Page 60 - Hikayat-Patani-The-Story-Of-Patani 1

STRUCTURE, AUTHORS AND DATE 51

contents raises the question of the unity of the text. There seem to be
good reasons for considering this text a composite whole rather than a
homogeneous unity. The Undang-Undang fragment looks like an appen­
dix which somehow got attached to A without having any strong internal
relationship with the rest of the text. There is a curious complication in
the problem of the relationship between the Hikayat Patani proper and
the Undang-Undang Patani, however, in that a small part of what A
has appended to it on pp. 88—94 (part VI), is in B interpolated in the
Hikayat itself. At the end of story 6 (p. 26), B has eight lines which
roughly correspond in content with what is found in A as the first
paragraph of part VI. While referring the reader to the notes to the
text and translation for a detailed comparison, we have to discuss here
the implications for the structure of the text of the presence of this
passage in B at this particular point. First of all it should be pointed out
that this passage on the court traditions appears in quite an appropriate
context in B. After giving the story of the death of Mudhaffar Syah
in Ayudhya and his succession by Manzur Syah, B goes on to tell us
something about the regalia and the royal orchestra during the reign
of the deceased king.
Structurally this passage corresponds closely with the passage on court
etiquette in the eleventh story of the Sejarah Melayu.2 There, too, all
kinds of rules concerning court etiquette and related matters are described
in relation to the sultan of Malacca; apparently the author of the SM
took advantage of this particular moment in his story about Malacca to
insert this information, which he probably considered useful for his
readers.
Actually, in the case of the Hikayat Patani it seems unlikely that this
paragraph of B belonged to the original text. B introduces it with the
word ingat, “attention!”, as it does in other cases of interpolation,
especially when it seems to give some special information to which it
wants to call the reader’s attention. It would therefore seem as though
at one point some author or copyist (the distinction is sometimes ir­
relevant in Malay literature) saw fit to include some remarks on court
adat in the text. There can be little doubt that this kind of information
was available in written form; in spite of a number of differences both in
the order and in details, the corresponding passages in A and B derive
ultimately from the same source. The author of the text from which
version A derives presented as an appendix to the Hikayat a much longer

2SM, 1952, pp. 83 ff. (Story 11.9 ff.); SM, 1938, pp. 84—88.