Commissioned by the royal court, the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals consists of the genealogy of the Melaka Sultanate, accounts of ceremonial customs, diplomatic missions, and court intrigues.Footnote 1 Despite being a work of historical literature, historical verisimilitude is of secondary importance to the author. Originally titled Sulalat-us-Salatin, the ‘genealogy of kings’, the text has been more generally known as Malay Annals or Sejarah Melayu ever since the publication of John Leyden's English translation and Munshi Abdullah's edition in the nineteenth century.Footnote 2 Both titles have unfortunately achieved greater recognisability in the popular imagination, if not unknowingly canonising the text as the history of the Malays. Throughout the Sejarah Melayu, moral judgement is tacitly made to impart lessons for prospective rulers and court officials.Footnote 3 Interspersed with moral anecdotes and injunctions, the text is unconcerned about documenting the past other than to abide by ‘the needs of the present’.Footnote 4 Included in the preface is the decree of the king, declaring outright the ideological underpinnings of writing the chronicle:
It is my wish that the Treasury shall make a chronicle setting forth the genealogy of the Malay Rajas and the ceremonial of their courts, for the information of my descendants who come after me, that they may be conversant with the history and derive profit therefrom.Footnote 5
Here, history is in the idea that knowledge of the past could benefit the future of a designated audience. The literature of the Malay courts as such was not produced for silent reading, but for performance, to be read aloud to regale audiences with their oral-aural eloquence.Footnote 6 By being heard, the text is activated, and the meanings and truths thereby conveyed, emerge more luminously.Footnote 7
In recognition of the political function the Sejarah Melayu performs, the scope of this article is confined to a select portion involving three consecutive victims of unjust violence before the fall of Singapura.Footnote 8 The victims are Pasai mystic Tuan Jana Khatib, an unnamed child, and an unnamed daughter of the state's treasury officer Sang Ranjuna Tapa, all of whose victimhood is a direct consequence of slander and jealousy, insinuating the imprudence of the ruling kings. The reading will proceed with a conviction that these accounts of unjust violence, beyond signalling the fall of Singapura, set forth the dawn of Melaka. And within this epochal shift of power from Singapura to Melaka, violence emerges as a constant to bypass moral meltdowns, acting as a rhetorical engine that drives and intuits what must arrive.
Probing the depictions of violence in the early parts of the Sejarah Melayu allows one to look deeper into the preconditions for the founding of Melaka that form the crux of the genealogy. This specific focus on the chronicle's beginning is partly indebted to O.W. Wolters’ scrupulous reading of the text. Duty-bound to present the vision of ‘uninterrupted sovereignty’, the author of the Sejarah Melayu is essentially a ‘genealogist’, claims Wolters.Footnote 9 According to the Sejarah Melayu, Melaka is founded immediately after Singapura, thereby purporting an uninterrupted sequence of reigns from Srivijaya to Singapura and to Melaka. For Wolters, the Singapura episode is strategically lodged in between Srivijaya and Melaka to create a chronology that elides an embarrassing interregnum in Malay history.Footnote 10 This gap can be situated in the eleventh century, which marks a turning point for Srivijaya's dominant position as an entrepôt in coastal Sumatra. From the Chola invasion of the Straits of Melaka in 1025 to the subsequent rise of Malayu-Jambi, in addition to intensified Javanese trade with China, these successive setbacks had contributed to awkward moments of hiatus and ignominy in the retelling of a Malay royal genealogy.Footnote 11 ‘The function of the Singapore story,’ as Wolters avers, ‘would thus have been to provide evidence of the way Malay sovereignty was represented by the family which ruled in Palembang and eventually in Malacca.’Footnote 12
Grafted onto the preceding passages of Melaka's establishment, the ‘Singapore story’ is literally the pre-text to power. It is an episode symptomatic of the genealogical structure, since, what remains at stake in the crafting of the Sejarah Melayu is the genealogist's overt desire to guarantee the unbroken dominion of his rulers. And in the making of this genealogy, it is violence, as this article argues, that helps shape a sense of continuity by creating ruptures to circumvent moral dilemmas so that a genealogy unfolds uninterruptedly in the hands of the scribe. By foregrounding the narratives of violence in the text, this study is historiographical in nature, that is to say, it examines the written discourse of history instead of history in itself. It is principally concerned with the use of violence as a rhetorical force in re-inscribing the past, and hence, its scope is more literary and historiographical as opposed to historical.
It must be stated beforehand that none of the selected incidents are described as ‘violent’ in the text. Using ‘violence’ as an analytical framework gives an etic perspective. Contemporary Malay equivalents of ‘violence’, such as ‘kekerasan’ and ‘keganasan’, are starkly absent. The root ‘keras’ is mostly used to describe a character's demeanour such as ‘strict’, ‘stubborn’, or ‘harsh’ rather than a violent event.Footnote 13 Words like ‘ganas’ and ‘buas’ are intended for criminals.Footnote 14 Wars and conflicts resulting in the deaths of many are never described as violent. Excessive use of force is described in the chronicle as ‘kesangatan’, meaning ‘excessiveness’, which acts as a neutral qualifier.Footnote 15 The closest term is perhaps ‘zalim’, meaning ‘cruel’, a characteristic attributed to oppressive rulers. And yet, ‘zalim’ is sparingly used.Footnote 16 Given these varying contexts, what constitutes ‘violence’ in the Sejarah Melayu refers not only to the brute power of conferring death, but the moral deficit of the sovereigns who wield excessive, absolute power.Footnote 17
Power and violence are natural bedfellows. Filtering the politesse of sovereign rule, one is left with violence. Yet, existing scholarship on the Sejarah Melayu gravitates towards discussing the ideology of power without laying stress on the violence that ensues. The view that the Sejarah Melayu is a political text, a legitimation narrative, articulating notions of justice and power, has been of considerable longevity.Footnote 18 The entwinement between traditional concepts of sovereignty (daulat) and treason (derhaka) too has been recognised as the basis upon which status hierarchy is played out and contested.Footnote 19 But inherent in these formulations is the widespread supposition that unjust rulers will receive divine retribution in due course; that a prophetic vision of justice will somehow prevail. Ergo, the collapse of Singapura, when set within this scheme of theodicy, illustrates a kind of moral lesson. A closer look at the indispensability of violence in the Sejarah Melayu, however, reveals that the maintenance of the status quo demands that sovereignty prevails, irrespective of injustice.
