Audiences and an artist

Abstract

ABSTRACTBuilding on Amin Sweeney’s study of Authors and audiences in traditional Malay literature (1980), this article sets out to investigate the artists who created illuminated Malay literary manuscripts, and the audiences for whose visual delight they were produced, through a focus on paratexts in the volumes: scribal or authorial notes or annotations, and ornamental and other graphic details. While distinctive regional artistic schools associated with Qur’an and other Islamic books from Southeast Asia have been identified in locations such as Aceh and the east coast of the Malay peninsula, most illuminated Malay literary manuscripts were produced in the burgeoning urban centres of Penang, Melaka, Singapore and Batavia, areas without a strong tradition of religious book production. The very different artistic profiles of these two broad groupings of manuscripts may therefore be linked with their contrasting physical and social locales. A detailed study of two illuminated manuscripts from Perlis then reveals, for the first time, the name of a Malay manuscript artist – Encik Muhammad, son of Raja Indera Wangsa – and casts valuable light on the mechanics of book production in the northern Malay peninsula in the early 19th century.