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©The Sun (Used by permission)
by Kunjari Sambanthan

Growing up in Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s in my father’s government quarters home could be fun.

With no PCs or Astro, we would create games and have adventures in the vast compound. My cousin, the leader, being five years older and a boy, would have his friends cycle or take a bus over – these were generally Malay and Chinese boys.

For Hari Raya, Chinese New Year and Deepavali, we would be supplied fire crackers (before they were banned), sparklers and fireworks, and the glamorous if less versatile Christmas crackers for of course, Christmas.

In school, we ate out of each other’s Tupperware, biscuits, kuih, sometimes boiled tapioca with sambal belacan, and also from the same stalls at the canteen where we sat together to perpetrate the kind of rowdiness that only girls in an all-girls school can.

Because that was what we were, Malaysian girls. Mine was an Anglican school and I would attend Christian Union because I loved to sing! Ugama and Bible Knowledge classes were held and nobody ever thought it fit to teach me my religion in school but nobody held it against me either.

Back home, my mother made it a point to teach me to salaam my Malay elders just as I was taught to greet my Indian elders traditionally.

Being Hindu, I was raised to not eat beef (we did not eat pork either) but not to hold it against others that they ate things we didn’t. So it was possible to be comfortable with friends eating beef and pork at the same table (different serving spoons would be used).

Friends of other races have equally been solicitous of my eating idiosyncrasies and rarely have I been made to feel a misfit or an encumbrance.

I don’t think that my upbringing was uncommon. It was part of being Malaysian. Our textbooks reflected this ethos.

This essay was supposed to be about ethnic relations and the Malaysian identity, 50 years from today. I have agonised on what this means as I get emotional constipation at the use of the phrase “ethnic relations” in a Malaysian context.

The growth of the use of the word “ethnic” in common parlance, may, if I am not mistaken, have associations with areas in which ethnicity has implied conflict, and different groups have grown separately from one another.

This is my blinkered and emotional misappropriation of the literal meaning of the phrase. When did “ethnic relations” begin to describe how we Malaysians feel for one another?

Certainly not when I was a kid or even a teenager in the ’70s. My classmates from the now defunct Bukit Bintang Girls School feel the same.

Given that rather singular association which that phrase has in my mind, I repeat the question, when did it start having application for Malaysia?

When did we become just Malays, Indians, Chinese, and others, and in the process stop being Malaysians as I understand the term, ie. a unique and workable identity?
Going back 1,000 years in time for Malaysia, we have a cherished heritage of assimilation. Malaya was called “The Golden Chersonese”. Many have washed onto our shores, whether as colonial forces such as the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, or as traders like the Arabs, Chinese, Thais, Indians, or as people seeking expansion or a better life – the Bugis, those who came from Majapahit or Palembang. The early immigrants were able to adjust to one another, and added to Malaya rather than bring with them the practice of oppression.

Even when people were migrating from one religion to another (with the conversion of groups from Hinduism to Islam, for example) our forefathers – not those from the same racial origins but rather those who came here before us and stayed on – generally understood and absorbed the differences of each group.

Was it a spirit of curiosity and adventure, a respect for humanity? A desire as an immigrant to learn from others?

As an aside, in the 1950s, tin miners in our home town of Sungai Siput, Perak (not Thanjavur) found ancient Buddhist statues in an area known as Rimba Panjang, suggesting that there may once have been a Buddhist settlement there.

Although Indian and Chinese immigration in the last 200 years has been for the opportunities offered by the tin mines and rubber estates, their presence has an almost ancient association.

Perhaps this is what the founding fathers had in their mind when they put together this glorious abstract – a nation in loving acknowledgement of what Malaya was at the time (and had been for a while), an original collage of different colours and textures that reflected the layers of “arrivees” and the indigenous, and with so much hope that this would be the basis upon which this country would grow and mature. And to this was later added the colours and traditions of Sabah and Sarawak.

Could W.B. Yeats’ closing lines from his poem Cloths of Heaven capture how they felt?

“I have spread my dreams under your feet, Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

It may be difficult for current generations of former colonies to fully empathise with this spirit – the trend of the times is that nationality is something which can be changed, sometimes hinging on professional, educational or commercial expediency.

But being a post-1957 baby, I was raised with the pride of being “born free”, a citizen of my own country. Unlike my aunts and uncles, I never had to have a special citizenship document. My father’s pride in our nationhood etched within us the primary identity of being Malaysian. Our parents had to wait well into adulthood to have a home, their parents having come from one colony to another.

How has this spirit of recognising the “specialness” of who we are as Malaysians become subordinate to a principle of fearing our differences?

And how have we allowed these fears, rather than that faith in being Malaysian that defined us, to guide us?

I have many wishes for those who will see Malaysia into its 100th year but shall express only one: That they may experience this feeling of belonging to one heritage quite unlike any other, a heritage which recognises the specialness of each component (race) of being a Malaysian, and understands (not just tolerates) and works with the differences.

Thankfully, we are a young nation. We can still learn and grow.May God’s Grace ever be upon our Malaysia.

Kunjari Sambanthan’s father was one of the founding fathers of independent Malaya, a signatory of the declaration of Independence, and the 5th MIC president.

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