In September 1913, the British Imperial government decided to honour Sultan Idris Shah of Perak who was regarded by the colonial authorities at that time as the most amiable, accommodating and progressive among his brother-rulers.(1)

It was decided that an investiture ceremony ought to be held to commemorate the event whereby the Sultan would be awarded the honour of the Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order (GCVO), the highest award ever conferred upon a Malay Sultan at that time.

When told of this momentous decision, the British administrators who manned the helm of the colony and the protectorates went about orchestrating what was perhaps one of the most elaborate, overwrought and overstated spectacles played out during Malaya's colonial era.

The editor of the Times of Malaya , Thomas Fox, was present throughout the sensational ordeal and he recorded the planning and organisation that preceded the event. In his report he states that: 'The idea broadly was to convey the impression that the insignia (GCVO) had come direct from the King of England to the Sultan in his palace at Kuala Kangsar'.

To achieve the desired theatrical effect, it was decided that the insignia should be transported over both sea (represented in this case by the Perak River) as well as land.

Buffaloes and elephants

Added to this, was a cast of several hundred Malay warriors (swordsmen, spearmen, and the royal bodyguard), palace officials, flag bearers, ulamas , qadhis and hajis (religious functionaries), actors and other entertainers, schoolchildren, several dozen buffaloes and a host of 70 huge elephants.

Of even greater interest is the manner in which the procession was choreographed and the symbolic ideological message encoded within it that it was meant to communicate to the Sultan and his people.

For as Fox was to note in his commentary of events: 'It was first intended to make the celebrations more elaborate... (After the riverside landing) the original suggestions allowed for an attack by rebel spearmen on the party bearing the insignia (led by the colonial high commissioner), this being an acknowledgment of past fighting days, before the peaceful settlement of the country when life was held cheap and death (was) faced every hour of the day, when rapine and murder were rife and progress stifled... Days of semi-barbarism. (sic)'.

The dramatic procession thus attempted to reactivate the trace of the initial moment of intrusion and imposition of colonial order ('an acknowledgment of past fighting days, before the peaceful settlement').

The GCVO thus symbolically embodied the very idea of order, peace and progress itself, while the high commissioner and his army of colonial administrators were the deliverers of that order.

The Sultan and his people were in turn portrayed as the grateful recipients of this externally-imposed arrangement, rescued by the timely intervention of colonial rule which delivered them from the state of war of all against all 'when life was held cheap and death faced every hour of the day'.

But the ceremony also demonstrated the fact that within the Empire there were no longer private, localised spaces that existed outside the all-encompassing grasp of its Imperialist logic, its order of knowledge, its orientalist discourse and its construction of the native Other.

Imperial presence

Indeed, the entire ritual showed that even as far as the banks of the Perak River, amidst the lush, green tropical environs of Kuala Kangsar, the British imperial presence could still be felt and that it could produce an immediate and direct effect upon the natives.

So effective and absolute was this civilising influence of rationalised, ordered, modern colonial rule that Fox noted how "even the elephants behaved themselves with the utmost propriety".

Long before he was deemed worthy of such an honour the Sultan had already demonstrated signs of awe and respect for the British Empire which the colonial authorities noted with approval: As heir-apparent to the Perak throne, he had visited the metropole of the Empire, London, in 1884 and was 'favourably impressed' by the military and economic might of the global power. (2)

The spectacle of Sultan Idris Shah's investiture thus graphically illustrates the manner in which the native Other was being repeatedly brought into the discursive economy of the colonial Order, albeit in terms which the subjugated native Other could not refuse.

However this incorporation of the native colonial subject was also clearly a forceful one for it required that the colonised native subject be first reduced to an instrumental fiction, to suit the ideological needs of a dominant discourse that was about to reconfigure him. It was, in short, a spectacle which incorporated the native while disabling him at the same time by reducing him to the status of the passive recipient.

Thus the anglophile Sultan Idris stood inert, seemingly paralysed in his exotic native splendour, to receive his knighthood from a global power which had descended upon the native land and civilised it in turn.

Sweet gifts

As he stood to receive the GCVO, Sultan Idris Shah was undoubtedly aware of the fact that he was receiving an award from a superior political power which he could neither match nor resist.

By the time that the staging of such spectacular events had become part of colonial life in Malaya, the British colonial authorities had learnt their lesson well. For direct intervention into Malay affairs had led to costly resistance in the past.

As with the rest of the Empire, the colonial authorities in the Malay lands learnt that the most effective means of forceful intervention was that which was sweetened with gifts, be it in the form of opium and weapons or titles and trinkets.

