Sri Lankan Malay Research Articles

Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon, by Ronit Ricci

The practice of banishment, an imperial tool for coercing mobility as a form of discipline or punishment, has been an important force in driving diaspora creation and cultural diffusion across the Indian Ocean world. The experience of physical, social and emotional distance from their place of origin led banished exiles and their descendants to transplant and transform beliefs and practices from their homeland in the process of making sense of, and adapting to, new environments. Ronit Ricci explores these processes with reference to a variety of manuscripts preserved by the descendants of Malay exiles and the community they created in Ceylon, later Lanka, where they were banished by the Dutch and British empires. Ricci’s book traces the creation of that community—now known as the ‘Sri Lankan Malays’—back to its origins in the lives of rebellious royals and their retinues, as well as religious leaders, convicts, slaves and troops transported or stationed there from the Indonesian archipelago and Malay Peninsula. Arriving in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, these exiles and their descendants have, according to Ricci, repeatedly reimagined their place of exile and the ‘routes and roots’ connecting it with both their homelands and the Holy Lands of the Middle East. In her discussion of texts by and about these exiles, Ricci shows how they have mobilised ‘traditions, histories, and attachments’ to construct a sense of belonging in displacement. By preserving, telling and retelling these narratives, this community has actively shaped the ‘experiences and affiliations’ of successive generations, along with the way its history has been remembered in sites and signs around contemporary Colombo and other parts of Sri Lanka.

Negative irrealis clauses in Malay/Indonesian and Sri Lankan Malay infinitives

This article concerns establishing a plausible connection between the word jang ( an ) in colloquial Malay varieties and jang- , a form which negates infinitives, in the diasporic contact variety Sri Lankan Malay. The principal claim is that jang ( an ) marks irrealis modality in Southeast Asian Malay varieties, in which it is frequently (optionally) deployed in negative subjunctive-like embedded clauses. A related claim, dependent on the first of the two, is that the irrealis interpretation conveyed by jang ( an ) makes it a semantically plausible bridge from a Malay grammar with clausal symmetry to the grammar of Sri Lankan Malay. In Sri Lankan Malay, embedded clauses are frequently non-finite, with infinitives similarly conveying irrealis meaning. Sri Lankan Malay jang- is in complementary distribution with the affirmative infinitival prefix me -, which is also derived from a marker of irrealis modality ( mau ) in colloquial Southeast Asian Malay varieties.

Telling Stories of Seas, Islands, and Ships

This article considers the crossings, modes of mobility, and affiliations that have shaped forms and contexts of storytelling within a small yet culturally resilient diasporic community: the Sri Lankan Malays, whose forefathers were sent from across the Indonesian archipelago to colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), beginning in the late seventeenth century, as exiles, slaves, and soldiers. Two storytelling contexts set in mid-to late nineteenth-century British Ceylon are discussed: the first centers on the Qur’anic tale of the prophet Nuh (Noah) and his ark, typically viewed as representing an age-old Islamic tradition; the second, based on stories and reports in a Malay newspaper, signals the drive toward novelty, progress, and modernity. The article explores how both storytelling contexts, despite certain differences, converge on the shared themes of travel, water, and islands and can be understood as overlapping and complementing one another. Both contexts taken together highlight the ways different temporalities, affiliations, and allegiances were concurrently relevant for colonial subjects. The article thus challenges the tendency to reduce colonial subjects’ experiences to interactions and engagements with the ruling Europeans and suggests that storytelling practices illuminate greater nuance and complexity in how people lived their lives while inhabiting different spaces, temporalities, and relationships simultaneously.

Thoughts on Writing Literary History: The Case of the Sri Lankan Malays

Literary Histories Have All Too Often Been Written with the Borders of Nation-States in Mind, Projecting Back in Time a political unity and standard use of language that only gradually, and sometimes recently, emerged. This approach has been criticized and increasingly replaced by an acknowledgment that literary histories must consider many variables that do not neatly map onto the story of single, powerful, and supposedly unified political entities and that these histories' artificial boundaries of inquiry must expand to encompass the movement of people, ideas, and texts. Although potentially more representative of the plurality of particular societies or cultures, a literary history that does not depend on the illusion of a stable state structure and the state's prioritized language is challenging to write, especially when basic questions regarding the location, religious affiliation, and linguistic preferences of the community producing a literature loom large. I present some thoughts and questions on one such challenging example—writing a literary history of the Sri Lankan Malays—in the hope that these reflections will resonate with those exploring other places, languages, and periods as we critically engage with old and new ways of understanding the diverse nature and roles of literature.

