Referenced in the discussion of Javanese Islamic education: ‘In Banten this principle (of sending students away for Quran study) is pursued so far that boys are even sent for their elementary studies to a pondok outside their own village.’ Also: ‘Haji Mangsur, the great saint of Banten is said to have one day set free a tiger which was caught in the vice of a huge shell-fish.’ Sundanese collections from Banten and South Chirebon are referenced in the description of Si Kabayan stories.
Expanded account from The Achehnese, Vol. I — Banten
Banten (also spelled Bantèn; once known to Europeans as Bantam) is a district on the north-west coast of Java whose Mohammedan customs and popular traditions are repeatedly cited in The Achehnese Vol. I. It is one of the Javanese regions — like Mataram and Chirbon — in which the ta’liq marriage contract was ordained by the rulers of the country in olden times, and it supplies several points of comparison with the institutions of Acheh.
The Javanese tradition that the ta’liq, an adat which extends so far beyond the limits of Java, was an invention of their great Sultan Ageng, is “of course to say the least of it”A picturesque, in Snouck Hurgronje’s telling; but it confirms the antiquity and the political sanction of the institution in the principal kingdoms of Java, including Banten. Banten also figures in the comparative calendar of folk-tales. The story current in Acheh as to the origin of the inhabitants of Nias — in which a princess suffering from a horrible skin-disease is banished to the island with only a dog for companion, and from her incestuous union with her son the whole population of Nias is descended — resembles the Javanese myth of the Kalangs; in Banten the same story is popular in a modified form, but in the absence of Kalangs it is there applied to the Dutch. The primitive Achehnese sugar-mills, worked by buffaloes, are similar to those found in Banten, the highlands of Padang and other places.
In the chapter on the domestic relations of the Achehnese, Banten is cited for its treatment of seduction. Cases occur in Acheh — just as in Banten — where the man is compelled to marry the woman on her complaining to the chief of his overtures to illicit intercourse and producing as evidence (tanda), like Potiphar’s wife, a fragment of a garment worn by him. The parallel indicates that this form of compulsory marriage, sometimes imposed in addition to a money fine and a direction that abortion be caused, was not peculiar to Acheh but was a recognised adat of the western Javanese states as well.
Banten is also the scene of a celebrated anecdote that Snouck Hurgronje tells in illustration of the fidyah (the fee for vicarious performance of neglected prayers and fasts). After every death of a person of substantial means who does not belong to the “upper classes” in Java, the fidyah is paid off by a sort of play: a purse containing the money is passed from hand to hand with the usual formal gift, acceptance and return, until at last it is restored to the heirs. Sometimes, however, the play has a less agreeable ending. “I know of a case in Banten,” writes Snouck Hurgronje, “where an Arab who had been invited to a funeral feast, witnessed for the first time in his life this method of distributing the fidyah. He saw the purse containing the money passed from hand to hand with the usual formal gift, acceptance and return. It came to him in his turn, but after he had duly accepted the money, he absolutely refused to restore it, in spite of all representations based on the adat. The chance of profit proved too strong for him!” The cannon Si Amuk at Banten is also noted as one of the named and quasi-sacred guns of the Mohammedan peoples of the archipelago, alongside Si Penjagio at Batavia and Setomi at Surakarta. Banten (Javanese Bantèn) is a region of Java — once an independent sultanate — which in The Achehnese serves Snouck Hurgronje as a recurring point of comparison with the institutions of Acheh. The old sultanate of Banten, lying at the western extremity of Java opposite Sumatra’s Sunda Strait, was in the seventeenth century a great commercial and political rival of Mataram and of the Dutch East India Company; its sultans played a part in the introduction of the characteristic Mohammedan marriage-customs of Java, and the country long retained usages which Snouck invokes to explain analogous phenomena in Acheh.
See Also
- Java
- Chirbon
- Batavia
- Acheh
- Nias
- Padang
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- Mataram
- Surakarta
- Sultan Ageng
- Ta’liq
- Meuseugit Raya
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.