DAVID Christy’s concluding remark that, “Really, there are no good old days” (“I wish the good old days were back”, NST, Sept 7) should alert the Malaysian public to an important aspect of how it views its past.
Like Christy, I believe that we increasingly misinterpret, even imagine, our past. This, I suspect, is largely due to a recent tendency to idealise our national origins.
The description of how three races came together in 1957 has become a sacred image in the imagination of the Malaysian public. Originally cultivated after Merdeka as a patriotic idiom for nation-building, this image has since been understood to describe our pre-independent and even pre-colonial eras.
In this imagination, Malaysia is regarded to have been since our earliest memory the site of social harmony between three distinct races.
While racial harmony may be historically true, what has subtly changed in its construction is the introduction of the idea that racial harmony arose because each race had sacrificed the values and beliefs of its culture for the happiness of the other races. In short, all differences had in the past been levelled so that cultures and races were relative to each other.
There is no evidence that this was ever the case. In fact, the anachronism in applying a Merdeka image to pre-Merdeka era suggests that an ideology of the present day (such as liberalism) is working on our conceptualisation of identity, and that the idealisation of the three races is rather a vision of the future.
The public should be careful in making this error. Interpreting the past in the context of the present leads to the neglect and misapprehension of past events that frame our historical understanding and identity.
On the contrary, the events of our national origin suggest that the three races had co-existed in the gravest tension, and rejected the enterprise of cultural equality.
The Malayan Union of 1946, for example, which was a multicultural model of statehood, was rejected not only by (Datuk) Onn Jaafar’s Malay Congress and the Malay rulers but also by Chinese groups that looked to Nationalist China and Communist China.
In the case of the communists, multiculturalism was rejected in favour of the rationalism of deculturalisation — something that would be realised with horrific consequences in 1960-70s China. This doctrine was shared by other groups, which looked to Indonesia-Raya and Pan-Americanism.
Malaysia at the dawn of nationhood saw some serious racial and social disharmony. Between 1945 and 1957, political, racial and religious riots happened in both cities and countryside.
If there was any sacrifice by one group for peace, it was the political concession made by the Malays, who in 1948 won sovereignty over the national Constitution.
Tunku (Abdul Rahman) and the rest of our founding fathers did not appeal to cultural equality and the levelling of differences. Instead, they balanced our historical multiculturalism on a delicate formula of cultural reconciliation, recognition and respect. Malaysia was not founded upon an ideal but by pragmatism.
Ng Tze Shiung, Petaling Jaya, Selangor