NEGOTIATIONS ON MARRIAGE CUSTOMS
6.6. Modes of encroachment and their impact
We must [...] eschew the compartmentalizing tendency of so much of social history that relegates sex and gender to the family, associates class with the workplace and the community, and locates war and constitutional issues exclusively in the domain of the ‘high politics’ of governments and states (Joan Wallach Scott 1988:6).
This chapter has covered the major watersheds in the history of the nineteenth-century Batak world, summarized below. But this concluding section has two other specific objectives. First, it intends to highlight that violence does not come only in the form of military violence, and second, that each phase had a specific impact on families and the formation of marital alliances.
When the Padri armies from Minangkabau in the south swept through the region between the years 1825 and 1830, it was probably the first time the Batak population had faced a foe so powerful and destructive. There is no record of the killings, but allegedly many died; others were captured, carried off, and sold as slaves, leaving families torn apart. After the Padri bands left, the region was probably destabilized; more powerful rajas, who had not seen their villages destroyed and population reduced, preyed on weakened ones. The murder of Singamangaraja X around 1825, and perhaps other religious leaders as well, must have been a heavy blow to the network of religious communities, the bius. The Padri brought the Dutch into the region, who established themselves only in Mandailing and Angkola and unintentionally promoted a process of Islamisation there. Between 1840 and 1870 many rajas converted to Islam, although in Sipirok only after 1860. The desire to maintain kinship ties played a role in this process.81 This Islamization drove a wedge based on difference of religion between the Mandailing and Angkola Batak in the south and the Toba Batak (in what used to be termed in the Dutch sources at the time the independent regions of Little Toba—Silindung and environs—and Great Toba—the Humbang Plateau and the southern shores of Toba) in the north. The Toba Batak, traumatized by the Padri invasions, retreated in isolation and kept their ancestral religion. The gulf between north and south proved to be permanent.
Een pionier van het bestuursgezag in de Bataklanden’, De Sumatra Post, clipping KITLV, Korn OR 435.421) The only other European raised to the status of ompu was Nommensen, who also served his entire professional life in the region from 1861–1917, fifty-six years in total (VEM personalia missionaries). Probably not coincidentally, both men died in their beloved Sumatra.
81 When the missionaries arrived in 1861, the population of Sipirok was still predominantly pagan, but by the end of the decade the most influential rajas had converted to Islam. Schreiber (1876:366) wrote that one raja in Sipirok embraced Islam after a Muslim raja in Angkola threatened to sever the kinship relations if he did not do so. Whether the Sipirok raja was the hulahula or marga boru of the Angkola raja is not clear.
Like the first phase in the encroachment of the Batak world, the second was not the result of intervention by the Dutch colonial state. The agent on the spot was a German missionary society, the Rhenish Mission. Social disruption was the result of the missionaries’ success in converting small numbers of Toba Batak in the valleys of Silindung and Pahae in ‘Little Toba’.
The type of violence deployed was not of a military nature, but came in the form of strong pressure to conform to rules set by the missionaries: abstinence from participation in ‘heathen’
rituals, and initially a prohibition of marriage with marriage payments.82 Again families and village communities were ripped apart, albeit on a more modest scale and in a different way than during the Padri war. The severance of kinship ties formed by marital alliances led to unprecedented demands of settlement of debts and other obligations. Although initiated by the pagan bridetakers and bridegivers, the unbinding of those ties was just as utterly unsettling for them as for the Christians.83
Even though over time the Christian communities were accepted, tensions must have remained, not by the unbinding of ties, but rather by their preservation. Marrying a partner from another faith must have been particularly stressful for women, because upon marriage they entered their husband’s clan and were expected to follow his religion. Nothing is written about this, but the implications are clear. A girl raised by a Christian family married off to a pagan man thus had to convert to the old faith, a religion which she had been taught to abhor. She also must have felt sad when her Christian parents would not participate in any of the rituals held in her new family. For a girl of a pagan family married off to Christian, things stood differently, because her parents did not object to her conversion to Christianity, otherwise they would not have consented to the marriage. Moreover, she would be eased into a Christian lifestyle by her in-laws and the congregation. Nevertheless, she must have felt sad as well, because she and her husband were not allowed to attend any rituals in her family of origin. But it is likely that the affined parents tried to cope as best as they could to keep the relations as good as possible. It must have been even more difficult for married women who did not wish to convert to Christianity when their husband did, or the other way round.
It has been generally acknowledged in the historical literature that the impact of the conversion to world religions is the deepening divide in the Batak world between the Mandailing and Angkola Muslim south and the Toba Batak Christian north.84 In contrast, the later ruptures in Toba Batak society have hardly been given recognition. The tensions due to the severance of family ties between Christian and pagan families in the southern part of the Toba region in the 1860s have faded into oblivion. This also accounts for the subsequent divide between the Christian southern and pagan northern part of the Toba Batak homeland during last four decades of the nineteenth century. These episodes deserve a legitimate place in the nineteenth-century history of the Toba Batak.
The third phase of encroachment on the Batak world was marked again by considerable military violence and brutality, which affected the regions of Humbang and Toba in 1878, 1883, and 1889. The rajas in these regions saw their world fundamentally transformed within a very short time span. Some chose to go along with the times, and quickly pledged allegiance to the
82 Höckner (2000) describes the use of similar methods of the mission working among the Lobedu in Transvaal, South Africa, calling this ‘structural violence’ (strukturelle Gewalt).
83 The term ‘ties that (un)bind’ is borrowed from Tony Day’s lucid article on the importance of family ties in pre-modern Southeast Asia (Day 1996).
84 For an historical overview of the antagonism between these two Batak groups, see Keuning 1953/4.
Dutch. But those rajas who had sided with the Singamangaraja must have harboured hate against the Dutch because of the violent campaigns of the colonial army and the humiliating punitive measures they were subjected to afterwards. They must also have held a grudge against the German missionaries who assisted the Dutch in the conquest. The experience of the rajas and the population in these regions with the forces of colonial imperialism were thus of an entirely different nature than those of the rajas in Silindung and Pahae two decades earlier. The latter, in their encounter with the missionaries, had the choice to convert or not, and could choose the moment for this as they saw fit. These very different collective memories of the rajas’ first encounter with the West cast a long shadow, influencing the discourse on marriage customs in the following decades.85
85 The rajas from Toba proved to be more conservative in the preservation of customary law than their counterparts from Silindung (Chapter 9, section 9.1).