Published in Berita Harian last week was a long letter urging film director Jins Shamsuddin to get cracking on the filming of an explosive event in Malaysian history, the assassination of James Birch, the first British Resident of Perak at Pasir Salak on Nov 2 1875, the second day of Hari Raya.
Three years have passed since the initial announcement on the film and among those offering co-operation and funding is the Perak Government. Finas (The National Film Corporation) had offered assistance and at one stage it was announced that a British film company would be involved in the project, but since then nothing more has been heard about it.
A charitable explanation for the delay might be the historical research required. In these days of books by biographers, hagiographers and traducers no royal personage, president or prime minister – past or present – is safe. Warts and all is what people want to read.
We begin with Sir Richard Winstedt, the Malay language scholar, who praised Birch and derided Sultan Abdullah. Of the former he wrote: “…an English gentleman with all the virtues and defects of his class…a man in a hurry to carry light to Perak…for even long experience had failed to bring home to his unimaginative mind that hurry is futile in the training of child-like chieftains, especially when they are sensitive, proud and spoilt”.
And of Abdullah, the Perak Sultan, Winstedt wrote: “….a young Malay raja with the charming manners of his class and the vices proper to the spoilt darling of a royal harem, sensitive as a woman to slights and shades of manner, fastidious as a woman over dress, an extravagant libertine, vain, timid and adept at intrigue”.
As Professor Khoo Kay Kim, the historian wrote in his monograph J.W.W. Birch: A Victorian moralist in Perak’s augean stable? Winstedt saw Birch as the epitome of virtue and Abdullah, the personification of vice. In short, everything is black or white and there are no shades of grey.
It had been submitted, Khoo added, that Birch failed as a Resident only because he lacked diplomacy and that he was ignorant of Malay adat (custom) and language. “But was he completely ignorant of the Malay language?”
Quoted then was Charles Fox, Chief Clerk of the Eastern Department in the Colonial Office in London: “There can be no doubt of his (Birch’s) ability and that his knowledge of Malay Language and some experience in dealing with these Native Chiefs is in his favour (Feb 2, 1874)….It will be very difficult to replace the loss of one who knew well the people and language” (Nov 10, 1875, after Birch’s death).
Noted was that Cox knew Birch for many years since the latter had been in the colonial service for 27 years, having previously served in Ceylon.
There was the oft-repeated story that Birch tried to abolish slavery. Quoted then was Sir Peter Benson Maxwell, an English barrister:”…the despatches allude to Mr Birch’s feelings of humanity as prompting him to protect runaway slaves. When the cases are examined, the slaves are found to be girls, and girls only”.
Mentioned in the accompanying notes was a letter sent by Datuk Mustapha Albakri dated Jan 31, 1952, Keeper of the Rulers’ Seal, about a Malay manuscript which described Birch as an “over-sexed man”.
Also in the manuscript was the claim that the “outrageous behaviour of the Indian guards towards the women in the locality multiplied the resentment of the Malay chiefs towards Birch and his men a hundredfold”.
Mention has been made by others that some slaves were given by Birch to his policemen to become their mistresses.
Also noted was the finding of a board of inquiry that Birch had borrowed money from three Chinese – Tan Seng Poh, Cheang Hong Lim and Tan Chin Hoon. “Some months after Birch had borrowed money from him, Chin Hoon’s steamer was seized by Tunku Kudin, Viceroy of Selangor. Birch wrote personally to Kudin to release the steamer but it appears that he failed to influence Kudin”.
As has also been mentioned in the introduction to Birch’s journals he was heavily indebted to several Chinese merchants, one of whom had the Singapore opium farm.
Despite the inquiry Birch was sent to Perak in October 1874 to assume provisionally the duties of Resident. Questioned later was his management of revenue collection in the State. There was then the conclusion: “Even the colonial office had sufficient misgivings about Birch to prompt it to refuse to confirm him in the post of Resident without more searching investigations into his financial circumstances. Until his death, therefore, Birch was but acting provisionally in the office”.
How did Birch get on with the Perak Sultan? Written in his diary dated Feb 3, 1875, is the following: “The Sultan wished to go down to Batarabit, and I accompanied him as far. I had a very long talk with him about the taxes, and gave him two proclamations which I want him to issue: one about the future duty on mines and the other about the customs duties”.
And on Feb 4, Thursday: “The Sultan ordered a fat sheep to be killed and invited me for breakfast with Dris. Again we had a long talk about the taxes etc, and he personally is quite ready to fall into my views”.
