Two Malay tales
H.E. Savage published “Two Malay Tales” in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1926, presenting two Malay folk narratives—one a romantic tale of a banished princess and a raja, the other an etiological story explaining the origin of the croton plant in Malaya—along with a Malay love charm associated with a cigarette. The article serves as a specimen of Malay oral literature collected and rendered into both English translation and original Malay text for a colonial-era scholarly readership.
Summary
The article opens with a short Malay charm (Hikmat dalam Rokok) that purports to induce lovelornness in a beloved through the medium of a cigarette, accompanied by an English verse translation. This is followed by two complete tales, each presented first in English and then in the original Malay.
The first tale, Cherita Raja Tasek, follows a youngest princess who, after expressing her desire to marry Raja Tasek (while her six elder sisters each wish to marry progressively lower-status herdsmen), is banished to the forest by her father. She is taken in by an old woman named Mek Tor, who lives in a banana garden. Through a series of magical interventions—a blue-bottle fly that guides the selection of flowers for a bouquet, and a thunderous overnight transformation of Mek Tor’s humble dwelling into a palace of gold and silver—the princess ultimately reveals herself from within a roll of matting to Raja Tasek, who is so struck by her beauty that he marries her with lavish expenditure.
The second tale, “How the Croton came to Malaya,” is an aetiological narrative in which a jealous secondary wife, Jainab, drowns the principal wife Zulaikha in a river. Zulaikha’s spirit passes successively into a fish, a lime tree, and finally a croton plant, each transformation prompted by Jainab’s attempts to destroy her. The croton is discovered in the virgin jungle by the Malay Raja Abdul Shah, who falls in love with Zulaikha’s daughter Jariah and brings both her and the plant to Malaya. Jariah provides a symbolic explanation for the variegated colours of the croton’s leaves (gold for her mother’s fair skin, red for her blood, green for the river water), and a magician ultimately restores Zulaikha to human form. The tale concludes with Jainab mutilated and enslaved as punishment, and the croton flourishing as “pokok puding.”
Key Findings
- The love charm (Hikmat dalam Rokok) is structured as a seven-line Malay verse with a corresponding English translation, invoking the name “Raja Ali” and the formula la-illaha (p. 138).
- In Cherita Raja Tasek, the seven princesses each declare a desired husband of descending social rank: horse-herd, cattle-herd, buffalo-herd, sheep-herd, goat-herd, dog-herd, and finally Raja Tasek (p. 141).
- The magical agent in the first tale is a “blue-bottle” fly (lalat hijau) that alights on the correct flowers for bouquet-making; the old woman is instructed not to let it be killed (pp. 139, 143).
- The croton tale specifies that Jainab’s punishment includes the cutting off of one arm, one foot, one ear, one nostril, and the blinding of one eye before she is given as a slave to Jariah (pp. 140, 147).
- The croton is identified in the tale as “pokok puding,” and its variegated leaf colours are explained symbolically: gold from the mother’s fair skin, red from her blood, green from the river water (pp. 140, 146).
- The Malay text of the croton tale explicitly states that Raja Abdul Shah is of Malay race (bangsa-nya Melayu) and that the setting is “negeri Melayu ini” (this land of the Malays), grounding the aetiology in a specifically Malay geographical origin (p. 146).
Conclusion
Savage’s presentation is primarily documentary in intent: the two tales are offered as specimens of Malay narrative tradition, with the croton story carrying particular ethnobotanical interest as a folk explanation for the presence and appearance of a plant in the Malayan landscape. The pairing of a romantic tale with an aetiological one, together with the inclusion of a practical charm, suggests an attempt to capture a cross-section of Malay oral culture—romantic, explanatory, and magical—within a single short contribution.
Context
- The article is a product of early colonial-era ethnographic collection, in which a European administrator or scholar records Malay oral narratives for publication in a learned society journal. The Malay texts are transcribed in a romanised orthography typical of the 1920s, with diacritical marks indicating vowel length and consonant quality.
- The inclusion of both English translation and original Malay text reflects the MBRAS convention of making vernacular materials accessible to a bilingual readership of colonial officials and scholars while preserving the source language for philological reference.