The Peasant Robbers of Kedah 1900–1929: Historical and Folk Perceptions ed. by Cheah Boon Kheng (review)

The second edition of this book is a reprint of the original (published in 1988 by Oxford University Press, Singapore), with the addition of Appendix 5 entitled ‘Robin Hood and Social Banditry: Myth and Historical Society’. In the preface the author expresses his appreciation to Mansor bin Abdullah whom he met in 2006. Mansor is the author of Panglima Nayan: Robin Hood Malaya (Penang: Sinaran, 1960), a small book that the author came across in 1975 in the Australian National University library in Canberra. While Hobsbawm’s Bandits ignited his interest in undertaking research on the topic, it was Mansor’s Panglima Nayan that whetted his curiosity about whether the Nayan story was true, a mere invention of Mansor or taken from an oral tradition. Myriad questions from this book led Dr Cheah to undertake further research to re-examine Hobsbawm’s views and models on social banditry.

The much-respected British historian E. J. Hobsbawm was the first scholar to take up the study of bandit myths in connection with peasant protests. Following the Marxist interpretation, Hobsbawm sees banditry as a universal phenomenon that took place in any society that experienced phases of change from tribal organization and kingship to modern capitalist and industrial society. Initially, Hobsbawm regarded social bandits as the ‘Robin Hoods’ of particular communities and labelled them peasant rebels. To Hobsbawm, social bandits are peasant outlaws who robbed the rich to help the poor. Subsequently they became enemies of the local lords and the state. However, in 1981 Hobsbawm changed his position with the revised edition of Bandits. He discovered that not all cases that he had studied supported the original theory and he finally accepted the idea that social bandits were inseparable from the living myth surrounding them.

Dr Cheah must be credited as the first historian to study peasant banditry in Malaysia. Using the ‘history from below’ approach, he directed his meticulous attention to problems of crime along the Kedah–Siam border, focusing on the Kedah rural peasants as the main actors, not the elite. The Kedah–Siam border, dubbed as ‘one of the most lawless and insecure district in the peninsula’, provided the ideal conditions for the emergence of banditry. Cattle thefts, gang robbery and other forms of violence that were widespread along the Kedah–Siam border were closely related to the lack of control from the state authority, the weak police presence at the frontier and the ease with which criminals could cross the border to evade arrest, as well as the socioeconomic underdevelopment prevalent in the southern provinces of Thailand. As a result, Kedah found it difficult to control this problem. In this study Dr Cheah makes it clear that he accepts the main features of the banditry based on myths, songs and ballads. From other sources, like the colonial records, literary sources and interviews with relatives of the bandits or former bandits, he finds that social banditry does not necessarily jive with historical reality. Rather, he opines it could be the invention of peasants who saw bandits as heroes. In the case of Kedah, Dr Cheah comes to a conclusion that the bandit myth could serve myriad purposes and was used by both the peasants and British officials for their individual purposes. In rural Kedah’s peasant society, bandits such as Nayan and Salleh Tui have been romanticized as heroes in songs, poems and dramas. The position of Nayan, a legend in the oral tradition of the Malay peasants in central Kedah, is similar to Robin Hood as he, too, robbed the rich to help the poor. But in the case of other bandits, Cheah discovers that it is possible that myths were invented by the peasants as a form of protest to the state authority, the rich and the powerful. The state authority, too, had utilized the bandit myth for its own ends. For instance, the state was...