Blang Pagon — rendered in the OCR of Vol. I as “Blang Pagoii” — is a gampong (village) of the XXVI Mukims named in The Achehnese in the course of C. Snouck Hurgronje’s description of the formal wedding dialogues exchanged between the orators of two villages at an Achehnese marriage. It is identified in a footnote as “a gampong in the XXVI Mukims.”
The village appears in a specimen ranta — that is, a “rhyming message” or set form of words — chanted by the spokesman of the bride’s side in the dialogue that introduces the demand for the bridegroom. After the orator of the bride’s house has recited the standard prelude — “a pa’ iko with red shoulders, a wagtail flies making the world shake, respectful greetings from grandmother peunganjo” — and laid on the bridegroom’s side the task of producing the bridegroom, the spokesman of the bridegroom’s village replies:
You said: “A pa’ iko with red shoulders”. But it has flown away to Blang Pagon. Teuku, convey our greetings to grandmother peunganjo, Say, Teuku, that there is no bridegroom among us.
The verse is a polite fiction: the bridegroom’s party protests that the bridegroom has flown away to Blang Pagon, and that there is no bridegroom to be had among them. The dialogue is one of the conventional stages of the Achehnese wedding, in which each side speaks through its keetren (orators) in a set form of words that may not be departed from. The naming of Blang Pagon as the supposed refuge of the missing bridegroom is thus a piece of conventional wit: a village of the Sagi of the XXVI Mukims, distant enough from the scene of the wedding to be plausible as a hiding-place, but not so distant as to be unknown.
Blang Pagon’s appearance in Vol. I is incidental to the ethnographic description of Achehnese marriage-customs, but the specimen is valuable because it preserves a village name — and a fragment of village-rhyme — that might otherwise have passed unrecorded. The wedding-customs in which it occurs are, in Snouck’s view, a compound of Mohammedan forms with a deep substratum of adat observance.
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.