MALAY LITERATURE.
By R. CLYDE FORD.
The Malay has a literature peculiarly his own, and in it comes to light all that subtle appreciation of Nature which marks him as a Naturmensch, but not a savage. This lore of his race he carries mostly in his memory, for to reduce it to writing has been, until recently, a task at once laborious and scholarly, and the ordinary Malay, living in the ease of perpetual summer, is neither. Still, there are dog-eared old manuscripts which circulate from one village or campong to another, and these are often read aloud in the evenings to eager companies. And it makes a scene never to be forgotten, to see a dozen people seated in the shadows around some old man and to listen to the mellow cadences of his voice as he reads to them a tale of the olden time, of the great days of his race, before the foreigner's ships had scared the fish from the bays or turned them into noisy harbors; the sparkling stars peep through the ragged, whispering fronds of the palm trees, the yellow light of the damar torch shines on eager faces, crickets chirp in the grass, and from afar comes the booming of the sea borne on the soft breath of the night wind.
Malay literature, like most literatures, has had an ancient and a modern period. In the former we behold a primitive people dominated by Sanskrit life and civilization, and naturally enough the literature of this time is mostly translations of Sanskrit poems and romances, or at least productions inspired by such, and full of allusions to Hindu mythology. Probably to this early time may be traced such works as Sri Rama, a free translation of the Ramayana; the Hikayat Pancha Tantra, an adaptation of the Hitaspodêsa; Radin Mantri, a history of the love affairs of a Javan royal prince; the Shaïr Bidasari, an epic; and several other such epics and romances.
One must not think that the language of these works is old-fashioned or obsolete, as Beowulf and Chaucer are to us, or the Niebelungen Lied in German. On the contrary, they are full of Arabic words and many other marks of recent composition; but it is the matter, the conditions of life described, the evident antiquity of the very feeling of the productions, that lead one to refer them to the early period.
There are also some works that are genuinely Malay in origin and inspiration, and probably of a date that would put them between the ancient and modern periods. Of such is Hong Tuah, a story of a prince of Malacca who was a kind of King Arthur of his day. This work exists in several manuscripts, some of which are in England, one in Leyden, and one or two in the East Indies, and the date of the oldest is not before 1172 of the Hegira. Considering the fact that the year 1317 of the Mohammedan era does not commence till May 12, 1899, we thus see that many of the manuscripts of Malay literature are of no great antiquity. Another of these intermediate works is the Sejarat Malayu, or Malay Annals, which narrates the history of the Malays of Malacca, and their heroic defense against the Portuguese in the year 1511. It is divided into chapters, and is about the only notable historical composition in the language.
The modern period is that period which marks the domination of Islam in the far East, the period in which the Malay mind has adjusted itself to a new faith and a new education. It is hard to tell when Mohammedanism first obtained a real foothold among the Malays, but probably not much before the fourteenth century. However, the conquest when once effected was complete, and to-day the people of Tanah Malayu are among the strictest followers of the Prophet.
In a certain sense this period of the literature has been fruitful, but not so fruitful as the former one. Originality has been checked and imagination deadened, and the result is seen in a loss of sprightliness and vivacity. Works of morals and philosophy and compilations of Mohammedan law, have flourished. Still, we find some prose works of this period which are commendable; they even have some of the spirit of the earlier writings by which, no doubt, they were inspired; among these may be mentioned the Tadju Elsalathin, or Crown of Kings, by a mendicant monk, and the Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim, a religious romance of some beauty and pathos.