INTRODUCTION

The picture of the village households painted in the preceding chapters shows them strongly anchored in the padi economy but by no means confined to it. Forces external to the village padi economy impinge significantly on the access to income and thus on the process of differentiation within the village. Landed property by itself would therefore have been an inadequate indicator for the understanding of the social structure of the village. On the other hand, the quantitative as well as strategic importance of the padi economy cannot be denied. This leaves us with the question of the distribution of access to land, one of the most crucial factors of production in padi cultivation. When questioned, the most serious problem voiced by the villagers was “land scarcity”. Data presented in Chapter 4 indicates however, that the problem for the village household is of an inadequate access to land rather than of absolute landlessness. Less than ten village households were wholly dependent on wage labour; the rest farmed padi, cither on rented or owned land. Only one villager farmed slightly more than 20 re, the bulk of which was on rented land.

A similar pattern in the distribution of farm size can be found in the Muda region as a whole. As can be seen from Fig. 8.1 the average farm size is 4 acres, with the bulk of the farmers operating less than 2.7 acres. Those farming 14.2 acres and above accounted for a mere 2 per cent of the farmers. 37 per cent are owner-operators, 28 per cent are owner-tenants and 35 per cent are tenants, including 8 per cent farm labourers. Furthermore, tenancy is largely between kin, with 71 per cent of tenancy agreements between close relatives.

Drawing from the experience of other agrarian societies which have been subjected to similar pressures of intensive commercialization and land scarcity, one could have expected a much more skewed pattern of access to land: a high degree of land concentration with a resultant pool of available wage labour from landless families.

The various policies introduced into the Malay states by British colonial administration wrought a major transformation especially of the social and economic landscape of the Malay peninsular. In particular its education policy was to have far-reaching implications on the production of Malay literature and culture. This was especially true of the early years when secular education was introduced into the country. In order to appreciate the impact of British presence in general and their education policy in particular, it is necessary to have an understanding of the structure of Malay society prior to British colonialism.

Traditional Malay society exhibited a rigid division between the ruling elite (bangsawan) and its subjects (rakyat). This division was based on birth and was strengthened by belief and custom. It was believed, for example, that rulers were vested with divine majesty (daulat) and that any infringement (derhaka) on this daulat would incur a tulah (retribution). This served to consolidate the rulers' position as one which admitted no challenge. Custom also helped to perpetuate the stratification by laying down as desirable and proper such conduct as absolute obedience and respect for elders and chiefs. The subject class was therefore obliged to serve their superiors without question. In this highly stratified society, control of virtually all aspects of life lay in the hands of the ruling élite.

This élite class in traditional Malay society was made up of two groups, the ascriptive and functional, which sometimes overlapped. The former were royal kinsmen who automatically belonged to the Malay upper-class by virtue of birth. The latter exercised administrative and political functions, and as such enjoyed the authority and power which attended their social role. Within this functional elite, the sultan constituted the supreme authority as the head of state, the largest territorial unit consisting of districts which, in turn, were composed of villages.

An approach often adopted in the study of modern Malay literature is to separate literary texts from the environment which produces them. Literature is seen as discrete, whose understanding calls for scrutiny of its structural elements only such as theme, technique, rhythm and the like. Context, is often peripheral to the study of literature. This paper, however, contends that both aspects are important and attempts to integrate them in its survey of modern Malay literary culture. It traces the socio-political changes which the country underwent from the period of British colonialism to the present nation state, and sees this historical context as an extra-textual factor which influenced the literature produced. No less important as a formative force are the literary conventions which writers inherit, how they adopt and adapt their literary heritage in the process of evolving a literary mode for their own situation and also their own unique role as they, as writers, influence the literary environment in which they operate. The survey also highlights writers' response to their immediate social realities and how this shapes and colours their perceptions of their society. Couched in literary expression, these perceptions draw attention to the prejudices, in short, the value orientations evident in modern Malay literary works. In discussing these factors, this study seeks to point out developments which take place as well as show continuity which persists in modern Malay literature.

The paper is organized into periods, not as an attempt at periodization of modern Malay literary history, but merely to facilitate understanding. However, the basic assumption remains that appreciation of specific historical and cultural bases is crucial for a clearer understanding of modern Malay literature on its own terms.

