Kunapipi XXV:2

MOHAMMAD A. QUAYUM

Malaysian Literature in English: An Evolving Tradition

Introduction

In spite of the many early challenges and lingering difficulties faced by writers in the English language in Malaysia challenges and difficulties of a political, literary and social nature literary tradition in English in this newly emergent nation has come a long way, showing considerable dynamism and resilience since its inception. Critics suggest that the literarture in English in post-colonial societies generally evolves in three stages. In The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, for example, explain these three stages as: (i) '[works] produced by "representatives" of the imperial power'; (ii) '[works] produced "under imperial license" by "natives" or "outcastes"'; and finally, (iii) the 'development of independent literatures' or the 'emergence of modern post-colonial literatures' (5­6).¹

If we apply the above evolutionary model to the local context and disregard the works of the earlier two stages for their overt 'metropolitan' bias works by writers such as Hugh Clifford, Richard Winstedt, Frank Swettenham, Katherine Sim and Margaret Leong, who engaged in diverse literary exercises but mostly as '"representatives" of the imperial power', or the output of such expatriate writers as Gregory W. de Silva and Han Suyin who were presumably not adequately rooted in the local soil to depict the local imagination and take into account the corpus of 'independent' local writings in the English language, characterised by local ideas and local experiences, or writings that hold up a mirror to the local reality, then, indeed, the literary tradition in English in this multi-ethnic society, standing at the cross-roads of cultures, would barely exceed a period of half a century. Its emergence can be traced back to the growth of a literary coterie at the University of Malaya, following the creation of its English Department and the appearance in print of The New Cauldron, a literary journal published by the University's Raffles Society, in 1949. According to Dudley de Souza, the process of development of this 'independent' Anglophone literature was hastened by consequences of the Second World War, 'that weaned the local literati from a complacent reliance upon the colonial power and stimulated the seeds of nationalism' (2).

It is no doubt interesting to note that English writings in the Malayan Peninsula, unlike in other post-colonial societies, such as India, took its roots