The marga Ramin legend of Boven-Singkel is the origin-narrative of the marga Ramin of Boven-Singkel (Upper Singkel, in present-day Aceh Singkil Regency), recorded by Ypes in his Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra (p. 57 nt. 1) and reproduced in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* ([[1956)]] (p. 220). The legend tells of Gedong, an Atjeher from Pasei and the eponymous ancestor of the marga, who suffered shipwreck on his way to Belawan and was caught by an eel that brought him to land after he swore never to eat eel; on the beach, a buffalo awaited him and threatened to push him back into the sea, but released him unharmed after he swore never to eat buffalo-meat. The members of the marga Ramin are said to abstain, to this day, from both eel and buffalo-meat, in fulfilment of Gedong’s two oaths.
The legend
The legend, as reproduced from Ypes in De Karbouw (p. 220), reads:
“Van de marga Ramin in Boven-Singkel bestaat de volgende legende. Een Atjeher van Pasei, Gedong geheten, die de stamvader heet te zijn van genoemde marga, leed op weg naar Belawan schipbreuk en werd door een paling gevangen, welke hem echter naar land bracht, toen hij de eed had gezworen, nooit paling te zullen eten. Op het strand wachtte hem evenwel een buffel op (of dit een albino-dier was, wordt niet vermeld), welke hem dreigde, weder in zee te zullen stoten, doch hem ongedeerd liet landen, toen hij gezworen had, ook geen buffelvlees te zullen nuttigen. Men zegt, dat de leden van de marga Ramin nu nog geen paling of karbouwenvlees mogen eten.”
Structure and significance
The legend is structurally a compact double-taboo narrative: a single ancestor, in a single episode of maritime crisis, contracts two food prohibitions (eel and buffalo), each mediated by an animal rescuer-threatener, and the prohibitions pass to his genealogical descendants. The structural elements are:
- Ancestor: Gedong — an Atjeher of Pasei — who is the eponymous stamvader (ancestral father) of the marga Ramin.
- Crisis: shipwreck on the way to Belawan.
- First rescuer-threatener: an eel (paling), which catches Gedong but brings him to land after he swears never to eat eel.
- Second rescuer-threatener: a buffalo on the beach (whether an albino is not specified), which threatens to push him back into the sea but releases him unharmed after he swears never to eat buffalo-meat.
- Inherited prohibitions: the members of the marga Ramin are said to abstain, to this day, from both eel and buffalo-meat. The legend’s significance is threefold. First, it ties the Boven-Singkel (Singkil-area) genealogical tradition to the Pasai cultural sphere of northern Atjeh — Gedong is explicitly an Atjeher of Pasei, not a Singkil-area figure, and his legend thus documents the cultural reach of the Pasai sphere into the southern Atjeh border zone. Second, it is one of the documented Sumatran pantang-origin narratives alongside the Atjeh pantang legend of the white buffalo licking the corpse-fluid of a fallen child — a parallel corpus in which the buffalo (especially the albino buffalo) figures as the central animal. Third, Snouck Hurgronje is quoted in the same chapter of De Karbouw (p. 218) cautioning that present-day obedience to such prohibitions rests on fear of ancestral wrath, even if the prohibition’s origin may lie in pre-Islamic totemistic ideas — a judgement that applies also to the marga Ramin case.
Significance
The marga Ramin legend is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history as a documented instance of the wider Atjeh-north-Sumatran pattern in which buffalo-meat avoidance is legitimated by an ancestral encounter. The legend ties the Boven-Singkel genealogical tradition to the Pasai cultural sphere of northern Atjeh, documents the double food-prohibition (eel and buffalo-meat) of the marga Ramin, and exemplifies the wider Sumatran pantang-origin narrative corpus in which the buffalo figures centrally.
Sources
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), p. 220.
Bijdrage tot de kennis van stamverwantschap op Sumatra, by W. K. H. Ypes, p. 57 nt. 1.