Hindu Javanese
Tengger Tradition and Islam
ROBERT W. HEFNER
Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey
6
CULTURE CHALLENGE AND CULTURE HERO: THE TALE OF AJISAKA AND MOHAMMAD
There are numerous versions of the Tengger Ajisaka tale. The following is a translation of an oral version recounted to me by an elderly man in a southern Tengger village of Buda persuasion.
It was still in the time of Ki Kures, who lived in poverty with his wife. They could do nothing: to eat, they gathered leaves and grasses in the forest, and with this they fed their children. While in the forest one day, Ki Kures entered a large cave. There, to his surprise, he encountered an enormous serpent (naga), known as the Antaboga. The serpent spoke to Ki Kures: “Ki Kures, if you wish to feed and clothe yourself well, bring me each day a portion of milk.” Ki Kures left and returned the next day with a bamboo container of milk. As he poured the liquid into Antaboga’s open mouth, the serpent instructed him to reach in and select a jewel or piece of gold. Ki Kures did this every day, and from this he became very wealthy.
Ki Kures also had a son, named Bambang Dursila. The youth was extremely mischievous, loving only to play and gamble. He became suspicious of his father’s new wealth, wondering from where it came. Thus one day he followed his father and saw him enter the cave and give milk to the naga-serpent. The next day Bambang went himself to the cave, bringing milk, and hoping to trick and slay the animal. But the naga knew already of Bambang’s plans. As the youth drew near, the Antaboga lashed at him with such force that Bambang was thrust into a tree, dead.
Ki Kures came later to the cave and saw his son. “How can this be, my lord? My son dead?” The Antaboga replied: “You must not worry, your son died trying to kill me.” Ki Kures became very upset. “My lord naga,” he said, “my son’s wife is pregnant.” “Tomorrow,” the naga replied, “when the child is born, name it yourself if it is a girl. But if it is a boy, bring him here that I may see him.”
The child was born a boy. Ki Kures brought him to the naga, who took him and raised him as his own son, teaching him many wonderful powers. He taught him how to make himself invisible, how to bend steel, how to block knives or bullets, how to control his strength in many ways. Antaboga named him Aji, because he was so handsome. Ki Kures exclaimed to Antaboga: “I have never seen one so handsome as he!” Antaboga responded: “Ah, but there is one who is even more handsome, whose name is Nabi Mohammad. Your grandson must now go to study (ngaji) with him.”
Aji went to Mecca, where he studied with four companions, Abu Bakar, Usman, Umar, and Ali. One day the Prophet Mohammad came to the five companions, and addressed Aji. “Aji?” “Yes my lord Gusti,” responded Aji. “You must go now to investigate an epidemic. People alive in the morning are dying by evening. You must learn why this is happening. Go and check the jamjam water. If it is clear, the plague will soon pass. If it is cloudy, the plague will continue.”
Aji set out immediately with his four companions. En route a devil entered Aji’s bowels, making him ill. He excused himself to relieve his discomfort. His companions awaited his return, but he did not appear. Alarmed, the four companions returned to Mecca, telling Mohammad what had happened. “We come bearing bad news, our Lord prophet. Aji cannot be found.” Mohammad responded: “Enough! We need not worry. Persons who disappear reappear. Don’t worry.” The prophet then looked at one of the pillars (saka) in the great mosque and saw Aji hiding invisible in the pillar. “Who is this hiding in the mosque pillar?” Mohammad exclaimed. He then understood what had happened. Mohammad spoke: “Henceforth you will be known as Ajisaka. You will be my equal, yes it is so Aji! When you become male, I will be female, when I become male, you will be female. When you walk the night, I walk the day; when I walk the night, you walk the day. The seven days of the week will be mine, the days of the five-day week will be yours.” Mohammad then named the days of the seven-day week: Senen, Seloso, Rebo, Kemis, Jemuah, Sabtu, Minggu. And these were the days of Ajisaka’s five-day week: Legi, Pahing, Pon, Wage, Kliwon. But Ajisaka still had his own ideas, and thus gave different names to the seven days of Mohammad’s week: Dite, Soma, Anggara, Buda, Respati, Sukra, Tumpak. Twelve were the names of the days, the two made one.
Two other men then appeared. One came from the west, and was named Setia; he was to be Mohammad’s servant. The other came from the east, and was named Setuhu; he was to become Ajisaka’s servant. Mohammad turned to Ajisaka and said, “Aji, now you must go to the country of Medangkamulian, in the southeast. Take there a primbon prayer book and an almanac for determining auspicious dates. Go there, the belief in that country is still not true belief. The king among the people eats human flesh. His name is Dewotocengkar.”
