Madura (Snouck Hurgronje’s spelling Maduré) is the island off the north-east coast of Java whose inhabitants — the Madurese — form one of the principal ethnolinguistic groups of the Netherlands Indian Archipelago. In The Achehnese it appears in connection with the comparative study of Mohammedan family and inheritance law, and as the subject of a critical methodological essay by L. W. C. Van den Berg which Snouck Hurgronje takes pains to refute.
Van den Berg’s Essay on Java and Maduré
In a footnote to his opening chapter on Achehnese adat and Mohammedan law, Snouck Hurgronje observes that the truth of his own position is “entirely overlooked” in Van den Berg’s essay on the “Divergences from the Mohammedan law as to family and inheritance in Java and Maduré” in the Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië for 1892 (p. 454 seq.). Throughout this essay, Van den Berg employs as data for determining the ancient institutions of Java “regulations which appear in various law-books compiled under Hindu influence.” To appreciate the folly of such a method, Snouck Hurgronje replies, one has only to imagine that the present civilisation of the Javanese were by a revolution exchanged for one totally different: the new order would leave behind complete codes of Mohammedan law — in Arabic, in Javanese, or with Javanese notes — far stronger evidence of a theoretical application of Mohammedan law than we now find as regards Hindu law.
Common Earnings of Husband and Wife
Madura appears again in the chapter on family law, where Snouck Hurgronje describes the Achehnese institution of common marital earnings (the pateuë or saguna-sakaya). Such property acquired by common labour is especially to be met with in the highland districts of Acheh, where the wife assists her husband in field work; the same peculiarity exists in Java and Madura and in most Malayan countries, viz. that where the woman is the fellow-worker of her husband, common earnings accumulate; where she is not, they do not. Snouck Hurgronje faults Van den Berg for treating as Javanese “exceptions” certain districts (such as Bantén) in which no such common earnings exist; the only reason the saguna-sakaya is not divided in those districts is that the women there do not assist their husbands in their work. The same variation may be observed within Java itself, as at Madiun, where division into equal parts — rather than the two-to-one proportion more commonly met with — is very customary.
Significance
Madura’s role in The Achehnese is thus that of a comparative reference point. The island is never described for its own sake; it is invoked as a counterpart to Java in matters of adat, and as a test case against which Van den Berg’s generalisations about “Javanese” inheritance custom may be checked. The combined treatment of Java and Madura in a single essay is itself treated by Snouck Hurgronje as a methodological convenience, not as a recognition of any fundamental identity between the two.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Madura
Madura (modern spelling: Madura; older Dutch: Madoera) is the island lying off the north-east coast of Java, separated from the main island by the narrow Madura Strait. Administratively part of the Netherlands Indies and subject to the Residency of Madura, it supplied both agricultural produce and sea-salt to the markets of the Archipelago. In Van der Kemp’s monograph Madura is associated with the salt-trade discussions of the late 1820s, in which the Netherlands Indies government sought to displace foreign — particularly Siamese, Makassarese, and Bimanese — salt from the markets of Sumatra’s east coast and of Singapore.
The salt question was a recurring irritant in Anglo-Dutch relations after the London treaty of 1824. Van der Kemp discusses the dramatic reduction in the export price of Government salt on Java — from 70 to 30 rupees per coyan — which was carried out on the advice of the Council of India member Van de Graaff and was aimed, in part, at preventing Java salt from being driven out of the Outer Possessions by Siamese, Makassarese, and Bimanese competition. The reduction was also understood by the British, particularly by the merchants of Singapore, as a hostile measure directed at their entrepôt trade, since cheap Java salt had previously been distributed through Singapore to the east coast of Sumatra. Governor Fullerton’s correspondence of 1828 devotes considerable attention to the salt question, and to the Dutch mission sent aboard the frigate Bellona to the Sumatran ports of Siak, Kampar, and Jambi to dissuade native traders from purchasing Singapore salt.
Madura, although not named explicitly in Van der Kemp’s text, belonged to the same Javanese salt-producing complex that drove this commercial rivalry. The salt pans of Madura and of the neighbouring East Javanese coast supplied a substantial part of the Government salt whose price reduction forms the subject of the Dutch salt price reduction of 1828 (see Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 235, note (a) on the salt reduction). The Madurese were also widely known as seafarers and traders throughout the eastern Archipelago, and Madurese settlers had established themselves in Batu Bara and other east-coast Sumatran settlements — a fact of some importance for the dense inter-island networks that Van der Kemp’s narrative takes for granted.
In his broader argument Van der Kemp uses the salt question to illustrate the hollowness of Dutch complaints about British “hostility” to Netherlands Indian commerce: the price reduction, he observes, “stood in no other relation to the fierce enmity against Singapore, than that every interested party seeks to bring his wares to market or to draw trade to himself” (Van der Kemp, 1900, p. 235). Madura’s salt, in this respect, was a commodity in a competitive market — not an instrument of any specifically anti-British policy.
See Also
- Java
- Madiun
- Acheh
- L. W. C. van den Berg
- Netherlands India
- Singapore
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Siak
- Batu Bara
- Robert Fullerton
- Van de Graaff
- Dutch Salt Price Reduction
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.