Surapati : portraits of a hero in Javanese Babad literature
Abstract
In 1926, the scholar N.J. Krom, faced with the problem
of judging the historical accuracy of works belonging to the
Babad genre in their accounts of the earlier period which was
his subject, concluded that their historicity could only be
assessed 'als men van andere zijde reeds weet, wat er
geschied is'. He concluded that the area of correspondence
between these accounts and the actual facts of the
situation was usually so pitiably small that one shrank
from using Babad or Sadjarah material without some means of
control. This discomfort in face of the Babad tradition was
not confined to non-Javanese scholars: 13 years before this
time, Hoesein Djajadiningrat, in his characterisation of
Javanese historiography, was constrained to remark upon the
'inability to distinguish fact and fantasy ...... the firm
belief in the miraculous' which the material displays.
Commenting on the strange aspect of many of the traditional
accounts, he concluded that they present 'a psychological
enigma, which we are not able to resolve'.