Read on Twitter
There is a polarizing debate on SGTwitter about Peranakan Nasi Lemak and whether it is really a thing/ a thing worth paying highly for. I wouldn’t weigh in on it if not for the tweet below which descended into arguing that Malay as a cultural category doesn’t exist and...
....doubled down on asserting that Malay-ness is a category that is imagined by Mahathir, jihadis and oh, British colonials too. This goes beyond defending Peranakan authenticity. This is using history (badly) to erase what is now an entire ethnic category.
Is there a historical basis for such an assertion? Short answer: not really. It is true, as the tweets imply, that Malay ethno-nationalists today tend to falsely hark back to a primordial Malay past and in SG and Malaysia, fold other ethnicities into that category. However...
It is NOT true that there is no historical basis for such an identity before Malays were politically mobilized in the 20th century. Earliest mentions of the term Malay/Malayu/Melayu dated back to the 7th century. ..
There is archaeological and linguistic evidence indicating the presence of a place called Malayu which was based in Jambi and may have controlled Palembang, the likely center of Sriwijaya. (Extract from L Andaya’s Leaves of the Same Tree).
So, yeah, there were people identifying as Malay in parts of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula from the 7th C on. Living and interacting with the Bugis, Acehnese, Boyanese, Javanese, Orang Asli etc. And because they controlled rivers and ports....
...their language became a trade language that many people who did not identify as Malayu could speak, leading to the idea that there was a ‘Malay World’ bound together by trade and Malay the language.
But that Malay world of the 7th to 18th C wasn’t politically bound up in ethnicity or race; political power was centered on the person of the king (raja), who also exemplified a Malay court culture eg. Malacca. But beyond Malacca, mentions of Melayu as a social group .....
....with a raja were all over hikayats (court chronicles) from Aceh to Patani. A quick search on the Malay concordance project ( http://mcp.anu.edu.au/Q/standard.html ) would show this.
So, where did the idea that British colonization that led to the invention of Malays as social category - an invention that was later on adopted by ethno-nationalists like Mahathir and some vague jihadis – come from? I think it could have stemmed from a misunderstanding of ...
... Anthony Milner’s work in ‘The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya’ and ‘The Malays.’
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/invention-of-politics-in-colonial-malaya/2F97A80271A5AADB01D6AB03DE6C2894
and
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Malays-p-9781444339031
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/invention-of-politics-in-colonial-malaya/2F97A80271A5AADB01D6AB03DE6C2894
and
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Malays-p-9781444339031
In ‘The Invention of Politics,’ Milner essentially argues that political consciousness of the Malays in the peninsula was only awakened in the late 19th C and mobilization along Malay nationalist lines occurred in response to British colonialism.
In ‘The Malays’, he urged a rethinking of the term ‘Malay World’ because of this lack of pre-colonial political consciousness and suggested 'kerajaan world' is more accurate. It would account for the Javanese, etc., who were not Malay but had a similar kingship cultural core.
However, notice that his argument was all about political consciousness and NOT the identification of a Malay culture. He was careful to maintain that there WAS a court culture that distinctively self-identified as Malay.
Malayness also became a marker to differentiate the Muslim sultanates on the coast and the non-kerajaan inland and sea communities. TDLR; Malayness was a thing before the British.
Okay, so where does Mahathir and real/imagined Nusantara jihadis come into the picture? They don’t – except in terms of redirecting Malay nationalism into either ethno-centric and religious directions for their political purposes.
Do they contribute to the hardening of boundaries between Malay and non-Malay? Yes. Did they invent Malayness? No.
I guess I think it is important to put this out there because of questions like this by @_flyswatter below. The short answer is – depends on who is doing it.
Using Malay to force diverse ethnicities into one banner for political expedience the way the Singapore and Malaysian states do it is a form of erasure. Using Malay to tag nasi lemak as a Malay dish is not.
At the end of the day - I can’t believe I have to say this - Malay as a social category exists and have existed long before Peranakan. Whether it has any presence on a plate of Peranakan Nasi Lemak is a separate debate. But it exists .