Kedayan Erotic

In a sultanate whose old capital was built on stilts over the river, the Kedayan were the people on the ground. Brunei Malays lived and traded in the water village; the Kedayan cleared the land behind it and grew rice. That split, water and land, is the oldest thing anyone will tell you about them, and it still shapes how they describe themselves: farmers, inland, plainer in manner than the court families they lived beside. Their villages follow the northwest coast of Borneo and the country behind it, across the districts of Brunei and over both borders, into Limbang and Lawas in Sarawak and the Sipitang and Beaufort country in Sabah. The numbers are modest, tens of thousands rather than millions, divided among three jurisdictions that count people differently. Brunei's constitution lists them as one of seven indigenous groups gathered under the Malay label, alongside the Tutong, Belait, Bisaya, Dusun and Murut, which gives them a standing in law their relatives across the border do not have.

The language is Malayic and sits very close to Brunei Malay, close enough that outsiders hear a dialect where Kedayan hear a language. Its clearest signature is an absence: Kedayan has lost the r that surrounding varieties keep, so the same words come out shorter and softer than a Brunei ear expects. Religion is Sunni Islam of the Shafi'i school, taken up early and held closely, and it runs through the farming calendar rather than beside it. Makan Tahun, the year's eating, is the plainest case: a village-scale thanksgiving after harvest, food cooked in common, prayers read, the season closed out properly before the next one opens. Field labor has traditionally worked the same way, households rotating through one another's plots instead of paying for hands. Where the Kedayan originally came from is genuinely disputed. One account brings them from Java as farmers in the retinue of Sultan Bolkiah and reads the name itself as a Javanese word for follower or companion; another has them long settled in Borneo, early to Islam and early to Malay speech. Neither has won. What is not in dispute is that Kedayan country kept getting cut by borders drawn elsewhere: the Brooke annexation of Limbang in 1890 put Kedayan farmers under a white rajah they had not agreed to, and Kedayan villages were prominent in the 1962 revolt, in the run-up to Brunei's decision to stay out of Malaysia.