Frontiers of Fear by Peter Boomgaard

Author:Peter Boomgaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2001-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rituals in the Nineteenth Century

For the early decades of the nineteenth century, we have the detailed and beautifully worded testimonies of two high British officials, Thomas Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd, in Java during the British Interregnum (1811–1816). Raffles called the rampog at the courts an “amusement,” as did Crawfurd, who used the term “diversion” for the tiger-buffalo fight. Raffles is the first, and possibly the only, author to state that, generally speaking, “the smaller species of the tiger” (that is, the leopard) was selected for the rampog macan.22 One is tempted to assume that real tigers had become somewhat rare in the princely states and that their use in rituals had to be restricted to the tiger-buffalo fight, or else Raffles was mistaken. Raffles also mentioned that if a tiger survived the encounter with a buffalo, he was to be destroyed in a rampog. This seems to have become the new orthodoxy, at least at the courts of Yogya and Solo. The combination is mentioned on the occasion of the visits of several Governors-General to the courts.23 Other Europeans also witnessed the combination of a tiger-buffalo fight and a rampog party at the central Javanese courts, for example, W. R. van Hoëvell (1840), Junghuhn, and J. Rigg (both 1844). In all these cases, the Residents of Solo or Yogya also were present.24

It is possible that tiger-buffalo fights and the rampog macan did not resume immediately after the end of British rule in 1816, when the territories of the central Javanese rulers had been reduced considerably. Just prior to his departure, Raffles had witnessed both ceremonies in Yogya in January 1816. The Dutch writer J. Olivier, who came to Java in 1817, also mentioned them, but he seems to have copied Raffles’s History. When the Dutch traveler J. B. J. van Doren visited Solo in 1822, he was present during a conversation between the Susuhunan and the Resident. When the latter mentioned the rampog macan, which had not been performed for a number of years, the Susuhunan promised to stage one.25

Tiger rituals continued to spread to Regency capitals outside the princely states. As in 1798, however, they constituted only one item in a range of possible “amusements” and very seldom were part of the by-now classic combination of a tiger-buffalo fight followed by a rampog macan. Apart from the Regencies of the north coast and eastern Java, where these rituals were recorded in 1798, they now were also mentioned in many other Regencies, including those that had come under direct Dutch rule after the Java War.26

I have found only one example of a tiger-buffalo fight followed by tiger sticking outside the Principalities, namely that in Cilacap (Banyumas) in 1858, at the arrival of the new Resident of Banyumas. It is not clear whether this ceremony was organized by the regent or by the European officials.

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