following

Another book from the back of the drawer, this one Antara Sejarah dan Mitos, which I got from a book fair ages ago and did not read because I felt ill-equipped to handle it. I'm still ill-equipped to handle it, but I have read it! As expected it's an academic text, by Prof. Emeritus Ahmat Adam, collecting a few essays he'd written that are critical of the use of Sejarah Melayu by other historians as a historical text, as opposed to a piece of literature that combines history with myth.

As a layperson it did take me a bit of effort to get through. I'm not even that familiar with Sejarah Melayu in itself! So I did learn some things along the way (like Melaka's diplomatic relationship with the Ryukyu islands), even if I could not appreciate the nitty gritty of Ahmat's criticism, a lot of which seems to come down to historians not translating the texts accurately (due to Jawi lettering and also by assuming the text is purely Malay instead of also using Sanskrit, ancient Javanese and other languages), not considering the different versions of the text tell a story in itself, and of not corroborating the text with other sources.

Ahmat has a particular bug bear about Hang Tuah, in arguing against the persistence of that name over the more accurate Hang Tuha or Hang Toh, and a near-angry argument against treating Tuah as a historical figure instead of a mythological one. I can't speak to his text-based arguments, but his major cultural argument is an old Malay belief I did not know about, which is the taboo of speaking and writing a person's real name. I assume it must have faded from practice during colonial times, but one of Ahmat's specific examples was that people would call someone by their relation to someone else, eg. "father of Mahmud", which is something my grandmother did, because she only ever called my grandfather as "father of [his eldest child's name]". Were those echoes of an earlier taboo, but no longer as sensitive in the era of romanized writing and documentation?

Ahmat continues to specify that Hang Tuah is clearly not someone's literal birth name, and from there his argument Hang Tuha was created as a literary Laksamana figure that symbolised the ideal over reality, like King Arthur I suppose, and that some of the references in the text using his name were akin to referring to a powerful man as "Caesar" or a generous folk hero "Robin Hood", i.e. they are not literally said figures, but the reference is made in order to highlight specific traits. And then he continues to demolish recent arguments of the discovery of Tuah's supposed tomb, and the non-critical inclusion of Tuah in historical tourism. Fun things! But a lot of it out of my wheelhouse.