The Theatre of Krishen Jit

The Politics of Staging Difference in Multicultural Malaysia Charlene Rajendran and C.J.W.-L. Wee

I actually believe that in the case of plural societies such as Malaysia and Singapore, and even certain parts of India, multiculturalism is in one body. We tend to think of it as a negotiation between one body and another, but I actually think it is in one body and in many ways I have been trying to excavate that in one way or another. —Krishen Jit (2004)

Krishen Jit, the acknowledged doyen of Malaysian theatre, sadly, passed away on 28 April 2005. His death leaves a huge gap in Malaysian cultural life that inevitably will take a while for all to come to grips with: he was one of the few public and cultural intellectuals engaged in work so critically analytical about cultural difference and its relation to the state of being Malaysian and the politics of staging Malaysian identity in its postcolonial and multicultural context. A strong historical perspective was also a crucial part of Jit’s work—not surprising, perhaps, given that he was also a former university history teacher.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 By and large, the politics of theatre in Malaysia are overshadowed by the theatre of Malaysian politics. Although Malaysian theatre makes political comments through its engagement with culture and identity issues, little public attention is drawn to the arts in general, and thus theatre is marginalized in the media and public discourse.1 In Malaysia’s postcolonial, multiracial, multireligious, and multilingual society, issues of identity, political ideology, and the economy occupy public attention as political leaders often dwell on concerns of national security in relation to the need for racial tolerance. Although “race,” with its implication of essentialized identity, is an increasingly contested term, it is still used officially in Malaysia to refer to the main ethnic groups that consist of Malays (50 percent), Chinese (25 percent), Indians (7 percent), and other groups that are either indigenous (Kadazan, Dusun, Iban) or “Eurasian.”2 Malay-Muslims (the hyphen is strongly present) are styled as bumiputera (Malay: sons of the soil). The postindependence state’s chosen mode of multiculturalism polarizes society along ethnoreligious lines and reinforces the pattern of communal politics left behind by the British colonial government.3 There is little critical discourse on issues of cultural sensitivity because the state seeks to curb “cultural activities that are consid- ered ‘subversive’ or ‘retrograde’” (Tan 1992:285), engendering superficial notions of national unity and ethnic harmony. While theatre is an acknowledged site for the critical analysis of culture and identity, few theatre makers have actually forged work that is deeply revealing about the politics of staging Malaysian culture. Jit forged what might be described as a simultaneously “intranational-intercultural” theatre,4 one with a further intracultural dimension. In Malaysian society members of plural cultures interact with each other as (not-entirely-equal) citizens of a Malaysia whose national culture needed to be defined after independence in 1957. Jit’s work

1. For a discussion of how some Malaysian artists negotiate and resist state control see Tan (1992:282–306). 2. Such ethnic categorizations inform a national quota system and policies of affirmative action. 3. Malaysia’s main political coalition, the Barisan Nasional (Malay: National Front) is made up of communally defined parties that are meant to represent the interests of each group accordingly. Being Malaysian has thus come to mean being Indian-Malaysian, or Malay-Malaysian, and never simply “Malaysian.” 4. Jit’s realizations of cross-cultural theatre do not fit neatly into any of the categories in Patrice Pavis’s categories of theatrical interculturalism (1996). Unlike the interculturalism of, say, Peter Brook or Robert Wilson, who engage international artists and draw on cultural traditions from different countries, Jit worked mainly with local artists from diverse cultural traditions that, as a result of British colonial immigration policy, ranged Indian, Chinese, Malay, and Anglo-European. Unlike Suzuki Tadashi or Ninagawa Yukio, he did not direct foreign canonical texts using local traditional forms. Jit’s theatre thus spans the intra- and intercultural while remaining intranational. He had reservations about a politics of interculturalism (Jit 2003b:114–20) that accepted neat identities that could become representative “pure” existences interacting with other such pure identities defined ethnically, linguistically or nationally. Such reservations are close to Rustom Bharucha’s (2001:25–56).

Figure 1. (previous page) Krishen Jit, 1997. (Courtesy of Five Arts Centre)

Charlene Rajendran teaches theatre at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is involved in the Malaysian performing arts as a director, performer, facilitator, writer, and producer.

