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The writings of Abdul Rahim Kajai: Malay nostalgia in a crystal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2009

Henk Maier
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Abstract

Abdul Rahim Kajai (1894–1943), his life and his work, are discussed against the background of socio-cultural developments on the Malay Peninsula in the 1930s. A journalist, writer and author, Kajai played an important role in the emergence of notions of ‘Malayness’ which made Malays feel different from and hostile to the growing numbers of ‘others’ in the colony. In particular, his stories, splendid exercises in fragmentariness, suggest a strong nostalgia for the pastoral way of life, at variance with Kajai's own life in urban areas.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 71 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2010

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References

1 See Roff, William R., ‘Kaum Muda – Kaum Tua: Innovation and reaction amongst the Malays 1900–1941’, in Papers on Malayan history, ed. Tregonning, K.G. (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1962), pp. 162–92Google Scholar.

2 See Benjamin, Walter, ‘Der Erzähler’, in Benjamin, Über Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969), pp. 33–61Google Scholar.

3 The (cursory) English translations of Malay keywords in this essay are based on their renditions in Winstedt, Richard O., An unabridged Malay-English dictionary (Singapore and Kuala Lumpur: Marican & Sons, 1953)Google Scholar; Sir Richard Winstedt was Abdul Rahim Kajai's British contemporary.

4 Stewart, Susan, On longing: Narrative of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 3–35Google Scholar (quotation from p. 13).

5 Ibid., p. 13.

6 History of modern Malay literature, ed. Johan Jaaffar et al., vol. 1 (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1992) is an authoritative introduction, floating and fluid, to these commemorations of the 1930s. In evoking the multiplicity of Malay writing, metaphors are as inevitable as nostalgia: knots, mycelium, crystal. Knots may be too concrete as they ignore the invisible energy of reading and writing connections. Whereas knots may be too fixed an image, the imagery of mycelium and mushrooms may be ‘too unorthodox’ and ‘too systemic’ (and too natural, for that matter); see Derks, Will, ‘A literary mycelium: Some prolegomena for a project on Indonesian literatures in Malay’, in Contesting Malayness – Malay identity across boundaries, ed. Barnard, Timothy P. (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), p. 189Google Scholar. Crystal is a figure that intrigued Gilles Deleuze in his Cinéma 2 – l'image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985) as an idea of multiplicity that is representative of specific states of temporality; the image of a crystal – many-faceted, no visible core, mysteriously coloured – appears like a spectral echo of the Malay figure of gemala hikmat, a coreless object which, shrouded in mysterious visibility, can work telling miracles with its almost hidden radiance.

7 In 1931, the total population of the Peninsula was around 4.5 million. It would be hard not to appreciate Roff's claim that Malay periodicals were ‘ephemeral’; see Roff, W.R., Bibliography of Malay and Arabic periodicals published in the Straits Settlements and Peninsular Malay States, 1876–1941 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 2Google Scholar.

8 It appears to be very hard to reconstruct the reading habits in Malay communities on the Peninsula in concrete detail. There are indications that copies of periodicals were used as teaching material at schools, that people subscribed to a periodical together, that copies were sold second hand — ‘manifold’ seems a safe summary for unaccountable guesses.

9 See Za'ba, , ‘Malay journalism in Malay’, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 19 (1941): 1–20Google Scholar.

10 Ahmad, A. Samad, Sejambak kenangan (sebuah autobiografi) (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1981), pp. 67–8Google Scholar.

11 Nationalism is strengthened and stimulated by stories about the glorious origins of the nation and heroic deeds of historical big men in defence of that nation. Interestingly enough, Kajai never showed much interest for Malay history, and he never wrote a tale about the historical exploits of Malay heroes; he was a chronicler of Malay misery in the present and not of Malay glory in the past. If he is seen as a nationalist author, eulogising the Malay nation in the present, he is an unusual one.

12 Kajai, Abdul Rahim, Rahsia dalam rahsia (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2005)Google Scholar. The Jawi edition of his work is Pusaka Kajai, ed. Al-Hussain Ali al-Sagof, 4 vols. (Singapore: Qalam Press, 1949). As a matter of fact, Kajai saw his first book published in 1931 (Hikayat Zul-Ruhaim [Penang: Jelutong Press, 1931]) and his second one a decade later (Panduan wartawan [Singapore, n.p., 1941]). One instance of his tales being published in a newspaper was in Berita Minggu in 1967.

