THE MALACCA CHETTY STORY By Gerald F Pillay FOREWORD This is Chapter 2 of ldquoA Loving amp Speculative Chronicle of Francis Joseph Pillay (My Dad) told against the long and colourful passage of the Chetty Malacca community through the history of Malaccardquo The main story is still being written Chapter 2 centres on our identity that we are Chetty Malacca The history of the community is our history This chronicle therefore includes a recount of the origins and progress of the Chetty Malacca from the Sultanate through to Portuguese and Dutch times and finally to British times Using the Internet as my source my objective has been to piece together a sufficiently coherent narrative so that we may understand ourselves by looking at the Chetty Malacca through the telescope of time It got longer as I found exciting new material It has ended up as a substantial narrative on its own While the facts can be found in separate places assembling the story in one document is new more so as it includes information released as recently as December 2010 and some data not in print before For the non-family reader this would be the most meaningful part and may be read on its own I have decided to release it to the public I cannot say when I shall finish the main story I hope this release will interest readers to look at it when completed The story of Odiang of course reflects and continues the more recent history of the community but told in terms of the events of one family Throughout there is interconnection with different groups of the Chetty Malacca community both in Malacca and later in Singapore It will be relevant for the full picture especially of the post-world War II period and for Diaspora(I have left the short first chapter in to give the flavour of the whole No need to read it The historical coverage is not comprehensive nor intended to be This is also not a work of scholarship I have not attempted to validate what I found (beyond consistency and common sense) or followed up references I have not tried to view primary data and source documents unless they were linked in I have also not sought to review the historical literature or the considerable research material on Malacca I saw archived in libraries and the academia Wherever I saw a reference to the Chetty Malacca I did follow it up as far as it would go Let me record here my indebtedness to the late Mr B K Naiker whom I knew as Mama (Uncle) Embong since I was old enough to sit on the crossbar of his bicycle and who pioneered the discovery of our roots

1 I am also indebted to Mr Samuel S

Dhoraisingam for his commendable publication ldquoPeranakan Indians of Singapore and Melakardquo the only such summary history in print (as far as I know

2

Needless to say I have worked only in English besides some peripheral information I picked up in Malay For the benefit of fellow lovers of Malacca and Malayan history I cannot not mention that the goldmine on the Internet is Sabri Zainrsquos website entitled ldquothe Sejarah Melayu Libraryrdquo described in its preface as follows

1 His posthumous Internet posting on the ldquoChetti of Malaccardquo may be found at httpchetti-malaccablogspotcom See also page 23 2 Published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Singapore 2006 ISBN 981-230-346-4

2

ldquoThe Sejarah Melayu Library is perhaps the largest public on-line collection of books and other documents on the history of the Malay archipelago and its surrounding region Consisting of over 1500 books academic papers and articles in electronic PDF format the library is divided into seven broad sections ldquo

httpwwwsabrizainorgmalayalibraryindexhtm

There is no intention to hurt or denigrate any person community or nationality Any biases found are entirely mine and I make no apology for them If in referring to or quoting someone elsersquos work I have distorted or misinterpreted them for this I do apologise Where there was conflict of information dates or spelling I chose what seemed reasonable There has necessarily been a lot of speculation what really happened Where alternative interpretations could be given for something I make no excuse for choosing that which threw our ancestors in the most favourable light Finally I have not covered the Malay the Peranakan or the Eurasian components of Malaccarsquos history except incidentally to throw into better relief our chief protagonists the Chetty Malacca There are other obvious gaps All in all my aim has been to provide in the time-frame and resources of the exercise a valid overview of the passage of the Chetty Malacca I have of course been more long-winded about areas of special interest Most coverage is given to the British period because most things happened then which had a bearing on my Dadrsquos and my life and more information was available than for earlier periods I welcome comments and inputs from the general reader the historian and especially my fellow Chetty Malaccansand the family Please feel free to add or correct what I have sought to convey As additions and corrections emerge I hope to incorporate them in subsequent editions of this chronicle I shall be pleased to acknowledge all contributions There are other acknowledgements I have to make but I shall do so in the completedwork Gerald F Pillay 45 Tessensohn Road Singapore 217662 Emailltgfpillaypacificnetsggt 23 June 2011 Motherrsquos Birthday

Copyright

The contents of this document may be extracted or copied for use in other publications provided due acknowledgement is given to the author and the work

3

IN MEMORIAM It is with deep sorrow that I have to record here that Sundrum Sanasee the senior person and head of our branch of the Pillay clan passed away on 19 Jul 2011 after a brief illness He was buried on 20 Jul 2011 at the Hindu Cemetery Choa Chu Kang Singapore He will be sadly missed It was during a visit to him in Mar 11 that he began chatting about our family and my Dad He urged me to get it down before it all got lost That‟s what started me off on this It is a small satisfaction to me that when I visited him again on 4 Jul 11 I was able to hand the very first copy of this work - the initial two chapters that is There and then he began reading it and gave me more inputs I know he subsequently read and enjoyed the whole thing

RIP

4

For information only the contents of the final work

Contents

CHAPTER ABOUT PAGES

1 BEGINNINGS

4 - 5

2 CHETTY MALACCA HISTORY

6 - 41

3 PRE-WAR YEARS

42 ndash part

5 WAR YEARS amp AFTER

Not ready

5 SINGPORE YEARS

Not ready

5

Chapter One

Beginnings -

Meringu Lane According to my calculations Nenek Kathai the grand old lady of our family was born around 1860 contemporary with the establishment of the Straits Settlements - of Malacca

3 Penang

and Singapore We know nothing of her parents or indeed of her husband only that she had two daughters and lived at No 7 Meringu Lane Tranquerah

4 which for purposes of this

chronicle was the family seat Her elder daughter whose name again remains unforgivably unknown must have been born in the early 1880s and was married to Sangaran Pillay in the late 1890s They had only one child my Dad born on 23 Dec 1900 According to the senior relatives Dad‟s mother my grand-mother passed away either at child-birth or soon after and my Dad was brought up by and under the thumb of Nenek Kathai By all accounts she did a fine job of it His name was Odiang and so he was known by all the elders and contemporaries in the community When I appeared on the scene I was proudly ldquoAnak Odiangrdquo Dad‟s mother‟s sister was named Letchimy

5 Periachi Again according to my calculations

she would have been born in the 1890s She married in the second decade of the new century to the great Suppiah Sundrum Pillay only son of Mak Bola who lived at 10 Meringu Lane He was known in the community as Mamat and outside the community as ldquoInche Mamatrdquo By my further reckonings Periachi was barely in her teens and not yet married when her sister gave birth to Dad So she must have been living with Nenek Kathai and my Dad It is safe to presume that Nenek Kathai lived and saw her younger daughter married before she died which would have been not earlier that around the mid 1920s when she would have been past 60 There is an as yet unconfirmed story that both Nenek Kathai and Mak Bola were connected in common to a family in Tranquerah When they moved to Meringu Lane cannot be established for the present It is safe to assume that Mamat and wife moved into his home at 10 Meringu Lane directly across the lane on marriage And Dad had completed secondary school My Dad would at this point probably have been working and might have already established roots in alternative accommodation When my Dad my mum and I lived for a short while with them around 1943 following our own vicissitudes during the Japanese Occupation I sized up their children as follows daughter Paparthi 26 eldest son Sanasee 18 daughter Ponoi 17 son Kandan (14) daughter Batak 13 son Krishna 12 and son Banian 9 At 9 I slotted in just ahead of Banian in the pecking order At this point my Dad was 43 pretty senior to his first cousins and was married and had a son Periachi would have been in her early fifties and her husband I recall was in his late 50s Paparthi married around 1944 after we made our appearance It was my first wedding and the first in their family The children addressed my Dad as ldquoAnengrdquo which is elder brother The family lived at No 10 Meringu Lane from then on until last year over 90 years and four generations when the land was finally acquired for re-development

3 I have retained the old spelling of Malacca throughout as most of the narrative relates to

historical times when it was so named The Official Website (porta rasmi) of Malacca does the same httpwwwperpustamgovmytyt_portaltyt_portalenglishhistoryhistorychronologyhtml The state is now named Melaka and is part of Malaysia 4 I have likewise consistently used the old names of countries districts suburbs and streets

adopting the spellings I grew up with in the latter cases

5 She was through out her life known by her family as Periachi No one seems to remember any

other name But I distinctly recall that my own mother called her Letchimy and I always called her ldquoAunty Letchimyrdquo Let this remain a matter to be cleared up in due course For this narrative I shall use Periachi in deference to the family members

4

For information only the contents of the final work

Contents

CHAPTER ABOUT PAGES

1 BEGINNINGS

4 - 5

2 CHETTY MALACCA HISTORY

6 - 41

3 PRE-WAR YEARS

42 ndash part

5 WAR YEARS amp AFTER

Not ready

5 SINGPORE YEARS

Not ready

5

Chapter One

Beginnings -

Meringu Lane According to my calculations Nenek Kathai the grand old lady of our family was born around 1860 contemporary with the establishment of the Straits Settlements - of Malacca

3 Penang

and Singapore We know nothing of her parents or indeed of her husband only that she had two daughters and lived at No 7 Meringu Lane Tranquerah

4 which for purposes of this

chronicle was the family seat Her elder daughter whose name again remains unforgivably unknown must have been born in the early 1880s and was married to Sangaran Pillay in the late 1890s They had only one child my Dad born on 23 Dec 1900 According to the senior relatives Dad‟s mother my grand-mother passed away either at child-birth or soon after and my Dad was brought up by and under the thumb of Nenek Kathai By all accounts she did a fine job of it His name was Odiang and so he was known by all the elders and contemporaries in the community When I appeared on the scene I was proudly ldquoAnak Odiangrdquo Dad‟s mother‟s sister was named Letchimy

5 Periachi Again according to my calculations

she would have been born in the 1890s She married in the second decade of the new century to the great Suppiah Sundrum Pillay only son of Mak Bola who lived at 10 Meringu Lane He was known in the community as Mamat and outside the community as ldquoInche Mamatrdquo By my further reckonings Periachi was barely in her teens and not yet married when her sister gave birth to Dad So she must have been living with Nenek Kathai and my Dad It is safe to presume that Nenek Kathai lived and saw her younger daughter married before she died which would have been not earlier that around the mid 1920s when she would have been past 60 There is an as yet unconfirmed story that both Nenek Kathai and Mak Bola were connected in common to a family in Tranquerah When they moved to Meringu Lane cannot be established for the present It is safe to assume that Mamat and wife moved into his home at 10 Meringu Lane directly across the lane on marriage And Dad had completed secondary school My Dad would at this point probably have been working and might have already established roots in alternative accommodation When my Dad my mum and I lived for a short while with them around 1943 following our own vicissitudes during the Japanese Occupation I sized up their children as follows daughter Paparthi 26 eldest son Sanasee 18 daughter Ponoi 17 son Kandan (14) daughter Batak 13 son Krishna 12 and son Banian 9 At 9 I slotted in just ahead of Banian in the pecking order At this point my Dad was 43 pretty senior to his first cousins and was married and had a son Periachi would have been in her early fifties and her husband I recall was in his late 50s Paparthi married around 1944 after we made our appearance It was my first wedding and the first in their family The children addressed my Dad as ldquoAnengrdquo which is elder brother The family lived at No 10 Meringu Lane from then on until last year over 90 years and four generations when the land was finally acquired for re-development

3 I have retained the old spelling of Malacca throughout as most of the narrative relates to

historical times when it was so named The Official Website (porta rasmi) of Malacca does the same httpwwwperpustamgovmytyt_portaltyt_portalenglishhistoryhistorychronologyhtml The state is now named Melaka and is part of Malaysia 4 I have likewise consistently used the old names of countries districts suburbs and streets

adopting the spellings I grew up with in the latter cases

5 She was through out her life known by her family as Periachi No one seems to remember any

other name But I distinctly recall that my own mother called her Letchimy and I always called her ldquoAunty Letchimyrdquo Let this remain a matter to be cleared up in due course For this narrative I shall use Periachi in deference to the family members

5

Chapter One

Beginnings -

Meringu Lane According to my calculations Nenek Kathai the grand old lady of our family was born around 1860 contemporary with the establishment of the Straits Settlements - of Malacca

3 Penang

and Singapore We know nothing of her parents or indeed of her husband only that she had two daughters and lived at No 7 Meringu Lane Tranquerah

4 which for purposes of this

chronicle was the family seat Her elder daughter whose name again remains unforgivably unknown must have been born in the early 1880s and was married to Sangaran Pillay in the late 1890s They had only one child my Dad born on 23 Dec 1900 According to the senior relatives Dad‟s mother my grand-mother passed away either at child-birth or soon after and my Dad was brought up by and under the thumb of Nenek Kathai By all accounts she did a fine job of it His name was Odiang and so he was known by all the elders and contemporaries in the community When I appeared on the scene I was proudly ldquoAnak Odiangrdquo Dad‟s mother‟s sister was named Letchimy

5 Periachi Again according to my calculations

she would have been born in the 1890s She married in the second decade of the new century to the great Suppiah Sundrum Pillay only son of Mak Bola who lived at 10 Meringu Lane He was known in the community as Mamat and outside the community as ldquoInche Mamatrdquo By my further reckonings Periachi was barely in her teens and not yet married when her sister gave birth to Dad So she must have been living with Nenek Kathai and my Dad It is safe to presume that Nenek Kathai lived and saw her younger daughter married before she died which would have been not earlier that around the mid 1920s when she would have been past 60 There is an as yet unconfirmed story that both Nenek Kathai and Mak Bola were connected in common to a family in Tranquerah When they moved to Meringu Lane cannot be established for the present It is safe to assume that Mamat and wife moved into his home at 10 Meringu Lane directly across the lane on marriage And Dad had completed secondary school My Dad would at this point probably have been working and might have already established roots in alternative accommodation When my Dad my mum and I lived for a short while with them around 1943 following our own vicissitudes during the Japanese Occupation I sized up their children as follows daughter Paparthi 26 eldest son Sanasee 18 daughter Ponoi 17 son Kandan (14) daughter Batak 13 son Krishna 12 and son Banian 9 At 9 I slotted in just ahead of Banian in the pecking order At this point my Dad was 43 pretty senior to his first cousins and was married and had a son Periachi would have been in her early fifties and her husband I recall was in his late 50s Paparthi married around 1944 after we made our appearance It was my first wedding and the first in their family The children addressed my Dad as ldquoAnengrdquo which is elder brother The family lived at No 10 Meringu Lane from then on until last year over 90 years and four generations when the land was finally acquired for re-development

3 I have retained the old spelling of Malacca throughout as most of the narrative relates to

historical times when it was so named The Official Website (porta rasmi) of Malacca does the same httpwwwperpustamgovmytyt_portaltyt_portalenglishhistoryhistorychronologyhtml The state is now named Melaka and is part of Malaysia 4 I have likewise consistently used the old names of countries districts suburbs and streets

adopting the spellings I grew up with in the latter cases

5 She was through out her life known by her family as Periachi No one seems to remember any

other name But I distinctly recall that my own mother called her Letchimy and I always called her ldquoAunty Letchimyrdquo Let this remain a matter to be cleared up in due course For this narrative I shall use Periachi in deference to the family members

6

My Grand-father the ldquoGary-manrdquo My grand-father Sangaran Pillay was a gary operator by trade That‟s all we know Say he was 25 when Dad was born he would himself have been born in 1875 and married my grand-mother in the late 1890s ldquoGaryrdquo was the street term used to describe a closed carriage for up to 8 persons pulled by a horse with the driver sitting in front The word is not found in the Oxford or Webster dictionary nor indeed on the Internet except as someone‟s name oddly enough someone connected with the carriage transport business We have no information of my grand-seigneur‟s birthday or when he passed away and surmise that he and my grand-mother lived with Nenek Kathai at least while the latter was alive I remember the last garies operating during the war and in the immediate post war years One service started from Limbongan beyond Tranquerah Another operated from the Malacca General Hospital in Peringgit The third as I recall started from Ujong Pasir They converged at the Big Market (Pasar Besar) off Bunga Raya which acted as the interchange In their day the garies provided essential cross-town services mainly for family groups on visits to relatives or to the hospital Soon after the war they were replaced by the Malacca Town Bus Service For close town-side or neighbourhood travel there was of course the ever-dependable rickshaw You usually found them waiting in a line under a road-side tree You only had to call out ldquobetchardquo and one of them would trot over A Chinese importation these were two-seater rattan armchairs with space at the legs for a third small person and a hood for protection against the sun or rain They were elevated on large wheels and attached with two long handles forward on the either side between which the ldquorickshaw pullerrdquo would run hauling his passengers along The latter were burly Chinese of incredible strength and endurance deeply tanned and perpetually bathed in sweat When they had to go upslope it was an all mighty effort but the passengers never thought of getting down They uniformly wore a huge circular rattan hat of about three feet in diameter with a pointed top hat like a Mongol warrior They used old motorcar tyres cut into strips under their feet to protect them from the heat and friction When resting they invariably smoked their opium pipes When two or more families went to church on Sunday by rickshaw the small children (third passengers) would yell and urge the rickshaw pullers to race against one another The rickshaw slipped into history with the coming of the trishaw In Malacca we called them ldquotaxisrdquo They could go the distances of the gary and in practice made the town bus redundant To this day they are to be seen about mainly for sight-seeing in the ldquoold quartersrdquo of town and joyrides for tourists So my grand-father was a very much part of the urban transportation scene of colonial Malacca We have to hope he lived to experience the first impulses of modernisation He may well have seen the first bicycle and car in town I like to think that while he continued to stay at Nenek Kathai‟s and perhaps after he supported the family and my Dad‟s schooling from his gary earnings until he disappeared into the mists of history

End

7

Chapter Two

The Chetty Malacca History Beginnings Chetty Malacca Who are the Chetty Malacca

6 As near as may be surmised we are the product of the

monsoons and human nature the outcome and survivors of history The famous geography dictum applies at the Equator the seas unite and the jungles divide The first strike must go to the monsoons These steady winds blow across the Indian Ocean from India to South East Asia for six months and then reverse direction They do exactly the same thing across the South China Sea creating a parallel history but we are not concerned with that here What is pertinent is that the monsoon winds were responsible for generating continuous streams of Indian merchant traders from the Coromandel coast to and fro South East Asia and beyond from as far back as the first centuries of the last millennium The second strike goes to history When the prince of Srivijaya Parameswara founded the port of Malacca in 1402 in the sheltered waters of the straits it immediately attracted the monsoon traffic from both sides of the peninsula the Chinese and the Indians For the latter it was in fact the nearest safe port of call Among the earliest Indian arrivals were wealthy and influential Tamil Hindu merchant traders identified in some sources as coming from Panai in Tamil Nadu It is reported that these successfully gained comparative advantage were much respected and in time became the largest and most influential Indian community in Malacca One of them even served as Dato Shah Bandar (harbour master) The third strike goes to human nature By custom of those times Indian women were not allowed to travel abroad Soon our Tamil forebears discovered the monsoon to be unseasonably long while the charms of our beauteous Malay damsels grew utterly irresistible with time The influence and wealth of the foreigners may or may not have provided some attraction Religion was no barrier as Malay culture at that point had grown from Hindu roots Commentators seem to suggest that the ruling powers gave their blessings to the unions So our ancestors happily married each other setting up local domicile These were the beginnings of our community I formed the impression they occupied the higher positions on the social ladder

More Beginnings Birth of Malacca

When we come to Malacca we owe it all to a mouse deer But before that we must briefly mention Srivijaya which provided the human agency for the founding of both Temasek and Malacca through the scions of its illustrious royal house

In the mid-seventh century there arose in Sumatra centred in Palembang the mighty Buddhist-Malay Kingdom of Srivijaya By the end of the same century it embraced most of Sumatra the Malay Peninsula up to Siam and parts of the Malay Archipelago By the eleventh century it had extended its suzerainty to West Java and thence across the islands to Manila embracing the Moluccas the Sulu Archipelago and the Visayas ndash the last were named after it Arab accounts state that the empire was so large that in two years the swiftest vessel could not travel round all its islands Located astride the Straits of Sunda and Malacca it controlled all traffic between India and China and exacted a toll on all shipping passing through Its capital was the premiegravere trade emporium of its time Srivijaya became renowned for Buddhist scholarship and learning and it was the source-springs of Malay culture Srivijaya maintained diplomatic and tributary relations with China and friendly relations with among others the Chola

6 There are many derivations and spellings of the name I use the Malay-language format with the

adjective following and my own choice of spelling For some reference to the origins of the name see page 11

7

Chapter Two

The Chetty Malacca History Beginnings Chetty Malacca Who are the Chetty Malacca

6 As near as may be surmised we are the product of the

monsoons and human nature the outcome and survivors of history The famous geography dictum applies at the Equator the seas unite and the jungles divide The first strike must go to the monsoons These steady winds blow across the Indian Ocean from India to South East Asia for six months and then reverse direction They do exactly the same thing across the South China Sea creating a parallel history but we are not concerned with that here What is pertinent is that the monsoon winds were responsible for generating continuous streams of Indian merchant traders from the Coromandel coast to and fro South East Asia and beyond from as far back as the first centuries of the last millennium The second strike goes to history When the prince of Srivijaya Parameswara founded the port of Malacca in 1402 in the sheltered waters of the straits it immediately attracted the monsoon traffic from both sides of the peninsula the Chinese and the Indians For the latter it was in fact the nearest safe port of call Among the earliest Indian arrivals were wealthy and influential Tamil Hindu merchant traders identified in some sources as coming from Panai in Tamil Nadu It is reported that these successfully gained comparative advantage were much respected and in time became the largest and most influential Indian community in Malacca One of them even served as Dato Shah Bandar (harbour master) The third strike goes to human nature By custom of those times Indian women were not allowed to travel abroad Soon our Tamil forebears discovered the monsoon to be unseasonably long while the charms of our beauteous Malay damsels grew utterly irresistible with time The influence and wealth of the foreigners may or may not have provided some attraction Religion was no barrier as Malay culture at that point had grown from Hindu roots Commentators seem to suggest that the ruling powers gave their blessings to the unions So our ancestors happily married each other setting up local domicile These were the beginnings of our community I formed the impression they occupied the higher positions on the social ladder

More Beginnings Birth of Malacca

When we come to Malacca we owe it all to a mouse deer But before that we must briefly mention Srivijaya which provided the human agency for the founding of both Temasek and Malacca through the scions of its illustrious royal house

In the mid-seventh century there arose in Sumatra centred in Palembang the mighty Buddhist-Malay Kingdom of Srivijaya By the end of the same century it embraced most of Sumatra the Malay Peninsula up to Siam and parts of the Malay Archipelago By the eleventh century it had extended its suzerainty to West Java and thence across the islands to Manila embracing the Moluccas the Sulu Archipelago and the Visayas ndash the last were named after it Arab accounts state that the empire was so large that in two years the swiftest vessel could not travel round all its islands Located astride the Straits of Sunda and Malacca it controlled all traffic between India and China and exacted a toll on all shipping passing through Its capital was the premiegravere trade emporium of its time Srivijaya became renowned for Buddhist scholarship and learning and it was the source-springs of Malay culture Srivijaya maintained diplomatic and tributary relations with China and friendly relations with among others the Chola

6 There are many derivations and spellings of the name I use the Malay-language format with the

adjective following and my own choice of spelling For some reference to the origins of the name see page 11

8

Kingdom of the Coramandel But relations with the latter deteriorated in the twelfth century and the Cholas went to war against Srivijaya eventually conquering Kedah Decades of internecine warfare with the Javanese Kingdom of Majapahit also weakened it and its vassal states broke away Finally it was vanquished by the latter in 1368

In 1324 a prince of Srivijaya Sri Maharaja Sang Utama Parameswara Batara Sri Tribuwana (also known as Sang Nila Utama) founded the Kingdom of Temasek

7 which he ruled for 48

years He was confirmed as ruler over Temasek by an envoy of the Chinese Emperor in 1366 He was succeeded by his son (1372ndash1386) grandson (1386ndash1399) and lastly his great-grandson Paduka Sri Maharaja Parameswara (1399-1411) In 1401 Parameswara was expelled from Temasek following its destruction by the Majapahit He travelled north to Muar then Ujong Tanah and Biawak Busuk before founding Melaka in 1402 According to the Sejarah Melayu the prince saw a mouse deer outwit a dog when he was resting under a Malacca tree He took what he saw as a good omen and decided to establish the capital of his kingdom there He called his kingdom Malacca

