its attendant meanings are very much a British colonial product. In “‘To Make a Curry the India way’: Tracking the Meaning of Curry across Eighteenth-Century Communities”, Stephanie Maroney writes that the “concept of a curry was

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developed by the British East India Company while stationed in India. Members of the EIC would describe any spicy Indian dish as a ‘curry,’ and when these men returned to England, they brought back their desire for Indian food” (126). Having its origins in the Tamil language (“kari” meant any kind of spicy sauce), the term was co-opted or appropriated to include any kind of Indian sauce, usually with one or some or all of the following spices: chilly, turmeric, coriander and cumin. In modern parlance, the British colonial “curry” has been adopted to mean any kind of spicy dish or stew, without necessarily having to originate from the Indian subcontinent, although there is no colonial Indian cookbook from 1800 that fails to include dishes with a curried sauce. 8. Leong-Salobir also adds that the versatility of the curry recipe and later the invention and wide use of the curry powder by the British made it a special food that travelled easily from colony to colony: “Even in its colonial heyday, curry was a dish that was the perfect example of food appropriation: it leapt from presidency to presidency in the subcontinent and across the colonies in the British Empire. Just as Anglo-Indian cookery was seen as the first pan-Indian cuisine, curry is the single most important dish that defines the culinary history of British imperialism. Specious claims of ownership and the authenticity of curry are contested and questioned by different communities. Curries were created, adapted and modified through the input of indigenous cooks, by the availability of ingredients in particular regions, by the social mores of the time and also by health and nutritional thinking of the nineteenth century. Drawing from Anglo-Indian, Malayan and Singaporean cookbooks, memoirs, diaries, travelogues and other primary sources I demonstrate […] that curry evolved as a hybrid, practical dish that could be made from leftover meat and poultry and which incorporated spice ingredients specifically selected for their preservative and nutritious qualities” (2011, 39–40). 9. Curries were even more popular during the British era than we tend to think today. Leong-Salobir asserts that, “The fact that curry was eaten at least once daily according to many accounts, contradicts the notion that colonizers only ate British meals. In Singapore, curry was even more ubiquitous, consumed at every meal, as recounted by John Cameron, editor of the Straits Times in 1865. He asserted that curry made its appearance three times a day, starting with breakfast, with ‘[a] little fish, some curry and rice, and perhaps a couple of eggs, washed down with a tumbler or so of good claret,’ forming ‘a very fair foundation on which to begin the labours of the day.’ Tiffin comprised ‘a plate of curry and rice and some fruit or it may be a simple biscuit with a glass of beer or claret’. An everyday dinner in Singapore was a sizeable repast and was comparable to a special occasion dinner in Britain: starting with soup, then the ‘substantials’ of roast beef or

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mutton, turkey or capon, accompanied by side dishes of tongue, fowl, cutlets and a variety of vegetables. This course was followed by ‘two or more different kinds of curry, rice and accompaniments of all manner of sambals (a spicy mixture served as a side dish) or native pickles and spices’. Curry was even jellied, served probably either as a starter or a savoury at the colonial dining table” (2011, 51–52). 10. Ong Jin Teong. 2018. The Hainanese Influence in Penang’s Cuisine. Penang Monthly Bulletin, June. https://penangmonthly.com/article. aspx?pageid=14963. Heng Pek Koon corroborates this by mentioning that the Hainanese main economic preoccupations were as cooks and in the hospitality industry (“Chinese Economic Activities”, in The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, ed. Lynn Pan, Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2006, 175).

References Barthes, Roland. 1997. Towards a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. In Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 20–27. New York: Routledge. Brennan, Jennifer. 2000. Curries and Bugles: A Memoir & Cookbook of the British Raj. Hong Kong: Periplus. Chan, Yuk Wah. 2011. Banh Cuon and Cheung Fan: Searching for the Identity of the “Steamed Rice-flour Roll”. In Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond, ed. Chee-Beng Tan, 156–171. Singapore: NUS Press. Chia, Philip. 2012. Peranakan Heritage Cooking. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Collingham, Lizzie. 2006. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Emperors. Oxford University Press. De Bierre, Julia. 2006. Penang: Through Gilded Doors. Penang: Areca Books. Fenandez, Doreen G. 2003. Culture Ingested: On the Indigenization of Philippine Food. Gastronomica 3 (1): 58–71. JStor. Handy, Ellice. 2012. My Favourite Recipes. Singapore: Landmark Books. Heng, Pek Koon. 2006. The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas. Edited by Lynn Pan. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet. Henry, Wilson, ed. 2004. Food from the Heart: Malaysia’s Culinary Heritage. Kuala Lumpur: Cross Time Matrix. Hutton, Wendy. 1984. Singapore Food. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press. ———. 2007. The Food of Love: Four Centuries of East-West Cuisine. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Komunitas Bambu, 2016. Mustikarasa: Resep Masakan Indonesia Warisan Sukarno. Depok: Komunitas Bambu. Lawrance, Benjamin, and Carolyn de la Peň a, eds. 2012. Local Foods Meet Global Foodways. New York: Routledge.

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Leong-Salobir, Cecelia. 2011. Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire, Routledge Studies. Oxon: Routledge. Maroney, Stephanie R. 2012. To Make a Curry the India Way: Tracking the Meaning of Curry across Eighteenth Century Communities. In Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History, ed. B.N. Lawrance and Carolyn de la Peña. Oxon: Routledge. Ong, Jin Teong. 2018. The Hainanese Influence in Penang’s Cuisine. Penang Monthly Bulletin, June. Parveen, Razia. 2016. Food to Remember: Culinary Practice and Diasporic Identity. Oral History 44 (1, Spring): 47–56. JStor. Pereira, Quentin. 2012. Eurasian Heritage Cooking. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta Books & Viking. Sen, Colleen Taylor. 2009. Curry: A Global History. Reaktion Books. Tan, Terry. 1981. Straits Chinese Cookbook. Singapore: Times Books International. Tan, Sylvia. 2014. Singapore Heritage Food. Singapore: Landmark Books. Tan, Florence. 2018. Timeless Peranakan Recipes. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. White-Kumar, Bridget. n.d. Anglo-Indian Cuisine Blog. Accessed March 1, 2019. http://anglo-indianfood.blogspot.com/2013/08/grandmas-country-captain-chicken.html. Xu, Wenying. 2008. Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.

CHAPTER 11

“Boria Everywhere in the World”: A Penang Burlesque and the Politics of Heritage Simon Soon

Introduction As a form of street theatre that emerged in Penang in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the Boria represents a type of cultural performance that has over the years come to be recognised as a repository of a uniquely local cultural knowledge. Of late, the term “intangible cultural heritage” has gained currency as an encompassing descriptor that reflects a new way of defining value in relation to a nation’s cultural heritage. Recent initiatives to list the Boria as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and

I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance I received for my research from Mahani Musa, Professor of History at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Mamu Abdul Malek of the Penang State Archive and Paul Augustine of the Penang House of Music. This chapter is an outcome of my participation as Field Director of Penang for “Site and Space in Southeast Asia”, a project conceived by the Power Institute, University of Sydney, Australia, and funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. S. Soon (*) Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4_11

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Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Intangible Cultural Heritage is a step in this direction (Mok 2019). As a heritage genre that expands the range of what we now consider to be artefacts worthy of conservation, intangible cultural heritage covers a whole system of expressing knowledge and creativity that is not tangible and object centred. What encapsulates the intangible is therefore the elusive “wealth of knowledge and skills that is transmitted through it from one generation to the next”.1 Yet, such knowledge and skills are sustained by institutions and their support systems—patronage, learning structure, material resources, the economic system, support from the public or leaders of a social group and so on. Support is therefore derived from a belief that there is value that then justifies the building of the support structure. What is intangible cultural heritage, then, is a customary set of practices, skills and knowledge, sustained in the past by a very tangible infrastructure. What if these infrastructures no longer exist? While heritage conservation in policy and practice acknowledges the very tangible infrastructure that needs to be in place for a knowledge and skill to continue to find meaning within society, the condition of modernity as a significant factor in rendering these infrastructures irrelevant is not something that is discussed honestly enough. A nostalgic patina tempers the most well meaning of efforts. Even with the full participation of the communities concerned, state-driven interventions focusing on policy, inventory, education, conservation, research, promotion and management might not always address the meaning-making mechanisms from which such knowledge and skills emerged.2 This is simply because value is measured according to the standards set by UNESCO. An institutionally defined concept of “intangible heritage” would come to “impose” what and how we understand the Boria. The word “impose” here is strongly emphasised by cultural anthropologist Pablo Alonso Gonzalez to suggest that an institutional discourse of heritage is an “alien category” with a “predatory tendency to commodify and heritagise traditions, folklore, and local customs in an attempt to add economic value to local industries and activities, particularly through cultural and rural tourism initiatives promoted and funded by public agencies” (Gonzalez 2018, 4). As explored later in this chapter, though it was used as a political weapon to challenge the state in matters of cultural values and urban planning in Penang from the late 1980s onwards, heritage became an untameable discourse when the state joined in the fray. Public investment needed to account for spending in terms of economic returns. The recourse was tour-

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ism, and the industrialisation of a selective understanding of the past and heritage that ensued enabled the widespread “doubling” of social life in site, practice and customs into representation spectacle (Debord 1994). The Boria of today encapsulates these larger social processes at play. A contemporary Boria performance is defined by a strict formal grammar that regulates a two-act performance. Performances generally begin with a comedy sketch that takes Everyman’s encounter with modernity as a fodder for laughter, which then resolves in a gaiety-driven dance repertoire. Today, the Boria is presented on the proscenium stage and gets by as a quirky Penang gaiety show in annual school competitions or state festivals or functions. But a hundred years ago, the Boria suggested something with only a superficial resemblance to what it is today. Described as “a troupe of strolling minstrels, generally dressed and drilled as soldiers and headed by a Captain and an Army Chaplain”, this roving song and dance company would spare no expense at dressing up and miming stock characters that referenced the multi-ethnic cast of people that one would have found in the colonial port city of Penang. On the first ten days of the Islamic new year, Boria troupes would visit “the houses of wealthy or popular Moslems and serenad[e] them till paid to go away. The songs are sometimes eulogistic and sometimes comic; the tunes are admirably suited for their purpose” (Wilkinson 1908, 41). A conclusive study on Boria’s etymology remains elusive. A weak consensus continues to reinforce an oral history account by an unnamed Indian resident of Penang recorded in H.  T. Haughton’s first written description of Boria(h) (Mozaffari-Falarti 2016). In this account, the word is said to have originated in “the Hindustani and Deccan language and carries the meaning of ‘a place of prayer’ (praying carpet), and in Malay they call it tikar (a mat)” (Haughton 1897, 312). The word “Boria” was also identified as one of the four characters played by the Madras native infantry stationed in Penang during the Muharram commemorative procession. What is certain is that Boria’s raison d’etre has shifted over the past century—as a veneer for the warring factions of secret societies, a renewed front for Malay nationalism, a refuge for transgenders and others who were recognised by the state (both colonial and postcolonial) as social misfits, a propaganda vehicle for nation-building after independence and as mass entertainment with the onset of television culture. Nevertheless, at almost a hundred years old, the Boria is today seen less as a hooligan by

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the State than an octogenarian gentry—respectable and safe enough to be appropriated as heritage. But who does the Boria belong to? What are its origins? To address these questions, this chapter discusses extant historical narratives before attempting a close reading of Boria’s artistic form. I suggest that the Boria as an art form offers another “historical method” that considers origin as sited not in place but as a coming together of worlds, vastly different from the conventions of academic historiography that continue to frame and dictate much of heritage discourse. Instead of advocating for the listing of Boria on the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list on the terms currently proposed, I suggest that Boria offers us a different way to understand cultural heritage and community values, which in turn offer a radically different way of understanding the self in relation to the other. While critiquing the UNESCO heritage list and the dominant role it played in curtailing more inclusive ways of thinking about cultural heritage, my reading of the Boria suggests that transformation and contestation must begin by engaging with the terms of the system even if the goal is to submit the logic of the system to an alternative interpretive framework for new possibilities to emerge. In the case of UNESCO, I will also explore new provisions conceptualised, ratified and activated in recent listings. These can be said to be new directions for rethinking the two foundational axes that have governed UNESCO’s approach to “heritage”—on the one hand, the reference between the nation-state and the international and, on the other, between ethnic identity and common humanity. In short, I call for the calibration of new terminologies that might contribute to a revision of what heritage can do. But first, a different kind of ownership needs to be imagined from a retelling of Boria’s many beginnings, as a counterpoint to the framing of culture by imperium.

