1 Introduction
With these words begins a famous scene in the Javanese Sĕrat Rama, the scene of the deer with the golden hair. The Sĕrat Rama was written in the eighteenth century as one of countless renderings of the Ramayana, the great epic from India. Making its appearance in Java in the ninth century almost simultaneously in stone (in a temple relief) and in writing, the epic has continued to move the hearts of the Javanese for more than a thousand years. Time and again it was reproduced in all sorts of artistic expression; up till today people read it, listen to it, watch it, refer to it and cite from it, and call their children and business companies after its heroes. It was even used for the periodization of Indonesia’s history (by G.J. Resink; see Resink 1975).
The story of Rama and Sinta is too well known to need a lengthy introduction. Dasarata, king of Ayodya, has four sons. It is his wish to be succeeded one day by his eldest son, Rama, but due to an earlier promise it is another son who becomes the next king, while Rama is sent into exile. Accompanied only by his wife Sinta and one loyal brother, Laksmana, Rama starts living the life of an ascetic in the forest. A foreign king, Rawana, informed about Sinta’s extraordinary beauty, kidnaps her and takes her to his overseas kingdom, Lĕngka. The war that follows brings about Rawana’s death and Sinta’s liberation (an English translation of the complete story can be found in Robson 2015, with reference to the Old Javanese version).
The story of the deer appears when Rawana is on the verge of seizing Sinta, but first has to lure her protectors, Rama and Laksmana, away. In the lines quoted at the top of this chapter, it is his servant Marica who is speaking. Marica is addressing his lord in response to the latter’s request to assist him in kidnapping Sinta. Soon Marica fulfills his plan and changes himself into a deer with golden hair, so as to arouse Sinta’s desire. With success: she sends Rama and Laksmana after the deer and thus, left defenseless, becomes easy prey for Rawana. This event is the impetus for the war between Rama and Rawana.
2 Imitation
Interestingly, there exists a skillful imitation of the scene of the deer in a completely different story, which has nothing to do with Rama and Sinta. I am referring to the Panji Paniba. In this story, written in the early nineteenth century, there is also a lady in a forest, who is likewise abandoned by her guardians at the sight of a seductive animal. Here, as in the story of Rama and Sinta, it is a ruse with the purpose of kidnapping the lady. With the same effect: a war, to set the lady free.
The lady concerned is Sĕkartaji, the female hero of the Panji Paniba; her flawed protector is her prospective husband, Panji, the male hero of the story. Sĕkartaji is kidnapped on behalf of the king of Makassar, who has sailed to Java with the aim of making the princess his own. The role of the deer in this story is filled by a dove.
The main line of the Panji Paniba is as follows. Princess Sĕkartaji of the kingdom of Kediri disappears all of a sudden without leaving a trace. Quite a few people set out to find her, including her fiancé, Panji, crown prince of the kingdom of Jĕnggala. While the efforts of all the others remain fruitless – which does not prevent them from having many adventures – it is Panji who finds the princess, in the forest. Before long, she disappears again, however, having successfully been kidnapped by a helper of the king of Makassar, whose assistant in crime in the guise of a beautiful dove has distracted Panji. Now the prince confronts the king of Makassar. The king is killed, and the princess is set free.
The Panji Paniba is an elaboration of the common plot of the so-called Panji tales. There are many such elaborations, created in a tradition of more than six centuries, which is still very much alive today (Poerbatjaraka 1940: 367 makes an estimation about the beginning of the tradition; Kieven 2020 reviews modern interest). The common plot involves four Javanese kingdoms, a princess who disappears and a prince who finds her again. The name of the princess is Sĕkartaji or some other name, while the prince – her fiancé – is referred to by his title, Panji (which is also the collective name of these tales). Notwithstanding the plot common to all tales, each tale stands on its own, although there is quite a lot of mutual borrowing of narrative elements.
No reader familiar with Javanese literature would fail to recognize the scene of the deer in the scene with the dove. Nor would any reader expect the scene from the epic in a Panji story. After all, the two narratives have little in common, apart from the religious background of Hinduism. Their settings and the textual traditions they belong to are completely different: sacred history of ancient India, versus fictionalized history of medieval Java; many renderings telling one story, versus one plot brought to life in many different stories. The contents of the two stories are also different: Panji stories are about a prince and a princess who have to overcome all sorts of difficulties as a condition for their union. Rama and Sinta on the other hand are already a married couple. Their aim is not to realize union, but to undo separation.
This anomaly of a narrative element transplanted into an alien context arouses curiosity.1 How does the scene of the deer fit in the Panji Paniba? What kind of adjustments do we see? Are there more borrowings from the same source? And above all: why was it borrowed?
The similarity seems to be more than just incidental: the scene is firmly anchored in the Panji Paniba by related elements of the epic. For example, the strong advice not to kidnap the Javanese princess, for moral and practical reasons, given to the king of Makassar by his prime minister, is reminiscent of the way Rawana in the epic is advised by his righteous brother Wibisana against kidnapping Sinta. Another example is how Sĕkartaji, once kidnapped, is protected by the king’s sister, like Sinta is in the epic by Wibisana’s daughter Trijata.
The way the poet of the Panji Paniba deals with the supernatural aspect of his example is quite creative. Rama, in the epic, is facing a supernatural enemy: his opponent is a demon, as are his subordinates. There is nothing strange about demons in the epic; they have a place in Hinduism alongside gods and humans. The Panji Paniba, although placed in a Hindu setting, was written in the Islamic era, hence the poet may have thought it wise to tone down the supernatural and adjust it to his (Muslim) readers’ horizons of expectation. Panji’s enemy is a human being of flesh and blood, like himself: the Makassarese king, unlike Rawana in the epic, is not the king of demons. However, this does not settle all the poet’s problems. The demons in the story of Rama and Sinta represent the wickedness combatted by Rama. What wickedness is there to be faced by Panji?
Both the how and the why of the borrowings are interesting problems deserving our attention. As the how is partly determined by the why, in this chapter I shall give priority to the second question.
3 Directives
There is no obvious answer to the question of why such scenes as mentioned in the previous section were borrowed by the Panji Paniba. Should we think of authority or prestige, accrued over the ages by the epic? But then, Panji stories can boast of a long tradition of their own; there is no need to borrow authority or prestige from outside. Or should we think of imitation for the sake of embellishment? As far as the epic is concerned, both the Old and Modern Javanese versions count as the summit of poetic beauty in their times. Again, this seems unlikely, as the author of the Panji Paniba is a skillful poet himself.
I think we should look somewhere else for the answer: the author of the Panji Paniba in my view wishes to steer the reader in a particular direction. In both stories the abduction scene marks a major turn, from the episode of the forest to the episode of the war. My hypothesis is that the author of the Panji Paniba, by using the scene of the dove as a marker, suggests an interpretation of his text similar to that of the story of Rama and Sinta.
The story of Rama and Sinta can be read in two ways. On one level it is a romantic story, about a couple whose happiness is ruined when the female partner is abducted. The male partner succeeds in killing the villain, and so husband and wife are restored to their original happiness. However, on a deeper level the story is about the struggle between good and evil in the world. Evil personified by Rawana threatens to gain the upper hand; the well-being of the world is at stake. The god Wisnu decides to rescue the world by descending to earth, incarnating himself in a human being, Rama. As Rama he will fight Rawana and restore the world to happiness. For this plan to be executed, it is necessary that Rama and Rawana be brought into contact with each other. Rama’s banishment to the forest, the demoness in the forest falling in love with him and her subsequent humiliation, her grudge and her scheming to lure Rawana into kidnapping Sinta: these are all events which, on the face of it, look like a chain of unfortunate incidents making for an entertaining love story, but as they unfold events of universal dimensions are taking place. Behind the kidnapping there is another reason why Rawana should be killed. Rama’s victory over Rawana is Wisnu’s victory over evil.
There can be no doubt about the two levels of interpretation, because the story invites us to see it that way. The reader is constantly reminded of what the story really is about, in addition to the events which make up the life of Rama and Sinta, by references to the actual identity of the protagonists and the universal values which lie at the heart of the struggle.
If my hypothesis about the suggestive turn in the narrative of the Panji Paniba is correct, then we may ask: what is the actual identity of its protagonists, and which are the values underlying the conflict between the Makassarese and the Javanese? Are there references in the text helping us in our effort to unravel the hidden intentions of the narrative?
A closer look at the Panji Paniba is called for. But let me first introduce the sources of the texts I am using.