13 Kajai was also given the title of ‘Bapak cerpen Melayu’ (‘the father of Malay short stories’), but apparently that name did not stick; see Siu, Li Chuan, Ikhtisar sejarah kesusasteraan Melayu baru 1830–1945 (Kuala Lumpur: Pustaka Antara, 1966), p. 126Google Scholar.

14 See, of course, for each and all of these fathers Anthony Milner's thoughtful and elegant descriptions in The invention of politics in colonial Malaya: Contesting nationalism and the expansion of the public sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

15 Quoted in Abu Bakar, Abdul Latiff, Abdul Rahim Kajai – wartawan dan sastrawan Melayu (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1983), p. 50Google Scholar. This survey of Kajai's life and work summarises a multiple series of words of praise in ch. 1.

16 Keris Mas gives an amusing description of the awe and confusion that filled him as a young man during his first meeting with ‘the sacred Kajai’ in the offices of Utusan Melayu. ‘It was as if I stood in front of a mountain and I felt warm and cold at once’; after the initial courtesies, Kajai suddenly asked the awed visitor if he had already visited the red light district of Singapore. ‘It was as if the mountain suddenly collapsed and was going to fall right on me.’ See Mas, Keris, Memoir Keris Mas – 30 tahun sekitar sastera (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1979), pp. 6–7Google Scholar. For an English edition, see Mas, Keris, The memoirs of Keris Mas: Spanning 30 years of literary development, trans. Ibrahim, Shah Rezad and Abu Bakar, Nor Azizah (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2004)Google Scholar.

17 In writings of the 1930s, the terms pengarang (author) and wartawan are used almost interchangeably, which is a uneasy juxtaposition: as if a ‘newsman’, a reporter of reality, is almost synonymous with an ‘author’, a composer of fiction.

18 Za'ba, ‘Malay journalism’, p. 19.

19 On the East Coast of the Peninsula, centred in Kota Bharu (Kelantan), Malay writing emerged in knots that had but few connections with knots elsewhere; the circle of A. Kadir Adabi's activities is a good example of this relative isolation, a perfect illustration of the workings of a mycelium.

20 Malays formed small minorities in these urban centres, probably no more than 10% of their total (floating) population. It seems safe to assume that the economic crisis made these urban Malays more aware of the fallibility of the colonial masters and of the growing self-confidence of ‘the others’ on the Peninsula than was the case for the Malays in the countryside which was apparently less hit by the Depression. It seems equally safe to assume that these urban Malays set the tone in the claims that the Malays, true children of the soil, were in trouble.

21 There appears to have been a certain shift in the content of Malay periodicals: whereas early periodicals were more focused on news, both local and foreign, and on the exploration of Malay traditions, later ones (beginning with Warta Malaya) tended to give more space to commentaries and opinion pieces, including letters from readers.

22 Wrote Kajai in an early editorial in Majlis (17 Dec. 1931): ‘The meaning of this paper may be summarized by the letters Melayu, the most prominent word of our nation, which may unite the people on the Peninsula – and the word Melayu will strengthen our position in the politics and economy of our lands. In other words, with the unity of the word Melayu we are going to push the foreigners aside who have flooded our lands. And with that very word we will demand and defend our rights.’

23 The question can be raised of how far British censorship played a direct or indirect role in this remarkable silence; connected with this, it seems self-evident that Malay editors were well aware of the fact that their papers were read or examined by members of the colonial administration, an essential part of their intended readership.

24 This term is used, for example, by Mandal, Sumit in his ‘Transethnic solidarities, racialisation and social equality’, The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, equity and reform, ed. Gomez, Edmund Terence (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 49–78Google Scholar. Transethnic solidarities refer to ‘a variety of efforts whereby Malaysians actively participate in society without respect to ethnic background and by rejecting primordial notions of ethnicity’ (p. 50). Mandal adds: ‘Transethnic solidarities are one of the most obvious and yet least studied aspects of Malaysian society’ – and here Abdul Rahim Kajai comes in, who has neither an ear nor an eye for them, focused as he is on developing the notion of Malay ‘nation’, wronged, threatened, cornered.

25 Cf. Morris, Rosalind, ‘Imperial pastoral: the politics and aesthetics of translation in British Malaya’, in Representations, 99 (2007): 159–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Roff, Bibliography, p. 22; Kajai introduced himself to his readers on 5 Apr. 1930: ‘I pay homage with promises and therefore please accept my writings that will follow; they are connected with views upon Malay decline.’

