MGG Pillai Commentary View

<< Previous || Next >>

Which is the more valuable: Kota Gelanggi or the rainforest that embeds it?

KOTA GELANGGI COULD be what it is, though not what it means: a thousand-year-old lost city in Johore that pushes Malaysian history back one and a half millenia. Malaysian history is older than Tun Sri Lanang's Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), but its discovery is to enhance newspaper circulation than serious archeological or historical inquiry. The location is a secret, we are told, to forestall bounty hunters and other greedy deizens of the modern world. I suspect it is to control what happens there, allowing in only the politically correct who accepts the modern UMNO-centric political view of what Malaysia is or ought to be. Or to rape the rainforest in which Kota Gelanggi is embedded before the archeological digs start, as the rainforest at the heart of the Bakun hydroelectric dam was

In the end, the archeological and historical excavations could well be what is claimed. If it is above board, why is the Star the only newspaper with access to the information? Are tycoons from its ultimate parent, the BN component party, MCA, who in the end the beneficiaries of this rich timber haul? Even Bernama, the official news agency who would be privy to this information can only comment and report from the periphery. The New Straits Times tries to debunk it in the spirit of sour grapes over what is, if true, a significant archeological find. Why?

Several questions must be asked, for which there are, as yet, no straightforward answers. Mr Raimy Che Rose, a Malaysian researcher and amateur archeologist in his thirties has had unrivalled access to the site for nearly a decade. He needs official permission, rarely granted to others research on less mundane topics that rely on official documents and political and social implications of government policies. He is not even a qualified archeologist. Yet he and a Singapore friend has unrivalled acess. He wants to keep the site a secret. Can he? When news of it is all over the place, and it does not take long for any determined man or women to find out the exact details.

If it is what it is or could be, why is news of it channelled as a digit in newspaper circulation wars? The spin around it is rubbish: the history of Malaya goes beyond Kota Gelanggi. Another is more serious: Are MCA-backed timber tycoons and power brokers behind this venture, which could explain why the Star has exclusive rights to the story, and the secrecy to forestall competiton. But its principal argument that it rewrites Malaysian history is spin. Malaysia's past, such as we know it, is proven in other archeological digs and contempary accounts from about 2,000 years ago.

In the third century A.D., Claudius Ptolemy, the Greek cartographer from Egypt, visited the Malay peninsula, which he christened the Golden Chersonese, and the Takkola emporium at the mouth of the Merbok river. It does not require Kota Gelanggi to prove Malaya is older than Malacca by 1,500 years. The archeological excavations in the Bujang Valley in the late 1920s by Mr Quaritch Wales and Mr Nilakanta Sastri uncovered various sanctuaries, palaces, halls of audience, temples, stupas, forts and a number of unidentified buildings. It was later abandoned for a site nearer the Merbok estuary.

There were numerous Malay kingdoms in the 2nd and 3rd century A.D., as many as 30 according to Chinese sources. Kedah – Kedaram or Kataha, in ancient Pallavi or Sanskrit script – was in the direct route of invasions of Indian traders and kings. Rajendra Chola, who is now thought to have laid Kota Gelanggi to waste, put Kedah to heel in 1025 but his successor, Vir Rajendra Chola, had to put down a Kedah rebellion to overthrow the invaders.

The Buddhist kingdom of Ligor took control of Kedah shortly after, and its King Chandrabhanu used it as a base to attack Sri Lanka in the 11the century, an event noted in a stone inscription in Nagapttinam in Tamil Nadu and in the Sri Lankan epic, Mahavamsa. During the first millenium, the religion of the Malay peninsula veered between Hinduism and Sanskrit until eventually converted to Islam. But not before Hindu, Buddhist and Sanskrit became embedded into the Malay worldview.

We can still see traces of this in political ideas, social structure, rituals, language, arts and cultural practices. To this day, when a Malay considers anything important, he looks for a Sanskrit word to describe it: It is the Sanskrit pradana mantri (the Malay perdana mentri) here while in another Malay land, it is Penghulu ng Pilipina for its president. The Proton car model names are from Sanskrit whilst the Perodua resorts to Malay names and is a poor and inferior to be bought only because the Proton is beyond one's means.

There are reports of other areas older than Kedah – the ancient kingdom of Ganganegara, around Bruas in Perak, for instance – that pushes Malaysian history even further into antiquity. If that is not enough, a Tamil poem, Pattinapillai, of the second century A.D., describes goods from Kadaram heaped in the broad streets of the Chola capital; a seventh century Sanskrit drama, Kaumudhimahotsva, refers to Kedah as Kataha-nagari. The Agnipurana also mentions a territory known Anda-Kataha with one of its boundaries delineated by a peak, which scholars believe is Gunong Jerai. Stories from the Katasaritasagaram describes the life of elegance of life in Kataha.

All this is revealed after earlier archeological and historical inquiry. Kota Gelanggi does not, it would appear, reveal more than the details of that long India, Hindu, Buddhist, Chola presence, the fitting of a historical jig-saw of a land that has a rich and enviable history long before the advent of Islam. We have been constrained by a mental block of not wanting to look beyond the Sejarah Melayu for our historical past. Malaysia's first prime minister, and a scion of the Kedah royal family, wanted independent Malaya to be know as Langkasuka, a kingdom that a millennium ago dominated north Malaya and southern Thailand, but he gave up the idea when he discovered that its capital was in Thailand. And the present contretemps between Malaysia and Thailand over the southern Thai Malays is also caught in this cultural time-warp.

Mr Raimy can chose to describe his quest as he likes, but it does have a fantasy that cannot be taken seriously. He claims he first went into the area with a Singapore friend, kept at it for years, with occasional help from the Johore government. But I ask the question I asked at the start: if it is what it is, why is it the stuff of newspaper circulation wars? And so secret it is that those who ought to know is ignorant of it. Yet work has been going on in the area, off and on, for a decade. I hope Mr Raimy can prove his thesis, but the unanswered questions remain. The culture, arts and heritage minister, Dato' Seri Rais Yatim, thinks history would be rewritten and "the world will be ogling us"; and talk to Mr Raimy to see what can be done.

Would it, as Dato' Seri Rais suggests, rekindle an interest in history? Let the well-known historian, Dato' Khoo Kay Kim, answer that: Malayians are more interested in making money and Kota Gelanggi would not change the mindset. The only way it can is to change the way history is taught, not as an examination subject but "because it is connected to our memory and experience." And that could, at a minimum, take a generation. Is history taken more seriously in Malaysia as Akademi Fantasia? No.

M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@streamyx.com