THE EPIC OF HANG TUAH - INTRODUCTION Part 2

The Hikayat was compared with the Odyssey or the Illiad of the Greeks by Kassim Ahmad; all three of them are still very close to the hearts of their readers.

Iskandar (1995) deduces that because one of its manuscripts was seen by Valentijn, the missionary-scholar, before he was asked to return to Batavia in 1712, the Hikayat was written down by the end of the seventeenth century at the latest'. Braginsky (1990: 403) suggests that it could have been written in Johor, the state which was successor to Melaka, between 1688 and 1710. 

It is now  more than forty years since the first publication of an edition of Hikayat Hang Tuah by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, in 1964, a work based on the MS 28a(c. 1860), in the collection of the Dewan Bahasa, transliterated and edited by Kassim Ahmad. Is is among a few famous and revered hikayats still in circulation on Malaysia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This particular manuscript was owned by Tengku Ibrahim, a Kelantan aristocrat. When Kassim was transliterrating it, the two other manuscripts now in the possession of National Library of Malaysia (MSS 1658 and MSS 1713) had not yet been acquired.

Besides Malaysia itself, most of the manuscripts of Hikayat are to be founded in Europe or Indonesia. Apart from the Kuala Lumpur manuscripts, there are more than twenty kept in various libraries in Leiden, Jakarta, Terengganu, Singapore, London, Cambridge, and Manchester (Sutrisno, 1983: 56-60). The majority of these manuscripts, which were written in Jawi or Arabic-Malay script, were collected during the colonial period by British and Dutch colonial officials and scholars from different parts of Malay world. The Copies originated from various states: Kedah, Penang, Perak, Kelantan, Melaka, Riau, Lingga and batavia (Salleh Yaapar: forthcoming, 2008)

Kassim Ahmad acknowledges that, in comparison with other hikayat manuscripts, the particular one which he used for transliteration is quite a recent copy. The oldest are to be found in the University of Leiden Library, Cod. Or. 1762, dated Rabi' ul-awwal 1172 (1758). The next one, KL 4 (from the Klinkert collection), was copied in 1864-67.

As Kassim pionted out in his introduction, the Dewan Bahasa manuscript is less than perfect, presenting quite a few problems caused by lacunae, unintelligible words, and errors in copying. He used three other published versions as guides and comparisons, including Shellabar's edition of 1908, published by the Malays Publishing House, Singapore, the 1956 Balai Pustaka edition, and the 1960 Jambatan and Gunung Agung Jawi edition. He has also referred to the University of Leiden library manuscript Cod. Or 1762.

In Jakarta there are also two copies, one MI 207, which was copied from a Riau copy, and the other MI 572, is from the Von de Wall collection, and copied in Melaka, 1277 H,i.e 1861.

Singapore also has two, nos, 23 and 24, in its Raffles Collection.

Manuscripts of the Hikayat are generally quite consistent in their story-line, and differences appear only in the wording of sentences and the arrangement of words simply in linguistic details. Otherwise the story-line is maintained.

Outside the Malaysian area, the work was first published in 1939 by Balai Pustaka, Jakarta, while in 1960 Jambatan and Gunung Agung published a Jawi edition.

Salleh Yaapar (forthcoming 2008) points out that besides two excerpts in a Bloemezing, Vol. 1 there is also a test in Roman script published in 1893 under the title of Hikajat Hang Toewah, transliterated from Jawi script by R. Brons Middel and printed by Brill, Leiden.

End of Introduction