Salleh Ben Joned, Poet Laureate of Melaka in the fora which matter, has had a play published last year, The Amok of Matt Solo. I have a couple of things in common with Ben Joned: for instance, my relationship with Melaka, and the fact that I am a Matt Salleh.
In his play - not published for twenty years because potential publishers found it too controversial until Silverfish Books in Kuala Lumpur decided to take a chance - there is a scene where Matt Solo meets his student Rina in the shadow of the Santiago Gate, the most famous remaining landmark of the old Portuguese Fort destroyed by Farquhar in 1810 or thereabouts. He remarks that the 'Portuguese relic' had given shelter to quite a few sinners before. Rina is a Chindian student of his who is also considering leaving the university - that is, University of Malaya - just as her mentor. I find the concomitant reference to Portuguese, mixedness (in Rina's person), and sin quite intriguing. Santiago is Saint James, and Santiago de Compostela is a major pilgrimage site of the saint in Galicia, in today's Spain. Galicians speak a language that is so close to Portuguese that at one point, hundreds of years ago, it was virtually indistinguishable from it (linguists still talk of Galaico-Português to describe that language). Sin, pilgrimage, Portuguese, Galicia - all conflated in the most unlikely place, that is, Melaka. And in the words of a local poet who is a local Malay in whose work Melaka does not figure particularly prominently.
I feel like engaging in all kinds of speculation after reading Ben Joned's play, essays, and poems with students (none of which had ever even heard his name, though they are, bar a group of Indonesian girls from Jakarta, all local and some times Malay as well). I wonder for instance whether Ben Joned's irreverent and highly original writing does not have somehow an origin in Melaka. He only learned English in his early teens, but became an important litterateur in English as well as in Malay (even though the official Malay literary establishment has always shunned him as a kind of Apostate Poet). The official culture which has sidelined and somewhat demonised Ben Joned has not allowed Melaka much of place either except as the birthplace of the Malay(sian) nation through the wondrous, long gone sultanate. Reading the work of another local Malay, this time Munshi Abdullah, it is clear that Melaka has an incredible, complex past. At the time Farquhar, under orders from the East India Company in Calcutta, began to destroy the fort, Melaka was still a very lively and bustling port. The idea was to destroy all public buildings and order the evacuation of the place so that when it was eventually returned to the Dutch it would not be able to compete with Penang, which was held by the East India Company. Stamford Raffles finally convinced the Company of the madness of its plan and Melaka was left standing. Only the Fort was destroyed, minus Santiago Gate, its foundations and a few bastions. The Munshi tells us in his Hikayat Abdullah, the first Malay autobiography, that all kinds of people profited from the bustling trade in the port, and that only after the founding of Singapore would the city empty itself and become the famous bandar mati - 'dead city' - of later times. In his account several Portuguese names still survived in the designation of institutions in the city which the Dutch had reshaped but not entirely destroyed when they took over, and which the English had still left intact in Abdullah's teenage years. Abdullah's account is therefore a precious link to previous times in more ways than one.
In his time children of wealthy Muslim families would learn Arabic as well as Tamil. In his case he was also taught classical Malay - the Malay of manuscripts - besides a new arrival in town, namely Hindustani, a language that existed until just over half a century ago (and has at least two postcolonial avatars, namely, official Hindi and Urdu). The interesting thing is that Ay Ling has mentioned Hindustani to me as the language of Indian songs as if it were still a living language. Well, in Melaka it perhaps is, or at least its name is there still. In Abdullah's time there were no Malay schools as such, though the classical language could be learned from manuscripts as well as learned men who were old but still alive. I have no idea whether Abdullah's trajectory was unique at the time - the early nineteenth century. His father's compulsion - which he eventually made his own - was to send him to learn Arabic, Tamil, and Malay in quick succession (first Arabic, then Tamil slightly later, and Malay much later). Abdullah took it on himself to learn Hindustani (I assume he learned the language in the Perso-Arabic script, not in Devanagari. He himself says that three quarters of all East Indian Company Indian soldiers in Melaka were Muslim, and the Perso-Arabic script was, I assume, preferred by them. Therefore out of the four languages which Abdullah was studying very intensively as a child and teenager, three - namely, Arabic, Malay, and Hindustani - shared a closely related script, in the last two languages one ultimately derived from Arabic via Persian. Tamil also existed in a modified Perso-Arabic script, but this was mostly used in the late nineteenth century and later, and therefore it probably only became current after Abdullah's time. Therefore, he almost certainly learned Tamil in the ancient Tamil script. Later he would also learn English, the language of the new conquerors of Melaka (as Abdullah was born the English had taken over Melaka from the Dutch without a fight). Abdullah, not being a Christian, never learned as far as I know, Melaka Portuguese, which was at the time the language of the local Christians, even though it was probably never written down (this was before missionaries later in the century would convert local Chinese and others and thereby create new Christian groups - as well as new congregations, both Catholic and Methodist - in town). He eventually made a living writing letters for the members of the East India Company garrison - in Hindustani. Hence his cognomen, the Munshi - منشی - i.e. a scrivener or amanuensis (from the Persian, and in current Malay orthography, Munsyi).
