2 - Pawangs and Munshis in Muhammad’s Ricefields

Summary

In 2007, the State Museum of Negeri Sembilan printed a short Malay book entitled Adat Berpuar dan Pertahunan (Agrarian Fertility Rites and Annual Cultivation Customs). In the opening pages of this paperback, the museum chair and the chief minister of Negeri Sembilan joined the author Norhalim Ibrahim in lamenting that Malaysians had forgotten the customs (‘adat) and rice worlds of the ‘not-so-distant’ past. They claimed that Malaysians had discarded Malay values of cooperation that had formerly been imbibed along with the agrarian ‘adat of Minangkabau and other societies in Malayan history. They reminisced about a bucolic era when the ricefields of Negeri Sembilan had not yet been transformed into rubber and oil palm plantations. Ibrahim recalled an age of innocent Minangkabau peasants and the ubiquitous rice pawangs (such as the eminent Dato’ Pawang Muhd. Saleh) who had been impresarios of berpuar (an agrarian fertility rite). Ibrahim stated that, since the zenith of rice pawangs had long since passed and the memories of Minangkabau lands in Malaysia were now endangered, it was urgent to recover and preserve the religious histories of their rice worlds. This brief paperback reminds us that little has been recorded in popular media, official histories or academic publications about the everyday lives of Malay cultivators and agricultural techniques or the Islamic practices of agrarian pawangs. In their History of Malaysia, Andaya and Andaya similarly noted that Malayan historiography continues to suffer from ‘glaring gaps’ in information on the ‘life of the Malay peasant’ and ‘common people’ and on Islamic practices in rural villages. To fill in some of these gaps, this chapter recalls a history of the rice worlds of Islamic societies by investigating a corpus of texts compiled in Minangkabau lands in the Malay Peninsula.