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Numéro spécial "Manuscript Libraries and Colonialism in Island Southeast Asia"
Postcolonial and decolonial

From Cik Candra to Tengku Zamzam: snapshots of personal libraries from Kedah and environs in the 19th and 20th centuries

Cik Candra, Che Menjalara et leurs manuscrits : deux aperçus de bibliothèques personnelles du Kedah et de ses environs
Mulaika Hijjas
p. 307-336

Résumés

Cet article identifie et analyse deux « instantanés » distincts de manuscrits provenant de Kedah et de ses environs : les manuscrits rassemblés par Raffles, Leyden et d’autres au début du XIXe siècle, et ceux rassemblés par le Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Bureau pour la Langue et la Littérature) au milieu du siècle suivant. Ces deux collections présentent des similitudes quant aux profils des personnes qui possédaient et copiaient les textes, aux pratiques de copie et d’emprunt, ainsi qu’aux genres représentés, les textes littéraires étant prédominants dans les deux cas. La comparaison avec le profil de genres d’une collection constituée plus tardivement au cours du XXe siècle, celle de la Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (Bibliothèque nationale de Malaisie), indique qu’il y avait alors beaucoup moins de manuscrits littéraires disponibles. Ceci suggère un mode de conservation différent pour les manuscrits littéraires par rapport aux manuscrits religieux.

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1Though collections of manuscripts from royal centres of manuscript production are known from Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Bone, Banten, Palembang, Riau, and elsewhere in Islamic Southeast Asia, there has as yet been no comparable collection identified from the sultanates on the Malay Peninsula. None of the eight royal families there has a defined manuscript collection in a public institution in Malaysia, and no private royal collections are so far known to researchers. This is all the more puzzling given that, by and large, these polities were not destroyed but rather transformed and thrived under British colonial rule. One explanation could be that the Malay sultanates never produced manuscripts in significant numbers and never had any institution that could be termed a library. The numbers of surviving manuscripts indeed suggest that production was always modest—especially in comparison to the Ottomans, the Mughals, or indeed the central Javanese courts. It may also be broadly true, as Proudfoot argued, that

there were no Malay scriptoria at any court or elsewhere; nor were there the bookshops, libraries and the like which are characteristic of the deeper and more fluid manuscript cultures of the Middle East, Muslim India, and classical and late medieval Europe (Proudfoot 2003: 26).

2However, since Proudfoot’s observation, documentation and digitisation efforts have shown that Islamic institutions in the region had significant libraries. Evidence of small-scale personal libraries has also emerged from within colonial-era institutional collections: Gallop (2025b) has described the 18th-century personal library of Tengku Sayid Jafar, the Panglima Besar of Selangor. Farouk Yahya (this volume) delineates another personal library, that of Muhammad bin Abdul Fattah in Melaka, and presents evidence of a cache of manuscripts related to the Perak royal house. Some people did own books, sometimes in fairly large numbers, and they were not all aristocrats.

  • 1 Annabel Teh Gallop, “Malay literary manuscripts in the John Leyden collection,” https://blogs.bl.uk (...)
  • 2 On colonial collecting and the under-representation of Arabic-language religious works, see Gallop (...)

3One surprisingly neglected collection, however, that of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP), the Malaysian government agency for the preservation and promotion of the Malay language, does contain the remains of personal libraries with connections to the Kedah royal family, dating from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Unlike most institutional collections formed in the post-colonial era, DBP’s contains a large majority of literary texts, and thus provides data about quite different Malay-world libraries when contrasted to those documented by the EAP (Endangered Archives Programme) and DREAMSEA (Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia), and from latterly formed institutional collections such as Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (PNM), all which consist predominantly of religious texts. The lateness of the DBP collection provides clues to how and when the Malay manuscript tradition came to an end. It is also illuminating because it can be compared to an earlier manuscript collection from the same region, that amassed by Raffles, Leyden and their associates over a century earlier. These, now mostly held in the British Library, provide what Gallop has called “a remarkable snapshot of literary activity along the northwest coast of the Malay peninsula in the first decade of the 19th century.”1 Both the Raffles-Leyden collection and that of DBP were formed with the same broad (albeit unstated) focus on Malay-language writing, particularly literature and historiography.2 Inevitably but unfortunately, the two collections discussed here do not provide a comprehensive view of Malay literary culture in Kedah and its environs in their respective periods. Both collections are haphazard, comprised more of whatever the collectors could find at that particular moment rather than according to any but the broadest guiding principle of prioritising Malay-language material. Both are made up of fragments of larger collections, the contours of which are only dimly discernible, and both have provenance histories that often must be hypothesised rather than known with certainty. Rather than being representative samples of literary texts, the early 19th century colonial collections and the mid-20th century postcolonial collections alike are partial, incomplete, and potentially idiosyncratic.

4All this being said, the collections provide precious material evidence of what people wrote and read in this particular region a century apart. Taken together, they allow at least the outline of a diachronic view of manuscript culture in Kedah, Perlis, and Pulau Pinang, and indicate important continuities, among them that personal libraries did exist there, and that literary works were prominent within them. Identical genres and even titles are found in both the Raffles-Leyden and the DBP manuscripts. While it appears that the book collections of Malay royal families did not take institutional form—that is, they were not housed in a specific repository, owned by the royal house as a whole—but rather were held by individuals, they were something more than strictly private collections, with manuscripts being loaned and recopied through personal networks. Importantly, the evidence from the earlier collection suggests that it was not only royal or other elite individuals who owned books. Further, the circumstances through which the DBP manuscripts were collected indicate how these libraries disappeared, and therefore suggest why there are no other known royal libraries from the remaining sultanates in Peninsular Malaysia. Contrary to what is often assumed, this disappearance may not have taken place in the colonial era but in the post-colonial, perhaps as late as the mid-twentieth century and quite suddenly.

5Writing of the need to better understand the “multiple forces which have worked and still work to allow books to survive for us to study so that we can have a ‘history of the book’ at all,” Adams and Barker propose three stages:

The first includes [the book’s] creation and initial reception: this is the period during which it is used to perform the function for which it was brought into existence. The second is the period during which it comes to rest without any use or at least intensive use. It is during this period that it is in the most danger of disappearing. If circumstances are right then it will survive until the third period. This is when it is discovered that it is a book desirable as an object, either in its own right or because of the text it contains. It documents the age that brought it into existence and thus enters the world of collecting and scholarly research (Adams & Barker 2002: 61).

6In the case of the Kedah manuscripts, the first period of active use, when the books were read within their original milieux for their original purposes, continued up to the early twentieth century. The second stage was likely the one or two decades leading up to their deposition in DBP in the 1960s. In other words, the moment of greatest danger for literary manuscripts was the middle decades of the 20th century, when society was rapidly changing and before artefacts such as these were regarded as cultural heritage worthy of preservation. In this case, the second stage was extremely truncated: a period of perhaps several decades saw a manuscript tradition that had flourished for centuries become effectively extinct. The third period corresponds to once the manuscripts were held by DBP and became objects of study rather than texts read for pleasure. It is also significant that the Kedah manuscripts made it to the relative safety of an institutional collection for an extremely contingent reason: their original owners were closely related to Tunku Abdul Rahman, first Prime Minister of Malaysia, in office during the establishment of DBP. The fate of less well-connected libraries is easy to imagine. If the survival of vestiges of personal libraries from Kedah is due to timely collection by DBP, conversely, the lack of such libraries from the other sultanates in Malaysia may not be because they did not exist but rather because they were not collected at that critical second stage.

The first snapshot: Kedah manuscripts collected by Leyden, Raffles, and Crawfurd

  • 3 Gallop, “Malay literary manuscripts.”
  • 4 Annabel Teh Gallop, “A Scottish poet’s favourite Malay poem? Syair Jaran Tamasa.” https://blogs.bl. (...)

7The first group of manuscripts has been identified by Gallop, comprising 25 literary manuscripts, almost all of which were collected by Leyden or Raffles in Kedah, Perlis and Penang, mostly in the first decade of the 19th century.3 Among these manuscripts, as Gallop has shown, is the work of Datuk Muda Muhammad in Kayangan, Perlis, the only named illuminator of Malay manuscripts known to date (Gallop 2017: 154). To this group should be added a few more collected in the same area and the same time by John Crawfurd (see Gallop, this volume). The most detailed discussion so far of Leyden’s collecting of Malay manuscripts appears in Bastin’s monograph on Raffles’ circle. Leyden seems to have had a genuine enthusiasm for Malay literary works, perhaps stemming from his own background—the son of a shepherd in the Scottish borders, he had an interest in folk culture of many kinds, and worked for a time as the assistant of Sir Walter Scott, collecting ballads and other material.4 This orientation towards folk literature meant that Leyden was more inclined to appreciate the literary practices of Southeast Asia, which tended to be strongly oral in performance and reception. If you like Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in other words, you will probably also enjoy Syair Jaran Tamasa. As will be seen below, it may be that we have Leyden’s tastes and his encouragement of Raffles’ collecting to thank for the survival of some literary works that are otherwise unknown.

