Dr. Muhammad Suhail Mohamed Yazid, Harvard University
Economic & Political History Review, Volume I, Number II, October 2025
Editorial Summary
In Performing Sovereignty: Political Authority in the Postcolony”, Muhammad Suhail Mohamed Yazid examines how sovereignty in postcolonial societies was not only a legal or political reality but a performed and symbolically represented practice. Focusing on the British Malay and Singapore, he challenges Partha Chatterjee’s dichotomy of the “spiritual” and “material” domains of sovereignty, arguing that these spheres were deeply intertwined. In Malaya, colonial rule coexisted with Malay kingship, where rituals and royal pageantry infused the colonial state with indigenous legitimacy. In Singapore, the invention of the Yang di-Pertuan Negara transformed a colonial office into a locally resonant symbol of sovereignty, blending British institutional forms with Malay royal imagery. Through these hybrid forms, Yazid shows that sovereignty was continuously negotiated and performed—its meaning shaped through ceremony, representation, and political culture. This performance revealed both the persistence of colonial structures and the creative agency of the colonised in defining postcolonial authority.
Introduction
Sovereignty has to be represented. While at the conceptual level it requires imagination, the idea of liberation from subjugation or the freedom to self-govern has to be manifested, externalised, and signified—in daily interactions, in action, and in symbols. Sovereignty has to exist in concrete conditions.
Since the era of colonial domination, the dependents of Euro-American empires had long struggled to be recognised as ‘sovereign‘. They sought equality in status relative to other nations, especially to their former colonisers. After the shift in power relations due to the Second World War, their projects ushered what came to be known as the ‘global age of decolonisation’. This is a familiar story. Nationalist leaders across Asia and Africa built their politics on the promise of universal self-determination, the cornerstone principle of the United Nations (UN) system of nation-states, itself cobbled together from the ruins of the liberal international order during the interwar period (Getachew 2019). Throughout the colonised world, nationalist leaders of different political persuasions found creative ways to represent the newfound sovereignty of their national communities while integrating colonial systems into this unequal postwar international system (Kelly and Kaplan 2001). From Cyprus to Singapore, their projects were embedded in national conditions yet international in scale as they too pushed for planetary-wide ambitions to subvert persistent inequalities in a world dominated by former imperial powers.
Even as the territorialised nation-state gradually became the hegemonic form of political community, multiple ways of expressing sovereignty ran parallel—at times in unison and other times in contradiction. Political culture came to be a critical medium for expressing national sovereignty, particularly intransitionary situations in (post)colonial societies. Partha Chatterjee has contended that in ‘most of the world’ (non-White colonial societies), the colonised defended sovereignty over the ‘spiritual domain’ despite living under regimes dominated by White colonisers. This domain can be defined as the cultural and symbolic, the realm of language, customs, and family. This was contrasted with the ‘material domain’ of the state in which the colonial power was paramount—the realm of the economy, technology, and political representation, or the plane on which the institutional and bureaucratic operated (Chatterjee 2004). While this dual framework restores agency to the colonised, one should be sceptical of this bifurcation playing out so neatly in the day-to-day or in every colonial context for that matter. What if the ‘material’ itself was the wellspring of the ‘spiritual’, and the ‘spiritual’ of the ‘material’? Below, with respect to the historical experience of Malaya and Singapore, I complicate this uneasy dialectic and suggest that in societies undergoing decolonisation, the division between what constitutes ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ cannot be taken too seriously in representing sovereignty.
Turning the ‘Spiritual’ into the ‘Material’
Chatterjee’s schema blurs in the British Malaya because Malay sovereignty harmonised with the colonial state following both violent and non-violent encounters between the British and local sultans. ‘Indirect rule’ was largely the norm as the colonial power left the spiritual domain of customs and religion under the jurisdiction of the Malay rulers, yet the British coopted local royaltyas an efficient component of colonial government. While themodern colonial state usurped almost all political, administrative,and economic functions of the precolonial polity (kerajaan) andcreated new mechanisms for control, its existence required the active participation of the rulers through ceremonial councils, meetings, and durbars. The political ceremony, then, was not aroutinised circus trick. It emerged as a critical medium for authorityas elites of the colonised society became the embodied componentof the colonial state—in other words, the British only governed in the names of the rulers, with the colonial state existing as a composite entity.
