They Speak With Tigers: The Pawang Rimung

“A tiger has entered the village, and disaster has come to the village.” In parts of Aceh, this traditional saying describes more than the arrival of a wild animal. It reflects an older belief that the tiger’s appearance carries social and spiritual meaning.

When a tiger leaves the forest and enters human space, the question is not only where it came from. It is also what may have shifted in the relationship between people, forests and nature. From this understanding emerged the pawang rimung, a person believed to possess special knowledge for confronting and “speaking” with tigers.

Acehnese cultural memory has never treated the tiger as merely a wild animal. The rimueng is seen as a powerful inhabitant of the great forest, with its own territory and rules that people must respect. Documentation of Acehnese culture recorded the term pawang rimung as a distinct form of expertise.

Traditional pawang rimung knowledge includes reading tracks, sounds, smells, claw marks, animal routes, prey availability and changes in the surrounding environment. This is a form of traditional ecological knowledge built through long interaction with nature and passed between generations. Tigers communicate through scent, scratches, calls and visual markings, allowing people with deep forest experience to interpret signs of their presence.

That is why communities say pawang can “speak with rimueng.” The phrase need not mean that tigers literally understand human language. There is no scientific evidence for that claim. Instead, the pawang’s ability to read tiger behavior can be understood as indirect communication between humans and wildlife.

The history of the pawang rimung also reaches back to the Aceh War. In Tangse, Pidie, Peutua Gam Masen was identified as a tiger handler and a figure connected to Acehnese guerrilla circles around 1910. His name appeared in Dutch military operations targeting resistance figures in Tangse, a forested and mountainous area important to Muslim fighters. In that setting, the ability to read the forest, locate routes and water sources, and recognize animal signs had practical strategic value.

Stories that portray pawang as possessing magical powers or controlling tigers should therefore be read critically. They belong to tradition, while the observable skill lies in interpreting the forest and the animal.