The Negara Kertagama Book & the Ila Galigo Carnival: The Wealth of Literature, Culture, and History of the Indonesian Nation
Author : Jacob Ereste
Freelance Journalist
According to P. J. Zoetmulder in his book, Kalangwan, the Negara Kertagama Kakawin provides direct information, unseen in other kakawins, about ancient Javanese society at a specific time. It also provides insight into an ancient Javanese poet and his personal life. Meanwhile, according to UNESCO.org, the Negara Kertagama testifies to the reign of a fourteenth-century king in Indonesia, where modern ideas, social justice, religious freedom, personal security, and the welfare of the people were highly valued. It seems likely that the Spiritual Guardian of the Archipelago, Sri Eko Sriyanto Galgendu, was right when he said that the tangible manifestation of the Negara Kertagama was an achievement of the Majapahit government, which succeeded in bringing its people equitable prosperity during its former glory.
Stuart Robson’s analysis of Desawarnana clearly states that Desawarnana is not a retelling of an epic or mystical tale, but rather a depiction of the everyday realities that Mpu Prapanca observed around him and experienced similarly, around the 14th century in a kingdom in the Indonesian archipelago.
This manuscript by Mpu Prapanca, often referred to as Kakawin Desawarnana, depicts the Majapahit kingdom around the 14th century under the rule of Rajasanagara (Hayam Wuruk), his family, the palace, and several other areas of the period.
Negara Kertagama is the source text for the Pancasila values formulated by Sukarno as the foundation of the Indonesian state, as Sukarno himself stated in his autobiography “Bung Karno, the People’s Tongue” (see page 240). “I don’t say I created Pancasila. “What I did was simply dig deep into our land, our own traditions, and I found those five beautiful pearls,” said Bung Karno about the Pancasila he discovered in the Indonesian archipelago. The Kakawin Negara Kertagama manuscript has also been recognized internationally and officially entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World list.
Negara Kertagama can be called “A History of the Archipelago” because it is a relatively comprehensive account of the glory days of the Majapahit Empire, from the figure of Maharaja Hayam Wuruk, the death of Sri Rajapatmi, the figure of the Maharaja’s father, his relatives (1, 2, and 3), the Maharaja’s power system, the Nusantara territories controlled by the Majapahit Empire, and the foreign countries conquered.
The notes, called pupuh (pupuh) in the Negara Kertagama book, number nearly 100 pupuh, taking up 313 pages, excluding the foreword published by Narasi Publishers in 2015, which was revised in 2015. 2019.
This book also includes the famous Palapa Oath of “Manggala Majapahit” by Prime Minister Gajah Mada. This means that through the poet’s poetry, one can learn about a past history that is worth remembering and learning from, proving that the ancestors of the Indonesian people truly possessed a high civilization. This is especially true when compared to the even more spectacular Ila Galigo, which is over 6,000 pages long and provides numerous testimonies about the life of the people of the Indonesian archipelago hundreds of years ago, between the early 14th century and the 18th century, written by many authors.
The Ila Galigo, an ancient Bugis literary work, is the only longest literary work in the world. The complete manuscript version is stored at the Leiden University Library in the Netherlands. Hopefully, all these historical objects belonging to the Indonesian nation, inherited from various kingdoms in the archipelago, can be returned, along with a number of artifacts and historical objects belonging to the Indonesian nation. President Prabowo Subianto and the King of the Netherlands have reached an agreement to return approximately 30,000 objects of historical value were returned to Indonesia.
The Ila Galigo book was written in the Lonyara script—a traditional Bugis-Makassar script in the Classical Old Bugis language, no longer used in everyday conversation. As a narrative poem, Ila Galigo was inscribed by UNESCO as a Memory of the World in 2011. This longest epic in the world ranks Ila Galigo above the Mahabharata, which describes the social system of the Bugis people before the arrival of Islam in the archipelago.***
Banten, October 9, 2025
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