By Farish A Noor

(Below is an excerpt of an essay I am currently writing entitled: “The Many Roads Not Taken post-1969′)

Our failure to develop a Malaysian language for us all:

One of the most glaring failures of the Malaysian nation-building project is our failure to develop a national language that is actually used as the lingua franca of all Malaysians. While the laborious debate over whether BM should be termed ‘Bahasa Malaysia’ or ‘Bahasa Melayu’ has been raging for decades, it is clear that Malaysia’s plural society remains divided along linguistic-cultural lines. The thorny issue of what constitutes the ‘mother tongue’ of so many Malaysians has led to at least one major political conflagration among the component parties of the BN, which in turn was used as the justification for the nation-wide security crackdown called ‘Operasi Lalang’ in 1987. Ironically it is well known to all and sundry that despite the ethno-linguistic posturing of the hot-headed communitarian leaders of the BN over the issue in the 1980s, these very same elites continued to speak to each other in English in private.

The hypocrisy of our leaders – from all parties – on the issue of the national language is something that no mature Malaysian ought to be stranger to by now. In fact, the issue of our national language (or lack of) has been one of the many punching-bags of Malaysian politics and every single communitarian-minded leader has jumped on the linguistic-nationalist bandwagon at least once in his or her political career.

This is perhaps one of the saddest things about Malaysia’s postcolonial politics and the development of Malaysia post-1969: It has been the case that almost every single ambitious and aspiring politician in this country has sought to rise to power by playing the communitarian card, touching on the hot buttons of race and language. It was only recently that BM was re-designated as ‘Bahasa Malaysia’ after it had been re-defined by nationalist politicians as ‘Bahasa Melayu’. The merry-go-round turns until today, and it would be prudent for us to go back to our early history to recover the moment where this country missed the point and went off track for good.

Let us begin by remind ourselves of some basic historical facts: Bahasa Malaysia was and remains a hybrid language very much like Urdu, which was dubbed as the ‘language of the camp’ and which remains an amalgam of Hindi, Persian, Arabic and other languages of Central Asia. The Malaysian language is likewise made up of words that are derived from Sanskrit, Arabic and other languages of the pribumi communities of the Southeast Asian region. Today it also betrays signs of cultural influence from the West, with English, Dutch and Portuguese words thrown into its repertoire as well.

Starting from this premise, it is difficult to understand how the Malaysian language could have been seen and used by those who wished to foreground an understanding of Malay and Malay identity as fundamentally fixed, closed and pure. Yet this was precisely what happened as soon as the debate on the status of the national language began during the 1950s.

Post-1969 witnessed the intensification of the debate over the status of the Malaysian language. The proponents of the pro-Malay policy (who wished to define BM as ‘Bahasa Melayu’ and thus identify the language with one primary racial-ethnic community) came from all the ranks of the Malay-Muslim parties, organisations, NGOs and student movements. As was the case with many other issues that caught the imagination of the Malaysian public then, most of these debates took place on the campuses of the country and were led by right-wing communitarian ethno-nationalist students who were aligned to the various Malay cultural, linguistic and religious student groups on campus, such as the Persatuan Bahasa Melayu Universiti Malaya (PBMUM) and the Malay Students’ Association of UM (PMUM).

In 1974, the student leaders of PMUM and PBMUM protested against the government’s decision to allow the creation of Tunku Abdul Rahman (TAR) College that had been one of MCA’s major demands on UMNO. The Malay students of the local universities were particularly angry over the government’s decision to allow a Chinese college to use English as the medium of instruction at a time when efforts were being made to make BM the medium of instruction in all the other institutions of higher learning in the country. Earlier, the students had defaced most of the campus signboards that were still in English. They also condemned the TAR College project on the grounds that as a privately run institution it would only serve as an additional source of funds for the wealthy MCA leaders. This cycle of protests and demonstrations culminated in the seizure and occupation of the local university campuses by the student unions in September 1974. Universiti Malaya’s campus was taken over by PMUM members led by Kamarazaman Yacob, who then formed the Majlis Tertinggi Sementara (Temporary Supreme Council, MTS).

While right-wing ethno-nationalist students were calling for BM to be seen as the Malay language and elevated to the status of the primary language of the country, other Malay-Muslim organisations and parties followed suit. Both UMNO and PAS were likewise adamant that the Malay language be seen as the language of the Malays, and that the recognition of BM as the national language also meant that by extension the dominance of the Malay-Muslims had to be recognised and accepted by all Malaysians.