Malacca Sultanate amp Empire

At the foundation of Malacca the people were virtually all Hindu According to the Sejarah Melayu Parameswara dreamt that Mohammed came to him proclaiming the Islamic creed Afterwards Parameswara dreamt again this time of a man named Sayyid Abu Al-Hassan who lectured him about the religion Later the same man arrived and converted him whereon he adopted the name Sultan Iskandar Shah An alternative report states that In 1409

8 the prince

(now king) became a Muslim due to his marriage to a Muslim princess from Pasai His marriage encouraged a number of his subjects to embrace Islam

Sultan Iskandar Shah (or Parameswara as he was still referred to) carried out far-reaching reforms These enhanced Malacca as a peaceful destination and centre of trade Traders from the surrounding region and from as far away as India Arabia and China traded in the port He also laid down the formalities of the Malay court ceremonials and regalia that have been adopted by succeeding Malay royalties all over peninsula including the Nobat and the white and yellow umbrellas for royalty He also started the system of administration based on a hierarchy of court officials With this stream-lining trade and commerce rapidly developed in Malacca

The Official Website of Malacca records that in 1403 the first Chinese trade envoy led by Admiral Yin Ching arrived in Malacca In 1409 Admiral Cheng Ho Commander of the Chinese Imperial fleet arrived in Malacca on the first of his seven voyages to the Indian Ocean And in 1411 Parameswara journeyed

to China with an entourage of 540 and met the Ming Emperor Yung Lo Parameswara maintained the highest level relationship with China I can do no better than quote the following in full to explain this

At the same time Malacca had a good relationship with Ming resulting in Zheng Hes visits Parameswara had met the Ming emperor to receive a Letter of Friendship hence making Malacca the first foreign kingdom to attain such treatment In 1409 the sultan paid tribute to the Ming emperor to ask for protection against Siam and Malacca was made as protectorate of Ming China

httpenwikipediaorgwikiMalacca_Sultanate

In 1414 his son visited China when he informed the Emperor that his father had died His was recognised as the second ruler of Malacca by the Chinese Emperor His adopted the name Sultan Megat Iskandar Shah and he ruled Malacca from 1414 to 1424

7 The Sejarah Melayu (translated Leyden 1821) states that Sang Nila Utama named it

ldquoSinghapurardquo 8 The Official Website of Malacca gives this date as 1414 but this seems improbably

9

The third ruler of Malacca was Raja Tengah or Radin Tengah According to the Sejarah Melayu he embraced Islam and took the title Muhammad Shah Other scholars believe this could also have been due to him marrying a Tamil Muslim wife On his decease In 1444 he was succeeded by Raja Ibrahim

By this time there could have been some tension in Melaka between the growing Tamil Muslim community and the traditional Hindu Malays for Raja Ibrahim does not seem to have embraced the new religion but instead adopted the title Sri Parameswara Dewa Shah He ruled for less than seventeen months - in 1445 he was stabbed to death He had an elder half-brother by a Tamil Muslim common woman called Raja Kasim He assumed the throne (in 1456) taking the name Sultan Muzaffar Shah - signalling a new golden era for the Melaka Sultanate

9

httpwwwsabrizainorgmalayaparameshtm

The small city state would now become a Sultanate and an Empire Sultan Muzaffar Shah appointed the famous Tun Perak as his Bendahara styled Bendahara Paduka Raja - a man deeply respected by the Sultans Malay subjects and a man he knew had the charisma ability and courage to build his Empire Tun Perak would shape the history of Malacca for the next 40 years and serve as Bendahara under four Sultans Malacca quickly mounted a series of military campaigns subjugating the surrounding states and in east coast Sumatra In 1459 on his decease he was succeed by his son Sultan Mansur Shah The latter successfully attacked and conquered Kedah and Pahang both vassal states of Siam which launched several attacks on the new kingdom previously The list of the other states who were conquered or became vassals included Johor and Muar in the Peninsula and Jambi Siak and (briefly) Pasai in Sumatra At its height Malacca ruled most of Peninsula Malaya and a great portion of eastern Sumatra Like its predecessor Srivijaya it controlled the Straits of Malacca It was also the centre of Islam Muslim missionaries were sent by the Sultan to other communities in the Malay Archipelago such as in Java Borneo and the Philippines For most of South East Asia at that time was Hindu

Mansur Shahs reign was the peak of Melakas meteoric rise to Empire and became the golden age of Malay folklore and culture It was recorded that by this time Melaka alone had 40000 inhabitants including almost all the known races in the world

It was during Mansur Shahs reign that Hang Tuah the ultimate Malay hero and symbol of honour courage and loyalty was made Laksamana or Admiral

httpwwwsabrizainorgmalayaparameshtm

The Chinese relationship continued and strengthened under the new sultan

In the year 1459 a princess Hang Li Po (or Hang Liu) was sent by the emperor of Ming to marry Malacca Sultan Mansur Shah (ruled 1459ndash1477) The princess came with her entourage 500 sons of ministers and a few hundred handmaidensThey eventually settled in Bukit Cina Malacca It is believed that a significant number of them married into the local populace The descendants of these mixed marriages are locally known today as Peranakan and still use the honorifics Baba (male title) and Nyonya (female title)

9 Raja Ibrahim was also known as Sultan Abu Syahid Shah He was a practicing Hindu His taking

a Hindu title represented a traditionalist reaction in Malacca against Islam the new religion After his death he was given the title Sultan Abu Syahid which means the Martyred King

10

In Malaysia today many people believe it was Admiral Zheng He (died 1433) who sent princess Hang Li Po to Malacca in year 1459 However there is no record of Hang Li Po (or Hang Liu) in Ming annals She is mentioned only within

Malacca folklore and Malay annals

httpenwikipediaorgwikiZheng_HeIn_Malacca

In 1477 Sultan Mansur Shah died and his son succeeded him as Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah But he mysteriously died 11 years later of poisoning There was a resurgence of Tamil Muslim politicking led by Tun Mutahir the son of the previously deposed Tamil Muslim Bendahara Tun Ali Sultan Alauddins elder son was by-passed in favour of his younger half brother the son of Mutahir‟s own sister This young man became Sultan Mahmud Shah in 1488 When Tun Perak died in 1498 his brother Tun Puteh succeeded him only to pass away soon after Finally in 1500 Tun Mutahir assumed the post with the title Bendahara Seri Maharaja He

became the grandest and most powerful of all the bendaharas accordingl to the official Malacca website

We might conclude this episode with another quote commenting on the state of affairs in Malacca then

Melakas State continued to flourish but the court was now thronged and dominated by Tamil merchants ready to buy their way to royal favour Their monopoly in trade made them despised by other traders and the Malay chiefs and common people hated the arrogant and greedy Jawi Pekan strutting like

rulers

httpwwwsabrizainorgmalayaparameshtm

But Malacca‟s greatest glory was in the flowering of Malay culture literature and society It was a remarkably cosmopolitan society Malays Muslim Indians Hindus Chinese Javanese Turks Arabs Burmese Siamese all flocked to share in its peace stability and prosperity Malacca became the focal point and entre-port for the smaller regional boats to exchange goods and discharge their spices and local produce and for long haul ships to collect and discharge their cargo for India and China ndash and beyond

I will conclude with the following statement from the same source

It was the first and most memorable civilisation to have emerged from the peninsula - and none have equalled it since

httpwwwsabrizainorgmalayaparameshtm

Then on 1 September 1509 a Portuguese fleet under Admiral Diego Lopez De Sequeira sailed into Malacca- the first European fleet to have ever dropped anchor into Malay waters That moment was to become a dramatic crossroads in the history of the Malay Peninsular and ultimately the fate of all eastern Asia More of this later

Life in the Malacca Sultanate The following description conveys the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the port and city of which our ancestors formed a resident and constituent part

ldquoAs a centre for trade the port of Melaka (Malacca) was a good harbour complete with godown facilities to store goods Foreign traders from different countries lived in separate residential areas As a result the port drew Chinese junks Moslem merchants Javanese Bengalis and Arabs Merchants from Persia India and the Indonesian regions also flocked to Melaka every year

11

Goods from the East and the West were sold in Melaka through out the seasons

rdquoThere were also Armenians Venetians and Turks who came through the Indian ports of Surat and Cambay which were major markets linked to Melakardquo ldquoThe long journey from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and then to Melaka took 18 months and the trips were full of danger The Venetians were aware of these dangers Their trade between Indian ports and Melaka was conducted mainly by Indian merchants and only a few Venetians were able to penetrate the Melaka trade Occasionally Indian merchants persuaded the Venetians to carry their goods in European ships they also formed companies of merchants to sail to Melaka In these companies Gujeratis and Western traders sailed for Melaka in March On their return journey they stopped in the Maldives Islands to trade with the localsrdquo httpeprintsusmmy90451EUROPEAN_TRADERS_IN_REGIONAL_TRAD

E_OF_MALAY ARCHIPELAGO_1681_to 1792pdf YEOH LIAN HEOH

It may be noted from the preceding that there was continuous Tamil involvement in the affairs of Malacca by way of business religion and politics It was common for both international and local alliances whether for political or religious purposes to be forged by marriage More than one Sultan had Tamil ancestry I suspect that If Tun Sri Lanang the compiler

10 of the Sejarah

Melayu had had an Hindu chronographer to assist him we might have had an equally intriguing recital of involvement of the Hindu Tamils the ancestors of our Chetty Malacca It seems that at the beginning they were in the ascendant There is mention that one of our ancestors was in fact made Shah Bandar or port-master of Malacca ndash probably at the beginning in the time of Parameswara when he depended on them The Sejarah Melayu narrative also makes reference to prominent Klings

11 who were wealthy and well thought of

From the context they seemed to be Hindu Tamils Among those mentioned was a ldquokelinger who settled in Malacca and became Shahbender or chief 0f port and he was named Raja Mudeliarrdquo I could not ascertain whether this was one and the same as the earlier report Another ldquokelingerrdquo Ilu Menu Nayen by name and a shopkeeper by trade generously distributed gifts on festive occasions There is no explicit reference anywhere that the Tamil Hindus did actively support the Malay Hindu opposition However what seems clear is that their rivals the Tamil Muslims swept the field politically and tried to dominate trade It is not hard to imagine that our ancestors were quite cheesed off in the end There is no specific information available but it may be imagined that our ancestors continued otherwise to engage in their maritime trade during the Sultanate still plying between the Coramandel and Malacca as the Hindu royal fleets still controlled the Indian Ocean at this time They might or might not have been carrying on regional entre-port activities as well They probably also controlled a fair share of the shore-based infrastructure having been first in the field including the supplies and services involved in chandlering There is no reason to suppose they did not continue to form an important backbone of the commercial strength of Malacca The Sejarah Melayu references certainly suggest that some at any rate were financially influential Despite the loss of leverage as the rivals merchants (Muslim Tamils and Gujeratis) dislodged our ancestors from their former positions of political influence it would appear that the Chetty Malacca survived thrived and shared in the prosperity of the sultanate We may note that notwithstanding the hot-house religious atmosphere permeating political and business affairs

10 The Sejarah Melayu is said to have been compiled around in 1621 in Johore at the behest of the

Sultan descendant of the last Malacca royal family and was completed in Aceh where Tun Sri Lanang was a prisoner 11 See Note 14 for a full statement on Klingsrdquo

12

by and large the ancestors of the Chetty Malacca they kept their faith It has remained the cornerstone of their identity to this day The question arises whether with the advent of Islam our ancestors began to experience difficulty in marrying Malay ladies I go along with the tenor of various descriptions of the time that the new religion may have taken many years to penetrate the population from royalty down to the common folk Customary norms and practices would have continued much as they were before The Official Website of Malacca states that Islam was made the official religion only in 1446 Thus we may suppose that our ancestors continued to marry locally with the Malay population in parallel with the growing nucleus of their own Chetty Malacca women Loss of their political position may have reduced their clout but they would still have been sufficiently well-off to support their charms Inter-marriage seems to have been quite the thing at all levels in Malacca judging by the Sejarah Melayu and has continued to be popular ever since We may observe that the Chinese Peranakan would also have grown over the same period As has been well established over the years since our ancestors have never been adverse to the charms of Peranakan women and married them freely And so our ancestry would have continued to enrichen during the time of the sultanate There were as yet no Eurasians

Portuguese Malacca The Chetty Malacca prosper The first contact by the Portuguese with Malacca was in 1509 as mentioned earlier They would not have inspired joy and celebration among the Malays because the Portuguese‟s ships were loaded with cannon and their men armed to the teeth It was perhaps already common seafaring knowledge that they had appeared still smoking from their capture of Goa not many months before and that their mission was conquest of strategic trade routes In any case the Gujerat merchants are said to have instigated against them They would have reported the Portuguese‟s hostility to Islam from their warfare they conducted on the west coast of India Thus while the visit was overtly exploratory and to open trade relations the Malays had every reason to look with suspicion upon them In the upshot the expedition was captured and imprisoned In June 1511 Alfonso dAlbuquerque Viceroy of all the Portuguese in the East arrived at Malacca from Goa with the entire army and navy of Portuguese India made up of 19 ships 800 European men and 600 natives (Indians)

ldquoAlbuquerque on arrival immediately demanded the rescue of the Portuguese The Sultan tried to gain time to strengthen the town defenses He was well aware of the small number of Portuguese troops and was confident on his powerful army of 20000 men and 2000 guns

Albuquerque wasted no time At dawn of 25 July 1511 the Portuguese attacked the town concentrating the assault on the bridge on the river dividing the town After a fierce battle the bridge was conquered but at nightfall they were forced to retreat After some days of preparations on 10 August 1511 the Portuguese renewed the attack Albuquerque had the assistance of some Chinese junks that were anchored in the port The use of a junk offered by the Chinese merchants was decisive as this junk was used as a bridgehead This time the attack was successful in establishing a bridgehead in the town There were then several days of siege in which the Portuguese bombarded the city On 24 August 1511 the Portuguese again attacked only to discover that the Sultan had escaped With Malacca now in Portuguese hands they sacked the town but following Albuquerque‟s orders they respected the property of those who sided with them

B W Diffie and G D Winius in the book Foundations of the Portuguese Empire 1415-1580 write the capture of Asias greatest trading city by a mere 900 Portuguese and 200 Indians must rank as an event in the history of

13

European expansion no less stunning than the better known conquest of Tenochtitlan by Hernando Corteacutes

httpwwwcolonialvoyagecomengasiamalaysiamalaccaportuguesehtml

As has been said before whoever controlled Malacca controlled the Straits Malacca became a key guardian of the Portuguese‟s spice route This strategic function was the principal reason for its capture besides the prize of a glittering port and the capital of the then greatest empire in the region Over the next one hundred and thirty years Malacca continued to reign in this role but now under the Portuguese It was not by any means a peaceful time From his base at Johore the former Sultan of Malacca and his successors repeatedly attacked Malacca in 1517 1520 1521 and in 1525 At last in 1583 a peace treaty was signed Malacca was also repeatedly under siege in 1550 1567 1571 this time by Johore and Aceh A major sea attack by Johore in 1587 was only overcome by re-enforcements from Goa The prize and obsession that Malacca was to the Dutch may be gathered by the fact that with only its third voyage out the VOC launched an attack on it in 1606 in alliance with Johore - just four years after the company‟s formation It would be the first of many To defend themselves from the surrounding Malay kingdoms who were still smarting from the loss of their prized port to the infidel Christians the Portuguese immediately set about building a citadel on the east bank of the Malacca River the site of the Sultan‟s former istana This fortification was called A Famosa meaning The Famous) and was finished in November 1511 On the hill rising behind the fort the Portuguese built their houses the governors palace and their churches while the Asian population of traders of many nations lived on the opposite bank of the riverThe Portuguese proceeded to surround their settlement with a walled fortress (Fortaleza de Malacca) This encompassed the hill and over-looked the harbour This fortress in its final form had 6 Bastions and 4 Gates It was completed in 1588 Soon after the conquest Ruy de Brito Patalim was appointed Captain of the Fortaleza de Malacca and about 500 Portuguese soldiers were left as garrison Albuquerque established a new administration minted a new currency and built a wooden chapel on the hill Adjoining the citadel a stone church dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Anunciada was erected in 1521 and later re-dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Assumpccedilatildeo On 4 February 1558 this church was consecrated as a Cathedral Many Portuguese casados mostly artisans merchants or farmers settled in Malacca In 1532 the Confraria da Misericoacuterdia (Confraternity of Mercy) was founded and a wooden hospital for the poor was also built In 1545 Saint Francis Xavier visited Malacca on the first of his five sojourns in the city Malacca was used as his base in the East and from there he attempted to get permission to travel to China In 1548 he set up the first school in Malacca named St Pauls College for the Portuguese Catholics and newly converted locals 1552 the camara (Municipal Council) of Malacca was set up In 1553 Saint Francis Xavier died on Sancian island His body was buried in St Pauls Church for nine months then transferred to Goa An early report during this period suggested that Malacca continued to be a cosmopolitan metropolis under the Portuguese with a population of over 50000 some 84 languages could be heard according to one count (Pires 1510 Summa Oriental) It should be mentioned that Malacca also had a slave population A report somewhere suggested that previously the Sultan had had about 3000 slaves Slaves were a widespread and marketable commodity They comprised those captured as the prize of war jungle tribes and unprotected micro-communities captured by raids people sentenced to slavery and of course people bought and sold in the slave markets They served in a wide range of jobs from domestic servants to agricultural and menial workers No doubt The Portuguese captured a good handful of slaves at the fall of Malacca

13

European expansion no less stunning than the better known conquest of Tenochtitlan by Hernando Corteacutes

httpwwwcolonialvoyagecomengasiamalaysiamalaccaportuguesehtml

As has been said before whoever controlled Malacca controlled the Straits Malacca became a key guardian of the Portuguese‟s spice route This strategic function was the principal reason for its capture besides the prize of a glittering port and the capital of the then greatest empire in the region Over the next one hundred and thirty years Malacca continued to reign in this role but now under the Portuguese It was not by any means a peaceful time From his base at Johore the former Sultan of Malacca and his successors repeatedly attacked Malacca in 1517 1520 1521 and in 1525 At last in 1583 a peace treaty was signed Malacca was also repeatedly under siege in 1550 1567 1571 this time by Johore and Aceh A major sea attack by Johore in 1587 was only overcome by re-enforcements from Goa The prize and obsession that Malacca was to the Dutch may be gathered by the fact that with only its third voyage out the VOC launched an attack on it in 1606 in alliance with Johore - just four years after the company‟s formation It would be the first of many To defend themselves from the surrounding Malay kingdoms who were still smarting from the loss of their prized port to the infidel Christians the Portuguese immediately set about building a citadel on the east bank of the Malacca River the site of the Sultan‟s former istana This fortification was called A Famosa meaning The Famous) and was finished in November 1511 On the hill rising behind the fort the Portuguese built their houses the governors palace and their churches while the Asian population of traders of many nations lived on the opposite bank of the riverThe Portuguese proceeded to surround their settlement with a walled fortress (Fortaleza de Malacca) This encompassed the hill and over-looked the harbour This fortress in its final form had 6 Bastions and 4 Gates It was completed in 1588 Soon after the conquest Ruy de Brito Patalim was appointed Captain of the Fortaleza de Malacca and about 500 Portuguese soldiers were left as garrison Albuquerque established a new administration minted a new currency and built a wooden chapel on the hill Adjoining the citadel a stone church dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Anunciada was erected in 1521 and later re-dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Assumpccedilatildeo On 4 February 1558 this church was consecrated as a Cathedral Many Portuguese casados mostly artisans merchants or farmers settled in Malacca In 1532 the Confraria da Misericoacuterdia (Confraternity of Mercy) was founded and a wooden hospital for the poor was also built In 1545 Saint Francis Xavier visited Malacca on the first of his five sojourns in the city Malacca was used as his base in the East and from there he attempted to get permission to travel to China In 1548 he set up the first school in Malacca named St Pauls College for the Portuguese Catholics and newly converted locals 1552 the camara (Municipal Council) of Malacca was set up In 1553 Saint Francis Xavier died on Sancian island His body was buried in St Pauls Church for nine months then transferred to Goa An early report during this period suggested that Malacca continued to be a cosmopolitan metropolis under the Portuguese with a population of over 50000 some 84 languages could be heard according to one count (Pires 1510 Summa Oriental) It should be mentioned that Malacca also had a slave population A report somewhere suggested that previously the Sultan had had about 3000 slaves Slaves were a widespread and marketable commodity They comprised those captured as the prize of war jungle tribes and unprotected micro-communities captured by raids people sentenced to slavery and of course people bought and sold in the slave markets They served in a wide range of jobs from domestic servants to agricultural and menial workers No doubt The Portuguese captured a good handful of slaves at the fall of Malacca

14

When the Portuguese attacked Malacca the Tamil Hindus stayed neutral But one faction led by Naina Chetty supported the invaders against the local Muslim alliance It is because of this that the Portuguese did not destroy their property and generally showed the Chetty Malacca favour It is further reported that Naina Chetty was granted the appointment of Bendahara (Chief Minister) but with less power than his predecessors under the Sultans This office was held by his family for some time I read no specific reports but we may imagine that the Jawi Pekan lost their positions of influence In fact they seem to fade from the history of Malacca

In this milieu the ancestors the Chetty Malacca prospered We may begin to say that the community had by now established their identity as Chetty Malacca and we shall begin talking of them as such There is no indication that they owned slaves but it could be expected at least the more well to do and those in business did Slavery was common in India and they could have brought their own slaves over It is reported that the Chetty Malacca grew in wealth and owned and occupied the best residential properties in preferred suburbs across the river from the fort including what was later to be named Hereen Street by the Dutch and in adjacent Tranquerah Here‟s peep into what it was like

ldquoTranqueira

Tranqueira was the most important suburb of Malacca The suburb was rectangular in shape with a northern walled boundary the straits of Malacca to the south and the river of Malacca (Rio de Malaca) and the fortalezas wall to the east It was the main residential quarters of the city However in war the residence of the quarters would be evacuated to the fortress Tranqueira was divided into a further two parishes Satildeo Tomeacute and Satildeo Estecircvatildeo The parish of STomeacute was called Campon Chelim (Kampung Keling in Malay) It was described that this area was populated by the Chelis of Choromandel The other suburb of Satildeo Estecircvatildeo was also called Campon China (Kampung Cina) (Chelis = Chetty Malacca)

Ereacutedia described the houses as made of timber but roofed by tiles A stone bridge with sentry crosses the river Malacca to provide access to the Malacca Fortress via the eastern Custome House Terrace The center of trade of the city was also located in Tranqueira near the beach on the mouth of the river called the Bazaar of the Jaos (JowoJawa ie Javanese)

Emanuel Godinho de Ereacutedia httpenwikipediaorgwikiPortuguese_Malacca

While the community took identity fully as Chetty Malacca and grew as surely as the Portuguese Eurasians and the Chinese Peranakans did there was also attrition for in individual cases some would have converted to Christianity or Islam to win their lady of choice It is in fact reported that the mosque in Temple Street alongside the Chetty Malacca Hindu temple was built by Chetty Malaca converts to Islam

It has to be remembered that all the above happened in the distant past ndash well before the British East India Company (EIC) or the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) were born in 1600 and 1602 respectively There were other visiting Indian traders They included a sizeable number of merchants from Gujerat a Muslim state in West India the original traders in spices supplying Europe through Venice I was curious not finding communities of local domicile of these Indians counterpart to the Chetty Malacca My own take on this is that they did indeed marry and were easily assimilated into the local Malay Muslim communities Even up to today Indian Muslims marry freely with Malays and their children more often than not identify themselves as Malay Mohamed Mahathir the former Prime Minster of Malaysia was I am told of Indian ancestry but

