Prabu Siliwangi

Siliwangi is the name Sundanese telling gives to the king of Pajajaran, and in that telling he is one figure: a great king who ruled in a time of plenty and who at the end did not die but ngahiang, vanished, together with part of his following.

The manuscripts and inscriptions give a different picture. The Batutulis inscription at Bogor, dated 1533, was raised by Prabu Surawisesa for his father Sri Baduga Maharaja, who ruled from 1482 and who on some readings is the figure called Siliwangi. But the name Siliwangi is also used in telling for other kings, and some scholars read it as a title or honorific borne by more than one man rather than the personal name of a single king.

This entry presents both and does not merge them. What can be stated on firm ground is that a Sundanese kingdom with its capital at Pakuan stood until 1579, that Sri Baduga Maharaja ruled in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and that the telling about Siliwangi is wider than any figure who can be pointed to in an inscription.

The telling that Siliwangi did not die but vanished connects to the telling about Kanekes: some accounts name the followers who vanished with him as the ancestors of the Baduy, and some Baduy people state that connection while others do not. This encyclopedia records that such telling exists and does not state it as information about origins, since statements about the origins of Kanekes fall under the restriction set by that village's customary body.

The name Siliwangi is in wide use across West Java in the twentieth century and since: an army division, a stadium, streets, a university, a hotel. That use began during the revolution and was kept afterwards, and it places the name as an emblem of Sundanese identity within the Indonesian national order.

Use of this kind is a recurring theme: a name from telling becomes a regional emblem in a modern state, and thereafter the question of who the figure actually was becomes a question whose answer carries consequences outside history. This entry records that as part of its record.