Saving high culture in an ageing Malaysia

AT 73, Pak Romli Mahamud (pic) is the last living Awang Batil performer and a designated National Living Heritage. The Awang Batil performance is a traditional form of musical storytelling native to Perlis, where a solo narrator weaves ancient epics, local myths and societal wisdom to the rhythmic beating of a brass bowl (batil).

Pak Romli is not an isolated case. He is the stark reflection of a cultural continuum that is actively breaking as our nation rapidly goes grey.

According to the Finance Ministry, Malaysia will officially become an “aged nation” by 2048. While economic planners are understandably panicking over healthcare capacities and pension payouts, the arts and culture sector is facing a silent existential crisis.

Our cultural custodians are ageing out and there is no structured pipeline to inherit their wisdom.

For decades, our national cultural policies have missed the mark. We have treated the arts as fleeting events, from funding festivals and temporary exhibitions to relentlessly chasing youth engagement.

We funded the performances but neglected the continuum. We expected the younger generation to organically inherit the budaya tinggi (high culture) values, yet provided no institutional bridge to connect them with the ageing masters who hold this knowledge.

Today, we patronise the youth with diluted, bite-sized kebudayaan (pop-culture entertainment) while leaving our ageing masters to fade in isolation.

We romanticise their lifelong dedication, but a library is entirely useless if the younger generation is never taught how to enter it and read its books.

If the culture and arts sector is to survive this demographic tsunami, our absolute priority must be to forge a cultural continuum. We have a rapidly closing window to extract and transmit this high culture before it disappears into the grave.

How do we create this continuum? The answer lies in moving away from funding one-off entertainment and aggressively scaling up structured, institutionalised mentorships.

We do not have to look far for the blueprint. The National Department for Culture and Arts (JKKN), an agency under the Tourism, Arts and Culture Ministry (Motac), has already laid the groundwork through its Apprenticeship Programme (Program Perantisan).

Recognising the ticking demographic clock, JKKN initiated targeted apprenticeships in highly complex, endangered art forms like Awang Batil, Mek Mulung and Mak Yong, to name a few.

The core philosophy of this programme is not merely to train performers but also to foster a direct, sustained collision between the philosophical wisdom of the old and the energy of the young.

By formally pairing ageing master practitioners (adiguru) with dedicated youth apprentices, we are actively engineering a new generation of custodians.

This model solves two national crises at once. First, it extracts the profound budaya tinggi from the ageing masters before it is lost forever.

Second, by institutionalising the process, it provides these elderly masters with a dignified role and a financial safety net in their twilight years while financially supporting the youth to learn full-time.

However, a few successful pilot programmes are not enough to combat a national demographic shift. This must become the definitive policy of our arts ecosystem, and it requires aggressive, cross-ministry intervention.

Motac cannot build this continuum alone. It must collaborate with the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry as well as the Education Ministry to scale these intergenerational apprenticeship models nationwide.

The ageing masters are the essential anchors of our cultural continuum. If we do not actively forge the link between them and our youth today, we won’t just lose a few traditional art forms; we will sever the very lineage of our national identity.

HESMEL FAZNEE FAISAL

Cultural administrator

National Department for Culture and Arts

Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture

Kuala Lumpur