Under British 'guidance' and management of the economy, other major changes in the political and economic culture of the Sultanates were introduced. The plural economic system where different areas of the economy were operated by different ethnic groupings was entrenched even further, until it crystallised into the form of a rationalised economic system which depended upon, and further intensified, ethnic and racial segregation in the Sultanates.

The Chinese monopoly in the tin-mining industry soon gave way to Western (and in particular, British) dominance. Indian coolies were brought in to help develop the railroads and the rubber industry, while the Malays became increasingly relegated to areas of agricultural production and fisheries thanks to the combined economic pressures placed upon them by both Western and Asian economic activity.

The few Malay entrepreneurs and developers who were left (like Datuk Kulup Mohd Yusuf, the Datuk Panglima Kinta (7)) were soon under intense economic pressure thanks to the intensified nature of competition for land and resources.

By the 1890s there were still around 350 privately-owned Malay tin mines in the Kinta valley of Perak alone, but these were soon to be eclipsed by British and Chinese-owned mining operations.

Haunting divisions

To ensure the efficient and peaceful management of this racially-segregated economic system, the British played the policing role of colonial overlords in the Malay states as well, creating Chinese protectorates and Indian and Malay enclaves which kept the different ethnic groupings isolated along vertical cleavages of group-loyalty, while maintaining their patron-client bonds with each ethnic grouping in turn.

All of this helped only to perpetuate the divisions of ethnicity, religion and race between the different communities- something that continues to haunt Malaysian society till today.

So rapid and deep had the extent of intervention grown by the closing stages of the 19th century that after the Federated Malay States were formally created in1896 more administration than ever before was carried out by the Residents in consultation with the Resident-General, without any reference to the Malay Rulers or the State Council in practically all areas.

By the time the Federation Council was created in 1909, it was obvious to all that the balance of power in British-Malay relations had changed irreversibly. And at the investiture of Sultan Idris Shah in 1913 it was the colonial High Commissioner of the FMS, as head of the Federation Council and superior to the Resident-General and all the state Residents, who was conferring the award upon a Malay ruler in his own kingdom (who was obliged to listen and abide by the centrally-dictated 'advice' of the High Commissioner's junior subordinates).

By then the sultans of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang were left with little else to concern themselves with but the finer points of sumptuary laws regarding courtly dress and protocol or to meditate upon the eternal questions of religion and to reflect, in dignified splendour, upon their sorry lot in times that were rapidly changing beyond their control.

Those who could afford to do so whiled away the remaining days of their fading glory by indulging in other imported Western pastimes like polo.(8)

What is wanting in the Malays: The reconstruction of difference as deficiency. Despite the audacity with which it was carried out, the practical mode of colonial intervention and penetration into the Malay lands and their affairs could not be conducted without a feasible raison det're .

Deficient intellect

To this end, colonial scholarship and ethnography were brought into service in order to construct the much-needed stereotypical categories of the natives and Others which would presumably fit neatly into the logic of the plural economy which was being set up.

Such Eurocentric scholarship was not hard to come by in the later half of the 19th century. In the field of Orientalist ethnography as well as colonial fiction and propaganda, the colonial order of knowledge was replete with fictional accounts of savage and backward Malays who were incapable of ruling themselves or lifting themselves out of their sorry state of affairs.

Writing on the Malay Archipelago in 1869, the famous Victorian biologist and admirer of Darwin, AR Wallace, insisted that "the intellect of the Malay race seems rather deficient. They are incapable of anything beyond the simplest combination of ideas and have little taste or energy for the acquirement of knowledge".(9)

Elsewhere, the travel narratives produced by European men and women like Isabella Bird and Anna Leonowens were constantly reminding their readers back home of the degenerate and seemingly irredeemable lot of the Malays and Asians in general.(10)

From the fiction of Joseph Conrad, for whom the Malay and his land was but a dark, negative counterpoint to his romantic ill-fated European heroes, to the prognostications of colonial officials such as Swettenham, Clifford, Windstedt, Hugh Low and others who could only foresee a future for the Malays under the glare of the sun of the British Empire that would never set, the Malays were condemned by the pen of author and bureaucrat alike.

