De-territorialisation, Re-territorialisation, and the Shifting Uses of Exile

Although not writing about exile or empire, the anthropologists Josiah Heyman and Howard Campbell provide a useful analytic framework for understanding the Dutch struggle to control mobility in Aceh in their article “The Anthropology of Global Flows.” Specifically, in their critique of the idea of fixed national borders and formulation of “a processual geography” capable of interpreting how “flows [of people, capital, and commodities] can create, reproduce, and transform geographical spaces,” Heyman and Campbell outline two concepts: “de-territorialisation” and “re-territorialisation.”Footnote ¹⁰ De-territorialisation, as broadly understood by a wide variety of scholars, can be defined as flows of people, labour, or capital across the established boundaries of nations that detach cultures and identity from any specific geographic space or physical referent point. However, while Heyman and Campbell accept the idea of de-territorialisation, they critique more utopian renditions of the concept, arguing that the ability of peoples to “communicate and act across the globe” does not, necessarily, “challenge the normal functioning of nation-states” or advance the “erasure” of bounded territory. Instead, mobile flows of people can serve the power of dominant political states.Footnote ¹¹ To underscore this contention, Heyman and Campbell pair “de-territorialisation” with the symbiotic concept of “re-territorialisation.” By harnessing mobile flows of people, powerful state actors can engage in a dialectical process of weakening preexisting polities, while producing “newer” political spaces and redrawing borderlines.Footnote ¹²

Although Heyman and Campbell describe twenty-first-century flows of capital and labour, their analytical framework can also be fruitfully applied to understanding histories of exile as a dialectical process of state-building. On the one hand, European merchant companies operating across Asia from the sixteenth century deployed banishment as a tool of de-territorialisation, banishing wayward royals, convicts, rebels, or religious leaders far from their home territory to eliminate potential security threats.Footnote ¹³ Just as Heyman and Campbell suggested in their article, the mobile flow of Asian elites did not portend some halcyon process of globalisation that detached culture from bounded space in an empowering or border-crossing way, but rather served the power of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) and the British East Indies Company (EIC).Footnote ¹⁴ Specifically, this process of coerced mobility relied on distance and dislocation to realise imperial ends. In her study of exile in colonial Asia, Ronit Ricci interprets exile through a geographic continuum in which “the greater the crime or perceived threat to indigenous rulers or Europeans, the farther away the site of banishment.”Footnote ¹⁵ Clare Anderson elaborates on this argument by noting that distance was often joined with a sense of “social and cultural rupture.”Footnote ¹⁶ By coercing movement across sociocultural boundaries, European merchant companies transformed mobility into a weapon that could threaten elites with alienation and physical distance from their homes if they strayed too far from imperial objectives. Ronit Ricci goes out of her way to demonstrate that dislocation did not translate into cultural erasure with her powerful portrait of Javanese exiles forging resilient ties of politics, religion, and genealogy in Sri Lanka. Still, the sense of terror wrought by colonial actions dominated their stories of exile.Footnote ¹⁷ Expulsion far from home was something to be avoided.

In turn, this process of physically detaching Asian elites from their home cultures enabled European empires to secure leverage over local polities and to pursue the dialectical process of re-territorialisation. In the early modern period, the idea of trading companies forging new territories might seem like a misnomer. Rather than seeking to realise “a radical rearrangement” of space or “new units of organized space,” in the words of Heyman and Campbell, British, Dutch, and other European companies generally sought to operate through extant Asian kingdoms, elevating amenable contenders or family members to the throne and sometimes dividing those kingdoms, as in the case of Mataram.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet significant reconstruction belied such surface continuity. As European companies impressed the horrors of forced banishment, those rulers who remained became increasingly entangled with European trading companies, making significant concessions to forestall the possibility of their own expulsion.Footnote ¹⁹ Such concessions transformed the nature of Asian kingdoms in places like Java, and even if Europeans did not enjoy complete hegemony, many polities were in effect re-territorialised.

The advent of direct colonisation in the second half of the nineteenth century shifted this calculus of exile, de-territorialisation, and re-territorialisation. If banishment had offered a subtle way to intervene in local kingdoms for centuries, what happened when empires now sought to forge new political spaces like the “Netherlands East Indies” or “British India,” whose extensive boundaries had little precedent in Asian geographies? Often, European colonial powers intensified older tactics, continuing to operate through extant kingdoms and gradually grafting indigenous elites onto a colony-wide system of administration. However, not all local kingdoms deferred to such a vision, and resistance in some places intensified. As trading companies evolved into more formal colonial administrations in the 1800s, and empires increasingly sought to divide the globe into a bounded grid of contiguous territories, would imperial administrators continue to deploy exile as a tool for redrawing borders and re-territorialising spaces?

Re-territorialisation and the Exile of ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad al-Zahir

The Dutch-Aceh War proved an important test case for the evolution of exile as a tool for manipulating mobility. For centuries before this conflagration, the VOC had long deployed armed forces to quell rebellions and intervene in local kingdoms across its maritime empire.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, even with the repeated deployment of military coercion and exile, company officials nonetheless generally refrained from dismantling indigenous political structures altogether, preferring to shunt aside one dynastic family and replace it with another. By contrast, after Dutch colonial troops suffered an unexpected defeat during their invasion of Aceh in 1873, compelling a hasty retreat and generating negative press back in the metropole, colonial officers evinced scant patience for the local sultanate.Footnote ²¹ Perhaps reflecting a new spirit of jingoistic imperialism in Europe, General Jan van Swieten, the commander of the second Dutch military expedition to Aceh, abruptly announced a decision with little precedent in the Indies: the unilateral dissolution of the sultanate, precluding any possibility of deposing the reigning sovereign, Sultan Mahmud, for a more tractable alternative.Footnote ²² The Dutch thus prescribed the destruction of the old Acehnese sociopolitical order and its sublimation within Heyman and Campbell's new “unit of organized space,” the Netherlands East Indies.Footnote ²³ Could exile and re-territorialisation still work with no contender left to ascend a now defunct throne?

