Thread by @uglyluhan

It's taken a long time but here's the requested thread on one of the most divisive issues in Malaysian socio-politics, the creation of the Malay race. Did I say creation? Yes I did, and if that confuses you, just read on. This will be a long thread so bear with me

https://twitter.com/Syfqiman/status/1065807977485979649

There is a difference between race and ethnicity. To put it simply, race refers to physical characteristics while ethnicity is cultural. Ethnicity as a social construct is very real, but race is skin deep and has little basis in science

sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/sci…

Today, Malaysia and neighbouring countries like Singapore are highly racialised societies. Racialism and casual racism are considered perfectly normal even in the public sphere. We accept this as our "culture"

But as we shall see, this colonial worldview was never "our" culture. I would go so far as to say Southeast Asians were among the least aware of race, especially in comparison to other civilisations like the Arabs, Chinese or Europeans

The Malay language doesn't even have a racial vocabulary. The words bangsa, kaum, puak, etc didn't originally have a racial meaning. Racist terms in BM don't have a long history, except those that weren't initially derogatory like Keling or Jakun

https://twitter.com/uglyluhan/status/1068487326723039232?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

So with this in mind, the people of the Malay Archipelago in ancient times associated themselves with the nearby rivers, or the settlement (negeri) they came from. If their home came under the rule of a kingdom (kerajaan), that affiliation became their only "ethnic" identity

So if you met a person from pre-colonial Pahang and asked about their identity, they'd call themselves orang Pahang after the sungai Pahang. This identity was impermanent, and not to be conflated with a racial or ethnic one

And so it was that the Melayu river in Sumatra became the name of the entire eastern region of Sumatra and the people living there. For details, see my thread on the etymology of the term Melayu

https://twitter.com/uglyluhan/status/1064776313523757056?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

In its earliest usage, Melayu was associated with Sumatra. Aside from ancient Indians calling the island Malayadvipa, even the 14th century Javanese used "Malayu" for Sumatra and "Pahang" for the peninsula

The founders of Melaka frequently used the term Melayu to evoke their lineage from Srivijaya. In this context, the true meaning of Hang Tuah's famous line becomes apparent. Not one of racial bravado, but of the Srivijaya line never dying. He specifically meant Melaka Malays

As I explained before, Tanah Melayu didn't have the same pan-archipelagic definition that we use today. Rather, it referred to areas that came under Melaka-Johor dominance. Kedah, Patani, Brunei, etc were not historically called "Malay" kingdoms

https://twitter.com/uglyluhan/status/1064455992446861312?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

Now before someone accuses me of being "geng Chola", I should point out that the people of these kingdoms on the peninsula were still what we'd identify as "Malay" today, in both appearance and culture. They simply didn't refer to themselves as such

Some orang asli referred to Malays as Gop. Dayaks referred to non-Dayaks (Malays in particular) as Halo. But it's really from foreigners that we get a collective descriptor, reflecting their view as outsiders. The first was presumably the Arabs

Arab writings used the terms Jawah and Jawi (meaning Javanese) for ALL the people of the Malay Archipelago, right into Indochina. Even Thais were called Jawi. Today we mostly use the word Jawi in reference to the Arabic-based Malay alphabet

https://twitter.com/uglyluhan/status/1083679179629985792?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

Malay-speakers of southern Thailand today refer to their dialect as Jawi and themselves as bangsa Jawi. Cambodian Muslims originating in Kelantan-Patani (as opposed to the Cham) call themselves Chvea, a derivative of Java or Jawi

But it was the Europeans who applied the term "Malay" in the sense we know today. It started small, at first including Javanese, Makassar, Banjar, and eventually the whole Malay Archipelago

Speaking of which, terms like "Kepulauan Melayu", "Alam Melayu", "bangsa Melayu" and "Semenanjung Tanah Melayu" are not native. These are translations from English. At times the colonists even referred to it as the Indian Archipelago or Indo-Australian Archipelago

