Narrating Physical Diseases in the Malayan Landscape: Hugh Clifford’s “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”

Diseases such as SARS, Ebola, Covid-19, and many others have swept across the world recently at pandemic and epidemic levels. These have impacted people regardless of ethnicity, while at the same time exposing glaring inequalities in treatment, separating those who can afford medical attention from those who cannot. These inequalities are due, in the main, to social and economic factors that were abundantly laid bare in mass media coverage. In the early 20th century, by contrast, disease and its treatment served to promote the colonialist agenda, with writers using physical and psychological depictions of the colonised body’s diseases in order to advance its fabricated “othering”. Among such colonial writers was Hugh Clifford (1866-1941), Resident and Governor in Malaya during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Documenting his experiences in Malaya in his short stories, Clifford constructed particular ontological realities regarding Malayan subjects for his European audiences, promoting a fabricated perception of their “difference”. In his short story “A Daughter of the Muhammadans”, published in his 1916 collection The Further Side of Silence, Clifford investigates the visually striking corruption of leprosy, juxtaposed against the wholesome, affectionate nature of Minah, the female Malayan subject. Based on the context of medicinal advancements, I will be proposing that Clifford’s physical and psychological depictions of the Malayan body’s diseases led to its constructed “othering”, especially through the furtherance of stereotypes of the Malayan subject that are inherent in his work.