1. Legal subjectivity in colonial Minangkabau

When Soetan Mohamad Salim of Kota Gadang died on 5 November 1934 at the age of 83 after a long illness, a lengthy obituary was dedicated to him in the West Sumatran periodical Berita Kota Gedang (LU, Berita Kota Gedang, November 1934). One aspect of his life that was highlighted was his position as hoofddjaksa (chief “native” prosecutor) at the landraad (“native” court of first instance) in Tandjoeng PinangFootnote ¹ in the province of Riouw. He had transferred there as a public official in the Binnenlandsch Bestuur (colonial bureaucracy in charge of “native” affairs) in 1889 after working as djaksa at landraden in Solok and Padang Pandjang (KB, De Indische Courant, 13 November 1934). Although Soetan Mohamad Salim had moved away from his native Kota Gadang 45 years previously, he was still seen as a son of his West Sumatran hometown as he prominently maintained an association with it through his writings on adat (Etek, Mursjid and Afan, Reference Etek, Mursjid and Arfan2017, pp. 57–59). Pride in him was unmeasurable in Kota Gadang as the obituary shows, and also evidenced by the usage of the term boeja (father) to refer to him among people in Minangkabau (KB, Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indie, 13 November 1934). Such pride was consciously engendered by local elites from Kota Gadang for whom Soetan Salim’s rise through the ranks of the colonial judiciary represented a noble achievement: he was presented as a pioneer and an example for all people of Kota Gadang (LU, Berita Kota Gedang, November 1934).

These discourses were proliferated in the long shadow of Dutch empire-building in the archipelago. After full-scale repression of civil society and its accompanying cultuurstelsel (cultivation system) failed to reap the hoped-for dividends for the colonial government, the early twentieth century saw the introduction of major reforms that aimed at liberalising commerce and maintaining traditional adat (custom) while embedding it in Dutch legal concepts. The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, as a result, underwent rapid modernist transformations initiated by colonial reforms but adopted and vernacularisd by local elites. New nationalist discourses went hand in hand with a renewed consciousness of regional identities and calls for broader educational opportunities. Building on this, I argue that new approaches to law played a foundational role among Minangkabau elites in reconceptualising local senses of self as legal subjectivities and in disseminating these as pedagogical tools to a wider public. Dutch legal concepts offered a novel way of reforming adat while maintaining it as the very basis of modernisation.

Mass media and publishing houses were instrumental in proliferating legal discourses that could create regional identities while tying such notions of belonging to European epistemic forms.Footnote ² They allowed Minangkabau notables to be both sons of the region and admirable colonial officials. This article investigates the formation of such novel Minangkabau legal subjectivities. By subjectivity, I refer to the conscious production of a certain kind of being that is contingent on the historical possibilities of power. In my case, such a reading of subjectivity is fundamentally shaped by the contingencies of legal discourse (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008).

The proliferation of legal discourse intensified in the early twentieth century as Dutch colonial ethnographers extensively researched archipelagic communities and framed these within legal grids of intelligibility to make sense of them (Burns, Reference Burns2004; von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann2011). Legal methods, such as codification, precedent, and the distillation of internally coherent rules, led to a rigidification of local custom. While Dutch ethnographers assembled rich collections of customary practices, they also rearranged them to slowly transform fragmented, polycentric adat orders into rules-based orders, circumscribed by the lens of legal methods and concepts. Minangkabau adat had traditionally been a patchwork of proverbs, village-specific discourses and practices, and dispute settlement that involved large extended families. Its elusive nature helped sustain a matrilineal dispensation of property (poesaka) while seamlessly integrating seemingly contradictory Islamic discourses (Hadler, Reference Hadler2008). Dutch ethnographers and colonial courts used legal methods of interpretation to excise the influence of Islam, represent Minangkabau as a coherent whole, and distil clearly applicable customary “rules.” This rearrangement of West Sumatran lifeworlds allowed the colonial government to create a secure legal base for property ownership, the liberalisation of the economy, and the extraction of taxes (Young, Reference Young1994).

Minangkabau elites embedded in the education and institutions of colonialism often adopted such legalised discourses. Increased publishing activities allowed them to engender and disseminate new types of beings that were fundamentally shaped by law. The example of Soetan Salim highlights that local social events or personal achievements were consciously enmeshed in legal registers. Through the publication of books and newspapers, novel types of subjectivities that placed adat socialities within a legal structure could be gradually disseminated. Whereas Dutch legal writers might not necessarily have reached many segments of Minangkabau, the publishing activities of local literati ensured a more granular proliferation of legalised adat subjectivities. In other words, many Minangkabau elites engaged in a vernacularisation of law while also normalising the presence of legal discourse in everyday life. The goals of such vernacularisations were twofold. On the one hand, local elites sought to represent themselves as mediators between the nagari (Minangkabau villages) and the colonial government. The placement of Minangkabau in legal discourses helped local elites gain a share in the new types of political power proliferating under colonialism. Soetan Mohamad Salim, for instance, regularly mediated in disputes between colonial governmental institutions and local social organisations. As a member of the landraad in Medan, he mediated between the Deli provincial government and the local branch of Mohamadijah (KB, Het Nieuws van den Dag voor Nederlandsch-Indie, 13 November 1934), a reformist social and religious organisation. On the other hand, legal discourses protected adat against attempts by the colonial government of excessive meddling. Embedding it in colonial methods and concepts would help protect adat against an ever-encroaching colonial state that was uninterested in listening to other discourses that were unintelligible to them. In any case, local elites saw themselves as leaders who could guide Minangkabau into the modern world and thus attain political power (Adam, Reference Adam1995, p. 128).

This article investigates the different types of legal subjectivities produced by local elites in books, court manuals, and newspapers in Minangkabau. I argue that legal subjectivities were consciously created to embed Minangkabau everyday life in the discursive parameters of law, first, by fashioning new senses of self (reflexive aspect) and, second, by communicating these to the wider public (projective aspect). Local adat proverbs were repurposed to serve legal ends, arguments about colonial policy were made by reference to legal codes, everyday events were interpreted as legal events, and the work of local Minangkabau on the landraden was praised. All these activities refashioned senses of self that were contained within the enunciative possibilities of law and encouraged the wider Minangkabau public to equally adopt such novel conceptions of self. This article aims to narrate this gradual framing of adat within the parameters of law by Minangkabau elites and to engage with the types of legal subjectivities thus engendered.

2. Legal subjectivity as a colonial discourse

Legal subjectivity is a contested concept and has been ascribed varied and unstable meanings. It has, for instance, been used to designate the status as a legal subject with rights and responsibilities. However, such positivist conceptualisations do not account for the many ways in which people relate to law and reflect upon their positionalities within the law (for a critique of positivist legal subjectivity, see Broekman Reference Broekman and Teubner1986; Guibentif Reference Guibentif and Přibáň2020). As such, legal subjectivity enters the domain of dispersed power relations within society (Foucault, Reference Foucault1977). While it has been argued that accounts of legal subjectivity are an “individualistic fallacy,” such critiques foreground apolitical, psychological processes (Ewick and Silbey, Reference Ewick, Silbey and Přibáň2020, p. 168). They understate the extent to which legal subjectivity-making is, first, the result of dispersed power relations and, second, created in relation to others. Legal subjectivity, therefore, becomes a societal process that comprises elements of self-reflection as well, communicating these thoughts about self-reflection (Guibentif, Reference Guibentif and Přibáň2020, p. 181). However, these processes of self-reflection and communication are deeply embedded in questions of power and agency, particularly in a colonial context.

