Media
Talks, Seminars, and Articles
Majapahit has long been celebrated in Indonesian nationalist imagination, as a mighty empire that unified the Nusantara and laid the foundation for modern Indonesia. But what do historical sources actually tell us? And why does this narrative continue to shape how Indonesians understand their past? This episode is a deep dive into historiography, political memory, and the ethical responsibilities of interpreting the past, especially in a nation still grappling with the legacies of colonialism.
Banyak naskah kuno Nusantara yang saat ini berada di luar negeri, tersimpan di perpustakaan atau museum di Eropa dan negara lainnya. Repatriasi atau pemulangan naskah-naskah kuno ini menjadi isu penting dalam upaya pelestarian identitas dan kedaulatan budaya bangsa Indonesia.Sebagian besar naskah kuno Nusantara dibawa ke luar negeri pada masa kolonial. Penjajah seperti Belanda dan Inggris mengumpulkan ribuan naskah dari berbagai wilayah di Indonesia. Beberapa di antaranya diambil secara legal melalui pembelian atau hibah, namun tidak sedikit pula yang diambil tanpa persetujuan masyarakat lokal. Salah satunya 500 naskah lontar milik dinasti Karangasem yang berada di Lombok.
My objects of study in this seminar are premodern texts from Java, written between the 9th and 17th centuries. Even as these texts are typically, and in my own research, mined for what they tell us about premodern Javanese history, they are challenging to use as historical sources: though they offer valuable information, they are often fragmentary, incoherent and mutually contradictory. My research finds that the materiality of writing has played a major role in the evolution of historical texts. The physical conditions of historical documents, such as their durability, the circumstances of their storage, and their capacity for reproduction, have powerfully influenced the development of Javanese historiography as a whole.
The Javanese state that flourished throughout the 14th and 15th centuries is often called the ‘Majapahit Empire’. But was it really an empire, and what does the word ‘empire’ mean in premodern Southeast Asia? This article in New Mandala surveys the evidence that can help us answer these questions. This evidence includes a handful of government inscriptions from east Java, Bali and Sumatra, two Javanese chronicles called the Desavarnana and the Pararaton, the official records of the Ming court, and the account of a Portuguese apothecary who visited Java in the early 16th century.
In this seminar, I propose a new theory of historical practice, by applying historical and philological methods to the inscriptions and manuscripts of premodern Java. My key finding is that historical practices are fundamentally shaped by the conditions in which texts are created, preserved, and transmitted. At the centre of this theory is the realisation that, for the premodern Javanese, the past was precarious. By understanding why the premodern Javanese practised history as they did, we can better interpret their texts and thereby improve our knowledge of the global diversity of historical practice.
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In this article, I examine a historical text written in northern Sumatra in the mid-17th century, which illustrates some of the complexities of cultural influence at global and local scales. The text is called The Garden of Kings, or Bustan al-salatin in Arabic. It is a 7-volume work commissioned by Sultan Iskandar Thani, the ruler of Aceh between 1637 and 1641. My aim is to illustrate a concrete model for how these cultural factors interacted to shape the way that history was written. I’m interested in the question: what did it mean to write history in the Indian Ocean world?
How did some species of animals, especially in Southeast Asia, get their names? Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan says that 'many of our English words for forest creatures have their origins in Southeast Asian languages. What sound to English speakers like exotic loanwords are meaningful in their original languages'. He believes that 'by exploring the Southeast Asian etymologies of these names, we can understand how humans have maintained relationships of respect and affinity with forest creatures over the centuries'.
