The Malay Ancient Kingdoms: My Journey to the Ancient World of Nusantara

By Nahar Akbar Khan and Ellis Khan

Personal account and onsite images bring to life Nahar Akbar Khans exhilarating discovery of ancient kingdoms in the Malay Nusantara, spanning parts of the present-day Malaysia and Indonesia.

Join the author as he takes you on a journey to uncover fascinating stories of the glorious past from powerful kings, wars and mergers, to architecturally magnificent monuments, the legacies of these ancient kingdoms. Skilled builders and master craftsmen of the past somehow had incredible technologies and knowledge to construct architectural wonders that have withstood the test of times. Think Borobudur and Pramanan Temples, and the Lembah Bujang archaeological site with its mind-baffling iron-smelting industry remains, and you will be similarly impressed.

A television documentary film maker in Malaysia, Nahar Akbar Khan has produced numerous documentaries on Malaysian culture and heritage programmes. Now he is immortalising his journey to the Malay ancient kingdoms in this book, which combines his travelogue, historal accounts and tales, as well as vivid pictures that add intrigue to his discoveries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Sep 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543742602

Nahar Akbar Khan

Mohd Nahar Khan has been a television documentary film maker in his home country of Malaysia since 1990. He has completed numerous TV documentary projects related to Malaysian history, wildlife, nature, and Malaysian cultural and heritage programs. Khan enjoys traveling and has visited Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and China.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Nahar Akbar Khan. All rights reserved.

Edited by: Putri Zanina Megat Zainuddin ([e-mail])

Images by: Ellis Khan

ISBN

978-1-5437-4259-6 (sc)

978-1-5437-4260-2 (e)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

01/09/2018

16961.png

Dedication

To my Dad Akbar Khan and My Mum Shamsiah Yassin

The inspiration of my life..

Preface

3.jpg

A rare stone carving of a Malay junk on one of the walls at Borobudur Temple, Central Java, Indonesia. Identified by the late Dr Supian Sabtu, senior history lecturer, University of Malaya.

4.jpg

Ninth-century Prambanan Temple site in Central Java, Indonesia.

I am a television documentary producer for more than 15 years in my home country, Malaysia. It has always been my dream to travel not so much as a tourist but a modern explorer documenting important ancient sites and reliving past events, which had shaped our history as we know it today. I was inspired by the journey of Ibnu Battuta, the great Moroccan and Muslim traveller, who according to writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith, had covered three times the distance of Marco Polo’s well-known journey from Europe to Asia in the thirteenth century..

Well, I can never be like Ibnu Battuta, far from that. This extraordinary man spent more than 30 years of his life on the road. I admired his hunger for adventure, and his tenacity in describing in detail the medieval world of his time. I was determined to do the same albeit a much smaller scale than his. I undertook my journey to trace the past golden era of ancient kingdoms in the Malay Archipelago, which I had heard so much in history classes during my school days. My travels to the ancient sites culminated in a documentary, which I produced for the national television station in Malaysia. Now I have taken it further by recording my research and experiences in this book.

I felt sheer exuberance when I set foot in the historically well-known fifteenth-century Malay Sultanate of Melaka (also spelled as Malacca) as well as the grandiose Hindu Kingdom of Majapahit located in Trowulan in the eastern region of Java Island and the first Islamic Kingdom of Pasai in North Sumatra, which dominated the sea trade of the fourteenth-century maritime. I found myself reliving the past, tracing all the timeless ruins still in existence today, studying their amazing architecture, delving into the complexity of old and forgotten local cultures, and exploring the minds of the great men behind these extraordinary historical accomplishments, which most of us knew nothing or very little about.

Since 2011, I have been sending documentary production proposals related to the ancient world of Malay Nusantara to our local television stations, but unfortunately, I was turned down on every occasion despite my enthusiasm during each presentation. I had produced numerous television documentaries on other subjects before but I had the feeling that all my proposals on this subject were rejected due to the local mainstream media opinion that historical or educational documentaries were too dull and would not attract viewers.

I considered giving up the idea all together until one afternoon in August 2016 I received a call from Haji Amin Khan, one of the producers I had worked with on several occasions. Sounding excited, he told me the good news. RTM, the national television station in Malaysia, had accepted my two recent proposals, and one of them was the one on the Ancient Malay Kingdoms of Nusantara!

I couldn’t believe it at first. It couldn’t be true. But Haji Amin convinced me otherwise. He kept insisting that he had in his hand the approval letter from RTM as we spoke! Finally, after all the rejections in the last six years, we had managed to convince the executives of the television station that our programme was worth producing. How this happened was anyone’s guess. Whatever the reason, it had to be as mysterious as the baffling construction of all the ancient structures in central Java!

5.jpg

The incredible stone inscription of King Purnawarman’s feet, the ruler of the fifth-century Tarumanagara Kingdom. It is located in Bogor, west Java, Indonesia.

During this period, I came up with the idea of putting everything down on paper so that we were not only going to produce episodic documentary for television, but also have a book printed in the form of a pictorial travelogue through which I could share my adventures of discovering these forgotten lands of historical significance. My travelogue would serve as a permanent record.

So What’s Next?

Before packing my bags for such a monumental quest, I had to find the right people to