27 Saudara, 5 Apr. 1930, quoted in Abdul Bakar, Abdul Latiff, ‘Abdul Rahim Kajai’, in Sastera dan Sasterawan, ed. Kim, Khoo Kay and Othman, Mohd. Fadzil (Kuala Lumpur: Persatuan Sejarah Malaysia, 1980), p. 49Google Scholar.

28 Saudara, 20 Sept. 1930, quoted in ibid., p. 51.

29 Ismail, A. Samad, Memoir A. Samad Ismail di Singapura (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1993), p. 215Google Scholar.

30 Samad Ahmad, Sejambak kenangan, p. 113.

31 In a Warta Malaya editorial (22 Jan. 1935), he is introduced as ‘the newsman Abdul Rahim Kajai, the famous author. His knowledge in Malay is no doubt sufficiently perfect (cukup sempurna) and he has also studied English and he is filled with knowledge of Arabic and religion.’

32 The total population of the Peninsula at the time was presumably around 5 million. Does it make sense, then, to claim that Kajai was a very well-known writer and Warta Malaya a very well-read periodical if nostalgia is excluded from writing about the 1930s?

33 Kajai described his tasks as editor and writer of Warta Malaya as follows: ‘(1) to lay out the main Malay opinions and ideas that are related to the administration and everything that is of interest for public opinion; (2) to convey to the government the suggestions, requests or even demands of the Malay people; (3) to depict the distress and suffering of those who are cornered by modernity and capital that has brought millions of foreigners to Malaya so that the government will observe this with the eye of justice’ (Warta Malaya, 23 Nov. 1938).

34 For a discussion of this issue, see Roff, William F., The origins of Malay nationalism (Singapore: University of Malaya Press, 1967), pp. 177–85Google Scholar.

35 A moving (and nostalgic) summary of Kajai's work at Utusan Melayu is given by Samad Ismail: ‘He really wrote because he believed that his writings would extend the fight and his ideas. Fighting for Malayness (takrif Melayu) was his conviction, an oath and an ideal. Malayness was not merely a slogan, a battle cry and a title that was stamped on the fight of the Malay nation (bangsa) – it was an appeal to the Malays not to kiss the hands of the Syeds [title for descendants of the Prophet Muhammad] – the fight for Malayness was truly a statement of the rise of the Malay nation in search of its own identity, to maintain rights of equality with others groups, a mass movement to elevate the Malay nation in the social and economic field. Incorrect is the accusation that the movement incited Malays to hate Muslims of Arabic or Indian descent; on the contrary, it was a movement of Malays to demand social and economic justice, demanding from the Islam community it be concerned with the ideal of the Malay nation to rise and develop.’ See A. Samad Ismail, Memoir, p. 115.

36 The equation of Utusan Melayu with Kajai (‘Nama Kajai menjadi synonymous dengan Utusan Melayu’) is in ibid., p. 64. The description that A. Samad Ismail, always sharp, always intense, gives of Kajai should serve as a radiant illustration of his spectre-like presence:

‘Each of the many visitors who came to the Utusan had stories to tell, and Kajai drew information, ideas, insights and facts from them. Of course the capacity of doing this – separating and filtering important from unimportant, useful from useless, relevant from irrelevant information in this pile of information and stories – asked for sharp thinking, intuition and instinct. Only a sensitive journalist, who has been exposed to life as a journalist, only a journalist who has a sharp mind and the time to evaluate the pieces of information one by one, is able to do this. What seems normal for other people may be unique, of special value as news for a journalist. News can be shaped into interesting news, it can be useful as background information for the writer of editorials. Kajai was unique among the authors of his time and the writers of his generation in this. He did not just write articles, make speeches, give advice. No, he combined his role as an advisor to his people with his function as a reporter, directly interacting with readers and society; every day he exposed his conscience, his consciousness, his awareness to every movement or activity in his society’ (p. 67).

37 Talking of ties and connections, it is intriguing that Kajai and his colleagues apparently had none with journalists and writers in the Dutch Indies.

38 Hussain, Mustapha, Malay nationalism before UMNO – The memoirs of Mustapha Hussain, ed. Jomo, K.S., trans. Mustapha, Insun Sony (Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Publications 2005), pp. 147–8Google Scholar.

