Historiography and shifting interpretations of the death of Sultan Mahmud Syah

Abstract

The sultan of Johor, Mahmud Syah II, was murdered in 1699. This was a key event in Malay history, and the story has been recounted in a variety of texts, ranging from traditional hikayat to comic books and films. In each instance, new elements and explanations were added to the tale. These details, and the perspectives they represent, allow for an examination of how literature and history—while ostensibly describing events as they happened—rarely do so solely for the sake of erudition. History is written to explain the present and inscribe the future, even when it concerns a murder that took place more than 300 years ago.

Summary

Timothy Barnard traces the shifting interpretations of the 1699 murder of Sultan Mahmud Syah II of Johor across more than three centuries of Malay and Western texts, arguing that each retelling reveals less about the event itself than about the society that produced it. Drawing on Nancy Florida’s concept of “inscribing the future,” Barnard demonstrates that accounts of the regicide—from contemporary European travelogues and VOC dispatches to traditional hikayat, colonial-era scholarship, and twentieth-century film and comics—have been continually reshaped to serve the ideological needs of their authors. The article’s central problem is how a fundamentally transgressive act (the killing of a sultan, the apex of Malay political and spiritual order) was absorbed into a literary and cultural tradition that otherwise glorified the inviolability of the ruler and condemned derhaka (treason) as the ultimate sin.

Barnard’s argument proceeds through three broad periods of textual production. Contemporary accounts (1699–1714) present a straightforward, if lurid, narrative of a sadistic young sultan killed by his own nobility, with no concern for the ideological implications of derhaka. Nineteenth-century traditional texts, particularly the Hikayat Siak and Raja Ali Haji’s Tuhfat al-Nafis, introduce elaborate new details—the jackfruit, the pregnant wife, the identity of the killer as Megat Sri Rama, the Friday prayer setting—that simultaneously explain the murder and manage its ideological fallout by assigning blame to a single individual and emphasizing Islamic accountability. Twentieth-century retellings, from Winstedt’s 1932 History of Johor through the 1961 film Sultan Mahmud Mangkat Dijulang to a 1996 Malaysian comic, progressively shift the tale’s moral centre from the consequences of treason to modern ideals of justice, individual rights, and the accountability of rulers in a post-colonial state.

The primary sources informing this narrative are diverse: VOC archival reports, Alexander Hamilton’s 1697 travelogue, Walter Vaughan’s 1714 account, the Malay court diary Peringatan Sejarah Negeri Johor, the Hikayat Siak (copied 1855), the Tuhfat al-Nafis (1860s), Eliza Netscher’s 1870 Dutch-language history, and a range of popular media including film, novels, and comics. Barnard treats all of these as legitimate historical sources whose value lies not in their factual accuracy regarding 1699 but in what they reveal about the evolving relationship between rulers and subjects in the Malay world.

Key Findings

• The Peringatan Sejarah Negeri Johor, a contemporary Malay court diary, records the event in a single clause: Sultan Mahmud was killed at Kota Tinggi and the rule of Sultan Abdul Jalil Shah ibni Datuk Bendahara began, with no elaboration on motivation or method (p. 7).
• The Hikayat Siak, copied by Tengku Said for Hermann Von de Wall in 1855, introduces the jackfruit motif and identifies Megat Sri Rama as the sole perpetrator of derhaka, who then suffers a supernatural punishment—grass growing from a keris wound between his toes for four years (pp. 10–12).
• Raja Ali Haji’s Tuhfat al-Nafis (1860s) modifies the Hikayat Siak version by having Megat Sri Rama killed immediately by the sultan’s thrown keris, eliminating the prolonged suffering and thereby removing any lingering sympathy for the traitor—a change Barnard links to the text’s function in legitimizing the Bugis-descended Riau elite (p. 14).
• The 1961 film Sultan Mahmud Mangkat Dijulang (directed by K. M. Baskar, screenplay by Salleh Ghani) replaces the framework of derhaka with keadilan (justice) and perjuangan (struggle), recasting the murder as a righteous act against tyranny in a manner that reflects the decolonization context of 1950s–60s Malaya and Indonesia (pp. 17–18).
• The 1996 Malaysian comic Laksamana Bentan (Komik Creative) frames the sultan’s death as a consequence of kesombongan (arrogance), with Megat Sri Rama explicitly rejecting the adat obligation of loyalty because the ruler no longer treats his subjects with respect—a reading Barnard connects to the Mahathir government’s constitutional efforts to limit sultans’ powers in the mid-1990s (p. 20).
• The Tuhfat al-Nafis places the murder during the month of Safar (hijrah year 1111), while the Hikayat Siak specifies it occurred on a Friday as the sultan was being carried in a palanquin to the mosque for prayers—a detail absent from all contemporary reports and which Barnard interprets as reflecting the growing centrality of Islam to political legitimacy in nineteenth-century Riau (pp. 13, 26 n. 26).

Conclusion

Barnard’s definitive takeaway is that the factual details of the 1699 murder will never be fully recoverable, and this is unproblematic: the historiographical value of the event lies not in establishing “what actually happened” but in understanding how successive generations have used the tale to articulate their core values, negotiate the relationship between ruler and subject, and project an ideal future. Each author, from Hamilton to Salleh Ghani to the anonymous pengarang of the Hikayat Siak, has written the past to explain the present and inscribe the future.

Context

• The article draws on VOC archival material (accessed primarily through Leonard Andaya’s 1975 The Kingdom of Johor, 1641–1727), traditional Malay texts held in collections in Leiden, London, and Jakarta, and a range of popular media (film, comics, novels) from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
• Historiographically, the article extends the “autonomous history” tradition initiated by John Smail and advanced by Leonard Andaya by applying Nancy Florida’s “inscribing the future” framework to Malay historiography, and by treating popular media (film, comics) as legitimate historical sources on equal footing with court hikayat and European archival documents.

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