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it can be explained by nothing more than a healthy and expedient regard for survival. "Going for broke" can have little appeal in a context in which the final word of this expression must be taken quite literally.

THE EFFORT TO STOP THE COMBINE-HARVESTER

The introduction of combine-harvesting, as the most sudden and devastating of the changes associated with double-cropping, also stirred the most active resistance. This resistance went well beyond the arguments about its efficiency, the complaints over lost wages, and the slander directed against those who hired it, which I have already described. Throughout the rice bowl of Kedah there were efforts physically to obstruct its entry into the fields, incidents of arson and sabotage, and widespread attempts to organize "strikes" of transplanters against those who first hired the machine. All of these actions ultimately failed to prevent the mechanization ofthe paddy harvest, although they undoubtedly delayed it somewhat. A close examination of the forms of resistance and the responses of large farmers can teach us a great deal about both the possibilities and limits that help structure this resistance.

Combines were, of course, not the first machines that had threatened the livelihood of poorer villagers in Muda. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the use of tractors and trucks to haul paddy directly from the field to town had earlier sparked spirited and successful resistance in some villages. The threat posed by combines, however, was of a far greater magnitude. Sporadic resistance began as early as 1970, when the first small experimental machines, adapted from a Japanese prototype, were used in field trials near the town of Jitra. Officials of the Muda Agricultural Development Authority, who conducted the trials, recalled several incidents of sabotage, all of which they chose to call "vandalism." 11 Batteries were removed from the machines and thrown in irrigation ditches; carburetors and other vital parts such as distributors and air filters were smashed; sand and mud were put into the gas tank; and various objects (stones, wire, nails) were thrown into the augers. Two aspects of this sabotage deserve particular emphasis. First, it was clear that the goal of the saboteurs was not simple theft, for nothing was actually stolen. Second, all of the sabotage was carried out at night by individuals or small groups acting anonymously. They were, furthermore, shielded by their fellow villagers who, if they knew who was involved, claimed total ignorance when the police came to investigate. As a result, no prosecutions were ever made. The practice of posting a night watchman to guard the combine dates from these early trials.

Starting in 1976, when combine-harvesting began with a vengeance, peasant

11. The term sabotage is precise descriptively as we shall see, originating as it does with the wrecking of machinery by nineteenth-century French workers who threw their wooden shoes (sabots) into the works.

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acts of vengeance likewise spread throughout the paddy-growing region. Poorer villagers in Sedaka can remember several incidents, which they recount with something akin to glee. Tok Mahmud, fur example, told me that he knew exactly how to jam a combine's auger-where to put the barbed wire or nailsbecause he had friends (kawan) who had done it. He declined to elaborate because, he said, if he talked openly his friends might be arrested (tangkap). Sukur described a more dramatic incident, two seasons befOre I arrived, near Tokai, just a few miles south ofSedaka, where a combine was set on fire. A number of poor people (orang susah), he said, surrounded the Malay night watchman and asked him who owned the machine (jentera siapa?). When he replied that it belonged to a Chinese syndicate, they ordered him to climb down and then poured kerosene over the engine and cab and set it alight. Two Malay young men were arrested the next day but were quickly released fur lack of evidence. Villagers report several other incidents of trees being felled across the combine's path into one village or another and of wire being jammed into the auger, particularly near Selangkuh.

I made no effOrt to assemble a complete inventory of reported incidents, although it was a rare peasant who could not recall one or two. No one, however, could recall any such incident in Sedaka itself. This may merely reflect an understandable reluctance to call attention to themselves. And at no time did the overall volume of sabotage reach anything like the level of machine breaking that accompanied the introduction of mechanical threshers into England in the 1830s. 12

At the same time that individuals and small groups of men were attacking the machines, there were the beginnings of a quiet but more collective effOrt by women to bring pressure to bear on the farmers who hired the machines. Men and women-often from the same family-had, of course, each lost work to the combine, but it was only the women who still had any real bargaining

12. For the now classic study of this movement, see E. J. Hobsbawn and George Rude, Captain Swing (New York: Pantheon, 1968). Without attempting an inevitably strained comparison, I note that the rural Luddites of the early nineteenth century had several advantages over the peasantry of Kedah when it came to mobilizing against threshing machines. They were far more fully proletarianized and dependent on wage labor; they could look to a set of traditional legal protections that reinforced their claim to a living wage; and they faced a repressive apparatus that was less firmly planted in the countryside. They too, of course, were overcome, but only by a military force that by the standards of the time was unprecedented. The resistance in Kedah was much more sporadic and abbreviated, although the saboteurs shared with their English counterparts a preference for the anonymity that acting under cover of darkness provided. By 1979, public warnings by officials and more rigorous guarding of the machines themselves had reduced the incidence of this form of resistance to negligible proportions.

