ABSTRACT
Rantjak Dilabueh is a type of traditional literature written by the Mi-nangkabau people of the central and southern parts of the island of Sumatra, the large western island of the Indonesian archipelago. Rantjak Dilabueh comes from central Sumatra, and is of anonymous authorship. The tale is an instructional manual for how to behave in the context of marriage, but within the context of the larger society, for the marriage described here is that of a local village leader. This excerpt illustrates an important form of what might be called subnational literature. In the modern nation-state of Indonesia, Java was the center of power, while outer islands to the east and west were politically and culturally more marginal. Sumatra represents the outlying region, though one with significant representation in the nationalist politics of the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. Sumatra had an important range of literary traditions, and had a healthy publishing tradition in the late colonial period.
