A Short History of Indonesia - 11 - BobHay Short History of Indonesia - 11.pdf · !3...
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11. A Short History of Indonesia
Mandalas of Power and Influence
WC 4040 Around the year 400 AD Mulavarman gave thousands of cattle1, something called a “wonder tree”, and a grant of land to Brahmin priests who had consecrated him and bestowed the title “lord of kings”. This “lord of kings” ruled over a kingdom on the Mahakam River near Kutei in Kalimantan. The
momentous occasion was recorded on seven stone sacrificial posts or stele. These are the first written records we have of events in Indonesia and thus mark the transition from pre-‐history to history. A “yupa” or “prasasti” of Mulavarman c.400 AD Kutei2
The inscriptions are significant in other ways too, foremost among which is that this is the earliest evidence of Indian cultural influence upon Indonesia, a topic we will be discussing in greater detail shortly. These inscriptions are also significant in that they demonstrate the evolution of this
kingdom over three generations: Mulavarman took the title of “lord of kings” but his father Asvavarman, was only the “founder of a noble race” while Mulavarman’s grandfather, Kundungga, had been a more lowly tribal chief or mere “lord of men”. Since it seems the grandfather retained his Indonesian name, it must have been Asvavarman who first adopted Hindu beliefs3. It is also noteworthy that the gifts recorded on the posts ⎯ here called yupa but more commonly known at a later time as prasasti ⎯ are only part of a transaction. The other part, of course, was the performance by the twice born4 of religious rituals which consecrated Mulavarman, conferred titles on him and endowed him with great religious power. Such a procedure, common throughout the Hindu-‐Java era, followed an ancient Indian tradition known as the dharmasastra (or law of gift) which is frequently demonstrated in the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Perhaps more interesting is that this 1 This seems a huge number but is stated in de Casparis, JG and Mabbet, IW: “Religion and Popular Beliefs of Southeast Asia before 1500 AD”, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Volume I – From early Times to c. 1500, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 305 2 Museum Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia 3van Naerssen, FH: “The Economic and Administrative History of Early Indonesia” in Handbuch der Orientalistik, EJ Brill, Leiden/Köln 1977, p. 18 4 The term used on the inscriptions ⎯ it refers to the men’s “re-birth” as Brahmins.
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ancient Hindu tradition can be traced back to even earlier Austro-‐Asiatic cultures from which both Indian and Indonesian are ultimately derived5. Map of Southeast Asia. Note the position of the Makassar Straits in relation to Java and Sumatra.
There are no dates on these “sacrificial posts” but the inscriptions are written in Sanskrit in the Pallava script which itself can be dated to this period. This script evolved in southern India during the Dravidian Pallava dynasty
which ruled the northern part of Tamil-‐Nadu and Andhra Pradesh from about 3rd to 5th Centuries AD6. They were finally defeated by the Chola kings in the 8th Century.
An example of Pallava script from India.
While the stones have remained to tell us about the gifts and glorious titles of
Mulavarman, little else is known of him or his dynasty. While the yupa say he defeated his enemies in battle (and hence became a lord of other kings in the region) history has nothing further to say about him except that his kingdom was somewhere near the Mahakam River where it empties into the Makassar Straits. Mulavarman’s kingdom probably faded from history because other parts of Indonesia, specifically Sumatra and Java grew to control the shipping lanes and consequently re-‐directed trade from India into their own ports. The trading routes of that era were largely those that brought Indian goods to Southeast Asia and returned local produce to India. Although as we have seen, China has played an important role in the pre-‐history of Southeast Asia for as long as there have been people there, during this period trade was not extensive with China. Professor van Naerssen7 concluded that:
As late as the third century the foreign trade of western Indonesia did not extend beyond India and Ceylon. Western Indonesia was not yet trading with China: only an Indonesian trade with India existed. “The fifth century was a time when western Indonesian commerce made a leap forward, benefitting from developments outside Indonesia itself by putting indigenous seamanship to good use8.” The regions engaged in this foreign
5 van Naerssen, FH, Op. cit. p. 19 6 They date originally from 275 AD but their greatest epoch was near their end, in the 7th and 8th Centuries. 7 van Naerssen, FH, Op. cit. p. 21 8 The quote is from Wolters, 1967, p.158.
