WE are now 61 years old. All notions on the national language, ethnicity and identity should have been overcome and resolved over the last six decades.
Yet for decades the nation has successfully lived in all its ideals and imperfections. Even so, the recent and distant pasts have not bode well with some of us. Our ignorance manifests itself in many avatars. One of which is public policy-making.
There is a strong link between the knowledge of history and the formulation, planning and implementation of public policies. Examples are policies on kampung, heritage, urbanisation, ethnicity and identity.
What happened and is happening to the kampung in Penang, especially on the island, is a case of the absence of knowledge on the island’s past and the history of the kampung there. This is true even of the policies on names and places. Replacing Jalan Yahudi with Jalan S.M. Zainul Abidin reflects ignorance, and selective amnesia. But that is for another piece elsewhere.
The destruction of kampung along the coast in the northeast district of the island, such as Jelutong, Batu Uban and Sungai Nibong, shows utter ignorance of the island’s past. Licences given to developers beginning in the 1970s throughout the decades only showed a distorted knowledge of the island’s history by its policy elites. This plays on prejudice. Batu Uban is now virtually levelled off except for Masjid Jamik, with its 400-odd graves, sandwiched between the highway named after one chief minister, and several high-rise structures. All without due regard to its past, crucial to understanding Penang society and the linkage to Kedah.
And only the mosque was gazetted. There is a burial ground behind the mosque, established in 1734 by Nakhoda nan Intan@Haji Muhammad Salleh from Kampung Bodi, Payakumbuh, West Sumatra. The roads in Batu Uban are not named after the Nakhoda. Neither is any structure in the vicinity. All we see are “Jalan Batu Uban 1” and “Jalan Batu Uban 2”.
Batu Uban in the early 1700s was not only a place — it was also a town and a port, earlier than the one in what is now George Town — what was then Tanjong Penaga. Even the mosque, the earliest in the state and one of the earliest in Malaysia, has not been cited or mentioned in books on mosques in Malaysia or tourist brochures and pamphlets on Penang historical sites.
Even the state seems to ignore the existence of the Batu Uban mosque. Instead, Masjid Kapitan Keling and Masjid Melayu Lebuh Acheh are much celebrated at its expense. And all simply because of apathy leading to ignorance. The “kampung” where the mosque is located lends the prejudice and ignorance. It reflects historical illiteracy on the part of the state’s establishment and policy elites.
Not knowing history is indeed destructive. Since 1957, the powers in Penang have some misguided notions of the state’s history. And they have a problem with attitudes too. The absence or presence of public policies is also dependent on the attitudes of those in authority.
The case of kampung in Penang, and there are more than 600 in various conditions where some have disappeared, illustrate this. And specifically, those like Batu Uban, Tanjong Tokong and Jelutong are seen as residues of the past — resided by the “faceless and the nameless”, people who are deemed to have no history and genealogy.
It is like having no attitude on Penang’s pre-1786 existence. I have delved on this many times in my other writings.
The above draws us to the fact that there is a strong link between history, attitudes towards local history and the formulation of public policies. The example of kampung and local histories, ignorance and apathy towards national and regional histories, and the refusal to accept national history as intertwined with regional histories are destructive to Malaysia.
As to the conception of public policies at the national level, certainly a proper knowledge of the nation’s history is critical. History textbooks and the teaching of Malaysian history is not a straight-forward case of factuality, pedagogy and perspective. It is not simply the history of the nation-state since 1957, where all borders are drawn up and formalised. At one level, that is false history. The history of Malaysia is a subset of the narrative of “greater Malaysia”.
Malaysia is not only the name of a nation since 1963, it is also the name of the Malay Archipelago as it appeared in early maps from the 16th century. The terms Malesia, Malaisia, and Malaisian were already being used, mainly by French ethnologists and writers when writing on the geography and the “brown-complexioned” people of the Indian Archipelago. The objection to “Malaysia” by the Indonesian and Filipino presidents then — Sukarno and Macapagal respectively — can also be traced to that name.
The Filipinos, for example, trace their history of “Malaysia” to at least Dr Jose Rizal, who referred himself as Malais-Tagale (Tagalog Malay). And this culminated when Dr Ahmad Domocao Alonto, a Filipino congressman and later senator in 1962, passed a bill in the senate to rename the Philippines “Malaysia”.
“Malaysia” certainly has been a contentious name many times over.
“Malaysia” — which literally means “islands of the Malays” — is the atma (Sanskrit for essence, breath, soul) and maya (Sanskrit for illusion or manifestation and/or appearance) of the Malay archipelago. This has to be taught in schools, as public history, public scholarship and public advocacy.
Civil servants and ambassadors, teachers, parliamentarians, the executive and the ministers must have cognisance of the grundnorm (ground rules) of the “rantau” (region). Public policies at both the national and international levels should not even be conceived without a knowledge of the relevant histories, and in this case, the collective histories and collective memories permeating the region.
Partisan, ideological, ethnicised and parochial interests would only distort and veil the atma and the maya, and in turn, destroy the nation and its rantau.
The writer is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies (CenPRIS), Universiti Sains Malaysia