Presenting Plural Pasts

This article examines the Bujang Valley in Kedah as a critical site for analysing the politics of heritage and historical narration in multi-ethnic, Islamising Malaysia. Once a major Hindu-Buddhist entrepôt within the Indian Ocean and South China Sea networks, the Valley has become a contested arena in which state agencies, scholars, and civil society actors negotiate what counts as ‘national history’ and who is authorised to represent the past. Drawing on archaeological research, museum displays, heritage legislation, tourism planning, and media debates, the article shows how the pre-Islamic material past is incorporated into official frameworks. It argues that the Hindu-Buddhist legacy is not entirely denied, but re-coded as cultural and civilisational heritage, emphasising trade, exchange, and cosmopolitanism, rather than as religious or normative history. By situating Bujang within the broader scholarship on Buddhism in Malaysia, the article argues that heritage governance operates as a form of temporal governance, organising historical continuity and rupture to preserve the normative centrality of Islam while admitting plural pasts in carefully bounded forms.