1Most of the manuscripts from the diverse writing traditions of island Southeast Asia that are now held in institutional collections are there as a result of colonial intervention, whether driven by philological or antiquarian scholarship or as the byproduct of conflict between local polities and European powers. Public discourse in Southeast Asia and in Europe increasingly asserts that the displacement of these manuscripts, whether commissioned or looted, was theft, and a deliberate act of violence against indigenous epistemologies. Within manuscript studies, academics have tended not to take this view, though several scholars (Kratz 1981; Proudfoot 2003) have noted the distortions that European collecting may have caused in Malay manuscript culture. The articles in this volume, the result of a workshop held at SOAS University of London in May 2023 as part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures, take a fresh look at this question, by focusing on manuscript libraries—collections of hand-copied texts from particular places and times—and their entanglements with colonialism.
2Definitions of the material basis underpinning this collection of articles may be helpful here. A manuscript is understood to be a text written by hand on perishable material. Thus the inscribed buffalo horn discussed by Sunliensyar and the paper codexes presented by Nurtawab (both in this volume) are equally manuscripts. A book, of course, may be a manuscript or it may be printed (or, indeed, digital), but the majority of the cases considered here concern libraries of manuscript rather than printed books. Many of the scholarly sources from which we cite use the terms book and manuscript interchangeably, and we follow their practice. Perhaps the more contentious definition adopted here, discussed in greater depth below, is that of the library, which follows the pragmatic approach of Delhey et al. (2015: 1):
- 1 With thanks to Roberta Zollo for bringing this source to our attention. This differs from the defin (...)
With the word ‘library’ we have mainly in mind the most usual way in which the English term is used, namely library as a collection of books and as a designation for the place that contains these books. We are taking into consideration institutionalized libraries as well as those that are not institutionalized (for instance, collections for private use). From the perspective of use, the quantity of books collected does not matter… either.1
3Setting aside preconceptions about grandeur and institutionalisation, any collection of manuscripts or books may be considered a library.
- 2 Forthcoming in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient.
4This point, indeed, was a topic of discussion during the workshop at which the articles here were first presented. Were there in fact any libraries in island South East Asia at all? Chambert-Loir’s paper presented at the workshop2 posited that there were not, sparking a lively discussion. Nor is he alone in this view. “Prior to the establishment of Elout’s office in the Secretariat in Batavia,” Proudfoot (2003: 26) argued:
[…] 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.
5Similarly, Sweeney (1987: 29) wrote that
[…] [m]anuscript collections such as those of Leiden or London, with works in numerous versions originating from different periods and areas, would have been an unfamiliar concept for a traditional Malay court, which had not sufficiently harnessed the environment to allow the development and maintenance of libraries.
6It is also the case that there is no word in classical Malay to denote a library. Terms in current usage are all fairly recent coinages: a neologism based on a Sanskrit loan word (perpustakaan), and imports from Persian (kitābkhānah) and Arabic (maktabah). Similarly, one looks in vain in surviving Malay royal buildings, or descriptions of them (Dumarçay 1991), or of any specialised spaces for manuscripts or books. Island South East Asia does not have an Ashrafīya library of 13th-century Damascus (Hirschler 2015), no Topkapı palace library of 16th-century Istanbul. Here, as so often, Southeast Asia is said to come up short against the Arabic and Persian cosmopolises that are always taken as the standard in the Islamic world. And again, as so often, colonial intervention, here the establishment of Elout’s scriptoria, is identified as the decisive moment.
7But even in the Middle East, usually the standard to which Islamic Southeast Asia is compared, prior to the 16th century the term used for library, khizāna, Hirschler notes, denoted
- 3 Konrad Hirschler, “Libraries (up to 1500),” Encyclopaedia of Islam (third ed.). Accessed 11 May 202 (...)
