As a beneficiary of local patronage and charity, however reluctantly given, onemight expect Razak to entertain a favorable opinion of his “social betters” inthe village. He did not. He also sensed what they said behind his back. “I don’tgo to the houses of rich people; they don’t ask me in. They think poor peopleare shabby (vulgar) people. They think we are going to ask for money as alms. They say we’re lazy, that we don’t want to work; they slander us.”37 Whatoffended Razak as much as anything was that these same rich people were notabove calling on the poor when they needed help. But when it came to reciprocity, there was none. “They call us to catch their (runaway) water buffalo orto help move their houses, but they don’t call us for their feasts.”
It has not escaped his notice either that he and many others like him are invisible men. “The rich are arrogant. We greet them and they don’t greet usback. They don’t talk with us; they don’t even look at us! If the rich could hearus talking like this, they’d be angry.”38 Razak is special in some respects, buthe is not unique. Compare what he has to say with this couplet from theagricultural laborers of Andalusia:
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I was a rich man and I became poor
to see what the world gave them.
And now I see that nobody
looks at the face of a poor man.39
A week after the funeral, I returned to my house from the market to find a land-rover on the path in front of Hamzah’s house. The emblem on the door said “Ministry of Health.” Presently, two nurses emerged from behind Hamzah’s house where Razak lived. They had instructions, they said, to make an inquiry whenever a young child’s death was reported and to try to help the family with nutritional advice. They had left some powdered milk, but they seemed profoundly discouraged by what they had seen and learned. “What can you do with people like that?” they asked no one in particular as they climbed into the landrover for the trip back to the capital.
HAJI “BROOM”.
Before considering the significance of Razak for class relations in Sedaka, it is instructive to introduce his symbolic, mirror-image twin, his fellow outcast from the opposite end of the social pyramid, Haji Broom. My stories about him are all secondhand, for he died some five or six years before I arrived in the village, but they are plentiful.
Not long after I moved to Sedaka, Lebai Hussein invited me to attend a wedding feast for his son Taha, who was marrying a woman from a village near the town of Yan Kechil, six miles to the south. To accommodate the large number of guests, the bride’s family had built a covered pavilion outside their house where the male guests sat. Talk centered on the prospects for the current main-season crop and on how the cancellation of the previous irrigated-season crop due to the drought had postponed many marriages until the main-season crop could be harvested.
Noticing what seemed to be a huge new warehouse on the horizon, I idly asked my neighbor what it was. He told me that it was a rice mill being built by Haji Rasid and his brother Haji Ani. At the mention of these two names most of the other conversations in the pavilion stopped. I had somehow, it was clear, stumbled on a subject of lively interest. For the next hour or so the men regaled one another with stories about the two brothers and especially about their father, Haji Ayub. In fact, as I quickly learned, the name of Haji Ayub was a sure-fire conversational gambit in any company, sufficient to set off a small avalanche of tales.
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There is little doubt that Haji Ayub became in his lifetime the largest owner of paddy land that the state of Kedah (and perhaps the whole country) had ever known. At the time of his death, he was reputed to have owned more than 600 relong (426 acres) of paddy fields in addition to his other holdings of rubber and orchard land. The magnitude of his feat must be viewed against an agrarian setting in which the median holding is less than three relong and a farmer who owns twenty relong is considered to be quite rich. Alarmed at the astonishing speed with which Kedah’s rice land was passing into the hands of Haji Ayub, the State Assembly at one point actually forbade him to acquire more.
The stories that swirl around the career and exploits of Kedah’s rice-land baron, however, touch less on his fabulous holdings per se than on his style of life and the manner in which he built his empire. What makes Haji Ayub such a conversational staple is his legendary cheapness. To judge from the popular accounts I was introduced to that afternoon, Kedah’s richest landowner maintained, by choice, a style of life that was hardly distinguishable from Razak’s. Like Razak, he lived in a broken-down house that had never been repaired or rebuilt.40 Rather than buy manufactured cigarettes, he continued till the end of his life to roll his own peasant cigarettes, using the cheapest tobacco and nipah wrappers he cut from his own plants.41 Like the poorest of the poor, Haji Ayub bought only a single sarong cloth a year and, if you passed him, you would have thought he was the village beggar. Surpassing even Razak, he was said to have eaten nothing but dried fish, except on feast days. Although he could have afforded a luxurious car, and a surfaced road passed near his house, he traveled by foot or on bicycle. Haji Kadir, at this point, brought down the house with a pantomime of Haji Ayub on his ancient Raleigh, weaving back and forth, accompanied by an approximation of the loud squeaking noises only the rustiest bicycles could possibly have made. It was in this fashion that Kedah’s rice baron issued forth to collect rents from scores of tenants who had not already come of their own accord. The spirit of self-denial touched all aspects of his life save one: he had allowed himself three wives.42
The humor of Haji Ayub’s tight-fisted ways depended of course on their contrast with his fabulous wealth. He had clearly become a legend because he represented the apotheosis of the rich miser, the unapproachable standard by [Page 15] which all other rich misers might be judged. In this respect, he was Razak’s precise opposite number. But while Razak’s fame was purely local, Haji Ayub was the pacesetter for the district if not the state of Kedah.
