Is there a Batak History?

Anthony Reid

The 8-10 million Bataks of northern Sumatra are one of Indonesia's most
important and intriguing groups. They have clearly been in Sumatra for
thousands of years. They have attracted a large number of studies of religion
and missiology, and a few good ethnological and language studies. Yet they
remain a people without history. It seems a classic case of Eric Wolf’s
argument, in Europe and the People Without History, that the neglect of the
history of such stateless people was not just an absence but a distortion.1
Ethnographers and colonial officials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
created such categories as highlanders, primitives, proto-Malays, and indeed
Bataks as ethnic categories, and assumed their unchanging isolation from the
currents of world history. But the Bataks, who were forcibly brought into the
scholarly world’s consciousness at that stage were, to follow Wolf’s argument,
already wholly transformed by international influences – their ‘isolation’ was
itself an historical process.
Ashis Nandy makes the more specific charge that it is the statelessness of
pre-modern non- Europeans that has denied them a history. In his view, my
profession -- modern secular history as practised in the academies -- is
inextricably linked as a mode of analysis with the modern nation state and its
rise. History traces the lineage and legitimacy of modern states, and distorts our
understanding of the past by doing so.2
Highland Sumatra does appear to support his case. Until the twentieth
century, the great majority of Sumatra’s people, and its complex, irrigated-rice,

*) This paper was initially delivered as a Public Lecture in the Museum Dahlem,
Grosser Vortragsraum, Berlin, in the context of an International Conference on
‘Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Highlands of Sumatra’, Freie Universität Berlin.
1
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (University of California Press,
1982), p.3 and passim.
2
Ashis Nandy , "History's Forgotten Doubles." History & Theory 34.2 (1995): 44-66.
literate societies, were in the highlands. Yet these are never mentioned in the
historical record. Virtually the only way in which Sumatra appears in histories
of either Indonesia or the wider world before 1500 (except as a visiting-point of
travellers like Marco Polo) is through Sriwijaya, thought to have ruled a large
area from its seat in Palembang between the 7th and the 10th centuries.
Concrete evidence on the ground about this state and its people is as scarce as
what we know about highland societies in a similar period. Yet because
Sriwijaya appeared as a state in Chinese and Arab records, it alone is celebrated
in the history books.
Of course I could not resist testing the coupling of “Batak” with “History”
in a Google search. Sure enough, the popular items at the top of the Googling
process revealed no books or articles on the subject, but rather items such as a
new keep-fit training apparatus called a Batak (and which seems already to
have a history), as well as a village in Bulgaria, “forever associated with the
April Uprising of 1876, one of the most heroic events in Bulgarian history”.
The Batak of Bulgaria have a history, it appears, but not those of Sumatra.
This paper was initially delivered as a Public Lecture in the Museum
Dahlem, Grosser Vortragsraum, Berlin, in the context of an International
Conference on ‘Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Highlands of Sumatra’,
Freie Universität Berlin.

HISTORIOGRAPHY
The curious absence of Batak history does indeed apply chiefly to the
history as written by academics, as Ashis Nandy might have expected. To my
knowledge only three professional historians have written dissertations in
English on Batak history. All wrote exclusively about the twentieth century,
and all regrettably remain unpublished in the original English. 34 In French
there was a unique attempt by Daniel Perret at a more comprehensive
history, albeit of the North Sumatra region rather than Bataks per se.45

3 4 Lance Castles, ‘The Political Life of a Sumatran Residency: Tapanuli 1915-1940,’

Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1972 (published in Indonesian translation in 2001);

