The Malays — a volume in Wiley-Blackwell's series ‘The peoples of South-East Asia and the Pacific’ — is an absorbing read, clearly written not only for those already interested in the cultural dynamics of the island world of Southeast Asia, but also for everyone who is interested in knowing how to successfully fail in defining a particular race, people or ethnicity. ‘In particular I ponder the issue of who are “the Malays” and ask how they became “Malay” and what it means to be a “Malay”,’ Anthony Milner writes in the Preface. ‘One thing that has intrigued me in particular is the often stated “Malay” anxiety about a lack of permanence — a fear sometimes expressed in terms of an emphatic denial that “the Malays will disappear from this world”’ (p. xi). The Malays tells its readers everything we always wanted to know about the Malays in terms of beginnings, transformations and present-day situations, Malay (Melayu) being a many-faceted, multilayered term which, if anything, refers to many phenomena at once — and why would Melayu ever disappear from this world?
Wherever we look, it has proved impossible to find a notion of being ‘Malay’ that has achieved stability — that has become secure. It is an idea in motion — something which can present danger as well as opportunities. ‘Malayness’ is often a matter of anxiety; it is always open to contest — and the most pressing contest today is the Islamist insistence on the dominance of ‘Islamic’ over ‘Malay’ identity and community. (p. 17)
Are the Malays perhaps in danger of disappearing from this world, after all?
It is telling that the author consistently uses inverted commas to refer to everything and everyone Malay from beginning to end: Malay and Malays refer to virtual if not imaginary entities, so it seems, as terms that have been floating through discursive formations and languages without a solid foundation, caught in contradictions, embedded in ambiguities and transformations, and hence constantly on the brink of disappearance. The Malays offers a wonderfully effective survey to these entities, which in one way or another have manifested themselves in peninsular and island Southeast Asia in many shapes and forms since times immemorial — before the Melayu River on Sumatra — to the present day, beyond the political discussions about the role of ‘the Malays’ in contemporary Southeast Asian nation-states. Anthony Milner's was the ‘daunting task’ of intertwining a wide variety of reports and discussions of ‘Malays’ and ‘Malay’ with more or less personal reflections and comments that circle around their concrete complement, ‘Malayness’. In his carefully crafted narrative about the formation of the Malay world — eight interactive chapters and the most extensive bibliography ever of writings of and about Malay and Melayu — he sees to it that ‘Malayness’, an ‘idea in motion’, gradually gains ascendancy over ‘Malays’ as the most effectual device to make sense of the constantly shifting presence of Melayu on the islands and beyond.
Two dialogues shape the backbone of The Malays. First, with a sharp sensitivity for issues of perspective and history, Milner explores the Malays from the inside — how self-proclaimed Malays see their own situation and how Melayu has presented itself — as well as from the outside — how ‘others’ talk about Melayu and how they have tried to define the Malays. At times, the inside tales and ethnic proclamations challenge the outside reports and scholarly literature through misunderstandings and differentiations. At times, the inside seems to have fused with the outside in a partnership that is riddled with struggles for conceptual authority. The conclusion of these multiple explorations becomes an open one: ‘Being “Malay”, it seems to me, means different things in different places, and at different times. In certain contexts it has entailed a fusion between Western notions of ethnicity and older, local “Malay” concepts of community’ (p. xi).
Second, Milner's tale performs an elegant dance between ‘Malays’ and ‘Malayness’, terms that refer to notions of, respectively, ethnicity and civilisation. The analysis of various points in history in which Malays were and are involved, starting with the ‘ways of Melaka’, makes it very clear that thinking of the ‘Malays’ in terms of a civilisation — dynamic, shifting states of mind; dialogical, transferable ideas and values — should be preferred to thoughts of a people or an ethnicity, stable and secure, caught, that is, in assumptions of ‘the real Malay’, of a true identity. The Malays’ final paragraph is vintage Milner — graceful, persuasive and personal — and deserves quotation if only for its historical and comparative depth:
Employing ‘civilisation’ provides a vantage point from which to think more sharply about ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’. Contemplating how being ‘Malay’, ‘Japanese’, ‘German’ and ‘Australian’ has undergone change over the last century, it seems to me that using ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ as our key concepts can obscure what has actually been taking place. Among other benefits thinking in civilisational terms may help to decipher more precisely how nineteenth-century ideas about ‘race’ influenced one situation against another. The differing way in which these ideas have been ‘localised’ — and the dynamics of that process — are certainly central to the ‘history of Malayness’ (p. 242).
So far, the conceptual framework of The Malays, thoughtfully laid out in the first and the final chapters. The six chapters in between, each with an umbrella-like title, offer a historically organised overview of the emergence of what is now conventionally called ‘the Malay world’, with a strong emphasis on local political culture. A necessarily fragmentary discussion of references to Melayu in Chinese records, to the enigmatic ‘Malay’ empire of Srivijaya, and local engagements with Hindu/Buddhist and Islamic visitors and migrants (‘Early history’) is followed by a more coherent examination of the formation of sultanates and, concurrently, of ‘kingship’ (kerajaan), epitomised by the ‘golden age’ of Melaka (‘The sultanates’) and emulated in the rise of numerous ‘Malay’ states, not seldom the result of violent confrontations of European visitors with ‘Malayness’ (‘A ‘Malay’ or kerajaan world?’). ‘Malays’ are made aware of the possibility of being a nation, a race (bangsa) in the colonial period (‘Experiencing colonialism and the making of the Bangsa Melayu’), but then the validity of this awareness is neutralised in the various nation states that emerge in Southeast Asia after the Japanese period (‘Building “Malays” into nation states’). Since then, the meaning of ‘being Malay’, of ‘Malayness’, has become more variegated than ever before (‘Multiple forms of “Malayness”’).
The conceptual framework is clear, and the continuous differentiations in the political culture of the Malay world may be familiar, not in the least the result of Milner's previous publications, some of them already classics on their own. The strength of The Malays lies in the detailed and elegant dialogues of a wide variety of ‘Malay’ issues past and present. ‘Malayness’ is made an open, flexible and vulnerable concept that changes form and authority time and again, emerging in different places, in such a variety of manifestations that the Malay world — a loose configuration of clusters of ‘Malayness’, constantly under construction — appears like a rhizome rather than the outgrowth of a single stock. ‘Rhizome’ may be another fictitious entity, not so much different from ‘Malayness’; they both definitely defer to The Malays, a wonderful book.
