As wartime alliances disintegrated in Malaya, on 10 October the Labour colonial secretary, George Hall, rose to his feet in the House of Commons to announce the grand plan for a Malayan Union. Mountbatten had urged the government to release its plans long before this, to give an unequivocal signal that the British intended to reward the Malayan Chinese for their loyalty. But by the time Hall’s statement came, if the British still expected plaudits from the Chinese they were bound to be disappointed. Reaction was at best lukewarm or indifferent, at worst hostile. The news that Singapore was excluded from the Union astonished most non-Malay observers: it was Malaya’s natural capital, and the heartland of ‘Malayan’ sentiment. But the British were anxious not to jeopardize Malay opinion too far, and wanted to keep a tight grip on their ‘fortress’. Singapore’s precise constitutional status was entirely undecided. In the longer term, this separation was to be the most enduring legacy of the grand design.108 Suspicion mounted when it became known that the next step towards the implementation of the Malayan Union would be consultations in private with the Malay rulers. Homer Cheng, a Chinese civil servant working under Victor Purcell, summarized the problem: the local-born Chinese, he wrote, ‘claim to have as much right as the Malays to be regarded as the sons of the soil. They contend that the Malays are technically and anthropologically as much immigrants and intruders as the Chinese.’ The indigenous people of Malaya were the aboriginal Orang Asli. The Malays had forfeited their claim to preference in the war. ‘Malayan nationality was an insult’, Cheng concluded. ‘Few would feel proud of being the subjects of Sultans.’109 The terms of the debate had moved on a long way from the question of citizenship. ‘The Union will go through without opposition or enthusiasm from the Left,’ Victor Purcell wrote. ‘Their interest is solely one of representation.’110
The Malay rulers were approached first in order to sign new treaties that gave the British crown the necessary legal jurisdiction in their states to establish the Malayan Union. In one of the first acts of the BMA, a former Malayan Civil Service legal officer, H. C. Willan, was to instruct field security officers to investigate the record of individual rulers during the Japanese occupation, and label them as ‘white’, ‘grey’ or ‘black’. Only five of the pre-war sultans remained in office, four others who had acceded during the Japanese occupation had yet to be recognized by the British government. The Malay courts well remembered the deposition by the British of the Sultan of Perak in 1874, an act that precipitated the first conquest of the Malay states. Mountbatten had all along worried about the propriety of this. It would, he warned, be ‘psychologically questionable’ to secure the rulers’ agreement under the shadow of ‘overwhelming force’.111 But, once again, the nature and extent of the local reaction took the British entirely by surprise.
Willan broke the news to the rulers like a bank manager refusing credit. He first called upon the senior ruler, Sultan Ibrahim of Johore, who had reigned since 1895 in a proud and independent manner, retaining his own army, administrative service and many of his own European advisers. He was, according to Sir George Maxwell, the only sultan who really governed his state. Ibrahim had a reputation for sympathy for the Japanese before the war, receiving imperial honours for his protection of Japanese business interests in his state; he had hunted big game with princes of the Japanese royal family. A vigorous man who sired a child in his seventies, between 1898 and 1927 Ibrahim had no fewer than thirty-five tiger kills to his name. Willan travelled from Singapore over the short causeway to Ibrahim’s capital at Johore Bahru. But Willan had some difficulty in finding him; his sumptuous palaces seemed deserted. Eventually Willan ran to ground Ibrahim and his Romanian consort at one of his minor residencies. He found the sultan in emollient mood: the Japanese had ousted him from his principal palaces and he resented them bitterly for it. Allied intelligence appraisals accepted that his relations with the Japanese had been driven solely by a desire to protect the independence of his state, and that they had soured swiftly during the war. With rare humility, Ibrahim offered to serve under the BMA. The British placed tremendous weight on Ibrahim’s acquiescence in the new constitutional agreements, and there was much relief at his state of mind. The sultan asked for permission to fly the Union Flag on his car on his way to the surrender ceremony in Singapore, and for assistance in taking passage as quickly as possible to his other residence, at Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane, where he had cut a colourful figure in happier times.112
