Page 63 - Hikayat-Patani-The-Story-Of-Patani 1

54 HIKAYAT PATANI

betrays a close personal relationship between the author of part II and
this sultan. However, it distinguishes the author of II from the author
of I rather than linking the two together. It is indeed typical of the
author of I that he is so detached and so seemingly uninvolved. It is
this detachedness which makes part I such delightful reading for the
Western reader, and it is a far cry from the emotional involvement
displayed at the end of part II.
Now, one has to be careful with such stylistic criteria as a means for
determining the authorship of a text. There may be other reasons why
I and II are so different in style. The author of part II was obviously
so close in time to the period with which he had to deal that he could
not but relate the many facts as he had witnessed them or been told them
by witnesses. Anecdotal stories such as those found in part I take time
to grow and develop. In the case of the Kalantan dynasty the distance
in time may simply have been too small to create literature out of history;
at best emotional judgment could replace the detached anecdotes. In
the Western world, too, we have historians who, although they are able
to write past history in a most objective, detached and subtle way, get
involved in the most subjective arguments and judgments immediately
they start writing on contemporary history I
It is impossible, therefore, to determine with certainty on purely stylistic
grounds whether parts I and II were written by the same author and
at the same time. It seems safer, though, in view of the marked differ­
ences which exist between the two parts, to deal with them separately
for the time being.
It should be added that even part I as such need not originally have
been written as one piece of literature; earlier histories of Patani may
have existed which later authors then used, revised and brought up-to-
date. It would be impossible, however, to prove anything like a plural
authorship for part I on the basis of the available manuscripts. On the
contrary, as this text runs now it is so much a unity that we must assume
that whatever the sources and materials available to its author, it was
written as a unitary whole.
With regard to the historical relationship between parts II and III
the following observations seem relevant. Part II ends with the death of
Alung Yunus. After him Patani had no more kings, and as the text
states, Patani has been in a state of lawlessness and confusion down to
the present day, although no-one knows with certainty what Allah holds
in store for the town. This sounds like the end of the story. This im­
pression is strengthened by the following sentence about the orang yang