TIMOTHY P. BARNARD Sedih sampai buta Blindness, modernity and tradition in Malay films of the 1950s and 1960s In the 1962 film Ibu mertuaku (My mother-in-law) writer-director-actor P. Ramlee presents a horrifying tale of a married couple whose happiness is destroyed through the machinations of an arrogant parent.1 Ramlee plays Kassim Selamat, a musician who falls in love with, and marries, Sabariah (played by Sarimah), a Singaporean Malay who has lived a comfortable life in a luxurious home with all of the accoutrements of a modern lifestyle. Her mother (Nyonya Mansur, played by Nak Dara), however, disowns her daughter on her wedding day for marrying a musician. The honeymoon- ers move to Penang, where they live in a rented room underneath a house (traditional Malay houses are built on stilts), having become poor due to the wife’s request that Kassim give up his music career. When Sabariah becomes pregnant, Nyonya Mansur invites her back to Singapore for the birth. Nyonya Mansur eventually sends a telegram to Kassim claiming that Sabariah and the child died during childbirth. When Sabariah fails to hear from her husband – Nyonya Mansur has intercepted the letters Sabariah sends – she believes that Kassim has abandoned her. In Penang Kassim is so distraught at the news of the death of his wife and son that he becomes catatonic for several months. His sadness leaves him blind, and not for the last time in the film. During the golden age of Malay cinema, lasting from the late 1940s until 1965, over 250 films were made. These films remain popular in Malay com- munities in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia due to their con- tinual appearance on local television and at market stalls. Most of the films 1 I would like to thank Jan van der Putten and Ryan Bishop, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their advice and help. Any mistakes, of course, are my own. TIMOTHY P. BARNARD received his PhD degree from the University of Hawai’i and is currently Associate Professor in the Department of History, National University of Singapore. Specializing in Malay society and history, he is the author of Contesting Malayness; Malay identity across boundaries, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004, and Multiple centres of authority; Society and environment in Siak and eastern Sumatra, 1674-1827, Leiden: KITLV, 2003. Professor Barnard may be reached at the Department of History, National University of Singapore, 11 Arts Link, Singapore 117570. E-mail: <[email protected]>. Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:59:44AM Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 161-4 (2005):433-453 via free access © 2005 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Barnard 433 17-11-2005 13:15:44 434 Timothy P. Barnard fit into one of four broad categories: comedy, horror, tragic love story, and legendary/historic tale. While the use of blindness as a plot device is fairly melodramatic, it was relatively common in tragic love stories, appearing in at least 12 films over a 14-year period. The underlying theme of these films is that Malays are facing a threat to their traditional lifestyles, as exemplified by an idealized depiction of the communal sharing and cooperation of the kam- pung (village), over against the individualistic, and ultimately demeaning, lifestyle of the modernizing city, usually Singapore. The explicit break with tradition and the past – which is the essence of modernity – is often treated in these films as a binary battle between past and present. Blindness thus acts as a metaphor for the distance between traditions and modernity, the kampung and the city. Such a dichotomy, however, was difficult to maintain. The city was enticing, with the technology and opportunities that modernity represented, not the least of which included cinema itself, delivering images of modernization to rural areas. Thus, blindness came to represent not only the dichotomy but also the ambivalence toward attempts to meld the trad- itional and the modern. In this article, I examine the origins of blindness as a metaphor in Malay films of the 1950s and 1960s, how it was used in these films, how the motif changed over time, and how this can be used to gain a better understanding of the forces of modernity and tradition in a rapidly changing society in Southeast Asia during the period in which the films were made. However, in order to understand these various influences, a closer examination of the context in which these films were made is required. Thus, this article begins with a discussion of the major Malay film producers of the period and the city in which they worked, Singapore. Blindness and the city While blindness is a common metaphor in many Malay films of the 1950s and 1960s, in each of these films it is the lifestyle of Malays living in a mod- ern urban environment that triggers the