ponies trotted on at a good round pace. The road still kept zig-zagging
between steep hill-sides, densely overgrown with nipah-palm, banana,
and dark-leaved brushwood, which shut out the view of the landscape.
And I remember no noteworthy incident, except the passing of a native
market, a "passar," in a spot where the road broadened a little, and
where an impetuous brook, that came bounding down the hillside, spouted
from a sort of primitive aqueduct made of bamboo. Half a score of naked
children were bathing themselves under the icy "douche," whilst their
parents stood bargaining and chaffering at the narrow booths that
adhered to the steep hillside like swallows' nests to a house-wall. As
we approached, the whole company, men, women, and children, squatted
down with one accord, as if they had been so many puppets pulled
by a string. One very fat baby, his fists and his mouth full of
sweetmeats, stood staring at us in round-eyed surprise; but his mother
managed to catch him and draw him to his little haunches, just in the
nick of time; and the whole company remained in this crouching posture
until our carriage rounded the bend of the road.
[Illustration: Girl from Kadoo.]
[Illustration: Women pounding rice.]
[Illustration: The rapids of the Tjitaroon.]
At Batavia, where the manners of the natives have suffered a change--a
change for the worse, as some maintain--by contact with Europeans, I
had never witnessed this peculiar mode of salutation. And I confess
I was painfully impressed by it, the more so as my friend warned me
that native etiquette forbade my acknowledging the humble greeting
by so much as a nod. I do not know whether it was the abjectness of
their semi-prostration, or the seemingly gratuitous insolence of our
thus ignoring it, that I felt as the more acute humiliation to human
dignity. But, after all, the only way to rightly judge the manners
and customs of a country is to look at them from the point of view
of the natives; and, to a Javanese, there is nothing undignified in
a salutation which impresses us as slavish. He squats down, just as
a European rises, in the presence of a superior. It is a token of
respect; nothing more. And the superior's apparent unconsciousness of
this greeting no more implies rudeness on his part than the familiar
nod with which in Europe a gentleman might answer a labourer's or
artisan's raising of his cap. "The way of the land, the honour of
the land," as the Dutch proverb puts it.
[Illustration: Pangeran Adipati Mangkoe Boemi (Djokjakarta).]
[Illustration: Javanese Lady.]
[Illustration: Waterfalls.]
[Illustration: The Tji-mahi falls.]
[Illustration]
On the point of etiquette, the Javanese, moreover, are infinitely more
punctilious than any western people of our period. I believe they might
even be said to surpass the Spaniards of the time of Philip II, in the
elaborateness of their code of manners and in their strict adherence
to its requirements. Every possible circumstance and occurrence in
life have been foreseen, and the appropriate conduct noted down in
the unwritten law of the "adat"; the attitude, the gesture, and the
set phrase, are all prescribed, down to the smallest detail. Nor is
it a question of phraseology only; the very language is subject to
the regulations of the adat, which distinguishes three separate and
altogether different kinds of Javanese, according as a man speaks to
his superior, his equal, or his inferior. For speech to one higher
in rank, there is the "Kromo"; commands to a subordinate are given
in "Ngoko"; friends familiarly converse in a third idiom into which
elements of the other two enter. The theory of these three kinds of
Javanese is a science by itself, and one not easily acquired by a
westerner. At the same time, it is imperatively necessary to him, if
he would gain the esteem of the natives; for the use of a Ngoko word
when a Kromo term should have been employed, would mark the offender
with an indelible brand of vulgarity and ill-breeding. When the Bible
was being translated into Javanese, this peculiarity of etiquette
proved a considerable difficulty; and the missionaries had to consult
countless authorities and compare a thousand precedents, before they
could settle the question whether Christ should address Pilate in Kromo
or in Ngoko, or in the third idiom. A solecism would have fatally
injured the "prestige" of the new religion: and its ministers could
not have escaped the accusation of being "koerang atjar" which being
translated into English means "ill-bred." It was in order to avoid this
qualification, that my friend and I seeing the country folk at the
"passar" squat down in the dusty road, passed on, without so much as
looking at them.
