by Tim Hannigan
By the dawn of the Current Era, goods gathered in or traded through the Archipelago were reaching Europe. Virtually no one traversed the entire length of this maritime trade route, however. It was a string of way-stations, and individual journeys were usually short: southeast China to Sumatra; Sumatra to Bengal, then a series of short hops around the Indian coast and north to the Persian Gulf; up the Euphrates, then overland across the Syrian desert to the eastern Mediterranean. By the time a packet of Javanese camphor or Malukan cloves was delivered to a Roman apothecary, it might have been transhipped a dozen times or more.
The crews of all the boats that plied the trade routes were at the mercy of the winds. During the dry period in the middle of the year, a long easterly breeze drives out of the red heart of Australia and along the length of the Archipelago, before bending north towards China. During the sodden months of the northern winter, meanwhile, the flow reverses. In December a sailor setting out from southeast China could expect to make landfall in Sumatra in as little as two weeks, and to be in India a month beyond that. But once he got there he might have to wait six months for the winds to switch before he could head back in the opposite direction. At all the little entrepôts along the line temporary communities of seamen gathered at anchor, waiting for the wind. Half a year is a long time to kick your heels, and inevitably some of these sailors made themselves comfortable and never went home.
Small communities of Indians and Chinese developed in Archipelago ports. The locals accepted the occasional new technological trinket and took the odd linguistic loan. Indeed, they almost certainly allowed the outsiders wives and concubines in return—for salty dogs have always been overwhelmingly male. But for the most part, they left this human flotsam and jetsam to get on with their foreign cultural practices undisturbed.
But as trade developed still further in the early centuries of the Current Era, there was an increasing impetus to form proper polities. If you didn’t establish your own authority over a river-mouth port and the goods that passed through it, then somebody else—quite possibly a wily foreigner—would do so instead, and would grow rich on the profits. But the indigenous people of the Archipelago simply didn’t have a suitable state mechanism of their own. Their traditional notion of tribal chief might work well enough out in the villages, but it was simply too modest to provide the linchpin for a nascent trading nation. Even their original Austronesian honorifics—ratu, datuk and suchlike—lacked sufficient grandeur. They were faced with the options of either going quietly back to their clan-houses and letting history pass them by, or of making a pragmatic adaptation. A few canny chieftains seem to have made the latter choice, for when the first indigenous Indonesian kings appeared in the early centuries of the Current Era, they did so under the portentous foreign title of raja—a glittering moniker of Indian Sanskrit origin which was connected, via the Indo-European root, to the words ‘regent’ and ‘regulate’. It was a term that brought with it a whole new culture.
The boat—a long, low Persian dhow with its huge lateen sail reefed in—swung to its mooring in the murky channel. It was the wettest part of the year, and the river was flowing furiously. But with a following wind the boat had made good time—crossing the full breadth of the South China Sea, negotiating the sharp turn at the bottom of the Malay Peninsula, and finally traversing the tidal stretches of the Musi River in all of twenty days. Now it had come to anchor deep inside Sumatra. The green levels of the island stretched away on all sides, and further inland to the west, towards the unseen bulk of the Bukit Barisan mountain range, there were banks of monsoon cloud. It was December 671 CE.
Standing on the deck of the dhow, looking out at the strange new prospect before him, was a Chinese man in the robes of a Buddhist monk. His name was Yijing, and he was thirty-seven years old. Yijing had been born in the city of Yanjing on the dusty levels where Beijing stands today. When he was seven, his family had sent him to a Buddhist monastery on the slopes of Mount Tai, a hulk of toothy stone rearing five hundred feet over the plains of Shandong. The boy grew up with his head in the clouds.
Yijing was, by all accounts, a profoundly religious child, and by the age of fourteen he had been ordained as a monk. He also seems to have been afflicted by a powerful sense of wanderlust, however, and a quiet life of contemplation in the chilly mists of Mount Tai was never on the cards. He developed a quiet obsession with the two great traveller-monks of early Buddhist China—the mighty fifth-century wanderer Faxian, and his later counterpart Xuanzang, the man who would inspire the Ming-era novel Journey to the West—and decided to follow in their footsteps to India.
