PART TWO—
REMBAU AND NEGERI SEMBILAN DURING THE COLONIAL INTERLUDE (1874–1957)

3—
Local Government and Religious Administration

The imposition of British colonial rule in Negeri Sembilan in 1874 precipitated the differentiation, polarization, and erosion of indigenous institutions. On the one hand there emerged a dualistic political system characterized by an eviscerated clan polity subject to a centralized bureaucracy concerned with law and order, revenue collection, and capitalistic development. Additionally, since the Pax Britannica all but precluded substantive political activities on the part of the Malay elite, the colonial period saw indigenous leaders encouraging the development and empowering of Islamic administrative hierarchies, which came under their dominion at the outset but soon evolved so as to diffuse still further their sanctions and authorities. This chapter looks at such processes, focusing on their implications for the status of clan leaders and the relationship between adat and Islam. The commercial and political climate prior to British intervention will be established, after which we will analyze secular government under British rule and early colonial-era trends in Islamic administration. We will then consider selected aspects of Malay nationalism

and Islamic reform during the 1920s and 1930s, along with subsequent political crises, including the Japanese Occupation and Rembau's 1951 "adat controversy."

Prelude to Colonial Intervention

In considering many of the more important political and commercial trends preceding colonial intervention in Negeri Sembilan, we may profitably begin with the state's southern neighbor, Malacca. As discussed by Wolters (1970), Malacca's political fortunes centered on an impressive trade entrepôt with a history extending back to the fall of Sumatra's Srivijaya-Palembang Empire in the late 1300s and the founding of the Malacca Sultanate in the very early 1400s. Negeri Sembilan's location and its proximity to the port of Malacca itself thus facilitated its inhabitants' access to trade goods and market networks, and likewise heightened the state's susceptibility to encroachments by Malacca-based foreign powers. Although neither the Sultan of Malacca nor the Portuguese who overthrew him in 1511 seemed to be especially concerned (or all that well equipped) to involve themselves in the affairs of Negeri Sembilan's politics, a radically different situation prevailed following the Dutch victory over the Portuguese in 1641 (CRACNS 1874, 11–12). Representatives of the Netherlands East India Company entered into various formal agreements with Rembau's leaders guaranteeing their uncontested access to the tin mined within or simply transported through Rembau (see Newbold 1839, 1 : 216–217, 2 : 94–96, 437–444; CRACNS 1874, 12–13; Parr and Mackray 1910, 15–16). Indigenous rulers, for their part, were formally assured that these monopolistic policies would result in their receiving more or less uninterrupted supplies of firearms, opium, and the like, as well as Dutch military support should their rule be challenged. Treaties of this nature served in certain respects to stifle the growth of Negeri Sembilan's tin industry—and to deprive local miners and rulers of the profits generated by their endeavors. They also fostered competition and warfare among indigenous political leaders who vied for recognition by the Dutch and control over commercially valued resources.

The British routing of Dutch forces in Malacca in the 1790s put an end to the Netherlands East India Company's monopolistic enjoyment of profits derived from Negeri Sembilan's tin-mining industry and other trade. It

contributed as well to the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, whereby the British gained control of the port city of Malacca and relinquished their claims to various interests in Indonesia (Newbold 1839, 1 : 15, 449–456). Although the intervening period saw a series of political reversals, through which the Dutch succeeded in temporarily regaining their ascendant position over the port (Newbold 1839, 1 : 123–125), the British ultimately emerged victorious. More important, in 1826 their established outposts were organized into a single administrative unit known as the Straits Settlements, which included Singapore and Penang in addition to Malacca. British policies in each of these areas encouraged the exploitation of local resources through a version of free enterprise fueled by the capital of Europeans as well as Chinese merchants and financiers. This commerce proved highly successful and worthy of spiraling investment, and necessarily had profound implications for entrepreneurially oriented Malay elites in Negeri Sembilan and the rest of the Peninsula.

The historical development of Negeri Sembilan's tin-mining industry is well beyond the confines of the present discussion. I should emphasize, though, that the unprecedented expansion of the industry beginning in the first third of the nineteenth century greatly increased the stakes to be won in Negeri Sembilan's political and military arenas, and otherwise changed the face of the entire state (Khoo 1972). For one, the phenomenal growth in the scale of mining activities entailed a large-scale influx into the state of foreign—and especially Chinese—capital as well as thousands of trade-dependent Chinese seeking work in the mines. By 1828, for example, an estimated 1,000 Chinese had settled in tin-rich Sungei Ujong, whose Malay population at the time was about 3,200 (Newbold 1839, 1 : 419, 2 : 96); and by 1879 the size of the Chinese community there had increased roughly tenfold, whereas that of the Malays had apparently declined (Bird [1883] 1969, 157). These demographic and economic trends generated a heightened demand for bamboos, canes, and other forest products earmarked either for industry or for the consumption needs of the Chinese. Hence, they strongly stimulated Malay males' involvement both in the collection and barter or sale of forest items and in the rearing and trade of village poultry and livestock.

All such trends fostered the emergence and consolidation of new interest groups, alliances, and power blocs—such as Chinese secret societies, mercantilists, and shipping firms—with operations and concerns both

within and far beyond Negeri Sembilan's territories (Khoo 1972). The entrepreneurial posturings of indigenous rulers were thus endowed with new meanings and economic consequences. Disputes over border areas and rival claims to the offices of district chief and Yang diPertuan Besar increased in frequency and scope, coming to focus ever more sharply on revenues derived from tin-mining activities in the state. The rapid growth of the state's commercial sector not only pitted local polities one against the other but also aggravated an unstable political environment in which surplus production by villagers had long invited confiscation by capricious or tyrannical rulers or else was lost through the ravages of warfare. More generally, as the frequency and intensity of armed skirmishes and major military altercations increased following the 1830s (Khoo 1972), so too did the likelihood that entire villages might be forced to flee their homelands (occasionally to return later, or to settle elsewhere). This climate provided villagers with little incentive to invest substantial labor or capital in either homes or irrigation works (Gullick 1958, 29–30). It also contributed, prior to the state's "pacification" by the British in the late 1800s, to the impermanent settlement of Jelebu, Linggi, and other areas most directly implicated in Negeri Sembilan's commercial networks (see Newbold 1839, 2 : 32, 36, 165–166; JAR 1892, 1, 9; Gullick 1958, 29).

The rapid expansion of the state's commercial sector was in many instances encouraged by district chiefs and other entrepreneurially oriented leaders with a stake in the extralocal trade—this despite the fact that their "prodevelopment" postures aggravated preexisting structural weaknesses in the state's numerous localized political hierarchies. In fact, this situation prevailed even in areas of Negeri Sembilan where traditional leaders discouraged the large-scale exploitation of tin-bearing resources from their territories. In Rembau, for instance, the two Undang whose reigns spanned the period 1819–1871 tried to prevent the industry from developing major local footholds, which would contribute to the silting of rivers and otherwise interfere with agricultural production (Hervey 1884, 256; Gullick 1951, 44). Their success may have been due in part to Rembau's simply having less tin than the neighboring territories of Sungei Ujong, Linggi, and Jelebu, making it not nearly so attractive to foreign capitalists.^[1] Be that as it may, the critical issue regarding the development of the Negeri Sembilan tin-mining industry, as well as the intensification of warfare in and around the Rembau district, is that in order to reach the Straits

of Malacca the bulk of the tin extracted from the state had to be transported down a river or major tributary, all of which at some point either cut across or bordered Rembau. The most widely used waterways, the Rembau and Linggi rivers, converged but a few miles from the straits in an area that had long been claimed as part of Rembau but that also served as a headquarters for the piratical and fiercely autonomous Buginese, who frequently allied themselves with Rembau's principal enemies (Newbold 1839, 1 : 46, 420, 2 : 32, 94).

By the late 1860s, Rembau and much of the rest of the state had lapsed into a civil war that bordered on full-scale anarchy (CRACNS 1874, 232–236; CRACNS 1875, 8–10, 18–20; CRACNS 1876, 193–222; Gullick 1958, 16, 17). Similar circumstances existed elsewhere in the Peninsula and were widely interpreted as posing intolerable threats to the mercantile interests of the Chinese, British, and certain of their partners among the Malay political elite. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the British would reassess their policies in the Peninsula and opt for direct intercession in the affairs of the Malay states.

Secular Administration under British Rule

The year 1874 is of profound significance in Malayan history, for it was then that direct British intervention in the political and other affairs of the Malay states was first instituted. In this year too, a blueprint for British administration emerged that served, in theory at least, to determine the allocation of authority between British officials and Malay rulers. I refer to the precedent-setting Pangkor Engagement, by which the Malay rulers of each "protected" state were obliged to provide suitable accommodations for a British officer, known as the Resident, whose chief responsibilities included overseeing revenue collection and the maintenance of law and order and otherwise "advising" indigenous leaders on all matters except those associated with "Malay custom and religion" (see Emerson [1937] 1964, 120–134).

The present-day states of Perak and Selangor had come under colonial administration by the end of 1874, as had Sungei Ujong in Negeri Sembilan, but other areas to be included in the Federated Malay States were somewhat later to receive British "assistance." This applies both to the state of Pahang, whose ruler had acquiesced to the British by 1888, and to

the remainder of Negeri Sembilan, including Rembau. Let us consider the case of Rembau.

I already remarked that the 1860s saw major social and political up-heavals throughout Negeri Sembilan. During this period the leaders of Rembau found themselves besieged by well-provisioned detractors based both in outlying territories and within their own jurisdictions. By 1871, if not somewhat earlier, Rembau's Undang had petitioned the British for assistance in shoring up his government and settling trade and territorial disputes with Sungei Ujong. His death shortly thereafter, however, impeded British plans for Rembau's early "pacification"; it also provoked a devastating struggle for succession to his title (CRACNS 1874, 29–34; Khoo 1972, 148–151). The chief of the gentry clans—a Bogang resident named Haji Sahil—emerged as the victor, albeit apparently owing to military prowess rather than popularity or truly appropriate qualifications. Haji Sahil's subsequent adventurism and wanton disregard for justice forced clan chiefs into rebellion, and by 1883 they had obtained British backing for their campaign to overthrow this despotic ruler (Parr and Mackray 1910, 22–23). This agreement paved the way for the treaty of 17 September 1887, whereby Haji Sahil's successor and a number of clan spokesmen surrendered to the British the power of administering Rembau in exchange for one-third of its annual revenue. The entire district thus came under the immediate authority of a British official with the title Collector of Land Revenue (and eventually, District Officer) (NSAR 1887). Some two years later Rembau joined the neighboring polities of Johol and Sri Menanti in a confederacy subject to the jurisdiction of a British Resident, whose political realm was augmented by the ensuing treaties of 1895 and 1898 to include all of the territory within the present-day state of Negeri Sembilan (NSAR 1898, 1; Parr and Mackray 1910, 23–24).^[2]

With the assignment to Rembau of British officials charged with administering the district, the authorities and prestige of the Undang and clan leaders especially were radically undermined. More importantly, in establishing a separate, all-powerful, and highly centralized political structure known as the Residential System, the British eviscerated the tradition of decentralized local rule, together with the very institutions through which it had been effected. This result is evident in the mandates of the Collectors of Land Revenue, each of whom governed one of the state's principal administrative units.

The Collector of Land Revenue charged with administering Rembau also held the title Chief Magistrate.^[3] His dual status testified to his two principal functions: first, the collection of revenue, which presupposed his hegemonic involvement in the administration of land matters in accordance with land enactments of 1887 and the Rembau Treaty of that same year (see NSAR 1887); and second, the maintenance of law and order, without which the collection and enhancement of revenue would obviously have come to naught. The latter in turn required the creation of a system of civil and criminal courts modeled on those existing in England at the time (NSAR 1888, 5). These courts handled cases of theft, assault, rape, murder, political subversion, and the like, and did so in keeping with Victorian-era judicial conventions rather than those of local origin.

The British did not, however, abolish the traditional system of clan offices or courts. Instead, these were left intact, if only in a formal sense, since one explicit but dubious colonial objective was to "preserve the customs and life styles of village Malays" and govern them through indigenous institutions insofar as practicable. Rembau's Collector of Land Revenue was thus enjoined by colonial policy to ask the advice of clan leaders and the Undang; but he was by no means bound to honor their wishes or formal rulings, or the sentiments of the populace at large. For that matter, he could discourage or even outlaw established custom should such action seem appropriate in light of revenue interests, administrative considerations, or Victorian notions of propriety.

One can say, then, that the earliest years of colonial administration witnessed the institutionalization of a system of political dualism, albeit one in which Rembau's Undang and the once fiercely independent clan leaders were both shorn of their control of many traditional sanctions and simultaneously pressed into serving colonial interests. In fact, these latter processes were set in motion at the very outset of colonial rule, as land policies promulgated during the first year of British administration in Rembau make clear. Codified in enactments of 1887, these policies led to the introduction of a version of the Torrens System of land registration as a preliminary for the taxation of all holdings in the district. By the very next year the British had enlisted selected clan leaders and other members of the traditional elite to help survey all of Rembau and issue titles of ownership to individual villagers (NSAR 1888, 4). The obvious objective: to accumulate annual revenue from Malay producers and assess the extent of unclaimed

land that could be sold or leased to Chinese, European, and Malay entrepreneurs committed to mining or to the estate cultivation of tapioca, gambier, coffee, or other export crops (Gullick 1951, 41). These policies laid the foundation for momentous changes in long-established tenure, domestic, and social arrangements; moreover, and of more immediate relevance, they severely restricted the jurisdiction of clan leaders and the Undang over both ancestral property and their political subordinates. In addition to depriving clan chiefs of the fees previously presented them for their validation of kinsmen's land transactions, the policies rendered the leaders directly beholden to the British by requiring them to deliver all annual quit rents to colonial offices. Further, whereas clan spokesmen continued to be responsible to the British and their appointees throughout the colonial era, their participation in land matters involving their kin was soon to be curtailed thanks to governmental efforts to forge a more direct link between District Office personnel and village proprietors. Indeed, in 1897 local leaders' services in the collection of rents from their enates were deemed too cumbersome for efficient administration and so no longer necessary (NSAR 1897, 4–5; NSGG 1897, 2 : 155).

