Malays National Organisation (UMNO) GeneralAssembly saw strident calls for other Malaysian communities to respect and honor the superior position of Malays and Islam in the country; for the unity of all Malays under UMNO, as their representative and protector; and for stronger safeguards to prevent slurs against Malaysia's revered sultans.From the cheers (or virtual sighs of resignation) with which the press and public met these appeals, one might think such discourse had always been the norm in Malaysia.Yet as Donna Amoroso's insightful study reveals, in fact, no part of the order UMNO leaders invoke is inevitable or even all that deep-rooted.Rather, the position of the sultans, the multiracial balance of population and power, and the relative prominence of UMNO itself reflect colonial patterns and anticolonial struggles more than age-old attributes of a unified Malay public.Published, sadly, only posthumously, Amoroso's convincing and readable Traditionalism and the Ascendancy of the Malay Ruling Class in Colonial Malaya takes us back to the early days of British colonialism, locating the roots of Malaysia's fundamentally conservative political order in patterns of indirect rule.Amoroso details the British elevation of what she terms "traditionalism,"or "the conscious selection of appropriate ritual and idiom and the reconstruction of Malay culture along lines that were compatible with colonial rule" (p.52).Traditionalism involved, on the one hand, the selective restoration of Malay culture and on the other, the creation of new norms and structures, to facilitate far-reaching changes.The result was both legitimation of British power and the aggrandizement of the Malay ruling class.Reified in the first key political transition, from Malay to British rule, then reaffirmed, with some adjustments, as colonial rule gave way to self-rule after World War II, the dominance of the Malay rulers over a presumed-feudalistic Malay populace has become iconic as a trope of Malay politics.Amoroso begins where the conventional wisdom tends to assume the story starts: with depictions of Malays as "backwards" and "feudal," needing and expecting, as former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared in his path-forging The Malay Dilemma, special assistance and paternalistic leaders.Such a formulation was as useful for Mahathir as it was for the British before him-and just as much a construction.Aiming both to disguise the extent of their intervention and to stabilize Malay society, while also economizing by working through preexisting structures, the British propped up a set of Malay rulers as heads of homogenized, territorially-fixed Malay states.The rulers enjoyed pomp and regular payments; the British gained the appearance of ruling with, rather than just through, these figures of "traditional" local authority as they con-Kyoto University
Meredith L. Weiss (Thu,) studied this question.