This fragile alliance of ethnic interests was not the ‘multiracial’ nationalism that British idealists had wanted to fashion. This now seemed much further away than it had in 1945, and Gurney, for one, was deeply pessimistic that a truly ‘Malayan’ consciousness would ever emerge: its future lay in education and in the young. Not least of the battles of the Emergency was the struggle for the imagination of the new generation; the men and women who were to lead Malaya to independence. But this was also the generation that had been exposed to the full force of Japanese cultural warfare, to the mystique of patriotic resistance and the general assault on the corrupt, colonialist mentalities. The British tended to portray radical nationalists as emotional adolescents and communists as vicious delinquents. They recoiled at the indiscipline and hostility ‘already noticeable in everyday street contact between Europeans and Chinese of the urchin variety or coolies who now often go out of their way to be rude without the least provocation.’146 The schools themselves – the large Chinese high schools of Singapore and Penang in particular – were dominated by over-age students who had missed out on formal education during the war. Their schooling had been on the streets, in petty trade and politics. Most were old beyond their years, and resented that the only path to advancement in a colonial world was the English language. They did not see their future as becoming clerks in British companies. Often with the connivance of teachers, classmates set up study cells and circulated clandestine political writings. They devoured the patriotic literature of the National Salvation movement, but also Russian authors – Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky – in cheap Chinese translations. It was, as one activist was later to recall, ‘an eclectic mix of romantic, naturalist and realist writers, who wrote of oppression, struggle and freedom. It was a heady literary diet, quite different from the staple fare most English-educated students were exposed or accustomed to.’147 In their spare time students remained part of the labour force, in which they were seen as something of an elite. Student broadsheets and hustings were schools for activism, and their leaders were the natural vanguard of a new wave of radical trade unionism. In 1955, when Singapore island was once again crippled by strikes, the governor struggled to explain to the colonial secretary why the British government was being held hostage by children.148
In no small way, the future of Britain’s interests in the region was staked on the creation of a new elite in its own image: anglophone, Anglophile in outlook and committed to the Commonwealth connection. As a step towards this, on 8 October 1949 the new University of Malaya was opened. It was built as a symbol of ‘national belonging’ and pride. Significantly, Singapore was chosen as its site, rather than the neighbouring Malay capital of Johore Bahru, as was originally suggested. Malcolm MacDonald was its first proud chancellor, and the economic architect of the second colonial occupation, Sir Sydney Caine, soon arrived as its vice-chancellor. Within a year 645 students were registered at the new Dunearn Road campus.149 It attracted a new generation of British educators to Malaya – ‘pale young colonial men’, wrote one of them, ‘graduates of technical colleges, brought up on the W. E. A. and the Arts Councils, who have read all the appropriate Penguins and Pelicans’.150 Many of them voiced a commitment to ‘Malayan’ culture. C. Northcote Parkinson, the first Raffles Professor of History, led research on Southeast Asia’s past (and drew on his experience of colonial bureaucracy to formulate his famous ‘Parkinson’s Law’: work expands to fill the time available for its completion). Under the influential Dean of Arts, E. H. G. Dobby, geography became a defining discipline, with surveys of the padi landscapes of Malaya and rapidly changing settlement patterns. Excavations resumed at sites such as the enigmatic Hindu remains of the Bujang valley in Kedah, and projected an ancient past for the new Malayan nation. Young local scholars cut their teeth in these endeavours; the economist Ungku Abdul Aziz, who had been schooled in wartime Japan, and the leading Malay literary figure of his generation, Za’ba, bristled in the hierarchical expatriate atmosphere. A highly coloured memoir of the campus by the English don Patrick Anderson captures well the missionary purpose and manifest contradictions of instilling a national culture through the English literary canon. So too, in a different way, do the travails of the dissolute schoolmaster, Victor Crabbe, in Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy. As John Wilson, Burgess taught at the elite Malay College Kuala Kangsar and, in his spare time, published translations of Shakespeare in Malay. But these writings also give a sense of a social and intellectual world that was evolving out of the reach of the colonial opinion makers, and against which, in Anderson’s words, ‘the whites seem no more than photographs, acutely defined in terms of surface personality, but isolated and ephemeral’.151
