Access to land and labour
3.7. The crucial factor: the agency of the daughter
At this point I would like to return to my main question: the relationship between women as property, women and property, and the agency of women in the realisation of marriage in pre- and early colonial Toba Batak society. Like Batara Guru and his daughters in the myth of origin and the creation of the earth, fathers and daughters had a potentially tense relationship. The father depended on his daughter’s cooperation in an arranged marriage that best served his interests. In this chapter, I have shown that during the pre- and early colonial period these
104 Sherman (1987:873) reports that a pauseang is not transferred permanently. He found that bridegivers took back a pauseang field if the marital alliance was not repeated.
105 For the traditional position of the widow without sons, see Chapter 5, section 5.7. For changes in her position, see Chapter 8, section 8.7.
106 Nasoetion (1943:65) claimed that Batak women received even more than their brothers, but I doubt whether this was true: the women I interviewed had a different opinion on this.
107 Neither the missionary reports nor the Batak authors of Ruhut and Patik provide information on this. Vergouwen, the most authoritative source on customary law, pays more attention to the norm than the general practice. This is not surprising; Vergouwen’s work was intended to serve as a guideline for judges on the adjudication of cases brought to court by daughters and sisters who felt they had not been given what was due to them.
108 See Chapter 14, page 374 on changes in the practice of bestowing the gift.
109 Vergouwen ([1933] 1964:215) wrote: ‘Sometimes the parboru who has to bow to circumstances shows his resentment by withholding his boru jewellery and pauseang’.
interests could cover practically everything desirable: access to land, labour, a coveted political alliance, and the discharge of debts. As such, a daughter’s complicity in an arranged marriage served the interests of the political elite of powerful rajas as well as the interests of the common man, who was always exposed to the risk of indebtedness and in need of the means to pay the brideprice for the wives of his sons.
Therefore, a father had good reasons to ensure that his daughter would be willing to accept the marriage he wished to arrange for her, and he would do his best to reward her for her compliance by ensuring the support for her family through a generous bridegift—in the form of land, if it was within his means. On the other hand, if he disregarded her determined refusal, he took a considerable risk. She could sabotage the marriage by acting in a way that made her husband impotent, thereby forcing the families to accept a divorce. Or, much worse, she could commit suicide, not only causing grief to the family but also depriving him of the marital alliance he had wanted to establish and forcing him to return the brideprice given for her.
In the case of a father giving his daughter the freedom to look for a husband by taking part in traditional courting meetings in the village, everything would be fine as long as her lover’s family followed the proper procedures for proposing marriage and the daughter did not deprive her father of the opportunity to set the terms for the negotiations by walking over to her lover’s house. Her father might hold it against her that she had forced a marital alliance on him that he did not like, perhaps because the brideprice received was lower than he could have received otherwise, or for some other reason. Because his gifts to her were to some extent commensurate with the amount of the brideprice received, he could justify denying his daughter and her husband the gifts she otherwise might have received, and treating her with contempt.
On the other hand, the abduction of his daughter could be advantageous for a father from a material point of view, as this not only left him with the authority to set the terms of the marriage negotiations, but also entitled him to demand the payment of a fine, since the abductor and his family had deprived him of his right to marry off his daughter. Abduction did not rule out the possibility that she had cooperated with her lover. But if she had been seized against her will, she depended entirely on her father’s compassion if she wished to return home. The abductor had no reason to fear repercussions if he had acted with the consent of his father or other kinsman serving as his paranak and the rajas of his village. Even if he acted without their consent, he would probably get away with it, because sons were allowed more freedom to choose their spouse than daughters.
RMV, no. A14-1-57. Photograph by E. Modigliani 19. Married couple of a wealthy family (1890)
RMV, no. A14-1-56 02. Photograph by E. Modigliani 20. Nai Muara, a Toba Batak woman (1890)
19.This couple was of high status, probably a young raja and his wife, who dressed up to be photographed by Modigliani. Niessen (1993:85) explains the indications of high status as follows.
The man has fastened his golden earrings (duriduri) to his head cloth, a silken parang rusak from Aceh which is trimmed with beadwork. He appears to wear a similar cloth around his waist.
His striped hip cloth (abit) is probably the Toba Batak woven cloth called ragi harangan. Around his neck, he wears two strings of large beads (imported glass?), ivory or bone bangles around his upper arms, and metal bracelets around his wrists. Like her husband, the wife appears to wear the wide blue Toba Batak woven cloth called sibolang as a hip cloth, while both have their decorated shoulder cloth, another product of Toba Batak weavers, on their lap. The woman wears one earring and is considerably less embellished than her husband. Her uncovered torso indicates that she has already born a child.
20. The picture of the still-young woman to the left is one of Modigliani’s most famous and most copied photographs. Nai is not a personal name, but indicates that she was married, while Muara probably refers to her village of origin, Muara on the Toba Plateau. Like the woman above, she must have born at least one child, because she does not cover her breasts. Toba Batak women used to go bare-breasted after the birth of her first child, which was called the ‘opener of the upper garment (baju)’. Note also the pock marks on Nai Muara’s cheek. The bubonic plague was a regular visitor in the Batak country in the nineteenth century.