L'Histoire à parts égales. Récits d'une rencontre Orient-Occident (XVIe-XVIIe siècle), Paris, Seuil, 2011.
Partly dating back to the heydays of Dutch colonial history, the officially endorsed narrative of the first Dutch-Javanese contacts celebrates a “face-to-face” encounter between monolithic, large-scale entities. Starting in Banten (North Java) in June 1596 with the arrival of Cornelis de Houtman’s First Navigation fleet, a “modern”, dynamic, and inherently expansive “(Northern) Europe” would have met with an over- ritualized, inward-looking, and “immobile” “(Southeast) Asia”. Making intensive use not just of Dutch, Portuguese, or British source-material, but also of Malay and Javanese chronicles, epics, mystical poetry, and etiquette treaties, nevertheless enables us to reach to a more nuanced and “equitable” understanding of what did and did not take place during these early modern “contact situations”.
The Sajarah Banten (1660-62) for instance helps us deciphering a local nexus of political plots, ideological claims, and economic concerns that were not primarily Europe-oriented, but that came to play a crucial role in determining the way Dutch traders were to be welcomed and dealt with by Javanese courtiers. The Hikayat Iskandar Zulkarnain (late 16th c.) and the Hikayat Hang Tuah (1750s with an early 17th c. nucleus) give us the opportunity of slipping out of the grips of the “face-to-face” contact scenario by providing us with a detailed picture of specific Malay cosmographical horizons – horizons that were centered not on Europe, but on the Arabic Peninsula, South India, and imperial China. Finally, one finds in key-texts of the Malay literature – like the Taj us-Salatin (1603), the Sejarah Melayu (1612), or the Hikayat Indraputra (early 17th c.) – a coherent and highly sophisticated vision of the rules governing both the maintenance of official diplomatic relations and the ritualized unfolding of an all-out war between polities. Thanks to these texts (and to a number of related late 16th / early 17th century adat-istiadat manuals, like the Adat Pahang and the Adat Kedah), one can reach to a clearer understanding of what were the official Malay norms of conduct governing situations of commercial, diplomatic, and military intercourse.
While this “thick translation” endeavor sheds new light on the social codes regulating the “contact zone” with the Dutch, digging deep into the world of Malay and Javanese scribes also is an experience in historiographical “estrangement”, since the “regimes of historicity” at play in these texts often do not intersect with those of Dutch (or Portuguese, or British) chroniclers. How, then, to account “in equal parts” for both the technological commonalities and the metrological differences that were the day-to-day fabric of these prime Dutch-Javanese “encounters”?