Kidung Sunda

The Kidung Sunda is the only source that tells the Bubat affair at length: the departure of the Sundanese party, the dispute over the bride's standing — whether she came as queen or as tribute — the Sundanese king's refusal, the fighting on the field, and the death of the party including the princess.

Its telling sympathises with the Sundanese side and places Gajah Mada as the cause. Because the kidung was copied in Bali in Middle Javanese, that sympathy cannot be explained as a Sundanese interest nor as a Majapahit one, and the explanation for why a work copied in Bali tells this episode in such a tone remains unsettled.

The kidung was written long after the events it recounts — estimates range between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries — so that at least two centuries separate the event from the telling. An interval of that size places it as a source on how the events were remembered, not on how they happened.

C. C. Berg's edition of 1927 underlies nearly all modern use, including its use in the argument about Sundanese and Javanese relations that continues today. That whole situation — a sympathetic telling written two centuries later, edited by a Dutchman in 1927, and used in a twenty-first-century Indonesian argument — is recorded here in full, since each link in the chain adds something to what people today call the Bubat affair.