Muslims and matriarchs: cultural resilience in Indonesia through jihad and colonialism 9780801468698, 9780801446979

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page vii)
Introduction: Culture of Paradox (page 1)
1 Contention Unending (page 17)
2 Shapes of the House (page 34)
3 Interiors and Shapes of the Family (page 58)
4 Educating Children (page 87)
5 Intimate Contention (page 112)
6 Earthquake (page 138)
7 Families in Motion (page 156)
Conclusion: Victorious Buffalo, Resilient Matriarchate (page 177)
Bibliography (page 181)
Glossary (page 199)
Index (page 201)

Citation preview

Muslims and Matriarchs

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Cultural Resilience in Indonesia

through Jihad and Colonialism

Cornell University Press PTPHACA AND LONDON

Cornell University Press gratetully 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, Jeftrey. Muslims and matriarchs : cultural resilience in Indonesia through jihad and colonialism / Jettrey 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—Sumiatera Barat—History. 3. Matriarchy—Indonesia—Sumatera Barat—History. 4. Women, Minangkabau—History. 5. Family—Indonesia—Sumatera Barat—History. 6. Sumatera Barat Undonesia)—History. [. 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-tree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell. edu,

Cloth printing 10987654321

Acknowledgments Vil Introduction: Culture of Paradox 1

1 Contention Unending 17 2 Shapes of the House 3.4

3 Interiors and Shapes of the Family 58

4 Educating Children 87 5 Intimate Contention 112 67 Families Earthquake 138 in Motion 156 Conclusion: Victorious Buttalo, Resilient Matriarchate 177

Bibliography 181 Glossary 199

Index 201

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In 1985, I signed up for the American Field Service high school student exchange program and was placed with a mixed Minangkabau-Mandailing fam-

ily in Jakarta. | 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. lam 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 Dalnua, Penny Edwards, Robert and Sally Goldman, George and Kausalya

Hart, Susan Kepner, Tom Laqueur, Ninik Lunde, Cam Neuyen, Aihwa Ong, Nancy Peluso, T. J. Pempel, Jose Rabasa, Raka Ray, Alexander von Rospatt, Virginia Shih, Clare Talwalker, Sylvia Tiwon, Bonnie Wade, and Joanna Wilhams. Berkeley’s Southeast Asianist graduate students have been a real source of camaraderie and conversation. Two in particular, lan Lowman and Scott Schlossberg, helped me with texts and ideas that were incorporated into this book. In Indonesia: Taufik Abdullah, Adriel Adh, Gusti Asnan, Azyumardi Azra, Langgeng Sulistryo Budi, Yusmarni Dyalius, Erwiza Erman, Yasrul Huda, Nelly

Pahama, Rusydi Ramli, Suribidari Samad, Noni Sukmawati, Edy Utama, M. Yusuf, and Mestika Zed. Pak Taufik not only sponsored the original research, he inspired it. | 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.1.M.)—-have shaped my thinking in fundamental ways. And Bung Edy, Iman, and Uh 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.)

Vill 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 Laftan,

Tamara Loos, Abdur-Razzaq Lubis, Ted Lyng, Barbara Metcalf, Rudolf Mrazek, Jim Peacock, lan 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. l have benefited from great teachers, and their influence is felt throughout this book. The lessons of James Scott, Hal Conklin, Joe Ernneton, Rufus Hendon, Ben Anderson, Takashi Shiraishi, and David Wyatt unfolded as I did research arid wrote. At its best, | 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 Farugui must be singled out for their detailed advice about this book and academic life

in general. Michael Peietz 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 Cnbb, whose monumental Historical Atlas of Indonesia is soon to appear in electronic format, drew new maps. Danielle Fumagaili checked tor 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 Jeftrey, and these led to two sequential panels at annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, “Politics and Matriliny: Comparative Historical

Acknowledgments ix and Anthropological Perspectives” (in 2003) and “The Futures of Matriliny in South and Southeast Asia” Gn 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 Pulbright, 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, | 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 Corneil and University of Calitornia, Berkeley, libraries in the United States. The librarians of Berkeley’s NR.LF 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 fanuly: 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 Kumu, for putting up with this thing for so long.

J.H. Berkeley, California

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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 f10. Exasperated, Pa’ Roemin itemized the total food money spent: 150 portions of rice (bali bareh 150 soeke) [30

a cow (bali djawi) f60

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portions of chili, salt (pambali lado, garam) 10

40 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 kacie’, or small chamber) be-

come open to the public.'* 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 kacie 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.'° 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 columms to the raising of the roof it’s f175, 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 eorift.

14. The terms babiliak kacie’ 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 tolks, but I have never seen them in print. 15. See J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Piural 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.

Shapes of the House 41 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 RafHes’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,'° 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 goid mines (even, perhaps,

Solomon’s)'’ were seemingly corroborated by the majesty and bluster of the royal decrees issued by the court in Pagaruyung.'® 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 nussionaries 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 Suindung] 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.””!” Wilham 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.”*° But this incomplete account was enough to convince Mars-

16. Dias, “Mission to the Minangkabau King”; Timothy P. Barnard, “Mestizos as Middlemen: Thomas Dias 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 Fernao 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 Royai Asiatic Society 1 (1827): 495, 20. Marsden, History of Sumatra, 333.

42 Muslims and Matriarchs 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, Rattles, Marsden’s friend and protegé, 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.” Rattes described the “tombs” found around the town of Solaya (near modern Solok) that were called jiri (analogous to jirat in modern Indonesian): “these are pecuhar, 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.”*! Raffles was right to take note of the architecture in Minangkabau— its wide-ranging structural homology was dissimular 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 ndge-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.*”

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

21. RafHes, Memoir of the Life, 351.

22. Ibid. 351-52. 23. Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism, 137.

Shapes of the House 43 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.** 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 hils 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, RatHes 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 Raftes’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.?°

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 Ratfes 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. Rathes, Memoir of the Life, 349-50.

25. Ibid. 355-56. Note the multiple hearths—a feature that would be outlawed by the colonial State.

44 Muslims and Matriarchs The equating of the longhouse and Minangkabau had two important ramifications: R.attles directed scholars to a more holistic consideration of Minangkabau culture, and he established the longhouse as the preeminent Minangkabau status symbol. Phinging 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.*° Every curve of a roof and carved motif ona 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.*” 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

o . ° “a . °

. . . ° es 4. . ° FQ se 9 > . . 90 .

of panghulu who resides within but also specific adat precepts and aphorisms.~® A “skin of adat” sheathes the Minangkabau house in meaning.*? According to Usman, there are at least ninety-four different carved motifs, each signifying a different ideal mode of behavior.°”

26. Roxana Waterson, The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (Singa-

pore: 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 (Tuc-

son: 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. Por an English-language gloss of this dissertation, see [benzam Usman, “The Traditional Adat House and Its Carving,” in Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau, ed. Anne Summertield and John Summerfield (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1999), 242—55. 29. ‘The idea of an adaf skin 1s 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, 17911991” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996), 68-70. Capistrano miustranslates 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 Tracisional,” 223-25.

Shapes of the House 45 4% Philosophy of the Gonjong J_— A final decision must not disagree

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«= fo ee ee Sea) Pe eee —e

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 1s not a centralized polity like the Javanese village promoted (and imposed) by the colonial and later the Indonesian state.'* 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.” !° Ifa 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.'® 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.

66 Muslims and Matriarchs laweivers, Datuk Ketemangegungan 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-Pilang 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 councu. The differences are reflected in the styles of houses built in the nagar. A Koto-Pilang 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.” All this is a Minangkabauist mouthful, and beyond anthropologicaily 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 unmustakable unity of all Minangkabau? ... One can observe a common culture Gn the widest sense of the word) and a common Minangkabau sentiment, in spite of great regional diversity, but it is hard to explain it.”!® 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 dittuse. Ideally, a Minangkabau communal lite 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.!” 17. Vellinga, Constituting Unity and Difference, 28-30.

18. Josselin de Jong, “Social Organization in Minangkabau,” 1. 19. Aman, Nostalgia Liau Andeh, 35.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 67 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.7° 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.*! 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.**

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 “Oecebat 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

° * Os model of sanitation.

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. Pay-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 identitied “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. Colombiyn, “Dutch Polder.” 23. Ludeking, Natuur- en Geneeskundige Topographie van Agam, 106-10, 135-40.

68 Muslims and Matriarchs 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.*4

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 Middie East has tried to block access to birth control, Islam itself has been relatively tolerant of birth control practices.*” Given the frank discussion of sex in the schoolschrifien, 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.*° By the early 1850s, a scar on the arm was significant enough to be deemed the gou-

vernements merk, the mark of the colonial government.*’ In 1920, Hendrik 24, ANRI (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia), Sumatra’s Westkust 125-9, Aleemeen Verslag Sumatra’s Westkust 1849 (Source provided by Freek Colombin from his personal research). It should be noted that throughout the archipelago evidence of precolonial and colonial-era abortion practices is largely anecdotal. Fora 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 (Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 26. Peter Boomgaard, “Smallpox, Vaccmation, 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.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 69 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 creat 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—smaillpox 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.*®

Regardless of its mortal effectiveness, the colonial government waged an in-

tensive campaign against smallpox in Minangkabau. In 1850, J. A. W. van Ophutjsen—father of Charles Adriaan van Ophuysen, the spelling reformer, and in 1856 the first director of the Bukittingei 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 stl young,” van Ophuysen 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.*?

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 Ophuiysen, “Péngadjaran képada toekang tjatjar,” January 1851 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, Or. 12.168 B/VRSC 694). The text is number 47 of a series, perhaps van Ophuysen’s.

70 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 trom the mother and her brothers and to the child’s father. By 1857——a year after van Ophuiysen had taken up his post as head of the Bukittingei Sekolah Raja, the primary teachers’ training college——he still coordinated a wide network of native vaccinators. Early in that year a smallpox epidemuc 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.”

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 ditterence 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.°! 30. J. A. W. van Ophuijsen, ““Tjatyar Sapi |[Cowpox],” various documents, 1857 (Manuscript Col-

lection, Leiden University Library, Or. 12.168 A/VRSC 693), Ir-2v. This is number 46 of a series. The text is in both fawi (Arabic script) and nimi (romanization). The texts are from Bukittinggi. 31. J. A.W. van Ophuysen, “Pitoewah: Darie bertanam Tjatjar sapie,” various documents, 3 March 1857 (Manuscript Collection, Leiden University Library, Or. 12.168 A/VRSC 693), 3v—13v.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 71 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 Bukittingei. 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.”°* 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 with-

out 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.°°

The smallpox vaccination program, even more than the Dutch propaganda efforts to prevent abortion, represented the boldest physical invasion of the sanc-

tity 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 do-

mestic 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—lIsinja tahan oedji) 1.36, 22 September 1923, pp. 2-3.

72 Muslims and Matriarchs rector of the Sekolah Radja translated and adapted these Police Laws to fit the Minangkabau case.°* The laws set fines not only for unauthorized movement and residence but also tor 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.°° 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 hikewise 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).°° Along with the obvious threat that came with arms manufacture, the colonial state was nght 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 bailitis. But the average Minangkabau also set out to learn the new language of Western tort law.°’ 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. [bid., 1-9, 30nn. 36. Ubid., 15-25. 47. 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 Baumer & Co., 1903); Ad. Gr. Pamoentjak, Soeatoe Kitab akan dikoendang olih Djoeroe Sita pada pangadilan Landraad atau Rapat atau siapa jang mendjalankan pekerdjadn seperti itoe menoeroet atoeran jang terseboet didalam oendang oendangnja (Padang: Otto

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 73 culture largely succeeded——although eftorts to regulate marriage were blocked

wherever possible.°° Land disputes tied up property for generations.”” 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 Naskali 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 buftalo 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. Steijyn Parve, 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 poit, 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.*° When read cohesively, the Naskah is clearly a single, interlinked text. The first section, the narrative of Tuanku Imam Bond)jol, is a Bauer, 1895); T. H. der Kinderen, Formutlierboek ten gebruike Bij de Toepassing van het Regelment tot Regeling van het Reetswezen in het Gouvernement Sumatra’s Westkust (Staatsblaad 1874 No. 946), voor zooveel betreft De Regtspleging bij de Distrikts-——en Magistraats- Geregten, De Landraden en Rapats, benevens

De Uitoefening der Policie, Regering van Nederlandsch-Indié, 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).

74 Muslims and Matriarchs story of war and defeat. The Tuanku’s singular triumph is the realization of his museuided 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 admuinsitration. 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.*! Like his father’s, Sutan Caniago’s narrative is one of disappointment and humiliation. In his years of service, Sutan Caniago clashes with corrupt Minanekabau colleagues and unresponsive Dutch superiors. The narrative concludes with a long series of dialogs between Sutan Caniago and Dutch ofticials, 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.** He has become a perverse inversion of a traditional tuanku. A religious tuanku would be localized and visited by students secking 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.*” 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.” 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. Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Caniago, 233. 42. Ibid., 316. 4%. Hadler, “Home, Fatherhood, Succession,” 141. A4, Tuanku Imam Bonjol and Caniago, 316.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 75 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.” 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 griev-

ances 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 re-

quest 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.”*° 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 Bonjolis 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.*” 45. Ibid., 319. 46, Ibid., 324. 47, Drakard, Kingdom of Words, 1999. The Dutch legal scholar Gerhardt Désire 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

76 Muslims and Matriarchs

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. Tartfintjang, 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. Ifthe 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 suilty of trading “love tokens among the sleeping mats,” then they are cut and shamed, and so too is justice done.*®

: . . 41 e = -°

Laws are as much a product of state fear as they are an inverse barometer for the real doings in society.*? 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 haisons were com-

mon 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 Ophuysen on the tront 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 sumilar 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 1s 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).

AQ, See Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997),

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 77 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.°° 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 Syjunjung 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.?!

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-certitied 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.°* Where adat had once been fluid, re-

50. 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 (Qesman) galar Baginda Chatib, “Kitab Adat Limbago Alam Menang Kabau poesako Datoek Katoemanggoengan dan Datoek Perpatih sabatang,” 16 February 1895 (RITLV Handschritten Or. 183). 5°. Holleman, Van Vollenhoven on Indonesian Adat Law.

78 Muslims and Matriarchs 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.°’ 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 con-

tinuation 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” Gnvented measurement) is law that is specific to Minangkabau, created either by the legendary lawgivers Datuk Kete-

mangeungan and Datuk Perpatih nan Sabatang, by adat authorities through a process of deliberation, or by wise individuals.°* Datuk Soetan Maharadja’s formulation all but elaminated 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.°? Bertram Schricke, 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.°© 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 Highiands. 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),” Adatrechibundel XXVU: Sumatra, Commmissie voor het Adatrecht (The Hague: Marti-

nus Niuhoff, 1928), 297-98. For Soeharto-era parallels, see Evelyn Blackwood, “Representing Women: The Politics of Minangkabau Adat Wnitings,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 1 (2001).

55. Jeffrey Hadler, “Immemorial Custom in the Balance: Hay 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 Cal-

ifornia, Berkeley, November 15, 2003). 56. Schrieke, “Development of the Communist Movement.”

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 79

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 deciared 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.°’

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.°®

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 mace mengeadaikan; Tidak pedoeli peroet ta’ makan, Tidak terkenang anak kemenakan.>?

The most interesting books—those that maintained ethnographic distance and often considered the Dutch as imitable anthropological subjects—were pi57. David G. Fairchild, “Sumiatra’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, Sja ir Pendjoedi dan Nasihat kepada Anak Moeda-Moeda (Fort de Kock: Modjtsan

80 Muslims and Matriarchs oneered by the Chinese community of Batavia (Jakarta).©°? 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.°! 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 Zaimuddin 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 tangea), 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 1s soon approached with otters of engagement for his son, who capitulates willingly. The son, betrothed, 1s given domestic advice. This is the theme of the book. He is told the meaning of isteri (wite) and the importance of good relations with his in-laws and wife’s extended family, her keluarga.°? 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 ffelana 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: Tyiong 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 tangea (house and ladder), orang isi rumah (people of a house), or even familie were preferred.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family Si

Advice to the daughter 1s even more specific. She must learn to order her housework and prepare a schedule. It 1s 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, Latit 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.° 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.°* 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 urimate), 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.°° 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 Adat Sopan Santoen Orang Minangkabau (Fort de Kock: “Merapi”

& Co., 1922). 65. Maharadja, Kitab Adat 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.

82 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 Latit’s book enjoyed a long lite 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 unmiugrants 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.°°

The Happy Home Once the dutiful sons and daughters had been married off, they had to find ways to umplement Latif-lke 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.’”®’ They were warned to avoid lead pipes and arsenic-tainted green wallpaper.°® Minangkabau women needed to learn how to clean their houses; they should follow the example of the Javanese middie class, who not only understood hygiene but whose men were obligated to assist in homemaking duties.°? Minangkabau observed Dutch fashions and tried to make functional sense of the whitewashed walls, paper flowers, and stainedglass windows, with mixed success.’°

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 Zakivoordenboek (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,” Seenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Minang Kabau 6.15, 20 April 1917, pp. 2-3. 70. Tj. Tim, “Késehatan,” Soenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Minang Kabau 6.2, 12 January 1917, p. 1. The blue glass repels flies.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 83

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 Islamuc-femunist 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.’!

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, [bu Sejati, Mande Rubiah, Bundo Kandung, Kak Sarinah, Sikejut, and Gelinggang. According to her, she did this so that the journal Asjarag | Asjrag|——ian 1928 it changed its name to Suara Kaum Tbu Sumatera—would not appear to have been written by just one author. Yet she also admut-

ted, “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 In-

formation [booklet accompanying the DVD] (Jakarta: Lontar Foundation, 2004), 25.

84 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].’“

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 ainan would view the female occupants of his wife’s longhouse, the place where he slept, as potential spouses. ’° 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.”

Like the “village girl” writing in Asjrag, Haji R.asul 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.’°? 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.’° Although he himself was a habitual divorce, Haji Kasul took particular of-

72. Abdul Karim Amrullah, Kitab Cermin Terus: Bersuna Untuk Pengurus-Penglihat Jalan yang Lurus

(Port de Kock: Typ Drukkery “BAR.OE,” 1929-1930), 153-54. Original in fawi (Arabic Malay), my transliteration. 73. Marzoeki er B. M., “Petata-petiti adat Menangkebau,” sec. “ Menikar Gnenggantikan lapik),” 12r.

74. Amrullah, Kitab Cermin Terus, 153-54. 75. Parada Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai: Perdjalanan ke-Soematra October-Dec. 1925 dan MaartApril 1926, vol. 1 (Weltevreden: Uitgevers Maatschappy “Bintang Hindia”, 1926), 75.

76. See the divorce tormulations in the 1927 adat law collections, translated in Cora VreedeDe Stuers, The Indonesian Womtan: Struggles and Achievements (The Hague: Mouton, 1960), 169.

Interiors and Shapes of the Family 85 fense at the practice known as cino bute Gin Indonesian, cina buta [blind China-

man]). 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 1s 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 corrup-

tion of cindur buta (blind aftection)—-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.’’ As with most of his anti-adat diatribes, Haji R.asul 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.’”° 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 Bukittingei 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 Kasul 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 Bukittingei. For Hatta, the traditional Minangkabau extended famuly 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 Hay 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 Ophuysen, De Huwelijksordonnantie en Hare Uitvoering, doctoral dissertation for the Faculty of Law, Leiden University (Leiden: P. W. M. Trap, 1907),

86 Muslims and Matriarchs yang bercorak individuil Gndividual family forms). For urban Minangkabau, the

unity of mother-father-child was fundamental, “Often too this was called a small family (Reluarga kecil)—and some used the term famili—to indicate a connection to a collective family (keluarga besar) that lived in the village.”””

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.°° 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 1931.5! 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 Tentane Mendirikan “Roemalt Adat Alam Minangkabau” di Biaro, Jang Akan Dikirim ke Int. Kol. Tentoonstelling di Parijs Tahoen 1931 (Port de Kock: Typ. Drukkerij “Agam’”, 1930).

Si. Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 229.

FOUR co ,@ guy *¢ ¥ 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 Dyakarta, 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. ... [ belong, I think, to the first score of the human rabbits which were experi-

88 Muslims and Matriarchs mented upon with western education.... Well, I think that first score did a rather good job. |

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 cen-

tury Islamic reform movement in West Sumatra.* Schools and networks of ulama were cosmopolitan and not always village-based. Reformusts, with peculiarly Arab habits, were beginning to make inroads into the heartland. And im-

portant tarekat centers, with particularly potent teachers, had long attracted supplicants.

Betore 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 Nahujys sighed that only in Padang, where an “Evangelical English missionary Mr. Evans” had gathered sufficient funds, was there a Western-style school.” 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 es-

tablished through the mid-nineteenth century, Dutch officials paid some 1. Agus Salim, “Hadj 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 Priday prayers at a mosque, as determined by the Shafu

school of law. Dylal-Eddin, “Surat Keterangan,” 6-14. 3. Nahuys, “Extracts from the Letters,” 186.

Educating Children 89 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 high-

lands.* 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.° 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 fawi 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.®

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 madrasal.’ 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.® 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.’ 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 Zyn Invloed op de Samenleving in de Padangsche Bovenlanden,”’ Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indié (ard ser.), no. 2 (1869).

6. C. Snouck Hurgronje, “Een en Ander over het Inlandsch Onderwiyjs 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 Pebruan 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).

90 Muslims and Matriarchs 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.'° 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.'! Sungai Batang

was the home base of Haji Rasul, and by 1924 this small village became the seedbed for Muhammadiyah in the Minangkabau region.'* 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

;..2.

European bildungsroman and educational literature.'? 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.”!* 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.1., 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. Lulots Gn Ma’aroef, “Luelut”) 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. [bid., 14.

Educating Children 91 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 slp away, carrying his wet and soiled mattress, bundled up and hidden. He grew fearful of the other boys, rattled by their daily taunt-

ing, 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.'° 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 sun-

set 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.'° 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.'’ 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. [bid., 19-22. 16. Radjab, Semasa Ketjil Dikampung, 21-24.

17. See, for example, Azyumardi Azra, “Surau di Tengah Krisis: Pesantren dalam Perspektif Masyarakat,” in Pereulatan Dunia Pesantren: Membangun dari Bawah, ed. M. Dawam Rahardjo ( Jakarta:

Perhimpunan Pengembangan Pesantren dan Masyarakat, 1985).

92 Muslims and Matriarchs 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.'® 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.!?

° ° Cc

With mixed success, the 1850s and 1860s brought an explosion of nagari schools through the highlands and along the coast.*° A Kweekschool, a teachers’ training

college, was established in Bukittinggi in 1856. But in the 1850s a Dutch epidemiologist clucked that regardless of ail the school construction, still fewer than thirty children in 200,000 were being educated——just 1/6,000.7' 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 Gn 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.** Although the Sekolah Radja was still prone to public criticism, the graduates began to have an impact on society in Minangkabau.*° 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

» . _ . “3

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.** is. H. E. Steinmetz, “Inlands Onderwys van Overheidswege in de Padangsche bovenlanden voor 1850. De Grondlegger. Ziyn Invioed en Zijn Persoonliyke Bemocienissen op dit Gebied,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Voilkenkunde 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: Landsdrukkery, 1872), 145-506. 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 Qemar

gelar Soetan Negeri, 1866-1922,” Cornell Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, ++MSS DS 028 1920.

Educating Children 93 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 exanunation 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 $1 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

ist, 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 (amily 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, nught 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 ving in Padang. In a 1919 letter detailing the sale and controi of rice fields, Oemar held at least {2139 worth of land. This sort of property, called harto pencarian GQndividually ac-

quired 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

94 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 ex-

amination and was promoted to full teacher and assigned to an elementary school of his own.*° 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.*°

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 Bukittingei 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 class-

rooms filled with many non-Minangkabau students, including a prince from Riau.?’ 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.

Educating Children 95 school’s first female student, Sjarifah.-* Nawawi makes but passing mention that this girl, and future Movement leader, was his own daughter.*”

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.°° 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 Bukittingei in 1873. The previous year he had authored a chrestomathy marketed to those Dutch people who wished to speak Minangkabau.°! 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.°* Taib, and his Dutch collaborator G. Lavell-Frélich, eventually produced a series of these books, all of which went through numerous reprintings.?° 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 coftechouse, 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 terkarane waktoe telah 35 tahoen oemoer Sekolah-

Radja 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-Prolich, and Moehammad Taib, Emboen I: Kitab Batjaan centoek Kelas Tengah Disekolalt Boemi Poetera, 2nd ed. (Leiden: P.M. W. Trap, 1915), stories 4,7, 12-15. 33. G. Lavell-Frolich and Moehammad Taib, Emtboen H: Kitab Batjaan oentoek Kelas Tinggi Dise-

96 Muslims and Matriarchs 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.** 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 Wilhelmina” of the Netherlands, with perfection we beseech Allah the Almighty news of her glory resounds widely.°° 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. (Ruswyk: Blankwaardt & Schoonhoven, 1922). See also Lain Dahoeloe, Lain Sekarang: Kitab Batjadn 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 Wulhelmina’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 1883. 36. “Sair Toean vander [sic) Toorn,” ca. 1888 (Leiden schoolschrift, Cod. Or. 5825/VRSC 622), 20r—-v.

Educating Children 97 Start off in the highlands board a ship in the lowlands ride the ship to Aden arrive safely in the Netherlands.°’ Moela berangkat di bovenlanden naik kapal di Benedenlanden menompang Rapal singeah 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 adminis-

trators. 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 Kemadjocan 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 prooressivisin was experienced in new, secular schools and through pedagogical theory. Dyja Endar Moeda, the first great progressive kemadjoean educator, has been largely forgotten because he based himself in Padang and was not a Minangka-

bau. Patriotic historians have instead focused attention on his colleague and sometime rival, Datuk Soetan Maharadja.°° Endar Moeda was a Mandailing Batak from southern Tapanuli (the region to the north of Minangkabau). 37. “Sar 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) (Uthaca: Cornell Southeast Asia

Program, 1995), 128, 145-50.

98 Muslims and Matriarchs Tapanuli and Sumatra’s Westcoast were a single colonial admunistrative 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

R20 + 5, ?° ° ° .

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 yoems.°? Endar Moeda maintained a regular correspondence with the colonial Islamologist Snouck Hurgronje and was able to draw on a grand roster of officiais in building the editorial board of the first progressive kemadjoean journal, Insulinde.*°

lnsulinde first appeared in April 1901 and was published more-or-less monthly until 1905.*' 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.** The editorial board of Insulinde included Datuk Soetan Maharadja, Soetan Maamoer (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 Ophuisen 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.*° 39, See the syair in Dja Endar Moeda, Kitab Boenga Mawar: Pembatjaan bagi anak (Padang: N. Venn. Snelpersdrukkery “Insulinde,” 1902); Kitab Sariboe Pantoen, Ibarat dan Taliboen, 2 vols. (Padang: Insulinde, 1900-1902). AQ, 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 fawi in 1901 by the Snelpersdrukkery 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 ul-defined. 42. Tirtoadhisuryo is discussed in Shiraishi, Age in Motion, 33. A3. That people were aware of Westermarck is interesting. His later work reviewed Islamic mar-

Educating Children 99 Numerous articles discussed the need for girls’ education. Essays on regional adat included descriptions of marriage strikingly similar to those found in the earlier schoolschrifien.** 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.t? 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—lInsulinde 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.*° As we will see, the Adabiyah school in Padang was an immediate adaptation by reformist Islam of progressive kRemadjoean 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 1926.7” Moehammad Sjafei, who developed an innovative curriculum that emphasized field experience and experimentation, pioneered elementary education in arts and music.*> His populist stance is evident in earlier textbooks by his

riage in Morocco, using texts strikingly simular 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 Negen,” Insulinde (n.d.):, 264-65. 45. See Abdul Rivai, “Samboetlah Pertoeloengan Im,” Insulinde (n.d.): 231-32; “Kewadyiban Orang Beristeri” Insulinde 4 41904): 1784-85. Rivai was possibly the originator if the term Remadjoean.

See Abdullah, “Minangkabau 1900-1927,” 49-50; Harry A. Poeze, “Early Indonesian Emancipation: Abdul Riva, 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 (PRRJD rebellion in 1958 were Padang and the coastal settlements rebuilt with Minangkabauizing rooflines and a newly invented past; Colombyn, Patclies of Padang; Hans-Dieter Evers, “Images of a Sumatran Town: Padang and the Ruse of Urban Symbolism

in Indonesia” (Working Paper no.164, University of Bielefeld, Sociology of Development Research Centre, Bielefeld, 1992). A7. A. A. Navis, Filsafat dan Strategi Pendidikan M. Sjafei: Ruang Pendidik INS Kayutanam (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1996). 48. Mohamed Sjatei, Pendidikan Mohd. Sjafei INS Kayutanam, ed. Thalb Ibrahim (Jakarta: Mahabudi, 1978).

100 Muslims and Matriarchs

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others in the prayerhouse. Radjab’s father offered no reassurance: “There 1s no

more hope, it is the End.” He advised the people, “We must be resigned and have faith [tawakkal], for the world will end 1n the next few days. ‘There are now so many wicked people that God is passing judgment.”” 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.

Earthquake 141 The Great Sumatran Fault is a shallow strike-slip fault running the leneth 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.® 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.” With the help of volunteers from the Boys’ Religious School (Dinijah School Poetera) and the Thawalib School, on June 26 the river-rock walls of the Girls’ Religious School (Dinijah School Poeteri) had at last been completed. Two

days later these walls collapsed and took the life of the popular teacher Nanisah.'° 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.'? 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.’’'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 Dikampuneg, the earthquake exposed Radjab’s father’s traditionalist fears and reaffirmed mod-

ernist 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.'? 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.'* 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 Economiusche Zaken, Voikstelling 1930, vol. 4 (Batavia: Landsdrukkery, 1935), 67. 10. Rahmah el Joenoesiyah, ed., Boekoe Peringatan 15 Tahoen Dinijah School Poeteri (Padang Pand-

jang: Dinijah School Padang Pandjang, 1936), 12-13. il. Soedarso A. Amaloedin, “Bahaja Gempa di Sumatra Barat/De Ramp op Sumatra’s Westkust,” Oedaya (September 1926): 194-95. 12. Joenoesyjah, 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 Indié 87 (1927): 36-71, 77-79.

142 Muslims and Matriarchs Traditionalists saw the destruction in this town of communists, reformist [slamic schools, and colonial admunistrators 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.!° 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 fanuly was caught up in a series of potent political metaphors that moved it from the intimate sphere of the house (babiliak kacie ) 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 sev-

eral children.”'® 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 tather 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.”'” It was only in the late 1910s is. 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. Tautik Abdullah, “Adat and Islam: An Examination of the Conflict in Mimangkabau,” Indonesia 2 (1966): 15-17. 16. A. G., “Indonesia dan poeteranja,” Doenia Achirat 4.2, 10 November 1925, p. 1. Dunia akhi-

rat means afterlife or World Hereafter and was just one of several newspapers implicitly preparing Minangkabau for the cataclysin. 17. Dyja Endar Moeda, “Jang Terhormat Pedoeka Toean Toean Pembatyal!,” Insulinde, April 1901, p. 1.

Earthquake 143 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 in-

dolent 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 “Famulie I. D. C.” (Family of the International Debating Club) introduced the first issue of Djago! Djage!; 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.'® It was possible to be considered the child ofa place for two reasons. First, the rise of cos-

mopolitan entrepots 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 famuliarity, 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,” Deenia Achirat 3.17, 10 July 1924, p. 2; Famihe I. D. C. “Pendahoeloean,” Djago! Djago! 1.1, 8 October 1923, p. 1; Redactie, ““Anak saparintah bapak,’ ‘Kamanakan saparintah mamak’,” Asjrag 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 Hawar' Press, 1994).

144 Muslims and Matriarchs cal and seismological uprising ruptured West Sumatra, the thorough conflation of family and public lite had transformed Minangkabau culture.

Newspapers and Daughters of the Indies

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Of the seventy-six newspapers that have been published in West Sumatra, most appeared and folded before the 1930s.'? 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

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coast of Sumatra, Medan.” 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.*! But in the first

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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.~- 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 ftulminating 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 communaily read, and even small villages could have a press supporting several competing periodicals.*°

° * “ 93° “

19. ‘This was the number proclaimed at a formal exhibition in Padang. For the catalog, see Erman Makmiur, 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 nmeteenth 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.

Earthquake 145 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.** Soedah berboeni poekoel sembilan, saja memandang Retengah djalan; Kelihatan konon Mohamad Dahlan, mengantarkan “Soenting” moeda andalan. Dalam kelihatan karangan perempoean, peri mentjeritakan hal kemadjoean; Perempoean nan tidak maloe maloean, menoeroet adat diini zaman.

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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.*° Praise like Poeteri Alamslah’s syair can be found throughout the initial year of the paper.*° 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.~’ By using this modern and politically charged medium to publicize women’s issues, Soenting Melajoe

3 nee . > A, ~y : : . ° - .

24. Poeteri Alamslah, “Poekoel Sembilan,” Soenting Melajoe: Soerat chabar perempoean di Alam Mi-

nang 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 f1.80. Of the thirty-five subscriptions, twenty-four were taken out in women’s names, and almost half were for addresses out-

side of West Sumatra. The paper, edited by Zoebeidah Ratna Djoewita in Padang and Sit 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. Por 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 Oc-

toesan Melajoe addressed to me, which contained as an insert the paper Soenting Melajoe for us women, and at that instant | became proud and my mind was opened, because finally a paper had been born for my people, women... .” Siti Alwaah, “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.

146 Muslims and Matriarchs

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 Buiten-

zorg 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).*° 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-laneuage 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.*? 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.°’ 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 Java-

centered 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 Feminine ou Féministe?” Archipel 13 (1977).

29, Saliamah Noehroehar Salim, “Onze Nieuwe School,” Poetri-Hindia 2.7, 15 April 1909, pp. 53-84. 30. See Poetri-Hindia 2.3, 15 February 1909. Sitti or Sit, 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 Roekayat bin Mohd. Saleh, a third-year student in a local native school.

Earthquake 147 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 acros-

tically 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.”’*! 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.”°* 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.”*° 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 tangega), 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.°* 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, “Ister: Perijai-Peryjai 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 Tyia, Tjerita pertemoean dalam kamar kemanten: Familie Ong dan Lie atawa Saipah gadisnja Marah Ocemin vintakan goeroenja: Satoe tjerita jang menarik hati, betoel telah terdjadi di Padang, nikalinja doewa soedara Ong dalam gedongnja familie Lie (Padang: Padangsche Snelpersdrukeryj, 1922).

33. Siti Sjam binth Datoe Goenoeng Radja Hulponderwyzer (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.-Onderwizer diMoeara-Laboeh (S. W. K.)), “Kewadjipan perempoean,”” Poetri-Hindia 2.17, 15 September 1909, p. 196.

148 Muslims and Matriarchs

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.°° 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 in-

ternational community. The alam Minangkabau, the expanded world and Minangkabau oikoumene, was no longer delineated by the movement of men only.°° And in the language of the pereerakan, movement no longer meant simply a change

in physical place; one could participate in a movement without having to migrate.’’ 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 trom 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

2 + AC . .

was a medical doctor and a man); and of girls tragically gobbled up by Congolese cannibals.°* 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.-’ The “assorted news” blended lurid crime sto35. Although adat required that women stay in the village, the idea that they did not migrate ts 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. Hiyymans van Anrooy, “Nota omtrent het Rak van Siak,” Tijdschrift voor Indische Taai-, 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 hulls. 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 ““Alam,” 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 Noerlala Anwar, “Gerakkan perempoean bangsa asing,”’ Soenting Melajoe 1.5, 3 August 1912, p. 2. 38. These were all stories in the kabar berita ot Soenting Melajoe, 1912-1917.

39. But not outside Dutch purview. The “Overzicht van de Inlandsche Pers” (IPO) was initiated in muid-1910s to monitor the native and Chinese press in the colony. Distributed by Balai Pustaka, the

Earthquake 149 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 *Sventing,’ 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).”’*°

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 simular eroup 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 fitth year, Soenting Melajoe teatured 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 {50 and board.*! 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 [PO as a substitute for the original SOUFCES.

40. S. Sari Doehan bin Dyania, “Seroean,” Soenting Melajoe 1.3, 20 July 1912, p. 1. 41. Advertentie in Soenting Melajoe 6.3, 19 January 1917, p. 3.

150 Muslims and Matriarchs might seek an accredited teacher, with the same salary.*“ 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.*° 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.** 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.*° Suddenly, an ability that had been merely part ofa 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 Maharadyja, 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 arid were also considering opening a school. From Balai Selasa, Datoe Radja Alam sent his sister to Padang to study weaving techniques.*° Tapanuli—the province to the immediate north of West Sumatra—kept closest ties with Minangkabau.*’ 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 Meiajoe 6.24, 22 June 1917, p. 2. Applicants had to have proot 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 Betiveen People and Statistics: Essays on Modern Indonesian His-

tory, ed. Francien van Anrooy and Dirk H. A. Kolft (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 147-56. 45. This is mentioned in passing in Verkerk Pistorius, Studien over de Inlandsche Huishouding, 237n. 1. The tamed 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 Oentoeck Perempoean [Skills for Women|]: Kabar berita, Padang 2 Pebuari 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 ]. 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. Dyalaloeddin Thaib through his Agam Publishing House in Fort de Kock.

Earthquake 151 Padang to enter the weaving school, and within three months she was making serviceable handkerchiefs and could return to Tapanuli.*° Minangkabau women answered the call and the ads in the back of Soenting Melajoe. The school in Langsa hired three Minangkabau teachers: Rahmah, a eraduate of a private school in Lubuk Sikaping, was brought on as head teacher with a salary of {50 plus board; Zainab, who graduated from the same school, was her assistant for f40 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 f40 and board.*? 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.”°” 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 entrepot 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 contin-

ued 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.°! By 1913, a direct passenger ship from Europe arrived only once a fortnight.°~ 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 f200. 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 Hlustrated Tourist Guide, viit.

152 Muslims and Matriarchs Sumatra, but a plan to build a trans-Sumatra railroad had stalled.°° 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.°* It was a hard journey of some 535 miles, with only marginal infrastructure from Tapanuli to Lake Toba. For European travelers, the road offered pasangerahan (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 (coftechouse) 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.°? 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. Por 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 Spoonvegplan voor MiddenSumatra, Ingevolge besluit van den Governeur-Generaal van Nederlandsch-Indié, Dato 14 Juni 1907, no. 26 (Batavia: Landsdrukkery, 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 ito 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.

Earthquake 153 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.”°° 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 trom 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.”°’ 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 lite. 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 tangea|.” 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.°® In 1919, Minangkabau and Malay women, with the backing of Parada Hara-

hap, 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 Delt) 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. My.” 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 Pebruar 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.7, 23 February 1917, pp. 2—3. The Perdamaian Setia Isteri had an executive board: Pres-

identie Tengkoe Ajoe Sabariah-Sabaroedin, vice president Entje’ Roemiah-Salim, and secretarisse Entje’ 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).

154 Muslims and Matriarchs ries focused on the particular challenges of motherhood in the modern world, the educational rights of girls, and the moral decay of society.°? 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 statt—-compared Dutch and Malay concepts of “the happy home.”°° “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.°' 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 pereerakan 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,” Perempocan Bergerak: Diterbitkan centoek petjokong per-

gerakan 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.”

Earthquake 155 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|.”°*

Why were so many early Indonesian leaders trom 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 Minang-

kabau 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.°? The tradition of out-mieration, 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 Lattan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds (London:

RoutledgeCurzon 2002).

SEVEN

— ege in° Motion ae? Families

In his study of Sutan Sjahrir, Rudolf Mrazek discusses the excitement of finde-siécle West Sumatra: “History seemed to accelerate in Minangkabau towards the beginning of the twentieth century.”! 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 pereerakan, 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

i. Rudolf Mrazek, Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia Ithaca: Cornell SEAP, 1994), 16.