15

called himself Malay The one reference I did find of a reference again to the Jawi Pekan They were Indian Muslims who married Malay women but maintained a separate identity Apparently they were affluent retained their own culture and practised their own form of Islam Apart from their role in sultanate times they arose mainly in Penang in British times some two hundred years in the future As might be expected over time the Tamil Hindu community brought over their artisans domestics and menial workers who themselves built local families This accounted for the stratification by economic class and wealth of the Chetty Malacca community even discernable these days While slaves were caught and sold in abundance in India to slave traders I have so far not heard that it was the practice for families and businesses to have domestic slaves working for them The caste system did pretty well in their place So I conclude they did not bring slaves over to Malacca A factor consolidating the local community was that local wives and families were not assimalable into the structure of Indian society even if brought back to India There was therefore no point The two worlds remained happily apart Finally history intervened again to seal the processes with the conquest of the last Coramandel Hindu Kingdom (Vijayanagar) by Muslim conquerors in 1642 Contact with their homeland was progressively severed their ships not longer enjoyed the protection of the Hindu royal fleets and they lost their maritime trade The Hindu merchants in fact began to lease or sell their ships to the Muslims and looked for solace in the ready arms of their local partners and landwards for their economic future This did not mean some of them did not sneak back to enjoy double marital bliss But even before this strand of events could reach its termination Malacca was conquered by the Dutch in 1641 That event was to truncate and transform everything According to the Tamil-English Dictionary by V Visvanatha Pillai the word setu means merchant This is thought to be the genesis of chitty Our ancestors therefore became known as Chitty Malacca - Chetty Malaca in our more natural local Malay colloquial language This has been supported by the fact that the Gujeratis called their higher echelon merchants classes ldquosertjisrdquo This was no doubt to measure up socially with the Chetty Malacca There is no better proof of human nature than human vanity We in turn always take pains to point out that we are totally different from (albeit much poorer as a whole than) the Tamil chettiars who came in at a later time and who were and still are familiar to our brethren in modern Malaysia as their clients in their professional business of money-lending At the turn of the century the population of Malacca was variously estimated at 20000 Eredia estimated that the Christian population in 1613 was as around 7400 Most of these would have been Eurasians (mesticcedilos) or Orang Serani (Christangs) as they came to be called The Portuguese married easily into the local communicates as they were about to do in Brazil facilitated by the Catholic Church which would in any case have insisted upon baptising the children Conversion and marriage was also the route for slaves to attain freedom By this time the Eurasians had had 100 years to create their own community There were eight parishes in the town I have no figures but judging by the fact that our ancestors had a hundred years head-start on the Eurasians we can conclude that the Chetty Malacca population should have been at least not less than that of the Christians taking into account that the Eurasians would be more advantageously placed by their affinity to the ruling power in securing brides Most of the others would have been Peranakans Chinese I have not checked out the parallel history of the Peranakan Chinese but I would say their numbers were always greater than that of the Christians It is probably true that the Malays by and large stayed out of town and were mostly not counted as part of the city‟s population I did not find any reference to any Malay elite in upper colonial society If during Portuguese times our ancestors found it harder to marry Malay ladies it could have been because of the latter reason and also because the Malays had by and large moved out of town into the kampong The figures I quote are from different sources were estimates and don‟t add up My aim is solely to give an impression of the broad ranges and relative proportions of the people including the Chetty Malacca

16

Enter the Dutch Formed in 1602 The Dutch East India Company or VOC was a joint stock company operating under the protection of the Dutch Republic From the outset the VOC set out to capture the monopoly of the spice trade The meant the source territories the trading posts entre-ports and the international route Among their prime targets was Malacca One of their first actions was to take over the Portuguese fort of Ambon in the heart of the Moluccas in 1604 They founded the first Dutch permanent trading post in Bantem West Java in 1611 and in 1619 it established Batavia (now Jakarta) as their permanent capital After an initial scramble for trading posts the newly formed British East Indian Company (EIC) withdrew and left the islands to the Dutch The latter proceeded to complete their conquests of the ocean routes in style They captured Galle and Colombo in Ceylon

12 from the Portuguese in 1640 and

1658 respectively In 1641 after 6 months‟ siege in alliance with the Sultan of Johore they captured Malacca rdquothe Pearl of the Portuguese Crownrdquo as they called it In 1643 they replaced the Portuguese on Dejima island in Nagasaki Bay Japan In India they took Negapatnam (Coromandel) in 1657 and Cochin (Malabar) in 1663 However repeated efforts to take Goa failed The Dutch were to go on to establish control of Formosa and Mauritius and set up other trading posts in Persia Siam and China In passing they established a victualling out-post at the Cape of Good Hope The last together with Mauritius enabled their ships to re-supply and opened up their own direct access from and to Europe The VOC also developed a growing intra-Asian trade as well as plantations in Formosa and the East Indies The VOC was enormously successful and became the largest and most powerful trading company in the world

Battle of Cape Rachado Ever since I was small I had heard tell that once upon a time there was a great big sea battle just over the horizon slightly to the west off Tanjong Kling Indeed this was the Battle of Cape Rachado It is a tale close to my heart so I make no bones about describing it in detail here Those not interested may skip this section But I can tell you it was a spectacular battle overshadowing the other famous battle in this area the Sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse on 10 December 1941 On 12 May 1605 the third fleet of the VOC to visit the archipelago sailed out of Holland Comprising an armada of 11 ships commanded by Cornelis Matelief de Jonge its mission kept secret even from the sailors was to seize Malacca They passed Malacca on 30 April 1606 and arrived at Johor on 1 May 1606 where de Jonge proceeded to negotiate terms of alliance with Johor The pact was formally concluded on 17 May 1606 in which Johor agreed to a combined effort to attempt to dislodge the Portuguese Unlike the Portuguese the Dutch and Johor agreed to respect each others religion the Dutch would get to keep Malacca and the right to trade in Johor

On 4 August 1606 de Jonge started the offensive by besieging the fortress and city However the Dutch with only a small force could not afford a land offensive while their Johor allies were unsure of their ability against Malacca and did not fully commit their resources Events took a turn when on 14 August 1606 a Portuguese fleet from Goa arrived led by the Viceroy of Goa Dom Martim Afonso de Castro with a flotilla of 20 ships The siege was lifted when they engaged the VOC fleet off the Malaccan waters The two fleets traded cannon fire and the Portuguese ships began to move northward drawing the Dutch away from Malacca On 16 August 1606 off the Portuguese lighthouse at Cape Rachado the battle between the two fleets was joined After a couple of days of cannon duels on the morning of 18 August with the wind in favor of the Portuguese de Castro ordered the Portuguese to sail forth for the grapple De Jonge ordered his ships to turn and sail away to evade boarding However the VOC ship Nassau failed to turn quickly and ended up isolated The Portuguese dashed forth and

12

Conforming to editorial policy mentioned earlier I have kept the old place and country names

wherever applicable

16

Enter the Dutch Formed in 1602 The Dutch East India Company or VOC was a joint stock company operating under the protection of the Dutch Republic From the outset the VOC set out to capture the monopoly of the spice trade The meant the source territories the trading posts entre-ports and the international route Among their prime targets was Malacca One of their first actions was to take over the Portuguese fort of Ambon in the heart of the Moluccas in 1604 They founded the first Dutch permanent trading post in Bantem West Java in 1611 and in 1619 it established Batavia (now Jakarta) as their permanent capital After an initial scramble for trading posts the newly formed British East Indian Company (EIC) withdrew and left the islands to the Dutch The latter proceeded to complete their conquests of the ocean routes in style They captured Galle and Colombo in Ceylon

12 from the Portuguese in 1640 and

1658 respectively In 1641 after 6 months‟ siege in alliance with the Sultan of Johore they captured Malacca rdquothe Pearl of the Portuguese Crownrdquo as they called it In 1643 they replaced the Portuguese on Dejima island in Nagasaki Bay Japan In India they took Negapatnam (Coromandel) in 1657 and Cochin (Malabar) in 1663 However repeated efforts to take Goa failed The Dutch were to go on to establish control of Formosa and Mauritius and set up other trading posts in Persia Siam and China In passing they established a victualling out-post at the Cape of Good Hope The last together with Mauritius enabled their ships to re-supply and opened up their own direct access from and to Europe The VOC also developed a growing intra-Asian trade as well as plantations in Formosa and the East Indies The VOC was enormously successful and became the largest and most powerful trading company in the world

Battle of Cape Rachado Ever since I was small I had heard tell that once upon a time there was a great big sea battle just over the horizon slightly to the west off Tanjong Kling Indeed this was the Battle of Cape Rachado It is a tale close to my heart so I make no bones about describing it in detail here Those not interested may skip this section But I can tell you it was a spectacular battle overshadowing the other famous battle in this area the Sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse on 10 December 1941 On 12 May 1605 the third fleet of the VOC to visit the archipelago sailed out of Holland Comprising an armada of 11 ships commanded by Cornelis Matelief de Jonge its mission kept secret even from the sailors was to seize Malacca They passed Malacca on 30 April 1606 and arrived at Johor on 1 May 1606 where de Jonge proceeded to negotiate terms of alliance with Johor The pact was formally concluded on 17 May 1606 in which Johor agreed to a combined effort to attempt to dislodge the Portuguese Unlike the Portuguese the Dutch and Johor agreed to respect each others religion the Dutch would get to keep Malacca and the right to trade in Johor

On 4 August 1606 de Jonge started the offensive by besieging the fortress and city However the Dutch with only a small force could not afford a land offensive while their Johor allies were unsure of their ability against Malacca and did not fully commit their resources Events took a turn when on 14 August 1606 a Portuguese fleet from Goa arrived led by the Viceroy of Goa Dom Martim Afonso de Castro with a flotilla of 20 ships The siege was lifted when they engaged the VOC fleet off the Malaccan waters The two fleets traded cannon fire and the Portuguese ships began to move northward drawing the Dutch away from Malacca On 16 August 1606 off the Portuguese lighthouse at Cape Rachado the battle between the two fleets was joined After a couple of days of cannon duels on the morning of 18 August with the wind in favor of the Portuguese de Castro ordered the Portuguese to sail forth for the grapple De Jonge ordered his ships to turn and sail away to evade boarding However the VOC ship Nassau failed to turn quickly and ended up isolated The Portuguese dashed forth and

12

Conforming to editorial policy mentioned earlier I have kept the old place and country names

wherever applicable

17

boarded the Nassau De Jonge ordered his own ship the Oranje to quickly turn around to rescue the hapless Nassau but the awkward maneuver sent the Oranje into a collision with the Middelburg While the Dutch captains were busy disentangling their ships de Castros ship the Nossa Senhora da Conceicatildeo boarded the Nassau from the other side

In the meantime another Portuguese ship the Satildeo Salvador drove towards the entangled VOC ships and pierced headlong into the Middelburg but was immediately itself grappled by the Oranje from the side which was in turn rammed from its open side by the Nossa Senhora das Mercecircs The entangled duo had now become a quartet A furious battle raged between the hopelessly entangled ships with point-blank cannonades quickly setting the ships ablaze Into this confusion entered the galleon of Dom Duarte de Guerra who sought to toss a line to help tow the des Merces away from the burning Oranje But the winds were unfavorable and instead the rescuer found itself drifting straight across the bows of the entangled ships Just then the Mauritius decided to join the fight and pierces Dom Duarte‟s ship from the other side The battle had reached its height in the sextet of burning interlocked ships Jonge deemed that the losses suffered were too much and ordered the Dutch fleet to disengage and abandon the fight The battle was won by the Portuguese but marked the beginning of a serious threat to their dominance

The Dutch arrived at the Johor River on 19 August 1606 Overall the Dutch lost Nassau and Middelburg 150 Dutch were killed and more wounded Johor allied losses amount to several hundred The Portuguese lost Satildeo Salvador and Dom Duarte de Guerras smaller galleon while

suffering 500 deaths (Portuguese and allies)

It was the biggest naval battle in the Malay Archipelago just off my hometown between two naval superpowers of the time with 31 ships involved (11 of the Dutch VOC and 20 of the Portuguese) Although the battle ended with a Portuguese victory the ferocity of the battle itself and the losses sustained by the victor convinced the Sultanate of Johor to provide supplies support and later on much needed ground forces to the Dutch

The Portuguese victory came to naught when the Dutch having repaired their ships returned to Malacca two months later to find the Portuguese fleet having left leaving only 10 ships behind The Dutch subsequently sank all 10 ships The last must have been clear writing on the wall of what was to come coupled with the news of the Dutch activities in the region One commentator has remarked that had de Jonge won Malacca would have become the VOC capital not Batavia

Fall of Malacca Near Extinction of the Chetty Malacca The Dutch made several fruitless attacks on Malacca between 1623 and 1627 It would be less than 10 years on that the Dutch would begin their final blockage from about 1633 This led to the siege and assault which started in Jun 1640 and the capture of Malacca on 15 January 1641 I did not read anywhere that there was a Portuguese naval rescue forthcoming nor indeed did one arrive By the time of the final blockage it may be presumed that the visiting population of traders would have come down to a trickle and most expatriates and wealthy foreign-domiciles such as the Chinese Indians and Arabs would have left At that point the local population would have concluded on their own that there was not going to be another Portuguese armada to rescue them Perhaps some wealthier and better connected Chetty Malacca left as well It is hard to imagine where the average Chetty Malacca would have gone If they did go it must be presumed that they insinuated themselves into the surrounding Malay states while those with shipping and influence might have emigrated to other parts of the archipelago belonging to the Portuguese Dutch or Malays perhaps to India But there are no historical records or traces of them being elsewhere In a century from now micro-research around Malaysia Indonesia and perhaps India may unearth linguistic and other connections Overall I have always felt that the Chetty Malacca have strong cohesion and respond to good leadership There is no reason to

18

suppose this was not the case then Their community leaders backed by the Hindu establishment would have protected them and guided them how to evaluate and respond to the coming invasion If they stayed they were in for apocalyptic levels of experience of war starvation disease and devastation which would in the end eradicate and exterminate most of them as far as I can see At the time of the final Dutch attack it is reported that there were in Malacca a garrison of about 50 Portuguese soldiers more than 300 Portuguese casados (Portuguese men settled in Malacca) with their families and 2000 or 3000 ldquomesticcedilosrdquo (Eurasians) and Native inhabitants It must be presumed that the last would have included our dear ancestors and the Chinese Peranakans probably again in proportionate numbers of about 1500 to 1000 It may be presumed that slaves were not invited into the garrison

The last attack on Portuguese Malacca was begun in June 1640 The Dutch force consisted of 2063 men including over 400 natives 12 Dutch ships and 6 sloops At first the Dutch bombard from the sea and cut off seaward communications

Twelve ships and six boats in half-moon formation blockaded the shore to cut off supplies keeping a cannonade to which the Portuguese Governor of Malacca Manuel de Souza Countinho replied bravely and patiently with his heavy guns At the end of July 1640 Johor sent a fleet of 40 sails carrying about 1500 men and on 2nd August the Dutch commander Antonissoon having as many men again partly Dutch partly German landed his combined forces north of Tranquerah They expelled several hundreds of the Portuguese troops from the first bastion entered Tranquerah and drove the defenders back into the Fortress Within a pistol shot of A Famosa the Dutch erected two batteries with sixteen 24 pounders which made breaches in the strong bastion and damaged the great Keep St Pauls Church and many other large buildings within the Fortress were damaged beyond recognition In reply the heavy Portuguese guns on St Pauls Hill left not one house in the Dutch occupied zones in Tranquerah intact During the battle the Johor forces destroyed the paddy fields fruit and vegetable gardens in Malacca and helped maintain a constant blockade at sea so that they frustrated the repeated attempts of Portuguese boats to get through

httpwwwcolonialvoyagecomengasiamalaysiamalaccaportuguesehtml

Some supplies did come through and Malacca survived the siege but the situation was growing desperate There was no food The hounds of famine and disease were upon them

The ensuing famine inside the walled settlement and fortress as well as in Melaka‟s sprawling suburbs was severe house pets rats and mice ndash dead or alive ndash fetched exorbitant prices as did chicken and uncooked rice providing they could even be obtained So did leather from shoes and discarded tools One story even has women digging up the bodies of their dead babies from the graveyard for food Those who managed to survive starvation were swept away in the hundreds by dysentery and the plague Just days before the surrender the Portuguese expelled women and children the sick and the old outside the city gates The expellees quickly found their way into the camp of VOC infecting the Dutch soldiers with the plague Within weeks the fatal disease had carried away two leading military officers unleashed confusion in the military campaign demoralized Dutch troops and inevitably threatened the very success of the protracted and costly military enterprise

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

On 14 January 1641 Dutch commander Willmsoon Kartekoe ordered the last desperate assault The Portuguese defenders made a fierce final resistance in the Fortaleza Velha and

19

the Dutch were finally driven back The two commanders then sued for an honourable truce with Malacca falling to the Dutch while the Portuguese gained safe passage to Nagapatnam then still in their hands

The price of Dutch the conquest was high in almost every respect The damage to the city from artillery shelling was considerable The suburbs to the north and south of the fortress were almost completely destroyed by fires (deliberately set by the Portuguese) Within the walled settlement many if not most of the buildings suffered serious damage As Special Commissioner Joost (Justus) van Schouten‟s detailed report completed in September 1641 bluntly remarks ldquoAll the houses have suffered from leakages and many including some very fine buildings will soon come down entirely if they are not repaired quickly For some buildings it was too late Several structures caved in during repair and salvaging works burying and killing Company slaves on site

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

Over half of the Dutch forces were lost through the war but mainly through malaria dysentery and the plague

Portuguese Melaka was not so much brought down by Dutch military might and the bravery of soldiers fighting under the Company‟s command as what I shall refer to here as the ldquoBlack Trinityrdquo namely war famine and disease

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

On the Portuguese side the number of survivors was small and the statistics were chaotic

Dagh-Register Batavia (1640-41) entry for 28 February 1641 p 201 estimated an original population ldquoinside and outside the cityrdquo at twenty thousand and the number of survivors at about 1500-1600 The concrete figures provided by the official VOC census are as follows 52 Portuguese casados and their families and seven members of the Roman Catholic clergy (ominously listed as clergymen with their family) a total of 261 Portuguese subjects and mesticcedilos remained within the city walls Added to the population of Melaka‟s suburbs and the household slaves the figure rises to 863 souls But these figures are hardly reliable as the official VOC documentations speaks of Dutchmen marrying Portuguese widows and more widows being taken slaves by the ldquoMalaysrdquo It is lamented that the ldquoMalaysrdquo have received more than they deserve besides the big profit made by appropriating thousands of Christian slaves during and after the siege while the saletes (orang laut) are blamed for enslaving a great number of ldquoMalaccansrdquo

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

Hardly anyone was left alive of the individual local communities If we interpret the VOC census figures correctly the headcount of survivors was 1123 of whom 261 were within the walls and 863 in the suburbs Of the former 59 were Portuguese and clergy leaving 202 who were apparently mainly mesticcedilos (Eurasians)This leaves us to divide the 863 outside the walls into mainly Peranakan Chinese say 500 Chetty Malacca say 300 and so as not to lose sight of them 63 slaves Of the Chetty Malacca we cannot tell whether they were merchants artisans or domestics What we can tell is that we are all descended from these few survivors the equivalent of some 30 families of 10 each who paid hell for their right to be our forebears The later infusions if any would have been few and far between as far as I can make out It may be presumed that the better connected Chetty Malacca were able to get themselves behind the walls of the Fortaleza the rest would have perished if they had not taken to the bushes and

20

been saved by their fellow-Malaccan Malay friends perhaps relatives of wives and daughters-in-law perhaps grand-parents

Dutch Re-Construction of Malacca The Dutch took Malacca not for its entre-port trade but to secure control of the Straits But there was also the trade of Asia‟s biggest port to look forward to And there were its fabled riches to be plundered and slaves to be picked up Except for the strategic location the final cost was beyond calculation and probably beyond the benefits Here‟s an account

Firstly the citadel bdquoA Famosa‟ was completely destroyed and the Fortaleza Velha was almost wholly erased by the Dutch bombardments As the guardian of the Straits Malacca was neutralized One commentator described the scene as ldquolike Jerusalem after the Romansrdquo The Dutch had to virtually rebuild the fort In fact they did just that and expanded it They added two more Bastions and raised and completed the walls in many places The crest that one sees on the only remnant portion today namely Porta de Santiago is the VOC crest They even re-named the parts of the fortress The job was not completed until 1588

Secondly when the Dutch landed in Tranquerah the Portuguese applied a scorched earth policy They put fire to everything ndash and that would have included all the woodndashand-tile homes of our ancestors To complete what the fire did not do the Portuguese then bombarded the suburbs to rubble when the Dutch encamped in Tranquerah and proceed to surround them As a result of their blitzkrieg -

ldquoThe suburbs are entirely ruined There is hardly a house standing All the dwelling places on both sides of the [Melaka] river are also totally destroyedrdquo

Leupe ldquoThe Siege and Capture of Malaccardquo p 113

A modern commentator might have said ldquojust like Sendai after the Tsunamirdquo The population had to rebuild their homes from the ashes This was not made easier by the fact that the Dutch commandeered all the slaves for re-building the fortifications and other civil works The latter would have included purging the town clean restoring public health support getting the port working again and putting the administration in place They did so with remarkable expedition for the Stadthyus the government offices and the Governor‟s residence was completed by 1651 and it still stands today among Malacca‟s proudest historical monuments

Thirdly there was the question of plunder By custom free plunder was allowed for the first day but it lasted for several days totally out of control with solders and allies killing one another for booty In the upshot little was officially recovered It appeared the Portuguese managed to take away much of their wealth It was further presumed rightly I think that much was hidden or buried I am sure our ancestral grandmothers buried all their gold and jewels and told one another and the temple priests where in case they died Otherwise our ancestors could not have rebuilt themselves at all and would have been candidates to be slaves

Fourthly a port without trade and ships is a dead port But the port facilities had to be restored Traffic resumed only slowly The Dutch‟s objective was that the new Malacca should be encompassed within the regulations restrictions and monopolies of the Dutch system but they were forced to allow continuity of some of the past free trade past to stimulate commerce However Malacca would not be allowed under any circumstances to outdo Batavia This set a natural limit to its recovery Asian continental and region ships did begin re-appear but only a fraction of former volumes

21

And finally there were the problems of the local population On the one had the city needed the locals to activate the functions of the port-city On the other hand each group had separate needs

Dutch and the Portuguese Eurasians

Of first importance the Dutch needed to win over the Portuguese Eurasians to become their natural allies and hand-mates in running the place The former were of course Catholics On the other hand the Dutch Reformed Church was intolerant of other religions especially Catholics At first the provisions against priests of other religions were rarely enforced in a strict sense But the Catholic priests who visited Malacca still regarded the Dutch as the heretical enemy and they encouraged their flock to resist Due to continuing subversion in 1665 the Dutch decreed that all Catholic priests were banned from entering Malacca and all forms of public preaching for the Roman Catholic faith were to cease By 1666 Governor Balthasar Bort began to strictly enforce his anti-Catholic legislation

The Portuguese Eurasians in turn formed the ldquoIrmaos de Igrejardquo (Brothers of the Church) a secret brotherhood of lay-people to ensure the continuance of Catholicism in Malacca A French Jesuit bound for China who visited Malacca in 1698 wrote that Catholics are obliged to go far into the interior of the forest to celebrate the sacred mysteries (ie Mass) Dutch persecutions against Roman Catholics were still adhered to up to the end of the 17th century

The Dutch did not look with contempt upon the Portuguese Eurasians In fact they regarded them as the natural Malaccans The Portuguese Eurasians remaining after 1641 together with their Portuguese-speaking slaves and their progeny subsequently became the backbone of the ldquoPortugueserdquo community in Dutch Melaka From 1702 and the Dutch administration began to take on a more liberal outlook towards the Catholics there applying a policy of regulated tolerance The Dutch were to adopt this throughout the islands They also soon reversed the policy of imposing the Dutch language and accepted Portuguese and the local Malay patois as the language of everyday life Soon the divides became irrelevant as the Dutch inter-married with the Portuguese Eurasians and proceeded to create a loyal Dutch Eurasian community both Protestant and Catholic in addition to the by now loyal Portuguese Eurasians In the long years of Portuguese rule every marching and missionary order of the Catholic Church set up an outpost monastery convent house hospital or church in Malacca - which became the springboard of missionary work in East Asia The story of St Francis Xavier is well-known My father I and Leslie bear his name The following excerpt gives a realistic picture of what the Dutch found

ldquoFirst in view of the severely reduced size of the Catholic population surviving in Melaka and its immediate surroundings the majority of monasteries and churches would be closed and converted to other functions The Franciscan monastery and the monastery of Santo Antonio were singled out for conversion to residences and a boarding house for Company slaves The two parish churches Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe and St Jeronimo could be repaired ldquobut are of no use to the Company unless they are made into residencesrdquo The Dominican monastery was slated to become a hospital the Jesuit monastery ldquoa school and library as it is in a secluded and quiet placerdquo and the church of the Misericordia was to be converted for future use by Dutch Protestants The Church of St Paul‟s had already been used by the Dutch Protestant community As for the main Cathedral some of the walls were reported to feature large cracks thus rendering parts of the building unsalvageable For this reason parts of the Cathedral were torn down and the remainder transformed into an arsenal This was an undignified end to what was under Portuguese rule the undisputed centre of Melaka‟s Roman Catholic spiritualityrdquo

