Today’s post, by Ida Bagus Komang Sudarma in Bali, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan in Sydney, and Arlo Griffiths in Paris, was written following yesterday’s post on the Javanese manuscripts in the Sloane collection. The speed of this response, identifying and transliterating for the first time this manuscript fragment in Old Javanese, illustrates well how collaborative scholarship across oceans is enabled by digitisation.

Detail of line v2, showing the characters // bhraṣṭaṅkaḍa, with an elegantly knotted tail of the subscript (gantungan) grapheme ṭ. British Library, Sloane 3480, f. 1v

Sloane 3480 is a manuscript fragment which represents less than half of the right side of a single palm leaf (lontar), and would originally have had a string hole in its middle, as it still does in its right margin. In its original condition, the leaf would have had four lines of writing on each side.

The text, incised into the palm leaf in Balinese characters, is written in Old Javanese language. The fragment contains parts of stanzas 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 (but not of stanza 13) from canto 10 of the Arjunavijaya, a court poem (kakavin) authored by Mpu Tantular in the second half of the 14th century, describing a scene of confrontation between Śiva’s attendant Nandīśvara and the demon Rāvaṇa. The fact that it was collected during the lifetime of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) means that the manuscript must be older than 1753, which makes this one of the oldest known witnesses for this important classic of Old Javanese literature (cf. Arps & van der Molen 1994). A critical edition of the text and English translation was published by Supomo (1977).

In our diplomatic edition below, we transliterate according to the system proposed by Acri & Griffiths (2014), which is based on the ISO standard 15919. The original is written in scriptio continua. We apply word breaks generally in conformity with the edition by Supomo, but with some adaptations in the light of our different understanding of how word boundaries in Old Javanese are to be represented in transliterated text. In the lines r2 and v3, where the top/bottom parts of all akṣaras (syllabic characters) are lost, we act as though a given grapheme is present unless no trace of the expected grapheme remains at all; in the latter case, we indicate the restored grapheme(s) in square brackets. Such restorations are uncertain at all the edges of the fragments, where parts of akṣaras are missing and it is often difficult to be sure whether this witness agreed with the critical edition or had a variant reading. In the parts that are well preserved, this witness does show several variant readings vis-à-vis Supomo’s critical edition. The sign # represents the breaks in the text on the right end of each line as they exist today.

British Library, Sloane 3480, f. 1r

(r1) lost
(r2) # nr[i] °l̥ṅk[ā] / mva[ṁ van]duva[rg]gamu kabeḥ[n]ya mah[ə]ntya [d]e[n]ya / n[ā liṁn]ya / [h]e[t]u[ni h]uyu[ṁ] daśavaktrar[ā]ja
(r3) #-ānaṁ tapodhara haneṅ giriparśva māvr̥g· / mvaṅ siṅha bharvaṅ alayū sahananya meṅas· / yatnā bha
(r4) #ri taṅannira lvat· / krodheya makrak ikanaṁ daśavaktrarāja // humyaṅ kabeḥ haliliṅi

British Library, Sloane 3480, f. 1v

(v1) # sira harṣacitta / yekan vinehnira vənaṁ munuseṁ taṅanya / hyunhyun sire vuvus ikan varara
(v2) # len taṁ pravīrabala rakṣasasaṅghya mahyaṁ // bhraṣṭaṅ kaḍatvan ika siṅ kaparaḥ ya curṇna / gəmpu
(v3) # hat i patapan s[u]ramya / ramyaṅ [k]ap[u]ṇ[ḍu]ṅ ika d[u]ryan ike j[u]raṁnya / maṅ[gu]ṣ[ṭa] la[s]b ika poḥ paṇaśāg[ṅ] aby[u]
(v4) lost

Supomo’s translation (1977, II: 203–4) of the relevant stanzas – depicting the confrontation between Nandīśvara and the demon Rāvaṇa (here designated several times by his epithet ‘the Ten-faced one’, Daśāsya or Daśavaktra) – was as follows:

12 ‘Hey, Daśāsya, you [have committed the sin] of despising others by laughing at my appearance. Therefore, in time to come, monkeys will destroy your kingdom of Ləṅkā and exterminate all your kinsfolk as well.’ Thus he spoke; and Daśavaktra was now furious.
13 Ferociously clenching his teeth, he put his hands under the base of Mount Girīndra, and took it in his arms, intending to destroy it completely. The Lord, who had just finished making love, was startled, and Pārvatī, who was exhausted, had not even put on her kain.
14 The hermits living on the slopes of the mountain were agitated and distressed, the lions and bears fled in opposite directions. Knowing the reason for what was happening, the Lord carefully pressed down the peak of the mountain with the big toe of his left foot.
15 In short, Daśāsya’s arms were trapped under the mountain, and he was not able to move them. Now he was all the more determined to pull them out, but he could not move them; furiously he cursed, and screamed aloud.
16 The three worlds were stunned by his great voice; the gods and others were astounded, and their shouts could be heard even from the world of Śiva, for his voice was most terrible, booming like turbulent sea, in truth like the sound of a hundred thousand thunderbolts clashing at the same time.
17 The god Jagatguru grinned with delight, and then allowed him to pull his arms free; the God was pleased at the sound of his excellent screams, and so the Lord called him Rāvaṇa.
18 Then Daśāsya departed from Mount Girīndra, after making obeisance to the Lord and asking his pardon. Riding his chariot, he now ranged around the world at great speed, accompanied by all the roaring demon officers and soldiers.
19 All the palaces he attacked were shattered and reduced to dust; the kings and their armies were all exterminated, and all ring-communities, cloister-halls and temple-complexes he seized by force as he swept along boldly throughout the three worlds.
20 Soon king Daśāsya came to Mount Himavan, and was delighted at the sight of beautiful hermitages. The slopes were beautiful with kapuṇḍuṅ, durian, mangosteen, laṅsəb, mango and jackfruit tree, laden with great fruits; …

References
Acri, Andrea, and Arlo Griffiths. 2014. “The Romanisation of Indic Script Used in Ancient Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 170 (2/3): 365–78.
Arps, Bernard, and Willem van der Molen (eds.). 1994. Serat Lokapala kawi: an eighteenth-century manuscript of the Old Javanese Arjunawijaya by Mpu Tantular. A facsimile edition of manuscript Cod. Or. 2048 in the Library of Leiden University. Leiden: Indonesian Linguistics Development Project (ILDEP) in co-operation with Legatum Warnerianum in the Library of Leiden University. (Manuscripta Indonesica, 3.)
Supomo, S. 1977. Arjunawijaya: A Kakawin of Mpu Tantular. 2 vols. (Bibliotheca Indonesica 14.) The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Ida Bagus Komang Sudarma, Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan and Arlo Griffiths