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trade were South Sumatra and West Java; the kingdoms mentioned by Chinese authors were Kan-t’o-li, predecessor of the empire of Srivijaya and in West Java Ho-lo-tan. Here was the favoured commercial coast of western Indonesia.
Salakanagara In 1677 AD Prince Wangsakerta in Cirebon called together a symposium of experts who compiled Pustaka Rayja-rayja i Bhumi Nusantara. It says that the first kingdom in Java was one called Salakanagara and that it was established in the Year 52 Saka or 130/131 AD. Although the exact location is not known, it is probable Salakanagara was in the vicinity of present-‐day Merak. Historians believe this was the city mentioned by Ptomemy of Alexandria (87-‐150 AD) in his Geographike Hypergesis. It is also mentioned in Chinese records of the time. Tarumanagara The earliest known contemporary record in Java are four prasasti of Purnavarman, king of Taruma nagara. Like the yupa of Mulavarman in Kalimantan, these inscriptions are written in Pallavi but on this occasion, they date to about half a century later9 ⎯ that is, to the mid-‐5th Century AD.
(l) prasasti tapak gajah purnawarman ⎯ the Elephant’s footprints of Purnavarman10 and (r) prasasti ciarteun – note the footprints on top of the stone.
Three of the prasasti were found near Bogor, south of Jakarta. On two of these footprints are carved ⎯ of the illustrious Purnavarman who once ruled at Taruma ⎯ and on another, the footprints of an elephant of the lord of Taruma.
The fourth stone records how Purnavarman altered the course of a river and gave the Brahmins 100 cows for their part in celebrating the occasion.
9 van Naerssen, op.cit. p. 23 10 Photos by maskur ridwan: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/3754783.jpg and http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3755396
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A Prasasti of Purnavarman, king of Tarumanagara, Tugu sub-district of Jakarta.
One scholar commented that these inscriptions
….bear ample testimony to a very high degree of civilization in West Java during the fifth century of our era – a civilization which is strongly marked by Indo-Aryan influence from the mainland of India11.
More is known about Purnavarman than Mulavarman. For example, we know he was the third of his dynasty to reign, the founding father being Rajadirajaguru Jayasingawarman [Raja di raja guru Jaya singa warman] who ruled from 358 to 382 AD. He was succeeded by Dharmayawarman [Dharma ya warman] 382-‐395 and then Purnavarman whose long reign extended from 395 to 434 AD. According to the book Nusantara12, Purnavarman controlled 48 small kingdoms. We also learn of Taruma Nagara from Chinese sources which record trade and diplomatic relations in the lands between China and India and more particularly, from the Buddhist monk Fa Xian who stayed on
the island of Yavadi (Java) for 6 months from December 412 to May 413. In his book fo-kuo-chi which was written in 414 AD, Fa Xian says that little was known there about the Lord Buddha but the Brahmins and heretics flourished. Purnavarman was also mentioned in the annals of the Sung dynasty because he had sent a diplomatic mission to China in 435 AD, the year after the great king died.
Funan and Foreign Trade Although it is clear India and China enjoyed active trade relations long into antiquity, there was relatively little trade between the Indonesian islands and China before the Sung dynasty (960 – 1279 AD). In contrast, trade between
11 Vogel (1925) quoted by van Naerssen, op. cit. p23 12 Nusantara means (a) those islands of the Archipelago not yet conquered by Madjapahit or (b) the whole of Indonesia in modern times. As for (a), it is said the great general and prime minister of Madjapahit, Gadja Mada, vowed to “eat no spice” until he had conquered the whole of Nusantara (see Negarakertagama and later Pararaton). Usage (b) was coined by Ernest Francois Eugene Douwes Dekker in his 1920 book in which he tried to write a history of Indonesia without using Indian words.
