by Tim Hannigan
Raden Wijaya (who ruled as ‘Kertarajasa’) died in 1309. He was succeeded by his son Jayanagara—by all accounts a rather sleazy character who had an unsavoury sexual obsession with his own stepsisters and who died in 1328 at the hands of a court physician he had cuckolded. Surprisingly, given his reputation, Jayanagara left no son of his own, and after his death there was a period of regency rule with queens at the head of the court. In 1350, however, a young prince named Hayam Wuruk ascended the throne.
By this time the Majapahit capital had grown from a village to a grand city. Some thirty miles up the Brantas from the sea, the kraton—the royal palace—was ringed by a wall of red brick. To the north, on the banks of the river, was the residential and trading city of Bubat, with a pulsing marketplace centred on a great square. There were all manner of foreign communities here, Chinese and Indian amongst them. The high-point of the Majapahit year was the celebration that marked Chaitra, the first month in the Hindu Saka Calendar. Festivities went on for weeks, with parades of princes dressed in cloth-of-gold. There were challenges of combat in the square at Bubat, and elaborate ceremonies in which the king received tribute then dished out lavish largesse in return. According to court chroniclers, towards the end of the festival things usually descended into a glorious tropical bacchanalia, with massed feasting on ‘meats innumerable’, and quaffing of heroic quantities of palm wine and arak until the point at which the entire population was ‘panting, vomiting, or bewildered…’
Hangovers notwithstanding, the realm was remarkably well-run. On the Brantas delta the old and corrupt layers of taxation through local lords were simplified so that payment—in cash or kind—went straight to the kraton. Majapahit also had a thriving spiritual life. Both Buddhist monks and Shaivite priests were given their own quarters in the capital, and the surrounding countryside was studded with temples. Airlangga’s old bathing temples on the slopes of Penanggungan got a new lease of life, and away to the south, in the beautiful countryside where the Brantas valley rumples up towards Gunung Kelud, an old Singhasari Shiva complex was updated and expanded to become the mighty temple of Panataran, a major focus of royal pilgrimages. There were already distinct local versions of the Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, rewritten so that the escapades of the Pandava brothers and the adventures of Rama and Sita were now played out against a recognisably Javanese backdrop. Batik was already being crafted in village workshops, and complex traditions of music and dance were coming to fruition, as a visitor from the north of Sumatra described:
Everywhere one went there were gongs and drums being beaten, people dancing to the strains of all kinds of loud music, entertainments of all kinds like the living theatre, the shadow play, masked plays, step dancing, and musical dramas. These were the commonest sights and went on day and night in the land of Majapahit.
These refined entertainments—the wayang kulit shadow puppetry, the masked topeng dances and more—would remain the cultural mainstays of Java and the lands that came under its influence forever more.
Feasting and frolicking cost money, of course, and the cash came mainly from trade. Majapahit had its own fleet—part merchant navy, part pirate armada—which traded out across the Java Sea and beyond, carrying, according to one account, everything from ‘pig and deer dried and salted’ to ‘camphor and aloes’. The kingdom also consolidated and extended the network of offshore tributaries and vassals that had been stitched to East Java during Singhasari days, and managed a good number of military conquests closer to home for good measure. All this did a great deal for Hayam Wuruk’s reputation as a god-king, and soon his court chroniclers were tripping over themselves to heap superlative epithets upon his head:
He is present in invisible form at the focus of meditation, he is Siwa and Buddha, embodied in both the material and the immaterial;
As King of the Mountain, Protector of the Protectorless, he is lord of the lords of the world …
In fact the real genius behind all this commercial and military glory was not Hayam Wuruk himself, but his mahapatih, his prime minister, a thundering Machiavelli of a man by the name of Gajah Mada, the ‘Elephant General’.
Gajah Mada had first found favour under the debauched Jayanagara. It seems that he was a significant schemer from the start, for rumour has it that it was he who had incited the cuckolded court physician to kill his king. He was given the role of prime minister in 1331 in the regency period before Hayam Wuruk’s coronation. During the lavish ceremony that marked his appointment, Gajah Mada made a vow. He would not, he declared, ‘taste spice’ until Nusantara had been brought under Majapahit sway.
