4 - Bangsawans in Borneo: Mobility, Transience, and Precarity, 1910s–1930s

From the end of the nineteenth century, the thread of commerce wove North Borneo into the cultural fabric of insular Southeast Asia. The port towns of this British protectorate became nodes in an emerging “entertainment circuit”—a term used by Nadi Tofighian to describe the schedule of entertainment companies touring the ports of fin-de-siècle Southeast Asia. Travelling theatres that specialized in various genres visited North Borneo: Chinese wayangs, European vaudevilles, and Filipino zarzuelas. Bangsawans—Malay-language operas that incorporated Arab, Chinese, European, and Malay cultural elements—were especially popular.

While these travelling theatres were welcomed in the first three decades of the century, the colonial state in North Borneo increasingly regarded them as a nuisance from the mid-1930s. Because the livelihoods of these theatres were thought to be insecure, colonial administrators feared that they would become destitute and reliant on state support. Police officials, diplomats, and shipping companies wrangled over who was accountable for the presence and the behaviour of these transient groups. Why did the colonial state’s attitude towards these travelling theatres change over the first half of the twentieth century? What was life along the fringes of the regional entertainment circuit like for transient thespians? This paper examines the people, politics, and policies associated with travelling theatres in North Borneo. It demonstrates how visits by these troupes had the capacity to draw the urbanites of North Borneo closer, even if only for a brief period, into a shared cultural world within Southeast Asia.