4
rasa are housed in vast eighteenth-century palaces and are headed by sovereigns who retain the respect and allegiance of a certain proportion of the general populace. The Susuhunan (or Sunan) Pakubuwånå (currently number XIII, in a contested succession), considered the king of Solo, is the head of the senior line. His palace is the Karaton Suråkartå Hadiningrat, called the Kraton for short. The junior line is headed by the sovereign prince Pangéran Adipati Ariå Mangkunegårå (currently number IX), whose palace is the Purå Mangkunegaran (or, simply, the Mangkunegaran). The present monarchy traces its lineage back to the prophet Mohammed on one side and the mythical heroes of the Mahabharata on the other (and, curiously, through both sides, back to Adam).2 More recently, it looks back to a glorious past in its progenitor, the large and powerful kingdom of Mataram (founded, or rather resurrected, toward the end of the sixteenth century). Around 1745, Mataram’s royal seat was moved from Kartåsurå to a new location eleven kilometers to the east.3 The new site was a village called Sålå, which was displaced to build the new Kraton (“royal palace,” from ratu, “king”). The place was renamed Suråkartå Hadiningrat, which is why the city still has two names, Surakarta and Solo (in their Indonesian spellings), of which the latter is more common in everyday speech. The reason for the move was that the old palace had been occupied by a series of invaders. Kartåsurå was thus contaminated and its symbolic power as the center of the universe was rendered suspect.4 As a result of these calamities, the sunan’s (monarch’s) legitimacy was called into question, and several princes broke away, hoping to challenge the throne. In 1749 Pakubuwånå II died, shortly after turning control of his kingdom over to the VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or the Dutch East India Company), in the hopes that this would secure the throne for his son. Near the end of a decade-long war of succession, a treaty was signed between Prince Mangkubumi (Pakubuwånå II’s brother) and the VOC, in which the former kingdom of Mataram was divided in half; two years later the half belonging to the sunan was divided again. To the Sunanate of Surakarta, then, were added the Sultanate of Yogyakarta (the seat of which was sixty kilometers to the southwest) and the Mangkunegaran Principality (in Solo). Yogyakarta was later divided into the Sultanate and the Pakualaman,5 so that both court cities each have a senior and a junior royal line. 2. See, for instance, Sindusastra 1978 and Brandon 1970:17. 3. Much of what follows is based on Houben 1989. See also Soepomo and Ricklefs 1967, Larson 1987, and Ricklefs 1981. Pemberton 1994 gives a detailed account of the move from Kartåsuråå, with quotations from various Javanese manuscripts. 4. See Behrend 1989. 5. The similarity in the royal names of the four sovereigns of Yogyakarta and Surakarta is not mere coincidence. They all reflect the concentric model of kingship inherited from India: Pakubuwånå means “nail of the world or universe”; Mangkunegårå means “holding the realm in one’s lap”; Hamengkubuwånå, the name of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, means “holding the world or universe in one’s lap”; and Pakualam means “nail of the realm (or world).”