PEOPLE

"In the evening, we were invited out by friends Dalbadal and Yahaya Merican and entertained at their home. They are Penang born Indian Muslim and they treated us with great honour, in the manner of high born persons lacking in nothing. And their home too was a fair place for persons of gentle birth and comfortable means. Moreover in disposition, refinement and genteelism, these brothers seemed quite untypical of the majority of locally born Indian Muslim, and formed an exception to the rule. We remained in their house, chatting intimately and joking together until late at night. Finally we made our way back in the rain to the house of Haji Mohd Noor and slept there."

Abdullah Munshi's hosts, the brothers Dalbadal and Yahaya were two of the three sons of Khider Saiboo Merican, who with his wife Hajee Bee, had sailed from the Coromandel coast for the strange new land of hope, called Penang. The daring voyage was done in a small boat, typical of the time, built by the skilled craftsmen of the great coastal region, where greedy adventurers from Denmark, Holland, France and England had set up trading posts and made their fortunes at Pulicat, Pondicherry, Trankebar, Karaika and Negapataml.  The trader Merican sailed, as did his forbears during Roman and Greek times, as did the great Cola fleets, but he brought with him spices and puliakat cloth for sarongs and various kinds of clothing.

It was here, in Penang in the 1800s, that the three sons Dalbadal, Yahaya and Zakariah were born. The new generation did not go back to India for their wives but instead married locals. Their customs and traditions gave birth to such terms as Mamak (uncle), Mamee, Bu or Khala (auntie), and Combee (beautiful Penang girls). 

The newcomers were good traders and were comfortably rich. Azmi Yusoff Merican's great-grandfather, and MM Nordin and other rich merchants were affluent enough to afford English coachmen, whom they employed, much to the annoyance of the colonial administrators. The Merican family resided in the Chulia Street and Kedah Road area. Yahaya, Dalbadal and Zachariah occupied what is now called Noble Hotel in Market Street, near Masjid Kling. Hasyim; the son of Yahaya was in Kedah Road, where the Kedah Road flats are today.  When the family grew, Mohd Naina Merican, grandfather of Yusoff Azmi Merican, leased a piece of land in what is now Zoo Road from a good friend and built a Malay type house for the family. The large house and its spacious land became centre for refugees when the Japanese army bombed Georgetown in 1941. 

The Zoo Road house and family
 

The people from Coromandel were pious and humble folk: they were strong in the belief that if one was rich it was one's duty to provide for the poor. The instrument was the wakaf, where land was dedicated to charity. In 1810, "Kapitan Kling" Abdul Kader Mohayaden was the first to establish the wakaf in Penang. Then followed Mohd Nordin Merican, Yahaya Merican, Dalbadal Merican, Zakariah Merican, Shaik Yusoff (wakaf land at Dato Keramat, Kg Baru) and Abdul Rawana (wakaf land at Jalan P Ramlee), Syed Al-Kadri and Wanchik Arrifin, who had come from Gujerat 

In the years between 1862 and 1871, Yusoff Azmi Merican's ancestors Yahaya, Dalbadal and Zakariah, created a wakaf in the district of Dato Keramat, now Perak Road, building the Dulbadalsah Yahya Mosque (now popularly called the Hasyim Yahya Mosque) sitting on  six pieces of land. The area, of some 15 acres, is now called Kampong Dodol. Next to it is the Arrifin family Wanchik Mosque. Hamid Khan's wakaf was at Macalister Road, where the first UMNO building was located, Haji Wahab's at Simpang Enam, Haji Mohd Kassim's at Kampong Makam. The wakaf of  NM Nordin (Mohd Nordin Merican), after whom Nordin Street is named, is  in the area of Buckingham Street - Chulia Street - Central Market. His grave is located within the Kapitan Kling Mosque grounds. 

But not all remained traders. The younger generation, learning the ways of the West, tended to look down on trade; entering government service was more prestigious. Yusoff Azmi Merican's grandfather Mohd Naina Merican, the son of Hasyim Yahaya joined the PWD, and moved from Kedah Road into the newly built government quarters in Lorong Selamat when they were built in 1930. Father followed suit, entering government service. #

Was Abdullah Ibrahim trying to make jazz "respectable"? As pointed out by the critic Donald MacDonald , the inherent racism of European capitalism can be seen in white society's view of music from other cultures. Collins' National Dictionary describes jazz as, "n. syncopated, noisy music derived from negro spirituals, and played as accompaniment to dancing, -a. discordant, raucous, garish."   The Concise Oxford Dictionary speculates as to its origins with the comment, "20th c.; perh. orig. = copulation."  That is to say jazz is the music of an inferior race. 

We had the uncomfortable feeling that this was an evening to demonstrate the genteelity of jazz, of its acceptability as an art form, of its classicism. It was night of music without sparks