Jawa, Melayu, Malay or otherwise?

ABSTRACTThe community known today as the Sri Lankan Malays traces its roots to political exiles, convicts, servants and soldiers sent to colonial Ceylon by the Dutch East India Company from the late 17th to the late 18th century and by the British after their takeover of the island in 1796. These ancestors of today’s community came from diverse linguistic, cultural and class backgrounds across the Indonesian archipelago and, to a lesser extent, the Malay Peninsula. Among the early exiles, for example, were kings and princes from south Sulawesi, Madura and Java, while soldiers in the early 19th century were recruited mostly from villages on the Peninsula. This variegated group was not always known as ’Malays.’ Drawing on archival sources, memoires and interviews this article attempts to trace the history of Sri Lankan Malay nomenclature by exploring how members of the group referred to themselves, how others (in the colonial and postcolonial periods) have referred to them, and how ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perceptions of the community interact and impact shifting naming practices and, with them, shifting identities.

Dissecting the genetic structure and admixture of four geographical Malay populations.

The Malay people are an important ethnic composition in Southeast Asia, but their genetic make-up and population structure remain poorly studied. Here we conducted a genome-wide study of four geographical Malay populations: Peninsular Malaysian Malay (PMM), Singaporean Malay (SGM), Indonesian Malay (IDM) and Sri Lankan Malay (SLM). All the four Malay populations showed substantial admixture with multiple ancestries. We identified four major ancestral components in Malay populations: Austronesian (17%–62%), Proto-Malay (15%–31%), East Asian (4%–16%) and South Asian (3%–34%). Approximately 34% of the genetic makeup of SLM is of South Asian ancestry, resulting in its distinct genetic pattern compared with the other three Malay populations. Besides, substantial differentiation was observed between the Malay populations from the north and the south, and between those from the west and the east. In summary, this study revealed that the genetic identity of the Malays comprises a mixed entity of multiple ancestries represented by Austronesian, Proto-Malay, East Asian and South Asian, with most of the admixture events estimated to have occurred 175 to 1,500 years ago, which in turn suggests that geographical isolation and independent admixture have significantly shaped the genetic architectures and the diversity of the Malay populations.

Asian and Islamic crossings: Malay writing in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka

This essay explores how a small diasporic Muslim community in the colonial era – known today as the Sri Lankan Malays – maintained its culture through the preservation of language, the transmission of literary and religious texts, the cultivation of genres and of a script. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, the Dutch United East India Company (VOC) used the island of Ceylon as a site of banishment for those considered rebels in the regions under Company control in the Indonesian archipelago. Criminals from these territories were also sent to Ceylon, as were native troops who served in the Dutch army, and others employed in various capacities. After their takeover of the island in 1796, the British too brought to Ceylon colonial subjects from the archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, primarily to serve in their military. I examine issues of cultural encounter and religious developments through an analysis of a Malay manuscript written in Colombo in the early years of the nineteenth century. I emphasize the referencing of titles and names as well as the text’s multilingual character. Through this discussion I question the notion of distinctly defined centres and margins as they pertain to the Sri Lankan Malays – situated physically and figuratively between the Malay and Arab worlds – and suggest that crossroads, connections and movement are more appropriate conceptual categories for considering their case.

THE MALAY WORLD, EXPANDED

Sri Lanka is a land of Asian crossings and contacts, epitomised in the history of the country's Malay community. Within that history the year 1869 was especially momentous. This was when the Suez Canal opened, significantly easing the hajj pilgrimage route from Southeast Asia and resulting in many a pilgrim ship docking at Sri Lanka's shores en route to Mecca. On another, no less revolutionary front, 1869 saw the publication in Colombo of the world's first Malay language newspaper, the Alamat Langkapuri. These developments transformed the relationships Sri Lankan Malays had with communities throughout Southeast Asia and beyond due to the flow – or crossing – of people and information brought about in their wake. Through an exploration of articles, essays and letters appearing in Alamat Langkapuri in 1869-70 I consider the ways ideas about, and attitudes towards travel, mobility, exchange, contact and distance were shifting at the time. Such an analysis opens a window to debates within a trans-local Muslim community whose changing lives were both shaped by the newspaper's introduction and reflected, debated and contested between its pages.

