Baringin sonsang — Malay “inverted waringin (banyan)” — is the allegorical image of a banyan tree whose roots stand in the air and whose leaves hang downwards, used in Malay, Minangkabau and Javanese folk tradition as a bedekte taal form for the inverted ancestral land of Taroema on the Sumatran east coast. The image is the principal bedekte taal sign of the dispersal of the Djawaka of Aru by the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe of 1539, and the central image of De Roo de la Faille’s chapter Melasaké pampang.
The image
The baringin sonsang, De Roo de la Faille records, is described in Minangkabau tradition (citing Van der Toorn in BKI, 5e Volgr. V, p. 88) as “a wholly imaginary tree, the baringin songrang, i.e. an inverted waringin, whose leaves with the rough surface turned upward, growing on the Moon, serves as the pleasure-garden of children deceased in youth, who are brought thither by bidadari’s and laid in golden cradles hung beneath the rich foliage”. In Perak tradition (citing Skeat’s Malay Magic), the same image survives as the beringin sonsang, “probably also a mythological explanation of the enigmatic black drawing on the lunar disc, the heavenly abode of the Heavenly Queen Doerga of Taroema”.
Decoding: Taroema inverted
The image, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, is a bedekte taal form for the inverted ancestral land of Taroema — the place whose “tree” (taroe) is its own name (na-ma), and whose “inversion” by the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe of 1539 marks the dispersal of the Djawaka and the close of the Hindu-Javanese east-coast age. The same image is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the *Melasaké pampang|Melasaké pampang]] of South Sumatran tradition — the “wonder-tree of Belalau” whose roots stood in the air, and whose leaves hung downwards — and the boom Melasaké pampang of the Lampong-Semangka origin legend.
The Bocheltje and the mouse
Beneath the inverted waringin, De Roo de la Faille records, sits an old hunchback (Bocheltje), ever fishing with a long line that hangs down to the Earth; if his line ever reached the Earth, the world would end — but a mouse ever gnaws the line through. The Bocheltje, De Roo de la Faille decodes, is the bong-kok of Taroema — a wordplay on hong (“Chinese cemetery”, i.e. soe-tji boewa-na, “the dead Taroema”); the line, of koelit terap bast, is the koe-ta a-lit Soengei Tarab; the mouse is ti-koes, the islet sak-ti koes-ta that prevents Taroema from carrying off the people of the Earth; and the cat that watches is koetjing, the Koetjing colony of Cochin on the Coromandel Coast — “in perfect agreement with the Bocheltje, whose wicked business is nonetheless prevented”.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the baringin sonsang is the principal allegorical sign of the dispersal of the Djawaka by the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe of 1539 — the bedekte taal form by which Malay, Minangkabau and Javanese folk tradition recorded the “inversion” of the ancestral land of Taroema and the close of the Hindu-Javanese east-coast age. Its survival in three regional traditions — Minangkabau, Perak, and Lampong-Semangka — also marks it as the most widely-diffused single allegory of the De Roo de la Faille corpus.
See Also
- Taroema
- Melasaké pampang
- Djawaka
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Doerga
- Cyama-Tara
- Bedekte taal
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Melasaké pampang”, pp. 38-42.