INTRODUCTION

In the late sixties, a massive drive to improve agricultural production with the aid of new technology, in particular new varieties of high-yielding grain, was launched in many countries of the Third World. This new phase of “agricultural modernization” and the tremendous changes it wrought in the lives of millions of farmers all over the world soon earned the epithet the “Green Revolution”. By the end of the decade, the “Green Revolution” had reached Malaysian shores as well, unleashing its waves of change most extensively in the traditional rice bowl states of Kedah and Perlis. Beginning in 1970, irrigation facilities made available under the Muda Irrigation Scheme have allowed for the double-cropping there of rice, the food staple of the country.

What has been the Muda experience often years of the “Green Revolution”? How have these changes been felt at the village level? What impact has the adoption of the new technology had on income distribution, labour relations, land tenure and other related issues? How, in short, has the process of agrarian transformation unfolded in this one particular part of the world under conditions, one could say, of peripheral capitalism? These are the questions to which this book addresses itself.

Before descending into the view from the village, which shall come into sharper focus in the following chapters, a review of the literature, comparing the generalizations which have been made for the Muda region to that of other Asian countries, is in order.

THE GREEN REVOLUTION: THE GLOBAL RECORD

It should be borne in mind that the “Green Revolution” is nothing more than a descriptive term covering a wide range of programmes which were undertaken in various countries. The actual form that these programmes took differed, of course, from country to country, but in general, the following five components were found in all such “Green Revolution” programmes:

1. A technological ‘package’ or recipe produced in scientific research centres and designed to fit the environmental conditions of the region in which it is to be applied;

2. Arrangements whereby knowledge of this technology could be communicated to cultivators;[…]

In the implementation of the new Law of the Sea on Australia and New Zealand there are no difficulties in terms of their position: both lie relatively far from the important international sea-lanes, both have hardly any neighbouring countries to argue with over the position of baselines or the size of territorial seas, fishing and economic zones, and both lie far enough apart so that their 200-nautical-mile zones only overlap slightly. Australia and New Zealand are relatively unimportant fishing nations and therefore did not see any reason to put their sea zones under national jurisdiction. The poor development of their deep-sea fishery has not changed: for example, even by the end of the 1970s the Australian firms contracted to explore the fishing resources in the 200-nautical-mile zone could not do this by themselves but had to work with firms from lapan, the Republic of Korea, the United States and Poland (cf. the policy of joint ventures of New Zealand, p.27).

Both countries do not have a deep-sea mining industry of a high technological standard. Therefore, their interests are not aimed at the continental shelf. And both countries are still under the influence of British tradition as an important seafaring nation, and therefore do not want the freedom of the sea disturbed (see Beeby 1975; Blezard 1980).

The Maritime Law Proclamation of Australia and New Zealand

Notwithstanding the above, Australia was one of the earliest states which pro claimed their continental shelf because of an unusual problem: since the 1930s Japanese pearl-fishers had worked on the Australian coast and the Australians feared the destruction of sedentary species. World War II put an end to the pearl-fishing. In the peace negotiations with Japan following the war, Australia asked for a dialogue on the preservation of sedentary species and other living resources before the pearl-fishing could commence again. In spite of this demand, the pearl-fishing continued without further talks.

INTRODUCTION

Common to all models of peasant society and economy or the “peasant mode of production” is the notion of the peasant household, as the basic unit of production and consumption embedded in a larger unit of distribution or better still, redistribution, be it the village or the kin group. The significance of the village (as opposed to kinship) as a unit of distribution where household production is governed according to the “safety-first principle” of subsistence assurance has been stressed for Southeast Asian societies in particular by Scott.

Scotts warns against romanticizing this ‘subsistence insurance’ provided by the village since it was a product of the exigencies of peasant agricultural production with its shortage of labour rather than of altruism. Notwithstanding this, the paradigm of the moral economy with its unbreachable injunction to share has been widely invoked in studies of the Malaysian peasantry. Following the lead taken in Chapters 5 and 6, where the concept of the household and its value as a unit of analysis was subjected to a closer examination, this and the following chapter will be devoted to an analysis of the village and kinship as units of distribution. The argument will be the limited utility of this paradigm both for describing the empirical reality as well as explaining the specificities of the Malaysian peasantry.

INCOME-SHARING WITHIN THE VILLAGE?

Corner, for example, alludes to this in her study of villages in the Muda region:

THE TRADITIONAL CONTEXT OF PADI PRODUCTION

The extensive monoculture of padi in the Kedah Plains is directly dependent on the availability of water. However, no traditional system of irrigation was developed to regulate the supply or access to water. Padi cultivation was entirely dependent on the rainfall brought regularly by the South-east Monsoon. During the dry season, the clay surface of the Plain dried up so completely that no crop whatsoever could be planted. Consequently,

The social organization of padi cultivation had thus to contend firstly, with individual household surplus management and/or consumption ties with other village households or sources of credit outside the village economy in order to tide over the lean and hungry months; secondly, inadequacy of household labour for harvesting in particular, due to the uniformity of the ripening process. Production ties thus had to be established with other households either in the form of exchange or hired labour.

On the other hand, however, the absence of irrigation as an important factor of production made the development of communal forms of organization based on the village as a territorial unit unnecessary.

The production ties made incumbent by the simultaneity of padi operations were of a flexible and largely dyadic nature, of which three major arrangements were found:

1. “Kontrek” (contract) arrangements between a farm operator and another villager, who would “help” with the transplanting or harvesting every year. This approximates to a patron-client relationship.[…]

COLONIAL HISTORY

There is no doubt that the era of colonialism has always represented a caesura for Third World societies. Although the impact of colonialism varies in different countries and regions, the era generally marked the beginning of far-reaching changes for colonized societies. What is of particular interest here is the destruction of the “natural economy”, that is, an economy with dominating use-value production and limited trade relations, in favour of the development and establishment of the market economy.

The most important mechanisms of this destruction since the era of colonialism have been:

1. • the intervention of the colonial state;

2. • the internal monetization of traditional social relations;

3. • an increasing dependency on industrial products in place of traditional self-produced goods;

4. • the development of new tastes and needs;

5. • the destruction of the ecological equilibrium;

6. • the disintegration of the domestic economy, social obligations, and traditional forms of reciprocal and collective labour.

(Elwert and Wong 1979; see also Evers, Clauss, and Wong 1984)

This does not mean that all these mechanisms have worked harmoniously. They were also dependent on other influences, such as the pre-capitalist social background and existing internal structures.

For a better understanding of the significance of this process of social transformation, we refer to the work of Polanyi (1971, 1979). Although his research is focused on the European context, particularly with regard to the explanation of the economic crises at the beginning of the twentieth century, a modified use of his theoretical reflections on so-called underdeveloped societies seems justifiable. His main issue was the potential destruction of social structures in the market-establishing process. He pointed out that the market principle as it was established in Europe during the eighteenth century effected a particular transformation of all societies concerned. It is one of Polanyi's fundamental statements that in pre-capitalist societies the economy was always embedded in social relations, while with the domination of the market principle, social relations are embedded in the economy. This means the establishment of the market principle as such results in a reversal of the relations between society and the economy.

The great benefit of competition is the pressure upon firms to be efficient. Efficiency means production of the quality of service desired by consumers at least cost. Provided there is some degree of price competition, firms whose quality of service is poor, whose costs are high or whose profit margins are excessive will lose custom to their rivals and ultimately be driven out of business. Market sanctions upon inefficient firms have the great advantage of being internal to the industry. If these sanctions are effective, the industry' is self-regulating as far as efficiency is concerned.

In the case of the Indonesian interisland shipping industry, there is strong evidence of competition. As discussed in Chapter 3, the large number of firms and the ease of entry appear to ensure that individual firms cannot hold significant market power. In other words, firms have little scope either to sustain excessive costs or to charge excessive profit margins if they wish to remain in business in the long-run. These predictions of market structure seem to be borne out by observation of competitive behaviour: firms engage vigorously in both price and quality competition. What needs to be determined now is whether that competition is in fact effective in raising the level of efficiency in the industry.

Ideally the level of efficiency would be measured in terms of the costs and profit margins of individual firms. Unfortunately financial data are highly confidential. Even if data were available they would be unlikely to present an accurate picture of a firm's true financial position. Many firms in Indonesia keep multiple sets of books — a set for the bank, a set for the taxation authorities, and so on.

The approach taken below is therefore to focus not upon performance and efficiency per se but upon the process by which competition raises the level of efficiency. The first part of the chapter looks at some indicators — crude and partial though they be — of the dispersion of efficiency among the many firms in the industry.