Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [16]
Further down the crescent in Malaya, an inchoate Muslim Malay nationalism was on the move. It had its roots in movements of reaction to the notion – endlessly reiterated by British officials, scholars and educators – that the Malays were custom obsessed, docile and passive. This ‘myth of the lazy native’ was challenged in the 1930s by movements of religious and community uplift and by a phenomenal expansion of newspapers and periodicals that debated the future of the Malay race. Malay martial pride was rekindled, even as the Malay Regiment all but perished in an heroic last-ditch defence of Singapore. The Malay rulers were not the effete figureheads – ‘pitiful Neros, squalid and insignificant’ in one description – that most British imagined them to be, and they guarded their privileges jealously, not least their status as the heads of the Islamic religion. A wealthy State such as Johore, just across the causeway from Singapore, could embark on its own programme of modernization; Sultan Ibrahim, who had ruled Johore since 1895, had looked to Meiji Japan as a model, as had his father before him. Initiatives were also coming increasingly from commoners, especially the new caste of clerks and school teachers. The more radical of these looked to Japan as well, but as a nation-state and an anti-Western force. In 1937 they founded the Kesatuan Melayu Muda, or League of Malay Youth, which, led and orchestrated by the civil servant and journalist Ibrahim Haji Yaacob, ran an underground intelligence network for the Japanese military. Ibrahim used Malay prostitutes in the northeastern town of Kota Bahru to coax information about the coastal defences from their British clients.8 It was here that Yamashita had made his initial landings, on Pantai Cinta Berahi – The Beach of Passionate Love – on the northeast coast of Malaya in December 1941. When the British rounded up 150 supporters of the movement shortly afterwards, they included fifteen bartenders and cabaret ‘taxi-dancers’.9 The Malays who assisted the Japanese were not to receive the same rewards as Aung San and his Thirty Comrades. The Japanese held a similarly patronizing view of the Malays to that of the British, but the Malay youths received the same kind of training as the Burmese and the Malay nationalism that emerged from the war would have the same radical potential. In the words of one of the central figures of these years, Mustapha Hussain: ‘although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender’.10 This was also a nationalism that did not necessarily recognize the old colonial boundaries. Mustapha Hussain and Ibrahim Yaacob had dreamed of merging their people into a greater Malay nation that would include the vast population of Indonesia.11
The much larger and older forces of Indian nationalism had also been galvanized by the war. The leaders of the Indian National Congress, the main nationalist movement, had witnessed the surge of popular anti-colonialism during the Quit India movement of 1942. Gandhi’s largely non-violent mass protest against the continuing British presence had been particularly intense in Bengal and the eastern areas of the country, where people had experienced real hardship during the war and had seen with their own eyes the humiliation of the British Raj by the Japanese invaders. They felt, perhaps for the first time, a sense of mass nationalism, unifying student and shopkeeper, peasant and small landlord, man and woman. They had ample time to ponder on the lessons of the movement: 14,000 of the 60,000 demonstrators and political activists arrested in August