Creole Hadramis in the Malay world in the 1800s: Fragments of biographies and connected histories

Introduction

Creole Hadramis lie at the conjunction of transregional and local histories, but the complexities of their location have been largely obscured if not suppressed by the normative notions of citizenship and belonging that have come about with the rise of nation-states. This article turns to creole Hadramis at a time when the colonial precursors of contemporary states were still in their early years and the bureaucratic categorisation of the population into ‘indigene’ and ‘foreigner’ had not advanced greatly. The article explores ‘lived cosmopolitanisms’, the theme of this special issue, by examining biographical trajectories. What we know of the creoles in question is fragmentary and almost exclusively related to elites, namely, traders, diplomats and the writers who recorded episodes in the lives of the former. The biographical fragments that emerge, however, offer insights into the cultural geography that deepen our appreciation of the complex and shared histories of the citizens of contemporary nation-states.

The ‘Malay world’ is preferable to the anachronistic use of the names of nation-states such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and so forth in providing a sense of the cultural geography of the article. ¹ The term is not understood to be a conclusive representation of peoples and places but an imperfect and always provisional form of naming. The Malay world in question is associated not with an ethnicity or a bounded region here, but a cultural geography constituted by the flow of people, texts, languages and commodities whose spatial dimensions vary across time. The argument can thus be made to include Colombo, Sri Lanka and Cape Town, South Africa, among other places (Mandal, 2011: 297–298).

The historical and conceptual basis of the article draws from the work on the Hadrami diaspora done by Engseng Ho (2006) as well as the idea of ‘connected histories’ of Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997). Ho arrives at a means of understanding the expanse of Indian Ocean histories by demonstrating how Hadrami genealogies provide a broad diasporic worldview that is connected to specific and disparate localities at the same time. Subrahmanyam is concerned with advancing ‘connected histories’ as an approach that grasps the shared cultural modalities that fail to be recognised through the regional frameworks of area studies. As he puts it, not only bullion, firearms, renegades and mercenaries constituted ‘supra-local connections in the early modern world’, but ‘ideas and mental constructs, too, flowed across political boundaries in that world, and – even if they found specific local expression – enable us to see that what we are dealing with are not separate and comparable, but connected histories’ (Subrahmanyam, 1997: 747–748). Ho demonstrates through the Hadrami diaspora the saliency of the transregional historical connections advanced by Subrahmanyam.

Creole Hadramis were significant and ubiquitous in the Malay world in the early nineteenth century when the archipelago’s polities began to be reshaped by nascent colonial states. They became prominent actors in the shifting cultural geographies of the time as old urban centres tied to a maritime world gave way to the new cities of landward colonial states. Melaka, Palembang and Pontianak declined, while Batavia (present day Jakarta), Penang and Singapore rose. Their ancestors arrived from the Hadramaut, in the Arabian Peninsula, in the eighteenth century, and were mostly descendants of Prophet Muhammad – the Arabic honorific Sayyid before their names marked their exceptional lineage. Hadramis already constituted a diaspora dispersed throughout the Indian Ocean at this time. Those who arrived in the Malay world were valued by local rulers for the diplomatic and trading skills accumulated through their transoceanic sojourns, their knowledge of Islamic texts and, of course, their distinguished descent. They were particularly attractive because they enhanced the credentials of Malay polities within the Islamic political, trading and cultural networks that characterised the Indian Ocean. As a result, they were frequently able to marry into ruling families. In time, they rose to important courtly positions, and, in several instances, became rulers themselves. By the early nineteenth century, their creole descendants were a well-established presence in the Malay world who were both intimately tied to their place of birth, and yet a measure apart. On the one hand, they were port-captains, diplomats, traders, Islamic scholars, keramat (revered spiritual figures) and members of ruling families who were integral to local polities. On the other hand, their distinguished descent separated them from others, and linked them to the transoceanic diaspora of their Hadrami brethren.