The operation of the British court and penal system, and of the larger political apparatus in which it was embedded, presupposed Malay cooperation and manpower. Hence, an initial dilemma confronting colonial rulers concerned the recruitment of petty clerks and assistant magistrates. Although the British had little difficulty selecting certain high-ranking members of the traditional elite for training and placement in the lower echelons of the civil service, they were reluctant to elevate all clan chiefs to positions in the local bureaucracy. Why this reticence appears to have been especially pronounced in the case of Rembau is not clear. It could well have stemmed from British perceptions—reinforced by disparaging testimonies from antagonistic Undang (see NSSSF [1924] 920/24)—that clan leaders in Rembau viewed all political prerogatives as just so many opportunities to line their own pockets.

Be that as it may, the turn of the century saw two events of profound significance for the status of clan spokesmen and ensuing trends bearing on Malay leadership. The first was the establishment of the office of Malay Assistant to the District Officer, which was designed to relieve the British of burdensome clerical work and other minor responsibilities and to allow Malays a more direct hand in administering their own affairs. Since the

position was filled by a government official appointed initially from among clan chiefs, its creation introduced a cleavage previously unknown in the traditional leadership. For even though all clan officials received some form of financial remuneration from the British, now a select few enjoyed authorities, salaries, and symbolic prerogatives that clearly superseded those of the others.

A second turn-of-the-century development encouraged by British manpower requirements centered on formal education. Legislative enactments rendering modern primary education compulsory for Malay boys in the seven- to fourteen-year-old age group were passed in 1899 (although Rembau's first government-sponsored school had opened its doors a few years earlier) (NSAR 1896, 11; NSAR 1900, 1). As opportunities for vernacular schooling became widely available in the following decades, colonial administrators could draw on a burgeoning labor pool of literate Malays. More importantly, the British offered financial and other incentives to boys of gentry birth who expressed interest in English instruction, thereby encouraging their entrance into the world of white-collar government employ and simultaneously vesting descent-based distinctions with new meanings and privileges. This latter trend led to the creation of an English-educated class of civil servants destined to play a prominent role in galvanizing diverse currents of Malay nationalism and Islamic reform; it also culminated, in the early 1950s, in an explicit attack on clan leaders and much of what they symbolized.

One need not look much beyond events and processes such as these to appreciate how significantly the stature of the traditional polity was undermined during the earliest decades of colonial rule. The appointment of a Judicial Commissioner to Negeri Sembilan in 1896, in conjunction with an expansion of the state's court system, further limited the appellate jurisdiction of the Undang and Yang diPertuan Besar, stripping them as well of their long-sanctified prerogatives to invoke capital punishment (NSGG 1896, 1 : 277–282). Subsequent legislation accelerated these processes. Thus in 1908 one British official claimed that clan heads exercised "little or no authority as the power to enforce or maintain it has been gradually taken from them" (Supplement to NSGG 1909, 14 : 2). More broadly, as another contemporary civil servant commented, there were no mechanisms enabling rulers at any level of the indigenous hierarchy to enforce "even the minor customs of their people" (NSSSF [1904] 7002/04).

With this transfer of power and authority from traditional leaders to the British, however, it would be incorrect to infer that indigenous rulers thenceforth played a passive role in the conduct of local affairs or the shaping of regional or statewide developments. The legitimate exercise of force, and of organized sanctions in general, was typically a last resort and probably relatively rare inasmuch as diffuse sanctions were fairly effective in assuring adherence to collective norms. As such points have been made with reference to Malay communities throughout the Peninsula (Roff 1967), I need only draw attention to the scope and force of pan-Malayan notions of shame (malu ) and good character (budi bahasa ), which even today enforce conformity to a great many community standards. The village-level impact of the transfer of authority from clan spokesman to the police and court system of the British, then, was less radical than might be assumed and, at least initially, more symbolic and formal than substantive. Clan leaders continued to exert social control over the enates and in-marrying males within their traditional realms of jurisdiction, mobilizing sentiment on their behalf through verbal exhortation and other informal strategies.

Traditional leaders were also actively involved in Islamic administration and reform and in encouraging and legitimizing rural economic change, especially the transition to cash cropping. Before addressing these issues, however, I should like to focus attention on the concept of adat and the factors contributing to its segmentation throughout the twentieth century.

One factor directly responsible for the shattering of the once unitary and all-embracing adat concept was the codification by the British of numerous aspects of adat that they perceived as consonant with the aims of colonial administration and revenue collection.^[4] Obvious examples appear in the British government's maintaining the formal structure of traditional courts, the interrelationships among indigenous offices, and many of the constraints associated with female proprietorship and the system of divided title. Yet at the same time the British decreed that some sanctified traditions subsumed under the adat rubric should be legislated out of existence (the Undang's right to conscript labor and invoke capital punishment, for example), and that others (such as those pertaining to breaches of exogamous principles) could be adhered to or not as suited local wishes. Such policy decisions, coupled with those demanding conformity to certain practices and imposing new penalties on violations thereof, effected

the initial conceptual distinctions and subsequent cleavages to which I referred earlier.

The cultural dilemmas thrust upon villagers derived from the simultaneous proscription of some behaviors previously enjoined by adat (and thus defined as eminently natural and God-given) and the toleration or outright prescription of others. It must be noted, moreover, that the relevant British policy decisions were inconsistent both regionally and over time. A noteworthy testimony to such inconsistency dates from just after the turn of the century when the British withdrew their formal backing from sanctified prohibitions (pantang larang ) embodying some of the most fundamental constraints of village culture. These included interdictions on marriage between the children of sisters (and other breaches of exogamy and sexual codes); but they also dealt squarely with inattentiveness to the prerogatives and other entailments of rank and status hierarchy, such as unauthorized displays of certain insignia of office. Since violations of such taboos amounted to treason (derhaka ) so far as Malays were concerned, the British initially adopted a policy of penalizing those guilty of transgressing them (see Lister 1891, 142–144). Although capital punishment was ruled out, the British had agreed by 1891 to levy fines of up to M$25 on the guilty. As with many other strategies of appeasement, however, British backing in this area was short-lived, and came to an abrupt end in 1901 (NSSSF [1908] 2790/08).

After the turn of the century, most offenses falling within the jurisdiction of adat leaders and their increasingly powerless courts were held to be too inconsequential to merit the serious attention of colonial officials or constitutional experts. This situation did not give rise to an outbreak of immoral or treasonous behavior at the village level; nonetheless, certain social codes associated with adat were now adhered to or not as suited individual whim and local sentiments, while others received the full backing of the state. Such distinctions proved to be of profound historical significance owing to land enactments and market forces of the rubber boom era, all of which placed a premium on individual acquisition and gain—and at the expense of property and social relations grounded in kinship commonality, and enatic siblingship in particular.

The intrusive policies of the colonial state thus contributed to undermining the scope and force of the adat concept as well as the stature of clan spokesmen. So, too, did the policies of the Japanese during their military

occupation of Malaya from December 1941 through August 1945. Significantly, they created a new political office, that of village headman (ketua kampung ), which remains in existence today. This new official held a position in the secular hierarchy immediately subordinate to the Malay Assistant—now known as parish headman (penghulu mukim )—who, prior to the Japanese invasion of Malaya, was the principal link between district-level authorities and the rural majority. Village headmen served the Japanese in the administration of individual communities; they were also ideally situated to help the British, and later the Malayan government, maintain law and order during the nationwide state of emergency proclaimed in 1948 in reaction to the guerrilla activities of the Malayan Communist Party. For these and other reasons village headmen came to personify the machinery of modern government, and to symbolize both the declining fortunes of clan spokesmen and the devaluation and ever-narrowing range of adat owing to the state's progressive consolidation of power.

The Administration of Islam, 1880s–1921

The trends outlined above coincided with a related nexus of developments involving the creation of a wholly separate—though never entirely autonomous—political structure centered on the office and courts of Islamic magistrates (kadi ). As such, I should emphasize that the legal pluralism referred to earlier was not so much dualistic in nature as tripartite. As early as 1889, when Rembau received its first kadi,^[5] the district had three separate court systems, each with its own realm of jurisdiction and distinct traditions governing procedure, justice, and retribution. From the very beginning, of course, Rembau's Islamic court and its cadre of officialdom came under the de jure authority of the Undang; he therefore retained his traditional supreme position as chief arbiter in religious affairs and as Allah's vice-regent (caliph) within the district. Nonetheless, events of 1889 engendered a separation of powers and legitimacy analogous to that between church and state, which had not existed in Rembau prior to colonial rule.

With the creation of an Islamic court in Rembau, many of the prerogatives, responsibilities, and symbols of adat leaders became vested in Islamic magistrates and their official representatives. As a direct consequence, in 1889 Rembau's Undang virtually ceased to participate in the

civil aspects of villagers' marriages and divorces (Parr and Mackray 1910, 52, 57); these duties were thenceforth assigned to Rembau's kadi. The following decade saw the passage of legislation requiring Friday mosque attendance by males residing in the vicinity of a mosque; it also made village-level Islamic functionaries directly responsible to the kadi for enforcing the payment of small fines by those irregularly present at Friday services (LNS 1 : 1). These developments effectively extended centralized political control into an area where it had never before penetrated, creating in addition new loci and linkages of authority both in villages and in the district as a whole. All such legislation impinged on the duties and stature of clan leaders, who had previously regulated all local affairs, including the observance of religious obligations. Even though the processes in question were fairly gradual, continuing through the late 1950s, clan spokesmen were the clear victims.

Significantly, much of the impetus behind religious hierarchical expansion and more consistent enforcement of Islamic law emanated from the highest echelons of the indigenous polity itself—including the Undang and Yang diPertuan Besar. This was largely because Islamic administration and reform was one of the few areas in which elite initiative received the formal approval and encouragement of British authorities (see Roff 1967; Willer 1975). We need bear in mind that the British introduced legislation bearing on virtually all domains of Malay life, thereby severely restricting indigenous rulers' involvement in substantive political activities. These circumstances prompted indigenous elites throughout the Peninsula to seek refuge and expression in progressively more elaborate displays of their traditional power and status,^[6] and further encouraged them to play an ever greater role both in the administration of religious affairs and in the more formal implementation of Islamic law. That their activities in this latter area often worked to erode the stature of clan chiefs and their subordinates was, it seems, of little direct concern, and occasionally was even to their advantage. One need only recall that status rivalries and political antagonisms rather than common interests seem always to have been characteristic of vertical (and structurally complementary) relationships the indigenous polity.

No less important here were the challenges posed to the traditional political elite by Sumatrans and other, mostly foreign-born, Muslims whose activities in Singapore, Malacca, and elsewhere in the Peninsula from about

1900 threatened both the elites' positions of privilege and their supremacy in the eyes of Islamic subjects. Spearheading a movement that came to be known as the "Young Group" (Kaum Muda ), these activists sought sweeping religious reform as a means of improving the lot of Malays, their Indonesian brethren, and Muslims the world over. Among other things, they endeavored to rid Malayan Islam of local accretions emanating from adat, and to persuade influential Islamic men of learning (ulama ) to rectify past errors associated with their conveyance of "false doctrine," and religious impurities more generally (Roff 1967, 58). This involved encouraging individual Muslims to exercise rationality (akal ) and informed judgment (itjihad ) so as to eradicate the uncritical acceptance of intermediate religious authority (taklid buta ), which was said to prevail throughout village society and to ensure a perpetuation of the status quo.

In short, Kaum Muda spokesmen launched an explicit attack on the spiritual and other evils stemming from a blind adherence to the religious figures who throughout the Peninsula bolstered and sanctified the positions of traditional rulers, including the most senior. These latter, for their part, reacted rather swiftly to this challenge—albeit primarily through legislative channels, since by the turn of the century they enjoyed virtually no other legitimate options. Thus the year 1904 saw the passage of an enactment forbidding the teaching or preaching of any religious doctrines outside one's home without the prior written permission of Negeri Sembilan's Yang diPertuan Besar (see NSGG 1904, 9 : 337–338). This legislation also provided for the penalization of persons involved in propagating "false doctrine," which could conceivably occur even in the case of duly authorized religious instructors.

One other sphere of activity over which Islamic magistrates and their representatives attained jurisdiction during the early decades of colonial rule involved villagers' behavior during the fasting month, Ramadan. Kadis throughout Negeri Sembilan were charged with overseeing conformity to prohibitions on eating, drinking, smoking, and the like during the daylight hours of Ramadan, and by 1915 could also fine local shopkeepers engaged in the daytime sale to Muslims of any food fit for immediate consumption (NSAR 1915, 3). These developments further confirm the larger process whereby outside authorities backed by the state intruded on the realm of village religion, and clearly at the expense of clan leaders.^[7]

Negeri Sembilan's kadis had encroached on the authority of local clan spokesmen even earlier, however. In 1888, to cite one example, the State Council of Sungei Ujong gave the district kadi and village-level mosque heads (imam ) the power to prevent parents from demanding extortionate marriage payments from their daughters' suitors (SUSCP [of 7/7/1888], 62–63). Local people undoubtedly saw this act as an infringement on both the prerogatives of clan officials and the autonomy of those with marriageable daughters. Of greater historical significance is the Muhammadan Laws Enactment of 1904, which embraced offenses associated with the propagation of "false doctrine." One subject it covered was sexual impropriety, including adultery and incest as construed by Islam. Incest was defined in exceedingly narrow terms—as sexual relations between persons forbidden by Islamic law to marry;^[8] this in itself is extremely revealing, since the British by this time no longer supported prohibitions within the far broader category of incestuous behaviors glossed sumbang. These constitutional biases engendered by British policy thus increased the cultural distinction between adat and Islam.

One can easily imagine that the kadi's jural sphere was of great concern not only to indigenous rulers but also to the architects of colonial policy. The creation of the kadi's office did in fact result in charged disputes within Malay and British official circles concerning both the types of penalties Islamic magistrates could impose on transgressors of religious law and the precise limits of their jurisdiction on the whole. Villagers obviously held opinions on such matters too, as suggested (although perhaps overstated) by the comments of Negeri Sembilan's first British Resident: "Nothing is more distasteful to the people than that Muhammadan law should be applied where custom provides the remedy, and as the Kathi is generally anxious to exercise Muhammadan law only, great care has to be taken to prevent him from interfering in cases of custom" (Lister 1890, 319).

Overall, issues relating to the kadi's authority proved quite problematic in terms of British policy and villagers' relationships with clan leaders and representatives of the state. This was particularly true within the area of property and inheritance. Indeed, as will be discussed in chapter 4, many of the major legal, political, and cultural quandaries that emerged as early as 1890 centered on the devolution of rights over certain categories of

property, especially land, and the extent to which village-level inheritance affairs ought to be directed by religious authorities and Islamic property codes more generally.

The appointment to Rembau of an Islamic magistrate, in conjunction with the progressive empowering of religious hierarchies, precipitated myriad dilemmas within the village—as well as profound legal and administrative problems for the British—owing also to the Malay people's varying knowledge of Islamic doctrine. The rural majority's understanding of Islamic doctrine has always been far less sophisticated than that of indigenous elites at the highest levels of the traditional polity or religious bureaucracy. Until quite recently, villagers' familiarity with the specifics of Islamic texts was at best rudimentary; typically, it was confined to what could be gleaned from the preachings of itinerant ulama, local mosque officials, and clan spokesmen.^[9] Through religious instruction in the village males gained the skills required to recite Koranic verse; yet this recitation proceeded in Arabic, not Malay, and the Koran was never widely available in the vernacular. This situation holds true even at present, with extremely few rural or urban Malays able to read (as opposed to recite) or speak Arabic. (The present-day village of Bogang, for instance, boasts no one with such skills, although it contains a mosque and a prayer house, three Islamic functionaries, a few certified religious instructors, and more than a dozen haji.) In the nineteenth century, then, the village majority undoubtedly lacked sufficient knowledge of Islamic legal theory to perceive and disjunction between adat and Islam within the domain of property and inheritance.

Representatives of the highest levels of the indigenous hierarchy, in contrast, have long enjoyed a relatively sophisticated understanding of Islamic doctrine, as well as an awareness of how adat and Islam diverge with respect to certain aspects of property and inheritance. It would be difficult to overestimate the extent to which colonial administrators and their policies contributed to the cultural realization of such divergences as contradictions; nevertheless, elite perceptions along these lines can be documented for the 1890s, and probably originated much earlier. By 1893, to cite one example, the Sungei Ujong leader with the title of Dato Klana had petitioned the district's British Resident to clarify official policy concerning rights over intestate property. More precisely, he had requested the British Resident to ask the State Council whether the kadi's adjudications in such cases should proceed in accordance with Islamic law or "the an-

cient custom . . . by which the property always remains with or descends to relations on the female side." The outcome of this inquiry appeared in a decree of 27 April 1893, which stated that "the Muhammadan law should be the one to be followed in a Muhammadan state and [that] the other could not be recognized in a Kathi's Court" (SUSCP [of 4/27/1893], 86).

Historical sources concerning late-nineteenth-century Rembau testify to a similar situation as regards elite perspectives toward adat and Islamic inheritance codes—including their favoring of Islamic conventions, at least in certain contexts (see Lister 1890). In Rembau, however, the changes advocated by indigenous rulers were far less extreme than those proposed in Sungei Ujong, for they did not urge the elimination of the system grounded in enatic rights and divided title (as the Sungei Ujong measures definitely did). This divergence may be attributed to the greater commercial development in the tin-rich territories of Sungei Ujong (as compared with Rembau at the time), and the resultant premium placed on the autonomy of proprietors at all levels of that region's indigenous hierarchy. It is highly instructive in any event that Malay leaders in Rembau focused on a dimension of property relations that seems always to have been characterized by structural contradictions and that would undoubtedly have caused controversy even without an Islamic emphasis on patrifiliation at the expense of collateral links through women. I refer to the fact that rights to a full half-share of a deceased man's conjugally acquired movable property (cash, weapons, livestock, and the like) could go to his mother or sisters—for the benefit of the latters' progeny—rather than his own offspring, particularly if he had failed to bequeath such rights to his children through paternal provisioning. Specifically, by 1890 the leaders of Rembau's indigenous polity had tentatively decided that all such items "became unconditionally the property of his children and could not in any case return to the man's [enatic] relations," since the alternative "made a great deal of difficulty, as it [was] not in accordance with Muhammadan law" (Lister 1890, 317).

The implications of these perspectives will be taken up in chapters 4 and 8. Here I would only reiterate generally that elite awareness of areas in which adat and Islam diverge with respect to the distribution of intestate property rights existed as early as 1890, and clearly predated similar perceptions among the populace at large. This should come as no surprise given the wealth of the indigenous elite and the far greater likelihood, as

compared with the village majority, that they could afford the pilgrimage to Mecca and fraternize with co-religionists of disparate cultural backgrounds, among whom were many of a strong reformist bent.

I next consider two more areas in which elite perspectives on Islam differed markedly from those of the rest of the population—namely, the related spheres of Malay nationalism and Islamic reform. In these areas, too, groups of indigenous elite not only helped instigate social and cultural change but also provided historically revised models for proper Muslim behavior.

Nationalism and Reform during the Reign of Dato Abdullah (1922–1938)

Many of the social and cultural currents that reverberated throughout Rembau and the rest of Negeri Sembilan in the twenties and thirties can be gleaned from the aspirations and accomplishments of Dato Abdullah (bin Haji Dahan), Rembau's Undang from 1922 through 1938^[10] and a man remembered in contemporary Rembau as a gallant statesman and modernday culture hero.

As with many other intellectually promising boys of gentry birth, young Abdullah received British encouragement and financial backing to attend an English-language school, the elite Malay College at Kuala Kangsar. This was the normal course for upwardly mobile Malays of gentry background seeking employment in the civil service. Abdullah's long-range goals, however, were much loftier, and led him to seek training in medicine. Had he pursued his education in Hong Kong, as was discussed at one point, he might have been among the very first Malays to receive tertiary training outside the colony, not to mention one of the earliest Malay doctors. But since both his father and the British authorities took a dim view of this plan, it was decided instead that he should go to Singapore and study medicine to become an assistant surgeon. It is not entirely clear from the material at my disposal whether Abdullah actually went to Singapore following his graduation from the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar. If he did, his stay there was relatively brief, lasting less than three years—for in 1922 the twenty-year-old Abdullah succeeded to the office of Undang upon the bankruptcy and ensuing resignation of Dato Haji Sulong bin Ambia.

The circumstances surrounding Abdullah's succession to office are likewise somewhat vague, although British correspondence written when he was a mere seventeen years of age refers to his "quite unusual ability, . . . ambition, determination and intelligence"; it also mentions that he was expected to be the next Undang of Rembau. He was of course born into the appropriate clan, the Sediaraja, and of wealthy parents, at least one of whom had been to Mecca. Moreover, since he was the nephew of a high-ranking clan official of Sungei Ujong, Dato Bandar Said, he may well have been groomed for Rembau's highest office from an early age. Viewed historically, however, it is of greater significance that intellectual and academic achievements in an English-language institution had become key qualifications for the Undangship. This situation was certainly a far cry from that prior to British intervention, when military prowess had been a decisive factor both in succeeding to office and retaining power thereafter. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, the balance and exercise of power had shifted dramatically with British administration, and the skills and competences required of indigenous leaders were very different from those demanded of their forebears during the precolonial period. Abdullah was thus eminently qualified to become Rembau's eighteenth Undang, for in contrast to the vast majority of his predecessors, his battles were waged not by force of arms along the rivers of Rembau but via memoranda, formal petitions, and council proceedings couched in the language of bureaucracy and addressed for the most part to colonial officialdom.

In short, the young man who came to be known as Dato (Sediaraja) Abdullah personified a new generation of Malay leadership and served to articulate and galvanize the sentiments and aspirations of an increasingly cosmopolitan, though still overwhelmingly rural, Malay society. When Dato Abdullah rose to office, most Malay boys living in Negeri Sembilan had ready access to modern Malay-language education and attended classes on a fairly regular basis.^[11] There were in addition numerous secondary institutions in the Peninsula by this time, although these existed for the benefit of the indigenous political elite and their untitled gentry counterparts, not for the children of "mere peasants" with commoner pedigrees.

The privileges and incentives that Negeri Sembilan's gentry clans received in the area of secondary schooling and government loans bestowed new meanings on, and likewise fostered the perpetuation of, traditional distinctions based on descent—this despite the fact that government poli-

cies also emphasized achieved status over ascriptive criteria. More important, whereas many of the educational opportunities made available to Malays aimed at providing the British with a well-born class of potential clerks, assistant magistrates, and other civil servants, the demand for education and bureaucratic posts soon outstripped all administrative requirements for native manpower. This posed no real problem for those content to pass their lives as farmers, but there was considerable dissatisfaction and frustrated ambition on the part of their brethren who sought white-collar employment or other avenues for social advance. The situation was aggravated, moreover, by the fact that petty trade and most forms of commerce were by this time controlled by Chinese, who predominated in all towns and quickly outnumbered Malays in the state as a whole (see chapter 4).

The problems stemming from the existence of a colonized Malay peasantry with a smattering of formal education—and among them a select few with white-collar credentials but no opportunities to practice their newly acquired skills—led to endless debate within British officialdom and among the Malay elite. Dato Abdullah, for example, lobbied vociferously for the establishment, in Rembau and elsewhere, of additional trade schools and English-language institutions, which would lay the foundations for a more informed and prosperous peasantry and a larger and better trained corps of potential administrators and professionals.^[12] The future well-being of the entire Malay race was quite rightfully said to be at stake, and to hinge directly on the educational policies of the British. Unfortunately, however, Dato Abdullah's proposals met with steadfast resistance from colonial administrators. The problem, as articulated some years earlier by the Director of Education in Negeri Sembilan, was that "the stream of Malay boys now flooding our English schools is alarming. There will not be clerkships for them all." They would certainly be ashamed "to dig," he claimed, adding, "I am sure that the Dato Rembau will see there is a grave risque [sic ] in bringing English to the doors of an agricultural population" (NSSSF [1926] 668/26; cf. NSAR 1934, 19; NSAR 1935, 21).

Dato Abdullah's efforts at change ranged well beyond the arena of formal education. He also helped to found within Negeri Sembilan various cooperative and self-help societies geared toward the material and spiritual betterment of rural Malays. Voluntary associations had been cropping up in towns and metropolitan areas throughout the Peninsula since the turn of the century. These typically took the form of self-improvement so-

cieties, cultural welfare organizations, literary groups, sports clubs, and the like (see NSAR 1931, 32; NSAR 1933, 35; Roff 1967). The activities and products of these associations had the effect of stressing the commonalities shared by all Malays—most notably, identification with Islam, communication in the same language, and a valuation of symbols and traditions defined in relation to adat. At the same time, however, and owing to regional differences throughout the Peninsula in dialects as well as adat symbols and conventions, these voluntary associations ensured that Islam would emerge as the most pertinent of these commonalities and ultimately the most powerful in generating and galvanizing pan-Malayan sentiment (Roff 1967).

Dato Abdullah also sought to discourage villagers' participation in various syncretic rituals and to foster a critical reassessment of long-sacrosanct cultural axioms underlying Malay belief in local spirits. Dato Abdullah's official position on territorial spirits and sacred shrines (keramat ) can be ascertained from articles he wrote and published in the 1920s ([Dato] Sedia Raja Abdullah 1925, 1927). One of these pieces provides a brief overview of the more revered keramat beings (glossed "saints") that were held to exist in Rembau during the 1920s; it concludes on the following note:

Such is the influence of these saints on the overwhelming majority of the Malays and it is needless to add that this influence is a lamentable obstacle to their economic, spiritual and moral advancement. Though Islam recognizes no intercessors between man and Allah, the relics of the pre-Islamic "Days of Ignorance" survive and will continue to exercise a disastrous influence so long as Malays are ignorant of the fundamental teachings of their religion and remain indifferent to the benefits of secular education. It is gratifying to note that for the rising generation primaeval beliefs are slowly but surely disappearing.^[13] ([Dato] Sedia Raja Abdullah 1925, 104)

Dato Abdullah's diatribe on keramat and their spirit guardians was but one of many such attacks in the early decades of the century that struck at the heart of village notions of propriety and sanctity, and all in the name of Islam.^[14] Dato Abdullah's successor, Dato Haji Ipap, shared Dato Abdullah's views on village syncretism (though he appears to have lacked the reformist zeal of many other modernists of the late 1930s and later). During the first part of his lengthy reign (1938–1962), Dato Haji Ipap convened Rembau's clan leaders and local-level Islamic theologians to emphasize that the week-long berpuar rituals (held every three years to enlist

the intercession of benevolent beings seen as capable of vanquishing evil spirits responsible for agricultural failures) were inconsistent with the teachings of Islam and best discontinued. By 1943 he had taken to fining clan chiefs for allowing their kin to participate in this ritual (BUR[M] [1943] 1103). These actions did not result in the immediate discontinuation of the rituals, nor did they seriously undermine, let alone cause the renunciation of, beliefs in these rituals or associated spirit cults. The fact remains, though, that Dato Haji Ipap's position on berpuar not only placed him in opposition to clan leaders, shamanic specialists, and the adat of the rural majority, but also reinforced the conceptual bonds linking the highest members of the indigenous elite with the institutions and ideologies of Islam.^[15] The interrelationship of adat and Islam was now seen ever more strongly in terms of contradiction rather than complementarity.

Successive waves of Islamic theologians trained in the early 1900s in Kedah and Kelantan, and more recently in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have also encouraged villagers' acceptance that various adat traditions are outmoded, against the teachings of Islam, and incompatible with progressive economic change. Moreover, extensive institutional supports bolstered these men's endeavors; indeed, each and every phase in the development of Islamic administrative hierarchies saw more traditional prerogatives pass from clan spokesmen to Islamic magistrates and other state-backed officials acting in the name of Islam.

Trends along these lines contributed to the polarization of adat and Islam. So, too, did subsequent crises that exacerbated antagonisms between Malays and Chinese and simultaneously politicized Islamic symbols and idioms, giving them greater centrality in Malay culture.

Crises and Polarization

The Japanese Occupation and the Emergency

The Japanese invasion of Malaya in December 1941 led to one of the most devastating military losses the British ever suffered. As such, but owing also to the hasty British retreat, the ensuing Occupation, which lasted through August 1945, raised new questions throughout the Peninsula concerning the invincibility of white rulers and their abilities to safeguard the lives and property of colonial subjects. The Japanese interregnum

also occasioned severe disruptions of trade and commercial activities, as well as widely redounding economic crises, and Japanese policies contributed to a significant polarization of ethnic relations, particularly in the case of Malays and Chinese.

The first contingent of Japanese arrived in Bogang early in 1942, in the midst of the harvest season. This event sent shock waves throughout the community, even though news of the invasion of Singapore and Kota Baru (Kelantan) had already reached the village. Just how long the Japanese stayed in Bogang is unclear, although some elders told me that they requisitioned at least one large house near the railroad tracks and maintained a camp in that area of the village for approximately two weeks. They then relocated to a nearby settlement but reappeared in Bogang frequently, invariably demanding rice, eggs, poultry, and other supplies, and commonly leaving with adult men conscripted for labor projects elsewhere in the Peninsula or beyond.

