As arguments spurt and twist in the spiraling debate over which movements were mainly responsible for gaining independence for the country, you can be sure that the only constant is surprise.
This would come from the unearthing of historical facts lying dormant in sundry archives in Britain, Malaysia and India.
Even with their disinterring, the debate would not necessarily recede through the disclosure of facts whose sheer potency would wrap up the argument of one or the other side in the reigning dispute, for there would then remain the task of sifting the newly unearthed trove and interpreting it.
Though uninterpreted truth may be as useless as buried gold, the task of interpretation is itself ridden with ambiguity. Still, there are facts and these are not easily gainsaid by obfuscation.
So far the debate over which political forces were the more critical towards gaining independence for Malaya, an exchange touched off by PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu, has been dominated by historians and politicians.
But what about the efforts of those to whom history is an avocation, not a professional discipline, and for whom the search for what lies beyond the welter of argumentative passions entail lonely burrowing in archival material in quest of the holy grail?
Just as war is too important a matter to be left to generals, so is history too significant a subject to be left to professional historians.
That ought to bring us to the avocation of such beavers in historical troves as Dominic J Puthucheary (right), sometime politician but more often a lawyer with an affinity for constitutional questions.
The latter inclination was what led him, over the past 20 years, to research the subject of the Malay left-wing and its role in growth of Malayan nationalism.
The research has led Puthucheary, 77, to public archives in Kew Gardens, London, and in Oxford where the papers of top British colonial civil servants who served in Malaya are kept.
As a result, he has formed some opinions about the Malay left-wing, whose members in the immediate aftermath of World War II were scattered among a slew of youth and women organisations that were later subsumed in the Malay Nationalist Party (MNP), whose luminaries were Burhanuddin al-Helmy, Ishak Muhammad and Ahmad Boestamam.
Mat Indera a Malay nationalist
Puthucheary said his research had led him to place Mat Indera, the character that Mohamad Sabu was supposed to have acclaimed a freedom fighter - a claim that has attracted to the PAS leader much Umno vitriol - firmly in the camp of the MNP.
"The MNP was the most influential political force in the country in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War," offered Puthucheary in a chat with Malaysiakini earlier this week.
"Many members of the MNP were also active in the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Unions (PMFTU) which was the other influential body among forces at odds with the British colonial administration in war's aftermath," he said.
According to Puthucheary, Mat Indera (right) was a teacher, "an intellectual", who was a good organiser of taxi drivers, of wharf and ferry workers in the Muar area.
"He was a well-known figure among Malay workers who came under the auspices of the PMFTU," said Puthucheary.
"Sections under the PMFTU were communist-inspired but not all of PMFTU were communist. They were all left-wing but not all were necessarily communist," said the nuance-seeking lawyer.
Puthucheary said that when the Emergency was declared in June 1948, the British had detained "something like 10,000 people."
He said the vast majority of the detainees were MNP members. "If you wanted to escape the detention dragnet, you had to flee and one refuge was the Malayan Communist Party, then on the run in the jungles," explained Puthucheary.
"Fleeing was the choice of William Kuok (elder brother of tycoon Robert Kuok) and Shamsiah Fakeh, both of whom were not communists so much as nationalists who were targeted for detention by the British," said Puthucheary.
He said in the early part of the Emergency (1948-60), it was the ploy of the British to get rid of their adversaries by prosecuting them for possession of firearms.
"The British got rid of three of their adversaries through this ploy - SA Ganapathy, who was the PMFTU leader, Kamarulzaman Teh, a trade unionist from Pahang, and Mat Indera," said Puthucheary.
He said all three were found guilty of possession of firearms and sentenced to death. Ganapathy and Mat Indera were hanged but Kamarulzaman's sentence was commuted to imprisonment.
Colonists feared losing their economic assets
Puthucheary said the British colonists were never going to negotiate independence with the left-wing forces in Malaya and Singapore because of fear that "their economic holdings in plantation agriculture and mines" would be nationalised.