In a distinctive essay elucidating the use of violence in a different variant of the Sejarah Melayu, Abdul Rahman Haji Ismail speaks of how ‘violence from above’ (kekerasan dari atas) is instigated for justificatory purposes.Footnote 20 When a violent punishment is incommensurate with the offence, he adds, conflicts and transgression happen.Footnote 21 Citing instances of unjust killings in the Sejarah Melayu, Syed Hussein Alatas appraises how power dominates through an insistence on ‘the demarcation line between what is permissible and what is prohibited’.Footnote 22 One could further add that violence is situated precisely at this threshold of permissibility. And by transgressing the threshold, violence carries power into effect. This article therefore examines how violence is emplotted in the Sejarah Melayu to transgress the confines of a historical narrative. It matters, then, how violence is storied, and how violence creates ruptures to bypass narrative inconsistencies, in order to maintain the structure of a genealogy. If the Sejarah Melayu, as the royal decree states, belongs to a work that brings ‘profit’ (beroleh faedahlah) to royal descendants, it is necessary to interrogate how violence exists within a composition to tell a ‘profitable’ story that preserves the status quo of sovereignty.Footnote 23 The transgressive capacity of violence is that which preserves the absolutism of power: it suspends, rather than enforces, justice. In shifting the scholarly focus from power to violence, this study highlights victimhood over kingship, it analyses the symbolic and rhetorical significance of violence, it looks at power from the receiving end, from the shadow it casts on the victims, and to read history—and historiography—against the grain.
The subsequent section opens with a summary of the three episodes of unjust violence. The focus then shifts to the ways in which violence is approached in this reading, looking at how victims of violence are scapegoated to become surrogate victims, as well as the implication of narrating death against the current of history. The article then gives prominence to all three victims of violence in each episode to explicate how each character embodies alterity vis-à-vis the Malay court. Typifying the figure of the foreigner is Tuan Jana Khatib whose magical prowess rivals that of the ruling king. The second victim is a child indifferent to the status quo and whose future potential triggers a fatal accusation. The third victim is Sang Ranjuna Tapa's daughter, a royal concubine, constituting the female subject victimised by slander. In all three accounts of unjust violence, the foreigner, the child, and the concubine are scapegoated. As surrogate victims, their crimes are seldom discernible, but in their embodiment of alterity, they bring about distinctive moments of transgression and are easily implicated in crimes of passion. Rulers and accusers who incriminate the innocent, on the other hand, are never brought to justice. Violence, then, as the penultimate section shows, is woven into a narrative not to presage a divine eventuation of justice, as is usually assumed, but to reinstate sovereign hegemony. To end, the article considers the aftermath of violence in restoring order and in suppressing the perils of transgression it initially sets forth.
When Singapura falls: Surrogate victims in the space of death
The end of Singapura begins with an episode about Tuan Jana Khatib, a Pasai mystic who has just arrived in Singapura.Footnote 24 As he saunters past the royal palace of Singapura, he espies the queen who is eyeing him keenly. He then casts a magic spell to turn a single betel palm in his vicinity into two trees. This display of magic infuriates the king of Singapura, Paduka Seri Maharaja, who then orders his execution on charges of trying to impress the queen by demonstrating his prowess. Just at the moment Tuan Jana Khatib is executed, his blood drips to the ground, his body vanishes and reappears in Langkawi. A drop of his blood coagulates into a rock that remains in Singapura to this day.
After a period of time, a school of swordfish strikes Singapura. With their snouts, they stab the people on the shore. Singapura takes fright at the ambush. Paduka Seri Maharaja surveys the coast with his ministers and courtiers, and commands his soldiers to fortify the island with hard wood palisades (betis).Footnote 25 But the swordfish are able to leap over the fence, killing even more of his people. Then comes a young boy who recommends Paduka Seri Maharaja to barricade the island with banana stems. The king agrees and the shore is immediately lined with banana stems, putting an end to the catastrophe as the swordfish snouts are stuck inside the stems. Soon enough, the child's genius draws unnecessary attention from wary courtiers, who hoodwink Paduka Seri Maharaja into killing the child. Upon execution, it is said that the consequence of his death shall be borne by Singapura. After the reign of Paduka Seri Maharaja that has lasted for twelve years and six months, Sultan Iskandar Syah succeeds to the throne.
Sultan Iskandar Syah has a treasury officer named Sang Ranjuna Tapa whose beautiful daughter is one of the ruler's concubines. Her incomparable beauty ultimately spawns jealousy among spiteful concubines. To get rid of her, they accuse her of infidelity. An enraged Sultan Iskandar Syah instantly orders that she be exposed at one end of a market.Footnote 26 Her father, Sang Ranjuna Tapa, is deeply humiliated by the punishment and connives with Majapahit to lay waste to Singapura. As a result, Singapura is sacked by Majapahit. Innumerable lives are sacrificed and their blood inundates the shores of Singapura, which, to this day, can still be seen on the country's plain. For betraying his ruler, Sang Ranjuna Tapa and his wife turn into stone that exists to this day. As Singapura is defeated, Sultan Iskandar Syah flees northwards and settles at the Bertam River. There, he finally establishes a new kingdom called Melaka, the paragon of Malay power in the Sejarah Melayu.
