P. de Roo de la Faille was a Dutch colonial-era scholar whose posthumously circulated monograph Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java (Den Haag, March 1954) gathers nine “curiosities” from the historical literature of the Malajoe and Java, all read through the lens of bedekte taal — the veiled or allegorical register that, in his reading, hides references to the Aru country and the Atjehnese sphere beneath the surface of Javanese and Malay chronicles. He dedicated the work to Dr D. J. Hulshoff Pol, whom he addressed as a former Officier van Gezondheid at Tandjoeng Poera with the K.N.I.L. Leger — that is, as a man who had himself served in the very Aroe country the book places at the centre of early Malay history.
Method and intellectual debt
De Roo de la Faille writes from within the Dutch-Indological tradition of Veth, Brandes, Rouffaer, Van der Tuuk and the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut, but he reads these authorities against the grain. Where Rouffaer, for instance, identified Marco Polo’s Gauenispola with the Strait light-tower on Poelo Bras and explained the name from Malay gawé, De Roo de la Faille presses further: the name is, in his reading, a wangsalan (riddle) on Ka-poe-laga-nis, a concealed form of Kapoelaga-Qaciolah, the camphor-name by which the Hindu-Javanese chronicles denoted the ancestral land of “Taroema” at Aroe. He is similarly prepared to correct Rouffaer on Pati Oenoes and Pigafetta’s list of Javanese cities, and to take van Stein Callenfels to task for dismissing the allegorical geography of the Old-Javanese Sang Satyawan as “zuivere nonsens”.
His interpretive confidence rests on the claim — repeatedly illustrated — that Javanese and Malay lettered men, when they wished to record matters that touched on royal shame or ancestral displacement, did so in bahasa kapoer (the “lime-language” of Malajoe), and that the foreign traveller (Pinto, De Conti, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Pigafetta, Tome Pires) was systematically gulled by it. The Curiositeiten is thus as much a key to the method as a catalogue of instances.
Connection with Acheh
De Roo de la Faille’s importance for AcehWiki lies chiefly in the central chapter on Mendez Pinto’s 1539 voyage, which is the only sustained modern retelling of the Atjeh-Aru war of 1539: the Atjehnese sultan’s campaign against the radja of Aroe, the Atjehsche vloot of 130 vessels, the fall of Aroe, and the Queen of Aroe’s flight to Malacca and Bentan and her remarriage to the Sultan of Johor. He also reproduces, in the chapter Over Soenan Kalidjaga, the legend of Putri Hijau — the fairy-tale queen of Deli/Asahan whose rejection of the Sultan of Atjeh’s marriage suit and whose glass-coffin voyage to Atjeh, lost at sea on the way, are among the few widely-circulated Acehnese legends of the east-coast polities.
Significance
For the wiki, De Roo de la Faille’s significance is double. He is, first, the conduit through which the Portuguese and Italian sources on sixteenth-century Atjeh reach a Dutch-reading audience in a single interpretive frame; and second, the principal exponent of a hermeneutic — bedekte taal — that, whether or not one accepts each of his particular identifications, must be reckoned with whenever an AcehWiki entry touches on the disguised geography of the Malay and Javanese chronicles.
See Also
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
- Dr. D. J. Hulshoff Pol
- Mendez Pinto
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Puteri Idjo
- Bedekte taal
- Wangsallan
- G. P. Rouffaer
- Dr. J. Brandes
- Dr. H. N. van der Tuuk
- Pieter Johannes Veth
- van Stein Callenfels
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954). 68 pp.
P. de Roo de la Faille was a Dutch colonial-era scholar whose posthumously circulated monograph Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java (Den Haag, March 1954) gathers nine “curiosities” from the historical literature of the Malajoe and Java, all read through the lens of bedekte taal — the veiled or allegorical register that, in his reading, hides references to the Aru country and the Atjehnese sphere beneath the surface of Javanese and Malay chronicles. He dedicated the work to Dr D. J. Hulshoff Pol, whom he addressed as a former Officier van Gezondheid at Tandjoeng Poera with the K.N.I.L. Leger — that is, as a man who had himself served in the very Aroe country the book places at the centre of early Malay history.
Method and intellectual debt
De Roo de la Faille writes from within the Dutch-Indological tradition of Veth, Brandes, Rouffaer, Van der Tuuk and the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut, but he reads these authorities against the grain. Where Rouffaer, for instance, identified Marco Polo’s Gauenispola with the Strait light-tower on Poelo Bras and explained the name from Malay gawé, De Roo de la Faille presses further: the name is, in his reading, a wangsalan (riddle) on Ka-poe-laga-nis, a concealed form of Kapoelaga-Qaciolah, the camphor-name by which the Hindu-Javanese chronicles denoted the ancestral land of “Taroema” at Aroe. He is similarly prepared to correct Rouffaer on Pati Oenoes and Pigafetta’s list of Javanese cities, and to take van Stein Callenfels to task for dismissing the allegorical geography of the Old-Javanese Sang Satyawan as “zuivere nonsens”.
His interpretive confidence rests on the claim — repeatedly illustrated — that Javanese and Malay lettered men, when they wished to record matters that touched on royal shame or ancestral displacement, did so in bahasa kapoer (the “lime-language” of Malajoe), and that the foreign traveller (Pinto, De Conti, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Pigafetta, Tome Pires) was systematically gulled by it. The Curiositeiten is thus as much a key to the method as a catalogue of instances.
Connection with Acheh
De Roo de la Faille’s importance for AcehWiki lies chiefly in the central chapter on Mendez Pinto’s 1539 voyage, which is the only sustained modern retelling of the Atjeh-Aru war of 1539: the Atjehnese sultan’s campaign against the radja of Aroe, the Atjehsche vloot of 130 vessels, the fall of Aroe, and the Queen of Aroe’s flight to Malacca and Bentan and her remarriage to the Sultan of Johor. He also reproduces, in the chapter Over Soenan Kalidjaga, the legend of Putri Hijau — the fairy-tale queen of Deli/Asahan whose rejection of the Sultan of Atjeh’s marriage suit and whose glass-coffin voyage to Atjeh, lost at sea on the way, are among the few widely-circulated Acehnese legends of the east-coast polities.
Significance
For the wiki, De Roo de la Faille’s significance is double. He is, first, the conduit through which the Portuguese and Italian sources on sixteenth-century Atjeh reach a Dutch-reading audience in a single interpretive frame; and second, the principal exponent of a hermeneutic — bedekte taal — that, whether or not one accepts each of his particular identifications, must be reckoned with whenever an AcehWiki entry touches on the disguised geography of the Malay and Javanese chronicles.
See Also
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
- Dr. D. J. Hulshoff Pol
- Mendez Pinto
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Puteri Idjo
- Bedekte taal
- Wangsallan
- G. P. Rouffaer
- Dr. J. Brandes
- Dr. H. N. van der Tuuk
- Pieter Johannes Veth
- van Stein Callenfels
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954). 68 pp.