Boria’s Agon A number of ownership claims to the Boria and its heritage have been advanced by various communities and advocates representing different types of cultural institutions and agendas. Though Boria developed from now long-abandoned nineteenth-century customs observed during the Muharram festivities by the Indian communities of Penang, it is today practised primarily by the ethnic Malay community. Nevertheless, one needs to qualify that “Malay” as a cultural identity in Penang included a

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large segment of creolised Muslims with mixed Malay and Indian heritage, many of whom would today describe themselves as Malay rather than Jawi Peranakan. The term “Malay-Jawi Peranakan” became the catch-all phrase to describe the ethnic background of  the performers of Boria in Wazir Karim’s recent book, designed to serve as a dossier for Boria’s UNESCO intangible cultural heritage listing (Wazir 2018). While extensive in scope, especially in its archival findings on religious land endowment (waqf ) records, Wazir’s book ultimately sees cultural history as a history of a community’s identity. Even if these historical identities were fluid, as can be attested to by the shifts between Jawi Peranakan and Malay identities that I had pointed to earlier, the book’s foregrounding of Boria’s cultural significance in terms of identity politics conforms neatly to the conventional, bounded view of culture. Recognising the complex and complicated web of social entanglements at the heart of Boria’s history and artistic form, the art historian in me is unsettled by the prevailing frameworks in heritage discourse. This chapter is thus an attempt to complicate the idea of heritage as consensually constituted by a ready-made historical destiny, transparent social memory and cultural practice template. Focusing on the disjunctures between rhetoric and the realpolitik of a concept, I suggest that “intangible cultural heritage” does not simply exist as an idea or a discourse, but forms a habitus— to borrow sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s idea—that consists of a set of habits, institutional practices, knowledge, vocabulary and actions that play an equal part in shaping what we understand the term to mean (Bourdieu 1990). Recent efforts to inscribe Boria as a UNESCO-listed intangible cultural heritage art form therefore must take into account not only the language used to frame the Boria but also the non-discursive knowledge and institutional practices of an international organisation that have come to stand in for a seldom challenged, universally adopted definition of intangible cultural heritage. As we shall see, such a dichotomy between the universal and the local drove not only the imperial ambitions of European powers from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century but also continues to police the relationship between the national and international as the only viable platform for political expression, even in matters of culture. It also structures how we see the world in binary terms, as citizens and ­immigrants, “us” and “them”, self and other. This chapter suggests that the Boria as a cultural form deconstructs the logic of this imperial binary.

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Instead of the consensus building of the “international” as the principal characteristic of democracy at work, I am inclined towards Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of agonism as a way to think about the democratic process, recognising conflicting forces as capable of producing meaningful forms of engagement (Mouffe 2000).3 Rather than take recourse to the liberal theory of consensus building that defines so much of imperial discourse, the recognition of conflict foregrounds the question of power in shaping who, what and how a history is told. It is these very same questions that compelled the critical turn in heritage studies ten years or so ago. Nowhere is conflict or agonism more rife than in the origin story of the Boria. It is to this story and its subsequent framing within a larger narrative of nation, history and culture that we turn to for clarification of a different historical method.

A Question of Origins To do that, we first return to the festival from which the Boria emerged. This particular festival, which enjoyed a measure of popularity, was celebrated in nineteenth-century colonial port cities around the world during the first thirteen days of the Islamic New Year in the month of Muharram.4 To put it simply, amongst Shi’ite Muslims, the Islamic New Year commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, on the battlefield of Karbala. Hussein had refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid, the second Ummayad Caliph who had come to power through hereditary succession. His appointment was seen as a betrayal of a pact that leadership of the Caliphate would return to the Prophet’s descendants. Having to face Yazid’s much larger army, Hussein’s resistance lived on as a story of sacrifice and a symbol of righteous resistance against the injustices of the world. This story grew over the years into various forms of commemorative rituals and practices celebrated during the first ten to thirteen days of the Muharram month. Known by different names across the world—Ashura, Tadjah, Hosay, Tabuik, Tabut and Asan-Usen—the festival followed from the migration and movement of South Asian native infantry (Sepoys), exiled convict labourers and indentured workers. As the British Empire grew in ambition, possessing at its height a quarter of the world’s landmass, the Muharram celebrations were reported across Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius, Fiji, Bencoolen and Natal (Vahed 2016). While the commemorative celebrations are today described as originating from Shi’ism, the

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distinction between Sunni and Shi’ite cultural practices was never clearly demarcated prior to the twentieth century. The origin story of Boria principally spotlights the Indian Sepoys (of either the Madras or Bengal regiment) for introducing the Muharram festival in Penang.5 While it is commonly assumed that these Sepoys were Shi’ites, recent scholarship has challenged the simplistic Sunni and Shi’ite binary by painting a more complex spectrum that structured their relationships before the twentieth century (Falarti 2016, 455–478). After all, the nineteenth-century Ashrakan (Ashura Hall) on Mesjid Street once accommodated both the Sunni and Shi’ite celebrants of Muharram (James 2004, 3).6 The Ashrakan was named after a religious endowment (waqf ) by Shaik Nathersah, who was also presumed to be the same military commander who sponsored the construction of a shrine to a Tamil Muslim Saint, Nagore Dargah, on Chulia Street (Khoo 2014, 145–147). These discoveries point to the danger of present-day assumptions of the Sunni-Shi’ite divide to our understanding of the past. Increasingly, scholars have turned their attention to Shi’ite cultural elements that were historically rooted in the Malay world (Wieringa 1996, 93–111; Sofjan 2013; Wan Z. Kamaruddin 2017, 67–93). In attempting to emphasise the foreignness of the festival, colonial officers had opined that “such scenes are despised by the Malays, they [would] not join in the […] orgies of Mohorum [sic]” (Vaughan 1858, 139). While it is suggested that these were the views of the Malays, they were likely to have been coloured by those of the Hadrami Arabs.7 The hiring of Indian infantry from the southern coast of India was already a practice amongst the Acehnese Sultans in the eighteenth century (Forrest 1792), and the Muharram procession was already a regular celebration in Aceh. Given Aceh’s close connection to Penang, even if the Penang Muharram was principally brought in by the Madras or Bengal native infantry from Bencoolen, the fact that values and stories connected to the Muharram festivity were already historically rooted in the Malay world meant that it would not have taken the Malay community very long to have found a place within the celebrations (Daneshgar et al. 2015). In 1864, the Muharram celebrations in Singapore were carried out with the usual carnivalesque fanfare. Describing it as a festivity observed by the “lower classes”, the newspapers noted with a tone of matter-of-fact resignation that the annual frenzied proceedings, replete with “the din of tom-tom”, was likely to test the patience of “the more quietly disposed portion of the [colonial] community” (Straits Times, 18 June 1864, 1).

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Across the colonies, the carnivalesque festivity often took the form of a procession. In the Straits Settlements, these processions were known as tabut (Daneshgar et al. 2015),8 with celebrants organised into competing groups that attempted to outdo each other in the building of temporary tower effigies that represented the mobile graves of Hussein and Hassan, principal martyrs of prophetic descent, around which the Ashura commemorative ritual revolved. On this particular year, 1864, the Muharram celebrations ended in social unrest, giving the British cause to strike out by issuing a ban against the celebrations.9 Newspaper reportage, which is the main historical source for this incident, naturally offered an unsympathetic account of what ensued.10 An alternative narrative to the 1864 incident was recently discovered in a formerly misattributed syair, a popular form of Malay metrical poem that was widely used for storytelling in the nineteenth century (Byl et al. 2017, 391–420).11 Little is known about Ali, the author of the syair, who simply professed himself to be a fakir, or “holy man”, from Bengkulu who worked as an assistant to a Sheikh Muhammad, who was of Bengali descent. Ali also noted that in composing the syair, he received help from a religious scholar, Muhammad Hassan. In Ali’s description of the Muharram festivity, competing teams in the procession were organised into battalions. The atmosphere acquired a martial tone in Ali’s theatrical account. One team fancied themselves as the protagonists of the then widely popular folktale Indra Bangsawan. The second team divided themselves into three boats and moved to the beat of the drum and the melody of the violin. Interestingly, each boat comprised members from different parts of the Malay world. The first boat was from Penang and we learn that the leader, who was also the team’s violin player, was of Burmese origin. The second boat was composed of South Asians, “shining black like starling birds”, while the third boat carried a crew from Bengkulu. In another team, we learn that a court singer sang to the accompaniment of a bamboo flute, while a team member from Siam played the violin. The leader was observed to be of mixed descent and as having directed a group of dancers to switch from singing in Malay to Bengali (Byl et al. 2017, 424–425). In an account of the procession in another surviving Malay syair, the cacophony is described as resulting from celebrants coming from such diverse backgrounds, “Angkat tabut malam sa-puloh/serunai gendang bunyi rioh/bulan terang api di-suloh/keling china tempoh-menempoh” (Wynne 1941, 226). The four-line verse written in the syair form translates as “Lift up the tabut on the night of the tenth/with flutes and drum-

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beats in festive cheer/lit by the moonlight and orbs of flame-torches/ Indians and Chinese all joined in the scuffle” (my translation). Written presumably by a Malay or Jawi Peranakan observer, the verse encapsulates key qualities of a tabut procession. Though originating in India and a cultural practice that was prevalent in British colonial port cities around the world, the Muharram procession has thus far been occluded from most present-day accounts of Malaya’s colonial history. The religious procession was said to have been unintentionally introduced to the Straits Settlements of Penang, Singapore and Malacca (now Melaka) by a number of overlapping agents, including Indian convicts who had been forcibly resettled to the then newly established penal colonies of Penang and Singapore in the Malay Peninsula, the native infantry of Madras and Bengal who were part of the military units established to protect the trade interests of the East India Company and an indentured labouring class known as the “coolies”, who emerged as new colonial subjects shaped by a new labour discourse and practice of perpetuating menial-­ labour exploitation following the abolishment of slavery. By emphasising not only the religious festivity’s foreignness, as mentioned earlier, but also by questioning its authenticity through new religious interpretative frames, and finally by condemning the festival’s criminal associations with secret societies, colonial administrators had over the course of the nineteenth century sharpened their racial discourse and the practice of social segmentation and stratification through a system of divide and rule (Musa 2003). These discursive parameters of cultural and racial identity continue to dominate our understanding of cultural heritage today. Yet, any close reading of nineteenth-century Muharram festivities and that of the minstrel song and dance performance known as the Boria that emerged from this festival would immediately produce a number of contradictions. This points to the severe limitations of colonial and later ethno-nationalistic discourse in the reorganisation of what we understand to be identity. To understand the limitations, the subsequent section deals with the story of origin that has given the Boria a historical destiny. While accounts of Boria’s history first emerged in 1897,12 a number of subsequent accounts have by and large expanded our knowledge of Boria in the twentieth century or offered new moral frameworks in order to critique the art form’s cultural purchase (Haughton 1897; Wilkinson 1908; Hamilton 1920; Muhammad Yusof 1922a, b; Ryans 1962; Shepard 1965).