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the Indonesian islands and India was extensive and date back to the Neolithic age in the archipelago.
Sanskrit and Tamil literary references to Southeast Asia may go back as far as the third century BC… By AD 70 there is evidence that cloves from the Moluccas were reaching Rome… Between the first and fifth centuries AD a number of small indigenous trading “states” (or emporia) developed in southern Indochina and in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula…13
It seems that rather than take the 1600 km voyage through the Straits of Malacca and round the Malay Peninsula, the earliest traders preferred to ship their goods across the Bay of Bengal, off-‐load them at the Isthmus of Kra, carry them overland and then take ship again across the Gulf of Thailand to an entrepôt in the Mekong Delta. The first such entrepôt was founded in the 1st Century AD at Vyadhapura (City of the Hunter – now thought to be have been the site of Angkor Borei we will mention later) which was near modern Banam in southern Cambodia, but later transferred to Oc Eo in southern Vietnam. This was probably strategically better situated but more importantly, the region was capable of producing the huge quantities of rice needed to supply the traders and the ships which came to the city. As we will see later, even the great maritime empire of Madjapahit had its centre where it did (ie, Trowulan) because this controlled the great rice bowl of Java and could therefore provision the ships and support the traders who did business with it. Although Funan rice farmers originally depended on the flooding of the river,
eventually an extensive irrigation system developed. This was a system of canals so large that it connected the coastal settlements to those in region of Ankor Borei ⎯ or Vyadhapura, the original entrepôt and old capital ⎯ a distance of over 90 km. This was so central to the well-‐being of the economy that that it must have demanded a very well organised and efficient government. Temple remains at Ankor Borei14
The volume of rice and other provisions it could supply was so important to the success of Oc Eo because ships in those days often had to wait in
13 I have omitted the references. See the original – Bellwood, P: Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago. Revised ed. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997 – Ch. Nine: “The Early metal Phase: A Protohistoric Transition toward Supra-Tribal Societies”, epress.anu.edu.au/pima/pdf/ch09.pdf 14 Photo: Kazuo Iwase,
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port for anything up to five months until the monsoon winds changed direction and allowed them to proceed on the second leg of their journey. Given that many of the traders and sailors waiting in port for the shift in the winds were from India, it is not surprising that their culture began to rub off on the local residents, particularly the ruling élite, creating a culture change which was the beginning of what some historians have called the Indianisation or hinduization of Southeast Asia15. Perhaps legitimising this change is a myth of origin which says that Funan was founded when a local princess raided a ship carrying an Indian prince called Kaundinya ⎯ the region has always been famous for pirates ⎯ but she fell in love and married Kaundinya and between them they found befriending ships rather than raiding them paid better dividends. Funan was the first of the “tiger” economies of Southeast Asia, not only growing rich on the proceeds of trade and agriculture, but because it was run efficiently by an extensive bureaucracy which apparently employed Indians as its administrators. Not surprisingly therefore Funan adopted Sanskrit as the language of the court which also adopted first Hindu and later ⎯ after the 5th Century AD ⎯ Buddhist religious beliefs and practices. Taxes were collected in kind, in gold, silver, pearls and perfumed woods. Justice was of the trial by ordeal kind, accused persons being required to carry red-‐hot iron chains or snatch gold rings or eggs from boiling water. The Funanese had slaves but, on the lighter side, they also developed music melliferous enough to impress the Chinese emperor when he heard a visiting Funanese orchestra and they had an extensive system of libraries and archives. Although the language and ethnic origins of the people of Funan are unknown, Funan is presumed to have been the first of the Khmer kingdoms. This presumption rests mainly on the myth of origin, of the pirate queen and Kaudinya mentioned earlier, a myth which is shared by the Khmer kingdom of Chenla which in the period eventually defeated and absorbed Funan. Chenla originally had its capital at Shreshthapura located in modern day southern Laos but from about 550 AD it was a vassal of Funan. However, 60 or so years later it rebelled. Led by its most famous king, Ishanavarman, by sometime between 612 and 628 AD Chenla had not only defeated its former master but proceeded to absorb the whole of Funan, the people, the economy and the culture into its own. Of course, Chenla itself was eventually transformed by Jayavarman II into a kingdom called Kambuja (790 AD) which later became the much more famous Angkor. Jayavarman in his early life had
