Javanese literature

Javanese literature is, generally speaking, literature from Java and, more specifically, from areas where Javanese is spoken. However, similar with other literary traditions, Javanese language works were and not necessarily produced only in Java, but also in Sunda, Madura, Bali, Lombok, Southern Sumatra (especially around Palembang) and Suriname. This article only deals with Javanese written literature and not with oral literature and Javanese theatre such as wayang.

The Javanese language is an Austronesian language and heavily influenced principally by Sanskrit in its earliest written stage. Later on it has undergone additional influences from mainly Arabic, Dutch, and Malay/Indonesian. Beginning in the 9th century, texts in Javanese language using a Brahmic derived script were written. The oldest written text in Javanese is the so-called Inscription of Sukabumi which is dated March 25, 804. Although this is not a piece of literature, this inscription is often mentioned as the starting point of Javanese literature.

The Dutch scholar Theodore Pigeaud divides the history of Javanese literature in four major periods:

The first era is a pre-Islamic period of about six centuries, beginning about 900 AD, up to about 1500 AD: the traditional date of the victory of Islam over pre-Islamic belief in the East Javanese kingdom of Majapahit. Javanese texts indubitably written in the pre-Islamic period have been preserved for posterity mainly in eighteenth and nineteenth century Balinese manuscripts. The idiom is called Old Javanese. In Java the original Javanese tradition of literature was interrupted and all but cut off by the rise of Islam.

The remnants of pre-Islamic Javanese literature are scanty. In some cases, it is doubtful whether a given text was written in Java or in Bali. In the relatively small number of Old Javanese texts a chronological distinction can be made between works of authors living in the period of suzerainty of the Kadiri Kings (up to about 1200 AD) and their predecessors, on the one side, and books written in the subsequent Singosari Majapahit period on the other. Almost all Old Javanese texts were written in East Java, mainly in districts situated in the basin of the river Brantas. The few exceptions are some very old texts probably written in the tenth century in Central Java in the district of Mataram, in the basin of the rivers Opak and Praga.

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