Ampus&dah, at the court of a Javanese prince of KMiri, about the centre and
towards the southern side of the island, one of the most fertile, beautiful, and
romantic parts of it. - ,, _ ,
I t cannot with truth be said of Javanese poetry, for such all Javanese literature is,
at least in name, that it possesses either vigour or fertility of imagination. On the contrary,
although a few better passages now and then occur, its general character is that
of inanity and childishness. At the same time, it,is certainly of a higher order than that
of any other people of the Archipelago, while it is much inferior to the literature of the
Hindus, itself assuredly puerile in comparison with that of the Persians and Arabs.
The Sunda language, as already stated, differs from the Javanese, and is a ruder and
less cultivated tongue. To judge by ancient inscriptions, it had once a peculiar
character of its own, but is now written in the Javanese, with the omission ot two
letters, a palatal d and a t. I t has no recondite, like the Javanese, and no ceremonial
dialect, except in so far as it has borrowed, in the last case, a few words Irom that ol
the Javanese. Its literature, also, small in amount, is taken from the latter.
The native government of Java is, like that of every other government of the civilised
nations of Asia, a pure despotism, and chiefly distinguished from that of the
other advanced nations of the Archipelago by its greater power derived from the
superior civilisation and wealth of the people. The sovereign is Üie arbitrary lord of
all, including, in theory at least, the religion and the property of his subjects. All
titles are derived from him, and are annulled at his pleasure. He names his suceessor
out of the members of his family; and there is nothing hereditary save the royal
family, for which there is a superstitious veneration, very like idolatry, even here,
however, scarcely extending beyond the first generation. Some notion of the prerogative
of a Javanese king may be formed from the following translation of a patent ot
nobility, known by the name of a nuwala, or “ royal letter, a word taken from the
Sanscrit:—“ Take notice 1 This, the royal letter of us the exalted monarch, we give in
keeping to our servant (or slave). Be it known to all our servants, whether high lords
or inferior chiefs of our royal city and provinces, that we have given this our rescript
to our servant, in order that he may be made high from being low, and placed m our
confidence by being raised to the rank of a noble (myaka, Sanscrit). Moreover, we
empower him to wear and use such dress, decorations and magma as belong to a
high noble (bopati, Sanscrit), giving for his subsistence, out of our royal property
within a certain district, the quantity of land laboured by one thousand femilies.
The popular name for a king is ratu, most probably the same word which m som
other languages of the Archipelago is written datu, meaning, literally, an ancestor,
and figuratively a lord or seignior. But there are no less than rune synonyms, most
of them compound epithets taken from the Sanscrit, as narendra, lord ot
and naradipa, “ lord of lords.” The Javanese sovereign exercises his authority
through a minister, pateh, which is Sanscrit, and he bears the Sanscrit title of
adipati, meaning “ excellent lord,” with the native epithet, raden, prefixed, which
signifies “ royally related.” Under him are four assistants, pateh or khwon.
These are the deputies of the first minister, as he himself is of the sovereign. T wo 0
these are charged with the administration of the royal household and capitel, and
two with the administration of the provinces of which, in the Javanese portion of
the island, when under native rule there were not fewer than forty. These were
themselves under the administration of governors bearing the Sanscnt title ot bopati,
who had their assistants, so that a provincial government was a copy m miniature ot
the supreme administration. The province was divided mto ^districts, administered
by officers, called by the native name of dámang, or the Sanscrit one of mantn. 1 e
district was composed of a certain number of villages, in Javanese, d*usum, and in
Sanscrit, desa, each village having its head man, bákál or patingi, and his kliwon
°r A^rief account of the palace and the village, the most important subjects of
Javanese government, will be a useful illustration of it. In Java there are no isolated
cottages or farmhouses; the whole island is an aggregation of villages, and both the
capitals and chief provincial towns are but assemblages of villages,.with a palace
in the midst of them. For a town there is, in fact, no native name; the only terms
for it being the Sanscrit words nagara or nagari, and praja. The palace of the prince
is called karaton, a derivative from ratu, a king, and meaning the royal residence.
This may be considered a walled town. The actual palace occupies the centre, and
is surrounded by the dwellings of the princes, and those of attendants and retainers.
The spaces unoccupied by houses contain the gardens and reservoirsof the sovereign.
