In this new and stimulating survey of monarchy in Malaysia, Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian — the author of a fine study of Thai–Malay relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1988) and a widely-cited book on the Thai monarchy (2003) — writes of a current ‘socio-political revival’ of ‘Malay kingship’ (p. xxii). The ‘proactive and participating constitutional rulers’ of today, she says, are a ‘new phase in the history of Malay kingship’ (p. 391). Since Prime Minister Mahathir left office in 2003, the Rulers have claimed ‘a royal discretionary power’ that is a ‘total rejection of the Westminster-style constitutional monarch’. According to Kobkua, the Rulers are seeking ‘another type of constitutional monarchy’ — one that is ‘akin to the concept and practice … perfected in Thailand’ (p. 408).
These observations will come as a surprise to many around the world who have taken an interest in Malaysian matters. Academics have buried the Malaysian monarchy time and again over the years. When the Federal Parliament ‘abolished the royal immunity from suit’ in 1993, for instance, the legal scholar Andrew Harding judged that ‘the veil of mystique which has always surrounded royalty in Malaysia’ was ‘drawn aside’, and that the ‘forces of populism’ had ‘demonstrated amply their superiority to the forces of feudalism’. He then proceeded to proclaim ‘the declining position of the Rulers in the Malaysian polity’.
Kobkua's work is an ambitious survey, reaching back briefly to precolonial times. In discussing the British period, it makes useful comparisons between the Federated and Unfederated Malay States and criticises Simon Smith's impressive British relations with the Malay rulers from decentralization to Malayan independence: 1930–1957 (1995) for not giving enough stress to the damage caused by the Japanese Occupation. In the Occupation, Kokbua argues, the Japanese ‘reduced the Rulers’ royal status to that of commoners, no different from their erstwhile subjects …'. She conjectures that it would have been ‘a cultural and political shocking experience’ for the ‘average Malay’ to witness ‘his Ruler performing self-demeaning exercises such as bowing in the direction of the Imperial palace as a mark of homage to the Emperor’ (p. 109).
Her account of the Malayan Union period and the lead-up to Independence contains a good deal of interesting material on the Rulers' role, and will supplement the writings of Sopiee, Stockwell, Smith, Fernando, Lau and others. The account of recent royal developments, however, is likely to attract most interest — and contains particularly useful detail on the views of the Rulers of Perak and Selangor, and the Raja Muda of Perak.
The main weakness of the book arises from poor editing — which is unexpected, given the generally high standard of NUS Press. The grammatical, spelling and factual errors are too numerous to list. Even in naming a book she has written herself there is an error (p. 63). There is also too much repetition — and at times apparent contradiction, often in identifying historical continuities and turning points. The book is interesting and important enough to have deserved careful editing. It contains plenty to argue with, and this is of course an academic compliment.
My debates with Kokbua start with her preoccupation with power. When she states that ‘the foundation of traditional Ruler–subjects relations’ survived ‘more than half a century under the British residential system’ (p. 114), she hints at an interest in the Ruler's role that goes beyond the amount of power he exercised — but this type of analysis is not well developed. She does not draw upon the research of recent decades on the social and cultural dimensions of monarchy — for instance, that of Geertz, Thongchai, Fujitani, Drakard, Day or Peleggi. It would also have been of benefit to take account of the work of Syed Hussain Alatas, Chandra Muzaffar, Shaharuddin Maaruf and Clive Kessler in examining the survival of ‘feudal’ thinking in Malaysia's contemporary political culture. Kobkua's own insightful work on pre-twentieth-century monarchy could also have been employed creatively in a more socio-cultural analysis.
One of the problems with Kobkua's focus on power is that she does not explain the far-reaching transformation that took place in Malaysian monarchy over 200 years. Her statement that ‘the foundation of traditional Ruler–subjects relations’ survived during the colonial period really is open to serious debate. My second debate involves questioning Kokbua's stress on the novelty of the current assertion of ‘royal discretionary powers’. There is a good deal of evidence — some presented by Kobkua herself — that the Rulers have continued since the Independence period to claim a role that (in her words) is ‘out of sync with the Western practice’ of ‘constitutional monarchy’ (p. 408). Third, Kokbua cites the Raja Muda of Perak as stating that monarchy can give both Malays and non-Malays a sense of common identity (p. 384). This line of analysis deserves greater attention: historically, one might ask, were the Malaysian Rulers ‘Malay Rulers’ or ‘Rulers’? I suspect the latter — and wonder if it was mainly in the colonial and decolonisation periods that the Rulers were pressed to identify strongly with the Malay community. Determining whether this view is correct might assist in deciding what role monarchy can play today in bonding the Malaysian — and not just the Malay — national community.
The overwhelming strength of this book, therefore, is that it reopens discussion and debate on a topic of both scholarly and practical importance.
