The Loss of the Dalam — the capture of the Dalam or sultan’s palace compound at Banda Acheh by the Dutch in 1873 — was the decisive event of the opening phase of the Achehnese War and the effective end of the Achehnese sultanate as a territorial power. As C. Snouck Hurgronje records in his political survey of the sultanate, before the Dutch gained possession of the Dalam, the sultan had already disappeared from the scene. Sultan Mahmut Shah died shortly afterwards, and during the subsequent course of the conflict it was always separate and independent bodies of troops, led either by adat-chiefs or by some newly-arisen commanders of energetic personality, that turned their arms against the invaders through their own impulse or to advance their own interests.
The Dalam itself — usually called the Kraton by the Dutch — was the centre and, in the Achehnese imagination, the origin of the glory of the sultanate. As Hurgronje explains, the Dalam and all that it contained, including the sultan himself, had been since the earliest times the objects of a somewhat extraordinary reverence in the minds of the Achehnese, “though this never prevented them from making a football of the sultanate at their pleasure.” This feeling of reverence was founded partly on the fact that the Dalam was the centre of a past almost fabulous in comparison with later times, and partly on the religious prestige which attached to the person of the sultan. The capture of the Dalam by the Dutch was thus not merely a military event but the symbolic destruction of the political and religious order which had given the Achehnese their sense of common identity.
The political consequences of the loss of the Dalam were immediate. The sultan, Mahmut Shah, died shortly after the loss, and it was not thought necessary, even in so perilous a crisis, to select from among the candidates for the succession a man before all things. The Achehnese contented themselves with a child, Tuanku Muhamat Dawot; and though his guardian Tuanku Asem (Hashim) was a man of royal blood most bitterly hostile to the Dutch Government, even he preferred to watch the contest with interest from a distance rather than himself to take a serious share in it. When once the fugitive “court” had found a safe place of refuge in Pidie territory, far removed from the theatre of the conflict, the condition of the sultanate became very much the same as it had been before the war — the scene alone being changed.
The loss of the Dalam revealed, in fact, the inherent weakness of the late sultanate. As Hurgronje observes, the power of the later sultans had been actually confined to the limits of the Dalam, though the superficial observer might draw another conclusion from the persistent survival of a different mode of address and of certain forms which really never had any substantial meaning. It was not only the powerful uleebalangs of the sagis that made war on one another; the lesser uleebalangs, who each controlled twelve gampongs, did the same, though their territories marched with the Dalam, and they might more than other chiefs have been supposed to be creatures of the sultanate. Even the sultan’s own followers took part in these conflicts, espousing different sides. The Dutch capture of the Dalam, in this view, did not so much destroy a functioning political order as remove the last symbol around which a merely nominal unity had been gathered.
The war which followed the loss of the Dalam was thus, from the first, a war without a single central command. As Hurgronje concludes, the most powerful compulsion from without could produce no union in Acheh, utterly broken up as she was. The sole individual who succeeded during the first portion of the war in organising the forces to a comparatively high degree was an ambitious and skilful foreigner, Sayyid Abdurrahman Zahir by name. The Achehnese resistance which the Dutch encountered after 1873 was therefore not the resistance of a sultanate but that of a congeries of sagis, mukims and gampongs, each fighting for its own territory and its own chiefs; and the capture of the Dalam, which had seemed at the time to be the decisive act of the war, proved in the event to be only the prelude to a conflict which was to last, in one form or another, for more than three decades.
See Also
- Acheh War
- Mahmut Shah
- Tuanku Muhamat Dawot
- Habib Abdurrahman Zahir
- Banda Acheh
- Pidie
- Coronation of the Sultan
- Adat Meukuta Alam
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.