Towards eleven o'clock, we reached the highest point of our journey--a
ledge upon the mountain-side called Njadas Pangeran. Here, the hills on
our right suddenly fell away, and the broad green plains of Cheribon
lay disclosed, dazzling with sunlight and living water. At our feet,
away far below, lay a brown hamlet in the midst of sawahs, like a
lark's nest in a field of clover; and the hills through which we
had threaded our way, since dawn, hung in the western distance like
massy clouds, tinted with brown and violet, and an exquisite pale,
half-transparent blue. We paused here for some minutes, to rest the
horses, whilst we gathered armsful of a splendid orchid which grew
in profusion on the hillside--great shiny snow-flakes of blossoms,
with a touch of carmine on the curling petals; and then resumed the
journey along a road which steadily sloped to the bottom of the valley.
A muddy river runs through it, which we crossed on a primitive kind
of ferry--the carriage, horses, and all standing on a raft, which a
score of natives dragged and pushed across the shallow water. On the
other bank, the road began to ascend again; we had reached the base
of Tjerimai, and a drive of some two or three hours more, along a
smooth road that passed by prosperous sugarcane plantations waving in
the breeze with thousands of glossy green streamers, brought us at
length to our destination--the little bamboo cottage upon the hillside,
whither my friends repaired for a spell of coolness and a breath of
mountain air, when the heat rendered the sojourn on their estate in the
plains unendurable. It was about four in the afternoon when we entered
the garden gates, and the air was as fresh as in the early morning.
The breeze rustled through the tall flower-laden njamploeng-trees on
the roadside; there was a smell of water and moist stones in the air;
I heard the murmur of a brook over its rocky bed. This was the country
of which hot, dust-stifled Batavia was the capital. The thing seemed
scarcely credible.
[Illustration]
IN THE DESSA
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Our bungalow on the Tjerimai hillside was situated in the near
neighbourhood of a native dessa. But we had been there for some time,
before I became aware of the fact. And my first glimpse of the village
was a surprise as fascinating as it was sudden.
It chanced in the course of a cool clear morning, as we rode along on
our way to the sacred grove of Sangean and the legend-haunted lake in
its shadow.
We had been skirting for some time what seemed to be an unusually
dense bamboo-wood, when suddenly, in the wall of crowded stems, there
appeared a breach and framed in it, lo! a prospect of brown huts, with
flowering fruit-trees set between, and a well-kept road in the middle,
on which a score of children were playing about. A plough-man came
along, driving a pair of grey buffaloes before him, women were coming
and going, carrying waterpitchers and piled up baskets of fruit on
their erect heads; it was a busy hamlet in the heart of the wood.
We entered, passing from the sunny hillside into the green twilight
among the trees, and out again upon the village road, flecked with
changeful lights and shadows. It was trim and clean as a gardenpath.
The huts on either side of it had a prosperous look, each standing in
its own patch of ground, surrounded by fruit-trees--mangoes, bananas
and djamboos that turned the soil purple with their fallen blossoms.
The rice-barns shaped like a child's cradle, narrow at the base, and
broadening out towards the top, were full of sweet new rice and in the
sheds sleek dun-coloured cattle stood patiently chewing the cud.
[Illustration: Raised shed from which the ripening fields are watched.]
I saw no men about, they were probably at work on the outlying
ricefields. But here and there, under the pent-roofs of the houses,
women sat at their looms busily weaving sarong-cloth. And on the
doorsteps plump brown babies were rolling about.
[Illustration: Gunungan, or Pile of Sacrificial Food, as offered by
women on Garebeg Mulud, the feast of the nativity of Nabi Muhamed, the
Great Prophet.]
[Illustration: A native official and his followers.]
One hut we passed, where a very old man sat playing with a tiny baby,
so exceedingly pretty, that we could not help stopping to admire it.
With a proud smile he told us it was his great-grand-child. Its father
and mother were living with him, and so indeed were all the other
members of his numerous family, sons and daughters and grandsons and
granddaughters who, each in turn, had wedded and brought a wife or a
husband to the parental home.
[Illustration: Rice-barn shaped like a child's cradle.]