Michael van Langenberg, ‘National Revolution in North Sumatra: Sumatra Timur and
Tapanuli, 1942-1950,’ Ph.D. dissertation, Sydney University, 1976; Masashi Hirosue,
“Prophets and Followers in Batak Millenarian Responses to the Colonial Order: Parmalin,
Na Siak Bagi, and Parhudamdam (1890-1930),’ Ph.D. dissertation, ANU, 1988
(published later in Japanese translation).
4 5 Daniel Perret, La Formation d’un Paysage Ethnique: Batak et Malais de Sumatra
Fortunately church or mission history is better served, especially in German.
The publications here include one extremely detailed history of the early Karo
mission written by anthropologist Rita Kipp.56
The general dearth of histories of any highland people in Indonesia is
reflected in the national histories of Indonesia and regional histories of
Southeast Asia. The more detailed studies may report the Christianization
and incorporation of highlanders into the colonial state at the end of the
nineteenth century, but nothing before that and almost nothing after. One of the
recent histories, that of Jean Taylor, has no mention whatever of Bataks.67
Bataks themselves have written history, though to a very limited extent in
the professional academy. The favourite topic of popular writers was, as in
many other regions, the official link between minority ethnicities and the
nationalist narrative—a ‘national hero’ sanctioned by the process
inaugurated by Sukarno in 1959. Singamangaraja XII (1845-1907) was
surprisingly the first Sumatran to make this list, in 1961, after a campaign
throughout the 1 950s by some of his descendents and affines to make him
the pre-eminent Batak hero. He was well-placed as not only the last major
resistance leader against the Dutch, hunted down and killed in 1907, but also
the scion of the dynasty to approach nearest to sacred king-like status, albeit
most respected by the Sumba group of Toba Batak lineages spread around his
western-lake redoubt of Bakkara.
The first hagiography was published in 1951 by Adniel Lumban Tobing,
who was also the leading figure in a festive reburial of his remains and the
erection of a statue in his honour in the Toba Batak heartland, at Tarutung, in
1953.78 Further writing in this genre was stimulated by the success of this
campaign in having Singamangaraja XII declared an Indonesian national
hero in 1961, and a huge statue erected in his honour in Medan (marking the
Toba Bataks’ definitive arrival in the regional capital). Mohammad Said was
one of the pioneers to build on Tobing’s slim work by marrying Dutch
sources with local legend. 89 Among a plethora of speculative works which

Nord-Est (Paris: Presses de l’EFEO, 1995).

5 6 Rita Smith Kipp, The Early Years of a Dutch Colonial Mission: The Karo Field

(Ann Arbor: The Universityof Michigan Press, 1990).

6 7 Jean Taylor, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2003).
7 8
Adniel L. Tobing, Sedjarah Si Singamangaradja I-XII (Medan: Firman
Sihombing, 4th ed. 1957).
8
Mohammad Said, Singamangaradja XII (Medan: Waspada, 1961).
followed, the book of Professor Bonar Sidjabat of the Jakarta Theological
Seminary sought to establish Singamangaraja’s credentials in the
Indonesian academic world.910
The increasing role of Singamangaraja XII in Toba Batak popular self-
identification was based largely on this success on elevating him to the official
national pantheon, and therefore into the national textbooks read by all
Indonesian school-children. For later generations educated in Indonesian
national schools, he became the sole Batak historical figure. His lineage,
although historically shadowy before the nineteenth century, could also
represent a simulacrum of a state, a key for later Batak intellectuals to try to
read the ‘state’ back into their earlier history.
In the 1957 reissue of his original 1951 book, Adniel Tobing put a version
of this legendary lineage into print, beginning with the miraculous virgin
birth of the progenitor of the line.1011 The imaginative engineer Mangaradja
Parlindungan took speculation of this kind to new heights in his 1965 book,
Tuanku Rao, of which more later. Batara Sangti, a Toba Batak government
official (wedana) who had accepted the task in the 1 950s of writing an
‘official’ history of Singamangaraja XII, finally produced his book well after
Parlindungan’s, in 1977. This was the first book to call itself a ‘Batak
History’, and was hailed by its publisher with the words, “until this time it
can be said that there was no book of ‘Batak History’ of a general and
complete kind, which was on a level with the histories of the kingdoms that
formerly existed in the northern Sumatra region and/or Indonesia”.1112 He
took the portentous step of providing dates for these shadowy figures, by the
simple device of allowing thirty years between the birth dates of each of the
twelve. By this means ‘history’ was pushed back to the imagined birth of the
first SSM in 1515.1213
The most interesting figures in linking Batak sources with international
history-writing are two Batak intellectuals to whom we must return.
Mangaradja Parlindungan has puzzled both historians and the Batak identity
industry ever since his remarkable book Tuanku Rao was published in
1965.1314 He reconstructed Batak history based on evidence he claimed his
9
Prof. Dr. W.B. Sidjabat, Ahu Si Singamangaraja (Jakarta: Sinar Harapan, 1982.)
10 11
Tobing, Si Singamangaradja I-XII, pp.14-19
11 12
Batara Sangti, Sejarah Batak (Balige: Karl Sianipar, 1977), p.3.
12 13
Ibid., p.22.
13 Mangaradja Parlindungan, Tuanku Rao: Terror Agama Islam Mazhab Hambali di
Tanah Batak, 1816-1 833 (Jakarta: Tandjung Pengharapan, n.d.[1965]).
father and the Dutch BB-ambtenaar and Batak-kenner C. Poortman had
assembled, reconciling oral and written Batak sources, many of them
mysteriously lost for any other researchers, with the data available in
Acehnese and Dutch writing. Secondly, there was the poet Sitor Situmorang,
who began to take an interest in Batak history when in a kind of exile in
Holland in the 1970s and ‘80s. His first writings on Singamangaraja XII
were compatible with the tradition of Dutch ethnography, and to ensure the
association did not sully his credentials, he never mentioned Parlindungan
or Poortman in his work.1415 After his return to Indonesia, however, he
developed the idea of “the institution of Singamangaradja as the principle of
Toba unity”. He sought to qualify Lance Castles’ reading of
‘statelesslessness’1516 through the notion of the ritual community or bius,
150 of which were individually sovereign throughout the Toba Batak
territory, yet formed a kind of federative unity through the
Singamangaradja. He made a bold use of Batak mythology to construct what
he called “The socio-political history of an institution from the 13th to 20th
centuries.”1617

