Recent research focusing on the court law prevailing prior to Dutch colonial rule in the eighteenth century has turned up some unexpected results. In the first place there does not seem to exist any reference to Sundanese (or Madurese) versions of the basic legal texts used in the period. Such texts include the "standard" one mentioned in the Pepekem Tjerbon of 1768 as the Jaya Lengkara, Raja Niscata, Jugul Muda, Kontara, etc. or Islamic variants of them as the Surya Alam, Adilulah, the luwangan texts. This is despite the painstaking work Edi S. Ekadjati and his colleagues at the Centre for Sundanese Documentation. Even more striking, the only two legal manuscripts attributable to the Sunda region contain no version of these texts in Sundanese; the texts are in Sundanese-Javanese or Javanese. One of the manuscripts (LOr 7440) originated from Candra Yuda, jaksa of Sumedang who was active in the 1720s. The other (LOr 7410) is associated with Ngabéhi Anggadireksa, Regent of Timbanganten (Bandung), who was active in the 1730s onward.

If-and the preliminary nature of the argument is acknowledged-this lack of reference to Sundanese versions of key legal texts reflects reality, then it raises a couple of interesting points which I should like to explore at the conference on Sundanese culture.

1. Is this court law using the medium of Javanese in actuality more Java-wide than a parochial one restricted to Central Java? Absence of ethnic differentiation within the textsña regular feature of Javo-Dutch codes and those of the Netherlands East Indies colonyñcoupled with clear Islamic alternatives within the texts, would tend to explain why they were recognized and applied in the Sundanese kingdoms of Cirebon, Sumedang, Timbantangen, and Banten.
2. Closely related is the issue of how does the Sundanese adat articulate with a court law that is Java-wide, i.e. not exclusively Sundanese, in a mutually beneficial relationship described by Redfield as that existing between the "great" tradition at court and the "little" tradition in the village.
3. And finally, how great are crucial differences between Sundanese and Javanese adat law, especially if they are both articulating with basically the same court law? To this belongs possible Dutch influences in the description, recording, and application of the adat.

In the possibility that a fairly close relationship existed between the law applied at court levels throughout Java, this would suggest existence of a reasonable degree of institutional similarity. If so, then the particular genius of Sundanese culture would tend to lie in such spheres as literature, music, dance, wayang golék, and speech. It also might suggest that Indonesia, even with its diversity of culture, is a more viable unit than that questioned by foreign observers.