Some people hold the view that Peninsular Malaysia belongs exclusively to the “Malay world”, and therefore the Indians and Chinese who live there are merely guests or immigrants within it. However, this view rests on a misunderstanding of what a “world” actually is.
A world is not a uniform, fixed, or singular space.
Every civilisational world has both a centre and borders. At its centre, a people may be dominant and culturally overwhelming. At its borders, however, identities are more mixed and dominance becomes less clear. Yet the people who live at these borders are not necessarily immigrants. They are as much a part of the world as they people of the center are.
Take the northern border of the Malay world, which lies in southern Thailand. The Malays there are not the dominant group within Thailand, but this does not mean they are immigrants in their own land. They may not dominate the Thai state, but southern Thailand, and Thailand by extension, is still their home. Their lack of dominance does not negate their belonging.
A world is also not a fixed space. It expands and contracts with the tides of history.
Historically, much of Southeast Asia—including Peninsular Malaysia—was deeply embedded within the Indian civilisational world. The very name Indonesia literally means “Indian Islands”, reflecting centuries of Indian cultural influence across the region. The ocean that forms the western boundary of the Malay world is itself called the Indian Ocean.
In earlier centuries, when the Indian cultural sphere stretched from the Indian subcontinent across mainland Southeast Asia and the maritime world of Indonesia, Borneo and the Philippines, a person travelling from Borneo to Kerala might not have felt that they are was leaving one world and entering another, anymore than a person leaving Yong Peng and arriving at Alor Setar today feels that they have left their home and arrived on foreign land. Rather, they may simply have felt that they were travelling from one end of their world to the other.
On the eastern side, there is also a reason why China asserts historical claims across much of the South China Sea through its well-known nine-dash line. For long periods in history, the South China Sea and its littoral societies—including areas of present-day Peninsular Malaysia—were deeply connected to the Sinic world through trade, migration, and cultural exchange. Even the Malacca Sultanate - which is universally held as the founding polity that the Malaysia is based upon, was established by the Ming Dynasty of China. The South China Sea and its littoral region might not be at the center of the Sinic world, but it is, as a China is insisting today, always a part of the Sinic world.
Seen from this perspective, when Chinese or Indians migrated to Malaysia, they were not necessarily moving from an entirely foreign world into an alien one. In many ways, they were simply moving from the centre of their civilisational spheres to their borders.
In fact, border regions are rarely the exclusive domain of a single civilisation. More often, they are places where multiple worlds intersect.
Southern Thailand illustrates this well. It belongs simultaneously to both the Thai and Malay worlds. It is home to both Thais and Malays. Even though the Thai state is dominant there, this does not mean the Malays of southern Thailand are guests who lack the right to call that land their home.
There is a crucial difference between dominance and belonging.
Dominance is factor of the present but the right to belong is determined by ones memory of the past.
To understand this difference, consider a village. Once upon a time, your family may have ruled that village. Over the years, however, your family’s fortunes may decline, and another family may rise to dominance. Some members of your family might move away from the village, while those who remain may become subordinate to the new ruling family.
But the loss of dominance does not erase your family’s connection to the village.
If you return to your village someday, you are not returning as a guest or an immigrant, who has no connection whatsoever with your village. Rather, you are returning to a place that has always been part of your ancestral home.
You may have to accept the authority of the new family that now dominates the village. But no one has the right to deny that the village is also part of your history and your belonging.
The same principle applies to nations and civilizations.
Dominance may shift over time. Borders may change. Worlds may expand and contract. Civilizations might rise and fall.
But belonging cannot simply be dismissed by declaring that only one world exists in a place where many worlds have always met.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact creator@newswav.com.