Professional Malay story-telling. Part 1: some questions of style and presentation
Amin Sweeney’s 1973 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 46, No. 2) presents the first part of a two-part ethnographic study of professional Malay story-telling, based on fieldwork conducted between 1968 and 1973 across Kelantan, Patani, Perlis, Kedah, Langkawi, Pahang, Trengganu, and Selangor. Its central thesis is that decades of colonial-era scholarship had fundamentally mischaracterized the oral tradition by conflating the stylized performance form with the non-stylized narrative form, thereby obscuring the artistic nature of the penglipur lara (folk romance) as a living performing art.
Summary
Sweeney opens by critiquing the methodological legacy of British colonial collectors such as Maxwell, Winstedt, and Sturrock, whose published texts of Malay folk literature were adapted by Malay scribes into literary prose, erasing the oral conventions of the original performances. He argues that the apparent contradictions in the collectors’ accounts—Maxwell describing a “monotonous chant” while Winstedt speaks of “shapeless colloquial passages”—are resolved once one recognizes that no story-teller could perform in stylized form at dictation speed, and that the scribes who produced the published texts worked from the non-stylized, conversational form rather than from the actual performance (pp. 3–4). Sweeney proposes a triangular model of expression: point A (oral, non-stylized, amateur, informal), point B (literary, stylized, formerly professional, formal), and point C (oral, stylized, professional, formal), with the sides representing continua of adaptation between these modes (p. 2).
The article then documents the genres of professional story-telling in detail, distinguishing between the tarik Selampit of Kelantan-Patani (singing with rebab accompaniment), the Selampit and Awang Batil of Perlis and Langkawi (chanting with gendang or batil), the Jubang of Kedah, the ahli cherita of Pahang and Trengganu, and the kaba of Selangor (p. 5). Sweeney assesses the professional status of performers, finding that only in Perlis—specifically in the cases of Ismail bin Hasan (Selampit) and Mahmud bin Wahid (Awang Batil)—does story-telling constitute a primary occupation, while elsewhere it remains a secondary or negligible source of income (pp. 6–10). He identifies a direct relationship between the complexity of the art and the performer’s professional status, and notes that the most developed forms cluster in areas of large-scale padi cultivation where social organization and post-harvest leisure favour such arts (p. 15).
The technical analysis examines intonation patterns (repetitive/strophic versus varied), the degree of variability between performances of the same tale by the same performer, the co-ordination of words to melody through fillers, prolongation, and parallelisms, and the linguistic features of the stylized form, including distorted grammar, special vocabulary, and the use of “rhythmical prose” passages (pp. 15–29). Sweeney demonstrates that the so-called “rhythmical prose” identified by Hooykaas and Winstedt as metrical islands in a sea of prose is in fact simply the fixed descriptive passages within a tale that is, in its stylized form, entirely intoned to a specific melody, making the distinction between “metrical” and “prose” passages an artefact of the non-stylized form alone (pp. 27–29).
Key Findings
- The published “folk literature” texts (e.g., Cherita Jenaka, Hikayat Malim Deman) were adapted from the non-stylized conversational form by Malay scribes, not from the stylized performance, meaning that structural features attributed to the oral tradition (such as the “climax” in Cherita Pak Pandir) are actually the work of the compiler (pp. 1–2).
- A triangular model (A: oral/non-stylized/amateur; B: literary/stylized/professional; C: oral/stylized/professional) accounts for the contradictory descriptions left by colonial collectors, who recorded the non-stylized form because stylized performance could not be transcribed at dictation speed (pp. 2–4).
- Only two performers in the entire survey—Ismail bin Hasan and Mahmud bin Wahid of Perlis—derive a major share of their income from story-telling; the Kelantan Tok Selampit Mat Nor receives at most ten invitations per year and earns M$4–5 per night, while Pahang performers may go five years without a single invitation (pp. 6–9).
- The tarik Selampit of Kelantan is traditionally a profession for blind people (vitamin A deficiency, not hereditary), and the genre has been progressively overshadowed by wayang kulit, Mak Yong, and more recently television; audiences at Sweeney’s own hosted performances in Kota Bharu would drift away after an hour to watch television next door (pp. 8, 15).
- Performers do not learn tales by rote but treat each rendering as a paraphrase of an imaginary “master-copy”; the opening of a tale displays the greatest constancy of form, while later sections show more variation in wording, sequence, and episode selection (p. 20).
- The “rhythmical prose” passages identified by Hooykaas (1947) and Winstedt (1957a) as fixed metrical insertions are, in the stylized performance, indistinguishable in rhythm and intonation from the rest of the tale; the entire story is delivered in the same intoned form, making the term “rhythmical prose” a misleading artefact of the non-stylized form (pp. 27–29).
Conclusion
Sweeney’s definitive historical takeaway is that the penglipur lara tradition, as documented by colonial-era collectors and perpetuated by subsequent scholarship, represents a fundamentally distorted picture of a living performing art. The published texts, produced for vernacular school curricula, capture only the content and conversational language of the tales while erasing the musical, rhythmic, and presentational dimensions that constitute their artistic identity. By distinguishing stylized from non-stylized form and documenting the actual performance practices of a representative sample of performers, Sweeney establishes that the penglipur lara is not a “folk romance” in the literary-critical sense but a professional performing art with its own technical conventions, social context, and aesthetic logic—most fully realized in the elaborate presentations of Perlis and the musically complex tarik Selampit of Kelantan.
Context
- The article draws on the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka tape collection and narrator inventory, which Sweeney was permitted to consult; the Dewan’s own publications of penglipur lara texts (e.g., Hamsiah 1964a, Zaharah Khalid 1963, Zaharah Taha 1963) are critiqued for failing to document the stylized form (pp. 4–5).
- The study is explicitly positioned as Part 1 of a two-part work; Part 2 (not included here) is reserved for a detailed analysis of the tarik Selampit of Kelantan, the most technically complex genre, and for a full comparison of complete renderings to assess variability of content (pp. 15, 20).