The History of Silat: The Fighting Arts of the Malay World

In 2018 the Asian Games came to Jakarta, and for the first time pencak silat was on the programme as a medal sport. Indonesia won fourteen of the sixteen gold medals. It was a home win in more senses than one, because the art being contested had been named, organised and given a rulebook by an Indonesian federation only seventy years earlier, out of traditions that had never before agreed they were the same thing.

The short answer: silat is the family of fighting arts of the Malay world – Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and the south of the Philippines and Thailand – with hundreds of regional styles, a repertoire of blades led by the kris, and a character that mixes combat with dance, music, ethics and, in many schools, religion. It has no founder and no single birthplace. Its literary hero is Hang Tuah of 15th-century Malacca, its oldest named styles date from the 18th century, and its modern form, pencak silat, was organised by the Indonesian federation founded in 1948, made an international sport by four countries in 1980 and inscribed by UNESCO in 2019. What follows is the history of an art that was never one thing.

Key facts

Region

Malay Archipelago – Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, southern Philippines and Thailand

Literary origin

Hikayat Hang Tuah, Malacca, 15th–17th century

Oldest named styles

Cimande (West Java, 18th c.), Minangkabau silek (Sumatra)

Modern organisation

IPSI, Indonesia, 1948; PERSILAT, international, 1980

Sport

SEA Games since 1987; Asian Games 2018; categories tanding, tunggal, ganda, regu

Heritage

UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, Indonesia and Malaysia, 2019

A thousand villages, each with a beginning

The Malay world is islands and coasts, and its history belongs to the traders, sailors and kingdoms that rose and fell on the straits between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Srivijaya on Sumatra from the 7th century. Majapahit on Java in the 14th. The Sultanate of Malacca in the 15th. Around and between them, the hundreds of smaller courts of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Sulawesi and the peninsula. Their warriors fought with the spear, the shield and the kris, the wavy-bladed dagger that became the region's symbol, and every court and every village had its own way of teaching them. Indian, Chinese and Arab traders left their marks, Islam arrived from the 13th century, and later so did the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. Silat is the Malay word for the fighting skill that came out of all this. The historian who goes looking for its beginning finds a thousand villages, each with its own.

The literature is older than the styles. The Hikayat Hang Tuah, the Malay epic set at the court of Malacca and written down by the 17th century, follows the admiral Hang Tuah, his kris Taming Sari and his fights, armed and unarmed, against pirates, rivals and finally his own friend Hang Jebat. He is the classic image of the pendekar, the silat master as loyal warrior, and every Malay style claims his lineage in spirit. Court chronicles, Dutch reports and travellers such as Stamford Raffles describe fighting dances and duels at weddings and festivals, which is how silat was seen for centuries: as a performance that also happened to be training.

The tiger, the flower and the fruit

The named styles begin in the 18th century. In West Sumatra the Minangkabau taught silek in the surau, the village prayer house, as part of a young man's education before he left on the merantau, the journey away from home that Minangkabau culture expects of him. Their styles, silek harimau (tiger), silek tuo (old) and others, are low, ground-hugging and built around the knife. In West Java the Sundanese Cimande, attributed to the 18th-century master Embah Kahir, and its offshoot Cikalong became the parents of dozens of Javanese schools. Central and East Java produced the great brotherhoods of the 20th century, Setia Hati Terate (1922) and Perisai Diri (1955), with hundreds of thousands of members, strong ethical teaching and, in some cases, the mystical training of tenaga dalam, inner power. On the peninsula Silat Seni Gayong, founded by Meor Abdul Rahman in the 1940s, and Silat Cekak are the best-known Malaysian systems, and the Bugis of Sulawesi, the Betawi of Jakarta and the Malays of Patani in southern Thailand all kept their own.

What the styles share matters more than what divides them. A fluid, dance-like movement called bunga, the flower, hides the fighting technique called buah, the fruit. Low stances and sweeps. Joint locks and throws. The kris, the machete-like golok, the sickle sabit and the staff. Music, in the Malay styles the gendang drums and the serunai oboe. And a code that ties the art to religion, to family and to the ruler. A stranger watching a wedding dance might see only the flower. The fruit was for later.

One name for all of it

Under Dutch rule in Indonesia and British rule in Malaya, silat was tolerated as folklore and watched as politics. Fighting arts and secret societies overlapped; silat schools turned up in peasant uprisings and, in the 1940s, in the resistance to the Japanese occupation and the wars of independence that followed. When Indonesia declared independence in 1945 the new state wanted a national art, and on 18 May 1948 the Ikatan Pencak Silat Indonesia (IPSI) was founded in Surakarta. It coined a compound, pencak silat, from pencak, the Javanese word for the performed art, and silat, the Sumatran word for the fighting, and with that one phrase it named a heritage stretching across the islands. Then it started the slow work: registering styles, more than 800 of them in time, writing rules and building a sport.

Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei organised federations of their own after independence, and on 11 March 1980 the four countries founded PERSILAT, the international federation, in Jakarta. The first World Championship followed in 1982. The sport entered the Southeast Asian Games in 1987 and became a medal event at the Asian Games in Jakarta in 2018, which is where this story began. Competitive pencak silat has four categories: tanding, full-contact sparring with points for strikes, sweeps and takedowns, and the forms events tunggal (solo, with weapons), ganda (pairs) and regu (teams). The last three exist so that the sport never loses the flower.

How the rest of the world found out

For most of the world, silat arrived through the cinema. Merantau (2009) and The Raid (2011), directed in Indonesia by the Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans with the silat practitioners Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, showed the Minangkabau and Javanese styles at full speed, and the same two men then carried silat into the John Wick and Star Wars films. The art had reached Europe and the Americas long before, through emigrants and through Dutch-Indonesian teachers after 1949, and the American researcher Donn Draeger's books of the 1970s had put it into the martial-arts literature. But it was the films that filled the schools.

In 2019 UNESCO inscribed both the Indonesian Traditions of Pencak Silat and Malaysian Silat on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising a living tradition with ethical, social and spiritual dimensions as well as fighting ones. That is the paradox silat has always carried and never needed to resolve: a martial art that is also a dance, a sport that is also a ceremony, and a national symbol in four countries that was never, until 1948, one art at all.

Where to go next

• The silat discipline hub collects training articles, workouts and gear.
• The blade arts of the neighbouring archipelago: The History of Kali, Eskrima and Arnis.
• Another Southeast Asian art shaped by royal patronage and sport: The History of Muay Thai.
• Hip mobility for low stances: Kettlebell Strength for Fighters.