Since the middle of the nineteenth century there has been continuous interest in one of Java’s most famous, yet not widely read, poetic texts written in macapat metres, the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten or Major Cĕnthini.1 The 722 cantos and 247,766 lines of poetry of this version of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, which was composed in Surakarta by Ki Ng. Ronggasutrasna, R.Ng. Yasadipura II, and Ki Ng. Sastradipura under the direction of the Crown Prince of Surakarta (later Pakubuwana V, r. 1820–23) in 1815 during the British occupation of Java (1811–16), are arguably the greatest expression of literary art ever written in Javanese.2 One of the text’s most important interpreters, P.J. Zoetmulder, quoted here by Tim Behrend, summarizes the value of the text for Western and Indonesian readers alike when he writes: “Next to no other Javanese poem contains such a wealth of information about Javanese life in all its diversity as does the work that is now generally known as the Sĕrat Cĕnthini” (Behrend n.d.: 2; my translation). Read and studied appreciatively as an “encyclopedia” of information about Javanese culture from the beginning of the nineteenth century by generations of Javanese and Indonesians as well as by Western academics, it is strange, notwithstanding its length and difficulty, that the Sĕrat Cĕnthini has been neglected as a work of literature in its own right, as a long narrative poem, “unsurpassed” in literary as well as other ways, from which much can be learned about the composition of poetic narrative in Java.
A drawing from Sĕrat Damar Wulan, British Library, London, MS. Jav 89, 44v. An East Javanese lĕbe (village mosque official) and his family are fleeing their village during the war between Majapahit and Menak Jingga. A soldier on the right seems to be doing a victory dance. The Javanese caption above the lĕbe’s head reads: lĕbe desa ngili (a village lĕbe takes flight).
Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Serat_Damar_Wulan.pdf (accessed May 5, 2022)
One philologist, however, has done pathbreaking work on both the Cĕnthini corpus of 321 manuscripts stored in collections in Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Great Britain and on the literary characteristics of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten. Tim Behrend’s analysis is the starting point for my own research on what makes the Major Cĕnthini great literature.
Behrend adopts and refines a definition proposed by Nancy Florida, the “santri lĕlana (wandering student of Islam) story,” for a large family of texts to which the Sĕrat Cĕnthini belongs. According to Behrend all santri lĕlana stories have: (1) At least one santri (pious Muslim, student of religion) as protagonist (2) who wanders (lĕlana) in search of a lost relative as well as religious knowledge, through forests and populated countryside far from courts and cities, a landscape that may or may not be identifiable as “Java,” (3) enacting a story of adventure which is told by means of recurring episodes that are combined or omitted in various configurations, (4) ending when the protagonist gets into trouble because of his heterodox religious ideas and either escapes punishment or is killed (Behrend 1987: 325–26). There are six kinds of recurring episode in santri lĕlana narratives, according to Behrend: the adĕgan lĕlampahan (wandering episode, involving descriptions of the protagonist’s departure from the village where he has spent the night, the landscape through which he passes and the adventures he has before reaching his next destination); the adĕgan pitĕpangan (the first encounter episode, when the protagonist arrives at a new village, learns something about it and is by degrees introduced to the village headman); the adĕgan tĕtamuwan (the pay-a-visit episode, in which the protagonist introduces himself and is invited to spend the night by his host); the adĕgan rĕrasan ngelmi (discussion of esoteric knowledge episode, in which after dinner and evening prayer, the protagonist discusses religion with his host and other invited guests and participates in musical performances and recitations of various kinds); the adĕgan tilamwangi (the bedroom episode, in which the protagonist retires for the night and has [or politely demurs from having] sex with the love-sick daughters of his host); and the adĕgan pamitan (the departure episode, in which the protagonist, after morning prayers and respectful goodbyes to the pious host, leaves for his next journey, with dejected, often deflowered daughters left behind in tears) (Behrend 1987: 233–35).
Behrend’s delineation of the structural building blocks of santri lĕlana “discourse”3 is enormously helpful for thinking about the literary form of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten, the longest, most sprawling text of the santri lĕlana genre, in which there are not one but seven groups of wandering protagonists, as well as many stylistic elaborations and additions of characters and scenes within each of the six basic episode-types described by Behrend.4 Indeed, textual expansion on many levels, Behrend argues, resulting from the addition of new scenes and characters as well as verse after verse of poetic “exuberance” and “eruptions” of new detail (for other examples of poetic exuberance in Javanese texts written in very different styles at different times, see the essays by Arps, Bogaerts, Florida and Ricci in this volume), is characteristic of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten and other santri lĕlana narrative poems written in the household of the Crown Prince of Surakarta (Kadipaten) in the first two decades of the nineteenth century (Behrend 1987: chapters 5 and 6). The Kadipaten version of the poem is 40 times longer than its oldest textual ancestor, the Kidung Candhini, written in the town of Cirebon on the northwest coast of Java in the early seventeenth century (Behrend n.d.: 43, n. 48), and 18 times longer than the version of the Cĕnthini written in Surakarta in the late eighteenth century (Behrend 1987: 87).
Behrend says that “[t]he principle means by bujangga [poets] to manipulate and vary scenes within episodes are the obvious: expansion, contraction, repetition and rearrangement. All the multiplicity of plot, character, thematic and theological variety within episodes is achieved through these processes” (Behrend 1987: 236). From the 1790s to the 1820s in Surakarta, especially in the literary world of the Kadipaten,5 however, the creative expansionism that can be observed in santri lĕlana poems as well as other genres involved the proliferation of what Behrend calls “extraneous incidents” (1987: 187) and “minor characters,” many of whom “are given odd traits or speeches to make them stand out” (1987: 261). Behrend comments: “The interest in characters and their quirks does not make either wayang [shadow puppet theatre] or literature such as the Jatiswara character-centered in the same way that western literature tends to be. Instead, these entertaining characters function as adornments and fillips to the plot. For in Java, it is always the plot and its exigencies that carry characters along, and not the characters who determine the plot as a vehicle or reflection of their own development” (1987: 261).6
But what do we mean by the word “characterization”? The literary critic Alex Woloch, whose ideas I draw on for my own reading of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, says it means (as Anderson observes of wayang characters) “the literary representation of imagined human beings” (2003: 14). Woloch makes the point that is crucial for my own analysis: Literary characters are derived from, imagined in terms of, living people in the real world outside the text.7 The fact that “the literary character is itself divided, always emerging at the juncture between [literary] structure [think of Behrend’s “episodes” and “plots”] and reference [to the real world]” explains, writes Woloch, why “characterization” has become such a “divisive question” in literary theory (2003: 17).8 To resolve the tension between character as an imagined human individual and character as a cog in the wheel of plot or some other feature of literary structure, Woloch proposes that we focus on “the dynamic interaction” between different characters and between the “discretely implied individual and the overall narrative form” (2003: 18). Here Woloch suggests an inversion of the relationship between character and plot in Java as proposed by Behrend: it may be the “dynamic interaction” between characters and between characters and literary structures that generates narrative, not the other way around.
Woloch’s reflections on characterization lead him to pay particular attention to “minor” characters and their interaction with “major” ones. Minor characters, from Greek Homeric epics to European nineteenth-century realistic novels to the Javanese Sĕrat Cĕnthini, I would agree, are irresistibly fascinating:
At first glance the interpretation of minor characters might seem to be nothing else than a repudiation of the text’s own hierarchy of values, bringing to the critical foreground what has been subordinated to the narrative background. But how do we come to have the term “minor character” in the first place? The very occasion of the category suggests some dissonance between the character’s delimited role and more extended impact. If “minor characters” were literally minor in the normative sense of this word – “Comparatively small or unimportant; not to be reckoned among the greater or principal individuals of the kind” (Oxford English Dictionary) – the term itself would never have been formulated or deployed so often in literary criticism and evaluation (2003: 37).9
“Minor characters exist as a category, then, only because of their strange centrality to so many texts, perhaps to narrative signification itself,” Woloch concludes (2003: 37).
We can now remind ourselves of what Behrend tells us about the addition of minor characters to the early nineteenth-century recensions of the Sĕrat Jatiswara and Sĕrat Cĕnthini with their “odd traits or speeches to make them stand out” (Behrend 1987: 261) and then turn Behrend’s observation into a question that Woloch might ask: Why were minor characters added to the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten in the first place unless they were somehow central to how the authors wanted to rework the santri lĕlana narrative that they inherited, via many recensions and permutations, from the seventeenth-century Kidung Candhini? Why indeed was the text from its inception called the Kidung Candhini/Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Candhini/Cĕnthini being the name of a servant, albeit the principal servant to a major character in the story? The poem, it seems, was inscribed with and calls attention to “minorness” from the outset.10
One of the answers to these questions might be: to make the story more realistic. It is true that Woloch’s thinking about the significance of minor characters in fiction is strongly influenced by the role that minorness plays in the realist novels of nineteenth-century Europe (in his book he focuses on the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Honoré de Balzac), which seek to represent everyday life in a comprehensive way. It is not my intention to argue that a comparable interest in everyday life of the sort that we meet in the works of Austen was expressed in literature in early nineteenth-century Java.11 It is worth noting, however, as Behrend points out, that Recension H, the so-called Cĕnthini Jalalen, written in Surakarta in the early nineteenth century, is the first Cĕnthini recension “to reflect a concern with fixing the historical and geographical features of the poem in real time and space … This minimal historicism is replaced in the Major Cĕnthini by a geographic literalness of extreme proportions” (Behrend n.d.: 28).12 Something like an expression of (what Europeans would call) “realism,” the representation of the real, everyday world of Java, therefore, was expressed in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Javanese literary texts.13
Realistic minor characters in Javanese poetry from this period are not just found in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten. Consider, for example, the illustrations in a late eighteenth-century manuscript of the Sĕrat Damar Wulan, British Library MS Jav 89, one of which is shown at the beginning of my essay.14 Annabel Ten Gallop writes admiringly: “The pictures are rich in humour and the artist had a marvellous eye for facial expressions and bodily postures (a woman sleeping with her arm across her eyes, a sandal just balanced on a foot). Everyday ‘things’ are depicted in fascinating detail, from bird cages to garden pots and textiles, with wonderful scenes of music and dance of enormous interest to performers today” (Teh Gallop 2013). We can see examples of how minor characters and everyday realism are brought to life in two places in the drawing shown above, where the written script of the manuscript becomes the imagined ground on which characters in the illustration stand. Moving from left to right, the second thole (little boy, short for konthole, “his penis,” a term of endearment for little boys, which is clearly visible in the drawing, since little boys always run around naked in village Java) has wrapped the toes of his right foot over the wulu (“i”) in the word adipati, as if it were a smooth, round stone lying on his path. The wulu has been written above the aksara for “d.” Adipati means “regent” and is used here as a title for one of the generals leading the attack on Majapahit, the Regent of Pasuruan. On the far right, the dancing soldier, celebrating victory perhaps, rests his right heel firmly on the layar (“r”), his toes on the wulu, of the word kumitir (“flutter, wave back and forth”; the wulu followed by the layar are written above the aksara for the consonant “t”).
Perhaps some amusing visual-verbal humor is intended here. The naked village boy is stepping on the high and mighty Adipati of Pasuruan’s adi (“elegant, noble”)-hood in verse 46, while the jubilant, dancing soldier is balancing, ironically perhaps, ever so precariously during a battle, on the Adipati’s wavering (kumitir) spear, about to be hurled at the enemy who will defeat him. The Adipati is killed in verse 47, so the dancing soldier may be celebrating in anticipation of his demise. Although the possible meaning of the little boy’s challenge to authority in MSS Jav 89 does not seem mystical, it is interesting to compare him to the representation of Sheikh Samsu Tabriz in a Sufi mystical poem, written by a Surakarta poet in 1815 (Florida 2021). Here the saint, “in the form of a naked three-year-old boy,” suddenly appears before the king of Rum and defeats him in a metaphysical debate by “manifesting himself as the embodied truth of a form of experiencial knowledge of the Absolute” that the bookish king cannot understand (Florida 2021: 597). He also defies the king’s authority during the debate by gradually adopting Javanese forms of address that are “cheeky and rather coarse” (Florida 2021: 603, n. 33), ending by speaking “down” to the king while the latter speaks respectfully “up” to the naked, upstart child. In both examples, little boys, stripped to their bare essentials, represent a down-to-earth realism that challenges mythologized royalty clothed in textual religiosity.
Whatever the case, the drawing shows a humble Muslim family, innocent refugees of war, fleeing anachronistically from a battle occurring in pre-Muslim Majapahit, thus adding another possible story line to the text, which makes no mention of the lĕbe and his family. The drawing transforms the top line of the written narrative of the poem on the folio page into the physical ground, located in a particular village somewhere in East Java in the eighteenth century, of that imagined, briefly unfolding, new narrative inspired by, but nowhere found within, the written text.15 “Couldn’t one argue, in fact,” Woloch wonders, “that precisely the possibility of telling more than one story at the same time rests near the center of literary narrative as such” (2003: 40)? The fleeing lĕbe and his family are minor characters that have been added to the main narrative, not as an adornment, but as a new visual story fragment grafted onto the main narrative that not only connects it to the eighteenth-century present of the manuscript’s composition, grounding its meaning vividly in the time and place when it was copied and first read, but also suggests another story waiting to be told.16 The simultaneous presence of that other story, enscribed onto the main text, makes the Damar Wulan story more “realistic” and believable.
Something similar happens in a passage from the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Kadipaten that I have translated below. These verses are found in a section of the poem in which a minor character known from pre-nineteenth-century recensions of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Mas Cĕbolang, has become the main protagonist of a newly added portion of the poem, 244 cantos long.17 Mas Cĕbolang plays a starring role in the episode we will examine. How the minorness of the three characters who also appear in this scene contribute to defining and qualifying Mas Cĕbolang’s star quality is one of the questions I want to consider.
Cĕbolang and his companions are reaching the end of a long journey through the countryside of East and Central Java where, as santri lĕlana in the mode described by Behrend, they have visited venerable Muslim mystics and Hindu-Buddhist temple ruins; discussed religious questions and learned about Javanese literature, history, and lore of all kinds; studied wayang and watched shadow puppet performances; displayed their dancing skills; and enjoyed lots of instructively described sex. At long last, they arrive in the prosperous town of Wirasaba18 where celebrations sponsored by the Adipati are underway to give joyous thanks for the birth of a child after his wife’s difficult labor. Cĕbolang and his four santri travelling companions meet the town pengulu Ki Jamali who introduces them to the Adipati (Kamajaya 1985–91, 4: 282; Canto 321, v. 20). The visitors are immediately swept up in the festivities. It doesn’t take long for Cĕbolang and the best dancer among his companions, Nurwitri, to perform for the Adipati and the masses of villagers who have gathered to celebrate. Our excerpt begins after Cĕbolang has begun his performance. The Adipati has requested that the seductive Nurwitri also dance dressed as a ronggeng (professional female dancer), with the Adipati and his raucous band of retainers joining in, and Cĕbolang has just exited the dance space after a star turn. The metre of the verses below is Sinom (8a, 8i, 8a, 8i, 7i, 8u, 7a, 8i, 12a).19
What are the minor characters doing here and how do they contribute to the “character-system”24 of the poem? Are they just creative “adornments” and “fillips” to the main narrative which is concerned with the performances by Mas Cĕbolang and Nurwitri that lead to their sexual encounters with the Adipati of Wirasaba, discussed by Ben Anderson in his essay “Professional Dreams: Reflections on Two Javanese Classics”? Or are they, on the contrary, fundamental to the narrative structure of the passage I’ve translated and to the Wirasaba episode as a whole? I want to test the following sweeping assertion made by Woloch against the evidence provided by the Major Cĕnthini: “Minor characters are not simply ornamental and cannot be analyzed as merely a supplement of or colorful counterpoint to the main plot and central characters because the overriding metaphoric structure, the ‘theme, plot and purpose’ that we can map out of the thickness of the narrative, is built through the minor characters, and, more saliently, through their very minorness …” (2003: 144–45).
The episode from which I’ve drawn our passage begins with a stunning dance performance by Mas Cĕbolang, a major character whose artistic and sexual prowess is already known to the reader from earlier episodes. He is just beginning to arouse the passions of his audience in Wirasaba. Canto 321, v. 40 opens the scene of the performance on a night when the moon is full and the Adipati, his retainers, and other village notables, together with the people of the town, have gathered to give thanks for the birth of his child. After a detailed description of the feast that has been prepared and of the finery worn by the Adipati, Mas Cĕbolang attires himself for his performance. At the Adipati’s command, Cĕbolang begins playing an instrument popular in Islamic circles called the tĕrbang (frame-drum), then dancing and singing, accompanied by a chorus of singers who also play tĕrbang and other instruments.25 The reaction of the villagers to what they are witnessing is instantaneous. As the instrumental sounds of the ensemble
Verses 52 and 53 contain the first of several crowd scenes that occur during Mas Cĕbolang’s performances in Cantos 321, 322 and 323. The description in these two verses is conventional, both because it registers the powerful effect that performances by the Sĕrat Cĕnthini’s santri lĕlana usually have on village spectators – disorderly conduct, uncontrolled sexual behavior, and a kind of ecstasy that occurs during Sufi religious experiences described in the poem – but also because they are impersonal. The verses register the intensely emotional, sexually overstimulated, and disorderly state of a crowd that is faceless. Spectator crowds are conventionally anonymous in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini and other works of Javanese literature.28 But here this does not remain the case.
A sequential rhythm of alternating vignettes and ever-expanding particularity has begun to take shape: description of the star performer and his performance; reaction of the crowd; more detailed description of the star performer and his ensemble as their performance unfolds; specific reactions to the performance by named and carefully characterized individuals in the audience of villagers. As the expansionary, repetitive sequence progresses, humans and their actions come into sharper focus, becoming more particularized and generative of the larger structures of meaning in the poem. As we will see, the minorness of Mr. and Ms. Subur and Jaemanis and their character-spaces are not simply an expression, in general terms, of the narrative process that is typical of early nineteenth-century Surakarta literature. We need to understand why these individuals should emerge out of the anonymity of the crowd in the first place and what their emergence has to do with the narrative of the episode we are examining and the meaning of the entire poem.
In verse 57 the Adipati intervenes in the proceedings directly for the first time. He has already been introduced in verse 42 of Canto 321, but he has been sitting in state, pingger pĕndhapi gennipun, “at the side of his pavilion,” surrounded by his retinue, watching the celebrations unfold. The Adipati’s request to see Nurwitri dance as a ronggeng makes him another sexually aroused spectator, since it registers the beginning of his own sexually motivated participation in the performance, which will eventually lead to his having sex, exuberantly described, with both the “woman” Nurwitri and with Cĕbolang, who is first a “woman,” then a “man,” in their encounter in Canto 323. But before the narrative reaches the description of Cĕbolang and Nurwitri dancing together as male and female performers in verse 81,29 it continues with its slowly expanding, particularizing rhythm of alternating vignettes of performer and audience, each of which elicits a more elaborate narrative response. The narrative moves forward in verse 59 with a pointedly evocative description of the seductiveness of Cĕbolang’s singing, after which he begins to dance, which in verses 59–61 provokes both the Adipati and his soldiers (at his command) to join in. In verse 60, for the first time, the Adipati is described as the maintainer of “ritual protocol,”30 law and order. Just like his request for Nurwitri to become “like a girl, a classy ronggeng” (carestri ronggeng linuwih, v. 57), such an added bit of characterization anticipates and calls for an expanded and more particularized treatment of that same narrative element further on. Cĕbolang’s own dance performance in verse 63, which eclipses Nurwitri’s and the Adipati’s in both quality and detail (his performative sexual superiority to his host will be displayed in full in Canto 323), leads to the introduction of the three minor characters, Mr. and Ms. Subur and Jaemanis, whom the preceding verses, starting with verse 52, have been preparing us to meet.
It is as if the poet, with a hand-held camera, while filming the event has suddenly zoomed into the crowd and picked out three individuals, recording sights and sounds close up. The handy-cam analogy seems apt because of the way the poet’s sharply focused takes on what is happening shift angles from one moment to the next, as different voices address the listener/reader in indirect discourse. We are prepared by what has been described before to find certain types of narrative topic in these verses, namely: a village crowd; a rĕbutan involving sex and money (or its equivalent, in this case clothing); alternating descriptions of individuals and groups who are responding back and forth to one another (like Cĕbolang and his chorus of santri musicians and chanters); and representations of both men and women. Because this is a crowd and not a group of trained performers, all the movements and speeches in verses 64 to 75 are out of control, crude, and violent, rather than artistically skillful, beautiful, and civilized. If anything, though, the poetry of these verses is livelier, the vocabulary used to construct the two vignettes more vivid and precise (in the way at which the Javanese language excels) than anything we have already encountered in the poem so far from Canto 321, verse 52 onward. Crowd behavior in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini expresses, in the crudest possible way, the raw, physical energy at the heart of Sufi devotional practices involving music and dance, performances which are themselves described in beautifully poetic, esoteric terms.
The contrast between the mob and the performers is predictably maintained, therefore, but what is striking, even surprising, is the extent to which the three minor characters are particularized and narrativized, in a far more realistic manner than either Mas Cĕbolang, the star main character, or the Adipati, an important minor character. What happens in the two vignettes, to choose another analogy, is like the ciblon section of a gĕndhing, when the intervals between the notes played by instruments that carry the basic melody expand, allowing various other instruments to fill those sonic spaces with creative, often highly individualistic improvisations on the basic melody. The range of possible improvisation in tĕrbang or gamelan performance is restricted by the nature of the instruments and what they can play. But the range of variations can be expanded by means of the musical skill and expressive personalities of the musicians who are performing on them.31 In our episode, spaces for three minor characters are opened within the main narrative to provide the virtuoso poet with opportunities to improvise new characters and story-telling possibilities, in addition to impelling the narrative forward and adding new perspectives on the main story as it heads to its dramatic denouement, its final gong, as it were, at the end of Canto 323. That is when Mas Cĕbolang violates the Adipati’s hospitality and defies his authority by carrying out multiple sexual dalliances with the Adipati’s concubines and is forced to flee Wirasaba when his escapades are discovered.
