Old Javanese Legal Traditions in Pre-Colonial Bali
HELEN CREESE Old Javanese legal traditions in pre-colonial Bali Law codes with their origins in Indic-influenced Old Javanese knowledge sys- tems comprise an important genre in the Balinese textual record. Significant numbers of palm-leaf manuscripts, as well as later printed copies in Balinese script and romanized transliteration, are found in the major manuscript col- lections. A general overview of the Old Javanese legal corpus is included in Pigeaud’s four-volume catalogue of Javanese manuscripts, Literature of Java, under the heading ‘Juridical Literature’ (Pigeaud 1967:304-14, 1980:43), but detailed studies remain the exception. In spite of the considerable number of different legal treatises extant, and the insights they provide into pre-colonial judicial practices and forms of government, there have only been a handful of studies of Old Javanese and Balinese legal texts. A succession of nineteenth-century European visitors, ethnographers and administrators, notably Thomas Stamford Raffles (1817), John Crawfurd (1820), H.N. van den Broek (1854), Pierre Dubois,1 R. Friederich (1959), P.L. van Bloemen Waanders (1859), R. van Eck (1878-80) and Julius Jacobs (1883), routinely described legal practices in Bali, but European interest in Balinese legal texts was rarely philological. The first legal text to be published was a Dutch translation, without a word of commentary or explanation, of a section of the Dewadanda (Blokzeijl 1872). Then, in the early twentieth cen- tury, after the establishment of Dutch colonial rule over the entire island in 1908, Balinese (Djilantik and Oka 1909a, 1909b) and later Malay (Djlantik and Schwartz 1918a, 1918b, 1918c) translations of certain law codes were produced at the behest of Dutch officials who maintained that the Balinese priests who were required to administer adat law were unable to understand 1 Pierre Dubois,’Idée de Balie; Brieven over Balie’, [1833-1835], in: KITLV, H 281.
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