The life of the Malay courts came to a standstill as they awaited the verdict of the British. To the surviving rulers of the pre-war period, Willan gave nominal recognition but to Japanese appointees he was, on occasion, unforgiving. In Selangor the Japanese had deposed the reigning sultan, Alam Shah, and installed his elder brother, Musa Uddin, a man who had been disinherited by the British in 1933 on the grounds of ‘personal misbehaviour’. Musa Uddin foresaw what was coming: in a speech on 10 September he warned that ‘the air has been thick with rumours’ about the future for him and his state.113 Three days later he was taken away by Indian Army officers and, with three servants and two suitcases, sent to his Elba, the Cocos and Keeling Islands, a remote Allied staging post in the southern Indian Ocean. The state regalia and Rolls-Royce were returned to Sultan Alam Shah. As news of these events circulated, some Malay courts acted to anticipate the British. In Trengganu, the legitimate sultan had died during the occupation and his eldest son, Raja Ali, had taken over. But before the war, it was said that Raja Ali had alienated both the British and local opinion through a misalliance with a woman of low reputation. During the war, he had entertained Japanese officers at his palace, and had shocked the local notables by asking them for ‘presents’ and by leasing out land for an amusement park where heavy gambling took place. Seeing their opportunity, the Trengganu State Council, using the authority of the state’s constitution, deposed Raja Ali. But many Malays would be increasingly uneasy that the adat, or customary law of succession, was not being followed.
These tensions came out into the open with the arrival in Malaya on 7 October of Sir Harold MacMichael, a former high commissioner of Palestine, as His Majesty’s special representative. He carried with him full powers to sign the treaties and to make or break kings by granting or withholding British recognition. His mission began, like Willan’s, in Johore and ran from 18 October to 21 December. It was conducted in a slow, stately fashion and, as MacMichael admitted, subject to careful ‘stage-management’. Accompanied by a small retinue, he again began with Sultan Ibrahim. Impatient to leave Malaya, it seems, Ibrahim handed MacMichael a list of concerns relating to his personal status and that of his state, but in the end raised little objection to the terms. Pointedly, he did not consult the leading Malays of the state. After signing, MacMichael reported, the sultan heaved a sign of relief and MacMichael responded in turn with ‘Praise God’ in Arabic. It was, he wrote to London, ‘reasonably plain sailing… The contrast to Palestine is quite remarkable!’114
But MacMichael soon ran into troubled waters. In Kedah the regent, Badlishah, was in a compromised position. He had succeeded during the war and needed recognition from the British. MacMichael met him on 29 November, and his first impression was rather dismissive: ‘the small shy and retiring “failed BA type”, unstable and inclined to be introspective and lonely’. However, the regent told MacMichael that he found the surrender of power ‘very devastating’. MacMichael responded tartly that an independent Kedah was not feasible. He raised the alternative of Thai control – a spectre from Kedah’s past history – and remarked that it was ‘fortunate that Labour ministers had not concluded that Sultanates were altogether out of date’. It was clear that the regent faced the choice of giving his signature or losing his throne. He signed only after a final meeting at which he and his state council made it clear they submitted ‘because there was no alternative’. At this point MacMichael stood and, on behalf of King George VI, formally acknowledged Badlishah as Sultan of Kedah. The sultan then rose and said that ‘this was the most distressing and painful moment of his life. Henceforward he would lose the loyalty, the respect and affection of his subjects, and he would be pursued with curses towards his grave by the ill-informed. He called on Allah to witness his act and to protect him for the future. He would sign because no other course was open.’ Although perhaps MacMichael was more polite, Badlishah wrote shortly afterwards, his manner was ‘not unlike the familiar Japanese technique of bullying’.115 Badlishah thought that MacMichael was acting upon London’s specific instructions, but later came to believe that MacMichael was not in fact authorized to deal with the rulers ‘in such a brutal manner’. Mac-Michael had, as one old Malaya hand put it, ‘blackmailed them all’.116 The term ‘MacMichaelism’ entered the vernacular.