Perhaps there is little wonder why the victims in this tripartite expression of violence comprise a foreigner, a child, and a woman. All are essentially scapegoats, sacrificed for the legacy of a kingdom that perseveres violently and miraculously. Within the ecology of the scapegoat mechanism, René Girard detects a tendency that violence always impinges on subordinated groups; they are ‘either outside or on the fringes of society’.Footnote 27
What we are dealing with, therefore, are exterior or marginal individuals, incapable of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants. Their status as foreigners or enemies, their servile condition, or simply their age prevents these future victims from fully integrating themselves into the community.Footnote 28
In the Sejarah Melayu, the symbolic elimination of the foreigner, the child, and the concubineFootnote 29 echoes the Girardian sacrificial logic that identifies a ‘surrogate victim’ as a scapegoat who provides a justification for the recourse to bloodletting, if anything, to atone for the sovereign's lapses into fits of envy and jealousy.Footnote 30 The endemic violence that punctures the Sejarah Melayu is also analogous to what Michael Taussig formulates as the ‘space of death’, within which terror is deployed to establish cultural hegemony over the production of truth and meaning.Footnote 31 At once destructive and generative, the space of death permits ‘terror to stun permanently, yet also revive and empower with new life’.Footnote 32 In the three instances of victimisation, unjust violence produces surrogate victims while setting forth a genealogy that necessitates the fall of Singapura and the birth of Melaka.
The discursive role of violence in buttressing state power has been convincingly argued by Tony Day in his study of Southeast Asian literary texts.Footnote 33 Using a plethora of examples, Day observes how the ubiquity of violence and death is represented as ‘beautiful’ and bears a transformative capacity that is likewise ‘destructive and creative’.Footnote 34 Is this not the operation of ‘necropolitics’, to borrow Achille Mbembe's term, where the ultimate expression of sovereignty lies in ‘upholding the work of death’?Footnote 35 Pronouncing who deserves to live and whose life is to be disposed of marks the essence of sovereign power. It is evident in the Sejarah Melayu that unjust rulers—from Paduka Sri Maharaja to Sultan Iskandar Syah, or even Sultan Mahmud Syah, who is beyond our scope of analysis—continue to live and rule regardless of their arbitrary killings. While the narrative arc has the effect of incriminating the rulers, its outcome is predictable. The Malay kingdom may rise and fall as a result of the rulers’ misdeeds, leading to further catastrophes and deaths, but once the kingdom is reestablished elsewhere, their reign continues unequivocally for more than a decade. The victims, meanwhile, are swiftly annihilated without hesitation.
Hence, the convention of reading the Sejarah Melayu as a ‘moral discourse’ begs critical evaluation. This framework, which usually attributes the fall of Singapura to the workings of moral divine providence, goes back to an agreement of reciprocity between the king and his subjects otherwise known as the Bukit Siguntang covenant. The Bukit Siguntang covenant is a contract between Demang Lebar Daun and Sri Tri Buana. Both entered into an agreement of mutual reciprocity when the former married his daughter to the latter and abdicated his throne in favour of the latter.Footnote 36 A significant component of the Malay ethos, the contract forms the cornerstone of harmonious relations between the ruler and the ruled. Sovereignty (daulat) guarantees unstinting loyalty from the ruled who must not commit treason (derhaka), and in return, the ruler must rule wisely, and not treat his subjects in a manner which brings disgrace to the realm, which could elicit treason.Footnote 37 But divine retribution in the Sejarah Melayu clearly evokes a different effect: as a succession of victims are unfairly punished due to the rulers’ ignorance, the latter hardly gain any wisdom from their previous miscalculations.
To return to Mbembe, ‘terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known telos of history’.Footnote 38 The narrativisation of violence signifies the space of death within which the subject is ‘cast into the incessant movement of history’.Footnote 39 Palace literature as such is an absolute expression of necropower, where the space of death is introduced to chronicle an uninterrupted genealogy, to engender truth and impress cultural norms upon the receiving Malay public. Such power to manage the distribution of violence is manifested absolutely in the Sejarah Melayu. Genealogical knowledge and truths are produced precisely through this inscription of violence that finds ways to conjure new sets of social relations and to rid the court of all embarrassing impediments.Footnote 40 In this regime of truth-making and necropolitics, history is written and renewed, as if from a clean slate after a sequence of crises. When the Sejarah Melayu is foisted upon the Malay public as a historical text, terror is disguised as history. With the collapse of the Singapura kingdom, the injustices committed by its rulers are expediently elided, and the sequence of reigns is guaranteed.
The foreigner: Rivalry with Pasai
The victim in the first narrative unit, Tuan Jana Khatib, is a foreigner from Pasai, a geopolitical rival of the Melaka Sultanate. He is a stranger and foe outside the body politic of the Malay centre. Keeping his gaze fixed on the queen who is looking at him, regrettably cost him his life. But it is made clear that Tuan Jana Khatib is at the receiving end in the exchange of gazes, as the Malay prefixes attached to the verbs convey: ‘maka Tuan Puteri pun ada menengok, maka terpandang oleh Tuan Jana Khatib’.Footnote 41 The verb ‘menengok’, meaning ‘to see’, suggests that the queen takes an active role in instigating the interaction. Meanwhile, the second verb ‘terpandang’ is formed with the passive prefix ‘ter-’ and indicates a state of being seen. In all likelihood, the queen is the suitress, enamoured by the presence of Tuan Jana Khatib who is admirably described in the text as ‘hamba Allah di Pasai’, literally, the ‘servant of Allah in Pasai’.Footnote 42 Reacting to the queen's instigation, Tuan Jana Khatib magically splits the betel palm into two. No less intriguing is the careful selection of the word ‘ditilikkan’ in describing Tuan Jana Khatib's action.Footnote 43 In a paragraph already replete with a crisscross of gazes, the word ‘tilik’, meaning ‘to glance at’, intimates yet another ocular experience.Footnote 44 Is Tuan Jana Khatib mustering his attention on a tree as he attempts a distraction from what is otherwise an amorous gaze from the queen?
There is much room for speculation as to why a betel palm is invoked in this fleeting encounter. Given the playful rhetoric of Malay court tradition, the use of the Malay word ‘pinang’ for ‘betel’ may be subject to metaphorical interpretations. ‘Pinang’, as it is, denotes the areca nut, but in the wider cultural context, it carries a supplementary meaning of marital or sexual union. ‘The offering and acceptance of betel,’ as Anthony Reid explains, ‘were so much identified with courtship and betrothal.’Footnote 45 Serving the betel quid is often a precursor to discussions on matrimony and is an integral social lubricant among Southeast Asian societies. Chewing the quid releases the areca juice, which creates a mild euphoric sensation, allowing interlocutors to ease into amicable conversation. The Malay linguistic tradition abounds with betel imagery implying romance and courtship: denominalising the noun ‘pinang’ brings about the verb ‘meminang’, which means ‘to ask in marriage’; while proverbial sayings such as ‘bagai pinang dibelah dua’, literally ‘to split an areca nut into two’, implies ‘similitude’ or ‘a compatible relationship’.Footnote 46
If commissioned Malay scribes were esteemed literati adept at rhetoric, it is not a stretch to conjecture that the betel palm is an analogy of romance, in which the queen reveals her interest in Tuan Jana Khatib, a man of spiritual standing. But to salvage the reputation of the royalty, the queen's illicit flirtation with him is artfully and diplomatically concealed in metaphorical garb.Footnote 47 The splitting of the betel palm tree may further signal Tuan Jana Khatib's outright rejection of the queen's advance, making him blameless of any offence against the king. Yet, his action whets more than it allays the suspicion of the king, Paduka Seri Maharaja. Out of jealousy, Paduka Seri Maharaja exclaims: ‘That's the sort of man Tuan Jana Khatib is! No sooner does he know that the queen is looking at him than he shows off his powers!’Footnote 48 The king then gives the order for his execution.
That Tuan Jana Khatib is a learned man originating from Pasai suggests that his foreign identity comes into play in the unfolding of his tragic death. In the Sejarah Melayu, Pasai is recognised as a major centre of Islam, for envoys are sent to Pasai twice by the Melaka Sultanate to seek answers on theological matters.Footnote 49 Letters received from Pasai too are accorded considerable prestige: ‘If it was a letter from Pasai it was received with full ceremonial equipment.’Footnote 50 Yet, beyond giving praise, these episodes also expose Pasai's ignorance and hypocrisy—an attitude symptomatic of Melaka's ambivalent relations with Pasai.Footnote 51 Mentions of Pasai end with additional commentary disapproving of Pasai's misreading of Melaka's generosity:
The three countries [Melaka, Pasai, and Haru] (were of equal greatness, so that) their Rajas, however they stood to each other in point of age, still sent ‘greetings’ only to each other, though the people of Pasai were wont to read as ‘obeisance’ the word ‘greetings’ in any letter, no matter whence it came.Footnote 52
To prevent Pasai from misreading Melaka's ‘greetings’ as ‘obeisance’, the minister Bendahara Seri Maharaja even decides to avoid writing a letter altogether, suggesting instead to ‘send an envoy but without a letter and we order the envoy to commit the message to memory’.Footnote 53 Beyond these dilemmas demanding diplomatic finesse, fifteenth-century Melaka was competing with Pasai in trade as it adopted Islam and partook in the Islamic trading network, attracting Gujarati Muslim merchants who were then frequenting Pasai.Footnote 54 Insofar as Pasai and Melaka competed for influence in the fifteenth century, Pasai mystic Tuan Jana Khatib and Singapura's Paduka Seri Maharaja, too, engage in a rivalry in the Sejarah Melayu. Contextualising the seventeenth-century Sejarah Melayu text, Ulrich Kratz notes this mirroring between distinct temporal dimensions:
the Sejarah Melayu was composed at a time when a relatively weak Johor endeavoured to strengthen its position as the rightful heir to the Melakan tradition; and it is no accident that what is described here is the delicate situation when the ruler of Melaka who always expected deference from the other Malay rulers, was to convey his own deference to another ruler.Footnote 55
Such a historiographical approach is typical of court literature that inscribes dynastic genealogy and projects power through text when crises of power occur.Footnote 56 By judiciously composing and reworking the Sejarah Melayu, the diplomatic insecurity that once shrouded Johor in the seventeenth century is delicately recast as diplomatic contestation between Melaka (or Singapura as its predecessor) and Pasai, allegorised in the form of Paduka Seri Maharaja's jealousy levelled against Tuan Jana Khatib. The image of Pasai as a foreign rival is effortlessly transposed onto a character known as the servant of Allah, possessing great mystical prowess, captivating even the attention of the queen. If history is written from the centre of power, the killing of Tuan Jana Khatib in the Sejarah Melayu stands as a metonymic representation of Melaka's imperial desire to eclipse Pasai.
