The orang-Pandan — the Pandan people, identified by the Encyclopaedisch Bureau as the inhabitants of the Petalangan country — were, in the Bureau’s survey of the Outer Possessions, the people who, in the early sixteenth century, collaborated with the Atjehers in the destruction of the kingdom of Gasip. The Bureau’s parenthetical gloss — “(de bewoners der Petalangan)” — fixes the orang-Pandan as the inhabitants of the Petalangan country, an interior stretch of land between the lower Siak River and the Minangkabau highlands, and it presents them as the indigenous allies of the Atjehnese in the campaign that overthrew the kingdom of Gasip.
The alliance with Atjeh
The Bureau records the alliance in a single, dense sentence: “Toen de Atjehers, met behulp van de orang-Pandan (de bewoners der Petalangan) Gasip overweldigd hadden, voerden zij de vorsten gevankelijk mede naar Atjeh en lieten het verwoeste rijk achter ten prooi aan ontbinding” — “When the Atjehers, with the help of the orang-Pandan (the inhabitants of the Petalangan), had overwhelmed Gasip, they led the princes away captive to Atjeh and left the destroyed realm to the prey of dissolution.” The orang-Pandan thus appear in the Bureau’s account as the indispensable local allies of the Atjehnese campaign: without their collaboration, the Atjehnese projection of force into the southern interior of Sumatra — far from their Atjehnese base — could not have been sustained.
The geographical context
The Petalangan country inhabited by the orang-Pandan is, in the Bureau’s framing, an interior stretch of land between the lower Siak River and the Minangkabau highlands. The Bureau’s placement of the orang-Pandan in the Petalangan country — rather than on the coast — signals that the alliance with Atjeh was an alliance between a coastal power and an inland people, with the inland people providing the local knowledge and the manpower that the coastal power needed to project force into the interior.
The aftermath of the destruction
The Bureau does not record the subsequent fate of the orang-Pandan. Its account of the destruction of Gasip ends with the deportation of the Gasip princes to Atjeh and the dissolution of the destroyed realm; the orang-Pandan do not reappear in the Bureau’s narrative. Their collaboration with Atjeh did not, it appears, translate into Atjehnese overlordship over the Petalangan country: the Atjehnese projection of force into the southern interior was, the Bureau’s account suggests, a one-off campaign rather than the basis of a sustained Atjehnese presence south of the Siak River.
Significance
The orang-Pandan are, in the Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s survey, the only named inland people recorded as collaborating with the Atjehnese in the destruction of Gasip. Their collaboration is the empirical basis of the Bureau’s reading of the conquest of Gasip as an inter-ethnic campaign, and it is the only documented instance of an Atjehnese alliance with an inland Sumatran people against a coastal Sumatran polity. The orang-Pandan thus represent, in the Bureau’s framing, the inland dimension of the long Atjehnese overlordship of the East Coast — the dimension that, in the Bureau’s account of the Atjehsche oppermacht in the Gajo- and Alaslanden, would later be institutionalised in the highlands through the Atjehsche viervorsten-systeem.
See Also
- rijk Gasip
- Petalangan
- Acheh
- Siak
- atjehsche-verovering-van-gasip-(begin-16e-eeuw)
- atjehsche-overheersing-der-noordelijke-kuststaatjes
- atjehsche-oppermacht-in-de-gajo-en-alaslanden
- Pagarroejoeng
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- 1509
- 1511
Source
De Buitenbezittingen, Deel II, Afl. 3: Oostkust van Sumatra. Eerste Stuk, bewerkt door het Encyclopaedisch Bureau, Mededeelingen van het Bureau voor de Bestuurszaken der Buitenbezittingen (Weltevreden: Landsdrukkerij, 1918), p. 102. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, shelfmark LS.08781.
Nota omtrent het Rijk van Siak, by H. A. Hijmans van Anrooy, in Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, dl. XXX (1885).