Chapter V More of Central Java
Le bon sens nous dit que les choses de la terre n’existent que bien peu et que la vraie réalité est dans les rêves. Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels (Dédication).
Except during a period of some four centuries and a half, from about 940 till the palmy days of Mojopahit, when declining Hindu civilisation, for reasons as yet unexplained, sought a refuge farther east, Central Java and especially that part of it known in our time as the Principalities, i.e. Surakarta and Jogjakarta, has always been the heart of the island. There lived and live the true Javanese, the people of heaven’s mercy, cherishing their old traditions; these and the beautiful scenery of their fire-mountains and fertile valleys are still theirs, whatever else may fail: glory, power and freedom. They lived and live in their world of custom and formality a life unintelligible in its inner workings to the western brain, impenetrable to the western eye. There are forces hidden in the Javanese mind, the resultant of a strangely moved past, which we can never understand, though we may admire their creative energy, revealed in the now conventional designs guiding the hand of the potter, the wood-carver, the goldsmith, the armourer, the batikker,49 hereditary practisers of dying arts and crafts; in the remains of a marvellous architecture long since altogether dead. No chapter in the whole history of eastern art, says Fergusson, is so full of apparent anomalies or upsets so completely our preconceived ideas of things as they ought to be, as that which treats of the architectural history of the island of Java...; the one country to which they (the Hindus) overflowed, was Java, and there they colonised to such an extent as for nearly a thousand years to obliterate the native arts and civilisation and supplant it by their own...; what is still more singular is, that it was not from the nearest shores of India that these emigrants departed but from the western coast.... A linga, erected in the Kadu in the year 654 Saka (A.D. 732), a Sivaïte symbol of generation, marks the origin of an artistic activity whose most brilliant period, the classical one of central Javanese architecture, as G. P. Rouffaer styles it rightly, begins with the construction of such buildings as the Buddhist chandi Kalasan or Kali Bening. The inscription of King Sanjaya in Venggi characters, and vestiges of Vaishnav tendencies in the Suku and Cheto temples of a much later date, point to the worship of Vishnu, while Brahma’s four sublime conditions and more subtle transcendentalism do not seem to have attracted the Javanese converts to Hinduïsm. They could grasp the unity of Siva’s threefold functions much better and accepted him as Mahadeva at the head of the Trimoorti. The advent of Buddhism in its mahayanistic form, the creed of the northern church so called, served to emphasise native tolerance. Sivaïsm and whatever there was of Vishnuïsm, harmonised with Buddhism to the extent of borrowing and lending symbols, emblems and divine attributes; Hindu gods played puss in the corner with Bodhisatvas, as already remarked upon in the preceding chapter; the chandi Chupuwatu surprises us with a stupa-linga;50 a Javanese prince of the thirteenth century bears the expressive name of Siva-Buddha; the old Javanese Sang Hiang Kamahayanikan contains the dictum: Siva is identical with Buddha.51 If more inscriptions had been found, more light might have been thrown on the anomalous ornamentation of, for instance, the Prambanan temples and the Mendoot; but Sivaïte records of the kind leaving the matter unexplained, Buddhist information is still scantier, perhaps a consequence of Baghavat’s followers not excelling in epigraphy or literary labours of any description.
If the backwash of great political events or religious discussion when the Islām superseded older creeds, may have aided Kala, the Destroyer, in demolishing a good many buildings of the classical period, whose sites even are sought in vain, it is certain that the pioneers of western civilisation, proud of their superiority, willfully and wantonly undid in many places work that had been spared by time and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and enemies born of the soil, devastating with fire and sword their brethren’s hearths and houses. Christian zealots regarded the ancient monuments as assembly-rooms of the Devil where the benighted heathen used to foregather in idolatry, lodges of abomination the sooner razed the better, a pious feeling often translated into action on grounds of utility: the stones offered excellent building material. Officials and particulieren52 of broader views, besides acknowledging the serviceableness of chandis in this respect, went recho-hunting53 for the adornment of their houses and gardens. Quite a collection has been formed in the residency grounds at Jogjakarta, the nucleus of which was moved thither from the estate Tanjong Tirta, whose former occupants, like most of the landed gentry, made exceedingly free with the temples and monasteries in that neighbourhood. As neither they nor the others bothered about noting where they got this or that piece of sculpture, we are entirely at sea concerning the meaning of several beautiful statues. This is the case, e.g., with one of remarkably fine execution, a crowned goddess, sitting on a lotus cushion and encircled by a flaming aureole, pressing her hands to her bosom. She has been fortunate enough to escape the fate of some deities who shared her sequestration and were left to the care of the convicts detailed to keep the Resident’s compound in trim, a duty performed by whitewashing or daubing them with a grayish substance, excepting the hair of the head, the eyebrows, the eyeballs and the prabha, which the gentlemen-artists of the chain-gang are in the habit of painting black, enhancing the general effect by “restoring” lost hands and feet and damaged faces after methods nothing short of barbarous, but therefore the better in keeping with the traditional attitude of those in authority. For this infamous disfiguration and desecration, which makes any one unaccustomed to Dutch East Indian processes shudder with horror, never disturbed the aesthetic sense or equanimity of the several occupants of the residency who, during the last thirty-five years, saw it going on under their very eyes, the eyes of the representatives of a Government lavish in circulars54 recommending the country’s antiquities to their care. Neither are those eyes shocked by the “museum” adjoining the residency, a jumble of plunder from chandis far and near; nor by the chaotic mass of torsos, arms and legs, fragmentary evidence of wholesale spoliation behind that pitiful exhibition of archaeology turned topsyturvy.
So much for the statuary removed from the chandis, as far as it can be traced. Concerning the chandis themselves, it should be remembered that the greater part has wholly disappeared. Hillocks, overspread with brushwood, sometimes awaken hopes that by digging foundations and portions of walls may be discovered; heaps of debris, tenanted by lizards and snakes, point to structures of which nothing that is left, indicates the former use; shattered ornamental stones speak of magnificent buildings fallen or pulled down—glimmerings of splendour that was. The temples still standing are reduced to ruins and diminish almost visibly in attractiveness and size. Rouffaer55 gave an interesting example of their fate in the story of the spiriting away of the chandi Darawati: in 1889 tolerably well preserved, though two large statues of the Buddha had been dragged off to the dwelling of a European in the dessa Gedaren, it was gone in 1894—vanished into air! The temples constructed of brick, like the chandi Abang, have suffered even more, of course, than those of stone, the memory of whose grandeur is retained in a few ghastly wrecks. Reserving the Buddhist remains for later treatment and passing by the Sivaïte caves with rectangular porches in the Bagelen, mentioned by Fergusson, I shall deal here with the chandis Suku and Cheto, and the most noteworthy ruins in the southern mountains. The latter comprise the kraton of Ratu Boko, Mboq Loro Jonggrang’s father, as the natives call it, and the temple group of the Gunoong Ijo. Of the legendary kingly residence little more is left than a square terrace with portions of a wall and the sill of a gate. The chandi Ijo consists of a large temple of the usual polygonal form with ten smaller ones and a pit which contained two stone receptacles and strips of gold-leaf with the image of a deity and an inscription; the buildings are in a sad condition, but decay has not impaired their beauteous dignity and the landscape alone repays a visit to Soro Gedoog, an estate whose gradual reclamation of the jungle led to their discovery in 1886 when ground was cleared for an extension of the plantations.
The chandis Suku and Cheto are situated respectively on the western and northern slope of the Gunoong Lawu, a volcano on the boundary between Surakarta and Madioon, not less expressive in its scenery of what heaven has done for this delicious island. Shortly after the mysterious pyramids of Suku had drawn the attention of Resident Johnson, in the British Interregnum, Thomas Horsfield visited them and made some drawings. The inscriptions and the sculptured ornament of Cheto were reported upon by C. J. van der Vlis, in 1842. The groups belong to the latest, most decadent period of Hindu architecture in Java and their foundation, Suku being a few years older than Cheto, must have coincided with the introduction of the Islām. Bondowoso, the son of the recluse Damar Moyo, who assisted the King of Pengging against Ratu Boko and took such signal revenge upon the latter’s daughter, Loro Jonggrang, for rejecting him, the uncouth slayer of her father, is supposed to have erected the buildings at Suku. Those at Cheto owe their origin to a prince of Mojopahit, who quarrelled with his brother, the ruler of that empire, or, according to another legend, to a certain Kiahi Patiro, who refused to become a convert to the new faith and repaired to the Lawu, where he lived as a hermit and was killed by Pragiwongso, an emissary of the Moslim King of Demak. Linga-worship returned in the temple groups of the Lawu to its crudest modes of expression, and Fergusson, who mentions the dates 1435 and 1440, speaks of a degraded form of the Vishnuïte religion, the garuda,56 the boar, the tortoise, etc., being of frequent occurrence in the ornamentation. Junghuhn described the staircases he found, which connected the terraces, and the statues, which hardly came up to the artistic standard of Prambanan and the Boro Budoor, one of them distinguishing itself by a colossal head whose measurement from chin to crown was three feet, half of the whole height. Comparing his description with the actual state of things, much must have been removed, heaven knows whither! Notwithstanding the obvious truth of Fergusson’s remark that a proper illustration of Suku and Cheto, and, I may be permitted to add, of the remains on the summit of the mountain, whether originally tree-temples or consecrated to devotional exercises in the open, à l’instar of West Java, promises to be of great importance to the history of architecture in the island, very little has been done in that direction or even for the conservation of the ruins where recho-hunters and a luxurious vegetation vie in obliterating the traces of most interesting antiquities. Junghuhn sounded a note of warning apropos of the falling in of the peculiarly constructed pyramidal temple, May 1838, but this and the other monuments have been suffered since, as before, to crumble quietly away and the easily removable sculpture to be carried off. Ganesa, in his manifold reproductions, seconds on the Lawu his father Siva, head of the Trimoorti, continuing the lead obtained seven centuries earlier in the plain of Prambanan, and a systematic study of the reliefs, now covered with moss and lichens, might shed a good deal of light on several unsettled questions. One of those reliefs, blending the human and the divine in the manner of the allusions to the Brata Yuda on the Diëng plateau and the Rama legend on the walls of the chandi Loro Jonggrang, represents a complete armoury, with Ganesa, protector of arts and crafts, between the armourer himself and his assistant who works the bellows. If, with Rouffaer, we divide the long era during which the Hindus, first as immigrants and then as rulers, merged gradually in the aboriginal population, into a Hindu-Javanese period of Central Java and a Javanese-Hindu period of East Java, the monuments of Suku and Cheto belong evidently to the epoch of Javanese-Hindu decline, decadent art flowing back to its classical source, tarnishing original Hindu-Javanese conceptions. Leaving Buddhist architecture to be dealt with in the last chapters, and before turning to the chandis of East Java, a short historical review may aid in the appreciation of this decline and subsequent paralysis of the creative faculty. Kartikeya, the god of war, a younger son of Siva and Parvati, had his strong hand in this, and how he invested and divested mighty princes, who conquered or were defeated and finally passed away, causing the rise and fall of glorious kingdoms, is written in the babads, the Javanese chronicles, by no means such old wives’ tales as Dominee Valentijn tried to make them out, but containing in their extravagance a kernel of stern reality, not the less explanatory of the condition of the fairy island Java because the magnanimes mensonges of a vivid imagination animate the dull facts.
Of the Hindu empire Mataram in Central Java nothing tangible is left except the ruins referred to, a few objects in metal and stone, accidentally unearthed or dug up by treasure-seekers, and some inscriptions, title-deeds, etc., the scanty “genuine charters of Java” as van Limburg Brouwer defined them. The name Mataram has been preserved on a copper plate, dating from about 900, which agrees in this respect with four other records, discovered in East Java; the capital of the Maharaja i Mataram is called Medang. For two centuries, from the beginning of the eighth until the beginning of the tenth, Mataram seems to have flourished as the most powerful state in the island, especially aggressive towards the east. Native tradition, in fond exaggeration of her importance, makes her sway the destinies of the world. Her star waned suddenly; by what cause is unknown; but whether it was the invasion of a mightier enemy or a natural catastrophe, the same as that which overtook the builders of the Diëng and the plain of Prambanan, forcing them to leave their work unfinished, ancient Mataram sank into insignificance. From the middle of the tenth until the beginning of the sixteenth century, the successors of her former eastern vassals, that is whichever of them happened to be on top in the continual struggle for supremacy, did in East and Central Java as they pleased, warring, intermarrying, annexing their neighbours’ domains, only to lose them again and their own kingdoms to boot, to usurpers, ambitious ministers, popular governors of provinces, enterprising condottieri or mere adventurers favoured by Dame Fortune. In that overflowing arena of high rivalry, dynasties succeeding one another with amazing rapidity, Daha, situated in what is now Kediri, secured paramount influence after Kahuripan, situated in what is now Southern Surabaya; then Tumapel, situated in what is now Pasuruan, became ascendant; then Daha once more and, last of the great Hindu empires, Mojopahit, about 1300, to be overthrown, after two centuries of preponderance, by the sword of Islām. Jayabaya, King of Daha, from about 1130 till about 1160, has been called57 the Charlemagne of Java, in whose reign learning and letters were encouraged; or the Javanese King Arthur, whose life among his heroes, in peace and war, is reflected in the idylls of the Panji-cycle, at whose Court the famous poet Mpu Sedah began his version of the Mahabharata, the Brata Yuda, finished by Mpu Panulooh, author of the Gatotkachasraya, while Tanakoong wrote the Wretta-Sansaya, a sort of Epistola de Arte Poetica. When Tumapel expanded, especially under Ken Angrok, troublous times arrived for Daha, which could hardly hold her own against the encroachments of that unscrupulous monarch. Ken Angrok or Arok, born in 1182 at Singosari, had seized the royal power after assassinating the old King in 1222 or 1223. The kris he used, had been ordered expressly for that deed from the famous armourer Mpu Gandring, who was its first victim because he tarried in delivering it, the tempering of the steel having taken more time than suited the usurper’s patience. Dying under the murderous stroke, Mpu Gandring uttered a prophetic curse: This kris will kill Ken Angrok; it will kill his children and grandchildren; it will kill seven kings. The prophecy came true with wonderful exactness. Ken Angrok having married Dedes, the widow of the old King he had despatched, was himself killed as the third victim of Mpu Gandring’s kris in the hand of a bravo commissioned by their son Anusapati, the Hamlet of Javanese history. And how blood followed blood during the hundred years of Tumapel’s hegemony, how Ken Angrok’s descendants harassed their neighbours before the curse took effect upon each of them, appearing like luminous stars in the sky of politics and war, and then disappearing behind the shadowy cloud of untimely death, is it not written in the Pararaton or Book of the Kings of Tumapel and Mojopahit?
The foundation of Mojopahit has been attributed to scions of several royal families, among them to Raden Tanduran, a prince of Pajajaran in West Java which, it will be remembered, owed its origin to princes of Tumapel. The most widely accepted reading is, however, that a certain Raden Wijaya, commander of the army of King Kertanegara, great-grandson of Ken Angrok, profiting from his master’s quarrels with Jaya Katong, ruler of Daha in those days, carved out a kingdom for himself, reclaiming, always with that end in view, a large area of wild land, Mojo Lengko or Mojo Lengu, near Tarik in Wirosobo, the present Mojokerto. King Kertanegara who, by branding the Chinese envoy Meng Ki, had stirred up trouble with the Flowery Empire, was unable to punish this act of arrogance, and his violent death in a battle won by the legions of Daha, meant the inglorious end of Tumapel. This happened in 1292 and the expeditionary force sent from China to chastise him for his ungracious treatment of ambassadors to his Court, consequently found their object accomplished or, more correctly speaking, unaccomplishable when landing in 1293. But its leader indemnified his martial ardour by entering the service of Raden Wijaya who, with his assistance, subjugated Daha, which had tried to reassume her former precedence. Firmly established on the throne of the realm he had fashioned out of Daha, Tumapel and his own territory near Tarik, he refused, however, to pay the price stipulated by his Chinese ally and when the auxiliary troops asked the fulfilment of his promises, arms in hand, he proved to them that superior strength is the ultimate arbiter of right and sent them home much diminished in numbers and pride. The Emperor of China, wroth that the beautiful princesses of Tumapel, daughters of the late King Kertanegara, whom he had deigned to accept as concubines, were not forthcoming, but stayed behind to adorn the harem of the self-made King of Mojopahit, ordered his unsuccessful generalissimo to be flogged by way of example to other commanding officers. Raden Wijaya who, with the kingly title, had assumed the name of Kertarajasa, enjoyed his royal dignity only until 1295 and his ashes were entombed in two places not yet located: in the dalem (the inner, private part) of his palace conformably to the Buddhist, and at Simping conformably to the Sivaïte ritual, not otherwise than King Kertanegara received last honours in the guise of Siva-Buddha at Singosari and in the guise of a Dhyani Buddha at Sakala, and the remains of King Kertarajasa’s successor were interred in three places according to the Vishnuïte ritual, circumstances from which we may conclude that in East as in Central Java the different creeds lived together in most amiable harmony.
The kris of Mpu Gandring might limit the earthly term of the descendants of Ken Angrok, it could not check their prowess while they were still up and doing. Overlords of East and Central Java, extending their rule to Pajajaran, they even looked for conquest to the other islands of the Malay Archipelago. Under Hayam Wurook or Rajasa Nagara, in the latter half of the fourteenth century, Mojopahit reached her zenith; a record of 1389 mentions Bali as being tributary since about 1340; Aru, Palembang and Menangkabau in Sumatra, Pahang with Tumanik in Malacca, Tanjong Pura in Borneo, Dompo in Soombawa, Ceram and the Goram islands acknowledged Nayam Wurook’s suzerainty too. Seeing no more worlds to subdue, he died and, as in the case of Alexander the Great, his empire fell to pieces; in East Java itself Balambangan seceded from Mojopahit proper and the Muhammadan propaganda, fanning discord between the Hindu princes of old and new dynasties, prepared their common doom. The beginnings of the Islām in East Java have already been spoken of, with Gresik as a missionary centre, Maulana Malik Ibrahim as the first wali in that region and the conversion into Moslim vassal states of the dependencies of Mojopahit, whose princes, combining under the auspices of Demak against their liege lord, sealed his fate. Raden Patah of Demak was a man of war and destiny. The fire of the new faith burning fiercely within him, he hurled his defiance at the stronghold of the heathen, speaking to the last King of Mojopahit, his father or grandfather according to tradition, as Amaziah, King of Juda, spoke to Joash, the son of Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, King of Israël: Come, let us see one another in the face,—but with a different result: the challenger from Demak came out victorious and Mojopahit ceased to exist, an issue fraught with grave consequences. This occurred about the year 150058 and Raden Patah, pursuing the royal family on their flight, defeated the King or one of his sons again at Malang, where a last stand was made. But Gajah Mada, the Prime Minister of Mojopahit, founded a new empire, Supit Urang, which comprised much of the territory once belonging to Singosari. The Saivas also held out at Pasuruan, which was invested by Pangeran Tranggana, a successor of Raden Patah, but after his assassination by one of his servants, the troops of Demak returned home. Pasuruan and Surabaya reverted, later on, to the Regent of Madura, a son-in-law of Pangeran Tranggana. Yet, Hinduïsm lingered on in the island; its political power was only broken with the conquest of Balambangan by the East India Company in 1767, and the population of the Tengger mountain region did not commence to accept the Islām until very recently.
In the confusion which resulted after the death of Pangeran Tranggana from the disruption of his domains into Cheribon, Jayakarta and Bantam in the western, Gresik and Kediri in the eastern, and Demak proper and Pajang in the central part of the island, the latter territory absorbed Jipang and its Prince Tingkir, a scion of the royal family of Mojopahit, was proclaimed Sooltan by the spiritual authority of Gresik, the first time we find that title mentioned in the history of Java. Sooltan Tingkir appointed one of his trusted servants, Kiahi Ageng Pamanahan, governor of the tract of land which had preserved the name of Mataram. Kiahi Ageng Pamanahan improved the condition of the people and his son Suta Wijaya, who had married a daughter of the Sooltan, making himself independent by rebelling, by poisoning his father-in-law after his having been captured and pardoned, finally by taking possession of the regalia in the subsequent war of succession, became master of the situation and laid in New Mataram the foundation of another state which, in the reign of his successor Ageng, 1613-1646, gained the ascendency over the rest of Java with Madura, subjugating even Sukadana in West Borneo. Not, however, without strenuous exertion for Balambangan gave a good deal of trouble in the East and the conquest of Sumedang in the West, in 1626, taxed the military strength of the rising empire to its utmost. When the East India Company began to make its influence felt, Moslim solidarity proved a valuable asset as, for instance, in the relations with Bantam and Cheribon, whose Pangeran proposed the title of Susuhunan for Ageng (1625) before Mecca promoted him to the Sooltanate (1630). In 1628 and 1629 he ventured to attack Batavia, the new settlement of the Dutch, but had to retire and, what was even worse, by provoking those upstart strangers, he damaged his trade: they closed the channels of export to Malacca and other foreign ports of rice, the principal produce of the land. “Mataram must now become our friend,” wrote the Governor-General to his masters, the Honourable Seventeen, and, indeed, Mangku Rat I., Ageng’s son, found himself obliged to sign a treaty of friendship with the Company—a dangerous friendship! Differences between their “friend” and Bantam with Cheribon were sedulously fostered by the authorities at Batavia; the Company took a hand in the putting down of disturbances created in East Java by Taruna Jaya of Madura and Kraëng Galesoong of Macassar; the Company patronised and protected the reigning Sooltans, who moved their residence from Karta to Kartasura, against pretenders and exacted payment in land, privileges, concessions, monopolies, etc., shamelessly in excess of the real or pretended assistance afforded in quelling purposely manufactured anarchy—precisely as we see it happen nowadays wherever western civilisation offers her “disinterested” services to eastern countries of promising complexion for exploitation by western greed.
Mataram, trying to escape from the extortionate friendship of the honey-tongued strangers at Batavia, whose thirst for gold seemed unquenchable, has its counterparts in benighted regions now being “civilised” after the time-honoured recipe: interference which upsets peace and order, more interference to restore peace and order with the naturally opposite result, occupation until peace and order will be restored, gradual annexation. The East India Company’s mean spirit of haggling was held in utter contempt by the native princes, grands seigneurs in thought and action, too proud to pay the hucksters with their own coin, though bad forebodings must have filled the mind, for instance, of Susuhunan Puger, recognised at Batavia as Mataram’s figurehead under the name of Paku Buwono I.,59 when near his capital a Dutch fort was built and garrisoned with Dutch soldiers to back him in his exactions for the benefit of alien usurers and sharpers. Like the rat of Ganesa, they penetrated everywhere and the tale of their relations to the lords of the land is one of tortuous insinuation until they had firmly established themselves and could give the rein to their sordid commercialism in always more exorbitant claims. Paku Buwono II., feeling his end approach, was prevailed upon, in 1749, to bequeath his realm to the Company, but one of the most influential members of the imperial family decided that this was carrying it a little too far: Mangku Bumi,60 brother of Paku Buwono II., supported by Mas Saïd, son of the exiled Mangku Negara,61 and other pangerans (princes of the blood), stood up in arms to defend their country’s rights and inflicted severe losses on the Dutch troops in stubborn guerrilla warfare. This led to the partition of Mataram between Paku Buwono III. and his uncle Mangku Bumi, both acknowledging the supremacy of the Company, the latter settling at Jogjakarta, the old capital Karta, under the title and name of Sooltan Mangku Buwono,62 while Mas Saïd, who did not cease hostilities before 1757, gained also a quasi-independent position as Pangeran Adipati Mangku Negara, which in 1796 became hereditary. With three reigning princes for one, the power of Mataram was definitely broken and Batavia assumed the direction of her affairs quite openly, the “thundering field-marshal” Daendels emphasising her state of decline and the British Interregnum bringing no change.
