Malay animal and flower shaers
H. O. Overbeck’s 1934 article in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society argues that the Malay shaer (verse romances) featuring animals and flowers as protagonists are not mere fables or erotic verse but veiled accounts of real human love-tragedies and court intrigues, composed in the Malay tradition of allusion to avoid naming real persons. Drawing on manuscripts in Batavia, Leiden, and London, as well as lithographed editions from Singapore, Overbeck provides detailed plot summaries of seventeen such poems, demonstrating that their non-human characters map onto recognizable social types—travelling merchants, court retainers, princesses, and their duennas—and that the poems fill a gap in classical Malay literature by revealing the emotional life of ordinary Malays.
Summary
Overbeck’s central thesis is that, with the exception of didactic poems like the Shaer Unggas (which he acknowledges imitates the Persian Makamat of Hariri), the Animal and Flower shaer are based on real or plausible incidents of Malay life, told through the conventional veil of animal and flower names drawn from pantuns and proverbs. He supports this by analogy with Captain R. S. Rattray’s observation on Akan beast-fables as “apologies” in which animal names substitute for real individuals whose naming would be impolitic. Overbeck extends this to the Malay context, arguing that in “Affairs of State” and “Love-Intrigues in Higher Circles” it was dangerous to name names, and that the Malay love of allusion provided an ample store of similes that delighted readers more than plain names would have done.
The article is organized into thematic categories—An Affair of State, Love in Higher Circles, The Loves of the Travelling Merchant, Didactic Shaers, and Malay Shaers from Java—each containing detailed plot summaries with extensive quotation from the Malay texts. Overbeck identifies recurring narrative patterns: the dream that initiates the love, the go-between (often a bird or insect of lower rank), the use of love-charms (ilmu ma’rifat), the refusal or obstacle (difference in rank, an existing marriage, the lady’s master), and the tragic or bittersweet resolution. He notes that the shaer were often composed orally and transcribed carelessly by scribes, which accounts for the frequent incoherence, missing passages, and abrupt endings. He also distinguishes between the refined “true” Malay shaer and the cruder Batavia-Malay versions produced by penny-a-liner scribes like Muhammad Bakr for circulating libraries.
Overbeck’s method is primarily philological and interpretive: he collates manuscript versions, identifies the social type behind each animal or flower name, and offers his own reading of the plot. He is candid about the obscurities that remain, acknowledging that some interpretations are conjectural and that the texts themselves are often fragmentary or jumbled.
Key Findings
- The Shaer Ikan Terubok (Singapore lithographed edition, A.H. 1320) contains 255 quatrains and narrates the love of a Hilsa fish (a young ruling prince at Tanjong Tuan) for a Climbing Perch princess in a riverpool near Tanjong Padang; Klinkert identified it as a skit on a refused marriage proposal by a Malacca prince for a princess of Siak (p. 115).
- The Shaer Kembang Ayer Mawar was written in 1275 A.H. by Pangeran Panembahan Bupati, brother of the exiled Sultan of Palembang, and consists of 155 quatrains; the Singapore lithographed edition of 1334 A.H. is a jumbled rearrangement of the Palembang manuscript quatrains (p. 129).
- The Shaer Burong Ponggok exists in MSS at Batavia and Leiden (one dated Tanjong Pinang 1865), with a zincographic edition from Padang (A.H. 1301) and a lithographic edition from Singapore (A.D. 1910); Overbeck interprets Ponggok as a court retainer in love with his master’s daughter, killed by her father’s men and denied a funeral (pp. 117–118).
- The Shaer Kumbang Chumbuan Sakti (Bumble-Bee and Jasmine) survives in five manuscripts (three in Batavia, two in Leiden), all fragments; the most coherent version (Batavia No. 477) contains 124 quatrains and ends with the Bumble-Bee’s visit to the sage Cricket for a love-charm (p. 122).
- The Shaer Unggas (The Birds), a didactic poem of 325 quatrains, is a Malay imitation of the Persian Mantik at-tajr (c. 1230 A.D.) by Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Nishapuri, as established by Dr. van Ronkel; MSS are dated as early as 1257 A.H. (p. 137).
- The Batavia-Malay Shaer Buah-Buahan by Muhammad Bakr (dated 22 November 1896) contains 542 quatrains plus a second poem of 400 quatrains; Bakr was a professional scribe who hired out his works at ten cents a night from a Native Circulating Library (p. 139).
Conclusion
Overbeck concludes that the Animal and Flower shaer are a genuinely Malay literary form—distinct from the Persian-influenced didactic bird poems—that deserves recognition as “little romances which show the Malay in a more human light than classical literature does.” He quotes Dr. de Hollander’s praise of their “childlike naivete” and “natural expression of feelings,” and argues that they constitute the main source, alongside pantuns and proverbs, for understanding the emotional and social life of the Malay people, a dimension almost entirely absent from court chronicles and imported fiction.
Context
- The primary archival collections consulted are the Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavia), the Leiden University Library (including Dr. van Ronkel’s supplement catalogue), and the Raffles Collection in the R.A.S. Library, London.
- The article’s historiographical contribution lies in establishing the shaer as a distinct genre of Malay vernacular literature with a social function (veiled commentary on real events) rather than dismissing them, as earlier catalogues had done, as mere “erotic verses put into the mouths of two fishes.”