Untung Suropati

Untung Suropati (Bali, 1660–Bangil, Pasuruan, 5 November 1706) adalah seorang pahlawan nasional Indonesia.

Beliau dimakamkan di Surabaya.

Pranala luar

• (Indonesia) Artikel di bagian Pustakaloka - "Tenggelamnya Sebuah Roman", KOMPAS, 16 Agustus 2003

Officially a national hero for the Republic of Indonesia three centuries after he died, this man's bio seems to have been made for a soap opera.

Untung Suropati was a slave from Bali, bought when still a kid by a Dutchman named Moor, and installed around the house. In that house there was the master's little daughter named Suzanna. They grew up together, and fell in love with each other when the time came, but of course this was the worst social sin one could have committed in the colony. When the relationship was discovered, Suropati got the usual punishment for the usual slaves for his unusual crime; but he lived despite being made a mess of by the professional torturers. He even managed to escape from the master's house.

Pursued by everyone from the colonial cops to slave traders, he gave in to the Dutch army, thinking that if they received him as a soldier one day he could get back to Suzanna and marry her in the way of the world. He provided enough proof of military usefulness, so instead of beheaded he was given a license to arm. He wormed his way up; quickly he was commander of the Balinese detachment.

Then came an important assignment -- he got to arrest a renegade from the West Javanese Banten kingdom, Prince Purboyo, son of the Dutch-hating Sultan Ageng. He found the prince and made him agree to surrender. But when Suropati delivered the captive to his superior, a Dutch, by the latter's conduct he felt personally insulted, and turned against the army, fled to the Central Javanese kingdom of Mataram with the prince and his two wives. The younger wife got a divorce from the prince and married Suropati -- this last name of his was actually given by the prince upon this marriage, as he was also given a job as commander of a Balinese troop attached to the Mataramese regular army. This great kingdom was steadily pygmied and under advanced relegation to obscurity by then, under the cruel, malicious, and foxy king Amangkurat II (the second).

After some time, the Dutch dispatched a troop under the command of Captain François Tack to ask Amangkurat II to hand over Suropati. The king said he would extradite the Balinese to Batavia, but he also simultaneously told Suropati to prepare an attack. The two armies clashed, the palace got partly burnt, and in the confusion Suropati ran away from Mataramese territory, until he reached a little Eastern Javanese town named Pasuruan, and fortified himself there, proclaiming it an independent realm, and he, having assumed the proper Javanese name of Duke Wiro Negoro (the name means 'soldier of the state'), ruling the area.

Once settled, he meddled in the Mataramese affairs again by supporting a prince of the blood on his claim of the throne against the Dutch-appointed candidate for the new king, Prince Puger. Suropati even sent an emissary to Batavia to offer the Governor-General a cooperation of his army, as long as the Dutch crowned his choice of king. The emissary was put into prison as the Dutch found it disgusting to even think of such an alliance with a runaway slave (which was consistently what they took Suropati to always be). A war ensued. In a battle at Bangil, Suropati got mortally wounded. His men kept fighting until all was lost. In 1706 the colonial army completely took over Pasuruan. They, according to tradition, exhumed Suropati's corpse, and threw it into the sea.

Untung Suropati has been a Javanese folktale's leading character since, and the Javanese traditional theater kethoprak (costume drama) appropriated his story.