To'' Janggut: Legends

To' Janggut: Legends, Histories, and Perceptions of the 1915 Rebellion in Kelantan

Author: Cheah Boon Kheng
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9789813250000
Weight: 0.274 kg 
Pages: 168
Year: 2021
Price: RM42

The story of the To' Janggut rebellion is recounted in folk tales, newspaper reports, and scholarly publications, and the author uses previously classified official reports and hitherto unknown photographs to shed further light on the episode. In his account, incidents presented in one version are revised, contradicted, or denied in others, but as the story unfolds the author also reveals unexpected links between different presentations of events.

Although the 1915 rising was a relatively minor incident in a remote part of rural Kelantan, the episode captured the imagination of the people of Malaysia. In revisiting the event, Cheah's purpose is not to establish the facts of what took place but to consider the broader significance of the uprising by reassessing the meanings and functions of history, biography, photography, and other genres. Cheah Boon Kheng's reconstruction of various versions of the incident serves as a form of argumentation and raises a number of questions.