A plural peninsula or Tanah Melayu?
Helen Ting Aug 29, 07 5:45pm
The other day, as I brought a group of Indonesian friends to visit Kuala
Lumpur by train, I explained to them that KTM stood for Keretapi Tanah
Melayu. They were quite amused by the term Tanah Melayu, hearing it for
the
first time in their life.
Tanah Melayu was the term Umno leaders insisted as the name of the
alternative Federation which replaced the short-lived Malayan Union. At
symbolic level, it summarised aptly their nationalist sentiment, that this
is a Malay land. Just when and how the name came about?
It is actually a considerable challenge for historians to find evidence of
local consciousness of the territory as a peninsula in the Asian sources
before the entrenchment of the European influence.
In the 14th century Javanese Desawarnana, the southern part of the
peninsula
was referred to as "the territory of Pahang", while the term Malayu
referred
to Sumatra. The earliest verifiable sources generally designate Malayu to
a
location in Sumatra, the island of Sumatra itself, or a specific kingdom
there.
European cartographers of the 15th and early 16th century generally
labelled
the Peninsula as the Golden Khersonese, probably after Ptolemy's
appellation.
The 17th century Portuguese writer, de Eredia, called it Ujontana. He
explained that throughout the "continental territory of Ujontana (defined
as
covering the Malay Peninsula beneath Junk Ceylon)" the Malay language was
used by the natives who called themselves "Malayos". Until around 1800,
English, French and Dutch maps generally called the Peninsula "Melaka".
From Deli to Tanah Melayu
In early indigenous written sources, the term Tanah Melayu is not
frequently
found, and is not a specific name for the Peninsula. Among the early Malay
texts, the term Tanah Melayu designating Malaya is used almost exclusively
in Hikayat Hang Tuah. It appears to be a general term denoting places
under
the reign or suzerainty of Melaka Kingdom, or where the Melayu lived. In
Hikayat Hang Tuah, the term was used just as Tanah Terengganu, Tanah
Brunai,
Tanah Melaka; Inderapura was regarded as Tanah Melayu while Brunai was
described as negeri asing. At one point, merchants from Melaka were said
to
have changed the name of Deli to Tanah Melayu.
It was only around early 19th century that current usage of the term began
to take hold. The first book which explicitly referred to the peninsula as
"Malay peninsula" was in a map of a book by J Begbie in 1834 entitled The
Malayan Peninsula.
The idea that the Peninsula was "Malay" appears to be an exclusively
English
conception. A British administrator turned academician, Sir Richard
Winstedt, acknowledged that the word "Malaya" for the peninsula was a
European invention.
The first English usage of the term "Malaya" appeared in the writings of
Alexander Hamilton in the 1720s in the form of the phrase "Coast of
Malaya"
in his reference to the ports of Kedah and Perak.
It is notable that, contrary to the current tendency to regard racial
purity
as one indication of ethnic authenticity, the term Malayu was in all
aspects
associated with hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Sejarah Melayu claim
genealogical linkage of the Malayu origins to Indian ancestry and
Alexander
the Great. The practice of tracing royal genealogy to illustrious or even
divine origins was probably inspired by the ancient Indic kingship
tradition.
Hang Tuah as a Melakan Malay admitted famously in Hikayat Hang Tuah that
he
was also a kacukan and not "pure" Malay. Several historical indicators
point
to the possible Chinese ancestry of some of the Malayu class, the maritime
elites of the Archipelago then.
The Malay language was initially referred to more as Jawi, understood as
anything mixed or crossed (just as "anah jahui"), or Bahasa Jawi
An authoritative historian of the region, Anthony Reid, pointed out that
"foreignness" was in fact considered an asset for entrepreneurs in the
region between the 15th to 18th centuries.
A contemporary Portuguese observer, Tomé Pires, wrote that at least 61
different races and communities could be found in 15th century Melaka,
with
84 different tongues being spoken.
The inhabitants of the region exhibited their receptivity and capacity for
adaptation and innovation in the face of stimulation from outside, as well
described by Anthony Reid:
"Chinese technology, weights and coins, Indian financial methods, Islamic
commercial laws, and European technology and capital, all played a major
part in creating the character of Southeast Asian urban and commercial
life
in this period (A.D. 1400-1800)."
'Identity problem'
In a keynote lecture he gave at the Fourth Malaysian Studies Conference in
2004, Prof Reid commented that the current label "Malay" carried by the
peninsula poses an "identity problem". He thought "Plural Peninsula" would
be a more appropriate name for it.
Reid noted that when the English appellation "Malay Peninsula" was
initially
applied to the territory, the term Malay had a much wider meaning. Yet the
meaning of the term "Malay" and "Melayu" had been narrowed down in the
"nationalist century" of the 20th "to become an ethnic adjective,
increasingly used in an ethno-nationalist spirit to exclude the other
long-term inhabitants of the Plural Peninsula, now labelled Thai, Chinese,
Mon-Khmer, Indian or smaller groups".
He lamented the tendency of the 20th century nationalism "to impose the
nation backwards onto a cosmopolitan past, claiming a great trading city
such as Melaka, Brunei, Ayutthaya, Srivijaya or Majapahit as an 'empire',
ancestral to the modern nation-state. In this construct, cosmopolis is
embarrassing, and where it cannot be avoided has to be put down to
aberrant
colonial schemes to divide and rule".
Despite 50 years of political independence from the British, we are yet to
undo this epistemological colonisation.
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