In his latest column ' Those not of our race ' Sim Kwang Yang talks about the collective guilt, shame and persecution complex of the Chinese in the wake of the Western (and Japanese) invasion of China. More importantly, he discusses how this catastrophe was later taken up and used by successive Chinese leaders as a means of creating an imagined community whose identity was founded on the notion of injured pride and a collective victimhood that lingers till today.

The invasion of China came at a time when the Han dynasty was already in decline and China was lagging behind the rest of the world in the race for material progress, modernisation and industrialisation. Cocooned by their belief that China was the centre of the world and that the middle kingdom did not need to learn or interact with others, the political and military elite of the Han government were in for a shock when, as Sim notes "the gates of Beijing, Shanghai and Canton were pounded to smithereens by gunboats from the western colonial powers, inflicting great shame on their national soul."

This marked a rupture in the continuity of the national imaginary, an unforeseen and radically contingent intervention that severely disrupted the continuity of the national narrative. Right up to the day when British troops landed on the shore, Chinese generals and officers were convinced that they had little to fear from the 'foreign devils' whose legs were 'made of wood' (an observation they came to after watching British marines march in column formation). Furthermore they could not understand how foreign ships would dare come close to their coastal fortifications, due to the enormous size of the Chinese cannons (which were of huge calibre but also short-ranged, as compared to the British seaborne rifled cannons that were of smaller calibre but longer-ranged and more accurate). The incredulity of the Chinese army leaders and political elite was summed up by Sim thus:

"The idea that those red-haired pink-skinned foreign devils had the audacity to infringe upon the Heavenly Empire was a shock from which the Han national consciousness could not recover for a long time. But they had no choice, with their spears, swords and kung-fu pitched against the canons and rifles of the invading forces."

To add insult to injury, it was obvious that the invasion of China by the Western powers had nothing to do with 'liberating' the people of China or opening its market to the world economy for the sake of progress. (Any more than the US's latest invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq has to do with the 'crusade for democracy'). In time, the Western powers most notably Britain

made every effort to squeeze as many preferential trade agreements from China in order to plunder the local economy. The British East India Company (EIC) then poured salt onto the wound by introducing opium, the trade of which it quickly monopolised, into the country to debilitate it further. (1)

What is relevant for our concerns here is Sim Kwang Yang's point that the Chinese government was not able to envisage the possibility that they could have been defeated in the first place, and when this defeat eventually came about it was used by the Chinese elite to rebuild the identity of the nation on the basis of a feeling of shared loss and victimisation. Sim argues that this, in fact, forms one of the pillars of the collective Chinese identity that has developed since then, and that this sense of persecution and collective injustice may well explain how and why the Chinese have developed a sense of collective identity that is exclusive of others.

If this be the case, it is certainly not the only instance in the corpus of human history where a people have come to be united in opposition to others, and where the identity of a nation is predicated on an oppositional dialectic that pits them against the rest of humanity. For this we need not look any further than here in Malaysia, for the same sense of injured pride, betrayal and defeatism is painfully obvious in the collective mindset of another ethnic group: the Malays.

The fall of Malacca and the rise of Malay ethnocentrism

Now most of us would know a little bit about the history of Malacca by now. (We've all seen it in the tourist brochures at least.)

The fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511 was, in many ways, a pivotal turning-point in the collective consciousness of the Malays as a whole. While the term 'Malay' (like the term 'Chinese') is basically a general category that cannot possibly encompass the myriad of social, ethnic and cultural groups that come under this broad heading, the hardening of the plastic signifier came about thanks to transformative events such as the invasion and capture of Malacca.

The capture of Malacca was one of the historical events that brought the Malays together, AS the Malays. If prior to that they were content to be known as Bugis, Javanese, Sundanese, Acehnese, Kerinchians, Rawanese, Patanis, etc. it was the invasion and conquest of Malacca by the Europeans that introduced a new boundary line between self and other, in-group and out-group. What was once a differentiated assembly of various ethnic-linguistic communities suddenly came together when confronted with an Other that was radically different in dress, language, culture and religion.

So deep is this sense of loss and defeat that till the 20th century Malay leaders were still talking about it. In his book 'Asas Falsafah Kebangsaan Melayu', the Malay politician and Islamist intellectual Dr. Burhanuddin al-Helmy talks about the ruins of Malacca as the new foundation upon which a collective (and politicised) Malay identity could be built:

'Diatas rubuhan kota Melaka,

Kita Bangunkan Djiwa Merdeka.

Membela hak keadilan pusaka,

Bersatu padu seluruh baka.' (2)

Judging by the manner and extent to which Malay politicians (from both Umno and PAS) have brought up the fall of Malacca time and time again, one might even come to the conclusion that the defeat of the Malaccans was the best thing that has ever happened to the Malays (or Malay politicians at least)! Had those dastardly Portuguese with their fuzzy whiskers and overblown pants not invaded the place, the Malays might have paid someone else to do it, just so that this diverse and internally-differentiated community would be given a final frontier between them and the Other.

