About Djaka Lodang

Djaka Lodang

Djaka Lodang is a Javanese-language weekly magazine published in Yogyakarta, appearing every Saturday. It was founded by the journalist Abdullah Purwodarsono and the printing businessman Kusfandi through the Kartika Cakti foundation in 1971, and its first issue is dated 1 June 1971. Its name borrows the title of a work by Ranggawarsita, the great nineteenth-century Javanese poet of the Surakarta court. Published today by PT Djaka Lodang Pers under editor-in-chief Kuswinarni, the magazine is described as the only Javanese-language medium in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, and for more than fifty years it has carried Javanese fiction, poetry, wayang stories, court culture, folklore and its famous supernatural rubric, Jagading Lelembut, to readers across Java. Its motto, in Javanese, is "Ngesthi Budi Rahayu, Ngungak Mekaring Jagad Anyar" — striving for noble welfare, looking toward the flowering of a new world.

Birth from the ruins of Kembang Brajan

The birth of Djaka Lodang is closely tied to the bankruptcy of Kembang Brajan — also spelled Kembang Brayan — a Javanese-language weekly newspaper published in Yogyakarta from 1968 to early 1971. Abdullah Purwodarsono, a retired teacher of SMA Negeri 2 Yogyakarta who had become one of that paper's journalists and had helped raise its circulation to about 3,000 copies before mismanagement ended it, decided to publish a medium of his own. With his friend Kusfandi — also written Koeswandi or Kuswandi — a well-known Yogyakarta printing-house owner, he founded the Yayasan Kartika Cakti foundation in April 1971; Abdullah handled the editorial side and Kusfandi production. To ease marketing, the new publication was at first to be named Sum Kuning, after the victim of a rape case that had shocked Indonesia at the end of 1970, but the idea was dropped on humanitarian grounds. The name Djaka Lodang was chosen instead, borrowing the title of a work by Ranggawarsita, the nineteenth-century pujangga — court poet — of Java. The young magazine was initially mocked and accused in the weekly Pelopor Yogya of living from division, being dominated by a political party and financed by a general, because it appeared during the quiet period before the New Order's first election in 1971; Abdullah, by his own later account, welcomed the hostile coverage as free advertising.

From newspaper to tabloid to magazine

Djaka Lodang changed physical form repeatedly in its first decade. It first appeared as a broadsheet newspaper of four pages. In October 1976 it became an eight-page tabloid. A year later, in June 1977, it returned to newspaper form, and only at the end of 1978 did it settle into publication as a magazine. Its first office, for a year, was at the Taman Hiburan Rakyat (People's Entertainment Park) in Yogyakarta, then used as a bus terminal — a deliberate choice, Abdullah explained, because people getting on and off buses would see the Djaka Lodang office and buy the magazine. Those format changes record a small publisher experimenting its way toward the form its readers would sustain, and the magazine format it reached in 1978 is the one it has kept.

Contents: a reader-written magazine

Most of Djaka Lodang's contents are manuscripts sent in by its readers, and its rubrics map the whole of traditional and modern Javanese print culture. Its flagship is Jagading Lelembut, the "world of spirits", which publishes mystery stories of encounters with supernatural beings; the rubric became so beloved that the magazine collected its stories into a book-length anthology of about 200 pages. Other rubrics include Pangudarasa (reflections), Aksara Jawa (the Javanese script), Sumrawus (editorial), Nasib Panjenengan (fortune-telling), Crita Cekak (short stories), Crita Rakyat (folktales), Crita Sambung (serialised stories), Geguritan (Javanese poetry), Warta Ringkes (brief news), Kraton (court culture), Napak Tilas (pilgrimage and site visits), Padhalangan (wayang stories), Macapat (classical sung poetry), Tosan Aji (the lore of keris blades), Wiranom (profiles of accomplished young people), Pustaka (books), Pawiyatan (education coverage), Pribadi Binuka (profiles of figures), Panggung (artist profiles), Tintingan Buku (book reviews) and Wacan Bocah (children's reading), with dialect rubrics Banyumasan and Semarangan carrying the Javanese of Banyumas and Semarang. Indonesian coverage of the magazine notes that its horror and weton (Javanese calendrical) stories remain reader favourites.

