$Unique_ID{bob00204} $Pretitle{} $Title{Indonesia Chapter 1A. Historical Setting} $Subtitle{} $Author{Donald M. Seekins} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{century java archipelago indian trade eastern portuguese islam indonesian islands see pictures see figures } $Date{1982} $Log{See Wayang Drama*0020401.scf } Title: Indonesia Book: Indonesia, A Country Study Author: Donald M. Seekins Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1982 Chapter 1A. Historical Setting [See Wayang Drama: Staging of a wayang drama calls for the use of this screen at the start and close of a performance.] Since the first centuries A.D. the islands of the Indonesian archipelago have attracted the attention of traders and colonizers intent on exploiting their rich natural resources and controlling their strategic location on the sea routes between China and India. Indonesia's place in the world economic system has always played a special role in the nation's development. First, the Chinese sought the aromatic resins of the eastern archipelago as a substitute for the frankincense and myrrh they had previously imported from the Middle East. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and English merchant-adventurers came for cloves, peppers, nutmeg, and mace. The nineteenth century witnessed the establishment of a colonial administration on Java by the Dutch, which facilitated the intense and highly profitable cultivation and export of cash crops, such as coffee and sugar. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the modern industries of the Western nations and Japan required the oil, rubber, and tin of the archipelago, making it a rich prize for nations wishing to establish or maintain a dominant position in the world economic and political system. World commercial interest in Indonesia over the centuries has had a number of important consequences. One was the implantation of foreign religious beliefs. Although historical records are fragmentary, Hindu-Buddhist influences were confirmed on the archipelago as early as the fifth century A.D. By the eighth century a civilization containing both indigenous and Indian elements was flourishing on the islands of Java and Sumatra and perhaps in Borneo and the eastern archipelago as well, epitomized by the great Borobudur archaeological site in central Java. From the thirteenth century Islamic influences appeared, and by the sixteenth century Islam had become the dominant, though not the exclusive religion of the archipelago. It is believed that both the Indian religions and Islam were brought to the islands by merchants who wished to establish influence with native rulers. A second consequence was the rise of indigenous maritime empires that came to control the trade within the archipelago. The Srivijaya empire, which lasted from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, was located on Sumatra but dominated interisland trade because of its control of the Strait of Malacca. A second empire was the Majapahit on Java, which lasted from the late thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. During its period of greatest power in the fourteenth century, it claimed vassals in Sumatra, Borneo, and the eastern archipelago. With the appearance of aggressive Portuguese traders and fighters in the early sixteenth century, a period was initiated in which established, indigenous trade patterns were disrupted or eradicated and local Indonesian rulers were deprived of their independence. Ultimately, the archipelago was forcibly drawn into a tight trade monopoly controlled by the Dutch-owned United East India Company. Although the company was disbanded at the end of the eighteenth century and a dismantling of the Dutch state monopolies was begun in 1870, by the early twentieth century the entire archipelago, except the small Portuguese enclave on Timor, was under Dutch colonial control. An "Indonesian" nation embracing the entire archipelago was, geographically, a problematic notion. Although the waters separating the islands were highways for trade, they made political centralization and cultural homogenization difficult, if not impossible. The great majority of the inhabitants, who speak Malayo-Polynesian languages, share a certain cultural unity, but it is their diversity rather than a basic "Malay" identity that is more apparent both to themselves and to outside observers. The precolonial maritime empires, Srivijaya and Majapahit, attempted to unify the archipelago, although the hold they exercised over their vassals and dependencies was tenuous. The Islamic religion provided a potential basis for unity, as some 90 percent of the people were Muslim. Yet Islam was itself a divisive factor as revealed in the politically significant split between the abangan, or nominal Muslims, who combined the foreign religion with indigenous beliefs, and the santri, the more fundamentalist Muslims. The Dutch colonial empire as it stood at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, provided a framework for a unified Indonesian nation. At that time members of the elite, working hand in hand with progressive Dutch officials, sought to promote educational reform and self-government within the colonial political system. Demands for independence, however, grew during the 1920s, and the geographic term Indonesia began to be used for