Imperial Enclosure, Literary Resistance: The Case of Ishak Haji Muhammad’s Putera Gunung Tahan (1938)

In 1938, the Malay anticolonial writer and politician, Ishak Haji Muhammad (alias “Pak Sako”), published his novel Putera Gunung Tahan, presenting readers with a seemingly straightforward epistemological struggle between two entities. One side is harmoniously acclimatised to nature, while the other is culturally and morally estranged from it. Throughout the narrative, a strategic appeal to the magically indigenous in the face of colonial encroachment is made. The inclusion of the fairytale-like qualities prompts readers to treat it as an allegorical fantasy or species of magical realism. The sustained antinomy inherent in its mode of storytelling is a mimesis of historic contestations of legitimacy that transforms the text into, among other things, a tool of anticolonial resistance to technologies of enclosure in twentieth-century Malaya. Interdisciplinary ecocritical approaches linking land and literature—geographical and literary forms, respectively—reveal how storytelling works as a literary counterstrategy to the colonial subjectification resulting from enclosure. At the same time, the text subsumes indigeneity under the sign of the native, thus problematically replicating a paternalistic colonial logic of racial hierarchisation. By deploying tropes of indigenous authenticity and making appeals to nature and the natural, Putera Gunung Tahan ironises its critique even as it works to legitimise counter-colonial discourse.