Radicals: Resistance and protest in colonial Malaya by Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied (review)

In this new work, Khairudin Aljunied, who has written prolifically about the history of Malays and colonialism in British Malaya (the name for the British colonies and Malay states under British colonial influence in present-day Southeast Asia before 1963), tells “the story of a group of radical Malay men and women in colonial Malaya… from ordinary social backgrounds who chose to oppose foreign rule of their homeland” (5). This work adds to a series of recent new histories in Malaysia and Singapore that recover the voices and contributions of non-state, non-elite actors whose stories have been neglected or marginalized by colonial, nationalist or revisionist historiography.

The history of the “Malay Left,” as these Malay radicals were also termed, is not unexplored, as Aljunied acknowledges (5). Nevertheless, he contributes an ethnographic account of the sentiments, aspirations and ideas that motivated their activism through close readings of the radicals’ memoirs and writings. In particular, he highlights the “mobilizing concepts” that animated the radicals, and through which the radicals mobilized others in Malayan society, to resist and critique colonial rule (6). These concepts include: 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). Aljunied convincingly argues that these radicals were autonomous actors who “showed creative agency and intellectual acuity in devising and sustaining their own anticolonial campaigns” (192), and helped stimulate political, educational, and cultural change, as well as radical strands of nationalism in Malaya.

In his first two chapters, Aljunied contextualizes the emergence and growth of the Malay radicalist movement within the political, social, technological and economic developments in early twentieth-century Malaya that politicized the radicals, especially the Great Depression of the 1930s. He also traces the movement’s local and transnational influences: it drew ideas and inspiration from Islamic traditions, Western intellectual currents, folk mythologies, socialist ideals and other youth-led anti-colonial movements around the world. Subsequent chapters recount the radicals’ struggles against the colonial regime until the early 1950s. These include a brief period of collaboration with the Japanese occupying forces in pursuit of their anticolonial agenda (Chapter Three), and a brief period of political and ideological “ferment and experimentation” after the end of the Japanese Occupation, where the movement split and splintered into different parties and organizations as various groups of radicals pursued different visions and strategies, or in some cases, shed their radicalism altogether (Chapters Four and Five). Chapter Six interestingly depicts the anti-colonial struggle played out on the smaller stage of the prison where the radicals were incarcerated.

Though Aljunied also seeks to tell a story “of contacts, interactions, and exchanges between the cultures of the colonized and the colonizers” (6), this effort is submerged by a narrative that focuses on recounting the ideas, actions, and fates of the radicals. Scholars interested in the cultural dimensions of British colonialism, and in examining the intersection between race and imperialism, will nonetheless be interested in how the radicalist movement partly grew out of the efforts of the British to restructure traditional educational institutions and create more avenues for education and local civic participation in Malaya, so as to fulfil their “civilizing mission” (31–34). These educated Malays creatively adapted traditions and concepts from a variety of sources, and subverted colonial knowledges and categories as well, to articulate new visions of Malay pasts and futures (34). In a later chapter, Aljunied also provides a relevant discussion on how key Malay radical thinkers like Burhanuddin Al-Helmy critiqued the myth of the lazy Malays (126) that became the ideological foundation of colonial racial hierarchies in Malaya.

Feminist historians of colonialism may be particularly interested in Chapter Five, in which Aljunied uncovers the little-known story of the Angkatan Wanita Sefar (AWAS), an organization of Malay radical women from peasant or working-class backgrounds (137–60). Not only did they contend with colonial discourses that painted the Malays as racial inferiors, but...