C.J.W.-L. Wee teaches literature and cultural theory at the Nanyang Technological University. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (Lexington Books, 2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming). He is also coediting, with Jon McKenzie and Heike Roms, an anthology presently titled Contesting Performance: Global Genealogies of Research. Rajendran/Wee

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 offered symbolic representations of the conflicts that occur within a pluralist society, itself functioning within a national framework, without resorting to simplistic narratives or unified categories that essentialize and standardize culture and cultural identities in accordance with nationalistic dictates. But Jit also confronted the idea that any ethnically defined person was singular in his/her cultural identity: this is the intracultural dimension that implied “other- ness” existed even within the same body. This could refer to the cultural negotiation (or conflict) between, say, traditional and modern Malay-Malaysians, or educated and illiterate Chinese-Malaysians. In general, Jit gestured toward the putative existence of a larger body that could be performed into existence by connecting forms and ideas that stemmed from local culture and indigenous cultural resources. His practical strategy here involved unearthing—or “excavating,” using Jit’s own archaeological metaphor—stories that confronted the slippages but also found commonalities among the dimensions of race, religion, and language. This generated empowering enactments of a “Malaysian-ness” willing to celebrate the richness of particularity and plurality. The nationalist agenda, in contrast, denies the many fusions, crossovers, intermarriages, and acculturations that go beyond how food is prepared and outfits designed (the way Malaysian multiculturalism is usually presented). The late director’s politics of cultural intervention thus sought to represent and reenact cultural flux without having to resolve difference, reflecting a reality denied in official discourse. One consequence was that Jit’s own personal politico-cultural positioning could (and did) dramatically change, as the circumstances of national life changed—laying him open to the charge of serious inconsistency. Despite losing his struggle with heart disease, Jit maintained to the end his resolve to make investigative and exigent theatre. From his hospital bed, he gave thorough directorial notes for a production he sadly never saw onstage.5 Jit eventually succumbed to a massive stroke, ironically the subject of a play he had directed only months before he suffered its devastation.6 This essay reflects upon his legacy for us, as his politics of theatre remain relevant to current conflicts of identity in a globalizing world which struggles with plurality while resisting homogeneity.

Examining Intracultural Theatre On Language and Identity Krishen Jit’s persona in the theatre was one that was constantly reinvented; his shifting cultural position and positionality were part of an ongoing reconsideration of changing national sociopolitical moods and mores, and therefore of what might constitute a more inclusive national culture resistant to the hegemonic norm. His journey in theatre commences in the 1950s and ’60s with monolingual English-language theatre and then in the 1970s to the early ’80s moves to Malay-language theatre, before proceeding to more pluralistic, multilingual theatre from the mid-1980s onward. This journey took Jit from single cultural and theatrical vocabularies to a theatre practice that negotiated and at points attempted to integrate the different cultural and theatre vocabularies he had encountered, investigated, and acquired.

