ABSTRACT
Man’s oldest industries are concerned with the getting of food. The pigmy Negritos, Malaya’s most primitive people today, live on jungle fruits and roots and game. The races who passed through the Peninsula eight thousand years ago left the bones of the wild beasts whose flesh they ate in the caves and rock-shelters of the northern states and the debris of the molluscs that formed the diet of some of them in the shell-heaps of Province Wellesley. Not till we come to that higher type, the Sakai (or Senoi) Indonesian hillmen, do we encounter agricultural methods that illustrate how the primitive Malay passed from shifting to permanent cultivation. Some Sakai move every year or so to plant fresh clearings with rice, millet, yams, tapioca, maize and vegetables; others live in the same clearing for a decade or longer, cutting down the trees and scrub on adjacent slopes in rotation. This was the stage the civilized Malay had experienced and passed many centuries ago. But some modern Malays still practised shifting cultivation, until the British forbade a practice so wasteful of timber. It was not that the Malays were ignorant of irrigation. But there were, what has hardly been recognized, two types of Malay in the peninsula: the landsman of the Kedah and Kelantan plains and of Negri Sembilan, and the coastal people whose ancestors were sea-gipsies and exploited forest as they exploited river and sea. The coastal Malay, like the Orang Laut or sea-tribes of today, was a fisherman originally and a pirate when international commerce offered a richer sea harvest, and the sea-gipsies, who were the earliest settlers in Malaya and the Riau archipelago, turned to shifting cultivation for what rice they wanted and took no more interest in agriculture than is taken by their descendants who dive for coins at the Tanjong Pagar docks. So the polyglot merchants who made Malacca a port kingdom had to import their rice from Sumatra and Java. For even in 1512 the only neighbouring places mentioned by Tomé Pires as having enough rice for their needs are Bruas and Muar. The solitary rice-patch in some narrow valley against a background of dark forest or green orchards is a delight to the eye, but if it escape drought, it is still too liable to the depredations of pig, rats and deer, not to speak of the dreaded elephant, to command the labour and care of any intelligent Malay with other scope. So until Malacca was founded about 1400, southern Malaya remained sparsely populated, though in the north some of the fertile plains may have been irrigated under the kings of Langkasuka, the hin-duized little state which Chinese chroniclers date back to the first century a.d. Possibly Kedah Kelantan and Patani must have planted wet rice under the sovereignty of Sri Vijaya, and when that Malay Buddhist empire and its colonies fell before Hindu Majapahit in the fourteenth century, northern Malaya came first under the influence of the Javanese and then under that of the Th’ai, or modern Siamese, both of them expert in the irrigation of rice-fields. It is for these historical reasons that rice-planting reached so high a standard in the north, where wide irrigable plains attracted a population large enough for rice to be cultivated even on a commercial scale. Before the sporadic immigration of small bodies of Javanese and Banjarese in modern times, the only other expert rice-planters in Malaya were the Minangkabau colonists of Negri Sembilan. A century ago Kedah and Minangkabau states behind Malacca grew enough rice to be able to export their surplus to the nearest ports. Kelantan and Patani must have produced more than enough for their own needs and Perak’s crop was adequate for its small population. But before the days of roads and railways, drought or pests often meant an insufficient diet of maize or tapioca for the people of remote isolated hamlets. From 1919 to 1921, when a famine in India led to restriction on the export of rice from India, the Malayan governments spent £4,900,000 on buying rice from other countries.
