How to read a chronicle

ABSTRACT

Traditional historical chronicles from island Southeast Asia are crucial sources for our understanding of the region’s pre-modern history. These chronicles were produced in contexts of textual practice that are unfamiliar to modern historians, which can result in erroneous interpretations of their historical meaning. In this article, I present a method for reading the region’s chronicles that treats them as conglomerate texts, which consist of fragments of earlier texts that have been combined into new wholes. I illustrate the usefulness of this interpretive approach by examining the Pararaton, one of the main sources for the history of the late medieval kingdom of Java with its capital at Majapahit. The key findings of this article are a revised textual history of the Pararaton, new data from six unpublished manuscripts of the text, and a re-evaluation of the dynastic chronology of the Javanese kingdom between 1389 and 1429. These findings show that reading chronicles as conglomerate texts not only sheds light on their textual evolution, but also improves our understanding of the historical realities they refer to.

KEYWORDS:

• history
• historiography
• philology
• chronicle
• Java
• medieval

Acknowledgements

I thank Professors Adrian Vickers, Peter Worsley and Arlo Griffiths for their guidance and feedback on my study of the Pararaton. I also thank Marine Schoettel and Dr Mekhola Gomes for reading this text with me and helping me to understand it better. I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions for further engagement with the scholarship. I am especially grateful to Hadi Sidomulyo for his feedback on this paper and for sharing his deep knowledge of Javanese history during my visits to East Java.

Note on contributor

Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. His doctoral research focuses on the historiography of late medieval and early modern Java. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Nancy Partner (1995) argued that this ideal type of a single-authored historical monograph, valorised by the modern discipline of history, has its roots in ancient Greek and Roman historiography. I would add that examples of this ideal type appear in certain genres of East Asian and Middle Eastern historiography, but that it is rare in other contexts.

2 The word pararaton is formed from pa-(ra)ratu-an, with the base word ratu ‘monarch’. The partial re-duplication of the first syllable ra- is a common morphological variation in late varieties of Old Javanese, possibly connoting plurality. I take the circumfix pa- -an in the sense of ‘the grouping, the whole of’ (de verzameling, het geheel van) (Zoetmulder 1983: 69).

3 This dynasty is sometimes also called the Rājasa dynasty, after the regnal name of its founder.

4 In this article I quote from a new text edition that I am preparing (Sastrawan 2019), which accounts for the numerous manuscripts discovered since the 1920 reprinting of the 1896 published text edited by J.L.A. Brandes (1896); Brandes et al. (1920). I indicate places in the text by reference to the page and line numbers of the Brandes’ original edition, in the following format: (Brandes 1896, page:line). I outline my approach to the romanisation of Old Javanese writing in the appendix.

5 A chronogram is a string of words that symbolise the digits of a year numeral, according to an established system of conventions (Noorduyn 1993, Teeuw 1998, Wieringa 2012). For example, the final event mentioned in this text is: ‘then the Watugunung eruption, in Śaka bodies-sky-oceans-tail, 1403’ (tumuli guntur Pawatugunung, i śaka, kāya-ambara-sagara-ikū, 1403) (Brandes 1896: 32, line 26). Here the words of the chronogram ‘bodies-sky-oceans-tail’ represents the digits in the year numeral 1403 in reverse order: bodies = 3, sky = 0, oceans = 4, tail = 1.

6 The Pararaton uses the Śaka era, which ran on average 78 years and 11 weeks ahead of the Common Era (CE) during the period covered by the text (Proudfoot 2007: 110). In this article I convert all Śaka years to CE years by adding 78 years, and I use an asterisk to indicate the discrepancy between the starting dates of the Śaka year and the CE year. For example, I write *1222 to refer to the year 1144 Śaka, which ran from the new moon in March 1222 CE to the new moon in March 1223 CE.

7 Another prose text of similar age to the Pararaton introduces its title with identical phrasing: ‘Thus follows (nihan) the Sang Hyang Tantu Panggĕlaran’ (Pigeaud 1924).

