The baboon Pa Si Bagok and the girl
G. M. Laidlaw published this Malay folk tale in 1906 in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, presenting a bilingual (English and Malay) rendering of a narrative in which a baboon named Pak Si Bagok abducts a girl and is ultimately outwitted and killed by her father’s community. The piece is a straightforward folklore recording with no analytical apparatus beyond a brief prefatory note situating the tale within a small corpus of known Pak Si Bagok stories.
Summary
Laidlaw opens by noting that an earlier story by Penghulu Mat Nordin also features this baboon, but that the present tale is the only other version he could locate, and that no further information or additional stories could be obtained. He explicitly states that the tale has no connection to Hanuman, a point of some significance given the frequent conflation of baboon figures in Malay folklore with the Hindu monkey god. The tale teller could provide no history of the tale’s origin.
The narrative itself follows a well-known folkloric pattern of abduction, captivity, and cunning escape. A poor couple’s daughter is carried off by a large baboon to the top of a toalang tree, where she bears a child who is half man and half baboon. Two months after the birth, she devises an escape: she persuades the baboon to fill a hollowed joint of betong bamboo with water (which leaks continuously), keeping him occupied while she lowers herself to the ground using her child’s terap-bark cradle lengthened to the earth. She reaches her parents’ house, where they prepare a trap—a deep pit lined with banana stems, presented to the baboon as the grave of his supposedly dead wife and child. When Pak Si Bagok digs into the pit, three or four men fill it in from above, killing him.
The tale is printed in full in both English translation and original Malay, the latter occupying the majority of the article’s pages. The Malay text preserves the oral register of the telling, including formulaic repetitions and the characteristic rhetorical structure of Malay narrative prose.
Key Findings
- The baboon’s name is given as “Pa Si Bagok” in the text but corrected to “Pak Si Bagok” in the errata on p. 71; the tree species is likewise corrected from “Tok Allang” to “toalang” (p. 71).
- The child born in captivity is described as “half man and half baboon” (English, p. 65; Malay, p. 68: “sa-kërat Manusia dan se-kërat sëpërti Bërok juga”).
- The escape device is a single joint of betong bamboo, hollowed at the bottom, which the baboon is sent to fill with water repeatedly throughout the day until evening (pp. 65–66).
- The killing trap involves a deep hole with banana stems at the bottom, into which the baboon digs to “open the grave,” at which point three or four men fill it in from above (pp. 66–67).
- The errata (p. 71) also corrects “roe deer” to “barking deer” and “deer” to “sambhur deer,” indicating the presence of a companion article on a pelandok (binturong) tale in the same issue.
- Laidlaw notes that the manuscripts were sent to the printers before final editing, accounting for the number of corrections required (p. 71).
Conclusion
Laidlaw’s contribution is purely documentary: he preserves a variant of the Pak Si Bagok cycle in both languages, acknowledging the limited corpus available and the absence of any known genealogy for the tale. The piece serves as an early ethnographic record of Malay oral narrative tradition in the Straits Settlements, valuable primarily for its fidelity to the spoken text and its bilingual presentation.
Context
- Laidlaw was a colonial administrator in the Straits Settlements; his folklore collection was part of the broader late-Victorian project of recording “native” oral traditions before they were perceived to be disappearing under modernization.
- The article draws on a single oral source (unnamed) and one earlier written account by Penghulu Mat Nordin, with no archival or comparative analysis beyond the brief Hanuman disclaimer.