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Locating colonial Indonesia in colonial Ceylon: Geography, language and belonging

Ronit Ricci

What constituted colonial Indonesia? Where did its borders lie? When thinking about it, should we prioritise territory, descent, longings? And, further, how do the naming practices used over time—that is, ‘Javanese’, ‘Indonesian’, ‘Malay’—shape our view of the past and obscure certain connections and affiliations? This chapter addresses these questions by focusing on a colonial Indonesian diaspora living in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the late nineteenth century. Can a decolonial approach change the way we conceive of history?

When I set out to find traces of attachment to ‘colonial Indonesia’ within the diasporic community in Ceylon—known today as Sri Lanka Malays—I envisioned myself going through the pages of the yet-unstudied late-nineteenth-century newspaper Wajah Selong, published in Colombo in Malay and written in jawi (modified Arabic) script, noting all instances in which places and events in the Dutch East Indies were mentioned, drawing conclusions on attachments from afar. Such attachments, I reasoned, would point to an extension or expansion of the boundaries of what we usually conceive of as the colony, to encompass not only the multiple islands of the Indonesian archipelago, but also an additional small island known as the ‘Gem of the Indian Ocean’ or, more casually, Ceylon.

Ultimately, after reading all extant issues of the newspaper (published from 1895 to 1898), I had to concede that I would need to change course as the available evidence did not conform to my hypothesis. As a result, I would like to dedicate this chapter to some possible reasons ‘Indonesia’—its sites and contemporary events—did not occupy the major role I had foreseen for it within the newspaper’s pages. Furthermore, although geography and space as they found shape in the newspaper apparently are not the best lens to employ for better understanding a colonial diaspora like the Sri Lanka Malays, I wish to explore the ways in which Wajah Selong does offer alternative inroads that show us that the Malays’ homelands in the Indonesian–Malay region and their historical, religious and cultural attachments to those lands played an important role in creating and maintaining their colonial-diasporic identity. Before addressing these questions, I begin with some background.

Introduction: A community rooted in colonial exile

Beginning in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries, the Dutch, who held control over parts of present-day Indonesia and Sri Lanka, sent people from across the archipelago to Ceylon as soldiers, convicts, servants and political exiles. Although coming from diverse backgrounds, the ‘Indonesians’ who arrived in Ceylon over time, and their descendants, gradually coalesced into a community who spoke and wrote in the Malay language—long the lingua franca of travel, trade, diplomacy and Islamisation across what we now term the Indonesian–Malay world.

The category of political exiles to Ceylon included many who belonged to the ruling elite in their homelands. For example, the Javanese King Amangkurat III, ruler of Mataram, was exiled in 1708 after a bitter struggle over the throne with his uncle, the future Pakubuwana I; the twenty-sixth Sultan of Gowa in South Sulawesi, Fakhruddin, was exiled in 1767 on charges of conspiring with the British to oppose the trading monopoly of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) in eastern Indonesia; also exiled during the eighteenth century were, among others, the Prince of Bantam, the Crown Prince of Tidore and the King of Kupang. Even earlier, in 1684, the Dutch exiled Sheikh Yusuf of Makassar, a leader, religious scholar and ‘saint’ from Sulawesi.¹ These banishments must be seen within the larger framework of Dutch colonial policies for the removal of individuals who were perceived as a threat to the rulers’ authority and punishing those who rose against Dutch rule by shipping them off to faraway places, often never to return. Such policies were applied often within the borders of present-day Indonesia: thus, for example, Pakubuwana VI, Susuhunan of Surakarta, was banished to Ambon in 1830, Tuanku Imam Bonjol of West Sumatra was sent in 1837 to Cianjur and later Ambon and Manado, while, most famously, Pangeran Diponegoro was exiled to Manado and later Makassar following his defeat in the Java War (1825–30). Therefore, whether sent to Dutch territories that would much later be declared as belonging to Indonesia or to those that would not, exile was a common plight and forms a historical phenomenon that transcends political geography when we now revisit histories of colonialism.²

In addition to political exiles whose numbers were not high but whose banishment was politically and symbolically significant, many of those sent to Ceylon were soldiers serving in colonial armies. When the British took over the island from the Dutch in 1796, they continued to employ soldiers from the Indonesian archipelago (and their descendants) who were already in Ceylon and to recruit new ones from Java, Madura and the Malay Peninsula.

In the early nineteenth century, Frederick North, Governor of Ceylon, established a special regiment for Malay men within the British colonial army on the island. Like other groups within colonised populations—for example, the Gurkhas and the Sikhs in British India (see also Protschky’s Chapter 6 in this volume)—the Malays were viewed, since serving the Portuguese in Ceylon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a ‘martial race’, admired and often feared for their bravery, determination and brutality.³ The Malay Regiment was active for several decades until its disbandment in 1873. During these years, it formed a central pillar of community life, with 75 per cent of men and boys serving in it for varying periods, their families living in nearby barracks and religious and literary works in the Malay language written, copied and taught within the regiment’s sphere. This last tendency is evidenced in extant nineteenth-century Malay manuscripts in Sri Lanka, many of which attest to ownership by members or retirees of the regiment.⁴ While the regiment’s loyalty in service and battle was to the British Empire, such manuscripts show a strong, ongoing bond to the literary, linguistic and Islamic traditions of the Indonesian archipelago.

