Page 76 - Hikayat-Patani-The-Story-Of-Patani 1

STRUCTURE, AUTHORS AND DATE 67

the style was changed, additions were made, moralistic comments added,
and a short paragraph on ad at raja interpolated in an appropriate place.
A has preserved the text of the original HP in a less revised form; in
the course of time, however, a number of appendices were added to it.
The history of Patani proper was expanded with the survey of the
Kalantan dynasty, up to and including Alung Yunus. This expanded
history of Patani which may have included some editing (the Raja
Hujan genealogy again!?) was probably finished not long after 1730.
A later editor, when copying the text for some purpose or other, saw
fit to add a number of further pieces to it, which somehow were available
to him and all of which may have been written originally before or
around 1707. Whether this editor had the four parts III, IV, V and VI
at his disposal as one unitary text or as four different texts is impossible
to ascertain; in any case he did not do any real editing: he did not
smooth out inconsistencies, nor did he bother to avoid repetitions. In
fact, he worked as a mere copyist and added to the Hikayat Patani one
or more texts as he found them. No specification of the time at which
he did this work is possible; it may have been any time between 1730
and 1830. It is obviously possible that more than one successive copyist,
rather than a single one, were responsible for a gradual expansion of the
text with III, IV, V and VI.
Needless to say the above attempt at reconstructing the textual history
of the Hikayat Patani is largely hypothetical. Some of the assumptions
on which it is built are open to doubt (the chronological framework!),
whereas the argumentation, too, is in several places inconclusive. None­
theless, in view of the many unsolved problems of the textual history of
comparable Malay texts, it seemed worthwhile to deal with these pro­
blems of the Hikayat Patani in some detail.