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.

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 (Netherlands Indies), 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 (the communist uprising), 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 (Minnanhua), 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.

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