After van Swieten's declaration, the colonial government sought to realise this reimagined political geography by obliterating any Acehnese resistance to their claims of sovereignty. Troops overran the kraton palace in 1874, forcing Sultan Mahmud to flee from the capital. The elderly sultan perished from cholera amidst the tumult, prematurely thrusting his young son to the throne under the stewardship of a regent, Tuanku Hashim.Footnote ²⁴ Likewise, colonial forces launched offensives in 1875 and 1876. The sultanate, condemned to fugitive status, was in grave peril.Footnote ²⁵

This concerted effort to dismantle the Acehnese sultanate reached its culmination in 1878 with the surrender of the person who had emerged as the effective leader of rebel forces in the Sultan's absence: Sayyid ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad al-Zahir. A cosmopolitan Hadrami Arab who had established himself as a prominent leader in Aceh through his diplomatic contacts, status as a learned Muslim scholar, and overall charisma, al-Zahir marshalled the Acehnese rebels to some early victories.Footnote ²⁶ However, he soon suffered a series of stinging reversals and surrendered to Dutch authorities two years later.Footnote ²⁷ With this triumph, Dutch colonial authorities defaulted to their long-standing practice of exile, banishing al-Zahir far from Aceh to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula with a generous pension.Footnote ²⁸ This act deprived rebels of a convenient martyr while simultaneously discrediting an erstwhile hero. The Dutch legatee in Arabia, J. A. de Vicq, reported in 1886 that the ignominy of surrender and a retreat to a luxurious lifestyle in Mecca had tainted al-Zahir's reputation, ensuring that “the Acehnese who come to Mecca want from their former commander nothing at all.”Footnote ²⁹ Exile to Mecca neutralised a once dangerous rebel leader.Footnote ³⁰

Yet, while the deportation of al-Zahir deftly extricated one resistance leader, it proved less effective than previous episodes of banishment at re-territorialising Aceh. In this case, the removal of one rebel leader did not defuse political opposition or allow the Dutch to elevate a more pliant member of the Acehnese royal family to the throne. After all, the colonial regime had formally dissolved the sultanate. Instead, in the absence of any legitimate structure of local government with which to collaborate, the decision to expel a rebel leader only served to usher in a more chaotic stage of guerrilla warfare. As a political tactic, exile had always entailed significant risk as well as reward for empires, with the scholar Clare Anderson noting that the displacement of key rebels sometimes “enhanced and deepened anticolonial networks.”Footnote ³¹ Given the political void in Aceh, the removal of al-Zahir provided such an opportunity for anti-colonial networks. Many of the rebel's erstwhile followers retreated deeper into the unconquered Sumatran forests, shifting their allegiance to religious leaders (‘ulamā) like Teungku Cik di Tiro who preached Islamic “holy war” (perang sabil) against infidel colonial invaders.Footnote ³² Absent any political architecture to take advantage of al-Zahir's removal, like a compliant but legitimate sultanate, Acehnese resistance evolved into a more decentralised and ideologically driven struggle.

“Deterritorializing Effects”: Alternative Acehnese Geographies at Keumala

The de-territorialisation and forced displacement of the sultanate in 1874 would come to signal not so much the deepening of colonial hegemony, but instead, something quite different: the resiliency of alternative Acehnese geographies. Writing on exile in Eastern Indonesia, the anthropologist Timo Kaartinen argues that de-territorialisation as a tactic for transporting, mobilising, and resettling indigenous Asians across borders and space did not always benefit European empires but could also backfire. Indeed, many indigenous Asians responded to the “deterritorializing effects” of colonialism and “the loss of political and cultural sovereignty” by embracing “mobile, commercial” opportunities.Footnote ³³ One can discern such a phenomenon start to unfold in Aceh in the aftermath of invasion.Footnote ³⁴ The young fugitive Sultan Daud and his regent, formally stripped of their sovereignty and forced to retreat into upland hills beyond the fortified “Concentrated Line” perimeter, did not merely hunker down in isolation.Footnote ³⁵ Instead, the Sultan's coterie manoeuvred in a way similar to what Kaartinen described in Eastern Indonesia, operating “outside the European domain of control and developing territorialities of their own” to reconstruct a parallel state in exile.Footnote ³⁶

The full scope of the reaction against Dutch de-territorialisation efforts came into focus with the establishment of a new court (kraton) for the sultanate at Keumala in 1879, just one year after al-Zahir's exile.Footnote ³⁷ In many respects, Keumala constituted the perfect interstitial location for taking refuge from invading forces while simultaneously attempting to revive connections to the wider web of traders, sultanates, and colonial officials in the Straits of Melaka region. Dutch soldiers on land could not easily scale the rugged terrain leading up to the settlement, while modern naval steamships struggled to forge the local river. By contrast, Acehnese could easily climb well-known trails and smaller Malay vessels could navigate farther upriver. As a result, Keumala lay beyond the grasp of Dutch soldiers, but within range of the networks of Chinese, Indian, and Malay traders who could connect Acehnese resistance to the sultanates of the Malay Peninsula, the port city hubs of the Straits Settlements, and the world beyond.Footnote ³⁸

