The earliest written literature of the Sasak people of Lombok (Indonesia) is in Javanese, and includes romantic and religious poetry, as well as original works such as local histories. From the nineteenth century onwards, poems have been composed in Sasak with greater local reference. The Sasak also have a strong tradition of oral literature, including lyric verse and prose folk tales, many of which have been recorded. All these are considered in the present work, based on study of materials in Leiden, Java, Bali and Lombok, followed by fieldwork in Lombok in 1991.
This catalogue contains descriptions of the romanized transliterations of manuscripts from Lombok in Javanese and Sasak kept by the Historical Documentation Department of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde in Leiden (Or. 508). The 506 items in this collection were collected between 1932 and 1941 by the Gedong Kirtya, Singaraja, Bali.
In this fascinating study the lives and mores of women in one of the least understood but most densely populated areas of the world are unveiled through the eyes of generations of court poets. For more than a millennium, the poets of the Indic courts of Java and Bali composed epic kakawin poems in which they recreated the court environment where they and their royal patrons lived. Major themes in this poetry form include war, love, and marriage. It is a rich source for the cultural and social history of Indonesia. Still being produced in Bali today, kakawin remain of interest and relevance to Balinese cultural and religious identities. This book draws on the epic kakawin poetry tradition to examine the institutions of courtship and marriage in the Indic courts. Its primary purpose is to explore the experiences of women belonging to the kakawin world, although the texts by nature reveal more about the discourses concerning women, sexuality, and gender than of the historical experiences of individual women. For over a thousand years these royal courts were major patrons of the arts. The court-sponsored epic works that have survived provide an ongoing literary testimony to the cultural and social concerns of court society from its ealiest recorded history until its demise at the end of the nineteenth century. This study examines the idealized images of women and sexuality that have pervaded Javanese and Balinese culture and provides insights into a number of cultural practices such as sati or bela (self-immolation of widows).
Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok discusses aspects of the long and impressive manuscript traditions of these islands, which share many aspects of manuscript production. Many hitherto unaddressed features of palm-leaf manuscripts are discussed here for the first time as well as elements of poetic texts, indications of mistakes, colophons and the calendrical information used in these manuscripts. All features discussed are explained with photographs. The introductory chapters offer insights into these traditions in a wider setting and the way researchers have studied them. This original and pioneering work also points out what topics needs further exploration to understand these manuscript traditions that use a variety of materials, languages, and scripts to a wider public.
Local renderings of the two Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata in Malay and Javanese literature have existed since around the ninth and tenth centuries. In the following centuries new versions were created alongside the old ones, and these opened up interesting new directions. They questioned the views of previous versions and laid different accents, in a continuous process of modernization and adaptation, successfully satisfying the curiosity of their audiences for more than a thousand years. Much of this history is still unclear. For a long time, scholarly research made little progress, due to its preoccupation with problems of origin. The present volume, going beyond identifying sources, analyses the socio-literary contexts and ideological foundations of seemingly similar contents and concepts in different periods; it examines the literary functions of borrowing and intertextual referencing, and calls upon the visual arts to illustrate the independent character of the epic tradition in Southeast Asia.
The third, concluding volume of "Literature of Java" contains Addenda and a General Index, preceded by Illustrations, Facsimiles of Manuscripts, Maps and some Minor Notes, additions which may be of U'se to students of Javanese literature. The older catalogues of collections of Indonesian manuscripts (Javanese, Malay, Sundanese, Madurese, Balinese), which were written in Dutch, did not offer such additional aids to interested readers. One of the reasons was. , that the authors (Vreede, Brandes, van Ronkel, Juynboll, Berg) presupposed a certain knowledge of the Indones,ian peoples, their countries and their culture with Dutch students. As often as not the latter, or their families, had lived for many years in Java, and they were destined, when they had completed their studies in The Netherlands, to pass one or more decades of 'their active life in the ,tropics in the service of Government, the Christian Missions or the Bible Society. The Archipelago was their second home country. Some familiarity with things Indonesian was found in several circles of society in The Netherlands before the second world war, and information (though not always scholarly and exact) was supplied by quite a number of books and periodicals. For this reason it was thought superfluoU's to encumber specialistic books like catalogues of manuscripts with maps and general information which could be found easily elsewhere, for instance in the Dutch "Encyclopaedie van Nederlandsch-Indie". As circumstances have changed it is.
