Salina Christmas

In Sanskrit, it means the state of equanimity and stillness. One achieves spiritual liberation at this stage. One’s ego is detached from the physical body, leading to inner peace. In Malay language, this has come to mean “to rest in eternal peace” or bersemadi, a polite way of saying that someone passes away.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the saha world is the physical world that we live in, where we endure the cycle of birth and death, and other types of suffering. It’s the opposite of nirvana.

The main pillar of a Malay or Javanese house. It serves as an architectural function as well as a mystical function as the ‘heart’ of the house.

A Javanese dish of cooked soya beans that are fermented and then sliced in pieces. The pieces are often wrapped in leaves.

The earthenware stone jar called tempayan is named after the alcoholic brew tapai, meaning the container to brew tapai. Islamisation means tempayan remains only but a name for these jars. The jars, in various sizes, are used to keep water, rice and other household items instead. See ‘tapai’.

Sweet, fermented rice or tapioca. Within indigenous culture where alcohol is still consumed, tapai is the alcoholic brew made from rice or tapioca. The alcoholic version can be called tuak, although tuak is also made of fermented coconut nectar.

On 16 June 1948, Communist insurgents murdered three British plantation managers and one Chinese contractor in Perak, and another Chinese person in Johore. In the River Siput murders, Elphil Estate manager A E Walker was shot at his office desk at 8.30 am. Less than an hour later, Phin Soon Estate manager John Allison and…

Possibly Hokkien for “newcomer’. Refers to Southern Chinese migrants, all of them men, who came to Malaya in the 1800s as indentured labourers. They came from the regions of Fujian and Kwantung to escape famine, political instability or persecution. Upon arrival in Malaya, they spent one year as indentured labourers, chained to the snakeheads, before…

Literally means ‘new brother’. A convert to Islam. The Malays, following the Austro-Polynesian custom, expand this to mean ‘to be a new Malay’. Regardless of ethnic background and DNA, a person who becomes saudara baru is considered a Malay and will be protected at all costs in times of trouble.

The Federation of Malaya Police began in Penang in 1806. In the 1870s, at the height of the Larut Wars in Perak, the Perak Armed Police was formed. The Federated Malay States Police, formed in 1896, was the body that looked after the states of Perak, Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang. Under the British system,…

A direct translation of the Malay term selepang merah. Selepang is a type of shawl or kesa draped diagonally over one’s shoulder. Merah means red. This is the name of a group of Malay vigilante groups that formed and reformed several times during Malaya’s and Malaysia’s tumultuous periods of the State of Emergency and racial…