Article

Swettenham’s manuscript of Hikayat Hang Tuah

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Swettenham’s manuscript of Hikayat Hang Tuah

Virginia Matheson Hooker’s 1991 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society reconstructs the provenance of a previously unknown manuscript of the Hikayat Hang Tuah that passed through the hands of Raja Mahdi of Selangor, Sir Frank Swettenham, and the Sultan of Pahang before resurfacing in a London bookshop in 1991. The study uses the physical history of the volume as a lens into the personal and political networks connecting Malay royalty and British colonial administrators in the late nineteenth century, revealing relationships that official records obscure.

Summary

Hooker’s central argument is that a Malay manuscript carries two stories: the narrative text itself, and the object’s biography of ownership, circulation, and reading. By tracing the second story of this particular Hikayat Hang Tuah copy, she illuminates the social world of the Klang War, the exile of Raja Mahdi in Singapore, and the carefully calibrated gift-exchange culture between Swettenham and the Malay sultans. The manuscript was copied for Swettenham in December 1881 from an exemplar owned by Raja Mahdi, who died of tuberculosis in Singapore just weeks later, on 10 January 1882. The text subsequently reached the court of Pahang, where Sultan Ahmad Muazzam Shah and his Tengku Ampuan both read it, as evidenced by Jawi annotations in the volume.

A significant textual finding is that Swettenham’s manuscript extends the narrative beyond the conventional endpoint of 1641 (the fall of Portuguese Melaka) to include events up to the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, making it the only known version with this later dating. The text also contains unique readings of proper names and a concluding syair absent from other witnesses, confirming that variant traditions of the Hikayat Hang Tuah existed in manuscript form, contrary to the claim by the Russian scholar Braginsky that no variants survive. Hooker further argues that the Riau-Lingga provenance of the exemplar is indicated by the specific mention of “orang Bentan” as Dutch allies in 1641, the use of Dutch-made Van der Ley paper, and the documented patterns of manuscript borrowing between Riau and Selangor courts.

The article closes by reflecting on how the British colonial project of selecting Hikayat Hang Tuah and Sejarah Melayu for vernacular school curricula transformed these court texts into instruments of nationalist identity, shifting the focus from the ideal of ruler-subject reciprocity to a narrower emphasis on obedience, and ultimately making Hang Tuah a symbol of Malay national pride rather than a model of feudal loyalty.

Key Findings

  • The manuscript was copied on 25 Muharram 1299 AH (17 December 1881) from an exemplar lent by Raja Mahdi of Selangor; Swettenham signed his name in January and February 1882, and Raja Mahdi died on 10 January 1882 (pp. 87, 89).
  • Swettenham’s text is approximately 112,000 words, considerably shorter than the Raffles Malay 1 (c. 149,000), Crawfurd (c. 153,400), Hervey (c. 179,000), and Maxwell (c. 156,000) manuscripts, and shorter still than Bland’s (c. 137,000) (pp. 94–95).
  • The last datable event in Swettenham’s manuscript is the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, nearly 200 years later than the 1641 endpoint in all other known versions; no other extant MS or printed edition contains this final section (pp. 89, 95).
  • The text uniquely mentions “orang Bentan” (Riau) alongside “orang Johor” as allies of the Dutch at the 1641 siege of Melaka, a reading found in no other witness, strongly indicating a Riau-Lingga origin for the exemplar (p. 90).
  • The manuscript is written on Van der Ley paper, a Dutch manufacture more commonly found in former Dutch East Indies territories than in Peninsular Malaya, further supporting a Riau or Singapore copying location (p. 90).
  • Governor Weld offered Raja Mahdi a monthly allowance of $350 to renounce his claims to Klang and retire to Johor; Raja Mahdi refused, and was later briefly arrested at the request of Resident J. G. Davidson before being released following Colonial Office intervention (p. 83).

Conclusion

Hooker’s definitive takeaway is that the physical journey of this single manuscript—from Riau-Lingga to Selangor, to Singapore, to the Pahang court, and finally to England—demonstrates that the Hikayat Hang Tuah was not a fixed text but a living tradition whose variants were shaped by scribal intervention, regional identity, and the social prestige attached to ownership. The ease with which a scribe could append events from living memory to a text ostensibly set in the fifteenth century reveals the flexibility of the Malay manuscript tradition, a flexibility that was permanently lost when the British selected and printed a single version for school use, thereby “fixing” the text and initiating its transformation from a court document into a nationalist symbol.

Context

  • The study draws on the Swettenham Papers (now partly held at Arkib Negara, Malaysia), the collections of the Royal Asiatic Society, the British Library, and SOAS London, as well as the Pesaka Selangor and Governor Weld’s correspondence for biographical detail on Raja Mahdi.
  • Historiographically, the article challenges Braginsky’s assertion (1990) that no variant versions of Hikayat Hang Tuah exist, and contributes to the growing field of manuscript studies in Malay literature by demonstrating how codicological evidence (paper, binding, annotations) can recover the social history invisible in colonial administrative records.

References