Perfect wedding, penniless life: Ali and Fatima in a Sri Lankan Malay text

Literary depictions of central figures in Muslim history offer telling glimpses of gender roles and expectations, however ideal. Fatima, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, and her pious and courageous husband and fourth Caliph Ali are among the most beloved and venerated of such figures across time and place. The Hikayat Siti Fatima, an 1865 Malay manuscript from Sri Lanka that depicts their heavenly marriage and earthly hardships, serves as the focus of a comparative analysis, offering insight into the circulation of gender images in Muslim South and Southeast Asia.

The discovery of Javanese writing in a Sri Lankan Malay manuscript

Beyond the boundaries of what is typically considered the Indonesian-Malay world, a small community known today as the Sri Lanka Malays continued to employ the Malay language in writing and speech long after its ancestors left the Indonesian archipelago and Malay peninsula for their new home. Although it is reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Malays spoke a variety of languages, at least initially, no traces of writing in another Indonesian language have ever been found. Below I present the first evidence of such writing, in Javanese, encountered in an early nineteenth century manuscript from Colombo.

Cross-Cultural Influences on the Language of the Sri Lankan Malays

AbstractAlthough Sri Lanka has had links with the Malays from ancient times, the Sri Lankan Malays trace their ancestry only from the mid-seventeenth century. Taking into account the process of global commercial interactions and territorial expansion, this paper demonstrates the effects of cross-cultural contact in the language of the Sri Lanka Malays illustrated through typological alterations and lexical changes in a multilingual and multicultural setting.

The perfect construction and complexity drift in Sri Lankan Malay

The verb morphosyntax of Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) differs strikingly from that found in other Malay varieties in that it has developed bound functional morphology as well as contrasts that are not present in related Indonesian varieties. Various types of functional prefixes and suffixes are now associated with the SLM verb which were not previously associated with Malay verbs, including tense and (non-)finiteness markers. The periphrastic perfect construction (1) is discussed and analyzed as biclausal, based on evidence from negation. (1) Farida nasi a(bI)s-makan (tr)-aɖa. Farida rice ASP-eat (NEG)-EXIST “Farida has eaten rice.” The auxiliary aɖa can be negated, interrupting the adjacency of the verb and the auxiliary. Negation ordinarily precedes the lexical verb in the SLM verbal complex. The fact that a morphologically finite negation element is prefixed to the auxiliary in (1) supports a biclausal analysis of this construction. The construction does not add a semantic contrast, but compensates for the reanalysis of the free-standing perfect marker su as a bound tense affix. Some younger speakers are not using past or completive prefixation, and are reinterpreting aɖa (as - ɖa) as a suffix on the main verb, demonstrating that morphological simplicity or complexity in radical contact languages does not increase monodirectionally.

Community of Sri Lankan malays notes toward a socio‐historical analysis

(1993). Community of Sri Lankan malays notes toward a socio‐historical analysis. Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs. Journal: Vol. 14, No. 1-2, pp. 143-155.

On license: A study of parole : by Pauline Morris and Farida Beverly. John Wiley and Sons (P.O. Box 063, Somerset, New Jersey 08873), 1975, 178 pp.

The verb morphosyntax of Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) differs strikingly from that found in other Malay varieties in that it has developed bound functional morphology as well as contrasts that are not present in related Indonesian varieties. Various types of functional prefixes and suffixes are now associated with the SLM verb which were not previously associated with Malay verbs, including tense and (non-)finiteness markers. The periphrastic perfect construction (1) is discussed and analyzed as biclausal, based on evidence from negation.The auxiliary aɖa can be negated, interrupting the adjacency of the verb and the auxiliary. Negation ordinarily precedes the lexical verb in the SLM verbal complex. The fact that a morphologically finite negation element is prefixed to the auxiliary in (1) supports a biclausal analysis of this construction. The construction does not add a semantic contrast, but compensates for the reanalysis of the free-standing perfect marker su as a bound tense affix.Some younger speakers are not using past or completive prefixation, and are reinterpreting aɖa (as -ɖa) as a suffix on the main verb, demonstrating that morphological simplicity or complexity in radical contact languages does not increase monodirectionally.