A plural peninsula or Tanah Melayu?

Written by Helen Ting

The other day, as I brought a group of Indonesian friends to visit Kuala Lumpur by train, I explained to them that KTM stood for Keretapi Tanah Melayu. They were quite amused by the term Tanah Melayu, hearing it for the first time in their life. Tanah Melayu was the term Umno leaders insisted as the name of the alternative Federation which replaced the short-lived Malayan Union. At symbolic level, it summarised aptly their nationalist sentiment, that this is a Malay land. Just when and how the name came about? It is actually a considerable challenge for historians to find evidence of local consciousness of the territory as a peninsula in the Asian sources before the entrenchment of the European influence. In the 14th century Javanese Desawarnana, the southern part of the peninsula was referred to as “the territory of Pahang”, while the term Malayu referred to Sumatra. The earliest verifiable sources generally designate Malayu to a location in Sumatra, the island of Sumatra itself, or a specific kingdom there. European cartographers of the 15th and early 16th century generally labelled the Peninsula as the Golden Khersonese, probably after Ptolemy’s appellation. The 17th century Portuguese writer, de Eredia, called it Ujontana. He explained that throughout the “continental territory of Ujontana (defined as covering the Malay Peninsula beneath Junk Ceylon)” the Malay language was used by the natives who called themselves ‘Malayos’. Until around 1800, English, French and Dutch maps generally called the Peninsula ‘Melaka’. From Deli to Tanah Melayu In early indigenous written sources, the term Tanah Melayu is not frequently found, and is not a specific name for the Peninsula. Among the early Malay texts, the term Tanah Melayu designating Malaya is used almost exclusively in Hikayat Hang Tuah. It appears to be a general term denoting places under the reign or suzerainty of Melaka Kingdom, or where the Melayu lived. In Hikayat Hang Tuah, the term was used just as Tanah Terengganu, Tanah Brunai, Tanah Melaka; Inderapura was regarded as Tanah Melayu while Brunai was described as negeri asing. At one point, merchants from Melaka were said to have changed the name of Deli to Tanah Melayu. It was only around early 19th century that current usage of the term began to take hold. The first book which explicitly referred to the peninsula as “Malay peninsula” was in a map of a book by J Begbie in 1834 entitled The Malayan Peninsula. The idea that the Peninsula was ‘Malay’ appears to be an exclusively English conception. A British administrator turned academician, Sir Richard Winstedt, acknowledged that the word “Malaya” for the peninsula was a European invention. The first English usage of the term “Malaya” appeared in the writings of Alexander Hamilton in the 1720s in the form of the phrase “Coast of Malaya” in his reference to the ports of Kedah and Perak. It is notable that, contrary to the current tendency to regard racial purity as one indication of ethnic authenticity, the term Malayu was in all aspects associated with hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Sejarah Melayu claim genealogical linkage of the Malayu origins to Indian ancestry and Alexander the Great. The practice of tracing royal genealogy to illustrious or even divine origins was probably inspired by the ancient Indic kingship tradition. Hang Tuah as a Melakan Malay admitted famously in Hikayat Hang Tuah that he was also a kacukan and not ‘pure’ Malay. Several historical indicators point to the possible Chinese ancestry of some of the Malayu class, the maritime elites of the Archipelago then. The Malay language was initially referred to more as Jawi, understood as anything mixed or crossed (just as “anah jahui”), or Bahasa Jawi. An authoritative historian of the region, Anthony Reid, pointed out that “foreignness” was in fact considered an asset for entrepreneurs in the region between the 15th to 18th centuries. A contemporary Portuguese observer, Tomé Pires, wrote that at least 61 different races and communities could be found in 15th century Melaka, with 84 different tongues being spoken. The inhabitants of the region exhibited their receptivity and capacity for adaptation and innovation in the face of stimulation from outside, as well described by Anthony Reid: “Chinese technology, weights and coins, Indian financial methods, Islamic commercial laws, and European technology and capital, all played a major part in creating the character of Southeast Asian urban and commercial life in this period (AD1400-1800).” ‘Identity problem’ In a keynote lecture he gave at the Fourth Malaysian Studies Conference in 2004, Prof Reid commented that the current label ‘Malay’ carried by the peninsula poses an “identity problem”. He thought “Plural Peninsula” would be a more appropriate name for it. Reid noted that when the English appellation ‘Malay Peninsula’ was initially applied to the territory, the term Malay had a much wider meaning. Yet the meaning of the term ‘Malay’ and ‘Melayu’ had been narrowed down in the “nationalist century” of the 20th “to become an ethnic adjective, increasingly used in an ethno-nationalist spirit to exclude the other long-term inhabitants of the Plural Peninsula, now labelled Thai, Chinese, Mon-Khmer, Indian or smaller groups”. He lamented the tendency of the 20th century nationalism “to impose the nation backwards onto a cosmopolitan past, claiming a great trading city such as Melaka, Brunei, Ayutthaya, Srivijaya or Majapahit as an ‘empire’, ancestral to the modern nation-state. In this construct, cosmopolis is embarrassing, and where it cannot be avoided has to be put down to aberrant colonial schemes to divide and rule”. Despite 50 years of political independence from the British, we are yet to undo this epistemological colonisation.