5. This was Monkey Business (2005), a production conceived and directed in collaboration with Malaysians Sunetra Fernando and Jillian Ooi. It was produced by Five Arts Centre and staged in Kuala Lumpur in April 2005. It was a reworking of a Gamelan performance that combined dance, theatre, and music in an unusual staging of Malaysian culture. For a review of Monkey Business see Antares (2005). Krishen Jit Krishen 6. This play was Everything but the Brain (2005), written by Singaporean Jean Tay in January 2005. The play was produced by Action Theatre in Singapore as part of a double-bill production entitled Roman Tam and the Three Bears. For more details see http://www.action.org.sg/productioncontent.html.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 The interethnic riots of 13 May 1969—a watershed year that led to socioeconomic policies that favored Malays7—had a significant impact on Jit. He had participated in English-language theatre when it was still largely the domain of British expatriates who produced plays drawn from the Western canon. After 13 May, Jit believed Malay-language theatre had the poten- tial to play a role healing the communal wounds opened by the riots. He began to work with prominent Malay theatre artists to forge a theatre that could be both Malay and Malaysian. The question was: could a Malay-language theatre be brought about that was simultaneously rooted in its traditions while being critically open to reenvisioning this tradition? Although Jit was not Malay, he was Malaysian-born and concerned with what it meant to be Malaysian. He thought it important to rethink Malay culture’s role within a larger plural national identity. Jit’s reorientation to Malay-language theatre signaled his willingness to cross ethno-linguistic boundaries to show that he could be a Malaysian citizen examining the possibilities of Malay culture, without particularly having to be thought of as an Indian- Malaysian.8 This was Jit’s way of bridging the yawning fissures in society in order to build a grounded cultural identity and social coherence. Within the political climate of the time, it was rare and, indeed, radical to have a non-Malay direct Malay-language theatre. (Sadly, it still is.) Jit challenged this norm of ethnic particularity and suggested that being non-Malay did not mean an inability to participate in Malay culture and even try to rearticulate that culture for a more open national collectivity. It was, to say the least, a risky and bold move. One seminal Malay play that Jit directed was Matinya Seorang Pahlawan (The Death of a Warrior: Jebat), written by Usman Awang, the Malaysian National Laureate in Literature.9 Usman’s play examined the undesirable feudal tendencies within the Malay community by reevaluating the relative importance of Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat, two important characters in the Malay-Malaysian pantheon of national heroes. Tuah was a noble warrior and the loyal servant to a Sultan during the Malacca Sultanate (1424–1511). Jebat, in contrast, had challenged the authority of this Sultan who had unjustly sent Tuah into exile. In the play, Usman follows the main lineaments of the story and has Tuah defend the dishonest Sultan, while Jebat revolts against him. What is different is Usman’s evaluation of the latter’s revolt against the immoral values and practices of corrupt power; he posits Jebat to be the rightful hero of the story, and not Tuah, usually accepted as a foundational hero of loyalty and right behavior. Jebat is no longer a traitor, but becomes the more enlightened and therefore “modern” heroic opponent of feudal authority. The play thus questioned Malay cultural values via an inter- rogation of the primacy of key historical characters; historical metaphor and cultural myth became the means to reconsider Malay identity. Jit himself described the play as an “updating

7. The interethnic riots of 1969 saw the eruption of brutal and bloody racial riots between Chinese and Malays. It ruptured a sense of social harmony and pointed to a need for changes in government policy to address the deep dissatisfaction among Malays over the economic divide that had been left unattended since the colonial period. It led to radical revisions of national language and cultural policies, as well as economic and political reform. The New Education Policy (1971) and the National Cultural Policy (1971) implemented Malay language and culture as the central basis for national culture and identity, with Chinese, Indian, and other cultures and languages as minor parts of the composite. One key result of changes in language policy was that children in school had to be educated in Malay. This disadvantaged those Indian and Chinese students who had previously been educated in English. The policy reduced the number of non-bumiputera students able gain admission to universities in Malaysia. 8. Jit’s formal education was in English. He had learned the Malay language as an adult, soon after he realized its role in postindependence nation-building. He eventually became fluent in both the informal and formal registers of Malay, and this gave him an unusual sociocultural advantage among both Malays and non-Malays, as few non-Malays of his generation had such a strong a command of the language. 9. Jit directed Matinya Seorang Pahlawan in 1970 for the First Third World Festival of Performing Arts in Manila. In 2002, Jit codirected the play with Jo Hasham, from the Actors Studio, Malaysia. (An English translation is published in Usman 1998:225–44). Usman’s reputation as a writer developed from his days as a political journalist in preindependence Malaysia. His poetry and plays represented a call for the inclusion

Rajendran/Wee of the marginalized, either economically or racially, and undertook a sharp critique of hegemonic power.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 of an old story that is already part of our collective consciousness” and “an important part of the modernization of the dramatic tradition” (2003a:64). Jit took the opportunity in Usman’s play to highlight that commonly received “Malay values” were not as stable as they seemed, and that in fact the subordinated aspects of Malay culture could offer greater contemporary national relevance and should be rehabilitated. Thus, Usman’s play was staged as intracultural theatre—received tradition had, without acknowledging it, its own internal cultural dialogue. Jit was one of a few theatre practitioners who cultivated a studied and cautious relationship with the state while staying on the margins of nationalist agendas. In 1971 he coauthored a significant paper for the state-sponsored National Congress on Culture entitled “Teaterku... Di Mana Akarmu?” (Malay: Our Theatre...Where are Your Roots?) with Usman as well as Rahim Razali and Syed Alwi, two other influential members of the Malay literati-intelligentsia (Usman, Jit, Rahim, and Syed Alwi 1973).10 Jit’s contribution to Malaysian theatre as director, critic, and scholar was unparalleled in that it was informed by his participation in national policy making as well as in a larger public discourse on postcolonial nationhood and cultural integration. However, he encountered, in the end, apparently insurmountable nativist tendencies in Malay-language theatre, which resisted his desire for a more inclusive theatre that could rework the central tropes of national culture and the values they represented. This prompted his eventual move away from Malay-language theatre.