"There are over a score of them" said the patriarch proudly. To him
had, in truth, been granted the prayer, which, on their wedding-day
Javanese couples put up to the gods "Give us a progeny like to the
spreading crown of the waringin tree." And the venerable sire,
trusting in his helpless old age to the love and piety of his children,
reminded one of the parent trunk, which, when decaying, is upheld by
the stalwart young trees that have sprung up around it.
We asked after his family. The children, the old man answered, were all
out in the fields; no hands could be spared from the work just now.
Only his youngest grand-daughter, the baby's mother, had stayed in the
house, to look after the little one, and cook the familydinner. Yonder
she was, at her bâtik-frame, painting the sarong-cloth with flowers and
butterflies. The girl looked up as he spoke, turning a pretty face on
us; and smiled.
"Ah! happy those that live among the woods and fields, if they but knew
their happiness...." It seemed to me that these dessa-folk knew theirs.
And I filled my eyes and my heart with the scene before me--the low,
brown roofs amidst the fruittrees, the merry-eyed children at play, the
leisurely comings and goings of the women upon their daily occupation,
with the rustling coolness and the soft green light of the bamboo
leafage over it all; gathering all the gladsome beauty of it, that it
might keep fresh and fragrant my thoughts, when I should have returned
to the world outside, to the weariness, the fever and the fret to which
we of the conquering race have condemned ourselves.
As we rode on, and the wood-enshrined hamlet disappeared among the
folds of the hillrange, like the beautiful day-dream it all but seemed
to me, I learnt that it was but a fair type of the prosperous dessa,
such as it is found throughout the length and breadth of Java.
[Illustration: "A progeny like to the spreading crown of the
waringin-tree."]
The plan and general appearance of these native villages are always the
same--a cluster of huts, each standing in its own patch of ground,
surrounded by a quick-set hedge; a main road from which numerous
bye-paths diverge, leading through; in the centre an open square,
shaded by waringin trees, fronting the mosque; then, surrounding the
whole, a dense plantation of bamboo trees, which completely hides the
village from sight. Around stretch meadows, ricefields, and plantations
of nipahpalm, which, in many cases, are the property of the community.
Where this particular form of proprietorship obtains, the village
authorities assign portions of the communal fields in usufruct to such
inhabitants of the dessa as will pledge themselves in return to pay
certain taxes, and to perform certain duties entailed by the possession
of landed property; the principal of which are, keeping the roads and
irrigation works in repair, and guarding the gates or patrolling the
streets at night. Moreover in all matters touching the cultivation of
these fields, they are obliged to observe the prescriptions of the
"adat," and such regulations as the village authorities may deem proper
to make.
Very strict supervision is excercised in this matter, so as to prevent
the occupant from exhausting, either through ignorance or neglect,
the field, which, at the expiration of his lease, will be allotted
to another member of the community. Disobedience to the commands of
the village authorities is punishable by forfeiture of the right of
occupation.
In most districts, this communal right alternates with private
proprietorship.
[Illustration: Sellers of rice.]
According to the ancient custom, which has been ratified by the
Colonial Regulations, whosoever, of his own free will, reclaims a piece
of waste ground, by that act acquires the possession of the same, and
the right to transmit it to his heirs, the "hereditary individual
right," as the legal term is. Any native, desirous to obtain land on
these terms, can apply for permission to the Government, which, having
taken the place of the ancient Sultans is considered as the "Sovereign
of the Soil." This permission is never refused. So that, under the
communal regime as under the system of hereditary individual ownership,
anyone who has the will to work is sure of being able to earn a
sufficiency for himself and his family. There need be no unemployed:
there are no paupers in our sense of the word. It should be added, that
the right of usufruct under the system of communal possession, can
be converted into that of "hereditary individual ownership." But the
inherited communistic sentiment is so strongly developed in the people
of the dessa, that they but rarely, if ever, avail themselves of the
facilities, which the law offers them in this respect; they prefer that
the community should own the soil.
[Illustration: Women dyeing sarong-cloth.]
[Illustration: Woman picking cotton, and man plaiting a sieve.]
As might be expected the principle of solidarity which pervades these
laws and customs, manifests itself even more strongly in the domestic
life of the dessa-folk.
[Illustration: A Javanese family.]
[Illustration: Mat-plaiting.]
The ties of kinship--though not those of marriage--are much respected
by them. Parents are so absolutely sure of the love and filial piety
of their children, that they often, as they grow older, abandon all
their property to them, content to live for the remainder of their
days as their sons' and daughter's pensioners. And even the most
distant relation, who, like the nearest, is termed brother or sister,
may count, in case of need, upon assistance and hospitality. Parents
are free to bequeath their property as they like; and they sometimes
give everything to the first-born son or daughter, without any of
the other children protesting. But, just as frequently, the heritage
is left to all the descendants in common, when the paternal house is
enlarged, so as to afford room for all the married sons and daughters
and their families; and the produce of the fields is equally divided
amongst them, as they equally divide the labour and the toil. Thus,
through all chances and changes, the communistic principle is still
maintained in the small community of the family, as in the greater
one of the dessa. And indeed it may be said that the dessa is but the
enlarged paternal house of the Javanese. All the inhabitants of it are
his kinsfolk and nearest of blood, whose interests are his own, whose
prosperity or misery is bound up with his, and who are his natural
allies in defending the common inheritance against the stranger. The
bamboo enclosure which defines and defends the dessa and the environing
fields--the common possession of all--are the symbols and the outward
visible signs of this.
Such then are the conditions which determine the existence of the
Javanese husbandman--a happy life on the whole, exempt from hardship,
excessive toil and care, and not without dignity or idyllic grace.
The dessa-man has to work, certainly, but he need not slave; a
very moderate exertion is sufficient to procure him what food and
raiment he wants. His neighbours are his next of kin, and spite
occasional bickerings, his helpful friends. He has himself chosen the
village-chief to whose authority he defers, and is free to follow that
ancestral law of the adat, which, to him, is the embodiment of supreme
wisdom and justice. And as he goes about his daily business, his labour
in wood and field, still keeping time to the recurrent rhythm of the
seasons, is graced by many a ceremony and religious rite, which while
honouring the gods, rejoices the hearts of the worshippers.
At these religious festivals called "Sedeka," sacrifices of flowers and
fruits are offered to the deity and the ancient, naïve idea, that which
is pleasant to human beings must also be acceptable to the gods, causes
the Javanese to lay on his altar offering of the eatables he is fondest
of himself. Such as spice-flavoured rice and all manner of sweetmeats.
[Illustration: A bamboo hut.]
[Illustration: Weighing rice-sheaves.]
[Illustration: Native official.]
In this he does but as Jews and Greeks did before him. But there is
a distinguishing detail about Javanese sacrificial rites,--a
feature, which one is never quite sure whether to call eminently
spiritual or naïvely gross and selfish. Of the food offered they
believe the deity to enjoy the savour only; the celestial being
disdains the material part. And so the worshippers, after a decorous
interval of waiting, when they may suppose the invisible and
imponderable essence of the meal to have been absorbed by the god,
make a cheerful repast on the visible and ponderable parts left on the
altar, thus combining piety and high living in one and the same act.
In Java, if anywhere, it may be said, that, when the gods are honoured
the people fare well.
It would be somewhat invidious to inquire whether piety or appetite
be the impelling motive; but, from whatever cause, the Javanese are
most assiduous in the performance of sacrificial rites. Not only are
the cardinal events of human existence, births, marriages and deaths,
and the recurrent epochs of the agricultural year honoured with solemn
observances, but any and every incident of daily existence is made the
occasion of a "Sedeka."
Sedeka is offered on setting out on a journey, on entering into any
contract or agreement, on moving into a new house, on taking possession
of a newly-acquired field: the sacrifice being oftenest dedicated to
the "Danhjang dessa," tutelary genius of towns and villages; to the
spirits who render the soil fertile; to the goddess Sri, protectress
of the rice crops; and to all the ancestors, up to Father Adam and
Mother Eve. Then too, side by side with these benignant deities, the
wicked "seitans" and djinns are worshipped, the princes of the air,
as powerful for evil as Sri and the Danhjang Dessa are for good. It
is they who send plagues and pestilence, who make the babe to die at
its mother's breast, and the buffalo to drop dead on the half-ploughed
field; who cause fires to destroy villages, and floods to sweep away
the standing crops; and who seduce men to theft, deceit, robbery, and
violence. Since, then, they are so powerful for harm, it is wise to
keep on terms of amity with them, and give even the Devil his due,
bringing him the appointed sacrifices of eggs and yellow boreh-unguent
and jessamine blossoms.
These evil spirits, it should be noted, are exceedingly jealous, and
one should never glory in the possession of any desirable thing, such
as good health, riches, power, or, above all, fine children, lest
in their spite, they should turn these blessings into curses. But
humility, or still better contempt of the things men generally covet,
conciliates them. Wherefore a Javanese mother will often call her
child, more particularly if it be remarkable for grace and beauty, by a
name implying that it is hateful, ugly and altogether worthless.
[Illustration: Preparing the village field.]
[Illustration: Native nobleman and his wife.]
Among the saints of El-Islam, Joseph the father of the Christian
prophet Jesus, is the one whom Javanese matrons venerate above all
others; from him they implore the gift of beauty for their children.
Nor do they implore in vain. Javanese babies are absolutely charming.
The brilliancy of their black eyes, and the dusky tints of their soft
skin give their round little faces a piquancy altogether fascinating.
The blue eyes, fair hair and pale complexion of European children
seem insipid by comparison. Now and then one sees faces amongst them,
innocent and earnest as those which on Murillo's canvases surround the
Madonna in cloud-like clusters. But alas! these heavenly memories fade
soon. The suns of a few East monsoons utterly wither them. Villon,
could he see the grown-up youths and maidens of Java, would vary his
melancholy refrain about fair dead ladies. "But where are the babes of
yester-year?"
[Illustration: Pilgrims returned from Mecca.]
Among adults beauty is as rare as, among children, it is common.
So that after all, it seems Saint Joseph takes the prayer for fine
children "at the foot of the letter" and answers the petition in a
somewhat ironical spirit.
Of the many "Sedeka's" which grace the agricultural year, those
connected with the cultivation of the rice-plant are the most
important. Java is essentially what, according to tradition, its
ancient name betokens--the Land of the Rice. The whole island is one
vast rice-field. Rice on the swampy plains, rice on the rising ground,
rice on the slopes, rice on the very summits of the hills. From the
sod under one's feet to the uttermost verge of the horizon, everything
has one and the same colour, the bluish green of the young, or the
tawny gold of the ripened rice. The natives are all, without exception,
tillers of the soil, who reckon their lives by seasons of planting and
reaping, whose happiness or misery is synonymous with the abundance or
the dearth of the precious grain. And the great national feast is the
harvest home, with its crowning ceremony of the Wedding of the Rice.
In order to approximately understand the meaning of this strange rite,
it should be borne in mind that a Javanese, similar in this respect to
the ancient Greek, believes all nature to be endowed with a semi-divine
life. To him a tree is not a mere vegetable, nor a rock a mere mass
of stone, nor the sea a mere body of water, any more than he regards
a human being as a mere aggregate of flesh, blood, and bone. A hidden
principle of life, invisible, imponderable, and powerful for good or
evil animates the seemingly inert matter. In this sense, a Javanese
believes in the _soul_ of a plant or a rock almost as he believes in
the soul of a human being. And this soul he endeavours to propitiate
with prayers, libations and offerings of fruit and flowers. Hence
the frequent altars under old waringin-trees, in which the Danhjang
dessa, tutelary genius of towns and villages, is believed to dwell.
Hence the solemn sacrifices to the Lady of the Sea, Njai Loro Kidoel,
who has her shrine on the rocky south-coast. And hence too the rites
in honour of Dewi Sri, the Javanese Demeter, whose soul animates the
rice-plant,--rites which culminate in the Wedding of the Rice.
[Illustration: A scholar.]
At every Harvest-Home this mystical ceremony, the Pari Penganten, is
celebrated; and the manner of its conducting is as follows: