PRINT, POETICS AND POLITICS

V E R H A N D E L I N G E N
VAN HET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT VOOR TAAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE

225

SUSAN RODGERS

PRINT, POETICS AND POLITICS

A Sumatran epic in the colonial Indies and New Order Indonesia

KITLV Press Leiden 2005

Published by: KITLV Press Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands website: www.kitlv.nl e-mail: kitlvpress@kitlv.nl

KITLV is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW)

Cover: Creja ontwerpen, Leiderdorp ISBN 90 6718 233 8 2005 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner. Printed in the Netherlands

Contents
Acknowledgments Part One I Introduction Writing tradition, writing language 9 Sumatran language hierarchies and school history 14 Surveying a language world 25 Datuk Tuongku in performance 32 Early publication circumstances: turi-turian folkloric writing in the Batak vernacular press 40 Datuk Tuongku as Batak literature 49 Datuk Tuongku as epic and lament 63 Datuk Tuongku in the New Order 78 On translating Datuk Tuongku 90 Part Two Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman; A turi-turian of people of the past; A reminder to us today Introduction What the writer saw and experienced travelling between Sipirok and Medan from 18 to 27 February, 1908 Baginda Napal Hatoguan, Baginda Napal the Strong Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman Sutan Sialang Jongjongans response (which smolders like a re down deep in the chaff) The Magic Stag: the big increase-and-prosperity deer Si Tapi Mombang Suro Laut na Lumonggom Nanjambur Marela Bulan The great Golden Carp 109 111 119 121 127 130 136 147 1 vii

vi

Contents

Nai Pandan Rumare Boru At the Crashing Boulders Forest Pool Going home to Kualo Batang Muar Lombang Si Porkas Lelo Manjolungi Sitapi Mombang Suro rushes off to the Sky World Up Above Little Porkas Lelo up in the Sky World Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman ascends to the Sky World Up Above Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman up in the Sky World Continent The village of Baka Bukit Paringgonan Boasar Pining Ayur na Rorondan Of matters that bring shame and embarrassment, as heavy as the earth, as weighty as the sky The big war All the roosters crow, Marnyanga-Nyengu Island is attacked, and the bondspeople nally return to their home villages Peace reigns and we go back home to Kuwalo Batang Muar The funeral horja feast of Sutan Murik Meden Tinamboran Sutan Batara Guru Doli returns home to the Sky World Up Above Short lessons Saban-saban Sinangnaga Tartomos Spells for when you are in the forest Harvesting out in the rice paddies Conclusion A bit more clarication Glossary Bibliography Index

154 159 168 175 179 184 192 207 211 212 223 225 233 239 247 249 249 250 250 250 251 254 255 259 263 277

Acknowledgments
Translating Datuk Tuongku was both a challenge and a pleasure and many Indonesian colleagues have made this possible. First and foremost is my Angkola Batak language teacher, the late G.W. Siregar, who gave me daily lessons in Hata Angkola in 1974 and 1975 for eight months and thereafter took a keen interest in my work with ritual oratory until his death in 1980. Baginda Hasudungan Siregar, now Ompu Raja Oloan, provided expert aid in helping me with the more difcult passages not only of Datuk Tuongku but also M.J. Soetan Hasoendoetans great 1927 novel, Sitti Djaoerah. Baginda Hasudungan has been an unagging fellow researcher of Batak texts with me, since we were both much younger. It has been an honor to work with him. The many rajas throughout the Sipirok area who entertained my many questions about oratory and turi-turian speech also have my heartfelt thanks. The late Ompu Raja Doli Siregar is rst among them for me in this regard: Raja Doli was long a big-branched, big-shelter baringin tree for me in all my research work in Sipirok, as an oratory phrase has it. A year at the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in 2001-2002, allowed me to devote full time to the manuscript; my thanks especially go to my 2001-2002 colleagues there, for their many helpful comments on my work. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2000-2001 provided me the opportunity to work on the translation, both at Holy Cross and in Indonesia. Earlier grants from the Fulbright program and from the Social Science Research Council allowed me to do work on Sipiroks wonderful ritual speech worlds as they relate to print. I also thank the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI), for Indonesian government permission to do much of the work on ritual oratory in South Tapanuli that undergirds this book. Holy Crosss Committee on Research and Publication has also been generous in their support, as has the College and Holy Crosss Department of Sociology and Anthropology in allowing me to take these research leaves. My Asian Studies colleagues at Holy Cross have afforded me their usual cheery support, as have my three Holy Cross anthropology colleagues, Professors Daniel Goldstein, Oneka LaBennett, and Ann Marie Leshkowich. The KITLV Press has also been a pleasure to work with. Special

viii

Acknowledgments

thanks go to Dr Harry Poeze, editor; to two sharp-eyed anonymous reviewers of the manuscript; to my tireless and sensitive copyeditor Bregtje Knaap; to Marjan Groen, who was responsible for the lay-out of the book; and to graphic artist Rob Ferwerda, who created the sparkling cover from some of my slides, including one from a memorable hike back into the woods near Hanopan village with one of my Holy Cross students, Mike Figge, to photograph that slippery peak, Mount Nanggar Jati. Several of the points in the section Datuk Tuongku as Batak literature were explored rst in my article, Folklore with a vengeance: a Sumatran literature of resistance in the Colonial Indies and New Order Indonesia (Rodgers 2003a).

Part One

Introduction
The chanted tale or turi-turian translated here into English was published as a paperback book by a Sumatran for Sumatrans in 1941, during the last decade of high colonialism in the Dutch East Indies. Over the 1910s to the late 1930s period, several such turi-turian appeared in print as newspaper serializations, or as indigenous folklore books (that is, as old traditions written down in an our ancient literature format, recorded by Sumatrans, not Dutch authors). As literary epics collected and re-imagined by amateur folklorists from places like Sipirok and Maga in the southern Batak highlands (Map 1), these sung stories were set down and published, quite self-consciously, as printed texts. That is, they were modern books, not traditional objects such as folded bark-books filled with inscribed Batak letters. Highland societies in this area had a widely-known Sanskrit-derived old script (the aksara letters,1 historically linked to Old Javanese). But, the turi-turian texts at issue here were anchored firmly in Latin alphabet literacy, in the surat Ulando (the Dutch letters), learned in colonial Sumatras government-run public schools. As we shall soon see, such concepts as modernity, tradition, new letters versus old letters, and Batak identities per se (not to mention then-emerging new ideas about Indonesian national identity) were all very much at play in pre-World War II Sumatran turi-turian publication. In fact, it is not too much to claim that these printed tales pointed far beyond themselves and their sheer storylines to engage some of the key social, linguistic, and artistic issues then current among literate southern Batak from the Angkola and Mandailing areas. These are the regions of Sumatra from which the turiturian recorders and writers most at issue here (and the bards with whom they interacted) hailed. It is these large, thematic aspects of these printed chant stories to which I shall attend here in this introductory essay to my translation of Sipirok-born novelist and newspaper freelancer M.J. Soetan Hasoendoetans wonderful 1941 book, Datoek Toeongkoe Adji Malim Leman; Toeri-toerian ni halak na robi, ingot-ingoton ni halak sannari (Datuk Tuongku
1

For a detailed discussion of the extensive Batak script writing traditions, across the several Batak societies, see Uli Kosok 1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2000.

The province of North Sumatra, with major Angkola and Mandailing towns marked

I Introduction

Aji Malim Leman; A turi-turian of people back in the past, a remembrancememento for folks today). The turi-turian feuilletons (newspaper serials) and folkloric books in the pre-Revolution decades were directed to audiences of moderns in the sense of modern consumers of heritage. That is, the texts recipients were southern Batak men, women, and youth who had been formally educated in the small government primary schools and in the more elite middle schools and who now sought to read about their old traditions, as part of their lives in the up-to-the-minute colonial Indies. Being au courant was much touted in the Batak vernacular press of the time, and in larger realms of southern Batak public culture tied to formal schooling and to life in towns and cities. Some of the turi-turians readers lived in southern Tapanuli upland market centres like Sipirok, Panyabungan, Kotanopan, and Padangsidimpuan, while others resided in villages. Tapanuli was one of the main Residencies, or provincial administrative units, in this part of the Netherlands East Indies. Other fans of these printed chant tales resided in southern Batak diaspora communities in Deli. This was the plantation-belt region laid out along Sumatras east coast (Stoler 1985), far from Tapanuli. Young people hungry for salaried jobs and eager to escape home-village poverty in Tapanuli had been walking on foot to Deli from places like Sipirok in the mountains since the 1880s. The trip took many days and often such migrs stayed in Deli permanently. There they worked as low-level clerks or in the Indies bureaucracies the railroad office, the school, the hospital, the public works department. Or, they had jobs in the newspaper companies in Medan, the large city that was the plantation belts commercial and banking centre and also a hub for the large Batak newspaper business of the time. Other, smaller newspaper towns with many Batak reporters and editors were Sibolga, Padangsidimpuan, and Sipirok, in Tapanuli. Bi-weeklies there often used Batak languages, whereas much of the Medan city press was in Indonesian. Sumatras language landscapes at the time were indeed complex, and creatively inter-referential. This strongly shaped turi-turian publication and consumption and made these literary epics especially knowing texts in regard to language ideology. At home and among fellow-migrants, Deli migrs from southern Tapanuli would speak a good deal of Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak. These were their home languages from the highlands. The two are very close dialects within the large Batak language family, which also includes Karo, Toba, Pakpak, and Simelungun Batak. Hata Angkola and Hata Mandailing (hata means word, but here, way of speaking) were the languages used in the printed turi-turian I deal with here. However, other languages surrounded Angkola Batak and Mandailing Batak, in Sumatran social space and also in the turi-turian texts themselves. This situation of polyglossia was so particularly in towns and cities, where turi-turian authors typically resided.

Print, poetics and politics

In their work lives, in many tobacco, tea, and rubber plantation settings and in communicating with Javanese, Acehnese, or Minangkabau people (Deli was floridly multi-ethnic), many east coast residents from southern Tapanuli would speak Bahasa Melayu: Malay. This language was then on the way to being reconceptualized by early Indonesian nationalists as Bahasa Indonesia, Indonesian. This was seen at the time as a language of possible national unification and anti-Dutch agitation. Ironically, Bahasa Indonesia was also being heavily promoted at the time by the colonial government itself, as a medium for officials to communicate with the natives in bureaucratic sectors, and in pedagogy and inter-ethnic commerce (Hoffman 1979). Bahasa Indonesia did become Indonesias official national language, after independence was declared at the start of the 1945-1949 national revolution. The precise turi-turian tale translated here, Soetan Hasoendoetans Datuk Tuongku, was in Hata Angkola, leavened by small additions of Toba Batak, Minangkabau, and Malay/Indonesian apparently to lend the story an extra element of mystery, and fun. Except for their closeness with Toba Batak, Angkola Batak and Mandailing Batak are not mutually intelligible with other Sumatran languages, nor with Indonesian. This linguistic situation made southern Batak turi-turian publishing at the time something of an enclave, in-group phenomenon within the colonial Indies maelstrom of language choices and print textualities. The 1920s and 1930s were decades that saw an explosive growth of an Indonesian literature, in Bahasa Indonesia. The novels, essays, and newspaper stories that constituted this nascent Indonesian literature was directed in part toward a hoped-for, new national Indonesian community (Teeuw 1979; Freidus 1977). This did come into political existence following the 1945-1949 Revolusi, after the defeat of Japan in World War II and that states withdrawal from their Indies occupation (they had ousted the Dutch in early 1942 in an invasion after the fall of Singapore). The turi-turian books authors and many of their Tapanuli and Deli southern Batak readers were well aware of these Indonesian language, Indonesian national literature developments. Most were fully bilingual in Indonesian and in their home Batak language. Indonesian was in common use in the southern Tapanuli schools at the time, near the larger towns. Sometimes readers and authors also knew some Dutch, if they had attended the high-prestige Hollandsch-Inlandsche School, the HIS. These were elementary schools where some Dutch was used. The even more illustrious Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs (MULO) institutions provided additional Dutch-language instruction. These were selective middle schools and by the late colonial decades were found in large towns such as Tarutung and Sibolga. Beyond the enmeshment of Tapanuli and Deli in Indies language situations like these, in the 1920s several southern Batak writers such as the nov-

I Introduction

elist Merari Siregar and, later, the novelist and essayist Armijn Pane were major figures in the development of an Indonesian language, Indonesian literature. Such writers had many southern Batak among their readers. However, Batak-language turi-turian publishing per se occurred somewhat to the sidelines of these larger-scale, archipelago-wide literary developments in Indonesian. Angkola Batak and Mandailing Batak turi-turian texts were largely invisible to broader Indies publics: the latter simply could not read them and beyond that, many of the archipelagos other residents apparently saw the Batak as rustics as primitives, surely incapable of anything so grand as exquisite literary epics, or elaborate chanted tales, for that matter. Since these turi-turian sung stories derived much of their authoritativeness and air of loveliness from Angkola and Mandailing high ritual speech registers, the folkloric print versions of these narratives implicitly commented at many junctures about writing and reading in relation to Batak oratory, in a time of European colonial control of Sumatra. Partly as a consequence of this, the turi-turian texts also engaged their Tapanuli and Deli authors and readers in somewhat anxious but profoundly inventive constructions of Batak traditions in relation to Indies modernities. Obviously, since the Batak were frequently denigrated as unsophisticated backwoodsmen, such modes of imagining Batak tradition and Batak modernities within the Indies were anxiety-filled ones. Given this setting, the turi-turian books and newspaper serials were simultaneously both political and artistic texts. That is how I read them here in this essay, which is designed as an anthropology of literature interpretation of Datuk Tuongku and some of its surrounding texts. In the several sections below I shall draw gratefully on several bodies of scholarship. I see southern Batak turi-turian publishing in part as a way through which Tapanuli and Deli Batak language authors wrote back to empire within the colonial Netherlands East Indies. That phrase, The empire writes back, is used as the title of an illuminating book on such issues by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989). But, what sorts of resistance art (Scott 1990) can published turi-turian most precisely be said to have been? In fact, to what extent is James C. Scotts influential concept of the arts of resistance illuminating here in doing this sort of anthropology of literature work? Scott asserts that social systems of extreme hierarchy (plantation slavery, feudal orders, and also some colonial societies) yield two fields of rhetorical play. There is first of all an on-stage existence where a group of social superiors and the persons they dominate play out their assigned roles, in a sort of public transcript of hauteur and obsequiousness. Then there is a second, hidden, off-stage existence where groups on each side speak among themselves and let their hair down. Scott is especially interested in recording and analysing the hidden transcripts of subordinated groups. Language use and the

Print, poetics and politics

role of literature in such power-charged situations are another prime concern in his generally quite useful study, but it is important to note that Scotts use of language metaphors to describe larger social interactions has come under some fire from anthropological linguist Susan Gal (1995). These criticisms of Scott tie into an even larger literature on resistance theory within anthropology that is also helpful here (for instance, Abu-Lughod 1990; Ortner 1995; Brown 1996). Such writers ask: Has resistance been adopted somewhat too enthusiastically and uncritically by anthropologists anxious to celebrate the underdog in situations of hierarchy? Has a sometimes faddish search for traces of resistance, seemingly everywhere in the ethnographic and historical record, clouded accurate reportage and analysis? Given this debate, whose cautionary tones I applaud, what is the most socially exact, least romanticized way to appreciate print literature such as these colonial-era turi-turian texts, lodged as they were in such morally conflicted print territory? After all, the southern Batak turi-turian were written and published in the surat Ulando, those Dutch letters. And, Tapanuli and Deli moderns often took Dutch standards of social accomplishment as models. Literature like these turi-turian texts was quite far from being a clearcut, heroic literature of resistance. Careful translations of ambiguous texts like Soetan Hasoendoetans 1941 Datuk Tuongku aid in specifying the nature of resistance here. Beyond these debates, I also draw upon theoretical literature from several areas of contemporary scholarship about indigenous print writing in formerly colonized parts of the world. That is, I shall rely on sectors of literary theory influenced by postcolonialism (E. Said 1993; Ashcroft et al. 1989, 1995). I also look at the anthropology of literature (Daniel and Peck 1996), particularly as it intersects with the rapidly developing field of language ideology studies (see for instance Fabian 1986 for a good ethnographic and historical application of this). I shall also be drawing on scholarship directed specifically at Sumatran, Malay area, and wider Indonesian literatures (for instance, Foulcher 1993; Freidus 1977; Teeuw 1979). I draw on this scholarship particularly as it touches on matters of orality and literacies (Sweeney 1980, 1987). I look too at the history of vernacular journalism in the Indies and the larger Malay/Sumatra region (Adam 1982, 1995; M. Said 1976). Turi-turian publishing sprang directly from Sumatran journalisms folkloric writing trends, which by the 1920s and 1930s were beginning to turn the islands ethnic customs, as it were, into feature story fodder. This line of print development mixed creatively with another important stream of publishing that shaped turi-turian textuality: Tapanuli school textbook production. Consequently, research on the history of schools and schoolbooks in Sumatra, in the wider Indies, and in nearby Singapore and colonial Malaya is also relevant here (Kroeskamp 1974; Masjkuri and Sutrisno Kutoyo 1982; Nasution 1983).

I Introduction

Some of the classic work on epics is of obvious help here (A.B. Lord 1960; M.L. Lord 1995). I shall also be using, with special gratitude, recent work by Indonesian specialists on power and narrativity issues, set into historical perspective. My most direct debts are to John R. Bowens Sumatran politics and poetics; Gayo history, 1900-1989 (1991), his Muslims through discourse (1993), Mary M. Steedlys Hanging without a rope; Narrative experience in colonial and postcolonial Karoland (1993), Rita Smith Kipps Dissociated identities; Ethnicity, religion, and class in an Indonesian society (1993), Anna Lowenhaupt Tsings In the realm of the diamond queen; Marginality in an out-of-the-way place (1993), Nancy K. Floridas Writing the past, inscribing the future; History as prophecy in colonial Java (1995), Laurie J. Sears Shadows of empire; Colonial discourse and Javanese tales (1996) and John Pembertons On the subject of Java (1994). All these studies explore the historicity of Indonesian narrative, whether it be oral, script-based, or set out in type as was the case with Datuk Tuongku. Such communication systems circumstances from the 1920, 1930s, and early 1940s are probably always best seen in terms of the culture of colonialism.2 A final section of this essay goes beyond the colonial Indies period and deals with the fate of oral and printed turi-turian in former President Soehartos 1965-1998 New Order regime. Here the following studies are especially helpful in sorting out matters of language, literature, and state hegemony: Kenneth M. Georges Showing signs of violence; The cultural politics of a twentieth-century headhunting ritual (1996), Joel Kuipers Power in performance; The creation of textual authority in Weyewa ritual speech (1990) and especially his Language, identity, and marginality in Indonesia; The changing nature of ritual speech on the island of Sumba (1998), Janet Hoskins article The headhunter as hero; Local traditions and their reinterpretation as national history (1987) and her The play of time; Kodi perspectives on kalendars, history, and exchange (1993), and, quite prominently, Webb Keanes Signs of recognition; Powers and hazards of representation in an Indonesian society (1997a). Although Datuk Tuongku was published before national independence I have decided to include a discussion of turi-turian publication under the New Order since this provides a wider historical framework for thinking about issues of Batak texts and textualities in relation to state power. Datuk Tuongku, it turned out, became a near invisible text in national times, although another printed, southern Tapanuli turi-turian (Mangaradja Goenoeng Sorik Marapis Turiturian ni Raja Gorga di Langit dohot Raja Suasa di Portibi, The turi-turian of Raja Gorga of the Sky and Raja Suasa of the Earth, first published in book form in 1938) has enjoyed a long, national-era life as a school textbook for Batak language classes. This is a situation that the political anthropologies of
2

Particularly useful guides to that here for me have been Gouda 1995; Cooper and Stoler 1997; and, on Toba, Sandra Niessens excellent study of fashion and colonialism (Niessen 1993).

Print, poetics and politics

language just cited along with studies such as George Quinns The case of the invisible literature; Power, scholarship, and contemporary Javanese writing (1983) can help elucidate. Quinns work on the Javanese novel is also of much aid here (Quinn 1983, 1992). Some researchers have looked particularly at the role of folklore scholarship in colonial and national times in constituting ethnic difference (see Kahn 1993; and again, Pemberton 1994; Sears 1996). Others have discussed the correspondingly important phenomenon of indigenous ancient customs writing (for instance, George 1990, 1996). These are also obviously relevant works here. Studies of the interplay between nationalist ideologies and narrative form (Bhabha 1990) are also of considerable help in illuminating the linked aesthetics and politics of printed turi-turian, in their several eras of public presence. Homi K. Bhabhas discussion of the anxious mimicry of metropolitan canons and standards by indigenous elites is especially valuable (Bhabha 1997, 1998). Research on epic tradition and nationalism is useful here too in looking at turi-turian textuality over the entire 1914-1990s span of time. This body of scholarship (for instance, Beissinger et al. 1999; Sells 1996) certainly reaches far afield for a student of Indonesia like myself. So, as Angkola orators often say, I must offer abundant apologies in advance for mistakes surely to be made. There is one further body of scholarship of moment here. In my earlier, translation-centred anthropology of literature excursions into southern Batak literature (my translation of Soetan Hasoendoetans novel Sitti Djaoerah (Rodgers 1997a, 1997b), for instance, and also Telling lives, telling history; Autobiography and historical imagination in modern Indonesia (Rodgers 1995), on Sumatran childhood memoirs in Indonesian), I have sometimes combined a focus on Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtins studies of language worlds in collision (Bakhtin 1990a) with some of Benedict Andersons insights about literary form and nationalism (Anderson 1991), especially as the latter have been modified recently by Partha Chatterjee (1993). This approach is apt here again. Also usuful is Pragmatics (1992) and Woolard and Schieffelin (1994) on language ideology. This essay proceeds through several sections. First is a consideration of the ways in which turi-turian print authors attempted to simultaneously write tradition and write about language, on the printed page. I then discuss Sumatran school history as that related to language hierarchy, as background to turi-turian publication. Next is a brief account of the way turi-turian in print but also in sung form have surveyed entire language universes, giving them epic proportions. Following this is a report on the Datuk Tuongku story as it operated as an actual oral chant performance (something I was able to hear and tape record during my first fieldwork in Sipirok in the mid-1970s). After this I look at Datuk Tuongkus precise publication circumstances, in

I Introduction

terms of some of the ways in which this one text emerged from folkloric writing practices in the Batak vernacular press of the 1910s to 1930s period. I next go on to place Datuk Tuongku within another of its literary settings, this time in relation to Batak language novels (and in regard to Soetan Hasoendoetans own Sitti Djaoerah, which first appeared as a newspaper serial in 1927). Soetan Hasoendoetan modelled that love story novel in part on turi-turian recitations, and on turi-turian folkloric writing. Correspondingly, in writing Datuk Tuongku, he drew on literary models of the novel that he had gleaned from reading the Indonesian language novels then being commissioned by Balai Pustaka. This was the governments official publishing house for fine literature, established in 1922 (Teeuw 1972, 1979; Freidus 1977). After this section on fiction narrative, I go on to suggest that Datuk Tuongku may have worked, at one and the same time, as an epic about changing Indies language worlds and as a lament on language loss. I follow this with a discussion of Datuk Tuongku and other turi-turian in the New Order, and conclude with some comments on my translation decisions and on my experiences as an anthropological fieldworker, plunging happily into the Datuk Tuongku text over the course of the last several years.3 Writing tradition, writing language Probably not by accident, the published turi-turian tales as folkloric books and newspaper serials emerged most forcefully during the last three colonial decades, from about 1912 to 1940 or so. This was a time of significant southern Batak print publication not only in the area of turi-turian texts but also in vernacular school textbook writing, journalism, verse narratives, and prose novels (Rodgers 1991a, 1997b). This boomlet in southern Batak language publishing yielded a densely intertextual universe of words. In consequence, the printed chants not only often appeared first in newspapers but also strongly influenced Batak-language novel writing, which in turn shaped turi-turian textuality. Given this print culture setting, the turi-turian books and serials wrote tradition in print in particularly self-reflexive ways. As
3

From July 1974 to January 1977, I did ethnographic fieldwork on oratory and constructions of modernity and tradition in Sipirok and in a small village nearby. On later fieldwork visits of several months duration in 1980 and 1983 I shifted focus to Sipiroks and wider South Tapanulis historical transition to print literacy. I spent six months studying this topic in Sipirok and Padangsidimpuan in 1985-1986; I returned for three months of translation-related fieldwork in 1989, then spent a Fulbright fellowship period of eight months in 1992 translating Sitti Djaoerah, in Bungabondar. Since 1992 I have returned to the same area for six short stays. This includes six months of translation work in Indonesia directly related to turi-turian. Some of my more directly relevant publications are listed in the Bibliography.

10

Print, poetics and politics

well, these works were often explicitly and always implicitly about language, and about Batak belonging in the Indies and in an Indonesian nation often seen as just over the social horizon. The turi-turian texts burst into print as proudly poetic old epics at a time of hesitantly, fitfully emerging Batak social identities in colonial Sumatra. It is telling that the term Batak was almost never used directly in southern Tapanuli turi-turian books and newspaper serials as far as I have been able to determine. Any such ethnic identity was just then coalescing for Tapanuli and Deli publics, although the phrases Halak Batak (Batak people) and Hata Batak, the Batak way of speaking, were in common use in the southern Tapanuli press of the time. The turi-turian stories were not generally labelled as Batak tales but were more simply directed by their authors to halak hita (our sorts of folks), in saro hita (our way of speaking Hata Angkola or Hata Mandailing over against Minangkabau, or Acehnese, say, or Indonesian or Dutch). These extraordinary printed chant narratives were generally formatted almost entirely in prose. This literary form was quite familiar by then to southern Tapanuli writers and readers from their experiences with another, even more prominent Latin alphabet type of text: the schoolbook. In this region, starting at the notably early date of the 1870s, many Angkola Batak and Mandailing Batak curricular materials had been written by Batak schoolmasters. They had often been trained in pedagogy by Dutch Kweekschool (teacher training institute) supervisors. Reading and recitation exercises set out in verse were popular in some of the earliest Batak language schoolbooks, but by the 1910s these locally-authored textbooks would often include long passages in prose. By the late 1910s, some schoolbook writing was also being shaped by novelistic narrative (streaming in from both Batak language and Indonesian language fiction literature)4 and also by newspaper narrative, from the Batak vernacular press. And, virtually all forms of southern Batak print writing at this time were shot through with oratorys aesthetics, which highlighted scintillating performance dynamics. In other words, the transition from orality to print was by no means simple or unidirectional.5 In prose, the turi-turian stories were shortened and heavily edited versions of tales that in oral performance would ideally extend over seven
See for instance the work of school principal and textbook author Soetan Martoewa Radja. His readers Dua sajoli I and Dua sajoli II (Martoewa Radja 1917-19) and Rante Omas (Martoewa Radja 1918) included folktales but also novelistic chapters about Tapanuli families caught up in modern Indies life (poverty in villages, coffee cultivation, troubled migrations to Deli). See Rodgers 2003a for an analysis of some of Soetan Martoewa Radjas narrative strategies in his schoolbooks, in terms of his attempts to write the critical child. 5 For an excellent discussion of a similar situation involving orality, script, and print, see William Cummings, Rethinking the imbrication of orality and literacy; Historical discourse in early modern Makassar (Cummings 2003).
4

I Introduction

11

nights of dusk to dawn sung narration. As chants, the turi-turian showered audiences with rhymed couplets and blessing formulae and spun out compelling stories about Sky Continent interactions with humans in ancient times. The specific tale most at issue here, about a shining prince named Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman, was an Angkola Batak telling of a story that has similarities to other Malay world tales about noble young men and their exciting companions who go on dangerous quest-journeys into the deep forest lands. Often they venture there in search of mystic beasts, battles, or brides. Related stories involving some of Datuk Tuongkus core elements (an aristocratic youth and his wayward little brother; a search for adulthood and a wife; a visit to the human world by the seven lovely daughters of the king of the Upper Continent) are found in Aceh, Minangkabau, and across the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia.6 Importantly, though, although scholars of comparative Malay literatures know that this tale is one of the more peripatetic ones of the region, colonial-era Angkola bards and audiences tended not to remark on these cross-cultural patterns but to see the story as their own, as an heirloom from their ancestors. For the Datuk Tuongku story this is most directly so in the town of Sipirok and its nearby villages the area whose residents claim the tale as distinctly their own. Luckily for this project, I have done most of my ethnographic fieldwork since 1974 in Sipirok and two villages outside town. What was the song and oratory background to the 1941 Datuk Tuongku? As chants, the southern Batak tales proceeded from mysterious incident to incident in a register of esoteric ritual speech in which normal Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak words were replaced by sacredly charged circumlocutions. For instance, chanters (men called bayo parturi) would choose phrases such as hand-the-honored-asker-for-favors, head-the-honored-bearer-ofburdens, and legs-the-bold-striders over the everyday words for hand, head, and leg. In addition, lengthy formulaic rushes of set phrases would be used by bards, to introduce main characters back into the action after an
6 Minangkabau, the southern Batak areas, Aceh, court states in south Sumatra, and Malay aristocratic circles all apparently participated in dense exchanges of story motifs and chant recitation styles in pre-national times and perhaps for centuries. In peninsular Malaysia the Malim Deman tale is well known. A touchstone colonial era text was Hikayat Malim Deman, by Winstedt and Sturrock (1908). See also Hikayat Malim Deman, the version of this same text in Malay (Winstedt and Sturrock 1963). Balai Pustaka brought out a version in 1932 in Indonesian (A.Dt. Madjoindos Tjeritera Malim Deman dengan Poeteri Boengsoe dipetik dari Bahasa Minangkabau, 1932). This version uses courtly levels of literary Malay, with verse inserts. For comparison, see the more recent Malim Deman, edisi logat Minang, by Rasyid Manggis (1989). The Angkola Batak Balai Pustaka version of the tale is Si Aji Panurats Si Malim Deman (1937). This text has much admixture with Toba Batak. William A. Collins translation of the guritan or chanted tale of Radin Suane (1998) from Rejang, south Sumatra, is also illuminating to read in conjunction with the 1941 Datuk Tuongku. Many story motifs are similar (the seven lovely daughters of the Sky, so on).

