Southeast Asian Epics

Not sure if I should've spent my time on this. It's a bit technical; best for folks who already know Southeast Asian classical lit AND Indian epics inside out.  In "Drona's Betrayal and Bima's Brutality: Javanaiserie in Malay Culture" by Bernard Arps, we do get the cool idea that Malay folks may have been purposefully using Javanese elements for exoticism, not just out of derivativeness.  And in "The Death of Salya: Balinese Textual and Iconographic Representations of the Kakawin Bharatyuddha", we have some nice Balinese paintings of King Shalya reluctantly leaving his wife in bed (post-coitally snoozing) so he can go off and die in war. Plus in "The Illustrated Astabrata in Pakualaman Manuscript Art" by Edwin P Wieringa, images of the Hindu gods Indra, Surya, Yama, Candra, Bayu, Wisnu and Baruna in Javanese wayang kulit art. But not much that's useful for my project right now.

Finally finished this 500 page book which Annaliza Bakri recommended. It's less a guide to the subject than a condensed library: maybe a hundred summaries of epics and mythic histories and religious treatises and legal codes and botanic allegories of romance, which makes it ditficult to skim. But now that I'm done, I daresay certain sections ought to be compulsory for anyone who wants to be an authority on Singapore Literature: instead of saying our foundations are the first few chapters of the Sulalatus Salatin/Sejarah Melayu, we need to know that there were dozens of parallel sagas about princes born as children of nagas or chosen by elephants, that it's perfectly normal to have tales of people dying and coming back to life and switching genders so they can fight in battles or become the King of Constantinople so as to win back their long lost husbands. Oh, and Nila Utama seems to be much more common as a name for women. Fairy women. God, the wealth of eccentricity

So I was asked to create a proper course outline for my project. It's as follows: HL7888 Directed Study in Literature: The Southeast Asian Epic August Semester 2018 Advisor: Boey Kim Cheng Student: Ng Yi-Sheng Description Southeast Asia was transformed by European colonialism: a historical phenomenon that fundamentally altered our politics, economics and society. As such, it is supremely difficult for a 21 st century writer to gain a holistic sense of the region’s culture before the invasions of Albuquerque in Melaka/Malacca, Legazpi in Maynila/Manila, the VOC in Jayakarta/Batavia/Jakarta. This study project is in effect a crash course in decolonization: my attempt to counter my Eurocentric and Sinocentric literary education through reading of a pre-modern Southeast Asian canon. I shall focus on narratives by Southeast Asians about Southeast Asians, composed in the classical tradition in the pre-colonial or early colonial eras; retellings of Hindu, Per

This is my attempt at a more complete bibliography! I won't manage to read everything, but I imagine folks online will find this a valuable resource. (I may have made mistakes here and there.) Malay Peninsula & Singapore: Undang-undang Melaka = The laws of Melaka / by Liaw Yock Fang, c. 1400s Melaka RCLOS, Level 11, 340.09595141 LIA -[LYF], 211 pages Sejarah Melayu / Sulalatus al-Salatin, by Tun Seri Lanang, c. 1612, trans CC Brown Singapore, Melaka Level 11, 959.5 SEJ, 273 pages Hikayat Hang Tuah / The Epic of Hang Tuah, c. 1700, trans Muhammad Haji Salleh Melaka Level 11, 398.2209595 HIK, 600 pages, also available for lending The Epic of Bidasari, c. 1750, trans Chauncey C. Starkweather Indrapura / Pahang Level 8, 899.2808 EPI, also for lending, 208 pages Bidasari : jewel of Malay Muslim culture / edited by Julian Millie. Indrapura / Pahang Level 8, 899.281 SYA