The same social logic can be seen in action whenever a landlord wishes to dismiss a tenant. This, of course, is a far more threatening possibility than an increase in rents or a switch to leasehold (pajak) tenancy, as it often spells ruin for the small cultivator. In terms of shared values, there is scarcely any way in which a rich landlord can rationalize taking the means of subsistence from a poor tenant. The qualifier “scarcely” is used purposely here, because the landlord’s position is not ethically hopeless. One possibility for the landlord is to claim that he needs the land to provide for his son or son-in-law. Everyone recognizes and accepts that one’s obligations to children should take precedence over any obligation to poorer but more distant relatives, let alone non-kin. A good many verbal tenancy contracts are, in fact, struck in just these terms: a landlord agrees to rent out the land with the understanding that he will reclaim part or all of it when his children marry or begin to farm. Thus, when Haji Din took back 4 relong from Tok Ahmad and Shamsul in 1975, he gave the only acceptable excuse. One of his sons, he said, had lost his tenancy and needed this to farm. Knowing his reputation, neither Tok Ahmad nor Shamsul took his explanation at face value and, since they had a rare written tenancy contract, they went to the District Office to lodge a complaint. The Assistant District Officer who deals with land matters forced a compromise in which Haji Din took back only 4 of the 10 relong he wanted. The next season, the ex-tenants’ suspicions were confirmed as Haji Din’s son never appeared, and the cultivation was done by a hired laborer. The following season the land was sold to a wealthy Malay paddy trader. [Page 211] The experience of Taib, after his dispossession a landless laborer, followed much the same script. The landowner announced that his son was going to be married at the end of the main season and would need the land that Taib rented in order to provide for his new family. As the landlord had at least 15 relong of paddy land, much of it closer to his own village, Taib thought he was lying. The usual protestations, in this case quite accurate, that the loss of the land would be a disaster, got Taib nowhere. During the following season, his landlord’s son actually did cultivate the land, occasionally hiring Taib to spread fertilizer and harrow. But sure enough, the second season after his dismissal, Taib discovered that the land had been leased for ten seasons to a Chinese shopkeeper and tractor owner. He surmises that this is what his landlord had in mind all along, but he was too embarrassed (malu) to reveal his deception immediately. Other landlords have been less concerned with appearances; in any event, hardly a tenancy has been lost in Sedaka in which the landlord’s duty to his children has not been invoked.37
In a few cases, of course, the landlord’s justification is not mere rhetoric. Some landlords have no other way of providing for their children; some do fall on hard times and have little choice but to resume cultivation. Often, however, the landlord’s goal is further accumulation of land or other productive assets or else a new house or a sumptuous wedding feast. As the land is his and his right to dispose of it as he pleases is protected, with few qualifications, by the force of law, he need not give any justification at all for his action. Nevertheless, he typically appeals to the only shared values that might possibly justify his behavior in the eyes of its victims by dramatizing his hardships or the needs of his children. His appeal, whether based on fact or not, serves to confirm and consolidate the existing symbolic order. The landlord’s performance, like that of Dickens’s Mr. Wegg, places him securely “with that very numerous class of impostors, who are quite as determined to keep up appearances to themselves as to their neighbors.”38 The tenant, for his part, contributes to the same [Page 212] symbolic edifice with his tale of ruin and woe, although in this case appearances are far less deceiving.
The greater economic power of the landlord usually ensures that the outcome of the drama is known in advance. But not always; this is not pure theater. Occasionally, the landlord appears, at least, to concede something. Perhaps he takes back only a portion of the land he originally insisted on; perhaps, as in Rosni’s case, he accepts a higher rent while giving way on the issue of advance payment; perhaps he settles on a rent slightly lower than his initial demand. I have, of course, no way of telling whether the original demand was a bluff intended to produce the final settlement, which may now appear as a concession due to his generosity. Kamil claims, for example, that his landlord, Haji Azaudin, who had wanted to sell the 5 relong Kamil rents from him, changed his plans when he (Kamil) could not raise the M$18,000 to purchase them. He chose instead to sell another rented parcel, where the tenant did have the cash for purchase. On this basis, Kamil calls him a good (bagus) landlord. Tenants are generally quite cynical and thus not easily impressionable, but there are a few landlords who consistently go easy (senang kira) on their tenants-charging lower than normal rents, collecting after the harvest, and making allowances following a poor harvest. Such landlords, by their liberality, help keep the symbolic edifice I have described intact; they help to animate the amateur theatrics that even the tight-fisted landlord feels obliged to stage when he puts the screws to his tenant.
IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT: THE VILLAGE GATE
If the richer farmers of Sedaka operate under some disadvantages, those disadvantages are more a matter of ideology than of action. There is, however, a small but significant exception to this pattern. It concerns virtually the only collective and public recognition that the village has an obligation to protect the livelihood of its members. As a rare and formal impediment to capitalist relations of production, it is little wonder that it would have come under attack. The attack was, as it happens, beaten back for the time being. The victory for older values was a small one, but the struggle was diagnostic for the issues we have been considering.
What the stakes were is perhaps best expressed in the crude lettering that adorns a wooden, swinging gate that bars the entrance to the main village path: “LORI PADI, LORI LAIN, DAN KUBOTA TIDAK BOLEH-JKKK.” Translated, it says simply that “Paddy trucks, other trucks, and tractors cannot [enter]” and the warning is “signed” by the Village Development Committee. The gate is a single timber about six feet high, which spans the path and is secured by a locked chain. It does not impede the passage of pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, small “walk-behind” tractors, or even automobiles, but it does effectively bar entry to trucks or large tractors. The key is kept at the house of [Page 213] Lebai Pendek just to the left of the gate, and the driver of any large vehicle must stop and ask that it be opened. Many, but not all, of the neighboring villages have similar gates, and this one has been here for at least the past fifteen years.39
The purpose of the gate is twofold. First, it is meant to restrict traffic along the dirt path, which during much of the year is muddy and slippery and therefore easily rutted. During the wettest months, a heavily loaded truck will be required to stop and unload its freight-for example, firewood, bricks, lumber, zinc roofing, furniture-which will then be carried by foot or cycle. At other times a fee of M$3 is collected for opening the gate and the truck is allowed to pass. The purpose of the fee was to create a small fund that was used annually to buy additional fill (tanah merah) to repair the damage done to the path in the previous monsoon.40 A second and, for my concerns, critical purpose of the gate was to prevent paddy dealers’ trucks from entering the village at all and thereby encroaching on the wages paid largely to villagers for hauling gunny sacks of paddy out to the main road. If the rice was to be sold or milled, as was usually the case, in nearby Kepala Batas, and if no large number of gunny sacks was involved, it made sense to pay villagers to haul it, a sack at a time, directly to the mill or buyer. The potential earnings for a villager were significant. It is not uncommon for a young man to earn as much as M$ 150 during a normal harvest and now, with double-cropping, such earnings were doubled.
The gate, then, was a collectively enforced example of tolong, a protected monopoly of work reserved for villagers alone.41 When it was first established, it was of particular advantage to poor villagers, sinc
e the gunny sacks were transported [Page 214] by bicycle, which even the poorest villager had. Now that motorcycles are more common, the principal beneficiaries have changed too, as we shall see. The gate itself was a fitting symbol for what it represented. It said that, in this small respect at least, Sedaka was a closed economy, that the hauling (tanggung, tarik) of paddy was open only to villagers, that the local monopoly on such work would not be lifted to accommodate the commercial paddy buyers and millers (mostly Chinese) who might provide the service more cheaply. Economically, of course, the gate represented a subsidy the larger farmers in the village paid to those of their neighbors who hauled paddy. The amount of the subsidy varied with the distance of the farmer’s rice fields from the gate and with the size of his harvest. He would, with or without the gate, have to pay hauling fees (per gunny sack) from the field to the main village path. But once the bagged paddy had reached the village path, he had to pay the haulers for each sack they took to the head of the village track where the paddy could then be loaded onto a truck, if he wished, or to pay the village haulers themselves to continue on into town. If there had been no gate-if the paddy dealer’s truck could come directly to that point on the village path closest to his paddy field-a farmer might save as much as M$2 a gunny sack. For a large farmer, of say 8 relong, the savings for two seasons might be as much as M$500. Farmers of 2 relong or less were little affected, since they were likely to keep most of their paddy at home and, when they did sell or mill some paddy, they could transport it themselves, a sack at a time.
