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Chapter 9. The Island of Bangka
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9 The Island of Bangka This chapter discusses the performing arts of Bangka’s four main musico-lingual subgroups: the Bangka Malays, the Suku Lom forest-dwellers, the Suku Sekak sea-boat-dwellers, and the Bangka Chinese Indonesians.1 According to some performing artists and community elders whom I interviewed on Bangka in 1981 and 1994, today’s Bangka Malays are descendants of former Bangka Malay chiefdoms,2 while the Suku Mapur or Suku Lom (where lom means belum [BI], i.e., “those who do not yet adhere to a world religion”) are animists who prefer to live in relative isolation in the forests, and the Suku Sekak are also animists who, like other Orang Suku Laut (Sea Peoples), prefer to live in boats at sea when the weather permits. The Bangka Malays, the Suku Lom, and the Suku Sekak speak varieties of Malay, while the Chinese Indonesians normally speak varieties of Hakka or Hokkien as well as Malay. The artists and elders also recognized that Bangka’s artistic history is linked to the exploitation of its rich natural tin and pepper plantations. As vassals of the sultans of Palembang in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, the former small Malay chiefdoms in Bangka were forced to assist the sultans and later the Europeans (the British and the Dutch) in their exploitation of Bangka’s tin and cash crops.3 However, they practiced their own adat-based customs, legends, music, and dance, and they bartered forest and sea products with the Suku Lom and the Suku Sekak respectively. It is widely believed that these two so-called Suku Terasing (B.I., “Isolated Peoples”) originally fled deep into the forests or out to sea to escape the endemic piracy and slave trade Kartomi_Text.indd 204 6/15/12 2:29 PM 9. The Island of Bangka 205 that operated along the coast until the late nineteenth century, and that by resisting attempts by the Dutch and later Indonesian governments to settle and “civilize” them, they have maintained at least some of their customs and arts to this day. The Chinese Indonesian culture, on the other hand, is maintained by the descendants of the Hakka- and Hokkien-speaking immigrants brought to Bangka to work in the tin mines and pepper plantations from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Bangka’s population has a greater proportion of Chinese Indonesians than any other part of Sumatra (Census 2001). Bangkan performing artists are proud of their cultural identity, expressed through their unique musico-lingual mix. They recognize the affinity between some of their Malay songs and dances and their counterparts in the Riau Islands and east-coast North Sumatra, and that they share a few genres—such as Dul Muluk theater and tanjidor brass-band music—with South Sumatra to their west. However, some Bangkans are hesitant to emphasize the latter link (Sakai 2003) because of their perception that the sultans in Palembang collaborated with the Dutch to exploit their resource-rich island, and that they also received the short end of the economic and political stick when they were still part of the Indonesian province of South Sumatra. Bangka and its twin island of Belitung broke away from South Sumatra in 2001, when they were reconstituted as the separate Province of Bangka-Belitung. To understand how Bangka’s four musico-lingual subgroups came into being it is necessary briefly to consider the history of foreign exploitation of their tin and cash crops by the sultans of Palembang (seventeenth–eighteenth centuries), Britain (1812–16), Holland (ca. 1817–World War II), and Indonesia (1949 to the present). Historical Background The existence of Bangka’s rich tin reserves was known from the late seventeenth century or earlier (B. Andaya 2003, 185), when Bangka’s Malay chiefdoms were vassals of the sultan of Palembang (Smedal 1989, 10) and were handling forest and sea products collected by the Suku Lom and the Suku Sekak (Muh. Tanjung, pers. comm., 1987). When the first European settlers arrived in the late seventeenth century, they found the island to be sparsely populated (Wertheim 1964, 43–45). From the 1720s onward, Palembang’s Sultan Mahmud controlled Bangka’s tin commerce via a network of Chinese Indonesian traders who had allied themselves with both his and Jambi’s royal families (B. Andaya 1993, 184–91). These traders brought in an influx of skilled Hakka tin miners from Yunnan, western Borneo, and other parts of Southeast Asia, especially in the 1740s. The great majority of the four thousand...