15 The best-known of whom was G. Coedès: Les États hindouisés d’Indochine et d’Indonesie, 1964 (the original under a slightly different title was published in 1944; translated as The Indianized States of Southeast Asia by Susan Brown Cowing, 1968)
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lived as a prince ⎯ perhaps as a hostage ⎯ at the court of the Sailendras in Java, the history of which we will look at later. However, in 802 AD Jayavarman II undertook a Hindu ritual and became Chakravartin which established him as a divinely appointed king and free of the rule of Java. He died in 834 and was succeeded by Indravarman who greatly extended the kingdom and undertook many projects including building temples and irrigation works. In turn, Indravarman was succeeded in 889 AD by Yasovarman I who built the first city of Angkor and the East Baray, the gigantic water reservoir which in its day held 50 million cubic meters of water. While some scholars still hold the purpose of this artificial lake was to hold water for the irrigation canals on which the people depended for their rice production, modern thought is swinging in the direction that the purpose
was purely symbolic, representing to the people the seas which surrounded Mount Meru on which the Hindu gods were believed to dwell. Today the monumental construction is bone dry and farmers cultivate its dry bed. Nonetheless, its outline ⎯ like the great Wall of China ⎯ can be seen from space. East Baray June 200916
Funan was probably at the peak of its powers in the 4th Century and had faded away by the end of the 7th Century. Its fall had many causes but paramount was the development of better ships and new sailing skills which in turn meant that Indian and other traders from the West no longer needed to rely on portage of their goods across the Isthmus of Kra but instead could sail the long way round, through the Straits of Malacca. Even during the hey-‐day of Funan, several ports east of the Malay Peninsula and in the Sunda Straits17 had been trading direct with India as well as with Funan. Indonesian sailors had also long been introducing local products into the international markets. Originally Indian and Chinese traders were interested only in what each could exchange with the other, but gradually they found value in Indonesian substitutes for sought-‐after products: for example, Sumatran pine resin and benzoin gradually replaced the more expensive frankincense and myrrh. Eventually, demand for other products such as sandalwood from Timor, camphor from Sumatra and of course, spices from the Moluccas began to
16 Photo: John, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/hRK3cAv2kagsuRiZoNlGYw 17 The Sunda Straits are between western Java and southern Sumatra.
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focus attention directly on the Indonesian ports as trading destinations in their own right. The first and the most long-‐lived of all the Indonesian kingdoms to emerge was Srivijaya, a maritime power we will look at in the next Unit. However, before proceeding, there are two issues we need to examine briefly because they affect how we understand the centres of power which form the subject of the next section of this course. These issues are (a) what do we understand by “kingdom” in Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago in particular; and (b) to what extent were these cultures “hinduized” and how did it happen? The Mandalas of Power Up to this stage I have been referring to “kings” and “kingdoms” but historians warn these terms are misleading when used in the Southeast Asian context. Much is lost in the translation, first because kings and kingdoms were
in many ways different from the European model we have in our heads, and second, because we underestimate the strength of the religious component of “kingship”. Buddhist monk creating a sand mandala18
Some historians have suggested the word mandala be used instead of kingdom in order to avoid any
confusion. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit meaning a circle, the circumference of a circle or completion but it implies much more than a simple circle. It is a pattern, a constellation which variously has been used to represent the cosmos, the unity of life and even the unconscious self19. Perhaps the best-‐known mandalas are those made from coloured sand by Tibetan monks. To call a Southeast Asian kingdom a mandala, argues Martin Stuart-‐Fox20, professor of history at the University of Queensland…
….is to draw attention, metaphorically, to relations of power that connected the periphery to the centre. The mandalas of Southeast Asia were constellations of power, whose extent varied in relation to the
18 http://www.clemson.edu/newsroom/articles/2008/march/IAW2008.php5 19 Carl Jung used it as a representation of the unconscious self 20 Stuart-Fox, M: A Short History of China and Southeast Asia ⎯ Tribute, Trade and Influence, Allen and Unwin 2003.
