THE WRITING OF A HISTORY

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The writing of any history takes place in history and is itself, then, a kind of historical event. Traditional Javanese historical writing, I would argue, is a practice more self-consciously aware of this truism than is the practice of writing history in the post-Enlightenment West. The post-Enlightenment historical project is conventionally understood as the objective representation of past events as framed and explained by the historical contexts in which those events are construed to have "really" occurred. Such a historical project is premised on the assumed absolute alterity of a positively dead past, a past which is there to be known and faithfully reconstructed in writing by "objective scientists" who themselves exist (miraculously) in a place which itself seems outside history. Traditional Javanese historical writing appears to have been a significantly different project with a significantly different relation to the past. Recognizing the presence of living pasts in the historically becoming presents in which they wrote, the writers of traditional histories in Java understood the inscription of these texts as historical events, and the texts themselves as potential contexts. Recognizing their own historical agency, these Javanese historians could, then, self-consciously employ traditional conventions of writing to effect a transformation of tradition itself. That is, such traditional Javanese historical writing, because it was self-consciously written in and of history, was capable, at times, of rewriting the conditions of its own production.

What, then, do we know of the history of the writing of Babad Jaka Tingkir? What kind of historical event does its inscription compose? How is the text of Tingkir situated as a writing of history? What manner of historical agent actually wrote this remarkably untypical traditional text? In this chapter, we will turn to the actual manuscript of Babad Jaka Tingkir to begin to address these questions.

In original manuscript there survives but a single witness of this unique telling of a Javanese past. This surviving manuscript witness is inscribed and bound into the end of a volume that is now stored in the library of the senior palace of Surakarta. That volume, titled Kupiya Iber Warni-warni Sampéyandalem kaping VI ("Copies of the Miscellaneous Correspondence of His Majesty the Sixth"; hereafter: His Majesty the VI's Correspondences), appears a diplomatic archive associated with Pakubuwana VI, the Surakarta king who vanished into exile in 1830. How, then, does Babad Jaka Tingkir, this history of a legendary hero of the sixteenth century, belong to the correspondence of an exiled nineteenth-century king? To begin to answer this question I turn now to sketch a very brief history of that exiled king's life and times.

I.S.K.S. Pakubuwana VI

Born in 1807 to a secondary wife of Pakubuwana V, Pakubuwana VI was the ruler of the Kraton Surakarta from 1823 to 1830. He was not, apparently, a particularly popular monarch. Elevated to the throne when he was only sixteen years old, at least in part by the machinations of his foster father, the powerful Grand Vizier Sasradiningrat II (dates of office, 1812–46), the young king proved somewhat less tractable than his elders might have wished. A restless figure, the king (often appearing in Dutch dress, to the dismay of his colonial" guardians") was, it seemed to his detractors, all too often on the road. Of the king's "dressing Dutch" and his incessant travel, Lieutenant Governor General H. M. de Kock complained: "[he] frequently goes off fishing and hunting, and often dresses up as a European, and has recently had the queen dress likewise; so that it can be said of him that he is doing whatever possible to make himself unpopular. A Mohammedan despot (Mohamedaansch despoot) must, if he is to inspire honor and respect, show himself little outside his Kraton." Apparently the restless young king—who would not conform to the Dutch ideal of the "Mohammedan despot"—was an avid reader, especially of "traditional Javanese histories"; and it seems he was an accomplished writer as well. Of Pakubuwana VI's literary prowess, the hostile de Kock reported: "The Emperor has little natural intellect, and yet he has picked up an extensive knowledge of Javanese historical traditions (gebruiken); he writes fluently/ smartly (vlug), and he has read extensively." Pakubuwana VI was known to perform occasionally as dhalang, or shadow-puppet master, and to waltz poorly.

Pakubuwana VI ascended to the throne in September 1823, shortly after his father's untimely death and the notorious canceling of land rentals in the Principalities—and a scant year and a half before Prince Dipanagara, elder statesman of the Yogyakarta Palace (Central Java's other royal city), went into open rebellion against the encroachments of colonial domination. At the time of the outbreak of the Dipanagara War in May 1825, Surakarta's king was barely eighteen years old. The popular Prince Dipanagara garnered a broad base of support for his rebellion: with the aid of a number of other aristocrats (including some from Surakarta) and with the extremely important backing of a powerful network of rural Islamic teachers, he earned the allegiance of a large number of ordinary villagers to his cause. The Dipanagara War, which was to rage for five long years, posed a serious threat to Dutch power in Java and marked the last stand of indigenous royal power against Dutch colonial hegemony. Where did the young Pakubuwana VI stand in this struggle? Although ostensibly supporting his Dutch overlords against the rebels, Surakarta's king was known to have sympathized with, and likely to have secretly assisted, the rebellious Dipanagara.

The war ended in the spring of 1830, when the Dutch finally captured Dipanagara (in the course of ostensible negotiations) and straightway exiled him to Menado and then on to Makassar. After finishing with Dipanagara, the colonial authorities turned to settle with their putative ally, Pakubuwana VI. The victorious Dutch shocked their shifty comrade in arms by annexing all the outer districts (mancanagara) of both the Surakarta and Yogyakarta courts. This act provoked the young...