The description offered by Frank Swettenham, Resident and later High Commissioner to the Federated Malay States, sums up this ambiguous Anglo-centric picture of the Malay with all its over-simplifications and contradictions:

"(The Malay) is a Muhammadan and a fatalist, but he is also very superstitious. He is conservative to a degree, is proud and fond of his country and his people, venerates his ancient customs and traditions, fears his Rajas , and has a proper respect for constituted authority.... While he looks askance on all innovations, and will resist their sudden introduction. But if he has time to examine them carefully, he is willing to be convinced of their advantage. ...The Malay is, however, lazy to a degree, is without method or order of any kind, knows no regularity even in his meals and considers time as of no importance'.(11)

Colonial framework

The reconstruction of the Malay race as a disabled one was thus part and parcel of the attempt to incorporate them into the colonial framework of a plural economy that was serving the needs of an international imperial trading network at the time.

In his work The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977), Syed Hussein Alatas has chronicled the development of this discourse on the disabled and wanting Malay in the ideologically-loaded rhetoric of colonialist domination. The very idea of the 'Malay' as the native Other was transgressed and reduced into rigid essentialist stereotypes.

Consequently, the British colonial functionaries and administrators in Malaya conducted their affairs with the Malays and their rulers according to their own decidedly jaundiced understanding of Malay culture, politics and history.

Having relegated the customs and religion of the Malays to another sphere beyond the concerns of colonial politics and economic management, they then set about to devalue the culture, economy, history and socio-political achievements of the Malays as a whole by setting as the universal standard of all progress the development of modern, rationalised industrial-capitalism as it developed in the West. The Malays, invariably, compared disfavourably to these newly-imposed standards.

Thus one of the consequences of the imposition of colonial-capitalist rule was that it brought with it the imposition of a static ideological order of knowledge and power which zealously guarded the privileged status of Europeans as superior rulers, administrators and men of capability and agency before all others.

The fact that this hierarchy of racial characteristics and pre-assigned roles invariably privileged the Europeans before the Malays and all others is aptly summed up by the British traveller Florence Caddy's glib remark: "The Malays will not work, and we in this climate cannot dig, but only direct the digging."(12)

With the development of colonial ethnographic discourse on the Malay native, the fluid, shifting world of pre-colonial Malaya was gradually arrested in every sense: epistemically as well as physically.

The epistemic arrest occurred as the signifier 'Malay' was eventually reduced to essentialist terms, restricting its play and movement. At the same time the physical arrest of movement of the Malays was imposed via a network of restrictive legislation that was introduced in the process of intervention and came to regulate and police the allocation of land rights, property rights, etc.

Prejudicial categorisation

While bureaucratic-administrative instruments like the census had effectively reduced the polysemous overabundance of the signifier 'Malay' by latching it to closed and totalised ethnocentric categories, one of the most striking contrasts between 19th century and early 20th century Malaya is the marked decrease in the geographical mobility of the Malays after the institution of British rule (due in part to new colonial legislation concerning land and property rights and entitlements).

The net effect was two-fold: colonial ethnographic scholarship had reconstructed the Malays as a backward race of agriculturists and feudal serfs, while the newly-imposed colonial legislation and regulations were operating to ensure that the Malay peasantry would be kept in precisely those areas of economic activity that were deemed compatible with their 'natural' Malay character: manual labour, farming and fisheries. This policy was justified in terms of 'protecting' Malay identity and their interests.(13)

To the colonial entrepreneurs and administrators whose job it was to govern and police the racially-segregated plural economy, the imagined differences in ethnic traits and predetermined behavioural patterns made it easier to govern the Asian groupings according to their imagined capabilities and weaknesses.

So pervasive would these prejudicial categorisations of the Malays and other native races become in the long run that the colonial officials themselves would conduct all their subsequent dealings with the Malays, Chinese and Indians on the basis of their own ethnocentric understandings of the Other.

As the colonial entrepreneur and tin-mining expert CG Warnford-Lock puts it in his own boorish terms: "From a labour point of view, there are practically three races, the Malays, the Chinese and the Tamils. By nature, the Malay is an idler, the Chinaman is a thief and the Indian is a drunkard. Yet each, in his special class of work, is both cheap and efficient, when properly supervised."(14)

Forever on the lookout for such 'good' Malays (as well as 'good' Indians and Chinese) who lived up to their own simplistic ethnocentric categorisations of the native Other, the colonial officials of the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States were always keen to ensure that both the epistemic and socio-political boundaries in the tightly regulated and strictly segregated colonial economy would be policed.

