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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
do not conflict with the first two
principles.
But what was meant by Malay culture?
The authorities did not take into
account that Malay culture is extremely
polyglot and pluralist. ‘Malay’ is an
anthropological term that extends all
the way to people of the Fiji islands and
the Philippines. It was a term
introduced by British administrators in
the 1920s. In fact, an entire study was
done by R.J. Wilkinson and R.O.
Winstedt called ‘Papers on Malay
Subjects’ in an attempt to homogenise
the indigenous peoples as they were
being confronted by large waves
of migrants from China and India,
people who worked in tin mines and
rubber plantations. And this term
Malay or Melayu and the concept of a
dominant culture in this heterogeneous
landscape were adopted in the 1970s to
provide a hegemonic culture for the
nation state.
The wonderful thing about the Malay
Peninsula is that it has a culture with
great nuance and subtlety, and not a
monumental culture. We have no
Borobudur, no Angkor Wat, no Bagan.
What we have, in the state of Kedah, is
a small but very refined and beautiful
enclave called the Bujang Valley, which
was a small temple site but in which
you can see the eccentricities of an
essentially Malay sensibility, lovely little
dancing Ganeshas with unique features
that you don’t find in the great
Jayavarman structures of Cambodia.
What we’ve seen in the Malaysian
nation over the past several years is an
aspiring to that monumental culture.
And on realising that it did not exist,
we decided to create one.
First of all, institutions were
constructed: universities and art
schools in urban Kuala Lumpur. The
authorities began to import traditional
musicians from villages in Malaysia and
house them in an institution called the
National Cultural Complex. Apart
from instituting policy, they basically
classicised traditions. Ours are folk and
community traditions based on
improvisation, ritual, and eccentric
approaches to storytelling. We remain
tied to oral traditions. But in the 1970s
there were efforts to codify these
traditions, which essentially meant
censoring them and cleansing them of
anything that did not fit into the
archetype of what Malay culture had to
be. So ritual vanished, Angin and
Semangat vanished, and a story known
as the Hikayat Seri Rama, the story of
Rama, replaced the story of Ravana as
the canonical text! This was done in
collaboration with many scholars, and