Literary agents in the Malay World: Scribes and copyists
Abstract
In the nineteenth century, a small group of scribes in Singapore copied texts by hand in paper manuscripts and prepared texts to be reproduced for mechanical reproduction on lithographic presses. This article discusses the rise of the craft and its decline in the face of technological change. It starts with literacy in centres of religious learning and royal patronage, places that gradually gave way under the pressure of modernity to emerging urban business centres as places where writings were produced. The people of urban conglomerates in the Malay world, home to a budding colonial cosmopolitan culture, needed information, entertainment and moral guidance, and the new print media made it possible to provide and distribute texts to the public in periodicals, books, and treatises.
Summary
The article traces the rise and fall of scribes and copyists as professional literary agents in the Malay world, from the pre-modern manuscript tradition through the nineteenth-century transition to lithographic printing and its eventual displacement by letterpress. Van der Putten frames the scribe not merely as a copyist but as a node in a broader network of cultural transmission — one whose role was shaped by the intersection of religious authority, colonial administration, and emerging urban commercial life.
A central argument is that the manuscript tradition did not simply collapse under modernity but was absorbed into it. The same individuals who copied texts for colonial officials and missionaries — Abdullah Munshi, Husin bin Ismail, Tuan Siami — became the bridge between sacred manuscript culture and the new print economy. The article shows how lithographic printing, initially introduced by missionaries as a practical solution for reproducing non-Latin scripts, was quickly appropriated by indigenous Muslim publishers who used it to serve a growing market of pilgrims, merchants, and urban readers. The scribes who had once served royal courts and religious institutions found new employment preparing texts for lithographic presses, and their craft continued almost seamlessly into the print era before being rendered obsolete by cheaper, faster letterpress technology from Bombay, Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul.
Primary sources include manuscript colophons and signatures identifying individual copyists, missionary correspondence and accounts, colonial administrative records, and the surviving lithographic imprints themselves. The article draws on scattered evidence from library collections worldwide to reconstruct the professional lives of individuals who otherwise would have vanished from the historical record.
Key Findings
- The Wilkes expedition (1842) acquired 29 Malay and 16 Bugis manuscripts in Singapore, copied by scribes including Abdullah Munshi and Husin bin Ismail, with payment for manuscripts and translations ranging between $3 and $30+ (p. 5).
- Husin bin Ismail, a Bugis-descent language teacher and copyist, may have produced more than one hundred manuscripts now preserved in library collections around the world, signing texts as copied in Kallang and Tanah Merah (p. 5).
- The first known indigenously owned and operated lithographic press produced a copy of the Qur’an in Palembang in 1848, with the printer acknowledging Abdullah Munshi as his teacher in the art of printing (p. 7).
- Encik Ibrahim from Riau is connected by name to at least 95 different titles — mostly rhymed narratives — produced on lithographic presses in Kampung Gelam from the early 1880s to 1910 (p. 8).
- The Hikayat Abdullah (1849) was among the first extended Malay texts printed on the lithographic press at Mount Zion, Singapore, using chromolithographic decorations developed by Reverend Keasberry (pp. 6–7).
- The Muslim lithographic printing industry centred in Kampung Gelam, Singapore, declined at the start of the twentieth century as the market was flooded with cheaper, technologically superior letterpress books from Bombay, Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul (p. 9).
Conclusion
Van der Putten’s definitive takeaway is that the scribes and copyists of the Malay world were not passive victims of technological change but active agents who adapted their craft across multiple media and patronage systems. Their profession — the penyurat and penyalin — ultimately disappeared not because of a single disruptive event but because letterpress printing from outside the region made lithography itself obsolete, and with it the specialized skill of preparing texts by hand for mechanical reproduction. Their names survive only in obscure colophons and marginalia, a testament to how the infrastructure of cultural transmission can vanish without a trace when the technology it depends on is rendered redundant.
Context
- The article draws on manuscript holdings in the Library of Congress (Washington), Houghton Library (Boston), and other collections worldwide, alongside missionary and colonial administrative records, to reconstruct the professional networks of individual scribes.
- Historiographically, the piece contributes to the study of manuscript cultures in Southeast Asia by shifting focus from texts to the human agents behind their production and distribution, and by situating the lithographic printing industry within the broader trajectory from orality to print in the Malay world.