The child: The threat of akal
Almost instantly, the death of Tuan Jana Khatib occasions the scourge of a swordfish attack on Singapura. The onslaught continues until a child proposes a workable solution that overthrows the king's ineffectual proposal of barricading Singapura with hard wood palisades. As soon as the threat of the swordfish is averted, Paduka Seri Maharaja is warned of the child's dangerous future potential. ‘Your Highness,’ the conspiring court officials alert him, ‘that boy will grow into a very clever man. It would be as well to be rid of him.’Footnote 57 The allegation makes clear that the child must be put to death for a crime he has yet to commit. Due emphasis must be accorded to the use of the Malay word ‘akal’, herein translated as ‘clever’. Akal is derived from the Arabic ‘‘aql’ and denotes ‘intellect’ or ‘rationality’. It is a trait expected of adults but lacking in children who too easily succumb to indiscipline and instinctive passion.Footnote 58 Recounted in this story of the swordfish attack is therefore a child who acts contrariwise. He is a boy whose intellect rivals that of an adult. By calling into question the king's idea, he has unknowingly transgressed the threshold of permissibility with his unsolicited advice.
Adding weight to the indecorum is the very juvenescence of a child. Within the purview of Malay feudalism, the boy's intellect is ill-suited to his age. Indifferent to the trifling social protocols engrossing the royal court, he operates unpredictably and fails to grasp the severity of his transgression. Insofar as the court officials are concerned, it is the child's future potential that poses an eminent threat to the king. In an insightful reading of the swordfish incident, Roger Tol pays close attention to the child's recommendation of using soft banana stems for the barricades instead hard wood (betis). He adduces ‘the opposition hard versus soft’ as a significant symbolism reflecting ‘the use of force versus the use of brains, troops versus a boy, the powerful versus the powerless’.Footnote 59 When ‘hard’ is outplayed by ‘soft’, hierarchy is upended. Fully cognisant of what the child is capable of when his ‘intellect develops’ (besarlah akalnya), the court officials appeal to the king to order his execution. Shrewdly scripted in this consternation is perhaps the imprudence and juvenile behaviour of the king. If the capacity to reason is a palpable sign of maturity, an adult overshadowed by a child thus has his intellect ridiculed.Footnote 60 Falling prey to accusation, Paduka Seri Maharaja demands the execution of the child as a preventive measure. Hence the boy is executed, not only for his exceptional intelligence, but for what he is destined to become.
The figure of a child is threatening because he is marginal, inadequately socialised, while remaining unaware of the violation he is bound to commit. The ‘new-born Malay child’, says J.L. Massard, encapsulates ‘different potential natures’ and possesses ‘a relative perviousness, or receptivity to influences coming from certain domains, such as that of the supranatural world or that of animals’.Footnote 61 Being a liminal figure, the child is permeable to forces beyond the immediate realm. Indeed, at the moment of executing the child, it is said that ‘the guilt of his death was laid on Singapura’.Footnote 62 In the Malay worldview, causing a premature death is akin to tempting a curse, and among all stages of life, the adolescent soul is prone to hold a vengeful grudge against its executioner.Footnote 63 Since the child is a symbol of innocence and vitality, child death is always unwarranted, untimely, and can be construed as—to borrow an anthropological explication—a kind of ‘bad death’.Footnote 64 Horrific consequences ensue from bad death for ‘the victim has been forced to relinquish life prematurely with the result that his embittered ghost is liable to return to afflict the survivors’.Footnote 65 What is threatening about bad death is the possibility of a spectral return of the accursed soul, whose lifespan has been brutally truncated. The use of the Malay phrase ‘menanggungkan haknya’ in the passage, which can be translated as ‘to lay his rights as a burden’, reinforces the illegitimacy of the killing and implies that retaliation is forthcoming.Footnote 66
To offer another angle from which to probe the symbolic significance of killing a child in the narrative of violence, one can turn to two Barus chronicles, which consist of a similar swordfish incident. Produced in the nineteenth century, the Barus chronicles—namely the Asal Keturunan Raja Barus and Tambo Barus Hilir (Sejarah Tuanku Batu Badan)—adopt the swordfish attack episode from the Sejarah Melayu corpus and refashion it to recount the genealogy of Barus.Footnote 67 As in the Sejarah Melayu, the swordfish incident is employed for the same purposes. In both the Barus chronicles, the victim is a child who befriends Sultan Ibrahim, the prospective founder of the Barus kingdom hailing from Tarusan. In the Asal Keturunan Raja Barus, when the child is first prompted for an idea to fend off the swordfish attack, he is reticent about it: ‘It is of no use for me to say it, for people will resent me.’Footnote 68 In the preceding passages, the child is expressly dubious of the competence of the chiefs (penghulu), whom he characterises as ‘orang tuha-tuha’ or old folks. His retort suggests an awareness of consequence should a person of lesser seniority, such as himself, offer an advice. Only when the king summons the child does he relinquish his silence, thereby revealing his ‘akal’ in suggesting the use of banana stems to barricade the shore.Footnote 69 A clear demarcation between the young and old comes to the fore. The Tambo Barus Hilir illustrates a similar dichotomy, since the senior minister, known simply as ‘menteri yang tuha’, is rivalled by a resourceful young boy known as ‘budak kecil’ or ‘anak kecil’, meaning ‘small child’, whose ‘akal’ is unmatched.Footnote 70 Once the child's proposal of setting up a blockade of banana stems accomplishes its purpose, his fate is more or less sealed. The minister's envy of his genius sounds his death knell.Footnote 71 Acting on ministerial advice, the king commands the child's death. Sultan Ibrahim, upon realising his parents’ complicity in his friend's death, is deeply aggrieved and parts from his family. He embarks on a journey during which he founds the kingdom of Barus. As a subsidiary character, the child is introduced, and killed, with the sole purpose of necessitating Sultan Ibrahim's departure from Tarusan. Violence, again, is necessary as a plot device, for the child's death brings about the condition for renewal and the impetus to establish another kingdom afresh.
