ABSTRACT
The Hikayat Sri Rma (HSR) is a literary version in Malay of the Rma storya long, comprehensive and basically Hindu prose narration with a few Islamic adjustments here and there. It seems to have been written in approximately the form known to us, or adapted to that form, the oldest MS extant dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century but is a comparatively late recension. Soon after the coming of Islam to the Malay world, the term Malay world, as here used, is a translation of alam Mlayu. Conversion of Malay governments to Islam was largely effected between the beginning of the fourteenth and the end of the sixteenth centuries. There is reason to believe that the missionaries were pantheistic fs. No further addition was made to the beginning of the Malay saga until Sir Richard Winstedt in 1944 published an article entitled an undescribed Malay version of the Rmayana.
