Old Javanese (Kawi)

Old Javanese, often called Kawi, the language of poets, is the literary language of Hindu and Buddhist Java. It appears in inscriptions from the early ninth century and matured into one of Asia's great court literatures, saturated with Sanskrit learning yet fully Javanese in structure. Nearly half its recorded vocabulary is Sanskrit borrowed, and its poets worked Sanskrit metres into the kakawin, the long court poem. The oldest surviving major work, the Kakawin Ramayana, from around the ninth to tenth century, retells the Ramayana with a sophistication that made it the model for a millennium.

The courts of Kediri, Singhasari and Majapahit produced the classics that followed, the Arjunawiwaha of Mpu Kanwa, the Bharatayuddha on the great Mahabharata war, the Sutasoma of Mpu Tantular, a Buddhist epic from which Indonesia later took its national motto, unity in diversity, and prose renderings of the Indian epics and puranas. Composition was itself a religious act. Kakawin poets open with a manggala invoking the deity of beauty into the poem, treating the finished work as a temple of language in which the god may dwell, an aesthetic theology that scholars of Java have called the religion of beauty.

When Islam became dominant on Java in the sixteenth century, the Hindu Buddhist literary tradition did not vanish but shifted east, above all to Bali, which became the ark of Old Javanese literature. Balinese scribes copied and recopied the kakawin and prose classics onto lontar palm leaf manuscripts, and Balinese Hinduism absorbed Old Javanese as a liturgical and learned register beside Sanskrit and high Balinese. Pedanda priests recite mantras and hymns whose language is Old Javanese and Sanskrit, kakawin singing societies, sekaa mabasan, meet to chant the old poems and translate them line by line into Balinese, an activity that is both literary study and devotion, and passages of the epics are performed at temple festivals, tooth filing ceremonies and cremations, where the Bharatayuddha and Arjunawiwaha accompany the great rites of passage.

The wayang shadow theatre keeps Kawi in the mouths of its puppet heroes, with the dalang shifting between Kawi for the noble characters and Balinese or Javanese for the clowns who translate. On Java itself the school of Yogyakarta and Surakarta court poets preserved a Kawi flavoured literary Javanese, and modern Indonesian universities teach Old Javanese as the classical language of the archipelago's civilization.