by Nigel Barley
* * *
I slumped at the airport, having forgotten it was Independence Day and, a foolish virgin, my wick untrimmed, I would have to pay the price. Independence celebrations in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, you can hit them all, one after the other, like a month of Sundays.
‘No taxis,’ said the man at the information desk to a small but actively resentful crowd of foreigners. ‘It’s closed. I’m closed.’ Even worse, the banks were closed and I had no Malaysian money.
‘Look,’ said the man cheerfully, ‘there’s a bus in ten minutes. Go to some hotel where you can charge everything. The banks open in the morning. You’ve got Singapore money? Well, there you are. They take Singapore money on the bus, at par. Yes I know it’s worth twice as much as Malaysian money but it’s not profiteering. It’s a matter of national pride. One for one. It is Independence Day.’
The crowd muttered. He was being helpful. Therefore he had accepted responsibility. Therefore it was all his fault. He grinned a ravishing Malay smile, the best defence he could have chosen, a better barrier than the counter.
‘You all sit down and I’ll tell you a story.’
It was an absurd thing to say to Europeans. We should have all bridled at the childishness of it. Yet somehow it tapped into deep currents of memory, nursery school, a treat from teacher, a story before going home to tea. We obeyed without murmur, settling down, brassy women, pushy executives, a dotty blue-rinsed lady. Mouths gaped, arms were crossed. We sat up straight.
‘Right,’ said the man, ‘I’ll tell you where Penang came from.’
* * *
Penang was a botched rehearsal for Singapore, the city that Raffles would later found. There had been several such rehearsals. Penang was simply in the wrong place, believed to be useful in the trade between India and China, which it was not. It was expected to grow opulent on the commerce of Thailand and Burma, gain aromatic wealth from the spices of the Moluccas. It was to have had a mighty shipyard building East Indiamen of Asian teak to replace scarce British oak. It was to help in this enterprise that Raffles, after ten years’ service in London, was recruited to the ‘absurd and extravagant’ Penang government in 1805. But only one frigate was ever slid down the slipway and the wood had to be brought from India at crippling cost. All his life, Raffles would feel contempt for the government of Penang.
* * *
‘It all started with love. We Malays,’ the man on the information desk almost crooned, ‘believe in love.’ A woman at the back snuffled. She, too, clearly was a believer.
‘Francis Light came in search of land in 1786. The Malays were very fierce. Oooh, we were so fierce we used to frighten each other! We were all pirates and warriors.’ He eyed one of the brassy women boldly to show the old skills had not been lost. ‘To be in business then was a terrible thing. Men’s business was killing and robbing.’
Not knowing what else to do, some of the tourists took photographs.
‘Well, Francis Light landed but they would not listen. They seized him and took him to the chief. “Wah!” shouted the chief. “Cut off his head! And all his men.” The Malay sailors they would make into slaves.’ He paced up and down behind his counter, a caged tiger. ‘They took him and tore off his coat. One of the men took his dagger and held it to his throat.’ He seized a pamphlet on tourist facilities in the north and rammed it, trembling, against the imagined throat of Francis Light. His lip quivered with rage and contempt. ‘But just as he was about to strike, there came a cry. It was the princess. She had seen the stranger and fallen in love with his fair hair and pale skin. She rushed out weeping, and begged her father to spare his life.’
He crouched behind the desk and wrung the pamphlet in agony between his hands.
Hang on. Wasn’t this a remake of the Pocahontas-John Smith story? Never mind. He had the audience in the palm of his hand.
‘Oh, Father,’ he intoned piteously, ‘spare this beautiful man so I may marry him.’
‘Very well, my daughter,’ he exclaimed back in manly gruffness. ‘You may have him and I give you’ – exultantly – ‘the island of Penang as a wedding present!’
A woman cried. A man clapped. A wheezy, broken-down vehicle appeared on cue and coughed black smoke.
‘And now your bus is here. Have a good journey!’