the first time in a political sense. The demands were met by more conservative Dutch attitudes, which in turn stimulated a more militant anticolonial resistance. The Japanese occupation of 1942-45 effectively broke the Dutch hold on the archipelago, though the Dutch attempted unsuccessfully to reestablish control during the war for independence of 1945-49. The forging of national unity was a long and difficult process. Sukarno, the Republic of Indonesia's first president, had been working to create its ideological bases since the 1920s. The ideas of Marhaenism, pancasila (the five principles), and Nasakom (Nationalism, Religion, and Communism) were developed to create a common ground for the archipelago's diverse social, economic, and religious groupings. The armed forces played what was perhaps the most important role in the unification process from as early as the war for independence. Sukarno's Guided Democracy period (1957-65) was sustained in part through the support of the armed forces, and with his fall and the rise of General Soeharto to supreme power, the armed forces came on center stage to dominate the political and economic systems. Although the transition from Guided Democracy to Soeharto's New Order was one of bloody confrontation, particularly as the army and Islamic groups sought to eliminate the Indonesian Communist Party, there was a strong sense of continuity between the two periods. In both, the importance of unity and consensus was stressed over group or regional interests. Pluralistic, parliamentary political institutions were repudiated in favor of those stressing traditional values of consultation and consensus. Thus the five principles of pancasila first declared by Sukarno in 1945-that the Indonesian state would be based on belief in one God, humanitarianism, national unity, democracy, and social justice-were adopted as the foundation of post-Sukarno political ideology under the New Order. Early Historic Indonesia Hindu-Buddhist Era In the third and fourth centuries A.D. Indian sailors bound for China, aided by monsoon winds, docked at the ports on the lower end of Sumatra, the western tip of Java, and the east coast of the island of Borneo. By means still being determined, an elaborate Hinduized culture developed in the coastal communities along the main trade routes and preeminently in the populous inland agricultural communities of Java. Finding no evidence to suggest either large-scale settlement or control or invasion by Indians, scholars attribute the heavy influence of Indian civilization in parts of the archipelago to the readiness of the more developed indigenous societies to absorb selected features of Indian civilization. This selection appears to have been made by and for the ruling elite rather than by the people at large. The Hindu and Buddhist religions of India provided the indigenous ruler with an ideology upon which to build a more elaborately pyramidal political structure. The kingdom was seen as the cosmos in miniature and the king as an incarnation of gods in the Hindu pantheon or as a bodhisattva in the Buddhist system. Although architectural evidence shows that some dynasties preferred Buddhism to Hinduism or vice versa, much mutual tolerance and interchange existed between devotees of the two systems. Neither religion appears to have been widely propagated among the people at large but rather served as court theology. Of equal importance to the ruling elite was the introduction of Indian learning in all fields. The Sanskrit alphabet brought literacy to the courts and with it an extensive literature on scientific, artistic, political, and religious subjects. Although literacy was eagerly grasped by the elite of the existing society, typically Indian concepts, such as caste and the inferior position of women, appear to have made little or no headway against preexisting Indonesian traditions. Nowhere was Indian civilization accepted without change; rather, the more elaborate Indian forms and terminology were used to refine and clothe indigenous concepts. In Java, after the tenth century A.D., even the outer forms of Indian origin were transformed into distinctively Indonesian shapes. The Indianized Empires By the seventh century A.D. Indianized kingdoms were the dominant powers in southern Sumatra and western and central Java. One of these, Srivijaya, centered in the Palembang area of Sumatra, had established suzerainty over large areas of Sumatra, western Java, and much of the Malay Peninsula. Dominating the Malacca and the Sunda straits, Srivijaya controlled the trade of the region and remained a sea power until the thirteenth century. Great wealth resulted from its Palembang entrepot for the Chinese market (see fig. 2). A stronghold of Mahayana Buddhism, Srivijaya was a center for Buddhist pilgrims and scholars in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile on Java, Sanjaya, king of Mataram, extended his Hindu Shaivite kingdom through central Java, building the first great complex of Indianized stone temples on the high Dieng Plateau of central Java. The latter half of the eighth century brought the rise of the Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty on Java. This dynasty was connected by marriage with the Srivijaya regime on Sumatra. The Sailendra center was slightly to the east of the early Mataram kingdom. The