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By Root 4612 0

in post-war Malaya was an Indonesian Labour Party, that worked to organize and repatriate the labourers. It set up an office in the Arab Street area, near the palace of the last, exiled ruler of the Johor-Riau empire that had once held sway across the colonial borders of the region. There was a short-lived attempt to revive the sultanate, and Singapore remained a symbolic centre of the entire Malay world: a crossroads for traders and craftsmen, scholars and writers, religious teachers and pilgrims, especially after the hajj to Mecca began to revive. With the arrival of Mountbatten Singapore became an important diplomatic centre and home to the Republic of Indonesia’s main external office.17 One of the many arrivals in 1946 was the 27-year-old Khatijah Sidek, a spirited, independent Minangkabau woman, educated at Padang Panjang in western Sumatra, a dynamic centre of modernist Islamic learning. She was one of the leaders of the controversial Puteri Kesatri, the women fighters of the revolution, who had challenged traditional roles in a dramatic way. On the prompting of exiles from Malaya, Khatijah decided to take her message of emancipation to Singapore. She arrived without funds but, with the help of local associations, travelled around Malaya lecturing to women of all communities, from the wives of the urban elite to peasant women in the Malay kampongs. The British were becoming increasingly alarmed by the activities of such people. ‘Whenever we made a speech’, Khatijah wrote, ‘the police and the Special Branch were there too, and the Malay people themselves advised us not to make our speeches too strong or too “hot” because Malaya was different from Indonesia; and it was not only the common people who advised us thus, but also the leaders… in those days they were very afraid to hear the word Merdeka, which we from Indonesia spoke of constantly.’18

But it was a two-way traffic. Many Malay radicals travelled to Indonesia and fought in the revolution, and what the British now began to describe obsessively as ‘Indonesian influence’ was often an expression of a local vision of a greater Malay nation.19 Young leaders such as Ahmad Boestamam cultivated the pemuda style. Malay orators took Sukarno as a model – ‘that Ox and Lion of the Indonesian podium’ – although Boestamam himself, perhaps the most effective platform speaker of his generation, claimed that his greatest inspiration was Subhas Chandra Bose.20 On 17 February 1946, the six-month anniversary of the Indonesian revolution, Boestamam founded the Angkatan Pemuda Insaf – the Generation of Aware Youth. It was known – as were many Malay associations in this period – by its dramatic acronym, API, which meant ‘fire’. Within the space of a few days he and his friends assembled around 500 young Malays, many of whom had received Japanese basic military training, and paraded at Jubilee Park, Ipoh, in red and white armbands that mirrored the Sang Saka Merah Putih flag of Indonesia. Although it kept its separate identity, API became the youth wing of the Malay Nationalist Party, and supplied many of its activists. The MNP was now a national force. Shortly after the foundation of API it moved its office to a shophouse in Batu Road, Kuala Lumpur, and the young radicals began to live in a communal fashion in a rented house in nearby Kampong Bahru which became known as ‘Hotel Merdeka’. Here they were joined by a young woman from Negri Sembilan, Shamsiah Fakeh, another graduate of a religious school, who slept next to the stove and took over the women’s section of the party. She created a sister organization to API: the Angkatan Wanita Sedar – Generation of Aware Women – or AWAS, ‘look out!’ With this cry, its members would raise their clenched right fist with the index finger extended as a warning sign. The women goaded the men, and encouraged wives of non-politically minded husbands to go on strike from their domestic duties.21

The Malay Nationalist Party also began to attract the support of leading Malay intellectuals of an older, pre-pemuda generation. Mockhtaruddin Lasso, a shadowy