Indonesia: Peoples and Histories - Tengku Muhammad Dhani Iqbal

EARLY BEGINNINGS
SRIVIJAYA AND INDONESIA
In Indonesian histories Srivijaya represents a past forgotten, a past recreated
by foreign scholars, and a past recovered and packaged by intellectuals
of the nationalist movement for Indonesian identity within an
Indonesian state. Until the published research of the French scholar
Coedès in the 1920s, neither Sumatrans of the Palembang area nor Indonesians
anywhere else had ever heard of Srivijaya. Coedès’s discoveries and
interpretations were published in the colony’s Dutch and Indonesianlanguage
newspapers. In the nationalist imagining, Srivijaya became evidence
of early greatness, of archipelago unities, of Sumatran importance,
a great empire of the western archipelago to balance Java’s Majapahit in
the east. Srivijaya and Majapahit were packaged to prove the unity of Indonesian
peoples prior to the Dutch colonial state.
A discoverable history of archipelago ports, known in textbooks by the
collective name Srivijaya, is therefore the product of several histories: of common
people whose taxes in forest and sea products supported the desires of
their rulers for international status; of mobile men who wrote in Sanskrit and
Malay, built temples, and developed a community of scholarship in archipelago
ports; of Chinese officials whose intellectual training led them to locate
Srivijaya within the Chinese vision of world center and vassals; and of Chinese
scholars whose interest in the real India led them to the invented Indias of the
archipelago.
The common thing that all foreigners injected into Indonesian networks
of exchange was the alphabet. Writing and knowledge stored in writing
slipped across networks of exchange. Lines written into stone in Malay thirteen
hundred years ago reinforce what objects tell in Indonesian histories in
the time before writing. Stone graves and their contents tell us people perceived
a great gap between ruler and ruled; that the duty of commoner to lord
was limitless; that ordinary men and women labored to support ruling families
and their devotional cults. Objects and writing on stone give evidence of the
meshing of communities on land and on sea, and of the reshaping of landscape.
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