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Notes on Malay beliefs

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Notes on Malay beliefs

Anker Rentse, a Dutch colonial administrator serving in Kelantan, published this ethnographic note in 1933, drawing on fieldwork among Malay and Semang communities in Ulu Kelantan to document three interrelated belief systems: the cosmology of Pusat Tasek (the ocean’s centre), the tiger-kingdom of Kandang Balok, and a system of daily omens governing travel and royal audience. The article presents these as living oral traditions, anchored in specific local informants and cross-referenced against earlier European scholarship on Malay and Persian folklore.

Summary

Rentse’s primary concern is to record cosmological and ritual beliefs that he judged to be in danger of disappearing. The Pusat Tasek section reconstructs a Kelantanese cosmology in which the ocean’s centre is a great whirlpool around which grows the giant coconut palm Pauh Janggi, with Heaven (Shurga) at its crown and Hell (Nuraka) beneath its roots. A dragon guards the gate to Hell, and the 1926 Kelantan flood is explained through a narrative of three dragons merging as they descended the Galas, Pergau, and Lebir rivers to relieve the overworked guardian. Rentse connects this to the Wayang kulit tradition and to Owen Rutter’s account of the Geruda bird, and further to a Persian tale in the Bodleian Library (MS. Ouseley 231) in which Alexander the Great encounters a similar whirlpool, suggesting a shared Indo-Persian substrate.

The Kandang Balok section is the article’s most substantial narrative. Rentse records a detailed account from To’ Mat Sah, a medicineman of Semang origin, describing the tiger kingdom on Gunong Ledang in Ulu Kemaman, ruled by Dato’ Uban in a palace of human bones. The tale follows the medicineman Sadinda, who invokes a tiger spirit during a Main Bangsi seance using a Semang noseflute (bangsi), bamboo pounders (chantong), and a stringed bamboo guitar (buluh kerong). When the spirit demands its fee and Sadinda fails to provide it, he is carried to Kandang Balok, married to the tiger king’s cousin, and eventually returns to Kelantan in tiger form after crushing the egg that would have allowed his permanent return. The story explains the origin of a hairless patch on a known tiger in the Ulu Kelantan jungle. Rentse uses this narrative to document Semang musical instruments and their Malay equivalents, cross-referencing Skeat and Blagden’s Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula.

The final section reproduces a Jawi text on omens, provided in writing by Che Ahmad of Kota Baharu, with Rentse’s English translation. The system assigns specific auspicious or inauspicious outcomes to each day of the week and each time of day for travel, and prescribes the cardinal direction one must face when seeking audience with a raja. The text claims the rules descend from the warriors of Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, situating the practice within an Islamicate framework of inherited martial wisdom.

Key Findings

  • The Pusat Tasek cosmology places Heaven atop the Pauh Janggi palm and Hell beneath its roots, with a dragon guarding the gate (pintu nuraka) to prevent the ocean from draining into Hell’s boiling pot (kawah nuraka) (p. 245).
  • The 1926 Kelantan flood is narrated as the merging of three dragons—gold-scaled, silver-scaled, and steel-scaled—at Kuala Pergau and Kuala Lebir respectively, the final composite dragon being carried to Pusat Tasek to relieve the overworked guardian (p. 245).
  • The Kandang Balok is located on Gunong Ledang in Ulu Kemaman; the tiger king Dato’ Uban dwells in a palace built of human bones with a roof thatched with human hair, and tigers pass through a bamboo tunnel under Sungai Putih to transform between human and tiger form (p. 247).
  • The Main Bangsi seance employs a Semang noseflute (bangsi, approximately 26 inches long), chantong (bamboo pounders), and buluh kerong (a stringed bamboo guitar), instruments Rentse cross-references with Skeat and Blagden’s Semang vocabulary (pensol, penbok, penyoign) (pp. 247–248).
  • The omen system prescribes specific facing directions for royal audience by day of the week (e.g., face northeast on Sunday, southeast on Tuesday, south on Wednesday, southwest on Thursday, northwest on Friday, southeast on Saturday) and attributes the rules to the warriors of Ali (pp. 250–251).
  • The Geruda bird legend in the Wayang kulit tradition explains the bird’s permanent confinement to Mount Kaf (Caucasus) after it failed to prevent Raja Iskandar’s marriage to the Chinese Emperor’s daughter, a narrative Rentse parallels with the Hikayat Marong Maha Wangsa (Sturrock, JRASSB. 72, 1916, p. 37) and a Persian tale from MS. Ouseley 231, Bodleian Library (p. 246).

Conclusion

Rentse presents these beliefs not as primitive survivals but as coherent, internally consistent systems that integrate Islamic, Persian, and indigenous Semang elements into a unified local cosmology. His implicit argument is that the 1926 flood and the continued practice of omen-reading demonstrate these traditions remain functionally active in Kelantanese life, and that their documentation is urgent given the rapid administrative and cultural changes of the colonial period.

Context

  • Rentse was a Dutch colonial official in Kelantan (then a British-protected state with Dutch advisory presence); his fieldwork relied on direct access to forest-dwelling informants, including a Semang-origin medicineman, which would have been facilitated by his administrative position.
  • The article draws on the Kelantanese oral tradition and cross-references European ethnographic literature (Skeat, Blagden, Wilkinson, Rutter, Sturrock) and a Bodleian Persian manuscript, positioning itself within the early twentieth-century comparative folklore tradition of the Royal Asiatic Society.

References