On another occasion Abdullah made a plea for some money but was turned down and instead given a humiliating lecture in front of his followers by Birch.
No less illuminating is his diary dated Nov 9, Monday, 1874: “Prince of Wales birthday. Did not forget it even here. Gave the man a duck curry and the clerks beer, and hoisted my flag at 8am. It was curious to see how many came to look at it, and then all sat down and expressed a general opinion as to the good to be derived to the country by its being hoisted, and their future comparative safety”.
As recorded Birch was killed while bathing on a raft after he had ordered his interpreter Mat Arshad to post three proclamations on a goldsmith’s shop. The action was challenged by Dato’ Sagor accompanied by some 50 armed men.
In the months that followed all considered implicated in the assassination were hunted by the colonial authorities with the assistance of troops from India and Hong Kong. Tried and hanged were Dato’ Maharaja Lela, Dato’ Sagor and four others.
Exiled to the Seychelles were Sultan Abdullah, the Menteri, Dato Laksamana and Dato Shahbandar. Several others were banished to Johor.
No mean task, therefore, would be the filming of the incident which indeed hastened the colonisation of Peninsular Malaysia. Tell it like it was, Jins has already been advised by the Perak istana. He would need to get advice from such as Khoo, history professor Zainal Abidin and others to get the story right.
What is to be presented is history, not propaganda. Among questions raised would be the practice of slavery in old Perak and how the ordinary rakyat in the kampung fared in those not so halcyon days.
A nation’s history has its ups and downs, zig-zags, bloody conflicts and moments of triumphs. As someone remarked, boring is the country in need of heroes. [Personally Speaking: Tell the Birch story like it was. Mazlan Nordin. NST. February 6 1998]
Category: History & heritage
Do you remember this?
The Asian Financial Crisis is an embarrassing episode in our history; the mighty tigers turned into sick kittens. This photo is the epithet of that period. The mighty Camdessus looked on the broken Suharto, reminiscing the old days of colonialism.
Throughout the next week or so, if time permits, I wish to revisit the fall, or hiccup, of Southeast Asian economies, including Malaysia, in the late 1990s. Please stay on and we will learn together what went wrong and answer some what-if questions.
Categories
[1247] Of we were one
In reading history, I have issues in applying the boundaries of modern states into the past, in times before modern states were established. While history is indeed continuous in nature unless we are referring to the beginning of time itself, the act of applying modern boundaries into the past before establishment of modern states knowingly falsely assumes that these states existed long before its establishment date. With respect to Malaysian history for example, there are those that take everything that occurs within modern Malaysian states as Malaysian history while those occurring outside Malaysian boundary as someone else’s. If one wishes to understand history, such perspective restricts overall comprehension of history.
In Malaysia, there are those that assert Malaysian history begins with Malacca. I opine that this is done to legitimize the position of those in power through religion. Like what been written earlier, history is continuous and Malaysian history is no exception. It is improper to assume that Malaysian history began at the beginning of the 15th century. For an event to occur, there must be a background, or a precursor, to it and that precursor for Malacca is the decline of Srivijaya, just as how the background for the establishment of Malaysia is everything related that occurred in that past, be it Sulu, Brunei, Langkasuka, Srivijaya, Chi Tu, Johor, Negeri Sembilan and the other modern states of Malaysia, etc.
While I have addressed how the time barrier placed on Malaysian history is a form of denial, I have yet to address how modern boundaries — within our context, Malaysia — are irrelevant in the distance past. As much as history is continuous in time, it is continuous in space as well. This is the purpose of the post.
The idea that Malaysian history is confined within the border of modern Malaysian border is acceptable to as far as the Anglo-Dutch Treaty in 1824 or maybe slightly earlier in the 19th century. History of this region only officially developed separately after that. Prior to the understanding between the Dutch and the British brought in part of the result of the Napoleonic War in Europe, history of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and to some extend part of Borneo and Java, mostly moved on hand in hand, at one point of time or another. Our society, we, in the past, especially before 1824, were a society unbounded by the boundaries of modern nation states.
During the era of Srivijaya, the commonality occurred close to a thousand years. And indeed, during Malacca, the history of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra was one of the same. Whatever happened to these powers affected the timeline of Malaysian history. Srivijaya was part of Malaysian history as much as Malacca; Malacca was part of Indonesian history as much as Srivijaya. On Borneo. the history of the Sulu belong to both Malaysia and the Phillipines. This history of Brunei is part of Sarawak and Sabah’s history and vice versa as well.
