Roro Jonggrang
Narrative Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta
Vigorous
The narrative of a woman who demands a thousand temples in one night from the suitor who killed her father, defeats the work at the last one by setting the village women to pound rice so the cocks crow, and is cursed into the statue that completes the count.
A thousand temples, and one short
Roro Jonggrang, daughter of a defeated king, is courted by Bandung Bondowoso, who killed her father. Unable to refuse, she demands a thousand temples finished in one night. With the work nearly done she wakes the village women to pound rice and burn straw in the east so that the cocks crow. Bandung Bondowoso curses her into the statue that completes the count.
In its main structure this is the same as Sangkuriang: refusal by impossible condition, and its defeat by a faked dawn. The two stories come from two different speech areas and explain two different landscapes, and the identity of their structure is among the clearest cases in Java of one narrative pattern used twice for different purposes.
The statue pointed to, and the statue that is there
The statue pointed to as Roro Jonggrang stands in the northern chamber of the Shiva temple in the Prambanan complex and is an image of Durga Mahisasuramardini — Durga slaying the buffalo demon — a Hindu figure armed and victorious, not a cursed woman.
Local naming displacing iconographic naming is a recurring phenomenon in Java and does not make either wrong: one names what its ninth-century carver depicted, the other names what the people around it have known for centuries since. This encyclopedia gives both and says which is which, since a visitor hearing only one will carry away an incomplete picture in one direction or the other.
Full entry 3 / 3
2 sections, 4 sources, one of them primary.
Full does not mean finished. It means this record clears the bar this encyclopedia sets before it will speak at length.