A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  Muara Jambi was once the seat of the Malayu kingdom. In the seventh century it fell under the sway of the Buddhist state of Srivijaya, but in the eleventh century the centre of political power in the region shifted to the delta of the Batang Hari. By the late thirteenth century, the region had slipped into obscurity. The jungle took over, and the Muara Jambi complex was left to the tigers. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that archaeologists began to clear the forest and take stock of the huge array of structures.

  THE TEMPLE MOSQUE In the town of Kudus, on the north coast of Java, stands the Masjid Menara, one of the most unusual Islamic buildings in Indonesia, with split candi bentar–style gateways and a remarkable three-tiered drum tower, all built from weathered red brick.

  Kudus lies in a region that formed the original foothold of Islam in Java. This was part of the Demak sultanate, which defeated Java’s last great Hindu-Buddhist kingdom, Majapahit, in the early sixteenth century.

  No one knows the true age of the brick buildings, but they are thoroughly reminiscent of Javanese Hindu-Buddhist temples. Some claim that they actually are an old temple adapted for a new religious purpose. Even if this is not the case, the structures were obviously inspired by the distinctive red-brick shrines of Majapahit.

  THE NINE SAINTS In popular belief, Islam was brought to Java by the Wali Songo, the ‘Nine Saints’, a group of men partly historical, partly mythological. They lived between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but their legend was only properly crystallised in the works of eighteenth-century chroniclers. The term ‘wali’ is Arabic, but individually each of the saints is known by a Javanese honorific, sunan. In the standard version of their story, the first of their number was Sunan Maulana Malik Ibrahim, who may have come from Persia or Central Asia, and whose grave at Gresik is dated to 1419. Amongst the other saints is Sunan Giri, who died in 1506, and whose origin myth has a heavy hint of the tale of Moses, with the saintly child of a Hindu princess placed in a box and thrown into the sea, only to be raised by pious Muslims after washing ashore at Gresik. Sunan Kalijaga, meanwhile, was reputedly a son of a Majapahit aristocrat who lived the life of a highwayman before taking the saintly path. He is credited—although there is no serious historical evidence—with the invention of wayang kulit shadow puppetry. The Wali Songo still have a powerful hold on popular imagination in Java, and their tombs—scattered along the north coast of the island—are major places of pilgrimage.

  THE TRADE-OFF Nine tiny pinheads of land, the Banda Islands amount to a total of no more than twenty-three square miles (sixty square kilometres) of solid ground. And yet this clutch of miniscule landfalls, whose main settlement of Bandaniera is depicted here in the nineteenth century, was once the ultimate hub of the spice trade—the only place on earth where nutmeg trees grew. Nutmeg had been finding its way to Europe by way of a relay of trade links since at least the Roman era, but it was only when the Portuguese turned up in 1511 that a direct connection was forged. Portuguese dominance gave way to a protracted tussle for control of the nutmeg trade between the Dutch and the English.

  Eventually the Dutch got the upper hand, but the English doggedly maintained their claim to the outlying islet of Run until 1667 when England and Netherlands signed the Treaty of Breda, which declared that both countries would drop all claims to overseas territories they had seized from one another. In practice this amounted to a trade-off, swapping tiny Run in the Bandas for a Dutch outpost called New Amsterdam, nine thousand miles away on the eastern seaboard of North America. An English fleet had captured it three years earlier, and England’s King Charles II had noted approvingly that it was ‘a place of great importance … we have got the better of it and ’tis now called New York’.

  A CITY OF MANY NAMES The city known today as Jakarta has traded under many different names. The original settlement at the mouth of the Ciliwung River was known as Sunda Kelapa—kelapa meaning ‘coconut’ in a presumed reference to an abundance of coconut palms in the area. In the early sixteenth century it was named Jayakarta, ‘victorious deed’, to commemorate a conquest by forces from Demak. This name was usually misheard by European visitors, who wrote it down as ‘Jaccatra’.

  In 1619 the VOC created a new centre of operations there. The governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, wanted to name the place after his own hometown, but ‘New Hoorn’ could hardly compete with an alternative cooked up by some unknown Hollander: Batavia, a name that was used for the best part of 350 years. The city came to resemble a tropical version of Amsterdam, with canals and Dutch-style houses.

  When the Dutch were ousted by the Japanese during World War II, the city became ‘Djakarta’. In 1946 when the Dutch returned to the stage, Batavia rose from the ashes once more, only to be banished for good in 1949. There was one final change in 1972 when Indonesian spelling was reformed: Djakarta dropped the D and became Jakarta.

  THE FALL OF MAKASSAR For many years Makassar rivalled Melaka on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, and later Batavia, as the major hub of trade in the eastern part of the Archipelago. It got a further boost in 1641 when the Dutch captured Melaka, throwing out its international traders—Indians, Englishmen, Portuguese and others—many of whom drifted to Makassar. For the Dutch the Makassarese were a significant challenge to their own trading power. In 1667 they joined forces with the Bugis of neighbouring Bone, and toppled the Makassarese sultan. As a result of the conquest, imagined above by a Dutch engraver, all foreign traders were turfed out of Makassar, and control of most of the region was handed to a Bugis pretender named Arung Palakka on an understanding of Dutch-Bugis friendship and exclusive VOC trading rights.

  However, both Bugis and Makassarese remained a powerful presence on the sea lanes for centuries to come, trading across the region from Timor to Aceh. Their seafaring skills were formidable, and their high-prowed white boats today still carry a significant proportion of interisland cargo in Indonesia.

  THE BUFFALO AND THE TIGER The alun-alun, the ceremonial grassy square that was an essential part of a Javanese royal city, was the scene of extravagant entertainments. Troops paraded here; musical performances and sporting contests were held here. And when European officials made formal visits in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were almost always treated to the gruesome spectacle of a buffalo and tiger fight. Many of them reported being thoroughly impressed by the bloody struggle. What few of them realised was that for the watching Javanese these inter-species clashes contained a secret symbolism. The tiger—quick-tempered and with a tendency to lash out violently—represented the Europeans; the buffalo—slow, dignified and strong—represented the Javanese. And it was usually the buffalo that won.

  THE SHADOW PLAY The wayang kulit shadow puppetry is perhaps the best known of all the Archipelago’s art forms. The puppets are made from filigreed buffalo hide and then animated against a backlit screen.

  Although many Indonesians insist that wayang kulit was invented in Java, shadow puppetry appears in China and India, so there is a possibility that it was originally a cultural import. It certainly existed by the eleventh century, when a court chronicler of the East Java king Airlangga described a performance: ‘There are people who weep, are sad and aroused watching the puppets, though they know they are merely carved pieces of leather manipulated and made to speak’.

  Today the wayang kulit remains popular, particularly in Java and Bali, and its legendary figures are still used as points of reference in discussions of everything from politics to business.

  BRITAIN’S SUMATRAN OUTPOST Bengkulu, pictured here in the early eighteenth century, is today the sleepy capital of Sumatra’s smallest and remotest province. But for 140 years this was an unlikely colonial outpost, one of the least profitable of all Britain’s Asian possessions.

  The first British settlers arrived in 1685, planning to develop Bengkulu as a major pepper port, but it lacked a proper safe anchorage; most passing ships travelled along the other coast of Sumatra, and the pepper crops were never v
ery successful. The colonists died in droves from the endemic tropical diseases of this feverish coastline.

  But instead of cutting their losses, the British kept Bengkulu until the nineteenth century. It never made a profit. Eventually a trade-off was organised, and in 1824 the British abandoned their claims on the west coast of Sumatra, while the Dutch gave up Melaka on the Malay Peninsula. Bengkulu rapidly became a backwater of the Dutch East Indies, and then a backwater of Indonesia in turn, though it is still studded with relics from the long British occupation.

  A TALE OF TWO PAINTINGS The arrest of the rebel prince Diponegoro by the Dutch General De Kock in Magelang in 1830 brought to an end the five-year Java War, and for the Dutch it was the moment at which they finally achieved uncontested paramountcy in Java. For the Javanese, it was the moment of final defeat and humiliation.