‘BATAK’ IN THE HISTORICAL RECORD

Historians are anxious to find voices that speak directly from a
vanished past rather than through the medium of multiple generations of
memory. Inscriptions and archaeological evidence from within, and the
information of travellers from without, are their preferred keys to the proto-
historic past. There is no doubt that we are at a terrible disadvantage in
this respect with highland peoples such as those in Sumatra. Tomé Pires,
our most reliable recorder of all manner of states and societies in sixteenth-
century Southeast Asia, merely records “There are many heathen kings in
the island of Sumatra and many lords in the hinterland, but, as they are not

14 15
Sitor Situmorang, ‘The Position of the Si Singamangarajas from Bakkara in
Relation to the Three Main Marga-groups: Borbor, Lontung, and Sumba,’ in Cultures and
Societies of North Sumatra, ed. Rainer Carle (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987),
pp.221-33.
15 Lance Castles, ‘Statelessness and Stateforming tendencies among the Bataks

before Colonial Rule,’ in Pre- Colonial State Systems in Southeast Asia: The Malay
Peninsula, Sumatra, Bali-Lombok, South Celebes, ed. Anthony Reid and Lance Castles,
(Kuala Lumpur: MBRAS, 1979), pp.67-76.
16
Sitor Situmorang, Toba Na Sae: Sejarah Lembaga Sosial Politik Abad XIII-XX
[1993], (2nd ed., Jakarta: Komunitas Bambu, 2004), p.20 and passim.
trading people and known, no mention is made of them”.1718
As with all shadowy protohistories, the question arises with Batak
whether we are on safer ground tracing the history of a place, the domain
currently dominated by the six major Batak ethnolinguistic groups of
today’s North Sumatra province, or of a people called Batak or
identifiable in some other way. And if the latter, what does this concept
mean before the period of national self-definition in the twentieth century?
In terms of place, physical remains have so far offered us three major
urban complexes in the North Sumatran area prior to the Islamization of
coastal ports. All must have been important gateways for the trade of the
interior highlands, though on the borders of what is thought to be Batak
territory today. Starting with the oldest, they are:
 The camphor and benzoin port of Barus on the west coast, flourishing
from the 8th to 13th centuries, and recently excavated by a French-Indonesian
team led by Claude Guillot;1819
 The Buddhist temple complex of Padang Lawas, near the upper
Baruman River in the south, which dates from the 11th to 14th centuries. The
ruins lie as far from the sea as one can be in North Sumatra, in what is an
unproductive grassland in modern times, but is at a low point in the Bukit
Barisan mountain range which may have been a transit route for early
traders.1920
 The east coast port of Kota Cina, near Medan, which flourished from the
12th to 14th centuries, and must have had a role in the presumably Karo-Batak
kingdom of Aru, a major maritime and piratic power from the 13th to 16th
centuries.2021
While archaeology remains in its infancy in this area, it is safe to
conclude that these would have been sites through which Indian (especially),