12

Print, poetics and politics

absence. Chanters were indeed male in all instances, as far as I know. As we shall see, however, women had major oratory roles as well in southern Tapanuli society in general. They sang andung laments over the dead in their own special register of elusive mourning speech. And, in complementary opposition to this, the male bards chanted their turi stories, which were called the andung cries of men. Turi-turian speech was decorated communication, in the extreme. Special infix forms set into numerous words in turi-turian speech lent it a tone of purported ancientness and beauty. For instance, the normal word for to open up branches with ones hands is harkar, but in turi-turian speech this would often be humarkar. The simple comparative in Angkola Batak involves an infix (gorsing, yellow, and gumorsing, yellower) but turi-turian speech makes much more frequent use of this form. Other devices, too, would add embroidery. For example, the bards would rely on a word such as halalungun (loneliness and poignant longing) in place of the more conversational word lungun. Turi-turian phraseology tended to be even more elaborate and indirect than Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak ritual oratory (kobar), which itself lay at quite a distance from regular Batak language conversational speech. In part because they were so specially worded (and chanted, to boot, in a moan-like, droned delivery style), turi-turian were thought to be tabo, delicious, savory to experience. But, by the time turi-turian print publication had become a major part of the southern Batak literary scene in the 1910s, the chants themselves were fading from view as oral performances. The southern Tapanuli schoolbook culture of print, not to mention Indies modern life in larger senses, was gaining apace during this period. The oral culture of lavishly long chant performances found itself beleaguered and encircled, by newer communication forms such as schoolbooks and newspapers and their associated moral universes. This situation helped generate a self-consciously modern form of nostalgia on the part of the turiturian authors of the 1910s to 1941 period (the Japanese occupation brought an abrupt halt to this sector of publishing, largely because of the sheer economic hardships of the war years in Tapanuli). The Angkola and Mandailing amateur folklorists who produced the first generation of turi-turian books and journalistic feature items in the Batak newspapers apparently tended to see their work as conservationist they were recording these tales before they disappeared. Such a writing project was at heart very much about life and identity in the modern Indies, at a time when the print technology brought by the colonial state had become a central part of the self-representation efforts of many residents of the colony themselves. The large-scale prestige hierarchy at work here for Batak readers vis--vis civilized societies versus tribal ones in the Sumatra of the time is crucial to note. This situation made Angkola and Mandailing Batak turi-turian folk-

I Introduction

13

lore authors attempts to seize the culture of print to write heritage especially poignant, and bold. They were writing tradition in sly ways, within Sumatran social and linguistic imagined hierarchies that sometimes, as noted, denigrated the Batak (seen rather generically) as primitive tribals. During the time of turi-turian print publication before the national revolution, the Batak, so designated, were apparently fairly widely feared and also distained in many parts of the island as coarse, unpredictable, angry-tempered upriver people: as primitives. Possibly in light of this sort of imagery, some Mandailing migrants to Deli around the turn of the twentieth century went so far as to drop their diagnostically Batak clan names (Lubis, Nasution, Rambe, Batubara, and so on) when they arrived on the east coast, the better to blend into Muslim, Malay society there (R. Kipp 1983; see also Cunningham 1958). Ethnic Malays had long lived along the Deli coast. In truth most Mandailing families themselves had been Muslim since the 1820s and 1830s, due to conversions during the Padri Wars and to strong Minangkabau influence throughout the southern Batak highlands. The Padri were Wahabhists who sought to cleanse Minangkabau Islam of so-called compromises with adat, or custom. In the 1820s the Padri had pushed northward into Mandailing and then Angkola, seeking conversions and also trying to secure large sectors of Sumatra free from Dutch control. But, long-term Muslim or no, when Mandailing families or young people got to Deli around the early years of the twentieth century they quickly encountered an alarming, further stereotype about the Batak: the notion that they were all pig-eating Christians. Toba (to Sipiroks north) by this period had been converted in some numbers to Protestant Christianity. The label pork-eater (sipangan babi, that is, Christian) was also beginning to adhere to others beyond the Toba Batak, from other parts of Tapanuli, from other sections of the Bataklanden. In sum, in the Indies of the late colonial decades Batakness and even Tapanuli origins could have distinctly negative associations for lowland, Muslim publics. The production of a literature of impressive ancient southern Tapanuli epics spoke directly to these processes of stigmatization. Possessing a printed literature of great epics countered accusations of cultural roughness and impoverishment. Ironically, though, since few outsiders could speak Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak, these literary accomplishments in epic were fully in view only to southern Batak audiences themselves. And, they were finding that their own young people were increasingly drawn to the emerging, new, Indonesian language, and national Indonesian literature. In consequence, Batak-language epics in print constituted a nervous literary endeavor, to say the least. This situation helped lend turi-turian print literature a special kind of creativity, rooted in conflict and multiple social identities. As Batak printed

14

Print, poetics and politics

texts written in the European alphabet on the traditional speech of places like Sipirok, the turi-turian books and newspaper items like Datuk Tuongku implicitly asked: Who could best tell history and narrate ancient heritage for indigenous readers in a Sumatra colonized by Europeans? What communication form should such stories take? Could (and should) Sipirok chant worlds live on in an age of Indies print? And, who should determine such matters as whether or not the chant stories should appear in books and newspapers: the Dutch, who had brought print technology, the schoolhouse, and Europeanstyle folklore scholarship to the Indies? Or, authors and readers in places like the southern Tapanuli highlands? These were regions where ritual speech was markedly abundant and sophisticated but also places where townspeople and even many rice farm village families had embraced Latin alphabet print literacy by the turn of the twentieth century with zest and considerable social strategizing acumen. The political and aesthetic assertiveness of turi-turian print publication in our own hata but also in a time of European colonial presence in Sumatra is remarkable. Why so? A few more points about Sumatras language ideologies and school history should help clarify matters. Sumatran language hierarchies and school history In the area around Panyabungan and Tano Bato in Mandailing, schoolbook literacy in the Latin alphabet began to supplant literacy in the Batak syllabaries of Indic origin in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s. The establishment of government primary schools in this region at this notably early date for the outer islands (the islands beyond Java and Bali) was linked to the states projected needs for educated manpower in the Deli plantations; in the hospitals, schools, and post offices of Tapanuli; and also in the coffee warehouses of the southern highlands. High quality coffee could be grown not only in the cool uplands of West Coast Sumatra where the colonial state had instituted a forced cultivation scheme for the crop starting in the late 1800s: Mandailing and Angkola too were excellent coffee growing locales. In fact, Sipiroks first institutional sign of the arrival of the Gomponi (the Company, the Dutch East Indies Company or VOC) was the construction of a government coffee warehouse in the settlement. The VOC itself was supplanted in 1799 by a formal colonial government but the Dutch presence in the archipelago in general terms was still referred to as the Company in this area around Sipirok far into the nineteenth century. The town itself was in some part a creature of the economics of coffee. The warehouse had spurred Sipiroks emergence as a market centre in the late 1800s. Correspondingly, some of Sipiroks traditional aristocracy (the anak raja or anak mata) had come to that status through

I Introduction

15

their forebears strategic alliances with the Dutch civil administration in the 1850s-1930s period. Much like many Minangkabau communities in West Sumatra, the southern Batak societies were notably school-minded quite early on in their dealings with European colonialism. People in Sipirok today, in fact, sometimes laugh and say that their grandparents and great-grandparents were fanatik about pushing school enrollment and high graduation rates for their children. Primary schools dotted this part of the southern Batak uplands by the 1870s and 1880s, to public acclaim (Nasution 1983; Masjkuri and Sutrisno Kutoyo 1982). By the late 1800s, the town of Sipirok had both Malay and Batak-language government schools as well as Batak-language Bible schools (sikola Injil). The latter were run by the German Rhenish Mission, which had arrived in the 1850s. The colonial government had given this German mission group from Barmen permission to proselytize in Sipirok as part of an effort to Christianize part of the Batak lands so as to drive a wedge between fervently Muslim Aceh and Minangkabau (a good, later account of mission times in Sipirok and environs is Gerrit van Asselts Achttien jaren onder de Bataks, Eighteen years with the Batak, 1905). The mission schools were also found in nearby villages and were open to new converts and Muslim youngsters. Notably studious and patient preachers such as W.F. Betz and Gerrit van Asselt himself lived for years in major villages near Sipirok such as Bungabondar, preaching, establishing Bible schools, and training indigenous church personnel. Fluent in Hata Angkola, they wrote excellent Angkola Batak translations of the New Testament and also produced an Angkola hymnal. The missions Bible schools taught basic literacy in the old Batak letters at first. But, by the 1880s, Latin alphabet instruction was coming to dominate the parochial and especially the secular, government schools. After several years in Sipirok the missionary Ingewar Nommensen astutely decided that this regions large Muslim majority population would probably never convert in huge numbers to Christianity. In consequence, he left his missionary brothers behind in Sipirok and pushed northward into then-pagan Silindung and Toba. There Nommensen spurred massive conversions. He did this in part by working with the village chiefs. Nommensen became known as the apostle to the Toba, their Evangelist. His portrait adorns churches in Toba and also Sipirok to this day. To return to the southern areas school history, by the 1920s Sipirok had its own HIS schools, elite Hollandsch-Inlandsche Scholen for privileged children. The HIS used a significant amount of Dutch throughout the school day. Attendance there was quite a feather in the cap for the status-conscious Batak families with sons or daughters enrolled. Dutch was a sterling language of high social accomplishment, and exclusivity. Only select families tended to be able to send their children to HIS schools; in Sipirok such youngsters

16

Print, poetics and politics

were typically the offspring of church personnel, wealthy cloth and coffee merchants, and well-connected schoolteacher families. Having a son or even a daughter graduate from HIS gained a kahanggi (a lineage, within the marga, or patrilineal clans) a good measure of tua, or magic luck-prosperity power. Their lineage was manifestly glowing with good fortune, to have such school graduates. Such lineages were both close to the Dutch and close to that currency of worldly success and modernity, the school diploma. In consequence, a tua-filled kahanggi could begin to demand similarly well-educated spouses for their children. This process of marriage alliance alert to school success worked to consolidate high prestige degrees and jobs in the hands of an elite group of lineages. Mandailings first government-run elementary school had been established at an even earlier (in fact, a breathtakingly early) date for this part of the Indies. The Dutch Assistant-Resident A.P. Godon founded a Malay-language primary school offering lessons in arithmetic and basic literacy in the town of Panyabungan in the early 1850s. That school produced Willem Iskander, an early school textbook writer and the eventual director of Sumatras second Kweekschool, or teacher training institute, in Tano Bato, Mandailing (Harahap 1976, 1987). Willem Iskander had been trained in pedagogy in the Netherlands itself. This was another extraordinary circumstance for an outer island part of the Indies. Willem Iskander returned from his studies in the Netherlands to write a series of highly influential Mandailing Batak-language textbooks for 10 to 14 year olds. Prominent among these books were Si Bulus-Bulus, si Rumbuk-Rumbuk, Mr Fleet-afoot, Mr Quick-at-the-Uptake at his Lessons (1872) and Taringot di ragam-ragam ni parbinotoan dohot sinaloan ni Alak Eropa, On the varieties of knowledge and expertise of the Europeans (1873). The latter was Willem Iskanders Mandailing-ized reworking of Malay schoolman Abdullah Munsyis text Ceritera ilmu kepandaian orang putih, Stories of the white peoples expertise, which had been composed for Benjamin Keasberrys mission school in Singapore (Rodgers 2002). In On the varieties of knowledge, Willem Iskander pursued a painful middle course between flattery of the Europeans for their great technological accomplishments (steamships, piped water, printing presses) and support for Mandailing self-sufficiency (Rodgers 2002). The Tano Bato schoolman evidenced a sort of double consciousness in writing this textbook. That is, in praising Dutch accomplishments he was also characterizing rural, village-based Mandailing as backward. Yet, at the same time, Willem Iskander was imagining his Tano Bato school pupils to be eager, bright, and fully capable of constructing a technologically and cognitively advanced society for themselves, in Sumatra. Schools were undeniably colonized and colonizing, yet the Lesson House (bagas sioparpidoan) could also be a place for Mandailing economic liberation, since it manifestly provided access to

I Introduction

17

those much-vaunted salaried jobs in Deli. A similar sense for the ironies of government school system service shaped the teaching careers of many of Willem Iskanders successors. These were locally famous schoolmen such as Raja Parlindungan and Mangaradja Goenoeng Pandapotan (M. Said 1976:45). Some were graduates of the Tano Bato Kweekschool, or its larger replacement school in Padangsidimpuan. After Willem Iskanders death in 1876 in Amsterdam probably a suicide (Van Dijk 1986) his Mandailing Kweekschool had reopened in the Angkola town of Padangsidimpuan. This circle of teachers included numerous school textbook writers. The colonial government encouraged this, and in fact commissioned the Padangsidimpuan Kweekschool to be not only a teacher-training institute but also a centre of folkloric studies (Masjkuri and Sutrisno Kutoyo 1982:345). Such schools were given the new government charge of documenting local folktales and such and transforming these into curricular materials for the expanding school system. Major Dutch folklorists and linguists headed the Kweekschool Padangsidimpuan: first L.K. Harmsen, then D. Grivel, then Ch.A. van Ophuysen, who was perhaps the schools most well-known exponent. The Padangsidimpuan folkloric centre/Kweekschools documentarian strengths were mostly in the areas of Angkola village stories and umpama (sayings), both of which the schoolmen ploughed into this Kweekschools preparation of Angkola Batak language elementary school textbooks. Back in the metropole in the Netherlands, following the 1909 founding of its monograph series, the Bataksch Instituut of Leiden was engaged in an even more broad gauged effort to document the Batak peoples, their customs, languages, health prospects, and geographical surroundings. Among the Instituuts publications were the following: M. Joustras Hyginische misstanden in het Karoland, Hygienic mistakes in Karoland (1909), De Islam in de Bataklanden, Islam in the Bataklands (1909), M. Joustras illustrated Van Medan naar Padang en terug, From Medan to Padang and back (1915), and Ch.A. van Ophuysens Kijkjes in het huiselijk leven der Bataks, Glimpses of the domestic life of the Batak (1910). This last volume concerned the Sipirok and wider Angkola region. Its 63 pages covered such topics as the southern Bataks high regard for children, the Batak wifes key role in the household (a laudatory section), the upbringing of adolescents, and the meaning of marga (clans). Much of this monograph concerns family life and larger clan and lineage relations. Van Ophuysen also writes briefly but with evident warmth of the elaborate bride price negotiation sessions conducted for large weddings in the area, via hours of oratory (Van Ophuysen 1910:17-20). He goes on to discuss taboos within wedding ceremonials (for example, a new wife has restrictions on visiting her natal family before her first baby is born). This volume is the only one of the full

18

Print, poetics and politics

thirteen monograph series focused on Angkola or Mandailing. Other monographs dwell on Batak literature and language matters. For instance, there are Toba word lists, two volumes on Toeri-toerin Karo, and numerous passages throughout the series on the Batak penchant for speechmaking and their love of aphorisms. The massive linguistic and folkloric research of H.N. van der Tuuk also formed part of the scholarly backdrop to local Angkola and Mandailing efforts to write tradition, although it is difficult to determine how much access local schoolmasters had to these studies. It is also important to note that Van der Tuuks own fieldwork methodology of encouraging informants to write down their traditional literature into the aksara script syllabary for him onto pustaha bark books may well have shaped his findings to a degree. Van der Tuuk was a tireless, brilliant documentarian of Toba, Mandailing, Pakpak, and to some extent Karo and Simelungun special speech routines (stories, laments, songs, and more) during his work from 1851 to 1857 near the Sibolga coast for the Netherlands Bible Society (Teeuw 1971). Trained in Oriental languages at the University of Leiden, Van der Tuuk took up a contract with the society to travel to Sumatra and establish a field camp as close as possible to the Batak heartlands. As it turned out, only the Indian Ocean coastal region was safe enough for outsiders at the time. He did travel upland to a remarkable extent, though, becoming the first European or Eurasian (his identity) to see Lake Toba. The Bible Society charged Van der Tuuk with the task of writing a grammar of Toba Batak and collecting texts (that is, aksara script texts) from the several Batak speech communities. All this was to be preparatory to the composition of Batak translations of the New Testament. Van der Tuuk was a religious skeptic (Nieuwenhuys 1999:100-3) and frequent critic of the mission, but his gospel translation work was typically exemplary (for Van der Tuuks main publications on Batak languages and literatures see Van der Tuuk 1860-62, 1861, 1971). In Van der Tuuks introduction to his 1867 classic A grammar of Toba Batak he wrote warmly of the richness of ritual speech forms in all the Batak languages, mentioning andung laments, possession speech, poda or moral lessons speech, the language of muttered invocation (Van der Tuuk 1971:xlix), and the language of the camphor gatherers. He heartily approved of Batak literature, that is, aksara products. He wrote:
The literature consists of prescriptions (poda) dealing with divination, stories, invocations to the spirits, laments (andung), ditties (ende), long-winded poems, such as, for example, the si-marganggang gaol, and narrative riddles (torhantorhanan). The larger part is in prose into which, however, a great number of short verses are introduced. There are no translations from other languages, and where a Batak text has the appearance of having been borrowed from another language, the color is so Batak that only a proper name here and there betrays the foreign

I Introduction

19

influence. For our knowledge of the language and the people the stories are the most important because the persons who play a part in them frequently occur speaking. The prescriptions on divination are of much importance for a knowledge of the dialects because, in almost every territory, one finds texts on this type of literature. (Van der Tuuk 1971:l.)

Van der Tuuk then mentions the mode of aksara recording of various genres and concludes (Van der Tuuk 1971:l),
C. In Mandailing the stories, which are interlarded with andung words and are narrated in a sing-song manner, are called turi-turijan, while those that are couched in the daily language and are spoken in an ordinary way are called hobar-kobaran, D. Laws are seldom found written down, and neither are orations which would certainly be the most beautiful part of Batak literature: the Batak, especially the Toba Batak devotes much effort to their composition.

This last comment probably indicates that Van der Tuuk had little access to the animal sacrifice ceremonies where much of the oratory is performed. He lauded the Batak for their ritual language accomplishments and old script literatures but turned a jaundiced eye on the growing influence of Malay and print (Van der Tuuk 1971:li):
Because there is no division of labor everyone does almost every task in his turn, with the result that every Batak knows his own language better than does someone who belongs to a cultivated nation. One can, therefore, safely consult them about the names of the most diverse things, for example, about the names of plants, birds, fishes, the parts of a building, shooting terms, etcetera. Because the Batak when he is not dealing with divination does not take into account the difference between the written and the spoken language, he writes it more easily and better than do many people of an educated nation who are chained to a traditional language form. In Mandailing, the native, under the influence of schoolteachers and interpreters some of whom are foreigners appointed by officials, is on his way to learning to write his language badly. In the Government schools too much authority is ascribed to the Batak who have become Muslims and, as new converts, seek to shine as much as possible with Malay words. Hence the wretched little schoolbooks that are there given to the young and which will, inadvertently, slowly bring the pagans completely under the influence of the Muslims.

The quality and creativity of Batak language schoolbooks written in the Willem Iskander lineage, and the wider Batak printed literature that followed in the Latin alphabet, thoroughly belie these bleak predictions. Apparently in some independence of the Batak Instituut series and Van der Tuuks own work, back in the small, upland Tapanuli corner of the Indies and over the 1880s to 1930s period Latin alphabet publications for the schools were written in some abundance by the Dutch teacher training institute instructors and their Angkola and Mandailing teacher employees.

20

Print, poetics and politics

Titles here included (in order of publication date) the RGM missionary W.F. Betzs Angkola Batak version of a simple Malay language arithmetic textbook by J.R.P.F. Gonggrijp (Boekoe etongan, Counting book (1871), published in Batavia at the government printing house, the Landsdrukkerij). From the same publisher was Radja Laoets Barita sipaingot ni Ata Mandailing, Moral advice stories in Hata Mandailing (1873); Mangaradja Goenoeng Pandapotans Parsipodaan taringot toe parbinotowan tano on, Lessons about knowledge regarding this earth (1884) and two primers for learning the Latin alphabet and simple syllable combinations, On ma soerat tongononkon asa sisejon I and II, Here are your spelling and reading lessons I and II (1893). Starting in 1904 came a series of locally famous first grade readers: Toloe sampagoel I, II, and III, Three in a clump, I, II and III (taken from the work of P.W.M. Trap, of Leiden). Missionary Ed. Muller, who was based in Pematang Siantar, contributed two arithmetic books in 1916. Two missionaries to Toba, the Reverend J.H. Meerwaldt and the Reverend C. Bielefeld, were also active schoolbook writers. They were the co-authors of the widely used Toba language Boengaboenga na angoer, Fragrant blossoms (1916-1919). Back in southern Tapanuli, Ph. Siregar and Soetan Kinalis Barita na denggandenggan, Good news, was republished by the colonial government in 1926. The writers were listed on the title page as kweekelingen of the Normaal School in Tano Bato. In the 1930s, another prominent Angkola Batak language schoolbook was the Reverend J.G. Dammerboers Singgolom,7 Little Singgollom bushes under a tree, a series of short readings (see Dammerboer 1907-9). Moehammad Kasims Doea oeli, Two times (1931) followed, while Radja Goenoengs Moetik,8 Fruit buds series appeared in 1939-1940, under Balai Pustaka auspices. In Toba, schoolbook publishing included abbreviated versions of turi-turian tales (see for example Arsenius Loembantobings Doea toeritoerian na masa di halak Batak, Two turi-turian that happened for the Batak (1919), a text heavily shaped by Dutch folkloristics). Script schoolbooks had also included volumes written by missionaries as well as by Angkola and Mandailing schoolmasters. These aksara textbooks consisted of primers for learning the syllabary and collections of short reading selections, with an emphasis on folktales. In southern Tapanuli, though, Latin alphabet schoolbooks soon overtook earlier generations of curricular materials that had been published in the aksara script. The thrust was toward
7

The sense of this title seems to be that little bushes under the trees undergird the growth of the forest canopy much as a schoolchilds success in reading early primers will undergird his or her progress in reading lessons later on. 8 This schoolbook title reflects much the same idea as that found in Singgollom; little fruit buds develop into actual fruits later on, much as the schoolboys or girls early reading lessons will blossom into more advanced academic work later on.

I Introduction

21

Latin alphabet texts by the 1910s at the very latest in school towns such as Sipirok and Padangsidimpuan. It is telling that in the hands of Angkola and Mandailing Batak authors, the full-length turi-turian tales became lodged entirely in the Dutch letters in that universe of letters that denoted school success, family hopes for a future of salaried jobs for offspring, and easy access to that other key instrumentality of modernity in the Indies, the newspaper. Vernacular journalism was a particular southern Batak preoccupation at the time and a field of notably early and remarkably wide-ranging literary activity for writers from little upland towns like Sipirok. These settlements were located far from the much more well-known newspaper cities of the Indies such as Batavia (Jakarta), Semarang, Surabaya, and Yogyakarta. But, an air of literary experimentation and contributors and editors sheer exuberance in writing journalism in line with Batak epistemological models of language made these Tapanuli settlements quite bracing small centres of Indies journalism. We shall return to Datuk Tuongkus vernacular newspaper settings, later on. Schools were linked to lively language politics in the Sumatra of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for the choice of instructional languages was always inflected for power issues within the colonial state, and in relationships among Sumatran communities. Language choice for writing popular print literature was similarly laden with political meaning. So, what language or languages belonged in epics-turned-into-paperbacks and newspaper stories? The Dutch language? Indonesian? Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak? A mixture of these? In theory, the chanted stories could have been translated from Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak into Dutch or Indonesian by their fond Angkola and Mandailing recorders, but they were not. This was surely not an accidental circumstance. And, what did it mean to speak or write of and in languages such as these last two, Hata Angkola and Hata Mandailing, in a polyglot colonial Sumatra? Webb Keane (1997b) has noted that language choice in Indonesian settings often works to mutually construct locality and state identity, in relation to nationalist discourse. How did such social processes work out in practice in turi-turian publication? The late Indies-era southern Batak turi-turian literary epics, it turned out, played a significant role in the indigenous social construction of the idea of there being such a thing as Batak languages qua local languages in the Indies in the first place. This is another key background element to Datuk Tuongku. In practical, biographical terms, the turi-turian texts authors were without exception bilingual in Malay (then, as noted, coming to be redefined as Bahasa Indonesia) and sometimes in Dutch as well. But, the southern Batak turi-turian epics were emphatically written in Mandailing Batak or Angkola

22

Print, poetics and politics

Batak. Mandailing Batak was the case for the famous book about the story chant of Raja Gorga of the Sky and Raja Suasa of the Earth. This 137 page book became the regions most renowned turi-turian text. It was published in book form in 1938, after an earlier, partial newspaper serialization starting in 1914. Its author was, as noted, Mangaradja Goenoeng Sorik Marapi, a newspaper freelancer and raja from Maga, in Mandailing. Other turiturian appeared in the Angkola Batak-language newspapers of Sibolga and Padangsidimpuan. Quite often the dialect used was the one spoken around the market town of Sipirok. Sipiroks hata is sometimes also called Angkola Batak (a usage I employ here). But, language categories of this sort have much social instability and fictiveness to them. In important ways, Angkola Batak as a name for a hata, a way of speaking, had roots in colonial discourse, in official Dutch government language policy for the highland schools. There, Malay was counterposed to Hata Angkola and Hata Mandailing Malay as the lingua franca for the archipelago, and by the late 1920s, the language of the early Indonesian nationalists, while Hata Angkola and Hata Mandailing were construed as the languages of Tapanuli homes, childhoods, and tradition. In addition, the notion of there being an Angkola Batak language (qua dialect of Batak) also owed much to Dutch folkloric and linguistic scholarship in the 1850s to 1930s period about the Batak peoples. Dictionary writers such as H.J. Eggink (1936) and folklorist/linguists such as Ch.A. van Ophuysen wrote forcefully of language maps of Sumatra where languages such as Toba Batak and Angkola Batak and so on had home areas, construed as ancestral lands outfitted with distinct languages, peoples, and sets of customs and adat laws. An important additional political player here was Protestant Christian mission language policy, for Bible translations and religious school instruction in the Sipirok area. Mary M. Steedly has reported a similar situation for Karoland (Steedly 1996). By the late nineteenth century, government and mission authorities had divided Sumatra into imaginary maps filled with supposedly discrete ethnic peoples (the Toba Batak, the Simelungun Batak, the Dairi and Pakpak Batak, the Karo Batak, the Angkola and Mandailing Batak, the Acehnese, the Minangkabau, the Niassians). Each of these had a (purportedly) distinct local language. Such classification practices were part of strategies of colonial rule and Christian proselytization, as Steedly has suggested. However, another forceful process was also at work by the 1910s and increasingly in the 1920s and 1930s, during the apogee of indigenous turi-turian publication: Angkola print authors like the writer of Datuk Tuongku sometimes appropriated that language tag or variants for the Hata Batak designation from Dutch linguists, folklorist school authorities, and missionaries and went on to make it very much their own. Artists such as Datuk Tuongkus Soetan Hasoendoetan went on to write a self-consciously saro hita print literature.

I Introduction

23

Importantly, this was for commercial sale, not for the somewhat more tightly censored school textbook sector. Publishing epics in our way of speaking took considerable linguistic bravery, as a deeper look at late colonial-era Sumatran language prestige hierarchies via some personal reminiscences of a Tapanuli writer will show. By the 1920s and 1930s, schoolboys and girls in places like Sipirok, Padangsidimpuan, and Panyabungan were embedded on a daily basis in language regimes in their government schoolrooms that privileged Malay over Hata Batak on numerous fronts. In the official view, Angkola Batak or Mandailing Batak was deemed fine for primary school instruction in rural areas but the schoolchilds progress on to the more exalted secondary schools demanded study of Malay, identified with adulthood and cosmopolitanism. And Dutch? The reminiscences of childhood times by the Toba memoirist P. Pospos indicate the language situation in 1920s and 1930s Tapanuli with some bitterness. Sipirok-area acquaintances with whom I have discussed this situation tell me that opinions in their immediate social circles were quite similar. In his autobiography Aku dan Toba; Catatan dari masa kanak-kanak, Me and Toba; Notes from childhood days, published in Bahasa Indonesia in 1950, Pospos recalls the high repute in which Dutch was held by statusconscious Batak adults in little Toba school towns like Porsea and Balige in the decades directly before World War II. At that time the author was about 10 years old. He recalls his Tapanuli childhood:
The Dutch language was held in unbelievably high regard by people in our area. There were several HIS schools: one in Sigumpulon, one in Balige, and one in Narumonda that was run by the Nommensen Schoolvereniging. Of course, people preferred the mission HIS to the others, since we were all Christian. Sometimes there were children from the huria pagaran [church congregations] who got into those schools: they were usually the children of mission schoolteachers or of the district head. On Christmas Eve these HIS kids were often asked to recite Bible verses in Dutch, even though there were only two or three people in the whole church who could understand them. I suppose it had to be demonstrated publicly that the HIS fourth graders were skilled at Dutch. Sometimes this tendency to show off got rather silly. If a HIS student was walking with his parents to the market and they happened to run into a Dutch person it did not matter who the parents often told the child to speak Dutch with the Dutch person. If the child, perhaps only a second or third grader and naturally still very shy, did not want to do this, the father would grumble, Well, dont continue in that school, lets just ask for your tuition money back. Its only wasting money to keep you there. Or if two HIS kids happened to meet, the father would tell them to speak Dutch to each other: Okay, friends, we want to hear you two speak Dutch. What delight there was in hearing other people speaking Dutch I cannot imagine, especially if the listeners themselves did not know a single word of the language. The two children little kids in the first or second grade! of course felt shy and embarrassed. (Pospos 1950, translated in Rodgers 1995:105.)

24

Print, poetics and politics

Writing from the vantage point of 1950 Pospos reports all this scrambling for language one-up-manship with sardonic humor:
Toward the end of my time in fifth grade in government school, a Dutch course opened in Porsea on the initiative of a teacher from the teachers school. It cost Rp 2.50 a month, with one lesson a week. I took this class. About ten of us at first (the number shrank to six after a month, four after two months, and then dwindled to none at all) diligently sat there in front of our teacher. One time the teacher told us to finish the sentence, De vogel vliegt over (The bird flies over..). A pupil answered, De vogel vliegt in de logulogutooi (The bird flies over the logulogutooi). The day before the teacher had taught us the sentence De vogel zit in de kooi (The bird is sitting in the cage). The child had apparently memorized this sentence but he had not gotten it quite right. What had apparently remained in his head was just the sound ooi, so when the teacher told him to complete the sentence De vogel vliegt over he added in de logulogutooi. (Pospos 1950, translated in Rodgers 1995:105-6.)

Pospos also has a good deal to report about his childhood encounters with Malay:
In those days the language of instruction in village school was Batak. But then we learned that beginning with the next school year students would be taught in Malay, so my teacher and my father decided that I should repeat the third grade. I would not lose any time, my teacher said, because the following year I could go right into fourth grade in middle school. Since third graders from primary school were usually admitted only to third grade in middle school, if I were admitted to fourth grade after an extra year of primary school I would not be behind at all. According to my teacher I would certainly pass the entrance exam for fourth grade. So for a whole year I emphasized Malay and did not pay much attention to the other subjects. After a second year of third grade, the time came to take exams in arithmetic and the Malay language: in the latter we had to translate from Batak to Malay and vice versa. Batak and Malay were not the same, even though the two languages shared many words, for example, finger, hand, eye and so on. Other words in Malay like gun, edge and the like were somewhat different in Batak, for example the Malay e was often changed to o in Batak; thus bedil (rifle) became bodil, and tepi (edge, border) became topi. Yet other words were entirely different. So when we had to translate sentences such as Bojak mangangkat-angkat dirodang (The frog jumped about the swamp) and Rongit mandoit-doit di podomanku (Mosquitoes were biting me in my bed) from Batak to Malay, some students translated them into Bejak beringkatingkat di redang (The bejak ingkated in the swamp) and Rengit mendeit-deit di pedomanku (The mosquito deited me in my guidebook), neither of which made much sense at all. I did not know what the Malay word for bojak (frog, katak) was, so I just wrote bedjak, which means nothing in Malay. Despite such problems I was accepted into fourth grade in middle school, for I had the second highest grade on the exam. (Pospos 1950, translated in Rodgers 1995:90-1.)

I Introduction

25

The presence of elegant, Batak-language turi-turian appearing in the undeniably modern-looking format of a printed, Latin alphabet book could work as something of a shield against the effects of European-toned language hierarchies of this sort, with Dutch at the glittering pinnacle and Malay basking in the same light. Surveying a language world The rapid-paced, effusively entertaining Datuk Tuongku book of 1941 turned turi-turian chant speech away from the extremely high register of Mandailing Batak ritual speech that Mangaradja Goenoeng Sorik Marapi had used in some passages of Raja Gorga (1914/1938) toward more forthrightly accessible prose, and in fact toward a novelistic reconceptualization of turi-turian chant worlds and storytelling. Present readers will probably be struck by how much the 1941 Datuk Tuongku resembles an entertaining, popular novel, in terms of chapter lay-out, narrative styles, pacing, and literary framing. The 1941 work made serious if implicit claims that turi-turian written in prose form in a Batak language could be as aesthetically excellent for their southern Batak readers as were the Indonesian language novels then being commissioned and printed in considerable number under the sponsorship of Balai Pustaka, Batavias publishing house for government-vetted, hightoned literature. This publishing house was an institution created to provide quality literature for the Indies increasing numbers of readers, the graduates of the secondary schools. Balai Pustaka commissioned popular novels in Indonesian from indigenous writers on topics assumed by the editors to be of interest and moral use to the literate public: topics such as marriage choice dilemmas among school graduates who were caught between city life and village tradition. This situation of a Sipirok-born writer grabbing popular print literature space for a Batak language turi-turian text in an atmosphere in which the state largely identified fine modern literature with Indonesian-language prose and Balai Pustaka-type Indies story lines showed evidence of a Batak writer seeking to upend colonial language hierarchies and processes of literary canon formation. To more fully understand Soetan Hasoendoetans literary accomplishments here, we can look next to one of the characteristic features of turi-turian chants: their claim to oversee a vast language landscape. This feature gave turi-turian texts like Datuk Tuongku some of their competitiveness, in relation to the linguistically less ambitious Balai Pustaka books. Soetan Hasoendoetans Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman was published by the Sjarif Siantar firm in the east coast Deli city of Pematang Siantar, where he was then living. He was the Pematang Siantar editor (perhaps more in the

26

Print, poetics and politics

sense of stringer) of the Angkola Batak language newspaper Tapian na Oeli, founded in Sibolga in 1919 (M. Said 1976:92). Soetan Hasoendoetan had been born and raised in the small roadside village of Pagaranjulu, which is located a few kilometres outside Sipirok on the way to Padangsidimpuan. He graduated from government school (open-access primary school) as a teenager. This was a normal circumstance then. At about age 18 he left the Sipirok area to migrate, on foot, to Pematang Siantar in east Sumatra, in search of salaried work. That is, he sought to become a person who mangan gaji, who eats from drawing a regular paycheck (a great sign of prestige in Sipirok, even today). Pematang Siantar is a commercial town lying about three hours car trip, today, from Medan. In Soetan Hasoendoetans early adulthood, Pematang Siantar had numerous Dutch residents, a Chinese Indonesian shopkeeper class, and a diversity of other southern Tapanuli migrs. Siantar also boasted several types of secondary schools and a major Normaal School, headed by Sipirok schoolman Sutan Martua Raja (the prominent textbook author mentioned above).9 The citys economy was shaped by Deli plantation enterprises in tea, tobacco, and rubber. Today, the international rubber business is still dominant there. Siantar was and is a bustling, polyglot place. After working first in a Dutch bank in Siantars city centre for several years, Soetan Hasoendoetan switched to a minor-level clerkship on a nearby plantation. He then went on to spend the majority of his career as a Crani I (head clerk) on a Dutch tea plantation outside town. He and his wife, a Sipirok woman, raised a large family of children in Siantar. Soetan Hasoendoetan wrote for freelance fees to help support them, contributing pieces on ceremonial speech and interesting events (a coolie uprising, a big horja feast) to the vernacular southern Batak newspapers of Siantar and Sibolga. He was also the author of a well-received verse narrative, Nasotardago. His novel Sitti Djaoerah appeared first in the Tapanuli newspaper Poestaha in 1927 and then was reissued as a book two years later, by the Sibolga publishing house Philemon bin Haroen. Soetan Hasoendoetan is not a well-known writer in terms of Indies or, now, Indonesian national acclaim. Far from it: few scholars of Indonesian national literature have heard of him or his prodigious output in Angkola Batak language publications. All of his published work, even his brilliant novel Sitti Djaoerah, were delimited by language access. Datuk Tuongku related Sipiroks own hometown chant tale, about the young nobleman Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman, his forest journeys to
9

I interviewed one of Soetan Hasoendoetans daughters about these biographical details in 1996, when she was living in retirement in Pagaranjulu after her husband had died (he had been a camat, a district administrator). She told me that the family did not have full copies of all of their fathers books, so I provided photocopies of the titles I had found in the National Library in Jakarta and in the KITLV in Leiden, the Netherlands.

I Introduction

27

secure a magic healing potion for his ill old mother, and his exhilarating but troubled encounter with a spirit girl, Si Tapi Mombang Suro di Langit, a daughter of the Sky World king, Sutan Batara Guru Doli. Datuk Tuongkus lengthy adventures in the human world and up in the Sky Continent gave the bards, and Soetan Hasoendoetan as literary raconteur, abundant opportunity to oversee Sipiroks large language universe of special speech forms. In the Sipirok turi-turian, Datuk Tuongku and Si Tapi Mombang marry and have a son, but Si Tapi Mombang flees her human home after her little boy discovers that his mother was just a girl found by the roadside, not a human woman and mother at all but a spirit girl who had no place in human genealogical history (no marga, no clan). This was a shameful circumstance for the child. Upon this discovery Si Tapi Mombang snatches her small son up in her arms, puts a spell on him to reduce his size to that of an areca nut, pops him into her hairbun for safekeeping, and dons her magic flying suit (which had carried her to earth in the first place, years before). She speeds back into the clouds toward her childhood home, up to the kingdom of her father, Sutan Batara Guru Doli. She returns there to her old childhood tasks of weaving magic cloth. She tries to mislead her family into believing that she is a still a virginal girl, not a wife and mother. As the oral, chanted tales wended their long way through their storylines about humans and the kingdom up above, they also presented Angkola and Mandailing audiences with a repast of special modes of speech. Any good turi-turian, that is, would ideally offer savoury tastes of many different types of ritual speech. There would be, for instance, womens lament songs (the andung), young peoples courtship poetry (martandang), invocations to the ancestors (tonggo-tonggo), wedding oratory (hata sipaingot ni boru), and verbal duels traded between houses united uneasily through marriage alliance (osong-osong, in couplets). There would also be new house entry oratory, blessing speeches, and formulae called surat tumbago holing speech. This was a sort of ritual talk used to recite the messages inlaid in the ancient leaf letters. These letters were not actual letters but rather such ceremonial objects as a brides gold spangled headgear and the woven red textiles laid across her chest for her wedding processions to her husbands village. Such regalia as the jewelled crown would tell the bride: be faithful to your new husband and keep your eyes demurely focussed on the ground in front of you as you walk along on your wedding processions. The gold headgear had light, dangling sections that hung down alongside each of the brides cheeks. The spangles literally prevented her from glancing too much from side to side. In this way the regalia spoke. The brides crossed red textiles on her chest told her, in this same elusive ancient leaf letters language: use your own forcefulness and might to protect your new kahanggi (your husbands close lineagemates and their

28

Print, poetics and politics

wives), much as your cloth costume mystically protects your body from dangers and harm throughout the wedding. Other, quite important surat tumbago holing messages lay inside the arcane arrangements of betel leaves which would be laid out atop porcelain plates at the beginning of horja, the feasts of merit held to solemnize large events such as weddings, house entries, and funerals, in wealthy and influential aristocratic lineages. Rajas (ceremonial speechmakers, and once, chiefs in a fuller political sense, see Castles 1972, 1975) would read the betel for its advice messages to the ceremonial assembly in such feasts. A turi-turian bard would take care to incorporate versions of such speeches into his chant as he spun out his long story about spirit world nobles and this-world princes and their spirit girl lovers. A complete turi-turian would also offer hearers a sampler of orations like those given by village chiefs at these horja water buffalo sacrifice feasts. A prominent type of these speeches was called alok-alok. They opened temporary time passages between the living and the long dead lineage ancestors. As well, a good turi-turian would include songs to accompany ritual tortor dances (songs called onang-onang). Ideally, such songs would be composed anew each time a different group of dancers stood up to dance.10 Their lineage identities and marriage alliance relationships would be praised in such lyrics (which also relied heavily on formulaic passages). A full-scale turi-turian would, additionally, also include curse speeches, spell-removal speeches, riddles, and even a dollop of the mystic way in which men should communicate with the tropical forest if they wished to lure aromatic resins from the trees with spiritual safety. In other words, Camphor Gathering Speech, a distinct register, as Van der Tuuk had found. The printed southern Batak chant tales of the 1910s to the late 1930s surveyed this bounteous language landscape in panoramic fashion, set it down in printed prose, and then went on to add schoolbookish or journalistic Introductions that positioned such Batak speech universes within the larger Tapanuli-to-Deli Indies language universe, and in regard to print literature standards of the time in the Indies. In fact, this large reach in terms of encompassing a wide language world is the main reason I dub the southern Tapanuli turi-turian epics. This is clearly a problematic term for performances and texts of this same general sort in island Southeast Asia (Sears 1996; Becker 1989; Flueckiger and Sears 1991). Are chanted tales like these more romances than epics, as has sometimes been said of the Ramayana? Do they include large-scale, grand societal founder figures? Not always, especially in the case of Sumatras much travelled and much-domesticated story cycles. But, like epics, the turi10

See my 1985 Symbolic patterning in Angkola Batak adat ritual for discussion of Sipirok tortor dancing and onang-onang song lyrics.

I Introduction

29

turian stories were capacious in their vision of the spoken world surrounding their bards and hearers. Their main conceit in this regard was that their narrative could encompass everything, all forms of speech. So, whatever the case with terminology in English, given the printed turi-turians scope they flattered the reader from Sipirok or that towns Deli diaspora into imagining that he or she was in possession of a hata of most surpassing beauty, complexity, and comprehensiveness a hata that coursed up and down ritual speech registers and that outshone Dutch or Indonesian, for sure (readers were urged to believe). Much political as well as artistic mischief within a colonial context could occur here, given these ambitious language claims. Turi-turian tales in print narrated multiple and inter-referential social journeys, for one thing. At the most overt level, turi-turian like Datuk Tuongku, as noted, told exciting stories about aristocratic young human men who leave their home villages on long, dangerous, mysterious quests. These would lead them into distant woodland realms that were marked out in the tales with explicit reference to high mountain peaks that audience members would recognize as actual geographical landmarks nearby. Despite their resonances with wider Malay world hikayat narratives and village tales, Angkola and Mandailing turi-turian were indeed quite domesticated as to geographic layout. For instance, in my fieldwork in the Sipirok area I once lived for nine months in a village within sight of Mount Nanggar Jati, a craggy peak that figures in the Datuk Tuongku tale as the heros slippery stairway up into the Sky Continent. In the tales forest lands, the protagonists (like Datuk Tuongku and his feckless little brother, Si Ali Tunjuk Parmanoan) would meet supernatural beings, such as talking civet cats, or Jolma So Begu, (Human Yet Evil Spirit). They would also meet the lovely, beguiling daughters of the spirit rajas of the Upper World, girls with names like the Honourable Radiant Moonlight. These spirit girls had travelled down to the human world, the Middle World here on earth, to play once a year in magic fragrant flower groves. This is a formulaic phrase: these tales obviously recall the wine-dark-sea sort of usage familiar from bardic poetry worldwide. Mystic groves banked with sweet-smelling blossoms appear often in Malay tales, wherever they travel. The spirit girls had reached these botanic playgrounds by donning their bialal-biulul magic flying suits. The first words are nonsense phrases, influenced in this case by Arabic and said for aural effects (in the Datuk Tuongku story many of these allude to Minangkabau usage). The bialal-biulul winged costumes were made of pastel silk; they shimmered in the sun and made humans gaze up in awe and pleasure as Si Tapi Mombang (our heroine) and her sisters coursed lightly from cloud to cloud. The human heroes would often meet and fall in love with these ethereal girls, after extended courtship poetry exchanges told in mock-combat style (the better

30

Print, poetics and politics

to take up time in these lengthy narratives). The boys would then pursue the spirit girls longingly; halalungun emotions (of longing, pining, and loneliness) figure prominently in turi-turian aesthetics. Despite all this courtship, though, the young women tended to flit back to their home behind the sky, back to their spirit raja fathers house, back to the weaving looms of their childhood. Sometimes children would result from these between-world affairs, and the small sons and daughters would themselves become travellers between pairs of complementary opposites: between Sky World and human continent; between mothers family and fathers kin; between supernatural realm and mundane existence on earth; and between past ancestral times and everyday life in the here-and-now. Beyond these entertaining storylines, however, the printed turi-turian also alluded softly to other journeys, such as the real-world ones that many readers families had made from their highland home villages to Deli plantation jobs and to long-term east coast residence. Another crucial journey was also in play: the transition from ritual speech to print, concretized by these very turiturian texts in their readers hands. The turi-turian stories had become items of literate consumption, tasty bits of commercially available conserved culture. An additional quest manifestly also underlay the printed turi-turian: an imagined journey from Batak tradition to Indies modernity, both of which the turi-turian books had a role in constructing in forceful emotional tones for their readers. Put differently, these turi-turian books and newspaper serializations were textual arenas that catalysed southern Batak thought about modernity in the Indies with imageries of heritage and more specifically, with luscious and enjoyable references to old style Batak language ways. This was also the case with southern Batak language novels and newspaper writing of the time. In all three fields of literature, the beauty and ritual authority of the old oratory was held by many Angkola and Mandailing writers to be a much-needed part of the dangerous journey to Deli and more generally to modern life in Hindia Belanda, the Dutch East Indies (Rodgers 1991a). According to some prominent writers, at least (Soetan Hasoendoetan certainly among them), the lovely old ritual speech routines and the extended night time chant narratives paradoxically provided some of the tua, the magic luck powers, that were needed to survive the threatening transition to Deli and the modern age with moral equilibrium. Given this, the turi-turian texts prodded readers to wonder: What was the nature of social community here down below, on the Earth Continent, in Sumatra in a colonial age? The government schoolrooms had privileged the study of Dutch and Malay/Indonesian but they had also given southern Batak bards and audiences seditious access to the technology and turns of mind of print. Authors like Soetan Hasoendoetan narrated Sumatran landscapes through a haze of turi-turian imagery and word play. In the process,

I Introduction

31

Dutch dominion over the island was questioned, and sometimes undercut. In such textual settings turi-turian like Datuk Tuongku asked: What was the social landscape of Sumatra under Dutch dominion? Given what these epics had to say about Sipirok, Angkola, and Mandailing identities, geography, cosmology, language accomplishments, old village heritages, and ritual oratorys beauty and pleasurability, might Sumatran space have been something quite different for turi-turian readers than the plans found on the administrative maps of the island drawn by the state in Batavia? Students of colonial culture from fields such as anthropology, history, and literary studies can perhaps discern one more question in the language play of these printed turi-turian, in terms of the ways that these tales contributed to the construction of Batak identities in the Dutch East Indies. Turi-turian texts like Datuk Tuongku ask: What was the nature of colonial control in places like these in the decades immediately preceeding the cataclysm of World War II and then national independence? To what degree were peoples like the Batak colonized, if they were writing robust literatures of this sort? Correspondingly, to what extent was a constructed category such as a Batak language not only a product of colonial school pedagogy, Dutch folkloristics, and Christian mission policies but also a creation of indigenous writers, readers, and the discursive practices undergirding the publication of such works as Datuk Tuongku? And, what does it mean to speak of colony and colonial state in extremely fluid social situations like these, where print literacy and the use of the Latin alphabet pushed these two sides to collapse into each other in complex and morally ambiguous ways? These are questions we can continue to pursue throughout this introductory essay, but first, some indication, from my fieldwork in Sipirok, of how these tales worked as actual oral performances. There is no direct way of reporting the sort of chanted performances that Soetan Hasoendoetan himself had heard as a boy around 1900 in Pagaranjulu (the village had famous bards). He tells readers of Datuk Tuongku that he had carefully consulted several prominent chanters from around Sipirok in his efforts to write the tale down, and he clearly had attended and enjoyed many recitals of this one story. Although no tape recording or film of a colonial-era Datuk Tuongku performance exists, and the tale may well have gone through important permutations over the years, a more contemporary performance of the story that I heard does provide some information on Datuk Tuongku as a ritual event, as a sung performance.

32

Print, poetics and politics

Datuk Tuongku in performance By the mid and late 1970s when I did my first fieldwork in Sipirok, the ceremonial rajas who had taken to supervising my studies of Angkola Batak language oratory had an extraordinarily difficult time finding a bayo parturi who could deliver an asli, an original, genuine chant performance for me to tape record (one of my assigned tasks). These rajas were themselves deeply engaged in a search for aboriginal southern Batak budaya or culture the very thing they took as the proper object of my studies, as a visiting anthropologist. At the time I was not really focused at all on turi-turian but was devoting most of my efforts trying to tape record and understand the ritual speech of the horja, the buffalo sacrifice feasts of merit. But, since my raja mentors spoke so often of turi-turian chant performances as the ne plus ultra of superb speech and refined storytelling, after several months of listening to their eulogies along these lines I too entered into a quest for an authentic turi-turian that we could all hear together and set down on tape. Clearly this sort of salvage anthropology was the proper research agenda for me, I was led to understand. We did eventually manage to tape record a two-night-long version of the Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman chant. This was performed by Baginda Hatimbulan, a man in his sixties from the Padang Bolak area (about an hour and a half bus drive from Sipirok, in a relatively dry plainland region). This recording session took place in the house of my Angkola Batak language teacher Bapak G.W. Siregar in October, 1975. Bapak G.W. was 77 years old at the time and a retired public schoolteacher. Bapak G.W. (also known around town as Guru Ginding) had taught Batak language and literature classes for Sipiroks Middle School No. 2 in the 1950s. This followed an earlier career in the colonial period as a HIS teacher, an instructor of teachers in Kabanjahe, Karo, and as a school inspector on Nias Island from the late 1930s through the Japanese occupation. We provided Baginda Hatimbulan with cigarettes, a promise of a set of copies of the tapes, and brandy to sip on throughout the night to keep his voice strong (surely not for its alcoholic content, he assured us). We also bought the goat he had asked for as an offering to the ancestors to open the chant. A motley group of little children and ompu-ompu (grandparents) from around Bapak G.W.s house in the Kampung Tinggi neighbourhood of Sipirok crowded into his and his wife Ompu Christinas front room, for the performances on each of the two nights. Bapak G.W.s and Ompu Christinas adopted teenage daughter Ida and some of her girlfriends kept the whole company provided with hot coffee laced with liberal amounts of tinned, sweetened, condensed milk. This was a particular sign of wealth and gracious living: after all, my research grants were funding this tape recording session.

I Introduction

33

Over the next several weeks Baginda Hasudungan Siregar (a raja, middle school teacher, and also, later, my close translation colleague) helped Bapak G.W. Siregar and me make a transcript of the tapes. Turi-turian speech is so far from conversational Angkola or Mandailing Batak that even Bapak G.W. felt that he needed help in making out some of the phrases from our recordings. These tapes and my typescript in themselves soon became items of public antiquarian interest in Sipirok and in several nearby villages. Many of the rajas of our acquaintance wanted copies, which Bapak G.W. and I provided. Baginda Hatimbulans sung chant was properly tabo, delicious. Short excerpts will perhaps show in what ways this was so and will also hint at some of the oratorical and song culture that the late colonial-era turi-turian writers redacted in their textualization projects. Baginda Hatimbulans Datuk Tuongku story goes as follows for its first several performance minutes.
Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee............... Ompung ancient ancestor full of magic luck powers, I offer respect, Ompung, to the most auspicious day of the earth, to the most auspicious day of the sky, may you not start in surprise and grow angry, to hear this oh-so-far-from-lovely voice of this poor suffering child of this andung lament sung here. If you should start and shake in surprise let it be only to shower good health, good luck on all of us gathered here. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee.............. I offer great respect Ompung to the origin-times land, to the land for gathering beeswax, to the land brimming with yellow smoking sulphur, may you not start and shake in surprise to hear the poor voice of this suffering child of this andung lament. If you should start in surprise may you shake only to shower health upon us, we who gather together here. I bow down in respect Ompung to the Begu spirits, I bow down in respect Ompung to the Begus who course upriver and down here in Sipirok, may they not start and shake in surprise, to hear this so-far-from-lovely voice of this suffering child offering this andung lament to us here. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee.............. The spokes of the spinning wheel, Ompung, the bamboo slats inside the fish-trap, since we are all firmly lined up together with a single purpose here, let us step lightly down a little fork in the road, let us branch off a bit like a twig on a tree, here in the words of this turi-turian, here in the words of this fine story, to the matter of that great raja, Datuk Tuongku Tuan Malim Leman, who casts Epidemic Spells and protects from them, who reads the gold-encrusted royal umbrellas for messages, who courses off to Daret, who suddenly appears in Mecca, who traverses the sea waves to Mecca and Medina, who died and miraculously came back to life, who drops from the sky, who flows like a geyser from the earth. That royal son of storied Pagaruyung, that Datu sorcerer, that youngest Mangaraja, that flourishing, most wealthy young leaf on the Tree of Life. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee............... That youth from the village of Kuala Batang Muar, that silent abandoned royal village, that much-traversed centre of the Eight Domains, that mystic peninsula land, that place where areca nuts flourish in the moonlight, that mystic marshland, that village where the tree stumps lie submerged, where

34

Print, poetics and politics red sugar palms grow in thick clumps, where ambasang manggoes course down in rich cascades, there at the upper reaches of the Bila River, there in the island buffeted by fierce winds. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeee............... Ah indeed many are the branches of the barkcloth tree, many more the branches of the baguri bush, many are the words of Tuan Commoner, far more of course the words of the turi, putting forth the pain, the suffering of those who lived in the past. Ah now we uproot the baguri bush but the simaragong-agong plant tags along, ah, we set out the turi words in order but look, it reminds us of all thats painful. Ah Ompung, whats to be done, we pull down the bamboo trunk but we also dislodge the caterpillars cocoon, that is just like awakening feelings of loss and sadness, opening up all manner of pain, that pain and suffering of that fine raja, Datuk Tuongku Tuan Malim Leman.

The chant went on for many hours more in this same format. This rendition of Datuk Tuongku had the hypnotic alliteration, reliance on formulaic phrases, and repetitive cadences of much bardic performance around the world. The entire tale was presented in a low-toned, droned chant. Throughout it all Baginda Hatimbulan reclined on a thick rattan floor mat (Bapak G.W. and Ompu Christinas best) with his head propped up with his right hand and his left hand cupped to his ear. After every several long stretches of story incidents he would pause briefly to take a short break. He often sequed into this with a line about needing to pause in the turi to smoke a cigarette. The literary bards themselves often evoked these same transitional formula on the pages of their books as they concluded a chapter (see for instance Magaradja Goenoeng Sorik Marapi 1957:40-1). Our taped narrative was overtly traditional in terms of following a familiar storyline and regaling listeners with clusters of stock phrases, sometimes ones specifically identified with this particular tale. The praise phrases for Datuk Tuongkus name, for instance, and the words lauding the beauty and prosperity of his home village are old chestnuts that are used specifically in this one turi-turian. Beyond such traditionalisms, though, this Datuk Tuongku performance was also creative. Baginda Hatimbulan told us later that his Datuk Tuongku would follow out different little tree branches each time he sang the tale. That is, he would add on or leave out different small side storylines (any Datuk Tuongku recital has an abundance) with each retelling. Typically for turi-turian, this 1975 Datuk Tuongku performance also had that other important aspect of these southern Tapanuli chant tales: as indicated above, it offered hearers a view of a village speech world seen entire. During the full seventeen hour length of this performance, Baginda Hatimbulan had his characters speak in numerous oratory formats as they moved through their forest adventures, encountered spirits, and as first Si Tapi Mombang and then Datuk Tuongku ascended on up into the heavens (Si Tapi Mombang with the aid of her magic flying suit and Datuk Tuongku

I Introduction

35

by eventually managing to scale Mount Nanggar Jati, after several hilarious pratfalls and run-ins with duplicitous talking animals, such as an alarmingly hungry giant garuda bird). Alongside this, as the bard, Baginda Hatimbulan proceeded through the introductory tonggo-tonggo invocation to the ancestors and on through a variety of other ritual speech forms as the story unwound. This comprehensiveness was apparently designed to awe the audience with the oral bards breadth of oratory competence, much as the wayang puppeteer in Java or Bali impresses his listeners by presenting all the speaking parts of a complex portion of the Ramayana to his hearers. Within this wide language panorama, this turi-turian performance also (again quite typically) provided a spacious tour of what anthropologists call a kinship system. This was because Hata Angkola assumes that all human speaking partners will stand in specific lineage descent or marriage alliance relationships to each other. In some sense, surely, protagonists of Angkola and Mandailing turi-turian were portrayed as bigger than life, as floating about the edges of normal human existence. They were Jolma So Begu, Human Yet Evil Spirit, or scaly anteaters who talked, or half-this world, half-Sky World young women like Si Tapi Mombang, or (late in the story) gondang gong and drum musicians with preternatural talents. All were residents of an extraordinary time before the present day, back when the sky still touched the earth and the denizens of the two realms were still in contact with each other. But, despite all this, all the speaking parts of a chant recital would also have a definite, more mundane Sipirok kin term talk (martutur) ethos to them. That is, the conversational partners would stand in hierarchically organized family relationships to each other. These relationships would shape the tone, style, and lexical choice of their communication. A chanter would have to evoke this entire family world of manners by having his characters speak the correct tutur, the proper kin term and kin relation talk. In addition, the chant recital as a whole would have a gendered element to it, as the andung laments of men. We can start with that point and then go on to the matter of Sipirok martutur kin term talk, as this was presented in turi-turian narratives like that of Baginda Hatimbulan. The turi-turians chanted performance style set them apart in terms of their air of mystery from other Angkola and Mandailing narratives such as hobar-kobaran (folk stories, about such characters as brave, diminutive Mousedeer, a clever little animal found in many Malay world village stories) and tarombo. These were clan genealogies, or more accurately put for southern Tapanuli, lineage genealogies, since few of these histories in this particular region extend far back in time to the toga, or clan founders. Rather, tarombo generally trace descent in a rather loose story format from the lineage ancestors about twelve to fifteen generations before the present. These were men who purportedly first opened rice farmland from the virgin forest in

36

Print, poetics and politics

places like Sipirok. These ancestors, tarombo reciters often hold, walked from more ancient clan origin spots in Toba, such as Muara, the settlement associated with Toga Siregar. Tarombo telling in any set narrative format is not very common in the Sipirok region. Although older men from some aristocratic lines do know their history in some detail, actual narratives on such matters are rare. This is in contrast apparently to the situation in Toba, where clan histories can be deep and detailed. This situation fascinated Dutch adat law scholars working in Toba. Their keen interest in Toba tarombo, in fact, may have artificially rigidified the genre there, through folklore collecting. What little tarombo telling there is in Sipirok is a male genre. Womens andung stands in opposition to this, but even more, andung is the female counterpart to mens turi-turian sung narrative. The chants of bardic turi-turian performance are more moaned than sobbed, although the singers say that their turi-turian are the way that men cry, in contrast to the andung mourning laments of women. Andung wails are sob speech and are performed at funerals when a company of women relatives bid a wrenching, public goodbye to a dead person when the corpse is laid out in the coffin immediately prior to burial. In one form, bereaved women berate the deceased for having the heart to go and leave them like this. They bemoan their sad fate to be left behind in death, as lonely as a tiny child left alone in a wide grass field, as bereft as a horse who has just lost a big race. Andung has many such formulaic phrases. Men typically do not sing andung either at funerals or at the other major occasions for their wives and mothers sob-speech. Womens andung also occurs at weddings, when a daughter leaves her childhood home to move to her husbands house, often in a distant village. The brides themselves andung lament their childhood bed, the door lintel of their parents home, and their old playground outside as they slowly leave all of these spots during the early stage of the wedding ceremony when the young woman is fetched from her village by the grooms party. The brides older women relatives will lament her departure, and her mother will sometimes lament the piles of bride price gold (in actuality, cash Rupiah bills) laid out in stacks on folded sarong cloths as the money is transferred from the grooms close lineage mates, or kahanggi, to that of the brides parents. Her fathers kahanggi consists of his brothers, his father and that mans brothers, all these mens direct male descendants, and the women who have married these people. Women carry the kahanggi of their husbands. In this they are said to be pareban (common-members-of-asingle-kahanggi), much as males within a kahanggi are also pareban. Such persons have a free and easy joking relationship with each other, accompanied by jocular banter. In full performance form when sobbed out complete with lavish use of its special, indirect phrases, womens andung is spectacular clearly womens

I Introduction

37

most affecting and highly respected form of ritual speech. Today very few women in the Sipirok area perform andung, beyond a few sobbed out phrases. According to my fieldwork interviews, lengthier laments were apparently performed with some regularity in mountain villages through the 1920s and 1930s. The male turi-turian chanters defined their performances over against this special high speech of adept old women. And, importantly, the bards took advantage of andungs special mystery and beauty by incorporating snatches of the sob-speech itself into their sung narratives (for instance, when a woman character laments the death of a child). Furthermore, the male chanters also took the distinctive andung phrases and used them more generally throughout their narratives. For instance, andungs abundant use of infix forms (harkar, to humarkar) reappears in turi-turian storytelling. So too does andungs emotionally evocative phraseology about little children abandoned by parents in wide grassfields and so on. Such usage lends the turi-turian stories an air of heightened affect, a tone of wrenching sadness and regretfulness. In the most general sense, male bards in effect engulfed womens prime genre of high ritual speech and tapped into its power for their own claims to authoritativeness. The incorporation of andung laments within the larger story frame of a turi-turian tale also shows some of the male bards ambitions here: to relate a speech world in its entirety, something that the women lamenters do not attempt. To survey broad ritual speech terrain, the turi-turian bard had to be a master of both the oratory of the aristocrats, the rajas, and the more everyday martutur or kin term talk of regular people. Sipirok rajas in truth are not that prepossessing as an actual, highly privileged class. Chieftainship leagues in the Padangsidimpuan and Sipirok areas never coalesced into full-scale traditional states, even when the Dutch systems of indirect rule rather artificially propped up certain close kahanggi lineages over rival ones (Castles 1972, 1975). Mandailing Great Houses were somewhat closer to a model of noble high status and privilege, a situation that many turi-turian tales describe (grand palaces with high-peaked roofs often appear in the stories). Beyond the sorts of turi-turian talk that the bard would assign to his glorious aristocratic characters and the Spirit World kings, though, these stories would also encompass a good deal of more down to earth lineagemate-to-lineagemate discourse, and much mannered conversation between marriage alliance partners. For this sort of family talk, the bard would have to have a keen sense for the workings of what is today called the dalihan na tolu, the three stones on the hearth for balancing a cookpot. One stone is ones kahanggi-mates, another is mora (the wife-providers to ones kahanggi), and a third is anakboru (the kahanggi that receives our daughters as brides). Anakboru means girl children vis--vis a brides parents. These young womens husbands

38

Print, poetics and politics

are also girl children to the brides parents. In a direct sense, mora means wealthy, rich. Indeed, mora is a key source of the worlds most central valuables: brides, spiritual health-blessings, and tua magic luck prosperity, which makes the crops grow and the livestock remain plump and fertile. A moras anakboru wife-receivers are obligated to give back the mundane valuables of bride price payments, rice field labor services, and support in times of war to their beneficent mora their sky, their bestower of blessings from on high. The southern Batak societies, in the ideal at least, have a strong form of this sort of marriage alliance involving as it does linked giver and receiver houses (seen metaphorically, each dalihan na tolu partner is a house). Anthropologists call this a system of asymmetrical marriage alliance (Lvi-Strauss 1969; see Singarimbun 1975 and Kipp 1984, 1986 specifically on Karo alliance, comparable in several ways to Angkola alliance). A similar marriage system was famously described by E.R. Leach in his Political systems of highland Burma (1954). This is a study that rightly stressed the instability of these alliance structures. Leach notes that in more politically centralized contexts, such marriage systems can intertwine with ideologies of traditional class hierarchy, while in more egalitarian settings (dispersed highland villages, for instance) these marriage alliance schemes of thought can oscillate in the other direction, away from hierarchy. Numerous eastern Indonesian societies have village social ideologies that describe structurally similar forms of marriage alliance (Van Wouden 1968; Fox 1980). In Sipirok, the gift of a bride from a long-established mora to its long-time, lower status wife-receivers in each generation is said in the ritual speech to maintain the proper, hierarchically ranked relationship between the two houses and between the lineages that metaphorically stand behind them. In the stylized ceremonial oratory, such alliance relationships are said to keep village social order itself peaceful and productive, and to help empower a benevolent cosmos. Each lineage has a number of mora and a number of anakboru, in practice, although wealthier houses tend to boast of our heirloom mora and our heirloom anakboru, ones long established in those marriage alliance roles. And, as noted, these two partners have a third house in cooperation with them. That is, a focal group of lineagemates will have a wife-giving house but will also themselves serve as wife-givers to a third house. Daughters as brides should only walk (the exact imagery) in one direction, not back to an established giver house. Precise types of gifts and counter-gifts flow between the marriage alliance partner houses, helping to enhance fertility and luck in each generation. A bride walks from her father and mothers house to her new home of marriage, accompanied by moras key fertility gifts such as woven, red, black, and gold textiles called ulos. Her new husbands house is correspondingly obligated to send back bridewealth payments (metal goods, the cash and labor services mentioned above, and also livestock) to the

I Introduction

39

young womans natal home (more precisely, to her fathers close-in lineage). Anakboru (again, in the ideal) provide physical labor services for mora such as field labor by teenage boys interested in meeting future brides, and work serving food and drink at moras horja ceremonies. The wife-givers in turn shower their supplicant anakboru with spiritual blessings and supernatural protection from bala, from great harm. All pairs of wife-givers and wife-receivers also have large repertoires of stylized forms of speech available to them, for their mannered interactions at ceremonial occasions such as horja feasts, bride price negotiation sessions, and smaller-scale village rituals of thanksgiving (joyful siriaon occasions) and sorrow (siluluton events, such as funerals). Every focal lineage will at times speak as anakboru to other lineages, and at times as mora to other alliance partners. Marriages should ideally be contracted with kahanggi of other clans. As a house goes through time, its men and women take on many oratorical roles, exchanging speeches as blessings or eulogies, as appropriate. Sometimes they will speak as kahanggi hosting a ceremony, sometimes they will speak as another kahanggis supplicant wife-receiver anakboru, sometimes they will say ceremonial words (mandok hata) as another houses anakboru of anakboru (that is, as the pisang raut). They will also perhaps speak as mora of another kahanggi, and then again as mora of mora (mora langit habiaran, Mora Fearsome Sky), and so on. The youthful daughters of the house will call mora to their fathers and these mens kahanggi-mates. To repeat, the girls are anakboru, literally girl children, to their natal houses. So too are their husbands: both are girls, anakboru, to the wifes father. Anakborus ceremonial role of serving food to mora, on their knees, ties into this. Women and their spouses are of a single kahanggi vis--vis a common mora, their bride-giving and fertility-power providing house. An up/down spatial imagery is often invoked in this regard. Mora is higher and anakboru lower, a pattern played out choreographically in the tortor dances of a feast. Anakboru dancers endeavor to keep their heads lower than those of mora. Oratory in Sipirok has strong, overt marriage alliance sinews to it in these ways, since ritual speechmakers deliver blessings and praise orations or argumentative but affectionate verbal duels, all with an eye toward keeping the flow of gifts and human and agricultural fecundity moving along in the proper directions. Ritual words themselves have a palpable gift-like quality to them within this calculus of clan loyalties and hierarchically ranked marriage alliance. Oratory is active in the world in this regard if well-phrased and well-delivered in a pressured, quick, but still mellifluous way, the hata (the words) work to empower the flow of life (an apt phrase from some of the scholarship on eastern Indonesia, see Fox 1980). This courses between past and present and among the houses tied together by marriage and by the gift of brides in each generation.

40

Print, poetics and politics

Turi-turian bards luxuriated in all this oratory tied to marriage alliance. Although the Malay world tales told elsewhere about quests and Sky World princesses were not predicated on such Batak social realities, in a Sipirok rendition of Datuk Tuongku each of the storys major characters would take on complex dalihan na tolu relationships to all the other protagonists. Sky World people too were reckoned into this-world kin term talk: the Sky World king, Sutan Batara Guru Doli, for instance, has Datuk Tuongku as his bere, his sisters son and daughters husband. The ideal marriage consists of a match between first cousins, between a young man and his mothers brothers daughter, his boru tulang, his daughter-of-mothers-brother. The Sipirok turi bard would consistently modulate the statements he imputed to each character into line with good martutur standards. In this, he was again rather like a dhalang (puppeteer) in Javanese shadow plays, in that both spoke all the parts of a full human world. Seven nights of turi chanting gave bards delicious opportunities to survey all these Sipirok kinship and alliance interrelationships. This would form the substrate of turi-turian conversation among the characters. These conversations would then be laid out onto a larger spatial framework: the Upper World and its spirit kings, bestowing their lovely daughters on the human men of the Continent Below, the human world. Added to this would be the profuse laments, the curses, the ceremonial communications with the powerful dead, the strange and haunting Camphor Gathering Talk, and so on. This was the general sort of bardic performance that turi-turian amateur folklorists like Soetan Hasoendoetan interacted with, in translating the chants and their personal memories of them into Latin alphabet texts. The way they did this was strongly shaped by their experiences with a specific type of print culture: Batak vernacular journalism. It is to this form of writing and its perhaps unexpected turi-turian chant connections that we now turn. Early publication circumstances: turi-turian and folkloric writing in the Batak vernacular press By the 1910s Batak language newspaper writing had arrived with force in southern Tapanuli. This was a vernacular press, staffed with numerous Angkola and Mandailing editors and freelance contributors. Many were or had been employed by the government schools. Prominent among such newspapermen were Dja Endar Bongsoe, Soetan Casayangan Soripada (a wellknown schoolman and journalist, educated in the Netherlands), Mangaradja Bangoen Batari, Mangaradja Tagor Moeda, Mangaradja Hoetagogar, and Mangaradja Salamboewe (M. Said 1976; Adam 1995). In the more immediate pre-Revolution years, a number of other newspapermen with southern

I Introduction

41

Tapanuli family origins also became prominent in the growing Indonesian language nationalist press (for instance, Flora, and Parada Harahap). The Batak vernacular press that shaped turi-turian publishing was a sturdy local growth not only because of its staffing patterns: it also construed journalism through a sense of language infused by oratory aesthetics. In the most generic sense, in ideal type terms, newspapers worldwide report quotidian events. By design they quickly lose their currency, to be replaced in the next issue by still newer news. Their rhetorical style aims for clean-lined reportage on a non-nonsense who-what-where-when format. The imagined newspaper reader is a consumer of informational texts and (editors hope) a devotee of advertisements. The reader grabs his or her paper each morning, oversees its sociologically busy panoply of stories and features, and comes to see the world on the journalistic page in a special way. As Benedict Anderson writes in his study of nationalism and its connections to print-ascommodity (Anderson 1991), the newspaper is a profoundly fictive genre that conjures up (at once) specific types of social communities, imageries of time, and visions of language (Anderson 1991:33):
What is the essential literary convention of the newspaper? If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by Mitterand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition (a later edition will substitute a baseball triumph for Mitterand) shows that the linkage between them is imagined.

Anderson goes on to assert that this imagined linkage derives from two obliquely related sources (Anderson 1991:33): calendrical coincidence, and the relationship between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market (Anderson 1991:33).
In this perspective, the newspaper is merely an extreme form of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity. Might we say: one-day bestsellers? The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing curious that one of the earlier mass-produced commodities should so pre-figure the inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables nonetheless, for just this reason, creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (imagining) of the newspaper-as-fiction. (Anderson 1991:34-5.)

The innumerable readers engaged in this same mass ceremony of surveying their morning newspapers form (Anderson contends) an imagined community thus primed by this specific reading activity to think of the world in terms of national communities. The latter like the newspaper itself are

42

Print, poetics and politics

conceptualized as rooted in everyday reality and as moving unidirectionally through secular time. The Batak vernacular press engaged these international-level communication systems processes but also redacted them into line with Tapanuli and Deli language ideologies, which were immersed in oratorical aesthetics at the same time that they were shaped by Indies-era print literacy. The result was an indelibly domesticated product: a newspaper rooted in small places like Sibolga and Padangsidimpuan. A glance at some of the Tapanuli papers co-existent with colonial-era turi-turian publishing will show this, but first, some historical background on Indies journalism for readers who may be non-specialists. The growth of the vernacular press in the colonial Indies and in colonial Malaya as well, particularly in relation to the rise of nationalism, has been fairly extensively studied.11 This research identifies several trends common to both colonies: the slow development and then the political and financial vulnerability of the Malay/Indonesian language press; the fact that a local journalism industry was a mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon, with a growth spurt in the Indies in the 1920s-1930s (when public discussion of both nationalist hopes and tradition versus modernity debates relied heavily on press outlets); and the rise of cagey writing and editing strategies on the part of native reporters and managers to deal with often heavy handed government censorship. In addition, in both the Netherlands East Indies and Malaya, the Malay/Indonesian language press was originally financed and edited by Europeans and Eurasians, until the mid 1800s. The Indies first non-Dutch language paper was Bromartani, a Javanese paper published in Surakarta (Solo) in 1855. The Indies first Malay language newspaper appeared a year later (the Soerat Kabar Bahasa Melaijoe, a Surabaya product). Press history in Malaya and the Indies is united on another front too: the Chinese business communities of both had a keen interest in supporting and nurturing a commercial press, in part to advertise their goods and keep a flow of financial information going, but also in part to support local Chinese social activism. In fact, press historian Ahmat Adam asserts that the Indies Malay language press gained its first political inspiration from the successful use of journalism by Peranakan Chinese intellectuals over the 1880s and 1890s period. At that time they used the press to lobby for a government relaxation of such repressive laws as the Travel Pass Ordinance (Adam 1995:59-71). Ahmat Adam points out that this law had required itinerant Chinese traders to register for the night if they were caught in a village overnight. Peddlers often
11

Adam 1982, 1995; Anderson 1991; Hagen 1997; Hooker 2000; Milner 1995; Roff 1967; M. Said 1976. For thought-provoking comparable material on the Vietnamese vernacular press, see Marr 1981.

I Introduction

43

had no time to meet government deadlines for this and were often forced to pay corruption money bribes in order to conduct business in isolated areas (Adam 1982:4-5). Pro-Chinese articles in the Chinese and European Indies press set the scene for the establishment of the Chinese social organization Tiong Hoa Hwe Kioan in 1900. This showed a native Indonesian readership of these same papers that newspapers could work as political soapboxes, and that they could also undergird actual social movements. A local Indies press in languages like Batak grew in the cracks of these same edifices of trade needs and nationalist concerns. Ahmat Adam traces some important time lines here that put Tapanuli and Deli developments into perspective. The earliest newspaper-like organs in the Indies were informational broadsheets exchanged among traders during the time of the VOC. For instance, the Memorie der Nouvelles, a compendium of mercantile notes and excerpts from letters, were circulated among the Companys employees in various parts of the island chain in the 1600s (Adam 1995:3). The first actual paper, the Bataviase Nouvelles, appeared in 1744, from the Castle Publishing House. This folio-sheet journal printed advertisements as well as small news items. But, the board of directors of the VOC ordered it shut down in 1746, for fear that merchants from other countries would learn too much about the Dutch trade in the archipelago. Thirty years later the Vendu Nieuws arrived, published by L. Dominicus, Batavias city printer (Adam 1995:3). Largely an advertiser, this paper may have been somewhat accessible to local populations in the city. It was referred to popularly as a surat lelang, an auction paper a characterization of the newspaper as a publishing form that Adam writes continued well into the 1800s for native observers. When the VOC came to a legal end in 1799 and the governance of the Indies passed to the home administration in the Netherlands the press scene began to change. By 1810 the weekly Bataviasche Koloniale Courant started publication in the capital. It again stressed advertisements. The British temporarily replaced the Dutch in the colony from 1811 to 1816; the Java Government Gazette weekly appeared in consequence. With the Dutch again in power, the Bataviasche Courant (later called the Javasche Courant) began publication. At this early date there was in effect no newspaper readership in the outer islands or for that matter in much of Java at all. Formal schooling allowing even rudimentary access to the Dutch language lay in the future for Indies residents. A Protestant missionary press did develop near Batavia, Adam goes on to report (Adam 1995:5-7). The Calivinist seminary in the capital acquired a printing press in 1743 (which they then lost to the Castle Printing House in 1755). The Moluccan branch of the mission had imported a press for evangelization by 1813. An English mission press also established a toehold in Bengkulu, south Sumatra, starting in 1819 (Bengkulu fell to the Dutch late, in 1826). These mission presses and others in Ambon, Tomohon,

44

Print, poetics and politics

Tondano, Kupang, and Banjarmasin (Adam 1995:6) concentrated on booklet and pamphlet publication, not newspapers. The large missionary thrust into church journalism was largely a post-1850 phenomenon. From 1825 to mid-century, the Dutch business community supported privately printed Dutch language newspapers in Batavia, Semarang, and Surabaya (Dutch language journalism was the only one available until 1855). Adam (1995:8) points to a symbiosis of government and journalism in this period but also some tenseness, noting that:
Prior to 1856, no less than sixteen papers had appeared in the Indies, from both government and private publishers. Of these, ten were privately owned. There were also two periodicals. The monthly Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indi became the first periodical to be published in the Netherlands East Indies. Permission to publish it was granted by Government decision No. 1 of January 10, 1838. Edited by the Reverend W.R. Baron van Hovell, the magazine, which tried to minimize government interference in its contents, was printed at the Landsdrukkerij.

The Landsdrukkerij was the government publishing house. By the 1850s and 1860s Javas priyayi hereditary aristocracy had gained some access to Latin alphabet literacy and low-level officials had some familiarity with the Dutch language press. These two decades saw what was in effect the birth of the native press, in court cities and trading entrepts with significant European populations and Chinese business communities: Solo, Surabaya, Semarang. The Javanese language Bromartani appeared in 1855, at a time when the colonial government was still debating a new press law. European, Eurasian, Peranakan Chinese, and now Javanese editors and correspondents had moderate hopes for press liberalization, but as Adam (1982:1) reports, the muchwaited Press Act which was finally introduced in 1856 soon aroused great disquiet among publishers and printers. Article 13 of the Act, supplemented by Articles 15-18, clearly stipulated the system of preventive censorship. The Act not only required printers or publishers to send signed copies of their paper or periodical to the Head of Local Government, the Public Prosecutor and the General Secretariat (failing which they would face a fine of between 50 to 1,000 guilders) but also empowered the government to supervise the operation of the press by stipulating that publication depended on permission from the government and that the Governor General had the power to stop the publication of any paper or periodical. The Governor General also had unlimited powers to expel anyone who appeared to pose a threat to peace in the Netherlands Indies. Vernacular papers in Malay and also in such languages as Batak and Minangkabau were to experience pers delicts (punishments for offenses against the Press Laws), the jailing of editors, and forced closings of long and short durations throughout the rest of the colonial period.

I Introduction

45

In Java, Low Malay and Bahasa Melayu Betawi (Jakarta dialect) and Bahasa Melayu Tionghoa (Chinese Malay) proved to be the most popular and economically viable language choices for the local press over the 1850s1890s period. In the 1870s Batavia had numerous Malay papers. By the end of this era many of the presses and newspapers were still in European or Eurasian hands but Javanese editors and reporters were finally gaining beachheads. The first non-European to edit a native language newspaper (Batavias Matahari) was a Peranakan Chinese. A pioneer Javanese journalist, Tirto Adhi Soerjo, edited the periodical Soenda Berita by 1903. This magazine was directed in important part toward the Peranakan and European communities. Bintang Hindia was another important early native edited journal. It was printed in Amsterdam with H.C.C. Clockener Brousson and the south Sumatran sometime medical student Abdul Rivai in charge. Since schools, teacher training institutes, and military posts picked up subscriptions, this journal gained some government backing. It survived from 1902 to 1907. The colonial administration was beginning to discover the power of the vernacular press to publicize its programs, especially after the inauguration of the new Ethical Policy. Bintang Hindia was mostly in Malay with some Dutch. Its mix of articles helped to set the standard that was to continue through the 1930s for the popular press. There were articles on the strains between the Kaum Muda and Kaum Tua (youth group in the sense of Young Turks, versus old-ways elders), and pieces on the relative merits of adhering to adat custom versus pursuing progress (kemajuan). There were also stories on education, social welfare, and language choice. The latter was often presented in the context of childrens upbringing. Padang in West Sumatra joined the Javanese court towns and business centres as a newspaper incubator by 1864, when the Malay Bintang Timor appeared. Again, it was under Dutch editorship. A bookshop owner named Van Zadelhoff and the printer Fabritius started the paper but also witnessed its quick demise. Adam reports that it had 400 subscribers, which was not a disastrously low number for these early papers. But as Adam goes on to point out, the owners marketing policies left something to be desired. Each Wednesday at 2 p.m. subscribers had to come to the printshop in person to pick up their papers (Adam 1995:26). In 1871 a second Padang paper began publication, also to vanish quickly. During the 1870s and 1880s, editors throughout Java and in these struggling Padang newspapers expanded the range of story items, as a circulation boosting strategy. Papers now included syair verses, pantun, stories, mini-Dutch lessons and practice drills, basic Malay lessons in the local language press, and word list sorts of dictionaries. This range of material was later mimicked by the Batak press (in fact, the editorship of West Sumatran and southern Tapanuli papers was quite fluid, with several south-

46

Print, poetics and politics

ern Batak working in Padang journalism, see Adam 1995:150-2). Marketing devices of this sort eventually paid off, for a fairly large Sumatran vernacular press was launched, to stay afloat this time, by the first two decades of the twentieth century. The islands first native owned print business was launched in Padang in 1911, following local ownership of a printing press there in 1906. The proprietor was the enterprising Dja Endar Moeda, who was to become editor of numerous publications in a remarkable journalistic career involving moves between West Sumatra, Kutaraja in Aceh, and Medan. He edited Padangs Insulinde (a Malay language education monthly for a schoolteacher clientele), sat on the editorial board for the West Sumatran Alam Minangkabau, and founded Tapian Na Oeli (an Angkola language paper, but based in Padang). While in Medan he established the Sjarikat Tapanoeli, which published the important paper Pewarta Deli. Dja Endar Moeda was a southern Batak and his name is an honorific chieftainship title. He was a graduate of the Kweekschool Padangsidimpuan and collaborated often in his newspaper endeavors with a fellow classmate, the Peranakan Chinese Lim Soen Hin. The latter was himself quite fluent in Angkola Batak and was a booster of the Batak press. All of this is some indication of the fluidity of the early Sumatran newspaper business in terms of ethnic affiliation and language use. The former editor of the Medan paper Waspada Mohammad Said discusses the early twentieth century development of the interdependent Malay language and Batak language press in Sibolga, Padangsidimpuan, Pematang Siantar, and Medan in his valuable Sejarah pers di Sumatera Utara (M. Said 1975). He also points to the sociological intersection of the journalism and schoolteaching professions and to the centrality of the Kweekschool Padangsidimpuan in launching a number of writing careers in Sumatras newspaper trade. According to Mohammad Said, northern Sumatra was an unusually intense nexus of Indies journalism because of the mutual existence of the vigorous Batak language press in Sibolga, the Christian mission press in Balige and Tarutung, and the plantation belt Deli press represented by Pertja Timor, Pewarta Deli, and the important commercial paper, the Deli Courant. The small Batak newspapers of Sibolga, Sipirok, and Padangsidimpuan aimed their subscription solicitations at a diverse and often argumentative set of audiences. These included Tapanuli schoolteachers, including elite ones fluent in Angkola Batak, Malay, and Dutch; adat chiefs from places like Sipirok and its close-in villages; southern Tapanuli migrants to Deli working in a variety of skilled plantation jobs; and school principals of southern Tapanuli origin working in places as faraway as West Sumatra and Jakarta. The latter were especially frequent contributors of opinion pieces on how-tobecome-modern themes in these entertaining and lively newspapers. The range of topics covered in the Tapanuli Batak language papers by the

I Introduction

47

time Raja Gorga made its first fragmentary newspaper appearances in 1914 and by the time Soetan Hasoendoetan himself was rising to local prominence as a novelist and freelance folklorist is indicated by a glance at front page headlines from issues of Poestaha from 1914 and the mid-1920s. Poestaha means ancient inherited treasure heirloom and this paper indeed was concretely conceptualized as an old heritage journal. Its 1914 headlines include, Tano hasorangan, Land of ones birth, on comparative modernity issues between Tapanuli and other parts of the Indies and the wider world (August 6, 1914); Hara ni aha asa songondia padjongdjong Volkscredietbank ambaen di anak negeri, Why local-peoples Volkscredietbanks should exist and how to build them (August 6, 1914); and an installment of the Sipirok school principal and newspaper editor Sutan Pangurabaans novel Tolbok Haleon, from the same issue. From the May 21, 1914 front page comes Writing, Evil spirits, A statement from a girl (on the need to hear womens voices in the newspapers of the Indies), and a segment of the Toerian ni Radja Tagor di Laoet, The turi-turian of Raja Tagor of the Sea. The February 26, 1914, front page offered Welkom (a ceremonial greeting to the paper itself upon the occasion of its birth); a poem in celebration of that same happy event (this time with the first letter of each line of the entry keyed to the successive letters of Poestahas name); Cultivating tobacco, and Hamadjoean ni Bangso Batak, On Batak peoples progress. The latter story was set out in oratory style. Other issues from 1914 contained items on unusually impressive horja feasts, more fan letters and ritual greetings related to the arrival of Poestaha on the Tapanuli newspaper scene, and a series of pieces on The writing of the Batak language. There were also more turi-turian. By the 1920s, one finds The coming of foreign peoples to Indonesia (April 19, 1926:2), Drugs and alcohol (same issue), Life in Tapiannaoeli, and Modes of education in India (page 1, same issue). Poestahas geographical purview had indeed become much more pan-Asian by this point. Articles on Indonesian nationalism, political study clubs, and Indies-wide economic problems increased in the mid-1920s issues of Poestaha, while antiquarian entries subsided to a degree, although they were surely still present. A typical range of headlines from this period included Hatanta, Our language (May 5, 1926:1), Sintasinta toe Poestaha, What we hope for Poestaha (May 12, 1926: 1), From overseas and [From] Tapiannaoeli (same page), Road construction in Atjeh, and The arrival of foreigners in Indonesia (April 19, 1926:2). Also noted as Life in Tapiannaoeli and Teaching in Hindia (April 21, 1926: 1) and A political punishment in Tjipinang and Parada Harahap goes to Djambi (April 7, 1926:2, on that well-known Sumatran journalist). The front page of 16 June 1926 offers The desire for freedom, accompanied by a short pantun style poem on that topic, an explicitly nationalist Indonesian one. In the 1910s and 1920s the newspaper itself, as a textual object, was often

48

Print, poetics and politics

commented upon in Tapanuli vernacular journalism. For instance, in such Angkola language papers as Poestaha, Sibolgas Tapian na oeli, and Sipirok Pardomoean, letter writers would sometimes inquire rhetorically on Page One, What is a newspaper? After all, this object was a fairly new thing in the Indies, especially this far from big cities like Medan and Padang. In Poestaha in 1914 one consensus had it that a newspaper was actually a new form of Sopo Godang. This was the village meeting house used for the speechmaking sessions of the chiefs, for their alok-alok congresses at feasts. These views held that the populace would gather there, on the pages of the newspaper, to deliver important and of course well-phrased ritual speeches, kobar. Correspondingly, many contributors to these newspapers packed their paragraphs with deftly phrased snippets from the kobar. Others sent in tarombo clan geneaologies; others reminisced about great horja feasts of the recent past. A sampler of especially fine alok-alok speeches was often the format for this. What are the uses of a newspaper? another 1914 Poestaha letter to the editor correspondent inquired. His answer was also typical for the southern Tapanuli vernacular journalism of the time: newspapers written in saro hita, in our way of speaking, not in Malay, would allow sons and daughters who are living off in the ranto, the diaspora regions beyond the highlands, to maintain good access to their own language in the midst of Delis swirling language marketplaces. Readers could visit the newspaper qua touchstone of traditional speech ways and emerge from that reading experience temporarily reunited with kobar ancient speech excellence. The Batak language newspaper, so defined, evidently served both as a lodestar of tradition and as a vehicle for prospering in this current age of progress, this jaman hamajuan on (as the phrase in many issues of Poestaha put it). These newspapers also provided the key substrate for the development of turi-turian literary epics as mementoes of old speech ways, for Indies moderns. As a 1910s and 1920s staple of Hata Angkola Tapanuli journalism, textual turi-turian on Page One both shaped and were shaped by these newspapers visions of a rich old Batak language speech universe. The turi-turian journey from oral chant tale, to material for Tapanuli schoolbooks, to circulationbuilding but also lexically dense and sophisticated old-speech bonbon for papers like Poestaha indicates this. Turi-turian on the front page offered the newspaper reader everything, much as the chanted stories themselves did: the reader got an infusion of fine old ritual speech, now on the pages of his or her biweekly broadsheet on Indies life in the present day. Although I have not found any newspaper locales where the 1941 Datuk Tuongku was serialized, the storys various chapters would work well by installment. This was a format that Soetan Hasoendoetan knew well from producing Sitti Djaoerah as a feuilleton for Poestaha in the 1920s. Moreover, in place of the very short chanted segments seen in oral performance turi-

I Introduction

49

turian, Soetan Hasoendoetans book has meatier chapters of four to ten pages or so in length. Each is arranged into paragraphs of variable length, lightly framed at times by evocations of chant style. Additionally, the list format seen in so much Tapanuli journalism of the time (schoolteacher contributors were especially fond of this organizational style) comes out again strongly in the 1941 Datuk Tuongku, in such passages as Soetan Hasoendoetans list of names and sterling attributes for the seven lovely daughters of the spirit king of the Sky World (Hasoendoetan 1941:29). An even more pronounced journalistic element of Datuk Tuongku is its entertaining Introduction, which includes a lengthy set-piece story about Soetan Hasoendoetans own first journey on foot from Sipirok to Deli, as a young man. This introduction reads much like a feature story in Poestaha. With this narrative, Soetan Hasoendoetan qua newspaper writer frames his turi-turian tale with a real-world story about his contemporaries and himself in their lives in Sipirok, Toba, Pematang Siantar, and Medan. He related all this in standard prose but used it to frame his other journey tale, that of Datuk Tuongku. He then concludes his turi-turian book with a folkloric few pages thanking Sipirok-area oral performance bards who helped him compile his turi-turian ni halak na robi, his turi-turian from folks of the past, ingot-ingotan ni halak sannari, a memento-remembrance for folks today. The chanted turi-turian had been re-imagined as material for the Tapanuli newspapers, that special village meeting house for school graduates. Another crucial literary substrate that underlay the 1941 Datuk Tuongku was Batak language novel writing, a topic to which we turn next. Datuk Tuongku as Batak literature Both in Soetan Hasoendoetans 1927 novel Sitti Djaoerah and in his 1941 turiturian, he wrote about writing to a remarkable extent, more so even than the other language-obsessed southern Batak authors of his time tended to do. Composing his works largely within a Batak language publishing enclave as a hobby and to earn freelancers fees, in the 1920s and 1930s he turned out a steady stream of Angkola Batak language verse narratives, newspaper pieces on horja feasts and such, and novels. He seems to have been the major southern Batak literary thinker of the pre-national period for vernacular language publishing, although he apparently did not write explicitly literary critical essays after the mode of his contemporary Armijn Pane (also from a Sipirok family). Rather, in major works like Sitti Djaoerah and Datuk Tuongku, Soetan Hasoendoetan thought his way through the issues of What is a novel? and What is a printed turi-turian? by actually writing these literary forms and seeing how they developed. In consequence, both texts have an organic,

50

Print, poetics and politics

experimental air to them. Trying to appreciate this seems to me to be a productive way to place the 1941 Datuk Tuongku within larger Sumatran literary contexts of the time. This will be my focus here, although of course many other approaches to the ways Datuk Tuongku works as a piece of imaginative literature would also be valuable. Soetan Hasoendoetans Sitti Djaoerah was animated throughout its lengthy two volumes with the storytelling strategies and also the intoxication with language found in oral turi-turian narrative. By the same token, Sitti Djaoerah drew deeply on indigenous printed folklore, for its narrative style. The novel quaffed turi-turian speech, as the loveliest register of any human language that Angkola and Mandailing speakers were likely to encounter in their lives as Indies moderns. In turn, Soetan Hasoendoetans 1941 turi-turian book drew frequently on the novel as a literary form, as Soetan Hasoendoetan had explored this earlier in Sitti Djaoerah and as he had encountered Indies-wide and also international canons of novel writing, via the Balai Pustaka publishing phenomenon. By intertwining these strands of different sorts of writing and writerly approaches to oratory, by the publication time of Datuk Tuongku Soetan Hasoendoetan was prepared to offer it as a turi-turian for modern Indies times and readers. In conceptualizing his turi-turian book in terms of novelistic language play and also in writing novels that were shot through with turi-turian aesthetics, he was formulating a Batak print literature that made major claims to artistic excellence. In so doing, he also interrogated the language and literature canons of both the colonial state and nascent Indonesian nationalism. A look at Soetan Hasoendoetans ambitious aesthetic scope here in his published work as a whole should help put his accomplishments in recording Sipiroks Datuk Tuongku story into fuller perspective. The closeness of novel and epic gave Soetan Hasoendoetan much of his experimental space here. In general, in southern Batak print literature of the three pre-war decades, there was a good deal of yeasty interaction not only between turi-turian publication and vernacular journalism but also between oral and literary epics and the writing of vernacular novels in Hata Angkola. Long, dramatic verse narratives about star-crossed young lovers were also being written in the Angkola Batak language at the time. These were issued as paperbacks by Batak owned publishing firms, such as Sipirok newspaperman Sutan Pangurabaans Sutan P house. As noted, Soetan Hasoendoetan himself had written one of these extended verse stories, Nasotardago (published in approximately 1925). That work concerned Sipirok young people in love and caught up in the dilemmas of home-area poverty circa 1900. They migrate toward the usual targets of these 1920s southern Batak love stories: maturity, marriage, and Deli. Probably intended in part for oral recitation, this book is long on charm and is still warmly remembered today in Sipirok

I Introduction

51

schoolteacher circles. By the mid 1920s, though, in southern Batak writing these pantun-style books were being eclipsed by the prose novel. This was modelled quite explicitly on the Balai Pustaka book series commissioned by the colonial government. Recall that Balai Pustaka was the government publishing house founded in the 1920s and charged with the task of producing a steady stream of fine literature books in Indonesian so that the colonys indigenous school graduates might have enough well-written (and government approved) popular literature to read and enjoy. Balai Pustaka also published some titles in languages such as Javanese and even Batak. In fact, in 1937 Balai Pustaka issued a short version of Si Malim Deman, which Soetan Hasoendoetan mentions in his introduction to Datuk Tuongku. In Angkola Batak, the 1937 Balai Pustaka text is by Si Aji Panurat (Mr Writer-Adept). It is written in a kind of storybook format with little recourse to ritual speech. Only minor framing by tonggotonggo invocations is used. This Balai Pustaka text also avoids any evocation of chant narrative style through devices such as inclusion of long, drawn out terms such as O-----------. Si Malim Deman is also less complex in plot terms than Soetan Hasoendoetans book, which is forthrightly based on oral narrative and also clearly involved Soetan Hasoendoetans consultations with Sipirok bards. Si Aji Panurats work for Balai Pustaka emerged in that format as a tale per se: as an old story told in Hata Angkola (mixed a bit with Toba), a story that takes on an almost literary Malay quality. Despite these excursions into these languages, Balai Pustakas presence in northern Sumatra at least seems to have been largely an Indonesian-language phenomenon. P. Pospos, the Toba memoirist quoted earlier, recalls at a later point in his childhood autobiography how much an impact the Balai Pustaka novels in Bahasa Indonesia made in his life when he was a young boy (Pospos 1950, translated in Rodgers 1995:105).
It was when I was in government school [here, elementary school] that I first discovered the Balai Pustaka books. According to the rules we were not allowed to borrow more than two books every two weeks, and since I did not like this rule I tried to make friends with the librarian. I would help him register the books and put covers on them. In exchange, I was allowed to read to my hearts content. I read a great many books. The ones I still recall were love stories like Pertemuan [Meetings] I and II, Karam dalam gelombang pertjintaan [Foundering in the waves of love], Pertjobaan setia [A trial run at being faithful], Djeumpa Atjeh [The Flower of Atjeh], and so on. I read no fewer than sixty books that year and three months time.

