The Maldives (Maldivian Dhivehi Raajje) is an archipelagic sultanate in the Indian Ocean, south-west of the Indian subcontinent. In The Achehnese Vol. I, the Maldives enter Snouck Hurgronje’s account only as the source of one article of Achehnese diet — the dried stockfish called keumamaih — but that article was so indispensable to the Achehnese kitchen that its provenance is recorded more than once.
Keumamaih: The Stockfish of the Maldives
The staple form of Achehnese food, eaten twice a day, is rice cooked in water. With the rice is taken gulé (the Malay sayur), of which there are three kinds in common use. The basis of the gulé is either dried fish (eungkot tin), or karéng (small fish of the kinds bilch or aivo, also dried), or “the stockfish imported from the Maldives (keumamaih),” or sliced plantains or brinjals. This stockfish from the Maldives was imported “in large quantities” and prepared in two different ways: keumamaih cheunichah (cut up into small pieces and mixed with blimbing, chillis, onions, and serai), and keumamaih reundang or teumeh (similar ingredients, but fried in oil rather than eaten raw).
Kanduris, Weddings, and the Comforts of the Sick
At kanduris (religious feasts) and at weddings, funeral feasts, receptions of distinguished guests, and other ceremonious occasions, long strips of stockfish boiled in cocoanut milk — called keumamaih teunaguën — are added to the glutinous rice and other accompaniments. At a child-birth, the strict dietary observed in Acheh (as in Java) forbids vegetables and most fish; “no fish except the eungkot chu’et and the stockfish (keumamaih) from the Maldives,” with dry rice and the like. Thus the same article that graced the wedding tray was also the one protein permitted to the lying-in woman, a striking index of its place in Achehnese life.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Maldives
The Maldives (Dutch: Maldiven) is the chain of coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, south-west of Ceylon and British India, forming in the nineteenth century a Muslim sultanate under varying degrees of British protection. The Maldives appears in Van der Kemp’s monograph only as a peripheral reference, mentioned in connection with E. de Waal’s Onze Indische Financiën — the same work in which De Waal discussed the abandonment of the Dutch Guinea Coast and the cost of the Acheh reservation.
Van der Kemp does not develop any substantive discussion of the Maldives. The reference occurs in his review of the wider financial and colonial controversies of the 1870s that surrounded the Sumatra Treaty of 1871 and the surrender of Dutch West African possessions. De Waal’s Onze Indische Financiën — a multi-volume survey of Netherlands Indian finance and colonial policy — touched on a number of Dutch and British colonial questions of the period; the Maldives, although not a Dutch possession, figured in the broader British Indian sphere that De Waal surveyed.
The mention of the Maldives is thus incidental to Van der Kemp’s main argument, but it serves to mark the breadth of the colonial horizon against which the Acheh question was discussed. The same Dutch ministerial and parliamentary debates that addressed the Acheh reservation, the Guinea Coast, and Sumatran supremacy also touched on scattered island groups across the Indian Ocean. For Van der Kemp’s purposes, the Maldives functions as a token of the comprehensive scope of mid-nineteenth-century colonial controversy rather than as a place of direct action.
See Also
- Acheh
- Java
- Kanduri (general)
- Keunong
- E. de Waal
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- Cape of Guinea
- British India
- Netherlands India
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.