Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism 9780801461606

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Muslims and Matriarchs

MUSLIMS AND

MATRIARCHS Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism

JEFFREY HADLER

Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the University of California, Berkeley, which has aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2008 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2008 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hadler, Jeffrey. Muslims and matriarchs : cultural resilience in Indonesia through jihad and colonialism / Jeffrey Hadler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4697-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Minangkabau (Indonesian people)—History. 2. Islam—Indonesia—Sumatera Barat—History. 3. Matriarchy—Indonesia—Sumatera Barat—History. 4. Women, Minangkabau—History. 5. Family—Indonesia—Sumatera Barat—History. 6. Sumatera Barat (Indonesia)—History. I. Title. DS632.M4H34 2008 305.89⬘928—dc22

2008016674

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Culture of Paradox 1

Contention Unending

vii 1 17

2 Shapes of the House

34

3 Interiors and Shapes of the Family

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4 Educating Children

87

5 Intimate Contention

112

6 Earthquake

138

7 Families in Motion

156

Conclusion: Victorious Buffalo, Resilient Matriarchate

177

Bibliography

181

Glossary

199

Index

201

Acknowledgments

In 1985, I signed up for the American Field Service high school student exchange program and was placed with a mixed Minangkabau-Mandailing family in Jakarta. I have been returning to Indonesia and living as part of this extended family ever since. I did a stretch of long-term fieldwork in West Sumatra in 1994 – 1996 and in Jakarta in 1998 – 2001. I spent a stray month or two in the Netherlands, Sumatra, or Java in 1996, 2005, 2006, and 2007. I am indebted to many people in all these places as well as in the United States. Among them are, in Berkeley: Beth Berry, Ben Brinner, Lawrence Cohen, Vasudha Dalmia, Penny Edwards, Robert and Sally Goldman, George and Kausalya Hart, Susan Kepner, Tom Laqueur, Ninik Lunde, Cam Nguyen, Aihwa Ong, Nancy Peluso, T. J. Pempel, José Rabasa, Raka Ray, Alexander von Rospatt, Virginia Shih, Clare Talwalker, Sylvia Tiwon, Bonnie Wade, and Joanna Williams. Berkeley’s Southeast Asianist graduate students have been a real source of camaraderie and conversation. Two in particular, Ian Lowman and Scott Schlossberg, helped me with texts and ideas that were incorporated into this book. In Indonesia: Taufik Abdullah, Adriel Adli, Gusti Asnan, Azyumardi Azra, Langgeng Sulistiyo Budi, Yusmarni Djalius, Erwiza Erman, Yasrul Huda, Nelly Paliama, Rusydi Ramli, Suribidari Samad, Noni Sukmawati, Edy Utama, M. Yusuf, and Mestika Zed. Pak Taufik not only sponsored the original research, he inspired it. I have spent years hanging around the campuses of Andalas University in Padang and the State Islamic University in Jakarta talking with teachers and students. Without question those conversations—in the Andalas Department of History and U.I.N.’s Center for the Study of Islam and Society (P.P.I.M.)—have shaped my thinking in fundamental ways. And Bung Edy, Iman, and Uli are the real reasons I keep heading back to West Sumatra. (Along with Om Liong’s kopi-o and lontong sayur at Nan Yo Baru.)

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Acknowledgments

I thank friends and colleagues scattered around the world: Ben Abel, Barbara and Leonard Andaya, Joshua Barker, Tim Barnard, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Renske Biezeveld, Evelyn Blackwood, Martin van Bruinessen, Freek Colombijn, Don Emmerson, Mike Feener, Michael Gilsenan, Mina Hattori, Anthony Johns, Sidney Jones, Audrey Kahin, Joel Kahn, Doug Kammen, Niko Kaptein, Tsuyoshi Kato, Pamela Kelley, Paul Kratoska, Ulrich Kratz, Michael Laffan, Tamara Loos, Abdur-Razzaq Lubis, Ted Lyng, Barbara Metcalf, Rudolf Mrázek, Jim Peacock, Ian Proudfoot, Tony Reid, Jim Rush, John Sidel, Kerry Sieh, Suryadi, Eric Tagliacozzo, Peter Vail, Marcel Vellinga, Nobuto Yamamoto, and Heinzpeter Znoj. The Indonesianist world is convivial, everyone has a spare bed and drink to share, and I have been looked after more times than can be counted. Four mentors passed away without really knowing how much they have shaped my scholarship and especially my sense of scholarly responsibility: Khaidir Anwar, Herb Feith, George Kahin, and Onghokham. I have benefited from great teachers, and their influence is felt throughout this book. The lessons of James Scott, Hal Conklin, Joe Errington, Rufus Hendon, Ben Anderson, Takashi Shiraishi, and David Wyatt unfolded as I did research and wrote. At its best, I hope that this book represents a blending of the Yale, Cornell, and Berkeley schools of Southeast Asian studies—an intellectual history that is attentive to literary traditions at the level of the village. Sarah Maxim, Nobertus Nuranto, and Sunny Vergara have been part of my life for twenty years, more or less, and we seem to follow one another around. They have kept me sane. Peter Zinoman, Henk Maier, and Munis Faruqui must be singled out for their detailed advice about this book and academic life in general. Michael Peletz gave the manuscript a thorough going-over and helped to firm up my anthropological footing. Chee-Kien Lai created illustrations of longhouses, and Cecilia Ng gave us permission to adapt two of her illustrations to create a single image of the “lifecycle within the longhouse.” Robert Cribb, whose monumental Historical Atlas of Indonesia is soon to appear in electronic format, drew new maps. Danielle Fumagalli checked for holes in my bibliography. Julie Underhill and Chi Ha hunted typos in a late draft. Roger Haydon has been a kind and patient editor from the beginning, nudging me and this book back onto the path more than once. Two anonymous reviewers for Cornell University Press were exemplary in their critical reading of the manuscript. Teresa Jesionowski pulled it all together with great humor, and Julie Nemer’s copy-editing brought clarity when things were hazy. Kevin Millham compiled the index. Thank you all. Teaching in a department of South and Southeast Asian Studies forced me to juxtapose Indonesia and India, if for no other reason than to have conversations with colleagues. Thinking comparatively drew me into discussions with Robin Jeffrey, and these led to two sequential panels at annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, “Politics and Matriliny: Comparative Historical

Acknowledgments

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and Anthropological Perspectives” (in 2003) and “The Futures of Matriliny in South and Southeast Asia” (in 2004). Without this comparativist move, I would never have realized the role that the Padri War and Islamic reformism played in the persistence of matrilineal traditions in Sumatra. My initial research and writing were supported by grants from Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation. The revision was supported by the Townsend Center and a Humanities Research Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley. I would like especially to thank Mary Ann Mason and Cal’s “Family Friendly Edge Policy” for making it possible for me to be an assistant professor and a dad at the same time. In the course of conducting research, I made use of the following libraries and archives: the Indonesian National Library and National Archive in Jakarta (with Pak Ali and Mas Langgeng as my guides); the libraries of the Genta Budaya, Andalas University, the Office of Civil Records, Provincial Library, and the mistshrouded rumah gadang of the Yayasan Dokumentasi dan Informasi Kebudayaan Minangkabau in West Sumatra; the Museum Sonobudoyo library, the Yayasan Hatta library, and the now-defunct Perpustakaan Islam in Jogjakarta; the Leiden University Library and manuscript collection, the Royal Institute for Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV) library, and the Van Vollenhoven law library in the Netherlands; and the Cornell and University of California, Berkeley, libraries in the United States. The librarians of Berkeley’s NRLF annex deserve a special thanks for fielding what must have seemed like an endless series of on-line requests from a faceless assistant professor. This is a book about peculiar families, and I have three to thank. I thank my own parents for their trust and support. I thank the Baharson family in Jakarta for giving me a love of Indonesia and Minangkabau (with a promise to the Malaon side of the family: Mandailing will not be neglected in future projects). Finally, this book is dedicated to the contents of my own matrifocal rumah gadang, to Noe, Maia, and especially Kumi, for putting up with this thing for so long. J.H. Berkeley, California

LUBUK SIKAPING

Bangkinang LIMAPULUH KOTA

Lubuk Sikaping Bonjol AGAM

Payakumbuh Fort De Kock Fort Van der Capellen

BATIPUH & PARIAMAN Padang Panjang Pariaman PADANG Padang

Sawahlunto TANAH DATAR

Solok

SOLOK Painan

PAINAN INDIAN O C EA N

RBC

Government of Sumatra’s Westcoast circa 1920, showing the administrative divisions.

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Sumatra circa 1920, showing the colonial residencies.

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Asia, centered on Sumatra.

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Muslims and Matriarchs

INTRODUCTION

Culture of Paradox

A student of Indonesia could be forgiven for thinking that the two great cultures of the archipelago are the Javanese and the Minangkabau. When we count the names in the history books or tally the individuals who shaped the national culture, these two ethnic groups stand out. Dutch colonial scholars posited the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra—supposedly dynamic, outward-looking, and pious—as a counterweight to the feudal, involuted, and religiously syncretic Javanese. During the revolution (1945 – 1949), Indonesians coined the term Dwitunggal to refer to the two-in-one leadership of the Javanese president Sukarno and the Minangkabau vice president Mohammad Hatta. This duumvirate signified a balance between Java and the outer islands, and the split between the leaders in 1956 created a national rift that remains unhealed today.1 Minangkabau intellectuals of the early twentieth century were central in nationalist and Islamic movements, and they defined Indonesian literature and culture. The street map of any Indonesian city includes boulevards named after Haji Agus Salim (born 1884), statesman and foreign minister; Mohammad Hatta (b. 1902), first vice president; Muhammad Yamin (b. 1903), nationalist philosopher; Muhammad Natsir (b. 1908), Islamic politician; Hamka (b. 1908), theologian; Sutan Sjahrir (b. 1909), socialist and first prime minister; Rasuna Said (b. 1910), revolutionary leader and politician; and, where Soeharto’s censorship lapsed, Tan Malaka (b. 1896), communist revolutionary philosopher. The Minangkabau people take great pride in this first generation of leaders and in 1. Java is often depicted as having merely replaced the repressive and exploitative colonial state. Audrey R. Kahin, Rebellion to Integration: West Sumatra and the Indonesian Polity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 7 – 8.

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the scores of Minangkabau politicians, theologians, and literati who are less well known but who also had defining roles in Indonesian history. It is striking, then, that in 1930 the Javanese represented 47 percent of the population of the Netherlands East Indies. Add to this the Sundanese people of West Java and the Madurese people—three ethnic groups that, combined, were viewed by the state as its cultural heart—and we have almost 70 percent of the population. At that time, the Minangkabau were just 3.36 percent of the Indies population, fewer than 2 million people.2 Given this Javanese hegemony, it is perplexing that the people of Minangkabau, a small and marginal region in a huge archipelago, loom so large in the national history. The Minangkabau preponderance in the roster of Indonesian luminaries has never been adequately explained. In analyzing Minangkabau modernity, the historian Taufik Abdullah points to the tradition of merantau (male out-migration) as a key to Minangkabau openness and dynamism. In accordance with custom, Minangkabau men must leave their villages and travel into the expanded world—the rantau—seeking wealth, education, or whatever might make them of value before they can return home and appeal to the family of a potential bride. Taufik argues that this Minangkabau male custom of merantau contributes to a “spiraling rhythm of history” that makes Minangkabau people more open to exotic ideas.3 But here his usually incisive analysis hangs on cultural idealizations and lacks real historical determination. After all, other Indonesian ethnic groups migrate with greater frequency than the Minangkabau do.4 And the rantau is traditionally a completely male province. It is a mistake to eliminate women from cultural formulae, especially for Minangkabau culture, whose defining feature is that it is the world’s largest matrilineal Muslim society. Current ethnographic literature relies on Taufik for his historical authority and moves on to contemplate Minangkabau matriliny as one of the sturdier fundamentals of the culture. That a matriarchate has survived in West Sumatra is chalked up to the admirable resilience of Minangkabau tradition. Little attention is given to the historical processes that have defined the matriarchate. And, in fact, it is the dynamic tension between Islamic reformism and the matriarchate that not only has preserved the matriarchate in the face of colonialism but has made West Sumatra the incubator for that extraordinary generation of fin-de-siècle Indonesian leaders. 2. Population data from the 1930 and 2000 censes are summarized in Leo Suryadinata, Evi Nurvidya Arifin, and Aris Ananta, Indonesia’s Population: Ethnicity and Religion in a Changing Political Landscape (Singapore: ISEAS, 2003). 3. Taufik Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World: West Sumatra in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century,” in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Claire Holt (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 245. 4. Mochtar Naim, “Voluntary Migration in Indonesia,” in Internal Migration: The New World and the Third World, ed. Anthony H. Richmond and Daniel Kubat (London: Sage Publications, 1976).

Culture of Paradox

3

In Muslims and Matriarchs, I address two central questions of Indonesian history. First, why did the Minangkabau culture in the highlands of West Sumatra produce so many dynamic and ideologically diverse first-generation Indonesian leaders? And, second, how did a matriarchate survive in West Sumatra when elsewhere in Asia it was undermined by colonial and national state policies? The answers are linked and relate directly to the tension in Minangkabau culture between Islam and the customs of the matriarchate.

Setting Sumatra is the sixth largest island in the world, the westernmost island in the archipelagic nation of Indonesia. Roughly the size of California, it covers an area of 183,000 square miles, is 1,100 miles long, and at its widest point is 270 miles across, running on a northwest-southeast axis and bisected by the equator. The mountainous western coast borders the Indian Ocean, and in the eastern plain silty rivers empty into the Straits of Malacca. Historically, these straits were the natural site for an entrepôt established for sailors following the monsoon winds. The Sumatran climate is governed by the monsoons. Rainfall is heaviest between October and April and lightest in June and July. As important to local climate as the monsoon, the Barisan Mountain range runs down the spine of Sumatra, close to the western coast, and acts as an enormous catchment zone. Clouds pushed in from the Indian Ocean pile up against these peaks, and rainfall is much heavier on the western coast and the highlands than on the broad eastern plain. The west coast and hills can receive as much as 236 inches of rain annually, whereas the east receives half that. The Minangkabau highland valleys in the west, where volcanic soils and dependable rainfall allow for extensive wet rice agriculture, have historically supported large populations. Sumatra, like any island, has seductively clear borders. But there is no panSumatran identity. Along the Straits of Malacca, traditional seafaring cultures— the Malay, Bugis, and Acehnese—followed trade winds; sought alignments with Arab, Indian, and Chinese merchants; and envisioned an expanded world of the Indian Ocean and the eastern Indonesian archipelago.5 Hill people—the various Batak cultures in the north and the other hinterland minorities in the south—farmed and harvested forest products, directing goods down a network of rivers to the straits.6 English and Dutch trading companies and imperial states 5. Hadrami emigrants, and their affiliations with the communities of the Malay world, provided a crucial link across the Indian Ocean to the Middle East. Engseng Ho, Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 157 – 73. 6. It is an old assumption that the mountains prevented easy highland travel, forcing people to use the rivers and creating isolated upland communities that traded with cosmopolitan seafarers at ports. The classic model is of equilibrium—sedentary hill folk shuttling alternatively between tributary rivers, directing their goods downstream, preventing any one port from monopolizing trade. See Bennet

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Muslims and Matriarchs

interfered with these systems in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, destroying local fleets, monopolizing ports, and redirecting trade. The Minangkabau had a hybrid culture. In turn they acted like an inland hill culture, sending gambier, camphor, rattan, and then pepper down from the forests. But they also had a maritime tradition, with ports along the western coast and a poetic sensibility that sang of wanderers, merchants, sailors, and men far from home. Unlike those of an island, the boundaries of such a society are far harder to map. Although the Minangkabau are now associated with the province of West Sumatra, this is arbitrary and a shadow of colonial partitioning. The first record of the name Minangkabau is in a 1365 list of the main Malay suzerains of the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit, and it appears again in the Ming Chronicles in 1405.7 So, it has been a recognized highland polity for over six hundred years. Minangkabau is defined by a handful of customs and rough linguistic commonalities, spreading out centrifugally from a heartland of highland villages called the darek and into the expanding rantau. In the east of Sumatra, Minangkabau culture mixes with the world of the coastal Malays. In the south, the Minangkabau people interact with the inhabitants of Bengkulu and Jambi, shaping local politics and customs.8 The northern frontier, where Minangkabau abuts the Mandailing Batak culture, has for the past two centuries been the site of the most intensive interaction. Mandailing was the focus of a ferocious proselytizing jihad from Minangkabau in the early nineteenth century; then, the two societies were, until the early twentieth century, jointly ad-

Bronson, “Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends: Notes toward a Functional Model of the Coastal State in Southeast Asia,” in Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia, ed. Karl Hutterer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan SEAS, 1977). These upstream-downstream networks, and their disruption, are discussed in Barbara Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993); Jane Drakard, A Malay Frontier: Unity and Duality in a Sumatran Kingdom (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP, 1990). Recent scholarship suggests that, despite the mountains, upriver peoples had a higher degree of overland mobility than has been recognized. Leonard Y. Andaya, “The Trans-Sumatra Trade and the Ethnicization of the Batak,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 158, no. 3 (2002); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Elephants, Horses, and the Coming of Islam to Northern Sumatra,” Indonesia and the Malay World 32, no. 93 (2004). 7. Mpu Prapañca, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama), trans. Stuart Robson (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995), 33, canto 13.1; Geoff Wade, trans., Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: An Open Access Resource (Singapore: Asia Research Institute and the Singapore E-Press, National University of Singapore, available at: http://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/entry/513) [accessed January 17, 2006]. 8. On the turn of the nineteenth century, see Heinzpeter Znoj, “Sons versus Nephews: A Highland Jambi Alliance at War with the British East India Company, ca. 1800,” Indonesia 65 (April 1998); Znoj, “Heterarchy and Domination in Highland Jambi: The Contest for Community in a Matrilinear Society” (Habilitationsschrift, Universität Bern, 2001). As late as the 1950s, the Rejang ethnic group, influenced by Minangkabau inheritance custom, was becoming matrilineal. M. A. Jaspan, “From Patriliny to Matriliny: Structural Change among the Redjang of Southwest Sumatra” (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 1964).

Culture of Paradox

5

ministered as a single colonial unit. In colonial schools and in the coastal city Padang, Mandailing people were key players in the definition of West Sumatran modernity. Like Java, West Sumatra was one of the few regions of Indonesia to experience intensive colonialism in the nineteenth century. But even before the Dutch reinforced Javanese feudalism through a cultivation system of agricultural labor taxes, Java had been turning inward, away from its northern coast and toward inland kingdoms.9 West Sumatra, located on the Indian Ocean and linked to ancient trading systems in the Straits of Malacca, had a reputation for outwardlooking dynamism. The port of Padang was the first stop for ships crossing the Bay of Bengal. Through trade and travel, the Minangkabau people were part of an expansive Indian Ocean world. They took a lively part in intellectual developments in South Asia and the Middle East, and Minangkabau activists transmitted new ideas to their compatriots in the East Indies and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The tension between the local matriarchate and Islamic reformism has lasted a long time. Since the late eighteenth century, Minangkabau has experienced a sustained debate between Muslim reformists and preservers of culture. The tensions began with violence. The reformist Padri War, the protracted and bloody conflict in the early nineteenth century, sought to replace the matriarchate with a society modeled on that of the prophet Muhammad. The capitulation of the Padri and the formulation of an uneasy truce that sought to find a balance between Islamic law and local custom ushered in an ongoing dialog. With the incorporation of West Sumatra into the nascent Dutch empire in the aftermath of the Padri War, this became a three-way critical dialectic among Muslim reformists, cultural traditionalists, and the colonial state. The existing tension between Islam and the matriarchate allowed the matriarchate to survive attacks from the colonial state and colonial “progressives.” And the ferment generated by the trinity of oppositions created social conditions that gave rise to numerous innovative leaders.

Matriarchate Matriarchate is the English equivalent of the Dutch word matriarchaat. Today, ethnographically informed Minangkabau use the term matriarchaat to gloss the institutions of matrilineal descent and inheritance and matrilocal residence that are essential components of their culture. According to Minangkabau adat (cus9. The precolonial move inland has been novelized in Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Arus Balik: Sebuah Novel Sejarah ( Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1995). And the social impact of the cultivation system is most famously analyzed in Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).

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tom), a person’s principal affiliation is to the longhouse and village of a maternal clan. Men marry into an extended family, but remain attached to their mothers’ houses. They return to that house daily to work the fields, convalesce there in times of sickness, and are eventually buried in the maternal family graveyard. A husband and father is an evanescent figure. In the words of a Minangkabau aphorism, “The urang sumando is like a horsefly on the tail of a buffalo, or like ashes on a burned tree trunk. [When a little wind blows, it is gone.]”10 A colonial official described the dawn ballet of men returning to their mothers’ houses after nights with wives as a chassez-croissez through the village.11 And according to tradition, it is the mamak (maternal uncle) who provides male authority in the lives of children. Minangkabau culture has been termed matrifocal because, although men can be part of the lives of their wives and children, it is mother-centeredness that grounds the family.12 To outside observers, this Minangkabau family life seemed peculiar, perhaps atavistic or even immoral, and certainly deserving of research. Ever since George Wilken called attention to Minangkabau custom in the 1880s, the culture (in Sumatra and in Malaysia) has become an important case study for ideas of kinship.13 “The Minangkabau case has always disturbed universalistic assumptions about women’s place in the world.”14 The first colonial efforts to define Minangkabau culture generated a “stock of images” that continued to inform ethnography through the twentieth century.15 Clichés of Minangkabau culture, convoluted kinship charts, and diagrams of inheritance patterns bear witness to this muddled project. In a discussion of matrilineal kinship practices observed in the 1990s, Evelyn Blackwood describes not an easy set of rules but a “matrix of matrilineal practices” that “provide the basic framework for acting in the world.”16 This is usefully vague. Another ethnography of the Minang-

10. Quoted in Tsuyoshi Kato, “Change and Continuity in the Minangkabau Matrilineal System,” Indonesia 25 (1978): 7. 11. A. W. P. Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding in de Padangsche Bovenlanden (Zalt-Bommel: Joh. Noman en Zoon, 1871), 75 n. 2. 12. Nancy Tanner, “Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and among Black Americans,” in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). 13. The essay was originally published in Dutch in 1888, then translated as G. A. Wilken, “The Extension of Matriarchy in Sumatra,” in The Sociology of Malayan Peoples: Being Three Essays on Kinship, Marriage, and Inheritance in Indonesia, ed. C. O. Blagden (Kuala Lumpur: Committee for Malay Studies, 1921). Some of the most illuminating work on Minangkabau kinship has focused on the Minangkabau community of Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia. See Michael G. Peletz, “Comparative Perspectives on Kinship and Cultural Identity in Negeri Sembilan,” Sojourn 9, no. 1 (1994). 14. Evelyn Blackwood, Webs of Power: Women, Kin, and Community in a Sumatran Village (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 9 – 10. 15. Joel S. Kahn, Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia (Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1993), 71. 16. Blackwood, Webs of Power, 17.

Culture of Paradox

7

kabau makes the case that a matriarchy would be expected to exhibit a high degree of gender egalitarianism and would not be the men-oppressing mirror image of patriarchy.17 I agree that this is the sort of society we find in highland West Sumatra. On the other hand, I am not prepared to dismiss patriarchal political and religious movements in West Sumatra as un-Minangkabau. Islam aside, Minangkabau culture contains male-dominated elements. And so I use the archaic term matriarchate as both a nod to local terminology and an acknowledgment that matriarchy is often more a utopian ideal than an ethnographic reality. There is a tension between this matriarchate (often glossed as adat, the Arabic and Indonesian word for local custom) and Islamic law, shariah. Inheritance customs whereby daughters receive all immovable property and ideas of an appropriate cohabiting family wherein a wife might find herself alone with a cousin’s husband are anathema to the basic tenets of Islamic law.18 Since the eighteenth century, foreign observers and Muslim reformists have predicted that the scriptural authority of Islam would overwhelm the fluid power of the matriarchate. This has not happened. Scholars and travelers have regularly pointed to the existence of single-family households and property acquired through individual male initiative (harato pencarian) as signs of the fragility and decay of tradition. Yet male acquisitiveness and even temporary patrilocal residence patterns are parts of a long-standing mechanism by which new property is incorporated into the holdings (harato pusako) of an extended matrilineal family.19 Minangkabauist scholarship makes much of an essential clash, a “bloody dispute” between adat and Islam, especially over the issue of inheritance.20 Although debates framed as “adat versus Islam” occur perpetually in West Suma-

17. Peggy Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 18. Describing the Indonesian Muslim critique of adat inheritance, Bowen writes, “Although the [Islamic inheritance] rules are complex, their major import in Indonesia has been to set the relative entitlements of sons and daughters at a ratio of two shares to one.” John R. Bowen, “The Transformation of an Indonesian Property System: Adat, Islam, and Social Change in the Gayo Highlands,” American Ethnologist 15, no. 2 (1988): 279. 19. Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Property in Social Continuity: Continuity and Change in the Maintenance of Property Relationships through Time in Minangkabau, West Sumatra (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 167 – 85. 20. This is particularly true of late Dutch colonial scholarship. For example see J. Prins, “Rondom de Oude Strijdvraag van Minangkabau,” Indonesië 7, no. 4 (1954): 320. Another scholar writes that matrilineal adat “in Muslim eyes can only be anathema.” G. W. J. Drewes, “Indonesia: Mysticism and Activism,” in Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization, ed. Gustave E. von Grunebaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 286. This simplistic analytical frame persists despite Bertram Schrieke’s 1928 admonition that “the political myth of the West Coast of Sumatra has been for a hundred years the struggle between the adat party and the religious party.” “The Development of the Communist Movement on the West Coast of Sumatra,” in Indonesian Sociological Studies: Selected Writings of B. Schrieke, vol. 1 (The Hague: W. van Hoeve, 1955 [first published in Dutch, 1928]), 150.

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tra, their essence is not universal and they lack a transhistorical theme. Not only is the tension between custom and Islamic law always rooted in particular historical dynamics, but it is almost always resolved dialogically and peacefully. Local tradition is not fragile; it is resilient and dynamic. The matriarchate changes, but it has survived a neo-Wahhabi war, intrusions by the colonial state after the Dutch used that war as a pretext to incorporate West Sumatra into their empire, attacks from Mecca-based reformists and their disciples in the late nineteenth century, the Muslim modernist and Eurocentric progressive movements of the 1910s and 1920s, and the police state imposed in the aftermath of a communist uprising in 1926. The central question of this book—Why does matriarchy persist?—has been dodged by scores of researchers who have been lured to Minangkabau by the seeming paradox of a matrilineal Muslim society. These scholars have relied on customary guidebooks and have attempted to gauge the degradation or survival of matrilineal traditions in one particular village or another. Here, however, the answer comes not from case studies but in a comparative approach to the histories of matrilineal societies under colonial regimes, in particular the matrilineal traditions found in Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia and Kerala in India.21 Both of these traditions were dismantled by the colonial state. New legal concepts, and a persistent discourse of progress (called kemajuan) and modernity that situated the matriarchate in a shameful and primitive past, encouraged people to scrap their atavistic customs.22 In West Sumatra, the Dutch colonial state implemented exactly the same sorts of policies that elsewhere proved pernicious. But there is one fundamental difference in the history of Minangkabau. There the Padri assault on matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal residence had forced the traditionalists to articulate a defense of custom. It prepared them for future Islamic reformist attacks from the Mecca-based Minangkabau Ahmad Khatib and his local disciples in the late nineteenth century. And it readied the traditionalists for the universalist critiques of progressives and modernists who dreamed of Europe, Cairo, and

21. On the delegitimizing of matriliny in Kerala, see G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c. 1850 – 1940 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003). Michael Gates Peletz discusses the Customary Tenure Enactment of 1926 in Malaya that favored Islamic inheritance law over matriliny in A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property, and Social History among the Malays of Rembau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 144 – 45. And he highlights the historical contingencies that have made the Minangkabau of Negeri Sembilan different from the Minangkabau in their Sumatran homeland in Michael G. Peletz, “The ‘Great Transformation’ among Negeri Sembilan Malays, with Particular Reference to Chinese and Minangkabau,” in Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms, ed. Robert W. Hefner (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998). 22. Timothy Mitchell argues that, although modernity is posited as a universal and transcendental ideal, it is usually thinly veiled Eurocentrism. Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

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Indonesian nationalisms in the twentieth century. The interactions between the Padris and the traditionalists forced the traditionalists to defend their ideological position. Elsewhere, traditional societies gave way to a universal notion of modernity, a notion that described matriarchy as particularly anachronistic. But in West Sumatra the Padri experience had armed the traditionalists for a defense of their matriarchate from the colonial state and the progressive critics. The Padri War was a violent neo-Wahhabi jihad. The Padri leaders attacked the institutions of the matriarchate, burning longhouses, killing traditionalist leaders, and murdering clan matriarchs. They demanded strict adherence to what they interpreted as a way of life prescribed in the Quran. Padri villages followed Islamic law, the men wore white robes and turbans and grew beards, and the women were required to wear burkas that covered all but their eyes. The conventional historiography states that the Padri were stopped only by Dutch military intervention on behalf of the traditionalists, that the Minangkabau chose between the destruction of their culture at the hands of Islamic puritans and subservience to a colonial state. But this was not the case. Padri capitulation was not a result of Dutch pressure but, rather, a response to ideological shifts in Mecca and a remorseful desire of a Padri leader to find a compromise between Islam and the customs of the matriarchate. It is instructive that an ideologically narrow and politically violent Islamic movement was capable of introspection and self-correction with no need for foreign military intervention. And it is paradoxical, perhaps, that in countering the Padri the Minangkabau traditionalists were forced to articulate the most heretical aspect of their culture, their matriarchate, in a manner that allowed these traditions to survive another two centuries of attacks and critiques. In analyzing the place of Islam in the Sumatran matriarchate, it becomes clear that in the case of the Minangkabau the transformative force of colonialism is overstated. Local culture may have been redefined by colonialism, but through the sustained debate with reformist Islam it also proves fundamentally resilient. And most striking, ever since the Padri War Islamic reformists have realized that occasionally they must compromise and adapt in order to succeed in Southeast Asia.

Heroes of the Nation The mystique of that first generation of Minangkabau leaders intrigues Indonesians, who long for political idealism untarnished by political reality. And students of Indonesia are equally curious: What was going on in West Sumatran villages and schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that shaped these thinkers? This fin-de-siècle generation was politically diverse and dynamic because it came of age in a world where every sacred truth was

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being questioned. In even the smallest village, the idea of a house, of a family, of parental authority, and of education was being challenged by Islamic reformists and the colonial state. More than anywhere else in Indonesia, in West Sumatra nothing could be taken for granted—not ideas of family, of house, of village, of religion, or of language. The Padri War gave the Dutch an excuse to establish an intensive and early presence in highland Sumatra. A cultivation system for the forced delivery of coffee required local bureaucrats, and so the colonial school system was inclusive and populist, training not feudal leaders but clerks and bean-counters. Islam in Minangkabau was particularly factional, and it was outward-looking and adaptive. Networks of competing Islamic schools used new pedagogies and provided often divergent educational alternatives. The tradition of merantau (outmigration) encouraged exposure to new ideas. All these factors contributed to an environment that produced many fiercely individualistic leaders. But most important, and the reason West Sumatra spawned so many national luminaries, were changes within the Minangkabau home. These changes, driven by the long-running tension between reformist Islam and the customs of the matriarchate, were further influenced by the interventions of the colonial state. The resilient matriarchate brought scrutiny from Muslim reformists and colonial progressives to the intimate details of Minangkabau culture. The house, the family, the village, and the concept of childhood—all were being aggressively challenged and transformed. In their daily lives, the Minangkabau were forced to question received and seemingly elemental cultural definitions. It was this condition of fundamental and inescapable change that made Minangkabau unique and dynamic. The people born in West Sumatra in these years had no easy truths on which they could plant a pivot foot. Off-balance, they were capable of envisioning new possibilities and fighting to make them real.

Victorious Buffaloes Since the early twentieth century, books about Minangkabau have all featured a cute but clichéd etymology: the name Minangkabau comes from the legend of a victorious (menang) buffalo (kerbau). The story goes that in the haze of prehistory an invading army appeared in the highlands of West Sumatra and demanded submission from the local people. The locals suggested that, rather than suffer a long war, the two sides should stage a buffalo fight. The defeat of an army’s buffalo would mean the defeat of that army. The invaders agreed and produced a massive bull. The locals sharpened the horns of a starving calf. When released, the calf raced out to suckle and eviscerated the bull. This trickster’s tale of victory, and supposedly the source of the name Minangkabau, is seen as evidence of a stubborn will to survive in the face of inva-

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sions from the Dutch or the Javanese colonial state.23 Similar tales exist in Thailand, with Ayudhya fending off a Burmese invasion, and Marsden collected the etymology when he was in Bengkulu in the late 1700s.24 But in no nineteenthcentury Minangkabau or Dutch account from West Sumatra do we find the story. I had assumed, therefore, that the etymology had been cooked up by the colonial tourism board in the 1910s to promote the highlands as a hill station.25 But the story appears far earlier, in a perversely violent account set down by the would-be conquerors from Java. This unusual text was preserved in the court libraries of east Java. The Chronicle of the Kings of Pasai describes events in Sumatra between 1280 and 1400: the introduction of Islam to the sultanate of Samudra-Pasai on the northeast coast, the travails of the ruling family there, and finally the expansion of the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit as it incorporated the western archipelago into its empire. At the end of this catalog of victories—it is the Majapahit version of the story, after all—there is a strange and unexpected conclusion. In the Majapahit story, the emperor launches an expedition to subjugate the island of Sumatra. Five hundred Javanese warships set sail, carrying ministers, commanders, 200,000 troops, and an enormous buffalo the size of a bull elephant. The fleet sails unhindered to Jambi and then heads upstream along the deep rivers of the east Sumatran plain, pushing into the highlands and finally arriving in a country called Pariangan. (According to the tambo, the traditional history of Minangkabau, Pariangan is the original Minangkabau nagari.) Following their plan, the Javanese propose to the local leaders, Patih Suatang and Patih Ketemenggungan (legendary figures also found in the tambo as Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang and Datuk Ketemanggungan), that the battle be waged symbolically by champion buffaloes. The loser’s army must surrender to the victor’s. The locals agree. The chronicle then recounts the final battle of the 23. Elizabeth Graves, “The Ever-Victorious Buffalo: How the Minangkabau of Indonesia Solved their ‘Colonial Question’ ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971); Gusti Asnan, “Geography, Historiography and Regional Identity: West Sumatra in the 1950s,” in Indonesia in Transition: Rethinking “Civil Society,” “Religion,” and “Crisis,” ed. Hanneman Samuel and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2004). 24. Maenduan Tipaya, “A Buffalo Challenge,” in Tales of Sri Thanonchai: Thailand’s Artful Trickster (Bangkok: Patamini, 1991), 99; William Marsden, The History of Sumatra (reprint of the 3rd ed., 1811) (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1966), 325n. Marsden’s version is of a fight between a buffalo and a tiger. A Chinese source from the mid-thirteenth century offers a tantalizing description of central Sumatra: “There is an old tradition that the ground in this country once suddenly gaped open and out of the cavern came many myriads of cattle, which rushed off in herds into the mountains, though the people all tried to get them for food. Afterwards the crevice got stopped up with bamboo and trees and disappeared.” Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, entitled Chu-fan-chï, trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (St. Petersburg, Russia: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911), 61. 25. L. C. Westenenk, Sumatra Illustrated Tourist Guide: A Fourteen Days’ Trip in the Padang Highlands (The Land of Minang Kabau), trans. Official Tourist Bureau (Batavia: Official Tourist Bureau, 1913).

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empire in Sumatra, a terrible defeat that marks the end of Majapahit’s westward expansion. So the great buffalo was set loose by the people of Majapahit, and he tramped across the field like a lion spoiling for a fight. Then the buffalo calf was released by Patih Suatang. It was starving, and like lightning it hurled itself beneath the great buffalo and began to suckle on his testicles. The great buffalo bucked and twisted until he was exhausted, but the calf held fast. The great buffalo tried to gore the calf with his horns but could not reach it below his own flanks. The great buffalo ran back and forth on the field but could not shake the calf loose from his testicles. At last the great buffalo fell, wailing, writhing on the ground. The soldiers of Majapahit, defeated, prepared to leave. But Patih Suatang and Patih Ketemenggungan graciously stopped them, insisting that they share in a feast before returning home. Hundreds of animals were slaughtered—buffaloes, oxen, goats, ducks and chickens. And many hundreds of jars of liquor and fermented rice cakes were prepared. All the various drinks were poured into thousands of sections of bamboo that had been fashioned into long cups. The lips of the cups had been sharpened into points. Patih Suatang then instructed his soldiers to serve the Javanese their food and drink. When the Javanese tried to receive the long cups, the Sumatrans explained that it was local custom for honored guests to be hand-fed by their hosts, and that the Sumatrans would pour the liquor into their mouths for them. At the sound of a drum the Sumatrans rammed the bamboo cups down the mouths of the Javanese, spearing their throats. Half of the Javanese army dropped dead. The rest fled, trampling the morinda trees that to this day still bend toward the east. The rotting corpses of the Javanese soldiers gave that place the name “Padang Sibusuk” (Stinking Field) and ever since the buffalo fight the country has been known as “Minangkabau.” With sorrow and regret the survivors fled back to Majapahit, escaping through Jambi and sailing back to their own country. After some time at sea they arrived in Majapahit and went ashore, and in the presence of the Emperor related all that had occurred from beginning to end, saying “This, your Majesty, is what happened.” The Emperor spoke no more, disappointed by his champions and ministers in whom he had placed so much hope.26

Jane Drakard has argued that precolonial Minangkabau authority hinged on the production of texts rather than on military muscle.27 And Leonard Andaya demonstrates that a sense of Minangkabau greatness was tied to the idea that the society was the direct political descendant of the kingdom of Srivijaya.28 It is

26. Hikayat Raja Pasai, transliterated by Russell Jones (Kuala Lumpur: Fajar Bakti, 1999), 68 – 69. My translation. 27. Jane Drakard, A Kingdom of Words: Language and Power in Sumatra (Selangor Darul Ehsan: Oxford University Press, 1999). 28. Leonard Y. Andaya, “Unravelling Minangkabau Ethnicity,” Itinerario 24, no. 2 (2000).

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certainly true that through the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries people from Minangkabau operated with great confidence in their cultural legitimacy and that being political and acting were often indistinguishable from speaking and, especially, from writing. Minangkabau women and men generated letters, debates, polemics, and stories of all sorts—the circulation of these texts described an expanding Minangkabau realm. In this way, the Dutch press restrictions and arrests of the 1930s were a cruel blow to Minangkabau activists in particular, forcing their discourse away from open debate and toward fiction and fantasy, preventing real historical and political analysis in a way that crippled Minangkabau intellectual discourse until the 1970s. It is not a coincidence that in the twentieth century we see the return of a diluted version of the “victorious buffalo” story to West Sumatra. In the etymological legend, the people are clever and aggressive in a manner that recalls the violent political actions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Padri War and its aftershocks, the 1908 Anti-Tax Rebellion, and finally the communist Silungkang uprising of 1926 – 1927. In each of these actions, the Minangkabau were defeated. The Padri War had shifted from internecine conflict between Muslim reformists and adat traditionalists, becoming a war against colonial occupation. It lasted years, and the Dutch victory came at great mortal and financial cost. The 1908 rebellion was short-lived and easily crushed, a peasant uprising that marked the defeat of the Sufi tarekat (mystical associations) as organizations capable of mobilizing mass resistance in West Sumatra.29 The communist uprising was equally ineffective, significant mainly for the heavy-handed response of the colonial state to it.30 Under Dutch rule, the Minangkabau people felt themselves becoming increasingly incapable of real political action. The rhetoric of shrewdness and self-determination, as exemplified in the story of the victorious buffalo, grew as actual power faded. The discursive skills of the Minangkabau helped to preserve the matriarchate, but these same skills went hand in hand with military impotence and a loss of local autonomy. The archive is richer for Minangkabau literary prowess. But after the eighteenth century, when rhetorical power no longer signified political power in the Malay world, Minangkabau felt themselves becoming increasingly marginalized. And under a postcolonial state perceived as a Javanese empire, the once victorious kerbau of Minangkabau were kicking against the pricks of a 29. Ken Young, Islamic Peasants and the State: The 1908 Anti-Tax Rebellion in West Sumatra (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1994). Young discusses the changing political influence of the Syattariyah and Naksyabandiah tarekat, and the colonial state’s response to an 1897 coup plot and the 1908 uprising. 30. The colonial state commissioned an extensive report on the uprising, written by Bertram Schrieke, that has been the focus of numerous revisionist studies. One of the best includes a concise summary of the events of the uprising, Audrey R. Kahin, “The 1927 Communist Uprising in Sumatra: A Reappraisal,” Indonesia 62 (October 1996): 29 – 34.

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nation-state invented, ironically, by Minangkabau idealists. The buffalo of Minangkabau was never again victorious on the field of battle. But the metaphor of the victorious buffalo would remind the Minangkabau people of artful resistance that preserves the matriarchate and local custom in the face of ideological invasions.

Structure and Sources Muslims and Matriarchs is bracketed by political violence, but it is not a linear political history. I have built on narratives that move beneath those of colonialism and nationalism by focusing on themes that are cultural: the changing conceptualization of a house and family; ideas of modernity that are alternatively Minangkabau, Islamic, and European; and competing systems of authority and education. The structure of the book is semi-chronological in that these themes emerge in West Sumatra in a rough sequence. So the narrative of the book moves forward in time, but follows themes that generate the occasional eddy in the stream of history. In the first chapter of Muslims and Matriarchs, I present a short history of the Padri War. I analyze the role of the controversial Padri leader Tuanku Imam Bondjol and his effort to replace the matriarchate with strict adherence to the Quran and authoritative Hadith. In an extraordinary moment in the Tuanku’s memoir, he apologizes for his violence, recants his ideology, and attempts to find a compromise between Minangkabau custom and Islamic law. His struggle frames this book, just as it has defined the debates that shaped Minangkabau through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the aftermath of the Padri War and Tuanku Imam Bondjol’s capitulation, the Dutch colonial state incorporated West Sumatra into the Netherlands East Indies. In chapters 2 – 4, I examine the debates about the physical shape of the house, the concept of the family, and the education of children in Minangkabau society. The nineteenth century transformed the Minangkabau from a traditional agrarian society in which women controlled the institutions of the house and rice fields, and therefore had great power, to a colonial society in which a patriarchal state gave opportunities to men. The colonial state imposed a patriarchal authority on aspects of Minangkabau society. Minangkabau women sought to redefine traditions that were now often used against them, binding them to their longhouse, limiting their access to new opportunities, and restricting their mobility. With the question of the matriarchate central to Minangkabau cultural debates, inevitably the political role of women and the definition of family became by the twentieth century central concerns of West Sumatran intellectuals. In chapter 5, I analyze ideas of morality and the role of women in the early twentieth century. This was the era of the pergerakan (Movement), a time of widespread participation in politics but

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little consensus about the goal of political activity.31 The village of Koto Gadang—most Dutch and most progressive—and the gender conflicts that took place there exemplify the rapid social transformation of West Sumatra in the early twentieth century. In chapters 6 and 7, I discuss the politicization of the culture in the 1910s and 1920s. This was a time when the public controversy between the matriarchate, reformist Islam, and progressivism came to dominate the pergerakan and Minangkabau society. The fissures were obvious. In 1921, a colonial observer commented that West Sumatra “offers the particularly interesting spectacle of a struggle, that one might term a triangular conflict, between local custom [volksadat], Islam, and ‘modern-Western’ conceptions.”32 This was the heat of the political movement, when women participated in journalism and politics and broke with tradition by taking part in the male out-migration to the rantau, leaving behind matrilocally constituted longhouses. The fears that modernity spawned were framed by a destructive 1926 earthquake that was followed by a failed communist uprising. Through the nineteenth century and up to the political crackdowns and censorship that followed the uprising, the role of women in society and the definition of house and the family were the focus of debate in Minangkabau. The women and men born into this contested world constituted the dynamic first generation of Indonesian political leaders. In telling a story of cultural transformation and resilience, I have, whenever possible, made use of local Minangkabau sources. This is not difficult when writing about the twentieth century because of the rise of Malay-language newspapers and printed books. For the nineteenth century, local sources are far more elusive. The sources used in Muslims and Matriarchs include newspapers and pamphlets, literature that identified itself as traditional, and modern novels.33 Early nineteenth-century manuscripts by Muslim reformists are transitional texts that follow Malay narrative convention but offer the first whisper of an intimate “I,” of interiority and of an awareness of a split audience of European and local readers. Mid-nineteenth-century manuscripts written by Minangkabau teach-

31. The word pergerakan is derived from gerak (to move). Early twentieth-century politics is known in Indonesian history as the time of this Movement, bracketed by the founding of the first political parties in the 1910s and a crackdown on politics at the end of the 1920s. The classic study of this period is Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912 – 1926 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 32. M. Joustra, Minangkabau: Overzicht van Land, Geschiedenis en Volk (Leiden: Louis H. Becherer, 1921), 159. 33. Sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed peculiar and changing romanization schemes to transliterate Minangkabau and Malay sources. Indonesian spelling as we know it today was not “perfected” (according to the Indonesian state) until late in the twentieth century. I have chosen not to standardize the Malay spellings in this book because the shifting use of language and orthography was another aspect of the transformation Minangkabau people were undergoing in the colonial era.

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ers and students in the Dutch-sponsored elementary schools discuss personal and often intimate matters—the sort of autoethnographic texts that do not exist for the eighteenth century and earlier.34 Throughout this study, I have relied on a collection of manuscripts that have been cataloged in the Leiden University Library as schoolschriften (school writings).35 The schoolschriften were written by students and native assistant teachers (inlandsche hulponderwijzers) in the colonial village schools of West Sumatra. It is in these texts, most from the 1870s – 1890s, that we find the first sparks of twentieth-century modernity. The schoolschriften usher in a literary mode with a new idea of audience that is simultaneously Minangkabau and Dutch, of a public sphere and personal interiority, and of confessional discourse. As sources, the schoolschriften are unique. In chapters 2 – 4, I translate extensively from these texts because of the insights they provide into the everyday concerns of Minangkabau villagers in the late nineteenth century. 34. On the idea of autoethnography, see Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33 – 40. 35. The documents are glossed in an early catalog. Ph. S. van Ronkel, Supplement-Catalogus der Maleische en Minangkabauche Handschriften in de Leidsche Universiteits-Bibliotheek (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1921). This book is also referred to as the VRSC, and I have in all citations included the VRSC description number along with the revised Oriental manuscript (MS. Or.) library call number.

ONE

Contention Unending Adat basandi syarak dan syarak basandi adat. Custom is based on Islamic law and Islamic law is based on custom. Minangkabau aphorism

In 2001, the Indonesian National Bank issued a note featuring a portrait of a stern man with a long beard, wearing a turban and a white robe thrown back over his left shoulder (figure 1.1). Tuanku Imam Bondjol was the formal title given to this man, whose name was Muhamad Sahab and who as a young adult had been called Peto Syarif; he was born in the Minangkabau region of West Sumatra about 1772 and died outside of the city of Manado in North Sulawesi in 1854. Tuanku was a title given to high-ranking ulama in West Sumatra. Imam, religious leader, usually refers to some individual characteristic of the ulama. Of the (at least) fifty tuanku who were contemporaries of Tuanku Imam Bondjol, we find Bachelor Tuanku, Little Tuanku, Fat Tuanku, Black Tuanku, Old Tuanku, and so forth. Bondjol is the old spelling of the town of Bonjol, where the Tuanku Imam established his fortress and from 1833 to 1837 led the fight against Dutch annexation of the Minangkabau highlands. I follow Indonesian convention and use the old spelling of Bondjol for the man and Bonjol for the village. Like Agus Salim, Hatta, Sjahrir, and others, Tuanku Imam Bondjol is an official Minangkabau national hero but from a prenational era. He is also a putative Wahhabi and leader of the Padri War, which is described as the first Muslim-against-Muslim jihad in Southeast Asia.1 My understanding of the war is based first on the memoir of Tuanku Imam Bondjol himself. The other The epigraph is quoted in E. Francis, “Korte Beschrijving van het Nederlandsch Grondgebied ter Westkust Sumatra, 1837,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 2, no. 1 (1839): 113 – 14. 1. The best study of the war is Christine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784 – 1847 (London and Malmö: Curzon Press, 1983). On the war as jihad, see Azyumardi Azra, The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia: Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern GUlamaH in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i

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Figure 1.1. Tuanku Imam Bondjol, as depicted on the 5,000-rupiah banknote.

major Minangkabau source for the history of the Padri War is an autobiographical note by the moderate religious scholar Syekh Jalaluddin, written at the request of the colonial administration in the late 1820s.2 Jalaluddin was persecuted by the Padri, and his text provides the history of Islamic reform in the late eighteenth century as well as a critique of the Padri from within the reformist movement. Along with this clarification by Syekh Jalaluddin, Imam Bondjol’s memoir stands as one of the first modern Malay autobiographies.3 In their memoirs, Jalaluddin and Imam Bondjol are the textual ancestors of the schoolschrift writers. The texts exhibit an emotional resonance that comes perhaps from being written simultaneously for a Dutch contemporary audience and for Minangkabau posterity, from the perspective of a villager, not a

Press, 2004), 146 – 47. In the Malay world, a jihad was more often referred to as a perang sabilillah (holy war); see E. Ulrich Kratz and Adriyetti Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin Karangan Fakih Saghir (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2002), 18, 20. The name Padri has been the cause of much speculation. It is most likely that Padri is a modification of the word Padre and referred (usually) disdainfully to priestly zealots of all faiths. J. Kathirithamby-Wells, “The Origin of the Term Padri: Some Historical Evidence,” Indonesia Circle 41 (November 1986). For a full analysis of the place of Tuanku Imam Bondjol in Indonesian historiography, see Jeffrey Hadler, “A Historiography of Violence and the Secular State in Indonesia: Tuanku Imam Bondjol and the Uses of History,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 3 (August 2008). 2. Djilâl-Eddîn, “Surat Keterangan dari pada Saya Fakih Saghir gUlamiah Tuanku Samiang Syekh Jalaluddin Ahmad Koto Tuo,” in Verhaal van den Aanvang der Padri-Onlusten op Sumatra, door Sjech Djilâl Eddîn, ed. J. J. de Hollander (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1857); Kratz and Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin. 3. Kratz argues in his introduction to the transliterated text and in his essay that Jalaluddin’s memoir is idiomatically novel; E. Ulrich Kratz, “Surat Keterangan Syekh Jalaluddin,” Indonesia Circle 57 (1992).

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19

courtier, and of a Muslim reformist concerned especially with family structure and everyday life.

Islam before the Padris Islam came to West Sumatra in the 1500s, delegitimizing animism and Buddhism in a process that has yet to be understood fully.4 An early-sixteenthcentury account reported that at least one Minangkabau king had recently converted to Islam.5 And Thomas Dias, a Portuguese mestizo who visited the highlands in 1684, reported seeing hajjis at the royal court.6 Minangkabau experienced the organized and institutional drive to convert to Islam only in the seventeenth century, when a central Sufi tarekat (mystical association) was established on the coast at Ulakan.7 Azyumardi Azra claims that the “embers of reformism” were first stoked in the late 1600s when members of the Ulakan student network observed with disappointment the overexuberance of their fellows commemorating the death of the founder of the tarekat.8 In the eighteenth century, American and European demand for coffee, pepper, and cassia created a boom in the highland economy that disrupted traditional trading systems and brought new intellectual influences through the port of Tiku, near Ulakan. Marginal villages with poor soil became wealthy by planting the new cash crops, threatening the influence of the traditionalist wet rice farmers. Many of the Muslim reformists came from these newly rich villages.9 By the later eighteenth century, Islamic reformism had followed the Naksyabandiyah, Syattariyah, and Qadiriyyah tarekat into the highlands, and the Islamic school headed by Tuanku nan Tuo became a center for the reformist 4. David S. Sjafiroeddin, “Pre-Islamic Minangkabau,” Sumatra Research Bulletin 4, no. 1 (1974); Satyawati Suleiman, The Archaeology and History of West Sumatra (Jakarta: Pusat Penelitian Purbakala dan Peninggalan Nasional, Departemen P&K, 1977). 5. Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires, an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to Japan, Written in Malacca and India in 1512 – 1515, ed. Armando Cortesão (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1990), 164. 6. Thomas Dias, “A Mission to the Minangkabau King,” trans. Jane Drakard, in Witnesses to Sumatra: A Travellers’ Anthology, ed. Anthony Reid (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1995), 152–61. 7. A tarekat is a global, hierarchical social network headed by a sheikh and his disciples and teaching a particular mode of worship. Most of the tarekat were centered in Mecca until they were expelled after the second Wahhabi occupation in 1924. Because of their international scope and organization, colonial states were particularly fearful of tarekat-led rebellions in the nineteenth century. On colonial concern, see Michael F. Laffan, “‘A Watchful Eye’: The Meccan Plot of 1881 and Changing Dutch Perceptions of Islam in Indonesia,” Archipel 63 (2002). On Ulakan, see H. A. M. K. Amrullah [Hamka], Sedjarah Minangkabau Dengan Agama Islam (Fort de Kock: Tsamaratoel Ichwan, 1929); Suryadi, Syair Sunur: Teks dan Konteks “Otobiografi” Seorang Ulama Minangkabau Abad ke-19 (Padang: Citra Budaya Indonesia, 2004). 8. Hamka reports emotional chanting (dzikir) and dancing. Azra, Origins of Islamic Reformism, 145. 9. Christine Dobbin, “Economic Change in Minangkabau as a Factor in the Rise of the Padri Movement, 1784 – 1830,” Indonesia 23 (1977).

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movement. Syekh Jalaluddin remembered his father’s stories of the ante-bellum 1780s and the religious changes already underway in Minangkabau.10 He described the religious conditions in Minangkabau in the late eighteenth century, when his father was an Islamic reformist and educator. Already in the 1780s, centralizing religious schools were spreading throughout the highlands. The reformists moved from the old Sufi-influenced school at Ulakan, near the coastal town of Pariaman, traveling through Kamang and Rao in the highlands, stopping briefly in Koto Gadang, and finally settling in Batu Tebal (figure 1.2), where eventually they garnered enough support to maintain the forty-man congregation necessary for Friday prayers. It would be a mistake to imagine that religious education in pre-Padri, precolonial Minangkabau was entirely localized and focused on village prayerhouses. Religious scholars advertised experiences and connections in the religious centers of Mecca, Medina, and even Aceh—the world of Islamic learning was inherently cosmopolitan. Reformists were beginning to make inroads into the heartland. And important tarekat centers, with particularly potent teachers, had long attracted supplicants. Attentiveness to private life and daily behavior was a novelty in the Islamic world in the late eighteenth century.11 Through the early 1700s Islam and the ulama had been primarily concerned with states and with kingship. The new reformist Islamic movements were more involved with the everyday lives of ordinary people; fataawa addressed issues of family life, of sex, of appropriate conduct. From West Africa through South Asia and into the Malay world, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought local Muslim reformist and revivalist movements that shared common objectives and similar violent rhetoric. But although the Padris had many contemporaries, they were more profoundly in opposition to local custom than their counterparts were; Minangkabau matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal residence were affronts to shariah law that were impossible to ignore. There were consequences to this new discourse on private life. In Indonesia, an attentiveness to the family and to daily life in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presaged what in the early twentieth century became known as the moderen. In the nineteenth century, a public sphere for Islam developed around concerns that the colonial state did not share (although the Dutch, and to a lesser extent the British, did attempt to control the private lives of their subjects). Muslims were kept out of politics—in the Dutch East Indies, hajji were barred from serving in the colonial civil administration—but they were political regarding social issues. From Mecca at the end of the nineteenth century, the Minangkabau Sheikh Ahmad 10. Kratz and Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin. 11. Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860 – 1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

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Khatib would rail against matrilineal inheritance in his homeland.12 His students and readers became the core of the early-twentieth-century reformist movement. When in the early twentieth century the colonial state tried to introduce nominal participatory politics to its “native” subjects, they expected a long tutelary process.13 But for the ulama no learning curve was needed for civil behavior, and they plunged into the political sphere fully fledged. Caught up in the wave of eighteenth-century Islamic reformism, Tuanku nan Tuo, a moderate reformist around whom the future Padri coalesced, pushed for a stricter application of Islamic law, better attendance at Friday prayers, an end to gambling and drinking, and a cessation of the brigandage and slaving that had come with increased trade. That trade also brought new wealth, and more people had the means to undertake the hajj pilgrimage. The Hijaz and Mecca were tumultuous in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From the final decade of the eighteenth century, the Wahhabis were involved in a campaign of conquest there, temporarily occupying Mecca in 1803 and capturing the city from 1806 through 1812. Wahhabi followers reject textual interpretation as innovation and demand adherence to a way of life that follows the Quran and the authoritative Hadith. In the Hijaz, the Wahhabis burned books, demolished domes, destroyed tombs and pilgrimage sites, and, according to one unimpressed scholar, engaged in a “campaign of killing and plunder all across Arabia.”14 Some time after the 1803 Wahhabi occupation, three Minangkabau hajji returned from Mecca, where, according to every history, they had been influenced by the teachings of the conquering army. It is impossible to know with any certainty whether the three hajji were directly influenced by Wahhabism while in Mecca.15 What is clear is that for these returning hajji traditional Minangkabau culture was unacceptable; matriliny and matrilocally constituted longhouses could not be reconciled with the essential teachings of Islam. One of the hajji, known as Haji Miskin, allied with more impatient reformists in Tuanku nan Tuo’s circle and established walled villages, grew beards, wore robes and turbans, and attempted to recreate an Arabian culture in highland

12. Yasrul Huda, “Islamic Law versus Adat: Debates about Inheritance Law and the Rise of Capitalism in Minangkabau” (M.A. thesis, Leiden University, 2003). 13. Inlander (native) was—with “European” and “foreign oriental”—a formal legal category in the late colonial Indies. C. Fasseur, “Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia,” in The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880 – 1942, ed. Robert Cribb (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994). 14. Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International, 2002), 20. 15. William R. Roff, “Islamic Movements: One or Many?” in Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning: Comparative Studies of Muslim Discourse, ed. William R. Roff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 37 – 39.

Figure 1.2. Map of the Padang Highlands in 1920. The Official Tourist Bureau, May 1920.

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West Sumatra.16 This combination of localized reformism and Wahhabi-like influence became known as the Padri movement. In a violent affront to the Minangkabau matriarchate, an extremist Padri, Tuanku nan Renceh, murdered his maternal aunt.17 The Padri declared a jihad against the traditional matrilineal elite, burning longhouses (rumah gadang) and killing traditional leaders who upheld custom (adat) in the face of religious commandments. The Padri War was a protracted series of conflicts, and the Padri “state,” influenced by the decentralized and democratic traditions of Minangkabau polities, lacked a clear administrative hierarchy. The decentralization of authority allowed for a natural sort of guerilla warfare that did not encourage climactic or pyrrhic battles. In 1815, the Padris, using peace talks as a ruse, slaughtered the royal house of Pagaruyung near Batusangkar.18 They turned against Tuanku nan Tuo and Syekh Jalaluddin, the moderate reformists, calling the men Rahib Tuo (old Christian monk) and Rajo Kafir (King of Infidels).19 For twenty years, sporadic fighting between reformist and traditionalist forces destabilized West Sumatra. Eager to rehabilitate the economy of the Netherlands in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (and moreover after the secession of Belgium in 1830) and lured by rumors of gold and the power of the Minangkabau court, in 1821 the Dutch colonial government returned to the port of Padang, signed a treaty with the traditionalists, and sent an army into the hills. It is at this point that the extensive Dutch archive takes control of the historiography of the Padri War. According to this history, a series of treaties and perceived betrayals on all sides of the conflict punctuated twelve years of difficult fighting. But in 1830 the Dutch were able to reinvigorate their army with Dutch and Javanese troops fresh from victories over Diponegoro, and by 1832 the Dutch had defeated Bonjol and apparently incorporated West Sumatra into their burgeoning colony. The collapse of the Padri in 1833, however, was followed by a unification of the reformist Muslims and matrilineal traditionalists in a revitalized resistance to foreign occupation. Six more years of violent warfare ensued, and by 1838 the Minangkabau were defeated, their leaders killed or, like Tuanku Imam Bondjol, exiled. It was, according to the archive and the authoritative histories, the Dutch entry into the conflict on the side of the matrilineal adat traditionalists that prevented West Sumatra from becoming a permanent Wahhabi outpost. The memoir of Tuanku Imam Bondjol gives the lie to this narrative. 16. T. S. Raffles, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, F. R. S. &C. (London: John Murray, 1830), 349 – 50. 17. H. A. Steijn Parvé, “De Secte der Padaries (Padries) in de Bovenlanden van Sumatra,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 2, no. 3 (1854): 271 – 72. 18. v. d. H., “Oorsprong der Padaries (Eene Secte op de Westkust van Sumatra),” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 1, no. 1 (1838): 130. 19. Kratz and Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin, 41.

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Although the reformists were defeated militarily, their arguments for a strict interpretation of the Quran and Hadith remained compelling in West Sumatra. For two centuries, Minangkabau intellectuals have been obliged to defend the maintenance of matriliny and matrilocality in the face of a rigorous critique from Islamic reformists. And despite regular predictions of the imminent demise of their Islamic matriarchate, the Minangkabau people have managed to sustain and strengthen these traditions. The Padri War and reformist critique of Minangkabau custom forced the supporters of adat to articulate and defend the legitimacy of their beliefs. It was the dialog with neo-Wahhabism that preserved matriliny in Minangkabau. And this dialog was started by Tuanku Imam Bondjol.

