Hang Tuah Ke Kuil Hindu: Cultural Ecumenicalism in the Hikayat Hang Tuah
By Farish A. Noor
Before it becomes a nasty habit and before people end up with the mistaken opinion that you can only visit a Hindu temple with a severed head of a cow in hand, let us re-visit the past of the Malays and look at how the Hikayat Hang Tuah provides us with an example of cultural ecumenicalism and cosmopolitanism of the highest variety.
Most of us have heard of the Hikayat Hang Tuah but have never read it in full. Indeed, what few of us realise is that there are several dozen versions of the Hikayat Hang Tuah and that till today scholars are discovering lost manuscripts that shed more light on this truly amazing text which in many ways encapsulates the Malay vision of the social and moral universe around them at the time.
Contrary to the shallow and narrow interpretation of Hang Tuah as a warrior in service of his King, the full version of the Hikayat presents Hang Tuah as a warrior-turned-diplomat who ends his life as a pacifist and mystic who renounces violence and the ways of war. Indeed, that is the true moral of the tale: that violence is not the solution to anything and that we are all creatures who live on this same earth with the same rights and human sensibility that is universal.
Hang Tuah’s own moral awakening comes after he is sent abroad to serve as the emissary of Melaka to India, Turkey, China and even as far as the Byzantine empire. But long before he becomes a globe-trotting man of the world, Hang Tuah’s first visit takes him to India, to visit the kingdom of the ‘Kelings’ (Kalinga) in South India.
The Hikayat Hang Tuah is rich with details about the wonders and riches of the Keling kingdom under the rule of Raja Kisna Rayan. Tuah notes, for instance, that the land of the Kelings is so rich that a single Keling merchant seems to possess more wealth then ten Malay kings. Tuah and his retinue are amazed by the commerce and welfare of the people of Bijaya Nagaram, and the effortless manner with which its King welcomes them into the fold of the court and the royal family.
In the course of their exchanges the Hindu ruler Kisna Rayan and his courtiers express their amazement for Tuah’s ability to converse in the Keling tongue, to which Tuah himself offers an interesting explanation that betrays his own open-minded ecumenicalism:
