26 - The Influence of Modern Civilization on the Malay

Summary

Editors’ Note

Questions of the modernization of the Malays were also raised in a discussion in the Society begun by Rev W. Murray’s “The Influence of Modern Civilization on the Malay” and responded by David Bishop. In Murray’s piece, which provided the standard characterization of the Malays by Europeans of that period, Murray rooted their character not only in the effects of climate. He also attributed it to the nature of the pre-colonial system of governance which had left the Malays “unambitious and lazy”. The British presence had been able in part to counteract this by providing a system of peace and law and order which had been able to effect external changes in the Malays. This, he argued, could be translated into internal changes that would modify the Malay from “a pirate and warrior … into a lover of peace and order”. This image which Murray expressed in terms of the domestication and taming of the Malay character did not, however, suggest for his critic, Bishop, that the Malays would modernize fully. In his view the Malay character and nature would require their continued dependence on British tutelage as “the Malay has been slow to adopt Western ideas and manners”. Arguing that, despite exceptions, the Malay is “conservative and suspicious of innovations, unambitious and unprogressive”, he noted that “[t]he great majority of the Malay lads in school are deplorably devoid of ambition, and seem only to desire to get along with as little trouble and as little exertion of brain-power as possible. The forces of heredity are apparently too strong.”

If the Committee of the Society, in fixing the subject of this paper, contemplated the Malay in widest sense of the word—that is, as a race peopling not only the Malay Archipelago generally so called, but also Formosa, the Philippines, Madagascar, and South Africa—it proposed a subject far greater than I can possibly deal with. Even in the narrowest sense of the Malay resident at our doors, I am afraid that all I can offer is an essay somewhat disjointed and incomplete.