The 'proper supervision' of the natives which the likes of Warnford-Lock so heartily recommended would in turn be provided with the aid of both the carrot and the stick, (translated in the colonial context as the dose of opium and the threat of deportation, detention, imprisonment or exile).

However, there was always the odd exception to the rule, and one of the first serious challenges to the newly-constructed colonial order of power and knowledge would come from one of 'Nature's own gentlemen' who would prove to be more than a match for the High Commissioner and his exasperated Residents: Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor.

Part 3 will appear on Saturday

Endnotes

(7) Datuk Kulup Mohd Yusuf, the Datuk Panglima Kinta, is regarded as the Malay Datuk who was responsible for opening up the Kinta valley of Perak for tin-mining operations.

(8) In order to complete their British 'education' the members of the Malay royal families were encouraged to take up the sports and leisurely pastimes of the British as well. The first Malay ruler to take up the game was Sultan Iskandar Shah of Perak, who in turn encouraged the young prince Tengku Abu Bakar of Pahang.

The story goes that the challenge was posed to the young prince by the elder ruler so that the former may prove his worth and thus win the hand of his daughter, the princess Raja Fatimah. Under the supervision of Sultan Iskandar, Tengku Abu Bakar proved to be an able sportsman and eventually succeeded in both mastering the game and winning the hand of his beloved.

Polo was introduced to the Sultanate of Pahang under most difficult conditions, when horses had to be transported over land and sea, in barges, river-boats and through the jungle, before they arrived to their appointed destination.

The royal Pahang polo club was formed in 1926, and it was the first all-Malay team to play against other polo teams made up of Westerners. It line-up included members of the royal family and the aristocracy such as Tengku Abu Bakar, Tengku Bendahara Mahmud, Tengku Abdul Aziz and Encik Zamri, among others.

It is not surprising that members of the Malay royalty in the Federated Malay States could find so much time to spare in such trivial pursuits, for by the turn of the century, increased British influence and intervention in their courts had rendered them practically useless in all other respects.

(9) AR Wallace, The Malay Archipelago , MacMillan and Company, London. 1869 (pg 585).

(10) I have argued elsewhere that the travel narratives produced by many of the female travellers and adventurers who came to Southeast Asia in the 19th century were constructed along the lines of the same racist paradigm which invariably portrayed the Malays (and other Southeast Asians) as degenerate, backward and in need of 'civilisation'.

In this respect, the travelogues of women like Anna Leonowens, Florence Caddy, Isabella Bird and Emily Innes were no different than the ethnographic studies carried out by colonial administrators and racial scientists in Europe. Their narratives display the similar concern with the 'plight' of the natives whose backwardness they claim to deplore but which they can only conceptualised via the spectrum of half-digested theories of racial difference, social Darwinism, and theories of native 'auto-genocide', which were also being employed to describe and explain the extermination and regression of other native peoples in North and Latin America, Africa and Australasia at the time. [See: Farish A Noor. 'Innocents Abroad? The erasure of the questions of Race and Power in contemporary Feminist and Nostalgic Travelogues', Journal of Southeast Asia Research , University of London. Vol 5 No 1, March 1997]

(11) Frank Swettenham, The Real Malay in 'Malay Sketches' . Bodley Head, London. 1895. pp 2-3.

(12) Florence Caddy, To Siam and Malaya (pg 279).

(13) Another interesting outcome of the colonialist's preoccupation with 'protecting' the Malays was the way in which they constructed a logic of differentiation which separated the different ethnic groups according to their sense of 'national belonging' and 'national origins'.

By the 20th century, when the Malayan Civil Service was opened up to allow the entry of non-whites, those who were employed were preferably Malays. This policy of selective employment was justified on the grounds of 'protecting' the Malays, who were by then regarded as the natural, indigenous population of Malaya and who consequently were regarded as having special territorial claims to it. (Despite the fact that the real de facto rulers of Malaya by then were the British colonial powers).

Non-Malays were rejected on the grounds that they were not 'naturally' entitled to such claims. Thus the Malayan Civil Service was yet another extension to the ideological apparatus of colonial capitalism, a means of allowing the native population to police and monitor their own identities. Behind the pro-Malay policy of preferment also lay the belief in the essential link between the Malays and their place of belonging.

(14) CG Warnford-Lock, Mining in Malaya for Gold and Tin . Crowther and Goodman. London. 1907. (pp 31-32).