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power. They were, fur the time being, still in control of transplanting. 13 The group of women (kumpulan share, from the English) who reaped a farmer's land were typically the same group that had earlier transplanted the same field. They were losing roughly half their seasonal earnings, and they understandably resented transplanting a crop for a farmer who would use the combine at harvest time. Thus, in Sedaka and, it appears, throughout much of the Muda region, such women resolved to organize a boycott (boikot) that would deny transplanting services to their employers who hired the combine.

Three of the five "share groups" in Sedaka evidently made some attempts to enfOrce such a boycott. Those groups of anywhere from six to nine women were led by Rosni (a widow), Rokiah (the wife of Mat Buyong), and Miriam (the wife of Mat Isa). The remaining two groups, led by the wives of Tajuddin and Ariffin, appear not to have been involved, but neither group would agree to plant paddy fur a farmer who was being boycotted by one of the other three gangs. Why the groups of Rosni, Rokiah, and Miriam took the initiative is not entirely clear. They are composed of women from families that are, on average, slightly poorer than those in the remaining two groups, but only slightly. The first two are, as well, largely from PAS households, but this may be as much due to kinship and neighborhood as to factionalism per se, and in any case they were frequently boycotting farmers from their own political faction. If we rely on local explanations fur the pattern of resistance, the consensus is that Rosni and Rokiah depend heavily on wage labor to support their families and are at the same time "courageous" (berani). 14

The furms the boycott took were very much in keeping with the kinds of cautious resistance I have so far described. At no time was there ever an open confrontation between a farmer who used the combine and his transplanters.

Instead, the anonymous and indirect approach of cara sembunyi tau with which we are familiar was employed. The women "let it be kno~n" through inter-

mediaries that the group was dissatisfied (tak puas hati) with the loss of harvest work and would be reluctant (segan) to transplant the fields of those wl).o had hired the combine the previous season. They also let it be known that,' when and if a combine broke down in the course of the harvest, a farmer who wanted then to get his crop in by hand could not count on his old workers to bail him out.

13.Broadcasting (tabor kering) only began to pose a serious threat to hand transplanting by 1979 or 1980.

14.Rosni, as we have noted, is a widow, while Rokiah's husband is considered

rather weak-minded, so that Rokiah is normally seen as the head of her household, making all the basic decisions. Such women, especially if they are past child-bearing age, are treated virtually as "honorary" males and are exempt from many of the customary requirements of modesty and deference expected of women in Malay society.

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When it came time at the beginning of the irrigated season of 1977 to make good on this threat, Circumspection again prevailed. None of the three groups refused outright to transplant paddy for those who had harvested with the combine in the previous season. Rather, they delayed; the head of the share group would tell the offending farmer that they were busy and could not get to his land just yet. Only a dozen or so farmers had used the combine the previous season, so the share groups had a good deal of work to occupy them just transplanting the crops of those who had not mechanized. 15 The transplanters thus kept their options open; they avoided a direct refusal to transplant, which would have provoked an open break. Fully abreast of the rumors of a boycott, the farmers who had been put off became increasingly anxious as their nursery paddy was passing its prime and as they feared their crop might not be fully mature befOre the scheduled date fur shutting off the supply of water. Their state of mind was not improved by the sight of their neighbors' newly transplanted fields next to their own vacant plots.

