CANDRASANGKALA: THE BALINESE ART OF DATING EVENTS. HANS HÄGERDAL [email protected] Department of Humanities University of Växjö Sweden 2006 1 Introduction 2 Babad Gumi 13 Babad Bhumi 42 Korn 1 74 Korn 2 93 Korn 3 100 Korn 4 105 Korn 5 113 Babad Tusan 132 Tattwa Batur Kalawasan 140 Pangrincik Babad 147 Sara Samuscaya Pakenca 156 Anjang Nirartha 164 Pasasangkalan 167 Pawawatekan 182 Postscript: Pasangkalan 198 Genealogies 201 Unpublished sources 204 Literature 206 2 INTRODUCTION Elements of Balinese historiography. History has deep roots on Bali, however one defines the word. To be more exact, Bali has a wider scope of historiographical continuity than anywhere else in Southeast Asia except for Vietnam and perhaps Burma. Pending some previous scholarly statements regarding the Balinese perception of time and the historical past, that are found in the anthropological literature about the island, such a statement may seem rather rash. However, it remains an astonishing fact. On Balinese soil historical texts were preserved and cherished; they informed ever new generations about ancient kingdoms far back in time, to the Javanese dynasties of Airlangga and Ken Angrok up to a thousand years ago. Certainly, these dynasties were mainly non-Balinese, but this is irrelevant for the self- perception of the Balinese elite groups, who found inspiration and raison d’être from tales of ancient Javanese realms. As against this, the genuinely historical memory barely goes back before the 13th century in Thailand, the 14th century in Laos and Cambodia, and the 15th century in the Malay world. Historical traditions from Java, Aceh, South Sulawesi and Maluku cease to be merely legends and start to take on a somewhat more plausible shape in about the 15th or 16th century. For remoter times we are confined to the results of modern archaeologists and epigraphists – and in the case of Java to the works preserved on Bali through the centuries. Nevertheless, indigenous Balinese sources that allegedly chronicle the past are difficult to work with, for several reasons. They presuppose a rather intimate knowledge of the cultural context in order to be appreciated, and there are important intertextual considerations that must be made before one can think of using them for historical reconstruction. Pre-modern Balinese authors who set out to describe persons and events were often Brahmana literati with a truly deep fund of knowledge of the Hindu-Javanese civilization that was considered to be the basis of Bali-ness (Creese 1991a; Creese 1991b; Rubinstein 2000:37). They could also be members of the other high castes, Ksatria or Wesia (Berg 1932). In either case, their obsession with Indic and Javanese models of kingship, ritual and ethics put its mark on what they wrote. A founder king of a Balinese kingdom – a Dewa Ketut of Gelgel, a Gusti Panji Sakti of Buleleng, a Gusti Agung Sakti of Mengwi – had to be pressed into a Indianized mould of kingship (Worsley 1972:43). His establishment of a proper court, his management of proper ritual paraphernalia, and the expansion of his power over the surrounding lands, all formed part of this, irrespective of the more complicated historical realities. Lost wars could be suppressed in these accounts, or they could be reduced to incidents, or explained through a mythologized forged chain of causality. Important protagonists of a dynastic realm could be suppressed as irrelevant for the purpose of the historian, who on the other hand could note down accurately every child of every granduncle of the present ruling member of the dynasty (Vickers 1989:69-71). 3 The texts that purported to tell of past lives of a dynasty or important family are called babad. The word literally means “opening up”, “clearing”, which gives connotations to the process of elucidating and uncovering the origins of a particular family. The babad usually have a marked genealogical concern, and parts of them may consist of catalogues of family members. The narrative parts of these texts are frequently concerned with origins. They tell of the founding of a polity, of the pseudo-historical origins of heirloom objects and family ceremonies, of the reasons for the social position of a descent group in current Balinese society, etc. (Hinzler 1976). All this seems to speak against a chronicling of historical facts in a Western sense. Events without relevance for the family are left out, and facts may be rearranged to suit the ideal picture of the past that the babad tries to depict. All this has given the Balinese brand of historiography a doubtful reputation in Western writings on Bali; in spite of their great literary and cultural interest they make a bewildering impression on a conventional historian (Ricklefs 1981:52). Nevertheless, the babad are rather varied in their scope and reliability. While some of them seem to be well informed, others stuff various kinds of stories and persons