The Malays are not pendatang

So let us be clear about the definition of pendatang. All those Malays who moved from one island to another but within the Malay Archipelago are not pendatang. It is just like Malays from Penang moving to Selangor. The cut-off date would be after the different sovereign states were created in the 20th Century.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

All the three key races that form Malaysia’s majority — the Malays, Chinese and Indians — are immigrants or pendatangs, even though the Malays, as the country’s dominant ethnic group, are given Bumiputera status, a Gerakan delegate, Tan Lai Soon, said today.

Tan said that supporters of Umno, who have in the past referred to the Chinese as immigrants, did not realise that even the Malays do not originate from Malaysia.

“I want to explain Malaysians’ position. The Malays, Chinese, Indians, are all pendatangs (immigrants) other than the indigenous people, Sabahans, Sarawakians — the original Bumiputera. So when Umno’s people say the Chinese are pendatang, they didn’t think that they are also pendatang from Indonesia,” said Tan.

Actually, Tan is not quite correct because he is looking at Malaysia as a sovereign nation separate from Indonesia, Philippines and Southern Thailand. Those are boundaries created by the European colonialists since the 16th Century. Prior to that, Indonesia, Philippines, Southern Thailand (up to the Isthmus of Kra), Singapore, East Timor and Brunei did not exist. What existed was just the Malay Archipelago.

The Malay Archipelago has been defined as an island group of Southeast Asia between Australia and the Asian mainland and separating the Indian and Pacific oceans. It includes what we now call Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Southern Thailand (up to the Isthmus of Kra), Singapore, East Timor and Brunei.

About 1,400 years ago, at the time of Prophet Muhammad, the Malay Archipelago, the name the Europeans gave this region, was part of the Srivijaya Empire. In the 13th Century, this was replaced by the Majapahit Empire until the 16th Century and still included those countries mentioned.

The language of this region was old Malay, old Javanese and Sanskrit with Buddhism and Hinduism as its main religions.

It was in the 16th Century that the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese started coming to the Malay Archipelago and began dividing up the territory, just like what the Europeans did to the Ottoman Empire after the First World War (and the cause of all those problems in the Middle East today).

Hence it would be incorrect to say that the Malays are pendatang or immigrants, at least not the original Malays of the 600s to 1800s. There was certainly movement of people between the different islands as well as the Malay Peninsula plus Thailand. But these people were not immigrants because this movement was still within the same empire or territory.

When Tan says that the Malays, too, are immigrants to Malaysia, he has to clarify what period he was referring to. The Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States and British Borneo did not come into existence until the 19th Century. From then on British Malaya came into being.

For purposes of history, all those people who came to British Malaya since 1850 could be correctly referred to as pendatang or immigrants (the date when the British immigration policy was launched to bring in Chinese and Indians from China and India). Prior to 1850, we cannot call the Malays from Java, Sumatra, etc., as pendatang.

So let us be clear about the definition of pendatang. All those Malays who moved from one island to another but within the Malay Archipelago are not pendatang. It is just like Malays from Penang moving to Selangor. The cut-off date would be after the different sovereign states were created in the 20th Century.

For example, when my family moved to Selangor in the 18th Century, Selangor was not yet part of British Malaya but was an independent territory under Perak control. At that time, the Bugis Johor-Riau Empire controlled that region. It was not until the 19th Century when the British and Dutch signed a treaty in London that the Empire was carved up and eventually ended.

Today, any Bugis from Indonesia who comes to Selangor can be called a pendatang. But in the 18th Century we were not pendatang. That is a historical fact.

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The Malay Archipelago is the largest group of islands in the world, consisting of the more than 17,000 islands of Indonesia and the approximately 7,000 islands of the Philippines. The principal islands and groups of the Republic of Indonesia include the Greater Sundas (Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Celebes), the Lesser Sundas, the Moluccas, and western New Guinea. The main islands of the Philippines include Luzon (north), Mindanao (south), and the Visayas in between. Other political units in the archipelago are East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak), Brunei, and Papua New Guinea.

Encyclopædia Britannica

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Definition and Boundaries

For reasons which depend mainly on the distribution of animal life, I consider the Malay Archipelago to include the Malay Peninsula as far as Tenasserim and the Nicobar Islands on the west, the Philippines on the north, and the Solomon Islands, beyond New Guinea, on the east. All the great islands included within these limits are connected together by innumerable smaller ones, so that no one of them seems to be distinctly separated from the rest.

By Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago.