Malayan Independence: Merdeka

Colonial Films 

http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/country/malaya

Slave Trade

The slave trade was described in Hikayat Abdullah (Abdullah's autobiography)

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellhpj/resources/abdullah15.HTM

Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir @ Munshi Abdullah @ Inchi Abdulla

• Born 1796 in Malacca; died 1854 in Jeddah
• An Indian Muslim writer and translator who worked with Colonel William Farquhar in Malacca and later, Stamford Raffles in Singapore
• Popular with the colonials but unpopular with the Malay and Arab communities
• Translated the Bible into Malay for the Christian missionaries
• Many of his life/work stories are studied in Malaysian schools and colleges
• Wrote Hikayat Abdullah (1843), an autobiography, in Jawi Malay script

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_bin_Abdul_Kadir
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellhpj/resources/abdullah.HTM
http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles/SIP_503_2004-12-27.html

Definition of Munshi

• a Persian, Urdu or Hindi word that originated from the Arabic word, munshi which refers to a writer or author
• The word existed or was used circa 1770-80
• a native interpreter or language instructor
• a native secretary or assistant
• a secretary or language teacher in South Asia (eg, Malacca)
• highly loyal personal attendant
• usually young Indian men
• worked for the British colonial masters as interpreters
• mainly from northern India where the British had ruled till India's independence
• See Queen Victoria's 'Indian John Brown' in 1800s
• Munshi is also used as a male name and a surname
• See usage in the literature

Definition of Hikayat

• From The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979): (also hikâyet), a literary term of the peoples of the Near and Middle East and Southeast Asia. In the broad sense, a hikayat is any long narrative work in prose or sometimes in verse. In the narrow sense, it is an anonymous prose work in book form, such as the 17th-century Malay work The Tale of Hang Tuah. In Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures, the term is synonymous with “short story.” In Turkish literature it also refers to an anonymous folk story.
• literary work, eg Hikayat Hang Tuah

List of Malay stories (hikayat)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hikayat