The year 1612 was the year of the commissioning of the Sadjarah Malajoe (the Malay Annals) — the principal Malay chronicle of the Malacca-Johor sultanate — at Batoe Sawar on the Mawlid (Mūlūd) festival of Sunday 13 Rabīʿ I 1021 AH, that is, 13 May 1612. The commission — by Radja ‘Abdoellāh, the younger brother of the reigning Sultan Alā’uddīn Ri’āyat Shāh III of Johor — was the event that inaugurated the composition of the principal Malay chronicle of the early-modern Malay-Indonesian world, and the year 1612 is, in Hooykaas’s reading in his survey of Malay literature, the principal literary date of the late-Batoe Sawar period of Johor history.
The Commissioning of the Sadjarah Malajoe
The Sadjarah Malajoe was commissioned on the Mawlid festival of Sunday 13 Rabīʿ I 1021 AH — that is, 13 May 1612 — at Batoe Sawar, the capital of Johor. The commission was by Radja ‘Abdoellāh, the younger brother of the reigning Sultan Alā’uddīn Ri’āyat Shāh III, who asked the Bendahara — Tun Sri Lanang, also styled Paduka Raja — to “beteren” (improve) an existing Hikajat Malajoe that had been brought to Batoe Sawar “door mensen uit Goa” (by people from Goa).
The commissioning, in Hooykaas’s reading, was for a “Geslachtslijst der Soeltanen” (Genealogy of the Sultans) — a work that was, in its conception, modelled on the Tādj us-Salāṭīn of 1607 that the Bendahara would later encounter in Atjeh after his 1613 captivity. The completed work — 34 stories — was finished after the Bendahara’s return from Atjeh in 1614, with later stories (35-38) added to cover the 1615 Atjehnese attack and the subsequent exile of the Johor court.
The Atjehnese Context
The commissioning of the Sadjarah Malajoe in 1612 falls in the middle of the Iskandar Muda reign (1607-1636) — the bloeitijdperk (golden age) of Atjeh — and just one year before the 1613 Atjehnese attack on Batoe Sawar that would interrupt the work and carry off the Bendahara to Atjeh. The Atjehnese context of the commissioning is thus the immediate threat: the court of Johor, under the shadow of the rising Atjehnese power of Iskandar Muda, commissioned the Sadjarah Malajoe as a record of the Malay sultanate’s past greatness in the face of the Atjehnese threat to its future.
The commissioning of the Sadjarah Malajoe in 1612 is, in Hooykaas’s reading, also the moment at which the Bendahara would have become aware of the Tādj us-Salāṭīn of 1607 — the Atjehnese “mirror for princes” completed in the year of Iskandar Muda’s accession. The Bendahara’s model for his “Geslachtslijst der Soeltanen” — in Hooykaas’s reading — was the Tādj, and the Bendahara would have become acquainted with the Tādj either through the Atjehnese attack of 1613 (which carried him off to Atjeh) or through the regular Malay-Atjehnese literary exchange of the early seventeenth century.
Significance
The year 1612 is, in Hooykaas’s reading, the principal literary date of the late-Batoe Sawar period of Johor history. The commissioning of the Sadjarah Malajoe on 13 May 1612 inaugurated the composition of the principal Malay chronicle of the early-modern Malay-Indonesian world, and the year 1612 is the chronological anchor of the Sadjarah Malajoe’s composition history — the year before the 1613 Atjehnese attack, and the year in which the Bendahara’s project of a “Geslachtslijst der Soeltanen” was first conceived.
See Also
- Sadjarah Malajoe
- Bendahara Sri Lanang
- Batoe Sawar
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Tādj oes-Salatina
- Over Maleise Literatuur (1947)
- 1613
- 1615
- 1607
Source
Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947), chapter 11 (“Geschiedschrijving in het Maleis”), pp. 96-98; Toelichting tot de Sadjarah Malajoe, Inleiding van de schrijver, pp. 203-205; chapter 19, p. 205.