The first post-war intake of students revived the platform of the Malayan Democratic Union.152 In 1949 student publications from Raffles College, which along with King Edward VII Medical College was the core of the new university, attacked ‘the opiate atmosphere’ of colonial education and the cultural model of nationalism that was being thrust upon them by the British. The Malayan Democratic Union had explicitly warned against the creation of ‘a miniature replica of Oxford or Cambridge’ and demanded ‘a focal point of Malayan cultural activities taking its bearing from the rich traditions of our people and the needs of their future development’.153 Poetry and prose in English attempted to give expression to the polyglot world of the colonial city; as one early literary journal, New Cauldron, put it, it was ‘a courageous attempt at synthesis between the conflicting currents’. Writers in English absorbed and tropicalized a wide range of influences from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot – ‘a very clever gentleman, of course’, the student poet and later historian, Wang Gungwu, mused to Patrick Anderson, ‘but we in Malaya perhaps require something… a little more direct… and a little more explicit’.154 Wang and his friends were later to experiment with a hybrid poetic language they called ‘EngMalChin’. They also recognized that if such a synthesis was not possible, ‘then we must start from scratch… with Malay as a basis’.155 But as their critics pointed out, they themselves were ‘cut off by intellectualisation from the mass of the common people’, and inherited from the British the dilemma of how to impose a new national culture from on high.
As predicted, the first generation of undergraduates was to have an enduring, but also diverse, influence on the intellectual life of Malaya. But it was an unrepresentative group: only 10 per cent of the first cohort to enter the new campus were Malay. The university’s much-vaunted meritocratic admissions policy disadvantaged Malay families who – through cultural pride or, more often, lack of choice – did not send their children to English-language schools. This point was driven home by ‘C. H. E. Det’, the future prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who was now a medical student, in his newspaper column, and it later became an argument for mandatory Malay ‘quotas’ in higher education. The Chinese-educated remained unreconciled to colonial curricula. However, radical students such as James Puthucheary kept alive contacts with Malay intellectuals. The principal channel for this after 1948 was the newspaper Utusan Melayu, which remained the vanguard of Malay anti-colonial opinion. Its editor, A. Samad Ismail, never placed himself in the foreground of Malay radicalism, but was at the centre of a network of correspondents from upcountry towns, and a web of cosmopolitan friendships. These began to include the new generation of activists from the Chinese schools and trade unions. The coming man was Lim Chin Siong. In 1949, aged sixteen, after a childhood spent mostly in rural Johore, he entered Tan Kah Kee’s foundation, the Chinese High School in Singapore. Within two years he would take the lead in student protests and be expelled for subversion. With a personal mythology grounded in the patriotic resistance to Japan, a trenchant anti-colonialism and a charismatic oratory rooted in the demotic Hokkien dialect of the urban working class, Lim Chin Siong would come to personify the politics of this new generation. He led popular campaigns in defence of Chinese culture, and against registration for national service (‘Listen friends, only dogs have licences and numbers’). The British dismissed these student activists as Chinese ‘chauvinists’, but Lim Chin Siong also won the respect and trust of the Malay left for his advocacy of Malay as a national language rather than English. ‘He appeared in the sky of history’, eulogized the Malay ‘people’s laureate’, Usman Awang, ‘as a shining star in the sky of time.’156 The united front had dissolved, but its trans-ethnic patriotic vision was never lost, or wholly defeated.
