Through Diasporic Eyes: The Writings and Worlds of 19th Century Malay Travellers

By Faris Joraimi

Introduction

When Munshi Abdullah (1796–1849) wrote the first Malay account of a steamship in 1841, he rendered a strange metal contraption of pipes, boilers and engines for his audience in terms and imagery they could understand. As the first Malay-authored work to be printed and commercially sold, Cerita Kapal Asap (The Tale of the Steamship) was part of a wider turning point in Malay history: from an era of sail and scribes, into the industrial civilisation of steam and print.

This essay explores that transition as a mediated process, where a new Malay world was generated as much through reinvention from within as it was by external disruption, primarily European forces. It uses stories about travel to examine how Malays redefined the relationship between the local and foreign. As new technologies of transport and communication accelerated the integration of Southeast Asia into colonial empires, travel became a means for Europeans to establish their authority over subjugated landscapes and peoples. Prolific studies have examined European travelogues, which began as adventurous accounts about the conquest of indigenous societies, and later reflected the rise in commercial tourism after the opening of the Suez Canal.² The stock personalities, imagery and settings of Somerset Maugham and Isabella Bird, among many, portrayed a distinctive colonial style that developed in British Malaya during the late 1800s. More importantly, their imaginative construction of space and place were arguments for European imperialism. As Lily Kong and Victor Savage noted, these works regularly featured the exotic peoples and lush tropics alternately feared and idealised, consistent with Edward Said and David Arnold’s influential theories considering the link between representation and power.³

Yet the writing of travelogues by local authors expands the range of what journeying and travel writing meant at this time. Namely, that it was not the sole preserve of Europeans who mapped and surveyed static places and cultures. These travelogues affirm the circulation of Asians who thrived despite, but also because of, colonial networks. Beyond being tools of imperialism, the industrial technologies of steam and print were, as James Gelvin and Nile Green argued, “enabling technologies” that allowed Muslim societies to redefine their worlds both materially and conceptually.⁴ Malays harnessed both, as members of the growing Asian-Islamic community of information and movement. Following Mark Frost, this essay seeks to further illustrate how the expansion of print and maritime communication allowed Malay literati “to explore, to imagine and to define” a modernising Asia.⁵ With increasing encounters with the unfamiliar, Malays wrote their own accounts to interpret a new world on their own terms. Malay travelogues remain an underused source to describe the colonial encounter in the 19th-century Malay world.

This essay does not seek to establish the travelogue as a coherent generic form in the Malay world or trace its trajectory of development. The term “travelogue” as used here refers to travel narratives – produced either as singular texts or as episodes within longer accounts – which this essay adopts as an analytical device. While travelogues did not exist as a distinct Malay literary genre, the narrative forms of hikayat (prose sagas) and syair (poetic ballads) were replete with extended accounts of characters wandering and undertaking quests. These episodes of movement and discovery were often central to the structure of the plot, as in the case of Hikayat Awang Sulung Merah Muda (Tale of Awang Sulung Merah Muda), which ends with the hero prince’s triumphant return to his rightful kingdom and romantic union with his beloved. This trope drew upon Javanese literature, especially the tales of Panji that became widely popular in Malay areas. Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati (Tale of Cekel Waneng Pati), one such Panji-inspired Malay tale, involves a protagonist performing various trials and journeys to win the hand of his love. Another source of inspiration for Malay travel writing was the Perso-Arabic Islamic tradition, which, as will be explored later, found rich expression in early modern works such as Hikayat Hang Tuah (Tale of Hang Tuah).

These incipient travel narratives provided inspiration for 19th-century Malay writers, who infused them with Enlightenment ideas in newerhikayat and syair, but also the first dedicated travelogues. All were written by political elites, or those privileged enough by close association, to undertake and record their journeys. They were all also impacted by the changed landscape of their time: in nearby Java, the aristocrat Purwalelana’s travelogue (the first of its kind in Javanese) drew on the spiritual wanderings of earlier traditional tales while engaging with the colonial reality of the Cultivation System and the Great Post Road.⁶

In the 19th century, the Malay world’s maritime ecology of port kingdoms was displaced by territorial colonial states. The scribe Ahmad Rijaluddin (1770–c. 1811) would have been a teenager when English official Francis Light acquired the island of Penang from the Sultan of Kedah in 1786. Thus began the creation of a British corridor in the Melaka Straits, with Melaka – a Malay emporium that passed over into Portuguese and later Dutch rule – and then Singapore coming under British control by 1824. For some, these “Straits Settlements” were oases: Munshi Abdullah was glad to live under English laws that prevailed in his native Melaka and adoptive Singapore, where he worked for most of his adulthood and witnessed the arrival of Western medicines and machines. The Settlements later became beachheads for landward expansion into the peninsular Malay kingdoms, as increasing involvement in their internal crises culminated in the “Forward Movement” of the late 19th century that created “British Malaya”.

Yet the colonial advance was uneven and gradual, with the Malay polities refashioning themselves and resisting in different ways, as the lives and accounts of the travelogue authors show. In Johor on the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, the Anglophile ruler Abu Bakar (1833–95) and his ministers built an administrative state drawing inspiration from not just Europe but also Meiji Japan and the Ottoman Empire. Munshi Abdullah’s son Ibrahim Munshi (1840–1904) and his student Salleh Bin Perang (1841–1915) were key figures in Abu Bakar’s government. South of Singapore, the kingdom of Riau, which had been sundered from the Malay Peninsula by the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, brought itself closer to a burgeoning global Islamic network. While a protectorate of the Netherlands, it developed itself into a centre for Muslim learning where the court scholar Raja Ali Haji (1809–73) enjoyed frequent interaction with literati circulating between the Malay Archipelago and the Arab lands.

