Article

The Malay press

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

The Malay press

Nik Ahmad bin Haji Nik Hassan’s 1963 article in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society provides the first comprehensive history of the Malay vernacular press in Malaya, tracing its development from the founding of the Jawi Peranakkan in 1876 through the post-war landscape of 1958. The central argument is that the Malay press evolved through three distinct phases—literary and social, religious reform, and political nationalism—each reflecting the changing consciousness of the Malay community under colonial rule, culminating in the press’s decisive role in the independence movement.

Summary

The article organizes the history of the Malay press into five chronological phases, each marked by a shift in editorial content and political orientation. The early period (1876–1906) was characterized by short-lived, one-man publications that dealt almost exclusively with social events, weather, and literary matters. The Jawi Peranakkan, founded by Munshi Mohd. Said bin Dada Mohiddin, set the template: a four-page weekly with minimal news content, distributed to Malay schools and a handful of agents across the Straits Settlements and the Malay Archipelago. Its successor papers, including the Sekola Melayu and the Romanised Bintang Timor, were equally ephemeral, collapsing within a few years due to limited capital and the absence of institutional support.

The second phase (1906–1930) was defined by the introduction of religious reform as a central editorial concern, triggered by the founding of the Al-Imam by Syed Shaikh Al-Hadi, a student of the Egyptian reformer Shaikh Mohamed Abduh. This paper, though short-lived (three and a half years), established a template that the Neracha and later the Saudara would follow, advocating the purification of Islam from what they perceived as non-Islamic accretions and calling for social modernization. The Utusan Melayu (1907) and the Lembaga Melayu (1914) represented a parallel current: news-oriented dailies controlled by English-language press proprietors (the Singapore Free Press and the Malaya Tribune respectively), which reflected religious controversy in their correspondence columns but did not adopt an explicitly reformist editorial line. The Lembaga Melayu dominated the market for seventeen years until the economic slump of the 1930s forced its closure.

The third phase, the 1930s, witnessed the emergence of political consciousness as the defining theme. The Warta Malaya (1930), backed by the Arab Al-Sagoff family and edited for four years by the future Dato’ Sir Onn Jaafar, became the leading Malay daily, distinguished by its direct subscription to Reuters and its critical editorials on state governance. The Saudara (1928) in Penang retained a more religious orientation but increasingly addressed Malay political grievances, such as the exploitation of padi farmers by Chinese middlemen. The founding of the Utusan Melayu in 1939 by members of the Singapore Malay Union—led by Inche Daud, Haji Embok Suloh, and Inche Yusoff Ishak—marked the definitive shift toward a “national” paper explicitly dedicated to serving Malay interests against perceived economic encroachment by other communities. The paper’s survival depended on the arrival of Haji Abdul Rahim Kajai, whom contemporaries regarded as the father of modern Malay journalism, and on the growing racial consciousness that drove circulation from 400 to 1,800 copies per day by 1941.

The Japanese occupation (1941–1945) functioned as a watershed. The anti-European propaganda of the occupation authorities radicalized the post-war press, which now openly demanded independence rather than merely the protection of Malay rights within the colonial framework. The Utusan Melayu, republished in September 1945, became the undisputed leading Malay daily, reaching a circulation of 30,000 by 1958, and aligned itself with UMNO and the Alliance. The Majlis and Melayu Raya attempted to fill the space left by the defunct Warta Malaya but succumbed to financial difficulties and editorial instability. By 1958, four Malay dailies remained in circulation: the Utusan Melayu (now based in Kuala Lumpur), the Warta Negara (Penang), the Berita Harian (Kuala Lumpur, a Romanised Malay edition of the Straits Times), and the Semenanjung (Singapore, financed by the Al-Sagoff family).

Key Findings

  • The Jawi Peranakkan (1876–1895) had a circulation of approximately 250 copies, with a significant portion purchased by the Straits Government for use in Malay schools; it was the first Malay newspaper and the only one of the early phase to survive beyond a few years (pp. 37–41).
  • The Utusan Melayu Press Ltd. was registered on 18 June 1932 (though the first issue appeared 29 May 1939) with approximately 600 small shareholders, including Malay peasants and taxi drivers—a structure the author notes was rare even globally for a newspaper (pp. 64–65).
  • The Warta Malaya was the first Malay newspaper to subscribe directly to a world news agency (Reuters), a distinction it used in its own promotional material; its price was reduced from 10 cents to 6 cents in January 1934 to stimulate sales (pp. 58–59).
  • The Utusan Melayu’s circulation jumped from 400 to 1,800 copies per day in 1941, driven by Malay racial consciousness and the formation of Malay associations in Perak, Selangor, and Pahang by 1938 (pp. 67–68).
  • The Melayu Raya reached a peak circulation of 28,000 copies per day within five months of its founding in August 1950, but was forced to close its own printing press by government order on 19 January 1951 following its coverage of the Muslim riots, and ceased publication entirely by the end of 1952 (pp. 76–77).
  • The installation of a Cossar rotary printing machine by the Utusan Melayu in 1951, capable of printing 5,000 copies per hour, marked the first time a Malay paper abandoned flat-bed presses, closing a technological gap of approximately thirty years with the English-language press (p. 72).

Conclusion

Nik Hassan’s definitive takeaway is that the Malay press was not merely a medium of information but an active agent in the political awakening of the Malay community. The press’s evolution from literary curiosity to religious reformist organ to nationalist political instrument tracked, and in some cases accelerated, the broader transformation of Malay consciousness under colonialism. The Japanese occupation served as the critical inflection point after which the press abandoned its previously moderate, rights-protection stance and became an explicit advocate for independence, a role it fulfilled most effectively through the Utusan Melayu and its alignment with UMNO.

Context

  • The study draws on surviving newspaper files (many of which the author notes are in a state of “disintegration”), interviews with former journalists and proprietors (including Yusoff Ishak, Inche Daud, Inche Manan, and Syed Alwi Al-Hadi), and secondary sources such as Winstedt’s A History of Malay Literature (1940) and Muhammad bin Dato’ Muda’s Tarikh Surat-Khabar Malaya (1940).
  • As the first systematic monographic treatment of the Malay vernacular press, the article established the periodization and narrative framework that subsequent studies of Malayan media history would follow, though its reliance on oral testimony and the limited survival of early newspaper files constrains its evidential base for the pre-1910 period.

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