Madras (now Chennai) was a city on the Coromandel coast of southern British India that appears repeatedly in The Achehnese as a node in the network of commercial and religious intercourse between Acheh and the Indian subcontinent. Snouck Hurgronje notes that “Mohammedan Klings and people from Madras and Malabar, but also heathen Klings, Chetties and other Hindus, have carried on trade in Acheh down to the present time”, and stresses that Acheh, like other countries of the Indian Archipelago, was in all probability mohammedanized from Hindostan. The Madras traders were thus among the oldest continuing channels of Moslem and Hindu influence in the sultanate.
The Indian seaside town of Nagore, on the same Coromandel coast, was the seat of the saint whose Achehnese name is Tuan Meurasab (in his own country called Kadir Wall Sahib), and whose anniversary is celebrated in Acheh on the 9th, 10th and 11th days of the month Jumadilawal. The vows made to this saint in Acheh — typically a gold or silver hand, or “the height of the child in gold” (santeut d’oyg) in the case of sick children — were transmitted to his shrine at Nagore through Kling traders journeying to Madras. The English translation by O’Sullivan appends a note that “Penang Mohammedans have a superstition that articles of value vowed to this saint, if thrown into the sea at Penang, will be washed up in a few months’ time close to the shrine at Nagore.”
Madras is also the place of publication of the second edition of Qanoon-e-islam by Ja’far Shurreef (Madras, 1863), translated into English by G. A. Herklots. Snouck Hurgronje treats this work as a key comparative source for understanding how the “Deccan form of Mohammedanism” — that is, the Islam of the coastlands of southern British India — exercised an influence on the creed of the Malay Archipelago superior in force to that of any other agency. The popular religious literature of the Archipelago, including the tales of Amir Hamzah, Mohammad Ibnu’l-Hanafiyyah, Sam’un and Raja Badar, is traced back to works circulating in British India, of which the Madras-published Qanoon-e-islam is the most accessible illustration.
The Klings of Madras and the rest of southern India are described as forming a permanent, if politically harmless, element of the population of Great Acheh and the East Coast; in the highlands of the XXII Mukims there were within living memory entire gampongs, such as Lam Alieng, the population of which consisted of such “hybrid Klings” who had adopted Achehnese language and agriculture. The word ureueng dagang (“stranger”) in Great Acheh is, without further addition, used to indicate a Kling.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Madras
Madras (modern Chennai) was one of the three presidencies of British India, on the Coromandel coast of the subcontinent. In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 it is mentioned only in passing, as the seat of the earlier military and political career of Colonel Bannerman, later Governor of Penang.
Bannerman’s Madras career
Van der Kemp introduces Bannerman as “no inconsiderable personality, a man whose heart was in the right place. As an officer he had behind him in Madras a meritorious military and political career, before he became a Member of Parliament and thereafter, for many years, an excellent member of the direction of the East India Company in London.” On the death of Governor Petrie at Penang, Bannerman stepped in as governor and “fell, as such, in the middle of the Achehnese questions that were unfamiliar to him.” The Madras background thus forms part of Van der Kemp’s rehabilitation of Bannerman against the aspersions cast upon him by Raffles’s partisans; the Colonel is shown to have been a man of substance and experience, not the dullard of Rafflesian polemic.
Madras otherwise plays no direct part in the events of the Treaty of Pedir (1819), the Raffles-Coombs commission having been dispatched from Calcutta — the capital of the Bengal presidency — and not from Madras.
See Also
- Tuan Meurasab
- India
- Pulau Pinang
- G.A. Herklots
- Jaffur Shurreef
- Klings
- XXII Mukims
- Colonel John Alexander Bannerman
- Penang
- Calcutta
- Bengal
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
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.
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.