…] collections of various sizes, ranging from a full-fledged library with several thousand volumes, to a mere bookchest or several shelves for storing manuscripts. At the same time, the term khizāna never denoted an institution in its own right, but always a collection within a house, palace, mosque, madrasa (school), dār al-ʿilm (academy), or similar repository.3
8Thus the lack of designated name or space does not mean that there were no libraries. After all, there were no named, designated spaces in Malay royal complexes for the production or storage of metalwork or textiles, but there is no doubt that such objects were abundant, valued and meaningful, with highly developed cultures of production and consumption surrounding them. In many cases, it may have been that manuscripts were stored with, and considered as, other kinds of treasured or sometimes pusaka, sacred heirloom, objects.
9And why ought a collection of manuscripts in Southeast Asia resemble an academic library in Leiden or London? The relationships between people and manuscripts as sources of knowledge or pleasure differ across cultures, and the institutional library should not be seen as the epitome. Green (2010: 243) urges us instead to reconsider our assumptions about what a library is in (even) the Mughal tradition:
Books worked in the service of an anthropocentric mode of knowledge, as mnemonic aids and adjuncts to the bodily incorporation of words in the person of the authoritative master and through him to his students. Correspondingly, those in search of knowledge looked for a master rather than a bookshop or library, with libraries in any case generally being private collections accessed through personal affiliation to a teacher.
- 4 EAP205/3/1, annotation on p. 143. Our translation: “knowledge is contained in secrecy, not in books (...)
10In maritime Southeast Asia likewise, knowledge was not primarily to be found in written form. As an annotation in an Acehnese compendium digitised by the EAP (Endangered Archive Programme) cautions: “[…] ilmu itu di dalam rahsia tiada dalam kitab dan tersurat dalam kertas melainkan pada isyarat guru nyatanya.”4
11In the realm of reading for pleasure, meanwhile, the importance of orality and performance in the Malay context has long been noted. In such a cultural setting, libraries take on different forms and meanings, and it does not seem productive to view a specific kind of library as an index of civilisational status. We argue that it remains useful to continue using ‘library,’ in the looser sense of ‘a collection of manuscripts or books,’ as a conceptual category, because it allows those objects and their readers to be placed in relation to one another. Rather than always considering texts in isolation from one another, the concept of library may help us to move towards a richer reconstruction of the manuscript culture of the past.
12For island Southeast Asia, these libraries are represented by three main sets of data. The first are the collections assembled during the colonial era. This we take to denote the time during which European5 political authority was established in maritime Southeast Asia, though of course this was uneven across the region. While at its greatest extent it could be said to span from early 16th-century Melaka to Portuguese Timor in 1973, the highest point of colonialism in maritime Southeast Asia, and the focus of most of the articles in this volume, are the 18th and 19th centuries. Manuscripts collected during the colonial era are almost always severed from the contexts in which they were originally found, and rarely come with contextual information about their original social and intellectual milieux, whether they once belonged to a larger collection or were held individually. Often enough these are not the manuscripts that were originally found but clean copies made by scribes in colonial service, meaning that codicological information is also lost. In some cases, however, it is possible through careful detective work to identify the remains of local libraries and reassemble, albeit incompletely, a more holistic picture of local manuscript libraries (Gallop 2025; Iskandar 1986; Drewes 1977). The second set of data is manuscript libraries that survive in situ and have been documented and digitised through initiatives such as EAP and DREAMSEA (Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia).6 These libraries remain in their places of origin, and may represent a continuous intellectual and literary tradition in that specific location. But though research on these collections is still emerging (for example Peacock 2019), it is obvious that these in situ collections have also changed over time, and that their contents, use, circulation and significance in the 21st century is not what it was in the 18th or 19th. The third set are manuscript collections that entered institutions of the newly independent nations, such as Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, and provincial museums in Indonesia, formed by collecting from the 1960s onwards as part of the nation-building process. These collections too usually lack provenance information, making the underlying libraries from which they came discernable only in fragmentary form. Though they are, by definition, postcolonial rather than colonial, they shed some light on colonial collecting by indicating what was still in the field after Indonesian and Malaysian independence.
