Introduction
Radicals as History
âş The night of 21 June 2010 was an unusual and memorable one for many Malaysians. For many hours, a large crowd of onlookers had gathered in the darkness to watch bulldozers demolish a 300-meter wall of Kuala Lumpurâs century-old Pudu Prison. The wall was adorned with what was reportedly the worldâs longest mural, which had been painted by former inmates of the prison. The onlookersâ attempts to salvage pieces of the rubble as souvenirs bore testimony to the symbolic importance of one of the oldest colonial buildings in Malaysiaâs capital city. In fact, in the weeks leading up to the day of demolition, battle lines were drawn between developers and conservationists advocating diametrically opposed views of the value of the prison. Real estate speculators and urban planners argued that the removal of the complex was necessary to make way for commercial buildings and hotels, as well as to solve traffic problems in the area. All of these efforts are part of Kuala Lumpurâs ongoing project to transform itself into a financial hub and a model world city that will grow out of its own past.1
These arguments for the complete removal of the prison from the city landscape were met with objections, primarily from former radicals who were once political prisoners and from heritage activists who contended that Pudu Prison was one of Malaysiaâs historical landmarks. Granted, the prison confined and hanged criminals and drug offenders; but to pull down a building that was closely associated with the countryâs independence movement would erase the physical reminder of some of the most important people and events of Malaysiaâs heritage and nationhood.2 The eventual destruction of Pudu Prison after weeks of protests indicates that Malaysia is a nation that has yet to come to terms with its colonial inheritance. Moreover, the controversy surrounding the prisonâs destruction reveals the divisions in public opinion in Malaysia today between those who wish to commemorate and celebrate the âradicalsâ versus those who might prefer that they be forgotten.
Not all radicals were makers of history, just as those who made history were not all radicals. In the pages that follow, I aim to tell the story of a group of radical Malay men and women in colonial Malaya who once formed part of the inmate population of Pudu Prison. These Malay radicals were people from ordinary social backgrounds who chose to oppose foreign rule of their homeland, knowing full well that by embarking on this path of resistance, they risked imprisonment or death. Their ranks included teachers, journalists, intellectuals, housewives, peasants, preachers, and youths. They formed, led, and contributed to the founding of political parties, grassroots organizations, unions, newspapers, periodicals, and schools that spread their ideas nationwide in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when colonialism was at its height and evident in all areas of life in their country. But when their efforts to uproot foreign dominance faltered in the face of the sanctions the state imposed upon them, some of these radicals chose to take up arms, while others engaged in aggressive protests to uphold their rights. Some died fighting to regain their nationâs liberty. Hundreds were incarcerated and lived to resist colonialism until their country attained its independence in August 1957. All of these Malay radicals were devoted to becoming free men and to claiming their right to be treated as equals in a world riddled with prejudice and contradictions.
figure 1 Aerial view of Pudu Prison, Kuala Lumpur, prior to its complete demolition, 20 December 2011
This book takes a different path from previous influential treatments of the Malay radicals.3 It seeks to rescue the Malay radicals from the shadows of nationalist scholarship, ethnic and regional parochialisms, the moral orthodoxies of our time, and intellectual reification, by presenting them as neither heroes nor villains, but as productive people in history.4 That is to say, the Malay radicals were essentially a creative, constructive, and avant-garde constituent of Malayan life. They were men and women who responded to the blatant injustices of colonial rule and chose to stand up to it. In speaking truth to power and mobilizing their fellow men in the cause of oppositional politics and forms of disobedience, they helped lay bare the devices of colonialism. Their most enduring contributions rest with the creation of unexplored spaces and methods of resistance and the development of new vocabularies of liberation and freedom.
I do not seek to offer another straightforward collective biography of the Malay radicals. Such narratives have already been written with varying degrees of detail and accuracy. My objective is to bring to light the less charted and unanalyzed terrain of the âexperienceâ of becoming and being radicalâthe radical experience, so to speak. Here, I am indebted to the work of Paul Cohen on the Boxer Rebellion in China. Cohen differentiates the âexperienced pastâ from the âhistorically constructed past,â which consists primarily of a series of events that explains the logic behind human actions. In his words,
the past as actually lived, in short, consists of a continuum of different kinds of experience, at one end of which are experiences that, in terms of a given set of variables, are central, key, memorable, defining, and at the other end, experiences, often highly repetitive, that are of a more auxiliary or supportive sort. Another property of the lived past, one that profoundly colors all experience, is that it is outcome-blind.5
Any scholar who seeks to comprehend experiences as they were lived, according to Cohen, must be sensitive to the biographical consciousness, ideas, and motivations of the historical actors, to contingencies that were never realized, to emotions and anxieties, and to the limitations brought about by the realities of culture, society, and geography. The focus is on providing a rich and thick description of feelings and thoughts, motives and practices, adaptations and responses across space and time; and to tease out commonalities among them, rather than to narrate, in a precise manner, events and incidents. This, according to Cohen, is the task of an âethnographic historian.â6
While agreeing with many aspects of Cohenâs delineation and interpretation of the experienced past, I find the drawing of a clear binary between that past and the one that is historically constructed to be problematic. Alternatively, it is my contention that the combination of the experienced and the historical, and the diachronic as well as the synchronic, can shed better light on the relationship between actors and contexts. To further this argument, I maintain that the radicals and their experiences in colonial Malaya can be understood in a more nuanced way by interrogating them alongside evolving local and global circumstances and by analyzing them through the lenses of a set of overarching and interconnected mobilizing concepts that were internalized, lived, and utilized in the course of their activism. I use the term mobilizing concepts to refer to a set of ideas, visions, and notions that the radicals used to reason and justify their advent, as thinking tools for them to make sense of the structures of domination inherent within their time and place, and as sources of motivation to induce them to surmount various challenges and problems that stood in their way. Mobilizing concepts, in that sense, are weapons and armor that the radicals employed to organize, strategize, protect, and consolidate themselves when menaced with the tentacles of the colonial state as they embarked upon the agonizing path toward independence.