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But it wasn’t until 1983 that a new historiographical attempt was initiated to safeguard its future. On this occasion, a Boria seminar was organised by Penang state cultural agencies at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. A close study of the historiography of Boria in relation to its heritage discourse remains unexplored. By analysing how accounts of the past and future of Boria are driven by historicism, the ideological dimensions of progress that underpin Boria’s teleology are foregrounded here. At the same time, recognising the slippages at play in these histories as texts, I also point to other potential readings that emerge from these historical accounts to demonstrate the limits of heritage as a discourse. Drawing on the insights gleaned from an analysis of the historiography of Boria through the 1983 Seminar, namely on the issue of margin/centre and the political will from the margins, I suggest that Boria could be understood not just as a political burlesque but as a form of burlesque rooted in a concept found in Malay ritual theatre called “main” that, in another context, the anthropologist James Scott has identified as “weapons of the weak” (Scott 1985).

Boria-Futurism Speaking at the Penang Boria Festival Convention in 1976, Ungku Aziz, the University of Malaya’s then Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Economics, laid down Boria’s future as “a people’s culture returning to the people”.13 Here, he outlined a new ethos for the Boria of the current age, which he termed “BORIA 70”. This new ethos was to be guided by four broad concerns: (1) the principle demonstrates the origin and the origin shapes the principle; (2) the state of society should inform cultural practice while preventing extreme forms of deviation; (3) technology should be subservient to cultural values even as cultural activities should aspire to accommodate suitable technological innovations; (4) being dynamic is better than being static—being on the move is better than being stationary (Ungku Aziz 1976, 3). Some context might shed light on Ungku Aziz’s plea for an updated Boria. The most immediate concern was to opine against the transmediation of Boria onto the television screen, with a segment in Radio Television Malaysia’s (RTM) Dendang Rakyat programme, which began in 1973 and was dedicated to showcasing Boria. While the performances were well received and sparked a new interest in Boria amongst the public, Ungku Aziz felt that the screen and the stage imposed creative limitations on Boria’s choreography and music.14

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Relying on the guidelines of the National Cultural Policy of 1971, Ungku Aziz felt that Boria needed to be liberated from a creeping formalism. He called for innovations like the inclusion of gymnasts, stilt walkers and unicycle riders alongside silat performances. He suggested that the dance moves could also be a lot more imaginative and that rumba, joget, Indian and Chinese dances could be explored. Mime play was suggested as an alternative to the comedy sketches (Ungku Aziz 1976, 6–7). For Ungku Aziz, Boria’s adaptability to the situation of a particular age was a testament to its viability. Indeed, it was its flexibility that gave the art form its soul, he opined. Yet, underpinning his call for a renewal in Boria was a sightline trained towards the other side of the world. Ungku Aziz not only traced Boria’s genealogy to a Shi’ite commemorative ritual but also comparatively to the carnivals of Europe and the West Indies and to New Orlean’s Mardi Gras. These were taken up as examples of a form of street spectacle that could help fulfil the goals of the National Cultural Policy by serving as a model for the realisation of a dynamic national culture that had Islamic values at its core. In reality, as much as the Dendang Rakyat TV programme sparked a new interest in the Boria throughout its ten-year run from 1973 to 1983, not all proponents of Boria were possessed of a similar historical consciousness. Over the next decade, a new history writing project gradually emerged. It began the following year, in 1974, with a Boria seminar convened over two days at Batu Uban, Penang. Three papers prospecting Boria in relation to its past, its present and its future were discussed on this occasion.15 These tentative ventures prepared the ground for a much more comprehensive study undertaken by Rahmah Bujang at the University of Hull from 1974 to 1977.16 In writing her doctoral thesis on “The Boria: A Study of a Malay Theatre in its Socio-Cultural Context”,17 Rahmah became the second Malaysian to have completed a PhD on an art and cultural historical topic.18 Recognising the growing cultural capital of Boria, state funding was poured into organising a course on Boria performance in 1978. In the following year, course participants were galvanised to establish an umbrella association for Boria in Penang.19 By 1983, with a leadership change in the organisation, the Boria Association also took on the responsibility to organise the Penang Boria Competition for Pesta Pulau Pinang.20 By laying out the series of events beginning from the 1970s leading up to the 1983 Boria seminar, which I will return to shortly, I want to suggest that as Boria gained new popularity through television broadcasts, it also

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gained new national audiences curious about what to make of this “Malay” art form. Televising the Boria set into motion a renewed interest in attempts to define the art form. Following from innovations that the TV format introduced to this art form and alongside the plea by Ungku Aziz to liberate Boria by returning it to the people were a range of activities that expressed a different future for the Boria. The cumulative efforts of offering courses, organising seminars, undertaking historical research and establishing an association brought coherence and standardisation to the art form, on the one hand, but also intensified the discrepancies about what constituted innovation and what might be asli or authentic. Seen in this light, the 1983 Boria seminar was more than an academic conference; it was also an attempt to address the social, political and moral implications of culture. Four papers were presented on this occasion. Rahmah Bujang opened the presentations with an overview of the foreign origins of Boria and its eventual localisation, appraising its value as a literary platform as well as its versatility. Implicit in her paper was the reinforcement of the acculturation logic in Malay identitarian discourse known as “masuk Melayu” (or “Malayisation)”. What the term implies is the potential of Malay culture to be versatile and open to the new challenges of each period. This framework also provided clarity to the paper by Abdullah Darus on “The history and development of Boria across the ages”. Here, he divided the Boria into six periods, dating its emergence to the early twentieth century despite common knowledge that the term “Boria”, as used to describe a roving minstrel band, had been in circulation since the last decade of the nineteenth century. The first period (1910s–1930s) corresponded with British colonial Malaya; the second period (1940s) covered the years  when Malaya was under Japanese Occupation (1941–1945); the third period (1940s–1950s) was during the Federation of Malaya and marked the return of Malaya to British colonial rule; the fourth period (1957–1960s) was named Boria Merdeka, framed by Malaya’s independence from British rule; the fifth period (1970s) was described as a period of “progress and nation-­ building”; and, finally, the sixth period (1980s) was noted as the contemporary period (Kertas Panduan Seminar Boria 1983) Recognising Boria as an unfinished project, Abdullah Darus concluded by offering a structural chart describing the need for a regulating body on culture and its function to uplift Boria as an art form alongside other suggestions about a system for state-funded competitions and plans to offer

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courses on Boria to public school students (Kertas Panduan Seminar Boria 1983, 52). In offering a periodisation of Boria that closely mirrored a nationalist historical trajectory, Boria became a metonymy for Malay cultural identity. Darus’s periodisation of Boria differs from Mervyn L.  Wynne’s 1941 police account Triad and Tabut, which located Boria’s emergence at around the 1870s–1890s.21 As the chief of the Straits Settlement’s Special Branch, Wynne’s role in overseeing intelligence gathering allowed him to harness state machinery and resources to produce a comprehensive report on clandestine activities recognised as being  politically subversive in the eyes of the British Empire. The consolidation of this information into report meant that Triad and Tabut became a foundational document for writing Boria history when it was made accessible to the public in 1957, especially since many of the cited documents had been lost to the war. Darus’s account could therefore be seen in a way to be an updated version that also covered Boria’s subsequent development after World War II. Wynne’s and Darus’s accounts were highly polemical in differing ways. While both recognised the significance of the 1867 Penang riots as instrumental in transforming the Muharram procession into the Boria, the crucial disagreement was on what this transformation entailed. With the curtailing of access to the use of public space for religious processions on the grounds that these forms of public assembly were prone to be disruptive of peace in a colonial port city, Muharram festival minstrel troupes who were persecuted for being a front for secret society activities went into hiding in obscure villages at the edges of the towns. For Wynne, the gradual development of Boria reflected the Jawi Peranakan community’s gradual assimilation into Malay society in the late nineteenth century. However, in shifting the beginnings of Boria to the early twentieth century, Darus aligns it much closer to the Islamic reformist movement and Malay nationalism that would strongly shape subsequent definitions of Malay identity. The next paper affirms the teleological narrative above with literati Azizi Hj Abdullah addressing the moral dimensions of Boria in his paper “Boria dari Kacamata Seorang Karyawan [Boria from the lens of a Literati]” (Kertas Panduan Seminar Boria 1983). Inveighing against the flippancy of Boria, Azizi asked if this was something that the Malay community could be proud of.22 It was a statement that had an uncanny historical precedent in Muhammad Yusof bin Sultan Mydin’s 1922 anti-Boria syair and tract (Muhammad Yusof 1922b, 22–23). To affirm the dignity of a

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racial identity, in the then emerging discourse of Malay nationalism, both found the need to point to the element of deviation to accentuate a norm that was newly being formulated. Cross-dressers became an easy target. This attitude to strict gender differentiation was more closely aligned to Victorian puritanical values than Malay customary mores. A wave of puritanism threatened those who found refuge in the Boria precisely because they were already marginalised by society. In a way, Boria’s futurism in the 1980s was not dissimilar to the impact on it of the Islamic reform movement in the 1920s.23 A key text then was Muhammad Yusof’s criticism of Boria in 1922, in which he noted “When they cross-dress and dance like a woman in front of the courtyard of those who belong to other races who watch along together with their wife and kids, how terribly undignified and shameful!” (Muhammad Yusof 1922b, 15). Compare this to Azizi’s 1983 call for the purification and refinement of Boria, which was predicated on a similar witchhunt: “Which represents the human amongst these characters?… [In the Boria] we see a Haji or a religious person dance along a drug addict, together with a cross-dresser or with a vagrant” (Kertas Panduan Seminar Boria 1983, 6). But this was not the only future offered on the table. A different potential could be found in the last paper presented by Mohd Anis Md. Nor. On first impression, the paper is a technical study of the role played by dance in the development of Boria. It constructs innovations in Boria as sustained by a playful shift between “overture” and “cadence”. “Overture” here suggests an established rhythmic repertory of “movement-phrase”, while “cadence” signals the improvised build up towards a display of extravagance aimed at visual impact. In offering a formalist reading of the Boria as structured by a series of movements, Anis suggests that there is a different ground on which one is able to take control of the narrative and on which Boria’s cultural polemics can be discussed. But recognising this avenue requires us to suspend our commonplace understanding of formalism as an engagement with art that is principally concerned with aesthetic form rather than with content that is political. When discussed as a “political” art form, a conventional reading would locate Boria’s political nature in its content. For example, ­contents of sketches and songs of the Boria were often described as satirical and mocking (Tan 2019). Such a binary is unhelpful and unproductive. Rather, I argue that a close study of Boria’s form does the opposite by reaffirming the political

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stakes involved. Thus, rather than reinforce the ideologies that framed Boria’s historical destiny, I suggest that it is from this other vantage point that we should pay closer attention to Boria’s very form—as an auditory, visual and performative medium—to better understand Boria’s political aesthetics.

