ABSTRACT
This article explores some of the ways by which a small diasporic Muslim community in the colonial era – known today as the Sri Lankan Malays – maintained its culture through the preservation of language, the transmission of literary and religious texts, the cultivation of genres and of a script.1 Such an exploration requires us to imagine the world of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the contours of Dutch Asia that included both the island of Ceylon and parts of present-day Indonesia encompassing, predominantly, the island of Java2; the established sea routes of trade and travel at the time, central among them the pilgrimage path from Southeast Asia to Mecca that passed through Ceylon; and the wide-ranging, active networks of Muslim scholars teaching and studying across these regions.
