Page 46 - Hikayat-Patani-The-Story-Of-Patani 1

THE HIKAYAT PATANI AND RELATED TEXTS 37

(b) The translation of the initial story of the Hikayat with which
Newbold has provided us enables us to compare in some detail this
fragment of the three MSS.; again it is clear that where these fragments
are concerned the MSS. are very similar. In fact, Newbold’s translation
could equally well pass as a “tolerably literal translation” of this episode
in our manuscripts. Only the end of Newbold’s story is somewhat briefer
than that of our Malay text, but here the translator may have consciously
abridged his text so that this difference need not go back to a difference
between the Malay texts. Allowing for a few misprints and misreadings
in Newbold’s text, the names are also identical. There is one interesting
point to make, however: whereas A has the fisherman tell a story about
the grandfather of the king going to build a new town of Ayutia, New-
bold speaks of his founding the “country of Kakayutia”. This error is
quite easy to explain, as in Malay writing the duplication of ka is
common in such cases: ke Ayutia has become ke Kayutia. The curious
thing about this error is that the double k has been reproduced both in
MS. B and in the Thai translation, both of which contain a further
mistake in that they have b instead of y (a difference of one dot in
Malay script!), so that they read Kakabutiya. All this points to some
similarity between A and the Newbold MS. on the one hand, and the
version of B and the Thai text on the other, even though this point is
such a minor one that no conclusion can be drawn from it.
(c) Upon checking Newbold’s list of kings with the data contained
in the Hikayat Patani as we have it in the Abdullah MS. they turn out
to be virtually identical. What few minor differences we find must in fact
be attributed to misreadings by Newbold or to misprints: instead of Raja
Biru he has Rajah Iju, which is an erroneous repetition of the previous
Rajah Ijo. The kings and queens who are omitted in the Thai text (see
below) are all present in the Abdullah text — Newbold’s Dawi Perachu
apparently is our Raja Dewi, who as queen was called Peracau; and
Paduka Syah cAlam and Laksamana are also both mentioned in the
Abdullah text, p. 76.
So all in all we can conclude that the MSS. of Newbold and Abdullah
were not only copies of the same version of the text, but that they were
also very close copies. In fact, in view of the rapid diversification which
we usually observe in the manuscript transmission of Malay texts it is
probable that they were extremely close to each other in the genealogy
of manuscripts of the Hikayat Patani; and if it is true that neither can
possibly have been copied from the other, the most probable relationship
is that both were direct copies of one original text.