The Kanduri Aja Bseutiri — also written Kanduri Aja Eseutiri, “the feast of my lady the consort” — is one of the three principal annual kanduris held at the tomb of the great saint Teungku Anjong in Gampong Jawa. C. Snouck Hurgronje treats it in The Achehnese in his discussion of the calendar of Achehnese festivals, where it is assigned to the 18th day of Rajab (the seventh month of the Mohammedan year), and explained as a feast in honour of the consort of the saint, whose own tomb stands close to his.
The Consort of Teungku Anjong
The consort of Teungku Anjong, commonly known as Aja Eseutiri — “my lady the consort” — was, in her lifetime, a daughter of a Sayyid of the famous clan of ʿAidīd, and her real name was Fatimah bint ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿAidīd. She appears to have died on the 18th of Rajab 1235 AH (May 1820 AD). The word aja is, as Snouck Hurgronje notes, “really an abbreviated form of raja = prince or princess”; the title Aja Eseutiri thus denotes the consort of the saint in the same idiom in which the wife of a chief is spoken of as aja in her own right. Her own descent from a Sayyid — that is, from a descendant of the Prophet through his daughter Fatimah — placed her, by birth, in the highest rank of Achehnese society; and her marriage to Teungku Anjong united two of the most venerated lines of Achehnese hagiology.
The Feast
The kanduri Aja Eseutiri is held in the deah (prayer-house) at the tomb of Teungku Anjong. Snouck Hurgronje notes that it “resembles exactly the two others that are celebrated at that sacred tomb on the 12th of Mo’lot and the 14th of Puasa.” The three feasts thus form a triad of annual observances at one of the most sacred sites of Acheh, each recalling a different aspect of the saint’s cult: the Mo’lot feast for the birth of the Prophet, the Puasa feast for the close of the fasting month, and the Rajab feast for the consort of the saint herself.
Place in the Calendar
The 18th of Rajab occupies, in the Achehnese calendar, a place in the same month that takes its popular name from the kanduri apam — the round flat cakes of rice-flour and cocoanut milk baked in every house on some one day of the month and brought as a kanduri to the mosque or meunasah. The same month is also marked by the commemoration of Mohammad’s celebrated “journey to heaven” (mi’raj) on the night of the 27th. The kanduri Aja Eseutiri thus falls in a month already crowded with pious observance; its specific reference to the consort of the saint distinguishes it from the more general festivals of the same period, and connects it with that special veneration of the family and connections of the saints which is so marked a feature of Achehnese hagiology.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.