The most effective of these tools, however, was the glib and self-effacing rhetoric of the colonial authorities themselves, who would dress their policies of intervention, exploitation and domination with the unctuous platitudes of moral duty and the white man's burden.(3) And for this ideological fiction to work, a conception of the native with a particularly disabling deficiency had to be constructed.

Twentieth century colonial propaganda needed to construct the notion of the disabled native in order to justify and facilitate the intervention of Western powers into their affairs. The problem that faced the architects of Empire in the Malay world was to find a place to locate this particular deficiency, for the Malay people did not seem particularly disabled in any respect.

The Malay world prior to the late 19th century was already a highly developed and sophisticated one. In the field of politics and trade, the Indon-Malay world was already in touch with the rest of the globe from China to Europe.

Slow degradation

The awareness of their place and importance in the international economic system ensured that the Malay rulers themselves would be confident in their dealings with foreign powers. Malay-Muslim rulers such as the Sultan Iskandar Muda of Aceh were still addressing European rulers such as King James I of England as their brother-rulers.

In the field of letters and learning, the thinkers of the Malay world such as Buchara al-Jauhari were already developing political ideas that were contemporaneous with, if not ahead of, the latest currents of thought in the Islamic, Asian and European worlds.

The fact that the Malay-Muslim political treatise Taj-us Salatin existed nearly half a century before Hobbes' Leviathan would make it difficult for anyone to suggest that the Malays were in need of instruction in matters political, historical or economic.

But with the gradual loss of more and more territory and crucial power centres such as Melaka to the forces of Europe, the Malay-Muslim powers of the archipelago gradually slipped into a process of slow degradation and decay.

The Malay peninsula in particular was devastated as a result of the loss of Melaka, and from the 17th to 18th centuries experienced a steady and seemingly-inexorable decline that resulted in countless civil wars, wars of succession and territorial conflicts.

Guiding hand

Economic stagnation took its toll on the rest of the Indon-Malay archipelago as beyond Malay waters the oceans of the world came under the heel of European fleets, thus crippling the trading networks between Asia and the Islamic world.(4)

In the eyes of the next generation of British colonial bureaucrats and administrators schooled in the ideology of modern colonial-capitalism, feudal Malay society was seen to lack the arresting weight of gravity imposed by a central supra-authority which would, presumably, have been used to introduce order and rationalisation to a decentred and inefficient system of rule and economic management.

It was precisely this stereotypical picture of a decentred Malay society which entered the discursive and administrative framework of colonial power in Malaya and came to dominate the colonialist's view of the Malay race as a whole.

At the edges of the colonial gaze there lay the Malay kerajaan s (governments), their negeri s (states) in perpetual disorder and economic decline due to their lack of administrative centralisation, in want of a guiding hand to bring them together.

The encroachment of British colonial rule into the Malay kerajaan s, first though the creation of the Straits Settlements (SS) in 1826, then the formation of the Federated Malay States (FMS) in 1896 and finally the Unfederated Malay States in 1909, was all part of a process of expansion and centralisation of colonial influence and authority.

British puppets

It was to reach its zenith in the postwar years of the following century with the attempt to form the Malayan Union which would have imposed a centralised administrative bureaucratic system that would have managed all transactions (economic as well as discursive/legislative) under the auspices of colonial-capitalist rule while conceding token autonomy to the traditional Malay rulers isolated in their istana s (palaces).

In the wake of this process of intervention, the rules, norms and laws of Malay society were reduced to empty formulae and impotent rituals, and the rulers themselves were reduced to serving as puppets manipulated by the British dalangs (masterminds).

In reality the Sultans' facade of authority was only two-dimensional and worth as much as the value of the baubles pinned on them by their de facto British rulers.

For the British colonial authorities themselves, the primary motivations behind the initial incursions into Malay territory and Malay affairs were neither missionary nor altruistic. They were instead motivated by the fundamentals of economics and realpolitik.

By the late 19th century, the emerging world order was one where a handful of Western imperial powers were caught up in the political and economic race of Empire. The opening of the Suez canal in 1869 meant that the economic stakes of Empire were getting higher.

Prices for tin and other commodities found in abundance in the Malay peninsula soared. There was also the threat of new encroaching powers that were threatening the already established British, French and Dutch interests in Southeast Asia.

Germany and America were gradually emerging as new powers, as was Japan. (5) In the Malay archipelago, the British colonial authorities and the business community worked hand in hand to ensure that British trade and investment would expand ever outwards, conquering new territories unhindered. The 1871 Anglo-Dutch 'Sumatra Treaty' gave the British business community yet another boost.

Foreign powers

In the Straits Settlements, European (and particularly British) trading agents and entrepreneurs were demanding immediate intervention into the Malay Sultanates lest the situation there got beyond their control and opened the way for other foreign powers to take the advantage.

