Ratu Baka (“King Baka”) is a legendary Javanese ruler who appears in Vol. I of The Achehnese in a Latin footnote supplied by Snouck Hurgronje as the classical source for the Javanese myth of the origin of the Kalangs. He is not, properly speaking, a figure of Achehnese tradition, but is cited by Snouck Hurgronje as a comparative parallel to the Achehnese legend of the origin of the Niasese.
The Achehnese legend relates that a princess suffering from a horrible skin-disease was banished to Nï’h (the Achehnese pronunciation of Nias), with only a dog for companion. On that island she found many peundang plants and gradually became acquainted with the curative properties of the peundang root. From her union with the dog a son was born; and when, after long wandering, the son found no woman on the island save his mother, the two wedded, and from this incestuous union “is descended the whole population of Nias.” Snouck Hurgronje notes that this story is clearly akin to the Javanese myth of the Kalangs, and that the same story, in a modified form, “is popular in Banten, but in the absence of Kalangs it is there applied to the Dutch.”
The Javanese myth, as set out by Veth in his Java (vol. III, p. 580 et seq.), has one feature wanting in the Achehnese version: the princess of the Kalang legend is “the offspring of a wild sow, which became her mother in a miraculous manner.” It is in this connection that Snouck Hurgronje cites the Latin anecdote of Ratu Baka:
Ratu Baka rex, ut aiunt, quondam venando fatigatus, dum quietis causâ consistebat, in corticem nucis coconensis minxit, quo facto corticem in terram deposuit. Nec tamen urina solum, sed etiam semen virile in vasculo manebat, quod cum forte sus fera bibisset, foeta facta est et filiam peperit.
That is: Ratu Baka, while hunting, stopped to rest and emptied his bladder into a cocoanut shell, which he then laid on the ground. The vessel preserved not only his urine but also his semen; a wild sow, drinking by chance from it, became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. This daughter, the princess of the Kalang myth, is the ancestress of the Kalang people of Java.
The point of Snouck Hurgronje’s parallel is ethnographic: the Achehnese, like the Javanese, typify the vileness of the origin of a neighbouring people by attributing to them an ancestry compounded of bestiality and incest. The myth thus reveals less about the actual origins of the Niasese or the Kalangs than about the Achehnese and Javanese imagination of the Other. Snouck Hurgronje himself notes that the Achehnese “derive from Nias their knowledge of the highly prized peundang treatment,” a curative practice which the legend simultaneously stigmatises and explains.
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.
Ratu Baka (“King Baka”) is a legendary Javanese ruler who appears in Vol. I of The Achehnese in a Latin footnote supplied by Snouck Hurgronje as the classical source for the Javanese myth of the origin of the Kalangs. He is not, properly speaking, a figure of Achehnese tradition, but is cited by Snouck Hurgronje as a comparative parallel to the Achehnese legend of the origin of the Niasese.
The Achehnese legend relates that a princess suffering from a horrible skin-disease was banished to Nï’h (the Achehnese pronunciation of Nias), with only a dog for companion. On that island she found many peundang plants and gradually became acquainted with the curative properties of the peundang root. From her union with the dog a son was born; and when, after long wandering, the son found no woman on the island save his mother, the two wedded, and from this incestuous union “is descended the whole population of Nias.” Snouck Hurgronje notes that this story is clearly akin to the Javanese myth of the Kalangs, and that the same story, in a modified form, “is popular in Banten, but in the absence of Kalangs it is there applied to the Dutch.”
The Javanese myth, as set out by Veth in his Java (vol. III, p. 580 et seq.), has one feature wanting in the Achehnese version: the princess of the Kalang legend is “the offspring of a wild sow, which became her mother in a miraculous manner.” It is in this connection that Snouck Hurgronje cites the Latin anecdote of Ratu Baka:
Ratu Baka rex, ut aiunt, quondam venando fatigatus, dum quietis causâ consistebat, in corticem nucis coconensis minxit, quo facto corticem in terram deposuit. Nec tamen urina solum, sed etiam semen virile in vasculo manebat, quod cum forte sus fera bibisset, foeta facta est et filiam peperit.
That is: Ratu Baka, while hunting, stopped to rest and emptied his bladder into a cocoanut shell, which he then laid on the ground. The vessel preserved not only his urine but also his semen; a wild sow, drinking by chance from it, became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. This daughter, the princess of the Kalang myth, is the ancestress of the Kalang people of Java.
The point of Snouck Hurgronje’s parallel is ethnographic: the Achehnese, like the Javanese, typify the vileness of the origin of a neighbouring people by attributing to them an ancestry compounded of bestiality and incest. The myth thus reveals less about the actual origins of the Niasese or the Kalangs than about the Achehnese and Javanese imagination of the Other. Snouck Hurgronje himself notes that the Achehnese “derive from Nias their knowledge of the highly prized peundang treatment,” a curative practice which the legend simultaneously stigmatises and explains.
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.