22

ldquoAll these clergymen lived on alms tolls by burying the dead performing ordinary or requiem mass and other church servicesrdquo And ldquo[T]he monastery [of St Paul] was very wealthy in houses and properties in and outside Malacca which were rented to foreigners It had also a few gardens two very big and beautiful orchards part of which was let and the other part was inhabited by its own slaves who were working that estate Considerable alms were collected always from the quick and the dead and consequently it was the wealthiest monastery in Malaccardquo

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

Soon after they won their ldquoreligious freedomrdquo around the year 1710 Catholics in Malacca built the Church of St Peters at Bunga Raya located just outside the town on land donated by the Dutchman Maryber Franz Amboer It is where my father and I were baptised Around the same time the Catholics in Malacca established the Chapel of the Holy Rosary located along the river bank in Bunga Raya The Dutch for their part had taken over the church on the hill behind the fort and re-named it St Paul‟s Church as well as another Portuguese church destroyed by the was near the river They built Christ Church in 1753

Resettlement of the Chetty Malacca Apart from religion the Dutch grasped the need for fair treatment of the inhabitants both locals and foreigners to revive economic life One recommendation was ldquoTo pacify the Portuguese and black burghers placards should be posted in the name of the Governor General declaring that all inhabitants may retain their possessions and properties in safety Such a declaration will make them more confident and they will start working for their living and the place will prosperrdquo This however ran counter to another recommendation which read ldquoIn our opinion the best policy is to give all the houses landed properties and grounds on loan to the inhabitants of Malacca without distinction of nationality for a certain period after which rent should be paid at the fair price In this way the company would reap good benefit from the conquest of Malacca It is not clear which they adopted Judging from events it seems they did both In the upshot they re-settled the Chetty Malacca in an area off Gajah Berang and just outside Tranquerah designated as Kampong Tujoh (7

th Precinct) where our ancestors were

encouraged to take up agriculture Kampong Kling their prestigious former abode which had been utterly destroyed the Dutch re-named Kampong Belanda (Dutch Village) encompassing Heeren Street and Jonker Street for their own occupation In time the Chetty Malacca owned substantial tracks of Kampong Tujoh They could have bought these or been forced to trade their Kampong Kling properties for these However they had no tradition of agriculture and we are told that most of them soon abandoned it and moved back into the town to pursue urban trades and monthly paid jobs It was said they achieved some fame as goldsmiths Nowhere have I found what education they had and I presume none The civil service was thus denied to them both by the Portuguese and the Dutch Along the way they had lost their Tamil and only spoke the Malay patois of the market place

Dutch and other Communities Needless to say our ancestors would not have buckled under the proscriptions of their religion as at first meted out to the Portuguese Eurasians nor indeed would the Peranakan Chinese There is a brief report by another Jesuit priest that the Dutch did not forbid the exercise of their religions by indigenous peoples and other native groups First cut Internet searches did not reveal the numbers of Peranakan Chinese in Malacca or what they did by way of economic activity over the years both in Portuguese and Dutch times My impression is that they were always a larger community than the Chetty Malacca

21

And finally there were the problems of the local population On the one had the city needed the locals to activate the functions of the port-city On the other hand each group had separate needs

Dutch and the Portuguese Eurasians

Of first importance the Dutch needed to win over the Portuguese Eurasians to become their natural allies and hand-mates in running the place The former were of course Catholics On the other hand the Dutch Reformed Church was intolerant of other religions especially Catholics At first the provisions against priests of other religions were rarely enforced in a strict sense But the Catholic priests who visited Malacca still regarded the Dutch as the heretical enemy and they encouraged their flock to resist Due to continuing subversion in 1665 the Dutch decreed that all Catholic priests were banned from entering Malacca and all forms of public preaching for the Roman Catholic faith were to cease By 1666 Governor Balthasar Bort began to strictly enforce his anti-Catholic legislation

The Portuguese Eurasians in turn formed the ldquoIrmaos de Igrejardquo (Brothers of the Church) a secret brotherhood of lay-people to ensure the continuance of Catholicism in Malacca A French Jesuit bound for China who visited Malacca in 1698 wrote that Catholics are obliged to go far into the interior of the forest to celebrate the sacred mysteries (ie Mass) Dutch persecutions against Roman Catholics were still adhered to up to the end of the 17th century

The Dutch did not look with contempt upon the Portuguese Eurasians In fact they regarded them as the natural Malaccans The Portuguese Eurasians remaining after 1641 together with their Portuguese-speaking slaves and their progeny subsequently became the backbone of the ldquoPortugueserdquo community in Dutch Melaka From 1702 and the Dutch administration began to take on a more liberal outlook towards the Catholics there applying a policy of regulated tolerance The Dutch were to adopt this throughout the islands They also soon reversed the policy of imposing the Dutch language and accepted Portuguese and the local Malay patois as the language of everyday life Soon the divides became irrelevant as the Dutch inter-married with the Portuguese Eurasians and proceeded to create a loyal Dutch Eurasian community both Protestant and Catholic in addition to the by now loyal Portuguese Eurasians In the long years of Portuguese rule every marching and missionary order of the Catholic Church set up an outpost monastery convent house hospital or church in Malacca - which became the springboard of missionary work in East Asia The story of St Francis Xavier is well-known My father I and Leslie bear his name The following excerpt gives a realistic picture of what the Dutch found

ldquoFirst in view of the severely reduced size of the Catholic population surviving in Melaka and its immediate surroundings the majority of monasteries and churches would be closed and converted to other functions The Franciscan monastery and the monastery of Santo Antonio were singled out for conversion to residences and a boarding house for Company slaves The two parish churches Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe and St Jeronimo could be repaired ldquobut are of no use to the Company unless they are made into residencesrdquo The Dominican monastery was slated to become a hospital the Jesuit monastery ldquoa school and library as it is in a secluded and quiet placerdquo and the church of the Misericordia was to be converted for future use by Dutch Protestants The Church of St Paul‟s had already been used by the Dutch Protestant community As for the main Cathedral some of the walls were reported to feature large cracks thus rendering parts of the building unsalvageable For this reason parts of the Cathedral were torn down and the remainder transformed into an arsenal This was an undignified end to what was under Portuguese rule the undisputed centre of Melaka‟s Roman Catholic spiritualityrdquo

22

ldquoAll these clergymen lived on alms tolls by burying the dead performing ordinary or requiem mass and other church servicesrdquo And ldquo[T]he monastery [of St Paul] was very wealthy in houses and properties in and outside Malacca which were rented to foreigners It had also a few gardens two very big and beautiful orchards part of which was let and the other part was inhabited by its own slaves who were working that estate Considerable alms were collected always from the quick and the dead and consequently it was the wealthiest monastery in Malaccardquo

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

Soon after they won their ldquoreligious freedomrdquo around the year 1710 Catholics in Malacca built the Church of St Peters at Bunga Raya located just outside the town on land donated by the Dutchman Maryber Franz Amboer It is where my father and I were baptised Around the same time the Catholics in Malacca established the Chapel of the Holy Rosary located along the river bank in Bunga Raya The Dutch for their part had taken over the church on the hill behind the fort and re-named it St Paul‟s Church as well as another Portuguese church destroyed by the was near the river They built Christ Church in 1753

Resettlement of the Chetty Malacca Apart from religion the Dutch grasped the need for fair treatment of the inhabitants both locals and foreigners to revive economic life One recommendation was ldquoTo pacify the Portuguese and black burghers placards should be posted in the name of the Governor General declaring that all inhabitants may retain their possessions and properties in safety Such a declaration will make them more confident and they will start working for their living and the place will prosperrdquo This however ran counter to another recommendation which read ldquoIn our opinion the best policy is to give all the houses landed properties and grounds on loan to the inhabitants of Malacca without distinction of nationality for a certain period after which rent should be paid at the fair price In this way the company would reap good benefit from the conquest of Malacca It is not clear which they adopted Judging from events it seems they did both In the upshot they re-settled the Chetty Malacca in an area off Gajah Berang and just outside Tranquerah designated as Kampong Tujoh (7

th Precinct) where our ancestors were

encouraged to take up agriculture Kampong Kling their prestigious former abode which had been utterly destroyed the Dutch re-named Kampong Belanda (Dutch Village) encompassing Heeren Street and Jonker Street for their own occupation In time the Chetty Malacca owned substantial tracks of Kampong Tujoh They could have bought these or been forced to trade their Kampong Kling properties for these However they had no tradition of agriculture and we are told that most of them soon abandoned it and moved back into the town to pursue urban trades and monthly paid jobs It was said they achieved some fame as goldsmiths Nowhere have I found what education they had and I presume none The civil service was thus denied to them both by the Portuguese and the Dutch Along the way they had lost their Tamil and only spoke the Malay patois of the market place

Dutch and other Communities Needless to say our ancestors would not have buckled under the proscriptions of their religion as at first meted out to the Portuguese Eurasians nor indeed would the Peranakan Chinese There is a brief report by another Jesuit priest that the Dutch did not forbid the exercise of their religions by indigenous peoples and other native groups First cut Internet searches did not reveal the numbers of Peranakan Chinese in Malacca or what they did by way of economic activity over the years both in Portuguese and Dutch times My impression is that they were always a larger community than the Chetty Malacca

22

ldquoAll these clergymen lived on alms tolls by burying the dead performing ordinary or requiem mass and other church servicesrdquo And ldquo[T]he monastery [of St Paul] was very wealthy in houses and properties in and outside Malacca which were rented to foreigners It had also a few gardens two very big and beautiful orchards part of which was let and the other part was inhabited by its own slaves who were working that estate Considerable alms were collected always from the quick and the dead and consequently it was the wealthiest monastery in Malaccardquo

httpwwwborschbergsgindex_filesMelaka1641pdf

Soon after they won their ldquoreligious freedomrdquo around the year 1710 Catholics in Malacca built the Church of St Peters at Bunga Raya located just outside the town on land donated by the Dutchman Maryber Franz Amboer It is where my father and I were baptised Around the same time the Catholics in Malacca established the Chapel of the Holy Rosary located along the river bank in Bunga Raya The Dutch for their part had taken over the church on the hill behind the fort and re-named it St Paul‟s Church as well as another Portuguese church destroyed by the was near the river They built Christ Church in 1753

Resettlement of the Chetty Malacca Apart from religion the Dutch grasped the need for fair treatment of the inhabitants both locals and foreigners to revive economic life One recommendation was ldquoTo pacify the Portuguese and black burghers placards should be posted in the name of the Governor General declaring that all inhabitants may retain their possessions and properties in safety Such a declaration will make them more confident and they will start working for their living and the place will prosperrdquo This however ran counter to another recommendation which read ldquoIn our opinion the best policy is to give all the houses landed properties and grounds on loan to the inhabitants of Malacca without distinction of nationality for a certain period after which rent should be paid at the fair price In this way the company would reap good benefit from the conquest of Malacca It is not clear which they adopted Judging from events it seems they did both In the upshot they re-settled the Chetty Malacca in an area off Gajah Berang and just outside Tranquerah designated as Kampong Tujoh (7

th Precinct) where our ancestors were

encouraged to take up agriculture Kampong Kling their prestigious former abode which had been utterly destroyed the Dutch re-named Kampong Belanda (Dutch Village) encompassing Heeren Street and Jonker Street for their own occupation In time the Chetty Malacca owned substantial tracks of Kampong Tujoh They could have bought these or been forced to trade their Kampong Kling properties for these However they had no tradition of agriculture and we are told that most of them soon abandoned it and moved back into the town to pursue urban trades and monthly paid jobs It was said they achieved some fame as goldsmiths Nowhere have I found what education they had and I presume none The civil service was thus denied to them both by the Portuguese and the Dutch Along the way they had lost their Tamil and only spoke the Malay patois of the market place

Dutch and other Communities Needless to say our ancestors would not have buckled under the proscriptions of their religion as at first meted out to the Portuguese Eurasians nor indeed would the Peranakan Chinese There is a brief report by another Jesuit priest that the Dutch did not forbid the exercise of their religions by indigenous peoples and other native groups First cut Internet searches did not reveal the numbers of Peranakan Chinese in Malacca or what they did by way of economic activity over the years both in Portuguese and Dutch times My impression is that they were always a larger community than the Chetty Malacca

23

Comparisons would have been interesting It is however reported that plagued by chronic shortages of skilled labour and personnel the VOC set out to encourage the settlement of Chinese craftsmen artisans shopkeepers and farmers I notice one report that the famous Cheng Hoon Teng Temple in Temple Street was built from as early as 1645 only four years after the capture and 136 years before our own Chetty Malacca Temple on the same street If nothing else the Chinese must have had clout and hid their wealth well My impression was that the number of Malay residents in Malacca town itself increased after the Dutch captured the city in alliance with Johore One commentator said that following this the first plural society in Malaysia came into existence with people from the Malay Chinese Indians European and Eurasian communities mixing and living in harmony in Malacca By and large the Malays lived in the kampongs outside the city One difficulty in dealing with their numbers is that it was never clear how far inland the territorial jurisdictions extended with both the Portuguese and the Dutch My overall impression was not much beyond the town limits This issue would finally only be resolved with the British demarcation of the state

Stock-taking 1667 By 1667 the population in the entire district of Melaka controlled by the Dutch had risen to 7560 souls according to Van Dam Beschryvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie II p 334 The following figures from a more official source give a less flattering picture

European Free Asian and Slave Populations of Various Establishments of the Dutch East Indies in the Late Seventeenth Century (Estimates in Italics)

Company Servants

Total European Population

Free Asian Population

Slave Population

Total

Ambon (1689)

816 914 58352 10761 70027

Batavia (1699)

3853 6119 44820 25614 72700

Ceylon (1684)

3055 4000 278859 2363 290000

Malabar (1686)

641 698 679 745 2122

Malacca (1680)

545 595 2350 1134 4624

This figure was not given and but has been calculated from the table by subtraction

Figures from another source give the total slave of Malacca as 1853 of whom 168 were company slaves The total of slaves traded in Malacca was given as 90-180 of which 8-16 were the Company‟s The total Dutch slave trade for the year (for the Dutch East Indies) was given as 66346 Malacca was a ldquoslavenburgrdquo ( slave market) but not a big one The slaves came earlier from the Coramandel and later the islands around

httpwwwhistorycooperativeorgcgi-binjusttopcgiact=justtopampurl=httpwwwhistorycooperativeorgjournalsjwh142vinkhtml

Using the second set of figures and setting aside the slave population we had a population of 3490 in 1667 This reflects a robust annual population growth rate of 457 pa in the intervening 26 years in fact this rate might be called a (higher than normal) ldquoreboundrdquo rate after the catastrophic losses from the siege often the case in survivalist situations It could also reflect that some who fled began to return including Malays The latter would have been counted under the Free Asian Population Their numbers would have been small at this point in Malacca‟s re-building with its continuing orientation seawards and not landwards We also have no way of telling what the numbers might have been Hence this element is not

24

accounted for and the Free Asian Population is taken to mean the Peranakan Chinese and Chetty Malacca (who would have made up most of the Indians then) The reported figures also clearly suggest that the European population numbers included the Eurasians On this basis and maintaining for present purpose the survival proportions of 1641 the Free Asian Population would have comprised some 1645 Peranakan Chinese and 987 Chetty Malacca making up 471 and 282 of the total population The Chetty Malacca are deemed to have grown at the same annual rate as the population

Temples amp Mosques Chetty Malacca amp Others The Dutch came to realize that the practice of different religions by the population could be and in this case was conducive to harmonious living and positive work attitudes It seemed this was the answer to the need of the Chetty Malacca And it seems our ancestors molded themselves into a coherent community with good leadership and were apparently in the end much appreciated by the Dutch This may be evidenced by the fact that the Dutch granted the community a piece of land in the heart of the town at Temple Street

13 for the purpose of

putting up a Temple The Temple was built in the year 1781 and was and is known as Sri Poyatha Venayagar Moorthi Temple‟ The temple is dedicated to Vinayagar or Ganesha It is the oldest Hindu Temple in the Malay Archipelago It was under the trusteeship of the late Mr Thaivanayagam Chitty the leader of the Chetty Malacca They have since built the following other temples Sri Muthu Mariamman Temple in 1822 Sri Kailasanathar Temple (Saivan) Kovil) in 1887 Sri Kaliamman Kovil in 1804 and Sri Angalamman Paremeswari Temple in 1888 All of them are in the Gajah Berang and Bachang areas There are also Grammangal Kovils or Shrines built in the interior of the territory near padi fields owned by the Chetty Malacca in Gajah Berang The Shrines include Linggadariamman Kovil Amman Kovil Dharma Rajah Kovil Kathaiamman Kovil and Iyenar Kovil It kept them busy and happy Many of the lands abandoned were given over to the temple authorities as ldquoTemple landsrdquo Some of the Chetty Malacca had embraced Islam during the Dutch time and were also given a piece of land to put up a Masjid (Mosque) on the same street known as Masjid Kampong Kling which name still remains up to the present time

14 There is one report which states that

at this time the Dutch generously offered to the Chinese (Babas) a piece of land to put up a Chinese Temple now known as Cheng Hoon Teng Temple (Another report suggests it was built in 1645) All of these buildings are in the one and same straight road That is why the road was known as Temple Street The Masjid Kampung Hulu built in 1748 is one of the still functioning mosques in Malacca besides Masjid Kampung Kling and Masjid Tengkera (Tranquerah) We are indebted for much of the information on the Chetty Malacca in the whole review and particularly in this section on the History of the Malacca Chetti Community by Mr B Sithambaram Naiker written in 1976 and posted posthumously in 2005 on the Internet at httpchetti-malaccablogspotcom Mr B S Naiker or Uncle Embong as I had always known

13 I have always known it as Temple Street and so I name it It seems others know it as Goldsmith

Street and later Jalan Tokong That‟s their privilege 14 One historical thread on the Internet suggests that Indians from the kingdom of Kalinga on the

Coramandel Coast used to visit Kedah in the north of the Malay Peninsula in and about the third to the seventh centuries they were known as Klings It seems the word crept into the Malay language so that our Tamil ancestors from Patna Tamil Nadu who arrived in Malacca later were referred to by this name And it stuck From my experience among my relatives when a small boy it was more common to hear the old folk say ldquokita orang Klengrdquo (we Kleng people ) than (kita orang Tamil) Certainly the Malays the Peranakan Chinese and the Eurasians called us ldquoorang Klengrdquo With the arrival of the new Tamil labourers for the rubber estates and for public works who were also called ldquoorang Klingrdquo the term took on a derogatory connotation and our forebears more so among the English educated dropped the appellation in favour of Chetty Malacca (and its variations) Baba Indians or Peranakan Indians

25

him was a close friend and compatriot of my Dad Eleven years apart their careers paralleled each other and he died in 1986 at 75 exactly the same age as my Dad almost to the day in 1975

From the Ashes The New Malacca From the ashes of Portuguese Malacca emerged a ldquonewrdquo colony managed under the rule of the VOC and launched into the 18th century but much smaller not much above one-tenth of what she was in her heyday There was no great resurgence of entre-port trade to earlier levels The Dutch were caught within the dilemma of enforcing their monopolistic restrictions in favour of Batavia and bringing Malacca back to economic life for the benefit of its population Malacca did take life as a port again but at a modest level In an impressive piece of research using the Malacca Port Shipping Lists as primary documents one researcher found there were 4615 incoming entries and 4360 out going entries of European ships between 1681 and 1792This worked out to 1 foreign-going ship movement per 4-5 days or 6-7 per month This was enough to sustain a reasonable level of complementary visits by local and regional ships The latter were many times more than foreign-going vessels maintaining the lively second tier entre-port functions that had always existed They acted as an intra-regional and local clearinghouse for non-designated produce and local needs

ldquoThis evidence proves that the local trading community patronising Malaccas port did not vanish even after it came under Dutch control The local traders were happy to return to the port because of its central position in the region It was a place where traders from both mainland and insular areas met in brisk trade for many generations In fact local traders were an important source of income for the Dutch in Malacca Commodities such as rice rattan dried fish sago salt locally woven cloths tobacco tin plates and cups Chinese ceramics and Chinese ceremonial gold paper spices such as pepper nutmeg clovers and cinnamon among many other items to meet the necessities of daily life was traded here The majority of traders who visited Malacca were Malay and Chinese There were other groups of Asian traders such as the Javanese and Indians as well as Arabs and Armenians and the Portuguese and Dutch traders operating between Asian ports But their number was small in comparison with that of the Malay and Chinese traders who amounted to nearly two-thirds of all traders These two groups were engaged in a lively competition for trade in the Indonesian archipelagordquo

httpeprintsusmmy90451EUROPEAN_TRADERS_IN_REGIONAL_TRAD

E_OF_MALAY ARCHIPELAGO_1681_to 1792pdf YEOH LIAN HEOH

Unfortunately Malacca acquired no new functions such as acting as the gateway for exploitation of hinterland resources or participating in the handling of the new generation market traffic except perhaps tangentially It was not geographically in the new regions of supply Even the tin which the Dutch began to extract from the Malay Peninsula was being taken out from Linggi and Pangkor nearer the sources in the north and from Siak in Sumatra So it seems Malacca and our ancestors settled down perhaps with relief to a stable state between population growth and an essentially localized economic activity There was time to build temples before the next colonial powers turned up I like to think though that our ancestors being the descendants of the original monsoon merchants did begin to take to the sea again as the Dutch became distracted by their European pro-occupations and did their share of privateering in and around the region Reports indicate that white burghers (Dutch Eurasians) and ldquoblack burghersrdquo began to do this out of Malacca I can‟t imagine the latter referring to anyone else but our ancestors I like to think further that perhaps in 150 years if

26

their forebears could find their way from India to Malacca some of them if not the whole community could have found their way up the colonial social pyramid to enjoy the status of black burghers and perhaps thereby also reestablish themselves in Tranquerah if not Heeren Street

I close the account of the Dutch era by mentioning that when the Bugis attacked Malacca in or about 1756 all the different local communities the Eurasians the Chinese the Tamils and the Malays came together and bore arms to help the Dutch in the defense of the city I like to think that this represented some success of their policies and measures to build the prosperity and support of the peoples In my review of Malacca I did not find this happening before

The strength of the Dutch lay in two sources One was the intercontinental shipment of spices and other products to the European markets The second was intra-Asian trade Their economic mode like that of the Portuguese for both streams relied on supplying goods of high-value and low volume in inelastic demand and not time-bound safely collected or extracted and safely delivered by the ships of the time These were relatively small and sail-driven Most merchantmen carried more tonnage in cannon and arms as well as soldiers than payload Hence their preoccupation with the capture of sources of supply and protection of supply routes As they sailed into the 18

th Century the VOC was blown along by strong cross

currents of change

Collapse of the Dutch First in 1647 the British East India Company (EIC) lost its monopoly of the eastern trade in a court judgment As a result British privateers took to the eastern waters marauding against the Dutch From about the 1670s due to external political factors the latter lost their Japanese and Chinese trade in silks Then they lost their trading posts in the Near East These eroded their intra-Asian trade At the same time the European demand for the traditional spice products declined The markets of the world began changing There began two-way and cross-continental demand for new products Among these were new raw materials like coffee tea cotton and more sugar These were low value high volume products requiring new larger ships with greater payloads and greater speeds New sources of supply came on-stream for both traditional and new products At the same time there were new manufactured goods like textiles machinery etc in search of markets The Dutch lost their supremacy over world trade The third Anglo-Dutch War of1752-4 interrupted their trade with Europe New competitors entered the field among them the French East India Company and the Danish East India Company In a mighty effort to re-orientate themselves the VOC between 1680 and 1720 resized their ships and expanded their fleet almost doubling the size of the company during what has been described as their Golden Age They also cut other costs and losses such as by withdrawing from India Basically they were left with Ceylon and the Malay Archipelago But with their large military establishment their large fleet and their far flung territories to protect and administer they were monstrously over-structured and unable to enjoy economies of scale They had become a behemoth The marginal gains of the expanded operations were less than the marginal costs In all this they stuck to their monopolistic restrictions which required all designated products of the Indies to be shipped via Batavia As a result many new outlets were opened in the region by-passing the Dutch and trading with their competitors The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War 1780-1784 struck the mortal blow Their fleet was halved They had borrowed money for the expansions and were unable to pay It is said there was corruption and payment of unjustified high dividends The VOC went bust and ceased on 31 December 1800 ndash a mere 19 years after the Sri Poyatha Venayagar Moorthi Temple was built by our ancestors

Enter The British

27

But before that the French had invaded Holland in 1795 and the Dutch thought it best to place Malaca among their other trading posts in the East in the hands of the British During these years Sir Francis Light founded Penang in 1791 and Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore in 1819 At the end of the wars by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 between Britain and the new Kingdom of Netherlands Malacca was ceded to the British and the Malay Peninsula was recognised as their sphere of influence in exchange for Bencoolen with the East Indies recognised as the Dutch sphere of influence the dividing line being the equator And with these developments our dear ancestors became British subjects and were catapulted into the world of the British Empire

Malacca was joined with Penang and Singapore to form the Straits Settlements under the East India Company (EIC) In 1826 the three Settlements were incorporated as the Fourth Presidency of India In 1830 the Presidency was abolished and the Straits Settlements were placed under the Government of Bengal In 1832 Singapore became the headquarters In 1867 the Settlements became a British Crown Colony directly under the Colonial Office which was extended with the addition of Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands to Singapore The EIC had already ceased in 1858 and India had become a British Crown Colony in 1857 Regrettably one act of perfidy needs to be record here which might well have terminated this history of our ancestors if not halted Malacca having lost its entre-port importance the EIC had decided also to erase it as a strategic threat - in case it fell into unfriendly hands (at that time the French) In 1806 it ordered that the fort be demolished and the population be transported to Penang The brainless company lackey in charge of Malacca at the time one Major William Farquhar proceeded to carry out the first part Not surprisingly our ancestors and others put up a stiff resistance to the second part What they should have done is shoot him out to sea in Dutch cannon Fortunately Sir Stamford Raffles who was visiting Malacca at the time wrote immediately against the order By the time the decision to revoke it reached Malacca all that was left of the fort was one gateway (Porta de Santiago) Fortunately he did not blow up the Stadhys as well as this nitwit might well have done thinking it was part of the fort This Farquahar (may his name live in infamy) was subsequently left by Raffles to start off the new free port in Singapore in 1819 and made a fine mess of that as well until Raffles replaced him with Crawford New Horizons Chetty Malacca in the British Empire The journey of the Chetty Malacca through history is like a community of space travelers alighting upon different planets through forces outside their control Bearing in mind the time-slip of 300 years they were in a future totally different from their previous two They were again in a free trade world Their Malacca had become territorially one third of three parts up and down the Straits Their own state was now a firmly delineated triangular piece of land between Johore and Negeri Sembilan with all the Malays living therein making up the new total population all equal citizens As a port Malacca fell under the shadow of Penang and later Singapore By the time the Settlements became a Crown Colony Singapore was already one of the biggest free-ports of Asia On the other hand as one of the three Straits Settlements Malacca enjoyed the entire civil social and development benefits that the British introduced in response to local needs especially of Singapore in proportionate if not equal measure On the one hand they were ruled from the Colonial Office in London On the other hand they now were part of the largest empire in the world ldquoon which the sun never setsrdquo as they used to say They could now peg their own opportunities with that of others in the world like Singapore and Penang for a start and not remain holed up in Tranquerah Whilst everybody now spoke English this was the lingua franca of the world Previously they were second class subjects as best Now they were entitled to a British Passport as a ldquoCitizen of UK and the Coloniesrdquo They could travel with unrestricted access to Britain and throughout the Empire Above all they were now protected by the Rule of Law for which the British have been famous in particular the Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code taken from British India And they now enjoyed the freedom to appeal to the Queen against any injustice of any court in the land That‟s a lot to wake up to on any Sunday morning It would take some years for them to appreciate their entitlements and for these to emerge as realities of their daily lives But the Chetty Malacca had finally arrived

27

But before that the French had invaded Holland in 1795 and the Dutch thought it best to place Malaca among their other trading posts in the East in the hands of the British During these years Sir Francis Light founded Penang in 1791 and Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore in 1819 At the end of the wars by the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 between Britain and the new Kingdom of Netherlands Malacca was ceded to the British and the Malay Peninsula was recognised as their sphere of influence in exchange for Bencoolen with the East Indies recognised as the Dutch sphere of influence the dividing line being the equator And with these developments our dear ancestors became British subjects and were catapulted into the world of the British Empire

Malacca was joined with Penang and Singapore to form the Straits Settlements under the East India Company (EIC) In 1826 the three Settlements were incorporated as the Fourth Presidency of India In 1830 the Presidency was abolished and the Straits Settlements were placed under the Government of Bengal In 1832 Singapore became the headquarters In 1867 the Settlements became a British Crown Colony directly under the Colonial Office which was extended with the addition of Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands to Singapore The EIC had already ceased in 1858 and India had become a British Crown Colony in 1857 Regrettably one act of perfidy needs to be record here which might well have terminated this history of our ancestors if not halted Malacca having lost its entre-port importance the EIC had decided also to erase it as a strategic threat - in case it fell into unfriendly hands (at that time the French) In 1806 it ordered that the fort be demolished and the population be transported to Penang The brainless company lackey in charge of Malacca at the time one Major William Farquhar proceeded to carry out the first part Not surprisingly our ancestors and others put up a stiff resistance to the second part What they should have done is shoot him out to sea in Dutch cannon Fortunately Sir Stamford Raffles who was visiting Malacca at the time wrote immediately against the order By the time the decision to revoke it reached Malacca all that was left of the fort was one gateway (Porta de Santiago) Fortunately he did not blow up the Stadhys as well as this nitwit might well have done thinking it was part of the fort This Farquahar (may his name live in infamy) was subsequently left by Raffles to start off the new free port in Singapore in 1819 and made a fine mess of that as well until Raffles replaced him with Crawford New Horizons Chetty Malacca in the British Empire The journey of the Chetty Malacca through history is like a community of space travelers alighting upon different planets through forces outside their control Bearing in mind the time-slip of 300 years they were in a future totally different from their previous two They were again in a free trade world Their Malacca had become territorially one third of three parts up and down the Straits Their own state was now a firmly delineated triangular piece of land between Johore and Negeri Sembilan with all the Malays living therein making up the new total population all equal citizens As a port Malacca fell under the shadow of Penang and later Singapore By the time the Settlements became a Crown Colony Singapore was already one of the biggest free-ports of Asia On the other hand as one of the three Straits Settlements Malacca enjoyed the entire civil social and development benefits that the British introduced in response to local needs especially of Singapore in proportionate if not equal measure On the one hand they were ruled from the Colonial Office in London On the other hand they now were part of the largest empire in the world ldquoon which the sun never setsrdquo as they used to say They could now peg their own opportunities with that of others in the world like Singapore and Penang for a start and not remain holed up in Tranquerah Whilst everybody now spoke English this was the lingua franca of the world Previously they were second class subjects as best Now they were entitled to a British Passport as a ldquoCitizen of UK and the Coloniesrdquo They could travel with unrestricted access to Britain and throughout the Empire Above all they were now protected by the Rule of Law for which the British have been famous in particular the Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code taken from British India And they now enjoyed the freedom to appeal to the Queen against any injustice of any court in the land That‟s a lot to wake up to on any Sunday morning It would take some years for them to appreciate their entitlements and for these to emerge as realities of their daily lives But the Chetty Malacca had finally arrived

28

British Malaya With the Straits Settlements established and coursing along towards prosperity the British turned their attention to securing their stretched hinterland This became the over-riding priority for it soon became abundantly clear that the fortunes of their free ports depended on how successfully they cornered the tin boom on the mainland The industrial revolution in Europe was creating a large demand for tin especially in Britain Europe in turn was looking for markets for industrial goods The arrival of steamships and opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the speed and capacity of maritime trade It was equally a question of how efficiently the ports serviced the two-way needs of the mainland The British concern was further prompted by the increasing inability of the Malay states to cope with the growth due to inadequate infrastructure and particularly due to the chaos caused by the large influx of Chinese miners and workers with their secret societies triads etc So the British jumped in In short this is what happened-

Kedah Kedah had no tin but it had Penang Under threat of invasion from Siam Kedah agreed to cede Penang to the British in 1791 in return for British help to fight off the Siamese In the event the British failed to do so and Kedah asked for the island back In the ensuing war Britain invaded Kedah and captured Province Wellesley as well (mainland opposite Penang) in 1800 In 1821 Siam conquered Kedah and held it until the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 when it became an Unfederated Malay State of British Malaya

Johore This state also had no tin (to speak of) but it had Singapore In 1819 the British secured an agreement by which they acknowledged Tengku Hussein as the legitimate ruler of Singapore (as against Tengku Abdul Rahman the younger brother who held the throne of Johore) if he allowed them to establish a trading post in Singapore Tengku Hussein secretly reached Singapore where he was quickly installed as Sultan (of Johore) Thereafter Johore worked closely with the British who resolved major succession issues in 1855 But it remained an Unfederated Malay State

Perak This state had tin Lots of it It was found in fact to contain the larges deposits of alluvial tin ore in the world In 1826 the Siamese ordered Kedah to attack it The immigration of Chinese from Penang and elsewhere flooded the place Again there was a rivalry between brothers for the throne The boiling conditions of the ldquotin rushrdquo were threatening the stability of the industry the state and British interests The Straits Settlements Governor (Ord) was sacked because he failed to act effectively ndash chose the wrong brother Finally the new Governor (Andrew Clarke) got it right By means of the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 they acknowledged the right brother (Raja Abdullah) as Sultan and Perak accept a British Resident and became a British Protected State Until 1874 the British restricted themselves to trade and avoided becoming involved in Malayan politics The treaty of Pangkor marked the beginning of British political control of Malaya

Selangor This state also had loads of tin in widespread locations The reigning Sultan was fortunate to have capable relatives and help whom he assigned to develop several mining settlements including Kuala Lumpur (with the help of Capitan China Yap Ah Loy) and Klang There were disturbances a civil war and acts of piracy The Sultan asked for the British appointed a Resident and Selangor became a Protected State in 1874

Negeri Sembilan This state a confederation of nine smaller states was a major producer of tin and there was constant pressure for leverage among them About 1873 a power struggle erupted at Sungai Ujong when one of the popular chieftains challenged the newly incumbent head of the state (Dato Kelana) The latter sought British aid The British and he signed a treaty which required him to rule Sungai Ujong

29

justly protect traders and prevent any anti-British action there In the same year the British sent an expeditionary force from Malacca which defeated the challenger Sungai Ujong accepted an Assistant Resident and Negeri Sembilan eventually became a British Protected State in 1876

Pahang This state had no tin The British became involved in the administration of Pahang after a civil war between two candidates to the kingdoms throne between 1858 and 1863 Pahang accepted a Resident in 1888 when it also became a Protected Malay State

By 1876 three Malayan States each had a British Resident or advisor and the fourth did so in 1888 The Sultans remained and were duly respected They continued to discharge formal responsibilities as heads of state and over customary and religious matters In all other respects the British were effectively given complete authority In 1896 Perak Pahang Negeri Sembilan and Selangor were formed into the Federated Malay States in a move designed to centralize administration for greater efficiency and coordinated development By the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 Kelantan Kedah Perlis and Terengganu were relinquished to the British sphere of influence They had earlier accepted British advisors in 1904 and Johor followed in 1914 These formed the Unfederated Malay States The whole including the Straits Settlements became known as British Malaya

Chetty Malacca Social History

There is scarcely anything on the Internet about the social history of our ancestors during the Portuguese and Dutch periods and only glimmers in the Sejarah Melayu about the Sultanate times For each period we might have been interested to know what education they received or was available did they pay household taxes and were counted as citizens were they called up for combat service how they kept their accounts were they stratified into occupational classes and if so what etc Unfortunately I have almost a blank sheet I would very much appreciate being guided to information that may in fact exist As I see it much research awaits to be done Four hundred years is a gold mine in historical terms

So it is necessary to conjecture a little what it was like at least in Dutch times after their near extinction when they were starting from scratch They could not have wallowed in ignorance and complete obscurity for 150 years It is helpful to establish their probable occupational structure Surely the majority of the workforce for the public sector such as there was had to be local Probably the standard colonial structure operated Dutch manager Eurasian administrators and clerks Chinese for accounts and a mix of others as technical craft and manual workers with of course a Malay syce and Sikh watchman - the model even in immediate post-war Singapore To my knowledge there was no Malay royalty in Malacca if there was we might have expected the Dutch to give them special treatment and probably appointed them to special offices or posts particularly with respect to the Malay population Of course there were as yet no Tamil coolies in those days So where did the Chetty Malacca fit in We had a clue when the Dutch first sought to turn them into agriculturalists Considering their elevated social profile under the Portuguese this must have been quite a shock Not surprisingly they gave it up and drifted back into the town to take up independent crafts and monthly paid jobs We may assume that they filled the lower rungs with the less successful Chinese and those rural Malays who did leave their kampongs This structure would also have obtained generally among the Dutch businesses Asian businesses would be run by their own people We have not as yet mentioned slaves who made up 346 of Malacca‟s population in 1667 and still existed at the end of Dutch rule We can conjecture that every employer had them and most of the established families too not excluding the church and the Chetty Malacca The Company certainly had them

The administration and public records of the government as well as of the Dutch firms must have been conducted in Dutch The rest of the country would have operated in the languages of the locals and in the Portuguese and Malay patois used in common by all locals Over 150 years the Dutch must have run some schools to supply the components of the workforce that had to be literate in Dutch This meant at least primary school with secondary school for the

30

essential few ndash probably Dutch and Portuguese Eurasians at least I could not find information to what extent they provided this education for the Chinese the Chetty Malacca and the Malays I found no reference to Christian or other mission schools existing in Dutch times ndash except for one mission school set up in 1819 and closed down when the first English school opened in 1826 It seems probable that the policy was that no education need be provided to the locals at large there was no need for them to be educated or educated to the same level as the Dutch (or even the Eurasians) Education was not a social measure This was the White South Africa‟s primary tool of suppression in Apartheid times just before its end ndash as I saw for myself in Soweto in 1990 on a World Bank mission At this point I therefore leave it as an open conclusion that there was no access to public education for the Chetty Malacca

By the fact that the Portuguese Eurasians the Peranakan Chinese and the Chetty Malacca had lost functionality in their mother-tongues it may be inferred that that they did not run vernacular schools of their own either It may be presumed that the pastors of the Dutch Reform Church did administer and teach their religion in Dutch while the Catholic Church did carry out the ministration and religious education of their flock in Kristang their oral Portuguese Creole with priests from Portugal and Goa The Peranakan Chinese and the Chetty Malacca used their common Malay patois in everyday life including prayer Both would have relied on imported clergy to run their temples There is no evidence that the temples provided education for their people The only group that would have done so would have been the Malays who would all have been Muslim The Muslim authorities usually ran madrasahs or religious schools for their children I have no information whether in fact they did so at this time and if so whether the Dutch treated them differently and subsided their education One problem would have been that the outputs would not have fitted into the upper workforce structure The education would have been in the Malay language and orientated towards religion So again we have nothing for the Chetty Malacca

We are left to assume therefore that the majority of the Chetty Malacca had no access to formal education and no Dutch beyond street talk and arithmetic They would not have fitted into the higher echelons We may assume that the top percentile would have gone into business got rich and paid taxes the Dutch could not ignore They would have arrived at the dining tables of the Dutch via the social ladder and maybe even held some civic appointments They would have had command of Dutch even education self-provided These gentlemen would obviously become the leaders of the Chetty Malacca community and instrumental in some ways in protecting them and dispensing benefits The gentlemen who got the temple going was obviously one such person

We may take it there were also no trade schools Skills were basic in the economy of the times such as iron-mongering wood-working cooking tailoring agriculture and animal husbandry These would have been handed down within the family and community perhaps through some form of apprenticeship For the average Chetty Malacca his best prospects of advancement would have been through the trades to self employment and small business An outstanding example would have been their traditional jewelry and gold craftsmanship for which the Chetty Malacca were well known

Stock-Taking Again 1795

Some 128 years down the road since the last estimate it is time to establish how many Chetty Malacca there were whom it was the privilege of the British to receive into their empire In 1795 when British occupied the Settlement they reported that Malacca had a population of less than 20000 and her trade and agriculture were at a low ebb ldquowhile the writ of government extended no more than a mile or two from the townrdquo No other figures are available but this estimate is timely For one thing it prompts us to speculate what the population growth was like in the very long period of 128 years‟ intervening in fact the main component of Dutch rule For another it provides a benchmark against which to see the future changes under British rule

31

Bearing in mind that the whole of the following is hypothetical firstly we have to deal with the slave population For our purposes we make an assumption that it remained the same over the period With this we arrive at our target population of 18866 in 1795 This represented a population annual growth rate of 132 pa over the period This is pretty sedate and reflects a stable population and a generally stagnant Malacca over most of Dutch rule New arrivals would be few and probably out-balance losses due to emigration (youngster leaving for jobs elsewhere) Next we need to identify a Malay component in this total as our premise is that there would have been a steady influx of Malays from the surrounding areas drawn by the employment prospects of supporting the urban nexus We arbitrarily set the total Malay component in 1795 at a timid 20 of the population which works out to be 3773 That leaves us 15092 to account for Keeping the 1667 proportions unchanged we arrive at a distribution of Europeans amp Eurasians 3713 (197) Chinese 7113 (37) Indians (4268 (226) - and Malays 3 773 (20) Making one more assumption that not less than 90 of the Indians were Chetty Malacca we finally and arduously reach the conclusion that the number of our revered ancestors who joined the British Empire was 3841 or thereabouts At that point they made up 228 of the population excluding slaves They would have been near equal to the Eurasians and slightly more than the Malays Over a century they would have become a mature and settled community probably with some pretensions to wealth They were therefore a significant minority group with some clout that had to be reckoned with This explains why they were given land to build their temple This seems a valid picture to go along with until someone is able to offer alternative data and insights to conclude otherwise It should be mentioned here that at this point within the parameters applicable to it the Chetty Malacca community had also reached the maximum extent of its growth After this its numbers in Malacca would decline due to changes in the variables affecting it The Chinese population was the largest but again we may postulate that a small percentage like the Indians were new imports The large new arrivals of these groups would happen only a century later

New Colonialism

Aghast alike at the levels of wealth amassed by the colonial powers and the excesses of exploitation (raw materials forced plantations and slaves) new attitudes took shape among the growing educated public in the mother countries of the colonial powers about their humanitarian responsibility to subject peoples Concerns were heard about ldquothe White Man‟s Burdenrdquo and their ldquodebt of honourrdquo Slavery was abolished by the British in 1833 and by the Dutch in 1863 In both their cases the home governments took over the colonies from the former companies and they were susceptible to the new public opinion Congruently industrialisation required new and more raw materials and export markets In the new economics the capital investments involved were larger and more long-term These factors called for more secure and more comprehensive occupation administration and social and infrastructural development of the colonies These factors further happily called for and justified proper attention to education and to social services Most cogently the colonies were and would be generating the money to pay for all this Apart from their social uplifting there was a broad-based need to have adequate educated strata among the local population to undertake the various occupations of increasing diversity and levels of skill whether in the public service the technical services primary production shipping commerce public health and even in education itself

The Dutch did change their colonial orientation and practices injecting greater responsibility towards their subject peoples It would be nearly a century late for our Malacca brethren but this extract provides a wholesome close to the Dutch episode of this history

During and after the Dutch secured their hegemony throughout the Indonesian archipelago they systematically eliminated slavery widow burning head-hunting cannibalism piracy and internecine wars

[13] The

Dutch formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers administrators

29

justly protect traders and prevent any anti-British action there In the same year the British sent an expeditionary force from Malacca which defeated the challenger Sungai Ujong accepted an Assistant Resident and Negeri Sembilan eventually became a British Protected State in 1876

Pahang This state had no tin The British became involved in the administration of Pahang after a civil war between two candidates to the kingdoms throne between 1858 and 1863 Pahang accepted a Resident in 1888 when it also became a Protected Malay State

By 1876 three Malayan States each had a British Resident or advisor and the fourth did so in 1888 The Sultans remained and were duly respected They continued to discharge formal responsibilities as heads of state and over customary and religious matters In all other respects the British were effectively given complete authority In 1896 Perak Pahang Negeri Sembilan and Selangor were formed into the Federated Malay States in a move designed to centralize administration for greater efficiency and coordinated development By the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 Kelantan Kedah Perlis and Terengganu were relinquished to the British sphere of influence They had earlier accepted British advisors in 1904 and Johor followed in 1914 These formed the Unfederated Malay States The whole including the Straits Settlements became known as British Malaya

Chetty Malacca Social History

There is scarcely anything on the Internet about the social history of our ancestors during the Portuguese and Dutch periods and only glimmers in the Sejarah Melayu about the Sultanate times For each period we might have been interested to know what education they received or was available did they pay household taxes and were counted as citizens were they called up for combat service how they kept their accounts were they stratified into occupational classes and if so what etc Unfortunately I have almost a blank sheet I would very much appreciate being guided to information that may in fact exist As I see it much research awaits to be done Four hundred years is a gold mine in historical terms

So it is necessary to conjecture a little what it was like at least in Dutch times after their near extinction when they were starting from scratch They could not have wallowed in ignorance and complete obscurity for 150 years It is helpful to establish their probable occupational structure Surely the majority of the workforce for the public sector such as there was had to be local Probably the standard colonial structure operated Dutch manager Eurasian administrators and clerks Chinese for accounts and a mix of others as technical craft and manual workers with of course a Malay syce and Sikh watchman - the model even in immediate post-war Singapore To my knowledge there was no Malay royalty in Malacca if there was we might have expected the Dutch to give them special treatment and probably appointed them to special offices or posts particularly with respect to the Malay population Of course there were as yet no Tamil coolies in those days So where did the Chetty Malacca fit in We had a clue when the Dutch first sought to turn them into agriculturalists Considering their elevated social profile under the Portuguese this must have been quite a shock Not surprisingly they gave it up and drifted back into the town to take up independent crafts and monthly paid jobs We may assume that they filled the lower rungs with the less successful Chinese and those rural Malays who did leave their kampongs This structure would also have obtained generally among the Dutch businesses Asian businesses would be run by their own people We have not as yet mentioned slaves who made up 346 of Malacca‟s population in 1667 and still existed at the end of Dutch rule We can conjecture that every employer had them and most of the established families too not excluding the church and the Chetty Malacca The Company certainly had them

The administration and public records of the government as well as of the Dutch firms must have been conducted in Dutch The rest of the country would have operated in the languages of the locals and in the Portuguese and Malay patois used in common by all locals Over 150 years the Dutch must have run some schools to supply the components of the workforce that had to be literate in Dutch This meant at least primary school with secondary school for the

30

essential few ndash probably Dutch and Portuguese Eurasians at least I could not find information to what extent they provided this education for the Chinese the Chetty Malacca and the Malays I found no reference to Christian or other mission schools existing in Dutch times ndash except for one mission school set up in 1819 and closed down when the first English school opened in 1826 It seems probable that the policy was that no education need be provided to the locals at large there was no need for them to be educated or educated to the same level as the Dutch (or even the Eurasians) Education was not a social measure This was the White South Africa‟s primary tool of suppression in Apartheid times just before its end ndash as I saw for myself in Soweto in 1990 on a World Bank mission At this point I therefore leave it as an open conclusion that there was no access to public education for the Chetty Malacca