However, in the later seventh-century, political turmoil in Tibet and Eastern Turkestan meant that the old overland trails traversed by Faxian and Xuanzang were firmly off-limits, so Yijing came up with an alternative plan: he would travel to India by sea. In November 671, he boarded the ship of a Persian trader in Canton (modern Guangzhou), and twenty days later they came to anchor on the Musi River, deep in the forests of southern Sumatra, at a riverine settlement which Yijing, struggling with the Indic consonants, called ‘San-Fo-Qi’.
This place was not some old-fashioned Austronesian village of ancestor-worshippers, however. The town was already a substantial settlement, ringed by a palisade wall. More importantly for Yijing, it was the hub of a civilised religious culture:
In the fortified city of Fo-Qi Buddhist priests number more than one thousand, whose minds are bent on learning and good practices. They investigate and study all the subjects that exist just as in [India]; the rules and ceremonies are not at all different. If a Chinese priest wishes to go to the West in order to listen and read, he had better stay here one or two years and practise the proper rules and then proceed to central India.
Parts of the Archipelago, it seems, had successfully turned themselves into mini Indias.
In the early centuries of the Current Era, Java, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and other parts of the western Archipelago had undergone a process of ‘Indianisation’ as new states formed under kings bearing Indian titles and confessing Indian faiths. The question of how exactly this process came about has long puzzled historians. European orientalists in the nineteenth century, hardwired with a sense of cultural superiority and hidebound by their own Greco-Roman concepts of civilisation, simply could not believe that ‘the degenerate Javan’ or ‘the indolent Malay’ had, of their own accord, raised the mighty monuments that dotted the Archipelago. They postulated a period of active expansionism with proselytising Indian colonists descending on Southeast Asia in droves. This idea has since been roundly discredited, not least because of the uniquely local features that Indian traditions developed in the Archipelago. But there is still some debate over how exactly the conversion did take place.
Much credit has traditionally been given to those little communities of Indian traders gathered in Archipelago ports. It was they, intermarrying with locals and displaying a compelling cultural sophistication, who converted the indigenous Austronesians, the theory goes. But there had been regular contact between the Archipelago and India for several centuries before the first significant signs of conversion ever appeared, and the long-standing presence of foreign traders alone is not enough to explain the change.
Local conversion myths, meanwhile, regularly feature a wandering holy man in the form of the Vedic sage Agastya, who comes striding through the rice fields, with his trident in hand, to convert some indigenous chieftain at a single stroke. This motif—of the wandering mystic and the miraculous conversion—is one that would come to be repeated a thousand years later during another period of cultural shift. But while there doubtless were a good few itinerant storytellers traversing the Archipelago during the period of Indianisation, they could not have done the job by themselves.
Other theories place the onus for conversion on the locals. Here and there some pretender prince, with ideas too big for the traditional role of village chief, might have seized control of a federation of hamlets or a growin
g port. Once he had done so he would have found himself in need of a political concept to bolster his new position as head of a proto-state. The Indian idea of kingship was perfect for the task. Not only was the notion of a raja or maharaja far more sophisticated than that of a village ratu; an Indian king was actually divine, an incarnation of a god, and as such magnificently unassailable. It was an intensely attractive job title for any man with political ambitions. What was more, by signing up to Indian cultural traditions, the ruler instantly tapped into a nascent internationalism. He allowed himself a cultural connection with other chiefs imbibing from the same Indic cup, everywhere from the Mekong Delta to the Arabian Sea.
Shifts of religious allegiance in Southeast Asia usually come from the top down, and the communities clustered around the new kings would have followed their lead, with concentric circles of diminishing influence extending into the hinterland. As literacy arrived in the Archipelago, it came first in the form of Sanskrit and Pali, and when local languages were first written down the medium was a version of the South Indian Pallava script.
