Ben Arps

A key aspect of culture is narrativity (the quality of being a story or like a story). Crystallized in stories proper, narrativity also manifests itself in cultural patterns in other domains, from ritual procedures to perceptions of self. It is especially under conditions of cultural encounter, where distinct narrative modes of making sense of the world meet and sometimes clash, that the significance of narrativity comes to the fore.

In Southeast Asia, Islamization and European colonization have been among the most profoundly transformative historical processes. Narratives and narrativity were central factors in these processes of social, cultural, political, and religious change. In turn, narratives and narrative patterns can be used, retrospectively, to understand the depth and extent of this historical change.

The foundations for this sea-change were laid in Java in the sixteenth century, when Islam firmly established itself not only along the north coast (where it had become increasingly powerful over the 1400’s) but also in the interior, and when the Iberian presence in maritime Asia became more and more noticeable. Nonetheless, this period in the history of Java, and the regions of which it was part is heavily underexplored. Where narrativity is concerned, 1500’s Java is decidedly a vast unknown.

Original Javanese documents from this period are indeed utterly rare. One particular palm-leaf manuscript, among the oldest extant codices inscribed with a text in Modern Javanese, which has been kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford since 1629, affords a splendid opportunity to use an original artefact as the focal point for exploring the narrative economy of Java in the 1500’s.

The aims of the research project are twofold.

(i) The first is to prepare an edition with English translation and annotations of this unique codex. The text belongs to the Hamzah complex of narratives. While this is known to scholarship and the public especially from the Persianate world, it is also prominent in certain Southeast Asian languages. The hero is Ḥamzah ibn ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib, an uncle and contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad. The Bodleian manuscript recounts a string of exciting adventures during Hamzah’s adult life. This text is the earliest known Hamzah narrative in Javanese.

(ii) The second part of the project is contextualization. In line with a conception of philology—which, as should be clear, furnishes this project’s disciplinary background—as the artefact-focused study of worldmaking, the aim here is to locate the manuscript’s narrative in the realm of narrative worldmaking in 15th-century Java, of course with the requisite attention to earlier history as well as translocal connections.