The Hikayat Abdullah; an annotated translation. A.H. Hill
A.H. Hill’s 1955 annotated translation of the Hikayat Abdullah in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 28, Pt. 3) presents the first complete English rendering of Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s autobiography, a document spanning the formative decades of British colonial Malaya from 1797 to 1846. Published exactly one century after the original’s 1849 lithographing, Hill’s edition combines a detailed political and biographical introduction with a close translation that preserves the author’s stylistic variety, supplemented by extensive notes correcting Abdullah’s factual errors and assessing his literary claims (pp. 5–6).
Summary
The Hikayat Abdullah is the life story of a man of Arab, Tamil, and Malay descent born in Malacca in 1797, who rose from a poor family to become the most prominent Malay writer of his generation. Abdullah’s narrative covers his childhood education under his father Abdul Kadir, his employment as a copyist for Stamford Raffles in Malacca (c. 1811), his teaching of Malay to LMS missionaries including William Milne and C.H. Thomsen, his move to Singapore after its founding in 1819, and his subsequent career as a teacher, translator, and petition-writer for English merchants (pp. 10–25). The text documents the founding of Singapore, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, the Opium War, and the suppression of piracy under Governor Butterworth, while also providing intimate portraits of Raffles, Farquhar, Crawfurd, and the Sultanate of Johore-Riau (pp. 72–267).
Hill’s introduction situates Abdullah within the political transitions from Portuguese to Dutch to British control of Malacca, and from Dutch to British dominance in the Straits. Hill corrects several of Abdullah’s “unhistorical blunders,” most notably his claim that Raffles was absent from the original landing at Singapore on 28 January 1819, and identifies the text Abdullah used as the 1849 lithographed edition at the mission press, which became the prototype of all surviving copies (pp. 18, 29–31). The translation itself retains Abdullah’s pleonasms, repetitions, and digressions to mirror the original’s variety of styles, while the notes illuminate his obscurities, misrepresentations of fact, and occasional solecisms (p. 5).
Abdullah’s literary significance, as Hill argues, lies not in the dry record of a well-served period but in the intimate pen-portraits he gives of the personalities of his time, and in his role as the first writer in Malay to bring realism to the art, seeing everyday life from the standpoint of common human experience rather than through the tinted spectacles of legend and romance (p. 32). His work, though marred by frequent blunders of fact and confused chronology, inspired generations of Malay writers and established a tradition of vernacular prose that remains a school text throughout the country (pp. 31–33).
Key Findings
- Abdullah’s great-grandfather was an Arab from Yemen who emigrated to Nagore in Mysore; his grandfather Mohammed Ibrahim settled in Malacca and married a half-Indian teacher at the Koran School, establishing the family’s mixed Arab-Tamil-Malay lineage (pp. 11–12, 35).
- Raffles employed Abdullah as one of the youngest of several scribes in his Malacca office around 1811, paying him to copy manuscripts; Abdullah provides the only surviving eyewitness account of Raffles detecting the forged letter from the Susunan of Mataram, which he observed through a crack in the door (pp. 15–16, 90–95).
- Abdullah taught Malay to missionaries at the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca from 1815, earning $10–15 per month, and later to English merchants in Singapore where he taught “hundreds of white men, English and French” as well as ladies and young girls (pp. 96–120, 201).
- The Hikayat Abdullah was completed in May 1843 and lithographed at the mission press in Singapore in March 1849; Governor Butterworth purchased 12 copies at four dollars each in 1849, sending six to the Bengal Government and distributing the rest among Malay chieftains (pp. 29, 31, 267).
- Abdullah’s account of the Thian Tai Huey secret society, based on his own infiltration of their encampment in the interior of Singapore Island, describes initiation ceremonies involving blood-oaths, the burning of votive paper, and the execution of a man who refused to join; his report to Crawfurd led to a police raid that was repelled when two hundred Society members broke into the gaol and rescued their comrade (pp. 180–191).
- The text contains forty-three different English words incorporated into Abdullah’s Malay prose, reflecting his hybrid idiom produced at a time when he was simultaneously translating religious and scientific pamphlets into Malay (p. 25).
Conclusion
Hill’s definitive assessment is that Abdullah’s great value lies in his character portraits and his pioneering realism rather than in his reliability as a chronicler. Despite his “frequent blunders of fact, his occasional deliberate distortion of the truth, and his often hopelessly confused chronology,” Abdullah brought to Malay literature a fresh and very real talent, leading his countrymen “back from an arid desert of euphuism and imitation of foreign models to a realism that had started in the fifteenth century and is in accord with the genius of a race of extraverts” (p. 33).
Context
- The publication was made possible by a donation from the University of Malaya towards printing costs, and the translation was begun in March 1949, exactly one hundred years after the Hikayat Abdullah was first published (p. 4–5).
- Hill acknowledges the assistance of Sir Richard Winstedt, Dr. C.A. Gibson-Hill, Stanley Read, the late C.E. Wurtzburg, C.D. Cowan, and the Rev. Dr. Amstutz, with maps supplied from the Raffles Museum and the Survey Department in Malacca (p. 6).