194

30.190 Javanese-Balinese kakawins (group C, 30.020).

About 1500 A.D. the supremacy of Islam and Muslim literature in the sphere of Ja vanese culture was established, and hence forth the ruling classes of Java proper were followers of the Prophet. Probably there is truth in Javanese and Balinese historical tradition saying that, when the power of the Muslim merchant-princes rose, Old Javanese Royalty, nobility and the Indian-Javanese clergy emigrated to Bali in order to continue living in a familiar sphere. Perhaps this in flux into Bali strengthened the traditional Old Javanese faction, so as to enable the conservatives to check the introduction of Islam into the island in the same way as it was introduced elsewhere in the Archipel ago. In Java, since about 1500 A.D. a new Islamic belletristic literature developed. It will be described in the second half of the present Part Three of the Synopsis (30.460 ff.). First, however, (30.191— 30.447) the development of the Old Javanese literary tradition in the islands of Bali and Lombok, isolated in a henceforth Muslim Archipelago, is to be discussed. On the whole, Balinese authors continued writing in the Old Javanese literary idiom which they mastered sufficiently well, but in the seventeenth century and afterwards, being Balinese by birth, they began to intro duce Balinisms and neologisms into their work. In the present Synopsis the latter idiom is called Javanese-Balinese. It is to be distinguished from the proper Balinese liter ary idiom, which developed in the same period and under influence of Javanese- Balinese (see 00020, sub B, on the history

of Balinese literature). In Balinese proper, grammatical formations are different. In the present Synopsis of Javanese Literature works written in Balinese proper are not discussed. There are borderline cases, how ever, texts with a mixed idiom. For the sake of completeness such texts are included. Neither Javanese nor Balinese authors were at any time at a loss for subjects of narrative poems. The inexhaustible collec tion of tales of the Indian epics, especially Mahabharata, made accessible by the Old Javanese prose versions of the Parwas, was used as a mine of subject-matter for the making of new kakawins. Balinese authors continued to write epic poems in the Old Javanese style for a considerable time, while their Javanese contemporaries wrote narra tive poems in a modernized Javanese style, using native Javanese metres. Probably the reigns of the Gèlgèl and Klutjkui} Kings of South Bali in the six teenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth cen turies constituted the flourishing period of Javanese-Balinese epic and romantic poetry. Lyrical and didactic poems also' were written in that period. Beside the ancient Indian prosody, metres of native Javanese origin were cultivated (cf. 30.170). But then, in the nineteenth century, some Balinese authors seem to have been inspired again to follow the models of the Old Javanese kakawins with Indian metres. It is difficult to' deter mine to which period of Bali written Java nese literature any given kakawin belongs. It is a remarkable fact that a considerable number of the kakawins registered under the following heads (30.191—30.214) were un-