Raden Ngabehi Ranggawarsita

The Serat Kalatidha contains the most quoted stanza in modern Javanese: the passage on zaman edan, the age of madness, which states that whoever does not join the madness gets no share, but that happy as the forgetful man may be, happier still is the one who remembers and stays watchful.

The stanza was written in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Surakarta court had lost nearly all its authority to the colonial government and the position of court poet had become an office without real work. A reading that takes the stanza as a prophecy about a coming age misses that its author was describing his own.

Since then the stanza has been quoted at almost every period of upheaval in Indonesia — at the end of colonial rule, in 1965, in 1998, and after — by different parties and to opposed ends. The quotation's resilience across opposed purposes is information about its form: it states a condition without naming who is at fault.

Ranggawarsita is commonly called pujangga panutup, the last court poet, the final figure in the line of Javanese court poets. The name is not an office but an assessment conferred later, and it states a particular reading of the nineteenth century: that court literature ended with him.

The reading is contestable. Javanese writing continued after him in other forms — print publishing, Javanese-language newspapers, and literature not resting on the courts — and calling one man the last focuses attention on a single institution and states that the end of that institution is the end of its literature.

A number of works attributed to him are also disputed, including several widely circulated prophecies bearing his name. Because his work was much reprinted in the twentieth century with editing that was not always declared, a reader quoting Ranggawarsita needs to check the edition used — a point recorded here because unchecked quotation is the commonest error encountered with this figure.