The Kanduri Blang, or “field-feast”, was a religious feast held by every gampong in Acheh at the beginning of the musem ludih blang—the season in which the common rice-land (blang) was released from cultivation and allowed to lie fallow. It generally took place in keunong 21 (the 21st lunar day of conjunction between moon and Scorpion), corresponding to about the 8th of February in the solar year, when the padi-harvest was at its height. Its purpose was to assure the continuance of the prosperity of the common land which had just yielded its harvest, and to mark by a communal act of devotion the moment at which the standing crops gave way to the open fallow season.
Each gampong chose its own day for the kanduri blang, the date being fixed by the village authorities. The viands—rice, meat and the like—were brought together in the usual way for an Achehnese kanduri, and the feast was preceded by the recitation of prayers by the teungku of the meunasah. As with most Achehnese ceremonial meals, the central act was a tahlil offered not only for the prosperity of the living but also for the ureueng chè or ancestors, on whose goodwill the fertility of the land was believed to depend. Neglect of such seasonal kanduris was popularly held to endanger the next harvest, since the dead were thought to withdraw their patronage from a community that failed in its pious obligations.
The kanduri blang also marked a transition in the agricultural calendar. With its celebration, the period of restricted access to the common fields—the musem piche blang or “closed season”, during which cattle were rigorously excluded from the growing crop—came to an end. From this point onward the blang lay open: everyone was free to graze his cattle on the stubble, and the rights of fishing in any umong (flooded rice-field) with traps or rod became general. The feast thus enacted, in religious form, the legal reorganisation of common-property rights that the cycle of padi cultivation demanded.
Snouck Hurgronje places the kanduri blang among those observances by which the Achehnese harmonised the keunong reckoning with the round of agricultural tasks. It belonged to the same family of seasonal ceremonies as the kanduri la’ot of the seine-fishers and the various feast-days of the Mohammedan calendar, but it was distinctively agrarian in character—tied neither to a fixed date of the lunar year nor to a saint’s anniversary, but to the harvest itself as read in the conjunction of moon and Scorpion.
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.