A Short History of Indonesia - 11

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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 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. 4
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, 5
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