SITI RAHMAWATI CHANIAGO

Universitas Indonesia professor who rescued hundreds of fading Minang proverbs

In Minangkabau tradition the house belongs to the women and the proverbs belong to everyone, and Siti Rahmawati spent her life making sure both were well looked after. Born in 1941 in Padang Panjang, a cool highland town of rain and mosques in West Sumatra, she grew up listening to her grandmother recite pepatah-petitih, the elegant rhymed sayings with which Minang elders settle arguments, bless weddings and quietly rebuke the young.

She came to Jakarta in 1960 to study at the University of Indonesia, graduating in Indonesian literature, and completed a doctorate in 1978 with a thesis on oral Minang poetry. For thirty-eight years she taught in the Faculty of Humanities at Universitas Indonesia, first at Rawamangun and later on the Depok campus, where generations of students knew her as Ibu Prof, the small woman in a batik blouse who could silence a lecture hall by quoting a proverb. She spent her holidays travelling by bus and motorbike through the Sumatran highlands with a cassette recorder, interviewing elderly storytellers, and eventually collected and annotated more than three hundred proverbs that had never been written down. She chaired a committee on regional language preservation and quietly paid tuition for dozens of first-generation students from the provinces.

At home in Jatipadang she cooked a rendang so slowly that it took the whole of a Sunday, kept a pot of sweet tea on the table for visiting students and read the newspaper aloud to her husband, Pak Hasan, a civil servant, until he died in 2016. She was a devout Muslim and a regular at the Friday talks at Al-Azhar Mosque. She passed away peacefully on 15 May 2024, aged eighty-two. She leaves her daughter Ratna, her son Fajar, three grandchildren, and a country with a better memory because of her.

“Alam takambang jadi guru: let the unfolding world be your teacher.”