Music in the Rubble

Late one afternoon in Jugra, in the soft light of fading memory, we walked to the skeletal remains of a house that hid behind a bank of trees. It was no ordinary place; its bones were the decaying remains of the istana of Sultan Abdul Samad, a colourful figure in the royal Bugis lineage of Selangor.

Time had been harsh on this historic pile, columns wrapped in the descending gloom and tiles and wood carvings that had seen better days, now exposed to the elements and worse. In the shadows were hands that were plucking and hacking at bits and parts of the past: we caught two men in the act of stealing Selangor’s history.

I wrote about that incident and connected it to a shadow in my own past in Kuala Trengganu [see Dah Nak Wak Guane] the Istana Kolam that sat in an area of some ambiguity, between Kampung Kolam and Kampung Petani. It too was an old istana, grander than the old ‘palace’ of Jugra, but wrapped likewise in sad decay and the hazy light of melancholy.

A friend recently wrote to say that he once saw bits of the Istana Kolam laid out in a car boot sale.

The Istana Kolam in its prime was at the heart of Trengganu’s history. It was there that the Trengganu gamelan was born and reborn, and there the Trengganu dissident-scholar Haji Abdul Rahman Limbong was called to meet the Sultan for a rebellion that he was allegedly fomenting in the Ulu. When a rabble-rouser named Garieb Rauf came to revive the Parti Negara after the death of Datuk Onn Jaafar, it was at this Istana that he first hung his shirt, before coming to live in our midst in Tanjong Pasar. He made much of his being in the Istana of course, but he was no Onn Jaafar, so the Istana Kolam outlived him and soon saw him fade away.

Unknown to me then the Istana had a hidden aspect, a wide living quarter under a roof of Senggora tiles, with porte-cochère, and raised on stilts. All I could see from the gap in the wall between the bend in the road and the old tamarind tree each time I walked past that way was the Balai Besar where many royal ceremonies would have taken place in the Istana’s heyday, where Cikgu Muhammad Hashim bin Abu Bakar, a teacher from the nearby Sekolah Paya Bunga stood with a group of school children from the Boy Scouts group of Kuala Trengganu to sing a song that he’d composed for Sultan Sulaiman’s birthday in 1927. The song later became the state anthem of Trengganu.

Istana Kolam became the centre of gamelan music in Trengganu during the reign of Sultan Sulaiman, but as to how the gamelan came to Trengganu is a contentious area. One version has it that like the older nobat, it came to Trengganu from Riau — in 1813 says one version of the story — before it moved on to the istana of Pahang. What can be said with certainty is that the gamelan as palace music flourished in Trengganu under the reign of Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Syah, after his marriage to Tengku Ampuan Mariam, daughter of Sultan Ahmad of Pahang. The Tengku Ampuan, helped by her mother Che Zubedah, developed dances for the first time to be accompanied by the gamelan. It is said that it was Sultan Sulaiman who turned the Joget Pahang into the Joget Gamelan Trengganu (Trengganu Gamelan Dance).

After Sultan Sulaiman’s death in 1942, the Trengganu gamelan moved completely from the ceremonial Istana Maziah to Istana Kolam, the official residence of Tengku Ampuan Mariam. There it stayed until the music faded completely away with the passing of the Tengku Ampuan and the decline of the Istana.

One sad day in Trengganu the municipal workers came with their lorries and their sturdy workers, and without as much as a passing thought for the glory of better days, they pulled down the Istana.