Manufacturing Malayness

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which the notion of Malayness was conceptualised, articulated, and debated in a set of foundational British discourses on this topic during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Using T.R. Trautmann's concept of locational techniques and D. Rowly-Conwy's idea of competing referential frameworks, the article argues that these conceptualisations have to be assessed within their contemporary colonial and epistemic contexts. The differences in the ascribed importance of language, nation, race, and civilisation in the definition of Malayness thus depended upon whether it was inscribed into a framework composed of orientalist philology, Scottish Enlightenment theories of stadial progress or a genealogically infused ethnology. Applying evidence procured from the fields of textual philology, comparative philology, racial classification, antiquarianism, and conjectural history, the scholar-administrators William Marsden, John Leyden, Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd offered their discrepant versions of Malay origin, history, and essence. These versions each embodied their own particular historical vision that not merely prefigured the authoritative mode of approaching and assessing the notion of Malayness, but it also prescribed the scope within which the imperial politics could be framed and the colonial projects unrolled.