great Buddhist monuments of central Java, Borobudur, and Mendut are associated with the Sailendras. Slightly to the east, in the Prambanan Plain near Solo, are the very substantial remains of the great Hindu kingdom of Mataram, which came into being in the late ninth century and disappeared within 100 years. The name Mataram was used later in eastern Java in the Brantas River valley. As the dynasties moved eastward, the long process of fusion of Hindu and Buddhist elements with the indigenous culture became increasingly evident. From the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, eastern Java was the center of Hindu-Javanese culture and of kingdoms rivaling Srivijaya. Under the greatest king of the first eastern Java dynasty, Dharmavamsa (A.D. 985-1006), Javenese laws were codified, and many Sanskirt texts, including a part of the Mahabharata, were translated-the first known literature in the Javanese language. In an attempt to make his kingdom a commercial power, Dharmavamsa brought Bali and western Borneo under his suzerainty, but his unsuccessful attack on Srivijaya brought his empire to disaster. The empire revived under King Airlangga, a Balinese who established an alliance through marriage with Srivijaya which, after Dharmavamsa's time, was weakened by attacks from India by the Chola Dynasty. The kingdom of Kediri, also in eastern Java, succeeded Mataram as the dominant power. Kediri collected spices from its subject regions, southern Borneo and the Malukus, or Spice Islands, in exchange for rice. These spices were then picked up at northern Java ports by Indian cloth merchants and eventually reached the Mediterranean market. The Maluku spice trade became increasingly important during the Kediri Dynasty. That and a contemporaneous decline in the Sumatran entrepot trade with China resulted in eastern Javanese north coast ports outstripping Srivijaya in trade. In the thirteenth century Singhasari, a new dynasty founded by a commoner on the Brantas River, took over control of the spice trade on the Java Sea. Under the last king of this dynasty, King Kertanegara (1268-93), the hero of one of the major Javanese epics, the process of assimilation of Shaivism and Buddhism reached its final form in the worship of the Shiva-Buddha, a cult that included many of the mystic rites of the Tantras, through which the king obtained secret knowledge and magic power to be used for the benefit of the realm. Prince Vijaya, Kertanegara's son-in-law and heir, fought a Chinese invasion and a dynastic contest simultaneously and established a new capital at Majapahit; this dynasty became the greatest of all Javanese territorial empires. Most of the expansion of the empire of Majapahit was the work not of a king but of the famous chief minister, Gadjah, who was virtual ruler from 1331 to his death in 1364. Gadjah Mada undertook the mission of unification begun by Kertanegara. In addition to his conquests, he commissioned a new codification of law and the writing of the epic poem Nagarakertagama, one of the major historical sources for the Singhassari and Majapahit periods and a work in which Kertanegara figures as the greatest of rulers. Gadjah Mada is probably the most highly regarded historical personage in Indonesia, being considered the architect of the only empire that may have encompassed all of modern Indonesia. The new university founded by the revolutionary Republic of Indonesia at Yogyakarta in 1946 is named in his honor. The actual extent of the Majapahit empire is a subject of scholarly uncertainty. Possibly for as long as a generation, all of the Indonesian islands and part of the Malay Peninsula were united under it, in the sense that the rulers of Majapahit were able to demand tribute although their internal control was minimal. Majapahit enjoyed a period of prosperity and stability under Gadjah Mada, but in the late fourteenth century conditions rapidly deteriorated. A civil war broke out by the beginning of the fifteenth century, and the disintegration of Majapahit was hastened by the hostility of states whose rulers had recently adopted Islam and wished to wage holy war against a kingdom that retained its old Hindu-Buddhist traditions. Its demise is shrouded in obscurity, as is much of early Indonesian history. The Chinese maritime expeditions commanded by Cheng Ho in the first third of the fifteenth century found the Majapahit empire dismembered and the seas infested with pirates. A Majapahit king apparently ruled in east Java until the early sixteenth century. The Coming of Islam to the Archipelago The Indian Ocean continued to serve as both a commercial and a cultural link between Indonesia and the countries to the west. Thus Islam, which was established on the Arabian Peninsula by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D., followed the Hindu and Buddhist religions into the archipelago. Muslims may have come to the islands as early as the seventh centuries, for Chinese records tell of Arab traders at Guangzhou and other south China ports who must have stopped at Indonesian ports on the way. Yet the conversion of significant numbers of Indonesians to Islam apparently did not begin until around the thirteenth century. As in the case of the Indian religions the medium of its infiltration seems to have been trade. Islamic merchants, most likely from Gujerat but possibly also from Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal on the Indian subcontinent, or Persia, were apparently active in encouraging members of the Indonesian elite to adopt the religion. The accounts of travelers outline its gradual progress from points in Sumatra down to Java and finally to the most remote of the Outer Islands (see Glossary). Although the hostility of states ruled by Muslim converts to the older Hindu-Buddhist states is recorded, the Islamization of Indonesia seems not to have been so much the result of a series of holy wars as it was a process of assimilation and synthesis. The discovery of Muslim gravestones dated from the fourteenth century, in eastern Java near the site of the Majapahit court, suggests that members of the elite converted to Islam even while the king remained an adherent of the Indian religions. Coastal areas, most open to overseas trade, were affected before inland areas. Although an eleventh-century Muslim tombstone has been discovered in eastern Java, historians doubt that it was of Indonesian origin. The first reliable evidence of Islam as an active force in the archipelago comes from Marco Polo. Polo landed in North Sumatra on his was back to Venice from China in 1292 and related in his book of travels that Perlak was an Islamic town, but its neighbors were not. An inscription on a tombstone dated from 1297 reveals that the first ruler of Samudra was a Muslim; the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta visited the same town in 1345-46 and wrote that its king was a Sunni Muslim. By the late fourteenth century, inscriptions on Sumatra were no longer written in the Indian-derived old Sumatran script, but Arabic letters were used. Malacca, the great port city of the Malay Peninsula that dominated the Strait of Malacca, was founded around 1400 by Parameswara, a descendant of the royal house of Srivijaya who fled Palembang after an attack by the forces of Majapahit. Originally a follower of Hinduism and Buddhism, he converted to Islam and took the name Iskandar Syah. His successors were also Muslims, and Malacca's dominance of archipelago trade during the fifteenth century promoted the spread of Islam. According to the Portuguese chronicler Tomo Pires, by the early sixteenth century most of the kings of Sumatra, with the exception of some in the eastern part of the island, were Muslim. The kingdom of Aceh, one of Indonesia's most strongly Islamic areas even in the contemporary period, was founded in the early sixteenth century at the northern tip of the island by Ali Mubhayat Syah (who died in 1530). The king of the Minangkabau people of central Sumatra and his followers were Muslims, though his subjects were not. Pires wrote that the Hindu-Buddhist state of Pajajaran in western Java was hostile to Islam, while Hindu-Buddhist kings still ruled in central and eastern Java. Only the coastal region around Surabaya was at that time Islamic. The conversion of Java to Islam was, according to legend, the work of nine saints (Arabic, walis) who converted rulers largely through the use of supernatural powers. The sixteenth century saw the spread of Islam throughout the island. In 1527 the Islamic sultan of Demak conquered an eastern Javanese ruler at Kediri, who may have been the last of the Majapahit monarchs, and the following year the island of Madura is said to have been converted. In the west the sultanate of Banten conquered the Hindu-Buddhist state of Pajajaran in 1579, thus removing the last important non-Islamic state on the island, although the religion was not established in the region of Balambangan at the very eastern end of Java until the eighteenth century. In the eastern region of the archipelago, Islamization proceeded through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often in competition with the aggressive proselytization of Portuguese and other European missionaries. According to Pires, the island states of Ternate and Tidore, off the west coast of Halmahera in the Malukus, had Muslim sultans, and Muslim merchants had settled on the Banda Islands (see fig. 3). One of the most important of the nine walis, Sunan Giri, had established himself at the port of Gresik on the north coast of Java, and he and his descendants sent Muslim missionaries to Lombok, Celebes (Sulawesi), and Borneo until 1680, when the ruler of the inland state of Mataram captured the city. In 1605 the ruler of Gowa in southern Sulawesi converted to Islam and between 1608 and 1611 imposed the religion on the other rulers of that area. Bali, however, continued to resist the pressure to convert, retaining its synthesis of Hindu and native animist beliefs up to the contemporary era. Scholars have speculated on why Islam was successful in gaining converts only after the thirteenth century when there apparently had been Muslim merchants in the archipelago much earlier. The historian M.C. Ricklefs suggests that Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam that emphasizes the ultimate reality of God and the illusoriness of the phenomenal world, may have been brought into the islands at this time. Given the mystical elements of both the indigenous Indonesian religious beliefs and the Indian religions, Sufism might have attracted greater numbers of Indonesian converts than the more austere legalistic versions of Islam. Yet Ricklefs cautions that no proof of the presence of Sufi brotherhoods in the islands in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries has been discovered and that, like many issues in Indonesian history before the colonial era, the thesis of Sufi proselytization remains speculative. The First European Intrusions and the United East India Company The Portuguese in the late fifteenth century initiated the European voyages of discovery to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Peppers, cloves, nutmeg, and mace, among other spices, were highly valued in Europe for the flavoring and preservation of meats in an age without refrigeration. Within the archipelago the Islamic sultans of Aceh controlled the Sumatra pepper trade, while their coreligionists, the sultans of Ternate and Tidore, had a monopoly over the production of cloves and nutmeg. The port of Demak on the north coast of Java, also Islamic, served as an important trading center. The most important port, however, was Malacca, because of its control of the strait, which linked the archipelago with the eastern Indian Ocean. In the words of one Portuguese chronicler, he who controlled Malacca "had his hand on the throat of Venice." From that city spices were carried by Indian or Arab ships to the subcontinent or to Egyptian ports. At the approaches to Europe, the spice trade was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, which occupied Egyptian and Syrian ports. Portuguese control of the Indian Ocean and the trade routes of the archipelago dealt a fatal blow to the worldwide Islamic trade network and at the same time gained the Portuguese vast profits, as spices bought for a pittance on the eastern islands commanded princely sums in European markets. In 1510 the royal governor of Portugal's overseas enterprises, Alfonso de Albuquerque, captured Goa on the west coast of India, and it soon became the most important Portuguese base on the Indian Ocean. Realizing the importance of Malacca, he sailed with a small fleet to capture it the following year. From Malacca his captains pushed eastward into Indonesia. Although the rulers of Tidore and Ternate were Muslims, they both offered to do business with the Portuguese in the hope of realizing big profits; in 1522, however, the Portuguese concluded an alliance with Ternate, thus gaining control of the clove trade. They would remain entrenched there until 1574, when a revolt forced them to move their base of operations to Ternate's rival, Tidore. They also had a base at Ambon, on a small island lying to the southwest of Ceram in the southern Malukus. Their attempts to gain control of the Banda Islands to the south, which were a center of nutmeg and mace production, however, ended in failure. Although the Portuguese were primarily interested in the eastern Spice Islands, developments in the western archipelago after the capture of Malacca quickly assumed threatening proportions. The sultan of Malacca had fled to the Malay Peninsula after 1511 and established a new center of power at Johore, across a narrow waterway from what is now the Republic of Singapore. The sultans of both Johore and Aceh attempted to drive the Portuguese from Malacca numerous times during the sixteenth century; in 1558 the latter laid siege to the city with a force of some 300 warships, 15,000 soldiers, and some 400 artillerymen brought from Turkey. On Java, which seems to have been of interest to the Portuguese only insofar as it lay along the sea-lanes between Malacca and the Spice Islands, there had been an attempt to ally with the remaining Hindu-Buddhist monarchs against the Muslims. By 1535, however, the entire north coast of Java was controlled by Muslim states, such as Banten, Demak, and Jepara, which were hostile to the Portuguese. Jepara proved to be the most active opponent, laying siege to Malacca in 1550 and 1574 with the aid of Johore and Aceh and encouraging the rulers of the eastern archipelago, with whom this coastal state had trade relations, to resist the Portuguese. Portuguese activities in the Indonesian archipelago were a burst of energy that rapidly diminished toward the end of the sixteenth century. Their enterprise depended upon a string of fortified coastal bases, or "factories," set up along the Indian Ocean littoral at Malacca, in the Malukus, as far north as Macao, near Guangzhou in southern China, and Nagasaki in southern Japan. Lacking the manpower or resources of a colonial hinterland, they found these bases increasingly difficult to maintain and defend. The crusading zeal of missionaries sent to Christianize the East aroused the hostility of the Muslim rulers. It was only in the southern Maluku area, particularly Ambon, where Saint Francis Xavier, founder of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, had established a mission in 1546 that a large number of converts were made. Elsewhere, the expansion of Islam could not be stemmed. Moreover, the tendency of the Portuguese to act more like pirates than traders antagonized native populations. Overall, the results of Portuguese expansion in the sixteenth century were limited to disrupting the indigenous trade networks that had evolved between Malacca, Sumatra, Java, and the eastern archipelago over the previous several centuries and to stimulating the greed of other European nations desiring to control the lucrative spice trade.