A MALAYAN ACTOR-MANAGER
AT KÔTA BHARU, the capital of Kĕlantan, some thirty years ago, the Powers of Wickedness in the High Places were at considerable pains to preserve a kind of cock-eyed, limping, knock-kneed, shambling morality which kept more or less even step with their conception of the eternal fitness of things. To this end, Yam Tûan Mûlut Mêrah, the “Red Mouthed King,” so called on account of his insatiable thirst for blood, did his best to discourage theft; and in pursuance of this laudable desire killed during his reign sufficient men and women to have repeopled a new country half the size of his own kingdom. Old Nek ‘Soh, the Dâto’ Sri Padûka, who stood by and witnessed most of the killing, used openly to lament in my time that all the thieves and robbers were not made over to him instead of being wasted in the shambles. It was his opinion that, with so considerable a following, he might have set up a new dynasty in the Peninsula and still have had enough men and women at his disposal to make it possible for him to sell a batch of them now and then if ready money were needed. Nek ‘Soh was a wise old man, and he was probably sure of his facts; but though his influence with his master, the Red Mouthed King, was great in most things, he was never able to induce him to forego
his killings or to try the experiment. So the king
continued to slay robbers, thieves, and pilferers,
never pausing to discriminate very closely between
those who were convicted and those who were merely
accused, and occasionally extending the punishment
to their relations and friends. Nek ‘Soh silently
bewailed the wholesale waste of good material on
utilitarian rather than upon humanitarian grounds,
and the bulk of the population thieved and robbed
and pilfered as persistently and gayly as ever, for
that was the custom of the country.
It must be confessed that the Red Monthed King’s
attempts to effect a reform in the habits of his people
were attended by no very encouraging result, and
this perhaps is why he confined his attention to an
effort designed to eradicate a single vice and in other
directions was content to let the morality of Kělan-
tan take care of itself. After many years, however,
old Mulut Merah died, and his son and later his
grandson, ruled in his stead. Nek ‘Soh, now a very
old man, continued to have a band in the government
of the country, but he no longer occupied the position
of king’s principal adviser. This post was held by
a person upon whom had been conferred the title of
Maha Mentri, which means “Great Minister”; and
as he was young and energetic, and was, to all intents
and purposes, the real ruler of the land, he presently
launched out into a scheme of reform which was des-
tined, as he forecast it, to work a revolution in the
manners and customs of the good people of Kelantan.
Undeterred by the knowledge that mutilation, vio-
lent death, and an ingenious system of tortures, had
proved quite powerless to cure the Kelantan folks’
innate propensity to misappropriate one another’s
property, Maha Mentri conceived the bold idea of
converting the entire population, on a sudden, into
fervent and fanatical Muhammadans. Now, judged
as an exponent of Islam, your average Malayan peas-
ant is wofully slack and casual, but the people of
Kelantan are the dullest and least fervent Malays in
the Peninsula. No more unpromising material for
a religious revival could be found in any part of Asia,
and any attempt to make such folk scrupulous ob-
servers of the Prophet’s law, by the local equivalent
of an Act of Parliament, was foredoomed to failure
from the outset. Nothing daunted, however, Maha
Mentri insisted upon all men attending at the mosque
on Fridays, for the recital of congregational prayer,
and inculcated the breaking of the heads of recal-
citrant church-goers: he observed, and personally
superintended the observance of fasts; he did his
best to prevent the use of silk garments by any save
women, and this, be it remembered, in a country
which is famous for its silk fabrics: he set his face
against cock-fighting, bull-matches, ram-butting,
human prize-fights, hunting, and the keeping of
dogs, all the sports of the well-to-do, in fact; and
while he pried into the home of every family in the
capital, with the landable object of ascertaining
whether its immates prayed regularly at each of the
five hours of appointed prayer, he dealt an even more severe blow to the happiness of the bulk of the popu-
lation by forbidding the performance of the ma’iong.
