De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat (Doorman, 1939)

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tagsdocument, article, colonial, political, atjeh, sultanate, mohammad-dawat, 1939, 1907, ex-pretendent, ballingschap, indische-gids
aliasesDoorman 1939, De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat, Doorman Sultan Mohammad Dawat, Capture of the ex-pretender Sultan of Atjeh, Tocangkoe Mohammad Dawat, Tuanku Mohammad Dawat Doorman, Mohammad Dawat death 1939

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De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat, na 32 jaar ballingschap den 7en Febr. 1939 overleden te Mr.-Cornelis — “The capture of the ex-pretender Sultan of Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat, who after 32 years of exile died at Meester-Cornelis on 7 February 1939” — is an article by R. G. Doorman, published in 1939 in De Indische Gids (The Indies Guide), vol. 61, p. 308 e.v., recording the capture and subsequent exile of the Atjehnese pretender Sultan Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat — also spelled Tocangkoe Mohammad Dawat — and noting his death at Meester-Cornelis (now Jatinegara, a suburb of Batavia) on 7 February 1939 after thirty-two years of banishment. The article is recorded as No. 563 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter.

Subject

The article’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the capture (gevangeneming) of the ex-pretender Sultan of Atjeh — ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh in Van Meurs’s spelling, ex-pretendent in the OCR — bearing the title Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat (also Tocangkoe Mohammad Dawat), and the circumstance of his death in exile. The title Toeanangkoe (or Tocangkoe) is a rendering of the Acehnese/Malay Tuanaku — “our lord” — a royal title borne by Atjehnese princes; Mohammad Dawat is the personal name, known elsewhere in the corpus in the forms Muhammad Dawot Shah, Teuku Muda Dawot, and Tuanku Muhamat Dawot. The designation ex-pretendent Sultan indicates that Mohammad Dawat had been, at some point before his capture, put forward as a claimant to the Atjehnese sultanate — a pretender — and that his capture removed him from the political arena of Atjeh.

The article notes that Mohammad Dawat died at Meester-Cornelis — the suburb of Batavia now known as Jatinegara — on 7 February 1939, after thirty-two years of ballingschap (banishment, exile). The figure of thirty-two years places the beginning of his exile in 1907 — the year of the Atjéh-enquête and of the 1907–1908 flare-up of resistance under van Daalen’s governorship — suggesting that the pretender’s capture and banishment were part of the Dutch response to the late phase of the Atjeh-oorlog and to the residual royalist politics of the sultanate. His death in exile, in 1939, marks the close of the line of Atjehnese pretender-sultans in the colonial period.

Author and venue

Doorman published the article in De Indische Gids, vol. 61, p. 308 e.v. — one of the principal monthly review journals of the Netherlands Indies, which carried articles on colonial administration, politics, and current affairs. The journal’s audience — colonial officials, planters, merchants, and the interested Dutch public — was precisely the readership to which a notice of the death of the last Atjehnese pretender-sultan would be of interest. The year 1939 — the year of Mohammad Dawat’s death — was the year of publication, indicating that the article was a prompt obituary notice.

Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht

The article is No. 563 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands among the D-letter entries of the Sumatra chapter, between the Damsté edition of the Seven Sleepers legend (No. 560) and the Geusau account of the van Daalen campaign of 1904 (No. 566). Its placement there marks it as one of the retrospective political-historical accounts of Atjeh published in 1939, and the only one to record the death of the last Atjehnese pretender-sultan.

Significance

For AcehWiki, the article is significant as the 1939 record of the death — in exile, at Meester-Cornelis, on 7 February 1939 — of the last Atjehnese pretender Sultan, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat, after thirty-two years of banishment dating from 1907. The article furnishes an independent source for the end of the line of Atjehnese pretender-sultans in the colonial period, and it complements the corpus’s existing entries on the Atjehnese sultanate and its pretenders — including Muhammad Dawot Shah, Teuku Muda Dawot, and Tuanku Muhamat Dawot — and on the late phase of the Atjeh-oorlog and the Atjéh-enquête of 1907. The date 7 February 1939 is the terminus ad quem of the colonial-period Atjehnese sultanate, and the article is the source for that date in the corpus.

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 563. Citing: R. G. Doorman, “De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Tocangkoe Mohammad Dawat, na 32 jaar ballingschap den 7en Febr. 1939 overleden te Mr.-Cornelis,” De Indische Gids, vol. 61 (1939), p. 308 e.v.

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