An Indian protagonist of the Malay language: Abdullah “Munshi”, his race and his mother-tongue
H.F. O’B. Traill’s 1979 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 52, Part 2) re-examines the racial and linguistic identity of Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, the early nineteenth-century writer known as Abdullah “Munshi”, arguing that the long-standing assumption of his Malay or half-Malay heritage is incorrect and that he was in fact a Peranakan Keling whose mother-tongue was Tamil, not Malay.
Summary
Traill’s central intervention is to dismantle what he regards as a persistent historiographical error, traceable to J.T. Thomson’s 1874 introduction to his translation of the Hikayat Abdullah, in which Thomson described Abdullah’s physiognomy as “a Tamillian of South Hindostan” yet nonetheless assumed a Malay mother without evidence. Traill traces this error through subsequent writers—A.H. Hill, A.E. Coope, and various Malay scholars—showing how it has been perpetuated or merely left ambiguous for over a century. He argues that the primary evidence in Abdullah’s own Hikayat and Pelayaran consistently places his family among the Peranakan Keling community of Malacca, and that his Malay, for all its considerable literary achievement, was a learned language superimposed on a “bazaar Malay” foundation rather than a native idiom.
The article then turns to the literary-historical implications of this reclassification. Traill contends that Abdullah’s celebrated status as “Father of Modern Malay Literature” rests on an irony: Abdullah himself explicitly tried to model his writing on the classical Malay tradition, using formulaic openings and archaic connectives in deliberate imitation of the Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Hang Tuah. His modernism was therefore fortuitous rather than intended, arising from his factual subject matter, his journalistic naturalness, his outsider’s critical perspective on Malay feudalism, and the residual “bazaar Malay” practicality that his classical imitations could never fully suppress. Traill supports this with close textual analysis, citing numerous unidiomatic constructions in the Hikayat that betray a non-native speaker’s limitations.
Throughout, Traill draws on Abdullah’s own autobiographical passages in the Hikayat (particularly the genealogical account on p. 5, the list of Malacca letter-writers on p. 31, and the account of his language studies on pp. 32–33 and 96–97) as the decisive evidence, cross-referencing these with Thomson’s contemporary description, Raffles’ reported remarks, and the burial records at Masjid Keling.
Key Findings
- Abdullah’s great-grandfather, Shaik Abdul Kadir, migrated from the Yemen to Nagur in Mysore, where he married a Tamil woman; their four sons dispersed across Southeast Asia, one (Muhammed Ibrahim) settling in Malacca (pp. 70–71).
- Abdullah’s mother, Salamah, was the daughter of Tamil forebears from Kedah who converted to Islam in Malacca; Traill argues her name is more accurately rendered “Sellamah”, a common Tamil female name, and that she was full Tamil rather than the “half-Indian” Hill described (pp. 71–72).
- By blood, Abdullah was approximately 7/8 Tamil and 1/8 Arab; his grandmother “Peri Achi” (a Tamil pet-name meaning “elder sister”) likely carried some Arab descent from her father Shaik Mira Lebai (pp. 71–72).
- Abdullah was born in Kampong Pali, which he identifies as the Tamil name for Kampong Masjid, a Tamil quarter of Malacca; his wife and daughter were both buried at the Masjid Keling (pp. 72–73).
- Raffles, on leaving Malacca for Europe, gave Abdullah a letter stating he would receive “a higher salary than Malay people” in Singapore courts—an implicit acknowledgment that Abdullah was not himself Malay; Traill notes that Hill’s translation unjustifiably inserts the word “other” before “Malays”, altering the meaning (p. 72).
- Wilkinson’s Malay-English Dictionary (1955) drew no fewer than 15,000 illustrative examples from Abdullah’s works, a fact Traill finds remarkable given his argument that Abdullah’s Malay was frequently unidiomatic (p. 81).
Conclusion
Traill’s definitive takeaway is that Abdullah’s works, while of immense historical and literary value, must be understood as the product of a scholarly foreigner writing in a second language. His “modernism” was an accident of his outsider position, his factual subject matter, and his inability to fully internalise classical Malay idiom—not a conscious literary revolution. The article ultimately calls for a recalibration of how Abdullah is positioned in the canon of Malay literature: not as a Malay writer whose style happened to be modern, but as a Peranakan Keling whose Tamil mother-tongue and learned Malay produced a distinctive, hybrid literary voice that was modern by virtue of its very foreignness.
Context
- The article draws primarily on the published Malay and Jawi editions of the Hikayat Abdullah and Kesah Pelayaran Abdullah, Thomson’s 1874 English translation, and the secondary literature of Hill, Coope, Winstedt, Wilkinson, Kassim Ahmad, and Edrus; no new archival discovery is claimed, but Traill’s close re-reading of the Jawi text (assisted by Ibrahim b. Ismail at the University of Malaya Library) yields several corrections to established translations.
- Historiographically, the article challenges the nationalist framing that had absorbed Abdullah into the Malay literary tradition from the 1950s onward, and it anticipates later scholarship on the Peranakan Keling community’s role in Straits literary culture.