Kapal Dagang Dari Seberang,
Nau mercadora vinda das margens opostas,
Poem next to the fountain in the roundabout
just across the bridge and Discovery Café (Jalan Bunga Raya). I read it while
waiting for my saadaa dosa at Selvam. I am not satisfied with the rhyming
scheme in my translation nor with my choice of words. Translated with the help
of Longman Kamus Dwibahasa, bought when Shanti took me to a bookshop somewhere
in Bangsar during my very first visit to Malaysia. Also, until Jamian puts his act together at Universiti Malaya, there will be no Kamus Bahasa Melayu-Bahasa Portugis.
I have been to the
موزيم دنيا ملايو دان دنيا اسلام . On the ground floor there
was a temporary exhibit on Chinese porcelain through the centuries sprinkled with
several other objects. Quite interesting and didactic. Porcelain was often an
imperial concern so a history of porcelain is often part of dynastic histories
with styles changing and techniques improving or being lost because of dynastic
changes inevitably accompanied by wars and disturbances. Then the imperial
kilns would close down for years and even decades and the artisans would start
making the porcelain ware privately in case they could. In this way many if not
most of the techniques and styles seem to have survived through the centuries.
Cheng Ho was of course also there with some porcelain items from shipwrecks -
the implication of the display was that the items came from one of his ships.
That is not likely. As is often
the case in Melaka, the exhibit, though good, was therefore amateurishly curated.
The history of the evolution of styles and
techniques through the centuries was not bad. The Sung porcelain on display was
however not nearly as attractive as that which I saw in the imperial museum in
Taipei. The rest of the museum is upstairs on two floors in an old British
colonial building of the first half of the twentieth century. I don't know what
to think. Sumatra makes the sole apparition that I have been able to trace in
local museums so far. Of course, half of the exhibit is devoted to Palembang,
with the accent on Srivijaya and its later avatars. Seventeenth century
Palembang was a city-state with both a Chinese and a Portuguese neighbourhood.
That was news to me, though it was not surprising. If the Portuguese were across the
straits in Melaka - until 1641 at any rate when the Dutch took over - there is
no reason why they should not be in Palembang as well. The Chinese as usual
were on both sides. Surprisingly, no mention is made of the link to Melaka.
After all, Parameswara famously came from there - via Muar and Singapore - to found Melaka in the fifteenth
century. A princely exile and rebel. He killed the Siamese vassal in Singapore.
That is before he had to leave the island in the face of a Siamese attack. He
was therefore twice a refugee or exile. The exhibit is otherwise not bad. Maybe
Parameswara doesn't feature in it because the exhibit was organised by
Sumatrans. It is funny to think that the man who was from Sumatra is now not
important there any more but only across the straits. There is also a whole
room devoted to some place in Sumatra that seems to have been 'curated' by a
tourism authority. I have forgotten the name of the place and have never
understood where it is located in the first place (perhaps in the same province
as Palembang). There is little history that makes any sense in that
exhibit.
A replica of a batu bersurat with
inscriptions in Pallava is one of the showcases of the Palembang exhibit. I
wonder whether this is one of the famous first inscriptions in Malay in any
script. Alas, there is no explanation attached. In fact, the rest of the museum
often has displays that not are easily understandable. There are some Jawi books -
books in Malay in Arabic script. No explanation as to what they are, who wrote
them, when they were made and where. Nothing more elaborate on Jawi itself (and why it is no longer widely used today). One of the books seems to be merely a
photocopy. In fact, there are also Malay newspapers clippings framed and
hanging on the walls. One of them is about the Malays of Cape Town; the other
is about the Malays of Liverpool, featuring an interview with Timothy Bunnell,
a British professor of geography from Singapore who has done research on the
Malay seamen who have inhabited Liverpool continuously since the beginning of
the nineteenth century. The latter is a better clipping than the former (but
then the interviewee, Tim, is a specialist who did serious research on the
subject); the former merely assumes that Cape Malays are Malays like Malays in
Malaysia today. Well, they are not. Perhaps the vast majority of them will never
be able to trace any historical connection to what is today Malaysia. Instead
they often descend from people - usually slaves but not necessarily so - in
what is today Indonesia and India, as well as Europeans and Africans besides
Khoisan (Orang Asli). Interestingly the Sri Lankan Malays (who also have
origins outside of today's Malaysia) are absent from the exhibit. The same
British Orientalism that constructed a monolithic ur-Malay identity in colonial
Malaya of course was operating also in the Cape Colony (and Ceylon) virtually
at the same time, namely the nineteenth century and beyond.
