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and for the popular will; in joining the AMCJA, it made an alliance of a kind that UMNO could not match.118 This was a bold and a dangerous political undertaking: the Malay Nationalist Party immediately faced charges that it had sold out the Malay people. To counter this, it withdrew from the AMCJA to form its own parallel coalition, the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat – Centre of People’s Power – or PUTERA. The man charged with leading it was Ishak Haji Muhammad, a celebrated novelist and journalist. He took the view that the party should give the experiment ‘a fair trial for one or two years’. In the course of 1947 Dr Burhanuddin lost support. The leftists within the Malay Nationalist Party were wary of his religiosity, and impatient with his caution.119 At the end of the year, in a delicately arranged coup, he was replaced as party leader by Ishak, although he remained its special adviser. Ishak represented a different stream of Malay radicalism, more secular and socialist in outlook. He was fluent in English, which Dr Burhanuddin was not, and as both an intellectual and a Bohemian he was more than a match for the leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union.

The chairman of the PUTERA–AMCJA was a 63-year-old Straits Chinese notable, Tan Cheng Lock. At first glance he appeared an unlikely choice to lead an alliance of young radicals. He lived a world apart from most of them, in a sprawling, antique-cluttered Chinese mansion at 111 Heeren St, Malacca. Before the war he had been the leading Asian on the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements, but had retired from public affairs, in a state of some disillusion, to Switzerland. He spent the war in India, far removed from the social upheaval at home. But he was remembered by the younger men of Malayan Democratic Union as one of the first advocates of a ‘Malayan’ nationalism. He commanded influence within the powerful Chinese business community, and on his return to Malaya in 1946 had been one of the first of its leaders to argue that the Union was a first step towards self-government and that the Chinese should act in concert to defend their position.120 But equally important was his status as a Straits Chinese, a member of a long-domiciled community that had absorbed Malay culture and habitually spoke the Malay language. As John Eber flattered him: ‘the Council needs an individual who is a Malayan as a focus… As it is you represent all interests.’ Tan Cheng Lock traced his local roots to 1771 – as ‘a true anak Malaka [son of Malacca]’ – and to a generation he would hold mythic status as one of the first true Malayan patriots. His multiracialism was rooted in a utopian cast of mind. His writings and speeches had a philosophical, somewhat mystical flavour, and were peppered with references to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, alongside the classic Chinese philosophy he had absorbed in English translation (like many Straits Chinese, Tan Cheng Lock could neither read nor write Chinese). He shared the spiritual cosmopolitanism of many Asian thinkers of the pre-war era; like Tagore, he searched for the underlying commonalties of Asia’s civilizations. But his nationalism was based on a modern democratic citizenship.121

We in Malaya have adopted and want to apply the dynamic conceptions of nationalism and democracy. Nationalism, if it is to be a unifying force, requires the elimination of communalism from political life. Democracy demands for its free operation an understanding of the conflicting claims of race and language and a willingness to compromise on major political issues after full and free discussion.122

When the Malay Nationalist Party met in Malacca, Dr Burhanuddin had called on him, and Tan Cheng Lock had promptly offered to raise $500,000 for Malay economic development. In the years to come he was to devote much of his energy into brokering an accord between the Malay political and administrative class and Chinese economic muscle.123

The British saw Tan Cheng Lock as a communist dupe. ‘A disgruntled “failed KCMG”’, the writer of one intelligence brief sneered, ‘who has time and