The Legacy of the Malay Letter / Warisan Warkah Melayu. By Annabel Teh Gallop, with an essay by E. Ulrich Kratz.  London:  British Library, for the National Archives of Malaysia, 1994.  240 pp., 232 photographs, map, appendices, bibliography.  Reviewed by Paul Michael Taylor, Smithsonian Institution.

Annabel Teh Gallop has produced a well-written, sumptuously illustrated, and meticulously researched survey of Malay epistolography, from the oldest known Malay manuscript (a letter from the Sultan of Ternate, 1521) to the very end of the nineteenth century (a letter from the Raja Muda of Patani, 1899).  The author, who was brought up in Brunei Darussalam and received her M.A. in Indonesian and Malay at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, is the Curator for Indonesian and Malay in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library.  This book served as the catalog of a photographic exhibition of Malay letters and manuscripts produced by The British Library for the National Archives of Malaysia during Visit Malaysia Year 1994.   

The form alone of Malay letter-writing often embodied elegant calligraphy, beautiful illumination, courtly language in the complimentary salutations, and sophisticated theological conceptions within the headings, all bound with intricate and meaningful seals.  The content of each letter, properly interpreted, also provides a window into, and a unique indigenous source for the study of, the Malay world.  Yet until recently, as Gallop notes, formal Malay letters were seldom included in studies of Islamic art or in historical studies.  Her book will correct this oversight and make this literary and artistic form far more accessible.

The book is presented in two sections.  The first section (about four-fifths of the book) is the sumptuously illustrated, bilingual catalogue of the exhibition, with the Malay and English versions of the catalog text appearing opposite each other, Malay on the left and English on the right.  The slight differences are those one would expect from the highest quality of translation:  some Malay quotations are paraphrased in the English text; some explanatory comments in English are unnecessary in Malay.  The second section, printed without illustrations and in smaller type at the end, provides in two Appendices the transliterated data on which many of the generalizations of the first section depend.  Though unassuming in appearance alongside the colorful exhibition catalog, these Appendices are products of careful study, equally sumptuous in their own quiet way.  Appendix I provides transliterations (without English translation) of one hundred Malay letters from the exhibition; Appendix II presents the transliterated texts of two works on letter-writing, by Munsyi Abdullah (1843) and Raja Ali Haji (1857), each based on various editions.  The author's bilingual "Note on Transliteration" (p. 192 in Malay; 193 in English) is definitive, for conventions needed in transliterating the Malay letter.

The broad range of topics discussed in Gallop's first section, the exhibition catalog, illustrates how useful this book will be not only to students of Malay literature, but also to historians and art historians, linguists, anthropologists, and many others.  Part I ("Malay Letter-Writing") consists of one chapter surveying some sources of information about letters and some of the remarkably uniform characteristics of Malay letters throughout the four centuries represented in the exhibition.  She examines literary references to scribes, letters, and envoys; and draws particular attention to the rather esoteric texts of various letter-writing guides (kitab terasul).   Since few examples of letter-writing among ordinary people have survived, especially private genres like love-letters, few can be included in this book; in such cases, the terasul are our major source of information about them.  She also reviews Persian and Western influences on the Malay letter.  Part II ("The Art of the Malay Letter") is divided into ten well-written chapters.  Using full-color illustrations, each chapter draws important inferences about Malay art and society, taking its point of departure from a particular aspect of Malay letter-writing:  (1) Design and decoration; (2) Seals; (3) Headings; (4) Compliments; (5) Contents; (6) Gifts; (7) Closing Statement; (8) Addresses and Envelopes; (9) Envoys; and (10) The Ceremony of Letters.  Part III ("History Through Letters") presents five chronologically arranged chapters looking at groups of letters in their historical contexts.  The first examines the earliest Malay letters, dating from 1500 to 1750.  The second chapter consists of an essay by E. Ulrich Kratz (Reader in Indonesian and Malay at SOAS), on the letters of Francis Light (1740-1794), who played a part in the East India Company's occupation of Pulau Pinang.  Subsequent letters examine collections of letters associated with Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (letters from 1810-1824) and William Farquhar (letters from 1818-1822). Gallop also includes the available biographical information that can be found or inferred about the Malay clerks associated with the English authors or collectors of these letters.  The book concludes with a chapter on Later Letters, 1840-1900,” drawing special attention to two prolific but very different nineteenth-century letter-writers: Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munshi (c. 1795-1854), who lived in Melaka among western missionaries and British colonial officers; and Raja Ali Haji bin Raja Ahmad (1809-ca. 1872), a Bugis-descent aristocrat born and raised at the court of the Johor-Riau empire. This final chapter also documents the very rapid demise of the Malay manuscript tradition, brought about by the spread of printing throughout the Malay world in the nineteenth century. 

This beautifully designed and written book has made the Malay letter accessible, as an art-form and as a rich source of cultural and historic information.

© 2001, Paul M Taylor.