39 A. Samad Ismail, Memoir, p. 200.

40 Ibid., p. 44. Tellingly, the handwriting of his close ally, Ishak Muhammad, is described as ‘clean, orderly and clear’: a fine summary of the differences between the two major tellers of Malay tales of the 1930s.

41 Abdul Latiff, Abdul Rahim Kajai.

42 Ahmad's, ShahnonRanjau Sepanjang Jalan (Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Melayu, 1966)Google Scholar comes to mind as the climax of this modern picture of dark Malay life, in combination with Busu's, FatimahKepulangan (Pulau Pinang: Teks Publishing, 1980)Google Scholar; the tradition of Malay writing about failure, misery and loneliness is a long and deep one, hailing back to the adventures of heroes in hikayat and the emotional eruptions of writers of syair. Shahnon's, book is available in English translation: No harvest but a thorn, trans. Amin, Adibah (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

43 Kajai was clearly not an anti-colonial thinker; he believed that British protection from ‘the others’ was what the Malays needed so as to have the opportunity to strengthen themselves.

44 In particular, Kajai's stance of ethnic exclusivism and his restraint in challenging colonial authorities deserve closer analysis than in terms of Malay culture alone. The ‘deep-rooted peasant-Malay deference to established authority’ and the ‘recognition that politics was a dangerous, even an improper, pursuit’, features that Roff brings up to explain Malay writing in the 1920s (Roff, Origins, p. 187), do not suffice to explain Kajai's approach, nor do they account for the stance of these earlier Malay writers. The moral and physical courage of Malay journalists on Java such as Mas Marco Kartodikromo suggests that a comparative analysis of Kajai's restraints is worth a second look.

45 Roff, Origins, p. 196.

46 Abdul Latiff's book (Abdul Rahim Kajai) does not even tell its readers, for instance, how many children (and wives) Kajai had, and where and how he lived with his family.

47 Samad Ahmad, Sejambak kenangan, p. 59.

48 A. Samad Ismail, Memoir, p. 71.

49 Samad Ahmad Sejambak kenangan, pp. 105 (dress), 107 (visitors). It is interesting that Samad Ahmad contrasts Kajai with his colleague Ibrahim hj Yaakub, 20 years his junior, who ‘always wore western clothes, never without a neck tie’ (p. 105).

50 A. Samad Ismail, Memoir, p. 71.

51 Ibid., p. 117.

52 Panduan Wartawan, published in 1941, is a collection of his journalistic pieces.

53 A. Samad Ismail, Memoir, p. 106.

54 A. Samad Ismail told young writers in Trengganu in 1966 an intriguing story of how he mastered writing Malay in his early days at Utusan Melayu and what role Kajai played in this: ‘Do write every day. That is the discipline of a writer. When I worked at Utusan Melayu before the war, I did not know how to translate even a simple short note about ebb and flood from English into Malay, but while I was unable to produce a sensible translation, I tried to write an editorial and I showed it to the editor. Kajai threw it in the wastepaper basket without much ado. “First learn to translate”, he told me, and hence I worked on translations, and then I discovered that writing editorials improved, concurrent with my progress as a translator. While I made translations every day, I automatically learnt to master Malay. Of course I tried to imitate the writing style of Kajai, and I discovered that that was impossible because Kajai had a Malay and Arab education while I had a Malay and English education’; Samad lIsmail, Tan Sri A., ‘Masalah penulis-penulis baru’, in Pemimpin dan sasterawan, ed. Haji Abdullah, Abdul Karim (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1993), pp. 27–8Google Scholar.

55 A. Samad Ismail, Memoir, pp. 65–6.

56 The question of how the networks of Malay Syekhs in Mecca operated at the beginning of the twentieth century (and before) has not yet been seriously addressed; the fragmentary discussion of Maljid, M. Dien in Berhaji dimasa kolonial (Jakarta: Sejahtera, 2008)Google Scholar suggests that the answer would probably lead to a murky picture of intimidation, fraud and deceit.

57 See Abdul Latiff, Abdul Rahim Kajai, pp. 18–19.

58 In its introductory issue (5 Nov. 1939) Kajai wrote: ‘On this day Utusan Zaman is born out of the folds of tales and ideals of a large part of the group of people of the Malay nation on this Peninsula, the nation which already for almost 25 years has been in mourning, seeing how it has been left behind in the struggle for progress. There is nothing wrong in saying that people want to see papers and journals and books disseminated, thus becoming reading materials that serve to increase the intellect so that the compass in administration and society be corrected. Hopefully the journal Utusan Zaman will be of some use, at least in succeeding to give reading materials to the community.’

59 As a matter of fact, ‘Kajai’ is the name of the village in the Minangkabau region where his father originated; see ‘Summary of life history of Abdul Rahim Kajai, chief editor, Malai Sinbun Sha’ (Malay News Agency), in Abdul Latiff, Abdul Rahim Kajai, pp. 380–3. The knowledge that he would die so soon afterwards makes reading this document even more moving: it reads like a testament rather than a statement.

60 See Morris, ‘Imperial pastoral’.

61 See, for instance, the literary work by Hugh Clifford, Frank Swettenham, and George Maxwell, all three of them prominent figures in the British colonial administration.

62 This policy is reflected in the British preference for traditional literature over contemporaneous lithographed and printed texts, which were viewed with horror and disgust as possible manifestations of hardly controllable ideas of identity formation. The texts that, under the guidance of Kajai's contemporary Richard Winstedt, were published as schoolbooks and works of scholarship were supposed to converge in a form of Malay literacy that would support the British policy of maintaining multilingualism and plurality, designed to restrict the communication among the various ethnicities which could potentially serve as a vehicle of integration and assimilation.

63 The term ‘nationalism’ which is so often used in the historiography of the Peninsula to describe the emergence of the notions of the Malay nation in this plural society appears to be a deceptive if not misleading name for ethno-nationalism or – if ‘bangsa’ is understood as referring to both race and nation at the same time – of racism.

64 Obviously there have always been counter voices and counter movements; see in particular Joel S. Kahn's inspiring Other Malays: Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the modern Malay World (Singapore: NUS Press, 2006).

65 It is also strong and momentous enough to justify its juxtaposition with another famous essay on the colonial situation, written in 1913 elsewhere in what is now called the Malay World, also composed in the language of the colonisers and also translated into Malay: Soewardi Soerjaningrat's ‘Als ik eens Nederlander was’ (If I were ever a Dutchman). A contrastive reading of the two essays could very well serve as the starting point in an analysis of the differences between the situation on the Peninsula and the situation in the Dutch Indies in terms of colonial rule and its slowly emerging countervoices, that is, the differences between ethnicised communalism and nationalism. Za'ba was widely praised and found himself actively involved in the British policy of protecting (read: virtually isolating) the newly formed ethnicised community of ‘the Malays’. Soewardi, by contrast, was silenced; a dangerous man, he was sent into exile to the Netherlands, and was forced to follow for a long time the emergence of Indonesian nationalism from a distance. For a discussion of Soewardi and this essay, see Siegel, James, Fetish, recognition, revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 26–37Google Scholar; an English translation of the essay is in Savitri Prastiti Scherer, ‘Harmony and dissonance: Early nationalist thought in Java’ (M.A. thesis, Cornell University, 1975), Appendix 1, pp. 298–304. As for a possible interest in the Malay World at large (beyond the Peninsula, that is), Kajai clearly found no inspiration in either Soewardi's essay or the numerous Malay writings that appeared on Java in its wake; his disinterest in ‘Malays’ beyond the Peninsula is curious, to say the least.

66 Za'ba's reference to ‘literature’ in ‘Poverty of the Malays’, The Malay Mail, 1 Dec. 1923, should serve as an indication of the prominent role ‘literature’ played in the discussions about ‘Malayness’ in the 1920s and 1930s.

67 Concurrently, Western scholarship – authoritative in its silent support of the construction of a plural peninsular society with a strong preference for the Malays – has shown a striking neglect of the importance of these very interethnic contacts in the marketplace and an equally striking disregard for the desirability of mutual assimilation. Studies of literary life on the Peninsula, for one, have been focused on Malay literary life alone (and for older forms of literature in particular), virtually closing off the possibilities of stimulating cultural (and literary) interactions, no matter how unknowing and unintentional, among the various communities. It could be argued that scholarship on the Peninsula has remained very much focused on ‘the Malays’ as the so-called indigenous population rather than on the dynamic interactions among the various ‘races’ that inhabit the Peninsula, including ‘Malays’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Indians’ and orang asli, equally indigenous each and all of them. This ‘racialised’ focus in scholarship (and administration) underwrote the societal movements towards segregation — and Kajai could have smiled. Moreover, it ignored the counter-movements towards an active integration in which notions of ‘race’ are secondary to notions of ‘capital’, ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘hybridity’.

68 Utusan Zaman, 29 May 1940; the words ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ are in English in the original:

‘Oleh karena bangsa Melayu itu pada masa sekarang umpama penyakit sedang tenat dan sungguh pun rebah tetapi belum maut karena itu tiadalah mustahil akan bangkit pada suatu masa kelak dan inayah Tuhan seru sekalian alam. Bangsanya jatuh terbenam, bahasanya hilang hampir2 hilang roh dan semangatnya telah hanyut seribu tahun di jalan Hatta takrif mereka itu telah hampir2 hanyut pula karena dirempuh oleh orang2 yang berdarah asing yang telah menyamar ke dalam bangsa mereka itu seperti harimau menyamar di dalam kawan kambing. Tetapi bagaimana pun sekarang bangsa Melayu itu telah mulai mengorak langkah baru hendak membersihkan takrif mereka itu supaya mereka berdiri di atas kaki sendiri dan supaya pergerakan mereka bersih dan ikhlas. Orang2 asing setelah mencoba hendak meracun takrif Melayu itu dengan memalukan ayat2 Allah dan memfitnahkan gerakan Melayu itu gerakan komunis konon telah mencoba pula hendak mengelirukan fikiran berkenaan dengan bangsa keturunan (race) dengan bangsa kerakyatan (nationality)’.

69 It would be hard to assume that Kajai was well read in the way Samad Ahmad apparently was; Kajai seems to have read the world around him rather than the books on his desk.

70 It is telling that the director of the 1931 Census of the multi-ethnic, diverse, plural Peninsular population had to admit that any ethnic or racial classification of people was a European fantasy: ‘The difficulty of achieving anything like a scientific or logically consistent classification is enhanced by the fact that most Oriental peoples have themselves no clear conception of race, and commonly regard religion as the more important, if not the determinant, element’; Vlieland, C.A., British Malaya: A report on the 1931 Census and certain problems of vital statistics (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932), p. 565Google Scholar.

71 Quoted in Omar, Ariffin, Melayu, Bangsa, Malay concepts of democracy and community 1945–1950 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 19–20Google Scholar.

72 Quoted in Roff, Origins, pp. 244–5. In particular, those who had roots in the matrilineal Minangkabau culture, Kajai among them, could not agree with this strong emphasis on the role of the man alone.

73 The idea of a Malayness that the people on the Peninsula claim to share with people on the islands had emerged, at least partly, in correspondence with British notions of the ‘Malay Archipelago’, another deceptive yet broadly used term. The assumption that people of the Islands are, in one way or another, ‘Malays’ (while they themselves had clear notions of being different and heterogeneous among themselves, not least as the result of Dutch interventions) is illustrated in Kajai's use of the ‘Javanese’ figure of Wan Ketok in his sketches for the Utusan Zaman. Ketok deals with Malay issues and is made to think and act like a Malay — Malay in Kajai's vision, at least.

74 See for instance, Abu Bakar, Abdul Latiff, Ishak Haji Muhammad, Penulis dan Ahli Politik sehinga 1948 (Kuala Lumpur:Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1977Google Scholar) which shows that Ishak's forefathers had moved from Aceh and Palembang to the Peninsula. See also Kahn, Other Malays.

75 The struggle to differentiate is clear from the difficulties speakers and writers in English have had in translating terms such as kaum (‘family’, ‘party’), ummat (‘the people’), watan (‘nation’) and bangsa (‘race’), terms that a newsman like Kajai used in shifting contexts; conversely, it is too easy, for example, to translate ‘bangsa’ simply as ‘race’, given the distinct connotations the two terms have, following different echoes. Concurrently, it seems sensible to argue that English notions of ‘race’ were only one element in the Malay identity that journalists and writers on the Peninsula tried to develop under the terms ‘bangsa’ and kebangsaan (‘racial’, ‘national’). In the Utusan Zaman editorial of 29 May 1940 quoted above (see note 65), Kajai himself ventures a distinction within bangsa between Malays and non-Malays by way of two English terms: ‘bangsa keturunan (race) is different from bangsa kera'ayatan (nationality)’; the distinction is used to keep certain Muslims who wear a cap (songkok) at bay. (Skull-caps were used by men of all ‘races’ as a sign that they were Muslim.) The introduction of the term ‘rakyat’ in the discussions about Malayness (takrif Melayu) only adds to the confusion as it refers variously to ‘commoner’, ‘people’ and ‘population’.

