I read these 3 books almost concurrently. I started off with Utama, and was quite confused by what I was reading. By coincidence, or perhaps a stroke of good fortune, I saw The Genealogy of Kings (Sulalat Al-Salatin) and Twisted Temasek at quite the same period of time.
Utama purports to tell the story of Sang Nila Utama, a supposedly mythical King who landed on the shores of Temasek, saw a beast which was identified to him as a Singa (lion) through the eyes of female narrators who were his contemporaries then. According to Utama, Sang Nila Utama had inflicted his wives with a skin disease and they were cast aside to live out their lives away from the palace after the wedding night. Although it was not explicitly identified as such, it appears that the skin disease was leprosy. And yet Sang Nila Utama was not described to be suffering from any skin diseases, and surprisingly, one of his wife was not infected and it was not explained how she came to not be infected by him. From what is understood about leprosy now, it would be quite impossible for the wives to be infected with leprosy merely from one night of contact, and if the disease was caused by the HIV virus, it would not have manifested symptoms overnight. Besides, it would be debatable if the HIV virus was even present in Southeast Asia in the 14th century.
Because the story in Utama seemed rather bizzare to me, I read The Genealogy of Kings. The title Sulalat Al-Salatin might sound unfamiliar, compared to its other name Sejarah Melayu. To understand what the Sejarah Melayu means to the Malays in Southeast Asia, a compatible comparison (I think) would be what 史记 means to the Han people. The story of Sang Nila Utama is collected in Sulalat Al-Salatin, and it is one of the earliest stories in the collection, meanng that Sang Nila Utama (if he really had existed and is not a myth) was a looooong time before the East India Company landed on the island of what is today Singapore. Interestingly, the ancient kings in the book were addressed as 'Raja' (which is hindu in basis) rather than Sultan (which is muslim in basis). Although it wasn't explicitly articulated, it would appear that at the start of Sejarah Melayu, Hinduism was already an established religion, and Islam arrived later with the Arab traders, and the Rajas and Bendaharas converted to Islam. Although Sejarah Melayu is difficult to corroborate chronologically, there were rich descriptions of the customs of the Malay courts, their epic battles and many famous individuals that when their stories were compartmentalised in short stories became easily lost in translations as myths or legends.
What was very surprising for me in Sulalat Al-Salatin, was that the Malays traced their ancestry to Alexander the Great (the Macedon King who is known as Iskandar Zulkarnain in the Islam world). Do the Malays see themselves as decendents of ancient Grecians?
Another surprising point for me was that what is today the Federation of Malaysia was once made up of many kingdoms, of which the Melaka Sultanate seemed to be the mightiest. How the kingdoms came to became the Federation of Malaya would be interesting to find out next.
Twisted Temasek, written by Ng Yi-Sheng (the same author who write Utama) is apparently targetted at children, with many illustrations. After the rather bizzare Utama and the overwhelming Sulalat Al-Salatin, Twisted Temasek is a condensed and fun way to learn about the ancient history of what is today Singapore.
If Sulalat Al-Salatin is not completely a myth (especially of the earlier stories), then it would mean that Southeast Asia has been inhabited for a far longer period than most people would have thought so. It wasn't explicitly articulated in Sulalat Al-Salatin (or perhaps it was articulated, and I didn't understand it as such) whether the Temasek that Sang Nila Utama landed on was already inhabited or otherwise.
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