Temporalities of Freedom: Did Nancy Florida's Babad Jaka Tingkir “Prophesy” Marco Kartodikromo's Student Hidjo ?

In her discussion of two episodes in the Babad Jaka Tingkir , a little‐known and incomplete nineteenth‐century Javanese narrative poem that is part genealogical history and part fictional romance, Nancy Florida asserted that these episodes, which are the two most “novelistic” episodes in the Jaka Tingkir “history,” hint at a new kind of historical writing. In this essay, I begin by interrogating what Florida meant when she called the Babad Jaka Tingkir “a historical prophecy” and then consider whether Student Hidjo (A Student Named Hijo), a 1918 novel written in Malay prose by a Javanese journalist and novelist, Marco Kartodikromo (1890–1932), can be interpreted as a fictional representation of what Florida termed “a new historiographic project” rather than as merely an interesting literary echo of a Javanese “history” written fifty years earlier in colonial Java.