Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat

Properties2
tagsperson, sultan, pretender, achehnese, colonial, exile, 1907, 1939, mr-cornelis
aliasesTocangkoe Mohammad Dawat, Tuanku Mohammad Dawat, Tuanaku Mohammad Dawat, Mohammad Dawat, ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat of Atjeh, Pretender Sultan of Atjeh, Mohammad Dawat pretender

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Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat — also spelled Tocangkoe Mohammad Dawat, from the Acehnese/Malay Tuanaku (“our lord”) Mohammad Dawat — was the ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh — the ex-pretender Sultan of Atjeh — who, after his capture by the Dutch, was held in exile for thirty-two years and died at Meester-Cornelis (now Jatinegara, a suburb of Batavia) on 7 February 1939. His death in exile marks the close of the line of Atjehnese pretender-sultans in the colonial period. He is the subject of an article by R. G. Doorman, De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat (De Indische Gids, vol. 61, 1939, p. 308 e.v.), recorded as No. 563 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940).

Title and name

The title Toeanangkoe — Van Meurs’s spelling, with the Doorman article’s spelling Tocangkoe — is a Dutch rendering of the Acehnese/Malay Tuanaku or Tuan-aku, literally “our lord,” a royal title borne by Atjehnese princes and pretenders. The personal name Mohammad Dawat is known elsewhere in the corpus in the related forms Muhammad Dawot Shah, Teuku Muda Dawot, and Tuanku Muhamat Dawot; the variation in spelling reflects the wider variation in the recording of Atjehnese royal names in Dutch colonial sources, and the relationships among these forms — whether they denote the same individual, closely related claimants, or a sequence of pretenders — are among the questions that the corpus’s entries on the late Atjehnese sultanate seek to clarify.

The designation ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh — ex-pretender Sultan of Atjeh — indicates that Mohammad Dawat had been, at some point before his capture, put forward as a claimant to the Atjehnese sultanate. The Atjehnese sultanate had been in abeyance since the Dutch conquest of Koeta Radja in the late nineteenth century, but the royal line continued to command loyalty in the interior, and pretenders to the sultanate were a recurrent feature of the late phase of the Atjeh-oorlog and of the post-war colonial order.

Capture and exile

The Doorman article records the gevangeneming — the capture — of Mohammad Dawat, and the circumstance of his subsequent exile. The duration of the exile — thirty-two years, ending with his death on 7 February 1939 — places the beginning of the exile in 1907. The year 1907 was a pivotal one in the late Atjeh-oorlog: it was the year of the Atjéh-enquête — the formal inquiry into the governorship of van Daalen — and of the 1907–1908 flare-up of resistance that van Daalen’s harsh policies had provoked. The capture and banishment of the pretender Sultan in that year suggests that the Dutch response to the late-war resistance included the removal of the royalist figurehead around whom the resistance might have coalesced, and that Mohammad Dawat’s exile was part of the consolidation of Dutch authority in the closing phase of the Atjeh-oorlog.

The place of exile — Meester-Cornelis, a suburb of Batavia — was the standard destination for political exiles from the outer possessions of the Netherlands Indies, and the choice of Meester-Cornelis rather than a remoter place of internment indicates that Mohammad Dawat was held under the relatively lenient conditions of suburban Batavian exile rather than under the harsher conditions of a prison or a remote island.

Death on 7 February 1939

Mohammad Dawat died at Meester-Cornelis on 7 February 1939, after thirty-two years of exile. His death — recorded in the Doorman article and in Van Meurs’s survey — marks the close of the line of Atjehnese pretender-sultans in the colonial period. The date 7 February 1939 is, in the corpus, the terminus ad quem of the colonial-period Atjehnese sultanate, and the only record of the death of a pretender-sultan in the corpus. The year 1939 — the year of the third centenary of the Atjeh martyrs and of the publication of the Damsté edition of the Hikajat Eitia Toedjoh — was thus the year in which the last Atjehnese pretender-sultan died in exile, and the year in which the Atjehnese past was, in several registers, being memorialised in Dutch colonial scholarship.

Significance

For AcehWiki, Toeanangkoe Mohammad Dawat is significant as the last Atjehnese pretender Sultan of the colonial period — the figure whose death in exile on 7 February 1939 closed the line of royal claimants that had persisted since the Dutch conquest of Koeta Radja. His capture in 1907 and his thirty-two-year exile place him at the intersection of the late Atjeh-oorlog and the colonial politics of the sultanate, and his death in the same year as the third centenary of the Atjeh martyrs gives his figure an additional resonance in the memorial landscape of late-colonial Atjeh. The entry complements the corpus’s existing entries on the Atjehnese sultanate and its pretenders — including Muhammad Dawot Shah, Teuku Muda Dawot, and Tuanku Muhamat Dawot — and the question of the relationship among these forms remains open in the corpus.

See Also

Source

Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 563. Citing: R. G. Doorman, “De gevangeneming van den ex-pretendent Sultan van Atjeh, Tocangkoe Mohammad Dawat, na 32 jaar ballingschap den 7en Febr. 1939 overleden te Mr.-Cornelis,” De Indische Gids, vol. 61 (1939), p. 308 e.v.

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