Those villagers who remained behind were apprehensive about the stores of freshly harvested grain in household granaries, but they were most concerned with the fate of unmarried girls and other females of the community. Thus, whenever rumors of an approaching group of Japanese reached Bogang, young girls were gathered up and rushed off to secluded forest areas where they were relatively secure. Others were hidden in community trash pits, which were then covered with palm fronds to disguise their existence. Married and formerly wed women, for their part, sought to make themselves as unattractive as possible by dirtying their faces with ash and adopting hairstyles that violated all aesthetic canons. Deterrent measures of this sort evidently proved fairly effective in Bogang, but villagers also point to rapes of Malay and other women elsewhere and recollect more generally that Japanese soldiers behaved like hill-dwelling aborigines (orang hutan ). This comparison is significant, since in Malay culture the non-Muslim aborigines have long been construed as lacking any form of religion—hence, they are acultural and subhuman.

More broadly, however, the actions of the Japanese were interpreted as posing an unprecedented threat to Malay society, and otherwise as representing the triumph of unbridled natural forces over culture. Such perspectives emerge most clearly in villagers' references to Japanese lechery. They are supported as well by local recollections of the invaders' treatment of male elders (as well as of Chinese of all ages) and their wanton

disregard of Malay social etiquette and religious propriety (for example, their refusal to remove their boots before entering Malay homes; their desecration of mosques and prayer houses throughout the Peninsula; and their forced enlistment of villagers in various physical and religious exercises, including what contemporary inhabitants refer to as "sun worship" [sembah matahari ]).

The Occupation years also brought severe shortages of rice, sugar, salt, dried fish, kerosene, cloth, and of course cash. Villagers' inabilities to obtain such items clearly meant material hardship, but it also bespoke a certain degradation. The dearth of cloth, for example, forced villagers to fashion death shrouds of banana leaves instead of white muslin, and thus prepare the deceased for a primitive burial that fell far short of the sanctified peacetime ideal. In addition, whereas villagers frequently cite widespread consumption of tapioca and various roots and tubers as evidence of the suffering they endured during the Occupation, it is also the case that a strong symbolic association exists between such foods and aborigines. In short, just as the Japanese, through their comportment, became associated in Malay eyes with pre- or noncultural aborigines, so too did the circumstances of war force Malays themselves down a path of cultural regression that led toward a precultural state.

Even though Malays were mistreated and abused by Japanese forces, they were spared the brunt of the invaders' wrath so long as they cooperated in provisioning them and also appeared not to be sheltering or protecting Chinese (who fled into the forest to escape Japanese search parties). Indeed, although village accounts of the Occupation dwell on Japanese atrocities, they refer primarily to abuses of Chinese rather than Malays or Indians. This situation might have led to closer ties between Malays and Chinese, but it did not; instead, owing in part to successful Japanese policies and propaganda but also to preexisting antagonisms between the two groups concerned, the opposite occurred. In particular, Malays in Bogang and other areas were forced to help Japanese soldiers locate the makeshift camps that Chinese established deep in the forest. Village accounts indicate that the discovery of such camps often led to bloody massacres of Chinese men, women, and children, and thus to a feeling on the part of Chinese survivors that their losses stemmed in no small measure from Malay collaboration with the invaders. This fact helps account for the force

and brutality of Chinese retaliations against Malays during the immediate postwar period.^[16]

The Japanese surrender in August 1945 witnessed the end of the Occupation, but it did not mark the beginning of an enduring peace in Negeri Sembilan or elsewhere in the Peninsula. Before the British had fully established civil order, supporters of the predominantly Chinese Malayan Communist Party prevailed throughout the Peninsula, seeking out wartime collaborators among Malays, Chinese, and others and meting out summary justice as befit the circumstances. Although the Party did not actually seize power, the scope of its underground and primarily forest-based activities prompted the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency in 1948. This state of emergency was still in effect on the eve of independence in 1957, remaining in force through 1960.

Throughout the twelve-year period known as "The Emergency" (Darurat ), curfews and restrictions on travel, trade, and the cultivation of comestibles easily seized by guerrillas operating from within the forest were imposed in various regions of the Peninsula. Since the government assumed that the bulk of the Chinese population was sympathetic to the guerrillas—and in any event highly susceptible to their propaganda and their demands for food and other supplies (NSAR 1948, 89)—during the initial phase of the Emergency large numbers of rural Chinese were forcibly resettled. Relocated at what were thought to be safe distances from centers of insurgent activity, Chinese were in many cases confined to fenced-off areas known as "New Villages."

As for Malays in Negeri Sembilan and elsewhere, the impact of the Emergency varied considerably according to whether a village or region was classified as "white" or "black"—that is, not known or presumed to be a staging ground for guerrilla campaigns, and vice versa. In "black" areas curfews and other restrictions were more severe. Because most Malay villages in Rembau were "white," their inhabitants experienced less disruption than Malays in other parts of the state (such as Jelebu and Kuala Pilah). Nonetheless, they too were subject to numerous constraints bearing on the purchase and transport of canned food and other provisions.

Certain of the conditions prevailing throughout the Emergency recall circumstances during the Japanese Occupation. Perhaps most obvious are the similarities in the limited availability of food and the restrictions

on freedom of movement. Additionally, since many adult males joined Emergency-era auxiliary units established to eradicate the guerrilla threat, much of the rubber tapping and other productive activity within the village was taken over by women (NSAR 1948, 13; NSAR 1949, 14). This had also occurred during the Occupation, when the women remained in their natal communities while the men were transported to distant places in accordance with Japanese manpower needs. Further, rural Malays, among others, interpreted much of the strife characteristic of the Emergency as interethnic in nature and indicative of an all-pervasive Chinese hostility toward Malays and their culture, including of course Islam. In short, then, throughout both the Emergency and the Japanese Occupation Malays saw themselves surrounded by an ethnically foreign group bent on degrading their culture and capable of eradicating their entire society.

Administrative Reorganization in the Postwar Era

Local accounts suggest that Malays emerged from the Occupation beset by deep-rooted fears that their very existence was threatened by the Malayan Communist Party. These same accounts indicate that they felt menaced by Chinese and Indians as a whole, who by this time outnumbered Malays in Negeri Sembilan and other western Malay states. Some of the more cosmopolitan villagers still living also point to British policies just after the war as contributing to these feelings of insecurity and impending doom—for, as occurred also in Indonesia with the Dutch and among other colonial powers in Southeast Asia, the British resumed control in Malaya showing little concern for the past. It was as if they felt they should be able simply to pick up where they left off when they effectively abandoned their colony to the Japanese. By and large the Malay elite found this attitude unacceptable, especially since British plans for the immediate future of the Malays involved a serious curtailment of their positions of power and prestige vis-à-vis the Chinese and Indians. These three groups were in fact accorded more or less equal treatment under the constitution embodied in the Malayan Union, which was rushed into existence in 1946.

The foundation of the Malayan Union met with immediate opposition from Malay leadership and led in the same year to the formation of the first Malay political party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO).^[17] This party was the dominant force in mobilizing Malay senti-

ment against the Malayan Union; indeed, it has received much of the credit for the Union's replacement in 1948 by the Federation of Malaya. With the birth of the Federation, the residential system was dismantled in favor of a constitutional arrangement whereby Malays regained some of their prewar ethnic privileges and also acquired greater autonomy in administering their own affairs. Among other changes, the status of Resident was downgraded to British Advisor, who served primarily in an adjunct capacity to a Malay executive styled Chief Minister (Menteri Besar ). Henceforth the principal organs of government within the state were essentially twofold: a legislative assembly in the form of a unicameral parliament referred to as the Council of State (Majlis Mesyuarat Negeri ), whose president was the Chief Minister; and a cabinet known as the State Executive Council (Majlis Mesyuarat Kerajaan ), the members of which were both to aid and advise the Yang diPertuan Besar in the conduct of his executive functions as council head and titular head of state and to appoint the Chief Minister (albeit with the approval of Negeri Sembilan's Ruling Chiefs).^[18]

With regard to religious administration, the state constitution empowered the Yang diPertuan Besar and Ruling Chiefs to enact laws regulating both Islamic affairs and adat. In consequence, the year 1949 saw the creation of a proposal to establish a Council of Islamic Religion and Malay Custom (Majlis Agama Islam dan Adat Istiadat Melayu) (FMGGGNS 1949 2 [25], 257–258). Given the thrust of state encroachments on the realms and interrelationship of adat and Islam, it was decided that an Islamic juriconsult (mufti ) should sit at the head of such a body. More important, in 1960 the state created a powerful administrative hierarchy, known as the Department of Islamic Religion (Jabatan Agama Islam) (FMGGGNS 1950 3 [3], 65–66). All dimensions of adat were theoretically excluded from the department's sphere of jurisdiction; moreover—and of broader historical relevance—adat received no institutional supports in any way comparable to those underwriting Islam. Perhaps most significant, the creation of Negeri Sembilan's Department of Islamic Religion furthered a process set in motion at the outset of colonial rule, that is, the institutional differentiation of functions and authority associated with state-defined realms of adat and Islam.

It remains to consider certain implications of the creation in Negeri Sembilan of the office of mufti, and to reiterate that this office, though common elsewhere in the Muslim world during the first half of the twen-

tieth century and long before, did not exist in Negeri Sembilan before 1950. Up until then (or, rather, ever since 1889) the state's district-level Islamic magistrates stood as the highest-ranking authorities of a purely religious nature. These magistrates were free of the political influences of persons and agencies whose esteem and expertise derived from knowledge and explication of Islamic texts (even though their activities were regulated by British officialdom and, to some extent, by the district Undang). When Negeri Sembilan received its first mufti, however, things changed, for these officials have always been charged with issuing authoritative interpretations (fatwa ) of Islamic doctrine and theoretically binding rulings on all points of Muslim law.

All such trends undermined the autonomy of district-level Islamic functionaries and their village subordinates. They also further eroded the ritual prerogatives vested in the Undang, clan leaders, and local enatic groups. In the interest of standardizing and otherwise tidying up the administration of Islamic affairs, for example, the Undangs' role in declaring the opening and close of the fasting month of Ramadan was given over to a national committee. Their involvement in selecting Islamic magistrates, too, was greatly reduced. At the village level, moreover, localized clans were stripped of their sanctified privilege to provide mosque officials from among their members, and clan leaders were rendered superfluous in the collection and distribution of religious tithes and taxes (zakat and fitrah ). In some areas of the state, such shifts provoked militant reaction from villagers, who had long construed such responsibilities as falling squarely within the dominion of clan leaders and adat (see Swift 1965, 93–96).

These historic developments illuminate colonial-era trends marked by the tremendously enhanced jurisdiction of Islamic officials in regulating the domestic, property, and other affairs of villagers, all at the clan leaders' expense. In short, the institutional differentiation and segregation of adat and Islam contributed immeasurably to undermining the integrity of both adat and its most revered spokesmen.

Rembau's "Adat Controversy" of 1951

The polarizing processes examined in this chapter appear in sharp relief in Rembau's 1951 "adat controversy." (See also de Josselin de Jong [1960] for additional background, and an alternative interpretation to that given here.)^[19]

The crisis was touched off in February 1951 when the Religious Affairs Section of the Rembau branch of UMNO published a memorandum stating that, from the perspective of Islam, adat traditions concerning "ancestral" property were illicit (haram ). The memorandum claimed in addition that persons abiding these (constitutionally upheld) conventions were by definition guilty of sin (dosa ) and could not obtain absolution through "the recitation of pious formulae." Rather, they were called on to adhere to Islamic law (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 167).

Shortly after the memorandum appeared a meeting was held at which thirteen or so speakers addressed six hundred inhabitants of Rembau. The UMNO position was publicly backed by all but two of the speakers, including the chiefs of one commoner clan and a representative of UMNO's Women's Organization (Kaum Ibu ). De Josselin de Jong (1960, 167) refers to these latter groups' support as "striking," coming as it did from women and clan leaders, who "one might have expected to be solid in support of the old order." In any event, those in attendance adopted a resolution stating that "the law of inheritance should be altered in accordance with Islam" and that Rembau's Undang, Dato Haji Ipap, should confer with the state government to bring about the proposed changes (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 167).

A few weeks later the Undang acknowledged his support of the UMNO resolution, but rightfully pointed out that he could not effect any changes without the unanimous consent of clan chiefs. For reasons not entirely clear, a highly placed education officer associated by birth with the dynasty of the Yang diPertuan Besar then brought the matter to the Council of State, proposing a review of Chapter 215 of the Customary Tenure Enactment of 1926 on the grounds that it was unfair to men. (This legislation prohibited males from inheriting rights over any lands formally classified as "customary," that is, ancestral; see below, chapter 4.) Shortly thereafter a group of eighty-two Rembau Malays living in Singapore became involved in the broadly publicized controversy, held a meeting, and voted overwhelmingly in favor of the suggested reforms. Among the speakers not in agreement with the dominant opinion was a member of the opposition party, the Peninsular Malays' Union (PMS/PMU) (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 167–168).

In April of the same year Rembau's clan chiefs convened and rejected the UMNO proposals, upon which UMNO charged that the chiefs' stance in the dispute was at sharp variance with that of the majority of Rembau's

inhabitants. UMNO then appealed directly to the Undang for his position on the issue. He merely hedged, indicating that he would urge clan leaders to consult with their kin and report back to him before taking any further action (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 168).

At this juncture the UMNO branch of the adjacent district of Kuala Pilah retreated from its earlier support of Rembau's UMNO group, arguing that it did not want to place local clan chiefs who supported their party in an untenable situation. Similarly, Malays of Rembau origin residing in Singapore canceled a scheduled meeting on the matter, evidently because they thought that the hostility of clan chiefs would render all such encounters meaningless (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 168).

The fasting month of Ramadan brought a truce of approximately four weeks duration so as not to compromise the spirit of the period. Early in July, however, the District Officer of Rembau—by this time a Malay, but apparently not one of Negeri Sembilan birth—publicized his intention to bring the issue to the office of the High Commissioner and, if necessary, to the House of Commons. His partisan intervention, which happened to be on the side of UMNO, resulted in his immediate transfer. According to de Josselin de Jong (1960, 169), this event "stands out in the memories of the inhabitants of Rembau as the dramatic climax of the whole conflict."