By the fact that the Portuguese Eurasians the Peranakan Chinese and the Chetty Malacca had lost functionality in their mother-tongues it may be inferred that that they did not run vernacular schools of their own either It may be presumed that the pastors of the Dutch Reform Church did administer and teach their religion in Dutch while the Catholic Church did carry out the ministration and religious education of their flock in Kristang their oral Portuguese Creole with priests from Portugal and Goa The Peranakan Chinese and the Chetty Malacca used their common Malay patois in everyday life including prayer Both would have relied on imported clergy to run their temples There is no evidence that the temples provided education for their people The only group that would have done so would have been the Malays who would all have been Muslim The Muslim authorities usually ran madrasahs or religious schools for their children I have no information whether in fact they did so at this time and if so whether the Dutch treated them differently and subsided their education One problem would have been that the outputs would not have fitted into the upper workforce structure The education would have been in the Malay language and orientated towards religion So again we have nothing for the Chetty Malacca

We are left to assume therefore that the majority of the Chetty Malacca had no access to formal education and no Dutch beyond street talk and arithmetic They would not have fitted into the higher echelons We may assume that the top percentile would have gone into business got rich and paid taxes the Dutch could not ignore They would have arrived at the dining tables of the Dutch via the social ladder and maybe even held some civic appointments They would have had command of Dutch even education self-provided These gentlemen would obviously become the leaders of the Chetty Malacca community and instrumental in some ways in protecting them and dispensing benefits The gentlemen who got the temple going was obviously one such person

We may take it there were also no trade schools Skills were basic in the economy of the times such as iron-mongering wood-working cooking tailoring agriculture and animal husbandry These would have been handed down within the family and community perhaps through some form of apprenticeship For the average Chetty Malacca his best prospects of advancement would have been through the trades to self employment and small business An outstanding example would have been their traditional jewelry and gold craftsmanship for which the Chetty Malacca were well known

Stock-Taking Again 1795

Some 128 years down the road since the last estimate it is time to establish how many Chetty Malacca there were whom it was the privilege of the British to receive into their empire In 1795 when British occupied the Settlement they reported that Malacca had a population of less than 20000 and her trade and agriculture were at a low ebb ldquowhile the writ of government extended no more than a mile or two from the townrdquo No other figures are available but this estimate is timely For one thing it prompts us to speculate what the population growth was like in the very long period of 128 years‟ intervening in fact the main component of Dutch rule For another it provides a benchmark against which to see the future changes under British rule

31

Bearing in mind that the whole of the following is hypothetical firstly we have to deal with the slave population For our purposes we make an assumption that it remained the same over the period With this we arrive at our target population of 18866 in 1795 This represented a population annual growth rate of 132 pa over the period This is pretty sedate and reflects a stable population and a generally stagnant Malacca over most of Dutch rule New arrivals would be few and probably out-balance losses due to emigration (youngster leaving for jobs elsewhere) Next we need to identify a Malay component in this total as our premise is that there would have been a steady influx of Malays from the surrounding areas drawn by the employment prospects of supporting the urban nexus We arbitrarily set the total Malay component in 1795 at a timid 20 of the population which works out to be 3773 That leaves us 15092 to account for Keeping the 1667 proportions unchanged we arrive at a distribution of Europeans amp Eurasians 3713 (197) Chinese 7113 (37) Indians (4268 (226) - and Malays 3 773 (20) Making one more assumption that not less than 90 of the Indians were Chetty Malacca we finally and arduously reach the conclusion that the number of our revered ancestors who joined the British Empire was 3841 or thereabouts At that point they made up 228 of the population excluding slaves They would have been near equal to the Eurasians and slightly more than the Malays Over a century they would have become a mature and settled community probably with some pretensions to wealth They were therefore a significant minority group with some clout that had to be reckoned with This explains why they were given land to build their temple This seems a valid picture to go along with until someone is able to offer alternative data and insights to conclude otherwise It should be mentioned here that at this point within the parameters applicable to it the Chetty Malacca community had also reached the maximum extent of its growth After this its numbers in Malacca would decline due to changes in the variables affecting it The Chinese population was the largest but again we may postulate that a small percentage like the Indians were new imports The large new arrivals of these groups would happen only a century later

New Colonialism

Aghast alike at the levels of wealth amassed by the colonial powers and the excesses of exploitation (raw materials forced plantations and slaves) new attitudes took shape among the growing educated public in the mother countries of the colonial powers about their humanitarian responsibility to subject peoples Concerns were heard about ldquothe White Man‟s Burdenrdquo and their ldquodebt of honourrdquo Slavery was abolished by the British in 1833 and by the Dutch in 1863 In both their cases the home governments took over the colonies from the former companies and they were susceptible to the new public opinion Congruently industrialisation required new and more raw materials and export markets In the new economics the capital investments involved were larger and more long-term These factors called for more secure and more comprehensive occupation administration and social and infrastructural development of the colonies These factors further happily called for and justified proper attention to education and to social services Most cogently the colonies were and would be generating the money to pay for all this Apart from their social uplifting there was a broad-based need to have adequate educated strata among the local population to undertake the various occupations of increasing diversity and levels of skill whether in the public service the technical services primary production shipping commerce public health and even in education itself

The Dutch did change their colonial orientation and practices injecting greater responsibility towards their subject peoples It would be nearly a century late for our Malacca brethren but this extract provides a wholesome close to the Dutch episode of this history

During and after the Dutch secured their hegemony throughout the Indonesian archipelago they systematically eliminated slavery widow burning head-hunting cannibalism piracy and internecine wars

[13] The

Dutch formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers administrators

30

essential few ndash probably Dutch and Portuguese Eurasians at least I could not find information to what extent they provided this education for the Chinese the Chetty Malacca and the Malays I found no reference to Christian or other mission schools existing in Dutch times ndash except for one mission school set up in 1819 and closed down when the first English school opened in 1826 It seems probable that the policy was that no education need be provided to the locals at large there was no need for them to be educated or educated to the same level as the Dutch (or even the Eurasians) Education was not a social measure This was the White South Africa‟s primary tool of suppression in Apartheid times just before its end ndash as I saw for myself in Soweto in 1990 on a World Bank mission At this point I therefore leave it as an open conclusion that there was no access to public education for the Chetty Malacca

By the fact that the Portuguese Eurasians the Peranakan Chinese and the Chetty Malacca had lost functionality in their mother-tongues it may be inferred that that they did not run vernacular schools of their own either It may be presumed that the pastors of the Dutch Reform Church did administer and teach their religion in Dutch while the Catholic Church did carry out the ministration and religious education of their flock in Kristang their oral Portuguese Creole with priests from Portugal and Goa The Peranakan Chinese and the Chetty Malacca used their common Malay patois in everyday life including prayer Both would have relied on imported clergy to run their temples There is no evidence that the temples provided education for their people The only group that would have done so would have been the Malays who would all have been Muslim The Muslim authorities usually ran madrasahs or religious schools for their children I have no information whether in fact they did so at this time and if so whether the Dutch treated them differently and subsided their education One problem would have been that the outputs would not have fitted into the upper workforce structure The education would have been in the Malay language and orientated towards religion So again we have nothing for the Chetty Malacca

We are left to assume therefore that the majority of the Chetty Malacca had no access to formal education and no Dutch beyond street talk and arithmetic They would not have fitted into the higher echelons We may assume that the top percentile would have gone into business got rich and paid taxes the Dutch could not ignore They would have arrived at the dining tables of the Dutch via the social ladder and maybe even held some civic appointments They would have had command of Dutch even education self-provided These gentlemen would obviously become the leaders of the Chetty Malacca community and instrumental in some ways in protecting them and dispensing benefits The gentlemen who got the temple going was obviously one such person

We may take it there were also no trade schools Skills were basic in the economy of the times such as iron-mongering wood-working cooking tailoring agriculture and animal husbandry These would have been handed down within the family and community perhaps through some form of apprenticeship For the average Chetty Malacca his best prospects of advancement would have been through the trades to self employment and small business An outstanding example would have been their traditional jewelry and gold craftsmanship for which the Chetty Malacca were well known

Stock-Taking Again 1795

Some 128 years down the road since the last estimate it is time to establish how many Chetty Malacca there were whom it was the privilege of the British to receive into their empire In 1795 when British occupied the Settlement they reported that Malacca had a population of less than 20000 and her trade and agriculture were at a low ebb ldquowhile the writ of government extended no more than a mile or two from the townrdquo No other figures are available but this estimate is timely For one thing it prompts us to speculate what the population growth was like in the very long period of 128 years‟ intervening in fact the main component of Dutch rule For another it provides a benchmark against which to see the future changes under British rule

31

Bearing in mind that the whole of the following is hypothetical firstly we have to deal with the slave population For our purposes we make an assumption that it remained the same over the period With this we arrive at our target population of 18866 in 1795 This represented a population annual growth rate of 132 pa over the period This is pretty sedate and reflects a stable population and a generally stagnant Malacca over most of Dutch rule New arrivals would be few and probably out-balance losses due to emigration (youngster leaving for jobs elsewhere) Next we need to identify a Malay component in this total as our premise is that there would have been a steady influx of Malays from the surrounding areas drawn by the employment prospects of supporting the urban nexus We arbitrarily set the total Malay component in 1795 at a timid 20 of the population which works out to be 3773 That leaves us 15092 to account for Keeping the 1667 proportions unchanged we arrive at a distribution of Europeans amp Eurasians 3713 (197) Chinese 7113 (37) Indians (4268 (226) - and Malays 3 773 (20) Making one more assumption that not less than 90 of the Indians were Chetty Malacca we finally and arduously reach the conclusion that the number of our revered ancestors who joined the British Empire was 3841 or thereabouts At that point they made up 228 of the population excluding slaves They would have been near equal to the Eurasians and slightly more than the Malays Over a century they would have become a mature and settled community probably with some pretensions to wealth They were therefore a significant minority group with some clout that had to be reckoned with This explains why they were given land to build their temple This seems a valid picture to go along with until someone is able to offer alternative data and insights to conclude otherwise It should be mentioned here that at this point within the parameters applicable to it the Chetty Malacca community had also reached the maximum extent of its growth After this its numbers in Malacca would decline due to changes in the variables affecting it The Chinese population was the largest but again we may postulate that a small percentage like the Indians were new imports The large new arrivals of these groups would happen only a century later

New Colonialism

Aghast alike at the levels of wealth amassed by the colonial powers and the excesses of exploitation (raw materials forced plantations and slaves) new attitudes took shape among the growing educated public in the mother countries of the colonial powers about their humanitarian responsibility to subject peoples Concerns were heard about ldquothe White Man‟s Burdenrdquo and their ldquodebt of honourrdquo Slavery was abolished by the British in 1833 and by the Dutch in 1863 In both their cases the home governments took over the colonies from the former companies and they were susceptible to the new public opinion Congruently industrialisation required new and more raw materials and export markets In the new economics the capital investments involved were larger and more long-term These factors called for more secure and more comprehensive occupation administration and social and infrastructural development of the colonies These factors further happily called for and justified proper attention to education and to social services Most cogently the colonies were and would be generating the money to pay for all this Apart from their social uplifting there was a broad-based need to have adequate educated strata among the local population to undertake the various occupations of increasing diversity and levels of skill whether in the public service the technical services primary production shipping commerce public health and even in education itself

The Dutch did change their colonial orientation and practices injecting greater responsibility towards their subject peoples It would be nearly a century late for our Malacca brethren but this extract provides a wholesome close to the Dutch episode of this history

During and after the Dutch secured their hegemony throughout the Indonesian archipelago they systematically eliminated slavery widow burning head-hunting cannibalism piracy and internecine wars

[13] The

Dutch formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers administrators

31

Bearing in mind that the whole of the following is hypothetical firstly we have to deal with the slave population For our purposes we make an assumption that it remained the same over the period With this we arrive at our target population of 18866 in 1795 This represented a population annual growth rate of 132 pa over the period This is pretty sedate and reflects a stable population and a generally stagnant Malacca over most of Dutch rule New arrivals would be few and probably out-balance losses due to emigration (youngster leaving for jobs elsewhere) Next we need to identify a Malay component in this total as our premise is that there would have been a steady influx of Malays from the surrounding areas drawn by the employment prospects of supporting the urban nexus We arbitrarily set the total Malay component in 1795 at a timid 20 of the population which works out to be 3773 That leaves us 15092 to account for Keeping the 1667 proportions unchanged we arrive at a distribution of Europeans amp Eurasians 3713 (197) Chinese 7113 (37) Indians (4268 (226) - and Malays 3 773 (20) Making one more assumption that not less than 90 of the Indians were Chetty Malacca we finally and arduously reach the conclusion that the number of our revered ancestors who joined the British Empire was 3841 or thereabouts At that point they made up 228 of the population excluding slaves They would have been near equal to the Eurasians and slightly more than the Malays Over a century they would have become a mature and settled community probably with some pretensions to wealth They were therefore a significant minority group with some clout that had to be reckoned with This explains why they were given land to build their temple This seems a valid picture to go along with until someone is able to offer alternative data and insights to conclude otherwise It should be mentioned here that at this point within the parameters applicable to it the Chetty Malacca community had also reached the maximum extent of its growth After this its numbers in Malacca would decline due to changes in the variables affecting it The Chinese population was the largest but again we may postulate that a small percentage like the Indians were new imports The large new arrivals of these groups would happen only a century later

New Colonialism

Aghast alike at the levels of wealth amassed by the colonial powers and the excesses of exploitation (raw materials forced plantations and slaves) new attitudes took shape among the growing educated public in the mother countries of the colonial powers about their humanitarian responsibility to subject peoples Concerns were heard about ldquothe White Man‟s Burdenrdquo and their ldquodebt of honourrdquo Slavery was abolished by the British in 1833 and by the Dutch in 1863 In both their cases the home governments took over the colonies from the former companies and they were susceptible to the new public opinion Congruently industrialisation required new and more raw materials and export markets In the new economics the capital investments involved were larger and more long-term These factors called for more secure and more comprehensive occupation administration and social and infrastructural development of the colonies These factors further happily called for and justified proper attention to education and to social services Most cogently the colonies were and would be generating the money to pay for all this Apart from their social uplifting there was a broad-based need to have adequate educated strata among the local population to undertake the various occupations of increasing diversity and levels of skill whether in the public service the technical services primary production shipping commerce public health and even in education itself

The Dutch did change their colonial orientation and practices injecting greater responsibility towards their subject peoples It would be nearly a century late for our Malacca brethren but this extract provides a wholesome close to the Dutch episode of this history

During and after the Dutch secured their hegemony throughout the Indonesian archipelago they systematically eliminated slavery widow burning head-hunting cannibalism piracy and internecine wars

[13] The

Dutch formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers administrators

32

managers teachers and pioneers They lived linked to their native subjects yet separately at the top of the rigid racial and social castes they set up in Indies society

[24] The Dutch East Indies had two legal classes of citizens

First the European class second the Indigenous (Dutch Inlander Malay Bumiputra) class A third class Foreign Easterners (Dutch Vreemde Oosterlingen) was added in 1920

[25]

In 1901 the Dutch adopted what they called the Ethical Policy under which the colonial government had a duty to further the welfare of the Indonesian people in health and education Other new policies included irrigation programs transmigration communications flood mitigation industrialisation and protection of native industry

[7] Although more progressive than previous

policies the humanitarian policies were ultimately inadequate While a small elite of secondary and tertiary-educated Indonesians developed the overwhelming majority of Indonesians remained illiterate Primary schools were established and officially open to all but by 1930 only 8 of school-aged children received an education

httpenwikipediaorgwikiDutch_East_IndiesSocial_history

In the new colonial world labour was becoming the major constraint in the absence of slavery particularly for mineral extraction and large-scale plantation agriculture This was followed by the need for technical manpower The latter were needed to survey the land and engineer and maintain the transport networks etc Later more would be needed to support the posts amp telegraphs the electrical grid and eventually the telecommunications infrastructure The colonies entered a new phase in which they experienced large-scale influx and imports of external labour and technical workers to support their rapidly expanding economies In British Malaya including Malacca the population structure would be totally changed

There was one commentator on the Internet who with a grand historic eye described the ldquoinvasionrdquo as he called it of the British into Malaya in the 19

th Century I wished to quote it but

unfortunately I lost the reference He conveyed the notion that they (the British) arrived in waves and echelons In the beginning came the administrators the law-givers and the law enforcers These were followed by echelons of civil engineers land surveyors water and port engineers and probably the public health people In the second wave would have come the economic echelons and commercial interests The first groups among these would have been tin mining engineers and subsequent echelons would nclude the planters These would have been followed by the entrepreneurs and bankers In the third wave would have come the medical social and education professionals The last among these would have been the religious and missionary echelons With the progress of time a fourth wave would include engineers to install and maintain the ldquonationalrdquo networks like the post and telegraphs system the railways the roads the electrical system and telecommunications network The sequence is of course poetic The echelons and waves both overlapped in time and ran in parallel some merging into others

Transformation From Malacca‟s transfer to the British to my Dad‟s birthday (on 23 December 1900) was 76 years The world and Malacca were dramatically transformed The tin boom brought the railways the telegraph and electricity The rubber boom brought roads motor cars and bicycles Both brought opened up the country brought wealth and opportunity Malacca became a part of Peninsula Malaya not just a backwater port We may here briefly note some of the changes which I had to check out to form my conclusions

When my Dad was born the modes of transport were the horse and carriage the rickshaw the bullock cart the buffalo cart and the perahu (boat) for riverine movement The roads were not metalled In the town the road surfaces were cobbled and stone compacted In the kampongs they would have been earth compacted and farther afield they would have been dirt tracks I doubt there were any ldquotrunkrdquo roads I

33

doubt one could have gone by land (presumably by stagecoach) from Malacca to Penang or Johore Bahru - maybe to Kuala Lumpur with a struggle But things were in the process of change These were already impacting Malacca‟s neighbouring states and would soon draw her in

Firstly there was a ldquotin rushrdquo in the Peninsula hinterland This put pressure on all surrounding ports to move the tin out and to deliver machinery and other supplies in While Singapore and Penang grew as the principal long-haul termini Malacca among others served as local entre-ports and points of collection and delivery Malacca was now back in the world of free trade There would have been a resurgence of business talk and a rising a tempo of expectation

The original tin mining operations were orientated towards the rivers used to convey the payload to the nearest port Global demand led to development of short railway lines from the mining centres to the nearest ports The first railway line in Malaya was from Taiping to Port Weld opened in 1885 This was followed by the Kuala Lumpur- Klang line in 1886 Next came the Seremban-Sungei Ujong to Port Dickson line in 1891 followed by the Tapah to Telok Anson line in 1893 Finally the connection from Ipoh to Prai was opened in 1899 In 1901 the FMS Railway was formed by absorption of the state companies Following this the inland nodes were quickly connected up by a trunk line down to Gemas by 1905 Eventually the line would be extended to Johore Bahru by 1909

On 1 December 1905 The Malacca State Railway (MSR) officially inaugurated the FMS Malaca Branch line to Tampin The following piece of history is well-worth reliving

ldquoAt 630 am The Hon Mr Bland and Messrs R C Fryer Firmstone Lupton and Darbyshire (the constructing engineer) met at Kubu station and proceeded thence to Tampin the junction with the trunk line where they arrived at 740 On the return journey they were joined by Messrs Fleming D O Tampin Goldthorpe Jones and Reid and the whole party on their arrival at Malacca at 941 proceeded to the Residency to breakfast After breakfast the Hon RN Bland proposed the health of the Queen and then proceeded to congratulate Mr Darbyshire on the way the construction of the line had been expedited Mr Fleming responded to the toast and the visitors after having a short look around Malacca left by the 1 oclock trainrdquo It was the Queen‟s Birthday

From the Straits Times 4th December 1905

The same newspaper trumpeted ldquoIt is now possible to leave Malacca at 1 pm and arrive in Penang at 621 on the following day instead of taking two to three days by steamer also and this I think is the great convenience Passengers to Seremban and Kuala Lumpur from Singapore can land at Malacca catch the 630 am train and arrive at their destinations at 95 am and 1112 am respectively by this greatly accelerating their arrivalrdquo Note 1 The MRS was absorbed by the FMSR in 1906 Note 2 My friend Ian McCubbin of Goosetrey UK and of the Great

Western Railway fame would expect me to record that the

34

MSR had four locomotives two Hunslets 850 amp 851 Class A and two Kitsons 4289 amp 4290 Class G)

At that time my Dad was four years old a few days short of five ndash about Christian‟s age at the writing of this (Jul11) He would grow up with the Blast and Woof-Woof-Woof of the steam locomotives a familiar sound over the years He loved the railway and I recall very many happy evening drives with him and Mummy to Kubu Station just to see and hear the trains arrive and depart We did the Tampin trip several times but I do not recall that either we or Dad alone travelled to Penang or Singapore by train The latter became possible when the Causeway was commissioned The first train carrying goods traveled across the Causeway on 17 September 1923 followed by the first passenger train on 1 October in the same year The Malacca line was ripped up by the Japanese occupying forces during World War II to build the Burma Railway It was never replaced

Among the related happenings we should mention the first motor car built by Daimler amp Benz in 1886 The modern (safety) bicycle was invented in the 1890s and in 1889 John Dunlup invented the pneumatic tyre for both In 1893 Ridley planted the first seedlings of the Havea Braziliensis (rubber tree) in the Singapore Botanic Gardens and in 1902 bitumen or asphalt was first introduced in the world to ldquometalrdquo a road Suddenly the world needed rubber I am proud to trumpet the fact that the first man to lead the response was Tan Chay Yan of Malacca There is no better way to savour this momentous development than to read this piece from the web

ldquoTan Chay An was the first rubber planter in Malaya Despite opposition he pioneered an industry which transformed the region‟s fortunes and used his enormous wealth to support worthwhile causes such as education Tan was educated at Malacca High School In 1891 he inherited from a tapioca farm at Bukit Lintang near Malacca He joined the Malacca municipal commission aged twenty-one and three years later became a justice of the peace as his father and grandfather had been

In 1896 Tan visited his friend Henry Ridley director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens whose advocacy of commercial rubber cultivation was widely scorned Rubber forests in Africa and the Amazon were being exhausted and Ridley saw opportunities in Malaya Encouraged by his friend Lim Boon Keng Tan agreed that there was potential so Ridley gave him seedlings of the indigenous Rambong (Ficus elastica) and the untested imported Para rubber tree (Hevea Brasiliensis) Tan planted these on 43 acres cleared from his Malacca property creating the first rubber plantation in Malaya and Asia‟s first Asian-owned one He sought to convert hostile planters from comestibles offering them seeds from his pocket

Two years later seeing how the rubber plants flourished he formed a syndicate with other Chinese entrepreneurs to manage a 3000-acre estate at Bukit Asahan obtained under favourable terms from Malacca‟s government His display of sheet rubber at that year‟s Malacca horticultural fair won a trophy and sparked wide interest This exhibit and other factors such as the demand for rubber arising from the worldwide growth of bicycling and motoring prompted more planters to follow Tan‟s lead

His rubber won a gold medal at the 1903 Hanoi Exposition and the following year he shipped the first one thousand pounds of rubber to be exported from Malacca By 1905 with rubber exempted from export duties the settlement shipped 18500 pounds and Bukit Asahan was the world‟s largest Hevea plantation Around 1905 Tan reached an agreement with the new London-based Malacca Rubber Plantations Ltd to sell for $2 million the Bukit Asahan

35

estate which had been created with $200000 while retaining an interest in the new company

This deal both convinced local growers that their future was in rubber and attracted European companies to Malaya By 1910 there were thirty-five European and Chinese companies growing rubber on tens of thousands of acres across Malaya The industry which Tan had started despite opposition produced around half the world‟s rubber by 1920 and brought unprecedented prosperity to Malaya and Singapore through which most of it was shipped ldquo

httpinfopedianlsgarticlesSIP_1628_2009-12-31htmlNational

It is perhaps worth mentioning that Sime Darby Malaysia‟s flagship corporation was among the companies that first set up their plantations in Malacca

Rubber was soon to overshadow tin and was far more widespread It needed a network of roads metalled roads The early roads served as feeders to connect to the railway lines Then they opened up the country which allowed access to new territories for occupation agriculture plantations and other economic activities For the first time the whole population began to enjoy greater mobility within their jungle-clad country The first metalled road ran from Taiping to Port Weld completed in 1901 I could not find when the roads in Malacca were metalled I also could not find out when the first motor car was introduced in Malacca or Malaya What we do know is that Singapore enacted automobile registration legislation in 1903 This would presage similar legislation in Malacca very shortly The same year saw the establishment of the Federated Malay States Automobile Club and in 1907 the Singapore Automobile Club By 1908 there was a metalled road between Kulim and Province Wellesley Similar extension took place along the Johore railway to the south We may imagine that the Malacca roads the trunk roads at least were well paved by the close of first decade ndash while my Dad was still in primary school Fords first local advertisement in the Straits Times appeared on 20 December 1909

Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and his code in 1850 Most people are familiar with the telegraph line as an ubiquitous item along the early railways as they were developed among other things because they were needed for signaling and messaging However I imagine that public telegraph facilities happened when the first public post offices were opened This appears to have happened in Malacca in 1854 In 1877 both Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison submitted their patents for the first telephone The records show that the first telephone exchange (50 lines) was installed in Singapore in 1879 and in Kuala Lumpur in 1891 Malacca probably had at least one working telephone when Dad was born

The earliest record of power generation has been traced back to a small mining town in Rawang Selangor Two enterprising individuals Loke Yew and Thamboosamy Pillai (Chetty Malacca) installed an electric generator in 1894 to operate their mines marking the first use of electric pumps for mining and the beginning of the story of electricity in Malaya In the same year private supply for street lighting purposes was extended to Rawang town and in the next year to the railway station in Kuala Lumpur In 1905 the Singapore Electrical Tramway Limited built the first power station at MacKenzie Road It not only provided power for its network of services but also supplied electricity for municipal needs The Tanjong Kling Power Station in Malacca is one of the oldest power stations in Malaysia but I could not find the date it beganFrom all this I conclude that Malaca would have been at least partly electrified by the end of the decade in the public places and perhaps streets but probably not down to household supply definitely not at Meringu Lane ndash judging from later evidence

35

estate which had been created with $200000 while retaining an interest in the new company

This deal both convinced local growers that their future was in rubber and attracted European companies to Malaya By 1910 there were thirty-five European and Chinese companies growing rubber on tens of thousands of acres across Malaya The industry which Tan had started despite opposition produced around half the world‟s rubber by 1920 and brought unprecedented prosperity to Malaya and Singapore through which most of it was shipped ldquo

httpinfopedianlsgarticlesSIP_1628_2009-12-31htmlNational

It is perhaps worth mentioning that Sime Darby Malaysia‟s flagship corporation was among the companies that first set up their plantations in Malacca

Rubber was soon to overshadow tin and was far more widespread It needed a network of roads metalled roads The early roads served as feeders to connect to the railway lines Then they opened up the country which allowed access to new territories for occupation agriculture plantations and other economic activities For the first time the whole population began to enjoy greater mobility within their jungle-clad country The first metalled road ran from Taiping to Port Weld completed in 1901 I could not find when the roads in Malacca were metalled I also could not find out when the first motor car was introduced in Malacca or Malaya What we do know is that Singapore enacted automobile registration legislation in 1903 This would presage similar legislation in Malacca very shortly The same year saw the establishment of the Federated Malay States Automobile Club and in 1907 the Singapore Automobile Club By 1908 there was a metalled road between Kulim and Province Wellesley Similar extension took place along the Johore railway to the south We may imagine that the Malacca roads the trunk roads at least were well paved by the close of first decade ndash while my Dad was still in primary school Fords first local advertisement in the Straits Times appeared on 20 December 1909

Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and his code in 1850 Most people are familiar with the telegraph line as an ubiquitous item along the early railways as they were developed among other things because they were needed for signaling and messaging However I imagine that public telegraph facilities happened when the first public post offices were opened This appears to have happened in Malacca in 1854 In 1877 both Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison submitted their patents for the first telephone The records show that the first telephone exchange (50 lines) was installed in Singapore in 1879 and in Kuala Lumpur in 1891 Malacca probably had at least one working telephone when Dad was born

The earliest record of power generation has been traced back to a small mining town in Rawang Selangor Two enterprising individuals Loke Yew and Thamboosamy Pillai (Chetty Malacca) installed an electric generator in 1894 to operate their mines marking the first use of electric pumps for mining and the beginning of the story of electricity in Malaya In the same year private supply for street lighting purposes was extended to Rawang town and in the next year to the railway station in Kuala Lumpur In 1905 the Singapore Electrical Tramway Limited built the first power station at MacKenzie Road It not only provided power for its network of services but also supplied electricity for municipal needs The Tanjong Kling Power Station in Malacca is one of the oldest power stations in Malaysia but I could not find the date it beganFrom all this I conclude that Malaca would have been at least partly electrified by the end of the decade in the public places and perhaps streets but probably not down to household supply definitely not at Meringu Lane ndash judging from later evidence

36

With the many landmark developments taking place Malacca would have experienced a resurgence of spirits and fortunes One might well speculate that the people including our Chetty Malacca would have been buoyant and ready to take part and find a place for themselves in the scenario expanding before them Certainly it would dawn on young Odiang as he grew up that the world was full of promise and he should not miss the boat Nenek Kathai would have realized that the passport to the new world for him was an education

Education Passport to the New World At the beginning the EIC‟s interests were purely commercial One did not run educational programes for people at trading centres There were however different pressures at work on the British on the spot Firstly they found an increasing need for an English-educated middle-level workforce to help run the country The need was of much larger dimensions than facing the Dutch before Needless to say this was complemented by an upsurge of demand for such education Underlying the latter was the realization that learning their mother tongue apart an English education was the prerequisite for employment social mobility and well-being Secondly the British were under pressure from diverse Christian groups to carry out missionary work It was the new policy to allow them to do so Education has always been the first step to enlightenment So the missions built schools The Straits Settlements and Malacca in particular had already evolved what we would these days call a plural society The education system had to cut across all local communities Because of the multi-racial composition of population (and no doubt because of the ready availability of religious materials in the language) they built English-language schools This suited the British Thirdly as the British penetrated the Peninsula they found themselves with a majority population of an homogenous indigenous people the Malays who already possessed a royal court language and culture and a tradition of education through informal and formal schools including religious schools The Malays were overwhelmingly in agriculture lived in the rural areas and were Muslim The British needed to evolve a policy to support Malay vernacular education as a separate and special exercise In time this would become the major issue of British Malaya Fourthly there was the parallel demand for vernacular schools from the other ethnic groups particularly the Chinese who formed the majority of the populations in the Straits Settlements The British allowed them to provide their own vernacular schools

It was only with transfer to Crown Colony status in 1867 did the British confront education as a full responsibility In 1870 a Select Committee of the Straits Settlements recommended as follows

1 To appoint an Inspector of Schools Straits Settlements 2 To reform the existing Grants-in-aid system which mainly applied to English

schools whether they be missionary or privately run 3 To greatly extend and improve vernacular education especially Malay

vernacular education

The primary focus of the British effort was on the English schools There were two types the first was the government English school managed by the government where all expenses were paid for by the government the second was the government-aided English school which received grants-in-aid and was controlled by its own governing body Mission schools fell under the second category Both categories admitted pupils regardless of race or religion from primary one up The mission schools usually charged a small school fee Over time there would be privately initiated English schools and they were accorded the same treatment as mission schools

37

The Anglican mission led the field They opened the first three English schools namely the Penang Free School in 1816 the Malacca Free High School in 1826 and the Singapore Free School in 1823 then commonly called ldquoProtestant Free Schoolsrdquo Here‟s an insight into how things went in Malacca

The school was professedly an English school but classes were also held in Portuguese Chinese and Malay After instruction in their own language the pupils were transferred to the English classes In 1875 the trustees came to the conclusion that they could no longer carry on with the funds at their disposal and decided to hand over their school funds and property to the Straits Settlements government Three years later (1878) the Government took over the school and renamed it ldquoThe Malacca High Schoolrdquo

Note 1 All three became government schools in time the first government school in each case and in time the premiegravere educational institution in their states and countries respectively The last became Raffles Institution Incredibly before 1870 there were no government English schools

Note 2 It is noteworthy that after the Dutch government took over from the VOC they did begin to provide schooling ndash as they proceed to do in the Indies The startup of Malacca High School was directly related to the closing of the Dutch-Malay school which was established in January 1819 by a Christian missionary during the Dutch reign

Note 3 Munshi Abdullah relates in the Hikayat Abdullah15

that in 1818 an English missionary W C Milne set up an Anglo-Chinese College near the Tranquerah Gate which provided education in English and Chinese He was closely associated with it teaching Malay and doing translation work The college was moved to Hong Kong in 1843 to become a seminary

Next we come to the educational highlight of this history I make no apology for reproducing in full the article in the Star on-line of 20 Jun 2010 about St Francis Institution (SFI) the alma mater of my Dad and myself

THERE are two key years in the colourful and chequered history of St Francis Institution (SFI) - 1872 and 1902

The humble origin of SFI is traced back to the opening of the attap-roofed St Mary‟s School close to Praya Lane along Jalan Banda Hilir in 1872

Managed by the then parish priest of St Francis Xavier Church Fr Maximillian De Souza this school ran on funds from the French Missions Students who had to pay a nominal monthly fee of three cents in adherence to the government of the day‟s ruling that grant-in-aid schools should charge fees

In 1880 St Mary‟s was relocated to bigger premises and renamed St Francis School However financial difficulties forced the school to shut down in 1902 but not for long

Within months encouraged by the then bishop of Malacca the LaSalle religious brother community revived the school with a pioneer batch of 102 students American cleric Maurice Josephus who had served the school for a year previously became the new principal

From then on it was a story of moving from strength to strength in various aspects including student enrolment and upgrading of school facilities

15 Munshi Abdullah Hikayat Abdullah translated by A H Hill JMBRAS June 1955

37

The Anglican mission led the field They opened the first three English schools namely the Penang Free School in 1816 the Malacca Free High School in 1826 and the Singapore Free School in 1823 then commonly called ldquoProtestant Free Schoolsrdquo Here‟s an insight into how things went in Malacca

The school was professedly an English school but classes were also held in Portuguese Chinese and Malay After instruction in their own language the pupils were transferred to the English classes In 1875 the trustees came to the conclusion that they could no longer carry on with the funds at their disposal and decided to hand over their school funds and property to the Straits Settlements government Three years later (1878) the Government took over the school and renamed it ldquoThe Malacca High Schoolrdquo

Note 1 All three became government schools in time the first government school in each case and in time the premiegravere educational institution in their states and countries respectively The last became Raffles Institution Incredibly before 1870 there were no government English schools

Note 2 It is noteworthy that after the Dutch government took over from the VOC they did begin to provide schooling ndash as they proceed to do in the Indies The startup of Malacca High School was directly related to the closing of the Dutch-Malay school which was established in January 1819 by a Christian missionary during the Dutch reign

Note 3 Munshi Abdullah relates in the Hikayat Abdullah15

that in 1818 an English missionary W C Milne set up an Anglo-Chinese College near the Tranquerah Gate which provided education in English and Chinese He was closely associated with it teaching Malay and doing translation work The college was moved to Hong Kong in 1843 to become a seminary

Next we come to the educational highlight of this history I make no apology for reproducing in full the article in the Star on-line of 20 Jun 2010 about St Francis Institution (SFI) the alma mater of my Dad and myself

THERE are two key years in the colourful and chequered history of St Francis Institution (SFI) - 1872 and 1902

The humble origin of SFI is traced back to the opening of the attap-roofed St Mary‟s School close to Praya Lane along Jalan Banda Hilir in 1872

Managed by the then parish priest of St Francis Xavier Church Fr Maximillian De Souza this school ran on funds from the French Missions Students who had to pay a nominal monthly fee of three cents in adherence to the government of the day‟s ruling that grant-in-aid schools should charge fees

In 1880 St Mary‟s was relocated to bigger premises and renamed St Francis School However financial difficulties forced the school to shut down in 1902 but not for long

Within months encouraged by the then bishop of Malacca the LaSalle religious brother community revived the school with a pioneer batch of 102 students American cleric Maurice Josephus who had served the school for a year previously became the new principal

From then on it was a story of moving from strength to strength in various aspects including student enrolment and upgrading of school facilities

15 Munshi Abdullah Hikayat Abdullah translated by A H Hill JMBRAS June 1955

38

Banda Hilir which had a seafront was chosen as the ideal site and in 1906 rose the old ldquoUrdquo building which forms the nucleus of SFI today

In 1914 a three-storey block of classrooms and a dormitory were builtrdquo

The Dames of St Muar had earlier established the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ) in 1860 The Italian Canossian Institute founded the Convent of the Sacred Heart in 1905 The Methodist Episcopal Mission established the Malacca Anglo Chinese School in 1910 The sister school the Methodist Girls‟ School had been established six years earlier in 1904 in the year following in 1905 the mission had also founded the Suydam Girls‟ School So when my Dad was ready to consider an education (c1906) in English there was only the one government boys‟ school (High School) and the one mission school (St Francis‟ ) Not to be left out the Government would go on to establish the Bandar Hilir English School in Malacca in 1908 and the Tranquerah English School in 1925 A research paper reported that in 1932 Malaca still had only 3 government and 2 aided (English) boys‟ schools there were 3 mission girls schools but even at that date no government girls‟ school

We should close this review of the English schools in my Dad‟s time by reporting that the University of Cambridge Location Examinations was introduced in Singapore in 1892 but Senior Cambridge classes were only initiated in St Joseph‟s Institution in 1927 It is therefore not possible to say conclusively whether my Dad would have taken the exam round about 1917-18 In normal circumstances pupils would have to complete the run up syllabi in the earlier secondary classes over a 3-4 year period not counting the teacher training to take the pupils through and the availability of textbooks High School was likely to have started first

From EIC times the Malay schools had received some support and from 1858 they were monitored Although the Select Committee Report related to the Straits Settlements it had a profound impact on the educational development of the Malay States as many of the officials in the Malay States during the first decade of residential rule were either seconded or transferred from the Straits Civil Service The Report recommended a large extension of Malay schools This did take place However for reasons explained further on they only provided 4 years‟ primary education

The British were concerned with the de-stabilising effects of ldquoover-educationrdquo on the traditional way of life of the Malay peasantry With no appropriate means of employment for secondary school-leavers in the kampongs there would be urban drift It could also lead to the emergence of political discontent They even saw no need to provide English In the upshot they introduced a secular school system of four years‟ primary education The package included some academic subjects like history and geography and arts and crafts suitable for their world Over time the Roman script (Rumi) got introduced alongside the Arabic script (Jawi) Incredible as it may sound there was no secondary tier caput The British planners actually meant for the Malays to remain in their rural world this in a new century that was already changing dramatically and with their urban non-Malay counterparts enjoying increasing opportunities of secondary education and employment in government and business Any decent thinking Malay or local would have said ldquoMana Boleh (How can)rdquo Be it as it may such was the policy implemented The British set up several teacher training centres throughout the country trained the teachers at the primary level and posted them to the rural schools In 1922 the Sultan Idris Training College was established as the apex and resource centre of the system ndash but again at the primary level in 1926 it acquired a Malay Translation Bureau tasked with the preparation revision reprinting and translation of books and the training of translators

16 The only available

16 Dussek He was not only committed to educate teachers as well as train them but also to raise the

standard of Malay vernacular schools gradually until secondary education was possible and to press for the use of the Malay language as the language of the government53 though as previously mentioned his proposal to establish Malay secondary schools and to increase the use of Malay in the government failed to materialize Dussek‟s Malay policy at the SITC was possibly the most significant British contribution to the growth of Malay nationalism prior to World War II

39

option for the Malays to further their education beyond the rudimentary level was by switching at the fourth grade for boys and third grade for girls to the Malay Special Classes in government English schools After two years of intensive coaching in English they were then allowed to proceed to secondary education in English However such opportunities were not many Malays were further fearful of conversion to Christianity in the mission schools

ldquoThus education of rural Malays was largely confined to four years of rudimentary education Many Malays remained entrapped in rural areas without any possible means of upward social mobility

The response was poor so much so that the British had in 1890 to introduce compulsion through the Malay rulership Thus by 1900 while the Straits Settlements had a total of 29 English boys‟ schools with a combined enrollment of 6155 there were 141 Malay boys‟ schools with an enrollment of 6591 The corresponding figures for girls‟ schools were 10 English with an enrolment of 1373 and 28 Malay with an enrolment of 753 Figures for 1916 indicate that as against 191 schools overall in the Straits Settlements there were 365 in the Federated States but still only 137 schools in the Unfederated States The schools in the latter two would have been predominantly Malays schools

As a quite independent strategy the British started the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar in 1905 It was a residential school for the Malay nobility and elite It provided a distinctly English education leading to the Cambridge exams The object was to prepare the pupils with an English orientation draw them into the structure of colonial administration and so cement British control of the Malay population

The Chinese vernacular schools were left to develop independently by the clans and associations These relied on China imported textbooks and teachers and later had to be regulated with political developments in China The British extended grant-in-aid to them where they qualified The Pay Fong School established in Malacca in 1910 is an outstanding example of an eminent Chinese school I did not find reference to any Tamil vernacular schools established in Malacca at that time In time Tamil education would emerge as a concern for the new generation which would grow out from the influx of Tamil labourers for the rubber estates and public works

By my Dad‟s time the value of education would have been fully apparent to the local population I have no doubt that if the Chetty Malacca understood one thing with any clarity it was to send their children to school When they boiled down their options we can see that they would not be interested in Chinese education There were no Tamil schools to speak of and they would not be particularly interested in them in any case having lost the language The Malay schools were in the rural areas and only up to primary four The choice would have been the English schools These were in the urban areas They admitted pupils of every colour and creed from age K1 up with no language or other pre-requisites and free They took them through to secondary and opened the doors to employment The situation would have been the same for the Peranakan Chinese who would similarly have preferred the English schools to the Chinese schools It is no surprise therefore that my Dad went to an English school

When Nenek Kathai took that decision there were already 8 cohorts of children Chetty Malacca kids among them who would have completed 10 years of schooling some less The first cohort (from High School)would have completed 10 years in 1836 and would already be over 60 years in the workforce and near 80 years old When Dad stepped into SFI there would have been 4 levels of seniors ahead of him Of course not all Chetty Malacca children would have gone to school There would be many too poor to afford the alternative cost of not working at home in the field or in the shop But perhaps over the same 80 years the proportions would have increased as incomes in the community rose During the Japanese Occupation when we

40

lived among the Chetty Malacca community I noticed that probably a majority of my Dad‟s peers had been to school up to varying levels Among his seniors it was less and among his juniors more A few had gone for further or professional education I could not tell about the children because there was only Japanese school A good number did not seem to be going to school It was a time for survival with all hands to the plough

Chetty Malacca Women

And finally what about the women In my observations during the above period I found the Chetty Malacca ladies ranged in roles from simple housewives to consorts and matriarchs In their first role they formed the core of the family They ran a tight ship at home enforced frugality and ensured practice of the religion As matriarchs they collectively decided the community norms and pronounced judgment upon individual behavior What offended the matriarchs was infradig They never met in committee but always seemed to know what the other is thinking As consorts they carried themselves off with all the comely elegance for which they were justly known When both were dressed in their fineries they stood up to their counterparts the Peranakan ladies In fact both sets of ladies dressed remarkably alike I never got the impression that these ladies needed an education They were in complete mastery of their domains Their functions overlapped of course with different weightages for the various age groups and accordingly to wealth As a small boy my criterion for judging them was simple by the excellence of their kitchen and by the excellence of their cakes The kitchen of Achi Manga was tops

But education of the women folk was creeping in Some of the young girls were already being sent to school about my time and it would become progressively standard in the post-war world We would progressively see them as clerks sales-girls nurses and teachers etc They would fill the professional ranks and some become politicians What we ought to point out is that the opportunities for them to attend school already existed There were in fact more girls‟ English schools than boys‟ schools from before my Dad‟s time

Stock-Taking 1877-91

Finally it is time again to do a headcount of the Chetty Malacca

The first British population tally of Malacca was the Census 1871 I have not been able to view this document It is reported as being flawed in classification methodology and other features and it was not used as a basis for subsequent census But one thing was fixed whereas earlier its boundaries barely extended beyond the town and suburbs in 1877 the area of Malacca was established as 648 square miles more or less what it is today Extrapolating from different secondary sources I managed to reconstruct some probable figures The total population of Malacca at that time was probably 77056 of which 17132 12 were Chinese (220) 3168 were Indians (41) 50659 were Malays (652) and 6797 Other Malayans (87) The annual rate of growth was a respectable 182 pa over the intervening 76 years Spectacularly the Malay population grew by 134 times to 50659 It now made up 652 of the total population We can at once say this was largely due to incorporation of the surrounding rural area into the state The Chinese population also grew but dropped to 220 We have to note that the Indian population dropped both in absolute numbers from 4268 to 3168 by a thumping 258 and by proportion They now constituted only 41 of the population There were no appreciable changes in the make up of the Indian population so we may take the total as comprising mainly Chetty Malacca The Chetty Malacca population therefore declined and they lost position as a significant minority community

For a better perspective of what was happening we need to look at the figures from the Census 1881 and 1891 The first was an improved state-only exercise while the second was a comprehensive one covering the Straits Settlements I have had the opportunity to see the latter which contained the comparative data for 1881 The figures are in the table below

41

Abstract of Population - Settlement of Malacca 1881-1891

Serial Nationality 1881 1891 1891

Total

Total

Town

1 Europeans 40

00 134

01 88 657

2 Eurasians 2213

24 1756

19 1684 959

3 Chinese

I Straits-born 5264

(56) 4971

(54) 3425 689

2Total 19741

211 18161

197 8409 463

4 Malays amp Other Natives of Archipelago

1 Malays 67513

(721) 68127

(739) 5025 74

2 Jawi Pekans 867 183 107

3 Total 69390

743 70325

763 5359 76

5 Tamils amp Other Natives of India

1 Tamils 1728

(18) 1471 (16) 797 542

2 Total 1891

20 1647 18 877 532

6 Other Nationalities

1 Arabs 220

95

53 558

2 Total 304

03 147

02 86 585

6 Grand Total 93579 100 92170 100 16503 179

We may note the following

The population peaked at 93579 in 1881 at an annual growth rate of 182 pa and then it dropped slightly to 92170 giving a overall annual growth of 150 over 96 years

The Chinese population grew up to 1881 reaching 19741 and then dropped to 18161 in 1891 finally arriving at a reduced 197 of the total population

The Indian population continued its drop from 4268 in 1795 to 1891 in 1881 and 1647 in 1891 The Tamil component is now identified separately It also dropped to

42

1728 in 1881 and 1471 in 1891 All the Chetty Malacca folk would have declared themselves as Tamil There were no significant changes yet in the demography of the Tamils So we can comfortably conclude that the Tamils recorded were mainly Chetty Malaca Both Nenek Kathai and my Grand-pa Sangaran Pillay would have been counted in both census Our ancestors now represented a mere 18 of Malacca‟s population

The Malay population grew normally to 67513 I 1881 and 68127 in 1891 the latter forming 739 of the population

For the first time the two census identified the Straits-born Chinese In 1891 there were 4971 Straits-born (Peranakan) Chinese 2213 Eurasians and 1471 Tamils (Chetty Malacca These proportions confirmed the relative sizes of these communities from historical deduction

For the first time the Jawi Pekan were also identified They were the counterparts of the Chetty Malacca (the Tamils Muslims who inter-married and settled down as locals) They were relatively small in number 183 in 1891

The Europeans apart all Non-Malay local communities showed a decline between 1881 and 1891 both in absolute numbers and proportions

The Census 1891 showed that the majority of the non-Malays lived in the town while the overwhelming majority of the Malays lived outside The Eurasians were highly concentrated in the town The Peranakan Chinese were also more in the town Nearly half of the Chetty Malacca had moved out of the municipal area

The big question is why the historical communities of Malacca were declining Among the factors affecting them in common the most probable were the rise in educational levels and the inadequacy of employment opportunities in Malacca The young people simply needed to move out to find their fortunes Malacca simply could not sustain its educated Singapore and Penang on the other hand were bursting with growth as the modern generation kingpin entre-ports of the new world economy Kuala Lumpur and the other Malayan towns offered opportunities to partake of the tin boom and the resultant economic activity It should be noted that at this point the rubber boom and the road system had not yet happened while the railways were just being put into place The Chetty Malacca being small and overall not too wealthy would not have had the kinds of business nuclei in Malacca that could retain their young and so would tend to lose more It is also possible that having lost their wealth and social position the Chetty Malacca as a whole found it harder to acquire recruits to inter-marry into their community On the other hand there may have been seepage and loss of identity through conversion to Christianity or Islam and subsequent marriage within their new religion With the education of men outpacing women the education disparity between the sexes may have contributed further to this seepage It is clear that at the turn of the century the Chetty Malacca were a dispersing community