Set against these shifting power relations, the authors and their works expressed a range of identities and imaginaries that presented themselves for a remade Malay world. Munshi Abdullah’s two travelogues, one detailing his voyage from Singapore up the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, and a second across the Indian Ocean to Arabia, form part of his corpus as the so-called father of modern Malay literature.⁷ But what their works more uniformly represent is the wider programme of modernist reform that Asian and Islamic societies initiated to meet the challenge of European expansion. As English-educated officials, Ibrahim and Salleh represented exposure to an intellectual culture foreign to the Malay world, based on printed books instead of manuscripts and oral accounts. Similar to the modernist reform projects undertaken by other non-European leaders, their works, like Abdullah’s, reproduced an Enlightenment-based notion of an “advanced” society. This consisted of, among others, the sense of a growing gap between the past and the present, the notion of an “old” world in retreat before the “new”. This modernism was not easily mapped onto trajectories of secularisation; as Raja Ali Haji demonstrated, it also entailed the imposition of stricter textualist interpretations of Islam as an antidote to the decline resulting from folk Islam’s supposed laxity.

Far from being mere spectators and students of Eurocentric modernity, these Malay authors were experiencing and developing their own forms of worldliness and connectedness. How they described their encounters with, and tried to understand, unfamiliar places, people and objects, were rooted in earlier Malayo-Islamic conventions of travel narrative. Ahmad’s 1810 Hikayat Perintah Negeri Benggala (Tale of the Government of Bengal) and Raja Ali Haji’s Tuhfat Al-Nafis (The Precious Gift), completed in 1866, both documented the rise of colonial cities using the language of traditional romance and conventions of the rihla, a genre of travel writing in Islamic literature. Ibrahim’s Kisah Pelayaran (Story of a Voyage), written in 1871–72, painted the old Malay world in twilight: mines and plantations opening it further to global capitalism, and displacing an entrepot-based economic pattern dominated by locally assimilated communities. His capacity to move between these worlds contrasts against his father’s caustic rancour towards the old Malay order. Salleh Bin Perang’s Tarikh Dato Bentara Luar (History of the Dato Bentara Luar) chronicled his 1883 journey with Abu Bakar to Japan. While crossing the South China Sea, Salleh conceived the ocean space as a site of observation in line with Victorian empiricism, but retained Islamic cosmologies presenting natural phenomena as manifestations of divine will.

These continuities upset the canonical periodisation of Malay intellectual history into the deceptively neat categories of “traditional”, “transitional” and “modern”. Instead of finding departure points or clear delineations, this essay explores how the Malay world’s endogenous knowledge systems interacted with imperial modalities to create an embedded modernity. That the authors drew on a confluence of traditions to talk about their place in this new interconnected world reflects what Tim Harper termed “many traditions of thinking and acting globally” that coexisted in the 19th century.⁸ Their journeys, both within and beyond the Malay world, defied the parameters that Europeans attempted to set, not just in surveys, maps and museums, but in travel writing as well: the idea of Malaya as a fixed territory, a destination to be visited rather than a dynamic node making autonomous links to the outside world.⁹

This essay by no means catalogues all 19th-century Malay travel writing. Among the unexplored works are major poetic travelogues: Syair Peri Tuan Raffles Pergi Ke Minangkabau (Ballad of Sir Raffles Going to Minangkabau; 1818), recounting Stamford Raffles’s expedition to the Minangkabau Highlands; Syair Kisah Engku Puteri (Ballad of the Story of Engku Puteri; 1831), concerning the voyages of the Riau queen-consort Engku Puteri Raja Hamidah; and Syair Perjalanan Sultan Lingga Dan Yang Dipertuan Riau Pergi Ke Singapura (Ballad of the Journey of the Sultan of Lingga and Viceroy of Riau to Singapore; 1891), which records a visit by the last Sultan of Riau-Lingga to Singapore by Khalid Hitam Bin Raja Hasan al-Haji. All these syair, written at different junctures of the 19th century, were of the so-called “traditional” style, which again complicates a neat narrative of literary “modernisation”.

That said, this essay’s study of the five authors mentioned – Ahmad Rijaluddin, Raja Ali Haji, Munshi Abdullah and his son Muhammed Ibrahim Munshi, and Salleh Bin Perang – nonetheless explores how the Malayo-Islamic world’s local modes and meanings of travel did change. It is structured around three main themes. The first is the colonial city, a site of new forms of social and cultural interaction, and which constituted the centre of different networks of trade and politics displacing those of the royal negeri. Introducing a temporal dimension to travel is the organised society, which Malays living in cities representing a modernist future began to identify with, against the “old” Malay regimes. Lastly, I examine the authors’ adoption of a scientific gaze over physical environments, especially the ocean, which had become a much busier arena of movement in the 19th century than ever before.

The City: Pleasure Gardens and Street Shows

The colonial city redefined the maritime ecology of the Indian Ocean realm with its commercial reach and military capacity. A sophisticated urban culture had thrived for centuries in the Malay world by the 18th century, comprising local port-polities, called negeri, and European castle-towns. While these were economic and cultural centres, few matched the colonial city in size, population and activity. This section explores accounts of two such sites: British Calcutta and Dutch Batavia, where Ahmad Rijaluddin and Raja Ali Haji wrote about the strangeness, disorientation and fascination they experienced.

When Ahmad Rijaluddin was born in 1770, European-ruled ports participated in the indigenous state system, adopting Malay codes of diplomacy and commerce to engage local powers. As penmanship was an uncommon skill, scribes and interpreters occupied a privileged position as political intermediaries. Ahmad had access to literacy as his father, the trader and judge Long Fakir Kandu, was an influential Tamil Muslim with ties to the court of Kedah.¹⁰ This elite pedigree made possible Ahmad’s and his brother Ibrahim Kandu’s employment as scribes to Penang’s leading officials and merchants.

