Kampung Chempaka is a “child of colonialism”. It was born out of a nation-wide and world-wide economic crisis which forced a section of the Mawar peasants – Kampung Chempaka pioneers – to seek alternative sources of livelihood by opening up an uncultivated area within the mukim. They were mostly rubber smallholders who had little or no land, drawn into growing the crop during the rubber boom early this century and thus abandoning food crop cultivation. A fall in rubber prices and a rise in rice prices left them in a “no-win” situation. Their decision to grow rubber was against the wishes of the British colonial administration expressed in its agriculture policy which was partly implemented through the imposition of “food crop only” cultivation conditions on most lands alienated to local peasants.

When the pioneers of Kampung Chempaka, in 1916, cleared the wasteland area of ladang or shifting cultivation they were in fact violating the then existing agricultural policy which outlawed ladang cultivation in favour of rice and other food crops. “Peasants grow food crop only” policy was promoted simultaneously with “cash crops for plantations only” policy. Through the former the British hoped ti reduce rice imports for feeding imported labourers on the foreign-owned plantations and miners and, at the same time, save some foreign exchange.

At the local level, the penghulu, as a government functionary, also played the role of “the guardian” og the agricultural policy and was responsible for ensuring that the policy was adhered to. For this reason as well as on personal grounds he warned the pioneers to revert to proper food cultivation. The pioneers did not obey him but the subsequent settlers did. Thus, a possible penghulu-peasant conflict was averted.

Four villages finally emerged from the swampy wasteland – Kampung Asal, Kampung Kasturi, Kampung Teratai and Kampung Chempaka proper. In the initial years, the inhabitants of the villages grew food crops not necessarily because they were in favour of the agricultural policy but mainly because it was unprofitable to cultivatecash crops, especially rubber which was suffering from slump in the price. This led to the introduction of the Stevenson Restriction Scheme to limit rubber growing among smallholders. By that time the Malay Reservation Enactment was already in operation as a result of which a stricter enforcement of the cultivation conditions attached to peasant land was imposed. Not long after that world rubber prices increased again. The more economically sensitive peasants of Kampung Asal led by Ahmad grew rubber again, thus violating not only the land rules but also the Stevenson Scheme. More importantly, this decision meant abandoning food crop cultivation and hence denying the penghulu who was growing coconut and rubber with special permission from the district colonial administration, the traditional gift of food items which he regularly received from Kampung Asal. Other villages were also making similar contributions. A combination of official and personal reasons prompted the penghulu to take action against Ahmad the head of Kampung Asal and his followers. The penghulu was supported by the villahe heads of Kampung Kasturi andKampung Chempaka proper. But Ahmad and his men continued to disobey him.

In the “1925 affair” Ahmad was not appointed as Kampung Asal village head and the village was denied official status and incorporated in the new Kampung Chempaka under Haji Abdul, who was appointed as

the new Kampung Chempaka village head. The officials versus peasant conflict brought antagonisms between them to the fore. The stage was set for what proved to be a protracted contest of sectional interest. Further implementation of the various schemes under the colonial agricultural policy in Kampung Chempaka gave rise to at least four other major official versus peasant conflict, one of which was only indirectly related. They were the “1934 scandal” which cost Haji Abdul of Kampung Chempaka his headmanship; the “1935 land dispute” in which some land in Kampung Asal was taken over by Haji Salam, the newKampung Chempaka village head, and Cikgu Omar, a teacher-cum-entrepreneur, further fueling the antagonisms between the officials and peasants in Kampung Chempaka; the “1936 mosque controversy” which resulted in a political compromise between the factions; and the “1939 land dispute” which involved the take-over ofa substantial area of Kampung Asal by Ali, the Kampung Kasturi village head, Haji Salam and the penghulu himself, which was considered as pencerobohan or the outrage of Kampung Asal by its villagers.

The series of conflicts was generated by a mesh of reasons – economic, political, religious, personal hostilities, localism, ecological disasters, and so forth. In other words, the conflicts were multi-faceted and thus could be seen as official versus villagers; or a petty entrepreneur class versus peasant and proletariat classes; or “leaders of peasants” versus “peasant leaders”; or Kampung Asal versus its neighbours; or officials versus the natural disaster victims; or peasants versus the colonial state; or the religious versus non-religious; and so forth. However, close scrutiny shows that most of these conflicts were related to the implementation of the various programmes under the colonial agricultural policy, ranging from important matters such as land to as petty as the participation in the district rice competition.

