The adat glé (Atjehnese, “the adat of the mountain” or of the uplands) was the composite levy imposed by the oeléëbalangs of Atjeh on cultivation carried on outside the gampong boundaries, in the period when the territorial chiefs still levied taxes as sovereigns in their own right.
Components
D. W. N. de Boer enumerated three heads:
- on wet rice fields, a levy identical with the boeët oemòng charged within the gampong — one naleh of padi per naleh of seed rice, roughly two to three per cent of the yield;
- on dry rice fields (ladang), the so-called padi lintjah, also called padi tadjoë (from tadjoë, the dibble or planting stick, hence “dibbled padi”), a levy of two naleh of padi per hippaang padi — per surface cleared by one person with a single parang (chopping knife);
- on gardens (lampoih), the thiploeëh-tha (Atjehnese thiploeëh, ten; tha, Malay satu, one) — “one out of ten,” the tithe of the crop, an institution found elsewhere in the Archipelago as well, for instance in Bali.
Abolition and evidentiary afterlife
Like the boeët oemòng, the adat glé was abolished by article 15 sub I of the zelfbestuursordonnantie (self-government ordinance), Staatsblad 1919 No. 822, the chiefs receiving in compensation an individually calculated civiele lijst. The records and memory of the levy nevertheless continued to serve, in the self-governing territories, as a means by which the radja could tell whether a parcel of apparently waste land had recently been in someone’s possession.
See Also
- Boeët oemòng
- Padi lintjah
- Thiploeëh-tha
- Ladang
- Staatsblad 1919 No. 822
- Beschikkingsrecht in Atjeh
- Oeleebalang
Source
Het recht op den grond in Atjeh, by D. W. N. de Boer, dated Scheveningen, November 1931, pp. 59-80. Offprint DLP-141, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, ‘s-Gravenhage; Bibliotheek KITLV accession 0060 4460 60 081470 428.