Raja Ali Haji, on the other hand, had a different vocation: he was a prince of the Malay principality Riau, rather than a member of the mercantile elite. His Bugis ancestors had migrated from Sulawesi to the Melaka Straits in the 17th century, becoming traders and kingmakers of the negeri there. Riau’s eminence as an economic and intellectual centre enabled his frequent interaction with European and Malay statesmen from neighbouring polities, as well as scholars from the Islamic heartlands. Like Ahmad Rijaluddin, he was well versed in the conventions of Islamic letters likely imparted by the traditional education that men of their class received.

The Hikayat Perintah Negeri Benggala (Tale of the Government of Bengal) was a product of such learning. Completed in 1811, it followed Ahmad’s visit to Calcutta together with his employer, Robert Scott of the Penang trading firm Forbes and Scott. Like earlier Malay romances, Ahmad did not describe the voyage across the Bay of Bengal, but his impressions upon arrival were colourful and evocative. He captured the bustle of Calcutta’s harbour, the ships “without stopping in the day and night, come and go in their thousands… too many to count”.¹¹ From there he described the settlements along the great Hooghly, which was so long that the journey to its source would take years, and “nobody has ever reached it or knows how far it is”.¹² Ahmad’s Calcutta was bigger, busier and noisier than the towns his audience in the Malay ports would have known, a city with thousands of streets and fine mansions.

Displaying familiarity with the Malayo-Javanese epic tradition, Ahmad made his characters recite pantun¹³ and compared Calcutta’s pleasure gardens and stylish residents to figures and places from the Panji tales.¹⁴ More noteworthy, however, are his inspirations from the rihla, typically set in Islamic lands but also occasionally the exotic heathen realms beyond it. A classic example was produced by the renowned 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta. Rihla encompassed “the believable and incredible”, balancing “the niceties of everyday life” with “the Adja’ib or marvels”.¹⁵ Ahmad’s descriptions likewise documented a wide range of activity, both banal and unusual, elevated through the rihla’s aesthetic preoccupation with wonder. He turned the gaze back to more than just Europeans: Arab rihla accounts of Southeast Asia had presented it as a strange and exotic place as well. Among the “various marvellous sights” (serba termasa yang ajaib-ajaib) that Ahmad saw were Calcutta’s grand bazaars and their curious wares, as well as public performers executing fabulous displays: puppeteers, conjurers and acrobatic dancers.¹⁶

While Cyril Skinner has considered Ahmad’s repetitiveness as evidence of a lack of creative talent, repetition was key in evoking the sense of excess associated with the rihla convention. This mode of enumerating myriad spectacles (termasa, from the Persian tamasha, “to behold”) was well established in Malay palace literature, notably in the Hikayat Hang Tuah. The protagonist of this 17th-century hero epic travelled to Constantinople as a diplomatic emissary of Melaka. Yet, as Hang Tuah declared, the trip also involved “the duty of bringing back news of the peculiar and exotic to Melaka”,¹⁷ with the embassy encountering an inexhaustible series of extraordinary sights, each lavishly described for the tale’s listeners.

Raja Ali Haji similarly emphasised the “peculiar and exotic” in his account of a separate diplomatic mission, to Batavia in 1823. The account forms a small episode in the encyclopaedic history that Raja Ali Haji composed, entitled Tuhfat Al-Nafis (The Precious Gift), encompassing two centuries of events centred on Riau. Virginia Hooker positioned Raja Ali Haji as a Malay chronicler concerned with factual accuracy, synthesising and evaluating sources, and supplying dates to events.¹⁸ However, the work conforms to the courtly style of Malay (and Islamic) historiography in its structure and language. Arabisms scattered in the text display his Arabic erudition. While Tuhfat al-Nafis seems “modern” for its presentation of a verifiable narrative, it resembles earlier Islamic histories, which were full of dates and sources.

The Batavia account was likely supplied by Raja Ali Haji’s father, Raja Ahmad, who led the mission together with other Riau officials. After nearly two centuries of rule by the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie; VOC), and futile attempts by past governors to transplant the culture and values of the Netherlands to a locally assimilated port-city, the old capital of Dutch Java entered a different phase of European rule. The British Interregnum (1811–16) initiated reforms sharpening distinctions between Dutch, part-Asian and Asian residents, and diminished the city’s isolation with European emigration. This new concept of administration, based on the racist ideas of post-Napoleonic Europe, was continued by the returning Dutch government of Herman Daendels. By the time of Raja Ali Haji’s account, Batavia’s “Indies style” had given way to features of European bourgeois society.

It posed a significant culture shock to the Malay embassy. At a banquet, the Tuhfat emphasised how all the Dutch dignitaries sat on chairs as they ate. Its narrator marvelled at the sheer gastronomic variety, not knowing “how many times the plates were replaced or how many times foods of different types and taste appeared!”¹⁹ The foreignness of “beautiful” European music played on Waterlooplein was evident in the effort with which the author described it for a Malay audience. He relied on visual resemblances, comparing the wind instruments to their closest Malay siblings: the seruling (bamboo flute), serunai (reed-pipe) and nafiri (royal trumpet).²⁰ While a contemporary reader may quickly identify what “pushed and pulled” as likely a trombone, it is harder to confirm what looked “like quivering rice hanging and rattling, ringing when beaten”.²¹

What the Tuhfat shares with the colonial travelogue is an emphasis on foreignness, by focusing on the peculiarity of everyday objects and practices. In defamiliarising European life, the Tuhfat can be read as countering the Othering voice of the colonial author. Raja Ali Haji’s attunement to cultural difference often served to glorify Malayo-Islamic kingship and customs, most prominently in his romanticisation of Raja Haji Fisabilillah (1727–84), the fourth Yang Dipertuan Muda (viceroy) of Johor famously martyred in battle against the Dutch. Yet in the Batavia episode, difference is approached not with derision but curiosity and often amazement.