Minstrel Country: Another Historical Method … the Malay youths black-faced themselves as Africans and the Africans red-­ faced themselves. —Jawi Peranakan, 17 August 1891.24

In reviewing the telos of Boria found in two different accounts, the preceding sections demonstrate that historicism as a model (whether colonial or its derivative discourse, postcolonial) infused a value system to what we understand as legacy. The value system provides the scaffolding on which a heritage discourse can be built. Therefore, it is commonly assumed that heritage is a consensual fiction about inheritance. Such a view of heritage, as a collectively agreed upon set of expressed values, is being increasingly challenged of late. Proponents of a new direction, rallying under the banner of critical heritage studies, argue that we might instead want to think of heritage as constructed out of “narratives of conflict” (Daly and Chan 2015, 429) and as “produced through sociopolitical processes reflecting society’s power structures” (Logan and Wijesuriya 2015, 569). Over the past ten years, critical heritage studies has gained increasing traction for challenging the industry-centred language (tourism, management, national treasures, conservation, public-private partnership, audience, foot-traffic, heritage list, creative economy) of heritage. By unpacking contemporary heritage discourse’s “epistemological bias towards scientific materialism” (Winter 2013), recent scholarship has also indicated how such a bias facilitated a popular policy discourse on heritage value primarily in economic terms. In response, critical heritage studies saw the intellectual activity of critiquing as offering “both provocation and engagement with professional practice” (Witcomb and Buckley 2012, 574) as well as a space that could prospect “alternative ways of ‘doing’ heritage” (Emerick 2014, 5). Methodologically, critical heritage studies invites us to explore other forms of narrating history. To replace the prevailing tendency to regard historical change as a series of eventful social and cultural processes that

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can be divided into specific time periods or that can be sharply delineated, as was evident in the periodisations of Boria discussed earlier, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz offers a complementary method to one’s historical inquiry in situations where textual records are not always complete or precise. Instead of having periodisation drive historical consciousness, the second method proposed by Geertz (1980, 5) treats historical change as a process of “slow and patterned alteration” in order to recognise “the formal, or structural, patterns of cumulative activity”. This method relies on a comparative approach across geographical contexts (missing details can be speculated through a comparison with other more complete sources elsewhere) and time (through an analysis of a more recent system that retains the logic of a past system that one wishes to reconstruct). The challenge is not only to gain interpretive confidence but also nuance. Geertz (1980, 8–9) further concludes that only by cultivating ethnographic sensitivity are we able to comprehend changes that are endogenous. Geertz’s historical method is useful for the study of Boria, not least because this allowed him to formulate his thesis on the “negara” as a theatre state, where “the life of the [Balinese] court generally, is thus paradigmatic, not merely reflective, of social order”. By privileging the ceremonial spectacle as an end and not just a means, Geertz argues that aspects of politics—exemplary centre, expressive competition, dispersive authority and confederate rule—configure the reality where “power served pomp, not pomp power” (Geertz 1980, 13 and 136). In this way, the theatre state distinguishes between political theatre and theatrical politics. The former—political theatre—is what I suggest Boria encapsulates in its redistribution of power across the most economically disadvantaged and socially marginalised communities in the Straits Settlement of Penang. In the growing field of “heritage from below”,25 we are required to confront the limitations of communal identity as a category of cultural ownership. In this sense, attempts to frame the Boria as belonging to either the Chulias or Malay-Jawi Peranakan in the two recent studies by Khoo Salma (2014) and Wazir Karim (2018), respectively, ultimately reinforce cultural patronage as the purchase of community elites. Notwithstanding their rich archival research, the conclusions by Khoo and Wazir remain problematic on the account that they merely reinforce the prevailing, but increasingly criticised, political arrangement of consociationalism in Malaysia (Jarrett 2016; Mauzy 1983). Power-sharing under this political model was distributed amongst the elites of major social

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groups divided along racial lines (Mohammad Agus Yusoff 1992). One crucial assumption made is that art and creative expression is taken as a stand-in or as reflective of a larger social reality. Boria for them functions primarily as a cultural component within a larger narrative centred on the achievements of a racial community. Given the growing critique of state-­ centred and consociationalist politics (Ooi 2018a, b), might a close reading of Boria’s form and structure offer a different view of the dynamics of power relationships? Seeing art as simply a mirror of social conditions limits our appreciation of the historically complex negotiations that community elites of the main racial groups had to perform to maintain their position as a go-between comprador class. This was a role that had demanded them to act as exemplary centres for the ideals of Empire, while also subscribing to multiple allegiances, as subjects of other Empires or causes. In a way, compradors, who were “civilised” through capital accumulation and cultural patronage, shared greater social aspiration and class affinity with each other across the ethnic divide. However, as intermediaries, their ambivalent role was a conduit through which power that came from burlesquing was distributed far more widely to the margins of a colonial townscape. The argument that follows is built on the foundations of the different historical method discussed above. It offers an interpretive frame with an alternative conclusion, which differs from Jan van der Putten’s reading that Boria’s burlesquing power was ultimately diminished when it was viewed as politically divisive by a new generation of Islamic reformists. At the same time, van der Putten (2015) suggests that while new religious sentiments could not entirely eliminate Boria, the moral pressure resulted in Boria being taken off the streets and contained along with other performing art forms in the safe confines of amusements parks, a new cultural space that would be the principal hub for urban entertainment and leisure across Malaya from the 1930s to the 1960s. As suggested in the section on Boria’s Futurism, one should not so readily dismiss Boria’s complicated post-war entanglements by linking it to the history of the United Malays’ National Organisation (UMNO). In 1946, the returning British colonial administration attempted to ­consolidate its rule through the establishment of a Malayan Union. On this occasion, the move was met with strong resistance from the Malays. Britain no longer possessed the image of imperial unassailability it formerly enjoyed.26 In Penang, protests against the Malayan Union were registered in the refusal to perform Boria.

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By then, Boria had not only gained cultural purchase but was also seen to have political purchase as a vehicle to reach out to the grassroots. The Union lasted for less than two years before popular pressure compelled the British to revert to a Federation model.27 In 1948, the Boria was revived on a spectacular scale. Shortened to and now known as the “Ria” festival, its post-war incarnation was rebranded as a kind of ethno-nationalist “gaiety” parade. Boria acquired new political purchase as a postcolonial folk form under the patronage of the United Malays’ National Organisation (UMNO). In the nation-building climate of the 1970s, Boria helped to communicate the federal government’s developmentalist ethos to a largely disenfranchised urban Malay youth population. The complex and divergent afterlives of the Boria following from the religious clampdown it had to endure in the 1920s suggest that moments of crisis could also compel an art form to renew itself. Van der Putten offers Joseph Roach’s study of cross-Atlantic performance culture as a useful lens to explicate this phenomenon. The cross-cultural comparison is no longer strange, for we have already discussed two precedents for this in Wynne’s police report and Ungku Aziz’s 1976 futurist manifesto. Roach (1996) suggests that cultural renewal entails a “complicity of memory and forgetting” in a process that he calls “surrogation”. The concept was expanded upon in a related case study by Frank Korom, who demonstrated that the new drumming rhythm that emerged in the Muharram “Hosay” celebrations of Trinidad and Tobago could be thought of as a “song surrogate” (Korom 1994, 68–85) that translated the mournful narratives of sung or chanted communication into drum melodies to overcome language barriers. In this sense, Boria could be thought of as the “surrogate” of the Muharram procession. The Penang riots of 1867 paralysed not only the social and economic life of the colonial port city; the political alliances amongst opposing camps of secret societies also demonstrated the idiosyncratic effects that colonial urban planning and knowledge systems had on its political subjects.28 On the one hand, political organisation grew out of the colonial urban planning that divided the port city into a patchwork of communal enclaves principally along the lines of ethnicities/nationalities. Kongsi/triads comprising Chinese majority members and the Red Flag/White Flag Societies made up primarily of Malay-Jawi Peranakan members suggest that these enclaves made space for the gradual political expression of a population who shared a common language and social practice.29 On the other hand, the cross-ethnic alliance-making configuration that pitted the Tua Pek

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Kong Society and the Red Flag with the Ghee Hin and the White Flag also hinted at other forms of political agency that disrupted the colonial science of population control through divide and rule. Fearing a reprisal, the settlement’s elites successfully pushed for the passing of new legislative bills to regulate processions and to prevent unexpected forms of public assembly. At the same time, the spectre of the 1857 Indian mutiny, which occurred ten years earlier, would be reanimated in the reckoning of the Penang riots. Colonial authorities realised that their earlier mistrust of the Indian convict and infantry population was now to be extended to the Chinese population. The gradual tightening of the law was a public strategy, but its slow and haphazard implementation suggests that implementation was not always easy. 1867 was also the year that the Straits Settlement of Penang achieved a measure of autonomy. No longer administered through the British Raj, the Settlement established its own legislative assembly and was able to chart its own future. As the Muharram celebrations declined in scale due to a gradual increase in stricter legislations that would regulate public assembly, the once-spectacular ensemble hived off into smaller units that sought cover in the fringe urban villages that surrounded George Town. It was in the fringes of these urban villages that Boria emerged as a front for secret society membership, which is not exclusive to it also serving as a local community for disenfranchised Malay youths whose cosmopolitan exposure to the world outside, as we shall examine closely, can be glimpsed through the Boria.

