Everyone in West Sumatra knows the story of the name “Minangkabau,” the dominant provincial ethnic group. Before the coming of Islam a Javanese army arrived in the highlands seeking to make itself suzerain over the indigenous polities. They were thwarted by shrewd local leaders who challenged the foreigners to a buffalo fight. The Javanese brought out a giant bull and the locals a starving calf with sharpened horns. The calf tried to nurse, eviscerated the bull, the invaders retreated and named the locals the people of the Victorious (Menang) Buffalo (Kerbau). However this story only emerges in local Malay and Minangkabau-language sources at the turn of the 20th century. And it appears alongside the name Adityawarman—who is described as either a local Buddhist king or the leader of the invading army.

This presentation is an analysis of these two cultural feedback loops, both involving Indonesian interactions with Dutch colonial scholarship, that transformed ideas of tradition in West Sumatra in the early twentieth century. By tracing the call and response between European colonial scholarship and local mythology we can examine how the classical Buddhist period is represented in late colonial historical fiction, how the figure of Adityawarman is rehabilitated in 20th century folklore, and why today pre-Islamic menhirs are not demolished by provincially-dominant sharia-enforcing political parties but incorporated into contemporary public spaces.