Page 35 - Hikayat-Patani-The-Story-Of-Patani 1

26 HIKAYAT PATANI

possession”.2 He adds: “The Malay historian affords no dates to guide
his readers as to the chronological order of the events he relates.”
Newbold then furnishes some information from European sources with
regard to the history of Patani and adds some details concerning con­
temporary Patani, after the final conquest by the Siamese in 1832.
What has happened to this manuscript is a question that has never
been cleared up. It is certainly not due to lack of interest in the history
of Patani that it has remained unstudied all this time. Patani is an
interesting place both from the viewpoint of earlier and of more recent
history: as was mentioned above, the town played an important role as
an international emporium during the 16th and 17th centuries, while
its geographical situation between the Malay (later British) and Siamese
spheres of influence and its position as a Malay Muslim state within the
kingdom of Siam (Thailand) have also given it special interest. As
Newbold’s brief summary of the contents of the Hikayat could hardly
satisfy the historian’s curiosity it is only natural that subsequent gener­
ations of scholars have long tried to locate this manuscript. But their
efforts have been in vain, Newbold’s manuscript so far having proved
to be irretrievably lost,3 while for a very long time no other manuscript
of the same text turned up. In fact, Thomas M. Fraser, who did field­
work in the Patani area in 1956, the results of which were published
in 1960, reported that his informant Haji Wan Yussof told him that the
only copy of the history of Patani which he knew of “had been recently
destroyed by fire”.4 Fraser gave a summary of the history of Patani,
mainly following a narration by his informant, who apparently based
his story on the text as he remembered it.
However, in that same year, 1960, or shortly after, we again hear of
a text which may be the selfsame Hikayat Patani. In 1962 or a little
earlier a book by Ibrahim Syukri called Sejarah Kerajaan Malayu Patani
(The History of the Malay Kingdom of Patani) was published in Pasir
Putih, in Kalantan. In the Introduction to this book the author states
that writing the history of Patani turned out to be a laborious and
difficult task, and although it is true that there exist a number of stories
of Patani written by old people in Patani, most of these turned out to be
cerita dongeng (fables) without historical authenticity. Moreover, the
people of Patani are very secretive about their manuscripts. But the
author nonetheless succeeded in collecting several texts of varying im­

2 Newbold, 1839, II, pp. 68—69.
3 Wyatt, 1967, p. 16.
4 Fraser, 1960, p. 20.