This paper reexamines controversies around Malayness during the early 1930s by focusing on Jawi (Malay in Arabic scripts) newspaper Majlis.
The 1930s saw a great increase of Jawi periodicals. Majlis, one of the leading Jawi papers, was established in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of the Federated Malay States, in 1931. While their discourses were Malay nationalistic, but heterogeneity of Malay Muslims and multi-ethnic contexts in the colonial city has not yet been fully taken into consideration by previous works.
During the interwar period, the so-called pro-Malay policy, that gave administrative preferences to Malays, aroused responses from various communities. Chinese and Indians, calling themselves as Malayans, demanded equal rights as Malays on the grounds that many of them were also Malayan-born British subjects. Their opinions appeared in English papers in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Meanwhile, Majlis always referred to criticism of these English papers and contradicted to them. Majlis’ quotation of other media, in spite of difference of languages, showed the presence of the multilingual media space in British Malaya during that time.
One important topic in the controversy was on Malayness, “Who were the Malays?” Non-Malays accused that Malays contained many foreigners from Sumatra and Java, though Malays were regarded as natives of Malaya in the pro-Malay policy. On the other hand, Majlis contradicted, stressing that Indonesians were brothers of Peninsula Malays and they were classified into Malays in the official categorization. In fact, urban Malays, including many Malay journalists were of foreign origin, including Abdul Rahim Kajai, the first editor of Majlis, whose father was from Sumatra.
Though the British defined Malays based on the concept of race, the Malay framework was still ambiguous even in the colonial period, as there was a constant inflow of immigrants. In addition, Malayness was always contested in multilingual controversies, sometimes by non-Malays. The concept of Malay nation had come to be shared along these controversies. It suggested how interactions with others played an important role in the formation of ethnic groups in the demographically fluid society.
