2 - Since When is Java an Island, and When Will It End? An Early-Modern Javanese Poetic Map in a Late 19th-Century Cosmopolis

In the “Big Menak” – the 18th-century Javanese poem telling the Asian-Islamic epic of Amir Hamza, the Prophet’s uncle – there is a fascinating passage about how Java became an island. This passage, resembling a poetic map, is puzzling because Java does not actually feature as a setting in the Big Menak. It states that Java used to be contiguous with Sri Lanka, itself represented as the capital of Ajam (continental West and South Asia). It predicts that Java, and other islands of the Indonesian archipelago and the Malay peninsula, will re-connect in 1000 years.

              Where did this idea come from? What did it mean against the background of contemporary ideas about Java’s islandhood? How did it relate to other oceanic peripheries that feature in the epic, including Abĕsi (Abyssinia)?

              In the 1880s the Big Menak was published for the first time, in eight volumes comprising 4000 pages of Javanese script. This happened in Semarang, the port city that had been under Dutch control for two centuries, a transportation hub linked to almost the entire planet, inhabited by a mêlée of Javanese, Chinese, Europeans, Malays, Arabs, South Asians, even African soldiers from the Gold Coast, and where Dutch and Malay newspapers reported about world affairs. How did the Big Menak’s ideas about Java’s past and future attachment to Asia and about the position of Africa fare in this modern and cosmopolitan environment? We have only circumstantial evidence, but enough for a calculated guess.