Historians & Their Discipline: The Call of Southeast Asian History

An Amateur Historian

An Amateur Historian By JOHN GULLICK Ibecame involved in Malayan history by the unforeseen effects of some incidents in my working life during and just after the war. Although fortuitous it has been a fortunate connection for me, as it has widened my view of Malaya, given me an occupation extending into old age and brought friendships that I should not otherwise have made. The beginning was somewhat stressful. At the end of six years’ (1940–46) of military service I came to Malaya with the British Military Administration. In Negri Sembilan making a treaty requires the participation of no less than six ‘rulers’, including the four Undang (ruling chiefs) of major districts. One of them had died just before our arrival, and another died at the end of 1945 – both deaths were from natural causes and terminated a tenure of office of 40-50 years. In the first case it was necessary to secure the election of a successor within weeks (par for the course in a Negri Sembilan election is about a year) so that he might be in office to sign, with the other rulers, the Malayan Union treaty proffered by Sir Harold MacMichael. I had to oversee both elections and this involved a crash course in local history since there was no one alive who could testify to the conduct of the last election. R J Wilkinson, Resident of Negri Sembilan c. 1910, had to deal with similar problems and wrote of ‘attempts to tamper with historical truth…sometimes a mere hiding of evidence’, the destruction of inconvenient documents and the forgery of others.1 It may be asked why British officials, excluded by treaty from intervention in matters of ‘Malay custom’ (an imprecise concept) should be concerned with the election of holders of traditional office under rules of Malay custom. The answer is that the colonial state government paid substantial ‘political allowances’ to the holders of those offices, and so had to be satisfied that they had been properly chosen. In the autumn of 1945 I came to Negri Sembilan with only a beginner’s knowledge of the Malay language, and none of its history. I am sure Menangkabau Malay has an equivalent of W.C. Fields’ dictum, ‘Never give a sucker an even break’and certainly I was fed a fair amount of misinformation, but as each candidate sought to refute statements by the other, the truth (more or less) 41 1 R.J. Wilkinson, ‘Notes on the Negri Sembilan,’ Papers on Malay Subjects: History, Part 5, Kuala Lumpur, Govt. Press, 1911, p.2, reprinted in Papers on Malay Subjects, ed P.L.Burns, Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1971, p.281. emerged. I made my debut as an historian with an account of the first election for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and included the other in a longer paper for the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (‘JMBRAS’).2 Although I did not foresee it, the JMBRAS paper recruited me to the select circle of contributors who dominated that journal. Up to the war (1939–45), Malayan historical writing was almost entirely the work of amateurs, in the sense that none had a history degree, let alone taught history at a university. The majority were, or had been, government officials – predominantly in the Malayan Civil (administrative) Service – but there were others, such as Wurzburg, a Singapore shipping magnate, Makepeace, editor of the Singapore Free Press, and Roland Braddell, an eminent member of the local legal profession, all of whom had been president or secretary of MBRAS in their time. Winstedt was conscious of the point and was disposed to emphasise that, unlike his colleagues of the MBRAS fraternity, he had held a university appointment as Reader in Malay at SOAS. It was rather like joining a London club. On the whole the existing members made a new member welcome, but he was expected to ‘mind his p’s and q’s’. I was soon in trouble. Ferreting into the history of Sungei Ujong (a district of Negri Sembilan) I had come on a long-forgotten 19th century agreement by which the ruling chief (Dato’ Klana) acknowledged the Dato’ Shahbandar as more or less a partner in any important act such as signing a treaty. The genuineness of the document was not in question (it had been witnessed by W A Pickering who had brokered the deal in 1874) but the key phrase was ‘hendak-lah beta...