1891 is a good point to take a last back-bearing Thereafter with the opening up of the land Malacca would experience the inflows and outflows of Chinese Tamils Malays and others as part of the new economy of Malaya It would not be possible to identify the historical communities of Malacca any longer Suffice it say to close this chapter that the Chetty Malacca then proceeded over the next century to migrate to MalayaMalaysia and Singapore In the latter they settled in numbers and now have a community there larger and more prosperous in Singapore From there a good number have migrated overseas

END

39

option for the Malays to further their education beyond the rudimentary level was by switching at the fourth grade for boys and third grade for girls to the Malay Special Classes in government English schools After two years of intensive coaching in English they were then allowed to proceed to secondary education in English However such opportunities were not many Malays were further fearful of conversion to Christianity in the mission schools

ldquoThus education of rural Malays was largely confined to four years of rudimentary education Many Malays remained entrapped in rural areas without any possible means of upward social mobility

The response was poor so much so that the British had in 1890 to introduce compulsion through the Malay rulership Thus by 1900 while the Straits Settlements had a total of 29 English boys‟ schools with a combined enrollment of 6155 there were 141 Malay boys‟ schools with an enrollment of 6591 The corresponding figures for girls‟ schools were 10 English with an enrolment of 1373 and 28 Malay with an enrolment of 753 Figures for 1916 indicate that as against 191 schools overall in the Straits Settlements there were 365 in the Federated States but still only 137 schools in the Unfederated States The schools in the latter two would have been predominantly Malays schools

As a quite independent strategy the British started the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar in 1905 It was a residential school for the Malay nobility and elite It provided a distinctly English education leading to the Cambridge exams The object was to prepare the pupils with an English orientation draw them into the structure of colonial administration and so cement British control of the Malay population

The Chinese vernacular schools were left to develop independently by the clans and associations These relied on China imported textbooks and teachers and later had to be regulated with political developments in China The British extended grant-in-aid to them where they qualified The Pay Fong School established in Malacca in 1910 is an outstanding example of an eminent Chinese school I did not find reference to any Tamil vernacular schools established in Malacca at that time In time Tamil education would emerge as a concern for the new generation which would grow out from the influx of Tamil labourers for the rubber estates and public works

By my Dad‟s time the value of education would have been fully apparent to the local population I have no doubt that if the Chetty Malacca understood one thing with any clarity it was to send their children to school When they boiled down their options we can see that they would not be interested in Chinese education There were no Tamil schools to speak of and they would not be particularly interested in them in any case having lost the language The Malay schools were in the rural areas and only up to primary four The choice would have been the English schools These were in the urban areas They admitted pupils of every colour and creed from age K1 up with no language or other pre-requisites and free They took them through to secondary and opened the doors to employment The situation would have been the same for the Peranakan Chinese who would similarly have preferred the English schools to the Chinese schools It is no surprise therefore that my Dad went to an English school

When Nenek Kathai took that decision there were already 8 cohorts of children Chetty Malacca kids among them who would have completed 10 years of schooling some less The first cohort (from High School)would have completed 10 years in 1836 and would already be over 60 years in the workforce and near 80 years old When Dad stepped into SFI there would have been 4 levels of seniors ahead of him Of course not all Chetty Malacca children would have gone to school There would be many too poor to afford the alternative cost of not working at home in the field or in the shop But perhaps over the same 80 years the proportions would have increased as incomes in the community rose During the Japanese Occupation when we

40

lived among the Chetty Malacca community I noticed that probably a majority of my Dad‟s peers had been to school up to varying levels Among his seniors it was less and among his juniors more A few had gone for further or professional education I could not tell about the children because there was only Japanese school A good number did not seem to be going to school It was a time for survival with all hands to the plough

Chetty Malacca Women

And finally what about the women In my observations during the above period I found the Chetty Malacca ladies ranged in roles from simple housewives to consorts and matriarchs In their first role they formed the core of the family They ran a tight ship at home enforced frugality and ensured practice of the religion As matriarchs they collectively decided the community norms and pronounced judgment upon individual behavior What offended the matriarchs was infradig They never met in committee but always seemed to know what the other is thinking As consorts they carried themselves off with all the comely elegance for which they were justly known When both were dressed in their fineries they stood up to their counterparts the Peranakan ladies In fact both sets of ladies dressed remarkably alike I never got the impression that these ladies needed an education They were in complete mastery of their domains Their functions overlapped of course with different weightages for the various age groups and accordingly to wealth As a small boy my criterion for judging them was simple by the excellence of their kitchen and by the excellence of their cakes The kitchen of Achi Manga was tops

But education of the women folk was creeping in Some of the young girls were already being sent to school about my time and it would become progressively standard in the post-war world We would progressively see them as clerks sales-girls nurses and teachers etc They would fill the professional ranks and some become politicians What we ought to point out is that the opportunities for them to attend school already existed There were in fact more girls‟ English schools than boys‟ schools from before my Dad‟s time

Stock-Taking 1877-91

Finally it is time again to do a headcount of the Chetty Malacca

The first British population tally of Malacca was the Census 1871 I have not been able to view this document It is reported as being flawed in classification methodology and other features and it was not used as a basis for subsequent census But one thing was fixed whereas earlier its boundaries barely extended beyond the town and suburbs in 1877 the area of Malacca was established as 648 square miles more or less what it is today Extrapolating from different secondary sources I managed to reconstruct some probable figures The total population of Malacca at that time was probably 77056 of which 17132 12 were Chinese (220) 3168 were Indians (41) 50659 were Malays (652) and 6797 Other Malayans (87) The annual rate of growth was a respectable 182 pa over the intervening 76 years Spectacularly the Malay population grew by 134 times to 50659 It now made up 652 of the total population We can at once say this was largely due to incorporation of the surrounding rural area into the state The Chinese population also grew but dropped to 220 We have to note that the Indian population dropped both in absolute numbers from 4268 to 3168 by a thumping 258 and by proportion They now constituted only 41 of the population There were no appreciable changes in the make up of the Indian population so we may take the total as comprising mainly Chetty Malacca The Chetty Malacca population therefore declined and they lost position as a significant minority community

For a better perspective of what was happening we need to look at the figures from the Census 1881 and 1891 The first was an improved state-only exercise while the second was a comprehensive one covering the Straits Settlements I have had the opportunity to see the latter which contained the comparative data for 1881 The figures are in the table below

41

Abstract of Population - Settlement of Malacca 1881-1891

Serial Nationality 1881 1891 1891

Total

Total

Town

1 Europeans 40

00 134

01 88 657

2 Eurasians 2213

24 1756

19 1684 959

3 Chinese

I Straits-born 5264

(56) 4971

(54) 3425 689

2Total 19741

211 18161

197 8409 463

4 Malays amp Other Natives of Archipelago

1 Malays 67513

(721) 68127

(739) 5025 74

2 Jawi Pekans 867 183 107

3 Total 69390

743 70325

763 5359 76

5 Tamils amp Other Natives of India

1 Tamils 1728

(18) 1471 (16) 797 542

2 Total 1891

20 1647 18 877 532

6 Other Nationalities

1 Arabs 220

95

53 558

2 Total 304

03 147

02 86 585

6 Grand Total 93579 100 92170 100 16503 179

We may note the following

The population peaked at 93579 in 1881 at an annual growth rate of 182 pa and then it dropped slightly to 92170 giving a overall annual growth of 150 over 96 years

The Chinese population grew up to 1881 reaching 19741 and then dropped to 18161 in 1891 finally arriving at a reduced 197 of the total population

The Indian population continued its drop from 4268 in 1795 to 1891 in 1881 and 1647 in 1891 The Tamil component is now identified separately It also dropped to

42

1728 in 1881 and 1471 in 1891 All the Chetty Malacca folk would have declared themselves as Tamil There were no significant changes yet in the demography of the Tamils So we can comfortably conclude that the Tamils recorded were mainly Chetty Malaca Both Nenek Kathai and my Grand-pa Sangaran Pillay would have been counted in both census Our ancestors now represented a mere 18 of Malacca‟s population

The Malay population grew normally to 67513 I 1881 and 68127 in 1891 the latter forming 739 of the population

For the first time the two census identified the Straits-born Chinese In 1891 there were 4971 Straits-born (Peranakan) Chinese 2213 Eurasians and 1471 Tamils (Chetty Malacca These proportions confirmed the relative sizes of these communities from historical deduction

For the first time the Jawi Pekan were also identified They were the counterparts of the Chetty Malacca (the Tamils Muslims who inter-married and settled down as locals) They were relatively small in number 183 in 1891

The Europeans apart all Non-Malay local communities showed a decline between 1881 and 1891 both in absolute numbers and proportions

The Census 1891 showed that the majority of the non-Malays lived in the town while the overwhelming majority of the Malays lived outside The Eurasians were highly concentrated in the town The Peranakan Chinese were also more in the town Nearly half of the Chetty Malacca had moved out of the municipal area

The big question is why the historical communities of Malacca were declining Among the factors affecting them in common the most probable were the rise in educational levels and the inadequacy of employment opportunities in Malacca The young people simply needed to move out to find their fortunes Malacca simply could not sustain its educated Singapore and Penang on the other hand were bursting with growth as the modern generation kingpin entre-ports of the new world economy Kuala Lumpur and the other Malayan towns offered opportunities to partake of the tin boom and the resultant economic activity It should be noted that at this point the rubber boom and the road system had not yet happened while the railways were just being put into place The Chetty Malacca being small and overall not too wealthy would not have had the kinds of business nuclei in Malacca that could retain their young and so would tend to lose more It is also possible that having lost their wealth and social position the Chetty Malacca as a whole found it harder to acquire recruits to inter-marry into their community On the other hand there may have been seepage and loss of identity through conversion to Christianity or Islam and subsequent marriage within their new religion With the education of men outpacing women the education disparity between the sexes may have contributed further to this seepage It is clear that at the turn of the century the Chetty Malacca were a dispersing community

1891 is a good point to take a last back-bearing Thereafter with the opening up of the land Malacca would experience the inflows and outflows of Chinese Tamils Malays and others as part of the new economy of Malaya It would not be possible to identify the historical communities of Malacca any longer Suffice it say to close this chapter that the Chetty Malacca then proceeded over the next century to migrate to MalayaMalaysia and Singapore In the latter they settled in numbers and now have a community there larger and more prosperous in Singapore From there a good number have migrated overseas

END

40

lived among the Chetty Malacca community I noticed that probably a majority of my Dad‟s peers had been to school up to varying levels Among his seniors it was less and among his juniors more A few had gone for further or professional education I could not tell about the children because there was only Japanese school A good number did not seem to be going to school It was a time for survival with all hands to the plough

Chetty Malacca Women

And finally what about the women In my observations during the above period I found the Chetty Malacca ladies ranged in roles from simple housewives to consorts and matriarchs In their first role they formed the core of the family They ran a tight ship at home enforced frugality and ensured practice of the religion As matriarchs they collectively decided the community norms and pronounced judgment upon individual behavior What offended the matriarchs was infradig They never met in committee but always seemed to know what the other is thinking As consorts they carried themselves off with all the comely elegance for which they were justly known When both were dressed in their fineries they stood up to their counterparts the Peranakan ladies In fact both sets of ladies dressed remarkably alike I never got the impression that these ladies needed an education They were in complete mastery of their domains Their functions overlapped of course with different weightages for the various age groups and accordingly to wealth As a small boy my criterion for judging them was simple by the excellence of their kitchen and by the excellence of their cakes The kitchen of Achi Manga was tops

But education of the women folk was creeping in Some of the young girls were already being sent to school about my time and it would become progressively standard in the post-war world We would progressively see them as clerks sales-girls nurses and teachers etc They would fill the professional ranks and some become politicians What we ought to point out is that the opportunities for them to attend school already existed There were in fact more girls‟ English schools than boys‟ schools from before my Dad‟s time

Stock-Taking 1877-91

Finally it is time again to do a headcount of the Chetty Malacca

The first British population tally of Malacca was the Census 1871 I have not been able to view this document It is reported as being flawed in classification methodology and other features and it was not used as a basis for subsequent census But one thing was fixed whereas earlier its boundaries barely extended beyond the town and suburbs in 1877 the area of Malacca was established as 648 square miles more or less what it is today Extrapolating from different secondary sources I managed to reconstruct some probable figures The total population of Malacca at that time was probably 77056 of which 17132 12 were Chinese (220) 3168 were Indians (41) 50659 were Malays (652) and 6797 Other Malayans (87) The annual rate of growth was a respectable 182 pa over the intervening 76 years Spectacularly the Malay population grew by 134 times to 50659 It now made up 652 of the total population We can at once say this was largely due to incorporation of the surrounding rural area into the state The Chinese population also grew but dropped to 220 We have to note that the Indian population dropped both in absolute numbers from 4268 to 3168 by a thumping 258 and by proportion They now constituted only 41 of the population There were no appreciable changes in the make up of the Indian population so we may take the total as comprising mainly Chetty Malacca The Chetty Malacca population therefore declined and they lost position as a significant minority community

For a better perspective of what was happening we need to look at the figures from the Census 1881 and 1891 The first was an improved state-only exercise while the second was a comprehensive one covering the Straits Settlements I have had the opportunity to see the latter which contained the comparative data for 1881 The figures are in the table below

41

Abstract of Population - Settlement of Malacca 1881-1891

Serial Nationality 1881 1891 1891

Total

Total

Town

1 Europeans 40

00 134

01 88 657

2 Eurasians 2213

24 1756

19 1684 959

3 Chinese

I Straits-born 5264

(56) 4971

(54) 3425 689

2Total 19741

211 18161

197 8409 463

4 Malays amp Other Natives of Archipelago

1 Malays 67513

(721) 68127

(739) 5025 74

2 Jawi Pekans 867 183 107

3 Total 69390

743 70325

763 5359 76

5 Tamils amp Other Natives of India

1 Tamils 1728

(18) 1471 (16) 797 542

2 Total 1891

20 1647 18 877 532

6 Other Nationalities

1 Arabs 220

95

53 558

2 Total 304

03 147

02 86 585

6 Grand Total 93579 100 92170 100 16503 179

We may note the following

The population peaked at 93579 in 1881 at an annual growth rate of 182 pa and then it dropped slightly to 92170 giving a overall annual growth of 150 over 96 years

The Chinese population grew up to 1881 reaching 19741 and then dropped to 18161 in 1891 finally arriving at a reduced 197 of the total population

The Indian population continued its drop from 4268 in 1795 to 1891 in 1881 and 1647 in 1891 The Tamil component is now identified separately It also dropped to

42

1728 in 1881 and 1471 in 1891 All the Chetty Malacca folk would have declared themselves as Tamil There were no significant changes yet in the demography of the Tamils So we can comfortably conclude that the Tamils recorded were mainly Chetty Malaca Both Nenek Kathai and my Grand-pa Sangaran Pillay would have been counted in both census Our ancestors now represented a mere 18 of Malacca‟s population

The Malay population grew normally to 67513 I 1881 and 68127 in 1891 the latter forming 739 of the population

For the first time the two census identified the Straits-born Chinese In 1891 there were 4971 Straits-born (Peranakan) Chinese 2213 Eurasians and 1471 Tamils (Chetty Malacca These proportions confirmed the relative sizes of these communities from historical deduction

For the first time the Jawi Pekan were also identified They were the counterparts of the Chetty Malacca (the Tamils Muslims who inter-married and settled down as locals) They were relatively small in number 183 in 1891

The Europeans apart all Non-Malay local communities showed a decline between 1881 and 1891 both in absolute numbers and proportions

The Census 1891 showed that the majority of the non-Malays lived in the town while the overwhelming majority of the Malays lived outside The Eurasians were highly concentrated in the town The Peranakan Chinese were also more in the town Nearly half of the Chetty Malacca had moved out of the municipal area

The big question is why the historical communities of Malacca were declining Among the factors affecting them in common the most probable were the rise in educational levels and the inadequacy of employment opportunities in Malacca The young people simply needed to move out to find their fortunes Malacca simply could not sustain its educated Singapore and Penang on the other hand were bursting with growth as the modern generation kingpin entre-ports of the new world economy Kuala Lumpur and the other Malayan towns offered opportunities to partake of the tin boom and the resultant economic activity It should be noted that at this point the rubber boom and the road system had not yet happened while the railways were just being put into place The Chetty Malacca being small and overall not too wealthy would not have had the kinds of business nuclei in Malacca that could retain their young and so would tend to lose more It is also possible that having lost their wealth and social position the Chetty Malacca as a whole found it harder to acquire recruits to inter-marry into their community On the other hand there may have been seepage and loss of identity through conversion to Christianity or Islam and subsequent marriage within their new religion With the education of men outpacing women the education disparity between the sexes may have contributed further to this seepage It is clear that at the turn of the century the Chetty Malacca were a dispersing community

1891 is a good point to take a last back-bearing Thereafter with the opening up of the land Malacca would experience the inflows and outflows of Chinese Tamils Malays and others as part of the new economy of Malaya It would not be possible to identify the historical communities of Malacca any longer Suffice it say to close this chapter that the Chetty Malacca then proceeded over the next century to migrate to MalayaMalaysia and Singapore In the latter they settled in numbers and now have a community there larger and more prosperous in Singapore From there a good number have migrated overseas

END

41

Abstract of Population - Settlement of Malacca 1881-1891

Serial Nationality 1881 1891 1891

Total

Total

Town

1 Europeans 40

00 134

01 88 657

2 Eurasians 2213

24 1756

19 1684 959

3 Chinese

I Straits-born 5264

(56) 4971

(54) 3425 689

2Total 19741

211 18161

197 8409 463

4 Malays amp Other Natives of Archipelago

1 Malays 67513

(721) 68127

(739) 5025 74

2 Jawi Pekans 867 183 107

3 Total 69390

743 70325

763 5359 76

5 Tamils amp Other Natives of India

1 Tamils 1728

(18) 1471 (16) 797 542

2 Total 1891

20 1647 18 877 532

6 Other Nationalities

1 Arabs 220

95

53 558

2 Total 304

03 147

02 86 585

6 Grand Total 93579 100 92170 100 16503 179

We may note the following

The population peaked at 93579 in 1881 at an annual growth rate of 182 pa and then it dropped slightly to 92170 giving a overall annual growth of 150 over 96 years

The Chinese population grew up to 1881 reaching 19741 and then dropped to 18161 in 1891 finally arriving at a reduced 197 of the total population

The Indian population continued its drop from 4268 in 1795 to 1891 in 1881 and 1647 in 1891 The Tamil component is now identified separately It also dropped to

42

1728 in 1881 and 1471 in 1891 All the Chetty Malacca folk would have declared themselves as Tamil There were no significant changes yet in the demography of the Tamils So we can comfortably conclude that the Tamils recorded were mainly Chetty Malaca Both Nenek Kathai and my Grand-pa Sangaran Pillay would have been counted in both census Our ancestors now represented a mere 18 of Malacca‟s population

The Malay population grew normally to 67513 I 1881 and 68127 in 1891 the latter forming 739 of the population

For the first time the two census identified the Straits-born Chinese In 1891 there were 4971 Straits-born (Peranakan) Chinese 2213 Eurasians and 1471 Tamils (Chetty Malacca These proportions confirmed the relative sizes of these communities from historical deduction

For the first time the Jawi Pekan were also identified They were the counterparts of the Chetty Malacca (the Tamils Muslims who inter-married and settled down as locals) They were relatively small in number 183 in 1891

The Europeans apart all Non-Malay local communities showed a decline between 1881 and 1891 both in absolute numbers and proportions

The Census 1891 showed that the majority of the non-Malays lived in the town while the overwhelming majority of the Malays lived outside The Eurasians were highly concentrated in the town The Peranakan Chinese were also more in the town Nearly half of the Chetty Malacca had moved out of the municipal area

The big question is why the historical communities of Malacca were declining Among the factors affecting them in common the most probable were the rise in educational levels and the inadequacy of employment opportunities in Malacca The young people simply needed to move out to find their fortunes Malacca simply could not sustain its educated Singapore and Penang on the other hand were bursting with growth as the modern generation kingpin entre-ports of the new world economy Kuala Lumpur and the other Malayan towns offered opportunities to partake of the tin boom and the resultant economic activity It should be noted that at this point the rubber boom and the road system had not yet happened while the railways were just being put into place The Chetty Malacca being small and overall not too wealthy would not have had the kinds of business nuclei in Malacca that could retain their young and so would tend to lose more It is also possible that having lost their wealth and social position the Chetty Malacca as a whole found it harder to acquire recruits to inter-marry into their community On the other hand there may have been seepage and loss of identity through conversion to Christianity or Islam and subsequent marriage within their new religion With the education of men outpacing women the education disparity between the sexes may have contributed further to this seepage It is clear that at the turn of the century the Chetty Malacca were a dispersing community

1891 is a good point to take a last back-bearing Thereafter with the opening up of the land Malacca would experience the inflows and outflows of Chinese Tamils Malays and others as part of the new economy of Malaya It would not be possible to identify the historical communities of Malacca any longer Suffice it say to close this chapter that the Chetty Malacca then proceeded over the next century to migrate to MalayaMalaysia and Singapore In the latter they settled in numbers and now have a community there larger and more prosperous in Singapore From there a good number have migrated overseas

END

42

1728 in 1881 and 1471 in 1891 All the Chetty Malacca folk would have declared themselves as Tamil There were no significant changes yet in the demography of the Tamils So we can comfortably conclude that the Tamils recorded were mainly Chetty Malaca Both Nenek Kathai and my Grand-pa Sangaran Pillay would have been counted in both census Our ancestors now represented a mere 18 of Malacca‟s population

The Malay population grew normally to 67513 I 1881 and 68127 in 1891 the latter forming 739 of the population

For the first time the two census identified the Straits-born Chinese In 1891 there were 4971 Straits-born (Peranakan) Chinese 2213 Eurasians and 1471 Tamils (Chetty Malacca These proportions confirmed the relative sizes of these communities from historical deduction

For the first time the Jawi Pekan were also identified They were the counterparts of the Chetty Malacca (the Tamils Muslims who inter-married and settled down as locals) They were relatively small in number 183 in 1891

The Europeans apart all Non-Malay local communities showed a decline between 1881 and 1891 both in absolute numbers and proportions

The Census 1891 showed that the majority of the non-Malays lived in the town while the overwhelming majority of the Malays lived outside The Eurasians were highly concentrated in the town The Peranakan Chinese were also more in the town Nearly half of the Chetty Malacca had moved out of the municipal area

The big question is why the historical communities of Malacca were declining Among the factors affecting them in common the most probable were the rise in educational levels and the inadequacy of employment opportunities in Malacca The young people simply needed to move out to find their fortunes Malacca simply could not sustain its educated Singapore and Penang on the other hand were bursting with growth as the modern generation kingpin entre-ports of the new world economy Kuala Lumpur and the other Malayan towns offered opportunities to partake of the tin boom and the resultant economic activity It should be noted that at this point the rubber boom and the road system had not yet happened while the railways were just being put into place The Chetty Malacca being small and overall not too wealthy would not have had the kinds of business nuclei in Malacca that could retain their young and so would tend to lose more It is also possible that having lost their wealth and social position the Chetty Malacca as a whole found it harder to acquire recruits to inter-marry into their community On the other hand there may have been seepage and loss of identity through conversion to Christianity or Islam and subsequent marriage within their new religion With the education of men outpacing women the education disparity between the sexes may have contributed further to this seepage It is clear that at the turn of the century the Chetty Malacca were a dispersing community

1891 is a good point to take a last back-bearing Thereafter with the opening up of the land Malacca would experience the inflows and outflows of Chinese Tamils Malays and others as part of the new economy of Malaya It would not be possible to identify the historical communities of Malacca any longer Suffice it say to close this chapter that the Chetty Malacca then proceeded over the next century to migrate to MalayaMalaysia and Singapore In the latter they settled in numbers and now have a community there larger and more prosperous in Singapore From there a good number have migrated overseas

END