Baleh-baleh (also bale-bale, balai-balai) was the Atjeh and Malay-Indonesian day-bed or low couch on which the Dutch legation was seated during the formal audience with the Sultana of Atjeh on 1 July 1641. The baleh-baleh is a piece of portable furniture — a wooden frame with woven rattan or palm-leaf surface, light enough to be moved and set up for an honoured guest — and its placement in the audience hall was itself a ceremonial act, marking the place the Sultana had assigned to her Dutch visitors.
Bali-bali — also written balé-balé — was the low platform-bed of split bamboo or wood used throughout the Malay world and in Atjeh for sitting, sleeping and the carrying of the sick.
The term appears in the record of the Atjeh debate of 17 November 1897 in a single sentence of H. van Kol’s catalogue of atrocities: “Nog kort geleden werd een oude man Joed Mohmed Lamtengah op een bali-bali naar buiten gedragen en toen doodgeschoten” — recently an old man was carried outside on a bali-bali and then shot dead.
The detail is significant in the passage because it establishes the condition of the victim: a man too infirm to walk, carried out on the platform on which he lay, and therefore hors de combat in the sense of the Brussels articles which Van Kol had quoted a few lines earlier — “tuer un ennemi qui se rend, ou qui est impuissant à se défendre est un crime déshonorant.”
Description
The baleh-baleh is a low wooden framed couch, traditionally with a woven cane or rattan surface, used throughout the Malay-Indonesian world for sitting, reclining, and resting. It is the standard piece of “day-bed” furniture of the region — found in houses, on verandahs, and in the audience halls of courts. Its placement in the audience hall of the Sultana was the formal marker of where the Dutch legation was to sit.
The audience of 1 July 1641
In Godee Molsbergen’s account of the ceremonial audience of 1 July 1641, after the Sultana had come out of the palace to greet the embassy and each had made the sembah, “daarna namen de Nederlanders plaats op een daarvoor opzettelijk geplaatste baleh-baleh, te midden van vele Atjehsche edelen, voornaam Moorsche kooplieden en schippers” — thereupon the Dutchmen took their places on a baleh-baleh placed there for the purpose, in the midst of many Atjeh nobles, prominent Moorish merchants and shipmasters.
The baleh-baleh was thus “daarvoor opzettelijk geplaatst” — placed there expressly for the purpose. Its placement was the Sultana’s act: she assigned the Dutchmen their position in the audience hall by having the baleh-baleh set up for them, and she placed them “te midden van” — in the midst of — the assembled Atjeh nobles and Moorish merchants. The seating arrangement was therefore both an honour (the Dutchmen had their own couch) and a placement (they sat among the court, not separated from it).
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, the baleh-baleh is the piece of furniture by which the court choreographed the position of foreign visitors in the audience hall. The “daarvoor opzettelijk geplaatste baleh-baleh” of the 1 July 1641 audience was the physical marker of where the Sultanate wished the Dutch legation to be — among the Atjeh nobles, in the midst of the court, but on a couch of their own. The detail is one of the small ceremonial facts by which the Soury embassy record preserves the texture of Atjeh court ritual.
See Also
- Pieter Soury’s mission to Atjeh (1641)
- Atjehsche ambassade ceremony (1 July 1641)
- Sembah
- Atjehsche feestjas
- Slendang
- Sultana of Atjeh (1641)
- 1 July
- 1641
- Acheh
- Joed Mohmed Lamtengah
- Atrocities in the Aceh War as alleged in the Tweede Kamer (1897)
- H. van Kol
- Lois et coutumes de la guerre
- Brussels Conference of 1874
- 1897
Sources
Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapter XI (“Atjehsche ambassade. Inlandsche feesten. Maagden als losprijs”), pp. 39–43 of the numbered-letter sequence.
Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898, uitgave van de Sociaaldemokratische Arbeiderspartij in Nederland (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br P95-178, p. 64.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.