Wangsallan — the Malay-Javanese rhyme-riddle — is the principal poetic instrument of bedekte taal (veiled language), and the form by which, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the chroniclers and romance-writers of the Malay-Javanese world concealed references to the older Hindu-Buddhist geography of Sumatra’s east coast and the Atjehnese sphere beneath the surface of their texts. A wangsalan works by giving an intermediate word that rhymes with or echoes the hidden target: the listener who hears the intermediate word is expected to supply the target by association, while the foreign listener records the intermediate word as if it were a plain ethnographic name.
Form
The wangsalan takes an intermediate word — often a common noun — whose sound recalls the hidden target. De Roo de la Faille gives many instances from Pinto’s account of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539): ikan “fish” on hin-doe ka-ri, “where Hindu population remained”; batoe rendang on the Batu islands; Paneticano on Kampi; minha cumbaa on the minjak sembawa of Pangkalan Soesoe. The riddle geta angkat, koeran tiba — explained by Klinkert, Favre and others as something like “a beautiful time, whose loss one regretted too late” — De Roo de la Faille decodes as getta angkat, Qor’an tiba, “the royal throne broke open, the Quran fell from the sky”, i.e. the fall of the realm of the Djao with the coming of Islam. The same form, applied to the Sadjarah Malajoe’s Sjahroe’n Noewi episode, identifies the menggombala ayam “tending chickens” as menggembala Pasaj semajam, “tending the like of Pasaj”.
Function
The function of the wangsalan is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, double. Among lettered Malays and Javanese, it allowed the chronicler to record matters of royal shame or ancestral displacement without exposing them to plain view — the point Van den Broek had made about Javanese writers’ use of beeldspraak (imagery) when they touched on the princely house, “because they were punished when they told the truth”. The foreign listener, by contrast, was systematically misled: Pinto records Paneticano as a place-name; Polo records Gauenispola as a small island; De Conti records Cernovem as an inland city; and all three, De Roo de la Faille argues, were gulled by the same Malay wangsalan.
Decoding and AcehWiki
For AcehWiki, the wangsalan is the operative form of bedekte taal: every entry that draws on De Roo de la Faille’s decoding of a chronicle place-name — Kampi from Paneticano, Sjahroe’n Noewi from Cernovem/Xarnauz, Pangkalan Soesoe from minha cumbaa, etc. — rests on the recognition that the surface form is a wangsalan whose target is the older Hindu-Buddhist geography of the Atjehnese sphere. The recognition that the chronicle register is wangsalan-pervaded, rather than plain, is what permits the cross-identification of chronicle place-names with European travel record.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the wangsalan is the practical poetic form through which bedekte taal operates, and the single instrument by which De Roo de la Faille connects the Sadjarah Malajoe and the Sadjarah Banten to the European travel accounts of Pinto, De Conti, Polo and Pigafetta. Its recognition is the methodological precondition for any reading of the chronicle geography of Atjeh and the east-coast Sumatran polities.
See Also
- Bedekte taal
- Dasanama
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
- P. de Roo de la Faille
- Sadjarah Malajoe
- Sadjarah Banten
- Babad Tanah Djawi
- Aroe
- Poelo Kampi
- Sjahroe’n Noewi
- Pangkalan Soesoe
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), Inleiding, pp. 5-6, and chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 7-17.