June 7, 2021

In “Against The Grain: Malay Studies and the School of Autonomous Knowledge” in The Edge Malaysia, Professor Syed Farid Alatas (Departments of Sociology and Malay Studies) writes about the history behind the School of Autonomous Knowledge, likely the only school of thought in the human sciences to have emerged in the Malay world.

At the NUS Department of Malay Studies, the Malay world is broadly regarded to be the entire Malay-Indonesian Archipelago comprising Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand and southern Philippines. The department is also interested in areas with substantial Malay minorities such as Singapore, and countries to which the Malay diaspora had spread such as Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and South Africa.

The department was first established during the 1952/53 academic session and upon the independence of Malaya, was transferred to the University of Malaya. NUS, the Singapore division of the University of Malaya, was only re-established in 1962.

The Department of Malay Studies was re-established in 1967 with Professor Syed Hussein Alatas as its first head of department. With Prof Syed Hussein and other faculty members at its helm being highly conscious of intellectual imperialism, the department chose to promote a critical perspective in the study of the Malays, taking a more social scientific approach rather than being more language and literature-based as Malay Studies in Malaysia and Indonesia tended to be. Research and teaching did not simply accept perspectives that were dominant in British or other Western studies of the Malays, or those that were promoted by governments or politicians in the region. Scholars in the department worked on the critique and reconstruction in history and the social sciences, an example being Prof Syed Hussein’s critical and non-Eurocentric account of the thinking and deeds of Raffles.

Prof Syed Hussein urged scholars to develop an autonomous social science tradition, a tradition of knowledge production that was free of Eurocentric, colonial, and other biased orientations. Though Prof Syed Hussein did not speak of a school of thought, his ideas for an autonomous social science tradition have influenced scholars for two generations. Various scholars and writers of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, including Prof Syed Farid himself, are all part of this autonomous social science tradition in their various fields and can be said to represent the School of Autonomous Knowledge.

Read the article here.