Galuh — the ancient Hindu kingdom of eastern Java — is named in Vol. I of The Achehnese in the course of C. Snouck Hurgronje’s account of the pantangs (taboos) observed by fishermen and seafaring men. The mention is brief, but it is significant for the light which it throws on the survival of pre-Islamic religious notions in the most unlikely corners of the modern Archipelago.
In the chapter on fishing and seafaring taboos, Snouck observes that “such unwritten pantangs have a very widespread range. In Java there are many such which are observed in the chase of wild animals. In the neighbourhood of the ancient Galuh there are places where the Mohammedan confession of faith must not be uttered while fishing, for fear of disturbing the spirits of the ancient heathen kingdom!”
The point of the comparison is that the formula lā ilāha illā ‘llāh — the very shibboleth of Islam — is, in the waters round Galuh, a forbidden utterance; its sound would offend the surviving spirits of the pre-Mohammedan Javanese kingdom, and so spoil the fishing. The survival is the more striking because Galuh — one of the oldest Hindu-Javanese states, traditionally founded in the early centuries of the Christian era and absorbed in the kingdom of Majapahit — had been Muslim country for centuries; yet its spirit-population continued to require the observance of an ancient silence.
Snouck adduces the case of Galuh as part of a wider argument: that the pantangs of fishermen and huntsmen are a survival of pre-Islamic, “heathenish” lore, of which comparable examples are to be found in Hadramaut — where “the chase is the subject of a certain amount of heathenish lore, in which prohibitions of forms of speech play a great part” — and in Acheh itself, where seafaring folk must not call a mountain by its proper name gunong lest waves as high as mountains should overwhelm their vessel, but must use the euphemism tanoh manyang (“high ground”). Among the fishermen of the North Coast of Java whole lists of forbidden words may be collected, and a similar usage prevails, to some extent, among the seafaring folk of Acheh.
Galuh thus appears in Vol. I as a token of the antiquity and obstinacy of the tabu-system — a system which the Mohammedan religion had overlaid but not displaced, and which persisted in the daily life of the fishermen of Java, the huntsmen of Hadramaut, and the seafarers of Acheh alike.
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.