  • 5 Although I have suggested (2024: 8) that Syair Jaran Tamasa is from an urban location (perhaps Pena (...)

8In 1803, Leyden travelled to India as an Assistant Surgeon for the East India Company, with the intention of rivalling the famous Orientalist William Jones in knowledge. In Madras he is said to have acquired a further eleven languages to the seventeen he already knew upon embarking from England (Bastin 2019: 27). He began his serious study of Malay after his arrival in Penang in October 1805, where he lodged with Raffles, and by December was apparently already fluent (or at least by the standards of the other Europeans). According to Bastin (ibid.: 35), it was Leyden’s practice of employing local language teachers, or munsyi, that inspired Raffles to do the same. In 1806, when Leyden had returned to Calcutta, Raffles wrote to the East India Company headquarters that he had no fewer than six scribes in his employ, occupied “in copying fair, several old and valuable manuscripts from the Malayee [sic]” (ibid.: 36). Raffles also wrote that he intended to retain two Malay scribes and an Arab for this activity, and was also “collecting several books containing accounts of the manners, peculiar customs, and laws of the Malays” (ibid.: 36). To another correspondent in 1808, Raffles wrote that he had “made a very large Collection of Malay Ms[s]. and I am still going on” (ibid.: 36, fn. 66). Leyden and Raffles also exchanged manuscripts: Raffles writes to Leyden in 1806 that he was sending him “the remaining sheets of the Jaran Tamássa—I have several other books to send you, but wait to hear whither you are bound” (qtd. in ibid.: 46). Syair Jaran Tamasa survives in only two witnesses (BL MSS Malay D9 and Malay B6), one of which is a direct copy of the other—an example of colonial collecting being the only reason that a particular literary text survives.5

9Leyden died in Batavia in 1811. Raffles attempted to sell Leyden’s books and papers to the Government to no avail, and some were then sent to Calcutta. However, another part of Leyden’s collection was mistakenly auctioned (for the value of the tin cases in which they were stored), and then later found its way to another philologist, Mackenzie, while a further 15 chests of Leyden’s books and manuscripts reached England in 1814 and were stored in East India House (ibid.: 82). These chests contained probably mostly Indian material, and were eventually purchased by the East India Company in 1824 for the sum of £500 (ibid.: 89), from whence they eventually passed to the British Library.

  • 6 Assuming he is the same Siami discussed by Proudfoot (2007), he seems in later years to have droppe (...)

10The scribes employed by Leyden and Raffles should also be recognised as key agents in the collection and reproduction of these manuscripts. These included one ‘John Leyden’ Siami, of Thai extraction, who adopted Leyden’s name as his own and may have been the first munsyi to teach Raffles Malay. Siami, who emerges in Bastin’s account as a key collaborator in the colonial knowledge project, was employed by Raffles from the latter’s arrival in Penang in 1805, accompanied him to Melaka, Bengkulu, Java, Calcutta, and even to England (Bastin 2019: 376–381). He may well have been engaged in sourcing and copying manuscripts for Raffles and Leyden in Penang, Melaka and Java.6 Ibrahim bin Fakir Kandu, another of Raffles’ Malay scribes, had been “assisting Leyden in Calcutta with his translation of the Sejarah Melayu” and was then hired by Raffles to run the latter’s Malay secretariat in Melaka 1811 (ibid.: 52). His brother, Ahmad Rijaluddin bin Fakir Kandu, was the author of Hikayat Perintah Negeri Benggala (see Gallop 2014, 2015c). As well as a copyist, Ibrahim is also named as the owner of a number of other manuscripts that are now part of the Leyden-Raffles collection at the British Library (Syair Silambari, Hikayat Misa Tanderaman).

  • 7 Marsden (1812: 300), “an order of priesthood.” Wilkinson (1932, accessed via sealang.net): “[Telugu (...)
  • 8 Cik Candra was the owner of Hikayat Nabi Yusuf (BL MSS Malay D4) and Hikayat Shah Mardan (RAS Malay (...)

11A subgroup of scribes and owners are several individuals with the religious honorific lebai.7 A certain Cik Candra commissioned the copying of Hikayat Shah Mardan from one Lebai Alang.8 Hikayat Nabi Muhammad Berperang dengan Raja Khaibar (now bound with other texts) was copied by Lebai Ishaq and a youth named Ahmad in Kedah (“Lebai Ishaq dengan Ahmad orang muda… di negeri Kedah,” BL MSS Malay D5 f.218r). Another (again an ‘authentic’ text bound with clean copies) is Hikayat Mi’raj Nabi Muhammad, which belonged to “Lebai M-r-y-m yang tinggal di Padang Lalang,” an area near Alor Setar (BL MSS Malay B3). Jumping ahead to 1897, a manuscript now in DBP’s collection, Hikayat Misa Kayangan Panji Nusa Indera (no class mark, see Kamariah & Wan Salhah 2006: 73) was copied by another Kedah lebai, Lebai Putih. The involvement of people beyond the court in textual culture, including religious figures, is a key feature of the Leyden-Raffles and the DBP manuscripts alike.

12The genres represented in the Leyden-Raffles manuscripts include some narrative didactic Islamic works, such as the Hikayat Nabi Muhamad Berperang and Hikayat Mi’raj Nabi Muhammad just mentioned, and two copies of Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah, as well as three manuscripts of legal texts, probably indicating Raffles’ interest in such material. But the majority of these manuscripts are prose and verse literary works that might be characterised as para-Islamic—produced in a Muslim society but not necessarily used in Islamic pedagogical or devotional settings nor transmitting Islamic teachings. One such is Hikayat Pandawa Jaya (BL MSS Malay B4) that may have belonged to the Shah Bandar, copied in Kota Setar, Kedah, in 1805, and apparently loaned out (see colophon on f.90 r). While the statement often found in Panji tales that they are translated from Javanese may often be seen as merely formulaic, the Padang Lalang district just mentioned includes a Kampung Jawa. Could there have been a Javanese village near Alor Setar in the early 19th century, the source of the “Javanaiserie” (to use Arps’ term, 2018: 85) material?

  • 9 For four letters sent by this sultan to Raffles in 1810 and 1811, see Ahmat Adam (2009: 35–57).

13Another manuscript from 19th-century Kedah should also be mentioned: Syair Sultan Maulana (British Library Add. 12394). Belonging to a genre well established in the Malay world, termed by Braginsky the historical syair (2004: 565ff), this is a verse account composed by a court functionary at the behest of a royal patron to commemorate significant events. The syair relates the 1809-1810 naval skirmishes and political manoeuvres when Kedah was called upon by its then suzerain, Siam, to expel Burmese forces from Phuket. According to Skinner, Syair Sultan Maulana was composed by the secretary of the Kedah Laksamana. The laksamana was a cousin of the reigning sultan, Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah II (born around 1757, r. 1803-1821 and 1842-1845), who was promoted, in the course of the events described in the syair, to bendahara. Though the only surviving manuscript was copied in 1825 for Crawfurd, then Resident of Singapore, there seems little doubt that it was originally composed by and for Kedah court circles (Skinner 1985: 31, 43). As we will see below, Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin II was a patron of manuscripts.9

14A final subgroup of manuscripts, though not literary, sheds further light on the manuscript culture of Kedah. These are three legal texts associated with the court: two called Undang-Undang Kedah (SOAS MS 40329 and Berlin Ms.Or. Fol. 408) and Undang-Undang Sultan Mahmud Shah (SOAS MS 40505). At least two of these are late copies made for colonial collectors: SOAS MS 40505 was copied for Hervey in 1877, and SOAS MS 40329 for Winstedt, from a manuscript that belonged to the Dato’ Luar of Kedah (Winstedt 1928: 1). But the dates given for the original source material are far earlier: 1642 and 1650 respectively (Ricklefs, Voorhoeve and Gallop 2014: 163–164). This suggests that the scribes who copied the manuscripts for Winstedt and Hervey had access to Kedah royal documents, whether originals or copies, dating back to the mid-17th century. In other words, in the late 19th and early 20th century the Kedah court preserved manuscripts that could be traced (potentially through intermediary copies) to two hundred years earlier. Such material implies the existence of a repository of written material accessible to court officials, as is also indicated by Gallop’s recent research on Kedah royal edicts (2024b). Indeed, Kedah is one of the relatively few locations in the Malay world for which a distinct scribal hand can be identified (Gallop 2015: 36). All this indicates a court culture in which the written word had a significant place by at least the 17th century, a process Hirschler has called “textualisation” (2012: 8). In such an environment, it is not surprising that production and consumption of literary texts was also well established.

