Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java
464
Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java
464eBook
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Overview
Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history’s episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography—thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378662 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/24/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Nancy K. Florida is Associate Professor of Indonesian Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future
History as Prophecy in Colonial Java
By Nancy Florida
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1995 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7866-2
CHAPTER 1
THE WRITING OF A HISTORY
* * *
The writing of any history takes place in history and is itself, then, a kind of historical event. Traditional Javanese historical writing, I would argue, is a practice more self-consciously aware of this truism than is the practice of writing history in the post-Enlightenment West. The post-Enlightenment historical project is conventionally understood as the objective representation of past events as framed and explained by the historical contexts in which those events are construed to have "really" occurred. Such a historical project is premised on the assumed absolute alterity of a positively dead past, a past which is there to be known and faithfully reconstructed in writing by "objective scientists" who themselves exist (miraculously) in a place which itself seems outside history. Traditional Javanese historical writing appears to have been a significantly different project with a significantly different relation to the past. Recognizing the presence of living pasts in the historically becoming presents in which they wrote, the writers of traditional histories in Java understood the inscription of these texts as historical events, and the texts themselves as potential contexts. Recognizing their own historical agency, these Javanese historians could, then, self-consciously employ traditional conventions of writing to effect a transformation of tradition itself. That is, such traditional Javanese historical writing, because it was self-consciously written in and of history, was capable, at times, of rewriting the conditions of its own production.
What, then, do we know of the history of the writing of Babad Jaka Tingkir? What kind of historical event does its inscription compose? How is the text of Tingkir situated as a writing of history? What manner of historical agent actually wrote this remarkably untypical traditional text? In this chapter, we will turn to the actual manuscript of Babad Jaka Tingkir to begin to address these questions.
In original manuscript there survives but a single witness of this unique telling of a Javanese past. This surviving manuscript witness is inscribed and bound into the end of a volume that is now stored in the library of the senior palace of Surakarta. That volume, titled Kupiya Iber Warni-warni Sampéyandalem kaping VI ("Copies of the Miscellaneous Correspondence of His Majesty the Sixth"; hereafter: His Majesty the VI's Correspondences), appears a diplomatic archive associated with Pakubuwana VI, the Surakarta king who vanished into exile in 1830. How, then, does Babad Jaka Tingkir, this history of a legendary hero of the sixteenth century, belong to the correspondence of an exiled nineteenth-century king? To begin to answer this question I turn now to sketch a very brief history of that exiled king's life and times.
I.S.K.S. Pakubuwana VI
Born in 1807 to a secondary wife of Pakubuwana V, Pakubuwana VI was the ruler of the Kraton Surakarta from 1823 to 1830. He was not, apparently, a particularly popular monarch. Elevated to the throne when he was only sixteen years old, at least in part by the machinations of his foster father, the powerful Grand Vizier Sasradiningrat II (dates of office, 1812–46), the young king proved somewhat less tractable than his elders might have wished. A restless figure, the king (often appearing in Dutch dress, to the dismay of his colonial" guardians") was, it seemed to his detractors, all too often on the road. Of the king's "dressing Dutch" and his incessant travel, Lieutenant Governor General H. M. de Kock complained: "[he] frequently goes off fishing and hunting, and often dresses up as a European, and has recently had the queen dress likewise; so that it can be said of him that he is doing whatever possible to make himself unpopular. A Mohammedan despot (Mohamedaansch despoot) must, if he is to inspire honor and respect, show himself little outside his Kraton." Apparently the restless young king—who would not conform to the Dutch ideal of the "Mohammedan despot"—was an avid reader, especially of "traditional Javanese histories"; and it seems he was an accomplished writer as well. Of Pakubuwana VI's literary prowess, the hostile de Kock reported: "The Emperor has little natural intellect, and yet he has picked up an extensive knowledge of Javanese historical traditions (gebruiken); he writes fluently/ smartly (vlug), and he has read extensively." Pakubuwana VI was known to perform occasionally as dhalang, or shadow-puppet master, and to waltz poorly.
Pakubuwana VI ascended to the throne in September 1823, shortly after his father's untimely death and the notorious canceling of land rentals in the Principalities—and a scant year and a half before Prince Dipanagara, elder statesman of the Yogyakarta Palace (Central Java's other royal city), went into open rebellion against the encroachments of colonial domination. At the time of the outbreak of the Dipanagara War in May 1825, Surakarta's king was barely eighteen years old. The popular Prince Dipanagara garnered a broad base of support for his rebellion: with the aid of a number of other aristocrats (including some from Surakarta) and with the extremely important backing of a powerful network of rural Islamic teachers, he earned the allegiance of a large number of ordinary villagers to his cause. The Dipanagara War, which was to rage for five long years, posed a serious threat to Dutch power in Java and marked the last stand of indigenous royal power against Dutch colonial hegemony. Where did the young Pakubuwana VI stand in this struggle? Although ostensibly supporting his Dutch overlords against the rebels, Surakarta's king was known to have sympathized with, and likely to have secretly assisted, the rebellious Dipanagara.
