Harimau Jadian

Also Known As: Malay rimau jadi-jadian, from jadi, “to become”; the Cindaku of Kerinci, the macan gadhungan of central and eastern Java, the maung kajajaden of western Java
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Malaysian Mythology, Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A person who takes on a tiger’s body by learned magic and carries a human mind, a human memory and a human grievance inside it.
Role in Mythos: It supplies the answer to a tiger that behaves as no tiger should, killing without eating, taking only poultry, or coming for one particular household.
Relation to Humans: The accusation almost always lands on someone who lives at the edge of the community rather than inside it, and in the recorded cases the accused were migrants and forest peoples. Villagers watched for its tells and colonial courts occasionally had to deal with the killings that followed.

Far out in the jungle, Malays in Selangor told Walter Skeat, the tiger-folk keep a town of their own. The house-posts are cut from the heartwood of the tree-nettle. The roofs are thatched with human hair, the rafters are human bone, the walls are human skin, and the tigers live there quietly, in houses, behaving in every particular like people, until the periodic fit of fierceness takes them and sends them out through the forest after prey.

That is the far end of the belief. The near end is a man in your own village whose upper lip is a little too smooth.

Harimau is the tiger. Jadian comes from jadi, to become, and the compound names a thing that has been made rather than born. Skeat’s own glossary is blunt about it: the jadi-jadian is the were-tiger, and it sits in his list of Malay spirits between the polong and the bengkus, filed alongside the pontianak and the pelesit as one more branch of ordinary, workable knowledge. Peter Boomgaard, working through three and a half centuries of records for the Malay world, separated two beliefs that keep getting tangled together. In one, a medicine man keeps a tiger familiar, can put on the animal at will, and turns into a tiger for good when he dies. In the other, the tiger is a made thing, a counterfeit, and this is the belief that carries the harimau jadi-jadian of the peninsula, the Cindaku of Sumatra, the maung kajajaden of western Java and the macan gadhungan of the Javanese heartland, where the name means something close to mock tiger.

The record is old. Ma Huan, who sailed with Zheng He and wrote up the ports of the southern seas in the fifteenth century, set down a single flat sentence about Malacca: a tiger changed into a man, came into the town and mixed with the crowd, and somebody with a sharp eye saw through it, caught it and killed it. Two centuries later Manuel Godinho de Eredia, writing his description of Malacca by 1613, recorded that around 1560 the town was troubled at night by men from the interior who turned themselves into tigers and killed women and children. Malacca’s first bishop answered with a High Mass and a procession on the Feast of the Assumption and formally excommunicated the tigers, after which, Eredia says, the attacks stopped. He also mentions, without dwelling on it, that the people accused of the shapeshifting held those same tigers to be the guardians of the queen of Mount Ledang. The being that one community calls a murderer is a sentry to another.

Malay tradition gave the tiger a human origin outright. A Selangor man dictated the story to Skeat word for word. An old man found a boy in the jungle with white skin, green eyes and very long nails, named him Muhammad the fatherless, and sent him to school, where he was so cruel to the other children that the schoolmaster took a stick of los wood to him. At the first cut the boy leapt to the doorway. At the second he was on the ground, at the third in the grass, at the fourth he growled, and at the fifth his tail dropped down behind him and he went onto all fours. The master, improvising, cursed him as God’s tiger and sent him to hunt the borderland between old forest and new, on one condition: he might take only the headless. So the stripes are cane marks, and so the tiger must divine for permission before it kills, lying down with a leaf between its paws and staring at it until the outline resolves into a person with no head.

A man working the rice at Labu stepped into the shade at noon and found a tiger doing exactly that. He crept close enough to see the leaf, and the leaf had his wife’s shape in it, lacking only the head. He ran back, told the neighbours, begged them to walk her home in the middle of the group, and they did, and the tiger came through them anyway and killed her. He asked to be left alone with the body. He lay down holding it with a dagger in each hand, and when the tiger came back to its kill at dusk and jumped onto the corpse he drove both blades in until the points met.

Where the weretiger stopped being a story and started being an accusation was the Korinchi trade. Frank Swettenham, writing in 1895, reported it as an article of almost universal belief that the people of that small Sumatran state could take a tiger’s form at will and use it to settle scores. Four Korinchi men came through a district of Perak, he was told, and fowls went missing that night; the men moved on up country and three of them came back to report that a tiger had just been killed and to ask the headman please to bury it. Another party took hospitality in a Malay house, the poultry vanished, there were tiger tracks in the morning, and one of the guests fell ill and shortly afterwards vomited chicken feathers. Swettenham was fair enough to record the denial. The Korinchi said the power was not theirs but belonged to the Chenaku district in their own interior, that only people trained in the occult arts had it, and that they themselves were afraid to go there.

