On my last visit to Kuching I fell into conversation with an Indian man who was very well-informed about the (still under-researched) history of the Sikh community in Sarawak. As our conversation, fuelled by tiger beer, spilled into the more general history of Sarawak, my new friend was surprised that I did not know that James Brooke had been born in Kochi, the city in Kerala, India, that had been known to European colonialists as Cochin. Notwithstanding my insistence that James Brooke’s birth and early career in India were well documented by historians and did not include reference to Cochin, my interlocutor could not be swayed. We were dealing, I realised more slowly than I ought (the effect of all those beers) with a case of reverse-engineered logic: my friend explained that, just as many Europeans, in exploring the ‘new world’, had brought familiar names from the ‘old world’ – New York, for example, New Amsterdam, New Caledonia – so James Brooke had named his little capital after his birthplace, Cochin.
In some ways, perhaps, these three different explanations represent important truths: first, the increasing importance of the Peninsula to Sarawak following 1963, and the subsequent extension of Peninsula Malay language into the State; and, further, the understandable importance to the Chinese and Indian communities of representing their own lengthy and highly significant associations with the city. The origins of the name, Kuching, lie, however, in the long-enduring Malay and Dayak settlement patterns of the pre-European era, and in Mrs McDougall’s identification of a now-vanished geographical feature, Sungei Kuching.
Traditionally, Malays in Borneo, as elsewhere in the archipelago, preferred to settle on rivers at the mouths of tributaries (as did many of their Dayak relatives). This settlement pattern facilitated the Malays taxing trade and other river traffic on both water-ways, and provided alternative flight paths in the event of overwhelming attack. Since there would, obviously, have been many settlements on the main river, many towns and villages took their names from the tributaries on which they were located. Only when a settlement was the most important on the river, would it be given the same name as the river – for example, the towns/rivers/kingdoms of Brunei and Sambas.