This was not the final stage of the crisis, however. In July a clan leader revealed that some women had begun taking steps to safeguard the female privileges they saw as being targeted by the reformers. The purported strategy was an interesting one and boiled down to women "threatening to institute divorce proceedings (or, expressed in legally more correct terms: . . . threatening to elicit their repudiation by their husbands) if their husbands continued to support" the UMNO position (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 169).

In September some 125 clan officers convened yet another meeting to respond to resumed UMNO agitation following Ramadan. They reportedly swore loyalty to adat and the disputed section of the Customary Tenure Enactment. Additionally, in November, a full nine months after UMNO had approached the Undang, the latter replied that he had conferred with the clan chiefs and could not honor the UMNO request to take the matter up with the State Council. By December, though, the State Council committee established at the education officer's initiative was still not fully formed. This failure also constituted a defeat of sorts for the

UMNO group, which now called off the entire Chapter 215 initiative; they did add, however, that the ancient adat was illicit and had gone astray, taking its adherents with it. By most every criterion, according to de Josselin de Jong (1960, 170), the "traditionalists" had won a complete victory.

Such was the controversy in its major outlines. The question thus becomes one of interpretation. Why was it a crisis at all, and not merely a hotly debated political, religious, or moral issue? Why should the events have engendered such antagonism? And finally, what were the underlying social and cultural issues at stake? We can begin to answer these questions by considering certain of de Josselin de Jong's interpretations of the controversy. His analysis comprises one of the better-known pieces on Negeri Sembilan, and has been accepted by many scholars as an accurate depiction of the relationship between adat and Islam during much of the twentieth century. Not all specialists concur with de Josselin de Jong, of course (see, for example, Hooker 1972, 226–227, and Banks 1976); moreover, his interpretation of the controversy and his conclusions concerning the interrelationship of adat and Islam merit sharp analytic separation from his purely descriptive material bearing on the principal actors and events. Yet de Josselin de Jong's extensive contributions to our understanding of the 1951 crisis, and of Negeri Sembilan more generally, deserve both our attention and our careful analytic scrutiny.

De Josselin de Jong commences his discussion of this controversy on a seemingly historical note, which raises several issues of critical importance (1960, 158): "In an article on 'Minangkabau's old controversy,' Professor Prins not long ago drew attention to one of the recent manifestations of the perennial struggle between the ancient matrilineal institutions and Islamic law in Minangkabau. . . . Negeri Sembilan . . . knows the same tension between the same two systems. In 1951 matters came to a head, and the state of tension erupted into a conflict." Now, while the existence of the 1951 drama is beyond question, we must question the purported antiquity of the struggle within Negeri Sembilan "between the ancient matrilineal institutions and Islamic law." How are we to interpret the statement that "Negri Sembilan . . . knows the same tension between the same two systems"? Put somewhat differently, precisely which segments of society were really aware of this "tension," either in the early 1950s or during previous decades? So far as de Josselin de Jong is concerned, the issue is rela-

tively straightforward, especially in the case of the 1951 dispute—for toward the end of his essay he comments that "we are not dealing with a conflict between value systems adopted in different layers of society" (de Josselin de Jong 1960, 198). The obvious implication here is that there was cultural homogeneity, namely, that familiarity with Islamic texts and other domains of cultural knowledge was, and perhaps always has been, more or less evenly distributed throughout Negeri Sembilan society. In fact, it often seems that the vast majority of individuals embroiled in the controversy (if not everyone who came to hear of it) viewed the doctrinal and other disputed issues similarly—including those issues bearing on the relationship between adat and Islam. We are also led to believe that people allied themselves with or against UMNO largely on the basis of a narrowly conceived self-interest.

In contrast to this position, I would propose that the highly uneven distribution of knowledge pertaining to Islam, in conjunction with the shifting political fortunes of distinct groups of Malay leadership—both the products, ultimately, of rapid social change—were the most decisive factors determining the opposing sides in the adat controversy. Moreover, the dispute as a whole testifies primarily to colonial-era processes that politicized adat and Islam while simultaneously polarizing their respective institutional expressions. This latter issue, however, should be viewed as analytically distinct from the village majority's perception of the relationship between adat and Islam; that is, the 1951 events were not simply another manifestation of "the perennial struggle between the ancient matrilineal institutions and Islamic law." Even at present, villagers tend to view the interrelationship of adat and Islam in terms of complementarity rather than opposition (see Lewis 1962, 1, 57–58 et passim; Swift 1965, 9; Hooker 1972, 9; and Nordin Selat 1976, 26–27 et passim). In previous decades, moreover, incongruities in this area have been acknowledged only by highly literate members of the religious and political elite—be they foreign-born Kaum Muda figures active early in the century, English-educated statesmen like Dato Abdullah, or, more recently, civil servants and modern-day party spokesmen, including UMNO leaders. Such groups of elite have assumed the role of cultural brokers and have been centrally involved in promoting social and cultural change. Islamic symbols and idioms have frequently been invoked in these arenas, but so too have Western notions of bureaucratic and agricultural efficiency. Conversely, matters tied

to female privileges in inheritance (the focus of the 1951 controversy) constitute but a small range of the issues on which adat has come under attack on Islamic or any other grounds.

It is also questionable whether the conflict turned on "a set of binary oppositions of a most variegated nature," which de Josselin de Jong (1960, 192) lists as follows:

Even if we confine ourselves to the first six of these pairs, it will, I think, be clear that the meanings of the adat controversy were not only much different than these dichotomies suggest, but also of far broader ramification than any such analytic scheme allows.

To take the first pair of oppositions, the dispute was indeed phrased—at least by the UMNO group—in terms of certain contradictions between the property codes of adat on the one hand and those of Islam on the other. As for the second pair, there is likewise no doubt that most clan chiefs stood allied against the "politicians" associated with the Religious Affairs Section of the Rembau branch of UMNO. Nevertheless, we cannot deduce from this fact, or from any of the other data available, that all other persons linked with the secular branches of Rembau's UMNO hierarchy stood in similar opposition. The third pair, too, between PMS/PMU and UMNO, requires considerable qualification at best. There was apparently only one PMS/PMU supporter directly involved in the dispute; thus we have no idea what position (if any) was advanced by the other members of the party, let alone its religious or secular leadership.

The opposition posed between "commoners" and "princes" (referring to the royal dynasty) can be similarly challenged. So far as we know, only one "prince" was involved in the affair—and he was (not coincidentally) a highly placed civil servant. His position in the colonial bureaucracy pre-supposed modern education, considerable literacy and sociolinguistic com-

petence, and other credentials characteristic of the "new elite" (and thus shared at least to some degree by the UMNO leadership). The same holds for the District Officer, as well as the female representative of UMNO's Women's Organization, both of whom also supported the "pro-Islam" platform but are effectively glossed over in de Josselin de Jong's scheme. When one considers as well that the "commoners" category effectively embraces clan chiefs of commoner and gentry birth, in addition to the Undang, who stands as Allah's vice-regent for all of Rembau, the distortions in this opposition are especially striking.

The binary oppositions between women and men, and between daughters and sons in particular, are perhaps the most problematic of all. Implied here is the existence of mutually opposed interest groups defined in terms of gender; yet in fact neither historical nor contemporary ethnographic data support such a view of male-female or cross-sex-sibling relations. Men as a group do not invariably favor or benefit from the application of Islamic inheritance codes, let alone resist those associated with ancestral property (see chapter 8). Conversely, women are not always the firm supporters and exclusive beneficiaries of ancestral conventions; nor are they necessarily wholly opposed to the introduction and extension into this area of Islamic religious law.

In sum, I would suggest that Rembau's adat controversy did not really revolve around issues of "Islam versus adat"—to draw on the title of de Josselin de Jong's essay—but turned instead, albeit less obviously, on conflicting cultural constructions of the relationship between the two institutions. In other words, whereas most of Rembau's inhabitants undoubtedly viewed the relationship in terms of complementarity, the UMNO activists rejected this view in its entirety (even though they focused almost exclusively on matters of inheritance). Further, they were extremely visible in their assault, using all the symbolic and other capital at their disposal—including, of course, well-publicized and highly dramatic references to the grave sins incurred by "adat adherents" and to the afterlife horrors awaiting them. I would also argue that UMNO's perspectives on the adat-Islam relationship, and its involvement in the affair more generally, were in large measure a product of colonial-era processes that eviscerated traditional institutions and radically diffused the functions, sanctions, and authorities once concentrated among clan spokesmen. As the symbols and prerogatives once vested in these figures passed increasingly to representatives of

the state's secular branches and religious hierarchies, they were necessarily endowed with new meanings and imperatives, only some of which were (or are) acceptable to the rural majority. Indeed, just as any mixing of modern-day politics and religion is anathema to villagers, so too is the mixing of politics and adat. In the contemporary situation, however, such boundaries and categories are impossible to maintain. This is especially evident, and no less ironic, in light of UMNO's mandate to protect Malay society and culture from the menaces and machinations of non-Malays—and to do so by transcending regional differences and parochial loyalties for the purposes of political unification, economic development, and the creation of a more pronounced and sustaining national consciousness based largely on the teachings of Islam.

Clearly implicated in all of this, as already noted, are issues of cultural heterogeneity and the fact that colonial-era processes not only accentuated the differential distribution of knowledge pertaining to Islam, adat, and the outside world but also bestowed unprecedented political meanings on virtually all sacred symbols and other cultural phenomena. On the other side of the coin, of course, we find the analytically distinct, though functionally related, development of geographic and social mobility, occupational specialization, and social stratification, all of which chipped away at the cultural like-mindedness characteristic of rural Rembau.

4—
Currents of Economic Change

Colonial rule in Negeri Sembilan brought momentous changes in rural production and proprietorship, and in the state's economy as a whole. The infusion of Chinese and European capital benefited the Malay elite enormously, and the village majority gained some advantages as well, at least initially, from the concomitant commercialization of agricultural acreage and the growth of cash cropping in particular. The realization of these benefits, especially by males, gave rise to new categories of wealth and proprietorship that in turn fostered an individualization of property and social relations. While trends of this nature contributed to a partial linealization of property ties, I argue that the structural precedents for these developments not only predated colonial rule but also facilitated cultural continuity during this time of dramatic change.

Commercial Trends and the Indigenous Elite

In one sense, the history of colonial-era economic change in rural Negeri Sembilan is that of the progressive commercialization of land suitable for village agriculture. The larger trend, alluded to above, witnessed the

growth of an extractive economy based initially on the exploitation of tin-bearing resources but also, especially after the turn of the century, on the estate cultivation of rubber and other export crops. That the expansion of mining and large-scale plantation activities both preceded and then generated major changes in the village economy is of course well documented (see Khoo 1972; Lim 1977). So, too, is the related point that activities of the former sort were encouraged through intensive capital investment and labor importation by British and other foreigners, whereas village agriculture (including the cash cropping of rubber) received no such major inputs of capital, planning, and the like. Lopsided investment patterns thus contributed to the emergence and persistence of two analytically separate though interpenetrating economic sectors, just as they hastened the process whereby village lands came to acquire commercial value.

In various areas of Negeri Sembilan, it should be emphasized, acreage suitable for village cultigens had acquired commercial value even before the onset of colonial rule. Here again the loci of the state's tin-mining industry and its expansion beginning in the first third of the nineteenth century are important. In the stanniferous region of Sungei Ujong, for example, some villagers were leasing out rights over their sawah (wet-rice fields) to Chinese miners and financiers, in exchange for a percentage of the tin extracted therefrom, as early as the 1830s (CRACNS 1874, 18). The extent and particulars of this practice cannot be precisely determined, but the precedent is of critical significance. More specifically, this and other developments in the mining industry during the precolonial period undermine the argument that village-level economic trends under colonial rule represented a radical departure from earlier theory and practice. In short, to summarize the history of colonial-era economic change in the rural sector as entailing the progressive commercialization of land suitable for village agriculture is to focus attention on a process that, although dominant throughout this time, had its origins in previous decades.

I have already pointed out that the traditional elite were important promoters of the local tin-mining industry prior to British intervention. They also encouraged the definition of certain categories of cultivable land as a resource that could generate monetary returns for villagers. Elite activities in this area need to be assessed in conjunction with subsequent British enactments bearing on rural proprietorship, and land administration more generally. Significantly, however, those individuals at the apex of the indigenous political hierarchy were themselves quick to purchase or other-

wise exploit commercially valued agricultural acreage. As early as 1878, Dato Bandar, a high-ranking district-level official of Sungei Ujong, had opened up a large plantation, just as Dato Klana, the Undang, boasted an extensive estate consisting of over two thousand nutmeg and clove plants (SUAR 1878, 3). Malay holdings of this scale had yet to appear in Rembau, but by 1888 Malacca-based Chinese claimed rights over thirty thousand acres of land in Rembau, all of which were planted in tapioca (NSAR 1888, 7; NSAR 1891, 5). Since these rights had been ceded by the Undang, who was to receive duties on all tapioca exported from Rembau, the situation is remarkably similar to that of Sungei Ujong. In both instances the heads of state reaped the initial rewards of cultivation for the world market.

Certain clan leaders and gentry group members also shared the profits generated by local commercial endeavors, and likewise had an appreciable stake in encouraging their successful development. I already mentioned Sungei Ujong's tin-mining concessions; by 1887, moreover, Rembau's Undang had granted previously unalienated waste lands to individual members of the gentry clans for the production of tapioca. No less significantly, the Undang reportedly failed to share the duties levied on the export of this crop with certain clan chiefs, thereby causing strife over the distribution of revenue obtained from land with no prior commercial value.^[1]

Overall, then, it stands to reason that the British worked through the elite to commercialize the state's economy. It was in fact in keeping with this objective that early British policies aimed to compensate the elite with a percentage of the revenue obtained from their territories rather than fixed monthly allowances (see NSAR 1891, 3). Hence, as British officers stationed in the district of Jelebu observed in 1890, the indigenous leaders did "not seem to take much interest in padi planting, but devote[d] all of their energies to inducing Chinese and others to come mine upon their land" (JAR 1890, 6).

We must now consider the enhanced trading opportunities that became available to men in the 1890s owing to the Malay elite's (among others) luring massive amounts of foreign capital into the state. They did so, of course, to encourage large-scale mining and plantation activities and thereby add to the state's coffers.

