Article

Malay beliefs

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Malay beliefs

Malay Beliefs

The religious and cosmological life of the Malay people of the Peninsula and Borneo has long been understood by scholars as a layered palimpsest of successive faiths—animist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muhammadan—each stratum preserved beneath the next, so that the average Malay simultaneously professes Islam while practising rites of far older origin under a thin veneer of orthodoxy [1, pp. 3–5]. This layered character distinguishes Malay belief from the Western model, in which theology is treated as one branch of knowledge among several; for the Malay, religion is the key to all science, morality, and civilisation, and Islam functions less as a creed than as a “quasi-political force” and “militant brotherhood” to which the Malay is proud to belong [1, pp. 3–5]. The study of these beliefs has occupied scholars of the Royal Asiatic Society and its branches from the late nineteenth century to the present, producing a body of literature that ranges from brief field notes to sweeping ethnographic monographs, and that has itself become an object of critical scrutiny for the epistemic frameworks it embedded.

Cosmology and the Spirit-World

Wilkinson’s 1957 monograph provides the most systematic account of the Malay spirit-world as it was observed in the mid-twentieth century. He identifies four distinct classes of supernatural beings: the vengeful souls of the prematurely dead (including the langsuyar, pontianak, and penanggalan); the gods and demons of successive foreign religions, Hindu deities such as Siva (Betara Guru), Kala, and Sri persisting alongside Moslem jinn; spirits generated from natural phenomena, including echoes, will-o’-the-wisps, and the rainbow conceived as a celestial serpent; and demons created at the will of magicians from the products of childbirth [1, pp. 10–16]. Beneath these strata lie what Wilkinson terms the oldest Indonesian divinities: the four Spirits of the Sea (of Bays, Banks, Headlands, and Tideways) and the “Black Youth” or “Black Spirit,” King of the Earth, who represent the gods of an aboriginal race whose blood still runs in the veins of the Malays [1, p. 14].

In Kelantan, the Dutch colonial administrator Anker Rentse recorded a more specific cosmological narrative in 1933. The Pusat Tasek (ocean’s centre) tradition describes a great whirlpool around which grows the giant coconut palm Pauh Janggi, with Heaven (Shurga) at its crown and Hell (Nuraka) beneath its roots. A dragon guards the gate to Hell, and the 1926 Kelantan flood is explained through a narrative of three dragons—gold-scaled, silver-scaled, and steel-scaled—merging as they descended the Galas, Pergau, and Lebir rivers to relieve the overworked guardian [2, p. 245]. Rentse connected this cosmology to the Wayang kulit (shadow-puppet) tradition and to a Persian tale in the Bodleian Library (MS. Ouseley 231) in which Alexander the Great encounters a similar whirlpool, suggesting a shared Indo-Persian substrate [2, p. 246].

The Kandang Balok (tiger kingdom) narrative, recorded by Rentse from a medicineman of Semang origin named To’ Mat Sah, describes a tiger kingdom on Gunong Ledang in Ulu Kemaman, ruled by Dato’ Uban in a palace of human bones with a roof thatched with human hair. Tigers pass through a bamboo tunnel under Sungai Putih to transform between human and tiger form [2, p. 247]. The tale follows the medicineman Sadinda, who invokes a tiger spirit during a Main Bangsi seance using a Semang noseflute (bangsi), bamboo pounders (chantong), and a stringed bamboo guitar (buluh kerong); when the spirit demands its fee and Sadinda fails to provide it, he is carried to Kandang Balok, married to the tiger king’s cousin, and eventually returns to Kelantan in tiger form after crushing the egg that would have allowed his permanent return [2, pp. 247–248].

Indian and Vedic Parallels

A substantial body of comparative scholarship has argued that much of Malay magical practice, wedding ritual, and popular belief is of Indian rather than indigenous or Islamic origin. R.O. Winstedt, writing in 1921, marshalled evidence from Vedic, Javanese, and Malay sources to make this case. His most striking identification equates the Malay Spectre Huntsman with Batara Guru (Siva), who in Vedic times was Rudra, the storm-god followed by hosts of spirits and leader of lost souls—the same figure as the German Wodan/Odin of the wild huntsman legend, a parallel that Winstedt noted corroborates the hypothesised Indo-Germanic storm-god as a common source [3, pp. 88–89]. The Malay magician’s practice of naming the source of a spirit before exorcism, and the use of hong (equivalent to om) in charms, correspond precisely with Vedic mantra practice as described by Havell: a single incorrect syllable voids the charm, and the formula must be kept secret [3, p. 89].