Also important to note is the question of nomenclature. Clearly, there was no Indonesia to speak of in the late nineteenth century and even the borders of the colony had not reached their final limits. Therefore, speaking of an ‘Indonesian diaspora’ in Ceylon is an anachronism. At the same time, as noted, the ‘Malay’ community’s origins were diverse and encompassed many parts of the archipelago and the Malay Peninsula, so imagining a map that includes their many places of origin conjures a space that is more like Indonesia than any other single state. In his Syair Faid al-Abad (Bounty of the Ages), a work written in the poetic syair metre at the turn of the twentieth century and recounting the community’s past in Ceylon, author Baba Ounus Saldin depicted the warriors sent by the British to fight the Kandy Wars thus:⁵

Dikirimnya orang ke tanah sabrang dari Betawi Bugis Semarang

Banten Ternate Petani Palembang Tuban Padang Pariaman Kelantan Pulau Penang⁶

They sent people off to foreign lands from Batavia, south Sulawesi, Semarang

Banten, Ternate, Patani, Palembang Tuban, Padang, Pariaman, Kelantan, Penang Island.

It is beyond our scope here to consider the gradual process through which this diversity of origins came under the umbrella term ‘Malay’. Suffice to note that some seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch records refer to people from the archipelago as ‘Easterners’ (Oosterlingen)—another blanket term—while others mention the category ‘Javanese’ and yet others contain a broader range of appellations, including ‘Balinese’, ‘Makassarese’, ‘Madurese’, ‘Ambonese’ and ‘Buginese’. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, at the very least, the twin affiliations Melayu (‘Malay’) and Jawa (or Ja, ‘Javanese’) were still employed in Ceylon, and their use depended, in part, on the language in which one was speaking and describing the community.⁷

The point I wish to emphasise here is that naming is rarely neutral but rather is the result and expression of certain circumstances, agendas and struggles. The naming of ‘Chinese Indonesians’ is perhaps the most debated and contentious example in modern Indonesian historiography but there are others, including Belanda Hitam (‘Black Dutchmen’) (see McGregor’s Chapter 7 in this volume), ‘Foreign Orientals’, ‘priyayi’ (elite Javanese), among others, and the use of ‘Malay’ in colonial Ceylon is no doubt another case in point. Within a discussion of history and its revisiting, questions about the naming of groups and categories of people must be acknowledged and explored: Who holds the power to name? How, when and why do names change? How do names employed in a colonial context continue to inform the decolonial present?

‘Wajah Selong’: A brief introduction

The biweekly newspaper Wajah Selong was published in Colombo from 1895 to 1898 by Baba Ounus Saldin, leader of the Malay community, religious scholar, author and publisher.⁸ To the best of my knowledge, only a single, incomplete set of copies survives, housed at the National Archives of Sri Lanka.⁹ A forerunner of this newspaper, one of the world’s earliest in Malay and titled Alamat Langkapuri, was published in the same city and by the same man in 1869–70 and 1877–78. Despite this, and despite both being written in Malay using the jawi script, a clear shift is evident between the two newspapers: the Alamat Langkapuri was more locally focused, with most of its items pertaining to the Malay community in Ceylon and events and developments in that colony, while Wajah Selong took a more international perspective and was also disseminated across a much larger region, with agents hired in several cities in Java, Sumatra, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula and Siam (Thailand). Wajah Selong thus focused less specifically on Ceylon’s Malays, but was also more connected to a wider Indonesian–Malay world and its dissemination had the potential to foster networks of shared knowledge and perspective, creating what Benedict Anderson dubbed ‘imagined communities’.¹⁰ Thinking in terms of a colonial diaspora and its identity, and its links to a ‘home country’, Wajah Selong therefore offered both less and more than its predecessor. More broadly, the modern newspaper was a new item on the older list of means by which the Malays maintained ties to the archipelago and Southeast Asia via trade, exile and return, the hajj and military deployment.

Wajah Selong’s distribution pattern was, as mentioned, different from that of Alamat Langkapuri. Saldin did not explicitly reflect on his motives for this change in his memoir or in his other available writings, but a recurring theme in Alamat Langkapuri was his plea to subscribers to pay their dues; indeed, he had to shut the operation because of financial difficulties. The need for a more stable financial basis for his press may have encouraged him to cast his net more widely. The newspaper was also used to advance additional business interests of its publisher and editor, including the printing and sale of books in Malay, Tamil and Arabic, and advertising various goods for export or import such as silk sarongs from Java and precious stones and wooden furniture from Ceylon. Wajah Selong employed agents (wakil) in Singapore (responsible also for Java, Sumatra and cities to the east), Penang, Malacca, Sungai Ujung and Siam, and these sites are mentioned often by name in the newspaper’s issues.

For example, in the issue published on 27 September 1896, we read:

Segala wakil kepada surat Wajah Selong

Bahwa wakil kepada surat ini tuan Ahmad bin haji Hasim nambar 91 Beach Road Singapura. Dan tuan haji ‘Abd al-Qadir bin haji Muhammad Salih Qadi nambar 54 Acin Street Pulau Pinang. Dan tuan haji Muhammad Saraj nambar 43 Sultan Road Singapura, adapun tuan ini wakil kami pada pihaq Tanah Jawa dan Sumatra dan nagari2 yang di sebelah timur.

All agents of the Wajah Selong newspaper

Agents for this newspaper are Mr Ahmad, son of hajji Hasim, 91 Beach Road, Singapore; and Mr hajji ‘Abd al-Qadir, son of hajji Muhammad Salih Qadi, 54 Acin Street, Penang Island; and Mr hajji Muhammad Saraj, 43 Sultan Road, Singapore, who is also our agent in the regions of Java, Sumatra and the lands to the east.

A list of prices also appears in quite a few issues as subscription costs varied depending on place.¹¹

Wajah Selong had a distinctly international character. It regularly cited various newspapers in Europe, Asia (especially colonial India) and the United States. It reported news from across the world, with examples including an earthquake in Japan, drought in America, war in Kashmir and events unfolding in Zanzibar, Russia, Armenia and Argentina, among many others. Some topics, like the ongoing conflict between Greece and Türkiye, received frequent and detailed coverage. More generally, news from the Ottoman Empire, which was a Muslim-ruled entity in a world in which most of the powerful were Christian, was given disproportionate attention.

This could be a good place to pause and mention the choice of Wajah Selong as the major source on which to base this chapter. Part of furthering a decolonial approach is searching for, exploring and taking seriously non-European sources from the colonial period. For too long, studies of colonial history have relied solely or at least primarily on documents produced by colonial administrators, scholars, soldiers and others who, by virtue of their positionality within the order of things, left us a representation of the past that possesses many blind spots. As scholarship over the past several decades has shown, archives and documentation are never neutral and must be approached with a good measure of healthy scepticism. One way to amend the legacy of heavy reliance on sources inherited from the colonising side, and to see a more nuanced historical picture, is to bring other voices and perspectives into view. The point is not to swing full scale in the other direction and present the colonised perspective as somehow ‘truly authentic’, but to engage with the different ways of knowing, seeing and acting by members of different social classes, ethnic groups, genders and nationalities during the colonial period and acknowledge the vast multiplicity of experiences and views.¹²Wajah Selong as well as other newspapers published within non-European communities in the colonial period (see also Beech Jones’s Chapter 4 on West Sumatran women’s newspaper writing in this volume) are examples of historical sources that can reveal much about thought worlds, beliefs, values and actions that remain hidden from view within the coloniser’s archive.

Locating Indonesia?

So, where did the Dutch East Indies fit in this picture of global reporting? Did the Malays’ ancestral lands receive special, perhaps more frequent, mention than other sites? Reading through the newspaper’s issues, one finds that places in the Indies, as well as in today’s Malaysia, were certainly mentioned, although the term Hindia-Belanda (‘Dutch East Indies’) is absent. There are readers’ letters from Perak and Malacca, a report on ‘a tiger in Malaya’ (harimau di Tanah Melayu), news of a large wedding gathering in Penang and statistics about pilgrims going on the hajj from Tanah Jawa and Tanah Melayu.¹³ These instances by no means overshadow events reported from elsewhere. For example, we might expect that in a Malay newspaper appearing in the 1890s developments in the Aceh War (Perang Nagari Aceh) would be followed closely, but they were not, and even when a brief report on that war appeared, the same page included a report on the war in Sudan. And this is not only a quantitative issue about coverage of the archipelago versus other lands; my impression is that, for the most part, the reporting from the former is not more interesting, intimate, detailed or enthusiastic than reporting from the latter. The newspaper tells of many dramatic and emotional events and what it labels ajaib (‘wonderous’, ‘strange’, ‘unusual’) occurrences from elsewhere. If the number and content of reports from the archipelago are not a good means for assessing a sense of Malay-ness and a connection to a colony that would come to be called Indonesia by members of its diaspora, what are some alternatives?

In the following pages, I will address three themes that I would like to suggest offer a possible lens on Malay identity and belonging: Islam, a juxtaposition of self and ‘other’, and Malay language and culture.

Historical records attest not only to ethnic and linguistic diversity among people from the archipelago who arrived in Ceylon during the colonial period, but also to a population that was non-monolithic in religious terms and included Christians and Balinese Hindus in addition to Muslims. Nonetheless, and certainly by the time Alamat Langkapuri and Wajah Selong were published, the Malays in Ceylon were largely affiliated with Islam. Malay mosques were erected and managed across the island in towns where Malays lived and served—for example, Wekande and Slave Island in Colombo, Badulla and Kandy; Friday sermons were offered in Malay and a range of Islamic texts, written predominantly in Arabic and Malay, were copied (and later also printed) throughout the nineteenth century. The centrality of Islam to Wajah Selong can be seen in the use of the jawi script, which was taught to children in Ceylon as part of an Islamic education through which they were familiarised with Arabic letters so they could read the Qur’an. Whereas in the Dutch and, to a lesser degree, British territories in Southeast Asia during this period the use of Romanised Malay was growing and, according to Adam, had a decisive impact on the character of collective identity that would emerge in Indonesia (that is, less Islam-centric than Malaysia),¹⁴ the use of Romanised Malay in Ceylon was not at all widespread at this time. Thus, the ongoing use of jawi attested to the Malays’ strong Muslim affiliation. A clear religious and political identity was also expressed in the newspaper’s opening sections, as exemplified in the 14 March 1897 issue:

Bismillah hamdan musalliyan

Kemudian daripada segala pujian2 maka memulailah kami membuat surat dengan beberapa shukur bagi tuhan malik al-shatar yang dighaibkan daripada tiap2 salah dosa kami. Lagi telah disampurnakan dengan lengkap saum Ramadhan pada bulan yang mulia, lagi bertambahnya beribu2 tasbih dan shukur bagi tuhan itu karena dikaruniakan bersuka2an kepada hari raya ‘Id al-Fitr. Dan lagi apalah kiranya mudah2an Allah subhan wa ta’ala menjauhi daripada tiap2 balanya daripada segala kupar yang bermusuh serta beroleh kemenangan ke atas khalifat sayyid al-mursalin maulana al-sultan al-Ghazi ‘Abd al-Hamid Khan dan sekalian raja2 Islam.

In the name of God praise be upon Him and prayers upon the Prophet

Then, of all praises, we begin this writing by offering many thanks to God, king Who causes all our sins to vanish. Furthermore, the Ramadhan fast has been completed during the blessed month thus we add thousands of tasbih [use of the formula Subhan Allah, extolling God’s perfection] and thanks to God, who has blessed us with various pleasures on Eid al-Fitr. And further we hope that Allah, may He be praised and exalted, shall distance each and every soldier from all hostile infidels and attain victory for the khalifa [successor] of Sayyid al-Mursalin [Master of the Messengers, the Prophet], the maulana [learned scholar of religion], the Sultan al-Ghazi Abdul Hamid Khan and all Muslim rulers.¹⁵

In addition to centring Islam and religious thought and practices, the newspaper reported frequently on events in other parts of the wider Islamic world such as Türkiye, especially Istanbul, and on the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, as well as on Muslims in various parts of India. News was sprinkled occasionally with hadith (words of the Prophet) or Qur’anic quotes. An intriguing dimension of Wajah Selong’s emphasis on Islam appears in a recurrent interest in converts, reported time and again under the rubric ‘Islam Baru’ (‘New Muslims’).

The new converts depicted included, above all, Westerners, as in news that came from London and Liverpool, including a story about a Jewish woman who took her two daughters to a Muslim man, who cared for children, asking that he teach and convert them. The man consulted with a sheikh, who believed he should go ahead and do so. There were also reports from neighbouring countries, especially India, including from Calcutta and Lahore, with one report (cited from the Punjab Observer) telling of two white people who expressed a wish to become Muslims, were told to recite the profession of faith (do’a kalimah) and were given new names. A case in Colombo of a white convert, who stood by the road to convince people of other faiths of Islam’s truth and succeeded in persuading a young Sinhalese man, was also discussed.¹⁶

These instances point to a strong commitment to Islam—a faith and way of life that were inextricably tied to the Malays’ roots in the archipelago. Another aspect of this commitment to Islam and the identity it fostered can be seen in the second theme, that of the relationship between, and often juxtaposition of, self and other. We have already noted the expression of allegiance and support to the Turkish Sultan and other ‘Muslim rulers’ (raja Islam) appearing in an 1897 issue. The emphasis on Western converts is likely, in part, related to tensions between coloniser and colonised and Christians ruling over Muslim subjects, including in Muslim-majority societies, as was the case in parts of the Dutch East Indies and British India. However, there was an additional group from whom the newspaper seems to have made a clear effort to distinguish its readership. In late nineteenth-century Ceylon, most of the population was Sinhalese (written as Cinggala in Malay) and Buddhist. Part of maintaining a diasporic Malay identity was an ethnic and religious differentiation from this majority.

The differentiation was achieved in part by the well-worn method of demonisation. For example, the 7 November 1897 issue contained a report attributing extreme cruelty to a Sinhalese individual under the title ‘Perbunuhan’ (‘A Killing’). It told of a Sinhalese man in Galle, who ‘worshipped idols’ (memuji berhala)—a typical way of referring to a Buddhist by employing iconoclastic terminology. The man’s wife, it was said, fell for an idolatrous guru (jadi semuka dengan seorang guru berhala) and, when the man returned home, his four-year-old child relayed to him all that had happened, with the result that hatred filled the home. One day when the man was away, the woman killed the child, cooked him as a rendang (meat dish) and served it to the man. Unfortunately, the relevant page is torn and the middle of the story missing, but the final part tells of the man finding his son’s head and reporting his wife and the guru to the authorities.¹⁷ Other reports depicted Sinhalese as killers and drunks. In an interesting case, Wajah Selong, citing the Independent, reproduced news of a Malay woman, who was tried in court for selling arak in Kampung Kertel, a Malay neighbourhood in Colombo, and was fined and warned by the magistrate that she would be jailed should the offence be repeated. Wajah Selong then commented:

Tetapi tiadalah kami percaya akan dia seperempuan Melayu, barangkali perempuan Cinggala yang boleh bertutur Bahasa Melayu, bahwa jika ia anaq cucu Islam tiada boleh ia berani membuat perbuatan yang demikian.¹⁸

However, we do not believe that she is a Malay woman, likely she is a Sinhalese woman who speaks Malay. Were she indeed a Muslim, she would not dare behave in this way.

In this instance, when a Malay woman was apparently guilty of an ‘un-Islamic’ offence, the editor responded defensively, preferring to believe that such behaviour was not possible and, without proof, blaming the actions on a Sinhalese in an attempt to preserve a positive self-image, all the more so for the community’s (and especially its women’s) presentation in the media. A juxtaposition between Muslim and non-Muslim others with clear endorsement of the former is also evident in reports from India that engage with Muslim–Hindu encounters. Further research is needed to assess whether this type of ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach was related to a hardening of boundaries between different groups under colonial categorisation schemes. We do know that there existed common views on the ‘typical’ Malay and ‘typical’ Sinhalese in Ceylon that marked them as different—for example, in addition to being considered daring and fearsome warriors, the Malays were believed to be good servants, gardeners and cooks, whereas the Sinhalese were often depicted as lazy or, as Robert Percival put it, ‘indolent in the extreme’.¹⁹ Such colonial images may have contributed to the shaping or sharpening of the Malays’ self-perception.

Finally, I wish to highlight, as a third theme to consider when trying to assess an often-elusive diasporic identity, mention in Wajah Selong of the Malay language and the Malays as a collective. More broadly, the ongoing use of the Malay language in colonial Ceylon presented the firmest evidence of historical and cultural bonds to the lands to the southeast. The language was used for speaking and for various forms of writing, including hikayat (a genre of prose writing that included tales of romance and adventure, history and pre-Islamic literature), syair (poetry), religious compendiums, letters, diaries, documents and of course the newspapers. On 15 August 1897, a letter to Wajah Selong’s editor described misbehaviour and ignorance among the youth and called on the preachers (katib) to explain what was permitted and forbidden (halal dan haram) in the mosques every Friday, and to do so while speaking in Malay.²⁰ A report cited from a Malay newspaper from Perak emphasised the importance of not forgetting ‘the language of one’s mother and father’ (bahasa ibu dan bapak) and of studying it.²¹ Books and the printing of invitations and other documents in Malay were advertised regularly. Certain local Malay sites were mentioned often, including Kampung Pangeran, Kampung Jawa and Jawatte—all of which had names that inscribed Java, and Javanese-ness, on to the developing urban landscape of Colombo.²² These examples also hint at the ongoing presence of other, non-Malay identities and memories—in particular, Javanese ones, which continued to exist alongside and combined with the broad Malay affiliation.

Rethinking histories of Indonesia: A view from Sri Lanka

This chapter addressed the question of how we might revisit the history of colonialism in the Indonesian case by thinking beyond geography—that is, beyond the area that eventually, after many wars, decades of exploitation and forced European expansion, coalesced into the future nation-state of Indonesia. This state, like many other newly independent states across Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the post–World War II era, had borders that were determined by the limits of colonial rule. Somewhat ironically, and sometimes tragically, such states inherited and often continued perpetrating not only social, legal and economic structures of coloniality, as discussed throughout this volume, but also, at an even more basic level, acquired the colonial-era spatial contours and imaginaries of their newly declared homelands. However, if we do not limit ourselves to the physical boundaries of the Dutch East Indies turned Indonesia, what other possibilities emerge for assessing the colonial period, its events, communities and emotional and cultural landscapes? The example explored here, the Malay community in colonial Ceylon, should be understood, in part, as a component of such a broadly defined colonial Indonesia. In part, this is because identities are always complex and multidimensional and all Malays possessed a past reaching back to the archipelago, family memories of exiled kings and courageous warriors, and a mother tongue from elsewhere—all of which constitute dimensions of the community’s self-understanding.

Returning to the theme of banishment, which is central to Malay history and identity in Ceylon, as it was the reason people from the Indonesian archipelago arrived on the island in the first place, would it be going too far to claim that the Dutch, too, understood Ceylon as part of the East Indies? Batavia was the beating heart of the Dutch empire, and second to it in importance was Colombo. Clearly, in the nineteenth century, the grand ‘unit of analysis’ for large parts of Asia was empire and not the nation-state, and the two colonies were distinct yet also strongly linked within a single empire, with the ability to exile a disobedient prince alternately to Ambon, Makassar or Jaffna signalling an imagined map in which such places were on a par. However, fast-forwarding to the postcolonial age, despite the fact that the plight of the Malays’ ancestors was inextricably linked to colonial forced migration (whether as exiles, slaves or soldiers), their story has been entirely absent from the Indonesian national narrative, and even the sons of royalty banished to Ceylon have been banished once more, this time from textbooks, historical research and popular culture.²³ It could be that the attachment, however diffuse, felt by many Malays to the archipelago as a distant ‘homeland’ was not mutual and that independent, postcolonial Indonesia did not feel attached to them in return.

A major issue that lurks in the shadows of my discussion and that I view as key to the debate about revisiting histories of colonialism is the presence of two colonial powers, the Dutch and the British, in the region we now term the ‘Indonesian–Malay world’.

Exploring Indonesia’s past from today’s vantage point, it is tempting to limit the discussions to the former Dutch East Indies and especially to its contours in the late colonial period leading up to independence. Nonetheless, for several centuries (the English and Dutch East India companies were founded just two years apart, in 1600 and 1602, respectively), these empires of trade and conquest competed with and fought one another, signed treaties and exchanged territories, all while contributing to the geographical and social shaping of their shifting colonies and the states that would later emerge from them. The historiographical British–Dutch divide obscures many connections, one of which is the Malay diasporic community’s ties to the Indonesian–Malay region, but there must be many more.

Thus, can we even speak of ‘colonial Indonesia’ without ‘colonial Malaya’? From the perspective of Wajah Selong’s weekly issues in the final years of the nineteenth century, what did one see?

In terms of empire, Ceylon in the days of Wajah Selong ‘belonged’ to the British yet possessed a significant Dutch past (which ended exactly a century earlier, in 1796) that, for the Malays, had determined their very presence in Ceylon. As Alicia Shrikker has shown in her study of the transition from Dutch to British rule, the processes of change were complex and gradual and Dutch legacies often continued to shape British policies and approaches.²⁴ In the early nineteenth century, Java experienced a regime change (one that was short-lived, yet significant) of the British Interregnum (1811–16) during which the new rulers imposed many changes yet continued, among other Dutch policies, the exiling of local rulers who did not gain their favour.²⁵ These episodes are but two examples of recurring transitions and negotiations in the region. Back in Ceylon, publishing a newspaper in Malay created a natural link with Malay-speaking societies in Southeast Asia and, concurrently, a barrier with neighbouring India just across the Palk Strait, which although under the same British rule had no readership for Wajah Selong.²⁶ Some prominent Malay families in Ceylon knew their places of origin (for example, Java, Sumenep, Makassar) and in that respect their connection was to ‘Indonesia’. But if we consider the diversity of their origins and their late-nineteenth-century allegiance to a British colony like the Straits Settlements and, above all, the linguistic and cultural commonalities across the vast region that now encompasses Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Timor-Leste (as well as southern Thailand and the southern Philippines), we might imagine that the Malays in Ceylon were no more an ‘Indonesian diaspora’ than a ‘Malaysian’ one. But that, too, is not what we aim to ask: were they (in retrospect!) more Indonesian or Malaysian? Focusing on this hypothetical question would be a complete cop-out to the forces of nationalism and the selective national narratives this volume seeks to interrogate and challenge. The point is not to present a final answer to a complex historical question but to broaden the horizon, to see new connections and new possibilities as we glance back and wonder where to locate, within the scope of a decolonial viewpoint, this small, geographically marginal yet remarkably resilient community.

The present state of affairs is beyond the scope of this chapter, yet it is worth noting in closing, and in a return to the question of nomenclature, that the category ‘Malay’, as I hope I have shown, narrowed the scope of the diverse identities of the people from the archipelago who arrived in Ceylon, yet it was also a unifying force through which to remain connected to a distant history and a faraway land throughout the colonial period, under Dutch and British rule, and beyond. After the mid-twentieth century, with decolonisation, the names ‘Indonesia’ and ‘Malaysia’ presented challenges of their own—the first lacking echoes with Malay-ness, Java, Ternate and all other historical points of departure to Ceylon and the second closely linked to the community’s name but very loosely related otherwise, as few Malays trace their lineage to sites in contemporary Malaysia. A study of the postcolonial legacies of the Malays’ complex history, of their senses of attachment, loyalty, belonging and identification, would shed further light on our understanding of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia and how these entities, real and imagined, continue to be negotiated and renegotiated over space and time.

References

Primary sources

Alamat Langkapuri. 1869–70; 1877–78. Colombo: National Archives of Sri Lanka.

Saldin, Baba Ounus. n.d. Kitab Segala Peringatan [A Book of Memories]. MS 137. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Library.

Wajah Selong. 1895–98. Colombo: National Archives of Sri Lanka.

Secondary sources

Abu Hamid. 1994. Syekh Yusuf Makassar. Seorang Ulama, Sufi, dan Pejuang [Syekh Yusuf Makassar: A Scholar, Sufi, and Warrior]. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia.

Adam, Ahmat. 1992. Sejarah dan Bibliografi Akhbar dan Majalah Melayu Abad Kesembilan Belas [The History and a Bibliography of Malay Newspapers and Magazines in the Nineteenth Century]. Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Anderson, Clare. 2016. ‘A Global History of Exile in Asia, c. 1700–1900.’ In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ronit Ricci, 20–47. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press. doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0002.

Anonymous. 1924. Jubilee Book of the Malay Cricket Club. Colombo: Ceylon Malay Cricket Club.

Hussainmiya, B.A. 1990. Orang Regimen: The Malays of the Ceylon Rifle Regiment. Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Press. doi.org/10.1017/s0022463400003003.

