Orang Melayu = Orang Pelarian
Debates on immigrants to this land called Malaysia are still raging on with the latest DAP anger towards one of the Malay dailies for calling non-Malays immigrants. I want to have my say as well on this subject even though it will only be limited to the cyberspace.
What is actually the origin of this race called Malays or more correctly “Melayu”? I myself am an offspring of a Bugis father and a Patani mother and I am being called a Malay man. I want to put forward this hypothesis or if at the end of my argument it is convincing enough, maybe it will become a theory. Professor Khoo Kay Khim may perhaps land his expertise on history to validate my accidental finding.
I was in a car on my way to a dinner with two friends who were both happened to be of Javanese descent. One hailed from Olak Lempit and that makes him a Jawa Banting and the other from Sungai Besar that qualifies him as a Jawa Sabak Bernam. Here we were in Pattaya calling ourselves Malays and Muslims and were heading for a Secret Recipe outlet for some halal food.
The Jawa Sabak Bernam joked about how Melayu and Jawa got into a quarrel, a tale told frequently amongst the Javanese community in Malaysia. The story was about a bunch of Melayu and Jawa boys sitting in a clearing just beside some bushes. Out of nowhere a pig jolted in front of them and ran across the clearing, apparently an escapee from a farm perhaps and was scared of something. The Jawa boys spotted it first and in unison shouted the words “Babi Melayu, Babi Melayu, Babi Melayu!”. On hearing this scuffle broke out between the Jawa and Melayu boys. The pig’s commotion was met met with a spontaneous remark from the Jawa boys and hence in their mother tongues. What they meant was “a pig running” or literally “babi lari”. In Javanese, the word “melayu” means “lari” in Malay or simply run in English!