As a reader foreign to the text in more ways than one - through language, nationality, lack of contemporaneity, religion, to name but a few - the Munshi's text strikes me in translation (I have never read it in the original) as quite peculiar. It is said to be the first autobiography in Malay. It reads very much like an autobiography, though I must say that it is also an attempt to give advice about the proper conduct people should have. For instance, the Munshi gives a long and enticing description of an elephant hunt carried out by a Pawang Gajah - a witchdoctor for elephants (sic). Locals considered the Pawang highly competent in his occult powers as shown by his successful penning of about sixty elephants in the jungle outside of Melaka (amazingly Melakans, according to the Munshi, had never seen live elephants even though largish herds lived not too far from the city. The harbour city was in this way strangely or not disconnected from its interior to a large degree, though I doubt the disconnection was ever absolute or that it encompassed all of Melaka's inhabitants). The Munshi was very skeptical, not to say condemnatory, towards the Pawang's occult powers and instead thought he was only a very competent elephant hunters and handler. In this way, the Munshi showed himself to be a local who did not share what were apparently the beliefs of most Melakans. Somehow his intense training - he learned for instance how to recite the entire Qu'ran without making mistakes - set him apart from his countrymen and women who apparently for the most part did not see any contradiction between admiring the Pawang Gajah for his mystical powers over elephants and being pious Muslims. The Munshi's writing therefore as it hovers over the whole of Melaka is both locally rooted and almost strangely detached from its surroundings. It could be argued that this is a characteristic of all good writing; however, in his case the feeling of disassociation is rather strong to my mind, and seems to spring from several sources at the same time: his religious training - which was also very importantly a deep kind of language training as Arabic was the very first language he learned in a systematic, scholarly fashion; his interlingual position in-between different languages; his scrivener's job that put him in constant touch with different sorts of locals and foreigners; the almost monastic training imposed by his father during many years so that he could master to a great degree of perfection the various languages he came to master, a training which certainly set him apart from his peers. In sum, his position as an interpreter and language specialist was a very special position which was not shared by anyone in Melaka bar a handful of people (all of them incidentally far more senior than the young Munshi). In a way, the Munshi was almost a unique inhabitant of Melaka at the same time that he was also very much a local.
His meeting with Raffles and other Englishmen made him even more peculiar. Raffles had a love of the Malay language - and a related fondness for Malay manuscripts. He can be seen as a true pioneer of Malay studies. The Munshi came to share his views - or else the Munshi and Raffles shared very close views on the subject right from the start. Raffles believed there should be Malay schools - nowadays Malaysia is dotted with them from north to south and east to west, universities included (all more or less offering an education of indifferent quality). He would buy Malay manuscripts on great quantities - the Munshi regrets that it was perhaps unwise of the local inhabitants to sell their manuscripts in such large numbers (an unheard of event in Melaka history until then). The manuscripts mostly went down into the depths of the ocean when the ship carrying Raffles's precious collections sank.
The sunken manuscripts are in fact part of a complex history of epistemological plundering, whereby all kinds of specimens of local flora and fauna - both dead and alive - as well as numerous samples of many other things (for instance, material objects of all kinds) were collected by the English, beginning with Farquhar. This last had commissioned the Pawang Gajah to capture elephants. Out of the sixty-odd elephants belonging to a single herd which the Pawang Gajah had managed to pen up, one or two managed to reach Melaka alive, only to eventually die there. Farquhar however sent the bones of the dead elephants to England all the same. Manuscripts and elephants therefore shared on a level the same fate: they were collectible items thought to be detachable from their original settings so as to become scientifically perusable objects in the metropolis (as well as of course objects which could be exhibited in museums, private collections, etc). It was a veritable wide-ranging ransacking of Melaka's heritage in all domains. This is much more than a horror story about colonial knowledge formations. It is in fact a veritable founding myth of Malayness, and at a further remove, of modern Malaysia's official view of itself as a majority Malay and Muslim nation-state. This is not exactly about roots as such, nor about the emergence of a colonial episteme only - rather it is about an incredible outburst of something akin to black magic casting a shroud over the centuries (it is now about two centuries since the events described here took place) as well as over an entire country. An outburst now entirely unlike Farquhar's destroying the old Portuguese fort by exploding its ramparts. The Munshi tells us that the pickaxes of the many men initially employed in tearing it apart had been completely ineffective against it. Many of them fell ill or suffered accidents and even died. It was widely believed that the fort was full of spirits who were resisting Farquhar's efforts quite successfully until this last resorted to gunpowder. The Munshi is interestingly fairly non-judgmental here in his descriptions of the spiritual resistance to colonial destruction, as opposed to his description of the Pawang Gajah's prowess in the jungle later on in the text.
The black magic of the Malay(sian) nation-state, to paraphrase Taussig's well-known book on the Venezuelan Bolivarist state. However, differently to Venezuela, the Malaysian nation-state is curiously literalist in its myths and symbols. These seem almost like empty shells or opaque objects, somehow not unlike sunken manuscripts or whitened elephant bones in a display case in some museum. Ben Joned's luminous poetry however remains, reinstating Porta de Santiago's joyous, sinful functions.
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