In this travel-diary Ahmad Rijaluddin recorded his impressions of a visit to Calcutta in 1810. Although the hikayat purports to give a description of negeri Benggala, the author focuses on Calcutta's government House. He is fascinated by the might and majesty of Raya Benggala. Ahmad's description is on the whole realistic and not without its humor, yet his style is conventional and reveals little of the writer's personality.

This collection of essays is the culmination of a symposium on the representation of Malays and Malay culture in Singaporean and Malaysian literature in English held in Universiti Putra Malaysia.

Malay text, parallel English translation.

In the field of Malay Studies, the traditional artist is among the most mysterious of beings, deeply buried under a tradition that was oral and anonymous. He is more enigmatic now, more than ever before, as he is further alienated from us, by the technological development, the different modes of literary communication, and not the least, by the disappearance of the rural environment that created the artist - all of these factors much influencing his mind. There is no doubt that much as he felt (rasa) the world, he also thought, fikir, about it, about its universe, the powers that governed his life, the community, its values, the arts and what made them please and so on.

This book traces connections in pre-modern Asia by looking at different worlds across geography, history and society. It examines how regions were connected by people, families, trade and politics as well as how they were maintained and remembered. The volume analyses these intersections of memory and narrative, of people and places and the routes that took people to these places, using a variety of sources. It also studies whether these intersections remain in later and present times, and their larger impact on our understanding of history. The narratives cover several journeys drawn from archaeology, texts and cultural imagination: trade routes, marts, fairs, forts, religious pilgrimages, inscriptions, calligraphy and coinages spanning diverse regions, including India–Tibet–British forays, India–Malay intersections, corporate enterprise in the Indian Ocean, impacts of slave trade in Southeast Asia shaped by the Dutch East India company, movements and migrations around Indo-Iranian borderlands and those in western and southern India. The book will greatly interest scholars and researchers of history and archaeology, cultural studies and literature.

This innovative book is a pioneering study of political debate in an important Southeast Asian society. Now available in paperback it re-examines the formative period in Malay nationalism and argues against using nationalism as the paradigm of analysis.'This magnificent book is certainly essential reading for Malaysianists and Malaysians interested in the intrigues and mystique of Malay politics, in the past and at present.' Shamsul, A.B., Asian Studies Review'The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya is a model of its kind and will undoubtedly become a landmark in Malaysian studies and an example to those in other fields. It is a stylish and highly readable essay in cultural history.' William R Roff, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies