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In August 1878 Frank Swettenham, a junior officer in the Malayan Civil Service who was then serving in the Colonial Secretary's Office, read a paper at a meeting of the Straits Branch Royal Asiatic Society in Singapore.
The title of the paper was A Malay Nautch. And it described a three hour performance by four Malay girl dancers in the Balai of Bendahara Ahmad of Pahang in Pekan in 1875. The instruments which accompanied the dancers were stated to be Javanese, and from their brief description they are probably those which appear in an illustration facing page 225 of Swettenham's British Malaya (revised edition 1948), with the somewhat misleading caption The Gamalan-Malay Orchestra.
Swettenham began his paper by remarking that he had never seen a similar performance anywhere else in the peninsula, and until recently all traces of this rare example of Malay culture seemed to have been lost. But a chance visit in September 1966 to Istana Kolam in Kuala Terengganu in search of examples of Malay wood carving, brought to light a duplicate set of the Pahang Gamelan instruments, and with the gracious assistance of Tengku Ampuan Meriam (Mariam), a daughter of Sultan Ahmad of Pahang and the widow of Sultan Sulaiman of Terengganu, the following facts have been assembled.
The Pahang Gamelan and the dances which Swettenham saw in 1875 originated from the Court of the Malay Sultanate of Riau-Lingga, and were still in active existence at the beginning of the 30th century at Penyengat, the island home of the last Ruler, Sultan Abdul Rahman II.
The Bendahara of Pahang, whose position at the beginning of the 19th century resembled that of a viceroy, maintained, at his headquarters at Pekan, a group of dancers and a set of instruments, similar to those at Penyengat, and it may be presumed that they were used in the celebrations which accompanied the marriage, in Pekan in 1811, of Wan Esah, sister of the ruling Bendahara Tun Ali, to Tengku Hussain, eldest son of Sultan Abdul Rahman of Riau, and first Sultan of Singapore.
When Sultan Zainal Abidin of Terengganu (1881–1918) arrived in Pekan in 1885 to marry Tengku Long, a daughter of Sultan Ahmad of Pahang, he heard the Pahang Gamelan and saw the Pahang Jogét for the first time. He appears to have been attracted by the music, for although his marriage to Tengku Long was short lived, and for a time relations between the two neighbouring Royal distant, Sultan Zainal Abidin borrowed a set of Gamelan instruments and their musicians, but not the dancers, from Lingga on a number of State occasions in the years which followed.
The marriage of Sultan Zainal Abidin's second son, Tengku Sulaiman, to Tengku Meriam, a much younger daughter of Sultan Ahmad of Pahang, in 1913 healed the rift and led to the preservation in Terengganu of the dances and music long after they had ceased to be performed in Pahang or Riau.
During the latter part of Sultan Ahmad's long reign (Bendahara and Sultan : 1863–1914), there were three separate groups of dancers, with their quota of instruments and musicians, at Pekan. One of these was controlled by Tengku Ampuan Fatimah, the Sultan's royal wife, another by Ché Besar, the wife who had shared the hardships which her husband had experienced before he became Bendahara, and the third was directed by Ché Zubedah, the Sultan's third wife and the mother of Tangku Ampuan Meriam of Terengganu. Cé Zubedah took a close personal interest in her group, and encouraged her daughter to do so, and when Sultan Ahmad died she joined her daughter in Terengganu.
Neither Sultan Mahmud (1914–1917) nor Sultan Abdullah (1917–1932) the successors of Sultan Ahmad, appear to have shown sufficient interest in the Pahang Jogét or Gamelan to maintain their active existence. Sultan Mahmud kept a set of Instruments at Istana Sri Terentang, the new palace which was completed after Sultan Ahmad's death, to replace Istana Pantai, but none of the dancers performed in Pekan after 1914.
Ché Zubedah's set of instruments were brought to Kuala Terengganu on loan after Sultan Sulaiman's accession in 1920, and four Terengganu girls were trained to perform the Pahang Court Dances by teachers from Pekan, named Yang Khoja and Meriam, working under the personal supervision of Tengku Ampuan Meriam. Three of the four Terengganu girl dancers were Chinese who had been adopted by Tengku Ampuan Meriam when they were small. Meriam, one of the Pahang teachers was also a Chinese by birth, but she had been brought up in the palace and was almost indistinguishable from her Malay companions.
In 1935 Sultan Sulaiman and his consort decided to acquire a set of instruments of their own. It proved impossible to obtain them in Riau, and Tengku Setia, a Riau raja living in Terengganu, was obliged to travel as far as Bali before he could obtain what was required. When the new Gamelan was delivered in 1936 Terengganu men were taught to play the instruments by old Pahang musicians headed by Encik Salléh.
