J. Ras The genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi; Origin and function of the Javanese court chronicle In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 143 (1987), no: 2/3, Leiden, 343-356 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:57:34PM via free access J. J. RAS THE GENESIS OF THE BAB AD TANAH JAWI* Origin and Function of the Javanese Court Chronicle Exactly a century ago, in 1885, the linguist and archaeologist J. L. A. Brandes began with the study of indigenous sources for the reconstruc- tion of the Javanese past. Because of his spade-work in this field he is now regarded as the father of Javanese historiographical studies as an academic discipline. As a government servant charged with the study of the Old Javanese language and of archaeology, Brandes was interested first and foremost in the history of the pre-Muslim past. When he began his studies, texts like the Pararaton and the Nagarakertagama, which we today regard as indispensable tools for the study of the Majapahit period in Javanese history, were not yet available, however. He himself was to discover them and make them accessible to an interested public by way of text editions (Brandes 1897V19202; 1904). The only sources which Brandes initially had at his disposal were texts belonging to the Babad Tanah Jawi tradition - a Modern Javanese tradition of much more recent date. The Babad Tanah Jawi is the official chronicle of the kingdom of Mataram, a realm which had its hey-day under Sultan Agung in the first half of the 17th century. As it is now one century since scholarly concern with Javanese history began with the study of precisely this text, and because of the present renewed interest in the potential contribution of indigenous sources of this type to the historiography of Indonesia, I would here draw attention to the problem of its genesis. The question of its birth also involves that of its function. It therefore has a certain relevance for particular problems of interpretation raised by the text, problems which should be solved before it can be used as a histo- rical source. The Babad Tanah Jawi has been discussed in detail by Brandes in his Pararaton edition of 1897. What he refers to as Babad Tanah Jawi here is the text that is commonly held to contain the history of the kratons of This article is an English-language adaptation of the author's inaugural address as Professor of Javanese at the University of Leiden on 25 th October 1985. The translation from the original Dutch was made by Maria J. L. van Yperen. Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:57:34PM via free access 344 J. J. Ras Pajajaran, Majapahit, Demak, Pajang, Mataram and Kartasura. In the Balai Pustaka edition it runs to almost 2400 pages (Brandes 1920:205- 207; Babad 1939-1941). It begins with Adam and continues until the year 1745. Brandes assumed - probably on the authority of C. F. Winter's Surakarta informants (Winter 1848, no. 73) - that this text crystallized into its definitive form around the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century. We find this form reflected in all the available versions and fragments, and, since obviously deviating versions are absent, Brandes believed it to be 'an officially decreed and author- ized version of the history of Java according to the views of a particular period' (Brandes 1920:207). This applies in the first place to the history of Java after the arrival of the Dutch, when the realm of Mataram was the dominant political power in Java. For the part dealing with the history of the period prior to 1600, however, there is a variety of sources available - according to Brandes - while in addition there are texts containing rather detailed quasi-historical descriptions of these earlier periods (Brandes 1920:208). By the former he means the extensive body of wayang stories that form part of Modern Javanese literature, while with the latter he is alluding to the texts belonging to the so-called kanda tradition. These kanda books contain summary outlines of wayang stories. These outlines are strung together in such a way as to provide a pseudo-historical account of events supposed to have taken place in Java in the distant past. When he extended his study to the Pararaton - a text in Middle Javanese, which consequently belongs to an older tradition - Brandes was struck by the enormous difference between the picture of the Majapahit period given here and the history of this period as sketched in the texts belonging to the Modern Javanese tradition of which the Babad Tanah Jawi forms part. He recognized the former as being the more authentic, and tried to find an explanation for the curious character of the latter. The results of his investigations led him to define tradi- tional Javanese literature as a huge body which on the one hand.keeps losing certain of its component parts as a result of their no longer being handed down at a particular point in time, and on the other hand continues to grow as a consequence of repetition and the addition of newly created works. The kanda books with their pseudo-history in the form of strings of wayang stories he regarded as forming part of the babad tradition. This is correct insofar as there is, in fact, a demonstrable overlap between the two. For a number of kanda texts carry their story on into the historical period, and thus link up with the babad tradition. Brandes' contention was that such a kanda book might with equal right be termed a handbook of Javanese literature, or a pepakem, i.e. a manual for the Javanese theatre, or, alternatively, a babad. The remark- able thing about these kanda books is that they often contain a varied body of genealogical information, whereas dates are mostly missing. Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:57:34PM via free access The Genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi 345 We must assume - Brandes argues - that these books originally derived from what must have been a handbook for poets (Brandes 1920:209), a handbook containing not only examples of metrical compositions and lists of synonyms, but in the long run also genealogical and biograph- ical information about particular persons, along with outlines of their mutual relationships, as well as brief synopses of earlier texts and wayang stories. With the arrangement of the gradually increasing contents of these books in some kind of logical sequence, a sort of pseudo-history books came about. By adding stories about more recent events, this pseudo-history was brought more up to date, ultimately resulting in what is currently referred to as a babad. What all this boils down to, then, is that Brandes considered the babad?,, at any rate those belonging to the Babad Tanah Jawi tradition and comparable texts, as a kind of kanda books, in which the purely fictitious history of the mythical past is followed by stories about events taking place in historical times. Brandes' successor in the study of the babad literature was Hoesein Djajadiningrat. In his Ph.D. thesis concerning the Sejarah Banten (Dja- jadiningrat 1913), he gave ample attention to the Babad Tanah Jawi. His merit was that he tried to unravel the genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi without resorting to a general theory concerning the genre to which this book is, rightly or wrongly, believed to belong. He observed that the part of the text dealing with the earliest period of the realm of Mataram contains predictions of events and situations which were to take place much later, namely after the fall of the kraton of Plered in 1677. This imparted to these stories a special relevance for those parts of the text that deal with this much later period. It was the function of these predictions to provide a justification for dynastic irregularities occurring at a much later point in history. The implication of this is that it will be possible to determine the time of writing of particular passages on the basis of their purport. What in Brandes' view had been a more or less chaotic process of uncontrolled growth thus was reduced by Djajadi- ningrat to a more or less orderly process of writing and rewriting of a historical account on the basis of a particular formula. In this connection it should be noted, however, that Djajadiningrat did not go back any further in his reconstruction of the genesis of the Babad Tanah Jawi than the canonized version attributed to Pangeran Adilangu II, which dates from the period of 1690 to 1718. He was able to determine what had happened to the text after 1690, but it remained uncertain what had happened prior to that. And so it is that we find Djajadiningrat concur- ring with Brandes' theory (Hoesein Djajadiningrat 1913:306) where the beginning of the Babad, dealing with the period prior to 1600, is con- cerned. On the basis of a comparison with the Sejarah Banten, Djaja- diningrat finally concluded that the outline of the earlier history of Java Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:57:34PM via free access 346 J. J. Ras given here is an old one and must date back to at least the first half of the 17th century. The first historian to make extensive use of the Babad Tanah Jawi as a source for research on actual historical processes was H. J. de Graaf. He demonstrated in a series of valuable monographs how such Javanese sources may profitably be used, thus becoming the first historian to successfully experiment with an Indonesia-centric approach in historio- graphy (De Graaf 1954, 1958 and 1961).