You know how it goes in small towns. There’s always that one
family everyone talks about in hushed tones. In Amityville, it was the DeFeos.
In Villisca, the Moore clan. But in colonial Priangan? Christ, in Priangan they
had the regents—men who might as well have worn crowns instead of traditional
headdress.
They called them “little kings,” and ain’t that the truth.
If you ever read that old novel Max Havelaar—and I bet you haven’t,
being sensible folks who don’t go digging in literary graveyards—you’d know
exactly what I mean. Picture this: ordinary people, breaking their backs
without a penny’s pay, just to throw a fancy shindig for some regent who
probably couldn’t remember their names if his life depended on it. Tyranny? You
bet your ass it was tyranny.
But here’s where our tale takes a turn into the shadows.
Not all these regents were the same breed of monster. Some
of them… well, some of them were different. And the different ones, as any of
us who’ve lived long enough know, are the ones you gotta watch.
There was this one regent—Raden Aria Adipati Kusumahningrat,
if you can wrap your tongue around that name—who ruled Cianjur Regency from
1834 to 1862. The locals didn’t bother with all those syllables. They called
him “Dalem Pancaniti,” and they spoke the name like they might invoke a spirit.
Not a demon, mind you.
Not quite.
Maybe something in between.
See, this Dalem Pancaniti wasn’t like the others. Didn’t
care much for the trappings of power, the way most men do when they get a taste
of it. No, this fella had other interests, darker passions that pulled him away
from the pomp and pageantry of colonial governance. He was what you might call
a hermit. An intellectual. A musician whose compositions would echo through the
centuries.
You’ve probably heard “Sabilulungan” without knowing it—that
haunting melody with flute and zither that seeps into your bones and stays
there. That’s his legacy. But it’s not his whole story. Not by a long shot.
The literary types—those academic bloodhounds who sniff
through dusty manuscripts—they know Dalem Pancaniti for something else
entirely. They know him as the man who birthed the Cianjuran genre, a form of
traditional Sundanese art that’s part vocal, part instrumental. Sekar, they
call it.
But here’s where it gets interesting, where the skin on your
arms might start to prickle just a bit.
They say he discovered this art form during a tawasul
ritual. You know what a tawasul is? It’s a kind of prayer, a way to get closer
to God through intercession. But Dalem Pancaniti wasn’t doing this in some
dusty prayer room or mosque. No, he was out on a bale kambang—a building
perched above a pond, like something floating between worlds—near the big pond
at the Cianjur Regency Hall.
Picture it: night falling over the water, mist rising like
ghosts from its surface. A solitary figure seated cross-legged on wooden planks
that hover above the dark mirror of the pond. And then… music. Music that hadn’t
existed before that moment, sliding out from between worlds.
That bale kambang was called Pancaniti, and that’s how our
regent got his nickname—Dalem Pancaniti, the regent who spent his nights not in
the comfort of his bed, but out there, suspended above the water, communing
with… well, who knows what exactly.
The songs that came from those nights weren’t just
entertainment. They were loaded with advice and Islamic philosophical
teachings, yes, but beneath those teachings ran an older current, something
that flowed from before Islam came to those shores. Something that whispered of
Hindu gods and Buddhist mysteries.
When he first developed Cianjuran, he wasn’t alone. There
were others—musicians from outside the regency hall, like Raden Etje Madjid
Natawiredja and a fellow known only as Maing Buleng. I wonder sometimes if they
knew what they were helping to birth in those midnight sessions above the dark
water. I wonder if they felt it too—that presence, that otherness that comes
when you hang suspended between worlds.
From those nights came the earliest Cianjuran songs: degung
palayon, balagenjat, nataan gunung. They spread through
Priangan like a beautiful contagion, setting the standard for aristocratic
arts. The nobility—the menak—embraced them, not knowing perhaps where they
truly came from.
You see, these songs weren’t entirely new creations. They
were evolutions of something older, something called pantun. Not the Malaysian
verse form you might know, but an ancient Sundanese oral tradition dating back
to the Hindu-Buddhist period. Carita pantun, they called it—historical romances
and prophecies passed down by juru pantun, specialized narrators.
We have proof of this tradition in an old manuscript, the Sanghyang
Siksa Kanda Ng Karesian. Even today, if you venture into certain Sundanese
villages like Kanekes in Lebak, you might hear pantun being narrated just as it
was centuries ago. Stories like Mundinglaya Dikusumah, Ciung Wanara,
Lutung Kasarung, and Dadap Malang Sisi Cimandiri—names that taste
strange on the tongue but carry the weight of ages.
The name Pancaniti appears in a song called Degung Putri
Layar, created during the regent’s lifetime. It’s a small immortality, a
thread connecting past to present.
But Dalem Pancaniti wasn’t just a musician conjuring
melodies above dark water. He was a writer too. He penned the Hikayat Bupati
Cianjur and the Hikayat Bupati Sumedang—historical works so trusted
that Dutch colonial scholars translated them repeatedly. One C.M.F.
Stouckhausen did so in 1863, a year after the regent’s death.
These weren’t just dry histories. They were political
statements written in Malay with Latin script—a demonstration that this
Sundanese regent could step outside his cultural traditions and play in other
linguistic sandboxes. These works traced his genealogical lineage, asserting
his position as a true Priangan regent.
He even created the first Sundanese-Malay dictionary, a
reference that later Dutch Sundanology researchers would rely on. This wasn’t
just some local potentate dabbling in scholarship—this was a man straddling
worlds, much like that bale kambang where he received his musical visions.
And maybe that’s not so surprising when you consider his
parentage. Dalem Pancaniti was the fifth child of Raden Adipati Prawiradiredja
I, regent from 1813 to 1833, and a legend in his own right. Prawiradiredja I
holds the distinction of being perhaps the only regent in all of Java who wrote
a letter in Malay using Latin script.
This wasn’t just any letter. It was addressed to Thomas
Stamford Raffles himself—yes, that Raffles, the British Lieutenant
Governor-General of Java. Dated April 9, 1816, the letter expressed the regent’s
sadness over Raffles leaving Java. It followed all the conventions of Malay
letter-writing tradition as detailed in the Terasul books, showing that
this Sundanese regent was steeped in Malay literary culture.
Like father, like son. The apple doesn’t fall far from the
tree, as they say. But sometimes, what falls from that tree isn’t quite what
you’d expect.
Sometimes, what falls is something else entirely. Something
that sits at the crossroads of worlds, creating music that still haunts us
centuries later, penning histories that shape our understanding of the past,
and spending long nights above dark water, receiving visions we can only guess
at.
And that, my friends, is the strange and terrible tale of
Dalem Pancaniti, the hermit-regent of Cianjur, whose shadow still stretches
across the centuries, reaching toward us with melodies we can’t quite shake
from our minds.
Sleep well tonight. And if you hear a distant zither, well…
it’s probably nothing to worry about.
Probably.
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