Extending Intracultural Theatre On Using English and Being Modern Even though many Malaysians are effectively bilingual or trilingual—able to communicate in Malay (the national language), English (the official second language), and/or a dialect of Malaysian-indigenous, Chinese, or Indian origins—English is regarded as the only “neutral” language because it does not “belong” to a specific ethnic group. English also enjoys prestige as the more modern and global language, granted a higher status among educated, cosmo- politan Malaysians. Jit’s work in both English- and Malay-language theatre, even by the 1980s, gave him insights into how language as well as race are intricately interwoven into the politics of cultural and national identity. Theatre still functions primarily within monolingual lines that follow the national ethnic classifications. Malay theatre is basically theatre in Malay, and so forth. When Jit returned to English-language theatre in the 1980s—now no longer a space dom- inated by expatriates, and one in which he would direct locally written plays rather than those from the Western canon—he skillfully used the “neutral” English language to study the politics of language and to interrogate the links of language to ethnicity in a theatre scene that was ironically still often monolingual and yet effectively multicultural in terms of thematics or even in its exclusion of “others.” Exclusions, as we might expect, marked the operation of the self defined against the hidden other. Jit’s work also became discernibly and firmly experimental, certainly in the way he mixed traditional with contemporary elements for his own form of socially engaged theatre. An important impetus here was a nine-month fellowship at New York University (NYU). Marion D’Cruz recalls, “when he came back, he was experimenting with greater confidence because his work was now informed by [a] critical discourse [on performance studies] that was [...encountered] in New York” (D’Cruz 2006). In a public forum in 2003, Jit himself spoke of “a man called Richard Schechner, who actually had come to Malaysia two to three years [before Jit’s trip to NYU...] and ran [...] workshop[s...] on acting and directing, which was Krishen Jit Krishen

10. Kathy Rowland notes, in her introduction to an anthology on Jit, that Jit “strongly advocated the construction of a Malaysian theatre that was rooted in Malaysian reality, rather than a Western one, and [that this idea] became part of the reconstituted idea of National Culture in the post-’69 era” (2003:17).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 very exciting.” He noted the value of his exposure to figures such as Victor Turner and the developing field of performance studies: [T]he study of [what was then called] Performance Theory put me very, very close to these ideas [such as the tenuousness of the separation between both traditional and contemporary theatre, and between high and popular culture] and I was more con- vinced [that] what I was doing in the ’70s was the right thing to do in terms of the ways in which I was juxtaposing contemporary and traditional ideas and images in the theatre I was involved in.11 Jit also explicitly connected language issues with this important need to weaken perceived cultural boundaries: “And also in terms of the use of language, while most of the plays I was doing in the ’80s were in English, the use of other languages were very much a part of the performances that I started undertaking.” In the 1980s, Malaysia was no longer traumatized by May 1969 and was thus less anx- ious about national identity and interethnic strife. Kuala Lumpur, the federal capital, was a burgeoning city, and the ascendance of Dr. Mahathir Mohammed as prime minister in 1981 marked the dawn of a new phase of national life, less concerned with issues of rootedness and decolonization and more absorbed with becoming modern and globalized. Malaysia had begun to turn from the West and even “looked East,” primarily to Japan, for inspiration in development and industrialization. There was more confidence in being Asian and more interest in being uniquely Malaysian in the international arena.12 Malaysia had become a more secure environment in which to investigate the area of national culture. In this environment, Jit collaborated with Malaysian writers who used English as a local language to examine their cultural experience and even their non-English-speaking linguistic identities. Two such writers Jit worked with extensively in the 1980s were K.S. Maniam and Leow Puay Tin. Maniam’s writing manifested a Tamil-Malaysian sensibility, informed by Hindu mythology but moderated by his colonial-style education in English. Leow explored Hokkien-Chinese patterns of speaking English, with urban Chinese memories told in a form of storytelling influenced by the actor and writer Spalding Gray’s experiments with elements of chance or free association in autobiographical monologues. Such examinations of a distinctive Malaysian cultural pluralism were still absent in Malay- language theatre. English seemed a more conducive medium for such examinations because it was less laden with the nationalist agenda. English, as we have suggested, was regarded not as a foreign colonial language but, instead, a Malaysian language suitable for addressing local multiethnic concerns. That it was consid- ered “modern” doubtless helped underwrite this sense of “suitability” given the goals for the new Malaysia under Dr. Mahathir. Maniam’s play The Cord (1984)13—the inaugural production of the Five Arts Centre,14 the visual and performing arts collective Jit is inextricably

