Destiny: The Life of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta, 1785–1855 by Peter Carey (review)

Prince Diponegoro is an Indonesian national hero who led a major uprising against the Dutch colonial regime, or the Java War, in 1825–30 and who wrote a valuable autobiography Babad Dipanagara. His life and the Java War itself have been subjects of numerous stories, research and ever paintings. Peter Carey, who published Diponegoro’s biography The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 in 2007 (Leiden: KITLV Press) offers an updated reconstruction of his life.

The new book title speaks for itself: Diponegoro’s life is treated as determined by his specific environments that considerably and even drastically changed over time, and their connections with changing world patterns as well as inner Javanese developments. Carey shows that Diponegoro became the ‘crucial figure’ of the Java War (p. 327) due to historical coincidence.

Despite the fact that the Java War was decisively the summit of Diponegoro’s fate—the time when he enjoyed greatest impact on the Dutch and Javanese—Carey places his life in a much broader historical context covering economic, social, political, and cultural changes in Europe that were influenced by the Double Revolution and in turn had influenced the changes in Southeast Asia and particularly in Java.

Carey divides his book into four well-balanced parts of three chapters each: ‘Youth and Upbringing, 1785–1808’, ‘The Beginning of the Ruin of the Land of Java, 1808–1812’, ‘Golden Years, Iron Years, 1812–1825’, and ‘War and Exile, 1825–1855’. The monograph also contains a glossary of Javanese terms and an index.

The first chapter, ‘Diponegoro’s Youth and Upbringing, 1785–1803’, shows that the prince was greatly influenced by his great-grandmother, Ratu Ageng Tegalrejo, who was his guardian and to whom he was obliged for his early and deep acquaintance with the needs of Javanese peasantry, for his great devotion to Muslim beliefs and Javanese practices, for his knowledge of the ideas and representatives of the Javanese Muslim (santri) communities in south-central Java. Such upbringing was unusual for the Yogyakarta princes and may be treated as a factor of Diponegoro’s unique destiny. The death of Ratu Ageng in 1803 made Diponegoro the lord of her estate, Tegalrejo, and opened a new page in his life.

The second chapter, ‘Young Manhood: Marriage, Education and Links with the Religious (santri) Community, 1803–1805’, stresses that, despite his impressive knowledge of Javanese and Muslim literary works, Diponegoro was in fact an ‘autodidact’ (p. 31). The prince ‘[w]as more a typical Javanese mystic than an orthodox Muslim reformer’ who concentrated more on ‘the use of dhikr (short prayers for the glorification of Allah endlessly repeated in ritual order and on various forms of meditation’ (pp. 33–4). Carey also emphasizes that Diponegoro was ‘flawed and all too human’, a fact which may be easily ignored due to on-going national myth-making in Indonesia (p. 42).

The third chapter, ‘Pilgrimage to the South Coast, circa 1805’, sheds a light on Diponegoro’s wanderings and spiritual visions. From them he learned that he ‘would become king’ (p. 51), that ‘the ruin of the Land of Java’ would begin soon, and that he should help his father and reject the title of Crown prince. Carey takes Diponegoro’s own stories about these prophecies, be they correct or imaginary, as the indispensable markers of his destiny. Diponegoro also strongly identified himself with the Javanese puppet theatre (wayang) hero Arjuna, a famous ascetic warrior.

The fourth chapter, ‘The Beginning of Ruin: Daendels’ “New Order” and the Central Javanese Courts, 1808’ touches upon Marshal Daendels’ reforms in Java. Daendels ordered new etiquette and ceremonial to the Yogyakarta court that had broken the Yogyanese perception of Java as divided between the Dutch in west Java with Batavia and the Sultan of Yogyakarta in south-central and eastern Java. From then on...