2 - Diasporic Crossings: Malay Writing in Nineteenth-Century Ceylon

Summary

This chapter considers Ceylon as a crossroads by way of a close reading of a Malay Compendium from early nineteenth-century Colombo. The references and texts it contains are clear indicators of intellectual and religious connections that the Malays maintained with the archipelago and Arabia. And this realization, in turn, suggests that, rather than viewing the Malays in Ceylon as occupying a distant, marginal corner of a vast Malay sphere, their physical and figurative location between the Malay and Arab worlds signifies that crossroads, connections and movement are more appropriate conceptual categories for considering their case than is marginality. Within the Compendium and other nineteenth-century manuscripts, these connections are most concretely and minutely evident in sections containing passages translated from Arabic, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence and even word by word, the latter taking the form of interlinear translation. Through an analysis of this volume’s content, language use and historical echoes, the chapter also argues for the need to look beyond the common, generalizing and flattening terminology of "Sri Lankan Malays." Deconstructing nomenclature and its history exposes the diversity of those sent into exile and enlistment in terms of language, place of origin and additional forms of affiliation.