The very same policy also contributed greatly to the formation of the different social classes in Kampung Chempaka. Initially, Kampung Chempaka was settled by a group of pioneers who were displaced peasants from the mukim of Mawar and Asap. Within two decades during the inter-war years, we saw the emergence of a small official-cum-entrepreneur class from the once displaced peasants. They were originally peasant leaders, that is, selected by peasants themselves to represent their economic political interests. Later, through their appointment as village heads they became closely associated with the penghulu. The association proved beneficial to both sides. The penghulu through its close contacts with the district office was able to help the village headman set up their small businesses, mainly as construction contractors, taking advantage of the various government contracts to build irrigation canals and other facilities associated with specific programmes under the agricultural policy, or private contracts in the local plantations. They mainly employed villagers who were victims of natural disasters or the Depression as their labourers. As a result, the village heads and a few local elites were drawn closer to the penghulu and became his loyal supporters, and thus socially distanced themselves from the peasants and the emerging proletariat class. From “peasant leaders” they became “leaders of peasants” who now derived economic and political strength by aligning with the penghulu and supporting the colonial cause, which frequently put them at odds with the interests of the peasants to which they had once belonged. Hence from what was essentially a peasant class now emerged two others, that of the official-entrepreneur class and the proletariat class drawn from the workers who worked on the estates. Nevertheless, the peasant class remained the largest in the community.

Based on the evidence presented in this study, many of the conflicts within the village manifested the underlying class contradictions within the community, but not necessarily overtly expressed in class terms at all times. Some emerged as religious conflicts, a few in the form of personal hostilities, some as narrow localism (Kampung Asal versus the outsiders), once or twice ad family feuds, and the there were even fiery verbal exchanges. This revealed that there was not necessarily a one-to-one or direct causal relationship between the colonial agricultural policy and local, community politics as the evidence amply demonstrated. What is suggested here is that in colonial Kampung Chempaka the community, from the beginning, was subjected to various forms of rules and politics, mainly related to the implementation of the colonial agricultural policy. Through the local official functionaries the policy, which changed from time to time, was implemented. There was widespread peasant opposition in colonial Malaya to many aspects of this policy, and this happened in Kampung Chempaka too. The opposition, direct or indirect, found expressions in local issues and took various forms thus obscuring their class origins. In essence, what we have observed were the local expressions of an important national issue dominating rural life in colonial Malaya.

The Second World War did not really generate as much change in the economic sphere as in the political sphere in Malaya. The pre-war colonial agricultural policy changed in name but not in content. It then became the rural development policy. Since most Kampung Chempaka villagers were involved in rubber cultivation or in rubber-related activities (such as working as labourers in nearby rubber estates) the specific programmes of the rural development policy which related to rubber affected the villagers most. The official-cum-entrepreneur class continued to receive the benefits of the rubber replanting programme as smallholder and businessmen. The proletariat class expanded as the nearby estates increased their replanting and new planting activities. The peasant smallholding class suffered as a result of not being able to participate in the replanting scheme, for economic bureaucratic reasons, but also as a consequence of the colonial government policy against new planting by peasant smallholders. The latter did not stop them from carrying out illegal new planting. The infrastructure and social services under the rural development policy did not reach the community as they were not meant for them. This situation persisted even after independence and to the late 1960s. whatever changes in the policy, which were translated in various forms, reached only the official-entrepreneur class who continued successfully to accumulate more wealth, but not the other classes.