The underground remnants of the Singapore Town Committee of the Malayan Communist Party tried to reconnect to this world. Under Ah Chin, the son of a Penang hawker, it was in tenuous contact by dead-letter boxes and couriers with the Party leadership in south Malaya, and was ordered to undertake acts of sabotage and arson to create economic chaos and tie up British resources. A young woman from a wealthy Perak family, Ah Har, was given responsibility for re-establishing links with the intellectuals. Only three of the Malayan Democratic Union leaders had taken to the jungle in late June 1948. Many of the older members, such as Philip Hoalim, repudiated the movement, but others remained sympathetic to the MCP’s claims to be at the forefront of national struggle. The key figure was thirty-year-old Eu Chooi Yip, who took a leading role in the formation of an ‘Anti-British League’. He was one of the most able activists of his time: Tan Cheng Lock had even invited him to be the organizing secretary of the Malayan Chinese Association. Eu Chooi Yip began to recruit from Malayan Democratic Union members, many of whom were already steeped in socialism, and to lead them to Marxism. Two important recruits to the Anti-British League were P. V. Sharma, a Brahmin schoolteacher who had championed the employment rights of Asian educators in relation to their expatriate counterparts, and John Eber. After the climactic events of May 1948 Eber had taken a eight-month holiday in Australia and New Zealand; when he returned he continued to lobby the Colonial Office for immediate self-government but, convinced that the British saw independence as far distant, he too threw in his lot with the Anti-British League. From a loft in Eber’s house Eu Chooi Yip produced Freedom News, perhaps the most sophisticated propaganda mouthpiece of the MCP. The League made inroads into the University of Malaya, and even among junior civil servants. In the Chinese schools activists such as Lim Chin Siong were equally receptive. By January 1951 thirty-six League members were groomed for admission to the MCP itself.157 But this incipient united front never reached the breadth of organization that was achieved between 1945 and 1948. Special Branch smashed the organization in 1951 with another spate of arrests, including John Eber, James Puthucheary and A. Samad Ismail. After their release two years later, P. V. Sharma went into exile in India and Eber went to London. Eu Chooi Yip remained underground in Singapore and then Indonesia, only to return to Singapore in the early 1990s. In London, another Malayan Democratic Union leader in exile, Lim Hong Bee, had, with the help of ex-national serviceman friends, become an unofficial roving representative for the MCP. At a ‘Malayan Forum’, the radicals debated the nation’s future with a new breed of anticommunist student leaders of whom the Fabian-inclined Cambridge-trained lawyer Lee Kuan Yew was the most prominent. Lee had been absent during most of the struggles of the past three years in Malaya. He returned after 1950 to a much narrower political arena and tempered his anti-colonialism accordingly. Over the next twelve or so years, Lee Kuan Yew and his friends were to ally themselves with Chinese-educated leaders such as Lim Chin Siong in order to harness mass support. But this also marked the beginning of a new and desperate struggle for control of the independence movement on the island that would last over a decade. During it, Lee Kuan Yew employed the spectre of communism and the methods of colonial counter-insurgency to prevail. In defeat, and in long years of detention and exile, Lim Chin Siong and a great many of his generation were to carry ‘an unerasable Communist stigma’.158
