Koh gigòe (“tooth-filing”) was the Achehnese practice of filing the teeth as a form of personal embellishment. In the case of boys it was performed in their 12th or 13th year; in that of women, not until after marriage, since it was thought proper to leave the decision of this matter to the husband. Many omitted the operation altogether, either because their teeth were not naturally too large or ugly, or from religious motives. So far from giving the custom a devotional origin, as some Javanese did by alleging that it was in conformity with the example of the Prophet (whose teeth were said to have been shaped as though filed from the time of his birth, or, according to others, after having been injured in the battle of Uhud), the Achehnese regarded it simply as a personal embellishment; and some of their ulamas were opposed to it as being self-mutilation.
The filer of teeth—an operation usually performed by women—used for her work a whetstone (batèë hanèe). To keep the patient’s mouth open, a piece of betel-nut was thrust between the molars on one side. The teeth to be operated on were the four front teeth (gigòe dilèu’è) and the two “dog’s teeth” (gigòe asèe) of the upper jaw. These were rubbed with white onions before the operation, “to make them soft”. After they had been ground down to the desired length, the line of the teeth was filed until all unevenness disappeared—a finishing process known as asah. Baja (soot) was then laid on the surface so formed as a curative. Baja Kleng (Kling) could be found with the medicine-sellers, but many made the baja themselves by catching the soot off a burning cocoanut-shell on a wet knife or other steel weapon.
The people of Pidie filed their teeth in a particular manner so as to make them appear as if they projected outwards, and ended by making them entirely black, as the Javanese used to do in earlier times. Some fops and women of light reputation used baja every day to blacken the space between each pair of teeth. The operation was thus closely related, both in technique and in social meaning, to the practice of tooth-filing among the Malays of the Peninsula, where (as Skeat describes in Malay Magic, p. 355 et seq.) it formed the centrepiece of an elaborate adolescent rite. In Acheh, however, the ceremony had been stripped of almost all ritual context: it survived as a private act of vanity, optionally undertaken, with neither religious sanction nor community observance to surround it.
Koh gigoe belonged, in the Achehnese life-cycle, to the same series of optional embellishments and ceremonies as peusunat (circumcision) and the piercing of girls’ ears; but unlike circumcision it lacked any religious obligation and was viewed with suspicion by the more rigorous ulamas. Snouck Hurgronje places it among the customs whose observance depended entirely on personal taste and on local fashion—a marginal survival, in the Achehnese case, of a practice that in other parts of the Archipelago had grown into a major ceremonial event.
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.