history

Fine Young Calibans: Ibrahim Yaakob and the Rise of the Malay Left. (Part 1 of 3)
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For among the many other sides of the Malaysian story that we seldom discuss there happens to be the forgotten legacy of the pioneering Leftist-nationalists of the early twentieth century, led by men like Ibrahim Yaakob.

Fine Young Calibans: Ibrahim Yaakob and the Sultan Idris Training College.

It is perhaps ironic to note that the man who would one day become one of the leaders of the Malay anti-colonial movement was himself a product of British colonial education.Ibrahim Yaakob was a student of the Sultan Idris Training College (SITC), which was set up by the British colonial authorities with the simple aim of creating a class of Malay functionaries and educationists who would help them maintain and manage the lower rungs of the British colonial educational system in Malaya.
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Among them was Ibrahim Yaakob, who proved to be more than just a difficult student when he turned away from basket-weaving classes at the SITC.Being denied the opportunity of being taught something really useful, Ibrahim opted for radical student activism instead.
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Ibrahim Yaakob was certainly not indifferent to these trends.As one of the founders of a student group called the Belia Malaya ('Malayan Youth'), Ibrahim and his colleagues began subscribing to Indonesian periodicals like the Fikiran Rakyat ('People's Thought') and they individually joined Sukarno's Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI) which was based in the neighbouring Netherlands East Indies.

It was also at the SITC that Ibrahim Yaakob met some of the friends and compatriots who would accompany him in the nationalist struggle in the years to follow like Abdul Karim Rashid, Hassan Manan and Isa Mohd.
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After a somewhat lacklustre start, Ibrahim Yaakob eventually found himself in Kuala Lumpur, the newly-created capital of the British-ruled Federated Malay States.By then the heated climate of the inter-war years was ripe for the emergence of radical thinkers and socio-political movements all over the country.Along with Abdul Rahim Kajai and Othman Kalam, Ibrahim later came to serve as one of the editors of Majlis, a metropolitan newspaper of some prominence based in the capital in the year 1938.
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Radicals like Ibrahim were an unstable phenomenon: they were the indigenous vernacular intelligentsia who clearly were not impressed by the ameliorating claims of colonial-capitalist discourse, but they were not about to return to their villages with their heads bowed in disappointment and disillusionment either.

Rejecting both the paternalistic gestures of the British imperialist power as well as the reactionary and defensive posture of the conservative Malay traditional elite, these emerging radicals occupied the intermediary space between the two spaces that had been allotted to them: the urban colonial administration (entry to which required a familiarity with eurocentric discourses of modernity, colonial-capitalism as well as the English language) and the rural traditional administration (entry to which required the precisely opposite: the return to colonial constructions of nativism, traditionalism and religious conservatism).Ibrahim and his colleagues were not prepared to enter either.

Ibrahim Yaakob was but one of thousands of Malays who were displaced and alienated thanks to the epistemic (as well as political and economic) injury exercised via the ideological reconstruction of the image of the native Other.His personal experience of migration to the metropolis was but one of thousands, which eventually led to the emergence of a previously unknown constituency: the urban-based Malays of the colonial metropolitan centres, who for the first time found themselves freed from the shackles of court and tradition of the Kerajaans and in an environment where they, too, were foreigners.

Working as a journalist and editor for Majlis in the late 30's, Ibrahim Yaakob would produce some of his own critical commentaries on the condition of the Malays under colonial rule which would show that he was indeed the inheritor of a critical tradition going back to the Kaum Muda radicals of the 1920s.The critical articles and editorials that Ibrahim wrote in Majlis were largely concerned with the condition of the Malays under colonial rule and the failure of the British to ,protect' the interests of the Malays in an increasingly lopsided plural colonial economy.