8 The title Sĕrat Pararaton, which first appeared in Brandes’ edition, seems to have been inspired by the sĕrat texts of later Javanese literature. There is no good reason to refer to the Pararaton as a sĕrat, as that term does not appear in the text itself or in any of its witnesses’ colophons.

9 These features of the structure and composition of the Pararaton were first mentioned by Brandes (1896: 2). They were discussed at length in N.J. Krom’s (1921) article ‘The composition of the Pararaton’, to which C.C. Berg (1962) gave an extensive response. J.J. Ras (1986) studied the Pararaton’s heterogeneous form and plural authorship in the course of his preparation of a new critical edition, which has not been published.

10 This is recorded in the colophon of witness C; see the appendix.

11 Berg (1962: 158) suggested that Prapañca, the author of the Deśavarṇana (dated 30 September 1365), had access to an early copy of the Angrok part of the Pararaton and drew on it for his account of the 13th century. While there is no direct evidence that Prapañca himself used such a ‘proto-Pararaton’, it is not impossible that some parts of the extant Pararaton text may have existed in written form during the 14th century.

12 Only 4 of the 68 dated entries in the text appear out of chronological order. Of these, only the entry dated *1440 (Brandes 1896: 32, line 3) appears to be genuinely out of order, while the other three are likely to have been in order originally but had their values changed due to errors in the later copying process.

13 Thomas Hunter (2007: 44–45) showed that the Pararaton uses sira as a third-person pronoun in the narrator's voice but as a second-person pronoun in quoted direct speech. From this, he argued that the Pararaton exhibits an incipient ‘process of literization’ of Middle Javanese, and that it therefore must have occurred in the context of ‘the everyday use of some form of spoken Javanese by a sizeable linguistic community’. This implies that the creation process of the first period must have occurred in Java and not in Bali.

14 The text’s exclusive focus on the Girīndra royal dynasty suggests that the compilation period may have occurred in a context where records pertaining to this dynasty were easily accessible; this is more likely to have been somewhere close to the dynasty’s centre of power in eastern Java, rather than in Bali.

15 If the compilation was done around the Majapahit or Daha courts sometime in the late 15th or early 16th century, then the text may have moved eastward to Bali shortly thereafter. This hypothesis is broadly consistent with later traditions about Majapahit court texts and customs being brought to Bali in the early 16th century (Vickers 2012: 76), but it remains purely speculative for lack of direct evidence.

16 The earliest evidence that the Pararaton was copied in Bali is the colophon dated 3 August 1613, found in witnesses B and F. The earlier *1600 colophon of witness C gives no geographical information. See the appendix for further details.

17 These colophons were sometimes copied into new manuscripts, which means that a colophon does not necessarily refer to the production of a particular manuscript but may instead refer to the copying of any of its predecessors in a line of transmission.

18 In his preface to this reprint, Krom stated that ‘the text is also entirely the old one, aside from a few corrected printing errors’ (De tekst is eveneens geheel de oude daargelaten een paar verbeterde drukfouten, Brandes et al. 1920: xiv). What is original in this second edition is the expanded apparatus prepared by H. Kraemer (including all the manuscripts of the Pararaton held by the Leiden University Library at that time), and the additional commentary by Poerbatjaraka and J.C.G. Jonker, based on their own studies of the text.

19 For example, Sūraprabhāva is stated to have been promoted to successively higher-ranked palaces: ‘The ruler at Paṇḍan Salas began to reign at Tumapĕl, and then became the sovereign’ (bhre Paṇḍan Salas añjĕnĕng ing Tumapĕl, anuli prabhu, Brandes 1896: 32, line 21).

20 The only instance in the text of an explicitly disambiguated palace reference is that of the two bhre Lasĕm of the late 14th century, who are referred to by their nicknames bhre Lasĕm sang ahayu (‘the ruler at Lasĕm, the beautiful one’) and bhre Lasĕm sang alĕmu (‘the ruler at Lasĕm, the fat one’). Noorduyn (1978: 267–268) argued convincingly that this duplication was due to two individuals from rival branches of the dynasty contesting the position of bhre Lasĕm. This example shows that the bhaṭāra palace terms refer uniquely to the incumbent at the time of writing, and when two people held the same title concurrently, they are explicitly disambiguated with an extra specifier.

21 My word searches for pañji and bhaṭāra in the published corpora of inscriptions find pañji being used occasionally for officials in the 9th and early 11th centuries, frequently for both officials and kings in the 12th and early 13th centuries, and infrequently for officials in the 14th century. The first use of bhaṭāra to refer to the palace of a living ruler seems to be in the Kuśmala/Kandangan inscription (issued on 14 December 1350) where a bhaṭāre Matahun (‘ruler at Matahun’) is mentioned (van Stein Callenfels 1918). The bhaṭāra palace references are the standard way of referring to members of the royal family in the Waringin Pitu inscription, issued on 22 November 1447 (Noorduyn 1978).

22 A similar argument could be made concerning a change in the term used for ‘paramount ruler’ in the text, with the term ratu more frequent in the early parts and prabhu more frequent in the later parts. Since these two words are nearly synonymous, the preference for one of them over the other may reflect the stylistic peculiarities of the original source materials that were later compiled in the Pararaton.

23 The text is ambiguous on the question of Suhitā’s year of death, as I discuss at length in the final section of the article. The evidence I present here offers some circumstantial support for Krom’s theory that Suhitā died in *1447, so for the meantime, I provisionally accept his chronology. Later I discuss some of the weaknesses of Krom’s interpretation and argue that reading the text as a conglomerate can help to clarify the matter.

24 Berg (2007: 95–97, 1962: 62–72), as part of the general theory of Javanese historiography that he developed in the 1950s and 1960s, argued the genealogies in the Pararaton do not refer to historical realities, but are variations of the same schematic pattern grounded in a Buddhist myth. He based this argument on certain structural similarities that he discerned between the family trees of successive generations in the dynasty, and so suggested that many of these genealogies had been fabricated to fit a set schema. I suggest that the conglomerate model used in this article, which explains the anachronistic placement of genealogies, offers a more plausible explanation for the peculiarities of the text rather than Berg’s theory of deliberate fabrication.

25 In the apparatus, I include variant readings only where they differ significantly from the majority of witnesses. Witnesses are indicated by capital letters. My preferred reading is given to the left of the double vertical bar, and alternative readings are given to the right of the double bar, separated by single bars. The null sign ø indicates that the witness supplies no reading for that variation unit.

26 medinī DGILQ || medini BCEFKMP | modiniṁ N

27 prabhu CDGILMPQ || ratu BF | prabhū EK | prabu N

28 apatiha CDGIKLMQ || apatiḥha E | apatih NP

29 This whole passage, from bhra yaṁ to gajah maṅuri, is omitted in BF

30 saṁ mokta BCDEFGIKLMPQ || ø N

31 bhavana BCDFGIKLMPQ || bhavanā E | bvaṇnā N

32 janma CEFGIKLPQ || ø B | janmā DMN

33 netrāgni CDGIKLMQ || netragni BEF | netraghni N | netryagni P

34 tajuṁ BCDEFGIKLMPQ || tañjuṁ N

35 aṅambil BCDEFIKLMPQ || ambil N

36 bhre BCDEFIKLMPQ || bhreṁ N

37 ø CDEIKLMNPQ || sara BF

38 ahayu CDILMQ || ayu BFNP | aha ø EK. Witnesses E and K omit the rest of this passage.

39 bhra BCDFILMPQ || bra N

40 yaṁ BCDFILMQ || ya N | hyaṁ P

41 wkas iṁ suka DILMQ || wkas iṁ sukā BFN | wka suka C | wkas P

42 Krom (1931: 427) acknowledged that it would have been a deviation from normal practice to have a non-sovereign ordering such an appointment. He offered an unconvincing argument that Wĕkas Ing Sukha II wielded such authority because he was the ‘only male descendant’ (eenige mannelijke afstammeling) of Hayam Wuruk. In fact, the text gives no information about the gender of Wĕkas Ing Sukha II. There are no known cases in 14th-century Java of a junior royal being given such great authority. Even Hayam Wuruk himself in *1364, at the age of thirty and having already been sole sovereign for 14 years, could not appoint a new chief minister without the agreement of his parents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives (Pigeaud 1960: 55).