Golden age in the 1980s

The magazine's golden age came in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, when its circulation reached 20,000 copies. Its own anniversary accounts give a weekly circulation in the 1980s of 10,000 to 20,000 copies. That success coincided with the boom of the Sumbangan Olahraga Berhadiah, the state sports-contribution lottery of the period, because the magazine's fortune rubric, Nasib Panjenengan, was believed by readers to be adept at predicting winning numbers. The combination was potent: a magazine of Javanese culture and literature whose pages also promised luck became a weekly habit across Yogyakarta and Central Java. Scholars who studied the magazine for media-research awards describe the tension in its identity ever since — idealism versus business, and the future of regional-language media — in a case study tellingly titled "Idealisme, Bisnis, dan Masa Depan Media Berbahasa Daerah".

The Koran Masuk Desa years

Djaka Lodang also played a documented role in Indonesian government literacy policy. The Department of Information's Koran Masuk Desa (Newspapers Enter the Village) programme, begun in 1980, targeted Yogyakarta province, and Djaka Lodang was one of its vehicles: a special village edition of the magazine was published from 1982, officially launched in the 1983/84 budget year with its first edition on 14 May 1983 under a ministerial decree of 1981. From 1983 to 1986 it appeared as the rural edition, and from 1987 to 1999 as the Koran Mlebu Desa edition, a 16-page insert placed in the middle of the parent magazine, which itself ran to about 50 pages. The episode shows the state treating the Javanese weekly as infrastructure: the surest channel through which printed information could reach Javanese-speaking villagers was a magazine they already read for stories and fortunes.

Companies, people and continuity

The magazine was published by Yayasan Kartika Cakti from 1971 to 1986 and by PT Djaka Lodang Pers from 1986 to the present. Its founder Kusfandi died in 2002; Abdullah Purwodarsono's service to Javanese literature was recognised in 2017 with the Hadiah Sastra Rancagé, the Rancagé literary prize's award for services to Javanese literature. The magazine's website is djakalodang.com, and its recent mastheads list Kuswinarni as editor-in-chief, with writers including Suhindriyo and Tatiek Poerwa Kalingga. Anniversary coverage at fifty-one years, in 2022, stressed the care of its editing in preserving its distinctive character — authentic, unique and classic, in the words of its commemorative edition — and its educational cultural rubrics as a means of preserving Javanese language and culture, while noting the challenge of the electronic-magazine era and the need to prepare for a digital future.

Awards for cultural preservation

Djaka Lodang's preservation role has been formally honoured. In 2014 it received the Yogyakarta provincial award for preservers and activists of culture, in the category of institutions preserving custom and tradition. In 2025 it received the City of Yogyakarta's award for artists and cultural figures in the category of preserver of language, literature and script (Pelestari Bahasa, Sastra, dan Aksara). These awards recognise what the magazine does simply by existing weekly: it keeps the Javanese language, its Latin and traditional scripts, its poetry forms and its story traditions in current commercial print, bought and read voluntarily by a living audience rather than preserved only in libraries.

Djaka Lodang and Panjebar Semangat

Together with Surabaya's Panjebar Semangat, founded in 1933, Djaka Lodang forms the pair of surviving Javanese-language weeklies in Indonesia — Panjebar Semangat the elder, from East Java's commercial capital, Djaka Lodang the younger, from the court and university city of Yogyakarta. Indonesian magazine lists group both among the country's regional-language titles. Djaka Lodang's own commemorative writing calls it the only Javanese-language medium in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, a status that gives a small weekly an outsized cultural responsibility. Its survival past fifty years — through format changes, the lottery boom and bust, the fall of the New Order, and the arrival of electronic media — rests on the formula set at its founding in 1971: reader-written Javanese stories, poems, court lore and spirit tales, edited carefully in Yogyakarta, in the language its audience dreams in.