Ho (2006: 189) develops the idea of creole Hadramis as ‘local cosmopolitans’ by relating their prophetic genealogies to their mobility. He sees Hadrami genealogies as a ‘collection of names’ that ‘circulated through many lines of descent and many territories across the Indian Ocean’ to create ‘an asymmetrical relation between a transregional social entity – the Hadrami diaspora – and local ones – the Muslim populations of port towns’. By marrying local women in the diaspora, ‘Hadramis and their offspring became Swahilis, Gujaratis, Malabaris, Malay, Buginese, Javanese, and Filipinos’. The genealogies ‘have evolved to become, in theory and practice, complex languages of cosmopolitanism in which the foreign and the local negotiate coexistence in vital ways’.

By focusing on the conjunction of the transregional and local in specific biographies, the article draws from the methodological insights of viewing supra-local phenomena through specific ‘sites of interaction’ (Harper and Amrith, 2012). Sites, as understood here, offer a means by which the different scales and complexities of the histories under study may become demonstrable in the textures of particular cultural geographies. Ho’s work might be regarded as a multi-scalar global history through which Hadrami biographies could be viewed as sites of interaction, and the interplay between broad historical dynamics and particular contexts brought to the fore.

In this article, cultural geographies are revealed through the texts of creole Hadrami writers who provide glimpses into the lives of a number of their prominent creole counterparts of the time. The writers in question, namely, Abdullah bin Muhammad al-Misri and Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, better known as Abdullah Munsyi, wrote in Malay and were likely to have been contemporaries. ² The latter’s work has been widely published and translated since the colonial era, and promoted then as well as in the post-independence period as an exemplary model of Malay language and literature. Efforts to create national canons have led to the anachronistic application of national and ethnic categories to both the writers. Locating the authors and their works within Malay world histories then restores their connected histories, and offers a textually grounded critique of rigidly defined identities in the same breath. The article begins with a discussion of the two creole writers and the ways in which they shaped the cultural geography before turning to a few fragments of biographies in their works.

The writers: Abdullah al-Misri and Abdullah Munsyi

We know little about Abdullah al-Misri’s life. From his writings, it appears that he lived from sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth century. From his name, we might surmise that Al-Misri’s ancestors were of Egyptian origin. If this were true, it would have made him exceptional in the migrations of Arabs to the Malay world as Hadramis were by far the majority. Al-Misri is nevertheless discussed alongside creole Hadramis because of his self-declared affection and close relations with them. Al-Misri’s family appears to have first settled in Kedah, to the north of the Malay Peninsula, and later moved to Pontianak in Kalimantan (Borneo) (Zaini-Lajoubert, 2008: 11). He was born in Palembang, Sumatera. As a trader, Al-Misri moved from place to place, but studied in Batavia, and is likely to have been based for a considerable time in Java. One of the few personal details that emerge in his writing is his declaration of deep ties to Pontianak and its creole Hadrami Sultan as well as other members of the ruling circle (Zaini-Lajoubert, 2008: 37–38).

Keeping within the genre of mirrors for princes, Al-Misri mostly produced didactic texts in which he frequently launched critiques of both local rulers as well as Europeans, though the language used in each instance was necessarily ambiguous. He also wrote Cerita Siam (The Story of Siam) about a trip he took to Siam (present day Thailand) upon accepting the offer of a Hadrami who was acting as a diplomat representing Dutch interests. We shall focus on an extract of this text in the next part of the article.

Abdullah Munsyi lived from 1796 to 1854 and was probably slightly younger than Al-Misri. The life of this Abdullah has been well documented in his own writing and the observations of the British with whom he came in contact as a Malay language teacher and translator. He was born in Melaka, spent a considerable and fruitful part of his life in Singapore and died in Makka. He was the grandson of a Hadrami who had settled and married in India. Abdullah’s father was one of the four sons of this union who each travelled from India to different parts of the Malay world, namely, Melaka, Java and Ambon (Sweeney, 2008: 240–241). A fluent Tamil speaker, Abdullah’s father mastered Malay and became a teacher of the language, thereby establishing a professional precedent for his son. Abdullah’s maternal grandmother was a Hindu from Kedah who moved to Melaka and converted to Islam. Thus, both he and Al-Misri had familial ties with the northern state on the Malay Peninsula.

