Looking Around

Malaysia
Has Lost One Of Her Greatest Intellectuals

For
an entire generation of younger Malaysian academics and intellectuals
who were born during the postcolonial era, Prof. Syed Hussein Alatas
was very much a mentor-figure, a model public intellectual and an
example of what the academic world could do if and when academics
applied their intellectual faculties to the pressing needs of the
times. His name and reputation as an activist-oriented sociologist
was not confined to Malaysia alone, but had spread across the world
from North America to Europe, the Arab world, Africa and many parts
of Asia. Though the pace and tenor of his life was not as hot and
racy as his contemporaries elsewhere such as Franz Fanon or Albert
Camus, his works and ideas reflected concerns that were common to
theirs; namely addressing the historical baggage of the colonial past
while also having to face the impending crisis of governance in a
post-colonial state rapidly floundering.

I,
like many of my generation, came across his works while studying in
London in the 1980s. A chance encounter at a book fair landed me with
the prize of possessing his work ‘Thomas Stamford Raffles:
Schemer or Reformer?’ (1972) where the younger Syed Hussein was
taking a few well-aimed jabs at bringing down the colonial construct
of Stamford Raffles as the ‘benevolent’ colonial functionary who
was busily ‘civilising’ the natives of Asia purely for the sake
of altruism. A closer reading offered by Syed Hussein showed that the
man revered by many as a forward-thinking ‘benevolent colonialist’
was little better than an operator on the make, working often outside
the boundaries of the law of the East India Company, and more often
than not motivated purely by personal gain and ambitions. I was
hooked to the book, and the Professor who wrote it from that day on.

While
preparing my own notes for my first teaching course on the history of
the decolonisation process in Asia, Alatas’s works were rudimentary
and essential. Among his works that remain on my top shelf are ‘The
Sociology of Corruption’ (1968), ‘Modernization and Social
Change in Asia’ (1972), ‘Intellectuals in Developing
Societies’ (1977) and of course, his magnum opus, ‘The
Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays,
Filipinos and Javanese from the 16^th to 20^th
Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism’
(Frank Cass, 1977).

In
the ‘Myth of the Lazy Native’ Alatas presses home several
important points that should never be forgotten by any scholar
working on political history: First, that identity politics and the
construction of racial categories and racial stereotypes are never
accidental but are processes fundamentally wedded to the working of
(racialised) power. Second, that the colonial enterprise required a
moral pretext that was granted by the construction of convenient
‘instrumental fictions’ (to borrow Edward Said’s phrase) that
helped to justify such an enterprise. Third, that the perpetuation
and reproduction of such categories of identity and difference were
running parallel to the workings of racialised colonial capitalism
and that the two sustained each other, thereby helping to create the
highly divisive and uneven ‘plural economies’ so common in many
colonial settings. And fourth, that the legacy of colonial
capitalism, having embedded itself in the racialised politics of
difference and sectarianism in many colonies, would be hard to
eradicate even after the departure of the colonial power for the
local native elites themselves would have, by then, come to learn
that the very same tools of divide-and-rule could be used by them to
perpetuate such power differentials in the future.

In
the same work Alatas proceeds to illustrate the last point clearly
when he critically debunks the racialised stereotypes that were found
in Malaysian works such as Mahathir Mohamad’s ‘The Malay Dilemma’
(1970) and ‘Revolusi Mental’, a compilation of essays edited by
the then Secretary-General of UMNO. Syed Hussein exposes how in these
works, written so late in the post colonial era by a new generation
of post colonial leaders, the colonial mindset that saw Malaysian
society as being fundamentally divided along racial lines was still
sadly prevalent. What is more he lamented the fact that even up to
the 1970s the generation of Malay ethno-nationalist leaders in the
country could not help but base their appeals for privilege and power
based on colonial clichés and stereotypes of the Malays as a
‘backward’ and ‘lazy’ race that had to be protected.

By
then Prof Syed was no longer alone in his academic endeavours.
Malaysian scholars like Chandra Muzaffar were also taking up his
lead, questioning the logic of racialised patronage and the culture
of neo-feudalism in Malaysia at the hands of UMNO in his work
‘Protector?’. A younger generation of Malaysian economists
like Jomo Kwame Sundaram were also labouring hard to question the
working of racialised capitalism that had by then been normalised in
the country. But many of us owe a debt of gratitude to Prof Syed
himself, who led the way and who maintained an approach that was
critical, objective, fundamentally rational, positivist and
unencumbered by the accoutrements of false ideology, racialised
essentialisms or politically expedient revisionism. 

Prof
Syed will be remembered by his colleagues and students as one of the
pioneers of critical theory in Malaysia, even though the term
‘critical theory’ had not been en vogue during his time.
Much of his work and the focus of all of his intellectual energy was
towards critically questioning and deconstructing many of the staid
comfortable assumptions upon which both the colonial and
post-colonial order of knowledge and power were based upon;
demonstrating that academic work does not only have social and
political relevance, but also that such critical thinking was
politically necessary. In the words of Prof. Noraini Othman of the
National University of Malaysia:

“His
passing marked the end of an era in terms of Malay and Malaysian
intellectual culture and scholarly tradition. Prof. Syed Hussein
was a globally-known social scientist whose work focused on Malay
society, culture and politics.  He was a fierce critic of Malay
political culture – using the term "bebalism" as a
concept to describe the inability of Malay intelligentsia and
politicians to cope and engage with the forces and challenges of
rapid social transformation, modernization, cultural change, and
‘westernization’.  Yet it was he who also fiercely defended
Malay society and culture against the prejudices of "colonial
perception and view of the lazy native".

Prof
Syed Hussein Alatas was born on 17 September 1928 in Bogor,
Indonesia. He passed away at his home in Damansara Heights, Kuala
Lumpur, on the evening of 23 January 2007, after suffering a heart
attack. He began his academic career in 1958 as the head of the
research department of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in Kuala Lumpur.
Between 1963 to 1967 he taught at the University of Malaya (UM) and
from 1967 to 1978 he served as the Head of the Malay Studies
Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Between the
late 1960s to the 1970s, he played an active role in Malaysia’s
political environment, helping to form the multi-racial Gerakan Party
in 1968. In 1972 he helped to form the Parti Keadilan Masyarakat
Malaysia (Malaysian Social Justice Party, Pekemas). In 1988 he was
appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya. From the
mid-1990s he spent the last decade of his academic life at the
Department of Anthropology and Sociology of the National University
of Malaysia (UKM), before moving on to serve as Professor and Senior
Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Malay World and
Civilisation (ATMA) at the same university.

Goodbye
and thank you for all that you have taught us, Prof.

We
have been, and remain, your students.