The aja’ib (wonder) topos recurs, for just as Calcutta’s entertainments impressed Ahmad Rijaluddin, so did Dutch theatre in Batavia dazzle the Malay envoys. However, aja’ib was also a vehicle for exploration and learning. As Lara Harb notes, aja’ib was at once emotional but also cognitive.²² Inherent in the feeling of awe at God’s creations was the desire to know and understand them, through which the observer came closer to piety.²³ The Tuhfat simultaneously marvelled at the sheer mass of people arriving in “hundreds of carriages”, but also came upon an alternate social reality where “men and women were seen sitting together”.²⁴ It documented the architecture of the playhouse where “wayang komidi” was performed, with its tiered and fixed seating. The special effects of “ships entering, rain, thunder, battles and other wonders [aja’ib]” were “marvellous”, but so too were the lush stage sets which depicted nature so accurately that “they appeared real”.²⁵

In drawing on an Islamic aesthetic tradition of wonder to capture the variety and excitement of the colonial city, Ahmad Rijaluddin and Raja Ali Haji embodied the encounter between two patterns of life in the Malay world that became increasingly contentious in the 19th century. Coded in their writing was a negeri-centred Malay cosmopolitanism, connected to Islamic networks of culture and learning, which brushed against a burgeoning network of European imperialism, centred on ocean portcities like Calcutta and Batavia. The former had become the capital of British India with a large subcontinental hinterland, while the latter, now occupied by a colonial regime no longer playing by indigenous terms of engagement, would have felt different to Riau embassies used to dealing with the VOC old hands. Public entertainment was, in fact, a microcosm for this social restructuring in space: theatre, as a European entertainment supposing equality between audiences and performers, had far-reaching consequences for Indies life.²⁶ According to Jean Gelman Taylor, it differed from the traditional amusements of “Indies households”, performed for elite families together with their Asian servants “at a discreet distance”.²⁷ The public life of mixed-gender seating, traffic congestion and outdoor symphonies diverged from the segregated and cloistered living of VOC Batavia.²⁸ Despite its geographical proximity to Riau, colonial Batavia felt more foreign than Mecca, which is described in the Tuhfat’s account of aja Ahmad’s pilgrimage.

Organised Society: Production and Improvement

Such cities inspired Malay elites to think about reorganising their own societies, as they assimilated European notions of administrative government, productivity and capital, and identified against traditional forms of social and political organisation. For Munshi Abdullah and his son Muhammed Ibrahim Munshi, the British Straits Settlements formed a dimension apart from the neighbouring Malay kingdoms that were still independent. But capital, production and bureaucracy would not be confined there for long. The father’s and son’s travels through the Malay Peninsula recorded the emanation of those commercial and political forces, displacing a traditional feudal order. Munshi Abdullah had much in common with Ahmad Rijaluddin, both being Malay-speaking townsfolk of Tamil ancestry. Their mixed cultural pedigree as Peranakan Negeri (local-born) resulted from established patterns of migration and assimilation into Malay society through foreign–local unions. They also shared elite parentage: Abdullah’s father was an interpreter and secretary for Melaka’s Dutch governor. When the British took over Melaka following the Napoleonic Wars, and later Singapore, Abdullah also became a secretary and Malay tutor for the Straits’ new European power.

Generations of scholars emphasised Abdullah’s realism and individuality in making him the first modern Malay writer. Despite his strong personal voice and style, commentators like Amin Sweeney have complicated this image by arguing that Abdullah drew extensively on traditional Malay literary conventions. Furthermore, intellectual biographies akin to Abdullah’s were numerous in Islamic letters, and the individual as narrative subject predates Abdullah: he himself extolled an 18th-century (Britishcommissioned) biography, Hikayat Nakhoda Muda (The Tale of the Young Mariner) as an exemplary piece of Malay literature.²⁹ What Abdullah introduced was the ethos and outlook of Enlightenment modernity, with its subjection of human society to order, reason and progress.

Consequently, he subjected the places he visited to those standards, becoming the progenitor of an enduring discourse on retrograde Malay ideas and their need for reform. His 1838 journey to the east coast kingdoms of Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang was recounted in Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah Ke Kelantan (The Tale of Abdullah’s Voyage to Kelantan). Abdullah was an interpreter negotiating the release of a Singapore vessel and its merchandise from the ruler of Kelantan, then in civil strife. These were not isolated areas, although the peninsula’s central dividing mountains prevented overland journeys from the Straits towns. Abdullah’s account records the merchandise shipped from their ports, suggesting active trade links. Nevertheless, he described the east coast as alien and dangerous: pirate-infested, untamed and closed off from European contact.

The apparently squalid and lawless east coast states were a far cry from the organised life Abdullah knew in British Singapore. Pahang, which had “no shops or marketplaces”, was so badly governed it was being reclaimed by the wilderness.³⁰ Kelantan’s poor sanitation and cleanliness reflected its primitivity.³¹ Abdullah made ordinary Malays, whom he called “negligent and idle”,³² the target of his industrial bias. In Terengganu, he chastised children left to play all day “without education or work”.³³ To him, these exemplified aristocratic misrule, undisciplined and unorganised around productive activity.

