Malay Periodicals in the 20th Century

The diagram shows the Malay periodicals which were published in Malaysia and Singapore in the twentieth century. Each bar represents a periodical, with the periodicals using the Jawi script depicted in green and those using the Latin script shown in red. The length of the bar is representative of the publication duration. The first periodical was al-Imam, which was written in the Jawi script. This publication was short-lived, remaining in print only from 1906 to 1908. As can be gauged from the diagram, almost all periodicals were written in the Jawi script before the Japanese occupation of Malaysia and Singapore.

A notable point here is that although most of the aforementioned periodicals were short-lived and went out of publication after a year or two, there was never a single period in twentieth century Malaysia when Malay periodicals were not published. Moreover, if we look at the articles closely, we find many articles being quoted and referred to in other articles not only within the same periodical but across different periodicals—in fact, some references and quotations have even been found across the state boundaries of Malaysia and Indonesia. From the above, we can infer that taken as a whole, the Malay periodicals published then served as a public platform for the exchange of ideas and thoughts in Malay.

Malay Periodical Digital Archive Project

While Malay periodicals are collected at libraries and archives in Malaysia and most of them are made available to the public, the problem is that the collection is incomplete in many libraries and archives, and one thus needs to scour many places for a particular periodical.

To help avoid this inconvenience, our project is developing an online database system of Malay/Indonesian periodicals. In this system, the original materials are kept in their respective institutions. By digitizing and uploading the materials by institution and installing a cross-search system, we can use the data of the uploaded periodicals online at each institution in the manner of accessing a complete set of a certain periodical.

CIAS Malay Periodical Database

As our project's maiden attempt at setting up such a database equipped with a cross-searching system, we have taken up the monthly magazine Qalam, which was published in Singapore and later in Selangor, Malaysia, from 1950 to 1969. We have so far gathered about 94 per cent of the articles published in this magazine and digitized them, and are now working on transscripting the articles from Jawi to Latin so that they are searchable along with other Latin-scripted documents.

Apart from Qalam, we are preparing towards the inclusion of periodicals such as Jawi Peranakan, Hiburan and Mastika from Malaysia and al-Munir and Waktu from Indonesia into the database. We have chosen these periodicals as the core periodicals for our database since they enjoyed a relatively long published life and were popular among readers.

With the contribution of other Malaysian and Indonesian institutions towards digitizing and uploading their materials, the fully developed database will encompass a wide range of written documents in the Malay/Indonesian language and thus be of great help in reconstructing the stereoscopic history of Islamized Southeast Asia.