INTRODUCTION

Disparate areas of Nusantara experienced a religious and socio-political “paradigm shift” during the period of AD 1400–1600, which here I call “early modern” for the sake of convenience. The Indic-influenced polities of Java and Sumatra, where Hinduism and Buddhism had been prevalent for nearly a thousand years, began to succumb to the advance of Islam and the Islamicate social paradigm. Yet, in spite of — or perhaps thanks to — political instabilities, the disruption (or reconfiguration) of patterns of international trade and diplomacy, and the emergence of new literary genres, religio-ritual paradigms, and social orders, those regions appear to have maintained a vigorous activity of preservation, transformation, and circulation of knowledge based on Indic paradigms.

Victor Lieberman (2009, p. 10) describes a process of cultural integration in Southeast Asia from the fifteenth century onwards, an example of which is what he calls the “demoticisation” of “textually based Indic religions [that] once had been the more or less exclusive preserve of capital-based elites”. (Lieberman here refers to western and central mainland Southeast Asia, and does not look further into the insular region.) Following this lead, in this paper I explore the “parallelisms” that seem to have existed across the mosaic of literary and manuscript cultures of Western Nusantara — i.e., Sumatra, Java, and Bali — in the early modern period. Those locales witnessed the flourishing of vernacular text-manuscript cultures that shared religious ideas, literary conventions, and text-building practices stemming from the heyday of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis and the ensuing Vernacular Millennium (Pollock 1996, 2006). Rather than being separate and delinked peripheries, I suggest that these locales partook, through religious and cultural networks, of a translocal textual tradition of ultimately Indic origin. Although their textual documents were produced in different local contexts characterized by different histories of reception, socio-cultural specificities, and religious contingencies, they appear to have developed in parallel, as it were, from what must once have been a shared Sanskritic tradition.

Here I will approach the literary cultures of early modern Malay and Javano-Balinese spheres by focusing on what Pollock (2007, p. 83) calls the “materiality of manuscript culture”, and elaborate on historical evidence that linked their social and religious contexts. I will first describe the networks of manuscripts and literati in the Javano-Balinese sphere from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth century.