Constructing Colonial Benevolence: Portraits of Persons with Leprosy in British Malaya
Abstract
The May 13 riot, which broke out in the aftermath of the country’s third general election in 1969, remains a defining moment in Malaysian politics. Malaysians are well aware that the riot took place even if they are vague about the details, but few are aware that a mass grave for victims of the riot, built ‘by the courtesy of the Malaysian government’, is located within the Sungai Buloh Leprosarium (SBL).
Historically speaking, a leprosarium segregated pathologized others from the general population, keeping patients out of sight and preventing outsiders from entering. The fact that the mass grave of political victims of the May 13 riot is found in such a space raises several questions. Why was SBL chosen as a burial site for the bodies of May 13 victims? If a cemetery is meant to allow the living to memorialise the dead, what does burying May 13 victims in a segregated space like SBL imply? How does the location of the mass grave affect memories and memorialisation of the riot and of those who died?
In this article I consider these questions by examining conceptual links between political violence, body management, the location of cemeteries and the politics of memory by critically reading the architecture and space of the May 13 mass gravesite. I also look at family narratives, which describe the difficulties families faced in finding out where their loved ones were buried, and show how the narratives serve as negotiated memories within the wider political dynamics of the country after the riot.
Summary
This article investigates the location of the May 13, 1969 riot mass grave within the Sungai Buloh Leprosarium (SBL), a segregated colonial-era quarantine facility, and examines how that spatial choice shaped the politics of memory surrounding one of Malaysia’s most contested historical episodes. The author argues that the government’s decision to bury 103 identified victims inside a gated, stigmatized leprosarium was not merely a logistical convenience but a deliberate strategy of memory management: the segregated space kept the visual and emotional traces of political violence out of public sight, suppressed the potential for collective memorialization, and made it physically difficult for victims’ families to locate and tend the graves of their loved ones (pp. 36, 47–48).
Drawing on a reading of the gravesite’s architecture and spatial logic as a form of archive, the author situates the burial ground within broader theoretical frameworks linking body management, cemetery locality, and the politics of memory. The uniform grey headstones—each inscribed only with the deceased’s name, date of passing, and the phrase “BY THE COURTESY OF THE MALAYSIAN GOVERNMENT”—strip victims of individuality and family connection, reducing them to anonymous casualties of state-acknowledged violence (p. 51). The dilapidated condition of the site, with broken and overgrown stones, contrasts sharply with the dignified uniformity of the Taiping War Cemetery maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, underscoring the absence of state commitment to public remembrance (p. 51).
The article then turns to family narratives gathered through interviews conducted at the gravesite during the 2016 tomb-sweeping season. These accounts reveal the extensive obstacles families faced: being denied photographs of their dead relatives, receiving no formal notification of burial location, and having to navigate multiple security gates to reach the cemetery. Some families reclaimed their loved ones’ identities by rebuilding or decorating headstones with Chinese names, portraits, and lunar calendar dates, while others processed their loss through ghost narratives that framed the cemetery as haunted by those whose lives were “wrongly taken” (pp. 48–52). These private, fragmentary memories function as counter-narratives that challenge the official state account of the riot.
Key Findings
- Of 196 documented deaths, 103 victims (99 Chinese, 2 Muslim, 2 Indian) were buried in SBL, 18 Muslims in Gombak, and 8 identifiable bodies from “non-sensitive areas” were handed to relatives; the NOC report does not account for the remaining 67 bodies (pp. 39, 41, 47).
- Dr Lim Kuan Joo’s oral testimony confirms that bodies were buried naked without coffins in four-foot-deep trenches dug by leprosy patients, making later exhumation and reburial practically impossible despite the government’s claim that bodies were individually tagged for identification (p. 47).
- SBL was secured by three gates (Gurkha Gate, West Gate, East Gate), and families reported needing to present ID cards and sometimes paying private drivers twenty ringgit for transport to reach the site during tomb-sweeping season (pp. 47–50).
- Only approximately 27 of the 103 tombstones bear traces of family visitation or prayer, suggesting the government made no comprehensive effort to notify all identified victims’ families of the burial location (p. 50).
- In 2006, religious authorities rejected Harun Mohamad’s family’s appeal to exhume and transfer his body to a Muslim cemetery, a decision the author interprets as preventing a precedent that might have prompted other families to make similar claims and thereby generate public scrutiny (p. 50).
- Families of at least 27 victims engaged in acts of reclamation—rebuilding stones, adding portraits, flanking with Earth God figures, painting inscriptions—while ghost narratives (particularly the Cantonese term yun wan, ghosts of those wrongly killed) served as a vehicle for expressing unresolved grief and injustice in the absence of a legitimate public space for remembrance (pp. 51–52).
Conclusion
The author concludes that the management of dead bodies and the strategic siting of the burial ground within a segregated, stigmatized space played a central role in controlling memories of the May 13 riot by foreclosing the production of non-governmental narratives. The leprosarium functioned as a double barrier: it kept the pathologized “other” (leprosy patients) inside while simultaneously keeping the public outside, thereby erasing the material traces of political violence from everyday sight. Yet family narratives, however fragmentary, do not merely fill gaps in the official record but actively call state narratives into question, demonstrating that private memory persists as a form of political resistance even under conditions of deliberate suppression (pp. 37, 52).
Context
- The Sungai Buloh Leprosarium was a colonial-era quarantine institution designed to segregate persons with leprosy from the general population, a legacy of biomedical othering that the post-independence state repurposed for political memory management (p. 47).
- The article was published in JMBRAS Vol. 90, No. 313 (December 2017), pp. 35–54, and represents a preliminary site-based study; the author notes having conducted over 30 additional interviews by the time of publication, with further material reserved for a future publication (p. 35, n. 1).