76 It may be significant that in 1938 Kajai became a member of Persatuan Melayu Selangor, an association of government officials and aristocrats. In spite of his close association with Ishak Muhammad, he was not very eager to use his pencils in support of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, at the time a rather obscure and unstructured political organisation that tried to find its inspiration (and terminology) in radical Indonesian nationalism.

77 Kajai's use of Malay was, it has been argued, strongly influenced by Arabic grammar which may have made it more recognisable for some of his readers and strange for others, be it only temporarily so: in retrospect his style of writing is generally admired as unusual, jumpy and powerful.

78 Kajai's writings are hard to place in the conceptual triangle of umat, raja, bangsa, developed by Roff, Origins in his efforts to make sense of intellectual life on the Peninsula and further explored by Milner, Invention of politics. It could serve as an indication that these words are perhaps not the appropriate tools for making sense of Malay discussions about takrif Melayu, but also as another proof that Kajai did not have to be consistent in his arguments in order to be respected.

79 See Matheson, Virginia, Writing a new society: Social change through the novel in Malay (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2000), pp. 17–60Google Scholar, in particular 36–39, for a rich discussion of Syed Syekh al-Hadi (1867–1934) and Hikayat Faridah Anom (published in 1925).

80 In the introduction to his Kawan Benar, published under the aegis of Syed Syekh (Penang: Jelutong Press, 1928), Ahmad Talu made a similar call to his Malay readers to take life in Egypt for an example. On the possible sources of Hikayat Faridah Anom see Matheson, Writing a new society.

81 For an analysis of the Wak Ketok sketches, see Johnson, Deborah, ‘Wak Ketok defends Melayu – mediated exchange and identity formation in late 1930s Singapore’, Comparativ, 3 (2006): 68–86Google Scholar; and Mahamood, Muliyadi, The history of Malay editorial cartoons (1930s–1993) (Kuala Lumpur: Utusan Publications & Distributors, 2004), pp. 34Google Scholar sqq. The Pak Lacok columns were later collected in Telatah Kajai: karangan Allahyarham Tuan Haji Abdul Rahim Kajai di dalam jenaka-jenaka pendek di dalam majalah Warta Jenaka dengan menggunakan nama kalam Pak Lacok (Singapore: Qalam, 1950).

82 See Awang's, Hashim wonderful study of Malay short stories, Cerpen-cerpen Melayu sebelum perang dunia kedua – satu analisa tentang tema dan struktur (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1975)Google Scholar. In an effort to explain the superiority of Kajai's tales over those of so many others, Hashim writes in nostalgic retrospect:

‘Short stories were created to teach readers, and they were clearly written as alternatives to editorials. This was the case because writing short stories was not the writers' regular job but just a hobby in their free time. That is why short stories were not written in a serious way. Only a few writers were serious: Abdul Rahim Kajai and Ishak Hj Muhammad. They were editors of a certain newspaper or journal, and they had to maintain the quality and image of that paper. The publication of short stories of a certain quality, the product of hard work, was a way to confirm the excellence of their paper’ (p. 10).

Hashim also shows that in the occasional essay on literary developments that appeared in the late 1930s, Kajai's work was already praised for its ‘seriousness’.

83 A complete list of Kajai's writings (and of studies of them) can be found in Abdul Latiff, Abdul Rahim Kajai, pp. 271–318. The latest collection of his short stories was published in 2005: Rahsia dalam rahsia (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2005). It is worth noticing that ‘the complete works of Abdul Rahim Kajai’ have never been published; in the spirit of the fragmentariness of Kajai's writing activities, that may be considered a good thing.

84 The transformation from Jawi to Romanised script of a (large) number of Kajai's tales raises complicated questions about their character, function and legibility, circling around issues of intertextuality, repetition and canonisation. Every reading transforms a text, and a transliteration itself is a reading; reading the later Romanised versions of Kajai's work steers significations into directions which are different from the significations that reading Jawi versions will give rise to; their configuration will develop along mutually differentiating lines. Above all perhaps, notions of nostalgia will emerge in different forms: invoking images of daily life on the Peninsula in the 1930s in Jawi is an experience that is different from suggesting how Malay identity politics developed in the 1930s in the Romanised script.

85 The anecdote that Kajai did not remember his own tales is telling.

86 For an excellent characterisation of Kajai's tales, see Awang, Hashim, ‘Kata pengantar’, in Satira Kajai – cerpen pilihan Abdul Rahim Kajai, ed. Awang, Hashim (Petaling Jaya: Fajar Bakti, 1985), pp. v–xiiiGoogle Scholar.

87 Utusan Zaman, 1 and 8 Nov. 1941. The following short analysis refers to a transliterated version as published in Cerpen Malaysia sebelum perang dunia ke2, ed. Hashim Awang (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1988), pp. 86–109.

88 Not only of a novel, but also of a traditional hikayat (story). The beginning – ‘the story, once upon a time, people say, there was a village named Tenong in the area of Temerloh (Pahang)’ – is followed by a description of ‘the vast rice fields as far as the eye can see’, and of the ‘numerous villages, like islands in a sea of sago palms’. It would indeed be ‘hard to find a village as peaceful as Tenong’ (ibid., p. 86).

89 ‘Many people in Tenong believed that Awang Putat was a saint and that is how his grave became a place where people make promises. The one who was very actively paying visits to this saintly grave was Cik Teh who was found dead there some three years later and was buried there, too’ (ibid., p. 109).

90 The tale opens with an intriguing ‘warning’: ‘This tale is mere fiction (rekaan); the names of the protagonists are made up and some of the place names have been borrowed, no reference is made to anyone in particular’ (ibid., p. 86).

91 ‘When Awang Putat entered school, he was around 10 years old. Now he is 14 years old, and he has learned the three R's, reading, writing, arithmetic. He has a lot of arithmetic to do; about Ah Kau, for instance. He realises that Ah Kau entered the village at the time he entered school; four years ago. And now he leaves school, and Ah Kau's shop has already two doors and five coolies. The Chinese man has five vegetable gardens not far from each other, and each of the five gardens has pigs, and many Chinese are working for him. Awang Putat is working with his father in the rice fields. Morning and evening he takes care of the one buffalo they have … Pendekar Colin has two daughters, the older maiden's name is Teh, and the younger maiden's is Yang. Awang Putat is interested, but he is not quite sure in which of the two. And his heart for Pendekar Colin is not clean because Pendekar Colin has too much taken the side of Tauke Ah Kau. Awang Putat has a deep hate for three men in the village, because of Tauke Ah Kau … And the road along the river, constructed by the government, is six feet wide; it is a pleasure to have a bicycle and go up and down that road’ (ibid., p. 90).

92 Initially Cik Teh tries to ignore his advances. ‘Do not think of things in the past, they are over. In one thing you have to believe me, by Allah I have never forgotten you. But what can we do? I am not at fault and you are probably not at fault either. We should leave it to the Lord. But if you feel like it, what is wrong in substituting Yang for me?’ 'Substituting people is easy, Teh', is Awang Putat's reaction. ‘But how to substitute a heart for another one? As for me and the girls, this world is in darkness. Even if you brought me a nymph, my heart would still be locked up. But it does not really matter, Teh, I know that it is all my fault because I am low class and the name alone of your man, Hamid Syah, is way superior to mine. I am no match for him, not only in terms of intelligence and wealth but also in terms of hair. He has a lot of hair on his chest, and I do not’ (ibid., p. 95).

93 Tellingly, Awang Putat makes that promise to his mother who blames him for not getting married: ‘I do not have the intention of destroying your heart, Mother. Of course I would like to have a wife. But you should know that I want to serve our village. Just see how our village has been hit by bad luck. It used to be united, and now it is divided. We used to have every possible comfort, and now everything has been pawned. Do you understand what I mean, Mother? Even if you do not, I want to ask for your consent. I cannot be successful if you do not give me your consent. Ah, there is a great work ahead of me.’ ‘So you want to save other people before you save yourself? If you ask me, you should not become a lamp wick, it only serves people to be in the light, and you will burn to ashes.’ ‘That is how it is, but do you not know that the wick sacrifices itself to give light to people? If it does not do that, they will stay in darkness and the wick will be thrown away, turns into soil … Would you not be proud, mother, if your son sacrifices himself like a wick?’ (ibid., pp. 96–7). On his deathbed, Awang Putat remembers this conversation with his mother – and he is happy that he has a ‘clean conscience, ready to appear before God’. ‘I have been like a lamp wick, the people are in the light, and I have been burnt to ashes’ (p. 109).