The Sri Lankan Malays, Melayu Bahasa and changing language attitudes

The origin of the Sri Lankan Malays.

Sri Lanka’s Malys, who comprise a community of over 50,000 persons, are largely descendent from political exiles (nobles and chiefs), soldiers, convicts serving the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in a military capacity or otherwise and freed slaves from the East Indies and the Malayan peninsula who were brought over to the island during the Dutch period.[see Lost Cousins. The Malays of Sri Lanka. B. A. Hussainmiya (1987)]

Contrary to the widespread belief that the Sri Lankan Malays are descended from the Malays of the Malayan peninsula, the vast majority of local Malays are of Javanese and East Indies extraction. The Malay Soldiers (who comprised by far the majority of the immigrants) included not only Javanese and Malayans, but also Amboinese, Balinese, Bandanese, Madurese, and other regional groups from the archipelago. However, the majority of these Soldiers, as well as a significant number of political exiles originally hailed from Java. This policy of bringing in Malay Soldiers was also continued by the British. In 1813 the British authorities brought into the island over 400 madurese soldiers accompanied by their women and children, followed in 1816 by about 228 Javanese and their families.[Hussainmiya.1987]

The local Malays commonly refer to themselves as Orang Java (people of Java) and Orang Melayu (the Malay people). That they are largely of Javanese extraction is also suggested by the Sinhala term for the Malays, Jā-minissu (Javanese people) as well as the Tamil term for them, Cāvakar (Javanese). The Moors refer to them as Java manusar (Javnese people). Whereas the early malay settlers were collectively referred to as Oosterlingen or ‘Easterners’ by the Dutch, they were later known as Javaans. This would indicate that with the passage of time, the Javanese element among the Malays gained a pre-eminent, if not a pre-dominant position over the rest. The fact that the headquarters of the VOC was situated in Batavia (Jakarta in Java) may have also contributed to this situation.

The Malays of Sri Lanka, like their brethren in Malaysia and Indonesia have preserved their Mongolo-Polynesian physical type to a great extent, including among other traits, the epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid which gives the impression of slanted eyes, flat, squat nose, high cheekbones, yellow-brownish skin, strait hair and sparsity of body and facial hair. Many of this traits, including eye and nose from which were pronounced among the early Malay population of the island as evident in old pictures and reports such as those of Cordiner (1807) have however been modified or have disappeared among a significant proportion of today’s Malays, evidently due to intermarriage with local Moor and Sinhalese folk. Such intermarriage seems to have been common ever since the early part of the twentieth century or perhaps even earlier, for Denham has noted in his census report (1912) that the Malays intermarried with Ceylon Moors and Sinhalese.