Chinese manpower and resources were very much responsible for the unprecedented growth of the mining industry after 1830. This fact helps explain Chinese enthusiasm for British plans to quell statewide distur-

bances during the decades immediately prior to colonial intervention: their mercantile interests, not to mention their very lives, were at stake in many of these altercations (Newbold 1839, 2 : 93, 96, 169–170; CRACNS 1874, 25), and they understandably assumed substantive protection and a relatively free hand to pursue commerce under British rule. Given extensive European investments in mining and that the mere presence of the Chinese in Negeri Sembilan afforded additional opportunities to enhance revenues (through taxes on gambling, opium, pig husbandry, and so on), the British elected to encourage Chinese emigration as a matter of policy. Thus, whereas Negeri Sembilan's Chinese population numbered only about four hundred in 1830, by 1891 it exceeded fifteen thousand, and it further doubled in size during the following decade (see table 4, which also reveals the phenomenal growth in the state's Indian population during the first decades of colonial administration).

These demographic trends provided male villagers with a ready market for forest produce and further solidified an incipient interethnic symbiosis in which Malays served as the middlemen in a trade involving hill-dwelling aborigines on the one hand and trade-dependent Chinese clustered around commercial settlements on the other. But these demographic shifts also fostered conditions of relative resource scarcity in which Malays found themselves competing with both aborigines and Chinese not only for forest produce but also for customers (NSAR 1892, 3; NSSSF 1893 [Sel. 2047/93]; NSGG 1896, 1 : 43; NSGG 1897, 2 : 107; NSGG 1898, 3 : 182–183).

The activities of Chinese, especially in rural areas settled by Malays, occasioned a multitude of problems for both Malays and the British. The presence in Malay villages of Chinese petty traders and itinerant vendors was "greatly objected to," since the Chinese were allegedly tempting Malay women into debt, extending credit to villagers engaged in the illegal (that is, unlicensed) collection of forest produce, and establishing pig farms "to the annoyance of the Muslims" (NSAR 1897, 3). It was for reasons such as these that local chiefs had ordered the Chinese to remove themselves to sites established for them by District Officers (NSAR 1897, 3).

The presence in Malay villages of Chinese settlers was not the only cause of antagonisms, however; the scale of their planting and mining activities (and those of Europeans as well) also imperiled successful village agriculture. The diversion of water resources for mining occurred sometimes (in Sungei Ujong, for example) at the direct expense of padi growers,

who suffered radically declining yields as a result and also witnessed an appreciable devaluation of their ancestral property (see SUAR 1877, 2; SU/JAR 1893, 8; NSAR 1909, 4; NSAR 1917, 6). Similarly, the untrammeled expansion of estate agriculture destroyed large tracts of cultivable land, the extreme case being acreage earmarked for two or three seasons of tapioca planting and thereafter fallowed for a decade, only to be overrun by virtually indestructible lalang growth. Thus one observer commented in 1890 that Rembau "is completely denuded of forest, and is now for the most part a lalang plain, with the exception of course of the Malay orchards" (NSAR 1890, 5). While patently disturbing to the British, dilemmas of this nature were not easily resolved. For, as Negeri Sembilan's British Resident reasoned in 1891, "if this Government refused to concede land for tapioca planting, the principal Chinese industry of this portion of the Peninsula would be abandoned" (NSAR 1891, 5).

These developments also had their positive side. For one, the Malays inhabiting Rembau and other districts of Negeri Sembilan obtained appreciable benefit in the 1890s from increased market demands for their forest produce and livestock, and from greater access to household necessities and prestige items. A British civil servant attending the 1895 Hari Raya festivities in Kuala Pilah, for example, was struck by the abundance of western perfumes, silk handkerchiefs, Chinese silk clothes, tweed suits, and smoking caps, all of which he described as "simply not possible ten years ago" (NSGG 1896, 1 : 112; see also SUAR 1885, 2; NSAR 1888, 16). The profits reaped through the sale of local produce and domesticates may have also contributed to villagers' successes in avoiding plantation work, except in cases of floods or other natural calamities that interfered with the planting or harvesting of rice (cf. Gullick 1951, 51–52).

One other area in which state-backed development policies brought economic benefits to villagers, and males especially, was the British system of land administration, which endowed proprietors with unprecedented security over their holdings but was of course grounded in foreign and highly individualistic notions of property.

Shifting Patterns of Production and Proprietorship

In 1887 British officials commenced a survey of Rembau to assess the extent of taxable Malay holdings and to determine the amount of "un-

claimed" acreage that could be sold or leased to European, Chinese, and Malay entrepreneurs committed to mining or estate cultivation. British notions of "unclaimed" land were at sharp variance with those of their Malay counterparts. The larger issue, though, is that all Malay rights over sawah and residential acreage came to be registered under the names of individual proprietors, even when the property in question was ancestral. Further, because the cadastral surveys aimed at identifying potential tax-payers, all registered claimants were held individually responsible for the payment of nominal processing fees and annual quit rents. These quit rents varied according to land use, although productivity levels also figured in their computation. Acreage per se was not an issue during the earliest years of colonial taxation, but neither was the indigenous distinction between redeemed and unredeemed lands (Taylor [1929] 1970, 133). Proprietors of redeemed holdings were thus no longer exempt from paying agricultural taxes to extralocal authorities; hence, the jural imperatives of a long-established cultural marker embedded in symbols and concepts of origin point were quickly undermined.

Of far greater consequence is that adult males were both allowed and encouraged to purchase or otherwise obtain rights over commercially valued acreage made available by the state. It is not clear whether these men were also enjoined to register such property in their own names, although this was a concurrent development (dating from about 1888 in Rembau) and a logical outcome of British policies regarding the responsibilities and prerogatives of individuals over the lands they cultivated or occupied. At the outset, the number of holdings registered in the names of male proprietors was quite small—in Bogang at the close of 1889, for example, only 6.8 percent (3.8 of 56) of village titles were listed as having been initially registered by individual male proprietors. One year later only sixty such cases existed in the entire district of Rembau, whose Malay population was roughly nine thousand. Similarly, just as less than 6.3 percent of the Malay titles recorded in the district by the end of 1898 were first registered as under male proprietorship, the corresponding figure for the state as a whole appears to have been about 1 percent (Gullick 1951, 41).

All such percentages increased rapidly as a result of the rubber boom, which soon followed.^[2] It should be stressed, though, that even during the earliest years of colonial rule a married man's rights in this area could be established independently of his wife and female enates, insofar as he

might clear and maintain lands entirely through his own efforts (Gullick 1951, 41). This unprecedented possibility had profound implications for male proprietors' autonomy vis-à-vis affinal kin; it also exacerbated a situation in which social control over in-marrying males and the fruits of their labor seems always to have been fraught with tension and potential discord. Although there is no reason to assume that such circumstances led to heightened property or social conflicts during a proprietor's lifetime, since his wife and children would in any event derive the major benefit from his day-to-day earnings, they did, however, cause serious disputes after his death. These conflicts usually involved a man's wife and children on the one side and enatic kin on the other, for both these groups could legitimately claim shares of the property acquired by the deceased during his marriage (that is, his charian laki-bini ). We will examine such disputes in due course.

Of more immediate concern is that the British viewed traditional constraints on male proprietorship and inheritance as just part of a larger institutional framework deemed primitive, anachronistic, and overly cumbersome as regards the objectives of colonial rule (see NSAR 1889, 2; NSGG 1898, 3 : 151–152). At the same time—and this, I think, is the more critical issue—the British clearly viewed as highly unnatural a system in which provisional rights over land devolved upon females to the exclusion of males. In consequence, women appeared to have a great stake in agriculture and to "cultivate their holdings to the fullest extent," whereas men were said to "rarely help the women in looking after" the land owing to their position that "We shall never get it, so why should we help to improve it?"^[3] This situation, aside from suggesting an inversion of the system of gender relations predominant in Victorian England, was believed to foster a lack of interest among males in local events and economic development, and to account for the "considerable majority of women" (NSGG 1897, 2 : 4) revealed by Rembau's 1891 census. "Unnatural" imbalances of this sort prompted British officials, in the mid 1890s, to induce Rembau males to acquire parcels of land for coffee cultivation; as a result, men were soon "beginning to have a stake in a country in which almost all landed property is vested in women" (NSAR 1896, 4).^[4]

Overall, then, the British not only conferred legitimacy on male acquisition of full title to commercially valuable acreage, but also encouraged the trend through local policy. They did so by working through the indige-

nous elite (clan and district chiefs), who were well suited to encourage the acquisition of land by adult men in their realms of jurisdiction. By holding political office, they stood as heirs to an entrepreneurial legacy that had always presupposed an ability to mobilize sentiment on their behalf. Moreover, being in the receipt of salaries and other remunerations, and relatively familiar with the workings of the colonial bureaucracy, they were ideally situated to purchase sizable holdings of state land themselves. In this connection we should recall the inordinate losses of prestige the elite suffered when British policies undercut their dominion over their subjects, and that one of their few avenues for partially recouping such losses entailed gaining control over commercially valued land and other cash-generating resources. We should also bear in mind that a man's prestige hinged on the nature of his relations with his affines, who tended to judge him in his capacity as provider and household entrepreneur; and that, through commercially valued acreage and other opportunities to obtain cash incomes, married men had a ready means for satisfying affinal demands on their productivity.

Also relevant to the theme of male prestige is that married men (like the rest of the [Malay] population) were Muslims and thus bidden to make the pilgrimage to Mecca should they be financially able. Rising to the status of haji also garnered considerable esteem. Gaining sufficient funds to make the haj was therefore a principal objective of men who engaged in cash-cropping activities in the 1890s. Even before that time, the sale of forest produce and livestock had been undertaken for this purpose. Thus in 1892 Lister wrote that the Yang diPertuan Besar informed him that

the money supply for luxuries had always been obtained from the sale of fruit, vegetables and orchard produce generally but in a far greater degree from the sale of buffaloes, goats, and poultry reared on these lands. . . . It was also by this industry that the people of the country were able to save up money to accomplish the pilgrimage to Mecca; . . . in former times, prior to the natives having been given facilities in regard to working for wages, this was in most cases the sole source of cash wealth.^[5]

We see here the mutual reinforcement of two separate though interrelated criteria for prestige ranking: the one based on the cultural construction of affinal obligations, relatedness, and cleavages; the other resting on a more transcendent ideology by which all men were equal before God, but those among them who journeyed to Mecca enjoyed exalted spiritual standing.

That a man could earn prestige on both counts through trade or the sale of agricultural produce is, I think, a critical factor in encouraging both the acquisition of land by males and their involvement in cash cropping on the whole.

Commercial currents during the final decade or so of the 1800s seem not to have affected any immediate restructuring of conjugal or affinal bonds, but they did contribute to an important conceptual shift in the domain of inheritance. This shift involved a reassessment and partial collapse of the distinction between movable and immovable property, the first evidence of which dates from about 1890 (cf. Lister 1890, 316–317; DeMoubray 1931, 202). To appreciate the issues at stake we must recall that throughout the precolonial era jointly acquired lands were apparently not divided between a man and his wife, or their respective enates, upon divorce or decease. Rather, since rights over such land (and houses) remained with the wife and her children or their enatic collaterals, questions as to the distribution of conjugal property between the two sets of kin focused only on movable goods, such as cash, weapons, jewelry, and livestock. A man's entire share of this movable property could pass to his enatic kin instead of his offspring, although the likelihood of this happening depended on numerous factors, including the occurrence or nonoccurrence of paternal provisioning. By 1890, however, Rembau's indigenous leaders seem to have decided that such property should thenceforth devolve upon the dead man's children rather than his enatic survivors, and that his rights over conjugally acquired land could now revert to his enates. The leaders were thus effectively equating land with cash resources and other consumer goods that had always been divided between spouses or their enatic representatives on the termination of a marriage.

We recall, too, that a married man appears always to have enjoyed the option of bequeathing rights over his share of conjugal acquisitions to his children but that if he failed to do so these rights passed to his sisters (or mother) for the benefit of their offspring. Thus, although children would stand to inherit their mother's entire share of jointly acquired earnings (and those of their mother's brothers as well), they would not necessarily receive any of their father's portion of such property. It was with reference to this issue, and to the transmission of a man's property classed as jointly acquired earnings more generally, that Lister (1890, 317) wrote the following:

That property of this kind should not go entirely to the children made a great deal of difficulty, as it is not in accordance with Muhammadan law. . . . In Rembau the Chiefs decided that all property other than "herta pesaka" [ancestral property] or "herta membawa" [the property a man brought to his marriage] became unconditionally the property of the children and could not in any case return to the man's relations. It was ruled, however, that land should not be affected, coming as it does under "herta pesaka" and that weapons, ornaments and silver untensils which were "herta pesaka" must be returned.

One of the more interesting features of this passage, and of the article as a whole, is that despite the point concerning the chiefs' "decisions" on the devolution of rights over conjugal earnings, Lister also refers to the matter as "not yet . . . decisively settled" (p. 316). Yet Lister does not mention any such conceptual shift in a similarly oriented piece of 1887. The issue probably arose only during the intervening period, for Rembau men first acquired commercially valued acreage in their own names beginning in 1888 or 1889 and by that time had also experienced very lucrative returns from trading activities, which greatly enhanced the financial stakes at issue upon their decease. One would expect a cultural realization of such shifts to result in a realignment of property distinctions or in heightened specificity in the conventions pertaining to the postmortem distribution of male property rights. And indeed, both phenomena are evident in the passage quoted above.

One consequence of these developments was that children's claims to their father's share of conjugal acquisitions in the form of movable goods no longer turned on demonstrating the prior occurrence of paternal provisioning. Children were deemed to have unconditional rights over such property, even in the absence of "gift giving" by their father. Clearly, moreover, the strengthening of children's rights over their father's properties occurred at the direct expense of those competing jural interests vested in sisters and other collateral enates.^[6]

None of this is to suggest the immediate demise of residual rights grounded in enatic siblingship, but it should be apparent that economic and jural developments in the first decade of colonial rule did strengthen the property bonds between Rembau men and their children. Further-more, even at this early stage the indigenous leaders of Rembau had assumed central positions both in commerce and in religious administration

and reform. This combination of prestige-conferring activities had profound implications for the evolution of property concepts. In this connection we might refer back to Lister's inference that chiefly proposals concerning the devolution of rights over a man's share of conjugally acquired goods were prompted in part by a desire to conform more closely with Islamic property codes. This at least is my interpretation of the ambiguous opening line of the passage cited above, namely "that property of this kind should not go entirely to his children made a great deal of difficulty, as it is not in accordance with Muhammadan law." There is certainly room for speculation as to who was more directly concerned with "the difficulty" in question, the Malay elite or British administrators, but it is instructive that Rembau's first kadi assumed office in 1889 and undoubtedly consulted with Rembau's clan leaders on aspects of property (and other matters of common interest) from the very beginning of his tenure. In sum, one cannot dismiss the possibility that Rembau's kadi played a key role in encouraging the chiefs to propose the policy shifts outlined above, especially in light of Lister's (1890, 319) observation that "as the Kathi is generally anxious to exercise Muhammadan law only, great care has to be taken to prevent him from interfering in cases of custom."