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attraction of the centre. They were not states whose administrative control reached to defined frontiers. Power diminished with distance from the centre, frontiers fluctuated, and relations with neighbouring mandalas tended to be antagonistic, as each attempted to expand at the other’s expense21.
So, for example, Stuart-‐Fox suggests we should not think of Funan as a
…centralised kingdom extending from southern Vietnam all the way round to the Kra Isthmus, but rather as a mandala, the power of whose capital in southeastern Cambodia waxed and waned, and whose armed merchant ships succeeded in enforcing its temporary suzerainty over small coastal trading ports around the Gulf of Thailand. What gave Funan the edge over others such centres of power was clearly its position astride the India-China trade route. Its power, however, is unlikely to have spread further inland. Further north, on the middle Mekong and on the lower Chao Phraya River, other centres were establishing themselves that in time would challenge and replace Funan22.
Religion and kingship were inextricably intertwined in Southeast Asia. As we saw earlier, the so-‐called Big Men had attributed to them
…an abnormal amount of personal and innate “soul stuff”, which explained and distinguished their performance from that of others in their generation and especially among their own kinsmen.23
Given the cognatic kinship system of Southeast Asia, in which descent was reckoned through both sides of the family, this “soul stuff” was not so much inherited but something more akin to a gift of the gods. If ancestry had anything to do with a person’s importance it was not whose son or daughter he or she happened to be but rather how many outstanding ancestors there were in the history of the extended family. Most importantly, when these Big Men died, they were recognised as Ancestors who in life had brought benefits to their community and, by extrapolation, would therefore continue to do so in the After-‐Life. As Wolters says, No special respect was paid to mere forebears in societies which practised cognatic kinship. Ancestor status had to be earned. And he added, Sites associated with the Ancestors, such as mountains, supplied additional identity to the settlement areas.24
21 Ibid, p. 29 22 Ibid., pp29-30. 23 Wolters, OW: History, “Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives”, Studies on Southeast Asia, Vol 26 – Revised edition in cooperation with the ISEAS. p. 18 24 Ibid. p 19.
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Leaders who did great deeds ⎯ won wars, donated land, built temples ⎯ probably anticipated that they could become Ancestors and so in their lifetimes attributed their successes to divine forces and chose their burial sites with an eye to these becoming shrines and places of pilgrimage in the future. Thus, in 802 AD, for example, the Cambodian king Jayavarman II inaugurated a cult known as devaraja on Mount Mahendra. This identified him with the god Siva who was king of the gods just as he, Jayavarman was king of men. It also established him as cakravartin or universal king who, long after his death could lend spiritual power to future rulers of Cambodia and thereby protect the realm from warring factions. Although we in the West remember the divine right of kings in European history, the notion of god-‐king is very foreign to us. In fact, in all three of the Abrahamic religions ⎯ Islam, Judaism and Christianity ⎯ the very thought is blasphemous and the idea of a king being absorbed as it were into the identity of a god is unthinkable. However, emperors of Rome were deified after their deaths and even Antinöus, the young lover of the Emperor Claudius, was deified after he drowned in the Nile and worshipped thereafter for several centuries conflated with the Egyptian god Osiris and for a time in Antinopolus, even with Jesus. The notion however was part of the currency of kingship in Southeast Asia. When Indian religious practises were first brought to the region they were organised around cults of Siva and ⎯ less often ⎯ Vishnu. Various teacher-‐inspired sects also existed in which the gurus taught that by way of ascetic practices and the pious cultivation of his mind ⎯ meditation ⎯ an individual could enter into a close relationship with a particular god. In the case of kings, several close relationships of the divine kind included being a portion of Siva or participating in his divine energy.25 This meant that the king participated in Siva’s divine authority and consequently, his personal authority was absolute. Further, since obeying the king became in effect an act of homage to Siva, obedience to the king was one way his subjects could enter into a closer relationship for themselves with the god.
