3 - Dorojatun Becomes Sultan

Summary

On 18 October 1939, Dorojatun's father and other family members met him on arrival in Batavia. Hamengku Buwono IX later recalled that an uncle had greeted him in high Javanese when he left the ship and that he knew at once that his father had named him as the successor, because his uncles had previously addressed him in low Javanese (ngoko).

During the journey home to Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwono VIII, already in rather poor health, fell ill on the train, and died in hospital shortly after reaching Yogyakarta. In Batavia he had already handed to Dorojatun the sacred kris Kyai Joko Piturun, an important heirloom of the Yogyakarta kraton, thereby reaffirming that Dorojatun was his chosen successor. Hamengku Buwono VIII's failure to take another principal wife after his divorce from Dorojatun's mother was taken in Yogyakarta to indicate his intention that Dorojatun should be the successor. The naming of a crown prince was the prerogative of the reigning Sultan in consultation with the Dutch authorities, and Hamengku Buwono VIII had never taken a decision on the point.

Dorojatun must have been unfamiliar even to most of his relatives. His father had sent him away while still a teenager in 1930, and apart from contacts with family members during rare visits to the Netherlands, and the occasional letter, few of which survive, the family would have known little about his early manhood.

Nevertheless, it appeared likely that Dorojatun would become the next Sultan of Yogyakarta; so before examining the process of his accession, it will be useful to explore the nature, historical background, and ideology of his father's legacy, as it stood in 1940 and thereafter.

YOGYAKARTA — ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SITUATION

The kingdom comprised five regencies and one city covering 3,168 square kilometres, compared with 132,187 square kilometres for the whole of Java. As this comparison indicates, the significance of the tiny principality, and indeed of the other principalities, derived far more from their role as exemplars of traditional Javanese culture, than from any direct political power over the population of Central or East Java as a whole. Despite the lack of political power, however, they remained important across the Javanese cultural sphere as influences on manners and social interaction, language, fashion, art and even architecture.