War and Words The area of the Minangkabau highlands to which the three Wahhabi hajji returned was not a static place. Coffee smallholding had generated considerable individual wealth, and local Islamic centers and tarekat were already in place, building a regional network of religious influence and friendships. An extensive system of footpaths connected highland villages to the west coast and the rivers that flowed east to the Straits of Malacca.20 The rotational daily market shuttled between the various towns, its parameters marked out by the distance a goods-laden water buffalo could shuffle in an evening. This market was an opportunity for news to be shared, for traditional stories to be told, and for connections to be made beyond the village. It was a proto-rantau—a chance for young men to leave home and accompany their mothers and fathers through a wider, although still circumscribed world. This market system was one of the principal means by which a regionwide Minangkabau identity and language were maintained. And rampant robber gangs—a chief concern of the Padris— had disrupted these traditional circuits. Tuanku Imam Bondjol was a village boy from the valley of Alahan Panjang in the northern reaches of the Minangkabau highlands. Alahan Panjang is a poor and arid region, and local boys were especially encouraged to out-migrate and seek their fortunes. The young Tuanku traveled the network of Islamic schools, studying with various teachers according to their specializations. He was, above all, a student of his own father, Khatib Bayanudin, and eventually joined his father’s surau (prayerhouse) as a teacher. As a young member of the ulama in the late 1790s, the Tuanku accompanied his patron, the traditional chief Datuk Bandaharo, to the reformist center led by Tuanku nan Tuo. The Tuanku and Datuk were part of the reformist movement there when the three hajji returned, and the Tuanku was deeply inspired by 20. Gusti Asnan, “Transportation on the West Coast of Sumatra in the Nineteenth Century,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 158, no. 4 (2002).

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their Wahhabi-like teachings and fashions and by their call for a return to the shariah. He joined the Padri, but he was not considered to be one of the eight most violent and aggressive of them, a group known as the Harimau nan Salapan (Eight Tigers). From the Tuanku’s memoir, it is clear that Datuk Bandaharo was a confidant of the Tuanku and was perhaps his leader. In the early 1800s, the two men set up a Padri fort in Alahan Panjang to wage their jihad. Anti-Padri forces conspired against them, and Datuk Bandaharo was poisoned and died. At this point, the Tuanku relocated his stronghold to the base of the Tajadi Mountain in the village of Bonjol, becoming the Tuanku Imam of Bonjol in 1807. The Padri War, up through the Dutch intervention, was a bitter civil war. Tuanku Imam Bondjol looked to the Eight Tigers, and particularly Haji Miskin and Tuanku nan Renceh, following their example and making his fort the northern base of the jihad. From his memoir, we know that Tuanku Imam Bondjol organized the burning of the village of Koto Gadang and instructed Tuanku Tambusai and Tuanku Rao to take the jihad farther north into the Batak lands. Bonjol, the fortress, became increasingly wealthy as the Tuanku Imam Bondjol seized cattle, horses, mines, and slaves during his campaigns. At this point in the Tuanku’s career, the Dutch joined the fight and in the central valleys were slowly annexing Padri territory. Haji Miskin had been killed (Tuanku nan Renceh later died of an illness), and the locus of Padri authority shifted north to Bonjol. The forces of the Tuanku Imam had great success in converting the southern Batak to Islam and even reached the shores of Lake Toba. The Tuanku was in contact with Muslim leaders in Aceh and stood to lead a revivalist movement that spanned the entire northern half of Sumatra. The Dutch had appeared in the Minangkabau heartland and had begun to engage directly the forces of Bonjol, but the Tuanku Imam was in a position of military strength. His cavalry and his knowledge of the highland plains and mountains were unmatched, and his troops had proven themselves capable of defeating the Dutch.21 Control of rice fields and croplands, as well as gold mines, guaranteed his soldiers food and supplies. In his memoir, the Tuanku expressed doubt, however. He needed to reaffirm the focus of his struggle. He contemplated for eight days and then called his advisers for deliberation. “There are yet many laws of the Quran that we have overlooked. What do we think about this?” His advisers affirmed, “We have overlooked many of the laws of the Quran.”22 With his spoils, the Tuanku funded four of his followers, including Tuanku 21. Clarence-Smith, “Elephants, Horses,” 276; J. M. van der Kroef, “Two Forerunners of Modern Indonesian Independence: Imam Bondjol and Thomas Matulesia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 8, no. 2 (1962): 151 – 53. 22. Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Naali Sutan Caniago, Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol, transliterated by Sjafnir Aboe Nain (Padang: PPIM, 2004), 39. I have checked this transliteration against a degraded

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Figure 1.3. Portrait of Tuanku Imam Bondjol. From H. J. J. L. Ridder de Stuers, De Vestiging en Uitbreiding der Nederlanders ter Westkust van Sumatra, vol. 2, edited by P. J. Veth (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen, 1850), opposite page 163.

Tambusai and his matrilineal nephew Fakih Muhammad, sending them on the hajj to acquire the “true law of Allah” in Mecca.23 The Tuanku continued to wage his war aggressively, burning enemy villages, killing the nobility, and building mosques. But in 1832 the hajji returned with unanticipated news. In Mecca, the Wahhabi had fallen and the laws as studied by Haji Miskin were invalid. The text of the Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol reveals an extraordinary narrative shift at this point; the narrator is chastened and repentant (figure 1.3). He immediately returns the spoils of war and calls a great meeting of all the tuanku and hakim (Islamic authorities and judges), basa and panghulu (customary rulers), declaring a truce and promising that he will no longer interfere in the work of the traditional authorities. Although discord remains, the people agree to follow the law of adat basandi syarak (Islamic law as the basis for custom).

photocopy of the original Jawi manuscript now deposited in the Berkeley library. Page numbers refer to the manuscript; this pagination is also reproduced in the margins of the published transliteration. Sjafnir uses the unconventional reformed spelling “Bonjol” for both the man and the town. 23. Ibid., 39 – 40.

28

Muslims and Matriarchs And they accepted the law of the Quran and they followed the Quran. So all the plunder and spoils were returned to their owners. And Friday, when everyone had arrived at the mosque, and they had yet to start their prayers then the Tuanku Imam, before all the judges, restored things to as they had been. “I speak to all the adat leaders and all the nobles in this state. And although more enemies may come from all directions rather than fighting them you adat leaders and I will live in mutual respect and peace and no longer will I meddle in the lives of the adat leaders in the state of Alahan Panjang. And so I restore all that is bad and good in this nagari [village confederacy].” “Now you speak this way to us, Tuanku, and so it is upon you that our hopes rest. You will replace our elders, and if oppressed or constrained we will complain but to you and you will be our protector.” This was the request of all the adat leaders to the Tuanku Imam. And so they applied the law according to the teachings of the Quran. And the adat leaders used the law of adat basandi syarak— shariah as the basis for custom. And if there was a problem with adat it would be brought to the adat leaders. And if there was a problem with Islamic law it would be brought to the four Islamic authorities. And so word spread to every nagari and luhak from the nagari of Tuanku Rao and Tuanku Tambusai [the Mandailing front] to Agam and Tanah Datar, to 50 Koto and Lintau. And so it is that today every nagari uses this division of authority.24

This is a complicated passage and one whose language deviates from the otherwise straightforward narrative. The Tuanku was writing his memoirs while in exile. He had in mind the twin audiences of the Dutch colonial state and Minangkabau posterity, knowing that the Dutch military would read the memoir and expecting that his son would eventually return with it to West Sumatra. This meeting was a transformational moment in Minangkabau history. The Padri War as an Islamic reformist war was abandoned. The Tuanku had surrendered in his struggle to purify Islam in Minangkabau, and he would soon abandon his house and mosque in Bonjol. The language is ambiguous—he is simultaneously celebrated and derided by his former enemies. In his memoir, the Tuanku’s will to fight his fellow Minangkabau crumbles when he learns that Wahhabi teachings have been discredited. In an act of great moral bravery, the Tuanku publicly renounces his ideology, makes reparations, and apologizes for the suffering his war has caused. Imam Bondjol’s enemies respond formulaically, looking to him as a patron. But there remains some ambiguity and even anger in their reported language. They demand that the Tuanku Imam replace their elders, people probably killed by the Padri in their war against traditional authority, and it is unclear whether the Tuanku Imam is to appoint replacements or personally to take the place of the people he was responsible for killing. In his wish for peace, the Tuanku uses the term dituahnya.

24. Ibid., 53 – 55.

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This is a form of royal blessing usually delivered by the sorts of nobles that the Padri had hoped to eliminate. The Tuanku Imam restores the status quo ante bellum, confining religious authority to matters of shariah and allowing customary leaders to adjudicate social issues. In the first recorded use of the adage, he proclaims that “adat basandi syarak”—shariah will be fundamental, even in questions of social custom. In fact, a Dutch administrator reported in 1837 the widespread acceptance of the formula “Adat barsan di Sarak dan Sarak barsan di Adat,” which asserts that both Islamic law and local custom are mutually constituted and interdependent.25 Imam Bondjol claims a kind of victory in his accommodation with the traditionalists. Yet we know that he has dismantled the Padri as a Muslim revivalist movement and that he will soon withdraw, temporarily, from his role as leader. The voice of the memoir is now exhausted; the Tuanku Imam wishes for peace with the Company (the common term for the Dutch colonial government, long after the dissolution of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie [VOC], or Dutch East India Company); he is tired of living in a state where the leadership is divided.26 Soon after the meeting with the local leaders, he gathers his family and leaves Bonjol for Alahan Panjang, turning the fort over to three traditional leaders. Within days, the three panghulu have agreed to surrender Bonjol to the Dutch for a promise that the Dutch troops will not disturb the fort itself. But the Dutch and Javanese soldiers soon evict the Minangkabau from Bonjol and occupy the fort, using the Tuanku’s house and even the mosque as a garrison. The Tuanku Imam learns of this and calls for a meeting with Cornelis Elout, the Dutch commander. In their conversation, the Tuanku Imam offers a truce, explaining that he is sixty years old and too tired to fight. Elout recommends retirement and appoints Tuanku Mudo, Tuanku Imam Bondjol’s protégé, as regent of Alahan Panjang. But the peace does not last. Both the Padri and traditionalists are furious at the Dutch and Javanese abuse of the fort and mosque. After an incident of Dutch mistreatment of Minangkabau workers, the Minangkabau (in the words of the memoir) run amuck, slaughtering the Javanese who were encamped in the mosque and 139 Euro-

25. Francis, “Korte Beschrijving van het Nederlandsch Grondgebied,” 113 – 14. This formula was common throughout the nineteenth century and was recorded by J. Habbema, “Menangkabausche Spreekwoorden [2],” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 26 (1881): 170. During the Japanese occupation, the first edition of an authoritative canon of proverbs reasserted that “Adat is based on sharia, sharia is based on adat.” K. St. Pamoentjak, N. St. Iskandar, and A. Dt. Madjoindo, Peribahasa (Djakarta: Balai Poestaka, 1943 [2603 in the Japanese imperial calendar]), 10. But independence brought new political demands, and by the mid-twentieth-century the adage was shifting to adat basandi syarak, syarak basandi Kitabullah (“Adat is based on shariah, shariah is based on the Holy Book”). See the seventh edition of Peribahasa (Djakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1956), 12. It is this latest iteration that is cited by adat authorities today. 26. Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Caniago, 43.

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peans stationed in the town. On January 11, 1833, the war enters a new phase, that of the unified resistance of Minangkabau society to Dutch occupation. Tuanku Imam Bondjol again becomes a military leader, and the memoirs remain exceptionally detailed. He is often on the run, living in the woods, engaging in guerilla warfare with the Dutch. The Tuanku Imam is no longer a revolutionary, overturning a corrupt society and bringing religion to his countrymen. He is attempting to expel a foreign invader, and then he is trying to survive. The memoir describes a life of shuttling from house to house, listing the names of mothers and children killed in the fighting and dreaming of peaceful days in Alahan Panjang. Tuanku Imam Bondjol is no longer a man blessed with the certainty of the zealot. His memoir becomes a text of doubt and trepidation. Tuanku Imam Bondjol is tired of living in the forest and fears for the welfare of his family. He becomes increasingly conciliatory, making speeches to traditional elites and assuring them of their essential place in Minangkabau society, meeting Dutch officials and attempting to win guarantees of protection for his children. The fighting remains horrific, but slowly the Dutch gain ground and retake Bonjol, defeating the Minangkabau rebellion in 1837. Resident E. Francis and other officials decide that the Tuanku Imam is too subversive a presence to allow him to remain in West Sumatra, as he has requested. He is exiled to Java, then Ambon, and eventually to Manado, where after a final five years of illness and pain, “at the end of his years, and out of luck,” the Tuanku Imam dies.27 The Tuanku Imam Bondjol had an epiphany of regret regarding Wahhabilike teaching and then a second career that combined warfare with conciliation. But, as the Dutch reports attest, his life was otherwise marked by extreme violence. In the 1820s, the moderate reformist Jalaluddin recounted his own experiences of the war for a Dutch audience. Jalaluddin complained that, yes, the traditionalists of Agam were warlike, unable to differentiate halal from haram, and willing to sell their mothers and siblings for the right offer. But the Padri were worse. There are good aspects of the Tuanku Padri, they organized prayers and enforced alms-giving and fasting during Ramadan, and undertook the hajj as they were able, and repaired mosques and bathing places, and wore permissible clothes, and commanded people to pursue knowledge, and commerce. And there are wicked aspects of the Tuanku Padri who committed arson, who [without customary authority] appointed officials in the villages, and murdered without cause, that is they murdered all the ulama [who disagreed with them], and murdered all the courageous people [who stood up to them], and murdered all

27. Ibid., 190.

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the intellectuals, calling them traitors, and pillaged and looted, and took women who had husbands, and married women of unequal rank without their consent, and captured people and sold them into slavery, and made concubines of their captives, and insulted noble people, and insulted elders, and called the faithful infidels, and deprecated them.28

The reaction of Europeans to this Padri violence had far-reaching implications for Indonesianist scholarship. The British scholar William Marsden was convinced that the Minangkabau kingdom was the cultural heart of the Malay world—a place where Sanskrit and Indic culture first touched down, civilizing and ultimately redeeming the Malays as it had the Javanese. In an early, influential essay, Marsden recommended an exploration of the Minangkabau kingdom, so that the original Hindu transmission texts might be discovered, uncorrupted by Arabic.29 This idea that Minangkabau was the ancestral home of the Malay peoples shaped early Indonesianist philology, just as it continues to shape Minangkabau self-perception today. The Padri War was, therefore, a threat to Pagaruyung, the ancient Minangkabau palace, and the purported source of Malay culture.30 Minangkabau was granted a privileged position within the cultural strata of Indonesia. Marsden’s essay set up Minangkabau as the Indic contact point for the Malay world. The palace of Pagaruyung, the fabled kingdom in the Minangkabau highlands, for the disciples of eighteenth-century Indology placed the Malay people on the same cultural plane as their more overtly Hinduized neighbors, the Javanese. When Thomas Stamford Raffles made his famous expedition into the Padang highlands in 1818, Marsden’s hypothesis was tested. Raffles traveled inland from Padang, seeking out the legendary kingdom, and found a ruin whose boundaries were marked only by fruit and coconut trees. In a feat of archaeological alchemy, Raffles conjured up Pagaruyung from rubble and scrub. The “once extensive city” had been thrice burned, and the Padri War had left the great Hindu-Malay stronghold abandoned and weed-clogged. In the village of Suroaso, Raffles and his entourage were escorted to the “best dwelling which the place now afforded— to the palace, a small planked house about thirty feet long, beautifully situated on the banks of the Golden River (Soongy Amas). Here we were introduced to the Tuan Gadis, or Virgin Queen, who administered the country.” These ruins (or fantasy of ruins) were proof of the great and noble history of the Malays, a civilization that once rivaled the Javanese and was now evidently “retrograde.” And 28. Kratz and Amir, Surat Keterangan Syeikh Jalaluddin, 49. Kratz and Amir argue that the manuscript was produced before 1829 and, therefore, before 1833 and the shift from civil war to broad social resistance to the Dutch. 29. William Marsden, “On the Traces of the Hindu Language and Literature Extant among the Malays,” Asiatic Researches 4 (1807): 218, 223. 30. Jane Drakard, Kingdom of Words.

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when Raffles upends the stone stairway of a small mosque, revealing a “real Kawi” (old Sanskritic Javanese) inscription, we know what is to blame for the tragic degeneration—Islam. The necropolis of Pagaruyung, the shadowy “site of many an extensive building now no more,” is demarcated in scorched earth and a “few venerable trees.” Melancholic, Raffles can still see the palace in a stand of sugarcane, the throne etched in a large flat stone.31 Raffles’s mission marked the beginning of an extensive and ongoing foreign penetration into the hills of West Sumatra. His sadness, his failure to find the Hindu-Javanesque kingdom that would legitimate Malay culture, would demonize Minangkabau Islam in the writings of many of the scholars who followed him into the highlands. And his overturned mosque stoop, an uncovered and “real” proof of Hindu origins, serves as a parable for the syncretic excavations thenceforth undertaken by Indonesianist scholarship.32

The Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol The peculiar form of the text of the Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol recapitulates the history of West Sumatra in the nineteenth century. The text comprises three distinct sections. The first 190 pages are the memoir of Tuanku Imam Bondjol himself, from his youth through to his death in Manado, brought back to West Sumatra by the Tuanku’s son Sutan Saidi, who had accompanied him into exile. Pages 191 – 324 are the memoir of the Tuanku’s son Naali Sutan Caniago, who had fought alongside his father in the jungle and who had been granted a position in the Dutch colonial administration as part of the terms of the Tuanku’s surrender. The third section, pages 325 – 32, contains the minutes of a pair of meetings held in the Minangkabau highlands in 1865 and 1875.33 Many Malay manuscript collections contain multiple and unrelated texts bound into single volumes. They are not read intertextually. In the case of the Naskah Tuanku 31. Raffles, Memoir of the Life, 358 – 60. The journey is also described in a contemporary Malay source; Raimy Ché-Ross, “Syair Peri Tuan Raffles Pergi Ke Minangkabau: A Malay Account of Raffles’ Second Expedition to the Sumatran Highlands in 1818,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 76, no. 2 (2003). 32. There is a line of intellectual descent running from Raffles and his colleague John Crawfurd, through Wilhelm von Humboldt, Adolf Bastian, Franz Boas, and on to Clifford Geertz and a tradition of disregarding or demonizing Islam in Indonesia while valorizing Hinduism. See Jeffrey Alan Hadler, “Places like Home: Islam, Matriliny and the History of Family in Minangkabau” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2000), 303 – 41; Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, Rethinking Raffles: A Study of Stamford Raffles’ Discourse on Religions amongst Malays (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2005). 33. The manuscript was borrowed from Ali Usman, the Tuanku’s descendant and the guardian of the family heirlooms in the village of Bonjol, in May 1966 for study and exhibition at the new Museum Adityawarman in Padang. It was never returned. The manuscript apparently changed hands numerous times, appearing at the opening of the Museum Imam Bonjol in the late 1970s and at exhibitions in Jakarta and Padang, and making a final appearance at the first Istiqlal Festival in Jakarta in 1991 [interview with Ali Usman Datuak Buruak in Bonjol, July 2006]. See, too, the newspaper

Contention Unending

33

Imam Bonjol, it is precisely the connectedness of the texts that gives the story of the Tuanku such potency. The Dutch scholar Philippus Samuel van Ronkel, who was granted access to the manuscript in the 1910s, read the third section as a distinct and separate text. In an article on “The Establishment of Our Penal Code on the West Coast of Sumatra According to Notations in a Malay Manuscript,” he noted that three different scribes had written the individual sections.34 Van Ronkel summarizes the third section of the Naskah, describing a major gathering of Dutch legal experts, leaders of the Residency government, and all the principal Minangkabau officials working for the Dutch colonial state. He correctly views the meetings as a turning point in the incorporation of West Sumatra into the Netherlands East Indies. So that the reader can fully appreciate the significance of this meeting, the chapters that follow analyze the sorts of intrusions that the Dutch colonial state brought into civil society in the Minangkabau region between the 1820s and 1875. West Sumatra is the homeland of the most influential and politically diverse cohort of Indonesian leaders. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these women and men saw their local culture challenged by Padri neoWahhabism and then by Islamic reformism and by European presumptions about progress and modernity. The matriarchate—a combination of matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal residence as well as relative gender egalitarianism—was sustained. The debates surrounding the survival of the matriarchate and the sociological developments facilitating it made Minangkabau a uniquely dynamic society. And the process that sustained the matriarchate was also, in part, responsible for the creativity and activism of the generations of Minangkabau that experienced it. Tuanku Imam Bondjol, in declaring the interdependence of shariah law and local custom, initiated an extended negotiation between Islam and the matriarchate. The Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol reflects both this negotiation and the Dutch intervention in the aftermath of the Padri War. The war and the controversy it generated is the fulcrum on which Minangkabau history moved in the colonial era. article “Pemda Sumbar akan Bentuk Team Khusus untuk Teliti Keabsahan Sejarah Imam Bonjol,” Haluan, 28 April 1983. After this final exhibition, the Naskah was allegedly returned to West Sumatra and has not been seen since. Rusydi Ramli, a professor at the State Institute of Islamic Studies (IAIN) in Padang, who was a member of the Istiqlal planning committee, had photocopied the manuscript, and I was able to obtain from him a copy of what is possibly the last remaining example of the Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol, now deposited in the library at University of California, Berkeley. Efforts to locate the original manuscript are recounted in Suryadi, “Ke Manakah Raibnya Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol?” (part 1) Sriwijaya Post, 30 July 2006, p. 21, available at: http://www.ranah-minang .com/tulisan/328.html. 34. Ph. S. van Ronkel, “De Invoering van Ons Strafwetboek Ter Sumatra’s Westkust Naar Aanteekeningen in Een Maleisch Handschrift,” Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur 46, no. 16 (1914): 251.

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Shapes of the House

The reformist Padri War did not end because of a Dutch military triumph; Tuanku Imam Bondjol ceased his attack on the matriarchate from a position of strength. An ideological shift in Mecca, the temporary defeat of Wahhabism, and the Tuanku’s ultimate conscientiousness brought an end to the civil war. Following the Tuanku’s exile, the Dutch colonial government wasted no time in incorporating western Sumatra into its empire. The Dutch state had taken over the territory of the bankrupt Netherlands East India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. So the colonialism of the nineteenth century was beholden to more than a board of directors and investors; it was to be representative of the Dutch nation. Nineteenth-century colonialism was invasive and comprehensive.1 The Dutch administrators who followed the soldiers tried to reshape Minangkabau at the level of the village and the family. And they were particularly attentive to the most striking aspect of the matriarchate—the iconic longhouse.

The Shapes of the House: Exteriors From the 1970s through the 1990s, the 100-rupiah coin—used for everything from bus fare to phone booths—featured a Minangkabau longhouse, or rumah gadang (figure 2.1). This structure is both a moral space and a symbol of Minangkabau custom. Although the forms of homes in West Sumatra have always

1. On Dutch colonialism, see chapter 1 and the conclusion of Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Sumatran Sultanate and Colonial State: Jambi and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism, 1830 – 1907 (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP, 2003).

Shapes of the House

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Figure 2.1. Longhouse on the 100rupiah coin.

been changing, the traditional longhouse became conceptualized and crystallized primarily during the period of the coffee cultivation system (1847 – 1908). The year 1847 brought the cultuurstelsel, a system for the forced cultivation of coffee, to the highlands of western Sumatra.2 With this, the Dutch set up a mechanism for maintaining a “native” managerial corps—including the positions of kepala nagari and tuanku laras that were first introduced in 1823.3 A subordinate native bureaucracy was created in parallel with the colonial civil service—the Dutch resident in Padang, assistant residents in the main highland towns, and controleurs in larger villages. Initially, the kepala nagari was responsible for enforcing the collection and delivery of coffee, receiving a bonus for success or considerable jail time for failure.4 By the 1860s, a newer position, the penghulu suku rodi, was introduced to manage both coffee collection and the fulfillment of corvée duties.5 In this period, Minangkabau began sarcastically to call themselves “leaf-coffee Malays,” in reference to the scraps of harvested bushes from which they would brew a weak beverage.6 It was for most a difficult time.

2. Summarized in Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism, 231 – 34; Kenneth R. Young, “The Cultivation System in West Sumatra: Economic Stagnation and Political Stalemate,” in Indonesian Economic History in the Dutch Colonial Era, ed. Anne Booth, W. J. O’Malley, and Anna Weidemann (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1990). 3. John S. Ambler, “Historical Perspectives on Sawah Cultivation and the Political and Economic Context for Irrigation in West Sumatra,” Indonesia 46 (1988): 49 – 51. 4. Freek Colombijn, “A Dutch Polder in the Sumatran Mountains: Nineteenth Century Colonial Ideals of the West Sumatran Peasant and Landscape,” in Environmental Challenges in South-East Asia, ed. Victor T. King (Surrey, UK: Curzon, 1998). On the colonial bureaucracy, see Gusti Asnan, Pemerintahan Sumatera Barat dari VOC hingga Reformasi (Yogyakarta: Citra Pustaka, 2006). 5. Taufik Abdullah, “Minangkabau 1900 – 1927: Preliminary Studies in Social Development” (M.A. thesis, Cornell University, 1967), 36 – 37. 6. Mestika Zed, “Melayu Kopidaun: Eksploitasi Kolonial dalam Sistim Tanam Paksa Kopi di Minangkabau Sumatera Barat (1847 – 1908)” (S2 thesis, Universitas Indonesia, 1983).

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The social transformation that came with the cultivation system was most obvious in the changing form of the longhouse. The physical shape of the longhouse affected social relations, and Minangkabau kinship rules and domestic behavior were codified as ethnography allied with colonial policy. It was at this level that the interplay of adat (customary strictures) and Islam was most pronounced. The Islamic alternative to the longhouse was the standard single-family dwelling. Islamic texts on the prohibition of longhouse residence provide a striking example of a fundamental attack on Minangkabau cultural identity. These texts were set against the influence of progressive notions on the construction of a modern and healthy domicile. Interestingly, the Dutch went from leading the attack on the moral inappropriateness of the traditional longhouse to being among its leading defenders as the rumah gadang became an essential part of the regalia of new Dutch-aligned Minangkabau rulers. Collections of traditional literature discuss the ideal family relations one should find within the house. Beginning with the building of a house in the 1890s and ending with the grand defrauding of the Dutch by Minangkabau housebuilders with the colonial exposition house of 1930, in this chapter I analyze the changing physical construction of the longhouse.

Building a House Long before 1908 and the switch to a money tax, the building of a Minangkabau longhouse, couched in ritual, was a tense matter of price and economy.7 In 1892, Si Satie gelar Maharadja Soetan, a teacher at the government elementary school in the village Palembayan, demonstrated the local Agam dialect in a schoolschrift titled “A Dialogue (negotiation) on the Building of a House.”8 Palembayan is a small town in the hills north of Lake Maninjau, and although it is in the coffee belt and did warrant the presence of a Dutch controleur, in the mid-nineteenth century the place was considered dreary and unwelcoming to Europeans.9 In 1867, the Dutch opened the last of nine highland elementary schools there; colonial education was received warmly by the locals, with a respectable thirty-five pupils enrolling the first year.10 7. Marcel Vellinga, “A Family Affair: The Construction of Vernacular Minangkabau Houses,” Indonesia and the Malay World 32, no. 92 (2004): 106. 8. Si Satie gelar Maharadja Soetan, “Partjakapan (paroendingan) Mamboeweh Roemah,” 15 November 1892, Leiden MS. Or., 5380 (gevolgd door MS. Or. 5831)/VRSC 690. Portion of a folio. Section one of four. 9. E. W. A. Ludeking, Natuur- en Geneeskundige Topographie van Agam (Westkust van Sumatra) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1867), 162. Ludeking lived in West Sumatra in 1853 and again in 1856 – 1857. 10. Elizabeth E. Graves, The Minangkabau Response to Dutch Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP, 1981), 93 – 94.

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The village of Palembayan itself falls within the northern reaches of the luhak (cultural area) of Agam, and today a house there would necessarily be built in a style without raised end-chambers.11 As we will find, the shape of the Minangkabau house was not neatly fixed until later in the twentieth century. There were three siblings, born of the same mother and father, two boys and one girl. The eldest, a boy, held the title Bagindo Hitam, the middle one was Bagindo Koening, and they were both cloth traders. The youngest, the girl, already had three children herself, all daughters, and her husband was called Pah Roemin, because their eldest daughter was named Si Oepih Roemin. One day, Bagindo Hitam got the idea to replace the house of his nieces, because it was already very run down. Said Bagindo Hitam to his younger brother Bagindo Koening: send your child over to the house of Si Roemin, because we have things to discuss with Pah Roemin too!

For days, and pages, the siblings discuss the family’s needs and financial capabilities. The number of sleeping chambers must be determined, along with the architectural style of the house itself. Each design carries specific adat interpretations as well as varying price tags—from the shape of the roof and layout of the floor, a house will be “read” by the village community. The family will decide what sort of social statement they wish to make, and how much they are willing to spend to make it. Eventually they settle on a smaller version of the grand gajah maharam house form.12 Answered Bagindo Hitam, “it is not possible to find a use for the stuff of the old house—not only is the thatching rotten, the columns all run down, but the floor beams, the floor, and the roof beams are, too. At this point it’s best to determine the materials needed for a Gadjah Maharam house, discuss the number of rooms, and determine exactly how many are needed. Said Bagindo Koening, “my feeling is, five rooms are enough . . . more than that I can’t really say, except that it might become difficult, as there are only three girls that will live there.

So they decide to build the house, and call in the master craftsman (tukang), evasively opening the bargaining with the formulaic praise common throughout Indonesia. 11. See the adat guidebook, A. A. Navis, Alam Terkembang Jadi Guru: Adat dan Kebudayaan Minangkabau, 2nd ed. ( Jakarta: Grafitipers, 1986), 107. The level floor of this Bodi-Caniago form of house has been interpreted as a sign of the Agam people’s natural tendency toward equality and democracy. 12. The gajah maharam (kneeling elephant) house is a palatial form and was most impressive to the Dutch. Its tiered floors are supposedly indicative of a more hierarchical political philosophy. See Marcel Vellinga, Constituting Unity and Difference: Vernacular Architecture in a Minangkabau Village (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), 112 – 13. On the political philosophy, see also Navis, Alam Terkembang Jadi Guru.

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Muslims and Matriarchs Said Bagindo Hitam, “Mr. Craftsman, I’ll make a long story short: we intend to build a Gadjah Maharam house, with five rooms. Please tell us how many columns we will need? None of us really know about matters of house-building, so for better or worse we leave it up to you. We surrender to your judgment, and we trust you.” Answered the craftsman, “In relation to that, we should all discuss these matters; as for me what matters is what all of you desire. Do you want a house with raised end-chambers, or not? If you want me to build this type of house, I’ll need four tall 22 cubit columns; eight medium columns of 15 cubits each, and eighteen low columns of 12 cubits . . . so in total thirty of them.”

The craftsman gives the standard prices for these columns: One toenggah tinggi (tall column) One toenggah pandjalang (medium column) One toenggah randah (short column)

f 3. f 2.50. f 1.25.

“So the price of those thirty assorted columns is f 54.50.” The family puts f 10 down as good-faith money, and the craftsman begins the arduous process of preparing suitable house pillars. He spends one month in the jungle selecting physically and ritually acceptable trees. They will be felled correctly and then cured in water. Not only must a craftsman find trees that are perfectly straight and growing on no-man’s-land—land neither claimed by a family nor within the public domain of a nagari—but he must also take precautions so that the process brings no ill luck on himself or his patrons. Each member of the team of men that hauls the timber from the jungle back to the village is protected by a special lime (limau kayu) held against his head or in his hand; otherwise, he risks being struck by or crushed beneath the logs.13 It should be noted—and it was noted by the writers of the schoolschriften—that these sorts of customs varied from village to village and changed from year to year. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century with the codification of adat law do we find Minangkabau men such as Navis writing about universal norms and traditions. In Palembayan, in 1892, the craftsman subcontracts both a team of wage-laborers and the dukun (healer) who will provide the limes, prepare the charms, and oversee other rituals (figure 2.2). Such material and spiritual provisions are expensive, and for the Roemin family, the costs begin to add up disconcertingly. The team of laborers brought by the craftsman—usually farmers earning money between plantings and harvests—needs to be fed. The craftsman requests 150 portions of rice, along with 13. Abas, “Pantangan dan Kapertjajaän orang Melajoe,” ca. 1890, Manuscript Collection, Leiden University, Leiden MS. Or., 5998/VRSC 688 (schoolshriften in Portefeuille 1197). “Limau kajoe,” 5r.

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Figure 2.2. Repairing a termite-damaged longhouse in Palembayan, circa 1895. From Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, collection #60043205.

condiments of chilies, salt, and so forth. This costs an additional f 10. Exasperated, Pah Roemin itemized the total food money spent: 150 portions of rice (bali bareh 150 soekeH) a cow (bali djawi ) portions of chili, salt ( pambali lado, garam) Total

f 30 f 60 f 10 f 100

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The building of a longhouse was a spectacle; villagers observed the progress and commented on choice of house form and exterior carvings. This could be a source of pride for a family of means, but it was also a moment of vulnerability, when the matters of the intimate sphere (biliak kacieH , or small chamber) become open to the public.14 The Roemin family might have felt unnerved at seeing their house—the bastion of Minangkabau morality—turned inside out. Like underwear on a clothesline, the small sleeping chambers (biliak) where the daughters of the house would eventually receive their husbands were awkwardly displayed before the larger community. This subtle affront to daughters’ propriety was coupled with an even more unsettling invasion of the biliak kacieH —money. From the reputation of the craftsman, the size of the workforce, and especially the form and quality of the house itself, other villagers had a fair gauge of the wealth of the family. Murmurs of frivolity or worse, a fleecing, kept the family on edge. Minangkabau have a reputation for being shrewd merchants and for being the only indigenous ethnic group capable of competing with the Chinese in trade.15 Today, shoppers mutter, “Padang crook [bengkok],” when they feel have been cheated by a less scrupulous West Sumatran. The family commissioning the longhouse apparently was becoming suspicious as costs continued to mount. They confronted the craftsman, who in this context might be appropriately called the general contractor: The craftsman answered the challenge, claiming that his commission fee was entirely normal! From the chiseling of the columns to the raising of the roof it’s f 175, because already in this village for the two or three houses that he has built, that has been what people have paid. Now, if he were to raise or lower the price from the norm, he will lose face with other people!

A good craftsman was expensive, and adept at chiseling more than wooden columns. Once the building of the house was under way, the Roemin family was in a weak negotiating position. As we shall see in chapter 3, even the force of the Dutch colonial state could not prevent Minangkabau craftsmen from running an intensive and ruthless grift.

14. The terms babiliak kacieH and babiliak gadang (literally, “of the small chamber” and “of the large chamber”) were suggested to me in discussions with Djoeir Moehamad about Minangkabau notions of private and public. They have been confirmed by a number of older folks, but I have never seen them in print. 15. See J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 455. It is this reputation that probably has allowed the Chinese community of West Sumatra to thrive relatively unmolested.

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Seeing Rumah Gadang: Raffles If the historiography of central Java is a romanticized narrative of syncretism, accretion, and continuity, then Minangkabau is a story of bad luck and disruption. Thomas Stamford Raffles’s phantom kingdom of Pagaruyung might have been an Indologist’s mirage, but the fires that raged through the highlands in the first decades of the nineteenth century were real. Minangkabau was, until the Padri War, a kingdom of myths and suppositions to the Europeans. Apart from the Dias mission to Pagaruyung in 1684,16 when a Portuguese emissary visited the court, the British East India Company and VOC were tantalized by the apparent authority that the Minangkabau king held over much of the Malay world. Legends of great armies, splendid palaces, and ancient gold mines (even, perhaps, Solomon’s)17 were seemingly corroborated by the majesty and bluster of the royal decrees issued by the court in Pagaruyung.18 But treaties and logistics had conspired to keep the Europeans from making any real forays into the highlands. To eighteenth-century men of the British and Dutch East India Companies, the Minangkabau kingdom was a place of mystery and a source of real concern. The peoples of the Malay world paid obeisance to a court at Pagaruyung, and coastal rulers deferred to a Minangkabau king. Even the most pernicious and slavering of the untamed Sumatrans, the Batak, confessed their subordinate status to visiting European missionaries before sending them to heaven in a cooking pot: “On asking how the Bataks regarded the Sultan of Manangkabaw at the present day, and whether they would submit to his authority, he [the chief of Silindung] assured us that he was still considered as a sovereign of the country, superior to their own immediate chiefs, and that a simple order from him would, in every part, meet with utmost submission.”19 William Marsden, who was based in Bengkulu in the late 1700s, never ventured into the West Sumatran highlands but gleaned his information from a Minangkabau chronicler who cut his narrative short “with a declaration, that the offer of a sum of money (which was unquestionably his object) should not tempt him to proceed.”20 But this incomplete account was enough to convince Mars-

16. Dias, “Mission to the Minangkabau King”; Timothy P. Barnard, “Mestizos as Middlemen: Thomas Días and His Travels in Eastern Sumatra,” in Iberians in the Singapore-Melaka Area and Adjacent Regions (16th to 18th Century), ed. Peter Borschberg (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004). 17. Mendes Pinto heard this rumor in Malaya in the mid-sixteenth century. See Fernão Mendes Pinto, The Travels of Mendes Pinto, ed. and trans. Rebecca Catz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 34 – 35. 18. These letters, and the conflict between European and Malay notions of authority, are discussed in Drakard, Kingdom of Words. 19. Burton and Ward, “Report of a Journey into the Batak Country, in the Interior of Sumatra, in the year 1824,” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1827): 495. 20. Marsden, History of Sumatra, 333.

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den that the Minangkabau kingdom was the cultural Ararat of the Malay world— a place where Sanskrit and Indic culture first touched down, civilizing and ultimately redeeming the Malays as it had the Javanese. Marsden focused his research on an area to the south of Minangkabau—the coastline around Bengkulu and the Rejang regions inland. His encyclopedic History of Sumatra bears no mention of Minangkabau family structure or the shapes of their houses. In 1818, Raffles, Marsden’s friend and protégé, was the first European to traverse the Padang highlands and make a scientific report on the conditions in the hinterland. He was the first to comment on the striking saddleback roofs of the longhouses and the first to note that the shape of these houses was replicated in all structures—the rice granaries, the raised platforms in the fields, the meeting halls—but not in the mosques, which were “small square buildings.” Raffles described the “tombs” found around the town of Solaya (near modern Solok) that were called jiri (analogous to jirat in modern Indonesian): “these are peculiar, sometimes little more than a shed, but frequently with a raised flooring, and seats raised one above the other at each end, like the stern of a vessel. Several of these were observed outside of the town, and in the rice-fields; these, we were informed, had been raised in memory of persons who had died at a distance.”21 Raffles was right to take note of the architecture in Minangkabau— its wide-ranging structural homology was dissimilar from the Javanese case with which he was familiar and certainly unlike anything he had known in Europe: The houses are for the most part extensive and well built; in seldom less than sixty feet; the interior, one long hall, with several chambers in the rear opening into it. In the front of the house are generally two lombongs, or granaries, on the same principle as those in Java, but much longer and more substantial: they were not less than thirty feet high, and capable of holding an immense quantity; many of them very highly ornamented, various flowers and figures being carved on the uprights and cross-beams; some of them coloured. The taste for ornament is not confined to the lombongs; the wood-work of most of the houses is carved, and coloured with red, white, and black. The ridge-poles of the houses, lombongs, &c. have a peculiar appearance, in being extremely concave, the ends or points of the crescent being very sharp. In the larger houses they give the appearance of two roofs, one crescent being, as it were, within another. The whole of the buildings are constructed in the most substantial matter, but entirely of wood and matting.22

Raffles was traveling through Minangkabau as the Padri movement was in full fiery bloom.23 His July 1818 was, for the Minangkabau, Ramadan 1233, the

21. Raffles, Memoir of the Life, 351. 22. Ibid. 351 – 52. 23. Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism, 137.

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fasting month and a time of heightened religious awareness and tension. Raffles stressed that Minangkabau had just undergone a violent transformation— that men and women no longer wore traditional clothing but rather imitated Arabian fashions.24 Small square buildings like the mosque were certainly not unusual in Minangkabau, but Raffles, setting a precedent for the Dutch who followed him into the hills throughout the nineteenth century, was oblivious to forms that did not strike him as different. Seemingly, he saw nothing but arched roofs and longhouses. On Wednesday, July 22, 1818, Raffles and his party climbed the hill to the village of Samawang (or Si Mawang, near modernday Bukitkandung). There they were given shelter at the house of the old village head. And by Raffles’s own design, this house would become the quintessential rumah gadang longhouse. The house in which we were now accommodated was in length about one hundred feet, and from thirty to forty in depth, built in a most substantial manner, and supported along the center by three wooden pillars, fit for the masts of a ship: indeed from the peculiar construction of the house, the gable end of which was raised in tiers like the stern of a vessel, they had very much this appearance. The floor was raised from the ground about ten feet, the lower part being enclosed and appropriated to cattle, &c. The principal entrance is in the centre, but there is a second door at one end. The interior consists of one large room or hall, the height proportioned to the other dimensions; three fire-places equally distant from each other were placed on the front side, and at the back were several small chambers, in which we perceived the spinning-wheels and other articles belonging to the women. This may serve as a general description for the houses in this part of the country, which I have described thus particularly, because they differ essentially from those on the coast, and from what Mr. Marsden has described as the usual dwellings of Sumatrans.25

A British Indophile, Raffles wanted very badly to locate the lost Indic heart of the Malay world. He was drawn to that which appeared to be as un-Malay as possible. Although Raffles was certainly capable of conjuring whole kingdoms from shadows and scrub—he did as much with the royal palace at Pagaruyung— he had no need to invent an entire Minangkabau civilization. The swayback roofs of the houses and granaries, the ornately carved walls, and the intensively cultivated padi-fields all existed. They existed, however, alongside other, equally valid although less distinctive buildings—square mosques and small houses. But Raffles noticed and described only those forms that struck him as unique, and the longhouse, the signal construction of the Minangkabau, became forever emblematic of the Minangkabau culture. 24. Raffles, Memoir of the Life, 349 – 50. 25. Ibid. 355 – 56. Note the multiple hearths—a feature that would be outlawed by the colonial state.

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The equating of the longhouse and Minangkabau had two important ramifications: Raffles directed scholars to a more holistic consideration of Minangkabau culture, and he established the longhouse as the preeminent Minangkabau status symbol. Plunging rooflines and carved finials might not have been everywhere, but they were and are common enough to suggest that Minangkabau folk culture has ritual and didactic connotations. An architectural similarity extended beyond the house to most of the buildings and served to remind Minangkabau of behavioral norms.26 Every curve of a roof and carved motif on a wall corresponds to a lesson of adat and the matriarchate. Anthropological reading of architecture is most often undertaken in studies of eastern Indonesia, where scholars make fairly broad social claims on the basis of one house. In western Indonesia, Java especially, architectural interpretation is performed on specific structures; the multiplicity of building forms makes broad-based societal claims impossible.27 Minangkabau has the complexity of Java, yet the sameness of its built forms lends itself to cohesive interpretation. Built into the peculiar forms of the Minangkabau house is a rich symbolic vocabulary. Specific carved motifs represent aspects of adat philosophy, as do the shapes of the house themselves. Minangkabau live within a catechism of fabric and woodwork. Old craftsmen interviewed for a 1985 study claimed that the carvings on the outside walls of the house reflect not only the status and type of panghulu who resides within but also specific adat precepts and aphorisms.28 A “skin of adat” sheathes the Minangkabau house in meaning.29 According to Usman, there are at least ninety-four different carved motifs, each signifying a different ideal mode of behavior.30 26. Roxana Waterson, The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990). See too the editors’ introductory chapter in Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones, eds., About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 27. In Java, the pendopo (pavilion), the Javanese house, and the kraton (palace) do not resemble one another—there is no microcosmic relationship. For one such reading, see Mark R. Woodward, “Yogyakarta Kraton,” in Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989). 28. Ibenzani Usman, “Seni Ukir Tradisional Pada Rumah Adat Minangkabau: Teknik, Pola dan Fungsinya” (Ph.D. diss., Institut Teknologi Bandung, 1985), 344 – 46. Of the tukang surveyed for Usman’s study, the eldest was born in 1897. For an English-language gloss of this dissertation, see Ibenzani Usman, “The Traditional Adat House and Its Carving,” in Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau, ed. Anne Summerfield and John Summerfield (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1999), 242 – 55. 29. The idea of an adat skin is usually a reference to traditional Minangkabau clothing. That carved walls can be considered such a skin comes from an otherwise flawed dissertation, Florina H. Capistrano, “Reconstructing the Past: The Notion of Tradition in West Sumatran Architecture, 1791 – 1991” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996), 68 – 70. Capistrano mistranslates Indonesian texts and, more seriously (because the study is concerned with changing house forms), mistakes the catalog numbers on photographs for dates. 30. Usman, “Seni Ukir Tradisional,” 223 – 25.

Shapes of the House

Deliberation

Voice of the people

45

Philosophy of the Gonjong A final decision must not disagree with the word of Allah as written in the Quran Village head (kepala desa) whose decisions must be subjected to review State

Figure 2.3. Soeharto-era interpretation of a finial.

Real adat such as this exists only at the level of the nagari. It was in the early years of the twentieth century that the Dutch began to work with local elites and codify adat law as a residency-wide system for purposes of control.31 A legalistic, precedent-based idea of adat has been perpetuated by the Indonesian government; figure 2.3 is adapted from a Soeharto-era official publication that sought to locate Minangkabau indigenous philosophy within the structure of the modern state. In it the state, the negara,32 is apparently subordinate but actually fundamental in the decision-making process. All suggestions and changes begin with the state, pass through a series of deliberations and—unless there is some sort of religious conflict—are finally sanctioned by the village head (kepala desa, an idea imported from, or imposed by, Java).33 31. Roy F. Ellen, “The Development of Anthropology and Colonial Policy in the Netherlands: 1800 – 1960,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 12 (1976): 317 – 20. A selection of the adat laws and a good critical introduction can be found in Van Vollenhoven on Indonesian Adat Law, ed. J. F. Holleman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). 32. The publication is talking about the negara of the republican nation-state and not the Minangkabau nagari. Syafwandi, Arsitektur Tradisional Sumatera Barat ( Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1993), 44. 33. Mochtar Naim, “Nagari versus Desa: Sebuah Kerancuan Struktural,” in Nagari, Desa dan Pembangunan Pedesaan di Sumatera Barat, ed. Edy Utama (Padang: Yayasan Genta Budaya, 1990).

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Figure 2.4. Tungkui Nasi, a lost house form. From Ibenzani Usman, “Seni Ukir Tradisional Pada Rumah Adat Minangkabau: Teknik, Pola dan Fungsinya” (Ph.D. diss., Institut Teknologi Bandung, 1985), 157.

Similarly, the Minangkabau panghulu co-opted by the Dutch legitimized their position through an elaborate system of invented adat. For these men, the longhouse became the supreme symbol of culturally sanctioned authority. And today, for some, the very notion of longhouse necessitates the presence of a titled datuk, a male hereditary chief. Without such an authority in residence, the house should not be carved and painted, nor should it have a traditional sloping roof. Likewise, it was in the late nineteenth century that styles of customary longhouses lacking saddle-back roofs and intricate carvings abruptly disappeared. Houses such as the relatively unspectacular kajang padati, tungkui nasi (figure 2.4), and dangau layang-layang are now known only through the haziest recollections of old clan chiefs and village scholars. These low-status adat houses were reserved for adopted family members and the descendants of freed slaves.34 34. See Usman, “Seni Ukir Tradisional,” 156 – 60. In 1869, a Dutch official observed that the designated slave’s house was the smaller lipat pandan. Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 26 – 30, n. 12. On the politics of house type in Minangkabau today, see Marcel Vellinga, “The Use of Houses in a Competition for Status: The Case of Abai Sangir (Minangkabau),” in Indonesian Houses: Tradition and Transformation in Vernacular Architecture, ed. Reimar Schefold, Peter J. M. Nas, and Gaudenz Domenig (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2003).

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Figure 2.4, adapted from Ibenzani Usman, shows one such disappeared house form—the tungkui nasi. This house served as a status marker for the kamanakan dibawah lutuik, or sister’s children “below the knee.” These people were the descendants of bondsmen who had been incorporated into an extended family. They were not entitled to hold adat titles ( galar) or act as chiefs. It was this sort of diminished status, and house, that people were eager to shake off in the late nineteenth century.35 These forgotten houses are far more reminiscent of the usual houses built by coastal Malays than of grand longhouses. They seem unimpressive, and they certainly did not impress Raffles or his fellow Europeans. The “classical” longhouse— sloping, horned roof, raised end-chambers, and luxuriant woodwork—suggested authority. A European entering a Minangkabau village and seeking a local leader would automatically go knocking on the door of such a house. That the longhouse evolved from but one house type of many, to become stylized and part of the formal regalia of Minangkabau authority, should not come as any surprise.36 This, then, is the second ramification of Raffles’s observations, and it had as much of an impact on the Minangkabau people as it did on their ethnographers. Throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century, the Dutch and, increasingly, the Minangkabau themselves saw possession of a longhouse as validation of the realness of a family’s lineage. This became extremely important as the Dutch sought to generate a native bureaucratic elite class—one that adhered to a system of patrilineal succession and that would administer taxes and oversee corvée labor for the colonial government.

Seeing Rumah Gadang: Photographic Clichés Raffles was drawn to the un-Malayness of the longhouse. He sought the houses out when entering a village, and he saw them as a sign of the possible refinement of the Malays. During the course of his expedition, he signed a treaty with a group of Minangkabau panghulu in the name of England. But in 1819 the English nullified his treaty, and the Dutch government took charge of administering Sumatra’s Westcoast.37 35. Note that not only the shape of the house but the location of a house within a village marked social status. Physical location was especially important after 1875, when slavery was formally banned in Minangkabau and parvenus began to build houses of forms to which they were not entitled. 36. With a nod to Verkerk Pistorius, one scholar writes, “It is clear that the spectacular family houses (rumah gadang), in which the women continue to live after their marriage, gave rise to the picture of the Minangkabau family life, which is so contradictory to the facts. They caused students to forget that even the oldest information concerning the Minangkabau mentioned the existence of family houses.” H. Th. Fischer, “The Cognates in the Minangkabau Social Structure,” Oceania 35, no. 2 (December 1964): 100. 37. E. Netscher, “Padang in het Laatst der XVIIIe Eeuw,” Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenshappen 41 (1881): vii, 122.

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The Netherlands did not share England’s experience in India and did not have a cohort of philologically aware bureaucrats. The first major Dutch expedition with scientific pretensions was launched in 1824, under the command of Colonel Huibertus Gerardus Nahuijs van Burgst. Nahuijs had been impressed with Raffles’s findings, and he anticipated bringing the ancient kingdom of the Malays under Dutch control. Nahuijs’s field notes attest to an abrupt revision of his prepossessions, however. In a letter of April 14, 1824, he concluded that the Padris were correct in attempting to remedy the degeneracy and moral turpitude of their countrymen—lapsed Muslims who were content to use the shade of the mosque for cockfighting, gambling, and smoking opium.38 Although they sided with the adat elite during the wars, over the ensuing twenty years the Dutch, sotto voce, expressed their approval of Padri morality. To Dutch eyes, the neo-Wahhabis were crypto-Calvinists. The Padris lived in walled villages composed of single-family dwellings. Their dress was sober; the Padri men were seemingly hard-working, and the Padri women far less likely to be outdoors, toiling like their traditionalist sisters.39 These were nineteenthcentury Netherlandish virtues. The Dutch state had recently taken control of the Indies from the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Government men such as Nahuijs had a mandate to purge the colony of the languid and amoral influence of the Company men.40 More important in western Sumatra, the council of male lineage heads (the datuk and panghulu) who governed each nagari proved far too diffuse and democratic for Dutch purposes. Throughout the 1820s, the Dutch proceeded to divide Minangkabau into governable administrative units. The nagari council was reduced to a ceremonial gathering because the Dutch appointed a single man, the kepala nagari, to represent this traditional polity. These men, in turn, were subordinate to the chief of an invented “district” of nagari, the kepala laras.41 And it was this man—popularly known as the Tuanku Laras—whose house and personage became equated with colonial authority and native collaboration. Nahuijs was more concerned with population, agriculture, and the sporadic fighting of the Padris than the aesthetics of houses. Still, in a published report he commented on the strategic implications of the distribution of longhouses. “Here the houses of the natives—unlike those of Java, tucked away in over38. Colonel H. G. Nahuijs van Burgst, “Extracts from the Letters of Col. Nahuijs,” trans. H. Eric Miller, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 19, no. 2 (1941): 188. 39. See the description of the village of Dalu-Dalu in H. J. J. L. Ridder de Stuers, De Vestiging en Uitbreiding der Netherlanders ter Westkust van Sumatra, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen, 1850), 130 – 33. On the role of women in pre-Padri economic life, see the speculative essay by Barbara Watson Andaya, “Women and Economic Change: The Pepper Trade in Pre-Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 2 (1995). 40. On the Dutch and British reaction to the VOC mestizo lifestyle, see Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). 41. Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism, 152.

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grown kampongs, or villages—are completely separated on small hills, rising up in the middle of the sawah fields, each in its place.”42 It was 1824, and the Dutch had yet to undertake extensive administrative reorganization. Just six years earlier, Raffles too had commented on the sprawling nature of Minangkabau settlement patterns, observing a “sheet of cultivation; in breadth it may be about ten, and in length twenty miles, thickly studded with towns and villages, some of them running in a connected line for several miles.”43 There is nothing less Dutch than scattered hilltop houses. The Padris were concentrated in fortified villages. But the majority of Minangkabau resided in corporate clan houses, surrounded by often-extensive wet-rice fields and bounded by cash-crop hedgerows. “One finds the dwellings, at such great distance from one another, that it was for me a sure sign of the security of the land, and the uncommonness of robbery and arson, which can be so misfortunate!”44 Ironically, this “security” was largely the result of a successful policy of the Padris, who had sought to put an end to robber gangs and slave-raiding in order to bolster trade.45 In 1833 a geological survey team reported similarly dispersed houses, but also made note of the market towns that had built up around Dutch garrisons.46 Over the next twenty years, the Padri forts were dismantled and the scattered adat house clusters were concentrated, so that by the 1860s the Minangkabau village was a Javanesque kampung—valley-nestled, easily controlled, and entirely indefensible.47 For Nahuijs, the mighty court whose shadow Raffles had glimpsed in rubble and tinder was little more than a miserable shack, “The so-called princely palace of Pagaruyung is a rather unsightly wooden barn, by comparison with any of the other houses.”48 The structure was not merely offensive from a “hy42. Colonel H. G. Nahuijs van Burgst, Brieven over Bencoolen, Padang, Het Rijk van Menangkabau, Rhiouw, Sincapoera en Poelopinang, 2nd ed. (Breda: F. B. Hollingerus Pijpers, 1827), 135. 43. Raffles, Memoir of the Life, 349. 44. Nahuijs, Brieven over Bencoolen, 136. Nahuijs does note the mountaintop “watch-houses,” reminding his party that the calm was tenuous and hard-earned (160). 45. Jalaluddin described the conditions of the mid-nineteenth century, when traveling merchants were often robbed and sold into slavery. Djilâl-Eddîn, “Surat Keterangan,” 8. The Padri tried to establish a “supra-village political organization,” and they built a network of roads that was praised by the Dutch. Freek Colombijn, “A Moving History of Middle Sumatra, 1600 – 1870,” Modern Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2005): 10. 46. H. Burger, “Aanmerkingen Gehouden op Een Reize door Eenige Districten der Padangsche Bovenlanden,” Verhandelingen van het Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenshappen 16 (1836): 168. Burger goes on to describe the market at Paja Kombo (Payakumbuh) (215). 47. Albert S. Bickmore, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago (London: John Murray, 1868), 479 – 80. At the same time, a colonial administrator discussed the “Malay village” in Minangkabau, “Spaced throughout the Padang Highlands, the dorp is like the desa on Java.” Dorp is a Dutch word, with no equivalent in Minangkabau, so he was seeing alien polities. A. W. P. Verkerk Pistorius, “Het Maleische Dorp,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië (3rd series), no. 2 (1869): 97. 48. Nahuijs, Brieven over Bencoolen, 154. Granted, the palace was newly rebuilt, and even Raffles had mentioned this quaint “small planked house” serving as a temporary court.

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gienic standpoint.” It was claimed that matrifocality also encouraged male indolence and the practice of abortion.49 Dutch disapproval of the Minangkabau longhouse would not abate until the mid-nineteenth century, when the rumah gadang came to house and symbolize their staunchest native allies. An 1878 Malay language reader contains a translated account of a European woman’s visit to the Padang highlands in 1852. She was escorted by the resident to that most Dutch of the Minangkabau showcase villages, Koto Gadang. There she described the shiplike houses, with their by now-familiar horned roofs and painted and carved doors. She peeped into the biliak, the women’s chambers, and found them carpeted, with pillows and sleeping mats. The Tuanku Laras himself displayed the wealth of Koto Gadang, the weaving skills of the girls, and the fine songket cloth and gold jewelry of the women.50 Already by the 1850s, the longhouse was becoming emblematic of Minangkabau culture. In nagari that did not necessarily have a tradition of building this house type, panghulu felt compelled to do so. Still, visitors to the Sumatran highlands made note of houses that fitted neither a Minangkabau nor Dutch ideal. A young scientist, who was to become professor of natural history at Madison University (renamed Colgate University in 1890), visited Minangkabau in 1866. Albert Bickmore was given ample assistance by the colonial government. He traveled into the hills in the governor’s borrowed “American,” a Boston-made horse-drawn carriage: In the cleft [Anai], at one or two places, are a few houses made by the people who have moved down from the plateau. They are places on posts two or three feet above the ground. Their walls are low, only three or four feet high, and made of a rude kind of panel-work, and painted red. Large open places are left for windows, which allow any one passing to look in. There are no partitions and no chairs nor benches, and the natives squat down on the rough floor. It requires no careful scrutiny of these hovels to see that they are vastly more filthy than the bamboo huts of the Malays who live on the coast.51

These were not the houses of Raffles’s account and certainly not the model homes of Koto Gadang. Bickmore had recently lost a research position at Harvard and was on a limited budget. Perhaps a lack of entourage and palanquin 49. On abortion, population control, and the questioned morality of the Minangkabau house, see chapter 3. On the supposedly unhygienic state of the rumah gadang in the mid-nineteenth century, see Ludeking, Natuur- en Geneeskundige Topographie, 98 – 101. 50. A. F. von de Wall, trans., Kesah Pelajaran Seorang Perampoewan Mengoelilingi Boemi (Betawi: H. M. van Dorp, 1878), 6 – 7, 36. There is also a Jawi version of this colonial schoolbook, and both claim that the text is excerpted and translated from a Dutch original. In fact, the author was Ida Pfeiffer, a German. For an English translation see Ida Pfeiffer, A Lady’s Second Journey Round the World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856). 51. Bickmore, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago, 392.

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made him particularly attuned to the more humble of the Minangkabau dwellings. At Samawang, he ate in a “dirty little hut” a meal consisting of rice and smoked fish, seasoned with a few grains of coarse salt and stone-ground red pepper.52 When he did espy an arched roofline, it was usually identified with nonresidential buildings, either markets (pasar) or the adat meeting halls (balai): The most remarkable thing in the kampong of Sinkara, is the bali, or townhall. Either end, on the inside, is built up into a series of successive platforms, one rising over the other. On the outside these elevated ends resemble the stern of the old three and four decked frigates which the Dutch generally used when they first became masters of these seas, and such as can yet be seen used as hulks in the ports of the British colonies. The exterior of the bali, as well as the better private homes, are painted red, and ornamented with flowers and scrollwork in white and black.53

Without Dutch escort, in the 1860s, it was still possible to see houses that were not rumah gadang longhouses. In the 1850s and 1860s the highlands were still being reined in. A native elite capable of managing a colonial bureaucracy was moving through a new school system, and outlying villages had yet to be assimilated. But these processes were well underway, and they were embodied in the hyper-remarkable longhouse. The triumphant incorporation of West Sumatra would finally occur in the late 1870s, with the grand Central Sumatran Expedition. Undertaken to survey a future transportation system to exploit the newfound (in 1868) Ombilin coalfield, it was also the first well-funded and broadly intentioned scientific research expedition sponsored by the Dutch Geographical Society.54 When the team leader Arend Ludolf van Hasselt wrote of “photographische clichés,” he was referring to the stereotype plates used by the expedition photographer, David Veth.55 These photographs, reproduced as photogravure tracings in the official account and prints in a separate album, were to become the emblematic images of Minangkabau culture. The house depicted in figure 2.5 is adapted from the Ethnographic Atlas of the Central Sumatra Expedition. It is based on a Veth photograph, was the first published photograph of a rumah gadang, and, in fact, is the defining stereotype for the Minangkabau house.56 This photograph or similar ones have been repli52. Ibid., 475. 53. Ibid., 477; on the pasar, 392 – 93. 54. The Society, and the Expedition, were sponsored by Pieter Johannes Veth. See Paul van der Velde, “The Indologist P. J. Veth (1814 – 1895) as Empire-Builder,” in The Low Countries and Beyond, ed. Robert S. Kirsner (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993), 55 – 67. 55. A. L. van Hasselt, Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra, ed. P. J. Veth (Volksbeschrijving en Taal 1 of the series Midden-Sumatra: Reizen en Onderzoekingen der Sumatra-Expeditie, Uitgerust door het Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1877 – 1879) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1882), 50. 56. Ibid., 152. See also A. L. van Hasselt, Ethnographische Atlas van Midden-Sumatra, met Verk-

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cated ad nauseam in every publication on Minangkabau since 1881. Here, the particular house is in the balah boeboeëng style. Specifically, it is the house of the larashoofd—the Tuanku Laras—of the village “Loeboeq-Tarïq.” Lubuktarap is located well beyond the coal seam, to the southwest of Sijunjung, and lies far outside any of the conventional longhouse areas. So by the 1870s, in an outlying nagari, the Tuanku Laras (this salaried position itself a Dutch invention) had built for himself a grand longhouse. In fifty years, a cohort of adat usurpers, working with the Dutch, had fundamentally transformed the very shape of the Minangkabau house. These men and their sons and nephews had warped Minangkabau political institutions, reshaping adat to better conform to colonial expectations and inventing a tradition that was enforced with a new legal code. It is critical to understand how the new bureaucratic elite accomplished this historical sleight of hand. And it is important to realize that at no point did their authority go unchallenged.

