Moral order in a time of damnation: the Hikayat Patani in historical context.(Critical essay)

Introduction

Andries Teeuw and David Wyatt first offered scholars a glimpse of southern Thailand's earliest historical chronicle, the Hikayat Patani, in 1970. (1) Pivotal for understanding the little-studied Malay-Thai border region, their work rooted the chronicle within the political context which produced it during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More recently, Davisakd Puaksom argued that the authors of the Hikayat Patani fashioned the chronicle as a political statement in the face of increasing Ayudhyan intrusion into local affairs, particularly from the last decade of the seventeenth century onwards. (2) While these studies have eloquently illuminated the political circumstances surrounding the chronicle, they have not paid adequate attention to internal social forces that coalesced in the writing of the Hikayat Patani, namely the desire by certain intellectuals to re-establish a moral order through writing during a period of social and political collapse. Set within the context of widespread economic downturn in Southeast Asia after 1650, the present study of the Hikayat Patani offers scholars an illustration of a society in turmoil with comparative possibilities across the entire region.

Authors composed the Hikayat Patani during the period 1690-1730 and it remains the earliest indigenous source for the sixteenth through eighteenth-century history of the region, during which time Patani was a semi-independent coastal trading polity. As I will show in the course of this article, the Patani sultanate experienced a period of turmoil after 1650 that eventually led to a social collapse in the court. Internal conflict wracked the sultanate as various contenders for the throne of Patani fought against one another as they attempted to legitimise themselves against numerous rivals. In their world, moral authority came to form the building blocks of their own claims to rule in Patani. A close reading of the chronicle sheds light upon the motivation of the authors as witnesses to the restoration and re-imagining of Patani as a place and a society.

The establishment and maintenance of moral order in Southeast Asia has received little attention in the scholarly literature, particularly in the pre-colonial period. Craig Reynolds, in his groundbreaking article, showed how historical texts served as legitimising forces in early Bangkok when King Rama I, the founder of the Chakri dynasty, felt a need to strengthen his position as the new monarch. (3) He faced particular problems because he was of no relation to the former Ayudhyan kings. Strong parallels may be drawn between Rama I and many of the claimants to the Patani throne in the 1710s and 1720s who either held weak genealogical claims to former rulers or were ambitious bendahara (4) who sought to usurp the throne. Political competitors thus employed historical texts as legitimising forces and as handbooks of raja-ship by which a just and wise ruler might restore the glory of Patani's perceived golden age of the seventeenth century. The resulting chronicles that authors produced in the period 1690-1730 eventually coalesced into the unified Hikayat Patani chronicle by the early nineteenth century.

The proliferation of early nineteenth-century historical writing that David Wyatt and others have noted throughout the Tai world coincided with a similar pattern in Patani. (5) While Wyatt argued that political turmoil compelled people in the central and northern Tai regions to turn to Bangkok as a moral centre, Patani embraced Mecca on an unprecedented level at the same time. (6) The period 1810-40 witnessed a great rise in local knowledge production and dissemination that included both historical as well as explicitly Islamic texts. It was precisely during this period that an anonymous compiler first brought together the stories that had been written over a century earlier in the form of the Hikayat Patani, (7) the oldest extant copy of which dates to 1839.

An investigation into the historical consequences of Patani's distinct form of moral authority and its active writing tradition leads one naturally to engage in what Professor John Smail termed 'autonomous history'. (8) He compelled scholars of Southeast Asia to study autonomous history as part of a movement away from colonial era scholarship and the nationalist counter-narrative. Smail sought to liberate pre-colonial history from the contemporary imprint often imposed back upon earlier times. In recent years, efforts by scholars such as Sunait Chutintarinond and others have made great strides forward in the realm of autonomous history. (9) On the Malay-speaking region of southern Thailand, however, there remains a dearth of scholarship, particularly regarding the history of the Patani Sultanate prior to its formal inclusion into Siam. The aim of this article is to explore the history of Patani when it was a political centre in contrast to the Malay-Thai borderland's position today on the periphery between the nation states of Thailand and Malaysia.

First, I will contextualise the Hikayat Patani within the broader genre of court hikayat writing to identify common characteristics and peculiarities about the text in question. Before looking at the critical events surrounding the origins of the text, I would redraw the chronology of Patani history after 1650 based upon recent scholarship concerning the history of the peninsula. By making adjustments to the established chronology of Teeuw and Wyatt, I argue that the first section of the text draws upon oral tradition while authors penned succeeding sections as contemporary witnesses to the events they recorded. I then follow with analysis of political relations between Patani and Ayudhya that formed the basis for the authors' preoccupations with the survival of the Patani court. Finally, I conclude by analysing the social crisis that arose after the conflict between Patani and Ayudhya in the 1690s that compelled intellectuals to preserve the history and traditions of the sultanate in the writing of the Hikayat Patani in which music was a centrepiece.