“Main”: Playing Artful Politics The term “main” often translates as “play” in the English language. But it also expresses a type of power that shape-shifts or that can transform itself through mimicry and by assuming the form of another. In this section, I will focus on the use in Boria of moving bodies as a burlesque of the power of the colonial state as well as of its epistemic ordering of social life and relations. A combination of comedy sketch, song and dance, the humour and exaggerated actions in Boria mime the collision of migrant bodies at play in a modern colonial port city. These collisions are never fully demarcated on the colonial faultlines of racial and religious identities. In turn, even as members of a Boria troupe are recruited from a village, thereby displaying strong local ties and factional identities, the Boria chal-

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lenges our common definition of what constitutes a village. Here, the village is seen less as the end of the world but as a crossroad where a new idea of the world and one’s relation to it as a modern subject can be called into being. Let us consider the choruses of various Boria troupes from the 1919 season as recorded by police officer and amateur scholar on Malay language and folklore, Arthur Wedderburn Hamilton. This can be compared to photographs taken around the early twentieth century, showcasing specific Boria troupes in formation. The photographs confirm Hamilton’s description of the size of a troupe, which ranges between twenty and forty youths who often belong to the same neighbourhood. The boys would seek out a composer, or the tukang karang, who was engaged to lead the troupe in chorus and performance. Troupes were made up of musicians and players. The latter further subdivides into star turns and the chorus. Depending on the chosen theme for the particular year, musical instruments and costumes were modified and players were also outfitted with suitable props (Hamilton 1920, 139). Beginning from the fifth to the tenth day of Muharram, troupes would move from house to house in search of homes that would receive them. Houses belonging to well-to-do Malay and Chinese patrons, as well as clubs, were lit up to signal an invitation and draw in the Boria troupes. The tukang karang’s role was first to announce their collective presence in a chorus; the troupe would then repeat the refrain. This established a pattern in which several verses were sung to compliment notables present in the hope of extracting some financial remuneration. Diversions in the form of “mirthful tales”, both scandalously topical and morally instructive, were occasionally dispensed halfway through the show. Each performance lasted for about half an hour before an impatient queue would form as other Boria troupes waited in line, compelling the troupe to move on in search of their next patron (Hamilton 1920, 140). Moreover, what is fascinating about this set of photographs by Hamilton is that it gives lively visual confirmation to the chorus that would be repeated over and over again throughout the season as an article of faith about one’s identity. Take the following chorus, sung by the Padang Garam Boria Party on Kimberley Street, as an example:                

Soldiers from Yunan and Kuantong are not so different They have “resigned” from China, Out and about in search of riches (turmeric) The children of Padang (Garam) are safe and sound.30

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The four-line chorus is representative of the musical form. Typically, the first line announces the chosen theme. In this case, a “Chinese theme” was selected, and when outfitted, it would have resembled the troupe photograph that included a lion dance corresponding to the theme. The second line would elaborate the community event that is being mimed. In the third and fourth lines, there is both a continuation and a shift in tone. The shift is obvious because the final line concludes with an aspirational note as well as a declaration of allegiance, normally to the village or the locality that the Boria party came from. In discussing the third line, an interesting moment occurs in the chorus. Often, it describes the condition which compels the declaration of aspiration and allegiance to place. In its poetic form, the Boria takes after the “syair”. The syair is a four-­ lined metrical poem (quatrain) developed around the eighteenth century by Sufi mystic Hamzah Fansuri but that became wildly popular in the nineteenth century as a vehicle to convey all kinds of stories, from myth to morality tales to event/travel reportage to contemporary fables to comedies of manners (Al-Attas 1968; Braginsky 1991; Mulaika Hijjas 2011). Because syair composition requires the poet to conclude each line in a four-line verse with the same number of syllables, the rhyming structure also creates a link, carrying the discrete image formed in one sentence to the next. Unlike the ABAB rhyming scheme of the pantun that produces a two-part structure, with the first two lines serving as a “pembayang” (a shadowy allusion) and the latter lines revealing the maksud (meaning or intention), the syair’s AAAA scheme threads one image to an action to a condition to a place. In this sense, the seemingly unconnected lives of deserting Chinese soldiers and a Malay community living in a fringe settlement of Padang Garam on Kimberly Street are intertwined in the syair’s representation of life. Moreover, in an imaginative repurposing of the emerging field of anthropological knowledge, the “soldiers from Yunan” invoked in the chorus could well be a claim to lineage made by “the children’ of Padang Garam”. Anthropological knowledge had begun to circulate a new consciousness of origins and of the migrations of stock ethnolinguistic groups of people. The idea of Malays or Austronesians originating from Yunan would have taken hold in the popular imagination.31 Instead of simply accepting the imperial categorisation of the world according to types, we see this knowledge being playfully crafted onto a poem about alliance-making—an escape not only from the confines imposed by  British imperium, but also that by the Chinese. In making

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their way out in the world in search of riches, what they hope to find is symbolised by the turmeric (“komkoma”)—an allusion to not only material wealth, since its yellow colour correlates with gold, but also physical and spiritual fulfilment, since the turmeric is used in folk medicine and ritual ceremonies, including as a protective or medicinal balm smeared on Boria performers during the performing season. The chorus’s theme of shared destiny could also readily serve as a form of effusive praising, since many of Boria’s wealthy patrons were well-to-do Chinese. The inclusion of a Chinese lion dance would have added to the popularity of the repertoire. Yet, it was precisely this form of deference that led Muhammad Yusof (1922b), emboldened by ethno-nationalism, to describe such praises as tantamount to a loss of dignity for the “Malay” race. The anthropologist James Scott offers a much more nuanced way of thinking about public performances of power. Scott suggests that as rehearsed as an act of public praising might be, there is a hidden transcript “beneath the placid surface that the public accommodation to the existing distribution of power, wealth and status often presents”.32 Besides Boria’s poetics that can be located in the literary form of the syair, there exists a whole ecology of practices that guides, drives and motivates a public action. In failing to capture the moment of cross-ethnic identification, Muhammad Yusof’s sense of what is “us” and what is the “other” conforms unimaginatively to the schemes of imperial classification. But “Padang Garam” also suggests that the power to negotiate is a complex set of dynamics. Scott argues that the “frontier between the public and the hidden transcripts is a zone of constant struggle between dominant and subordinate—not a solid wall”.33 Adding to this, one could say that because the zone between public and hidden transcripts is not a solid wall, the world that gave rise to the Boria is one where overhearing occurs. It is from the proximity of living beside one another, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, that new ways of responding to each other are to be devised and ritualised. There might be a lesson to be gained from paying close attention to the kinds of playful responses offered in Boria’s subtle art of effusive praising. Boria Everywhere in the World Boria the best of its kind; Boria everywhere in the world; Boria the beautiful (was) seen; Pristine and pure Boria.

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In the country of Madras; The Boria is made of grass; Fences are made from bamboo; Boria is green in colour, etc. etc.    - Boriah.34

What does one do with the cards one has been dealt with? In today’s race for heritage listing and the measure of the social, political and economic prestige it might bring to the country, we often forget there was a time when heritage work was civil society work. In a sense, it still is. In his 1941 police report Triad and Tabut, head of the Straits Settlement special branch Mervyn L. Wynne quoted a 1926 study of secret societies in Annam by Georges Coulet to describe what he found to be most troubling about secret societies and their organising units such as the Boria troupe. Coulet’s passage reads, “En effet, la société secrète ne se cache pas sous les formes d’une société civile quelconque. Bien au contraire, elle est et veut être exactement cette société civile [Indeed, a secret society does not hide behind the form of a civil society. On the contrary, it is and wants to be exactly this civil society]” (Coulet 1926). The quote is revealing for encapsulating the imperial anxiety of the day—of what the colonisers recognised very early on as the true nature of secret societies. Secret societies were civil society par excellence. The paradox then attends to the history of heritage work in Penang as an equally riveting story that revealed an often prickly relationship between civil/ secret society and the multiple agencies that make up the phantasmic Leviathan that is the state. Anthropologists such as Laura Ann Stoler (2016) have argued that many of our modes of thinking about the self and our relationship to one another, whether colonial or postcolonial, are still conditioned by what she terms as “imperial durabilities”. Concepts such as civilisation, race identity, consociationalism and cultural glory continue to serve as defining terms about how we understand the self, identify a community and recognise the other. The anxious quest to assert an affirmative jati diri (identity) belies other modes of conducting oneself playfully along the cracks of the identity fortress. Boria suggests other possibilities for conducting oneself with others by playing with the cards one has been dealt. When the Penang Heritage Trust (PHT) initiated the movement for Penang to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998, it did so

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strategically, and perhaps naively, thinking that this might afford some measure of protection to the historic city centre in response to the passing of the Rent Control (Repeal) Act 1997, which had a 28-month transition period to come into effect.35 The feared implications were the mass eviction of low-income tenants caused by overnight rental hikes. The repercussions of such an exodus would also contribute to massive changes in the urban environment and its cultural ecology (Mohammad Abdul Moit and Mohd Bashir Sulaiman 2006, 107–121), including the shortage of affordable housing (Atsumi 2003, 34–35). At that stage, UNESCO was very much a deferred dream. But learning to write and speak in an increasingly global vocabulary of heritage gained some ground for the PHT. In the meantime, the PHT and the Consumers Association of Penang set up a property watch to monitor the prices and rents of decontrolled premises. The work paid off. In 1999, the George Town Historic Enclave was listed as Site No. 50  in World Monuments Watch’s One Hundred Most Endangered Sites 2000 (1999, 35).36 The listing helped to crystallise public concerns for the decay of the inner city that had now expanded to include concerns for the survival of small business and culture in Penang. Mobilising and leading public discussion this way resulted in the postponement of the full repeal to 2003. Over a two-year period, the campaign in response to the crisis had also won over the Penang State government. State endorsement was required for the nomination of a site to the World Heritage tentative list. However, the working committee soon realised that federal government backing was also needed to secure the process. Since the latter had earlier initiated a similar move for Melaka, the outcome was that Penang and Melaka were to be jointly nominated. In 2008, Melaka and George Town were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. As a joint listing, Melaka and George Town brought into awareness the growing number of transboundary listings across all UNESCO heritage listings in the past ten years. What the joint listing suggests is that the two sites constituted a cultural zone rather than discrete unconnected sites.37 Yet, if we were to follow through the conclusion of what was valued here, we know that the Straits of Malacca did not connect just the Straits Settlements. Penang and Melaka’s history connects to Aceh, to Junk Ceylon (Phuket today), to Johore-Riau and most importantly, across the Bay of Bengal, to South Asia. Their transboundary history and geography makes new demands on how and what we consider to be history and heritage. Of concern and interest here is a clause in the Operational Guidelines that stipulates that

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sites are extendable and that “extensions to an existing World Heritage property located in one State Party may be proposed to become transboundary properties”.38 Joint nominations have become increasingly common over the past ten years. A recent example is that evinced in  the Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement that encompasses seventeen buildings across three continents involving the coordination of seven countries. In the area of intangible heritage, the Nowruz spring celebration, also known as the Persian New Year, was successfully listed in 2016 under a joint nomination by no less than twelve countries. The growing number of listed joint nominations since 2010— one being the inscription of “falconry” as living heritage by eighteen nations across East and Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe—suggests a shift in discourse and a willingness to challenge the previously nation-centred framework of the UNESCO listings. While the nominator recognised by UNESCO is still the “State Party”, joint nominations are not always simply a rosy vision about shared heritage. Sometimes, such as in the bizarre nomination from Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam and South Korea for “tugging rituals and games”, a joint listing can also be a commitment towards a common future. Tugging rituals and games are widespread enough across the world and so the application sticks out for its arbitrariness. At the same time, that such  countries with distinct cultural roots (Khmer, Austronesian and Sinic) are attempting to imagine a shared heritage does demonstrate great creativity and a generosity of spirit, even if these are probably undergirded by shared economic interests. What these examples offer is a refreshing solution to the senseless competition over heritage patrimony fuelling cultural wars between Malaysia and Indonesia, or between Malaysia and Singapore over food, craft traditions and music, as elaborated in the Introduction to this volume. In this sense, World Heritage extensions offer hosts the possibility to demonstrate agglutinative generosity. It is both an invitation to take stock of this imagined past together, and through this process discover new values about the sites, practices and knowledges that might help redefine what we understand to be cultural heritage. The listing of Melaka and Penang as “historic cities of the Straits of Malacca”39 did not mark an end to a journey. Instead, the listing instantiated a new set of challenges, when the floodgates of capitalism in the form of tourism required a new language to account for what is recognised to be of value.

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There are lessons that we can learn about heritage from the Boria. I have in the course of the chapter provided an overview of Boria as a musical and performing culture that emerged sometime in the late nineteenth, or early twentieth, century from the Muharram procession. I have considered how the art form’s history has been consolidated over time and how this provides the scaffolding to frame the Boria as an intangible cultural heritage. I also pointed to the limitations of heritage discourse today in what it does to our historical imagination and the role that UNESCO plays in affirming the legitimacy of the nation-state and indirectly its existing power-structure and discrimination model. Instead of abandoning UNESCO altogether, heritage activists have offered us a third way—Khoo Salma’s reflection on what compels her to focus on early twentieth-century social housing is one example (Clarke et al. 2018, 256–271). In this way, heritage activists and cultural workers are demonstrating cultural leadership in constituting heritage work as a conversation with impersonal and overbearing institutional agencies like UNESCO, reframing the relationship premised on imposition to an ecology of practice that is open to change. If Boria is to secure a nomination and subsequent listing, then it must offer us another history of the world, unique for its own method of reckoning with the challenges posed by identity politics today. Wresting the power of racial stereotyping that was often played out in oriental costume parties held in the private drawing rooms of colonial officials, and later on for the comprador elites of a colonial port city, Boria troupes mastered and deployed high camp to expose the very artifice of all actions and identities in a public setting. In doing so, the performances recognised the complex urban cultural web that could be  conjured through acts of imagination that brought worlds into collision. Here, the Malay word “main” is important, less as role-pretending than as a role-assuming embodiment through which one transforms one’s subjectivity and assumes the actions and behaviours of the other. Consisting of a sketch as well as a song and dance, what the Boria “plays” with is the power to resist assigned identities and the self’s ability to slip into other modes of conduct. In doing so, it claims the power of self-reinvention, central to any self-professed modern subject and a migrant public brought into contact with each other by global colonial capitalism’s reconfiguration of social and economic life. Underlining this form of playfulness is what philosopher of science Isabel Stengers calls “cosmopolitics”. “Main” offers a playful “mode in

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which the problematic co-presence of practices may be actualised: the experience, always in the present, of one into whom the other’s dreams, doubts, hopes, and fears pass” (Stengers 2010, 371–372). Viewed in this light, the cosmopolitics of “playing” Boria returns agency to the spontaneity of dreaming up new permutations of the encounters, accidents and chances that constituted the unpredictable nature of late colonial modern life. In the Boria’s motley configuration, the sailors delivered a chorus that on the one hand conveyed the idea of sea voyages, while on the other it sang of both the world and how the world from which the Boria troupe originated came to the outlier village. Here, the choir, made up of the sailors, stood in line and assumed the identities of a colourful host of townspeople—a fumbling Englishman, a taciturn Nyonya, a brolly-carrying Chettiar moneylender, an Arab soldier for hire, a Scottish privateer, a Tamil chicken thief and so forth. The Boria challenged imperialism’s post-­ Enlightenment rationalism by exposing the moral disorder of the colony. In its playful performance, the Boria’s culturally permutative (transformation of self) and agglutinative (alliance-making) principles were activated. The Shi’ite memory of an unjust martyrdom against the descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, so central to the commemorative practices of the Muharram festivities, found renewal and new resonance in the unjust socio-economic world that imperialism had created. Boria teaches us that the paradox of modern life is not something we should iron out with history, but that we need to confront the limits of a discipline with humour, imagination and myth. In championing a more inclusive and meaningful heritage practice, we may indeed  be required to break the illusion of ­consensus upon which an increasingly untenable heritage industry has been built.

Notes 1. UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage on 17 October 2003 during its 32nd General Conference. It is knowledge and skills that manifest in (a) oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage; (b) performing arts; (c) social practices, rituals and festive events; (d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; (e) traditional craftsmanship. See What is Intangible Cultural Heritage. 2011. UNESCO.  Accessed February 2, 2019. https://ich.unesco.org/en/ what-is-intangible-heritage-00003.

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2. These are listed as methods of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage at the national level. See 2003. Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. UNESCO, 29 September–17 October. Accessed March 2, 2019. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention. 3. See also Tambakaki, Paulina. 2014. The Tasks of Agonism and Agonism to the Task: Introducing “Chantal Mouffe: Agonism and the Politics of Passion”. Parallax 20 (2): 1–13. 4. It should be established that Muharram festivities should not be seen as a single festival with one ritual template. They were an occasion for multiple, at times overlapping and intersecting, forms of celebration by different communities. For an extensive description of the Muharram festivities in India, see Jaffur Shurreef. 1832. Chapter XV. Qanoon-e-Islam, or The Customs of the Moosulmans of India. Translated and supervision by G.A. Herklots, 148–228. London: Parbury, Allen and Co. 5. A good overview of the period in which the Boria emerges from Muharram festival practices can be found in Mahani Musa. 2003. “Boria Muharam: Antara Kreativiti dan Realiti Masyarakat Melayu Pulau Pinang Abad Ke-19 dan Ke-20” [The Muharram Boria: Between Creativity and Reality in the Malay Society of Penang from the Nineteenth–Twentieth Century]. Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse 2: 19–39. 6. The main building was a representative type of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century Anglo-Indian bungalow with arched façade, thick walls and imposing interior pillars. 7. 2004. Ashrakan, burial ground and kramat. Penang Heritage Trust Newsletter, 12, April–June. 8. This is known also as tabot in Bengkulu and tabuik in Pariaman and Asan-­ Usen in Aceh. 9. This was not the first time attempts were made to ban the Muharram procession. One finds in many early newspaper reports letters written by irate members of the European public who complained about the noise level and the hazardous use of flame torches during the processions. As a penal colony, convicts in Singapore were allowed to join in the procession up until 1856. See Wynne, Mervyn Llewelyn. 1941. Triad and Tabut: A Survey of the Origin and Diffusion of Chinese and Mohamedan Secret Societies in the Malay Peninsula A.D. 1800–1935, 285. Singapore: Goote Printer. 10. A good selection of newspaper accounts can be found in, Turnbull, C.M. 1970. Convicts in the Straits Settlements, 1826–1867. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 43 (1): 87–103. 11. The syair was initially assumed to describe a Muharram procession in neighbouring Bencoolen, Sumatra. 12. It should be qualified that the term was already listed in an 1894 dictionary, which defined Boria as “a topical song”. See Clifford, Hugh, and

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Frank Swettenham. 1894. A Dictionary of the Malay Language, 267. Taiping, Perak: Printed for the Authors at the Government Printing Office. 13. Ungku A.  Aziz. 1976. Boria—Kebudayaan Rakyat dikembalikan kepada Rakyat. In Konvensyen Boria Pesta Pulau Pinang 1976. The event was held at the Multipurpose Complex, Batu Uban, Penang, December 12. 14. Ungku Aziz voiced his concern that the dance routine felt constrained since producers had to squeeze a big group of dancers into the camera frame. Similarly, one also gets a sense that he was not too pleased with the introduction of the electric guitar and the use of speakers in a Boria performance. 15. 1974. Seminar Boria, Batu Uban, Penang, 27–28 April 1974. Unpublished manuscript. Penang State Department of Culture. The three papers were Abas Marican, “Boria Dahulu [Boria of the past]”, Mohd Habib Syed Ahmad, “Boria Sekarang [Boria today]”, and Shukri Ismail, “Boria Akan Datang [Boria of the Future]”. 16. For more information on the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hull, see Carey, Peter. 1986. Maritime Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom: A Survey of their Development, 1945– 1985. Archipel 31: 24–25. 17. Rahmah Bujang. 1977. The Boria: A Study of a Malay Theatre in its Socio-­ Cultural Context. PhD thesis, University of Hull; A revised and condensed version of the thesis was later published, see Rahman Bujang. 1987. Boria: A Form of Malay Theatre. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. 18. The first was Khoo Joo-ee, who completed a PhD thesis at SOAS, both would shortly return to work at the University of Malaya. See Khoo Joo-ee. 1976. Chinese Elements in Javanese Culture During the Majapahit Period. PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. 19. The name of the association is Persatuan Gabungan Boria Pulau Pinang-­ Seberang Perai. See Sohaimi Abdul Aziz. 2003. Pulau Pinang Pusat Perkembangan Kesusasteraan: Dahulu dan Sekarang [Penang as a Centre of Literary Development: Then and Now], 114. Penang: Universiti Sains Malaysia Press. 20. 2011. Pesta Pulau Pinang. Penang Monthly, January. Accessed March 5, 2019. https://penangmonthly.com/article.aspx?pageid=7477&name= pesta_pulau_pinang. 21. When it was first printed in 1941, Triad and Tabut had a limited circulation, suggesting that it was issued as a classified or internal report. The book-length report was however released in 1957 and deposited in major libraries across Malaya. 22. Azizi Hj Abdullah. 1983. Boria dari Kacamata Seorang Karyawan [Boria viewed from the lens of a literati]. Kertas Panduan Seminar Boria 1983. Held on 11–13 November at Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2.

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23. Fujimoto suggests that Muslim reformists in neighbouring Kedah were already waging a campaign against Boria as early as 1917, and Boria was no longer performed by 1920. See Fujimoto, Helen. 1988. The South Indian Muslim Community and the Evolution of the Jawi Peranakan in Penang up to 1948, 177. Tokyo: ILCAA, Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku. 24. 1891. Jawi Peranakan, 2, August 17. In the original Malay, it reads, ‘… anak2 Melayu bermain Afrika bermuka hitam dan Afrika bermuka merah’. 25. See 2016. Heritage from Below, ed. Iain J.M.  Robertson. London: Routledge. 26. Examples of this image or presentation are conveyed through a series of trade expositions and fairs organised in the early twentieth century. Of relevance are the Malaya-Borneo Exhibitions of 1922  in Singapore and subsequent Empire Exhibitions of 1924 in Wembley and 1938 in Glasgow. For an account of the Malaya-Borneo Exhibition, see 1922. MalayaBorneo Exhibition. The Sarawak Gazette, 37–41, February 1; On Empire exhibitions, see 1923. British Empire Exhibition: Malayan Series Nos. 2–19. Singapore: Fraser and Neave, Ltd.; See also Wong Lee Min. 2013. Negotiating Colonial Identities: Malaya in the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925. MA thesis, Department of History, National University of Singapore. 27. The British Colonial government established the Malayan Union after the second world war upon their successful return to Malaya. The new political system was designed to unify administrative rule over the Malay states but was strongly resisted by the Malay population due to policies that were deemed to be detrimental to the community’s interest. This resulted in two years of political agitation leading to the establishment of a much more decentralised system of administration called Federation of Malaya that also included clauses to safeguard Malay community interest. 28. For an urban studies and spatial politics perspective of the riots, see Pieries, Anoma. 2009. Battle for the City. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes, 156–187. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 29. A detailed study of this can be found in Mahani Musa. 2006. Malay Secret Socieites in the Northern Malay States, 1821–1940s. Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Also see Wynne. Triad and Tabut. 30. The verses in Malay are recorded as follows:                

Askar Yunan Kuantong sama, Sudah ‘resign’ daripada China; Keluar menchari som, komkoma, Anak padang selamat sempurna

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31. Some of the earliest postulations on the Austronesian theory emerged from the Straits Settlement in The Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia. These were later compiled and published in Logan, J.R. 1850. The Ethnology of the Indian Archipelago: Embracing Enquiries into the Continental Relations of the Indo-Pacific Islanders. s.n.; See also Thomson, J.T. 1881. A Sketch of the Late James Richardson Logan of Penang and Singapore. Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Singapore: Straits Branch, Royal Asiatic Society, June, 76–81. 32. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and Arts of Resistance, 15. Yale University Press. 33. Scott, Domination and Arts of Resistance, 14. 34. The verses appear in Haughton’s 1897 notes on the “Boriah” [sic]. Haughton. Boriah. Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society: 312. A Malay version was later published in Tuan Haji Mubin Shepard. 1965. The Penang Boria. Malaya in History: 39–41. I am not able to verify if the Malay version are the original verses. They are just as likely to be a translation of Haughton’s record in English. 35. The original Act enacted in 1966 was designed to regulate the rental of pre-1948 buildings with private ownership due to housing shortage in the early years of nation-building. When Mahathir Mohammad took over as Prime Minister, a new corporate ethos centred on meeting the challenges of a globalised market economy met that rent control stood in opposition to the values and principles of a liberal economy and the full exercise of property rights. See Atsumi, Saeko. 2003. The repeal of rent control in Malaysia. Cornell Real Estate Review 2: 29–38. 36. The grounds for the listing were the “imminent repeal of rent control is accelerating the pace at which tenants are displaced and buildings insensitively renovated or demolished”. 37. More specifically, it met three of the stipulated criteria, namely: (ii) exceptional examples of multi-cultural trading towns, forged from mercantile and exchanges of Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures and three successive European colonial powers for almost 500 years, each with its imprints on the architecture and urban form; (iii) living testimony to the multi-­cultural heritage and tradition of Asia and European colonial influences; (iv) Melaka and George Town reflect a mixture of influences which have created a unique architecture, culture and townscape without parallel anywhere in East and South Asia. See 2008. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention. Paris: World Heritage Centre, 2017, 25–26; see also 2008. Melaka and George Town, Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca. Accessed March 3, 2019. https://whc. unesco.org/en/list/1223/.

