Malaysianinsider reports that you had “defended the social contract, the so-called unwritten agreement between the Malays and the non-Malays during independence, by affirming that without the agreement, Malaysia would not have been formed”.
They quoted you :
“If there was no social contract, the terms and conditions of allowing citizenship to non-Malays would have not taken place. One million outsiders were given citizenships at the time.”
Now, this quote from you got me curious.
Let me tell you why.
I conferred with my aunt, who confirmed that my maternal great grandfather, Eliathamby, of whom I’ve written previously in a posting entitled “The land that my forefathers helped build”, would have left Ceylon and arrived in what is now West Malaysia, around 1870. He died well before the conclusion of that social contract that you spoke of, so my great grandfather would not have come within those ‘one million outsiders’ who acquired citizenship at the time of independence in 1957.
My maternal grandfather, Vellupillay T. Williams, never lived to see the formation of Malaya so he, too, did not make up the ‘one million outsiders’.
Enough of my family tree.
Let’s look at yours.
I got this from a blog, Malaysiana :
Perhaps, the most famous Malayalee to land in George Town was Iskandar Kutty, a merchant who married a Johor-Riau wife Siti Hawa Iskandar.
They became the proud parents of Alor Star’s top public school Sultan Abdul Hamid College’s founder-principal and Kedah’s royal educator Datuk Mohamad Iskandar.
Mohamad was the school teacher of Tunku Abdul Rahman.
He and his wife Datin Wan Tempawan Wan Hanafi from the Kedah Bendahara’s (Prime Minister’s) clan, were the proud parents of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s Father of Modernisation and fourth Prime Minister.
And this from Malaysia Today :
Born in December 20, 1925, Dr Mahathir hailed from the state of Kedah, at the capital of Alor Star, whose father was a school teacher. His father was Indian who migrated from Kerala, who married a malay lady and sold banana fritters during the second world war. His early education was through vernacular school and at the Sultan Abdul Hamid College in the city.
My question, then, Doc, firstly, is whether your father was amongst the ‘one million outsiders’?
And when did you become ‘Malay’, Doc?
When did you move from being a son of an Indian who migrated from Kerala to a Malay?
Not that I care, but when?
Speaking of Malay, do you remember your “Malay Dilemma”, Doc?
Do you remember what you said about the problem of inbreeding amongst the Malay community, and that whole business of genes?
Back then, who had heard of this thing called DNA?
Who had ever imagined that science would one day make it possible for all of us to trace our genealogy?
Guess what, Doc?
It seems, based on all this new DNA scientific knowledge, that there’s no such thing as a Malay race.
[For continuation, read here]
No comments:
Post a Comment