In the political sphere, the introduction of modern political parties in Malaya, in the late 1940s, was largely an immediate response to British post-war politics. The protagonists in the anti-malayan union campaign, which was countrywide, were the Malays from the governing class-administrators, aristocrats and royalty-and they were the same people who established UMNO in 1946. At the local level, the governing class, mainly through “soft” coercion, were able to recruit the support of local Malay elite in their anti-Malayan union campaign. The latter, were responsible, after 1946, for organizing UMNO local branches through Malaya. Therefore, from top to bottom, UMNO’s organization was elite-controlled. Evidence from Malawati revealed that within the district, UMNO was initially organized along the pre-existing local colonial administrative hierarchy-district and mukim-without village branches. In mukim Mawar, for the first six years there was only one UMNO branch in the whole mukim, called UMNO Mawar, and the members were mainly village heads, successful local petty entrepreneurs and rich

landlords, none from the local peasantry and the proletariat class. The second branch, at Sungai Ikan also had a similar membership composition. Only in 1955 did peasants begin to participate in Mawar UMNO politics, but mostly as sponsored members, and hence they could be categorized as “passive political passengers”-a term used by the members themselves. In Kampung Chempaka, UMNO was represented by the village head, his sons and a few close friends of theirs.

From the beginning, UMNO was perceived as the political party which belonged to the official-entrepreneur class, both in Kmapung Chempaka and in Mawar as a whole. Thus in the local context, UMNO inherited all the problems associated with the official-entrepreneur class, and at the same time became the new vehicle through which the interests of the class were expressed. The latter, was evident when many of its members’ participation in the post-1950 rural development programmes-replanting, RIDA activities-was facilitated by the fact that they belonged to UMNO and hence were given priority by local Malay civil servants who were the district’s party officials. Until 1954, after which government regulations forbade high-ranking civil servants to participate in politics unless they resigned, the role of local Malay administrators was crucial in consolidating the support of local elites for UMNO in Malawati as a whole and in Mawar in particular. In Kampung Chempaka, peasant leaders, like Zainal from Kampung Asal, observed these developments with contempt but were not able to do anything safe express their discontentment verbally in gossip and coffee-shop or surau talks. Their this satisfaction stemmed from their not being able to participate in the rubber replanting scheme. Although the man reason that denied the peasants participation was essencially an economic land, it was the bureaucratic reason which became the contentious political issue locally, because the official-entrepreneur class of Kampung Chempaka received various forms of “bureaucratic favours” when they applied for the replanting grants. This was more obvious and more directly felt by the peasant then the economic reasons which from the outset hindered the participation. Although the peasant this satisfaction did not lead to any open conflict, nonetheless, it signaled the introduction of a new element to the already complex local political relations, that is, party politics. Thereafter, the post-war conflicts within Kampung Chempaka were often seen in the intra-party and inter-party rivalries especially after PAS made inroads into the villages, obscuring further the underlying class tensions which generated most of the pre-war conflicts.

In 1958 PAS established its first branch in Mukim Mawar at Kampung Asal, and in 1962, the second branch in Kampung Teratai. It was the former which eventually became one of PAS strongholds in Malawati. It was no coincidence that the majority of Kampung Asal managed to dominate party politics within Kampung Chempaka, for about a decade and to a lesser extent after that. This was due to several related reasons. Firstly, there was no UMNO branch in Kampung Chempaka until 1968 which, ironically, was established by expelled PAS dissidents of Kampung Asal. Secondly, after failing to recruit new members for the then existing UMNO branches at Kampung Mawar and Sungai Ikan, the UMNO “representative” at Kampung Chempaka focused their attention on improving their economic position through the party. Thus, they were perceived by most villagers as self-seeking. Thirdly, the PAS leaders, by virtue of being peasant leaders, were able to identify themselves particularly with the peasants and through their initiatives and diligence were able to organize and establish religious classes and later a religious school. These concrete contributions were sufficient proof, as far as the peasants were

concerned, of their ability and leadership. The successes of the PAS leaders were exaggerated by the failures of the village official-entrepreneur class, who were all UMNO members, to bring rural development projects to the village. Fourthly, the ability of PAS leaders to take up the long-standing local issues and represent them as party issues, such as the official status of Kampung Asal, must not be under-rated.

Since the advent of the NEP, the national government has introduced many new policies to achieve its objectives, both at the local and national levels. Concomitant changes have been made to the general administrative structure in order to facilitate implementation of the various government development programmes. The impact of such changes at the district level, as observed in Malawati, has been great. Most significant had been the increased dominance of local politicians, namely, the wakil rakyat of the ruling party, over the decision-making process within the district bureaucracy – especially in the operation of the district development machinery, which was traditionally the domain of local bureaucrats.