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Cardinal points

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Cardinal points

The Malay terms for cardinal and intercardinal compass points exhibit considerable regional variation across the Malay Peninsula, shaped by Islamic burial customs, Javanese linguistic influence, and the practical needs of coastal and upland communities. In Kedah and Trengganu, the ordinary Malay compass vocabulary is supplemented or replaced by distinctive local terms whose origins have been debated by scholars; in Kelantan, both coastal fisher-folk and upland medicine men employ separate lexical systems, the latter drawing heavily on Javanese equivalents. These variations, documented in the early twentieth century, reveal that the standard four-point compass—utara, selatan, timor, barat—was neither universally nor uniformly applied across the region, and that directional language was embedded in religious, ritual, and ecological contexts that gave it meanings far beyond simple orientation.

Lexical Variation and the Problem of Origin

The most extensively discussed case concerns the terms Kepala tidor (head-in-sleep) and Kaki tidor (feet-in-sleep), used respectively for South and North in Kedah and Trengganu. J.L. Humphreys, writing in 1926, examined the etiology of these expressions and rejected the explanation previously offered by A.W. Hamilton in 1922, who had attributed them to the fixed East–West orientation of Siamese houses in Kedah. Humphreys argued that no such rigid architectural orientation existed in practice, and that the terms were equally common in Trengganu, a state where Siamese influence was absent, rendering Hamilton’s hypothesis untenable [1, p. 134].

Humphreys proposed instead that the origin lay in the Islamic burial custom of interring a corpse with the head oriented to the North and the feet to the South. The ordinary Malay sleeping position—head to the South, feet to the North—was then understood as a deliberate avoidance of the corpse’s orientation, operating on what Humphreys identified as the principle of homoeopathic magic as described by Frazer in The Golden Bough. In this framework, the sleeping position was a taboo-based inversion: to sleep in the same orientation as the dead would be to invite misfortune, and the terms Kepala tidor and Kaki tidor preserved the memory of that avoidance by naming the cardinal points after the body’s position in sleep rather than in death [1, pp. 134–135].

This explanation, while speculative in its anthropological reasoning, had the merit of accounting for the geographic distribution of the terms. Their presence in both Kedah and Trengganu, separated by the states of Perlis, Penang, and Pahang, suggested a common cultural substrate rather than a single localised architectural practice. Humphreys’s note thus shifted the explanatory framework from material culture to religious and ritual behaviour, a move that would have resonated with the broader scholarly interest in the interplay between Islam and pre-Islamic Malay custom during the 1920s.

Practical Usage in Trengganu

Beyond the distinctive Kepala tidor and Kaki tidor terms, Humphreys documented the practical usage of the standard Malay compass vocabulary in Trengganu, revealing that even the ordinary four-point system carried regional rather than strictly cardinal meanings. In Trengganu, timor (East) referred not to the geographical east but to the direction of Pahang and Johor; barat (West) denoted the direction of Kelantan and Patani. For the true East and West, speakers employed the descriptive terms mata-hari naik (sun rising) and mata-hari jatoh (sun setting), which are transparently solar in origin and likely represent a more archaic layer of directional language [1, p. 135].

This finding is significant because it demonstrates that the standard Malay compass terms, even where they were in active use, had been semantically displaced by local referents. The words timor and barat retained their formal status as compass points but had acquired specific geographic meanings tied to neighbouring polities, while the purely solar expressions filled the gap for the directions they had vacated. The result was a functional four-point system in which the lexical items and their referents had diverged from the pan-Malay standard.

The Kelantan Evidence: Coastal and Uland Systems

Anker Rentse’s 1933 note on the points of the compass in Kelantan provides a complementary and in some respects more granular picture of regional variation. Rentse reported that coastal fisher-folk in Kelantan were generally familiar only with the names for North, East, and South, with uncertainty surrounding the minor compass points towards the West. This asymmetry is notable: the western direction, which in the Trengganu usage of Humphreys corresponded to Kelantan and Patani, was precisely the direction that coastal Kelantanese speakers found most difficult to name. Rentse attributed this to the practical orientation of coastal life, in which the sea lay to the west and the land to the east, making the western horizon a less salient reference point for daily navigation [2, p. 252].

