Article

The folk-tales of Indonesia and Indo-China

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

The folk-tales of Indonesia and Indo-China

R. O. Winstedt published “The Folk-tales of Indonesia and Indo-China” in 1917 in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, a comparative folklore study arguing that the extensive distribution of identical or near-identical tales across Malayo-Polynesian and Austroasiatic language groups points to a shared cultural heritage rather than casual borrowing. Writing against the backdrop of Schmidt’s proposed Austroasiatic–Malayo-Polynesian linguistic synthesis and Kern’s hypothesis that Indo-China was the ancestral homeland of the Malay peoples, Winstedt treats folk-tale distribution as a proxy for deep historical contact.

Summary

Winstedt’s central method is to identify specific tales or tale-episodes that appear in both the Malay Archipelago and the mainland Southeast Asian cultures of the Khmer, Cham, Annamite, and Mon (Talaing) peoples, then to assess the degree of structural and verbal correspondence. He draws on a wide range of previously published collections—Aymonier’s Khmer texts, Landes’ Cham and Annamite tales, Hazeu’s Javanese material, and his own earlier Malay folklore publications—to demonstrate that the same narrative motifs recur with remarkable fidelity across the two regions. The most extensively treated example is the mouse-deer (or hare) versus tiger cycle, in which the small animal outwits the predator through a series of deceptions involving a wasp’s nest passed off as a drum, a slit bamboo passed off as a musical instrument, and dung passed off as rice. Winstedt provides a detailed outline of the Cham version and notes the significant detail that the Cham hare gores the elephant with a horn, a motif absent from the Malay mouse-deer tales but present in the broader cycle.

Beyond the animal-tale cycle, Winstedt examines the “judgment” tale in which a man who releases a tiger from a trap consults a tree, a bridge, and a small animal (squirrel in the Mon version, mouse-deer in the Malay) on whether the tiger may eat him; the “clock” or chain-riddle sayings in which one creature’s complaint triggers the next in a causal chain; and several human-hero tales including Pa Belalang (a riddle-solving trickster) and Si Kebayan (a “sharp-nosed” suitor). In each case he identifies the specific parallels and their locations in the published record. His argument is cumulative: the sheer number and closeness of correspondences across such a wide linguistic and geographic range makes simple fortuitous borrowing an insufficient explanation.

Key Findings

  • The mouse-deer/hare vs. tiger deception cycle (wasp’s nest as drum, slit bamboo as instrument, dung as rice, coiled snake as girdle) appears in Malay, Dayak, Javanese, Sundanese, Cham, Cambodian, and Annamite versions, with the Cham text (Contes Tjames, pp. 50–60) preserving the detail of the hare goring the elephant with a horn (p. 119).
  • The “judgment” tale (man releases tiger, consults tree, bridge, and small animal) occurs in Malay, Mon/Talaing (Stewart, J. Burma Research Society IV, pt. 1, p. 49), Indian (Gul Bakuwali; Steel’s Tales of the Punjab, pp. 107, 307, 336), and Tibetan versions (p. 122).
  • The “clock” chain-riddle (heron → fish → grass → buffalo → belly → rice → wood → rain → frog → snake) appears in Malay, Cham (Contes Tjames No. XVII), Mon/Talaing (J. Burma Research Society IV, pt. 1, p. 68), and as a formulaic ending in Bengali tales (Lal Behari Day, Folk-Tales of Bengal, 1883) (pp. 123–124).
  • The Khmer tale of Thmenh Chey (Aymonier, Textes Khmers, pp. 20–30) closely parallels the Indonesian Pa Belalang / Pak Bandjir riddle-solving cycle, including the watermelon-seed riddle (p. 125).
  • The Javanese tales of Watu-Gunong and Nawang-Wulan find parallels in Landes’ Contes et legendes Annamites (tales LIII and LIV) and in Contes Tjames No. VIII (“Le Fort”), which resembles the Malay tale of Todjo (p. 125).
  • The Cham “Noix de Coco” tale (Contes Tjames, Excursions et Reconnaissances XIII) parallels the Javanese Djaka Deleg / Djaka Selira / Kadal Kentjana cycle and the Madurese Tjaret Brakai (Vreede, Leiden 1887) (pp. 125–126).

Conclusion

Winstedt concludes that the points of resemblance between the folk-tales of Indonesia and Indo-China are “so numerous and so close that one may venture to doubt if they are due merely to fortuitous borrowing” (p. 126). While he does not commit to a single definitive model of diffusion, the cumulative weight of his evidence is directed toward the hypothesis—consistent with Kern’s and Schmidt’s linguistic arguments—that these tale traditions share a common origin in or near the Indo-Chinese region and were carried into the Archipelago by the Malay migrations.

Context

  • Winstedt was a Straits Settlements civil servant and the principal collector of Malay folklore of his generation; this article draws heavily on his own earlier publications (Malay Literature, Part II, 1907; Cherita Jenaka; Hikayat Pelandok) as well as on the French colonial ethnographic collections of Aymonier and Landes.
  • The article contributes to the early twentieth-century comparative folklore tradition that sought to use tale distribution as evidence for prehistoric migration and contact, operating at the intersection of linguistics (Schmidt, Kern) and folkloristics.

References