To return to our main question: What are the function and significance of the two vignettes in verses 64 to 75 in which minor characters memorably appear? To give an answer with respect to the whole Wirasaba episode (Cantos 320 to the end of 323), we can begin by noticing that the Major Cĕnthini poet has adapted the standard episode structure for santri lĕlana poems to his own, innovative narrative plan. Already in the adĕgan pitĕpangan in Canto 321, the reception of the wandering guests involves moving them out of a strictly santri realm where, after the adĕgan tĕtamuwan, an evening of religious learning and debate, punctuated by Sufi performances involving music, singing and dance, ending in the adĕgan tilamwangi, filled with sex and perhaps some sleep, would normally be expected. Instead, in Canto 321, verse 40, on a night when the moon is full, the travelers step into the realm of the Adipati of Wirasaba where performances, religious observances, and sex assume new forms and take on additional meanings to those the reader might anticipate from conventional santri lĕlana stories. Here, as described until the end of Canto 323, there are musical and dance performances, scenes of village rĕbutan, and sex, episodes that are still recognizable as structurally appropriate for adĕgan rĕrasan ngelmi and adĕgan tilamwangi and still expressive of conventional religious meanings, but very different nonetheless because they are components of a kind of story that differs from what we expect to find in standard santri lĕlana discourse, or from Benedict Anderson’s quite different reading of the poem.32
In his sociological analysis of the Major Cĕnthini Benedict Anderson interprets Cĕbolang’s encounter with the Adipati of Wirasaba as a struggle between Javanese possessors of various kinds of specialized knowledge and the feudal overlords of Old Java (Anderson 1990). Once all the cultural and historical differences between Java and elsewhere are peeled away, Cĕbolang resembles a French intellectual during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Anderson argues, the Sĕrat Cĕnthini being an “encyclopedia” different from but comparable to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which sought “to show that on almost any topic – from the nature of magnetism to the origins of language – the (mostly) commoner, lay cognoscenti ‘knew more’ than their putative social and religious superiors. In this sense, the Encyclopédie can usefully be understood as a weapon in the struggle between a professional, secular clerisy and the whole structure of hegemony of the ancien régime” (1990: 273–74). Later in his essay, Anderson gives a detailed synopsis of Mas Cĕbolang’s sexual encounter with the Adipati in Canto 323, concluding that “[the] paired sodomies, with each partner alternately taking the role of penetrator and penetrated, shows that Cabolang is the master of his master. He is the skilled professional in every aspect of sexual intercourse between males, without ever losing his control or manhood … He forces his lord first into linguistic equality, then into sexual submission” (1990: 281–82).
Whether we think of the discourse of the Major Cĕnthini in Behrend’s terms, as a santri lĕlana tale structured out of sequences of adĕgan that all contain conventional elements proper to each, or as an encyclopedic battle, with de Sadean flourishes, between the forces of Enlightenment and autocracy in Old Java, comparable to what took place in eighteenth-century France, the fact is that the stories being told in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini are not exactly what we would expect to find in either discoursive mode. The narrative in Canto 321, from verse 52 to verse 79, consists of not one but several stories. There is a story of Mas Cĕbolang, the wandering young musician and dancer looking for adventure, and a story about the Adipati of Wirasaba, who has problems maintaining control over his villagers and his women. There is a story, nipped in the bud before it can even get started, of the merchant in all his finery who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there are, most especially developed, with the greatest number of verses, the most vividly and varied action-packed descriptions, the deepest forays into character development, stories about Dulsubur, his randy wife, and Jaemanis. There is a “tension,” to use Woloch’s word, between the discourse and the stories that are told, both those that span many cantos, like Mas Cĕbolang’s, or those that only come and go after a few verses, but which could have gone on for much longer if the poet had decided to keep telling them. “To read characters in narrative,” Woloch writes, “we need to read the dialectical tension between the formal distribution of attention within the discourse and the potential patterning of distribution within the story” (2003: 41).
The characters in our passage that are the most “at odds with, or divergent from, the formal pattern of attention in the discourse” (2003: 41) are Dulsubur, Ni Subur and Jaemanis. Both Cĕbolang and the Adipati are congruent with either Behrend’s or Anderson’s version of what defines the discourse. But the three minor characters emerge out of the anonymous crowd and create new character-spaces, redirecting our attention toward possible narrative pathways and destinations that lie beyond the discursive boundaries of the Major Cĕnthini.
The kacu mas, or “golden handkerchief,” the pyramid-shaped box, described as a “handkerchief box” by J. Groneman 1895: 81, was one of the eight insignia (upacara) of royal rank in the courts of central Java, carried and displayed in processions.
Photo taken from Groneman 1895, plate VII
Of course, we can also read what happens to Ni Subur and Jaemanis in terms of homilies about women that are found in many places in the Cĕnthini. And the little story about Jaemanis, whose finery and pride are dirĕbut (seized), could be cited as an example of rĕbutan that has important political as well as religious echoes elsewhere in the text. It would be possible, in other words, to recuperate these minor characters for either version of the discourse and pigeonhole them there, turning them into mere adornments and fillips.
But their appearance in the narrative, like that of the fleeing lĕbe and his family in the illustration on folio page 44v in MSS Jav 89, does more to disrupt and diversify the discourse than to adorn or reinforce it. These characters suggest new narrative possibilities. In Canto 323, Jaemanis suddenly reappears, her story continuing for a few more verses. We learn new things about her home situation and about her character before she disappears again, this time for good.
After Cĕbolang and Nurwitri finish their dalliance with the Adipati, they return to the Kauman (the neighborhood surrounding the mosque where santri live). They pay a visit to Ki Jamali, who was the first to welcome them to Wirasaba at the beginning of Canto 321, and make a gift of the clothes and money they have received from the grateful Adipati. Meanwhile, Cĕbolang spends his days in debauchery (/Mas Cĕbolang tan suda balunthahneki, / sayamber angĕlantrah. //).33 The metre in the following verses is Dhandhanggula (10i, 10a, 8e (o), 7u, 9i, 7a, 6u, 8a, 12i, 7a).
Even as he adds a coda to the story of Jaemanis, the poet can’t resist beginning another story about Nyai Jamal. One minor character begets another!
In both of her appearances, what Jaemanis does and what is revealed about her as a person draw the reader’s attention away from the two main male characters who dominate her and who are supposed to be at the center of our attention. While they seem to have interesting stories of their own to tell, Ni Subur and Jaemanis also offer streetwise parodies of the culminating adĕgan tilamwangi enounters between the Adipati and the visiting dancers that Anderson analyzes in his essay. The sodomizing gang rape of Ni Subur and the lèse majesté committed against the Adipati when Jaemanis is stripped naked, not to mention her own parody of his adigang36 pretensions as she preens and struts, are essential incidents that enable the poet to thicken the description (to adapt Clifford Geertz’s famous phrase “thick description” and Woloch’s “thickness of the narrative,” 2003: 144–45) of Wirasaba; to people it with new narrative possibilities that challenge the centrality of Mas Cĕbolang and the Adipati in this episode; and to foreshadow, in a mocking way, the polico-sexual encounter between the Adipati and Cĕbolang that Anderson analyzes in his essay.37
The sexual encounter between the Adipati, Nurwitri and Cĕbolang reads like a comical parody of the mystical kawula-gusti (servant-lord) metaphor used, along with many others, to express the unitary identity of God and all existence, which is the realization of His “pure being” (wujūd) in bodily/material forms.38 Zoetmulder quotes one of the many examples of the kawula-gusti concept found in Javanese Sufi poetry in the following excerpt from a scene of mystical instruction (by Amongraga to his new bride Tambangraras; Kamajaya 1985–91, 6: 209–11, Canto 368, v. 37–56) in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini: “There is no Lord and no servant; there is both Lord and servant. The Lord has the attributes of the servant; the servant has the attributes of the Lord” (1995: 135). In Anderson’s words, when Cĕbolang and the Adipati have sex, “each partner alternately tak[es] the role of penetrator and penetrated,” thereby erasing the distinction between male and female, kawula and gusti. In Amongraga’s words, they become, in a seemingly quite profane but possibly also divine way, “two-in-one” (roroning ngatunggal; Zoetmulder 1995: 134; Kamajaya 1985–91, 6: 209, Canto 368, v. 38). The “mixing of servant and Lord” (pamoring Gusti kawula) is also communicated in the scene when Cĕbolang speaks low Javanese with the Adipati.39
But, if there is a playful parody of mystical union in this scene, what explains the raunchy, carefully detailed physicality of the “servant” Cĕbolang’s parodic-mystical-egalitarian sexual dalliance with his “Lord”? The conventions of the adĕgan tilamwangi scene? Realism? Encyclopedism? The future Pakubuwana V’s prurient interest in sex? Perhaps the poets of the Major Cĕnthini were just having fun writing about sex. All these explanations, taken singly or together, are plausible but not conclusive. Ricklefs comments on a passage from Canto 446 in which, in a state of mystical ecstasy, “Men and women mixed together, / whoever on top of anyone else, / just so they were naked /.” He writes: “When excessive ecstatic mysticism and its attendant debauchery are depicted, they are the action of a sect of Muslims, those whom the Prophet describes as followers of the false ngelmus that mark the age of confustion” (2006: 204). Ricklefs is right about a strictly sharīʿa-based perspective on such scenes, but the poets of the Cĕnthini held another view, one that was widely prevalent in Sufi Islam before the ascendancy of puritanical Wahhabism in the nineteenth century. This view embraced the sharīʿa but also the role of music, dance, the sexualized human body, even “debauchery” in ecstatic Islamic mystical practices.40 For a beautiful example of the kind of performative, sexualized Sufi worship espoused by the poets of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, see Florida’s essay in this volume.
