History and Time in Traditional Texts of Equatorial Southeast Asia

Abstract

Historical texts written in traditional genres of equatorial Southeast Asia, such as hikayat and babad, are a vitally important source for the study of the region’s history, especially for the period between the 16th and 19th centuries. Despite this, professional historians have often doubted the reliability of indigenous texts and are reluctant to value them as highly as European and Chinese sources. This thesis addresses the issue of how modern historians’ judgements about reliability of indigenous sources are closely related to how time is organised within those source texts. Its major finding is that these judgements implicitly assume that chronological organisation is a prerequisite of historicity. When indigenous texts exhibit chronological organisation, historians tend to treat them as historically reliable, but when the texts exhibit other forms of temporal organisation like genealogy, they tend to be seen as unreliable. This finding is reached through a structural analysis of three historical texts from across the region: the Malay Sulalat us-Salatin, the Balinese Babad Dalem and the Javanese Babad Tanah Jawi. The thesis deploys an original framework to analyse the temporal organisation of these three texts. This framework treats historical time as being constituted by particular ‘technologies’, such as era, calendar and genealogy, each of which produces its own temporality within the text. The thesis reassesses existing debates about the historicity of these three core texts, in order to show the correlation between the use of chronological technologies in a particular text and the positive judgement by historians of that text’s historical reliability. Hence, the multiple temporalities in the historical texts of equatorial Southeast Asia challenge the privilege that the conventional historiographical model gives to chronology. These texts can therefore serve as a basis for expanding these conventional criteria for what counts as a valid historical text, to better encompass the diversity of historical writing in this region.