PAS in the 1970s was led by the Malay-supremacist Asri Muda, who not only brought PAS into the ruling Barisan coalition but who also was a steadfast advocate for the special position and privilege of the Malay-Muslims. Asri’s constant attacks on the UMNO-led government’s record in the area of cultural and language development was one of the factors that put UMNO on the defensive and forced the government of the Tunku Abdul Rahman (and, later, Tun Razak) to act. In 1970, under pressure from PAS and the other defenders of the Malay language and culture, the government implemented the National Education Policy that made the promotion of the Malay language one of its key objectives. In 1971, Tun Razak followed this up with the Kongres Kebudayaan Kebangsaan (National Culture Congress) that paved the way for the Malaysian National Culture Policy which also privileged Malay culture and identity above others.

A close reading of the history of Malaysia during the years immediately after 1969 would show that practically every single Malay-Muslim leader of note: Mahathir Mohamad, Asri Muda, Anwar Ibrahim, et al. – were positioning themselves as the champions of their race, religion and language. But while Malayness and Islam could not be effectively hegemonised and used as a tool for dominance with a nation-wide impact, language could. By demanding that BM be seen as the language of the Malays and demanding that BM be given the special position that reflected the special position of the Malays, these ethno-nationalist supremacists were working to ensure that the Malaysian public domain and the Malaysian culture that developed in the wake of ’69 would be coloured with clearly identifiable Malay-Muslim hues.

The foregrounding of the Malay ethno-linguistic agenda also meant that the other ethno-linguistic communities were given two stark choices: Either to accept the supremacy of the Malay language as the national language or to opt out of the system and thereby relegate themselves to the margins of their respective ethno-linguistic ghettos. Unfortunately again, many of the leaders, spokesmen and intellectuals of the other communities chose to opt for the latter, and compounded the problem by retreating to their own linguistic enclaves.

From the 1970s to the 1990s we have seen the development of a lopsided Malaysia where one language – Bahasa Malaysia – was singled out to serve as the benchmark and collective marker of one ethnic-racial community. In the process of doing so, a systematic erasure and forgetting of BM’s hybrid and plural past and character was carried out, thereby reinforcing the impression that BM emerged almost exclusively, sui generis, out of the bosom of an undifferentiated and essentialised Malay cultural bosom. Yet all of these nationalists forgot (or chose to forget) the fact that BM was always a hybrid and eclectic lingua franca that bore the cultural traces of other communities, including the Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Thais, Indonesians, Europeans and others. Instead BM was essentialised as a unique, pure, uncontaminated language-system that it certainly was not and has never been. (Any more than we can say that any other language in the world, be it Chinese, Japanese, Tamil, English, etc. were ever ‘pure’ either.)

Compounding this situation was the cultural-linguistic impasse that had been reached that forced the other communities of Malaysia to likewise turn to their own ‘mother tongues’ for support and succour. In time, there developed various lobbies calling for the protection of mother tongue education for practically every other racial-ethnic community in Malaysia; and to make things worse many of these linguistic-communitarian advocates betrayed signs of being just as demagogic, exclusivist and even as racist as their Malay-Muslim supremacist counterparts.

Malaysia’s failure was not to create a generation of post-1969 leaders who would have discarded the values and praxis of linguistic nationalism and who would embrace diversity and hybridity instead. What Malaysia needed most of all was a leader who would have been able to say to all the communities of the country: “The Malay language is not merely the language of the Malay people: Look at the vocabulary of BM and you will clearly see the influences of every other community of Asia. So let us accept this pluralism and diversity in our language, let us play with it and expand it repertoire of words, so that it will reflect the pluralism of Malaysian society even more”. But of course such a leader never emerged – instead we were served a host of communal-minded sectarian nationalists whose only penchant was to stand on the stage and demand special rights for their special community on account of their special history and special identity, and who not once took into account the needs of Malaysia as a whole.

Had we taken the opposite path towards the recognition of diversity and pluralism that is already pre-existing in BM, imagine what could have developed? Working from the premise that BM was and is already a hybrid language with no fixed sematic and semiotic frontiers, the vocabulary of BM could have been expanded and deepened further with the introduction and adoption of more words from other languages. As it was, BM remains clearly one of the proto-Indonesian languages with strong traces of Sanskrit and Arabic thrown in. Had the designers of this new national language been given the incentive to adapt the language further, BM today would have more words that are derivative of Mandarin, Hokein, Cantonese, Tamil, Urdu, Javanese, Bugis, Acehnese, Thai, English and others.

Unlike the Indonesians next door who demonstrate an acute understanding of the plasticity of language and discourses, our national language was instead frozen in time and embalmed in official documents. Over the years what has actually developed has been the street ‘bazaar’ Malay which now serves as the real – albeit uncritical and depoliticised – lingua franca of the Malaysian people.

How sad that after half a century of coming into being, we still do not have a national language where every Malaysian citizen can find herself or himself.

End.