Parit: Waterways that Shape Life in Indragiri Hilir

The Communal and Cultural Development

The Indragiri Hilir Regency of Riau takes place on land that many doubt its suitability for farming. The landscape is dominated by vast tidal swamps and peatlands that have the characteristics of water abundant, high acidic, and high maintenance in terms of cultivation. Yet for generations, communities here found ways not to fight these conditions, but to live with them.

This is where parit in Indragiri Hilir emerged, to the point that Indragiri Hilir is reckoned as “Negeri Seribu Parit” or “The Land of a Thousand Parit.”

The Early Making of Parit

Originally to condition the land to be arable fields for living, local communities work with what nature offers. Our ongoing ethnographic research found that parits in districts such as Enok and Sapat have even existed for as long as four to five generations. In our findings, elders dug narrow waterways or ditches, which were later called as parit, through unutilized lands in their nearest surroundings to manage excess water and make the land cultivable. It was within these lands that the locals began transforming difficult terrain into spaces of livelihood and survival.

The early development of these parits were heavily catered to the natural state of the surroundings. This manifests in how the local communities paid close attention to tidal rhythms and the natural direction of water flow, ensuring that each parit worked with the movement of the tides rather than against it. Additionally, riverbanks lined with mangrove and nipah palms were deliberately left intact, recognized as natural buffers that protected the land from erosion and strong currents. These choices reveal a careful balance between cultivation and conservation, long before such terms became part of formal discourse.

Given its development taking place long before the modern infrastructure reached the region, the early construction of parit was done traditionally, representing and strengthening a deep communal value to it. Foremostly, the local communities used to dig the parit entirely by hand using basic tools, such as crowbars and hoes. The work was often done collectively, among families connected by kinship and shared responsibility.

Shared Water, Shared Responsibility

The community didn’t stop the communal efforts at the early construction of parit, it went beyond that. Over time, parit evolved into a shared water resource for agriculture, deliberately managed through collective agreement and responsibility as discovered in our ongoing ethnographic research.

As a community-based water management system, each parit in Indragiri Hilir is led by a local leader known as Wakil Parit or Kepala Parit. Their roles consist of maintaining the parit’s condition and resolving land-related issues among farmers whose fields are connected by the same waterway. In its early days, the person who first opened the parit often took on this role, passing the responsibility down through generations, usually within kinship networks.

Today, the leadership of a Wakil Parit is determined through musyawarah, a collective deliberation process attended by all farmers along the parit. This system reflects a shared understanding that parit cannot be governed by individuals alone, which also reinforces parit and all knowledge regarding it as common goods rather than private property.

Distinctively, this governing system is developed through a consensus of intercultural exchange between Banjar, Bugis, Javanese, and Malay settler communities that has long shaped Indragiri Hilir. Each group brought its own practices and knowledge to the development processes, including its governance system, through continuous interactions and adaptations. Although each ethnic group manages their own parit, the collective governance basis remains shared.

Not just that, the naming system of Indragiri Hilir’s parits are also uniquely historical. Its naming origins varied from one another. For example, some are named after the person who opens it, like Parit Hidayat in Sapat sub-district, while others we found is named after its surrounding characteristic, like Parit Atap Seng in Pantai Sebrang Makmur sub-district that was derived from a zinc-roofed hut along the parit.

The collective parit governance is also reflected in their function and structure, which is classified into three categories. The first one, which is led by the Wakil Parit, is parit kongsi or parit utama. This parit connects the smaller feeder parits directly to the main rivers. Whereas, the smaller feeder parits are called parit cacing or parit anak that serves as an irrigation system to farmers’ plots. Then, finally there is also parit lapis that connects each parit utama although it is not always present in every area.

Parit as a Living System of Water, Community, and Culture

Through these practices and processes, parit became more than an agricultural tool. It is a form of collective knowledge passed down through generations. It stands as an adaptive response to a challenging environment, demonstrating how communities in Indragiri Hilir learned to shape the land while respecting its limits.

Over time, it also grew into a living system of governance, one that weaves together environmental knowledge, cultural values, and social cooperation. Managing water through parit is, at its core, about sustaining relationships between people, land, and tides across generations.

Learn deeper on Indragiri Hilir’s parit’s richcultural history through our latest brief here. Also, follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for more updates!