Malay literature . by Sir Richard Winstedt . for more than a 1,000 years Malaya &apos;s little courts and ports were under the influence of Hindu and Buddhist India , which in fact had created them . first Pallavas from the Coromandel coast imported a mixture of the religions of Brahma , Shiva and Visnu and Buddhism ; and Sanskrit inscriptions of the 4th century of the Xtian era show that in Kedah , Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism flourished side by side . from the 6th to the 13th centuries , northern Malaya was part of a Buddhist empire , Sri Vijaya , that ruled the Malacca straits from Kedah and the Sunda straits from Palembang in south Sumatra . and though the conversion to Islam 600 years ago destroyed the Hindu alphabets and any palm-leaf literature , there remain four times as many Sanskrit loanwords even in Malay village verse as there are Arabic . the Indians were too few in the land to introduce Prakrit or any Dravidian tongue as the language of conversation , but the court Brahmins brought religion and learning and furnished the primitive Malay with his first abstract terms , terms still used by the Muslim Malay to denote religion , fasting , heaven , sin , life , language , time , name , prince , property , thing , a fine , work and so on . it is this background that gave the Malay stories from the Jataka tales , Bidpai &apos;s fables and the Katha Sarit Sagara or ocean of story , carried down the centuries per ora virum , until they were written down and published in modern times . most of these stories are known throughout south east Asia and there is Buddhist influence in folktales . but the two chief literary relics of the Hindu period are Malay versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata . the former , the Hikayat Sri Rama , is derived from the oral tradition of the Javanese shadow-play and contains details from the east , west and south-west of India . some of the episodes are not found in India before the 12th century . the Malay version in the Perso-Arabic script would appear to date from the first half of the 15th century , when children in the streets of Malacca knew the story , and Islamic romance had not yet ousted the Hindu epics . the Malay versions of sections of the Mahabharata are derived from Javanese versions of the 14th century and again may probably have been translated in 15th century Malacca with its large Javanese quarter . by 1634 Malays were instructed by a famous theologian writer in Malay that the Ramayana might be condemned to the rubbish heap provided the name of Allah did not occur in the manuscript . in the Bodleian manuscript which goes back to the 16th century or earlier , it is Nabi Adam who gives Ravana his kingdoms and Allah taala has been substituted for the Hindu trinity ( dewata mulia raya ) . one other strong pre-Muslim element in Malay literature was a cycle of some forty tales enacted in the shadow-plays of Java , Bali , Malaya , Siam and Cambodia , whose hero is a Javanese prince Sri Panji and heroine Chandra Kirana , moon-beam . some are preserved in Kelantan thanks to the shadow-plays . one Kelantan tale is typical . the god Indra sentences a heavenly nymph guilty of an illicit love affair to become a mortal and be murdered by a Javanese queen before she can return to heaven . she descends and becomes incarnate in the wife of a Javanese headman . a prince hunting sees her and weds her , though he is betrothed to a princess . his mother mad with rage stabs the girl in her sleep , whereupon she returns a nymph in heaven . as always there is horse-play by the prince &apos;s followers who are deified ancestors turned by Hinduism into clowns . the Panji cycle influences the Malay annals and inspired the only original Malay romance before modern times , the story of Hang Tuah or the lucky Captain whose exploits are a mixture of myth and history found in Indian and Javanese literature of this type and include an apochryphal trip to Istanbul . Virginia Woolf &apos;s analysis of Sidney &apos;s Arcadia fits exactly not only the Panji tales but a number of Malay romances that are a jumble of Hindu folklore and mythology , Panji episodes , allusions to the heroes of the Shahnameh , incidents from the Alexander legend , references to Baghdad , Medinah , Egypt and Byzantium and even expositions of Sufi mysticism . Sidney writes Virginia Woolf , had no notion when he set out where he was going . telling stories , he thought , was enough - one could follow another interminably . but where there is no end in view , there is no sense of direction to draw us on . nor , since it is part of his scheme to keep his characters simply bad and simply good without distinction , can he gain variety from the complexity of character . to supply change and movement he must have recourse to mystification . these changes of dress , these disguises of princes as peasants , of men as women , serve instead of psychological subtilty to relieve the stagnancy of people collected together with nothing to talk about . but when the charm of that childish device falls flat there is no breath to fill the sails . who is talking and to whom and about what , we no longer feel sure . some of the Malay romances , which apart from any Javanese additions , all come from India , appear to have been translated in the 15th century , others in the 16th and 17th . one , the Indraputra was condemned to the rubbish heap in 1634 along with the Ramayana . the two last romances of this type were translated early in the 19th century . the modern Malay views them with the eye of Virginia Woolf and today they are of interest only to the folklorist and the linguist . the first missionaries of Islam had to provide romances to take the place of the Ramayana and Mahabharata and the popular Panji tales . so the pseudo-Callisthenes story of Alexander the Great as a warrior missionary of the faith of Abraham , the precursor of Mohamed , was presented to the Malays in a translation