Interpreting Diversity: Europe and the Malay World

Christina Skott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315471679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume departs from conventional historiography concerned with colonialism in the Malay world, by turning to the use of knowledge generated by European presence in the region. The aim here is to map the ways in which European observers and scholars interpreted the ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity which has been seen as a hallmark of Southeast Asia. With a chronological scope of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, contributors examine not only European writing on the Malay world, but the complex origins of various forms of knowledge, dependent on local agency but always closely intertwined with contemporary metropolitan scientific and scholarly ideas.

Knowledge of the peoples, languages and music of the Malay world, it is argued, came to inform and shape European scholarship within a variety of areas, such as Enlightenment science and anthropology, ideas of human progress, philological theory, ethnomusicology and emerging theories of race. But this volume also contributes to ongoing debates within the region, by discussing ideas about the Malay language and definitions of 'Malayness'. The last chapters of the book present a reversed viewpoint, in examinations of how local cultural forms, theatrical traditions and literature were reshaped and given new meaning through encounters with cosmopolitanism and perceived modernity. This book was previously published as a special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World.

Christina Skott

Europe and the Malay world

The historiography of the Malay world has, in a variety of ways, long revolved around the complex issue of Europe’s relationship with the region. In D.G.E. Hall’s History of South-East Asia (1955) European powers were still seen as dominant engines of change, but the view that the history of the region could and should be seen through the prism of European expansion was soon challenged (see Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee 2003: ix–x). The idea of writing an ‘autonomous’ history of Southeast Asia was furthered in the 1990s with the emergence of the concept of ‘early modern’ Southeast Asia. Here, this term was linked to the establishment of a periodisation from indigenous rather than European historical categories, on the premise that fundamental aspects of political and economic change were initiated before the arrival of Europeans. Since then, literature on the ‘early modern’ Malay world has flourished despite the fact that historians by necessity have had to lean principally on European sources (see, for example, Reid 1988, 1993). In recent commentaries, the era of European presence in the region is discussed as a ‘fleeting, passing phase’ (Tarling 2001).

This issue of Indonesia and the Malay World departs from the political, social and economic aspects of this often uneasy discourse, to explore interactions between Europe and the Malay world in spheres which have hitherto attracted less attention. Ranging in chronological scope from the mid 18th to the 20th century, the seven articles presented here explore the relationship between Europe and the Malay world in two different ways. The first five articles (Skott, Müller, Irving, Govor & Manickam, Matauschek) take a fresh look at European writing on the Malay world, to examine how scholars and observers of the Malay world interpreted the ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversities and hybridities of the region. Between them, they provide examples of how the region informed and shaped European science, theories of race and ideas about the progress of civilisation, and as such can be labelled as studies of ‘colonial knowledge’, a vibrant branch of colonial historiography. The last two articles (van der Putten, Khor) reverse the viewpoint, in exploring how the encounter with cosmopolitan, colonial societies and ideas shaped and transformed ‘indigenous’ cultural forms in a colonial setting.

The chronological focus of the articles presented here is the 19th century. As a precursor, it might be useful to briefly outline European knowledge of the Malay world prior to this time, pointing out the origins of the themes discussed here, most notably European perceptions of racial distinctions and issues linked to the much debated notion of ‘Malayness’. Interrogating what Europeans knew or could know at various points in time also enables reflections on the implications of this concept: did Europeans perceive a ‘Malay world’, and if so, what were its boundaries?

