Ancient laws from a forgotten time…
You know how they say the past is another country? Well,
friend, sometimes it’s another goddamn nightmare. Take the kingdom of
Majapahit, sprawling across the Indonesian archipelago back in the 1300s. These
folks weren’t playing games when it came to laying down the law.
Imagine you’re a simple boatman, ferrying folks across some
nameless river under a merciless tropical sun. Your palm-leaf hat provides
scant protection as sweat trickles down your spine. The wooden hull creaks
beneath you. And then—God help you—a female passenger boards.
Don’t touch her. Don’t even speak to her unless the damned
boat is sinking. Because if anything happens—anything at all that could be
construed as “immoral”—you’re as guilty as sin.
(And sin, my friends, was serious business in Majapahit.)
They called it strisanggrahana—sexual harassment of
women. The word itself sounds like something that might crawl out from under
your bed at three in the morning, something with too many legs and hungry,
ancient eyes.
It’s all there in the Canggu inscription, July 7, 1358 AD.
Those copper plates, ten of them, recording laws from King Hayam Wuruk’s reign.
Can you imagine? Some poor bastard had to hammer all those words into metal,
preserving for centuries the precise ways you could fuck up your life by
looking at the wrong person the wrong way.
The Kutaramanawa—their big book of 272 laws—reads
like something a particularly creative demon might dream up during a long, dark
night of the soul. Those pages held your fate if you stepped out of line,
spelled out in excruciating detail.
Adultery? May God have mercy on your worthless soul.
If you raped a man’s first wife, that’ll be two laksa,
pal. That’s twenty thousand coins you didn’t have. Middle-class woman? One laksa.
Lower class? Five tali. The kingdom had a goddamn price list for your
transgressions.
But here’s where it gets really interesting—and by
interesting, I mean the kind of interesting that makes your blood run cold. If
the husband caught you in the act? Well, the law said he could kill you right
then and there. No trial. No appeal. Just whatever farm implement or kitchen
knife was closest at hand, and then darkness.
Even following a married woman home with impure thoughts
dancing in your head could get you a death sentence. The king wasn’t fooling
around. Touch her, embrace her without consent, and you might as well start
digging your own grave.
And God help you if you were caught in another man’s
bed—even if the wife wasn’t there. Two laksa fine for that moment of
madness. Two laksa for borrowing clothes from someone’s wife in a
secluded place. The law had thought of everything, mapped out every possible
way lust could lead you astray.
The matchmaker, the procurer, the one who “provides a place”
for illicit meetings—they all paid. 4,000 picis if you were a woman
running what amounted to a brothel.
What haunts me most is how they handled the aftermath. A
rapist branded as a “pig.” Stoned by angry villagers who heard a woman’s
screams. Hands cut off as a permanent mark of shame. Exiled from your
village—cast out to wander strange paths where other horrors surely waited.
In the shadows of ancient Majapahit, desire was dangerous.
One wrong glance, one moment of weakness, and everything you had—everything you
were—could be taken.
I wonder sometimes about those nameless men and women,
trapped in the web of laws from a kingdom long turned to dust. Did they lie
awake at night, sweating in the tropical heat, fighting their own hearts? Did
they whisper forbidden words in the dark, knowing that dawn might bring
punishment?
Those copper plates remain. The words endure. And somewhere
in the collective memory of that ancient place, the kingdom still watches,
still judges.
Still waits for you to slip.
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