i came across a reference in boiardo to alexander and undersea voyages and i remembered the sang nila utama's connection. zakir was online so i pounced and he gave me some links history articles and told me i might google seri teri buana/sri tri buna instead of sang nila utama. up came a bunch of english links. by the way is there an english translation of the serajah melayu (malay annals) that is more recent than 1970? that's the one widener's got. i'll have to ask zak how reliable it is. i saw on selectbooks this newer text which is not in the harvard library system. but as it turns out it is a transcription of the original jawi manuscript into new romanised malay script. this does me no good, not being able to read malay, but i've asked zak to recommend some good books on early history of the malay peninsula.

i don't agree with the idea of cultivating a malay elite (for that matter, i don't agree with the idea of cultivating a chinese elite either. i don't know it should be the special province of any particular ethnic group to be responsible for their own part of history or cultural heritage.) or with the sort of malay nationalism espoused by, perhaps, alfian sa'at, but then i'm always wary of him because he is so bitter and angsty. and i can't stand the sort of angry youths who keep complaining about singapore and leaping on every instance of injustice or folly and going "there, you see?" i read this essay when it first came out, when i was still at virginia, and have come back to it many times since. if it bears rereading, it is not because i agree with his interpretation of the facts, but that we need reminding of those facts. how little i know anything about the precolonial history of singapore, and how true that our national history has been taught to us with 1819 as the point of origin, and that the malay narrative has been displaced by "settler narratives" of the chinese, eurasians and indian community, which, once he has said it, suddenly seems so obvious i am aghast i never thought of it before. and remember how in school we studied indian and chinese civilisation and of course the history of modern singapore, but other than some references to sang nila and parameswaran and the mahapajit empire in your primary school social studies textbook i know nothing. and even someone as politically conscious and invested in malay culture as zak was unsure of such a great deal when i tried asking him. (mind you, what do i know about chinese history? which is what i mean about the cultivation of any racial elite - if people should take an effort it is for that history's own sake - because it is worthy of study in its own right - not as the preservation of a ethnically-defined cultural heritage)