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38. Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, 37. Significant boundary change must be submitted as if it were a new nomination, going through the process of joining the “Tentative List” before being added to the “Nomination File”. 39. Melaka and George Town. Accessed March 3, 2019. https://whc.unesco. org/en/list/1223/.

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Index1

A Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir/Munshi Abdullah, 237 Abdullah Darus, 286 Alienation, 215, 233 Anderson, Benedict, 14, 27, 28, 56, 57, 59, 65, 74, 89, 231 Anglo-Indian, viii, 262–264, 267, 268, 270n5, 271n8, 302n6 Anthropology, 60, 62, 75 Anti-cession movement, 74 Arts-ED, Penang, 87, 115n5, 149, 150, 155, 157 Asian Civilisations Museum, 68 Authenticity, viii, 4, 5, 14, 15, 21, 37, 41, 42, 46, 75, 257–269, 271n8, 283 Azizi Hj Abdullah, 287, 288, 303n22 B Baba, xi, 40, 235, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 248, 252n6

Baba Malay, 235, 243, 246 Balik Pulau, Penang, 33, 149–158 Banh cuon, 259 Banks, Edward, 65–67, 72–74 Baram district, 62, 70, 71 Bay of Bengal, 298 Bengali, 282 Boas, Franz, 60 Bobohizan, 169, 170, 176–179 Boria, ix–xi, 42, 43, 46, 275–301 Borneo, 26, 49n3, 55, 56, 59, 60, 65, 68, 74, 75, 77–79, 113, 114n3 Brennan, Jennifer, 263 British Empire Leprosy Relief Association, 134n14 British Museum, 60, 70 Brooke government, 58, 64, 71, 73 Brooke Heritage Trust, 77, 78 Brooke, Rajah Charles, 27, 55–80 Brooke, Rajah Charles Vyner, 64, 74 Brooke, Rajah James, 60, 63, 77, 79 Brooke, Ranee Margaret, 79 Burmese, 282

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. P. Gabriel (ed.), Making Heritage in Malaysia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1494-4

311

312 

INDEX

C Cambridge, University of, 60, 70, 74 Care and Share Circle (CSC), 124, 128 Chan, Yuk Wah, 259 Chang Jee Koo, 65–68 Cheung fan, 259 Chinese (language), 268 Chinese community, xii, 23, 92, 108, 113, 115n3, 152, 251, 252n6, 253n13, 262 Climate, 6, 41, 73, 210, 212, 217, 221, 223, 292 Climate change, 221, 224, 225 Cohn, Bernard, 57, 62 Collecting, 31, 59, 61, 62, 70, 75, 90, 147, 151, 154, 258, 270n4 Collecting expeditions, 66, 81n15 Collingham, Lizzie, 263, 264, 269, 270n5 Colonial curry, 267 Colonialism, 10, 11, 40, 49n5, 93, 126, 128, 129, 132, 212, 225, 260 Community-led heritage movement, 132 Community museum, 29, 31, 87–114 Conrad, Joseph, 236 Consociationalism, 290, 297 Cosmopolitics, 42, 300, 301 Coulet, Georges, 297 Country captain, 262–264, 267, 269 Crespigny, Claude de, 69 Criminalisation, 126 Culinary practice, 26, 258 Cultural citizenship, 11–13, 44, 48 Cultural mapping, 23, 30, 33, 34, 103, 139–159 Cultural osmosis, 269 Culture Malay culture, 64, 98, 110, 164, 166–168, 170, 231, 232, 238, 240, 286

Malaysian culture, 97, 144, 152–154, 159, 165, 200, 231 national culture, 14, 21, 40, 143, 149, 232, 233, 238, 250, 285 Culture wars, 19 Curator, 28, 55, 59, 60, 62–70, 72–74, 78, 80n3, 102, 115n9 D Dak bungalow, 263, 264, 267, 268 Dayak, 63, 73 De Bierre, Julia, 262 Dendang Rakyat, 284, 285 der Putten, Van, 291, 292 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 43 Destigmatisation, 130–132 Diasporic, 22, 30, 200, 210, 214, 215, 218, 247, 258 Dislocation, 233 Distributed museum, 28, 58 Dutch, xiii, 42, 95, 195, 237–239, 250, 257, 262 Dwelling, 30, 38, 104, 210–212, 217–226 E Ecology, 217–219, 296, 298, 300 Ee, Tiang Hong, ix, xi, 39–41, 231–251 Emergency, 30, 94–96, 99, 100, 107–109, 112, 115n9, 192 Emigration, 40, 241, 242, 251, 253n12 English (language), 23, 40, 238, 239, 252n8, 293 Malaysian English, 243, 244 Environmental imagination, 211

 INDEX 

Epistemic implication, 45, 120, 128, 132 Ethnicity, xi, 10, 22–25, 31, 34, 37, 93, 110, 120, 140, 145, 151, 158, 191, 196, 202, 204, 205 Ethnology, 65 Eurasian, 98, 157, 245, 246, 261, 267, 268, 270n5 Exhibition, 26, 28, 31, 64, 65, 67, 71, 72, 75, 76, 94, 96, 99, 103–106, 108, 109, 111, 212, 213 Exile, 39, 41, 233–242, 245, 248 F Farish A. Noor, 188, 190, 191, 196 Federation of Malaya, 49n3, 286, 304n27 Fernandez, Doreen, 258, 259 Folk museum, ix, 29, 30, 87–114 Folktales, 6, 35, 36, 151, 163–181, 282 adaptation, 35, 36, 163–181 Fort Margherita, Kuching, 79 Foucault, Michel, 8, 149, 159 Futurism, 288, 291 G Garden City, 32, 123, 133n7 George Town, Penang, 33, 37, 149–158, 194, 248, 293, 298, 305n37 Gerrard, Edward, 60 Ghee Hin, 293 Global South, 14, 224 Goode, George Brown, 69 Governmentality, 8, 11–13, 25, 27, 34, 45, 46, 48, 128 Greenhouse effect, 224 Guillemard, Sir Laurence, 68 Gunung Ledang, 196, 200

313

H Haddon, Alfred Court, 60–62, 66, 70 Hainanese, 268, 272n10 Hakka, ix, xi, 31, 66, 88, 106, 109–111, 156 Hall, Stuart, 18, 48, 89, 90 Hamilton, Arthur Wedderburn, 283, 294 Handy, Ellice, 263, 264 Harrisson, Tom, 28, 60, 74–77, 79 Hegemony/hegemonic, x, 5, 8, 11–13, 29, 33, 48, 89, 93, 149, 159, 211, 233, 235, 238–240, 248 Helping Hands Penan Project, 77 Heritage built heritage, 141, 151, 197, 199, 200, 205n2 cultural heritage, viii, 7, 13, 15, 16, 18–20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 30, 33–35, 37, 38, 42, 46, 55–80, 87, 88, 90, 110, 126, 140–146, 148–150, 158, 163–181, 188, 193, 195, 196, 211, 220, 249, 275, 276, 278, 279, 283, 299, 300, 301n1 heritage as process, 34, 36, 197 heritage dish, 268 heritage-making, 7, 11, 21, 25–28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 44, 45, 47, 56, 88, 92, 110, 114, 120, 127, 132, 189, 196, 203, 248, 251 heritage movement, 113, 119–124 heritagising, 14–18, 36–39 limits of heritage, 44–46, 284 living heritage, 154, 164, 165, 180, 197, 199, 203, 299 multicultural heritage, 7, 150, 193, 198, 249–251, 254n23 natural heritage, 15, 37, 38, 94, 143, 188, 209–226

314 

INDEX

Hikayat Abdullah, 237, 253n8 History, xi, xii, 4, 5, 7, 8, 14–18, 20–22, 25–27, 30, 31, 33–37, 40–42, 44–47, 55, 57, 58, 72, 78, 88–95, 98, 99, 101, 103, 106–108, 110–113, 114n2, 121–132, 141, 142, 147, 148, 151, 153–159, 164, 187, 191–201, 203–205, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 220, 224, 225, 238, 240, 248, 250, 251, 259–261, 264, 267, 271n8, 277, 279, 280, 283, 285–287, 289, 291, 297, 298, 300, 301 national history, 34, 109 Homeland, 21, 39, 41, 140, 145, 146, 153, 192, 215, 216, 221–223, 234, 248 “Hosay,” 280, 292 Hose, Charles, 70, 71 Huggan, Graham, 10, 209 I ICOMOS, see International Council on Monuments and Sites Iban, 64, 68, 98 Iban collectors, 28 Identity cultural identity, viii, 6, 18, 40, 42, 43, 97, 269, 278, 287 national identity, 11, 13, 15, 44, 46, 47, 49n2, 76, 187, 191, 195, 231, 238, 251 Imagined Communities, 48, 231 Imperial durabilities, 297 Indian, 271n8 Indian mutiny, 1857, 293 Indigenous collectors, 68 Indonesia, 19, 20, 42, 191, 257, 266, 299 Intangible heritage, viii, x, 32, 36, 45, 141, 142, 150, 180, 188–190, 193, 248, 276, 299

International authorized heritage discourse (IAHD), 125 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), 122 Investigative modalities, 57 Islam, 37, 143, 158, 231, 232 Islamist, 233 J Jabatan Muzium Sarawak, 27, 56, 77 Jakun, 239 Japanese community of Kuching, 71 Japanese Occupation, 60, 72, 74, 133n8, 157, 158, 192, 286 Jawi Peranakan, xi, 262, 279, 283, 287, 290, 292 Joget, 232, 285 K Kalimantan, 75 Kampung, 18, 21, 94, 109, 113, 196–198, 205, 236 Kari kapitan/curry kapitan, x, xii, 41, 42, 257–269 Kayan, 68 Kelabit, 28, 74, 76 Kenyah, 64, 75 Ketit, 68, 81n15 Khoo Salma, 290, 300 Konfrontasi (Confrontation), 19 Kongsi, 292 Korom, Frank, 292 Kow, Shih-Li, 36, 112, 187–205 Kuala Kubu Baru (KKB), ix, xi, xii, 36, 37, 198–200, 202, 205n2 Kuching, 59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74–80 Kuching community, 69, 78, 80 Kuching Courthouse, 79 Kuching Regatta, 73

