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architect of the second colonial occupation, Sir Sydney Caine, soon arrived as its vice-chancellor. Within a year 645 students were registered at the new Dunearn Road campus.149 It attracted a new generation of British educators to Malaya – ‘pale young colonial men’, wrote one of them, ‘graduates of technical colleges, brought up on the W. E. A. and the Arts Councils, who have read all the appropriate Penguins and Pelicans’.150 Many of them voiced a commitment to ‘Malayan’ culture. C. Northcote Parkinson, the first Raffles Professor of History, led research on Southeast Asia’s past (and drew on his experience of colonial bureaucracy to formulate his famous ‘Parkinson’s Law’: work expands to fill the time available for its completion). Under the influential Dean of Arts, E. H. G. Dobby, geography became a defining discipline, with surveys of the padi landscapes of Malaya and rapidly changing settlement patterns. Excavations resumed at sites such as the enigmatic Hindu remains of the Bujang valley in Kedah, and projected an ancient past for the new Malayan nation. Young local scholars cut their teeth in these endeavours; the economist Ungku Abdul Aziz, who had been schooled in wartime Japan, and the leading Malay literary figure of his generation, Za’ba, bristled in the hierarchical expatriate atmosphere. A highly coloured memoir of the campus by the English don Patrick Anderson captures well the missionary purpose and manifest contradictions of instilling a national culture through the English literary canon. So too, in a different way, do the travails of the dissolute schoolmaster, Victor Crabbe, in Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy. As John Wilson, Burgess taught at the elite Malay College Kuala Kangsar and, in his spare time, published translations of Shakespeare in Malay. But these writings also give a sense of a social and intellectual world that was evolving out of the reach of the colonial opinion makers, and against which, in Anderson’s words, ‘the whites seem no more than photographs, acutely defined in terms of surface personality, but isolated and ephemeral’.151

The first post-war intake of students revived the platform of the Malayan Democratic Union.152 In 1949 student publications from Raffles College, which along with King Edward VII Medical College was the core of the new university, attacked ‘the opiate atmosphere’ of colonial education and the cultural model of nationalism that was being thrust upon them by the British. The Malayan Democratic Union had explicitly warned against the creation of ‘a miniature replica of Oxford or Cambridge’ and demanded ‘a focal point of Malayan cultural activities taking its bearing from the rich traditions of our people and the needs of their future development’.153 Poetry and prose in English attempted to give expression to the polyglot world of the colonial city; as one early literary journal, New Cauldron, put it, it was ‘a courageous attempt at synthesis between the conflicting currents’. Writers in English absorbed and tropicalized a wide range of influences from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury to W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot – ‘a very clever gentleman, of course’, the student poet and later historian, Wang Gungwu, mused to Patrick Anderson, ‘but we in Malaya perhaps require something… a little more direct… and a little more explicit’.154 Wang and his friends were later to experiment with a hybrid poetic language they called ‘EngMalChin’. They also recognized that if such a synthesis was not possible, ‘then we must start from scratch… with Malay as a basis’.155 But as their critics pointed out, they themselves were ‘cut off by intellectualisation from the mass of the common people’, and inherited from the British the dilemma of how to impose a new national culture from on high.

As predicted, the first generation of undergraduates was to have an enduring, but also diverse, influence on the intellectual life of Malaya. But it was an unrepresentative group: only 10 per cent of the first cohort to enter the new campus were Malay. The university’s much-vaunted meritocratic admissions