In this video: - Tunku Tommy’s journey from fashion designer to production designer on local films
- Why Kedah’s history begins centuries before Parameswara and Malacca
- Kota Tampan (74,000 years), Perak Man (11,000 years) and evidence of early civilisation in the peninsula
- Kedah as a capital of the Funan kingdom, and the roots of Southeast Asian artistic identity
- The 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty and Sultan Abdul Hamid’s fight to restore Kedah’s sovereignty
- How the Malaysia-Thailand border was said to have been drawn along the locations of Buddhist temples
- Why the Federal Constitution defines a Malay as Muslim
- ‘Melayu’ and ‘Malay’: do they really mean the same thing?
- The Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa, and how oral history was dismissed by British administrators
- ‘Indianisation’ vs ‘Hinduisation’ in understanding the Bujang Valley’s heritage
- Who exactly is the mysterious ‘they’ who supposedly don’t want this history told?
- Sinbad the sailor and the golden kingdom east of India
- Losing Jim Bradman and the personal cost behind the book
- Why Kedah, the nation’s ‘rice bowl’, is now one of its poorest states
- What’s next: an art and cultural chronology of Southeast Asia
Tunku Tommy also opens up about losing his co-author Jim, who died before the book could be launched, and how that loss nearly made him walk away from a project that had taken more than 30 years of his life and over RM1m.
Are we ready to accept a history that challenges beliefs we’ve held for so long? And if our identity was shaped by a colonial narrative, how well do we really know ourselves?