The political and ideological reinvention of the event and the re-writing of the history of Malacca has been going on in earnest since the beginning of the Malay ethno-nationalist struggle. Malay politicians point to the fall of Malacca as the nadir of the Malay race, the ultimate humiliation against which the Malay community must gird its loins and struggle against. It has given Malay ethno-nationalist movements the rationale, justification and momentum to pursue their own exclusive communitarian struggle, in order to right the perceived wrongs of the past and to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world and more importantly in the eyes of themselves.

So flagrant is this political deployment of the myth of the fall of Malacca that it has come down to us as an ideological construct that has little to do with the facts themselves. Malay politicians have not only used the myth of the fall of Malacca to explain their communitarian politics, they have even exaggerated the facts of the case to the level of hyperbole and epic drama. Years ago when I was teaching in University Malaya I had the misfortune to have to listen to a speech by a senior Umno politician who had come to deliver his opening address at a conference on inter-civilisational dialogue. Like many other Malay politicians, he could not resist delving into the past and conjuring the ghost of the fall of Malacca once again.

In his speech he spoke of the people of Malacca as peace-loving and how rosy life in the Malaccan kingdom was. (This was already a major error on his part, for as any historian will tell you Malacca was also a power with imperial ambitions of its own and its political culture, steeped as it was in feudalism, was anything but egalitarian and benign.) He then described the advent of the Portuguese invasion of Malacca in typically hyperbolic terms. The Malaccans, he claimed, were innocent, passive people who were only armed with spears and puny kerises. The nasty Portuguese, on the other hand, came armed to the teeth with muskets, cannons and all sorts of weapons of mass destruction. Though I cannot remember the text of the speech in full by now, one sentence he uttered remains fresh in my memory: "When the Portuguese bombarded Malacca, the Malaccans did not know what to do because they had never seen a cannon ball before" he stated.

Even then, the statement raised my temperature and blood pressure considerably. This was a typical case of a Malay politician deliberately exaggerating the facts of history in order to weave that ideological narrative that we have all become familiar with by now: the myth of the 'poor, weak, backward' Malays who were unjustly treated by foreign bullies, and whom the rest of the world now owes a living.

To set the record straight, we need to remember that Malacca in 1511 was no backwater coastal emporium.(3) By the fifteenth century Malacca had already become one of the major trading centres of the Islamic and Asian worlds. Muslim traders from the Hijaz and India considered it to be one of the most important cities of the world, and indeed, all trade routes in the East headed towards the port-capital of the Malay kingdom.(4)

Nor were the Malaccans a bunch of backward, poor, unrefined country yokels who did not know how to deal with the challenges of modernity: The Malaccans were in fact arms manufacturers, and after the fall of Malacca the Portuguese counted the number of guns the Malaccans actually had in their arsenal: eight thousand in all, of various calibre. In the testimony of Alfonso de Albuquerque the Younger (son of the Portuguese commander Alfonso de Albuquerque), he notes that the guns made by the Malaccans were as good as the ones being made in Germany at the time! (5)

The real reason for the defeat of the Malaccans was in fact similar to the reason for the defeat of the Chinese at the hands of the Europeans centuries later: A sense of insularity and narrow-mindedness had set in, lulling them into a false sense of comfort and security which made them lax and negligent. As the Portuguese ships came into view, the Malaccan soldiers

spent the night before the battle listening to a reading of the 'Hikayat Amir Hamzah' instead of training their gun sights of the invaders' ships. Like the Chinese whose forts were levelled by the cannons of the British navy, the Malaccans did not think they could possibly lose. And when defeat came to them in the end, a new myth had to be invented to explain what they could not explain for and to themselves. The legend of national defeat and shame was born.

Myths, legends and the collective imaginary

Let us return to Sik Kwang Yang's insightful article. The author notes, correctly, that "eventually, all forms and expressions of ethnic nationalism must find their origin, legitimacy, inspirations in different kinds of history, in the myths, legends, literature, and philosophy that constitute the collective memory and provide that sense of ethnic uniqueness".

This is as true today for the Malays as it is for the Chinese as well as every other race in the world. Just take a look at Israel, where the fascists of the Zionist phalanx bemoan the loss of the nation and the long list of calumnies and injustices that are said to have been inflicted on the

Jewish people. This sense of collective defeat and loss is in turn used to support a politics of violent expansionism and conquest, which is fundamentally communitarian and racist at its core. Likewise the Hindu fascists of the BJP/RSS in India have justified their sectarian policies on the grounds that the Hindu nation has faced countless humiliations at the hands of nasty invaders, be they Westerners or Muslims from Central Asia.