* * *
It is the best sort of myth, flying in the face of every known ethnographic and historical fact. There is a more pedestrian version. It says that the Company came looking for a convenient staging-post on the way to China and offered to pay rent in cash. The Sultan of Kedah needed the money and hoped to use the Company’s presence to keep the Siamese at bay. Later, the unintimidated Siamese invaded and the Company got behind with the rent. That version has the ring of truth. For it is unfulfilled expectations and crazy optimism that sum up John Company in the eastern archipelago.
Having acquired a jungle-covered island, Francis Light had to develop it, for, in that first wave of enterprise culture, it was the rise in property values that was to pay for the establishment that did not yet exist. The solid facts of imperialism rested on a mirage. The cheapest expedient – he realized with brilliant originality – was to load the Company’s cannon with silver dollars and fire them off into the bush. The acquisitive Malays swarmed out with machetes, hacked and trampled down the undergrowth to recover the coins and so cleared the island, free of charge, for the British. That, too, is myth. Paul Theroux would later re-use it, shifted to the setting of an African school, in one of his stories. Writers are like slow-chewing termites that reduce literary leaves to a timeless humus and Raffles, too, was a writer. The history of trade is perhaps that men meet to exchange things and end up exchanging ideas and stories. Raffles was unusual in that, for him, the ideas were more important than the things. This had been so since his childhood and the child holds the key to the man.
* * *
‘Where to?’
‘Love Lane.’ The rickshaw-driver behind me was Indian, very black, with thick, ponderous legs and splayed toes, leathery knees like calluses. Raffles would have called him a Chuliah. We cycled through needling rain, for it was the rainy season in Penang.
‘Love Lane,’ he repeated. The name seemed to strike a chord. He leaned forward and brought his mouth level with my ear.
‘You want fuck?’ he hissed. I thought at first this must be a personal invitation, then he added, ‘Schoolgirls?’ I had a vision of fat, Chinese matrons with ring-covered fingers squeezing themselves into school-uniform blouses. ‘Tourist not know difference lah!’
It was a shock to the system, like spooning in your morning cornflakes and finding whisky had been substituted for milk.
‘No, I most definitely do not want fuck. For one thing, it’s only ten in the morning.’
A woman crossing the road clutching a child and dressed in the long Malay dress and headscarf gave me a dirty look, annoyed at such language.
For all sorts of cultural reasons that was probably not a clinching rejoinder anyway. Few things vary as much from place to place as what is known to be universally true about sex. From student days, I recalled a Malaysian engineer incredulous at college rules that sought to prevent fornication by excluding ladies from rooms after two in the afternoon but not in the morning. But then he had firmly believed in the aphrodisiac properties of cocoa, having observed White Men to drink it before going to bed.
* * *
The Javanese noodle-seller was right. To read of Raffles is to read of Sukarno. Yet there is a paradox in this. While I was being taught at school to see Raffles as a benefactor of humanity through empire, Sukarno was emerging as one of the demons of the third world, his very opposite. He had led his nation in a successful struggle for independence from the Dutch in the thirties and forties, overcoming regionalism and religious factions. He was vilified in the Western press, depicted as endlessly anti-democratic, difficult and tiresome in international affairs, a military enemy in the semi-official war over Sabah and Sarawak, a Preside
nt of Indonesia who delighted in undermining the conventional certainties that constituted international order. Ultimately, in the sixties, his playing off of one group against another would end in an avowedly anti-Communist military coup and he would find himself penned up, a powerless figurehead, in his own palace. How then could his life and that of Raffles possibly intersect?
Perhaps this is the proof that what we have is not the truth about such men but something already structured in advance. Beneath the exigencies of time and place, they are incarnations of the great archetypes by which we can approach the bare facts of history by pressing them into a known mould. They are Poor Boy Makes Good, Triumphant Patriot and ultimately both are Wronged Hero. Their footsteps constantly cross, their words intermingle. A passage written about one always seems to recall something about the other. Their lives inform each other, a mass of dots that can be joined to form a dozen different pictures.