4 Sources
The Panji Paniba is written in poetry, the standard form of Javanese literature up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The text numbers 18,065 lines in 60 cantos. Canto 60.26, the final stanza of the text (see Javanese page 153 of the manuscript), informs us that the text was written in Surakarta, on the orders of Crown Prince Mangkunegara, during the reign of Pakubuwana IV (r. 1788–1820). The author is not mentioned. The text is dated October 17, 1817 CE, or more precisely: the writing started on that date and was completed in the running Javanese year. In the wording of the text (Canto 60.26ab, Javanese page number 153 of the manuscript):
When this was, is indicated at the beginning of the text (Canto 1.3a–d; Javanese page number 1 of the manuscript):
October 17, 1817 CE is the equivalent of the Javanese date 5 Besar windu year Be 1744. This year began on Friday, November 22, 1816; see “Tijdrekening” 1927: 412. The Javanese year 1744 is expressed by the lines sewu pitung atus nĕnggih dadi, catur ingkang pinurweng ukara “(the year) one thousand seven hundred was on when the story was put into words.” The second line is a chronogram; both catur and pinurweng ukara mean “4,” pinurweng ukara by association with words like ucap “talk,” rumpaka “literary embellishment,” anggit “poem,” as mentioned in Bratakesawa 1952: 48, s.v. warna. Pigeaud, while arriving at the same Javanese year 1744, equates this with 1816 CE, taking only the beginning of the year into account (Pigeaud 1968: 60).
The Panji Paniba was written on the basis of a wayang gĕdhog play, a type of wayang theater with two-dimensional leather puppets and with Panji tales as its special repertoire. The transformation from wayang play to poem is mentioned in stanzas 1 and 2 of the first canto; the source text is unknown and probably was not preserved (play scripts were – and are – not written down and circulated).
The text is preserved in a manuscript kept in Leiden, MS University Library Or. 2029. It is the only manuscript of the text I know. It is a copy, given the presence of copyist’s errors and corrections.2
In the early nineteenth century, when the Panji Paniba was written, the story of Rama and Sinta was accessible in several forms and versions, in the first place the performances of the shadow theater. As the modern situation in Java shows, such performances were an excellent way for young and old to learn the stories of traditional literature; hence, every Javanese knows them (or used to know them) by heart. Unfortunately, little can be said about the situation in the early nineteenth century in general, or about performances of the Panji Paniba in particular, due to a lack of documentation. Carey, writing about a famous contemporary of our author, Dipanagara,3 gives an impression of the widespread popularity of the shadow theater and its importance as a frame of reference, on the basis of information from secondary Javanese sources (in a section called “Importance of wayang in Javanese culture”; Carey 1974: 7–11).
Among the written forms of the Rama story were manuscripts containing the ancient text from the ninth century, the Ramayana, in the Old Javanese language. Modern versions were also available: the jarwa or “interpretation” (of the Old Javanese version), in its wording still close to Old Javanese, and a version in Modern Javanese. The latter was the Sĕrat Rama, created towards the end of the eighteenth century by Yasadipura.4 The author of the Panji Paniba, being a poet, may have had access to all three written versions of the epic, old, jarwa and modern, but he will certainly have known the modern version, Yasadipura’s poem. So would have his readers.
Around the time the author of the Panji Paniba composed his poem in 1817, some important social and political events were taking place in Java. One important event which occurred in neighboring Yogyakarta, which must also have drawn attention in Solo, was the marriage of the Yogyakarta sultan Hamengkubuwana IV on May 13, 1816 (Carey 2007: 411). Incidentally, among the festivities held on this occasion there was a performance of a wayang gĕdhog play, hence of a Panji story – but which one, I do not know.
The return of the Dutch to Java was important in a different way. They had been forced out by the British in 1810 (Hagen n.d.: 260–62), after two hundred years of commercial and military presence in the Indonesian archipelago. Once the Napoleonic wars in Europe were over, it was decided by the victors to restore the Dutch to their former position. The transfer of power from the British to the Dutch took place on August 19, 1816 (Carey 2007: 429). The poet of the Panji Paniba saw as it were before his eyes how his country was handed over by one foreign power to another. My interpretation of the Panji Paniba leads me to believe that the author was indeed deeply affected by the event and used the story to express his concern.
Meanwhile, the Javanese were left unmoved by the political changes of 1816, if we are to believe Dutch historiography. As one popular Dutch history book has it: “However, most of the indigenous inhabitants of the Indian archipelago hardly noticed the gunshots, the striking and hoisting of the flags and the promulgation of the proclamation […] What the ‘Dutch East-Indies’ in the end would mean for the indigenous population was in any case still completely unclear in 1816” (Van den Doel 1996: 21).5 I am not sure Van den Doel’s picture is correct. Perhaps “the indigenous inhabitants” were not asked for their opinion. They surely did not have an army strong enough to interfere. Yet, remaining silent is not exactly what they did.
