A variant epilogue to an epic tale: the ‘latest’ recension of Hikayat Hang Tuah
Nathan Porath’s 2011 article applies René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and Stephen Harrison’s concept of “fracturing resemblances” to the Hikayat Patani, a six-book Malay manuscript composed between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Porath argues that the text’s first book is structured as a mimetic narrative that simultaneously affirms Patani’s political-cultural similarity with Ayutthaya and fractures its resemblance with Johor, thereby positioning the kingdom within a hierarchical Indic order of power-centres rather than along modern ethnic lines (pp. 45–48).
Summary
Porath reads the Hikayat Patani not as a straightforward chronicle but as a symbolically political-cultural text that functions as a charter for the viability of the Patani kerajaan. The first book, which Bradley has identified as originally oral in composition, uses the trope of mimesis to articulate Patani’s place in the world of pre-modern Southeast Asian kingdom hierarchies. The text’s founding legends—particularly the two skin-disease narratives of Encik Tani and the converting king—are interpreted through Jordaan and Josselin de Jong’s framework of sickness as a metaphor for the social contract between ruler and realm. The conversion story, in particular, encodes the political and social contract between the kingdom and the Islamic faith, with the shaykh’s demand that the king convert (rather than simply marry his daughter) making the kingdom’s health conditional on its becoming a Muslim polity (pp. 48–50).
The article’s central analytical move is to show how the hikayat treats its two major neighbours asymmetrically. With Ayutthaya, the text affirms mimetic similarity even during narratives of rebellion: Sultan Mudhaffar Syah’s declaration that “that king is not different from us” and the phrase “rather than one country, two is better” are read as indirect references to the Ayutthaya–Burmese war and Patani’s role as an ally seeking to keep Ayutthaya independent from Pegu. The first rebellion is thus reinterpreted not as an act of secession but as a failed usurpation within an Indic frame of mimetic kingdom-hood. With Johor, by contrast, the text goes to great lengths to fracture resemblance at every juncture, from the deflation of the Johor raja at the Patani court to the final mission of Raja Lela, in which the Malay identity question is raised precisely to deny total similarity (pp. 51–62).
Porath further argues that the hikayat’s refusal to moralize against Ayutthaya—unlike other Malay texts such as the Sejarah Melayu—reveals that the text’s underlying teleology is to show that maintenance of peace and hierarchic order with Ayutthaya was a precondition for Patani’s existence as a viable kingdom. The text’s scribes, writing in the last decade of the seventeenth century after sixty years of warfare, chose to encode this shared political-cultural atmosphere rather than to denigrate the northern kingdom (pp. 62–63).
Key Findings
- The Hikayat Patani manuscript was written in 1839 and comprises six books composed at different periods between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, following the end of the original founding dynasty (p. 46).
- Sultan Mudhaffar Syah’s attack on the Ayutthaya palace is confirmed by the Luang Prasoert chronicle, which records the sultan riding one of King Cakkraphat’s white elephants in the palace plaza just after the Burmese king departed for Pegu (p. 56).
- The second rebellion was resolved in 1636, in the first year of Raja Kuning’s reign; King Prasat Thong mobilized 60,000 men for the punitive expedition against Patani, and the Dutch in Batavia agreed to send armed ships but arrived too late (pp. 60–61).
- Raja Ungu rejected her royal Thai title Phra Nang Chaou Ying and substituted the Islamic/Malay title Paduka Syah Alam, severing Patani’s ties with Ayutthaya in a manner unprecedented in the kingdom’s history (p. 60).
- 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 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 at that date (p. 51).
Conclusion
Porath’s definitive takeaway is that the Hikayat Patani should be read through the lens of pre-modern Indic kingdom-hierarchies rather than through modernist concepts of ethnicity. The text’s mimetic structure reveals that Patani’s political identity was constituted by its relationship to Ayutthaya as a shared cosmic order, and that the kingdom’s decline resulted from the devolution of power to Sai and its eventual appropriation by Kelantanese figureheads, culminating in its absorption by Siam.
Context
- The study draws on the Teeuw and Wyatt (1970) edition of the Hikayat Patani, the Thai version edited by Baker et al. (2005), van Vliet’s Siam (2005), the Royal Chronicles of Ayutthaya (Cushman 2006), and Syukri’s mid-twentieth-century history (1985).
- The article contributes to the historiography of Patani by shifting the analytical frame from ethno-nationalist readings to a structural-mimetic interpretation of pre-modern Southeast Asian political relationships, building on Bradley (2009) and Bougas (1994).