What these UPM academics did was merely further the cause of racial and religious superiority and to further entrench “ketuanan” (supremacy) principles.

Preeta Samarasan wrote - “This... is unbelievable. I knew something of the audacity of our rewriters of history, but rewriting history for our local textbooks is one thing, and rewriting it for international academic journals that should be peer-reviewed is quite another.”

Desensitisation

What “ketuanan” narratives do is desensitise people who subscribe to any kind of concept like ethics, integrity, and fidelity to principles other than racial and religious dogma. This is about indoctrination, not edification.

And really, the Malay “junk” article would be right at home in National Civics Bureau-type programmes. It reinforced narratives that the Malay culture was as advanced as those ancient cultures whose people inhabited “Malay lands”.

It assuages feelings of insecurity when it comes to the expansiveness of Indian and Chinese cultures. What we are talking about here is not education but rather propaganda. We are not talking about history but myth creation.

And this is why a work of fiction like “Mentega Terbang” is so hurtful to these people. It strips bare the lie that a specific society is immune from questioning or doubt. It strips bare the lie that other religions are a threat to the way of life of a specific community.

It is a narrative that challenges assumptions instead of enabling them.

The Malay junk research paper comforts those who believe that Malay history and culture are divorced from everything else in this country. It enables certain people to take comfort in a fictional history of a land that never was but which is claimed to be the sole province of the Malays.

Malays are constantly told that they owe everything to the non-Malays but what narratives like these hope to achieve is a foundation of independence beyond the messy communal relationships both economic and cultural that the “pendatang” (immigrants) bring to the table.

What “ketuananism” has done especially when it comes to the arts is to destroy anything that references a diverse Malay culture from the political landscape and replace art and history with mythological narratives of a people who never were.

Orwell said: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Remember that.