The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726-1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II.

• Author: ROSKIES, D.M.
• Position: Review

The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726-1749: History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II. By M .C. RICKLEFS. Honolulu: ASIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA, in association with ALLEN & UNWIN and UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 1998. Pp. i-xxiv + 391 + plates. $35.

The publication of yet another monograph on the history of the Mataram dynasty from the pen of Merle Ricklefs is a welcome event for professional Indonesianists, for specialists in Southeast Asia, and indeed for students of Islam in general; His distinction as an historian of early modern Java and the valuable qualities of his History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300 and of his Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749-1792 are so well known that a reviewer feels no need to repeat the praise already bestowed upon his enterprise as whole, and may rest content with saying that the present volume comes well up to the standards of its predecessors.

Together they form a single opus, or work-in-progress, fruit of an archival zeal for, and exceptional control of, the materials in Old and Middle Javanese and in Dutch lodged in Jakarta, London, Berlin, Surakarta, Leiden, and Yogyakarta. The tumultuous Kartasura period of Javanese history (1680-1746) was authoritatively explored in the author's War, Culture and Economy in Java, 1677-1726 (1993), a study that, in illuminating the labyrinthine vicissitudes of Java as it was on the eve of Dutch hegemony, was as far-reaching a rehearsal of the subject as one could hope to find. The book under review sinks another deep shaft into this most violent of ages, a time when warfare was rife and military intervention in indigenous affairs by the Dutch East India Company, firmly ensconced in its stronghold in Batavia, well underway.

Like its forerunners, this excavation reaches into hitherto undetected ore-bearing strata, with the aim, now, of bringing to the surface the lineaments of an ethnic identity in process of formation. This, it transpires, was governed in part by language, in part by religion, and, most significantly perhaps, in part by an ancient legacy of belief, custom, and ritual. The cynosure of the exhibit is the last ruler of Kartasura, Pakubuwana II, "teenage king, aspiring mystic monarch under the influence of his pious and powerful grandmother, conquering lord of Holy War against the Europeans, fool and failure, agent of the destruction of Kartasura itself and, on his deathbed, the king who was willing to turn his children and entire kingdom over to the ... very infidels of...