A collection of Malay proverbs
J. L. Humphreys, a Straits Settlements Civil Service officer, published this collection of 149 Malay proverbs in 1914, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Naning (1907–1908) and Batu Pahat, Johor (1911–1912). Framed by Sir Richard Temple’s observation that proverbs constitute “a powerful force working for influence” in colonial administration, the article uses proverbial speech as a lens into the social structures, legal customs, and cultural distinctions of Peninsular Malay communities under British rule.
Summary
Humphreys organises his material into three divisions. Part I (pp. 96–101) presents widely known proverbs not previously recorded by Maxwell or Clifford, offering brief glosses on their multiple senses and occasional cross-references to the Kiliran Budi. Part II (pp. 101–114) is the ethnographic core: proverbs collected in Naning, grouped under two headings—married life and the administration of the Adat—and embedded in extended commentary on Menangkabau custom. Part III (pp. 114–123) collects proverbs from Batu Pahat, Johor, which Humphreys contrasts sharply with the Naning material, describing the Johor-Riau dialect as “a brilliant and flexible medium of intercourse” suited to “the stilted terms of official correspondence or the technicalities of jurisprudence,” while the Naning speech is “the simple and ancient speech of a peasant community, with no literature worth the name” (p. 114).
The Naning section reveals the architecture of Adat Menangkabau as it survived in a single district. Marriage is treated as a tribal alliance governed by exogamy: the husband enters his wife’s clan, lives in her house, and tills her fields; divorce is a deliberate inter-clan transaction requiring formalities, and the children remain with the mother (pp. 101–102). The legal section documents a system of customary justice built on circumstantial evidence (tanda) rather than oral testimony (saksi), with the principle stated explicitly: “religious law is established by witnesses, custom is established by signs” (p. 108). Humphreys illustrates the force of this principle with a 1908 incident in which an unmarried girl’s removal of a school teacher’s cap from a peg constituted an irrebuttable tanda of misconduct, compelling him to marry her despite his protests (p. 110).
The Johor section, by contrast, records a cosmopolitan vocabulary shaped by trade, colonial contact, and literary culture. Proverbs reference Chinese card-games, Dutch nails, Singapore Tamil slang, the head-hunting scares surrounding public works in Singapore, and the first four-masted ship to arrive in the port (pp. 114–123). The article thus functions simultaneously as a linguistic collection, an ethnographic study of two distinct Malay social worlds, and a subtle record of colonial disruption—most visibly in the Naning section, where Humphreys notes that the political constitution of the State was “destroyed, so fully and deliberately” after the Naning War that instructions were issued forbidding the use of the terms Dattoo and Sookoo (p. 105).
Key Findings
- The 149 proverbs are divided into three geographically and culturally distinct groups: 32 widely known Peninsular proverbs (Part I), 56 Naning proverbs (Part II), and 61 Johor proverbs (Part III), reflecting what Humphreys describes as a fundamental dialectal and cultural divide between the “simple and ancient” peasant speech of Naning and the “subtle and modern” literary idiom of Johor (p. 114).
- The Adat legal system of Naning operates on a principle of circumstantial evidence explicitly contrasted with Muhammadan law: “hukum berdiri dengan saksi, adat berdiri dengan tanda” (p. 108). Each of the twelve recognised offences has an appropriate physical clue (tanda) by which the culprit may be detected, and once found, the court “holds very fast thereby” (pp. 108–109).
- The 1908 Naning school incident demonstrates the practical force of the tanda principle: a girl’s removal of a teacher’s cap from a peg was taken by clan elders as an irrebuttable presumption of misconduct, compelling the teacher to marry her, with her bride-price halved as a penalty (p. 110).
- The Naning War’s aftermath is documented through the reduction of the Datok Naning—once head of the most powerful state in the Negri Sembilan—to “a superior Penghulu on a monthly salary of thirty dollars,” with criminal jurisdiction of the Adat restricted to compoundable offences under the Procedure Code (p. 106).
- The Johor proverb membuat hautah Suleman preserves the memory of a specific individual—a Muhammadan Madrasi notorious in Singapore a generation earlier for his “impudent, but successful, defiance of the law in the Police Courts”—and illustrates a slang expression in active transition, as Malays increasingly misattribute the name to the Prophet Solomon (p. 117).
- Naning marriage customs, governed by exogamy, make marriage “a miniature alliance between two clans,” with the husband passing into his wife’s tribe; the proverbs encode the full lifecycle of this arrangement from betrothal formalities through the “ordeal of a public personal combat” between co-wives to the inter-clan settlement of divorce (pp. 101–105).
Conclusion
Humphreys’ definitive historical takeaway is that Malay proverbs are not merely anthropological curiosities but living instruments of social order, legal reasoning, and political authority. The Naning material in particular demonstrates that the Adat persisted as a functioning system of property, marriage, and criminal redress even after the colonial state had deliberately dismantled its political superstructure, and that its evidentiary logic—grounded in material signs rather than sworn testimony—represented a coherent and self-conscious alternative to both Muhammadan law and English procedure. The article thus stands as both a linguistic record and a quiet indictment of colonial disruption, preserving in proverbial form the social architecture that British administration had sought to erase.
Context
- The article builds directly on Sir W. E. Maxwell’s earlier collections in JSBRAS Volumes I and XI, and on R. J. Wilkinson’s essay in the Papers on Malay Subjects, which Humphreys cites for the general characteristics of the Malay proverb (p. 96).
- The Naning material was collected during Humphreys’ service in the district following the 1900 Naning War, one of the most consequential military operations in the history of the Negri Sembilan, whose aftermath is documented in the article’s account of the destruction of the state’s political constitution (p. 105).