WHERE ARE ALL THE MALAY ROYAL LIBRARIES?

We know from the impressive surviving libraries of the Javanese palaces in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, that royal courts in maritime Southeast Asia could and did act as patrons and repositories of manuscripts. We also know that much of Malay literature in the manuscript age was produced in and for royal courts—dynastic annals like Sulalatus Salatin and Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, epics featuring swashbuckling courtiers like Hikayat Hang Tuah, religious texts composed for royal patrons such as Abudurrauf Singkili’s Mirʾāt al-ṭullāb, syair composed by Lingga court attendants like Encik Kamariah’s Syair Sultan Mahmud. But there are, in stark contrast with the Javanese examples, no Malay royal libraries still in situ (or at least none known to researchers)

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ADVENTURES IN NUSANTARA

Step into the Malay Heritage Centre (MHC)’s permanent exhibition on the first floor and you will hear birds chirping away in the space. That is the sound of ‘Birds of Paradise’, one of the features in the Children’s Space - Adventures in Nusantara, launched as part of MHC’s special exhibition ‘Seekor Singa, Seorang Putera dan Sebingkai Cermin (A Lion, A Prince and A Mirror): Reflecting and Refracting Singapura’, organised as part of the Singapore Bicentennial.

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HISTORY-WRITING IN PREMODERN NUSANTARA

Premodern peoples of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago wrote history. Their historical methods and the resources at their disposal were significantly different to what modern professional historians are used to, which is why historical texts from the region are often treated with suspicion. We tend to ask: ‘are they reliable sources?’, ‘are they genuinely historical?’, and ‘are they mythological or legendary?’. I argue that we can better understand the region’s historical traditions by investigating the distinctive historical practices that shaped them.

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INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES FROM THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO: MALAY DESCRIPTIONS OF THE WEST BEFORE 1876

The “Ferringhi’ (sometimes “Ferringi”, “Ferringghi”) is perhaps the most known (archaic) moniker of the Western Other in Malay consciousness. The other is “Orang Putih.” We know that Batu Ferringhi is in Pulau Pinang. If we translate the name of that well-known beach area, it would mean “foreigner’s rock”. Not many take the name seriously. I had imagined how the Malays in Kedah, like the Malays in Melaka earlier or at the same time, had likened the foreigner a Ferringhi (meaning foreiqgner or outsider). It depicts an early encounter between East and West. Early Portuguese fleets, carrying hundreds of Portuguese who had little prior interaction with non-Christians, were perceived as the “Franks” by the larger non-European Asian population, especially in the immediate geopolitical and cultural proximity of Turkey, the Arab World and Persia. The Muslims who first encountered the Portuguese brought the idea of the “Franks” as the people who had attacked the holy places during the Crusades.

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