This shellfish collector wears the distinctive east coast headdress—an unsewn batik sarong wrapped around the head in the form of a turban (kain semutar).
The Peninsular Malay Headdress
Apart from the sarong format, the batik technique was formerly applied to the square head cloth, called tengkolok, worn by men of the Malay Peninsula. Similar in size to the Javanese head cloth (iket) but folded and worn in a different way, it was predominantly patterned with repeated geometric motifs enclosed by multiple borders often containing meandering foliage. The design structure and patterns closely resembled the continuous grid on kain songket.
The Roots of Batik
The roots of batik are ancient, difficult to trace and much debated, with many countries claiming to be the original cradle of the art. The word ‘batik’ itself, meaning ‘to draw with a broken dot or line’, is derived from two words—the Javanese word amba, ‘to draw’, and the Malay word for ‘dot’, titik—but batik has become a generic term referring to a process of dyeing fabric by making use of a resist technique, covering areas of cloth with a dye-resistant substance to prevent them from absorbing colours. Today batik is recognized and practised in many countries by craftsmen and contemporary artists.
It is not exactly known when and where people first applied beeswax, paraffin, rice and other vegetable paste, even mud, to cloth that would then resist a dye. What is known is that the batik process existed in India, China, Japan, Thailand, East Turkestan, Europe and West Africa from ancient times, employing a variety of dye-resist techniques, before it emerged in Indonesia, on the island of Java, in the sixteenth century before the arrival of the Dutch. Here it was to develop into one of the greatest and most enduring art forms of Asia. Here also wax became the dominant resist material used, and here also the canting or stylus was developed and perfected, allowing the drawing of hitherto unknown fine and complex lines of wax on the surface of cloths.
The first known record of batik in Java, on a sixteenth-century lontar palm, refers to tulis (‘to write’), while the word ‘batick’ first appears on a Dutch bill of lading for a shipment of cargo that set sail from Batavia (present-day Jakarta) to Bencoolen (Bengkulen) on the west coast of Sumatra. The first systematic study of batik appears in Thomas Stamford Raffles’ The History of Java, published in 1817, in which Raffles, at that time Lieutenant Governor of the Dutch East Indies, describes in detail various types of clothing and the local techniques of weaving and patterning of cloth. Illustrations in the volume show numerous batik blocks and the designs produced from them.
At the time batik emerged in Java, Southeast Asia was a fluid assemblage of coastal and inland communities that were in constant communication with one another. There was a great deal of reciprocal exchange of goods and ideas, in particular between India and Southeast Asia as Islam spread through the region via Indian and Arab Muslim traders. There is no record, however, of artisans in the Malay Peninsula adopting the process of wax-resist batik making from the Javanese in the sixteenth century. It appears that Javanese batik only became familiar to Malays from the early nineteenth century through the Islamic designs produced especially by artisans from the north coast of Java for a Muslim clientele.
It is generally agreed that the Malays of the peninsula adopted the habit of wearing batik, especially batik sarongs, long before the east coast Malays of Kelantan and Terengganu began making batik themselves. The preference of the people remained for locally woven cotton or silk plaid sarongs (kain tenunan)—the Malay plaid is considered the earliest and most widespread contribution of Malay weavers to Southeast Asian textiles—or imported Indian cotton plaids from Pulicat, known as kain pelekat. The labour-intensive kain songket and kain limar continued to be woven at the behest of sultans or rajas for ceremonial use and other special occasions. Indeed, up until the twentieth century, all Malay women from all sections of society were expected to be skilled at weaving, which may partly explain why surface-decorated cloth took a back seat. But with the increasing availability of cotton from India and England, woven with tight, smooth surfaces on industrial looms that made it possible to stamp designs with precision, as well as chemical dyes in a wide range of colours that did not need to be steeped for long periods, the local weaving industry was driven into decline. As British colonial officer R. O. Winstedt admonished in his pamphlet on ‘Arts and Crafts’ (1909), now was the time for Malays to learn the art of batik from Java.
A selection of the precious Malay hand woven textiles that, in one way or another, exerted an influence on the design register of later machine-woven, surface-decorated batik cloth. From left: a geometric patterned weft ikat silk stole (kain limar) from Kelantan, inspired by Indian patola silks; a silk kain limar stole from Kelantan, combining a red-dyed floral border and a green-dyed badan (body) covered with Islamic script; the kepala (head) of a ceremonial royal sarong from Terengganu, patterned with supplementary metallic gold threads (kain songket), its design featuring the ubiquitous triangular pucuk rebung (bamboo shoot); a woven plaid silk sarong (kain tenunan) from Pahang.
Forerunners of Malay Batik
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Malay artisans did not completely spurn applying designs to the surface of machine-woven cloth, especially as it did not depend on a highly evolved technical level of weaving or dyeing. In a little known publication, Serian Batik, produced by the Malaysian Handicraft Development Corporation in the late 1970s, it is stated that the earliest form of Malay batik was a rudimentary form of resist dyeing that came to be known as batik pelangi. It is attributed to a woman named Minah Pelangi who lived in Terengganu during the 1794–1808 reign of Sultan Zainal Abidin II and was the best-known proponent of the art.
A prototype of Malay batik, batik pelangi (‘rainbow cloth’) was a rudimentary form of tie-and-dye in which patterns were made by stitching and gathering small areas of the cloth before dyeing and, sometimes, painting. The process was repeated for each colour.
The spatial arrangement and bright colours of Indian textiles are apparent in batik pelangi, as are some of the patterns, such as rows of triangles and droplet-shaped paisley figures, locally known as bunga boteh.
Batik Pelangi
Popularly known in India since the eighteenth century as bandhani from the Hindustani word ‘to tie’ and in Indonesia as pelangi or ‘rainbow’ after the colourful end result, batik pelangi was created using a tie-and-dye process in which areas to be left undyed on the cloth were bunched and bound tightly so that the dye could not penetrate. The process was repeated a number of times using a different set of bindings and a different dye each time to achieve a multicoloured rainbow effect. Pelangi textiles closely resembled their Indian prototypes in spatial arrangement, design elements—mostly random abstracts—and range of colours. Because the technique was particularly suited to lightweight machine-woven fabrics, especially silk, as well as to the more garish chemical dyes used in the process, batik pelangi was popularly used for smaller, softer items of apparel, such as head cloths and sashes for men, most often palace dignitaries, or as bodice wrappers for their royal womenfolk.
In a further development of the batik pelangi technique, and a more likely precursor of today’s Malaysian batik, Winstedt, in his pamphlet on ‘Arts and Crafts’, tells of how the random, abstract designs generated by the pure pelangi tie-and-dye technique on already woven cloth evolved into more typical Malay floral scrolls with the use of small wooden stamps carved with only a single flower or a portion of a border.
The stamps were pressed onto a pad comprising a wet rag impregnated with water-soluble red ferruginous