Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java is a posthumously circulated monograph by P. de Roo de la Faille, dated Den Haag, March 1954, that gathers nine “curiosities” from the historical literature of the Malajoe and Java in which the author — through the method of bedekte taal (veiled language) — seeks to recover a Sumatran, and especially an Acheh-and-Aru-centred, substratum beneath the chronicles of Java. Dedicated to Dr D. J. Hulshoff Pol, who as Officier van Gezondheid at Tandjoeng Poera with the K.N.I.L. Leger had begun his career in the very Aroe country the book places at the centre of early Malay history, the work treats Mendez Pinto’s Atjeh-Aru war of 1539, the Putri Hijau legend of Deli, the chronicle of Sjahroe’n Noewi in the Sadjarah Malajoe, the introduction of the Sadjarah Banten, the wonder-tree of Belalau, and the multiple identities of Pati Oenoes-Raden Sahid.
Genre and method
De Roo de la Faille writes as a philological amateur in the best Dutch-Indological sense: steeped in Veth, Brandes, Rouffaer, Van der Tuuk and the Bijdragen tradition, but refusing to take their readings at face value where chronicle language strikes him as deliberately veiled. The book’s central instrument is the wangsalan — the Malay/Javanese riddle in which a phrase is indicated by an intermediate word that rhymes or echoes it (e.g. ikan on hin-doe ka-ri, “where Hindu population remained”). De Roo de la Faille applies it systematically to such puzzles as Pinto’s Paneticano, Marco Polo’s Gauenispola, the Cernovem of Niccolò de’ Conti, and the Xarnauz of the Roteiro of Vasco da Gama, reading them all as concealed references to the Aru country at the mouth of the Straits of Malacca and its sacred islet of Kampi.
Chapters
The nine chapters of the book are: an Inleiding; Mendez Pinto op Sumatra (the Atjeh-Aru war of 1539); “Zuivere Nonsens?” (a defence of the Old-Javanese Sang Satyawan against van Stein Callenfels’s dismissal); Djempol Soekoe (the Chinese annals’ Queen Sima of Kaling read through the Javanese djempol soekoe idiom); Gamispola (Marco Polo’s island); Over Sjahroe’n Noewi (the Sadjarah Malajoe episode of Awi Ditjoe’s capture of the radja of Samudra); De inleiding van de Sadjarah Banten (a critique of Dr Hoesein Djajadiningrat’s reading); Melasaké pampang (the inverted-tree allegory of South Sumatra); and Over Soenan Kalidjaga (the identification of Soenan Kalidjaga with Pati Oenoes of Demak). Throughout, Acheh and its fleet of 1539 recur as the great antagonist whose expansion broke the older Hindu-Buddhist commonwealth of the Sumatran east coast.
Significance for AcehWiki
For AcehWiki the Curiositeiten matters in three ways. First, it is the principal modern source that gathers, in one place, the scattered Portuguese references to the Atjehnese sultan of 1539, his brother-in-law and admiral Alleredin Mahomet, and the war against Aroe — material otherwise buried in Pinto’s Peregrinação. Second, it preserves the Putri Hijau legend in the form that ties the Sultan of Atjeh’s rejected suit to the Javanese fortification at Deli and to the loss of a glass coffin at sea between Deli and Atjeh — a story of direct relevance to the early-modern Atjehnese sultanate’s relations with the east-coast polities. Third, its central methodological claim — that chronicles of “Java” repeatedly encode places on Sumatra’s north and east coast, including the Atjehnese sphere — is the framework against which several AcehWiki entries must be read.
See Also
- P. de Roo de la Faille
- Dr. D. J. Hulshoff Pol
- Mendez Pinto
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Alleredin Mahomet
- Puteri Idjo
- Sadjarah Malajoe
- Sadjarah Banten
- Babad Tanah Djawi
- Bedekte taal
- Wangsallan
- Aroe
- Poelo Kampi
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954). 68 pp. Copy consulted: Royal Library, The Hague (signature “pg27 4561”).