Manufacturing Malayness

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which the notion of Malayness was conceptualised, articulated, and debated in a set of foundational British discourses on this topic during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Using T.R. Trautmann's concept of locational techniques and D. Rowly-Conwy's idea of competing referential frameworks, the article argues that these conceptualisations have to be assessed within their contemporary colonial and epistemic contexts. The differences in the ascribed importance of language, nation, race, and civilisation in the definition of Malayness thus depended upon whether it was inscribed into a framework composed of orientalist philology, Scottish Enlightenment theories of stadial progress or a genealogically infused ethnology. Applying evidence procured from the fields of textual philology, comparative philology, racial classification, antiquarianism, and conjectural history, the scholar-administrators William Marsden, John Leyden, Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd offered their discrepant versions of Malay origin, history, and essence. These versions each embodied their own particular historical vision that not merely prefigured the authoritative mode of approaching and assessing the notion of Malayness, but it also prescribed the scope within which the imperial politics could be framed and the colonial projects unrolled.

Keywords:

• Colonial discourses
• British ideas on Malayness
• science
• history
• and ideology
• early nineteenth century
• colonial Southeast Asia

Notes

¹Jambulus or Iambulos, was a Hellenistic merchant and traveller who authored the fabulous travel account ‘Islands of the Sun’, or ‘The adventures of Iambulus in the Southern Ocean’, excerpts of which have survived in Diordorus Siculus' writings. Although by the 1800s recognised as what J. Stagl (1995: 200) has labelled a ‘fictive traveller’, Jambulus' text was nevertheless eagerly scavenged for information on ancient Greek knowledge of the Indian Ocean. F. Wilford referred to him in his ‘An essay on the sacred islands of the West”, published in the 10th and 11th volumes of Asiatick Researches in 1810 and 1811. This seems to imply that Jambulus was a rather well known figure, at least amongst people interested in orientalist knowledge. For more on Jambulus's identity, see Müller 2013: 156.

²Milner has advocated for a study of Malayness rather than a study of the Malay as an ethnic entity given that the Malay is, and has always been, ‘an idea in motion’ and ‘open to contest’ (Milner 2011: 16–17); it defies any fixed definition and as such it seems more profitable to examine the convoluted paths of the idea of Malayness and its multiple roles in the formation of ethnic and national core cultures, to use A. Reid's terminology (Reid 2001: 296–7).

³The medical profession had been ‘chosen for him’ (Thompson 1870, III: 592).

⁴For a general treatment of the tenets and teachings of Scottish conjectural history and its impact upon British society and empire, see e.g. Hopfl (1978); Meek (1976); Spadafora (1990: 253–320); Pocock (1999: 163–365; 2005: 157–226).

⁵Rendall (1982: 44–5) explicitly included Crawfurd in this group, and she later discussed him in greater depth (1982: 50, 56–7, 59, 62, 63–4, and 69). For much more on Crawfurd as an orientalist and as a conjectural historian, see Müller 2013.

⁶Aarsleff's (1983) seminal text on this topic, however, did not mention Marsden. On Marsden's linguistic analysis, see Trautmann (2006: 21–34); Campbell and Poser (2008: 102–4); and Marsden 1838.

⁷The existence of these linguistic similarities had been noted in 1706 by Dutch philologist Adriaan Reland who, according to Crawfurd (1820, II: 81), drew ‘no important or interesting conclusion from this interesting fact’; contemporary with and independent of Marsden the Spanish Jesuit, Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, had suggested a similar hypothesis (Yanguas 2000).

⁸It was not until 1812 that Marsden provided a nomenclature for this language family discovered 30 years before. He then used the term Polynesia which he had borrowed from the East India Company hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple, a personal friend (Fry 1970: 252). Marsden (1812: i) subdivided Polynesia into Hither Polynesia, or ‘the Malayan Archipelago’, and Further Polynesia or the ‘vast expense of South-sea islands’.

⁹Prichard mentioned it the first time in (1843) in The natural history of man and reiterated it (Prichard 1836–1847) in the fifth volume of the third edition of Researches into the physical history of mankind. It was probably borrowed from Franz Bopp's Über die Verwnadtschaft der malayisch-polynesischen Sprachen mit den indisch-europäischen (1841), even though Prichard (1843: 327) referred explicitly to Wilhelm von Humboldt's magnum opus Über die Kawi-Spracheaud der Insel Java (3 vols, 1836–1839) as the reference for his coinage of the concept of Malayo-Polynesian.

¹⁰Ballantyne (2008) on the historiography on ‘colonial knowledge’ within- vs. outside of the South Asian setting.

¹¹As emphasised by Bernard S. Cohn (1996: 4–15) in his conceptualisation of a series of investigative modalities that prefigured the imperial gaze upon its colonial subjects.

¹²Marsden (1798: 227) interpreted Sanskrit influence on the Malay language and civilisation as being ‘such as the progress of civilization must soon have rendered necessary’. In this he differed from Sir William Jones (Jones, Teignmouth and Elmers 1824, I: 139) who, in his eighth discourse to the Asiatic Society (Originally delivered in 1791), had intimated a genealogical relationship between Sanskrit and the family of languages that Marsden had discovered 10 years earlier.

¹³This aspect of the antiquarian interest in the Javanese past and its material vestiges has been the object of much recent scholarly interest; see e.g. Ray (2007: 7–12); Tiffin (2008, 2009); Díaz-Andreu (2007: 215–22); Gomperts et al. (2012); Bloembergen and Eickhoff (2013).

