The Anthropological Background

The attention of Europeans was first drawn to Jambi's batik art in 1928, when a Dutch ethnographic and photographer,Tassilo Adam, presented a Jambi batik cloth to the Ethnographic Department of the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam . There it became the subject of much speculation from the Ethnographic Curator , B.M.Goslings, who was surprised at the existence of a highly refined craft practice about which previously nothing had been known (Goslings 1928 :279). Following this acquisition, a number of reports were commissioned and cloths collected by members of the Dutch administration in Jambi.

Goslings was meticulous in his research, comparing the examples of Jambi cloths brought back with other cloths in Dutch collections and with those illustrated and described in the standard texts of the time. Of the origin and status of the blue batiks with a yellow-brown veined background there was no difficulty. These were still being produced in the villages across the river from Jambi's capital city, and Tasillo Adam had seen them being manufactured there himself . The question which aroused doubt in his mind was the origin of the batiks displaying a red dye. Heer van der Kam, Controlleur from 1928 to 1931, who had visited the village in question to make enquiries on Goslings, Behalf, reported that local manufacture.Red dyes had been produced in the past, but these were no longer in use.Goslings was skeptical, however, partly because the techniques employed also differed from those employed in the blue cloths, and having compared the cloths, and with textiles from various production centers in India, he concluded that they were probably importd from there.

Shortly afterwards, however, he was surprised by communications from a number of correspondents who had returned from colonial service in Jambi with textiles obtained there, and who where insistent that these cloths had, indeed, been made in Jambi. He was invited to visit the owners, including Heer Petri, who had been Resident in Jambi from 1918 to 1923, and having heard their accounts and examined the cloths, he was conviced that Heer van der Kam's informant had been correct and that the cloths did indeed originate in Jambi. He concluded that they had been made at a much earlier time than the cloth brought to Europe by Tassilo Adam., possibly before 1875 when the Jambi sultan was deposed by the Dutch and the royal household fled into the upriver regions.

The Red Cloths

Goslings had been puzzled by the fact that the Jambi villagers claimed not to know hwo the red dyestuff was produced, and this was his chief reason for doubting that The cloths really came from Jambi. However, the preparation of red dyestuffs has often been a jealously guarded secret both in Indonesia and elsewhere, and it is likely that villagers were reluctant to reveal their sources to each other, let alone the Dutch (Maxwell 1981 ). The recipes for the use of annatto,.dragon's blood rattan and sappan wood for dyeing red in Jambi are still secrets which one family told me they alone held; the women who knew the secrets would not even tell their menfolk. None of these dyestuffs was in widespread use in Java, where until the introduction of the mengkudu tree was normally used for the prepartion of red .While the mengkudu tree grows in the batik- making villages of Jambi, and its fruit is used in the treatment of hypertension, its roots are not used in for dyemaking.It thus seems likely that the dyeIng of red was common practice before the introduction of new techniques and materials from Java.

The use of te xtiles in Jambi society

Jambi has a long tradition of textile production of its own, but as a busy center of international trade, an integral part of its culture has always been its appetite for imported textile These have originated from India, Java and the Middle East, as well as from Europe.The roles played by textiles are many and varied

Upstream- downstream trading

Historically, imported textiles played an important part in the relationship between the King and his subjects in the interior, upstream parts of the Jambi sultanate. According to Adat or customary law, there was a reciprocal arrangement during the sultanate whereby The King supplied his subjects with rice, metal tools, salt and cloth ; in exchange they must send down forest products such as gums and resins, ivory, rhinoceros horn and dragon's blood (A.Mukty Nasruddin 1989:122}.

This arrangement no longer pertains, but the Indigenous forest dwellers,the Kubu people (Anak Dalam tribe ) ,still operate a system whereby they barter goods, including imported textiles from Malaysia whom they supply in return with forest products including Jerenang. They refer to their Malay contact as the jenang,. the term for Merly used under the Jambinese sultanate, abrogated by the Dutch in 1906, for the functionaries who dealt with the collection of upstream tribute of this kind.Trade textiles also retain a central importance in Kubu society, where there is no indigenous textile production, and where fines, measured in standard units of cloth, are imposed for a range of transgressions (Sandbukt 1988 :126 ).

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Taken from the book of Fiona Kerlogue " Scattered Flowers "

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