17
Sitor Situmorang, ‘The Position of the Si Singamangarajas from Bakkara in
Relation to the Three Main Marga-groups: Borbor, Lontung, and Sumba,’ in Cultures and
Societies of North Sumatra, ed. Rainer Carle (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987), pp.221-
33.
18
Claude Guillot (ed.), Histoire de Barus, 2 vols. (Paris: Association Archipel, 1998-
2003).
19
This point is made by Miksic in Ancient History: Indonesia Heritage (Singapore:
Editions Didier Millet, nd [1996]), pp. 98-9.
20
A.C. Milner, E. Edwards McKinnon, and Tengku Luckman Sinar, ‘A Note on Aru and
Kota Cina’, Indonesia 26 (1978), pp. 1-42.
Chinese, Javanese and other influences entered the Bataklands at this time,
if not before. Kota Cina is usually associated with the influx of Hindu
elements among the Karo, and Barus among the Toba Batak. But Padang
Lawas remains mysterious, and the new work there may prove it to be a
more important key to a state-forming ‘path not taken’ .2122

The only element of ‘Batakness’ spectacular enough to be noted in the

earliest sources is their cannibalism. Foreign sources note its presence in
Sumatra long before the appearance of the term ‘Batak’ or any other feature
which could be identified with it. Ptolemy was the first, around 100 CE, to
record the presence of cannibalism in what he identified as an island cluster
of Barusae, presumably Sumatra. Following him a long series of Arab, Indian
and European sources, including Marco Polo, attest to the existence of
cannibalism in the island, including on its more accessible north coast. Nicolo
da Conti was the first European, in 1430, to use the term Batak (Batech) for
this cannibal population in Sumatra.2223
The term Batak appears even earlier in Chinese sources, but as a polity or
place, not a people. Chau Ju-kua (1226) has an obscure reference to Bo-ta as
connected with Sriwijaya, while the Yuan (Mongol) dynastic chronicle
mentions Ma-da next to Samudra (Pasai), both offering tribute to the
Imperial court in 1285-6. Ma-da would be pronounced Ba-ta in Hokkien, the
likely language of Chinese trader informants.2324
This thirteenth-century Bata appears to have survived to the beginning
of the sixteenth century, the first great watershed in Batak self-definition
because of the confrontation with Islam. About 1515, before the rise of Aceh,
Tomé Pires described a loosely Muslim kingdom in the same area.
The kingdom of Bata is bordered on one side by the kingdom of Pase
and on the other by the kingdom of Aru (Daruu). The king of this country is
called Raja Tomjano.2425 He is a Moorish knight. He often goes to sea to

21
A Franco-Indonesian team led by Daniel Perret has commenced excavations at Padang
Lawas, which may at last shed more light on this complex.
22
“In ejus insulae [Taprobana=Sumatra], quam dicunt Batech, parte, anthropophagi
habitant..”, cited in Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson (new ed. New Delhi, 1979),
p. 74.
23
I owe this point to Geoff Wade.
24
This title may be the same as the Timorraja (‘eastern king’) in the title of the king
reputedly encountered by Pinto around 1540; The Travels of Mendes Pinto, transl. Rebecca
Catz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 20.
pillage. He is the son-in-law of the king of Aru. He brought in the ship Frol
de la Mar which was wrecked in a storm off the coast of his country, and they
say he recovered everything water could not spoil, wherefore they say he is
very rich.2526
Pires’ most specific geographical information is that this Batak
possessed the sources of petroleum in the Tamiang-Perlak area, later a
precious resource for Aceh. The fact that the king was listed as Muslim and
a son-in-law of the Aru king, also in some sense Muslim, indicates that the
religious situation was still fluid, the inhabitants of the island recognised
themselves by place rather than ethnicity or religion, and that the natural centre
for state-like formations for the interior peoples was at their points of
connection with maritime trade. But Pinto did not list this presumably hybrid
Karo state as cannibalistic; that honour was reserved for the west coast area
above Singkil.2627
For Mendes Pinto writing of 1539, northern Sumatra had been
transformed by the expansion of Aceh along the north coast, swallowing
whatever kingdoms there were between its Banda Aceh centre and Aru. This
militantly Islamic character of this expansionism was vividly described by
Pinto, but is also evident in other Portuguese, Turkish and Acehnese sources
on the sixteenth century confrontation between an Aceh-led commercial
coalition and the Portuguese, with whom were associated both non-
Muslims and kingdoms like Aru whose Islam had rested lightly on the
ruling court.2728 This confrontation seemed already to have turned the term
Batak definitively into a description of a people; a people defined by their
resistance to Islam in this militant new form. But it was still a people with a
king, “the King of the Bataks”, whose capital was at Panaju, now on the
west coast, about 8 leagues (50 km) up a river Pinto calls Guateamgim.2829
This was presumably one of the west coast rivers to the south of Singkil
giving access to the camphor and benzoin land west of Lake Toba. The
capital’s name Panaju is reminiscent of the kingdom of Pano (Pão)

