Langgeh umòng (“excommunication of the rice-fields”) was a peculiar method of compulsion employed by the uleebalangs of Acheh to ensure the payment of fines, particularly in cases where the offender had committed an act regarded as a slight upon the honour or dignity of the chief, his family, or his friends. The uleebalang caused a stake to be fixed in the rice-field of the guilty party, with the white spathe of a young cocoanut palm fixed to its upper end. From that time forth it was forbidden to the owner to till his rice-field until the uleebalang was pleased to remove this token. The stake and its cocoanut-spathe thus constituted a public proclamation of the chief’s displeasure, visible to every passer-by and effective as a suspension of the offender’s rights over his own land.
Such removal, however, did not take place until the case was settled—i.e., until the owner as it were redeemed his right of possession by a money offering. Where he was unable or disinclined to do this, the excommunication lasted sometimes for years. The uleebalang then proceeded gradually to have the field tilled by his servants or (as a sort of feudal service) by his subjects, or else by private contract in consideration of a share (commonly one-half) of the produce. After some years the field passed irretrievably into his possession. The institution thus combined the functions of a judicial sanction and a slow mechanism of confiscation.
Langgeh umòng was imposed in cases of striking (even on strong provocation) a member of the uleebalang’s family, the loss of a weapon entrusted by the chief to a man’s charge, or similar offences against his person or dignity. Since wilful provocation was often given in order to multiply the cases of confiscation, more than one of the uleebalangs had the name of being “very clever in annexing rice-fields”. The practice belonged to that wider complex of adat-punishments by which the Achehnese chiefs enlarged the profits of their privy purse: alongside the cheukie ordeal for adultery, the fines for dina, the ha’ ganchèng deposit in suits for debt, and the various arbitrary humiliations inflicted at the whim of the chief, langgeh umòng stands as a striking example of the economic dimension of Achehnese chieftainship.
The institution is one of Snouck Hurgronje’s clearest illustrations of the way in which the daily life of the gampong escaped the uleebalang’s intervention while the more lucrative occasions of jurisdiction did not. Even the adat meulangga—the formalised procedure for settling quarrels between gampongs—was carried out without his intervention; the alienation of rice-fields through langgeh umòng, by contrast, was an act of the uleebalang himself. Together with the rules governing the sale of lands, in which 1/10 or more of the value of every rice-field sold had to be paid to the chief, and the long-established principle that mortgaged fields were always returned to their owner “in the same season, i.e. in the case of rice-fields always in the musem luah blang”, langgeh umòng helped to define the chieftain’s economic authority over the landed base of Achehnese society.
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.