Haldar has argued that Occidental law (as he refers to it) colonised peoples’ subjectivity and the social sphere (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, pp. 2–3). His focus is on the “universalizing propensity of law” that turns it into a “global form of existence” (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 3). As such, he proposes that law should be seen as a “foundational discourse” (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 4) that plays a primary role in colonising the subject; he claims that even where subjects of the law resist, the resistance they resort to will always be confined within the “tight limits of legal discourse” (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 4) where a sense of “self” is always measured against the law, failing to “rise above this legal existence” (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 5). However, Haldar affords a slightly generous authority and universality to law that it does not necessarily have. His references to the “universalizing propensity of law” (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 3) do not make it clear to what extent the colonisation of the subject was, perhaps, an overly self-assured account of Orientalist scholarship and what role colonised subjects played in creating and contesting it in the first place.

The idea of legal subjectivity implies a degree of agency on the part of the actors engaging with law but also the circumscription of this agency by the contingencies of discourse. The engagement of colonised peoples with the law and colonial law’s impact on local subjectivities has been the subject of much attention over the last two decades. Hussin has investigated the roles of Islamic elites in shaping new conceptions of colonial law. In her analysis of colonial Malaya, she demonstrates how these elites utilised the toolbox of colonial law to transform the rules governing Muslim subjects and construct pluralist legal regimes. In doing so, they generated new opportunities for participation and discourse on who may engage in colonial politics. Local jurisdictional politics, she argues, played an integral role in state formation (Hussin, Reference Hussin2016). Yahaya has emphasised the “legal consciousness” among litigious Southeast Asian Arabs. She has argued that Arab elites and traders were engaged in litigation and jurisdictional jockeying to leverage Dutch colonial laws to their advantage and even initiate more legislation (Yahaya, Reference Yahaya2020). Moreover, Sharafi has emphasised the Parsis’ self-fashioning as legal subjects in colonial South Asia by enmeshing themselves in the colonial legal system as litigants, lawyers, or politicians. Sharafi argues that Parsis contributed significantly to the formation of personal law in colonial India as they rethought colonial legal categories and filled them with meaning derived from their everyday lives (Sharafi, Reference Sharafi2014). Such emphasis on conscious enmeshment in the law will be instructive to my argument as well. Hussin, Yahaya, and Sharafi have painted a vivid picture of the complex modes of legal subjectivity-making. They have all shown that law played a fundamental role in creating new senses of “self” in encounters with the colonial state. Although colonial law was designed to subjugate populations and extract wealth, local activists were often able to carve out spaces for themselves within the law and use it as a conduit for engagement with colonial politics. What can also be gleaned from these authors’ works is that colonial law played a prominent role in the formation of group identity, although the diverse interests and capacities of each group and elites within them determined how exactly law was engaged with.

Mukhopadhyay has investigated how Bengali elites used the printing press and mass media to forge legal subjectivities through writing, reflecting Guibentif’s argument about the externalising aspects of legal subjectivity (Mukhopadhyay, Reference Mukhopadhyay2006) explicitly. Mukhopadhyay focuses her analysis on a nascent social group that emerged in the late eighteenth century, the so-called bhadralok, whom she defines as a “variegated, literate, and self-reflective social group, exposed to Western intellectual thought, [that] struggled to forge a new understanding of a thinking legal subject for itself” (Mukhopadhyay, Reference Mukhopadhyay2006, p. 1). Through writing and publishing, the bhadralok engaged with the new colonial types of governance around which they sought to fashion new identities. Through engagement with colonial types of legality and governance, the bhadralok aimed to constitute themselves as a specific class that exhibited common behavioural codes and thereby presented themselves as “‘good’ legal subjects” (Mukhopadhyay, Reference Mukhopadhyay2006, p. 1). These self-identified elites thereby seized and refashioned (particularly) principles of criminal law to advocate law and order and remake themselves around these ideas.

The work by Hussin, Yahaya, Sharafi, Mukhopadhyay, and Guibentif is foundational to understanding Minangkabau elites’ engagement with the law. The Minangkabau intelligentsia used novel legal discourses to fashion a sense of “self” around the law and employed its language to reflect upon themselves and their societal relations. As such, engagement with the law allowed Minangkabau elites to position themselves as mediators between the colonial state, to which they often had good relationships, and the nagari. However, my article introduces two important, interrelated dimensions to previous discussions. First, the role of vernacular media, publishing, and dissemination of legal discourses to wider audiences have been largely absent as court cases, private communications, legislation, colonial records, and colonial newspapers have so far been foregrounded in legal subjectivity-making. Second, in contrast to the Parsis, the bhadralok, Southeast Asian Arabs, or Malay Islamic elites, the Minangkabau intelligentsia did not simply deploy legal discourses to constitute itself as a unitary social group but proliferated these discourses to encourage others to conform to these new conceptions of a “legal self.” I argue in this article, in line with Guibentif’s argument about subjectivity as a projective act, that vernacular media and publications designed for practical legal purposes (such as court manuals, guidebooks, model forms) were of considerable importance as a pedagogical tool of legal subjectivity formation, adding, thus, an additional dimension to the repertoire of influence local elites wielded.

3. Social transformations and the press in the early twentieth century

The proliferation of publishing activities in West Sumatra played a crucial role in shaping new subjectivities. It coincided with the height of the long ascent of Dutch colonial legal thinking in the region where colonial courts and Dutch ethnographers continually enveloped local custom into a web of legal intelligibility.

Adat (Minangkabau custom) had long been an object of Dutch meddling. Traditionally, a fluid and indeterminate matriarchal social order for the people of West Sumatra, adat had been intertwined for centuries with Islamic law, contributing to its open-ended deliberations in inter-family disputes (Abdullah, Reference Abdullah1966). However, after the Dutch conquest of West Sumatra in 1837, colonial administrators, jurists, and ethnographers continuously sought to remake adat to bring it in line with Dutch legal thinking and practice. Such efforts intensified in the late nineteenth century when Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje wrote about adat “that has legal consequences” (Ter Haar, Reference Ter Haar, Hoebel and Schiller1979, p. 5) as separate from Islamic law to bolster support for the Dutch government from village authorities. As a consequence, adat gradually became more amenable to reinterpretations by Dutch legal scholars and courts.

From the early twentieth century onwards, the Leiden School under the helm of Cornelis van Vollenhoven, and later Barend ter Haar, advocated the maintenance of adat while slowly bringing it into legal shape through court jurisprudence and a written distillation of rules that just stopped short of codification. Moreover, courts had become ever more prominent in everyday life through an intensification of state-sponsored justice. Overall, such legalisation was to lead to a reorganisation of the economy as property was to be divided up among legally determined owners (individual or communal) to spur local trade and petty commodity production upon which taxation could be extracted. While van Vollenhoven never endorsed the exploitation of rural classes or the upward transfer of wealth (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann2011, pp. 180–181), Leiden practices of slow legalisation carried colonial administrative practices that aimed at maximising tax burdens on indigenous agriculture. Law, thus, did not exist in a vacuum but in a material context in which a fiscal state based on corporate property-holding and direct taxation was to be built (Manse, Reference Manse2022).

These processes of “jural colonisation” occurred at a time of social, economic, and cultural turmoil in West Sumatra. A variety of social movements and rebellions were organised to express a general frustration with Dutch domination and the breakdown of a value system that was seen as being compromised by colonialism. After the imposition of a head tax in 1908, a sequence of rural uprisings attached itself to traditional elites (Young, Reference Young1994) who capitalised on both frustration with colonial economic policy and the slow collapse of traditional Minangkabau social organisation. Minangkabau was deeply polarised through a confrontation with European modernity (doenia madjoe), from which some argued Minangkabau should take inspiration and model itself after (Abdullah, Reference Abdullah and Holt1972). At the same time, Islamic modernism, which sought the abolishment of vernacularised and localised forms of Islam, was reinvigorated in the early twentieth century. Such discourses were engendered by the formation of new intellectual and social reformist elites in Minangkabau, referred to as the kaum muda, which was split into secular and religious reformist factions. The former was a loose group of adat authorities who held conservative views of adat but also advocated for couching adat within educational and material progress (kemadjoean) (Adam, Reference Adam1995, p. 137). Additionally, the rapid penetration of a cash economy into the interior of Minangkabau spurred by liberal colonial efforts at economic reorganisation (Abdullah, Reference Abdullah and Holt1972, pp. 210–211) led to the growing influence of a modernising education system and new professional ambitions (Graves, Reference Graves1981), as many Dutch-educated Minangkabau aimed to become part of the civil service, teachers, or entrepreneurs (Abdullah, Reference Abdullah2018). The emergence of a new intellectual class was followed by intense publishing activity as various newspapers were established to promote a growing sense of nationalism (Abdullah, Reference Abdullah and Holt1972, p. 220; Adam, Reference Adam1995) while also relying on adat as the basis of broader social change and democracy (Abdullah, Reference Abdullah and Holt1972, p. 222). It is these two groups (the secular kaum muda and an emerging new class of professionals) that will be most pertinent to my argument, as their members were prominent editors, writers, and intellectuals arguing for adat-based social reform and were thus closely aligned with Dutch colonialism, its institutions, and law.

Within this period of social turmoil, many Minangkabau elites sought to reposition themselves within a new social order. Supported by the colonial administration against Islamic reformers, they aimed to reinforce their political authority by consciously embedding themselves and the Minangkabau social world in a secular language of law that excised the influence of Islam and allowed them to position themselves as indispensable interpreters of a legal regime that many ordinary Minangkabau struggled to understand. These local elites and literati were often educated in secular Dutch-language schools and were either panghoeloe (traditional village heads) or members of an emerging intellectual class deeply intertwined with the Dutch colonial bureaucracy (Graves, Reference Graves1981). Many, in fact, worked as court officials in colonial courts (Adam, Reference Adam1995, p. 135). They did not, however, constitute a unified class, as some were members of traditionalist elites hoping to reinforce their positions within the nagari, while others sought the prestige of colonial politics or to become mouthpieces of Sumatran resistance to colonialism. Yet, all of them made extensive use of newly established publishing houses and the press to proliferate legal discourses and position themselves as indispensable political and legal mediators.

The vernacular press in Minangkabau and elsewhere in the archipelago experienced a significant change when a 1906 decree ordained that preventive prepublication censorship would no longer be applied. Instead, it was hoped by the colonial government that indigenous sentiments would be better understood and nationalist fervour would be better controlled and guided by allowing certain outlets for them (Yamamoto, Reference Yamamoto2019, p. 45). Censorship still continued but often under the guise of liberal governance and as a tool to shape public opinion (Yamamoto, Reference Yamamoto2019, p. 2). Since most editors and writers in Minangkabau were closely aligned with the colonial state, publications under their editorship were often allowed to flourish. Due to these relative freedoms and newspapers being headed primarily by Dutch-educated literati, the press was regarded as a primary actor in the negotiation of local forms with a European-inspired modernity. Through the dissemination of Western types of knowledge-making by a “trail-blazing” press, it was argued that the “advancement” of Indonesian society could be achieved (Poeze, Reference Poeze1989, p. 88). Many writers and editors were also engaged with colonial courts as clerks and djaksas and thus were exposed to reformist scholarship by Leiden scholars. Their newspapers and publishing houses became mouthpieces and important purveyors of such new conceptualisations of law and embedded them in Sumatran social reality as a way to vernacularise colonial law while also allowing them to become the foundation of regional modernity. Any examination of law and accompanying subjectivities in Minangkabau must hence be seen in this context of considerable social, economic, and political turmoil within which the parameters of nationalism, regionalism, and different forms of modernity (kemadjoean) were negotiated, especially in vernacular publishing activities.

4. Minangkabau and the naturalisation of law

The respect for Soetan Salim as a member of the colonial judicial apparatus described in the introduction was indicative of discourses around law disseminated by the press in Minangkabau in the 1930s. Admiration of and references to European legal concepts were very common in the colonial Minangkabau local press as everyday life was extensively enmeshed in legal categories by Sumatran literati. In Minangkabau, rather than the reverence for European legal forms and their use as a modality of exclusion identified by Mukhopadhyay in colonial Bengal, local elites made a conscious attempt at pragmatic communitarian identity formation where a sense of self and social relations were measured against the law as a form of being-in-the-world (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 5). They disseminated such transformative discourses using the law as a “global form of existence” (Haldar, Reference Haldar2008, p. 2) through careful cultivation in periodicals from Minangkabau and monographs by adat experts. Personal achievement, success, and admiration, as well as a sense of being-with-one-another were thus linked to colonial categories of law. Community life was enshrined through the application of legal categories, and disputes were reframed as simple matters of law. To this end, professional positions in the colonial legal machinery were promoted, and the law was used to reshape ideas around property, debt, or wrongdoing. Such issues were thus taken out of their previous community-based contexts and reconceived through a seemingly immutable notion of law. In other words, the existence of law was normalised, and its ultimate material-colonial origins and purposes were obscured from view.

The publication and circulation of newspapers were particularly important in disseminating legal discourses. Appointments to local courts were usually honoured by reporting them in columns such as Chabar officieel (official news) in Tjaja-Soematra, a reformist Sumatran daily edited by Datoek Soetan Maharadaja, an adat traditionalist but fervent believer in kemadjoean who enjoyed good relationships with the Dutch colonial administration (Adam, Reference Adam1995, pp. 132–135). As a typical example of this, on 11 November 1920 it was reported that Moeara Aman toean K. Maeros was hired as a debt collector by the raad van justitie (court of appeal) in Padang and Joenoes gelar Soetan Malano was appointed as adjunct-djaksa at the landraad in Sawah Loento (LU, Tjaja-Soematra, 11 November 1920). Even court members’ retirements were widely publicised; for instance, a note in Berita Kota Gedang shows when it dutifully reported on the retirement of Rahman Datoek, the hoofddjaksa at the landraad in Padang (LU, Berita Kota Gedang, August 1934). Incidentally, the short article on Rahman Datoek was co-authored by Soetan Salim. Other references to well-known local and Dutch persons who acted as members of the courts also appeared regularly, usually as matter-of-fact statements (LU, Tjaja-Soematra, 9 November 1920).

Furthermore, Bintang Hindia, a periodical published by Indonesian expats in the Netherlands (Poeze, Reference Poeze1989, p. 87), often published photos of court staff from across the archipelago to cultivate a sense of admiration for the professional classes. One prominent picture of a member of the court from Minangkabau was of Pemoentjak Maharadja, then hoofddjaksa in Padang. The image portrayed him wearing Dutch imperial clothing, including a medal of honour pinned to his ceremonial coat although he also wore insignia of Minangkabau origin (LU, Bintang Hindia, 15 April 1903). Court staff were thus relatively well known, and local people’s presence as part of the colonial courts was either praised or simply normalised. The abundance of reporting on news from local and regional courts highlights the awareness of matters related to the courts as well as the presence of law among the local population.

