Article

On going into the field

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

On going into the field

William R. Roff’s 2012 memoir recounts his first fieldwork in Malaya in the late 1950s, undertaken as a graduate student from the Australian National University researching what would become The Origins of Malay Nationalism. The article’s central argument is that an anthropological approach to historical research—living within a community before turning to documents—proved indispensable to his understanding of Malay society and, ultimately, to the archival discoveries that underpinned his published work.

Summary

Roff’s narrative traces a deliberate methodological choice: rather than proceeding directly to archives, he embedded himself in Malay domestic life, first in the rural kampung of Kampung Jawa near Klang and then in the urban Malay enclave of Kampung Baru in Kuala Lumpur. In Kampung Jawa, he lived for approximately six weeks with the family of Haji Karim bin Mohammad Noor, a carpenter for the Public Works Department, learning spoken Malay, Jawi script, and the rhythms of kampung social life. In Kampung Baru, he stayed nearly two months with the family of Datu Zakaria, a lorry driver by day and a bomoh (traditional healer) by night, while attempting to locate usable colonial-era documents.

The archival search in Kuala Lumpur proved largely fruitless: the State Secretariat held no pre-war papers, and a godown containing a jumble of colonial files was beyond any single researcher’s capacity to organise. Roff therefore pivoted to the Malay press of the colonial period, using Muhammad bin Dato’ Muda’s 1940 compilation Tarikh Surat Khabar as a guide, and identified a collection of Malay newspapers held at the University of Malaya library. The decisive turn came on his east coast journey, where he made a series of archival discoveries that he later described as the most important of his career.

The most consequential of these occurred in Kota Bahru, Kelantan, where Roff discovered that the entire pre-war record of the British Advisor’s office and the Setiausaha Kelantan was being stored in the enclosed undercroft of the old B.A.’s building—a structure then being dismantled by a contractor who intended to burn the papers. Roff’s intervention secured a stop-work order and the eventual transfer of the records to safe storage in Kuala Lumpur. He also located a complete volume of the journal Al-Imam (1906–1908) in the office of the Kelantan publisher Haji Ahmad b. Ismail, a find that became a foundation text for his work on Malay nationalism.

Key Findings

  • The complete pre-war administrative record of the British Advisor’s office and the Setiausaha Kelantan was discovered in the old B.A.’s building in Kota Bahru, where it was about to be destroyed; Roff’s intervention led to a stop-work order and eventual transfer to the Arkib Negara (pp. 107–108).
  • A complete volume of Al-Imam (1906–1908), the only known copy at the time, was found in the office of Haji Ahmad b. Ismail in Kelantan and became a foundational source for Roff’s published work on Malay nationalism (p. 108).
  • Pre-war government records in Dungun were found in reasonable condition and discussed for transfer to the fledgling national archives, facilitated by Roff’s relationship with the acting director Alwi Jantan (p. 107).
  • Pre-war records in Kuala Terengganu were stored in a below-ground room that periodically flooded; the papers had become solid masses requiring re-wetting, separation, and lamination before they could be used (p. 107).
  • Kampung Baru, the urban Malay enclave in Kuala Lumpur where Roff lived during his second phase of fieldwork, had been established by the colonial government in the early 1920s with legislation restricting residence to Malays only, a prohibition that persisted into the 1960s and beyond (p. 105).
  • The Tarikh Surat Khabar by Muhammad bin Dato’ Muda, published in 1940 by Al-Mutbaah Al-Zainiyah, Bukit Mertajam, served as the principal guide to the colonial-era Malay press, though it contained significant lacunae and inaccuracies (p. 106).

Conclusion

Roff’s definitive takeaway is that the anthropological immersion he undertook—learning language, observing religious and social institutions, and building trust within Malay communities—was not merely a preliminary to his historical work but constitutive of it. The cultural knowledge gained in Kampung Jawa and Kampung Baru shaped how he read and interpreted the documents he subsequently discovered, and he argues that this method would be valuable for historians working on a wide range of subjects, not only those dealing with contemporary or near-contemporary material.

Context

  • The article draws on Roff’s personal experience and memory rather than a systematic archival survey; the primary collections it references are the pre-war Kelantan state records (B.A.’s office, Setiausaha Kelantan, Hakim Besar), the Majlis Agama Islam archive in Kota Bahru, and the Malay newspaper holdings at the University of Malaya library.
  • Historiographically, the piece contributes to the small body of reflective writing on research methodology in Malaysian history, offering a concrete case study of how ethnographic fieldwork and archival discovery intersected in the production of a foundational text on Malay nationalism.

References