Simon Soon
The earliest record of the term 'Boriah' dates to its appearance in part II. of Clifford and Swettenham's Malay-English Dictionary, published by the Government's printing Office in 1894. The dictionary defines BORIAH, as a topical song, and Bâcha boriah, to sing a topical song.
In 1897, the 'boriah [sic]' is first mentioned in learned society journal, Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. While An earlier mention of play-acting on the street that is likely in reference to a Boria performance, can be found in a August 1891 copy of the Jawi Peranakan, '... anak Melayu bermain Afrika bermuka hitam dan Afrika bermuka merah (Malay youngsters play African by blackening their faces, and Africans wear red-faces.)'
Boria’s etymology remains elusive up til today. A weak consensus continues to reinforce an oral history by an unnamed Indian resident of Penang recorded in Haughton’s first written description of Boria[h]. In this account, the word originated in ‘the Hindustani and Deccan language and carries the meaning of ‘a place of prayer (praying carpet), and in Malay they call it Tikar (a mat)’ . The word Boria was also identified as one of the four characters played by the Madras native infantry stationed in Penang during the Muharram mourning procession.
Contemporary scholarship tended to note that in the post-riot Muharram celebrations, the festival was divided into two parts. The boria is principally performed at night, while during the day an activity called 'koli kallen' was performed. Translated as 'chicken thieves', the word is said to be Tamil derived, and refer to masked characters who roamed the town either stealing from others or forcefully begging from one house to another. The atmosphere was one of misrule. In a sense, the koli kallen is a carnivalesque aspect of the Muharram that survived the 1867 riots.
While koli kallen is often described as the boria's insalubrious other half, they are really two sides of the same coin. This can be explained by the hooded mat-masked figure that appears as the principle character of the koli kallen, and also provides the name for the boria. Mervyn Llewellyn Wynne suggests that koli kallen is a corruption of the phrase khodun garun, the 'grave digger' character that groups of fakirs are known as in India.
When public assembly was increasingly curtailed with the enactment of new laws to proscribe use of public spaces, the format of the boria and koli kallen adapted and became a channel for residents who were politically and economically marginalised within the port city not only to register social presence but also to carve out an economic space for themselves in the competitive environment of the the port city through participating in the making of a new entertainment culture.
NOTES
Jawi Peranakan (17 August 1891), p. 2.
Sir Hugh Charles Clifford, and Sir Frank Athelstane Swettenham. 1894. A Dictionary of the Malay Language, Part 2. Singapore: Government's printing Office.
H. T. Houghton. 1897. 'The Boriah' Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, No. 30 JULY, 312-313
