The power behind the throne: the role of queens and court ladies in Malay history
Cheah Boon Kheng’s 1993 article in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society surveys the political agency of queens, queen mothers, and court ladies across Malay sultanates from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, arguing that these women were active power brokers whose influence was systematically underrepresented in official Malaysian historiography. Drawing on Malay court chronicles, European travel accounts, and colonial reports, Kheng demonstrates that female rulers and their female kin shaped succession, trade policy, and interstate diplomacy in Melaka, Patani, Aceh, Johor, and beyond (pp. 1–6).
Summary
Kheng opens with the Sejarah Melayu episode in which Sultan Mahmud Shah’s mother, listening behind a door, directs her son to appoint her brother Tun Mutahir as Bendahara over other candidates, illustrating how queen mothers operated as decisive political actors within the Melaka court (p. 1). He then traces the status of women in Melaka, noting that while the Undang-Undang Melaka formally subordinated women in legal proceedings, the chronicles record numerous cases of assertive queens and consort figures who manipulated succession, provoked royal abdication, or even attempted regicide (pp. 2–4). Tun Fatimah’s repeated abortions and her eventual extraction of a promise from Sultan Mahmud that her son would inherit the throne exemplify the “head-strong character” of Melakan royal women (pp. 3–4).
The article’s central empirical weight falls on the sustained reigns of female rulers in Patani (1584–1688) and Aceh (1641–1699). In Patani, four queens—Raja Ijau, Raja Biru, Raja Ungu, and Raja Kuning—governed in succession, overseeing canal construction, diplomatic relations with European powers, and anti-Siamese alliances, with their authority legitimised by the exhaustion of the male royal line and the preferences of commercially oriented aristocracies (pp. 7–10). In Aceh, four sultanahs followed the death of Sultan Iskandar Thani in 1641, their rule endorsed by the conservative cleric Nuruddin ar-Raniri in Bustanu’s-salatin, and only ending when a fatwa allegedly obtained from Mecca forbade female rulership (pp. 10–12). Kheng invokes Anthony Reid’s thesis that these queens served as neutral referees for trading aristocracies seeking to limit royal despotism (p. 6).
The Johor section is the most narratively dense, covering the Laksamana’s daughter who served as regent (1685–1688), the assassination of Sultan Mahmud II in 1699 precipitated by a concubine’s pregnancy, the Minangkabau-backed rise of Raja Kecik through Puteri Jamilan of Pagar Ruyong, Tengku Tengah’s orchestration of the Bugis overthrow of Raja Kecik, and finally Tengku Hamidah’s refusal to surrender the royal regalia in Riau between 1812 and 1823, which blocked the installation of either rival claimant to the Johor throne until Dutch military force compelled her compliance (pp. 12–18).
Key Findings
- Patani’s four queens (1584–1688) presided over a period of prosperity marked by canal engineering, multilateral trade with Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese merchants, and successful resistance to Siamese aggression, with no recorded religious objection to their rule (pp. 7–10).
- Aceh’s sultanahs were legitimised by the religious authority of Nuruddin ar-Raniri, who described the first queen, Taj al-Alam, as a “wise and just ruler” under whom “food was cheap, and the country was at peace” (p. 11).
- Tengku Hamidah (Tengku Puteri) held the Johor royal regalia from 1812 until 1823, refusing to surrender it to either British-backed Tengku Hussein or Dutch-backed Tengku Abdul Rahman, and was only compelled to yield when the Dutch Governor of Melaka marched armed troops into her presence chamber (pp. 17–18).
- Wan Fatimah of Perlis, in 1839, convened district chiefs at her residence and secured a royal appointment for her son from the King of Siam, effectively transforming the district of Arau into the kingdom of Perlis (pp. 19–20).
- The Tuhfat-al-Nafis records that Tengku Tengah, spurned by Raja Kecik, threw down her ear stud before the Bugis princes and declared she would “willingly be your slave” if they avenged her family’s shame, directly precipitating the Bugis conquest of Johor (p. 15).
- Kheng notes that the Bugis Salasilah Melayu dan Bugis prescribes that the Malay ruler “must be like a woman only, when asked to partake of a meal, then he partakes of the meal,” suggesting that the ideal Malay sovereign was defined by passivity rather than gender (p. 21).
Conclusion
Kheng concludes that Malay female rulers were an accepted feature of the feudal system, provided no legitimate male heir contested their claim, and that the underlying logic of Malay succession was not gendered but power-based: aristocrats consistently preferred a weak, pliant ruler who would defer to ministerial counsel, a quality they associated with femininity regardless of the sovereign’s actual sex (pp. 20–21).
Context
- The article draws heavily on Anthony Reid’s 1988 study “Female Roles in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia” (Modern Asian Studies 22:3) and on Teeuw and Wyatt’s two-volume critical edition of the Hikayat Patani (1970), both of which were foundational to the emerging field of gender and political history in Southeast Asian studies.
- Kheng explicitly frames his work as a corrective to the erasure of women from Malaysian school history textbooks, situating the article within the broader feminist historiographical intervention of the late 1980s and early 1990s (pp. 5–6).