In 1914, a booklet titled Serat Subasita, written in Javanese, was published in the Central Javanese city of Surakarta by Ki Padmasusastra (1843-1926). A former disciple of the last and highly-praised pujangga dalem (“official court-poet”) of the Kasunanan, Raden Ngabehi Ronggowarsito, Ki Padmasusastra was brought at an early age to court. He was a prolific writer who wished to emulate and keep alive the “age-old tradition” of court-based mystical-pedagogical poetry by writing down versified litanies of “do’s and don’ts” (belonging to the piwulang and pitutur genres). Yet while he wishes his
Serat Subasita to replicate classical etiquette treaties, hence to enshrine bits and pieces of a “ceremonial knowledge (kawruh)” that he knew was on the verge of falling into oblivion, Ki Padmasusastra also firmly engages the novelties of the (colonial) day. For instance, he provides the reader with this as-yet unheard of “customary rule of conduct (tatacara / aturan)” that when a nobleman meets another one of an equal or higher standing, he has “to take off his sunglasses”. A few years later, by the late 1920s, in the neighboring city of Jogjakarta, a harsh debate takes place among Javanese Muslim intellectuals regarding the “lawfulness” of new means of representation, namely of a photographic or cinematographic nature. While reformist thinkers close to the Muhammadiyah welcome this emblem of “Western science”, Nahdlatul Ulama leaders ban its use on the grounds that it goes against the hadith-based prohibition of any naturalistic representation of living beings.
One could sum up these two vignettes by saying that while old-style priyayi like Ki Padmasusastra try to incorporate colonial novelties like sunglasses into their moral world by hastily crafting new aturan in the shape of ancient ones, some self-styled “traditionalist” Muslim intellectuals flatly reject imperial technologies like photography as yet another embodiment of “idolatry”. Things are of course a little bit more complicated than what this contrastive way of framing things suggests. Even if they are almost simultaneous, these two sets of reactions to disturbing novelties are not, in any sense, “contemporaneous”, for they appeal to two “styles of thought” that have seemingly always coexisted – but indeed rarely mixed together – in late modern Javanese society. The first one is rooted in the old Central Javanese, palace-based dream of warding off the dangers of the unpredictable and the unclassifiable by enacting “rules of conduct (aturan)” that both regulate the minute details of social intercourse and allocate fixed properties and potentialities to visible and invisible beings and forces, whether living or inanimate. The second one points towards strong iconoclastic currents among those emerging Islamic associations that were soon to play a decisive role in the pergerakan – the “(anticolonial) movement”. Yet both the antiquated pujangga worldview impregnating Ki Padmasusastra’s writings and the militant iconoclasm of young NU intellectuals take unusual overtones in a period when, due to new colonial conditions of knowledge production, it becomes possible – for the very first time in Javanese history – to think of an ideal way of life as a “tradition” one can contemplate at a distance, whether to endorse or to discard it.