Jappie, Saarah. 2012. ‘JAWI DARI JAUH: “Malays” in South Africa through Text.’ Indonesia and the Malay World 40, no. 117: 143–59. doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2012.683675.

Kaartinen, Timo. 2016. ‘Exile, Colonial Space, and Deterritorialized People in Eastern Indonesian History.’ In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ronit Ricci, 139–64. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press. doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0007.

Margana, Sri. 2016. ‘Caught between Empires: Babad Mangkudiningratan and the Exile of Sultan Hamengkubuwana II of Yogyakarta, 1813–1826.’ In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ronit Ricci, 117–38. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press. doi.org/10.1515/9780824853754-008.

Percival, Robert. 1803. An Account of the Island of Ceylon Containing its History, Geography, Natural History, with the Manner and Customs of its Various Inhabitants: To Which is Added, the Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Kandy. London: C. & R. Baldwin.

Ricci, Ronit. 2016. ‘Jawa, Melayu, Malay or Otherwise? The Shifting Nomenclature of the Sri Lankan Malays.’ Indonesia and the Malay World 44, no. 130: 68–80. doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2016.1219491.

Ricci, Ronit. 2018. ‘Along the Frontiers of Religion, Language and War: Baba Ounus Saldin’s Syair Faid al-Abad.’ In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas, 82–92. London: Routledge. doi.org/10.1017/9781108648189.

Ricci, Ronit. 2019. Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2021.1928932.

Saldin, Baba Ounus. 1905. Syair Faid al-Abad [Bounty of the Ages]. Colombo: Alamat Langkapuri Press.

Schrikker, Alicia. 2007. Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780–1815: Expansion and Reform. Leiden: Brill. doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004156029.i-272.

Schrikker, Alicia. 2011. ‘Caught between Empires: VOC Families in Sri Lanka after the British Takeover, 1806–1808.’ Annales de démographie historique [Annals of Historical Demography] 122, no. 2: 127–47. doi.org/10.3917/adh.122.0127.

Suryadi. 2008. ‘Sepucuk Surat dari Seorang Bangsawan Gowa di Tanah Pembuangan (Ceylon) [A Letter from a Gowa Noblewoman in the Land of Exile (Ceylon)].’ Wacana: Jurnal Ilmu Pengetahuan Budaya [Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia] 10, no. 2: 214–45. doi.org/10.17510/wjhi.v10i2.194.

Ward, Kerry. 2009. Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511551628.

Wilkinson, R.J. 1959 [1901]. A Malay–English Dictionary. 2 vols. London: Macmillan & Co.

Yang, Anand A. 2016. ‘“Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath”: The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Exile of Bhai Maharaj Singh in Singapore.’ In Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, edited by Ronit Ricci, 71–93. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press. doi.org/10.1515/9780824853754-006.

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1. 1 On the history of exile to colonial Ceylon during the Dutch period and the development of a colonial Malay diaspora in Ceylon, with an emphasis on diasporic Malay literary culture, see Ronit Ricci, Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), doi.org/10.1017/9781108648189. On the Sultan of Gowa and his family’s life in Ceylon, see Suryadi, ‘Sepucuk Surat dari Seorang Bangsawan Gowa di Tanah Pembuangan (Ceylon) [A Letter from a Gowa Noblewoman in the Land of Exile (Ceylon)]’, Wacana: Jurnal Ilmu Pengetahuan Budaya [Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia] 10, no. 2 (2008): 214–45, doi.org/10.17510/wjhi.v10i2.194.

2. 2 Even further afield than Ceylon lay another site of exile, the Cape in South Africa (Nagari Kap), which was under VOC rule from 1652 to 1795. On forced migration from the Dutch territories in the archipelago to the Cape, see Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511551628. On the Cape Malays and their religious and literary culture, see Saarah Jappie, ‘JAWI DARI JAUH: “Malays” in South Africa through Text’, Indonesia and the Malay World 40, no. 117 (2012): 143–59, doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2012.683675. A comparative study of the Sri Lankan Malays and Cape Malays is very much warranted but has not been carried out to date.

3. 3 Anonymous, Jubilee Book of the Malay Cricket Club (Colombo: Ceylon Malay Cricket Club, 1924), 158.

4. 4 On the establishment of the Malay Regiment and its subsequent history and demise, see B.A. Hussainmiya, Orang Regimen: The Malays of the Ceylon Rifle Regiment (Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Press, 1990), doi.org/10.1017/s0022463400003003.

5. 5 The Kandy Wars were a series of wars fought against the last sovereign king in Ceylon, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, in the early nineteenth century, ending several centuries of European engagement with the highland kingdom of Kandy. On these wars and the Malays’ complex roles within them, serving on both sides, see Ricci, Banishment and Belonging, 181–217.

6. 6 Baba Ounus Saldin, Syair Faid al-Abad [Bounty of the Ages] (Colombo: Alamat Langkapuri Press, 1905). For a study of some historical and literary aspects of the Syair, see Ronit Ricci, ‘Along the Frontiers of Religion, Language and War: Baba Ounus Saldin’s Syair Faid al-Abad’, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, ed. May Hawas (London: Routledge, 2018), 82–92, doi.org/10.4324/9781315686271-7.