In late March 1980, toward the end of a late harvest season, the gate was opened briefly to admit two paddy dealers’ trucks, thus stirring up a bitter controversy, the effects of which still reverberate in Sedaka. It was opened initially by Fadzil, a middle-aged farmer who owns 8.5 relong and has for some time been a member of the UMNO committee UKK) that runs village affairs. Fadzil is not much liked, even by his factional allies; he is reputed to be one of the two or three most careless cultivators, with consistently low yields, and spoiled (sayang manja) from an early age as the favorite adopted son of the late Tok Halim. Despite his air of superiority (sombong), his literacy and skills as a public speaker are valued by Bashir and others on the JKK. His position on the JKK is notable here because, as everyone in Sedaka knows, he spoke and voted for keeping the ban on paddy trucks a few years back when the issue was raised.
Fadzil’s story is that, after his harvest was bagged and lying in the fields, he approached Lebai Pendek’s son, Musa, who is a member of a small group that hauls paddy. Musa told him that the price per gunny sack would be M$1.80. Fadzil was furious, not only because he thought the rate was far too high but also because the rate is often left to the discretion of the farmer. But he did not negotiate further, simply saying that M$1.80 seemed too much. His reasoning was that the existence of the gate had allowed these young men to “extort” (tekan) from the farmers. The previous year, he noted, the fee was only M$1.20 and there was no justification for it to jump to M$1.80. The price of consumer [Page 215] goods (harga barang) had not gone up much, nor had the price of paddy.42 This was not all. He added that the road itself had been improved recently by the addition of fill, making the transport by motorcycle much easier, especially now, late in the dry season (musim kemarau), when it was not slippery. Since it was the tail end of the harvest and there was not much paddy left to be hauled, the piece-rate should have declined.
Had the paddy been hauled that afternoon, the matter might have ended with no more than Fadzil’s grumbling. But the haulers did not show up. Fadzil went again to see Musa, who promised that the paddy would be hauled early the next day. By noon the following day Fadzil’s fifty sacks of paddy were still stacked in the middle of the field, and Musa sent word that it would be hauled that afternoon. By 3 P.M. nothing had happened; Fadzil was, he said, concerned that sacks might be stolen that night, and he was also scanning the horizon for the storm clouds that might soak his paddy. He briefly considered approaching another group of paddy haulers but thought better of it. Musa and his friends were all from UMNO families, politically aligned with Fadzil and the JKK, while the other group (puak lain) were from the PAS faction of the village. To have PAS men haul the paddy of an UMNO stalwart such as Fadzil would have been a serious breach of factional loyalties.
At this point, Fadzil apparently decided to attack the issue of the gate head on. He claims that he went to talk with Bashir, who while not the village headman is acknowledged as UMNO leader, to explain the situation and ask that the gate be opened. Here the stories diverge somewhat. Bashir denies that he was ever approached about opening the gate, while Fadzil claims that Bashir told him to open it. At any rate, Fadzil then went to Kepala Batas to contact his Chinese paddy dealer, who sent a truck to the village, led by Fadzil on his motorcycle. Reaching the gate, Fadzil dismounted and got the key from Lebai Pendek’s wife, claiming that he had Bashir’s permission to open it. By 5 P.M. the Chinese driver and his two Malay laborers had loaded Fadzil’s crop aboard the truck and had left to deliver it to the dealer in town.
Meanwhile, word spread quickly, and many angry men were soon assembled in Bashir’s village shop, a gathering place for the UMNO faction in Sedaka. Their tone was unmistakable. A few had already torn down the gate itself, as if to magnify Fadzil’s crime. What he had done, they said, was “wrong” and “dishonest” (karut). He had done it, moreover, “as if he were in charge,” as if “he wanted to take over” (dia mau jadi kuasa). Others spoke of violence. “He should be shot” (kena peluru), “He should be shot straight away” (kena tembak terus). The members of the UMNO paddy-hauling group (golongan moto-tarik) were, not surprisingly, the most inflammatory, but the anger was general.
