Kedah Darul Aman is one of the northern state in Malaysia. Consisting of the state capital Alor Setar. Reference to ancient Kedah was first mentioned in a Tamil poem Paṭṭiṉappālai written at the end of the 2nd century A.D. It described goods from Kadaram “heaped together in the broad streets” of Chola capital. The famous Tang dynasty Buddhist monk, Yi Jing who visited Malay Archipelago between 688–695, also mentioned about a kingdom known as Ka-Cha in the northern part of Malay peninsula. According to Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa or the Kedah Annals, Kedah was founded by a Hindu king named Merong Mahawangsa. According to the text further, the Sultanate of Kedah started in year 1136 when King Phra Ong Mahawangsa converted to Islam and adopted the name Sultan Mudzafar Shah.
Kedah Cultural Month Program is one of the yearly activities specifically to provide space for students to actively participate in co-curriculum in the college. We organized this program to share the cultures of Kedah and to expose all information on Kedah to our staff and students. For this programme, the college has entrusted MPP’s to manage the program and assisted by the Student Affairs Department. To get official notification of this program is by posters for all the students along with all staff of SMART College and SPA.
For the first week of this program, we carried out the Introduction of Negeri Kedah. Introduction for the state of Kedah was presented by Mohd Azri Bin Saaya using Kedah accent, he holds the position of representative to the District Officer and Tanah Larut, Matang and Selama. He was originally from Kulim, Kedah and served in the Department of Survey and Land, Taiping, Perak. In the video, he shared about the origins and some information on Kedah. Not only that, MPP also show the movie of Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa and the activity known as movie night.
The second week of June, we had Kedah Cultural week. During this week, we carried out various competitions from Monday to Thursday. The first was “Cooking Competition: Nasi Daging Ayaq Asam”. To make this program a success, each batch of students are required to submit entries and lecturers also can join this competition. Conditions for joining this activity, participants need to send their cooking videos according to their creativity before due date submission and need to cook according to the theme. The next activity was “Teka Loghat Kedah” which was hosted by Ms Nurin via Kahoot. The students and staff participated in this competition by answering questions only in regards to words from the Kedah slang. On Wednesday we carried out Kedah Trivia which was hosted by Ms Nisha via Kahoot. The participants consists of students and staff had to answers questions which were related to information on Kedah. On Thursday we had Kedah Fashion Show where the participants must send their video or picture wearing the Kedah traditional costume and Kedah TikTok Competition.
During the closing ceremony of Kedah Cultural week, we had the participants join our event through google meet. During the ceremony, we played videos from all the activities during Kedah cultural month, the ceremony was officiated by Madam Susan and we had singing and dance performances from our staff. We also announced all the competition winners during the ceremony. We continue Kedah cultural month program with week three that includes Kedah Famous People and will end Kedah month.