Hikayat Indraputra

Book excerpt: The Hikayat Indraputra, or adventures of Indraputra, is a fine example of traditional Malay story-telling, in the form of the prose hikayat. It follows the hero through the fantastic realms of jinns and demigods where he wins the hands of beautiful princesses and obtains magic stones to aid him in his battles. It is a tale that is well-known and must long have been popular among he Malay-speaking peoples, to judge from the large number of manuscripts that have survived. Dr. Mulyadi presents the complete Malay text, according to the reading of a manuscript dating from 1700 and now kept in the collection of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, Leiden. She also gives a very full English rendering of the story, and enough background information to provide a sound basic for further literary analysis. There is ample material here for the student of folklore, as well as those interested in the problems of Malay philology. This work represents a further step forward in the study of traditional Indonesian literatures, hence its place in the series Bibliotheca Indonesica, which aims to make texts in critical editions accessible to a wider public.