NST Editorial: Retrieving manuscripts

By The New Straits Times
June 3, 2008

 

 

SOME are concerned that our scholars still have to travel to London or Leiden when they want to study Malay manuscripts. They blame the situation on the lack of effort to develop a good collection. Given that we couldn’t hold on to an islet, the worry that we could also be losing out in the collection of manuscripts is understandable.

 

Certainly, we need to collect, catalogue, preserve, maintain and make accessible records of the past. We should recognise the value of the manuscripts as our national heritage, and provide the tools of the trade to historians and other scholars to conduct research. The original documents or their duplicates form the basis of a better understanding of who we are, where we have come from and where we are going. For this reason, the effort to search for Malay manuscripts scattered around the world and recover our heritage deserves more support.

However, nothing is ever simple. In the first place, the situation simply speaks volumes about the 300-year head-start that the Dutch and the British had, which means there was hardly any Malay manuscript they did not know about or had not collected. There is no way to make good on the losses sustained during centuries of colonial acquisitions, nor will there be enough money to get them back.

It is also not possible to collect everything, and neither should this be an aim. Collecting is always about choices. While there is a need to compile a shopping list, collecting decisions are not straightforward when emotions run high and opinions of what to collect and why can vary widely.

Moreover, as the song and dance over music and the performing arts demonstrate, the question of who owns what can be anything but clear-cut when it comes to cultural property. In the case of the manuscripts, we may have to ditch the parochialism of our right to ownership.
Instead of viewing them as priceless national treasures to be hoarded at home, we should be seeing them as visible markers of Malaysia’s presence abroad and valuable items of cultural exchange. Moreover, they have neither been stolen nor lost to us, although they are no longer here.

In assuming ownership and guardianship of the materials, the foreign libraries and institutions have made serious and successful attempts to make them easily available to all researchers.

There is a need, therefore, to strike a sensible balance between the heritage value and the knowledge-producing value of the manuscripts that have their origins in this country.