25
Tomé Pires, pp. 145-6.
27
26
Tomé Pires, p. 163.
27 28
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, pp. 20-49. Anthony Reid, An
Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore:
Singapore University Press, 2004), pp. 69-93; Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia
in the Age of Commerce, c.1 450-1 680 (Yale University Press, 2 vols., 1988-
93), II: 143-50
28 29
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, pp. 20-25.
mentioned in the same area by Pires.2930
Pinto makes his story of the Bataks a tragic one, with a king first
refusing the offer of Islam and determining to fight the Acehnese sultan,
then making a treaty and marriage alliance with him, which the sultan
treacherously broke by attacking and killing his sons. The Batak king then
assembled a major alliance of local chiefs to fight the Acehnese, whose
Turkish reinforcements however proved too much for him. He then retreated
far up the river.3031
This appears to mark the last of coastal ‘kingdoms’ associated with
Bataks either by name or life-style. The ports were hereafter all Muslim to
some degree, and the people of the uplands who resisted the Acehnese jihad
were called Batak by them. Thus Barros, writing in mid- century, could
report that Sumatra is inhabited by two kinds of people, moros [Muslims]
and gentios [heathens]; the latter are natives, while the former were
foreigners who came for reasons of commerce and began to settle and
populate the maritime region, multiplying so quickly that in less than
150 years they had established themselves as senhores [lords] and began
calling themselves kings. The heathens, leaving the coast, took refuge in
the interior of the island and live there today. Those who live in the part of
the island facing Malaca are called Batas. They are the most savage and
warlike people in the whole world; they eat human flesh.3132
The definition of Bataks as being those who resisted Islam and
continued to eat pork was shared by a seventeenth century Aceh text, the
Hikayat Aceh. It twice mentions Batak as an ethnic group. In a succession
conflict of the 1 590s it portrays a rebel prince stopping at Barus on the way
to challenge his brother at the capital, and recruiting two upriver Batak datu
(healers), “skilled in the arts of sorcery (sihir) and magic (hikmat)”, who
successfully caused the king to become sick.3233 A second incident is more
surprising, portraying the young Iskandar Muda encountering ‘an old
Batak’ on a hunt for a wild buffalo, who tricked the prince into giving him

29
Pires p. 410 (Portuguese text). In his English translation, p.163, Cortesão gratuitously
rendered Pão as Barus, declaring it “obviously a transcriber’s mistake”.
30
31The Travels of Mendes Pinto, pp. 20-30.
31
32 Barros, João de, Da Asia (Lisbon: Regia Officina, 1977, reprinted Lisbon 1973),
Decada III,Livro V, cap. 1, p. 509.
32
33 De Hikajat Atj eh, ed. Teuku Iskandar (‘s-Gravenhage, Martimnus Nijhoff, 1958), p.
92.
a sword and kris, and then scampered off into the forest.3334 This
presumably says nothing about ethno-linguistic identity, but means only that
there were still villagers unincorporated into the Aceh state and religion very
close to Banda Aceh, and that such people were called ‘Batak’. This became
in succeeding centuries a definition that many Bataks accepted. Nineteenth-
century witnesses assert that when Minahassan missionary teachers, and
Chinese traders, penetrated into Batak areas for the first time they were also
considered Batak, since they ate pork.3435

“ISOLATION” OF THE LONG 18TH CENTURY

The aggressive expansion of Islamic Aceh in the period 1520-1630, at
the expense of all the varied coastal states, ensured a separation not only
between Bataks and Islam, but also between Bataks and the port-states of
the coast. Batak “statelessness” can be dated from this period, when states
came to be associated by Batak with an aggressive ‘other’. This
statelessness was however qualified. The Karo and Simalungun on the east
coast, and the Toba Batak on the west, each preserved from the earlier
period a certain memory of state, often linked through tradition with Aceh.
Thus the four Sibayak who had a certain ritual primacy in the Karo area, and
the four Raja who held a somewhat stronger position in the Simalungun area,
were popularly believed to have been inaugurated during the period of
Aceh hegemony over the coast.3536 Parlindungan claims Toba sources from
Bakkara chastised the Karo and Simalungun for erecting their own states and
thereby falling away from the Sori Mangaradja dynasty, but it is very doubtful
there was ever such a sense of common identity among the different ethno-
linguistic groups.
Many Toba Batak traditions also linked a principal of sacred descent
with the coastal kingdoms they remembered – Aceh and Barus. The latter
was long recognised as a crucial port for Toba Batak, and therefore some
ritual tribute was to be expected. Joustra was struck by the surprisingly
uniform set of traditions about the Barus link with Bakkara and the

