SOAS Research Online

Abstract

It is common knowledge that from the early centuries AD to the nineteenth century India remained an important source of inspiration for creators of traditional Malay culture and Malay men of letters. However, if literary ties between Hindu India and the Malay world, both direct and mediated by Javanese literature, have frequently drawn the attention of researchers, creative stimuli that came to the Malays from Muslim India remain inadequately studied. Yet the role of these stimuli, radiating from major centres of the Muslim, Persianate, India such as Bengal, Gujarat, Deccan, and the Coromandel coast, in the development of Malay literary culture was by no means inferior to the inspiration originating from Hindu India. In this context, cultural and literary contacts of the Sultanate of Aceh with the Mughal Empire in the seventeenth century are a particularly interesting and challenging subject