Indrapatra is the locality in the XXVI Mukims sagi of Great Acheh which gave its name to the great mosque (meuseugit raya) founded, by tradition, by Sultan Meukuta Alam (Iskandar Muda, reigned 1607–1636) as the head mosque of that sagi. The site is described by Snouck Hurgronje as lying “almost in the very place where Ladong now stands.”
The foundation of the great mosques of the three sagis is ascribed by Achehnese tradition to the same great sultan. Besides the Meuseugit Raya of the capital — the great mosque par excellence, from which the whole district surrounding the ancient seat of royalty takes its name — there was one for each of the three sagis of Great Acheh: that of Indrapuri, which still existed at the time of Snouck’s writing, for the XXII Mukims; that of Indrapeurua (in the VI Mukims of the XXV) for the XXV Mukims; and that of Indrapatra for the XXVI Mukims. Of the last two, Snouck notes, “scarcely any trace remains.”
The three toponyms — Indrapatra, Indrapuri, Indrapeurua — are clearly related, and testify to a common layer of Hindu (or Hindu-Buddhist) nomenclature anterior to the Mohammedan settlement. The first element Indra- is the name of the Vedic king of the gods, preserved in countless place-names of the Indianised archipelago; the second element varies between -patra, -puri (Sanskrit pura, “city”), and -peurua (perhaps an Achehnese corruption of one of these). The occurrence of these names in the topography of Great Acheh is one of the principal evidences of the Hindu influence on the language and civilisation of the country, of which Snouck remarks that, though there is but little trace of such influence remaining in the popular traditions and institutions of his own day, “it is past all doubt that Hinduism exercised for a considerable time a direct or indirect influence on the language and civilization of Acheh.”
The mosque at Indrapatra, like its two sister foundations, owed its special reputation to two circumstances: its size, which marked it out among the ordinary parish mosques, and its foundation by a sovereign prince. By the Achehnese constitution such mosques were the head mosques of a great number of mukims, and their supervision was originally committed to imeums of superior rank — officials who, in Snouck’s analysis, were intended to stand to the mosque as the teungku stood to the meunasah. In the course of time, however, the office of imeum degenerated; the great mosques themselves fell into disrepair, and at Indrapatra, as at Indrapeurua, scarcely a trace survived into the late nineteenth century.
The disappearance of the Indrapatra mosque has left the historical name attached principally to the tradition of the Meukuta Alam foundations and to the topographical identity of the site with that of modern Ladong. The locality is otherwise unremarked in Vol. I.
Additional account from The Achehnese, Vol. I — Indrapatra
Indrapatra is the site of the great mosque (meuseugit raya) of the XXVI Mukims of Great Acheh, mentioned by Snouck Hurgronje as one of the three sagi-mosques of the Achehnese kingdom. The mosque stood, in Snouck’s account, “almost in the very place where Ladong now stands,” and scarcely any trace of it remained at the time of his writing.
The Three Sagi-Mosques
In the chapter on the Achehnese imeum and the administration of the mosques, Snouck describes the constitution of the great mosques of Great Acheh. Such is the great mosque par excellence, the Meuseugit Raya of the capital, from which the whole district surrounding the ancient seat of royalty takes its name. “Besides this there was one for each of the three sagis of Great Acheh viz. that of Indrapuri, which still exists, for the XXII Mukims, that of Indrapeurua (in the VI Mukims of the XXV) for the XXV, and that of Indrapatra, almost in the very place where Ladong now stands, for the XXVI Mukims. Of the last two scarcely any trace remains.”
The three sagi-mosques — Indrapuri, Indrapeurua, and Indrapatra — were the head mosques of the three great territorial divisions of Great Acheh. Their erection was, by tradition, attributed to a sovereign prince, and they were regarded as the head mosques of a great number of mukims. The same chapter observes that there were also, in Pidie, a number of mosques which enjoyed the reputation of having been erected by Meukuta Alam and which were thus also called meuseugit raya; but the three sagi-mosques of Great Acheh held, in the constitution of the kingdom, a place apart.
The Site near Ladong
The site of Indrapatra, “almost in the very place where Ladong now stands,” places the sagi-mosque of the XXVI on the north-western coast of Great Acheh. Ladong itself is a settlement of the same coast, lying a short distance to the east of the Banda-Acheh roadstead, and the choice of the neighbourhood for the sagi-mosque is consistent with the political and military importance of the coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The name Indrapatra itself — a Sanskrit-derived compound, like the other Indra- names of the Achehnese coast — is a survival of the Hindu period of Achehnese history, and its attachment to a Mohammedan mosque is one of the many instances in which the Moslem Achehnese kingdom perpetuated the toponymy of the pre-Mohammedan past.
The Loss of the Sagi-Mosque
The disappearance of the mosque of Indrapatra, like that of Indrapeurua, is itself a fact of Achehnese history. The sagi-mosques were, by their nature, dependent on the patronage of the sultans and on the cohesion of the sagi; with the decline of the sultanate and the increasing independence of the uleebalangs, the great mosques fell into decay. Only Indrapuri, the sagi-mosque of the XXII, survived in any form into Snouck’s time, and its survival is in itself a mark of the relatively greater cohesion of the XXII Mukims throughout the period of the kingdom’s decline.
The Name Indra- in Achehnese Toponymy
The name Indrapatra is one of a small class of Indra- toponyms on the Achehnese coast. The element Indra- — the name of the Hindu god of the atmosphere and the wielder of the thunderbolt — is here combined with a Sanskrit second element (patra = “wing, blade, leaf, vessel”), and the resulting name is the kind of compound that, in the Hindu period of the Achehnese coast, was attached to royal and religious foundations. The survival of such names, after the Mohammedan conquest, in the toponymy of the mosques and the markets of Great Acheh is one of the clearest evidences of the Hindu substratum of Achehnese civilisation.
See Also
- Indrapuri
- Indrapeurua
- Meuseugit Raya of the capital
- XXVI Mukims
- Ladong
- Sultan Meukuta Alam
- Three Sagis (XXVI, XXV, XXII Mukims)
- Great Acheh
- XXII Mukims
- XXV Mukims
- Meukuta Alam
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.