Two folktales of Kelantan
This short note by Anker Rentse presents two Kelantan folktales concerning a primordial catastrophe, collected in connection with the major flood of 1926 (p. 141).
Summary
Rentse opens by noting that the 1926 Kelantan flood was described by local elders as unprecedented in living memory, and then turns to W. Skeat’s 1901 collection for a related deluge narrative in which animal fights—culminating in a bout between dogs and cats—trigger a flood that drowns the entire population of Kelantan except a few firewood gatherers in the hills (p. 141). He then offers a second version, told to him in Kota Bharu by Che Ahamad, Bedari to Tengku Khalid, in which the same dog-and-cat provocation causes Tuan Allah to hurl the mountain Gunong Noring from Perak into Kelantan, killing all festival-goers except a single pregnant woman who becomes the sole survivor (p. 141).
The note closes with a brief etiological appendix: the coconut palms near Tadoh by Gunong Noring are said to remain bent from the mountain’s impact, and a berhala (a mounted horseman figure) once stood on the summit, its poisonous breath repelled only after a seven-day main peteri seance and the sacrifice of a pink buffalo (p. 142).