A Short History of Indonesia - 11

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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”. 8 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. 9
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A Short History of Indonesia - 11

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