A trope becomes evident as the swordfish incident is variously outlined above. More than a vignette of moral collapse, an overlooked rhetoric undergirding this specific episode is the recalibration of power, the violent replacement of the old with the new.Footnote 72 In the case of the Sejarah Melayu, this betokens the receding of Singapura and the birth of Melaka. The swordfish attack and its aftermath are interpolated into a narrative as an enabler of future potential. In this transgressive and forceful advancing of power, a scapegoat is sacrificed. The child becomes a ‘surrogate victim’ par excellence, scapegoated to necessitate a crisis that permits power to reinvent its grounding. Indeed, from a Girardian perspective, especially vulnerable to the violence of rivalry is a child, because the child neither possesses the means to reciprocate, nor is he conversant with the social protocols that consign him to victimhood.Footnote 73 Often, as Girard intriguingly puts it, the child ‘reaches out for his model's objects with unsuspecting innocence’ while the adult would ‘interpret the child's actions in terms of usurpation’.Footnote 74 And the inevitable outcome in this relation is the unjust violence inflicted upon the child.
In the Sejarah Melayu as in the two Barus chronicles, the significance of ‘akal’ is fleshed out to reconceive a new kingdom that will possess greater power and moral legitimacy than that of its predecessor. At the forefront of this tragic tension, manifested through the envious allegation made by conspiring adults against the child, is the familiar collision of akal and nafsu.Footnote 75 To the extent that the killing of the child signals the deprivation of reason, it brings to fruition a moral meltdown through which power can be radically reinvented, and the genealogical structure maintained. Unjust violence creates a necessary paralysis to stun and reshuffle the conditions of narrative. It is this narratological impulse of violence that inscribes power into history.
The concubine: The spread of fitnah
The death of the child does not deter power from slipping further into moral ruin. Paduka Seri Maharaja's inept judgement is doomed to recur during the reign of his successor Sultan Iskandar Syah. The victim, this time, is a royal concubine, the unnamed daughter of the state's treasury officer Sang Ranjuna Tapa. There is scant description of her character apart from her charming appearance, but this trait alone is deemed sufficient to relate her story. Being the ruler's most treasured jewel, she inspires jealousy among the other concubines who accuse her of misdemeanour. The concubines eventually succeed in persuading an irked Sultan Iskandar Syah to inflict a humiliating punishment on her.
What needs to be noted in this narrative is the use of the provocative word ‘fitnah’, which can be translated as ‘slander’ or ‘calumny’, signalling the spread of misinformation with an intention to harm.Footnote 76 As an Arabic origin word, fitnah carries immense weight and must be used with considerable discretion. In Malay sources, the dissemination of fitnah is coterminous to wreaking destruction; accusing others of fitnah, too, is a grave allegation for it tarnishes one's reputation by suggesting that the person's statement should not be taken as reliable truth.Footnote 77 In her commentary on the nineteenth-century Tuhfat al-Nafis, Virginia Matheson regards fitnah as ‘a mixture of propaganda, malicious gossip, scandal mongering and defamation’, consistently employed in the narrative ‘to spread dissension and worsen a turbulent situation’.Footnote 78 In most cases, the root of fitnah lies in motives of envy and rivalry.Footnote 79 The desire to seek vengeance and to besmirch potential rivals is premised on unreciprocated love or the unequal distribution of care.Footnote 80 In this particular episode where Sultan Iskandar Syah is the principal object of desire, the concubines have conspired to eliminate the lover he cherishes the most by committing fitnah.
There is little doubt that the concubines were the ones who incite the wrath of the king, but it is Sultan Iskandar Syah who acts upon their allegation without thorough investigation. He is additionally culpable for mismanaging his private affairs as he ignites jealousy among his concubines by favouring one over the rest. Exposing Sang Ranjuna Tapa's daughter in public, and probably naked,Footnote 81 is a heavy-handed punishment to boot. ‘Even if my daughter is guilty of misconduct, let her merely be put to death’, Sang Ranjuna Tapa bemoans, ‘why humiliate her like this?’Footnote 82 In the Malay tradition, being shamed, or ‘diberi malu’, is more severe a punishment than death.Footnote 83 Worse still is perhaps the father who does not query the veracity of the accusation, but as implied in his lamentation, provisionally acquiesces to her guilt, preferring that she be put to death rather than prolonging this shameful punishment.
Throughout the Sejarah Melayu, the female body is implicated in the guilt of passion.Footnote 84 Female characters are mostly described in physical terms, since their roles are confined to sexual and reproductive functions. Exceptions, such as Tun FatimahFootnote 85 and Puteri Gunung Ledang,Footnote 86 exist. They are women reputed for their unparallelled beauty, yet, they are bold characters with unflinching demands, often exerting profound influence on the rulers.Footnote 87 Notwithstanding their courage, both are discursively constituted as objects of desire and are defined in relation to men. Female characters as such are deemed as lodestones of passion, typically portrayed as disruptive and capable of leading the realm astray should the king become preoccupied by their emphatically absurd requests.