In 1949, of the Malay radicals, the only leader of consequence who remained outside jail was Burhanuddin al-Helmy. At its fourth and final annual conference in January 1949, Dr Burhanuddin spoke of the Malay Nationalist Party as ‘fighting a cold war with the authorities’.159 Mustapha Hussain remained at liberty, but on strict police conditions. He brokered a meeting between Burhanuddin and Special Branch to ease the tension. But Pak Doktor and the Malay Nationalist Party were under notice and Mustapha Hussain was already an example of how hard life could be for a former detainee. He ran a stall selling noodles and sweet tea at the Sunday market in Kampong Bahru in Kuala Lumpur. His former students were embarrassed to meet him in the street. But he learnt how to tailor his dishes to the tastes of the different communities who patronized his stall, and it became a popular haunt for politicians, journalists, cabaret artistes, dancing girls and European policemen. Next door, a former leader of AWAS, Aishah Ghani, also owned a restaurant. Mustapha Hussain’s stall was watched by the Special Branch, but his high-profile patrons seem to have given him some protection. This was all one with the curious intimacy that grew up between the secret police and their prey. The trade union adviser John Brazier even brought a visiting Labour MP, Woodrow Wyatt, to eat there, and to talk politics with Mustapha: it turned out that he had read Wyatt’s Theories and Practices of Socialism. Visiting nationalists from Burma and India also sought him out. ‘Is there another place’, he wrote, ‘apart from the Left Bank in Paris, where so many artists and performers from all walks of cultural pursuit gather at a dilapidated stall?’ Then there were other, more unwelcome visitors. On a busy Saturday night in 1949 a young man known to Mustapha rushed into his shop, thrust a note into his hand and promptly disappeared into the crowd. The paper was wrapped in wax, the message written in Arabic script in red ink: ‘You are required to set up a third force as soon as possible. Benzin will be sent’ (literally ‘petrol’ or, in Indonesian slang, money). It was signed ‘IBHY’: Ibrahim Haji Yaacob, the lost leader of the Malay radicals who had fled to Indonesia in August 1945 in a Japanese plane. No benzin came and Mustapha did nothing. Ibrahim was now a wealthy Jakarta businessman. Too many of Mustapha’s comrades were in detention, and he himself, as he put it, ‘still had one foot in the drain’.160 But it was to Indonesia and into the hands of Ibrahim Haji Yaacob that the leadership of the Malay Nationalist Party passed when it was finally dissolved on the peninsula in early 1950. Ibrahim himself did not return to Malaya until shortly before his death in 1979.
In the invisible city, the embers of radicalism still smouldered. There was, from around this time, a large influx of Malay migrants to the towns, particularly to Singapore. The island was at least a haven from the full weight of the oppressive Emergency Regulations; it remained the principal centre for publishing and entertainment, and it was in these fields that many of the new arrivals found employment. The poet Usman Awang was one of the Malay policemen on duty to witness the triumphal rally of the Malay Nationalist Party in Malacca in December 1946; he threw up his job and drifted into the world of letters in Singapore. The novelist and short-story writer Keris Mas, who succeeded Ahmad Boestamam as leader of Malay Nationalist Party youth, now worked beside A. Samad Ismail at Utusan Melayu. The short-story form was easily adapted to newspaper columns, and at a time when events could not be fully reported, fiction became an important way of representing actuality. Where overt political propaganda was dangerous, writers were encouraged to engage more deeply with social themes. They adopted a symbolic and allusive literary language; in the words of the poet Masuri S. N., ‘parcels so wrapped up that it became difficult to grasp their message’. They learnt how a national culture might flourish under conditions of strict censorship. In this way, the anti-colonial, anti-feudal message of the Malay Nationalist Party found an outlet. Young writers quietly forged a new language, purged of status terms, in which the people were addressed as equals. They coined new borrow-words to modernize and urbanize the Malay language; to create a language that was realistik and showed inisiatif.161 Poets and storytellers – emulating Chairil Anwar and his Indonesian pemuda contemporaries – created ‘art for society’, and the following year Keris Mas and other writers in Singapore took the lead in forming an Angkatan Sasterawan 50 – Generation of 1950–that would, over time, play a crucial role in defining a national culture.