Hugh Clifford collected the same reports and one long story. A Korinchi trader called Haji Ali came to the Slim valley in Perak with two sons, prospered, prayed conspicuously, and married a local girl named Patimah. Every night he went out at dusk and came home before dawn. On the third night of the marriage she stayed awake, and what came up the ladder had a tiger’s head on a man’s body. She ran. Later a headman’s buffalo was killed, the villagers laid an ambush, wounded the animal in the leg and followed its tracks straight to Haji Ali’s house, where his sons said their father was too sick to come out. On the way down the ladder somebody noticed that the ground under Haji Ali’s room was stained a dull red. The family disappeared within days. Months afterwards they turned up in another part of the peninsula, and Haji Ali was limping badly on his right leg.

The tells all work the same way, by leaving evidence in the wrong body. The wound taken as a tiger comes home on the man. Clifford’s Malays knew of a Haji Abdallah of Korinchi caught naked in a tiger trap, who bought his freedom back at the price of the buffaloes he had killed while marauding, and of men who left their clothes and their trade packs in a thicket that a tiger then walked out of. At Jugra they told Skeat about a man with gold-plated teeth who was killed by accident while in the tiger stage, and the same gold plating was found in the tiger’s mouth. And in the plainest test of all, recorded across the Malay world, a person with no groove in the upper lip was reckoned a weretiger. It costs nothing to check a stranger’s face.

The pattern in who got accused is not subtle. Korinchi people migrated to the peninsula in numbers through the nineteenth century, and the transformation reports track that movement closely; the accusation attached itself to newcomers, and to the Semang of the deep forest, whose own shamans are indeed said to become tigers, and to an Indian man in Kuala Lumpur in 1923. A belief that explains a killed buffalo is also a belief that explains a neighbour you did not want.

In Kerinci itself the picture is less one-sided. Robert Wessing recorded that two villages near Kerinci were held to be inhabited by the Cindaku, one turning into pigs that raided gardens at certain seasons and the other into tigers that hunted people, and Skeat noted that the Malay were-tiger sometimes appears as a wild boar getting out of a grave, leaving the hole in the middle of the mound for anyone to see. The village of Pulau Tengah still keeps the tale of Bujang Nunggal and the tiger princess of Pasemah, performed in a rite whose name means tiger roaring, and used to hold the community’s rules in place rather than to frighten it.

What the harimau jadian can do follows from what it is: an animal’s body operated by somebody who knows the village. It has the weight, the silence and the night sight of a tiger, and behind them an ordinary human capacity for planning, for waiting and for holding a grudge across weeks. It can eat a neighbour’s poultry and sit in his house the next day. It can, according to the reports, be hired for revenge.

What limits it is that the disguise is only ever a disguise. The body is borrowed and everything done to it is repaid on loan: the spear wound, the snapped trap, the gold in the teeth, the feathers coming back up. The knowledge has to be learned, and the Korinchi were adamant that most of them had never learned it. J. V. Mills, annotating Eredia in 1930, recorded a Malay opinion that is almost a shrug and almost a warning, that the affliction only comes to people who accept the lore in the first place. And a tiger, whoever is inside it, can be speared, trapped or stabbed to the heart with two daggers at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Harimau Jadian?

The Harimau Jadian is the weretiger of Malay and Indonesian folklore, a person who takes on a tiger’s body through learned magic rather than by birth or by any lunar cycle. The name combines harimau, tiger, with jadian, from the verb jadi, “to become”, so it literally names a tiger that has been made. The person keeps a human mind, memory and motive inside the animal.

How can you tell a Harimau Jadian in human form?

The best known test recorded across the Malay world is the upper lip: a person with no groove running down from the nose to the lip was taken to be a weretiger. Other signs are evidence carried back from the tiger’s body into the human one, such as vomiting chicken feathers after a night when poultry went missing, or turning up with a wound in the same place a raiding tiger was speared. In one account from Jugra a man with gold-plated teeth was killed while in tiger shape and the same gold plating was found in the tiger’s mouth.

Who was accused of being a Harimau Jadian?

In the nineteenth-century records the accusation lands overwhelmingly on outsiders. Frank Swettenham and Hugh Clifford both reported that the power was ascribed to men from Korinchi in Sumatra, who were migrating to the Malay Peninsula in large numbers at the time, while Clifford’s Pahang informants blamed a Semang forest-dweller and a 1923 case in Kuala Lumpur concerned an Indian man. The Korinchi themselves denied it and said the magic belonged only to the Chenaku district in their own interior.

Is the Harimau Jadian always dangerous?

No. On the Malay Peninsula it is almost always cast as a raider and a killer, but the same shapeshifting is read very differently elsewhere. Manuel Godinho de Eredia noted that the people accused of it around Malacca regarded their tigers as guardians of the queen of Mount Ledang, and in Kerinci the weretiger tradition is bound up with a village rite that reinforces social order rather than threatening it.

How is the Harimau Jadian different from a tiger-shaman?

Peter Boomgaard separates two beliefs that often get merged. One concerns shamans and medicine men who keep a tiger familiar, can become tigers at will and turn into tigers permanently when they die. The other, which is where the Harimau Jadian belongs, treats the tiger as a made or counterfeit shape put on by magic, and it covers the Cindaku of Sumatra and the macan gadhungan and maung kajajaden of Java as well.