After the sacking of Melaka by the Portuguese in 1511, the royal line re-moved to Johor-Riau with its progeny intact. In 1699, Sultan Maâmñd, the last of the Melaka line, was killed by one of his o‹cials. His murder had been agreed upon by all the court nobles because of his cruel ways.
Upon his demise, the bendahara assumed the sultanic throne, with the title Sultan ªAbd al-Jalôl. This move was not accepted by a number of groups. Dogged by the shadow of ill-gotten gains, the bendahara-turned-sultan was plagued by constant revolts. These upheavals became more per-sistent with the appearance of a pretender prince in Siak (across the Strait of Melaka in east Sumatra), who claimed to be Sultan Maâmñd’s son, Raja Kecik, and was supported by the Minangkabau power of West Suma-tra. Raja Kecik had been brought up at the court of the Minangkabau
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queen and thus became a vector for the projection of Minangkabau influence in the southern Strait of Melaka. Raja Kecik’s forces overran Jo-hor-Riau in 1718. He humiliated Sultan ªAbd al-Jalôl by demoting him back to the rank of bendahara and forcing himself in marriage upon ªAbd al-Jalôl’s daughter Tengku Qamariyya.
Ex-sultan ªAbd al-Jalôl’s children plotted to restore their honor and state.
At this time, the Malay lands were seeing the arrival of Buginese fighters from Sulawesi in the east, who had been displaced by wars in their home-land. In particular, five princely Bugis brothers—the Five Opu’s—played a major role in subsequent events. ªAbd al-Jalôl’s children decided to ally themselves with the Buginese Opu’s. Our main source for these events, the Buginese text The Precious Gift, or Tuâfat al-Nafôs (Raja Ali Haji ibn Ahmad 1982; Raja Haji Ahmad and Raja Ali Haji 1997), says that ªAbd al-Jalôl’s son Raja Sulaymán suggested that his sister Tengku Tengah oªer to be the wife of one of the Five Opu’s, Opu Daeng Parani, to secure their help. But the text also provides a diªerent interpretation, from the Mi-nangkabau-oriented Siak Chronicle, suggesting that “it was Tengku Ten-gah who was intent on avenging their humiliation, and it was she who conferred with Raja Sulaymán” (Raja Ali Haji ibn Ahmad 1982: 50).
The diªerence between the texts—one saying that the brother gave his sister away, the other saying that the sister oªered herself—is built on the apparent assumption that wife givers are the inferiors, as formulated in the customary relation between bendahara and sultan, and in its crude reenactment by the victor, Raja Kecik. Since the family had already been humiliated by Tengku Qamariyya’s forced marriage to Raja Kecik, the sug-gestion that her sister Tengku Tengah marry the Bugis was no longer as big an issue. The delicate manner in which The Precious Gift handles the matter suggests that large room for ambiguity exists: in an act of appar-ent capitulation may lurk an iron will that could emerge superior. Fur-ther, great kings were known to give daughters to their vassals as acts of investiture. The key point was who initiated the action.4This ambiguity opens the next step up to interpretation. Once the Bugis princes had dined,
“Tengku Tengah stood at the entrance to the guests’ gallery, opened the screen and threw down her ear stud, saying, ‘Oh, Bugis princes, if you
4. Lévi-Strauss’s ambitious comparative exercise (1969), an “as if ” thought experiment that gave bridal exchange, alliance, and hierarchy a seemingly autonomous existence, dis-tracts us from seeing the possibilities of a single marriage. For example, when the sultan of Aceh defeated the Johor sultan in 1613, he summoned the Johor royal family to his court, married his own daughter to the Johor sultan’s brother, and sent his new son-in-law home to rule Johor, under an armed guard of two thousand Acehnese (Andaya 1975: 24). Despite
are truly brave, avenge the shame of our family! When that is done, I shall willingly be your slave, and even if you ordered me to cook your rice, I would do it’” (Raja Ali Haji ibn Ahmad 1982: 50).
Opu Daeng Parani agreed to avenge their shame, and the two parties agreed to constitute a diarchic state in which one of the Bugis princes—
and their descendants—would become the Yang diPertuan Muda, the jun-ior ruler to the Yang diPertuan Besar, the Malay sultan, if the princes suc-ceeded in restoring to power the ex-sultan ªAbd al-Jalôl’s family. This marriage established the di‹cult dual system of rule in Johor-Riau for the next century, whereby the Malay senior partner was often at the mercy of his Bugis junior, even if Tengku Tengah, as sister to the sultan, was saved from cooking Buginese rice. Though ex-sultan ªAbd al-Jalôl’s fam-ily negotiated from a position of weakness, the episode demonstrates that although conducting relations through women was a means of marking subservience, women were able to use their alliance-making ability to ad-vance the interests of their families and male relations.
While Malay disunity following the regicide of Sultan Maâmñd en-abled the foreign Bugis to enter into Malay politics, the elaborate ge-nealogical basis of Malay sovereignty prevented the stronger Bugis from ruling in their own names. Force of arms was a common factor in decid-ing gross outcomes, but the complex politics of apportiondecid-ing indebted-ness, revenge, booty, sexual favor, and trust were best pursued in the sub-tle medium of kinship and a‹nity. The Bugis joined the Malay family even as they entered Malay politics, and thus began the process of their disarmament. Four generations later, the Buginese-Malay chronicler Raja Ali Haji was to sum up that process as a splicing of Malay and Buginese genealogies, the story of his family:
The story goes on to say that Raja Sulaymán had sixteen brothers and sisters, but only the following will be mentioned in this genealogy. First, Raja Sulaymán; sec-ond, Tengku Tengah; third, Tengku Qamariyya, generally known as Tengku Puan;
fourth, Tengku Mandak. It was Raja Sulaymán who became king, raised up by the Bugis princes, that is, the Five Opu’s who were Brothers. Their story will come later in this chronicle.
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the appearance of a‹nal alliance, and the gracious conversion of the Aceh sultan’s military superiority to generational precedence, the Johor princes knew full well that not only were they under guard, they were being watched from close quarters, by someone well placed to gather intimate local information and relay it abroad. Marital unions were also nodal points in overlapping circuits of information, here linked by subjugation.
Tengku Tengah became the wife of Opu Daeng Parani, and gave birth to Raja Maimunah, who married the Temenggung of Johor, giving birth to Daeng Cel-lak, Daeng Kecik and the Engku Muda. Daeng Cellak died in a gunpowder ex-plosion on a keci which he had attacked. . . .
. . . Tengku Qamariyya married Raja Kecik of Siak and gave birth to Raja Maâmñd, generally known as Raja Buang.5
Tengku Mandak married Opu Daeng Cellak and had two daughters, one named Tengku Putih and the other Tengku Hitam.
These are some of the daughters of Sultan Abd al-Jalôl whose lines were min-gled with the Bugis and Siak princes. (Raja Ali Haji ibn Ahmad 1982: 20)