“if the Malays start tearing each other apart, a Malay leader who is heavily vested in and dependent upon the Chinese will eventually come into power and end up becoming very powerful”
Raggie Jessy Rithaudeen
ديليما مليسيا: اسلام ترانچم جك ملايو-اسلام تيدق برساتو
When rubber estates were first opened in Malaya, it proved impossible to recruit Malays from nearby villages.
As a result, estate managers were obliged to rely on the recruitment of single males from India and Sri Lanka, who were regarded as best suited for estate life compared to the Chinese.
By contrast, Chinese immigrant workers were generally brought in by Chinese businessman, many of whom were ‘ring leaders’, ‘head honchos’ or clan leaders (hereinafter referred to as “Taikos”).
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These workers were either labourers or coolies (hereinafter referred to as “Chinese labourers”) – mainly of Teochew origin – and were assigned to work in the tin mining industry.
Still, some plantations run by Taikos in Penang and Johor did have their fair share of Chinese labourers during the early 19th century.
The Penang plantation scene was heavily vested in cash crop such as pepper, gambier, betelnut and clove, while the plantations in Johor focussed mainly on pepper and gambier.
A sizeable number of Chinese labourers also ended up in rubber plantations run by the Europeans, though they were still kept under the charge of Taikos that headed informal associations, similar to the Kongsi organisations found in other Chinese communities.
Because the Chinese labourers were so industrious and hardworking, many quickly rose to become owners and (or) or co-owners of the plantations they worked in.
That left the British with little choice but to allow more and more single males from India and Sri Lanka to replace Chinese planters through a de facto form of slavery, known as “indentured servitude.”
Many Indians who came in under this system were either laborers, sepoys or convicts (hereinafter referred to as “Indian labourers”) and brought along with them the Indian caste system.
Over the years, some of the Indian males that came in succeeded in bringing their siblings into Malaya, and many married the children of Indians from an earlier wave of arrivals.
Needless to say, the caste system led to an untold number of family feuds that almost always ended with brutality and even death.
For instance, a girl from one caste would have risked getting herself butchered were she to have eloped with a boy from another caste.
But as the years went by, a small but significant number of Indians from the youth segment preferred to venture out of the estates and were emboldened by values that did not exist in India.
They spoke better English than the Chinese and Malays and were not suited to work in tin mines.
They also lacked the money to venture into business but were determined to work and help free their parents from the shackles of servitude.
Because of this, they ended up in various ancillary roles, predominantly in the healthcare and postal services, provided by the British due to their command of the English language.
The identification of Indians by caste gradually became non-existent among them – this may have had to do with workplace requirements, apart from the fact that they chose to live near Malay enclaves away from the town centre, due to their inability to pay the high rentals in townships.
Some lived in quarters provided by the British, and even then, their neighbours comprised mostly of Malays. To say that they were not influenced by the Malays is ignorance, to say the least.
In the estates, the caste system became less and less prevalent with the passage of time, and I am convinced that this also had to do with the influence of the soft spoken and mild mannered Malays from neighbouring farms and fishing villages.
It was only a matter of time before Hindu temples that once forbade members of a certain caste to pray within their confines, exposed the concept of “communal living” and opened their doors to all devotees.
That’s cultural assimilation for you, or the process by which one group’s language, attitudes and (or) culture evolves due to the influences of another.
Over the years, the discrimination of one group of Indians by another due to caste became almost non-existent.
However, despite decades and decades of British rule, the caste system is still very much alive in India, a country that comprises almost entirely of ethnic Indians.
See how the lack of ethnic diversity favours the preservation of negative elements in society?
Some might call this an overgeneralisation, but when you observe the Indians in lesser developed countries (such as South Africa and Kenya) and the more developed countries (such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Singapore), and when you compare them with the Indians in India, you will see a clear pattern.
Suffice to say, a multiethnic and multiracial setting helps weaken the socio-cultural walls that distinguish one group from another, bringing about “a synergistic compromise.”
The impressionable young always tend to steer away to a certain degree from the arbitrary values preserved by the older generations and are open to new ideas and new philosophies.
And when you’re the majority, it is your culture that ultimately rubs off on minority groups no matter how hard the minorities try to avoid it.
In a sense, there is a certain degree of Malayness in every Malaysian Indian today as there is in every Malaysian Chinese.
The fact that the early Malays could have had such an impact on the early Chinese and Indians stems from another fact – the Malays then were much less divisive than the Malays are today.
Today, all the Malays need to do to is to go on with their lives without worrying about who is in charge of government, as long as the person in charge isn’t dependent upon the Chinese.
The day will come when the number of Malays grow so large, the Chinese will behave more and more like the Malays, to a point that one day, the Chinese will agree to meet the Malays halfway on Islamic governance, so long as the constitutional right of the Chinese to practise any religion is preserved.
It is estimated that by 2050, there will be seven Malays in Malaysia for every Chinaman on the street.
But if the seven Malays start tearing each other apart, a Malay leader who is heavily vested in and dependent upon the Chinese will eventually rise to power and end up becoming very powerful.
“This can happen and will happen, because the Chinese are united, while the Malays are a fractured lot, ready to accept any leader “as long as he is a Malay.”
I said this one year ago, and already, it has become a reality.
One fine day, the liberal values espoused by the Malaysian Chinese will gradually seep into mainstream Malay culture.
Should that happen, then, even if you were to have ten Malays for every Chinaman on the street, you will end up with a liberalised and less Islamic Malay culture in no time at all.
And when that happens, Malay politicians can find a spot in Timbuktu and sit down with their children and cry, observing how reluctant their children are to pray five times a day.