The normalisation of legal relations between individuals was especially extensive in the reporting of criminal matters, which played a fundamental role in integrating legal thought in everyday life. Criminal matters had been taken out of adat jurisprudence with the introduction of the Wetboek van Strafrecht voor Inlanders in 1873 and were firmly placed into the grasp of the colonial state to be administered by the landraden (Cribb, Reference Cribb2010, pp. 63–64). In 1915, the colonial state consolidated its hold on criminal matters with the introduction of the Wetboek van Strafrecht voor Nederlands-Indie, which entered into force in 1918 and represented the single deviation from van Vollenhoven’s principles of local jurisdiction towards a unified law while maintaining the dualistic court structure with the landraden in charge of criminal law for the “native” population. In any case, criminal law was firmly institutionalised by placing the colonial state at the centre of its administration. However, local adat-based practices around criminal matters kept thriving and led to what Cribb (Reference Cribb2010, p. 63) refers to as a “vast range of arbitrary local arrangements.”

News reporting from the 1930s reflects the universalist aspirations of the colonial government to place the state and its institutions (especially the landraden) at the centre of criminal matters. To create a sense of normality around the new state-centric arrangements, criminal matters were regularly featured in all periodicals as matter-of-fact issues. In November 1931, in one week, Berita, a Sumatran daily, alone reported seven criminal incident verdicts. These cases were reported in sober, plain, and unsentimental language that made them and the state’s jurisdiction in these matters appear natural and mundane. A few examples:

Other reports on criminal matters from the course of that week were also covered elsewhere in Berita (LU, Berita, 13 November 1931; LU, Berita, 14 November 1931). The mundane, repetitive reporting of criminal matters abstracted from lived realities represents social lives as clearly ordered by legal rules and does not question the possibility that any normative order other than law could possibly regulate daily conduct. As another example, a Tjaja-Soematra reporter wrote in 1920 (LU, Tjaja-Soematra, 2 November 1920) that the colonial government planned to implement harsher punishments for road traffic violations. Without further commenting on these plans or the material-colonial origin of road traffic laws, the reporter thus normalised the presence of traffic rules and the related punitive regime. Indeed, the title of the article Minta hoekoeman lebih keras (“Ask for harsher penalties”) suggests that he even encouraged his readers to request these harsher punishments.

Such representations of the relationship between law and everyday life constructed a remarkable legal discourse. Legal reporting led to a representation of law as a constant, almost mechanical, naturalised repetition of legal processes. Constant repetition of legal processes and the representation of Minangkabau social worlds as something that the law and its state-centric institutional apparatus merely worked upon but were not influenced by created an image of the law as inevitable and natural. Law was thus established as a mechanical process that was located outside the logics of the nagari but which became persuasively self-evident. Such self-evidence and repetition were to lead to self-internalisation of law, or self-judicialisation, among the Minangkabau, which, in turn, was to guide nagari dwellers towards what ter Haar coined self-disciplining “rational communions” (Ter Haar, Reference Ter Haar1930, p. 27) who could participate in capitalist trade and commerce.

One’s worth in society and social deviancy could thus be measured by the confines of the law and its particular conceptions of right and wrong. Readers were hence encouraged to internalise a way of being-in-the-world that rested on their ability to conform to state-backed legal categories that appeared as autonomous and external to the nagari. This new ordering tool thus represented itself as a transcendental entity that merely worked upon inert objects that are positioned, fixed in place, and distributed along legal processes. This was to cultivate new senses of self among the Minangkabau of being emplotted in a structure of law that appeared as the “conceptual” itself and worked upon their world (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell1991) through the machinery of a distant colonial state as opposed to the locale-based negotiations around adat and vernacular Islamic law before.

While authors and editors never explicitly stated who their target audiences were, it is likely that they were not simply other members of the intelligentsia. Rather, articles and opinion pieces normalising the presence of law constituted a broader cultural pedagogy. By the early twentieth century, newspapers constituted an integral part of village life. Even a small town, such as Kota Gadang, where Berita Kota Gedang was published, had printing presses and local newspapers publishing regional news, poems, and advice columns. Indeed, it has been argued that vernacular newspapers had a considerable influence on shaping cultural life in West Sumatra (Darwis, Reference Darwis2010). As a result, news and opinion pieces normalising the presence of law were aimed at a broad readership to institute wider processes of legal subjectivity making.

5. Court manuals, digests, and attempts at codification: Hoekoem Adat

In addition to newspaper reporting, another way of integrating legal discourses and the making of legal subjectivities into everyday life was the writing of court manuals and legal digests that were to be disseminated to court employees and the broader population. These publications were written by elite Minangkabau working for the colonial judiciary and administration. They were built around the ideas of Leiden scholars whose discourses and practices were firmly anchored in the colonial judiciary by the 1920s. While none of the authors ever mentioned van Vollenhoven or ter Haar explicitly by name, their style of systematising and organising reflects their engagement with Leiden-influenced discourses and juridical practice in their position as court clerks, djaksas, and journalists. Elite Minangkabau argued that legal modalities, such as paragraphical systematisation, accessible and perusable restructurings of adat, or the establishment of precedent, could structure malleable Minangkabau social worlds and ensure a definitive, Ur-conception of adat. Whereas adat-based social orders were historically conceived of as malleable relationships that allowed for multiple sources of power and political allegiance, they gradually became more unyielding and were given new signification through new “meta-relations” (Messick, Reference Messick1993, p. 126) in tables of contents, subject indices, footnotes, and cross-references; all of them required careful interpretation and elaboration by trained specialists. As some prominent Leiden scholars who had started teaching at recently established law schools in Batavia (Djalins, Reference Djalins2013), such as ter Haar, espoused clearly systematised collections of adat practicesFootnote ³ and legal precedents as ordering tools (Ter Haar, Reference Ter Haar1930),Footnote ⁴ these were increasingly taken up by the Minangkabau themselves to structure adat and gradually place it within the enunciative possibilities of law: from the early twentieth century onwards, several publications by Minangkabau members of the colonial state apparatus were disseminated in West Sumatra that radically transformed a malleable adat into hoekoem adat (adat law).

Local elites from Minangkabau who were in the service of the colonial administration played a crucial role in embedding adat notions and proverbs in webs of legal meaning-making. Their positionality as culturally hybrid elites gave them the opportunity to use legal discourses around adat for the creation of a new arena for local politics. By situating themselves as local Minangkabau who were embedded in adat but also proficient in colonial interpretive techniques, they could position themselves as authoritative mediators of adat and thus enhance their political credentials, and, by associating with adat but also the language of law and its institutions, they were able to associate with new technologies of statecraft while continuously institutionalising adat at the service of the colonial judiciary. At the same time, their influential positions could be used to initiate a cultural pedagogy in which legalised adat discourses could be disseminated to the broader nagari population through legal guidebooks and accessible summary manuals. These elite Minangkabau could, thus, represent themselves as essential interpreters and mediators of a new ordering tool that, as I mentioned before, appeared as external to and unilaterally worked upon nagari relations. As interpreters of this new transcendental realm of law, local elites positioned themselves as indispensable interlocutors to their own communities.

Writing a manual on court procedures, Pamoentjak, adjunct-djaksa at the landraad in Tandjong Balei, provided an in-depth guide to the steps to be taken by people to engage a court in a dispute (Pamoentjak, Reference Pamoentjak1895). His elaborations ranged from which judge to approach, how to find someone to write a charge on someone else’s behalf in case of illiteracy on part of the complainant, the price for (legal) stamps, and what information needs to be provided to the clerk, to the provision of standard forms to be used for multiple legal purposes, such as a written oath, witness testimony, or the institution of an appeal. The exact steps to initiate proceedings, how to respond to charges, and how to interact with courts are given in accessible summaries with frequent references to the procedural laws of the Dutch East Indies (Inlandsch Reglement and Sumatra Reglement). Additionally, letter templates were to allow litigants easy access to courts. A template for the institution of landraad proceedings, for example, reads as follows:

Such standard forms were to give a definitive form to adat disputes in which extended families, social factors leading to a dispute, and extra-legal forms of restitution were to play no role. The manual, therefore, aimed to initiate a type of cultural pedagogy—it introduced into Minangkabau, in accessible language, the novel idea of conceiving of disputes as externally driven legal disputes, as opposed to disputes mediated within wider families according to loosely defined norms that required many formalities, procedures, and abstract reasoning to be followed, irrespective of the case.

Moreover, Pamoentjak’s manual also localised colonial law to bestow on it a degree of legitimacy. He reinterpreted several Malay proverbs that had formerly contributed to conceptions of social conduct in the fluid and volatile nature of Minangkabau life, arguing that they could equally be used to legitimate new forms of disputing. To this end, he recontextualised them within a web of legal concepts and methods. When it came to the question of where a case should be heard, Pamoentjak stated that this should be done where the defendant (madai aleh) lives and that a judge who did not live in the same area as the accused was not legitimated to hear the case. Pamoentjak lent cultural legitimacy to this procedure by repurposing the Malay proverb “dimana tjendawan toemboeh disana tambilang tiba (lit.: where mushrooms grow, there a tambilang [a tool to dig up vegetables or similar from the ground] gets to work; meaning mushrooms are harvested where they grow)” (Pamoentjak, Reference Pamoentjak1895, p. 2). A proverb that previously served as a metaphor of social belonging was thus transformed into a legitimating device for colonial law.

Law thus served to create a new conception of Minangkabau proverbs that were to be contained within a web of legal formulations. The embedding of the aforementioned proverb, for instance, meant that it was repurposed to serve legal ends in explaining a rule of litigation. The reliance on and repurposing of proverbs sought to lend legitimacy to law but also to embed previous conceptions of the social within a web of legal meaning-making and thereby institute a transformative cultural pedagogy. It is not clear who exactly Pamoentjak’s intended readership was; was it confined to other Minangkabau elites employed in the colonial judiciary, or was it targeted at the wider population as well? While he never stated which segments of society he was trying to reach, it is likely that his manual was meant for wider consumption. Instructions on which courts to approach, how much money to prepare for court fees, and what forms to use certainly were to be of interest not just to court clerks but also to litigious nagari populations keen to leverage courts. Pamoentjak’s manual, thus, was an early example of publications that reflected the proliferation and trickling down of legal discourse into Minangkabau, developments which accelerated in the 1920s and 1930s.

Periodicals from the early twentieth century show how adat-based notions were consolidated by local adat experts who applied codification-like canonisations of otherwise fragile normative orders. These publications serve as an example of the conscious fashioning of “Minangkabauness” within the frames of law and structures signalling European modernism more generally. It was particularly Minangkabau members of landraden and those holding official posts in the colonial bureaucracy that promoted a type of modernisation that was based on reframing adat upon its encounter with the legal form, for instance, through publications such as Koempoelan ‘Adat Minangkabau (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935), a periodical newsletter published by Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo and supported by an illustrious group of local officials in the service of the colonial administration. In publications such as the above, previously volatile and fluid adat norms were brought into a rigid, logical arrangement and listed under codification-like paragraphs.

The term koempoelan translates as “collection” or “set.” The latter term, in particular, hints at the closed nature of the endeavour of writing down adat norms and proverbs—a closed system of browsable adat rules was to be gradually assembled with each periodical. The Koempoelan ‘Adat Minangkabau was a passionate attempt by the elite Minangkabau to maintain the normative orders of the nagari and a way of life determined by adat. As a result of their positionality within colonial institutions and discourses, the authors were, however, also strongly influenced by Leiden’s ideas about the framing of adat in legal terms so as to ensure its continuance while being able to communicate their logics to the colonial state. The authors of the Koempoelan ‘Adat Minangkabau passionately defended adat while positioning themselves as its authoritative interpreters within a legalised system.

In the first edition of the newsletter, the authors acknowledged that some Minangkabau had become critics of adat, particularly those students who had returned from Java or elsewhere and were now lamenting, among other things, its matriarchal nature (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935). The editors then set out to argue that such charges were misconceptions of adat that were the result of a failure to have properly compiled and written down the rules of and justifications for Minangkabau adat (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935). The Koempoelan was envisaged as just such a clearly structured compilation. Difficulties of interpretation resulted from the manifold sources of adat that guided conduct in everyday life, the editors argued. They also discussed the erratic nature of storytelling and analogy that made adat dynamic and fluid in everyday life but also made it difficult to pin down rules or ensure coherent interpretation (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935).

It becomes clear at this point that the Koempoelan was conceived of as an interpretive tool that applied a clear, coherent structure to the otherwise malleable processes of adat to ensure an objective interpretation. This effect of structure would help develop adat into a clearer corpus and establish an Ur-type “real” adat (yang sebenarnja ‘adat Minangkabau) (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935). The Koempoelan was thus an illustrative tool for how to reframe a malleable and loose world of storytelling and analogy into a clearly discerned, bounded corpus. In the process, for instance, the editors elaborated on what was to be conceived of as “real” adat and laid down justifications why adat should not be construed in any way other than within a code-like structure of distilled rules. Regarding the latter point, the matriarchal practice of inheritance and the passing down of poesaka to the kemenakan (nieces and nephews) was distilled into a clear rule that was to be streamlined across nagari (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935). Paragraph no. 8 highlighted two folk stories about fathers’ lineages illustrating them as being more prone to greed and having a tendency to leave their families. These folk stories were, first, encased in a code-like structure of closed interpretation, and second, canonised to serve as the sole justification for matriarchal practices (Diradjo, Reference Diradjo1935). Other types of interpretation were thus excluded by design.

Such standardisations and canonisations of certain features of Minangkabau everyday life contributed to a sanitisation of adat. By glossing over tensions arising in daily life, for instance, between reformist Islam and a matrifocal adat, “the popular is […] appropriated in a sanitized form, carefully [excised from] all marks of vulgarity, coarseness, localism, and sectarian identity” (Chatterjee, Reference Chatterjee1993, p. 73). The Koempoelan even addressed some tensions that had arisen, as they argued, as a result of a Minangkabau diaspora returning and criticising adat based on externally acquired conceptions of the social. By simply glossing over them and replacing them with a standardised history of Minangkabau adat, a discourse of timelessness was created. Through mediation by learned Minangkabau leaders, it was argued that uncontrollable tensions and criticisms could be resolved and adat’s true essence brought to the fore, thus both protecting Minangkabau tradition and ensuring that it would continue to flourish. Collation and digestisation along legal lines facilitated such discourses.

In 1934, Darwis gelar Datoek Madjo Lelo published a monograph on adat law that made no secret of its conceptualisation of adat—it was titled Hoekoem Adat (Adat Law) (Madjo Lelo, Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934). The author was a prolific districthoofd (local colonial official) in West Sumatra and the only local member of a commission that was tasked with investigating the reasons behind the communist uprising in West Sumatra in 1927. He was thus deeply embedded in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy. His monograph on adat law was designed as an explanatory guide for village heads on the procedures of the landraden. Madjo Lelo stated in the introduction that guidance for village heads was needed as these were often called upon by landraden as adat expert witnesses (getuigen-deskundige) but regularly misunderstood questions by judges or could not give clear answers since the abstract, theoretical, and generalisable lines of questioning by courts went against on-the-spot, deliberative, and consensual discussions in the nagari. Therefore, a codification of adat was needed, Madjo Lelo argued, to ensure clarity of rules and legal certainty in the nagari. While his guidebook was not to be thought of as a definitive collection,Footnote ⁵ Madjo Lelo very much argued that his digest should be used as a foundation for codification in the near future.