Under the leadership of the Sultan's regent, Tuanku Hashim, the sultanate moved to outflank the besieged Dutch military and to establish Keumala as a centre of alternative Acehnese mobilities through a deft blend of diplomacy, transregional trade, and military insurgency. For example, Tuanku Hashim encouraged international envoys to visit the new kraton. Delegates from Malay sultanates across the Straits of Melaka, including Johor, Kedah, Klang, and Selangor, as well as emissaries from the Ottoman Empire, trekked to the sultanate-in-hiding.Footnote ³⁹ Prominent Arab Hadrami merchants based in Singapore and Penang played a vital role not only as intermediaries in these encounters, but also as economic catalysts who funnelled the trade of Tamil Indian Muslims and non-Muslim Chinese towards Keumala. This trade, moreover, provided a dependable flow of weapons from the British Straits Settlements. Religious ulama waging “holy war” (perang sabil), including rebel figures like Teungku Cik di Tiro, flocked to Keumala to procure weapons before slipping back to the Acehnese countryside to launch guerrilla attacks.Footnote ⁴⁰

In sum, the reestablishment of the Acehnese sultanate at Keumala embodied the initial failure of exile. Acehnese leaders regrouped at the interstices of the imperial order, revived transregional connections, and revitalised religious resistance. Decreeing Acehnese sovereignty defunct or exiling one rebel leader did little to interrupt such alternative mobilities. So long as the sultanate survived and thrived at Keumala, an example of de-territorialisation gone awry, Dutch pretensions of re-territorialising Aceh within the Netherlands East Indies remained just that—pretensions.

Harnessing Mobility? Exile, Education, and the Production of a Periphery

While the reconstitution of the Acehnese sultanate represented a setback to colonial ambitions, the Dutch did not abandon pacification. After an extended stalemate, the arrival in Aceh in 1891 of the controversial Dutch Orientalist scholar of Islam, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, portended a reversal. Following Snouck's recommendations, Dutch officers combined outreach to the customary rulers known as ulèëbalang with ruthless suppression of “fanatical” Muslim ‘ulamā.Footnote ⁴¹ Arguably more vital, Snouck Hurgronje also urged military planners to strike Keumala; troops overran the de-facto Acehnese capital in 1898 and caught Sultan Muhammad Daud Syah five years later, in January 1903.Footnote ⁴² Colonial forces finally eliminated the interstitial space that had sustained alternative Acehnese geographies.

The destruction of Keumala presented the Dutch with both opportunities and daunting challenges. This conquest did mitigate the worst “de-territorialising effects” of the 1870s invasion by starting the process of unwinding the “mobile and commercial” Acehnese networks linked to the Straits Settlements. Even after Keumala's destruction, though, these connections, extending from Penang and Singapore to India and Mecca, still jeopardised the tenuous veneer of colonial authority. Sultan Daud himself now lived in the colonial capital in Aceh, a potential threat from within.Footnote ⁴³ How would the Dutch convert the destruction of Acehnese geographies into a more sustainable colonial replacement?

The scholarship on re-territorialisation suggests that part of the strategy to colonise Aceh, and a defining characteristic of modern state power, was the manipulation of mobility itself. Political actors, for example, could harness mobility to transform places like Aceh that once stood at centres of indigenous geographies into marginalised colonial peripheries.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his discussion of Asian historical contexts, Engseng Ho explains the generative possibilities of mobility for coercive projects, noting that “connections” might be “broken,” but could also “be cultivated, thickened, used, [or] abused” by various political actors.Footnote ⁴⁵ Could exile still be deployed not simply to “break” networks, but also to “thicken” new connections and consequently to “reaggregate” Aceh within their imperium?

Once the Dutch secured the submission of the fugitive sultan in 1903, colonial authorities grappled with various strategies for restoring the symbiosis of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation that had unravelled in previous decades. Beyond Aceh, exile remained a popular strategy, as British and French colonial regimes banished numerous indigenous African and Asian sovereigns.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dutch authorities, however, initially balked at the prospect of expelling the Sultan far from Sumatran shores, instead permitting the erstwhile ruler to stay in the occupied Acehnese capital of Kutaradja. It was only four years later after heated debate that Dutch officials reversed course and deported Sultan Daud to Ambon Island in Eastern Indonesia.Footnote ⁴⁷ What did this delay suggest about evolving ideas on mobility and re-territorialisation?

The reluctance to exile Sultan Daud reflects a recognition that colonial authorities needed to move beyond merely expelling a wayward leader far from home towards more intensive strategies of supervising and monitoring mobility. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European empires had dramatically escalated programmes of convict transportation, sentencing lower-class people to hard labour in far-flung locations. Clare Anderson and Anand Yang have described how the British empire mobilised convict labour to construct critical infrastructures like roads, canals, and military forts in formerly “peripheral” locations like Mauritius, the Andaman Islands, Van Diemen's Land in Australia, and Sumatra.Footnote ⁴⁸ Matthias van Rossum has recently depicted a similar process of Dutch authorities shifting convict labour around within the East Indies itself, including some five hundred to one thousand prisoners sent yearly to Aceh to help build infrastructure for pacification.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such efforts reflected an escalating investment in the management of mobility.