By introducing minor characters in Canto 321, the poets of the Major Cĕnthini made it possible for us to interpret the poem in a variety of ways, ones that include but are not restricted to interpretations that are predicated on a santri-lĕlana or Enlightenment-encyclopedic narrative discourse. Minor characters in the episode we’ve examined do not simply draw attention away from the main characters as they are defined in terms of the discursive regimes they represent. Nor do they only serve to satirize and thereby critique, albeit in a subservient way, the dominant discursive regimes of the poem and the social order those regimes mirror and uphold. The violent effects of Mas Cĕbolang’s tĕrbang playing and mellifluous singing on the festival mob that rapes Ni Subur cast his centrality and the cultural dominance of the music he performs in another light, suggesting the opening scene in another kind of narrative, in which the high culture of the gusti class would be viewed and experienced from below, not as a subaltern kawula might do, meekly willing to become “one” with his or her Lord, but as a violent rebel against the aristocracy and its culture.41 Ni Subur and Jaemanis “stand as potential, if submerged, forces of narrative interest and agency,” as Woloch puts it (2003: 197). Potentially, they are anticipations of major characters in a different kind of literary work from a different political era, like a short story or novel written by Pramoedya Ananta Toer during the Indonesian Revolution or the New Order, for example.42
Alex Woloch’s innovative analysis of minor characters and literary narrative opens new perspectives on the question of characterization and its role in generating narrative and realism in Javanese literature. Ni Subur, Jaemanis and their stories belong to a network of “minor,” everyday women – wives, servants, lusty sexual beings, and tellers of tales – that spans the entire Major Cĕnthini.43 In this essay I have tried to show how minor characters perform a dual function in the poem, as potential “sources of interest and agency” in their own right (Woloch 2003: 197) and as drivers of the main narrative. The form of that narrative, as shaped by the agency of characters themselves, with their own, additional stories to tell, rather than by a mechanically conventional sequence of adĕgan in which characters appear as ornaments and fillips to a preordained plot, remains to be described. That can happen once the network of minor female characters has been connected to the whole “character-system” of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, which is the “arrangement” of all the characters who have generated “the unified narrative structure” of the poem as a literary masterpiece (Woloch 2003: 14). Notwithstanding Behrend’s sidelining of characterization, it is his work on the Cĕnthini corpus and his exploration of the literary characteristics of the santri lĕlana genre that have made it possible to imagine the poem as “literature,” rather than simply a uniquely encyclopedic hodge-podge of information on Javanese culture. Studying characterization and all other aspects of literary composition in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini will make it possible to locate the poem as literature on a continuum extending from ancient Javanese kakawin to novels written by Javanese authors in both Javanese and Indonesian in the modern period. And greater attention to characterization will also teach us more about religious and political thinking in early nineteenth-century Java and how ideas from that period influenced the writing of the text. Contrary to a view widely held in Javanese and Indonesian studies, fictional characters in Javanese literature, based, however indirectly, on real, thinking, religiously devout (or impious), and sexually active people in the everyday world, are centrally important for understanding how literary narratives in Java have been created and what they mean.
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For a brief overview of this interest, see Day 2021.
The eminent philologist R.M.Ng. Dr. Poerbatjaraka called the poem “de onvolprezen Tjĕntini” (the unsurpassed Cĕnthini) (1940: 361, n. 3).
I refer here to one of the two elements in every narrative. The other is the “story.” “Structuralist theory argues that each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire), the content or chain of events (actions, happenings), plus what may be called the existents (characters, items of setting); and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated. In simple terms, the story is the what in a narrative that is depicted, discourse the how” (Chapman 1987: 19).
As Behrend puts it (I quote him in full to convey the full reality of the text’s literary- epistemological sprawl): “… [T]he Major Cĕnthini is precisely a hodge-podge of great masses of quite diverse materials gathered together within the dramatic framework of the Cĕnthini story. Passages that unquestionably come directly out of such sources as primbon (numerology and divination), pakĕm (wayang stories), suluk (Islamic mysticism), piwulang (etiquette and morals), kawruh kalang (building lore), jampi-jampian (herbology and medicine), musawaratan para wali (Siti Jenar story), babad (history), jangka (predictions), sastra wadi (mystical meaning of the alphabet), dasa nama (poetic language), pikih (Islamic law), anbia (tales of the prophets), katuranggan (animal lore/divination) and many others, are worked neatly into the greatly multiplied adventures of Amongraga and company as they travel among the hermitages and villages of the Javanese countryside. Oral sources and common, everyday experience were also tapped, as reflected in the numerous passages devoted to origin legends of sacred places, folk etymologies of names, remains of pre-Islamic kingdoms, power of heirlooms and their histories, ranks and titles of court retainers, wayang history and performance, and lists of such things as foods, fruits, plants, wild animals, birds, fishes, and more” (Behrend 1987: 84–85).
Behrend has a thought-provoking discussion of Recension G from Yogyakarta in the 1840s, which he says comes the closest of the Jatiswara recensions to being a “novel” in a Western sense (Behrend 1987: 186–87, 262–64). To my knowledge, santri lĕlana poems written in Yogyakarta have received even less attention than have those written in Surakarta.
This view is the dominant one in Javanese literary studies. For an exception, see Anderson’s examination of puppets in wayang. Throughout his discussion Anderson connects shadow puppet “types” to living human beings. For example, at one point he writes: “For the characters of wayang are not simply divided into Left and Right, Kuråwå and Pandåwå, gods, kings, brahmånå, satriyå, princesses, giants, apes, and clowns, each with their own style and way of life. Each of these general categories contains within itself a wide range of personalities, which must be analyzed, however summarily, in their aspect as human types and as bearers of contrasting values” (1996: 23). The approach taken in this essay picks up on Anderson’s observations of wayang to pursue a new direction in the study of Javanese literary texts.
For Woloch the central question is: How do “living persons get rendered into literary form” (2003: 11)?
Woloch (2003: 14) quotes Chapman (1987: 107): “It is remarkable how little has been said about the theory of character in literary history and criticism,” a comment that also applies to critical writing about Javanese (and Indonesian) literature generally.
Notice that Woloch writes as if his critical ideas can be applied to any literature anywhere. His book begins with a discussion of minor characters in the Iliad.
