Kapau is a district in the Menangkabau country of west-central Sumatra, mentioned in The Achehnese Vol. I as the place of publication of a lithographed Malay treatise on adat, cited by Snouck Hurgronje as a comparative parallel to Achehnese usages.
The reference occurs in the chapter on domestic ceremonies, where Snouck is describing the prolix stereotyped discourses that accompany important occasions in Achehnese domestic life — the formal orations exchanged, for example, between the envoys of a suitor and the elders of the bride’s house at the ceremony of betrothal. These discourses, he observes, are not peculiar to Acheh; they are also found in other parts of Sumatra and in Java. “A good example of those employed in Menangkabau,” he writes, “may be found in the essay on the adats in use at the appointment of a pangulu ndiko in the district of Kapau, lithographed at Padang in 1890 at the house of R. Edw. van Muien.” The Kapau text is thus one of the small corpus of nineteenth-century lithographed Malay works on Minangkabau adat, drawn upon by Snouck for its close parallel to the Achehnese ceremonial discourses which form his proper subject.
The comparative use to which the Kapau treatise is put is characteristic of Snouck’s method throughout Vol. I. The institutions of Acheh are not treated in isolation but are constantly illustrated by comparison with those of the cognate peoples of the archipelago — the Malays of the peninsula, the Minangkabau of central Sumatra, the Javanese, the Bataks, and the Buginese. The presence in Kapau of the same elaborate formal oratory as in Acheh shows that the Achehnese “speeches” — which, Snouck remarks, “sometimes furnish important historical and ethnographical material, for crystallised forms of this kind generally live longer than the adats on which they are founded” — are an institution common to the older Malay world, and not a local peculiarity of the Achehnese.
Kapau itself is a small district of the Agam division of the Minangkabau highlands, lying a short distance to the north of Padang and close to the more celebrated town of Bukittinggi (Fort de Kock). It was, in the late nineteenth century, an active centre of Malay lithographic publication, in which the adat of the local nagari (village-republics) was reduced to writing for the use of the panghulus and other native officials. The van Muien press, named in Snouck’s citation, was one of several private lithographic establishments that flourished in west Sumatra in the decades before and after 1890, supplying a vernacular literature of adat, religious instruction, and popular poetry to a Minangkabau readership.
The mention of Kapau in Vol. I is otherwise incidental; the district does not reappear in the body of the work, and serves only to point a comparative observation on the wider Malay character of the Achehnese ceremonial discourses.
Additional account from The Achehnese, Vol. I — Kapau
Kapau is a district of the Menangkabau country in west-central Sumatra, mentioned by Snouck Hurgronje in a footnote concerning the stereotyped orations (pantuns and pasisiahs) that accompany the appointment of a pangulu ndiko in that country. The mention is brief, but it places Kapau in the comparative horizon by which the Achehnese adat-speeches are brought into relation with the parallel institutions of the neighbouring Sumatran peoples.
The Lithographed Essay on the Adat of Kapau
In the chapter on Achehnese betrothal and marriage, Snouck observes that the prolix discourses which accompany important domestic occurrences in Acheh are also to be met with in other parts of Sumatra and in Java. “A good example of those employed in Menangkabau,” he continues, “may be found in the essay on the adats in use at the appointment of a pangulu ndiko in the district of Kapau, lithographed at Padang in 1890 at the house of R. Edw. van Muien.” The reference is to a lithographed Malay text, of the kind that was, in the late nineteenth century, produced in considerable numbers by the small printing-houses of west Sumatra, and which constitutes one of the principal documentary sources for the adat of the Menangkabau country.
The Pangulu Ndiko and the Adat-Speech
The pangulu ndiko (also written penghulu nan dituko, “the installed penghulu”) is the Minangkabau hereditary or elected clan-head, whose appointment is the occasion of one of the most elaborate of the adat-ceremonies of the Menangkabau country. The ceremony of installation includes, like the Achehnese marriage, a long series of formal speeches — the pasisiah, or “explanations,” and the kaba, or “stories” — in which the rights and duties of the new pangulu are set forth in conventional language. The lithographed text from Kapau, cited by Snouck, is a record of one such ceremony; it is, in his view, a “good example” of the kind of oration to which the Achehnese discourses may be profitably compared.
The Comparative Method
The mention of Kapau belongs to the comparative method by which Snouck, throughout The Achehnese, brings the institutions of Acheh into relation with those of the neighbouring peoples of the Indian Archipelago. The Achehnese adat-speeches, in his view, are not an isolated phenomenon; they are part of a wider Sumatran and Javanese complex of stereotyped orations, “sometimes furnish[ing] important historical and ethnographical material, for crystallized forms of this kind generally live longer than the adats on which they are founded.” The Kapau text is one of the principal documentary sources by which the comparison may be carried out; its citation by Snouck is a mark of the careful documentation on which his comparative statements rest.
Kapau in the Geography of Minangkabau
Kapau is a small district in the Agam regency of the Menangkabau country, lying to the north of the valley of Bukittinggi (the old Fort de Kock of the Dutch) in the highlands of west-central Sumatra. The district is one of the many small settlements of the Minangkabau heartland, each of which had, in the late nineteenth century, its own adat of pangulu-appointment and its own corpus of ceremonial speeches. The lithographed text cited by Snouck is one of several such texts produced in the Minangkabau country in the 1880s and 1890s; the choice of Kapau as the example reflects the relative accessibility of the Kapau text and the reputation of its publisher, R. Edw. van Muien of Padang.
See Also
- Minangkabau
- Minangkabau territories
- Sumatra
- Padang
- R. Edw. van Muien
- Java
- Menangkabau
- East Indian Archipelago
- Acheh
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.