Sukadana (Dutch spelling Soekadana) was a Malay-Muslim sultanate on the west coast of Borneo, centred on the town of Sukadana in what is now the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan. Successor to the older polity of Tanjungpura, Sukadana was one of several coastal sultanates — alongside Pontianak, Mempawah and Sambas — that ringed the Kapuas delta and formed the principal interface between Borneo’s interior and the wider maritime world of the Malay archipelago. Although it does not figure prominently in the diplomatic correspondence gathered by P. H. van der Kemp, it appears as the terminus of a remarkable individual career that links Borneo to the politics of Sumatra’s east coast.
The figure in question is Raja Akil (Syed Akil), the crown-pretender of Siak whose tangled career Van der Kemp traces in a footnote. After years of manoeuvring in Siak — involving the Acheh court, the Deli region, the British at Penang and the Dutch at Batavia — Raja Akil “werd in 1828 vorst van Soekadana op Borneo.” Van der Kemp refers the reader to Veth’s Borneo’s Westerafdeling, dl. II, pp. 150 ff., for an attractive biographical sketch, and to the note on p. 162 of Netscher’s Djohor en Siak for further detail. The Sukadana principate was, in effect, the consolation prize for a man whose ambitions in Siak and Deli had been frustrated by the combined pressure of Dutch and British policy in the Strait of Malacca.
The fact that Raja Akil could move from the Siak succession to a sultanate on Borneo illustrates the permeability of political boundaries in the early nineteenth-century archipelago. The same Malay-Muslim commercial network that linked Siak to Penang and Singapore also linked Sumatra’s east coast to the west coast of Borneo. From the Dutch perspective, Raja Akil’s installation at Sukadana in 1828 — four years after the treaty of 1824 had sorted out the broad division of the archipelago into British and Dutch spheres — was a reminder that local actors continued to pursue their own strategies within and across the new colonial lines. From the British perspective, Raja Akil had been a useful irritant in the Siak-Deli corridor, and his transfer to Borneo removed one source of friction in the Strait.
Sukadana itself was a small polity, never matching Pontianak in commercial significance, and it gradually declined under Dutch pressure over the course of the nineteenth century. Van der Kemp’s single mention is enough, however, to remind us that the long paper war over Acheh and the east coast of Sumatra was not fought out only in Sumatra or the Strait of Malacca: its human instruments and beneficiaries moved freely across the whole archipelago, from Siak to Borneo and back.
See Also
Source
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.