Patusan and the Malays

Abstract

One of the books Conrad (1857–1924) had read on the subject of the Malays is Major Frederick McNair’s (1828–1910) Perak and the Malays. It is tempting to consider Lord Jim as Conrad’s romantic and no less compelling account of a fictional native state and its inhabitants, Patusan and the Malays as it were. Cedric Watts has pointed out that Mohammed Bonso, Doramin, Tamb Itam and Tunku Allang are characters gleaned from McNair’s narrative (Watts, 1986: 363–4). In Lord Jim, Rajah/Tunku Allang’s exclamation of ‘You hear, my people! No more of these little games’ (LJ 250) echoes one made by the Sultan of Salangore to his followers in McNair’s book (McNair, 1972: 289). In contrast to a work which is widely recognized as belonging to the realm of ethnographic reliability (McNair having witnessed the customs and manners of the Perak Malays first-hand), Patusan and its Malays are Conrad’s conjuration of fragmentary images ‘rescued’ by the writer from obscurity into the light for the multitudes. In this chapter, I show that Conrad’s perception of Malay political culture and statecraft is historically informed and proves pivotal to his romantic construction of the Malay and the white rajahs of his Eastern tales. This fidelity to the facts of history duly fulfils the need ‘to envelop [unfamiliar things] in their proper atmosphere of actuality’ (NB 129–30).