Introduction
Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed largely, or even solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, their study offers insight into large scale social, religious and literary developments and encounters. The particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses, spread and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory and forgetting, and attachment to community and place. As David Damrosch writes in his discussion of “scriptworlds,” we must go beyond thinking of scripts only in relation to their original language or language family in order to realize how “scripts that achieve a global reach extend far beyond their linguistic base, with profound consequences for literature and for cultural in general.”Footnote 1 Alongside histories of script change, we might also ponder the “other side of the coin,” so to speak, and explore the challenges of why some scripts—like those of Tamil or Hebrew—have been used with little change over many centuries. How does a changed or consistent script affect processes of writing in and translating into particular languages? Can we find patters and theorize these specific histories into a larger framework? Still more questions touching on the relationship between language, culture and script arise if we consider the continuum between Sanskrit, a single language written in many scripts and in a sense script-less, and Arabic, whose single script was employed to write many languages across great geographical and cultural space. The use of such a cosmopolitan script in diverse local circumstances fostered the dissemination of new religious ideas and texts and helped create and sustain a translocal bond among Muslims of many backgrounds.Footnote 2 This essay is an attempt to engage with questions arising from the consideration of script as an important artifact: in it I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.
I begin with a story: the tale of Aji Saka. It is a story with which I have been intrigued for a considerable amount of time for the themes it raises, many of which are relevant to this dossier: the power of texts, cultural and religious transformations in Indonesia and their relationship to wider circuits of knowledge and faith, ideas about language, writing, history, memory and forgetting, travel, notions of belonging and place. The movement in the story across the Indian Ocean from India to Indonesia and the explicit and implicit connections between these two places it underscores are also significant, as is its emphasis on a moment of pivotal change, theorizing as it does a new literary and cultural beginning. I will now recount the story, as narrated in the anonymous Serat Kridhaksara, a nineteenth-century Javanese manuscript, and then consider some of its relationships to writing, translation and history.Footnote 3
The tale of Aji Saka
Many years ago there was a prince in the Lands Above the Winds—that is India—who wished to be a wise scholar. He loved learning and teaching and decided to go to the island of Java in search of further knowledge.
Aji Saka left home with two servants, Dora and Sembada, whose names foreshadow their roles within the story: Dora, in Javanese, means “lie” or “deceit,” while Sembada means “appropriate, fitting, wish-fulfilling.” On the way the three stopped at the island of Majethi, where Aji Saka told his servants to stay put and guard his keris, a sacred heirloom in the form of a dagger which they must not hand over to anyone but Aji Saka himself.
Aji Saka continued on his way and arrived at the kingdom of Medhang Kamulan, ruled at the time by a cruel man-eating king. Afraid and despairing, many of the king’s subjects had escaped or were living in hiding. Aji Saka, upon hearing of their plight, volunteered to be served as the king’s supper that night. The king was amazed and tried to dissuade Aji Saka, telling him he was too noble and handsome to die, but to no avail.
At his request Aji Saka was granted a wish before he was devoured: he asked for a piece of land as large as his iket, a kind of turban made of batik cloth which was wrapped around his head. The cloth was spread on the ground and kept rolling and unfurling, expanding across the land until it covered the entire kingdom. The king, who was standing on the edge of the fabric, was tossed into the Southern Sea and transformed into a white crocodile who from that day onwards ruled the ocean.
Aji Saka was then crowned as king of Medhang Kamulan and his subjects were prosperous and happy. After some time passed he remembered Dora and Sembada and, wondering what had become of them, he sent two of his advisers to bring them to his kingdom. Meanwhile, Dora and Sembada had heard of Aji Saka’s success and argued over whether they should leave the island and join him or remain there. Dora wanted to go, but Sembada insisted that they must obey their master’s words and not leave unless he comes for them in person. Then Dora left on his own and, on his way, met Aji Saka’s advisers. The three returned to Medhang Kamulan where Aji Saka, having forgotten his own command, was furious that Sembada refused to appear with his sacred dagger. Dora was sent back to fetch him but Sembada would not budge, insisting that Aji Saka had told them not to leave the island and not to hand over the keris to anyone but himself. A heated argument which turned into a fight ensued between the two until finally they stabbed each other with the powerful heirloom and fell to the ground, dead.
Several days passed and Aji Saka, wondering about their whereabouts, sent his advisers again to Majethi. Upon return they informed him of Dora and Sembada’s tragic fate. Realizing his error Aji Saka was overcome with shock and sorrow. In commemoration of his two loyal servants he created a Javanese alphabet.
