Sumatra's Manuscript Cultures

08/09/2025

Save the date! More details to follow

Thursday, February 19, 2026, 6:30 pm EST

Logics of Localisation: Vernacular Islamic tombstone traditions of Sumatra

Talk by Jessica Rahardjo

The canon of Islamic art history has long been shaped by exclusions—none more consequential than the omission of Southeast Asia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population. Recent scholarship has begun to address this gap while also examining its roots in colonial taxonomies of culture. This ...

01/09/2025

https://www.youtube.com/live/ej1y-9y6kRE?si=s-TGnxIvdUUPcpDI
https://www.youtube.com/live/PMtOb7jY90A?si=Owl3ELkOiJmLXX_V

12/05/2025

Among the manuscripts that escaped the royal palace of Palembang, some of them are gone missing. What we know about these items are only from the notes of Dutch linguist H. N. van der Tuuk, providing traces of the lost royal manuscripts.

A recent post on the Leiden special collections blog by our postdoc fellow Dr Alan Darmawan.

During the 19th century colonial wars the library of the rulers of Palembang in Sumatra was looted by British and Dutch troops; its manuscripts were transported to other places and some of them are lost. Alan Darmawan visited Leiden to look for traces of some of these mishandled treasures.

29/04/2025

Call for Participants: Manuscripts Masterclass in Padang, 23-24 July 2025 [2 days left for submission].

Friends and colleagues, please consider sharing this call with those who might be interested to join our upcoming masterclass in Padang, West Sumatra. Researchers, manuscript enthusiasts, university lecturers, PhD candidates are welcome to apply. See in the flyer below what you will need for submission.

15/04/2025

Rekan-rekan sekalian,
Lingkar Baca Jawi telah bergulir kembali sejak 8 April yang lalu sebagai kegiatan dwi-minggu. Bagi yang sudah mendaftar, tandai kalender anda untuk pertemuan Selasa 22 April. Silakan bagikan pengumuman ini kepada rekan-rekan anda yang berminat untuk mendaftar melalui tautan ini: https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=odBNZ2Kux0Kjn2nuGZU3qFsTqfQ4IRdPpE7-2rIOs3pUMjFQWTJRTktPR003NkkwT0ZaNUwyUjNNSy4u&route=shorturl

Dear colleagues,
From 8 April, we have resumed our bi-weekly Jawi reading group. If you have signed up for this, mark your calendar for the upcoming meeting on Tuesday 22 Apr. Please circulate this announcement for those who might be interested to register through the link above, or in the flyers below.

12/04/2025

Call for Participants: Manuscripts Masterclass in Padang, 23-24 July 2025.

Friends and colleagues, please consider sharing this call with those who might be interested to join our upcoming masterclass in Padang, West Sumatra. Researchers, manuscript enthusiasts, university lecturers, PhD candidates are welcome to apply. See in the flyer below what you will need for submission.

12/03/2025

Hello friends,

if you happen to be in Leiden, please come to join the special guest lecture by Dr Mulaika Hijjas on maps, manuscripts, and the colonial division of the Malay world. Happening on Friday, 14 March, Lipsius, room 0.03, Reuvensplaats 1, Leiden. 3-5pm.

https://www.student.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2025/03/special-guest-lecture-maps-manuscripts-and-the-colonial-division-of-the-malay-world?cf=humanities&cd=south-asian-studies-ma&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1yOCOaQL0SxEKPbWJqxwnvEyLcFdnq2LAEAJKSS38e1qQjG54eMeBHVM8_aem_rNxKGs2jdo2h19pX54NaXQ

One specific effect of colonialism in maritime Southeast Asia is so naturalised as to be invisible: the partition of the Malay-speaking world into Dutch and British domains through the Treaty of 1824. Since it is the basis for part of the boundary between the modern nation states of Indonesia and Ma...

28/02/2025

Resources for reading jawi are now available on our project website.

https://naskahsumatra.org/reading-group-resources/

20/02/2025

Hello friends,
Indonesia and the Malay World (IMW) has made one of the important sources in studying jawi text open access. Check out this article: A jawi sourcebook for the study of Malay palaeography and orthography though the link below.

This special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World was compiled by friends and colleagues as a tribute to Professor E. Ulrich Kratz's three decades of teaching Jawi and traditional Malay literatur...

03/02/2025

Kami membuka kesempatan bagi peminat Jawi/Arab-Melayu untuk membaca beberapa manuskrip pilihan bersama tim Naskah Sumatra dalam kelompok baca. Silakan daftarkan diri Anda melalui tautan berikut: https://tinyurl.com/3cujnd2x

04/12/2024

Dear friends,

Let’s join us to welcome Dr Aglaia Iankovskaia, a new postdoc researcher in our team. Aglaia is leading the case study of Aceh manuscripts in our Naskah Sumatra project. Before joining SOAS, Aglaia was a postdoctoral fellow at the ERC project ‘Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies’. Her undergraduate studies in history and cultural anthropology were at St Petersburg State University and her master’s degree in medieval studies was from the Central European University in Budapest. During her PhD studies in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, she completed Arabic and Indonesian language courses in Morocco and Indonesia. Her doctoral thesis (2016) dealt with descriptions and perceptions of the Indonesian-Malay world in pre-modern Arabic geographies and travelogues. Aglaia’s research interests include history of cultural engagements between the Middle East and Indonesian-Malay world, as well as history and cultural anthropology of Sumatra.

Welcome to the team, Aglaia!

03/12/2024

Thanks to Dr Annabel Teh Gallop for arranging a workshop on Aceh manuscripts at the British Library on Thursday last week (28/11). At the event, Masykur Syafruddin thoughtfully commented upon the small collection of Aceh manuscripts at BL, which, according to him in comparison with his collection at Pedir Museum, "represents the various styles of codicological features of Aceh book tradition."

For more about the collection, see the article by Annabel Gallop and Oman Fathurahman, "Islamic Manuscripts from Aceh in the British Library" ( https://doi.org/10.1163/1878464X-01302002 )