Serat Kalatidha
Text Jawa Tengah
Maintained
A mid-nineteenth-century poem by Ranggawarsita framing zaman edan — the age of madness, in which those who do not join the madness get no share — as a description of a court losing its authority under colonial rule.
The stanza quoted, and the stanzas not
What is almost always quoted from the Serat Kalatidha is its seventh stanza, which names the age of madness and states that whoever does not join it gets no share, but that the one who remembers and stays watchful is better off. The preceding stanzas set out the condition of the realm — authority lost, officials not to be relied on, signs no longer legible — and those following are a prayer.
Because only one stanza circulates, the work reads as a cynical statement about an age. Read whole, it is closer to the complaint of an official who has lost meaningful work, closing his complaint with submission. The difference is named here because the stanza's use in speeches and writing almost always rests on the first reading.
Editions, and what is attributed
The work circulates in many editions from the late nineteenth century, some printed in Javanese script and some in Latin, with editing not always declared. Several other works attributed to Ranggawarsita — above all widely circulated prophecies of the future — are doubted by some scholars.
This encyclopedia records the doubt without settling it, since settling it would require a manuscript comparison that has not been carried out in full. What is stated here is a caution a reader can use: a Ranggawarsita quotation circulating without a manuscript and stanza reference should be treated as unverified.
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.