Our history, Malaysian history, cannot be taken in isolation. Malaysian history itself occurred within and without the modern boundary of our federation. What happened within the boundary of the modern states of Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines in the past may be part of our history as well simply because our history is a history of trade. It is a story of interaction among us, our neighbors and strangers from afar. A substantial amount of history, especially before 1824, is shared.
If we insist that events occurred outside the boundary of modern Malaysia are not part of our history, we are denying part of ourselves. Reading history in isolation might be tantamount to living inside a box, being simply unable to see the big picture.
Three firms from Malaysia, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are cooperating to build a pipeline worth USD7 billion to transport crude oil across the Malay Peninsula, bypassing the busy Straits of Malacca. The chairman of Trans-Peninsula Petroleum expects the pipeline to divert 20% of oil tankers traffic off the Straits of Malacca.
“The savings in using our pipeline to the oil producers, to oil traders, is enough to even pay for one month of storage,” said chairman of Trans-Peninsula Petroleum Sdn Bhd (Transpen), Mohd Kamil Sulaiman.
[…]
Mohd Kamil said the pipeline would help ease congestion in the Straits of Malacca where out of 60,000 vessels that transit the straits, 30 percent were oil tankers.
He said the pipeline would divert about 20 percent of the oil tankers. [Transpen’s US$7 Bln-pipeline To Cut Down Time Taken To Transport Oil. Bernama. May 29 2007]
While the project is huge, this is not the first time northern Malay Peninsula becomes a land bridge facilitating international trade. Not in such gigantic scale of course but still, in my humble opinion, far more significant.
The third century of the common era was a period of economic boom in Southeast Asia. The boom was caused by a civil war in China; the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The conflict threatened the reliability of the Silk Road, the artery of international trade and soon, the route between China and Rome became unsafe for passage.
Like water, trade seeks the path of least resistance. The unique circumstances encouraged the development of sea routes that ran through Southeast Asia. This is the impetus of the formation of many kingdoms in this region during this period. Three of the kingdoms were Dungsun, Pan Pan and Langkasuka. Another one, although not located on the Malay Peninsula but closely related to the history of the three Southeast Asia kingdoms was Funan.
Funan was a civilization that existed at the mouth of river Mekong. More importantly, it was the gate to southern China which was controlled by the kingdom of Wu. It is probably safe to claim that almost all goods originated or going to southern China went through Funan. Relating to the topic at hand, the three kingdoms at one time or another came under the influence of Funan.
To or fro Funan, depending on the flow of trade, goods would pass through Dungsun, Pan Pan, Langkasuka or by circumventing the Malay Peninsula. There may be other routes but there four are the major ones.
Dungsun was a kingdom located near the Isthmus of Kra. Its strategic location allowed it to connect the Bay of Bengal and the Bay of Siam. Apart from that, not much is known about it and this makes it so mysterious.
South of Dungsun was Pan Pan, centered around the cities of Ligor or Chaiya. It is worth remembering that Chaiya was the regional capital of the Malay empire of Srivijaya later in history. While that is clear, I find Pan Pan a little bit confusing though. Some called Pan Pan as Tambralinga while others recognized Tambralinga as Ligor. Nevertheless, Pan Pan accommodated international trade.
Even farther south was the kingdom of Langkasuka that roughly covered the old Malay kingdoms of Pattani as well as Old Kedah and its surrounding. Over land, goods traveled between Singora and Kedah or Pattani and Kedah. The Pattani-Kedah route in particular ran along Muda River in Kedah and Pattani River on the other side of the Peninsula. Anyway, as mentioned earlier, Funan exerted influence over Langkasuka but among three kingdoms, Langkasuka was the farthest from Funan and hence, Funanese controlled over it was probably the weakest.
About four centuries later, both Pan Pan and Langkasuka were absorbed by Srivijaya. Despite the presence of a new master, these two kingdoms still played the role they played back in the second century. Langkasuka specifically reached its peak between the 7th and the 10th century, coinciding with the Srivijayan golden age. The era made Kedah a very busy port. The archaeologically rich Bujang Valley provides some proofs of the prosperity Kedah once enjoyed.
So, when you ever passby that crude oil pipeline will connect Kedah and Kelantan around 2014, just remember that the idea of trade cutting through the Malay Peninsula went as far back as about 1800 years ago. Beyond Malacca, if I might add.