33
34 Ibid. pp. 186-7.
34
35 Daniel Perret, La Formation, p. 60.
35
36 M. Joustra, Batak-Spiegel (Leiden: van Doesburgh, 1910), p. 23; Rita Kipp,
Dissociated Identities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 215-17; Simon
Rae, Breath Becomes the Wind: Old and New in Karo Religion (Dunedin: University of
Otago Press, 1994), pp. 63-4.
Singamangaraja line,3637 though I will present it here in the form of the Barus
Hilir chronicle edited by Jane Drakard. This describes the journey of the
founder of the Muslim dynasty of Barus Hilir, Sultan Ibrahim, through the
Batak territories prior to establishing his kingdom on the coast. First in
Silindung, and then at the Singamangaraja’s sacred place of Bakkara, and
finally in the Pasaribu territory, the local chiefs pleaded with him to stay and
become their king. At Bakkara he urged the Bataks to become Muslim, because
then they would be one people (bangsa) with him and he could stay as king.
The Bataks responded apologetically, “We do not want to enter Islam.
Whatever else you order we will obey”. He therefore moved on, but not before
fathering a child by a local woman, who became the first Singamangaraja. In
each place agreements were sworn to by both sides, establishing the long-term
relationship between upland Batak producers on one hand and coastal Malay
traders on the other. These included establishing the ‘four penghulu’ of
Silindung as a supra-village institution linked to the Barus trade.3738
Since Barus and other ports on the west coast were themselves
frequently under Aceh suzerainty, it is not surprising that Aceh also
figured in Batak memory. Its ritual preeminence over the Singamangaraja
line was acknowledged in various ways in the better- known nineteenth
century, including the Singamangaraja’s seal and flag, both of which
appear modelled on those of the Aceh Sultan (see fig. 1). This link,
mythologised in the mysterious Batak progenitor-figure Raja Uti who
disappeared to Aceh, may go back to the sixteenth or seventeenth century
links.
For Parlindungan, however, and the Batak manuscripts of the ‘Arsip
Bakkara’ he claims as a source, there was another powerful connection with
Aceh in the late 18th century. He claims that these documents reveal a treaty of
friendship between the otherwise unknown Singamangaraja IX and Sultan
Alauddin Muhammad Syah, known to have ruled Aceh uneasily from 1781 to
1795. The treaty purportedly agreed that Singkil was Acehnese, the Uti Kanan
(Simpang Kanan?) area Batak, and Barus a neutral zone. But the Acehnese
cannon which sealed the deal caused such havoc among some elephants at
Bakkara that Singamangaraja IX was killed by one of them.3839
As so often with Parlindungan’s fanciful stories, there seems to be

36
37 Joustra, Batak-Spiegel, pp. 25-26.
37
38 Jane Drakard, A Malay Frontier: Unity and Duality in a Sumatran Kingdom
(Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1990), pp. 75-80.
38
39 Parlindungan, Tuanku Rao, pp. 486-7.
something of substance in this. In the 1780s, the Singkil area was
developed for pepper-cultivation, and the limits of Acehnese control
became an urgent concern. Acehnese raided the British outstation of
Tapanuli (Sibolga) in 1786, and the British responded by attacking some
Acehnese forts.3940 This was indeed a time, in other words, when Acehnese
would have sought to lock Batak suppliers and traders into their networks
rather than the British ones.
Let me throw in a further fanciful vignette, if only to further undermine
what remains of the idea of Batak “isolation” during the long 18th century.
In 1858 a Frenchman or Eurasian called De Molac told a Pondicherry
newspaper that in the last quarter of the 18th century “his family settled in the
most savage part of Sumatra, established magnificent agricultural
establishments there, acquired great influence among the natives and
succeeded in reforming their customs”. The head of the family “had recently
been elected chief of the confederation of Bataks, a Malay people whose
lands border Dutch possessions and the kingdom of Aceh.”4041 While no
doubt largely invented, this story is sufficiently consistent with the
supernatural inferences drawn about 19th century visitors to the Batak
highlands, including Burton and Ward, Van der Tuuk and Modigliani, that
we should not be surprised if such a pattern began earlier.

PADRI INCURSIONS
The nineteenth century was another time of great upheaval for the
Bataklands. The Christianisation of its last three decades is rather well
documented by western and Batak writers, but the traumatic Padri invasions
remain poorly covered. By far the most detail is provided by Parlindungan, and
is therefore highly suspect. Yet this episode is so important that it demands
serious attention. Batak sources agree that some of the most militant of the
Islamic marauders who brought fires and sword to the Toba area were
themselves newly- converted Bataks. Singamangaraja X was killed by a
militant Padri they called Si Pokki, around 1830 according to most authorities.

39
40 Lee Kam Hing, The Sultanate of Aceh: Relations with the British, 1760-1824 (Kuala
Lumpur: OUP, 1995), pp. 67-75. The British record on this seems unlikely to have been
available to Parlindungan, though it may have been to his alleged source, Resident Poortman,
who he says was an official in Singkil around 1900 and in retirement made a trip to British
archives in 1937.
40
41 Le Moniteur Universel (Paris), no. 104, 4 avril 1858, page 467.
Parlindungan however puts this event in 1819, and traces the source of the
hostilities to cleavages within the Singamangaraja lineage itself, with Tuanku
Rao presented as an alienated Batak turned militant Muslim.
In any case, this event marked the historic emergence of the
Singamangaraja dynasty as a symbol of Batak unity against outside
threats. It begins a period of upheaval as these unprecedented threats assail
the mountain strongholds one after the other. And for these upheavals of the
early nineteenth century there are enough traces in the pustaha as well as
European sources to create the stuff of real historical debate.

CONCLUSION
So, is there a Batak history?
Yes, there have been some ingenious attempts by Batak authors to extend
the known story back in time to the sixteenth century, even if this has not yet
made a significant impact on the received history of the professionals. Yet even
these Batak labours remain a somewhat perverse attempt to make Batak history
more like every other civilizational story, with a respectable state to give it
meaning.
Should not the glory of the Bataks be rather their success in managing
without states, and the real challenge of the Batak historian be to show how
social and economic history could for once be written without the distorting
lens of state-imposed hierarchies?
It is not an easy task, but I believe that there is much that can be done.
Let me end with just three avenues which seem particularly promising, if
challenging.
The difficult Batak manuscripts, the pustaha. They have so far seemed
so difficult and so ahistorical as not to repay sustained effort to master
their contents. Yet the claims of Parlindungan/Poortman are so suggestive,
those of Sitor Situmorang so ingenious, that somebody ought to follow
these tracks systematically, to establish what can be known about the
connections with Islam, with Aceh and Barus, and with the east coast; what
can be said about the Padri incursion and the social upheavals they brought,
and what was the dynamic of Batak society in that century before
Christianisation.
The ‘underside’ of history can be accessed through the slaves who found
their way to Melaka, Padang, Batavia, Penang and Singapore. There is an
unfortunate avoidance of this feature by nationalist historians, though the
documents are richer on slaves than any other non-elite category. It may
well be, for example, that the Sumatran slave who accompanied Magellan
around the world, Enrique, was as much a Batak as anybody at that time.4142
Penang in 1835 counted 56 1Bataks among its population, and some did
enter into court and other records before being assimilated into Malay or
Chinese populations.4243
A fuller examination of material culture, including the textiles which
Sandy Niessen used to such effect; the systems of trade and exchange which
effectively united the coastal regions and the interior of Sumatra in an
efficient four-day market cycle;4344 and the ritual systems which helped
establish the coherence of Batak society.
By these and other means our successors may eventually reveal through
Batak history how to truly write a history without states. I wish them well.

41 42 Magellan and Pigafetta agree that Enrique was a Sumatran, purchased by

Magellan in Melaka around 1514. Yet curiously it is Filipinos and Malaysians who have
competed to claim him, never Sumatrans to the best of my knowledge.
42 43 James Low, The British Settlement of Penang (1836, reprinted Kuala Lumpur:

OUP, 1972), pp. 126, 290-91

43
44 George Sherman, Rice, Rupees and Rituals: Economy and Society Among the
Samosir Batak of Sumatra (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 36-47.