THE CONCEPT OF VILLAGE

The village, or kampuang, is the social unit that defines the living environment of people from West Sumatra. In addition to its obvious physical characteristics, the concept of the village is an important organizing feature in the way people think about themselves and others. One of the first questions people ask someone they just met is, Kampuang di ma? [Where is your village?]. Even though a large number of Minangkabau now come from large cities and the question really means “Where are you from?”, Jakarta or Padang has the same cognitive status as an actual village in the Minangkabau heartland in the mountains of West Sumatra. The village is a place to live but also an encapsulation of all the elements required for human existence in the Minangkabau context.

Until comparatively recently, the majority of Minangkabau really did come from a village or maintained a close relationship with the village of their ancestors. Folklore holds that all Minangkabau originated in one of three regions in the highlands of what is now West Sumatra. These areas are referred to as luhak and represent the original homeland of this ethnic group and the centre of its traditional culture. The myths of the region indicate that the Minangkabau came down from Mount Merapi to the area of Pariangan. Later, they spread out into the original luhak, and even later to the coastal plains which were the first rantau, an area outside of their region of origin that served as a destination for migration. This happened, according to legend, at an unrecorded point in the distant past sometime after the original settlement of the area, which took place when the volcanoes that form the backdrop for the Minangkabau world were only “as big as a duck egg”. Whether there is any truth to this idea, and if so, how much, cannot be discerned from the archaeological record of the region. However, it is the case that traditional literature, including proverbs and proverbial phrases, maintain the view that traditional customs and way of life developed in the highlands and spread down the mountains into the regions that have been inhabited by the Minangkabau in modern times. By contrast, newer influences of all kinds are seen as entering the Minangkabau world from the lowlands and travelling up the mountains into the traditional homeland regions.

MINANGKABAU IN THE RANTAU

There are large communities of Minangkabau living permanently in other parts of Indonesia, outside the regions that customarily use the Minang language and that are associated with long settlement. This represents the outer ring of the Minangkabau world where the individuals involved typically live among and interact with large numbers of people from other linguistic/cultural groups, even if they are part of a significant community of Minangkabau origin. While the proportion of professionals within this rantau population is increasing, the Minangkabau are well known among other Indonesians for their business activities all over the country which have traditionally included various kinds of retail and wholesale activity and restaurants. Restoran Padang (Padang restaurants), which serve Minang food with a characteristic type of service, are found all over Indonesia as well as in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. These restaurants, where all the dishes available are placed on the table and diners pay for what they eat, are often the first places where unskilled newcomers from West Sumatra work when they arrive in the rantau. They also serve as important sources of information about the local Minangkabau community or about people newly arrived individuals may know and are looking for.

It is difficult to estimate how many people of Minangkabau origin are living in Jakarta or other parts of Indonesia outside of West Sumatra because information on ethnic background is not collected as part of the national census. However, it has been suggested that as much as 6 per cent of the population of the Jakarta metropolitan area is Minangkabau (Tempo 2012). The approximately 600,000 people this figure represents are the equivalent of 11.5 per cent of the total population of West Sumatra (BPS Sumatera Barat 2016b). While Minangkabau are concentrated in the capital and in the larger cities of other Sumatran provinces, smaller communities can be found almost everywhere in Indonesia. Some of these are very long-standing and began to be established many generations ago. During the New Order period of Indonesia's history under President Soeharto (1965–98), national administration was highly centralized, which resulted in a dramatic increase in the importance of the national capital as the centre of governance, business, and cultural activity. The Minangkabau community in this part of the rantau increased enormously during this time in response to the perception of enhanced opportunities (Kompas 2013).

During the final stages of writing this book, Nurijah, whose profile appears in Chapter 2, died. The circumstances surrounding her death were remarkable and illustrate the very significant role cultural consonance, which is discussed in some depth in Chapter 10, plays in the experience of older Minangkabau.

One day a few months ago, Nurijah fell ill. This in itself was not unusual; she had often felt unwell since suffering a stroke in Koto many years before and becoming paralysed as a result of it. This intensified after her children brought her to Jakarta to live. She hated the city and repeatedly asked her daughters why one of them could not return to Koto with her. All four of her daughters live and work in Jakarta and cannot leave, especially for an extended period of time. Finally, Nurijah had to agree to leave Koto and her home there as there was no one who could take care of her in the village. She did not want to live with her son and his wife even though they are also in Koto.

