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'.