The war ended in the spring of 1830, when the Dutch finally captured Dipanagara (in the course of ostensible negotiations) and straightway exiled him to Menado and then on to Makassar. After finishing with Dipanagara, the colonial authorities turned to settle with their putative ally, Pakubuwana VI. The victorious Dutch shocked their shifty comrade in arms by annexing all the outer districts (mancanagara) of both the Surakarta and Yogyakarta courts. This act provoked the young Pakubuwana to action; he protested the annexation by withdrawing secretly to the tombs of his ancestors and to the magical embrace of his spiritual consort. Almost certainly preparing for armed rebellion, the twenty-three-year-old Pakubuwana VI was arrested in June 1830 on Java's southern coast where he was communing with the spirit Queen of the South Sea. The young king was deposed and exiled to the remote island of Ambon, located across a great expanse of ocean some 1,200 miles to the east of Central Java. Joining the young ex-king in exile were his favorite wife, Ratu Anom, one of his young daughters, and a tiny handful of faithful retainers.
With the exile of Pakubuwana VI and the ascension to the throne of his Dutch-favored uncle, Prince Purbaya, as Pakubuwana VII (r. 1830-58), whatever vestiges of political power the Surakarta rulers had managed to retain were finally lost. But at war's end, it was not just the ruling elite who suffered: five years' warfare had brought devastating losses to the people of Central Java. At a time when the population of the entire island of Java numbered but seven million souls, the war had claimed well over 200,000 Javanese lives; Yogyakarta's population was reduced by half. After the war the Javanese peasantry, under the notorious Cultuur Stelsel, would be pressed into the forced cultivation of export crops, the profits of whose sale would go into the Dutch colonial treasury. The year 1830 is, then, a watershed year in Javanese history, marking the final end of indigenous royal political power, the defeat of the last serious military challenge to Dutch authority on the island (prior to the Indonesian national revolution), and the beginning of high colonialism in Java.
Pakubuwana VI was never allowed to return to Surakarta; he died in exile in 1849 at the age of forty-two. His remains were not returned to Java until 1957—after the Indonesian Republic had won its independence from the Dutch. In December 1830, six months after his arrest, a son was born to the exiled king by one of the queens he had left behind in Surakarta. That son, who was never to see his father, eventually succeeded to the throne of the Kraton as Pakubuwana IX (r. 1861-93). Over a century after his death, Pakubuwana VI was proclaimed a "Hero of Indonesian National Independence" by presidential decree in 1964.
Babad Jaka Tingkir, item number sixty-three of the sixty-three items composing His Majesty the VI's Correspondence, somehow belongs to the documentary archive of this Hero of Indonesian National Independence. What manner of royal correspondence is compiled in this volume? In addition to the Tingkir history, the volume comprises a collection of letters and treaties (dated 1812-48) that appear to have been copied from documents in the Kraton Surakarta archives, the genealogy of a certain Sarifi Ibrahim Madyakusuma, two pages of captioned pen and ink drawings, and a single page noting that "this is a commemoration of His Majesty's dream ..." This chapter explores historically the nature of this volume of "His Majesty the VI's Correspondence [or dream]."
The Manuscript
His Majesty the VI's Correspondence in manuscript measures 34.5 × 22 cm. and numbers some 304 pages (152 leaves, double-page numbered). A single hand, aside from a few duly noted exceptions, inscribes the entire manuscript. That hand writes in a cursive style that was prevalent in and around Surakarta around the middle of the nineteenth century. The hand appears to have been a fluent and practiced one (figure 4). The original text is preceded by a five-page table of contents inscribed in a different (likely later nineteenth-century) hand. The spelling and punctuation of the manuscript are consistent with nineteenth-century Surakarta conventions. The manuscript is inscribed upon relatively lightweight European paper. There is no watermark. The leaves are brittle, and some are torn. Relatively mild ink bleed-through has perforated a number of the leaves.
The manuscript's binding is distinctive: the boards are covered with plain white cloth; the spine, with red velvet. The bound volume thus evokes the red and white gula-kelapa (sugar-coconut) motif of the royal flags of Java. This use of the gula-kelapa motif in book binding is rare. In all the Surakarta repositories, I found only one other manuscript thus bound. That other manuscript, also housed in the Kraton Surakarta library, resembles His Majesty the VI's Correspondence in other ways as well. The scripts and the papers of both manuscripts, though not identical, are remarkably similar. And, as it turns out, this other gula-kelapa manuscript is also associated with the exiled Pakubuwana VI. Inscribed on its cover is the title: Serat Rama: Tilaran-dalem Sampéyan-dalem I.S.K.S. Pakubuwana kaping VI ("The Book of Rama: Legacy of H.R.H. Pakubuwana VI"). The manuscript is a copy of Yasadipura's late-eighteenth-century macapat Serat Rama, which—though written in a Surakarta script, and stored in the library of the Surakarta Palace—was produced on the island of Ambon. The copy was commissioned by the exiled Pakubuwana VI in May 1846, some three years prior to his June 1849 death. Were, then, both these gula-kelapa volumes produced in Ambon for the exiled Pakubuwana VI and then, following his death, brought home to Surakarta by one of the wives, children, or retainers who, having shared his exile, were repatriated to Java in June 1850?