Let us see what the Panji Paniba has to say.
5 Identity and Values
Two questions were posed above, in the section before the previous one, about identity and values. These will be addressed in the present section, to begin with the question of identity: who are the Makassarese, for whom or what do they stand? The narrator does not tell us but gives several clues, which may be discovered by paying attention to appearance, attitude, and intentions.
5.1 Appearance
What the Makassarese look like is given attention early in the story, when two foreigners arrive at the royal court of Kediri. Both men introduce themselves as ambassadors of the king of Makassar; they bring presents and a letter. The Javanese rub their eyes with astonishment: they have never seen such strange beings before. What a spectacle! This is what they see (Canto 1.26–27):
Winusonan (“treated with a wusu”) in the second line refers to an instrument known from the history of the cotton industry (see Van der Molen forthcoming). It was meant to pluck the cotton, after it had been cleaned and carded, to make it airy. Think of the effect of backcombing hair. So, the comparison apparently suggests a flicked-up or bouffant hairdo, quite the opposite of the Javanese ideal.
The Javanese are lost in amazement. These people are in every respect different from how they look themselves: small, moving about without any noise, smooth hair neatly tied together and tucked under a headscarf. But courtesy is strictly maintained. In the Panji Paniba, Makassar was not unknown to the Javanese. The two nations according to the story have commercial ties, which implies regular visits to harbor cities. Now a visit to the court takes place. There is no mockery or fear. The Javanese keep their amazement to themselves; the tone of what follows displays respect and equality.
This reaction can be explained. The Javanese are known for their high and refined culture. The Panji Paniba nourishes the reader’s high opinion by referring to reading and writing literature, enjoying and making music, singing, dancing, and etiquette, all as part of Javanese upbringing, at least in the higher echelons of society. Not part of one’s upbringing but connected with it in the eyes of the Javanese is outward appearance: refined people are handsome. The text makes it clear that the Makassarese ideas about culture and civilization correspond with those of the Javanese: they esteem similar qualities. At the Makassarese court we meet with the same manifestations of refined manners, skills and looks, be they sometimes unevenly distributed (the Makassarese prime minister is a refined person and a man of letters, while the king is a rough character, embarrassing his subjects when he starts singing). So there is enough room for mutual appreciation on the basis of equality.
The Makassarese, like their Buginese neighbors, are known for their enterprise and their fighting spirit. Their appearance corresponds with their reputation: a sturdy build, a heavy step, abundant hair growth. Actually, to my taste there is little of an Indonesian flavor in the description. If the context had not told us otherwise, I might well have believed that it was a bunch of Europeans who had stepped through the door.
5.2 Intention
The letter from Makassar contains a marriage proposal, asking the king of Kediri for his daughter’s hand. The ambassadors arrive at a critical moment. The princess has disappeared, no one knows where she is, and the king of Kediri, seeing that all possible sources of information about his vanished daughter have been exhausted without result, is announcing a sayĕmbara as a last resort: whoever is able to trace her whereabouts and bring her back, will be rewarded by marrying the princess and obtaining half of the kingdom. The king of Makassar is forthwith invited to join the sayĕmbara.6
In one of the next scenes, we learn about the intentions ascribed to foreigners. The Javanese king’s welcoming disposition towards the ambassadors and their king contrasts with the suspicion about their intentions on the part of his elder sister, when she is informed about the visit. She fears hidden motives. Foreigners never give presents for nothing, such is her conviction (Canto 2.17–18):
This is a clear statement. But how can the lady be so firm? Does she speak from personal experience, has she met foreigners before, did others inform her, or do we sense xenophobia? The story does not tell. The only thing we hear about her is that she spends her days as a hermit in seclusion (a kili suci, “holy female hermit,” in Javanese). Persons like her, male and female, are held in high esteem in Javanese society, and their wisdom in both spiritual things and worldly matters is acknowledged and valued. It makes sense if the king – her younger brother – asks her advice.
Were foreigners really seen as calculating and unreliable? Which foreigners? By whom? A correct interpretation of what the king’s sister is saying requires more information, which the rudimentary state of Javanese textual studies makes hard to find. Pending further research, I can point out the following. The Makassarese appear in traditional Javanese historiography as regular troops, involved in the battles and wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Java, and – staying in Java after disbandment – as gangs scouring the country; see for example Babad Tanah Djawi 1939–1941 or Babad Tanah Djawi 1987, passim. There is no mention of their supposedly calculating or unreliable nature, but then, there is not much of characterization anyway in these chronicles or babads. Some of the more articulate characterizations in the babads do not relate to Makassarese but to Europeans. I found one which is part of a discussion held among Bantenese leaders in the late 1620s, on the calculating and unreliable nature of the Dutch, who are stealthily turning the trading post they were given in Jakĕrta into a fort (Sajarah Bantĕn Canto 29–30, as summarized by Djajadiningrat 1913: 44. Sajarah is another word for babad). A similar statement, also made in a conversation, this time in the early 1810s, between the author of the Babad Bĕdhah ing Ngayogyakarta and his elder brother, typifies the British as people who “would always seek their own advantage” (Carey n.d.: 18, drawing on Canto 14.16–18 of the babad). Such statements are too incidental, of course, to be attributed much value, yet they are interesting in connection with the present discussion, all the more so as they are made at crucial points in Javanese history. An overall interpretation of the texts concerned is needed in order to avoid the danger of citing out of context, besides making more texts accessible for research.
5.3 Attitude
The third clue as to who the Makassarese and their king are, or what they stand for, as well as outward appearance and open or secret intentions, is attitude, more specifically receptiveness to Javanese culture: the recent hostilities being what they are, the Makassarese are interested in Javanese literature, or at least the prime minister is. The texts he reads belong to the canon: the Mintaraga, the Bratayuda, the Ramayana. The first one is a text about the austerities of Arjuna to prepare himself for the great war, which is the subject of the second one. (The Ramayana has already been summarized above.) It is through these texts that the prime minister becomes aware of the special position of the Javanese: they are the favorites of the gods, because Arjuna was the favorite of the gods and the Javanese are his descendants. The lesson is: Arjuna was victorious in the Bratayuda, so the Javanese will be victorious in the war the Makassarese king is about to launch. Likewise, it is not advisable to take away the wife of the Javanese crown prince; see what happened to Rawana.
How should the reader of the Panji Paniba interpret this preoccupation with Javanese literature? There is no historical evidence of a Makassarese interest in Javanese literature, but there was an interest elsewhere: for ages in Bali and, very recently, among Europeans in Java, among the Dutch and the British. Leaving aside the Balinese who have no role in the story, I wonder whether the author is hinting once more at the Europeans. Analogous to what we are told about Makassar, it was the upper layer of European society in Java, not the ordinary Europeans, who showed this interest: ministers like Josua van Iperen, one of the founders of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of the Arts and Sciences), administrators like John Crawfurd, Resident of Yogyakarta, even the Lieutenant Governor himself, Thomas Stamford Raffles. A detail worth mentioning in this connection is that the Makassarese king, making fun of the prime minister and his Javanese books, does not use a Javanese word for “book” but the rare Dutch loanword ĕbuk (he says: ngandhut layang Bratayuda gembol ĕbuk, “with a Bratayuda stuffed under your shirt”; Canto 4.16).
Reviewing the results of this search for identity, it seems that “European” or “Dutch” or “British” would stand a good chance as a substitute for what is allegorically referred to as “Makassarese.”
There are still other indications in evidence, which, however, are equally ambiguous. For example, the Makassarese king, when receiving important guests, has them sit on chairs, while alcohol flows freely (Canto 35.27–28). Sitting on chairs was not the custom in Indonesia in the past, except for kings; it only spread after it had been introduced by the Europeans. Drinking alcohol admittedly was by no means limited to Europeans; spirits are traditionally known all over Indonesia. Nor did the drinks mentioned in the Panji Paniba – wine, jenever, brandy – brought to Indonesia by Europeans, remain an exclusively European prerogative. On the other hand, drinking and the types of beverages certainly fit the European image.
No less significant, I think, is the characteristic of the Makassarese as coming from overseas. Often, if not always, in Panji stories there is a foreign kingdom attacking the Javanese. Usually, these foreign kingdoms are located in Java, but some happen to be overseas realms. Whether coming from overseas is a distinctive feature or not, in light of the present discussion it is more than a narrative coincidence: it is a condition, if for “Makassarese” we are to read “European.”
If these arguments to read “Europe” for “Makassar” make sense, they would shed new light on the Makassarese king refusing to join the sayĕmbara (the contest on behalf of the vanished princess), as he will – see the next section. In his claim to her, to the exclusion of the other participants of the sayĕmbara, contemporaneous readers may have recognized the monopolistic efforts of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC. The same context would explain the remark about presents with strings attached, made by the sister of the Javanese king.
Hypothesizing about the author’s intentions will never reach the stage of certainty; the best one can hope for is probability. But then, this is inherent in allegories. They have to allow for ambiguity, in order to be allegories.
5.4 Values
The narrative similarity, in certain respects, of the Panji Paniba to the story of Rama and Sinta evoked two questions: what is the real identity of its protagonists, and which are the values underlying the conflict between the Makassarese and the Javanese? The first question was addressed in the first sub-sections of this section. Let us now turn to the second question.
For the time being trust prevails at the Javanese court, after the Makassarese diplomats have left again, notwithstanding the critical remarks of the king’s sister. In Makassar, however, the king considers the story about the vanished princess as a rejection, and furiously takes up arms against Kediri. Soon a large fleet sails for Java. The news of the hostile attack only reaches the Javanese court after the first clashes on Javanese soil have taken place and the first deaths and injuries have occurred.
Curiously, what worries the Javanese in the first place is not the attack, but the fact that the king of Makassar sets foot on Javanese soil without prior notice. We learn this from a dialogue between two Javanese princes discussing the new situation. It follows that entering the country without prior notice is illegal and is considered an attack; underlying this view is the idea that there is someone to whom to report, someone who is in charge of the country. It is the king, not surprisingly, who is in charge (Canto 39.56–57):
The Javanese expression translated here as “the suzerain” is kang gadhah nagari, literally “the one who owns the country.” The verb gadhah “to own” is unusual in this context. There are several verbs available in Javanese to refer to the business of ruling, such as madĕg or mĕngku. These verbs have a literal meaning which in a metaphorical way allows for the meaning of “reigning.” Madĕg literally means “to be established,” mĕngku literally means “to frame something.” Why choose gadhah “to own,” which is never used in the sense of “to reign”? The reason may be that the author wishes to exclude any idea of vassalage or subordination. Madĕg and mĕngku are neutral in this respect. Gadhah, however, excludes higher authority (such as a colonial government). Kang gadhah nagari refers to the owner of the country like kang gadhah griya refers to the owner of a house, who has the exclusive right to it, whom one asks for permission to enter lest one be a trespasser. Please note the stoical tone of the passage. To call the sudden attack by hundreds of Makassarese their dhatĕng, their “coming,” is quite an understatement. I guess irony is intended.
In fact, what the prince is talking about is sovereignty. Although the concept of sovereignty is not mentioned, he identifies the core of the matter: the king is entitled to say yes or no, fully, finally and alone, without being answerable to anyone else. Foreigners are welcome – indiscriminately; see the spontaneous invitation for the sayĕmbara with its precious stake, no matter what they look like – provided they politely use the entrance. They can lay no claims; they are guests who should knock on the door and have to submit to the will of the ruler. If we are looking for the values underlying the conflict between Makassar and Java: this is it. The conflict is about the princess, but more fundamental is the king of Makassar’s challenging the authority of the Javanese king. It is easy to see what this means if transposed to the time of the author.
The three classic studies on traditional Javanese statecraft, Schrieke 1957, Moertono 1968 and Miyazaki 1988, discuss the divinely inspired legitimacy of kingship, the administration and geographic divisions, and the relationship between ruler and ruled, besides other topics. However, none of them mentions the idea of “ownership” of a country, in the sense of sovereignty. The absence of this concept from these three studies and their Javanese sources suggests that it was irrelevant in the political situation prior to 1800. However, around 1817, on the threshold of a new era, of Dutch colonialism, it had become acutely relevant. With no tradition to fall back on, the author of the Panji Paniba coined a term of his own to describe the current events.
6 Further Questions
My analysis of the Panji Paniba raises a couple of new questions. One is: why write an allegory in poetry, if one has something critical to say on such an important subject as the usurpation of power? Would not the message come through more clearly if worded as a clear-cut, straightforward text in prose?
A reason for using poetry may be access: how to reach the intended audience. Unlike in Europe, in 1817 newspapers or pamphlets to air one’s views were unknown in Javanese society (the first example of political propaganda addressing a Javanese readership I have seen appeared in a newspaper of 1829, directed against Dipanagara. See De Kock 1829). Prose was a rare medium at the time, popular in the domain of religion, but not much in use outside it. If aiming at a larger audience, the obvious channels would be theater and literature. One can imagine that theater (such as shadow theater) was used for political purposes in those days, if only as a way of release, but unfortunately it did not leave a trace. Literature in Java by definition meant poetry. Much traditional Javanese poetry was narrative and therefore, unlike modern lyrical poetry, not necessarily ambiguous or difficult to understand (even though such poetry did have its problematical passages). So, a literary format was not an obstacle for the audience to get the message – on the contrary, it was the format people would expect. The same goes for allegories: the Javanese had had enough training, for centuries, to be able to face an allegory in 1817 with the required sophistication. A reason for applying the genre of allegory may have been safety; after all, the author was targeting the powers that be.
One might wonder why the poor Makassarese were selected for the role of the scapegoat. One reason has been mentioned already: the author needed a nation from overseas if he were to allude to Europe successfully. Another reason could be that the Makassarese had a history of raiding Java in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so putting them in the position of an enemy would make sense to the reader (see the babads referred to in the previous section and also Ricklefs 2001: 96). A related question in this connection is: why call the Makassarese foreigners; aren’t they Indonesian as much as the Javanese? The answer is: nowadays they are, but in 1817 Indonesia did not yet exist. At a time when the distance between Java and Makassar was expressed in days rather than hours, and contacts were in any case far less frequent, the relationship was less close – let alone before that time, in the Middle Ages, which forms the chronological setting of the Panji Paniba. So calling the Makassarese foreigners (and vice versa) would not have been strange at the time. Throughout the text when referring to Makassarese court or military hierarchy the narrator uses Javanese terminology, such as patih for the prime minister or tumĕnggung for officers of some high rank. This is how foreign habits and traditions are translated into concepts which are familiar to the readers at home, in the days of the Panji Paniba no different from now.
Another question is: why choose the Hindu past as a context for the allegory? Is there a shortage of historical material of an Islamic nature? (Saying that a Hindu past is implied in the choice of a Panji story would shift the question, not answer it.) The answer may have to do with the focus of the author’s criticism. If the Islamic past had been chosen as a context, this could have blurred the author’s focus, by raising religion-related problems of believers and unbelievers, thus thwarting the desired discussion about a problem of statecraft. Precluding the wrong discussion by opting for a distant past with a different religious context cleared the way for the correct focus.
The Javano-Makassarese war in the Panji Paniba ends with the victory of the Javanese over the Makassarese. This is not what happened in history, if we take “Makassar” to stand for “Europe.” How are we to reconcile literary and historical truth? Where the new developments would lead in the course of the nineteenth century was not yet clear in 1817 and was actually only decided fifteen years later (by the Java War of 1825–30). Nevertheless, the author has to say something about the still unknown future – call it “hope.” He puts what he has to say in the mouth of the enemy, that is, the prime minister of Makassar, the same character who opposed the king’s evil plans. The prime minister keeps imploring his master not to attack the Javanese. He admits the possibility of a Makassarese victory, but this, he warns, should not be accepted for what it would seem. Because, whatever one might imagine, God is on the side of the Javanese (siniyan ing batharane “[the Javanese] enjoy divine favor”; canto 1.4); victory could only be temporary (sĕtun inggih sagĕd unggul / angger amung sakĕdhap; canto 17.27). In the end the once-victorious foreigner will find himself on the wrong side of history (Canto 17.32–33):
It seems a peculiar coincidence of history that the same idea of eventual blame after initial victory would be formulated by the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2005, in a belated acknowledgement of the course of history: “In retrospect, it is clear that its large-scale deployment of military forces in 1947 put the Netherlands on the wrong side of history” (Bot 2005). The minister is referring to the violence which accompanied the dissolution of the Dutch East Indies. The Panji Paniba, written at the very beginning of this regime, in 1817, predicts what Bot was to admit almost two centuries later, in near- identical words.
7 Concluding Remarks
The Panji Paniba, a Javanese text of 1817, is one version among many about the adventures of Panji looking for his lost fiancée. We can read it as a story about the difficulties the male and female heroes have to overcome before they are united with each other and are able to marry. However, the text opens the possibility of an interpretation at a deeper level, surpassing the interests of Panji and Sĕkartaji and looking at the interests of Java. We read about statecraft and the sovereignty of Java, and the infringement of its sovereignty by foreign intruders.
The reader is alerted to this possibility, of an interpretation of the Panji Paniba at a deeper level, by a particular transition in the narrative. This particular transition, I hypothesize, was borrowed from the story of Rama and Sinta exactly for that purpose. The epic, besides being a love story of separation and reunion, at a deeper level is also a story about the universal conflict between good and evil. If my hypothesis is correct, then we should ask how this works in the case of the Panji Paniba: who or what is it that the enemy of Java stands for, and which evil is it that the author wishes to bring to our attention?
My analysis of the Panji Paniba leads me to the conclusion that the text is an allegory informed by historical events taking place in 1816, in which the Makassarese – the enemy – stand for Europeans. Their intended identity can be inferred from a number of characteristics ascribed to the Makassarese but in fact found not – or not exclusively – with the Makassarese but with – or also with – the Dutch and the British. Unlike the story of Rama and Sinta, the Panji Paniba addresses a conflict not of universal but, more down to earth, of Javanese dimensions, of a Java on the verge of being turned into a colony of foreign countries. Contrary to the claims of Dutch historiography, “the indigenous inhabitants” did voice their opinion – it would have been strange indeed if they had not. The text testifies to a deep concern about what was happening on Javanese soil in 1816. At the same time, it illustrates what is to be gained by listening to the Javanese voice when studying Javanese history.7
The Javanese being victorious, as the text has it, is at odds with historical reality in 1816. It is with this reality in mind that the author stresses that foreign triumph will be finite, as God is on the Javanese side; in the end the oppressor will find himself blamed by the whole world. The author saw this correctly; his confidence was warranted. Even the enemy agrees.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this chapter were listened to by the audience at the Erasmushuis (Dutch Embassy, Jakarta) on November 26, 2019, and read by Korrie Korevaart, Judith Bosnak, and the research group New Directions in the Study of Javanese Literature at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (2018/2019). A final touch was given by the participants of the webinar “Relevansi dan aktualisasi budaya Panji,” held on November 18, 2021 by the Komunitas Seni Budaya “Brangwetan,” Sidoarjo, together with the Asosiasi Tradisi Lisan Jawa Timur. The English was corrected by Stuart Robson and Ronit Ricci. I thank them all for their many thoughtful suggestions for improvement.
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Intertextuality at its best, as an analytical tool, circumventing any urge to trace origins because the origin is easily recognized. Too often according to F.W. Korsten intertextual relations are reduced to hierarchic relations (“which one was first”), instead of being used as a source of information on the dynamics of meaning (Korsten n.d.: 130). Ricci in this volume, addressing intertextuality in texts on walis and prophets, speaks of tales, not versions, in order to avoid any interference of problems of origin.
An example is the corrected mistake in Canto 33.26i (page 78 – Javanese numbering – of the manuscript): the copyist wrote eman tĕmĕn wong juris “too bad if a rascal,” but should have written eman tĕmĕn wong agung kaya wong juris “too bad if a nobleman would behave like a rascal”; the correction is added in the margin. The cause of the error is clear (twice wong in the same line).
The Yogyanese prince Dipanagara (1785–1855) rejected Dutch claims of authority in Java. The ensuing Java War (1825–30) ended with his defeat and the firm establishment of Dutch colonial rule. Dipanagara is celebrated as a national hero in Indonesia.
Yasadipura (1729–1803) was the court poet of Surakarta in the second half of the 18th century. He counts as the father of Modern Javanese literature. With him began a period of literary bloom of more than a hundred years. The Sĕrat Rama is only one out of many works for which he is famous.
“De meeste inheemse bewoners van de Indische archipel merkten daarentegen de kanonschoten, het strijken en hijsen van de vlaggen en het afkondigen van de proclamatie nauwelijks op […] Wat ‘Nederlands-Indië’ uiteindelijk zou gaan betekenen voor de inheemse bevolking van de archipel, was in 1816 in ieder geval nog geheel onduidelijk.”
A sayĕmbara is a “contest of arms, with as prize being chosen in marriage by a princess [in ancient story]” (Robson and Wibisono n.d., s.v. sayembara).
Where the use of literary sources in Javanese can lead is shown by Ricklefs in his contribution to this volume, on the study of historical Islam in Java. He connects a change of paradigm with it.