The king’s special representative’s past connection with Palestine now took on a deeper significance. In Badlishah’s capital, Alor Star (now Alor Setar), posters appeared that showed a Malay walking sorrowfully out of the town into the country, carrying a small bundle of possessions, with the caption: ‘The meaning of equal rights’.117 There was a mood of crisis within the Malay community. The memories of the communal violence was still fresh, and in parts of Perak and Negri Sembilan there was renewed fighting. Not only had MacMichael trespassed against the adat of succession, but the ancient constitutions of Malay states had been transgressed by the rulers themselves. A writer in the Malay newspaper Majlis, or ‘Assembly’, of Kuala Lumpur, described the situation: ‘the entire Malay community will stand solidly behind the Rulers… But the majority of our Sultans ignore the interests of their loyal subjects in this vital matter… Our Sultans should not be surprised if the Malays ignore them in the future.’118 There was a deepening sense that the new treaties were tak sah dan tiada halal, ‘illegitimate and unlawful’. The citizenship proposals were also coming under attack. In Kedah and elsewhere slogans circulated: ‘Malaya for the Malays, not the Malayans’.119
During these weeks the Malay elite was paralysed by the uncertainty surrounding the courts. This was an opportunity for commoners to seize the political initiative. The first post-war Malay political party was founded in Ipoh, which was fast emerging as a centre of radical politics. A group of journalists who had worked together in the occupation period took over the offices of the local Japanese daily, and created a new paper called Suara Rakyat, ‘The Voice of the People’. The leading personality was the 24-year-old Abdullah Sani bin Raja Kechil. Like many writers of the day, he was better known by a nom de plume, Ahmad Boestamam. Before the war he had been a precocious talent in Malay journalism, working for Majlis when it was edited by the leader of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, Ibrahim Yaacob. On the eve of war, Boestamam was arrested by the British in a pre-emptive sweep of Malays suspected of being sympathetic to Japan. This was the first, and by far the briefest, of Boestamam’s three periods in preventive detention. Released after the fall of Singapore, his life in wartime was low-key and quite typical for a young Malay radical of the time: he was schooled in propaganda techniques and underwent officer training in a Japanese militia. But he was to emerge after the war to become one of most charismatic political personalities of his day.
Boestamam and his friends were visited by another young man who said he wished to speak with them. At first Boestamam thought he was a Special Branch man. He introduced himself as Mokhtaruddin Lasso, and calmly announced that he was with the MPAJA guerrillas. He was smoking English Craven A cigarettes; these had been unattainable for years. ‘We didn’t know where he had got them, and we didn’t want to ask either.’ But this seemed to vouch for his authenticity. Like many voyagers of the Asian underground, little was known of his origins, both at the time and now, even by local communist leaders like Chin Peng. He came from Sumatra, it was said, where he had been active in the communist movement. He had been a schoolteacher, and had a nickname in Javanese: Lang Lang Buana, ‘The Traveller’. But through him, the MCP began to extend its links with the Malays, and young radicals would be introduced to Malay cadres of the MPAJA. Mokhtaruddin used his communist connections to acquire money for the new paper; eventually $50,000 was invested in this project by the Malayan Communist Party.
It was, as Boestamam realized, ‘tantamount to an ultimatum’. But he took it and gathered his own supporters into the venture to retain the upper hand. They argued down pressure from Mokhtaruddin and his friends to form a socialist party, and on 30 November 1945 a first meeting was held in Ipoh town hall of the Partai Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, or the Malay Nationalist Party. It was a fresh venture for Malay radicalism. It announced a very different claim for the sovereignty of the Malays to that of the rulers; that of a bangsa Melayu, a Malay nation. To signal its opposition to the courts, the new party voiced tentative support for the Malayan Union. But it was also a challenge to the synthetic nationalism of Malayan Union, and it reached far beyond its borders: its ultimate aim was to create a greater Indonesia, an Indonesia raya.120 As the British completed their second colonial conquest, they were encountering a world of interconnected protest of a kind they had never witnessed before. The champions of liberal imperialism were beginning to learn that imperialism was never so vulnerable to attack as when it attempted to reform itself. To many of its subjects it had never been so invasive. These attacks became more ferocious and unyielding when, in late 1945, British and Indian armies extended the boundaries of the British Empire to encompass the vast entirety of colonial Asia. Rarely had Britain’s benevolent intentions been so tested, and by so many people.