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Pa Senik and his son-in-law Awang

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Pa Senik and his son-in-law Awang

G.M. Laidlaw published “Pa Senik and his Son-in-law Awang” in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1906, presenting a Malay folk narrative collected from the storyteller Mat Nordin of Kota Stia. The tale, rendered in both English translation and original Malay, depicts a cunning son-in-law who engineers a humiliating fishing episode to extract bananas from his stingy father-in-law, illustrating a common Malay literary motif of the clever subordinate outwitting his patron.

Summary

The piece is a straightforward folk-tale publication: Laidlaw provides a brief editorial note identifying his source (Mat Nordin, who “learnt it when he was a boy”) and then prints an English rendering of the story followed by the full Malay text. The narrative concerns Pa Senik, a banana cultivator who demands two hundred and fifty banana stems as marriage expenses for his daughter Senik, and Awang, who accepts the condition and plants his own banana garden to fulfil it.

The dramatic core of the story is Awang’s stratagem: after observing that his father-in-law has never shared a single banana with him, Awang lures Pa Senik to a jungle pond under the pretext of fishing, using ripe golden bananas as bait. Awang takes a straighter path to the pond, repeatedly steals and eats the bait from his father-in-law’s line, then drowns him in the water while demanding bananas on his behalf. Pa Senik emerges soaked and promises bananas, which Awang then consumes with mock piety, framing the episode as a divine deliverance from a vow.

The bilingual presentation—English translation on pp. 59–61, Malay text on pp. 62–64—follows the standard JSBRAS convention of the period for Malay literary texts, making the tale accessible to both European readers and Malay-speaking scholars.

Key Findings

  • Source attribution: the tale was narrated by Mat Nordin of Kota Stia, who stated he learnt it in boyhood; no further provenance is recorded (p. 59).
  • The stipulated marriage price is two hundred and fifty banana stems (dua ratus lima puloh perdu pisang), and the wedding feast consists exclusively of various kinds of bananas (pp. 59, 62).
  • The story is printed in two languages: an English translation (pp. 59–61) and the original Malay text (pp. 62–64), the latter in a romanised orthography typical of early twentieth-century Straits Malay publications.
  • The tale’s central comic device is the fishing-pond trick, in which Awang consumes his father-in-law’s entire bait supply (two combs of ripe golden bananas, counted by Awang) before the climactic drowning (pp. 60–61, 63).
  • The Malay text preserves colloquial Straits Malay features (e.g., sahaya, tuan, mëngail, bëngkok) consistent with a Peninsular Malay vernacular register (pp. 62–64).

Conclusion

The publication serves as a simple ethnographic record of a Malay trickster tale of the “clever son-in-law” type, preserved in bilingual form for the colonial scholarly readership of the Straits Branch. Its value lies in the documented oral source and the unedited Malay text, which offers a snapshot of vernacular narrative prose in early twentieth-century Malaya.

Context

  • Laidlaw was a colonial administrator in the Straits Settlements; his editorial note is minimal and administrative in tone, offering no interpretive commentary beyond source identification (p. 59).
  • The text follows the JSBRAS house style of the period for Malay literary items: brief provenance note, English translation, then full original text, with no bibliographic apparatus or comparative references.

References