Historians & Their Discipline: The Call of Southeast Asian History

How I got into Malaysian History

How I got into Malaysian History by CHEAH BOON KHENG Southeast Asian history was a relatively new area of study in the 1960s when I entered university to study. It was only during World War II that the idea of ‘Southeast Asia’ as a region developed, more for military purposes as a strategic zone of operations, but the idea and the term caught on and became popular after the war. The earliest centres of learning specializing in Southeast Asia were in the metropolises of colonial empires, especially the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and Leiden University in Holland. Initially they offered courses to administrative cadets and junior officials who were to embark on a career in the colonial service, but gradually they became well known centres of scholarship and research. Former colonial officials known for their knowledge of history and cultures of the peoples in the colonial territories they had served and who possessed the requisite languages of the native peoples like R.O. Winstedt and Victor Purcell joined university institutions on retirement. Both had been prolific writers who had started publishing while they were in the colonial service. Later on, as Southeast Asia became a ‘hot spot’in world politics, especially after the Vietnam War, interest in Southeast Asian studies spread further and led to the opening up of other centres of Southeast Asian history in the US, in Australia, and in Europe. But in Asia Southeast Asian history as an area study developed rather slowly largely as there were fewer centres of learning specializing in Southeast Asian countries. I shall start by recounting how I became interested in studying history, and later Southeast Asian history. I first studied at a Chinese primary school for two years in Fraser’s Hill (in rural Pahang state), where my father was posted as a civil servant, and then at an English-medium Christian mission-run school in downtown war-ravaged Kuala Lumpur. It was at the age of 12 at this second school, where my interest in history was initially kindled. S.T. Ratnam, a young Malaysian-Indian, was a temporary history teacher. He was among the first batch of graduates of the history department at the newly established University of Malaya in Singapore. He later took up a career in the Singapore civil service. He taught us history deductively as a moral narrative of the “great men” in the history textbooks we used. 27 It was much later in adult life that I learnt that history served many other interests than teaching moral lessons. At secondary school, I learnt the history of the British Empire, the ‘heroic’ piratical adventures of Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, the search of Europeans for the NorthWest Passage, the founding of the new colonies in the U.S. and Canada, and British rule in India, Malaya and Borneo.1 These books glorified the might and influence of Britain and explained how through conquests she acquired her large empire. It was only in 1956 my last year in school, a year before Merdeka (Independence), that the Ministry of Education announced the introduction of a new Malayan history syllabus based on R.O. Winstedt’s standard account of Malayan history. Apart from two chapters which gave what could be said to be indigenous roles in Malaya’s pre-history and in the Malay empire of Melaka, the remaining chapters of his book reflected a truly Euro-centric bias: “The Portuguese period,” “English Pioneers”, “The Dutch East India Company,” and “The East India Company’s Relations with Siam and the Northern Malay States”.2 In 1957 I went out to work as a reporter on the British-owned English-language newspaper, The Straits Times, in Singapore. After first being assigned to a number of ‘beats’, I ended up doing the labour ‘beat’ for a long stretch. This involved covering trade unions, industrial disputes, labour strikes and the arbitration courts. It was around this time that unionization was gaining momentum. The journalists in the different media groups in Singapore decided to form a national union of their own. I was elected the union’s first treasurer as well as the English-language editor of its monthly newspaper. This turned out to be a baptism of fire. I became politically conscious, got interested in trade unionism and socialism , and began reading widely on these subjects, including books on labour history by British socialist writers like Beatrice Webb, G.D.H. Cole and R...