11. All quotations from “‘Interrogating the Director’: Krishen Jit Talks to Kathy Rowland,” a program that was part of Kuala Lumpur-based Instant Café Theatre’s Raise the Roof Festival in June 2003. Text transcribed from a videotape by Mark Teh. 12. For the move from “ethnicism to developmentalism” and “cultural liberalization” policies in the 1990s, see Loh (2000:37–65). 13. Maniam’s The Cord was first directed by Jit in 1984, and then again in 1994 as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Five Arts Centre. The play is published in Sensuous Horizons (Maniam 1994). 14. Five Arts Centre was cofounded by Jit in 1984 with actor Chin San Sooi, visual artist Redza Piayadasa, novelist-playwright K.S. Maniam, and dancer-choreographer Marion D’Cruz. D’Cruz (Jit’s wife) also was a producer who collaborated with him on several productions. D’Cruz and Jit played a crucial role in making the Centre’s work collaborative and pluralistic. The Centre offered opportunities for training, performing, facilitating, producing, and directing in collaboration with well-known practitioners from the region. See

Rajendran/Wee http://www.fiveartscentre.org.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 linked with—examines and exposes the subaltern psyche of the Indian-Malaysian plantation laborer within the larger cultural climate of a modernizing and thus increasingly less-impoverished Malaysia. Muniandy, a plantation laborer who had emigrated from India during the colonial era, struggles to come to terms with the revelation that his adult son, Ratnam, is actually the illegitimate son of Muthiah, his immediate superior, who had raped his wife, Lakshmi. The family unit is disenfranchised and then destroyed by despair and a sense of powerlessness in the face of this act of sexual violence. Muniandy’s family is representative of the community of disempowered and impoverished plantation-estate workers—in Malaysia, primarily descen- dents of indentured Tamil laborers originally from South India—who are similarly unable to extricate themselves from a sociopolitical system that not only excludes them from the rights and privileges of citizenship, but effectively turns the community against itself in a corrosive manner. Jit deliberately cast privileged Figure 2. Provocative intraculturalism: a Chinese- English-speaking, English-educated, Malaysian playing the Indian oppressor. Kee Thuan urban, and Anglicized Malaysian-Indian Chye, in K.S. Maniam’s The Cord. Directed by actors for most of the key roles, thereby Krishen Jit and produced by Five Arts Centre, 1999. extending the analysis of intracultural (Courtesy of Five Arts Centre) Indian-Malaysian relationships to both language and class concerns. The “actual” characters in the play themselves should be speaking Tamil and not the privileged language of English that the colonialists had left behind. But playwright Maniam, along with Jit, certainly had enough distance from the colonial past such that, effectively, the decolonization of English had taken place for both of them.15 The Cord focuses mainly on the Tamil underclass’s poverty and cultural isolation in the country they or their immigrant forbears imagined would provide wealth and security. Muniandy laments both deprivations, against which he romanticizes his earlier life in India. Even locally born Ratnam cannot find security; his wife, Leela, is reduced to begging for salt from her neighbor. Ratnam is unable to attain his dream of owning a motorcycle, a symbol of Malaysia’s modernity and wealth. The use of middle-class Indian-Malaysians to play such roles fostered an intracultural dialogue of sorts within Indian-Malaysian culture on how both social groups—the privileged and the underclass—existed within the ethnic frame of a common Indian-Malaysian framework. The lack of citizenship rights plague all ethnic Indians Krishen Jit Krishen 15. For a more detailed examination of the politics of language in The Cord, see Lo (2004:51–80). The need to think through language issues was an important concern for Anglophone writers in the years immediately following the end of the British Empire; for an example of some concerns with using the colonizer’s language in literature, see Ngug wa Thiong’o (1986).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 within Malaysia, regardless of languages spoken (whether, say, Tamil or Punjabi) and social class: albeit at different economic levels, all suffer from the official discrimination that privileges primarily Malay-Malaysians. Jit proceeded to further complicate the intracultural orientation of the play by provoca- tively casting Kee Thuan Chye, an urban, Chinese-Malaysian actor, as Muthiah, Muniandy’s oppressive supervisor.16 The Chinese overseas, in their various places of settlement in Southeast Asia during the colonial period, played a comprador role. Because they were effectively entrepreneurial and able to develop a grasp of the indigenous languages and social norms, many Chinese were recruited by the British (and also by the French in Indo-China) to act as intermediaries between the colonial government and the local people. Given this circumstance, it is no surprise that as a minority ethnic group, the Chinese, whether acculturated or not, had and still have an ambiguous status in their countries of residence, even when they are locally born. Jit drew upon this historical and social strand in casting a Chinese-Malaysian as Muthiah to address the economic ghettoization of different ethnic groups, proposing that such racialization of the colonial economy continued even in the era of a Mahathir-led modernization of the economy. Audiences were confronted not only with the realities of Malaysian-Indians’ position on the lower socioeconomic rungs of society, but also with the possibility that the newly developing wealth in the nation had not eradicated the older racialization of the economy, even if the balance of wealth had become more equitable for a larger proportion of Malays. In a rapidly modernizing and more affluent society, Jit attempted to uncover the marginal or hidden problems in Malaysia’s multiethnic landscape. In the process, he tried to make the texts he was using gesture beyond their literal meaning to other related issues regarding the fate of all ethnic groups in the process of becoming a modern economy—The Cord well illustrates this attempt. Additionally, Jit’s particular staging suggested that the past of each culture is never quite left behind in the rush for development, even while the reality of the present demanded attention: Muniandy plays a small drum—an udukku—in The Cord, thereby evoking the sounds and traditions of a distant land that still had meaning for him. Of course, this evocation transpires in a play staged in the evolving urban environment of the federal capital, the showcase for the new “can-do” Malaysia. Ironically, and also fittingly, The Cord was staged in English, the indigenized language of the former colonial master, now the language of the emerging neoliberal world of the global economy.

