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©The Sun (Used by permission)
by Eddin Khoo

Melaka was a successful trading port in the 15th century. Traders from both East and West converged on the Malay peninsula, foreshadowing Malaysia's multi-culturalism today.

"And what should be saved here from these giant carved stones - if indeed there is anything to be saved at all?" Goenawan Mohamad in "History" from Sidelines.

IF myth-making appears, in our commonplace national impulse, to verge on the obsessive, it is largely because the Malaysian landscape has always inspired that tendency. But for the slim isthmus that binds our terrain to the Southeast Asian mainland, ours remains a territory (and imagination) largely dominated by the presence of the sea.

And upon its waters, fables have travelled flawlessly.

To the early Indian traders of the classical maritime age, the Malay peninsula was described as a land laced with gold. They came to call it Yavadvipa - the Golden Pear - mentioned in highly-romantic terms in the epic The Ramayana. Adventurers and travellers venturing along the Southeast Asian mainland in quest of trade brought with them sensual variations of that epic, forging a Ramayanic crest, which established its furthest point in that region by the South China Sea known today as Kelantan.

Melaka was a successful trading port in the 15th century, resulting in the growth of different cultures in the Malay peninsula.

It has, nevertheless, been convenient to locate the early culture of Southeast Asia (and Malaysia) neatly within the broader settings of a benign process of Indianisation. The notion of a grand, inexorable cultural trend, however, betrays the deeper realities of a landscape replete with conflicting forces and cultures contending for command of raw materials and the control of trade routes.

It was from such a climate of fratricide and regicide that a fugitive prince from Palembang in Sumatra, known by the appellation Parameswara, emerged to begin the process of formalising trade avenues and constructing state organisation in the Malay peninsula. For all that Malacca has since become in our hierarchy of hagiographies, the fact remains that this city-state was soon to rise as Southeast Asia's first modern cosmopolis.

The organisation of Malacca was administered along the lines of a carefully considered and astute diplomacy. Having procured protection from the Ming Dynasty in China through its emissary, the Chinese Muslim eunuch Admiral Cheng Ho, and in assembling a host of advisers, including those of Indian and Javanese origin within its court, the port of Malacca did indeed thrive, capitalising on its strategic location at the crossroads between the trade routes of India and China.

And so, when the first fleets of Da Gama departed from the port of Lisbon to begin its circumnavigation of the globe, whisperings of a vibrant port "filled with spice and incense in greater India" began to seize the Portuguese imagination.

By the time the archivist and diarist Tome Pires visited the port of Malacca, the centre had grown to be not just a thriving port for trade but a principal city-state in the region, renowned for its sophisticated commercial and political networks as well as a centre for Southeast Asia's encounter with Islam in its various strains and manifestations. Inspired by the wealth, diversity and vibrancy of the city-state, Pires described Malacca ebulliently in his Summa Oriental, noting that "at any given time and spot, at least 90 languages were being spoken".

Following the fall of Malacca, various independent Malay sultanates sprouted in the peninsula, drawing communities from within the larger rumpun Melayu (Malay stock) of the Southeast Asian archipelago to settle and commence the formative stages of state organisation - kerajaan - in the peninsula. Greater colonial intervention and the consolidation of Malaya's economic possibilities later induced extensive immigration, not only from India and China, but also from various locations in the Southeast Asian region.

The shadow of the Malacca cosmopolis loomed large over the subsequent evolution of the Malay states - the experience of pluralism and an ever more complex diversity conditioning the nature of what would eventually gather shape as contemporary Malaysia. The forging of a culture here was essentially eccentric, idiosyncratic, polyglot, permeating all aspects of collective cultural life, from language to forms of cultural expression, music, performance, even religion.

A wayang kulit performance.

But always the proverbial Imagined Community, it was the beginnings of national formation that induced the first examples of cultural management, which would dominate political concerns for much of our post-independent national life.

The collectivisation of the rumpun Melayu - Javanese, Bugis, Kelantan-Patani Malays and other communities - beneath the arch of emerging political parties and the nationalist "struggle" drew a commensurate response from other communities, partners in nationhood, who were nevertheless intent on protecting community rights and privileges under a political system devised along racial and community boundaries.

Following the events of May 13, 1969, the cultural chaos - fluid and adept - that had thrived and forged the basis of a collective cultural consciousness yielded to the demands of national unity and re-conciliation. The National Cultural Congress of 1971 was overt in its objective of replacing a liberal plurality in culture with a national one. It was a time, in the words of the poet Derek Walcott, "when real culture confronted the sigh of history".

Since the implementation of the National Cultural Policy, the notion of culture has continued to vacillate with the sway of shifting (political) ideologies and persuasions. Following a period of Islamisation, and increasing religious identification among the various communities, stronger still are the puritanical trends.

In no context is the word culture more ubiquitous than in the Malaysia one; in no culture are its contours and possibilities less understood. For all the celebration (and capital) we have showered upon the concept of "Malaysia Truly Asia", the singular, principal aspect of our contemporary cultural life is that relentless, onward march towards sameness.

Eddin Khoo is a poet, writer, translator and journalist, and presently Director of Pusaka, a cultural organisation. 

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