BOOKS: LOST TIMES AND UNTOLD TALES FROM THE MALAY WORLD

This is a festschrift—a tribute book—for Ian Proudfoot, the Australian philologist who is one of the great scholars of early Malay printing and classical Malay literature.

Published in 2009 by NUS Press and edited by Jan van der Putten & Mary Kilcline Cody, Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World brings together international scholars inspired by Proudfoot's wry, deeply scholarly perspective.

The core idea: look at offbeat, overlooked texts to find new history. Instead of grand chronicles, the authors look at calendars, wanted posters, medicine ads, matchbox labels, radio scripts, and printing press catalogues.

The book is organised around Proudfoot's three obsessions—time, texts, and technologies—and covers a huge geography from Peninsular and Insular Southeast Asia to Japan and Europe.

What’s inside:

1. Lost Times—Calendars and Royal Myths 

• M.C. Ricklefs corrects the founding date of Surakarta using Javanese chronograms.
• Ann Kumar on Javanese concepts of cyclical vs. linear time and royal power.
• John Miksic on investiture stones linking prehistoric and modern ideas of kingship.

2. Colonial Expeditions and Myths of Adventure

• George Quinn finds Java's Tuyul—the Get Rich-Quick Tree spirit—in a Central Java village.
• Timothy Barnard traces the Komodo dragon expedition that inspired King Kong.
• Mikihiro Moriyama on Marquis Tokugawa Yoshichika, the Japanese aristocrat hunter who ended up shaping Malay language studies in Japan.
• Amin Sweeney contrasts the heroic official eulogy for explorer H.M. Becher with Hugh Clifford's short story, calling him a "Gaseous Windbag of Colossal Ignorance".

3. Untold Tales - Texts, Printing and Propaganda

This is the heart of the book, reflecting Proudfoot's work on early printing:

• Mary Kilcline Cody on the advertised testimonials for Dr Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People — a universal cure-all for ailing colonials in Malaya.
• Paul Kratoska on Allied WWII propaganda in Sumatra and Malaya — analysing radio scripts, pamphlets, postcards and matchboxes.
• Jan van der Putten on colonial police wanted posters that often boosted a fugitive's reputation instead of catching him.
• Anthony Reid on Fr. Pecot's Catholic printing press in early 19th-century Penang.
• Edwin Wieringa on Ahmad al-Fatani, the Malay press supervisor in Mecca.
• Wendy Mukherjee, Michael Laffan, and A.H. Johns on Islamic manuscripts — tracing Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter, in Southeast Asian texts, and re-evaluating key Acehnese scholars.

4. Transformations in Theatre, Art and Modernity

• Julian Millie on the karamat ritual reading in West Java, Helen Creese on why oral performance persists in literate Bali, Holger Warnk on Faust in Southeast Asian theatre.
• Muhammad Haji Salleh & Christine Campbell on love and eroticism in classic Malay texts and in the early novel Hikayat Faridah Hanom — where letters, carriages and a pistol drive erotic tension.
• Kees van Dijk & Nico Kaptein on modernity — how the bicycle emancipated women and workers, and how colonial elites panicked about cars in Batavia.
• Ulrich Kratz on how colonial scholarship compartmentalised cultures and broke the old Jawi writing network linking the Muslim world.
• Annabel Gallop on Chinese influences in Malay manuscript illumination, inspired by Proudfoot's famous "mousedeer manuscript mis-catalogued as Chinese".
• Virginia Hooker closes with Malay gardens — from Qur'anic Paradise to literary metaphor for books themselves.

In short: it's not a single narrative history. It's a demonstration of Proudfoot's method — that cheap print, odd ads, marginal manuscripts and failed expeditions tell us more about the real Malay World than official histories do.

If you are in Malaysia, the essays on early lithographic presses in Singapore/Penang, the Pink Pills ads from Straits Settlements newspapers, and the wanted posters will feel very local.

References:

1. Sabri Zain: Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World.

Hj Zulheimy Maamor

29 September 2026: 3:08 a.m