Forgotten Wars

by Harper, Tim

  8

  1947: Malaya on the Brink

  On the eve of Mountbatten’s arrival in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, at the other side of the city, in the old fort of Purana Qila, the new leaders of Asia were meeting for the first time. On 23 March 1947, standing beneath a huge illuminated map of the continent, Nehru opened the Asian Relations Conference. Those present would long remember his words: ‘When the history of our present times comes to be written, this Conference may well stand out as the landmark which divides the past of Asia from the future.’ The idea for the gathering had come to Nehru during his visits to Malaya and Burma in March 1946. Although the coming of Swaraj was clouded with anxiety, Nehru and many other Indian leaders felt that they had brought Asia to the threshold of a new millennium. They believed that Congress was the exemplary nationalism for Asia and that India’s civilization formed the core of what Rabindranath Tagore called the ‘inner human bond’ of its peoples. The Asian Relations Conference was a form of missionary outreach to other national struggles.1 The Muslim League denounced Nehru as a ‘Hindu imperialist’ and boycotted the proceedings, but virtually every nation, or nation-of-intent, from the Levant to China was represented: there were delegations of Jews and Arabs from Palestine; commissars from Soviet central Asia; courtiers from the Kingdom of Thailand; hardened communist guerrillas from Malaya, and polished Kuomintang diplomats. The greater number of delegates were from the lands of Britain’s imperial crescent, and the official language of the meeting was English, but the largest individual contingents were from Southeast Asia. Few of the 200 delegates and 10,000 or so observers were known to each other. When Sutan Sjahrir flew in for the final days of the meeting, he apologized for the size of his retinue: Indonesians, he explained, had so few opportunities in the past to meet their fellow Asians. Sjahrir was met at the airport by his Dutch wife: such was the sum of his own years of isolation and exile that they had not seen each other since 1932. The visitors were entertained in the Viceroy’s House with the full ceremonial of the Raj, but, in the words of one Irish observer, they ‘felt they were witnessing the last departing gleams of its sunset splendour, not only in New Delhi, but throughout a continent’.2

  Over the next few days the delegates surveyed their shared inheritance. Panels on social and cultural problems heard harrowing testimonies to the continuing issue of war. A session on ‘economic development and social services’ revealed that, from the left to the right, from Malayan communist to Indian businessman, the new generation of leaders saw a common future in planning and state intervention. But, paradoxically, it was the climactic forum on ‘National Movements for Freedom’ that proved to be the most divisive. The very cause that brought these men and women together – anti-colonialism – was now diminishing for some of them. In New Delhi there was no echo of the war cry of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’: the memory of Japanese rule was too immediate and traumatic, and leaders of new nations could ill afford to alienate the West. The crucial question of how ‘free Asia’ should aid nations ‘struggling to be free’ was left unresolved. The spiritual support offered by Nehru was far less than was sought by the Vietnamese and Indonesians. The closing session was addressed by Gandhi, who arrived following a tour of Bihar and Bengal, where he was trying to stem the tide of communal violence. ‘He looked’, recalled one witness from Malaya, Philip Hoalim, ‘very tired and extremely frail’. The Mahatma was an inspiration, but, in the words of Abu Hanifah from Sumatra: ‘We thought the idea of turning the other cheek was silly. We had then preferred the ways of Kemal Ataturk, the hero of Anatolia.’3 Southeast Asian nationalisms shared a martial cast of mind, and the area’s representatives found that they had most in common with each other. In New Delhi they witnessed at first hand the spectacle of India and China vying for influence, and it alarmed them as much as the revived imperialism of the West. The regional entity that was later to emerge, in the shape of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967, was much smaller than that envisaged in New Delhi. The summit was the high-water mark of pan-Asian solidarity, but it also signalled the beginning of its decline as a political ideal. ‘We seek no narrow nationalism,’ Nehru had proclaimed. But narrow nationalism was to prevail. A second meeting in China did not materialize: civil war and Cold War intervened. Purana Qila was the start of a road that led to Bandung in 1955. But the Afro-Asia Conference was to be a conclave of sovereign nation-states, and not a parliament of peoples.

  THE CRESCENT FRAGMENTS:ORPHANS OF EMPIRE

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the great crescent had begun to fragment. The perpetual motion of peoples across frontiers that had given it unity began to still. By the end of the war, transport had ground to a halt, and borders were battle fronts. During the Japanese occupation, the largest migrations were internal: they were either forced, as in conscription for the railway projects, or took the shape of flight from troubled areas, as in the mass exodus of Chinese from the towns and mines into the forests of Malaya. By the beginning of 1947 travel, trade and remittance had resumed, and migrant communities raced to restore ties with their homelands. As many as 20,000 Indians from Malaya chose to travel back to South Asia at fares six times their pre-war level. Overseas Chinese businessmen returned to invest in the economic reconstruction of their ancestral regions. Most of them later went back to Southeast Asia but, in the longer term, the great political upheavals in India and China gave these journeys a new finality. When the communist armies entered the port cities of China, the seaboard would close to migration for two generations. Many of the later journeys from Southeast Asia would be passages into banishment or exile. Dying empires and new nations guarded their frontiers jealously. Much was lost in the process. The dream of a greater Malay nation floundered against the Dutch blockade of the Indonesian republic. Prosperous ports became backwaters. Penang, which bridged India, Burma and the Eastern world, faced the decline of its entrepôt trade, and the loss of its special status as a Straits Settlement. Fired by ‘Penang patriotism’, and afraid of being swamped in a Malay-dominated state, the Straits Chinese and other outward-looking traders fought to retain their British citizenship, and campaigned to secede from the new Federation of Malaya. But they could not survive alone. More enclosed state structures were being erected that placed greater importance on internal identity politics, the local defence of status and nationality, than on the pursuit of global sympathies. Wherever new ‘national’ boundaries were drawn, they broke up older communities that had transcended them, and left behind ‘orphans of empire’.4

  A cosmopolitan age was drawing to a close. Many of the minorities who had embodied it lost influence, and some were even confronted by the spectre of statelessness. Singapore’s Jews, who numbered over 1,000 in 1941, were mostly of Middle Eastern, and specifically Baghdadi descent. They dispersed across India, Southeast Asia and coastal China in the nineteenth century, where many of them achieved prosperity and status. But in the war, the community began to break up. The story of Alfred Lelah was typical. He was born in Baghdad in 1913, and had first visited Singapore as a young child with his father. This led him to see it as a safe haven when in 1938, worried about the deteriorating relations between Arabs and Jews, he decided to leave Iraq. He created a comfortable niche for himself, trading in Japanese goods which were at the time boycotted by Chinese firms, and re-exporting them to the Middle East. Shortly before the Japanese invasion Lelah evacuated his wife and children to India, but he remained, and was interned along with the rest of the Jewish and European community. When the camps were liberated, and because he carried an Iraqi passport, Lelah was ‘repatriated’ via Cairo to Iraq. Before the war, in an Indian Ocean administered by the British, it would have been relatively easy for him to return to Singapore. But now Iraq lay outside the British orbit, and on arriving in Basra, Lelah was charged for his repatriation costs in local dinars and found that his immigrant status was very insecure. He struggled to reach Bombay to find his wife and children, moving through a succession of grim, isolated tra
nsit camps, and eventually secured a passage for his family from Calcutta back to Singapore. When he finally boarded the ship he destroyed his Iraqi passport. On his return, Lelah faced the full force of colonial exclusion: a British immigration officer who had been imprisoned in Changi with him refused an entry visa to his parents. His family was now homeless. They were given refuge by relatives in a house in Bencoolen Street, a Jewish quarter of the city, but they had to share it with its new occupants: the Malayan Communist Party.5 Lelah had travelled to Iraq with a fellow internee, Jacob Ballas, who later described how their world had changed:

  The Second World War showed us that we are Jews and we were pushed aside as a Jewish community by the Japanese. And we were considered enemies. When the war was over we saw and couldn’t believe what had happened in Europe, the crematoriums and Auschwitz, and about Hitler and what he did to the Jewish people, which were unbelievable to us, because we’d never experienced any of these.

