A Short History of Indonesia - 11

WC 4040
11. A Short History of Indonesia
Mandalas of Power and Influence
Around the year 400 AD Mulavarman gave thousands of cattle 1 , 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 Kutei 2
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 beliefs 3 .
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 born 4
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
3
van 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 derived 5 .
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
3 rd to 5 th Centuries AD 6 . They were finally defeated by the Chola kings in the
8 th 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 Naerssen 7 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 use 8 .” 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 7 th and 8 th 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 later 9 ⎯⎯ that is, to the mid-­‐5 th Century AD.
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(l) prasasti tapak gajah
purnawarman ⎯⎯ the
Elephant’s footprints of
Purnavarman 10 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

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 India 11 .
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 Nusantara 12 , 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 Borei 14
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 Asia 15 . 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
5 th 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.
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East Baray June 2009 16
Funan was probably at the peak of its powers in the 4 th Century and had faded
away by the end of the 7 th 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 Straits 17
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.

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”.
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Buddhist monk creating a sand mandala 18
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 self 19 .
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-­‐Fox 20 ,
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.

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 expense 21 .
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 Funan 22 .
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.
25 Ibid p. 22.
26 Ibid p. 22.
“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 earth 26 .
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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 books 27 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 Asia 28 .
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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