  To celebrate, De Kock commissioned the acclaimed young painter Nicolaas Pieneman—who had never been to Java—to recreate the moment of his triumph. The end result, The Submission of Prince Dipo Negoro to General De Kock (above), was calmly paternal. Diponegoro, resigned to his fate, stands below De Kock, who points decisively to the carriage waiting to carry Diponegoro into exile, and, with this gesture, also appears to banish all unseemly resistance from the Dutch East Indies.

  Another young painter, an Indonesian aristocrat, Raden Saleh Syarif Bustaman, who had studied art in the Netherlands under the European masters of the day, created his own version of events in Magelang. He had obviously seen Pieneman’s painting, and was obviously influenced by it. But his painting, Capture of Prince Diponegoro (below), is radically different. Diponegoro’s distraught followers crowd around the steps of a shabby Dutch building. Instead of Pieneman’s bright blue skies and brisk breeze, the air has the heavy look of the late monsoon. The prince looks furious at this moment of betrayal, feet braced and fist clenched. But most striking is that Javanese figures all look natural, dynamic and with expressive faces. By contrast, the triumphant Europeans are stiff and inflexible, with heads a little too big for their bodies and not sitting entirely naturally atop their necks. Raden Saleh had made De Kock and the other soldiers look like the big-headed raksasa, the giant demons of Javanese mythology.

  Raden Saleh remained a darling of colonial society and a fixture on the European social scene in Batavia. He actually presented his painting of Diponegoro’s arrest to King William III of the Netherlands, disseminating an influential, alternative viewpoint of this symbolic moment of history.

  THE FINISHING The Dutch conquest of southern Bali in the first decade of the twentieth century featured appalling massacres. Accounts of the killings were contradictory, but all featured the king of a Balinese court and his followers advancing in ceremonial fashion towards a heavily armed column of Dutch soldiers, who opened fire. The illustration above is of the death of the Rajah of Buleleng in an earlier killing in 1849, as imagined by the French newspaper Le Petit Journal.

  Today these killings are remembered as puputan or ‘finishings’, often described as ceremonial mass suicides. Some decidedly romantic notions have developed around the puputan, with the idea of the killings as a kind of ritual, the ultimate Balinese dance-drama, brought to the fore. But a puputan was sometimes a more conventional fight to the death, a last stand that was anything but ceremonial.

  PHOTO BY: JIALIANG GAO CC BY-SA 3.0

  A TALE OF TWO VOLCANOES In 1833, the Krakatau eruption—imagined, below, in an 1838 lithograph—got more world wide attention than the much bigger Tambora eruption earlier in the century. Gunung Tambora (right) is a huge volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Nusa Tenggara. It erupted in 1815, culminating in a stupendous series of explosions that British soldiers in Java mistook for cannon-fire. The mountain shrank from 13,780 feet (4,200 metres) above sea level to 990 feet (2,800 metres), and a staggering 150 cubic kilometres (36 cubic miles) of material was blasted into the atmosphere. Global weather patterns went haywire, prompting famines in Europe. Over 100,000 people are thought to have died during the eruption.

  THE POISON TREE OF JAVA Early European accounts of the Archipelago were full of fabulous beasts and fantastical happenings. In the fourteenth century the French Catholic traveller Friar Jordanus wrote of Java (which he had never visited) that there were ‘trees producing cloves, which when they are in flower emit an odour so pungent that they kill every man who cometh among them, unless he shut his mouth and nostrils’. Remarkably the tale of ‘the Poison Tree of Java’, likely to be the antiaris toxicaria pictured above, was still doing the rounds some five hundred years later.

  In an 1783 edition of The London Magazine, a German doctor, J.N. Foersch who had been employed as a surgeon in the Dutch East Indies, claimed that he had there come across the deadly Pohon Upas, or ‘Poison Tree’. The tree, he said, was so toxic that it had poisoned a vast swathe of ground, ‘and the country round it, to the distance of ten or twelve miles from the tree, is entirely barren’. No man or beast could enter the desert without succumbing at once to the choking gases.