This was the quiet beginning of a second wave of independence struggle, one that would carry on beyond the formal transfer of power: the decolonization of the mind. The impact of this movement stretched beyond print to performance. In these years the theatre took a scripted form and the Malay cinema became a new vehicle for exploring social and national agendas. It was the invisible city brought to life; the life of the streets and the urban villages featured heavily in the new films. Most dramatically of all, the Malay cinema became a new vehicle for exploring social and political themes. It reached beyond its language stream and built on the hybrid, polyglot style of the Malay opera. Malay movies spun tales of the wartime underground and brought the urban fantasy of the Worlds, the entertainment parks, to life: indeed, the cabaret was a staple backdrop for early social dramas. The Shaw brothers’ film Nighttime in Singapore, directed by B. S. Raghans – a graduate of the Indian National Army’s wartime propaganda school in Penang – had settings at the Padang and the New World. In Seruan Merdeka, Bachtiar Effendi – a leading ‘culture warrior’ for the Japanese during the war – played a police informer.162 The Shaw brothers and Loke Wan Tho ran rival racing stables, and rival film studios with their own small galaxies of stars. Politics retreated into popular culture. But this urban world was beginning to vanish almost at the moment it came to life on the silver screen. Ever since the anarchic days of the British Military Administration, the authorities had been cleaning up the streets. After 1948 the uniform flats of the Singapore Improvement Trust would remap dramatically the urban landscape of Singapore. It was an ambitious programme of urban regeneration, but it was executed in much the same way as the resettlement of squatters on the peninsula, as an emergency measure, and, for much the same reasons, as a strategy of social control.163 The cosmopolitan world of the village-city – which had moulded Malaya’s politics for a generation – began to recede.
The generation of 1950, born into a world of radically expanding horizons, came of age in a time of shrinking political opportunities. Keris Mas, in his famous story ‘A would-be leader from Kuala Semantan’, captured one of central political dilemmas of his generation. In it a young radical, Hasan, confides his doubts as to whether or not to join the struggle in the jungle.
He hated violence, yet violence was everywhere, inside the jungle and out. He loved freedom, yet he was pursued by circumstances which imposed upon him and his society. He was committed to only one thing, truth. And a man without freedom has no way of obtaining truth.
‘Perhaps I am a coward!’ – once more the explosion of Hasan’s thoughts shattered the stillness of the night.
Perhaps he’s a coward… the explosion reverberated inside my head.
‘Is it cowardly to hate violence?’ asked Hasan finally. The words vanished into the night.
I had no conclusion of my own with which to reply.
Kuala Semantan, in Pahang, was a centre of MCP support among the Malays. In 1949, for a brief moment, Malay support for the insurrection seemed to be growing and party propaganda attacked the ‘white man’ instead of the capitalist and promised Merdeka.164 Villages along the Pahang river, around Temerloh, were dangerous badlands, and infused with the memory of the heroes of the first British conquest. This was the worst nightmare of the British. For the first time a recording of the voice of a Malay sultan, the ruler of Pahang, was broadcast to calm the area.165 On 21 May a new regiment of the MNLA was formed: the 10th Regiment, under the command of Abdullah C. D., as political commissar. The Malay radicals who had taken to the jungle rallied under its banner. It was seen as a major triumph by the Party: a goal ‘realised for the first time in the twenty years of Malaya’s revolutionary struggle… This solid fact has also smashed to smithereens all those anti-revolutionary arguments concerning the backwardness of Malayan peasants.’166 Abdullah C. D. was ordered by Chin Peng to mobilize recruits, and managed to raise nearly 500 Malays by early 1950. The British need for information was now ‘desperate’: ‘the reign of terror established by Malay banditry’, it was reported from the area, ‘is quite extraordinary’: they even took the unprecedented step of paying money to those Malays whose property was destroyed for helping the British.167 A camp near Jerantut was broken up by military action – led by Chinese ex-Force 136 personnel – and the remnants were dispersed in much smaller numbers. It was a serious setback. The alliance of the Malay peasant and the Chinese worker failed just at the time the feudalists and the capitalists, in the shape of UMNO and the MCA, were coming together. There were other centres, in Jenderam in Selangor, the site of the Peasants’ Congress in May 1948, where at least eighteen villagers joined the MNLA, eleven of whom died in the jungle.168 The 10th Regiment remained a demon to haunt the British.
