Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgedments
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Issues and Ideologies in the Study of Regional Muslim Cultures
- 1 Connected Histories? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact Between Early South and Southeast Asia
- 2 Like Banners on the Sea: Muslim Trade Networks and Islamization in Malabar and Maritime Southeast Asia
- 3 Circulating Islam: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar and Nusantara
- 4 From Jewish Disciple to Muslim Guru: On Literary and Religious Transformations in Late Nineteenth Century Java
- 5 Wayang Parsi, Bangsawan and Printing: Commercial Cultural Exchange between South Asia and the Malay World
- 6 Religion and the Undermining of British Rule in South and Southeast Asia during the Great War
- 7 The Ahmadiyya Print Jihad in South and Southeast Asia
- 8 Making Medinas in the East: Islamist Connections and Progressive Islam
- 9 Shari‘a-mindedness in the Malay World and the Indian Connection: The Contributions of Nur al-Din al-Raniri and Nik Abdul Aziz bin Haji Nik Mat
- 10 The Tablighi Jama‘at as Vehicle of (Re)Discovery: Conversion Narratives and the Appropriation of India in the Southeast Asian Tablighi Movement
- 11 From Karachi to Kuala Lumpur: Charting Sufi Identity across the Indian Ocean
- Index
5 - Wayang Parsi, Bangsawan and Printing: Commercial Cultural Exchange between South Asia and the Malay World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgedments
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Issues and Ideologies in the Study of Regional Muslim Cultures
- 1 Connected Histories? Regional Historiography and Theories of Cultural Contact Between Early South and Southeast Asia
- 2 Like Banners on the Sea: Muslim Trade Networks and Islamization in Malabar and Maritime Southeast Asia
- 3 Circulating Islam: Understanding Convergence and Divergence in the Islamic Traditions of Ma‘bar and Nusantara
- 4 From Jewish Disciple to Muslim Guru: On Literary and Religious Transformations in Late Nineteenth Century Java
- 5 Wayang Parsi, Bangsawan and Printing: Commercial Cultural Exchange between South Asia and the Malay World
- 6 Religion and the Undermining of British Rule in South and Southeast Asia during the Great War
- 7 The Ahmadiyya Print Jihad in South and Southeast Asia
- 8 Making Medinas in the East: Islamist Connections and Progressive Islam
- 9 Shari‘a-mindedness in the Malay World and the Indian Connection: The Contributions of Nur al-Din al-Raniri and Nik Abdul Aziz bin Haji Nik Mat
- 10 The Tablighi Jama‘at as Vehicle of (Re)Discovery: Conversion Narratives and the Appropriation of India in the Southeast Asian Tablighi Movement
- 11 From Karachi to Kuala Lumpur: Charting Sufi Identity across the Indian Ocean
- Index
Summary
The 1870s is an attractive vantage point from which to start a discussion about an intensification in the exchange of “modern” cultural expressions between South Asia and the Malay world. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had brought a host of new people and a variety of new products to the East, and the rapid development of steam navigation facilitated new patterns of their circulation across the Indian Ocean. First landfall in Asia would often be Bombay, which by then was part of a network of profitable steam shipping lines transporting goods and people further east. The unprecedented global economic expansion of that period had far reaching effects on South and Southeast Asia, where colonialism and entrepreneurism shaped the creation of new spaces for cultural production and exchange. An increasingly vast land area was cleared from forests to make way for plantations that needed an enormous influx of labourers to work them, while the products were shipped from port towns that grew into urban centres populated by an amalgam of immigrants seeking new fortunes. It was in these urban centres that small enterprises were established to tap into the dynamics of this new economy. The situation thus gave rise to the circulation of a wide range of new material and cultural products, ranging from bicycles and Swiss-made watches, to newspapers, shows by Indian snake charmers, and British professors giving public lectures about new inventions such as the telephone and gramophone.
The following advertisement from the late 1880s, published in a Malay newspaper nicely captures the opportunities that opened up for people in rapidly expanding towns such as Singapore:
Advertisement
Whoever wants to contract at cheap rates the Betawi band players who played with the Wayang Parsi theatre group the Imperial Theatre of Deccan Hyderabad Company at tauke Lee Cheng Tee's stage can come and talk to me at 44 Sultan Road opposite the mosque in Kampung Gelam.
Haji Agus bin Masagus Abdulkarim Palembang, 14.10.89In many ways this advertisement epitomizes the multicultural and commercial character of popular art forms in the Malay world and the contacts it had with the South Asian subcontinent at the end of the nineteenth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Islamic ConnectionsMuslim Societies in South and Southeast Asia, pp. 86 - 108Publisher: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak InstitutePrint publication year: 2009