- 7 Leiden Cod. Or. 2304a. This is apparently a Jambi version of the Palembang royal genealogy, and was (...)
13The articles presented here draw productively on new directions in the study of manuscripts, particularly from the wider Muslim world, such as the interest in “social codicology” and on materiality, and the combination of ethnography and textual study (for further discussion see Akkerman 2025). For instance, a genealogy of the Palembang royal line7 may be used to shed some light on the network of manuscript owners at the Palembang court in the late 18th century (See Fig. 1). The bulk of the material belonged to Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II, but he was clearly far from the only person interested in manuscripts. Contemporary observers were also clear, as Darmawan’s article for this volume makes clear, that the Palembang palace did have a specific space for manuscripts, an “extensive library” (“vrij uitgestrekte bibliotheek,” van Sevenhoven 1823: 80). The circled areas on the genealogy indicate individuals known to have owned manuscripts (Fig. 1): five people, all quite closely related, owning 19 codexes from a wide range of genres. Keeping in mind that the bibliographic information comes only from what Palembang palace manuscripts happen to have survived, it is nevertheless possible to make out something about the range of interests in the palace, including a recently commissioned translation of an Arabic history (Kitāb futūḥ al-Shām), literary works in Malay and Javanese (Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati, Jayalengkara Wulang), scientific works (Surat bintang, Shumūs al-anwār wa kunūz al-asrār) and many Islamic treatises. Knowing, for instance, that Sultan Baha’uddin owned a Javanese romance and an Islamic religious treatise enables different conjectures about the textual culture of which he was a part.
- 8 But perhaps a key thing to note, when thinking about European incursion, is that for island South E (...)
14This was a library that was not pre-colonial in the temporal sense—Palembang had been engaged in fluctuating conflicts and alliances with the VOC and the EIC since the 17th century.8 But the contents of the library do not show any influence of European epistemologies, except perhaps in the negative sense that the court may have sought to shore up its Islamicate credentials in the face of increasing European pressure. The Palembang palace library, like others in South East Asia, may be thought of as “para-colonial,” in Newell’s sense (2012: 350), where
the prefix para signifies beside and also beyond [in order to] discard the centre-periphery model and instead to analyse in historical and sociological detail the local cultural productivity which undoubtedly took place over the generations, alongside and beyond the British presence in the region, as a consequence of the British presence but not as its direct product.
15In our attempt to understand the impact of colonialism on local manuscript traditions, it is essential to avoid monocausal explanations, and to remember that local initiatives could take place in parallel with, rather than instigated or determined by, colonialism.
Fig. 1 – Leiden University Library Cod. Or. 2304a (detail). Palembang genealogy
No. 1: Sultan Ahmad Najamuddin I, later known as Susuhunan Ahmad (SOAS MS 12225 Umm al-Barāhīn).
No. 2: Dinayu Bupati ibn [sic] Paduka Pangeran Purba b. Paduka Panembahan b. Mahmud Badaruddin I, owner of Cod. Or. 2283 Hikayat Cekel Waneng Pati. [Note that Dinayu Bupati herself does not appear on the genealogy; circled area mentions her father Paduka Pangeran Purba.]
No. 3: Sultan Muhammad Baha’uddin, owner of PNRI CS 104 Hikayat Jayalengkara Wulang, PNRI A 206 al-Durr al-manẓūm fī bayān al-sirr al-maktūm, and SOAS MS 11505 Kitab Futūḥ al-Shām.
No. 4: Pangeran Jayakrama, younger son of Pangeran Ratu (sultan-to-be Ahmad Najamuddin, brother of Sultan Muhammad Baha’uddin), owner of PNRI Gen Sec 39 Durrat al-farā’iḍ bi-sharḥ al-‘aqā’id.