The second snapshot: Kedah manuscript owners in the DBP collection

15Following the third Kongres Bahasa dan Persuratan Melayu in 1956, the Malayan Parliament adopted the congress’ recommendation that Balai Pustaka, then a Johor-based division within the Ministry of Education, be renamed, made a federal organisation and moved to Kuala Lumpur. Among the stated aims of the 1956 Congress was to “unearth and research old Malay literature” (Kongres Bahasa 1984 cited in Mitchell 1993: 87; Leow 2016). A parliamentary ordinance of 1959 made DBP a statutory body independent of any ministry, led by a board. The first chairman of DBP’s board, during whose term most of the manuscripts discussed here were collected, was Sheikh Ahmad bin Muhammad Hashim, appointed Chief Minister of Perlis by Tunku Abdul Rahman in 1959. DBP board members in the 1970s, the time of the most active manuscript collection, included experts in traditional Malay literature, such as Za’ba, Aminuddin Baki, Ismail Hussein, and Mohd Taib bin Osman (Mitchell 1993: 94). At the National Culture Congress of 1971, the remit of DBP to collect “traditional literature,” as well as to publish affordable editions of literary works, was again affirmed (ibid.: 119). Thus the importance for DBP of collecting manuscripts, and a certain northern peninsula orientation, were clear at the outset.

  • 10 The bibliographical information is drawn from the catalogues of the DBP collection by Kamariah Abu (...)
  • 11 Genealogical information is derived from Christopher Byers’ Royal Ark website (https://www.royalark (...)
  • 12 Tunku Mahmud was married to Syarifah Khatijah binti Sayyid Muhammad Shahabuddin, presumably related (...)

16The DBP manuscript collection as a whole includes some 205 manuscripts, 60 of which can be traced to royal families of the Peninsula and elsewhere.10 Five manuscripts are associated with Kelantan royal individuals, four with Perak, four with Selangor, two with Brunei, and even one with Istana Kuala Lumpur. Kedah, however, has the lion’s share. Forty-four manuscripts, over 20% of DBP’s entire manuscript collection, come from a closely related group of people over five generations, all in the main line of descent of the Kedah royal house.11 The earliest identified owner is Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah II (1803-1821, 1842-1845), followed by his great-grandsons Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah (1881-1943) and Tunku Mahmud (1876-1937). Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim’s wife Che Menjalara is also represented, along with their daughter Tunku Kalthum, and his daughters by other wives, Tunku Balqis and Tunku Zamzam. These individuals are collectively responsible for 35 manuscripts, with Tunku Zamzam and Tunku Kalthum appearing as owners or intermediaries for by far the largest number (12 and 15 respectively). There are a further two named manuscript owners—Tunku Abdullah and Tunku Aishah—who are evidently from the Kedah royal family but whom it has not been possible to identify. In addition, there are two women from sayyid families, Sharifah Mastura binti S.A. Shahabuddin12 and Sharifah Alawiyya binti Uthman al-Habshi, who likely were closely linked to the Kedah royal family. These manuscripts indicate that the early 20th-century Kedah royal family still owned, copied, and exchanged manuscripts.

  • 13 Examples of topical syair that survive only in one manuscript collected by Europeans include Syair (...)

17The earliest identifiable manuscript owner in the DBP collection is Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah II (born around 1757, r. 1803-1821, 1842-1845), the patron of an illuminated Kitab Mawlid Sharaf al-Anām (Idros and Raja Masittah 1983: 7). That this appears to be the oldest extant text could be a clue to the pattern of survival: religious manuscripts using deluxe materials are more likely to be preserved through the generations, as compared to literary manuscripts copied using quotidian materials. It also indicates that the Kedah court was one of the many royal centres in the region to own an illuminated example of this text, which Gallop has characterised as “by far the most popular mawlid text in Southeast Asia” (Gallop 2024a: 55). Another text produced during this Sultan’s reign was Syair Sultan Maulana, discussed above, surviving in the single copy collected by Crawfurd. Thus there was clearly production of literary texts at Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin II’s court, not just religious ones. In this case, as in many others,13 the topical text composed in honour of a particular political actor or to commemorate a specific event apparently survives only because of European collecting. In other words, these historiographical works were an ephemeral genre and would not have been safeguarded or recopied, whereas a Kitab Mawlid would be treasured down the generations.

18The next individuals identifiable as manuscript owners within the DBP collection are two great-grandsons of Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin II: Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah II (1881-1943) and Tunku Mahmud (1876-1937). Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah II’s court had a highly prolific scribal culture, with almost three thousand copies of royal Kedah letters in Jawi to the Siamese court produced during his reign and now held by the National Archives of Malaysia.14 This of course was a time of great upheaval, with Kedah oscillating between Siam and Britain, ending with the 1909 agreement between the two which transferred suzerainty over Kedah from the former to the latter. The single manuscript associated with Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah II in DBP is Al-Tarikh Salasilah Negeri Kedah, a history of the sultanate, composed by the Sultan’s private secretary, Muhammad Hassan bin Dato’ Kerani Muhammad Arsyad. As argued by studies of this work (Jelani Harun 2019, Ibrahim Bakar Langkawi [undated], Maier 1988), it occupies a transitional position between traditional Malay historiography and modernity. Indeed, Maier reads this work, alongside a 1911 history of Kedah by another courtier, Salasilah atau Tarikh Kerajaan Kedah by Wan Yahya bin Muhammad Taib bin Tumenggung Wan Musa, as an attempt to write a modern Malay historiography, purged of the mythological elements and rhetorical flourishes that brought the genre into disrepute in western eyes (Maier 1988: 135–147). The traditional aspect of the DBP manuscript is evident in its highly formulaic opening section, in which the author states that he is carrying out the decree (titah) of the sultan, and in the fact that it begins with events in the year 390 AH (1000 AD). Its modernity, meanwhile, is evident in the use of the sultan’s British-bestowed titles (“Sri Paduka Sultan Sir Abdul Hamid Halim Shah K.C.M.G. [=Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George],” DBP MS 100 f.1r), and in the very materiality of the manuscript, written in a mass-produced ledger book, with repairs to tears in the paper made using scraps of postage-stamp panes. The repeated injunctions that the text not be printed without permission (“tiada dibenarkan mengecap tawarikh salasilah negeri Kedah ini dengan tiada izin yang muzhahirkannya” appears on the title page) is in fact an assertion of copyright, and indicates an awareness and an anxiety about the new technologies that could now circulate a royal text far beyond the palace. Judging by the many ink fingerprints, this may have been the very manuscript that was used for the Jelutong Press edition of 1928.15 Thus here is a court-commissioned manuscript now intended—and authorised—expressly for the masses, a thoroughly modern phenomenon. Yet the agents of this modern historiography were court officials, as in earlier court manuscript culture. The role of women in the transmission of the manuscript (the donor was one Cik Soda, daughter of Muhammad Hassan16) also echoes earlier norms.

19Meanwhile, Sultan Abdul Halim Hamid Shah II’s brother, Tunku Mahmud, owned quite different books. Tunku Mahmud gave an audience to the British folklorist Skeat in the Balai Besar at Alor Setar in December 1899. As Skeat recounts:

We sat on European chairs at a table which stood at the upper end of the dais, and were entertained with the customary cheroots, and a cup of tea. Tunku Mahmud was dressed in a European coat with coloured shirt, stand-up collar and linen tie.

  • 17 Page numbers are not consecutive as the catalogue is not organised chronologically.
  • 18 I have not been able to locate this name among Tunku Mahmud’s children on Royal Ark.

20Tunku Mahmud, educated at King’s College, Bangkok, and later a guest at the coronation of George V and Mary, appears here thoroughly Anglicised. Yet Skeat notes directly after this observation that “[b]y a special act of courtesy the Sultan’s Malay Story-teller (Pĕnglipur Lara) was ordered to wait on me at eight o’clock the following morning” (Gibson-Hill et al. 1953: 126). Evidently, the modernising impetus at the Kedah court co-existed with official patronage of traditional narrative forms, making it apt that the four DBP manuscripts that can be traced to Tunku Mahmud are all hikayat, fictional prose narratives, specifically Panji tales. This was a highly popular genre within the Malay manuscript tradition, telling of the adventures of a prince and his circle in the kingdoms of pre-Islamic Java. Tunku Mahmud’s four Panji manuscripts were copied relatively recently—1895 (untitled), 1897 (Hikayat Misa Kayangan Panji Nusa Indera), 1907 (Hikayat Kelana Kembar Jaya) and “bulan [sic] orang putih 1932” (Hikayat Misa Kiambang Panji Andrus Andra) (Kamariah and Wan Salhah 2006: 73, 18, 73, 2217). A fifth manuscript, Hikayat Kelana Siti Kembar, may have also belonged to Tunku Mahmud, since it came to DBP from his daughter, Tunku Muthadraah,18 in 1963 (ibid. 2006: 18). Two copyists are named (Lebai Puteh and Mat Arif bin Jaafar) and three locations (an unspecified place in Kedah; Mentalun, a neighbourhood in Alor Setar close to the palace; and Pulau Pinang). Perhaps for religious reasons, Panji tales did not enjoy the same popularity in the print age as they had in the manuscript one: none of the top ten most frequently reprinted books of the lithograph era was a Panji tale (Proudfoot 1993: 29). Only Hikayat Panji Semirang and Panji Kesuma were ever lithographed (ibid.: 375–376), indicating a process of reduction of textual diversity as manuscript transitioned into print.