Ajisaka departed immediately. Mid-route he realized he had forgotten his kris dagger. He turned to Setuhu and said, “Go fetch my sword and make sure that you allow none other than me to have it.” Meanwhile in Mecca, Mohammad found Ajisaka’s kris. He thus commanded his servant: “Take this sword to Ajisaka and make sure that none other than he takes it from you.” Each of the two servants set out on his journey, and after much travel the two men came face to face. Setuhu spoke to Setia: “I have come for my master’s kris.” Setia responded: “I can allow no one other than Ajisaka to have it.” Words gave way to struggle as each servant sought to grasp the sword. First Setia pulled it to him, then Setuhu pulled it back, back and forth, back and forth, until each was pierced by the blade and fell dead. Setia fell to the north, Setuhu to the south. It is for this reason that Muslims bury their dead with the head to the north, and Buda people bury theirs with the head to the south.
When their servants failed to return, Ajisaka and Mohammad grew worried. Each finally set out to find his servant. Meeting mid-route, Ajisaka and Mohammad saw the bodies of their faithful servants lying in the road. Saddened, the two lords then agreed to honor the memory of their servants. Mohammad created the thirty letters of the Arabic alphabet; Ajisaka created the twenty letters of the Javanese alphabet. The twenty and thirty make fifty, which is five surrounded by a zero, as the four corners of the house enclose its center. Mohammad then addressed Ajisaka: “Yes it is so. You must continue your work in the east. In Medangkamulian you must build a house of prayer. There you will find your followers. I return now to Arabia.”
The people of Medangkamulian were very backward. Aji taught them to build a place of worship, a sanggar. The people pronounced the two sentences, the profession of faith. Aji explained that the two sentences (kalimah loro) had the following meaning: “There are two expressions. If there is male, there is female; if west, east; and it is for this reason that we must perform the Karo worship.” To worship two (loro) is to worship Karo. In worship we remember Setia and Setuhu, the will of Mohammad and Ajisaka, the memory of the slain servants.
In Medangkamulian all admired Ajisaka’s wisdom and good looks. Aji lived with an elderly widow, who had taken him as son. One day a servant of the evil king Dewotocengkar came to the house, to tell the widow that she had been chosen as the next victim of the king’s cannibal appetite. On hearing this, Ajisaka immediately volunteered to take her place. The old woman protested, saying, “But you are such a handsome person, a man like a prince. You must not die.” But Ajisaka went ahead and was taken before the evil Dewotocengkar.
The king was delighted to learn that one so young as Ajisaka was to be his meal. He asked Ajisaka if he was indeed prepared to die. Ajisaka replied, “Yes, but you must grant me one final wish. For my grave, you must grant me a land area as broad as my turban. That much land I request of you.” The king agreed, and instructed his servant to unravel Aji’s turban. As the turban was unfurled, it stretched to the east, south, west, and north. It was so large that Dewotocengkar was himself forced to retreat before its breadth, until he was pushed to the cliffs above the south sea. Suddenly Aji snapped the cloth, pushing the evil king into the water, where he turned into an enormous white crocodile. Aji then called all the people of the country to join him in throwing stones at the evil king, so that he would never again ascend onto land. Dewotocengkar cried: “Hey Ajisaka—all your children and descendants to the smallest mouse, any who dare come near this water I will capture as my own.” Aji replied: “That makes no difference, for you are now in the water and must never again return to land.”
Free of their evil king, the people of Medangkamulian made Ajisaka their king. He taught them many things. The learning and prosperity of the kingdom were great.
Mythic Word and World
As with the earlier Kasada myth, the Ajisaka tale is a story of two cultural traditions told through the interaction of personnages: Ajisaka and Mohammad, Buda and Islam. The story moves the main actors through a series of episodes that provide important, if at times implicit, comment on the quality of their relationship. Personal relationship is here of course symptomatic of a larger cultural process. The myth is not merely a tale of Islam and Buda, but of the evolution of Javanese culture.
From the start we hear sounds of a new order and of the demise of the old. It is, the story begins, the time of Ki Kures. Despite the honorific Javanese title (ki), Kures is recognizable as a character from a less exclusively Javanese literary tradition. In popular Javanese Muslim tradition, the Kures are the pagan enemies of Mohammad at the time of Islam’s founding in Arabia. Here in the Aji tale, however, Kures is a simpler symbol of a precultural past, at a time when people “could do nothing.” Ki Kures is a forager; he and his family are miserably poor. Only his name gives hint of a larger impending religious order. It is Kures’s poverty that creates the condition for the first important relationship introduced in the myth. Ki Kures will meet the great naga-serpent, Antaboga, and become his servant.
