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Many Malayas: Placing Malaysia in a Historical Context Paul H. Kratoska Introduction In the early 1970s a Malaysian public figure, an academic but not a historian told me that the country needed a glorious history, an account of the past that would generate a nationalistic sense of pride. It didn’t matter, he added, whether that history was true. The idea of inventing a past, glorious or otherwise, has no place in the discipline of history, which is based on gathering and evaluating factual information and drawing conclusions that are firmly grounded in those facts. Nonetheless, I found the proposition extremely interesting. It reflects a belief commonly held in Malaysia that the value of history lies in the contribution it can make to an understanding of the present. It also raises intriguing questions. First, just what sort of history could be considered glorious? A glorious past sounds like stories of heroes performing valiant actions, but it could equally be based on distinguished scholarship, humanitarian achievements, or simply the honour and dignity of a people. Second, just how might Malaysia benefit from a glorious past? Assuming that heroes were identified, would Malaysians develop a sense of pride based on the past actions of others who happened to have lived in the same country? Would the existence of such people make Malaysia a more worthwhile place in which to live? And is pride, which is, after all, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, even a desirable sentiment to cultivate? Third, to what extent are existing histories of Malaysia already skewed, or untrue? Before considering these issues, a more basic question should be answered: what constitutes the history of Malaysia? What are the boundaries of the subject matter? What information is relevant and what not? In short, what is “Malaysia”? History is about concrete things – events, persons, ideas, polities, or very often places. Like Britain or the United States or France, Malaysia represents three things at once: a territory (the country), a political and administrative apparatus that controls public affairs (the state), and a group of people who are citizens or permanent residents (the nation). Malaysia – properly the Federation of Malaysia – 229 came into existence through a constitution adopted in 1963, when the Federation of Malaya (comprising a group of states in the lower reaches of the Malay Peninsula) joined with Sarawak and Sabah and Singapore to form a new country. What, then, is the history of Malaysia prior to 1963, before Malaysia even existed? Most historians simply treat past events in the lower Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo as the history of Malaysia. Similarly, past events in Pattani are handled as part of the history of Thailand, and events in Sumatra and the Riau Archipelago as part of Indonesia’s history. Peninsular West Malaysia was formerly known as Malaya, and before 1963 was home to the Federation of Malaya, the Malayan Union, Japanese Malai, British Malaya, and a changing set of states (including the Melaka Sultanate) that recede back to a time known only through archaeological remains. One purpose of the present chapter is to argue that this way of handling Malaysia’s history is unsatisfactory because the entities concerned were different in many important ways from modern Malaysia, and cannot be understood by treating them as though they were the same. The borders of Malaysia, its state structures, and its civic identities follow models created by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When these elements are applied to events that preceded British rule, they misrepresent the past and distort the processes that led to the creation of Malaysia. An invented past Malaysian school textbooks present the country’s major institutions as having Malay rather than British origins. The Form Five history textbook claims that the basic institutions of the modern Malaysian political system can be traced to traditional arrangements in various Malay sultanates that pre-dated British rule (referred to as the heritage of the sultanates, or warisan kesultanan Melayu): a written constitution to Johor, the cabinet system to Kelantan, the constitutional monarchy wherein Islam occupies a special position to Trengganu, and the principle of democracy and a federal concept to Negri Sembilan.1 The textbook omits basic information not only about the British, but also about non-Malay citizens and permanent residents, and even about the Malays, many of whom are descended from people who were once residents of Sumatra or Borneo or other islands in the Indonesian archipelago. This version of the past supports a...

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