tunics came into being. The sarong is typically a large tube or length of fabric, most often wrapped around the waist and worn as an ankle-length skirt by women. Men would wear it down to the ankles on informal occasions and slightly shorter over loose trousers where formality was involved. The sarong is secured by folding and twisting the upper edge of the cloth so that it fits tightly around the wearer’s body. Women usually fold then twist their sarongs to one side while men fold theirs in front to secure them. As a costume, the sarong is ingenious because it demands no zippers, buttons or pins. In a tropical, humid climate, it is ideal because it is comfortable and airy, allowing air to circulate in the folds covering one’s legs. According to Azah, a family’s status and wealth or poverty were measured by the number of sarongs it possessed.
Locally woven cotton or silk plaid sarongs (kain tenunan) or imported Indian cotton plaids from Pulicat (kain pelekat) are primarily worn by Malay men at home and to the mosque.
The versatile batik and plaid sarong worn in a variety of formal and informal styles, c. 1910–20.
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A rattan processor in a stamped batik sarong teamed with a white singlet, his companions in kain pelekat.
The sarong is also a wonderfully versatile garment, whether the ends are sewn to form a tube or left free in the form of a long cloth. In addition to its function as a wrapped skirt, the sarong is used as a head covering, a bathing cloth when folded above the breasts, a baby cradle, a baby sling, a wrapping cloth, a carrying bag, even a makeshift prayer mat. Many Malaysian men and women sleep in a sarong and a blouse or T-shirt. On the east coast of Malaysia, the distinctive headdress of Malay fishermen is an unsewn sarong wrapped around the head in the form of a turban (kain semutar), on which they can carry heavy loads. Later, specially designed square head cloths were sometimes worn. Nowadays, unsewn sarongs are used as tablecloths or fashioned into Western-style skirts, trousers and blouses. In Malaysia, plaid sarongs are invariably associated with men and batik sarongs with women. The growing popularity of the batik sarong from Indonesia was directly responsible for the development of batik in Malaysia.
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,
