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John Peterson’s passion for old Javanese manuscripts
Devotion: John Peterson and a staff member of Yayasan Sastra Lestari (Yasri) read an ancient script in Surakarta, Central Java
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Devotion: John Peterson and a staff member of Yayasan Sastra Lestari (Yasri) read an ancient script in Surakarta, Central Java.
An Australian scholar shows how the love of ancient manuscripts and history does not recognize borders.
When John Peterson arrived in Indonesia from Australia in 1996, he was a doctoral student of the history and culture of 19th century Java at Monash University, Australia. During this time, he visited Sebelas Maret University (UNS) in Surakarta, Central Java, to conduct research for his dissertation.
“I needed old manuscripts to complete my dissertation. I was crazy about old texts for a long time and thus got fully engrossed,” said Peterson at the office of Yayasan Sastra Lestari (Yasri), a literary foundation in Banjarsari, Surakarta, Central Java, recently.
Peterson, who was born in Melbourne in 1956, and Supardjo, a lecturer at UNS Surakarta, founded Yasri in 1997. The foundation’s missions are the preservation, transliteration and digitization of manuscripts in Javanese and old Javanese.
Today, Yasri has transliterated over 6,000 texts or around 15 million words of the old documents, mostly comprising Javanese literary manuscripts from Central Java and its nearby regions written during the 19th century and the early 20th century.
“I just feel worried lest the old manuscripts be lost or gone. I think they’re important documents authored by literary men from the Kasunanan Surakarta and Pura Mangkunegara [palaces],” revealed Peterson.
Peterson’s interest in the old texts began in the early 1980s when he followed the Indonesian government’s scholarship program to study Javanese language and literature in the UNS Javanese culture and literature department. After studying for two years, he became a fluent Javanese speaker.
Regarding his anxiety about the loss of old manuscripts, Peterson said he had found a lot of them in poor condition and being sold at very low prices in the flea markets of Surakarta and Yogyakarta.
“The old documents are highly valuable, in terms of history as well as their content. I really couldn’t bear to watch the situation,” said Peterson, who is married to an Indonesian woman, Helena Budi Cahyani.
Such circumstances prompted him to preserve old texts by collecting them through purchases in Surakarta and Yogyakarta for years, until finally he had thousands of volumes.
As most of the manuscripts are in Javanese script, Peterson began to study writing and reading Javanese letters under the guidance of the late Suranto, a Javanese cultural expert and leading figure in Surakarta.
“Pak Suranto taught me to write, read Javanese characters and speak Javanese. Before he died, he even left his document collection to me to keep,” Peterson recalled.
After his two-year scholarship at UNS, Peterson returned to Melbourne, Australia, along with his text collection for fear that it would be damaged or lost. He later took a master’s program in Southeast Asian studies dealing with Indonesia, especially the Javanese language, at Melbourne University.
In the early 1990s, he went back to Surakarta for his doctoral research. With his colleague Supardjo, he founded Yasri before its official launch in 1997. All the documents he had taken to Australia were sent back to Indonesia and have become Yasri’s collection and transliteration project material.
“In Yasri, we started documenting the manuscripts and transliterating them up to the present,” said Peterson.
In the early period of Yasri, there was suspicion among Surakarta cultural circles that Peterson as a foreigner would take the old texts to Australia.
“It’s true that I’m a foreigner. But I think it’s unnecessary to make this an issue. I’m a man interested in a language, literature and culture, and I happen to be a citizen of Australia,” said the father of three.
In Peterson’s view, citizenship is only a matter of administration but the effort to rescue old texts is a matter of passion and enthusiasm. It has nothing to do with being a foreigner or Indonesian. Peterson has even financed Yasri with his own money, covering office rentals, computer procurement and employees’ salaries.
“This is a nonprofit foundation. Not all businesses are profit making. There’s no foreign fund, no government aid either. We undertake this project independently,” said Peterson, who makes his main living as an informatics consultant.
Some old texts that have already been transliterated by Yasri include Babad Majapahit (1901), Babad Pajang (1910), Serat Centhini in two versions (1912), Pararaton (1912) and Sri Karongron (1912). Yasri’s oldest manuscript already transcribed is Serat Damarwulan, written in 1810.
Peterson described Serat Centhini as one of the greatest works in new Javanese literature. It constitutes a handbook or source of knowledge of Javanese culture, containing everything about Javanese customs, traditions, rituals, legends, sexuality, mysticism and religion.
“Its texts are handwritten and printed in the form of Javanese poetry, totaling 12 volumes with 3,500 pages. Centhini is remarkable because it has become a reference for the activities of the Javanese community,” added Peterson.
Besides Cethini, Peterson also considers Babad Majaphit, written in 1836, as an important document, because the text contains the complete history of the Majapahit Kingdom, one of the major ancient kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago.
“This manuscript records the early establishment until the fall of Majapahit, complete with its culture, language, religion and even the money used at the time,” said Peterson.
He noted that of the around 6,000 texts, only 844 had so far been preserved through the digitization of transliteration from Javanese script to the Roman alphabet. The digitization results are uploaded to the website so that everybody can download and read them.
“Not everybody wishing to read old texts can read Javanese letters so that transliteration has to be done, followed by digitization. The documents are thus not only physically rescued but also have their content preserved,” Peterson pointed out.
Of the digitized texts, 27 are correspondence archives of great poet Ranggawarsito from 1836 to 1844 as well as 40 correspondence archives of Kasunanan Surakarta Prime Minister Kanjeng Raden Arya Sasradiningrat to subordinate administrators of Surakarta in 1837.
For Peterson, Javanese culture is an interesting subject of study for further research. However, he observes that very few people are attracted to study customs and traditions while in fact they serve as an important basis to strengthen the identity in this era of globalization.
“From the early 19th century, many literary men and intellectuals gave thoughts to cultural developments. In the period, Javanese newspapers even already appeared, such as Bramartani (1860s) and Jawi Kondha (1890s),” Peterson said.
— Photos by JP/Ganug Nugroho Adi.