In 1939, Zoetmulder speculated that Cĕnthini is the character with whom the “everyday” Javanese reader most identifies in his/her search for mystical knowledge as s/he reads the poem (1939: 85). My thanks to Ben Arps for this reference. In footnote 17 of her essay for this volume, Nancy Florida independently reaches a similar conclusion: “Perhaps the title [of the poem] reflects the position of Cĕnthini (and Tambangraras) as audience for Amongraga’s teachings – like the audience of the book itself.”
Ian Watt’s comment, quoted by Woloch (2003: 19), that the European realist novel reflects a “vast transformation of Western civilization” in which “… the unified world picture of the Middle Ages [has been replaced by] … one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places” cannot be applied unqualified to the Sĕrat Cĕnthini. That said, it might be interesting, as an exercise in comparative world literary analysis, to compare the poem to a novel by Jane Austen, who published her first novel in 1811. Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813, Emma in 1815.
Behrend observes (Behrend n.d.: 24–28) that the Surakarta recension of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini that directly precedes its 1815 recension, known as the Sĕrat Cĕnthini Jalalen, dated 5 May 1806, was explicitly “intended as a sort of guidebook for the devout, the faithful, and those filled with prayer.” It seems likely that the word “Jalalen” in the title alludes to the Tĕpsir Jalalen, the Javanese version (in Arabic or Malay or Javanese?) of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī’s Qurʾan commentary, Tafsīr al-Jalālayn, which Soebardi says “has been the most popular tafsīr in the pĕsantrèns [religious schools] of Java and Madura up to the present day” (Soebardi 1971: 339). When Tambangraras is first introduced in the poem, she is described as having studied the Tĕpsir Jalalen (Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 143, c. 353, v. 10).
In fact, literary realism can be found in Java long before the late eighteenth century. Realistic depictions of everyday Java date from the beginning of recorded literature in Java in the ninth century CE. See, for example, Zoetmulder’s discussion of “the world of the poem” (1974: 187–214) and the work of Jiří Jákl on Old Javanese kakawin, for example Jákl 2020. The description of bawdy festivities and assembled crowds for the marriage of Prince Aja and Princess Indumatī in the thirteenth-century Sumanasāntaka (Worsley et al. 2013: 297–99) offers a close Old Javanese poetic parallel to the passage from the Major Cĕnthini of 1815 that I will discuss below. It is also worth noting that the seventeenth-century Kidung Candhini, although the geography it depicts is fictional, already displays an “unusual devotion to small detail and exhaustive description,” foreshadowing what Behrend calls the “encyclopedic copiousness” and realism of the 1815 Kadipaten recension (Behrend n.d.: 8–9).
This page, 44v of IOL 89, as well the entire manuscript, can now be found on sastra.org, accompanied by transcriptions of the text. The line across which the lĕbe and his family are fleeing is from verse 46 of canto 13 in Durma. See https://www.sastra.org/kisah-cerita-dan-kronikal/cerita/3133-damarwulan-british-library-mss-jav-89-akhir-abad-ke-18-1012-pupuh-01-34 (accessed 17 September 2022). For a discussion of the Damar Wulan story, see Pigeaud 1967: 231–33. Pigeaud says that the poem was first composed in East Java in the sixteenth century and became known in Central Java a century later. The number of different recensions and illustrated manuscripts attests to its popularity. The Damar Wulan story is referred to twice in the Major Cĕnthini. In Canto 79, Jayengsari and Rancangkapti, who like their older brother Amongraga have fled Giri but in a different direction, visit the ruins of Menak Jingga’s palace in Blambangan with their servant Buras (Kamajaya 1985–91, 1: 285). Starting in Canto 607 and lasting intermittently into Canto 610, a Damar Wulan puppet play is performed for Jayengrĕsmi and Jayengraga, the two brothers of Tambangraras, and their uncle Kulawirya, who have gone wandering in search of their brother-in-law and central character in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Amongraga, after he has disappeared from Wanamarta (Kamajaya 1985–91, 10: 45–61).
Other striking examples of the ways in which the drawings in MSS Jav 89 intrude upon, appropriate, and visually rewrite the Damar Wulan story by adding new, narratable detail can be seen on folio pages 23r, 42r, 54v, 59r, 76r, 112r, and 134v. British Library MSS Jav 89 can be accessed online at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=MSS_Jav_89. The drawing on folio page 76r, for example, which doesn’t at first glance seem to intrude on the text graphically, shows four guards in Menak Jingga’s palace after night has fallen, three of them fast asleep in different locations and postures, while the fourth reads to himself from a text on which is written: mamaca damar wulan (reading Damar Wulan). Perhaps the graphic embellishments painted in gold and red on which the reader and the sleeping guard right behind him are sitting are a meta-comment on the textuality of the scene, suggesting a purwapada sign meant to signal the beginning of a new poem. In this case, the drawing of the reader not only depicts a scene in a possible, new story about a young man starting to read the Sĕrat Damar Wulan, it also comments visually on, and seems to revise, the first three lines in the second verse in the Dhandhanggula meter written below it: //Ana ingkang mĕmaca puniki / dangu-dangu anungkĕmi layang / tĕka ambanjur angorok … (There was one [guard] who was reading / gradually he leant over the text / until he ended up snoring …). In the drawing, however, the young reader is leaning forward but is wide awake, his hands clasped over his ears so that he can listen to himself softly singing the text. Annabel Ten Gallop’s pioneering work on the visual/ artistic aspects of Southeast Asian manuscripts invites more attention from philologists to the ways in which the visual/artistic and the written/narrative elements of Javanese manuscripts interact with one another to produce meanings.
For the late eighteenth-century history of Blambangan, where English traders, the Dutch East India Company, Balinese kingdoms, and local Javanese potentates fought against one another for political and economic control, see Margana 2007. The illustrations of MSS Jav 89 clearly refer to this historical background by representing the commanders of the contending forces, one of whom is a Raja Inggris (king of England), as looking like Europeans dressed in eighteenth-century uniforms.
See Behrend n.d: 43. The new section in which Cĕbolang is the main protagonist begins in Canto 88 and ends with Canto 332 of the Major Cĕnthini. I accept Behrend’s reclassification of Cĕbolang as a major character in the Major Cĕnthini, but I still don’t have a clear idea what makes some characters major, others minor. In the case of Jayengraga, the younger brother of Tambangraras, who enters the poem when the narrative reaches Wanamarta and is a very prominent character from that point onward in the poem, I have discussed him as a “minor” character in a recent essay (Day 2021). He is, however, quite possibly a minor character in earlier versions of the poem who achieves major status in the 1815 recension. It is important to recognize, as Behrend points out, that it is possible for minor characters to become major characters across recensions, an occurrence that supports Woloch’s contention that characters are important for narrative, since both Cĕbolang and Jayengraga have many adventures that would be otherwise missing from the 1815 recension. A character’s status within a single recension is also debatable, depending on how we interpret her or his significances. For example, we could ask: Is the hero of the Major Cĕnthini Amongraga, the aristocratic Sufi saint, or Nyai Cĕnthini, the village “everywoman” and female attendant of his wife Tambangraras, after whom every recension of the poem from the seventeenth century onward has been named? See n. 10 above.
