Malay Must Read This : Origin of `Malayness'

The Star, Malaysia
30 April 2002

Origin of `Malayness'

The word `Melayu' originally referred to a region rather than a race. ANTHONY REID traces the development of the word from its earlier meaning to the time when it became linked to a group of people. THE term Melayu is very ancient, which appears to apply to a place in Sumatra or possibly the Straits of Melaka region more generally.

Ptolemy, the second-century (CE) Egyptian geographer, inserted the toponym "Melayu Kulon" (west Melayu, in Javanese) on the west coast of his Golden Khersonese, somewhere near the southern border of Burma today.

The 12th-century Arab geographer Edrisi also reported "Malai" as a large island off southern Asia full of gold, spices, elephants and rhinoceros.

The characteristic of `Melayu` as a people supporting a line of Malay kings was supported by Hikayat Hang Tuah but the long period over which it was compiled makes it hrad to specify when this characteristic came to be central. In Chinese records, beginning with Yijing in the seventh century, "Malayu" appeared as a more specific kingdom to the north of Srivijaya, absorbed into the latter in the 680s.

The Tanjore inscription of 1030 and Marco Polo around 1290 also identified "Malayur" as one of Sumatra's ancient kingdoms.

Most specific are the references of the 14th-century Javanese texts, Pararaton and Nagarakertagama, to the Pamalayu, or the expedition to conquer the great Sumatran kingdom of Malayu decreed in 1275 by King Kertanegara of Singasari, though perhaps not undertaken until some decades later.

By this time, Malayu, probably centred primarily in the Jambi area, had definitely taken over the mantle of Srivijaya, even if Chinese imperial records in their conservative way went on using the term Srivijaya after it had disappeared on the ground.

Malayu thus appears to be an old toponym associated with Srivijaya, and indeed better represented in the non-Chinese sources than Srivijaya itself.

While the scholarly reconstructions usually identify Malayu with Jambi and Srivijaya with Palembang, the reality is much less clear cut, with Malayu frequently representing the larger area.

Nevertheless, Malayu did not establish itself as the name for a people at that time. The commonest term used by foreigners to designate the Archipelago or its people was "Jawa" or "Yava". Ancient Indian sources used terms such as "Yava-dvipa" and Arabs and Europeans followed by using "Jawa" as an island or collections of islands, and "Jawi" as a people.

For Chinese of the 17th and early 18th centuries, as for Vietnamese and Cambodian sources of this period, the most general term for sea-faring people of the Archipelago was "Jawa". Thus Chinese junk captains reporting to the Japanese harbourmaster in Nagasaki around 1700 declared that both Melaka and Patani "belonged to Jawa".

The first Chinese source to use "Melayu" (wu-lai-yu) rather than "Jawa" to refer to the same broad culture area (including the Philippines), as Wang Gungwu has pointed out, was a text from 1730.

Malay-language sources themselves are surprisingly obscure about the heritage of Srivijaya or Malayu. They did not use these terms, but cited Bukit Siguntang as the place of origin of their kings. There is a small sacred hill by this name in the modern city of Palembang. Although today graced only with Islamic graves of much later date (and some bizarre contemporary fantasy structures), this is presumed to be the sacred site of Srivijaya/Malayu.

The Sejarah Melayu gave Malayu only as the name of a small river said to originate near this hill and flowing into the Musi (though it is in Jambi, not Palembang, that modern maps show a Sungei Malayu flowing into the Batang Hari at precisely the point of the ancient ruins). Other than this, the Sejarah Melayu used the term "Melayu" sparingly, in most cases as an adjective for kings (raja-raja Melayu) or for customs (adat Melayu), or to indicate the line of royal descent from Bukit Siguntang.

When Melaka was shown in conflict with Siam, Majapahit and other states, their opponents were orang Siam (Siam people) and orang Jawa, but the home team was usually orang Melaka. Once Melaka was firmly established as a Muslim kingdom, however, the term orang Melayu began to appear as interchangeable with Melakans, especially in describing the cultural preferences of the Melakans as against these foreigners.

When describing the defence of Melaka, the Sejarah Melayu referred as usual to the struggle of the orang Melaka, but when the king was wounded in the hand he strikingly held up his wound and said, "Hai, anak Melayu, lihat-lah" (Hey, Malays, look at this). This seems to reinforce the idea that what Brown translated as "Malays" are seen in the text as the clients (anak) of the raja Melayu.

By the end of the Melaka sultanate, it appears, Melayu had become away of referring to the minority of the Melaka population who hadlived there long enough to speak Malay as a first language and toidentify with the sultan as his loyal people. This group traced itsorigins, or the origins of its ruling dynasty, to Srivijaya, whichthey recognised through their literature as Malayu or Bukit Siguntang.

The Hikayat Hang Tuah is still more emotive about Melayu as a people supporting a line of Malay kings, but the long period over which it was compiled (16th to 19th centuries) makes it hard to specify when this characteristic came to be central.

The great Malay folk-hero Hang Tuah was pre-eminently a man of the sea, a naval commander always going on long sea voyages for the sultan of (15th-century) Melaka, to distant places like India, Java, Turkey and China. As an exemplar of modern-style "Malayness" he is, however, at best, ambivalent.

When the people of Kampar seemed ashamed of their poor dancing because they were not real Malays from the Melaka metropolis, he reassured them that he was no better – "the Melaka people seem to be bastardized Malays (Melayu kacokan), mixed with Javanese from Majapahit."

This passage seems among those likely to have been written in the 16th century, evoking as it does the world of the Sejarah Melayu, whose readers were presumed to understand Javanese, and of the earliest European reports, which suggest Javanese as the most numerous inhabitants of Melaka.

When the Portuguese arrived in the region after 1500, they initially adopted the same view that Malayos were essentially the pro-sultan ruling people of Melaka, one of several types of people in the town. Tome Pires explained how the Melaka sultanate itself classified visitors to Melaka in four groups, according to which syahbandar (the harbourmaster) they reported to:

1. Gujeratis

2. South Indians, Pegu, Pasai

3. Javanese, Malukans, Banda, Palembang, Tanjungpura (West Borneo),
Luzon

4. Chinese, Ryukyu, Chancheo and Champa

Malayos do not appear in this list, suggesting they were not then regarded as a category outside Melaka itself. The city appears to have categorised traders in terms of the direction they came from and the intermediate ports they visited rather than any sense of common ethnicity or language. Far from being regarded as a coherent group, Austronesian-speakers are spread among all the syahbandar except the first and most explicitly Muslim one.

The Portuguese did, however, describe Malayos as traders in other places such as China and Maluku, and it appears that initially, they meant traders from the ruling group in Melaka.

Joao Barros, somewhat inclined to attribute Chinese ancestry to all the maritime elites of the Archipelago whom the Portuguese encountered, has an interesting description of the coastal people of Sumatra – generally described as Malay in recent times.

For Barros, they were not Malay but Jawi (Iauijs), the same term used by Arabic-speakers and by Hamzah Fansuri in describing himself. Barros says that these Jawi "are not natives of the land which they inhabit, but people who come from areas of China, because they imitate the Chinese in their appearance, their political system and their ingenuity in all mechanical work".

Although this seems a strange claim, there are other indications of a strong Chinese presence on Sumatra's east coast, notably at the only well-excavated 11th- to 14th-century site of the area – Kota Cina near Medan. There are also Chinese connections at Palembang or Bukit Siguntang around the time its heritage was being claimed by the dynasty that founded Melaka. Some upheaval occurred in Palembang between 1377, when the last king of Srivijaya sanctioned by the Chinese court was reported to have died and his son asked for Chinese approval in his turn, and 1397, when Palembang appears in Chinese sources to be in rebellion.

