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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Map of Malaya
- Introduction: Colonialism, Nationalism and Contest
- 1 The Ancien Régime: Described and Condemned
- 2 Establishing a Liberal Critique
- 3 A Description of the Real World: Expanding Vocabularies
- 4 Conceptualizing a Bangsa Community: A Newspaper of Moderate Opinions
- 5 Building a Bourgeois Public Sphere
- 6 Ideological Challenge on a Second Front: The Kerajaan in Contest with Islam
- 7 Answering Liberalism: Islamic First Moves
- 8 Kerajaan Self-reform: Chronicling a New Sultanate
- 9 Practising Politics in the Mid-Colonial Period
- 10 Surveying the Homeland: Sedar and Dialogic Processes
- Conclusion: The Malay Political Heritage
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - Establishing a Liberal Critique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Map of Malaya
- Introduction: Colonialism, Nationalism and Contest
- 1 The Ancien Régime: Described and Condemned
- 2 Establishing a Liberal Critique
- 3 A Description of the Real World: Expanding Vocabularies
- 4 Conceptualizing a Bangsa Community: A Newspaper of Moderate Opinions
- 5 Building a Bourgeois Public Sphere
- 6 Ideological Challenge on a Second Front: The Kerajaan in Contest with Islam
- 7 Answering Liberalism: Islamic First Moves
- 8 Kerajaan Self-reform: Chronicling a New Sultanate
- 9 Practising Politics in the Mid-Colonial Period
- 10 Surveying the Homeland: Sedar and Dialogic Processes
- Conclusion: The Malay Political Heritage
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
How we assess Abdullah's writing and influence must affect our entire view of late nineteenth-century Malay society. This chapter suggests that his work forms a point of departure for a liberal critique of the kerajaan, a critique which proposed new ways of thinking about political life and urged the primacy of ‘race’ over raja as a focus of communal loyalty and identity. Much recent historiography plays down such indications of social dislocation in the first century of British involvement on the Malay Peninsula. Despite the fact that Penang had been under colonial administration since the 1780s and that vast economic, bureaucratic and communication changes had taken place during the 1800s, some scholars judge that only in the twentieth century did “accelerating processes of social change” develop in Malay society. Abdullah's works are vital in judging such a conclusion, because it is certainly the case that no other writer of the period can rival Abdullah as a possible nineteenth-century founder of Malay modernism.
One reason given for denying Abdullah's importance as an exponent of passive revolution is the suggestion that he exercised his principal impact on only a “section of the European community.” His postulated audience is also sometimes described as having been “European not Malay” and the Malays themselves are said, even today, to “have difficulty appreciating Abdullah”. He is accused of a lack of patriotism and of “disloyalty” to the Malays because of his “extreme Anglophilia” and it is observed that he “left behind him no school of writers”. Against this view, certain Malay writers describe the Munshi as the “father of modern Malay literature”.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Invention of Politics in Colonial MalayaContesting Nationalism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere, pp. 31 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995