Sultan Agung of Mataram - Legacy

Legacy

Pilgrimage to his graveyard complex is considered to be significant to many Javanese pilgrims, who make considerable effort to go to Imogiri at appropriate times and days in the Javanese and Islamic calendars.

In the Sukarno era he was nominated and confirmed as a National Hero of Indonesia (Pahlawan Nasional Indonesia).

However, Sultan Agung's legacy is elsewhere. The conquest of new territories led him to create an administrative structure to manage these territories. He created "provinces" by appointing people as adipati (equivalent to Duke) at the head of territories called kadipaten (Duchy), particularly those territories in the western part of Java, where Mataram was facing Banten and Batavia, two places who resisted his wars of conquest. A kabupaten like Karawang, for instance, was created when Sultan Agung appointed prince Kertabumi as its first adipati in 1636. When the V.O.C. (the Dutch East India Company) took control of Mataram territories, it kept the kadipaten structure. Under the colonial administration of the Netherlands Indies, adipati, now called bupati, were called regenten and kadipaten, now kabupaten, regentschapen. The title of a bupati consisted generally in a formal name, for instance "Sastradiningrat" in the case of Karawang, preceded by "Raden Aria Adipati", hence "Raden Aria Adipati Sastradiningrat" (shortened into R. A. A. Sastradiningrat). The word adipati survived in the colonial system.

The Dutch had grouped kabupaten into regions under a resident, called residenties. The Indonesian government kept the kabupaten but disbanded the residenties in the 1950s, resulting in kabupaten being administrative subdivisions directly under a province. The laws on regional autonomy promulgated in 1999 give a high degree of autonomy to the kabupaten, not to the provinces. Sultan Agung's legacy is also recognised by modern Indonesia.