Devising Intercultural Theatre On Urban Sense and Sensibility The changing cultural and literal urbanscape of the capital city Kuala Lumpur (or “KL,” as it is usually referred to) became Jit’s primary site for theatre invention and intervention. What KL was, and was becoming, took its place in Jit’s theatre. Now the home to the Cesar Pelli–designed Petronas Twin Towers, until recently the world’s tallest building, the city that Jit grew up in during the 1940s and 1950s had all but disappeared into history books and personal memories. The city of his childhood was recovering from the wartime Japanese occupation and, thereafter, the communist insurgency action called the Emergency (1948–1960). After Independence in 1957, the Malay community became politically dominant, while the Chinese still controlled many of the economy’s levers; the city become more conscious of its

16. Kee Thuan Chye, who played the role of Muthiah, is a prominent Malaysian theatre practitioner whose plays in English were directed by Jit in the 1980s. A notable collaboration between them was Jit’s direction of Kee’s play 1984—Here and Now (1985), which played to “packed houses under the scrutiny of Special Branch police” (Gilbert and Lo 2004:7). The inflection of the play’s title using the 1949 novel by George Orwell was

Rajendran/Wee of course deliberate.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 distinct social and ethnic composition and its cultural heritage. Increasing wealth during the so-called “Asian Miracle” years of the 1980s through the ’90s meant that the Malay population grew in numbers vis-à-vis the Chinese: change remained a major part of KL life. In general, the capital had benefited from of a long and fluid cultural history as part of a maritime region impacted by many cross-cultural influences for at least a millennium.17 Jit’s theatre in the 1990s expanded to deal with the most recent socioeconomic changes, even as it continued to try to bridge the ethnic-cultural divides originating from the colonial era. In his childhood, Jit had witnessed several ethnic groups who lived and worked in a range of professions, often ghettoized according to colonial administrative policies or migration patterns. Racial stereotypes abounded—the Malay government official, the Indian teacher, the Chinese businessman—and continue today. Yet Jit’s parents were Punjabi immigrants from India who became textile merchants, typically perceived as a Chinese domain. Thus although he could be labeled as “Indian” (insufficient as that term is, since he strictly would be Punjabi-Indian-Malaysian), Jit’s personal experience did not fit the stereotype. Growing up in colonial KL meant watching traditional Chinese opera troupes, go-go girls, Western films, and Bangsawan performances (a peninsular-Malay vaudeville form). Jit’s understanding and sense of the capital’s urban culture encompassed a range of foreign, par- tially indigenized, and local components. Understandably, Jit’s vision of a post-independence nation of Malaysia became part of his inventive studies in the fluidity of cultural identities. The city’s disjunctive yet connected cultural components were part of his experiments in intercultural theatre, and especially devised intercultural theatre. Us: Actions and Images (1993) is representative of this genre.18 Jit devised the performance in collaboration with five actors in their 20s—two Malay, two Chinese, and one Sri Lankan-Eurasian of Sinhalese extraction—all living in KL. As the title suggests, Us was an exploration of what made these five an “us,” given their differing cultural backgrounds. Some did not even grow up in an urban environment, but had come to live in KL. The connections among them could only be grasped through oftentimes fragmented images; yet there was a sense of this “us,” still somewhat inchoate even so many years after