  The upas tree, or antiaris toxicaria, did in fact exist in the forests of Java, and was used as a source of toxin for assassination, warfare and hunting—though it certainly didn’t poison the surrounding air. Foersch’s description of a dreary land of lifeless rock where nothing would grow, ringed by a wall of sheer hills and ridges, sounds suspiciously like a garbled report of one of Java’s many volcanic craters, such as the Ijen volcano, pictured below, where locals still harvest sulphur in potentially deadly conditions.

  THREADS OF HISTORY The best-known traditional textile in modern Indonesia is batik. The most refined forms are to be found in Java, and it was here that the technique of making the wax patterns with a canting, a small copper cup with a spout, probably emerged in the twelfth century. In the court cities of Central Java, batik features abstract geometrical patterns, but along the north coast there are motifs showing influences from China, Persia, India and Europe, each speaking of trade across centuries.

  Foreign influences are also written into the fabric of another Indonesian textile tradition—ikat, pictured above. The name simply means ‘to tie’, and the weft threads for the cloth are tied and dyed before the warp is added, to create patterns which only become visible on the loom. Ikat is found all over the Archipelago, but it is commonest in the east, particularly in Nusa Tenggara, where local designs sometimes show the influence of the Indian patola clothes shipped into Southeast Asia in the distant past.

  KARTINI The role of women in the story of the Archipelago is often obscured by the antics of the men, but one woman who is given plenty of attention is Javanese aristocrat Raden Ajeng Kartini, commemorated below in street art in her hometown, Jepara, in Java, where she was born in 1879. Her father was the local regent, and Kartini received an education in Dutch, even though she still had to go into traditional aristocratic seclusion for the years between puberty and marriage. During this time she struck up correspondences with several Dutch women, writing of her desire to see more education for girls, and for reform of the aristocratic system in which she was trapped. She married the Javanese regent Joyodiningrat of Rembang, who let her set up a school for girls. She died aged twenty-five in 1904, after the birth of her first child.

  After her death, the Dutch proclaimed her a figurehead of their so-called Liberal Policy, which sought to improve Indonesian education in the early twentieth century; in 1913 the Kartini Foundation for girls’ schools was launched. In 1964 President Sukarno declared her a national hero, implying she had fought against Dutch colonialism. The New Order, meanwhile, turned her into the epitome of ideal womanhood, educated and intelligent but ultimately dutiful.

  BUNG TOMO The formidably feisty East Java youth leader Sutomo, known as ‘Bung Tomo’, became a prominent figure in Surabaya during the resistance to the British Allied troops in late 1945. He was described as ‘a slight, handsome man’ whose ‘eyes shone with an inward fire’.

  Foremost amongst Bung Tomo’s revolutionary efforts was his pirate ra
dio station, Radio Pemberontakan, ‘Rebellion Radio’. Ultimately, though, Bung Tomo’s role in the revolution was a minor one, once the British had finally taken Surabaya. In later years Bung Tomo remained a fairly obscure figure, though he served briefly as a minister in Jakarta in the 1960s.

  THE PROCLAMATOR Of all the iconic moments in the last century of Indonesian history, few could rival the proclamation of independence on 17 August 1945. And yet, for those present at the modest Jakarta bungalow that morning, it must have felt like an anticlimax; there were only a handful of people there, and most Indonesians had no idea that anything had happened.

  When Indonesia’s Japanese occupiers announced their surrender on 15 August, the leaders of the Indonesian nationalist movement were thrown into turmoil. In discussion with the Japanese they had been creeping towards some sort of independence for many months, but now, all that slow progress was undone, and it looked as though the Dutch might soon return to pick up where they had left off.

  The more radical Indonesian revolutionaries were agitating for a unilateral declaration, one that was as much a rejection of Japanese rule as of Dutch control, but Sukarno stepped to the fore and displayed the remarkably cool-headed pragmatism that was often masked by the flamboyant antics later in his career. Even after being kidnapped and pushed to act by radical students he managed to draft a declaration that was unequivocal but that met with the approval of the Japanese. Read to a small crowd outside his own home, it was short and simple: ‘We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia’, it stated.