But the MNLA was locked in the jungle fastness, and coming to terms with the fact that its fight would drag on for many years. ‘Throughout the history of the world’, it warned, ‘one can never find a simple and easy revolutionary struggle. So revolutionary wars, in particular, must necessarily be full of difficulties, obstructions and dangers.’169 By the end of 1949, the number of incidents began to rise again. As Chin Peng later acknowledged: ‘If I had to pick a high point in our military campaign, I suppose it would be around this time. But it would be a high point without euphoria and it would be short lived.’ The MNLA turned increasingly towards smaller-scale operations against remote rural targets. With reinforcements from Johore, the Pahang guerrillas launched exploratory raids on isolated police stations. But even this strength was insufficient to make an impact on fixed positions.170 There were some dramatic incidents, but the MCP never gained the initiative in the ‘shooting war’. Its defeats and reverses in 1948 and 1949 proved fatal. The diminishing food supplies meant that its units were steadily broken into ever smaller contingents. As the effects of resettlement began to bite, conditions in the forest deteriorated sharply. The Party leadership’s core strategic assumption was that the squatters would swell the ranks of the revolution. But already relations between the party and the rural people had deteriorated from what they had been during the war. Then, the MPAJA had acted as protectors of communities from the Japanese. They enabled them to eke out a living in the face of shortages and sudden violence. Chin Peng, for one, had assumed that the forced movement of people by the British would fail, just as similar schemes by the Japanese had failed. The central strategic assumption of the revolution was that the villages would rise in resistance to the British. But the MNLA could offer them little protection from an equally tenacious and better-equipped regime. Peasant resistance was futile, the Malayan revolution foundered on a false premise. As the Emergency dragged on, the communists became an increasing liability to their most natural supporters, and there was little prospect that this burden could be lifted. The British watched the borders closely, and despite their propaganda to the contrary, there was virtually no infiltration in support of the MCP by land or sea. Chin Peng was in contact with the Chinese Communist Party by a secret postal service in code. Some cadres who were suffering from tuberculosis were sent to China for medical treatment; the expectation was that they could brief their Chinese comrades, receive instruction and then return to Malaya. But none made their way back until the late 1950s. The Malayan revolution – unlike the revolution in Vietnam – had to fall back entirely on its internal resources, and had already begun to eat its own.
The Party leadership was now facing open criticism. Two critics in the southern leadership sparked what became known as the ‘South Johore incident’. Siew Lau was a schoolteacher and intellectual. In 1949 he produced a pamphlet, ‘The keynote of the Malayan revolution’. He argued that the Party had misunderstood and misapplied Mao’s tenets of ‘New Democracy’. They had not built up a wide enough coalition of support across all communities. The lack of Malay support had ‘doomed the revolution from the start’. There was no coherent programme of land distribution of the peasantry. He attacked the ‘buffalo communists’ on the Central Committee, and his polemic came with a call for elections for a new committee. Siew Lau went as far as to hold a meeting in November to discuss his ideas. The Party leadership demanded that he recant. Siew Lau tried to escape with his wife and some followers to Sumatra, but was caught and executed. ‘Siew Lau’, the leadership pronounced, ‘had proved himself impossible.’ Another figure involved was Lam Swee, a former vice-president of the Singapore Federation of Trade Unions. Chin Peng later argued that his alienation was as much the consequence of ambition as of doctrinal dissent. The following year Lam Swee became one of the most high-profile surrenders to the British. Both these incidents were the subject of early attempts at black propaganda by the British against the Party.171 But ordinary rank-and-file members were voicing similar complaints at the arrogance and privileges of the high command, leaders of which ordinary Party members had only the haziest notion. The party’s once formidable apparatus for political education went into steep decline. As one early defector put it: ‘I was treated like a coolie.’172 By February 1953 986 communists had taken advantage of amnesty terms. In such circumstances, the mood of paranoia and betrayal that had so dogged the Party since the war became deeper still.
