Hans Ras
Johannes Jacobus (Hans) Ras (1 April 1926 – 22 October 2003) was emeritus professor of Javanese language and literature at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
In 1961 he was lecturer at the University of Malaya, and in 1969 first representative in Jakarta of the KITLV (the Leiden-based Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde = Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology).
After Hans Ras passed his school-leaving exams, the Second World War broke out and he went into hiding, while his brothers were sent off into forced labour in Germany.
In 1946, Ras enrolled for the special course of Indonesian studies for future employees with the Dutch colonial civil service.
On his return to the Netherlands, he did his national service training and after that, at the age of 24, applied for a job with the Rotterdam firm of Internatio (now called Internatio-Müller).
He married Widjiati, and the newly-weds set out for Kuala Lumpur, where Ras had been appointed as lecturer at the University of Malaya even before passing his Master’s exams.
Besides his teaching duties, Ras devoted his time to writing a PhD thesis on the Hikayat Banjar, the Malaysian-language history of Banjarmasin.
Not long after this, the Ras family left the Netherlands for Jakarta to make the necessary preparations for the establishment of the first Indonesian office of the KITLV there.
In the first place he made a close study of the Indonesian wayang theatre and its historical development, translating the text of one play, The Abduction of Subadra, into Dutch.
No less important are his studies on the origin, structure, function and reliability of Javanese historical texts, in particular the Babad Tanah Jawi.
Ras spent the last years of his life preparing a new edition of the Pararaton, one of the most complex Old Javanese texts from a philological and literary-historical point of view.
On the ground of this, he concludes that from the whole Indonesian area one specific type of texts can be placed together in one literary genre, the ‘government chronicle’ or the ‘book of kings’: historiography at the service of the legitimity of kingship.
The qualities for which his publications stand out most are painstaking factual research, mostly of manuscripts, combined with wide scholarly reading, critical acumen, and keen intellect.
The focus on written texts, by which of course Javanese studies in Leiden were characterized also before Ras’ time, continues to be dominant in the department’s approach.
Although traditional historiography – which was one of his specialities – rather faded into the background, Ras’ attention to contemporary popular culture laid the foundations for the serious scholarly study of this which is still practised there today.