responses of the various characters in the film. The blind person usually reacts against a binary gulf that exists between the kampung and the city. In most of these films, Singapore acts as the metaphor for modernity, a foreign city filled with Malays who are acting in new and unfamiliar ways. This is a role that Singapore had played in the Malay world for over a century. Singapore was outside of the strictures of traditional Malay states as well as being the focus of British industrial and technological infrastructure. In this vein, Singapore was also the centre of the Malay film community in the 1950s, since it was where the two major film production studios were located. Chinese businessmen founded the Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:59:44AM via free access Barnard 434 17-11-2005 13:15:44 Sedih sampai buta 435 and Cathay Keris in the late 1940s and early 1950s respectively in an attempt to appeal to Malay-speaking customers in Singapore and Malaya by develop- ing a profitable product for their cinemas.2 During this early phase, Indian nationals wrote and directed the vast majority of Malay productions through contracts with the Chinese businessmen who owned the studios. The plots of these films were often based on Indian tales. During this period, Malays were only found in front of the camera, as they acted out scenes their Indian and Chinese colleagues thought would be popular with audiences. Despite their limited role, members of the Malay cultural intelligentsia often worked as translators of scripts or as assistants behind the camera. By the mid-1950s, as Malaya was moving toward decolonization, there was a concerted attempt on behalf of the Malay talent onscreen and the intellectuals behind the scenes to gain control over the filmmaking process. One of the leaders in this move- ment was P. Ramlee, who broke several barriers when he directed and wrote, as well as starred in, Penarek beca (The trishaw driver) in 1955. While the pro- duction of Penarek beca is often cited in studies on Malay film as a key devel- opment (Uhde and Uhde 2000:13), the plot of most Malay films, which had developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s and revolved around a binary opposition between the city and the village, remained (Barnard and Barnard 2002). The same is also true for the sub-theme of blindness as a metaphor for the difficulties in dealing with a modern world. Another constant in Malay film was the use of the city of Singapore as a backdrop, which is not surprising since the films were made there. However, the importance of Singapore to the Malay psyche and modernization can also be related to the era in which the films were made. In the 1950s Singapore was the intellectual and technological centre of Malaya. While Kuala Lumpur would be named the future federal capital, Singapore was the most modern city in the region, and a focus for fervent Malay intellectual activity since it was outside many of the restrictions that the colonial government had imposed due to a communist ‘Emergency’ in the Peninsula (Hooker 2000:182- 8; Harper 1999:302-6). Among the Malay intelligentsia one of the most impor- tant organizations was Angkatan Sasterawan 50 (ASAS 50, Generation of the Writers of the 1950s), which originated from the journalistic community. Its members saw themselves as revolutionaries promoting modernity not only through their newspaper articles and editorials, but also through their short 2 In the Malayan market of the 1950s, Indians and Chinese exclusively viewed films from their cultural homelands, while ‘Malays and Chinese’ attended Malay language pictures. Letter, Lionel Gate, Rank Screen Services (1 September 1958), Loke Wan Tho Private Records [Letter written by Lim Keng Hor], National Archives of Singapore (NA 216). However, horror films attracted a wider audience. Pontianak (Vampire, 1957) was one of the most popular Malay films of all time, and the initial audience was made up of 60 per cent Malays, 30 per cent Chinese, and 10 per cent Indians, according to one estimate (Hamzah Hussin 1998:41). Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 12:59:44AM via free access Barnard 435 17-11-2005 13:15:45 436 Timothy P. Barnard stories and poetry. Their critique of British rule and modernization, as well as of ‘feudalistic’ elements of Malay society, resulted in a period of artistic renais- sance among urban-based Malays. While their early activities focused around language and nationalism, the ultimate goal of many of these activists was the development of a modern society, one that rejected ‘old traditions’ (a common refrain in many of their writings). The Singapore where the members of ASAS 50 lived, wrote and performed was a vibrant port city in which Malay film was one of the primary avenues for reaching out to the masses, and in many respects represented this modernity (Keris Mas 2004).