The mobilizing concepts that I am concerned with are warisan (heritage), cita-cita perjuangan (spirit and the ambitions of struggle), kesedaran (consciousness), kesatuan (unity), kebangsaan (nationalism), Melayu Raya (a union of Singapore, Malaya, and Indonesia), and merdeka (freedom). These mobilizing concepts were born out of the confluence of the personal, social, structural, and ideational factors that shaped the Malay radicals. These processes included the onset of colonial rule, the memories of past struggles of local heroes, the alienation wrought by capitalism, the exposure to modern education and foreign migrants, and the influence of Islamic revivalism, third-world nationalism, and socialism. Other factors included the awareness of the excesses of traditional norms, the suffering that resulted from punitive actions by the colonial authorities, and rejection by the society at large for having radical visions and dreams. An ensemble rather than separate entities, these factors provided the social, political, and intellectual contexts that gave birth and meaning to these mobilizing concepts.
These mobilizing concepts pervade the writings and discourses of the radicals. They were manifested in the form of programs and activities, and were communicated to the masses from the birth of the Malay radicalist movement up to the eve of Malaysian independence and beyond. By analyzing the radical experience chronologically through the lenses of these mobilizing concepts and scrutinizing the ways in which these frames of reference were utilized and implemented, one may well break down the dichotomies of personal/political, local/global, colonized/colonizer, and religious/secular.7 In doing so, one can uncover new pathways and insights into the ways in which radical activists appropriated ideas and practices that came from both within and without their own societies.
One mobilizing concept that helps us to interrogate these dichotomies further is warisan, which means heritage. Warisan includes the objects, events, and ideas that have been handed down from generation to generation. The object that Malay radicals sought to recover was Melayu Rayaâa union of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This was an âimaginative geographyâ that inflected the colonialistsâ representations of space and territory in the Malay world.8
The Malay radicals saw the era of the precolonial Malay kingdoms as the golden age of Malay civilization. Like the memories of great wars and upheavals that become part and parcel of a communityâs heritage, warisan includes events that were remembered through oral tradition and folklore. This notion of the warisan emphasizes the failed wars against foreign rulers exemplified in the battles fought by Datoâ Bahaman, Dol Said, and Toâ Janggut, whose struggles were traced all the way back to prominent rulers of the Islamic world.
Yet while memories of these events evoked a sense of loss and defeat among the radicals, they also had the opposite effect of inspiring them to think through their perceptions of the past and to propound new ideas about the role of Islam and the relevance of new ideologies, of breaking the barrier between the religious and the secular. It is here that the mobilizing concept of cita-cita perjuangan (spirit and the ambitions of struggle) was an important core of the radical experience. As the vanguard of the dispossessed rakyat (commoners), the radicals saw themselves as representing the aspirations and concerns of the common folk. They were aware, however, that there was no turning back to the precolonial past. In charting their visions and aspirations for their nationâs future, the Malay radicals formulated the ideas of the kebangsaan (nationalism). Kebangsaan is a galvanizing identity that would aid in the resistance against the ills of colonialism and capitalism. Recognizing the limitations of the concept of bangsa (race), the Malay radicals fused the idea of Malay nationhood with Islam and socialism. The creative welding of socialist ideals with folk mythologies, while drawing from Islamic traditions and Western currents of thought, testifies to the fact that the Malay radicals were deeply aware of a variety of streams of thought beyond their own local context, redacting and presenting these ideas in ways that made them applicable for their own projects of resistance and mobilization.9
It follows, then, that the story of the radicals is also a story of contacts, interactions, and exchanges between the cultures of the colonized and the colonizers, rather than just a case of mutual antagonism between one another. Indeed, it was the coming of colonialism that brought about kesedaran (consciousness) among the Malay radicals. The sense that society was being stifled by the machinations of colonialism and its collaborators was critical to the radicalist experience. This was, ironically, a by-product of the colonial situation. But what were the factors that contributed to this consciousness? All of the radicals maintained that there was no single route to this. At the level of the family, the fact of being raised ...