Like Al-Misri, Abdullah wrote didactic texts, on many an occasion, launching severe critiques of local rulers. He became best known for his 1849 publication Hikayat Abdullah (The Story of Abdullah), a substantial biographical reflection on language, social life, historical incidents, rulership and so forth. In the next part, we shall turn to an extract from this text in which a couple of Hadrami historical figures come into conflict with dramatic consequences.

Besides the general didactic orientation, both Al-Misri and Abdullah reflected in their life and writings, the transregional connections that made them a part of the Malay world, as well as the nascent colonial states that were introducing an era of parochialisation. On the one hand, the authors in question might be regarded as part of what Ronit Ricci has described as the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, as the Arabic language inflected their writing in Malay. At the same time, they contributed towards the vernacularisation of Arabic (Ricci, 2011: 15–17). Anthony Johns provides further evidence of transregional connections in an evocative account of how Abdullah describes learning to copy the Qur’an by hand from his grandmother and father. Johns elaborates on how this was an important tradition in Muslim societies in the age before print (Johns, 1998: 120–121; Sweeney, 2008: 262–263). Abdullah was eventually employed by an officer of the British garrison in Melaka to produce copies of the Qur’an for sale to Bengali and Madrasi soldiers in the service of the East India Company.

On the other hand, the authors and their families gravitated from the old centres of the Malay world such as Kedah, Melaka, Palembang and Pontianak to the relatively new centres of Singapore and Batavia, and thereby embodied the shift from the relative mobility of maritime political cultures to the growing centralisation of power under colonial states in the 1800s. Importantly, however, transregional legacies did not come to an abrupt end but were perpetuated in the lives of the authors. Hence, their biographies demonstrate a multiplicity of languages, familiarity with significant texts of the Arabic Cosmopolis and the unusual position of being both intimately tied to local polities and yet somewhat apart.

The texts of both authors provide plentiful evidence of the multiple languages and geographical origins of the people among whom they lived. Al-Misri quotes generously from the hadīth (traditions of the Prophet) in the original Arabic, and then quite naturally switches to translations in Malay. When he describes a title or position in one language, he provides translations in others without hesitation. For instance, for the Malay ‘Tuanku [Lord – in addressing a sovereign]’, he offers Telapakan Sampeyan and Maulana as the Javanese and Arabic equivalents, respectively (Zaini-Lajoubert, 2008: 71). Abdullah draws from his Arabic and Tamil heritage with ease, frequently to explain terms, or perhaps to make an amusing emphasis. In Hikayat Abdullah, he finds the refusal of the Sultan of an offer to have his children educated in English schools so deplorable as to describe it as ‘jāhil murakkab [doubly ignorant]’ (Sweeney, 2008: 403).

Al-Misri and Abdullah might be regarded as writers who reflected the creole world around them for they demonstrate examples of creole and hybrid uses in the language and social contexts they were familiar with, and produced explanations for these very same formations. Al-Misri wrote Bayan al-Asma (‘A Guide to Names’) for the Sultan of Kutai in the hopes of securing a position in the service of the ruler of the state in eastern Kalimantan. This text provides descriptions of titles that include such hybrid combinations as Pangeran Syarif Sukmawira to describe a child of a sultan who is of Banū Hāshim descent and is courageous in battle (Zaini-Lajoubert, 2008: 193). Pangeran and Sukmawira are Javanese terms describing a battle-worthy prince, while Syarif – from the Arabic Sharīf – indicates descent from the Banū Hāshim, the clan of the Prophet Muhammad. Syarif, then, like Sayyid, denotes prophetic descent. Similarly, Al-Misri refers to a certain Sayyid Hassan, whom we shall encounter shortly. This figure’s name, including the full complement of honorifics, is as follows: ‘Tuan Pangeran Sayyid Hassan bin Umar bin Abdullah al-Habsyi’. The Malay word Tuan may be translated as ‘Lord’ and the Javanese word Pangeran as ‘Prince’. Sayyid, we are already familiar with, adds a symbolic significance that is derived from a transcendent authority. Together, the honorifics in the diplomat’s name represent a conjunction of Indian Ocean histories.

Creole Hadrami figures feature prominently in the writings of Al-Misri and Abdullah. Indeed, the latter’s birth is credited to a miracle performed by a sayyid who felt compassion for Abdullah’s mother upon witnessing her sorrow after suffering repeated miscarriages (Sweeney, 2008: 245). Abdullah was named after the sayyid in question to honour the latter’s request. In the next part, we turn to an examination of a number of creole figures who appear in the texts of the two authors. Biographical information on these creoles is sparse. Besides the scattered narratives about public figures found in a number of contemporary Malay texts, there are also references to them in the writings of European colonial officials. Altogether, these sources provide scant biographical information, and practically no intimate or personal details. Biographical fragments, however, emerge from scattered information gathered from different texts as we shall see.

Biographical fragments

In this part, two excerpts from the works of Al-Misri and Abdullah are examined in succession for the fragments of biographies found in them. ³ The first excerpt concerns Sayyid Hassan, who is described by Al-Misri in the performance of his duties as a diplomat in the court of Siam. The second excerpt is a description by Abdullah of what appears at first to be a rather mundane dispute in Singapore over an unpaid loan between Sayyid Yasin and Sayyid Umar al-Junid.

Concluding discussion

Reflections on cosmopolitanism in the Malay world have typically rested on the early twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. This is understandable given the ubiquity of Malay language newspapers in the early 1900s that were financed and produced by various creoles – Hadramis, Tamils, Europeans and Chinese. Located in now well-established colonial centres such as Penang, Singapore and Batavia, these efforts produced popular newspapers and novellas in Malay and thereby served as the first shared public manifestations of the language. In contrast, the textual production of the early nineteenth century constituted handwritten manuscripts that circulated only in limited ways, with the exception of work such as the Hikayat Abdullah. However, this article suggests that earlier signs of illuminating creole biographical trajectories can be seen in the textual evidence examined. Readings of the language and content, as well as the possible strategies of the authors examined, suggest the salience of Ho’s ‘local cosmopolitans’.

By paying attention to the connected histories that span the Indian Ocean, we are able to appreciate the significance of creole Hadramis in the early 1800s. Nevertheless, when the period is framed in terms of colonial state building, creole histories become vastly diminished. For this reason, Tim Harper reminds us that an inordinate ‘emphasis on the global connections forged by European imperial expansion’ can suffer the ‘danger [of generating] a false Eurocentric telos to world history’ (Harper, 2002: 142).

The fragmentary biographies of prominent creole Hadramis as well as their biographers of sorts are indicative of elite trajectories that underscore the lived cosmopolitanism of the times by demonstrating the relative mobility and porosity of the cultural geographies of the Malay world. The picture that emerges suggests that the scales and complexities of mobile and adaptive communities were not eliminated with the establishment of colonial states. Rather, the world of the authors examined reflects a multiplicity of languages and geographical origins that arose from the interplay of both transregional and local cultural geographies. The biographies and the places they recount were not only creole Hadrami but included Tamils, Javanese and so forth, as noted in the introduction. Sunil Amrith (2009) provides a valuable social history of the Tamil diaspora, frequently associated with its Hadrami counterpart, which shows how Singapore and other urban centres were sites of a tremendous and unusually transcultural mobility in a period that corresponds with this article. Despite the parochialising thrust of the colonial state at this time, a long-standing outcome of global historical processes was carried over and re-established from the old Malay world centres to the new colonial capitals. Writers such as Al-Misri and Abdullah produced a creole or hybrid language and worldview that reflected the circumstances of their family backgrounds and social interactions, and shaped emergent cultural geographies.

