Prince Dipanagara

The Java War of 1825–1830 was the costliest war the colonial government fought in the archipelago before the Aceh war. It killed some two hundred thousand Javanese and about fifteen thousand on the government side, and its expense so drained the Dutch treasury that the cultuurstelsel — the cultivation system — was imposed afterwards to cover it. The war is therefore not a self-contained event but the direct cause of the policy that shaped Java for the next forty years.

The cause stated at its outbreak was the driving of road stakes across the land holding Dipanagara's ancestral graves at Tegalrejo. The wider causes include the leasing of land to Europeans, road tolls, interference in the succession, and the declining position of nobles who held no office.

Dipanagara was seized in March 1830 at Magelang, having come to negotiate under a guarantee of safety. The seizure during negotiation is recorded by both sides and is not disputed. He was exiled to Manado and then Makassar, and died there in 1855.

In exile Dipanagara wrote the Babad Dipanagara, the account of his own life in Javanese macapat verse, completed at Manado in 1832. The autograph manuscript is among the very few sources in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia in which the leader of a resistance recounts that resistance in his own hand, and since 2013 it has been listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World.

The manuscript is not a report of events in the modern sense. It is composed as a babad, with Javanese dating, accounts of dreams and meetings with unseen beings, and a structure placing its author within the succession of Javanese kings. A historian using it must read both at once: direct testimony, and a form that arranges that testimony by its own rules.

For this encyclopedia the manuscript is the clearest illustration of why classing a source at tier one means nothing without qualification. It is an irreplaceable primary source and at the same time a work with designs on its reader, and both statements hold together.