ARI Working Paper Series

This paper considers the ways Java’s Islamization was imagined and remembered within the small ‘Malay’ community of Sri Lanka at the turn of the twentieth century. This community, descended from exiles, convicts, soldiers and others from across the Indonesian-Malay world who were brought to Sri Lanka first by the Dutch (beginning in the late seventeenth century), and later the British, maintained its Muslim-Malay identity in large part due to an adherence to the Malay language, both spoken and literary. Through a reading of the Hikayat Tuan Gusti, an 1897 manuscript composed in Malay in the Arabic script, in Sri Lanka, and retelling the story of Java’s conversion to Islam, I explore the community’s attachment to an earlier era of globalization within its history.