Families in Motion 157

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, Asjraqg, and the Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera, carried women’s voices to the podium and on to the stage of the Scala movie theater in Bukit-

tinge.

Political Education Dyjoewita, a founding editor of Seenting 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.*

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 fam-

ily. In the years after the Tax Rebellion of 1908, public action took on a decidedly modern and political form.’ 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.

158 Muslims and Matriarchs

them.* 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, Bukittingei, Shaykh Tahir maintained close ties with his home region and funneled new ideas along to the modernist Kaum Muda reformiusts of Padang and Padang Panjang.? Al-Imam championed property rights for Malay women, criticized polygyny, and was guardedly supportive of women’s educa-~

tion.° 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 fihal piety, the Kaba Cindua Mato.’ This morality play of motherhood and court intrigue, set in the musts 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.> This, too, was the first tume 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 Islamuic reform, see Noer, Modernist Muslint 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 Zakarrya, “Islamic Reform in Colonial Malaya: Shaykh Tahir Jalaluddin and Sayyid Shaykh al-Hadi’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Calitornia Santa Barbara, 2006).

6. See Wilbam RB. Rofl, “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, AL

Imam: 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 transhterated by Yusuf, “Persoalan Translitersai.” 8. Baginda Malin, Sjair Tjerita Seorang “Radja Perempoean” dan Tjindoer Mata serta Toeankoe Sahi

‘Alam dalam Nagari Pagar Roejoeng, vols. 1-4 (Padang: Toko & Snelpers Drukkerij Orang Alam Minangkabau, 1918). The only extant copy trails off unfimished 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 Schriyvers and Els Postel-Coster, “Muinanekabau Women: Change in a Matrilineal Society,” Archipel 13 4977).

Families in Motion 159 of this story. In 1923, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Sekolah Radja in Bukittingei, Abdul Muis adapted the kaba into a drama celebrating

Minangkabau democratic traditions.” 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.”!° 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 statt

under the authority of the ‘toean Gadang’ [Big Man] in Batipuh.”!' 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 night. By 1918, Minangkabau women of the Movement had moved beyond Sventing 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?” !* 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 Tyindua 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 1s 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 Schruyvers and Postel-Coster, “Minangkabau Women,” 90-91.

{was unable to locate any copies of the newspaper, but I have consulted the account by the editor, Saadah Alim, “Minangkabau, Eenige Grepen uit de Samenieving,” 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.

160 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 “TER TIBSOPAN” (good behavior), harmonische ontwikkeling (harmonious development),

and Islam. From these seeds would grow the “Iboe Pendidik” (the educating mothers).'° 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).'* Leon Salim, a pergerakan leader who had attended the boys’ Diniyyah school in the 1920s,'° 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 [Raum 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 KHALIFAH '° 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 tangeal.*/ 13. Joenoesiyjah, Boekoe Peringatan, 4.

14. Ibid., 17-18. Por a colorful description of this period that discusses Zainceddin Labay ElJoenoesy, the surau Djembatan Besi, Dyjalaloeddin Thaib, movie theater politics, and the Islamic com-

munists Djamaloeddin Tamin and Natar Zainoeddin, see Abdoelmalk K. A. [Hamkal, “Saja Teringat,” 283-34. 15. At the age of thirteen, he had been expelled trom 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 orginal. 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-

Families in Motion 161 Girl’s Religious Diniyyah School students and graduates never denied the importance of motherhood. Through the teachings of RKasuna 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.'® Anak Hindia marilah bergerak, Pemimpin kita biar bertegak. Akan melawan toekang pengroesak. Reactié jang amat banjak.

The reactions and movements were extreme. Forces set in motion by the earthquake of 1926 erupted in the Suungkang Uprising and continued unabated until the crackdowns in summer 1933.'? 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 Bukittingei had reinstituted the long-banned horse races, and with the money earned trom 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.”*" 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.LS.; League of Sumatran Mothers) was founded in 1924—1925, and shortly thereafter it began to plan a major condonesia, ed. Acmnuddin Rasyad (Jakarta: Pengurus Perguruan Diniyyah Puteri Padang Panjang, 1991),

125-27. 18. Z, “Sedikit sja ir,” 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. Djage! 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’,” Asjrag 2.7-8—-9, July-August—September 1926, p. 216.

162 Muslims and Matriarchs

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.LS. had assumed control of the journal Asjrag, changed its name to the Soeara Kaoem Iboe Soematera (Voice of Suma-

tran 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 Bukittingg: for the opening day of the first Grand Meeting of the Association of Sumatran Mothers.*! 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 Meiajoe, through Soeara Perempoean, and finally to Alsjarg [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, Remadjoean.

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 (reemah tangga |household]) that constitutes this greater community (doenia [the world]) 1s 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 Zeinoe ddin, who in a series of clichés discussed the matter of women within the household; “The household lroemal 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| trom the S.K.LS.” 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. L. 8S.) di Boekit Tinggi,” Soeara Kacem Tboe Soematera

5.10 (Nomor Congres), November 1929, pp. 1-4.

Families in Motion 163 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 kemiveka, Kaoem Iboe, toeroet membantoe; Mengeloearkan perasaan serta tjita-tfita,

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.

‘Aisyiyah: Modern Women, Modernist Islam Padang Panjang in the 1920s was the town around which movements of the Minangkabau pereerakan 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.”-* 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.

>...

164 Muslims and Matriarchs

gan, on Java, to visit his daughter Fatimah and son-in-law A. R. Soetan Mansur.*° 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.**

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 mod-

ernist, in that the organization drew on new Egyptian and European pedageogical 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 Muhammadtiyah of the Minangkabau was a cautious one and distrustful of things modern: “The condition of the world 1s 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. ... 925 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 accompa-

. 4: . . fpr - - 49

nied her husband as the representative for Aisyryah, 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.*° 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 R.asul’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 Muhammadiah was to take place in Bukittingei, 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 Pooting—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: Drukkeriy Persatoean Moehammadiyah 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 Voikenkunde 161, no. 2-3 (2005).

26. Along with Alfian, Muhammiadiyah, 248; here, too, consult Kahin, “Repression and Regroupment.”

Families in Motion 165 row view of women’s rights on the participants. Organizers from Java envisioned a joint session of Muhammadiyah and “Aisyiyah, in which “Aisyiyah member

Siti Haiinah—a “young and beautiful woman”—would address the combined assembly.*’ 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, atter the negotiations by K. H. Mas Mansur, R.asul relented and changed his declaration from haram to makrul (reprehensible, meritorious if avoided), but he still refused to permit a mixed public address. The Hoofdbestuur caved in, and the Muhammadiyah Mi-

nangkabau 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 “Aisyiyah women who packed the Scala on August 28. The Minangkabau branch of Muhammiadiyah, 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 tran-

scribed 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.*® 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, Hay Abdul Karim Amrullah and his brother addressed a crowd of some 1,000 men at the Jurung Nagari mosque in Sungai Batang:“” 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, Muhammiadiyah, 262-63. 28. Abdullah, “Some Notes on the Kaba Tyjindua 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.

