A note on the Maha-Bharata in Malaysia and Indonesia: Sabha-Parva found in Bali
C. Hooykaas, writing in 1965, reports the discovery in Bali of a metrical paraphrase (parikan) of the Sabha-Parva of the Mahā-Bhārata and argues that this find fundamentally challenges the long-held assumption that only eight of the epic’s eighteen parvas survive in Old Javanese. The article situates this discovery within the broader, still-underserved field of Mahā-Bhārata transmission across Malaysia and Indonesia, calling for further manuscript collection and philological work.
Summary
Hooykaas opens by surveying the state of scholarship on the Mahā-Bhārata in the Malay-Indonesian world, noting that foundational work by Van der Tuuk (1875, 1879) and later by Winstedt, Rentse, Hill, and Cuisinier has left significant gaps. The central problem he identifies is one of provenance: it remains unknown whether Malay wayang stories are copies or translations from Javanese models, or whether Malay puppeteers composed their own shadow plays independently. A related but more specific question concerns which parva of the Mahā-Bhārata underlies the various lakon traditions in Malay, Javanese, and Balinese performance.
The article’s core contribution is the identification of a Balinese manuscript acquired by the Kirtya Liefrinck-Van der Tuuk foundation on 12 December 1948 from Karangasem. This text is a metrical parikan of the Sabha-Parva, composed in Modern Javanese metres (Sinom, Pankur, Durma, Dandang Gulo) and totalling 50,182 syllables across 58 typewritten pages. Hooykaas, who began comparing it with Pratap Chandra Roy’s Sanskrit translation in 1957, judges that the parikan follows the Sanskrit faithfully but enriches it with descriptive elaborations he classifies as ‘topoi’. Crucially, he demonstrates that an Old Javanese prose Sabha-Parva is not merely postulated but actually registered in Poerbatjaraka’s catalogue of Javanese manuscripts in the Bataviaasch Genootschap collection, though noted as “very corrupt.” The Balinese metrical text therefore likely derives from a better-preserved Old Javanese prose source that may still be traceable in Bali.
Hooykaas further argues that the parikan is a product of the first quarter or first half of the twentieth century, based on the observation that Van der Tuuk’s late-nineteenth-century Balinese collections scarcely mention any parikan, whereas the Kirtya had accumulated several dozens within its first decade of operation (1929–1939). This pattern suggests a wave of “rejuvenation” in which Old- and Middle-Javanese prose works were rendered into metrical Balinese forms during that period.
Key Findings
- The Balinese Sabha-Parva parikan consists of 6 cantos in Sinom (240 verses), 5 in Pankur (191 verses), 5 in Durma (378 verses), and 1 in Dandang Gulo (11 verses), totalling 50,182 syllables across 58 compactly typewritten pages (pp. 126–127).
- The manuscript was acquired by the Kirtya Liefrinck-Van der Tuuk foundation from Karangasem on 12 December 1948 (p. 126).
- An Old Javanese prose Sabha-Parva is registered in Poerbatjaraka’s “Lijst der Javaansche Handschriften” in Jaarboek I (1933) of the Bataviaasch Genootschap, though described as “very corrupt” (p. 127).
- Only eight prose extracts from the Mahā-Bhārata had previously been traced in Old Javanese, leaving the question open as to whether a complete Old Javanese prose version of all eighteen parvas was ever composed (p. 126).
- Van der Tuuk’s late-nineteenth-century Balinese manuscript collections scarcely mention any parikan, whereas the Kirtya possessed several dozens within ten years of its 1929 founding, indicating a concentrated period of metrical paraphrase production in the early twentieth century (p. 128).
- Dalang-composed lakon collections in Bali (Kirtya Nos. 2189, 2209, 2231–35, 2243, 2247) all emanate from a single source and are notably shorter and less varied than their Javanese counterparts (p. 127).
Conclusion
Hooykaas concludes that the survival of the Sabha-Parva in Bali is not an isolated curiosity but evidence that the other nine “lost” parvas may also be recoverable on the island. He urges continued manuscript collection and direct questioning of Balinese dalangs about their repertoires, expressing confidence that further discoveries—both parva and not-parva—remain possible.
Context
- The article draws on the Kirtya (formerly Kirtya Liefrinck-Van der Tuuk) palm-leaf manuscript library in Singaradja, Bali, and the Bataviaasch Genootschap (now Museum Nasional) manuscript collection in Jakarta.
- Historiographically, the piece is a short field note that shifts the scholarly conversation from the Malay-Indonesian wayang tradition toward the Balinese manuscript corpus as a potential repository for Old Javanese literary sources previously assumed lost.