Malaysia’s hidden riches
The cultural richness of Malaysia’s crosscultural Peranakan communities is slowly fading thanks to globalisation.
IT is 6am in the morning, and Suppiah K. has been up since 4am helping his wife prepare his great-grandfather’s favourite dishes, including Kuih Tekan and prawns fried in belacan. Suppiah is paying close attention because the recipes have to be just so.
It’s a lot of effort, considering his great-grandfather passed away in 1972.
The occasion is Parchu Kuih Muih, or Parchu, a slowly fading yearly Chitty tradition of offering prayers and food to honour their ancestors.
“Whatever our ancestors like to eat, we’ll have to source and prepare it, by hook or by crook, to make them happy,” he says, just before heading out on his motorbike to find two durians, a month before the fruit’s season begins.
The ceremonial dishes vary from family to family, depending on the recipes passed down, and can range from 10 to 20 dishes. Every year, they are presented in the exact same way – atop banana leaves, next to other treats the ancestors loved in their lifetimes (cigarettes and beer in Suppiah’s great-grandfather’s case).
A ‘rojak’ race
The Chittys, also known as Indian Peranakans, came about when traders from Tamil Nadu and local Malay women intermarried during the Malaccan sultanate.
Their unique culture is a seamless mix of Malay and Tamil – they celebrate Parchu, with its Hindu practice of ancestor worship, and communicate in a Malay-Tamil patois. Men wear sarongs, and women kebayas. They don’t speak fluent Tamil.
“I don’t see myself as Malay or Tamil,” says Suppiah. “I am Chitty. We practise Malay customs, we eat with our hands.”
They are also Hindu, and decorate their homes with mango leaves, as their ancestors did back in Tamil Nadu.
However, this unique culture is in danger of dying out, as more and more Chittys assimilate into mainstream Malay or Indian culture.
Suppiah, 66, is one of the few Chitty people living in Kampung Chitty, Melaka – the last remaining Chitty settlement in Malaysia.
According to sociologist Patrick Pillai, Malaysia’s crosscultural history, seen especially in the Peranakan community, is often overlooked by most Malaysians.
“There is far more cross-cultural mingling, sharing and co-dependence among us than we care to recognise, admit or celebrate,” says the author of Yearning To Belong ,abookon Malaysia’s Indian Muslims, Chittys, Portuguese Eurasians, Peranakan Chinese and Baweanese.
“These communities have at least two important lessons for Malaysians: they remind us of our long history of diversity, shared histories and cultures, and the need to overcome our fear of acculturation.”
6.5km away from Kampung Chitty lies another last bastion for a separate community – the Malaccan Portuguese, or Kristang, a creole ethnic group of mixed Portuguese and Malaccan descent.
It’s the kind of small friendly neighbourhood where everyone knows everyone and people drop by their friends’ houses for tea and a chat in MalayPortuguese patois.
“It’s our secret language,” says Ann D’Costa, a resident and member of their traditional dance troupe O Maliao Maliao 1511. “It’s part of our Malaysian history. And it’s also fun to speak!”
Their dance troupe comprises of senior citizens who perform dances as cross-cultural as they are: the branyo and farapeira they inherited from their Portuguese forefathers, influenced by the Malay Dondang Sayang and joget.
But Ann’s unique hybrid heritage is facing decline. The dance troupe is made up of elderly people, one or two with knee problems, because the young aren’t participating.
The younger generation aren’t as interested in learning Portuguese dance, they prefer hip hop or K-pop,” she said. Even the language is dying out.
“When I speak in Kristang, they can understand what I say, but a lot of the younger generation can’t answer.”
A common problem
Suppiah is facing the same issue. His Parchu recipes have no one to be passed onto – his son has yet to learn how to prepare for the ceremony. The same goes for most of those in his village, he says. “It’s the elderly who practise the tradition and the young that come and eat.
“Young people these days prefer to eat fast food, they are not interested in learning how to cook Chitty food, which can only be found in the Chitty Village,” he says.
Chitty cuisine, much like other Peranakan cuisines, is heavily influenced by Malay cooking, with Indian elements and heavy use of belacan (fermented shrimp paste). Their cakes bear close resemblance to those of their Chinese Peranakan counterparts.
A lack of interest, coupled with cultural assimilation, means even this last Chitty vil-
lage is in danger of closing down altogether.
There are currently 10 to 20 families still living in the village, and a number of them aren’t even Chitty.
On top of that, the youth are moving away for economic reasons, and women are marrying outside the village and adopting their spouses’ cultural practices instead, said Suppiah.
“We Chittys came from mixed marriages so I have no problem with marrying other races as long as the youth don’t forget where they came from,” he said.
“We are now a few, but soon we might be a zero.”
All the way in Terengganu, Mek Da, 73, is the last “Kueh” (traditional cakes) and “Kaychiap” (traditional sauce) maker in her Chinese Peranakan village.
She doesn’t have the energy to continue for much longer – and her grandson, Yap Yik Meng, 26, is in a race against time to learn her special recipes.
But he has never learned to speak the Chinese Peranakan dialect – he converses with his grandmother in Teochew Hokkien.
But hearteningly, Yap is interested in finding out more about where he came from.
He has returned to his grandmother’s house in Kampung Tiruk, Kuala Terengganu to study her art of Kaychiap-making.
The process is arduous – it takes about 10 hours just to simmer the concoction – and Mek Da’s standards are high. After completing one batch, she has a taste, “It’s just okay.”
But Yap is undeterred.
“As I grow up, I’m placing a higher importance on retracing my heritage. In Chinese we have a saying, ‘the leaf returns to its roots’, which describes the urge to return to one’s origins,” he said.
Yap is a rare case, though. “The younger generation are all westernised and very modern,” says Yap Chuan Bin, Terengganu Chinese Peranakan Association secretary.
“Wearea rojak (mixed) race, but we are losing the last of our rojakness. That rojakness is what makes our cultures so special and soon it will be gone.”
Reviving culture through capitalism
Yap plans to perfect his grandmother’s Kaychiap recipe and mass produce it for the Malaysian market. Thinking like a true entrepreneur, he chose it because of its long shelf life and unique flavour.
“It hit me one day when I was having a meal at my grandmother’s house,” he says. “I realised we didn’t have these flavours back in Kuala Lumpur, which is a shame.”
He hopes to keep at least the flavour of Terengganu’s Chinese Peranakan culture alive – and he’s not the only one to resort to marketing a culture in order to keep it alive.
The Portuguese community is looking to tourism to keep their culture relevant. According to former village head Richard Hendricks, they hope to capitalise on their settlement’s celebrations such as Christmas and Festa San Pedro, a Portuguese festival in honour of Saint Peter, to draw in paying crowds.
“We want to keep our youngsters here and show them that there is an economy in their heritage,” he says.
In June, the village committee applied for state funding for their annual Festa De San Pedro, a festival in honour of Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, in hopes of attracting more tourists.
Pillai doesn’t entirely agree with capitalising on culture.
“I see the necessity in preserving heritage, but you don’t want to lose the essence of what you are celebrating for the sake of preservation.”
So does that mean the battle is lost either way?
“Only if we stop fighting,” he says.
Meanwhile, in Malacca, Suppiah sits in his village.
He faces the knowledge that unless the battle is won, there will be no one to prepare Kuih Tekan or cigarettes for his great-grandfather in the future.