Singing for the Sultan

Cik Gu Muhammad Hashim bin Abu Bakar standing before the Istana Kolam in its glory days, leading a group of schoolchildren in the first performance of what was later to be the Trengganu state anthem before Sultan Sulaiman Badrul Alam Shah on his birthday [see, Music in the Rubble]. Some of the children, I am told, were from Sekolah Paya Bunga, a school that must have stood close to a pond with pretty flowers, but not in the days when Father was there. And I don’t think Father was among the young people who stayed back after school to do the solfeggio in preparation for the big song on the big day.

If as Peter Newmark* says, imagination has two main faculties: sonorisation and visualtion, then we’ve all been there and there. I’ve replayed in my head many times our hot mornings in Padang Paya Bunga (which is some distance away from the Sekolah), us parading schoolchildren, songkoks on heads and probably flags in hands, listening to speeches and more speeches and then singing. In sonorisation, says Newmark, you normally hear voices in your mind, of people dead and living, and you hear your own voice too. It's all part of memory.

My sonorised memory of those days on Padang Paya Bunga consists of some distinguished voices, of Buya Hamka, the Indonesian writer and religious scholar speaking and wiping tears as he narrated the story of what I now think was most certainly the Qasida Burda, the Poem of the Prophet’s Mantle. Father took us there one evening, and all I could hear were hypnotic words (Hamka was a formidable speaker) that I could not relate to any everyday thing, but I remember him saying selendang (a cloak, veil or scarf) as he wiped his eyes. There were many dignitaries who spoke there, and once we heard the voice of a lanky man with thick glasses who was known widely by his pen name of Misbaha, the distinguished amateur historian of Trengganu.

I began sonorising yesterday when a Trengganuspeaking friend sent me an email to say that he felt ssebök when he saw on television the installation ceremony of the Sultan of Trengganu as the thirteenth Yang di Pertaun Agong of Malaysia and the third Agong from Trengganu. Ssebök is the more evocative Trengganuspeak version of the standardspeak tersebak, that welling up of the emotion, that swelling in the chest and that tissue moment for the eye, in sadness or happiness or a mixture of both.

And of course I remember the state anthem of Trengganu, but only in my sonorised way that went, for a long time, like this:

"Allah peliharakang rajakang mi,
Memerintah Trengganu negeri...**

That was probably how I (we) sang it on the Padang, and looking back now on that first line, how wonderfully alliterative it falls in its Tregganuspeaking way, what sonorous memory!

We were taught that at school, not from a song sheet, but from listening to the words as poured from the mouth of our teacher. Mine was in Sekolah Melayu Ladang, built on colonies of Cik Ru on sandy Ladang soil. Traffic went past our front gate, the red and yellow of the Trengganu Bus Company, the tarpaulin covered lorries of the Pahang Mail Transport Company, the Tok Peraih middlemen with their cone-shaped terendak hats cycling at speed from one fish market to another, with their trade mark fish baskets in the back-rack of their bicycles. Fish odour and diesel fumes and dust wafted into our grounds at playtime, and the occasional Arabic noises from the Madrasah Sultan Zainal Abidin next door. Walking home via the footpath through the village in the back of the school, we met the putrid smell of dried shrimps pounded, with sea salt and the sweat of labour, into grainy looking dark brown paste that now lay in slabs on the belacan racks that were put out to dry in the sun and air.

"Allah peliharakang rajakang mi..." how wonderfully apt the sound, how evocative the rhythm of Trengganu.

____________________

* Professor Peter Newmark, occasional lecturer in translation studies, University of Surrey, in The Linguist magazine, Feb/March 2007.

** Allah peliharakan Raja Kami, God save our King.

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.