Kaje’e Jat’oe (also written Kayee Jatoe in the OCR of The Achehnese) was a gampong near Kuta Raja, the capital of Acheh, which Snouck Hurgronje locates “just about where the hospital at Kuta Raja now stands.” The village is named in Vol. I only in connection with the legend of Burong Srabi or Srabi Tanjong, the most dreaded of all the burongs or female spirits that prey upon pregnant women and women in childbed; it is the gampong whose people were spared by the burong in gratitude for retrieving her body from the water.
The legend, as told by Snouck Hurgronje, recounts that Rabiah (Srabi), the daughter of a religious teacher, was seduced into an intrigue, and that when she had been some time pregnant, her lover induced her to fly with him to the West Coast. “They dropped down the river in a boat, but before they reached the open sea, the man slew his paramour and casting her body into the water, pursued his journey to the West alone. Her body was found near the gampong of Kaje’e Jat’oe (just about where the hospital at Kuta Raja now stands), and was pulled out of the water by the people of that gampong. When they found it was the body of a woman belonging to Tanjong, they brought her thither and she was buried there.” The unhappy woman had meantime been transformed into a burong, which rested not until she had overtaken and slain her murderer.
After her revenge was accomplished, Srabi “seized a man in the gampong of Kayee Jatoe, but on his reminding her that his people had rescued the body of Rabiah or Srabi from the waves and made her burial possible, she let him go, and at the same time swore never to molest a woman of that gampong.” In token of this oath, the women of Kaje’e Jat’oe were spared by the dreaded burong; “all the more violent, however, were her onslaughts on pregnant women and those in childbed in other gampongs.” The women of the other villages of the capital had thus to take precautions — particularly the avoidance of the open air after sunset, and the observance of certain purificatory rules by husbands returning home in the evening — from which the women of Kaje’e Jat’oe were exempt.
The legend of Kaje’e Jat’oe is one of the small popular traditions of the lowland capital that Snouck Hurgronje records for the light they shed on Achehnese folk-religion; the gampong itself, by his time, had been swallowed up by the colonial settlement of Kuta Raja, and its site was occupied by the Dutch hospital. The association of Kaje’e Jat’oe with the cult of Burong Srabi (whose tomb stood in the neighbouring mukim of Pagaraye) made it a recognised landmark in the spiritual geography of the capital, even after its physical identity as a separate gampong had been lost.
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.