A few years later, in 1405, the Zheng He missions visiting the region reported that Palembang was dominated by a Cantonese defector named Liang Dao-ming, who had been there for many years along with "several thousand military personnel and civilians from Guangdong who followed him there". The Chinese intervened to impose an imperial commissioner, but this did not work and Palembang remained for the next 20 years out of imperial favour but active in trade and seemingly still dominated by the Cantonese renegade group.

Since this is about the period when Palembang appears to have played a role in the founding of Melaka on the one hand, and the Islamic dynasties of Java, through Raden Patah, on the other, we can only surmise that people of part-Chinese descent played some part in creating new mercantile elites, including those known to Barros as Jawi but to later observers as Melayu.

The heritage of Melaka went in two directions after the city fell to the Portuguese in 1511. A number of lines of kingship sought to continue the royal lineage and court style of Melaka, of which the most successful for two centuries was the Riau-Johor line centred in the region of modern Singapore.

On the other hand, the merchants who had given Melaka its life spread almost throughout Southeast Asia in their quest for entrepots sympathetic to their trade. Their diaspora helped give new life to a range of port-states like Aceh, Patani, Palembang, Banten, Brunei, Makasar and Banjarmasin, and even Cambodia and Siam. This was a community of wonderfully mixed ethnic origins: many of the numerous Javanese of Melaka, as well as the "Luzons" who were also prominent traders there, appear themselves to have been partly descended from the Chinese who came en masse to Southeast Asian ports at the time of the Zheng He fleets. In addition, there were large Gujerati, South Indian, Chinese and Ryukyuan communities in Melaka, many of whom were assimilating to the extent of speaking Malay and practising Islam. When dispersed around the Archipelago, this diaspora (or at least its Muslim majority) became simply Malays.

A decade after the fall of Melaka, the Magellan expedition, which visited only the eastern part of the Archipelago – Brunei, Maluku and Central Philippines – produced a Malay word-list which defined cara Melayu (literally "Malay ways") as "the ways of Melaka".

The farther away from the heartland of Sumatra and the peninsula one travelled, the more likely it was that the trading community of Muslims would be known collectively as Melayu, whatever their ethnic or geographical origin.

The Malay entrepreneurs recorded in Makassar chronicles as entitled to the kind of autonomy and guarantees of property that traders everywhere require, were reported to originate from "Johor, Patani, Pahang, Minangkabau and Champa", while Indian Muslims later also played a prominent role in the community.

As if prophetically aware of the stereotype into which British colonialism would caste Malays two centuries later, the Melayu community who had helped spread Islam in the island of Sumbawa refused to be rewarded with rice-fields, for "we are sailors and traders, not peasants", and asked instead for exemption from port duties.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Malayness in maritime Southeast Asia retained these two associations – a line of kingship acknowledging descent from Srivijaya and Melaka or Pagarruyung (Minangkabau), and a commercial diaspora that retained some of the customs, language and trade practices developed in the emporium of Melaka.

The kingship role was more prominent in the Straits of Melaka area, the diaspora one elsewhere. Although this second sense was exceptionally open to new recruits from any ethnic background, it can be seen to have evolved towards the idea of orang Melayu as a distinct ethnic group.

Ence Amin, for example, writer for the Makassar court and author of the Syair Perang Mengkasar, declared himself to be "a Malay of Makassar descent" (nisab Mengkasar anak Melayu) and took pride in his fellow Malays' heroism in defending Makassar against the Dutch.

Beyond these two uses of Malayness there was a broader community of Muslims of a variety of ethnic backgrounds who wrote in Malay (whatever their mother tongue), dressed in a similar Jawi style (distinguishing themselves thereby from the less orthodox Bugis or Javanese) and took part in the widespread Malay-language "civilisation" of Islam. Such people might be referred to as "Malays" by Europeans, but there seems little evidence that they saw themselves in this light.


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This article first appeared in the October 2001 issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, which is published by Cambridge University Press for the History Department at the National University of Singapore.

Prof Anthony Reid is a Professor of History and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.