Winstedt extended his analysis to domestic and ceremonial life. Malay betrothal verses (the girl as a calf, the wooer searching for a lost bird) are matched against Estonian, Finnish, and Sardinian examples, while the mimic combat for the bride, the throwing of rice, the confarreatio (eating of the octagonal bridal rice), and the tinsel crown of the bridegroom are all attested in ancient India [3, p. 90]. Occupational taboos—regard for the physician and sailor as degrading, distrust of one-eyed and hairy persons—mirror the code of Manu, and dietary prohibitions match the Dharmasūtras of Apastamba and Gautama [3, pp. 90–91]. The Malay objection to younger siblings marrying before elder, termed langkah batang, matches the Brahmanical prohibition recorded in Gautama’s Dharmasūtra [3, p. 91].

H. Overbeck’s 1925 article, the third in a series on Malay customs and beliefs as recorded in Malay literature and folklore, examined the institutions of betrothal and marriage through close reading of classical Malay romances and chronicles. The Hikayat Anggun Che Tunggal provides the most elaborate description of betrothal: a prime-minister presents the betrothal betel in a set of quatrains, the bride’s father grants the request with a stipulation (a faith-breaker shall be turned into a monkey), and the couple later confirm the betrothal by exchanging arm-rings [4]. The full marriage ceremony, described in the Hikayat Raja Muda, Hikayat Malim Deman, and Hikayat Hang Tuah, involves initial festivities of up to forty days during which subject rajas contribute presents in fantastic shapes (dragons, lions, flying carriages, pavilions with turning wheels), the bridegroom sends penumah (bridegroom’s presents) and mas belanja (contribution towards expenses), and cannon are fired daily [4]. The final day features the kadzi conducting the nikah, a marriage procession announced by nine cannon-shots, the couple taking their seat on a twelve-storey bridal throne under sixteen umbrellas of state, the confarreatio, sprinkling of rose-water, and the joining of the little fingers by the chief female attendant [4]. Overbeck also records the Hindu-derived practice of marriage to a keris (weapon-marriage), which Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir denounces as a “disgraceful custom” practised by Malay rajas who seize girls against their will [4].

The Pagan Substrate and Colonial Interpretation

The pawang (wizard) occupies a central position in the Malay belief system as the lineal representative of the old priests of Siva; his office is hereditary, he possesses regalia, and he appeals directly to Betara Guru, yet the word pawang itself predates Hinduism and belongs to a still older creed [1, pp. 38–39]. In Perak, Wilkinson recorded that a separate spiritual Sultanate exists alongside the secular one: the Sultan Muda rules over the Spirits of the Land, presides over a ghostly court numbering spirits from all religions, and may never succeed to the secular throne; his fee for conducting a royal berhantu ceremony is $100 [1, pp. 69–70].

Wilkinson’s concluding historical analysis argues that Malay ceremonial is “a museum of dead customs kept up for the benefit of the dead”: the Malay does not exchange old practices for new but adds the new to the old, preserving each as a mere formality to appease the ghostly majesty of ancient lawgivers [1, p. 74]. The bersanding (enthronement) at a wedding, for instance, is not a marriage rite at all but a dramatisation of royalty inherited from the old Palembang tradition, while the simple Moslem marriage contract is treated as a mere legalising form [1, pp. 59–60]. Wilkinson closes with a melancholy assessment of British colonial impact: the Malay is “becoming less of a Malay and more of a Mussulman,” his national ceremonies discarded, his racial laws set aside, and his allegiance transferring from local Sultans to Pan-Islamic ideals [1, p. 40].

The interpretive frameworks through which these beliefs were recorded have themselves become subjects of critical examination. Farish A. Noor’s 2021 article interrogates the epistemic violence embedded in the colonial knowledge-production apparatus of British Malaya, focusing on how the works of W. W. Skeat, C. O. Blagden, and A. Hillman constructed and reinforced the stereotype of the “unscientific native.” Noor argues that colonialism was never a consultative dialogue between knowledge-systems but an epistemically unequal process in which non-Western belief-systems were deliberately downgraded as “magic,” “myths,” or “legends” and relegated to a secondary register of “non-knowledge” that could not be instrumentalised to serve racialised colonial-capitalism [5]. In Skeat’s Malay Magic (1900), the foundational binary of the scientific European versus the unscientific Asiatic is established through the framing of the Malay pawang as a “legitimate representative of the primitive medicine-man” and the characterisation of Malay prayer-rituals as “still at an unethical stage” (quoting Tylor) [5]. Noor identifies a clear genealogical shift in colonial Malay stereotypes: from the “piratical” Malay of the early colonial period (associated with lawlessness and violence) to the “superstitious agrarian” Malay of the later period (associated with backwardness and passivity), a transition linked to the spread and development of British colonial power across the peninsula [5, p. 3].