166 Muslims and Matriarchs that it has already become a favorite discussion, unifying and unions, for every-

one, 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 httle, 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 | bangsal, 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 umprisoned almost all the communist activists, Haji Rasul’s avowed enenies. But the colonial state—also loathed by Haji Rasul—became increasingly intolerant of political activism generally, and the ulama were forced to be suarded 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 R.asul 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.

Families in Motion 167 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 yust 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 Muhammiadiyah 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! ...90 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.

168 Muslims and Matriarchs

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.?? Haji Rasul’s particular provocation would have been assemblies such as the Grand Meeting of the Association of Sumatran Mothers and Aisyryah, 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 commutment 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”!

~y Cn . . =>

Islamism and Communism The topic of Islam and communism has long attracted scholars of Indonesian history.°* 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.”)°° 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.”°* 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 Dyk and A. H. de Groot (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1995). Shiraishi discusses the essay “Islamism and Communism” by the Javanese theologian Hadyji 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 memaeras kita? Siapakah jang meroesakan agama kita?,”” Djago! Djago! 1.1, 8 October 1923, p. 4. 34. Kabar berita, “Harga beras di Padang, Padang & Juni 1917,” Soenting Melajoe 6.22, 8 June 1917), pp. 2-3.

Families in Motion 169 too warned of the “Kapitalisten”—they bring dancing and other ruinous sorts of adat.°° Long after the Silungkang Uprising and suppression of the communists, the discourse of those exiled to West Papua, the “jang di Digoelkan,”°° lived on in the newspapers and political rales 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 ammu-

nition 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.’”°’ But Datuk Soetan Maharadyja, 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, folowing Dutch progressive wisdom, asserted that education begins with the household (roemah tangea). Prospective mothers must learn about

: ; . ee ~ ~ . 3 : . . ;

the care of infants, about basic health, and domestic agriculture. In this, he praised the activities of the Sarikat Keoetama an Ister1 Minangkabau, which had recently opened a girls’ Industrie and Huishoudschooi in Padang Panjang, complete with a Dutch teacher, stone walls, and a zinc roof.°® But it was in an article in Soenting Melajoe that Datuk Soetan Maharaja most thoroughly set down his position on women in Minangkabau custom:°”

° soe . e C 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, Sceloeh Moebailigh 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 Marta

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 (Nimegen: Uitgevery) Katholieke Universiteit, 1996), 386-87. Tollenaere relies exclusively on the Dutch-language summaries in the “Overzicht van de Inlandsche Pers” (PO)—

a limited source that speaks more to Dutch concerns than those of the “natives” but that covers periodicals no longer available in their onginal form. 38. Soetan Maharadja, Keoetamaan isteri Minangkabau (Padang: Snelpers Drukkery 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. 5. Maharadja, “Perempoean,” Soenting Melajoe 6.4, 26 January 1917, pp. 1-2.

170 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 R.asuna Said, his student. And the first woman journalist and women’s educator in Minangkabau, Rohana Kudus, was a protegée 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.*° 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.

Families in Motion 171 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 tor the women trom 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 itis 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

172 Muslims and Matriarchs such as the Kitab Cermin Terus have all but disappeared.*' 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 Isiam and member of the Rasul camp, made the threat delightfully clear in his book The Political Chessboard of Devils and Demons.** With a twisted prologue in mixed Dutch and Malay——“‘the Devil calls a meeting” U/blis 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.*? 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 ettective 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 wite, 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 ap-

prehension 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. Dyamain Abdul Moerad, Pertjateeran Politiek Sjaitan Iblis (Port de Kock: Drukkeryy MODJTSAN ['Tsamaratoelechwan], 1924).

43. This is probably a reference to the communist takeover of the Thawalib.

Families in Motion 173 nangkabau society.** 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 atraid 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 Siuungkang 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!”* 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 scofted at these traditions, including Labai himself, were making a particularly bold and revolutionary statement.*° Other towns were less carnal in their approach to revolutionary thought; Kota Lawas near Padang Panjang was jokingly referred to as a “little Soviet.”*” But as Schricke 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 mem-

bers 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.”*> 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; Oefoesan 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 mterviews 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; Steyn Parvé, “De secte der Padaries,” 271-72. 46. Schricke, “Course of the Communist Movement,” 102. Silungkang’s restrictive marital rules are discussed by Umar Junus, “Some Remarks on Minangkabau Social Structure,” Bidragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 120, no. 3 (1964). 47. Soviet keyil. Harahap, Dari Pantai KePantai, 98.

48. Schrieke, “Course of the Communist Movement,” 109, 113.

174 Muslims and Matriarchs

Friedrich Engels. They would have understood that their own society was, therefore, somehow closer than most to a pure communism.*? In his prison memoirs, Tan Malaka mused proudly: A society that takes this form, that is jwhat 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 Oniginal-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 [Reluarga]). 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|.°°

Like Tan Malaka, Bertram Schricke 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, Priedrich Engels, The Ongin 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 II” (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 Muinanekabausche Maleiers,” appended to Harry A. Poeze, Tan Malaka: Levensloop van 1897 tot 1945

(The Hague: Martinus Nuyhoff, 1976), 539-41,

Families in Motion 175 of communism and the uprising. “The establishment of the family, the onefamily dwelling, inheritance laws, the relaxation of the rules governing land

2a...>..

tenure, the lessening of sacred family property——all these are factors combining

to slacken matriarchal family ties.”°' Schrieke’s analysis has been thoroughly critiqued elsewhere.°~ 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 Schricke himself was present in Minangkabau through the 1910s and was tamiliar with the immediate background to the uprisings.°’ 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 Stud-

ies, no. 13 (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1984); Akira Ola, “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,” Bidragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Voikenkunde 149, no. 1 (1993).

176 Muslims and Matriarchs 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 lite today was a lite that was empty... a life without hope.’’°* 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. heir 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. Dah, Hantjoer-Leboernja Padang Pandjang, ed. D. R.. Roesnam (Padang: Bangoen, 1940), 70.

CONCLUSION

Victorious 5 — ee 1 a @ € ,

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 retormist 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 ot 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.' 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 ’.”

pe a , Fi 178 Muslims and Matriarchs

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aaa —— eee ee es a 4 ae a

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 (Amster-

dam: 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.” 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 1n 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.° 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 a 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-

Victorious Buffalo, Resilient Matriarchate 179

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 complance 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.* 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. 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 mulitary 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 Minanekabauists, part of that outwardly “spiraling rhythm of history” that makes Mi-

nangkabau 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&lane=.

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 Janina, 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).

180 Muslims and Matriarchs 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.° The neo-Wahhabi jihad forced the Minangkabau people to articulate and defend their matri-

lineal 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 buftalo 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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