Reading a History of Writing: heritage, religion and script change in Java

Abstract

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.

The role of symbolism in moral education: a study of the ruwat murwakala ritual

“…In the middle of the journey, these two people had disagreements because of differences in understanding of Aji Saka's will. Finally, the two envoys fought until all of them died because they were both magical [47]. This story is then immortalized into a series of alphabets which are believed to be the origin of Javanese letters.…”

The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources

“…The circulation of ideas (particularly complex concatenations of ideas in written form) therefore faces quite different barriers to the easier movement of goods. Their linguistic, orthographic and discursive embeddedness renders compound formations of ideas far less transferable than trade items, particularly the cumulative aggregates of ideas that constitute texts then intellectual disciplines in turn (Raia, 2017; Ricci, 2015). This becomes immediately clear when we begin to consider the process of translation (a term that literally, and aptly, means “to move from one place to another”) across so linguistically and orthographically heterogeneous a space as the Indian Ocean.…”