The Mandailing People ( Malaysia) ~ Digest these..

by :Abdur-Razzaq Lubis

For centuries the Mandailings, an ethnic group from the island of Sumatra, have travelled across the Straits of Malacca to seek their fortune in Malaysia. THE Straits of Malacca has never posed a barrier to human movement from Sumatra to Malaysia and vice versa. The Mandailings have been arriving in Pai Kolang, as they call Klang in Selangor, for centuries to seek their fortune and mine tin before heading back to their ancestral villages. The Mandailings in Sumatra still remember their Ompu Kolang, forefathers from Klang, today.

This picture is of Datuk Setia Raja of Batu Gajah (seated on the right of the empty chair) and his Mandailing clansmen. The `empty` seat is occupied by a rubber sheet, commemorating the fact that the Mandailings were amongst the first non-Europeans to cultivate rubber in the Kinta Valley, Perak.

In fact, the mass migration of Mandailings to Klang and other parts of Peninsular Malaysia preceded any substantial migration of Mandailings to the east coast of their own island. The latter movement only occurred in the 19th century during and after the Padri War.The early Mandailing mining areas were clustered around the two Kinta tributaries, Sungai Johan and Sungai Raya. The Mandailing miners were involved in mining, smelting and trading in tin in the Kinta Valley.De la Croix's scientific report on the potential of the Kinta valley soon attracted European mining intrerests. Raja Bilah as Penghulu of Papan was the one who guided de la Croix on the tour of Papan valley, and it was he who first showed de la Croix the mining deposits at Lahat, near Papan. The French eventually opened the Lahat French Tin Mines in 1882, which became the first European company to break the Chinese monopoly on tin production. Raja Bilah also showed a mining site in Papan to J.H. Hampton of the Shanghai Tin Mines, which was set up by a few enterprising merchants from Shanghai.

A PERMANENT HOME

When Raja Bilah first moved to Papan with his family at the beginning of 1879, he built a "rest-house" (rumah rehat) to stay in. He finally chose a hillock as the site of his permanent home when after three years of sinking holes to prospect for tin in that place "not even a coconut shell of tin ore was found." It is believed that he built his bagas godang (raja's dwelling) in 1882.

The house was probably constructed by Raja Bilah's Mandailing followers and it still stands in Papan today. It is erected on simple rectangular plan, and faces east. Built of chengal and other timbers, unplaned logs were used as beams. Simple cross latices served as vents above the windows and doors. The hipped roof, now of corrugated metal, could originally have been made from attap or some other natural material.

The design hardly reflected the architecture of Raja Bilah's homeland in Tapanuli where the chief's house and other notable buildings would have sweeping roofs with pointed ends, made of ijok. Whether or not the house has any construction details betraying the contribution of Mandailing builders is a matter for future study.

One feature, however, is conspiciously Mandailing in origin, though it may have been adapted in form. The house is raised high on brick piers, part of it over a reservoir called a tobat, now no longer in use. Fresh running water used to be conveyed from a nearby stream by means of bamboo ducts and fed to the pond. The pond water itself was used for ablution.

On the north side, a bath house was built over a platform (pelantar) with open slats over the pond. A separate area next to the pond was used for washing and this was drained by a open ditch (parit). The pond itself was filled with water lilies and fish, in particular a kind of gold fish (ikan emas), which the Mandailings serve on feast days such as the Eid-ul-fitri, Eid-ul-Adha, weddings and installations. The community would get together to clean out the tobat once a year.

In 1884, Papan was linked to the towns of Ipoh, Lahat, Batu Gajah and Kota Baharu in the Kinta Valley by means of a postal system consisting of "dak" service - relays of runners and horsemen who carried the mail - linking these towns to the outside world.

THE PAPAN MOSQUE

In 1888, the Papan mosque was completed and the first Friday prayers were held. Raja Bilah had done his duty as the leader of the Muslim community by providing the land and building the mosque. Mandailing carpenters had erected the mosque in the character of the mosques in Tapanuli. It was a large timber hall raised on piles, with a full bay for a mihrab, and a double-tier hipped roof capped by a finial. Prayers were announced by beating the drum (tabuk) followed by the Bilal calling out the azan (call to prayer).

For many years, the Masjid Papan was the only mosque in the vicinity of Papan and Muslims came from miles around to do the daily and Friday prayers. The Papan Mosque still stands today. At the author's request, the Architecture Department, University Technology Malaysia (UTM), did a measure drawing of the mosque in 1996. In 1999, the National Museum turned the mosque into a training restoration exercise for its staff.

THE RUMAH BESAR

After Raja Bilah had attained some measure of prosperity, his concern now was to ensure the long-term future of his people in Malaya. As the founder of the Sumatran community in Papan, he had not only built a mosque for his people but also allocated a piece of land on an adjacent hillock called Changkat for Muslim burial ground.
Now the next thing that had to be accomplished was to build the customary seat for the Raja, a sopo godang, a "council house", where his family would play out its role as the patron of the community. The Rumah Besar would be used for the conference of elders, for charity feasts given to Muslims, for weddings and other receptions. It also impressed the "orang putih" and raised the standing of the Mandailing community in the eyes of the other peoples.

Going by Raja Bilah's will the Rumah Besar and its contents was a family endowment or private waqf.. It is a tradition among the Mandailing chiefs, and men and women of standing to leave an ancestral home for the clan. It would serve to bring the children and descendants together during ceremonial occasions such as marriages and Muslim feasts.

The council house was to be located on the hillock right next to Raja Bilah's timber house. As Penghulu, Raja Bilah enjoyed some privileges. Apart from salaries and commissions, he would also have been given a site for his house and garden free of land rent. He may have applied for an outright grant for his house-site before building the Rumah Besar.

Before work commenced, supplications (du'a) were made. An auspicious day was chosen to start building, and a fistful of soil from the Mandailing homeland was scattered at the foundation of the mansion. Constructed mainly by Chinese craftsmen, the Mandailings chipped in in gotong-royong fashion, helping their chief put up the house. Elephants may have been used to raise the large timber beams.

The Rumah Besar Raja Bilah was a double-storey house with a tiled roof, the lower floor of brick and the upper floor of chengal timber. It had a large hall downstairs and another one upstairs which could accommodate large gatherings of people.

Its interior shows that it is different from the mansions of the rich Malay aristocracy and Chinese miners of Kinta. It has a large hall with eight-sided columns and was used as a meeting hall for all the Mandailings in Perak, and from this evidence we know that it was functionally a sopo godang. The use of eight-sided columns symbolises a community hall.

A Penghulu's office was built into the buttress wall along the side of the hillock, and this was thereafter called "Balai Penghulu". Stucccoed over the gateway leading up the side of the hillock to the mansion was the date of completion - 1896. The year 1896 was also significant to the district because the Kinta Valley Railway connecting Ipoh to the port of Telok Anson had begun operation.

The descendants of Raja Bilah have always called the council hall, Rumah Besar, but in more recent times it has come to be popularly known as "Istana Raja Bilah" (Raja Bilah's Palace) probably out of the mistaken notion that Raja Bilah was a Malay Raja and therefore his house would be an Istana.

THE RUMAH BESAR