The idja — plural idja’s — is the Atjehnese silk cloth with gold- and silver-thread decoration worked in flottante inslag (floating weft) that, in F. A. Wagner’s Sierkunst in Indonesië (1949), is the principal product of Atjeh weaving and one of the masterpieces of Sumatran textile art. The cloth is described in the chapter “Weefsels en weefpatronen” (Weaves and weaving patterns) under the section on Sumatra, and is illustrated in figs. 34 and 35 of Wagner’s volume (pp. 55, 56). The idja’s defining combination — silk ground, narrow ikat-ed warp bands carrying the plang motif, and gold- and silver-thread patterns in flottante inslag built on the anker-motief — is, in Wagner’s reading, what raises the cloth to “objecten van werkelijke schoonheid” (objects of real beauty).
Construction and technique
The idja is woven on a silk ground, and Wagner is emphatic that silk, not cotton, is the weaving material of Atjeh: “terwijl in de Bataklanden katoen het weefmateriaal vormt, zijn de weefsels van Atjeh meestal van zijde.” The silk yarn itself is not produced in Atjeh; it is imported from Singapore and Penang — see Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang. On the silk warp, the weaver lays down a narrow band of ikat work — the only ikat in the cloth — and this band carries a single motif, the plang (arrow-point). “Het ikat-procédé wordt in Atjeh uitsluitend toegepast op smalle banen van de schering, terwijl geen ander motief wordt gebruikt dan de pijlpuntvorm, hier plang genoemd.”
The rest of the decoration is worked in flottante inslag — the floating weft technique in which a supplementary weft thread of gold or silver is laid across the surface, floating over whole groups of warp threads to build up the pattern, and bound down only where the pattern requires. “Maar naast het ikatten als middel tot versiering wordt overvloedig gebruik gemaakt van goud- en zilverdraad. Door middel van de flottante inslag worden de motieven ingeweven.” The result is a cloth on which the gold and silver patterns float over the silk ground, anchored at their binding points, so that the metallic surface of the pattern reads against the coloured surface of the silk.
Motifs and composition
Wagner describes the motifs of the idja as having “een eigen karakter” (a character of their own), while the underlying geometry of the patterns is still recognisably the older geometric vocabulary: “in de gebruikte motieven nog duidelijk de oorspronkelijke geometrische opbouw is terug te vinden.” The composition divides into a field and borders, each with its own motif register:
- In the veld (field) appear the ankerfiguren — the anchor figures that are variations of the sleutelfiguren (key-figures). These are the anker-motief of Atjeh.
- In the randen (borders) appear afgeronde geometrische motieven — rounded geometric motifs — in which the originally angular geometric forms have been worked into a more flowing whole.
The pairing is structural: the field carries the large, loud motif (the anchor), and the borders carry the smaller, softer motifs (the rounded geometrics). The same preference for rounded forms that the anker-motief displays in the field is, in the borders, diffused into a more general vocabulary of curves. Fig. 35 — captioned “Atjeh. Weefsel met zilverdraadversiering in flottante inslag. Een groot gedeelte der toegepaste figuratie is gebaseerd op het anker-motief” — illustrates an idja in which a large part of the patterning is built on the anchor motif.
Colours
Wagner writes that what raises the idja’s to “objecten van werkelijke schoonheid” is the way the colours are combined: “Maar wat deze z.g. idja’s tot objecten van werkelijke schoonheid verheffen, dat is de wijze, waarop de fraaie kleuren zijn gecombineerd.” The colour palette is:
- Purper (purple) — “zeer gewild” (much sought after)
- Rood (red)
- Groen (green)
- Geel (yellow)
- Blauw (blue)
- Sometimes wit (white) and zwart (black)
Purple is the most valued colour, but the palette is wide, and the beauty lies in the combination rather than in any single colour.
Uses of the idja
The idja is woven for many garments. Wagner lists: slendangs (shoulder-cloths) in several kinds, hoofddoeken (head-cloths), lendendoeken (loin-cloths), and so on. He also singles out one garment as “een typisch Atjehs kledingstuk” — a typically Atjehnese garment — the wide trousers worn by women; see Atjeh women’s wide trousers.
Alongside the costly idja’s, Wagner notes coarser Atjeh cloths in which red and orange predominate: “Naast deze kostbare, zeer beschaafde weefsels vindt men ook grovere, waarin rood en oranje overheersen.” The idja’s are thus the top of a hierarchy of Atjeh cloths, with the coarser red-and-orange cloths at the bottom.
Significance
The idja is, in Wagner’s account, the masterwork of Atjeh weaving — the cloth in which the Atjeh weavers’ distinctive decorative signature (the anker-motief in the field, the rounded geometrics in the borders, the plang in the ikat band) is carried in silk and gold and silver. Its significance in the larger history of Atjehnese decorative art is that it shows a regional craft tradition combining three techniques — ikat on the warp, flottante inslag in gold and silver, and a silk ground — into a single cloth, with a restraint and a refinement that Wagner reads as the equal of anything in Sumatran weaving. The dependence of the idja on imported silk yarn from Singapore and Penang is, in turn, a reminder that even the most refined Atjeh craft was already, in the period Wagner describes, plugged into a regional trading network — the silk came from across the Strait of Malacca, and the gold and silver thread was, Wagner notes, “tegenwoordig uitsluitend worden geïmporteerd” (today exclusively imported).
See Also
- Anker-motief
- Plang
- Atjeh silk culture
- Atjeh silk yarn import from Singapore and Penang
- Atjeh women’s wide trousers
- Sierkunst in Indonesië
- Acheh
- 1949
Source
Sierkunst in Indonesië, by F. A. Wagner, Insulinde — Serie Handleidingen voor de Kennis van Indonesië, Vol. VI (Groningen, Batavia: J. B. Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij N.V., 1949), pp. 55–56 (figs. 34, 35).