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Sejarah Melayu

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Sejarah Melayu

The Sejarah Melayu, commonly known in English as the Malay Annals, is the oldest surviving work of Malay historiography, composed in the second decade of the seventeenth century at the court of Johore. It narrates the political history of the Malay world from the legendary founding of Singapura through the sultanate of Melaka to the post-conquest succession at Johore, and it has served as the foundational text for the study of Malay political ideology, royal genealogy, and literary tradition. The work exists in multiple recensions, the earliest of which was edited from Raffles MS 18 by R. O. Winstedt in 1938, and its transmission history—spanning Portuguese custody in Goa, Acehnese diplomatic channels, and colonial-era manuscript collection—has made it one of the most intensively studied texts in the field of Malay studies [1, pp. 38–42], [2, pp. 10–13].

Composition, Authorship, and Political Context

The Sejarah Melayu was commissioned on 12 Rabi’ul-awal A.H. 1021 (13 May 1612) during the reign of Sultan ‘Ala’ud-din Ri’ayat Shah of Aceh, at a moment when the Johore court was in captivity there following Acehnese military pressure [1, pp. 38–42]. T. Iskandar, writing in 1967, challenged R. O. Winstedt’s long-standing argument that Tun Bambang, rather than Tun Seri Lanang, was the true author. By comparing the Shellabear edition with Raffles MS 18—which Iskandar judges to be the earlier version on linguistic grounds—and by noting that the name “Raja Dewa Said” in later manuscripts is likely an accidental reduplication of dewasa itu, Iskandar reconstructs a coherent reading in which the Bendahara, Tun Seri Lanang, receives the commission directly from the Raja di-Hilir [1, pp. 39–41]. He reinforces this with a passage in the Bustanus-Salatin (Book II, ch. 12) that explicitly attributes the Sejarah Melayu to “Bendahara Paduka Raja,” and with the Dutch Admiral Verhoeff’s report confirming Tun Seri Lanang’s survival until 1624 [1, pp. 39–41]. The work was likely completed by 1615 [1, pp. 38–42].

Iskandar situates the composition as a deliberate Johore political response to the Acehnese Tajus-Salatin of 1603, serving to vindicate the legitimacy of the Johore royal house at a moment of vulnerability to both Portuguese and Acehnese pressure [1, pp. 38–42]. The Bustanus-Salatin of Nuruddin ar-Raniri, compiled in 1638, states that the Sejarah Melayu was written in 1612, a date Sweeney suggests may indicate when the Achinese first became acquainted with the text [3, p. 104].

Textual Transmission and the Goa Episode

The transmission history of the Sejarah Melayu is one of its most distinctive features. C. A. Gibson-Hill published a tightly argued note in 1956 addressing the documentary puzzle of how the manuscript passed from the Malay world to the Portuguese and back again. The Raffles MS 181 version of the Malay Annals ends abruptly after describing the first Portuguese attack on Johore in 1535, with no account of the second attack in 1536, yet the Shellabear preface records the sudden appearance in 1612 of “a Malay history brought by people from Goa” [4, pp. 185–186]. Gibson-Hill argues that the 1536 attack by Dom Estevao de Gama provides the obvious mechanism for the manuscript’s removal to India, and that the Portuguese diplomatic mission of 1611/12, headed by an envoy named de Amoreira according to Rouffaer, explains its return [4, pp. 185–186].

The decisive evidence Gibson-Hill marshals is textual rather than archival. Four Portuguese writers—Tome Pires, Albuquerque, Barros, and Eredia—all independently describe the last ruler of Singapore as a refugee prince from Palembang (Parameswara) who murdered his host and seized the city, and who was subsequently driven out by Siam or a Siamese vassal [4, p. 186]. The Malay Annals tells a wholly different story: Iskandar Shah succeeded his father normally, and the city fell through the treachery of a treasury official whose daughter had been the sultan’s mistress and was publicly humiliated for infidelity [4, p. 187]. The critical observation is that a fifth Portuguese source, Diogo do Couto, gives an account closely matching the Annals—naming the last ruler Raja Sabu or Iskandar Shah, and repeating the treasurer’s-daughter episode—despite never having visited Malaya. Couto served as Keeper of the Goa Archives from 1595 until his death in 1616, and Gibson-Hill reasons that if the Annals manuscript was in the archives during that window, Couto would have had direct access to a translation [4, pp. 187–188]. The fact that Linschoten, resident in Goa from 1583 to 1589, reports yet another founding story for Malacca (a village of fishermen from Pegu, Siam, and Bengal) further indicates that the Annals version was not commonly current in oral circulation, strengthening the inference that Couto’s source was the manuscript itself [4, p. 188].

