The <i>Hikayat Abdullah</i>, the Missionary Press, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century “World Literature”

Abstract According to many British Orientalists, Malay was decidedly inferior to Sanskrit or Arabic. This essay examines Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s efforts to counter the second-rate status accorded to Malay literature in his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah (1849). The text represents an attempt to present Malay writing to European audiences as a coherent national and, by extrapolation, world literature. Retracing Abdullah’s strategic textual work is important not only because it helps explain his status as the “Father of Modern Malay Literature,” but also because it exposes the processes contributing to the construction of nineteenth-century world literature. In its critique of and appeal to Euro-American readers, the Hikayat Abdullah illustrates the degree to which world literature depended on imperial preoccupations with “nationness,” which meant that debates over the “world” status of non-Western texts often played out in colonial microencounters rather than European metropoles. Moreover, Abdullah’s text demonstrates how the secular logics undergirding world literature were significantly produced by missionary institutions, given their involvement in colonial publishing. Contextualizing the Hikayat Abdullah and the broader concept of world literature in this imperial frame, this essay develops a literary microhistory to illumine the criteria to which non-Western texts conformed in order to be regarded as properly “literary.”