Two worlds have met. Related to the naga-serpent found in much Asian folklore (cf. Tambiah 1970:169), Antaboga in Javo-Balinese tradition is none other than the world serpent who lies at the foundation of the world (Covarrubias 1937:7). In this narrative, however, his role is less vast; whatever he may have once meant to Tengger Javanese, Antaboga now figures in no other popular tales. In this tale, Antaboga plays a central role in the readjustment of relationships that leads to Ajisaka’s appearance. Antobaga kills Ki Kures’s son, and this act ultimately results in Antaboga’s becoming teacher to Aji, the son of Bambang Dursila. Aji, the eventual culture hero, is thus of very humble origins: the grandson of the pagan Ki Kures, he is also the son of the good-for- nothing Bambang. Expressed formally, the movement of personnages is simple: elimination of the father facilitates a new and higher relationship, that of teacher to student. This relationship, however, is no more than a bridge to another. Aji’s knowledge and good looks, it is said, are only surpassed by those of the prophet Mohammad. So Aji is off to Mecca, to ngaji, a term used in Java for formal Islamic study. The change of relationship—here Aji’s movement from Antaboga to Mohammad as teacher—once again signals the inauguration of a new cultural era. From the pagan Ki Kures, savagery personified, to the syncretic Antaboga, we have now come to one “yet more handsome.” This cultural stage, a Muslim one, will also eventually be superseded.
In Mecca Aji studies with four companions: Abu Bakar, Usman, Umar, and Ali. The four-plus-one balance is recognizably Javanese in its numeral classification, but Aji’s four companions figure in another tradition as well: they are the four successors to Mohammad as caliphs of the Islamic nation. Aji’s cultural quest has brought him to a curious milieu indeed. At this early point in the tale, Aji’s relationship with Mohammad is unquestionably that of social inferior. In the Javanese-language version of this tale, Aji addresses Mohammad in respectful high Javanese, whereas Mohammad responds in the low Javanese of a superior addressing a subordinate. Mohammad commands Aji—but even early in the tale, there is a tension to their relationship that becomes more apparent as the story progresses. Mohammad, for example, orders Aji to go to the jamjam spring to perform divination concerning a plague. Jamjam is Javanese for the Arabic zamzam, the name of a holy spring in Mecca, and still the site of pilgrim activity. En route to the spring Aji falls ill. According to this version of the Aji account, Aji has been possessed by a devil (iblis); in other versions of the same tale, however, Aji is said to encounter not a devil but an archangel (melaikat), an Islamic spirit being that in Javanese folk tradition often plays a spiritual role very similar to that of Indic dewa as a source of power, guardianship, and knowledge. According to these tales, Aji learns from the archangel things that even the Prophet Mohammad (who is, after all, still a human) does not know. Aji’s wisdom thus comes to exceed that of Mohammad’s, and the stage is set for the curious mosque encounter described in the present version of the Aji tale.
Aji’s relationship with Mohammad has changed. He returns to Mecca and, trickster style, hides in the main pillar (saka) of the great mosque. The ruse is at once suggestive of Aji’s new relationship with the prophet and indicative of the meaning of Aji’s full name. Aji is to be Ajisaka or, according to this pop etymology, “Aji of the pillar.” At this point in the text the dynamic tension between Aji and Mohammad becomes dearer; Aji and Mohammad become, literally, polar opposites, bound to each other in their difference. When one is night, the other is day; when one is the moon the other is the sun; when one is female the other is male. The two primary systems of weekdays used in Java are also explained by Aji and Mohammad’s relationship. Aji is the owner of the five-day week (the terms of which are Javanese), whereas Mohammad is the owner of the seven-day week (the terms of which are derived from Arabic). Aji’s trickster role appears once again, however; he has his own ideas as to what one should call the days of the seven-day week. The terms that he uses (dite, etc.) are in fact the Sanskrit-derived terms still used in some cultural settings in Java; Javanese popularly think of these Sanskrit terms as the Old Javanese names for the seven days of the week. In this tale however, Aji’s use of the Old Javanese terms provides one more example of Aji’s tricksterish ways, putting what is Javanese before orthodox Islam.