Mter more than two weeks of this war of nerves-the seeming boycott that never fully announced itself-six farmers "let it be known" that they were arranging for outside laborers to come and transplant their crops. By most accounts, these six were Haji Kadir, Haji Salim, Tok Kasim, ·Lazim, Kamil, and Cik Mah, who between them cultivate nearly 100 relong. They claimed in their defense that they had pressed fur a firm commitment fur a transplanting date from their local share group and, only after being put off again, had they moved. At this point, the boycott collapsed. Each of the three share groups was faced with defections, as women feared that the transplanting work would be permanently lost to outsiders. They hastily sent word that they would begin transplanting the land in question within the next few days. Three of the six farmers canceled their arrangements with the outside gangs, while the other three went ahead either because they felt it was too late to cancel or because they wished to teach the women a lesson. Transplanters came from the town of Yan (just outside the irrigation scheme) and from Singkir and Merbuk, farther away. Haji Salim, using his considerable political influence, arranged with MADA to bring in a gang of Thai transplanters-a practice he has continued and fur which he is bitterly resented.

The brief and abortive attempt to stop the combine by collective action was

15. Not all farmers in Sedaka that season could be neatly classified either as combine hirers or share-group hirers, since at least four farmers had used the combine for one plot and hand labor for another. In two cases, these were decisions based on the ripeness of the crops in each field when the combine was available or the inability of the machine to harvest a given plot (because it was on soft, waterlogged land or because it was surrounded by plots or unripe paddy). In the remaining two cases, the decision was almost certainly an attempt by the farmer to hedge his bets and avoid the threatened boycott.

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the subject of demoralized or self-satisfied postmortems, depending on which side of the fence one happened to be. Aside from the pleasure or disappointment expressed, the postmortems, fOr once, converged on the inevitability of the outcome. Those with most to lose from mechanization realized that the women could not really move beyond talk and threats. Thus, Wahid said that the rumored boycott was "just talk and they planted anyway." "What could they do?" he asked, throwing up his hands. Tok Mahmud echoed this assessment: "Other people took the work; once the work is gone they couldn't do anything." "People are clever," Sukur added, "If you don't want to transplant, they'll take the work and money." It is fOr this reason, Samad claimed, that the women were careful not to burn their bridges and only talked of a boycott well out of earshot (kot jauh saja) of large farmers. Finally, in the same vein, Hamzah summed up the long odds against the women:

Whether you complain or don't complain, it's no use. You can't do anything; you can't win. If you say anything, they won't hire you to plant even. The women will even have to cut paddy fOr a farmer if the combine breaks down. If you're hard up, you have to take the work. If you refuse (tolak), if you don't do it, others will. Only those who are well-off (senang) can refuse.

We could ask fOr no clearer exposition of the "dull compulsion of economic relations." The well-to-do were not only aware of this "dull compulsion" but were counting on it. As Mat Isa noted, "They didn't do anything; it was only idle talk (mulut saja)." 16 Tok Kasim, whose stake in mechanization was higher because he was a machine broker as well as a farmer, realized the boycott would never be carried out, since "the poor have to work anyway; they can't hold out (tahan)." And Lebai Hussein said that, although they were "angry," the women could only talk about (sembang-sembang saja) a boycott, since they needed the money. He concluded with a Malay saying that precisely captured the difficulties the women faced: "Angry with their rice, they throw it out fOr the chickens to eat." 17 The closest English equivalent is "cutting off your nose to spite your face. "

If we step back a few paces from our single village perspective, a wider and more melancholy pattern appears. The share groups of women in Sedaka were, in this same period, occasionally hired to transplant paddy fields as much as thirty miles away. Rosni told me that once a woman from Setiti Batu, where their share groups was planting, had told her that the farmer for whom they were working had not been able to recruit local transplanters because he had

16.He then concluded by saying padi tumpah, which, literally, means "spilled paddy," but its idiomatic sense would perhaps best be expressed by the English "just chaff" (as opposed to wheat).

17.Marah sama nasi, tauk, bagi ayam makan.

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harvested last season with the combine. When she learned this, Rosni told the woman that she was "sick at heart" (sakit hati) but that the work was nearly finished anyway. 18 It is only too likely that there were similar cases as well. Thus, from this wider perspective, the poorer women of Sedaka were inadvertently serving as "strike-breakers" in other Muda villages. And women from these villages, or others like them, were undoubtedly coming to break the boycott in Sedaka. What we have here is a nearly classic example of the crippling effect of class action by peasants when it is confined, as it typically is, to one or a few villages in a much wider labor market. 19

Similar attempts at a labor boycott occurred throughout much of the Muda region. An official at the state headquarters of MADA confided to me that he suspected most of the landlords, like Haji Salim, who applied there for permission to import Thai transplanters were actually attempting to get around a local labor boycott. Inasmuch as they were invariably quite large-scale farmers, they were the ones most likely to have hired the combine at the first opportunity. Talk of a boycott was certainly very common. Thus Rosemary Barnard writes of a village near the state capital of Alor Setar in which (in 1978) there was "talk of combining forces to attempt to block combine harvesters next season." 20 In Scdaka itself I frequently heard the names ofvillages that had, it was claimed, kept the combine harvesters off their fields. Lebai Pendek said that the village of Gelam Dua to the north still harvested all its local fields by hand. Kubang Jecii and other villages in the Bukit Raya district, a PAS stronghold, were often mentioned as places where the boycott and machine breaking had prevented the combines from coming. Mansur said that in Kangkong, to the north, the poor were "better organized" (lagi teratur) and hand harvesting was still the rule. 21

18.The fact that the paddy field they were planting belonged to the brother of one of the women in the share group further complicated matters.

19.This serves as a salutary reminder of the limitations of local or village studies that treat only local fragments of class which stretch over wider areas and whose members are unknown personally to one another. A more accurate view of class would in fact include not only a spatial dimension but a temporal one as well, as the class

of tenants as a concept must include those who have ever had this status in the past as well as those who are tenants today. The spatial dimension of class by itself may, in this context, seem to argue fur the role of an elite or intelligentsia to coordinate and unify its fragmented action. As we shall see later, this conclusion is not necessarily warranted.

20. Rosemary Barnard, "The Modernization of Agriculture in a Kedah Village, 1967-1978" (Paper presented at Second National Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, May 15-19, 1978), 33.

21. The salaried head of the MADA branch office in Kepala Batas explicitly emphasized this when he explained to me why the attempted boycott had "no effect" (tak ada kesan) and added that the improvement in surfaced roads now permitted large farmers to bring in labor from much farther away.

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In nearby Mengkuang, the police had to be called to prevent a near riot when a large landowner had, at the last minute, attempted to send his assembled harvest laborers home upon discovering that a nearby combine could be hired immediately.

The village most often mentioned in this connection, however, was Permatang Buluh, about twelve miles to the north. In this kampung, many said, combines were still not used because the poor had banded together so successfully. The harvest workers and transplanters ofSedaka spoke of this community with something approaching awe, so I made a point of visiting Permatang Buluh to see for myself. My companion that day was Amin, who had an uncle living there. The uncle, who himself farmed over 10 relong, reported that he and most others now used combines and that the boycott had failed. It was only when I walked through the paddy fields unaccompanied that I heard a slightly different account from a small tenant. He said that the "poor" in Permatang Buluh had, in fact, prevented the combine from harvesting paddy fur three seasons, until 1978. When I asked how they had done it, he replied that the large farmers had been "afraid." And when I asked why they were afraid, he simply said golok putihputih, which might be translated as "the machetes were gleaming (or very sharp)." Perhaps sensing that he had already volunteered too much to a stranger, he declined to elaborate, but it was clear from his remark that the threat of violence was a factor. Two other characteristics of Permatang Buluh may help account fur its relative success in delaying mechanization. It appeared that the village had more than the usual proportion of landless and smallholders who depended heavily on wages. The headman of the village was also unusual in a way that might have facilitated solidarity among the poor. Although he was born, like most headmen, into a well-to-do household, his father had lost nearly all his land through gambling debts and thus the present headman was himself a part-time harvest worker. Even with those particular "advantages" the success of the Permatang Buluh had been short-lived.

When the would-be boycotters and machine breakers of Sedaka spoke about their own experience or about the relative success of others, what one heard was not just a litany of discouragement and despair. There was also more than just a glimmer of what might have been (or might be) if the poor had acted with more unity and furce. Thus Samad saw Permatang Buluh as something of an inspiration: "If we had done the same thing here, the machines wouldn't have come. It would have been good (bagus) if we had, but we weren't organized (tak teratur). "22 Rokiah herself spoke with disdain of the share groups in Sedaka compared with Permatang Buluh: "Here they didn't want [to carry it through}." "If they had all agreed, if they had struck, [the machines} would not have been brave enough to come in. " 23 Mansur, one of the few pure landless laborers in

22.Teratur might in this context be translated also as "disciplined."

23.Kalau berpakat, kalau mogok, tak berani masuk. The term mogok is the standard Malay word for "strike."