Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese Vol II. - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/86

 what the Sundanese call pamali, chadu or buyut and the Javanese ila-ila, and also the adats which control the daily life of each individual. The blessings, orations and stereotyped speeches described in the first volume of this work, may also be classified as hadih maja.

Haba of the kind corresponding to the dongèngs of the Sundanese and Javanese has a somewhat less uncertain form than the haba jameun and hadih maja. The reciters of these prose narrations, passed as they are from mouth to mouth, have of course greater freedom in the treatment of their subject than the copyists of an Achehnese book, yet certain elements of the haba remain unaffected by this license, and each reciter endeavours to adhere to the exact words in which the story has been repeated to him.

These Achehnese fables and stories are well worth the trouble of transcribing. They present to the ear a language much more closely akin to the colloquial of daily life than do the rhyming verses in which almost the whole of the written literature is composed, and their contents are often of much interest.

Some habas are simply modified reproductions in prose of romances written in verse. I have had reduced to writing, among others, a very long Achehnese dongèng consisting of numerous disconnected parts, the principal elements of which may be met with elsewhere in Achehnese and Malay literature. It also frequently happens that an Achehnese, after reading some Malay romance hitherto unknown in his own country, popularizes its contents in the form of haba among his own fellow-villagers, and that it is thence disseminated over a wider area.

In the habas of the Achehnese one also meets with much indigenous folklore, which entices the enquirer to comparisons with kindred matters among other peoples of Indonesian race. Besides peculiar differences in the manner of transmission of these tales among the various peoples of the Eastern Archipelago, there is a still more striking agreement among them in the main subjects, and this is noticeable even where there can have been hardly any possibility of borrowing, in later times at least. How much of this common material have all these different peoples, obtained from India, and subsequently worked up and added to, each to suit their own taste? How much of it is of purely domestic origin?