R. O. Winstedt’s 1940 note on Valentijn’s copy of the Sejarah Melayu adds further evidence to the transmission history. By comparing the Singapore and Melaka ruler data in the Johore text (as in Shellabear’s edition), the older Melacca text edited from a Raffles manuscript, and Valentijn’s description of Malacca, Winstedt demonstrates that the Dutch orientalist François Valentijn (1666–1727) used the older Melacca text rather than the Johore recension. The agreement in reign lengths and omissions—such as the absence of Raja Besar Muda and Raja Tengah, and the specific figures for Sultans Muhammad, Muzaffar, and Mansur—confirms Valentijn’s dependence on the Melacca recension [5, p. 151]. Winstedt notes that Valentijn likely did not possess the complete manuscript, as he was unaware that Mahmud had his son Ahmad killed, and suggests that if Valentijn’s copy had survived, it would have preserved another witness to the oldest version of the Sejarah Melayu [5, p. 151].

Recensions and Variant Manuscripts

The Sejarah Melayu survives in multiple recensions that differ substantially in their final chapters. C. O. Blagden, a British colonial administrator and Malay philologist, published in 1925 the first edition of eight previously unprinted chapters from a variant manuscript, arguing that this text—though physically a copy made in the early nineteenth century for Stamford Raffles—preserves a genuine seventeenth-century historical tradition about the post-conquest Malay states that is both more candid about Malay military failures and richer in local detail than the received text of Shellabear [2, pp. 10–13]. The manuscript, MS. No. 18 of the Raffles collection in the Royal Asiatic Society, London, is written on English paper bearing a C. Wilmott watermark dated 1812, comprises 202 pages of Malay script, and was clearly a copy made for Raffles from an older source [2, p. 13]. Blagden notes that Van der Tuuk had flagged the variant in his catalogue fifty-seven years earlier, but no further work had been done on it [2, pp. 10–13].

Blagden’s central argument is that the variant text embodies authentic historical tradition rather than mere scribal corruption. His evidence includes the archaic spelling patterns (such as keluar, di-luar, bēdil, tuan) that suggest a seventeenth-century rather than nineteenth-century origin; the presence of a superior reading (turun daripada bizurai) in chapter 34; and, most importantly, the text’s frankness about Malay defeats and internal dissensions, which Blagden considers unlikely to be invented [2, pp. 11–13]. He concedes, however, that the passage establishing a genealogical link between the Johore dynasty and the rulers of Perak appears to be “special pleading” possibly composed by a Perak man seeking to authenticate his rulers’ pedigree, and that certain spellings suggest a northern dialect [2, p. 12]. The text diverges from Shellabear’s published version only after chapter 34; in the first 34 chapters it merely rearranges chapter order and omits chapter 16 entirely [2, p. 11].

The eight published chapters narrate the political and military history of the Johore-Bentan court under Sultan Mahmud Shah and his successor Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah, covering the failed Malay sieges of Portuguese Malacca, the rivalry between Lingga and Indragiri, the Portuguese bombardment of Kota Kara, the exile of the Raja Muda to Perak where he was proclaimed Sultan Muzaffar Shah, and the internal court disputes that characterised this period [2, pp. 13–16]. The text includes vivid episodes such as the cockfighting of Tun Biajit (son of Hang Tuah) at Indragiri, the breaking of the royal elephant’s tusk against the Malacca fort wall, and the execution of the Portuguese envoy by Sultan Alauddin Riayat Shah [2, pp. 13–16]. Sultan Mahmud Shah’s reign is given as 48 years total: 30 years at Malacca, 1 year at Pahang, 12 years at Bentan, and 5 years at Kampar [2, p. 40].

R. O. Winstedt’s 1938 edition of the earliest recension from Raffles MS 18, published in the JMBRAS (vol. 16, part 3), remains the standard critical text of the Sejarah Melayu [6], [7]. Winstedt’s edition established the linguistic and textual basis for all subsequent comparative work on the Annals, and his identification of the Melacca recension as the oldest surviving form of the text shaped the field’s understanding of the work’s composition and redaction history.