In his initial elaboration of adat law, Datoek Madjo Lelo relied primarily on Dutch sources and origin myths. Specifically, he references Philip Kleintjes, an adat researcher briefly employed by the colonial civil service, and follows him in his definition of adat law as “a law (recht) that appears within indigenous (boemi poetra) communities according to the necessities of life” (Madjo Lelo, Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934, p. 1). He also quoted a few more sources from the tambo adat (Minangkabau historical literature) to argue that adat law was compiled by elders (ninik katumanggungan) and could be subdivided into clearly delineated categories (Madjo Lelo, Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934, p. 3), such as oendang-oendang loehak (debt payment), oendang-oendang oerang dalam nagari (miscellaneous matters on death, marriage, etc.), and oendang-oendang nan doea poeloeh (criminal matters), none of which had previously existed as unmalleable, discreet distillations. In his elaboration of these categories, the author derived solid, discrete rules from proverbs or selective textual sources. These rules and systematisations corresponded with early twentieth-century perceptions of adat in that they used as their basis the fluent normative order of Minangkabau while consolidating it. Datoek Madjo Lelo thus followed the Leiden School in its custom of seeking an Ur-type of adat while clearly seeking legal certainty.Footnote ⁶ Regarding the oendang-oendang oerang dalam nagari, for instance, he stated: “Unfortunately, it is not clearly laid down in any of the historical literature. This is regretful, because disputes in burgerlijk recht (civil law, which the author equates with the aforementioned) have triggered many cases” (Madjo Lelo, Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934, p. 6).

In the process, Datoek Madjo Lelo thoroughly embedded adat within the grammar of law and the logics of the landraden. He repeated the charges of the Leiden School that judges were often not close enough to village justice and overly formalistic (seemingly disregarding his own formalism towards adat) but also argued that cases in the landraden were guided by “the judge’s wisdom” (Madjo Lelo, Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934, p. 10) to establish legal certainty. Furthermore, he provided guidance for expert witnesses on adat.Footnote ⁷ Datoek Madjo Lelo again closely followed the logics of Dutch colonial legal thinking, especially its Leiden brand, in establishing a corpus of adat sources, a hierarchy of sources, and guidance on how to respond to abstract questions. He stated that any testimony on matters of adat must derive either from written law or custom as ordained by the past. Any rules not conforming to or contradicting these sources could not be invoked. He also pointed to the novel nature of abstract legal rules that could act as models and be applied to varied situations. In reference to expert witnesses, he stated: “The tribal leaders who are called by landraden as “getuige-deskundige” often get questions at the trials which are very difficult to answer because these questions have sometimes never been heard before” (Madjo Lelo, Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934, Foreword). Datoek Madjo Lelo thus hinted at the novel way of conceiving of disputes in an abstract, deductive manner. Whereas adat decisions had previously been based on the concrete circumstances of a specific situation as well as the broader social context, legal logics now dictated that rules be rigid and all-encompassing so as to accommodate even hypothetical cases. While both Datoek Madjo Lelo and the Leiden School more generally afforded adat the capability to change based on societal developments, the processes for apprehending adat became more rigid. Datoek Madjo Lelo’s monograph thus speaks primarily of a new modality of conceiving of the social world through legal grammars. He embedded social interactions in a web of legal relationships and aimed to guide readers towards an idea of social life that could be conceived through the clear and planned-out categorisations of law.

Datoek Madjo Lelo’s monograph illustrates how the Minangkabau intelligentsia engaged with colonial law and disseminated such types of engagement to the colonised public. In his writing, he employed legal methodologies, such as code-like systematisation, the clear designation of valid sources, a hierarchy of sources, and abstract deduction, and allowed them to coalesce around adat. He disseminated to his readers a view of a malleable object world (the Minangkabau social world) that could be ordered according to the unmalleable structure of law.

Datoek Madjo Lelo’s Reference Lelo and gelar Datoek1934 monograph is just one example of a flurry of publications by Minangkabau literati in the early twentieth century in which they embedded adat in legal conceptions and thus contributed to the formation of hoekoem adat. Another prolific writer on adat law at the time was Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo, a panghoeloe educated at a Dutch school and editor of the aforementioned Koempoelan. He published a number of writings, including a monograph in which he compiled several aspects of adat into a code-like system structured by clauses (fasal) (Sanggoeno Diradjo, Reference Sanggoeno Diradjo1919). In doing so, he remained close to the Minangkabau vernacular. On the matter of poesaka, for instance, he wrote: “Regarding that which is called the heritage of the world (poesaka alam), it is the heritage of the sovereign Radja, the heritage of the chief of a law, the heritage of one religion, the heritage of the people” (Sanggoeno Diradjo, Reference Sanggoeno Diradjo1919, p. 74). At the same time, he arranged such proverbs in a statute-like manner—sentence structures were aligned as most fasal started with the words “Regarding … (Adapoen)” and were followed by elaborations on thematic topics. Each fasal discussed a certain topic, as these were clearly delineated and kept separate. By structuring such proverbs in clauses and arranging them in a statute-like manner, Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo utilised a code-like structure or plan to systematise vernacular adat. Through such structuring and thematic enumeration, individual proverbs were separated from others and given self-validating meaning. They could therefore become standalone rules. Datoek Sanggoeno Diradjo’s method of legal development closely resembled the approaches to adat by the Leiden School.

Minangkabau literati employed some of the constitutive elements of legal grammars, such as code-like systematisation or the elaboration of a corpus juris, to meld them around adat and thus further enmesh them in local life. Publications such as those discussed in this section illustrate that certain legal forms had become commonplace in the early-twentieth-century Minangkabau. The embedding of Minangkabau adat norms in legal discourse through the publication of periodicals and monographs by Minangkabau adat experts who had roles in the colonial judiciary and bureaucracy exemplifies the degree to which “Minangkabauness” was consciously tied to European forms of modernity. “Minangkabauness,” as embodied by essentialised adat norms, was made contingent on solidifying signs of European modernity, in this case, Dutch colonial legal thinking. Legal discourse, therefore, penetrated deeply into the social consciousness of elites who aimed to disseminate it to their communities. The legal subjectivities disseminated thus highlight both the reflexive, internal processes according to which local elites could position themselves as authoritative mediators of a definitively constituted Minangkabau polity and communicative processes through which a wider public was to be engaged and influenced to internalise a newly emerging legal discourse. Local elites could, thus, position themselves as indispensable interpreters of a new, seemingly transcendental realm of law.

6. “Poesaka Minangkabau Gojang”: Adat law in practice

After having elaborated on the conceptualisation of law by Minangkabau elites in monographs, newspapers, and periodicals, I now turn to a specific case that highlights how local disputes were discursively reconstructed as fundamentally legal affairs by vernacular writers but also the slippage that occurred in the translation of legal discourses to actual village practices. There is not much historiographical evidence of how ordinary, non-elite Minangkabau engaged with law in the nagari, to what extent it was adopted in everyday discourses, and how it interacted with nagari-specific concepts. While there is clear evidence of communal newspaper readings and the targeting of a broad readership by authors and editors, the eventual impact of novel legal concepts on Minangkabau life remains opaque. The Indisch Tijdschrift van het Recht, a legal journal in which local court cases and decisions were summarised, indeed recorded many non-elite Minangkabau as apt users of colonial courts. However, due to its highly technical summaries, it gives little to no detail on court users’ motivations or how these decisions were later adopted in the nagari (Koenig, Reference Koenig2024). The following discussion is, thus, meant to illustrate two issues: first, legalisations of adat by no means displaced local social concepts, and legal decisions were considerably reinterpreted once they entered the world of the nagari, and second, vernacular writers nevertheless sought to re-embed such moments of slippage within the comforting discursive parameters of the law.

