The study of traditional Malay literature
Ismail Hussein delivered this Annual Lecture to the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1966, situating it within the post-war expansion of Malay Studies and the growing institutional infrastructure for the discipline. His overarching thesis is that a century of European scholarship on Malay traditional literature has been fundamentally non-literary in method—dominated by source-tracing, historical, and ethnological approaches—and that the field urgently requires a structural, literary-scientific treatment grounded in the Nusantara cultural context rather than in the comparative frameworks of Greater India or Greater Arabia (pp. 1–2, 20–21).
Summary
Hussein traces the history of Western engagement with Malay literature from the near-total neglect of the Portugo-Spanish and early Dutch-English colonial periods through the Romantic-era awakening that produced the great manuscript collections of the nineteenth century. He identifies the Leiden University tradition—shaped by Hendrik Kern and Snouck Hurgronje—as the institutional engine of pre-war Malay literary studies, noting that this tradition was structurally modelled on the Greek-Latin twin-civilisation paradigm of Dutch classical education, which generated a persistent and misleading assumption that Malay culture could be understood through its Indian and Islamic “sources” rather than as an autonomous system (pp. 3–11). He estimates the surviving corpus at approximately 5,000 manuscripts representing some 800 distinct titles, of which only 25 had been edited to a scientifically reliable standard by 1966 (pp. 9, 13).
The core of Hussein’s critique targets Richard Winstedt’s A History of Malay Literature (1940), which he regards as the foundational but methodologically flawed text of the field. Winstedt’s tripartite schema—Shaman (primitive), Saiva (Hindu), Sufi (Islamic)—compelled a compartmentalised reading that emphasised borrowing at the expense of native creative ingenuity, and his treatment of the Hikayat Hang Tuah as a Javanese-inspired Panji derivative rather than a literary creation in its own right exemplifies the broader failure to apply literary norms (pp. 12–13, 20–21). Hussein argues that Malay literature must be studied first within the Nusantara linguistic and cultural sphere—where motifs, forms, and literary practices recur across Sumatran, Javanese, Bornean, and Celebes traditions with characteristic modifications—before any comparative work with Indian, Persian, or Arabic literatures is attempted (pp. 15–19).
He closes by surveying the post-war turn toward nationalist and ideological readings of the Hikayat Hang Tuah—Kassim Ahmad’s elevation of Hang Jebat as revolutionary hero and the Russian scholar Parnickel’s Marxist class analysis—and rejects both as non-literary impositions of contemporary social needs onto a sixteenth-century text. The proper task, he insists, is structural and philological: textual reconstruction from multiple manuscript versions, interpretation within the culture of composition, and literary analysis that treats each work as a self-contained aesthetic unit (pp. 21–22).
Key Findings
- The surviving corpus of Malay traditional literature comprises roughly 5,000 manuscripts representing approximately 800 titles, with the largest single collections at Leiden University (c. 1,500 items) and the Jakarta Museum (c. 919 recorded in 1909, likely now exceeding Leiden) (pp. 8–9).
- Only 25 texts (about 0.03% of the total) had been edited to a scientifically reliable standard by 1966; a further ~100 had been printed but from imperfect manuscripts and were not authoritative (p. 13).
- The Leiden University Library’s Malay manuscript holdings grew from 7 items in c. 1850 to 107 in 1864, 401 in 1899, and 1,168 in 1921, reflecting the intensive collection drive of the nineteenth century (p. 5).
- Winstedt’s tripartite cultural schema (Shaman–Saiva–Sufi) produced a history organised by civilisational “stages” rather than chronology, and his treatment of the Hikayat Hang Tuah as a Javanese Panji derivative was, in Hussein’s view, a misreading that ignored the text’s internal literary unity (pp. 12–13, 20–21).
- The pantun form, a central puzzle in Malay poetics since 1868, found its most promising explanatory key not in Malay cultural life but in the secret leave-language of the Batak and the magical recitation practices of the Javanese, demonstrating the necessity of a Nusantara-wide comparative framework (pp. 19–20).
- The Toraja (Bare’s-speaking) literary tradition of Central Celebes, documented by Adriani and Kruyt in 1914, represents the most primitive Nusantara literary stage, in which recitation is a taboo-bound magical act tied to specific calendar periods, providing a developmental baseline for understanding the evolution toward the professional penglipur lara tradition and ultimately written literature (pp. 17–18).
Conclusion
Hussein’s definitive historical takeaway is that Malay traditional literature has been studied “by everybody except by a literary scientist, and for all sorts of purposes except for a literary purpose” (p. 20). The field’s future lies in rigorous philological reconstruction of individual texts from their multiple manuscript versions, in structural and literary analysis that treats each work as an autonomous aesthetic creation, and in a Nusantara-centred comparative method that recognises Malay literature as one node in a regional system of interrelated literary cultures rather than as a derivative of Indian or Islamic originals.
Context
- The article was published in the journal that had previously carried Winstedt’s A History of Malay Literature (1940), which Hussein acknowledges as the foundational text that became the starting point for the Malay Studies Department at the University of Malaya when it was established in 1953 (p. 1).
- Hussein highlights the MBRAS’s ongoing role as a publisher of Malay philological works that lack sufficient commercial appeal for ordinary publishers, and calls on the Society to continue this function alongside the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka and the University of Malaya (p. 22).