Rajat (Malay-Arabic ra’yat, “subjects, the common people”) was the term for the ordinary subjects of an Atjehnese landschap, as distinguished from the chiefs and the great landholders.
Indifference of the chief to the origin of the rajat
D. W. N. de Boer used the term in describing the oeléëbalang’s attitude to settlement: it mattered little to this powerful and genealogically independent chief “welke rajat, van welke kawom of soekëë ook, en waarvandaan” — which subject, of whatever clan or sub-tribe and from wherever — took waste land into use in his territory, provided it was not done in secret. The remark encapsulates the territorial rather than genealogical basis of the Atjehnese polity.
Emancipation of the rajat
De Boer also recorded the rajat as the beneficiary of the changes that were causing mawaih to decline: an increasingly effective protection of the small man against the great landholders; the countering of usury through the credit system and the Woekerordonnantie; a growing mutual market traffic; and “de emancipatie van den vroeger zoo afhankelijken rajat, die nu zijn eigen recht van bestaan leert begrijpen en dat ook leert verdedigen” — the emancipation of the formerly so dependent rajat, who was now learning to understand his own right of existence and also to defend it, and who was gradually freeing himself from a more or less disguised slavery or serfdom.
See Also
Source
Het recht op den grond in Atjeh, by D. W. N. de Boer, dated Scheveningen, November 1931, pp. 59-80. Offprint DLP-141, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, ‘s-Gravenhage; Bibliotheek KITLV accession 0060 4460 60 081470 428.