Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago

Chapter 2: Provincial Capital

30 Being Malay in Indonesia 30 2 Provincial Capital As one of the officials working at Tanjung Pinang’s international harbour, Agam had met a lot of researchers as they embarked on their initial forays into the Riau Islands. It was one of the perks of his job. Describing himself as a “man of learning”, he hoped that one day he could become a lecturer in harbour design and used his work as a means of securing the opportunity to share ideas with experts visiting from abroad. But, as he told me over drinks in a foodcourt late at night, he had often been disappointed. The researchers he had met were, in his words, “rubbish”. “But you’re not like the others,” he added tipsily, patting me affectionately on the shoulder. “You’re a real researcher.” The son of two Toba Bataks who had moved to Tanjung Pinang in the 1970s, Agam frequently lived up to the Batak reputation for forthrightness. “You know why? Because you’re not just interested in Malays. Most of them only want to know about Malays. They get off the ferry and they ask me, ‘Where are the Malays?’ In fact, even here, people say that this is a Malay town. It’s not. At least 75 per cent of the people here are migrants.” Agam was right. Tanjung Pinang prides itself on its Malay heritage and atmosphere. Arriving at the town’s harbour by boat, one can see numerous colourful placards issuing a warm welcome to “the heartland of Malay culture”, “the land of Malay history”, and “the pinnacle of the Malay civilisation” (Figure 2.1). Yet both historically and today, Tanjung Pinang would much more accurately be described as a multicultural town than as a Malay one: in the 2010 census, only 30.7 per cent of Tanjung Pinang’s residents selfidentified as “Malay” (Minnesota Population Center 2011). So why Provincial Capital 31 should the central predicament facing residents of the town today be that of “being Malay in Indonesia”? This chapter offers a historical and genealogical approach to the puzzle, exploring how the preoccupation with the town’s Malayness has emerged as a consequence of its changing demographic composition as well as its shifting political and economic relations with Singapore, Jakarta and the Sumatran mainland. Founding the Town Ironically, for a town reputed to be the “heartland of Malay culture”, Tanjung Pinang was founded in the late 1780s by Chinese plantation workers. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the island of Bintan1 had been the site of a sizeable entrepôt. Known as Bandar Riau, this entrepôt was located at the estuary of the Bintan River, in the present-day suburb of Kota Piring, and run by the viceroys of the Johor-Riau-Lingga sultanate (Chapter 3). To guarantee the prosperity of the trading port and its visitors, a steady food supply was needed, but the granitic Bintan soil did not lend itself to rice Figure 2.1 A harbourside billboard welcoming visitors to “The pinnacle of the Malay civilisation, Riau Islands Province” (Source: author) 1 Prior to Indonesian independence, “Bintan” was also commonly referred to as “Riau Island”. To avoid confusion, I refer to it as Bintan throughout the text. 32 Being Malay in Indonesia farming. However, gambier, a leaf extract used as a medicine and for tanning leather, could be cultivated easily on Bintan and exchanged with Javanese merchants for rice at a very profitable rate. In 1734–40, the second viceroy of Riau, Daeng Celak, decided to bring Chinese workers to Bintan in order to establish and run gambier plantations (Trocki 1979: 33–4). His decision paid off. By the 1780s, over 10,000 Chinese workers were resident on Bintan, and the entrepôt was noted by European visitors as “one of the most frequented trading posts in Southeast Asia” (Vos 1993: 149). That period of prosperity was shattered when hostilities broke out between the region’s indigenous rulers and officials of the Dutch East India Company in Malacca over how to divide the spoils from a captured British ship. In 1784, a series of military skirmishes culminated in a devastating Dutch attack on Bintan, the destruction of the trading post and the expulsion of many of its inhabitants. The sultan, Mahmud, signed a contract intended to render Johor-RiauLingga a vassal state (leenrijk) in which the Company took control of all trading operations. Indigenous aristocrats...