The balance between Aji and Mohammad, however, is not yet complete. Mohammad still commands Aji in low Javanese, and Aji is still the servant of the Prophet’s will. The appearance of Setia and Setuhu, servants to Aji and Mohammad, will ultimately allow for a displacement of this relationship. On order from Mohammad, Aji leaves for Medangkamulian, the mythical first kingdom of Java according to popular Javanese tradition. Aji forgets his kris dagger, Mohammad finds it, and the servants of the two set out to return the kris to Aji. Setia and Setuhu meet, clash, push and shove, and fall back dead. Each is, in effect, victim of overscrupulous fidelity to a master’s command. The fate of the two servants is, of course, intended to give warning to anyone inclined to be overzealous in obeying religious masters. Patience and religious tolerance are the way to avoid conflict and pain. Setia and Setuhu learned the hard way. Their position in burial, however, will serve as a reminder to others who serve Aji and Mohammad: followers of Mohammad will be buried with their head to the north, followers of Aji, to the south. Arabic and Javanese script are also invented, the myth recounts, to commemorate the servants’ unfortunate clash. Here too the message of the myth is that two key, and often opposed, aspects of Javanese and Islamic culture are, in reality, not at all antagonistic. Both were invented to remember the same disaster, and to prevent its recurrence. Those inclined to see Arabic and Javanese writing as opposed ways of knowledge must remember this and never repeat the servants’ mistake.1
Aji returns to Medangkamulian after this reencounter with Mohammad. In that country, he teaches the people to build a sanggar, a traditional (and not necessarily Islamic) house of worship, rather than an Islamic langgar. He also instructs people in the meaning of the kalimah loro, that is, the “two sentences,” usually understood to mean the Islamic profession of faith, recognizing Allah as God and Mohammad as his prophet. Ever the trickster, however, Aji has other ideas as to the meaning of the “two sentences.” His ideas have to do with the necessary unity of opposites: male and female, east and west, Islam and Buda. According to Aji, this is the true meaning of the kalimah loro, and it is a meaning that also underlies the Karo celebration. Islam and Buda celebrate the same truth.
While working in Medangkamulian, Aji lives as an adopted son to an elderly widow. Earlier bereft of a father, Aji became a student (to the naga); now adopted as an adult son, Aji becomes teacher. His new relationship to the widow, however, will serve to introduce the final conflict of the Aji tale: Aji will take the place of the widow as victim of the flesh-eating king, Dewotocengkar. The evil-king’s name signals a larger cultural reference: from cengkar, “without,” and dewoto, “deity, spirit,” Dewotocengkar is godlessness personified. Aji’s task is to change all this, and introduce another cultural order into the kingdom. To do this, Aji resorts to another in his bag of tricks. His turban—an item of dress conveniently identifiable as either Muslim or Hindu—covers the island and forces the evil king into the south sea. The story here touches on a familiar theme in Javanese folklore: the dangers of the south coast and of oceans in general. To this day the cult of Nyai Roro Kidul in Central Java identifies that sea goddess as the being who periodically snatches unsuspecting male bathers from the shore. Here in the Aji myth, however, the sea’s danger is identified with the evil king who, on entering the water, becomes a white crocodile—a fitting image for the south sea’s dangerous pounding surf. Dewotocengkar’s warning gives voice to a generally recognized value of inland Javanese society: Javanese should stick to land and avoid the seas, where danger and death lurk.
On land, however, a new cultural order has emerged. It is the age of Ajisaka, and the cultural evolution about which the Aji tale has spoken appears complete—if rather inconclusively. Mohammad remains unheard, but still in the background. It was he, after all, who commanded Aji to bring religion to Java. It would thus appear to have a rather fragile independence, this kingdom of Ajisaka.
Tengger and Non-Tengger in the Aji Tale
Few of the terms massed in the Ajisaka tale appear distinctively Tengger. The tale abounds with Islamic references, and makes almost no mention of specifically Tengger practices or beliefs. Indeed, comparative and historical evidence suggests that the tale is not an orthogenetic product of Tengger tradition. I recorded variants of the same tale in kejawen Muslim communities far to the south of the Tengger highlands. There are nineteenth-century versions of the same tale in the National Museum in Jakarta, most of which come from non-Tengger areas of Java.2 The central narrative of the Ajisaka tale appears to have been popular in lowland areas of the Eastern Salient before it was adopted by Tengger.
