From ‘Suitable Wives’ To Nation Builders

Wheelchairs bumped into unsuspecting backs and canes stubbed toes as the women congregated in the Orchid Room at the Royal Lake Club here one Sunday afternoon, but there was nary a complaint to be heard.

Instead, each bump elicited an excited cry, or a stubbed toe a tearful hug. Dressed in house colours red, blue, maroon, green and yellow, it had been years, even decades since the women last saw each other when they were all schoolgirls at Malaysia’s (then known as Malaya) first premier boarding school for girls, Malay Girls’ College (MGC).

The women, most of them now in their 70s and 80s, were here for a reunion and the official launch of a book commemorating their years in the school. MGC opened its doors in 1947 in Damansara (now Bukit Damansara) here before closing them in 1962 and moving to a new location in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, along with a new name, Tunku Kurshiah College (TKC). 

At the recent book launch, former MGC student and past president of the Malay Girls College/Tunku Kurshiah College Old Girls Association, Puan Sri Fauzah Mohd Darus, told the ‘Old Girls’ – as former MGC and TKC students are called – that the opening of MGC decades ago carried a clear, if quietly patronising, mission to educate Malay girls of “good birth” so they could one day become “suitable wives” for the young men of Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK), the all-boys boarding school in Perak, which many “future political leaders” of this nation had attended since colonial times.

In his royal address at the opening of MGC in 1947, the then Sultan of Selangor, Sultan Sir Hisamuddin Alam Shah, reminded the new students to appreciate the education and the exposure they would gain from each other, and also to learn “sewing, cooking, etiquette, household management, domestic science, as well as religious studies” for the good of their families and country.

The girls, many of them 10 years old at that time, listened and, probably, quietly rebelled, deciding they had more to offer the nation than just learn domestic science.

LANGUAGE AS THE GREAT UNIFIER

One of them was Prof Emeritus Datuk Nik Safiah Karim, 86. 

When Malaya became an independent nation in 1957, she was in her final year at MGC. But she could not participate in the festivities in nearby Lake Gardens as there were “more English than Malayan teachers at MGC” then, who did not consider the Merdeka celebrations important enough to risk taking the girls out at night.

Sounding a bit wistful, Nik Safiah told Bernama a few brave girls did sneak out to join the festivities.

But it was in the 1960s when Nik Safiah had a chance to have a direct impact on the fledgling nation. Simply said, there was a problem with the language used. Namely, which language the new nation should have as its national language. Should the country keep using English or use a language that carries with it the nation’s new identity, pride and independence?

Nik Safiah said as a linguist, she felt that Malay should be the national language of the new nation. 

“It’s a sign of independence. When you get your independence, you get a new flag, a new song for the country, a new name for the country and then a new (national) language. You cannot (only) use the language of (the colonisers),” she said.

It was easier said than done. In the 1960s and 70s, English dominated classrooms, courts and Parliamentary debates. Even Malay speakers doubted their mother tongue could be a language of science, law and modern media.

“There was a total lack of confidence in the national language, including among the Malay speakers. At that time, the battle was not so much to make the language successful, (we need) acceptance that our language can be the national language (and) that it can perform as a modern language,” she said.

Nik Safiah, who was also the former president of the Malaysian Linguistics Association, cautioned that this did not mean that Malaysians should favour one language over another.

“Fighting to make Malay a modern language does not mean throwing out English, but to promote both languages together. And then the policy was to make Malaysians bilingual, not only proficient in the national language, but in English as well,” she said. 

During the 1960s, Nik Safiah and other like-minded activists and friends, including teachers, linguists and staff from Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, lobbied for Bahasa Melayu to be the national language and the language of instruction in schools.

Part of the work involved developing a vocabulary for Bahasa Melayu. Due to the British occupation earlier and subsequent use of English as the primary medium, Bahasa Melayu had fallen into disuse and was out of date, not suited for modern times. 

Unlike other languages, which have decades and centuries to borrow, adopt and adapt other languages into common usage before being accepted into the official lexicon, Nik Safiah said they only had 30 years to update the Malay language, by borrowing words from the English and Indonesian languages, as well as finding old Malay words that had fallen out of favour.

“We will not be successful until you know and you feel that the language can express scientific ideas,” she said.

Now, many research papers and theses are written and presented in Bahasa Melayu. The national language is the primary language of instruction in mass media, courts and Parliament. Bahasa Melayu is also used in several LLM (Large Language Model) and AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots. It is also a recognised language in Chat-GPT and Gemini.

BUILDING MALAYSIA’S TECH FOUNDATION 

If Nik Safiah gave Malaysia a national voice, Shamsiah Ramli, 80, helped give it a technological one as one of the first computer scientists in Malaysia, if not the first.

After she graduated from MGC in 1962, she boarded a plane to the United Kingdom in 1968, not realising she was about to enter uncharted territory. 

“Back then, I didn’t even know what computer science was. (I took it) because I was good at maths. So I went to Brighton Polytechnic, but found that only two people had registered. Hah!” she said.

Disliking the lack of numbers, she enrolled in Hatfield Polytechnic – today’s University of Hertfordshire – which had more students enrolled in its computer science programme. Shamsiah was the only Malay girl in her class and after graduating in 1972 with a degree in computer science, she returned home a year later, at a time when many Malaysians had never seen a computer.

By 1974, she had joined Institut Teknologi MARA (ITM, now UiTM) as a lecturer. She told Bernama ITM’s computer science department at that time did not even have its own computers. Instead, their computers were on loan from IBM, which she had to share with students.

The computer science department itself was staffed by mathematicians and engineers – and was initially slotted as engineering – which made Shamsiah the first fully-qualified computer scientist on the faculty. She designed the computer science curriculum and set the qualification standards for enrolling students. 

Her proudest achievement was a programme she wrote to manage student intakes across ITM’s many courses, replacing a chaotic manual process with a flexible system that could adapt to changing requirements. 

Later, in the 18 years as head of ITM’s computer centre, as the computer science department was called then, Shamsiah developed staff and student record systems, even consolidating data for a Cabinet report that restructured salary schemes nationwide. The hours were long. Shamsiah said that often, she had to drive home at 2 am from Shah Alam to Petaling Jaya, but the work was important.

“Whatever to do with computers, that was her,” said her daughter Nur Suzeebaayah Jalani.

Shamsiah laughed at the idea of being the “mother of UiTM’s computer scientists”, but was nevertheless thrilled to think of the impact she may have had.

When asked about the old idea that MGC students were trained only to be “educated wives”, she dismissed it outright. “I don’t understand that. That was their mentality then. (I’m my) own entity,” she said. 

BEYOND ‘WIVES OF MCKK BOYS’ 

The contrast between intent and outcome at the Malay Girls College is inspiring. The school, modelled on elite British boarding institutions, sought to mould polished companions for future statesmen. Instead, its graduates became leaders in their own right. Over the years, MGC and TKC have produced many of Malaysia’s firsts and female firsts, including the country’s first astrophysicist, first female deputy prime minister and first female chief justice.

Rather than being the stereotypical “woman behind every successful man”, Nik Safiah and Shamsiah credit their pioneering ways to their husbands, who did not stand in their way but instead encouraged them to seek success on their own terms, something far from guaranteed even today. 

Neither defined herself by their marriage, which in the Malaysia of the 1960s and 70s, was quietly radical and helped serve as an example to generations of other women.

“We can look at what was perceived to be our role then and we can rejoice in the fact that we have gone far beyond that expectation,” said Nik Safiah.

“I think now there is no question about Malaysian girls being capable.”

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