A GIANT in Malay studies recently left us. A contemporary of Royal Professor Ungku Aziz and Professor Hamzah Sendut, Professor Emeritus Mohd. Taib Osman joined the newly formed Department of Malay Studies in 1959. He inherited much from his mentor, the Pendeta Za’ba (Zainal ‘Abidin Ahmad).
Mohd. Taib was one of the early Malay scholars who had actively revived the study of Malay from an anthropological approach. He also saw the study of Malay manuscripts as a “gold mine”. Malay manuscripts, he said, manifested the genius of the Malays. Malay manuscripts are the anchor in the consciousness on Malay identity and civilisation. He was aware that the field has its origins in colonial knowledge and the outcome of the need of the colonialist to know the soul of the Malays.
The budi, jiwa, rasa and rupa of the Malays have generated strategic knowledge in the Dutch, English and French, initially induced by the sciences of biology and botany, and subsequently anthropology and ethnography. Mohd. Taib was one of the last in his generation to revive and rejuvenate the field from an endogenous perspective. For example, to him, the Hikayat Pelanduk Jenaka (Tales of the Wily Mousedeer) is not only entertainment for adult and children alike for centuries, but also a satire on human society in the form of the lives of animals, much like Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
In a 1984 article titled Pengajian Melayu dan Masa Depannya: Sidang Sarjana Tahun Depan Kena Pada Waktunya (Malay Studies and its Future: A Timely Meeting of Scholars Next Year), Mohd. Taib expressed the need to review the works and scholarship of previous Malay Studies scholars; to engage and re-examine schools of thought and the intellectual orientation of current scholars on language and linguistics, literature, and culture and society that make up current themes in Malay Studies; and to forecast and spearhead the pioneering of new areas and approaches linked to the study of Malay society and inherent future change.
Malay Studies go by other names — Indonesian Studies and Indology. We call it Malay Studies, the Americans (and later the Australians call it Indonesian Studies and Malay Studies), and the Dutch term it as Indology. One of the problems in configuring the epistemology of Malay Studies is the factor of geography. Mohd. Taib saw the geo-political conditions of the Malay Archipelago as problematic.
What we term as Malay Studies is now configured by the geographical and political spread of not only the Malay Archipelago, but also the Malay world. As such, he noted, the nation-state of Madagascar may one day (or has become) irrelevant, except from a historical perspective.
He foresaw then that Malay Studies will undergo a metamorphosis — a re-emergence of itself. And he termed this as the study of the “Malay Man”. The encounter of the West with the Malay Man connotes a unity of cultural and geographical space, literature and languages, the arts, historical experience and collective memory, and technology. Mohd. Taib emphasised the continued deployment of philosophy and methodologies to comprehend and penetrate the Malay psyche.
Mohd. Taib took offence at colonial scholars who assumed that Malays are incapable of change. One such example was C. C. Brown. Brown had asked Mohd. Taib and his colleagues to compile a Malay-English dictionary in the 1960s. Brown objected to the suggestion to include new lexicon, saying that it is not Melayu Tulen (“pure” Malay). Brown, a colonial administrator-scholar, was much interested in the Malay language, especially dialects, and fluent in the language. But he saw Malay society as static, that the Malay Man was unchanged and unchangeable.
It is the same with the German, Hans Overbeck, who stated that Malay Literature was dead around the 1920s. What Overbeck had meant was that the Malays had stopped producing literature. The image of a “fossified” Malay Studies was endemic in European scholars then. Unfortunately, the modern “Malay Man” also sees it that way, in that Malay Studies is a study of the past, of the past tense. Malay Studies in popular Malay culture is about old Hikayat (classic texts), previous civilisations and polities of the Malay archipelago, archaeology, epigraphy, philology and history.
Malaysia and the Malays do not have a long and established tradition in Malay Studies. The Malays do not have a long intellectual history of studying the Malay language itself, apart from Raja Ali Haji in the 19th and Za’ba in the 20th century. According to Mohd. Taib, the dearth of an intellectual tradition in the study of things Malay by the Malays had posed uncertainties and difficulties in establishing a Malay Studies Department at University Malaya in Singapore in 1953. It was difficult to find scholars in the field, or the Malay Man who studies his own society.
And so, when the department was formed in that year, it continued with the established traditions from Leiden and London, with Dutch P. E. de Josselin de Jong and Pendeta Za’ba as pioneering scholars.
Mohd. Taib saw that Malay Studies must move away from the romanticised image of the kampung or from the Sejarah Melayu (The Malay Annals). In recent years, new scholars have emerged, and those from other disciplines and fields have new ways of looking into Malay society, contributing to the study of the Malays. The emergence of a corpus in science, technology and media in the Malay context cannot be neglected.
Yet, stretching Mohd. Taib’s arguments from the 1970s, Malay Studies has an image problem. There are still condescending attitudes from the Malays if a Malay studies his own society. Ironically the same cannot be said for Western scholars studying the Malays. We tend to celebrate them. The absence of a positive and conducive climate in the Malay psyche itself has hampered many a Malay scholar to produce works in the likes of Anthony Milner’s The Malays (2008) and Vladimir Braginsky’s The Heritage of Traditional Malay Literature: A Historical Survey of Genres, Writings and Literary Views (2004).
It is indeed tragic that Malay studies still faces an uncertain, ambivalent image, resonating from Mohd. Taib’s Malay Man. Mohd. Taib was University Malaya vice chancellor from 1991 to 1994. Born on May 13, 1934, he left us on Sept 3. Al-Fatihah.
The writer is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and the first recipient of the Honorary President Resident Fellowship at the Perdana Leadership Foundation. Email him at ahmadmurad@usm.my