THE BAY OF BENGAL AND THE MALAY WORLD

Abstract

This article provides a long historical perspective on the interactions between the Malay world and the wider Indian Ocean. Its primary attention is on the shifting geographical imaginaries that linked the Malay world with southern India – and on the ways these imaginaries were embedded in the cultural and intellectual lives of Tamil-speaking Muslims. It focuses on the ways in which the Malay world overlapped and interacted with the world of the Bay of Bengal. By combining a range of textual sources with a series of biographical sketches of individuals with multiple roots – people whose lives and writings were shaped by their connections across the Bay of Bengal – this article argues that inter-regional flows of people, ideas, texts, and material culture shaped the modern Malay world.