Talk about a ghost town. Pontianak, capital city of Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, shares its name with a fearsome monster from Malay folklore, known variously as Pontianak or Kuntilanak. But what do the locals actually think of their vampire-like namesake, who is believed to be the vengeful ghost of a woman who died in pregnancy or childbirth?
To find out, researcher Timo Duile headed to Pontianak for conversations with ethnic Malay Muslim and Dayak Christian residents. There, he found that Kuntilanak/Pontianak “plays an important role for the urban site of Pontianak…as both a haunting, terrifying, and absent evicted spirit.”
The seductive but bloodthirsty Kuntilanak is a popular character in Malay horror films and novels, where she typically lurks around forested areas with abundant banana or banyan fig trees. Indeed, part of the name Pontianak may originate in the pohon tinggi, or tall trees, that serve as her lair. Yet these tales rarely mention her mythic role in founding the city of Pontianak—no surprise, as that story is “commonly known only in West Kalimantan,” according to Duile.
Pontianak is said to have been founded in 1771, near a delta on the trade route of the Kapuas River. Unfortunately, the region was infested with pirates and evil spirits. To frighten away these unwanted inhabitants, the city’s founder, Sultan Syarif Abdurrahim, ordered cannons to be fired. The sultan then cut down the trees to build a mosque and a palace.
In this way, “the place was transformed from a wilderness into a place of Muslim Malay civilization,” Duile explains. The process turned the jungle interior of Borneo, or pendalaman, into a dangerous and haunted zone—the very opposite of “Islam, Malayness, and the related notions of masyarakat madani [civilized society], urbanity, and cosmopolitanism” represented by the town.
“[T]he story of Kuntilanak is well known, and, to a certain degree, my friends found it entertaining to talk about her, but things become different when it is dark,” Duile recounts. “Several times I had the impression that people on purpose talked about Kuntilanak, sharing stories of her appearance they had heard from friends, just in order to attract other people’s attention through fear.”
He adds that “there used to be annual festivals in order to commemorate the founding of the city, during which people fired the cannon and thereby symbolically evicted Kuntilanak,” which he takes as a sign that “people must still use certain means to keep her at bay.”
Yet Duile finds that it’s a different matter among the Dayak communities in Kalimantan’s pendalaman. Despite conversion to Christianity, animist beliefs remain widespread among the Dayak—including their faith in local spirits, called penunggu or “someone who is waiting,” that live in rivers, trees or rocks. For Dayaks, “the place-bound spirits are beings in the sense that they maintain social relationships with humans” and behave “like persons,” notes Duile.
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Whether they act in a benevolent or hostile fashion depends on whether they have been treated with respect by their human neighbors. As Duile learns from speaking with Dayak farmers and activists, this belief system doesn’t have room for “the concept of a place-bound spirit who is merely evil and threatening,” like Kuntilanak.
From this, he observes that the Dayak see spirits as beings who live in nature but are part of their cultural life, whereas “Kuntilanak is alienated from the human masyarakat madani of Malay modernity” and “embodies uncivilized human characteristics.”
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In light of the two disparate worldviews, the tale of Pontianak’s founding takes on a new meaning for Duile, who interprets the Malay sultan in the story as deploying religion as a modernizing force to establish the conquest of nature by civilization.
“On the surface, cannon and Islamic performances are all that is required to annex a space once inhabited by spirits. But the horror of Kuntilanak testifies to the remorse buried in the collective subconscious,” Duile suggests.
“[I]t seems that nature continues to be the constitutive outside of the civilized, advanced society…. As nature and society remain unreconciled, Kuntilanak will keep on haunting the archipelago.”
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