This can be exemplified by the case of Sidi Badoesih, which was summarised and commented on by an anonymous author in an article for Sinar Sumatra titled “Poesaka Minangkabau Gojang (Minangkabau Poesaka is insecure)” (LU, Sinar Sumatra, 11 November 1926). This case concerned a rather complicated matter of Minangkabau adat. A man named Sidi Badoesih, mamak kepala waris (also mamak, the brother of the eldest woman of a lineage, the representative of the family vis-à-vis the outside world) of his kaoem (colonial unit to designate poesaka-holding matrilineal families in court, see von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann2004, p. 11) in the nagari of Air Pampan, had migrated (merantau) to Sasak for 30 years. His kaoem deemed such a lengthy absence irresponsible and elected another man, Sidi Taib, as mamak. Sidi Badoesih’s kaoem had a plot of land (sepotong tanah) that had been rented to them by Sidi Badoesih’s father, the late Hadji Sidi Abdoerachman. The plot of land was under the authority of Hadji Sidi Abdoerachman’s matrilineal family, which, after his death, was led by his nephew (kemenakan), Marah Hakim.

When Sidi Badoesih returned to Air Pampan, he quarrelled with his nieces, among them Siti Adam who accused Sidi Badoesih, her former mamak, of being irresponsible. Offended by this, Sidi Badoesih tried to sell the plot of land, which, for some reason, was considered by his kaoem as ancestral land at this point, perhaps due to a misunderstanding in the rental agreement that was construed as a sales agreement by Sidi Badoesih’s kaoem. However, as previously discussed, the sale of ancestral land by a mamak was controversial, to say the least, and such practices had previously led to various conflicts among family members in colonial Minangkabau. Matrilineal land could usually only be mortgaged by a mamak without his family’s consent for specific purposes, such as payment for a funeral or to build a house.

However, Sidi Badoesih quickly came to an agreement with Marah Hakim, who had the responsibility under adat to take care of his family’s land and who still considered the plot of land to be his family’s. Both men eventually agreed to sell the land to a third party for f200Footnote ⁸ and obtained a legal deed from the controleur (local colonial administrator) of Pariaman. Marah Hakim promised a share of f60 to Sidi Badoesih.

Eventually, however, Marah Hakim sued Sidi Badoesih in September 1925 in the Pariaman landraad. He claimed that the plot of land was under the sole authority of his kaoem because Sidi Badoesih’s father, Hadji Sidi Abdoerrachman (Marah Hakim’s uncle and former mamak) had only rented the land to Sidi Badoesih’s matrilineal family, not sold it. The court dismissed the case (for reasons unknown), however. Subsequently, more pressure was piled on Sidi Badoesih as he was accused by his own kaoem, represented by Sidi Taib, of having sold their land. Sidi Taib brought a claim against him in May 1926, also at the Pariaman landraad. Meanwhile, disgruntled that his own case had been dismissed by the court, Marah Hakim appealed to the raad van justitie at Padang, which again dismissed his claim, arguing this time that the same case could not be submitted twice by the same applicants: it seems that the raad considered the two separate cases to be similar in substance and all applicants to be from the same kaoem. According to the raad, it should first be clarified who the mamak was, and then applicants should focus on one claim.

At this point, Sinar Sumatra’s description of the case ends, and the author commented at length. He stated that the phenomenon of mamak trying to sell matrilineal land (even where its matrilineal status was contested, as in this case) had become more common over recent years and that the landraad at Pariaman was particularly engaged in deciding disputes of this nature (Di Landraad Pariaman telah seingkali hal sematjem itoe [ditemoekan]). Traditionally, adat had acted as a safeguard against such practices, but mamak had gained considerable power under the influence of colonialism, which led to the proliferation of such practices.

The author then commented that the raad’s decision was not in accordance with the 1884 Sumatra Reglement,Footnote ⁹ which the landraad, however, had interpreted correctly. Unfortunately, the author did not divulge in what ways the reglement had been misinterpreted. The author then urged readers to wait for the final decision of the raad. At the same time, he cautioned against a decision in either Sidi Badoesih or Marah Hakim’s favour as this would mean that the decision could be used as a precedent for mamak to alienate more matrilineal land without the checks and balances traditionally provided by adat. The landraden, bound by precedent, would then be able to be strategically used by other mamak.

The case of Sidi Badoesih is thus illuminating in various aspects. With its extensive summary of the events leading to the court case, Sinar Sumatra provides us with rich detail about the lead-up to and engagement with colonial courts that are usually otherwise lost in Dutch sources. First, the article shows that courts were struggling considerably with the complex matters brought to them under adat. Their rigid rules regarding who could be a mamak, who were acknowledged as actors in a case, and what was at stake struggled to contain the complex lifeworlds and social relations of Minangkabau. Nevertheless, courts were used strategically. It seems, for instance, that Marah Hakim attempted to cheat Sidi Badoesih out of his share from the sale. Courts thus provided a new avenue for the attainment of personal gain. Second, Sinar Sumatra’s author’s comments are of interest. They are well versed in colonial legality as they pointed out the court’s misinterpretation of the Sumatra Reglement. As the reglement was not explained any further, the author must have presumed a degree of awareness of it among the newspaper’s readership. It is likely that both the author and the targeted readership were members of the newly emergent non-traditional professional classes who had emerged from Dutch-language schools and were immersed in the colonial judiciary, considering Sinar Sumatra’s editors’ allegiance to the colonial government and reformist bent.Footnote ¹⁰

The author’s comments on the court case further show much trust in the colonial court system. While the court struggled to comprehend the complexity of Sidi Badoesih’s case, Sinar Sumatra’s writer rather confidently re-embedded it in the confines of court procedures. They placed much trust in the decision-making process and objectivity of the raad, arguing that no judgement should be passed on the court’s decision yet and urging readers to be patient and await the final verdict. At the same time, the author cautioned against the consequences of a decision in favour of unruly mamak and issued a warning that if their practices were approved of, they would become more rampant in the future and courts could be used strategically by other defiant mamak. However, such warnings should not be seen as a disavowal of the court system but, rather, anxiety about the infiltration of courts by uncouth local actors.

The ultimate impact of court decisions and rigidified conceptions of adat on nagari populations is hard to gauge. While the author speaks about the law’s influence on village practices, it is likely that his comments were first and foremost targeted at other literati who were immersed in colonial culture and, therefore, placed a degree of trust in courts. It is equally likely that court decisions developed a second life once released into the complex social networks of the nagari. While little evidence is available for this from the colonial period, Von Benda-Beckmann has traced the social trajectories of court decisions in the nagari post-independence. She argues that court decisions, once issues, are often reinterpreted in the nagari and subjected to its norms: “Villagers feel legitimated by the legal system of their own social field to interpret and transform a decision” (von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann1984, p. 110). The winning party might not wish to enforce a ruling fully due to social pressure, as relationships with the members of various social groups may determine the extent to which a ruling is acted upon (von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann1984, p. 131). Moreover, decisions may be subjected to further deliberations by family councils and be opened to consensus-making in accordance with the Minangkabau traditions of musyawarah (deliberation and discussion) and mufakat (consensus). As a result, the dynamic social environment of Minangkabau could lead to drastic changes in how law is interpreted and loosen its reified grip on adat.

