Rawa is a province — perhaps the Rawas country of interior Sumatra — from which settlers or strangers of mixed descent came to the West Coast of Acheh, giving rise to the contemptuous Achehnese nickname aneu’ Rawa (“people from the province of Rawa”) applied to the people of mixed descent on the West Coast. In The Achehnese Vol. I, Snouck Hurgronje invokes Rawa in connection with the nicknames by which the Achehnese distinguished the various foreign elements of their population.
The Aneu’ Rawa
The author explains that another contemptuous appellation of the West Coast people, alongside the Malay and Kling ele and the ancu’ jamee (“descendants of strangers or guests”), is aneu’ Rawa — “people from the province of Rawa” — to which latter nickname the epithet “tailed” (meuikòt) is also added. The “tailed” or “tail-less” strangers, so the Achehnese imagination ran, contributed their quota to the composition of the Achehnese race, just as the multitude of Klings in Great Acheh and on the East Coast brought more half-caste progeny into the world than now commands recognition as such.
The West-Coast Populations
The aneu’ Rawa thus belong to that complex of mixed populations — Kling, Arab, Chinese, and now Rawa — which settled along the West Coast of Acheh and which were regarded by the Achehnese of the interior as strangers and as less than pure Achehnese. The very use of the epithet “tailed” — a stock device of popular derision in the Indian Archipelago — marks the contempt in which these mixed populations were held by the Achehnese of the metropolitan district. The Rawa element, though less prominent than the Kling or the Chinese, was nonetheless sufficiently marked to give its name to a whole class of mixed-descent West-Coasters.
Rawa and the Achehnese Race
The mention of Rawa is one of several notices in The Achehnese of the way in which the Achehnese race has been formed by the successive influx of foreign elements. The Klings, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Menangkabau, the Europeans, and the people of Rawa have each contributed to the composition of the population of Acheh; and the epithet aneu’ Rawa preserves the memory of one such contribution, in the contemptuous form in which it survives in the speech of the Achehnese of the interior.
Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Rawa
Rawa (sometimes Rawas) is a region of central Sumatra lying inland from the eastern coastal plain, in the upper watershed of the Batang Hari and its tributaries. It is the home of the Rawa people — known in Malay as orang Rawa or anak Rawa, and in Achehnese as aneuʾ Rawa — a Malayic-speaking group related to, but distinct from, the neighbouring Minangkabau. In P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 the term appears in the Achehnese form aneuʾ Rawa, used as an ethnic epithet — a label applied to outsiders or strangers of a particular Sumatran provenance, in much the same way that other Achehnese expressions singled out the aneuʾ Jawa (people of Java), the aneuʾ Kling (Coromandel Indians), or the aneuʾ Pidië (men of Pedir).
Place in Van der Kemp’s article
Van der Kemp’s narrative of the Acheh treaty of 1819 and of the diplomacy surrounding it makes only incidental reference to the peoples of the Sumatran interior; his interest lies chiefly in the political relations of Acheh with the European powers and with the coastal polities of Sumatra’s east coast — Deli, Langkat, Siak, Kampar, Jambi and the rest. The mention of the aneuʾ Rawa belongs, rather, to the broader ethnographic register in which Achehnese sources — and the Malay letters preserved in the archives of Penang and Calcutta — habitually described the human landscape of northern Sumatra. It is a reminder that the world in which Raffles and Coombs negotiated in 1819 was peopled not only by Achehnese, Malays, Arabs, and Europeans, but also by interior Sumatran groups whose movements and alliances affected the politics of the coast.
The Rawa country
Geographically, the Rawa country occupies the rugged interior south-east of Tapanoeli and west of the modern province of Jambi. It lay athwart the old overland routes by which gold, camphor, and forest products were carried down to the east-coast ports, and through which, in turn, Islam and Minangkabau cultural influences penetrated the highlands. Although never a single political unit, the Rawa districts maintained their own chiefs and adat, and their people were sufficiently numerous and mobile to be remarked upon by observers as far apart as the Achehnese capital and the British settlements at Penang.
Significance for the Acheh narrative
For Van der Kemp’s purpose, the epithet aneuʾ Rawa is valuable chiefly as a marker of the linguistic and ethnographic precision of Achehnese usage. The Achehnese language, like other Malayic tongues, formed ethnic designations with the prefix aneuʾ (cognate with Malay anak, “child”), and these were used both descriptively and, at times, pejoratively — to identify a man’s origin and, with it, the stereotyped characteristics attached to that origin. The Rawa appear in this vocabulary alongside the other peoples of the Sumatran interior and the wider Malay world; their mention, however fleeting, helps to map the human geography against which the events of 1819 unfolded, and underscores the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic character of Achehnese society even in its apparent isolation at the northern tip of Sumatra.
See Also
- West Coast (of Acheh)
- Acheh
- Malabar
- Menangkabau
- Great Acheh
- Sumatra
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Tapanoeli
- Jambi
- Siak
- Pedir
- Stamford Raffles
- John Coombs
- Acheh treaty of 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.