Chapter 4. The Babad Pamijahan: Sunda, Java and the Identity of the Pamijahanese

The babad, or historical chronicle, is widely known as a genre of traditional Javanese literature. The genre came to Sunda in the 18^th century through the Javanese administrators who occupied certain territories of Sunda. In Javanese, it is a narrative of past events telling, for example, about the founding of a new settlement or insurrection against an older power. The Javanese chronicle is a literary work written in a poetic metrical form which is intended to be sung. From the perspective of narrative, the babad to some extent is similar to the hikayat or sejarah in traditional Malay terms such as Sejarah Melayu. Like these texts, the babad was traditionally addressed through performance to real and present audiences. Structurally, the babad consists of genealogical and narrative elements. Writing about the very similar Balinese genre, Worsley (1972:4-5) observes that the author of a babad inserts various narratives into particular segments at critical points in the dynastic linkages. This mixture of genealogical and narrative components is especially dense in major babad.

Another characteristic of the babad is that it is written within an 'open tradition' of composition, by more than one author, from the same or from different periods. Accordingly, there is an evolution in the structure of babad (Djajadiningrat 1965). This open tradition, in which the author is free to mix various texts from different variants, reflects an important function of the babad in its society.

The genre legitimates the contemporariness of the scribe and the authors. This phenomenon, according to Ras, can be found in the Banjarese chronicle, the Hikayat Banjar. Based on his linguistic analysis of this text, Ras (1968) finds that the chronicle was written by at least three authors. The scribes or copyists attempt to bring the past into their contemporary conditions. For instance, from an external historical perspective, the fall of Majapahit (probably around 1527) was a very important event in its scale and its impact, yet the authors and the copyists in Banjar view this event as being of relatively small significance. Their main objective is to declare their own contemporary dynastic linkages. Furthermore, as a product of an open tradition, the babad also appears in various versions. A good example of this is the emergence of long and short versions of a particular chronicle corpus (1991:18). The combination of genealogical and historical narrative in babad attracts the attention not only of philologists and literary scholars but also historians and anthropologists. Ras states that the study of the babad must be based on the internal character of the texts. He identifies babad as

From a different point of view, the babad stands between an expressive and persuasive discourse, reflecting the ideological point of view of the author or the patron. The question of whether the babad also supplies historical evidence does not concern those who approach the text as a literary genre. For the literary scholar, the task at hand is to describe the poetics of the text. There are also researchers who locate babad as both history and literature (sastra sejarah). However, the genre of sastra will theoretically conflict with sejarah particularly in the modern sense in which history is usually understood. Winstedt (1969: 223) argues, with reference to classical Malay literature, that sastra tends to refer to a belle lettristic tradition. In fact, however, what is called sastra in the Nusantara region is any narrative material recorded in written and oral tradition. These may range from theological catechisms to plantation manuals to romances and proverbs.

For the purposes of this study, I will try to use the concept of ‘narrative’, in Indonesian, tuturan. I do not pretend to characterise narrative or tuturan in the babad as belle-lettristic sastra, but rather simply as ‘telling’. Tuturan in Sundanese is also called pitutur or kasauran. It seems to me that pitutur or tuturan is close to the tutuik Fox has described on the island of Roti (Fox 1979, 16)

In this chapter, I will treat the Babad Pamijahan as a narrative and, to borrow Fox’s phrase, a “culturally acceptable chronology and location” (Fox 1976: 10). In Austronesian as suggested by Fox, there is an indication that ‘historical narratives’ project the image of a people in time. (ibid. 10)

For students of Javanese and Sundanese literature, the Babad Pamijahan (BP) is extremely concise. It is nevertheless evident that it retains the general character of babad as found in other places such as Central and East Java. The Babad Pamijahan becomes a very important reference for the villagers who want to trace the linkages of their ancestry. Through a close examination of it we find that the chronicle not only lists various names but also recollects the myth of the two kingdoms of Sunda and Java. Foremost among the mythic stories relating to the relationship between Java and Sunda is that of the Perang Bubat, an incident that traumatised relations between the two regions. According to the story the intended bride of the King of Majapahit and her father, the king of Sunda were executed at the gate of the palace of Majapahit (Atja 1984/1985; Zoetmulder 1985: 528-532). However, Sunda also received religious enrichment when some Javanese ulama penetrated to the heartland of Sunda and introduced Islam there. The Babad Pamijahan, in fact, illustrates the myths of these two kingdoms from a Sundanese perspective. Custodians call this text the Sejarah Babad Kuna (in a Javanese version) and the Babad Pamijahan (in a Sundanese version), the Sundanese version having been copied from the Javanese. The villagers believe that it was members of the wali’s family, living close to him, who wrote the Sejarah Babad Kuna.