More importantly in the long run, the position advanced by the chiefs paved the way for the kadi and his representatives' extensive involvement in the inheritance affairs of villagers. This trend had major implications, if only because Islam accords far greater priority to rights grounded in patrifiliation than to those based on enatic connections. Islam, moreover, not only allows but also encourages individualism of the sort fostered by villagers' involvement in the production of rubber for export after 1910.

Rubber, Colonial Administration, and Property Relations

Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis ) was introduced into Negeri Sembilan around 1895. It was immediately successful as an estate crop, as early-twentieth-century figures on the amount of acreage devoted to various agricultural products in the state make clear. The data in table 5 reveal a phenomenal increase in the area planted in rubber both in the 1903–1912 period and thereafter, as well as a corresponding decline in the estate cultivation of all other export crops. European and Chinese planters reaped unprecedented

profits from this great rubber boom, as indeed did Malays, who by 1909 showed considerable interest in cultivating rubber and had successfully petitioned local authorities for plots suitable for the new crop.

Malay enthusiasm to grow and tap rubber posed a multitude of problems for the British owing to the contradictions in their policies toward indigenous subjects. On the one hand, British support of traditional institutions was highly selective, forthcoming in general only when it might enhance revenues and other colonial objectives; on the other hand, there was much concern to bolster certain Malay practices so as to "keep the natives native." It was partially in line with this latter goal that the British encouraged Chinese immigration to Negeri Sembilan and other Malay states and also imported thousands of Tamils and other South Asians to labor on plantations, road crews, and other public works. Relevant as well was the British view that Malays not only lacked interest in and were ill suited for year-round estate-sector employment (SUAR 1880, 2) but also that they required protection from the market forces unleashed by rapid economic development. This perception contributed to the promulgation of colonial legislation discouraging Chinese settlement in rural areas inhabited by Malays; it also helps to explain why the British responded with marked ambivalence to the flood of Malay requests for plots of state land to be planted in rubber.

Despite misgivings in some official circles (see NSAR 1911, 5), over ten thousand holdings "under ten acres in size" were handed over to Negeri Sembilan Malays between 1908 and 1912 alone, primarily for purposes of rubber cultivation (NSAR 1912, 6). In the village of Bogang, the state alienated over 180 acres of land from 1910 to 1920, the bulk of which was planted in rubber and registered under male proprietors (see table 6). Alienated acreage thus increased by more than 44 percent, and the growth of market and credit networks, together with the accumulation of cash and theretofore largely inaccessible consumer goods, was sharply stimulated. These developments signaled a languishing interest in the purchase of any land not suitable for rubber trees, as well as a diminished concern with cooperative rice planting, including the proper care of dams and irrigation works. Stated differently, these trends heralded the beginnings of a shift from a subsistence orientation characterized by a fair range of economic activities and considerable self-sufficiency to a heavy dependence on mono-

cropping for cash, Chinese brokers, and world-market prices. Such trends, moreover, posed further problems for the British in their self-assigned role as the protectors of the Malay populace, spawning a host of legislative measures designed to maintain food production and insulate Malay proprietors from Indian money lenders, Chinese and European speculators, and others who might tempt or force them to part with their land.

Land-related legislation passed during the first third of this century is profitably viewed against economic trends and protectionist concerns of the sort outlined above. Three measures—the Malay Reservations Enactment of 1913 and the Customary Tenure Enactments of 1909 and 1926—were of particular historical significance, and are at least indirectly responsible for innumerable aspects of property and ethnic relations even at present.

The Customary Tenure Enactment of 1909 was supposed to preserve the traditional system of land tenure and inheritance in its entirety (NSAR 1908, 3). The principal responsibility for doing so lay with the Collector of Land Revenue, who was to endorse existing titles to land according to whether the registered proprietors held their rights in a manner consistent with "the custom." If the Collector was satisfied that land was occupied "subject to the custom," he was "to add to the entry in the . . . [parish] register the words 'Customary Land' and authenticate the same by his signature." This act would be taken as "conclusive proof that the land to which such entry relates was occupied subject to the custom"; it would also guarantee that rights over it would not be "transferred, charged, transmitted or otherwise dealt with except in accordance [there] with" (see NSGG 1909, 14[38] : 633–636).

As a result of the 1909 enactment, a great many preexisting titles were endorsed with the designation "customary" or "customary land," which was intended as a synonym for land classed as ancestral. Despite the ambiguity of this ill-chosen gloss, the enactment did ensure that most rights over property thus registered not only devolved in accordance with the system of enatic constraints and divided title but also remained among Malay proprietors (Lim 1977, 110). The problem, however, was that the legislation was by definition backward-looking: it concerned itself only with existing rights previously transmitted or simply held in accordance with "the custom" and endorsed as such. Because it did not explicitly provide for distinctions of gender or for the potential existence of new catego-

ries of rights, it thereby left open the question of how such new rights should devolve within the Malay community (as well as the possibility of their passing to non-Malays). At the same time, the legislation failed to address jural issues bearing on the recategorization of rights over time through inheritance, even though it implicitly recognized that land defined as "customary" property should be dealt with as such in the future. If only by default, it thus rendered possible the gradual elimination of the system's diachrony. Moreover, since the very existence of residual rights hinged on the automatic reclassification over time of acquired land as the ancestral property of enatic segments, this undermining of diachrony necessarily foreshadowed the eventual demise of divided title. In a word, the Customary Tenure Enactment of 1909 went a long way toward eviscerating the very system it sought to reinforce.^[7]

The Malay Reservation Enactment of 1913 worked similarly, though it aimed less at bolstering selected aspects of the indigenous system than at making sure that Europeans, Indians, and Chinese especially did not gain control of Malay lands (see Lim 1977, 106–116). The British were quick to acknowledge that the Customary Tenure Enactment of 1909 was but a partial solution to the problem of Malay holdings passing to non-Malays, especially since it pertained only to lands formally classified as customary and thus included no provisions specifying that rights over other Malay-held plots would always remain within that ethnic community. One alternative would have been to endorse all current and future Malay titles with the words customary land , thereby effectively extending the provisions of the 1909 legislation to include all current and future Malay lands. This policy would have been partly consistent with—but also far more restrictive than—precolonial property conventions. The British chose not to pursue this course, however, being convinced that traditional constraints on the conveyance of land rights were generally acceptable in the case of residential acreage and sawah but rather "irksome," as one official later put it, when it came to land "taken up merely for profit" (NSAR 1916, 9–10). Another alternative lay in adopting a laissez-faire approach to the whole issue, but the likely consequences of such a policy were seen as disastrous.

A compromise was decided on, involving the creation of a new category of property, known as Malay Reserve Land, rights to which non-Malays were constitutionally barred from obtaining. These reserves encompassed large stretches of land already held by Malays, and they came to include the

bulk of unalienated state acreage as well. Reserve land helped guarantee that the Malay community, or their representatives, would always retain control of agricultural acreage, and that Chinese and other non-Malays would continue to rely on plantation-sector activities, petty trade, public works employment, and the like to meet their economic needs. The most important aspect of the Malay Reservation Enactment, though, is not that it explicitly prohibited the transfer of land rights from Malays to non-Malays (but not vice versa), but rather that it clearly provided for a category of Malay property—that is, noncustomary land—that was not necessarily subject to preexisting constraints of the sort relevant to customary holdings. This was, in fact, one of its principal objectives.

There are two points of great importance here. First, the ensuing decades witnessed major controversies concerning the inheritance of intestate lands not formally labeled as customary. Second, the bulk of the litigation generated by competing inheritance claims (coupled with inconsistent administrative policy and procedure) focused on acreage planted in or suitable for rubber. Indeed, most plots alienated before 1910 were not only associated with customary titles but were also of relatively little monetary value given their utilization for subsistence rice production or residential compounds. In sharp contrast, the post-1910 era saw very few new titles defined as customary. In Bogang, for example, 94.1 percent (128 of 136) of the plots made available to villagers between 1910 and 1920 were alienated specifically for rubber, but only 17.6 percent (24 of 136) came under the customary heading. In subsequent decades this latter percentage declined even more radically. Villagers' interests aside, then, the questions facing British settlement officers overwhelmingly centered on the allocation of rights over intestate lands in the noncustomary category. In particular, the dilemma confronting colonial administrators was construed as one involving a choice between the property codes of adat and those of Islam. And, to oversimplify, British officials tended to favor resolutions defined as Islamic in nature.

A sterling example of the colonial bias in favor of Islamic property conventions appears in certain British administrators' interpretations of the Customary Tenure Enactment of 1926. This piece of legislation superseded the 1909 enactment and further codified the jural implications of rights associated with customary titles (in part by formally barring males from inheriting such rights, except in extenuating circumstances, where

they might be awarded "life interests"). It is somewhat ironic, then, that the bias in question took the form of a rigid posture on the part of some officials concerning the devolution of rights over lands defined as noncustomary—to wit, that such rights could be allocated only in accordance with the letter of Islamic law. The assumption seems to have been that adat pertained only to titles formally registered as customary and that Islamic codes necessarily prevailed in all other situations, regardless of the history of the property at stake (for example, its classification by villagers as ancestral) (see Taylor [1948] 1970, 172–195). In the case of intestate property in the form of previously inherited land, this could occasion a serious compromise of the prerogatives vested in the enatic kin of the deceased. If the deceased were male, for example, rights over much if not all of his land could easily pass to non-enates (his wife and children), an impossible situation under previous circumstances, since the property would have ranked as ancestral harta pembawa subject to the unconditional jurisdiction of the dead man's enatic survivors. In any event, these settlement policies effectively denied the diachrony that was not only inherent in the system of property relations and central to its reproduction but also wholly necessary for the increase and future viability of enatic estates.

British motivation in pursuing policies of the sort outlined above is an interesting topic in and of itself. Certain of the architects saw the policies as likely to minimize the possibility of local Muslim opposition to colonial rule. Thus, Andrew Caldecott, a former District Officer and onetime Acting Resident of Negeri Sembilan, argued on their behalf that the Dutch had experienced formidable difficulties in Sumatra when they reacted hostilely to the Islamic reformers credited with fomenting the Padri War of 1803–1837 (Taylor [1948] 1970, 192). What Caldecott failed to realize, however, was that matters of inheritance were of little significance in this war, and in any case did not figure in colonial backing of traditional leaders against the reformers, or in the reformers' resistance to Dutch rule (Taylor [1948] 1970, 192; Dobbin 1977).

In all fairness to Caldecott's more enlightened contemporaries, it should be recalled that numerous nationalistic and Islamic organizations and movements had come into being throughout the Peninsula during the twenties and thirties, and were in many instances lobbying for change in the name of Islamic reform. Administrators thus had to determine which of these groups and movements actually represented the sentiments of the

Malay majority and then decide to what extent their objectives might be accommodated with those of efficient colonial rule (cf. DeMoubray 1931, 213–215).

We might bear in mind, too, that Rembau's eighteenth Undang, Dato Abdullah, discouraged certain agricultural rituals and other practices deemed unacceptable by Islamic orthodoxy, and also advocated reforms in property and inheritance that were conceptualized as Islamic in design. The property and inheritance reforms that Dato Abdullah proposed were actually of quite limited scope and focused entirely on the devolution of rights over jointly acquired earnings (Taylor [1948] 1970, 189–191). His basic argument seems to have been that a married (or formerly married) man ought to have greater autonomy in bestowing rights over such property, and in any case should no longer be bound by adat stipulations that a full half-share of conjugal acquisitions remain with or pass to his wife in the event of divorce. Apparently, Dato Abdullah merely sought a change whereby these property rights would go to children of the marriage as opposed to the wife. Nonetheless, and even though no such issues as gender in heirship were mentioned (that sons were to be included as heirs or awarded the larger shares of the property at stake, for instance), the proposed alternative was stated in exceedingly broad terms—specifically, that Islamic rather than adat codes should govern the inheritance of all conjugal acquisitions (Taylor [1948] 1970, 189–191). This sweeping generalization proved to be highly unfortunate. For, in conjunction with the Customary Tenure Enactment of 1926, some British administrators interpreted it as justification to effect rigid settlement policies grounded in Islam, even when villagers' legitimate property claims (such as over ancestral lands associated with titles not formally endorsed as customary) were thereby disregarded.

Dato Abdullah's position on changes in property and inheritance was shared by most of Rembau's clan leaders (Taylor [1948] 1970, 189–190). Because these leaders spoke for themselves and not necessarily for their clansmen, we have no way of knowing whether their sentiments coincided with those of untitled males, let alone the village majority. Yet these officials appear to have been the principal Malay advocates of change in property and inheritance; moreover, they stopped short of pursuing any measures that would have undermined the institutions of ancestral property and divided title. Their proposed amendment could even be interpreted as bolstering the system's foundations by focusing attention on one of its

relatively minor elements. This point merits special emphasis, if only because it militates against any suppositions that they acted on behalf of any male-oriented interest group. In effectively upholding the temporal reclassification of acquired property as ancestral, the clan leaders were in fact supporting those indigenous policies that excluded males from owning previously inherited land.^[8]

Although this discussion has taken us rather far afield from land-related legislation passed during the first third of the century, I have been concerned here to draw attention to British settlement policies that reinforced the individualizing implications of those enactments. Among other things, I have tried to show that processes contributing to the individualization of property and social relations stemmed partly from the legislative decrees in question but also, and perhaps more importantly, from the interpretation and execution of such legislation by British officials.