almost with the advent of Islam . there is a Megat Iskandar in 14th century Pasai and soon after 1400 the first Muslim ruler of Malacca changed his Hindu title of Parameswara for Sultan Iskandar Shah . several Malay manuscripts name as the author of the Arabic version Al-Suri , who cites as his authority Abdullah ibn Al-Mustafa translator of the Pahlavi version of the Kalila wa Dimna . from its early date and the fact that it is a compilation from Persian as well as Arabic sources , the Malay Hikayat Iskandar may be derived from a Perso-Arabic source in India . it seems probable that Malacca &apos;s first ruler , who died in 1424 knew the Hikayat . the 15th century author of the Malay annals borrows anecdotes from it and also mentions the Hikayat Amir Hamza and Hikayat Hanafiah , the former a direct translation from the Persian and the latter having Shi&apos;ah colouring and quoting a Persian verse . another Malay work of Persian origin is the story of Joseph and Zulaikha , namely Potiphar &apos;s wife . an excellent Malay work is the Hikayat Bayan Budiman , or story of the wise parrot , a cycle of tales in a frame story , where every night the parrot dissuades his mistress from going to meet a lover by diverting her with tales . ultimately this cycle of stories comes from the Sanskrit but the Malay version claims to be from the Persian Tutinameh . three times in the text the work is ascribed to one Kadli Hassan and twice a date , A.D 1371 is given . its excellent style suggests that it was done into Malay in 15th century Malacca and the Malay annals tell us how the daughter of a Malaccan Laksamana , or Admiral was named Sabariah patience almost certainly after a celebrated character in the story of the wise parrot . another cycle of tales , called the story of Bakhtiar was also translated from the Persian . the original Persian work was written in A.D 1203 and later done into Arabic . from the Persian recension are derived two Malay versions of the Hikayat Bakhtiar and from the Arabic comes the Malay Hikayat Ghulam . the fact that Malays could borrow so much from the Persian and yet remain orthodox Sunnites of the school of Shafi&apos;i is explained from the Turkish and Mongol rulers of Persia between 1000 and 1500 being also Sunnites . and during that period the Persian influence on Malay literature must have come not only from India but from Persians themselves . in 1336 Ibn Batuta records the presence of several Persians all Shafi&apos;ites at the Pasai court . a tomb in that little Sumatran state bears an inscription from Sa&apos;di and half a century later there were theologians living in Pasai who had come from Transoxana and Khorassan . the Malay version of the 1,000 questions , the fullest version extant of the book from which Europe got to know the Arab account of Islam , is derived from two old Persian recensions and contains many references to places round the Caspian sea . it has no Shi&apos;ah colouring . when Persians became Shi&apos;ahs , Sayids from Mecca and the Hadramant gradually took their place in the Malay world , and we get a large number of theological works translated from orthodox Arabic originals . but Persian influence lingered . and there are four stories about the prophet with a Shi&apos;ah tinge , namely the tale of the Nur Muhammad or mystical light of the prophet , the splitting of the moon , the prophet &apos;s shaving and his death . one manuscript of 1688 calls the first an abridgement of a Persian Rauzat al-ahbab or paradise of lovers . after the capture of Malacca by the Portuguese in 1511 the mastery of the Malay world passed to Acheh , which was frequented by missionaries from Mecca , Yemen , Egypt and Syria whose names we know and who found pupils eager to study Islamic mysticism . works of pure literature fell more and more out of fashion as Arab influence supplanted Persian . but still Persian influence lingered . the earliest Malay version of the Panchatantra or Bidpai &apos;s fables was known to the Dutch historian Valentyn in 1726 and from its poor Malay and Sumatran style it must have been translated at Acheh . it came through some Indian original from the 12th century Persian recension of Nasr Allah as amended in the 15th century by the author of the Anwar-i Suhaili or lights of canopus . there is an ethical treatise the crown of kings compiled at Bokhara and done into Malay in 1603 and therefore almost certainly at Acheh . the verses in this miscellany are all in the form of Persian prosody . among Persian works cited in it are the Siyar ul Muluk compiled by the famous Vizier Nizam ul Muluk , a verse out of the secrets of Attar , the romances of Mahmud and Ayaz and Shirin , and Yusuf and Zulaikha . the introduction acknowledges indebtedness to the author of the Anwar i Suhaili . with the coming of Arabs from the Hadramant and with Malays studying in Mecca and later in Cairo , Indo-Persian belles-lettres gave way to theology , even the Arabian nights not being translated until the 19th century and then from the English . but Malay theology is too vast a subject to handle here . the example of Thucydides , Gibbon and Macaulay before us , we may risk the contempt of so many of its modern practitioners and count history a branch of literature . certainly it is the most original and best prosework of the Malays . and just as artistry has kept alive the work of the three great historians I have mentioned when countless others are forgotten or consulted only by specialists , so artistry puts the Malay 15th century annals above all other Malay histories . it was not the earliest Malay history . the earliest is a history of the rulers of Pasai ( a small extinct Sumatran state ) written after there had been time for Arabic loan-words to be adopted into the Malay language and containing one Arabic loan-word not met elsewhere in Malay asfa reef , gold reef . Islam reached northern Sumatra late in the 13th century and Pasai &apos;s first Muslim ruler died in 1297 . 