Abdullah’s own mention of Malays in these parts enjoying luxuries, like fine clothes, however, makes us question his generalisations. As an interpretive account, the travelogue is perhaps more insightfully read as his evaluation of two distinct political systems. On the east coast were courtly negeri where authority was given meaning and form through the enactment of difference according to rank and lineage. In Singapore, the state functioned as lawmaker and civic administrator, setting the realm in order and stimulating trade. In ridiculing the sumptuary laws Malay rulers imposed on commoners – while their towns were disorderly, overgrown and filthy – Abdullah asserted good administration as the agenda and moral purpose of political authority.

Despite being a messenger of British and Eurocentric modernity, however, Abdullah’s liberal critique is innovative for its articulation in Islamic terms. Malay nationalists excoriated Abdullah for identifying himself with “the customs of the English”.³⁴ Nevertheless, Abdullah performed these “customs”, by which he meant having “the license to criticise the improper conduct of kings without being executed or seized”,³⁵ using arguments from the familiar Islamic political tradition. Abdullah modelled his counsel for the Malay kings after the “mirrors for princes”, manuals for statecraft common across the Islamic world. The 11th-century Siyasatnama of Nizam al-Mulk was an especially famous example. Abdullah staged his expositions through interactions with locals. He boasted of an “easy and free” life under egalitarian British rule to a Kelantan commoner, where one “lived like a king, and we can sit with kings”.³⁶ An exchange with an official, Tengku Temena, allowed Abdullah to give sermons on the merits of liberal government in line with Islamic injunctions. “Evil customs” bedevilling Malay society, such as smoking opium, were “forbidden in Islam”.³⁷ When the Tengku told him to ignore the commoners’ complaints about Malay tyranny, Abdullah reminded the Tengku that unjust kings would be the first to enter Hell.³⁸ He implored all rulers to read the Taj as-Salatin (Crown of Kings), a 17th-century Malay “mirror for princes” from Aceh, to cultivate themselves as righteous leaders who earn God’s mandate.³⁹

Abdullah’s rhetoric set a crucial precedent in Malay thought, combining Enlightenment liberalism with Islamic statecraft to produce a modernist Islamic politics. He shared much in common with other 19th-century Muslim scholars who encountered European modernity such as Rifa’a at-Tahtawi and Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, widening the field of Islamic reformism in this period beyond the Nahda (Awakening) movement, which saw Muslim societies receiving modernist inspiration primarily through Arab-European connections. Abdullah’s ideas about what gave Europeans their power – the responsible government consistent with Islamic teachings – would be echoed by the Kaum Muda, a later generation of Malay religious literati calling for political and social reform in the early 20th century.

Abdullah’s son Ibrahim Munshi in many ways continued his father’s ideological legacy. Ibrahim was an official of Johor, a Malay kingdom neighbouring Singapore that, with its plantation economy and efficient administration, was the last to accept British protection. Abdullah himself taught numerous Johor ministers educated in Singapore’s Anglo-Malay missionary school, where the state’s reformist ruler Abu Bakar studied. British reports praised Abu Bakar’s capital Johor Bahru as a tidy little town with clean streets. Its 1893 constitution, and adoption of the Ottoman civil code that same year, represented the formalisation of government and Islam within the state machinery. It would have won Abdullah’s approval.

Ibrahim’s journeys between 1871 and 1872 intersected with more direct colonial intervention in the Native States, whose internal conflicts disturbed British economic interests. He travelled to manage Johor’s outlying territories and to interpret for British delegations, reflecting his capacity to inhabit multiple worlds. Tim Harper called his account “a quietly troubled picture of an old world on the turn”, with Ibrahim describing Malaya’s integration into a global capitalist network, “a tale of tin, tax and land title”.⁴⁰ Roads and police stations disciplined the landscape, while Singapore’s comfortable amenities ranked it first in Ibrahim’s list of exemplary towns.⁴¹ Penang’s exciting street entertainment recalled Ahmad Rijaluddin’s descriptions of Calcutta, precursors to the Asian mass culture industries of the 20th century.⁴² Yet the more light-hearted scenes – of Ibrahim’s companions spinning narrative yarns, or of his father’s old friends reminiscing happier days – anchor these sweeping changes to the quotidian as well.⁴³

Ibrahim clearly inherited Abdullah’s capitalist bias against the Malays as “lazy natives”. Even the Malays of Melaka, commercial cultivators participating in the town’s economy, were “the noblest” of their race only because of their industriousness.⁴⁴ Elsewhere, local resistance to “the white man’s custom” of having land grants was a sign of Malay “stupidity”,⁴⁵ even though the tenure system subjecting them to regular taxation disrupted the mobile pattern that afforded Malay planters flexibility and freedom. He likewise recorded the flows of produce in and out of ports along the Malayan west coast, albeit now in volumetric units. Unlike his father, however, Ibrahim was actively remaking this landscape, through his political position. In resolving disputes and drawing up contracts between Chinese planters, his scribal procedures diverged from those of Malay court penmen.⁴⁶ Instead of producing ceremonial documents signifying the royal person, Ibrahim made and stored copies, part of the paperwork bureaucracy defining Johor as a new Malay polity. This created a depersonalised, bureaucratic government detached from the raja’s charismatic power.

Visiting Klang in 1872, the headquarters of chiefs Syed Zain and Tengku Ziauddin engaged in the wider Selangor Civil War, Ibrahim described a Malay government bent on public improvement. A town plan was drawn up for roads and civic buildings including assembly houses, police stations and hospitals.⁴⁷ As revenues poured in from the thriving tin trade with Melaka that Tengku Ziauddin helped develop under his rule, this local polity set itself in order, unlike the “messy” Terengganu that Abdullah saw decades earlier. Ibrahim’s uniform, which Abu Bakar commanded he wore to display his position as a member of “our government”, was noticed by Syed Zain, who was also designing a seal and uniform to be made in Europe.⁴⁸ The Malay elites, therefore, were conscious of adopting the official trappings that enabled them to lay claim to “modern” government.

Yet the effort must have seemed to Ibrahim a pale attempt to pursue those Europeanising reforms that earned his state recognition. He was unimpressed by the English names Syed Zain adopted for Klang’s streets, imitating the Straits Settlements.⁴⁹ More importantly, Syed Zain and Tengku Ziauddin’s undisciplined military, commanded by European drifters who failed to obtain Singapore appointments, revealed their inability to organise a formidable challenge to British intervention.⁵⁰ However, Ibrahim had a less adversarial relationship with these Malay chiefs, unlike his father. Despite representing a progressive Malay leadership, as Fadzil Othman observed, Ibrahim enjoyed the company of Malays with refined traditional manners, such as Tengku Ziauddin.⁵¹ Ibrahim’s expansive belonging, encompassing multiple modes of kinship and community, was not circumscribed by strict membership in either an “old” or “new” Malay world.

Difference, however, came also in non-human forms, as travel introduced Malays to new physical landscapes. This time of change was also related to the environment: Ibrahim’s account can be read as the story of an urbanised Malay for whom jungles were exotic, and who struggled with drinking from silty streams and sleeping through mosquito-infested evenings. His description of a geothermal spring⁵² is part of a proliferation of Malay science-writing in the 19th century, mostly educational texts by his father Abdullah intended for missionary schools, such as a geography entitled Hikayat Dunia (The Tale of the World), a zoological guide called Hikayat Binatang (The Tale of Animals) and Chermin-mata Bagi Segala Orang Yang Menuntut Pengetahuan (An Eye Glass for All Who Seek Knowledge), a quarterly magazine featuring subjects from economics to hotair balloons. The next section focuses on two travelogues that paid particular attention to the environment as a site of inquiry, reflecting an empirical view of the world as a site of observation, description and measurement.

Science Adventures: Crossing the Open Ocean

While the maritime space featured prominently in the old Malay sagas, the experience of being at sea itself was usually undescribed. The trope of voyaging predominated in a society where wealth and state power depended on maritime trade and control of vital sea lanes. But scribes and storytellers often timed the characters’ journeys across water with approximate numbers of days, or formulaic estimations like “seven days and seven nights”.⁵³ Rare descriptions of the ocean’s materiality were often accompanied by mystical encounters. In the Hikayat Hang Tuah, for instance, sudden storms and high waves attended the appearance of Nabi Khidir, an Islamic guardian saint of the sea.⁵⁴ The contraction of time and space typically associated with the age of steam undergoes a reversal in the works of Munshi Abdullah and Salleh Bin Perang, whose material conception of the world produced slow and detailed observation.

Munshi Abdullah’s Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah Ke Jeddah (The Tale of Abdullah’s Voyage to Jeddah) is an account of his pilgrimage to Mecca, but as he died in the Holy City before the journey was completed, the voyage from Singapore to Jeddah takes centre stage. Abdullah travelled on the Sabil al-Islam, one of many Arab sailing vessels plying the Indian Ocean between the Red Sea and the Malay Archipelago at the time, noting the stark difference between the archipelago’s shallow and tranquil seas and the tempestuous oceans beyond. Abdullah’s uneventful trip up the Melaka Straits ended when they passed Penang and entered the Bay of Bengal, where “the waves and swells were immense”.⁵⁵ Like a mere “coconut husk”, the Sabil al-Islam was “thrown about by the waves, floating and sinking”.⁵⁶

Abdullah introduced not only an enlarged sense of oceanic space, phenomenal and frightening, but also a new temporality that contrasts with the old sagas’ beberapa lama (“after some time”). He logged the hour whenever a weather event occurred or a new sight appeared, lending a predictability to journeying itself. This clock-based chronology reflected the enfolding of the Malay world into a universal regime of timekeeping. A European time-structure, in standardising schedules for work and travel, was central to the stability and homogenisation that facilitated imperial commerce and administration across vast distances. Abdullah might have seen shipping tables in the Singapore newspapers, which foreshadowed the arrival of railway schedules in Malaya in the early 20th century.

As the Sabil al-Islam travelled from Ceylon to the Malabar coast and on to the Hejaz, Abdullah described the ocean space with a meteorological gaze. Torrential winds gushed “as if they were being poured down on us”.⁵⁷ The colour of the water changed from “white as white can be” in the storms off Ceylon to “green with corals visible underneath” in the Red Sea.⁵⁸ The air in some places was “clear and bright, and sometimes we would see the rays of the sun”, despite the “unspeakable” strong waves and winds.⁵⁹

Yet these elemental terrors were not for Abdullah entirely rational processes, as they inspired reverence for the divine. Despite his diatribes against “stupid” Malays whose superstition he blamed for their technological backwardness, his invocations of God upon witnessing the high waves off Cape Comorin⁶⁰ still suggest belief in an Islamic cosmological order wherein a divine power governed natural events. Abdullah’s naturalistic observations are replete with the topos of aja’ib, seen in his description of the island of Socotra, whose “appearance was made by God as a wonder”, with “neither a single blade of grass, let alone trees nor anything else upon it”.⁶¹ his political beliefs, Abdullah’s approach to science reconciled Enlightenment ideals with Islamic theology. Indeed, the mythical sea of Hang Tuah existed still in traces of Abdullah’s account. Mentions of sacred sites to which the passengers and crew paid tribute along the way, from Adam’s Peak to mystics’ tombs, cast this maritime passage as an active spiritscape.

