Mpu Sedah begins the Bharatayuddha for Jayabaya of Kediri

Kediri, or Panjalu, was one of the two kingdoms into which Airlangga had divided East Java; by the late 11th century it apparently held the ports of the coast and represented Java to Chinese merchants. Its inscriptions give little more than the names and dates of its kings, but its court produced a flowering of Old Javanese poetry. Jayabaya, crowned as Sri Varmeshvara, is known from inscriptions of 1135, 1136 and 1144, and by 1159 another king, Sarveshvara, was reigning.

The prologue of the Bharatayuddha praises Jayabaya as a conqueror to whom all his enemies, among them a certain Hemabhupati, had submitted, and contains a chronogram composed by Sedah that gives the Shaka year 1079, AD 1157; its paraphrase even names the day, which P. J. Zoetmulder converted to 6 September 1157 (some accounts give 6 November). The epilogue, by Panuluh, states that Sedah wrote the first part and that he himself was charged by the king to go on from the moment when Shalya takes command of the Kaurava army. Javanese tradition later explained the change of author by a romantic tale that Sedah had used the queen as his model for Shalya’s wife and was punished; Zoetmulder found nothing in the text to support it. Panuluh also wrote the Hariwangsa, on the legends of Vishnu-Krishna.

In 52 cantos the poem retells the battles of the Pandavas and Kauravas on the field of the Kurus. In the prologue the king is one with Shiva; the epilogue presents him as an incarnation of Vishnu who has returned to restore peace to Java — a devotion to Vishnu that George Coedès compared with that of Angkor under Suryavarman II. Coedès, following C. C. Berg, also called the poem replete with allusions to contemporary events. Parts of the Bharatayuddha remained in use in the Islamic period, recited in the wayang shadow plays.