While mass-scale convict transportation and labour could be applied to “subalterns,” empires sought to develop other methods for systematically refashioning local elites; one of the foremost of these methods centred on education. Across the colonised world, governments sought to transform local elites into dependable agents of the state by establishing networks of schools with classrooms and chairs, chalkboards and modern pedagogy. Numerous works of scholarship, including Kelly Duke Bryant's exemplary study of schools and politics in colonial Senegal, have chronicled not only the way that education moulded local chiefs and instilled loyalty through the instruction of industry, science, and European languages, but also how local elites could leverage education for their own patronage networks and power.Footnote ⁵⁰ Modern education thus comprised, along with convict transportation, an escalation of colonial efforts to intervene in the lives of the colonised and supervise their development into loyal subjects—albeit with mixed results. Still, unlike convict transportation, mobility only occasionally figured into scholarly narratives covering the disciplinary logics of colonial education.Footnote ⁵¹

The schooling of Acehnese elites provided one example of colonial authorities seeking to merge the logics of exile and education into a more intensive form of re-territorialisation. After the authorities declined to expel the Sultan in 1903, they turned their attention to another indigenous elite class—the aristocracy of customary Acehnese rulers known as the ulèëbalang. In 1909, a special Dutch government commissioner named Frederik Albert Liefrinck identified this ulèëbalang class as the lynchpin of any future colonial government in Aceh, providing the basis for the division of the region into districts ruled by an individual ulèëbalang who served as a zelfbestuurder, or “autonomous ruler.”Footnote ⁵² Yet, prominent historians like Anthony Reid, James Siegel, and David Kloos have argued the ulèëbalang did not comprise a natural class of feudal lords. While they commanded respect stemming from their trading activities and their royal vassal status, they had never exercised absolute control over landed peasants, nor had they proffered absolute loyalty to the sultan.Footnote ⁵³ Dutch officials hoped this elite class might provide a malleable instrument for governing a hitherto ungovernable province.

The efforts to fashion loyal ulèëbalang subjects through education undertaken by the Dutch Advisor for Native Affairs, Godard Arend Johannes Hazeu, encapsulate a transition away from the punitive dimensions of extricating exiles towards a more aggressive approach of supervising, monitoring, and managing mobility.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hazeu's vision for reshaping the ulèëbalang pivoted upon an initiative that bore closer resemblance to the sort of educational and bureaucratic “pilgrimages” described by Benedict Anderson in his foundational work Imagined Communities than it did to older templates of exile: training schools in Java.Footnote ⁵⁵ Rather than expelling Acehnese to remote lands, Hazeu instead endeavoured to send many ulèëbalang, including some of Sultan Daud's closest advisers and even his own son, Tuanku Ibrahim, to the geographic core of Dutch colonialism, Java, and specifically to the city of Bandung.Footnote ⁵⁶ Acehnese aristocrats would then enrol in “Training Schools for Native Administrators” (Opleidingscholen voor Inlandsche Ambtenaren), where they could study the Dutch language and government.Footnote ⁵⁷ Exile had always intermingled disciplinary and tutelary logics, with the absence of banished people providing a didactic reminder to those left behind of the unfortunate fate awaiting people who did not yield to European demands. Nevertheless, training schools marked an important innovation: an attempt to use formal classrooms to mould pliable agents of the colonial state and incorporate Aceh into the colonial periphery of the “Outer Possessions” (buitenbezittingen).Footnote ⁵⁸

Advisor Hazeu's vision of education continued to rely on mobility, but in a different way than had earlier episodes of exile. Instead of parachuting indigenous rulers far from home, this colonial training sought to harness mobility to fashion affective bonds of adhesion among Acehnese to the Dutch East Indies state. Much of the scholarly literature on colonial education—apart from Benedict Anderson's work—has illuminated the nuances of schools that educated indigenous elites close to home, but otherwise rarely focused on distance and dislocation as a component of the curriculum. Advisor Hazeu's ideas provide an instructive contrast. Schooling in Aceh, Hazeu believed, would not suffice for this task. As a Javanist scholar by training with expertise in wayang shadow puppetry,Footnote ⁵⁹ Hazeu emphasised the educative dimensions of travel to Java, exposure to its culture, and concomitant social dislocation:

In other words, the “imposed” dislocation of residence in Bandung and the example of diligent Javanese peers would convert Acehnese into loyal servants of the colonial centre. Distance underpinned the formal curriculum in providing the “development” necessary for making Acehnese leaders “useful as chiefs.” While we do not have precise statistics on the number of Acehnese ulèëbalang sent to Bandung, Advisor Hazeu does report on several promising customary elites who pursued such studies.

Yet, just as Hazeu sought to revamp mobility for the imperatives of re-territorialisation, older templates of exile as punishment persisted. Most conspicuously, the Dutch designated numerous Acehnese as enemy “political exiles” subject to deportation. Many of those deportees belonged to the same class of ulèëbalang elites targeted for training, but instead found themselves consigned to social quarantine and penury. The Dutch counterbalanced education with punishment.

The training programme in Bandung highlighted the ongoing struggle to balance the disciplinary and tutelary logics involved in managing mobility—especially in the context of the mistrust bordering on outright paranoia that informed colonial decision-makers as they tried to anticipate what the Acehnese might do next and forestall a recurrence of rebellion. Ironically, the Acehnese political exiles and students often resided in the same Bandung districts. These blurred distinctions, at least partially, appeared deliberate. Hazeu expressed the hope that political exiles, through their own course of “training” by distance, might become amenable to colonial designs and even enrol in formal schools. Education for students, presumably, might feature more engaging inducements to learn within prescribed colonial bounds. Nevertheless, these officials acknowledged that once-promising students might also revert to exile status. Exile abased and humiliated. While colonial officials envisioned education and punishment as mutually reinforcing, could they navigate the inevitable tensions that followed?

