Caliban Discourse from Shakespeare to Java's Baron Sekeber

• Main Author: Sarwoto, Paulus
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: babad; communist; discursive congruities; ketoprak; new historicism; pilgrimage; postcolonialism; priyayi; Senapati
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss45/8
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Caliban discourse, marked with the arrival of a white man on a non-European island, is also found in the Javanese babad or semi-historical narrative of Serat Babad Pati (1925), a rewriting of the older text Serat Baron Sakendher (1600s). Both texts depict the arrival of European aristocrats on a foreign island. If Prospero in The Tempest (1610) is an exiled Italian duke, Baron Sekeber in Serat Babad Pati is a Dutch aristocrat traveling to Java to conquer the Mataram kingdom. Considering the possibility that both texts were produced in the same time period, at the beginning of both English and Dutch colonialism, the texts as contemporaries intersect within similar cultural and aesthetic discourses. While Sekeber’s cultural surrogation circulated in Java, the tale of Caliban and Prospero has traveled across time and space through cultural surrogation in various texts, such as in political, psychoanalytical, and dramatic texts. Although the two texts are quite distant intertextually, Serat Babad Pati can be said to have subverted the assumptions about racial supremacy underlying The Tempest. The presence of dialectical discursive congruities is apparent in how the European colonial gaze found in The Tempest is displaced in Serat Babad Pati and the contemporary Javanese cultural performance of ketoprak staging the Baron Sekeber narrative. The text and the performance use both stratified Javanese language and staged mimicry of the Dutch baron as a means to return the gaze, albeit ambiguously. The ambiguity extends beyond text and performance and is strongly reflected at two pilgrimage sites in Central Java, where Javanese Muslims and Chinese Indonesians are divided in their valuation of Baron Sekeber. The reconstruction of the colonizer/colonized dialectic in Serat Babad Pati, its surrogation in the Javanese folk performance of ketoprak, and the divided religious pilgrimage evidence the ambiguous dialectical discursive congruities of decoloniality in Java.