Chetty communitys heritage threatened - Malaysiakini COMMENT Whoever comes to the small, modest-looking but historical Kampung Budaya Chetty (this is its official name) in Gajah Berang, Malacca, is immediately struck by a long metal wall surrounding a good deal of this neighbourhood. Beyond this wall, there are cranes and, during the day, the constant noise of foundations being laid. A hotel, an exclusive condominium and a multistoried car park are rising up right next to the kampung. In fact, practically inside it. There are all kinds of speculations doing the rounds, and it is very difficult to sift the facts. A meeting with NGOs from Selangor has been called and further meetings and negotiations are apparently afoot. However, what is undeniable is that the kampung - an official Unesco World Heritage site - is threatened by this development. The modest, low-lying houses and temples of the tiny kampung (of just two streets) will be overshadowed by the future high-rises. Worse still, there is talk of the developers wanting to use the main road of Kampung Budaya Chetty as the access road to the hotel. This will necessitate the razing down of a couple of houses. It will, of course, also destroy the tranquil, homely atmosphere currently prevailing inside the neighbourhood. It is expected that the hotel will have a bar. Apart from the fact that, if the current plan (in case its details have been accurately reported to me, that is) goes through, the heritage status of the whole city may be threatened, as Unesco will probably not take lightly to such a proposed major disfiguring of the site. There is also the larger issue of what heritage really means locally and in the larger national context. Last year, it was reported that an ancient temple was casually razed down in the Bujang Valley in Kedah. Examples of shoddy heritage conservation Malacca already sports daily examples of shoddy heritage conservation. Every time I look into a major shophouse renovation in Chinatown, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the centuries-old building is being literally gutted out and reconstructed da capo. The end result often looks not entirely unlike a Mediterranean, Greek island-style house, with immaculately whitewashed walls, no colours anywhere outside or inside, and wooden window and door fittings that would also not necessarily be out of place in the Mediterranean. Granted, importing Chinese artisans and craftsmen from China to redo the elaborate carvings, mouldings and outdoor and indoor fittings many of the houses originally sported is very costly, to say the least. Also, old wooden fittings, stone materials, old bricks, old paintings and then like may look odd in a restored house. Unfortunately, that is what heritage is all about. Heritage is not about what is immaculately clean and pure, but rather about what looks from a modern perspective slightly odd, out of place, and démodé. Also, the coral used in some houses as building material makes the walls look ugly from the perspective of todays aesthetic expectations, for the paint inevitably peels and cracks, there are asperities and continuous shedding of dust, etc. There is also the striking, but difficult to reproduce, attractive blue tint of the interior walls of some houses. I have aspecific, very large and long house on Heeren Street in mind, that has been completely whitewashed. It is not nowadays a fashionable colour for walls, I am afraid. The renovated house wells may also look better if they seem brand-new, say, by cementing them. By comparison with the grand old houses on Heeren Street, however, those in Kampung Chetty look modest at best. Most of them are made of wood only. Inside they also do not look impressive. Hideousness of living in shadow of highrises Yet, heritage is not only about the grand, old houses of the rich and powerful; it is also about the homes of the orang kecil, unprepossessing as these may inevitably seem, especially if we have scant knowledge about the local history. Apart from physical structures, there is also the issue of atmosphere, hardly an issue that is often raised when heritage is brought up. A heritage village where the main thoroughfare is going to become an access road to a hotel, a condominium and attached car park will have a very hard time keeping to its old rhythms and traditions. This not to mention the hideousness of living in a small house right in the shadow of highrises. What used to be a rural area in living memory, out of town, is already encircled by busy roads and housing developments on practically all sides. Needless to add that these housing developments do not usually harbour the Chetties or any other former residents of Gajah Berang, but higher income house buyers and investors who are absentee owners. Most Chetties actually live not only outside the kampung, but in fact outside of Malacca as well, especially because the city does not exactly have a lively and varied labour market. The current community is very small, and some of its residents are old people, whereas many others are actually Chinese rather than Chetty (roughly about half of all residents). It is clearly a fragile community as it is. Inside the modest looking houses, however, the heritage - both tangible and intangible - is clearly alive. The diverse food items - for instance, I was offered a pepper stuffed with seasoned papaya with a stunning taste to it - the old family heirlooms (I have been shown many objects belonging to ancestors), the old portraits on the walls, the ancient usages, and above all the stories are all there, not