In Praise of a Virtuous Woman

By Edwin Wieringa

In a nutshell the story of Darma Tasiah tells about a pious woman, the eponymous heroine, who offends her husband by inadvertently one night by allowing a lamp, the sole source of light in their house, to go out. Incensed by this carelessness, her husband throws her out. After being rejected by her parents too, Darma Tasiah wanders off, to perform penance in a forest. The angel Jibrail (i.e. Gabriel) visits her and clothes her in splendid new garments and transforming her into the likeness of a beautiful nymph descended from Heaven. Returning to her family she is not recognized at first, but in the end Darma Tasiah is joyously reunited with her husband.
The Darma Tasiah belongs to a category of texts featuring an 'innocent, persecuted heroine' as its protagonist. In these tales, which are found in many parts of the world, the heroine is depicted as particularly virtuous: she will not succumb to evil, even under the most horrible of circumstances. The heroine is banished to the wilderness, but with the help of a saint, angel or the like, she is miraculously saved and in the end she is fully rehabilitated (cf. Dan 1977 and Brednich et al. 1987:113-115). Although the Darma Tasiah, generally speaking, belongs to the female fairy tales in which the heroine endures trials and tribulations, it is more specifically a sacred legend: Darma Tasiah is a saintly figure and the miraculous helper is an agent-of-the sacred, namely Jibrail, the best known among the angels of Islam.
The Darma Tasiah story is found in numerous manuscripts in Malay, Javanese (where it is called Murtasiya or Murtasiyah), and Acehnese (where it is known as Hikayat Inong), and continues to be recited and interpreted in some parts of Indonesia, namely in Riau, Java, and Madura. In the so-called Major Centhini, known as the encyclopaedia of Javanese culture, we find one important reference to a reading of the Darma Tasiah at a wedding ceremony. In Cantos 143:19 - 156:57 in the second volume of Kamajaya's edition (Kamajaya 1986:218-274; translated into Indonesian in Darusuprapta et al. 1987:207-227) there is an elaborate scene in which during a nocturnal group vigil on the eve of a wedding ceremony, a learned female tells the guests exemplary stories concerning women, including a version of several cantos of the Darma Tasiah story.

Javanese, Malay, and Acehnese versions
During my study tour I decided to concentrate on the Javanese version of the Darma Tasiah, because in Javanese the story is represented in different recensions. My first impression, based upon a quick perusal of the Malay material at the National Library in Jakarta, was that the Malay manuscripts seemed to show little variation and in Acehnese the text is represented by a single manuscript only. The apparently unique manuscript of the Acehnese version is a rather sweeping transformation of the Malay Hikayat Darma Tasiah and interspersed with Malay. Unfortunately the manuscript could not be traced when I wanted to consult it at the National Library in Jakarta. Therefore I had to be satisfied with a microfilm which was barely legible. As far as the Javanese texts are concerned, I wanted to apply a so-called þcorpus-based strategyþ which means that by a meticulous scrutiny of the whole body of manuscripts the Darma Tasiah can be divided into discrete stages of its textual development (see for this new philological approach in Javanese literature Behrend 1987 and Wieringa 1994).
In the course of time the Javanese version of the Darma Tasiah has clearly passed through a number of evolutionary stages. One of the most recent recensions, dating from the early 19th century in Surakarta, is a frame story of a few hundred pages in which an overwhelming proportion of the text is devoted to episodes of religious discussion. Interestingly, most of the material of this recension seems to have been borrowed from other texts (cf. Behrend 1987:332- 336). As I had suspected previously, that is to say before my fieldwork, the shorter, and most probably older, recensions seem to point to Cirebon as the place where the Darma Tasiah entered Javanese literature. Further research, however, is needed to verify this hypothesis.

Cirebon literature
Lack of time necessitated I confine my research to the major public libraries in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Surakarta. I made one excursion to Cirebon, because it is known that in Cirebon there are quite large manuscript collections belonging to private individuals. The problem is, however, how to discover individuals or families with manuscripts. Obviously it is impossible to go from door to door in search of manuscripts. Nevertheless, by a stroke of good luck I had stumbled upon an unpublished Indonesian research report about private manuscript collections in Cirebon and this mentioned at least one Darma Tasiah text. After some difficulties in locating its owner, I was able to visit this person who lives in a small village in the vicinity of Cirebon. He was a so-called dhalang maca, i.e. a man who recites traditional Javanese poems on various occasions, like rites of passage (birth, circumcision, marriage, etc.), the annual village cleansing ceremonies, etc. He turned out to be a good-humoured man who had no objections to have his manuscript collections photocopied. His manuscripts were all still very new as they had only recently been written down. The texts of these manuscripts, however, had been passed down from generation to generation. The rather idiosyncratic handwriting bars an easy interpretation; when I showed the Cirebon manuscripts to some Javanese experts at the Mangkunagaran library (Surakarta, Central Java), they could not make head or tail of them. According to these experts, who are daily engaged in transliterating Javanese texts, the writing was too coarse, too rustic to be deciphered.
During my visit to Cirebon I learned that there were still quite a few dhalang maca active. Unfortunately I did not have the time to investigate Cirebon literature more closely. Hopefully this can be done at a later stage. To get a complete picture of the Darma Tasiah corpus it will then also be necessary to visit Riau, Aceh, and Madura where the story also is known. Clearly, the numerous manuscripts not to mention its still active use in different parts of Indonesia testify to the Darma Tasiahþs cultural, and especially religious, significance in Indonesia, past and present. The best way to make the Darma Tasiah corpus available for a larger audience of students of literature, anthropology, (Islamic) religion and the like, seems to be philological research of the written sources in combination with fieldwork.

References
- Behrend, T.E., 1987, The Serat Jatiswara. Structure and change in a Javanese poem 1600-1930. Unpublished PhD thesis Australian National University.
- Brednich, Rolf Wilhelm et al., 1987, Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Band 5. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.
- Dan, Ilana, 1977, þThe innocent persecuted heroine: an attempt at a model for the surface level of the narrative structure of the female fairy taleþ, in: Heda Jason and Dimitri Segal (eds.), Patterns in oral literature (The Hague, Paris: Mouton), pp. 13-30.
- Darusuprapta et al., 1992, Centhini; Tambangraras-Amongraga. Karya Ngabei Ranggasutrasna dkk., Kanjeng Gusti Pangeran Adipati Anom Amengkunagara III (Sunan Pakubuwana V). Disadur ke dalam bahasa Indonesia. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka.
- Kamajaya, 1986, Sêrat Cênthini (Suluk Tambangraras). Jilid II. Yogyakarta: Yayasan Centhini.
- Wieringa, E.P, 1994, Babad Bangun Tapa. De ballingschap van Pakubuwana VI op Ambon, 1830-1849. Unpublished PhD thesis University of Leiden.

Dr Edwin Wieringa is a philologist of Indonesian literatures.