Europeans at the time believed that humans were divided into 4 races, devised by Swiss scientist Carolus Linnaeus. Later the German scientist Johann Blumenbach added a 5th category, the "Malay race" which spanned from Southeast Asia through Polynesia to the Pacific islands

The influence of ancient and medieval European racial theory is evident in their taxonomy. Physical characteristics were associated with particular traits. And naturally, white Europeans were the superior beings at the top of the hierarchy

Their method of categorising races according to skin colour was known to be inaccurate even in the late 1800s. Others used hair and eye colour, then later blood groups. Today we know it's all bogus. Scientifically there is only one human race

nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/…

Yet the five races taxonomy has been extremely influential, and was disseminated by schools worldwide even into the 20th century. Our modern classification of "white", "black" and "yellow" people traces directly to Linnaeus and Blumenbach

Through British influence, this extended definition of Melayu was used in Malay writings of the colonial era, such as Pelayaran Abdullah. But even among more knowledgeable colonials, we often see distinctions like "Penang Malay", "Kedah Malay", etc

Indonesians were among the immigrants to Malaya during the colonial period, along with Chinese and Indians, but the British made no distinction between them and Malays. Those Indonesians intermarried and assimilated, often losing their culture and language in the process

Obviously the reason this topic is so divisive in Malaysia is due to the constitutional privileges given to "natives". The word Malay needed a legal definition, and so three criteria seen as the common denominators of the community were laid out

The Constitution defines Malay as any Muslim who speaks BM and practices Malay customs. This definition not only excludes many Malays, but includes people who are not of Malay descent. Indian Muslims, Indonesians, and various orang asal became legally Malay overnight

Science has progressed but people haven't. The colonial Malay race concept is still commonly accepted in the former British colonies of Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. In fact, it persists even in the modern Philippines

academia.edu/2141396/Filipi…

In Malaysia especially where the word Malay is legally defined, racial supremacists still use outdated racial theories on a near daily basis. Politicians of Indonesian or Indian origin proudly call themselves pembela Melayu

themalaysianinsight.com/s/112263

Like I said before, such individuals and organisations are the most similar in their outlook to the colonists. Both their definition of Malay and the accompanying stereotypes are purely western colonial constructs

financetwitter.com/2018/09/mahath…

In fact, they very often cite colonial-era Europeans as "proof"

As people have become better informed, some have tried to replace "Malay" or "Malay world" with other terms they don't fully understand. One of their favourites is Austronesian. This refers to a language family, not a race

Another is Nusantara (and its recently invented descriptor "Nusantaran"), a medieval Javanese term for states that paid tribute to Majapahit but were otherwise autonomous. In Indonesia today, the word refers to the Indonesian archipelago, basically only Indonesia itself

Historically a term used in this sense was "countries below the wind" (negara di bawah angin), referring to the monsoon winds that brought traders from across the Indian Ocean. But this also includes Siam and Cambodia

Some of Farish Noor's writings use "Indon-Malay" for shared aspects of culture. This would be useful, but it never became popular partly because Indonesians might find "Indon" offensive

The reason it's so hard to find a replacement is because there was never a historical cuddly sense of brotherhood among the peoples of the archipelago setting themselves as apart from the rest. No Melakan would have felt greater kinship with a Bugis than a Thai, for example

But there is one place where the word Melayu is preserved in its original correct ethnic form. And of course that place is Indonesia, a diverse country which recognises Malays as just one of many ethnic groups, not a collective for them all

selipan.com/story/13-karak…

Indonesians aren't completely alone in this. International academics generally still use Malay only for one single ethnic group. The "Malay race" or "Malay world" is a myth that has no place anywhere outside the racialism of former British colonies

If Indonesians can resist the colonial past and use the term correctly, what's stopping us? No good has come of the extended definition of Malay. On the contrary, it has benefited only the racists. We can't change the Constitution, but we can reject the colonial notion of race

Sources:

Anthony Milner
Tim Babcock
Jared Diamond
Raymond Scupin
Christopher Decorse
Charles Hirschman