The Kanduri bungong lada — the “pepper-blossom feast” — is an annual religious feast held by Achehnese pepper-planters on the East and West Coasts when the pepper blossoms. As C. Snouck Hurgronje records, the feast is celebrated in honour of the saint Teungku Lam Peuneu’eun, from whose planted kapok (silk-cotton tree) seeds the first pepper-plants are supposed, by an Achehnese legend, to have sprung. The legend itself is a close parallel to the Arab story of the discovery of coffee: just as the first coffee-trees were said to have grown from goats’ dung sown by a saint, so the first pepper-plants grew from the kapok seeds planted by an Achehnese saint. It is for this reason, the Achehnese say, that pepper is propagated by cuttings rather than by sowing.
Unlike the Kanduri blang of the rice-planters, the kanduri bungong lada is not the occasion of a public gathering. It is held separately in the house of each pepper-planter, and the constituents of the feast are glutinous rice and its accessories. In a single house as much as a naleh of this rice may be prepared for the occasion. The reason for this domestic observance is twofold: first, the pepper-plants do not all blossom at the same time, so that the period of these kanduris lasts as long as three months; and second, the pepper-planters labour in the rantos — the wild and inhospitable districts on the West Coast which separate the larger settlements from one another — and are not organised as village communities in the manner of the rice-growing lowlands.
The contrast between the kanduri bungong lada and the kanduri la’ot of the fishermen, or the Kanduri blang of the rice-planters, illuminates the social geography of Acheh. The fishermen’s kanduri is communal, held by each lho’ or “bay” of pukat-fishermen at the change of the monsoons; the rice-planters’ kanduri is village-based, held in the fields at harvest; the pepper-planters’ kanduri is domestic, held in each house whenever the plants come into blossom. Each feast is shaped by the labour it accompanies — communal on the shore, communal in the padi-fields, solitary in the upland pepper-gardens.
The saint in whose honour the kanduri is held, Teungku Lam Peuneu’eun, takes his name from the gampong in the IX Mukims where his tomb is situated. His cult, like that of Teungku Anjong at Gampong Jawa, is one of the local sainthoods which give the Achehnese religious calendar its specific Achehnese colouring; and the legend which makes him the originator of pepper-planting is a typical piece of Achehnese hagiology, in which a useful craft is referred to a holy man and its techniques thus placed under religious sanction. The kanduri bungong lada is at once a thanksgiving for the year’s blossom, a petition for a fruitful harvest, and an act of homage to the patron saint of the pepper-gardens.
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.