Minangkabau authors particularly flocked to the task of writing this sort of literature and secured Balai Pustaka commissions for new books, which Balai Pustaka underwrote and marketed widely throughout the Indies. The titles were promoted for sale and subscription in post offices. Various sorts

52

Print, poetics and politics

of lending library arrangements were also used, even including chartered vans as mobile bookstores in parts of Sumatra and Java (Freidus 1977:25-30). Sumatran Balai Pustaka authors included Sipiroks own Merari Siregar (from Bungabondar village) along with West Sumatrans Marah Rusli, Abdul Muis, Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, and the woman novelist Selasih. Many of their works concerned modernity and Minangkabau. Marah Ruslis Sitti Nurbaya was a case in point. This was a story about Minangkabau young people and the personal pain occasioned by social change and modern aspirations in colonial Padang and environs. Sitti Nurbaya was a decidedly Minangkabautoned story but it dwelt on pan-Indies modernization themes. Rusli asked: How should ambitious, educated young people deal with village obligations such as arranged marriages predicated on family welfare, when the modern age pulled them toward love matches? Can village traditions survive in an Indies on the move? Should they? How can individual young men and women position themselves emotionally within such trajectories, ones moving from village tradition toward cosmopolitan city life? How can authors best write about such transitions, for Indies readers much attracted to the sort of high aspirations that led Sitti Nurbayas lead characters to want to succeed in school? Rusli went on to urge readers to ask themselves: Does reading such novels help Indies young people in any substantive moral way? The storylines of these Indonesian-language novels often ended bleakly, with the young protagonists stuck in stultifying arranged marriages, or even dead. Journeys to adulthood and city life in the cosmopolitan Indies are viewed in these books with trepidation. Supposedly stifling, inhumane village tradition was often counterposed in these works in fairly stark ways to dangerous, morally corrupting city life. Protagonists often find themselves tragically caught between the two poles, with no good solution at hand. These books were thus cautionary tales of a kind of voyeuristic sort, where Indies readers could witness and relish the personal emotional shipwrecks of the novels characters on their journeys through life. The Angkola language fiction of the same period offered much brighter vistas of Indies progress.12 Main characters, even the young women, often survived to the end of the book, for one thing. Maturation toward marriage from rural childhoods to adulthoods spent in Deli (the geographical locale for all the southern Batak stories that I am aware of) were often presented as travels of hope and promise. In fact, these growing-up journeys were porThere is also a large and unexamined Indonesian language literature of popular fiction about Batak modernization dilemmas books published outside of Balai Pustaka auspices. See for instance Tamar Djajas Samora gadis Toba (circa 1940), Hassanoelarifins Sitti Djauhari, isteri yang setia (circa 1930s), D.I. Loebiss Lily van Angkola (circa 1925), and Sjamsoeddin Nasoetions Keris poesaka (circa 1940).
12

I Introduction

53

trayed in these books quite explicitly as quests. This ties this tradition of vernacular novel writing directly to turi-turian narrative and to the same eras boomlet in print publication of the turi-turian, just when Batak novel writing was becoming common in the 1920s and 1930s. As we shall soon see, the Japanese occupation, the national revolution, and then national life brought both popular fiction in the southern Batak languages and a good deal of turiturian print publication to a virtual halt. It is notable that the two best-known Angkola Batak language novelists of the time (Soetan Hasoendoetan and Sutan Pangurabaan Pane, Armijns father) also published turi-turian books. Sutan Pangurabaan was a prominent and controversial school principal, pamphleteer, and newspaper editor. His turi-turian contribution was the 1930 Ampang Limo Bapole. This was a short work (37 pages) issued in this instance in Padangsidimpuan by the publisher Partopan. This brief turi-turian was a fairly unadorned one, in terms of ritual speech formats and lexicon. It formed part of the informal popular literature series that Sutan Pangurabaan was soon to start churning out from his own Sutan P press in Sipirok (some of his other titles are listed in the references). He may have intended the booklet as a school text, since most of his other work except for his novel Tolbok Haleon was explicitly pedagogical in nature. Drawing on their admiration for the tales, both Sutan Pangurabaan and Soetan Hasoendoetan infused their novels prose with turi-turian phraseology and story frameworks. This emerges most clearly in Soetan Hasoendoetans Sitti Djaoerah, from which we can cite several short passages in this regard. Soetan Hasoendoetans deft use of turi-turian artistry to make points about Indies language worlds was to animate both Sitti Djaoerah and Datuk Tuongku. When the first installment of his novel appeared in the September 2, 1927 issue of Poestaha on Page One, Soetan Hasoendoetan framed his work with an illuminating Introduction. He wrote that the Indonesian language novels of the time such as the famous Sitti Nurbaya could certainly be enjoyable, edifying, and well worth careful reading by his fellow southern Batak who had access to them, thanks to the government publishing house. But, Soetan Hasoendoetan continued, just as halak hita (our people) usually prefer good home cooking made with the regions distinctive, piquant curries to foreign dishes, no matter how well prepared and richly oily the latter might be, so too Angkola language books were necessarily going to be more delicious to them than any Indonesian language ones like Sitti Nurbaya. Our folks would simply in the nature of things prefer saro hita, our way of speaking, to conversation and texts in Indonesian. And, as Soetan Hasoendoetans readers quickly discovered in that first newspaper installment, the Angkola Batak language Sitti Djaoerah dealt in terms of the tastiest linguistic repast possible: turi-turian.

54

Print, poetics and politics

As is evident by now, a turi-turians lusciousness derived from many things: for instance, its panoramic linguistic scope, its air of heightened beauty and special emotional affect, its tendency to relate events through a fog of substitute phrases for normal, mundane ones (such as, meow-meower-inthe-kitchen-her-eyes-following-our-every-move-for-a-food-handout, for cat, huting). At a superficial level Sitti Djaoerah seems much like one of the Balai Pustaka love story books, what with its plotline about Tapanuli young people who meet, fall in love, walk to Deli, and encounter numerous problems of living there. But, Soetan Hasoendoetan marshalled a number of turi-turian narrative techniques and turns of phrases to help make sure that his novel was as savory as hometown hot curries to his Angkola speaking readers. In this, the author seems to have been in subtle competition with the much more wellknown Balai Pustaka circle of writers. And, this style of composition used in this 1927 novel helped prepare the ground for his later turi-turian tome. Several examples will show Soetan Hasoendoetans fondness for turi-turian. In his 1927 novel he often salted his sentences with legs-the-bold-striders and commoners the two and the three sorts of wording, often incorporating several of these per page. Sitti Djaoerahs protagonists also tend to have fine turi-turian names, which gives the story a special speech air. Where an overt turi-turian like Datuk Tuongku will have spirit girl heroines with names like Shimmering Raindrops, Sitti Djaoerah itself has characters with names such as Pandingkar Moedo, Young Martial Arts Battler. Sitti Djaoerahs childhood friend and eventual husband Djahoemarkar also has a turi-turian flair to his excellent name. It means Raja (Dja, a shortened form of the old spelling Radja) Opener of Things Hidden, opener of wells of deep longing and sadness, as a verse often cited in the book goes on to say. This eulogy and allusions to it are repeated often in the novel when the young man re-enters the action (an evident turi-turian touch). The word humarkar itself has a turi-turian element to it. Present readers will recall that harkar is the everyday word for to open something up by pulling back things like tree branches with both hands from an enclosure. Humarkar is an elegant form of this, thanks to the infix. In addition, objects and places such as homesteads and the garden lands surrounding an aristocratic house are also ushered into Sitti Djaoerahs story in a cloud of praise phrases. Ones like the following immediately recall Angkola and Mandailing turi-turian presentations of redoubtable noble houses, to anyone familiar with these chant tales. The following passage opens Chapter III of Volume I. Readers familiar with Malay tales will also recognize this sort of eulogizing of illustrious Great Houses surrounded by bounteous orchards and well-stocked fish ponds. Soetan Hasoendoetan writes,
People still remember, I would think, that in the past it was common for folks to drive carts or ride horses into Padangsidimpuan to sell goods or to go bartering. This was also true of people who lived right there in town: theyd go on toward

I Introduction

55

the centre by cart or by horse. Why, look, over there [] over near the OtherSide Market, on the right side of the road if youre going to Sipirok (and on the left side if youre going to Mandailing) there it is! A fine, big house standing beneath a thick ring of verdant coconut palms, palm trees hanging heavy with rounded fruit a large, solid house surrounded by sweet mango trees and the even sweeter ambasang mangoes, by glossy yellow lanseh fruit trees, by rambutan shrubs hung with bunches of their hairy red fruit, and by thickets of abundant pineapple bushes. The house was four entire armspans wide and three armspans (plus two elbow to middle fingertip lengths) deep. It had a proud peaked roof and four stout houseposts, one at each corner, while its walls were made of strong, thick causarina planks and its roof of tin. At the front of the house there was an office entryway, stretching all the way across the front of the home. And this porch had two big glass windows extending across its front with two additional windows on each side. All of these panels were neatly set into their frames in carefully matched pairs. The kitchen angled out a bit at the back of the house, and behind the home, beyond that good abundant orchard just mentioned, there was a capacious pond well stocked with a variety of fine food fish: halu, lampan, siroken, gabus, and tingkalang fish along with all manner of tiny minnows that just happened to live in the pool anyway. Surrounding this pond was a wide expanse of fertile green rice paddy, and between the orchard and the paddy land was a corral for water buffalo and there were, oh, about ten fat buffalo cows grazing and gamboling about in a nearby field. And all of these things just mentioned were, indeed, the property of that householder. (Rodgers 1997a:65.)

In turi-turian style, Sitti Djaoerah is studded with panegyrics of this sort, for handsome heroes, winsome and clever maids, gleaming tigers in the forest, and even smart (and of course talkative) white crocodiles swimming in the Straits of Malacca. One such loquacious beast helpfully rescues Djahoemarkar from a boating mishap and deposits him on a sandy beach near Medan. As shown by the noble house passage above, Sitti Djaoerah also had a down to earth side beyond its elaborate phraseology. This novel concerned real people living in secular places like the town of Padangsidimpuan in the 1870s to 1920s period. The book dealt with real world events of Tapanuli poverty, livestock plagues, villagers suffering under the states corvee labor demands, and desperate family migrations to Deli. Soetan Hasoendoetan wrote the book in part as a sort of lament for the pain his fellow Tapanuliers had suffered in their real-world journeys to Deli. The novel also had two actual recitations of turi-turian by some of the characters. One, in verse, goes on for nine pages and comes in a chapter of Volume I in which the protagonist (Young Martial Arts Battler, Pandingkar Moedo, heir to the aristocratic house just described) is out in the forest gathering aromatic resins with two companions. One of them tells him part of a turi-turian, which readers encounter in a story within a story framework. The novels second turi-turian recital is set out in prose. It covers seventeen pages and forms part of Volume IIs Chapter XXI, Airplane. Volume I is

56

Print, poetics and politics

more explicitly enveloped in a turi-turian oral aesthetic, as Young Martial Arts Battler gets drawn into an odd forest adventure when he just so much as hears the turi-turian performance. Entranced, he falls into the turi story and its world and almost into the clutches of a seductive spirit woman, who lives far up on a cliffside reachable only by a rickety bamboo drawbridge over a deep ravine. He eventually wakes up from his turi-turian sojourn and the books narrative itself returns to the socially realistic plane. By the end of Volume II, by contrast, when characters hear a turi-turian, they take it as entertainment, not as a tale with its own inherent oratory powers to transform and seduce. This is one of the main artistic and language world journeys the 1927 novels two volumes are tracing. By the time Soetan Hasoendoetan came to his task of writing Datuk Tuongku years later, he was an experienced neomancer of turi-turian speech in print literature. For its part Datuk Tuongku, published fourteen years after Sitti Djaoerah, also had numerous novelistic qualities. Recall the singsong cadence and small section-by-section progression of Baginda Hatimbulans oral chant. Soetan Hasoendoetan makes it clear in his Introduction and Afterward that he had heard many chant performances of the Datuk Tuongku story. But, his 1941 text is far from any simple attempt to replicate sung passages. Almost any passage from the book illustrates this, once readers get past the heavily formulaic introductory tonggo-tonggo sections. Datuk Tuongkus standards of characterization, temporality, pacing, punctuation, and paragraph structure closely resemble the novelistic vision of writing Soetan Hasoendoetan had tried out in Sitti Djaoerah. The intertextual quality of Soetan Hasoendoetans understanding of literary epic and novel also had more hidden dimensions beyond these formal borrowings from one type of literature to another. This dimension of concordance between novels and turi-turian allowed Soetan Hasoendoetan to write both Sitti Djaoerah and Datuk Tuongku as oblique sorts of resistance literature. Another short textual passage will show this, but first more background on Sitti Djaoerah. This novel had an immense linguistic playfulness and insouciance to it, a gift in part from turi-turian. The narrative careened from Angkola Batak to Mandailing Batak to Toba Batak in some passages, when the protagonists happen to be walking through that region on their way to Medan. In addition, characters spout oratory to each other, and also dispatch both surat tumbago holing ancient leaf messages letters and handwritten missives to each other. In other sections of the novel, forest animals talk with humans with an Angkola ritual speech lilt; spirits seduce young men through indirect speech full of secret phraseology borrowed from Minangkabau; a characters beautiful name is praised through elusive ancient words; and bereaved protagonists mourn a lost loved one or a rural home left behind in a migration

I Introduction

57

to plantation work in Deli through andung lament speech. When characters migrate to east Sumatras plantation belt, they are often portrayed reading newspapers such as Pertja Timor, an actual paper. The novels characters are also shown writing ads for newspapers, perusing handbills, or in one case, stencilling big block letters in the Latin alphabet all around the upper walls of a house to write out a few old sayings from the oratory for the edification of the households children, who are enrolled in school. In Mikhail Bakhtins work on just what sort of literary text early novels in a culture tend to be, these sorts of genre admixtures are elucided. In his essays, Epic and novel, Discourse in the novel and forms of time and chronotrope in the novel and Discourse in the novel (Bakhtin 1990b, 1990c, 1990d, 1990e), Bakhtin asserts that the novel tends to be a radically uncanonical or even anti-canonical sort of text, one that redacts all historically previous forms of writing and ritualized speech according to its own irreverent aesthetic. Genres such as epics or written romances, which previously stood on their own in aesthetic terms, are knocked off kilter when novel writing arrives on the scene. They lose their once-pelucid authoritativeness in the new context of novel writing. Bakhtin further asserts that novel-writing tends to come on a historical stage when previously more isolated languages crash into each other in new nations (here we might say, new nations in the making), and when the emergence of a national language throws other possible political candidates for this role into high relief. Novel writing in such settings also fosters a new self-consciousness about language, as
the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly [] Languages throw light on each other: one language can after all only see itself in the light of another language. The nave and stubborn coexistence of languages within a given national language also comes to an end that is, there is no more peaceful co-existence between territorial dialects, social and professional dialects and jargons, literary language, generic languages within literary language, epochs in language and so forth. All this sets into motion a process of active, mutual cause and effect and interillumination. (Bakhtin 1990b:12; emphasis added.)

This is exactly what occurred in Sitti Djaoerahs near-comic portrait of Sumatran Indies language diversity. Novel writing also offers new ways of narrating time and social space. Characters exist in secular history; the traces of the epoch are imprinted upon them and the storyline (Bakhtin 1990d:157); protagonists move through historical time unidirectionally, unable in general to work the supernatural feats found in myth. In Sitti Djaoerah, part turi-turian, part novel, entirely about the idea of writing novels in a colonized society at the dawn of print, supernaturalism abounds in Volume I and then recedes markedly in Volume II. This second volume is lodged firmly on the socially realistic plane and the magical

58

Print, poetics and politics

events of turi-turian worlds are folded down inside scenes in which the protagonists recite the chants to each other, for entertainment (Rodgers 1991a). Bakhtin also presciently notes that an early novels characters run into conflict with conventionality in a deeply moral sense, allowing the novelist to construct images of an authentic humanity that has become distorted by the parochial social arrangements in which a books protagonists are enmeshed (Bakhtin 1990d:169). Here one might add that the literary form of the novel in the hands of southern Batak writers of the pre-war years also allowed considerable space to imply that the presence of the Dutch in Sumatra ran counter to Sumatrans authentic humanity. And, novelists like Soetan Hasoendoetan went one step beyond this: they occasionally tipped their hats to readers to indicate that even Sumatra was a concept they should interrogate. In Sitti Djaoerah, the authors authentic humanity, seen as beset by colonial systems of oppression and moral compromise, is identified quite explicitly with the fine old forms of Angkola Batak ritual speech and with the emotions of lungun (that poignant longing and loneliness) that hearing such speech conjures up in readers who are seen in the narrative to be living far from their village roots. Soetan Hasoendoetan offers his readers, further, a vision of Indies modernity (a way to be modern in Hindia, in the colonial Indies) that cheekily asserts that Angkola ritual speech brilliance, in our way of speaking, can be as modern as paid work on a Deli plantation. In fact, the writer goes on to assert that maintaining ones ties to fine old speech forms and the moral authority they embody will help Tapanuli migrants succeed in their new east coast economic lives. Moreover, the novelist implies that poignant feelings of longing, of lungun, can be directed simultaneously toward home village life and toward new social worlds of economic opportunity, in Deli. To return to Bakhtin on the novel, in preparation for savoring a short turi text from Sitti Djaoerah that will illustrate these points. Several of Bakhtins insights resemble Benedict Andersons regarding novel writing as a form of narration central to the formation of new national communities in late colonial contexts. In Imagined communities; Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (1991), Anderson contends that novel writing works together with newspaper textuality to foster new visions of the imagined community of the nation. Anderson even more than Bakhtin contends that novels and novel writing as an institutional form actually do something in the societies in which they exist. From this perspective, novels foster certain specific types of worldview about readers, human society, agency, and time (Anderson 1991:9-46). The implied audience for the first waves of novels in nations or nations in the making tend to be we-Filipino-readers (Anderson 1991:27) and so on. Sitti Djaoerah seems to have been a text simultaneously about our way of speaking and the southern Tapanuli us behind this conceptualization of language. Evident by now, turi-turian narrativity in itself had some of the same

I Introduction

59

world-overseeing capability and irreverence that Bakhtin highlights for novels (and only for novels: Bakhtins interpretive scheme that sharply contrasts epic and novel is not a clean match here). Turi-turian storytelling, too, had some of the same community-imagining capacity that Anderson assigns to novel-writing and newspaper journalism. Consequently, when an author of the talent and insight of a Soetan Hasoendoetan drew on both novelistic storytelling techniques and those of the turi-turian (from performance and from journalistic, folkloric print), the resulting work could be a text of greater fictional power and linguistic scope and literary self-consciousness than the usual run of Balai Pustaka novels. A profoundly indigenized novel such as Sitti Djaoerah could emerge as a powerful instrument for reconstructing the Indies and Indies language worlds for its readers, at least in their imaginative lives. This makes Sitti Djaoerah much more than a mere newspaper circulation boosting device. Its artistic ambitions were recognized immediately, Sipirok fans of the book told me in the late 1970s and 1980s, when this generation was in their seventies and eighties. Not shy about length, Soetan Hasoendoetan played out his turi-novel (and possibly partial autobiography) for 457 pages. The better to sell newspapers, perhaps, but also the better to give the novelist ample space to convince his readers that Sipirok and Padangsidimpuan tradition and old speech ways were entirely compatible with modern life for migrants from these towns to Deli jobs. The novels complete title is Sitti Djaoerah; Padan djandji na togoe, Sitti Djaoerah; The firm oath-vow. This is a reference to the solemn promise the hero of Volume I makes with two rather strange, almost supernatural companions, Rangga Poerik and Rangga Balian. These are fighting cock titles, taken from turi-turian speech. In their full form the names say, Fighting Cock as Angry as the Bubble Boiling Rice Cooking Water and Fighting Cock Protecting Us Out on the Ramparts. The two boys promise Volume Is hero Young Martial Arts Battler that they will defend and help him in the face of any adversity. Pandingkar Moedo also vows to do this for them. It turns out, though, that the two youths panic when Pandingkar Moedo encounters a mystical attack from a supernatural tiger out in the deep forest. The broken vow contributes to the final tragedy of Volume I: Pandingkar Moedos death at the hands of his two old helpers, after he pursues a court case against them. Writers of southern Batak fiction of the period, and newspaper prose and poetry for that matter, were fascinated by the workings of the court system of the colonial Indies. These authors often included detailed descriptions of trials and court testimony in their narratives (Sally Engle Merry suggests in Colonizing Hawaii; The cultural power of law that a near-obsession with court proceedings may be a common focus in early colonial encounters between indigenous societies and empire, see Merry 2000).

60

Print, poetics and politics

The vow makes another transformed, firmer appearance in Volume II, which concerns the childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of Pandingkar Moedos son Djahoemarkar and his school friend, Sitti Djaoerah. The vow here refers to their secret promise to wed in the face of parental displeasure. Sitti Djaoerah as a whole comprises not just two vow stories but also a pair of love stories (Pandingkar Moedo of Volume I courts and marries a village girl) and two journeys to adulthood narratives. The first trajectory of this sort ends unhappily with Pandingkar Moedo dead only a month into his sons infancy, while the growing up experiences of Volume IIs Djahoemarkar and Sitti Djaoerah end with the young couple married and the parents of a boy and girl, living in the big house provided to the Head Clerk of the tobacco plantation near Medan where Djahoemarkar has found work. A textual example will show how Soetan Hasoendoetan catalyzed turiturian writing and novel writing to interrogate Indies language hierarchies. One time about midway through Volume II, Sitti Djaoerah is a young bujingbujing (a blooming marriage-age adolescent girl. Bujing-bujing is a major human personhood term for Angkola Batak speakers, one counterposed to doli-doli, dashing, marriage-age young men, in adolescence. Angkola Batak ritual speech relies on many such personhood categories, a usage that also aids speakers in conforming to one of saro hitas cardinal rules: avoid personal names). Sitti Djaoerah has run away from home with her sympathetic mother to escape her fathers plans to pair her off to a rich old merchant. The father, Awaiting Riches, hopes thereby to secure the other man as a new business partner. The other merchant hopes to secure to the 14 year old Sitti Djaoerah. The threat of a forced marriage to a loathsome old merchant is a plot device also used in several Balai Pustaka novels. Sitti Djaoerah and her mother have sought refuge in the Mandailing town of Panyabungan, where they have started to sell little cakes at the weekly market to support themselves while they await word from Djahoemarkar. He is about 20 years old at the time and has left Tapanuli for Deli in search of a salaried job after a livestock pestilence in Tapanuli destroyed the family herds. This was an occasion in the book for lengthy andung funeral laments on his mothers part, but perhaps the present reader has already guessed that. At this point in the story the narrative is going along at a comfortable pace in the recognizable tones of 1920s Angkola Batak-language novelistic social realism:
Now, Dear Reader, as days went by Sitti Djaoerah grew taller as she attained her full adult height. As she grew her face just got prettier, her figure filled out and she became that much more outstanding in comparison with all the other girls in the marketplace.

Directly at the conclusion of this passage, however, comes the following

I Introduction

61

interlude, which the novelist seems to have designed to take the readers breath away. In this case a more accurate term than reader may be reciter, for certain passages of Sitti Djaoerah invite oral reading and sometimes the novelist makes an explicit aside to the reader to that effect (specifically, to sing certain sections). This passage has no explicit directions to that effect, however. The paragraph goes as follows:
Nowadays it seemed she was as lovely as the tall bamboo shooting skyward, protected from the winds by two surrounding mountain slopes, what with her face as lovely as the round, full moon; her hairbun as big as the weaverwomans huge ball of thread; her eyebrows curved jauntily like the roosters back claw; her cheeks rosy and round like a ripening mango; her eyelashes thick like fat buzzing black bumblebees; the nape of her neck curved like a bunch of bananas on its stalk shimmering in the early morning sun; her chin rounded and oval like the honeybees pendulant hive; her fingers long and slim like the quills of the young porcupine; the calves of her legs like rice grains bursting from their husks; the soles of her feet smooth and round like the tender eggs of a hen laying for the first time; her sight so sharp it sends the hillsides cascading down in landslides; her steps so slow and deliberate one thinks she is carrying a burden on her head; her strides swaying like the undulant sea waves; her teeth white and even like the grains of sand at Bagan Api-Api beach; her smile coming and going like the glistening shining flying fish as they jump in and out of the water in the Moonlight Radiance; her manner of speaking as lovely and elegant as the bamboo bending gently down over our path; her very cough stirring our feelings of deep love and longing; her gentle throat-clearing sounds making whirlpools of our feelings, like hidden eddies in the deepest woods. (Rodgers 1997a:446-7.)

This sort of thing, in the midst of a much more mundane prose narrative, about Sitti Djaoerahs job of selling rice flour treats in the Panyabungan marketplace. What was Soetan Hasoendoetan about here, working as he did in the borderlands between orality and commercial print literacy, between Balai Pustaka novelistic narrative and turi-turian artistry, and Sipirok, Padangsidimpuan, Tapanuli and Deli as ideas he was helping to write into the common imagination for southern Batak readers? Bakhtins theories of the novel and Andersons points, inflected a bit for colonial-era Tapanuli oral/print turi-turian rhetoric, help us to understand some of the answer. In this novel the author has his hero Djahoemarkar, with his lovely turiturian name, decorate the walls of his front room in Deli coast plantation housing with those snippets of Angkola oratory for the benefit of his simultaneously modern and traditional young children. Djahoemarkar and Sitti Djaoerah are portrayed throughout the book, in fact, as energetically writing colonial locales such as plantation-provided homes into aesthetic existence as Sipirok and Padangsidimpuan places, through the medium of a defiant and remarkably non-nostalgic use of Angkola ancient speech as something that deserves a prime place in writing and, further, in Latin alphabet print. Soetan

62

Print, poetics and politics

Hasoendoetan is also reconceptualizing Indies language hierarchies here, to place Angkola Batak dead centre as the loveliest saro, way of speaking, for halak hita, for our people an us the novelist is in the process of helping to create for his readers. Again, the us is not we-Indonesian-readers in this case but something closer to we-Hata-Angkola-speakers. In Sitti Djaoerah, Batak is largely a term associated with Toba. Padangsidimpuan, Sipirok, and the mountain lands and forest surrounding them operate as a luat, a chiefdom domain led by rajas and a region with common ways and speech. But, as imagined in Sitti Djaoerah, this domain is a very modern one indeed, full of commercial activity, schools, new roads, and the rising crime levels and social disarray that (Soetan Hasoendoetan tells readers) accompanies such change. Soetan Hasoendoetans technique of privileging saro hitas ways of speaking lies at the centre of the novelists understanding of home language novels, as devices to re-narrate the Indies. This re-narration technique depended on Sitti Djaoerahs turi-turian roots and appears throughout the book in passages such as the one quoted. The girl of the seven lovelinesses format, the one alluded to here, is a common turi-turian praise oratory technique, for introducing a ravishing girl of the Spirit World into the chant, or for re-ushering her back into the action. As we have seen the turi-turian bard has a number of such formulaic geysers of beautiful phrases that he inserts into his story at frequent intervals. This is of course a familiar storytelling technique in many oral epic traditions (A.B. Lord 1960; M.L. Lord 1995). Such rushes of lovely words are often used in turi-turian to eulogize the stunning appearance of filmy beings from the Upper Continent. These passages remind readers especially of the poignant feelings such scenes evoke in the chants male protagonists when they glimpse one of these luminous girls. Prints seditious potential to allow subtle critiques of the colonial regime had greatly intensified in Tapanuli and southern Batak east-coast outposts like Pematang Siantar and Medan by the 1920s, the decades that were arguably the crest of Angkola language publication in terms of variety but also artistic quality. In his masterwork Sitti Djaoerah Soetan Hasoendoetan attempted nothing less than a veiled denial that the Dutch held effective linguistic dominion over Tapanuli, or even Deli. Soetan Hasoendoetan seems to have been attempting several things at once in passages such as this one, all of them tied to his overall effort to invent the Angkola novel in a form faithful to his vision of Angkola-ness and Angkola language excellence in the Indies. Soetan Hasoendoetan was using his novel in sections like this one to place Angkola standards of female beauty at the centre of Sumatran aesthetics for his audience. His readers encountered few ravishing southern Tapanuli girls in the official public imageries of the ethnic feminine in 1920s Deli. In novels, though, these spirit girls could work their magic. The Dutch would not even see her. At the same time he was doing this, Soetan Hasoendoetan was

I Introduction

63

placing Angkola spoken art at the centre of his readers aesthetic world in even larger senses, implying that other languages such as Malay or Javanese or even Toba Batak and certainly Dutch had no such metaphoric depth as Angkola Batak does, and could not come up with such a cascade of praise phrases as this one. Angkola Batak turi-turian speech flows just to hita, to us, as Angkola language hearers, as do the print versions of chant speech. Sitti Djaoerah would not have been readable by Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabau, Acehnese, and so on, unless such readers had gained fluency in the language beforehand. Sitti Djaoerahs flow of words just toward us acted as a sort of communal secret in the midst of the Indies swirl of print sources surrounding the Angkola Batak language reader. In this passage Soetan Hasoendoetan was also claiming Latin alphabet print as an Angkola domain: a place to display Angkola verbal facility in a modern key, for Angkola readers. Print was not just a communication medium where they would encounter the colonial state in school textbooks, in censorship battles over the newspapers, or in terms of worrying about securing official travel passes for the dangerous journey to Deli. In Sitti Djaoerah and its reinvigorated vision of turi-turian language beauty and storytelling, the European novel-writing enterprise had been poetically domesticated, at least in a few small spots along the Indies literary landscape. Present readers might be on the lookout for similar mischief at work in much of Datuk Tuongku, a sly work on many of these same fronts. Datuk Tuongku as epic and lament From accounts today it seems that some areas of southern Tapanuli still had a very small number of turi-turian chanters giving nighttime performances as a kind of sideline entertainment event at large-scale feasts of honor through the early 1930s. In some villages, turi-turian were also occasionally sung by itinerant chanters independent of feast celebrations. My interviews with ritual orators indicate that this was the case in the immediate area around Sipirok, where bards continued to visit the small villages strung out along the rough road from town toward Simangambat (a mountain village) through the 1930s. For instance, Bungabondars elderly today recall an accomplished bard of that era who would sometimes stop in the village on Thursdays on his way to Sipiroks main marketday. This bayo parturi was from dolokan, from way back in the mountains, and he would bring his dramatic story expertise to Bungabondar for a small gratuity and a place to stay on his way into town. According to my fieldwork interviews, though, by the time Soetan Hasoendoetan was first working on Datuk Tuongku (probably in the 1920s)