‘Nusantara’ literally means ‘the islands in between’. Gajah Mada probably meant by it something along the lines of ‘the outer islands’, but in time the word would form the key to the concept of the Archipelago as a single entity—if not a single nation. Today it is a synonym for ‘Indonesia’ itself.
By the time Hayam Wuruk was king, Gajah Mada had already made sure that Majapahit had more or less direct control over most of East Java, Madura and Bali, with a solid footing in Lombok and Sumbawa too. The Majapahit fleet had also become the main force in the Straits of Melaka. Over the course of Hayam Wuruk’s reign, more links were forged across Nusantara.
Not everyone was prepared to acknowledge Majapahit suzerainty, however. A particular thorn in the Majapahit side was its West Java counterpart, the Sundanese kingdom of Pajajaran, a realm which had never submitted entirely to East Javanese rule. In 1357, in an effort to forge a bond, Hayam Wuruk contracted a marriage with a princess by the name of Pitaloka, daughter of the Pajajaran king. When the Sundanese wedding party arrived in the capital Gajah Mada informed them that the girl would be less of a queen than a concubine, and that the moment had come for Sunda to submit to its East Javanese overlords. The Sundanese were a proud lot, and despite the fact that they were camped out in Bubat, smack in the middle of Majapahit and surrounded by hostile forces, they refused. It was a brave but suicidal gesture. In response, Gajah Mada had the entire bridal party—including the bride-to-be—massacred. Naturally relations between Majapahit and Pajajaran would never be particularly cordial after that, and even today the ethnic Sundanese country of West Java, centred on Bandung, is the one part of Indonesia where ‘Majapahit’ is something of a dirty word.
In the Negarakertagama, the epic poem written out on strips of lontar leaf to mark the apogee of Hayam Wuruk’s reign, a huge swathe of the Archipelago is claimed for Majapahit. Everywhere from the northern tip of Sumatra to the westernmost promontory of New Guinea gets a mention. It is a rundown that comes remarkably close to encompassing the entire Archipelago, and with the very notable exception of interior New Guinea and southern Maluku, it takes in all modern Indonesian territories and a little more besides. Any places in this vast maritime realm that failed to acknowledge Majapahit supremacy were, according to the Negarakertagama, ‘attacked and wiped out completely’.
Inevitably, later nationalists would latch very firmly onto this aspect of Majapahit and claim it as a pre-colonial precedent for the existence of the Indonesian nation state. Some of the islands and outposts mentioned in the Negarakertagama do seem to have been directly conquered by Majapahit at some point, but for the most part the list of scattered vassals probably amounts to little more than a run-down of all the places with which Majapahit had ever traded.
Rather than a true empire in the European sense, Majapahit, like Srivijaya before it, was a cultural and economic brand. The extent of its direct rule and centralised authority probably stretched little further than East Java, Bali and Madura, but its pervasive presence on the sea routes and its remarkable cultural sophistication gave it incredible kudos throughout the Archipelago. If the Majapahit king could have his chroniclers claim ownership of some isolated dot of land in a lost eastern sea that no one from Java had ever even visited, then the petty chieftain of that same dot might well award himself hand-me-down Javanese airs and graces when he wanted to impress his subje
cts. Origin myths in remote places like Adonara at the eastern extremity of Nusa Tenggara, or the misty Pasemah Highlands of Sumatra, make a claim of royal Javanese descent, and art-forms, palace architecture, dress and even language across the Archipelago would display a conscious Majapahit influence for centuries to come.
