COMMENT War is too serious a matter to be entrusted to military men, French statesman George Clemenceau famously observed.

Well, to paraphrase Clemenceau, it seems history in Malaysia has become far too grave a matter to be left to the historians.

Three of the latter tribe held forth on this topic - an increasingly contentious one these days - at a panel discussion at Universiti Malaya yesterday on the supposed inadequacies of the history syllabus for secondary schools in the country.

But if a small but eager knot of listeners who showed up expected to gain a measure of certainty that present-day history syllabus is indeed skewed to serve a political agenda, they had to depart a trifle disappointed.

NONE That was not because the speakers - the renowned Professor Khoo Kay Kim, the redoubtable A Thambirajah, and the lively Dr Ranjit Singh Malhi - were inadequate to the topic proposed, but because the learned Khoo, who spoke first, took a highly interesting but ultimately self-defeating tack.

Speaking without notes - the sure mark of a master but, in his case, not one acutely conscious of the need for boundaries - Khoo's approach is that his subject's centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

A historian who begins by declaiming that history is the mother of all disciplines because everything that is anything has to have a history otherwise the subject cannot be on the table for discussion threatens you with a discourse that is Himalayan in scope, with every peak attained turning out to be a chimera.

No doubt, that tack has its attractions but it also involves the risk of scatter and sprawl with a possible collapse into mere miscellany.

Making history sit up and breathe

Fortunately, that didn't happen mainly because Khoo is a prolific dispenser of the titillating tidbit which can make history sit up and breathe, a not inconsiderable achievement given the lament of all three speakers that most Malaysians view history as a boring subject when it manifestly is not.

Someone who discloses that the reason one of the Malaysian states (Kelantan) has a suffix similar to the ones that punctuate the names of central Asian republics is traceable to Pathans having settled in the state long ago can't help but snare your attention.

khoo kay kim anti auku gma 141006 pointing But it is one thing being a profuse assembler of the recondite; it's another to have the ability to pull the disparate strands into a coherent thesis.

Khoo appeared chary of doing the latter, being content to press the eminently worthy suggestion that Malaysians must read more history so that they will comprehend more and therefore, he implies, contend less.

Clearly, Khoo had done much reading, even up to burrowing in the dusty stacks of archival material in libraries in Tamil Nadu (this, presumably, on British colonial policy on indentured labour), but if all that learning does not yield in distilled conclusions, it's much ado - interesting, albeit - over, what must remain, inconsequential.

All ethnic groups have contributed

Khoo's approach differed from Thambirajah's, a historian whose earnestness is so palpable it veritably spills out of him.

Thambirajah offered the view that Malaysian history is a multicultural achievement to which all ethnic groups have contributed - a hypothesis with which only charlatans and mountebanks would quarrel.

He agreed that present-day history textbooks slight the contributions of the many communities in Malaysia to the country's evolution and represent a wasted opportunity for the development of a multicultural nation in which intellectual discourse would thrive on humanistic premises.

If earnestness can win arguments, Thambirajah would be the Malaysian historian of choice because he deeply feels that there is so much that waits to be made known about every ethnic group's contribution to our history that the effect of Malaysians knowing this truth would be interracial peace, which, he implied, is the purgation of xenophobic emotions.

Thambirajah was touching in his faith that the act of moral appreciation of every community's contributions would in itself overcome barriers of race and religion. Hence history textbooks that convey this multicultural reality would be a sine qua non for the building of a multicultural nation.

History texts must be factually accurate

Ranjit Malhi dispensed with the erudition of his fellow panelists - "I'd like to be known as a student of history more than a historian" - and came straight to the point.

NONE He said that if history is to be a compulsory subject for secondary school students from 2013, as the Education Ministry plans, history textbooks have to factually accurate, generally objective, be well balanced, devoid of value judgments and promote critical thinking.

Apparently, present-day texts fail these canons of historiography. He held that the texts, in parts, represent crass ethnic and religious triumphalism, probably the worst sin of history writing.

By the end of the evening's forum, it was quite clear that a satisfactory resolution of the current controversy over secondary school history textbooks would entail that these texts be resourced by Khoo Kay Kim, re-premised by A Thambirajah and vetted by Ranjit Malhi. Or, at least, by students of history of their ilk.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.