HISTORY | Rewriting Malaysia's past, dividing its people

HISTORY | Rewriting Malaysia's past, dividing its people

Ranjit Singh Malhi

Published: Sep 13, 2026 9:15 AM


HISTORY | Our history is not the private property of any ethnic group, political party or government agency. It is the collective inheritance of all Malaysians.

Yet over the past three decades, the historical narrative promoted by the Education Ministry and other public bodies has become increasingly Malay-centric and Islam-oriented.

The contributions of the Orang Asli, Chinese, Indians and other communities have been reduced, marginalised or omitted, while some long-established accounts have given way to questionable claims.

This is not an argument for diminishing Malay history or the importance of Islam. Both belong at the heart of our national story.


The issue is whether they should be elevated by pushing other peoples and civilisations to the margins.

A national history worthy of Malaysia should help every citizen understand how our country was shaped by many communities, influences and struggles.

It should educate, not elevate one community’s past at everyone else’s expense.

A measurable change in our textbooks

The difference between earlier and current secondary school history textbooks is too substantial to be dismissed as a mere change of emphasis.

Until about the mid-1990s, the textbooks were generally more balanced in their authorship, coverage and interpretation.

They were not perfect, but they gave students a broader view of the peoples, economic forces and cultural influences that shaped Malaya and, later, Malaysia.

In the words of Azmi Sharom (above), an outspoken public intellectual: “History as it is taught appears to be an effort to push forward the Malay/Muslim agenda and little else. The current history syllabus is divisive and selective and it does not give … a clear or holistic picture of our history.”

Santhiram R Raman reached a similar conclusion in “From Decolonization to Ethno-Nationalism: A Study of Malaysia’s School History Syllabuses and Textbooks 1905–2020.”

He argued that “biased history teaching in schools” has “turned history into a private, ethnic domain” and that “half-truths and inaccuracies favouring and glorifying the efforts of one ethnic group” had entered history textbooks.

The comparison with earlier textbooks is revealing. “Sejarah Menengah Malaysia Tingkatan Empat”, published by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in 1979, devoted about eight pages to tin mining and acknowledged that the Chinese virtually controlled the industry until the 1880s.

It devoted another seven pages to rubber and gave due recognition to Indian labour. The 2018 Form Three textbook reduces the Chinese role in tin mining to two or three sentences and treats the Indian role in rubber in much the same cursory manner.

The 1996 Form Two textbook offered a reasonably detailed account of Chinese and Indian contributions to Malaya’s economic development, including the opening of settlements and towns.

It described Chinese miners as the leading entrepreneurs in the 19th-century tin industry.

The 2003 Form Two textbook similarly stated that the Chinese dominated tin mining until the end of the 19th century.

In the current series, however, no mention is made of the role of Chinese pioneers in the commercial cultivation of pepper, gambier, tapioca and pineapple.

The contribution of Indian labourers to the construction of Malaya’s roads, railways, bridges, ports, airports and government buildings is similarly absent.

These are not peripheral details. Tin and rubber drove Malaya’s export economy, while migrant labour built much of the infrastructure that sustained it, often under appalling conditions.

Remove these contributions and students are left with mines without miners, plantations without labourers and towns without the communities that built them.


From Indianisation to historical amnesia

Earlier textbooks also explained the profound Hindu-Buddhist influence on early Malay civilisation. Gilbert Khoo’s “Sejarah Malaysia Tingkatan Satu” (1977) discussed its influence on government, royal installation, language, literature, the arts, customs and beliefs.

The 1979 Form Four textbook covered early Kedah as an Indianised kingdom and discussed the roles of Indian traders, priests and princes.

Current textbooks do not adequately explain this inheritance. Concepts such as “devaraja”, Sanskrit-derived royal terminology and the extensive Sanskrit influence on Malay vocabulary receive insufficient attention.

Words such as “raja” (king), “syurga” (heaven), “neraka” (hell), “sembahyang” (pray) and “puasa” (fasting) did not appear from nowhere.

Acknowledging their origins does not make Malay culture less Malay. On the contrary, it reveals the depth, adaptability, and richness of a civilisation shaped by centuries of cultural exchange.

The same selectivity appears on page 13 of the 2017 Form Two history textbook. A caption states: “Penemuan beberapa buah candi di kawasan Lembah Bujang yang menunjukkan kewujudan kerajaan Kedah Tua” (The discovery of several candi in the Bujang Valley indicates the existence of the kingdom of Kedah Tua).

The term “candi” refers here to Hindu-Buddhist religious monuments. The caption is not false, but it omits what these monuments most directly reveal: the influence of Hindu-Buddhist religion and culture in Kedah Tua.

By acknowledging the monuments while withholding their defining significance, the textbook presents a partial truth - a clear example of bias through omission.

The treatment of Parameswara (above) is even more troubling. The 2017 Form Two textbook repeats the disputed claim that he converted to Islam in 1414 and became Megat Iskandar Shah.

The “Ming shih-lu” (also known as Ming Veritable Records), however, records Megat Iskandar Shah reporting Parameswara’s death to the Ming court.

Leading scholars, including Wang Gungwu, Christopher Wake and OW Wolters, provide strong grounds for distinguishing father from son and for concluding that Parameswara did not convert. A disputed interpretation should not be presented to schoolchildren as settled fact.

The Orang Asli have suffered a similar disappearance. “Tawarikh Tanah Ayer Kita” (1963) devoted five pages to them, while William Jalleh’s 1972 Standard Four textbook gave them four pages and explicitly described them as “penduduk asal Tanah Melayu” (original inhabitants of Malaya).

