ofthe SAME TREE

frequent and meaningful at the lower levels of identity, where people identified
with a local community.
Until perhaps the late fifteenth century, issues of identity arose principally
if not exclusively on a local level. But the situation changed dramatically when
the rantau inhabitants were confronted increasingly by self-confident and
aggressive Malayu groups along the coast. To safeguard their interests against
the coastal Malayu, the rantau communities created a larger and hence more
competitive identity of “Minangkabau.” The ethnicization of Minangkabau
was possible because of the great reverence paid to the Minangkabau rulers
of “Pagaruyung.” The first two Minangkabau kings appear to have had their
courts in Tanah Datar in the darek, and the third at an unspecified site but
with a possible jurisdiction over the coastal region. 50 In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, no matter where the particular court of a Minangkabau
ruler in the highlands, the missives were always from the “emperor” of the
Minangkabau at “Pagaruyung.” 51 The existence of a court at Pagaruyung that
retained the aura of the spiritual powers associated with Adityawarman made
the new Minangkabau identity a credible and increasingly effective one. In the
middle of the seventeenth century the Pagaruyung court proved to be a major
source of inspiration and motivation for Minangkabau everywhere. By this
time the Minangkabau highlands were no longer regarded as Malayu, since
that identity had now been firmly appropriated by the coastal kingdoms.
Pires’ informative account of the Minangkabau in his Suma Oriental
can be compared to what is known of the past to see the changes that had
occurred. According to Pires, the Minangkabau lands in the early sixteenth
century included the interior highlands of central Sumatra where the kings
lived; the east coast areas from “Arcat” (between Aru and Rokan) to Jambi;
and the western coastal port cities of Panchur (Barus), Tiku, and Pariaman.
He then writes that the lands of Indragiri, Siak, and Arcat are all part of the
“land of the Minangkabau” but all the people are Malayu. 52 Later he qualifies
that statement by stating that, though the area from Arcat to Jambi is called
Minangkabau, “it is more properly the interior.” 53 In making this distinction,
Pires was repeating the Minangkabau formulation of the “land” (darek) and
the “sea/coast” (rantau). The coast was part of the Minangkabau rantau, but
the inhabitants were Malayu because of their earlier association with the polities
called Malayu and the cultures they developed. At the time Pires made
these statements, however, there was no longer a Malayu political entity on
the east coast of Sumatra, and the former heartland of the Malayu in Palembang
and Jambi was now governed by patih appointed by a Javanese ruler.
“The people of the land of Jambi,” he observed, “are already more like the
Palembangs and Javanese than Malays.” 54
Ethnicization of the Minangkabau 91