The ma’iong are heroic plays which are acted
throughout the length and breadth of the Peninsula
by troupes of strolling players, and they are specially
dear to the natives of Kelantan. They are bastard
off-shoots of the magnificent spectacular plays which,
to this day, are performed in the palace of the king
of Kambodia at Pnom Phen. These in their turn
had their origin in the traditional and ceremonial
dances enacted at Angkor, when that city of gigantic
ruins was still the capital of a great Hindu empire,
which extended over most of Burma, Siam, and Indo-
China, and was established and ruled for several
centuries by Brahmans who migrated from across
the Ganges. Since the enslaved population rose
in revolt against the twice-born tyrants, utterly
destroying them and reducing their city to ruins,
the plays have undergone many changes, and in our
time the clown, who plays the part of low comedian,
is called Bram in Kambodia. In the Malayan.
ma’iong he reappears as Pran; and this butt of the
other actors, and object of the derision of the specta-
tors, derives his title of infamy from the proudest
caste on earth, who long ago at Angkor exacted the
worship of the people, and by their oppression of them
earned a hatred of which this grotesque piece of spite
is the last surviving manifestation.
The Malay renderings of these plays are of the
most primitive character. They are performed in-
side a small square paddock, enclosed by a low bamboo railing, but otherwise open on all four sides, so
as to afford the spectators an unobstructed view of
all that goes forward within the enclosure. A palu-
leaf roof protects the players from the sun by day
and from the heavy dews by night; and whenever a
panggong is erected upon a new site, the pawang, or
medicine-man, who is also the actor-manager of the
troupe, performs certain magic rites with cheap in-
cense and other unsavoury offering to the spirits.
This he does in order to enlist the assistant of the
demons of the earth and air, and of all local deities,
whom he entreats to watch over his people and to
guard them from harm. The incantations of which
he makes use are very ancient, and it is possible to
trace in some of them a strong Hindu influence, but
for the rest, the whole business is pure devil worship.
First he calls upon Black Awang, King of the Earth
and Air, he who is wont to wander through the veins
of the ground and to take his rest at the portals of
the world. Awang, of course, is one of the common-
est of Malayan proper names, and here it is obviously
used as an euphemism substituted for a word which
it is not lawful for men to utter. Next the pawang
calls upon the Holy Ones, the local demons of the
place, and finally upon his grandsire, Pětěra Gûru,
the Teacher who is from the Beginning, who is
incarnate from his birth, who dwells as a hermit
in the recesses of the moon, and practises bis magic
arts in the womb of the sun; the Teacher whose coat
is wrought of green beads, whose blood is white, who
hath but a single bone, the hairs of whose body stand crect, the pores of whose skin arc adamant, whose
neck is black, whose tongue is fluent, whose spittle
is brine. All these he prays to guard his people, and
he then cries to thein to fling wide the gates of lust
and passion together with the gates of desire and
credulity, and the portals of longing “the longing
which endureth from dawn unto dawn, which causeth
food to ecase to satisfy, which maketh sleep uneasy,
which remembering maketli memory eternal, which
causeth hearing to hear and sight to see.”
Such shameless trafficking with spirits, which
should find no place in the demonology of any good
Muhammadan, was quite properly regarded as an
abomination by the straitlaced Maha Mentri; and
not content with prohibiting the performances of
the ma’iong, he contrived to make life so singularly
unattractive to the actors and aetresses that many
of them quitted Kelantan and trooped across the
jungle-clad mountains which divide that state from
Pahang.
Now, no matter what other faults are to be at-
tributed to the people of Pahang, they cannot justly
be accused of bigotry or religious fanaticism, so the
players were welcomed with open arms, and from
end to end of the land the throbbing beat of the
ma’iong drums, the clanging of the gongs, the serap-
ings of the ungainly Malay fiddles, the demented
shricks and wailings of the serunai, which sounds
like hagpipes in distress, the nasal chantings of the
prima donna, and the roars of laughter which greet
each one of the clown’s threadbare jests, made merry discord in the villages. The gates of all the least
desirable passions were flung unwontedly wide on
this occasion, for hitherto the coming of a ma’iong
had been a very unusual event in the interior, and a
series of deplorable incidents were presently reported
to me from many localities in the wide Pahang Valley.
While the ma’iong was playing, and it played morn-
ing, afternoon, and evening, no one had any care
for the crops; the women left their babies and their
cooking-pots, and the elders of the people were as
stage-struck as the boys and maidens. When the
strolling players broke up their panggong and moved
forward upon their way, having squeezed a village
dry of its last copper coins, many of the peasants
followed in their train, cadging for food and lodging
from the people at the next halting-place, enduring
every sort of discomfort, but unable to tear them-
selves away from the fascination of the players and
the contemplation of the actresses. Many lawful
wives found themselves deserted by their men, and
the husbands and fathers in the villages had to keep
a sharp eye upon the doings of their wives and
daughters while the ma’iong folk were in the neighbour-
hood; for when once the drab monotony of their
lives is accidentally disturbed, the morality of the
Malay villagers, which ordinarily is far better than
that of the townsfolk. goes incontinently to pieces
like a stranded ship in the trough of an angry sea.