Their demands to 'civilise' the Malay lands meant, as Andaya puts it, 'the adoption of English law, English government, and, as far as possible, the English way of life'.

But most importantly, the main objective was to secure a total monopoly over the rights and privileges of exploiting the resources in the Malay lands before they could be taken away for good by competing Chinese merchants or any other Western power.

This was particularly true after the announcement of the Selangor Tin Mining concession in 1873, which came at the end of the Selangor Civil War of 1866-1973.(6)

Part 2 will appear on Monday.

End notes

1) Sultan Idris Shah was installed to the throne of Perak in 1887. A few years before that the British colonial forces had deposed the previous monarch, Sultan Abdullah.

Before the time of Sultan Idris, Perak was in a state of conflict as three different contenders for power were engaged in conflict against each other: Sultan Abdullah, Sultan Ismail and Raja Yusuf. Sultan Abdullah was originally supported by the British who attempted to use him as a pliable Malay ruler.

But Sultan Abdullah later chose to rise against the British after his ill-fated decision to sign the Pangkor treaty of 1874. It was this treaty that introduced the Residential system of indirect British rule to the Federated Malay States.

Sultan Abdullah's chieftains revolted against the conditions of the treaty and one of his chieftains, the Maharaja Lela, was held responsible for the killing of the first British resident J W Birch. Maharaja Lela and a few of his followers were caught and hung by the British.

While Sultan Abdullah was sent to exile in Seychelles, Raja Yusuf was made the regent, and eventually Sultan, by the British, despite his unpopularity with the people. In 1887 the regalia of state was passed on to Raja Dris.

He then assumed the title of Sultan Idris Shah. Sultan Idris was very much indebted to the British and was much better disposed towards the 'reforms' brought by British rule.

(2) Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Andaya, ' A History of Malaysia ', MacMillan Press, London, 1982. (pg. 227).

(3) Foremost amongst the more sophisticated colonial architects of indirect rule in Malaya was Frank Swettenham, who rose from the station of colonial resident to become the high commissioner of the Malay states in his career.

His general account of the process of British intervention in the Malay world is aptly summed up in his work British Malaya (1906), where he states that 'when you take the Malay - sultan, raja, chief or simple village head-man - into your confidence, when you consult him on all questions affecting his country, you can carry him with you, secure his keen interest and co-operation, and he will travel quite as fast as is expedient along the path of progress'. (pg. 344).

Contemporary scholarship will show, however, that while he served as colonial resident and high commissioner, Swettenham was less inclined to consult the Malay rulers (much less the Malay masses) about anything.

Andaya and Andaya have noted, for instance, that when he went about creating the Federated Malay States in 1896, Swettenham was curt and economical with the truth and the facts in all his dealings with the Malay rulers.

They conclude that 'it seems fair to say that the implications of this scheme were never fully explained to them (the sultans). The longest discussion that Swettenham had with a Malay ruler took only four hours, and there was no consultation with the leading chiefs and princes'. (Andaya, pp. 182-183).

(4) J M Blaut notes that prior to 1492 there existed all over the world other non-European 'proto-capitalist' trading networks and commercial centres, engaged in intensive exchange of goods, services and ideas that rivaled the patterns of exchange in the West.

It was the Spanish and Portuguese expansion westwards and eastwards respectively that disrupted these non-European networks and redirected the flow of wealth and ideas towards Western Europe and gave it the edge which it fought to conserve and exploit even further in the future.

Thus a diverse array of networks of exchange were violently re-territorialised within another network centred around the metropolitan centres of Latin Europe and eventually Northern Europe.

By the middle of the 19th century, the era of the independent Malay entrepot state was coming to its end, and even Malay kingdoms such as Aceh were feeling the brunt of the weight of competition from British, Dutch and French trading companies. [J M Blaut, ' The Coloniser's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History '. Guildford Press, New York. 1993].

(5) The British colonial authorities in the Straits Settlements were particularly worried about the possible threat of German influence in the Malay states.

In a secret agreement with the Siamese made in 1897, the British agreed not to intervene in the affairs of the four northern Malay states under Siamese suzerainty: Kelantan, Trengganu, Perlis and Kedah, provided that the Siamese government guaranteed that they would not engage in any dealings with Germany or German companies seeking concessions and trade links there.

(6) The Selangor Tin Mining concession was opened at the end of the Selangor civil war. British forces had promoted Tengku Kudin as the dominant ruler in the kingdom, and foreign investment began to trickle in.

The colonial authorities and business community in the Straits Settlements were keen to encourage further British intervention, for fear that the city of London might start selling off concession rights to non-British competitors.