In the current secondary series, they are virtually invisible apart from a brief reference to the Senoi Praaq. Yet the 2019 Form Four textbook describes the Malays as “rakyat asal Tanah Melayu”.

Malays have an indisputable and central place in the peninsula’s history, but the Orang Asli are its first peoples. An honest national history must be capable of stating both truths.


How Yap Ah Loy was diminished and discredited

No individual better exposes this change in emphasis than Yap Ah Loy. The 1979 Form Four textbook devoted almost three pages to his contribution and praised the determination with which he rebuilt Kuala Lumpur despite repeated disasters.

The 2018 Form Three textbook places him last among four personalities associated with the city’s development and gives students little sense of the scale of his achievement.

However, the Kuala Lumpur City Hall’s (DBKL) “Kuala Lumpur Structure Plan 2040” reduces him to the ungrammatical statement that the tin mining centre was “continue developed by Yap Ah Loy”. This is not merely poor English. It symbolises the shrinking of a once-prominent historical role into an awkward afterthought.


READ MORE: HISTORY | Kuala Lumpur's origins: DBKL should set the historical record straight

More recently, Yap has been attacked as a secret-society leader, gambling operator, opium profiteer and even a pimp, as though those labels were sufficient to erase his place in history.

The facts should not be concealed. SM Middlebrook and JM Gullick record his association with the Hai San secret society and his early management of a gaming farm.

According to Gullick, there were about 300 prostitutes on Yap’s (above) premises. In 19th-century mining settlements, secret societies, revenue farms, gambling, opium and prostitution formed part of the political economy. The colonial government licensed or taxed several of these activities and profited from them.

These facts deserve critical treatment, particularly the exploitation of women. Context is not exoneration, but condemnation alone is not history. Unsavoury business interests do not erase Yap’s documented public role.

Secret societies were not merely modern criminal gangs; they also organised labour, credit, protection and communal authority where state institutions were weak.

A truthful account must examine the whole man, including his failings, without weaponising selected vices to make his achievements disappear.

After Kuala Lumpur was devastated during the Selangor Civil War, Yap helped to recapture it in 1873 and undertook its reconstruction.

He borrowed heavily, revived mining and trade, persuaded people to return, maintained order, built roads, supported community institutions and kept the town viable.

Historian Ahmad Kamal Ariffin has argued that Yap’s role in rebuilding Kuala Lumpur deserves its proper place in textbooks and that, without him, the city might not have become the national capital.

Kuala Lumpur was not built by one man, but its survival owed much to Yap’s courage, resilience and determination. To acknowledge that is not communal triumphalism; it is historical fairness.


Distortions beyond Kuala Lumpur

The same weakness appears in a 2019 academic article on the Pahang Uprising. Amnah S Ismail and her co-authors claim, without citing a source, that the British proposed raising Dato’ Bahaman’s monthly allowance from $72 to $500, but that Bahaman rejected the offer because the chieftains’ other demands were ignored.

British colonial records and Abdullah Zakaria Ghazali’s study state the reverse: Bahaman requested an increase from $70 to $500, the British refused, and his resentment was one factor behind the revolt.

Reversing who made and rejected the request alters both the motive and meaning of the episode.

Our school textbooks display the same tendency to magnify one role while minimising others. The 2019 Form Four textbook says that the Malay Regiment formed the bulwark of Malaya’s defence during the Japanese invasion, although British, Indian and Australian formations constituted the main defending forces.

The 2018 Form Three textbook credits Long Jaafar with introducing Larut to the world tin market while overlooking the Chinese capital and labour that transformed production.

It also attributes pepper and gambier cultivation to the British, marginalising the Chinese pioneers who developed these commercial crops.

The pattern is subtle but persistent: acknowledge non-Malay contributions briefly, reduce their scale and shift the centre of agency elsewhere.

History must belong to every Malaysian

Not every error or omission proves a conspiracy. Textbooks must inevitably select and condense. Taken together, however, these changes reveal a consistent direction: Malay and Islamic agency is expanded, while non-Malay and pre-Islamic contributions are compressed, qualified or removed.

What emerges is not simply a shorter account of the past, but a national history rewritten through an increasingly narrow ethnic and religious lens.

This contradicts the declared purpose of national education: to build unity and a shared identity. When a Malaysian child opens a history textbook and cannot see his or her community in the making of the nation, the message is painful and unmistakable: you may live here, but you do not fully belong to the story.

The Education Ministry should appoint a genuinely independent, multi-ethnic panel of historians chosen for scholarship rather than ideological conformity.

Textbook claims should be properly sourced, contested questions clearly identified, and major departures from earlier accounts openly explained.

Drafts should undergo transparent review by specialists in Malay, Chinese, Indian, Orang Asli, Sabah and Sarawak history. Government agencies, including DBKL, should meet the same standard before publishing historical narratives that carry the authority of the state.

Malaysia does not need a Malay history with Chinese, Indian and indigenous footnotes. Nor does it need rival communal histories competing for recognition.

It needs an inclusive Malaysian history, grounded in evidence and large enough to acknowledge every community’s rightful place. Our children deserve to inherit the past as it was, not as political fashion would prefer it to have been.

Telling the whole truth does not diminish the Malays, weaken Islam or threaten national unity. It honours every generation whose labour, sacrifice and imagination helped to build this country.

The past belongs to all of us. If we allow it to be selectively rewritten, we do more than wrong the dead: we teach the living that some Malaysians matter more than others.

That is not the foundation of unity. An honest history is.



RANJIT SINGH MALHI is an independent historian who has written 19 books on Malaysian, Asian, and world history. He is highly committed to writing an inclusive and truthful history of Malaysia based upon authoritative sources.