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The rise and decline of a national hero

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The rise and decline of a national hero

P.E. de Josselin de Jong, a Dutch lecturer in Malay Studies at the University of Malaya, published this essay in 1965 as a tribute to his mentor Carl Gibson-Hill. Set against the backdrop of newly independent Malaya, the article traces how Hang Tuah — a fifteenth-century admiral of the Malacca Sultanate — was elevated from a flawed courtier in the Sejarah Melayu to an apotheosized national hero in the Hikayat Hang Tuah, and then, in the 1950s, was abruptly devalued by a generation of Malays who came to identify more with his rebel counterpart, Hang Jebat. The overarching thesis is that this reversal mirrors the structural decline of the Malay Sultanate and the accompanying ideology of unquestioning loyalty, which could no longer serve as a political ideal in a modern constitutional state.

Summary

De Josselin de Jong uses two classical Malay texts as his evidential baseline. The Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), composed c. 1536 by a member of the hereditary Bendahara lineage, depicts Hang Tuah as a brave but ambitious and spiteful courtier whose career is ultimately played down to flatter the Prime Minister’s family. The Hikayat Hang Tuah (Romance), dating to around 1700, transforms him into a blameless paragon of chivalry born to a woodcutter, armed with a supernatural kris, whose fate is bound to the fate of Malacca itself and who vanishes into a state of immortal hiding. The author treats the gap between these two texts as the “rise” of Hang Tuah from historical figure to mythic national symbol, a process fuelled by centuries of foreign encroachment and the need for a unifying Malay identity.

The “decline” is documented through a cluster of post-1955 cultural events: the 1956 Shaw Brothers film Hang Tuah, which ended not with triumph but with the hero’s anguished question “Did I do right to kill him — or was I wrong?”; the consistent audience cheering for Hang Jebat at re-enacted duels staged by the film’s actors; and a series of literary and media productions from 1958 to 1961 that explicitly rehabilitated Jebat as the true hero. De Josselin de Jong argues that this revaluation was not mere literary fashion but a sociological signal: the values Hang Tuah embodied — blind loyalty to the Sultan, acceptance of hierarchical order, the sacred daulat of kingship — had become politically untenable once the Sultans were reduced to constitutional figureheads and real power shifted to elected parliament and civil service.

The author further contends that Islam itself worked against the Hang Tuah cult. Because the figure is thoroughly un-Islamic in his supernatural attributes, he could function as a national symbol but never as a rallying point for political action, unlike comparable Javanese hero-cults. Simultaneously, the deepening of Islamic consciousness introduced an ethic of individual conscience and personal responsibility that aligned more naturally with Jebat’s assertion of moral autonomy than with Tuah’s passive fealty.

Key Findings

  • The Sejarah Melayu was composed c. 1536 (dated by Sir Richard Winstedt) and depicts Hang Tuah’s death around 1500, some years before the Portuguese conquest of Malacca (p. 141).
  • The Hikayat Hang Tuah dates to approximately 1700, a century and a half after the Annals, and extends Hang Tuah’s life-span to the full 110 years of Malacca’s independence (p. 142).
  • The 1956 Shaw Brothers film Hang Tuah was estimated to have been seen by seven million people across Malaya (p. 145).
  • The rival Cathay Kris Film production Hang Jebat (1961) collected $90,000 in its first ten days of release and “played down the part of Hang Tuah” (p. 147).
  • The first ship acquired by the Indonesian navy was named Hang Tuah, illustrating the figure’s pan-Malay prestige before the decline (p. 144).
  • The Sejarah Melayu is based on the motif of a primeval contract between the first Malay king and his subjects, under which loyalty may be broken only if the ruler subjects a man to shame (p. 150).

Conclusion

De Josselin de Jong concludes that Hang Tuah’s decline as a national hero is structurally inseparable from the decline of the Malay Sultanate as a source of legitimate authority. Once the Sultans ceased to be the apex of the political system and the ideology of daulat lost its practical force, the hero who symbolized perfect fealty to that system became an anachronism. The younger generation, facing the complex moral choices of post-colonial nationhood, found in Hang Jebat’s assertion of individual conscience a more fitting model — one reinforced by the growing emphasis in Malay Islam on private moral examination rather than public hierarchical obedience.

Context

  • The article draws on the two principal classical Malay texts (Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Hang Tuah), contemporary Malay periodicals (Dewan Bahasa), film and radio productions, and the author’s own field observations in Malaya between 1953 and 1957.
  • Historiographically, the essay is notable for applying a sociological-anthropological framework to a literary-critical subject, and for arguing that commercial media (film, radio, popular press) constitute valid primary sources for the study of public opinion and value change in non-Western societies (p. 154).

References