But where to start with a man? Perhaps with the name that recognizes his separate existence. Bung Karno, for instance.
‘According to Ibu Wardoyo, when he was small, Soekarno was called Koesno. But because he was constantly ill, his name was changed to Soekarno. The name Karno is full of meaning to Javanese. Adipati Karno from Ngawonggo in the old shadow-puppet plays is a symbol of the hero who is outstandingly loyal to his country until the end of his days.’
– R. Rahim, Bung Karno Masa Muda
It is a common belief in the eastern archipelago that the name of a child is important. A name that is too ‘heavy’ may weigh upon a child and make it ill. So a sickly child may have to be renamed. In the West, names are not without their burden of class and affectation, but Christian names are given once and for all at christening. Yet in defiance of the dictates of the Church of England, Raffles too seems to have been christened twice.
The circumstances of his birth were unusual. He was born in Jamaica in 1781 on the West Indiaman of which his father was master. The vessel was named Ann after his mother. On this first occasion he was dubbed Thomas Stamford Bingley. Bingley was a shadowy, even shady, godfather who turned up later in Java during Raffles’ years as Governor. Raffles for some reason then denied his relationship to Bingley. Stamford was a merchant in the West India trade, otherwise unknown. From the point of view of posterity, he is named after Raffles. Three years later. Raffles was christened again as plain Thomas after his grandfather and thus he would remain until his knighthood when the name Stamford re-emerged. The history of those early years may be seen as the passage from plain Thomas to Sir Stamford, the passage from a ‘light’ name to a ‘heavy’ one.
* * *
The rickshaw-driver’s response to Love Lane was an argument for historical continuity, evidence that, after more than two hundred years, it was still in business. It was here that the young bachelors – the ‘writers’ of the Company – lived in Flowerpot Hall. The cost, I recalled irrelevantly, had been one and a half dollars a day, which included a bottle of wine among four. Their amorous needs had given the street its name but their generous donations of genetic material had not marked Penang. For Penang is a ramshackle Chinese city, laced with Indians. Malays seemed in a decided minority. They only appeared at night to throng the seafront food stalls and show off their flashy motorbikes.
* * *
At the age of fourteen, Raffles joined the East India Company as the lowest form of clerk. Initially, he is an unattractive hero. He is a swot. He isn’t even good at games.
‘My leisure hours, however, still continued to be devoted to favourite studies; and with the little aid my allowance afforded, I contrived to make myself master of the French language, and to prosecute enquiries into some of the branches of literature and science; this was, however, in stolen moments, either before the office hours in the morning, or after them in the evening … I shall never forget the mortification I felt when the penury of my family once induced my mother to complain of my extravagance in burning a candle in my room.’
– T. S. Raffles
Bung Karno was marginally luckier.
‘Actually, Soekarno’s room already had electricity. However, since he did not have the price of a light bulb, he preferred to read and study with an oil lamp.’
– R. Rahim, Bung Karno Masa Muda
Raffles’ childhood sings a song of poverty and, like Sukarno, his principal friends were books. The precise cause of his father’s lack of substance has never been established – illness, drink, gambling? Raffles always wrote as if he had no father at all, though he seems to have lived until 1797. Raffles only had two years of proper schooling and all his life would feel the lack of it. He described himself in later years as being ‘as ignorant as a Hottentot’. Like many who lack formal education, he saw it as the panacea for all human ills and yearned with missionary zeal to give it to others. That is a major theme of his life. Themes, of course, are constructed retrospectively and beloved of biographers who usually like to make their characters move in straight lines.
Given the straitened circumstances of his youth, it is small wonder that Raffles kept quiet about that pretentious ‘Stamford’ and ‘Bingley’ of his first fonting. His aunt twitted his intimations of gentility with the nickname ‘The Duke of Puddle Dock’, a poor area in Wapping. He was comparatively lucky in this. In later days, he might have ended up as ‘Bing’. The English poor have always been merciless to members of their own class who attempt to rise. During my own boyhood, in those same London localities, ‘The Duke of Puddle Dock’ had yielded to a coarser peer. Anyone showing such a frustrated sense of position as Raffles was typically rewarded with the name ‘Lord Muck from Turd Hill’.