This diaristic, chronological and naturalistic approach to writing the sea was adopted and developed further by Salleh Bin Perang, Abdullah’s student. A Johor minister in Ibrahim’s cohort, Salleh’s tenure as chief surveyor and cartographer was apparent in his keen eye for physical terrain. Invited by his master Abu Bakar, Salleh joined a delegation bound for Meiji Japan. This official diplomatic trip, consistent with the Maharaja’s pursuit of international legitimacy, also satisfied Salleh’s fondness for travel.

The party left Singapore on the French steamer Oxus on 28 April 1883.⁶² Along the way, Salleh recorded the names of islands the ship passed, their shape, terrain and position in relation to the ship, as well as the people who inhabited them (if any) and their principal occupations. In addition to landmarks and weather, Salleh noted the date and time the ship passed through specific channels, and its arrival at and departure from their stops en route. Three hundred miles from Saigon, “the temperature changed and it felt cool”, and “the sky also changed colour and took on a misty aspect”.⁶³ A “deliciously refreshing” rain quickly turned into a violent thunderstorm inducing seasickness.⁶⁴ Here, in contrast to summarised itineraries of activities on shore, time at sea is marked by daily weather reports. The entry for Tuesday, 8 May, two days after the Oxus left Hong Kong, documents the changing wind speeds that led from cold swells in the morning to calmer breezes in the sunny afternoon.⁶⁵ The following day’s entry records the ship’s slow advance due to poor visibility in the fog from morning to night, making the approach to Shanghai, with its sandbanks, especially treacherous. Salleh still operated across calendrical systems, however, with the appearance of the new moon that evening a reminder that it was “the first day of the month of Rejab, 1300”.⁶⁶

Like Singapore, the three transit cities – Saigon, Hong Kong and Shanghai – were now colonial ocean ports of the international steam network. Infrastructures of communication, like a “telegraph station” Salleh saw in the Shanghai harbour,⁶⁷ signified their integration into an electrified, global space. As at other international oases of imperialist control, the Maharaja and his aides had access to familiar comforts and elite pastimes: a succession of banquets at governors’ houses and billiard at gentlemen's clubs.

In expressive prose, Salleh painted lush seascapes: in the South China Sea, distant “mountains on the mainland… loomed up and disappeared one after another in the mist which pervaded everywhere”.⁶⁸ Nigel Philips argued that Salleh introduced a “picturesque” sensibility to Malay nature writing, an appreciation of which he likely obtained from learning Chinese ink painting.⁶⁹ Much like a tourist, Salleh admired the “extremely beautiful” scenery surrounding the Seto Inland Sea, with its high hills above “narrow channels edged with white sand, interspersed with islands, which are green and verdant”.⁷⁰ But beyond aestheticising these physical environments, Salleh also juxtaposed them with sites back home, making the Malay world’s natural formations the standard of comparison. The Nagasaki harbour, with its “beautiful green” hills, was “twice the size of the Teluk Belanga channel”,⁷¹ thus accommodating what his Malay readers knew first-hand as a guide.

On 20 May, the delegation arrived in Kobe and began their tour of Japan’s cities, each bustling with jinrikishas, crowds and entertainment venues. The account takes us through the temples, theatres and boulevards of Kyoto, Nara, Nagoya, Yokohama and finally Tokyo, where the Meiji Emperor received Abu Bakar for a brief (and rather uneventful) audience on 26 June. Salleh often summarised events in cursory sentences, and some days are unreported altogether. On 30 August, the party departed Nagasaki for the Pacific, and a week-long excursion up the Huangpu.

When a typhoon hit the party’s vessel, the P&O steamer Sutlej, on their return leg from Hong Kong, Salleh gave man-made technology a divine origin, thus also subjecting it to divine whims and disposal: “All-Pure God, who created a ship of this size, did not exempt it from being tossed about by the waters.”⁷² The weather abated in the days leading to their arrival in Singapore, and Salleh used the exact same phrase as his teacher Abdullah to describe the calm sea: “placid as water in a tray”.⁷³ With mathematical precision, Salleh provided the Sutlej’s bearings at “8 degrees, 17 minutes latitude by 108 degrees, 54 minutes longitude”.⁷⁴ They berthed in Singapore on 5 November to a welcome crowd of thousands.

As a Malay text, Salleh’s account is innovative in its presentation of a measurable world. Space and time were experienced in legible units: distances, dates, hours and observable natural phenomena. In addition, the maritime world it depicts was no longer the dynastic space of traditional Malay sagas, where courtly norms of hospitality governed relations between port kingdoms and the voyagers who called at them. It was an imperial space where European-ruled ocean-ports provided safe haven for princely cosmopolitans like Abu Bakar and his retinue, given their adoption of “civilised” government, law and culture. The Hikayat Hang Tuah is again useful for comparison, as the eponymous hero in the traditional maritime Malay world successfully forged Melaka’s alliances with foreign powers by speaking the latter’s languages and participating in their local customs.⁷⁵ In contrast, Malay travellers of the high colonial period established their legibility through universalised norms that signified proximity to Eurocentric modernity, including the requisite scientific knowledge to move through the technologised space of steam and electricity. Even so, as Charles Forsdick pointed out, mechanised movement did not inexorably result in abstraction from one’s surroundings or disembodiment, but also sometimes “deceleration” that “subverted the speed of mechanised transport” and “disrupt[ed] the anticipated progress of the journey”.⁷⁶

Both Abdullah’s and Salleh’s travelogues prefigure the remapping of the Malay world onto a global order where Japan and the Ottomans emerged as the vanguard against growing European imperialism. The old route to Mecca that Abdullah undertook was on the eve of subjection to a regime of passports and visas that territorialised a historically fluid Islamic world. Nevertheless, Mecca and Istanbul, which Abdullah did not survive to visit despite his plans to, would become ever more central in the imaginary of a growing solidarity spanning the global ummah (Islamic community). Salleh’s journey in the opposite direction to Tokyo reflected a nascent “Asian” regionalism under Japanese leadership, which Malay elites began to see as another strategic bloc with which to identify themselves.⁷⁷ These routes were incipient connections that multiplied and solidified into the pan-Islamic and pan-Asian awakenings of the early 20th century, through which Malays contested the meanings of community and modernity. It is to those notions that we now turn.