Political Ideology and Comparative Analysis

The Sejarah Melayu has been the subject of sustained comparative analysis, particularly in relation to the Tuhfat al-Nafis, a mid-1860s Bugis-Malay chronicle composed by Raja Ali al-Haji in Riau. Timothy J. Moy’s 1975 article offers a comparative assessment of the two texts, arguing that the Tuhfat presents a “real” political world grounded in personal loyalty and pragmatic governance, in marked contrast to the Sejarah Melayu’s ideological and didactic framework [8, pp. 64–78]. The Tuhfat has no concept of “the state”; its integrating force is upward-focused personal loyalty of a “feudal” type, running from a broad mass base through intermediate officials to the ruler [8, pp. 64–78]. It makes no reference to the foundational pact between Sri Tri Buana and Demang Lebar Daun upon which the Sejarah Melayu builds its entire political ideology [8, pp. 64–78].

On the question of derhaka (regicide or treason), the Tuhfat is notably less strident than the Sejarah Melayu, treating the crime with a degree of ambivalence and, in the case of the 1699 regicide of Sultan Mahmud II, presenting a conspiracy of senior nobles that runs directly against the Sejarah’s didactic tenor [8, pp. 64–78]. The Tuhfat attributes the Portuguese capture of Melaka explicitly to Sultan Mahmud I’s unjust slaughter of Tun Mutahir Bendahara Sri Maharaja and his family, writing: “maka datang-lah qada’ Allah Ta’ala ia-itu datang-lah Peringgi melanggar Melaka itu” [8, p. 72]. This represents a significant departure from the Sejarah’s principle that Allah alone executes punishment for regal injustice [8, pp. 64–78].

Moy also contributes specific genealogical and institutional data absent from or vague in the Raffles MS 18, including the identification of the first Bendahara, Tun Permata Muka Berjabar, as the brother of Sri Pekrama Wira (Sri Tri Buana’s successor at Singapura), thereby establishing the Bendahara lineage as second only to the royal line in rank [8, p. 68]. The Tuhfat inserts a Raja Besar Muda between Iskandar Shah and Sultan Muhammad Shah, crediting him with instituting court protocols, royal regalia, and the positions of the four mentri and four bentara—a figure absent from the Raffles MS 18 [8, pp. 67–68]. The yang di-pertuan muda first appears in the Tuhfat during the reign of Sultan Abdul-Jalil II (d. 1677 A.D.), initially held by his brother in Pahang, and developed throughout the eighteenth century into the direct overseer of the Johore-Riau kingdom [8, pp. 68].

Relationship to the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai

The textual relationship between the Sejarah Melayu and the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai (HRP) has been a subject of prolonged scholarly debate. P. L. Amin Sweeney’s 1967 article re-examines this question, challenging both Winstedt’s thesis of HRP priority and A. Teeuw’s more recent counter-argument [3, pp. 94–105]. Sweeney’s central intervention is methodological: he subjects the linguistic and stylistic evidence marshalled by Winstedt and Hill for the HRP’s antiquity to close scrutiny and finds it largely unconvincing. Winstedt’s “archaic” vocabulary—kutaha, nentiasa, penah, kendiri, mangkin, bepersembahkan—is shown to survive well into the seventeenth and even nineteenth centuries, and the manuscript’s own orthographic variants are consistent with seventeenth-century Acehnese usage rather than fifteenth-century composition [3, pp. 94–105].

Having dismantled the case for HRP priority on linguistic grounds, Sweeney turns to the passages where verbal similarity between the HRP and the Sejarah Melayu is genuinely striking. He accepts that a direct written connection exists—oral transmission in fixed form is implausible for the degree of overlap—but argues that the direction cannot be settled by the “plausibility” criterion Teeuw favours [3, pp. 94–105]. Instead, he points to specific linguistic markers: the use of ia for rulers, the word sabda in royal context, and the verb ujar all appear in the Sejarah Melayu exclusively within the Pasai section, suggesting that the Sejarah’s compiler borrowed from a text using these forms [3, pp. 94–105]. Sweeney introduces a complicating hypothesis: the HRP may itself have been revised after the Acheh conquest of Pasai in 1524, with certain passages altered to counter the Sejarah’s less flattering version of Semudera-Pasai’s role [3, pp. 94–105].

The “Answer of Pasai” Episode

One of the most studied episodes in the Sejarah Melayu is the “Answer of Pasai” narrative, in which Sultan Mansur Shah of Malacca sends a theological question to the learned men of Pasai. R. Roolvink’s 1965 article presents a newly discovered Palembang-origin version of this episode and argues that this third text represents a skillful redaction that inverts the story’s satirical target from the Pasai Makhdum to the entire Pasai scholarly establishment [9, pp. 129–139]. The episode had previously been studied by Hans Overbeck (1933) on the basis of the Shellabear edition, and by Winstedt (1938) in the Raffles 18 manuscript [9, pp. 129–139].

Roolvink identifies a structural “flaw” in both the Shellabear and Raffles 18 versions—the passage in which the book is sent to Pasai for interpretation and the Malacca theologian praises his Pasai colleague’s exegesis—which is absent from the Palembang text, where the book is instead translated into Malay locally [9, pp. 132–134]. In the Palembang version, Sultan Mansur Shah himself delivers the devastating reply, exposing the collective ignorance of the Pasai theologians and instructing them to study the mystical teachings of Maulana Abu Bakar [9, pp. 133–134]. The narrative concludes with the King of Pasai requesting Maulana Abu Bakar be sent to Pasai, where he becomes teacher to the king and all the people of rank, and esoteric knowledge becomes as widespread in Pasai as in Malacca [9, p. 139]. Roolvink concludes that the Palembang version is a later, more skillful redaction of the Shellabear text, one that eliminates narrative inconsistencies and concentrates the satire on Pasai as a whole rather than on an individual figure [9, p. 134].

Research and Documentation

The Sejarah Melayu occupies a central position in the Society’s journal literature, with contributions spanning from the 1920s to the 1970s. The earliest significant intervention was Blagden’s 1925 edition of the variant recension, which established a methodological framework for evaluating the authenticity of Malay manuscript variants through palaeographic, linguistic, and internal-consistency evidence [2, pp. 10–13]. Winstedt’s 1938 critical edition of the earliest recension from Raffles MS 18 [6], [7] and his 1940 note on Valentijn’s copy [5, p. 151] consolidated the textual base for all subsequent work. Gibson-Hill’s 1956 note on the Goa transmission [4, pp. 185–188] and Sweeney’s 1967 article on the HRP connection [3, pp. 94–105] extended the investigation into the manuscript’s movement and its relationship to other Malay historical texts. Iskandar’s 1967 comparative study of three seventeenth-century Malay historical writings [1, pp. 38–53] and Moy’s 1975 assessment of the Tuhfat al-Nafis [8, pp. 64–78] shifted the focus toward the political ideology embedded in the text and its reception in later historiographical traditions. The cumulative effect of these contributions is to establish the Sejarah Melayu not as a static document but as a living textual tradition, shaped by political imperatives, diplomatic exchanges, and the editorial interventions of successive copyists and redactors across at least three centuries.

MBRAS Sources

Bibliography

References

  1. T. Iskandar (1967). Three Malay historical writings in the first half of the seventeenth century JMBRAS 40(2): 38–53. Read on JSTOR
  2. C.O. Blagden and Sejarah Melayu (1925). An unpublished variant version of the “Malay Annals” JMBRAS 3(1): 10–52. Read on JSTOR
  3. A. Sweeney (1967). The connection between the Hikayat Raja2 Pasai and the Sejarah Melayu JMBRAS 40(2): 94–105. Read on JSTOR
  4. C.A. Gibson-Hill (1956). The Malay Annals: the history brought from Goa JMBRAS 29(1): 185–188. Read on JSTOR
  5. R.O. Winstedt (1940). Valentijn’s copy of the Sejarah Melayu JMBRAS 18(2): 151.
  6. Sejarah Melayu and R.O. Winstedt (1938). The Malay annals; or, Sejarah Melayu. The earliest recension from MS. No. 18 of the Raffles Collection in the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. .O. Winstedt JMBRAS 16(3): 1–226.
  7. Sejarah Melayu and R.O. Winstedt (1938). The Malay annals; or, Sejarah Melayu. The earliest recension from MS. No. 18 of the Raffles Collection in the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society, London. .O. Winstedt JMBRAS 16(3): 1–226.
  8. T.J. Moy (1975). The “Sejarah Melayu” tradition of power and political structure: an assessment of relevant sections of the “Tuhfat-al-Nafis” JMBRAS 48(2): 64–78. Read on JSTOR
  9. R. Roolvink (1965). The answer of Pasai JMBRAS 38(2): 129–139. Read on JSTOR