In 1938 Ibrahim Yaakob helped to form (and lead) the Kesatuan Melayu Muda.The KMM was made up of like-minded young Malay radicals, was ,vaguely Marxist in ideology' and ,reflected both a strong anti-colonial spirit and opposition to ,bourgeoise-feudalist' leadership of the traditional elite'.Opposed as they were to both colonial rule as well as the petty despotism of the Malay Sultanates, they called for the creation and return to the Indon-Malay world of precolonial past, the dream of Malaya-Raya, (,a Greater Malaya') and a unified anti-colonial struggle which brought together all the peoples of the Indonesian-Malay world and Asia.The members of the KMM engaged in meetings and discussions amongst themselves, comparing the condition of the colonised Malay lands to that of other colonies caught in the throes of anti-colonial struggle.They argued for an end to colonial rule as well as a challenged to the corrupt and enfeebled traditionalist order of the feudal Malay elite.Yet as a fledgling youth grouping without the means to appeal directly and openly to the masses, the KMM's activities, though ambitious in its scope and radical in temper, were nonetheless comparatively muted in their effect.This proved to be both productive and frustrating for Ibrahim himself.

In the end, the stifling environment of Kuala Lumpur itself would force Ibrahim to take to the road once more.And it was here, on his journey across his homeland, that Ibrahim would come to see the glaring inequalities and injustice of colonial rule laid bare.

The Itinerant Gaze of the Colonial Subject: Ibrahim Yaakob's Melihat Tanah Air.

After his impromptu expulsion from the editorial board of Majlis thanks to the manoeuvrings of its new conservative editor Tengku Ismail, the Malay radical was forced to take to the road once more.Ibrahim decided to take the opportunity to travel across his homeland in order to assess the political and economic condition of the Malays of all the states, while also engaging in a number of covert underground activities such as negotiating with the Malay rulers while preaching his ideology of radical nationalism to his supporters.

In 1941, with the tentacles of Imperial Japan slowly easing their way southwards between the islands of the Pacific, Ibrahim Yaakob completed the first volume of his work, Melihat Tanah Air (,Surveying the Homeland').In it we find for the first time a comprehensive exposition of Ibrahim's political philosophy and strategy, which served as the basis of his dream of establishing the long-awaited Malaya-Raya.

In Melihat Tanah Air, Ibrahim's own account of how and why he decided to embark on his tour of the homeland gives us an insight into the way in which he perceived the problem of the Malay people and his emotional response to the Malay condition under colonial rule then:

,...hak kebangsaan orang Melayu jadi sangat lemah.Orang-orang Melayu menjadi bangsa yang tersingkir di luar bandar tidak ada di daerah perniagaan di tanahairnya sendiri.Hal inilah yang menimbulkan kesedihan hati saya melihat tanahair saya dan bangsa saya yang menjadi bangsa yang ditakluk dikuasai orang asing.Menjadi bangsa yang miskin tenggelam didalam kekayaan tanahairnya sendiri.Tak ubah seperti ayam mati kelaparan di kepuk padi.Perasaan hati inilah yang membawa saya berjalan melihat tanahair menjelajah Malaya yang belum dilakukan oleh orang-orang yang dahulu'.

He ended his travels in Singapore, where with the help of the Japanese funds he would resume his career in journalism.He then intended to commit his thoughts and opinions to writing, but unfortunately only the first volume of his work would see the light of day.The second would be stopped by the British Internal Security services who decided to detain the errant Malay journalist-activist during the opening stages of the Second World War (October 1941), just before the unwelcomed arrival of the Imperial Japanese Army which would bring to a hasty conclusion the penultimate chapter of Britain's story of Empire.

Melihat Tanah Air was Ibrahim Yaakob's first serious attempt to understand and describe the economic and political malaise that had come to grip the Malays of his homeland.It offered precisely what the title of the book claimed it to be: a survey from the point of view of a Malay journalist of decidedly radical political complexion.But Melihat Tanah Air was written at a time when Ibrahim's frustration had to be restrained to avoid attracting the gaze of the colonial censor, and his narrative had to be written with care.The socio-political circumstances surrounding the writing of Melihat Tanah Air also account for its two most outstanding features: (1) Ibrahim's tendency