No. 5: Mahmud Baha’uddin II, owner of Gen Sec 23 Surat bintang, Leiden, Cod. Or. 7283 Shumūs al-anwār wa-kunūz al-asrār, Leipzig Ms. Gabelentz 52 Dalā’il al-khayrāt, PNRI ML 117 Kitāb al-fawā’id, PNRI ML 118 Ṣirāṭ al-Mustaqīm, PNRI ML 119 Jawāhir al-‘ulūm fī kashf al-ma‘lūm, PNRI ML 120 Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar, PNRI ML 121 Baḥr al-‘ajā’ib, Gen Sec 5 al-Durr al-naẓīm, Gen Sec 7 creed of al-Sanusi, Gen Sec 9 ‘Uddat al-ḥiṣn al-ḥaṣīn, Gen Sec 10 Shams al-āfāq fī ‘ilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq, Gen Sec 13 tracts by Abdul Ra’uf [Daqāʾiq al-ḥurūf, Aghmāḍ al-masāʾil, and Kifāyat al-muḥtājīn], Paris Mal-Pol 104 ‘Umdat al-Muhtājīn.
Image in the public domain and accessible online at: <http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:2371844>)
16By attending to the question of the impact of colonialism on the insular Southeast Asian library, this volume aims to provide a well evidenced and nuanced account of local manuscript cultures—in terms of texts, genres, practices, and materiality—in island Southeast Asia during the colonial era and after. Though engaging with the legacy of colonial philology, collecting practices, and epistemology, emphasis is placed on the responses of local actors, moving beyond a simplistic narrative of destructive European powers and waning local polities.
17The legacy of colonialism comes to the fore in public discourse about manuscripts and other artifacts, which increasingly challenges the ethical aspect of collecting and calls for repatriation.9 A paradigmatic case of violent intervention is presented by Snouck Hurgronje in his inventory of a collection of Acehnese manuscripts in the Notulen of the Bataviaasch Genootschap. These, Hurgronje (1902: 122) remarked, came from “the younger teungkoes who are still hostile to us, from whom new documents fall into our hands again and again,” including “papers left on [Tuanku Raja Keumala’s] flight to the Gajö countries.”10 Hurgronje received 315 manuscripts and printed books from Captain van der Maaten of the Marechaussée, as a result of the 1898 attack on Keumala; 46 manuscripts from Luitenant-Kolonel G.C.E. van Daalen from Karang Ampar; and ten items that Captain Scheepens ‘found’ in Semelet and Pameue in 1902. The Marechaussée would go on to carry out the atrocities at Kutö Réh in 1904, in which 313 Acehnese men, 189 women and 59 children within the stockade were killed. In this case, as Harm Stevens (2015: 91) argues with respect to the two chests of “ethnographica” subsequently sent by van Daalen to the Bataviaasch Genootschap, the objects “were the fruits of a unique alliance between ethnological interest and political and military submission.” For ‘ethnological’ read ‘philological’ in the case of these manuscripts, which just like the two chests come to us as the by-product of war crimes. Typically, Hurgronje takes little note of this, praising instead the age of some of the Keumala manuscripts and the breadth of learning demonstrated by the collection. At the same time, the fact that Hurgronje’s inventories record personal libraries provides us with precious information, no longer visible once the items were dispersed into the Bataviaasch Genootschap. Here are the personal manuscript collections of religious and political leaders, that they thought important enough to bring with them into mountain exile.
18The incidences of manuscript libraries entering colonial hands occur with the outbreaks of colonial war, and in particular cluster around the British interregnum in Java (1811-1816), and the expansion of Dutch power in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries. The former led to the looting of the palaces of Palembang and Yogyakarta in 1812, with their libraries entering British hands, and the dissolution of the Banten Sultanate in 1813, with the manuscripts later transferred to the Bataviaasch Genootschap in 1833 (see Nurtawab, this volume). Similarly, further Dutch military action against Palembang in 1821 led to more manuscripts leaving royal collections (see Darmawan, this volume). The latter period includes not only the Aceh war but also the Dutch attack on Lombok, which resulted, in the words of Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, in the capture of “one of the most significant libraries of Indonesian palm-leaf manuscripts ever collected.”11 While many of the other precious objects from the so-called Lombok Treasure were returned to Indonesia in 1973, only one manuscript was sent back.12 That this was the Deśavarṇana, telling the history of the Majapahit empire, may have been because of its symbolic significance to the New Order government. The effect of this partial restitution is that the remains of the Lombok royal library are now dispersed between Jakarta and Leiden.
