Ratu Boko is amazing. It is on the top of a hill. Margana tells me that location is not very usual for Javanese candi. The locals call it a 'kraton', though it was most probably a temple complex. There is a place apparently meant for cremations, but only ashes from burnt wood have been found on the place. There are local people on the grounds, with their sheep. It is therefore a somewhat pastoral environment, though it is also lush and humid, not unlike similar places in Brasil (by the way as I write this in Malioboro Mall, the music streaming out of the loudspeakers is classic bossa-nova from the 1960s and 1970s).
I wander all over the grounds with Margana. The place has a great feel to it. It is in a way much more entrancing than either Borobudur or Prambanan. We can of course see Prambanan in the distance. There used to be a connection between Ratu Boko and Prambanan, though its exact nature remains a matter of speculation as so much else here. Ratu Boko seems to have been a priestly settlement. It includes goa or gua, which is a makeshift cave hermitage on the very top of the hill, hidden among the trees. The interesting thing is that the sign 'Goa' awakens memories in me - of a never visited place, namely, Goa in India. I find it slightly eerie that goa stands for cave here.
There are bathing ponds too. The water is now quite dirty and full of snails. Though it now looks very uninviting even in this sultry weather, it must have been often used in former times. There are also structures made of stone floors, some with the clear remains of columns. There must have been pendopos made of wood though of course now the wood is all gone. There are also three very small shrines, surprisingly well-kept. No idea what deities may have inhabited them. I say suprisingly well-kept because the site must have been abandoned by the sixteenth century at the latest when this part of the valley - the Pergunungan Seribu (Thousand Mountains, a very fertile and therefore fairly densely settled valley that extends all the way from Central to East Jawa) - became islamised. On the way to Solo - we stop at Ratu Boko on our way back - Margana mentioned to me the grave of a wali, or saint. Interestingly, he is not one of the famous nine wali's who would have islamised Jawa, and whose graves are all, if I am not mistaken, on or near the north coast (from where Islam must have come into the valley centuries ago). The grave therefore marks out a local history that is not necessarily shared. I ponder that this local history of Islam - that is still quite retrievable - is actually what has made sure that Ratu Boko has now become a historiographical mystery just as much of pre-Islamic Jawa. The temple complex functioned for about eight centuries and then was abandoned. Three very short inscriptions, one of them a mere two lines from a prayer to a goddess in Jawa Kuno, are all the records that are left, besides Chinese porcelain from the eighth to the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. The place looks placid, quiet and out of time now; however, it was once clearly at the receiving end of international trade coming from China - almost certainly Fukkien and then the Pearl River delta - through the pasisir or north coast. It was therefore anything but isolated.
The peace and quiet that we are now enjoying - only locals are around, there are practically no tourists - is in this way quite deceptive. Ratu Boko must have been a bustling, lively place at times.
Margana is clearly entranced by the place - he has been here many times - and I can understand why. There is so much history in it, and it is so incredibly obscure. The setting is almost enchanted. We don't even know for sure what the ruins we are looking at were really used for - there is a building that locals fancy was used by women, another by men. One area is, according to local fantasy, the waiting room to the king's palace, where the supplicants must have sat for hours on end waiting to see the sovereign. There are impressive walls everywhere, suggesting that the place was also a kind of fortification. Locals used to take out the stones to build their own houses until the archaeological service found out and got the stones back. However, locals are still building right on the site, profitting from the ready-made stone floors available (no cement or mortar was used, the stones just fit together - encaixadas, 'boxed' together, as we say in Portuguese). Margana points out to me that the complex must still hide quite a few things, as no excavations have been carried out in the recent past, for instance, in the forest nearby. I wonder whether they ever will be carried out. Indonesia has so many sites, many of them much grander too. Even a much wealthier country would have trouble keeping so many sites, let alone excavating them.
There are children playing soccer by the still imposing gate at the entrance. The stones steps of the stairs are very high as usual (just as in both Borobudur and Prambanan). The casualness of their game amid the grandeur of the ruins is gripping. They could have been playing football in a vacant lot in one of Brasil's cities, except that the setting would have been completely different. Probably a vacant lot in a periferia, with some trees and shrubs nearby or else just modest housing, closely packed together. Just as here, however, the children would have been barefoot and shirtless. Even the sultriness and humidity of the place - the stones look like they are oozing water or like they have been just washed by the rain - would have been the same. Over there, however, there would have been virtually no ruins, often not even of a Portuguese colonial building. It is the New World. This is supposedly the old one. Indonesia, just as many other Asian countries, seems nonetheless so incredibly young, vital, and upstart.