Indeed, whenever feminine beauty is brought into the picture, the dialectics of passion and reason, nafsu and akal, reappear as if to put to test the ruler's rectitude. This gendered framework is already in place moments before the fall of Singapura. Prior to the episode of Tuan Jana Khatib, the fraternal relationship between Sultan Malik al-Zahir and Sultan Malik al-Mansur foreshadows the peril of passion stirred by yet another unnamed concubine. The brothers are affectionate with one another until one day, when Sultan Malik al-Mansur visits his brother and catches a glimpse of his brother's concubine, thus ‘conceiving a passion’ (berahi) for her, and decides to bring her back to his place.Footnote 88 Expressing regret over his action, Sultan Malik al-Mansur bewails to his chief minister:
Alas, my friend, something that was too difficult for me has come upon me. Conquered by my fleshly lusts my discretion vanished. What I have done has been my ruin, my fleshly lusts were too strong for me.Footnote 89
In this woeful statement, the term ‘nafsu’ is explicitly used to describe his ‘fleshly lusts’ that render him powerless. In tandem with this is the word ‘fitnah’, which in fact occurs earlier—in his minister's cautionary advice not to visit his brother for fear of an unforeseeable ‘fitnah’.Footnote 90 The dialectics of nafsu and akal are herein laid bare, not only through the king's internal struggle with desire, but through his refusal to see reason, as advised by his chief minister, a ‘menteri tuha’.Footnote 91
While the interplay of nafsu and akal is often recognised as inherent to human life, looming beneath these narrative threads is the female figure serving as the seed of rupture, the enabler of conflict. As a consequence of taking his brother's concubine, Sultan Malik al-Mansur is dethroned and his chief minister is beheaded. More instructive is the expressed repentance of the surviving brother Sultan Malik al-Zahir: ‘Just because of a woman I have dethroned my brother and killed his minister.’Footnote 92 Not unlike his brother, Sultan Malik al-Zahir too has submitted to nafsu, resorting to the impulse of anger and renouncing reason altogether. From this episode of strained fraternity to Tuan Jana Khatib's unintended gaze, the female subject is comparable to a saboteur, one who is determined to upset the judgement of the sovereigns and is always culpable for the guilt of male rulers.
Read against this backdrop, the punishment of Sang Ranjuna Tapa's daughter signals a scapegoat mechanism coming into fruition within the circuits of passion and reason.Footnote 93 All too characteristically, the female subject is scapegoated as a result of malicious gossip. Anchored in this episode is an emotive vocabulary tied to the heat of passion. Fitnah, committed out of jealousy, initially brings malu to the king, but it is subsequently exacted on the concubine suspected of lewdness. Malu is relayed to her when she is publicly exposed (perjenggikan).Footnote 94 Violence enters into the picture as the sovereign attempts to extricate himself from malu, making a surrogate victim out of the persecution. The character is not only a victim of fitnah, she is a victim of unbridled nafsu, collectively exemplified by her rival scandalmongers as well as the king.
Necessary and generative violence
Reverberating through the three episodic outbursts of violence thus far examined is the triumph of fitnah, the primacy of nafsu over akal. Violence comes to light as a result of the ruler failing the test, when reason resigns to passion and gives in to the immediacy of nafsu. The injustice embedded in these accounts of violence is glaring.Footnote 95 It reminds the audience to be mindful of the Bukit Siguntang covenant, makes clear that the rulers’ exercise of violence cannot be reasonably justified beyond the mantle of sovereign immunity, and it conveys instructive moral lessons to prospective Malay rulers so that disasters could be averted. Accordingly, the Sejarah Melayu is perceived as ‘a form of moral discourse’.Footnote 96 The fall of Singapura, in the wake of unjust violence, often attests to the intervention of divine retribution in fulfilment of the Bukit Siguntang covenant.Footnote 97 The connection between the swordfish incident and the demise of Singapura is accepted as evidence that the Sejarah Melayu text contains notions of moral justice, coupled with a subtle criticism levelled against the king.Footnote 98 The Portuguese conquest of Melaka, too, produces the same effect.Footnote 99 This line of argument, however, overlooks the fact that the rulers directly responsible for the fall of Singapura survive unscathed. Both Paduka Seri Maharaja and Sultan Iskandar Syah easily evade the consequences of their unruly actions and continue their grip on power with injustice.
To extract a ‘moral discourse’ from this perpetuation of power is to gloss over a substantial amount of intervening information. It is necessary to reconsider the rhetorical purpose in the accounts of unjust violence that precipitate the fall of Singapura. The common understanding that a putative divine overseer is at work to rectify royal misconduct blatantly disregards the resultant establishment of Melaka, which picks up from where Singapura left off. Moreover, despite Paduka Seri Maharaja's acts of injustice, he rules for twelve more years and six months,Footnote 100 after which he is succeeded, peaceably, by Sultan Iskandar Syah, who, again yields to baseless accusation and replicates Paduka Seri Maharaja's impulsive deeds. Sultan Iskandar Syah then commits the same mistake of punishing the concubine out of jealousy and hearsay. Subsequently, the concubine's father Sang Ranjuna Tapa conspires with Majapahit to ravage Singapura. In strict conformity with the Bukit Siguntang covenant, divine punishment is then meted out to Sang Ranjuna Tapa who has committed treason. However, whereas Sang Ranjuna Tapa and his wife turn into stone, the ruler only relinquishes the Singapura kingdom, with his legacy to be reinvigorated later in Melaka. The end of Singapura is not a fatal blow to Malay rule. Far from it, Sultan Iskandar Syah escapes to Muar unharmed, he builds a fort elsewhere and founds Melaka, where he rules for two impressive decades.Footnote 101
The oft-perceived notion of mutual obligation as stipulated in the Bukit Siguntang covenant falls unevenly on the governed subjects, because ‘Malay subjects … shall never be disloyal or treacherous to their rulers, even if their rulers behave evilly or inflict injustice upon them.’Footnote 102 The rulers, on the other hand, are only punishable by God, and even so, only by ‘a sign that his kingdom will be destroyed’.Footnote 103 Yet, unjust violence augurs ill for Singapura inasmuch as it necessitates the birth of Melaka. A kingdom is destroyed, another is established; the legacy continues unabated. In pursuit of an uninterrupted sequence of reigns, the Bukit Siguntang covenant preserves the absolutism of sovereignty. Without any allowance for justice, the covenant is only an insurance of domination in the guise of justice.
