Banjar: river people of Kalimantan in Perak and Johor

Banjar: river people of Kalimantan in Perak and Johor

A flat-bottomed boat slides along a wide, brown river. The land on either side is low and wet, with rice growing beyond the bank. It looks like the Barito River in Kalimantan. But this is Kerian, in Perak, and the family on board has just made it their home.

The story

The Banjar (Urang Banjar, "Banjar people") are a Malay community from South Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. They speak Banjarese (basa Banjar). Their old sultanate was based at Banjarmasin. A well-known Banjar saying, haram manyarah waja sampai kaputing, means "never give up until the very tip of the steel": persistence.

The Banjar have a long tradition of merantau, going abroad to seek a living. A first big wave left for Sumatra in the 1780s, after a quarrel between the sultan and a prince. A second followed the Banjarmasin War of 1859 and the end of the Banjar sultanate in 1860, as Dutch rule grew in South Kalimantan.

Some Banjar went to Landak, in West Kalimantan, famous for diamonds, and some went to Singapore. Others came to the peninsula. In Perak, they found land like the Barito River basin. Floods around that river in the late 1880s sent many to Krian (Kerian), in the north-west of Perak, where they cleared and farmed rice land. They also settled in Batu Pahat in Johor.

This is not only a story of war. For many, it was a story of opportunity: a place with the same soil, the same water and a chance to work the land.

Where you can still see it today

• The paddy lands of Kerian in Perak, which Banjar settlers helped to open.
• Batu Pahat in Johor, another place where Banjar families settled.
• The Urang Banjar exhibition held at the Malay Heritage Centre in Singapore in 2020 and 2021, which shows how Banjar culture took root across the strait.
• The Banjar language, basa Banjar, still heard in Banjarmasin and Martapura.

What DNA can tell, and what it cannot

A region estimate for a Banjar family may show close links to the Malay world and to island Southeast Asia, as many Malay families do.

A mother line such as E ("The island line") is found across Borneo, Indonesia and the Philippines. A scientific study of mother-line DNA in this region (Hill and colleagues, 2007) found great diversity. Most lines mark movements after the last Ice Age, and at most about one-fifth could be linked to the later farming spread from Taiwan.

DNA cannot tell you whether a family is Banjar, which river they came from or when they moved. It cannot tell you about religion, and it does not decide race or bumiputera status. These come from family, law and culture.