After visiting the abaca weavers in Kalibo, Aklan, I accepted my brother-in-law’s invitation to Batan, an hours ride by taxi from Kalibo. His family kept an ancestral home there. Most of you would have heard or read about the Code of Kalantiaw. Not many of you would have heard of the Kalantiaw Shrine in Batan. In 1956, the National Historical Institute, the body mandated to verify the authenticity of historical persons, places and events throughout Philippine history, declared and placed a official marker stating that the Code of Kalantiaw was very likely promulgated in the now town of Batan. The country, eager to recreate its own pre colonial identity embraced the notion of a datu, a chieftain who had the clout to enforce a code of behavior.  Thus, years ago, Batan boasted of being the place where the Code of Kalantiaw was enshrined. Its citizens have proudly built a pretty park with bridges and walkways along the shore, and a library to exhibit artifacts donated by prominent families of the town. The ‘shrine’ itself is a modest frame house with an exhibit area on one side and a library on the other half. So for many years, tourists would visit the shrine; Boy Scouts would camp out in the park, activities that would otherwise make any town mayor proud. That was until 2008, when a Presidential Executive Order withdrew the national shrine status of Batan. The park is pretty in its bareness and the ‘museum’ is now in a sad state of disrepair.  The Code of Kalantiaw and the facsimile document on which the code was inscribed have since been declared a historical fraud.  It is curious that as early as 1968, W.H. Scott in his PhD dissertation at UST, concluded that the original document whence the list of commandments attributed to Kalantiaw, was suspect and its provenance questionable as has been established by the librarians at the National Library during the American colonial period. In 1936, NVM Gonzalez, then a young journalist writing for the Graphic magazine at that time, reported having seen the artifacts displayed at the National Library, and naturally being a fiction writer was intrigued by the material’s imaginary possibilities. Post-war thought leaders promoted the same fiction even after Scott’s discovery. Numerous awards were named in Kalantiaw’s honor.  The Kalantiaw imagination fed the country’s hunger for precolonial identity as it modernized into its nationalist phase. Granted that Jose Marco, the purveyor of the fake artifacts, may have manufactured the item, it seems probable at least, that these “code” was the residual memory from local history and folklore. Whether folklore is history is debatable among academics but existing anthropology and folkloric studies indicate areas of veracity in in the “code”. For instance, feeding miscreants to the crocodile for violating the code, was similar to the punishment meted out by Spanish friars on babaylan practitioners in their attempt to quell their influence. Apparently crocodile feeding was deemed a punishment most abhorred. Where else would the Spanish have seen or heard about it. It would be a productive analysis if someone mapped the code proscriptions to available folkloric evidence that has been collected since.

Batan today is a quiet coastal town, off the major Kalibo-Iloilo route. Its inhabitants are mostly retirees from Manila or from abroad. Indeed, the large two-story houses along the main road, speaks of this quiet well-to-do-ness. It also boasts of a simple pier where and an even more simple but effective ferry service that takes commuters from Kalibo to Batan across the bay. The ferry ride which is a good 15-minutes across, cuts down the two hour travel time between Kalibo to Altavas, a major town and the highway that leads to Iloilo. Business people from even as far as Roxas City would take this short cut.

As I leave Batan for Iloilo, my brother-in-law drove by the “old Spanish cemetery”. No one knows who were buried there except that they were Spanish.  I suppose the “other” cemetery was where the locals were buried. The cemetery walls have crumbled and the remaining sections of an apparently scalloped-shaped wall appeared to be on the verge of collapsing, pushed by the roots of large trees that covered the area with shade. Weeds and other crawling plants hid what appears to be the “nicho”, a colmbary where the bones where buried. In one open nicho, some bones could still be seen. An encomienda here was established in 1591 by a certain Miguel Rodriguez and the Agustinians soon after, founded a parish in 1603. These actions suggests that Batan was a sizable settlement with enough souls for conversion  before the Spanish came. Might it be Kalantiaw and his descendants resided there? It certainly is a great story.

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