I wonder about Dewantara - yet again. I didn't like his reasoning developed in the late 1930s. He thought that Javanese had to be written in the Latin script because that was the 'international' script; and that if that script were to be used, foreigners would become interested in the language. He was wrong, I guess. To him, however, the script was only the outward form of the language, so it was not that important. He preconized that Javanese script - that locals call it 'Sanskrit' - would impair the development of children's abilities to read and write. He thought however that Javanese script should be taught after the second year of schooling when students had already learned the Latin script, so that they could remain connected to the their ancient and prestigious heritage. The children I am looking at are going through a school syllabus that was in part shaped by Dewantara's ideas long ago. When I first read his opinion on Javanese script, I disagreed with him: after all, in India hundreds of millions learn how to read and write both in Latin and local scripts. Many will never use Latin script much in the rest of their lives.
However, even though I still think Dewantara's ideas were a bit colonial, Ratu Boko reminds me of something else. Namely, Jawa is not India. That locals should call aksara Jawa or Javanese script - a modern avatar of the script used in the three short inscriptions that is all we have to enlighten us about the history of Ratu Boko - Sanskrit is an eye-opener. It is something that came from India. It is therefore something from outside. The palace libraries - very impressive - in both Yogya and Solo, one of which Margana and I have just visited (namely, the Mangkunegara library and archive) are full of material and records in old Javanese script. However, that script is now not important any more. I should have understood that right away. I am from the New World. We simply leave things behind and move on, in case we can and even when we cannot. Those children playing football among the ruins are not necessarily better connected to their past than our children, nor are they more disconnected. The connection is different, of course. In terms of the Indian subcontinent, this is also the New World - a place where you expand your civilisation, except that here it was South India, Sri Lanka, and South China, rather than Iberia and West and Central Africa, as in the case of my country. However, differently to Brasil, this was not colonial territory, at least not before the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English came. Locals were clearly more than a little complicitous therefore in the process of indicisation, though, again, much of this remains quite obscure to this day.
Today therefore the attachment to aksara Jawa is not wholly unlike our attachment to Portuguese. We don't really speak the official language - which is very close to Portugal's Portuguese - but varieties that some linguists describe as a semi-creole. We have therefore moved away from the European language. Though this is not about script as such (we still write very much in the way the Portuguese do, some minor differences in spelling, grammar and vocabulary notwithstanding), this also shows that we are not really Europeans just as the Javanese are not Indian (in case they ever were - probably immigrants were always a small though influential minority in Jawa). The time span is also different - they have had about two thousands years to work out their common history with India and China (and Arabia), whereas we have had five hundred years, our precolonial history notwithstanding.
Ratu Boko is a moving remain from that past of complicity between Javanese and outsiders. In a way, postcolonial society is right when it seems to shun the Dutch colonial heritage and instead looks towards the distant - and hazy - past. The lovely lady guide at the Mangkunegara puro actually told me that Majapahit in fact extended as far as Madagascar.
Who am I to say it did not? After all, Malagasy is an Austronesian language just as Javanese, and there is some evidence that contacts between both shores of the Indian Ocean continued for centuries after the original immigrants moved from Kalimantan to Madagascar. There are in fact Sanskrit loanwords in Malagasy - coming not from India, however, but via Malay, and after the original Malagasy speakers had left Kalimantan (judging from the historical phononological studies that linguists rely on to say such things). The idea of a seafaring people - related to the Javanese - spreading a language they originally took on from South India and Sri Lanka all the way from Taiwan to Madagascar is actually astonishing. It is also very humbling as it undermines our received ideas on history and geography and the way people move around the globe and settle in regions other than their countries of birth.
Margana was in fact once in Cape Town, for a conference. That is the farthest extent of 'Malay' influence as some exiles from Sulawesi and elsewhere were sent there by the Dutch. Malay used to be spoken and written in the nineteenth century Cape. Some local families still hold on to prestigious manuscripts in Malay, such as the one written in the late eighteenth century by the famous Tuan Guru. Margana is interested in the connection. He even briefly visited the archives there. He also asks me questions about Rio de Janeiro. He met some Brazilians in Dakar a few years ago, a couple of them from Rio.
The bossa-nova keeps pouring into my ears on Jalan Malioboro. Nobody here usually knows the music is from Brasil, and more often than not sung in Portuguese too.
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