into a garbled account (Schulte Nordholt 1992; Schulte Nordholt 1996:26). For example, the Klungkung chronicle Babad Ksatria, written by a learned court Brahmana in the second half of the 19th century, presents a reasonably well-structured although very selective account of the Klungkung kingdom. This account contrasts sharply with the Babad Blahbatuh, compiled by a minor aristocrat in 1868, which brings in pieces of information from various corners and forges a chronologically confused account which expands the number of generations in the genealogy considerably (Warna 1986; Berg 1932). But apart from that it is also important to note that Balinese history writing, as the experience of the past, included other genres than the babads. To write about dramatic events in the classical Javanese world, which had taken place before the coming of Islam, required the poetic form of the kidung. In verbose songs like Kidung Harsawijaya, Kidung Sunda and Kidung Rangga Lawe Balinese poets expanded core stories found in Old Javanese historical texts, filling out the original stories with fictive speeches and descriptions. Dramatic historical events that lay closer in time, perhaps even within the lifetime of the author, could take the form of geguritan, songs that described the tragic qualities of the fall of a dynasty or aristocrat. None of these genres were particularly concerned with the exact dates for events, or with the arrangement of events in a precise chronological chain. On the contrary, comparisons with external (mostly European) sources amply show that the historians of Bali forged their own chain of causality from events that in themselves might very well be historical (cf. Vickers 1990; Schulte Nordholt 1992). Rather few dates are found in the pre-modern babad texts, and those who are there seem to be of varying reliability. For the twentieth- century Balinese who were confronted with Dutch and post-independence Indonesian history writing, this was probably seen as a something of a problem. Figures who were revered as major rulers, priests and literati were not chronologically anchored in the same way as the grand figures of Indonesia-wide history – Gajah Mada, Sultan Agung, Hasanuddin etc. In some modern Balinese babad texts this handicap has been redeemed by the forging of new dates, which have often found their way into historical literature in Bahasa Indonesia, and even occasionally in Western academic texts (cf. Putra 1991). 4 There was nevertheless a further genre of history writing that covered exactly this dating aspect. If there were no dates in most Balinese historical texts it was not because such did not exist. Rather, we have once again to review the Balinese attitude to genres of texts. Different aspects of the past were accorded to different kinds of text. A dynastic origin- story was confined to a babad, an episode of ancient history to a kidung, and a dramatic modern episode to a geguritan (Vickers 1990). And series of exact dates that had been preserved were included in particular compendiums or lists (sometimes called “babad” though they do not actually belong to this genre). The years were indicated with words possessing a numerical value. Such dates are called chronograms or candrasangkala. They could not be used extensively in the babad since the aim of the latter was not to present a chronologically determined series of events. But they could certainly be placed at the end, or sometimes in the midst of, a narrative text. For example, the Pamancangah Karangasem, a genealogical register of the East Balinese Karangasem dynasty, ends with such a series of dates, which in themselves have little relevance to the rest of the text. Other series could be appended to, for example, law-texts or legendary accounts. It is precisely these compendiums that will constitute the object of the present study. The material. For this study fourteen lists have been studied and translated. All of them are found in the collections of the Dutch Asianist stronghold of Leiden, either in the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV) or in the Department of Eastern Letters at the University Library. Twelve are available in transcriptions to the Latin alphabet while two have been transcribed from the Balinese aksara alphabet. The inquiries I have made on Bali itself about possible further lists have so far led to no result. There seems to be very little interest for these compendiums today among the Balinese themselves. Among these fourteen items not one seems to be younger than the early 1920s. At that time the Dutch colonial official Victor E. Korn, famous for his work on Balinese adat law (Korn 1932), collected all kinds of materials on things Balinese. To these belonged the Babad Bhumi, a legendary tale of ancient Bali that included 145 dates of events, and furthermore five lists which I have called Korn 1-5 in this book for the sake of convenience.