Of all the actor-managers who were then roaming
up and down Pahang, none was so successful both
with the playgoers and with the women, as Saleh or ‘Leh, as he was usually called, Malay energy rarely be-
ing equal to the effort of articulating more than a frag-
ment of any given proper name. In their mouths the
dignified Muhammad becomes the plebeian “Mat”;
Sulehman our old friend Solomon is reduced to
plain “Man”; Abubakar becomes “Bakar,” Ishmail
“Mail,” “Patimah,” “”Tunah,” or even “Mali,”
and so on with all the sonorous nomenclature of the
Bible and the Arabian Nights.” This is worth not-
ing, because it is typical of the Malay’s propensity to
scamp every bit of labour, no matter how light its
character, that falls to the lot of man in this work-a-
day world.
Leh was a man of many accomplishments. He
played the fiddle in excruciating wise to the huge
delight of all the Malays who heard him; he had a
happy knack of imitating the notes of birds and the
cries of wild and domestic animals, and as the pran
in the ma’iong he was genuinely funny. In order
to act this part, he used to put on the grotesque mask
which is assigned to it by tradition, a thing of a vio-
lent red colour with a piece of dirty sheepskin for the
hair, and prominent forehead, bulging eyes, and
foolish, inflated cheeks, which together give to the
uncovered, lower part of its wearer the appearance
of an impossibly receding chin; and thus arrayed he
interwove with his appointed dialogne a succession
of pungent and frequently unprintable topical jokes,
which he improvised with an astounding facility.
Above all he was a skilled rhapsodist, and with that
mellow voice of his would sing the wonderful story of Awang Lôtong-the Monkey Prince which is a
bastard, local version of the Ramayana-until the
cocks were crowing to a yellow dawn. He travelled
with me on one occasion for a fortnight and I had
the whole of this folktale written down from his
dictation. When completed it covered sixty pages
of foolscap of fine Arabic manuscript, which com-
presses a great many words into a surprising small
space; yet Leh, who could neither read ner write,
knew every line of it by heart and could be turned
on at any point, invariably continuing the story in
precisely the same words. He had learned it from
an old man in Kelantan, who in his day was reputed
to be the last surviving bard to whom the whole
of the tale was known. It was one of the most plain-
spoken pieces of literature ever committed to writing,
abounded with archaic phraseology, and the corrupt
Hinduism to be traced in it lent it a very special
interest. In due course, I sent the manuscript with
a translation and elaborate notes to the Straits
Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society by which learned
body the whole thing was presently lost with the
usual promptitude and despatch.
It was always a marvel to me that Leh escaped
having some angry man’s knife driven into his body
during his wanderings through Pahang, for the Malays
of that state were accustomed to discourage too sue-
cessful lovers by little attentions of the kind, and
Leh was adored by the women both high and low,
throughout the length and breadth of the country,
Whether he owed his survival to cunning or to sheer luck, I do not know; but he certainly lived to return
to Kelantan after an absence of about a couple of
years.
This was rendered possible for the ma’iong people
by the sudden and violent death of the Maha Mentri.
That great and good man—the self-appointed cham-
pion of Muhammadanism in its strictest forms, the
enforcer of public and private prayer, the orderer of
fasts for the mortification of the erring flesh-had one
little weakness that marred the purity and the con-
sistency of his character. He was so scrupulous that
he would not suffer himself to be photographed when
a view of Kota Bharu, in which several hundreds of
people figured, was being taken, since he held that
the making of pictures was contrary to the Prophet’s
ordinances. In the name of religion, he had con-
trived to make his neighbours’ lives as little worth
living as possible; but all the while he was aggres-
sively attentive to an increasingly large number of
the said neighbours’ wives. Meticulous regard for
the letter of the law, combined with an ostentations
disregard for its spirit, is only to be found in its full
perfection in Asiatic lands, but the Maha Mentri
dovetailed the incompatabilities together with an wi-
precedented persistence and shamelessness.
The mild folk of Kelantan bore with him and with
his amiable peculiarities for a considerable time, and
they might perhaps have endured them even longer
had it not been that his zeal for religion was pushed, in
directions that were not distasteful to him person-
ally, to extremes which rendered life a very wearisome ordeal. Upon a certain evening, therefore,
it befell that the Maha Mentri was shot through the
flooring while he lay abed in another inan’s house by
the aggrieved owner thereof ably and actively as-
sisted by two other injured husbands, who were
quite convinced that there was not room enough for
the Maha Mentri and themselves upon the surface
of the same planet.
Everybody knew the identity of the Maha Men-
tri’s executioners, and the king, who was fond of his
minister, would dearly have liked to punish then
with a lingering dicath. They chanced, however,
to be under the protection of a young prince with
whom, for political reasons, the king could not
afford to precipitate a quarrel; so he and his advisers
professed to be lost in speculations as to who could
have been so unmannerly as to shoot the pions Maha
Mentri in three several places and at that the matter
rested in spite of the clamorous protests of the dead
man’s relatives.
Very soon the glad tidings of the Maha Mentri’s
death reached Pahang, and the ma’iong people
packed their gear and started back for their own
country, leaving many men and women lamenting,
and a set of utterly demoralized villages behind them.
Leh went back by sea with half a score of broken
hearts in his wallet; and soon after his arrival lie was
appointed to the post of court minstrel and warden
of the royal dancing girls. For the Kelantan to
which he had returned was a very different place
from the land he had quitted when he started out for Pahang. As soon as the worthy Maha Mentri
had been laid in his grave, the reaction which always
follows a paroxysm of religiosity set in with full
force, and Kelantan became forthwith a pleasant
land for unregenerate folk to live in. The five hours
of appointed prayer were suffered to slip by unre-
garded of the people; no man troubled himself to
fast more than his stomach thought fitting; and the
music of the ma’iong broke out anew, flinging wide
the gates of all the unmentionable passions.
In this new and joyful Kelantan, Leh found him-
self very much in his element. His wit and his
many accomplishments caused the old pillar dollars.
which in those days were the standard currency of
the country, to come rolling in, and he was thus
able to go forth among his fellows lavishly clad from
the waist downward in a profusion of gaudy silk
sarongs and sashes, such as the Kelantan folk affect.
From the belt upward he went naked, of course; for
unlike most Malays the people of this state never
wore coats, though these exotic garments were oc-
casionally used by the rájas and nobles at court
functions when strangers chanced to be present.
It was never Lelr’s habit to keep all his good for-
tune to himself, and not only a select few of the king’s
dancing girls, but a goodly troop of other dames and
maidens who should rightly have been occupied
exclusively with their lawful lords and masters-
came in for a share of the spoil. Given a well-set-up
figure, a handsome face, gay apparel, a witty tongue
and a superfluity of ready money, and a far less clever and engaging fellow than Leh, the strolling
player might confidently reckon upon a brilliant.
series of successes at the court of a Malayan king.
He came upon the scene, moreover, at a time when
the soul of the Kelantan people was stretching itself
luxuriously after its release from the moral bonds
with which the Maha Mentri had fettered it, and it
was not long before the best favoured, half of the
female population of Kota Bharu, a town famous for
the beauty of its women, were, to use the Malay
phrase, “mad” for Leh. The natives of the Penin-
sula, who are philosophers in their own way, recog-
nize that love, when it wins a fair grip upon man or
woman, is as much a disease of the mind as any other
form of insanity; and as it is more common than most
other forms of mania, they speak of it as “the mad-
ness” par ercellence.
Such a state of things, however, caused much dis-
satisfaction to the rest of the male community, and
the number of the malcontents received constant
recruits as the madness spread among the women.
The latter, as time went on, became more and more
shameless and reckless, and threw off all disguise, for
they were too numerous for any unorganized system
of wife and daughter beating effectively to cope with
the trouble. When they were not occupied in way-
laying Leh in sending him notes or presents, in making
assignations with him, or in ogling him as he swag-
gered past their dwellings, cocking a conquering eye
through the doorways, the ladies of Kota Bharu were
now frequently engaged in shrill and hard-fought. battle one with another. Each woman was wildly
jealous of all her fellows, mother suspecting daughter,
and daughter accusing mother of receiving more than
her fair share of Leh’s generous and widely scat-
tered attentions. Many were the scratches scored on
nose and countenance, long and thick the tussocks
of hair reft from one another by the combatants,
terrible and extravagant the damage done to one an-
other’s rival wardrobes by the infuriated ladies; while
the men beholding these impossible goings-on with
horror and dismay, said among themselves that Leh.
the warden of the king’s dancing girls must die.