Between Exile and Education: Cut Muhammad and Teungku Muhammad Tajeh

Specific case studies can elucidate this tension between punishment and education in Dutch re-territorialisation schemes, with the figures of Cut Muhammad Teuku Kali Malikon Ade and Teungku Muhammad Tajeh illustrating such divergent pathways. While both passed through Bandung at the behest of colonial authorities, the similarities in their social trajectories end there. Cut Muhammad, an erstwhile officiant at the royal Acehnese court, plunged into penury, ill-health, and humiliation, whereas Teungku Muhammad Tajeh excelled at his studies and prepared to assume the position of ulèëbalang in his East Acehnese home. Cut Muhammad and Teungku Tajeh embodied the Janus-faced nature of mobility.

The decision to banish Cut Muhammad Teuku Kali Malikon Ade to Bandung reflected the colonial ambition to deploy mobility as a tool for unwinding the Acehnese sultanate as a node in alternative geographies. Cut Muhammad was the scion of a hereditary line of royal functionaries known as the Kali Malikul-Adil (Malikon Ade).Footnote ⁶¹ According to the aforementioned expert on Aceh, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the office of Teuku Kali had over time acquired the role of master of ceremonies at the royal court, overseeing the installation of new sultans and performing various judicial duties.Footnote ⁶² During the Dutch-Aceh War, Cut Muhammad remained loyal to Daud and resided in the Keumala encampment.

If the office of Teuku Kali Malikon Ade embodied the sovereign prerogatives of the sultanate, the exile of Cut Muhammad to Bandung constituted an attempt to dismantle the vestiges of Acehnese power through abject humiliation. Cut Muhammad's correspondence with Teungku Mohammad Noerdin, Snouck Hurgronje's personal secretary, revealed this sense of loss.Footnote ⁶³ In one letter, Teuku Kali noted that although “salary for one month was stipulated as f10,” thus far he had only “received 40f for ten months in Bandung.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Cut Muhammad wondered where he could “rent a room and where to buy clothes and where to eat” on this sum, precipitating a plea for “compassion from Sripaduka Tuan Hazeu.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Bandung could represent a place of isolation and immiserisation for Acehnese elites.

Even as travel to Bandung constituted punishment for some recalcitrant Acehnese, for others like Teungku Muhammad Tajeh, this sojourn represented an upwardly mobile path into colonial service, a trip that served to articulate the newly peripheralised region of Aceh with colonial centres in Java. The son of the ulèëbalang of Peurala in eastern Aceh, Teungku Tajeh travelled to Bandung in 1906.Footnote ⁶⁶ According to Hazeu, Tajeh departed “on his own urgent request to Bandung,” where he has “demonstrated himself a steady and diligent student.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Juxtaposing the congenial Training School in Java with the Acehnese “environment in which T. Mohamad Tajeh spent his childhood” and the “limited knowledge he possessed at the time he came here,” Hazeu praised him for “successfully follow[ing] the Dutch classes,” and for “surpassing all reasonable expectations.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In contrast to disgraced exiles, distance allowed students like Teungku Tajeh to prepare for their return to Aceh and “assume the burden . . . of administration.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, the colonial Governor of Aceh, W. G. Swart, saw this education as an opportunity to privilege colonial mobilities over indigenous sojourns. He noted that he would only grant the request of Teungku Tjihi Moeda Peusangan to “go on pilgrimage to Mecca,” if he agreed to relinquish his position as ulèëbalang to Bandung-educated Teungku Tajeh.Footnote ⁷⁰

Fusing Education with Punishment? Paranoia and the Paradoxes of Teuku Bentara Moeda

If Cut Muhammad Teuku Kali and Teungku Tajeh followed convergent geographic routes from Aceh to Bandung, their divergent social trajectories underscored the dual imperatives involved in reforging the symbiosis of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. Yet while these intertwined imperatives mapped neatly onto Cut Muhammad Teuku Kali and Teungku Tajeh, the boundaries between political exiles and students were also permeable. Sometimes, the figure of the exile and student could merge into one, with the process of imposed dislocation providing its own education. No mobile figure better embodies the fusion of the logics of punishment and education than did the Acehnese ulèëbalang Teuku Bentara Moeda.

Originally from the Bireuen area, Teuku Moeda exemplified Advisor Hazeu's hopes to deploy forced mobility to transform wayward leaders into loyal instruments for the integration of Aceh. Colonial officials deported Teuku Bentara Moeda to Java as a “political exile” in 1905 in response to accusations of gun smuggling. Hazeu nevertheless did not isolate Teuku Moeda, but encouraged interaction with students in Bandung, arguing to the Director of the Prison System that the example of diligent Acehnese and Javanese chiefs would impart a “good education.”Footnote ⁷¹ Such salutary exchanges with colonial pupils, in Hazeu's views, justified Moeda's repatriation back to Aceh and his installation as the ulèëbalang of Bireuen province. Consummating this virtuous feedback loop between exile and education, Hazeu noted Bentara Moeda sent his son back to Java not as a deportee, but for training school; other figures that received more colonial scorn, like Cut Muhammad, also considered that “his son T. Djohan should also perhaps be trained in Bandung.”Footnote ⁷² Exile could thus educate and redeem the recalcitrant.

