The Travelling Text: Manuscripts, Print Culture and Translation in the Making of the Malay World

Abstract

The principal focus for this study is the historic role of linguistic translation in the creation of a multiethnic, multilingual Malay world. Adopting a longue durée approach, it seeks to understand the ways that translators have been deeply implicated in the movement and adaptation of various kinds of knowledge. The analysis makes use of Edward Said’s notion of ‘travelling theory’—and the analogous concept of the ‘travelling text’—to unpack histories of how and why ideas circulated, from situation to situation and from one period to another. The discussion is organised in four main sections. First, the ‘cosmopolises of language’ interprets the significance of long-established, premodern Asian translation traditions, and the impact of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Sinographic linguistic cosmopolises on the cultural geographies of knowledge in Southeast Asia. Second, ‘in the company of translators’ examines early European forays into the Indian Ocean world and the hybrid forms of ‘useful knowledge’ that were acquired to buttress the quest for spices and souls. Trade and translation went hand in hand. Third, ‘transmitting history’ deals with the carving out of a British Empire in Asia in the eighteenth century and the specific role of Penang, Melaka and Singapore—the Straits Settlements—in this process of imperial expansion. This period gave rise to a discourse we now name as Orientalism as well as the beginnings of the comparative method in linguistics. Fourth, the introduction of the nineteenth-century ‘print revolution’ explores how texts were newly constituted and transmitted, and what effects this had on language, literature and the technology of translation. This history of translation practices is illustrated by the stories attached to exemplary travelling or world texts that circulated the globe and settled and were indigenised in the Malay world. Particular attention is paid to the agency of local writers and translators who acted as traffickers or brokers of the information order that emerged during the colonial period. The concluding argument suggests that the worlds that emerged from the history of translation contained important continuities even across the ruptures created by colonial capitalism. These worlds are inherently plural, cosmopolitan and hybrid—in terms of the cultural geographies of knowledge covered, the identities of the actors involved and the types of knowledge assembled.