He was a hefty fellow and known to be a good man
of his hands, wherefore, badly as they all felt about
him, no one saw his way to engage him in single
combat, though there were half a hundred very angry
husbands and lovers who were anxious to take an
active part in assassinating him. At last a commit-
tee of three specially aggrieved citizens was appointed
by general consent to act for the rest, and they lay in
wait for Leh during several successive evenings, hoping
to catch him returning alone from the ma’iong shed.
It was on the third night of their vigil that their
chance came. The moon was near the full, and the
heavy shadows cast by the palm fronds lay across
the ground like solid objects. The footpath, which
leads from the main thoroughfare into the villages
around Kota Bharu, branches off some twenty
yards from the spot where the watchers lay concealed.
The committee of three sat huddled up just within
the clustering compounds, hidden from sight by the patch of shadow cast upon the bare earth by a neigh-
bouring house, and the vivid moonlight revealed
every detail of the scene around them-the yellow,
sun-baked soil, the green of the smooth banana
leaves, even the red of a cluster of rambut-an fruit
on a tree near at hand.
Presently the sound of voices talking and laughing
light-heartedly came to the ears of the listening
tuen, and as the speakers drew nearer the committee
of three were able to distinguish Leh’s mellow tones.
At the parting of the ways he turned off by himself
along the footpath, his companions keeping on to the
main road. Leh took leave of them with a farewell
jest or two, which sent the others laughing upon
their way, and then he strolled slowly along the foot-
path humming the catch of a song under his breath.
The three in the shadow of the house could see
the colour of the gaudy cloths wound about their
enemy’s waist, the fantastic peak into which his
handkerchief was twisted, the glint of the polished
kemuning wood and the gold settings of his dagger
hilt, and the long, broad-bladed spear that he carried
in his right hand. They watched him drawing
nearer to them, still luumming a song, and with a half
smule upon his face. They allowed him to come
abreast of them, to stroll past them, still unsuspicions
of danger; but no pity for him moved them. All had
been injured in too deadly a fashion by this callous,
light-hearted libertine, who now went to the death he
knew not of with a smile on his face and the stave of a
song upon his lips.
As soon as he had passed them the committee of
three stepped noiselessly out of the shadow, poised
their spears aloft, and plunged them into Leli’s
naked brown back. As they struck they rent the
silence of the night with their sorak, a war-cry into
which they compressed all the pent-up hatred of
their victim which had been devouring their hearts
for months. Leh, giving vent to a thick, choking
cough, fell upon his face, and a few more vigorous
spear thrusts at his prostrate body completed the
work which the committee of three had been up-
pointed to perform.
They left the body of Leh, the strolling player,
lying where it had fallen, face downward in the dust
of the footpath; and though the king did all that lay
in his power to secure the detection of the murderers,
and though his efforts were seconded by half the
women in the town, the men who had planned the
deed kept their secret well, so no punishment could
be inflicted upon those who had actually effected the
assassination of the warden of the king’s dancing
girls.
In the eyes of Malayan justice, however, if you are
unable to punish the guilty, it is better to come down
heavily upon the innocent than to let everybody get
off scot free. The house near which the body of Leh
had been found happened to be tenanted by an okl
crone, her widowed daughter, and three children of
tender age. That they were not concerned in the
murder was obvious; but none the less their abode
was taken as the centre of a circle of one hundred fathom radius and all whose houses chanced to lie
within its circumference, whether men or women
young or old, whole or bedridden, mothers great with
child or babies at the breast, were indifferently fined
the sum of three dollars each, a large sum for a
Malayan villager of those days to be called upon to
pay, and producing, from the king’s point of view, a
refreshingly big total, when all heads had been
counted, for in the neighbourhood of Kota Bharu the
people herd together as closely as kine in a byre.
This system of wholesale muleting was recognized
in Kelantan as having several advantages attaching
to it. In the first place, it did something to enhance
the revenues of the king, which was a matter of no-
ment; and for the humbler folk, if a man chanced to
have a quarrel with a neighbour, with whom he was
otherwise unable to get even. he could punish him
by the simple process of leaving a corpse at his front
door. In a land where human life was as cheap as it
used to be in Kelantan, this was not a difficult matter
to arrange, and if the corpse chanced to be that of
yet another enemy, two birds, so to speak, could be
killed with a single stone. Which is economical.
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