Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu — “Land and people of Atjeh, past and present” — is a book by J. J. Jongejans, published in 1939 by Baarn with maps and illustrations (Met krt. en ills.), surveying the land and people of Atjeh in their past and present aspects. The book is recorded as No. 571 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter, and is accompanied in the same number by the companion article No. 571a, *Taboet- of Hasji-Hosseinfeest* and by No. 572, Het heiligdom te Oelakan — the three together marking Jongejans as one of the principal Atjeh-focused authors of the year.
Subject
The book’s subject, as recorded by Van Meurs, is the land and volk of Atjeh — the land and the people — treated in their vroeger (past) and nu (present) aspects. The dual temporal framing — past and present — indicates that the book is a survey of the Atjehnese land and people in both their historical and their contemporary (late-colonial) dimensions, and the inclusion of maps (krt.) and illustrations (ills.) indicates that it is a substantial illustrated survey rather than a brief article. The book is, in the corpus’s terms, a general ethnographic and historical survey of Atjeh, comparable in scope to Kreemer’s Atjeh (1922–23) and to the later Piekaar Atjèh and the War with Japan (1949), and it takes its place among the principal Dutch surveys of Atjeh.
Author
Jongejans — already known in the AcehWiki corpus as Resident Jongejans and as one of the principal authorities on Atjeh, cited by Piekaar in the Bibliography of Atjèh and the War with Japan alongside Snouck Hurgronje, Damsté, Kreemer, and Zentgraaff — was a former Resident of Atjeh, and his survey draws on the administrative and scholarly experience of a colonial official who had served in the territory. The book is the principal published work by Jongejans recorded in Van Meurs’s survey, and it is the basis of his citation in the Piekaar canon.
Companion pieces
The book is accompanied in Van Meurs’s survey by two companion pieces, both also by Jongejans:
- No. 571a: *Taboet- of Hasji-Hosseinfeest* — an illustrated article in Onze Aarde (Our Earth), vol. 1939, p. 326 e.v., on the Taboet or Hasji-Hosseinfeest — the Taboet or Hossein festival, the Shi’ite-derived commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein that is observed in parts of Sumatra under the name Taboet.
- No. 572: Het heiligdom te Oelakan — an illustrated article in Onze Aarde, vol. 1939, p. 305 e.v., on the sanctuary at Oelakan, a place of pilgrimage on the west coast of Atjeh.
The three pieces together — the book and the two Onze Aarde articles — mark Jongejans as one of the principal Atjeh-focused authors of 1939, and the book as the central statement of his survey of Atjehnese land and people.
Place in the 1939 Literatuur-Overzicht
The book is No. 571 in the Sumatra chapter (Hoofdstuk III, Nos. 548–658) of Van Meurs’s survey, where it stands among the J-letter entries of the Sumatra chapter, between the H-letter entries (including the Hikajat Eitia Toedjoh, No. 570) and the K-letter entries. Its placement there, alongside the Damsté edition of the Seven Sleepers legend (Nos. 560, 570) and the Doorman notice of the death of Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat (No. 563), marks it as one of the principal Atjeh-focused publications of 1939.
Significance
For AcehWiki, the book is significant as the 1939 survey of Atjehnese land and people by a former Resident of Atjeh — a colonial-official ethnography that takes its place alongside Kreemer’s Atjeh (1922–23) and Piekaar’s Atjèh and the War with Japan (1949) in the canon of Dutch surveys of Atjeh. The book furnishes an independent source for the late-colonial state of Atjehnese land and people, and it complements the corpus’s existing entries on Jongejans and on the wider Dutch scholarly canon on Atjeh. The companion pieces — on the Taboet festival and on the Oelakan sanctuary — extend the survey into the religious and pilgrimage life of Atjeh, and they are the subject of separate entries in the corpus.
See Also
- Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (Van Meurs, 1940)
- H. van Meurs
- resident-jongejans
- Taboet- of Hasji-Hosseinfeest (Jongejans, 1939)
- Oelakan
- J. Kreemer
- Dr. A. J. Piekaar
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- H. T. Damsté
- De legende van de heilige zeven slapers in het Atjehsch (Damsté, 1939)
- De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat (Doorman, 1939)
- Acheh
- Baarn
- 1939
- 1940
Source
Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 571. Citing: J. J. Jongejans, Land en volk van Atjeh vroeger en nu. Met krt. en ills. (Baarn, 1939).