Conclusion

The travelogues discussed expand the meanings of being Malay through changing times. As a mechanised period, the 19th century opened up the world to Malays who ventured farther and faster away from home. Yet these authors destabilised the teleological outcomes presupposed by dominant narratives of Malay modernity, such as liberalism, rationalism, mass politics and eventual nationhood. The colonial city was still viewed through the lens of fantastical imagery and the topos of wonder. Political reform was still advocated by appealing to Islamic doctrine, and with appreciation for some traditional Malay modes of cultural and social interaction. Even an empirical view of the world found room for older spirits, guardian entities and divine intervention.

That local intellectual labour through translation and adaptation was key to forging a modernity embedded in local circumstance is not news to Southeast Asianists. Barbara Andaya, for instance, considers these societies’ selective adoption of outside influences over centuries to express an innately “modern” sensibility.⁷⁸ The paradigm is echoed by Oliver Wolters: Southeast Asia’s penchant for “making sense” – by organising its reality with reference to past experience – helped it understand its place in wider worlds.⁷⁹ Travelogues have been studied as part of the field’s call to write “autonomous history”, going back to the 1930s. Far from being “monologic”, as Ben Murtagh argues in relation to Malay literature’s tendency to obscure differences between locals and foreigners,⁸⁰ Malay belonging was capacious and expansive. Between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, a regional cosmopolitanism was fostered by the accelerated movement of Malay-speaking peoples despite imperial control, as Joel Kahn noted. It defied the notion of “a pre-modern Eastern society into which an already fully formed Western modernity was inserted”.⁸¹

These Malay travel accounts also subvert narratives of Islamic modernity that highlight journeys by Arab thinkers to Europe as central to the Nahda. In contrast to those metropolitan routes, Malay travelogues recorded impressions of other colonised spaces, and engaged in a tradition of selective stylistic adaptation reaching back well before the 19th century. Like the earlier rihla tales, they contained what Nabil Matar called “the happy combination of piety and curiosity”.⁸² They expose our depleted contemporary notions of the “Islamic”, understood now as a religious category taxonomised apart from its social entanglements, therefore frequently associated in Malay literature with theological or ritual texts but not “secular” narrative. The aesthetic and intellectual dimensions of these travelogues were Islamic insofar as Islam exists, beyond prescriptive orthodoxy, as a system of “explorative meaning-making” that is made by and consequential to the subjects who engage in it (i.e., Muslims).⁸³

While some of these writers, like Ibrahim Munshi, expressed their sheer excitement at experiencing foreign destinations, the tone of the works suggests they were not writing for pleasure or profit. As influential figures in their respective societies, these authors had clear political and intellectual agenda, which inflected their works. Contrary to colonial travel-writers, they were not writing for a mass European public for whom the prospect of commercial tourism increasingly became routine as the 19th century wore on. Each of the Malay authors had a different audience in mind: Munshi Abdullah was clearly prefiguring an emergent Malay literati and future mass readership; Ahmad Rijaluddin produced a royal panegyric for his English employers, just as Ibrahim and Salleh sought to proclaim Johor’s dramatic transformation as the future of Malay society and government; Raja Ali Haji’s Tuhfat was likely meant for circulation within the Riau aristocracy whose adherence to Malay customs and Islamic ethics – as his other works also reflected – he was anxious to maintain.

These divergent audiences and objectives resonated down to the early 20th century, when Malayness came to be contested between the triple axes of bangsa (national community), royal subjecthood and membership in the ummah .⁸⁴ The Ottoman collapse, which ended dreams of pan- Islamic rejuvenation, further strengthened the bangsa cause. Yet while the racial nationalism of the 1920s may have circumscribed the range of Malay identity, the world remained an arena to affirm its shape-shifting meanings. Henk Maier, in reading Hang Tuah , dwelt on its notion of “playing relatives”, where “conversations rather than conclusions” maintain the fluidity of Malayness.⁸⁵ Performances of kinship held together an internally diverse society distributed over a wide geographical span, making personal negotiation between insiders and outsiders an enduring feature of Malay life. Thus, even in the postwar period, when the bangsa ideologue Harun Aminurrashid wrote his prolific series of travelogues on Europe, the Middle East and Asia, his attempt to form a “post-imperial voice” through travel⁸⁶ resorted once more to locating difference and commonality at the level of personal interaction and impressions. As Maier argued, the elusiveness of a fixed and definite Malayness through foreign encounters endures.⁸⁷ It was, and is, as large and varied as the worlds it already contains.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Drs Sai Siew Min and Mulaika Hijjas for reading drafts of this essay and providing helpful and constructive comments. I also record my gratitude to Enche’ Juffri Supa’at, my research assistant at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, as well as all staff at the National Library for their kindness and generosity during my fellowship there.

About the author

Faris Joraimi is pursuing his PhD in history, specialising in the Malay world. His research interests include concepts of time, narrative and Islam in the early modern period.