Keris pincit?

[A. G. Maisey]

Yes Jaga, certainly.

Keris are not one dimensional, they were and are made for a number of reasons.

A keris can be made as a weapon, pure & simple, it can be made as a work of art, it can be made as a pusaka intended for ongoing use as this in a family, it can be made as an item of dress. There are probably other reasons in respect of why a keris is made.

Not all keris are equal, a keris can be made by anybody who can hold the tools, but a keris made as a pusaka, and a keris made with tuah can only be made by an empu when he is making with the attendant rituals & mantras.

Since keris are not signed we then need to ask just how it is that we can be relatively certain that an empu has indeed made a particular keris.

This is where tangguh comes into play, we need to be able identify the approximate period when the keris was made. Tangguh does not really allow us to do this across all times, but if we understand the parameters that govern tangguh it does allow us to differentiate between recent keris & truly old keris, further it does permit us a reasonable degree of certainty in respect of where it might have been made. Armed with these approximations we can then judge whether or not the quality of workmanship is high for the time & place, it permits us to eliminate at the outset keris that have no possibility of having been made by an empu.

Once we have a keris of empu-made quality identified, and we have a reasonably defensible opinion on time & place of manufacture, we can then say whether or not there is a reasonable possibility that this particular keris was empu-made or not.

This is really very important from the Javanese perspective, because this defensible opinion goes a very long way towards determining the value of a keris. Empu Suparman made most of his income by providing this sort of defensible opinion to sellers, dealers and buyers.