While Nurijah's complaints about her health would not normally alarm her children, this time was different. She began to deteriorate quickly. Within hours, her breathing became irregular, and she was in and out of consciousness, which had never happened before. The daughter, whose turn it was to take care of Nurijah, immediately contacted her three sisters and one brother who live in Jakarta, and they all arrived within a few hours. Everyone agreed that Nurijah's situation was very serious, particularly as, whenever she was conscious, she insisted that she wanted to go back to Koto immediately. The children were all stunned and confused and tried to persuade Nurijah that she was in no condition to travel. They promised to take her back to Koto when she felt better, if that was really what she wanted. Conveying this took hours because of Nurijah's condition and because her speech was even harder to understand than usual.

PADANG AND THE TRADITIONAL RANTAU

In the traditional Minangkabau conceptualization of place, the city of Padang, which is now the capital of the Indonesian province of West Sumatra, was seen as the rantau. Because folklore holds that the Minangkabau originated in the mountainous interior of the region, marantau included a spreading out in all directions, first to closer areas outside this heartland and later to more distant locations. The Minangkabau world, then, at least as it in depicted in folklore and traditional conceptualizations, consists of a set of concentric rings with the three original regions (luhak) of Tanah Datar (where Koto is located), Agam, and Lima Puluh Kota at the centre. The oldest traces of Minangkabau civilization can be found in these regions, and the traditional home of the royal family was in the village of Pagaruyung in Tanah Datar, not far from the town of Batusangkar and the village of Koto. Conceptually, if not literally, all Minangkabau are said to have had their origins in one of the three original luhak, even if they went to other areas in the distant past.

The oldest rantau areas were those places closest to this cultural heartland and are located within a few days travel on foot. They include the coastal areas of West Sumatra, where Padang is located, as well as cities and towns in neighbouring provinces. It is believed that Minangkabau going to the rantau first reached the Jambi region in the seventh century. These early travellers set themselves up as goldsmiths, a traditional profession in an area of Agam near Bukittinggi (Munoz 2006). Other parts of Sumatra that are farther away were reached by Minangkabau settlers later. By the fourteenth century, there were colonies of Minangkabau living permanently in Sibolga and Natal in North Sumatra, Meulaboh in Aceh, Bengkulu, Lampung, as well as in Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia (Dobbin 1983). In time, people of Minangkabau heritage came to dominate the population in Negeri Sembilan, and Minangkabau cultural elements are still visible in the community, which has become part of the Malay mainstream (Peletz 1994). By the sixteenth century, large numbers of Minangkabau were living in towns on the island of Sulawesi, where, in addition to trading, many became religious leaders and teachers (Mukhlis et al. 1995).

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

Introduction

It is difficult for students of contemporary Malaysia to write dispassionately about the institution of monarchy in a country where the Malay rulers have been protected from criticism, where they have been so embedded in Malay culture, and where they are perceived as guardians of Malay rights and of the Islamic faith. Yet in a world in which royalty is increasingly seen as anachronistic, Malaysia's nine sultans occupy a special place. Not only do they constitute almost a quarter of the world's monarchies, they continue to exercise considerable influence in Malaysia's political life. More particularly, over the last two decades a growing public disenchantment with the dishonesty and self-interest of politicians has led many Malaysians to look to the sultans as an alternative source of leadership. To a considerable degree this has been encouraged by the rulers themselves, alienated by the limitations on royal privileges imposed during the earlier regime of the current Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and by the depth of corruption in the government of Najib Razak as revealed by the 1MDB scandal. In October 2015, after the domestic inquiry was halted by Najib's dismissal of the attorney general, the Conference of Rulers issued a joint statement calling for a revival of the investigation and “stern action” against those incriminated. Two years later, the government's unabashed politicization of Islam prompted another royal warning about the deepening of racial and religious divides.3 On the other hand, it has sometimes been difficult for individual rulers to take the moral high ground; in Pahang, Najib's home state, 1MDB disclosures indicate that the sultan received large sums of money taken directly from development funds.

The elections of May 2018 (GE14) brought a new coalition government to power under the banner of Pakatan Harapan, currently led by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the erstwhile nemesis of the sultans. It is not yet clear whether Pakatan Harapan leaders will be able to set aside a baggage of resentment towards royal privilege and form a solid working relationship with the sultans at both state and national levels. Mahathir's supporters claim that he is a changed man, while the sultans, energized by what one observer has called “monarchical activism” are in a far stronger position than they were in the 1980s and 1990s.

Executive Summary