Javanese Court Society and Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century: The Record of a Lady Soldier. Part I: The Religious, Social, and Economic Life of the Court

Abstract

One of the questions which have occupied the attention of observers of modern Indonesian politics is the extent to which the contemporary conceptualization and practice of politics shows a demonstrable legacy of colonial and, especially, pre colonial, "traditional" form s.* 1 The legacy o f older social and political forms has also been discussed by students o f other Asian polities, but it seems fair to say that in the case of Java-the "majority tradition" o f Indonesia-the discussion has been characterized by a higher level o f abstraction than has been the case for other societies. In studies attempting to relate the traditional to the contemporary, this has perhaps been due in part to the utility of presenting the former in a dis tilled and firmly characterized form in order to facilitate comparison. Yet a similar level of abstraction, a concentration on theory rather than practice, conception rather than reality, has also marked many studies not concerned to relate contem porary to traditional political behavior but simply to characterize the latter. Clearly the extensive analyses o f C. C. B erg, portraying Javanese political beha vior as the enactment of a periodicity based on the alternation of Buddhist and Vaishnavite kingdoms at predictable intervals, fall into this category.2 Not all writers, of course, have seen traditional Javanese political behavior as essentially the enactment of the developments preordained by a religious schematization made manifest in this world, but even those who have attempted to study in detail the more "practical" side of political life, the administrative and political geography o f the kingdom, have tended to present a picture characterized, to a greater or lesser degree, by a concentration on ideal structures and a depiction of a fixed, perfected, * This is Part I of a two-part article. The second part, which will examine politi cal developments between

The power of the heart that blazes in the world

“…But Nancy Florida (1997: 195) has demonstrated that palace literature 'extends well beyond the palace walls and is thoroughly Islamic in character'. This accords with the first-hand historical information, unearthed by Ann Kumar (1980aKumar ( , 1980bKumar ( , 1997) from a verse journal written by a woman soldier, about public religious life at the Surakarta princely courts in 1781-1791, and especially the religious practice of the rulers. Kumar (1980b: 107) noted 'a perhaps surprising amount of evidence of the dominant place of Islam as an organizing principle in at least one Javanese court; and on the other hand, no evidence of the currency of pre-or non-Islamic "Javanist" philosophies'.…”

The last stand of autonomous states in Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1870: problems, possibilities, and a project

“…James Warren's fine study of Sulu (1981), van der Kraan's (1980, 1992) work on Lombok, Trocki's (1979) on Riau-Johor and Shaharil Talib's (1990) on Trengganu have begun the revisionist task for some of the more dynamic Archipelago states, though almost everything remains to be done on the internal dynamics of states such as Aceh, Palembang, Bone and Wajo in this period. For the Javanese states after the Gianti Treaty (1755) the work of Ricklefs (1974), Kumar (1980) and Carey (1986) has begun to show the rich diversity and capacity for social and intellectual change even after the military disasters of the previous period.…”

Gender Transgression in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia

“…The royal courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta had women bodyguards and soldiers dressed in soldier's attire (Kumar 1980;Carey and Houben 1987), but whether they were thought to be like men is not stated. She had the power to take on many forms, including young or old, man or woman (Kumar 2000). Hindu-Buddhist gender-switching gods and goddesses maintained a strong presence in island mythology and were highly revered in the royal courts of central and east Java after 1633.…”

“…The burgeoning of commerce-oriented states was strongly associated with the support that influential Islamic leaders offered. Acehnese courts were also well known for their women soldiers (see Kumar 1980). Royal courts in Southeast Asia followed the models from the Near East by enforcing seclusion of the women of the courts.…”