Gajah Mada died in around 1364. Hayam Wuruk continued without him for another twenty-five years, commanding that final annihilation of vestigial Srivijayan power in 1377 and earning Chinese respect, rather than retribution, for the extermination of their mission to Sumatra. But by this stage Majapahit had probably already passed its prime. All royal houses and great businesses eventually decay—and Majapahit was both. The problem for the East Java royals was probably that they had been too successful. The Archipelago economy had grown so vibrant under their aegis that the wealthy tributary chiefs of ports in Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and beyond had every reason to strike out on their own the moment they suspected a weakness at the centre. Majapahit’s energy had created the opportunity for the myriad entrepôt-states across the Archipelago that would ultimately usurp it. And the Majapahit-inspired atmosphere of internationalism would also provide the essential fertiliser for a cultural shift that would end the thousand-year process of Indianisation in the Archipelago.
In 1407, another Chinese fleet anchored off the coast of East Java. Unlike the Mongol armada 114 years earlier, it was not there to invade: its business was trade, treasure and tribute. It was quite unlike anything anyone had ever seen. A forest of brick-red sails stretched to the horizon over a flotilla of some three hundred ships. And if the size of the fleet was impressive enough, then the scale of the vessels themselves was truly staggering. The biggest amongst them were some 390 feet (120 metres) long with decks the size of football pitches. They were five times bigger than the Portuguese carracks that would begin to edge their way across the Indian Ocean in the following century. The fleet was a floating city of 30,000 men headed by seven imperial eunuchs and tended by 180 doctors and half a dozen astrologers.
Majapahit was still alive and kicking, and though its power had begun to atrophy in the western reaches of the Archipelago, it was still a place deserving of a visit from this, the first of a series of spectacular treasure fleets that the Ming Emperor, now ruling in place of the evicted Mongol Yuan Dynasty, would despatch to the furthest reaches of the Indian Ocean—and which would eventually carry the first giraffe back to China. The man placed at the head of these epic voyages was not the most likely candidate for the role of greatest seafarer in Chinese history. Zheng He (sometimes spelt as Cheng Ho) was the descendent of central Asian migrants, born in 1371 far from the sea in Yunnan and raised as a Muslim. As a small child he had been kidnapped by resurgent Ming troops, castrated, and dragged off to the north to serve as a eunuch at the imperial court. Despite his early emasculation, he grew to a formidable height and spoke with ‘a voice as loud as a huge bell’, becoming a key strategist in the Chinese court. When the first of the mighty treasure fleets sailed, Zheng He was placed in charge.
When Zheng He’s men came ashore in Java they discovered a rather violent place. In a small skirmish 170 sailors were killed, and one of the fleet’s chroniclers recorded that all the locals—‘little boys of three years to old men of a hundred years’—were armed with deadly kris daggers, and that ‘If a man touches [another man’s] head with his hand, or if there is a misunderstanding about money at a sale, or a battle of words when they are crazy with drunkenness, they at once pull out these knives and stab…’
The unravelling authority of Majapahit was probably responsible for the edgy atmosphere, but the capital on the banks of the Brantas was still a bustling place. And it was still remarkably cosmopolitan. The sailors would doubtless have found other Chinese living around the market square of Bubat, as well as Indians, Sri Lankans, and people from the Southeast Asian mainland. There is no record of whether Zheng He himself ever came ashore, but had he done so he would almost certainly have encountered a few co-religionists in Majapahit, for by the beginning of the fifteenth century there were Muslims quietly settling in all over the Archipelago. Majapahit might still be rumbling on—and indeed it would be another hundred years before it finally breathed its last—but the Hindu-Buddhist centuries were coming rapidly to an end and the scene was set for the next great sea change in Southeast Asia.
CHAPTER 3
SAINTS AND WINNERS:
THE ARRIVAL OF ISLAM
They had sighted the land when they were still far out at sea: a long, grey-green stain stretching out across the horizon of the Andaman Sea. It took shape as they edged steadily towards it over the course of the morning: a range of mountains rearing inland under banks of creamy cloud, and a strip of pale foreshore under an infinite rank of palms. Eventually the ship—a Bengali merchantman that had been lumbering southwards for twenty-five days since its last landfall—came to anchor in the shallows. There was a large village of thatch-roofed houses onshore, and as the ship swung to her anchor rope, small boats swarmed around it with villagers clamouring for a sale and holding up bunches of ripe bananas, fat mangoes, bulbous green coconuts and bundles of dried fish.
