The Chulia in Penang: Patronage and Place-Making around the Kapitan Kling Mosque, 1786–1957
Tamil Muslims – once known as Chulias – prospered as traders of pelikat cloth, pepper and local products in the Straits of Malacca. In the nineteenth century, they enriched the port town of Penang with endowments for mosques, Sufi shrines, burial grounds, a water tank and an ashurkhanah, holding religious feasts and processions. The most valuable endowment in the Straits Settlements was that for a mosque and burial ground in George Town, granted in 1801 by the English East India Company.
On this site, a South Indian vernacular mosque was founded by the leader of the Chulias, Kapitan Kling Cauder Mohuddeen, a Marakkayar shipowner, merchant and progenitor of the ‘Merican’ clan. In the early twentieth century, the colonial government enacted an ordinance to take back the lands and modernize the townscape. In the process, they co-opted the traditional leadership and refashioned the mosque into a grand Indo-Saracenic symbol of British patronage over its Muslim subjects.
The Chulias excelled as Malay scribes, clerks and land surveyors, and also as ship chandlers, stevedores and lighter owners in the port industry. Educated in English, Malay and Islamic schools, the local-born Chulias, called Jawi Pekan or Jawi Peranakan, became part of the cosmopolitan Muslim elite. They innovated the performing arts of Boria and Bangsawan and pioneered early Malay and Tamil print media in Penang, which helped give birth to modern vernacular discourses.
Influenced by the Khilafat and Self-Respect Movements in India, they strengthened Tamil identity and started Tamil schools. For economic and political reasons, they formed the Muslim Merchants Society, the Muslim Mahajana Sabha and then the Muslim League, the last of which competed in Penang’s city and settlement elections in the 1950s. The book looks at how this diaspora community – living under the East India Company, then in the Straits Settlements and British Malaya – evolved in response to the changing terms of colonial patronage.
Read more about the book here.
From the Foreword by Raj Brown
Khoo Salma, while providing a fascinating perspective on Chulias in Penang and the historical processes that defined their society, politics and Islam, also illustrates an important microcosm of the city and the state… The book is almost an encyclopaedia on the Chulias, with evocative images that sharply capture their Indianness and Islamic Cosmopolitanism. It is an excellent book which deserves to be at the top of the league in diasporic studies.
Raj Brown, Emeritus Professor of International Business, Royal Holloway, University of London
Praise for The Chulia in Penang
Khoo Salma Nasution’s The Chulia in Penang is a vital contribution to the study of Penang’s history. More broadly, it enriches our understanding of Southeast Asia’s cosmopolitan port cities, it adds depth to our knowledge of the history if Islam in modern Southeast Asia, and it presents in great detail the history of the Tamil Muslim merchant networks of the eastern Indian Ocean. The book is based on years of painstaking research, and mines a huge variety of written and oral sources. It is beautifully produced and sumptuously illustrated. It is an exemplary local history, rooted in a profound depth of local cultural knowledge, that also situates its subject in a wider transnational context. Khoo Salma is a leading light of Penang’s heritage scene, a publisher, and a renowned author: this is her finest work yet. The Chulia in Penang will be enjoyed by a wide readership, from professional historians of Southeast Asia to visitors to Penang interested in its cosmopolitan culture.
Sunil Amrith, University of London
The Chulia in Penang is a beautifully written book by Khoo Salma and published by Areca Books. It clearly illustrates and depicts the history of the Penang Chulia (Tamil Muslim), the founding of the Kapitan Keling Mosque and its surrounding from a period from 1786 to 1957. It brings back fond memories of Penang during the 50s and 60s and the Kapitan Keling Mosque is the subject of my current major painting.
Khoo Salma has put in tremendous effort to document the contributions of the Chulias, in terms of economic vitality, social diversity and rich cultural heritage, who formed an integral part of George Town and Penang , as a whole. Penang would not be what it is today without these contributions.
Syed Thajudeen, Malaysian artist
Winner, ICAS Book Prize 2015, Colleagues’ Choice Award
“an important work, a model of its kind and one to enjoy as well to enlighten.
The depth of research is remarkable, and the range of enquiry admirable.”
Citation, ICAS Reading Committee
50 Best Malaysian Titles for International Rights 2015
Book Reviews
“The Chulia in Penang will be an dispensable source of information for those interested specifically in Penang history, but it should also be a standard citation in bibliographies dealing with many other topics, from Indian migration and Muslim cultures to regional trade and colonial town planning. Recording and preserving a historical record that might otherwise be lost forever, The Chulia in Penang has set a benchmark for future explorations of communal pasts in Malaysia, and has provided a background to issues of identity that are still pertinent today.”
Barbara W. Andaya, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
Khoo Salma Nasution’s The Chulia in Penang is a significant and unique contribution to understanding the dynamic development of a diaspora Tamil Muslim community in the island of Penang in Malaysia. With its cognomen Chulia or Kling, which reflects the tenth century connection between the Chola Empire and Malaya, these Muslims in less than two centuries have become totally integrated with indigenous Malays. The Islamic religious commonality between the two groups which is implicit in this research has, to a great extent, smoothened the process of integration.
The uniqueness of [Khoo’s] study is in its sociological approach to the history and development of an enterprising migrant Muslim community that evolved around a mosque built by the migrants on a piece of land granted by the English East India Company in the early twentieth century. The mosque is the most illuminative marker of any Muslim settlement and in the case of diaspora Muslim community there is usually not much of a gap between the year of the migrants’ first arrival and the year of the construction of the first mosque. The arrival of the Chulias in Penang and the building of the Kapitan Kling mosque are no exception to this universal reality.
The centrality given in this study to the Kapitan Kling mosque, its activities and management, its legal battles and mediations, and its politics and personalities, all written in lucid style makes [Khoo’s] book a fascinating but absorbing reading. Immaculately documented and pictorially presented the information gathered for this work is encyclopaedic and impeccable.
Ameer Ali, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (2014), 34:4, 467-468.
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