Whereas scholarship on the relationship between Europe and the Indian subcontinent has made much of the ways in which Europeans ‘imagined’ Asia, this type of literature is largely lacking for the Malay world. The reasons for this absence become obvious by looking at European cosmographies and other compendia of knowledge in the early modern era: what we now see as a ‘Malay world’ was then seen as something ‘in between’ Mughal India and China, a region made up of a multitude of small states with no clear political, ethnic or cultural gravity, it was simply not easy to ‘imagine’. Furthermore, the heterogeneous geography did not delineate a unified region. Since Hellenistic times Europeans had referred to the region as the ‘third India’ or ‘India extra Gangem’, a term which was used until the beginning of the 19th century. Although it has been argued that this would have included ‘specifically Indochina and modern Indonesia’ (Edney 1997: 3), European cosmographical literature before the 19th century always separated the mainland from the archipelago. Maritime Southeast Asia would fall under the section ‘Oriental islands’, in the company of Taiwan, Ceylon and often Japan, while ‘India extra Gangem’ comprised not only the Malay Peninsula, Indochina, Siam, Burma, but also often Assam. This meant that the Malay world was presented to Europeans as partitioned by the Straits of Malacca, a perception reinforced in 1824 when Europeans simply drew a line along the Straits to divide up Dutch and British interests. Another widely used term was that of the ‘East-Indies’, but this was in the early modern period a vague and undefined term. At the close of the 18th century it was explained to British readers that to some the ‘East-Indies’ meant ‘Hindustan’ only. Some understood this term to include ‘the peninsula beyond the Ganges’, whereas to others it meant ‘the islands of the Indian sea, from the east and north of Madagascar, as far as new Holland, and thence eastward to the Philippines islands, together, with New Guinea’ (Forster 1790: 4).

European publications which made up the corpus of Europe’s knowledge of the region have their origins in classical Greek and Roman writing. Authors such as Pliny had peopled the furthest East by marvellous races and other ‘wonders of the East’. These images would colour much of the reporting from the earliest encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Malay world, and throughout the early modern period European writing would lean on the legacy of the classical authors and biblical references, such as the interpretation of the Malay Peninsula as ‘the Golden Chersonese’ (Wheatley 1961). The first European visitors to the region, most notably the Venetian Marco Polo and the Franciscan Friar Odoric of Pordenone’s (whose travel account was abridged and incorporated into the enormously popular work Mandeville’s travels) were able to confirm some of the ancient marvels, the wonderful wealth of the king of Java (Majapahit), as well as curious animals and plants. However, these European contacts with the region were at best cursory, little or no information of substance was to be had.

The arrival of the Portuguese in the region at the beginning of the 16th century generated the first European systematic eyewitness reports, published in the form of missionary literature and official chronicles, such as João de Barros’ Décadas da Ásia. Other accounts, now considered goldmines of information, such as Tomé Pires’ Suma Oriental were published in full only in the 20th century and so not known to Europeans at the time. The earliest compilers of knowledge, most notably Giovanni Battista Ramusio in his Delle navigationi e viaggi (1550) translated and abridged some of this material, but the overall picture was fragmentary. The first English and Dutch expeditions to the Malay world resulted in a series of publications, but once the English and Dutch East India companies had been established (in 1600 and 1602, respectively) these organisations resisted publication about their activities in the East. This meant that the earlier accounts were copied, translated and recycled, and in the 18th century were still referred to by European social theorists and philosophers such as Montesquieu. The main purpose of these accounts had been to provide useful trading information, not to analyse indigenous society. But, to a reading European, the Malay world appeared as a long series of cosmopolitan trading ports, peopled by a multitude of ethnicities.

During the 17th and 18th centuries new knowledge about the region appeared in the form of travel literature, complemented by an extensive series of Jesuit letters from Asia, mainly published in French. In Holland, François Valentijn’s Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën [Old and new East India] (5 vols. 1724–1726), presented for the first time a detailed and systematic account of the East Indies. Valentijn’s richly illustrated folio volumes would remain the most quoted work throughout the 18th century, but it was not translated into other European languages. In Britain, the 18th century saw a surge in the production and publication of travel writing which was directly linked to the country’s more assertive colonial ambitions in Asia. However, little of this touched on the Malay world. In 1800, a British visitor to the region could still report that there were ‘no countries of the habitable globe, where the arts of civilisation are understood, of which we have so limited a knowledge, as of those that lie between the British possessions in India and the empire of China’ (Marshall and Williams 1982: 79).

