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The law sharpens the mind and narrows it, observed Edmund Burke. The first part is obvious enough. Laws can be complicated and arcane. Special skills are required for their comprehension.

The second part of the Burkean aphorism may be harder to perceive but is no less real: while the law can begin in principles, it ends in interests, a hyper-arena where a strife of interests can be disguised as a contest of principles, as the drama of who won in the 2000 US presidential elections ramified into a judicial issue on which the highest court in the land finally and unsatisfactorily pronounced.

The law has a dark side and a light side; the former pushes even as the latter pulls. Oscillations between both are like the swing of the chain that dangles a hypnotist's watch. Your attention has to fasten on the timepiece, not the swing.

Otherwise, you could get addled enough to fail the test of logic devised by Lewis Carroll, logician and author of Alice in Wonderland . Carroll showed how to derive the conclusion that "babies cannot manage crocodiles" from three premises:

1. Babies are illogical.

2. Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

3. Illogical persons are despised.

The syllogism here tends to the conclusion that babies and crocodiles are to be despised. That way you fail Carroll's test.

Theory of knowledge

A wide-ranging conversation with Dominic J Puthucheary can suggest that while the law has hewed this constitutional scribe's mind to a fine edge, it has not narrowed it; and while the talk can ricochet from one topic to another, its eclecticism is held within a fairly tight logical structure.

"I have often felt that you have to be a generalist first, then a specialist and then you can generalise," he said about his theory of knowledge.

It was possibly forged with a little help from his wife, Savithri, a medical doctor who specialises in microbiology and teaches at Universiti Malaya. Doctors generally view themselves as realists who disdain theorists and philosophers.

But the history of medical science would show that progress was made only after the manifestations of sickness were systematised in a way that allowed physicians to know they were dealing with the same problem does this patient with rash and fever have the same disease as that patient with rash and fever?

And that could not come about until a theory of medicine developed that emphasised and unified actual symptoms displayed by a sick person.

In sum, empirical observation begat doctrinal coherence which in turn engendered a composite professionalism: empiricist to specialist to polymath.

Puthucheary's career flight path resembles his theory of knowing. He began his political education while active in trade unions in Singapore in the mid-1950s, shuttling between the vying anti-colonial circles of left and right, taking stock of the men and ideas he encountered in the roiling conditions caused by contraction to Britain's imperial stature, the result of pressure by its restive subjects and its own financial strains.

Puthucheary's elder brother, James, and friend, A Samad Ismail, were mentors on the left of the anti-colonial movement; Lee Kuan Yew was a paladin on the fringes of the left, really someone of amorphous political belief but with an eye firmly fixed on the main chance.

Dominic, more than a decade junior in age, moved between the steadily coalescing and contesting forces of left and right, with the ease of a young man in whom an operating political philosophy had not, as yet, congealed.

Samad's Malay nationalism

When it did, the younger Puthucheary threw his lot in with the left-wing Barisan Sosialis, the sizeable group that broke away from the rump People's Action Party (PAP) led by Lee. It was a parting that was to prove fateful to several players in the drama of Singapore's emergence from colonial rule, its subsequent merger with Malaysia and separation; and in the initial period of its rise to prosperity.

Fateful not just to the fortunes of several activists, who would suffer political detention for their beliefs (Dominic was detained under the Internal Security Act for a year in the early 1960s) but also to the beliefs that animated the politically conscious in the formative years of Malaya's emergence from the colonial yoke.

"Those years were of crucial importance to the way things turned out for Malaysia," mused Puthucheary, reflecting on the current situation in the country through the prism of his knowledge of those times. He will combine personal experience of that period with research and interviews for a doctoral dissertation on the subject of Malay nationalism, to be submitted to the Queensland University of Technology.

Puthucheary, now 67, contends that had the particular strand of Malay nationalism, espoused by Samad, succeeded in reaching a critical mass, the political evolution of this part of Southeast Asia would have been different.

An intended byproduct of his doctoral thesis is a biography of Samad, in Puthucheary's view, the pivotal player during the critical years (1945 to 1950) of the rise of Malay nationalism with its potential to subsume all other ethnically-driven aspirations of the diverse peoples of Malaya.

"The still unresolved question in Malaysia today is the issue of nationalism which is inextricably bound up with the issue of Malay nationalism," asserted Puthucheary. "It was the issue of Malay nationalism that energised the post-war Malayan struggle against British colonialism. That struggle in the five years after World War II was defined by the strand of Malay nationalism represented by Samad Ismail."

Puthucheary said that strand took its inspiration from the leading lights of the anti-colonial movements in the rest of Asia. "There was nothing ethnocentric about it," he asserted.

Was it a Trojan horse for the communists? Puthucheary replied by way of anecdote: "I used to visit Samad and James at their haunts in the Utusan Melayu and at the Socialist Club in the [then] University of Malaya and then see Lee Kuan Yew. On one occasion, after a round of visits, Harry (Kuan Yew) asked me if I had become a communist because of my rapport with the other side. I said, 'Come on, Harry, you know I'm not communist.' 'That's politics, Dom!' was the tart reply."

