ABSTRACT
Babad Sepehi (BS) is a Javanese traditional historiography—commonly called babad—which describes many events that took place during the British colonial government in Java, from 1811 to 1816. BS portrayed the involvement of Sepoy troops—often referred to as Sepoy as well as Sepehi, Sepei, Spehi, sepoy, or Sipahi by Javanese people or Javanese texts—during the raid of Keraton Yogyakarta, from 18 to 20 June 1812. The Javanese commemorate this raid as the event of “Geger Sepehi”. It is likely that BS manuscripts were duplicated in the period from 1813 to the early 1900s. In this article, we describe how BS recorded the “Geger Sepehi” event. Research on philological work was conducted to present the written edition of BS. How BS texts recorded “Geger Sepehi” was textually and contextually explained from its historical notes. The text is an extract from the manuscript PW.141/NR 36, which is part of the collection of Universitas Indonesia Library. The author of the text was Mangkudiningrat (1778–1824), the son of Sultan Hamengkubuwana II and Ratu Mas. The notes found in “Geger Sepehi” reveal that this text is rich in historical data. BS recorded in the manuscript PW.141/NR 36 was known to be a typical daily journal in that period.
