Ketika Pangeran Minta Jabatan: Kajian Filologis terhadap Sepucuk Surat untuk Raffles (1811)

Abstract

In this article, I discuss a letter from three high-ranking officials of the Cirebon Sultanate to Thomas Stamford Raffles. The letter written on 25 Syaban 1226 AH (September 11, 1811 AD) is a collection of the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia and is coded ID-ANRI K66a, File 3584, Folio 683. Through the letter, they the letter, in essence, they asked for a position to Raffles. As the “old people” in the Cirebon Sultanate, they felt worthy and could occupy certain positions which they submitted themselves to Raffles. In this article, the letter firstly was studied by using the philology theory that contains the method of manuscript study (codicology) and the method of text study (textology). Furthermore, the manuscript content was dialogued to the historical fact in the Cirebon Sultanate, especially in the context of the British plan to occupy Java, so that we obtained a complete understanding of the context of writing the letter. The result shows that when the letter was written, the British had not fully controlled Java. The three high-ranking officials of the Cirebon Sultanate only took advantage of the situation because they knew that power in Java would soon transfer to the British hands. However, until the end of the British interregnum period in 1816, there is no evidence that the request was granted by Raffles.

A text criticism of Hikayat Si Miskin: A textological study of writing and use of letters

“…Philological studies of archipelago manuscripts have been carried out by philologists for several decades at the end of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 3rd millennium century, even text studies from various scientific studies related to the content of the text (Permana et al, 2020;Nurizzati et al, 2022;Noh et al, 2022;Mohd & Yusoff, 2022). In the beginning, the final purpose of philological research is simply to present a text that has been revised, edited or edited for written errors in the language of the text itself (Aminuddin, 2021). After the text is edited and presented in a form that can be read by the current generation, the content can be studied with various approaches related to the content of the text.…”