Tjoet Gambang — modern Cut Gambang — was a daughter of the celebrated Teukoe Oemar and of Tjoet Nja Din, and became the wife of the last adult Tiro-oelama, Tgk. Majet di Tiro. Zentgraff says of her that bon sang ne peut mentir (good blood cannot lie): the daughter of “Heer der westelijke zee” and of one of the greatest female figures of the war, she proved in her death the lineage she carried.
The overval of 1910
In 1909 began the sharp hunt for the last members of the Tiro-oelama family in the mountains around Tangsé. Schmidt had the spoor and held to it like a fox-terrier. In the last part of 1910 he had the bende nearly in his hands; he surprised their schuilplaats. Tgk. Majet di Tiro barely escaped — for him it would be a reprieve of only a few days — but his wife fell severely wounded into Dutch hands.
When the brigade had cleared the ground this woman was seen. She was dressed in black pantalon and baadje, a powerful woman of about thirty; she lay on her back with a bullet-wound in the belly, and even in this misery her face kept a proud rejection. Despite the pain she suffered she did not groan; without a sound she waited for the end.
The refusal
Schmidt came to her with something to drink and asked her, in polite Atjehsch, whether she would let herself be bandaged. She turned her head away from him and snapped:
“Bèta mat keë, kaphé boedo.”
“Touch me not, leprous kafir.” She chose death above life from the hand of a kaphé — unbelieving dog. Her mother Tjoet Nja Din had lived the same faith in the forests of the Westkust; her aunt-by-marriage the wife of Tengkoe di Barat would die the same death, placing herself before her husband.
Significance
Of all the Atjehsche women who fought and died in the long guerrilla, Zentgraff singles out Tjoet Gambang’s refusal as the most striking example of what the Atjehsche wife could be in war: her fierce unyieldingness, her contempt of the enemy, her choice of death before a compromising life. There is, he writes, no novelist whose fantasy, in her wildest flights on this terrain, could reap a harvest such as the reality piled up.
See Also
- Teukoe Oemar
- Tjoet Nja Din
- Tengkoe Majet di Tiro
- Tengkoe di Barat
- Tiro-oelama
- Schmidt
- Tangsé
- Kaphé
- Sjahid
- Prang sabil
- 1910
- Aceh War
Source
Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia. OCR-filename: 20260709_002148_DLP-81-Atjeh_OCR.txt.