64

Print, poetics and politics

the schoolbook culture of Indonesian/Malay language textbooks and also Batak language school publications such as folktale collections had come to almost completely encircle the village-based, oral, ritual speech regimes, ones phrased in esoteric forms of Angkola Batak. This fundamentally changed the communications climate for turi-turian by this period, especially given the fact that pedagogical publishing by Batak authors was so strongly tailored to Dutch school system developments. The oratory in general was not so much disappearing (in some regards it thrives today) as it was being edited and reconceptualized through the lenses of print literacy and Sumatras colonial language regime and school cultures. Seen by this time through such screens, forms of oral ritual speech such as clan genealogies and verbal duels between family factions began to emerge for Batak publics as oral literature. This happened via processes discussed in some of the scholarship on transitions from orality to print worldwide (for clear examples of the strong version of the transition to literacy hypothesis about communication form and thought, see Ong 1967, 1971, 1977, 1982. See also Goody 1968, 1977, 1986 for an anthropological account of some of the same issues). That is, with the move into print, a more socially amorphous readership probably began to replace the speaker-plus-circle-of-hearers format found in strongly oral cultures. The bards of printed turi-turian tales could not enjoy the immediacy of impact that chant performers could, with the latters nighttime audiences in relatively ceremonialized contexts. Anyone of any age, of any social location who could read a southern Batak language in the Latin letters could read these turi-turian texts (although they might not understand some of the most high-flown oratory passages). In the process of transforming oratory into popular literature a tonggo-tonggo invocation to the ancestors on a book page (in contrast to a tonggo-tonggo performed as a chant) also lost some of its ritual aura and authoritativeness, in terms of claiming to contact ancestral shades and founder spirits. The textual tonggo-tonggo passage took on an as if quality. With words now strung out in printed lines and divided into paragraphs and chapters, the beauty of the turi-turian shifted to a degree, from the hypnotic loveliness of the droned words to the cooler (but still oratory inspired) resonance of affecting folkloric phrases. In turi-turian books and newspaper serializations, these shifts were partial. In part this was because the literary bards so self-consciously tried to evoke the sung flair of turi-turian performance (this was something much more evident in Raja Gorga than in the more novelistic Datuk Tuongku). Although neither the 1914 nor the 1941 text deviated from flat, very standard page lay-out and a use of unexceptional typeface, some passages in both texts did cry out for oral recitation. As Amin Sweeney has pointed out in his work on the continued penetration of oral styles in Malay print literature (Sweeney 1987), the shift into print in this entire region from the

I Introduction

65

Malay Peninsula through Sumatra was not a simple process at all. Oratorys performance aesthetics deeply penetrated print works through much of this region, just as print culture redacted folk conceptualizations of special speech forms. In his compelling study of the textual versions of the Malay hikayat Merong Mahawangsa (1988), Hendrik M.J. Maier points to the complex political settings of such communication system transitions, when they occur in colonial settings. Maier notes that the textualization of this particular Malay tale indexed a series of shifts in authority in colonial Malaya. The Merong Mahawangsas various Malay and European interpreters added new layers of validating texts, as Malay tradition remained in contention in the process. Moreover, given the fact that Batak villages at European contact times had well-developed and long established script literacy traditions, the plunge into book and newspaper publication of literary versions of old ritual speech made Tapanulis slurry mix of literacies and ritual oratory denser still. As we have seen turi-turian were turned into printed texts at a time when Sipiroks aksara script literacy was becoming increasingly marginalized. But, Latin alphabet readers would typically have studied the aksara in school, would probably have some degree of fluency in them, and would likely have a general sense that some materials were written in the old letters. For instance, in Bungabondar village, prominent lineages had bulu aor tobol or aksara-covered long tubes of bamboo. The transition to the sort of print literacy shown in 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s southern Batak turi-turian publishing worked to redefine the bards role. He was now operating alongside high prestige schoolmen and newspaper contributors. And, the bard of the printed texts emerged as an artist, as opposed to a magician with spoken oratory. The literary bards instructional role was also a marked feature. Like a schoolteacher, he clarified difficult concepts and provided helpful learning materials on the abstruse ritual speech (glossaries, and Introductions that worked as readers guides). Mangaradja Goenoeng and Soetan Hasoendoetan, for their part, maintained an identity in their texts as painstaking (if fun rather than fusty) composers of books that were good for readers, along with being entertaining texts. In the hands of their Latin alphabet recorders, print also pushed the tales in another, related direction: the old turi-turian tales were being codified into a genre framework, with the chant narratives crowned in the process as Angkola and Mandailing oratorys overarching summary form. These canonization processes affected indigenous folklore publishing beyond turi-turian discourse, especially with the rise of what might be termed ritual speech samplers and oratory guidebooks in the 1920s. By this period, Dutch and indigenous folklorists both sought to set down canonical examples of different types of special speech, with the Europeans concentrating largely on folktales. For the southern Batak societies, no Dutch scholar had followed up on Van der

66

Print, poetics and politics

Tuuks depth of engagement with the more difficult ritual speech forms. Local writers took on the more ambitious tack of writing these ritual speech guidebooks. Some of the early exemplars of this type of literature employed a novelistic story format for presenting the various forms of kobar. For instance, Adat Batak II by H. Pane (1922) followed an imaginary Angkola immigrant family living in Deli through its successive rite of passage occasions, complete with suitable oratory. A.N. Loebiss important Harondoek parmanoan (or A rattan satchel of memories, an undated work but probably from the early 1920s) also offers readers an extensive repertoire of ritual speech forms via no less than 35 chapters. This 89-page book also follows a fictional Medan migr family through their households major life crisis events, complete this time with exciting plot twists, family tensions, and scenes of Deli modernity. Upon each ceremonial occasion and juncture in family relations where formal advice is called for, the family members will mandok hata, say ritual words, as appropriate to that event. The chapter titles alert readers to the range of speech forms to come: chapters cover father and mothers request words to their child, dream-divinations, surrendering the bride price gold words, words in the blessing mound of ancestral foods, andung words, presenting the baby sling words, and many more types. Deli immigrants in need of aid in doing the adat could utilize this guidebook to practical effect. With prints redaction of Tapanuli and Deli language ideologies in these ways, and with the associated creation of a Tapanulier culture where reading subjects were simultaneously nostalgic Batak and upwardly striving residents of the Indies, the few remaining oral turi-turian chanters likely found themselves competing for social prestige with Batak schoolteachers sporting diplomas from the Dutch-run teacher training institutes and with southern Batak newspapermen. The book form and newspaper feuilleton turi-turian texts emerged in the midst of this sort of instructional literature, as a kind of master genre. This was a situation tailormade for inventing tradition in political contexts of emerging nations where public rhetorics of ethnic peoplehood sometimes fix upon the expansive, tour de force literary epic as a demonstration of home-culture excellence and antiquity. Sung turi-turians panoramic vision of ritual speech forms and stylized social persons and interacting social units could readily be transformed into literary texts about a sophisticated society imbued with ancient speech excellence. As several of the essays in the valuable recent collection Epic traditions in the contemporary world; The poetics of community (Beissinger et al. 1999) demonstrate, the expansive, world-surveying nature of the sung epic in terms of its exuberant tendency to include many diverse forms of standardized speech within its narrative scope often gives epic poets and their literary recorders the ability to treat a societys language world in an impressively comprehen-

I Introduction

67

sive fashion, thereby showing its richness and abundance. New national cultures can cite such epic narratives as central parts of their heritages and thus lay claim to being a natural national community. Early nationalist rhetorics in new nations also often entail a rediscovery of epic traditions of the folk. As Beissinger et al. (1999:2-3) note,
The epic [] has a peculiar and complex connection to national and local cultures: the inclusiveness of epic the tendency of a given poem to present an encyclopedic account of the culture that produced it also explains its political potency. This political explosiveness is evident in the charged contemporary performances of epic [], in the intense reimagining of epic undertaken by most emerging European nations as a means of coming to self-knowledge as a nation.

The epics political valences are even evident, the editors note, in the distant context of American college and university debates, in the bitterness of accusations today about the dangers of abandoning canonical study in the academy (Beissinger et al. 1999:3). Familiar examples of the political dynamic linking nationalism and the writing of epics are found in the Balkans (Sells 1996). In the colonial Indies, Indic court epics were sometimes turned toward political ends, as Laurie J. Sears has pointed out in her study of Javanese wayang tales (Sears 1996). Late Dutch colonial governmental control brought Javanese language and literature institutes, where European scholars collaborated with Javanese priyayi research associates to produce authorized versions of Javanese texts. The Java study institutes canonized ancient Indian epic-based puppet theatre story cycles as quintessentially Javanese (as noted, over against a Muslim Java that the colonial state perceived as threatening and less controllable). Sears goes on to report that the wayang stories also acted as a field of negotiated meanings for village puppeteers, court puppeteers, and for the various Dutch and aristocratic Javanese literary recorders and scholars of the tales. These various parties to the wayang project defined rival versions of Java and Java in the Indies, in the process of discussing the wayang plays. Batak authors decisions in the late colonial decades to write versions of oral turi-turian about such figures as Datuk Tuongku as literary epics, as texts on heritage, and Batak newspaper and book publishers decisions to bring these works to wide southern Batak publics, operated in somewhat different ways as political acts, in a time of fragilely coalescing nationalisms in the colonial Indies. No such high aristocracy as the Javanese priyayi existed in the Bataklanden, to join any court-focussed colonial Batak studies endeavor of the sort Sears examines for Java. No Batak nation emerged, surely, although turi-turian discourse of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s did foster strong imageries of Tapanuli peoplehood and local language, Hata Angkola and Hata Mandailing genius. Indonesian

68

Print, poetics and politics

nationalism soon swamped local nationalist streams of literature in places like Tapanuli, and Batak peoplehood ideas became firmly subsumed within the Republic of Indonesias From Many, One (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) national motto. The southern Batak epic imagination in print went more toward the level of quiet protest possible in the reading experience itself. In the Sipirok area, the major publishing thrust to transform story cycles like the Datuk Tuongku ones into books and newspaper serializations took place over a span of time when oral performances of turi-turian chants were becoming increasingly rare. Turi-turian were not just a fading chant form in New Order times, nostalgia aside: oral performances of the stories were also apparently becoming uncommon by the late Dutch colonial period. This was the same era when Batak peoplehood ideas were being written about with some fervor in southern Tapanuli vernacular journalism and fiction. At this same time, Indonesian nationalism was a topic for debate and defense, for Batak newspaper editors and writers working in both the Angkola Batak language press in towns like Sipirok and Sibolga, and in Indonesian language journalism in cities like Medan and Pematang Siantar. Within this dense literary context, printed and commercially published self-confessedly Mandailing literary epics like Mangaradja Goenoengs Raja Gorga and Soetan Hasoendoetans Sipirok-focussed Datuk Tuongku provided one important public culture stage for writing those particular imagined community in the Indies, in tense counterpoint to the more official, state-based and lexically simple Dutch folkloric works on this part of the Bataklands. How did Datuk Tuongku work in this way? Notions about this particular tales supposed great ancientness were probably key. The origin of turi-turian narrative in the southern Batak languages is hard to date objectively with any degree of specificity, especially given local claims about the chants ancientness. Many of the storylines have strong similarities to Minangkabau kaba (extended story cycles, themselves linked to the Malay hikayat). Since the droned chant form itself somewhat resembles prayer recitation in Arabic, this type of story could well have come to the region now called South Tapanuli as late as the 1820s, when the Padri forces from Minangkabau brought Islam to the southern Batak regions. Beyond this, though, story cycles with as many references to fine courts and aristocrats as the Raja Gorga and Datuk Tuongku tales have, could even have ties to palace literatures of older Sumatran kingdoms, such as Jambis Melayu state of a thousand years ago, or Minangkabaus fourteenth century court of Adityarvarman. But, there is no direct evidence for that. For their part, the southern Tapanuli turi-turian chanters and their print recorders in late colonial times tended to avoid much speculation about the chants possible connections to Padri times, or Minangkabau, or south Sumatran kingdoms, or indeed to other Malay world epic traditions. Whatever the case with ori-

I Introduction

69

gin stories, though, to my knowledge at least, all literary epic writers from this region from the 1910s forward have agreed: oral, performance-format turi-turian were fast vanishing. When the 1914 Raja Gorga chant was published, its author was already clearly concerned that the genre needed to be safely set down in books since so few southern Batak young people had had or would ever have the chance to hear a full oral performance. The printed books and newspaper serials, qua literary epics, were presented as texts that preserved the old, old tales of places like Sipirok at the same time they also linked contemporary readers to an era long pre-dating the arrival of the Company, the Dutch. Turi-turian books and serials have many heated rushes of old ritual words, making them fun to savor, and satisfying as word repasts. However, as present readers will discover once they plunge into Datuk Tuongku, the colonial-era turi-turian texts also tapped into another range of emotions, sadder ones this time: feelings of loss and longing, associated in the ritual speech most explicitly with womens andung laments and the emotion of being lungun (poignantly sad, lonely, pensive, pining for a loss). Since turi-turian were the male counterpart to old womens sob-speech laments for the dead and for beloved kinspeople who are departing on long journeys (the bride on her way to her husbands home, a son or daughter on the trip to Deli) these tales had a sizeable emotional reach. Turi-turian antiquarian writers such as Mangaradja Goenoeng and Soetan Hasoendoetan actively constructed emotions of loss and longing in new ways in their literary texts, rather than simply reflecting some traditional range of folk understandings of feeling. In writing of loss and longing, they conveyed pointed messages about late colonial Indies-era Tapanuli and Deli language worlds. If I read these turi-turian books correctly, in effect they seemed to be writing laments for Angkola ritual speech universes that were dying. These literary texts in consequence became a specific sort of emotional memento, devoted to engendering pleasurable yet painful feelings in regard to an old world of achingly beautiful language excellence. The authors at issue here also wrote of another topic within this lungun emotional register: what they seemed to have seen as the encirclement of our way of speaking and its ritual registers by those purportedly more modern languages, Malay and Dutch. As a literary turiturian author, Soetan Hasoendoetan attempted to claim Latin alphabet print as a domain for righting these wrongs. And once again, his stratagem was subtle. Casual readers of a book like Datuk Tuongku might well think that they are just dealing with a pleasant old tale told in elaborate prose. Soetan Hasoendoetan, though, was using his pages to strategically manipulate a specific range of emotions, in relation to language excellence. Lungun feelings are centrally important ones in Angkola emotional universes, as I found in my fieldwork in Sipirok and in investigations of ritual

70

Print, poetics and politics

speech and song there. To be lungun, to the extent this is a translatable concept, is to feel plaintively sad about a combination of social isolation and loss (or anticipated loss). More than just sadness, a lungun state is one of deep pining and a sort of emotional ache. In addition, a mountain village far from other settlements, for instance, is lungun: isolated, lonely, so the people there necessarily (within this emotional calculus) feel lungun too. A coconut palm standing alone in an abandoned village, swaying slightly this way and that in the wind, is a common ritual speech image of the lungun state. This feeling is something audience members are definitely to try to avoid, although as we shall see, another element of lungun-ness is its hidden enjoyable qualities, in a sort of wallowing in pain sense (and making sure that others know you are suffering). A child who migrates to Deli, even today, is expected to be lungun for his or her family, home village, home cooking, and home area scenery. The migr may well begin to lose weight (supposedly) from this isolation from kin and home base: lungun-ness can have a bodily correlate. Folks back home can also miss a migrant so much that they too begin to waste away. In fact, when I first did fieldwork in Sipirok and stayed there two and a half years without going home, new acquaintances who found out that I happened to be an only child often asked me if my mother back in America was losing weight. This was a puzzlement to me (and a source of amusement to my mother when I wrote her about it), until I figured out a bit more of the lungun domain of feelings. When one is living in a Medan household, hearing a favorite village song in the Angkola Batak language can make one lungun (in this case, to somewhat pleasurable effect). Lungun feelings also have a good deal to do with close love relationships. A young man can pine for a lover, and feel lungun; songs called ungut-ungut ditties express this sort of male love complaint. These songs are as much moaned out as sung and are accompanied by plaintive music from a small bamboo flute. These compositions and performances are designed to make the girls who might hear them cry and also feel sorry for the boys. Lungun feelings expressed publically do have this manipulative edge to them, as they are designed to make others sympathize with ones plight and join in the suffering. Beyond romantic relationships, a mother can grow lungun for a child living far away, as just noted; old friends separated by job constraints, for instance, and living in different towns can also be lungun for each other. Lungun emotions lead one to long for the repair of social connections broken by circumstance. The balm for deep longings of this sort often consists in the very public protests of the lungun state: through ungut-ungut song, through complaints to a friend about how lonely one is, or through andung lament. These sobbed andung laments elicit the strongest feelings of lungun.

I Introduction

71

Over my nine 1970s to 2001 visits to Sipirok and nearby villages, I found that andung is performed with long snatches of its special phraseology only very rarely (in some villages, never). A distinctive keening wail is still frequently performed by old women over a corpse at a funeral, with the women sometimes stroking the cheeks of the dead person. However, andung like the following, with the laments full-scale special wording, is almost never heard today around Sipirok. In 1975 in a village where I lived for nine months, three old women performed fairly extensive andung, both at funerals and for brides departing on their marriage journeys. Those ompu-ompu (grandmothers) have now died and no younger women in this settlement any longer know the long stretches of andung words. In 1992 when I lived in another village near that one (in Bungabondar) when I was working on the translation of Sitti Djaoerah, there was one very elderly woman who sang andung. People told me she was a hundred years old. She has died now, and most andung in this village now consists of drawn out sobs with only a few special lament phrases. Full-scale andung at a death might go:
Oh---------- father -------- mother, oh ---------- Dear Older Lineage Companion, whom I never imagined would die, apparently you have had the heart to go and leave us, to leave my body here, to abandon our unlucky little son! Apparently you went ahead and asked to leave, asked to leave us behind! Oh, I lament that request! You left us here with a feeling of mourning far greater than others have ever borne, hi-hi-hi ---------- I cry out laments, I cry out laments ---------- father, mother, oh, perhaps it is best that your life companion simply follow you to the grave, taking along our unlucky little son, so that we are all together in the grave, oh, that is my mournful request! Oh, what are we to do, I ask for your life companions eyes are like the eyes of a horse who has lost his race, never daring to raise his head to people again, that is how this solitary persons eyes are now, shifting from side to side, blankly watching people go about their normal work, gazing at them but always thinking and mulling over my life companion and his death request, his plea to die, which carried him off to his grave. Oh------- father, oh, mother, oh ---------- It is only my life companions death request that has left me destitute here in the midst of other people happily going about their work, oh-------- if your hand outstretched to me has already died I do not have the strength of will to continue drawing lifes breath. Oh ------- it is better that I just follow along behind you to the grave, oh ---------- my husband, how am I to think of our little son, whose good fortune has been so very short-lived? When people sit there eating their hot rice meals his gaze rises and falls to watch them put food in their mouths, yet he has no food himself, his gaze is like the gaze of meow-meower, hip-hopper-in-the-kitchen, waiting there on the floor for people to drop table scraps for him to eat, oh, our son is like someone carried out into the centre of a big grassy field where the vicious birds will swallow him up, his fate none other than that, the fate of our unlucky little son, oh, mother -------- oh, my mother, who once gave birth to her little daughter, hai -------

Tellingly, this example is taken from a piece of literature, from Soetan

72

Print, poetics and politics

Hasoendoetans Sitti Djaoerah, from a scene in which the male lead character Djahoemarkars mother Si Taring laments the death of her husband, Young Martial Arts Battler. He has died in a robbery, leaving his widow with the infant Djahoemarkar to support. All the andung that I tape recorded in my fieldwork has been much more abbreviated, even when I arranged special taping sessions with the three village women mentioned above. Audience members, especially women, were once expected to burst into tears when they heard such laments, which are delivered in a kind of low, sobbing droned voice. Importantly, the chanted cadence of the male bards turi-turian tale explicitly recalls this andung sob-speech. This manifestly helps turi-turian bards to index some of this same range of emotion of loss and regret and also to invoke some of andungs combined beauty and painfulness. If I read books like Raja Gorga and Datuk Tuongku correctly, late colonial period turi-turian literary bards tried to harness this domain of strong feeling and to reconstruct it to a degree in relation to a very up-to-date, modern Indies sort of loss: the ebbing away of the grand old ritual speech universes in the Angkola Batak language within Sumatran language landscapes increasingly dominated by high prestige Malay/Indonesian and Dutch. Reading such texts as Datuk Tuongku thus became an exercise in trying to assuage ones lungunness for past linguistic glory all the while that these texts were themselves playing a role in constructing such notions as an Angkola Batak language and such ideas that readers had an ancient speech heritage associated with Tapanuli villages and ceremonial life, in the first place. A glimpse at some of the comparative context on epic and lament might be illuminating here. Much of the research on epic worldwide has shown that these long linguistically and emotionally panoramic narratives have intimate connections to lament. Further, the deep feelings of sadness that epics so often spark, causing listeners to cry at mournful points in the story, often work to create social community through that specific mobilization of feeling. Some of the research by classicists on epic and lament show how some of these patterns of narrative form and the imagination of community work. In The natural tears of epic classicist Thomas Greene explores what he calls the epic telos of tears, this story forms central enmeshment with grief. He goes further to assert that epics create communities of shared mourning. They do this by binding audience members together through the emotional intensity and experiential reality of weeping. In reference to Homeric epic, Greene notes that the sharing of grief was perceived in the fourth century as the characteristic response to the most privileged poetry (Greene 1999:190). This was an audience phenomenon that Greene suggests was also found in the bardic recitations of the Homeric tales four centuries before (Greene 1999: 190). He leaves these oral/literate possible correspondences undetermined in any final sense, but goes on to cite the overt preoccupation in the Odyssey

I Introduction

73

with scenes of grief and tears (Greene 1999:190):

the proper response to heroic poetry becomes an issue almost at the outset of the Odyssey, when the bard Phemioss song of nostoi, that bitter song, the Homecoming of the Achaians, is interrupted by Penelope in tears, commanding him to chose another subject. Penelopes grief stems from her own personal loss. But Telemachoss response seems to underscore the inevitable convergence of pain and song, You must nerve yourself and try to listen, he tells her, as others listen to stories of suffering. Penelopes tears here at the beginning anticipate her husbands tears when later in the poem he listens to another bard. But the scene which for our purposes is decisive is the reunion of husband and wife in book 23, that scene that the Alexandrian critics already described as the telos of the poems narrative. Whether or not the remainder of the poem is authentically Homeric, Sheila Murnaghan has rightly called this scene the definitive conclusion to the Odysseys plot. The dramatic power of the reunion lies in its mingling of joy with the bitterness of loss, so that the mutual tears stem from the inextricability of love and pain. Now from his breast into his eyes the ache of longing mounted, and he wept at last, his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms The rose Dawn might have found them weeping still had not the grey-eyed Athena slowed the night when night was most profound, under the Ocean of the East. (Odyssey 23:259-262, 271-273.)

Greene (1999:192) contends further that this is a common, cross-cultural pattern:

the resolution of tears that ends both Homeric poems ends most of the Eruopean poems that we commonly describe as epics. Most of them conclude quite literally in tears, and those few that fail to do so tend to centre on a pivotal scene of mourning. The only difficulty in making this argument is that the pattern is so common as to risk tedium in the enumeration.

He examines Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the twelfth-century Russian epic Igors raid, and the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh in this light. Each narrative concludes with a torrent of tears. In such a field of grief, audience member, poet, and character in the story meld together (Greene 1999:195):
Joseph Russo and Bennett Simon, writing on the oral epic tradition, suggest that recitation sets up a kind of common field in which poet, audience, and the characters within the poems are all defined, with some blurring of the boundaries that normally separate the three. In that common field, the grief of the poet, the character, and the hearer seem to blend in a form of communion, and where the performer can be distinguished from the poet, his grief also joins in a necessary continuum. This continuum is metaphorized by Socrates in the Ion as a series of rings magnetized by a lodestone, beginning with the Muse, passing through

74

Print, poetics and politics the poet and performer, and ending with the spectator (533d-e, 535e-536b). He might have added the ring belonging to the character, the Priam or Charlemagne or Gilgamesh. In the common field of performance, in the series of magnetized rings, the grief of the poet merges with the performers, and the characters, and the audiences. Truly to listen to the epics is to enter that space where the conventional distinctions break down, Jean-Pierre Vernants au dela of Mnemosyne, where the participation of past and present produces a hallowed communion between the two.

Greene asserts that the experience of shedding tears fosters this blurring of personal and poetic boundaries. In a written epic-like work such as Spensers Faerie queen, the poets ability to collapse the grief of reader, character, and reciter together into a single aestheticized field of tears allows him to conjure up a community of intense belief (in that Spenserian case, a shared community of Christian penitents). Many other observers of epic have noted this narrative forms affinity for national community: epics ability to instantiate notions of national community in terms of some past heroic greatness. Greenes line of research suggests that epics particular focus on mourning and grief may provide the concrete folk emotional terrain upon which these ideological connections are made. Many other students of epic have pointed out the debt male bards in many societies owe to female lamenters (Beissinger 1999). If epic is a somewhat imperious male transformation of womens lament song, the content of womens mourning wails can also work to interrogate the grand heroism of epic (making these stories fuller with contestation than older generations of scholars suspected, some feminist classicists now argue). The feminine mourning wails emotional focus on crying and grief and its ideational complexity might well be what empowers epic poetry to create community imageries of the sort Greene describes. I would suggest that literary turi-turian worked in some of these same ways in late colonial Indies times. Beyond simply conjuring up ideas of shared communities of mourners, however, these texts were quite self-consciously designed to foster piercingly sad feelings of lungun about language loss and then to situate these emotions in reference to the reading experience itself: to the Deli and Tapanuli social scene of a Batak reader holding a modern print book about old tales and ritual speech magnificence. The turi-turian texts accomplished this transformation of reader into lamenter and old language loyalist in several ways. Overtly, the emotion of lungun-ness that a reader would feel in reading a book like Raja Gorga or Datuk Tuongku would be directed by the storytellers toward the concrete poignant events of the turi-turian tales themselves. For instance, readers learned of such affecting situations as the young aristocratic boy heroes of Raja Gorga being forced into unwilling forest exile and having to leave a beloved home behind. This was an andung situation; these boys

I Introduction

75

were losing their village and their childhood innocence. In Datuk Tuongku, the young male and female protagonists become ensnarled in numerous family circumstances that also leave them lungun: for instance, the time when Si Tapi Mombang decides that she must leave her husband Datuk Tuongku and flee the human world to return to her fathers Sky World. On this occasion she andungs her spouse as she leaves this Earth World step by step as she departs from the palace to climb first to the top of a coconut palm out in the front yard, then as she ascends to the lower cloud banks, then as she flies further upward, and so on until she finally zips through the Baba Pintu Langit, the Mouth of the Sky World. At each point in her journey she mourns the loss of her human family. Datuk Tuongku himself is dissolved in tears to see his wife leave him step by step in this way. The book has many such sad events, including funerals, the severing of love relationships, and the abandonment of small children (to the extent that poor little toddlers have to be adopted by the water buffaloes. As we have seen, the image of a tiny child left to fend for himself or herself in the middle of a wide grassy field is andung talk). Readers are clearly meant to feel sad and tearful at these points in the text, and to enter into the characters lungun sorts of suffering and complaint. Raja Gorga is a particularly striking lament in many of these ways. In Mangaradja Goenoengs rendition of this tale, the text begins with a lengthy, lexically dense tonggo-tonggo invocation to the dead and then proceeds through several rhymed verses that indicate, in concrete ways, just how a male bards turi-turian stands in relation to womens lament (Mangaradja Goenoeng 1957:7-8):
Bulung singkut kutari do da, Anso uparrege-regehon; Losok-losokku tangis, Anso uparende-endehon, Hata ni turi hata ni hobaran di ak ni abornginan on. Ranga-ranga ni sorka, Niarit sunggapa ni bubu; Marsak-marsak ni roha, Panggurgurkon ni pusu. Murdung lai-lai, Matapor bona ni puli; Andung ni halaklahi, Nipadjodjor hata ni turi... I pull back on the singkut leaves So I can plait them into a mat Slowly and gently I sob So that I can sing out a song, Sing out the words of this turi, this story, here on the spine of night. The spokes of the spinning wheel And the bamboo slats inside the fishtrap Deep anxiety of thought and mind Makes feelings of vengeance bubble-boil. The ponys tail bends down in a curve The small sugar palms trunk breaks in two The andung laments of men Thats whats put forward in the turis words...

Readers soon have their two young heroes, Raja Gorga and his sweet

76

Print, poetics and politics

but rather aimless little brother, Raja Suasa of the Earth. Both are in their midteens, as southern Tapanuli turi-turian characters tend to be at the start of the tales. The pair plays happily at a variety of games like marbles and candlenut jacks in a bowered grove, the sacred flower grove of the kings. Sadness enters: an old crone warns Raja Gorga and his brother that a fierce, cold wind is blowing toward them that is, that their mother will soon grow ill and die. The boys do not believe the portent, but soon it comes true. A funeral is held in their home village, Binanga Torluk Simarulak-ulak. Their father Sutan Patembal Dolok is urged by his kinfolk to quickly remarry. He resists at first, and then gives in. He weds a young kinswoman of his late wife. This woman, the beautiful but dishonest and lustful Si Tapi Tondang ni Bulan, takes to watching her adolescent stepsons play with more than motherly interest. Bored with her old husband, one day she follows the boys out to their playgrounds at the Magic Fragrant Flower Grove. She attempts to seduce them there but they rebuff her, horrified at her amorality. Si Tapi Tondang fears that they will alert their father to her wild behavior if they return to the village before she does. She plots to forestall this. She dashes home, gives herself cuts and bruises, yanks her lacey jacket askew, loosens her hairbun, and tells Sutan Patembal Dolok that her stepsons have done the unthinkable: they have tried to rape their stepmother. She pulls off this act convincingly enough to make her husband believe the libel. Furious, he sends his sons into forest exile: an occasion in the tale for much andung-like complaint by the two boys. The old kings anakboru wife-receivers sympathize with the youths and head off an even worse tragedy: the king had originally wanted to murder his sons. The remainder of the turi-turian follows the many adventures that the boys have, growing up toward marriage in the deep jungle lands. There they meet more old crones, supernaturals like Jolma So Begu (Human Yet Evil Spirit), and nubile spirit girls. Raja Gorga woos one of these, Nai Mangatak Langit Sumurat Tano, a coy, well-spoken maiden. Along the way numerous sad situations and events occur, such as the boys continuing lonesomeness for their home village, their unassuaged grief for their mother, their lovesickness for the playful, unpredictable spirit girls, and (repeatedly), Raja Gorgas mournful feelings and profuse tears at the death of his little brother Raja Suasa. But not to worry each time the boy dies and is buried, Raja Suasa miraculously comes back to life through the handy administrations of some magic healing oils. Present readers will find this a circumstance that also occurs in Datuk Tuongku. Eventually, after these many tribulations and poignant lungun occasions of grief, the Raja Gorga story wends its eventual way back to the home village, where the perfidious young stepmother is suitably punished and the now-grown princes are welcomed back as the new rulers. They arrive back

I Introduction

77

home attired in splendid, glittering costumes (Raja Gorga has a good deal of the Malay court tale to it). The story as a whole is a lament for the sadnesses incumbent on families where members fail to fulfill their proper relationships of love and respect. A special kind of lament, Raja Gorga is also a proud antiquarian text about Mandailings ritual speech excellence and profusion. It was designed in part as a schoolbook sort of volume on this theme. Young students and older leisure time readers both could savor the books lexical richness and ranges of oratory forms and special speech registers and grow pensive and sad that such language beauty was now passing from the Tapanuli and Deli scene. The book is a poestaha, a memorial treasure chest of old speech ways, in this sense. It was a relinquary for a fading language world. Datuk Tuongku worked as a lament and language memento text in a similar way, even though this turi-turian books language levels were not so consistently high as is much of the material in Raja Gorga. More comfortably paced, sometimes almost conversationally so, Datuk Tuongku still offers readers dense honorifics, a hearty smorgasbord of ritual speech forms, and an array of narrative genres. The latter include an origin myth for woodcarving; tales about clever if bothersome forest animals (Sipiroks variation on the widespread Malay world Mousedeer stories); and Malay-style fish and white crocodile tales. And, as we have seen, Soetan Hasoendoetan also outfits his text with a kind of journalistic/scholarly apparatus his lengthy journalistic introduction, several elaborate footnotes, and his serious-toned Afterword noting what Sipirok bards he worked with in collecting various versions of the tale. By framing his turi-turian in this way Soetan Hasoendoetan sets a careful preservationist tone for the volume, but the artistic verve with which he attacks his story seems designed to sweep readers off their feet. Readers will know quite definitely what is to be lost when the turi-turian leave the Sumatran scene. Print literature becomes both an arena for lamenting this and a text-relinquary for capturing this special speech world, in a print bookmemento form. Datuk Tuongku provides many occasions for tears and mourning. Readers are slated to suffer along with Datuk Tuongku, Si Tapi Mombang, their young son Si Porkas Lelo Manjolungi, Datuk Tuongkus little brother Si Ali Tunjuk Parmanoan, and assorted village assemblies, as the story shifts from village to forest glade to royal palace to Sky World to that slippery, slidey peak, Mount Nanggar Jati, that limestone outcropping that Datuk Tuongku uses to climb up into the sky in search of his wife. Shedding tears throughout this entire lament of men helps make the readers pursuit of Datuk Tuongkus quest journeys simultaneously fun and crushingly sad.

