Russell Jones (orientalist)


Russell Jones is a British Orientalist who has researched Malay and Indonesian languages and culture in the broad sense. He is a noted scholar of pre-modern Malay literature, particularly when it comes to relating the texts to the manuscripts. His other interests include foreign influences on Malay and Indonesian, the Chinese in the Nanyang, and the history of papermaking. His current research is focused on the paper and watermarks of Malay manuscripts.

Life and career

His involvement with Indonesia and Malaysia resulted from the fortunate accident of being posted to South East Asia as a young soldier. He was born in England, near the Welsh border, and brought up on a farm in Shropshire. He left school at the age of 16, and since it was during World War II, at the age of eighteen he enlisted in the Royal Marines. A posting to Singapore in 1945, then to Batavia, inspired a lasting interest in Malay and Indonesian. Being inspired to learn more about the Malay world he had discovered, on returning to England he studied Malay at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
For ten years, from 1948, he served in the Colonial Service, serving in the Federation of Malaya Immigration Department. He was stationed amongst other places in Perlis and Kelantan, and in 1950 had the task of introducing immigration control for the first time in Johor. This was the time of the Emergency, and security matters inevitably impinged on the work of the Immigration Department. For the latter part of his service he held the post of Senior Assistant Controller of Immigration at the headquarters in Penang.
His interest in Chinese arose during this period. He acquired a knowledge of the Hokkien dialect of Chinese, and took the government examinations in spoken Amoy Hokkien following private tuition in Singapore and Penang. This enabled him to introduce a system of recording Chinese names in the department, based on the Chinese characters, and eventually led to the publication of a book on Chinese names, and another on Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian.
Returning to Europe after Merdeka, he resumed his studies which included Malay, Dutch and Arabic languages, and Islamic history, in the School of Oriental and African Studies, followed by three years of doctoral research at the University of Leiden. In 1961 he went to Australia, where he taught in the University of Sydney until 1965. His subsequent academic career until he retired in 1984 was in SOAS, University of London, where he is an honorary Research Fellow still. Altogether he has published about sixty articles and books.
In 1973 he was instrumental in founding the international Indonesian Etymological Project, which gathered a corpus of about twenty thousand loan-words in Indonesian and Malay, leading to the publication of a book in 2007, and embodied in a web site in Bangkok, . Also in 1973 he was instrumental in founding a newsletter which over the years has been transformed into the academic journal , published by Routledge.
The preparation of his PhD, on the legend of the Sufi, Ibrahim ibn Adham, rested extensively on Malay manuscript sources. This and subsequent research into Malay manuscripts, nearly all written on Dutch or British or Italian paper, brought a realisation of the need to study the watermarks to establish the date they were written, or copied. He soon found that this science of filigranology has a way of becoming an all-consuming passion for those who take it up. After more than forty years’ devoted to filigranology of Malay/Indonesian manuscripts he has become something of an authority - perhaps the only one - on this neglected field and as he approaches the end of his working life he is dedicating himself single-mindedly to passing on his knowledge to the next generation of Indonesian and Malay codicologists.
In retirement, he lives in Cornwall, England.

Selected publications