Painting a Portrait of the Real Little Nonya

If someone went to ask you and your friends what is a Peranakan, chances are your answers may vary from a description of their scrumptious food to a brief history lesson. However, the one image that seems to explode into our imagination is that of the little Nonya, a character from the popular MediaCorp drama of the same name. Try as we might to put forward our academic credentials our minds always seem to harken back to that image of Jeanette Aw in a Nonya Kebaya, an image that has always been visually Chinese.

But what if we were to tell you that this image of the Peranakan or the Straits people only shows us a part of what the early Peranakan community looked like and that various other groups of mixed Malay heritage have contributed to the history of Southeast Asia? Today we would like to introduce you dear reader to the Jawi Peranakans, a community whose members pioneered some of the first Malay newspapers in Singapore and whose actress graced the silver screen.

For this article, we will define the term Peranakan as a name used to refer to any group born of a fusion between indigenous cultures and foreign cultures within the strait cities.

Origins of the Jawi Peranakans The Jawi Peranakans were the descendants of then-foreign traders and local Malay communities, but unlike the Peranakans of the public imagination these trades hailed not from southern China but from India and the Middle East, and the fusion of these cultures created an altogether unique culture in the straits. Much like Chinese Peranakans, Jawi Peranakans absorbed aspects of the Malay culture not least of the Malay language (A trading lingua Franca at the time) but retained many cultural elements of cultures from their previous homeland.

What is interesting about the Jawi Peranakan community, and to a certain extent apparent in all Peranakan communities is that the creation of this new culture can not simply be described as a simple fusion of two cultures, one initially foreign and one indigenous. Rather we may find that the Jawi Peranakan community like any unique cultural community were as much a product of social and economic factors unique to that particular time and place as they were a product of the various Arab, Malay, Indian and Persian cultures that preceded them.

A melding of familiar recipes Jawi Peranakans like Chinese Peranakans and probably all Southeast Asians loved a good meal and incorporated familiar flavours with newly acquired tastes. Jawi Peranakans have devised some curious recipes such as Nasi Kenduri and Nasi Lemuni which take inspiration from the traditional Biryani but utilise ingredients such as saffron, a popular ingredient in Persian cooking (Add one other dish with Malay element) Theatre (Boria)

The Boria play is an excellent example of a tradition that was localised in the straits by the Jawi Peranakan community. While the Boria play was initially a Persian cultural and religious construct that presented the familiar and sombre scene of the prophet Muhammad's grandson Husayn's death at the hands of the caliph Yazid at Karbala, researcher, Datuk Wazir Jahan Karim had argued that the play evolved into a secular form to appeal to a wider audience in strait society that included the migrant Muslims, local Malays, the Jawi Peranakan and Jawi Pekan. The Boria was also used as a means by which the local community would voice their opinions and criticisms regarding colonial rules.

From this, we can see that the Boria was a clear example of how a central cultural pillar of the jawi peranakan community was formed not simply as a simple combination of foreign cultures but as a unique art form that evolved to meet the tastes of the local population as well as to provide a platform with a unique political for political representation.

Notable Jawi Peranakans Beyond the contributions of the community, several individual Jawi Peranakans made their mark in various strait cities. Amongst the various sung and unsung cultural giants of the community one man in particular stands out and to not discuss his life in this article would be a cultural crime. Munshi Abdullah was a cultural giant, born of Yemeni and south Indian parents, he is well known for his prowess as a writer and for being the author of the Hikayat Abdullah, an autobiographical work in Malay.

In this piece, Abdullah not only described the societies of Malacca and Singapore but also provided his opinion regarding various communities and personalities such as Sir Standford Raffles, Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor and the Chinese trading community. On an individual level, the work is a testament to how Munshi Abdullah like many Jawi Peranakans held unique perspectives regarding current events.

Munshi Abdullah's ancestors may have mainly hailed from Yemen and the sub-continent, but his use of the Malay language demonstrates his localisation. In many ways, it can be said that while his ancestry played a part in shaping his identity, the Malay language was the medium for that expression and current events in the strait cities provided the fertile ground by which his identity was shaped.

In conclusion, while the Jawi Peranakan community was a unique blend of various cultural elements, it was also fermented in the oven of political and economic movements unique to its time.

If anything can be said about the Jawi Peranakan community, it is that the uniqueness of their community stems from the simplicity of cultural formation. As much as we like to see our respective cultures as unchanging and timeless, the truth is that the only constant is change and the formation of the Jawi Peranakan community was simply another development in the long history of mankind, as is the formation and evolution of every culture and individual on earth.

That being said it would be foolish for us to cling to stereotyped views of what a Peranakan is when more than anything the term Peranakan is a testament to the static nature of culture.

*Peranakan is a term for straits people but these people come from all over the world.