The Hikayat Perintah Negeri Benggala, in which Ahmad Rijaluddin has recorded his impressions of a visit to Calcutta in 1810, is in the form of a travel-diary, a form which I have argued elsewhere¹ is symp- tomatic of a literature in transition between a 'classical' and a 'modern' period. In Malay literature, the first of the 'modern' authors is usually reckoned to be Munshi Abdullah, whose work breaks with the con- ventions of classical literature by the employment of an 'author- conscious' style and an insistence upon realism for its own sake.