43 The title Bhra Hyang Wĕkas Ing Sukha appears in two other contemporary documents. The Walaṇḍit B inscription, issued on 21 June 1405, refers to Bhaṭāra Hyang Wĕkas Ing Suka as the ruler who issued the earlier Walaṇḍit A inscription, whose date of issue is unclear, but may have been in late November or early December 1381 (Damais 1952: 78–79). The opening canto of the poem Arjunavijaya mentions the synonymous titles Sang Hyang Wĕkas Ing Sukha and Sang Pamĕkas Ing Tuṣṭa, which unambiguously refer to Hayam Wuruk as the sovereign at the time of the poem's composition, sometime in the final third of the 14th century (Supomo 1977: 4). In these cases, the title Wĕkas Ing Sukha clearly refers to the paramount ruler of the kingdom, which rules out the young child of bhre Lasĕm.

44 bhaṭārestrī DIGLMQ || bhaṭārestri BFKN | bhaṭarestri CP | bhaṭari strī E

45 prabhu CDEGIKLMPQ || prabhū BF | prabu N

46 bhiṣekaning BCDEFGIKLMPQ || biseka N

47 dhaṙmma BCDEFIKLMPQ || dhaṙma G | dinaṙmma N

48 viśeṣapura BCDFGIKLMQP || viśeśa, śura E | viseṣapura N

49 prabhu strī DILMQ || prabhū stri B | prabhu CGP | prabhu histri EK | prabhu stri FN

50 prabhu strī IM || pramestri B | prabhu histri CNP | prabhu stri D | prabhū histri E | pramaistri F | prabhu histrī KLQ

51 1369 BCDEFIKLMPQ || 1357 N

52 hangganteni BCDEFIKLMPQ || hangantyani N

53 This conflict is usually referred to as the Parĕgrĕg, but that term is based on a linguistic misunderstanding. In the Pararaton, events are labelled by adding the prefix pa- to one or more keywords. For example, the Javanese attack on Malayu in Sumatra in *1275 is called pamalayu (Brandes 1896: 24, line 31), the rebellion of Rangga Lawe in *1295 is referred to as paranggalawe (25, line 15), and the massacre of the Sundanese at Bubat in *1357 is called pasuṇḍabubat (26, line 15). Hence the better translation of parĕgrĕg is ‘the Rĕgrĕg event’.

54 An entry dated 23 October 1407 in the Chinese annals Tai-zong Shi-lu (compiled in 1430), confirms that hyang Viśeṣa (楊威西沙) was the ruler of the western palace during the Rĕgrĕg war. At this time, hyang Viśeṣa was referred to as Tumapĕl (都馬板 or 杜馬班) by the Chinese (Wade 2005).

55 ‘bhra hyang Viśeṣa withdrew from the kingship’ (trekt Bhra Hyang wiçeṣa zich uit de regeering terug) (Brandes 1896: 150–151).

56 Damais disputed Krom’s claim that Airlangga became a priest at this time, arguing that the title Aji Pāduka Mpungku must have been a posthumous title for Airlangga because it only appears in a later copy of one of his inscriptions (Krom 1931: 428; Damais 1955: 184–185).

57 verkeerdelijk ingevoegd c.q. van zijn plaats geraakt […] er toch iets in den tekst niet in orde is (Krom 1931: 430).

58 Another important example of this kind of inconsistency is the year given for Jayanagara’s accession. At one point in the text, this event is dated *1335 (Brandes 1896: 25, line 2), given only in figures without an accompanying chronogram. This date occurs out of chronological order, falling between Raden Vijaya's accession in *1294 and the Rangga Lawe incident in *1295, suggesting that it may not have originally belonged to this sequence. The *1335 date conflicts with a later statement that Jayanagara came to the throne two years before *1311, i.e. in *1309: ‘King Jayanagara had reigned as sovereign for two years in Śaka fires-fires-hands-one, 1233’ (sira Aji Jayanagara anjĕnĕng prabhu rong tahun, i Śaka, api-api-tangan-tunggal, 1233, Brandes 1896: 25, lines 27–28).