DEC 5 — Malaysia is a country that values its history.
No one can deny this and we have evidence to support it: How many countries in this world will make it compulsory for high school students to pass history papers in exams, giving it a status on par with Bahasa Malaysia? You won’t get your SPM cert if you fail history, no matter how many A’s you’ve scored in other subjects.
Students are made to commit to memory a whole list of names: Parameswara, Ubaidullah, Munshi Abdullah and many more significant years — 1511, 1824, 1957 — along with a whole string of key events.
The students’ heads will be packed with history. But where is our civilisation?
Part of the civilisation could have been bulldozed for a new housing project.
What I am talking about is the ruins of candi number 11 at Lembah Bujang, in Kedah.
The 1300-year-old temple could have been one of the earliest relics on this land and even the whole of Southeast Asia. In a more fashionable term, it is a cultural heritage.
1,300 years! If you marvel at the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, for your information it was built in the 12th century A.D., about 900 years from now. Whereby the official recorded history of Malay civilisation began with Parameswara, still shy of 600 years old. As for the history of our nation-building, it is a mere 60 years!
The ancient ruins littered in the Bujang Valley, including ancient Hindu ruins and porcelain sculptures, could be dated up to 2,000 years back.
The Bujang ruins were first discovered by the British in the 1920s. The many relics that were unearthed, including the ruins of scores of Hindu stupas, have brought back the history of this land by at least a thousand years.
Of course, they are nothing as spectacular as Angkor Wat or Borobudur in central Java.
But what we care is not just another sightseeing spot. We are talking about history and civilisation!
The human relics at the Bujang Valley attest to the fact that civilisation indeed existed on this land way before the arrival of the Malay and Islamic civilisations.
Traders from India who sailed across the Indian Ocean into the Malacca Straits, saw Mount Jerai before anything else. As their boats were anchored, they landed at a place between Mount Jerai and the Muda River, i.e. the Bujang Valley, doing spice, timber and mineral business with people either living locally or coming here from other regions. Some of them later settled here.
They brought their culture and religion to this land and temples were subsequently built to pay homage to their gods, adorned with various sculptures. Economic activities were carried out here, and infrastructure started to take shape, developing gradually into a social entity that has later evolved into a nation.
Historical accounts from India, Arabia and China did carry the records of Bujang Valley in Kedah as a once thriving commercial and political enclave.
Over the centuries that followed, the Bujang Valley gradually faded into oblivion, probably owing to military invasions or demise of commercial activities. Nevertheless, it did leave behind traces of history, as well as civilisation.
The scores of unearthed temple ruins tell us that this place used to be a point of convergence between the East, West and local cultures, mingling and moulding into a unique economic, political and cultural landscape of its own.
Its value is more than just the names of dead men, years and events. It’s about organic legacy of a bygone civilisation.
Ironically, we value history subject in schools, but despise our inherited legacy. From the federal level National Heritage Department, to the state-level land offices and local administrative authorities, civilisation is visualised as dead ruins, unprotected, unsupervised, and eventually levelled by developers unaware that they were part of the country’s “historical legacy”.
Beneath the houses that will rise above them is our buried civilisation. — Sin Chew Daily
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.