Colonial officials believed that the tutelary value of exile derived not only from witnessing diligent students, but also from the reality of distance and travel. The publication of the Acehnese Hikayat Peutawi (Tale of Betawi/Batavia) text, translated into Dutch for the 1916 edition of Indische Gids, a prominent organ of colonial thought, reflects this view of mobility as education.Footnote ⁷³ Few historians have commented upon the Hikayat Peutawi, which recounts Bentara Moeda's exile to Java. A colleague of Native Affairs Advisor Hazeu, H. T. Damsté, wrote the preface and noted that “Bentara Moeda has chronicled the history of exile, along with his impression of Batavia and Bandung.”Footnote ⁷⁴ While warning that Bentara Moeda's tale, as an Acehnese hikayat tale, veered towards “embellishment,” Damsté nonetheless esteemed the text as a window into exilic experiences:

Damsté's words were not uniformly approving. He admitted that Bentara Moeda's tale betrayed “the Acehnese view of the Dutch, and how arrogantly they talk among themselves over our high authority.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Nonetheless, the advisor saw the mobile tribulations of Bentara Moeda as a redemptive crucible which provided its own kind of education for repatriation back to Aceh.

Beyond Advisor Damsté's framing, the text of Bentara Moeda's hikayat likewise speaks to the tutelary power of travel to the colonial centres of Java. Throughout his tale, the ulèëbalang spoke in wondrous tones of strange sights and humiliating punishments, of diverse peoples and miraculous technologies, of immoral temptations and personal triumph. After starting with a description of the beating he received from his Dutch captors with a “rattan . . . hundreds of times in succession,” Bentara Moeda described the terror of steamship travel.Footnote ⁷⁶ “Only now, O wondrous things of God,” wrote Moeda, “the waves came in huge rolls . . . half the passengers were vomiting.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Such suffering continued once Bentara Moeda arrived in Java, as he plaintively described separation from his family. Yet, writing of his arrival in the colonial capital of Batavia (Jakarta), the ulèëbalang also spoke with awe:

Similarly, he described Bandung and his first trip to the cinema, where he saw “lamp lighted cloth and a beautiful image rushed” across it of “a woman who has danced.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The dislocation of separation from family and of travel on unfamiliar steamships, along with the magnetic pull of cosmopolitan cities, transformed Bentara Moeda's perspective on Aceh and the world.

While some Dutch officials envisioned the temptations of travel as a necessary part of forging colonial subjects for re-territorialisation schemes, it is also important not to overstate the intentionality or premeditative quality of such visions; paranoia and the spectre of indigenous sedition, of supposedly disciplined subjects plotting against their colonial overlords, continued to haunt this educational project. For all his enthusiastic praise of Bentara Moeda's redemption, Hazeu himself could not jettison his suspicions entirely, noting the ulèëbalang's “Acehnese caution often makes him supplement his equipment with a rencong and pistol.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Scepticism proved pervasive, with the Military and Civil Governor of Aceh, W. G. van Daalen, expressing reservations about the “bad influence exerted” by exiles upon those who “follow the education of the Training School.Footnote ⁸¹ Ultimately, many Dutch feared that exiles might contaminate nodes of colonial training like Bandung.

One exiled ulèëbalang, Teuku Ben Peukan of the Meureudu region of Aceh, crystallised such paranoia that Acehnese actors could undermine the disciplinary logics of education and mobility. Advisor Hazeu himself discerned in Teuku Ben Peukan some hint of an independent streak that needed to be sequestered as best possible, writing that “this Acehnese is such an unusually crafty and cunning individual” preoccupied with satisfying “his greed and ambition” that he should be “isolated here in Java” from the Acehnese community.Footnote ⁸² As a result, authorities expelled him to the more distant eastern coast of Java, and the Director of the Prison System promised that “all further requests” from Teuku Ben Peukan to return to Bandung “be denied and that it is expedient . . . to prevent any further personal contact with their racial compatriots [from Aceh].”Footnote ⁸³ In other words, the Dutch must extricate any hint of autonomous action and agency from Bandung.

While Advisor Hazeu only believed specific threats should be removed from Bandung, other Dutch officials panicked and advocated the wholesale separation of political exiles from students. One administrator based in Aceh, the Assistant Resident of the Outer Dependencies, W. G. Kamerling, lamented such intermingling. Noting that “in due time there will certainly follow more young leaders” to Bandung for whom the “goal is to form them into solid, trustworthy, and reliable administrators,” Kamerling argued that “everything must be done to achieve as such.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, the Dutch “must eliminate the possible bad influence of their exiled countrymen” through their “relocation elsewhere.” Anxiety over rebellious elements thereby diluted the schemes of re-territorialisation advanced by Advisor Hazeu.

Paranoia that emerging colonial centres at places like Bandung could morph from nodes of disciplinary training and subject formation to breeding grounds for anti-colonial scheming persisted. Hazeu himself acknowledged that exiles like Ben Peukan posed significant dangers but nevertheless clung to his vision, asserting that such tensions were not only difficult to avoid, but necessary for refashioning the Acehnese ulèëbalang class. In response to Kamerling, Hazeu challenged the paranoia of his colleagues by contending that “vague announcements concerning the disadvantageous influence of some of the Acehnese exiles interned in Bandung on the school-going Acehnese youth was based on faulty and partially incorrect information.”Footnote ⁸⁵ While Hazeu's argument ensured the continued mingling of exiles with training students, these debates revealed persistent fears that deportations to the colonial centre could backfire. These anxieties were not limited to Bandung; they would erupt back in Aceh over Sultan Muhammad Daud Syah.