Life-Cycle Customs and Material Culture

Beyond the spirit-world and ceremonial life, Malay beliefs are embedded in the practical rhythms of daily existence. Wilkinson records that the Malay possesses over 500 names for fish and over 500 for birds, with both generic and specific nomenclature that in several cases (for example, the distinction between tragulus napu and tragulus pygmaeus) accords with modern zoological classification [1, p. 30]. A 1907 agricultural experiment in Krian demonstrated that Banjarese native methods yielded 366 gantang per acre (the best result), while imported Ceylon seed produced a “complete fiasco,” confirming that local ryot knowledge was superior to European agricultural science [1, p. 64].

Cremation was practised by the Malacca Malays in the first half of the fifteenth century, as attested by Chinese navigators, and tree-burial survives in the Northern States for those who die a “bad” death, indicating that Islam overlaid Hinduism in the South and Buddhism in the North [1, pp. 75–76]. The Menurun batu ceremony—the hundredth-day feast and washing of tombstones in tepong tawar (rice flour paste)—was identified by Abdul Majid in 1927 as a decidedly non-Islamic relic of the Hindu cult, and the “bathing” of graves on festival days was linked to Chinese practice [6, p. 361].

Rentse’s 1933 article also documents a system of daily omens governing travel and royal audience, preserved in a Jawi text provided in writing by Che Ahmad of Kota Baharu. The system assigns specific auspicious or inauspicious outcomes to each day of the week and each time of day for travel, and prescribes the cardinal direction one must face when seeking audience with a raja (ruler): face northeast on Sunday, southeast on Tuesday, south on Wednesday, southwest on Thursday, northwest on Friday, southeast on Saturday. The text claims the rules descend from the warriors of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, situating the practice within an Islamicate framework of inherited martial wisdom [2, pp. 250–251].

Research and Documentation

The documentation of Malay beliefs within the Society’s literature spans nearly a century and reveals distinct phases in methodological approach and interpretive priority. The earliest contributions, such as Winstedt’s 1921 comparative study and Overbeck’s 1925 literary analysis, represent a philological and comparative-folklore tradition in which Malay beliefs were read through the lens of Indian and Vedic sources, with the primary aim of establishing genealogical connections between Malay practice and ancient Indian texts [3], [4]. Winstedt’s work was prompted by Dr. O. Schrieke of the Dutch Indies Native Affairs department, who directed him to Winternitz’s 1900 review of Skeat’s Malay Beliefs; the Wiener Zeitschrift was not held in any Peninsular library and had to be borrowed from the Batavian Society [3, p. 88].

The interwar period saw a shift toward direct fieldwork and ethnographic observation. Rentse’s 1933 article, drawing on access to forest-dwelling informants in Kelantan, represents this turn: his work relies on specific named informants, records oral narratives in detail, and cross-references European ethnographic literature alongside a Bodleian Persian manuscript [2]. Wilkinson’s 1957 monograph synthesises decades of direct observation with the archival holdings of the Society, building on and frequently citing the earlier scholarship of Skeat (Malay Magic, 1911–1913) and Snouck Hurgronje (The Achehnese, 1899–1900), positioning itself as a comprehensive update of the foundational literature on Malay religion and custom [1].

The most recent phase, represented by Noor’s 2021 article, turns the analytical lens back upon the colonial ethnographic tradition itself. Rather than treating Malay beliefs as objects of description, Noor examines the power relations embedded in their documentation, demonstrating how the devaluation of local knowledge served the material interests of colonial-capitalism rather than mere academic curiosity [5]. This critical turn marks a significant departure from the earlier literature, in which the Malay belief-system was treated as a subject to be classified, compared, and ultimately explained away as a residue of earlier civilisations. The trajectory from Winstedt’s Vedic parallels to Noor’s critique of epistemic violence thus maps a broader shift in the Society’s intellectual culture: from the confident comparative scholarship of the early twentieth century to a self-reflexive engagement with the political dimensions of knowledge-production.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R.J. Wilkinson (1957). Malay beliefs. {In Papers on Malay customs and beliefs JMBRAS 30(4): 1–40.
  2. A. Rentse (1933). Notes on Malay beliefs JMBRAS 11(2): 245–251. Read on JSTOR
  3. R.O. Winstedt (1921). Indian and Malay beliefs JSBRAS 83: 88–93.
  4. H. Overbeck (1925). Malay customs and beliefs as recorded in Malay literature and folklore, Part III JMBRAS 3(3): 22–30. Read on JSTOR
  5. Farish A. Noor (2021). The Uses of Magic: Local Knowledge and the ‘Unscientific Native’ in Colonial Malaya JMBRAS 94(2): 97–119.
  6. Abdul Majid bin Haji Zainuddin Haji (1927). Random notes on current Malay beliefs JMBRAS 5(2): 360–361. Read on JSTOR