Daim the 'Muscles'

Puthucheary said Samad's brand of nationalism was left-wing and libertarian. "It had the potential to reach a critical mass in its following because Samad had the ability to win the support of the Chinese working classes but three forces feared the nascent movement and combined to defeat it," he opined.

The British colonialists, Malay aristocracy and Chinese mercantile interests were inimical to the thrust of ideas and forces converging around Samad, according to Puthucheary.

He said the defeat and dispersal of the Samad Ismail brand of Malay nationalism through ISA detentions of its critical votaries in three spells one in the early 1950s, another in the early 1960s, and a third in the mid-1970s emasculated the movement.

Briefly, in the early 1970s, the ideas and individuals that motored the movement enjoyed hopes of a resurgence in the premiership of Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, James Puthucheary, an economist before plunging into law practice in Kuala Lumpur, was sought out for his views on how to transform the economic plight of the Malay Malaysians.

One seeker of his nostrums was Daim Zainuddin, lawyer and corporate parvenu, who beat the path to James's digs at prominent legal firm, Skrine & Co.

Daim was tagged "Muscles" ("You are 'Muscles' and I'm the brains," kidded the elder Puthucheary) as he probed James, a brilliant former student of political economy, for ideas on how to better the economic plight of the Malay Malaysians. The raft of measures that savoured of state intervention in the corporate sphere, introduced from 1972 onwards, for Malay upliftment were emanations of James Puthucheary's ideas on political economy. It was Samad who steered the seekers towards James's door.

Sucked into ISA vortex

However, those days in vogue proved tragically brief. Factional strife within Umno in the mid-1970s, following Tun Razak's unexpected death, saw other players, however distant from the machinations of party apparatchiks, sucked into its vortex.

Again, the sweeping powers of detention conferred by the baleful ISA proved useful to the victors in a power play that arose from personality conflict rather than ideological differences.

The brothers Puthucheary (Dominic had started practice at Skrine in the late 1960s after law studies in London) were saved from being swept into the detentive dragnet by the friendship of a former senior partner in Skrine, Hussein Onn, who happened to be prime minister.

Tun Hussein was a man of rectitude but new to the wheeling and dealing of politics, the arts of subterfuge by which amoral politicians lever murky circumstance to serve vaulting ambition.

James, saved by fortuitous friendship, grieved at the fate of the now thrice-detained Samad. On St John's Island off Singapore in the early 1950s, under detention by the British colonial authorities, a crucial intervention by Samad saved James from being stabbed in an intramural feud among detainees.

Dominic Puthucheary, reprieved by friendship, hunkered down in pursuit of the law at Skrine, favouring constitutional briefs. But a quiet life in the law was not an enduring option.

To the older (by 12 years) James, it was. James' was the more markedly liberal imagination, the sort that is always surprised by the slings and arrows of fortune. Disillusionment and fatigue follow hard upon surprise. So law became an anodyne to James.

Gerakan's quest

For Dominic, however, the arena continued to beckon. In 1984 he joined Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia (Gerakan), in speculative quest of a strand of nationalism he felt was reminiscent of what he had seen and liked in a now rapidly receding past.

He became vice-president of Gerakan but after only one term as member of Parliament for Nibong Tebal in Penang (1990-95), Dominic quit Gerakan.

"In their quest for the Chinese vote they felt they had to beat out the MCA in championing the race's interests," he said with no trace of regret that he had been wrong about Gerakan's 'nationalism'.

Quite unlike James', Dominic's worldview is leavened with the realism that enables a liberal to act even when the scent of utopia is not in the air. That was why even after he withdrew from Gerakan, to plunge even deeper into law, he continued to be deeply interested in that concept of a nationalism (Samad Ismail's) that had been rendered weak by time and untoward fate.

Furthermore, the happenings in the judicial arena in Malaysia in recent years have made Dominic rueful over the concept's defeat.

"The judiciary is rife with plumbers," he wryly observed about a branch of Malaysian institutional life whose deterioration he traces to the defeat of that concept of nationalism that he claimed was large enough to embrace tris juridica , the Latin term that connotes separation of powers, the nub of constitutional government.

The death of James in April 2000 quickened Dominic's quest for resuscitation of that concept. Hence the effort at a doctoral study of the subject and a biography of Samad Ismail, whom Dominic believes was the concept's representative man, one who embodied the consciousness of that epoch, who perceived its stirrings in fresh lights and new connections, who displayed unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.

Prologue to the future

Dominic was unmoved by the irony that both Samad and James, though writers themselves, penned little about their experiences. "They were men of spontaneity who didn't want to write about those struggles for fear of self-inflation or, the obverse side of the coin, denigration of others," he explained.

Was Dominic aware that his sympathy for them could illumine as well as distort? Will he try to portray them in all their valour and in all their frailty? He answered: "That ought to be the way."

Obviously, for Dominic Joseph Puthucheary, examination of a certain slice of Malaysian history is a necessary prologue to a future hopefully different to the tawdry present a time rife with failures of Lewis Carroll's test of logic. Puthucheary's doctoral study and his planned biography of Samad are a small contribution towards keeping the crocodiles in check.

J TERENCE NETTO is a journalist of nearly 30 years' experience consisting of spells spent in the mainstream papers interspersed with bouts of freelancing. All that time he found that the main attraction in journalism is that it puts you in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.