 INDEX 

L Language, 5, 23, 40, 41, 48, 49n2, 50n6, 96, 106, 113, 124, 145, 192, 219, 232, 235, 238–240, 252n8, 258, 268, 271n7, 277, 279, 289, 292–294, 299, 301n1 national language, 40, 232 Leong-Salobir, Cecilia, 267, 269, 271n8, 271n9 Lepo’ Tau, 75 Leprosy, x, 31, 32, 45, 119–122, 124, 126, 127, 129–131 Lewis, John, 63 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 38, 210–212, 214–226, 226n1, 232, 233 Literature national literature, 232, 249 sectional literature, 40, 232, 238, 251 Long Nawang, 75 Losheng Sanatorium, 123, 133n8 Low, Hugh Brooke, 61 Lowenthal, David, 39, 44, 120, 143, 144, 166, 171, 181, 187, 188, 233, 248 M “Main,” 43, 284, 293–301 Malacca, Melaka, 211, 238, 283, 298 Malay, x, 6, 57, 93, 140, 163, 191, 231, 259, 277 language, 49n2, 50n6, 238, 294 Malaya-Borneo Exhibition, 64, 304n26 Malayan Union, 291, 304n27 Malay community of Kuching, xi, 235 Malaysianness, 5, 19, 21, 29, 47 A Malaysian Journey, 193–198, 200 Medical trial/drug trial, 122, 124, 127 Memory, xiii, 6, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30, 38, 46, 47, 78, 90, 92, 110, 121, 146, 209, 210, 212–218, 222, 223, 225, 257, 258, 267, 279, 292

315

Ministry of Tourism, 15, 16, 18, 22, 132, 195 Miri, 66 Mjöberg, Eric, 55, 64–66, 72, 73 Modernity, 59, 61, 64, 94, 124, 129, 276, 277 Mohd Anis Md. Nor, 288 Monocultural, 191, 232, 237, 239, 249, 251 Monsoon, 217, 218, 220 Moulton, John Coney, 62, 66–68, 73, 80n3, 81n15 Muhammad Yusof bin Sultan Mydin, 287 Muharram, 42, 277, 278, 280–283, 287, 292–294, 300, 301, 302n4, 302n5, 302n9, 302n11 Multiculturalism, 12, 22–25, 29, 95, 114n3, 193, 238, 244, 250 Museum, xii community museum, 29, 31, 87–114 National Museum, viii, ix, xii, 17, 29–31, 89–91, 93–97, 99, 108 Sultan Alam Shah Museum, 30, 31, 89, 93, 100, 108 Museum donation, 69 Museum history, 26, 57, 72 Museum staff, 58, 66, 68 Museum visitors, 58, 72, 98 N Nation, ix, x, xii, xiii, 5–8, 11–20, 22–24, 29–35, 41, 45–48, 90–95, 108, 109, 111, 132, 143, 145, 157, 180, 188, 189, 191, 192, 197, 198, 202, 218, 225, 231, 235, 237, 249, 275, 280 nation-building, vii, 12, 17, 18, 22, 40, 56, 95, 111, 231, 236, 286, 292 National Culture Policy, viii, ix, 17, 48, 231–233, 245, 248, 249, 253n17

316 

INDEX

National Heritage Act (NHA), 15, 16, 18, 23, 26, 35, 39, 122, 143, 164, 165, 181n1, 249 Nationalism, 43, 89, 94, 96, 144, 231, 236, 237, 277, 287, 288 National Language Acts, 232 Natural history, 57, 60, 68–70, 78 Nenek Kebayan, x, 35, 36, 163–181 New Village, ix, 30, 89, 94, 96, 99–110, 112, 113, 115n9 Niah Caves, 77 Nomenclative, 259 Nostalgia, viii, xi, 6, 22, 36–39, 78, 110, 202, 209–226, 245, 250, 258, 264, 269 Nyonya, 152, 216, 219, 220, 226n1, 252n6, 261, 262, 266, 268, 269, 301 O Oldrieve, Frank, 134n14 Ong Jin Teong, 268, 272n10 On-site facilitator, 132 Operation Semut, 74 Orang Asli, 99, 199, 239 Orang Laut, 239 Oxford, University of, 60 P Padang Garam, 294–296 Pantun, 220, 295 Parameswara, 238, 250, 254n23 Pathogenic subjects, 128 Penang, ix, xi, xii, 33, 40, 42, 46, 115n5, 121, 149–158, 167, 174, 194, 205, 252n6, 262, 268, 272n10, 275–301 Penang Heritage Trust (PHT), 297, 298 Penang riots, 1867, 287, 292, 293 Peninsula: A Story of Malaysia, 193, 198

Peranakan, xii, 40–42, 195, 215, 216, 220, 226n1, 235, 240, 241, 243–245, 251, 252n6, 253n13, 254n19, 261, 262, 268, 269, 270n4, 279 Pesta Pulau Pinang, 285 Philippines/Philippine, 134n13, 191, 258, 259, 299 Pillai, Janet, 147, 148, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157 Pitt Rivers Museum, 58 Place, 5, 6, 8, 10, 14, 19, 23, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 58, 64, 73, 79, 102, 111, 112, 114, 119, 120, 123–126, 129, 131, 132, 140, 143, 145, 147–149, 151, 153, 154, 158, 159, 169, 176, 179, 189–194, 197–205, 212, 215, 217–219, 221, 232, 235, 237, 239, 240, 257–272, 276–278, 281, 295 Planetarity, 21 Poetry/poetic, 6, 37, 39, 106, 212, 217, 218, 220, 221, 233, 234, 240, 244, 245, 248–251, 268, 295, 296 Portuguese, 95, 98, 195, 237–240, 245, 246, 250, 262, 270n4, 270n5 Postcolonial, 10, 22, 23, 29, 33, 38, 42, 48, 56, 76, 210, 215, 225, 231, 237, 277, 289, 292, 297 Presentism/presentist, 33, 45, 120, 130 Pua kumbu, 68 Pulau Jerejak, 121 Pulau Serimbun, 121 Puteri Gunung Ledang, 35, 163, 164, 167 Q Quarantine, 45, 122, 128

 INDEX 

R Race, xi, xii, 6, 10–12, 21, 22, 34, 36, 37, 42, 48, 61, 62, 73, 140, 145, 154, 156, 157, 180, 190, 192–194, 202, 203, 260, 288, 296, 297 Racial Other, 45, 126, 133n3 Raffles Museum, ix, 57, 59, 65, 68, 81n15, 81n16 Rahmah Bujang, 285, 286 Rajah of Sarawak, 27, 56 Reade, Charles, 200, 205n2 Regiment of Madras, 281 Rehman Rashid, 36, 187–205 Representation, 6, 11, 13, 17, 18, 21–23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 49, 75, 78, 79, 91, 92, 96, 98, 99, 111, 113, 114n3, 120, 130, 145, 149, 166, 167, 180, 191, 195, 212, 232, 234, 238, 242, 248, 251, 277, 295 Roach, Joseph, 292 Rosaldo, Renato, 11 Rothschild, Baron Walter, 70 Rushdie, Salman, 14, 41, 258, 269 S Salvage ethnography, 60–62, 64, 65, 74, 78 Sandin, Benedict, 76 Sarawak, ix, xi, 26–29, 49n1, 49n3, 55–80 Sarawak, colonial government of, 27, 62 Sarawak Gazette, 58, 61, 63 Sarawakians, 55, 56, 64, 68, 71, 73, 76, 78 Sarawak Museum, ix, 27, 28, 55–80 Sarawak Museum Journal, 62, 75, 76, 80n4 Sarawak Museum murals, 75

317

Sarawak Rangers Band, 73 Save Valley of Hope Solidarity Group (SVHSG), 120, 122, 123, 134n9 Scott, James, 296 Scott, Walter, 248 Segregation, 23, 31, 45, 100, 121, 126–129, 132, 190, 191 Sejarah Melayu, 35, 163, 164, 167, 180 Serani, 245 Serdang, ix, xi, 31, 87–114 Setapak Camp, 121, 126 Shah Alam, 98, 115n5 Shelford, Robert W. C., 62, 69 Shi’ite, 280, 281, 285 Singapore, ix, 19, 20, 26, 40, 42, 49n3, 49n5, 57, 59, 64, 65, 68, 129, 139, 157, 191, 192, 200, 214, 216, 218, 237, 244, 252n6, 257, 261, 264, 266, 269, 270n1, 271n9, 272n10, 281, 283, 299, 302n9, 304n26 Small town, 9, 21, 36–39, 187–205 Smith, Laurajane, 5, 9, 88, 89, 91–93, 120, 125, 189, 203 Smithsonian Institution, 69 Society Atelier, Kuching, 77 South Kensington Museum, 61 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 21 Stengers, Isabel, 300, 301 Stigmatization, 171 Stoler, Laura Ann, 297 Straits Chinese, viii, 40, 42, 215, 216, 226n1, 252n6, 261, 269 Straits of Malacca, 218, 226n1, 238, 298, 299 Straits Settlements, 40, 57, 68, 226n1, 254n19, 262, 267, 270n5, 282, 287, 297, 298, 305n31 Subaltern history, 31, 45 Sulu, Sultanate of, 60 Sumatran, 224, 265–268

318 

INDEX

Summa Oriental (Pires), 239 The Sum of Our Follies, 36, 200–203 Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement (SBLS), 31, 32, 119–133 Surrogation, 292 Syair, 6, 43, 282, 287, 295, 296, 302n11 T Tabut, 280, 282, 283 Tamil (language), xii, 24, 50n6, 156, 249, 271n7, 301 Tangible heritage, 14, 32, 126, 139, 141, 142, 150, 167 Taxidermy, 66 Temuan, 239 Thai, 156, 159, 266, 270n6 Tourism, 15–17, 22–25, 37, 38, 46, 77–80, 94, 95, 140, 144, 194, 196, 276–277, 289, 299 Translocal, 260 Travers, E.A.O., 129 Triad and Tabut, 287, 297, 303n21 Tropical, 66, 73, 217–220, 222 Tua Pek Kong, 292 U Ungku Aziz, 284–286, 292, 303n14 United Malays’ National Organisation (UMNO), ix, x, xii, 114n2, 291, 292

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), viii, 7, 19, 20, 32, 37, 42, 45, 46, 87, 88, 90, 124, 132, 141, 142, 145, 164, 180, 188–189, 194, 248, 250, 276, 278, 279, 297–300, 301n1 World Heritage, 250 Universiti Malaya, 139 Universiti Sains Malaysia, 284 V Valley of Hope, x, 119, 133n1 Victimhood, 39, 233–240, 248, 250 Vietnam, 260, 299 Visual culture, 33, 126 W Wazir Karim, 279, 290 Weather, 38, 210, 211, 217–226 White-Kumar, Bridget, 262, 263 Winter, Tim, 3, 9, 20, 289 Wong Phui Nam, 249 Wynne, Mervyn L., 282, 287, 292, 297 Y Yunan, 294, 295, 304n30 Z Zoology, 61, 69, 70, 75