to mention the distinctive cadence and vocabulary of the Chetty Malay language. This is not only about a small community of people who are Hindu, and say they descend from Indian traders and local women in the distant past of the Malacca sultanate. Unlike the Portuguese in town, but not unlike the Baba Nyonya community, the Chetties are a living reminder of the fact that Malacca is a pre-colonial city. The issue here is in this way hardly one of a local, circumscribed and specific heritage only. It is about a cosmopolitan past that is very much alive and even vibrant in the present. A past that is world heritage - and therefore not only the heritage of the Chetties, Malaccans, Malaysians, or even Asians. The Unesco World Heritage proclamation has simply put an official, international stamp on an age-old reality: namely, Malacca is a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean harbour with far-flung connections, rather than merely the historical cradle of one single post-colonial nation-state. Shopping complex on archaeologically site The issue of whose heritage is at stake is therefore actually irrelevant. Take for instance the Dataran Pahlawan, a well-known and apparently ever-expanding shopping mall in town. It was built partly on archaeologically and historically highly-sensitive ground. Though excavations were apparently conducted before the mall was built, the fact remains that malls are not built right next to historical sites of world renown, let alone right on top of them. The old sultans palace was in all likelihood in the neighbourhood (its modern, impressive replica is right there to remind us of this fact); and so was the old Portuguese and Dutch fort, mostly destroyed by the British just over 200 years ago, but whose foundations still pop up all over the place (in some points they are quite visible and the remains have been preserved). This is also about world heritage, and again not only the heritage of a specific group or nation-state. The casualness and swiftness with which development for private profit is often carried out on heritage sites is nothing short of scary, as the recent destruction of the old temple in the Bujang Valley of Kedah also reminds us. Therefore, rather than whose heritage is being threatened with destruction by who (it is everybodys heritage, also including the yet-to-be-born generations), at the end of the day the real issue seems to be sheer cupidity. A new town being wrenched from the sea A look at Malaccas shoreline reveals the fact in a glaring manner. A whole new town is arising in Kota Laksamana, much of it still in the process of being wrenched from the sea. I have taken a look at rows of shophouses completed barely two years ago. In some cases over half of all shops remain unoccupied to this day. Yet more shops and even large buildings have risen in the meantime; and many more are being built right now, whereas the foundations for even further buildings are being laid out at this very moment. Who is going to take all these shops and buildings, especially in what looks increasingly like an economic downturn, if barely two years ago there were already not enough takers? Furthermore, what is the point of the relentless reclamation going on in the neighbourhood and beyond it? The local joke is that soon, Malacca will stretch all the way to Sumatra. It is clearly not being fuelled by any visible market demand, as shown by the many empty shops and buildings. Now there are also new hotels, which do not seem to have enough guests in some cases. I remember, in particular, a large one where most windows seem to be dark night after night throughout the year. I also wonder who buys at all the new shops opening up in Kota Laksamana. Everybody seems to be somewhat short of money nowadays. It is an area next to the old historic centre that started out back in the 1980s as a reclamation project that did away with the sea that came right up to the old shophouses on Heeren Street, to the point that houses often had a wooden balcony built on stilts right above the water. The beach used to be right there too, as somebody who used to visit the city decades ago keeps reminding me. This is therefore an old issue, and one that goes well beyond Kampung Chetty (incidentally this last is very close to Kota Laksamana and, of course, used to be close to the sea as well). The issue is about being besotted with mindless development benefitting comparatively a few people, something that is unfortunately hardly unique to Malacca or Malaysia (and I have personally come across it all over the world). One of the highlights of the new buildings and shops in Kota Laksamana is their higher-than-average rent and market value, even in terms of the old buildings and shops in the earlier reclamation phases of the same neighbourhood. At stake is also a view of the past and even of existence that seems to partake of a strange malaise. We seem to live as if we had really no past we care about, and no future we want to leave for the coming generations. We live therefore for the present and to fulfil our consumerist fantasies only. Unless of course a Kota Laksamana shophouse or a mall is the legacy we wish to leave behind us. I wonder whether future onlookers will contemplate one day the decayed remains of Kota Laksamana (its glitzy but pricey buildings often look cheaply and shoddily made, not unlike its old ones), and wonder what kind of Dark Ages we lived in. BY FRED ROSEN
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 06:34:27 +0000
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