The weakness of the museum lies not only in
its obvious lack of overall curatorial expertise. There is a much deeper problem. One display
actually points to the problem in a poignant way: Munshi Abdullah's Hikayat Abdullah is presented as the
Munshi's Malay Dilemma. Namely it is
equated to the famous work of Mahathir Mohamad, builder of today's Malaysia and to this day an important senior politician (he has set as a goal that Malaysia should become a fully developed country by 2020. The chief minister of Melaka then decided to fast forward and declared a couple of months ago that Melaka was already developed). That may be useful in presenting the work to the public - a public that does
not read very much, I am afraid, nor is particularly knowledgeable about its
own history. However, the principle of once Malay forever Malay that is at the
basis of the museum is actually tricky. It turns out that the definition of
Malay is even trickier. At the very entrance to the first floor there is a huge
wall map of the Malay World. It shows the Malay world as in fact practically
most of the world. It stretches from Rapa Nui - Easter Island, now a Chilean
possession not too close to but not too far from South America's Pacific coast -
all the way to Madagascar on the African coast. Its northernmost point in the
Asian mainland is Taiwan and surrounding islands; and then there is Hawaii in
the middle of the Pacific; its southernmost point is New Zealand. From Melaka
to the world...
There is a beautiful exhibit on Malay cloth
with incredibly well crafted items. The sarong for instance is presented as
being quintessentially Malay - it is therefore found in Thailand, Indonesia,
the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam...but somehow not in Taiwan, Hawaii, Rapa
Nui or Aotearoa. There is also a display on the sireh that is one of the best
in the whole museum: it shows very handsomely crafted utensils for betel nut
chewing from virtually from all over Southeast Asia as well as Yunnan. I was
quite impressed. So the map seems to be based on a linguistic criteria - for
incredible as this may seem Austronesian languages - the largest family of
languages in the entire world - indeed stretch all the way from Rapa Nui to
Madagascar and Taiwan and Hawaii to New Zealand, with Yunnan included. Malay is
an Austronesian language. The historical stretch of Malay is quite impressive
too - Adelaar (an Australian linguist of Dutch origin, I think) in fact shows
that there is evidence of influence from Malay in Taiwan's indigenous languages
as well in Malagasy (the language of today's Madagascar) and in Tagalog in the
Philippines. In more recent, colonial times once some form of Malay used to be
spoken all the way from the Cape of Good Hope in the south Atlantic to the
southern Philippines in the South China Sea, not to mention Liverpool in
England. Only Arabic has had a similarly impressive presence through the
centuries over such a long stretch of territory, besides Persian (to a much
smaller degree however), and in colonial times, languages such as Portuguese,
Spanish, and more recently French and English (and once upon a time Dutch as
well). Yet both Malay's more ancient as well as more recent history hides a
good deal of caveats.
The most important caveat is that
linguistic evidence, ethnographic materials (those sarongs, for instance) and
the historical and archaeological records are not easy to match. In fact, more
often than not they are fiendishly difficult to match. Therefore, if you fix
your gaze on the sarong you can easily travel within Southeast Asia (judging
from the exhibit itself - I have never read any studies on the sarong) but
perhaps not much further beyond. If you fix your gaze on linguistic evidence,
then your trip becomes much longer as it takes in vast new seascapes;
archaeology however brings you much closer to home again, but not so close that
you have to stay within the boundaries of Southeast Asia alone as the Bujang
Valley in Kedah abundantly shows. As for 'race', well, this is colonial
territory par excellence. During a conference in Penang an expert in
archaeology proposed that the identity of the Bujang Valley inhabitants may
become less obscure once cemeteries or graves with human remains are found.
That is highly optimistic, to say the least. In fact it is not impossible that
finding human remains may simply shroud the ancient history of Lembah Bujang
into further obscurity. Reading human remains in historical, linguistic and
ethnological terms is very difficult. Therefore, whatever human remains are
found in Lembah Bujang, it is highly unlikely they will be identifiably 'Malay'
human remains. The material
culture in Bujang Valley is a better indicator, but then the valley is famously
dotted with Indian and Chinese artefacts of every description...
Staring at the wall-to-wall map of the
Malay World is in fact staring at a historical and ethnographic conundrum that
has fascinated generations of scholars in every field: even if you read Malay
as Austronesian (a reading that in fact the map seems to impose as otherwise it
makes no sense), and even though there are naturally many objections to such a
reading, the mystery is how a collection of linguistically related seafaring
people managed through many centuries to cross the seas in search of new lands
to colonize over such a vast extension - from the African coast to the Pacific
coast of the Americas. In fact, there is some evidence of contacts and
exchanges between what is today Polynesia and South America in ancient times.
Therefore, it is not altogether impossible that even Brazil, on the other side
of the continent, may have been under some vague and very indirect Polynesian
influence at some point in terms of material culture, plant exchange and so on
(especially considering that the different parts of South America were never compartmentalized
in pre-colonial times, though there was often a marked difference between the
various Andean cultures, on the one hand, and the lowland indigenous cultures
on the other). In fact, considering that Madagascar is next to the African coast, Europe may have been the only continent untouched by Austronesians until modern times.
That is actually far more enigmatic and
entrancing than the Malay Dilemma.
If anything the quandary at the heart of
the museum is in fact how the truly oceanic and cosmopolitan, even though
somewhat obscure, can be presented in terms of the utterly parochial and
familiar.
No wonder the poor curators were out of
their depth.
No comments:
Post a Comment