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The Real Hang Tuah by Farish Noor |
Betuahnya negara yang tidak ber-Tuah. THERE ARE TIMES when our folk heroes need to be brought down a peg or two, particularly when they have overstepped the frontier of ideological correctness. I've always nursed a vendetta against Hang Tuah, that beloved ‘budak Raja' so adored by amok-prone keris-waving nationalists and humbug patriots who can never chant the slogan ‘Tak kan Melayu hilang di dunia' too many times. But of late the cult of Tuah and his keris antics have become too staid, too repetitive, too predictable for this academic; and so the time has come to take off the gloves and give the fella a good whuppin'. Who hasn't heard of Tuah and his gang? The trials and tribulations of our national hero have become part and parcel of our nation-building process, and since childhood we have been reminded time and again of his blood-soaked exploits and his valiant efforts to keep the status quo intact. Tuah was always an instrument of regime maintenance at best, and at worse comes under the category of Preman-mercenary types who, like the ever-so-loyal English yeoman, was cast as the salt of the earth. In case any of us are still doubting, the opening lines of the Hikayat Hang Tuah (which, admittedly is a classic in its own right and a sample of authentic Malay literature) announces his entry thus: "Inilah Hikayat Hang Tuah yang amat setiawan pada tuan-nya dan terlalu sangat berbuat kebaktian kepada tuan-nya." ‘Terlalu sangat berbuat kebaktian kepada tuan-nya' is an apt way of putting it. Others might argue that it is an understatement. The bottom line is that Tuah was and is blind loyalty and deference personified. In the Hikayat he performs many deeds that are calculated to please his master, the Raja of Melaka, and more importantly, to uphold the presiding order of things. Tuah's fatal stabbing of Hang Jebat has been cited as the example par excellence of loyalty to the state superseding loyalty to his friend: And by doing so anticipating the Hegelian dialectical conflict of state ethics versus the ethics of filial and familial relations. |
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second part It is this shameless devotion to power that makes Tuah so important and favoured to the powers-that-be. What other archetype of model citizen would we need today? Imagine living in present-day Malaysia with a legion of Tuahs out there, badges and batons in hand. Forget peaceful demonstrations and legal protest: Tuah and co. would be in the front rank shooting off rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at point-blank range. During the 1960s some Left-leaning cultural critics and intellectuals such as Kassim Ahmad attempted an early deconstruction of the character of Tuah, by pointing out that our national hero was little more than a running dog of the establishment. Then it was quite trendy to argue that Hang Tuah's nemesis Hang Jebat stood for his dialectical other: If Tuah was loyalty incarnate, then Jebat was seen as the spirit of rebellion – At least until it was noted by others like Chandra Muzaffar that Jebat was likewise a loyal sidekick of the king and that his rebellion was sparked off by a contestation of desire over a woman (as it often is). No, sad though may it may seem to the liberals among us, Jebat was likewise another ‘budak Raja' in the pay of the istana's coffers… The political appropriation of Hang Tuah was only possible, however, with the essentialisation of his character and its multiple displacement. For a start, most of us have only read the abridged version of the Hikayat Hang Tuah that was for primary school consumption. How many of us have even heard of Kassim Ahmad's magnum opus edition of the Hikayat Hang Tuah, painstaking and lovingly edited and compiled in 1962 and published by our very own Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka? This is the definitive version of the full Hikayat, in two volumes, running a total of 523 pages. It is in this definitive edition of the Hikayat Hang Tuah that we see the multiple identities of Hang Tuah himself, and the stereotypical man of steel is laid bare and denuded of his power and glory. As Kassim Ahmad notes in his introduction to the text, in the full version we see how Tuah evolves from being the pahlawan who is ‘gagah, garang dan berani' to the eternal wanderer and Sufi mystic, ‘bijaksana, sabar dan waraq'. This change of heart comes about after his killing of Jebat and the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese and later the Dutch, and Hang Tuah is left with the task of serving as emissary for the tattered remnants of a fallen Malay power. It is here, in the second part of the Hikayat (which, incidentally is almost as long as the first), where we see a totally different Tuah evolve before our very eyes. He journeys from Vijayanagar (Kalinga) to China, from Ayudhya across Asia and all the way to Turkey. In the process his character evolves as he renounces violence and the bloody ways of the keris. His meditates and contemplates the fate of men and the world, and ultimately comes to the realisation that all that is worldly is temporal and fleeting. Having found salvation, he saves himself from himself, though sadly this did not save him from the grasping hands of revisionist nationalist ideologues and demagogues. Needless to say, the second part of the Hikayat Hang Tuah is rarely read and discussed. Its not too difficult to figure out why: As an exercise of de-masculation it strips our hero of everything that is |
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associated with power. And in his gradual disempowerment Tuah detaches
himself from the very structures of power that he once served and which
in turn afforded him the license to kill. James Bond without MI6 is just
a thug with a gun; but Tuah without his king and kingdom redeems himself
by turning his back to all. And this is why the early Tuah is so important
to the nationalist crowd, while the latter Tuah of the second part of the Hikayat has to be forgotten, erased, buried forever. Perhaps in the final analysis the pacifist in me doesn't have to diss Tuah, as it is Tuah himself who performs the decisive act of self-deconstruction as he transforms himself from warrior to itinerant nomad. The soldier with his keris finds himself finally free, and in that freedom confronts the emptiness that was his existential lot. His wanderings take him across Asia, and ultimately this timeless man among men is reduced to a mystic preaching to the men of the forest. Hot-headed nationalists may not be too comfortable with the fate of Tuah, who renounces worldly power for the sake of enlightenment, but in this age of over-heated speeches and bellicose rhetoric, Tuah's eventual maturation leaves us with the redeeming belief that men do grow up in the end. And by doing so, they become real men. What balls.# Note: This "Other Malaysia" article first appeared in Off The Edge Magazine, January 2007. Published under a licence which reads: All content within the The Other Malaysia website are owned by Farish A. Noor or their respective authors unless otherwise specified. You are free to use the articles, photos and other media under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. |
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