  With this came the realization that disaster could strike anywhere, as it did in Iraq in 1948 when, in the wake of the partition of Palestine, the Jews were expelled from Baghdad.6 Still seeking security, they dispersed again: to Sydney, Los Angeles, London and Israel. The Jews of Singapore diminished in number, but survived: Alfred Lelah re-established a booming business in Singapore’s legendary travellers’ bazaar, Change Alley. The community would achieve brief prominence with the rise of David Marshall, a charismatic lawyer and politician. He had been sent in the later part of the war to a coal mine in northern Japan, and on his return had busied himself in the causes of ex-prisoners of war and Jewish welfare – ‘I am’, he was to declare, ‘both a Jew and an Asian’ – and proved that it was possible for a Jew to win the political support of Chinese and other communities.7 His spell in 1955 and 1956 as the first chief minister of Singapore was one of the final flourishes of the city’s pre-war cosmopolitanism.

  Between 1945 and 1950 a substantial number of the Eurasian communities of India and Burma, including many technicians, teachers and railway workers, left Asia. During the days of nationalist agitation they had identified themselves closely with the continuation of the British presence. They hoped that, at the very least, India, Pakistan and Burma would continue as dominions within the Commonwealth. As this possibility receded and ethnic conflict deepened across the crescent, they were increasingly uncomfortable. They felt betrayed by the British and suspicious of the exclusive nationalism of the incoming independent governments. Some of this anxiety was captured in fiction by John Masters’ powerful novel Bhowani Junction, filmed in 1956 with Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger, as Hollywood’s first retrospective of the Raj. Some Eurasian families packed for ‘home’, a mythical Britain which their ancestors had left as long as a century and a half before. But the cannier or less sentimental members of the community had sensed that racial and class prejudices were still deeply ingrained in the United Kingdom. They too left, but for Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Though these countries still maintained discriminatory immigration laws, they seemed more open and friendly and their cheerful citizen soldiery had made a positive impression in India and Burma during the war. Some ‘Britasians’ tried to enlist the support of Eurasians in Malaya for a colony in the Nicobar Islands, just as some of the Dutch had looked to New Guinea as a new frontier.8 But the leaders of Malaya’s 10,000 or so Eurasians saw a role for their community, perhaps above all others, in defining a new ‘Malayan’ nationalism. In Singapore, Gerald de Cruz and John Eber, founders of the Eurasian Progressive Association, were two of the main sponsors of the Malayan Democratic Union. De Cruz’s anti-colonialism and embrace of communism was spurred by his rejection of his Indian-Irish father’s slavish attachment to a colonial culture and ‘an alien patriotism’.9 The Eurasians of Malacca traced their roots to the Portuguese conquest of 1511. They petitioned the Malay sultans to be recognized as their non-Muslim subjects and as co-claimants of the status of ‘sons of the soil’.10 But two generations later, this claim had yet to be acknowledged.

  As Britain’s Asian empire broke apart, India came to play a much reduced role in the affairs of Southeast Asia. In the wake of Nehru’s visit, Congress sent a medical mission to relieve the sufferings of local Indians: its ability to defend its own was an important test of its new authority. But, after this, the diaspora dropped out of vision. In 1942 and 1943 the Indians of Southeast Asia had been the vanguard of the freedom struggle, but these epic days soon passed into legend. INA veterans still paraded in their tattered uniforms and clung to the memory of Subhas Chandra Bose. Around this time stories first appeared in the Malayan press – rumours which would never be dispelled entirely – that he was alive and somewhere in Tibet. The British witch-hunts against the INA cast a long shadow. Many of its civilian leaders left Southeast Asia to become ambassadors for the new Indian republic, and as pre-war figureheads resurfaced, many reaffirmed their loyalty to the British Empire.11 The community was effectively leaderless. In August 1946, on Nehru’s advice, a former minister of Bose’s provisional government, John Thivy, who had recently been released from a British jail, founded a Malayan Indian Congress. In its early days the new party remained firmly anchored to the subcontinent. ‘Indians in East Asia’, Thivy argued, ‘are the Ambassadors of India.’ He promoted Hindi, although the language had virtually no native speakers among Indians in Malaya, and opposed the proposals for a Malayan Union citizenship in order to safeguard dual-citizenship rights for Malaya’s Indians. But as they watched the death throes of the Raj, Indian leaders in Singapore and Malaya realized they could no longer trust New Delhi. In early 1947 Thivy took further advice from Congress in India and conceded that Indians should seek their Swaraj in Malaya and adopt local citizenship. He allied the Malayan Indian Congress with the Malayan Democratic Union and other parties of the left. But Indians remained ambivalent about Malayan politics. Thivy himself stepped down as party leader in July to take up a diplomatic appointment as agent of the government of India, and the party continued to attend Congress meetings in India until 1950.12 The labouring masses were disenchanted with an elite who claimed to speak for them, yet ignored their immediate concerns. It was an article of faith of the Penang shop and municipal workers that they would trust no man who wore trousers or spoke English.13

