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By Root 4370 0

enlisted under strict military discipline.16 They were lured by the promise of good pay and conditions, but found themselves earning less than locals for heavy labour. On 17 September 1947 a large contingent of Ceylonese in Singapore mutinied. They refused to eat the ‘coolie’s food’ they were given and pelted their officers with stones: 416 men were arrested. There was another revolt in April of the following year, and brawls with local Malays and Tamils in Sungei Patani and Kuala Lumpur. To local trade unionists, the use of the Ceylonese was another blatant attempt to exploit non-unionized labour: their principal employer – the RAF in Singapore – had dismissed over a thousand local workers earlier in the year.17 Migration now was subject to new political pressures. After the Malayan Union debacle, Malay politicians refused to countenance fresh arrivals from China. In the constitutional negotiations, control over immigration policy was, Sir Edward Gent told Arthur Creech Jones, ‘a matter of life and death to the Malay people’.18 The only acceptable alternative was fellow Muslims from Java, but the British feared that they would bring with them the politics of the Indonesian revolution. For the first time, the workforce of the future would be born in Malaya itself.

In September 1947 the colonial government took a census of Malaya and Singapore, the first since 1931. It was a sign of the consolidation of boundaries and the revival of bureaucratic power. But for most people, the sudden appearance of over 13,000 enumerators with clipboards, interrogating households and placing chalk marks on dwellings, was deeply ominous. There were rumours of mass evictions and conscription, and flashbacks to Japanese screenings and massacres. The census drove home the new importance of ethnic definition and status. Where earlier censuses had made multiple distinctions in recording people’s origins, the categories were now consolidated into rigid ethnic blocs: ‘Chinese’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Malays’. Some sub-categories were used, but they were arbitrary and contentious. The census divided the Chinese along dialect group lines, but it made no distinction between the locally born and the China-born, which was seen as the most pertinent divide by the community itself. For official purposes, the ‘Straits Chinese’ did not exist. There was, for the first time, no subdivision of the category ‘Malays (Indigenous Malaysians)’, and it stood in sharp antithesis to ‘Other Malaysians’, that is people of Indonesian origin. These categories were the subject of anxious debate, and because census enumerators tallied individuals in the way they described themselves, there were choices to be made.19Utusan Melayu waged a campaign for Indonesians to identify themselves as ‘Malays’: the census category ‘Other Malaysians’ was a specious ploy to ‘disunite the Malays’.20 Malaya’s political arithmetic hung in the balance: Malays now comprised 50 per cent of the peninsula’s population, Chinese 38 per cent, and Indians 11 per cent. The census also showed that the Chinese community was reproducing at a far faster rate than the Malays. Women speakers from UMNO toured to remind Malay women of their duty: ‘if we want to retain our identity as Malays we must have more babies’.21 In this Malthusian mood, Malay leaders entered the final negotiations for a constitutional settlement.

The numbers game dealt a blow to those who were attempting to build non-communal solidarities. It also obscured another vitally important change: the growth in the number of women, particularly in the towns. On the peninsula, the ratio of Chinese women to men rose from 486/1000 in 1931 to 815/1000 in 1947. Malaya had evolved from being a land of pioneering males to one of rapidly extending families. For many Indians and Chinese, a land of sojourn had become a place of permanent settlement. The elderly, too, were now less likely to return to their country of origin, and most would die in Malaya. Many had no kin locally, and care for them became a pressing social need: ‘We shall not forget’, vowed the