Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0020/00204.txt

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$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.