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The most active members of PAS lost no time in responding. As they gathered at “their own store,” Samat’s, only two doors down from Bashir’s, they shared with great glee the unseemly spectacle of an open battle among members of the UMNO ruling group. Some realized that, once one person had disregarded the gate, others could too (mula se-orang, habis) and that, if the rule was to be broken, it was important that members of the PAS faction establish their right to bring in paddy trucks too. Accordingly, Nizam bin Haji Lah, whose antipathy for Bashir was legendary (he neither spoke to Bashir nor traded at his store) and who still had bagged paddy in his field, left to call in a truck to fetch his own rice. Within a half hour after Fadzil’s truck had left, Nizam’s truck had entered and parked in front of Samat’s store. The Chinese driver, to judge from the fear written on his face, would rather have been anywhere else; he would not get down from the cab. Before loading could begin, Bashir himself came to talk to the driver. And while he did not directly order the driver to leave, he made it clear that it would be better if the driver allowed the village to settle this matter before any more paddy trucks were loaded. Seizing this golden opportunity, the driver sped away empty, not even pausing to explain his hasty retreat to Nizam.
Basir had good reason to try to defuse a potentially violent conflict. He certainly was aware of what had happened in nearby villages when large farmers tried to circumvent the fees for transporting paddy to the main road. In Dulang Kechil a farmer had tried to use his own tractor to haul his harvest to the road in order to save the local piece-rate charges. The young men whose wages were at stake stopped his tractor, removed the battery, and threatened to slash his tires unless he abandoned the attempt. Under the circumstances, he relented. In Mengkuang a few years before a Chinese landowner brought trucks right into his large field during the dry season to haul rice directly to the mill. Alerted to the threat, a large number of villagers managed to fell two large coconut trees across the road, after the first loaded truck had left, to prevent the others from leaving. The other trucks were finally unloaded and the sacks of paddy taken one by one to the main road after a large crowd shouting threats of violence persuaded the landowner that discretion was the better part of valor. With this in mind, Bashir undoubtedly re
alized that the situation might easily take a violent turn, one that was as likely to involve fighting among UMNO members as between UMNO and PAS members.
Bashir’s dilemma was a difficult one. There were other large farmers, including himself, who would have been only too pleased to see the gate demolished. Other villages had already done it. But he faced determined opposition from his own immediate political following, many of whom were his relatives. Amin, his cousin, Daud and Khalid, the two sons of headman Haji Jaafar, Musa and Sahil, the sons of Lebai Pendek, as well as Taha, the son of Lebai Hussein, were the very core of Bashir’s “kitchen-cabinet” and, at the same time, the core of the UMNO paddy-hauling group. All of them represented influential families whose support he needed.
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That evening Bashir brought together a group of five (Lebai Pendek, Taha bin Lebai Hussein, Amin, Daud Haji Jaafar, and Fadzil) to discuss the issue. The group was perhaps designed especially to isolate Fadzil. Bashir’s position was that Musa had demanded too much for hauling the paddy but that Fadzil ought to have negotiated a lower piece-rate rather than taken matters into his own hands by opening the gate: “Such an important issue cannot be decided by one person.” Fadzil, realizing that the group would go against him, tried to justify his action but stopped short of explicitly implicating Bashir in the opening of the gate. He added, significantly, that he knew that others thought that he had not been considerate (tak timbang rasa) nor compassionate (tak bersimpati) but that he believed that “we are free (kita bebas) [to open the gate}.” “Other villages have taken down their gates and we will be forced (terpaksa) to do the same.” This is the closest he came to asserting boldly the priority of his economic freedom of action over the village’s right to protect its diminishing sources of wage income. Lebai Pendek and the three members of the UMNO hauling group all argued that the work should be given to villagers, not outsiders, and that the trucks would damage the road. Bashir finally spoke for closing the gate but was concerned that, if they called a general meeting on the issue, richer UMNO peasants who typically attend such gatherings might actually vote to let the paddy trucks in.
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 34