An urban man from a community to the east of Malang once visited my first village of residence in southern Tengger, and heard me discussing the Aji tale with villagers during a slametan meal. Something of a self-taught specialist in mystical matters, Pak Dar later took me aside to explain what he said was the “true” meaning of the Ajisaka tale. He said that Aji went to Mecca, yes, but not to become a Muslim. He sought to acquire Mohammad’s spiritual knowledge (ilmu). In this respect, Pak Dar pointed out, Ajisaka was similar to him. After independence, Pak Dar had been an army administrator in the Tengger highlands, and took advantage of his frequent visits to the area to study with a local priest. He was not interested in the detail of the priestly liturgy (here he imitated in grotesque fashion the stylized gestures of priestly invocation) but the ilmu that lay behind it. “I was not a student of the priest, but a thief of his knowledge.” The agreement between Aji and Mohammad, Pak Dar explained, stipulated that islands to the west of Java would become Islamic, whereas those to the east would remain Buda. When I pointed out to Pak Dar that the pact seems to have been ignored, since most of Java is now Islamic, Pak Dar shrugged and added that, in fact, the dividing line between Islam and Buda lay just to the west of the town in which he lived.
Pak Dar was typical of some lowland visitors to the Tengger region. He saw Tengger as “true” or “native” Javanese (Jawa asli). As a student of kebatinan mysticism, however, he had rather little patience with the detail of Tengger liturgy. He sought to get at what he thought was the metaphysical essence behind the Tengger priest’s ritual hocus pocus; he wanted ngelmu knowledge, not religious community.
This and other evidence indicate that the Aji tale once played a role in a religious cult linking Buda Tengger to non- or nominally Islamic people in communities below the Tengger highlands. To this day, there are at least two separate burial sites (punden) where Setia and Setuhu are reputed to be buried. One of these lies near Turen, well over 40 kilometers from any Tengger settlement. According to this site’s caretaker, pilgrims flocked to the area until the massacres of 1965-1966; since then, people come only rarely. Where did most of these pilgrims come from? According to the caretaker’s report, most were from the Turen area, and communities to the south and east here in the Eastern Salient, although some came from as far away as Central Java. Tengger Javanese, the man added, were known to visit the site but were not its most frequent visitors.
The fact that Tengger joined in a spiritual cult which was in no way exclusively “Tengger” provides testimony to the changing self-perception of this people in the face of a revitalized Javanese Islam. Like the earlier Kasada myth, the Tengger version of the Ajisaka tale is concerned with cultural legitimation of a threatened tradition. But the terms the tale mobilizes for its task are profoundly different from those heard in the Kasada myth. Gone entirely is any mention of the sacred geography of Tengger territory. In its place one sees a somewhat less parochial cultural terrain that includes Mecca, the jamjam spring, and Medang-kamulian. Gone too is any mention of Tengger ancestors and social organization. The sociological reference in this tale is much less local: it appeals to all followers of Ajisaka, all non- or nominally Islamic Javanese. The strength of the myth’s appeal lies in its very generality; it speaks, evidently, to mystic townspeople as well as to mountain ritualists.
Because of the generality of its appeal, the myth speaks only sparingly of the ritual which, according to Tengger interpretation of the tale, it is supposed to explain. Coming as it does after a parade of syncretic and Islamic references, the myth’s mention of the Karo celebration appears anomalous, as if it were tacked on to an already existing tale. Judging by comparison with non-Tengger variants of the Ajisaka tale, the reference to the Karo celebration does appear to have been appended to a preexisting moral tale. Several non-Tengger variants of the tale that I collected in lowland communities were similar to the above version in all major details except the reference to the Karo celebration; the lowland versions made no such mention. Historical evidence also suggests that the Ajisaka myth entered the Tengger region later than it did some of the surrounding non-Tengger communities. Based on research carried out in 1867, Meinsma reported that “Of the coming of Ajisaka (to Java), the Tengger know nothing” (Meinsma 1879:132). Meinsma was a meticulous researcher, and his report seems credible. Only a few decades later, however, Jasper reported that turn-of-the-century Tengger cited the Aji-Mohammad myth as their own, and linked it to both the Karo festival and the sodoran dance (Jasper 1926:41). A University of Indonesia research team, working in northeast Tengger in 1955, noted a similar association; Karo and the sodoran “remember the deaths of the two faithful servants” (Wibisono 1956:41).