In sum, the case of Sidi Badoesih shows that efforts at disseminating novel legal subjectivities among a wider public by elite Minangkabau were subject to significant slippage when they entered the nagari. While courts were widely and strategically used, senses of self often remained unperturbed by elite discourses of law, and thus, the pedagogical tools meant to encourage a wider public to adopt novel legal subjectivities only arrived in villages in small doses (such as using courts as strategic resources) or seemed to have been renegotiated in village life. While vernacular writers expended much energy in reinforcing a notion of law that could structure everyday life and in disseminating it, such discussions seem to have been confined to a limited elite audience already versed in aspects such as raad precedents or the Sumatra Reglement.

7. Minangkabau critiques of law

While legal discourses were extremely prominent among elite Minangkabau, criticisms of law were equally as prominent and manifold. Many elite Minangkabau, of the newly emergent and traditional types, engaged in radical critiques of how law worked in theory and practice. At the same time, these criticisms were, in fact, themselves often framed within the enunciative parameters of law. At one point, for example, an anonymous Berita author was concerned about the way the legal regime, in this case, the law of obligations, operated. While the author moved only within the confines of legal discourse, they worried about the potential unfairness of a landraad decision:

The reporter never doubted that this case should be construed in any context other than formal legality and made this clear by commenting that “of course” a debtor’s possessions must be auctioned off to compensate for her rent arrears, since this process is prescribed by law. They thus leave no room for an argument that such a situation could be construed in any way other than through the law. However, the last, more sympathetic (to Nj. R.), phrase represents a remarkable incision into the otherwise matter-of-fact reports on violations of the law. Such an incision represents a quiet, yet critical, consideration of the omniscience of law and whether the law always knows best. It thus undermines, to an extent, the universal hermeneutic authority of the law while still moving within its confines. Such interventions show that voices that expressed clear doubt in the inevitability of law are still audible in the archives of periodicals.

In an article for Tjaja-Soematra, Pamoentjak nan Sati, a Dutch-educated reformist writer and poet, wrote in 1920 about the village of Tilatang (Pamoentjak nan Sati, 1926). He described the composition of the village and the changes it had undergone over time, as well as the impact of colonial bureaucrats, such as the demang (local colonial official) at the time. He then wrote about agriculture in the area of Tilatang and the role the fertile ground of the village had played over the years in preventing starvation, and especially the important role of the cultivation of cassava and rice. He argued that one reason why the soil was so fertile, and agriculture had been so productive, was that the inhabitants of Tilatang had “put their souls into the land.” Somewhat poetically, he then argued that such fertility can be achieved as long as “the Erfpacht monster doesn’t take over” (Pamoentjak nan Sati, 1926) the fields. By strictly separating the Dutch legal concept of erfpacht (a Dutch legal concept that gave long leases on parcels of land to individuals) from the souls of the villagers who inhabit the soil of Tilatang, the author historicises European legal forms and marks them as alien. He delimits the judicialisation of selves and social relations as a process that is rooted in real and historical-material processes and thereby de-metaphysicalises the idea of law. Erfpacht thus contributed to the increased rate of land alienation within the nagari in the early twentieth century as the Domeinverklaring (Domain Declaration) of 1874 envisaged the transferral of rights over oelajat land (communal nagari land) to the central government. Although this large-scale alienation never materialised, the introduction of individualised property rights had a profound impact on the nagari (Kahn, Reference Kahn1993, pp. 236–237). The process of judicialisation and the introduction of property rights was thus recognised as a historical-material process that stood apart from daily village relations. As I mentioned previously, colonial law in Minangkabau thrived on the representation of itself as a transcendental realm that stood apart from material processes and which appeared as the “conceptual” itself, separate from its material realisation (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell1991). However, by highlighting the real, material origins of erfpacht and the Domeinverklaring, Pamoentjak nan Sati rooted law in a historical process and, thus, contested its status as an autonomous ordering tool.

It shows that, despite the tendency of vernacular periodicals to disseminate clear legal subjectivities, the ability of law to structure the self was also challenged. Protest against certain categories of the law was, in fact, relatively common in early twentieth-century Minangkabau. In 1919, for instance, Resident J.D.L Le Fèbvre reported that, shortly before he left West Sumatra as Resident, a group of approximately 200 Minangkabau leaders, including a number of panghoeloe, had come to his office. The delegation submitted several demands (toentoetan) to Le Fèbvre and asked him to relay these to the Dutch Parliament in The Hague upon his return to the Netherlands.Footnote ¹¹ Such requests to colonial administrators by village chiefs were relatively common as the position of mediator between the village and the government had been retained by panghoeloe despite attempts on the part of the colonial government to limit their powers (Graves, Reference Graves1981, p. 80). The demands given to Le Fèbvre included, inter alia, calls for more schools for “native” children and more “native” physicians, tax exemptions and the abolishment of the legal concept of erfpacht. Such legalisation of landed relations, they argued, had negative impacts on adat relations and the local economy (Amran, Reference Amran1997, p. 87). Erfpacht was thus specifically identified as a foreign legal concept that was alien to village relations, and, therefore, its existence was firmly rooted by the Minangkabau leaders in historical-material processes of dispossession.

As these Minangkabau criticisms of erfpacht show, the inevitability of having one’s being-in-the-world framed by law as a distant and detached entity was demystified through such critiques by the rooting of law in real historical-material processes and juxtaposing it with vernacular subjectivities that were not merely inert objects upon which the law could work unhindered. However, such forms of resistance often also went hand in hand with tacit support of certain institutions of the law. In the abovementioned case of the Minangkabau leaders seeking support from Resident Le Fèbvre, for instance, the demand to abolish erfpacht was accompanied by a call for more “native” staff to be appointed to the courts (Amran, Reference Amran1997, p. 87). Often, therefore, opposition to law was rather selective and arguably pragmatically focused on those legal categories that were perceived as severely disruptive to social relations and the interests of local elites. Broader critiques of the simple existence of legal discourse were rarer.

By way of example, a writer named Keris, in an article for Berita, demanded that adat dispute settlement mechanisms (kerapatan adat) be established in Padang (Keris, 1931). He argued that they were common in the West Sumatran highlands but had all but vanished in the region’s capital city. The reasons for the establishment of a kerapatan adat in Padang, however, were entirely derived from legal conceptions of local administration. According to the Inlandsche Gemeente Ordonnanties (municipal laws setting out the parameters of self-governance of villages) of 1914 and 1918 (Keris even referenced their publication in the Staatsblad, the colonial government gazette), Minangkabau towns were to be largely self-governing, and adat institutions that had previously been suppressed by the growing administrative apparatus of the state were to be reinstated. Although these adat institutions were considerably transformed by the state (von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann, Reference von Benda-Beckmann and von Benda-Beckmann2013, pp. 84–85), the law was quoted as a reason for a return to adat governance. Keris, with much legal fervour, wrote: “It amazes us. Why is it that in practice the ordonnantie is not carried out here [in Padang]?” (Keris, 1931). Moreover, he argued that decisions issued by a kerapatan adat would often be upheld in the landraden. They would, as a result, facilitate dealings with colonial courts. Thus, while demanding a reinstatement of adat institutions, Keris at the same time tied these institutions to the administrative apparatus of the colonial state and already had the colonial judiciary in mind when elaborating on the potential decision-making of a kerapatan adat.