Ngaju-Bajau: significant early term usages in Southeast Asia (especially Malaysia
Tom Harrisson, a veteran ethnographer of Borneo, published this article in 1976 to challenge the prevailing scholarly separation of the Ngaju (an upriver Kalimantan people) and the Bajau (the sea-nomads of the Sulu Sea and northern Borneo), arguing that early European sources demonstrate the two terms refer to the same or closely related populations whose roles shifted between land and sea over time. The piece draws on 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and British voyage accounts, early 20th-century ethnological fieldwork in southern Thailand, and a recently published Bajau oral narrative to reconstruct a more fluid, pre-colonial pattern of maritime and agricultural life across the archipelago.
Summary
Harrisson’s central argument is that the modern taxonomic distinction between “Ngaju” (inland) and “Bajau” (maritime) is an artefact of colonial-era classification that obscures a historically continuous population. His evidence begins with Daniel Beeckman’s 1718 account of a Dutch trading voyage to the southwest coast of Borneo, in which the upriver inhabitants of the Barito region are called “Byajo” or “Biajo” — forms Harrisson identifies as phonetic variants of “Ngaju” — and are described as pagan, warlike, and engaged in the production of gold dust, diamonds, rattans, and bezoars for coastal trade (pp. 1–2). Crucially, Beeckman also records that these same “Byajo” men appeared at sea in large prows, launching a poisoned-arrow attack on a Dutch longboat, demonstrating that the upriver people were not confined to the interior but actively participated in maritime activity, including what Europeans interpreted as piracy (p. 2).
Harrisson extends the argument through several additional case studies. He notes that P.M. Worsley’s research on pre-Cook Australian contacts identifies a group called “Baijini” who visited north-western Australia before the 18th century, a name Harrisson reads as another variant of the same root (p. 2). He then turns to Annandale and Robinson’s 1903 account of the Orang Laut Kappir of Trang, southern Thailand, who maintained terrestrial cemeteries in limestone caves and rock shelters, practised rice and coconut cultivation on small islands, and claimed descent from pre-Islamic populations displaced from Langkawi — evidence that even the “sea-gypsy” populations of the peninsula retained strong agricultural and inland roots (pp. 2–3). Finally, he examines the Bajau of Sabah, who by the 1970s had become the dominant rice-farming and horse-riding community in the Kota Belud district at the foothills of Mount Kinabalu, a dramatic reversal from their mid-19th-century status as coastal fishermen and salt pedlars recorded by Spenser St. John (p. 4).
The article’s most original contribution is its reading of a Bajau Laut oral narrative, “Pitun Depah,” published by Clifford Sather in 1975. In this tale, a culture hero of extraordinary strength consumes vast quantities of rice as an infant, survives multiple attempts on his life by his fishing-dependent father, and ultimately demonstrates full mastery of rice cultivation before setting out on an inland journey through seven valleys — a trajectory Harrisson compares to the Brunei culture hero Wang Alak Bertata (pp. 9–10). Sather himself expressed puzzlement at the agricultural content of a story told by a people who do not cultivate rice; Harrisson argues that the narrative preserves a memory of an earlier period when Bajau ancestors were competent rice farmers, and that the story encodes a symbolic assertion of the superiority of agricultural life over purely maritime subsistence (p. 10).
Key Findings
- Beeckman’s 1718 account records the first known European encounter with “Byajo” men at sea, who attacked a Dutch longboat with poisoned arrows off the southwest Bornean coast, confirming that upriver Ngaju-identified populations were active maritime participants by the early 18th century (p. 2).
- The article compiles a table of term variants across areas and centuries: Byajo/Biajo/Beaju/Beadje/Viadje (17th–18th c., Kalimantan), Badjoo (18th c., Sabah and Sulu), Baju (mid-19th c., Sabah), Bajou (late 19th c.), Bajau (20th c.), and Baijini (traditional, Australia) (p. 5).
- Annandale and Robinson’s 1901–2 fieldwork at Trang documented two Orang Laut Kappir cemeteries — one in a limestone cave with hollowed-log coffins containing gold ornaments and imitation palm-wood swords, the other in a rock shelter with pottery and Chinese porcelain — proving the group’s terrestrial burial practices and prior agricultural settlement (pp. 2–3).
- The Bajau of Kota Belud, Sabah, had transformed from coastal fishermen and salt pedlars (St. John, 1862) into the dominant rice-farming and horse-riding population of the Mount Kinabalu foothills within roughly a century, a shift Harrisson attributes to the disruption of traditional warring patterns by British colonial administration (p. 4).
- The Bajau Laut of Semporna, who do not cultivate rice, nonetheless celebrate an annual new-rice-harvest festival, a ritual anomaly Harrisson interprets as a vestige of earlier agricultural practice (p. 10).
- Harrisson identifies the peak period of indigenous maritime trade in the region as approximately 1000–1400 A.D., when Bajau and related boatmen served as intermediaries carrying jungle and sea produce (rattans, camphor, rhino-horn, hornbill ivory, bezoars) to northern mainland markets (p. 7).
Conclusion
Harrisson concludes that the Ngaju and Bajau should not be treated as separate ethnic categories but as historically interlinked populations whose roles oscillated between agriculture, jungle collection, and maritime activity in a fluid pattern that was progressively rigidified by the introduction of Islam along coastlines in the 15th–16th centuries and by European colonial administration from the 16th century onward. He warns that modern scholars risk “classifying human reality out of recognition” by imposing fixed racial or occupational categories on pre-literate peoples whose own oral traditions — as the Pitun Depah narrative demonstrates — preserve evidence of a far more integrated and mobile past (pp. 7–8).
Context
- The article draws primarily on early European voyage literature (Beeckman 1718; Forrest 1780; St. John 1862), the rarely accessed Fasciculi Malayensis (1903), and Sather’s 1975 publication of a Bajau Laut narrative from the Brunei Museum Journal; no single modern archival collection is the study’s foundation.
- Harrisson’s contribution is historiographical rather than field-based: he re-reads existing sources through a long-term structural lens, arguing against the “thesis approach” of individual anthropologists who study one group in one locality, and calling for comparative, diachronic research that treats populations in “the dimension of time as well as space” (p. 10).