When it came to describing how Haji Ayub acquired all this land, the conversation was just as animated but not nearly so jovial. The whole process is perhaps best captured in the nickname by which he is widely known: Haji “Broom.” Peasants prefer the English word in this case because, I suspect, its sound suggests a single, vigorous sweeping motion. Quite literally, Haji Broom swept up all the land in his path. The force of the word also connotes something akin to what is meant by saying that one has “cleaned up” at poker (that is, swept up all the chips on the table) or “cleaned out” one’s opponents.43 The image is more powerful precisely because it is joined with “Haji,” a term of respect for those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Thus the nickname “Haji Broom” accomplished for Haji Ayub more or less what the nickname “Tun Razak” accomplished for Razak.
Haji Broom’s name came up not long afterward when I was asking a few villagers gathered under Pak Yah’s house about moneylending and credit practices before double-cropping. Nor was explaining to me the notorious padi kunca system of credit and began his account with, “This is the way Haji Broom would do it.” It involved an advance of cash roughly six months before harvest, repayable by a fixed quantity (a kunca) of paddy at harvest time, which typically amounted to an effective annual rate of interest approaching 150 percent. For at least half a century, until 1960, it was the standard form of seasonal credit extended by shopkeepers, rice millers, moneylenders, and not a few wealthy landlords. Virtually all observers of rice farming cited it both as a major reason for persistent poverty in the paddy sector and as the cause of defaults that further concentrated land ownership.44 It was clear, moreover, that in this area Haji Broom and padi kunca were nearly synonymous.
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If the practice of padi kunca skirts perilously close to the strong Islamic injunction against interest, it appears that Haji Broom also became a moneylender pure and simple. Mat “halus” said that Haji Broom regularly lent money, usually in M$100 amounts, for six months, requiring repayment of M$130 or M$140. “His sons, Haji Rasid an
d Haji Ani, do the same thing. It’s sinful.45 They’ve been doing it for seven generations. They only care about this world.” Part of this lending, they said, was secondhand. That is, Haji Broom would take money from large Chinese moneylenders at 40 percent interest and relend it to peasants at 80 percent interest, pocketing the difference. In the eyes of these villagers, the fact that he worked hand-in-glove with the Chinese creditors in town made for an even worse transgression than if he had operated alone. The Chinese practice of lending cash at interest, on the other hand, occasions virtually no commentary; it is expected. After all, it is their normal business practice and nothing in their religion forbids it. For a Malay—a member of their own community, their own religion, and in this case a Haji—to practice usury despite its explicit denunciation in the Koran is to call forth the most profound censure.46
But the keystone of Haji Broom’s fortune, the means by which most land fell into his hands, was the practice of jual janji (literally, promised sale).47 Nor, Pak Yah, and Mat “halus” can each tick off easily the names of families in the area who lost land to Haji Broom in this fashion. The practice worked as follows: Haji Broom would lend a man a substantial sum in return for which the title to all or a part of the borrower’s land would be transferred to Haji Broom. The written contract of sale provided that if, by a specified date, the borrower repaid the initial sum (nearly always less than the market value of the land), he could recover his land.48 For the borrower, the loss of the land was, in principle at least, not irrevocable. In practice, of course, it often was, and most of the large landholdings in Kedah were acquired in this fashion. Haji Broom and a few [Page 17] others, Nor adds, devised a new wrinkle to the procedure. A few days before the final date, he would go into hiding so that a peasant who was lucky enough to have amassed the cash to redeem his land could not find him. Once the date had passed, he would then immediately ask the court to award him the land of the defaulting borrower.49 By such stratagems, Haji Broom turned nearly all his jual janji loans into land sales. As if to dramatize the finality of a loan from Haji Broom, Pak Yah noted that a visitor to the land baron’s house would have found him seated in front of a large cupboard filled from top to bottom with land titles.
Something of a lighthearted competition had developed among the three men to tell the most outrageous stories about Haji Broom. Nor provided the finale by describing how the man treated his own sons. He would come to visit his son Haji Ani, Nor said, bearing a sack of one hundred sapodilla fruits (an inexpensive brownish fruit from the same tropical evergreen that produces chicle), ostensibly as a gift. Before leaving, he would ask Haji Ani to give him one hundred duck eggs in return. “Which is more expensive?” Nor asked me rhetorically. This is not just another story of Haji Broom’s sharp dealing. Here he had violated the spirit of a gift to make a profit, he had actually asked for a return, and he had, above all, exploited his own family for his private gain. Mat “halus” summarized it all by describing his behavior as “the politics of getting ahead.”50
When I remarked that I had never heard of a man so “stingy,” Pak Yah corrected me, “Not stingy but greedy,”51 thereby emphasizing that Haji Broom was not so much husbanding what he already had as plundering others. “He is without shame.” In a sense, this last is the ultimate accusation, one that I have heard applied to Razak as well. For it is shame, that concern for the good opinion of one’s neighbors and friends, which circumscribes behavior within the moral boundaries created by shared values. A man without shame is, by definition, capable of anything.52
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Nor finally makes it clear that it is not Haji Broom’s wealth per se that is offensive but rather the way in which he came by it and subsequently deployed it. “No matter if a person is rich, if he is a good man, the villagers will help him. If he had a feast, villagers would bring gifts of rice, even if he had a hundred gunny sacks in his granary already. But if he is not good-hearted, we don’t want to help him at all.”53 Neither the fortune of Haji Broom nor the poverty of Razak would have become so notorious were it not for the shamelessness of their behavior, a shamelessness that breaks all the rules and makes of them virtual outcasts: the one becoming the symbol for the greedy rich, the other the symbol of the grasping poor.
Only in Haji Broom’s case, however, does the condemnation take on a somewhat mythical, religious dimension. More than once I was told that, when Haji Broom fell ill, his body was so hot that he had to be moved beneath the house, where it was cooler. And when he was borne to the cemetery, they said, smoke (some say fire) was already rising from the freshly dug grave. When I once asked Ghazali, with deliberate naivete, whether this had really happened, he replied, “Maybe, but it could be a fairy tale too.”54 The point of course does not depend on the actual truth value of such reports, but rather on the social fact that villagers should conjure up the fires of hell waiting to consume Haji Broom even before he was finally laid to rest.
Most of that class of wealthy landowners of which Haji Broom is simply the most blatant and therefore serviceable example are also Hajis. That is, they are also men who have fulfilled the fifth “pillar” of Islam by making the pilgrimage to Mecca. Some have in fact made more than a single pilgrimage. The pattern of association between religious status and landowning wealth evidently has its origins in the late nineteenth century when much of the Kedah rice plain was settled by migrants led by respected religious teachers. Land grants, voluntary gifts, and the Islamic tithe allowed much of this class to become something of a landed gentry, while strategic marriage alliances with officials and the lower aristocracy solidified their position.55 By 1916, the Acting British Advisor was [Page 19] complaining about fraud on the part of the larger landholders who had applied for several smaller land grants, using bogus names in order to avoid the risks of applying openly to the State Council for a large grant.56 Class barriers have, however, remained quite permeable, as Haji Ayub’s case illustrates, and a good many wealthy Hajis in the region are comparative newcomers.
The fact that most of the larger Malay landowners, paddy traders, rice millers, and owners of agricultural machinery are also Hajis,57 having amassed sufficient capital to make the pilgrimage, lends the title a highly ambiguous status. On the one hand, there is a genuine veneration for the act of pilgrimage itself and for the religious charisma that pilgrims thereby acquire. On the other hand, not a few of these pilgrims have accumulated the necessary capital for the Haji only by decades of sharp practices (for example, moneylending, taking jual janji land mortgages, renting land at the highest possible rates, being tightfisted with relatives and neighbors, minimizing ceremonial obligations), which most of the community judges abhorrent. Small wonder that villagers should be less than completely worshipful of a returning Haji whose trip to Mecca was financed by their land, their labor, and their rents.
Perhaps this is why the term Haji is often joined in popular parlance to adjectives that are anything but complimentary. Haji Sangkut58 refers literally to a man who wears the cap and robe of a Haji without having made the pilgrimage, but it is also used to describe, behind their backs, actual pilgrims whose subsequent behavior continues to violate what the community would expect of a religious man. Haji Merduk and Haji Karut59 refer to “false” or “fake” Hajis who have made the voyage to Mecca but whose conduct is anything but saintly. Since one of the main purposes of the Haj in village terms is to cleanse oneself of sin and prepare for Allah’s judgment, it is an especially grave transgression—a sign of bad faith—to persist in sinful ways. As Basir says, “God will not accept Hajis like that. They have just wasted their money. There’s no benefit. It’s useless.” The sins of such a Haji are worse than those of ordinary Muslims, Fazil adds, because “He knows it’s wrong but he does it anyway. A false Haji is the very worst.60 He goes to Mecca to wash his sins clean but… God doesn’t like signs like that.”
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Once, as a few of us sat around Samat’s small village store, I asked Tok Kasim whether Haji
Ani was like his father. We had just been discussing a well-known minister who had been dismissed, ostensibly for corruption, and Tok Kasim chose to draw the parallel. “A Haji who cheats and steals is just like a minister who does the same. Muslim punishment is more severe (than civil punishment).61 It’s worse because the rich are enjoined to help the poor. Those who don’t are not afraid of God, they only want to take (not give). When a Muslim does this, it’s the worst possible.”
The title Haji is often heard in conjunction with other adjectives as well, most of them having to do with miserliness. Much as the Eskimos are said to have a great wealth of words to describe varieties of snow that would pass unnoticed in other cultures, the Malay tongue offers a sumptuous linguistic feast of terms to describe every possible degree and variety of tightfistedness.62 Nearly all of them I have heard used at one time or another to modify the noun Haji. The terms most in vogue are Haji Kedekut and Haji Bakhil, each of which means stingy or miserly Haji. One Malay author remembers a chant with which she and her childhood friends used to bait a tightfisted Haji:
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 4