This “Wirasaba” is possibly the actual town in East Java in the lower Brantas River valley that was conquered by Sultan Agung in 1615. According to Ricklefs (2008: 47; see the map on p. 467), the town was strategically and politically important because it was the gateway to the lower Brantas and located in the heartland of the ancient kingdom of Majapahit. The Sĕrat Cabolek, which Ricklefs thinks was composed in Kartasura c. 1731 (1998: 127–62), mentions the main character of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Amongraga, and says that “he was a man from … the village of Wirasaba / the hamlet of Wanamarta, / the son in law / of Kyahi Bayipanurta. / He was the husband of Tambangraras / and the master of nyai Cĕnthini” (Soebardi 1975: 104). According to the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Amongraga was from Giri, not Wirasaba, but it is interesting that “Wanamarta,” which is fictional, is said to have been under the jurisdiction of Wirasaba. When Cĕbolang leaves the narrative (temporarily) in Canto 332, the action shifts to Wanamarta, where Amongraga arrives and marries Tambangraras. Another connection between Wirasaba and Wanamarta is made later in the poem: the supernaturally beautiful gamelan set Alun Jaladri, which is played during the wedding celebrations for Amongraga and Tambangraras, was a gift from the Adipati of Wirasaba to Ki Panurta, village head and father of Tambangraras (Day 2021). Note also that the Sĕrat Cabolĕk mentions Nyai Cĕnthini as memorably and inseparably linked to the story of Amongraga “who had opened the veil” of secret, mystical knowledge and as a result was put to death by Sultan Agung (Soebardi 1975: 104–5).
The full passage, from which this excerpt has been taken, is in Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 6–9, Canto 321, v. 54–79. My Javanese text comes from the sastra.org online version of Kamajaya’s edition, https://www.sastra.org/kisah-cerita-dan-kronikal/serat-centhini/969-centhini-kamajaya-1985-91-761-jilid-05-pupuh-321-332, with small changes to the spelling (pĕpĕt as “ĕ” and taling as “e”). In making my translation, I have followed Nancy Florida’s practice of observing the syllable count for the Javanese poetic metres in my English rendition. Any other poetic effects, such as alliteration and assonance, which in Javanese poetry are used to make puns and convey multiple meanings of and connections between words in different lines of a verse, are accidental. Nancy Florida gave me invaluable help in improving the translations throughout the essay since I first drafted it. My warm thanks also go to Willem van der Molen for suggesting important refinements to the translation of the excerpt presented here and to Els Bogaerts and Sarah Weiss, who have been my expert advisors on matters of Javanese dance and music, respectively, for sections of this episode that I have not had space to include here.
Dulsubur is a shortened form of the name Abdul Subur. Subur means “luxuriant, abundant,” suggesting that Dulsubur is a santri of some substance and standing in Wirasaba, but also that his wife has “abundance” of another kind.
Jaemanis means “sweet ginger root.”
It can be supposed that Jaemanis has either wrapped betel-chewing ingrediants in these napkins, gambir leaves for example, and was bringing these to the musicians with whom she was flirting (especially Mas Cĕbolang, as we learn in verse 73) or that she was bringing kacu to any prospective lover who was chewing betel and might need more gambir and/or a handkerchief to wipe his lips. In verse 7 of Canto 521, in a description of a wild tayuban dance party hosted by Nyai Sĕmbada, kacu and gambir seem to be synonyms (Kamajaya 1985–91, 9: 34, Canto 521, v. 7). The kacu mas, or “golden handkerchief,” the pyramid-shaped box that is described as a “handkerchief box” by Groneman (1895: 81), was one of the eight insignia (upacara) of royal rank in the courts of central Java, carried and displayed in processions (See Figure 2.2). Given the way Jaemanis is flaunting her connection to the Adipati, to suggest that she was attributing something “aristocratic” to her kacu-bearing mission of seduction is not entirely fanciful. My thanks to Nancy Florida for identifying the purpose of the handkerchiefs and for suggesting the further, self-royalizing association that they might have had in the characterization of Jaemanis (personal communication, 26 February 2021).
Namely, Mas Cĕbolang.
Woloch defines the “character-system” as “the arrangement of multiple and differentiated character-spaces – differentiated configurations and manipulations of the human figure – into a unified narrative structure” (2003: 14).
For more on this kind of performance, see the essay by Nancy Florida in this volume.
Lĕmpang is mentioned several times in the Major Cĕnthini as the name of a melody, a tĕrbang piece and a gĕndhing for gamelan.
Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 5.
The question of how such impersonal crowd scenes fit into and function in the generation of a narrative structure, however, has never been studied.
Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 9. Mas Cĕbolang and Nurwitri, it is said, danced so beautifully that they “caused hearts to release their feelings, as Onĕngan and Wukirsĕkar always do” (/ akarya wĕmbaning ati, / kaya uga Onĕngan lan Wukirsĕkar //). Onĕngan is a sister of Panji, the famous hero of a large cycle of stories, married to Wukirsĕkar or Gunungsari. The character Gunungsari had a prominent role in masked dance performances of the Panji epic in Surakarta in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. See the index to Pigeaud 1938, s.v. Onĕngan and Goenoengsari. For a discussion of Mas Cĕbolang’s charisma as a performer in a much later episode of the poem, long after he has returned home from his educational adventures, married Amongraga’s sister, Rancangkapti, and assumed the name of his father, Anggungrimang, following the latter’s death, see Nancy Florida’s essay in this volume.
The anonymous village crowd, which has gathered to celebrate the birth of the Adipati’s child, reacts to the opening moments of Mas Cĕbolang’s performance by “seizing” (Jav. ngrĕbut) money, breasts, and sexual organs. This kind of “contestation of desire” (or rĕbutan; Pemberton 1994: 18) is a characteristic occurrence in ritual events in Java. As John Pemberton observed them while living in Java during the 1970s to 1990s, “rebutan struggles appear as exceptions to ritual protocol, moments of interruption when crowds suddenly descend on objects of power … To rebut is to ngalap berkah, to ‘swoop down on and capture’ (ngalap) … ‘blessings’ (berkah)” (1994: 257). Pemberton thinks that such seemingly random rĕbutan are an essential part of rituals in Java. There are many descriptions of various kinds of rĕbutan in the Major Cĕnthini. It may (or may not) seem strange to think of the rape of Ni Subur as “capturing a blessing,” but there are good reasons for arguing that here and elsewhere in the poem, sex has a ritual, mystical significance associated with rĕbutan (and Sufism; see the comments and references in n. 38).
For a wonderful discussion of how Javanese musicians deploy both skill and personal preference to produce improvisations in their playing, see Pemberton 1987: 25–27.
Interestingly, Behrend notes that one of the creative innovations in Recension F of the Sĕrat Jatiswara, written in Surakarta in 1820, is the repeated alternation of adĕgan rĕrasan ngelmi and adĕgan tilamwangi before reaching the final adĕgan pamitan (Behrend 1987: 275). The alternation between performance scenes and village crowd scenes involving sex in Canto 321, leading to an unusual adĕgan tilamwangi involving Mas Cĕbolang, Nurwitri and the Adipati in Canto 323, is similar to the pattern observed by Behrend in Recension F of the Sĕrat Jatiswara.
Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 28, v. 93.
That is, the Adipati’s wrath.
Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 28.
“An arrogant display of one’s superior power” (Robson and Wibisono 2002: 26). In addition to being aware of the overall political and cultural context of the writing of the Major Cĕnthini in 1815 (Day 2002: 126–36), it is worth reflecting on Peter Carey’s discussion of the treaties signed between the British and the courts of central Java on 1 August 1812 (2008: 377–82). The third article in these treaties stipulated the British annexation of territories in the western and eastern provinces of the principalities. One of these was Wirasaba, belonging to Surakarta (see Map 4 in Carey 2008: 241). Carey comments: “The annexation of these eastern outlying provinces … meant that numerous – but not all – Yogya and Surakarta bupati lost their positions and livelihood, for the British government only wanted to retain officials from the rank of sub-district head (demang, mantri désa) downwards. Most of these bupati returned to the kraton where they eked out an impoverished existence … Only a few from the eastern mancanagara [outlying provinces] were reassigned to newly created – and much smaller – kabupatèn in Madiun. The grievances of these prematurely dismissed bupati, the so-called bupati dhongkol [fired bupati], encouraged many to join Dipanagara in 1825” (2008: 381). The characterization of the “Adipati of Wirasaba” in the Major Cĕnthini, where he is mocked as if he were already a bupati dhongkol, may offer the poet’s comment on the annexation of Wirasaba by the British in 1812 or even mirror an actual Wirasaba bupati dhongkol eking out an impoverished, derisible existence in Surakarta, who served as a model for the character.
