While fish fueled the making of modern Southeast Asia, they also fed the growth of Malay nationalism. This paper looks at the relationship between fish and politics through the career of Ishak bin Ahmad (1887-1969), a fisheries scientist who became the first non-European to head a department in Malaya in the 1930s. It tells a different kind of science story, one that narrates how Ishak’s labor as a fisheries expert shaped his life as a Malay nationalist. Drawing on multilingual sources, the essay argues that Ishak’s knowledge of food fish, investigations on scientific surveys, encounters with Japanese fleets, and concern for Malay fishers mobilized his political work in interwar Singapore. After moving to the city in 1923, Ishak became a founding member of Kesatuan Melayu Singapura (KMS), Singapore’s first Malay political association established in 1926. By the late 1930s, Ishak was serving not only as Malaya’s Director of Fisheries and as vice-president of KMS, but also as a broadcaster of a Malay-language radio program that popularized effective fishing methods and the value of “fish as food” (“ikan bagai makanan”). Ishak’s son, Yusof (1910-1970), joined KMS too and co-founded Utusan Melaya in 1938, the first Malay-owned, Malay-language newspaper that, among other things, championed the plight of Malay fishers and documented the conditions of Malayan fishing. By tracing the arc of Ishak’s life, this paper thus shows how local scientists leveraged their expertise and mobility in ways that not only captured colonial opportunities, but also, and more importantly, cultivated national horizons.
