ofthe SAME TREE

uler of Campa is nursed with the milk of the wives of his various subject raja
(“kings” or chiefs) and ministers. 114 The practice of having a child nursed by a
lactating woman other than the birth mother appears to have been common
enough to have warranted a comment in the early seventeenth-century work
from Aceh, the Taj al-Salatin. Parents are told to be circumspect in selecting
a “milk mother” since the child would absorb her character. 115 The belief in
the power of milk is also captured in the Salasilah Melayu dan Bugis, where
the milk of Engku Raja Fatimah is described as being so powerful that a child
nursed at her breast acquired special fortune (bertuah). 116 The close bond of
the milk mother and the child is made evident in an episode in the Hikayat
Hang Tuah. When slander causes the ruler of Melaka to banish Hang Tuah, the
latter flees to Indrapura. To regain the favor of the ruler, Hang Tuah attempts
to convince Tun Teja, the daughter of the ruler of Indrapura, to become the
ruler of Melaka’s bride. He therefore succeeds in being adopted by Tun Teja’s
milk mother as the best means of gaining privileged access to the family. 117
The strength of the relationship between the child and the milk mother motivated
a Jambi ruler to act instantly to assure the release of his children’s former
wet nurses detained in Melaka. 118
The significance of lactation relationships is clearly established in Islam.
Among the most popular of Islamic scholars among the Malays was the Sufi
philosopher al-Ghazzali (1058–1111). His Ihya’ Ulum al-Din would certainly
have been known in religious circles in the Malayu lands and the information
disseminated to the rest of the population. In the twelfth book of his work
Kitab Adab al-Nikah (Book on the Etiquette of Marriage), al-Ghazzali lists a
number of legal restrictions on prospective brides, one of which is a woman
who had been nursed by the same mother as the intended groom. The reason
is that in Islam the sharing of a mother’s milk is considered to have established
a sibling blood relationship. 119 A pronouncement by such an eminent
and popular Islamic scholar in the Malayu world would have encouraged the
use of lactation as another strategic means of creating an extended kinship
network. Equally important would have been the examples from Mughal
India, a Muslim kingdom that was one of the most illustrious in the world in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Because the act of feeding the divine
royal child was of such great importance, milk mothers had to be “eventempered,
spiritually-minded nurses.” Multiple milk mothers created close
links between the royal family and the noble families of the wet nurses. 120
In the Malayu world, too, outsiders could be incorporated into the family
through lactation relationships.
Bonds created through mother’s milk greatly enhanced the opportunity
to create larger and more effective kinship units. A child provides the family
with an opportunity to advance its fortunes by eventually marrying him or
74 Chapter 2