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The Kedah Annals

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The Kedah Annals

R.O. Winstedt’s 1938 article in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society offers a critical dissection of the Hikayat Merang Mahawangsa, the text conventionally known as the Kedah Annals. Writing as the pre-eminent Malay scholar of his generation, Winstedt argues that the work is not a genuine historical chronicle but a late romantic compilation drawn from folk-tales, Indian and Buddhist literary sources, and common Malay romance tropes, with a probable date of composition in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

Summary

Winstedt’s central task is to strip away the veneer of historical authority that the Kedah Annals have enjoyed since their first publication. He demonstrates that the text’s narrative architecture is built from borrowed and recycled material: the opening episodes derive from the Ramayana and the Maha-Sutasoma-Jataka (No. 537), the Prince from the Bamboo and Princess Carp motifs are widespread Malay folk-lore shared across Kedah, Patani, and Perak, and the Tusked Raja episode is a direct adaptation of an Indian-Buddhist cannibal-king story familiar to Siamese audiences (pp. 31–32). The text’s only genuine attempt at historical narration is the account of Kedah’s conversion to Islam through the agency of a Baghdadi Shaikh, a passage Winstedt identifies as the work of a different hand writing in Javanese style (p. 32).

The article then turns to the manuscript evidence to establish the text’s late origin. Winstedt catalogues four known manuscripts: a Batavian MS. formerly belonging to the Dutch scholar Von de Wall (1807–1873), two in the collections of Sir William Maxwell and Mr. R. J. Wilkinson, and notes the conspicuous absence of any copy in Leiden or in the older London collections, including the Raffles MSS. despite Raffles’s posting at Penang (p. 32). The Batavian MS. is the oldest, its colophon ending with Sultan Ahmad Taju’d-din Halim Shah, who conquered Perak in 1818 and was expelled by the Siamese in 1821. The paucity and modernity of the surviving copies, Winstedt argues, point decisively to a recent origin for the text (p. 32).

Finally, Winstedt provides a running summary of the narrative itself, annotating each episode with its anachronisms and errors. He highlights that Aceh is treated as an established kingdom when it only became one at the end of the fifteenth century, that Shaikh Nuru’d-din appears in the narrative before his documented arrival in Aceh in 1637, and that the founding of Indra Sakti on the Perak river is attributed to a Kedah prince when it was in fact established by Sultan Iskandar of Perak around 1750–1764 (pp. 32–35).

Key Findings

  • The preface of the Kedah Annals is copied word for word from the Malay Annals of 1612 A.D., borrowing the title Sulalatu’s-Salatin for what is in fact a “farrago of folk-tales” (p. 31).
  • The Tusked Raja (Raja Bersiong) episode is sourced from the Maha-Sutasoma-Jataka, No. 537, a Jataka tale well known to Buddhist Siamese (p. 31).
  • The Batavian MS. (formerly Von de Wall’s) is the oldest known copy; its colophon ends with Sultan Ahmad Taju’d-din Halim Shah, who conquered Perak in 1818 and was driven out of Kedah by the Siamese in 1821, not returning until 1842 (p. 32).
  • Shaikh Nuru’d-din, translator of the Sirat al-Mustakim and author of the Bustanu’s-Salatin, did not reach Aceh from India until 1637, yet appears in the narrative as a contemporary of Kedah’s early Muslim rulers (p. 32).
  • Indra Sakti on the Perak river was founded and named by Sultan Iskandar of Perak (reigned c. 1750–1764), not by a Kedah prince as the Annals claim; Perak was not subject to Kedah until 1818 (p. 32).
  • The colophon lists Sultan Muzaffar Shah as fifth in ascent from Sultan Sulaiman, who died a prisoner in Aceh just after 1622; the fifth ruler in descent from Sulaiman was alive in 1741, while the fifth in ascent may have reigned as early as 1474, the date given in an Achinese account for Kedah’s conversion (p. 32).

Conclusion

Winstedt’s definitive judgment is that the Kedah Annals, despite their title and their colophon listing Kedah Sultans, are not a historical document in any meaningful sense. The text is a late romantic compilation—probably not completed before the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century—whose narrative material is assembled from Indian, Buddhist, and Malay folk sources, whose historical claims are riddled with anachronism, and whose manuscript tradition is too sparse and too modern to support any claim of antiquity.

Context

  • Winstedt held the position of Director of Education in the Straits Settlements and was the leading authority on Malay literature and history in the colonial period; his assessment carries the weight of institutional authority and reflects the scholarly conventions of the Royal Asiatic Society’s Malayan Branch.
  • The article draws on manuscript holdings in the Batavian Society (Leiden), the Maxwell and Wilkinson private collections, and the Raffles MSS. in London, and engages directly with earlier scholarship by C. O. Blagden, A. J. Sturrock, and W. G. Shellabear on related Malay texts.

References