to sell cotton cloth there, competing with Java's own home-grown cotton. By 1755 VOC control was established throughout Java, except in the courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta. And just as surely as Dutch influence would change all aspects of Javanese life, so would the establishment of the VOC affect north-coast batik,
At the end of the eighteenth century, several events were to seal the fate of the VOC and very nearly doom the prospects for later Dutch rule. The spice trade became less lucrative. Money was now to be made in produce shipped directly from Java: coffee, tea, and palm oil among other items. What virtually bankrupted the VOC, however, were savage doses of dysentery and malaria—along with piracy and corruption. Finally, the Napoleonic wars changed the fate of Java as well as Europe. Coincidentally, they also led to the first authoritative chronicling of batik.
The children's hospital of Batavia was actually an orphanage. built of brick with lodgings for servants and maintained by voluntary contributions.
Johan Nieuhoff was one of numerous brave, and sometimes foolhardy, seventeenth-century explorer.
BATIK AS COSTUME
Until well into the twentieth century, batik was. used almost exclusively for clothing and for ceremonial occasions. In a rank-conscious society, class distinctions were made by the type of cloth worn and its pattern. In a tropical, humid climate such as Java, batik was ideal. As a costume, it was ingenious because batik demanded no zippers, buttons, or pins.
A sarong, usually sewn together at the ends, is only two yards long (180 cm.). A sarong has a "body," or badan, and a "head," or kepala. The badan is about three-quarters the length of the sarong. The kepala is a wide perpendicular band, usually in the middle or at the end of the sarong. Sometimes the kepala has two rows of equilateral triangles running down each side with the points of the triangles facing each other, much like a backgammon board; this design is called a tumpal.
The dodot, made by sewing two lengths of batik together, is a prerogative of royalty; dodots are usually worn only by the sultan, a bride or groom, or dancers at the courts, and are usually of unsurpassed quality. The dodot is worn draped and folded as an overskirt, sometimes with a train of fabric hanging at one side. Silk trousers are often worn underneath, with the pattern of the trousers showing in front.
Sarong is a Malay word, but the idea of draping a cloth as a skirt probably originated in India. A young nineteenth-century girl from western Java wears a typical sarong with tumpal at its head.
A kain panjang or "long cloth"—often simply called kain—is an ankle-length batik about forty inches wide (107 cm.) and about two and a half to three yards long (about 250 cm.). The entire surface is decorated, often with borders at the shorter ends. Worn by both men and women, a kain is usually considered more formal than a sarong. When worn by women, it is usually wrapped left over right, sometimes with narrow pleats in the front; men usually wear a kain with broader front pleats, wrapping it loosely right over left.
A pagi-sore or "morning-evening" batik is the Javanese version of reversible clothing. A little longer than a kain, the pagi-sore is divided diagonally, each half with a distinctive design and color. It is a simple matter to arrange the same cloth for two strikingly different effects.
The selendang (or slendang) is a long narrow cloth used exclusively by women as a carryall or a shawl. Draped over the shoulder, it can hold a baby, the day's marketing, or anything else that needs carrying. Selendangs often have striped borders at each end suggesting an imitation fringe; they are sometimes finished by a true fringe, which is attached, knotted, and twisted.
The iket kepala, worn only by men, is a square headcloth, tied elegantly to form a turban. The pattern of the iket may be distributed evenly over the surface of the cloth, but in the middle there is usually an undecorated area called tengahan. Often the perimeter has finely drawn stripes, imitating a real fringe.
A kemben is a "breast cloth," which is a narrow batik wrapped around the upper part of the body used to secure a kain or sarong. It is worn instead of a kebaya (a long-sleeved blouse usually decorated with lace and embroidery) or sometimes under the kebaya.
Cotton for Sale—and to Wear
Cotton had been grown and spun in India for five thousand years, and by the middle of the fourteenth century it was probably the most important medium of exchange among Muslim, Hindu, and Arab traders. Within another three hundred years most merchants, except the Chinese—who traded mostly in porcelain—were carrying cotton throughout the East Indian archipelago. A single length of three or four yards was worth about forty pounds of nutmeg, and one ship might carry thirty or more different kinds of cloth, most likely including batik.
The export of batik from southeastern India to Java, Sumatra, Persia, and Siam reached its peak in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early batik designs imitated woven textiles and were called djelemprang; they were popular because the simulated woven design took far less time to produce than actual woven cloth. The double ikat weave (patola) was often copied as a batik design, and this and other geometrically patterned djelemprangs were to find their way into the batik of both central Java and the north coast.
The Indian textiles suggested the possibility of multicolored patterns, as well as new designs. They probably also inspired a new organization of the textile surface—as a framed rectangle. That seemingly simple change brought about a profound revolution in perspective: now the cloth could be viewed as a picture-plane to be filled with something other than stripes or plaids. All these innovations may well have suggested to local craftsmen the idea of filling major design elements in batik with a network of finer designs. This would later lead to the development of isén—the fine "filling" or pattern within a motif.
In a 1662 book by the Dutch explorer Johan Nieu-hoff, numerous Javanese are shown dressed in what appear to be batiked garments. Shortly thereafter, a Dutch official visiting the central Javanese kingdom of Mataram reported four thousand women who were "painting" cloth. The numbers may have been inflated, but batik by then had become important enough to rival Dutch imported cloth. In fact, the ruler of Mataram encouraged his people to grow cotton in a vain attempt to free his people from the yoke of Holland.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the common people of Java were wearing plaid cloth (called lurik); others, more exalted, "preferred baték, or painted cloth," which came in a hundred different patterns. Not all these patterns were available to everyone, however. Certain designs, especially those used in the courts of central Java, were "forbidden" to commoners. But the freewheeling people of the north coast generally ignored such strictures.
Cotton, both locally grown and imported, was a key ingredient in the development of batik. Two types of cotton were grown in seventeenth-century Java. Je- rondo was "used instead of feathers
