Gajah Mada

The palapa oath is recorded in the Pararaton and reads as a refusal of pleasure until a list of places has been brought under control. The places named include Gurun, Seran, Tanjung Pura, Haru, Pahang, Dompo, Bali, Sunda, Palembang and Tumasik — which, read onto a modern map, run from Kalimantan to the Malay Peninsula and Singapore.

The meaning of the word palapa is itself uncertain; it is usually rendered as fruit or as pleasure, and the rendering decides whether the oath reads as a fast or as a refusal of rest. That difference is seldom mentioned outside philological work.

What deserves further notice is that the oath was used in the twentieth century to support the idea that Majapahit was a forerunner of the territory of Indonesia. The Palapa satellite launched in 1976 takes its name from the oath, and the choice of name states the intended reading. This entry records that reading as a twentieth-century event and not as information about the fourteenth.

Gajah Mada held the office of mapatih or patih hamangkubhumi, usually rendered as prime minister. The rendering transfers a modern structure of government onto one that was not the same, and what can properly be stated is that he held the highest executive authority under the king for more than thirty years, across two reigns.

The events at Bubat in 1357, when a Sundanese wedding party was killed on the Bubat field, are recorded as the turning point of his standing: the Pararaton and the Kidung Sunda name him as responsible, and his position declined thereafter. Those events are recorded separately as an event entry, including the irreconcilable difference between Javanese and Sundanese sources.

The consequences continue today in an observable form: in Sundanese cities there are almost no streets named for Gajah Mada, and naming that sets Sundanese and Javanese names side by side in this matter still draws objection. This encyclopedia records that as part of the record on this figure, since a figure's standing in memory is information about him.