Asia World Series. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. xxv, 225 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-7391-6842-4.
Through a consideration of the kingdom of Kedah, Maziar Mozaffari Falarti portrays the pre-colonial Malay world. Kedah is located at the northern end of the Malacca Straits; it thus was proximate to the Siamese, Burmese and Acehnese empires. Given its geographical environment, it is appropriate to look at Kedah from the viewpoint of mixed riverine and maritime structures as well as that of trans-peninsular inland routes.
Falarti is a polymath who knows the vernacular literatures of the Malay world, the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. He gathers facts relevant to Kedah and assembles them into an overview of the region. The book covers the wide period from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, but focuses on the occupation of Kedah by the Siamese from 1821 to 1841. The sultan of Kedah, who fled to the neighbouring British territory of Penang, was followed by tens of thousands of Kedah Malays, who later joined him in regaining control of the state. The book is structured around fundamental questions: How was the exiled sultan able to ensure his subjects’ continued loyalty for twenty years? What went wrong in the Siamese occupation of Kedah? Who joined forces with the sultan in recapturing Kedah? And what was the impact of the Siamese occupation on the position of Kedah in the Malay world? These questions are discussed in four chapters.
The first chapter is “From Raja to Sultan: The Conversion of the Tantric Malay Ruler.” There are significant discrepancies in the indigenous and more recent scholarly sources on the conversion of Kedah’s raja. Post-nineteenth-century erudite sources tend to omit the miraculous events of this conversion. Falarti carefully analyzes the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa or the Kedah Annals and compares them with indigenous and foreign literature. Prior to the Islamization of Kedah, ministers with knowledge of Islam dethroned the ruler, Raja Bersiong, who resorted to tantric power to counter them. Mahawangsa, the grandson of Raja Bersiong, banished Satan or the great snake with the help of a saintly Sufi disciple and mystic and converted to Islam. Raja Bersiong is described as having a vampire-like taste for human blood and Mahawangsa as having the habit of drinking arak. By denying these barbaric acts, the converted raja, as sultan, established his administration in Kedah.
The second chapter, “The Malay Ethos: The Sultan and His Subjects,” considers the relationship between ruler and people as being modelled after the covenant of the Sejarah Melayu or the Malay Annals. It has been observed in various parts of the Malay world that only God may punish rulers; hence, officials and people should not commit the crime of high treason against a ruler, who should not, in turn, publicly humiliate them. This concept, which is widespread in the Malay world, was even observed in twentieth- century Singapore under British colonial rule. The Siamese treatment of local Malays including women, and minors, was humiliating; it led to the Malay support for the former sultan in recapturing Kedah.
The third chapter is entitled “Controlling Kedah’s Maritime Lines of Communication: The Sultan and the Raja di-laut, or Sea Lords.” Kedah was exposed to the attack of the neighbouring states of Aceh and Siam in the seventeenth century, and the sea people defended it. Meanwhile, the Dutch, in competition with the British, attempted to monopolize the tin trade in the Malacca Straits and join Siam in a blockade of the sea lines of Kedah. Kedah sought an alliance with the British, which eventually led to the emergence of British merchants in the region who weakened the control of the ruler over the local sea people. The ruler employed foreign sea peoples, such as the Bugis and Minangkabau, to encourage civil war in 1681–84.
The fourth chapter, “Bay to Gulf or Gulf to Bay: The Sultan and the Trans-Peninsular Routes of Kedah,” discusses the importance of inland trade routes in Kedah, since the state had many good ports that led to the development of trans-peninsular trade routes. These routes were equipped with animals, such as elephants and buffaloes, to carry goods that were provided by the local inhabitants of the 128 parish-styled divisions, each under a chief. The routes were used not only for trade but also for incursions, kidnappings and escapes. Kedah embarked on the reestablishment of the trans-peninsular routes after 1842, after the Siamese occupation, but the inland trade routes had lost their significance, both because the Kedah lost the districts of Perlis, Satun and Penang and because of the introduction of the railway system in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the administration of Kedah came under the protection of the British after Siam gave up its claim over the region in 1909. The sultan of Kedah gave up control over the trade routes, which resulted in his subjects eventually losing a sense of unconditional devotion to him.
The author successfully portrays the historical world of Kedah, although his arguments could have been weightier and accompanied by fuller quantitative data in the third and fourth chapters. On the other hand, the author makes important points; for example, he points out that the historical acceptance of foreign rulers for the Malays are well explained by the covenant that existed between the ruler and subject, even when a sovereign was not Malay.
If the Hikayats were the form of self-representation in the pre-colonial Malay world, feature films may be regarded as the present-day form of Hikayat. “The Malay Chronicles: Bloodlines” was released in 2011 in Malaysia; it is based on the Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa, as the Malay title of the film indicates. The centuries-old Hikayat remains relevant as a means of representing Malays and their position in the world. The methodology of this book is not only applicable to restructuring the historical world but also in foreseeing and interpreting the future.
Hiroyuki Yamamoto
Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
pp. 387-389