If there was no real sense in Europe of a ‘Malay world’, there was certainly information to be had about the Malays themselves, although this was often contradictory and imprecise. Europeans, nevertheless, saw the Malays in relation to the categories still seen as defining ‘Malayness’: religion, origins and language. The most ambivalent of these was religion. Although Malays of the trading ports were usually described as ‘Moors’, there was much confusion regarding religion overall. The much copied travel account compiled by Johann Nieuhof in the 1670s concluded that ‘most of the Malayers are either Christians or Mahometans, tho’ there are likewise some pagans and Jews settled at Malacca’ (Nieuhof 1988: 180–1). The Hindu-Buddhist past observed by early visitors to Java also lingered on. At the beginning of the 18th century an English cosmographer still described the Javanese as ‘Mahometans, or Gentiles, according to the fancy of their Several Kings, whereof in this island there are very many, one for every great Tribe’ (Heylyn 1703: 831–2).

Similar ambivalences can be observed in comments on the Malay language and its speakers. Although the first Portuguese observers acknowledged the cosmopolitan nature of Malacca (with Tomé Pires reporting that 83 languages were spoken in the city), Melayo was not only acknowledged as the language of trade in eastern Asia but also as the native language of the Malaios of Malacca 1975: 541). European commentators initially defined Malay as ‘the language of Malacca’ (Ramusio 1978: 687), but European interest in the Malay language stemmed from the fact that it was seen as the lingua franca of the East. This was reflected in the publication of Malay vocabularies, starting with Antonio Pigafetta’s much copied Malay word list in the 1520 s. One of the very first Dutch publications, Het tweede boeck (1598), contained a Malay-Javan-Dutch word list, and in the 17th century a variety of dictionaries appeared in Dutch travel accounts. In England, the four gospels were printed and published in Malay (Linehan 1949; Jones1984), and the first original Malay grammar in English was compiled by Thomas Bowrey in 1701. Consequently, Malay was probably the best known of the Asian languages in 17th-century Europe.

The Malay word lists which became standard ingredients in 17th- and 18th-century travel accounts showed little concern with definitions of the Malay people. Instead, European interest in the Malay language stemmed from the peculiar characteristics of the language itself; its simple grammar, its softness (which gradually was contrasted against the perceived fierceness of the Malay) and its usefulness as the universally spoken language of trade in the East Indies. These characteristics led to speculations about the language itself: perhaps Malay, the ‘Latin of the East’, like Latin in Europe, had no native speakers. Nieuhof saw Malay as a constructed language, a kind of early modern Esperanto:

For the general concourse of so many nations, different in their languages, has put them upon a necessity of compiling a certain language, composed of the best and choisest words of all the rest, which therefore is accounted the neatest and most agreeable of the East-Indies, which is the reason that not only the neighbouring, but also far distant nations that trade with Malacca are desirious to learn it.

(Nieuhof 1988: 180)

The concept of a regional demotic language was also presented by G. H. Werndly, who in his Maleische Spraakkunst (1734) distinguished ‘low Malay’ by the fact that it had borrowed words from a variety of other languages. But Werndly also saw Malay as a learned language which was not tied to ethnicity or geography: all those who spoke Malay as a mother tongue could be termed Malay (Sweeney 1987: chapter 2). The visibility of a specifically Malay culture in the port cities of the archipelago was largely a result of the diaspora which had followed the fall of Malacca, but it was the Malay language which created an ambivalent but persistent European perception that all the inhabitants of the archipelago were Malay (see Reid 2001).