78

Print, poetics and politics

Datuk Tuongku in the New Order The New Order period from 1965 to May 1998, was the era when former President Soeharto was in power and when his brand of nationalistic economic development held sway. This was a time when memories of the 1920s and 1930s Angkola Batak language novels and novelists were almost completely expunged from public view at the national level, in favor of a certain boosterism for sectors of national Indonesian literature. In the 1950s and 1960s, Raja Gorga remained in print and in fact was a well-regarded textbook in Batak language classes, in the South Tapanuli public schools. It was seen as a repository of old speech forms and was used in elective courses in Batak literature in middle school. My own Angkola Batak language teacher Bapak G.W. Siregar often taught from this text, in Sipiroks Middle School No. 2. The New Orders Ministry of Education and Culture brought Raja Gorga back into print once again in 1979, as part of its own folkloric series of publications on the languages and literatures of the archipelago. This came under the auspices of the Ministrys Proyek Penerbitan Buku Sastra Indonesia dan Daerah (Project for the Publication of Indonesian and Local Literatures). In contrast to Raja Gorga, Datuk Tuongku vanished totally, although Sipirok old people who I got to know well in my fieldwork trips to the town often warmly remembered Soetan Hasoendoetan and his novel Sitti Djaoerah. This process of social erasure and partial memory had a companion: the central states attempted re-definition of peoples such as the Batak as minority societies existing in the shadow of Javanese high culture, an entity associated with the palace arts such as gamelan music and shadow puppet plays. During the New Order a few additional Angkola-Batak language turiturian books were published, as were articles including snippets of the chant stories in special interest Batak culture magazines from Medan (for instance, Budaya Batak). Similar features also appeared on the Ethnic Culture Page, the Lembaran Budaya, of the major Medan dailies such as Sinar Indonesia Baru and Mimbar Umum (Rodgers 1991b). In some of the Soeharto-era chant books and in the larger field of antiquarian literature focused on adat that surrounded them, writers from Sipirok families sometimes engaged in a wary strategy of presenting southern Batak old speech ways as respectable (indeed, better) counterparts to Javanese high culture, and as speech worlds that long predated the New Order and in fact even the colonial Indies. In this way, these more recent turi-turian texts had become players in the cultural politics of New Order Indonesia (R. Smith Kipp 1993; Kuipers 1998), where the Jakarta government used its considerable culture-defining apparatus (the school system, the Ministry of Education and Culture) to folklorize outer island ethnic cultures in negative senses. Members of these societies in turn sometimes managed to speak back to state hegemony by writing their own traditions

I Introduction

79

via somewhat clandestine indigenous literatures, often focussed on adat. When these literatures were published in languages such as Angkola Batak, as opposed to the national language, such books were sometimes able to fly just under the censorship radar of the Soeharto state. These informally produced and sometimes commercially printed publications stood in dialogic tension to the important folkloric series issued by the governments Ministry of Education and Culture. The level of lexical and grammatical complexity of the Soeharto-era turiturian texts by southern Tapanuli authors from towns and migr cities pales in comparison to that of Datuk Tuongku and Raja Gorga. But, when seen as part of the more general publishing phenomenon of local southern Batak antiquarian writing during the New Order, these turi-turian tales surely have stories to tell about language and power under the Soeharto government, the topic that forms the focus of this section. Although this may not be an exhaustive list since many Batak language publications appear and then vanish quickly from Tapanuli, Medan, and Jakarta bookstores and streetside bookstalls, I have found the following printed turi-turian from national Indonesian times: Sutan Habiaran Siregars 1974 Turi-turian ni Tunggal Panaluan, Abdul Rahman Ritongas 1986 Turi-turian ni Hak Sipirok Banggo-Banggo, Abdurrahman Ritongas Halilian; Turi-turian ni Halak Sipirok Banggo-Banggo (1999, with Part Two consisting of a rendition of the Datuk Tuongku story), and Baginda Soripada Patuan Daulat Baginda Nalobis Turi-turian ni Datuk Tuongku Aji Malim Leman dohot Si Tapi Mombang Suro Dilangit (probably late 1990s although the book includes no publication date nor is the Introduction dated). Sutan Habiarans work here was a Toba story with a few minor Angkola rhetorical flourishes, while Abdul Rahman Ritongas 1986 volume was a family reminiscence, travelogue, and sampler of novelistic fragments. The other Ritonga volume (possibly by the same author) was an omnibus work including a history of religion for Sipirok and Pahae, several short narratives, family history notes, and the aforementioned 71 page long Datuk Tuongku tale. Baginda Soripadas volume, as its title indicates, is also a version of Sipiroks story. It was told this time through a combination of very short prose passages (paragraphs of a sentence or two) and verse inserts. In a long Preface, Baginda Soripada sets out his theory of Datuk Tuongkus historical origins. He tells readers that it was brought to southern Tapanuli from Minangkabau during the Padri Wars by a Batak military figure named Tuanku Tambusi (a man from the Harahap marga from Batang Onang). Baginda Soripada reports that Tuanku Tambusi studied Islam in Minangkabau in his youth at Tuanku Nan Rencehs pesantren; the shech was then in the process of bringing the faith to the Batak and he recruited the young man to his cause. Finding the Dutch army powerful in secular terms, the Padri forces

80

Print, poetics and politics

(again, in Baginda Soripadas account) decided to fight them by more indirect means, such as magic. Fanciful tales like Datuk Tuongku were part of this armamentarium, Baginda Soripada contends. Furthermore, he goes on to assert, the Dutch tried to outlaw the recitation of chanted turi-turian, for they knew these tales were really about resisting the colonial state. The author subtitles his turi-turian book A story about; The Tapanuli populaces underground struggle to counter the colonialists. He goes on to include a glossary of names of protagonists from the chant tale with their supposed equivalents in colonial history (for example, Ulubalang Soripada Bajonti Alom = the Dutch, p. vi). This interpretation is uncommon, in my fieldwork experience. I also have no evidence that the late colonial-era published turi-turian books or newspaper serializations encountered any official censorship. Whatever the case, Baginda Soripadas turi-turian is phrased for the most part in nearconversational Angkola Batak, minus the kind of playful and arcane lyrics prevalent in the pre-Revolution texts. Some historical context is needed to begin to make sense of New Order era developments in turi-turian writing. Antiquarian writing in general in the Angkola and Mandailing Batak languages had tapered off immediately after the start of the Japanese occupation in 1942. In Tapanuli, sheer survival took precedence over book matters for the 1942-1945 war years. After independence, after the unsettled years of the 1945-1949 Revolution, southern Batak language writing was largely supplanted by a flood of Indonesian language texts on nationalist themes. Southern Batak writers themselves followed this turn toward the national language and many of the old Batak print texts like Sitti Djaoerah and Datuk Tuongku went out of print and could be found (if at all) in peoples home libraries. In my fieldwork experience these often consist of piles of books stacked one upon another in tall wooden cabinets, which are sometimes shielded from dust with cloth draperies. Mice are a problem. Through the 1950s, primers for grades 1-3 in Angkola Batak and Mandailing Batak were still being published and used in South Tapanuli. But, the larger portion of textbook writing for southern Tapanuli schools had switched over to Indonesian by this period. In the formal school sector Batak receded to the status of the medium of instruction for the early grades. Some Batak literature was taught at the middle school level, but as a special subject. In journalism in this same period, after the creative intensity of the vernacular Angkola Batak language newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950s newspaper-writing scene shifted quickly from the Tapanuli market towns to Medan, and also from Batak to Bahasa Indonesia. The feisty small Batak newspapers of Sibolga, Padangsidimpuan, and Sipirok folded. Only a few family-managed Batak presses in these towns survived into the 1950s and 1960s. Pustaka Timur in Padangsidimpuan was one of these; it remained an important publisher of Angkola Batak language school primers through the

I Introduction

81

1980s. It suffered a serious warehouse fire but persisted nonetheless. The late 1960s brought changes to the southern Tapanuli publishing landscape. With the New Order regime taking hold in sub-provincial administrative towns like Sipirok and Padangsidimpuan and with a degree of economic stability returning to parts of Sumatra after the tumult of the late Sukarno years, Batak-language antiquarian publishing experienced a mild upswing. By the 1980s this writing phenomenon had become more prominent, to the point that I was easily able to identify, seek out, and interview many old customs guidebook writers in Sipirok, Padangsidimpuan, and Medan. The preeminent concern of their publications was kobar, ritual speech. These authors tended to hark back to a glorious but lamentably past age of oratorical excellence, dated usually taran so ro Jepang, before Japan came, before the World War II occupation years. In Angkola circles starting in about the mid 1970s, in the rural towns and in Medan and Jakarta, retired schoolteachers, government staffers, even retired military men had begun to publish old ritual speech guidebooks for popular audiences of urban Angkola young people, who were often construed in these ancient heritage tomes to be seriously in need of instruction in the old speech ways (see for instance Dalimunthe and Pohan 1985 and St. Tinggibaranialam et al. 1977). These small volumes offered sample speeches in Hata Angkola (now tagged as such, by many of my fieldwork interviewees) for weddings, funerals, and new house entries. Sometimes portions of these books would be in Indonesian, apparently since the readership was assumed to lack fluency in Angkola Batak. The model orations here were sometimes set into fictionalized family history narratives (recall this had also been the case with the 1920s adat antiquarian volumes such as Harondoek Parmanoan). These New Order-era southern Batak how-to books on ritual speech were often cheap paperbacks. Some were simply mimeographed as opposed to being formally printed. A few of these volumes were informally distributed to writers kin at horja gatherings while others were sold in larger numbers in Medan, Pematang Siantar, and South Tapanuli bookstores. These shops were otherwise largely dominated by Indonesian and Angkola Batak language schoolbooks and by Islamic pamphlets and Koranic literature, in Indonesian and a combination of Indonesian and Arabic. This small swell in Hata Angkola vernacular publishing on old speech themes continued through the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, it accelerated. I saw this as a collector of these books. In the mid 1970s in Sipirok and Medan my stacks of such titles totalled no more than 5 exemplars, while by the late 1980s I had amassed dozens of titles. Among these by the 1990s were the modest number of Angkola Batak language turi-turian listed above. Southern Batak language fiction had largely disappeared by this same period, except for some serialized long narratives on the so-called Ethnic

82

Print, poetics and politics

Culture Page of some of the Indonesian language Medan dailies such as Sinar Indonesia Baru, Waspada, and Mimbar Umum. The Ethnic Culture Page (Lembaran Budaya) was in part a circulation boosting device invented by Batak city editors in the mid and late 1970s, to increase subscriptions outside Medan in Tapanuli towns among a readership presumably interested in old ethnic culture items (Rodgers 1991b). Sinar Indonesia Baru or SIB was the most enterprising proponent of this new feature page; by the early 1980s its Ethnic Culture Page was a weekly feature, offering a full page worth of stories on such topics as Karo ceremonial costumes, Toba traditional house architecture, Dairi Camphor Gathering Speech, Angkola courtship rhymes, and so on along that folkloric line. These Medan papers were overwhelmingly in Bahasa Indonesia but some Lembaran Budaya stories would have some passages in a Batak dialect (and much more rarely, in Niassian). The Ethnic Culture Page had a sociologically complex range of contributing authors: avocational antiquarians; old customs authors who wrote as a sideline to jobs as teachers or Ministry of Education and Culture staffers (Padangsidimpuan branch); Batak university professors; and Batak Protestant ministers. Some Ethnic Culture Page articles were fairly flimsy pieces whose touristic tones about exotic Karo village customs and such recalled the travel and leisure campaigns then being sponsored by the national government. In Jakartas tourism efforts, outer island ethnic minority societies such as the Toraja were presented as colorful, quaint consumables for an international market of upscale travellers who had already done Bali and now sought something more primitive. Toby Volkman has reported some of the ironies of such government tourism promotions from the 1970s and 1980s: the central governments touristic visions of scenic tribals such as the Toraja had elements of condescension and statism, but Toraja themselves sometimes gained a fair amount of control over the specific imageries of ethnic identity marketed to visitors. Toraja villagers and tour directors also made some money from tourism. In the process a fair amount of dissembling occurred, with representatives of the state seeing the Toraja as compliant and the latter exercising some degree of hidden agency (Volkman 1984, 1990). The political dynamics of Medans Ethnic Culture Page were somewhat similar. Beyond the accommodationist, fairly pro-government writers were other contributors to the Page, more unpredictable freelancers (in fact, sometimes they were South Tapanulis own adat old heritage antiquarians). In their articles Batak village polities were often described in more muscular terms, not as quaint but as culturally deep. A social science language of societies, cultures, and social functions (fungsi social) was used in both streams of Ethnic Culture Page journalism. SIBs political dynamics vis--vis the province and the nation were complex during this period, as the managing editor, a Toba Batak named G.M. Panggebean, was on something of a cam-

I Introduction

83

paign to become a well-known, influential figure throughout not only Toba but North Sumatra as a whole. He deployed his ethnically ecumenical Ethnic Culture Page each Thursday to curry a bit of favor in media markets like Sipirok (areas otherwise adverse to Toba self-promotions). The national-era uptick in South Tapanuli Batak-language folklore had a concrete source, as far as I have been able to determine. The inspector of public schools for the Tapanuli Selatan sub-province in the 1960s, a man named Baginda Marakub (Marpaung), may well have sparked the publication of these New Order ancient heritage works. In 1969 his deftly phrased Djop ni roha pardomuan (Joy in common gatherings, as in coming together in horja feasts) was issued by the Padangsidimpuan firm Pustaka Timur. This Angkola Batak language book presented readers with a novelistic family narrative in which a prosperous household proceeds through the marriage of a favorite son to the birth of his child through to yet another, siriaon (thanksgiving) adat occasion, the entry into a new house. At each juncture of all these ceremonies Baginda Marakub wrote out sample kobar ritual orations, replete with flowery phrases. The speeches were serviceable for both Muslim and Christian families (that is, the oratory was not framed with extensive use of Arabic prayer phrases, which often happens in real life throughout the subprovince when Muslim speakers join in the kobar). Baginda Marakub targeted his book to a school audience. Djop ni roha was marketed as a textbook for Middle School courses in Batak language and literature. The South Tapanuli public schools switched children over to almost full-time Indonesian language use in the third grade after earlier instruction in Hata Angkola and Hata Mandailing, but Batak grammar and Batak old literature was a subject area for pupils through the Middle School years. Raja Gorga, as noted, was used as a textbook in some of these classes in the 1950s and 1960s. In part because that turi-turian involved so difficult a level of vocabulary (and perhaps also because the far more accessible Datuk Tuongku had gone out of print), South Tapanuli schoolteachers embraced Djop ni roha as a teachable text for Batak literature classes. In 1962 Baginda Marakub and a colleague, B.R. Sohuturon, had published another antiquarian volume, called Pundjut-pundjutan (Wallet of valuable little things stuffed inside). This was a latter day old language memento treasure chest reminiscent of Poestaha. The 1962 text had a studious flair to it, consisting as it did of some 740 umpama (traditional sayings), each followed by a paragraph of so explication du texte commentary, all in an elegant form of Angkola Batak. Many of these entries dealt directly with speech, since so many of the sayings did. This well-marketed volume was available in bookshops throughout South Tapanuli and valorized a certain approach to ritual language: the kobar and its umpama should properly be the subject of literary preservation and study, in schools and at home; the novice orator could con-

84

Print, poetics and politics

sult commercially produced texts of this sort to augment a stock of sayings; women as well as men, young as well as old could build up an impressive storehouse of umpama by perusing Pundjut-pundjutan. And, Angkola oratory was (purportedly) uncommonly rich, and unusually deep (there were those 740 entries, after all, each in need of several paragraphs worth of explication). Beyond concrete literary influence such as that between Baginda Marakubs work and the New Order period old heritage materials, what might have been occurring in larger senses? The publishing dynamics of SIBs Ethnic Culture Page has already indicated part of the answer: Batak antiquarians writing under the New Order were writing Batakness within a state regime that attempted to control hinterland regions in part through processes of ideological trivialization. Government-sponsored publishing campaigns envisioned Angkola, Toba, and so on as antique and villageified, if culturally rich; these writing strategies attempted to erase politics in these regions, by rendering Batak social worlds as cultural phenomena. But, enterprising southern Batak writers sometimes managed to write back to such nationalist projects. In Dissociated identities; Ethnicity, religion, and class in an Indonesian society (1993) Rita Smith Kipp has summarized some of these locality/state tensions well: the New Order state obscured social class tensions by promulgating a rhetoric of ethnic cultures; outlying minority societies were put on display as touristic icons, if marketable; Indonesian Chinese identity was racialized in indirect ways by the Soeharto regime and sometimes used in damaging processes of scapegoating, if popular resentment against the Soeharto familys wealth grew too heated. The handful of published turi-turian that appeared during this era, for their part, seemed to be working as deeply historical cultural texts in such a context, much as their predecessors had in the Netherlands Indies. The New Order turi-turian were often exquisitely attuned this time to quite contemporary southern Batak understandings of their ethnic identity and political situation within the Indonesian nation state. By the late 1960s, New Order Indonesia was a military-backed regime encompassing over 300 locally based societies, which were often construed by the state as ethnic peoples, as suku bangsa in the national language. In provincial areas like Sipirok far from the centres of national power, the Republic of Indonesia under Soeharto was an often-resented state dominated by Javanese high culture, sometimes to the detriment of so-called outer island minority societies such as Angkola. What of Mandailing? In significant ways it had begun to disappear in New Order times, at least as a concretely self-identified Batak entity. Urban migrants from rural Mandailing in southern Tapanuli often avoided the Batak designation entirely. Others, though, it must be noted, promoted a proud Mandailing identity, complete with marga (patrilineal clan) names.

I Introduction

85

Identity matters in this area are nothing if not changeable. Under the New Order, the Batak had been consigned (once again) in some nationalist discourses to the realm of tribalism, with covert, ambiguous reference to a threatening, violence-prone Toba, who were identified with the land around Lake Toba to Sipiroks northwest. In this context, within a powerful but contested New Order state, turi-turian as an idea if not as actual performances sometimes once again became a focus of local public affection among Angkola Batak speakers. These audience members were, so to speak, old heritage afficionadoes, fans of what they took to be authentic old Angkola language ways. And, once again, the finest exemplar of this was held to be the turi-turian tale. By New Order times Angkola identity had emerged for some of the people I met during my fieldwork around Sipirok as a special, highly refined and civilized sort of Batakness, shorn of some of its supposedly rough and brusque Toba associations. Angkola Batak language chant narratives (sometimes, existing just in memory) were warmly appreciated by some older rural people and town residents in New Order times in this part of highland southern Tapanuli as relinquaries of old speech excellence, and also moral refinement. Language and moral personhood were tightly linked. In Tapanuli communities, fluency in the home language and adeptness with words and especially with ritual speech were often seen as constituative of full humanity, of complete human personhood. Individuals who fell short of such language excellence were deficient as humans and incomplete as moral beings. That is, babies, newcomers to an area, and the insane were all thought to suffer a common moral-cum-linguistic deficit: they did not yet speak saro hita. Fluency in Bahasa Indonesia (politically and financially wise though that accomplishment might be) could not make up for a lack of facility in saro hita, neither in linguistic nor moral personhood terms. And, I found in conversations with the turi-turians fans in the Sipirok area, the chanted stories were the epitome of saro hitas dual accomplishments in language refinement and moral virtue. My interlocuters averred: these sung stories were chock full of old ritual speech forms such as laments and rhymed verbal duels between marriage alliance partners. This imagery of the panoramic breadth of the chant tales was a constant, from colonial times. In my interviewees view, the turi-turian were performed (rather, were remembered to have been performed) in an especially refined, poignant way. They were droned out in chant and not simply spoken. This lent these tales a special measure of lungun-ness. Further, for these observers, turi-turian were epics about excellence on multiple levels, and mere Indonesian speakers could not begin to follow their storylines or delicate wordplay. By 1974 when I did my first ethnographic fieldwork on ritual oratory and local ideas about the modern in the Sipirok area, memories of turi-turian

86

Print, poetics and politics

chants and the many types of special speech they had incorporated had gained quite an active role among the elderly old heritage mavens I met, as forceful ethnic identity badges denoting southern Batak cultural richness and antiquity. In contrast to turn of the twentieth century Mandailing migrants to east coast Deli, most of my new Sipirok acquaintances were proud to be Batak, although they would often take pains to tell me that they were surely not Toba, not Batak in that sense. In Sipirok, in this context, the turi-turian were being applauded by their local boosters within a mid-1970s Indonesia whose public culture on broader stages beyond southern Tapanuli often denigrated the Batak (seen in rather monolithic terms in the state bureaucracies) as culturally impoverished, most especially in relation to an imagined Java with its panoply of refined court arts such as gamelan orchestras and shadow puppet plays. For New Order Java itself, this particular portrayal of these forms of music and drama as emblematic of high civilization had a statist cast to it, as Laurie J. Sears has pointed out in Shadows of empire; Colonial discourse and Javanese tales (Sears 1996). The New Order state had cagily appropriated some of the refined palace arts of Central Java as national art forms, to lend luster to the regime and perhaps to obfuscate its military origins in the national bloodbath that followed the traumatic 1965 transition from Sukarnos presidency to that of General Soeharto. All of this shaped my own fieldwork encounters with turi-turian. The tales high local luster in parts of southern Tapanuli intrigued me. I wondered, what sort of epics were these shimmering stories, with their cascades of lovely special speech and their connections to such texts as the Batak language novel, fixed as it tended to be on journey-to-modernity and journey to Deli themes? I began to see the slight increase in interest in turi-turian during the New Order as a cultural site with much the same sort of duality that the colonial-era turi-turian texts had had. That is, at the same time that regional writers and readers were pursuing their points about the language excellence of the turi-turian, they were also undeniably participating in statist discourses about their own lives, simply by holding such debates in the arena of print. During this same time the New Order was funding government folklore writing projects, issuing from the Ministry of Education and Culture. These projects sought to document (the national governments exact wording, in their proyek dokumentarisasi) the customs of minority peoples far from Jakarta. Southern Batak folklore had become a definite collectible, in these central government projects: there were Ministry of Education and Culture volumes on South Tapanuli folktales, old sayings, and ceremonial costumes. But, my amateur folklorist acquaintances in places like Sipirok villages had also captured a bit of this project for their own purposes, all the while mimicking the documentarian energy of the national government. Let me conclude by looking in some detail at one of the turi-turian texts cited

I Introduction

87

above, as it worked in this way. The text was Sutan Habiaran Siregars Turiturian ni Tunggal Panaluan (1974b). When I was translating Sitti Djaoerah into English in Bungabondar in 1992, my translation colleague Baginda Hasudungan (a raja, schoolteacher, and old customs writer) encouraged me to have frequent conversations about Angkola history, adat, and kobar special speech with his lineagemate Sutan Habiaran. The latters house was located near mine along Bungabondars curving central paved road and several times a week when I took an afternoon walk I would drop by his house, with an American college student of mine in tow. Sutan Habiaran was in his eighties and was vastly enjoying his retirement from his lumber business in Medan. By this point, he had become a font of antiquarian volumes, well known in both Sipirok and Medan old culture circles. We had first met in 1974. On my first weekend in Sipirok I was invited out to a village near Bungabondar to attend a bone reburial horja, one of the Sipirok areas very first secondary mortuary ceremonies. Some rajas attending the horja, in fact, wondered what a secondary bone reburial was. The host households were urban residents from Jakarta and Medan. They had attended some impressive bone reburials held by Toba acquaintances in North Tapanuli and had subsequently decided to employ the practice in their home village. Horja competitiveness among lineages seems to have been an issue here. The hosts were Siregars, close in tarombo clan genealogy terms to Sutan Habiarans line. Many of the grander horja of the time were fuelled by infusions of new family money coming into lineages from lucrative real estate sales in downtown Jakarta, where some Sipirok families owned residential land that they had found profitable to sell in the capitals building boom. These funds were transformed into horja feasts in praise of the long dead ancestors, who could then be beseeched to continue to shower luck blessings, tua, on their many descendants living in Jakarta and Medan and working in such occupations as law, teaching, medicine, engineering, and, indeed, national government service. Sutan Habiaran and I had kept up with each other in the years after 1974 in a desultory anthropologist/local culture expert way but it was after I moved to Bungabondar in 1992 for eight months of translation work on Sitti Djaoerah that our talks became more frequent. I began to discover more of his life story. By the early 1990s Sutan Habiaran was dividing his time between his large, solidly built, rather upscale house in Medans Padang Bulan neighborhood and his ancestral house in his village. At least, that is how he spoke of his Bungabondar home, although the structure was actually a newly constructed bungalow built as a retirement getaway and as a home for his son, who was trying to establish a florist business there. Over the two decades since we had first met, Sutan Habiaran had mount-

88

Print, poetics and politics

ed an intensive, one-man effort to menggali, or dig up and investigate, all aspects of what he called the traditional Angkola adat from jaman na jolo, from the distant past age. One day in Bungabondar he told me, somewhat to my chagrin, that my graduate student fieldwork activities with Sipirok orators in the mid 1970s had first inspired his own investigations into adat. He told me further that my devotion to attending horja feasts and tape recording adat speeches had often proved an object lesson to him in professionalism. Whatever the case, by the early 1980s Sutan Habiaran was assiduously writing down all of his major findings in small, lined notebooks and then typing them up in revised form as naskah, as manuscripts. These he would then have privately published as a series of typeset, soft cover booklets, which he would sell from his home or from newsstands or bookstores owned by Batak proprietors of his acquaintance, in Sipirok, Padangsidimpuan, and Medan. He also had artistic interests touching on old Angkola lore. For instance, in the 1980s he decided that the old Batak housecarving arts needed to be revived in Sipirok and in villages like Bungabondar. This was his construction of events; he tended to speak in terms of Batak this or that. This, despite pervasive public apathy in Sipirok, as far as I could tell, toward anything looking remotely like a Sipirok traditional house. Convinced, though, that the Sipirok regions like Toba once had magnificent housecarving and painting traditions, Sutan Habiaran set himself the task of studying traditional woodcarving with the aim of re-importing the art back into Bungabondar, which he fondly hoped would become a model arts village for all South Tapanuli. Sutan Habiaran is quite a cosmopolitan Indonesian city man and had spent the majority of his career in the building trade in Medan. Logically enough, then, he chose to study traditional woodcarving techniques first in Jakarta, at a national arts institute, and then on a pleasure trip to Bali that he took with his wife. In Bali he worked with master carvers in the arts village of Ubud, sitting alongside foreign students of Balinese crafts. After all, he told me in one of our 1992 chats in his Bungabondar home, Ubud is famous for this sort of thing, in all the tourist guides on Indonesia. At this point in his Batak culture endeavors Sutan Habiaran returned to Bungabondar to take on the occasional commission to decorate other families new houses in what he told me was the traditional Batak style. By this point, Sutan Habiaran had become convinced that there was an underlying, generically Batak set of design elements in village architecture, tracing back to ancient clan origin times in Toba. It turned out that most of his carving and decorating activities subsequently focused on his own residence, which is brightly outfitted with red, white, and black strips of wainscoting in what outsiders, at least, might say is a Toba style. In the early 1990s Sutan Habiaran was also busy supervising the construction and decoration of a new multipurpose centre for the villages Gereja Kristen Protestant Angkola

I Introduction

89

(GKPA, Angkola Protestant Christian Church). Sutan Habiaran is from a longtime Christian family and has been a mainstay in the development of this breakaway Gereja Kristen Protestant Angkola denomination both in Sipirok and Medan. The church is one of several splinter factions that separated off from the Huria Kristen Batak Protestant-Angkola (HKBP-Angkola, Batak Protestant Christian Congregation-Angkola) after the latters own split from the Huria Kristen Batak Protestant (HKBP, Batak Protestant Christian Congregation) in 1975. Nowadays, after the creation of the new denomination, the Bible, the hymnal, and all church sermons and announcements are in Hata Angkola, in the GKPAs rural and town churchs in South Tapanuli. These texts were written in the nineteenth century by the German and Dutch missionaries to Sipirok; these materials are today held up in local Christian circles as shining examples of Hata Angkola asli: the genuine, original, mostpure Angkola language. The Bungabondar churchs multipurpose centre is a large, swoopbacked building adorned with Sutan Habiarans red, black, and white ancient designs, some of which he had acquired from investigative trips to Mandailing. In that area there actually are a few old-style houses still extant, although their stylistic provenance is opaque. Other design motifs he found in Muara, the Toba town said in some tarombo to be the origin spot for the Siregar clan. These genealogies Sutan Habiaran knows in part from his reading of old Toba clan history books, themselves inspired, it happens, by the Dutch adat law scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. Sutan Habiaran would go on his periodic research trips around North and South Tapanuli with numerous family members in tow, including his notably patient wife. Also tagging along would be several grandchildren, on school holidays. Sutan Habiarans 1974 Turi-turian ni tunggal panaluan, one of his earliest publications, sprang in part from his work on comparative Batak arts and cultures. This 21-page volume (many of Sutan Habiarans works are small pamphlets) is illustrated with photographs of a number of ritual objects (carved wooden staffs, decorated barkbooks) that are normally associated with Toba traditions. The turi-turian that Sutan Habiaran relates is also Toba: Sutan Habiaran forthrightly bills it as such. The story concerns the creation of the Datu sorcerers intricately carved magic staff, the tunggal panaluan. This familiar myth was recorded by Dutch scholars of Toba. Sutan Habiaran retells the Toba narrative in conversational-level Angkola Batak. Then, he concludes his booklet with some commentary on his lineages historical linkages to Toba. He ends with a description of the components of a ceremonial rajas costume he is shown wearing in a photograph at the back of the publication (Sutan Habiaran Siregar 1974b:19). The caption reads, The Writer in full ornaat taking on the role of Datu Nahurnuk in Re-inkarnasi Form (the original is a mixture of Indonesian, Angkola Batak, and European

90

Print, poetics and politics

languages: Panyurat in full ornaat memperagahon DATU NAHURNUK IN RE-INKARNASI). Sutan Habiaran appears draped in Toba ulos textiles, holding a splendid spear of office. It would be easy to see such a photograph and such a pamphlet as nostalgia run rampant. More serious undercurrents were present. Sutan Habiaran and his fellow non-governmental, avocational adat antiquarians were publishing their works at a time in the 1970s and 1980s in a print landscape that was already filling up with the government backed folklore volumes mentioned above, in an Indonesian nation dominated by Jakartas assertions that the national culture was forward thinking and modern and that ethnic minority cultures in places like highland Sumatra were mired in the past and bound for extinction, except perhaps as touristic relics. Sutan Habiarans accomplishments and energy as a writer gain added weight in this context of central state distain for outmoded regions like Sipirok. In fact, Sutan Habiarans work is best taken not as the diverting retirement hobby of a sentimental city man but as a small volley in a muted but bitter contest with the national state over what Angkola-ness and the Angkola past are and how best to access them. Under the New Order, such contests took place within a sometimes quite hostile Indonesian possessing a considerable state apparatus for trivializing minority social worlds and their aesthetics of ritual speech and writing. Sutan Habiarans small turi-turian volume wrote back to these hegemonic processes, although one could not argue that the tales in print by this time had the same lexical, grammatical, and stylistic complexity and suppleness that present readers will find in Soetan Hasoendoetans earlier Datuk Tuongku. On translating Datuk Tuongku Texts like Datuk Tuongku are obviously challenging ones, especially for wouldbe readers and interpreters from distant social communities unfamiliar not only with these works turi-turian phraseology but with the social processes of their creation in chant and in print. How might far-away readers gain some access to turi-turian texts and the oratorical worlds they transformed and commented upon? How can distant readers begin to glimpse some of the traces of political contestation that undergirded turi-turian print publication and that of these chant books ancillary literatures such as pre-Revolution Batak-language journalism and novels? One possible answer lies in combining the theoretical frameworks used in the preceding interpretive sections of this essay with an anthropologically informed translation strategy. An anthropological study of literature must be a social analysis at base but will be richer (and a better analysis) if it also entails an engagement with a text as a work of art. Here, translation as a methodological approach to

I Introduction

91

reading Batak literatures in social context can enter the scene, and for this Indonesianist literature scholar Nancy Floridas Writing the past, inscribing the future; History as prophecy in colonial Java (Florida 1995) offers a rewarding model. Turi-turian books and serializations could be open to anthropological readings in various ways. Turi-turian books like Datuk Tuongku, however, manifestly are not dense social events that can merely be read as texts by social scientific observers: they are actual literary products, printed texts, written and read to conscious aesthetic effect. An extensive methodological literature on how anthropologists might report and analyze complex text-like social scenes or cultural sites followed the publication of Clifford Geertzs influential 1972 article, Deep play; Notes on the Balinese cockfight (Geertz 1973; see for instance, Clifford and Marcus 1986; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). But, an important question remains when anthropologists study assertively modern, intensely literate peoples like the residents of places such as Sipirok and Maga, with their sophisticated literature. That is, if print is an important arena for their self-fashioning as a people within states, and if European alphabet print literature from colonies and former colonies is among the densest of texts, how best can anthropologists study such things as turi-turian books as imaginative literature? How might anthropologists guard against reductionism on the artistic plane, while they pursue their social institutional forms of analysis? How might an anthropologist write an analytically but also aesthetically sensitive account of a cultural form such as turi-turian texts, published and read as they were, as art, over a considerable sweep of historical time? Given the boon of having a splendid turi-turian text to work with, the design of Floridas Writing the past suggests one possible approach. She examines what she finds to be future-oriented historical writing found in a nineteenth-century Javanese script court poem, a work called Babad Jaka Tingkir. Florida combines interpretive chapters with her English translation of the babad in its entirety. She takes this approach for several reasons. She contends that in Java this prophetic court poem cried out for successive rereadings in different historical eras. One of those re-readings is her own book, which involves situating, translating, and critically analyzing the hauntingly prophetic Babad Jaka Tingkir. [Her book] is, in short, a close reading of a particular text of Javanese historical writing which was itself produced with an eye toward its own potential future readings (Florida 1995:4). Florida also pays attention to the processes of translation throughout her study: translations in Java, in the past, today, and in terms of her own task as an English translator of this previously untranslated work. Moreover, she realizes that the poets historical prophecy was a marginalized text written by a now unknown man or woman who was living in exile from the court of

92

Print, poetics and politics

Surakarta. But, Florida guards against claiming to have salvaged the work in some colonialist way for English-speaking readers. Rather, by presenting the poem in full she allows the Babad Jaka Tingkir space to revise her own Western theoretical frameworks into line with its own epistemologies at various points in her book. This has been a valuable lesson for me, as I have worked with a brilliant Batak text which intersects so powerfully with multiple planes of social scientific and literary theory. As readers will discover, Datuk Tuongkus language visions (and those of the chanted tale it records and comments upon) diverge considerably from contemporary American models (unavoidably, my own vantage point). Having to develop an English language translation strategy that heard and softly represented the various ritual speech and literary tones of Datuk Tuongku was, for me, a major part of the work of interpreting this text. I found this was also the case in my earlier encounter with Soetan Hasoendoetans great novel Sitti Djaoerah. Florida opted for a translation of the entire babad she was studying, a plan that also seemed wise here too. She writes,
Translating Babad Jaka Tingkir in full, I am compelled to attend in a sustained manner both to its profound intertextuality and to its historicity; to the stylistic, linguistic, and literary modes through which its writer, in the particular reality of his or her historical becoming, worked to generate its senses (Florida 1995:6).

