Saga of the Light Letters: the Malaysian narrative
By A Murad Merican
November 28, 2018 @ 12:58pm
It was on Oct 13, 2011 that I first contacted Susannah Rayner. She was then the Head of Archives and Special Collections Library at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London. About seven years later, in September this year, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) was given the sole rights to host the Light Letters, the first and only institution outside of SOAS and the United Kingdom which has been formalised to do so. Susannah had since left the SOAS Library, not long after discussions began.
In the years that followed, negotiations and goodwill continued with a host of kind and concerned souls at the School. One particular person, Erich Kesse, then in 2014, SOAS’s newly appointed Digital Library Project Officer with the Library and Information Services Directorate, was instrumental in continuing, maintaining and facilitating links and exchanges, trust and goodwill with the integrity of the Letters foremost in mind.
Issues of public accessibility, copyright and ownership dominated throughout the seven-year negotiation with SOAS.
From the outset, it was understood that there was no interest in bringing back the physical Letters themselves. I had told Susannah earlier that they would keep better in temperate climes. At the same time, on this side of the world, a number of Malaysian scholars had wanted to assert rights over the Letters, saying that they are the property of Malaysia because they were written within its territories and the region — the Malay peninsular, Sumatera and Borneo. It was the rights to the 1,200 Letters through some 2,400 images that was at issue. We were focused on the digitisation and, by extension, the transliteration process.
My email in 2011 was to inquire on the accessibility to the Light Letters collection for my research on Pulau Pinang. I had heard of the Letters about a decade earlier from a colleague who had told me that the collection was mainly letters on trade, and commercial transactions between Francis Light, the country trader, and Malay dignitaries and traders from the peninsula and around the Malay Archipelago.
Over the decades, the Letters have received a fair share of attention from some Malaysian scholars and historians. I came to know then that a number of institutions nationally and from around the region had inquired to acquire the images. But SOAS turned to me instead Earlier on, while exchanging messages with the head of its Archives and Special Collections Library, I had suggested a few steps to protect the artifact and at the same time enhance its accessibility, as per the philosophy, free of charge. Measures included digitisation and developing a portal-cum-concordance to facilitate and enhance its usage to the historian and researcher in terms of content as well as deploying the intersections between the humanities and technology beyond the simple word search capability. Deep artificial intelligence can certainly detect and identity names, patterns of words and meanings in the Letters that the human eye is not able to penetrate. I was thinking of developing a corpus of the digital humanities.
But what is equally significant, perhaps of much immediacy to scholars, historians and connoisseurs of manuscripts and local history are the stories behind the Letters — what was penned and communicated, and how that can enhance our understanding of the past or debunk what was thought to be the received narrative.
This led to transliterating the Jawi script used into Rumi. It was not an easy task. The calligraphy varies but is typical of the period. The language in the Letters is Bahasa Melayu — the lingua franca of the Malay Archipelago, peppered with Arabic, Farsi and Siamese. That would enable greater accessibility to those who did not enjoy facility for Jawi.
The Light Letters Collection is probably the largest single collection of Malay letters extant today. Generally linked to Francis Light, the letters cover roughly the period 1771 to 1794. The Letters were bequeathed to King’s College in 1835, and later passed on to SOAS upon its establishment in I916. Earlier, Malay grammar and language scholar William Marsden had bought the Letters in an auction in London in the early 1800, not long after the death of Francis Light in 1794. The actual Letters are now kept in the School’s archives as MS40320. A few “stray” letters can be found inthe British Library and in Cambridge.
The Letters are bound in 11 volumes. To the researcher and the student, the themes that can be studied from the Letters are numerous.
These include pre-colonial economic and trading systems in the Malay Archipelago, diplomacy and international relations, philology, Malay cosmology and voices of Malay women.
And of course, the relations between the sultans of Kedah and the island of Pulo Pinang.
Perpustakaan Hamzah Sendut and the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies USM are the custodians for the Letters.
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