Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [63]
With many Labour and Liberal MPs undecided and the Conservatives generally opposed, the political consensus in 1945 for Indian independence was fragile. Only with hindsight has it seemed a sure thing. This helps to explain why the Indian National Congress was so suspicious of British intentions, a suspicion that ultimately led them to accept the partition of India rather than trust British good offices. Even if successive British cabinets had made vague promises about freedom after the war, the senior leadership of the Congress, especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, were wholly unconvinced. They believed that the British were still playing a game of ‘divide and rule’ and that Wavell was privately building up Mahomed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League against them. The result would be a ‘Balkanization’ of India into a host of fragments that the British could easily manipulate: some kind of Muslim ‘Pakistan’, semi-independent princely states with treaties with the British crown and, possibly, an independent Bengal.
If Britain’s grip on the subcontinent should weaken, the great arc of empire could still be anchored in Southeast Asia. On this, if nothing else, the consensus in Westminster was solid. The region was now crucial to Britain’s Great Power status. Malaya was the ‘dollar arsenal’ of the sterling area, and Singapore was destined to become more of a ‘fortress’ than ever it was before the war. But reconstruction was not seen in solely material terms. Britain had to rebuild her moral authority: the humiliation of 1942 was to be redeemed by the creation of new model colonies. For over a decade Malaya and Singapore were to be subjected to some of the most ambitious projects of political development and social engineering in British imperial history. As a first step, reform-minded civil servants in Whitehall seized the opportunity to realize a long-cherished ambition: the ten different authorities which constituted British Malaya were to be ruled directly for the first time. A Malayan Union was to be created, under the British crown, and united by a common citizenship. At a stroke, this overturned the founding principles of British Malaya: that of the sovereign independence of the Malay rulers and the privileged position of the Malays. With the memory of the final squalid exodus from Singapore never far from the surface, the new watchword was ‘multi-racialism’.
One of the few senior Malayan civil servants to be included in these discussions was Dr Victor Purcell. Aged forty-nine, he was an influential voice in the Malayan Planning Unit in London that developed the new policy from mid 1943, and adviser on Chinese Affairs to Mountbatten’s military administration. ‘The rigid pro-Malay attitude’, Purcell wrote, ‘was more often than not a paternalistic feeling towards the Malays (and occasionally it was homosexual)’, but it was not universally shared. The Malayan Civil Service was ‘virtually split… into two camps’.8 Purcell was a scholar-administrator of a special kind: as a cadet he was sent to Canton to learn Chinese dialects and put to work in Malaya as a ‘protector’ of Chinese. This was a personage unique in British colonial history; the protector acted as tai-jin, a great panjandrum to every level of Chinese society: banqueting with tycoons, suppressing secret societies and traffic in women, even mediating in marital rows. From Purcell’s perspective, the ‘fiction of a “Malay” Malaya had become a farce’. At the last census of the peninsula in 1931, of a population of 3.79 million, 49 per cent were classified as Malays, as against 34 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indians. If the overwhelmingly Chinese city of Singapore was included, the Malays were reduced to only 44 per cent of the