The story can, and has been, understood in a variety of ways, ranging from the mystical to the political. Like the textile of the turban unfolding across Java, the texts recounting Aji Saka’s deeds have expanded in number and in their modes of interpretation. Versions of the tale appear in at least twenty Javanese texts including well known ones like the Manikmaya, with most extant manuscripts written in the nineteenth century and print editions appearing since 1857.Footnote 4 Above all, the letters of the Javanese alphabet—which appear only at story’s end—have been interpreted often, according them great significance and potency, not unlike those accorded the letters in other cultural traditions. In the following discussion I wish to explore two aspects of the story. The first has to do with the notion of creating a new script: what might it mean and why does it matter? I’d like to suggest that changing the script of a language, transliterating it, can be viewed as a form of translation, one akin to that of retelling a story in a new language. The second aspect I wish to address touches upon the ways in which this story, as told and retold over time, reflects something of the textures of Javanese history, including the shifting roles of cosmopolitan and vernacular languages and traditions, religious change and its impact on cultural processes of writing, creativity, and memory.
The story and history of Javanese writing
The alphabet that Aji Saka created to commemorate his two loyal servants who died battling each other because of his misdeed, has the following sequence:
Ha na ca ra ka
Da ta sa wa la
Pa dha ja ya nya
Ma ga ba tha nga
This particular sequence tells, in very condensed form, the story I have just recounted, as the letters are joined into words and sentences:
Hana caraka—there were [2] messengers
Data sawala—they argued, disagreed
Padha jayanya—equal was their power
Maga bathanga—they ended up as corpses, dead. [See images 1-4]
Ha na ca ra ka (“There were [2] messengers”). Source: Dharmabrata. Lajang Hanatjaraka. Groningen/Batavia: J. B. Wolters, 1939.
Da ta sa wa la (“They argued”). Source: Dharmabrata. Lajang Hanatjaraka. Groningen/Batavia: J. B. Wolters, 1939.
Pa dha ja ya nya (“Equal was their strength”). Source: Dharmabrata. Lajang Hanatjaraka. Groningen/Batavia: J. B. Wolters, 1939.
MA ta ba tha nga (“They died”). Source: Dharmabrata. Lajang Hanatjaraka. Groningen/Batavia: J. B. Wolters, 1939.
This alphabet, known as aksara Jawa or carakan (from a combination of the third to fifth letters: ca, ra, ka) or simply as hanacaraka was certainly not the first to be used on Java. In that sense, as attested in the vocabulary typically used to describe Aji Saka’s deed, the story is more about a transition from one writing system to another—a reformulation of the script—than about a move from oral to written culture. In some versions there is explicit mention of a pre-Aji Saka script. The Kridhaksara, for example, notes that the earlier script had only fifteen letters as compared with the twenty created by Aji Saka. In this case the verb used in the text—kaéwahan—implies change or replacementFootnote 5; in other cases—in which the verb nganggit (to arrange, to compose, to invent) is employed—more ambiguity surrounds the question of whether Aji Saka invented Javanese writing, introduced a new script or modified an old one.
Javanese writing, as well as other writing systems across the Indonesian archipelago, was derived from the south Indian Pallava script.Footnote 6 Before the introduction of the carakan, Javanese writing followed a different sequence of letters, known as kaganga, after the Indian sequence beginning with ka-kha-ga-gha-nga. This sequence, based on the letters’ articulation site, is still used for writing in Sumatra and Sulawesi.Footnote 7 It is not clear when the change in letter order was made for Javanese, why or by whom, although scholars have pointed to textual evidence suggesting that the shift goes back to the mid-seventeenth century or earlier.Footnote 8 It is also unclear when the association of the present sequence with the figure of Aji Saka was made as some sources mention the alphabet in the hanacaraka sequence but are silent on Aji Saka’s role.Footnote 9
However, the “old order” did not disappear entirely and manifested itself occasionally as, for example, in the prevalence of the so-called “capital letters” in Yogyakarta manuscripts, descendants of the Sanskrit aspirates that were used to indicate names of important persons.Footnote 10 Raffles, the British Governor-General of Java (1811–1816) in his lengthy history of the island, noted the difference between the Indian and Javanese sequences and speculated that the latter was preferred for its story-like quality. The new sequence was viewed as befitting a perceived Javanese preference towards stringing together words into sentences and meaningful statements, however brief, as was the case with the candra sangkala choronograms.Footnote 11
Be the causes as they may, the reordering of a language’s alphabet seems to signal a radical shift, one which Aji Saka’s story seeks not so much to explain as to commemorate. While the history of the significant change represented by the newly ordered Javanese script remains shrouded in mystery, the story does offer a metaphor for thinking about the importance of particular scripts, as well as the conditions and meanings of script change. Clearly the shift is portrayed as unfolding in a dramatic, emotional and even tragic context to which loss is central. In that respect the story may have distant echoes, I think, with the one in the opening section of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, when the poet watching the hunter kill the male krauñca bird was pain-stricken and moved to produce the very first śloka, from Sanskrit śoka, grief.Footnote 12 Despite the differences in these narratives both stories theorise their respective traditions’ understanding of a certain kind of literary beginning, in which a traumatic experience gives rise to a creative impulse which bestows language with a new dimension, a new possibility.
In the case of Aji Saka the possibilities opening up had to do with the adoption of a new writing system. By no means only a technical shift, changing a script can have far reaching cultural implications. The late linguist and anthropologist A.L. Becker in his book Beyond Translation: Essays Towards A Modern Philology, observed in the context of transliterating Burmese (which has a writing system similar to Javanese and Balinese) into Latin script “that writing systems… are among the deepest metaphors in a language, that they resonate richly throughout a culture, and so for us to substitute one technology of writing for another is not a neutral act, a mere notational variation. It means to re-imagine language itself.”Footnote 13 Indeed, the hanacaraka script has been employed in powerful mantras recited in shadow puppet performances, used to elaborate on the relationship between the human and divine and to predict births, marriages and other significant events. In all these cases the particular shaping and sequence of the letters has been considered potent.Footnote 14
Another kind of potential suggested by the story—especially if we think of Aji Saka as a creator rather than reformer of the script—is that inherent in a commitment to the written word and its power. The story suggests that memory and writing are linked, whereas illiteracy (or a previous, insufficient form of literacy) is tied to forgetting, which has dire consequences. Aji Saka’s command to his servants was conveyed orally, resulting in confusion, doubt, misunderstanding and death as Dora and Sembada drew different conclusions from what they had heard and bitterly disagreed while Aji Saka repressed or forgot his own speech. The decision by a guilt-stricken Aji Saka to choose a script—of all things—as the means to commemorate his loyal servants implied that the new writing system would ease remembering in the future and allow for a precision and certainty that would prevent repetition of the chaotic consequences of undocumented words.
Shaping the way Javanese was to be written did not end with Aji Saka’s lament over Dora and Sembada’s fate and the ensuing use of the carakan. Over the past several centuries Javanese came to be written in two additional scripts, Arabic and Roman, although neither ever entirely subsumed the carakan, at least not until recent times.Footnote 15 Both these cases signaled important shifts, re-mappings of the language onto new expressive terrain.
The adoption of Javanese written in a modified form of the Arabic script, known as pégon, was a feature of Java’s gradual Islamisation which began in the fifteenth century.Footnote 16 Diacritic marks were added to existing Arabic letters to accommodate Javanese sounds, as has been done for other languages spoken by Muslims. With the great significance accorded by Muslims to the Arabic alphabet, writing in pégon meant that the language of Javanese Muslims became infused with religious authority and sanctity; it also meant that important Arabic vocabulary and names could be retained in a manner closely resembling or identical with the original, with fewer errors and misunderstandings, common when the carakan was used to represent Arabic.
To write Javanese in Arabic script meant, once again, a change in sequence. The carakan order was replaced with the entirely different alif, bā’, tā’ one of Arabic. The number of letters too was once again transformed, from Aji Saka’s twenty to Arabic’s twenty eight, with seven modified letters added to represent sounds not existing in Arabic like “pa” and “cha.”Footnote 17 Probably most striking, the directionality of the written language was altered, read from right to left rather then left to right as it had been for many centuries. Writing Javanese in this way was part of the wide-ranging phenomenon of adopting the Arabic script in Indonesia and the wider region, a development that is highly relevant to our thinking about cosmopolitan and vernacular and religious transformations, as well as to this dossier’s goal of comparing and connecting Indonesian and other Indian Ocean cases. The religiously-sanctioned Arabic script elevated vernaculars and bestowed them with an aura and authority associated with the cosmopolitan Arabic, while also initiating a process of orthographic standardization across space and cultures that had far reaching implications [See image 5].
Javanese in Arabic script. The Kidung Rumeksa ing Wengi (“A Song Guarding in the Night”). Compendium inscribed 1803–1831, Sri Lanka. Private collection, courtesy of B.D.K Saldin.
Another script and sequence transformation transpired in the gradual adoption of the Roman script, into which many Javanese materials were transliterated as the nineteenth-century progressed. This shift was clearly reflected in the changing formats of Javanese dictionariesFootnote 18 [See images 6 and 7]. In the expanding network of European-style educational institutions Dutch gradually replaced Javanese (and Malay) as the medium of instruction, at least for the elites, and Javanese writing was no longer viewed as an important field of study. The colonial government encouraged the publication and study of Javanese texts in Roman script with official rules for the spelling of Romanised Javanese drawn up in 1918. Such measures were perceived as contributing to an on-going decline in the status of Javanese with some viewing them as an attempt to “bring about the death of Javanese.”Footnote 19 The process reached its peak during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, 1942–1945, when the use of the Javanese script was prohibited.Footnote 20 This development had a profound impact and seems to have marked a point of no return in terms of the script’s usage.
Javanese-Dutch dictionary following the hanacaraka sequence. Source: Gericke J.F.C. and T. Roorda. Javaansch-Nederlandsch Handwoordenboek. 1847. Amsterdam: Johannes Muller, 1901.
Javanese-Javanese dictionary following a Romanised sequence. The sequence appears on the bottom part of each page. Source: Poerwadarminta, W.J.S. Baoesastra Djawa. Groningen/Batavia: J.B. Wolters, 1939.
The Roman alphabet, at least when compared with Javanese (and other Southeast Asian scripts), suggests a kind of progressive, linear sequence which becomes a metaphor for ideas and narratives told through its use. This was especially the case, I think, in early twentieth-century colonial Java where the bearers of the script—officials, missionaries, scientists—were often viewed as representing a forward moving modernity. The written Javanese figure—a center with marks above, below, before and after it—seems a very different type of icon, suggesting perhaps a different perspective on chronology and causality.Footnote 21 However, within the realm of writing in Javanese it seems to me that the story of the adoption of the hanacaraka script expresses a shift in the way writing was understood even as the central metaphor of the letters may have remained that of centre and periphery rather than the straight line. The fact that the letters were arranged in such a way as to tell a story—a chronological narrative that had a beginning, a middle and an end –seems to put forth a more “linear worldview” than the one often represented in the way knowledge was ordered and remembered in Java.Footnote 22
If we think of this script-reformulation narrative as a kind of statement about writing history, it may not be surprising that Aji Saka himself became an integral figure within the genres of Javanese historical and literary writing, appearing in many accounts, from those depicting the appearance of the first humans on Java to its Islamisation many centuries later. And for at least some Javanese communities, during certain periods, Aji Saka became a central cultural hero, a very real figure whose deeds and words and burial site were matters of fierce debate and contestation.Footnote 23
Religious and cultural transformations: Aji Saka’s travels through place and time
Some works, most notably Ranggawarsita’s early nineteenth century Pustaka Raja Purwa which recounts the history of Java from the year 1 to 1400, open with the arrival of Empu Sangkala (another name of Aji Saka) and the first humans on the island.Footnote 24 Here Aji Saka bears two important titles: empu, a master artist, poet or kris smith; and sang, an honorific applied to exalted persons or things which here prefixes kala, Time. In such accounts Aji Saka is the founder of early human settlement on Java and a great master whose presence initiates and informs local notions of time.
The story of Aji Saka can also be read as depicting a cultural evolution or change from pre-Indic to Indic times on Java with Aji Saka, as a wise Indian prince, bringing with him teachings, ideas and art forms from the subcontinent to the Indonesian archipelago, among which the creation or innovation of the alphabet was no doubt pivotal. In the Serat Ajisaka Ngejawi his arrival from India is said to have occurred in the year one, thus signaling the beginning of the Javanese Saka era which carries his name. He is also said to have named the eight year windu cycles and the five days of the pasaran calendar, thus formulating the Javanese time-reckoning systems.Footnote 25
In some cases the story addresses another significant shift in Java’s past. In the Manikmaya Aji Saka, known initially as Abu Sakya, travels to Mecca and meets there with the Prophet Muhammad. He studies with the four companions and accompanies them wherever they go. One day Muhammad sends them on a mission and on the way Abu Sakya is tempted by the devil Ijajil who claims him as a descendent. Ijajil teaches him many things, including how to stay cool in fire, dry in water, how to change form and how to compose poetry in the kakawin and tembang meters. When Abu Sakya returns to the Prophet’s mosque he hides in one of the pillars (J. saka), providing an etymology for his new name, Aji Saka, “Aji of the pillar.” The Prophet knows all that had transpired and, after Aji begs forgiveness through the companions’ intervention, sends him away.Footnote 26 From there he goes to Java and the story of the king, the turban and the ensuing events unfolds. In this telling Aji Saka, the Javanese hero, is linked to Islam’s heartland and its Prophet, albeit in an ambiguous manner.
Similar but more ambiguous and ambivalent still is the depiction of events in the Serat Sindula. Aji Saka is a close disciple of the Prophet who betrays him to follow Ijajil; he later repents and repeatedly begs Muhammad to accept his apology but he is angrily turned away. Annoyed, the Prophet hurls a powerful keris at him, known as Kalamunyeng, the same dagger that was used successfully in the 15th century to defeat the last king of the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit kingdom, paving the way for the rise of Muslim rule. Ijajil then commands him to go to Java and rule it for three years, stressing provocatively that the Prophet is Arab while Aji Saka is Javanese. In this vein the text also counter-poses the two scripts, Javanese and Arabic. While on his way to Java to become king Aji Saka travels through India and Sri Lanka, creating and teaching many of the classic, pre-Islamic works of Old Javanese, amassing a great following.Footnote 27
The tension, or struggle between the two traditions that the story expresses was sometimes resolved in a definitive manner. In a version recounted to the anthropologist Robert Heffner in the 1970s in the mountainous Tengger region of East Java, an area where an ancient, non-Muslim tradition was still practiced, Aji Saka’s standing appeared to be diminishing. The story ended abruptly after Muhammad had called Aji Saka back to Mecca to report on his activities and the boat in which he sailed got stuck in a motionless, windless sea. Symbolizing the end of an era for the Tengger, struggling to affirm their identity in a time of revitalised Islam, Aji the cultural hero was swallowed by a vast ocean and never heard from again.Footnote 28
In the transition to Islam—of the story and of Java—we find the newly created twenty letters of the alphabet interpreted as God’s twenty attributes (J. sipat kalih dasa), the etymology of the name changing from the name of the Javanese year to a pillar in the Meccan mosque. It might also be noted that the art forms which Aji Saka was supposed to have brought along to Java from India, like the gamelan music and the poetic meters, were later attributed to the wali sanga, the nine walis who, also coming from afar, are believed to have converted Java to Islam.
In colonial times, within the Dutch educational system, the Aji Saka story took on special significance. In the late 1930s children in Java began learning the Javanese script with the help of a small, two-volume booklet titled Layang Hanacaraka.Footnote 29 Towards the end of the second volume, after the children had practiced every letter of the alphabet, it was time for them to learn the history of their script. The author recounted how Aji Saka had travelled to Java, how he entrusted his keris to Dora and Sembada and the sad fate they both met because their master had forgotten his promise. The story and the school book ended with Aji Saka creating the letters the children were now studying out of his remorse and regret.
For generations of children the Javanese alphabet became synonymous with the story about Aji Saka and his servants, encapsulated in the brief, four lined poem (syair) that both told the tale and listed the letters. A strong, inseparable connection was made between writing and stories: the letters are a story, the story is the letters. The account of Dora and Sembada’s plight, written traditionally in flowing poetic meters or prose spread over many pages, was presented in this concise genre, evoking a different rhythm, underscoring the bare yet powerful thread of the story, to be recited and imprinted on every child’s mind.Footnote 30
Several years ago I walked into a book shop in Yogyakarta and looked through the pile of books instructing school-age children in the Javanese language. Although the books were clearly re-modeled from those sold only a few years earlier, appearing more colorful and child-friendly, their contents seemed quite familiar, with pages filled with wayang characters the children must memorize and various exercises that require rote learning. However, one well known and just recently indispensable story—that of Aji Saka and his creation of the Javanese alphabet—was missing from at least some books, indicating it no longer offered a universal standard for formulating the history of Javanese writing.Footnote 31 My attempts to understand who made the decision to leave the story out of the curriculum and why were unsuccessful. However, several people speculated that the story was perceived as too old fashioned or that political change in recent years has brought about less centralised decision making and more room for educational innovation. It is also possible, I think, that the story, with its pre-Islamic or Javano-Islamic overtones (as evident in the illustrations that almost always accompanied the story) considered not “Islamic enough” by many, was too potent to be left in the books and was purged along with other more traditional kejawèn elements.
Omitting Aji Saka from the syllabus may be an occasion for sentimentality, for bemoaning the loss of a long-held tradition by some. More broadly it is related, at least in part, to the cultural struggles that we have seen played out between the story’s pages, emphasizing different ideas and models of what it has meant to be Javanese and, more pointedly, a Javanese Muslim. It is also tied to questions of how Javanese is taught in present-day Indonesia and to the fact that many Javanese have only a basic ability to read the hanacaraka script because little time is dedicated to it at school and mastering it is viewed as a heavy burden. The educational policies help sustain and reinforce the common notion that the script is somehow unusually complex and mysterious, beyond the realm of other scripts typically acquired in school and used throughout one’s life time. Leaving the story—with its mnemonic device for learning the alphabet—out of the books, will surely not help in this regard. In addition, with this omission comes the loss of a certain perspective on how Javanese came to be what it is, how important both writing and story-telling are, what creativity can arise from powerful feelings of regret and sorrow, and how certain tales have the potential to tell us so much.
Concluding thoughts
The story of Aji Saka, which can be read as a fantastic tale about a man-eating king, a magical dagger and a kind of Javanese “flying carpet” is highly suggestive once we consider the themes it highlights, some of which I have touched upon above. A key question in contemplating the literature produced in Java and the larger region, one for which Aji Saka’s story serves as an example, is how to think about and conceptualize stories that are both the same and different: literary works offering the contours of a story with the same characters, general plot and title, written and copied over long spans of time, that often differ in important ways in detail or agenda or conclusion.
It is not only, as discussed, that the “same language,” Javanese, was written in different scripts but also that the “same story” of Aji Saka was transformed with the ebb and flow of time as its protagonist, through his deeds and travels, came to represent a shifting religious landscape. The various tellings of the Aji Saka tale represent different “takes,” we might say, on Java’s heritage. The nineteenth century versions in which Aji Saka encountered the Prophet, ones that highlighted the Prophet’s powers and vision and Aji Saka’s straying from the path of Islam, are especially evocative: they resonate with tensions and ambiguities inherent in Java’s ongoing Islamisation and in the ways that process has been explained and remembered in the realm of literary and historical writing. The creation of the new letters after the encounter with the Prophet Muhammad underscores further the themes of memory and forgetting in the story as Aji Saka’s failure is magnified beyond forgetting his command to Dora and Sembada. It comes to include, in addition, a certain erasure of his contact with the Prophet as he begins a new chapter, a new path, with his newly created script recounting a story from which that charged encounter is entirely absent.
The story’s emphasis on a change of script that transpires under tragic circumstances invites us to think about how alphabets, often viewed as technical devices in the service of meaning, at least in part shape and dictate the ways in which a particular language finds expression. Aji Saka’s new script, as well as the Arabic and Roman ones adopted and adapted for Javanese, were in fact forms of translation in the guise of transliteration: although the written language remained “the same”—that is Javanese –new possibilities emerged with each new script just as old ones diminished or disappeared, reminiscent of the changes that inevitably take place when we translate—always imperfectly—from one language to another.
Scripts are sites of power: religious, social, political. In Southeast Asia, where Aji Saka’s story as we know it emerged, the phenomenon of script change was by no means unique to Java. Suffice to mention here the most recent of conquerors in this regard, the Roman script, which has replaced the Arabic script in Malaysia, many local scripts in Indonesia and the Chinese characters in Vietnam. Like the sacred dagger, both a symbol of Aji Saka’s potency and, by providing the rationale for Dora and Sembada’s death, a sign of his failure, alphabets can represent the powerful and the defeated as circumstances change. Or, as Patricia Crain writes in her book about the alphabetization of America, The Story of A: “As an object of study, the artifact of the alphabet offers access to a broad range of cultural formations, including the contours of ideology, as they have developed over time.”Footnote 32
Scripts can illuminate questions of heritage and history in their capacity both as concrete, tangible artifacts and conveyors of echoes of radical change from an intangible past. The comparative study of displaced, migrating and overlapping alphabets and the stories told about them and by them—what we might call a “poetics of script”—offers new ways of exploring and understanding the practices and politics of writing, reading, and cultural transformation.