"The left-wing forces, which succeeded in drawing the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress into their camp, came up with the People's Constitutional Proposals in early 1947," said Puthucheary.
"Those proposals were the charter of the left-wing movement whose strength was displayed in the success of the nationwide 'hartal' (strike) they organised in October that year," he opined.
"The British simply ignored the People's Constitutional Proposals and after the success of the 'hartal' chose to deal with Umno instead of the more popular Malay-led left-wing movement.
"This was because they regarded the feudal and aristocratic class of which Umno was compounded as the safer bet for the protection of their economic interests.
"The British were not so much afraid of the Malayan Communist Party as they were of the Malay-led left-wing movement. They used the Emergency to decimate the Malay left because they feared their popularity and the ultimate threat the Left posed to their economic interests," expatiated Puthucheary.
He said sections of the left-wing movement aspired to merge Malaya with Indonesia under the 'Melayu Raya' slogan, an archipelagic banner positing the unity of peoples in the arc stretching from Aceh in the west to Sulawesi (Celebes) in the East.
"But these sections were persuaded by other groups within the left-wing movement to seek only the unity of Malaya and Singapore as an independent nationstate," said Puthucheary.
Tunku booted out of Afro-Asian conference
He said that although Umno and Alliance leader Tunku Abdul Rahman went to the Bandung Conference of the Afro-Asian Movement in Indonesia in 1955, he was not admitted - not even to observer status - because the international non-aligned movement did not recognise him as the true inheritor of the mantle of Malayan nationalism.
As for the argument that the British did not really colonise Malaya, Puthucheary dismissed the contention as "deliberate disinformation to obfuscate the issue."
"If the British did not colonise Malaya, why did the British Parliament pass the Independence of Malaya Act and why do we have Merdeka Day at all?" he asked.
Clearly, the exchanges on who were the prime movers and shakers in Malaya in that critical period between the end of the Second World War in August 1945 and Merdeka 12 years later are set for more interesting spins.
This would come from the unearthing of historical facts lying dormant in sundry archives in Britain, Malaysia and India.
Even with their disinterring, the debate would not necessarily recede through the disclosure of facts whose sheer potency would wrap up the argument of one or the other side in the reigning dispute, for there would then remain the task of sifting the newly unearthed trove and interpreting it.
Though uninterpreted truth may be as useless as buried gold, the task of interpretation is itself ridden with ambiguity. Still, there are facts and these are not easily gainsaid by obfuscation.
So far the debate over which political forces were the more critical towards gaining independence for Malaya, an exchange touched off by PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu, has been dominated by historians and politicians.
But what about the efforts of those to whom history is an avocation, not a professional discipline, and for whom the search for what lies beyond the welter of argumentative passions entail lonely burrowing in archival material in quest of the holy grail?
Just as war is too important a matter to be left to generals, so is history too significant a subject to be left to professional historians.
That ought to bring us to the avocation of such beavers in historical troves as Dominic J Puthucheary (right), sometime politician but more often a lawyer with an affinity for constitutional questions.The latter inclination was what led him, over the past 20 years, to research the subject of the Malay left-wing and its role in growth of Malayan nationalism.
The research has led Puthucheary, 77, to public archives in Kew Gardens, London, and in Oxford where the papers of top British colonial civil servants who served in Malaya are kept.
As a result, he has formed some opinions about the Malay left-wing, whose members in the immediate aftermath of World War II were scattered among a slew of youth and women organisations that were later subsumed in the Malay Nationalist Party (MNP), whose luminaries were Burhanuddin al-Helmy, Ishak Muhammad and Ahmad Boestamam.
Mat Indera a Malay nationalist
Puthucheary said his research had led him to place Mat Indera, the character that Mohamad Sabu was supposed to have acclaimed a freedom fighter - a claim that has attracted to the PAS leader much Umno vitriol - firmly in the camp of the MNP.