The Compilation
His Majesty the VI's Correspondence comprises some sixty-three textual items, the sixty-third and longest of which is Babad Jaka Tingkir. Of the remaining sixty-two textual items, sixty-one comprise copies of Javanese language correspondence and archival documents, the overwhelming majority of which relate directly to the royal family and affairs of the Kraton Surakarta. Most of the documents (forty-five) originate from that court. The original documents date from 1812 to 1848, with a preponderance dating from 1823 to 1830, Pakubuwana VI's regnal years. The documents are not, however, copied into the volume in any strict chronological order. Seventeen of the volume's documents (fifteen of these at the close of the compilation) pertain directly to Pakubuwana VI's exile to Ambon. As I noted above, upon first reading, the copies appear to have been made from original documents that would have belonged to the Kraton Surakarta archives. A more careful examination of these documents, however, proves a very different source was consulted by the compiler of His Majesty the VI's Correspondence.
Royal correspondence constitutes the single largest category of documents copied. Included in this category is correspondence of Pakubuwana IV (r. 1788-1820), Pakubuwana V (r. 1820-23), Pakubuwana VI (r. 1823-30; d. Ambon, 1849), and Pakubuwana VII (r. 1830-58). The greater part of this correspondence comprises letters from these kings to colonial officials, Sultans of Yogyakarta, and members of the Surakarta nobility. The tone and content of the letters is formal and official, with the notable exception of the sometimes deeply personal Surakarta-Ambon correspondence of exile at the end of the collection. The final six of these personalroyal letters are composed in macapat verse, three of them by Pakubuwana VI, one by the daughter who had followed him into exile (Gusti Radèn Ayu Timur), one by his son (the future Pakubuwana IX), and one by his brother.
In addition to the correspondence of these kings and their families, the compilation contains several letters that concern land administration and finance in the Surakarta region. Most of these letters were addressed to colonial officials from various ranks of Surakarta royalty and court retainers. There is a single missive from a senior Surakarta prince to a colonial official cum scholar of Javanese letters.
The volume opens with a complete copy of the famous and rather lengthy treaty of 1812 between the ruler of the Kraton Surakarta and the British colonial government. This treaty, which Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles secured by threat of force, seriously compromised the royal power of Surakarta kings—notably removing from them their military troops, their control of tolls and markets, their rights to move their kraton, and a goodly amount of land. When the Dutch regained control over Java in 1816, their first order of business in Surakarta was to ratify this important legal agreement. For it was this British treaty of 1812 that was to lay the foundations for the nineteenth-century colonial relationship the Dutch overlords would enjoy with their royal Surakarta vassals. Also copied into this volume are a report submitted by Prince Mangkunagara to the colonial Resident of Surakarta on a (putative) death-bed wish of Pakubuwana IV and copies of Pakubuwana V's accession treaties. Several documents pertain to matters of concern to the Kraton Surakarta during the Dipanagara War.
Another Compilation and Its Copy
In the course of my eight years' research in Java, I had occasion to examine a number of compilations of Javanese language correspondence and archival materials. Most of the compilations I reviewed were in manuscript form. One, however, was a published text. That volume, which I found at the Mangkunagaran Palace on the shelf of Surakarta's other royal library, was first published in the Netherlands in 1845. The book was T. Roorda's Javaansche brieven, berigten, verslagen, verzoekschriften, proclamaties, publicaties, contracten, schuldbekentenissen, quitanties, processtukken, pachtbrieven en andere soortgelijke stukken; naar handschriften uitgegeven ("Javanese letters, notices, reports, petitions, proclamations, publications, contracts, IOUS, receipts, legal documents, leases and other such documents; published from manuscripts"; later, and hereafter, known as the Brievenboek). This publication, comprising a collection of 233 Javanese language documents dated from 1812 to 1843, was produced as a textbook for the Javanese language education of Dutch civil servants bound for the Indies. Roorda opens his preface to the compilation:
It should be unnecessary to waste many words to point out the obvious utility and importance of this collection to any student of Javanese language, institutions, and customary practices—but most especially to him whose study of them is in preparation to become an official in the colonial possessions of the Government of the Netherlands East Indies.
(Continues...)
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