Hikayat

<i>Hikayat</i>

Hikayat

Genre of malayan literature

Hikayat (Jawi: حكاية; Gurmukhi: ਹਿਕਾਇਤਾ, romanized: Hikā'itā) (or hikajat), which may be translated as "Romances", represent a genre of literature popular in Malay and Sikh literature and can be written in both verse and prose. Hikayat often mix past- and present-tense such that past events appear to be prophesied. Texts in this genre are meant to be publicly performed and are also often self-referential, in which they record examples of the recitation of other hikayat.[1]

A copy of the Hang Tuah Saga in display.

Malay hikayats relate the adventures of heroes from kingdoms across the Malay archipelago (spanning modern Indonesia and Malaysia, especially in Sumatra) or chronicles of their royalty. The stories they contain, though based on history, are heavily romanticized.[2] Poetical format is not required in Malay and Arabic Hikayat while the Acehnese Hikayat requires it. [3] Hikayats also appear in Sikh literature of the Indian subcontinent, of which 11 or 12 are associated with Guru Gobind Singh.[4] One famous example is the Hikaaitaan.

The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah, originating as a translation of a fourteenth-century Persian text, may be the oldest example of the hikayat genre.[5] It is mentioned already in the oldest known list of Malay manuscripts from 1696 produced by Isaac de l'Ostal de Saint-Martin.[6]

One common set of traditions which were frequently written into hikayat included literature in the tradition of the Alexander legends. These include the Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain ("The Story of Alexander the Two-Horned One"), the Hikayat Raja Iskandar ("The Story of King Alexander")[7] and Hikayat Ya’juj wa-Ma’juj ("The Story of Gog and Magog").[8]

See also

References

  1. [1]
    Woolf, D. R. (2011). A global history of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 421. ISBN 978-0-521-87575-2. OCLC 665137609.
  2. [2]
    Frits A. Wagner, Indonesia; The Art Of An Island Group, Ann E. Keep, tr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, 246.
  3. [3]
    Kees Versteegh; Mushira Eid (2005). Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics: A-Ed. Brill. pp. 8–. ISBN 978-90-04-14473-6.
  4. [4]
    Singh, Harbans (2011). The Encyclopedia of Sikhism. Vol. 2: E-L (3rd ed.). Punjabi University, Patiala. p. 271.
  5. [5]
    Marcinkowski, M. Ismail (2005). From Isfahan to Ayutthaya: contacts between Iran and Siam in the 17th century. Contemporary Islamic scholars series. Singapore: Pustaka Nasional. pp. 13–14. ISBN 978-9971-77-491-2.
  6. [6]
    Brakel, L. F. (1975). The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah: a medieval Muslim-Malay romance. Bibliotheca Indonesica. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. p. 7. ISBN 978-90-247-1828-3.
  7. [7]
    Daneshgar, Majid (2019). "Dhu l-Qarnayn in Modern Malay Qurʾānic Commentaries and Other Literature on Qurʾānic Themes". In Daneshgar, Majid; Riddell, Peter G.; Rippin, Andrew (eds.). The Qurʼan in the Malay-Indonesian world: context and interpretation. Routledge studies in the Quran (First issued in paperback ed.). London New York: Routledge. pp. 212–228. ISBN 978-0-367-28109-0.
  8. [8]
    Doufikar-Aerts, Faustina (2003). "Sīrat Al-Iskandar: An Arabic Popular Romance of Alexander". Oriente Moderno. 22 (83) (2): 505–520. ISSN 0030-5472.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Hikayat, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.