Performances by the Terengganu Jogét and Gamelan were familiar and popular part of royal hospitality at Istana Maziah for many years before the Japanese invasion, but they ceased with the death of Sultan Sulaiman in 1942 and were not revived after the war. Tengku Ampuan Meriam preserved the instruments at Istana Kolam, where she lived in retirement, and they are still in excellent condition. Two of the four dancers are still members of Tengku Ampuan Meriam's household.
In Pekan, memories of the Pahang Jogét survived, and when the title of Tengku Mahkota was conferred on Tengku Abu Bakar, in 1930, Dato Maharaja Perba Jelai brought a group of Javanese musicians and dancers from rubber estates in his territory to perform what was referred to as Jogét Jawa, since neither musicians nor dancers could be mustered in Pekan.
The Terengganu Gamelan consists of seven different instruments, all except one of which are foreign to the peninsula. Two of these are xylophones, four athers are groups of gongs of varying shapes and sizes, the seventh is a large cylindrical drum.
The larger xylophone is called Gambang and has 20 wooden bars arranged side by side on a rectangular wooden frame, the base of which is raised about an inch from the floor. A pair of smaller xylophones of the same style are called Sarun. Each has six horizontal bars, but they are made of brass. The basic melody is played on the Sarun, and elaborated on the Gambang. Both these instruments are supported and their sound enhanced by a set of 20 medium-sized brass gongs, which stand in two rows, face upwards on taut string, attached to a rectangular wooden frame : this is called Keromong, and is probably the most difficult of the instruments to play. Background accompaniment is supplied by three very broad rimmed gongs, called Kenong, which stand face upwards with protruding bosses, on tall wooden stand ; and a pair of larger gongs with much narrower rims, which hang vertically, with their faces towards each other, from a tall carved stand.
Pa' Mat, who is now more than 70 years old and was for many years the leader of the Terengganu Gamelan, states that he learnt 32 different compositions, which for convenience may be referred to as tunes, each of which continued for at least 15 minutes. He also relates that Sultan Sulaiman could detect a single wrong note on any of the instruments or any error in tempo, and could play all the instruments himself.
Ché Adnan, the leader of the dance quartet in the hey day of the Terengganu Jogét, who still lives in Istana Kolam, refers to the dances as stories (cerita), many of which continued for half an hour. The names of the dances, and their accompanying musical composition, are Malay and include
- Ayok-Ayok (Ayak-Ayak), which was always the opening item
- Timang-timang Burong
- Lantai Lima
- Ketam Reñjong
- Kundang-kundang Mabuk
- Selansing (Selanting)
- Lolor
- Kumbang Sawit
- Ketawang
- Perang Manggong
- Perang Geroda
The dancers each carried a fan, but other minor properties, such as small wooden keris, swords or bows and arrows, were handed to the dancers by an attendant when the action so demanded. The girls usually danced from 9 p.m. till midnight, but in Pahang they often began after midnight and continued till 5 a.m.
Swettenham described the dresses in some detail, and few changes were made in Terengganu. The principal garments were a silk, short-sleeved blouse and an ankle-length skirt. In Pahang the blouse was rarely worn but was replaced by a silk scarf which was wound round the body over the breasts, leaving the shoulders bare : it was called dodot. Another silk scarf called saboh, was looped behind a large gilt waist buckle, the ends hanging down to the hem of the skirt. This scarf was used frequently throughout the dances for graceful gesturing, and at the end of each dance, when the dancer knelt on the floor, she threw the ends of the scarf over her shoulders.
An elaborate headdress was in three parts, a chaplet, called Gandék, a flowered cap covering the back of the head, called Gerak Gempa and a spring of gold or silver flowers called Tajok Asoka which stood upright above the crown.
It is evident from the appearance and sound of the musical instruments and from the description of the dances that Javanese cultural influence was dominant in the central and southern Malay Sultanates in the 18th and 19th centuries, leaving the ancient indigenous Malay culture of Patani and Kelantan to exist in isolation in the north.
By preserving the Jogét Gamelan Terengganu, Tengku Ampuan Meriam has made it possible for students of Malay culture to lift the veil of ignorance which has shrouded the court life of Lingga, and to study some of the dance forms and musical arrangements which were in favour at least a century and a half ago in that historic region.
Without this royal enterprise our knowledge of this subject would still be limited to that short paper read by Swettenham in 1878.
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