The Kanduri tulaka bala — the “religious feast to allay the calamity” — is a communal kanduri given by the inhabitants of an Achehnese gampong during an epidemic of cholera, either in the chapel or at the entrance to the village (babah ret). As C. Snouck Hurgronje records, the custom is observed in Acheh “as in the other Mohammedan countries of the Archipelago,” and forms one of the principal religious responses to the outbreak of epidemic disease. The Achehnese name for cholera itself, ta’cun, is derived from the Arabic and signifies pestilence or epidemic; another name, inuah-chi’rët (vomiting and diarrhoea), describes the disease by its two prominent symptoms.
The religious conception underlying the kanduri tulaka bala is the Achehnese theory of epidemic disease, which differs in detail from that of Java but shares its general structure. Cholera, in the Achehnese account, originates in the battles waged between two classes of jens or spirits, who are divided into Muslims and unbelievers. The Mohammedan jens, when pursued by their enemies with arrows invisible to the human eye, take refuge among human beings, without distinguishing between the heathen and their fellow believers. Many men are thus smitten by the arrows of the heathen jens, and it is these arrows which are the cause of cholera. The kanduri tulaka bala is, in this view, a means of interposing the merit of a pious offering between the beleaguered Muslim jens and their pursuers, and so of averting the arrows from the human population.
The ritual of the kanduri tulaka bala is accompanied by several ancillary observances. Public processions, at which Arabic formulas of prayer are chanted, become the order of the day; when these arrive at the entrance to the gampong, the company intones the baug or adhan, the familiar summons to prayer. At such times many dream that some one asks them for a white or yellow apam-cake, and the dreamers do not omit on the following day to offer the two things so asked for to a teungku, since they fear that omission to do so will render them a prey to the disease. The white and yellow apam-cakes thus become, in time of epidemic, a private supplement to the public kanduri — a domestic offering made by those whom the unseen world has singled out by a dream.
The kanduri tulaka bala is one of a group of epidemic-averting observances recorded by Hurgronje, of which the others are the annual kanduri of Ja’ Karieng on Pulo Breueh and the setting afloat of a lanchang formerly employed in Acheh as an official preventative. The kanduri tulaka bala differs from the other two in being an occasional rather than an annual rite: it is held only when an epidemic is actually present, and it is given by the gampong as a whole rather than by an island community or by the central authority. It thus represents the most direct and communal of the Achehnese responses to epidemic disease — a collective act of piety by which a threatened village seeks to deflect the arrows of the unseen war from its own households.
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.