REPOET ON MALAY STUDIES. 
33 
many of these texts Dr. Winsteclt lias again played a great part. 
His Introduction to the collection of quatrains in the pantun form 
is a very valuable critical account of the subject founded in part 
■on the work of his predecessors but adding much that is both new 
and illuminating. 
I have attempted to do justice to the new-born activities of 
the Committee for Malay Studies. But meanwhile the old es- 
tablished Straits Branch of our Royal Asiatic Society steadily con- 
tinued its labours in the same field. That branch was founded in 
1877, and its Journal with its 81 numbers now fills quite a respect- 
ably sized shelf. In the last ten years it has issued about 25 
numbers of very varied contents. A great part of its activities has 
always been devoted to Natural History, a subject on which I will 
not enlarge, as it does not concern the studies with which we have 
to deal here. But it has also issued a number of valuable papers 
on matters that interest us more directly, and has published a good 
many Mala\ r texts. I must particularly mention the Seri Rama, 
printed (in the Arabic character) in 1916, from the early 17th 
century MS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. No existing 
Malay MS. is much older than this one, and the work, which is a 
Malay prose recension of the Rdmdyana, is interesting from several 
points of view. It illustrates the changes of style, language, and 
orthography that have taken place in Malay in the last three cen- 
turies, and it is a good example of the way in which the ancient 
Indian epic has been remodelled to suit Malay ideas. The recen- 
sion was, of course, made after the Malays had already been con- 
verted to Islam, but in spite of consequent anachronisms it still 
retains much of the flavour of its old Indian original. An analy- 
tical comparison of the two made by its editor, Dr. W. G. Shella- 
bear, in No. 70 of the Journal will be found of interest to Indianists 
who care to follow up the fortunes of the old Sanskrit epic in 
foreign lands. 
Two other texts of more local interest published in the Journal 
are the histories of Kedah and Pasai, both of which had already 
been issued in the Arabic character but had long been out of print. 
Amongst a large number of miscellaneous articles that have ap- 
peared in the Journal there are several which owe their origin to 
the extension of British influence over the North-Eastern States of 
Trengganu and Kelantan, where a very curious dialect of Malay 
is spoken that differs considerably from the Malay of the Southern 
States. I may perhaps be permitted to mention that a paper con- 
taining specimens of this dialect recorded phonographically and ex- 
pressed in the symbols of the international phonetic alphabet will 
appear before long in the Bulletin of our London School of Oriental 
Studies. In the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic 
Society Dr. Winstedt has found another outlet for his superabun- 
dant intellectual activity, and the last few numbers contain many 
articles from his pen, all of them contributing something to our 
knowledge of Malay life, customs, history, or language. 
R. A. Soc., No. 83. 1921. 
