Beasts of the Indian Ocean

Scholarship in the nascent field of Indian Ocean cultural studies have trained their eyes on Africa and India but not quite the Malay Archipelago. Attempting to address this gap, this talk will explore the literary translation and rewriting of two related classical animal stories from the western parts of the Indian Ocean in its easternmost parts, the Malay Archipelago, as manifesting the Malayophone cosmopolis. These are Vishnu Sarma’s Panchatantra (c. 200 BCE) which has been translated from Sanskrit to Bahasa as Hikayat Pancha Tanderan (1835) by Munshi Abdullah as well as Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Kalilah wa Dimnah(c. 700 CE) translated from Arabic to Bahasa by various translators in Malaysia and Indonesia in the twentieth century. Yet why are these translations not constitutive of the more established notions of the Arabic (Ricci) or Sanskrit (Pollock) cosmopolis? The talk will respond to this question by drawing on two theoretical frameworks: Byung-Chul Han’s notion of ‘fuzhi’ or ‘copies’ (2021) as well as the Global South concepts of the oceanic imaginary by Fijian author Subramani (2001) and its related notion of tidalectics by the Barbadian scholar Kamau Brathwaite (1995).  

Nazry Bahrawi is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian literature and culture in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is an associate editor at the Journal of Intercultural Studies, an editor-at-large at Wasafiri magazine and a member of the editorial committee of Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature. 

Host or Publisher SFU David Lam Centre