The Triumph of Paranoia: the Extrication and Isolation of Sultan Daud

When Hazeu undertook his scheme to send Acehnese students and political exiles to Bandung in 1906, there was one notable omission: Sultan Muhammad Daud Syah. As mentioned before, the Sultan had been caught in 1903 after decades embodying the Acehnese regime-in-exile in Keumala. Once subordinated to colonial rule, Daud would seem to constitute a prime candidate for retraining in the disciplinary centre of Bandung. However, the act of exiling the Sultan threatened to unravel the already delicate balance between education and punishment. The Assistant Resident of Aceh Besar Province had already emphasised that figures “associated with the family of the former Sultan” such as Cut Muhammad Teuku Malikon Ade, acted as “dangerous intriguers” and would instil in the “Acehnese youth in Bandung the feel of hate against the administration in Aceh.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Such concerns led the Dutch to allow him to stay at home in Aceh under careful surveillance.

However, the inescapable symbolism of maintaining the former Sultan of Aceh in his erstwhile capital, denuded of power but still a tangible physical presence in an imperfectly peripheralised region, would fuel the anxiety of colonial authorities already predisposed to paranoia after decades of pacification; Daud's web of external connections, in turn, would emerge as a key motif of this colonial fear as officials tried to anticipate his actions and forestall any manoeuvrings independent of their re-territorialisation schemes. The spectre of Ottoman Turkish intrigue, pan-Islamic affinities, and British intervention continued to pervade the colonial imagination.Footnote ⁸⁷ Chinese smuggling and the supposed religious “fanaticism” of Hadrami Arabs remained notable preoccupations. Yet one group that has garnered little attention from historians of Aceh would play a decisive role in the final disposition of Sultan Daud: the Indian diaspora, today known as Chulia, but in the past referred to by Malays as “keling” and by colonial regimes in Southeast Asia, often pejoratively, as “Kling.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Colonial anxieties about the Sultan's connections converged around two Indian traders likely of Tamil descent: Moena Pakir and Ghulam Ghouse.Footnote ⁸⁹ A father-son duo based across the Straits of Melaka in the British-controlled port city of Penang, Pakir first caught the notice of Dutch officials in 1896. The Resident of the coastal city of Sigli spoke of “communications” concerning “a Kling named Moena Pakir . . . [who] travels back and forth frequently between Penang and Aceh.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Two years later, the Assistant Resident of Aceh reported that “the son of Moena Pakir, Ghulam Ghouse, sailed from Pinang to Siam . . . and had been pushed by a wind toward” Aceh, where his boat “broke down.”Footnote ⁹¹ Thus began a decade of colonial speculation on Pakir and Ghouse's relationship with Sultan Daud.

Ghouse and Pakir's arrival in Sumatra represented the continuation of long-standing historical connections between India and the Acehnese kingdom. From at least the sixteenth century, Tamil travellers from the Coromandel Coast of southern India had travelled to Aceh as traders, craftsmen, and slaves.Footnote ⁹² Such long-standing connections materialised in writings like those of a Dutch diplomat in Singapore, William Read, who noted the “Arab and Kling” attributes found in the lineage of the Acehnese Sultan.Footnote ⁹³ Colonial observers also continued monitoring the Aceh Sultan's external contacts with Indians, as a large proportion of Aceh's diplomatic “Council of Eight” in Penang consisted of Indian Muslim traders.Footnote ⁹⁴

Thus, just as Dutch administrators like Advisor Hazeu sought to reinforce ties between Aceh and colonial administrative hubs in Java, south Indian traders threatened to lure Acehnese back to nodal centres beyond Dutch control, particularly the British-administered Straits Settlements. As discussed earlier, Singapore and Penang had been a vital hub of commerce, religious exchange, and munitions throughout the Aceh War.Footnote ⁹⁵ By the late 1880s, approximately 22,000 Tamil migrants trekked to Singapore and Penang annually before filtering out to plantations across the Bay of Bengal from the Malay Peninsula to Burma.Footnote ⁹⁶ Most of this influx bypassed war-torn Aceh, but the possibility that Indian trading networks centred in the British Straits Settlements could infiltrate the area only heightened Dutch fears of potential “Kling” troublemakers.

From the moment Moena Pakir and Ghulam Ghouse arrived in Aceh, Dutch paranoia dwelt on the nexus between Indian diasporic networks, Straits Settlement port cities, and Daud. The Consul General in Penang heaped opprobrium on a letter Moena carried “from the pretender Sultan of Aceh to the Sultan of Kedah,” a British-controlled Malay kingdom lying on the other side of the Straits of Melaka.Footnote ⁹⁷ This missive contained a request for the Kedah Sultan to “act as a middleman for the possibility of bringing a reconciliation between him [Daud]” and the Dutch government.Footnote ⁹⁸ Growing alarmed that Indian traders could act as a portal for Aceh to the wider world of Malay sultanates and British influence, the Dutch redoubled their investigations into Moena Pakir.Footnote ⁹⁹ Reflecting racialised biases, one Dutch Resident, K.F.H. van Langen, noted that Pakir's desire to “find a means for recuperating his debt . . . like a true Kling,” drove him “into contact with the pretender” Acehnese sultan.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ According to the Resident, Pakir plotted marriage between the Acehnese sultan and the niece of the Sultan of Kedah to pay off this debt.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Colonial paranoia over the implications of the Indian-Aceh nexus intensified after the submission of Daud in 1903, soon growing to encompass fears of his conspiring with Ottoman Turkey and imperial Japan. The military commander who had orchestrated the Sultan's capture, J. B. van Heutsz, continued criticism of Ghulam Ghouse and Moena Pakir, decrying them as “meddlers . . . who had interfered in the affairs of the pretender Sultan.”Footnote ¹⁰² Van Heutsz fixated on one meeting which Ghulam Ghouse held in which he reputedly persuaded Sultan Daud to “invoke the mediation of the Sultan of Turkey,” raising the spectre of pan-Islamic conspiracy.Footnote ¹⁰³ He observed that even “after his submission to our authority,” Sultan Daud had continued to meet with the Indian trader.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The outgoing Civil and Military Governor of Aceh, Gottfried van Daalen, attributed yet one more malign plot to Pakir in 1908, writing that “Toeankoe Moehamad Dawot maintained a certain understanding with the Consul General of Japan in Singapore through the intermediation of the Indians G. Ghouse and Mana Pakir.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Noting that the “plan to enlist the help of Japan is devised by these Indians with the apparent goal of swindling the ex-pretender Sultan,” Governor van Daalen wrote incredulously that Ghouse and Pakir “requested to receive money, using the most ridiculous pretexts,” including the “purchase of two crocodiles . . . [to] be given to the Kaiser of Japan as gifts.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Whether or not the Sultan actually engaged with this request, or if it amounted to a fanciful scheme concocted by Ghouse and Pakir, is not clear. The Acehnese historian Teuku Ibrahim Alfian concurs with van Daalen's assessment that the Sultan's seal and signature were forged.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nonetheless, van Daalen's discussion of this potential contact with Japan still served dual purposes, denigrating Sultan Daud as a credulous dupe while also identifying Straits-Indian traders as the key nexus to foreign manipulation in Aceh.

Even if some Dutch officials counselled patience with the Sultan, such forbearance dissolved with rumours that the Indian-Japanese conspiracy had reverberated back to Bandung. Governor van Daalen grew apoplectic upon discovering that the aforementioned exile, Teungku Kadli Malikon Ade, had revealed instructions sent from Java back to Aceh to a prominent ulama “to consult with agents of the Japanese,” and that these instructions reached Sultan Daud. Rather than a site of colonial subject formation, Bandung risked morphing into a networked node of Acehnese resistance. Van Daalen regarded such revelations as proof that the “patience of the Netherlands Indies government to let the ex-Sultan stay” in Aceh had been misplaced, and that “expectations concerning his [Daud's] faithfulness to the Government would not materialise.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This failure to redirect local Acehnese networks away from the Straits of Melaka towards new colonial centres in Java contributed to a momentous policy reversal in 1907: the decision to exile Sultan Daud. Colonial officials acknowledged the inconclusive nature of Ghulam Ghouse and Moena Pakir's intervention in Acehnese affairs, but the danger seemed intolerable.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Mobile Indian networks in the Straits Settlements provided the Acehnese Sultan with a portal to the wider world.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Governor van Daalen warned of the “damage and harm . . . that the presence of Toeankoe Moehammad Dawot in Aceh does . . . to the pacification operations.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The Sultan needed to be extricated. After a brief stay in Bandung, Dutch authorities expelled him beyond Java to the island of Ambon in the eastern extremities of the Netherlands East Indies.Footnote ¹¹² By removing Daud to a distant location, the Dutch signalled that they would no longer seek to straddle the tensions between subject formation and punishment necessary for re-territorialization. Instead, the colonial state cast the Sultan off beyond the dense mesh of Indian, Arab, Malay, and British networks in the Straits of Melaka region, beyond the emerging centre of colonial education in Bandung, to a place from which they hoped he could not interfere in Acehnese affairs.

Yet the decision to parachute Sultan Daud to the Moluccas would not entirely sidestep the tensions of re-territorialisation, as Ambon Island did not exist in isolation from accelerating global currents of trade and diasporic migration. Daud was the scion of a royal family that traced its roots to the Bugis community of mobile seafarers, a community with a large presence on Ambon.Footnote ¹¹³ Moreover, the Bugis of Ambon conducted significant trade, often through Chinese and Arab traders, with Singapore.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Continued colonial fears over the Acehnese Sultan's web of contacts crystallised around a lawsuit filed by Ghulam Ghouse and Moena Pakir. Although Daud had been exiled far from the Straits of Melaka, these two Indian traders still sought restitution. Instead of directing their claims to Dutch authorities, the Netherlands embassy in Penang reported that “Ghulam Ghouse turns to the State Secretary for the Colonies in London” for assistance and even hired a British law firm, Allen and Gladhill.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Ghouse claimed that as part of his initial series of interactions with the Acehnese ruler in 1898, the Sultan took out a mortgage deed on property valued at $500,000 that swelled with interest to $2,787,200.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The legal claims made against Daud, therefore, both validated colonial anxieties and reinforced the commitment to exile in distant Ambon. If the Dutch conceded the claims of the British lawyers and Indian merchants, they would not only admit the wrongness of their decision to expel him, but also surrender sovereign authority over the erstwhile Sultan. Governor van Daalen declared that “it was already fully demonstrated that the signature and stamp [on the deed of mortgage] must be false.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The noted historian of Aceh, Teuku Ibrahim Alfian, agrees with van Daalen's assessment, observing that someone capable of lending $500,000 to the Sultan would not struggle to pay the cost of a telegram as the Dutch claimed.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Despite considerable doubt over the validity of these claims, the colonial government went further, noting that any contract with Daud was null and void because “the Toeankoe has always been considered and treated . . . as a pretender,” and the claims to represent sovereign authority were thus invalid.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Such a lawsuit, therefore, must be quashed and the colonial government suppressed any effort to draw the Sultan back into his old web of connectivities.