19As many of the articles in this volume attest, another means by which local libraries entered colonial collections was through purchase and copying. The relationship between European philologists and scholar-administrators, on the one hand, and Southeast Asian manuscript owners, copyists, and language teachers on the other, has long been a focus of scholarship (Proudfoot 2003, Sweeney 2006; Al-Azhar & van der Putten 1995; Kratz 1981). “These nineteenth-century collections,” Proudfoot (2003: 3) writes,
[…] inevitably have a big influence on how we now see the Malay manuscript tradition. They leave us uncomfortably dependent upon the interests and collection policies of a few nineteenth-century Europeans and their local collaborators, and with little reason to think that we have been bequeathed an accurate snapshot of the manuscript tradition even in its last phase.
20Having tracked down their specimens, the philologists of the 19th century were usually uninterested in who had owned them or how they had been read, with the 1909 cataloguer of the Bataviaasch Genootschap’s Malay holdings opining that provenance was of little relevance (van Ronkel qtd. in Drewes 1977: 198). Several of the articles presented here, however, show how much can nevertheless be gleaned about historical or social context.
21The eight articles in this collection range chronologically from the late 18th and the early 19th centuries (Darmawan, Gallop, Nurtawab), the consolidation of colonial rule in the mid-19th century (Farouk, Sunliensyar, Maulani), and a comparison between colonial and postcolonial-era collecting (Mulaika), to the maintenance of palace collections and the issues raised by digital repatriation in the present day (Meyer and Ardiyansyah). The articles are presented starting from those discussing colonial intervention impacting royal libraries (Darmawan, Nurtawab, Maulani), colonial philological collecting and personal libraries (Gallop, Farouk, and Sunliensyar), collecting in the postcolonial era (Mulaika), and digital return from a decolonial perspective (Meyer and Ardiyansyah). If there is an overarching theme of all the articles it may be the ambivalence of colonial intervention—sometimes destructive, at others with surprising productive side effects, and at yet others having a rather limited impact. Nor do all the contributors to this volume agree, either on the question of libraries or of colonial legacy—a range of views we hope proves illuminating.
22The best preserved Sumatran royal library is that of the Sultanate of Palembang. Alan Darmawan’s article on the Palembang palace library is the first treatment of this topic since Drewes and Iskandar, some forty years ago, and brings together the manuscripts they identified with ones that remain in Palembang itself to the present day, some of which are identified for the first time in this article. As well as carefully tracing how manuscripts left the palace and where they ended up, Darmawan uncovers how those that remain in Palembang in a sense democratised access to written literature and may have spurred on local literary production.
23Ervan Nurtawab traces the path of the 116 manuscripts the Dutch seized from the Banten palace, focusing on Qur’an commentaries. Using the material features and marginalia in the copies of the Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, the most widely used commentary in Islamic Southeast Asia, Nurtawab shows how they were used for pedagogy. The Banten court also had copies of a commentary not found anywhere else in the region, which Nurtawab has been able to identify as ʿArāʾis al-Bayān by the Persian Sufi Ruzbihān al-Baqlī. All these attest to the sophistication of Islamic scholarship at the Banten court.
24Annabel Gallop’s investigation of John Crawfurd’s manuscripts at the British Library reveals the vestiges of other collections that can be traced within it—“libraries within libraries”—including from the kraton of Yogyakarta and from the Sultan of Bone’s palace at Bontoala, both in the course of British attacks on those polities, and also through gifts, purchase and copying, with approximately half of Crawfurd’s Javanese manuscripts obtained as clean copies made for him. From these diverse local libraries, Crawfurd’s collection would go on to be dispersed once again, with some going to the German scholars August Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt. That colonial philological collecting was less a matter of national policy and more one of happenstance is indicated by Gallop’s discovery of how the bulk of Crawfurd’s collection very nearly did not end up in the British Museum.
25Farouk Yahya examines the manuscripts collected by William Maxwell in the course of his career as a colonial administrator in the Malay Peninsula during the second half of the 19th century. Through careful study of Maxwell’s collection, Farouk identifies fragments of local libraries within it, including some from the Perak royal court and others that belonged to a man named Muhammad bin Abdul Fatah. A police clerk and then a cashier in the Magistrate’s Office in Singapore, Muhammad is a rare example of a ‘middle-class’ manuscript owner about whom it has been possible to find a few pieces of biographical information. His manuscripts contain traces of others like him, and more broadly of the existence of non-royal readers and manuscript copyists in the late 19th century.
26At times, as Hafiful Hadi Sunliensyar shows in the case of Kerinci, the impact of colonialism on the local manuscript tradition was limited. Only eight manuscripts from Kerinci are in colonial collections today, of which three were collected during the course of a Dutch military expedition in Jambi (1901-1903), and the remaining five by Dutch scholars and administrators. Sunliensyar provides an account of Dutch colonial attempts to procure Kerinci artifacts, often unsuccessful or partial, with leaders of the community, who were after all adat officials within the Dutch East Indies administration, able to assert the pusaka status of these items. At the same time, Sunliensyar notes that local depati were keen to have their manuscripts deciphered by Dutch scholars, even though this risked violating adat stipulations. It may be that this loosening of adat restrictions is the most significant legacy of colonial intervention with respect to Kerinci manuscripts.
27Abdullah Maulani’s article investigates the surviving manuscript holdings of the Kotawaringin Sultanate of Kalimantan, from the mid-18th to the late 19th century. Never previously studied, his approach to this corpus shows how what survives of the palace library provides clues as to the political, cultural, and intellectual landscape. As well as 232 letters between the sultanate and the Dutch colonial government, which document the control Batavia exerted over Kotawaringin, the palace also still holds several manuscripts of religious works, including by Southeast Asian ‘ulama, and deluxe illuminated copies of the Qur’an and devotional texts. One Qur’an was copied in Mekah by a scribe from Sumbawa, and another is illuminated in the Ottoman style. Other works were commissioned and produced in Penang and on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, indicating Kotawaringin’s links with the network of manuscript culture of the time.
28Juxtaposing two moments of manuscript collection in the same geographical location—Leyden and Raffles at the beginning of the 19th century, and Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in the mid-20th—Mulaika Hijjas’ article traces the continuities in manuscript culture, in terms of genres, titles and kinds of readers and copyists, in Kedah and surrounding areas across the two periods. She argues that the disappearance of the manuscript tradition in this sultanate of the Malay Peninsula was not a direct result of colonialism but of modernity, and that the extinction event may have taken place very recently, in the 1950s and 1960s.
29Meyer and Ardiyansyah bring decolonial questions to the fore in their examination of the 2019 transfer of digital images of the manuscripts seized by the British in 1812 to the Yogyakarta Sultanate, exploring the ways in which the British attack has been recently memorialised in Yogyakarta itself, as well as the ethics and limitations of digitising manuscripts. Showing that the Yogyakarta court today has been keen to present digital return as equivalent to physical return, Meyer and Ardiyansyah point out the inherent limitations of this, particularly in the case of material that may be regarded as pusaka.
30Given the importance of geographical place in the framing of the workshop in the first place, it is important to note that the articles collected here are confined to western parts of insular Southeast Asia: Sumatra (Darmawan, Sunliensyar), Peninsular Malaysia (Gallop, Farouk, Mulaika), Java (Nurtawab, Ardiyansyah and Meyer) and Borneo (Maulani) (See Fig. 2). The lack of case studies from elsewhere in maritime Southeast Asia, and in particular from Bali and the Philippines, is regrettable, and underscores the need for further research from those areas. As is also clear, the articles in this volume deal only with the British and Dutch colonial empires, with their particular patterns of engagement with local manuscript traditions. The Spanish in the southern Philippines took a different approach, with Gallop (2021: 5) pointing out that they saw Islamic books as “dangerous and deviant tracts deserving of destruction.” This destructiveness, of course, means that less material record survives (but see, among others, Fathurahman et al. 2019). Another limitation of this collection should also be noted, this one simply contingent on participants’ time and energy—while the papers presented at the workshop included case studies on Balinese and Batak manuscripts, the final articles are largely confined to Islamic or Islamicate traditions. Much more could fruitfully be done by bringing research on more diverse traditions into conversation.
- 13 That is, that the death of the Malay manuscript tradition is a form of epistemicide, in de Sousa Sa (...)
- 14 Mahdzir Ibrahim, “Tuntut semula 20,000 manuskrip Melayu lama di luar negara.” Malaysiakini 24 June (...)
31In the debate around colonial intervention and restitution, there is, on the one hand, the view, perhaps once rather tacitly prevalent, that few Malay manuscripts would have survived to the present day without European collecting. The large numbers of manuscripts remaining in the field, as well as in institutional collections in Southeast Asia, indicate that this was not the case—at least not where religious manuscripts are concerned. The different survival rates for literary, as opposed to religious manuscripts, is however an important feature to note: colonial-era collections are much richer in literary material than most of those assembled in the post-colonial era, so it is also true that one effect of colonial collecting is the preservation of much of the classical Malay literary tradition. But if the idea that colonialism somehow saved manuscript traditions can be partially debunked, so too can the opposing extreme of some decolonial argument, which asserts that colonialism set out systematically to annihilate local epistemologies, by appropriating and/or destroying manuscripts.13 While this may have been true for Spanish colonialism in the southern Philippines, as noted above, this does not seem to have been the case in the areas of island South East Asia that the British and Dutch sought to control. On the contrary, British and Dutch philological collecting tended to neglect Islamic and Arabic-language manuscripts because they saw them as foreign imports, when what they sought was vernacular literature, law, and history. And if the destruction of ‘local knowledge’ was the colonialists’ aim, it was singularly ineffective—for the hundreds of Acehnese manuscripts now in colonial-era collections, there are at least 4,000 still in Aceh itself (Gallop & Fathurahman 2022: 155). This line of argument is often embedded in a nativist or ethno-nationalist position. Tellingly, a recent opinion piece in a Malaysian news outlet arguing for the return of 20,000 Malay manuscripts also mentions disputed territories such as Pulau Batu Putih and Sipadan, weaving a narrative of loss, humiliation, and the need for the restoration of lost glory, all in the service of claims that in fact owe a great deal to dividing lines laid down by the colonial powers.14
32In the case of material taken by force there is of course a strong imperative for return, to be worked out between the civil society groups, institutions and governments concerned, but physical return should not be the final step. For researchers the imperative is of a different nature: we should surely be aiming to improve our knowledge of these manuscripts and their wider tradition, to document and better understand the entangled history of Southeast Asia and Europe, and to enable renewed engagement with this material by contemporary publics. The idea of returning home from a long period of exile—pulang dari merantau—is of course a richly resonant one in the Sumatran context. But let us send the exiles back enriched by greater knowledge after their long absence.
33The articles in this collection were 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.
34The editors would like to thank the participants of the workshop, the reviewers and editorial team of Archipel, and Zacky Khairul Umam, Aglaia Iankovskaia, Jessica Rahardjo, and Adrienne Johnson from the project team, for all their efforts in bringing this issue to fruition.
Fig. 2 – Main place names mentioned in this special issue
Map by Frederik Florenz