"The MNP was the most influential political force in the country in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War," offered Puthucheary in a chat with Malaysiakini earlier this week.
"Many members of the MNP were also active in the Pan Malayan Federation of Trade Unions (PMFTU) which was the other influential body among forces at odds with the British colonial administration in war's aftermath," he said.
According to Puthucheary, Mat Indera (right) was a teacher, "an intellectual", who was a good organiser of taxi drivers, of wharf and ferry workers in the Muar area."He was a well-known figure among Malay workers who came under the auspices of the PMFTU," said Puthucheary.
"Sections under the PMFTU were communist-inspired but not all of PMFTU were communist. They were all left-wing but not all were necessarily communist," said the nuance-seeking lawyer.
Puthucheary said that when the Emergency was declared in June 1948, the British had detained "something like 10,000 people."
He said the vast majority of the detainees were MNP members. "If you wanted to escape the detention dragnet, you had to flee and one refuge was the Malayan Communist Party, then on the run in the jungles," explained Puthucheary.
"Fleeing was the choice of William Kuok (elder brother of tycoon Robert Kuok) and Shamsiah Fakeh, both of whom were not communists so much as nationalists who were targeted for detention by the British," said Puthucheary.
He said in the early part of the Emergency (1948-60), it was the ploy of the British to get rid of their adversaries by prosecuting them for possession of firearms.
"The British got rid of three of their adversaries through this ploy - SA Ganapathy, who was the PMFTU leader, Kamarulzaman Teh, a trade unionist from Pahang, and Mat Indera," said Puthucheary.
He said all three were found guilty of possession of firearms and sentenced to death. Ganapathy and Mat Indera were hanged but Kamarulzaman's sentence was commuted to imprisonment.
Colonists feared losing their economic assets
Puthucheary said the British colonists were never going to negotiate independence with the left-wing forces in Malaya and Singapore because of fear that "their economic holdings in plantation agriculture and mines" would be nationalised.
"The left-wing forces, which succeeded in drawing the Malayan Chinese Association and the Malayan Indian Congress into their camp, came up with the People's Constitutional Proposals in early 1947," said Puthucheary."Those proposals were the charter of the left-wing movement whose strength was displayed in the success of the nationwide 'hartal' (strike) they organised in October that year," he opined.
"The British simply ignored the People's Constitutional Proposals and after the success of the 'hartal' chose to deal with Umno instead of the more popular Malay-led left-wing movement.
"This was because they regarded the feudal and aristocratic class of which Umno was compounded as the safer bet for the protection of their economic interests.
"The British were not so much afraid of the Malayan Communist Party as they were of the Malay-led left-wing movement. They used the Emergency to decimate the Malay left because they feared their popularity and the ultimate threat the Left posed to their economic interests," expatiated Puthucheary.
He said sections of the left-wing movement aspired to merge Malaya with Indonesia under the 'Melayu Raya' slogan, an archipelagic banner positing the unity of peoples in the arc stretching from Aceh in the west to Sulawesi (Celebes) in the East.
"But these sections were persuaded by other groups within the left-wing movement to seek only the unity of Malaya and Singapore as an independent nationstate," said Puthucheary.
Tunku booted out of Afro-Asian conference
He said that although Umno and Alliance leader Tunku Abdul Rahman went to the Bandung Conference of the Afro-Asian Movement in Indonesia in 1955, he was not admitted - not even to observer status - because the international non-aligned movement did not recognise him as the true inheritor of the mantle of Malayan nationalism.As for the argument that the British did not really colonise Malaya, Puthucheary dismissed the contention as "deliberate disinformation to obfuscate the issue."
"If the British did not colonise Malaya, why did the British Parliament pass the Independence of Malaya Act and why do we have Merdeka Day at all?" he asked.
Clearly, the exchanges on who were the prime movers and shakers in Malaya in that critical period between the end of the Second World War in August 1945 and Merdeka 12 years later are set for more interesting spins.
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