The ‘Malay world’, then, could comprise the area where Malay was spoken and understood, but there was also a sense that Malacca was the original seat of the Malay people. In his description of Malacca, Valentijn’s discussion of the history of the city started from this question, ‘whether they have been thus called after the country, or whether the country has been called after them’ (Hervey 884: 52). To determine this, Valentijn turned to indigenous sources. However, this was specialised knowledge, not known by the casual visitors to the region who wrote of the Malays as a people ‘whose origin is not clearly ascertained, but who are scattered over an immense portion of the islands and coast of the east’. During the 18th century the universality of the Malay language, far from defining the Malays, only promoted uncertainty about its native speakers.

A reading of 18th-century travel literature and other publications produced in order to aid trade, clearly shows that the Malays were increasingly stereotyped through perceptions of their behaviour as ferocious and dangerous. This image was at least partly created by reports of European encounters with piracy in Malay waters and the political turmoil in the Straits of Malacca towards the end of the century, and was meant to inform and warn prospective visitors and traders. The most quoted European commentator on the Malays in the late 18th century, the ‘philosophical traveller’ Pierre Poivre, who had visited Malacca and the eastern islands in the 1760s, saw the Malays as an ancient seafaring people, ‘the most treacherous, ferocious people on the face of the Globe’. They could be defined as one ‘nation’, on the basis that ‘the inhabitants of all these islands, those at least upon the coasts, are the same people, they speak almost the same language, have the same laws, the same manners’, and as Poivre added ‘Is it not somewhat singular, that this nation, whose possessions are so extensive, should scarce be known in Europe?’ (Poivre 1770: 64).

Later in the 18th century a series of European publications would appear which initiated discussions central to several of the articles in this issue. The first was the racial and linguistic connections established between the Pacific islanders and the Malay world, a result of the Pacific voyages which caught the imagination of a European reading public. James Cook’s first expedition (1768–71) was the only of his three Pacific voyages to touch on the Malay world. After a disastrous stop-over in Batavia, where many of Cook’s men perished, the ship Resolution anchored off Banka on its return journey, partly in order to collect linguistic material. An account of this expedition was published by John Hawkesworth in his Account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His Present Majesty for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere(1773). In an appendix Cook’s naturalist Joseph Banks presented a word list, which compared the Pacific languages to Malay and Javanese, concluding that there was no doubt that all these peoples had in fact a ‘a common root’ (Hawkesworth 1773: appendix).

This idea would be furthered by William Marsden, a British East India company official who after spending ten years at the British trading post at Bencoolen (Benkulu) in Sumatra returned to Britain in 1779 to join the circle around Joseph Banks, by then a scientific celebrity. The Malay world was still largely unknown in Britain and Banks encouraged Marsden to publish his History of Sumatra (1783), based on his knowledge gathering in Bencoolen. A year earlier Marsden had published a short article on the Sumatran languages in the journal Archeologia, where he was able to make use of Banks’ word lists from the Pacific, writing that ‘the only general inferance we can draw on this head, is that from Madagascar eastwards to the Marquesas, or nearly from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of America, there is manifest connexion in many of the words by which the inhabitants of the islands express their simple ideas, and between some of the most distant, a striking affinity’ (Marsden 1782: 155). Whereas it has been claimed it was Marsden who first proposed a ‘Great Polynesian Language’ (Quilty 1998; Ballantyne 2002: 62) it seems that the idea must be seen as a direct result of the Pacific voyages.

The Pacific voyages also initiated another theme discussed in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Europe and the Malay world
• 2. Linnaeus and the troglodyte: Early European encounters with the Malay world and the natural history of man
• 3. Manufacturing Malayness: British debates on the Malay nation,civilisation, race and language in the early nineteenth century
• 4. Hybridity and harmony: Nineteenth-century British discourse on syncretism and intercultural compatibility in Malay music
• 5. A Russian in Malaya: Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay’s expedition to the Malay Peninsula and the early anthropology of Orang Asli
• 6. Malay – Latin of the Pacific: Hugo Schuchardt’s pursuit of language mixing and creole languages in the Malay world
• 7. Bangsawan: The coming of a Malay popular theatrical form
• 8. Lady White: The literary migration of a Chinese tale
• Index