Rumah Gadang as Regalia In August 1893, a Minangkabau chief wrote a letter to the official colonial civil service journal, blasting the government’s policy toward the new adat elite. “To Question the Education of Natives in the Padang Highlands” is a remarkable document—remarkable in that a “native” would submit a public attack on the government to the government’s own periodical and remarkable, too, that it would be published. It is a testament to the colonial government’s self-confidence and perhaps also to the presence of contending factions within the Dutch bureaucracy in West Sumatra. The writer, voicing the outrage of both the peasants and the passed-over elite, railed against the government promotion of unworthy tuanku and the creation of sanctioned adat-bureaucrat dynasties. “If so, all of those who are numbered among the ‘well to-do natives’—other than the children of heads and the Melayu civil servants—are selected haphazardly here and there; so some nephew who will succeed a Datuk, then someone who will succeed a Manti, someone who will succeed an Imam and someone who will succeed a Khatib, that’s all.”57 Of the tens of appointed kepala laras in the residency of Sumatra’s Westcoast, the writer claimed that many were illegitimate. There were those who had only minor adat titles ( gelar muda) and those who had attained their gelar and positions patrilineally. The writer singled out five particularly unworthy tuanku, and

larenden Tekst, ed. P. J. Veth (Volksbeschrijving en Taal 1.2 of the series Midden-Sumatra: Reizen en Onderzoekingen der Sumatra-Expeditie, Uitgerust door het Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1877 – 1879) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1881), 23 – 24, plate LX, pt. 1. 57. A. M. B. M., “Pada Menjatakan Pengadjaran Orang Boemi Poetera di Padang-Darat (Padangsche-Bovenlanden),” Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur 9, no. 1 – 6 (1893): 412.

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Figure 2.5. The stereotypical rumah gadang, 1877. From A. L. van Hasselt, Ethnographische Atlas van Midden-Sumatra, met Verklarenden Tekst, ed. P. J. Veth, Volksbeschrijving en Taal 1.2, of the series Midden-Sumatra: Reizen en Onderzoekingen der Sumatra-Expeditie, Uitgerust door het Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1877– 1879 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1881), plate LX.

he was incensed by a kepala laras in Tanah Datar who had no adat legitimacy whatsoever but rose up through the ranks as a Doktor-Djawa (a member of the native medical corps). Just because the Doktor spoke a little Dutch, claimed the writer, he had been able to insinuate himself into the hearts of all Europeans who passed through the region. Here, too, the writer was specific, and there can be no doubt that his thinly veiled references to the kepala laras would have been easily deciphered by any interested contemporary reader.58 “A. M. B. M.” com58. Just as remarkable as this letter, but in more ways understandable, is a furious footnote scrawled in a schoolschrift. The author would have known that his diatribe would be read only by a Dutch school supervisor, and it has a confessional quality. He asserted that in an era of Dutch-revitalized adat (“Adapon zaman ini Goebernemen telah mehidoepkan adat”), pretenders were making claims on titles and houses, giving as an example his own battles with the “Panghoeloe Kapala Loeboeq-Djantan” in Lintau. He concludes (with a hint of menace) that the Panghulu Kapala, after a sudden and surprising illness, dropped dead and thus resolved the dispute. Marzoeki gr B. M., “Petata-petiti adat Menangkebau: Minangkabausche Spreekwoorden en Spreekwijzen,” 1897 (Leiden University Library MS. Or. 5982/VRSC 569). See the footnote to the section “Nan babaris nan bapahat, nan batakoeäh nan di tingkat, nan basoeri nan di tanoen” (13r – 14r). It is possible that this schoolschrift author is the same A. M. B. M. who wrote the letter to the Tijdschrift.

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plained that the unworthy kepala had garnered praise in a recent book by Buijs (Marius Buys)59 and endeared himself to the engineer Jan Willem Ijzerman during his more recent expedition. The writer finally concluded his tirade with a pantun that was “quoted by almost every article that dealt with the Minangkabau situation in the 19th century.”60 Once, it was the lute that had a stem. Now, it’s coffee that flowers. Once, adat was consulted. Now, the corvée is more useful. Dahoeloe rabab nan bertangkai. Kini kopi nan berboenga. Dahoeloe adat lebih dipakai. Kini rodi lebih bergoena.61

The writer of “To Question the Education of Natives” was, by his own admission, a member of the adat elite. It was not for lack of opportunity, he insisted, but because of his scrupulous nature that he never became an appointed tuanku or kepala. That he was familiar with the work of Buys attests to the fact that he read the popular Dutch texts on Minangkabau; that he was aware of the doings of Ijzerman is proof that he was reasonably well-connected among the native elite. J. W. Ijzerman, the chief engineer of the state railway, was, like van Hasselt, following up on the discovery of the Ombilin coal seam. Traveling in Minangkabau from February to April 1891, he assessed the feasibility of constructing a local railway to transport the rock from the hills down to the port of Emmahaven. Ijzerman’s report was published in 1895, so the author of the 1893 “To Question the Education of Natives” must have had intimate knowledge of Ijzerman’s itinerary. The sundry tuanku laras owed their fortunes to the Dutch and provided a sort of instant retinue for Dutch officials visiting the Minangkabau highlands. At the time of Ijzerman’s survey, a Datoek Toemanggoeng was the Tuanku Laras of Sungai Puar, a small blacksmiths’ village on the volcanic slopes between

59. He is referring to M. Buys, Twee Jaren op Sumatra’s Westkust (Amsterdam: A. Akkeringa, 1886). Buys was a missionary; his tour in Sumatra began in December 1877, making him a contemporary of the Midden-Sumatra Expedition. 60. Abdullah, “Minangkabau 1900 – 1927,” 208, n. 97. 61. A. M. B. M., “Pada Menjatakan Pengadjaran,” 417. This same pantun was collected on the Sumatra Expedition in the late 1870s; A. L. van Hasselt, De Talen en Letterkunde van Midden-Sumatra, ed. P. J. Veth (Volksbeschrijving en Taal 3, of the series Midden-Sumatra: Reizen en Onderzoekingen der Sumatra-Expeditie, Uitgerust door het Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, 1877 – 1879) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1881). These texts are transliterated and translated in R. J. Chadwick, “Topics in Minangkabau Vernacular Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Australia, 1986), esp. 259.

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Figure 2.6. The house of the Tuanku Laras of Sungai Puar, 1896. From Alfred Maass, Quer durch Sumatra: Reise-Erinnerungen (Berlin: Wilhelm Süsserott, 1904), opposite page 56.

Padang Panjang and Bukittinggi. This chief, perhaps, was responsible for the ire of the letter-writer. He was declared an official companion (tochtgenooten) of the Ijzerman expedition and set a precedent for the future tuanku laras of his village, who would also prove exceptionally amenable to Dutch visitors.62 From the 1870s to the 1930s the larashoofden of Sungai Puar always proved themselves to be gracious hosts by giving tours of the house, posing for photographs with the family, and accompanying visitors on their travels in Minangkabau. These men—and there were at least three who held the title—tend to blur into one giant, corrupt, scraping Tuanku Laras. In 1896, a German race scientist journeyed across central Sumatra, seeking crania to measure; he was given a generous tour of the interior of the Tuanku Laras’s home. He photographed the main chamber, commenting on the worked pillars, hanging oil lamps, and antique clavier tucked into the corner (figure 2.6).63 An almost identical photograph was 62. J. W. Ijzerman, Dwars door Sumatra: Tocht van Padang naar Siak (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn, 1895), 159, 194; for a photo by Delprat of the Tuanku and his family, p. 164. 63. Alfred Maass, Quer durch Sumatra: Reise-Erinnerungen (Berlin: Wilhelm Süsserott, 1904), 53 – 56.

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Figure 2.7. The house of the Tuanku Laras of Sungai Puar, 1920. From M. Joustra, Minangkabau: Overzicht van Land, Geschiedenis en Volk (Leiden: Louis H. Becherer, 1921), opposite page 144.

taken around 1920, when the ex-missionary Meint Joustra added Minangkabau to his growing catalog of ethnographic encapsulations (figure 2.7).64 Since at least the 1870s and van Hasselt’s expedition, the stereotyped longhouse had become part of the official regalia of the new native bureaucratic elite. In 1875, hajjis were formally banned from working in the colonial civil service, furthering the perception that the Dutch meant to foist an anti-Islamic elite on Minangkabau.65 And, in fact, post-Padri Muslim reformists tended to disregard matrilineal tradition. They built single-family houses that might be inherited patrilineally but that, like all self-acquired property (harato pencarian), would become matrilineal property one or two generations down the line.66 The village of Koto Gadang was exceptional and idealized—a triumph of Dutch influence and native industry. In the less famous village of Sungai Puar, the sempiternal Tuanku Laras opened his home to camera-wielding foreigners. This man’s (or men’s) obsequiousness would echo for decades; in the early 64. See the photograph of the Tuanku Laras Soetan Soelaiman, in Joustra, Minangkabau, opposite p. 144. 65. Hasselt, Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra, 61. 66. Franz von Benda-Beckmann, “Ayam Gadang Toh Batalua?: Changing Values in Minangkabau Property and Inheritance Law and Their Relation to Structural Change,” Indonesia Circle 10, no. 27 (1982).

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1970s, a researcher found that “In the nagari of Sungai Puar, the ultimate authority on Minangkabau adat, according to the most respected clan chief, is ‘a book by some Dutchman who understood how we do things better than any of us.’”67 The legacy of men who made deliberate and effective use of Dutch culture-bound colonial policy still stands as a testament to the effectiveness of that policy. A report from the late 1860s discussed the abuse of corvée labor. Not only were people compelled to build coffee warehouses and government buildings, but Each larashoofd demanded his own residence and office in the territorial center for when he had to confer with Dutch officials. To make matters worse, local officials, both Dutch and Minangkabau, often misused the corvée levies, demanding in some cases extravagant architectural styles and decorations which increased the already onerous task.68

The daughter of a tuanku laras recalled her father’s perquisites—four servants performing corvée duty and a horned-roof house, one of only thirteen that the Dutch permitted to be built in areas of new settlement.69 These Dutch-made panghulu, kepala, and tuanku outlasted the cultivation system that had once given them purpose and justification. The corruption of the false adat elite led directly to the tarekat-based Anti-Tax Rebellion in 1908.70 Yet they survived these challenges, and the trappings of their offices have until the present defined the guise of state-sanctioned authority in Minangkabau. 67. Joel S. Kahn, “ ‘Tradition,’ Matriliny and Change among the Minangkabau of Indonesia,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 132, no. 1 (1976): 65 – 66. 68. Verkerk Pistorius, quoted in Graves, Minangkabau Response, 68. 69. Sitti Djanewar Bustami Aman, Nostalgia Liau Andeh ( Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 2001), 15, 60. 70. Since 1847, under the cultivation system, taxes had been collected in coffee beans. This was in accordance with the 1833 Plakaat Panjang, a contractual “long declaration” by the Dutch colonial state that forbade Minangkabau warfare while promising colonial protection, guaranteed nagari autonomy and some limited Minangkabau representation in local government affairs and that assured Minangkabau that taxation would be in the form of crops, never money. In 1908, the colonial state abolished the cultivation system and introduced a money tax. This was seen as a betrayal of the promises of the Plakaat Panjang and was met with armed rebellion. The rebellion was crushed. Rusli Amran, Sumatra Barat Pemberontakan Pajak 1908 ( Jakarta: Gita Karya, 1988); Young, Islamic Peasants and the State, 49 – 83. On the text of the Plakaat Panjang, see Ph. S. van Ronkel, “De Maleische Tekst der Proclamatie van 1833 tot de Bevolking van Sumatra’s Westkust,” in Gedenkschrift Uitgegeven ter Gelegenheid van het 75-Jarig Bestaan op 4 Juni 1926 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1926).

THREE

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The stereotypical Minangkabau longhouse developed alongside a new tradition of authority. The concept of the family was changing as well, and the ideal form that a household should take became the subject of heated debate. Dutch policy was shifting authority away from nagari councils and the senior women representing matrilocal longhouses. The colonial state encouraged the transformation of the now emblematic longhouse from a limited and particular form into a symbol of status and collaboration. The cultivation system created a patrilineal corps of local bureaucrats. But the customs of the matriarchate did not collapse. Minangkabau critics continued to uphold matrilineal inheritance and resisted the invented adat authorities. But in a more aggressive attack on the matriarchate, the colonial state turned its attention from the appearance of the house to the design of the family that lived within it (figure 3.1). For a Minangkabau woman, the interior of the house was a mortal stage on which the rituals of birth, first bath, marriage, sex, and death were played out. Although the physical longhouse was continually repaired, renovated, and even relocated (if the family saw an opportunity to shake off a slave genealogy), spiritually a family’s house was an immemorial space. Whereas a boy spent much of his time in the prayerhouse, mundane rites of passage took place in the house of his mother and, eventually, that of his wife. With the arrival of the colonial state in the 1840s came new intrusions. The Dutch felt an obsessive need to increase the taxable size and productivity of the family. They railed against Minangkabau abortion practices and launched a medically invasive assault against smallpox through a program of adult education and child inoculation. Dutch laws combined with Malay and Islamic laws

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Figure 3.1. Local people of the village of Kinali circa 1890. From the collection of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), Leiden, Netherlands, photograph #2986.

to regulate life within the longhouse. And by the 1920s the Islamic reformists and progressive women were at odds with aspects of what they saw as the traditional Minangkabau home. A Minangkabau house—like other houses in the Malay world—was wreathed with the remnants of its previous inhabitants. A family graveyard was on the grounds, nearby. Buried beneath the house or tacked to the interior columns, the mummified afterbirth forever joined child and birthplace. In the roof beams, the heirlooms were hidden—cloth and kris awaited repairs and future marriages. These grouts of flesh reminded even the most modern of the Minangkabau that they were linked to their longhouse by an unbreakable cord.

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The Shapes of the House: Blood and Time Births In the late nineteenth century, a birth that took place in the village of Matur (on the caldera ridge of the crater lake Maninjau) was described in a schoolschrift by a native teacher. When the child begins to emerge, the woman is told to push hard, so that the baby is forced out with a long umbilical cord. After that, the long umbilical cord is cut with a bamboo knife by the traditional healer [dukun], leaving it around 10 finger-widths long. This cut part is also called the kakak paja [the “child’s older sibling,” a term usually referring to the placenta, and here probably describing combined cord and afterbirth]. The kakak paja is washed clean by the healer and is then placed inside of a cook pot or in camphor and sealed up tight. After this the woman dresses herself, takes a torch and the umbilical cord, and goes below the house or the granary. There a hole is dug and the kakak paja is buried, at a depth of 1 1/2 cubits, covered with dirt and tamped firmly. Above the hole the torch is placed; and then the container is wedged in with a quicklime-spackled stone; on the stone is placed a rice scoop, and then all of this is covered with a lid of plaited rattan. . . . Finally, after four or five days, the portion of the umbilical cord that was still attached to the baby is dry, and sloughs off. It is stored with care, for should the child contract tapeworms, then the umbilical cord is soaked in water, and a little of the liquid is given to the child to drink.1

The schoolschriften were often written on topics assigned by colonial administrators; birth was, evidently, one such topic. Sometime in the 1890s, in the Dutchified model village of Koto Gadang, another woman had a baby. This moment was described by the schoolmaster Soetan Sarit. Once the placenta is cleaned, it is placed in a new earthenware pot, along with salt and other preservatives, namely pepper, garlic, jengkol [or sweet flag], benglé [a medicinal rhizome]; then the pot is closed off with a banana leaf. At this point a hole is dug beneath the house, at around two cubits deep, the inside lined with the leaves of the sour eggplant. Then the pot is placed in the hole, covered up with dirt and finally hot ash, and then tamped down with a large stone. This is so that ants and other creatures do not get into the pot. According to the healer, if ants or other creatures invade the pot, then the child will become ill. On top of the stone is placed a rattan covering and this is strewn with a kind of soft nettle, so that the placenta is not disturbed by a devil or vampire [palasit].2 1. Goeroe sekola II, “Adat perampoean hamil didalam negeri Matoea,” ca. 1885 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, schoolschrift, MS. Or. 6006/VRSC 682), sec. “Dari hal perampoean bersalin,” 3v – 5v. 2. The Minangkabau palasit is a creature that resembles a human, except that it has no philtrum and its feet point backward. It pierces the fontanel and then sucks a child’s brain and vital fluids up through the skull, leaving the child with a fatal, wasting disease.

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Once the placenta is buried, then the healer sprays [her spittle] from the child, to the place where the child was born, and finally to the spot where the placenta is buried. This is to ward off any evil sprits or devils that might be around.3

House-Memory I offer these two exemplary schoolschriften as reminders of the indissoluble bond created by family ritual. For even the most modernist of schoolteachers or the most reformist of ulama, there was a house somewhere that had pieces of his or her body buried in jars in the yard and a childhood of stories and taboos curdling any dreams of home.4 Minangkabau emigrants, like most Malays, try to return to their villages yearly, for the end of fasting month. Minangkabau also attempt to visit the graves of their ancestors before making the pilgrimage to Mecca.5 Even in early-twenty-first-century Jakarta, Minangkabau feel compelled to maintain a longhouse in a home village, even if it means hiring people to live in it for them. In Minangkabau, a house is an ancient thing. It is built on and of the flesh of the tabernacled family. The supposed antiquity of a longhouse is not entirely an invented colonial legacy. Even with the genealogical sleight of hand that allowed some degenerate families to turn noble, there were loose record-keeping systems that gave Minangkabau a graphic sense of themselves in generational time. Minangkabau maintain silsilah, family trees that are often elaborately illustrated and considered heirlooms. Oral and written genealogies predate Islam, but were certainly reinforced by Islamic custom. Islamic tradition maintains tarjama, a genealogy of knowledge showing the legacy of a particular teacher. This is particularly important because the validity of a hadith is gauged by the record of person-to-person passage from scribes back to the original witness of Muhammad.6 Minangkabau, and other Indonesians, also maintain silsilah (or tarsila). These lineage charts show not only a rough family tree but the passage of particular adat titles, galar, through the gen3. Soetan Sarit, “Dari hal orang beranak di Kota Gedang,” ca. 1890 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, schoolschriften, MS. Or. 6005/VRSC 681). Sarit’s schoolschrift on marriage is analyzed in chapter 5. 4. See the two autobiographies, N. St. Iskandar, Pengalaman Masa Kecil, 5th ed. ( Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1987) [first published by J. B. Wolters, 1948]; Muhamad Radjab, Semasa Ketjil Dikampung (1913 – 1928): Autobiografi seorang anak Minangkabau (Djakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1950). Iskandar, a kinsman of Hamka, was born in Sungai Batang by lake Maninjau in 1893. The second memoir has been translated as “Village Childhood” in Susan Rodgers, Telling Lives, Telling History: Autobiography and Historical Imagination in Modern Indonesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 5. On a number of occasions in West Sumatra, I witnessed not just villagers but wealthy Jakartan perantau paying graveside respects before undertaking the Hajj. 6. On the idea of tarjama, see Dale F. Eickelman, “Traditional Islamic Learning and Ideas of the Person in the Twentieth Century,” in Middle Eastern Lives: The Practice of Biography and Self-Narrative, ed. Martin Kramer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 39.

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erations. According to Minangkabau tradition, a matrilineal kin group occupies a longhouse on a specific plot of land forever. The original settlers of a nagari, with houses in the center of the village, could trace their ancestry back to legendary feuds and the Minangkabau Ur-mother, Bundo Kanduang.7 Some current familial feuds have their roots in the Padri War.8 And with the advent of Dutch-sponsored education, which defined a child’s grade level as a function of age rather than knowledge, there was increased pressure to maintain accurate birth records.9 When in 1921 the brother of Datuk Soetan Maharadja could write of the “geschiedenis famille hamba sendiri ” (the history of my own family), the influence of Dutch recording trends could no longer be doubted.10 Such record books and silsilah-genealogies became heirlooms and were kept locked in chests or hidden in the roofs with the other treasured regalia of the house. The Minangkabau think of themselves as members of a house, both a residence and a common lineage, in a manner similar to European noble families. For Minangkabau, however, membership in a house was and is pinned to the figure of a common female ancestor and maintained through rules of matrilineal descent. Even those Minangkabau born and raised in the rantau, outside of West Sumatra, know their “home” village and extended clan names, and carry an evocation of their longhouse with them. The house is never lost.11 This group of household affiliates maintains a deep bond, or house-memory, that links them forever to a longhouse in a village in the highlands of Sumatra. 7. This is the famous and often-cited “Kaba Cindua Mato,” best analyzed by M. Yusuf, “Persoalan Translitersai dan Edisi Hikayat Tuanku Nan Muda Pagaruyung (Kaba Cindua Mato)” (M.A. thesis, Universitas Indonesia, 1994). See also a political take on the kaba in Taufik Abdullah, “Some Notes on the Kaba Tjindua Mato: An Example of Minangkabau Traditional Literature,” Indonesia 9 (1970). 8. For one Sukarno-era example that discusses the ulama Taher Djalaluddin, defining him as a member of a “Padri family,” see Rusjdi, “Generasi Terachir Keluarga Paderi,” Gema Islam 1, no. 4 – 5 (1962): 136 – 39, 158. Datuk Soetan Maharadja, the journalist and editor, bore a grudge against “Padri” recidivism and what he saw as Wahhabi-influenced fanatical reform in the early twentieth century. See Maharadja’s own writings, and Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World.” 9. An article in Rohana Kudus’s kemadjoean paper, entitled “Legal Civil Status: For Natives,” advocates maintaining family records, suggesting that archival family documents are prerequisite for Dutch-like civil rights. St. Besar, “Burge[r]lijke Stand: Oentoek anak boemi poetera,” Saudara Hindia: Pembatjaan dan Pemimpin Anak Negeri 1.7, 1913, pp. 103 – 5. But the Minangkabau ulama staunchly and successfully resisted Dutch attempts to implement a marriage registration law in 1937. For this reason, there are no civil records for Minangkabau during the colonial period. The Kantor Catatan Sipil (Bureau of Vital Statistics) in Padang maintains such records today. Their archive also holds the birth, marriage, and death records of the Dutch and “foreign oriental” community going back to the founding of the municipality, in the 1860s. These are well-maintained and still consulted by Dutch people seeking ancestral data. There are no such records pertaining to local Muslim residents. 10. Geschiedenis is the Dutch word for history, and famille frenchified Dutch for family. Ahmed Kamiloedin Maharadja, “Aardrijkskunde, Geschiedenis dan Studiereis,” Soenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Minang Kabau 10.4, 28 January 1921, p. 1. 11. Or rarely lost, at any rate. Losing an association with a rumah gadang is a deeply traumatic event for a Minangkabau. In the traditional laws, there was no death penalty; banishment was the ultimate punishment. See Jeffrey Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession: Three Generations of Amrullahs in 20th Century Indonesia,” Indonesia 65 (April 1998).

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Interiors: The Mechanics of the Rumah Gadang Toward the end of chapter 2, I introduced two photographs of the interior of the Tuanku Laras’s house in Sungai Puar. These photographs, taken by the German Maass and the Dutchman Joustra, allow our analysis to shift from the exterior “skin” of the Minangkabau house to a consideration of its interior. Although less visible and obvious to the tourist, the doings inside of the house were important to both Minangkabau dwellers and Dutch administrators. Through rituals and life passages, the bodies of the family were incorporated into the house. In birth and afterbirth, the blood of the mother and her child stained the floorboards, were hung from the houseposts, or were buried in the yard. The girls born to the house returned to the sleeping-chambers to consummate their own marriages and give birth their own children. The house was marked in blood and time. The house-memory of a family confirmed the antiquity of the land in a manner that neither Dutch colonial policy nor the parvenu posturing of adat elite (in the building of “traditional” longhouses) could entirely disturb. Figure 3.2 depicts the floor plan of a longhouse. The circles represent the internal columns of the house; the tonggak tuo is the first and ritualistically superior column. The floor is raised in three steps, from the lowest, public space immediately inside the door up to the numerous biliak in the rear. Old women, unmarried girls, and prepubescent boys sleep in the open spaces toward the front of the house; married women receive their husbands in the small chambers. Traditionally, each nuclear family could maintain a hearth and cooking area within the house itself. This allowed for a degree of sovereignty among the women and prevented disputes, which often occurred among sisters and cousins, from becoming divisive. But in 1847, in an effort to curb fires, the Dutch banned the internal hearth.12 The cooking space became a separate kitchen, set below the rear of the house. This colonial intrusion led to the splitting of some longhouses and the building of numerous smaller, often single-family houses on the surrounding property. These houses adopted the stereotypical roofline of the rumah gadang longhouse and maintained matrilineal descent, but they were no longer communal homes for an extended matrilineal kin group. Figure 3.3 presents the life cycle within the longhouse. The house expels the postpubescent boys to the prayerhouse or the rantau. But girls are kept cycling through the longhouse, begetting more girls. In Cecilia Ng’s model, external elements (in-marrying men) enter through the door, joining the old cycle of girls who sleep on the floor of the main chamber. The newlywed couple then 12. Hasselt, Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra, 154.

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Figure 3.2. The floorplan of a longhouse, drawn by Chee-Kien Lai.

moves into the large bower, an element of one type of longhouse, that adjoins the house on the far left, farthest from the door. (Old Minangkabau women told me this was for decorum—the chamber was bound to be noisiest.) With the next marriage, all the couples are shuttled down, one biliak to the right. If the woman in the last biliak in the series is still sexually active, then an extension could be built onto the house, creating additional biliak. Otherwise, the woman leaves her chamber, rejoining the children to sleep on the main floor. From the various biliak, children are produced, the girls entering the internal cycle of the longhouse. The rules of life in a rumah gadang vary by house and by village, and change over time. A broad-stroke description of Minangkabau culture is rarely meaningful to Minangkabau individuals. Commonalities may usefully be kept in mind, however, because through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Minangkabau was defined anthropologically by the colonial state and local adat experts. There are, according to Patrick Edward de Josselin de Jong, two principal and interrelated units in Minangkabau culture: the nagari, which is territorial, and the suku, which is genealogical.13 A suku is a matrilineal clan, and there are as many as one hundred suku in Minangkabau. Nagari is often glossed 13. This discussion is drawn largely from P. E. de Josselin de Jong, “Social Organization in Minangkabau,” in Two Essays on Minangkabau Social Organization (Leiden: Institute of Cultural and Social Studies, Leiden University, 1980). Josselin de Jong first defined Minangkabau in his dissertation, a classic of Dutch structural anthropology, Minangkabau and Negri Sembilan: Socio-political Structure in Indonesia (Leiden: E. Ijdo, 1951). Josselin de Jong has been critiqued both for presenting an untenable schema of Minangkabau kinship and for a lack of fieldwork (it was the revolution, so he based his descriptions on printed sources and discussions with a lone Minangkabau student in Leiden). Lynn

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Figure 3.3. The life cycle within the longhouse. Adapted by Chee-Kien Lai from illustrations in Cecilia Ng, “Raising the House Post and Feeding the Husband-Givers: The Spatial Categories of Social Reproduction among the Minangkabau,” in Inside Austronesian Houses: Perspectives on Domestic Designs for Living, ed. James J. Fox (Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, ANU, 1993), 124 and 128.

as village, as it is by Josselin de Jong, but it is not a centralized polity like the Javanese village promoted (and imposed) by the colonial and later the Indonesian state.14 Every nagari has ideally four suku represented among its inhabitants. Members of a suku in a particular nagari live in a quarter, called a kampuang, where they share communal property and a common leadership. The kampuang is, therefore, a “genealogical unit seen in its territorial aspect.”15 If a local kampuang grows in size, it divides into branches, each controlling its own ancestral property and represented by its own leaders. The members of a branch, called a paruik (womb), share a common ancestress. They reside in a rumah gadang or in a cluster of houses. Of the numerous named suku, there are four that are considered original and definitive: Koto, Piliang, Bodi, and Caniago. Every nagari in Minangkabau can be divided into one of two broad dyadic adat clusters, called laras or lareh, based on these suku, Koto-Piliang and Bodi-Caniago.16 In Minangkabau legend, two Louis Thomas, “Kinship Categories in a Minangkabau Village” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1977), chap. 3. 14. Jan Breman, “The Village on Java and the Early Colonial State,” in The Village Concept in the Transformation of Rural Southeast Asia, ed. Mason C. Hoadley and Christer Gunnarsson (Richmond: NIAS/Curzon, 1996). 15. Josselin de Jong, “Social Organization in Minangkabau,” 4. 16. Even this essential dichotomy breaks down on the ground. Joke van Reenen, Central Pillars of the House: Sisters, Wives, and Mothers in a Rural Community in Minangkabau, West Sumatra (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1996), 72 – 74.

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lawgivers, Datuk Ketemanggungan and Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang (of baby buffalo fame), established these two broad notions of adat. The adat of Datuk Ketemanggungan, Koto-Piliang, is more elitist, and in a Koto-Piliang nagari only members of the four original suku are allowed representation on the governing council. Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang’s adat, Bodi-Caniago, is considered egalitarian, with every suku represented, although in neither system are the descendants of former slaves permitted representation on the nagari council. The differences are reflected in the styles of houses built in the nagari. A Koto-Piliang house has a raised annex on one side where the high-ranking panghulu might sit, whereas the floor of a Bodi-Caniago house is level.17 All this is a Minangkabauist mouthful, and beyond anthropologically informed adat textbooks I have never heard anyone in West Sumatra hold forth with such precision on their cultural particulates. The rules are fluid and different in every nagari; they shift and are broken in specific cases and across historical contexts. As Josselin de Jong acknowledges, “What are the factors that make for the unmistakable unity of all Minangkabau? . . . One can observe a common culture (in the widest sense of the word) and a common Minangkabau sentiment, in spite of great regional diversity, but it is hard to explain it.”18 It is harder to imagine any culture anywhere whose outlines do not blur when examined microscopically. Still, given the prominence of Minangkabau people in modern Indonesian history, and the force of the Minangkabau kingdom in defining the Malay world in the pre-European period, Minangkabau identity can feel disconcertingly diffuse. Ideally, a Minangkabau communal life provides people with a large extended family, related matrilineally, and prepared to provide assistance to its kinspeople. The daughter of a Tuanku Laras recalled the 1910s: My father often assisted others, treating them as if they were his own nieces and nephews. This sort of thing happens in Minang because the meaning of family is rather broad, as opposed to Westerners who consider a family to be just a father, mother, and their children. Such a concept does not exist in Minang. For them there are various divisions: separuik, the people of one womb, a grouping that traces its lineage to a single female ancestress in a longhouse; sepayung, a matrilineal group that shares a single village head; sesuku, a matrilineal clan that shares the same ur-ancestress in a village confederacy; and those relatives who have left the heartland. Through these terms the people form families, even if they come from different regions. Because of this it is difficult to claim that a Minang person’s lineage is truly extinct (a reference to a family without daughters and therefore no descendants to receive the clan inheritance), for there are always her “wings and tail-feathers,” the more distant relatives who can persevere.19 17. Vellinga, Constituting Unity and Difference, 28 – 30. 18. Josselin de Jong, “Social Organization in Minangkabau,” 1. 19. Aman, Nostalgia Liau Andeh, 35.

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The Dutch colonial administration, like the Padris, criticized and disrupted this idealized conceptualization of the Minangkabau family.

The Administration of Houses: Invasions of Privacy In 1847, the Dutch colonial state came to Minangkabau. The banning of the hearth meant that cook-spaces could no longer subdivide a house in case of sororal conflict. The houses themselves began to split; after this point, there are no longer reports of sprawling multifamily longhouses, with many tens of inhabitants.20 That same year, the institution of the forced cultivation system created the administrative need to rationalize Minangkabau property and crops. The Dutch undertook cadastral surveys, forcing households and individuals to claim their holdings on a map.21 As we have seen in chapter 2, the Dutch moved houses out of the forts and from the hilltops of the Padri days, creating comfortably administrable clustered villages.22 Largely to increase their tax base and pool of corvée labor, the Dutch administration in West Sumatra made an increase in population its principal concern. This was accomplished by a dual policy of discouraging abortion and eradicating smallpox.

Reproductive Control E. W. A. Ludeking, a Dutch medical officer who served in West Sumatra in 1853, and again in 1856 – 1857, prepared a fascinating report on Gezondheidtoestand, the state of health and sanitation. Ludeking discussed the problem of mothers hemorrhaging in childbed, the practice of abortion, and polygyny. In a section on Minangkabau “Oebat keloe-loessan (Abortiva),” Ludeking described native abortion techniques, both medicinal and magical. He saw this practice as most damaging to the health of a community that had, he sniffed, no indigenous word for hygiene. In an attempt to introduce European notions of health and sanitation, Ludeking coordinated (in the village of Pelupu) an effort to control dysentery. He taught people to air out their houses and to dispose of old sarongs, and he established the residence of the Tuanku of Koto Lawas as a model of sanitation.23 20. An anthropologist who did fieldwork in 1922 – 1923 described one alternative—a house in which numerous kitchens had been built in back, one for each of the feuding daughters. Fay-Cooper Cole, “Family, Clan, and Phratry in Central Sumatra,” in Essays in Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 21. 21. On the 1853 Pusako-Eigendomsakte (Pusako-Property Deed) and the 1870/5 Domain Act (that identified “wastelands” and claimed them for a colonial government in search of lucrative mining concessions), see Benda-Beckmann, Property in Social Continuity, 209 – 10. On the 1874 wasteland declaration, see also Kahn, Constituting the Minangkabau, 189. 22. Colombijn, “Dutch Polder.” 23. Ludeking, Natuur- en Geneeskundige Topographie van Agam, 106 – 10, 135 – 40.

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As early as 1849 a colonial official could smugly write to his superiors in Batavia: We observe everywhere an increase of population. The main reason is the improvement of rice cultivation, so that there is always enough food. Since this improvement, we have seen more marriages, and we have seen a halt to the “verderfelijke gewoonte” [ruinous practice] of women to abort. Although the wish to look young has often been mentioned as a primary reason that “Malayan” women did not want to have more than three children, it is doubtless that lack of food, or high prices, contributed to the wish of no more than three children as well.24

Certainly there was an increase in the population through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is unlikely, however, that the Dutch were able to interfere directly in the control Minangkabau women had over their reproductive choices. Walled Padri villages tried to replicate what were thought to be Arabian households, and so Padri women had limited access to the outside world. But there is no clear evidence of a Padri position on the question of reproductive rights. Although reformist Islam in the Middle East has tried to block access to birth control, Islam itself has been relatively tolerant of birth control practices.25 Given the frank discussion of sex in the schoolschriften, mention of abortion practices in ethnographies, and the strength of the matriarchate itself, neither the colonial state nor reformist Islam changed Minangkabau attitudes toward reproductive choice in a substantial way.

The Pox Smallpox, the deadliest epidemic disease in modern history, was of course in no way limited to Western Sumatra. But in the late 1840s, the Dutch government mobilized in the Minangkabau region their first Outer Island program of mass inoculation. In 1850, approximately 20,000 people were inoculated.26 By the early 1850s, a scar on the arm was significant enough to be deemed the gouvernements merk, the mark of the colonial government.27 In 1920, Hendrik 24. ANRI (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia), Sumatra’s Westkust 125-9, Algemeen Verslag Sumatra’s Westkust 1849 (Source provided by Freek Colombijn from his personal research). It should be noted that throughout the archipelago evidence of precolonial and colonial-era abortion practices is largely anecdotal. For a discussion of Java, see Terence H. Hull, “Indonesian Fertility Behaviour before the Transition: Searching for Hints in the Historical Record” (Working Papers in Demography no. 83, Demography Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, 1999), 8 – 12. 25. Basim F. Musallam, Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 26. Peter Boomgaard, “Smallpox, Vaccination, and the Pax Neerlandica: Indonesia, 1550 – 1930,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 159, no. 4 (2003): 606. 27. On the mark, see Ludeking, Natuur- en Geneeskundige Topographie van Agam, 144.

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Freerk Tillema, the Dutch self-appointed sanitation missionary, summarized the findings of A. L. van Hasselt and J. W. Ijzerman, two colonial officials whose thorough reports influenced policymaking in West Sumatra. Throughout “Reizen in Midden-Sumatra” (1877 – 1879) and “Dwars door Sumatra” (1895) are repeated references to the pock-marked skins of the people the travelers met. The Malayan finds these scars from the pox to be the cause of great ugliness. “Sadly the disease would often lay waste to not insignificant numbers of villages.” In “Reizen in Midden-Sumatra” it is also described how whole village houses were stricken with disease, that eventually all the inhabitants would die from an epidemic—smallpox and cholera—and so the population was in various ways diminished. In 1870, in a region of the Padang Highlands, a terrible smallpox epidemic broke out. All is now ruined there, the people are indigent, house-bound with no means of making a livelihood.28

Regardless of its mortal effectiveness, the colonial government waged an intensive campaign against smallpox in Minangkabau. In 1850, J. A. W. van Ophuijsen—father of Charles Adriaan van Ophuijsen, the spelling reformer, and in 1856 the first director of the Bukittinggi Kweekschool—was selected to coordinate the training of the first phalanx of native vaccinators. In January 1851, in Solok, he prepared the Minangkabau-inflected Malay-language “Instructions for vaccinators [toekang tjatjar].” “We must vaccinate while the child is still young,” van Ophuijsen began, At first the government made a regulation, so that anyone with a small child was required to bring their child in for vaccination. A portion of the people agreed, and a portion refused saying that although a child is vaccinated with cowpox, still the “wild” disease [smallpox] will erupt, and be contracted. This can be called confused thinking, because backward beliefs are evident, for in truth, if the cowpox vesicle appears, then in no way can the person contract the wild disease. Perhaps there are other eruptions that resemble smallpox, that appear on the body of a small child, but these are not deadly or destructive like the results of real smallpox. Whosoever becomes a vaccinator will know that those people who have been vaccinated with cowpox can no longer contract smallpox, even from direct contact with the pus from a smallpox weal. This is one reward for the vaccinator who helps the mothers and fathers of young children to understand.29

Variolation is an invasive treatment, involving incisions in the arm of the child. Given that a child must be healthy in order to receive the cowpox vac28. H. F. Tillema, “Kromoblanda”: Over ’t vraagstuk van “het Wonen” in Kromo’s groote land, vol. 3 (The Hague: Privately Printed, 1920), 28. 29. J. A. W. van Ophuijsen, “Pëngadjaran këpadå toekang tjatjar,” Januarij 1851 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, Or. 12.168 B/VRSC 694). The text is number 47 of a series, perhaps van Ophuijsen’s.

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cine (a smallpox survivor was necessarily immune), it was not easy to convince parents to risk the infection of a puncture wound through the deliberate introduction of a disease. The vaccinator holds one hand of the child, the mother the other, and the pinkie finger is pricked with a knife; the vaccinator then drips the living cowpox fluid into the wound. The parents are instructed to observe the various signs and processes as the pox begins to work. This graphic account is drawn from the actual instructions given the first Europeanized Minangkabau medical corps. It is striking in that the mother and father, but not the mamak (maternal uncle), are specified as assuming responsibility for the health of the child. And it is remarkable that new, Western ideas of the body, and newer, modern, and highly sophisticated concepts of disease, were accepted at all. Through inoculation, the colonial state tried to shift authority over children away from the mother and her brothers and to the child’s father. By 1857—a year after van Ophuijsen had taken up his post as head of the Bukittinggi Sekolah Raja, the primary teachers’ training college—he still coordinated a wide network of native vaccinators. Early in that year a smallpox epidemic broke out, and on February 10 the vaccinators issued a kind of public health warning. The warning is in the style of an Islamic fatwa: Ruling: In order to reduce the danger of smallpox epidemic or infection. First. As smallpox tends to spread, whoever has contracted the disease must be quarantined within the house, and kept from contact with uninfected people, or those who have not been vaccinated. Second. Whoever shares a house with an infected person and seems healthy, still must not associate with the people of another house, as the disease is still communicable.30

The admonition continues with advice on particularly healthful foods and a warning that the areas around Bukittinggi are within the sphere of the epidemic. It advises residents of Sungai Puar and other nearby villages to escort the unvaccinated to Bukittinggi, or, if needed, the vaccinators can bring the vaccine out to the villages. The ranks of the vaccinators continued to swell. The second document in the bundle reiterates the difference between cowpox and “wild” smallpox, describing the symptoms of the disease and the reddish swelling that precedes the emergence of a pustule. Again, the vaccinators are instructed to concentrate their efforts on children. Most important, they must keep the vaccinated child’s parents informed throughout the process.31 30. J. A. W. van Ophuijsen, “Tjatjar Sapi [Cowpox],” various documents, 1857 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, Or. 12.168 A/VRSC 693), 1r – 2v. This is number 46 of a series. The text is in both Jawi (Arabic script) and rumi (romanization). The texts are from Bukittinggi. 31. J. A. W. van Ophuijsen, “Pitoewah: Darie bertanam Tjatjar sapie,” various documents, 3 March 1857 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, Or. 12.168 A/VRSC 693), 3v – 13v.

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The vaccinators were usually recruited from the lower tiers of the adat elite. Datuk Sanggoeno Diradjo, an adat scholar whose books are still in print, made his living as a vaccinator. Later, in the late nineteenth century, they were, ideally, drawn from the alumni of the Sekolah Radja, the elite teachers’ training college in Bukittinggi. These men saw themselves as the vanguard of kemadjoean, bringing progress and information to people on the level of the physical body. They had their own periodicals, geared to the “gathering of teachers, native doctors, and vaccinators.”32 But grand adat pedigrees, government sanction, and promises of health did not always guarantee the acceptance of the vaccinator. In perhaps the most honest and sardonic of the short-lived Minangkabau protest newspapers, Soeara Momok (Ghost Voice), the writer Raksasa (monster) warns the vaccinators: The people in the kampung Dobi [a poor neighborhood of Padang] were surprised, hearing that they had to be vaccinated, and that the great tuanku Demang [a colonial adat position] would come to oversee this project. Monster gives thanks for this good work. But, but, if Monster was a young woman, and then came a vaccinator without permission, without black or white [written authorization], and then he goes into the house, allegedly in order to vaccinate, wah. . . . Monster of course would be surprised. And Monster’s clean white hand is clutched . . . please don’t! Hey, Raksasa has a man [meneer] who will be coming with a crossbar.33

The smallpox vaccination program, even more than the Dutch propaganda efforts to prevent abortion, represented the boldest physical invasion of the sanctity of the longhouse. Not only were a mother and father defined as the unit responsible for the welfare of a child—but they then had to allow their child to be mutilated by a stranger who deliberately introduced a pathogen into the child’s body. The gouvernements merk could be nasty and ragged, the knife wound prone to infection. The vaccinators targeted children and, by implication, parents, and the antiabortion campaign was directed toward wives, but there was another colonial intrusion that was utterly inclusive.

The Law In 1872, van Harencarspel, the self-described chief secretary (secretaris basar) of the colonial government, drafted regulations controlling movement and domestic behavior for all non-European residents of the colony. In 1894, the di32. From the masthead of Bintang Timoer, first published in Padang in 1914. 33. Raksasa, “Dongkak-Minangkabau,” Soeara Momok (Mengatakan kebenaran—Menjapoe kekotoran—Isinja tahan oedji) 1.36, 22 September 1923, pp. 2 – 3.

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rector of the Sekolah Radja translated and adapted these Police Laws to fit the Minangkabau case.34 The laws set fines not only for unauthorized movement and residence but also for what was deemed to be inappropriate behavior within the longhouse. The fines are tiered according to the offense and provide a telling gauge of Dutch priorities. The following offenses were, evidently, least offensive to the Dutch. “Wrongful movement” and “wrongful residence in a village” brought penalties of just 1 to 15 rupiah. A woman faced the same fines if she slept with a man other than her husband or slept away from her house for more than one night without permission. The appended notes clarify this, “An overstepping of these prohibitions occurs if a woman engages in various acts with a man, but does not technically commit adultery.” A man, too, could be fined for having illicit relations with a married woman. Trespassing and the unauthorized disposal of rotten goods also garnered fines of 1 to 15 rupiah.35 Greater fines—from 16 to 25 rupiah—could be levied for intentional malice, the manufacture of firearms or gunpowder, and a failure to guard one’s house. Failure to watch over children or the insane was likewise punished. The largest fines, 26 to 60 rupiah, were reserved for people who wrongfully called meetings, were squatting on another’s property, or sold amulets (presumably blessed by a Muslim syekh and usually promising invulnerability).36 Along with the obvious threat that came with arms manufacture, the colonial state was right to be concerned about the trade in amulets because they were inevitably distributed before any uprising or violent conflict. Most of these prohibitions were easily policed—wrongful residence, squatting, and arms manufacture were quickly investigated and confirmed. Other, more lustful crimes were far more difficult to prove and required the weighing of testimony and allegation. Although Minangkabau would have tried to settle disputes without turning to the Dutch, irreconcilable differences left the colonial justice system as the arbitrator of last resort. The new legal system, of course, generated its complement of native lawyers, jaksa and jurusita, attorneys and bailiffs. But the average Minangkabau also set out to learn the new language of Western tort law.37 The Dutch attempt to turn Minangkabau into a litigious 34. J. L. van der Toorn, Oendang-Oendang Poelisi: Tarsalin Kadalam Bahasa Malajoe, 2nd ed. (Batawi: Partjitakan Gouvernement, 1904) [first published 1894]. Not coincidentally, many of these laws correspond to Soeharto-era restrictions. The expression secretaris basar is from this translation. 35. Ibid., 1 – 9, 30nn. 36. Ibid., 15 – 25. 37. Books explaining the new regulations were published, appending sample “official letters” and petitions. For three important texts, see A. F. van Blommestein, Peratoeran dari segala hal hakim dan hoekoeman jang terpakei di dalam segala negri jang menoeroet pemerentahan: Pasisir Barat Poelou Pertja, trans. B. A. Dessouw (Padang: Pertjitakan Persarikatan Paul Bäumer & Co., 1903); Ad. Gr. Pamoentjak, Soeatoe Kitab akan dikoendang olih Djoeroe Sita pada pangadilan Landraad atau Rapat atau siapa jang mendjalankan pekerdjaän seperti itoe menoeroet atoeran jang terseboet didalam oendang oendangnja (Padang: Otto

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culture largely succeeded—although efforts to regulate marriage were blocked wherever possible.38 Land disputes tied up property for generations.39 Under the Dutch, Minangkabau lived under colonial law and were watched by a native constabulary. Fines were enforced, and a failure to pay meant time in prison. The colonial legal system was yet another intrusion into the longhouse that began during the Padri War but that accelerated and was made procedural in the meetings described in the memoirs of Tuanku Imam Bondjol, the Padri leader, and Naali Sutan Caniago, his son (discussed in chap. 1). The minutes appended to the Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol describe a sequence of meetings in the central court in Bukittinggi, the first on April 6, 1865, and the second on December 14, 1875. Both meetings were chaired by Timon Henricus der Kinderen, the architect of colonial law reform, who was evidently not prepared to invest in ritual buffalo slaughter without first being assured of a kind reception for his pronouncements. The meetings were attended by J. F. R. S. van den Bossche, the governor of Sumatra’s West Coast in the 1860s; H. A. Steijn Parvé, the resident of the Padang Highlands; eleven Dutch controllers; seventy-six tuanku laras; and untold numbers of clan heads and panghulu. In the 1865 meeting, Kinderen advocated for the creation of a regional bureaucracy, with local Dutch officials supervising Minangkabau counterparts who would be in charge of carrying out the regulations. The law would be a combination of local customary adat and the hukum (secular law) of the colonial government, echoing the balance between adat and shariah that was part of the Tuanku Imam’s legacy. A decade later, Kinderen reconvened the meeting and evaluated the successful implementation of a legal bureaucracy in West Sumatra. Only at this point, after ten years of state legalist propagandizing, did he promulgate the formal end of slavery. A reader of the Naskah will notice a familiar name among the roster of tuanku laras—Imam Bondjol’s son Sutan Caniago was representing Alahan Panjang. In a separate article, Philippus van Ronkel summarizes the first two sections of the Naskah, but he fails to acknowledge an intertextual connection among the three sections.40 When read cohesively, the Naskah is clearly a single, interlinked text. The first section, the narrative of Tuanku Imam Bondjol, is a Bäuer, 1895); T. H. der Kinderen, Formulierboek ten gebruike Bij de Toepassing van het Regelment tot Regeling van het Regtswezen in het Gouvernement Sumatra’s Westkust (Staatsblaad 1874 No. 94b), voor zooveel betreft De Regtspleging bij de Distrikts—en Magistraats-Geregten, De Landraden en Rapats, benevens De Uitoefening der Policie, Regering van Nederlandsch-Indië, 2nd ed. (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1882). 38. Although the Civil Registry (Kantor Catatan Sipil) in Padang lists about fifteen native women marrying Europeans (soldiers, mostly) every year, none of these women was explicitly noted as Minangkabau. 39. For more on land disputes, see Freek Colombijn, Patches of Padang: The History of an Indonesian Town in the Twentieth Century and the Use of Urban Space (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1994). 40. Van Ronkel, “Inlandsche Getuigenissen Aangaande den Padri-Oorlog,” De Indische Gids 37, no. 2 (1915).

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story of war and defeat. The Tuanku’s singular triumph is the realization of his misguided decision to join the Padris; he embarks on a campaign of apology and restitution that is largely ignored by both the local traditional elite and the Dutch military. The Tuanku is not a martyr. He relents in the Padri War, and he is defeated in the war against the Dutch, but he is not executed. Instead he lives a long life as an exile in what might be considered a Protestant beach resort in northern Sulawesi. People searching Indonesian history for an unrepentant neo-Wahhabi should choose Haji Miskin, Tuanku nan Renceh, or Tuanku Rao. If they want to memorialize a nonviolent and moderate reformist, Tuanku nan Tuo or Syekh Jalaluddin is worthy of admiration. Instead of these men, Tuanku Imam Bondjol is remembered, a man who was ultimately a military failure, who was ideologically disillusioned, and for whom a shift from violent action to conciliation was rewarded with exile and misery. Section two of the Naskah is equally perplexing. In 1865, in time for the first of the two legal symposia, Naali Sutan Caniago is toiling as an unhappy bureaucrat in the colonial adminsitration. His appointment as tuanku laras seems to have been the result of the fulfillment by the Dutch state of a thirty-year-old promise to his father.41 Like his father’s, Sutan Caniago’s narrative is one of disappointment and humiliation. In his years of service, Sutan Caniago clashes with corrupt Minangkabau colleagues and unresponsive Dutch superiors. The narrative concludes with a long series of dialogs between Sutan Caniago and Dutch officials, including the Tuan Besar (the resident). During a dressing-down Sutan Caniago protests, claiming that he does not proselytize (mendakwa) or even speak, but merely wanders the roadways supervising laborers.42 He has become a perverse inversion of a traditional tuanku. A religious tuanku would be localized and visited by students seeking knowledge. He would speak and not move; his voice was the site of his authority. Sutan Caniago is voiceless, moving aimlessly, the sort of powerless wanderer who is a tragic figure in Minangkabau literature.43 He complains of people who “mandago mandagi ” (an odd expression that suggests insubordination). The Tuan Besar asks him to explain the term, and Sutan Caniago responds that mandago “is the making of a disturbance in the country that interrupts the livelihood of the people. . . . And mandagi is the making of disputes that impede the flow of money.”44 At this point, a sympathetic Datuk (a customary leader) attempts to show respect for Sutan Caniago and is reprimanded by the Jaksa (the native law offi41. 42. 43. 44.

Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Caniago, 233. Ibid., 316. Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession,” 141. Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Caniago, 316.

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cial) in Dutch-inflected Minangkabau, “Do not, now, show respect to Tuanku Sutan in any manner. Why do you pointlessly oppose the Dutch, and don’t start begging for mercy. Now it is too late to beg for mercy.”45 Sutan Caniago then requests to speak privately with the resident and the commander. He threatens the state with the wrath of his children and sisters’ children if his grievances are not addressed, saying to the resident, “I will salute you from your shoes to the tufts of your hair if you permit me to make my request part of the written record.” The text then seems to trail off, unresolved: “Then so it was from this day forth I was allowed to remain outside of the [true] custom and request that the command of [invented colonial] custom and the command of the corvée bear witness to Lord Allah and Muhammad so concludes this matter in the year 1868 in the village of Kampung Koto in the house of Tuanku Laras Bonjol Alahan Panjang.”46 There is no recorded response to Sutan Caniago’s plea and no narrative resolution in the second section of the Naskah. But of course the text itself is the answer to Sutan Caniago’s request. It is the written record that he requested. And the apparently unconnected third section is the response of the colonial state to his pledge for a life lived outside of Minangkabau tradition and under the invented adat of colonial law. He has successfully generated an archive—the second section of the Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol. And although we might suspect that Sutan Caniago would have been removed or have quit his post as tuanku laras after the confrontation in 1868, we know from the third section of the Naskah that he attended both law meetings in 1865 and 1875. The Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol is the history of the Padri War, but it is also an allegory of the transition from precolonial custom and the possibility of militant Islamic radicalism to a state of discourse and colonial law. This is not merely a matter of Dutch control but a return to an era of weak kingship and consultative adat councils that was remembered as a politically stable period before the Islamic reformism of the later eighteenth century. The Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol appeals to the deliberative idiom of Minangkabau adat, to the traditional democracy of the highlands, and to a vision of a local political tradition that was egalitarian and nonviolent. After the turmoil of the Padri War, the colonial state might evoke the discursive power of what Jane Drakard has called the seventeenth-century “kingdom of words,” a time when textual authority superseded military power and Minangkabau was defined not by military muscle but by the rhetorical prowess of the court.47 45. Ibid., 319. 46. Ibid., 324. 47. Drakard, Kingdom of Words, 1999. The Dutch legal scholar Gerhardt Désiré Willinck described the cultivation system as a period when new and specialized legal practicioners disrupted a “time of adat”—a precolonial era when the discussion of law was still a popular activity. While professionalizing the practice of law the colonial state also reclassified adat into components derived from European

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Restraint and Lust in the Rumah Gadang The Dutch were by no means the first to institute laws in West Sumatra. In anticipation of the advent of a complementary Dutch-Minangkabau legal code, the early colonial administrators made a point of collecting local laws. One collection, transcribed in the port village Air Bangis in the early 1850s, was unforgiving toward people found guilty of marital infidelity: 1) Tartjintjang [cutting], taragei [shaming]. 2) Tartanda, tabetie [evidence]. a. Tartjintjang, cutting, is the multiple wounding of the man with a weapon; and ragei is the cutting of the woman’s hair so that all people can see and know the wrongful deeds that were carried out in seclusion—in the biliakchamber—or hidden shelter—forest—or a quiet place, wherever they did those evil deeds. If the cut hair is covered up as with a hair bun then the punishment is invalid. b. Tanda betie, evidence, is a wrongdoing bespoken with a love token. If the token is acquired by the shamed party, and taken as evidence of the doings of the couple and so is made known publicly, it is just. They are punished with cuts and with shame, and so justice is done. If they are placed in solitary confinement, after evidence is presented, then it is done. And if found guilty of trading “love tokens among the sleeping mats,” then they are cut and shamed, and so too is justice done.48

Laws are as much a product of state fear as they are an inverse barometer for the real doings in society.49 But in the case of these Minangkabau codes, had there not first been a “criminal” precedent, then it is likely the law would never have been drafted. From the very specific strictures cited, we can assume that forbidden liaisons took place in the seclusion of a biliak, in a bowered shelter, and hidden in the forest. And we can assume these sorts of liaisons were common enough to demand explicit punishment. It is important to bear in mind

legal presumptions. See Amin Sweeney, A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 121. 48. From the anonymous “Oendang-oendang Perpatie Sabatang,” 1850s (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, MS. Or. 12.142/VRSC 635). The manuscript bears the signature of J. A. W. van Ophuijsen on the front cover; also on the cover: “No. 20. Oendang oendang adat Ayier Bangis.” A Minangkabau law book from the Malay peninsula, transcribed in September 1875 in Penang but supposedly dating from 1700 – 1728, covers topics similar to the contemporary Dutch Police Laws. Wandering beneath a house, or in between houses, renders a man guilty of the theft of any goods missing from those houses. Sneaking into a house and startling the women is an offense punishable by fines. And “outrage” (angkara), carrying the heaviest fine, is caused by breaking into a house and frightening a girl so that she falls or is otherwise injured. Richard Winstedt, “An Old Minangkabau Legal Digest from Perak,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, no. 1 (1953). 49. See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

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that many of these laws have their basis not in some ill-defined Malay or Minangkabau culture. As with much that is considered traditional, laws about houses often follow precedents set by the prophet Muhammad and recorded in the Hadith.50 By the late nineteenth century, “traditional” laws were being refined to conform to Dutch expectations. Likewise, the creation of a residency-wide corps of professional adat specialists meant that adat—which was once defined on the level of the nagari—was now becoming generalized throughout Minangkabau. On February 16, 1895, commissioned by the Resident H. E. Prins, a Minangkabau adat official in Sijunjung compiled laws that were then transcribed by Soetan Negri of Maninjau. This was a blending of the Dutch Police Laws and the earlier Minangkabau undang-undang. These “heirloom” laws for all Minangkabau also speak of adultery. This too is the Melayu adat: for example a man comes to a judge explaining that “young Polan has committed evil deeds with my wife, once I caught them at it and they both fled, and I chased them and so was able to get some of Polan’s clothing and some of her clothing, or some hair from both of them,” then the clothing or hair will be taken by the judge, who then interrogates Polan and the wife and various other people. Answered young Polan, “It wasn’t I who committed wicked deeds with that woman.” And the wife says, “it was not I who engaged in wicked union with Polan and it’s neither our hair nor is it our clothing that you have there.” Then villagers who should know are asked to identify the clothing and they say Yes, true, those are the clothes of Polan and the clothes of the woman, or are shown the clumps of hair and confirm that it was pulled from the scalps of the couple.51

The couple, clearly guilty, must confess to their deeds. At this point an appropriate punishment will be determined. Interestingly, the ostensibly traditional law demands formal arbitration by a judge and the fairly rigorous gathering of evidence. The newly minted native lawyers and magistrates, Dutch-certified jaksa and hakim, entrenched themselves by drafting ever-more-complicated traditional legal codes. These same legalists were, in the early twentieth century, responsible for defining and codifying Minangkabau adatrecht, (adat law), an invention of the Dutch scholar Cornelis van Vollenhoven.52 Where adat had once been fluid, re50. Islamic notions of the house are discussed by Juan Eduardo Campo, The Other Sides of Paradise: Explorations into the Religious Meanings of Domestic Space in Islam (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991). 51. Fatsal 110 [67 – 68], Hossman (Oesman) galar Baginda Chatib, “Kitab Adat Limbago Alam Menang Kabau poesako Datoek Katoemanggoengan dan Datoek Perpatih sabatang,” 16 February 1895 (KITLV Handschriften Or. 183). 52. Holleman, Van Vollenhoven on Indonesian Adat Law.

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defined yearly by the nagari adat council, it became precedent law, bound up in a huge series of easily consulted tomes. The erosion of old adat was gradual, and it required the complicity of those numerous titled Minangkabau in the colonial civil service.53 The legacy of this colonial project resonates in the system of adat law used in Indonesia today. But, most important for the matriarchate, in seeking out adat authorities the colonial state turned always to the traditionalists. Datuk Soetan Maharadja, the leading Minangkabau newspaperman of the early twentieth century, saw his struggle against the Muslim reformists as a continuation of the Padri War. The adat law tomes collected his editorials and reprinted them as canon law. Soetan Maharadja argued that the law of God is that which is universal, natural, and unchangeable, something he called “cupak usali” (original measurement). “Cupak buatan” (invented measurement) is law that is specific to Minangkabau, created either by the legendary lawgivers Datuk Ketemanggungan and Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang, by adat authorities through a process of deliberation, or by wise individuals.54 Datuk Soetan Maharadja’s formulation all but eliminated shariah as a legal force in Minangkabau. In the early 1920s, the colonial state sided with the traditionalist Datuk Sanggoeno Diradjo in his debate with and legal case against the reformist Haji Rasul.55 Bertram Schrieke, the colonial sociologist, relied on Sanggoeno Diradjo’s writings as authoritative texts on custom in his 1928 report on the communist movement in West Sumatra.56 Colonial policy might have eroded the matriarchate, but colonial practice and wariness of reformist Islam favored the authority of men whose writings claimed to represent the matriarchate and tradition.

Good Housekeeping In the late nineteenth century, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture was invited to tour West Sumatra and the Minangkabau Highlands. Comparing the scenery to Switzerland—a pitch the Dutch often made when

53. Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, “Transformations and Change in Minangkabau,” in Change and Continuity in Minangkabau: Local, Regional, and Historical Perspectives on West Sumatra, ed. Lynn L. Thomas and Franz von Benda-Beckmann (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1985). 54. Datoek Soetan Maharadja, “Artikelen van Datoek Soetan Maharadja in De Oetoesan Melajoe (1911 – 1913),” Adatrechtbundel XXVII: Sumatra, Commissie voor het Adatrecht (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1928), 297 – 98. For Soeharto-era parallels, see Evelyn Blackwood, “Representing Women: The Politics of Minangkabau Adat Writings,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 1 (2001). 55. Jeffrey Hadler, “Immemorial Custom in the Balance: Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah, Datuk Sanggoeno Di Radjo, and Islam versus Adat in 1919” (paper presented at the conference on Muslim Societies of Southeast Asia: Perspectives from Anthropology, History and Literature, University of California, Berkeley, November 15, 2003). 56. Schrieke, “Development of the Communist Movement.”

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luring tourists to Minangkabau—he traveled to Padang Panjang, where he stayed in a “comfortable hotel of brick and thatch, after the Dutch style.” David G. Fairchild declared that the natives must be a “wealthy race,” judging by the evident cost and beauty of their houses: The interiors of these houses are not without modern conveniences in the way of comfortable beds, with pillows and canopies, the better of the latter being often decorated with curious and showy pendent ornaments made entirely of the white pith of some tropical plant. These houses are more comfortable than those of any other race in the Dutch East Indies, and seem luxurious when compared with the dirty hovels of the Maories or the pebble-floored homes of the Samoans.57

Minangkabau and European sensibilities were beginning to meld; travelers of the mid-1800s might have found Minangkabau houses remarkable but never “comfortable.” But, similar to Fairchild, an American woman traveling in Minangkabau in 1914 described the interiors of Minangkabau houses: At the back and ends are small sleeping-rooms, a house sometimes containing as many as fifteen. In rich families these are supplied with bedsteads and mattresses, covered by the overhanging sheet edged with crochet-work, which is seen in every Dutch home in the East Indies. Tables, chairs, hanging-lamps, clocks, framed pictures, sewing-machines, and graphophones [for wax cylinder recordings] are frequently found.58

The adapted fashions were not always decorative. Moralistic texts warned men to avoid temptations (prostitutes and gambling) and to uphold the famili. If you start to enjoy gambling, You will want to pawn padi and field; Paying no mind to a hungry stomach, Never recalling children, nephews and nieces. Permainan djoedi kalau disoekakan, Sawah dan ladang maoe menggadaikan; Tidak pedoeli peroet ta’ makan, Tidak terkenang anak kemenakan.59

The most interesting books—those that maintained ethnographic distance and often considered the Dutch as imitable anthropological subjects—were pi57. David G. Fairchild, “Sumatra’s West Coast,” National Geographic Magazine 9, no. 11 (1898): 453 – 54. 58. Carrie Chapman Catt, “A Survival of Matriarchy,” Harper’s Magazine (April 1914): 741. 59. Maamoen, SjaGir Pendjoedi dan Nasihat kepada Anak Moeda-Moeda (Fort de Kock: Modjtsan

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oneered by the Chinese community of Batavia ( Jakarta).60 These books were widely available in West Sumatra, as attested by the booksellers’ advertisements in the local newspapers. The first local Minangkabau behavioral handbook was written in 1921, in Arabic script, by A. Latif, a Bonjol Alam-based adat expert. Latif was a familiar contributor to the women’s newspaper Soenting Melajoe (Malay Ornament) and the adat-traditionalist Oetoesan Melajoe (Malay Messenger). Husband and Wife was picked up the following year by the state publishing house Balai Pustaka, and it saw at least eight print runs over a span of twenty years.61 Although the colonial publisher pitched the book as a general guide for adults planning to marry, the themes and situations are Minangkabauist. All editions make use of the journal Soenting Melajoe and quote the local educator Zainuddin Labai—even though both writer and journal had died in the 1920s. Latif asserts that there are four definite levels of interaction: adat negri (nagari; custom), agama (religion), ilmu kesehatan badan (physical health), and adat sopan yang umum (public etiquette). The book discusses only that last form, public etiquette. Latif sets up an exemplary Minangkabau family: two good parents, two dutiful children. The son is sent to a Dutch primary school when he turns six years old; the daughter attends a village elementary school. Mother divides their afterschool home-time into three discrete sections: personal hygiene, home economics (beladjar bekerdja diroemah tangga), and school work. The boy dreams of becoming a government scribe. On graduation, he takes a position in the assistant resident’s office, where he rises rapidly and at nineteen years of age is promoted to police officer. Father is soon approached with offers of engagement for his son, who capitulates willingly. The son, betrothed, is given domestic advice. This is the theme of the book. He is told the meaning of isteri (wife) and the importance of good relations with his in-laws and wife’s extended family, her keluarga.62 The book continues, advising on the correct sort of relationship a man should have with his kampung (village) and nagari. It covers the moral duties of a husband and father, asserting that monogamy is preferable. [Tsamaratoelechwan], ca. 1920), 32. Incidentally, the clothes that most signify destitution are the tjelana Djokdja (Jogja trousers) that remain popular today. 60. One book describes the “manner and responsibility of being a parent to one’s children, a child to one’s parents, husband and wife, siblings, friends and acquaintances, etc.” B. S. The, Occidental Customs: Hadat Sopan Bangsa Europa (Batavia: Tjiong Koen Bie, 1915). The earliest book was written by a Eurasian, F. L. Winter, Kitab Pri Halnja Adat Sopan dan Lembaga dari Bangsa Wolanda, 2nd ed. (Betawi: Albrecht & Co., 1898). 61. A. Latif, Soeami Isteri (Weltevreden: Balai Poestaka, 1924). An identical eighth edition appeared in 1941. 62. This is the modern Indonesian term for family, derived from Sanskrit. As far as I know, Latif is the first published use of the term in the Minangkabau context, where rumah tangga (house and ladder), orang isi rumah (people of a house), or even familie were preferred.

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Advice to the daughter is even more specific. She must learn to order her housework and prepare a schedule. It is best to wake at 5:30 to clean. The hours from 1:30 to 3:00 and 5:00 to 7:00 are for personal relaxation; the rest of her day is efficient housework. More advice follows on shopping and using a ledger and on the importance of cleanliness and of clothing. There are passages on lying and on coping with polygyny (bermadu, co-wives). Finally, Latif addresses the daughter’s moral imperative when her husband is not at home and when she is attending entertainments in public spaces. The advice to daughters is strikingly secular. There is no mention of the Islamic morning prayers or the dusk call to prayer—still the most common mode of conceptualizing time in West Sumatra. And although watches and clocks were available, they were considered luxury items and could hardly have been part of the average bride’s accoutrements. For the majority of Minangkabau, an hourly reckoning of time would have been possible only when near the clock tower in Bukittinggi or within earshot of a passing train’s whistle.63 The year after Latif ’s book was published by Balai Pustaka, a similar text appeared in West Sumatra. Latif wrote for would-be couples, but B. Dt. Seri Maharadja’s book was meant for recent immigrants to Minangkabau, local students, and youths.64 Maharadja is an arbiter elegantiarum who in his introduction tells a story of cross-cultural misunderstanding and of the need for books such as his. With increased migration and travel, cultural guidebooks were becoming necessary. Unlike Latif’s book, which is sanctimonious and moralistic, Maharadja’s is delightfully frank and occasionally crass. Along with the basic Minangkabau customs for greeting friends and entering houses, and warnings against what are fairly universal crimes, Maharadja covers important and often taboo essentials. For example, when one is sitting in a group, it is important not to fart; and if one yawns, the mouth should be covered. When going to the toilet (to defecate) it is proper to cover the head, wear clogs, and keep one’s genitals shielded; there should be no talking—one should not call out to people except with a small cough—and cleaning must be performed with the left hand. When going to the river (to urinate), one should find a sheltered place and not stand up if exposed. It is improper to sleep at the house of one’s sister, and a man may never sleep naked or with his pants untied in a bed with his sister.65 Maharadja continues pragmatically, explaining the different meaning of Minangkabau 63. One woman, born in 1912, describes a childhood in which the “train became the clock,” letting her know when to cook meals, when to come to supper, and when to go to school. Aman, Nostalgia Liau Andeh, 63, 65. 64. B. Dt. Seri Maharadja, Kitab A G dat Sopan Santoen Orang Minangkabau (Fort de Kock: “Merapi” & Co., 1922). 65. Maharadja, Kitab A G dat Sopan Santoen, 75 – 80. In the case of sisters and incest taboos, Maharadja perhaps is referring in the first case to a sister who has married and established a household of her own and in the second case to a sister who still lives in the rumah gadang with the mother.

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names, titles, and kinship terms. He concludes with letter-writing etiquette and gives examples of how to write formal letters to the government. It is telling that Latif’s book enjoyed a long life throughout the archipelago, whereas Maharadja’s guide, even with the backing of a major local publisher, seemingly disappeared. Balai Pustaka was, at the time, actively soliciting manuscripts in West Sumatra. Latif ’s high-handed “improving” book was the sort of text the colonial government wished to promulgate. Had the book not sold well, however, it would never have been reprinted eight times. Despite its usefulness (to historians), Maharadja’s book probably did not have the untapped readership of confused immigrants he envisioned. It is unlikely that many nonMinangkabau were ever given the opportunity to live “as a Minangkabau,” and so the book was for the most part an unnecessary curiosity. For travelers and rantau-dwellers, the Minangkabau journalist Adinegoro’s Progressive Dictionary of ideological buzzwords was far more practical.66

The Happy Home Once the dutiful sons and daughters had been married off, they had to find ways to implement Latif-like advice in a changing world. Newspapers of the day featured articles not unlike Husband and Wife. Women compared Dutch and Malay notions of the “happy home.”67 They were warned to avoid lead pipes and arsenic-tainted green wallpaper.68 Minangkabau women needed to learn how to clean their houses; they should follow the example of the Javanese middle class, who not only understood hygiene but whose men were obligated to assist in homemaking duties.69 Minangkabau observed Dutch fashions and tried to make functional sense of the whitewashed walls, paper flowers, and stainedglass windows, with mixed success.70

Modern Women and Modernist Muslims It was easier, perhaps, for those progressive kemadjoean-influenced women who sought to emulate Dutch households. Women who grew up in the tradition of reformist Islam often faced a kind of social split-personality. Reformist Islam in Minangkabau advocated a sound education for girls and even women’s politi66. Adi Negoro, Kamoes Kemadjoean: Modern Zakwoordenboek (Gouda: G. B. van Goor Zonen, 1928). 67. Sitti Sahara, “Roemah jang berbahagia,” Perempoean Bergerak 1.1, 15 May 1919, pp. 3 – 4. 68. St. Besar, “Roemah Yang Sehat,” Saudara Hindia 1.7, 1913, pp. 102 – 3. 69. R. Djoewita, “Boenji lezingnja: Seorang perempoean di Tanah Djawa R. Djoewita di Soerabaja,” Soenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Minang Kabau 6.15, 20 April 1917, pp. 2 – 3. 70. Tj. Tim, “Kêsehatan,” Soenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Minang Kabau 6.2, 12 January 1917, p. 1. The blue glass repels flies.

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cal activism, but turned to strict and literal interpretations of the Quran and Hadith in resolving matters of domesticity. “Modern” women and Islamic “modernists”—mutually opposed—again found themselves at odds over the form of the Minangkabau house and family. A reporter calling herself “village girl” raged in the Islamic-feminist Asjraq against the custom of child brides, describing a girl who had climbed a tree to observe her own wedding negotiations. The writer claims that girls often have between “9 or 3” years added to their ages, so children twelve to fifteen years of age can be offered for marriage, circumventing state and religious restrictions on marriage. She continues, Is this sort of marriage everlasting? Don’t expect it. The husband will get sick of seeing his wife’s childish behavior, and the wife will feel trapped and try to escape her marital bonds, even if in some inadvisable manner. So frequently we meet with women who are 20 to 25 years old, and have already been married 4 or 5 times and have 3 or 4 children from different fathers. So it is that marriage is sampled haphazardly.71

The reformist Muslim scholars had their own problems with the morality of the traditional Minangkabau marriage. Although serial marriage and child brides were not actively promoted by these men, the extended-family form of the Minangkabau longhouse was most upsetting to them. Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah (Haji Rasul), the father of the populist Muslim reformist Hamka, wrote of this in 1929 in his Kitab Cermin Terus: Improper behavior at home Gentlemen! In truth something we do has become habitual although it is absolutely haram [forbidden]. I will explain it now so that it is understood. Regarding its practice at home it just seems normal to each of us! That is when we as husband and wife have domestic contact with our wife’s sisters—adiknya [younger sister] and kakaknya ipar [elder sister] are the terms we use. Or the sisters of our mother-in-law—in-laws too we call them. These sorts of affairs are definitely occurring in our nagari: so it is when our wife lives in the house of our family—that is our mother’s house for matrilineal children and cousins. Doubtless there will be a mamak there. A maternal uncle. Nephews and nieces 71. Gadis doesoen, “Perkawinan soeatoe permainan,” Asjraq 3.5 – 6, May – Juni 1927, p. 43. The author might have been Selasih, one of the first Indonesian women novelists. A documentary film made shortly before her death in 1995 discusses her pen names. “Her pseudonyms were various: Seri Tanjung, Ibu Sejati, Mande Rubiah, Bundo Kandung, Kak Sarinah, Sikejut, and Gelinggang. According to her, she did this so that the journal Asjaraq [Asjraq]—in 1928 it changed its name to Suara Kaum Ibu Sumatera—would not appear to have been written by just one author. Yet she also admitted, ‘What really amused me, when I was young I wanted to hide and I wanted to be sought.’” Eka Budianta and Jajang C. Noer, “Nama Saya Selasih,” On the Record: Film Transcripts and Biographical Information [booklet accompanying the DVD] ( Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2004), 25.

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Muslims and Matriarchs and other relatives! Moreover according to the holy religion, between us and the family of our wife, besides our mother in-law and matriline . . . from our maternal grandmother on down, and besides our own daughters and our adopted daughters . . . everyone else is an outsider and we may marry them after we have divorced our own wife! So too may our wife and our male relative marry in order to replace us [in case of death]! This is called sebelah lapik [dividing or changing the sleeping mat].72

In fact, the practice of “changing the mat” was equally applicable if a widower married one of his wife’s sisters. This, too, being adat, it was entirely likely that a man would view the female occupants of his wife’s longhouse, the place where he slept, as potential spouses.73 Such a lustful situation was intolerable for Haji Rasul, who continued, (Hence) That which I have called haram but has already become habitual, that is the fact that men and women who are not mukhrim [muhrim, a level of intimate kinship that makes marriage impossible] are usually left alone together in certain place. Namely when we are with someone in the house (for instance) we usually enter a house even when our brother’s wife is alone in the house. She is not our woman or our mother in-law . . . or when our brother visits his elder sister’s house according to adat. While the only person in the house is our wife or some other woman, then this sort of action is clearly haram according to all the Islamic authorities.74

Like the “village girl” writing in Asjraq, Haji Rasul also found fault with Minangkabau marriage practices. Visitors to West Sumatra clucked at the ease of divorce and remarriage among the Minangkabau. Parada Harahap, a journalist touring West Sumatra in late 1925, wrote disapprovingly of women who had been married as many as six times, gathering prestige from the adat titles of husbands.75 Minangkabau marriage contracts are famously generous with regard to a woman’s right to divorce her husband if he does not provide basic maintenance money.76 Although he himself was a habitual divorcé, Haji Rasul took particular of-

72. Abdul Karim Amrullah, Kitab Cermin Terus: Berguna Untuk Pengurus-Penglihat Jalan yang Lurus (Fort de Kock: Typ Drukkerij “BAROE,” 1929 – 1930), 153 – 54. Original in Jawi (Arabic Malay), my transliteration. 73. Marzoeki gr B. M., “Petata-petiti adat Menangkebau,” sec. “Menikar (menggantikan lapik),” 12r. 74. Amrullah, Kitab Cermin Terus, 153 – 54. 75. Parada Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai: Perdjalanan ke-Soematra October – Dec. 1925 dan Maart – April 1926, vol. 1 (Weltevreden: Uitgevers Maatschappij “Bintang Hindia”, 1926), 75. 76. See the divorce formulations in the 1927 adat law collections, translated in Cora VreedeDe Stuers, The Indonesian Woman: Struggles and Achievements (The Hague: Mouton, 1960), 169.

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fense at the practice known as cino buto (in Indonesian, cina buta [blind Chinaman]). In Islam, a man can divorce his wife, repudiating her with a formula called the talak. After one or two pronouncements of the talak, reconciliation is still possible. But once the third talak has been uttered, then the divorce is irrevocable without the woman first marrying and divorcing another man in the interim. In Minangkabau, it seems, the dreaded triple talak was delivered impetuously and often. The “blind Chinaman”—this phrase probably a corruption of cindur buta (blind affection)—was a man who served as a sort of professional transitional husband. The inappropriateness of this practice, and its questionable grounding in the authoritative texts of Islam, was the topic of a tract by Haji Rasul.77 As with most of his anti-adat diatribes, Haji Rasul was preaching to the choir; there is no evidence that divorce in Minangkabau was curbed whatsoever. It must be remembered that data on marriage and divorce in Minangkabau during the colonial period is almost entirely anecdotal. As late as 1937, the ulama of West Sumatra were prepared to fight to prevent the Dutch from requiring that marriages be formally registered.78 Only during the national period have such records been maintained.

Building a House—1930 Despite assaults from European- and Middle Eastern-style moralists, the Minangkabau longhouse was transformed, adapted, and ultimately survived the period of Dutch colonialism. The form of the “traditional rumah gadang” is used in museums in Padang and Bukittinggi today, but the living house never became a museum piece. The changes in the shape of the house were echoed in the semantic transformations of the family. The grand, extended clan of relations was replaced by multiple options and definitions. Haji Rasul in his writings often used the word famili to highlight the conflict between Islamic and Minangkabau concepts of family. Mohammad Hatta, the future vice president, remembered his childhood on the outskirts of Bukittinggi. For Hatta, the traditional Minangkabau extended family was an artifact of village life, introduced to him by his postman grandfather. In town and in Hatta’s own household, he experienced keluarga 77. On this text by Haji Rasul, see Hamka, Ayahku: Riwayat Hidup Dr. Abdul Karim Amrullah dan Perjuangan Kaum Agama di Sumatra, 4th ed. ( Jakarta: Umminda, 1982), 121 – 29. See also the catalog of manuscripts in M. Sanusi Latief et al., Studi Tentang Karya Tulis Dr. H. Abdul Karim Amrullah: Riwayat hidup ringkas, Karya tulis, dan Content Analysis, vol. 1 (Padang: privately published, 1988). 78. Audrey R. Kahin, “Repression and Regroupment: Religious and Nationalist Organizations in West Sumatra in the 1930s,” Indonesia 38 (1984): 49. Marriage registration was required elsewhere in the colony; Adriaan Hendrik van Ophuijsen, De Huwelijksordonnantie en Hare Uitvoering, doctoral dissertation for the Faculty of Law, Leiden University (Leiden: P. W. M. Trap, 1907).

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yang bercorak individuil (individual family forms). For urban Minangkabau, the unity of mother-father-child was fundamental, “Often too this was called a small family (keluarga kecil)—and some used the term famili—to indicate a connection to a collective family (keluarga besar) that lived in the village.”79 There is some irony in the fact that the Dutch themselves were not immune from the machinations of their native elite. In 1930, after the Silungkang communist uprisings, the Dutch government commissioned a longhouse, a “Roemah Adat Alam Minangkabau,” for export to the colonial exposition in Paris.80 Accommodating craftsmen, organized by the district chief of the Tilatang IV Angkat region, chiseled and gouged and created a vastly overpriced “traditional” monstrosity. This house was reduced to cinders in the mysterious fire that consumed the Dutch pavilion in late June 1931.81 The Minangkabau longhouse, the symbol of Minangkabau tradition, had proved to be an adaptable weapon in the battle for cultural preservation. Certainly the state was not barred from entering the house in the form of laws and taxes. A colonial native elite corrupted the shape of the longhouse, making the house a central trapping of Dutch-sanctioned status. New social movements—most notably reformist Islam and Western-style progressivism—attacked conventional perceptions of the longhouse. But the “traditional” Minangkabau house proved to be far less monolithic than its critics had suggested. The rumah gadang longhouse did not stand unchanged through the colonial period, but it did stand. 79. Mohammad Hatta, Memoir ( Jakarta: Tintamas, 1979), 12. 80. Datoek Radja Intan, Verslag Tentang Mendirikan “Roemah Adat Alam Minangkabau” di Biaro, Jang Akan Dikirim ke Int. Kol. Tentoonstelling di Parijs Tahoen 1931 (Fort de Kock: Typ. Drukkerij “Agam”, 1930). 81. Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900 – 1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 229.

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Educating Children

In the nineteenth century, villagers in West Sumatra grew up with divergent ideas of a house and a family. Parenthood was debated and negotiated by mothers and aunts, fathers and uncles. Both reformist Islam and the colonial state favored patriarchy but mistrusted one another. The matriarchate navigated between these two ideological forces. Whereas reformism and colonialism situated their authority in the universal and absolute truths of the Quran and Hadith and of post-Enlightenment ideals, the matriarchate saw itself as essentially local and fluid. Beyond the house and family, the three-way dialectic continued. Children attended schools that almost always deployed conflicting pedagogies. Girls and boys heard of the matriarchate at home, learned about Islam in the surau, and received a European education in the “native” schools established by the Dutch. The great statesman Haji Agus Salim attended elementary school in the early 1890s in the village of Koto Gadang. In a lecture that demonstrates the ease with which he juggled the pedagogies of Islam, the colonial state, and the matriarchate, he recalled: My religious education was quite correct. Besides that, in the house of my father I had also the traditional religion as a member of the Minangkabau community. That is that I heard the legends of my people. And besides that too we got education as members of the Malay people, having read to us and reading ourselves the classics of the Malay people. So that part was rather complete, and when at the age of 13 I was sent away from home to go to the high-school in Djakarta, I had finished the Malay and Muslim first part of religion. Then I started the schooling according to Western rules. I started, as a matter of fact, when I was 7 years old, going to a Dutch primary school. . . . I belong, I think, to the first score of the human rabbits which were experi-

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mented upon with western education. . . . Well, I think that first score did a rather good job.1

Schools and Children For Minangkabau children, the experience of going to school was transformative. Competing pedagogies combined with contested ideas of house and family to destabilize their self-conception. For Minangkabau boys and girls, an Islamic education at the prayerhouse and practical lessons at home were central to their experience of childhood and passage into adulthood. Even in the precolonial era, large religious institutions attracted students from throughout the region, and by the late nineteenth century a network of colonial schools joined the prayerhouses in establishing a kind of pre-adult educational rantau. In the early twentieth century, the rise of secular and Islamic-reformist colleges made participation in a community of students, removed from the family and house, a controversial part of Minangkabau life. It was in the village schools of West Sumatra, and not the Dutch academies in Batavia and Leiden or the universities and madrasa of Cairo and Mecca, that Indonesian intellectuals were first forged.

Surau From Syekh Jalaluddin’s Padri-era memoir we learn of the late-eighteenth century Islamic reform movement in West Sumatra.2 Schools and networks of ulama were cosmopolitan and not always village-based. Reformists, with peculiarly Arab habits, were beginning to make inroads into the heartland. And important tarekat centers, with particularly potent teachers, had long attracted supplicants. Before the Padri War was won, in 1833, the Dutch had recognized the need for Western education in the highlands. Writing on April 5, 1824, Colonel Nahuijs sighed that only in Padang, where an “Evangelical English missionary Mr. Evans” had gathered sufficient funds, was there a Western-style school.3 The ensuing development of a system of colonial schooling is discussed later in the chapter. Jalaluddin’s memoir, however, is the only real source of information on precolonial Minangkabau education. As the colonial schools were established through the mid-nineteenth century, Dutch officials paid some 1. Agus Salim, “Hadji Agus Salim dan Agama Islam,” in Hadji Agus Salim: Hidup dan Perdjuangannja, ed. Solichin Salam (Djakarta: Djajamurni, 1961), 79. Agus Salim was speaking at a seminar at Cornell University in 1953 and the original text, with ellipses, is in English. 2. Forty men is the minimum required for Friday prayers at a mosque, as determined by the Shafii school of law. Djilâl-Eddîn, “Surat Keterangan,” 6 – 14. 3. Nahuijs, “Extracts from the Letters,” 186.

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attention to the presence of a network of prayerhouses that extended far beyond the village and nagari. In the 1860s, Arnold Willem Pieter Verkerk Pistorius did research on the prayerhouses of the highlands, paying attention to the “priest and his influence on society.” In his study, Verkerk Pistorius concentrated on the “Iron Bridge” Surau in the town of Silungkang, considered to be the largest prayerhouse in the highlands.4 Since returning from Mecca, Haji Mohammed, the Tuanku Syekh of Silungkang managed to attract more than 1,000 students to his institution. Some of the buildings in the prayerhouse compound were donated by the people of the nagari Sulit Air and 13 Kota. Students made use of the library, took their morning meals at nearby coffeehouses, and steeled themselves against the temptations of women and opium.5 Ten years after Verkerk Pistorius did his research, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje inspected the religious tracts used at this prayerhouse. He was especially interested in the Jawi script, Minangkabau marginalia that glossed the Arabic text. Although he was impressed by the books, Snouck cautioned that it was not likely that the students all attained their teachers’ level of learning.6 None of these early studies gives even a glimpse into the everyday world of the prayerhouse. Other writings by Minangkabau are more revealing. Mahmud Yunus was an early reformist, a romanizer of the Quran, and the founder of his own prominent madrasah.7 In the late 1950s, he established himself as the chronicler of “modernist” Muslim pedagogy in Indonesia. His History of Islamic Education in Indonesia recalls lesson plans, course schedules, and textbooks—the new pedagogical technologies adopted by the reformist ulama.8 Still, Yunus offers little insight into the experience of school beyond the classroom. Hamka, a keen observer of Minangkabau history, falters too when discussing the school system. His own father, Haji Rasul, was a powerful reformist, and Hamka gives a fairly thin description of the classroom, insisting that he was usually truant.9 For the best description of the prayerhouse, we must turn to the memoirs of Hamka’s older kinsman, Nur Sutan Iskandar’s Childhood Experiences.

4. Note that this Surau Jembatan Besi Silungkang was not connected to the later reformist surau of the same name in Padang Panjang. 5. Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 188 – 211. The particular chapter was first published as “De Priester en Zijn Invloed op de Samenleving in de Padangsche Bovenlanden,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië (3rd ser.), no. 2 (1869). 6. C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Een en Ander over het Inlandsch Onderwijs in de Padangsche Bovenlanden,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde, special Orientalist Congress volume (1883): 57 – 84. 7. Mahmud Yunus, Riwayat Hidup Prof. Dr. H. Mahmud Yunus: 10 Pebruari 1899 – 16 Januari 1982 ( Jakarta: Hidakarya Agung, 1982). 8. Mahmud Yunus, Sejarah Pendidikan Islam di Indonesia, 3rd ed. ( Jakarta: Mutiara Sumber Widya, 1992). The book was originally written in the 1950s. 9. Hamka, Kenang-kenangan Hidup 1: Dimasa Ketjil (Djakarta: Gapura, 1951).

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Iskandar was born in Sungai Batang, on the shore of the volcanic-crater lake Maninjau, on November 3, 1893. Maninjau was an unusual area. In the 1850s, two Chinese brothers had settled there, collecting shellac and nutmeg for export.10 They eventually converted to Islam, took Muslim names in Mecca, and integrated into the local population. In 1902, the Dutch Controleur C. Lulofs promoted the planting of cinnamon, along with coffee, in the rich soil of the crater walls. In this way, the Maninjauers maintained a real cash-crop income throughout the cultivation system and forced planting of coffee.11 Sungai Batang was the home base of Haji Rasul, and by 1924 this small village became the seedbed for Muhammadiyah in the Minangkabau region.12 But, in his memoirs, Iskandar recalls the first decade of the twentieth century, when religious education was still dominated by so-called traditionalist ulama. At the time of his writing, Iskandar had worked as an administrator for the colonial publishing house Balai Pustaka, and his 1948 memoir was admittedly inspired by the European bildungsroman and educational literature.13 The account is, therefore, particularly artful; it remains, however, extremely important. Iskandar describes his initiation into a large lakeside prayerhouse not far from his longhouse. One Friday, when he was not yet six years old, the head of the surau came to his parents’ house, “After eating and drinking, my father turned me over to him, so that I would be taught to read the Quran. While speaking, surrendering me up, father handed him a whip of braided palm leaf ribs, so he could beat me, if I was disobedient or naughty.”14 This was the inauspicious introduction to a set of experiences that traumatized young Iskandar. The prayerhouse consisted of one grand square room with two end-chambers—one for the books and teaching materials, the other for the teacher’s bed. At night, there were no lamps and no light. The boys slept on mats, lined up against the walls, in a group. For Iskandar, all of this would have been fine had 10. The source for this refers to damar sarang, which I have translated as shellac although it means literally “nest resin.” See M. N. Soetan Ma’aroef, Riwajat X Koto Manindjau (Manindjau: Comitie Pembangoen Sekolah P. M. I., 1931), 13 – 19. It is possible that the damar sarang was a kind of tree resin or edible bird’s nest; that Maninjau was a source of these nests is confirmed in Bickmore, Travels in the East Indian Archipelago, 402. It is also possible that Ma’aroef forgot a comma and meant both resin and nest. 11. Soetan Ma’aroef, Riwajat X Koto Manindjau. Lulofs (in Ma’aroef, “Lueluf ”) was active throughout the highlands at this time, helping to establish modern markets with fixed storefronts and to do away with weekly rotational pasar. C. Lulofs, “Passar Inrichting en Pasarbeheer,” Tijdschrift van het Binnenlandsch Bestuur 46 (1914), app. 4. 12. Muhammadiyah, founded in Central Java in 1912, was a reformist Muslim organization that looked to contemporary Egyptian ideals and European pedagogical trends. The Minangkabau branch was particularly strict in its interpretation of the Quran. Alfian, Muhammadiyah: The Political Behavior of a Muslim Modernist Organization under Dutch Colonialism (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1989), 244 – 45. 13. Iskandar, Pengalaman Masa Kecil, 7. 14. Ibid., 14.

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he not developed a problem with bedwetting. Unlike his longhouse, the prayerhouse had no convenient outhouse in the back, just a privy built over the lake. Each night, he had to slip away, carrying his wet and soiled mattress, bundled up and hidden. He grew fearful of the other boys, rattled by their daily taunting, and began to close himself off from the world of children. Iskandar endured the shame of asking his mother and grandmother to wash his pants and bedding every morning. Finally, his mother’s younger brother, Iskandar’s mamak and ideally his protector, wrote in large letters on a piece of white paper, “Little Manun [Iskandar’s childhood name] wets his bed.” Everyone in the prayerhouse gathered and jeered. At this point, the prayerhouse became like a “tiger’s den,” intolerable, and Iskandar shut himself into his longhouse. Although he stopped bedwetting once he turned six, he never forgot the experience, and he offers it to readers as a confessional object lesson of prayerhouse misery.15 These memories overwhelm his other prayerhouse recollections. Muhamad Radjab, whose memoir A Village Childhood (1913 – 1928) describes life by the crater lake Singkarak, found the prayerhouse to be a more benign experience. His own father was a traditionalist Islamic leader, with his own surau. It was there that young “Ridjal” spent his nights, with between twelve and twenty other boys and a few stray grandfathers. From eight in the morning until one in the afternoon, the boys of Sumpur went to school. They were then free to play until dinner, when they would eat at their mothers’ houses. After sunset prayers, they returned to the prayerhouse and studied the Quran until evening prayers. The boys would try to coax the married men of the village to sleep at the surau and talk about the world of adults. Whenever a man returned from travels in the rantau, he was thronged by prayerhouse boys and spent the night telling stories of far-away places.16 Nur Sutan Iskandar’s jaundiced account is unusually bitter in recalling the long nights in the village prayerhouse. In more recent years, the prayerhouse has become a focus of considerable nostalgia among Minangkabau men.17 Because the prayerhouse existed beyond the realm of the longhouse—the most oppressive institution in conventional male Minangkabau narratives of rantau-escape— it has remained a safe peg on which wistful remembrances can be hung.

Colonial Education Both Radjab and Iskandar went to sekolah (school), as well as the prayerhouse. Although sekolah was a term adapted from the Dutch word school, by the early 15. Ibid., 19 – 22. 16. Radjab, Semasa Ketjil Dikampung, 21 – 24. 17. See, for example, Azyumardi Azra, “Surau di Tengah Krisis: Pesantren dalam Perspektif Masyarakat,” in Pergulatan Dunia Pesantren: Membangun dari Bawah, ed. M. Dawam Rahardjo ( Jakarta: Perhimpunan Pengembangan Pesantren dan Masyarakat, 1985).

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twentieth century sekolah was no longer a foreign concept in West Sumatra. The first resident of the Padang Highlands, Carel Philip Conrad Steinmetz, began to establish secular primary schools in the mid-1840s.18 With some colonial guidance, the schools were set up to be locally run and locally financed; by 1847, they were producing trained clerks capable of managing the coffee warehouses. School was held in a balai (customary meetinghouse) or in the warehouse itself. There were four distinct grades, and all students were welcome as long as they were prepared to use the Malay language and wear officially sanctioned “native” dress.19 With mixed success, the 1850s and 1860s brought an explosion of nagari schools through the highlands and along the coast.20 A Kweekschool, a teachers’ training college, was established in Bukittinggi in 1856. But in the 1850s a Dutch epidemiologist clucked that regardless of all the school construction, still fewer than thirty children in 200,000 were being educated—just 1/6,000.21 In the 1870s, in an era of economic liberalization, the Indies underwent a process of total educational reorganization and standardization. A Dutch royal decree in 1871 made the colonial state responsible for indigenous education. The new (in 1867) Department of Education, Religion, and Industry took control of a diffuse network of schools. State interest and capital added considerable prestige to a native school diploma. As Elizabeth Graves explains, it was at this time, in 1872, that the Kweekschool Fort de Kock became known formally as the Sekolah Radja, the School of Kings.22 Although the Sekolah Radja was still prone to public criticism, the graduates began to have an impact on society in Minangkabau.23 It is difficult to point to a representative individual among the Sekolah Radja alumni or the ranks of schoolteachers, not all of whom were kweekschool graduates. The personalities of schoolschrift writers occasionally emerge from usually anonymous texts. Certain prominent teachers warrant mention in the colonial records; but no teacher published cohesive memoirs. We are fortunate, then, that the manuscript collection of the Cornell Olin Library acquired a bundle of documents that are now titled the Archives of Oemar gelar Soetan Negeri.24 18. H. E. Steinmetz, “Inlands Onderwijs van Overheidswege in de Padangsche bovenlanden vóór 1850. De Grondlegger. Zijn Invloed en Zijn Persoonlijke Bemoeienissen op dit Gebied,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 64, no. 1 – 2 (1924). 19. Graves, Minangkabau Response, 77 – 80. Graves gives the most detailed analysis of the development of these schools. I have also consulted the Verslag van het Inlandsch Onderwijs in NederlandschIndie over 1869 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1872), 145 – 56. 20. Each school is discussed in detail by Graves, Minangkabau Response, 89 – 104. 21. Ludeking, Natuur- en Geneeskundige Topographie van Agam, 88. 22. Graves, Minangkabau Response, 111 – 14. 23. However, a Dutch academic research team that visited Minangkabau in the late 1870s claimed that the school was without purpose. Hasselt, Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra, 54. 24. Twenty-some letters, certificates, contracts, and stories are bundled as the “Archives of Oemar gelar Soetan Negeri, 1866 – 1922,” Cornell Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, ++MSS DS O28 1920.

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Born in the town of Bonjol, in 1866, Oemar seems to have been a typical native schoolteacher. In 1880, while still a student at his village school in Bonjol, he received a letter from Batavia appointing him teacher’s assistant there. This was a training period; on December 26, 1888, Oemar passed the examination and was promoted to fully fledged assistant teacher (hulponderwijzer). His professional life was spent teaching in his hometown, Bonjol, and in the nearby towns Palembayan and Matur, all located in the northern reaches of the Minangkabau heartland. His career was summarized midstream in an official Dutch-language report: Service record of Si Oemar galar Soetan Negeri, Native assistant teacher born in Bondjol (Padang Highlands), 32 years old, compiled in Matoea on the 23rd of May, 1898. As a student in Bondjol he was given a monthly salary of three gulden. Appointed assistant teacher in Bonjol. Reassigned to Palembajan, with adjunct responsibilities in Bondjol. Received first five-year salary raise on March 1st, 1894. Reassigned to Matoea.

The salary of a hulponderwijzer was not great. But the position was part of the colonial bureaucracy, and it gave teachers access to Dutch officials and avocational opportunities. Oemar was called on to oversee nagari-based adat meetings. As a trusted local contact, the Dutch administration in Padang relied on him for assistance in negotiating the granting of local mining rights; the Archives contain the record of his efforts from 1908 to 1915. When on July 1, 1916, Oemar requested his pension from the Governor-General, he had accumulated substantial wealth and was able to maintain a large extended family. In a stamboek (family history), Oemar described his four marriages. His first wife was Roekajah, the daughter of the coffee administrator in Padang Panjang. Married in 1880, she was probably a child bride—her father, a well-connected official, might have seen a good match in the promising young teacher. Oemar and Roekajah did not have a child until 1892, five years after the birth of Oemar’s first child from his second marriage. When his stamboek was prepared in 1915, his second and third wives were already deceased; Roekajah was still living in Padang. In a 1919 letter detailing the sale and control of rice fields, Oemar held at least f 2139 worth of land. This sort of property, called harto pencarian (individually acquired wealth), was not unusual in a society in which land was controlled corporately by matrilineal longhouses. It would upon inheritance be incorporated into the ancestral holdings ( pusako) of a matriline. In a will prepared in 1922, he left this land, and more, to the three living children of his first wife. Like Oemar, Nur Sutan Iskandar began his career as hulponderwijzer in his local native school, although he ended up in Batavia working for the Balai Pustaka publishing house. The school was far from his village, and Iskandar, already set back by his moistly traumatic experiences in the prayerhouse, started

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late. But by 1908, when he was fifteen years old, Iskandar was appointed magang (or guru kwekeling; teacher trainee). Although he still studied and took tests, he was now permitted to wear special clothes—batik trousers, a sarong of Jogja cloth, a white satin jacket, and a black silk cap. In 1911, he passed the final examination and was promoted to full teacher and assigned to an elementary school of his own.25 Muhamad Radjab, the son of a traditionalist Muslim scholar, appreciated the logic of school lessons compared with the faith-based teaching in the prayerhouse. Radjab’s village was poorer and less worldly than the towns on the shore of Lake Maninjau. Using the Indies-wide standard, a child there was ready for school when he could reach his arm over his head and touch the opposite ear. But, in the late 1910s in Radjab’s region, there were still few fathers prepared to send their sons and, especially, daughters to school. The problem was not one of stubby arms or even of cost—tuition was low. Resistance came from a longheld superstition that whoever was able to write well would have his fingers lopped off in hell. Radjab also suspected that fathers feared an errant daughter’s ability to send love letters and thus circumvent marriage arrangements.26

Sekolah Radja Neither Oemar galar Soetan Negeri nor Nur Soetan Iskandar required a diploma from the ostensible teachers’ training college to become a certified teacher. Relatively few of the kweekschool graduates went on to careers in the native schools. In 1872, the educational system in the Indies had been consolidated, and the kweekschool in Bukittinggi was advertised across Sumatra with the regal name Sekolah Radja. Once it was called the School of Kings, it began to attract them. In the early 1880s, when Oemar was fulfilling his apprenticeship in Bonjol, Minangkabau boys at the Sekolah Radja were sitting in classrooms filled with many non-Minangkabau students, including a prince from Riau.27 A book published in 1908, compiled by Nawawi, the kweekschool ’s senior native teacher, commemorated thirty-five years of the Sekolah Radja. The Netherlands had just incorporated Aceh into the Indies after a protracted war, and the Sekolah Radja was then undergoing a major expansion in anticipation of an influx of Acehnese students. The book was a celebratory text, and for it the school solicited prepayment from alumni; an appendix includes lists of all students from 1873 through 1907. And that last class saw the admittance of the 25. Iskandar, Pengalaman Masa Kecil, 169 – 81. 26. Radjab, Semasa Ketjil Dikampung, 16 – 18. 27. Marzoeki gelar Baginda Maharadja, Kitab Kamoes Melajoe jaitoe Mentjoeraikan Arti Kata-Kata Dalam Kitab Logat Melajoe dan Lainnja (Makassar: Brouwer & Co., 1906), vi.

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school’s first female student, Sjarifah.28 Nawawi makes but passing mention that this girl, and future Movement leader, was his own daughter.29 In its first two decades, the Sekolah Radja lacked decent textbooks. There were old books in Dutch, and a few in Javanese, but nothing suitable for the teaching of the Malay language.30 It was imperative that the school produce Malay-language primers. Radja Medan, a native instructor of Malay and the head teacher at the Inlandsche (Native) School in Padang, was recruited to Bukittinggi in 1873. The previous year he had authored a chrestomathy marketed to those Dutch people who wished to speak Minangkabau.31 Its Jawiscript title read “Hendak2 Bahasa Melayu Minangkabau” (So You Want to Speak Minangkabau-Malay), and the book contained early everyday dialogs— women going to market, a father speaking with his son, and so forth. For the first time, the Sekolah Radja had an experienced language textbook author on its faculty. Radja Medan retired from the school in 1890. During his tenure, the bulk of the schoolschriften authors were trained—and his particular dialogic style is evident in those texts, too. In 1898, Moehammad Taib joined the Sekolah Radja as the native instructor in charge of Malay-language training. Taib, a Koto Gadanger, was the first Minangkabau to produce commercial texts for the study of the Malay language. The first of these books, Emboen (Dew), was published in 1912, in the Netherlands. Moralistic and trite, the stories might have been intended for an Indieswide school system, but they are thematically grounded in the Minangkabau culture. In them, good boys buy cooking oil at the coffeehouse for beleaguered mothers, and naughty girls fail to watch over their little sisters, who wander off. The parables grow increasingly grave: bad boys carelessly set a fire that destroys sixty houses, others get lured away from righteousness with gambling and opium, and one fine son gets involved with such a bad crowd that he ends up roasting in the fires of hell.32 Taib, and his Dutch collaborator G. Lavell-Frölich, eventually produced a series of these books, all of which went through numerous reprintings.33 It is difficult to gauge student reaction to these texts. But for boys used to traditional tales told in the darkness of the prayerhouse or earthy rantau secrets revealed in the coffeehouse, they may have seemed a little bland. 28. Nawawi, Gedenkboek Samengesteld bij Gelegenheid van het 35 Jarig Bestaan der Kweekschool voor Inlandsche Onderwijzers te Fort de Kock/Kitab Peringatan terkarang waktoe telah 35 tahoen Goemoer SekolahRadja oentoek Goeroe Melajoe di Boekit-Tinggi (Arnhem: G. J. Thieme, 1908), 32, 71. 29. Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai, 83 – 84, 103. See also the memoir by Nawawi’s granddaughter, Mien Soedarpo, Reminiscences of the Past, vol. 1 ( Jakarta: Yayasan Sejati, 1994). 30. Nawawi, Gedenkboek, 11 – 12. 31. Si-Daoed Radja Medan, Menangkabausch-Maleische Zamenspraken (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1872). 32. G. Lavell-Frölich, and Moehammad Taib, Emboen I: Kitab Batjaan oentoek Kelas Tengah Disekolah Boemi Poetera, 2nd ed. (Leiden: P. M. W. Trap, 1915), stories 4, 7, 12 – 15. 33. G. Lavell-Frölich and Moehammad Taib, Emboen II: Kitab Batjaan oentoek Kelas Tinggi Dise-

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Still, Nawawi’s commemorative book depicts the Sekolah Radja as an exciting place—the new classrooms, sports equipment, and even music facilities made attendance at the school a uniquely modern experience.34 And whether extorted or freely given, eulogies were written by the boys for departing teachers, as with this schoolbook syair in round, youthful handwriting: With your most honorable excellency [ Johannes Ludovicus van der Toorn, the school’s director] we interacted for a short time around one year we were together many were the lessons we received. Fondest wishes to princess Wilhelmina35 of the Netherlands, with perfection we beseech Allah the Almighty news of her glory resounds widely.36 Dengan padoeka seri oetama kami bertjampoer beloemlah lama sakedar satahoen bersama-sama banjaklah pengadjaran kami terima. Salamat sempoerna poeteri Wilhelmina di tanah Nederland dengan semporna kami poehoenkan kapada Allah Soebhana warta Baginda masjhoer bahana.

The geographical awareness of another of van der Toorn’s extollers is evidence of a new and more Eurocentric rantau consciousness, made possible by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869:

kolah Boemi Poetera, 4th ed. (Rijswijk: Blankwaardt & Schoonhoven, 1922). See also Lain Dahoeloe, Lain Sekarang: Kitab Batjaän oentoek Kelas Tinggi Disekolah Boemi Poetera (Leiden: P. M. W. Trap, 1920). On the history of textbooks in West Sumatra, see Suryadi, “Vernacular Intelligence: Colonial Pedagogy and the Language Question in Minangkabau,” Indonesia and the Malay World 34, no. 100 (2006). 34. Nawawi, Gedenkboek. 35. This dates the syair between 1880 (the year of Wilhelmina’s birth) and 1890 (her coronation). The young princess was something of a poster girl for educated native boys; see the pictures on the dorm room wall in Nawawi, Gedenkboek, 35. Van der Toorn was the school director from 1877 to 1888 and again for one year in 1895. It is likely then that this poem was written in 1888. 36. “Sair Toean vander [sic] Toorn,” ca. 1888 (Leiden schoolschrift, Cod. Or. 5825/VRSC 622), 20r – v.

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Start off in the highlands board a ship in the lowlands ride the ship to Aden arrive safely in the Netherlands.37 Moela berangkat di bovenlanden naik kapal di Benedenlanden menompang kapal singgah di Aden salamat sampai de Nederlanden.

By the late nineteenth century a Sekolah Radja diploma was for most too prestigious to be used for securing a mere teaching position in the native schools. Kweekschool graduates often established their own schools, serving as administrators. They went on to obtain higher degrees in Weltevreden or even the Netherlands, or they sought more lucrative careers in the colonial civil service. In the early twentieth century, the school became a training academy for Sumatra’s elite. Future national leaders—Adam Malik, Mohammad Hatta, Abdul Haris Nasution, and many others—all were sent on an educational pilgrimage to this School of Kings in Bukittinggi.

Progressive Kemadjoean Pedagogies and Insulinde The early twentieth century brought progressive kemadjoean pedagogical strategies to a burgeoning private school system. Competing Islamic boarding houses and Dutch elementary schools meant that ideas of social change were debated more often in villages. The tensions among custom, reformist Islam, and Dutch progressivism were not imported from the colonial cities but were felt first and most profoundly in family longhouses and village mosques. Through the first decades of the twentieth century kemadjoean merged with reformist Islam to create something called moderen (discussed in the following section). But progressivism was experienced in new, secular schools and through pedagogical theory. Dja Endar Moeda, the first great progressive kemadjoean educator, has been largely forgotten because he based himself in Padang and was not a Minangkabau. Patriotic historians have instead focused attention on his colleague and sometime rival, Datuk Soetan Maharadja.38 Endar Moeda was a Mandailing Batak from southern Tapanuli (the region to the north of Minangkabau). 37. “Sair Toean van der Toorn,” ca. 1888 (Leiden schoolschrift, Cod. Or. 5825/VRSC 622). 38. Soetan Maharadja plays a central role in the work of Taufik Abdullah. Endar Moeda is given passing mention in the canonical history of Indonesian journalism, Ahmat B. Adam, The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian Consciousness (1855 – 1913) (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1995), 128, 145 – 50.

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Tapanuli and Sumatra’s Westcoast were a single colonial administrative unit until 1905; it made sense then for Endar Moeda to publish even his Mandailinglanguage Tapian na Oeli in Padang. The first decade of the twentieth century was a period of intense activity for him. He was trained as a teacher, and his first publications included a basic children’s reader and a collection of edifying poems.39 Endar Moeda maintained a regular correspondence with the colonial Islamologist Snouck Hurgronje and was able to draw on a grand roster of officials in building the editorial board of the first progressive kemadjoean journal, Insulinde.40 Insulinde first appeared in April 1901 and was published more-or-less monthly until 1905.41 The journal—its title a reference to the “island India” envisioned in the 1860 novel Max Havelaar—introduced modern modes of thought to readers throughout the Indies. Endar Moeda sought to naturalize the new, progressive ideas for those “children of the land” sympathetic to colonial educational ideals. In this, Insulinde predates the much-vaunted newspapers Soenda Berita (1903) and Medan-Prijaji (1907), both published in Java by Raden Mas Tirtoadhisuryo.42 The editorial board of Insulinde included Datuk Soetan Maharadja, Soetan Maämoer (the hulponderwijzer at the Kweekschool Fort de Kock), and a handful of other progressives on Sumatra and Java. Likewise the board of directors enlisted the leading colonial educators, among them Charles van Ophuijsen and Kweekschool director G. J. F. Biegman. Contributors to Insulinde were largely Mandailing and Minangkabau schoolteachers, but the journal also regularly published essays from Java and even the Moluccas. Along with general introductions to pedagogy, Insulinde included histories of the ancient world; studies on the regional languages of Insulinde, on Dutch, on Jawi, on regional adat, on health issues, and on foods; a running history of the Dutch East Indies; a history of Sumatra’s Westcoast; explications of colonial laws and regulations; comparisons of the temple Borobodur and the West Sumatran Padang Lawas; essays deriding polygyny and explaining the importance of keeping time, the theories of Charles Darwin, and the dangers of syphilis; and a review of Edward Westermarck’s History of Marriage.43 39. See the syair in Dja Endar Moeda, Kitab Boenga Mawar: Pembatjaan bagi anak (Padang: N. Venn. Snelpersdrukkerij “Insulinde,” 1902); Kitab Sariboe Pantoen, Ibarat dan Taliboen, 2 vols. (Padang: Insulinde, 1900 – 1902). 40. See the letter dated 13 May 1905, and bound in the back of the book Kitab Aqaid al-Iman in the Leiden University Library. The letter is regarding a book Endar Moeda had sent to Snouck in Batavia. The book, by a Sjech Padang Kandi(s), was published in Jawi in 1901 by the Snelpersdrukkerij Insulinde. Endar Moeda requested Snouck’s opinion and referred to an ongoing conversation. 41. The two libraries that contain copies of Insulinde are the Leiden University Library and the KITLV. Both sets are fragmented, but combined they represent a complete run of the journal. Pagination is cumulative, and the journal is bound like a book, so we know that the final issue was volume 4, number 47, and the final page number 1836, but volumes and issues are otherwise ill-defined. 42. Tirtoadhisuryo is discussed in Shiraishi, Age in Motion, 33. 43. That people were aware of Westermarck is interesting. His later work reviewed Islamic mar-

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Numerous articles discussed the need for girls’ education. Essays on regional adat included descriptions of marriage strikingly similar to those found in the earlier schoolschriften.44 Insulinde ran two letters from the kemadjoean pioneer Abdul Rivai: the first on the need for literacy and reading in order to progress, and the second an article on ideal marriage.45 Like many early-twentiethcentury journals, Insulinde regularly included lists and addresses of subscribers. The majority were Minangkabau, Mandailing, and Chinese, with some Javanese and Dutch readers in the reaches of the colony. Articles were usually written in Malay—Insulinde made a point of promoting this language of kemadjoean. Occasionally, contributions were in Dutch and even romanized Minangkabau. In 1905, on the last page of the final issue, Dja Endar Moeda announced the sale of half of the Insulinde press and declared that there was no longer enough movable type to maintain Insulinde along with more profitable publications. The first kemadjoean periodical promised to refund subscribers’ money and was finished.46 As we will see, the Adabiyah school in Padang was an immediate adaptation by reformist Islam of progressive kemadjoean pedagogies. But the 1920s saw the philosophies introduced in Insulinde come to fullest fruition in the founding of the Indonesisch-Nederlandsche School (INS Kayutanam) in late October 1926.47 Moehammad Sjafei, who developed an innovative curriculum that emphasized field experience and experimentation, pioneered elementary education in arts and music.48 His populist stance is evident in earlier textbooks by his

riage in Morocco, using texts strikingly similar to those in the schoolschriften. Edward Westermarck, Marriage Ceremonies in Morocco (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914). 44. For example, see the essay on Mandailing marriage by Radja Moelia, “Adat Negeri, Mendjadi Perhiasan Negeri,” Insulinde (n.d.):, 264 – 65. 45. See Abdul Rivai, “Samboetlah Pertoeloengan Ini,” Insulinde (n.d.): 231 – 32; “Kewadjiban Orang Beristeri” Insulinde 4 (1904): 1784 – 85. Rivai was possibly the originator if the term kemadjoean. See Abdullah, “Minangkabau 1900 – 1927,” 49 – 50; Harry A. Poeze, “Early Indonesian Emancipation: Abdul Rivai, Van Heutsz and the Bintang Hindia,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 145, no. 1 (1989). 46. The influence of Insulinde would be felt among educators in West Sumatra for the next twenty years. But when Minangkabau patriots began to rewrite the history of West Sumatra in the late 1950s, the role of the Mandailing and Chinese journalists was obliterated and Dja Endar Moeda forgotten. Through the 1920s, Padang was understood to be a cosmopolitan town, its history one of multiethnic interaction; Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai, 55 – 64. Only in the aftermath of the failed Revolutionary Government of the Indonesian Republic (PRRI) rebellion in 1958 were Padang and the coastal settlements rebuilt with Minangkabauizing rooflines and a newly invented past; Colombijn, Patches of Padang; Hans-Dieter Evers, “Images of a Sumatran Town: Padang and the Rise of Urban Symbolism in Indonesia” (Working Paper no.164, University of Bielefeld, Sociology of Development Research Centre, Bielefeld, 1992). 47. A. A. Navis, Filsafat dan Strategi Pendidikan M. Sjafei: Ruang Pendidik INS Kayutanam ( Jakarta: Gramedia, 1996). 48. Mohamed Sjafei, Pendidikan Mohd. Sjafei INS Kayutanam, ed. Thalib Ibrahim ( Jakarta: Mahabudi, 1978).

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Figure 4.1. Cover of the Kitab Batjaan. The autograph is from Moehammad Sjafei.

mentor, Mara Soetan, to which Sjafei had contributed illustrations (figure 4.1).49 Although Sjafei’s proto-nationalist school is still active today, the influence of Insulinde was felt most immediately among Islamic reformists, the so-called modernists. 49. Mara Soetan and R. Soekardi, Kitab Batjaan 1: Oentoek Moerid-Moerid Sekolah Boemi Poetera Kelas II dan Sekolah Désa (Weltevreden: J. B. Wolters, 1923).

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The Reformists The history of Islamic reformist education in Indonesia is traced in a trilogy of dissertations written at U.S. universities by Minangkabau men—Deliar Noer, Taufik Abdullah, and Alfian.50 Deliar’s book is essentially an encyclopedia of Indonesian Islam, with an emphasis on West Sumatran contributions. Alfian discusses the history of the Muhammadiyah organization and uses perceived Minangkabau/Javanese factionalism as a narrative thread. Alfian and Deliar were breaking new ground, giving an English-speaking scholarly community a hint of the topics and sources available to historians of Indonesian Islam. Taufik Abdullah is more subtle in his approach, which is highly focused. Taufik is largely responsible for the rantau perspective of Minangkabau history, a “spiral with widening circumferences” in which the most dynamic and interesting folks were also the most likely to succumb to the centrifuge and flee the heartland.51 These three books give a wide-ranging introduction to the history of Indonesian Islamic education; Alfian and Deliar Noer in particular exemplify the modernist Minangkabauist perspective that is now canonical in Indonesia. It is difficult to tease the everyday history of the school experience from texts and sources that emphasize pedagogy and teacherly attitudes. Both Deliar Noer and Alfian focus on the Adabijah (Adabiyah) school in Padang as a pivotal moment in the history of reformist education in Minangkabau. Founded by Haji Abdoellah Ahmad in 1909, Adabiyah was modeled on the Iqbal school in Singapore, which emphasized rational thought and modern, printed textbooks. In 1915, the school was taken over by the colonial government and became the subsidized Hollandsch Maleiche School Adabijah, losing some of its reformist character.52 But those early textbooks are helpful in understanding the classroom experience. One edifying poem, the Syair of First Principles, referred to the pillars of Islam and offered basic instruction to young students. Reformists did not shy away from the modern world, and Abdoellah Ahmad advises students how to answer properly when asked questions about religion; for instance, regarding the birthday of the prophet Muhammad: If you want to know it in Dutch months, Just memorize this explanation: April 20th is easy to recall, 571 was the year.53 50. Deliar Noer, The Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia 1900 –1942 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1973); Taufik Abdullah, Schools and Politics: The Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra (1927 – 1933) (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP, 1971); Alfian, Muhammadiyah. 51. Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World,” 189. 52. Noer, Modernist Muslim Movement, 38 – 39, 43 – 44; Alfian, Muhammadiyah, 108. 53. H. A. Ahmad, Sjair Peroekoenan, 2nd ed. (Padang S. W. K.: Typ “Tiong Hoa Ien Soe Kiok”, 1917), 5. It is worth noting that Ahmad’s publishing house was Chinese and at the time also published the newspaper Bintang Tiong Hoa.

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Muslims and Matriarchs Kalau naH tahoe diboelan belanda, Keterangan tjoekoep hafal didada; 20 April hafallah moeda, 571 tahoen jang ada.

In a traditionalist prayerhouse, advanced students sat in a circle called a halakah (Arabic, halqa), facing the teacher, and listened to lectures on the meaning of the Quran and Hadith.54 The Adabiyah school made use of desks and chairs; it introduced a system of hierarchical grades based more on students’ age than on their perceived level of learning. Abdoellah Ahmad’s first formal textbook, the Path to Heaven, was also the first Minangkabau attempt to produce a work that followed both Islamic reformist and progressive kemadjoean tenets. This combination of Middle Eastern Islamic reformist pedagogy and Europeaninfluenced kemadjoean progressivism produced what is in Indonesia called Islamic modernism, the moderen. Path to Heaven advises the consideration of information obtained through the five senses, through external news, and through one’s own reasoning in coming to conclusions. This is particularly important in weighing news of war. Abdoellah Ahmad cites the conflicts between Russia and Japan (1904) and between Italy and Turkey (1912) as events with which Minangkabau people had no direct involvement and yet which had an impact on political consciousness in West Sumatra.55 It was the Russo-Japanese War and First World War that made Minangkabau generally aware of world news. The Path to Heaven concludes with extensive platonic dialogs between a teacher ( guru) and student (murid )— a kind of interaction that would have been revolutionary in a traditional educational system emphasizing rote memorization and unquestioned discourse. Abdoellah Ahmad’s efforts inspired a total reformation of the Islamic schools in Minangkabau. In 1912, his colleague Haji Rasul joined the Surau Jembatan Besi in Padang Panjang. By 1918, he had introduced grades, textbooks, and diplomas; in the 1920s, he had transformed the prayerhouse into the modernized Sumatra Thawalib, the most influential reformist school in the highlands.56 These Islamic schools, and in particular the schools in Padang Panjang, became increasingly politicized throughout the 1920s. As the malaise (the term then favored in newspapers) of economic depression settled on Minangkabau, the provocative ideas of Tan Malaka and the anti-colonial message of international communism blended with reformist Islam to create a dynamic sort of IslamicCommunism in West Sumatra. As schools became aggressively political, and frantically combative, the matriarchate came under increasing scrutiny. Com54. Yunus, Sejarah Pendidikan Islam di Indonesia, 45 – 46; see also, Abdullah, Schools and Politics, 55. 55. H. Abdoellah Ahmad, Titian Kesoerga: Kitab OetsoeloeGddin, ed. Moehd.gali and gAbdoeglmadjid, Sjarikat Gilmoe, ser. 1 (Padang: Snelpersdrukkerij “AlMoenir”, 1914), 14 – 15. 56. Abdullah, Schools and Politics, 34 – 59; Noer, Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 45.

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munist thinkers looked to Friedrich Engels’s ethnographic writings and saw in the Minangkabau matriarchate a primitive communism. Islamic reformists, even more attuned to developments in Egypt, Turkey, and the Middle East, were less inclined to seek a compromise with some heretical local custom. Anthropologists and feminists from Europe and the United States descended on West Sumatra to report on the fading glory of a survival of matriarchy.

Schools and Politics The colonial sociologist Bertram Schrieke testified, “The center of Communist propaganda in the Padang Highlands (the so-called Bovenlanden) was situated in Padang Pandjang.”57 Would-be revolutionaries on the fringes of the educational community were drawn to the town. Muluk Nasution, who graduated from the Gouvernement Inlandsche School (a native elementary school) but failed to gain admission to the Normaal School (another teachers’ training college) in Padang Panjang, took a job on a road crew in Silungkang. The secretary of the left-leaning Sarikat Rakyat Silungkang maintained a library, and Nasution had access to Jules Verne and Harriet Beecher Stowe along with political tracts.58 Hamka too recalled this period, which saw his own father Haji Rasul forced out of the Sumatra Thawalib, with excitement—Zainuddin Labay El-Yunusy was spreading the word of the Egyptian Mustafa Kamil, the prayerhouses were transforming, and there were Hollywood films and political rallies in the Scala Cinema. Djalaloeddin Thaib, radical reformist, and Djamaloeddin Tamin and Natar Zainoeddin, communists, were yet to be exiled to Digul.59 The motion of the pergerakan’s movements was felt every day and in all things. Djoeir Moehamad, a future socialist and associate of Sutan Sjahrir, came of age in the 1920s. Born late in 1916 in a small village near the base of Mount Merapi, Djoeir had access to a full range of Minangkabau educational opportunities. He received a primary education in the five-year Volks Onderwijs school and took another year of training in the nearby colonial agricultural college. In 1929, as a young teenager, Djoeir enrolled in the Moderne Islamietse School, an Islamic normal school in Bukittinggi. The curriculum was a combination of Islamic studies and colonial-standard courses, along with Dutch- and English-language training—a perfect example of the Islamic moderen.60 In the afternoons, Djoeir studied 57. B. Schrieke, “The Course of the Communist Movement on the West Coast of Sumatra (Political Section),” in The Communist Uprisings of 1926 – 1927 in Indonesia: Key Documents, ed. Harry J. Benda and Ruth T. McVey (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1960), 104. 58. A. Muluk Nasution, Pemberontakan Rakyat Silungkang Sumatra Barat 1926 – 1927: Pengalaman Perjuangan dalam Merintis Kemerdekaan ( Jakarta: Mutiara, 1981), 48 – 50. 59. H. Abdoelmalik K. A., “Saja Teringat,” in Boekoe Peringatan 15 Tahoen Dinijjah School Poeteri, ed. Rahmah el Joenoesijjah (Padang Pandjang: Dinijjah School Padang Pandjang, 1936), 28 – 34. 60. The school borrowed the European curriculum from the Meer Uitgebried Lager Onderwijs (MULO) schools, the colonial secondary school system.

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at the branch of the Sumatra Thawalib run by Syekh Ibrahim Musa, in the town of Parabek. There he met Adam Malik (the future foreign minister and vice president was then an orang siak, an indigent and often wandering religious student who is the recipient of alms) and a handful of other youthful national leaders. In Parabek, Djoeir had the opportunity to study with Haji Rasul and the leading reformists.61 It was in West Sumatra that the dynamic conflict among Islam, the matriarchate, and colonialism produced a concentration of innovative leaders. And through the politicized schools even non-Minangkabau who were growing up in the region or had been sent there for an education—the Mandailing Batak Adam Malik; Abdul Haris Nasution, the Mandailing Batak general and political leader; and Soedjatmoko, the Javanese intellectual and diplomat— experienced the productive ferment of the debates. The period following the communist Silungkang uprising brought Dutch surveillance and repression to West Sumatra. The magic years of Movement and intellectual strife were coming to an end in the Minangkabau highlands. In 1930, the ulama were united one last time, in successful opposition to the colonial Guru Ordinance (a colonial decree that established government controls on religious activity). This was a revision of a law that had been in place in Java and Madura since 1905, requiring any would-be Islamic teacher to obtain permission from a district chief before speaking publicly.62 And, in fact, there was a final flare of political activity in Minangkabau in the early 1930s. New parties launched aggressive campaigns of rallies and demonstrations; in the face of increased nationalist awareness, local politics promoted tjap Minangkabau (Minangkabauness). But in 1933 travel restrictions within Minangkabau began to be strictly enforced. A network of police informants created suspicion and undermined morale within the increasingly circumscribed movement of the pergerakan. And following an old and successful policy, the Dutch boosted the power of local adat authorities, as a self-suppressing element in Minangkabau society.63 In August 1933, the colonial government arrested many of the Minangkabau activists, snuffing out the last spark of the Movement in Minangkabau. The extensive politicization of Minangkabau made it one of the most dangerous regions in the eyes of the government. The government vigorously applied the repressive measures which characterized the policy of rust en orde. Minangkabau became the test case for the government’s hard-line policies. “From the West Coast [of Sumatra],” according to a famous colonial theoretician, de Kat Angelino, “the victory begins.”64 61. Djoeir Moehamad, Memoar Seorang Sosialis: Sebagaimana Dituturkan pada Abrar Yusra ( Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 1997), 17 – 29. 62. Abdullah, Schools and Politics, 110 – 13. 63. Kahin, “Repression and Regroupment”; Abdullah, Schools and Politics, 176 – 205. 64. Abdullah, Schools and Politics, 195.

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The Silungkang uprising had signaled the end of Minangkabau politics, however. Following the uprisings, the pergerakan, channeled through the prison camp Boven Digul and nationalist oath “Sumpah Pemuda,” became focused on a future Indonesia.65 The schools and movements had undergone transformations, preparing them for a shift to nationalism. During the 1920s the Thawalib and Islamic schools in Padang Panjang and Bukittinggi had become self-funding, raising money through the sale of books published by Syekh Muhammad Djamil Djambek’s press, Tsamaratul Ichwan, and establishing networks for sales and distribution throughout the Indies.66 Soetan Mangkoeto, a student of Haji Rasul, promised to donate 10 percent of the proceeds of his book to help build schools in Padang Panjang. This book, Preachers’ Torch of Indonesian Islam, was an attack on the Guru Ordinance. By the late 1920s, we can already read the influence of “Indonesia,” of the Sumpah Pemuda and nationalism, in seemingly local writings: “The children of Indonesia who desert or neglect Islam, no matter how much they might shout about saving their nation and homeland (Greater Indonesia), they will never attain it.”67 And the heyday of the movements of the Minangkabau pergerakan, the first two decades of the twentieth century, a time of manifold voices and visions, would never return.

Beliefs of Children So far this chapter, ostensibly about the experience of studenthood, has been drawn into a discussion of politics by the allure of the pergerakan’s movements. Memoirs that recall childhoods spent in the 1920s—and these make up the bulk of nationalist autobiographies—concentrate primarily on political awakening. After the revolution, all historical narratives were adjusted to fit a universal plot of nationalist 65. Boven Digul, a prison camp “above the Digul” river in West Papua, was established by the colonial state in 1926 in response to the commuinist uprisings in Java and West Sumatra. Whereas the Dutch had previously made good use of the geography of the archipelago for internal exile—Imam Bondjol had been sent to North Sulawesi—now prisoners were concentrated. And rebels who had fought in their local variants of the Movement now found themselves prisoners of the same colonial state, with a shared enemy and a shared anti-colonial nationalist identity. For the memories (originally written in Dutch) of a Minangkabau who experienced this prison in the New Guinea hinterland, see I. F. M. Chalid Salim, Limabelas Tahun Digul: Kamp Konsentrasi di Nieuw Guinea, Tempat Persemaian Kemerdekaan Indonesia ( Jakarta: Bulan Bintang, 1977). In 1928, at the second Youth Congress, Sukarno and other leaders of the Movement swore an oath that they were of one Indonesian people, speaking a common Indonesian language, with a shared homeland, Indonesia. With this oath, the varied Movement gave way to the Pergerakan Nasional (Nationalist Movement). 66. The press was founded in 1913. Noer, Modernist Muslim Movement in Indonesia, 35 – 37. On the Thawalib, specifically, see Burhanuddin Daya, Gerakan Pembaharuan Pemikiran Islam: Kasus Sumatera Thawalib, 2nd ed. (Yogyakarta: Tiara Wacana, 1995), 245 – 300. 67. S. Soetan Mangkoeto, Soeloeh Moeballigh Islam Indonesia: Bergoena boeat goeroe-goeroe dan Moeballigh Islam Indonesia (Padang Pandjang: Boekhandel M. Thaib bin H. Ahmad, 1929), 43.

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struggle and triumph. Again, we must turn to an earlier time and make use of the schoolschriften to excavate the everyday lives of Minangkabau children. One wonderful manuscript describes thirty-six “Prohibitions and Beliefs of the Malays.”68 In what was almost certainly an assigned topic, Abas, possibly an assistant teacher, reluctantly discusses the superstitions of his people. The native schoolteachers were the original transmission point for progressive kemadjoean ideals in Minangkabau. Abas dismisses most of the beliefs, not on the basis of the Quran and Hadith, as would an alim, but by providing rational, functionalist explanations for superstition-based behavior. Belief number one, a prohibition against the chucking of water from the raised longhouse at night, was in place because villagers feared that wandering ghosts could be struck by the water and bring a plague on the house. Nonsense, says Abas. The explanation was simple. During times of epidemics, the dukun (traditional healers) need to make the rounds at night. The dukun invented this prohibition so as not to get wet. Children were told not to walk in rain showers while the sun was shining; these are the favored conditions of evil spirits, and contact with their shadows can cause illness. Children must not tread on rice; old folks believe that rice has a soul and will let out an inaudible scream. Beliefs such as these are explained away by Abas: you can catch cold easily in a warm rain, and trampling rice is a waste of food. Some prohibitions are transcribed without comment, evidently deemed legitimate. Do not disobey your mother and father, say the Malays, or else “if the child sails away, he will be shipwrecked, and if he tries to do business then he will make no money.” Likewise, it is forbidden, offensive, and insubordinate to use the real name of a person’s mother or father. Only adat titles and honorifics are permissible. If a child is brave enough to utter the given name of an adult, then he will magically degenerate and become an infant. “Malays who follow the religion of Arabs, Islam” are excepted, of course, because they often use their father’s name as part of own name. But to Abas other beliefs were unredeemable. West Sumatra had a large population of wild tigers, and many of the more sensible prohibitions are designed to avoid encounters with them. But Abas cannot accept the widespread belief in orang djadi-djadian (were-tigers). It seems that some wronged folks transform rather than molder in their graves; one could stumble on newly risen weretigers gathering strength in the weeds surrounding graveyards. Abas declares, “Do not for a minute believe this story, for no dead person will rise up, as a tiger or any sort of animal; a person once buried will turn only into dirt.” Also dismissed is a race of spritelike creatures, the orang boenian, who inhabit mountaintops, making their homes in chaparral clearings, and inaccessible reaches.69 68. Abas, “Pantangan dan Kapertjajaän orang Melajoe.” 69. Stories of men lured away by bunian women are still told today. Bunian are blamed for the inexplicable disorientation of climbers in the mountains of West Sumatra. For similar arcana, noted in the 1870s, see Hasselt, Volksbeschrijving van Midden-Sumatra, 74 – 78.

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These folk can choose to make themselves visible to certain humans, luring men away to their villages for weeks of lost time. “Prohibitions and Beliefs” describes a children’s world of magical and dangerous places. Kids are warned not to pitch objects indiscriminately into the woods—they might hit the home of an evil spirit, who can cause sickness. There are other more dangerous sites too, spots in the forest capable of crippling unwary children. These mengindo places might exist where a genie bled after being bludgeoned by an angel or where a rainbow made contact with the earth. If someone happened to offend a spirit and contract a disease of magical origin, then a dukun was called on to make propitiations and offerings of food. Abas is disdainful of this too, pointing out that such offerings merely waste food, which is eaten by village dogs. “Look at the white people’s dukun, would he ever make such offerings? Although he does not ever make offerings still hundreds are cured through his medications; because of this do not believe in such a false saying.”70 The world was a topology of supernatural objects and magical places. A large tree, certain pools, swamps, a stone, a grave—they had power and could do harm to an unwary person. Every nagari contained a handful of sacred spots, keramat. Before the planting of rice villagers visited the keramat to pray, and then replaced its protective canopy, to ensure a good harvest. Such animism was a favorite target of ulama ire, to little effect. “On several occasions the syekhs, the religious elders, have forbidden the visiting of the keramat, but most people pay no heed to their words, and continue to follow those impossible beliefs.”71

Schoolgirls In the first decade of the twentieth century, Minangkabau women began to write in public forums. Although women ran numerous private schools and were in charge of religious and colonial girls’ schools, there is no evidence that the schoolschriften teachers were anything other than adult men. In this sense, although women were active publicly in critiquing and transforming Minangkabau culture, they did not leave the same sort of records of constructing and idealizing a Minangkabau homeland (ranah Minangkabau) and misty, bowered childhood. Although written nostalgia was mostly for men, it is not exclusively male discourse. Sitti Djanewar Bustami Aman, the daughter of a tuanku laras, was born in 1912. When she was six years old, she was sent to the town of Solok to live with an aunt and to study. From an elite family, Siti Djanewar was admitted to the Dutch-language Hollandsch-Inlandsche School (H. I. S.; Dutch-Native School). 70. Abas, “Pantangan dan Kapertjajaän orang Melajoe,” 9v. 71. Ibid., 16v – 17r.

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When she reached the fifth grade and was nine years old, she also began to study the Quran during evening classes at the surau. At the H.I.S., along with geography, history, and biology, girls learned sewing and embroidery and practiced making baby clothes. Two Minangkabau women from the girls’ normal school in Padang Panjang often visited and presented lessons on geography. Djanewar began to thirst for travel and an education in the rantau: “In daydreams I wandered.”72 When she was in sixth grade, Djanewar learned that the Teachers’ Training Kweekschool in Bukittinggi would no longer accept women students. She was devastated. She lobbied her family for permission to attend the Women’s Kweekschool in Salatiga, in central Java. Although Djanewar’s own mother had, as an adolescent, been cloistered (adat pingit), Djanewar was not, and eventually her family permitted her to go into the rantau. In written discourse, Minangkabau men often speak for women. This is particularly true among adat writers. Nur Sutan Iskandar, the author of Pengalaman Masa Kecil, had in 1922 even written as a woman, in the novel Apa Dayaku Karena Aku Perempuan (What Can I Do, Being a Woman). Iskandar was homeeducated with girls and later went to school in a coeducational classroom. In his autobiography, he asserted that the rows of girls in the front of the class were no distraction to him.73 Djoeir Moehamad too remembered visiting his older sister, who was then living in a girls’ dormitory in Bukittinggi. Peering through the window, he witnessed “the girls in that dormitory deliriously climbing the walls.” They had fallen under the spell of sijundai, a kind of magic worked by a man in a mountaintop hut, spinning a top made from a human skull. This young man had felt himself slighted—spat on by one of the girls.74 But the story is indicative of the place women hold in these memoirs and adat writings. They are wise mothers and grandmothers, but otherwise they exist only in minor and incidental roles. The students in Dutch-sponsored village schools were primarily boys, and it is not surprising that boys had greater exposure to the idiom of the Bildungsroman. But there were women in these schools, as a Dutch scholar reminds us in the 1910s, “[Raïssa] has been a pupil of the native school at Matoor [Matur], where six gurus, appointed by the Dutch Government, instruct some two hundred children, among whom are already fifteen girls. Female emancipation is beginning to spread around the lake of Maninju [Maninjau]!”75 The schoolschriften are more revealing. The prenuptial lives of women garner only slightly less attention than marriage itself. “If a girl is already grown, 6 or 7 years old, then she is sent to study the Quran with a rubiah [devout woman] 72. 73. 74. 75. 306.

“Saya bertualang dalam khayalan.” Aman, Nostalgia Liau Andeh, 73. Iskandar, Pengalaman Masa Kecil, 120 – 27. Moehamad, Memoar Seorang Sosialis, 21 – 22. J. F. Scheltema, “Roostam, the Game-Cock,” Journal of American Folklore 32, no. 124 (1919):

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as agreed upon by the mother and father of the girl.”76 The writer continues, revealing a regimen of work and study for a young girl. When not studying the Quran, from 9 in the morning until 6 in the afternoon, she helps her mother with household chores, like shopping in the market, or if she’s poor, then her mother sends her out selling pastries, to add to father’s spending money. Some money, a kepeng at midday, a kepeng at night, is given to the prayerhouse as a contribution, to buy oil and such (the money is drawn from the profits from selling pastries). At night she sleeps in the prayerhouse or at the room of the rubiah; and sometimes if her parents’ house is nearby, she goes home to her parents’ house. In the morning at 5 she wakes up, and runs to the prayerhouse, to perform the dawn prayers with her teacher and friends; that morning from 6 to 8 she studies reading the Quran; at night she studies aspects of Islamic prayer and chanting [zikir] according to the manner of Arab women.77

Religious education was more than its own reward—men found pious women particularly appealing. But a girl’s public life was curtailed at puberty: “If the girl has already developed pubic hair, then she will no longer go to the prayerhouse, but remain sequestered; so that it is difficult to see her.”78 The young woman was taught by her mother the domestic skills of sewing, cooking, and cleaning, along with reading texts such as the story of Nan Tongga, and the epic poem of the ascension of the prophet Muhammad. Other girls enjoyed more liberty. In a different schoolschrift, we learn about the “Behavior of girls from age 5 until marriage” in the highland village of Tanjung Ampalu. Eventually she begins to reason and to become more clever, and can tell right from wrong, when she’s around 10 or 11 years old. She can now assist in the activities of her mother and father, going to the rice fields, and she’s good at going off with a group of her friends and there are also those girls who will join a group of boys.79

A final schoolschrift writer describes games and the play of girls. Not surprising, play offered a chance for socialization, and although it is not revealed in women’s memoirs, it is likely that these girls had many of the same sorts of conversations about life as boys in the prayerhouse and at the coffeehouse had. 76. “Adat kawin di Priaman,” late 19th century (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, schoolshriften, MS. Or. 5828/VRSC 675), 18r. The coastal town of Pariaman is known for unusual adat, including the paying of a groomprice upon marriage. 77. Ibid., 18r – 18v. It is very unusual for a girl to sleep in the surau. 78. “Ibid., 19r. 79. “Hal perempoean di Tandjoeng Ampaloe,” late nineteenth-century schoolschrift (Leiden MS. Or. 5999/VRSC 687, in Portefeuille 1197), 1v.

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There are those girls who love to play games; it brings joy to their hearts. They are taught how to play them by the older girls, and so the skills are passed down from girl to girl. The mother and father approve of all of this, as they can ignore the child and go off and take care of their own needs, for a while. The games enjoyed by girls are of various types, primarily: making mud-pies, pretending to boil rice in a coconut shell, making dolls, etc.80

Dangers of the Moderen Heterosocial interaction was often permissible in the nineteenth century, but the modern schools, with students boarding away from home, were more likely to lead to unacceptable intercourse. An alumna of a Padang school, vacationing in Padang Panjang in 1919, was horrified to see unchaperoned students gallivanting together. It would seem, she wrote to a newspaper, that all of this progressive education would be good, But unfortunately, it appears that among those women who have acquired a bit of freedom and with it demand Western-Dutch habits, there are those who are excessive and would casually discard our Adat. For instance during school vacation I traveled to the Highlands, and in Padang Panjang and Fort de Kock I often saw our people’s girls walking as couples with boys who were not kinsmen, and among them some were laughing and holding hands. My goodness, I just drew a long breath, felt unsettled, and continued on my way, witnessing this and that.81

This letter was rebutted aggressively in a following issue of Perempoean Bergerak by a student of the Jongens Normaal School, Sitti Daina Wahab. Late May had brought the end-of-fasting holidays, she wrote, and most students had gone home. Moreover, students cannot leave campus without permission and, even then, must remain in Padang Panjang. Our teachers, she wrote, make use of spies, “Goeroe kami memakai mata mata.”82 For other later moralists, the danger was not found in coeducation, but in the single-sex boarding houses. “We can explain this frankly—for in scientific analysis we do not need to shirk and hide—that homo-sexuality is running rampant in places where only boys or only girls gather, youths whose sexual urges have already developed, like in prayerhouses, barracks, dormitories, and so forth.”83 Thaib, a graduate of an Islamic normal school in Padang, continued, 80. “Permainan anak perempoean,” late 19th century (Leiden MS. Or., 5996/VRSC 587?), 1r – 3r. 81. A. Wahab, “Boeah tangan dari Padang,” Perempoean Bergerak 1.2, 16 July 1919. 82. Sitti Daina Wahab, “Menjoesoer karangan ‘boeah tangan dari Padang’ dalam P. Bergerak No. 2,” Perempoean Bergerak 1.4, 16 September 1919, p. 3. 83. Maisir Thaib, Bahaja Homo-Sexualiteit dan Bagaimana Membasminja (Fort de Kock: Boekhandel en Uitgever A. M. Djambek, ca. 1939), 2.

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offering a warning: “To those parents who send their children to prayerhouses and dormitories, without first instructing them as to the dangers of these immoral acts, it is like throwing them into a pit of lions.”84 The multiplicity of schools in West Sumatra educated Minangkabau youths and unintentionally created a generation of skeptics and innovators. Like Agus Salim and Muhamad Radjab, Muhammad Natsir, the future prime minister and Islamic political leader, experienced contradictory pedagogies. He attended a surau and government village school in Maninjau, the Adabiyah School in Padang, and the Islamic Madrasah Diniyah and elite H. I. S. Dutch-Native School in Solok. Recalling his school days of 1916, “At night it was Quranic recitation, mornings at the H. I. S., and afternoons at the Diniyah.”85 Natsir emerged from these schools as the leading Indonesian Islamic thinker, one of the “giants among Indonesia’s nationalist and revolutionary political leaders.”86 Throughout his education, Natsir enjoyed the support of his parents. For other Minangkabau women and men, scholastic choices and the uncertainty of modernity led to conflict. As we will see in the following chapter, sexual fear and intimate contention were driving factors behind both challenges to and defenses of the morality of the Minangkabau family and the longhouse. 84. Ibid., 2 – 3. 85. From Natsir’s letters to his children, in Yusuf Abdullah Puar, ed., Muhammad Natsir 70 Tahun: Kenang-kenangan Kehidupan dan Perjuangan ( Jakarta: Pustaka Antara, 1978), 5. 86. George McT. Kahin, “In Memoriam: Mohammad Natsir (1907[sic] – 1993), Indonesia 56 (October 1993): 158.

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Penumbras The revolution is the great eclipse of Indonesian history. Time is marked relative to its passing, all other moments are swallowed up in its shadow. It is awesome, beautiful, and, if stared at directly, blinding. The unexpectedness of the revolution, precipitated by the Japanese occupation, eclipsed the myriad visions of the future that had grown, clandestine and subversive, in the oppression of the Netherlands East Indies. Once the revolution had happened, the incantation mau kemana (where to go?) that had sounded throughout the popular literature of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, was answered.1 Immediately, movements were reoriented and historicized to fit with a nationalist narrative. Deeds were exaggerated; unserviceable alliances were forgotten. As one old man in Padang told me, recalling the postrevolutionary scramble for heroic recognition, “I am a victim of the Revolution.”2 The revolution was largely admirable, and the heroes mostly heroic, but much of Indonesian history has been lost in the shadow zone of this eclipse. It is worthwhile to shake off the strictures of the revolutionary narrative. There is a peculiar illumination to be found in the penumbra. Modern histories of Indonesia have tended to focus on the overtly political—those movements and people whose acts led to today’s nation-state. The 1. I am struck by the recurrence of the phrase mau kemana in the West Sumatran newspapers of the 1910s and 1920s, and then in the popular novels of the 1930s and 1940s. I have done no comprehensive survey of the phenomenon; however, as a sort of pre-independence mantra mau kemana figures prominently in the writings of such divergent figures as Hamka and Tan Malaka. See Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession.” 2. “Saya korban Revolusi.” Roestam Anwar then continued, dramatically addressing the younger Minangkabau in the group, “Tapi kamu korban Pembangunan!” (But you are victims of [Soeharto’s] Development!). It was 1995 and expressing such a sentiment publicly was risky.

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understandable appeal of anti-colonial struggle has relegated apolitical organizations to footnotes and caused historians to ignore the intimate histories of family life and household relationships.3 The protagonists in most histories— even the more anthropological and sociological histories—have been the people and movements labeled “modern.” Families and households necessarily insinuate themselves into the biographies and hagiographies of national heroes, but these “modern” men and women were just too modern to be trapped in an anthropological matrix of kinship and culture for very long. In their books, family is confined to first and last chapters—birth and death. A hero’s family is visible only when the hero is helpless. But for many who struggled in the colonial period, “Indonesia” was neither the battlefield nor the prize. Those Sumatrans who saw themselves as participants in the Alam Melayu (Malay World) looked to Singapore and Malaya (and not Java) for a sense of community. Hajjis were inhabitants of the Ummat Islam and maintained ties with Mecca and Cairo. In Minangkabau, there were numerous cultural and political identities from which one could choose. The people in the rallies and on the stages, running the printing presses and huddled in back rooms—although these people addressed a world greater than that of immediate and daily life, and although they fought for vast and inchoate identities—at night still went home to eat and sleep.4 So it was in these homes that the dreams and possibilities articulated by day were tested and challenged when the sun set. The revolution reduced the rumah gadang (the Minangkabau longhouse) to a logo—the emblem on the flip side of the 100-rupiah coin or a silhouette shingle marking Padang-style restaurants. The rumah gadang is now the rumah gadang tradisional—and the flip side of another piece of Indonesian symbolic currency, moderen. It is necessary to analyze the history of the ideas of home and family because the home was not only a mirror for contemporary political thought but also an actively contested and precarious ideological space.

Balatentara Nafsu—The Army of Desire Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah, called Haji Rasul, the father of Hamka and author of the Kitab Cermin Terus, formulated in the early 1930s the official Muhammadiyah reformist line on passion and lust: 3. Tony Day has criticized the state-centric historiography of Southeast Asia. Although Day is referring to an earlier period, the influence of nationalism has put blinkers on the study of modern Southeast Asia too. See Tony Day, “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996); Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). 4. A point of this book is to call into question the idea of home in Minangkabau, and I am certainly not taking the notions of home and domesticity for granted. Not everyone “went home,” of course. Part of the romantic legend of Tan Malaka is his wandering and homelessness. Abdul Muis seems to have spent much of the 1910s and 1920s on a continual propaganda tour. And in Minang-

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The operation of desire in man may be likened unto a king who has two armies, one for the control of internal affairs and one for use in the settlement of foreign problems. In like manner there are two forces operating in connection with desire. The outward army is called hissiyah, things visible to the eye. The second army is called magnawiyah, the things not visible to the eyes, i.e., desires and passions. Some of the mystics claim that in order to seek for holiness we must despise, or discount the value and strength of the army of desire. . . . It is not the purpose of mysticism to destroy man’s attributes; hawa nafsu (lower nature [lust]), shahwat (desires [sexual pleasure]), ghadab (passions), but only to direct or control them.5

Perhaps only Haji Rasul could be so dismissive of the forces of passion. Lust (hawa nafsu) and the control of lust are of critical concern throughout the Malay world.6 In the Sufi rites of the Islamic mystical societies (tarekat)—and Muhammadiyah’s “modern mysticism” was an explicit attack on tarekat teachings—the control of lust and passion through rituals of privation and isolation led to moments of epiphany.7 Haji Rasul’s advice, that lust should be marshaled and directed, proved to be wishful thinking.

Moral Control and Domesticity Thomas Raffles was not really the first European to visit the Minangkabau highlands. In 1684, Thomas Dias, a Malacca-based mestizo, was contracted by the VOC to undertake a diplomatic mission to the court of Pagaruyung. Traveling inland from the eastern coast of Sumatra, Dias found an impressive palace and community of courtiers. He reported the presence of hajjis among the king’s retinue, along with the yellow banners and umbrellas reserved for Malayan royalty. The mission was largely successful, but as Dias prepared to depart, the Raja of Minangkabau confessed that an earlier visitor had presented to his majesty an inappropriate gift. The king sanctimoniously handed to Dias “a small case in which improper pictures were enclosed,” so that it might properly be disposed of back in Malacca.8 As with gambling and drunkenness, kabau, the tradition of merantau valued a man’s journey away from his home and village. But the rantau always implied peregrination, with a longing for and an eventual return to a fixed matrilocal house. 5. H. A. K. Amrullah (Haji Rasul), from the section “Balatentara Nafsu” in a reformist analysis of Islamic mysticism (tasawwuf ), first published in the 1932 – 1933 Almanak Muhammadiyah and translated in Raymond LeRoy Archer, “Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 15, no. 2 (1937): 115 – 16. My glosses are in brackets. 6. See the accounts in James Siegel, The Rope of God (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Michael Peletz, Reason and Passion: Representation of Gender in a Malay Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 7. See the description of the suluk ceremony in Archer, “Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra,” 100 – 104. 8. Dias, “Mission to the Minangkabau King.”

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pornography has long been available in West Sumatra, and it is no symptom of Western lasciviousness. Likewise, the moralistic rebuke of lustful things is as old as the recorded history of the Minangkabau kingdom itself. The Minangkabau longhouse was defined as the seat of Minangkabau morality. But if left unguarded, the house could become a box of sin. As we see in chapter 3, there was an urgent need to keep postpubescent boys out of the longhouse at night. The house is full of adolescent sisters and half-sisters; a fear of incest propelled the boys out of the rumah, first into the prayerhouse and finally to the rantau, before they could return to marry.9 Boys studied and slept in the prayerhouse, honed their storytelling skills, and learned of the wide world from the travelers who found lodging and the widowers who sought shelter there. One scholar—comparing the prayerhouse to analogous structures of nonMuslim Sumatrans—suggests that the buildings were originally spirit houses used for ancestor worship.10 And probably an individual prayerhouse would have once been affiliated with a particular longhouse and matriline.11 But by the late eighteenth century, a surau was known for its teacher and the strengths of his pedagogy. In the 1860s, Verkerk Pistorius discussed the various prayerhouses of Minangkabau, the hajjis who ran them, and the subjects they taught, providing “amusing statistics” for fifteen prayerhouses that ranged in size from one thousand to fewer than one hundred students.12 The prayerhouse is an official institution—one of the essential components of Minangkabau society. In it, boys are socialized, studying the Quran, learning martial arts, and listening to stories from Minangkabau traditional literature. Of almost equal importance was a less official institution—the lapau (coffeehouse). Like the prayerhouse, the coffeehouse is a male space that exists apart from the longhouse. Unlike the prayerhouse, the coffeehouse is in many ways outside of the purview of adat and its forced decorum. From the 1800s on, Minangkabau men and prayerhouse boys took their morning meals at the coffeehouse.13 And by the twentieth century, the coffeehouse was the place to discuss modern politics and the movements of the pergerakan.14 In the coffeehouse, a 9. In some nagari today, brothers and sisters are forbidden even to sit together on the same floor. 10. R. A. Kern, “The Origin of the Malay Surau,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 29, no. 1 (1956): 179 – 81. 11. Azyumardi Azra, “The Surau and the Early Reform Movements in Minangkabau,” Mizan 3, no. 2 (1990): 66. 12. Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 222. The chapters first appeared as articles in the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië between 1868 and 1869. In his conclusion, Verkerk Pistorius uses a favorite metaphor when he compares Islam in Minangkabau to a smoldering volcano, its eruption inevitable and unpredictable. 13. See ibid., 206. Lapau were commonplace in West Sumatra, serving as snack bars and convenience stores. Ijzerman too ate at lapau as he conducted his survey. Ijzerman, Dwars door Sumatra, 173. 14. Khaidir Anwar, “The Dutch Controller’s Visit to a Minangkabau Village,” Sumatra Research Bulletin 4, no. 1 (1974): 58 – 62.

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Minangkabau boy first heard about sex, often from the village toughs known as parewa—boys who wandered outside of conventional family life, mastered fighting arts, and were seen as part-thug, part-hero.15 One Minangkabau intellectual, recalling his childhood by lake Maninjau in the first years of the twentieth century, wrote, “Oh, yes, the songs and the manner of the ‘storytellers’ that I would listen to at the coffeehouse just about every Wednesday night, I still remember them.”16 This particular Minangkabau remembered too his coffeehouse lessons on how to compose adat orations, how properly to invite a guest to eat, and how a groom must act on his first night in the house of his new bride. From the coffeehouse, the prayerhouse, and the rantau, boys emerged as men, to seek wives and sleeping space in another longhouse. For they say, “If a daughter does not find a husband, she is as a fire lit in the roof beams of the house; if a son does not find a wife, he is as contention unending.”17

Intimate Contention In the late 1880s, Soetan Sarit, the assistant teacher at Native School 1, described a courtship and wedding in the village of Koto Gadang. In careful handwriting, his manuscript fills fifty-four pages of a blue, lined examination booklet.18 For its ethnographic detail, frank intimacy, and playfulness, “On the Matter of Marriage in Koto Gadang” is an extraordinary text. This manuscript, written by a man, describes social conditions in which mothers have great power and women great value. Less than half a century later, “Explaining the Letter of Request of the Women of Kota Gedang” was published.19 On May 6, 1924, eight Koto Gadang women sued the village adat council for, principally, the right of exogamy to be extended to the women in the nagari. These women faced down the ninik mamak, Imam Chatib, and cerdik pandai—thirty-seven assorted elders, religious officials, and intellectuals, and a handful of boys and bachelors. Like Soetan Sarit, the women spoke to a natural and progressive process of adat revisionism. “We hope our feelings and requests will truly be taken into consideration, so that the inhabitants of Kota Gedang will see some sorts of changes, 15. On the parewa, see the description in Noer, Modernist Muslim Movement, 35 n. 15. 16. Iskandar, Pengalaman Masa Kecil, 127. In this passage, he is describing experiences of 1901 – 1904, before the Russo-Japanese war. 17. In the anonymous schoolschrift “Hal perempoean di Tandjoeng Ampaloe,” section “Dari hal kalakoean anak perampoean jang beroemoer dari 5 tahoen sampai ia bersoeami,” 2r. 18. Soetan Sarit, “Dari hal orang kawin di Kota Gedang,” schoolschriften in Portefeuille 1197. 19. Datoeh Kajo and Soetan Pamenan, “Memperkatakan soerat permintaän Kaoem Perempoean Kota Gedang, Pada 2 Sjawal 1342,” Kerapatan Negeri Kota Gedang IV Koto Agam (Fort de Kock: Typ Drukkerij Merapi, 1924). The letter is signed by Rawidah, Hadisah, Roebak, Fatimah, Sjahroem I, Sjahroem II, Zabidah, and Noeriah.

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we hope leading to improvements and prosperity, from the narrow to the expansive, from the decayed to the good, from the heavy to the light.”20 After serious deliberation by the assembled men, and with one important dissenting vote, the women’s request was denied. The exemplary story of Koto Gadang has an important place in the history of Minangkabau reaction to Dutch colonialism.21 It turns on these two texts and on the forty-odd years that separate them. Situated on a volcanic plateau across from the town of Bukittinggi, Koto Gadang was the Minangkabau village most invested in the Dutch administration. The village’s florescence and decline is a gauge of Dutch influence at a time when Minangkabau society was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan and outward-looking. Whereas the rest of Minangkabau could react to Islamic movements in Egypt and Arabia, Japanese panAsian imperialism, or Euro-American progressivism, Koto Gadangers remained fixated on developing what they thought to be Dutch bourgeois sensibilities. At first, this served them well. But the village’s thorough association with things Netherlandish turned myopic, and the place that had produced luminaries such as Haji Agus Salim and Sutan Sjahrir was, by the 1920s, becoming a joke. Parada Harahap commented in late 1925 that two-thirds of the 2,000 inhabitants of Koto Gadang were spinsters, “There certainly are a lot of good looking single girls—but they’re old, some of them 25 years and up.”22

Koto Gadang in the Padri War In the late eighteenth century the village was for a time the center of a reformminded tarekat led by Tuanku nan Kecil. Through a network of religious leaders, the tarekat sought to establish a more dedicated community of Muslims in Minangkabau, as well as to curb the rampant slaving and intervillage marauding that had hampered regional trade.23 Despite shared objectives, it became a target of the Padris’ jihad in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Naskah Tuanku Imam Bonjol mentions the burning of the village in a list of Padri victories.24 The wars were a time of persecution and unprecedented internecine 20. Ibid., 2 – 3. 21. Graves, Minangkabau Response. The chapter “The Genealogy of the New Elite: A Case Study” also focuses on Koto Gadang. 22. Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai, 76. 23. See the Jawi-script memoir Djilâl-Eddîn, “Surat Keterangan,” 6 – 9. It is a mistake to view members of tarekat and so-called traditionalists as unsophisticated and superstitious anachronisms. In their pedagogies and networks of influence, they were as innovative and dynamic as the modernists. The dominant histories of Indonesian Islam, however, have been written by reformists who embraced the moderen (Hamka, Deliar Noer, and Mahmud Yunus were all Muhammadiyah-influenced). The reformists were the first to embrace the technologies of printing and romanization, and so their opinions were most easily propagated. 24. Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Caniago, 33.

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conflict. Neutrality was not an option. The more aggressively reform-minded Minangkabau donned the white robes and turbans of the neo-Wahhabi Padris. Others aligned with local adat elites. In Koto Gadang, tarekat members rallied around a local saint. The Dutch—with troops hardened by victory in the Diponegoro War and sensing a fine opportunity to establish themselves in the Sumatran agricultural highlands—intervened in the civil war. Siding with the adat elites, they established their principal garrison at Fort de Kock, on a hilltop in Bukittinggi. From there, the Dutch coordinated a network of forts and kept close watch on the nearest Padri stronghold, Koto Tuo, lying on the far side of Koto Gadang from Bukittinggi.

The Saint of Koto Gadang In the mid-1870s, forty years after Imam Bondjol’s surrender and at the height of the coffee cultivation system, the people of Koto Gadang were still telling the story of Tuanku Malim Kacil and the “place of the round knoll.”25 The story is strange and central in understanding the strangeness of Koto Gadang. My summary translation follows: Around three hundred years ago [as recounted in the 1870s], an unmarried girl of the suku [matriclan] si Kumbang journeyed to the outlying hamlet of Pahambatan in search of rushes for weaving. She was hot and thirsty, and eventually found some water that had accumulated in the spathe of a taro leaf. This she drank and quenched her thirst. Allah then used his almighty power, and the girl became pregnant. Upon her return to Koto Gadang, the appalled villagers called a meeting and demanded their right to menyarang her—to stone her house and enslave her and her unborn child. But for two days there was torrential rain, and the meeting had to be postponed. Finally on the third day the villagers met and gathered to stone her house, but on the way there they were attacked by bees, wasps, and other stinging insects. Eventually the crowd dispersed and fled home. That night one villager had a dream: an old man with a long white beard told him not to menyarang the girl’s house, that the child was indarjati, a virgin birth. The dream warned that God will visit disasters upon anyone who tries to harm the child. So the boy was born. When he touched the floor, the floor broke apart. When he touched the cross beams, the beams shattered. When he touched the sendi (the joint or pedestal of a house support-pillar), the sendi cracked. And when he touched the earth, the earth itself was stove in. When the boy was several years old his mother [mandénya] relinquished him to the prayerhouse and the study of Islam. He learned quickly, became a great 25. D. Gerth van Wijk, “Een Menangkarbauwsche Heilige,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 24 (1877): 224 – 33.

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alim, and was given the title Tuanku Malim Kecil. The Tuanku was wise and powerful, capable of miraculous deeds. In time he was betrothed to a girl with a single, empty breast [perampuan yang bersusu hampa dan tunggal], a member of the Piliang clan in Koto Gadang. Soon afterward his mother [bunda] fell sick and was dying. He announced to the kinfolk in the house: “Hai, my kinfolk, soon I will travel to Mecca to acquire a gong [agoeng], cymbal [tjètjèk momongan, literally a dependent great-grandchild], and small cymbals [rodjeh]; if my mother’s hour of death comes, do not bury her before I return, for I will bury my mother upon the knoll myself.” Rather if she died, the family was instructed to smear her body with quicklime, in order to prevent decomposition.26 The Tuanku then called his student si Cubadak. They took a small mat, descended the cliff path and traveled to Priaman [Pariaman—the site of an important Shiite tarekat], on the coast. There they sat on the mat, facing Mecca. They prayed, and then, suddenly, vanished. On that same day the Tuanku’s mother died. Three days later the family buried her corpse, as they were certain it would be impossible for the Tuanku to return from Mecca within seven days. But the Tuanku did return after seven days, bringing a set of gongs and cymbals. Before he arrived at the house he noticed that the earth of the knoll had been freshly disturbed, as if for a grave. He asked someone, who told him that it was indeed his mother’s grave. The Tuanku was furious, and there he struck the gong and then hurled the instruments into the rice field, which is to this day called sawah goleH agoeng (the field of scattered gongs). About a mile from that place he shouted, “Hey, si Kumbang people, that gong there is for all of you,” and “Hey, Piliang people, you gather your share of the set of gongs at this place here.” Then the great man himself vanished, never to return, and the sound of those gongs can still be heard in the village of Koto Gadang. The cymbal of the Piliang clan is gone, lost in a house fire. But the gong of the si Kumbang clan is still around, just a little cracked from when the Tuanku threw it to the ground. The gong has been known to sound spontaneously, and if someone steps over it the gong strikes out at that person; if compared to another, the gong of the Tuanku will far surpass it in beauty of tone. This is how it is.

This story exhibits numerous conventional elements. Taro has a pronounced floral spike, and its seminal evocations are an unsubtle single entendre. The conception, birth, and adventures of Tuanku Malim Kacil are similar to the Jataka tales of Buddhist tradition and so evoke the pre-Islamic Minangkabau past. More important, the Tuanku falls within a widespread pattern of local Islamic wali (saints).27 His powers and authority are derived from Allah, and his mysterious departure is not unusual in the Islamic mystical tradition. 26. This is, of course, abhorrent to Islam, which demands a speedy burial. 27. This concept has been examined in Vincent J. Cornell, Beyond Charisma: Sainthood, Power, and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

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What is extraordinary about the legend of Tuanku Malim Kacil is his relationship to his mother and the mention of his deformed wife. Throughout Minangkabau (and much of Sumatra) the preeminent mother-son myth is the Kaba Cindua Mato—the story of a perantau out-migrant son who rejects his destitute mother and, as a punishment, is turned to stone.28 Tuanku Malim Kacil, a purely matrilineal man born without a father, will neither renounce his mother nor merantau like other Minangkabau. His bride—in an unspecified arranged marriage—is an ambiguous woman. She is nameless. All we know of her is that she has “a single, empty breast,” and that she is a member of the suku Piliang. This bride is an unusual figure in Minangkabau literature, and it would be wrong to ascribe a set of relative cultural traits to Minangkabau or even Koto Gadangers based on her appearance in this textual fragment. (Van Wijk, the story’s original transcriber, posits that the bride is a hermaphroditic figure with a man’s chest but does not elaborate on this suggestion.29 ) The legend of Tuanku Malim Kacil was significant (and remains so—the round knoll of the Tampèh Goegoek Boelèh was pointed out to me in 1995) in that it distinguished Koto Gadang as a village with a unique religious tradition and particular myths of filial and connubial responsibility. Religious innovation and uniqueness were little appreciated by neo-Wahhabis, who demanded a strict adherence to the Quran and authoritative Hadith. The legend gave the Padris good reason to subject Koto Gadang to the purifying fires of their jihad. (One hundred years later, its echoes provided the adat council with the means to dismiss the women’s plea.) To the Dutch, warily regarding Koto Tuo from the ramparts of Fort de Kock, the small and beleaguered village was an ally. In 1833, the Padris capitulated, and although resistance continued, West Sumatra was incorporated into the Indies under the terms of the Plakaat Panjang. The Dutch promised a form of indirect rule and guaranteed that a money tax would never be imposed. So the Dutch needed, first, a group of educated Minangkabau civil servants to serve in the nascent colonial bureaucracy and, second, the infrastructure and mechanism for the levying of a tax-in-goods. The Dutch built schools and in 1847 established the West Sumatran cultivation system for the collection of coffee.30 When the Dutch set up staunchly anti-Padri Koto Gadang as the administrative center for IV Koto31 coffee, the si Kumbang gong must have bonged 28. The kaba is analyzed in Abdullah, “Some Notes on the Kaba Tjindua Mato.” It has been fully edited and transliterated in Yusuf, “Persoalan Translitersai.” 29. Wijk, “Menangkarbauwsche Heilige,” 231n. 3. 30. Again, the nineteenth-century educational system is discussed thoroughly by Graves. The cultuurstelsel is covered in Young, “Cultivation System in West Sumatra,” 90 – 110; see also Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism, chap. 7. 31. IV Koto is a Minangkabau laras (district) and an indigenous political division well exploited by the Dutch.

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merrily. Through the 1840s and 1850s, the village monopolized regional coffee distribution, and many of the 2,500 villagers grew rich. The wealthiest was Radjo Mangkuto, who controlled a transportation cartel and was able to charter a ship, undertake the hajj, and then continue to the Netherlands where he presented King William III with samples of Koto Gadang gold filigree. A German woman who visited the village in 1852 commented on the wealth of the people—amid spectacular houses, weaver-girls, and goldsmiths, she was feted by the Tuanku Laras (another Dutch-invented adat position).32 One of Mangkuto’s brothers, Abdul Rahman, was hoofdjaksa (chief judicial officer) of Bukittinggi from 1833 to 1868. Another brother, Abdul Latief, was the first head of the Bukittinggi Normaalschool when it opened in 1856. The Normaalschool, or Sekolah Radja, was a teacher training college, designed to produce native instructors for the new network of village elementary schools. Abdul Latief worked under J. A. W. van Ophuijsen and was not entirely appreciated by his Dutch employers. In an 1866 report, Jacobus Anne van der Chijs, the inspector for native education, wrote, The only teacher is the Malay, Abdul Latif, and he himself is unsupervised, his intellect is no greater than that of his countrymen. Of the 49 students who graduated between 1856 and 1866, only 12 became teachers, the others principally secretaries, warehouse supervisors, vaccinators, coffee-corvée administrators, etc.33

Although Latief did not last, his tenure at the Sekolah Radja established a firm connection between the college and Koto Gadang. Later in the century, Moehammad Taib, another Koto Gadanger, served from 1898 as the Malay language instructor at the Sekolah Radja.34 The memory of scrappy young men learning discipline and willpower by traversing the gorge to Bukittinggi remains fixed in the nationalist imagery. Villagers continued to be closely involved with the European-style education, and as teachers and students at the elite Sekolah Radja they had unmatched access to Dutch colonials. The Dutch did not shy from this contact. They needed the educated Minangkabau, and needed them to be more than mere clerks and bean counters. Taken to task by Raffles, nineteenth-century Dutch civil servants were supposed to be intellectuals and had a mandate to publish. A sole scholarly society and journal, the Bataviaasch Genootschap, had been founded in 1779. It was now insufficient. A raft of new scholarly journals appeared that provided a forum for the flood of official ethnography—Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië (1838); In32. Wall, Kesah Pelajaran Seorang Perampoewan Mengoelilingi Boemi. Also Pfeiffer, A Lady’s Second Journey, 139 – 43. 33. Nawawi, Gedenkboek, 11. 34. He translated Lavell-Frölich and Taib, Emboen I.

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disch Archief: Tijdschrift voor de Indiën (1849); Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde (1851); Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (1852); and Indische Gids (1879) all gave voice to these intellectual bureaucrats. Certainly some of the Dutch writers did traipse into the hills to conduct research. But most of these ethnographies were desk jobs, culled from research assigned to the students and native teachers of the Normaalschools. The Leiden University Library schoolschriften, the handwritten booklets filled with essays on folklore and language that were written by Minangkabau students and assistant teachers in the late nineteenth century, provide evidence for the interconnectedness of colonial scholarship and Minangkabau autoethnography. A note inside the cover of one schoolschrift reads, “Vide Schriften No. 66, 117, 67, Tijdschrift v. Ind. T. L. en V. K. Deel XXV, Afl. 5 x 6.”35 In this issue of 1879, there are essays by the schoolteacher J. Habbema (“Proven van West-Sumatraansch Maleisch” and “Menangkabausche spreekworden”) and by J. L. van der Toorn (“Verscheidene verhalen omtrent het bijgeloof van de Maleiers in het land Minangkabau” and “Iets over de Spreekwoordelijke Uitdrukkingen bij de Bewoners van de Padangsche Bovenlanden”). The contents of the journal articles correspond exactly to the themes of the schoolschriften. It is clear that the Dutch civil servants posted to West Sumatra relied on the work of the local teachers and students for uncredited ethnographic insight. Van der Toorn, who served as vice director of the Sekolah Radja from 1874 through 1876 and then as director until 1888 (and again in 1895), was one of the most influential Netherlanders at the school. He was a lexicographer and teacher and an avid exploiter of the schoolschriften. The writers who made use of the schoolschriften would have appeared to have unusual knowledge of the more intimate details of native life. For instance in Koto Gadang, a kampung in the immediate vicinity of Fort de Kock, this system [of marriage] can be understood. There, by the young woman’s side, instead of a male intermediary one of the female family-heads makes the proposal on behalf of the would-be spouse. (note: As the betrothal approaches the bride may not under any circumstances leave her dwelling. Then generally, one day before the wedding, the parents or other kinfolk of the bridegroom will come and fetch her, and she will spend the whole night in their dwelling. The same thing is then taking place with the bridegroom.)36

It is important for us to be aware of this mechanism by which the Dutch generated anthropology. And it is essential to consider how serving as informants 35. See “Minangkabauche Spreekwoorden en Spreekwijzen,” n.d. (ca. 1870), Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library (MS. Or. 5980/VRSC 569). 36. J. L. van der Toorn, “Aantekeningen uit het Familieleven bij de Maleier in de Padangsche Bovenlanden,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 26 (1881): 215.

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affected the Minangkabau—providing a learned attentiveness to Dutch concerns and a familiarity with new modes of ethnographic discourse. The Dutch did not make use of every schoolschrift, and those they did use were heavily edited and bowdlerized. Let us consider the wonderful schoolschrift translated next—a distillate of its fifty-four pages.37 “On the Matter of Marriage in Koto Gadang” The groom [marapoelai ] is picked up and brought to the bride’s house, where he is met by the senior women. The ritual trays of food brought by his kinswomen, as an appeal to be married, are carried up into the house. Then the groom is given food, and the adat titles of the young people of the village are announced. The religious official, the iman chatib, marries the groom, and everyone eats. Finally everyone leaves but the groom, who stays until night. The following day the groom’s mother sends her extended family to the house of their new in-laws. In an elaborate ritual “the groom becomes the leader, insofar as he is the one to address the pasamandan [the women of the inmarried husbands’ lineages; bride’s brothers-in-law’s female relatives] and he is the one to spoon the chili onto the rice, and he is the one to carve the curried chicken. When it’s time to eat there will be jokes and teasing between the groom and the women, to that there is continual laughter. While they are doling out the rice and spreading it around, the bride [anak dara] is brought from a dark place and creeps up behind the women who are eating, and is asked to join in the meal. If the groom knows that the bride will join the meal, he’ll grasp her fingers and say a few words. That makes everyone laugh. The women laugh and the bride runs away. And if this goes unnoticed by the groom, if he doesn’t hear the bride being invited to eat, the women laugh and tease the groom, so that the groom laughs in embarrassment, and makes up a little speech, to alleviate his embarrassment.” The groom again drinks and eats, and then chats with his in-laws late into the night. Once everyone is sleepy, the groom is led to his bed and the lamp snuffed out. One or two hours later, the bride is led by a relative to the groom’s sleeping place. At the bedside, the groom is awakened by his in-law, and he is given the hand of the bride and told to hold it. Once the groom is holding the bride’s hand, the women block the bride from the main room and return her to her sleeping place. The bride is held by the groom, who cajoles and snuggles with her until dawn. But that night the bride is not to be “consummated” [dikaranai] by the groom. And only before dawn do they separate. For two or three days the groom will continue to shuttle between houses, eating with members of both families. After days of rituals and ritual meals the couple returns to the bride’s house, and they change into their everyday clothes. Muslim chanting continues until midnight, when most of the guests leave. There remain only the intimates—those who normally live in the house—and 37. Sarit, “Dari hal orang kawin di Kota Gedang.”

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two or three close relatives. Earlier in the days the groom had gone to his mother’s house. Before he returned home to his wife’s house, he faced his mother, and women flanking his mother gave him three gold rings—a pinkie, a ring finger, and a pointer ring—and f 10 of kepeng coins. The purpose of the rings and money was explained. Now, at his wife’s house, he sits with the religious officials. When all of the orang siak [religious students] have gone, then he is left sitting by himself, or accompanied by some in-laws. Not long afterward he will be ordered to his bed. After he goes into the chamber, the mosquito net is closed and the lamp is snuffed. Soon, the bride is brought in as she had been on the first night. After the bride is received by the groom, the person who escorted her runs back to her own place. On that night several women hide around his sleeping chamber, making sure that there are no problems between the bride and the groom. And if there is a problem, then those women will make sure it is settled and does not become known by outsiders. So the groom holds the bride, coaxing and flirting and snuggling sweetly, until the bride feels comfortable and they are ready to sleep together. When she’s relaxed, the groom intends to tell her to take off her shirt . . . but she doesn’t like the idea, so finally he is forced to pay her the three rings, and only then she likes it. After that the groom coaxes her again, wanting the bride to open her wrap, but she doesn’t like it . . . when she’s paid the f 10, then she likes it. So goes the adat of a man seducing a woman, so that all his desires are fulfilled. When all is settled, and nothing is lacking, then the bride goes in [to the main part of the house] bringing the rings and money. There are pasamandan women who follow her and joyfully receive the rings and cash, the coins jingling in their hands. Then all the women in the house wake to see what the bride has brought, and at this time a chime is struck, so that people in the nagari too know that things have gone smoothly with the bride and the groom. All of them will sleep well into the day. And if there is no problem, then in the morning the newlyweds wake, again returning to his mother’s house. If he is clearly happy as usual, then his mother says nothing and orders him home to his wife. Sometimes a religious official will have been awaiting him, and will read a prayer before sending him on his way. From that day on when the bride has already mingled [bercampur] with the groom, then every mealtime the bride is invited by two or three pasamandan women to eat with the groom. The women continue to do this for four or five days, until the bride is no longer embarrassed to wait on her husband38 herself and eat together with him.

The schoolschrift concludes, “Such is the matter of the marriage custom in Kota Gedang, as was carried out between the years 1880 and 1885. What went on earlier or later than that God only knows, because the adat of that nagari is 38. This is the first use of the word suami in the text.

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changed every year by a meeting of panghulu (village leaders), so that over time the effort becomes lighter and easier.”39

Years of Plenty Soetan Sarit was married in the fat years of the late nineteenth century. Koto Gadang had no real agricultural base, but the coffee trade and filigree work kept the coffers full. Trained at the Sekolah Radja and connected to a network of influential Koto Gadangers, village men entered the rantau and followed opportunity throughout West Sumatra and the expanding Indies. Their wives and daughters stayed home. “It was interesting to notice the independence of the native women, which in fact is one of their marked characteristics, either an outgrowth or consequence of their marriage customs.”40 In this period, an affiliation with a wife’s house was a vital component of a Koto Gadang man’s identity. In the 1880s, marriage to a woman of breeding (bangsa utama) became particularly important.41 Recall the legend of Tuanku Malim Kacil—his mother was to have been stoned and then sold into slavery. Debt bondage and slavery were common throughout the Malay world, and every household could have its attendant slaves. Then on January 1, 1860, the Dutch government formally abolished slavery in the Indies.42 Such declarations were not necessarily implemented immediately. It was only in 1875 that Timon der Kinderen came to Minangkabau from Batavia, slaughtered a buffalo in each of the three luhak, and proclaimed all the slaves to be free.43 Immediately, Minangkabau society devised a means of recognizing absolutely the class and status of a household. New kinship terms, such as kamanakan dibawah lutuik (sister’s children “below the knee”), were coined to designate 39. Soetan Sarit’s use of diacritical marks and a peculiar romanized orthography in quoting Minangkabau speech in a Malay-language manuscript is a hallmark of the schoolschriften—an author’s home language is constructed as foreign and transcribed with linguistic precision. 40. A representative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture visited Minangkabau; Fairchild, “Sumatra’s West Coast,” 459. 41. A contemporary syair about the troubles of finding a wife advises: “Pilih perempoean jang beragama [choose a girl with religion] / Kemoedian pilihlah bangsa oetama [then choose one who’s high-class].” “Kitaboeh lnikah wa ma,” Manuscript Reading Room, Leiden University Library, schoolschriften, MS. Or. 6077. 42. Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 106 – 11 (on slavery), 26 – 30 (on types of houses). 43. Datoeh Sanggoeno di Radjo, Kitab Tjoerai Paparan A g dat Lembaga gAlam Minangkabau, transliterated by B. Dt. Seri Maharadja (Fort de Kock: Snelpersdrukkerij “Agam,” 1919), 93. One of Kinderen’s proclamations is printed in Arabic script and filed in the Leiden University Library under a Dutch title, Proclamatie van den Heer T. H. der Kinderen aan de Maleische Hoofden, Bukittinggi 12 Sawal 1292 [11 November 1875] (Betawi: Pertjetakan Gouwernemen, 1875). Kinderen was the official translator of colonial law in Minangkabau; see T. H. der Kinderen, Formulierboek.

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the former slaves. The “free” families lived in longhouses at the center of the village, in places reserved for the “original settlers.” In the 1860s, Verkerk Pistorius observed that slave families were segregated, restricted to the margins of the village, and limited to a particular house type, specifically the Lipat Pandan.44 By the 1880s, marriage to the right sort of house was of unprecedented importance. It was in this atmosphere that Soetan Sarit was coached by his mother, was observed by his in-laws, and clumsily exchanged rings for sex. Within Sarit’s ritual and disparaging language of Minangkabau adat, bondpeople (dangan) are still distinguished from free folk (oerang). He was an educated man and could be expected to merantau, but he would always return to his wife and home in Koto Gadang. The Minangkabau culture that Soetan Sarit described was evanescent. By the turn of the twentieth century, circumstances were again changing. When the women of Koto Gadang—Rawidah, Hadisah, Roebak, Fatimah, Zabidah, Noeriah, and the two Sjahroems—petitioned the Nagari Council for the right to exogamous marriage in 1924, the village was neither as rich nor as much in need of prestigious longhouses. The world in which the women grew up had already witnessed the Dutch political incorporation of the remainder of Sumatra and the other Outer Islands (during the 1880s with the rise of plantations). People took for granted a relatively accessible Muslim world (the Suez Canal opened in 1869, increasing sea traffic from the Indies via the Middle East). They were born into an environment of expanding educational possibilities, in which a new Dutch Ethical Policy (1901) brought a drive toward regional decentralization (1903) and an end to the forced cultivation system (1908).45 Joel Kahn argues convincingly that 1908 was a revolutionary year for Minangkabau. Along with the dissolution of the cultivation system and the imposition of a tax and money economy (met with rebellions), 1908 signaled the beginning of a collaborative effort on the part of Minangkabau adat elites, foreign anthropologists, and legal scholars to constitute a Minangkabau “golden age” that expedited Dutch administration.46 Taufik Abdullah also believes that 1908 transformed Minangkabau; both the economy and demand for education boomed. By 1887, a rail system linked the 44. Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 26 – 30 n. 12. As noted previously, there were other low-status house forms. 45. An overview of the Dutch entrenchment of Sumatra can be found in Anthony Reid, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. chap. 3. Education is discussed in Abdullah, “Minangkabau 1900 – 1927.” Both the Ethical Policy and the process of decentralization are treated in the classic Harry Benda, “The Pattern of Administrative Reforms in the Closing Years of Dutch Rule in Indonesia,” in Continuity and Change in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale SEAS, 1972). The end of forced cultivation and the imposition of taxes and a money economy on Sumatra’s Westcoast specifically is discussed in Kahn, “ ‘Tradition,’ Matriliny and Change.” 46. Ibid., 65.

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coast and the highlands. Padang was becoming a trading center and had a Malay newspaper as early as 1865.47 A pamphlet published for the 1915 International Exhibition in San Francisco boasted that by 1887 Sumatra had been wired for telegraphs.48 Technology was paramount; this was a world where identities, “scientific” ideas of race and ethnicity, had assumed great significance.49 In 1914, a U.S. suffragist traveling through the Minangkabau highlands reported, “The people are now taking an intelligent view of their own comparative status among the peoples of the world, and more than one possesses a fair knowledge of ethnology.”50 The same decade witnessed the creation of the Encyclopaedisch Bureau (1911) and the Koloniaal Instituut (1910); throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, centers of ethno-regional scholarship were established, including Batak (1908), Minangkabau (1923), and Aceh (1924) institutes.51 For Koto Gadang, the abolition of the cultivation system brought an end to the coffee trade. Coffee had become less lucrative, however, and the men entrenched in the civil service were already bolstering the village economy with substantial cash remittances. The village continued to emulate the Netherlands. Koto Gadang was the first village to have a girls’ school. From 1908, boys and girls were offered a full Dutch and Malay bilingual education.52 A Dutch official who visited the village in 1915 was pleased to report being greeted by children in Dutch. All of the signs were in Dutch. The village was, he pronounced, the most “Dutch” in West Sumatra. When K. A. James published his eulogy,

47. Abdullah, “Minangkabau 1900 – 1927,” 44 – 48. On journalism specifically, see Ahmat Adam, “The Vernacular Press in Padang, 1865 – 1913,” Akademika 7 ( July 1975). The rapid economic transformation of Padang is striking. In 1855, the head of the U.S. commercial agency could report, “At Padang there are no Banking or Insurance Companies, so that all financial transactions, are made at Batavia, with the exception of paying for purchases of Coffee from the Government, which are made at Padang.” By 1887, the consular officer described a thriving financial district: Java Bank; Agency Dutch Trading Company; Chartered Bank of India, Australia & China; Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London & China; Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation; New Oriental Bank Corporation Ltd. The U.S. officials were not merely observing these changes; on September 23, 1897, acting vice council C. G. Veth smugly reported to the State Department that Consul Boon was arrested for defrauding the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Company. Daniel T. Goggin and Ralph E. Huss, eds., Despatches From United States Consuls in Padang, Sumatra, Netherlands East Indies 1853 – 1898 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1969). 48. B. Wieringa, “Posts, Telegraphs and Telephones in Netherlands East India” (Netherlands East-Indian San Francisco Committee, Department of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, Essay no. 9, Boekh. en Drukkerij v/h G. C. T. v. DORP & C., Semarang-Soerabaia-Den Haag: 1914). 49. Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 50. Catt, “Survival of Matriarchy,” 748. 51. Ellen, “Development of Anthropology,” 314. 52. Salimah Noehroehar Salim, “Onze Nieuwe School,” Poetri-Hindia 2.7, 15 April 1909, pp. 83 –8 4. Salim was the only non-Javanese editor of this important journal, founded by Raden Mas Tirtoadhisuryo. Hers was the only Dutch-language article in 1909.

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165 Koto Gadang men were in the Binnenlandsch Bestuur (civil service), and 79 of them were posted outside Sumatra’s Westcoast Residency.53 An important government report on religious and political conditions in West Sumatra was equally proud of the success of Koto Gadang: The situation of the last decade: the influence of “kemadjoean.” This factor, kemadjoean [progress], brings us one year further in our description of the developments; it can be grouped with what we should be able to call the situation of the last decade. But here is not the place for a discussion of the idea of progress. We merely indicate that the village of Kota Gadang, in Agam, was the origin of an “expansion” of the Malays, outside of the confines of their homeland, first to Java, and now to the eastern islands of the archipelago. With this the enterprising Minangkabau shed their narrow, localized belief in some mystical kampung-greatness, and with these repeated displacements they no longer had time to sit at the feet of the orthodox teachers. From Kota Gadang the movement was propagated; everywhere people sought an existence better than that in the home village. Youths follow the example of their elders; new kinds of knowledge were needed for these new endeavors, and so the pressure to be educated was born. In this the aversion to our [Dutch] instruction was broken. Where 10 years earlier a man who sent his children to a government school would have been scorned as a kapir [infidel], now the requests for places in the school far surpass those available.54

The men of Koto Gadang progressed. Their rantau and influence had expanded beyond Minangkabau and even Sumatra. These men maintained ties to their village and village houses, but increasingly they did need to return to those homes. The women of Koto Gadang continued to progress, too. They were educated and thoughtful and becoming dissatisfied. Much of this progress was exemplified in Rohana Kudus, who pioneered women’s newspapers and practical education in West Sumatra.55 In 1912, Rohana Kudus helped to found the first women’s newspaper in Sumatra, Soenting Melajoe (Malay Ornament). In another more local journal, Saudara Hindia, Rohana discusses gender and differences in educational attitudes—how boys and girls are treated differently by their fathers: Because of this, rise up Indies women! Organize ourselves to demand that which is useful and necessary for women—that which safeguards the home, and other 53. K. A. James, “De Nagari Kota Gedang,” Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur 49 (1916): 185 – 95. 54. Ph. S. van Ronkel, Rapport Betreffende de Godsdienstige Verschijnselen ter Sumatra’s Westkust, Samengesteld door den Ambtenaar voor de Beoefening der Indische Talen (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1916), 9. 55. Born in Koto Gadang in 1884, Rohana Kudus founded schools and newspapers and is held up as the Minangkabau superordinate of Kartini. Tamar Djaja, Rohana Kudus: Riwayat Hidup dan Perjuangannya ( Jakarta: Mutiara, 1980); Fitriyanti, Rohana Kuddus: Wartawan Perempuan Pertama Indonesia, rev. ed. ( Jakarta: Yayasan d’Nanti, 2005).

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courses of action so as to determine one’s own life-course. Consider what has happened in a small village not far from Fort de Kock (Kota Gedang). There we’ve initiated a women’s-only association, to study handicrafts, housekeeping, and various skills. We call this association the Keradjinan Amai Satia (Mothers’ Solidarity Handicrafts) and the abbreviation—Kas—means cashbox; because when the members of the association have mastered these skills, certainly the association will be making a lot of money from selling the handicrafts.56

The women of Koto Gadang were generating disposable income—harato pencarian (personal, perquisite wealth) beyond the purview of the family. They were well-educated and modeled themselves on the women’s movements of Europe. Conditions should have been particularly fine for Koto Gadang women. But they were not. All nagari (the Minangkabau autonomous village republics) had been transformed and co-opted into the colonial administrative system by the 1914 Nagari Ordinance.57 The nagari was no longer the unquestioned seat of traditional authority. Over thirty years, the Dutch had granted exclusive political authority to men, codified a once-fluid adat, and allowed a corrupt group of panghulu and datuk to establish patrilineal dynasties. Koto Gadang, which had so benefited from its relationship with Dutch, had by the 1920s the least resistance to this Dutch political culture. Down the road in Padang Panjang, Rahmah el Yunusiyyah was establishing her Girls’ Religious School (Sekolah Dinijjah Poetri) and creating a model for women’s Islamic education. In the Sumatra Thawalib, men were looking to Egypt, Mecca, and even international communism for inspiration. Rohana’s Soenting Melajoe led to Soeara Perempoean and eventually the blistering Asyrak. The women’s wing of Muhammadiyah, gAisyiyah, was giving Rasuna Said a political voice. The thorough association with the Dutch that had once brought Koto Gadang such great success now cut the village off from the stream of Minangkabau history. These developments led to May 6, 1924, and eight women making their reasoned plea for female exogamy before the adat council. The Request of the Women of Koto Gadang58 We hope that our feelings and requests will truly be taken into consideration, so that the inhabitants of Kota Gedang will see some sort of changes, leading to improvements and prosperity, from the narrow to the expansive, from the decayed to the good, from the heavy to the light. Adat, which has been the actions and province of our elders from years past

56. Roehana, “Gerakan Perempoean Hindia,” Saudara Hindia 1.7, 1913, p. 101. 57. Akira Oki, “Social Change in the West Sumatran Village” (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 1977), 82 – 91. 58. Kajo, “Memperkatakan soerat permintaän Kaoem Perempoean,” 2 – 7.

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until now, has always limited us women, in all matters, primarily in the finding of a husband like initiating proposals and setting dowries. Whereas men, they’re free; whomever his heart desires, he may take, make her his wife, and occasionally he won’t choose one of our own people. But what if this went on among us, the women of Kota Gedang? We don’t need to be specific, oh elders, you who are so wise of course know full well the punishment we would receive. Just look, for example, at what became of young Daena [infamously banished in April 1920 for marrying a Javanese in Medan]. And if you really think about it, it would be proper to heap praise on her for her actions, because at this point she is the only Kota Gedang woman to build a pipeline from another nagari to our nagari Kota Gedang, so that the waters of another nagari might flow to this nagari Kota Gadang. But her actions were rewarded with nothing but exile, for we know that each nagari has its particular adat. What puzzles us: why is it that this adat only refers or is applied to women? Men and goods flow out of Kota Gedang. . . . Whose fault is that? None other than the adat of Kota Gedang; because not even hell has adat as withering as the adat of Kota Gedang is toward women, if compared with men. So it’s the adat of Kota Gedang that harms the people of Kota Gedang. The adat of Kota Gedang that keeps a girl happy never to get a husband and remain an unmarried spinster forever. And if the man, as usual, already has an outside wife, then it tends to be her family and children that he cares for. Yes, ninik mamak and skilled thinkers, you oceans of reason, burst forth in artful discourse. Much of what we have said is rude, but don’t just take in the rudeness of our words, for it’s the content that should be grasped and considered, and in deliberation you shall see its rightness!

The women requested that this adat be scrapped, or at least made equally applicable to men. They also asked the council to lift the adat restriction on clan (suku) exogamy, while still forbidding endogamy within the more narrow matriclans ( payung) that traced their roots to a common ancestress.59 The men’s response and refusal invoked history, and conditions “seventy years ago,” to explain why Koto Gadang men began to marry outlandish women and why Koto Gadang women still do not. Seventy years ago many of the men went on the rantau for months, to other nagari and places. The women had to stay at home. Once or twice a year the men were required to go home to the village to visit their wife and children, and bachelor out-migrants held tightly to adat, not wanting to take a wife in the rantau until he was married in the village. Because of this it’s not difficult for a Koto Gadang woman to find an eligible man, moreover many Koto Gadang men like to have 2, 3 or 4 wives, so it’s not difficult for women. Men must marry a Koto Gadang woman first of all, so it’s easy for the women [to become co-wives]. 59. This is a very specific request, so that the Sikumbang clan can marry with people of the Koto, Caniago, and Guci-Piliang clans.

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After the Kompeni came to Minangkabau, many Koto Gadang men became ambtenaars [civil servants]. So a lot of money came in to the nagari, so that outsiders were afraid of marrying in, because they couldn’t afford to follow the adat [the expense of marriage].

The councilmen then reiterated the need to keep the nagari exclusive and the property undivided. After reviewing all opinions, thirty-six councilmen rejected the women’s appeal. The sole dissenting voice was that of Rohana’s husband, Koedoes gelar Pemoentjak Soetan. The adat council, removed from intellectual developments in the rest of Minangkabau, invoked the same Koto Gadang exceptionalism that had been reverberating since the gong of Tuanku Malim Kacil was first struck. A village that had suffered Padri wrath and Dutch largess was by the 1920s deliberately oblivious to the changing world next door.

Dangers Koto Gadang was the model village for the Dutch colonial project in Minangkabau; in this, it was unique. But although “On the matter of marriage in Koto Gadang” is a particularly frank and playful account of a wedding night, the rituals of courtship and marriage it describes are no more intricate and arcane than those revealed in other schoolschriften.60 In the Koto Gadang account, the principal danger is that the groom will discover that his new bride is not a virgin and make a fuss. This appears to be a right that men have throughout Minangkabau, although there are significant exceptions. From a schoolschrift on “Women in Sijunjung”: Sometimes, if the man is a smooth talker, on that night he can “be of one body” with the woman. If the woman turns out not to be a virgin, then the man will not be displeased with the woman, and just accept this; apparently a girl’s virginity is unnecessary to the men of Sijunjung. Because parents don’t guard the honor of their children, it is quite infrequent that a daughter’s virginity is claimed by her husband.61 60. For example the anonymous schoolschriften “Hal perempoean di Tandjoeng Ampaloe”; “Mentjari toenangan,” late 19th century (Leiden MS. Or., 5997/VRSC 676); “Adat orang laki-isteri,” late 19th century (Leiden MS. Or., 6008/VRSC 677); “Dari hal adat kawin dalam negeri Siroekam (Onder Afdeeling Kabangnan Doea),” late 19th century (Cod. Or. 5825, VRSC 622); “Adat kawin di Priaman”; “Adat bertoenangan dan kawin di Matoea I,” late 19th century (MS. Or. 6007a/VRSC 680); “Adat bertoenangan dan kawin di Matoea II,” late 19th century (MS. Or. 6007b/VRSC 680). And the authored schoolschriften Arif, “Hal perempoean di Si Djoendjoeng,” 4 September 1896 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University, Leiden MS. Or., 6003/VRSC 686); Soetan Ibrahim, “Pada menjatakan orang kawin di Padang,” late 19th century (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University, Leiden MS. Or., 6004/VRSC 679). 61. Arif, “Hal perempoean di Si Djoendjoeng,” 4 September 1896 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University, Leiden MS. Or. 6003/VRSC 686), 9r.

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The schoolschriften present an image of courtship and marriage that is troubled by romantic foibles and sexual peccadilloes. In all accounts, the groom forgives his wife’s transgressions, and the sanctity of the longhouse is upheld. Even in the bawdier of the schoolschriften, morality and the family prevail: If there isn’t enough money to take the daughter shopping, if even one’s sex-drive is a little low, then marriage is forbidden. If your sex-drive is too wanton, your penis rises up like a banana, day and night it throbs painfully like a punting pole caught in the rapids. Choose a girl with religion. Then choose one who’s high-class. Set an auspicious date on a full moon, and you will be blessed with four or five children.62 Djika tiada oeang nan gerang, Mengantarkan berlandja anaknja orang Sjahwat poen ada sedikit terkoerang Djika demikian nikah dilarang. Djika sjahwatmoe terlaloe gasang Zakarmoe bangoen serta memisang Siang dan malam ia tertjentjang Seperti galah diaroes bergoentjang. Pilih perempoean jang beragama, Kemoedian pilihlah bangsa oetama Kemoedian élok boelan poernama Baka peranak empat dan lima.

Later, in the 1920s, the dangers of sexuality were promulgated in widely distributed government booklets. Writing for the colonial publishing house, a Minangkabau revealed the “Sundry Beliefs of the Malays” that are no longer held by progressive (madjoe) folk and are not sanctioned by the “European doc62. The anonymous “Kitaboehlnikah wa ma,” 181r – 88r, selections.

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tors.”63 Soetan Lémbang gAlam takes particular interest in the traditional cures for sexually transmitted diseases, something he refers to euphemistically as “soap.”64 Most dangerous, however, and impossible to cure, is the magic potion that brings a wayward husband in thrall to his wife. The wife takes hot rice, holding it beneath her crotch so that it catches a few drops of menstrual blood. This rice is then given to her husband, reducing him to a fearful, obedient zombie.65 The 1920s also brought educational literature to West Sumatra, warning of venereal disease and the dangers of prostitution.66 At the same time, Hendrik Tillema, an apothecary and former member of the Hygiene Council of Semarang, launched his personal crusade against moral and municipal filth in “Kromoblanda,” his term for the Netherlands East Indies. Sumatra’s Westcoast was not spared an examination; in the towns of Batipoeh, Pariaman Bangkinang, Manindjau, Painan, Pangkalan Kota Baroe, and Soeliki, Tillema recorded significant levels of sexually transmitted disease.67 The train yards and the mining camp of Sawahlunto and Ombilin were, not surprisingly, a transmission point for these diseases.68 And in the coastal town of Pariaman, he found that syphilis, gonorrhea, and “framboesia tropica” (yaws, a disease similar to syphilis but, in fact, not sexually transmitted) were spread by the students there.69 Minangkabau men had, by the twentieth century, a new arsenal of fears to accompany their old temptations. Corruptive, outside elements could be brought into the longhouse as disease; the biliak (sleeping chamber) was no sanc63. M. T. Soetan Lémbang gAlam, Berbagai-bagai Kepertjajaan Orang Melajoe, vol. 2 (Weltevreden: Balai Poestaka, 1920), 3, on the triumph of reason [akal ] over superstition. 64. “Saboen= sakit saboen, sakit perempoean.” Ibid., 27 – 28. The use of the term sabun (soap) is confirmed by contemporary dictionaries in Minangkabau. M. Thaib gl. St. Pamoentjak, Kamoes Bahasa Minangkabau—Bahasa Melajoe – Riau (Batavia: Balai Poestaka, 1935). 65. “Termakan ditjirit berendang—termakan dinasi berdjiangau.” Lémbang gAlam, Berbagai-bagai Kepertjajaan, 38. This expression is, of course, one of real spite, used most often by a man’s siblings when they feel he is spending too much time with his wife and her family. The expression is used in this manner by Radjab in Semasa Ketjil Dikampung. 66. J. C. Hollander, and J. Lameijn, Bahaja jang Mengantjam pada Laki2 dan Perampoean, trans. Abdoel Moeis (Bandoeng: N. V. Mij. Vorkink, ca. 1916); F. W. van Haeften, Penjakit Perempoean, trans. Goelam (Weltevreden: Volkslectuur, 1920). 67. Tillema, “Kromoblanda,” 130 – 31. 68. The peculiar social world of the mining camp, with many Javanese men and women laborers, prostitution and concubinage, and family life that differed from that in the surrounding Minangkabau villages, has been explored by Erwiza Erman in two essays, “Hidden Histories: Gender, Family and Community in the Ombilin Coalmines (1892 – 1965)” (CLARA Working Paper no. 13, IIAS, Amsterdam, 2002); “Labouring Communities: Women’s Roles in the Ombilin Coal Mines of Sumatra (1892 – 1965),” in Labour in Southeast Asia: Local Processes in a Globalized World, ed. Rebecca Elmhirst and Ratna Saptari (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). 69. Tillema, “Kromoblanda,” 119 – 20, 131.

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tuary. The battle for Minangkabau morality would be intense, and the proving ground far more ambiguous than the smallpox of the 1850s was.

Haji Rasul’s Army of Desire Earlier in this chapter I presented a quotation from Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah (Rasul), directing men to control their lusts and rein in their passions.70 In the same article, he wrote, “If a man’s wife has done all she can to satisfy him, but it has not been according to his fancy, then, in order to secure further satisfaction, he goes beyond the bounds of decency and seeks gratification in other places and from other women. My brothers, be considerate and put such conduct far from you.”71 Haji Rasul did not heed his own advice because, although there is no evidence he visited prostitutes, he was renowned as a ruthless, serial divorcé. This reputation is crystallized through the writings of his own son, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, known acronymically as Hamka. In 1929, Hamka, recently returned from the hajj, was married. In that same year, he also wrote three books—Agama dan Perempoean (Religion and Women), Sedjarah Minangkabau dengan Agama Islam (The History of Minangkabau and the Religion of Islam), and Pembela Islam (Sedjarah Saidina Aboe Bakar) (Defender of Islam: The History of Our Leader Abu Bakr). The first two explicitly address the role of women as mothers and wives in Minangkabau. This is a key topic in Hamka’s biographical and fictional writing, and one that occupied Hamka, I believe, because he was troubled by his father’s own marital practices and the resulting destruction of the family home. Hamka’s earliest writing is venomous as he lashes out at the customs of West Sumatra and particularly sharp in its critique of the position of women in modern Minangkabau culture. Nevertheless in Minangkabau adat does not give power to women who wish to progress. Penghulu and ulama really like to have lots of wives, without constraints, so that they might vent their lusts. When he’s satisfied the wife is divorced and replaced with a younger one. In short it’s common in Minangkabau to have more than one wife, to divorce the old and marry the young; co-wives fighting has become commonplace, and no longer strange.72

When he composed this attack, Hamka was living in Padang Panjang. The town had recently experienced two crises: the 1926 earthquake had razed many of the buildings, and Hamka’s father had been cast out of his own school by communist-influenced teachers. The political climate was tempestuous, and the 70. Portions of the following analysis are drawn from Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession.” 71. Translated in Archer, “Muhammadan Mysticism in Sumatra,” 117. 72. Amrullah, Sedjarah Minangkabau dengan Agama Islam, 33.

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reformist Islam of Muhammadiyah was in flux. Even in this milieu, Hamka’s attempt to synthesize cultures is striking. “In the search for progress in this era, there are two bases that people use. Those are the Eastern way and the Western way.” Asian culture is good for purifying the soul, claims Hamka, whereas Europe is good for the knowledge it produces. Hamka praises the Occidental respect for women (the kaoem isteri ), but he recommends avoiding fashionably untrammeled interactions with them. And although Easterners do have established rights set down for women, they tend jealously to block the strides women make.73 Other reformist ulama might borrow pedagogy and dress from the Europeans, but to praise even obliquely the position of women in the West was at the time almost heretical. In a chapter on the “Fate of Muslim Wives in Indonesia,” Hamka catalogs the sufferings of women: forced marriage, becoming co-wives, divorce, and child brides. And the newlywed Hamka tellingly decries the failure of true love (tjinta soetji ) in recounting the story of an unfortunate man who, forced to become engaged to a village girl while in Mecca, ultimately sacrifices his heart’s desire for fear of rebelling against his parents.74 Hamka attacks the elite—the datuk, panghulu, and ulama—for exercising their prerogative and casually shuttling through a sequence of wives. For with “poligamy” comes easy divorce, and a vision of hordes of unwanted divorcees: Teluk Bayur is a harbor, The Dutch come inland in small ships. The flowers have wilted, the garden’s deserted, Now no bees will return.75 Teloek Bajoer Laboehan kapal, Belanda moedik bersekoetji, Boenga lajoer keboenlah tinggal, Tiadalah koembang kembali lagi.

In his autobiography, published in the early 1950s, Hamka described a palmy Minangkabau childhood, filled with the trappings of traditional Minangkabau culture.76 Hamka’s grandmother had only two daughters and the elder had died 73. H. A. M. K. Amrullah, Agama dan Perempoean (Padang Pandjang: Boekhandel & Uitgever Dt. Seripado, 1929), esp. “Timoer dan Barat,” 69 – 70. 74. That Hamka’s own marriage was unhappily arranged for him is made clear in an interview; see Hamka, “Nama Saya: Hamka,” in Hamka di Mata Hati Umat, ed. Nasir Tamara ( Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1983), 51 – 52. Furthermore, Hamka’s still-popular 1936 novella, Di Bawah Lindungan Kabah (Under the Protection of the Ka’bah), is a story of missing fathers and ruined love that is based on his own hajj experience. H. A. M. K. Amrullah, Dibawah Lindoengan Ka’bah (Batavia: Balai Pustaka, 1938). 75. Amrullah, Agama dan Perempoean, 79. 76. Hamka, Kenang-kenangan Hidup 1.

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in Mecca. So, all of the hopes of the grandmother and her five brothers fell on Hamka’s mother, who would inherit the family property and would be responsible for the maintenance of a place where the uncles “could receive water if thirsty, rice if hungry.” All of Hamka’s great-uncles were adat chiefs. Even before describing the scene of his birth, Hamka took pains in setting up the matriarchate and idealized Minangkabau home and world into which he was born. Hamka’s father ruptured his childhood idyll. Tragedy comes in a passage titled “Bad Luck.” Bound up in a critique of Minangkabau marriage custom, Hamka expresses disgust at his father’s cycling through wives with each fasting month. “His father was a famous religious scholar. But he had yet to free himself from the ties of society and local custom.” Hamka is furious; in the voice of an adult he rages bitterly against adat and Minangkabau custom. Although intimate specifics are not given—accusations against the author’s father are couched in a general cultural condemnation— the passage builds to a “ ‘Climax’ that would determine the course of his life.” His maternal grandmother accuses Hamka’s father of abandoning his family, “Exploding from the mouth of that elder was a question like the cut of a sharp blade on the heart of that child, ‘Teacher Hajji! Teacher Hajji! Why are you leaving your children?’ ” Hamka learns then that his father has divorced his mother. He writes that at age twelve he “already knew the meaning of sorrow.”77 According to Minangkabau tradition, if parents divorce, or if the wife dies, the children “remain at the house of their mother and the regular relationship between father and children ceases to be maintained.”78 Whereas for Hamka it is adat that allows his father to betray his mother, it is Islam that drives his father to break with adat over custody of his children: His father then calls Hamka over, asking, “If father divorces your mother, with whom would you live? Who would you follow?” His mouth is locked with tears. He could not answer, because he could not conceive of a life with just his father, not his mother. Or with just mother, not father!79

Although Hamka accompanies his father, “Because of the influence of the social structure, adat, his own father did not feel like his father any more.” Hamka feels as an “abandoned child” and worse, “It felt like the ties with the people 77. Ibid., 46 – 50. 78. Tsuyoshi Kato, Matriliny and Migration: Evolving Minangkabau Traditions in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 58. Hamka’s father was resisting more than Minangkabau adat. In December 1911, the Dutch government had codified aspects of Minangkabau adat law, making regional administration, taxation, and control much easier. Officially, this state-sanctioned customary law contradicted Islamic law because children “belong[ed] to the mother” and the father had no authority over his children in the house. See Holleman, Van Vollenhoven on Indonesian Adat Law, 134 – 35. Haji Rasul’s action was, then, as much the stance of an anti-colonialist as an Islamic reformer. 79. Hamka, Kenang-kenangan Hidup 1, 50.

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of that house had been cut.”80 Hamka is ripped away from his longhouse. The house becomes a rumah tunjuk (“house of indication,” a term only Hamka uses) at the very moment when it can no longer be pointed to as “home.” Although the boy Hamka still sees his mother occasionally, she eventually leaves for Deli to start a new life with a wealthy merchant. Now Hamka can only gaze, unwelcome, at the “desolate old house.”81 And by the time he is thirteen years old, he is fully detached from the longhouse; he has become a wanderer (an anak tualang, as opposed to a perantau, or out-migrant).82 The intimate contention of Hamka’s life—as with that in the lives of any other Minangkabau—could neither be anticipated nor prevented by any amount of culture or religion. It is this painful and aleatory aspect of human life that demands change and makes history. Nevertheless, the particular ways that Hamka, the women of Koto Gadang, and the schoolschriften writers of the late nineteenth century could articulate this contention were linked to the contested nature of the Minangkabau home and family by Padri and reformist and by the colonial state and colonial progressives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 80. Ibid., 51. 81. Ibid., 52 82. Ibid., 53.

SIX

Earthquake When the earth shudders most violently. And forces out all that it contains. And people say, “Why is the earth like this?” On that day the earth will tell its story. For God has ordered it to do so. On that day all the people in their graves will come out, to see what they have done. Whoever has done a mote of good, surely they will see that good. Whoever has done a mote of evil, surely they will see that evil. Quran, Surah 99

Earthquake In the 1920s, colonial West Sumatra was turned upside down. For Minangkabau, it was not unreasonable to believe that the day of reckoning, foretold in the Quran, was imminent. In smaller villages, the conflict between reformist and traditionalist religious leaders had proved divisive; in separate mosques and prayerhouses, doomsayers awaited Judgment Day and final arbitration.1 This religious factionalism was particularly significant for the nagari—the Minangkabau autonomous village republics whose ideal composition included a single The epigraph is from chapter 99 of the Quran, “Earthquake,” translated from “Soerat Az-Zilzal (Gempa, Gojang),” in Mahmoed Joenoes, Tafsir Koerän Indonesia (Padang: Boekh. Mahmoedijah, 1938), 516 – 17. Yunus’s was the most popular Quranic exegesis in West Sumatra, and the first two printings of this edition sold out in months. In his posthumous autobiography, Yunus mentions that he had written a tafsir as early as 1921; Yunus, Riwayat Hidup, 22. 1. On the religious schisms, see Zaim Rais, Against Islamic Modernism: The Minangkabau Traditionalists’ Responses to the Modernist Movement ( Jakarta: Logos Wacana Ilmu, 2001); Abdullah, Schools and Politics. Literature on the period has been dominated by Muhammadiyah-influenced Minangkabau ( particularly Hamka and Mahmud Yunus), who characterize the traditionalists as superstitious bumpkins. In pedagogical techniques and political networks, however, the traditionalists were no less sophisticated or “modern” than the reformists.

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prayerhouse.2 Two decades of social and bureaucratic intervention had transformed the nagari, and in 1914 the Nagari Ordinance formally reorganized local authority. Dutch-sanctioned headmen, panghulu, administered taxes through a new nagari council. Its mollifying nod to tradition and restoration fooled nobody.3 Less visibly, dogmatic disputes began to cleave families. Uncles, nephews, fathers, and sons were set against one another in their adherence to particular ideological groupings.4 With both religious authority divided and the traditional leaders corrupted, the sacred pillars of Minangkabau society were teetering precariously. More than anywhere else in the region, West Sumatra in the early twentieth century experienced the transformations and contestations of modernity not only in the cities and towns but also in the smallest villages. Villagelevel religious schisms, village newspapers, and village politics were the front lines of debates that elsewhere in Southeast Asia were confined to the colonial capital. At the same time, the West Sumatran urban centers were caught up in the pergerakan—the varied movements of political and social awakening. In the hill town of Padang Panjang, the famous modernist Thawalib schools had become the loci of a peculiar form of intellectualized Islamic communism. Disaffected Communist Party members in Silungkang plotted with Ombilin coal-mine workers, and in the final hours of 1926 a communist uprising broke out in the nearby industrial town of Sawahlunto.5 So West Sumatra was experiencing its “age in motion”—giddy and tumultuous and fraught with infinite possibility. The earthquake of June 28, 1926, tore down a century of change in West Sumatra (figure 6.1). When it hit, thirteen-year-old Muhamad Radjab (then called by his childhood name Ridjal) was playing in the yard of his father’s traditionalist prayerhouse. He first supposed that a comet had slammed into the far side of the Earth, pulverizing the Americas and setting off tremors in Sumatra. This moment of scientific reason did not last as panic—kehilangan akal (the vanishing of rational thought)—consumed his village of Sumpur.6 Radjab remembered people chanting “La ilaha ilallah!” so that at the moment of death this holy phrase might be on their lips. He remembered cowering with 2. The nagari is composed of five fundamental institutions; it must have a road [berlebuh], bathing place [bertapian], meeting hall [berbalai ], mosque [bermesjid], and field or square [bergelenggang]. Sanggoeno di Radjo, Kitab Tjoerai, 96. 3. Oki, “Social Change,” 82 – 91. 4. Kaum, an Arabic word, means “group,” and by the twentieth century these groups were usually ideologically defined. In Minangkabau, there were modernist reformists (Kaum Muda, the young group) and traditionalists who might represent either an adherence to adat or to tarekat-based Islam (Kaum Tua, the old group). The distinctions are discussed by Abdullah, Schools and Politics. 5. Nasution, Pemberontakan Rakyat Silungkang, 83 – 91. The colonial state’s report on the uprising has become a classic; Schrieke, “Course of the Communist Movement.” 6. Radjab, Semasa Ketjil Dikampung, chap. 17 (“Gempa”), 127.

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Figure 6.1. Photograph of the destruction that occurred in the 1926 earthquake. In the foreground, a modernist minaret has collapsed; in the background a traditionalist mosque stands unscathed. From S. W. Visser and M. E. Akkersdijk, “De Aardbevingen in de Padangsche Bovenlanden,” Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 87 (1927), figure 7 after page 42.

others in the prayerhouse. Radjab’s father offered no reassurance: “There is no more hope, it is the End.” He advised the people, “We must be resigned and have faith [tawakkal], for the world will end in the next few days. There are now so many wicked people that God is passing judgment.”7 Anticipating that most violent and ultimate earthquake, the people of Sumpur confessed sins and begged forgivenesses. Ridjal—who earlier had boasted shamelessly of his garden marauding—had a litany of pilfered mango and jackfruit for which he had to atone. As the tremors subsided, the villagers realized that their divulgences had mundane, not divine, inspiration. But there was no opportunity to recompense or castigate because news of the fate of Padang Panjang began to reach his village. 7. Ibid., 128.

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The Great Sumatran Fault is a shallow strike-slip fault running the length of the Bukit Barisan mountain range. As a seismological event, the 1926 earthquake was of unremarkable magnitude; the offshore earthquakes of 1833 and 1861 were far more powerful. But with major population centers built along the fault, its occasional slips have had devastating human consequences.8 In 1926, faulting was strongest in Padang Panjang, where a large community of students was taught and boarded in the most modern of buildings—the stone house.9 With the help of volunteers from the Boys’ Religious School (Dinijjah School Poetera) and the Thawalib School, on June 26 the river-rock walls of the Girls’ Religious School (Dinijjah School Poeteri) had at last been completed. Two days later these walls collapsed and took the life of the popular teacher Nanisah.10 Older stone buildings fared no better. The military barracks, the train station, and the assistant resident’s house were razed along with Minangkabau shops and homes.11 Rahmah el Yunusiyyah—the founder of the Girls’ Religious School—remembered the sad exodus of students and merchants on June 30: “They departed like caravans in the Sahara desert, these throngs of people each carrying their burdens.”12 The first caravans began to pass through Sumpur—on the road between Padang Panjang and Solok—on the night of June 28. They told of Padang Panjang’s stone buildings demolished. They described children home from school, eating lunch, and buried by the midday temblor. They spoke of the shelters set up in the yard of the Normaalschool. As recounted in Semasa Ketjil Dikampung, the earthquake exposed Radjab’s father’s traditionalist fears and reaffirmed modernist rationality in a time of spiritual crisis. But, Radjab reminds us, parenthetically, that for those who were thrown from vehicles or crushed by debris, June 28 was in truth the day of reckoning.13 The earthquake took lives. It flattened buildings, twisted railways, and sent mountain roads slipping into ravines. It was a moment of physical and social tearing down reminiscent of the Padri War a century earlier. Nearly all of the 393 houses that collapsed in Padang Panjang were made of brick.14 8. K. R. Newcomb and W. R. McCann, “Seismic History and Seismotectonics of the Sunda Arc,” Journal of Geophysical Research 92, no. B1 (1987): 421 – 39. 9. In 1930, the town of Padang Panjang had the highest percentage (48.64 percent) of nontraditional housing in West Sumatra, excepting the mining camp of Sawahlunto. (Traditional was defined as matrilineal pusaka [clan] and pencarian [single-family] houses.) Department van Economische Zaken, Volkstelling 1930, vol. 4 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1935), 67. 10. Rahmah el Joenoesijjah, ed., Boekoe Peringatan 15 Tahoen Dinijjah School Poeteri (Padang Pandjang: Dinijjah School Padang Pandjang, 1936), 12 – 13. 11. Soedarso A. Amaloedin, “Bahaja Gempa di Sumatra Barat/De Ramp op Sumatra’s Westkust,” Oedaya (September 1926): 194 – 95. 12. Joenoesijjah, Boekoe Peringatan, 13. 13. Radjab, Semasa Ketjil Dikampung, 131. 14. S. W. Visser and M. E. Akkersdijk, “De Aardbevingen in de Padangsche Bovenlanden,” Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië 87 (1927): 36 – 71, 77 – 79.

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Traditionalists saw the destruction in this town of communists, reformist Islamic schools, and colonial administrators as a judgment against a corrupt and collapsing modernity. In figure 6.1, a modernist minaret in the foreground is shattered, whereas a traditionalist wooden tiered mosque appears unscathed.15 In the aftermath of the earthquake and the communist uprising, Minangkabau was rebuilt. A jury-rigged Girls’ Religious School (Diniyyah Putri) opened its doors just forty days after the quake; within a year, new wooden classrooms were being constructed. After the uprisings, there was greater police presence and more political and journalistic repression. For the varied movements of the pergerakan, the repaired roads increasingly led in one direction—to the prison camp of Boven Digul and further toward the Indonesian nation.

The Politicized Family By the 1920s, at the level of the home and family, a century of intimate contention was coming to a climax. Now, in the age of movements, the family was caught up in a series of potent political metaphors that moved it from the intimate sphere of the house (babiliak kacieH) to the public sphere of the newspaper and auditorium (babiliak gadang). “The character of Indonesia,” claimed a 1925 article in the Islamic-communist Doenia Achirat, “is the same as that of a mother and father who have several children.”16 By the 1920s, anak (child) was no longer confined to kin relations but signified an emotional commitment to broader territorialities— child of Indonesia, child of Hindia, child of Sumatra, and so on. Child had connoted, until the twentieth century, a sense of kinship. This could be imaginary; in the eighteenth century the king of Pagaruyung could call his subjects “children of Minangkabau.” Since the mid-nineteenth century, the paternalistic expression anak negeri (child of the state) had been used by the Dutch government in reference to its colonial subjects. This colonial trope of childhood permeated the first progressive journal, the Dutch-sponsored Insulinde, which was published in Padang in 1901, as shown in its opening editorial: “So the Dutch Government, for all of us, is no different than a father and mother; because it is what endeavors, takes the initiative, so that the children of the land become clever, become rational. So that the children of the land become people with customs and traditions that are good.”17 It was only in the late 1910s 15. The three tiers of the wooden mosque symbolized the three components of society according to adat: the adat leaders, the religious officials, and the masses. Taufik Abdullah, “Adat and Islam: An Examination of the Conflict in Minangkabau,” Indonesia 2 (1966): 15 – 17. 16. A. G., “Indonesia dan poeteranja,” Doenia Achirat 4.2, 10 November 1925, p. 1. Dunia akhirat means afterlife or World Hereafter and was just one of several newspapers implicitly preparing Minangkabau for the cataclysm. 17. Dja Endar Moeda, “Jang Terhormat Pedoeka Toean Toean Pembatja!!,” Insulinde, April 1901, p. 1.

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and 1920s that this trope of childhood was wrested from the colonizers and naturalized. The Doenia Achirat article “Indonesia and Its Children” reclaims child from the Dutch, admonishing children to feel obligated to their parents, and not “repay mother’s milk with poison.” This metaphor is extended relentlessly, describing a vague past time when Indonesia’s children (anak Indonesia) were indolent and weak, content to stay at home eating, playing, and sleeping late. Today’s dutiful children better themselves, become educated, and ultimately join the Movement, where they may bring their parents some happiness. And the notion of ideological children participating in the movements of the pergerakan permeated all contemporary journals; someone called “Child of Soematera” wrote an article about protecting the maternal geo-body of Sumatra from foreign exploitation; the “Familie I. D. C.” (Family of the International Debating Club) introduced the first issue of Djago! Djago!; and the editors of Asjraq defined command, or govern, in a series of neo-Confucian analogies that led from God : believers through king : subjects to father : child.18 It was possible to be considered the child of a place for two reasons. First, the rise of cosmopolitan entrepôts such as Batavia and even Padang had, by the twentieth century, forced people to think of themselves in comparative terms. Second, and more important, the family had been endowed with new political and social valence and was starting to seep, semantically, out from under the door of the longhouse. So, in the 1920s familiarity, familyness, was an easy metaphor. Through a pervasive and diverse educational system the Dutch, secular modernists, and Islamic moralists had all made the home and family the proving ground and microcosm of society and state. A didactic apparatus was in place to make good mothers and fathers of Minangkabau youth—that their children might become colonial bureaucrats, teachers, leaders, ulama, or whatever career goals were deemed ideologically serviceable. In the alloying of family and politics, Minangkabau experienced twenty years of bloodily demarcated turmoil. The Tax Rebellion of 1908 hurled West Sumatra into an era of broad-based political awareness characterized by a pergerakan of dynamic and variegated movement. And the suppression of the communist insurrection of 1926 – 1927, with the creation of a concentrative colonial prison camp at Boven Digul in New Guinea, both stifled and focused the different movements under the rubric of pergerakan nasional (the Nationalist Movement). Throughout those twenty years, the Minangkabau family was a bitterly contested space. By the time the politi18. Anak Soematera, “Tanah Soematera dan Ra’jat,” Doenia Achirat 3.17, 10 July 1924, p. 2; Familie I. D. C. “Pendahoeloean,” Djago! Djago! 1.1, 8 October 1923, p. 1; Redactie, “ ‘Anak saparintah bapak,’ ‘Kamanakan saparintah mamak’,” Asjraq 2.12, December 1926, p. 219. The notion of a geobody is from Tongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).

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cal and seismological uprising ruptured West Sumatra, the thorough conflation of family and public life had transformed Minangkabau culture.

Newspapers and Daughters of the Indies Of the seventy-six newspapers that have been published in West Sumatra, most appeared and folded before the 1930s.19 In the 1920s, Padang was still the center of Sumatran journalism. After 1926, there was an exodus of editors and reporters to Batavia and especially the burgeoning commercial center on the east coast of Sumatra, Medan.20 An informal report on the “Islamic Press in Minangkabau” compiled in 1929 covers some thirty-four individual newspapers that had recently shut down, with orientations that ran from reformist Kaum Muda and Thawalib to communist and even Ahmadiyyah.21 But in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Malay-language West Sumatran press was the most active and democratic in the Indies. Newspapers that directly addressed educators and women highlighted children and the family. As attentiveness to these institutions became hallmarks of modernity and kemajuan, they became topical in all of the periodicals. Journalism, then, was in many ways the lowest common denominator of the myriad movements that were influencing Minangkabau. Every ideological and social movement of the pergerakan had its organ, and every organ had a cohort of journalist colleagues out to rouse the rabble.22 Newspapers are usually not the best sources a historian can use to reconstruct the past; most of everyday history goes by without becoming news. Movement-era Minangkabau was exceptional. Although the journalists fulminating between 1908 and 1926 might not have been real voces populi, they were close. Newspapers honed their audiences and routinely published the names and addresses of their subscribers (especially those who were in arrears). They were widely and often communally read, and even small villages could have a press supporting several competing periodicals.23

19. This was the number proclaimed at a formal exhibition in Padang. For the catalog, see Erman Makmur, Perkembangan Suratkabar di Sumatera Barat: Dari Dulu Sampai Sekarang (Padang: Museum Negeri Propinsi Sum. Barat Adhityawarman, 1995). 20. For the authoritative early history of journalism in Padang, see Adam, Vernacular Press, chap. 7. On the move to Medan, see H. Mohammad Said, Sejarah Pers di Sumatera Utara (Medan: Percetakan Waspada, 1976). 21. The author of the report admits that there are probably many more “dead” newspapers of which he is unaware. Amrullah, Sedjarah Minangkabau dengan Agama Islam, 39 – 41. Ahmadiyyah was a South Asian religious innovation of the late nineteenth century—a revisionist Islam that was particularly distasteful to the Minangkabau ulama. 22. See the remarkable account of his “collega journalisten” by Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai. The chapter “Mengoendjoengi collega journalisten” is about the press specifically. 23. The press in Maninjau—a small lakeside village that served as an administrative center for a large region with population in 1930 of over 100,000—supported at least five local newspapers.

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Stories regularly focused on the act of receiving and reading the paper itself, as in this syair, a traditional Malay poetic form, by Poeteri Alamslah: It’s past nine o’clock, I watch the street; To see Mohamad Dahlan, bringing “Soenting” the new mainstay. Within one can find the writings of women, telling of matters of kemajuan (progress); Women who are not too shy, according to the adat (custom) of this era.24 Soedah berboeni poekoel sembilan, saja memandang ketengah djalan; Kelihatan konon Mohamad Dahlan, mengantarkan “Soenting” moeda andalan. Dalam kelihatan karangan perempoean, peri mentjeritakan hal kemadjoean; Perempoean nan tidak maloe maloean, menoeroet Gadat diini zaman.

Very little was left to the imagination regarding one’s community of fellow readers. In its eighth issue, Soenting Melajoe—the first women’s newspaper in Minangkabau—published a list of subscribers’ names and addresses.25 Praise like Poeteri Alamslah’s syair can be found throughout the initial year of the paper.26 When it appeared in 1912, Soenting Melajoe invited Minangkabau women to participate in an overtly public forum; the paper saw itself as a deliberate challenge to Minangkabau male authority.27 By using this modern and politically charged medium to publicize women’s issues, Soenting Melajoe 24. Poeteri Alamslah, “Poekoel Sembilan,” Soenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Minang Kabau 1.5, 3 August 1912, p. 1, stanzas 1 and 4. The author is the daughter of the “manteri Opium, Priaman.” 25. The paper appeared every eight days, and a yearly subscription was f 1.80. Of the thirty-five subscriptions, twenty-four were taken out in women’s names, and almost half were for addresses outside of West Sumatra. The paper, edited by Zoebeidah Ratna Djoewita in Padang and Siti Roehana in Koto Gadang, was established with the backing of Datoek Soetan Maharadja, Zoebeidah’s father. See also Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World.” 26. For example, a sentence from the town Kota nan Ampat (Pajakoemboeh): “On Sunday, 9 June 1912 at 3 in the afternoon I was sitting with two or three friends in my house in Koto nan Empat (near the Chinese school in Payakumbuh) when the Postlooper arrived bringing the newspaper Oetoesan Melajoe addressed to me, which contained as an insert the paper Soenting Melajoe for us women, and at that instant I became proud and my mind was opened, because finally a paper had been born for my people, women. . . .” Siti Alwijah, “Selamat!!” Soenting Melajoe 1.3, 20 Juli 1912, pp. 1 –2. 27. Although the name sunting Melayu is most easily translated as “Malay ornament,” sunting also means “to edit” or “to correct.” Readers would have chuckled at this pun; the paper was a very effective corrective to conventional male views of Minangkabau culture.

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transformed the topic of family from a progressive fashion into a politicized controversy. But in its first year Soenting Melajoe championed frailer causes, too. Even within the broader Malay world, Minangkabau was a culture famous for the power of its women. Women controlled the household and padi fields; Dutch bourgeois morality and cloistered Javanese priyayi gentility had yet to make inroads into the Minangkabau highlands. So, the concerns of Minangkabau women did not neatly conform to the more contentious and persecuted feminisms of Java and Europe. The early contributors to Soenting Melajoe invented a particular, intolerable Minangkabau male authority against which they would rail. In building this notion of male authority, the redactors of Soenting Melajoe drew on two principal sources—European progressivism and a Kartini-esque elite feminism. Both of these movements had been synthesized just four years earlier in Raden Mas Tirtoadhisuryo’s journal, Poetri-Hindia. Founded in Buitenzorg in 1908, Poetri-Hindia was a women’s counterpart to Tirtoadhisuryo’s Medan-Prijaji. It became a journal for the well-bred “Isteri Hindia” (Wives of the Indies).28 Of the seven women who acted as head editors (hoofdredactrices), only one was based outside of Java—S. N. Noehar Salim, a private educator in Koto Gadang. Then the most Dutch village in West Sumatra, Koto Gadang came closest to producing passable Minangkabau priyayi, the petty nobility of Java who had become an integral part of the Dutch colonial regime. In the only Dutchlanguage article that year, Salim boasted of the initiative of the Tuanku Laras of IV Kottas in opening a girls’ school. Since 1908, there had been mixed Dutchand Malay-language education for both the boys and girls of “Kotta Gedang” (a Javanized pronunciation), and in 1909 the triumphantly acculturated students were able to participate in a soccer match.29 The women who contributed to Poetri-Hindia were mostly students, teachers, or especially the wives of teachers in the extensive network of Dutch-sponsored native schools. Other Minangkabau women wrote in Malay and about more practical concerns. Siti Julia, the wife of the candidate teacher at Tiku, in the coastal region of Priaman, was a frequent contributor.30 The use of poetry, and especially the syair, distinguished the Minangkabau submissions to Poetri-Hindia. There was no

28. Putri Hindia means “daughters of the Indies.” The best work on Tirtoadhisuryo is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Sang Pemula ( Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1985). Tirto may be a pioneer in Pramoedya’s Javacentered world, but he was in all ways predated by Dja Endar Moeda in Padang. On the women’s press in the Indies, with attention to Minangkabau, see Claudine Salmon, “Presse Féminine ou Féministe?” Archipel 13 (1977). 29. Salimah Noehroehar Salim, “Onze Nieuwe School,” Poetri-Hindia 2.7, 15 April 1909, pp. 83 – 84. 30. See Poetri-Hindia 2.3, 15 February 1909. Sitti or Siti, once an honorific, was in this period a term of address meaning “miss” and conveying a sense of camaraderie. Siti Julia was praised in a syair by Siti Roekaijat bin Mohd. Saleh, a third-year student in a local native school.

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effort to imitate European prose forms. Minangkabau women—trained in the martial art of silat lidah (tongue-fu)—were confident and comfortable with traditional Malay poetics. They wrote in verse and embedded their messages acrostically and in metaphor. These women were quite aware that their society differed fundamentally from that of Java. Responding to the deluge of articles discussing “matters of women’s progress or the wives of priyayi,” Siti Halimah wrote sarcastically about “Priyayi Wives in Minangkabau.” She rejected the claim of Minangkabau women’s independence, having herself witnessed, in the town of Tiku, the custom of wives paying tribute (oepati, a dowry) of hundreds of rupiah to their husbands. In coastal West Sumatra, complained Halimah, “women must woo the men.”31 Yet from the same town, Siti Julia discusses the idea of djodoh pertemoean (fated love), describing a beautiful vaudevillian and the undeserving dark-skinned keling (a common but derogatory term for a person from India) with whom she fell in love. Julia cited the favorite Minangkabau adage of predestination, “The ocean fish and mountain spice will meet in the cook-pot.”32 The progressive era, she concluded, was breaking down old divisions of class and race as true and fated love flourishes. These articles gave the women and schoolgirls in the cook-pot of West Sumatra their first real taste of what it might mean to be an “Indies woman,” and how Minangkabau fitted within this broader identity. A daughter of the assistant teacher in Maninjau waxed florid, sniffing and plucking the flowers within Poetri-Hindia’s “beautiful garden.”33 And another candidate-teacher’s wife summed up the four obligations of every married daughter of the Indies: to her husband and children, to her household (roemah tangga), to her extended family (kaoem keloearganja), and to humanity generally. As a wife, the “most important person in the house,” each woman must be aware of these four obligations.34 She must not let her own desires conflict with her obligations to these institutions. And she must be prepared to transform these institutions if they prove incompatible or mutually harmful.

31. Siti Halimah, “Isteri Perijai-Perijai di Minang kabau,” Poetri-Hindia 2.8, 30 April 1909, pp. 94 – 95. 32. Siti Julia, “Djoedoh pertemoean,” Poetri-Hindia 2.11, 15 Juni 1909, pp. 142 – 43. The new possibility of divinely sanctioned but socially inappropriate “fated love” was a favorite literary subject. See, for example, the true-story novel of cross-cultural love set in Padang’s Chinatown, Soen Yong Tjia, Tjerita pertemoean dalam kamar kemanten: Familie Ong dan Lie atawa Saipah gadisnja Marah Oemin tjintakan goeroenja: Satoe tjerita jang menarik hati, betoel telah terdjadi di Padang, nikahnja doewa soedara Ong dalam gedongnja familie Lie (Padang: Padangsche Snelpersdrukerij, 1922). 33. Siti Sjam binti Datoe Goenoeng Radja Hulponderwijzer (Manindjau), “Poetri Hindia itoe adalah seperti soeatoe taman jang permai,” Poetri-Hindia 2.23, 15 December 1909, p. 268. Taman (garden or park) was a favorite metaphor for the discursive space carved out by these newspapers. 34. Siti Ramalah (Isteri Cand.-Onderwijzer diMoeara-Laboeh (S. W. K.)), “Kewadjipan perempoean,” Poetri-Hindia 2.17, 15 September 1909, p. 196.

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Writing and Acting These Indies women who read and wrote for Poetri-Hindia and Soenting Melajoe had new conceptions of themselves and of their role in society. Most did not yet travel—the rantau was still a male domain.35 But they saw themselves as cosmopolites, taking part in global movements and living in a worldwide progressive era. The women had seen the territory of their influence expand in a single generation from their households, villages, and at most nagari, out into the international community. The alam Minangkabau, the expanded world and Minangkabau oikoumene, was no longer delineated by the movement of men only.36 And in the language of the pergerakan, movement no longer meant simply a change in physical place; one could participate in a movement without having to migrate.37 This expansion and these movements were figured in aspects of the newspapers that have commanded the least attention from scholars. Women’s papers featured columns of assorted news (called, usually, pelbagai chabar or kabar berita) that had been culled from other more international media. These tabloid columns, combined with advertisements, composed the bulk of the four pages of a newspaper. In them, women learned of a women’s exhibition in Amsterdam (1912); of a woman factory worker in England who shot a criminal; of Annie Weigham Weiker (sic), America’s wealthiest heiress; of Katherine Stinsan (sic), the daredevil pilot, now in Shanghai; of Nyonya Jap Hong Tjoen and the activities of Chinese women in the Netherlands (sic; Yap was a medical doctor and a man); and of girls tragically gobbled up by Congolese cannibals.38 Equally important, every snippet of news was attributed to its source paper, as the murmuring lattice of record, influence, and authority rapidly built up outside of Dutch control.39 The “assorted news” blended lurid crime sto35. Although adat required that women stay in the village, the idea that they did not migrate is not entirely true. After the 1840s and the Padri War, Minangkabau women began to appear in the hulu of Siak, on the Sumatran east coast. Perhaps they were exiles, fleeing the Dutch with their husbands; perhaps they were ex-slaves. See H. A. Hijmans van Anrooij, “Nota omtrent het Rijk van Siak,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 30 (1885): 315. 36. Alam entered Malay from Arabic; it was originally a Sufi notion referring to realms of perception and had the more pedestrian meaning “banner.” In modern Indonesian, alam is a technical term, referring to an abstract physical space and the character of a people who inhabit that space. The Alam Minangkabau is traditionally far larger than the cultural heartland in the West Sumatran hills. It could be both the political sphere that recognizes the authority of Pagaruyung (which was once much of the Malay world), and the farthest reaches of the rantau known to Minangkabau adventurers. My early definition of Alam is taken from the entry “gAlam,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. M. Th. Houtsma (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1913), 248 – 49. 37. For example, one article discussing the “Movement of Foreign Women” and the increased rights of Chinese women is Noerläla Anwar, “Gerakkan perempoean bangsa asing,” Soenting Melajoe 1.5, 3 August 1912, p. 2. 38. These were all stories in the kabar berita of Soenting Melajoe, 1912 – 1917. 39. But not outside Dutch purview. The “Overzicht van de Inlandsche Pers” (IPO) was initiated in mid-1910s to monitor the native and Chinese press in the colony. Distributed by Balai Pustaka, the

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ries and reports of supernatural events with international news and very personal announcements of community goings-on. Alongside stories of two-headed calves, Rohana Kudus reported on the development of the Keradjinan Amai Satia in Koto Gadang or made announcements about school examinations in Payakumbuh. This interweaving of the local and international in the “assorted news” was, more than the editorials or formal stories, a potent symbol of the transformed alam. The actions of Minangkabau women were actions that occurred within the assorted news of the world, and with that their alam had instantaneously expanded. As the pergerakan had made metaphorical the notion of movement, so the newspapers were given spatiality. They were gardens, fields, “Mountains became small, so did my heart swell, to see the publication of this garden ‘Soenting,’ a place where all the Malay Ornaments can joke around and chat; it’s in this field of Soenting where Malay women can have fun discussing this and that about progress (kemadjoean).”40 These women had three vocations; they were journalists, mothers, and teachers.

A Matrix of Teachers Although some of the women who wandered the paths of Poetri-Hindia were teachers, for the most part they were students and teachers’ wives. A similar group made up the initial readership of Soenting Melajoe. But within the first years of that paper’s publication, a change was evident. Increasingly, the subscribers and contributors were drawn from an expanding cohort of Minangkabau primary schoolteachers. Advertisements sought accredited teachers for schools throughout Sumatra; stories focused on the Minangkabau women who then took up these posts. Educated women, normal school graduates already familiar with a textual alam and an expanded progressive world, left their villages and found work in the burgeoning schools of Tapanuli, Bengkulu, Palembang, and especially Medan. By its fifth year, Soenting Melajoe featured regular advertisements for teachers. There could be a call for a woman teacher at the girls’ school in Langsa, Aceh, offering a starting salary of f40 or f 50 and board.41 The girls’ school in Sinabang

IPO provided Dutch officials with regular summaries of hundreds of periodicals. Nobuto Yamamoto, “Colonial Surveillance and ‘Public Opinion’: The Rise and Decline of Balai Poestaka’s Press Monitoring,” Keio Journal of Politics 8 (1995). The IPO provides a fairly thorough gloss of the news, but it is a Dutch lens and deceptive. Researchers cannot rely on the IPO as a substitute for the original sources. 40. S. Sari Doehan bin Djania, “Seroean,” Soenting Melajoe 1.3, 20 July 1912, p. 1. 41. Advertentie in Soenting Melajoe 6.3, 19 January 1917, p. 3.

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might seek an accredited teacher, with the same salary.42 There were stipulations. The prospective teachers had to be young and single, with primary school (sekolah rendah) credentials and training in the making of handicrafts.43 Of these skills, the one most in demand was the ability to teach weaving. Honed in the making of songket, gold-weft cloth, Minangkabau weaving techniques were exported as the market for cotton and silk cloth strengthened.44 Weaving had flagged in West Sumatra in the post – Padri War period, and only the women of Silungkang had maintained a viable industry through the nineteenth century.45 Suddenly, an ability that had been merely part of a girl’s training for wifely chores was quite marketable. In the 1910s, weaving schools were founded throughout Sumatra, and Minangkabau girls were the homespun experts recruited as faculty. Datoek Soetan Maharadja, the “father of Malay journalism” and an early promoter of girls’ education, discussed this burgeoning career and the opportunities it held. Not only were Minangkabau women needed as teachers, but non-Minangkabau girls were sent to Padang to study. He reported that in Langsa, Aceh, the Dutch controleur had started a school for writing, arithmetic, and sewing, in the hope that the graduates would become well-paid teachers. The people of Pulau Tello had requested swatches of cloth and were also considering opening a school. From Balai Selasa, Datoe Radja Alam sent his sister to Padang to study weaving techniques.46 Tapanuli—the province to the immediate north of West Sumatra—kept closest ties with Minangkabau.47 In Padang Sidempuan, a group was raising money to establish a weaving school; two women were already in West Sumatra studying weaving “in the manner of the Alam Minangkabau.” Mr. Salamah Maharadja Djamboer djagong Nasoetion Brotan escorted his daughter to

42. Advertentie in Soenting Melajoe 6.24, 22 June 1917, p. 2. Applicants had to have proof of their acte or certificaat of teaching, and send letters to either Soetin Amin Landschapshoofd Sinabang or Radja Maulana kepala sekolah no. 3 in Padang. 43. Kabar berita, “Padang 11 Mei 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.18, 12 May 1917, pp. 2 – 3. 44. The vicissitudes of this cloth trade are discussed in Akira Oki, “A Note on the History of the Textile Industry in West Sumatra,” in Between People and Statistics: Essays on Modern Indonesian History, ed. Francien van Anrooij and Dirk H. A. Kolff (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 147 – 56. 45. This is mentioned in passing in Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 237n. 1. The famed songket village Pandai Sikat (literally “clever reed,” or weaving-comb) really produced only piecemeal work until later in this century. 46. D. S. Maharadja, “Kepandaian Oentoek Perempoean [Skills for Women]: Kabar berita, Padang 2 Febuari 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.5, 2 February 1917, pp. 1 – 2. 47. This is not surprising. Until 1905, Tapanuli and West Sumatra were a single administrative unit, and the people of Tapanuli, the Mandailing Bataks, were trade and publishing leaders in Padang. See Lance Castles, “The Political Life of a Sumatran Residency: Tapanuli 1915 – 1940” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1972). The 1916 legislation covering the division was translated into Malay by J. A. Elsborg as “Oendang-oendang Sumatra boeat Sumatra-Barat dan Tapanoli” and could be purchased from Elsborg (the clerk of the provincial government in Padang Panjang) and B. Djalaloeddin Thaib through his Agam Publishing House in Fort de Kock.

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Padang to enter the weaving school, and within three months she was making serviceable handkerchiefs and could return to Tapanuli.48 Minangkabau women answered the call and the ads in the back of Soenting Melajoe. The school in Langsa hired three Minangkabau teachers: Rahmah, a graduate of a private school in Lubuk Sikaping, was brought on as head teacher with a salary of f 50 plus board; Zainab, who graduated from the same school, was her assistant for f 40 and board; and Alimah, a Padang woman who studied at a private school in Fort de Kock, was hired by the Meisjesschool Peureula as an assistant teacher for f 40 and board.49 Yet the rantau was not without dangers for women. The Assorted News told of the “sufferings of a woman who went to Langsa and then fled her partner.” This Minangkabau woman was living in Aceh, but after three years, sick children, and an unhelpful husband, she “asked for leave to go home to the Alam Minangkabau like a European returning to Europe for medical treatment.” But rather than being a warning to girls who might want to leave their villages and teach, the article was a cautionary tale for those who would marry out of Minangkabau and break with custom. This group the Assorted News mordantly referred to as the anarchist group, the “kaoem anarchist.”50 The rantau was an acceptable place for young women, as long as they returned to their homes when the time came for them to marry. Minangkabau youths feeling stifled in their villages and led to expect, in novels and movies, a fated and romantic love, found in the rantau a world free of meddling uncles and arranged marriages. Some made their way to Java and Batavia. But most pushed north, through the Bataklands to the bustling harbor town of Medan. Medan had replaced Padang as the main entrepôt of Sumatra. In the nineteenth century, Emmahaven—Padang’s harbor—was the busiest in Sumatra. Most European shipping stopped in Padang, stayed the night, and then continued south through the Sunda straits and on to Batavia. But in 1908 the Acehnese were conquered, and the Straits of Malacca finally offered safe passage to Dutch ships. Spurred by the rubber boom, Medan quickly superseded Padang, and Emmahaven lost its cosmopolitan flavor.51 By 1913, a direct passenger ship from Europe arrived only once a fortnight.52 Depressed shipping made the sea route from Padang to Medan inconvenient. The coal mines of Sawahlunto had spurred the development of a good localized railway in West 48. Maharadja, “Kepandaian Oentoek Perempoean,” 2. 49. Kabar berita, “Padang 16 Maart 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.10, 16 March 1917, p. 3. Alimah was assistant to a European woman who, in comparison, was making f 200. 50. Kabar berita, “Perasaian seorang perempoean jang pergi ke Langsa menjoeroetkan rakanannja: Padang 2 Maart 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.8, 2 March 1917, pp. 2 – 3. The story uses a Minangkabau expression for husband, rakanan (partner). 51. The diminished Emmahaven is described in Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai, 37 – 41. 52. Westenenk, Sumatra Illustrated Tourist Guide, viii.

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Sumatra, but a plan to build a trans-Sumatra railroad had stalled.53 There are no navigable rivers from West Sumatra into the highlands. So, with the introduction of the automobile, a trip to Medan was overland in swirling fumes of gasoline. The road to Medan ran from Padang, through Padang Panjang, and north into Tapanuli, where it passed through Kotanopan and Padang Sidempuan before returning to the Indian Ocean and the bay at Sibolga. The road then hooked inland through Tarutung, rounding Lake Toba to the east, then traversing the mountains at Pematang Siantar, descending through Tebing Tinggi, and finally arriving at Medan and the Straits of Malacca.54 It was a hard journey of some 535 miles, with only marginal infrastructure from Tapanuli to Lake Toba. For European travelers, the road offered pasanggrahan (government-sanctioned resthouses). But for “natives,” the demands of this road probably spurred the development of the first real restaurants—rumah makan—based on the model of the Minangkabau lapau (coffeehouse) and guaranteeing halal food but also offering rudimentary beds and bath. Traditional Minangkabau cuisine features an array of preserved meats, most notably dendeng (a kind of beef jerky), and rendang (chunks of buffalo mummified in spices). During this period and along this road, Padang-style cooking developed to serve the appetites of long-haul perantau, out-migrants of the rantau. European travelers who experienced the artery-hardening delights of rendang later wrote begging Minangkabau women to ship the stuff on to places such as Batavia and even Kupang, Timor.55 Minangkabau settlements crept north along the road, establishing way stations and restaurants, weaving schools and prayerhouses. For most, the goal was Medan and a city of seemingly endless possibility and freedom.

Marantau ka Deli (Migrating to Deli) Of this freedom Hamka wrote in 1940, “There eventually developed a new generation which was called anak Deli [child of Deli]; and this anak Deli was a 53. For details of this plan, along with charts and elevations of the potential route, see K. J. A. Ligtvoet and E. van Zuylen, Rapport betreffende Terreinverkenningen en een Spoorwegplan voor MiddenSumatra, Ingevolge besluit van den Governeur-Generaal van Nederlandsch-Indië, Dato 14 Juni 1907, no. 26 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1909). 54. A 1913 trip symbolically opened this road to traffic; M. Joustra, Van Medan naar Padang en Terug (Reisindrukken en Ervaringen) (Leiden: S. C. van Doesburgh, 1915). Throughout the 1910s, plans for a trans-Sumatra railway withered as the motorcar made spectacular inroads into the Indies. Rubber concerns, with plantations around Deli, supplied the rubber for tires. And the automobile manufacturers sponsored brave “expeditions.” For example, General Motors backed A. Zimmerman, “Blazing a Motor Trail through Sumatra,” Inter-Ocean 8, no. 11 (November 1927): 612 – 14. 55. Letters arrived at the Soenting Melajoe office from Palembang and Kupang asking for rendang; European gentlemen in Betawi sent cash in advance for a shipment of “rendang Alam Minangkabau.” Maharadja, “Kepandaian Oentoek Perempoean,” 2.

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bud which blossomed splendidly in the development of the Indonesian people. The father of an anak Deli would originate from Mandailing, but his mother was a Minangkabau. . . . The outlook of this [new] man was free, and his Malay was fluent, having lost the accents of the place of his ancestors.”56 Hamka was writing of the 1930s, Medan’s heyday. But the Minangkabau men and women who ventured to Medan in the 1910s were true pioneers. After Ramadan, in mid-September 1912, in a house on Soengai Rengas Street near the Chinese school, a woman from Koto Gadang founded the first full-fledged rantau school for girls. Lessons concentrated on sewing, crocheting, lacemaking, embroidery, painting, weaving, “and other skills of use to girls.” Of the twenty some applicants, most were from West Sumatra because the emigrants had “yet to mix with the local people.”57 In the ensuing five years, the Minangkabau women of Medan and Padang established a corridor through which money, news, and teachers could travel. In Medan, far from villages and extended families, the job of raising children fell entirely on the mothers. Most Minangkabau women celebrated this freedom that came with the single-family home; strained, sisterly negotiations regarding kitchens and baths and beds were left for memories and holidays. Minangkabau women gathered and organized to replicate the communal institutions that were the benefits of village life. And, finally, without avuncular supervision at home, the rantau newspapers gradually became how-to manuals for child-rearing. On January 28, 1917, the Minangkabau women in Medan established the association Perdamaian Setia Isteri (Wives’ Association for Peace and Solidarity). Through this group, they set up a charity school (sekolah derma) and had regular meetings with the aim of “seeking any rightful means to ensure peace within the household [roemah tangga].” The Wives discussed the care of children and hoped to awaken the emotions of other native women, so that they might find a sense of self-worth.58 In 1919, Minangkabau and Malay women, with the backing of Parada Harahap, founded a monthly newspaper that gave voice to these concerns, Perempoean Bergerak. The name translates, commandingly, as “Women [on the] Move,” and the paper’s masthead motto read, “published to support the women’s movement.” This was the rantau how-to manual par excellence. Sto56. Hamka’s “Merantau ke Deli” (Migrating to Deli) is quoted in Reid, Blood of the People, 59. 57. The woman who opened this “dame school” was a “Malay from Kota Gedang (Fort de Kock), wife of Bachtiar, a clerk [kerani, an unusual Hindi term] with the Ned. Handel. Mij.” Pelbagai chabar, “Sekolah perempoean jang pertama di-Medan,” Soenting Melajoe 1.9, 30 August 1912, p. 3. 58. secretarisse Commarmiah (“Benih Merdeka”), “Kabar berita: Padang 23 Februari 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.7, 23 February 1917, pp. 2 – 3. The Perdamaian Setia Isteri had an executive board: Presidentie Tengkoe Ajoe Sabariah-Sabaroedin, vice president Entjeh Roemiah-Salim, and secretarisse Entjeh Gombarinah-Soetan Sri Alam. The association caught the attention of the Dutch women and was visited by njonja [Mrs.] van der Veen and addressed by njonja besar [big Mrs.] van der Plas (both wives of leading colonial officials).

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ries focused on the particular challenges of motherhood in the modern world, the educational rights of girls, and the moral decay of society.59 Most of the writers were Medan-based, although a considerable number of the submissions came from West Sumatra. An alumna of the H. I. S. Padang, the Dutch-Native School, described not only the network of women teachers, but also the presence of one or two women postal workers at every post office in Java and Sumatra. Another contributor—a member of the Perempoean Bergerak staff—compared Dutch and Malay concepts of “the happy home.”60 “Women Move” was a directive given to women who had moved and who were participating in movements; Perempoean Bergerak was the consummation of Minangkabau women’s first effort to redefine their alam and rantau. In one decade, from 1908 to 1919, the women of Minangkabau developed, first, an entirely new language and set of metaphors for the changing world and, then, new possibilities of action to realize those metaphors. Minangkabau has been described as a matrifocal society, meaning that families and households are mother-centered.61 Women might control, but they are also fixed within the home. They were not (and still today are not) supposed to travel. In PoetriHindia, Soenting Melajoe, and Perempoean Bergerak, these women reinterpreted the word gerak (suggesting physical movement) to mean political and ideological change. Once these women could envision themselves participating in an abstract movement, once they saw their names in print alongside women’s movements elsewhere, it was possible for them to return to the original meaning of gerak and physically move to new places. Similarly, the women exploded conventional, received notions of the alam Minangkabau. This had been a space traditionally described by the migrations of men, but through the newspapers the Minangkabau women began to inhabit a textual and metaphorical alam. And once they were already there, figuratively, it was far easier to pick up, leave the village, and travel to Mandailing or Batavia or Medan—places populated by friends known through bylines, “assorted news,” and lists of subscribers. Through these movements the women of Minangkabau fundamentally transformed their culture. The once sacred institutions of home and family were questioned, and the shackles of tradition gave way to endless possibility. The particularly Minangkabau habit of attacking notions of family had been going on since the adat-versus-Islam battles of the Padri War. This continual, everyday interrogation of essential cultural definitions gave the movements of the West Sumatran pergerakan breadth and energy. Future national leaders born in

59. Just about every article in 1919 touched on these topics. 60. Sitti Sahara, “Roemah jang berbahagia,” Perempoean Bergerak: Diterbitkan oentoek penjokong pergerakan kaoem perempoean 1.1, 15 May 1919, pp. 3 – 4; A. Wahab Az., “Boeah tangan dari Padang,” Perempoean Bergerak 1.2, 16 July 1919. 61. Tanner, “Matrifocality.”

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Minangkabau at the turn of the century—Tan Malaka (1896), Rahmah el Yunusiyyah (1900), Mohammad Hatta (1902), Muhammad Yamin (1903), Muhammad Natsir (1908), Hamka (1908), Sutan Sjahrir (1909), and Rasuna Said (1910), to name just a few—were brought up in a world of new ideas, new schools, and new notions of family. Tan Malaka, a revolutionary and innovative idealist, was born in the relatively isolated and poor village of Pandan Gadang, in the north of the Minangkabau heartland. In his memoirs, From Jail to Jail, he boasted that even his parents had learned to accept his revolutionary activities, “For a father and mother who were not modern [moderen] this was true progress [kemajuan].”62 Why were so many early Indonesian leaders from Minangkabau? The Padri War gave the Dutch an excuse to invade and establish an intensive presence in highland Sumatra. The cultivation system created the need for a cadre of trained bureaucrats, not a petty aristocracy, and so the colonial native schools were exceptionally populist, reaching down into the smaller villages. Islam in Minangkabau was not only factional but also outward-looking and adaptive. The post-Padri ulama remained attentive to developments throughout the Muslim world, and networks of competing Islamic schools adopted new pedagogies and provided often divergent educational alternatives.63 The tradition of out-migration, merantau, encouraged exposure to new ideas. All these factors contributed to an environment that produced many fiercely individualistic leaders. But most important, and the reason West Sumatra was the birthplace of so many national heroes, were changes within the Minangkabau home. The house, the family, the village—all were being challenged and transformed. In their daily lives, Minangkabau were forced to question received and seemingly elemental cultural definitions. It was this condition of fundamental and inescapable change that made Minangkabau unique and dynamic, capable of envisioning possibilities and of making them real. 62. Tan Malaka, Dari Penjara ke Penjara, vol. 1 (1947; Jakarta: n.p., 1998), 88. 63. Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds (London: RoutledgeCurzon 2002).

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In his study of Sutan Sjahrir, Rudolf Mrázek discusses the excitement of finde-siècle West Sumatra: “History seemed to accelerate in Minangkabau towards the beginning of the twentieth century.”1 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Movement politics infused daily life in West Sumatra. The role of women in political life was hotly debated as the period following the 1908 Tax Rebellion saw women claiming a discursive space in the political and public spheres (through women’s newspapers and political parties). And this age in motion is apparent in the archive—sources grow cacophonous and exuberant, building up momentum and lacking direction. As events led toward the 1926 – 1927 Silungkang communist uprising, the family became contested politically. There were painful contradictions, as modernist Islam pitted itself against the modern woman. Inevitably, the family was appropriated, metaphorically, by those involved in public life and politics. Although writers of this period heralded the end of tradition and the matriarchate, it was the Movement itself, the pergerakan, that did not last. The earliest women’s newspapers redefined Minangkabau society and rewrote conventional gender roles. At the same time, these papers sought to construct a catalog of tribulations inappropriate in the Minangkabau context. Minangkabau women traditionally had more power than their Javanese and European counterparts. This is the strangeness of Poetri-Hindia and Soenting Melajoe —they appropriate European feminist grievances and bemoan conditions to which Minangkabau women were never exposed. Matrilocality was not incarceration; these women were never cloistered in the house, peeping

1. Rudolf Mrázek, Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell SEAP, 1994), 16.

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from behind the draperies. The women’s newspapers enjoyed long print runs—Soenting Melajoe was in press for a decade, whereas most other papers were fleeting. But in editorial stance these first women’s papers were planted on an invented bourgeois morality and sensibility. A failure to engage in real politics led to their downfall as other, more aggressive journals, such as Soeara Perempoean, Asjraq, and the Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera, carried women’s voices to the podium and on to the stage of the Scala movie theater in Bukittinggi.

Political Education Djoewita, a founding editor of Soenting Melajoe and the daughter of Datuk Soetan Maharadja, anticipated the limits and downfall of her own newspaper. In 1912, she compared Minangkabau women and men, asserting that women were better at planting seed, putting things in order, laying out food on a plate, arranging flowers, sewing, painting, writing, drawing, embroidery, crocheting, weaving, basketry (in the making of plaited bamboo walls and mats), And in choosing and arranging words that will become a composition; in this too men cannot defeat the know-how of women; because even in grief and mourning in an instant we women can compose a lamentation that will both sadden the listeners while at the same time providing an allusive commentary; and thus when given time to choose the words that will be put to paper, why wouldn’t we women be more clever than men? And so it is if we want to wage a war of pens, for there are men who are not ashamed to want a war of pens with women, who want to engage in a discussion with women, and so begin to ridicule and taunt us women. There will be no shortage of spirit among the women they choose to oppose and afterwards these men will feel ashamed for themselves, for inviting women to fight, and for wanting to fight with women.2

Oratory was a traditional skill in Minangkabau culture, and one that was in no way limited to men. In village decisions—and especially in marriage negotiations—a skilled practitioner of silat lidah (tongue-fu) was an asset to any family. In the years after the Tax Rebellion of 1908, public action took on a decidedly modern and political form.3 Women would have had a harder time participating in pre-Rebellion proto-political discourse; it was filtered through the tarekat, the mystical Islamic brotherhoods, and so was far less accessible to

2. Z. R. Djoewita, “Kepandaian kita perempoean,” Soenting Melajoe 1.5, 3 August 1912), p. 1. 3. Two books that best discuss this period are Alfian, Muhammadiyah, and especially Abdullah, Schools and Politics. Both are based on dissertations from the late 1960s. Abdullah discusses fully the implications of kemajuan and explains the convoluted Kaum Muda – Kaum Kuno schisms.

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them.4 But by the 1910s, kemajuan and Islamic reformism had introduced a skein of new discursive techniques and, as Djoewita realized, women were at least as capable as men at weaving these techniques into new forms of behavior and action. Coincident with the anti-tax rebellion, a new Islamic reformist periodical appeared in Singapore. Al-Imam (1906 – 1908) was edited by Shaykh Tahir Jalaluddin, a pioneer of Muslim reformism in British Malaya. Born in 1869 in Ampek Angkek, Bukittinggi, Shaykh Tahir maintained close ties with his home region and funneled new ideas along to the modernist Kaum Muda reformists of Padang and Padang Panjang.5 Al-Imam championed property rights for Malay women, criticized polygyny, and was guardedly supportive of women’s education.6 The journal was the immediate inspiration for the Padang-based AlMunir, and it set the tenor for the anti-adat formulation of women’s rights that devastated both Soenting Melajoe and Datoek Soetan Maharadja. Like his cousin Ahmad Khatib in Mecca, Shaykh Tahir was part of an expatriate Minangkabau network that shaped reformism in the Islamic world at the turn of the century. The 1910s also saw the renovation of the classic Minangkabau tale of filial piety, the Kaba Cindua Mato.7 This morality play of motherhood and court intrigue, set in the mists of Pagaruyung, was rewritten as a story of politics and primordial democracy. A 1918 poem describes the Bundo Kanduang, the Minangkabau Ur-mother and a character in the Kaba Cindua Mato, as the wise arbiter of Sumatran government and international politics.8 This, too, was the first time that the mother displaced the man, Cindua Mato, as the titular focus 4. Young, Islamic Peasants and the State, chap. 3. During the Tax Rebellion, however, the fighting in the nagari of Manggopoh was even led by a woman. See Abel Tasman, Nita Indrawati, and Sastri Yunizarti Bakry, Siti Manggopoh: Catatan Perjuangan Singa Betina (Padang: Yayasan Citra Budaya Indonesia, 2004). 5. On the Shaykh, as well as brief descriptions of all the key people and events of Indonesian Islamic reform, see Noer, Modernist Muslim Movement, 33 – 35. Details of the Shaykh’s life (as well as a transliterated letter) can be found in Rusjdi, “Generasi terachir keluarga Paderi,” 136 – 39, 158. On his role in the Malayan reformist movement, see Hafiz Zakariya, “Islamic Reform in Colonial Malaya: Shaykh Tahir Jalaluddin and Sayyid Shaykh al-Hadi” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2006). 6. See William R. Roff, “Kaum Muda—Kaum Tua: Innovation and Reaction,” in his The Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). See also Abu Bakar Hamzah, AlImam: Its Role in Malay Society 1906 – 1908 (M. Phil. thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1981 [reprinted Kuala Lumpur: Media Cendiakawan]), 114 – 18. 7. Annotated and transliterated by Yusuf, “Persoalan Translitersai.” 8. Baginda Malin, SjaGir Tjerita Seorang “Radja Perempoean” dan Tjindoer Mata serta Toeankoe Sahi GAlam dalam Nagari Pagar Roejoeng, vols. 1 – 4 (Padang: Toko & Snelpers Drukkerij Orang Alam Minangkabau, 1918). The only extant copy trails off unfinished after four volumes and 536 pages. Note that the publishing house Orang Alam Minangkabau was owned by Datuk Soetan Maharadja. The idea of Bundo Kanduang (womb mother; kanduang is the Minangkabau spelling of kandung) was resurrected during the Soeharto era as the women’s auxiliary of the adat-watchdogs L.K.A.A.M. (Lembaga Kerapatan Adat Alam Minangkabau); see Joke Schrijvers and Els Postel-Coster, “Minangkabau Women: Change in a Matrilineal Society,” Archipel 13 (1977).

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of this story. In 1923, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Sekolah Radja in Bukittinggi, Abdul Muis adapted the kaba into a drama celebrating Minangkabau democratic traditions.9 The traditional political potency of women was inscribed into the Minangkabau canon, just as modern Minangkabau women were beginning to move from the domestic concerns of the women’s movement to participation in a more public and confrontational pergerakan. In an influential report on “The Minangkabau Nagari,” Louis Constant Westenenk, the assistant resident of West Sumatra, gave official Dutch sanction to the idea that traditional Minangkabau society was essentially political—that the customary systems of the two laras were rudimentary “partijen.”10 By the end of the 1920s, this perspective was overwhelmingly accepted: “Long ago there lived a renowned female King of Minangkabau, with the title Bundo Kandung. Because she was so clever at governance, she arranged our governmental system to be based on a Parlement of four balai, with a Generaale staff under the authority of the ‘toean Gadang’ [Big Man] in Batipuh.”11 Unlike women in other regions of Indonesia, as Minangkabau women entered the political arena in the 1910s and 1920s, they did so knowing that their participation was an inherent culture-given right. By 1918, Minangkabau women of the Movement had moved beyond Soenting Melajoe. In October of that year, a contributor to the new journal Soeara Perempoean wrote, “It is true that in adat women have high status, but in fact their freedom is meaningless. They live like birds in a cage. Is this equality?”12 The First World War had brought economic hardship to the Indies (because shipping routes were shut down), along with more radical European political trends (because people for the first time paid close attention to world news). Life as a Malay ornament had lost its appeal, and Minangkabau women took part in public demonstrations and party politics. The liberal custom of Datuk Soetan Maharadja and the reformist Islam of the Kaum Muda had both authorized women’s schooling and publishing as institutions that would make girls into 9. Abdullah, “Some Notes on the Kaba Tjindua Mato.” 10. L. C. Westenenk, De Minangkabauche Nagari, 3rd ed. (Weltevreden: Boekhandel Visser & Co., 1918), 41. In 1912 a draft was circulating in Padang, and in 1915 the first edition was published. 11. Amrullah, Sedjarah Minangkabau dengan Agama Islam, 32. It is interesting that Bundo Kandung is always referred to as a female king (radja perempoean) rather than a queen. See too the metaphor of a female commander in S. B. Basir, Panglima Perempoean: Satoe Gadis jang Pendekar di Soengai Arau, Padang (Weltevreden: Boekhandel West Java, 1924). 12. Quoted in Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World,” 241. Soeara Perempoean and its editor, Saadah Alim, are glossed in Schrijvers and Postel-Coster, “Minangkabau Women,” 90–91. I was unable to locate any copies of the newspaper, but I have consulted the account by the editor, Saädah Alim, “Minangkabau, Eenige Grepen uit de Samenleving,” in Indisch Vrouwen Jaarboek, ed. M. A. E. van Lith-van Schreven and J. H. Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp ( Jogjakarta: KolffBruning, 1936), 85 – 91; Ainsah Jahja, “De Indische Vrouwenbeweging op Sumatra,” translated in Indische Gids 41, no. 1 (1919): 101 – 2.

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better mothers. When women began to assert an influence beyond the household, however, both custom and Islam recoiled. The Adabiyah school in Padang had been providing modernist Islamic education for girls and boys since 1909. But in 1915 it was incorporated into the Dutch colonial school system and could no longer be looked to for radical educational reform. In the 1910s, private reformist schools were established throughout West Sumatra as a modern answer to both the rote memorization and perceived superstition of the traditionalist prayerhouses and the covert Christianity of the Dutch schools. Most of these schools were for boys or were co-educational. Only in November 1923 did Rahmah el Yunusiyyah found an Islamic school exclusively for girls. The Girls’ Religious Diniyyah School, tragically straddling a major earthquake fault, sought to plant the seeds of “TERTIBSOPAN” (good behavior), harmonische ontwikkeling (harmonious development), and Islam. From these seeds would grow the “Iboe Pendidik” (the educating mothers).13 The first students were mostly married woman, but the school, despite Rahmah’s founding principles, soon became a hotbed of political activity. Teachers such as Rasuna Said actively incorporated political matters into their classes (until 1930, when Rahmah forced her out and she moved to Padang).14 Leon Salim, a pergerakan leader who had attended the boys’ Diniyyah school in the 1920s,15 recalled Rahmah’s influence in Minangkabau, People are not wrong to dub her the ‘Bundo Kandung’ [the Ur-mother] from the alam Minangkabau. . . . Her thoughts were directed to the mothers [kaum ibu] who would give birth to the youth who are the hope of our people [ pemuda harapan bangsa]. The mothers of such God-intended youths must be cultivated, so that the generation to which they give birth is surely able to shoulder the burden of KHALIFAH16 on this earth. This endeavor is most difficult but it must be undertaken. Especially if we are convinced that our short time in the world is truly to save the family, to save the ethnic group [suku], to save the island, to save the people [bangsa], and (or in order) to save the world. For this our view must be directed principally to . . . the HOUSEHOLD [rumah tangga].17 13. Joenoesijjah, Boekoe Peringatan, 4. 14. Ibid., 17 – 18. For a colorful description of this period that discusses Zainoeddin Labay ElJoenoesy, the surau Djembatan Besi, Djalaloeddin Thaib, movie theater politics, and the Islamic communists Djamaloeddin Tamin and Natar Zainoeddin, see Abdoelmalik K. A. [Hamka], “Saja Teringat,” 28 – 34. 15. At the age of thirteen, he had been expelled from a Dutch elementary school in Payakumbuh and had moved to the politicized schools of Padang Panjang; Audrey Kahin, “Translator’s Preface” to Leon Salim, Prisoners at Kota Cane (Ithaca: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1986), 4. 16. Caliphate. This refers to the spiritual successors of Muhammad and a state in which they govern. All capitalization is in the original. 17. Leon Salim, “Rahmah el Yunusiyah Satria Wanita dari Alam Minang,” in Hajjah Rahmah El Yunusiyyah dan Zainuddin Labay El Yunusy: Dua bersaudara Tokoh Pembaharu Sistem Pendidikan di In-

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Girl’s Religious Diniyyah School students and graduates never denied the importance of motherhood. Through the teachings of Rasuna Said and the influence of the other radicalized schools of Padang Panjang, however, they began to realize that the world might not have time to wait for their children to be born if it was to be saved.

Women and Politics Children of the Indies, let us move, So that our leaders are sustained. We will oppose the makers of ruin. The many reactionaries.18 Anak Hindia marilah bergerak, Pemimpin kita biar bertegak. Akan melawan toekang pengroesak. Reactiè jang amat banjak.

The reactions and movements were extreme. Forces set in motion by the earthquake of 1926 erupted in the Silungkang Uprising and continued unabated until the crackdowns in summer 1933.19 Women were at the political fore, and they became involved in activities that had once been the sole province of men. In 1924, the women of Bukittinggi had reinstituted the long-banned horse races, and with the money earned from the gambling proceeds they purchased schoolbooks. In this era of “clear purpose,” the books were rewritten to instill the “delicious fruits of learning” within the hearts of those women “still forced to be wrapped in darkness.”20 After the earthquake, their cut of the race money went to aid quake victims. Women raised funds and rebuilt homes and schools. For this, they traveled outside of their villages, to Padang and North Sumatra. In the postquake period the editorial board of Asjraq transformed the journal, creating one of the first Minangkabau women’s activist organizations to have an explicitly public, political agenda. The Sarikat Kaoem Iboe Soematera (S.K.I.S.; League of Sumatran Mothers) was founded in 1924 – 1925, and shortly thereafter it began to plan a major condonesia, ed. Aminuddin Rasyad ( Jakarta: Pengurus Perguruan Diniyyah Puteri Padang Panjang, 1991), 125 – 27. 18. Z, “Sedikit sjaGir,” Djago! Djago! 1.1, 8 October 1923), p. 3, final stanza. Z was probably Natar Zainoeddin, the editor-in-chief, who was soon to be exiled. Djago! Djago! and its sister publication Pemandangan Islam were the pioneering Islamic Communist papers of Minangkabau. Jago means “champion” in Indonesian, but in Minangkabau it means jaga (to keep awake or to guard). 19. Kahin, “Repression and Regroupment.” 20. Nazirah, “Kaoem Iboe ‘Fort de Kock’,” Asjraq 2.7 – 8 – 9, July – August – September 1926, p. 216.

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ference on the condition of Sumatran women. This conference was to have taken place in 1926, but the earthquake and uprising forced its postponement until August 1929. By this time, the S.K.I.S. had assumed control of the journal Asjraq, changed its name to the Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera (Voice of Sumatran Mothers), and began monthly publication from the women’s teachers’ college in Padang Panjang. The congressional issue of the newspaper is a remarkable record of Sumatran feminism in the late 1920s. On August 17, 1929, eight hundred men and women gathered in the Scala movie theater in Bukittinggi for the opening day of the first Grand Meeting of the Association of Sumatran Mothers.21 In the audience were colonial officials and local luminaries. The keynote speeches reviewed and revised twenty years of Minangkabau feminist development. The first speaker was Rangkayo Seri Kiam Azis, who discussed the conditions of women “eighteen years ago,” tracing the lineage of the S.K.I.S. from Soenting Melajoe, through Soeara Perempoean, and finally to Alsjarq [sic]. Entjik Noerani then talked about “Women’s Understanding”—and the obligations between a mother and her children. Rangkaja L. Kahar Masjhoer discussed “Women as Educators,” saying that a mother’s duty to educate her children was an aspect of progress, kemadjoean. The second day brought more than 1,000 attendees to the Scala. The speeches were more incisive and revealing. Encik Noermi first addressed the topic of women in religion: “Because the security, the tranquility of each small community (roemah tangga [household]) that constitutes this greater community (doenia [the world]) is for the most part in the hands of mothers.” Calling the household a small community or society (masarakah ketjil), she placed it at the essential microcosmic center of civilization (masarakah besar). The topic was elaborated upon by R. Sitti Noer Marliah Zeinoehddin, who in a series of clichés discussed the matter of women within the household; “The household [roemah tangga] is the kingdom of women,” she continues, and “women are the soul of the body that is called the household.” After more speeches, the conference closed with a traditional poem composed by encik Alim, entitled “Jewels of Morality [Moestika kiasan] from the S.K.I.S.” Mother is prepared, for her husband, To educate children; to guard the house; A heavy burden, which should be lightened, Scorn erupts, even her eyes are red. Sumatra progress, step to the fore, Mothers, join and help, 21. The account of the August 17 – 18, 1929, meeting is found in “Pertemoean Besar jang pertama dari Sarikat Kaoem Iboe Soematera (S. K. I. S.) di Boekit Tinggi,” Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera 5.10 (Nomor Congres), November 1929, pp. 1 – 4.

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Express your feelings and your hopes, The good of your deeds is certain. Iboe bersedia, oentoek djoendjoengan, Mendidik anak; mendjaga roemah; Beban jang berat, hendak diperingan, Tjatjian toemboeh, mata poen mérah. [stanza 9] Soematera madjoe, langkah kemoeka, Kaoem Iboe, toeroet membantoe; Mengeloearkan perasaan serta tjita-tjita, Goena kebaikan soedahlah tentoe. [stanza 14]

The Grand Meeting of the Association of Sumatran Mothers was a grand success. Motherhood was firmly established as a revolutionary activity. The Sumpah Pemuda Youth Oath of 1928—a watershed in nationalist mythology— had energized and concentrated the movements of the pergerakan with its suggestion of an Indonesia unified in language and people. Women, and specifically mothers, were the champions of the domestic sphere; their household was then defined as the elemental constituent of the world. If this logic might have served to trap women within their domestic “kingdoms,” this was precluded by the fact that the arguments were put forth by women themselves and in a very public space. But, for some, the sight of women on the stage of the Scala Theater was unsettling. For others, the very sound of their voice was unacceptable.

gAisyiyah: Modern Women, Modernist Islam Padang Panjang in the 1920s was the town around which movements of the Minangkabau pergerakan turned. Rahmah el Yunusiyyah, the Islamic reformist and educator, and Rasuna Said, an activist, were pioneering different routes for women’s political participation. In the Diniyyah and Thawalib schools for boys, equally strong men pitted their visions against one another. Most famous and fiery was the reformist Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah. Called Rasul by most, he was, in contemporary Dutch taxonomy, “the fanaticus.”22 Haji Rasul was the founder of the Sumatera Thawalib and a staunch anti-communist. But in 1923 communists—his old students—had gained influence in the Thawalib, and Rasul began to divide his time teaching in Padang Panjang and his home village Sungai Batang, on the shore of Lake Maninjau. In 1926, after the earthquake, Haji Rasul was driven from his own school. He left the Thawalib for Sungai Batang. In this tense atmosphere, in 1925, he had traveled to Pekalon22. Ronkel, Rapport Betreffende, 18.

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gan, on Java, to visit his daughter Fatimah and son-in-law A. R. Soetan Mansur.23 Sutan Mansur was a successful batik trader—a business (in Pekalongan and Surakarta, especially) favored by Minangkabau out-migrants. He was also a leader of the local branch of Muhammadiyah. Haji Rasul found the organization compelling, and on returning to his home village he revamped his own organization, Sandi Aman, creating the first branch of Muhammadiyah in Sumatra.24 Muhammadiyah was reformist in its opposition to religious innovations and its advocacy of a return to the original holy texts of Islam. And it was modernist, in that the organization drew on new Egyptian and European pedagogical techniques and did not shy away from modern technological (in its schools) and decorative (in dress) fashions. But compared to the head office (Hoofdbestuur) in central Java, the Muhammadiyah of the Minangkabau was a cautious one and distrustful of things modern: “The condition of the world is changing, and the people who live upon it always strive to find that which is new (modern). Modern in their instruments of war and modern in their governmental arrangements, modern in clothing, modern in hairstyle, totally modern. . . .”25 In 1926, the Muhammadiyah Central Committee in Yogyakarta sent Sutan Mansur and Datuk nan Bareno (the publisher of Haji Rasul’s Al-QawloeshShahih) home to West Sumatra as its official representatives. Fatimah accompanied her husband as the representative for gAisyiyah, Muhammadiyah’s women’s auxiliary. In the aftermath of the 1926 – 1927 Silungkang Uprising and the ensuing crackdown, the ostensibly apolitical Muhammadiyah became a haven for Minangkabau political flotsam.26 The organization grew wildly during this period, expanding from eleven West Sumatran branches in 1927 to fifty-seven by 1932. It was an Amrullah family affair—along with his daughter and son-in-law, Haji Rasul’s son Hamka, brother Jusuf, and sister Hafsah were all Muhammadiyah branch leaders in Maninjau and Padang Panjang. When in 1930 the Nineteenth Congress of Muhammadijah was to take place in Bukittinggi, Haji Rasul was in a fine position to impose his particularly nar23. Unless otherwise noted, the details of the following discussion are drawn from Alfian, Muhammadiyah, 240 – 89. 24. A sandi is the pier or foundation stone for a house pillar and so Sandi Aman—Secure Footing—is a longhouse-derived metaphor. 25. Abdul Malik T. N. and Datoek Nan Bareno (alias Marah Intan), “Pendahoeloean penerbit dan penjalin,” preface to Hadji Abdul Karim Amroellah, Al-Qawloesh-Shahih, 2nd ed. (Djokjakarta: Drukkerij Persatoean Moehammadijah Djokjakarta, 1926). The book is an attack on the modern fashion of religious conversion and a condemnation of the Ahmadiyyah movement. Parentheses are in the original. The conflict is discussed by Herman L. Beck, “The Rupture between the Muhammadiyah and the Ahmadiyyah,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 161, no. 2 – 3 (2005). 26. Along with Alfian, Muhammadiyah, 248; here, too, consult Kahin, “Repression and Regroupment.”

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row view of women’s rights on the participants. Organizers from Java envisioned a joint session of Muhammadiyah and gAisyiyah, in which gAisyiyah member Siti Haijinah—a “young and beautiful woman”—would address the combined assembly.27 In such a meeting, the men and women in the audience were separated by a screen, but any speaker was at the podium and visible to both groups. Rasul declared this to be absolutely haram (forbidden). But, after the negotiations by K. H. Mas Mansur, Rasul relented and changed his declaration from haram to makruh (reprehensible, meritorious if avoided), but he still refused to permit a mixed public address. The Hoofdbestuur caved in, and the Muhammadiyah Minangkabau Conference of late August 1930 brought eight hundred men to the Scala Theater in Bukittinggi. There would be no formal interaction with the 2,000 gAisyiyah women who packed the Scala on August 28. The Minangkabau branch of Muhammadiyah, led by the fanaticus Rasul, was considered dogmatic and intractable. But what could be read as narrow religious interpretation also masked Minangkabau literary playfulness and patriotism. Haji Rasul formulated his stance against women speaking in public in sermons transcribed into Arabic-script Malay and published in 1929. “Cermin Terus,” the title of the book, means “continual reflection” and is seemingly a reference to Sufi notions of an inner heart. But to Minangkabau traditionalists the title would have been a clear reminder of the magical weapon camin taruih used in the Kaba Cindua Mato to destroy part of the palace of Pagaruyung.28 The enemy of Pagaruyung, Imbang Jayo, used his magic mirror to redirect sunlight and ignite the palace, and so Haji Rasul was metaphorically taking up the battle against Minangkabau traditional authority abandoned by the Padri a century earlier. But he was making his declaration of war not as some neo-Wahhabi but from within the Minangkabau folkloric tradition. On March 14, 1929, Haji Abdul Karim Amrullah and his brother addressed a crowd of some 1,000 men at the Jurung Nagari mosque in Sungai Batang:29 Kitab Cermin Terus (section two) An answer to the second question that asked: are there demands for the unifying of women according to Islam? O, wise readers!! In truth questions such as this are in this day and age no longer important to answer, because all Muslims already know that it is required for the servants of Allah to unite, men and women regardless, to unite principally as the ummat Islam. And all people are already adept at explaining this requirement of unity wherever there is a place for meetings, large and small, of men and women. So

27. As reported in Alfian, Muhammadiyah, 262 – 63. 28. Abdullah, “Some Notes on the Kaba Tjindua Mato,” 7. 29. Unless otherwise noted, the quotations in this section are from Amrullah, Kitab Cermin Terus, 14 – 22, 104 – 6. Sections from the Quran have again been checked against Junus’s contemporary Tafsir.

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that it has already become a favorite discussion, unifying and unions, for everyone, old and young. From those who are big to those who are small. Even children playing in the yard beneath the rice barns are uniting! Uniting in reading: hold fast to Allah [from the Quran] . . . and other verses of the Quran and Hadith that lead to an understanding that draws all who hear together so that they are unified, men and women. Nevertheless there are many too who do not yet understand the way to unify. Why unify? And for what? It is this that it is appropriate for us to clarify a little, just enough to get the main points and origin . . . may Allah show us the way.

Haji Rasul then reviewed the religious obligations to unite: in faith, in accordance with the five pillars of Islam, the teachings of the Quran and Hadith, and in avoidance of that which is forbidden. That which is called the commands of Allah are all that is good, and that which is called the prohibitions of Allah are all that is evil! Such goodness and evil are substantiated equally in the Quran! To oneself, to reason, to faith, to worldly goods, to family [kaum famili], to one’s people [bangsa], to country [negeri], to all the servants of Allah, to good behavior, to the world, to the afterlife, to the extrinsic world and inner self and so forth.

Haji Rasul continued with a critique of secular political organizations. He was speaking in ambiguous circumstances. Following the 1926 – 1927 communist uprisings in Java and West Sumatra, the colonial state had rounded up and executed or imprisoned almost all the communist activists, Haji Rasul’s avowed enemies. But the colonial state—also loathed by Haji Rasul—became increasingly intolerant of political activism generally, and the ulama were forced to be guarded in their sermons and publications. He continued: Unite with resolute faith! Unite with pure intentions! Unite according to the path of Allah! Unite in the avoidance of Allah’s prohibitions! Unite to tend the religion of Allah! Unite to put things in their place! Unite to differentiate progress [kemajuan] that is praiseworthy from that which is disgraceful. Unite and depend on the Quran and the clarifications of the Prophets of Allah.

Haji Rasul warned against cavalier political associations, and he asserted that interference with the “ummat Muhammad while they are gathered together— unified—according to the Quran and Hadith” would be met with a sword to the neck. Imitation of foreign customs and religions is false progress. Only the teachings of Islam lead to true progress.

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Namely be determined all you intelligent people to draw your motives from the Quran and Hadith, because in truth you have already been preceded in striving for this kemajuan you keep demanding, others have attained it long before you. So if you also take your motives and rules from right and left, hither and thither, it will just be a sort of imitation. Or following of the demands of passion, for in truth you will stray from the path of Allah, and you will be perfect only in your deviance. What can also be gleaned from that hadith is that we do not need to take as our model the doings of people in Mecca, Medina, Turkey, Baghdad, Java, and elsewhere, to mold our deeds. Being religious makes us similar in an essential sense [usul and furuk], and not according to what we might think is good. Instead all those views need to be measured against the Quran and authentic Hadith so that we know if they are good according to the rules of Allah and Rasul! . . . Yes all you Muslims! Let us all imitate Europe, America, Australia, Africa, Hindustan, Turkey, Java and other places regarding worldly endeavors that are useful too for the afterlife, and demand all sorts of knowledge that will not conflict with the commands of Allah and Rasul! Progress as far as possible! There are religious endeavors of essence and principle. So I repeat again these are in no way approved of. Take only from the Quran and the Hadith of the Prophet! Do not just imitate!

It is striking that in his list of foreign lands Haji Rasul twice included Java. He was in constant conflict with the Javanese Muhammadiyah leadership and was clearly not subscribing to any notion of Indonesian nationalism. Haji Rasul’s sermon, transcribed and published by his students, gives us unique insight into the sort of discourse heard in the reformist mosques of the 1920s. In Minangkabau, where women were noted for their oratory, Haji Rasul was especially controversial. He continued his sermon with a declaration on “the truth of the law regarding the voice of strange women”: Know this o all you Muslims! Truly the voice of a woman is that of an outsider! This is one matter that must be discussed as clearly as possible for this matter is still not an open one for most people here in Indonesia. Because of this, consult the words of the imam regarding this matter: First. As mentioned in the book of Nawazil, al-Kafi, al-Muhit, al-Fath . . . all four books state that the voice of a woman singing is also taboo [aurat]. Because of this, it is not permitted for them to sing or chant the Quran at all, moreover if it will be heard by outside men! . . . So men in this godless day and age, all the servants of Allah, can they not help but have their thoughts diverted, because they hear the voice of a woman, singing, chanting, making speeches that are pregnant with language that is sweetly intense—actions that are sweet too, clothing that is beautiful and so on—all that is finally haram too. As it is said, rice is planted but nettles grow. Allah knows best.

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The Fanaticus The Kitab Cermin Terus is a transcription of a sermon by the most powerful and uncompromising Muslim reformist in late colonial Indonesia. Haji Rasul led what was not an uncommon confrontation between literal interpreters of the Quran and the age of kemajuan. In the late nineteenth century, a similar debate had taken place over the mechanical reproduction of a woman’s voice—if listening to a recording of prayers being read was not the same as hearing a live person recite the Quran, then would a recording of a woman singing be forbidden even though the physical woman was not truly present? In this case, the declaration of haram depended on the lustful reaction of the listener rather than on the physical presence of the singer.30 Haji Rasul’s particular provocation would have been assemblies such as the Grand Meeting of the Association of Sumatran Mothers and gAisyiyah, his venom long reserved from failed battles with the communists for control of the Thawalib. Haji Rasul was not acting out of spite but, rather, from a deep commitment to the literal interpretation of the Quran. Scholars such as his own son, Hamka, were at the same time making counterarguments to Rasul’s proscriptive fatwa.31

Islamism and Communism The topic of Islam and communism has long attracted scholars of Indonesian history.32 It does not need a detailed recapitulation here. The period following the First World War brought the language of international communism to the Indonesian pergerakan. Articles in explicitly communist periodicals instructed readers to “Bury Capitalism! Long Live Communism!” and asked, “Who oppresses us? Who exploits us? Who ruins our religion?” (The answer: “Ooooo, I know, capitalism is what ruins everything.”)33 But borrowed Marxist rhetoric suffused even the less political of journals; Soenting Melajoe warned that the price of rice must be protected “so that it doesn’t just fall prey to the kapitalisten, and is then sold back to us by the kapitalisten with a higher price.”34 Hamka

30. C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Islam and the Phonograph,” Moslem World 5 (1915). 31. See the discussion of Hamka’s 1929 Agama dan Perempoean (Religion and Women) in Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession.” 32. See Shiraishi, Age In Motion; C. van Dijk, “ ‘Communist Muslims’ in the Dutch East Indies,” in State and Islam, ed. C. van Dijk and A. H. de Groot (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1995). Shiraishi discusses the essay “Islamism and Communism” by the Javanese theologian Hadji Misbach and the inclination to ideologize religion during the pergerakan. 33. Bsa, “Koeboerlah Kapitalisme! Hidoeplah Communisme!,” Djago! Djago! 2.9, 4 April 1924, p. 1; Z, “Siapakah jang menindas kita? Siapakah jang memeras kita? Siapakah jang meroesakan agama kita?,” Djago! Djago! 1.1, 8 October 1923, p. 4. 34. Kabar berita, “Harga beras di Padang, Padang 8 Juni 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.22, 8 June 1917), pp. 2 – 3.

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too warned of the “Kapitalisten”—they bring dancing and other ruinous sorts of adat.35 Long after the Silungkang Uprising and suppression of the communists, the discourse of those exiled to West Papua, the “jang di Digoelkan,”36 lived on in the newspapers and political rallies of West Sumatra. Kapitalisten were equated with kafir (infidels), and for many, communism was seen as a quasi-religious struggle against colonialism.

Good Behavior In the late 1910s, women were becoming dissatisfied with Soenting Melajoe and moving toward more confrontational and politicized activities. Progressive men of adat set aside their differences with their Islamic reformist brothers and censured this behavior. Whereas reformists such as Haji Rasul found their ammunition in the words of the Quran, the adat group sought to “protect and provide” for women in keeping with the traditions of Minangkabau culture. They could be scathing: “A Maharadja supporter a year later called the SoearaPerempoean a magazine of ‘whores and pub-crawling girls.’”37 But Datuk Soetan Maharadja, the founder of Soenting Melajoe, was more constructive in his criticism. In a brief manifesto entitled “The Superiority of Minangkabau Wives,” he again championed the need for women’s schooling, for the progress of kemadjoean, and for the raising of intelligent children. Motherhood must be taught. Soetan Maharadja, following Dutch progressive wisdom, asserted that education begins with the household (roemah tangga). Prospective mothers must learn about the care of infants, about basic health, and domestic agriculture. In this, he praised the activities of the Sarikat Keoetamahan Isteri Minangkabau, which had recently opened a girls’ Industrie and Huishoudschool in Padang Panjang, complete with a Dutch teacher, stone walls, and a zinc roof.38 But it was in an article in Soenting Melajoe that Datuk Soetan Maharaja most thoroughly set down his position on women in Minangkabau custom:39 35. Amrullah, Agama dan Perempoean, 70. 36. Boven Digul was the Dutch political prison camp in New Guinea. The phrase refers to those who were exiled there. Soetan Mangkoeto, Soeloeh Moeballigh Islam Indonesia, 8. Soetan Mangkoeto was a student of Haji Rasul. 37. Not my translation; the original text has been lost. This was reported, allegedly, in the Warta Hindia 6 – 8, 1919, and translated in a disturbingly eccentric book by Herman A. O. de Tollenaere, The Politics of Divine Wisdom: Theosophy and Labour, National, and Women’s Movements in Indonesia and South Asia, 1875 – 1947 (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Katholieke Universiteit, 1996), 386 – 87. Tollenaere relies exclusively on the Dutch-language summaries in the “Overzicht van de Inlandsche Pers” (IPO)— a limited source that speaks more to Dutch concerns than those of the “natives” but that covers periodicals no longer available in their original form. 38. Soetan Maharadja, Keoetamaan isteri Minangkabau (Padang: Snelpers Drukkerij Orang Alam M. Kabau, ca. 1916). See also the discussion of the Datuk in Noer, Modernist Muslim Movement, 217. 39. Unless otherwise noted, the quotations in this section are from D. S. Maharadja, “Perempoean,” Soenting Melajoe 6.4, 26 January 1917, pp. 1 – 2.

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One must honor and humble oneself to women. According to our adat in the Alam Minangkabau, we must esteem and safeguard our women, build houses for them, so that they are protected from rain and heat, and so that they have places to sleep within the house chambers [biliak] shall be made, small and large, so that their slumber is not just in any haphazard place. The women are the ones who own the house and who own the sleeping chambers.

Datuk Soetan Maharadja and Haji Rasul opposed one another in interpreting Minangkabau culture. Haji Rasul was a founder of Sumatran Muhammadiyah and a stern Islamic modernist; the Datuk was a pillar of the adat group and believed that traditional Minangkabau philosophy offered the best guide to correct behavior. Both, however, agreed that, ultimately, women belonged within a domestic sphere. It is worth noting that the most potent attack on Haji Rasul’s sexism came from the woman activist Rasuna Said, his student. And the first woman journalist and women’s educator in Minangkabau, Rohana Kudus, was a protégée of Soetan Maharadja. The Datuk continued: When carving the central pillar [tonggak toea] of the house for the woman, it is only the woman who sits upon [controls] the central pillar, and of her the senior craftsman asks permission when he begins to chisel the pillar; because the woman is the one who owns the central pillar, and all the other pillars merely follow on that first central pillar, meaning that the central pillar is the house and whoever owns the central pillar then they own the house; and although it was the men who felled the tree or bought the wood, they are just helping; meaning it is all done for the woman too; so it is according to our adat Alam Minangkabau, the women own the house, and never the men; and it is for the girls and daughters that the house is built; because it is for them that the house is intended from the very start, with the exception of the prayerhouse [surau], coffee-stall [lapau], shop, or commercial store.

Defining a house by its central pillar, and metaphorically associating the senior woman and that same pillar, joins the “living house” to the female inhabitants.40 If perhaps a man is in debt, it is not permitted to repossess the house in order to pay off his debt; because according to the adat of the Alam Minangkabau, the house is the place of the women, and only the women are the owners, are given chambers, for even when seeking timber in the forest or purchasing materials, it is already determined in the heart and born when carving the central pillar, that the house is to be a place for women; because it is a great shame in the adat of the Alam Minangkabau if a woman is not given a house in which to live and a chamber in which to sleep. 40. Waterson, Living House; Reenen, Central Pillars of the House.

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The village must assist in the building of houses for women by providing rice or other foods. The reason for the building of longhouses [roemah gedang] in the villages of the Alam Minangkabau is to safeguard women with a home and community.

Here Datuk Soetan Maharadja used the unusual rhetorical construction berkampoeng berhalaman, literally a village (kampoeng) and yard (halaman); I have translated this as “home and community.” Kampung halaman—no ber—is evocative in traditional Malay literature and in modern Indonesia, the closest expression to the Western bourgeois notion of home. In Minangkabau, the rumah gadang longhouse was, as much as kampung (village), a focus of nostalgic longings and idealizations. It was a thing to be pined for when traveling, the source of a homesickness expressed throughout the Malay world as rindu. Soetan Maharadja continues to construct his ideal home: “We need to provide a ricefield that will endure. A reservoir ricefield [ padi voorraad ] means a ricefield that is ready to serve as food for the women from year to year.” Datuk Soetan Maharadja then compared the customary rights, or adat, of Minangkabau women to those of the powerless Persian and Arab women governed by syarak, or Islamic law (sharia). The Arab women’s bodies are owned by the men, he asserts, whereas in Minangkabau adat women’s inheritance rights are powerful. This was a clear warning, often repeated in Soetan Maharadja’s writings, against “fundamentalist” Islam, Ahmad Khatib’s anti-adat reformist campaign in Mecca, and a Padri resurgence. He continued: If it is the case that the house is already destroyed or run down according to the adat of the Alam Minangkabau because people just want to follow the syarak [Islamic law], surely the status of the women of our people will fall, and there will no longer be the family bond [bond familie] that is the essence of kinship, that constitutes a village and that bond or alliance of clans [suku] to safeguard women and the good behavior of women. There are now nagari within the Alam Minangkabau that no longer heed adat but just follow Islamic law, so that the maternal uncle [mamak] wants nothing to do with his nieces or sisters according to adat: “by day they are watched at night they are heard”; but what becomes of the sisters and nieces who are unmarried or are left by their men who go to seek their fortunes in other lands? Because of cases like these we have needed to form the S. A. A. M. (Serikat Adat Alam Minangkabau, The Adat Alliance of the Alam Minangkabau) so that the adat that safeguards women and women’s status is upheld.

Through the compilation and fixing of customary law in the adat law tomes (adatrechtsbundels), the ideals of men such as Datuk Soetan Maharadja entered the colonial canon and were carried on into modern Indonesia. Minangkabau as an ethno-legal identity was fixed during the second decade of the twentieth century. The discourse of the adat progressives is kept alive today, whereas books

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such as the Kitab Cermin Terus have all but disappeared.41 Both strains of thought provided fierce, although ultimately failed, resistance to the political movement of Minangkabau women.

Demons and Devils What was then to fear? What would happen if politics invaded the household? Haji Rasul’s polemic made it clear that the Quran forbade women’s speechmaking because it could provoke lust in unfamiliar men. And the adat group hinted at wanton huddles and backroom murmuring—the harder stuff to which Movement participation led. Djamain Abdul Moerad, a redactor of the journal Pewarta Islam and member of the Rasul camp, made the threat delightfully clear in his book The Political Chessboard of Devils and Demons.42 With a twisted prologue in mixed Dutch and Malay—“the Devil calls a meeting” (Iblis mengadakan vergadering)—Moerad describes a classic political rally. In discourse rife with Dutch political buzzwords, Satan (the Iblis) directs the assembled demons to go and do evil—specifically tricking teachers into being arrogant and students into becoming lazy and ignorant.43 To this end, people must be encouraged to drink alcohol, so they become hotheaded and lustful. Satan recommends destroying the husband-wife relationship and undermining the peaceful household as particularly effective evil-sowing stratagems. He admonishes the demons to foster love between young men and women—love that will lead to seduction, uninhibited fondling—so that, then entwined, the couple will descend to the “submarine world” of illicit sex (zina). The demons should stake out those bawdy places where boys seek pelesir and lustful release; they should stalk poor girls who are willing to “rent their honor” (a not uncommon phenomenon, we are assured). Iblis becomes specific in his directives: seek out a couple that is not too in love, and encourage the wife, out of desire for affection or in vengeful spirit, to commit adultery. Lure the husband away to gamble and waste time, so that his family has no food and the wife is forced to “rent her honor.” Uncontrolled, the couple’s fighting will lead to divorce and the abandonment of the children. The destruction of the good family is the ultimate goal of the hell-spawn, who harrumph approvingly at Satan’s suggestions and agree to implement the policy. The Political Chessboard of Devils and Demons illustrates beautifully popular apprehension of the political Movement. Moerad, like many of his peers, saw modernity as a dangerous force unleashing a raft of imported vices upon Mi41. Contemporary adat writers include A. A. Navis and Datuk Rajo Penghulu, and many of the classic adat texts of the late colonial period remain in print and are easily available in bookstores. 42. Djamain Abdul Moerad, Pertjatoeran Politiek Sjaitan Iblis (Fort de Kock: Drukkerij MODJTSAN [Tsamaratoelechwan], 1924). 43. This is probably a reference to the communist takeover of the Thawalib.

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nangkabau society.44 Using Dutchified political language, formal rules of order, and numbered resolutions, Moerad’s Devil and demons wreak evil on West Sumatra in the most modern of fashions. The Dutch were at this time afraid of the hidden forces in their colony; for Indonesians these overt and modern influences were cause for the greatest concern.

Families Contested: The Uprising Two years later, Moerad’s demons were shoulder-perched and giddy as the Silungkang communists planned their uprising. On the first night of January 1927, the agitator Kamaruddin held forth at a meeting in Silungkang, “We can no longer go back. Whoever wants to stop us now gets killed—even if he is our own father, our own mamak! ”45 That a Minangkabau would have viewed a father as a potential threat or counterinfluence is indicative of twentieth-century social transformations. Throughout 1925 – 1926, the Silungkang-based propagandist Sulaiman Labai demanded a change in adat that would allow middle-class men to marry aristocratic girls. Silungkang is famous within Minangkabau as a nagari with unusually restrictive marriage customs; men who scoffed at these traditions, including Labai himself, were making a particularly bold and revolutionary statement.46 Other towns were less carnal in their approach to revolutionary thought; Kota Lawas near Padang Panjang was jokingly referred to as a “little Soviet.”47 But as Schrieke himself recognized, Padang Panjang was the ideological heart of Minangkabau communism. The Dutch official discussed the Islamic-communist newspapers and the Thawalib, noting that the Sarikat Rakyat had 660 members by the end of 1924 and that at least thirty-six of them were women. “If 1924 had been the year of public meetings, 1925 was that of Communist lecture courses. These courses dealt with the three stages of social development, viz., primitive communism, feudalism, and capitalism.”48 Although interest in these lectures was not sustained, the Minangkabau communists were clearly aware of the important place that theories of matriarchy had in the thinking of 44. Moerad was not just seeing spirits; Oetoesan Melajoe, Datuk Soetan Maharadja’s general daily newspaper, fumed editorially about the dangers of opium and alcohol throughout the 1910s. Yet ads for liquor were some of the most consistent in the paper. 45. These events were reconstructed through informants and interviews in an official government report. Schrieke, “Course of the Communist Movement,” 177. Contrast this threat of patricide with Tuanku nan Renceh’s killing of his mother’s sister during the Padri War; Steijn Parvé, “De secte der Padaries,” 271 – 72. 46. Schrieke, “Course of the Communist Movement,” 102. Silungkang’s restrictive marital rules are discussed by Umar Junus, “Some Remarks on Minangkabau Social Structure,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 120, no. 3 (1964). 47. Soviet ketjil. Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai, 98. 48. Schrieke, “Course of the Communist Movement,” 109, 113.

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Friedrich Engels. They would have understood that their own society was, therefore, somehow closer than most to a pure communism.49 In his prison memoirs, Tan Malaka mused proudly: A society that takes this form, that is [what Engels called] a “Self-Acting Armed Organization of the Population” can be found in a society based on IndigenousCommunism (Ur-Communism!). Many are the lessons that we can draw from that Little Book by Engels that I mentioned above. And the more we study Engels’s opinions about the ancient societies in America (Indian society)—opinions based upon Lewis H. Morgan’s book “Ancient Society”—the more we can comprehend the intricacies of our own society. I myself, when reading Engels’s book, have often felt that there are many similarities between the society of the Original-Americans (Indians) and the societies in several regions of Indonesia. For but one example I might propose that there appears to be little difference between the conditions in ancient Minangkabau society, at its noblest, and that condition of a “Self-Acting Armed Organization of the Population”!

Tan Malaka continues, discussing Minangkabau customary adat and the process of deliberation in settling legal matters, depicting an idealized society of communitarian responsibility. The conditions described above were sustained as long as the Minangkabau economy remained uninfluenced or little influenced by money. Property was in large part held by the suku (family [keluarga]). Ancestral property such as rice fields and houses could never be sold or pawned if, in a family deliberation, one single relative, man or woman (and usually a woman!) disagreed. Wealth was distributed equally throughout a suku. Important work like planting the rice fields and building an adat house or communal balai meeting hall were still undertaken by the group according to a system of mutual assistance [tolong-bertolong].50

Like Tan Malaka, Bertram Schrieke imagines a West Sumatra before the appearance of money. Using an adat text by Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo, Schrieke supposed that the introduction of a money economy in 1908 led first to individualization and then an erosion of adat traditions. A “slackening of the matriarchal family tie” and the disappearance of the longhouse precipitated the rise 49. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In Connection with the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978 [originally published in German, 1884]). 50. Tan Malaka, “Dari Pendjara ke Pendjara III” (typescript in the University of California, Berkeley, Library, Jogjakarta, 1948), 24 – 25. In 1919, Tan Malaka made a similar boast about Minangkabau communism in the alumni magazine of the Amsterdam Public Trade School. See the article “De Minangkabausche Maleiers,” appended to Harry A. Poeze, Tan Malaka: Levensloop van 1897 tot 1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 539 – 41.

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of communism and the uprising. “The establishment of the family, the onefamily dwelling, inheritance laws, the relaxation of the rules governing land tenure, the lessening of sacred family property—all these are factors combining to slacken matriarchal family ties.”51 Schrieke’s analysis has been thoroughly critiqued elsewhere.52 It is true that his account is ahistorical and that his data were too neatly interpreted at the time. But Schrieke’s informants were wellconnected, and Schrieke himself was present in Minangkabau through the 1910s and was familiar with the immediate background to the uprisings.53 The longhouse never did disappear, and the matriarchate never did collapse. But as with the Padri War a century earlier, there was a real perception of this kind of upheaval at the time of the Silungkang Uprising.

Aftershocks After 1927, after the earthquake and the uprising, everything changed in West Sumatra. The translation of pergerakan from physical movement to political movement—which finally reified the physical movement of women—now marched in one direction. The alam Minangkabau that had in the 1910s and 1920s also seen shifts at once textual and metaphorical, as well as spatial, was now bound increasingly to a physical map. In the first decades of the twentieth century, these transformations most affected women, and it was through women that social, political, and religious battles were waged. After 1927, the query implicit in the terms kemajuan and pergerakan was answered by Boven Digul and the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Oath)—movements led to prisons and then on to an Indonesian nationalism. But the uprising and earthquake were not soon forgotten and eclipsed by nationalism. A dime novel from 1940, The Razing of Padang Panjang, recapitulates the events of 1926. Readers find a young man of the Movement battling 51. Schrieke, “Development of the Communist Movement,” 115 – 19. 52. See Joel S. Kahn, “Peasant Political Consciousness in West Sumatra: A Reanalysis of the Communist Uprising of 1927,” in History and Peasant Consciousness in South East Asia, ed. Andrew Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe, Senri Ethnological Studies, no. 13 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1984); Akira Oki, “The Dynamics of Subsistence Economy in West Sumatra,” in History and Peasant Consciousness in South East Asia, ed. Andrew Turton and Shigeharu Tanabe, Senri Ethnological Studies, no. 13 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1984); Akira Oki, “Economic Constraints, Social Change, and the Communist Uprising in West Sumatra (1926 – 1927): A Critical Review of B. J. O. Schrieke’s West Coast Report,” in Change and Continuity in Minangkabau: Local, Regional, and Historical Perspectives on West Sumatra, ed. Lynn L. Thomas and Franz von Benda-Beckmann (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1985); Kahin, “1927 Communist Uprising in Sumatra.” 53. Schrieke followed some of the more intricate debates within the Minangkabau Muslim community, collecting materials and familiarizing himself with the local leadership. Nico Kaptein, “The Berdiri Mawlid Issue among Indonesian Muslims in the Period from circa 1875 to 1930,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 149, no. 1 (1993).

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with a local thug for the affection of a Girls’ Religious Diniyyah School student. The earthquake brought the house crashing down upon them, and only the hero survived. This man of the Movement then slunk home, where he “lived as a fisherman in his village on the shore of that beautiful lake [Singkarak], forgetting his newspaper and forgetting the world, because this life today was a life that was empty . . . a life without hope.”54 But even this broken-hearted hero picked himself up eventually and returned to Padang to join the struggle. The dime novels are delights for literary historians. Their language is experimental and incisive, their politics obnoxious. But they represent a tragic turn in Indonesian intellectual history. In them, political action and movement become tropes and take the place of actual politics and the possibility of change. In The Razing of Padang Panjang, a text that commemorated the end of the Movement with the uprising and earthquake of 1926, the hero can recuperate and be political. But when the book was published in 1940, direct political action was inconceivable off the pages of novels and stories. The 1930s repression forced the fictionalization of historical discourse, and this literary turn was spearheaded by writers from West Sumatra. The writers who created the dime novels lived in a time when secular novelistic and religious lives were not exclusive. Authors such as Hamka and Jusuf Sou’yb had careers that saw adat and Islam decompartmentalized. They were free to write novels or religious tracts, but they could not produce political discourse without the promise of censorship and threat of exile. This inability to address political and historical issues unambiguously led to a stagnation of historiographical analysis in West Sumatra that lasted through the Japanese occupation and the Revolution, on into the national period. For the men and women of Minangkabau, the 1930s brought a move away from revolutionary action and toward the generation of texts. The politics of Islamic reform and communist revolution gave way to a poetics of subversion and textuality that would be a hallmark of Indonesian discourse, with occasional ruptures, through the fall of Soeharto in 1998. 54. Dali, Hantjoer-Leboernja Padang Pandjang, ed. D. R. Roesnam (Padang: Bangoen, 1940), 70.

CONCLUSION

Victorious Buffalo, Resilient Matriarchate Adaik nan indak lakang dek paneh, nan indak lapuak dek ujan, (paliang-paliang balumuik dek cindawan). Adat doesn’t crack in the sun, [it] doesn’t rot in the rain, (at most [it] is grown over by mushrooms). Minangkabau proverb

The Minangkabau matriarchate is hard to kill. Since the 1820s, the people of West Sumatra have been involved in an intensive three-way contest among reformist Islam, the traditions of the matriarchate, and what would become European progressivism. This dialectic focused on the concept of the ideal house and family. Reformist Islam had concerned itself with the definition of everyday life and home among villagers since the middle of the eighteenth century. Colonialism, with an eye toward an expanding tax base and corvée labor, had a stake in the control of families and populations. Colonial states, in particular, have been extraordinarily successful in dismantling “matriarchal” customs. In South and Southeast Asia, two matrilineal societies—that of Kerala in India and that of Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia—were undermined by the British colonial state, by legal reform, and by a universalizing notion of progress and modernity that fixed matriarchy as an anachronism, a survival of a socially less-evolved past.1 The Minangkabau of West Sumatra felt the full force of strict reformist Islam during the neo-Wahhabi Padri War. They then experienced intensive colonialism through the cultivation system, colonial schools, health regulations, and legal reforms. Both the Dutch and Padri attacked the shape of the Minangkabau longhouse, the Epigraph proverb from Ismet Fanany and Rebecca Fanany, Wisdom of the Malay Proverbs (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 2003), 191. Ismet Fanany is from West Sumatra, and despite its title the book is Minangkabau-specific. 1. On Kerala, see Arunima, There Comes Papa; Robin Jeffrey, “Legacies of Matriliny: The Place of Women and the ‘Kerala Model’,” Pacific Affairs 77, no. 4 (2004). On Negeri Sembilan, see Michael G. Peletz, “ ‘Great Transformation’.”

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Figure C.1. Women of West Sumatra during the Padri War. From H. J. J. L. Ridder de Stuers, De Vestiging en Uitbreiding der Nederlanders ter Westkust van Sumatra, vol. 1, edited by P. J. Veth (Amsterdam: P. N. van Kampen, 1849), opposite page 32.

custom of matrilineal inheritance, and the form of the matrifocal family. Yet the Minangkabau matriarchate remains strong today. Ethnographies from the late Soeharto period describe a Minangkabau village life that is still matrifocal, with women sharing power with men in all major activities and decisions.2 All of Indonesia, however, has been transformed since the dictator’s fall in 1998, and Padang has not escaped the superficial piety of the early twenty-first-century Islamic revival. The mayoralty implemented a kind of limited shariah in 2003, demanding a Quranic competency test for high school graduates. In March 2005, the mayor decreed that female students and civil servants must wear veils, and in sweeping Anti-Sin Laws he forbade women from leaving their houses at night unchaperoned.3 On a visit I made to 2. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a handful of anthropologists were ensconced in Minangkabau villages working on gender relations. Evelyn Blackwood, “Wedding Bell Blues: Marriage, Missing Men, and Matrifocal Follies,” American Ethnologist 32, no. 1 (2005); Jennifer Krier, “The Marital Project: Beyond the Exchange of Men in Minangkabau Marriage,” American Ethnologist 27, no. 4 (2000); Ng, “Raising the House Post”; Ok-Kyung Pak, “De la Maison Longue à la Maison Courte: Les Femmes Minangkabau et la Modernisation,” Culture 9, no. 1 (1989); Reenen, Central Pillars of the House. 3. Novriantoni, “Kasus Jilbab Padang dan ‘Fasisme Kaum Moralis’,” Jaringan Islam Liberal, 6 June 2005, available at: http://islamlib.com/id/index.php?page=article&id=827; Lyn Parker, “Uniform Jilbab,” Inside Indonesia 83, July– September 2005, available at: http://insideindonesia.org /content /view/159/29/; Widya Siska, “Setahun Perda Syariat di Padang,” Voice of Human Rights News Cen-

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Padang in 2006, it was clear that these developments had been met with much annoyance by the university lecturers with whom I spoke, although both compliance with and enforcement of the Anti-Sin Laws seemed arbitrary. And villages in the hills were entirely unaffected. The Center for the Study of Islam and Minangkabau in Padang has been involved in revitalizing the flagging tradition of surau education.4 The nagari had been delegitimated in 1983 by the Indonesian state, replaced by smaller (and more easily policed and controlled) polities based on the Javanese village, the desa. In 1998 came a drive for decentralization and regional autonomy, and in West Sumatra this meant an effort to restore the nagari as the essential political unit.5 The past two centuries teach us that in ahistorical snapshots Minangkabau adat always appears on the verge of collapse. Yet it lasts. Adat is not a husk of tradition; it is a dynamic system that withstands seemingly overwhelming external criticism. Minangkabau cultural authorities have taken pride in the persistence of the matriarchate. With scholars of Minangkabau, they celebrate the stubborn, innate resilience of the culture as the key factor preserving custom. Paradoxically, the survival of Minangkabau matrilineal and matrilocal custom is due to the experience of the Padri War, and not its inherent fortitude. Tuanku Imam Bondjol’s capitulation—not in the face of Dutch military might but rather with the knowledge that Wahhabism had been disgraced in Mecca—brought an end to a reformist war that probably would have permanently undermined the local matriarchate. Instead, the Padris forced the traditionalists to define their concept of culture and custom in the face of an incisive and well-reasoned critique. Armed with proven rhetorical defenses of adat, the Minangkabau were able to counter colonial intrusions into their houses and families and to fend off a more insidious critique of matriarchy from universalized modernity. The Minangkabau embrace of new ideas of progress and modernity while sustaining tradition has been chalked up to some ancient and essential cultural trait by Minangkabauists, part of that outwardly “spiraling rhythm of history” that makes Minangkabau people open to foreign influence. But we need not rely on their wishful cultural essentialism. It is a result of its confrontation with the Padri neo-Wahhabi jihad that Minangkabau culture retained its matriarchal aspect through more than a century of Dutch imperialism. tre, 15 November 2006, available at: http://www.vhrmedia.net/home/index.php?id=view&aid =3051&lang=. 4. See the set of books by H. Mas’oed Abidin, Silabus Surau: Panduan Pembelajaran Budaya Minangkabau, Adat Basandi Syarak, Syarak Basandi Kitabullah (Padang: Pusat Penkajian Islam dan Minangkabau, 2004); H. Mas’oed Abidin, Surau Kito (Padang: Pusat Penkajian Islam dan Minangkabau, 2004). The center has also recast matrilineal adat as a pedagogical tool. Jamaris Jamna, Pendidikan Matrilineal (Padang: Pusat Penkajian Islam dan Minangkabau, 2004). 5. Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, “Recreating the Nagari: Decentralisation in West Sumatra” (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers, no. 31, Max Planck Institute, Halle/Saale, 2001).

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The decayed matrilineal societies of Kerala, Sri Lanka, and Negeri Sembilan, like Minangkabau, experienced intensive colonialism, a grain tax, the imposition of Western educational systems and laws, the pressures of modernity, and new technologies of travel and communication. In South Asia and Malaysia, matriliny is today at best atavistic. In Minangkabau, it remains strong enough to be called a true matriarchy by at least one anthropologist.6 The neo-Wahhabi jihad forced the Minangkabau people to articulate and defend their matrilineal customs before the arrival of the Dutch and allowed matriliny to be maintained. It is not the case that matriliny exists today despite reformist Islam or that it hangs in some symbiotic equilibrium with it. Rather, the challenge posed by the Padri has sustained matrilineal custom and allowed it to flourish in the face of other external challenges. Violent Islamic revivalism, followed by years of foreign occupation, can still have a happy ending. The conflict and interaction among the matriarchate, reformist Islam, and the colonial state destabilized the most essential elements of Minangkabau society. Minangkabau youths who experienced this ideological controversy found no safe haven in their homes, among their families, or in their surau or schools. Nothing was sacred or immune from interrogation. West Sumatra in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became an ideological breeder reactor. The disproportionate contribution of Minangkabau people to Indonesian national politics is a direct result of this destabilization. Hamka, Mohammad Hatta, Tan Malaka, Muhammad Natsir, Haji Agus Salim, Sutan Sjahrir, and countless other leaders were shaped by homes and schools in which all sacred truths were questioned. Although under the Dutch the Minangkabau polity experienced nothing but defeat, the victorious buffalo of Minangkabau custom survived all challenges. The endurance of the matriarchate is testimony to the fortitude of local tradition, the unexpected flexibility of reformist Islam, and the ultimate weakness of colonialism. The history of West Sumatran politics is of recurring defeat. But the story of Minangkabau culture is one of survival. Minangkabau reminds us that a people can be at the vanguard of ideologies that are universal in scope and global in ambition, yet they can stay true to local custom that is particular, even heretical, and relatively egalitarian. The passionately renegotiated balance between Islam and the matriarchate, modernity and tradition, makes the people of West Sumatra wary of extremism and inclined to compromise. In an age of fundamentalists and monolithic belief systems, a place such as Minangkabau might seem an anachronism, sui generis. It is a hopeful exception. 6. Sanday, Women at the Center.

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Winstedt, Richard. “An Old Minangkabau Legal Digest from Perak.” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, no. 1 (1953). Winter, F. L. Kitab Pri Halnja Adat Sopan dan Lembaga dari Bangsa Wolanda, 2nd ed. Betawi: Albrecht & Co., 1898. Woodward, Mark R. Islam in Java: Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. Yamamoto, Nobuto. “Colonial Surveillance and ‘Public Opinion’: The Rise and Decline of Balai Poestaka’s Press Monitoring.” Keio Journal of Politics 8 (1995). Young, Kenneth R. “The Cultivation System in West Sumatra: Economic Stagnation and Political Stalemate.” In Indonesian Economic History in the Dutch Colonial Era, edited by Anne Booth, W. J. O’Malley, and Anna Weidemann. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1990. ——. Islamic Peasants and the State: The 1908 Anti-Tax Rebellion in West Sumatra. New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1994. Yunus, Mahmud. Riwayat Hidup Prof. Dr. H. Mahmud Yunus: 10 Pebruari 1899 – 16 Januari 1982. Jakarta: Hidakarya Agung, 1982. ——. Sejarah Pendidikan Islam di Indonesia. 3rd ed. Jakarta: Mutiara Sumber Widya, 1992. Yusuf, M. “Persoalan Translitersai dan Edisi Hikayat Tuanku Nan Muda Pagaruyung (Kaba Cindua Mato).” M.A. thesis, Universitas Indonesia, 1994. Zakariya, Hafiz. “Islamic Reform in Colonial Malaya: Shaykh Tahir Jalaluddin and Sayyid Shaykh al-Hadi.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006. Zed, Mestika. “Melayu Kopidaun: Eksploitasi Kolonial dalam Sistim Tanam Paksa Kopi di Minangkabau Sumatera Barat (1847 – 1908).” S2 thesis, Universitas Indonesia, 1983. Zimmerman, A. “Blazing a Motor Trail through Sumatra.” Inter-Ocean 8, no. 11 (November 1927). Znoj, Heinzpeter. “Heterarchy and Domination in Highland Jambi: The Contest for Community in a Matrilinear Society.” Habilitationsschrift, University of Bern, 2001. ——. “Sons versus Nephews: A Highland Jambi Alliance at War with the British East India Company, ca. 1800.” Indonesia 65 (April 1998).

Glossary

adat Custom; and later adatrecht, codified customary law. alam Realm, oikoumene (e.g., Alam Minangkabau, the Minangkabau World). biliak Sleeping chamber in a rumah gadang. controleur Title of the most localized Dutch colonial officials who had the closest dealings with Minangkabau people. datuk Hereditary chief; a Minangkabau adat title, given to some men, usually panghulu and usually after marriage. kampung Village; a complex of houses and fields but not an administration (see also nagari). kaum An ideological group (e.g., Kaum Muda, young group, reformists, modernists; Kaum Tua or Kaum Kuno, old group, traditionalists). kemadjoean (kemajuan) Progress (from maju, to go forward). kweekschool Teachers’ training college (Dutch language). Kweekschool Fort de Kock, also called the Sekolah Radja, was the flagship “native” school in West Sumatra. lapau Coffeehouse. laras The two laras are the Minangkabau cultural traditions of Bodi-Caniago and Koto-Piliang. These were interpreted as political units by the Dutch, and the laras then became administrative divisions. See tuanku laras. luhak Three regional divisions of the darek, the Minangkabau highlands: Agam, Tanah Datar, and Lima Puluh (50) Koto. madrasah Islamic school; usually implies a modernist, regional school (as opposed to a surau). mamak Maternal uncle. merantau See rantau.

200

Glossary

Minangkabau Both the principal ethnic group in West Sumatra and the territory it occupies. moderen Modern, a combination of Islamic (often Egyptian) reformist ideas and European fashions. The modernists called themselves the Kaum Muda (young group). nagari Minangkabau village confederacy; the indigenous political unit. panghulu (penghulu) Male village leader. perantau See rantau. pergerakan Movement; various political movements of the 1910s and 1920s (from gerak, to move). rantau Migration, place of migration (merantau, to out-migrate; perantau, one who out-migrates). resident Title of the highest-ranking Dutch colonial official in a particular region. rumah (roemah) house. rumah gadang Minangkabau longhouse. rumah tangga Household (literally “house and ladder”). schoolschriften Nineteenth-century Dutch examination booklets containing Minangkabau texts. Silungkang uprising The communist uprising of December 1926, sparked by civil servants in the town of Silungkang and the Ombilin coal mine. songket Minangkabau cloth with golden weft. suku Matrilineal clan. Sumatra’s Westkust Sumatra’s Westcoast, the colonial administrative unit. surau Village prayerhouse, Islamic school, and boys’ boarding house. syarak Shariah, Islamic law. tambo Traditional historical account of the Alam Minangkabau. tarekat (tariqa) Sufi association. tuanku laras Dutch-created adat title for a native administrative head. Also called kepala laras; in Dutch larashoofd. ulama Scholars learned in Islamic law (sg. alim).

Index

Abas (assistant teacher), 106–7 Abdoellah Ahmad, Haji, 101–2, 101n53 Abdullah, Taufik. See Taufik Abdullah Abdul Latief, 121 Abdul Muis, 113n4, 159 Abdul Rahman, 121 Abdul Rivai, 99 abortion, 50, 58, 67–68, 68n24 Aceh (Sumatra), 3, 20, 26, 94, 127, 151 Adabiyah School (Padang), 99, 101–2, 111, 160 adat (custom), Minangkabau, 5–6; colonial legal system and, 73, 136n78; communism and, 173–75; elite class, 52–57; Imam Bondjol’s compromise with, 27–29; legal codification of, 45–46, 71–75, 75–76n47, 171–72; longhouse designs and, 37, 44–47; orations, 116; persistence of, 171–72, 172n41, 179; revision of, 116–17; shariah as interdependent with, 29, 29n25, 33; shariah vs., 7–8, 7n18, 27–28, 171; titles ( galar), passage of, 61–62; women and, 159, 169–72 adat basandi syarak (Islamic law as basis for custom), 27–28 Adriyetti Amir, 31n28 adultery, 75n47, 172 afterbirth, mummifying of, 59–61, 63 Agama dan Perempoean (Hamka), 134 Agam people, 37, 37n11 Agam Publishing House (Fort de Kock), 150n47 Agus Salim, Haji, 1, 87–88, 111, 117, 180 Ahmadiyyah, 144, 144n21, 164n25 Ahmad Khatib, 8, 20–21, 158, 171 gAisyiyah, 164–65, 168 Alahan Panjang (Sumatra), 25, 29, 73 Alam Melayu (Malay World), 113 alam Minangkabau, 148, 148n36, 154, 171, 175 alcohol, 173n44

Alfian (historian), 101 Alimah (teacher), 151 Alim, Encik, 162–63 Ali Usman Datuak Buruak, 32n33 “A. M. B. M.” (Tijdschrift letter-writer), 52–54 Ambon, 30 Amrullah, Abdul Karim. See Rasul, Haji Amrullah, Abdul Malik Karim. See Hamka (theologian) Amrullah, Jusuf, 164, 165 anak Deli (child of Deli), 152–53 anak negeri (child of the state), 142 anarchist groups, 151 Andaya, Leonard, 12 animism, 19, 107 Anti-Sin Laws, 178–79 Anti-Tax Rebellion (1908), 13, 13n29, 57, 143, 156, 157 Arab merchants, 3 arms manufacture, penalties for, 72 Asjraq (women’s journal), 129, 143, 157, 161, 162. See also Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera Association of Sumatran Mothers, Grand Meeting of (1929), 162–63, 168 automobiles, 152, 152n54 Ayudhya (Thailand), 11 Azis, Rangkayo Seri Kiam, 162 Azyumardi Azra, 19 balah boeboeëng house form, 52 Balai Pustaka publishing house, 90, 93, 148– 49n39 Balatentara Nafsu (Rasul), 113–14 Bandaharo, Datuk, 25–26 banishment, 62n11 Bareno, Datuk nan, 164, 164n25 Barisan Mountains, 3, 141

202

Index

Bastian, Adolf, 32n32 Batak cultures: conversion to Islam, 26; ethnoregional scholarship on, 127; European missionaries and, 41; Minangkabau culture and, 4–5; trade/publishing leaders from, 150n47; trade systems of, 3–4, 3n6 Batavia ( Java), 144 Bataviaasch Genootschap ( journal), 121 Batusangkar (Sumatra), 24 Batu Tebal (Sumatra), 20 Bengkulu, 41, 42, 149 Bickmore, Albert, 50–51, 90n10 Biegman, G. J. F., 98 Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde ( journal), 122 Bildungsroman, 108 biliak gadang (large chamber), 40, 40n14 biliak kacieh (small chamber), 40n14 Binnenlandsch Bestuur, 128 Bintang Tiong Hoa (newspaper), 101n53 birth control, 68 birth practices, 63 birth records, 62, 62n9 Blackwood, Evelyn, 6 Boas, Franz, 32n32 Bodi (suku), 65 Bodi-Caniago (adat cluster), 65–66 Bodi-Caniago house form, 37n11, 66 Bonjol (Sumatra), 17, 24, 26, 29, 30, 93; Tuanku Imam of (see Imam Bondjol, Tuanku) Bossche, J. F. R. S. van den, 73 Boven Digul (prison camp), 169n36; establishment of, 105n65, 143; pergerakan and, 105, 142, 143, 175; political discourse and, 169 Bowen, John R., 7n18 Boys’ Religious School (Padang Panjang), 141 British colonialism, 177 British East India Company, 41 Buddhism, 19, 119 Bugis people, trade systems of, 3–4 Bukit Barisan mountains, 141 Bukittinggi (Sumatra), 105, 164–65 Bukittinggi Normaalschool, 121 Bukittinggi Sekolah Raja, 72; educational system consolidation and, 94; establishment of, 92; Eurocentric rantau consciousness at, 96–97; facilities at, 96; female students not accepted at, 108; fiftieth anniversary celebrations, 159; first female student at, 94–95; graduates of, 97; Malay-language primers of, 95; native vaccinators trained at, 69, 70, 71 Bundo Kanduang (Minangkabau Ur-mother), 62, 158–59, 158n8 bunian (mythical creature), 106n69 Burma, 11 Buys, Marius, 54, 54n59 cadastral surveys, 67 Caniago (suku), 65, 130n59

Caniago, Naali Sutan. See Naali Sutan Caniago cassia, foreign demand for, 19 Central Sumatra Expedition, 51–52, 54nn59, 61 Chijs, Jacobus Anne van der, 121 Childhood Experiences (Iskandar), 89–91 children: beliefs of, 106–7, 106n69; divorce and custody of, 136, 136n78; inoculation of, 58, 68–71; as paternalistic metaphor, 142–44; schools and, 88 Chinese emigrants, 40n15 Chinese merchants, 3 Chronicle of the Kings of Pasai, 11–12 cinnamon, 90 civil service, 127–28 coeducation, dangers of, 110 coffee: foreign demand for, 19; IV Koto, 120– 21, 120n31; smallholding in, 25 coffee, Dutch cultivation system for (cultuurstelsel): cash crops planted as income alternatives to, 90; dissolution of, 57n70, 126, 127; establishment of, 35; in Koto Gadang, 120–21; Minangkabau political/social leaders and, 155; native bureaucratic elite class needed for, 10, 35, 58, 155; social transformation caused by, 35–36, 58, 67, 75n47; taxation and, 57n70 coffee warehouses, management of, 92 colonialism: impact on Sumatran trade systems, 3–4; invasiveness of, 34; Islamic reformism/ Minangkabau matriarchate tensions and, 5, 9; in Java, 5; matriarchal customs dismantled by, 177; Minangkabau matriarchate survival in face of, 2–3, 177–78; transformative power of, 9; in West Sumatra, 5 communism: Dutch crackdown on, 104–5, 105n65, 166; Islam and, 168–69; Islamic, 102, 139, 142, 173; Islamic education and, 129; matriarchy theories and, 102–3, 173–75; newspapers, 144; school politicization and, 134. See also Silungkang uprising (1926-27) conduct, Islamic reformist focus on, 20 Cornell University, 92 corvée duties, 35, 47, 57, 177 Crawfurd, John, 32n32 cuisine, Minangkabau, 152, 152n55 cultuurstelsel (colonial coffee cultivation system), 10, 35–36, 58, 67, 75n47 Customary Tenure Enactment (Malaya; 1926), 8n21 darek (highland villages), 4 Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo, 71, 174 Datoek Soetan Maharadja, 62, 158; ideal home of, 170–71; as Insulinde editorial board member, 98; Islamic reformism opposed by, 62n8; protégées of, 170; publishing houses owned by, 158n8; scholarly focus on, 97, 97n38; on women in Minangkabau custom, 169–71; women’s education promoted by, 150; women’s political discourse and, 159–60

Index datuk, 48 Datuk Ketemenggungan, 11–12, 66, 78 Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang, 11, 66, 78 Day, Tony, 113n3 debt bondage, 125 Deli (Sumatra), 152–53, 152n54 Deliar Noer, 101, 117n23 dendeng (Minangkabau dish), 152 desa ( Javanese village), 179 Dias, Thomas, 19, 41, 114 Di Bawah Lindungan Kabah (Hamka), 135n74 Dinijjah School Poetera (Boys’ Religious School; Padang Panjang), 141 Dinijjah School Poeteri (Girls’ Religious School; Padang Panjang), 129, 141, 160–61 Diponegoro War, 118 divorce, 84–85, 135, 136, 136n78 Dja Endar Moeda, 97–98, 97n38, 98n40, 99n46, 146n28 Djago! Djago! ( journal), 143 Djalaloeddin Thaib, 103, 150n47 Djamain Abdul Moerad, 172–73, 173n44 Djamaloeddin Tamin, 103 Djanewar Bustami Aman, Sitti, 107–8 djodoh pertemoean (fated love), 147 Djoeir Moehamad, 40n14, 103–4, 108 Djoewita, Z. R., 157, 158 Doenia Achirat (Islamic communist journal), 142, 142n16, 143 Domain Act (1870/5), 67n21 domesticity: historical ignorance of, 113; moral control and, 114–16 dowries, 147 Drakard, Jane, 12, 75 dukun (healer), 38, 106, 107 Dutch Empire, 5, 9. See also Netherlands East Indies Dutch Ethical Policy (1901), 126 Dutch Geographic Society, 51 Dwitunggal (two-in-one-leadership), 1 dysentery, 67 education: bilingual, 127; three-way dialectic in, 87–88 education, Islamic: centralization of, 20; conflicting pedagogies and, 87; dangers of, 110–11; girls’, 108–9, 129, 158; Islamic revival and, 179; kemadjoean pedagogies in, 99–100; politicization of, 134, 139, 160–61; reformist, 101– 3; secular competition with, 97. See also schools, Islamic; surau Education, Religion, and Industry, Department of, 92 education, secular: conflicting pedagogies and, 87, 88; girls’, 94–95, 99, 107–8, 127, 128, 153, 154; Islamic competition with, 97; kemadjoean pedagogies, 97–100; primary schools, 91–92; teacher training, 94–97. See also school system, Dutch colonial

203

Eight Tigers (Harimau nan Salapan), 26 Elout, Cornelius, 29 Elsborg, J. A., 150n47 El-Yunusiyyah, Rahmah. See Rahmah elYunusiyyah Emboen (Malay-language primer), 95 Encylopaedisch Bureau, 127 Engels, Friedrich, 103, 173–74 Erwiza Erman, 133n68 Ethnographic Atlas (Central Sumatra Expedition), 51–52, 53 fig. 2.5 ethnography, 121–23 ethnology, 127 Eurocentrism, 96–97 exogamy, 116–17, 126, 129–31 family/family life: birth practices, 60–61; colonial regulation of, 58–59, 68–71; feuds, 62; historical ignorance of, 113; impact of modernity on, 172–73; Islamic reformist focus on, 20; matrifocal, 177–78, 178 fig. C.1; Minangkabau political/social leaders and, 155; politicization of, 142–44, 146, 156; religious factionalism and, 139; rules for, 64–67 family trees (silsilah), 61–62 fataawa, 20 Fatimah (Rasul’s daughter), 164 feminism, 146, 156 feuds, 62 Fort de Kock, 118 From Jail to Jail (Malaka), 155 gajah maharam house form, 37–38, 37n12 galar (adat titles), 61–62 Geertz, Clifford, 32n32 General Motors, 152n54 Gezondheidtoestand (Ludeking), 67 Girls’ Religious School (Padang Panjang). See Dinijjah School Poeteri Gouvernement Inlandsche School (Padang Panjang), 103 Grand Meeting of the Association of Sumatran Mothers (1929), 162–63, 168 Graves, Elizabeth, 92 Great Sumatran Fault, 141 Guci-Piliang (suku), 130n59 guesthouses, 152 Guru Ordinance, 104, 105 Habbema, J., 122 Hadrami emigrants, 3n5 Hafsah (Rasul’s sister), 164 Haijinah, Siti, 165 Haji Miskin, 21–24, 26, 27, 74 hajjis, 19, 20, 21–24, 25, 113 Halimah, Siti, 147 Hamka (theologian), 1, 113, 180; on anak Deli, 152–53; arranged marriage of, 135n74; birth of, 155; communist rhetoric of, 168–69; edu-

204

Index

Hamka (theologian) (continued ) cation and, 89, 103; on marriage customs, 135; Minangkabau childhood of, 135–37; as modernist, 117n23, 138n1; as Muhammadiyah branch leader, 164; synthesizing philosophy of, 134–35; writings of, 134, 135, 176 Harahap, Parada, 117, 153 harato pencarian (male-acquired property), 7, 56, 93, 129, 141n9 Harencarspel, van, 71 Harimau nan Salapan (Eight Tigers), 26 Hasselt, Arend Ludolf van, 51, 53 fig. 2.5, 56, 69 Hatta, Mohammad, 1, 97, 155, 180 hearth, Dutch banning of, 67, 67n20 Hijaz, the, 21 hill people, trade systems of, 3–4, 3n6 historiography: stagnation in, 176; state-centric, 113n3 History of Islamic Education in Indonesia (Mahmoud Yunus), 89 History of Marriage (Westermarck), 98 History of Sumatra (Marsden), 42 Hollandsch-Inlandsche School, 107–8, 111, 154 Hollandsch Maleiche School Adabijah, 101 homosexuality, 110–11 horse races, 161 household relationships: education and, 169; historical ignorance of, 113; as microcosm, 162 house-memory, 61–62, 63 hukum (secular law), 73 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 32n32 Ibenzani Usman, 44, 46 fig. 2.4, 47 Ibrahim Musa, 104 Ijzerman, Jan Willem, 54–55, 69, 115n13 al-Imam (reformist periodical), 158 Imam Bondjol, Tuanku, 18 fig. 1.1, 27 fig. 1.3, 34; anti-Dutch resistance of, 29–30; birth of, 17; birthplace of, 25; compromise with traditional authorities, 27–29, 33, 74, 179; death of, 17, 30; exile of, 24, 28, 30, 74, 105n65; influences on, 25–26; joins Padri movement, 26, 74; memoirs of (see Naskah Tuanku Imam Bondjol ); in Padri War, 26–27 incest, 115 India: colonial bureaucratic corps in, 48; matrilineal traditions in, 8, 177, 180; merchants from, 3 Indisch Archief ( journal), 121–22 Indonesian National Revolution (1945-49), 112–13 Indonesisch-Nederlandsche School (INS Kayutanam), 99 Industrie and Huishoudschool (Padang Panjang), 169 inheritance, matrilineal. See matrilineal inheritance Insulinde (progressive journal), 98–100, 99n46, 142 International Exhibition (San Francisco, Calif.; 1915), 127

intimate contention: politicized family and, 142– 44 Iqbal School (Singapore), 101 Iskandar, Nur Sutan. See Nur Sutan Iskander Islam: birth control and, 68; communism and, 168–69; as cosmopolitan, 20, 155; European demonization of, 32, 32n32; as factional, 155; five pillars of, 166; genealogy of knowledge in, 61; housing styles preferred in, 36; in Minangkabau, 10; modernist, 156; mosque symbolism, 142n15; pre-Padri history of, in Sumatra, 19–25; revisionist, 144n21; saints (wali ) in, 119; ummat Islam, 165–67 Islamic communism, 102, 139, 142, 173 Islamic Madrasah Diniyah, 111 Islamic modernism (moderen), 20, 97, 102, 103, 110–11 Islamic reformism: birth control and, 68; Dutch colonialism and, 87; dynamism of, 117n23; education and, 99–103, 134–35, 159–60; factionalism and, 138–39, 139n4; flexibility of, 180; focus on private life, 20; in highlands, 19–20, 25–26; kemadjoean pedagogies adopted by, 99–100, 102; marriage customs and, 135– 37; periodicals, 158; women’s political discourse and, 158, 159–60 Islamic reformism and Minangkabau matriarchate: colonialism and, 5, 9, 24; dialogical resolution of, 8, 27–29, 74, 179–80; fin-desiècle Indonesian leadership and, 2–3, 5; matrilineal inheritance opposed, 20–21; Padri assaults as preparation for, 8–9, 24–25; as political myth, 7–8, 7n20 Islamic revival, 178–80 Istiqlal Festival ( Jakarta), 32–33n33 jaksa (native lawyers), 72–73, 74–75 Jalaluddin, Syekh: Islamic reformism as described by, 18–19, 20, 88; memoirs of, 18–19, 18n3; as moderate reformist, 74; Padri opposition to, 18, 24; on Padri violence, 30–31; on robber gangs, 49n45 James, K. A., 127–28 Jataka tales, 119 Java, 1; architectural interpretation in, 44, 44n27; colonialism in, 5; communist uprisings in, 105n65; Imam Bondjol exiled to, 30; longhouse distribution in, 48–49; Muhammadiyah leadership in, 167; population of, 2; priyayi gentility of, 146; Sundanese people of, 2 “Jewels of Morality” (Alim), 162–63 jihad, 4–5, 9, 17, 18n1. See also Padri War jiri ( jirat), 42 Jongens Normaal School (Padang Panjang), 110 Josselin de Jong, Patrick Edward de, 64–65, 64n13 Joustra, Meint, 55–56, 56 fig. 2.7, 63 Julia, Siti, 146, 146n30

Index jurusita (native bailiffs), 72–73 Jusuf Sou’yb, 176 Kaba Cindua Mato, 62n7, 120, 158–59, 165 Kahar Masjhoer, Rangkaja L., 162 Kahn, Joel, 126 kakak paja (placenta and afterbirth), mummifying of, 60–61 kamanakan dibawah lutuik (kinship term; sister’s children “below the knee”), 47, 125–26 Kamaruddin (communist activist), 173 kampongs ( Javanese villages), 49 kampung halaman, 171 Kantor Catatan Sipil, 62n9, 73n38 Kaum Muda (modernist reformists), 139n4, 144, 158, 159–60 Kaum Tua (traditionalists), 139n4 Kecil, Tuanku nan, 117, 118–20, 125, 131 kemadjoean/kemajuan (progress), 8; family records and, 62n9; Islamic modernism (moderen) as result of, 102; motherhood and, 162; native schoolteachers as disseminators of, 106; native vaccinators and, 71; pedagogy, 97–100; Quranic interpretation and, 168; women’s political discourse and, 158 kepala desa (village head), 45 kepala nagari (“native” managerial position), 35, 48 Keradjinan Amai Satia (Koto Gadang), 149 Kerala (India), matrilineal traditions in, 8, 177, 180 keramat (animistic sacred spot), 107 kerbau (water buffalo), 13–14 Khatib, Ahmad. See Ahmad Khatib Kinali (Sumatra), 59 fig. 3.1 Kinderen, Timon Hendricus der, 73, 125 kingship, Islamic focus on, 20 kinship terms, 125–26 Kitab Aqaid al-Iman, 98n40 Kitab Batjaan, 100 fig. 4.1 Kitab Cermin Terus (Rasul), 113, 165–68 Koedoes gelar Pemoentjak Soetan, 131 Koloniaal Instituut, 127 Koto (suku), 65, 130n59 Koto Gadang (Sumatra): affluence of, 125–29; birth practices in, 60–61; burning of, during Padri War, 26, 117; courtship/wedding customs in, 116–17, 123–25, 129–31; Dutch colonialism and, 117, 120–23, 125, 127–28; local saints in, 118–20; in Padri War, 117–18, 120; priyayi gentility of, 146; rumah gadang in, 50, 56; women’s progress in, 128–29 Koto-Piliang (adat cluster), 65–66 Koto-Piliang house form, 66 Koto Tuo (Sumatra), 118, 120 kraton ( Javanese palace), 44n27 Kratz, E. Ulrich, 18n3, 31n28 “Kromoblanda” (Tillema), 133 Kudus, Rohana. See Rohana Kudus

205

kweekschool (teachers’ training college), 92 Kweekschool Fort de Kock. See Bukittinggi Sekolah Raja land disputes, 73 lapau (coffeehouse), 115–16, 115n13, 152 larashoofd. See tuanku laras Lavell-Frölich, G., 95 lawyers, native, 72–73, 74–75 Leiden University Library, 122 Lembaga Kerapatan Adat Alam Minangkabau (L.K.A.A.M.), 158n8 Leon Salim, 160 limau kayu (ritual lime), 38 lipat pandan house form, 126 Ludeking, E. W. A., 67 Lulofs, C., 90 lust, repudiation of, 114–15 Maas, Alfred, 55, 55 fig. 2.6, 63 Madurese people, 2 Mahmoud Yunus, 89, 117n23, 138n1 Majapahit ( Javanese kingdom), 4, 11–12 Malaka, Tan. See Tan Malaka Malaya, 8n21, 113, 158 Malay language: instruction of, 121; as kemadjoean language, 99; newspapers, 127, 144; primers in, 95 Malay people, 3–4 Malaysia, matrilineal traditions in, 6n13, 8, 177, 180 Malik, Adam, 97, 104 Manado, 30 Mandailing Batak culture, 4–5, 150n47 Mandailing language, 98 Maninjau (Sumatra), 90, 111, 144n23, 164 Mansur, A. R. Soetan, 164 market system, 25 marriage: courtship/wedding customs, 123–25, 147; exogamy, 116–17, 126, 129–31; house form and, 126; impact of modernity on, 172– 73; intermarriage, 73n38; Islamic reformist critique of, 135–37; negotiations for, 157; polygyny, 93; registration law, 62n9 Marsden, William, 11n24, 31, 41–42 Mas Mansur, K. H., 165 matriarchaat, 5 matriarchy, 102–3, 173–75. See also Minangkabau matriarchate matrifocality, 50, 154, 177–78, 178 fig. C.1 matrilineal inheritance, 4n8; adat and, 5–6, 171; delegitimization of, 8n21; family relations and, 66; individually-acquired property and, 93; Islamic reformist opposition to, 21, 56; Padri opposition to, 8; persistence of, 33, 58, 177– 78; shariah opposition to, 7, 20 matrilocality: adat and, 5–6; male returns to, 114n4; Padri opposition to, 8, 20, 21; persistence of, 25, 33, 179; in rumah gadang, 15, 21;

206

Index

matrilocality (continued ) women’s rights and, 156–57. See also rumah gadang Matur (Sumatra), 60 mau kemana? (where to go?), 112, 112n1 Mecca, 20; ideological shifts in, 9, 27, 34, 179; tarekat centered in, 19n7; Wahhabi control of, 21 Medan (Sumatra), 144, 149, 151–52 Medan Prijaji (newspaper), 98, 146 Medan, Radja, 95 Medina, 20 Meer Uitgebried Lager Onderwijs (MULO) schools, 103n60 Mendes Pinto, Fernão, 41n17 merantau (male out-migration). See rantau Minangkabau culture: oratory in, 157; Padri opposition to, 21–24; principal units of, 64–65; ritual/didactic connotations of, 44; rumah gadang as emblematic of, 43–47, 50–52 Minangkabau kingdom, European chronicles of, 31–32, 41–44, 114–15 Minangkabau matriarchate: described, 5–6, 33; education and, 87, 102–3; ethnographic studies of, 6–7, 6n13; house-memory in, 61–62; as local/fluid, 87; persistence of, 2–3, 8, 25, 33, 175, 177–80; power of, 146, 156–57, 159. See also Islamic reformism and Minangkabau matriarchate; matrilineal inheritance; matrilocality; rumah gadang Minangkabau people: cultural influence of, 4n8; ethno-regional scholarship on, 127; etymological legend of, 10–12, 11n24, 13–14; hybrid culture of, 4–5; Islamic factionalism among, 10; Islamic revival and, 178–80; longhouses of (see rumah gadang); market system of, 25; matrilineal society of, 2–3; patriarchal elements among, 7; as percentage of Indies population, 2; political/social leaders arising from, 1–3, 9–10, 17, 104, 154–55, 180; politicization of, 104–5; precolonial textual authority of, 12–13; settlement patterns of, 49; traditional cuisine of, 152, 152n55 Ming Chronicles, 4 mining camps, 133, 133n68 mining rights, 93 miscegnation, 73n38 Miskin, Haji. See Haji Miskin Mitchell, Timothy, 8n22 moderen (Islamic modernism), 20, 97, 102, 103, 110–11 Moderne Islamietse School (Bukittinggi), 103 modernity: dangers of, 172–73; earthquake (1926) and, 142; as Eurocentric concept, 8n22; Minangkabau matriarchate and, 8–9, 179 Moeda, Dja Endar. See Dja Endar Moeda Moehamad, Djoeir. See Djoeir Moehamad Moehammad Sjafei, 99–100, 100 fig. 4.1 Moehammad Taib, 95, 121 Mohammad Hatta. See Hatta, Mohammad

Mohammed, Haji, 89 money economy, 126 monsoon, 3 morality: domesticity and, 114–16; sexuality and, 131–34 mosques, adat symbolism in, 142n15 mother-son myth, 120, 158–59 Movement. See pergerakan Mrázek, Rudolf, 156 Mudo, Tuanku, 29 Muhamad Radjab, 91, 94, 111, 139–40 Muhamad Sahab, 17. See also Imam Bondjol, Tuanku Muhammad Djamil Djambek, 105 Muhammad, Fakih, 27 Muhammadiyah, 135; factionalism and, 138n1; as modernist, 164; Nineteenth Congress of (1930), 164–65; on passion/lust, 113–14; as reformist, 164; scholarship on, 101; Sungai Batang as seedbed for, 90; women’s auxiliary group ( gAisyiyah), 129, 164–65, 168 Muhammad Natsir, 1, 111, 155, 180 Muis, Abdul. See Abdul Muis al-Munir (reformist periodical), 158 Museum Adityawarman (Padang), 32n33 Museum Imam Bonjol, 32n33 Mustafa Kamil, 103 myth, mother-son, 120, 158–59 Naali Sutan Caniago, 32, 73, 74–75 nagari (village confederacy): adat in, 45; council, 48, 58, 66, 126, 139; delegitimization of, 179; Dutch co-optation of, 129; original settlers of, 62; religious factionalism and, 138–39; sacred spots in, 107; schools in, 92; suku and, 64–65 Nagari Ordinance (1914), 129, 139 Nahuijs van Burgst, Huibertus Gerardus, 48–50, 49n44, 88 Naksyabandiah tarekat, 13n29, 19 Naskah Tuanku Imam Bondjol, 17; manuscript of, 32–33n33; Minangkabau political tradition and, 75; on Padri War, 24–25, 27–29, 117; textual form of, 32–33, 73–75; on war against Dutch, 29–30 Nasoetion Brotan, Salamah Maharadja Djamboer djagong, 150–51 Nasution, Abdul Haris, 97, 104 Nasution, Muluk, 103 Natar Zainoeddin, 103 nationalism, 175; Dutch prison camps and, 105n65, 143; historical narrative focused on, 105–6, 112–13, 113n3; Minangkabau intellectuals active in, 1; pergerakan nasional, 142, 143; schoolschriften and, 106; Sumpah Pemuda Youth Oath, 163; tjap Minangkabau as alternative to, 104 Natsir, Muhammad. See Muhammad Natsir Navis, A. A., 172n41 Nawawi (Bukittinggi Sekolah Raja teacher), 94–95

Index negara (state), 45, 45n32 Negeri Sembilan (Malaysia), 6n13, 8, 177, 180 Netherlands East India Company: Dutch state control of, 34, 48; Imam Bondjol and, 29; Minangkabau as viewed by, 41 Netherlands East Indies: adat law codified in, 45–46; anticommunist suppression in, 104–5; censorship in, 13; corvée duties in, 35, 47, 57, 67, 177; education system of, 10, 36; ethnography in, 121–23; family life regulated in, 58– 59; hajjis barred from colonial administration in, 20; Islamic reformism and, 87; legal system in, 71–75; Minangkabau population of, 2; Minangkabau resistance to, 29–31, 31n28; native bureaucratic elite class in, 35, 46, 47, 48, 52–57, 58; paternalistic metaphors used in, 142–43; West Sumatra incorporated into, 34, 47, 51. See also coffee, Dutch cultivation system for (cultuurstelsel ); school system, Dutch colonial; taxation, Dutch colonial New Guinea, Dutch prison camp on. See Boven Digul newspapers, 127; communist rhetoric in, 168– 69; Dutch monitoring of, 148–49n39, 169n37; Islamic communist, 173; numbers of, 144; rantau, 153–54; spatiality in, 149; of women, 145–49, 153–54, 156–57. See also specific newspaper Ng, Cecilia, 63 Noehar Salim, S. N., 146 Noerani, Entjik, 162 Noer, Deliar. See Deliar Noer Noer Marliah Zeinoehddin, R. Sitti, 162 Noermi, Encik, 162 Normaal School (Padang Panjang), 103 nostalgia, 91, 107, 171 Nur Sutan Iskandar, 89–91, 93–94, 108 nutmeg, 90 Oemar gelar Soetan Negeri, 92–93 Oetoesan Melajoe ( journal), 173n44 Ombilin coal seam, 54 Ombilin mining camp, 133, 139 “On the Matter of Marriage in Koto Gadang” (schoolschrift), 116, 123–25, 131 Ophuijsen, Charles Adriaan van, 69, 98 Ophuijsen, J. A. W. van, 69, 70, 121 opium, 173n44 Orang Alam Minangkabau, 158n8 orang boenian (spritelike creatures), 106–7 orang djadi-djadian (were-tigers), 106 Overzicht van de Inlandsche Pers (IPO), 148– 49n39, 169n37 Padang (Sumatra): Dutch colonial government in, 24, 98; historical revisionism in, 99n46; Islamic education in, 101–2, 111, 160; Islamic revival in, 178–79; as journalistic center, 144, 158; Kantor Catatan Sipil, 62n9, 73n38;

207

Mandailing language publications in, 98; songket weaving schools in, 150–51; as trading center, 5, 127, 127n47, 151 Padang Highlands: Islamic reformism in, 19–20, 25–26; map, 22–23 fig. 1.2; market system of, 25; smallpox epidemic in, 69 Padang Panjang (Sumatra): as communist center, 173; earthquake in (1926), 134, 139–42, 140 fig. 6.1, 161, 175–76; girls’ education in, 129, 169; inappropriate behavior in, 110; Muhammadiyah branches in, 164; nontraditional housing in, 141n9; Normaal School in, 103; pergerakan in, 139, 163; political climate of, 134–35; school funding in, 105; schools politicized in, 102, 160–61 Padang Sibusuk, 12 Padris: anti-Dutch resistance of, 30–31, 31n28; collapse of, 24, 29; Eight Tigers (Harimau nan Salapan), 26; fortified villages of, 49, 68; heyday of, during Raffles’s journey, 42–43; Imam Bondjol as member of, 26, 74; matrilineal inheritance opposed by, 8, 9; morality of, Dutch approval of, 48; origins of movement, 21–24; use of term, 18n1 Padri War, 13; Dutch colonialism and, 10; Dutch intervention in, 24, 26, 118; family feuds with roots in, 62, 62n8; Imam Bondjol as leader in, 17, 26–27; Islamic reformists defeated in, 24– 25, 27–29, 74, 179; Koto Gadang in, 117–18, 120; Minangkabau historical sources for, 17– 19; Minangkabau matriarchate and, 5, 9; Minangkabau political/social leaders and, 155; as Muslim-on-Muslim jihad, 9, 17 Pagaruyung, royal palace of: European chronicles of, 31–32, 41, 43, 49; in Minangkabau folklore, 165; Padri War and, 31; paternalistic metaphors used at, 142; royal family of, slaughtered by Padris (1815), 24 palasit (devil/vampire), 60, 60n2 Palembang (Sumatra), 149 Palembayan (Sumatra), 36–40, 39 fig. 2.2 Pandai Sikat (Sumatra), 150n45 panghulu/penghulu (village leader), 44, 46, 48, 134, 139 Parabek (Sumatra), 104 Parada Harahap. See Harahap, Parada parewa (village toughs), 116 Pariaman (Sumatra), 133 Pariangan, 11–12 pasanggrahan (guesthouses), 152 passion, repudiation of, 114–15 paternalism, 142–44 Path to Heaven (Ahmad), 102 Patih Suatang. See Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang patriarchy, 7 patricide, 173, 173n45 patriliny, 47, 129 pedagogy: kemadjoean, 97–100; “modernist” Muslim, 89

208

Index

Pekalongan ( Java), 163–64 Peletz, Michael Gates, 8n21 Pelupu (Sumatra), 67 Pembela Islam (Hamka), 134 pendopo ( Javanese pavilion), 44n27 Pengalaman Masa Kecil (Iskandar), 108 penghulu. See panghulu/penghulu penghulu suku rodi (“native” managerial position), 35 pepper, foreign demand for, 19 perang sabilillah (holy war), 18n1 Perdamaian Setia Isteri, 153n58 Perempoean Bergerak (women’s newspaper), 153– 54 pergerakan (Movement), 14, 103; coffeehouses and, 115–16; communism and, 168; defined, 15n31, 139; Dutch repression of, 104–5, 105n65, 142; fictionalizations of, 175–76; “ideological children” metaphor in, 143; journalism and, 144–49; movement metaphor and, 148, 149, 154, 175; Padang Panjang as center of, 139, 163; three-way dialectic in, 15; women and, 161– 63 Pergerakan Nasional, 105n65, 143 Peto Syarif, 17. See also Imam Bondjol, Tuanku Pewarta Islam ( journal), 172 Pfeiffer, Ida, 50, 50n50, 121 Piliang (suku), 65, 119, 120 Plakaat Panjang (1833), 57n70, 120 plantation economy, 126, 152n54 Poeteri Alamslah, 145 Poetri-Hindia ( journal), 127n52, 146–48, 146n28, 154, 156 Political Chessboard of Devils and Demons, The (Moerad), 172–73 polygyny, 67, 93 pornography, 114–15 Portuguese missionaries, 41 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 146n28 Preachers’ Torch of Indonesian Islam (Mangkoeto), 105 print culture, 117n23 prison camps. See Boven Digul priyayi, 146 progressivism. See kemadjoean/kemajuan “Prohibitions and Beliefs of the Malays” (Abas), 106–7 prostitution, 133 Pusako-Eigendomsakte (1853), 67n21 Qadiriyyah tarekat, 19 Quran: competency tests in, 178; earthquake (1926) as foretold in, 138; Islamic reformism and, 82–83, 87; literal interpretation of, 168; Muhammadiyah and, 90n12; Padris and, 9, 14, 25, 26; romanization of, 89; Wahhabism and, 21, 120; women’s rights and, 166–67, 172

Radja Alam, Datoe, 150 Radjab, Muhamad. See Muhamad Radjab Radjo Mangkuto, 121 Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 41; Dutch civil servants and, 121; Islam demonized by, 32, 32n32; Padang Highlands expedition of, 31– 32, 49; rumah gadang as described by, 42–44, 47 Rahmah, 151 Rahmah el-Yunusiyyah, 129, 141, 155, 160, 163 railroads, 126–27, 151–52, 152n54 Rajo Penghulu, 172n41 Raksasa (protest writer), 71 Ramadan (Islamic fasting month), 42–43 rantau (expanded world): alam Minangkabau and, 148n36; Koto Gadang men in, 125, 129–30; as male domain, 2, 148; Minangkabau culture and, 4; Minangkabau male entrance into, 2; Minangkabau openness/dynamism and, 2, 10, 155; newspapers, 153–54; peregrination implied in, 113–14n4; women and, 148n35, 149–52 Rao, Tuanku, 26, 28, 29, 74 Rasul, Haji, 89; as anti-communist, 163, 168; child custody and, 136; driven from Sumatra Thawalib, 103, 163–64; as fanaticus, 168; multiple marriages of, 136; on passion/lust, 113– 14; protégées of, 104; as sexist, 170; Sumatra Thawalib founded by, 102, 163; Sungai Batang as home base of, 90; women’s rights and, 163–67, 172 Rasuna Said, 1, 129, 155, 160–61, 163, 170 Razing of Padang Panjang, The, 176 Rejang ethnic group, 4n8, 42 Renceh, Tuanku nan, 24, 26, 74, 173n45 rendang (Minangkabau dish), 152, 152n55 “Request of the Women of Koto Gadang, The,” 129–30 restaurants, 152 Revolutionary Government of the Indonesian Republic (PRRI), 99n46 robber gangs, 25, 49, 49n45, 117 Roekaijat bin Mohd. Saleh, Siti, 146n30 Roemiah-Salim, Entjeh, 153n58 Roemin family, 37–40 Rohana Kudus, 128, 128n55, 129, 145n25, 149, 170 romanization, 117n23 Ronkel, Philippus Samuel van, 33, 73 rubber, 151, 152n54 rubiah (devout woman), 108–9 rumah gadang (Minangkabau longhouse), 35 fig 2.1; balah boeboeëng form, 52; birth practices within, 59–61, 63; Bodi-Caniago form, 37n11, 66; burning of, during Padri War, 24; carved motifs in, 44, 44n29; colonial regulation of life within, 58–59, 63, 67, 71–75; construction of, 36–40, 39 fig. 2.2; corruptive influences brought into, 133–34; cost of, 38–

Index 40; Dutch colonialism and, 34, 35–36, 46, 48–50, 177; European chronicles of, 42, 43– 44, 50–51; family relations in, 36, 47n36, 64– 67; finials, interpretations of, 45 fig 2.3; fixed shape of, 37; floorplan of, 63, 64 fig. 3.2; gajah maharam form, 37–38, 37n12; house-memory in, 61–62, 63; Islamic alternatives to, 36; Islamic opposition to, 59, 177; Koto-Piliang form, 66; life cycle within, 63–64, 65 fig. 3.3; location of, 47, 47n35, 67; as logo, 113; losing association with, 62n11; low-status, 46–47, 46 fig. 2.4, 126; as Minangkabau cultural emblem, 43–47, 50–52; as moral seat, 115; persistence of, 175; as photographic clichés, 51–52, 53 fig. 2.5; as regalia of native bureaucratic elite, 52–57, 55–56 figs. 2.6–7; rituals involved in, 38; strategic distribution of, 48– 49; as unhygienic, 49–50; women metaphorically associated with, 170–71 rumah makan (restaurants), 152 Russo-Japanese War, 102 Rusydi Ramli, 33n33 Sabariah-Sabaroedin, Tengkoe Ajoe, 153n58 Said, Rasuna. See Rasuna Said Salim, Agus, Haji. See Agus Salim, Haji Salimah Noehroehar Salim, 127n52 Samawang (Sumatra), 43, 51 Samudra-Pasai, Sultanate of, 11 Sandi Aman, 164 Sanggoeno Diradjo, Datoek. See Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo sanitation, 67 Sarikat Kaoem Iboe Soematera (S.K.I.S.), 161–63 Sarikat Keoetamahan Isteri Minangkabau, 169 Sarikat Rakyat Silungkang, 103, 173 Sarit, Soetan. See Soetan Sarit Saudara Hindia (women’s journal), 128–29 Sawahlunto (Sumatra), 139, 151–52 schoolschriften, 53n58; as autoethnography, 122; birth practices described in, 60–61; children’s beliefs in, 106–7; Dutch colonial scholarship and, 122–23; linguistic hallmarks of, 125n39; marriage customs described in, 116; sex discussed in, 68, 131–32; women’s prenuptual lives described in, 108–10; writers of, 92, 107 schools, Islamic: dangers of, 110–11; earthquake (1926) and, 141; Imam Bondjol as student in, 25; politics and, 104–5, 134, 139, 160–61; secular competition with, 97; spread of, 20. See also education, Islamic; surau schools, women’s rantau, 153 school system, Dutch colonial: conflicting pedagogies and, 87, 88; consolidation of, 94; curriculum of, 103n60; establishment of, 120; in highlands, 36; Islamic competition with, 97; politics and, 103–5; as populist, 10, 155; primary schools, 91–92; teacher training, 92, 94– 97. See also education, secular

209

Schrieke, Bertram, 7n20, 13n30, 103, 174–75, 175n53 Sedjarah Minangkabau dengan Agama Islam (Hamka), 134 Sekolah Dinijjah Poetri (Padang Panjang), 129 Sekolah Raja. See Bukittinggi Sekolah Raja Serikat Adat Alam Minangkabau (S.A.A.M.), 171 sexism, 170 sexuality: boys’ first knowledge of, 116; dangers of, 131–34, 172–73; Islamic reformist focus on, 20 sexually transmitted diseases, 133 shariah (Islamic law): adat as interdependent with, 29, 29n25, 33; adat vs., 7–8, 7n18, 27– 28, 171; limited, 178; longhouse family life and, 58–59; matriliny/matrilocality as affronts to, 20–21 shellac, 90, 90n10 Sikumbang (suku), 118–19, 130n59 silat lidah (“tongue-fu”), 147, 157 silsilah (family trees), 61–62 Silungkang (Sumatra), 89, 150 Silungkang Uprising (1926-27), 13; colonial report on, 13n30; communist matriarchy theories and, 173–75; consequences of, 143; Dutch crackdown following, 104–5, 166; fictionalizations of, 175–76; Muhammadiyah and, 164; pergerakan and, 139, 161 Si Mawang (Sumatra), 43 Sinabang (Sumatra), 149–50 Singapore, 101, 113 single-family houses, 36 Sinkara (Sumatra), 51 Si Satie gelar Maharadja Soetan, 36–40 Sjafei, Moehammad. See Moehammad Sjafei Sjahrir, Sutan. See Sutan Sjahrir Sjarifah (teacher trainee), 94–95 slavery: abolishment of, 47n35, 73, 125; freed slaves, housing patterns of, 46, 125–26; regional trade and, 49, 49n45, 117 smallpox, 58, 68–71 Snelpersdrukkerij Insulinde, 98n40, 99 Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan, 89, 98, 98n40 Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera (women’s journal), 157, 162. See also Asjraq Soeara Momok (protest newspaper), 71 Soeara Perempoean (women’s newspaper), 157, 159, 162 Soedjatmoko ( Javanese intellectual/diplomat), 104 Soeharto, 158n8, 176, 178 Soenda Berita (newspaper), 98 Soenting Melajoe (women’s newspaper): advertisements for teachers in, 149–50, 150n42; communist rhetoric in, 168; demise of, 158, 159; European feminist grievances appropriated in, 156–57; family politicized in, 145– 46; founding of, 128; influence of, 129; letters

210

Index

Soenting Melajoe (women’s newspaper) (continued ) to, 152n55; movement metaphor and, 154; name of, 145n27; pergerakan and, 148; print run of, 157; S.K.I.S. and, 162; subscribers listed in, 145, 145n25; subscription rates, 145n25 Soerara Perempoean (women’s newspaper), 129, 169 Soetan Maämoer, 98 Soetan Maharadja, Datoek. See Datoek Soetan Maharadja Soetan Mangkoeto, 105 Soetan Sarit, 60–61, 116, 125, 125n39, 126 Solaya (Solok; Sumatra), 42 songket (gold-weft cloth), 150, 150n45 Southeast Asia, state-centric historiography of, 113n3 spice trade, 19, 90 squatting, penalties for, 72 Sri Lanka, 180 Srivijaya, Kingdom of, 12 stamboek (family history), 93 Steijn Parvé, H. A., 73 Steinmetz, Carel Philip Conrad, 92 Straits of Malacca, 3, 151 Suez Canal, opening of, 96, 126 Sufism. See tarekat Sukarno, 1, 105n65 suku (matrilineal clan), 64–66 Sulaiman Labai, 173 Sulawesi, 105n65 Sulit Air (Sumatra), 89 Sumatra: Dutch incorporation of, xii (map), 126; geography of, 3–4; Malay-language press in, 144; transportation on, 151–52, 152n54 Sumatra Thawalib (Padang Panjang), 104; earthquake (1926) and, 141; founding of, 102, 163; newspapers of, 144; politicization of, 103, 129, 139, 163, 173; self-funding of, 105 Sumatra, West: adat vs. Islam in, 7–8, 7n20; administration of, xi (map), 98; Chinese community of, 40n15; colonialism in, 5; communist uprisings in, 105n65; Dutch incorporation of, 33, 34, 47, 51, 120; Dutch mass inoculation programs in, 68–71; home forms in, 34–35; Islam arrives in, 19; Islamic reform movement in, 88; lapau in, 115n13; legal bureaucracy in, 73; Minangkabau associated with, 4; Padri War and destabilization of, 24; political/social leaders arising from, 9–10, 33, 104, 111, 180; railroads in, 151–52; sexually transmitted disease in, 133; weaving in, 150, 150n45 Sumpah Pemuda, 105; Youth Oath (1928), 163, 175 Sumpur (Sumatra), 91, 140, 141 Sundanese people, 2 “Sundry Beliefs of the Malays,” 132–33 Sungai Batang (Sumatra), 90 Sungai Puar (Sumatra), 54–57, 55–56 figs. 2.6–7 superstitions, 106–7, 106n69

surau (village prayerhouse/Islamic school), 102, 160; conflicting pedagogies and, 87; described, 89–91; female students at, 108–9, 109n77; Imam Bondjol as teacher at, 25; Islamic revival and, 179; as Minangkabau cultural emblem, 115 Surau Jembatan Besi Padang Panjang, 102 Surau Jembatan Besi Silungkang, 89, 89n4 Suroaso (Sumatra), 31 Sutan Caniago, Naali. See Naali Sutan Caniago Sutan Saidi, 32 Sutan Sjahrir, 1, 103, 117, 155, 180 syair (Malay poetic form), 145, 146–47 Syattariyah tarekat, 13n29, 19 Taher Djalaluddin, 62n8 Tambusai, Tuanku, 26–27, 28 Tan Malaka, 1, 180; birth of, 155; on communism and matriarchy, 174, 174n50; homelessness of, 113n4; Islamic communism and, 102 Tapanuli, 98, 149, 150–51, 150n47 Tapian na Oeli (Moeda), 98 tarekat (Sufi mystical associations): Anti-Tax Rebellion (1908) and, 13; defined, 19n7; dynamism of, 117n23; first West Sumatran, 19; Islamic reformism and, 88; Padri War and, 117–18; political influence of, 13, 13n29; regional networks and, 25; religious factionalism and, 139n4; rituals of, 114; women’s political discourse and, 157–58 tarjama (genealogy of knowledge), 61 tarsila (family trees), 61–62 Taufik Abdullah, 2, 97n38, 101, 126–27 taxation, Dutch colonial: adat legal codification and, 136n78; crop-based, 57n70, 120; Dutch efforts to increase base for, 67, 177; moneybased, 126; native bureaucratic class needed to administer, 47, 139 teachers, 92–97, 149–51 telegraph, 127 textuality, 176 Thaib (Islamic normal school graduate), 110–11 Thailand, 11 Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde ( journal), 122 Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indië ( journal), 121 Tiku (Sumatra), 19, 147 Tillema, Hendrik Freerk, 68–69, 133 Tirtoadhisuryo, Raden Mas, 127n52, 146, 146n28 tjap Minangkabau (Minangkabauness), 104 Toba, Lake, 26 Tollenaere, Herman A. O., 169n37 Toorn, Johannes Ludovicus van der, 96, 96n35, 122 “To Question the Education of Natives in the Padang Highlands” (“A. M. B. M.”), 52–54 Tsamaratul Ichwan, 105, 105n66 Tuan Besar (resident), 74

Index Tuan Gadis (virgin queen), 31 tuanku laras (“native” managerial position), 35, 48; communal life and, 66; illegitimate, 52– 54; longhouses of, as regalia, 52–57, 55–56 figs. 2.6–7 Tuanku Imam Bondjol. See Imam Bondjol, Tuanku Tuanku Mudo. See Mudo, Tuanku Tuanku nan Kecil. See Kecil, Tuanku nan Tuanku nan Renceh. See Renceh, Tuanku nan Tuanku nan Tuo. See Tuo, Tuanku nan Tuanku Rao. See Rao, Tuanko Tuanku Tambusai. See Tambusai, Tuanku tukang (master craftsman), 37–40 tungkui nasi house form, 46–47, 46 fig. 2.4 Tuo, Tuanku nan, 19–20, 21, 24, 25, 74 Ulakan (Sumatra), 19, 20 ulama (Islamic legal scholars): Ahmadiyyah and, 144n21; animism opposed by, 107; as cosmopolitan, 88; Guru Ordinance opposed by, 104; Imam Bondjol as, 17; Islamic reformism and, 20, 21; multiple marriages of, 134; political activism of, 166 ummat Islam, 113, 165–67 vaccinators, native, 69–71 variolation, 69–70 venereal disease, 133 Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). See Netherlands East India Company Verkerk Pistorius, Arnold Willem Pieter, 47n36, 89, 115, 115n12, 126 Veth, C. G., 127n47 Veth, David, 51–52 Village Childhood, A (Radjab), 91 Volks Onderwijs School, 103

211

Wahhabism, 9, 19n7, 21; influence on Minangkabau hajji, 21–24; temporary defeat of, 27, 28, 34, 179 wali (Islamic saints), 119 weaving, 150, 150n45 were-tigers (orang djadi-djadian), 106 Westenenk, Louis Constant, 159 Westermarck, Edward, 98, 98–99n43 Wilken, George, 6 William III (king of Netherlands), 121 Willinck, Gerhardt Désiré, 75n47 women: activist organizations of, 161–63; exogamy rights and, 116–17; Islamic revival and, 178–79; migrations of, 148n35, 149–52; in Minangkabau custom, 169–72; newspapers of, 145–49, 153–54, 156–57 (see also Soenting Melajoe; specific newspaper); political education of, 157–61; political involvement of, 161–63; progress of, 128–29; as teachers, 149–51; virginity of, 131–32 “Women in Sijunjung” (schoolschrift), 131 women’s education, 159–60, 169; Islamic, 108– 9, 129, 158; rantau, 153; secular, 94–95, 99, 107–8, 127, 128, 154 Women’s Kweekschool (Salatiga, Java), 108 women’s rights, 158 World War I, 102, 168 wrongful movement, penalties for, 72 wrongful residence, penalties for, 72 Yamin, Muhammad, 1, 155 Young, Ken, 13n29 Yunus, Mahmoud. See Mahmoud Yunus Zainab (teacher), 151 Zainuddin Labay el-Yunusy, 103 Zimmerman, A., 152n54