The satire of the aristocracy, its culture and mores, in the Wirasaba episode we have been discussing offers a critique of social inequality, with intimations of social rebellion, in the poem, as Anderson shows. It may also reflect, in a playful way, the mystical Sufi perspective on human affairs that is repeatedly enunciated throughout the poem. A forcefully explicit, nearly contemporaneous statement of Muslim egalitarianism that has both political and mystical implications was expressed by Dipanegara’s pious great-grandmother, Ratu Agĕng, in her dying words to her son, the second sultan of Yogyakarta, on 17 October 1803: “‘Sultan! The path I have to lay aside is difficult and now I feel that I am essentially no more than an ordinary person. My son, keep that in view and do not believe that, although you are now ruler, after your death you will be anything more than a common coolie [Jav. batur]. So, live accordingly!’” (Carey 2008: 81). For a discussion of Ratu Agĕng’s Shaṭṭāriyya silsilah (Sufi lineage) and her influence on Dipanagara, see Fathurahman 2018: 54–57. Ratu Agĕng traced her line to Shaykh ʿAbd al-Muḥyī of Karang Saparwadi (now Pamijahan, West Java, where his tomb is still a popular pilgrimage destination), “the main murshid [Sufi master] of the Shaṭṭārīyah Sufi order in West Java” (Fathurahman 2016: 50). The protagonist of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Amongraga, also traces his Sufi silsilah to “Karang” and receives the name “Amongraga” there. The poem says his teacher is named Kyai Agĕng Karang Seh Ibrahim Ibnu (Kamajaya 1985–91, 1: 67, Canto 50, v. 4; 1: 203–207, Canto 58, v. 22–49 – Canto 59, v. 1–2; 5: 51–53, Canto 333). Cĕbolang also has a “Karang” connection. On Mt. Sĕmeru he meets and studies mysticism with the ascetic Danadarma, who tells him that he himself has studied under Seh Kadir Jalena in Karang for three years together with Cĕbolang’s father (Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 33–39, Canto 325, v. 6 – Canto 327, v. 14). The reverential way in which the poem’s “Karang” is spoken about, especially as Amongraga introduces himself to his future bride’s family in Wanamarta, makes it seem certain that the poetic place is meant to recall the most famous location of Shaṭṭāriyya learning in early nineteenth-century Java, Karang Saparwadi. For a different but equally awe-inspiring resonance of the place name “Karang” in the Cĕnthini, see Day 2021: 715, n. 10.
My thanks to Nancy Florida for helping me phrase this fundamental Sufi idea accurately; see also Meyer 2021: 687 and Florida 2019: 230. Florida says that the Sĕrat Cĕnthini is “redolent” with the teachings of Shaṭṭāriyya Sufism, bearing witness to the “apparent prominence of the Shaṭṭāriyya among the Surakarta literati at the time of its composition” (2019: 234). For more on Sufism, and opposition to it, in Surakarta and Indonesia generally before the end of the nineteenth century, see Meyer 2021, Florida 2019, and the essays Azra 1999 and Steenbrink 1999.
As Meyer argues in her interpretation of the representation of Sunan Kalijaga in the nineteenth-century Cariyosipun Seh Mlaya from Surakarta (2021: 689) and this passage from the Sĕrat Cĕnthini makes clear, Cĕbolang’s relationship with the Adipati could be interpreted as something of a mystical paradox. On the one hand, as Anderson says, Cĕbolang is a “skilled professional,” superior to the Adipati in every aspect of knowledge and physical performance. On the other hand, in mystical terms, he only confirms that superiority, like Sunan Kalijaga when he practices austerities in the forest, living and roaming with the wild deer, by his “submission, obedience, and seeming lowliness” (Meyer 2021: 681–82, 689) during his visit to the Adipati’s house with Nurwitri. Cĕbolang is not just being deferential to the Adipati (and we know how much he flouts the Adipati’s authority behind his back): he is also learning to abase himself before the authority of God. Cĕbolang’s whole experience in Wirasaba is part of the education he receives as he travels through Java as a santri lĕlana. His Bildung is finally completed when, after fleeing Wirasaba, he is given his final instruction in mystical knowledge by the ascetic Buyut Danadarma (Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 33–39 Cantos 325–27) and returns home to his parents in Sokayasa, “karĕm marang kautaman” (infatuated with Virtue; Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 39, Canto 327, v. 12, 39). See Florida’s essay in this volume for Mas Cĕbolang as a mature Sufi, married to Amongraga’s sister.
Kugle 2007, especially Chapter 4. Commentators on descriptions of explicit, excessive sexual behavior in Javanese mystical poems, including the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, tend to explain them as expressions of residual Tantrism in Javanese religious belief rather than as well-known examples of Sufi devotional practices found in North Africa, Persia, and India, as well as Java (for example, see Zoetmulder 1995: 234–38 and Acri 2019). My thanks to Verena Meyer for calling my attention to Kugle’s book and for encouraging me to think more about the influence of Sufism on depictions of sex in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini. Only further research will determine the extent to which the interest in “minor” characters and sexual relationships between fictional kawula and gusti in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini and other poems written in the Surakarta Kadipaten in this period reflected and was motivated by Sufi mystical thinking.
Musical performances and their social effects are represented in different ways in the Major Cĕnthini. In another passage, verses 9 and 10 of Canto 364, which I quote and discuss elsewhere (Day 2021) the effect of a gamelan performance on an anonymous crowd of villagers is sexually arousing, but also magically calming and instructive at the same time, reinforcing the beneficent authority of the village elite:
The instruments being played, the ritual context, the time of day, and the type of gĕndhing are all different in the two gamelan performances, the one in Wirasaba, the other in Wanamarta. In addition, the instruments in Canto 364 are themselves supernaturally powerful. Alun Jaladri (Ocean Waves) is the gamelan set from Wirasaba that the Adipati (possibly the same character we meet in Canto 321) has given to Ki Panurta, the headman of Wanamarta and the father of Amongraga’s bride, Tambangraras. Kunst (1973: 217) refers to a tĕrbang performance that takes place a day or two earlier during the wedding festivities in Wanamarta as part of a complex musical event involving tĕrbang, gamelan and dancing, in Canto 356, v. 217–308 (Kamajaya 1985–91, 5: 206–20). In this performance Jayengraga is the star tĕrbang performer. This passage and the one we have been examining from Canto 321 should be closely compared when the character-spaces of Cĕbolang (later Anggungrimang) and Jayengraga are analyzed. The two major characters exhibit differences that are as striking as their similarities, and they are both surrounded by minor characters who help define them.
Throughout this essay, in my attention to parody, the everyday, the futurity of the present, and the “unrealized surplus of humanness” in minor characters in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, there are echoes of M.M. Bakhtin’s approach to what he calls the “novel.” The possibility of “novelizing” the poem in Bakhtin’s sense, it seems to me, is very real, but I can only hint at such a reading here. See Bakhtin 1981: 37, 39 and passim.
In addition to Nyai Cĕnthini herself, such female minor characters include: Niken Rarasati, the independent-minded wife of Jayengraga; Ni Atikah, a story-telling lady ulama; the wealthy “merry widow” Nyai Sĕmbada, patron of gamelan and insatiable lover; and the beautiful and talented Ni Pĕlangi, who is discussed by Nancy Florida in this volume. For a wonderful essay on literary representations of “sex wars” in nineteenth-century Surakarta, including a male phantasy-shattering incident in the Major Cĕnthini, see Florida 1996.