The Kanduri of the 7th day — the kanduri held seven days after a death — is one of the series of memorial feasts observed by the Achehnese at fixed intervals following an interment. As C. Snouck Hurgronje records, the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 10th, 40th, 44th, 50th, 100th and 1000th days after birth, marriage or death are regarded throughout the Eastern Archipelago as epochs of importance, and are always marked by some ceremonial observance. In Acheh, the 3rd, 5th and 7th days after death are those most strictly observed, and the 7th-day kanduri is distinguished from the others by the requirement that it must consist, at least in part, of apam-cakes — the round flat cakes made of ordinary rice-flour and cocoanut milk which give the seventh Mohammedan month, Rajab, its Achehnese name.
The reason for the inclusion of apam-cakes in the 7th-day kanduri lies in the same legend which accounts for the kanduri apam of Rajab. As Hurgronje recounts, an Achehnese who feigned death and was buried alive found that, when the angels Munkar and Nakir began to smite him with their iron clubs, the blows were warded off by a moon-shaped shield which proved to be none other than the round apam-cakes then being prepared by his relatives for a kanduri. From this arose “a certainty that apam-cakes exercise a specially favourable influence on the fortunes of the dead,” and the cakes have accordingly become a necessary constituent of the 7th-day memorial feast. The connection of the cake with the dead is thus at once lunar — the round cake resembles the moon — and eschatological — it shields the deceased from the blows of the angels of the grave.
On the other days of the memorial series — the 3rd, 5th, and so on — the kanduris given are very small, and consist merely in the gift of food to some needy folk, or in the recitation of the Quran in the evening by a few leubes, who are supplied with food either before or after the performance of this task. The 7th-day kanduri alone requires the apam-cake, and it is therefore the most distinctive of the early memorial feasts. The 44th day is further marked by a visit of the female members of the family to the grave, where they pour water on the tomb, offer flowers, and eat plantains on the spot; the 100th and 1000th days are observed with similar, if more elaborate, kanduris, when means permit.
The 7th-day kanduri stands in a natural relation to the Kanduri meureung woe jeurat — the meal held immediately on the return from the grave — and to the later memorial feasts which succeed it. Together with the kanduri of the month of Rajab, it shows how thoroughly the apam-cake has become, in Achehnese religious thought, the food of the dead: a single round cake, eaten at a funeral or offered at a mosque in the seventh month, suffices to commend the deceased to the mercy of Allah and to shield him from the chastisement of the tomb. The Achehnese popular saying recorded by Hurgronje — “the third day (the body) smells, the fifth it swells, the seventh it bursts, the tenth the worms have devoured it” — gives a grim naturalistic background against which the 7th-day kanduri takes on its full significance: it is the offering made at the very moment when, in the popular imagination, the body has reached the nadir of its corruption, and the soul most needs the intercession of the living.
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.