Indianisation did not amount to a wholesale rejection of older traditions, however. The new kings of the Archipelago were pragmatic in their adoption of new customs. Though the Austronesian communities of Java, Sumatra and the surrounding landmasses accepted the broad fourfold Indian division of society into priestly Brahmins, knightly Kshatriyas, farming and trading Vaishyas, and common Sudras, they gave little space to obsessive stratification into infinite sub-castes. They were also always ready to take advantage of any latent flexibility, and to insert their old indigenous deities and practices into the new systems.
The faiths which seeped into parts of the Archipelago during the centuries of Indianisation are often crudely lumped together under the term ‘Hinduism’. Indeed, this is the term that Indonesia’s few million modern inheritors of the pre-Islam mantle use for their own faith today. But ‘Hinduism’ is a recent designation, first popularised by eighteenth-century European travellers, who used it as a reductive catch-all for the myriad interconnected traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
Roughly speaking, the states that formed around Archipelago rajas subscribed to one of four Indian religious traditions. Some, at an early stage, focused their worship on the Brahmins, the inheritors of the original Vedic traditions of north India. Kings only recently converted to a new religious outlook had much need of the priestly caste to bestow legitimacy. A fifth-century stone pillar from Kutai in eastern Borneo, one of the earliest Indianised states, records a raja called Mulavarnam showering gifts of gold and cattle on a local community of Brahmins. Later, worship of the god Vishnu developed a powerful hold, and later still it was Shaivism—devotion to the god Shiva—which held general sway. And by the time Yijing arrived in Sumatra in the seventh century and noted that ‘Many kings and chieftains in the islands of the Southern Ocean admire and believe, and their hearts are set on accumulating good actions’, the faith to which he was referring was his own Buddhist creed.
Buddhism, which emerged from the broader Indian tradition in the fifth century BCE, had the advantage of a more missionary bent than the other subcontinental schools, and it had found fertile fields in Southeast Asia. As for that muddy township on the banks of the Musi where Yijing scrambled ashore from a Persian ship at the end of 671, he may have known it as San-Fo-Qi, but its own inhabitants called it Srivijaya, the Buddhist trading state that would soon become the preeminent power of the Archipelago.
Yijing, sweltering in the heat of the tropics, found the Srivijayan capital a busy township. At its heart was the walled-off compound of the raja, an ambitious man by the name of Jayanasa. His palace was a series of wooden pavilions and platforms. Outside this inner sanctum were the wooden hutments of traders, artisans and minor courtiers, and scattered through these quarters and into the countryside beyond were the sanctuaries and temples of the Buddhist monks. Along the banks of the Musi, meanwhile, were rafts of moored boats, the scent of cooking and the chatter of children emerging from the rattan domes sheltering their middle sections. These were the floating homes of the Orang Laut, the ‘Sea People’ who plied Archipelago waters practicing a mix of trade and piracy.
At some point Yijing had an audience with the king, and he was well received. He settled down for six months and began to get to grips with the unfamiliar squiggles of Sanskrit and the more arcane details of Buddhist theology. Once the wet weather had passed, the king arranged a passage for him to the neighbouring city-state of Malayu, where he stayed for another two months. Then he crossed the narrow straits to yet another of these Indianised entrepôts—Kedah at the narrowest, northernmost section of the Malay Peninsula. Finally, in December 672, Yijing set sail once more and headed for India. He would spend almost fifteen years in the subcontinent, and during his stay he would achieve his ambition of visiting the holy places of Buddhism, of perfecting his own grasp of the holy languages and the holy law, and of meeting with many holy men. Eventually, in 687, he headed back to Srivijaya, bringing a bundle of accumulated Buddhist texts amounting to some half a million stanzas. In his absence the state had grown exponentially. Malayu was now a Srivijayan vassal, and Raja Jayanasa was clearly a man on the make.
