Stories from Deli

Anthony Reid, DELI-LANGKAT-SERDANG: THE OPULENT SULTANATES,1920-30s

Prior to the devastating invasion of the foreign plantations East Sumatra had been the home of a primarily agricultural population of coastal Malays, and Karo and Simalungun Bataks. It was the three Malay statelets of Deli, Langkat, and Serdang, in the tobacco-growing area, which experienced first and most intensively the impact of this alien economic monster. The contradictions inherent in Dutch indirect rule were nowhere more acute than in these three wealthy sultanates. As the twentieth century progressed, bringing ever greater government centralization on the one hand and an increased theoretical emphasis on localized ‘self-rule’ on the other, these contradictions became ever more pressing. Both planters and government officials had found the Malay sultanates extremely convenient in the first half-century of western development. The planters obtained very advantageous terms for their concessions, and found the system of bribes and perquisites with which they kept the goodwill of the Malay elite much cheaper than the taxation of a modern government structure. For government, the rajas provided not only the basic pretext for a Dutch presence, but an inexpensive intermediary to the baffling complexity and autonomy of Batak social structure, and an invaluable shield with which to cloak the more unpopular government measures—in particular those directed against the demands of the national movement. Yet the Dutch B.B. (Binnenlandse Bestuur—the European administrative service) constantly judged the ‘loyalty’ of the sultans in terms of their immediate implementation of Dutch suggestions in all matters of importance to the central government—a category which expanded steadily.

In a bureaucracy as extensive as the B.B. there was no place for the degree of symbolic deference British Residents paid to the sovereignty of their sultans in Malaya. The big three East Sumatra rulers had a number of advantages, however, over most of their colleagues in either Netherlands India or Malaya. Their Political Contracts allowed them autonomous administrative and juridical structures of completely aristocratic-Malay composition, with full nominal responsibility in a number of areas. One of these areas was land, which of course explained the special concern of the estates for the welfare of the rulers. By paying large sums to the rulers personally as persen tanah when each land concession was made, the estates ensured that the annual rental was fixed very low. A good example of the advantage the estates drew from the sultanates was the debate of the 1930s over the terms on which the plantations would have their land under the new erfpacht (long lease) regulations. Although the estates had been accustomed to paying a minimal rent of f. 1.42 per hectare, the Agricultural Affairs Department estimated at the beginning of the debate that f.25 per hectare per year would be fair return for such productive land. By 1937, the planters’ organizations had succeeded in persuading the pliable Sultans of Deli and Langkat to accept a figure of f.3.50. Although the then Resident found this rather low, he was not prepared to support the higher demand of the ‘troublesome’ Sultan of Serdang, the sultans having so little sense of the value of money.17 Soon after, the Resident discovered to his indignation that the tobacco companies had undertaken to show their appreciation of the attitude of the Sultans of Deli and Langkat by financing their visits to Europe to the extent of f.85,000 each. As a planters’ representative said in defence, this was simply ‘the policy followed by the tobacco enterprises towards the sultans for years’.18 The enormous wealth which flowed from this symbiotic relationship with the estates was another guarantee that the rulers would remain too visible to be pushed aside lightly. Even after the distinction was established between the landschapskas (treasury) of each statelet and the personal income of its rulers, a large percentage of the royalties from estates and (in Langkat) from oil continued to flow to the sultans and their datuks. In 1915 39.2 per cent of the revenue of Deli, 37.9 percent ) that of Langkat, and 51.9 per cent that of Serdang went personally to the sultans and their chiefs, in the form of official allowance plus their large share of the royalties. This compared with 16.1 per cent and 10.9 per cent respectively for Simalungun and the Karoland, whose rajas were under the Korte Verklaring (Short Declaration).

Even in 1928 Dutch efforts had brought the proportions down only to a little less than a third of the revenues in each case. The wealthiest of the sultans, Tuanku Machmoed of Langkat, with the advantage of the oil royalties from Pengkalan Brandan, had a personal income of f.472,094 in 1931, while Sultan Amaloedin of Deli received f. 184,568 and Sultan Soeleiman of Serdang f.103,346.21 Such wealth enabled the rulers to maintain the lavish palaces, the fleet of limousines (Sultan Machmoed had thirteen in 1933, and an unused launch), the racehorses, the receptions for influential Europeans, the tours to Europe, and the army of dependent aristocratic relatives, which kept them before the public eye as true monarchs, making up in kemuliaan (majesty) what they lacked in power.

The dissatisfaction of Indonesian ‘intellectuals’ from other regions over the conservatism and extravagance of the rulers could be dismissed as the grumblings of foreigners. For the immediate Malay and Karo subjects of the sultans there was little cause for complaint.

The Malays in particular, numbering only 40,451 (18.57 per cent of the population) in Langkat and 61,953 (14.35 per cent) in Deli-Serdang in 1930, had a close and comfortable dependence on their rulers and on the tobacco estates. They had not disputed the right of their rajas and datuks to alienate land to the estates in the early days, nor had they been disappointed in the share of the proceeds they received.

All the contracts had clauses providing that each family living within the area of the concession should be allocated 4 hectares, or in later concessions 4 bahu (2.8 hectares), on a shifting basis for their own crops. In practice the tobacco estates tended to ignore this clause, preferring to plant where it suited them throughout the concession. So precious was the unique Deli wrapper leaf that the planters were prodigal with the land, convinced that any one plot should be planted in tobacco no more than once every eight or nine years. This rotation system allowed the estates to turn over the fields from which tobacco had been harvested for one year’s cultivation of food crops, before they reverted to fallow for the intervening six or seven years. Each family was allotted each year a jaluran of 0.6 hectare of this ‘heavily fertilized, beautifully prepared, and generally superior land’.

Such a plot could provide a generous harvest of 600 gantangs (1920 kg) of rice for a minimal amount of labour.23 The opportunity to receive jaluran in this way reduced interest among Malay farmers in the 4-hectare (or 4-bahu) lots, on which much more preparation and attention would have been required for a usually smaller crop. Those Malay farmers who continued to enjoy these lots as well either used them as orchards or leased them to Chinese or Javanese.

In the early freewheeling days of the estates prior to 1920 it was only the jaluran which were in demand, and any objections could be met by a more generous allocation of the prepared plots especially to influential chiefs or ulama. Later acts of concession wrote the provision of jaluran into the obligations of the estates. The tax burden on subjects of the major sultanates was also relatively light. Most aristocrats were exempt from herendienst, and the rulers did not usually press it on subjects for whom it was a burden. For Malays content with their traditional lot, the estates had made life both secure and comfortable. But dependence had sapped many of the habits and talents required in the new commercial economy of the region. By the late 1920s, when virtually all the land in the Malay areas of the three sultanates was occupied by estates, jaluran were almost the only form of Malay agriculture. There was scarcely any planting of cash crops or intensive rice cultivation in irrigated fields. Few parts of Indonesia showed such a complete dearth of Indonesian buyers, middlemen and exporters. Small trade was overwhelmingly in Chinese hands.

As the population of the tobacco area grew by natural increase and immigration from less favoured parts of the residency, it became harder for the estates to meet all the demands for jaluran. The reduction of planting during the depression years, and consequent reduction of jaluran, threw the whole system in the balance. The estates now made clear that they wished to withdraw from the increasingly troublesome jaluran distribution altogether, even though there was scarcely enough land available to provide the alternative of 4 hectares to which they were bound. Having long seen themselves as the most privileged community of the region by reason of their close and comfortable clientship to the rulers, the Malays discovered they were also the most vulnerable, facing an uncertain future without the land, the talents, or the power the situation demanded.

The Karo Batak subjects of the three big sultanates (28,079 in Langkat and 37,341 in Deli-Serdang in 1930) were in a less dependent position, even though they showed an equal enthusiasm for tobacco jaluran where they could obtain them. The Karos were overwhelmingly concentrated in the so-called dusun (literally: garden) or upland section of the three sultanates, bordering on Karoland proper. Until the coming of Dutch administration and the estates their basic socio-political unit had been the village (kuta), governed, as in other Batak areas, by members of the founding marga. A kinship link was acknowledged to the parent village (perbapaan) of a group of villages, but it was at the level of the kuta that land was controlled.

The conflict between this Karo custom and the claim of the Malay sultans to a right to alienate land anywhere in their theoretical dominions has already been discussed as the origin of the ‘Batak war’ in Sunggal in 1872. As a consequence of continuing Karo resistance to estates in the dusun the Dutch established direct contacts with them in 1888 and channelled one-sixth of estate royalties to the Karo village headmen. Some Karo villages in tobacco areas established the same dependence on jaluran as the Malays. In the higher land of the dusun perennial crops (particularly rubber) were more typical, and most Karos oscillated between casual work on the estates and shifting cultivation on their 4-hectare plots. The sultans had traditionally dealt with the Karos through datuks, who though of Karo descent had long identified themselves as Malay and Muslim. These datuks had built the rudiments of Malay-style courts near the frontier between Karo and Malay settlements, and operated independently for most purposes.

The Karos of the dusun had traded with the datuks lower down their respective rivers, and sometimes supported them in wars, without ever being directly administered by them. Dutch rule, however, having made the initial decision to include the Karo dusun within the Malay kerajaan, steadily extended the sultans’ bureaucratic and judicial sway over them. A hierarchy of Karo officials was established beneath each datuk, who in turn was subordinated to the bureaucracy of the sultanate.26 At the other end of the scale the village bond was gradually eroded, and a tendency was observed towards individual land tenure.27 One Dutch official argued that this process had gone so far that ‘the village community no longer offers a viable basis from which successfully to operate [decentralization reforms]’.

More obviously than most inhabitants of East Sumatra, the Karos of the dusun were in a volatile state of transition between traditional village loyalties and new bureaucratic or organizational ones.

Anthony Reid, The Blood and the People.