The period between Meinsma’s research and that of Jasper at the beginning of this century was, of course, a critical one in modern Tengger history. The advance of Dutch colonialism in the countryside had engendered a political crisis throughout Java, and a revitalized Islam was in the forefront of a growing anti-colonial and anti-traditional movement (Carey 1979, Kartodirdjo 1972, 1973). The agricultural lands below the Tengger highlands were major centers of Dutch enterprise, and it was in these areas that a progressive and politically self-conscious Islam began to grow as a social movement. It challenged not only the oppressive policies of Dutch colonialism, but also village traditions that were deemed parochial and out of step with the political and religious challenge of the era. A new identity had to be forged, based on a moral community greater than that specified by village traditions and first-founding ancestors. The Aji tale spoke to this same crisis. It too proposed a new identity, but one, it was hoped, that left room for the followers of Ajisaka along side the community of Mohammad.
Ajisaka Vanquished
As a tool for cultural legitimation the Aji myth was, at least for Tengger, critically flawed. In defending a non-Islamic tradition it adopts a number of Islamic references. A tension thus remains between Aji and Mohammad, one that is apparent in the Javanese dialogue in the Aji text. It is always Aji who speaks as social subordinate to Mohammad. Mohammad speaks as Gusti or Lord to a subordinate. Aji nonetheless manages to get his way most of the time through trickster artifice. But this does not so much resolve the tension between the two leaders as it defers it through deviousness. Aji is a trickster, not a victor, and from this perspective the curiously unfinished tone of the tale is appropriate. The tale in effect ends with a standoff that refuses to acknowledge itself as such. Although nominally under Mohammad’s command, Aji is a unreliable messenger of the word because he is, quite simply, too committed to Javanese ways. In building a place of worship, he thus constructs a sanggar rather than a Islamic langgar. For scripture, he uses a Javanese primbon rather than the Koran. Yet he never proclaims his independence from Mohammad. It should come therefore as little surprise that, in communities below Tengger, there exists a final chapter on Aji’s fate. I recorded this oral addendum to the tale in a recently Islamized community to the south of Tengger. My informant explained that Ajisaka was a good king, but a lousy religious teacher. One day a messenger named Subakir arrived from Mecca with a letter from Mohammad. Mohammad wished to discuss the progress of Aji’s work, so Aji was ordered to return immediately to Mecca. Aji set out in a sailing vessel for Mecca, accompanied by his wife and son. They sailed and sailed for many days. But one day, in the middle of the ocean, it became dead calm. No wind, no motion, no sound—nothing. That was it, finished, the end of ole Ajisaka. Aji couldn’t do anything, and no one could do anything for poor Aji. “I don’t know if he died or what,” my informant explained. “But no more was ever heard from him. He was finished, kaput, right there in the middle of the sea. That’s Ajisaka.” As in the earlier version of the Aji tale, the dangers of the sea are again brought into mythic service. This time, however, the sea simply swallows its victim in its vastness. There is a new order arising, one that knows nothing of Ajisaka, which will proclaim the glories of one “even more handsome.” What better metaphor for the Islamization of rural Java? There is here no conversion by the sword, but the benign if deliberate neglect of a collective memory. The culture hero does not die; he and his truth fade away.
Those Tengger who still endorse the Aji-Mohammad pact bitterly deny the truth of this mythic addendum. Most of these true believers live in southern Tengger villages, areas that have resisted the Hindu reform movement (Chapter 11). For them, Ajisaka established a pact between Buda and Islam that must be renewed each year through the celebration of Karo and the remembering of the slain servants. “The ujung rattan fight must be performed each year,” a southern priest once told me, “so as to cast away the evil of the battle between the servants of Aji and Mohammad.” Village leaders throughout most of the Tengger north, however, today reject the Aji tale, and deny that it has anything to do with the Karo celebration. The disagreement over the myth and its relation to Karo has further alienated traditionalists in southern Tengger from Hindu reformists in the north.
Myth, Ritual, and the Conflict of Interpretations
The Aji and Mohammad myth is not the only tale of Ajisaka. Long before he figured in a tale with Mohammad, Ajisaka was already a familiar figure in Javanese folklore. He is associated with the earliest of Java’s Hindu kingdoms (cf. Raffles 1965:11:66), and his arrival in Java is said to have been the beginning of the Javanese saka era. Aji is also said to have been the creator of gamelan music, Javanese script, and a variety of other distinctive elements of traditional Javanese culture. He is a culture hero par excellence, familiar to everyone who studies Javanese script. When a child learns that alphabet for the first time, he or she usually learns a little jingle by which to remember the order of letters. Sound-similarities between the letters and Javanese words create the following tale:
Ho no co ro ko There were two servants
Do to so wo lo Who did not deviate from their orders
Po do jo yo nyo Equal in victory (happiness)
Mo go bo to ngo Stopped dead together.
The story which is told with the jingle is that of the two servants, also mentioned in the Aji and Mohammad tale. The kris over which the two servants struggle is, as in the Tengger tale, Aji’s. In this Aji tale, however, both servants are identified as aides to Ajisaka; Mohammad is not drawn into the story, and the tale is not thought to have anything to do with Islam. There is another Ajisaka tale widely known throughout Java that similarly makes no mention of Islam, elements of which have also made their way into the Aji-Mohammad story. According to this account, Ajisaka was the son of an Indian Brahmanic family. He was also a seeker of knowledge, as in the Aji-Mohammad tale, and he sailed off from India for Java to learn more of the islands to the east. He arrives in a kingdom called Medangkamulian, and there does battle (turban and all) with a man-eating king named Dewotocengkar. His victory brings an era of knowledge and great prosperity to the heretofore backward people of Java. As Poerwadhie (1957) has noted, Aji’s odyssey here symbolizes cultural evolution, centered on the transition from pre-Indic to Indic culture. It is this version of the Ajisaka tale that my Central Javanese friends were most familiar with; none had ever heard of the Aji-Mohammad tale.
The Tengger version of the Aji tale uses these other Aji accounts as building blocks in a story with a different cultural message. Ajisaka’s identity, above all, is much more ambiguous than in these other tales. Neither Indic nor Islamic, nor even just Javanese, Aji is all of these at once—a fitting figure for the turbulent terrain of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century East Java. What is curious about the Aji tale in Tengger, however, is its relation to the Karo festival and the sodoran pole dance. Even in those accounts in which Tengger reportedly identify these ritual events with the servants of Mohammad and Ajisaka, villagers are also heard to identify these ritual activities with sexual and fertility themes not mentioned in the Aji myth. Both Jasper (1926) and Wibisono (1956), for example, stress that Karo and the sodoran remember the slain servants of Aji and Mohammad. Not noting the inconsistency, however, both authors then go on to say that some people identify elements of these ritual activities with other meanings: the dancers in the sodoran are said to be bride and groom, their movement in and out is said to represent sexual intercourse, and so on.
In providing observers with these descriptive details, Tengger villagers may themselves have been unconcerned as to whether the fertility interpretation of Karo and the sodoran conflicted with the themes stressed in the Aji-Mohammad tale. What more appropriate image of complementarity, after all, than the fertile interaction of man and woman? Something was going on, however, in the larger cultural context. When Meinsma was in Tengger in the 1860s, after all, Karo was a regular ritual tradition, but Tengger “knew nothing” of Ajisaka. A half-century later, the dualities represented in Karo and the sodoran were associated in interpretive exegesis with Mohammad and Ajisaka. Yet another half-century later, when I came to Tengger to witness the Karo celebration, the majority of Tengger denied that either Karo or the sodoran had anything to do with Ajisaka and Mohammad, whereas a minority of Tengger (most in the southern region) insisted otherwise. To judge by Jasper’s (1926) description of the sodoran, the basic ritual detail had not changed dramatically in the period between his study and mine. What had changed was the larger social world in which Tengger lived, and the experience they brought to their interpretation of the rite. It was this larger changing experience which underlay the interpretation and reinterpretation of Karo and the sodoran. The meaning of the rites, in other words, was not timelessly stored away in fixed ritual symbols or pregiven meanings. There can be no such essential center to ritual interpretation.
In practical terms this was the point illustrated in the comments of an elder, Pak Joyo, in the Tengger northwest. He had heard of my interest in the Aji tale, and took me aside to explain that the version of the tale I had collected in southern Tengger (where I was living at the time) was “mistaken.” Northern Tengger, he explained, had also once believed in the Aji-Mohammad pact. Some village elders, however, always rejected the tale, saying that it was a scheme to lead Tengger bit by bit to Islam. In the 1950s, the lowlands around Tengger were tense with religious and political strife. Leaders in one northern village brought together community elders to dicusss Tengger history. These elders insisted that the true meaning of Ajisaka could be seen in the sodoran dance. The sodor poles were symbols of the “staff of life,” and the dance itself represented sexual intercourse. Why else, Pak Joyo explained, would the poles have been filled with seeds? Tengger ancestors were concerned with a fundamental truth. They understood the origins of life, and recognized that this was God’s plan. All Tengger rituals thus celebrate this same theme of male and female, creation and life. “It is a simple truth, one which does not try to impose itself on others.” Ajisaka, Pak Joyo added, was merely a symbol of these concerns. He had nothing to do with Islam. He was a “shield to protect our tradition,” and to help us remember: “Never forget the way of your ancestors.”
At the time of my research, most southern Tengger were familiar with such criticisms of the Aji-Mohammad tale, but bitterly rejected them, nonetheless. When a Hindu Tengger school teacher once visited my southern village of residence, he tried to explain to the local priest and village chief the importance of the Hindu reform movement. He defended that movement’s criticisms of the old Aji-Mohammad tale, and spoke of the need to build a truly modern religion, with its own scripture, commandments, and national organization. The priest and chief stood adamant in their opposition to the northerner’s comments. Who came first to Java, they asked, Ajisaka or Hinduism? Which is older, the Weda of which Hindus speak or Ajisaka’s teachings? Knowing of my interest in the Ajisaka tale, the southern village chief turned to me at one point in the conversation, visibly upset. I had visited northern Tengger recently, he said. So could I please tell him one thing: Had not Tengger ancestors in the north also once spoken of Ajisaka and Mohammad? Did they too not speak of ngaluri and the inviolability of Buda ways?
Conclusion: Aji and Identity
The gulf between the Kasada tale—first recorded in Dutch sources in 1785—and the Ajisaka myth clearly reveals the depths of the identity crisis shaking turn-of-the-century Tengger. The contrast is striking. Whereas Kasada looks up toward Mt. Bromo, Aji looks out on Java. Kasada’s contract linking territory, people, and ancestral progenitors is replaced in the Aji tale with an almost desperate appeal for an alliance between all those faithful to Ajisaka’s ways—all those, in other words, who identify with kejawen or Javanist culture. The ancestral legitimation of a territorial tradition thus gives way in the Aji tale to a more appropriately pan-Javanese appeal, neatly symbolized in the figure of Ajisaka. Under his banner, Java’s diverse local traditions could be characterized in terms more general than those of some backwater parochialism. There is a problem with Aji, however. His appeal is formulated within such an Islamic framework that, at least for non-Muslims like Tengger, it is already fatally compromised. Perhaps sensing this, many modern Tengger have come to regard the tale as “dangerous and wrong,” as one priest in north Tengger explained.
From the perspective of religious rationalization, the Ajisaka tale is a fascinating document. The religion from which it comes fits neatly into the category of neither “traditional” nor “modern” religion, as we understand these terms in a contemporary (and largely Weberian) sense. The world of Ajisaka’s followers had not experienced secularization or a “disenchantment” of its territory; it preserved much of its spiritual vitality. There is nonetheless something dramatically untraditional about the tale. It displays little of the confident self-assurance one so often encounters in the narrative traditions of small-scale societies. It has caught wind of other ways, and appears anxiously aware of their challenge. Hence it talks not of local ancestors occupying a familiar terrain, but of Mohammad, Mecca, the zamzam spring, Abu Bakar, archangels, and a host of other beings who, at least from a philological perspective, can hardly be considered autochthonous fauna. The story is thus quite deliberately not just Tengger, but pan-Javanese. It addresses the cultural plight of a variety of non- or nominally Islamic traditions in a Java witness to a revitalizing Islam. It insists that although that Islamic heritage is itself proper and true, so too is the heritage of Ajisaka and Java. In other words, the Aji tale seeks to create a new self-definition for a threatened Javanese tradition. In the area of rural East Java around the Tengger highlands, in particular, it was intended to provide a disparate assortment of local traditions with the terms for a new and more expansive social identity, articulated in terms of a pan-Javanese identity rather than punden cults of first-founding ancestors. Mohammad’s counterpart, Aji was the prophet of this pan-Javanese community.
Ajisaka was, however, a flawed prophet for a compromised community. The pan-Javanese community promised in the Aji tale never really came into existence. It would be swept aside by an integrative revolution that, beginning in nineteenth-century Java, slowly redefined the self-perceptions of rural populations increasingly pressed by the demands of a modern political economy and by the collapse of received self-definitions. Out of these same circumstances, Java’s Islamic community managed to forge the cultural idioms and the organizational apparatus for the construction of a national movement premised on a revitalized religious identity (Kartodirdjo 1972). Events of the twentieth century would reveal, however, that the community hoped for under the terms of the Aji tale failed to materialize as planned. The alliance sought between Tengger and other “followers of Ajisaka” would, with a few isolated exceptions, be forgotten or repressed. Aji’s erstwhile proponents would have to come up with other solutions to the problem of self-definition in a changing Java.