Contemporary scholarship tends to overstress the salience of moral justice when the Sejarah Melayu is simply reinforcing the sovereign's hegemony. Such a moralistic framework, as Clive Kessler astutely notices, emerged from an ideological milieu at the end of the twentieth century when Malay nationalism and Islamic populism held sway in the hermeneutics of Malay philology.Footnote 104 In part a result of Islamisation and modernity, progressive ideas of justice were given prominence and the Bukit Siguntang covenant in the Sejarah Melayu offers an expedient moral backbone with which to rationalise postcolonial resistant politics within the ambit of Malay feudalism. Kessler remarks that this ‘cry of populist insurgency’—primarily observed in the revisionist and nativist inquiries into the Sejarah Melayu as well as the Hikayat Hang Tuah—is compatible with the view that ‘Malays shall remain loyal to their rulers so long as their rulers rule over them with justice’.Footnote 105
As a legitimation narrative, the Sejarah Melayu offers theological explanations for political ends, doing so not only through the supernatural sanctions of the royal genealogy, but more importantly, through violence deemed necessary for the maintenance of power and order. The Bukit Siguntang covenant guarantees the survival of Malay rulers and their legacy while it punishes treacherous subjects. Political and divine authorities converge in the covenant to present a tenuous reciprocity between the ruler and the ruled, with an agreement that is inconsequential to the former, while the latter is inescapably bound by divine decree and whose transgression is punishable by death. A semblance of justice appears only to the extent that it is enshrined in the agreement, but the selective distribution of divine intervention clearly invalidates any notion of justice so eagerly sought by revisionist and nativist renditions. In the moral universe of the Sejarah Melayu, the fall of Singapura is neither divine retribution nor the revenge of the weak, but simply a recalibration of the powerful. Rulers escape and relocate their centres of power, all the while continuing their rule in anticipation of even greater power and praise from the scribe. The narratives make scapegoats of victims in order to convey an ideal genealogy. A sequence of crises is necessitated only to reconstitute power in ever-new ways that ensure an unperturbed sequence of reigns. The space of death and the injustice therein generate a respite, a suspension of morality, alluding to an absolute power that does not fall absolutely. It is in this sense that unjust violence is almost always necessary, since, it warrants a narratological overhaul in which power could reinvent itself relentlessly.
Conclusion: Of blood and bodies turning into stone
Unjust violence, acting as a form of ritualised persecution, is vital to the preservation of the status quo. Scapegoats, as surrogate victims, are symbolic proxies chosen ‘not for the crimes they are accused of but for the victim's signs that they bear’, reminds Girard.Footnote 106 It is useful to regard violence as an instrument of control. By exterminating potential transgression, violence guards against the many crimes of passion and restores the symbolic system of order consistent with the existing status quo. ‘All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving’, Walter Benjamin notes.Footnote 107 Should the order be unhinged, the wrath of God is incurred, sovereignty threatened and violence unleashed. In the cases of the foreigner, the child, and the concubine, restoring order means putting them to death, effectively immobilising the spread of fitnah, annulling the transgression their presence has brought to bear.
The ideological orientation of the Sejarah Melayu makes explicit that the source for derailing order is passion or nafsu. In the Malay cultural milieu, enabling the flux of passion are the orifices of the human body—the sensory organs from the mouth, ears, eyes, to nose—that expose the self to the world, the internal to the external.Footnote 108 Not by coincidence, all three episodes of violence above are sprinkled with suggestions of desiring bodies channelling their passion through these orifices. In the first episode, it is the ocular exchange of the gaze through the eyes of the queen and Tuan Jana Khatib; in the second and third episodes, it is the mouth that informs and spreads accusation among courtiers and consorts. Sight and speech activate the flow of nafsu and inspire seduction, provocation, allegation, and so forth. Ending this vicious cycle of passion entails violence, and of course, death, during which the eyes could no longer see, and the mouth could no longer speak. If violence and the space of death, following Taussig, could serve the purpose of reinventing and stabilising meanings, one may also read violence as a technique of immobility, a method for hardening the fluidity of passion.Footnote 109 Consider how the culmination of violence ends with the hardening of blood and bodies: the blood of Tuan Jana Khatib, the bodies of Sang Ranjuna Tapa and his wife, all turn into stone upon death.Footnote 110 Suggestive of arriving at a finality in the aftermath of unjust violence, this phenomenon of hardening could imply the final touch in the cycle of violence: it is violence against the body, and perhaps, a violence that ends all violence, eliminating entirely the possibility of vengeance, of retributive justice, as triggered by nafsu. With the hardening of blood and bodies, the vicious circulation of nafsu is pacified, thus putting an end to the perils of transgression. Additionally, this hardening transcends time, since, the passages describing the events usually conclude with a statement that the stone, as a residue of passion, can be witnessed ‘to this day’ (datang sekarang, yang ada sekarang). The memorialisation of unjust violence has never been so pronounced. Order is restored and the status quo is preserved.
With the fall of Singapura, comes the dawn of Melaka. The legacy lives on with all acts of injustice being paid for in the blood of others. The sovereigns remain untarnished as state-sponsored history advances forward, perhaps with more confidence than ever, owing to the paradigmatic establishment of Melaka. If the Sejarah Melayu is understood as a text filled with moral precepts, then, most lessons are learnt through the space of death, through the narration of violence by scapegoating victims and not by the failings of the kings. Unjust violence committed by the kings provides only a cathartic paroxysm through which an uninterrupted Malay genealogy is retold. In enabling a sequence of moral crises, violence allows sovereign power to reinstate status hierarchy through an unbroken sequence of reigns. The genealogy of kings is exempted from the consequence of injustice and from the rules of the Bukit Siguntang covenant. Reading the Sejarah Melayu from the particularities of its surrogate victims, violence crops up as a rhetorical trope, a method of writing power into history, and a narratological springboard for rulers to continue ruling, come what may.
