Stylistic architectural changes that occurred during the colonial era in South-East Asian nations such as Malaysia and Indonesia, particularly in the 1800s, had always been simplistically'lumped'together as the colonial style. This paper argues for the contrasting streams of public architecture, the modernised Malay Classical style; vs the Malayalised Colonial style, though they depict similar combinations of hybrid architectural tectonic language in buildings. This paper argues that various present writings and discourses had'hijacked'the essentially evolving Malay style and had grouped these with the changes attributed to Colonial stylisations, rather than attributing them to the modernisation of their vernacular style. The paper highlights cases to expand the discourse to include the evolving language of local Classical (Malay) architecture, which represent an evolvement from tradition to the Neo-Classical era of modernity through analysis of case studies. The missing discourse is characteristic of a nation undergoing postcolonialism attributed to the rupture of history. These essentially regionalised forms within the Neo-Classical era are often mistaken as colonial pastiche-like borrowings or'kitsch', rather than associating it within a broad local early modern vernacular which arises local phenomena desire to modernise.