Melasaké pampang — also Melasaké-pampang, in the Lampong-Semangka origin legend the boom Melasaké pampang — is the “wonder-tree” of the Belalau plateau in South Sumatra whose “roots stood in the air, while the leaves hung downwards” — the principal allegorical form, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, of the inverted ancestral land of Taroema at the bay of Aroe. It is the central image of De Roo de la Faille’s chapter Melasaké pampang, and the South-Sumatran counterpart of the Minangkabau baringin songrang and the Perak beringin sonsang.
The Lampong-Semangka legend
The Belalau plateau, De Roo de la Faille records (citing Resident Westenenk’s report in the Eerste Java-congres, p. 27), was the tanah asal mula jadi — the land of origin — of the four margas of Segalo- or Batoe-berak, Beloenggoe, Kambahang and Soekau, who of old formed a league. The same tradition held that the land had been inhabited by Boda’s and Toemi’s — bangsa djihin dan déwa — whose kabesaran (state-ornament) was a tree whose roots stood in the air, while the leaves (seboekau named) of two kinds hung downwards; that tree was called Melasaké pampang. The Minangkabau princes’ sons, the legend adds, drove out the Boda’s and Toemi’s and seized the Melasaké pampang.
Decoding: wilasa and the inverted Taroema
The name Melasaké pampang De Roo de la Faille decodes as the causative of wilasa — “playing with beautiful appearance” — by the making of a riddle, a rebus, in which the underlying figure (pa-mpang, contraction of roe-pa + toempang) is laid upon = toempang, so that the image of the allegory, namely the boom (tree), becomes visible. The figure is taroe — the Kawi word for “tree” — which is also the taroe of taroe-na-ma, i.e. Taroema. The “tree whose roots stand in the air” is thus the inverted Taroema — the ancestral land “turned upside down” — and the seboekau leaves of two kinds are roepa ka-lih — da-on-ke-da-ton, Se-m-boe-dja kaw-i — the two leaves of the Sambodja of the chronicle tradition.
The Boda’s and Toemi’s
The Boda’s and Toemi’s whom the Minangkabau princes’ sons drove out De Roo de la Faille decodes as bo…da-toe-mi — i.e. datoe boe-mi — “of the lineage sa-dji hin-a”, the “small rajas and satrijas” of the Sambodja. Their expulsion by the Minangkabau princes’ sons is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the allegorical record of the dispersal of the Djawaka of Taroema — the same dispersal that the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe of 1539 would close in military form.
The Radja Sakti of 1686-1687
The same inverted-Taroema allegory, De Roo de la Faille notes, underlies the South-Sumatran career of Radja Sakti — the “holy king” who, after making the sea unsafe around Bangka and Billiton as a sea-rover, was driven out in 1686–1687 and settled at Laoet Kawar in Semangka with 400 men, women, and children. His subsequent career at Benkoelen — where he was worshipped as a “holy” figure, coined money, established a market, and wrote to the East India Company — is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the late-seventeenth-century echo of the inverted-Taroema tradition.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Melasaké pampang is the principal South-Sumatran allegorical form of the inverted ancestral land of Taroema — the bedekte taal image by which the Lampong-Semangka origin legend recorded the dispersal of the Djawaka of Aru. Its survival in three regional traditions — Lampong-Semangka, Minangkabau, and Perak — also marks it as the most widely-diffused single allegory of the De Roo de la Faille corpus.
See Also
- Baringin sonsang
- Taroema
- Djawaka
- Belalau
- Lampong-Semangka
- Boda’s and Toemi’s
- Sambodja
- Radja Sakti (1686-1687)
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- 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.