Within the last seventy-five years the prose literature has received some notable additions through the writings of Abdulla bin Abdulkadir, a famous moonshi of Singapore, who attained to some distinction under the Straits Government, being sent once or twice on missions to native states. He was born in Malacca toward the close of the last century, of Arab-Malay parentage, and received the ordinary education of a Malay lad of good family. After Singapore was founded, in 1819, he moved thither, where he thenceforth spent most of his life. His most important works are the Hikayat Abdulla, an autobiography, the Pelayaran Abdulla, an account of his trip for the government to Kelantan, and a narrative of his pilgrimage to Mecca made in the year 1854.
Without a doubt Abdulla was the most cultured Malay who ever wrote. In his capacity as teacher he was often called upon to help missionaries with their translations of the Bible into Malay; though a devout Mohammedan, he was more than ordinarily liberal in belief, and quite willing to see the contest between Christianity and Islam go on fairly and on its merits. He once assisted a Mr. Thompsen, of Malacca, in translating portions of the Scriptures, but it was a thankless task, for the missionary was obstinate, and thought he knew more about the language than the moonshi himself. As a result, such wretched Malay got into the work that Abdulla felt called upon in his autobiography to set himself right before the world. This is what he says:
"... But let it be known to all gentlemen who read my autobiography that where there are wrong expressions or absurd Malay phrases in Mr. Thompsen's translation they must consider well the restraint put upon me, wherein I could neither add nor subtract a word without the concurrence of Mr. Thompsen. Now, because of all the circumstances mentioned here, let no gentleman rail at my character, for I was merely Mr. Thompsen's moonshi or instructor. I acknowledge I am not destitute of faults, but truly by God's grace I am able to distinguish between right and wrong in all that relates to the idiom of the Malay language, for I have made it my study. I did not attain it by hearing, nor by the way, nor in the bustle of the crowd."
But it is in poetry that we must look for whatever of originality and beauty there is in Malay literature, a fact not to be wondered at if we consider the softness and mellifluence of the language, which lends itself easily to the requirements of rhyme and rhythm. Two chief forms of poetry are recognized—the pantun and the shaïr.
The Pantun.—The pantun in Malay literature corresponds to the lyric verse of Western lands. It consists of one or many quatrains, as the case may be, the lines usually from ten to twelve syllables in length. However, if worse comes to worst, the Malay poet with true poetic license suits himself in preference to others, and frequently employs as few as six or as many as thirteen syllables in a line. The length of a syllable is determined by tonic accent, but penult syllables not ending in a consonant are long, those ending in silent i are short. But here, too, the Malay often departs from theory, and his rhymes, instead of being always exact, are constructed for the eye and not for the ear; and as for the short lines, they have to be drawled out into a legitimate scansion. The lines are not written one below another as with us, but the second opposite the first, the third under the second and opposite the fourth, and so on.
The pantun is much employed in improvisation, the stanzas being recited alternately by the two taking part. To the Malayan mind the beauty of this kind of verse lies in the artistic perfection of each quatrain by which it is made to veil some charming metaphor, which in turn serves in the last two lines to point a moral or express some sentiment of love or friendship, depending on the allegory of the preceding. To illustrate:
Tinggih tinggih pokok lamburi
Sayang puchok-nia meniapa awan
Habis teloh puwas kuchari
Bagei punei menchari kawan.
Bulan trang bintang berchaya
Burong gagah bermakan padi
Teka tuan tiada perchaya
Bela dada, melihat hati.
The lamburi tree is tall, tall,
Its branches sweep the sky;
My search is vain, and o'er is all,
Like a mate-lorn dove am I.
Clear is the moon, with stars agleam,
The raven wastes in the padi field;
O my beloved, when false I seem,
Open my breast, my heart is revealed.