My approach too has entailed translating Datuk Tuongku in its full 125-page length, complete with Soetan Hasoendoetans Introduction, which is one that will likely surprise English readers in terms of what book introductions are. I have also included Datuk Tuongkus Afterword, where Soetan Hasoendoetan urges readers to mail him letters suggesting corrections to the turi-turian text if they wish but please dont forget to include return postage! Present readers may demur. Let me explain some of my concrete translation decisions while also acknowledging the help of Sipirok language teachers and orators. The Batak languages form part of the large Western Austronesian language family that extends from Malaysia and Sumatra through much of the rest of Indonesia and the Philippines, outward through the Pacific toward Hawaii and southward toward the Maori region, in New Zealand. As would be the case for translations dealing with any Western Austronesian language, in sheer grammatical terms Angkola and Mandailing Batak have many decidedly non-English features that an English-language translator must confront. Recall one of the thornier structural features of Batak, for would-be translators: infixes. In Angkola Batak everyday speech, the comparative form for an adjective is constructed by inserting the infix -um- into the word after its start (rara, red, becomes rumara, and so on). Under normal circumstances an English translator would use the regular English comparative forms and not

I Introduction

93

even try to allude to this infix structure, which has no resonance in English. But, as noted, in contrast to everyday conversation in Angkola Batak and in fact to most other printed texts in the language, turi-turian chant speech and its published versions include much more frequent use of this infix form, far beyond simply marking the comparative. Bards use this to lend an air of poetry to a range of other words, many of them nouns. Indonesian speakers will recognize this as the guruh gemuruh phenomenon (an archaic-sounding way to say, thunder, a sort of extra-fancy thunder-thumunder). Sometimes a single page of a printed turi-turian such as Datuk Tuongku or Radja Gorga will include five or six of these extra infix forms, in several varieties beyond the -um- form. I flag such usage choices by moving up a level of poetic elaborateness, albeit elsewhere in the phrase, sentence, or paragraph. Beyond grammar, the turi-turian oral chanters bag of linguistic and poetic tricks is capacious. And, as a print author, Soetan Hasoendoetan was no slouch either in this regard. Thus I have had to be even more resourceful than I was as an English translator of Sitti Djaoerah, a playful text in its own right (Rodgers 1997a:35-9). Let me mention several additional translation dilemmas I have encountered in working with Datuk Tuongku. Batak speakers address each other with kin terms that presuppose a different family world than those found in the West. Within a three-stoneson-the-hearth ethos, kinship ideology assumes a social world where all are kin (again, see R.S. Kipp 1984, 1986 and Singarimbun 1975 for comparative points on Karo). As noted, Angkola speakers operate in terms of clans inherited through the fathers line and in regard to marriage alliance partners who must be carefully catered to: to mora, ones holy, beneficent wife-giving houses, and to anakboru, the houses that receive brides. The three partners here (the focal kahanggi or small lineage segment, mentioned earlier, and their wife-givers and wife-receivers) balance good village social order and also the cosmos, through their mannered interaction in gift giving, etiquette, and proper speech. This is a highly idealized ideology of kin relationship, but in polite Angkola Batak all speaking partners must be identified and then addressed precisely within this matrix. In actual speech, though, such kin term usage often has a self-consciously fictive quality to it, since people are quite aware that many kahanggi find themselves in several, mutually exclusive dalihan na tolu relationships to members of other households. Print authors play on these ambiguities, even in a self-consciously traditional form such as turi-turian books. As an English translator I have at times coined new usages, by using such phrases as Mora Fearsome Sky, or Older Lineage Companion and Younger Lineage Companion (for the terms of address between pareban: members of the same kahanggi, whether two men, or a husband and wife, or a courting couple, or two women who have married men of that same lineage).

94

Print, poetics and politics

In Angkola kin term usage there are other definitely un-English patterns with which an English language translator must grapple. For instance, in the southern Batak languages daughters address their mothers as inang, a word that Angkola and Mandailing speakers will define as mother (as in, Inang ni Si Ria halak Bungabondar do, Rias mother is a Bungabondar person). But, mothers will also call their daughters inang, in direct address. Father/ son usage works the same way, with the word amang. Grandparents and their grandchildren also use a reciprocal ompung, a word of which the primary meaning is grandparent. Readers will discover how I worked out translation strategies for these patterns in the translated turi-turian itself. I have provided a glossary, for assistance. There is also another facet of Batak translation endeavors, to spice the pot further: speakers tendency in many forms of talk and writing to mix words and passages from Arabic, Indonesian, Minangkabau, and other Batak languages into their Angkola Batak. Their printed texts often also take on this compound, or maybe curry-like, quality. Sitti Djaoerahs mix of Angkola Batak, Toba Batak, Mandailing Batak, Malay, Minangkabau, and a spritz too of Dutch was typical of much pre-Revolution writing by southern Tapanuli authors. Datuk Tuongku is variegated along some of these same lines, so I have worked out a translation strategy for keeping as much of its original linguistic mishmash quality as possible, along with its air of fun and self-consciousness about language play. I also specifically avoid staying in a single register of courtly phrasing and tone of the sort found in some renditions of Malay tales. A monotone rendering of this 1941 text in high literary prose throughout would do considerable damage to Soetan Hasoendoetans pastiche style. Given their many language choices and their peripatetic economic biographies, southern Batak themselves have often been intensely concerned with translation matters. This was so particularly for the specific generations of the Batak writers mentioned here. Translating among languages, between ritual and everyday registers of speech and writing, and between the Batak script and the Dutch letters have long formed a focus of much conscious local commentary in Sipirok. Translation was also a topic for Mangaradja Goenoeng in his project of translating oral turi-turian into newspaper serial form and then into a book; for Soetan Hasoendoetan in his work of translating turi-turian narrative into novelistic storytelling and vice versa; for other Batak authors writing along the margins of ritual speech and printed literature; and, for the New Order era South Tapanuli and diaspora Batak authors who took up the task of changing Angkola Batak stories or oratory passages into Indonesian versions, so called. As Webb Keane has pointed out, such translation work often indexes translators assumptions about the larger language politics of local languages in relation to national languages (Keane 1997a, 1997b).

I Introduction

95

The challenges of translating Batak materials into European languages has also attracted thoughtful attention. One of the most continually rewarding commentators in thus regard was the great colonial linguist H.N. van der Tuuk. He was an accurate, imaginative translator of Toba, Angkola, and Mandailing special speech forms, including andung laments and small sections of turi-turian. His bold approach to translating andung phrases has been a model for my work here. The Mandailing school founder Willem Iskander was also an important commentator on Batak translation issues. Working with the colonial public school authorities just a few years after Van der Tuuk did his work in Sibolga, Iskander was much concerned with translation of kobar into the prose and verse of his Mandailing-language primary school textbooks. He also translated Dutch childrens dramatic dialogues into Mandailing Batak, a project tied to his two study trips to Amsterdam. Van der Tuuk and Iskandar have hardly been alone in the Indies and New Order Indonesia in dealing with and commenting on inter-language and inter-communication format translation possibilities and problems. Especially useful commentaries on such matters may be found in some of the scholarship on Indonesian language and society issues.13 My own translation strategy overall aims for a kind of social holism in terms of bringing an ethnographic fieldworkers knowledge of social context in Sipirok and two nearby villages to the task of writing an English version of a complex Hata Angkola text. I draw here on my research in the Sipirok area during my several stays there since 1974 (1974 to early 1977, six weeks in 1980-1981, several weeks in 1983, 1985-1986, eight months in 1992, three months in 1997, two months in 2000, and two weeks in 2001). I also rely on my lessons with my three extraordinary teachers: G.W. Siregar, a retired Sipirok schoolteacher who gave me a series of Angkola Batak language lessons from July, 1974, until early 1975; Ompu Raja Doli Siregar, a ceremonial chief and orator from Padang Bujur village, who gave me a series of adat lessons (his term, parsiajaran adat) in 1974 and 1975 and later became a kind of sponsor for my research, helping me to gain access to horja-level feasts of honor throughout the Sipirok kecamatan county district; and Baginda Hasudungan Siregar, another raja and another schoolteacher, who has been my translation colleague to the present day on numerous projects including our work together with Sitti Djaoerah. I arrived in Sipirok in July, 1974, a 24 year old graduate student intent on studying ethnic identity construction in the city of Medan, after what I had assumed would be about six months of intensive Batak language study in this Tapanuli market town. I had studied Indonesian for a year beforehand
13

For instance, Becker 1979, 1995; Flueckinger and Sears 1991; Sears 1996; Siegel 1986, 1997.

96

Print, poetics and politics

in the United States. As it happened, I stayed two and a half years in Sipirok and a nearby village, never did get to Medan for more than casual visits, and focused my dissertation on southern Batak oratory and constructions of the modern there. Bapak G.W. and Ompu Raja Doli were the self-appointed supervisors of my ritual speech investigations. They felt I was better off in Sipirok than in the dangerous city, anyway. Seventy-six years old when we first worked together in July 1974, Bapak G.W. was an educator of the old school. In the terms Sipirok people often used about him, approvingly, he was a guru lama: an old-style teacher. In 1974, he was famous in town as one of Sipiroks few remaining schoolteachers who had actually been educated by the Dutch in their old teacher training institute in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra. This was the famous sekolah raja or Rajas School (more, in practice, the school that rajas sons got into). In this illustrious Kweekschool Bukittinggi, pupils were instructed in Dutch by Dutch teachers. The students also had intensive courses in Malay there, that is, in Bahasa Indonesia. Bapak G.W. stayed four years in the Bukittinggi school and emerged with a degree to teach in Dutch-language elementary schools back home, in Sipiroks new Hollandsch-Inlandsche School. The kweekelingen were targeted to become instructors in a new crop of these elite schools then being planned for several larger Tapanuli towns. Bapak G.W. was a high-born Siregar clansman from the Bagas Lombang lineage in town, a founder line for Sipirok. His father had been one of the southern Tapanuli regions first indigenous mission school religion teachers. As youngsters Bapak G.W. and his two brothers and two sisters had moved around with their parents to various little mountain villages near Sipirok where the Zending (the German Rhenish Mission) had sent their father to teach. When Bapak G.W. was about twelve years old and already a promising student, his parents sent him off to the town of Sipirok itself to board with relatives and attend the final years of elementary school. He soon became one of only four young men from all of southern Tapanuli to get high enough marks on the 1914 Kweekschool entrance exam to matriculate at the Bukittinggi school. The four were joined by several more young adolescents from Toba. All set off by ponycart for the long trip through the mountains to West Sumatra. Today this trip takes just eight hours by bus (by Tapanuli standards, this is a short trip). But, in 1914 the boys spent many days on the road. The mountains near Mandailings border with Minangkabau are high and rough, with steep drop offs. By the time he had become my language teacher, Bapak G.W. had been retired from teaching in the Indonesian national public school system for seventeen years. He had resigned in 1959 in disgust at falling standards there in comparison to the sort of education that he felt the colonial schools had delivered. No apologist for the Dutch, Bapak G.W. nevertheless held to

I Introduction

97

a strong belief that schoolroom standards had been higher in jaman Belanda, in the Dutch Age. Retired or not, he showed up in my house for our first Angkola Batak language lesson in July, 1974, toting a small chalkboard and carrying a neat pile of elementary school primers in Hata Angkola under his arm. He had dressed for the occasion, in starkly white, crisply pressed trousers, a longish stiff white shirt worn over his belt, and his black peci. This was Indonesias national hat for men, modelled on the ones Sukarno and Hatta and other early nationalists had worn as a sign of republican solidarity. He was always a courtly dresser and Bapak G.W. almost never set foot outside his house on a journey of any distance without the peci. This he complemented with a shining wooden cane and a long ivory-stemmed cigarette holder, for the cigarettes he rolled himself from rough-cut tobacco supplies he purchased each Thursday, Sipiroks main market day. Our language lessons themselves would prove to be as rapi (Indonesian for, neat and in good order) as my instructor himself. These two to three hourlong sessions Monday through Friday also proceeded at a remarkably quick pace. Starting with that first lesson day Bapak G.W. took me through a barrage of sentence practice drills, vocabulary exercises, and song and recitation activities. Bapak G.W. was a stern task master and after only a few sessions I had switched over from Indonesian to Angkola Batak for most of our lesson hours, although I was still relying on the national language for talks with others, outside of these lessons. A full switch into Angkola took me about six months. My primary conversation partner during those first weeks, besides Bapak G.W. and his wife Ompu Christina, was my landlady Ompu Elpina. She was a 62 year old retired schoolteacher and the mother of eleven grown children. They had all moved away from home, to Indonesian cities. Ompu Elpina (Elpinas Grandparent, a teknonym, with a girl named Elpina as her first grandchild) was another high-born Siregar, also from that same Bagas Lombang lineage of aristocrats. She had a degree from the old Normaal School in Pematang Siantar, the one headed by Sutan Martua Raja Siregar. Her family of origin was famous in Sipirok for being uncommonly maju, modern and progessive. Ompu Elpinas father had been one of Angkolas first indigenous ordained Protestant ministers. Her late husband had also been notably maju: he was another nobleborn son-of-the-rajas, from Sampean village, and a graduate along with Bapak G.W. of the Kweekschool Bukittinggi. This man, Guru Gabriel, had become a school principal in the West Sumatran city of Padang in the 1930s. He died of a stroke in 1959, when he was serving as the principal of one of Sipiroks middle schools, the same one where Bapak G.W. had taught. Since parts of northern and western Sumatra were experiencing separatist violence at the time (the PRRI rebellion), road travel was hindered between the city of Medan, where Guru Gabriel had died during a school

98

Print, poetics and politics

conference, and Sipirok. But, since he was a well-regarded, high-born raja as well as a major Tapanuli school figure, both sides of combatants arranged a ceasefire for the time it took to transport his body home, for a horja-level funeral. Sons of the rajas and prominent public figures such as Guru Gabriel warranted large buffalo sacrifice funerals, with hours of kobar oratory. After about four weeks of instruction in spoken Angkola with Bapak G.W., just as I was settling in for what I had imagined would be my six months of uninterrupted lessons in conversational Angkola and Latin alphabet texts, he decreed that our lessons would now switch over to a lengthy encounter with the Batak letters, the aksara Batak. I protested that specialized training of that sort could come later once I had learned enough conversational Angkola to begin doing my interviews with rajas about oratory in that language instead of in Bahasa Indonesia, which I had found to be somewhat of an outsiders language for some rajas from villages outside town. But, Bapak G.W. simply ignored my komentar, my commentary on his intentions. He proceeded apace with designing and implementing our Batak script lessons. I went along. I was learning rapidly. For several weeks we studied the Batak letters and a set of childrens folktales written in them (by Dutch schoolmasters). I managed to learn to decode the letters, although I did this with much scowling, for Bapak G.W.s benefit. Eventually, sure enough, we returned to our spoken Angkola lessons and to my efforts to build up my vocabulary and acquire the ability to read increasingly more difficult printed texts in the Latin alphabet. I knew by this point that virtually all-important twentieth-century southern Batak literature had been written in the Latin alphabet. In Sipirok and other southern school towns, the Batak letters had begun their long slide to the status of a special subject in school by the turn of the twentieth century, at the latest. For our language lessons, we used that fine proverb sampler by schoolman Baginda Marakub Marpaung, Pundjut-pundjutan, Satchel [of sayings], (1962) and the same authors Joy in common meeting. Bapak G.W. and I had one dictionary, H.J. Egginks 1936 Angkola- en Mandailing-Bataksch/Nederlandsch woordenboek, a useful text that went some way into the oratory lexicon. After a few months, a former student of Bapak G.W.s (a man who was then a school principal in West Sumatra) heard about our language lessons together and kindly mailed us a partial photocopy of the novel Sitti Djaoerah that he thought we might enjoy using as a textbook. We were overjoyed. Bapak G.W. had long since lost his only copy and the book was out of print. I quickly recognized Sitti Djaoerah for the oratory and literary treasure chest that it was. But, it took until 1985 for me to find a complete copy of the novel, as it had fully disappeared from the Sipirok scene. I found the book in the old National Library collection, when the latter was still housed in the National Museum building in Jakarta.

I Introduction

99

Bapak G.W. had given me to understand that the old script and also the old 1920s novels like this one were among the finer things about Hata Angkola, which was (he said) a far more excellent language than Indonesian. As he presented the matter to me, Angkola Batak had delicate verse, esoteric oratorical ranges based in ancient adat, this complex script harking back to times when old Hindu kingdoms ruled in Sumatra, and a lilting, pleasing sweetness and melodiousness that Indonesian lacked and even the other Batak languages either never had or were fast losing. Equally lamentably (he averred), the national tongue seemed to be stuck in a narrow range of registers: the stilted official pronouncements by government bureaucrats, chatty everyday household speech, and Medan tabloid newspaper prose. Hata Angkola, as Bapak G.W. would often tell me in our afternoon discussions of life and adat and my field research (which he was coming to supervise more and more) was by contrast a multivoiced language of high complexity whose speakers could move deftly between everyday talk, andung, alok-alok (rajas speeches in nighttime congresses at horja feasts), and marosong-osong (the verbal duels at horja feasts between wife-givers and wife-receivers, jesting over a mock down payment on a bridewealth transaction for a future wedding). As it turned out, this language situation as Bapak G.W. described it was not strictly true. For one thing, in other conversational contexts Bapak G.W. spoke with great warmth of Bahasa Indonesia and of his pride in the exact type of Indonesian used in this part of Sumatra: Bahasa Indonesia asli, original, authentic Indonesian, the language that he was proud to say had gone on to become the language of the Indonesian Revolution. Beyond this, many of our neighbours in Kampung Tinggi (a residential area of town mostly of schoolteachers and retirees from salaried jobs) knew little of andung lament speech and still less of oral turi-turian, at any rate from direct experience of actually hearing a full chant performance (until the one I sponsored occurred). In horja feasts, they generally left the more difficult speechmaking to the rajas and to older women like Ompu Elpi who cultivated expertise in praise and blessing speeches. Many Muslim families in Kampung Tinggi tended to salt their brief ventures into kobar with liberal stretches of Arabic, from the prayer recitations (Rodgers 1981). Bapak G.W., a Christian, was ever the language purist and decried such admixtures as a corruption of genuine, pure, old Angkola. It was the latter saro, way of speaking, that he was endeavoring to teach me, he often said: only the most authentic Hata Angkola, with no contamination from Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic, Dutch, Toga, or Minangkabau. I was learning genuine, aboriginal, true Angkola, Angkola asli (but, asli is Indonesian. And, it occurred to me, saro in Batak sounds quite similar to Bahasa Indonesia cara). After three months of language study, Bapak G.W. and I moved on to the

100

Print, poetics and politics

next stage of my endeavors: lessons on adat, on custom. Bapak G.W. had decreed this is what I needed to study next as an anthropologist. We wondered whom to approach to become my second teacher: A raja (a ceremonial chief)? A retired schoolteacher/raja? A Christian? A Muslim? An adat author? Finally, at the behest of Hormat Pulungan, a raja and church elder friend of Bapak G.W.s from Sibadoar village, where Bapak G.W.s father had retired from the church schools years before, we approached Ompu Raja Doli. He came over to Ompu Elpinas house late one afternoon in early October, 1974, to in effect present his papers to us. That is, in introducing himself to me, Bapak G.W., and Ompu Elpina as a possible adat expert and instructor, he had brought along a sheaf of important looking papers: his government ID cards, a letter from a Padangsidimpuan government official inviting him to an Adat Seminar, and, most crucially, a letter on official sub-provincial government stationary testifying to the fact that he was an adat figure, a tokoh adat officially designated by the government as a source of expertise on horja celebrations. Closer to home beyond these pieces of paper, Ompu Raja Doli was a retired Sibualbuali bus company bus driver, a subsistence rice farmer, and a raja orator of high repute for the Bungabondar-Baringin group of Siregar aristocrats. He was a Muslim, from a mixed Muslim and Christian village. Soon we agreed: Ompu Raja Doli would begin coming over to Ompu Elpis house twice or three times a week as his busy schedule allowed, to teach me about Sipirok adat (perhaps needless to add, Sipirok adat of the asli version). Thus commenced our series of 33 formal lessons, which I tape recorded. These proceeded with Bapak G.W. in attendance, with me mostly listening and scribbling hasty notes and Raja Doli delivering what turned out to be impressive sample kobar speeches. Indeed, orating was his primary pedagogy. He would come in the door, sit down at Ompu Elpinas big wooden dining table, and accept a cup of sweetened tea with condensed milk from Ompu Elpi or myself or one of the village girls who frequently visited our big house to stay in town for a while. Then Raja Doli would launch into the various sectors of adat that he wanted conveyed to me that particular day. Bapak G.W. enjoyed this immensely, in part because his career in the schools had left him with little time to attend such events as the alok-alok sessions of feasts. Our lessons started with explanations of all the main ceremonial arrangements of betel leaf and betel quid used to break open the words of the kobar. We then followed an idealized familys progress through all the standard adat ceremonies that a household could experience, from the marriage of a son, to the birth of that couples first baby, to a new house entry, to a funeral for an ompung, a grandmother, all of whose children had been married and were safely established in households of their own (that is, an ompung whose weaving work is done). Raja Doli would speak all the parts

I Introduction

101

of the ceremonial gatherings: the bride leaving her childhood home for her husbands parents place and andung-ing her bedstead, the door lintal, her old playgrounds outside; the father of the groom welcoming his new daughter-in-law, his new parumaen (his wifes brothers daughter) to his home upon her arrival there late at night; the village elders blessing a firstborn infant of such a marriage as a luck-conveying ulos textile was presented to the baby; an old ompu conveying tua sahala (luck and prosperity powers) via a similar sort of speech to a young family just entering their newly constructed home. Four months into Raja Dolis adat lessons and still occupied as well with my five day a week Angkola Batak language lessons each morning with Bapak G.W., Raja Doli introduced me to the praktek side of my adat education. That is, he started to take me around the harajaon (the adat chieftaincy) to attend horja ceremonies. These lasted from one and a half to three days and involved many hours of oratory. My Raja Doli-assigned task at these events, it developed, was to tape record every possible bit of kobar oratory. This meant staying awake all night to tape record the full alok-alok sessions of the rajas and to witness (and join) the tortor ritual dancing (Rodgers 1985). Soon he had me delivering kobar speeches of my own, supposedly as a speaker who had come to the feast from an especially distant luat or adat chieftaincy domain: Chicago. My circle of raja interviewees increased with gratifying speed after I started to make speeches of my own. During the weeks following a major horja, I would pursue follow-up interviews and Bapak G.W. and I would also transcribe as much of the taped oratory from the ceremony as we could, with me acting as typist. We used our growing pile of naskah, adat manuscripts, as materials for our language lessons, which we were by then continuing three or four times a week. This continued on all through my time in Sipirok during that first stay there. In February, 1975, I moved from Sipirok out to a village 15 kilometers back on the mountain road toward Simangambat. There I participated in all major adat rituals for the next nine months. This had been my goal in moving there, so that I could study a more commonplace sort of oratory than just the grand speeches of the horja feasts. In this village, rite of passage events were typically marked by pangupa ceremonies, which involved goat sacrifices and far fewer participants than the large feasts of the high-level rajas. One time, while living in this village, a raja of my acquaintance (and a rival of Raja Dolis) approached me to offer to arrange a tape recording session with a turi-turian bard friend of his from a large village on the road to Sibolga. Without checking with Raja Doli first I readily agreed, with a neophyte fieldworkers cluelessness. This was a taping session with much bad fieldwork fallout in regard to my otherwise amicable relationship with Raja Doli. It seemed that I was freelancing too much. Several months later, once

102

Print, poetics and politics

Raja Doli and I were back on speaking terms, he arranged a longer turi-turian taping session with another chanter (his choice, this time). This was the taping session with Baginda Hatimbulan that took place in Bapak G.W.s house in Kampung Tinggi. As we have seen, happily this turi-turian was a version of the story of Datuk Tuongku Tuan Malim Leman. Our tapes of this one were clear in a technical sense but extremely hard for not only me but Bapak G.W. as well to understand. The chant included many shifts among Batak dialects and among registers of Angkola. I was, frankly, stumped. Eggink, our dictionary author, did not help very much, as his entries were mostly everyday words. Although by this time I was comfortably fluent in conversational Angkola and knew a good deal about the oratory of horja feasts, I certainly could not handle Datuk Tuongkus numerous linguistic flights of fancy on my own. Bapak G.W. was similarly at sea in some of this turi-turian. We decided we needed help, and so we enlisted the aid of a young schoolteacher friend of his, Baginda Hasudungan Siregar. We asked him to take over the task of transcribing the tale. This he did on the lined pages of a school notebook. Baginda Hasudungan was a teacher in a middle school in a village right outside of town. He lived in Bungabondar and was a raja there. He was also a former student of Bapak G.W.s (in Sipiroks SMP II, the same middle school where Ompu Elpinas husband Guru Gabriel had been principal). Moreover, Baginda Hasudungan was an orator whose star was definitely on the rise at the time in the Haruaya Mardomu Bulung area. This was the Banyan-treewhose-leaves-all-meet-in-the-middle domain, the triple adat chieftaincies of Sipirok, Bungabondar-Baringin, and Parau Sorat. These three luat, domains, were founded by three Siregar brothers generations ago, according to the tarombo genealogy stories. Rajas speaking for each of these chieftainships would gather in nighttime oratory congresses called alok-alok sessions to give their formal permission for a lineage to host a horja. Baginda Hasudungan was emerging as the most respected orator of his generation in this highly competitive circle of ceremonial experts in the 1970s. By the time we worked together translating the Sitti Djaoerah in 1992, he had become the triple chieftaincies most highly regarded raja. Even in the mid-1970s, Baginda Hasudungan was recognized as an unusually powerful speaker of blessing speeches (pangupa blessings). Baginda Hasudungan also knew many of the hidden messages inlaid in the designs, textures, weaving and dyeing techniques, and colors of ulos textiles and a good deal of the difficult osong-osong repartee used between mora and anakboru at feasts. And, he knew the secret language of forest plants and betel leaves used in adat, at least to the extent that he would allow himself to do so as an elder of Bungabondars Christian church. In the early to mid 1970s his church was the Huria Kristen Bapak Protestant (HKBP); then it was the HKBP-Angkola, and then, the Gereja Kristen Protestant Angkola (GKPA). As noted, the latter was a breakaway

I Introduction

103

faction whose parent demonination, the HKBP-A, had split with the HKBP in part over language issues. The HKBP was the Toba-dominated original mission church, now staffed by Batak; its pastors insisted on using Toba Batak Bibles, although Sipirok people knew very well that there was a perfectly good Angkola Batak translation of the New Testament available: the missions own work from the 1850s and 1860s. The new GKPA proudly uses the Angkola Batak-language gospel and hymnal, for rural services. Bapak G.W.s and my original tim riset (research team, in Englishified Indonesian) formed through our work with Ompu Raja Doli had now expanded to include a fourth member. After Bapak G.W.s death in 1980 and Ompu Raja Dolis passing in 1993, Baginda Hasudungan and I have continued our collaboration, including a year and a half of work together on Datuk Tuongku and also Raja Gorga of the Sky, to appear in English in a later publication.

104

Print, poetics and politics

I Introduction

105

Part Two