In 1825 the divided remnant of Mataram, viz. Surakarta with the Mangku Negaran and Jogjakarta with the Paku Alaman,63 was deeply stirred by Pangeran Anta Wiria calling upon his compatriots to chase the oppressors away. Born from a woman of low descent among the wives of Mangku Buwono III., Sooltan of Jogjakarta, it seems that, nevertheless, hopes of his succession to the throne had been held out to him when he assisted his father against the machinations of his grandfather, Sooltan Sepooh (Mangku Buwono II.), banished by Raffles in 1812. However this may be, he resented the settlement of the Sooltanate on the death of Mangku Buwono III. upon Jarot, an infant son, and other circumstances adding to his dislike of Dutch control, he raised the standard of revolt. The Javanese responded with alacrity to an appeal which bore good tidings of delivery as the wind, ridden by the Maroots who make the mountains to tremble and tear the forest into pieces, bears good tidings of coming rain to a parched earth. Anta Wiria, under his more popular name of Dipo Negoro, and his lieutenants Ali Bassa Prawira Dirja, or Sentot, and Kiahi Maja, gave the Dutch troops plenty of bloody work in the five years during which the Java war lasted, 1825-1830. It was the last eruption on a large scale of the fire imprisoned in the native’s heart, the last sustained effort at regaining his independence, crushed by the white man’s superiority in military appliances, but occasional throbbings, ruffling the surface as in Bantam (1888), the Preanger Regencies (1902), Kediri (1910), etc., show that the volcano is by no means an extinguished one. Though “kingdoms are shrunk to provinces and chains clank over sceptred cities,” the love of liberty, laid by as a sword which eats into itself, does not own foreign dominion, and the native princes, especially the Susuhunan of Surakarta and the Sooltan of Jogjakarta, remain objects of worshipful homage. Their genealogy remounts to the gods whose essence took substance in the illustrious prophet Adam who begat Abil and Kabil on the goddess Kawa; the history of their house begins with the arrival in the island, in the Javanese year 1, of Aji Soko; they are the panatagama and sayidin (shah ad-din), directors and leaders of religion; their Courts set the fashion in high native society, Solo64 being more gay and extravagant, Jogja64 more sedate and solid, as a writer at the end of the eighteenth century already remarked.
The Dutch Government recognises the imperial or royal dignity of Susuhunan and Sooltan by the superior position of its Residents in the capitals of their Principalities, who, directly responsible to the Governor-General, correspond in rank to the general officers of the army, while the administrative heads of the other residencies have to content themselves with the honours due to a colonel; also by the institution of dragoon body-guards whose ostensibly ornamental presence can be and has been turned to good account when the mental intoxication arising from meditation on gilded disgrace, charged with the lightning of passion, produces effects irreconcilable with the fiction that all is for the best in this best of worlds. With the Government steadily encroaching on the native princes’ ancient rights, bitterness grows apace and irritation at the recoiling weight of bondage lives on, though colonial reports represent it as dead. Truly, in the three centuries during which it pleased Kuwera, the fat god of wealth, to inspire the strangers from the West, rich in promise but slow in performance, exacting and pitiless, to deeds of unprincipled rapacity, the people have learned to hide their thoughts that worse may not follow, hoping that time will set things right. But as everything points more clearly to the fixed purpose of the Dutch Government to avail themselves of every pretext for swallowing the Principalities as all the rest has been gobbled up, there are those who cherish the memory of Dipo Negoro and consider the necessity of new man-offerings: the greater the need, the greater must be the propitiation. On the whole, however, better counsel prevails, deliverance being sought on planes of mystic exercise, silent submission being practised in expectation of the consummation of a higher will, and this is the native’s secret as he repeats the lessons inculcated in the Wulang Reh, the treatise on ethics written by one of the eminent of the past, Sunan Paku Buwono IV.: May ye imitate our ancestors, who were endowed with supernatural strength, and may ye qualify for penitence, heeding closely the perfection of life; this is my prayer for my children; be it granted! Meanwhile taxation increases, but who can object to that when in days of old the good people had to pay for the privilege of looking at the public dancers, whether they cared to look at them or not; when compulsory contributions to the exchequer were levied upon one-eyed persons for their being so much better off than the totally blind; etc.... Fancy a Minister of Finance in Holland defending a vexatious new assessment on the ground of arbitrary cesses in the Middle Ages!
Hindu art had lost its vitality when the second empire of Mataram arose in Central Java and the cult of the ideal was effected by modernising currents from the eastern part of the island. Sanskrit, as the vehicle of thought in Venggi and Nagari characters, made place for Kawi which, related in its oldest forms to Pali and in its symbols to the Indian alphabets, evolved soon afterward into a specific Javanese type. Sivaïte literature paved the way for the Manik Maya, the Bandoong, the Aji Saka, the Panji- and the Menak- or Hamza-cycles, the Damar Wulan; as to Buddhist literature, Burnouf’s comment upon its inferiority holds also good for Java: no trace exists even of a life of the Buddha, of jataka-tales, except such as have originated in the eastern kingdoms at a comparatively late date. Literary culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a continuation of and throve on the efforts of the great authors hospitably entertained at the Courts of Mojopahit and Kediri. The Javanese language with the wealth of words it acquired and the diversity of expression it developed,65 exercised and still exercises in its four dialects66 a vivifying influence upon the Soondanese speech in the west and the Madurese in the east. Its script, like the people who speak and write it, and cling to their hadat, the manners and customs of the jaman buda, which, notwithstanding their Islāmitic veneer, they prefer to the law of the Prophet,—its script rejects Moslim interference and refuses to employ the Arabic characters, sticking to its equally beautiful aksaras and pasangans. Religions succeeding one another, generally without discourteous haste, Muhammadanism penetrated Central Java but slowly from the north, first by the conversion of the great and mighty who profited by the example of Mojopahit, then by grafting the idea of the one righteous god upon the godless Buddhist or pantheistic Hindu creed of the orang kechil, the man of slight importance who, up to this day, though fervent in his outward duties as a Moslim, shows in every act that his individual and national temperament is rooted in pre-Islāmic idiosyncrasies. The heroes of the Brata Yuda and Ramayana are just as dear to him as the pre-Islāmic saints whose legends are gathered in the story of Raja Pirangon and the Kitab Ambia, as the forerunners, companions and helpers of the Apostle of God.
The sacred waringin, never wanting in the aloon aloon, the open places before the dwellings of the rulers of the land and their deputies, what is it but the bo-tree, the tree of enlightenment? One of venerable age in the imperial burial-ground of Pasar Gedeh, planted, according to tradition, by Kiahi Ageng Pamanahan or his son Suta Wijaya, announces without fail the demise of a member of one of the reigning families either at Solo or at Jogja, by shedding one of its branches. Pasar Gedeh, Selo and Imogiri are silent spots, peopled with the dead whose lives’ strength made history and is mourned as the strength of a glorious past. Selo, an enclave belonging to Surakarta, in Grobogan, residency Samarang, contains the ancestral tombs of the rulers of Mataram; Imogiri and Pasar Gedeh in Jogjakarta, which latter marks the site of the original seat of empire and was comparatively recently put to its present use, are the cemeteries common to the royalty of both Principalities, and guarded by officials, amat dalam with the title of Raden Tumenggoong, appointed by mutual consent. A Polynesian bias to ancestor-worship, unabated by Hinduïsm, Buddhism and Muhammadanism, accounts for the almost idolatrous adoration67 of the graves of the Susuhunans and Sooltans, their ancestors and also their progeny that did not attain to thrones, receptacles of once imperial dust, feeding the four elements from which it proceeded and to which it returns like meaner human clay. Look, says Kumala in the Buddhist parable, all in the world must perish! The religious brethren of his faith used to repair at night to the sepulchres of those taken to bliss and spend the lone hours in pondering on the instability of conscious existence, desiring to gain the Nirvana by their undisturbed meditations, but Sivaïte associations people the old graveyards of Java with raksasas, monstrous giants, eaters of living and dead men and women, and santons, bent on prayer amid the last abodes of the departed, have been terrified, especially at Pasar Gedeh, by weird noises and apparitions signalling their approach, commending hasty retreat to the wise. It is advisable to distrust darkness there and rather to choose the day for acts of devotion, even if annoyed by worldlings who come to consult the big white tortoise in the tank, ancient Kiahi Duda, widower of Mboq Loro Kuning, presaging the better luck the farther he paddles forth from his subaqueous habitation. At a little distance is the sela gilang, a bluish stone with a more than half effaced inscription, only the lettering of the border being legible. Tradition calls it the dampar (throne) of Suta Wijaya, sitting on which he killed Kiahi Ageng Mangir, his rival and owner of the miraculous lance Kiahi Baru, who had been lured into his presence by one of his daughters to do homage by means of the ujoong, the kissing68 of the knee; near by are a stone mortar and large stone cannon-balls, the largest possessing the faculty of granting untold wealth to those strong enough to carry it three times without stopping round the sela gilang, whose legend, carved by a prisoner of war, either a spirit of the air or a magician, reveals in its marginal commentary a philosophic mind coupled with linguistic talents: zoo gaat de wereld—così va il mondo—ita movet tuus mundus—ainsi va le monde.
Selo, Imogiri and Pasar Gedeh: so goes the world indeed, and the nameless prisoner of war’s motto, preserved near the pasarahan dalam, the imperial garden of rest, would be hardly less appropriate over the gates leading to the kratons, the residences69 of the Susuhunan of Surakarta and the Sooltan of Jogjakarta, where they do the grand in the grand old way, cherishing the memories of a power gone by. A visit to the Principalities without an invitation to attend some function at Court cannot be called complete and it is a treat to watch the ceremonial exercises connected with one of the three garebegs70 or with the salutations on imperial birthdays and coronation-days in the roomy pendopos, the open halls whose general style betrays its Hindu origin no less than the aspect, the dresses, the movements of the native nobility, officials and retainers, an assemblage of a fairy tale, betray their Hindu parentage. The bangsal kenchono, the audience-chamber of the Sooltan at Jogja, is a masterpiece of construction in wood, the carved beams and joists, richly gilt and painted in bright colours, forming a ceiling of wonderful airiness and elegance; in the bangsal witono the Sooltan shows himself to the people on days of great gala; in the bangsal kemandoongan, a hall in one of the many open squares of the palace grounds, seated on his dampar or throne, he used to witness the execution of his subjects sentenced to death, who were krissed71 against the opposite wall; another of these open squares was dedicated to pleasures which remind of the munera gladiatoria, more especially of the ludi funebres, and kindred amusements with a good deal of local colour: we find it chronicled of Sunan Mangku Rat I., Java’s Nero, that once he beguiled a tedious afternoon in his kraton at Kartasura by stripping a hundred young women and letting a few tigers loose among them. The dining-hall (gedong manis: room of sweets) in the kraton at Jogja, to the south of the audience-chamber, can easily hold three hundred guests with the host of servants they require; at Solo the imperial stables and coach-houses72 are scarcely inferior in interest to the friend of horses, riding, driving and coaching, than the Kaiserlich-Königliche Marstall at Vienna or the Caballerizas Reales at Aranjuez. But of all the sights at the Courts of the Principalities of Central Java it is the human element that fascinates most, a waving mass of silent figures in the magnificent setting which reflects centuries of Sturm und Drang, the new to the visitor’s eye being nothing but the very, very old; men taught by fate to treasure their thoughts up in their hearts, as their mountains do the hidden fire, worshipping tempu dahulu, sustained by l’amour du bon vieulx tems, l’amour antique, even the rising generation remaining apparently unaffected by the example of western fickleness, an inconstancy ever more pronounced since the illustrious citizen of Florence, of the Porta San Piera, commented on it:
Che l’uso de’ mortali è come fronda In ramo, che sen va, ed altra viene. 73
The country-seats of Susuhunans and Sooltans, where they sought repose from cares of state, often contained temples erected, if not in the name then in the spirit of their kind of sacrifice, to Kama, the god of love, smuggled into the practice of a later creed. They had no wish to become the victims of their virtue like the excellent King Suvarnavarna; they did not aspire to the fame accruing to Rama in his relations to the female demon Shoorpanakha, personification of sublunar temptations. And the manifold functions assigned to water in their pleasances, to the limpid, running water of the cool mountain rills, are characteristic of an island where a bath, at least twice a day, preferably in the open, is both a necessity and a luxury which the poorest does not dream of denying himself. Observe the crowds of men, women and children, always chaste and decent, disporting themselves in lakes and rivers, every morning and every evening; note the names of Pikataän, Kali Bening, Banyu Biru, idyllic spots and equal to the classic chandi Pengilon, Sidamookti and Wanasari to the lover of a plunge and a swim, screened by flowers and foliage, with the blue heaven smiling on his joy. Passing by Ambar Winangoon and Ambar Rookma, the remains of the so-called water-castle at Jogjakarta convey some notion of the manner in which royal personages sought recreation, amusing themselves in their parks of delight, fragrant and tranquil like the restful Loombini, where Maya gave birth to the Buddha; toying with their women in and round the crystalline fluid. An abundant spring within the boundaries of the palace grounds led to the conception of this retreat or, rather, these retreats, for there were two, connected by a system of canals which speaks highly for native hydraulics, though the buildings erected to obey a capricious will, show in their present ruinous state how architecture had degraded since the Hindu period, its flimsy productions being unable to withstand the first serious earthquake. Of Pulu Gedong, to the northeast of the aloon aloon kidool, nothing is left but crumbling portions of the walls which jealously guarded the privacy of the Sooltan’s watersports. Of Taman Sari and Taman Ledok, situated in the western part of the kraton, a good deal is still recognisable, especially the structures on Pulu Kenanga in the largest of the artificial lakes which are now dry ground, the one here meant being incorporated into a kampong, one of the several groups of native dwellings inhabited by the Sooltan’s numerous retainers. The whilom islands convey in quite a picturesque way the lesson that human works must die like the hands that fashioned them.
The building of the “water-castle”, whose pavilions, artificial lakes, tanks and gardens spread over an area of about twenty-five acres, was begun in 1758 by a Buginese architect under the orders of Mangku Buwono I., a great raiser of edifices, as Nicolaas Hartingh74 wrote in 1761, and maker of “fountains, grotto-work and conduits which, though completed, he orders immediately to be pulled down, not finding them to his taste, thus squandering some little money.” We possess a description75 of the kraton at Jogjakarta, dated September 1791, from the hand of Carl Friedrich Reimer,76 who speaks of “a collection of gardens, fish-ponds and pleasure-pools.” He probably visited Pulu Gedong before proceeding to Taman Sari77 and expatiates on the spaciousness of the dwelling room in Pulu Kananga, where it seems that the Court could find plenty of accommodation. But what made the greatest impression on the expert in hydraulics was the arrangement of passages and an apartment for prayer and meditation under water, as if the Sooltan deemed it an advantage to worship surrounded by the babbling stream, light and fresh air being provided through turrets rising above the surface. In the place called Oombool Winangoon, situated on a low level, with three tanks, fed from the great lake of Taman Sari, was a cool retreat where the Sooltan used to rest a while after his bath, refreshing himself with a cup of tea. Alluding to the Sumoor Gumuling, Reimer remarks that the architect must have chosen a round form for his structure to make it the better resist the pressure of the water all round. The strange building which went by that name and consisted of two concentric walls with a flat roof,78 taken for a subaqueous house of prayer by the visitor of 1791, has also been very differently explained: some see in its remains a dancing-school, awakening visions of the Sooltan’s corps de ballet practising in the first storey to the dulcet tones of the gamelan, the native orchestra, that ascended from the basement and aided them in going through their paces; others connect it with functions never referred to in polite society and which have nothing in common with praying, either with the heart or with the feet, more correctly speaking: with the arms, hands and hips, for Javanese dancing is no loose skipping and hopping about, but a graceful and expressive play of the body and more particularly of the upper limbs in rhythmic, undulating motion. Passing from one lake to the next, the Sooltan’s means of conveyance was the prahu Niahi Kuning, a gorgeously decorated barge, given to him by the East India Company; other boats, plying between Taman Sari and Taman Ledok, were at the disposal of the ladies of the royal household desirous of an outing with their babies; two small skiffs left their moorings every night alternately, at a signal given on a bendeh, to feed the fishes, which knew the sound and assembled in shoals. The guard-rooms near the northern watergate, of which the remaining one, i.e. the one not altogether fallen into ruin, shelters in the morning a motley crowd of sellers of fruit, vegetables, sweetmeats, etc., witnesses to the Company’s dragoons, protecting and shadowing their Highnesses of Surakarta and Jogjakarta with the princes of their blood, already having been entrusted with that task in the days of Mangku Buwono I.
Of the delicately carved woodwork hardly a trace remains, but some foliage and birds among flowers, executed in stucco, give evidence of a good taste which knew how to make old motives subservient to new requirements. Though a Muhammadan pleasance, designed by a Muhammadan architect for a Muhammadan prince, the garuda over one of the entrances, the Banaspatis on gables and fronts in Taman Sari and Taman Ledok, the nagas coping the balustrades of the staircases, show that Hindu conceptions continued to leaven Javanese art. The relations with China and the consequent influx of Chinamen have also borne their fruit in Central Java as in Cheribon and the eastern kingdoms: Reimer informs us that the galleries and tops (now gone) of the several buildings were constructed like pointed vaults, and were wrought “in the manner of Chinese roofs”; Pulu Gedong was famous for the lofty Chinese tower erected near the spring which furnished the water for the “castle”, its lakes, ponds, tanks and canals, and for the irrigation of its grounds. The orchards, renowned for their mangoes and pine-apples, the vegetable-, sirih- and flower-gardens had a great reputation in the land; assiduous attention was paid to horticulture on the principle, well understood by oriental gardeners, that flower-beds, ornamental groves and bowers are like women; that however much art and pains are bestowed on their make-up, the art of arts is the concealment thereof.... Writing this it occurs to me how properly a western version of that universally approved maxim has been put in the mouth of Gärtnerinnen, niedlich and galant:
Denn das Naturell der Frauen Ist so nah mit Kunst verwandt.79
Though Mangku Buwono I. was a contemporary of Goethe, his knowledge of Faust is extremely doubtful, but being an artist in his own way, he took care that the natural scenery, assisted by art, should contribute to a pleasant general impression in the distribution of the dwellings for his retinue: native princes (and of his rank too!) do not move an inch inside or outside their kratons without numberless attendants at their heels. In the “water-castle” were apartments, not only for the Sooltan, for the Ratu, his first legitimate spouse, for his other wives and concubines, for the little family they had presented him with, but for the dignitaries of his Court, officials of all degrees, secretaries, servants of every description, various artificers from the armourers down to the kebon kumukoos, the makers of tali api (fire-rope), necessary for lighting his Highness’ cigars. There were reception-, dining-, living- and sleeping-rooms for the Sooltan, his Ratu and female relatives, each apart; common rooms for the selir (wives of lower degree); rooms for the instruction of their children; rooms where his Highness’ daughters spent a few hours every day in batikking; guard-rooms for the prajurits, the male guards; guard-rooms for the female guards under command of the Niahi Tumanggoong, a lady of consequence, who kept and keeps the dalam, the interior of the kraton, under constant observation so that no illicit amourettes shall occur in the women’s quarters, and yet—! There were store-rooms, kitchens, workshops, prisons, halls set apart for the dancers, male and female; the cream of the female dancers, the srimpis and girl bedoyos, were probably housed in or near the principal pavilion on Pulu Kananga, of which the Sooltan occupied the eastern and the Ratu the western portion. Above all there were the bath-rooms, dedicated to Kama and his wife Rati of Hindu memory; and since the parrot is the vahana of that frivolous god, many are the unspeakable tales of revived rites of his luxurious worship.
The etiquette at Court is fitly illustrated by the two tea-houses of Taman Sari, the eastern one for the Grand Pourer-out-of-Tea of the Right, who presided over the preparation of the delectable beverage for the Sooltan, and the western ditto for the Grand Pourer-out-of-Tea of the Left, who provided for the Ratu. A scrupulous punctilio is ingrained in Javanese habits and customs, from high to low, on great and small occasions, the native’s mentality always reverting to things which were, but never more can be. The homage done to sacred objects, arms, gamelans, etc., by giving them a human name and a title,80 venerating them as if endowed with supernatural faculties, recalls Polynesian fetishism, Hinduïsm being blended with it in Siva’s trishula, Vishnu’s chakra, etc., which are still carried behind the native princes among their ampilan.81 The upacharas or imperial and royal pusakas82 are treated with the utmost reverence when shown at the appearance in public of Susuhunan or Sooltan, and their bearers, the koncho ngampil, who hold an honoured position at the Courts of Solo and Jogja, may be considered direct successors of the envoys of King Dasharatha on the reliefs of the chandi Loro Jonggrang, who bore his regalia when meeting Rama and Lakshama. The strange ceremonial, preserved from the time when gods walked amongst men, seems hardly antiquated, on the contrary very germane to siti-inggil83 surroundings. One need not visit the kratons though, to notice how the spirit of the past permeates all things Javanese; any well-dressed native getting out of his sado84 at the railway station or repairing thither on foot for a journey with the fire-carriage, will do. Even if he cannot afford the few doits85 necessary and must impair his dignity by going afoot, he has his retainers to look after his box and, stuck behind, he has his magnificent kris in a sheath of gold, with a beautifully carved ivory handle, in nine cases out of ten a pusaka, cherished like the kris Kolo Munyang of the Prince of Kudoos or, as others allege, of a Susuhunan of Surakarta, who sent the weapon, which killed its master’s enemies without human direction, to the assistance of Pangeran Bintoro, then oppressed by a king of Mojopahit. The chronology of this legend is evidently a little faulty, but, O! the wonders of Java’s golden age, and, O! the superstitious honour in which their memory is held by these lovable people, whose actual existence is a dream of days gone by. And that happy dream, they ween, is a presage of the future, prophesying the restoration of their fathers’ heritage. If, nevertheless, the hour draws near of unconditional surrender, the Dutch Government steadily and surely arrogating to itself the externals with the substance of power in the Principalities, they will silently submit to the nivarana of their ancient faith, the hindrance arising from torpor of mind appointed to them in the sansara, the rotary sequence of the world, and seek consolation in the promise of their new faith that the Lord will not deal wrongly with his servants. The life of nations, like the life of men, starts running as the mountain torrent and meets many an obstacle before it swells to a broad river in the plains and flows tranquilly and mightily to the sea; also for Java it is written:
... Non anche,
l’opra del secol non anche è piena.86