They might have been rubber stamps, but the rulers wereelevated, salaried colonial officials who enjoyed the trappings of royalty. They jealously defended their spiritual domain of sovereignty from the colonial power, negotiating their exclusive rights in shaping matters pertaining to Islam and Malay traditions. Since the precolonial Malay kingship operated mainly through the political ceremony and sovereignty was built on ‘soul-stuff’ endowed by god to the ruler, adapting precolonial traditions, pomp,and rituals—elements of political culture—sanctified the colonial state with the astral quality of Malay sovereignty. These symbolic conventions served as a crucial vector for the consolidation ofBritish overlordship, as marrow to the skeleton of the colonial state. The socio-political order that emerged signalled continuityespecially in the eyes of the governed; it was an odd political love song between the elites of the colonised society and the coloniser(Amoroso 2014). In short, at the onset of the colonial state, sacred and secular, ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ were co-constitutive of the other.
This approach to colonial governance maintained the socio-political structure of precolonial Malay society in the peninsular kingdoms of Malaya. What took place in this part of the worldfurther resonates with David Cannadine’s arguments about empire as a cross-territorial superstructure stratified according to class(Cannadine 2002). Through pageantry, the bestowal of honours, and ritualistic splendour, social hierarchies were perpetuated and integrated into a larger imperial order in which the British monarch reigned at its apex. This idea of a universal foreign sovereign also did not negate Malay sovereignty. In fact, the alliance between local and foreigner was a fundamental theme in Malay political thought, furnishing a political idiom of legitimisation, recognition, and authority (Ho 2013).
Till today, the symbolic practices through the public ceremonial remain an important signifier of sovereignty in many contexts. In the everyday, they communicate a certain socio-political structure in the lived realities of human beings—think national parades, flag raising ceremonies, award investitures, and on the international scale, conferences of national leaders, along with their grand photo ops. Importantly, these pompous political displays represent a nation’s state of being. These patterns tie the individual to a particular society, and within the global cluster of sovereign states, to a certain global order.
In the context of postwar decolonisation within the British world system, the dyarchical model of government allowed underthe 1919 Government of India Act served as a useful template for many colonies as Britain began to devolve powers. This pedagogical model served as a ‘Commonwealth schoolroom’ in which Britain trained the colonised for ‘responsible government’ in a way that both preserved British initiative for decolonisation and ensured the rise of nationalist leaders friendly to British interests (Darwin 2006). In the second half of the 1940s, the non-White ex-colonies of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon opted not to restore local monarchical systems and temporarily retained the British Crown as sovereign in the postcolonial state. Ghana, in the meantime, preserved the system of tribal chiefs but still had the British monarch as head of state.
Malaya offered a unique case. Nationalist groups led by the Malay aristocratic class maintained that Malay society, despite British colonial rule, had always been sovereign under Malay kingship. What was necessary for this historical moment, however, was international recognition for this sovereign existence. This framing was consistent with the covenant between the local and foreigner in the constitution of sovereignty in Malay political thought mentioned above—in the postwar context, this meant equal membership to the UN and other international organisations as well as diplomatic recognition from other nations. Malayan nationalist leadership did the very opposite of their Commonwealth counterparts, choosing to retain the rulers under a federative arrangement and absorbed two other port cities, Melaka and Penang, under this framework. As the Malays found themselves outnumbered by non-Malay migrant communities, the Federation of Malaya entrenched the colonial order and ensured the political dominance of the Malays. The rulers thus became a central element in the postcolonial state. Malaya’s independence constitution, then, was a simple piece of paper which translated the rulers’ sovereigntyfor the global context of the day. Upon the Federation’s entry into the nation-states system in 1957, they remained the fountain of authority from which Malay sovereignty, whether ‘spiritual’ or ‘material’, emanated.
