I first came into contact with Roderick Orlina in early May 2002, when I was completing my doctoral dissertation on Malay seals. My supervisor at SOAS, Ulrich Kratz, had been visiting the University of Hawai’i and had met Rod Orlina. Ulrich put Rod in touch with me, as Rod had mentioned that some Spanish letters from the Philippines in the Newberry Library in Chicago bore Malay seals. Rod generously sent me images of two of these documents, which I would never have encountered otherwise, and this enabled me to later order good photographs from the Newberry. My catalogue of Malay seals from the Islamic world of Southeast Asia was eventually published in 2019, and a search of my database reveals that of the 73 seals from the Philippines listed, 15 were first brought to my attention by Rod Orlina.
I remained in sporadic but regular contact with Rod Orlina over the next two decades, a friendship conducted mainly by email save for one brief meeting in London in 2013. But our first moment of contact illustrates well two hallmarks of Rod’s academic activities. The first was his scholarly generosity in sharing with others sources which he had discovered and of whose rarity he was fully aware. The second was his felicitous talent for seeking out primary sources, both in the course of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, tramping through rural areas and cemeteries in search of inscriptions, and through archival sleuthing, tracking down materials in repositories not often frequented by scholars working with Southeast Asian language materials.
On another occasion in 2013, Rod was in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville and emailed me to say that in the file Escribania 423A he had encountered a large number of Malay seals from Sulu and Mindanao, impressed on letters in both Spanish and in Malay in Jawi script. Although historians working on Spanish sources may have previously consulted this material, the rare original Malay letters had never been referenced or published before. In those days before widespread digitisation, and at a time when archives and libraries did not generally allow photography in reading rooms, but being fully aware of the critical importance of images – however slight or poor – for the documentation of seals, under the cover of his laptop screen Rod surreptitiously snapped a few precious photographs for me, necessarily at a steeply acute angle. These invaluable pictures allowed me to catalogue these seals (all of which were previously completely undocumented), and later put in a formal request for scans from microfilm of the relevant folios. Happily, the complete file is now fully digitised and openly accessible, and my edition of these ‘Malay Letters from Mindanao and Sulu from the Early Eighteenth Century’ has just been published in Philippine Studies (2024), and is dedicated to the memory of Roderick Orlina.
Roderick Garcia Orlina was born on 22 May 1976 in New York to parents who had emigrated from the Philippines, Rogelio V. Orlina (1947-2023) and Paulita Garcia Orlina, and he had two younger brothers, Rex and Rich. Rod studied at the Bronx High School of Science in New York, graduating in 1994. He received his BA in Linguistics and Religious Studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999, with minors in India studies and Japanese studies. He taught English at various institutes in Japan from 2000 to 2001, and then again from 2007 to 2009. Rod’s deep interest in languages also led him to study Malay at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia in 1999, Turkish at Taksim Dilmer in Istanbul in 2003, Arabic at the Center for Arabic Language and Eastern Studies at Sana’a in Yemen in 2003 and at the Arabic Teaching Institute for Non-Arabic Speakers in Damascus in Syria in 2004, and Chinese in Xiamen in 2005 as well as in Xi’an in 2006, when he also taught English at Xi’an International Studies University. In 2012 Rod obtained his MA in Islamic Studies from the University of the Philippines at Diliman, and in 2014 he enrolled as a Ph.D. Candidate for Asian History at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, working on a dissertation on everyday life in early colonial Manila.
Rod’s published output is slim but includes two significant studies on early Philippine epigraphy: on the the Mahāpratisarā gold foil amulet from Butuan (Orlina 2012) and the Bud Datu tombstone of Sulu (Orlina 2018). Yet the many acknowledgements of Rod’s help in diverse publications of others – from Jean-Paul Potet’s work on Arabic and Persian loan-words in Tagalog (2014: 37) through Elsa Clavé’s and Arlo Griffiths’ study of the Laguna copperplate inscription (2022: 219), to Yoshiteru and Bytheway’s study of Japanese relations with Siam in the 17th century (2011: 82) – testify perhaps more eloquently to his myriad valued contributions to the study of languages and the history of writing in Southeast Asia. Peter Skilling’s study of a Buddhist verse unknown in any Indian source but found widely in insular Southeast Asia cites Rod’s help with information and photographs of the inscribed stone stupas in Makam Dagang, Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, and at Kampung Buang Abai, Limbang, Sarawak, from a field trip undertaken in May 2012 with Oliver Lee (Skilling 2015: 40-42, fns 79-82). In 2012 Rod also travelled with Arlo Griffiths to Manila, again Brunei, and Sarawak, documenting various inscribed artefacts including, in Kuching, some metal foil amulets in Old Malay from Sumatra belonging to Tom McLaughlin (see Griffiths forthcoming).
Through his life Rod struggled periodically with his mental health, and on 10 September 2023 chose to depart, too early, in search of rest.
Publications by Roderick Orlina:
2012 Epigraphical evidence for the cult of Mahapratisara in the Philippines. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 35 (1-2): 159-169. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/jiabs/article/view/13762/7635
2015 7. Tamontaka, Mindanao, 1701: Letter from Sultan Jalaluddin; 14. Tamontaka, Mindanao, 1719: Letter from Sultan Ja’far Sadik Syah. In: A Jawi sourcebook for the study of Malay palaeography and orthography, ed. Annabel Teh Gallop. Indonesia and the Malay World, 43(125): 52-53, 66-67. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13639811.2015.1008253
2016 Roderick Orlina and Eva Stroeber. ‘New perspectives on late Tang maritime trade? A collection of storage jars in the Princessehof Museum, the Netherlands’, Newsletter, 73: 50. https://issuu.com/iias/docs/iias_nl73_full
2018 Revisiting Sulu relics: Islamic epigraphy from Jolo, Philippines. Writing for eternity: a survey of epigraphy in Southeast Asia, ed. Daniel Perret; pp. 377-383. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient. (Études thématiques; 30). https://www.academia.edu/37745062/Revisiting_Sulu_Relics_Islamic_Epigraphy_from_Jolo_Philippines
Other references
Annabel Teh Gallop, Malay letters from Mindanao and Sulu from the early eighteenth century. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2024,72(2): 153-204. https://ajol.ateneo.edu/pshev/articles/591/7666
Elsa Clavé and Arlo Griffiths, ‘The Laguna Copperplate inscription: tenth-century Luzon, Java, and the Malay World’. Philippine studies: historical and ethnographic viewpoints, 2022, 70(2): 167-242.
Arlo Griffiths (forthcoming). Inscriptions of Sumatra. V. Ancient Amulets in Sanskrit, Malay and Javanese.
Jean-Paul G. Potet, Arabic and Persian loan-words in Tagalog. Raleigh, N.C.: Lulu Press, 2014.
Peter Skilling, ‘An Untraced Buddhist Verse Inscription from (Pen)insular Southeast Asia.’ In: D. Christian Lammerts (ed.). Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015, pp. 18-79.
Iwamoto Yoshiteru and Simon James Bytheway, ‘Japan’s official relations with Shamuro (Siam), 1599–1745: as revealed in the diplomatic records of the Tokugawa Shogunate’. Journal of the Siam Society, Vol. 99, 2011, 81-104.
Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator for Southeast Asia, The British Library
Southeast Asia Library Group (SEALG) 
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