It remains to point out that a policy reversal seems to have occurred among settlement officers either during the late 1930s or shortly after the Japanese Occupation ended in 1945 (see Taylor [1948] 1970). This shift explicitly provided for the existence of ancestral constraints and prerogatives in the case of previously inherited intestate lands whose titles lacked formal endorsement as customary. Thus, if a woman could prove that rights over land to which she felt entitled had already devolved in accordance with adat and should also pass to her by virtue of enatic ties, her claims to the property would be accorded priority over those of individuals without such jurally based interests. For the most part, however, such settlement decisions still hinged on potentially troublesome evidentiary and procedural issues—such as whether Islamic magistrates or clan spokesmen, or both, were to evaluate the competing claims and inform secular officials as to the most equitable distribution of rights over intestate property. Moreover, and of far greater historical relevance, even when settlement decisions resulted in the rights of female enates, and divided title more generally, being recognized, there was no corresponding effort to endorse the relevant land grants with the designation customary. Hence, just as all subsequent transmissions of rights over the lands in question entailed more or less identical proceedings, so too did they leave room for controversy and dissatisfaction on the part of potential heirs. Further complications developed following independence, when there was a reversion to the practice whereby all lands lacking formal classification as customary were held to be subject to the property codes of Islam, as interpreted by

well-financed Islamic administrative hierarchies. The implications of this trend will be considered in chapter 8.

The vast majority of the property disputes following the rubber boom of 1910–1920 focused on lands, especially previously inherited acreage, not formally endorsed as customary (Taylor [1948] 1970). It is thus important to understand why previous generations of proprietors failed or elected not to register their lands as customary. Such an alternative has long been, and still is, available to proprietors. Yet only 17.6 percent (24 of 136) of the titles first registered in Bogang between 1910 and 1920 have ever been formally categorized as customary, and only 3.2 percent (10 of 310) of all titles recorded since then. Administrative oversight might be at work here; the complexities of dealing with the state bureaucracy, too, may have discouraged many individuals from formally reclassifying their land titles and attendant rights. In light of the contemporary villagers' position on this matter, however, neither of these explanations goes far enough.^[9] Rather, the underlying issue would appear to be one of maintaining as much freedom as possible in conveying land rights through mortgage, sale, inter vivos bequests, or postmortem inheritance, and doing so both for oneself and for one's spouse and children. In short, while present-day villagers occasionally express hope that their funds of land will always remain intact and among kin, they are more directly concerned with enhancing, or at least maintaining, their own autonomy and that of the other members of the household. To register any noncustomary lands as customary would severely undermine such autonomy, for it would subject everyone with an immediate claim over the property to the residual prerogatives of the proprietors' collateral enates. Further, it would necessarily exclude sons from receiving any shares of the property, through inheritance or otherwise, and could even, if they had no sisters, lead to their being passed over in favor of female cousins.

On the one hand, then, most people with whom I discussed the issue felt that the existence of conventions pertaining to ancestral lands was of great social value—particularly in providing women with the resource base to satisfy their own subsistence requirements and those of their children (see below, chapter 8). On the other hand, no one thought it worth-while to actually register titles as customary and thereby guarantee the perpetuation of such conventions. Villagers simply want the best of both worlds: unobstructed personal and domestic autonomy, and at least diffuse

guarantees that future generations of female descendants will always derive the larger shares, if not all, of the inheritance. Thus, villagers themselves have also contributed to the demise of divided title, even though they still favor exclusive female proprietorship in the case of previously inherited lands, whether customary or otherwise. This distinction merits emphasis, because it demonstrates that a heightened concern with personal and domestic autonomy (that is, with relative immunity from the jural claims of collateral enates and affines) is a separate issue from that of gender-based moral imperatives bearing on the transmission of land rights.

Elsewhere we will see that throughout the past century most rights over inherited lands have passed to females and that there is no evidence for A. Wahab Alwee's (1967, 40–41) contention that the post-1926 era has seen a shift in inheritance "from matriliny to patriliny." Instead, a linealization of property and inheritance relations has occurred, whereby the rights of collateral enates have been undermined owing to the progressive foregrounding of individual freedoms and the links between parents—including fathers—and their children. Even when rights over conjugally acquired lands pass to male children, they tend to pass thereafter to female relations of the males (their sisters, or occasionally their own daughters) and thenceforth to the latters' enatically related female descendants (usually daughters). Aside from the initial transfer, then, land rights are still most commonly conveyed through individuals belonging to the same lineage, and to the females among them in particular. For that matter, the property ties involved in the initial transfers between men and their offspring by no means lack historical precedent. Married men have always had the option of bequeathing certain categories of property to their children; the major difference is that in precolonial times these rights centered on movable goods rather than land. There is thus considerable justification for viewing all shifts in the social links and categories of property rights implicated in inheritance as entailing a progressive realignment and reweighting of traditional structural principals and property concepts, rather than the creation ex nihilo of a new and distinct nexus of property or social constructs.

One other matter, however, represents a partial exception to the trends and interpretations discussed here. This is the concept of capital interest, or bunga , for which the precolonial system appears to have had no explicit provisions. Prior to the turn of the century little if any interest usually ac-

crued to a husband's personal estate such as the livestock, weapons, or cash he may have brought to his marriage. Perhaps for this reason alone there seems to have been no indigenous policy concerning the distribution of such interest when the marriage ended. Once males began to acquire rubber land, however, this facet of inheritance came to assume crucial importance. For example, a man might possess potentially valuable acreage suitable for the cultivation of rubber prior to betrothal, or he could inherit rights over such property in the course of marriage. Assuming the land was developed, what was to become of the increase in value, which could be phenomenal? Historical reports vary on this issue, but a general consensus seems to have emerged as early as the late 1920s that the enates of the deceased man could claim as his personal estate only the original value of the land, and not the increase or the land per se (DeMoubray 1931, 143). Both the land itself and the interest on it fell within the category of jointly acquired earnings, or charian laki-bini, and were therefore subject to restrictions on that domain of property. As noted by the District Officer stationed in Rembau at the time, "the ranking of increases of value as charian laki-bini went hand in hand with, and was a consequence of the progressive acknowledgment of the claims of children " (DeMoubray 1931, 143). This development constitutes but another stage in the historical advancement of rights based in patrifiliation and affinal relatedness (since a married man's affinal kin were the ultimate beneficiaries in this regard), just as it further undermined the nexus of property rights vested in the bonds of siblingship and descent linking a man with his enates.

Restrictions and Out-Migration

When Dato Abdullah became Rembau's eighteenth Undang in 1922, the Malays of Negeri Sembilan could look back on a decade of relative prosperity thanks to the rubber boom and their pronounced enthusiasm to produce latex for the world market. Because the rubber trees of smallholders were usually planted in previously uncleared forest areas rather than swampy lowlands given over to sawah, the spiraling Malay interest in rubber did not pose a direct threat to rice cultivation in the sense of encouraging a transformation of padi fields into holdings suitable for latex production. Yet Malay involvement in rubber tapping did serve to divert labor and other resources from rice growing and related subsistence pur-

suits, for it fostered new patterns of consumption and a correspondingly enhanced reliance on the medium of cash. Thus British administrators reported in 1928 that it was becoming "increasingly difficult every year to persuade sawah owners to plant up their land and to take an interest in its efficient cultivation" (NSAR 1928, 15). This situation was to change rather quickly, however, for in the very next year there occurred a sharp decline both in the prices fetched by rubber and in the living standards of the rural majority, and a renewed concern among Malays with the growing of rice (NSAR 1929, 15).

By 1930 the depressed state of the rubber industry led to a major reduction in the daily wage paid to estate laborers and the repatriation of foreign workers, especially Indians. The following year all plantations in the state reportedly produced at a loss, and the tappers' wages afforded but a bare living, since the price of rubber had plummeted to four cents a pound (NSAR 1931, 14, 27).^[10] Owing to cash shortages in all quarters and consumers' greatly reduced purchasing powers, Chinese and other shopkeepers saw their sales fall off dramatically and also had trouble paying rents as well as taxes. As a consequence, in the town of Kuala Pilah alone over thirty shops closed in 1931 (NSAR 1931, 29). These trends not only made the purchase of supplies even more problematic but also led to unprecedented declines in the volumes of cash Malays obtained through the sale of fruits, vegetables, poultry, and eggs (NSAR 1931, 35). British reports suggest that although few Malays engaged in padi cultivation experienced rice shortages, there was nevertheless a dearth of cash throughout the countryside. Villagers were thus unable to buy those subsistence necessities and other consumer goods they had come to rely on but did not themselves produce (NSAR 1931, 35).

In 1932, economic conditions worsened; short-lived experiments with the cultivation of tobacco were also undertaken, and there was a heightened interest in padi planting, with noticeable increases both in the areas of sawah cultivated and per-acre yields (NSAR 1932, 25). Subsistence requirements, however, could not be satisfied solely through rice production, particularly since some Malays (such as those in the coastal district of Port Dickson) had no access to sawah. As one British official pointed out, "a very large number of Malays own small rubber holdings . . ., [but] some unfortunately are wholly dependent on rubber. It was they who suffered so seriously during the slump" (NSAR 1935, 9). Persons in this

latter category were not alone in enduring hardship, for as one colonial agent acknowledged in 1933, "the economic depression subjected the majority of the population to a hard and relentless struggle" (NSAR 1933, 39).

The immediate effects of the depression subsided somewhat in 1933, despite extreme subsequent fluctuations in the price of rubber. Furthermore, whereas improved market conditions during 1933 stimulated a resumption of tapping by smallholders (NSAR 1933, 8), the following year saw the implementation of colonial schemes restricting the output of village producers so as to limit their competitive threat to large-scale capital-intensive enterprises characterized by greater overhead costs, hence a more expensive product. Owing largely to what was known as the Rubber Control Scheme, for example, a mere 41 percent of the state's smallholding plots were in tapping during the final quarter of 1935 (NSAR 1935, 9). In the latter part of 1937 this figure was about 60 percent, but it fell to 40 percent by the end of 1938 and remained in the range of 38–48 percent throughout 1939 (NSAR 1938, 10; NSAR 1939, 5).

Restrictive policies of this nature continued in force until the Japanese army routed the British in 1942, and they were effectively reinstituted, albeit temporarily, following the Japanese surrender in August 1945. These types of policies not only curtailed village producers' incentives but also contributed to the emiseration of rural Malays and all others dependent on income from non-estate tapping (see Bauer 1948).

British efforts to ensure estate-sector profits ranged well beyond imposing production quotas on village tappers by requiring rationed coupons for the legitimate sale of latex. The British also introduced extreme restrictions both on replacing old, low-yielding, and diseased trees with new ones and on the overall acreage of potentially valuable land that villagers could obtain from the state. Bauer (1948, 14) summarized this policy succinctly when he concluded that "there has . . . been very little alienation of land for rubber planting in Malaya over the last quarter of a century, especially for new planting by small holders."

Quotas bearing on production and replanting aside, the total Malay-held rubber acreage remained more or less constant from the early 1920s through the late 1940s, despite demographic expansion of momentous proportions. In Negeri Sembilan, for instance, the period between the censuses of 1921 and 1947 saw the Malay population grow in size from

76,319 to 108,938, an increase of approximately 43 percent. This growth occurred almost entirely in the rural sector, as opposed to urban areas, and was supported on the one hand through small-scale tapping subject to constraints of the sort outlined above, and on the other through the production of rice in a situation that remained more or less unchanged—that is, both the total amount of land given over to sawah (about thirty-six thousand acres) and all technological and organizational coefficients were much as they always had been. For the state's Malay population as a whole, sawah declined from 0.472 to 0.330 acres per person, or from 2.360 to 1.650 acres per five-member household. Even if we assume annual average statewide yields of 225 gantang (gallon measures) an acre,^[11] a household would bring in only about 371 gantang a year, far too little to satisfy the consumption requirements for a domestic group of this size over a twelve-month period.^[12] Even if we confine ourselves to the domain of comestibles, then, it is evident that household cash requirements were on the rise at a time when the possibilities of engaging in potentially lucrative cash cropping were severely restricted, or else simply unavailable.

These developments had important implications for the sexual division of household labor, and for the productive roles of in-marrying males in particular, for they coincided with a consistent decline in male proprietorship by virtue of inheritance. The variables accounting for this phenomenon were mentioned earlier and will be addressed at greater length in chapter 8. Here I will simply note that male proprietorship with respect to the total plots alienated in Bogang during the rubber boom decade 1910–1920 had by 1950 fallen from 54.6 percent to 42.9 percent. In the case of rubber, then, we are not merely dealing with a situation characterized by a more or less constant supply of land and an expanding population, but also one in which male rights over the acreage in question declined significantly.

These factors help to explain married men's stepped-up out-migration beginning in the mid 1940s. On this point Bauer (1948, 39), who visited Negeri Sembilan in 1946, had the following observations:

[The] economic position of men without a rubber holding is very insecure. By local custom, property in the kampong houses and in wet padi fields vests in women only; on marriage a man enters the household of his wife (or his mother-in-law) and cultivates her padi field. Moreover, the same custom also sanctions easy divorce when initiated by the wife, so that a man frequently finds

himself at comparatively short notice without a wife, a house and a padi field. These somewhat one-sided arrangements do not, however, apply to rubber holdings, so that a man with a few acres of rubber is in a much stronger position. No land has been alienated for rubber for many years past, and there are thus many people in eastern and south-eastern Negri Sembilan who are landless and many more whose economic and social position is very uncomfortable. The more enterprising men seek to escape from this situation by migration, or by joining the forces, the police or the merchant navy . (emphasis added)

Bauer's comments are highly instructive, but his reference to men "seeking escape from this situation" through out-migration requires considerable qualification, insofar as the majority of all such individuals eventually resumed residence among their wives' enatic kin. In addition, while considerations of capital accumulation obviously figured into decisions to out-migrate, a married man also stood to gain inordinate prestige through successful ventures beyond the village. Further, many men who fared well outside their wives' communities during the forties and fifties were later ideally situated to take advantage of independence-era policies geared toward alleviating relative land scarcity and otherwise upgrading the living standards of the rural Malay majority. In Bogang, for example, village males who found some success outside the community today not only occupy the highest rungs of the community's socioeconomic ladder, but also predominate on the secular village councils that constitute the principal organs of local government.

All these facts reveal critically important threads of continuity in a political and economic context of momentous change. The long-standing and highly esteemed tradition of out-migration accounts not only for the "considerable majority of women" in Rembau's 1891 census but also for the initial Minangkabau emigration to Negeri Sembilan during the 1500s (or earlier). At the same time, more recent demographic movements along these lines testify to a partial reversion to precolonial patterns of tenure and labor division by sex, insofar as men, once again effectively distanced from productive agricultural acreage, were forced to obtain cash through extralocal trading and other labor activities. In this sense, economic constraints during the final years of British rule worked in the opposite direction to laws passed during the initial phase of colonial administration, particularly early state measures encouraging men's acquisition of commercially valued acreage.