Turning the ‘Material’ into the ‘Spiritual’
The political situation unfolding in the Federation of Malaya became a serious conundrum for the colony of Singapore. Situated south of the Malay Peninsula, the island’s sovereignty lay with the British Crown, but it was largely seen as inseparable from the Malay world. The local sovereign of the island had been deposed by the British since 1824, giving Singapore a postwar context similarto ex-princely states like India, Pakistan, or even non-Commonwealth Burma. As the raja reigned in the peninsular sultanates, the governor, as viceregal officer, reigned over the islandas representative of the British monarch, receiving his instructions from the Colonial Office in London. The metropole-colony axis was thus central to the governance of a colony like Singapore, but the South-South axis remained equally important because the islandcontinued to be embedded in the region, where the constellation of Malay sovereignty nexus remained. There was a parallel socio-political ordering at play.
Singapore was conditioned by the density of its relations with the Malay Peninsula. Geographical proximity ensured colonial rule did not break cultural links, people-to-people ties, and economic interdependence between the island and the sultanates up north.Following the interlude of the Second World War, Singaporecontinued to be regarded as a vital colonial outpost for Britain.Needing unimpeded access to military installations, naval base, andport facilities, the British were determined to keep Singapore as a colony in order to meet Commonwealth defence commitments and to ensure their strategic foothold in the region (Hack 2001). To further legitimise continued colonial rule, the British also responded to the global demand for universal self-determination by extendingsuffrage to colonial subjects and long-term residents, allowing theelection of a local government under the dyarchical model. Merger with Malaya, in one form or another, emerged as the most practical and popular model for independence championed by all political parties in Singapore. The biggest puzzle for Singaporeannationalists was the following: how could they claim sovereigntywhile satisfying British pretentions as paramount power? It required creative faculties to craft a lifeworld in which the scaffold of British rule remained but in some way gestured towards the island’s sovereignty and its destined reunification with the Federation.
The colonial governor, which was the highest office in the land, became a site for nationalist struggle when constitutional negotiations took place from the mid-1950s. The governorship was not just a political office concerned with administration, but its viceregal character meant that it was an important emblem for the sovereignty of the British Crown over the island (Kumarasingham 2020). Due to Singapore’s errant political system and demographic realties of being overwhelmingly Chinese, its entry into the Federation meant a constitutional mess. The British, citing geopolitical concerns of the Cold War, also insisted on retainingultimate authority over Singapore and aimed to maintain the colonial governorship in some form or another. Out of political expedience for their own independence, leaders of the Malay-dominant Federation distanced themselves from Chinese-majority Singapore and deferred the question of merger, forcing nationalist leaders of the city-state to search for novel ways to represent self-determination while shaving the excesses of colonialism.
The Singaporean case offers a historical laboratory to observehow the territorialised colonial state in itself became a site for the colonised to invest multiple understandings of sovereignty. Following a series of constitutional dealings and the 1956 Suez Crisis which put unprecedented global pressure on Britain to decolonise, the governorship was split into the executive functions of a British commissioner and the symbolic (read ‘spiritual’) functions of the Crown representative. The former would be occupied by a British appointee who would govern matters under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom—defence, external affairs, as well as presiding over internal security with reserved emergency powers. Meanwhile, the latter would be occupied by a non-White, local-born person, presumably creating a deflationary effect on anti-colonial nationalism. This was constitutional innovation at its best.
It was in the Crown representative that different local nationalists invested their contesting visions of nation and sovereignty. They styled the office using elements of Malay political culture, calling it ‘Yang di-Pertuan Negara’ (‘He Who is Made Lord’), a title reserved for Malay kings, adapted and repurposed to signify Singapore’s sovereignty. Its first local-born appointee, Yusof bin Ishak, was a scion of a defunct aristocratic family, playing to the cultural weight of social class. Even foreign dignitaries were confused as to whether Singapore was a sovereign state or a colony because the Crown representative now appeared like a Malay sovereign. These active decisions sacralise the ‘material’ state with the ‘spiritual’.
Despite being an institution of the ‘material’, the Yang di-Pertuan Negara participated in many intricate rituals which consecrated his perceived status as a Malay sovereign. For instance, during the coronation of the federal head of state in Malaya in January 1961, Yusof, alongside the other rulers from the Federation, presided over a ceremony with spiritually-charged spears, sword, and daggers—the regalia of Malay sovereignty. Sitting with the rulers on the same elevated platform over the crowd of officials and dignitaries bestowed onto the Yang di-Pertuan Negara an apparent status equal to the other royals. When Yusof visited the Southern Islands in Singapore in January 1960, Malay village chiefs lined up to personally swear their loyalty to his person for he was the embodiment of the Singaporean state. He performed the role of a living potentate and accepted pledges of allegiance from his subjects. As reward for their loyalty, he promised villagers there access to electricity and new infrastructure projects. Amid global decolonisation, the colonial governorship in Singapore had transformed into a pseudo-sultan. Singapore, at least at the level of the ‘spiritual’, now had a Malay sovereign who acted with benevolence and largesse, ushering a new revolutionary era seemingly free from the colonial order when it had a deficit of local kingship. It was a phenomenal performance in postcolonial sovereignty, fixing the sense of broken time due to colonial rule and re-consecrating Singapore within the cosmology of Malay sovereignty (Muhammad Suhail Mohamed Yazid 2023).
While constitutionally Britain held ultimate prerogative over Singapore, the outcome remained a semantic maelstrom. This benefited the nationalist regime. Upon coming into power in 1959, political leaders from the ruling anticolonial, left-leaning People’s Action Party (PAP) introduced narratives to shape the meaning of the Yang di-Pertuan Negara, concealing the colonial subjugation which endured. Yet their ideological project of a socialist, multiethnic Singapore was not absolute. Counter-narratives by the British, other nationalist leaders, and ordinary people endoweddifferent meanings into the office. In the Yang di-Pertuan Negara were dialectical tensions between those who wanted to see both a Malay-Muslim sovereign and an avatar of an all-inclusive nationblind to ethnicity; an icon for class equality who maintainedprivileges of elites in colonial society; a personification of the lasting reign of the British Crown and also a totem of nationalist revolution. The Yang di-Pertuan Negara became all things to all men. A projection of ambivalent sovereignty, it was born of the colonial state but became a nucleus of national culture from which Singaporeans imagined themselves as Malayans free from British rule. Conjuring sovereignty from the colonial apparatus meant manoeuvring in a liminal space full of contradictions.
Making Sense of the ‘Material’ and ‘Spiritual’
The historical experience of Malaya and Singapore demonstratesthat carving a separate ‘spiritual’ plane apart from the ‘material’ is not the only way to productively recover the agency of the colonised. As scholars look towards elements beyond the state to consider the operation of sovereignty and political authority in non-state dimensions—like culture, religion, or even the environment—looking inwards at the state can in itself destabilise coherent understandings of unitary and territorialised sovereignty. In other words, the imposition of the colonial state did not mean the extinguishing of multiple notions of sovereignty reinvented fromprecolonial worlds. There was the possibility of dynamic adaptation, where different frameworks of sovereignty came to coexist, were in competition, or were even complementary. When thinking about the sovereignty beyond colonial statecraft, there also needs to be a consideration of how the colonised creatively harnessed the magic of colonial statecraft in interaction with localised understandings of sovereignty. It was in this dynamic interstice of the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’ that sovereignty manifested.
Sovereignty needs representation. But through representation is the potential to disrupt totalitarian notions of authority. Whether in the form of symbols or concrete institutions, historical actors in postcolonial contexts had the agency to interpret what it meant to be free from colonial subjugation based on their own circumstances, and at the same time, they could interrupt dominant narratives of the day imposed by both colonial masters and nationalist leaders. This indivisibility of the symbolic and the political invites a re-look at the many (post)colonial political systems, opening up vantage points otherwise hidden in thinking about sovereignty.
References
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Muhammad Suhail Mohamed Yazid. 2023. He Who Is Made Lord: Empire, Class and Race in Postwar Singapore. ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute and University of Hawai’i Press.