Here in Malaysia our own brand of mutually exclusive racist communitarian politics so expertly deployed and utilised by leaders of all ethnic groups is likewise based on the belief that each community has been wronged by the Other without. The Malays feel that they are the victims of history (even if that history has been conveniently re-written for their political agendas). The Chinese likewise feel that the same holds true for them, and the Indians as well.

The net result of this sort of politically-biased and narrow misrepresentation of the past is clear for all to see: it has not brought us any closer to creating a nation that is truly multicultural, based on shared values, wants and aspirations. Rather it has divided Malaysian society and it helps to maintain the boundaries of race, ethnicity, religion and language which we should have overcome long ago. If and when these politicians try to bring the national body together, they still cannot leap out of the dialectical trench they have dug for themselves, and have instead to look for foreign scapegoats to blame for all our common troubles: be they the nasty 'hook-nosed Jews', the evil corrupted West, the decadent culture of modernity or whatever.

What this means is that we Malaysians still cannot live at peace with ourselves and our past. We cannot come to terms with our mistakes and shortcomings, and so we cannot evolve and move ahead beyond them. Our national narrative is one that begins on the premise of loss, defeat and humiliation; it proceeds along a teleology of communitarianism and opposition to the Other, and its logical apotheosis is the eventual defeat of the Other and the triumph of the Self.

One does not need to spend hours on a psychoanalyst's couch to see what is wrong here: If our collective identity can only be based on a sense of injured pride and the thirst for redemption, how can we ever developed to become a civilised people who can see positivity in ourselves and concede the same for others? The myth of collective injury which is present in the mindset of all races and communities in Malaysia remains the basis of our fragmented national consciousness. And as long as it remains so, racism, rather than nationalism, will be the real basis of our shared and contested identities.

Endnotes:

(1) Britain gained the total world-wide monopoly over the trade in opium after its success in defeating China in the Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1857-60, where its main aim was to break the resistance of the Chinese government and penetrate the Chinese market so that it could sell the drug to the Chinese population. Having achieved this strategic goal, the British promoted the spread of opium throughout Asia more than any other power known in history. Opium was a crucial tool and commodity in the British colonial economy. The British had been engaged in the sale of opium in the Malay archipelago from the end of the eighteenth century, and the East India

Company was directly involved in the monopolisation of the trade, production and distribution of Opium throughout Asia from India to China.

(2) Translation: 'On the ruins of Melacca, we will sow the spirit of nationalism; Defending the rights of our forefathers, we will unite all'. From: Dr. Burhanuddin Helmy, Asah Falsafah Kebangsaan Melayu (1963, later edition).

(3) KN Chaudhuri has noted that even before the arrival of European powers Melacca (like Canton and Alexandria) was an international commercial metropole which did not operate according to the economic system of the primarily agrarian-based kingdoms around it; but instead existed on a different international time-frame tuned to the cycles of long-distance

international trade and production, and consequently occupied a different temporal space compared to the rural agrarian communities on the periphery around it (pg. 88). These Asian commercial centres (of which Malacca was but one) held together an integrated non-European economic network which linked together different corners of Asia within a regulated metropolitan temporal space (pg. 343) which had to be policed and regulated internally

(pg. 367) and was extended as far as the Middle East and Europe. But what is more Malacca served as the crucial link between the Indo-Malay world and the Muslim diaspora. For apart from being a commercial metropole linked to the precolonial global economy, it was the port of embarkation and return for Indon-Malay muslims going on their hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca as well as the major destination point for many itinerant Islamic scholars and preachers from the rest of the Islamic world. (pg.353). [See: K.N. Chaudhuri, 'Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750'. Cambridge University Press. 1990.]

(4) The importance of Melacca as a centre for trade, political activity and Islamic learning can be gleamed from the fact that it appears in nearly all the major treatises on navigation written by Arab and Muslim navigators of the period. Melacca is found in the texts of Ahmad ibn-Majid, the Kitab al-Fawa'id (Book of beneficial knowledge on Navigation) and the writings of

Sulaiman al-Mahri, navigators of the 15th and 16th centuries respectively. As Tibbetts notes, the importance of Melacca is seen in the fact that 'the majority of routes led to this place' (pg. 485) and in comparison to Melacca, navigational knowledge of other parts of Asia were inaccurate,

scant and obscure. [See: G.R. Tibbetts, 'Arab Navigation: Being a translation of the Kitab al-Fawa'id fi usal al-Bahr wa'l-Gawa'id of Ahmad ibn Majid', Luzac Press, London. 1971].

(5) Alfonso de Albuquerque the Younger, 'Commentarios do Grande Alfonso de Albuquerque', Chapters 22-28. 1576. Translated (in Malay) in 'Albuquerque: Ceasar Timur (Albuquerque: Ceasar of the East'). Penerbit Universiti Malaya. Kuala Lumpur 1995.