independence. A key difference between the young people Jit worked with and his generation was that the young no longer had quite the same intense fear of what the British had called “communalism” (Pandey 1990). By the 1990s this new generation was removed from the fraught discussions on the need for nationalistic Malay-ness that dogged Jit’s early artistic life. The young actors explored traumas dealing with race, the suppression (or loss) of memory, and fragmentation between social and ethnic groups. The difference between their experience of such concerns and those of the previous generation possibly lies in their ability to process their experiences at a more personal level than those who had been caught up in the struggle to define national identity. The former generation did not always have the luxury to deal with multilayered complexities and nuances; they had to contend with more basic needs and rights. The wealthier, more stable Malaysia that 1990s KL represented offered new cultural spaces for theatre artists to navigate. Scenes were improvised from the actors’ personal stories and performed in fragmentary fashion, in relation to their differing yet also interconnected socioethnic backgrounds. In one scene, the Sri Lankan-Eurasian woman ruminated over the death of her Sinhalese grandfa- ther in colonial Singapore and mourned the lack of information about his death. A paean to

17. Indian and Chinese cultural influences across Southeast Asia are deep and wide, even while European elements remain evident. Thus Malaysians—particularly urban Malaysians—have lived within effectively multicultural contexts for several generations. For more on Southeast Asia’s “permeable ethnicities” and Jit Krishen “alternative pluralisms,” see Hefner (2001). 18. Us was first produced by Five Arts Centre in 1993 in KL, and then performed at the 1994 Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 Figure 3. Foo May Lynn in A Chance Encounter, a devised performance created by Faridah Marican, Foo May Lyn, and Krishen Jit during the same period as Us: Actions and Images. Directed by Krishen Jit and produced by Five Arts Centre, 1999. (Courtesy of Five Arts Centre)

his memory emerged in her song performed in a specific traditional Malay style. Her Sri- Lankan “Eurasian-ness,” already complex in itself, did not mean that Malay cultural forms were foreign to her emotional makeup. In another scene, the five actors told stories of how their parents came to be married. The spotlight moved randomly from one actor to another, coming on and off without warn- ing. The five juxtaposed stories were drawn from memories of marriage urban and rural, marriages traditional and modern in form, marriages among the English-educated and the unschooled. The fractured narratives became parts of a poignant collective story of marriages in this elusive and yet palpably existent postcolonial society called “Malaysia.” The actors interrupted and at points even participated each other’s stories. Different languages were used—English, Malay, and different forms of Chinese. No translations were projected any- where: you understood or you did not, the way such situations took place in daily interethnic relations. Thus the narratives became strategically but not quite coherently interwoven into a composite: a young, plural identity that presented—as with many other theatre productions by Jit—an alternative to the neat, state-sanctioned taxonomy of races and racial identities. As he had before, Jit steered away from inventing a fictional unity that reduced identity to a set of known markers and categories. Instead he explored marginalized aspects of being Malaysian that included the tensions of interracial marriage, fragmented urban lives, deraci- nated rituals of identity, romanticized rural nostalgia, and also problematized the desire be “globalized.”

