Demotic Alexander in Indian Ocean Trading Worlds

Abstract

This chapter examines the late seventeenth-century Malay prose romance, Hikayat Hang Tuah (Story of Hang Tuah), a maritime epic that projects the figure of Alexander the Great onto a merchant character in a trading world. Hikayat Hang Tuah retells the story of Melaka’s legendary admiral, Hang Tuah, a long-distance trader modeled after the Islamic Alexander. The text is structured around trade embassies to the Mughal and Ottoman Empires, in which Tuah performs the role of the long-distance merchant. The chapter considers Tuah’s kinship diplomacy, his function within Hikayat Hang Tuah’s conception of sovereignty, and how his association with Alexander rescripts the latter’s image. It also explores how Tuah’s outsider identity reworks the Southeast Asian pattern of stranger-kings, of which Alexander was the most important, before concluding with an analysis of Tuah as a commoner or demotic Alexander, who exemplifies the new non-monarchical heroic model of merchant seaborne empires.