The principal approach to the palace is invariably from the north, and througli a
square or court of considerable extent called the alun-alun, the sides of which are
adorned by rows of fig trees (ficus benjamina), while a pair of these are invariably in
its centre. I t is here that the prince shows himself to his subjects with much
ceremony once in every week, and that tournaments, public processions, and military
exercises are exhibited. I t is, in a word, the Javanese field of Mars. To the south
side of the palace there is a similar court, but on a much smaller scale. After
passing through the principal court we come to the actual entrance into the palace,
called the paseban, a word of Sanscrit derivation, meaning “ place of entry,” and also
named pag&laran, or “ place spread with mats.” I t is a pavilion, forming a waiting
room for the courtiers before entering into the presence. A spacious flight of stairs
leads from this to a terraced pavilion, the sitingil, literally, the “ high ground,” or
terrace in which the prince gives audience on public occasions. From this spot
winding passages through a variety of walled inclosures and gates lead to the different
dwellings of the sovereign himself, and of the members of his family. '
The external walls of the ancient kraton, were of hewn stone, or of excellent brick
and mortar, without any other defence than round towers. At present they are imitations
of European fortifications, with bastions, parapets, moats, and glacis, the form,
however, being always the same in other respects. Of the extent of these walled
towns we can judge from the modem one of Yugyakarta, which is three miles in
circumference, and in my time, in 1816, contained a population o f 10,000 inhabitants,
exclusive of the kampung or quarters—properly villages—which surrounded it
nearly up to the glacis. The extent of the Hindu capital of Majapait must have far
exceeded this, for the two principal gateways, still standing, are distant three miles
from each other. The residences of the governors of provinces, kabopaten, are
counterparts in miniature of the palace of the sovereign.
The village community constitutes the most important part of the Javanese institutions.
The Javanese village, like the Hindu, is an incorporation, in which the
powers of self-government to a large extent are inherent. Its officers consist of the
head man, his assistant or deputy, and the village priest, who are elected by the
occupants of the land, and in a few cases, by its proprietors. With these village
officers rests the collection of the public taxes, and the whole care of the police.
In the structure of Javanese society there is no other distinction of classes, except
that of nobles and commonalty, or, as the Javanese express it, the head and the foot,
or sometimes “ the whole,” and “ the broken grains ” of rice. There are several
words for a slave, but they are obsolete, unless to express a servant or retainer, as
batun and renchang, or as a pronoun of the first person in the polite or ceremonial
dialect. Slavery is, in fact, at present unknown in Java, in so far as concerns its
native inhabitants, nor is it known to have existed in any period of Javanese
history, which is remarkable enough since it prevails more or less among all the
less advanced nations of the Archipelago. That at a remote and early time it did
exist in Java there can be no doubt. Its disappearance must be attributed to
density of population, with its concomitant cheapness of labour, which made it more
economical and convenient to employ free men than to breed and maintain slaves,
and assuredly to no higher motive. The humbler order of the Javanese are
sufficiently docile and servile .without being bought or sold.
The main source of the revenue of a Javanese prince is derived from the rent of
land, or consists of a tax on re n t; and Java is probably the only country of the
Archipelago, with the exception of Bali and Lomboc, in which, from the relation
between land and population, a real land rent can be said to exist. This rent is
chiefly found in the irrigated land, that is, in the land of the highest fertility, and is
composed of two elements—the difference in the quality of different lands, and the
value which in the course of ages has been invested in such lands in converting them
into water-field, equivalent in a temperate region not only to clearing, draining, and
fencing, but to the conversion of ordinary pasture into watered meadow—indeed,
even to far more than all this, for the produce of irrigated in comparison with dry
lands for the same amount of labour is usually from five to ten fold.
In the ruder country of Sundas there are some remains of a private and heritable
property in the land, but in the country of the Javanese the sovereign has gradually
taken the whole rent as tax, reducing the cultivators to the condition of mere
occupants or tenants at will, he himself having become the virtual proprietor. This
state of things is exactly parallel to the condition of land tenures in India, where
more or less of a private right of property in the land exists, in proportion to the
capacity of the riding power to exact, and of the occupants to resist exaction.
The mode of registering the irrigated, for the dry land or upland is only supple