As the merchants and crewmen reached down from the deck and embarked on their first bout of commerce after a month at sea, one of the passengers looked out on the scene, noting its detail in his formidable memory and wondering what he would find here, in yet another strange land. He was forty-one years old and seven thousand miles from home. His name was Ibn Battuta, and now, after twenty years of travel, he had reached the Sumatran state of Samudra Pasai. It was 1345.
Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan Muslim, born in 1304 in Tangier—a town at the mouth of the Mediterranean and in view of the sierras of southern Europe. He was clearly a man afflicted with a truly spectacular case of wanderlust, for at the age of twenty-one, ‘swayed by an overmastering impulse within me’ and ‘finding no companion to cheer the way’, he had left his sobbing parents and headed eastwards. He was planning merely to complete the Haj, the mandatory Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. But once Ibn Battuta was on the road, there was no stopping him. He wandered right, left and centre through the swelling realms of fourteenth-century Islam, eventually winding up as a qadi—an administrator of Islamic jurisprudence—at the court of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq in Delhi.
Many years later, back at home in Morocco after three decades on the road, Ibn Battuta would dictate the tale of his travels. It was a story full of colour, rich in the detail of life in far-off lands—and rich also with insights into the author’s own character. He was a man thoroughly interested and engaged in the world around him, taking careful note not only of the dynastic and theological arrangements in far-flung sultanates, but also of what was sold in the markets, of how the people dressed and ate, and of what they said. He was, in short, a travel writer par excellence.
In 1345 Ibn Battuta had left India for Sumatra, where, once the babble of bargaining with the local hawkers had died down, an official came aboard the ship with the news that the local ruler would be delighted to make Ibn Battuta’s acquaintance—for he, too, was a Muslim. Ibn Battuta was led inland between banks of lush greenery and wooden houses built on stilts. Several miles from the shore he came to the capital—‘a large and beautiful city encompassed by a wooden wall with wooden towers’—where he was told to swap his Arab robes for a local-style sarong. Once the costume change was complete he was installed in a house in the middle of a garden and provided with a pair of slave girls. The custom of the country, he was told, was that he must bide his time for three days before meeting the sultan. The wait was hardly onerous. Food, he noted, was ‘sent to us thrice a day and fruits and rare sweetmeats every evening and morning’; the locals seemed to be good Muslims of the Shafi’i school of Law, and the slave girls were excellent company.
The following Friday he finally met the sultan, Mahmud Malik az-Zahir, in the royal enclosure of the grand mosque. Once prayers were over there was a lavish entertainment laid on for the ruler a
nd his guest:
Male musicians came in and sang … after which they led in horses with silk caparisons, golden anklets, and halters of embroidered silk. These horses danced before [the sultan], a thing which astonished me…
Ibn Battuta stayed with the sultan for two weeks before travelling onwards to China. He was very impressed with what he had seen. Samudra Pasai—a pocket of territory on the far northeast littoral of Sumatra in what is now the province of Aceh—was a hive of tropical commerce. Locals traded using tin cash and pieces of unrefined gold, and the hinterlands were rich with areca, aloes, camphor and all manner of fruits. Above all, as a sometime theologian and a part-time zealot, Ibn Battuta was particularly pleased to find a small Muslim territory here at the ends of the earth. Sultan Mahmud, he declared, was ‘a most illustrious and open-handed ruler, and a lover of theologians’:
He is constantly engaged in warring for the Faith and in raiding expeditions, but is withal a humble-hearted man, who walks on foot to the Friday prayers. His subjects also take pleasure in warring for the Faith and voluntarily accompany him on his expeditions. They have the upper hand over all the infidels in their vicinity.
Away to the south in Java, Hayam Wuruk had not yet ascended to the throne of Majapahit and Hindu-Buddhist priests were still traipsing along the pilgrimage trails of Gunung Penanggungan. But here in Sumatra a new chapter in Archipelago history was already unfolding.