From Srivijaya, the discussion moves on to Malacca. Gardam writes:
…I came to study the subject of Sriviyaja/Singapura/Malacca because of a research I did a few years back on Bintan and the Riau archipelago and found it indeed a fascinating subject.
There is in my opinion no doubt that Srivijaya was a far greater civilisation than Malacca. It lasted many centuries as opposed to barely one, it laid the basis of an economic and trade pattern that still defines the region to this day and which Malacca only tried to re-enact. It made the Malay language the lingua franca of South East Asia. Much less known, the Hindu-Buddhist spiritual legacy of Srivijaya is still alive today in Thibetan Buddhism (on that subject you should research the life of the Bengali Buddhist monk Atisha who brought the Srivijayan spiritual knowledge to the Land of Snow in the early 11th century).
And there is no doubt that the consensus in modern Malaysia to take Malacca as the starting point of Malay history exist only for purely religious reasons, to bind it to a Muslim identity which is largely a fabrication. This can be explained if one looks a little more closely at how the transition from Srivijayan heritage to Muslim Malay world took place in Malacca.
To carry on with this subject I am afraid to have first of all to correct you on something you said in the other blog that carries the answer to Menj. Your mistake can easily be explained because you simply repeat what keeps on being said everywhere, that the first “sultan” of Malacca was Parameswara/Iskandar Shah. For a long time this was indeed the version that prevailed, largely based on Wolters’History of Malacca. However more recent researchs, summarised in “the Malay Sultanate of Malacca” by Muhammad Yussoff Hashim (1992), have established that the first Malacca king to convert was the son of Parameswara who had taken the name Iskandar Shah by the time he went to the Ming Court to announce the death of his father in 1414.
The third ruler still had a Srivijayan name and was enthroned as Sri Maharaja. He eventually converted to Islam to become Muhammad Shah in 1436, a conversion told in the Sejarah Melayu as a miraculous event of the boat from Juddah. He is credited with initiating the rise to greatness of Malacca, but according to Ming sources was not yet a “Sultan”.
After two muslim kings ( and again according to foreign sources not yet sultans, this is an important point because they are much more neutral on this subject than the Sejarah Melayu) Raja Ibrahim, son of Muhammad Shah, again reverts to a Srivijayan name and is enthroned as Sri Parameswara Dewa Shah. This probably marks a Hindu/Buddhist reaction in the aristocracy living in the palace of Bertram, further up the Malacca river. He is the son of a princess form Sumatra and of pure Malais aristocratic descent. His half brother, Raja Kassim, is the son of a Tamil common woman, but he has the support of a Tamil faction that enjoys a growing influence in the port.
In 1445 Sri Parameswara II was killed in a coup d’etat by his half-brother who is the first Malacca king to take on the Arabic title of sultan to become Sultan Muzaffar Shah. And it is only under Raja Kassim’s rule that Islam became the state religion of Malacca.So we see that in fact Malacca was truly a Muslim state for barely more than half a century. Of course, later literature such as the many versions of the Sejarah Melayu (and remenber that they were in fact written in the 16-17th century in Riau when the descendants of the Malacca line were trying to boost their prestige) started calling kings of the Malacca line “sultan” all the way back to Temasek (first Iskandar Shah in the supposed grave of Fort Caning), as a way to give a Muslim identity to Malacca as early as possible, a fabrication now so well entrenched that it can hardly ever be corrected.
So why is Malay history today trying so hard to erase the memory of Srivija? Because the full transition from the Srivijayan heritage to an Islamic state in Malacca rests on a coup d’etat, a regicide and a fratricide, and because the first real sultan of Malacca was not a pure Malay aristocrat. Not quite the clean start that many people would like it to be, in particular in regards to the adat of utter respect and obedience to the king on which part of the Malay identity is supposed to rest in the Bumiputra concept. In my opinion this is precisely the reason behind the problem which Mahatir came to define as “the Malay dilema”. There is indeed an untold dilema because most of what defines the Malay identity rest on a lie that Malays can not help but subconciously perceive…
I have yet to read The Malay Sultanate of Malacca by Muhammad Yusoff Hashim. So, I am unable to go back to the source. However, for something less rigorous, do crosscheck with the excellent Sejarah Melayu by Sabri Zain on the internet. In particular, pages entitled Parameswara and The Melaka Empire. Apart from that, I do not think that site requires introduction.