Surakarta (also called Solo or Sala) is a royal city of central Java which is mentioned in The Achehnese Vol. I in Snouck Hurgronje’s survey of the Achehnese custom of giving proper names to particular cannons. It is cited as the home of Setomi, one of a series of personified guns of the Java-Sea region that are compared with the Achehnese sacred cannon Lada Sichupa.
Named Cannons of Java
Snouck’s reference to Surakarta comes at the very beginning of the legend of the cannon Lada Sichupa of Acheh. “It is well known,” he writes, “how common has been the custom amongst native peoples of giving proper names to certain cannons, which they regarded more or less as personified and even worshipped as sacred after a time. We may instance Si Penjagio at Batavia, and its consorts Si Ajiak in Banten and Setomi at Surakarta, with many more. Similarly in Acheh there were many such guns with proper names, among them that mentioned above, which bore the title Lada Sichupa — ‘a chupa of pepper.’”
The Comparative Setting
The comparison with Surakarta is part of Snouck’s wider effort to show that Achehnese civilisation, in its cannons and their legends as in much else, must be understood as one local variant of a common Indonesian (and indeed Malay-Indonesian) cultural pattern. The named cannons of Java — those of Batavia, Banten, and Surakarta — provide the comparative material against which the Achehnese Lada Sichupa stands out. The legend of Lada Sichupa itself, narrated immediately after the comparison, connects the gun to a tradition about the cannon having been brought from Pidie and having been used in the defence of the Dalam of the Sultan of Acheh.
Significance
Surakarta’s appearance in Vol. I is brief, but it places the city in a network of comparative references by which Snouck seeks to position Achehnese institutions in the wider Indonesian world. As one of the great royal cities of central Java, Surakarta had its own court traditions, its own kraton and its ownnamed cannon, the Setomi, which Snouck treats as a parallel instance of the personification of artillery that he had observed at Batavia, Banten, and elsewhere. The reference is part of his continuing argument that the political and religious life of Acheh cannot be understood in isolation but must be set against the background of the broader Malay-Javanese culture area.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.