Both the authors’ works suggest a rather carefully crafted position on the growing colonial order. Al-Misri and Abdullah were appreciative of some of the outcomes of European political ascendancy at this time, typically naming administrative, infrastructural and economic improvements. They were at the same time critical of acts that disregarded faith practices and excused forms of economic exploitation. In this regard, these authors might probably be better viewed within the genre of the mirrors for princes. Therefore, they subjected the European colonial officers of their time with the same carefully crafted critiques as they had local rulers before them. As Sweeney has suggested for Abdullah in particular, we need to pay particular attention when an author appears to merely report without commentary, for therein lies the critique.

The fragments of the biographies examined are exemplary of elite Hadrami creoles of the time. Sayyid Hassan provides diplomatic services for the Dutch governor general as others before him had done for local rulers. His position in relation to the European ruler, however, need not have been a subservient one, at least not in Al-Misri’s rendering. It is he who saves the day when the outburst of a European in the Siamese court creates a diplomatic crisis. Al-Misri attributes to Sayyid Hassan considerable symbolic capital, if not authority, when he reports the Siamese recommendation that no ‘white-skinned nobleman’ be sent to them again; they would only receive the venerable sayyid in the future.

Nationalist readings of creole authors have nevertheless tended to be black and white. The views of Malaysian scholars and cultural activists regarding Abdullah Munsyi are particularly striking. As Sweeney observes, these views have veered between seeing the author as the father of Malay literature and a British stooge (Sweeney, 2006: 225–226). Here, the multiplicity of languages and geographical origins that constitute Abdullah’s creole worldview becomes a problem as it casts doubts on his Malay identity in the eyes of contemporary critics armed with racialised perspectives. The Malaysian state erases the creole past of its citizens and privileges those regarded ‘indigenous’ over and above the ‘foreign’. From this perspective, Abdullah’s transregional connections mark him as a foreigner and thereby cast his body of work in some doubt. Efforts at resolving this debate have frequently resorted to oddly anachronistic arguments. Siti Hawa Haji Salleh, for instance, suggests that Abdullah should be included in the national literary canon because he would be considered Malay going by the definition of the said identity in the Malaysian Constitution that came into effect in 1957 (Salleh, 1997: 158–172). The Constitution defines a Malay as somebody who practices Islam and speaks the Malay language. Siti Hawa’s argument is a good illustration of the retroactive application of the terms of a twentieth-century legal instrument to nineteenth-century social conditions.

Efforts to advance national literary canons project contemporary ethnic, racial and national categories into the past, and thereby erase the scales and complexity of mobile and adaptive communities. The examination of the writers and biographical fragments in the preceding pages suggests, however, not only the fluidity of creole Hadramis but of Malayness itself. Judging by the intimate connection of Hadramis, Tamils and others with Malays, indeed the active participation of creole Hadramis in shaping the Malay world, it could reasonably be argued, as Joel Kahn has, that Malay culture is itself creole in constitution (Kahn, 2006: 170). An acknowledgement of this creole character, however, would require an admission of the location of the Malay world at the conjunction of transregional and local histories. The connected histories of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and other nation-states might be salient counterpoints to the exclusions and chauvinisms of nationalistic and racialised thinking. Rather than focus on the counterpoints, this article has demonstrated the connected histories of creole Hadramis in the Malay world and presented cultural geographies that bring to the fore the multi-scalar and shared histories of the citizens of contemporary nation-states. It makes an historically grounded argument for a cosmopolitan Malay world.