More strikingly, Rentse documented that Ulu Kelantan Malays—those of the upland interior—knew primarily the directional terms used by medicine men in incantations. These were: North = Hilir bangsawan (or besawan), East = Sinar naik, South = Hulu bani, West = Sinar rundok. The medicine men also employed Javanese equivalents for the same directions: North = Lor (or long), daksina; East = Wetan; South = Kidol, paksina; West = Kolong [2, p. 252].

The coexistence of a Malay incantatory vocabulary and a Javanese one within the same ritual context is a point of considerable interest. The Javanese terms—Lor, Wetan, Kidol, Kolong—are recognisable as the standard Javanese compass points, and their presence in Kelantanese medicine men’s practice points to a sustained Javanese cultural influence on the ritual and esoteric dimensions of Malay society. The Malay incantatory terms, by contrast, are more opaque. Sinar naik (light rising) and Sinar rundok (light setting) are solar in origin, parallel to the Trengganu mata-hari naik and mata-hari jatoh, suggesting a shared archaic layer of directional language across the eastern Peninsula. The terms Hilir bangsawan and Hulu bani are less transparent; hulu and hilir are standard Malay words for upstream and downstream, and their application to North and South respectively implies a hydrological orientation in which the river flows from North to South, a pattern consistent with the major rivers of Ulu Kelantan.

The fact that these terms were known primarily through the medium of incantation, rather than through everyday speech, indicates that the upland directional vocabulary had become ritualised and specialised. It was preserved in the oral repertoire of the medicine men as a technical language of the sacred, distinct from the practical vocabulary of the coastal fisher-folk. This separation between a ritual and a secular register of directional terms is a feature that Rentse’s brief note does not fully explore but that it clearly documents.

Comparative Observations

Taken together, the two sources reveal a pattern of directional language in the eastern Malay Peninsula in which the standard four-point compass was neither uniform nor stable. In Trengganu, the ordinary terms had been semantically displaced by local geographic referents, and the solar expressions had filled the resulting gap. In Kelantan, the coastal and upland communities maintained distinct vocabularies, the latter being a ritualised system of Malay and Javanese terms preserved by medicine men. The Kepala tidor and Kaki tidor terms of Kedah and Trengganu represented yet another layer, one that Humphreys linked to Islamic burial custom and taboo.

What unites these variations is the observation that directional language in the region was not a neutral, abstract system of spatial reference but was embedded in specific cultural practices—burial, sleep, fishing, river navigation, and ritual incantation—that gave the terms their meaning and their persistence. The standard Malay compass vocabulary, where it existed at all, was often a formal overlay on a more complex and locally grounded system of orientation.

Research and Documentation

The scholarly investigation of Malay cardinal points in the Society’s literature is characterised by brevity and specificity. Both Humphreys’s 1926 note and Rentse’s 1933 note are short contributions, the former spanning three pages and the latter a single page, and neither represents a comprehensive survey of directional language across the Malay world. Humphreys’s note is explicitly comparative, engaging with Hamilton’s 1922 hypothesis and proposing an alternative explanation grounded in Islamic ritual and Frazerian anthropology. Rentse’s note is descriptive, reporting a compiled diagram of local terms without extended analysis.

The gap between the two notes—seven years—reflects a period in which the Society’s journal was absorbing a wide range of ethnographic and linguistic contributions from the eastern Peninsula, and in which questions of local vocabulary and their cultural contexts were treated as discrete, self-contained notes rather than as components of a larger programme of linguistic documentation. Neither author attempts to situate the Kelantan or Trengganu evidence within a broader comparative framework that would include the western Peninsula, the Straits Settlements, or Borneo. The result is a body of literature that is rich in local detail but thin in synthesis, and that leaves open the question of how far the patterns documented in Kedah, Trengganu, and Kelantan extend to other parts of the Malay world.

The Javanese influence documented by Rentse in the medicine men’s vocabulary of Ulu Kelantan is a point that merits further investigation. The presence of standard Javanese compass terms in a Kelantanese ritual context suggests a channel of cultural transmission—whether through trade, migration, or the movement of dukun (medicine men) between Java and the Malay Peninsula—that neither Rentse nor Humphreys pursued. This remains an open question in the documentation of Malay directional language.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. J.L. Humphreys (1926). note on the north and south points of the compass in Kedah and Trengganu JMBRAS 4(1): 133–135. Read on JSTOR
  2. A. Rentse (1933). The points of the compass in Kelantan JMBRAS 11(2): 252. Read on JSTOR