Malayness Essay

516 Words3 Pages
The colonial construction of Malayness, according to Maier's stimulating account (1988), emanates from two groups of British colonists in Malaya in the nineteenth century. These were the early generation of colonists and mainly Scottish servants of the East India Company, the so-called merchantscientists, and the later generation of scholar-administrators. The first group, which included men like James Low, who served in Penang and Province Wellesley in the 1820s and 1830s, was imbued with the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment and held the view that human nature is uniform and that all human beings have similar capacities (Maier 1988:37, 43). Although the Malays had a simple economie system and less advanced social institutions, this pro-Enlightenment camp argued, they should be taken seriously because they were capable of improvement. Commerce and industry in this view provided the key for their advancement, and once inpossession of this key, the Malays would move up to a higher level on the scale of civilization (Maier 1988:59). The second group, the scholar-administrators, which included men like H. Clifford, F. Swettenham, and the leading British Malaya educator Richard Winstedt, rejected the assumption that the Malay 'race' could fully attain to the benefits of civilization (Maier 1988:51-7). Hence the Malays could not be taken seriously, even if they were to be admired - their behaviour reminded the colonists of the courtesy and loyalty of the English gentleman class. By the time Winstedt arrived in the Peninsula, at the turn of the 20th century, British social and cultural superiority was well established. Malay society, by contrast, was regarded as being disoriented and decadent, partly, so the colonists believed, because the Malays were incapable of withstanding Western and Islamic influence, and partly because their society was
Open Document