Print and colonial port cultures of the Indian Ocean littorals: Penang and Rangoon
Su Lin Lewis’s 2009 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society examines how print culture and English-language media in the colonial port-cities of Penang and Rangoon fostered distinct but parallel forms of political consciousness among multi-ethnic Asian communities from the 1860s to the 1940s. Drawing on colonial records, newspapers, and memoirs, Lewis argues that the cosmopolitan public sphere of the Indian Ocean littoral enabled Asians in both cities to contest colonialism through the press—yet produced divergent outcomes: a cosmopolitan, rights-based citizenship in Penang and a culturally homogeneous ethnic nationalism in Rangoon.
Summary
Lewis situates Penang and Rangoon within the broader network of Indian Ocean port-cities that emerged after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, arguing that both cities shared a lineage as multi-ethnic trading ports where Chinese, Indian, Arab, and Malay communities had coexisted for centuries before British colonial rule intensified their cosmopolitan character. The article’s central analytical move is to compare how the same structural conditions—steamship networks, English education, vernacular and English-language press, and the presence of hybrid “Peranakan” communities—produced fundamentally different political trajectories. In Penang, where the settlement had been negotiated as a free port in 1786 and where long-domiciled immigrant communities had prospered under British rule for over a century, political claims were framed in the language of imperial citizenship and democratic rights. In Rangoon, seized by force in 1852 and made the administrative capital of a conquered state, the same print infrastructure became a vehicle for an increasingly exclusionary Burmese nationalism that defined the nation in ethnically homogeneous terms.
The article traces the development of the English-language press as a key site of multi-ethnic interaction. In Penang, the Straits Echo (founded 1903 by the Lim family’s Criterion Press) became the principal platform for debate among Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Eurasian communities, with its correspondence columns hosting arguments on education, gender, and political reform. Under the editorship of Manicasothy Saravanamuttu from 1931, the paper articulated a vision of “Malaya for Malays” that was explicitly cosmopolitan, pointing to Ceylon’s multi-ethnic democracy as a model. In Rangoon, the English press—Rangoon Times, Rangoon Gazette, New Burma—served as a shared space where Burmese and Indian literati debated Indian immigration and nationalist strategy, but the vernacular Burmese press increasingly channeled a narrower, Buddhist-defined nationalism. The Dobama Asiayone (“We Burmans”), formed by Rangoon University students including Aung San, exemplified this turn toward cultural homogeneity, drawing a parallel with Ireland’s Sinn Féin.
Lewis gives particular attention to hybrid figures who navigated multiple cultural worlds: Taw Sein Ko in Rangoon, a polyglot of Chinese, Burmese, and Western education who served as a cultural interlocutor; Lim Cheng Law in Penang, a Straits Chinese businessman and Straits Echo contributor; and the Jawi Peranakan community, whose children of Tamil-Muslim and Malay parentage had pioneered the Malay press with Jawi Peranakan (1876) and later, through the Jelutong Press, became the centre of reformist Malay publishing in the 1920s. These figures, Lewis argues, were the first to seize the opportunities of the anglophone public sphere to enact political and social change.
Key Findings
- In 1903, Rangoon had twenty-six newspapers: sixteen in English, eight in Burmese, one in Tamil, and one in Gujarati (p. 17).
- The Straits Echo circulation tripled to 4,500 by the 1930s under Manicasothy Saravanamuttu’s editorship, making it the most popular paper in North Malaya alongside the Kwong Wah Yit Poh (p. 20).
- The Jelutong Press in Penang, spearheaded by Sayyid Shayk Al-Hadi, became the largest Malay publishing house in Malaya, producing the monthly Al-Ikhwan (est. 1926) and the twice-weekly Saudara (est. 1928) (p. 14).
- The Straits Echo staff in the early 1920s numbered between 70 and 80 Chinese, Malays, Tamils, Singhalese, and Eurasians, as recorded by editor George Bilainkin (p. 18).
- Rangoon became the third biggest port in British India by 1920, following the destruction of Mandalay in 1885 (p. 11).
- The Kwong Wah Yit Poh was established in 1911 by supporters of Sun Yat-sen to counter the royalist views of the Penang Sin Poe (founded 1894) (p. 14).
Conclusion
Lewis’s definitive takeaway is that the colonial port-city’s cosmopolitan infrastructure—its multilingual press, English-medium schools, and hybrid communities—did not produce a single, uniform nationalist outcome but rather a spectrum of political imaginaries shaped by each city’s specific colonial history. Penang’s negotiated founding and long history of immigrant prosperity underpinned a vision of the nation as a multi-ethnic, rights-based polity; Rangoon’s violent conquest and the marginalization of indigenous Burmese entrepreneurs underpinned a culturally exclusive nationalism. Both visions, however, were born within the same interconnected world of letters, and both left enduring legacies in the civic cultures of their respective cities.
Context
- The article draws primarily on the Straits Echo archive, the Gazetteer of India: Provincial Series—Burma, the Annual Statement of Newspapers and Periodicals published in the Province of Burma (India Office Records), and Bilainkin’s memoir Hail Penang (1932).
- Historiographically, the article extends the work of Tim Harper and Mark Frost on the “diasporic public sphere” in Singapore to a comparative Penang–Rangoon framework, and engages with Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” thesis by emphasizing multiple and informed communities rather than a single national one.