Srivijaya, which first appears in historical records under Jayanasa’s rule, had not been the first political entity to emerge in Sumatra. The island is a huge lozenge, angled across the equator and stretching some 1,050 miles (1,700 kilometres) top to toe. From its wild and wave-lashed western shore the land rises rapidly into the ridges and ravines of the Bukit Barisan, a spine of volcanic uplands running the entire length of the island. On the far side of this range the land levels out into slabs of low-lying forest and swamp, threaded by many meandering rivers and giving way eventually into the sheltered Straits of Melaka. By the dawn of the Current Era, this narrow band of water between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula was already a crucial shipping route for traffic between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. It would remain so forever more, and over the coming centuries various ports would rise to prominence along its shores, growing fat on the transhipment business.
In the fifth century a minor regional power called Kantoli had appeared in the convoluted mesh of islands and deltas that flank the western shores of the Straits of Melaka. Kantoli, however, had merely dabbled in trade; it was its successor, Srivijaya, which first truly claimed the title of ultimate Straits entrepôt.
Srivijaya was not a nation in the modern sense, with defined geographical frontiers—and, indeed, neither were any of the other trading polities that came after it. Instead, it was the hub of a web of interconnected vassal ports that stretched up and down the Straits of Melaka, and out into the Archipelago. Those close to the centre might be kept firmly under the thumb, but the more distant vassals probably paid little more than lip service to their notional overlord, and were usually at the hub of their own smaller spiral of sub-states. Today Srivijaya is sometimes called an ‘empire’, but in truth the classic model of Archipelago power featured a grand, but geographically limited, central territory, and a scattering of regional franchises and sub-franchises. Srivijaya was more a brand than a bone fide nation state.
But still, in the immediate vicinity of southern Sumatra, Raja Jayanasa was an imposing figure. By the time Yijing returned to Srivijaya his host had not only conquered neighbouring Malayu; he had brought all the small islets of the Straits under his sway, and was tightening his grip on the sea lanes. He underscored these victories with some decidedly ominous threats, carved into celebratory stone columns and set in place in the newly annexed territories:
All of you, many as you are, sons of kings, chiefs, army commanders, confidents of the kings, judges, foremen, surveyors of low castes, clerks, sculptors, sea captains, merchants and you washer men of the king and slaves of the king, all of you will be killed by the curse of this imprecation. If you are not faithful to me, you will be killed by the curse.
This might seem like the deranged bluster of an unhinged
dictator today, but in the seventh-century Archipelago it showed how thoroughly Jayanasa had taken advantage of the Indian notion of divine kingship. He had invested in himself the power to strike down his foes with supernatural force. Above the chiselled threat was the carven hood of a seven-headed serpent beneath which holy water emerged from a narrow spout. Those submitting to the raja had to drink from the aperture, and it was in this liquid that the curse was carried. Transgressors, it was declared, would find themselves rotting away from the inside out.
The wandering monk Yijing, exhausted by a quarter-century of travel and translation, went home to China, where he died in 695. At the turn of the eighth century, Raja Jayanasa, too, passed on to whatever reincarnation his expansionist actions had earned him.
Srivijaya did not crumble on his death, however, and its subsequent kings found themselves at the crucial anchorage on a mighty web of trade that spanned the Archipelago. From the headwaters of the Musi, small canoes descended carrying gold and camphor; across the water from the river mouth, the miners of Pulau Bangka were digging pitch-black tin ore from the granitic bedrock; precious stones were spewing from the estuaries of Borneo; and from Java came pepper, slaves and rice (the latter a vital necessity, for Srivijaya only ever had a limited agricultural hinterland of its own). From even further afield there was fragrant Timorese sandalwood. Cloves and nutmeg came from Maluku, and at the very furthest limits of the network, Melanesian hunter-gatherers in the islands off western New Guinea, living lifestyles little changed since their distant predecessors had had that unnerving encounter with the Flores Hobbit, found that there was a foreign market for the fabulous feathers of the greater bird-of-paradise.