Once there was a prince Fatihu'1-Arzi, great-grandson of
Alexander the Great. He set out to conquer China but the minister of the
Emperor of China filled a junk with eighty old men of eighty and a cargo of
needles and he planted fruit-trees on the decks and set out to meet the fleet
of Fatihu'1-Arzi. When the invading fleet met this junk, Fatihu'l-Arzi's men
hailed her and asked whence she came. " From China, years ago,"
replied the minister. " The crew were boys when we left China and these
needles were iron bars: moreover these trees have grown on deck from the seeds
of fruit we ate as boys." So instead of the interminable voyage to China
Fatihu'1-Arzi determined to visit the depths of the sea. He was let down in a
glass chest and he came to a town called Bahrain ruled by a Muslim genie, Raja
Suran, and he married Princess Chahaya Khairani, daughter of Raja Suran, and
begat two sons, Raja Kilan and Raja Chulan and then returned to the earth. When
Raja Kilan and Raja Chulan had grown up, they set out to find their father and
they came to a rice-clearing in the land of Minangkabau where they were greeted
and entertained by the owners, Dang Pok and Dang Malini. Raja Kilan returned to
his mother but Raja Chulan married the daughter of Demang Lebar Daun, chief of
that country, and begat a son. And at the time of that son's birth, a bull
belonging to Demang Lebar Daun vomited and out of the vomit came a child with
the manuscript of the Perak coronation address in his hand. And when the child
of the Bull's vomit grew up, Demang Lebar Daun said unto him, " Thine is
the family which shall instal Malay kings: else is their installation invalid.
But before one of thy family instal a king, he shall receive the title Sri Nara
'diraja. Then shall he give his ruler a title and whisper the state secret in
his ear and read the coronation address. After that he shall light the royal
candle and ask for how many tunes by the royal band his ruler can sit immobile
on the throne."
On an auspicious day Demang Lebar Daun took his grandson and
the child of the Bull's vomit to the top of Mount Si-Guntang and gave his
grandson a silver bow and a silver arrow, saying, " Shoot, and where the
arrow falls thou shalt be king. Call the country Perak, that is, Silver."
And the arrow flew for seven days and seven nights and fell at Pulau Indra
Sakti, opposite Bandar in Lower Perak.
This version of the story then continues as in the legend
collected by Sir William Maxwell (vide pp. 122-3). Generally the above version
calls the grandson of Demang Lebar Daun
119
Page 120 A History of Perak.
Sultan Ahmad Taju'd-din, rightly
associating the story of the silver arrow, which is borrowed from the Kedah
story Marong Mahawangsa, with what we shall find to be a king of Kedah.
Elsewhere, inconsistently, it calls him Muzaffar Shah, father of Mansur Shah,
and has him installed by Sri Nara 'diraja and Amar 'diraja; it adds that it was
Sultan Mansur Shah who divided the Perak chiefs into the Four, the Eight, the
Sixteen and the Thirty-Two.
There is another variant of the story. Once four princes
came out of the sea, sons of a Raja Chulan and of Princess Darustan, daughter
of King Fatihu'1-Arzi. They were descendants of Alexander the Great. Their
names were Nila Utama, Nila Pandita, Nila Pendaga and Nila Kechil Bongsu. The
first became Emperor of Byzantium and China, the second Sultan of Singapore and
Malacca, the third Sultan of Perak. In this wanderings Raja Kechil Bongsu gave
Singapore its name of Lion-City because of a lion he saw on the shore. In the Singapore
straits the jealous god of the sea raised such a tempest that the prince had to
throw away his crown and change his name (to Muzaffar Shah) in order to avoid
shipwreck. So the Sultans of Perak have no crown and in the little strait of
Lembayan the fish rise to the surface, dazzled by the splendour of its jewels.
Muzaffar Shah reached the Perak river. Over the Shoal of the Wet Rice (Beting
Bras Basah) a great serpent stretched its coils from bank to bank. Then said
the prince's saintly counsellor, Demang Lebar Daun, " Among your heirlooms
is the blade of King Fatihu'1-Arzi, the magic sword chura simanjakini, once
owned by the king of the sea. Take it and slay the serpent'' So Muzaffar Shah
took the sword and, his thoughts fixed on his ancestors, slew the serpent at
one blow. Howbeit the magic sword was dented as men may see to this day.
These legends are Perak variants of the stories told in the
" Malay Annals " of the founders of the Palembang and Singapore
dynasties. Even there they are folk-lore (JRASMB., 1926, vol. IV pp. 413-419).
Nila Uttama, for instance, is Tilottama, an Apsara or nymph of Indra's heaven!
The serpent of the Shoal of the Wet Rice is an avatar of Sakti-Muna whom Sang
Sapurba (another Apsara!) slew with the sword Chemundang Giri (Hewer of
Mountains) or Chura Semandang-kini, notching his sword in 190 places but
gaining the throne of Minangkabau. Both are avatars of the demon of Ujjain,
capital of Malwa in western India, which was slain by Vikramaditya, grandson of
Indra (ib.).
The names Raja Suran and Raja Chulan may refer to the Chula
kings who were at enmity with Srivijaya and raided Bruas in the XIth century
A.D. The country Bahrain stands for Bruas, whose history the purely romantic
tale called Hikayat Shamsu'l-Bahrain (JRASSB. No. 47) is supposed in Perak to
record!
Perak Versions of the Malacca Dynastic Legend. Page 121
The Kedah story of the silver arrow comes from a
Perso-Arabic source. Elisha bade Joash king of Israel shoot an arrow eastward
out of the window " the arrow of the Lord's deliverance from Syria "
(2 Kings, Chapter 13, verses 14-17). The shooting of an arrow to determine a
site was practised by the Persians both in Sassanian and Muslim times and was
also done by Arabs. (JRASSB., 1920, LXXXII p. 137).
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