* * *
We turned down a narrow side street. There it was, Love Lane, proclaiming itself upon the wall but not as I had pictured it in my imagination. The houses were too similar to Catford dwellings to be exotic, and evoked rising damp and the difficulties of sanitation rather than romance. A few sleazy Chinese hotels stood dankly about on slick asphalt, exuding hard-edged discomfort. A thin old man in a vest emerged from one of the houses, worked his chest briefly and projected a mouthful of phlegm neatly into the street in front of us. It was probably not a personal comment.
The ground floors of the buildings provided a sort of covered walkway as prescribed by Raffles in his designs for the houses of Singapore. Perhaps he had taken the design from here – but then there is a uniform Portuguese–Chinese–European architectural style that is much the same from Macao to Timor. Motorbikes had been wheeled out of the rain and effectively barred access to pedestrians so that they were forced into the seeping gutters.
‘The Chinese do that!’ snarled the driver. It was the sort of petty resentment that racial feuds are built of.
I tried to think of Raffles here, stalking around in knee-breeches, probing this, inquiring into that, making endless notes, but could detect no answering resonance from the past. It was like shouting down a well and hearing no echo. But then Raffles had not been a bachelor on arrival in Penang. Perhaps he had never lived in Flowerpot Hall.
‘Where to?’ the driver called again.
* * *
‘Mr Raffles went out to India in an inferior capacity, through the interest of Mr Ramsay, Secretary to The Company, and in consequence of his marrying a lady connected with that gentleman.’
– H. Colburn, Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland
It was through his marriage that scandal first touched the life of Raffles. In an age of patronage, he seems to have gained promotion by merit alone, rising in a single bound from London clerk at £70 a year to Penang Assistant Secretary at £1,500. His contemporaries might have chosen to believe that this was the recognition of his sheer ability and ten years’ hard work. Instead, they looked for a less creditable and more plausible reason.
They found it in his wife. Five days after his appointment Raffles was married to Olivia, the widow of an Indian surgeon and some ten years his senior. The acquisition of a ready-ma
de Company wife might be seen merely as completing his tropical outfitting, or be the result of sudden passion invading the arid, industrious life of young Thomas. But rumour wanted it otherwise. The 120 white residents of Penang were hungry for gossip and needed someone to disapprove of. It was said – almost certainly libellously – that Ramsay, Raffles’ boss, had needed to dispose of an importunate mistress. Raffles had got her out of the way in return for promotion.
‘“… Utari is now motherless. Tjokro worries much about her future and who will watch over her and give her love. This is a deep concern on his mind. I think, possibly, if you were to ask my niece to marry you it would relieve some little bit of pressure from Tjokro.”
‘… “Well,” I explained slowly, “I owe Tjokro much gratitude and … I love Utari … But not very much. However, if you think I should ask for her hand because this may make the burden lighter for my idol, then I will do so.”’
– C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography
I could hear the sea at the bottom of the road. ‘The fort,’ I said, a little peevishly. ‘Take me to the fort.’ Perhaps I would find him there.
* * *
It was Penang that was Raffles’ introduction to the East. By the time the six–month outward voyage was over, Raffles could speak Malay, something most of his seasoned colleagues would never learn to do. For them it was a language to be quarantined within the interpreter’s domain. His career at Penang has more than a touch of unconscious comedy about it. His office must have been like that small cabin in the Marx Brothers’ movie which ends up containing the entire ship’s population. One by one, he assumes all the important jobs of the colony. He keeps the minutes of the Council, oversees the newspaper, produces the dispatches for home, acts as Recorder to the law court, discovers that the official translator cannot, in fact, speak Malay and takes over the job himself. In his spare time, he researches the history and customs of the Malays. And here he begins to form about him ‘the Family’, a clique of intelligent and slightly hungry men who look to him as their guiding light and will stick with him throughout his career.