¹⁴For an analysis of the conceptualisation and naming of the Southeast Asian space in British discourses between Marsden and Alfred Russel Wallace, see Müller (2013: 111–39).

¹⁵See Mss Eur Mack Private 85/1: 17–18; Crawfurd (1814: 158; 1820, II: 51, 378). In the latter text, Crawfurd did concede that the Malay manuscripts possessed a certain historical value, not through their content, but by virtue of what they revealed about the society in which they were concocted.

¹⁶See also Hamilton (1810: 390); Marsden (1838: 139); Bastin (1965: 256); Boon (1990: 30–4); Quilty (1998: 4, 9–10); Aljunied (2005: 17); Andaya (2008: 100).

¹⁷Gascoigne (1994: 131–2, 164–7, 182–3) and Marsden's own account (1838: 44–50).

¹⁸The article was written 1780 and read before the Society of Antiquaries on 22 February 1781 (Marsden 1782).

¹⁹Marsden (1783: 36) states that this region was settled by ‘a colony from the [Malay] peninsula’. This latter emphasis was absent in a revised publication (Marsden 1811: 41).

²⁰This paper was later published (Raffles 1818).

²¹See Reid (2010: 83–7), for recent analysis that emphasises hybridity as crucial in formation of the Malay ethnicity.

²²For more on the methodology of the ‘word list’ and Marsden's use of it, see Aarsleff (1982: 84–100); Trautmann (2006: 21–34); Campbell and Poser (2008: 102–4).

²³An orientalist, later identified as Crawfurd (Skinner 1976: 204), annotated in his own manuscript copy of this text about Leyden's Malay annals that:

‘this translation is merely a free rendering of some of the principal incidents it [Sejarah Melayu] contains, Ibrahim the Moonshee made a copy of the Salelata Salatin [Sulalat Us-Salatin] at Malacca, and took it with him to Bengal, where he was in the service of Dr. Leyden. Ibrahim read the book to the Doctor and explained the meaning to him, and he [i.e. Leyden] wrote down what he seems to have considered as worthy of notice. This is the account which Ibrahim gives me. It would indeed be tedious to translate all the prolixity and repetitions of a Malayan author, but his translation is tolerably faithful. There is considerable variation in the Malayan copies’ (quoted in Low 1849: 20).

Leonard Andaya (2008: 251) explains this ‘variation in the Malayan copies’ by pointing to the fact that ‘in the Malay world a copyist's task was to “improve” a text to accord with current social and political realities. It often resulted in the expunging and inserting of information to support the genealogical claims of powerful families’.

²⁴Although Raffles (1818: 107–8) also recognises a clear racial divide on the Malayan peninsula between the coastal Malays and a ‘race of Caffries, who are occasionally found near the mountains’; the latter, named the ‘Samang’, were described as being wool-haired. In an 1806 private letter to Marsden he wrote at length about this ‘woolly-haired race’ of ‘Caffries’ (Raffles 1835, I: 18–20). See also Manickham (2009).

²⁵Raffles here refers to what Marsden had written in 1796 (Marsden 1798: 227–8).

²⁶Leyden (1811: 158) bestowed the label ‘Indo-Chinese’ on all the ‘inhabitants of the regions which lie between India and China, and the greater parts of the islanders of the eastern sea’. Despite exhibiting ‘a diversity of national characteristics’ and possessing ‘various degrees of civilization’, Leyden (ibid.) stressed that they all had a common origin, and the differences between the various nations could be accounted for by their different historical trajectories.

²⁷See Marsden (1838: 87); Kejariwal (1988: 79–80); Carroll (2011: 270).

²⁸These were the ‘Sulalat assalatin or Penurun-an segala raja-raja’ (Sejarah Melayu) and the ‘Taju assalatin or Makuta segala raja-raja’ (Marsden 1811: 326). Marsden cited Leyden's article as well as earlier references by the Dutch late 17th- and early 18th-century orientalists Petrus van der der Worm and Francois Valentyn as the principal sources for his revised perception. Christina Skott (2010: 161–2) has convincingly shown how Marsden's correspondence with Raffles was instrumental in this process.

²⁹Here Marsden's use of the term ‘race’ was obviously to be equated with the notion of ‘nation’.

³⁰The draft version is in the Mackenzie Private Collection; European Miscellanies (Mss Eur Mack Private 85/1: 1–75).

³¹According to the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900 I (Houghton 1965–1988: 452) the article was authored by either Alexander Hamilton or possibly by John Crawfurd, whereas Rendall (62) identifies Crawfurd as the author. Rendall's assessment seems definitely to be accurate with regard to the draft of the article in the Indian Office Records. See also Müller (2013: 338).

³²As stressed by Pocock (1999: 315), there were several competing stadial theories during the Enlightenment. In this context Crawfurd's stadial theory followed Adam Smith's four-stage theory, according to which the prevailing modes of subsistence economy constituted the defining criteria; the four stages were those of the hunter-gatherer, the pastoralist, the agrarian, and finally the age of trade. See e.g. Meek (1976: 5–36); Spadafora (1990: 255–84); Müller (2013: 76–91) on the use of stadial theories in Crawfurd's discourses.

³³For an insightful discussion of primordialism as an analytical concept and an ontological entity as well as the associated notions of linguism, ethnicity, etc. in South and Southeast Asian contexts, see Pollock (2006: 497–524).

³⁴See Knapman (2006) for more on the notion of liberal imperialism as preached, if not always practised, by the British in a Southeast Asian context.

³⁵Although this was not entirely without reservations (see Crawfurd 1820, II: 372, 375).

Additional information

Author biography

Martin Müller obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.