Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xx, 261 pp. (Tables, maps.) US$29.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-316-60260-7.
In Taming Babel, Leow examines the role of languages—namely, Malay and Chinese—in the making of the Malaysian state. She contends the British viewed the plurality of languages as a crisis, and as such, they exerted great efforts to tame the diversity as opposed to embracing it. We see this dynamic play out over time through the lens of five actors.
The book begins with the language technocrats in the colonial era. Chapter 1 highlights their challenges with the diversity of Chinese vernaculars (Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka) in legal matters. Chapter 2 shifts the attention to how the British succeeded at taming Malay, courtesy of three interrelated transitions: from manuscript to print; from orality to writing; and from Arabic to romanized script. The next two chapters focus on the rise of the vernaculars. Chapter 3 details how the Japanese occupation created new opportunities for Malay-Indonesian linguistic collaboration, most notably with lexicographic activities—an area formerly dominated by Europeans. Chapter 4 looks at the inability of the British to compete with Chinese propaganda, presented in different vernaculars and often in colloquial wording, during the fight against the communists (the Emergency). And the final chapter examines how in the postcolonial era, the language planning institute successfully imposed a monolingual definition of the nation: one that eliminated English, denied the plurilingual landscape of the country, and trivialized bazaar Malay.
Taming Babel makes important contributions to two fields of study. The first is ethnic politics. Conceptually, Leow disaggregates the oft-monolithic Malay and Chinese. She convincingly demonstrates the diversity of both ethnic groups. The fact that we can talk about either group as homogenous today betrays the very challenges facing the national language planning institute, but is a testament to its success at taming the language diversity. Theoretically, Leow calls attention to how ethnic politics does not always manifest dyadically—in other words, between a colonizer and the colonized (the British versus the Malays) or between a hegemonic group and an ethnic minority (the Malays versus the Chinese). Instead, ethnic politics can involve multiple parties, each with conflicting preferences.
The book also contributes to the field of Malaysian (and generally Southeast Asian) studies. Temporally, the book highlights how decolonization cannot be divorced from its colonial past. The speed with which the Malay language was developed post-World War II (chapter 4) and then disseminated (chapter 5) could not have happened without the British attempts at taming it (chapter 2). Likewise, the challenges the British faced against the Chinese during the Emergency (chapter 4) were rooted in their failures during the colonial era (chapter 1). Spatially, Leow does an excellent job situating the developments in Malaysia as part of something else ongoing in the region. The best example is the discussion about how the Japanese governed the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra together, and how this administrative boundary would have lexicographical implications. The aggregation of these two cross-national regions into one unit is important but is all too often ignored in the literature.
While the premise of the book is to demonstrate the tendency to tame languages, absent is a framework for understanding who was doing the taming. Ironically, for having disaggregated the monolithic Malays and Chinese, Leow treats the British as one unit. Yet, there is no reason to assume the officer corps, the missionaries, and the businessmen shared an equal urgency and common purpose for taming languages. Treating these different groups as one, British entity means that nuances regarding who did the taming are lost. For example, the focus in chapter 1—taming of the Chinese—is about the language technocrats, but in chapter 2—taming of the Malay language—the attention is on the missionaries. Where were the missionaries in the Chinese case? There were European missionaries in Malaya who spoke the vernaculars, and made efforts at Romanization. The British colonial office must have found their linguistic skills attractive and a possible asset, even if the competencies were not in the legal realm. What would have strengthened the monograph is not a separate discussion of each group at one critical juncture, but rather, addressing how the different groups interacted together at each point.
And despite the rich chronology, conspicuously absent is a discussion about the pre-independence bargain. This is an important—and arguably the final—moment when the British tried to tame the languages by negotiating with the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA). This oversight of the two political parties is not trivial. In the book, Leow argues that scholars often treat the Malays and Chinese as agentless groups during British colonialism. Yet, Leow commits the same sin. In chapter 5, her focus is exclusively on the language planners in the post-colonial era, thus depicting the Malays and the Chinese as hapless. The institute director, Syed Nasir, appears more times in the chapter than Tunku Abdul Rahman, the UMNO leader and Malaysian prime minister. In doing so, Leow misses the bargain the UMNO struck with the MCA; she misses the challenges Tunku felt the Malays owed the Chinese (note that the one quote on page 203 is in response to a Chinese opposition party member, as opposed to an MCA member); and she misses the crises the Singapore merger brought. But most importantly, she allows for slippage in language (pun intended) between the national language and the official language (179). In Malaysia, the politics was less about the national language. The Chinese—at least those making up the MCA—were willing to concede on that matter even before independence. Even the Chinese in Singapore designated Malay as the singular national language (while recognizing four official languages). Instead, the crisis was over the official language. But by focusing on the national language institute, Leow overlooks the areas that arguably needed taming the most.
These comments notwithstanding, Taming Babel is a must read. It demonstrates convincingly that it is not only the nature of governments to tame and make borders, but more importantly, it is also the nature of language to untame and unmake these borders.
Amy H. Liu
University of Texas, Austin, USA