An expedition into the politics of Malay philology
Ian Proudfoot’s 2003 article examines a 1821 manuscript-collecting expedition dispatched by the Dutch colonial administration in Malacca, arguing that Malay philology has been fundamentally shaped by the political interests of its patrons and the material fragility of the manuscript tradition it studies. Drawing on recently identified documents in the Houghton Library, Harvard, Proudfoot reconstructs the circumstances, motives, and outcome of the expedition to expose how colonial competition and bureaucratic imperatives determined which texts were collected, preserved, or lost.
Summary
Proudfoot situates the expedition within the turbulent aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, when the returning Dutch found themselves in a precarious position vis-à-vis the British in the Malay world. The new bureaucratic colonial state, modelled on Napoleonic and British-Indian precedents, demanded a more sophisticated command of local languages than the old Company had ever required. The Dutch, who could not find a single person in Holland capable of writing Malay in Arabic script, were acutely conscious of their cultural deficit relative to the British, whose administrators—Marsden, Raffles, Farquhar, Crawfurd—had already produced a substantial body of Malay linguistic and literary scholarship. This anxiety drove the establishment of a Dictionary Committee in 1820, whose first practical step was to survey the Malay manuscripts available in Batavia and to dispatch an agent to collect more from the supposed heartland of Malaydom.
The expedition’s agent, Abdul Kadir, was a Malay clerk and translator already serving as tolk to the Dutch Resident in Riau. Proudfoot uses two documents—Koek’s letter of authority and Abdul Kadir’s own report, both preserved in copies made by his son Abdullah in the missionary Alfred North’s commonplace book—to reconstruct the venture in detail. The article reveals that the expedition was guided by a list of seventy titles derived from Werndly’s 1736 grammar, a list that was largely drawn from manuscripts already in the Batavian archives. In practice, Abdul Kadir acquired texts through personal and political connections rather than any open market, receiving more by gift than by purchase. In Terengganu, a religious fatwa condemning royal romances had created a peculiar buyers’ market, as owners disposed of texts that could no longer be read in company. In Riau and Lingga, by contrast, manuscripts were jealously held by the nobility and accessible only through patronage.
The expedition’s outcome was a profound anticlimax. The manuscripts it gathered were never used for the dictionary project, which was overtaken by competing initiatives and ultimately dissolved. The broader political settlement of the 1824 London Treaty removed the competitive urgency that had animated the entire enterprise. Proudfoot uses this case to make a larger epistemological argument: the surviving corpus of Malay manuscripts is so heavily filtered through nineteenth-century European collecting that our vision of the Malay past is “markedly foreshortened,” and the thinness of the manuscript tradition means that even small losses—whether from censorship, fire, or institutional neglect—could extinguish entire text traditions.
Key Findings
- Abdul Kadir was authorised on 3 April 1821 with a budget of $500 and a list of 70 titles (derived from Werndly’s 1736 “Malay Library” appendix) to collect manuscripts in Riau, Lingga, and Terengganu (pp. 7, 19–20).
- In Terengganu, a fatwa by Tuan Haji Abdul Kadir had proscribed the reading of royal romances (hikayat raja yang dahulukala), resulting in manuscripts being burned or carried to other countries; Abdul Kadir purchased nine volumes there for a total of $84 (pp. 8, 21–22).
- Of the approximately 30–34 books collected, 16 were received as gifts from the princes of Lingga and Terengganu, and 14 were acquired by purchase or copying at a total cost of $97–$102.75 (pp. 9, 38).
- Only one manuscript from the expedition is known to have survived to the present: a copy of Gangga Sakti (identified as Kumala Bahrain) now in the National Library of Indonesia; the rest were lost between 1850 and 1880 (pp. 27, 45–46).
- The St Martin collection of over 50 seventeenth-century Malay manuscripts, which the Dictionary Committee had been given access to, was lost during the decay of the Batavian Society in the first half of the nineteenth century—a loss Proudfoot judges more damaging to Malay philology than the sinking of the Fame with Raffles’ collection (p. 27).
- The Dictionary Committee’s work was rendered redundant when Roorda van Eysinga published his own Dutch-Malay dictionary in 1824–25 and Elout’s translation of Marsden appeared in 1824–26; the committee’s own dictionary (Lenting and Schaap, 1835) reached only the letter dhal before its stock was lost from a Batavian warehouse in 1839 (pp. 23–24).
Conclusion
Proudfoot’s definitive takeaway is that the survival of Malay manuscripts has depended less on the physical climate than on the intellectual and political climate of their custodians. The 1821 expedition demonstrates that even a well-funded, officially sanctioned collecting effort could not overcome the structural fragility of a thin manuscript tradition, and that the political settlement which ended inter-imperial competition simultaneously removed the incentive for cultural investment. The result is a surviving corpus so heavily mediated by nineteenth-century European collectors that the field remains “poorly placed to understand how our view of the past has been distorted.”
Context
- Primary archival sources: Houghton Library, Harvard (MS Indo 14, Alfred North’s commonplace book; MS Indo 23, Hikayat Abdullah), with cross-referencing to van der Tuuk’s 1850–51 list, the Gouvernementssecretaris inventory of 1867, van den Berg’s 1880 report, van Ronkel’s 1909 catalogue, and Behrend’s 1998 catalogue of the National Library of Indonesia (pp. 6, 45–46).
- Historiographically, the article extends the emerging “history of philology” approach pioneered by Amin Sweeney and Henk Maier, applying it to a specific colonial case to demonstrate how political competition, institutional failure, and the material conditions of manuscript culture jointly determine the evidential base of Malay cultural history (pp. 2, 25–28).