“A fine sphere for female usefulness”: missionary women in the Straits Settlements 1815–45
Nathan Porath’s 2011 article applies René Girard’s mimetic theory and Stephen Harrison’s concept of “fracturing resemblances” to the Hikayat Patani, arguing that this 1839 manuscript—composed in parts between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries—functions as a symbolically political-cultural text that affirms Patani’s mimetic similarity with Ayutthaya even while narrating rebellions against it, and simultaneously fractures its resemblances with Johor at every narrative juncture. The article challenges the standard ethno-nationalist reading of the text and reinterprets Patani’s early rebellions not as secessionist acts but as episodes within an Indic hierarchical order of kingdom power.
Summary
Porath treats the first book of the Hikayat Patani as a mimetic text operating through two complementary processes: the recognition of similarity (with Ayutthaya) and the deliberate denial of similarity (with Johor). The founding legend and the conversion narrative are read as variants of the “skin disease” social contract trope identified by Jordaan and Josselin de Jong, in which illness metaphorically represents a disrupted relationship between ruler and realm. The conversion story specifically encodes the kingdom’s political and social contract with Islam: the shaykh’s refusal to accept the raja’s daughter without demanding conversion means the kingdom’s health and unity become conditional on its being a Muslim polity, yet the converted king “did not alter a single one of his heathen habits,” remaining an Indic king who balanced the politically Indic and the Islamic (pp. 49–50).
The article’s central intervention concerns the first rebellion of Sultan Mudhaffar Syah against Ayutthaya (c. 1564). Porath argues that the sultan’s famous Malay phrase—“dari pada sebuah negeri baiklah dua” (rather than one country, two is better)—is not an expression of separatist desire but an indirect reference to the Ayutthaya–Burmese war, in which the Burmese king’s declared aim was to make the two kingdoms “one great golden country.” The sultan went to Ayutthaya as an ally to preserve its independence from Pegu, and only when he perceived the Ayutthaya king and his heir as weak did he attempt usurpation within the Indic frame of political succession. This reading is supported by the Luang Prasoert chronicle’s account of the sultan riding one of King Cakkraphat’s white elephants in the palace plaza, a moment of cosmic appropriation, and by van Vliet’s contemporary explanation that the sultan saw the Siamese monarchs as “weak kings on the verge of losing Ayutthaya to the Burmese” (pp. 55–57).
The second rebellion under Queen Raja Ungu (c. 1630s) is interpreted differently: here the queen rejected her Thai royal title and assumed the Islamic title Paduka Syah Alam, severing Patani’s ties with Ayutthaya in a way unprecedented in the text. This act was motivated by the illegitimacy of King Prasat Thong, a usurper who had murdered the rightful heirs, and by the datuk besar (bendahara of Sai), who Porath identifies as the likely instigator. The article further demonstrates that the text’s treatment of Johor—portraying its raja as a deflated, untrustworthy figure and using the envoy Raja Lela’s mission to raise and then deny Malay identity similarity—serves to maintain Patani’s elite political differentiation within the Malay-speaking world (pp. 53–54, 60–61).
Key Findings
- The Hikayat Patani manuscript was written in 1839 and comprises six books composed at different periods from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century; the first book was originally oral in composition (pp. 46–47).
- Sultan Mudhaffar Syah’s attack on the Ayutthaya palace is confirmed by both the Luang Prasoert chronicle and van Vliet’s account; the sultan is described as riding a white elephant in the royal compound before departing through the execution gate (p. 56).
- King Prasat Thong mobilized an army of 60,000 men against Patani in the 1630s, headed by the Governor of Ligor, Okya Kalahom, the Pra Klang, and a Muslim official named Rabisit; the king also requested armed ships from the Dutch in Batavia, which arrived too late (p. 61).
- Bradley (2009) revised the date of the Kelantan dynasty’s installation in Patani to 1649–1651 (with Ayutthaya’s support), contradicting Teeuw and Wyatt’s earlier dating of 1688 (p. 52).
- Van Vliet’s 1644 dispatch to Batavia reported that war was imminent between Patani and Johor and that the Johor raja’s mother and relatives in Patani were assumed massacred; a second dispatch in October of the same year reported a Patani envoy had arrived in Johor to settle differences (p. 54).
- The Javanese poem Desawarnana (completed 1365) mentions Langkasuka and Sai as separate political entities but does not mention Patani, suggesting the kingdom may not yet have been founded or was not yet recognized by distant scribes (p. 51).
Conclusion
Porath’s definitive takeaway is that the Hikayat Patani is not a secessionist or ethno-nationalist text but a charter for the viability of the Patani kerajaan whose underlying teleology is to demonstrate that maintenance of peace and hierarchical Indic order with Ayutthaya was a precondition for the kingdom’s existence. The text’s affirmative mimetic relationship with Ayutthaya—its shared cosmos inherited from a Buddhist past—distinguished Patani from Johor and gave it the elitist confidence to position itself as a superior polity within the Malay-speaking world. Reading the text through a modernist ethnicist lens, Porath warns, would fundamentally misread its political-cultural logic.
Context
- The study draws primarily on the Teeuw and Wyatt (1970) edition of the Hikayat Patani, the Luang Prasoert chronicle (via Cushman 2006), van Vliet’s Siam (Baker et al. 2005), and Bradley’s (2009) historical contextualization, with secondary engagement with Bougas (1994), Suwannathat-Pian (1988), and Horstmann (2004).
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in applying Girardian mimetic theory and Harrison’s “fracturing resemblances” to Malay hikayat literature, offering a structural reading of the text that moves beyond both ethno-nationalist and purely political interpretations of Patani’s early history.