  The independence of India was not an occasion for celebration in Malaya, and it left the Indian community more divided than ever and anxious about their future. The Sikhs and other minorities revived their separate associations; Indian Muslims supported a local branch of the Muslim League. At the time of the Calcutta killings there was communal violence in Singapore. The British slapped censorship on publications from India, and attributed the trouble to local gang rivalry. But on Penang, the largest centre of Indian Muslim settlement, there were protracted tensions between Hindu and Muslim workers in rival trade unions.14 The island was home to a distinctive community of Straits-born Hindustani Muslims, or Jawi Peranakan, and many of them lent spiritual support to Pakistan. Yet Lahore was far away, and offered little hope of protection. The majority chose to identify more closely with their fellow-Muslims, the Malays. But relations between them had a history of tension. Malay nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s had asserted the precedence of Malays of ‘full blood’ over those of Indian or other Muslim descent. But facing bigger political challenges after the war, the Malay community was now more willing to absorb resourceful co-religionists. Jawi Peranakan leaders joined the conservative United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and, in time, became a distinct network within it. In 1947, the son of a Jawi Peranakan headmaster from neighbouring Kedah began to write a lively and acerbic column on Malay affairs for the Straits Times, under an Anglicized nom de plume, ‘Che Dat’. It showed an unwavering identification with the Malay people, and an unsentimental view of the challenges they faced; Mahathir Mohamad would later become one of the Malay community’s strongest defenders and most astringent critics, Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister and ‘father of modernization’.15


  For the British in Southeast Asia the loss of the Raj also meant the loss of its cheap labour. Under pressure from Thivy and others in Malaya, Nehru refused to allow any more recruitment from India. When Japanese surrendered personnel were finally shipped home in early 1947, the military despaired of finding manpower to rebuild its camps and airfields. It considered looking to Mauritius, to 30,000 Maltese workers who had washed up in Cairo, and even fresh levies from Japan. In the event, around 10,000 volunteers from Ceylon were hurriedly enlisted under strict military discipline.16 They were lured by the promise of good pay and conditions, but found themselves earning less than locals for heavy labour. On 17 September 1947 a large contingent of Ceylonese in Singapore mutinied. They refused to eat the ‘coolie’s food’ they were given and pelted their officers with stones: 416 men were arrested. There was another revolt in April of the following year, and brawls with local Malays and Tamils in Sungei Patani and Kuala Lumpur. To local trade unionists, the use of the Ceylonese was another blatant attempt to exploit non-unionized labour: their principal employer – the RAF in Singapore – had dismissed over a thousand local workers earlier in the year.17 Migration now was subject to new political pressures. After the Malayan Union debacle, Malay politicians refused to countenance fresh arrivals from China. In the constitutional negotiations, control over immigration policy was, Sir Edward Gent told Arthur Creech Jones, ‘a matter of life and death to the Malay people’.18 The only acceptable alternative was fellow Muslims from Java, but the British feared that they would bring with them the politics of the Indonesian revolution. For the first time, the workforce of the future would be born in Malaya itself.