Experience, person, and myth: A socio-cultural history of the ‘oily man’ in post-colonial Malaysia and Singapore

Abstract

Drawing on English, Chinese, and Malay newspapers, this article examines the ‘oily man’, a figure who shifted between sexual assailant, ghost, and intruder across twentieth-century Singapore and urban and semi-urban peninsular Malaya/Malaysia. It situates him not as a timeless ‘Malay’ entity but as an elastic label and repertoire, assembled and reassembled through rumours, retellings, and recurring events. Departing from most studies of Malay-world monsters, which reduce such figures to allegories or cinematic symbols of gender, modernity, or social change, this article demonstrates how the oily man’s historical force lay in intrusions, panics, and community responses—events mediated, disputed, and reworked across time and place. His history is framed through three registers: experience, person, and myth, which trace how this elastic label took shape through encounter, attribution, and retelling. Experience captures sightings, rumours, and assaults that animated fear; person traces how individuals were accused or apprehended as oily men; myth designates the narratives and repertoires that amplified these encounters in film, fiction, and folklore. Across these registers, the article shows how monsters emerge through lived circulations of testimony, attribution, and storytelling. It highlights the value of historical research that privileges experience and offers a framework for future scholarship: monsters as unstable, context-specific composites of encounter, narrative, and transmission that illuminate the entanglements of state, society, culture, and religion in post-colonial Malaysia and Singapore, with resonance for the study of rumour and monstrosity elsewhere in Asia.