The last year of a troubled decade ended with the beginning of a series of long marches for the Malayan Communist Party. It drew on legends of the Japanese war to sustain morale. Within the jungle, songs and commemorations kept the dream alive, such as the marking of the legendary 1 September 1942 Batu Caves massacre, with a ‘91’ oath to reaffirm loyalty. It was a morality tale of strength in adversity that encouraged a belief in the inevitability of victory, a faith that sustained the MNLA, even when it suffered severe reverses.173 But its leaders knew that there was no road back: it was too late to break up the army and return to civilian life. They pressed ahead, hoping that some sudden shift in conditions within Malaya would occur, that a new wave of labour unrest might paralyse the country and allow them to take over. But neither this nor a dramatic widening of Malay support materialized. The Party’s 1 October 1951 directives – the product of two months of self-criticism by Chin Peng and his small politburo – openly acknowledged that the initial campaign of terror, the slashing of rubber trees and the destruction of identification cards, had hit hardest the Party’s own sympathizers. The MCP still looked to rebuild its political base, to attempt to recapture influence in the towns and revive the united front. But its fighting units began to withdraw into the deep jungle interior. Chin Peng and his dwindling headquarters was harassed from near Mentekab through a series of camps northwards to Raub, then to the Cameron Highlands and eventually, in the last weeks of 1953, compromised by betrayals from comrades in the pay of the Special Branch, he passed over the Thai border. The area around the Betong Salient remained the redoubt of the Malayan revolution until December 1989, when a peace treaty was finally signed in the Thai town of Haadyai. ‘I never admit that’s a failure’, Chin Peng said later. ‘It’s a temporary setback…’ But by this point guerrilla morale was deteriorating in many places, and more defections occurred. From this position the MCP could prolong the war indefinitely, but it could not win it. ‘I don’t think there was any opportunity of our success,’ reflected Chin Peng. ‘Without foreign aid, we could not defeat the British army, even if we expanded our forces to 10,000… the most was to continue to carry out the guerrilla warfare.’ The Party was now fighting for honour and for posterity, awaiting a general Asian uprising that would never come.
Surrendered Japanese troops in Burma, August 1945
Japanese troops clearing the Singapore Padang before the surrender ceremony, 12 September 1945
Lt General Seishiro Itagaki signing the surrender, Singapore, 12 September 1945
Mountbatten announces the surrender of the Japanese in Singapore, September 1945
A forgotten army: surrendered Japanese in north Malaya, November 1945
Seagrave’s return, 1945
Leclerc and Gracey with Japanese sword of surrender, Saigon, 1945
Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, Java, 1945
Bengal sappers and miners watch the reprisal burning of the village of Bekassi, Java, 1945
Imperialism’s return? Christison in Java, 1946
Sukarno addresses an ‘ocean’ rally, Java, 1946
Charisma and revolution: Sukarno, Java, 1946
Nehru’s arrival at Kallang Airport, Singapore, April 1946
Macdonald inspects the Malay Regiment, Kuala Lumpur, 1946
Dorman Smith leaves Burma, June 1946
Muslim rioters and the corpse of a Hindu, Calcutta, August 1946
India’s interim government at their swearing in, Delhi 1946
Aung San and Attlee, London, January 1947
The Mountbattens in Delhi, eve of independence, August 1947
Aung San and family, 1947
Celebrating independence in Calcutta, August 1947
Ending the Burmese days: Rance and Burma’s president, January 1948
Communist suspect, Malaya, c. 1949
Bren gun and stengah: rubber planter in Malaya, 1949
Chinese peasants being arrested by Malay policemen, April 1949
Dyak trackers in Malaya, c. 1949
The Sultan expects: the ruler of Selangor inspects Malay special constables on a rubber estate, 1949
Hearts and minds: a propaganda leaflet drop, 1948
Imperial twilight: drinks party at Malcolm MacDonald’s residence, Bukit Serene, 1949
Fighting during the Karen insurgency, 1949
The quiet man: Ne Win (left) in London for military training, 1949
The man with the plan: Templer with the Home Guard, Kinta, 1952
Bandung spirits: Nasser, Nu and Nehru celebrating the Burmese Water Festival, 1955
Chin Peng at Baling, December 1955, with his old Force 136 ally, John Davis.