A Balinese contribution to Malay literature
C. Hooykaas, a Dutch Indologist with long teaching experience in Java, published this short note in 1975 identifying a previously uncatalogued Balinese poem composed in the Malay language and set to Javanese metres. The article’s central thesis is that a Balinese prince-ruler of Badung, writing in 1903, made a deliberate if imperfect contribution to Malay versification by importing Javanese metrical forms into the Malay language — a parallel Hooykaas draws to the earlier, more celebrated introduction of Arabo-Persian metres by Bukhari al-Jauhari in the early seventeenth century.
Summary
The article centres on a short poem titled Gaguritan I Nengah Jimbaran, composed by the ruler of Badung (based in Denpasar) who perished in the puputan of 1906. Because the text is written in Malay rather than Balinese, it escaped inclusion in the standard catalogues of Balinese manuscripts and in Dr. H. H. Juynboll’s two surveys of Balinese literature. Hooykaas reconstructs the poem’s structure and narrative from the manuscript itself, noting that it proceeds through three successive metrical sections — dandang, kinanti, and pankur — all belonging to the Javanese macapat tradition that had been practised in Bali for centuries. The narrative concerns a man whose wife dies of cholera; after days of vigil at her grave he receives a supernatural voice directing him to a sanctuary in the paddies, where a brahman-like old man guides him toward reunion with his deceased wife.
Hooykaas situates this poem within a broader pattern of cross-cultural metrical borrowing in the Malay literary sphere. He recalls that Bukhari al-Jauhari, writing the Tajus-Salatin for the court of Aceh around 1603, attempted to introduce the Arabo-Persian metres masnawi, rubaʿi, kitʿah, and nazam into Malay verse. That effort met only partial success: the new forms were not widely imitated, though the content was valued and the work was copied, rewritten, and translated into Javanese over subsequent centuries. By the early twentieth century, traditional Malay verse was in decline, and Hooykaas argues that the Balinese prince’s experiment represents a second, later attempt by a non-Malay to enrich Malay versification with foreign metrical structures.
The author is candid about the poem’s limitations. The metrical execution is far from regular — in the pankur section, only the first line and the last two conform to the prescribed syllable and vowel formula — and the thematic content (post-mortem reunion of lovers) is a well-worn topos in Balinese literature, attested in works such as Japa Tuan, Lingga Peta, Dreman, Bagus Diarsa, and Jaya Prana. The presence of Muslim vocabulary (niat, sukur, niʿmat, masghul, billahi, laylat ul-qadar, insā Allāh) indicates the poet’s familiarity with educated Malay discourse, even if his versification remained loose.
Key Findings
- The poem Gaguritan I Nengah Jimbaran was composed in 1903 by the ruler of Badung (Denpasar), who died in the puputan of 1906; it is absent from Balinese manuscript catalogues and from Juynboll’s BKI articles (1908, 1916) because it is written in Malay (p. 113).
- The poem comprises three metrical sections: dandang (38 stanzas, occupying half the poem), kinanti (22 stanzas), and pankur (30 stanzas), all drawn from the Javanese macapat genre (pp. 113–114).
- The prescribed dandang formula is 10i-10a-8e-7u-9i-7a-6u-8a-12i-7a; the pankur formula is 8a-11i-8u-7a-12u-8a-8i, though the poet or copyist deviates substantially in practice (pp. 113–114).
- The narrative includes Muslim terms — niat, sukur, niʿmat, masghul, billahi, laylat ul-qadar, insā Allāh — evidencing the poet’s conversance with educated Malay (p. 114).
- Bukhari al-Jauhari’s Tajus-Salatin (Mahkota segala Raja), the earlier model for foreign-metre introduction into Malay, dates from 1603 and was first printed by P. P. Roorda van Eijsinga in Batavia in 1827 (p. 112).
- The post-mortem reunion of lovers theme is documented in at least five other Balinese works: Japa Tuan, Lingga Peta (De Vroom, 1903), Dreman (Kern, 1898), Bagus Diarsa (Hooykaas-nee Van Leeuwen Boomkamp, 1949), and Jaya Prana (Hooykaas, 1958) (pp. 114–115).
Conclusion
Hooykaas’s definitive takeaway is structural rather than literary: the Balinese prince was neither a skilled versifier nor an original poet, and his poem’s metrical imperfections and derivative theme would not, in isolation, merit scholarly attention. What justifies the article is the symmetrical historical observation that at two widely separated moments — c. 1603 and c. 1903 — non-Malay authors attempted to expand the metrical repertoire of Malay verse by importing foreign forms, and that the second attempt, though less successful, marks a meaningful data point in the history of Malay literary culture.
Context
- The article draws on a single manuscript (the Gaguritan I Nengah Jimbaran) and cross-references Juynboll’s catalogues of Balinese and Sundanese manuscripts at Leiden, as well as Hooykaas’s own prior publications on Balinese and Javanese literature.
- Historiographically, the piece is a brief but pointed intervention in the study of metrical cross-pollination in the Malay literary sphere, extending the narrative beyond the well-known Arabo-Persian influence to include Javanese macapat metres as a vector of formal innovation in Malay verse.