7. 7 For an expanded discussion, see Ronit Ricci, ‘Jawa, Melayu, Malay or Otherwise? The Shifting Nomenclature of the Sri Lankan Malays’, Indonesia and the Malay World 44, no. 130 (2016): 68–80, doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2016.1219491.

8. 8 For autobiographical writing by Saldin, see Baba Ounus Saldin, Kitab Segala Peringatan [A Book of Memories], MS 137 (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Library, n.d.).

9. 9 The set was catalogued under the wrong title and therefore, despite many visits to the archives, I was unaware of its availability until 2017. This could be viewed as a negligible anecdote but points to a significant issue: materials written in the jawi/Arabic script could not be read or recognised by any of the National Archives’ staff, so have been doomed to further marginalisation and loss within the institution charged with the preservation of Sri Lanka’s documented history, mirroring the marginality of the Malays within the national narrative and contemporary political life. The fact that Wajah Selong was published only for a brief period and that not all issues survived make reading the entire source possible but also limit the scope of analysis and the ability to draw definitive conclusions. Nonetheless, it provides insights and information that would be difficult to access elsewhere.

10. 10 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

11. 11 For example, in the 15 March 1896 issue, subscription prices were listed for one year, six months or three months, with those for Ceylon approximately 10 per cent lower than for places overseas.

12. 12 For studies on forced migration and exile under colonialism that highlight local, vernacular sources, see Clare Anderson, ‘A Global History of Exile in Asia, c. 1700–1900’, in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, ed. Ronit Ricci (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2016), 20–47, doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0002; Yang, ‘“Near China beyond the Seas Far Far Distant from Juggernath”’; Timo Kaartinen, ‘Exile, Colonial Space, and Deterritorialized People in Eastern Indonesian History’, in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, ed. Ronit Ricci (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2016), 139–64, doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0007.

13. 13 Even in the few examples presented in this chapter one may notice the consistent use of tanah (‘land’) added to placenames, especially Melayu and Java (that is, Tanah Melayu, Tanah Jawa). This phenomenon occurs throughout the newspaper’s pages and can be contrasted with the consistent use of pulau (‘island’) whenever Ceylon is mentioned. This is intriguing, especially considering that Java is also an island.

14. 14 Ahmat Adam, Sejarah dan Bibliografi Akhbar dan Majalah Melayu Abad Kesembilan Belas [The History and a Bibliography of Malay Newspapers and Magazines in the Nineteenth Century] (Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1992), 91–92.

15. 15 Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) was the last sultan to exert effective rule over the Ottoman Empire.

16. 16 These events were reported, respectively, in the issues dated 14 March 1897, 28 March 1897 and 26 September 1897.

17. 17 7 November 1897.

18. 18 6 June 1897.

19. 19 Robert Percival, An Account of the Island of Ceylon Containing its History, Geography, Natural History, with the Manner and Customs of its Various Inhabitants: To Which is Added, the Journal of an Embassy to the Court of Kandy (London: C. & R. Baldwin, 1803), 120 (on the Malays), and 190 (on the Sinhalese).

20. 20 Most Muslims living in Ceylon were Tamils and there were various ties between them and the Malays, so Tamil was likely the alternative language to be employed for the sermons.

21. 21 The newspaper was the Perak Pioneer and Native States Advertiser, the first English-language newspaper in Perak (founded in 1894). It is noteworthy that of the many newspapers cited in Wajah Selong, very minimal mention is made of those from the Malay world.

22. 22 Kampung Pangeran (Prince Village) was named for one of the exiled princes, likely Pangeran Arya Mangkunagara, the older brother of Pakubuwana II of Kartasura, who was exiled in 1728. Kampung Jawa (Java Village) was home to descendants of Javanese exiles, soldiers and servants; Jawatte (Java Gardens) is an area in western Colombo where the Jawatte Mosque and cemetery are currently located.

23. 23 Sheikh Yusuf of Makassar is somewhat of an exception, perhaps, but even articles and books dedicated to his life briefly gloss over the decade he spent in Ceylon. See, for example, the study by Abu Hamid, Syekh Yusuf Makassar. Seorang Ulama, Sufi, dan Pejuang [Syekh Yusuf Makassar: A Scholar, Sufi, and Warrior] (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1994), 108–11.

24. 24 Alicia Schrikker, Dutch and British Colonial Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1780–1815: Expansion and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2007), doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004156029.i-272.

25. 25 On the exile to Penang and later Ambon of Hamengkubuwana II of Yogyakarta by the British, see Sri Margana, ‘Caught between Empires: Babad Mangkudiningratan and the Exile of Sultan Hamengkubuwana II of Yogyakarta, 1813–1826’, in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, ed. Ronit Ricci (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2016), 117–38, doi.org/10.1515/9780824853754-008.

26. 26 Ahmat Adam, in his extensive study of nineteenth-century Malay newspapers, concluded that the Malay press under the two empires, Dutch and British, exhibited many similarities and attested and contributed to a shared Malay identity. Adam, The History and a Bibliography of Malay Newspapers, 92.