“Kingship”, signified by the personal Siva cult of the man who had seized the overlordship and not by territorially-defined “kingdoms”, was the reality that emerged from the “Hinduizing” process, but this does not mean that widely extending territorial relations were not possible. On the contrary, there need be no limit to a ruler’s sovereign claims on earth26.
25 Ibid p. 22. 26 Ibid p. 22.
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The Hinduized states of Southeast Asia One of the greatest of the pre-‐historians of Southeast Asia was George Coedès. Born in Paris in 1886, he moved to Thailand in 1918 when he was appointed director of the National Library. In 1929 he became the director of L'École française d'Extrême-‐Orient in Hanoi where he had studied as a younger man. Coedès served there until his retirement in 1946 after which he returned to Paris as Professor of Southeast Asian History at L'Ecole des Langues Orientales and curator of the Musée d'Ennery until his death in 1969. Apart from his many influential papers, Coedès’ two books27 most recently re-‐published in English translation in the 1960s have long been principal texts for students of Southeast Asian history. Of these, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia was first published in 1944 and perhaps more than any other in the field, has influenced the way scholars have approached their field. As it happens, after Coedès’ death, his collection was bought by the National Library of Australian. Ann Nugent, writing in the Library’s News in 1996 summed up the great man’s achievements thus:
His great legacy to scholars is his documentation of the cultural influence of India in most parts of Southeast Asia. That influence brought Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas, the Indian concept of kingship, the use of Sanskrit as an official and ceremonial language, as well as Indian artistic traditions to the peoples of Southeast Asia28.
Although one cannot diminish Coedès’s contribution, an unexpected consequence of his focus upon the influence of India upon cultures in Southeast Asia has been to underestimate the strength and persistence of indigenous cultures. For a time, scholars seemed to be conceptualising Indonesian kingdoms (or mandalas) as though they were colonies of India. More recent studies suggest that although Indian beliefs and practices influenced the courts of the island kingdoms, the ordinary people were scarcely affected except perhaps when they were required to participate in ceremonies which enhanced the ruler’s status or were required to assist in the building of the many temples rulers caused to be built during their reign. There is no evidence that Brahmin priests or Buddhist monks were ever imported in any great number into Java, for example, and there is certainly no 27 These books are now available as: Les peuples de la peninsule indochinoise, Dunod, Paris (1962) The Making of South East Asia, Routledge and Kegan-Paul, English translation by H. M. Wright. (1966) Les États hindouisés d’Indochine et d’Indonesie, de Boccard, Paris (1964); The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, ANU Press, Canberra, English translation by Susan Brown Cowing, (1968, 1975) 28 Nugent, A: “Asia's french connection : George Coedes and the Coedes collection”, National Library of Australia News, 6 (4), January 1996, pp 6-‐8. http://www.nla.gov.au/asian/form/coedes2.html
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evidence of proselytizing. Furthermore, although many of the great monuments, such as Borobudor and Prambanam, tell Indian stories such as the life of Buddha or the Ramayana, the people depicted in the masterful stone bas-‐reliefs are Indonesian, not Indian people. Scholars nowadays seem to be leaning towards the view that aspects of Indian culture were imported by rulers of local polities, often to enhance their own status but that these were transformed into Indonesian beliefs and practices, sometimes by identifying them with indigenous traditions, sometimes by re-‐working them until they fitted more comfortably into the local culture and its values. That there was Indian cultural influence upon Indonesia is undeniable but we need be wary not to over-‐emphasise it despite Coedès’ catchy title.
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