  • 19 Her name is sometimes given as Manja Lara or Menyalara.

21Perhaps the most significant figures for understanding why and how these Kedah royal manuscripts came to the DBP collection are the royal women associated with Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah. One is Che Menjalara,19 one of his wives. Born in Bangkok and descended from a Siamese governor of Martaban, she had been brought to Kedah as a child by a sister of Sultan Abdul Hamid, and was married to him in 1886 (Sheppard 1995: 12–13). The manuscript she owned, DBP 133, provides a glimpse of the domestic context of literary reading among Kedah court women. Copied in a ledger book, the early pages include records of financial transactions of the Raja Perempuan and other members of the household. The manuscript is a composite of several literary texts, copied by Muhammad Ali bin Abdullah of Alor Setar at different times, with the latest date in 1944 (Kamariah and Wan Salhah 2006: 19–20). All are literary: Hikayat Koris Mengindera, Hikayat Umar Umayyah, Hikayat Seri Rama, and Hikayat Kelana Jayeng Seteru. Among Che Menjalara’s five children was Tunku Kalthum, who, as already noted, was the source of a large number of DBP manuscripts. Tunku Kalthum’s half-sisters, Tunku Balqis and Tunku Zamzam, are again associated with numerous Kedah literary manuscripts. Among them are two copies of Hikayat Shamsul Anwar, the only known hikayat attributed to a woman author, Raja Aishah Sulaiman of Riau. Three (of five) surviving manuscripts of this work come from women in royal families in Kedah, Terengganu, Johor and Penyengat, indicating a literary network between royal families (Mulaika Hijjas 2010: 164–165). It is, however, another of Che Menjalara’s children who holds the key to why all these Kedah manuscripts appear in DBP. This is of course her son Tunku Abdul Rahman, who would become Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, serving from Merdeka in 1957 to 1970. According to Ibrahim Bakar (undated: 4), Tunku Abdul Rahman himself instigated the production of the 1968 edition of Al-Tarikh Salasilah by Dewan Bahasa. Despite the lack of direct evidence, it seems likely that Tunku Abdul Rahman asked his sisters and wider family to contribute to DBP’s collecting efforts.

22In addition to the manuscripts linked to the Kedah royal family, there is another group of owners, associated with Kedah sayyid families: Syarifah Alawiyya binti Uthman al-Habshi owned Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati and Syarifah Mastura binti S.A. Shahabuddin owned Hikayat Koris Mengindera and Hikayat Misa Perabu Jaya (Kamariah and Wan Salhah 2006: 7, 19). While it has not been possible to precisely identify these women, their names indicate that they are from sayyid families, descendants of the Prophet, in the Malay world often of Yemeni origin and in positions of religious and political authority. The Shahabuddin family produced several Chief Ministers of Kedah20 and also intermarried with the Kedah royal family (Tunku Abdul Rahman’s sister Tunku Aminah married Syed Omar, Chief Minister from 1959-1967). Indeed, Muhammad Hassan, the author of Al-Tarikh Salasilah, was also of Yemeni descent (Jelani 2019: 169), as was the owner of Jelutong Press, the well-known reformist Syed Sheikh al-Hadi (Roff 1994: 62, 82–83). The Hadrami network also provides a connection to another Straits literary centre, Palembang: a progenitor of the Perlis dynasty was Syed Ahmad Jamal ul-Lail, a Hadrami from Palembang, who married a Kedah princess in 1735.21 Hadramis and Malay aristocracy on both sides of the Malacca Straits were closely intertwined, in life and in manuscript culture. It is striking, for example, that there is a Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati in the Palembang palace library, captured in 1812, one in Leyden’s early nineteenth-century Kedah collection, and one belonging to Syarifah Alawiyya in the early twentieth century, indicating a continuity of literary culture across a century and from the northern to the southern extremities of the Malacca Straits.

  • 22 See marginalia on British Library MSS Malay C 2 Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati, as discussed by Gallop, (...)

23Kedah literary manuscripts in DBP’s collection help us to better define this courtly literary culture. Copyists and readers, like the members of the royal family themselves, were ethnically diverse, with Siamese and Hadramis acculturated into Malay society. The genres include texts that represent the viewpoint and interests of the ruling sultan (Al-Tarikh) and his high officials (Syair Sultan Maulana), but also, and in greater numbers, the wider royal family, including women. These readers seem to have particularly enjoyed Panji tales, which is somewhat surprising given the repeated polemic aimed at such literature by religious figures (attested a century earlier by the copyist who wrote “jangan beriman” across every page of Leyden’s Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati22). The survival of this cluster of works from the Panji genre, with its archaic roots and persistent association with women readers, into the 20th century, is indeed remarkable.

24Another feature of court culture indicated by these manuscripts is that the entertainment forms popular in the Kedah court in the first half of the 20th century were apparently rather similar to those of the 19th and earlier (in spite of the Sultan’s enjoyment of European diversions such as billiards and horseracing). At the festivities surrounding the circumcision of Tunku Abdul Rahman and seven other boys, for instance, wayang kulit performances took place every night for three weeks (Sheppard 1995: 15). It is at such times that syair and hikayat recitations may also have happened. The DBP collection further makes evident that manuscript copying carried on well into the age of print—indeed, into the age of newspapers and cinema. Even at this time, there remained an appetite for traditional court reading material, and scribes in urban areas of Kedah and Pulau Pinang able to reproduce it.

Collecting at the end of the manuscript tradition

  • 23 It is not specified in the catalogue whether the manuscripts were newly acquired or simply had not (...)

25The end, when it came, was sudden. Almost all of the DBP manuscripts were collected in the 1960s. The most recent catalogue of 2006 (Kamariah and Wan Salhah) describes the acquisitions since the previous catalogue of 1983 (Idros and Raja Masittah), amounting to 29 items. Of these, only five are literary: two syair and three hikayat, and the remainder are religious works (including didactic hikayat). In other words, 60.7% of the newly acquired were Islamic works, compared to only 17.5% of the manuscripts from the 1983 catalogue. This suggests that there were few literary manuscripts remaining in the field after the 1960s.23 Source locations from beyond the peninsula are prominent: Pontianak, Pattani, even Palembang (see Darmawan this volume), but especially Aceh. A similar pattern is evident in the cataloguing information of the other major Malaysian institutional collection, Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia.

Bar chart 1 – Numbers of literary and religious manuscripts in the collection of Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (PNM), by date of acquisition.

Bar chart 1 – Numbers of literary and religious manuscripts in the collection of Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (PNM), by date of acquisition.

Data from the PNM catalogues (see Appendix III)

  • 24 Compare the breakdown of Palembang genres in Darmawan (this volume). For estimated percentages of g (...)
  • 25 Unfortunately, it appears that some of these items are not manuscripts at all. PNM MSS 95, for exam (...)
  • 26 The Acehnese manuscripts (PNM MSS 2983, 3839, 3955B, 4696, 4817B), are catalogued only as “hikayat (...)

26From the first instalment in 1987 to the most recent of 2022, these volumes document the collection as it grew (from 759 to over 5,000 manuscripts over that period). Literary and historical manuscripts were always a very small proportion of the material collected—only 4% of the total.24 It is probably significant that the earliest tranche of material (345 manuscripts catalogued obtained up to 1986) contains the highest proportion of literary texts, at 11%.25 No subsequent catalogue even reaches double digits in terms of percentage, suggesting that from the 1990s onwards, literary texts were exceedingly scarce. It is also notable that, as with DBP, many of the literary texts that are found come from beyond the Peninsula, particularly the west coast of Kalimantan and Aceh,26 suggesting that there was little left to collect more locally.

  • 27 Kindly shared with me by Andrew Peacock.
  • 28 With thanks to Farouk Yahya for alerting me to this source.

27A final Malaysian institutional collection should also be mentioned here: that of the University of Malaya (UM), which, though small, is instructive for what it reveals about the availability of Malay manuscripts in the 1950s. The 326 items in the handlist27 are highly eclectic, including documents and letters in a range of languages, and no information is given beyond a number and a title. But there also exists an account of an expedition carried out by P.E. de Josselin de Jong and A.H. Hill in 1954 to Kelantan, Terengganu, Kedah, and Pahang, to survey Malay manuscripts in private hands there, with a view to acquiring the originals or copies for the University of Malaya library (de Josselin de Jong 1980: 24).28 De Jong’s article, written up almost 30 years later, details the individuals he met and the manuscripts they owned. Once again, as with the DBP collection, individuals with royal connections are prominent—Rajas, Tengkus and Engkus in Kota Bharu, Palembang, Kuala Terengganu, and Pekan (ibid.: 24–25). But so too are what de Jong terms “specialists,” people with a professional application for their manuscripts, such as a silat practitioner, a dalang and a bomoh (ibid.: 27). Perhaps the most emblematic figure of this specific moment in Malay cultural life, when the traditional arts where still flourishing alongside modern entertainment forms, is the Kelantan dalang who owned a manuscript of Hikayat Inu Kertapati. The dalang consulted this hikayat often in order to “find beautiful phrases,” which he would use in his wayang kulit performances in his permanent booth at the Biarritz amusement park in Kota Bharu (ibid.: 26–27). De Jong noted that he and Hill “did no more than scratch the surface of the store of Malay manuscripts in private hands in Malaya” on their month-long trip (ibid.: 28). It is deeply regrettable that this was not followed up on in good time, for, turning to the University of Malaya handlist, it is clear that the items that De Jong and Hill identified form a significant part of UM’s Malay literary manuscripts. It appears that because more manuscripts were not documented or collected in the crucial next decades, they are now lost, along with the Biarritz with its regular wayang kulit fixtures.

Materiality

28One reason for this rapid disappearance of manuscripts is suggested by an aspect that only becomes visible when we move from the catalogues to examination of the physical manuscripts—their materiality. With the exception of Kitab Mawlid Sharaf al-Anām, all the DBP Kedah manuscripts are copied on poor quality paper, often in pre-lined, mass-produced blank books such as ledgers and exercise books. None are bound, and none of the literary manuscripts have illumination. Indeed, they are so humble that it is easy to understand why the descendants of their original owners might not have bothered to preserve them. Without recopying, of course, a text decays with the paper on which it is written. Indeed, the transition from the relatively expensive and durable laid paper of the 19th century to the cheaper notebooks of the early 20th century would have hastened the disappearance of this literature. Precisely the quotidian materiality of these texts speaks of the milieu in which they were produced—perhaps by copyists without much spare money for deluxe editions, but who nevertheless executed their tasks with care and skill. Creative reuse of materials to hand is evident in the repairs made to Al-Tarikh dan Salasilah Negeri Kedah (DBP 100), using what look like the remnants of the edge of a pane of postage stamps. One of the volumes of Hikayat Misa Perabu Jaya (DBP MS 66b) is wrapped in a sheet of paper with a handwritten calendar on the reverse.

29The scribes of the DBP manuscripts, late though they were, still operated within an established copying tradition. The very length of the texts—amounting to thousands of pages of dense writing, inscribed in brisk Jawi with hardly a line blotted—attests both to a considerable expenditure of time and also to fluent scribal ability. They are not the products of a semi-literate culture. This rather obvious fact bears repeating, given that the Malay literary tradition is sometimes characterised as basically oral/aural and only superficially literate (see discussion in Braginsky 2004: 22–26). While it is likely the case that most or even all genres within it found their fullest expression and their most avid audiences when read aloud, the DBP collection indicates a highly textual literary culture with its own established practices. Despite being written on commercial lined paper, DBP MS 16a Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati, for instance, was gathered into quires which were then sewn together by hand. The first page of DBP MS 66a, with its box frame surrounding text follows the same layout conventions of most Malay manuscripts, and indeed of those in Leyden’s collection, where Gallop (2017) described the text block as “written densely across the full surface of the page, with no extraneous embellishment.” This continuity of scribal practices extends also to the methodology of copying, where, as is attested throughout the Malay manuscript tradition, copyists were at liberty and indeed encouraged to augment, edit or improve. As a note by Syarifah Alawiyyah on the first page of Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati (DBP MS 16b) reads:

Inilah hikayat Jawa yang bernama Cekel Waneng Pati / yang sudah dibetulkan karangannya dan / ditambah lagi mana yang kurang / ceteranya dan perkataannya / ada yang dibuang ada yang / ditambah / oleh / Sarifah ‘Alawiyya / binti ‘Uthman / al-Habshi

This is a Javanese tale named Cekel Waneng Pati, the composition of which has been corrected and added to where it is lacking in the story and the words; some has been removed and some added, by Syarifah ‘Alawiyya binti ‘Uthman al-Habshi

30The persistence of traditional norms of copying is perhaps behind a particular difficulty encountered when studying the DBP manuscripts—it is at times difficult to ascertain whether a manuscript was copied by the owner in the early 20th century or by DBP staff after it was accessioned. One such is DBP MSS 16b, a copy made of DBP MSS 16a, presumably in 1963. This act of reproduction by the modern library is indicated only by the obviously recent ledger book used and by a small note on the box reading “tulisan tangan semula” (“rewritten by hand”). Evidently, the DBP policy was to prioritise the text over any consideration of materiality. In this, it was not so dissimilar from colonial-era collecting. Raffles and Leyden, of course, were interested solely in the texts, and the copies made by their scribes make no reference to any codicological or paratextual features of the original manuscripts.

Conclusion

31The demise of traditional Malay literature could be dated to 1964, when Tunku Kalthum died. By that stage, the DBP’s collection was formed, thanks in large part to donations and sales from the Kedah royal family, with, as we have seen, a particularly important role being played by Tunku Kalthum and Tunku Zamzam. At this point the manuscripts ceased to be sources of entertainment and pleasure for their original audiences and instead became objects of study. Several important works and editions, especially on Panji tales, were based on these manuscripts and published by DBP (Baharuddin Zainal 1965, Harun Mat Piah 1980, Abdul Rahman Kaeh 1989, Noriah Mohamed 1992), but in recent decades they have attracted little attention. The collecting history of DBP underscores the particular vulnerability of literary manuscripts to disappearance and the importance of personal networks, namely the connection between Tunku Abdul Rahman and manuscript owners in his family, in forming the collection. It follows that there were likely other royal collections that are now lost or currently unknown, which is also what is implied by de Josselin de Jong’s report from the east coast states.

32In the Kedah case, the comparison between the two ‘snapshots’, the colonial collection of the early 19th century and the DBP collection of the mid-20th century, illustrates important continuities across the intervening period, including the role of religious figures and palace women, and the persistence of particular genres and even specific titles. This time span—from Raffles to Merdeka—also delineates quite precisely the colonial period. That there are very similar manuscripts at either end implies that it was not colonialism, nor colonial collecting, that ended the manuscript tradition, as is often assumed. Rather, the charge should probably be laid at the door of modernity—the changing lifestyles, tastes, and norms that rendered a manuscript culture once widely enjoyed into something opaque, unfamiliar, and, eventually, extinct.

Acknowledgements

33This article was first presented at the “Colonialism and manuscript libraries in island Southeast Asia” workshop at SOAS University of London, in May 2023, organised as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Leadership Award Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures. I would like to thank Puan Kamariah Abu Samah, former librarian at Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and co-author of the 2006 catalogue, for her invaluable assistance in facilitating access to the library and for sharing articles with me. I also thank Bibi Omar at the Pusat Dokumentasi Melayu for her help during my visit in 2024. Much gratitude is also due Annabel Gallop for her blogposts on the British Library manuscripts, the augmented catalogue notes in the digitised versions, and many publications on Kedah in particular that have enabled this study.

Appendix I: Manuscripts from Kedah and environs from early 19th century colonial collectors

Call Number

Title

Date

Scribe/
Owner/
Patron

Location

Certainty of

Location/Evidence

Berlin Ms.Or.Fol.404

Hikayat Dewa Mandu

after 1809

Crawfurd

Penang/

Kedah

Possible,
due to association
with Crawfurd

Berlin Ms.Or.Fol.407

Hikayat Seri Rama

Crawfurd

Penang/

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Crawfurd.
See Gallop (this volume)

Berlin Ms.Or.Fol.408

Undang-Undang Kedah

1747

Crawfurd

Kedah

Probable,
by association with
Crawfurd.
See Gallop (this volume)

BL Add. 12384

Hikayat Hang Tuah

Copied by Bapu
Kandu, from
an ms belonging
to the Sultan
of Kedah;
subsequently
owned by
Crawfurd (see
Gallop this volume).

Kedah,

Penang

Definite,
by inscription

BL Add. 12394

Syair Sultan Maulana

1825

Composed for
Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin

Kedah

Definite, by content

BL MSS Malay A1

Hikayat Ular Nangkawang

Leyden

Kedah

Possible,
due to association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay B1

Hikayat Hang Tuah

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Possible,
due to association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay B12

Hikayat Perang Pandawa Jaya

1804

Muhammad Kasim,
Leyden

Kedah

Possible,
due to association
with Leyden and B6

BL MSS Malay B2

Hikayat Pelanduk Jenaka

1804

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay B3

Hikayat Mi’raj Nabi Muhammad; Syair Orang Berbuat Amal; Syair Silambari; Syair Surat Kirim Kepada Perempuan

Raffles/

Leyden

Padang,
Lalang
(Kedah)

Definite,
by inscription

BL MSS Malay B4

Hikayat Pandawa Jaya

1805

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Definite,
by inscription

BL MSS Malay B5

Hikayat Putera Jaya Pati

1806

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Possible,
due to association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay B6

Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah

1805

Muhammad Kasim, Raffles/

Leyden

Penang

Definite,
by association
with Raffles

BL MSS Malay B7 and B8

Hikayat Bayan Budiman

Raffles/

Leyden

Penang

Definite,
by date
and scribe

BL MSS Malay B9 (copy of D6)

Syair Jaran Tamasa

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden
and vocabulary

BL MSS Malay C1 and C2

Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay C3

Hikayat Misa Tanderaman

1807

Ibrahim bin
Fakir Kandu
(Raffles’ secretary),
Raffles

Penang

Definite,
by inscription

BL MSS Malay C4 and C5

Hikayat Isma Yatim

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay C8

Hikayat Maharaja Boma

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay D1

Hikayat Dewa Mandu

1808

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden

BL MSS Malay D2

Hikayat Raja Dewa Maharupa

1801

Raffles/

Leyden

Penang

Definite,
by inscription

BL MSS Malay D3

Hikayat Parang Puting

1806

Ibrahim, Raffles/Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Ibrahim
and Raffles

BL MSS Malay D4

Hikayat Nabi Yusuf

1801

Cik Candra, subsequently acquired by Muhammad Yusuf b. Mir Hasan. Copyist: Lebai Muhammad and Bapu Syaikh ‘Alaidin. Illustrator: Cik Mat Tuk Muda.

Perlis

Definite,
by inscription

BL MSS Malay D5

Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah; Hikayat Nabi Muhammad Berperang Dengan Raja Khaibar; Hikayat Pelanduk Jenaka; Hikayat Shah Mardan

Lebai Ishaq and Ahmad, Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Definite,
by inscription

BL MSS Malay D6

Syair Jaran Tamasa

Raffles/

Leyden

Kedah

Probable,
by association
with Leyden
and vocabulary

RAS Malay 66

Hikayat Shah Mardan

Copied by
Lebai Alang,
original owner
Cik Candra,
subsequently
acquired by
Muhammad
Yusuf b. Mir
Hasan in 1790

Perlis

Definite,
by inscription

SOAS MS 12260

Hikayat Budak Miskin

1810

Marsden, from Griffiths

Penang

Definite,
by inscription

34The information in this table is derived from the following sources, and by physical examination of the majority of the British Library manuscripts: Ricklefs, Voorhoeve, and Gallop (2014); Hanstein and Pudjiastuti (2016); and Gallop’s dataset (Gallop 2025), and Gallop [this volume].

35Note that not all Leyden manuscripts are from Kedah: for example, BL MSS Malay C6 Hikayat Selindung Delima and BL MSS Malay B10 were copied in Melaka.

Appendix II: Manuscripts from Kedah and environs in Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka collection

Call Number

Title

Date

Scribe/Owner/Patron

Location

Certainty of Location/Evidence

DBP MS 10

Kitab Bayān al-Arkām fi Maʿrifat al-Insān

Translated into Malay by Syed Abdullah b. al-Marhum Syed Shariff Jamalullail. Bought from Mustafa b. Abdul Hamid in 1963.

Perlis

Probable, by biographical association

DBP MS 100

al-Tarikh Salasilah dan Sejarah Negeri Kedah Darulaman

Donated by Che Soda Kedah, commissioned by Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah.

Kedah

Definite, by content and inscription

DBP MS 107

Hikayat Betara Jaya Asmara

1931

Belonged to “Tengku Kalthum binti Sultan Kedah,” copied by Habsah [?] binti Haji Muhammad Saman, “daerah Kelawai, Pinang.”

Kedah/

Penang

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 111

Hikayat Jeranka Kargin

Bought from Tengku Zamzam.

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 133

Hikayat compendium: (i) Koris Mengindera, (ii) Hikayat Umar Umayyah, (iii) Hikayat Seri Rama, (iv) Hikayat Kelana Jayeng Seteru

(iv) 1944

Copied in a ledger book, with early pages including accounts of financial transactions of the Raja Perempuan and others. Four titles contain different information of copyists, presumably indicating source manuscripts. Ownership mark on f. 22 of Che’ Menjalara. (i) copied by Muhammad Ali bin Abdullah of Alor Setar in 1924; (ii) Tuan Syeikh Abu Faisal, translated by Muhammad Hashim Abdul Ghani in Pulau Pinang in 1886, copied by Muhammad Ali bin Abdullah in Alor Setar in 1944; (iii) copied by Muhammad Ali bin Abdullah in 1944; (iv) Muhammad Ali bin Abdullah in 1944.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 154

Hikayat Kelana Kembar Jaya

Copied by Mat Arif bin Jaafar Pinang in 1907; has name of DYMM Tunku Mahmud Darul Aman.

Kedah/

Penang

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 155c

Hikayat Jenis Panji (provisional title)

Bought from Tengku Zamzam.

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 16

Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati

In 5 volumes (exercise books)

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam (and other HCWP below)

DBP MS 162

Hikayat Kuris Mengindera Raja Alam

1926

Belonged to Sharifah Mastura binti S.A. Sahahbuddin; copied 1345.

Kedah

Probable, by association with Syarifah Mastura

DBP MS 16a

Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati

In four volumes. Bought from Tengku Zamzam but copied and corrected by Sharifah ‘Alawiyya bt. Uthman al-Habshi.

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Kalthum

DBP MS 19

Hikayat Dalang Menggoda Asmara

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 25

Hikayat Ganja Mara

1932

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 28

Hikayat Hang Tuah

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 36

Hikayat Indera Kesuma

Bought from Tengku Kalthum

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Kalthum

DBP MS 38

Hikayat Jaran Kulina

Belonged to Muhammad Ali bin Ahmad in Mentalun, Kedah, 1923. Sold to Sharifah Maznah binti Syed Syeikh. Donated by Tengku Kalthum.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 38a

Hikayat Jaran Kulina

Bought from Syarifah Mastura binti S.A. Shahabuddin

Kedah

Probable, by association with Syarifah Mastura

DBP MS 38b

Hikayat Jaran Kulina

1923

Copied by Tuan Syed Bakar Shahabuddin, Muhammad Ali b. Ahmad and someone else unknown. Belonged to Tengku Abdul Hamid bin Tengku Abdullah. Given by Tengku Kalthum in 1963.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 39 and 39a

Hikayat Jaran Misa Gembar Sari

Gift from Tengku Zamzam in 1963

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 40 and 41

Hikayat Jaran Nandak/Pandap

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 45

Hikayat Kelana Jaya Seteru

Belonged to DYM Tengku Balaqidah (read: Balqis) binti Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah, Kedah. See http://www.royalark.net/​Malaysia/​kedah10.htm

Kedah

Definite, by association with Tengku Balqis

DBP MS 46

Hikayat Kelana Siti Kembar

Bought from Tengku Muthadraah [?] binti Tengku Mahmud in 1963

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Muthadraah

DBP MS 50

Hikayat Kuris Mengindera Raja Alam

1929

Has the name of Ismail bin Md Said, Alor Setar, Kedah, copied 1929. Bought from Sharifah Mastura binti SA Sahahbuddin in 1959.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 55

Kitab Maulud Sharaf al-Anām

Belonged to Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 64

Hikayat Misa Kiamang (or Kiambang) Panji Andus Andra

1932

Belonged to Tengku Mahmud ibni Almarhum Paduka Seri Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Mukarram Shah, Kedah. Bought from Tengku Kalthom.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 66

Hikayat Misa Perabu Jaya

1917

Eight volumes, copied in exercise books by Muhammad Hashim Haji Ali in 1952 in Perlis.

Perlis

Definite, by inscription

DBP MS 66a

Hikayat Misa Perabu Jaya

(a) 1917, (b) 1938, (c) 1867, (e) 1932

Conflicting information in 1983 and 2006 catalogues, suggesting different numbering of copies. Per 2006: (a) bought from Tengku Kalthum; (b) copied by Shafie bin Endut in 1938, bought from Syarifah Sapura bt. Syed Salim in 1963; (c) bought from Tengku Kalthum in 1963; (d) bought from Tengku Zamzam; (e) bought from Muhammad Yusuf bin Othman in 1963; belonged to Rafidah binti Ibrahim, dated 1932, and bought from Syarifah Mastura.

Kedah

definite, by inscription

DBP MS 67

Syair Sultan Mansur

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah

Probable, by biographical association

DBP MS 69a

Hikayat Misa Udana Indera

Bought from Tengku Kalthum

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Kalthum

DBP MS 7

Hikayat Badar Kresna

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 70

Hikayat Misa Wadan Andra

Gift from Tengku Kalthum

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Kalthum

DBP MS 90

Hikayat Shamsul Anwar

Bought from Tengku Zamzam

Kedah (note Riau/

Singapore origin)

Probable, by association with Tengku Zamzam

DBP MS 90a

Hikayat Shamsul Anwar

6 volumes. Copied in 1917. Two volumes each bought from Sharifah Mastura in 1959, Tengku Kalthum and Tengku Zamzam.

Kedah

Probable, by association with owners

DBP MS 95

Letters from Kedah aristocracy

1928, 1929, 1943

Kedah

Definite, by content

DBP MS 98

Syair Raja Muda Perlis

Gift from Sharifah Hanim bt Syed Hamzah

Perlis

Definite, by content

DBP MSS 16b

Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati

(The catalogues of 1983 and 2006 both note the very poor state of the manuscript, but the item classed as MSS 16b is in decent shape and very recent, so must be a copy of the original 16b made by DBP (as noted by the “tulisan tangan semula” note on the case).

Kedah

Probable, by association with Tengku Kalthum

No call number (acquired after 2006)

Hikayat Jenis Panji (provisional title)

1895

Tengku Mahmud ibni Almarhum Paduka Seri Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Mukarram Shah, Kedah. Bought from Tengku Kalthum.

Mentalun,

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

No call number (acquired after 2006)

Hikayat Misa Kayangan Panji Nusa Indera

1897

Copied by Lebai Puteh in Kedah. Belonged to Tengku Mahmud ibn al-Marhum Paduka Seri Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Mukarram Shah.

Kedah

Definite, by inscription

36This information is derived from the two published catalogues of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka manuscript collection, supplemented by physical examination of some of the manuscripts.

Appendix III: Numbers of literary and religious manuscripts in PNM

Total manuscripts

Literary manuscripts

Kitab

Percentage literary (rounded)

Ringkas (1987)

345

38

307

12

Ringkas: Tambahan Pertama (1989)

420

15

405

4

Ringkas: Tambahan Kedua (1993)

467

19

448

4

Ringkas: Tambahan Ketiga (1997)

296

15

281

5

Ringkas: Tambahan Keempat (nd)

291

7

22

2

Katalog (2000)

151

1

150

1

Katalog: Tambahan Pertama (2001)

188

7

181

4

Katalog: Tambahan Kedua (2002)

260

8

252

3

Katalog: Tambahan Ketiga (2003)

136

4

132

3

Katalog: Tambahan Keempat (2006)

500

27

473

5

Katalog: Tambahan Kelima (2008)

380

11

369

3

Katalog: Tambahan Keenam (2011)

318

19

299

6

Katalog: Tambahan Ketujuh (2012)

187

2

185

0

Katalog: Tambahan Kelapan (2015)

148

0

148

0

Katalog: Tambahan Kesembilan (2016)

221

1

220

1

Katalog: Tambahan Kesepuluh (2018)

106

2

104

2

Katalog: Tambahan Kesebelas (2022)

276

13

263

5

Totals

4,690

189

4,239

4

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Bibliographie

Websites

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Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2017. Malay literary manuscripts in the John Leyden collection. https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/01/malay-literary-manuscripts-in-the-john-leyden-collection.html Accessed 23 September 2025.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2015a. A Scottish poet’s favourite Malay poem? Syair Jaran Tamasa. https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2015/11/a-scottish-poets-favourite-malay-poem-syair-jaran-tamasa.html Accessed 23 September 2025.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2015b. Panji stories in Malay. https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2015/06/panji-stories-in-malay.html Accessed 23 September 2025.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2015c. Ibrahim: portrait of a Malay scribe. https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2015/01/ibrahim-portrait-of-a-malay-scribe.html Accessed 23 September 2025.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2014. A Malay account of Calcutta. https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2014/07/a-malay-account-of-calcutta.html Accessed 23 September 2025.

Pustaka Ilmu. Surat Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah, Kedah Darul Aman, 1882-1943. https://pustakailmu.arkib.gov.my/index.php/ms/pustaka-ilmu/permata-pusaka/surat-sultan-abdul-hamid-halim-shah-kedah-darul-aman-1882-1943 Accessed 14 October 2025.

Royal Ark. https://www.royalark.net/ Accessed 14 October 2025.

Publications

Abdul Rahman Kaeh. 1989. Panji Narawangsa. Kuala Lumpur: DBP.

Adams, Thomas R. & Nicolas Barker. 2002. “A new model for the study of the book.” In David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds.), The book history reader (2nd ed). London and NY: Routledge, pp. 47–65.

Ahmat Adam. 2009. Letters of sincerity: the Raffles collection of Malay letters (1780–1824). Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Arps, Bernard. 2018. “Drona’s betrayal and Bima’s brutality.” In Ding Choo Ming and Willem van der Molen (eds.), Traces of the Mahabharata and Ramayana in Javanese and Malay literature. Singapore: ISEAS, pp. 85–86.

Asmah Haji Omar. 2013. Surat-surat Abdul Hamid, 1881-1895: gambaran penggunaan bahasa dan masyarakat Kedah akhir abad ke-19. Kuala Lumpur: Arkib Negara Malaysia.

Baharuddin Zainal. 1965. Hikayat Chekel Waneng Pati. Kuala Lumpur: DBP.

Bastin, John. 2019. Sir Stamford Raffles and some of his friends and contemporaries: a memoir of the founder of Singapore. Singapore and Hackensack, N.J: World Scientific Publishing Co.

Braginsky, Vladimir. 2010. “‘Newly found’ manuscripts that were never lost: three François Valentijn manuscripts in the collection of Muzium Seni Asia (MS UM 81.163).” Indonesia and the Malay World 38 (112), pp. 419–458.

Braginsky, Vladimir. 2004. The heritage of traditional Malay literature. Leiden: Brill.

Darmawan, Alan. 2025. [this volume] “Where are the Palembang kraton manuscripts? Trajectories of a royal library.”

Farouk Yahya. 2025. [this volume] “The Maxwell collection and local private libraries in the Malay Peninsula during the nineteenth century.”

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2025a. [this volume] “Libraries within libraries: the John Crawfurd collection in the British Library.”

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2025b. “The library of an eighteenth-century Malay bibliophile: Tengku Sayid Jafar, Panglima Besar of Selangor.” In Olly Akkerman (ed.), Social codicology: the multiple lives of manuscripts in Muslim societies. Leiden: Brill, pp. 199–258.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2024a. “In praise of the Prophet: illuminated Kitab Mawlid manuscripts from Southeast Asia.” In Siti Mariana Mohd. Maidin (ed.), Oceans that speak: Islam and the emergence of the Malay world. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, pp. 54–61.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2024b. “Royal Malay edicts from Kedah: a diplomatic study of istimi.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 97.2 (327), pp. 43–86.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2020. “Shifting landscapes: remapping the writing traditions of Islamic Southeast Asia through digitisation.” Humaniora 32.2, pp. 97–109.

Gallop, Annabel Teh. 2015. “A Jawi sourcebook for the study of Malay palaeography and orthography: introduction.” Indonesia and the Malay World 43, pp. 13–39.

Gibson-Hill, C. A., Skeat, W. W., and Laidlaw, F. F. 1953. “The Cambridge University expedition to the North-Eastern Malay states, and to Upper Perak, 1899-1900.” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 26.4 (164), pp. 3–174.

Hanstein, Thoralf and Pudjiastuti, Titik. 2016. Catalogue of Indonesian manuscripts. Jakarta: Museum Nasional Republik Indonesia.

Harun Mat Piah. 1980. Cerita-Cerita Panji Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: DBP.

Hirschler, Konrad. 2012. The written word in the medieval Arabic lands. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Ibrahim Bakar Langkawi. [undated]. “At-Tarikh Salasilah negeri Kedah: analisis perbandingan teks.” Working paper presented at Forum At-Tarikh Salasilah Negeri Kedah.

Idros Samsudin and Raja Masittah Raja Ariffin (eds.). 1983. Katalog manuskrip koleksi Perpustakaan Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Jelani Harun. 2019.Al-Tarikh Salasilah Negeri Kedah: a Malay world literary heritage.” Malay Literature 32.2, pp. 165–184.

Josselin de Jong, P.E. de. 1980. “Privately owned Malay manuscripts in Malaya.” Indonesian Circle 8 (21), pp. 24–31.

Kamariah Abu Samah and Wan Salhah Megat Ahmad. 2006. Katalog manuskrip Melayu koleksi Pusat Dokumentasi Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Leow, Rachel. 2016.What colonial legacy? The Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (House of Language) and Malaysia’s cultural decolonisation.” In Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle (eds.), Cultures of decolonisation: transnational productions and practices, 1945-70. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 245–264.

Maier, Hendrik M.J. 1988. In the center of authority: the Malay Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program.

Marsden, William. 1812. A dictionary of the Malayan language, in two parts, Malayan and English and English and Malayan. London: Printed for the author.

Mitchell, Carol Lynn. 1993. Language as an instrument of national policy: the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka of Malaysia. PhD thesis. University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mulaika Hijjas. 2024. “Prakata.” In Mulaika Hijjas (ed.), Syair Jaran Tamasa: Manuskrip cinta dari tahun 1804. Kuala Lumpur: Fixi, pp. 5–12.

Mulaika Hijjas. 2022. “Marsden’s Malay manuscripts: reassessing a colonial collection.” Philological Encounters 8.1, pp. 38–72.

Mulaika Hijjas. 2010. “Not just fryers of bananas and sweet potatoes: literate and literary women in the nineteenth-century Malay world.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 41(1), pp. 153–172.

Noriah Mohamed. 1992. Hikayat Panji Semirang. Kuala Lumpur: DBP.

Proudfoot, Ian. 2007. “Abdullah vs. Siami: early Malay edicts on British justice.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 80.1, pp. 1–16.

Proudfoot, Ian. 2003. “An expedition into the politics of Malay philology.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 76.1, pp. 1–53.

Proudfoot, Ian. 1993. Early Malay printed books: a provisional account of materials published in the Singapore-Malaysia area up to 1920, noting holdings in major public collections. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya.

Ricklefs, M.C., Voorhoeve, P., and Gallop, Annabel Teh (eds.). 2014. Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain. (Rev. ed.). Jakarta: École française d’Extrême-Orient, Perpustakaan Nasional Republik Indonesia and Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia.

Roff, William R. 1994. The origins of Malay nationalism. Second edition. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Skinner, C. 1985. The battle for Junk Ceylon. Dordrecht: Foris.

Sheppard, Mubin. 1995. Tunku: his life and times. Subang Jaya: Pelanduk Publications.

Warnk, Holger. 2009.Collecting Malay books in nineteenth-century Europe.” In Rohani Rustam and Zawiyah Baba (eds.), Libraries and the Malay world. Bangi: Institut Alam dan Tamadun Melayu, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, pp. 25–46.

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Notes

1 Annabel Teh Gallop, “Malay literary manuscripts in the John Leyden collection,” https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2017/01/malay-literary-manuscripts-in-the-john-leyden-collection.html

2 On colonial collecting and the under-representation of Arabic-language religious works, see Gallop (2020: 97), Mulaika Hijjas (2022).

3 Gallop, “Malay literary manuscripts.”

4 Annabel Teh Gallop, “A Scottish poet’s favourite Malay poem? Syair Jaran Tamasa.” https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2015/11/a-scottish-poets-favourite-malay-poem-syair-jaran-tamasa.html

5 Although I have suggested (2024: 8) that Syair Jaran Tamasa is from an urban location (perhaps Penang), the linguistic similarity between SJT and Syair Sultan Maulana (ed. Skinner) suggests that SJT may also be a Kedah court text. Both texts include the words paisari/pésari and bembar, neither of which can be found in Wilkinson or in modern dictionaries (Skinner 1985: 262–263, 265).

6 Assuming he is the same Siami discussed by Proudfoot (2007), he seems in later years to have dropped the sobriquet ‘John Leyden’ and to have taken a critical approach to the British.

7 Marsden (1812: 300), “an order of priesthood.” Wilkinson (1932, accessed via sealang.net): “[Telugu labbi] “Levite.” Name of a class of persons of Southern Indian descent and connected by family association with religion, labbi being sometimes explained as arabi. They are expected to be pillars of the mosque and are invited to charitable and religious feasts.” Note that in Aceh, with which Kedah was in quite close contact, lebai manuscript copyists are also occasionally found.

8 Cik Candra was the owner of Hikayat Nabi Yusuf (BL MSS Malay D4) and Hikayat Shah Mardan (RAS Malay 66) (Gallop 2017: 151–163). At this time, the honorific ‘Cik’ could be used for either sex.

9 For four letters sent by this sultan to Raffles in 1810 and 1811, see Ahmat Adam (2009: 35–57).

10 The bibliographical information is drawn from the catalogues of the DBP collection by Kamariah Abu Samah and Wan Salhah Megat Ahmad (2006), and Idros Samsudin and Raja Masittah Raja Ariffin (1983). The 2006 catalogue omits the total number, but taking the 177 given in the earlier catalogue and adding the 28 from the ‘koleksi terkini’ section gives 205. Numbers of manuscripts include those that are or may be handwritten copies or facsimiles made by DBP itself, as it was not possible to examine and rule out all possible cases.

11 Genealogical information is derived from Christopher Byers’ Royal Ark website (https://www.royalark.net/Malaysia/kedah.htm).

12 Tunku Mahmud was married to Syarifah Khatijah binti Sayyid Muhammad Shahabuddin, presumably related to Syarifah Mastura. See http://www.royalark.net/Malaysia/kedah6.htm.

13 Examples of topical syair that survive only in one manuscript collected by Europeans include Syair Hemop (RAS Farquhar 3), Syair Engku Puteri (Leiden Cod Or 1761), and Syair Sultan Mahmud (Leiden Klinkert 138), Syair Kerajaan Bima (Leiden Cod Or 6726), Syair Kunjungan Tengku Selangor (Leiden Cod Or 1722), Syair Perang Johor (Leiden Cod Or 1761), and Syair Perang Wangkang (PNRI Ml 92). Perhaps the most famous topical syair, Syair Perang Mengkasar, also conforms to this pattern of survival through European copying, though there are four extant (some partial) copies (University Malaya’s Valentijn manuscript, SOAS MS 40324 and 12902, Leiden Cod Or 1626, see Braginsky 2010).

14 https://pustakailmu.arkib.gov.my/index.php/ms/pustaka-ilmu/permata-pusaka/surat-sultan-abdul-hamid-halim-shah-kedah-darul-aman-1882-1943. See also Asmah Haji Omar (2013).

15 This is discussed by both Jelani Harun and Ibrahim Bakar, but neither gives a location for the print edition.

16 I differ from Jelani Harun and Ibrahim Bakar Langkawi, who assume that [En]cik Soda is a man. The attribution apparently comes from the typed accession note, which states only Cik Soda.”

17 Page numbers are not consecutive as the catalogue is not organised chronologically.

18 I have not been able to locate this name among Tunku Mahmud’s children on Royal Ark.

19 Her name is sometimes given as Manja Lara or Menyalara.

20 Syed Omar bin Syed Abdullah, 1959-1967; Syed Ahmad bin Syed Mahmud, 1967-1978; Syed Nahar Syed Sheh Shahabuddin, 1978-1985.

21 http://www.royalark.net/Malaysia/perlis2.htm.

22 See marginalia on British Library MSS Malay C 2 Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati, as discussed by Gallop, Panji Stories in Malay,” https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2015/06/panji-stories-in-malay.html.

23 It is not specified in the catalogue whether the manuscripts were newly acquired or simply had not been previously catalogued. Some, such as DBP’s Syair Mambang Jauhari, are clearly the former, while others, such as the two Panji tales belonging to Tunku Mahmud, may be the latter.

24 Compare the breakdown of Palembang genres in Darmawan (this volume). For estimated percentages of genres in colonial collections see Warnk (2009: 33) and Mulaika Hijjas (2022: 19–20).

25 Unfortunately, it appears that some of these items are not manuscripts at all. PNM MSS 95, for example, is listed as a manuscript but is actually a photographic facsimile of British Library Add 12394. This would mean that the number of literary manuscripts here is higher than it should be, but unfortunately it was not possible to examine all suspect cases.

26 The Acehnese manuscripts (PNM MSS 2983, 3839, 3955B, 4696, 4817B), are catalogued only as “hikayat berbahasa Aceh,” so it is quite possible that they are not literary at all.

27 Kindly shared with me by Andrew Peacock.

28 With thanks to Farouk Yahya for alerting me to this source.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Bar chart 1 – Numbers of literary and religious manuscripts in the collection of Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (PNM), by date of acquisition.
Crédits Data from the PNM catalogues (see Appendix III)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/archipel/docannexe/image/8693/img-1.jpg
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Mulaika Hijjas, « From Cik Candra to Tengku Zamzam: snapshots of personal libraries from Kedah and environs in the 19th and 20th centuries  »Archipel, 110 | 2025, 307-336.

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Mulaika Hijjas, « From Cik Candra to Tengku Zamzam: snapshots of personal libraries from Kedah and environs in the 19th and 20th centuries  »Archipel [En ligne], 110 | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/archipel/8693 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15d9i

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