Printing in Riau; Two steps toward modernity

Abstract

Printing in the Malay archipelago started with the establishment of Dutch rule in Batavia in 1619. For a long time Batavia would be the most important center of printing in the archipelago, although there were other places in the region where Malay works were printed, such as Melaka and Penang. Only with the establishment of Singapore in the beginning of the nineteenth century did a new center for Malay printing come into being. In Singapore an indigenous industry flourished during the last decades of the nineteenth century, predominantly making use of the technology of lithography, which needs lower capital investment compared to printing with movable type. The technique of lithographic printing was probably introduced in the region by British missionary Medhurst. He started a lithographic press in Batavia in 1828 to print Malay-Arabic, Javanese, and Chinese scripts without needing a large amount of capital to buy different kinds of type. When the American and British missions moved to China in the 1840s, the mission press in Singapore was left with the Reverend Keasberry, who had learned the trade of printing at the Parappatan orphanage run by Medhurst in Batavia. In 1839 Keasberry moved to Singapore where he established a self-supporting mission with a school and a print shop. There he worked together with the Malay language teacher and prolific author Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi, who also had learned the printing technique from Medhurst (Hill 1970:124). Gallop rightly calls Abdullah the 'Father of Malay Printing' (Gallop 1990:97-8), as it was primarily through him that