The Sěrat candraning wanita (Book of descriptions of women) is a voluminous Javanese manuscript written in Yogyakarta in the 1930s. This handbook for would-be husbands is basically an instruction manual, informing its (male) readers how to choose a good wife/sexual partner (based on physiognomy) and how sex works (based on ‘the etiquette of sexual intercourse’). It can be regarded as the swansong of pre-modern Javano-Muslim erotology.

Javanese literature can boast a distinct genre of worksabout the adventures of wandering students/scholars,who travel about the countryside in pursuit ofesoteric knowledge. Journeying and undergoingvarious trials and tribulations on the way isregarded in Javanese culture as an ascetic practice,preparatory to ultimate enlightenment. An early,pre-Islamic representative of this genre is theKidung Subrata, dated 1541. Thebest-know examples, at least by name, i.e. theCĕnṭini andJatiswara, probably originatefrom the beginning of the seventeenth century. Inthe course of time these two stories were constantlyreworked until by the beginning of the nineteenthcentury they reached massive proportions and weremade into storehouses of encyclopaedic knowledge ofall kinds of things Javanese. The so-called MajorCěntini, compiled in 1814 at theSurakarta Crown Prince's court, has hithertoreceived most attention. Quite a few scholars,guided by Pigeaud's table of contents, have tappedthis source for information on many topics.

The motto of this article, taken from a novel by Rushdie (1995: 3), briefly summarizes its theme. The ‘traveller’ I wish to discuss is the love story of Abimanyu and Ksiti (or Modern Javanese Siti) Sundari. The earliest account of this story seems to be the Old Javanese kakawin Gaoṭkacâsraya (‘Gaṭotkaca's help’), said to be composed by mpuPanuluh in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century (Zoetmulder, 1974: 277). But how the story travelled and what mouths it ended up in! In 1990, for instance, Kamal Z. recorded his performance of the Javanese pop song ‘Siti Sundari’, composed by himself, in which he sang the following lines:

When the Aceh War finally broke out in 1873 it did not come as a surprise to most contemporaries. In colonial historiography Aceh, a ‘nest of pirates’, according to the Dutch, had obviously precipitated the war by its ‘treason’ in turning to Turkey, America and other foreign powers for support against the Dutch. The discussions with the American consul in Singapore early in 1873 on a possible Acehnese-American treaty constituted a casus belli in the eyes of the Dutch.