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By Root 4555 0

and Mustapha did nothing. Ibrahim was now a wealthy Jakarta businessman. Too many of Mustapha’s comrades were in detention, and he himself, as he put it, ‘still had one foot in the drain’.160 But it was to Indonesia and into the hands of Ibrahim Haji Yaacob that the leadership of the Malay Nationalist Party passed when it was finally dissolved on the peninsula in early 1950. Ibrahim himself did not return to Malaya until shortly before his death in 1979.

In the invisible city, the embers of radicalism still smouldered. There was, from around this time, a large influx of Malay migrants to the towns, particularly to Singapore. The island was at least a haven from the full weight of the oppressive Emergency Regulations; it remained the principal centre for publishing and entertainment, and it was in these fields that many of the new arrivals found employment. The poet Usman Awang was one of the Malay policemen on duty to witness the triumphal rally of the Malay Nationalist Party in Malacca in December 1946; he threw up his job and drifted into the world of letters in Singapore. The novelist and short-story writer Keris Mas, who succeeded Ahmad Boestamam as leader of Malay Nationalist Party youth, now worked beside A. Samad Ismail at Utusan Melayu. The short-story form was easily adapted to newspaper columns, and at a time when events could not be fully reported, fiction became an important way of representing actuality. Where overt political propaganda was dangerous, writers were encouraged to engage more deeply with social themes. They adopted a symbolic and allusive literary language; in the words of the poet Masuri S. N., ‘parcels so wrapped up that it became difficult to grasp their message’. They learnt how a national culture might flourish under conditions of strict censorship. In this way, the anti-colonial, anti-feudal message of the Malay Nationalist Party found an outlet. Young writers quietly forged a new language, purged of status terms, in which the people were addressed as equals. They coined new borrow-words to modernize and urbanize the Malay language; to create a language that was realistik and showed inisiatif.161 Poets and storytellers – emulating Chairil Anwar and his Indonesian pemuda contemporaries – created ‘art for society’, and the following year Keris Mas and other writers in Singapore took the lead in forming an Angkatan Sasterawan 50 – Generation of 1950–that would, over time, play a crucial role in defining a national culture.

This was the quiet beginning of a second wave of independence struggle, one that would carry on beyond the formal transfer of power: the decolonization of the mind. The impact of this movement stretched beyond print to performance. In these years the theatre took a scripted form and the Malay cinema became a new vehicle for exploring social and national agendas. It was the invisible city brought to life; the life of the streets and the urban villages featured heavily in the new films. Most dramatically of all, the Malay cinema became a new vehicle for exploring social and political themes. It reached beyond its language stream and built on the hybrid, polyglot style of the Malay opera. Malay movies spun tales of the wartime underground and brought the urban fantasy of the Worlds, the entertainment parks, to life: indeed, the cabaret was a staple backdrop for early social dramas. The Shaw brothers’ film Nighttime in Singapore, directed by B. S. Raghans – a graduate of the Indian National Army’s wartime propaganda school in Penang – had settings at the Padang and the New World. In Seruan Merdeka, Bachtiar Effendi – a leading ‘culture warrior’ for the Japanese during the war – played a police informer.162 The Shaw brothers and Loke Wan Tho ran rival racing stables, and rival film studios with their own small galaxies of stars. Politics retreated into popular culture. But this urban world was beginning to vanish almost at the moment it came to life on the silver screen. Ever since the anarchic days of the British Military Administration, the authorities had been cleaning up