Bedekte taal — Dutch “veiled language” — is the term De Roo de la Faille uses for the allegorical and riddling register that, in his reading, pervades the chronicle and romance literature of the Malay-Javanese world and conceals references to the older Hindu-Buddhist geography of Sumatra’s east coast and the Atjehnese sphere. Its Malay form is bahasa kapoer — “lime-language”, the “peculiar language” of Malajoe that Marco Polo noted on his travels, and which De Roo de la Faille identifies with the “lime” (kapoer) of Baros camphor — a code of speech, that is, whose key is the trade-goods and place-names of the Sumatran coast. Its instruments are the wangsalan (the Malay rhyme-riddle) and the Kawi-Javanese dasanama (the synonym-book), and its function is to record matters of royal shame, ancestral displacement, or sacred geography without exposing them to plain view.
The bahasa kapoer of Malajoe
Marco Polo had noted, in connection with the small island he called Gauenispola, that he encountered the “peculiar language” of the place. De Roo de la Faille identifies this with the bahasa kapoer of Malajoe — the same “lime-language” that Langka-poer-i (the Poelo Bras of the Willemstoren) recalls. The “lime” of the name points, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, to the kapoer baroer (camphor) of Baros, the great west-coast emporium whose product gave its name to a whole register of speech.
The wangsalan and the dasanama
The principal instrument of bedekte taal is the wangsalan — the Malay-Javanese riddle in which a phrase is indicated by an intermediate word that rhymes with or echoes it. De Roo de la Faille gives many examples: ikan “fish” on hin-doe ka-ri “where Hindu population remained”; batoe rendang on the Batu islands; Paneticano on Kampi; minha cumbaa on the minjak sembawa of Pangkalan Soesoe. The Kawi-Javanese dasanama — the synonym-book of ten-for-one equivalents, used by children of good family from an early age — supplied a parallel register: “die voor het eerst in dienst bij den vorst kwam”, as Brandes had noted, “moest met de dasanama djarwa weten om te gaan”. The two together — the spoken riddle and the written synonym-book — formed the practical machinery of bedekte taal.
Function and the foreign listener
The function of bedekte taal was double. Among lettered Malays and Javanese, it allowed the chronicler to record matters of royal shame or ancestral displacement without exposing them to plain view — a point Van den Broek had noted in his translation of the Geschiedenis van Kadiri: “Javaansche schrijvers steeds gebruik maken van beeldspraak en vergelijkingen, wanneer zij iets van het vorstenhuis mededeelden, omdat zij straf kregen, wanneer zij de waarheid vermeldden”. The foreign listener, by contrast, was systematically gulled by it: Pinto, De Conti, Polo, Ibn Battuta, Pigafetta and Tome Pires all, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, recorded Malay and Javanese bedekte taal as if it were plain ethnographic fact — and so produced travel accounts whose very naïvité is the mark of their authenticity.
Decoding as method
The method of decoding is illustrated at every turn of De Roo de la Faille’s book. To take only the Atjeh-Aru war of 1539: Surotilau is read as Soera-sakti-lawoe-kir, the roadstead of Malajoer in Aroe; Ilikandure as the ikan-on-hin-doe ka-ri riddle; Minhatoley as mina-ng-k-a da-toe Olèh-leh; Batorrendan as batoe rendang; Turban as Batoe-poer-wa-boewana; Paneticano as Kampi; minha cumbaa as the minjak sembawa of Pangkalan Soesoe. The same method, applied to the Sadjarah Malajoe, Sadjarah Banten and Babad Tanah Djawi, produces De Roo de la Faille’s reading of Sjahroe’n Noewi as Tandjoengpoera-Aroe, of Soenan Kalidjaga as Pati Oenoes, and of the Putri Hijau legend as the Atjehnese sultanate’s design on the Deli-Asahan coast.
Significance
For AcehWiki, bedekte taal is the single most important methodological concept underlying De Roo de la Faille’s reading of the chronicle record. Whether or not each of his particular identifications is accepted, the recognition that the Malay and Javanese chronicles routinely employ a veiled-language register — and that European travel accounts of the archipelago were routinely misled by it — is the framework against which any AcehWiki entry touching on the chronicle geography of Atjeh and the east-coast Sumatran polities must be read.
Sources
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Gamispola”, pp. 22-23.
See Also
- Wangsallan
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
- P. de Roo de la Faille
- Sadjarah Malajoe
- Sadjarah Banten
- Babad Tanah Djawi
- Pararaton
- Bahasa kapoer
- Dasanama
- Aroe
- Sjahroe’n Noewi
- Puteri Idjo
- Dr. J. Brandes
- Bedekte taal
- Kapoer baroer
- Marco Polo
- Taroema
- Barus
- Malajoe
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), Inleiding, pp. 5-6, and chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 7-17.