Conclusion Jit’s theatre aesthetics and evolving directorial vision allowed him to experiment with many diverse performance and cultural forms and formats, while maintaining a commitment to Rajendran/Wee

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 the idea that even a fractured, multiethnic Malaysian identity comprised overlapping cultural experiences. His aesthetics thus both acknowledged and drew upon cultural difference as a way for thinking through postindependence Malaysian identity, and thereby in the process contributed toward envisioning what that identity might be. The nationalist vision of Malaysia—culturally singular, despite a nominal multiculturalism and, in more recent years, strident in touting its economic prowess within the region—was rejected in the name of a freedom that Malaysian historian Sumit Mandal calls a more “fluid intermingling” pluralist model. Mandal cites Jit as a “veteran director” whose work “include[d the positive] articulations of Malaysia’s hybrid realities” (2001:160). Mandal also observes that while a younger artistic generation offers and therefore recog- nizes a “transethnic Malaysian identity [...] expressed increasingly in English” (160), there is also a strain of artistic thought that represents increasingly chauvinistic and therefore antipluralist tendencies (155). In this regard, Jit is clearly exceptional among those of his generation in the imagining of the nation as an intergenerational and intercultural community.19 This aesthetic and cultural vision complemented his work as theatre critic and scholar. Later in his career Jit also became actively involved in Singapore theatre.20 Beginning in the late 1980s, he collaborated with prominent theatre practitioners such as Ong Keng Sen and the late Kuo Pao Kun and was influential in discussions of the politics of theatre in the neighboring city-state.21 In the late 1990s, he was instrumental in helping Ong conceptual- ize the Flying Circus Project, an ambitious international intercultural workshop project that brought together traditional and contemporary Asian artists to examine the aesthetics and dynamics of artistic integration and fusion.22 Negotiating and understanding Jit’s cultural and aesthetic prerogatives was not easy, given his various experimental theatrical modes, but it could lead—for both those who watched and those who acted in his plays—to searching questions about theatre as well as insights about the dynamics of culture in Malaysia. As a director, he was hightly respected—indeed revered—for his experience and capacity to draw powerful performances from trained and untrained actors alike. Most Malaysian actors have day jobs and perform as “amateurs,” but develop professional work standards when held to the exacting standards of directors such as Jit. His ability to train actors of diverse backgrounds and varied experience and abilities was unequalled in Malaysian theatre over the past 40 years. His role as director often included a pedagogical element, again for both theatregoers and actors, given that Malaysia offered few opportunities for formal theatre education. Numerous theatre practitioners of various ages who were connected to Jit have gained from his theatre interventions into the life and culture of the nation—have indeed learned that a culturally pluralist aesthetic with a historical dimension can function as a resource for resisting dubious state attempts to forge a homoge- neous and monocultural national culture. Jit’s capacity to reveal connections among the nation’s multiethnic cultures without a need to seek approval from any of them led him to depict with candor the potent areas of common

19. See Mandal (2001:141–64) on the contemporary dynamics of pluralism in urban Malaysia, and the engendering of “alternative pluralisms” in cultural expression. 20. In 2002, Singapore’s Action Theatre’s production of David Auburn’s Proof, directed by Jit, garnered the DBS-Life Awards for Best Play, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress. Jit did not qualify for nomination as Best Director as he was not Singaporean. For a contextual discussion on the politics of culture in contemporary theatre in Singapore, see Wee (2003). 21. Jit researched and wrote comprehensively about performance in Southeast Asia. His sabbatical in 1987 took him on a nine-month field trip to Southeast Asian countries, as Jit explains, to “study the performance structures and systems that had been forged in contemporary theatre from its origins in the 1960s to the Jit Krishen present” (2003d:44). For more of Jit’s writing on Southeast Asian performance, see section one in Rowland (2003:26–120). 22. For a comprehensive overview of the Flying Circus Project, see Ong (2001); for a critique, see Grehan (2004).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.11 by guest on 29 September 2021 or shared reality often marginalized by the state. Although his theatre was largely seen by a limited sphere of urban middle-class theatregoers and practitioners, the wider public audience included those in the university and arts academies who studied theatre with Jit. Such people were not bourgeois Malaysians who “did theatre” as a hobby or from the need to be “cultured.” Jit’s death seems to mark the untimely end of a period in which a studied and felt understanding of history and nationhood led to theatrically profound articulations of Malaysian identity that had contextual depth and relevance. Krishen Jit’s legacy, though, will continue to emphasize the integral role artists can play in a nation-building process not completely subject to the state’s monocultural imperatives.

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