Introduction

Beyond the narrow circle of specialists, even among scholars of Southeast Asia, the very existence of a literature in a language called Old Javanese may come as a surprise, and so one should not automatically expect to find an appreciation of its special qualities. Yet it is undoubtedly part of the heritage of the people of Java and Bali who created it, and hence more generally of all Indonesians, constituting an element of their national culture.

At the same time, however, it has often been non-Indonesians who have taken an interest in Old Javanese, beginning with Dutch scholars in the colonial period, and continuing with others in various countries in the post-independence era. Such international attention suggests that the products of Old Javanese literature are by no means the exclusive possession of any one group, but are capable of taking their place among the treasures of world literature, which can be enjoyed by readers of any background. This is then the present writer's point of view.

The scholars who first came to the academic study of Old Javanese (as distinct from the traditional indigenous study) approached it from their understanding of the cultural history of the region, with its obvious links to Indian civilization — after all, the script used for writing and many of the themes could be traced to Indian origins. A knowledge of Sanskrit is understandably useful for reading Old Javanese. However, the spirit and the inspiration of many of these literary works, prose and poetry, is also plainly indigenous, so that we should not make the mistake of denying the Old Javanese authors due credit for their remarkable achievements.

The “Javanese” Presence in Malay Literature and Performance

It has long been noted by scholars that traditional literature and performance in Malay, as once practised throughout the archipelago, in an area ranging from the island of Java itself, particularly Batavia, up to Kedah and Kelantan in Malaysia, contains elements with explicit and strong Javanese associations. Settings, characters, objects, idioms, stories, texts, even entire genres are explicitly identified as “Javanese” or “from Java”. Certain Malay prose and verse narratives (hikayat and syair) are set at medieval Javanese courts, with Javanese protagonists. These works mostly tell stories about Prince Ino Kertapati (Panji) and his close relatives. Some are labelled as translations from the Javanese language or said to have been performed by narrators in or from Java. An often-discussed example is the Hikayat Andaken Penurat, but there are numerous others (Robson 1969, pp. 7–8; Koster 1997, pp. 55–56; Braginsky 2004, p. 159). There are also, of course, Malay texts with only a few episodes set in Java and with Javanese characters more as antagonists, including the celebrated Sejarah Melayu and Hikayat Hang Tuah. A genre of shadow-play named “Javanese” (wayang Jawa) used to be performed in a variety of Kelantan Malay with Panji and Pandawa narratives — stories about the heroes of the Mahabharata — for its repertoire (Sweeney 1972, pp. 3–25).

Introduction

It has been said that there are many Ramayanas, both in India and abroad, and “each reflects the social location and ideology of those who have appropriated it” (Richman 1991, p. 4). The same is, of course, true of the Mahabharata. There are many Mahabharatas and its multiple stories are variously read, recited, acted, danced, sculptured, filmed, drawn, and possibly recreated in many other ways as well, all reflecting the values and aesthetics of the time and place in which they are recreated. Sutjipto's Indonesian translation of the Old Javanese Kakawin Bharatayuddha describes the story of fratricidal violence as “cerita yang mengerikan ini”, this horrifying story (Sutjipto Wirjosuparto 1968, p. 360). Few sections of the epic are as horrifying as the death in battle of Abimanyu, the young son of Arjuna and Subadra.

The written literatures of Malay and Javanese have a long history — more than one thousand years in the case of Javanese. During this long period the outward appearance of the book changed beyond recognition, themes occupying the minds of the authors and their audiences were adapted to new ideologies, long established literary conventions gave way to completely different ones, and the languages concerned, subject to constant renewal like any natural language, went through successive stages that became more and more incomprehensible with increasing distance in time.

These and other factors contributed to old texts falling into oblivion and new ones rising to popularity. A constant element amidst change, resisting the threat of oblivion, was the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Having arrived early in the history of Javanese literature, both epics found expression in various forms during the long period of Indian influence. The epics remained after the Indianized culture to which they belonged waned and disappeared. Continuing to manifest themselves in all sorts of shapes, their presence was not undermined by the advance of Islam in Java, nor was it by the more recent influence of Western culture. Information on the history of Malay literature, though providing less detail, shows a similar picture.

The chapters collected in Traces of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Javanese and Malay Literature go beyond mapping epic presence. They show what happened during transmission, adaptation and borrowing, and offer hypotheses on the underlying motives. The authors scrutinize a couple of selected texts and pictorial representations and — again or for the first time — address old questions and raise new ones, going back and forth in time, connecting Javanese and Malay and even Balinese literature.

The author with whom the volume opens, Stuart Robson, gives an overall view of the history of one text, the story of Rama and Sita, from the Old Javanese Ramayana of the ninth century up to the Serat Rama and Rama Keling written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Quite extraordinarily, the intervals between copies (partly hypothetical, partly based on real examples) appear to coincide with important moments in the history of Javanese culture. Taking Teeuw's theory on literary history and on translation as his starting point, the author is able to explain continued Javanese interest in the story from the wider social context as it developed over almost one millennium.

Introduction

With these words opens the narrative of a bulky Malay Panji romance, entitled Hikayat Misa Taman Jayeng Kusuma (henceforth called HMTJK), that according to its editor, Abdul Rahman Kaeh (1976), was possibly copied or written between 1860 and 1870. On Betara Kala's proposal, so the hikayat subsequently tells us, Betara Indera Naya and his wife Dewi Mandurati descend to earth and incarnate as the king and queen of Koripan, whose sons then become the kings of the Javanese kingdoms of Koripan, Daha, Gagelang and Singasari, and whose daughter marries the king of Manjapahit.

Introduction

On 6 September 1157 CE, Mpu Sĕḍah, a poet at the court of King Jayabhaya of Kaḍiri, began to compose the Old Javanese kakawin, the Bhāratayuddha, “The War of the Bhāratas”. This long narrative poem of 731 stanzas retells the story of the war between the Pāṇḍawas and the Kaurawas described in the “battle” books of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, that is, from the preparations for battle in the Udyogaparvan (Book 5) to the annihilation of the Kaurawa forces and the slaughter of the five sons of the Pāṇḍawa heroes on the night after the battle from the Sauptikaparvan (Book 10). In the introductory tribute to his patron in Canto 1, Mpu Sĕḍah, who composed the first section of the poem, reveals that his retelling of the story of the great war between the Pāṇḍawas and the Kaurawas is presented in homage to another mighty hero, his patron, King Dharmeśwara, or Jayabhaya, who has vanquished all his enemies (Supomo 1993, pp. 7–8). This kakawin therefore serves also as an allegorical panegyric to the world-conquering East Javanese monarch who ruled from c. 1135 to 1157 CE.

Rāma's Lessons on Leadership and “Javanese Genius”

In 2011, a book on the astabrata, also known under such designations as “the eightfold teachings”, “the eight ways of life”, and “the eight royal virtues”, was published in Indonesia, stating in the blurb that Indonesians were nowadays intoxicated by imported theories on leadership that, however, were ill-fitted to local realities.1 Hence, the author argued that local wisdom from Indonesia's own heritage as presented in the Astabrata is in fact still relevant (Yasasusastra 2011). Strictly speaking, however, the Astabrata is no less foreign-derived, being a concept of ancient Hindu political theory on “the divine qualities that a king was to emulate” (Weatherbee 1994, p. 414).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY