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18. A Short History of Indonesia
Warring States and the VOC
WC 3861 On 23 June 15961 four Dutch ships dropped anchor in the harbour of the Javanese trading port of Banten2. Portuguese merchants came on board to welcome them showing them all politeness and explaining the conditions of Java to them and exalting the great fertility and wealth of the island3. The following day the Sultan’s representatives also made them welcome by granting the Dutch permission to trade freely in their port. While this first contact between Indonesians and Dutch presents a rosy picture, all was not well.
Map showing the kingdoms of Sunda and Galuh (red dots=capitals, black dots=important centres)
The Dutch enterprise was under the command of Cornelius de Houtman who, as DGE Hall explains, was a bad commander, a boaster and a ruffian4. de Houtman has spent several years as a merchant in Lisbon and claimed to have a thorough knowledge of the Portuguese trade in Southeast Asia and charts drawn by the cartographer Plancius to help them find the spice isles. As it happened, the voyage took them twice as long as it should have done and de 1 There seems to be some dispute over the exact date: this, 23rd June, I have taken from Vlekke, HM: Nusantara – A History of Indonesia, W. van Hoeve Ltd, 1959. Others say it was 27th… 2 This is variously spelled Banten and Bantam. The “-am” ending is the contemporary English spelling but is used by some historians, eg. Vlekke, op. cit; Hall, DGE: A History of South-East Asia, Macmillan Student Editions, 1970. Personally I prefer the Indonesian “Banten”. 3 Quotation from Vlekke, op. cit p.107 4 Hall, op. cit. p. 289
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Houtman lost 145 out of his 249 man crew, mostly from scurvy, before they reached Banten. The Dutch quickly wore out their welcome: de Houtman and his men behaved so badly in port that de Houtman himself was thrown in prison and had to be ransomed a month later, but not before his ships had bombarded the city. They sailed eastwards to the tiny port once known as Sunda Kelapa and then as Jacatra (now Jakarta) and from there as far as Bali before his crew forced de Houtman to return home. They arrived back in the Netherlands in August 1597 with only 3 of his four ships and 89 of the men who had sailed at the beginning of the expedition. Perhaps most damning of all, they returned with a disappointingly small cargo to pay for the venture. Nonetheless, the Dutch were overjoyed because de Houtman had at least demonstrated it was possible to reach the Indies and to obtain the valuable spices which drew them like the lure of gold. The Dutch were to remain in Indonesia for the next three and a half centuries until finally driven out in 1942 during World War II by the Japanese. Initially their intrusion was only spasmodic and motivated entirely by their desire to trade, but like other European powers of the time, they found themselves increasingly involved in the power politics of the region and in defending their establishments from the depredations of their fellow Europeans. This incurred costs which ate into the profits of their ventures, costs which, for example, included building forts, hiring mercenaries or supplying military and naval support, costly gifts and bribes to indigenous potentates and others which eventually forced the Dutch state to take over responsibility and thus effectively to turn the Indonesian archipelago into a colony. However, it is a common mistake for those of us of European descent to see this period of Indonesian history through the dark glass of our European self-‐interest. The biggest distortion occurs when we focus on the role of the Dutch in the archipelago as though this was all that was happening. In fact, just as in the earlier Buddhist-‐Hindu period, the mandalas of power in Southeast Asia were forever changing and to a large extent ⎯ certainly before the 19th Century ⎯ the Dutch were tantamount to just another small state playing a part in the power games of the time. So, before outlining the events of Dutch rule in Indonesia, we will look back over the changes which followed the decline of Majapahit because it is against that shifting background the European intrusion must be viewed. The lingering decline of Majapahit saw power shift from East Java and the valley of the Brantas River, back towards Central Java and perhaps more importantly, to West Java, or Sunda as the region is known. This also saw a
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shift from the old kingdoms which drew their kesaktian, or right to rule, from the old Javanese Hindu religion, to newer states which espoused Islam. The Sunda Kingdom Sunda is the westernmost part of the island of Java. About 40 million people inhabit the area of approximately 35,000 square kilometres, making it outside Jakarta the most densely populated region in Indonesia5. Until 2000, the province also included the Banten region but this was excised as a separate province in that year.
Sundanese suling ( bamboo flute) and wayang golek
Angklung and angklung orchestra
Apart from the national language, the people speak Sundanese, a language distinct from Javanese, and claim a culture identifiably different from that in Central and East Java. For example, instead of the wayang kulit so popular in the rest of Java, in Sunda the great folk-‐theatre employs three-‐dimensional puppets known as wayang golek. Music is also different ⎯ gamelan degung, angklung and kacapi suling are the genres which stand out for me. Even food makes the point this is a different culture: whereas the Javanese cuisine tends
5 In 2005, population density was 1,150 persons per square kilometer.
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to be sweet, in Sunda they cook with Lombok or birds-‐eye chilli in just about everything so that food is usually pedas sekali!6 The degung whose bass tone punctuates the Sundanese gamelan.
Sunda is a very mountainous region. Its capital, Bandung, lies in the shadow of the volcano Tangkuban Perahu, so named because it resembles an upturned boat. Both Bandung and its neighbour Bogor (in the mountains above Jakarta) are important university cities with the Bandung Institute of Technology and the Institut Pertanian (Agriculture Institute) in Bogor being outstanding examples places of higher learning. The late
President Soekarno enrolled at ITB as a young man in 1924.
(Left) The insignia of IT: Ganesh, son of Siva and the god of science. (centre) The famous “buffalo horns” roof of the main ITB building and (right) ITB as it was when first built in 1920.
This mountainous region is these days home to endless tea and coffee plantations as well as the ubiquitous rice terraces.
Tea plantations, Puncak Pass (near Bogor)7 and sawah terraced down the mountain-sides (photo: BH 1969)
6 Very spicy ⎯ there are two words in Indonesian for “hot”: panas, as in “hot water”, and pedas as in “hot with chilli” 7 Photo: http://www.weltrekordreise.ch/a_akte_indonesien.htm
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It was in this rugged terrain that the kings of the Sunda kingdom reigned from 669 to c. 1579, their boundary with the kingdoms of Central Java being the Brebes and Serayu Rivers . The name Sunda was first used in an Old Malay inscription dated 536 AD memorialising a Rakryan Juru Pangambat who, according to the text, re-‐established power in the kingdom of Sunda. This date places Sunda at the time of the kingdom of Tarumanagara. A much later mention of the name Sunda is on the Jayabupati inscription of 1030 AD. This records a law made by the King of Sunda which forbade catching fish in a river on pain of horrible punishments by supernatural beings, die[ing] in horrible way[s] like their brain being sucked [out], blood being drunk, intestines being destroyed, and chest split in two. Another account, this time from what is known as the Wangsakerta manuscript, indicates that king Tarusbawa inherited Tarumanagara and changed its name to Sunda in 670 AD. Chinese records confirm this. But all was not easy for Tarusbawa: the ruler of another small kingdom which had been a vassal of Tarumanagara insisted the old kingdom be divided between him and Tarusbawa. Because the other ruler had powerful connections in Central Java, rather than risk war, Tarusbawa agreed and the Taruma territory was divided in 670 into Sunda in the west and Galuh in the east.
The division of the Tarumanagara territory into two kingdoms, Sunda and Galuh.
The two kingdoms led a turbulent existence, sometimes as separate kingdoms, sometimes re-‐united. The many wars and complicated
genealogies make this period difficult to comprehend, but one name stands out: Sanjaya. Apparently related to both dynasties, this man succeeded Tarusbawa as the second king of Sunda. He ascended the throne there as Prabu Harisdarma and ruled 723-‐732 but later, when he succeeded to the throne of Galuh, he took the name Sanjaya. In the Byzantine maze of family relationships, Sanjaya also had a legitimate claim to the throne of Kalinga in Central Java and in 732 AD he thus established the Kingdom of Mataram and began the Sanjaya Dynasty. His son, Prince Tamperan then assumed the throne of Sunda as Rakeyan Panaraban. Although we have extensive king-‐lists and the relationships of these rulers to each other, very little is known about the early history of this part of Java. Fortunately, however, there is one first-‐hand account of the life of the ordinary people in the 11th century. Chu-‐fan-‐chi, a Chinese visitor to the region sometime between 1178 to 1225, recorded his impressions of Sunda and its port:
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All along the shores, people are dwelling. The people are working in agriculture, their houses are on poles and the roofs are thatched with the bark of the leaves of palm trees and the walls were made with wooden boards tied together with rattan. Both men and women wrap round their loins a piece of cotton, and in cutting their hair they only leave it half an inch long. The pepper grown on the hills (of this country) is small-grained, but heavy and superior to that of Ta-pan (eastern Java). The country produces pumpkins, sugar cane, bottle-guards, beans and egg-plants. As, however, there is no regular government in this country, the people are given to brigandage, on which account foreign traders rarely go there8.
Much further down the king list of Sunda is Prabu Maharaja Lingga Buana. Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit wanted to marry Lingga Buana’s daughter, Dyah Pitaloka and so, with much ceremony, the Sunda court travelled to Trowulan in 1357 and established themselves on Bubat Square in the city. However, Gaja Mada did not approve of this marriage and at the last moment made it known that the princess was to be a concubine, a gift in submission to Hayam Wuruk. The Sundanese king was outraged, a skirmish broke out in which he, the princess and most of his court were killed. One of the major books of the Sunda kingdom, the Kidung Sunda, records that Prabu Maharaja Lingga Buana was thenceforth known as Prabu Wangi in remembrance of his heroism in defending the honour of his kingdom and his descendants, the later kings of Sunda, were known as Siliwangi or “successor of Wangi”. A great-‐grandson of Lingga Buana when he became king was called Sri Baduga Maharaja or more popularly, as Prabu Siliwangi. The period of his rule (1482-‐1521) was the Golden Age of the Sunda kingdom during which the Maharaja paved the road to the port of Sunda Kelapa (now Jakarta), established reserves and forest plantations and created the Talaga-‐warna-‐mahawijaya Lake near the Puncak Pass. This was a time when the kingdom reached the zenith of its power and became extremely wealthy through increased efficiency of its agriculture and the growth of the pepper trade. But this was also the time in which the Sultan of Demak was aggressively expanding his domains and along the way, bringing about the downfall of Majapahit. By the early 1500s, only Balambangan in the far east of Java and Sunda in the west of the island remained Hindu states. In both 1512 and 1521 the king of Sunda, Sri Baduga Maharaja sent his son, the Crown Prince, to Malacca to ask for their assistance by signing a peace treaty between them, and inviting them to trade in pepper and to build a fort at Sunda Kelapa. The treaty was finally concluded in 1522 after the old king died and the former Crown Prince, best known as Ratu Sang Hiang, had ascended the throne.
8 Chu-fan-chi: Report on Far Countries, quoted by Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunda_Kingdom
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However, the Luso-‐Sundanese Treaty was never put into effect. The Portuguese were distracted by trouble in Goa and by the time they returned it was to find the harbour at Sunda Kelapa had been captured by the combined forces of the Sultans of Cirebon and Demak, most of the city destroyed, its people massacred, and the harbor itself renamed Jayakarta. Although the king sent troops, they were defeated and driven back to the Sunda capital, Pakuan. The war between the Cirebon-‐Demak alliance and the King of Sunda lasted for 5 years until finally king Surawisesa concluded a peace treaty with Syarif Hidayatullah in 1531. Although the Portuguese made two attempts to land in Jayakarta they were too weak and finally gave up any attempt to re-‐take the city for their ally, the Sundanese king. There were two centres of power during the history of the Sunda kingdom, one at Pakuan–Pajajaran9 in Sunda itself, the other in the some-‐time kingdom of Galuh when it was located at Kawali. The name Pajajaran referred to Pakuan’s position between two rivers and is perhaps more familiar today than the older Pakuan. It is also the name of one of the great universities of Indonesia, the Universitas Padjadjaran in Bandung. Although the court moved from Pakuan to Kawali for some time, Sri Baduga Maharaja moved the
government back again in 1482 and it remained there until the end of the kingdom with its fall to the Sultanate of Banten in the 1550s. Banten10
The Kingdom of Banten The Sultanate of Banten was founded by Sunan Gunungjati, a Javanese wali11 who married the sister of Sultan Trenggono of Demak. He is said to have been the grandson on his mother’s side of the king of Sunda, Prabu Siliwangi. In 1527 when known as Fatahillah he helped defeat the Portuguese when they tried to take Sunda Kelapa. He also led military expeditions for Demak against Banten, then still a Hindu kingdom. One of the problems in studying the life of Sunan Gunungjati is that his death is dated to 1580 and this means, if he was indeed the grandson of Prabu Siliwangi, he must have been 120 years old! He
9 This is the new spelling; the Universitas Padjadjaran in Bandung still employs the old spelling based on Dutch phonetics in which the modern [j] is spelled [dj]. 10 Photo: The blog of Mikhail Tsyganov, http://mikejkt.livejournal.com/4736.html#cutid1 11 This is a term referring to men revered for their role of spreading Islam in Java and is more or less equivalent to “saint”. They are customarily given the title Sunan. Sunan Gunungjati is the only sunan to have become a king.
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is also credited with founding the Sultanate of Cirebon, another of the important trading ports on Java’s north coast. Built by Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin and his successor Maulana Yusuf in 1552-1580 the stronghold cum palace Keraton Surosowan lies in ruins (its western and eastern walls are 300 metres and its overall area is 3 hectares).
Sunan Gunungjati’s son, Hasanuddin succeeded his father as Sultan and set about reviving the glories of the old kingdom of Sunda. Whereas his father’s capital had been at Banten Girang, some distance inland, Hasanuddin decided to build a new capital on the coast, at the mouth of the Cibanten River in the area between two arms of the river as it flowed from its delta into the sea. The new city was divided into quarters by main streets running north-‐south and east-‐west. The royal residence, the kraton, was built on the south side, the mosque on the west side of the city. Overall, the city covered 3 hectares. Merchants and other foreigners had to live outside the city.
The remains of the palace Keraton Kaibon, the residence of the sultan’s mother Saifuddin. It is probably older than Surosowan. The Dutch dismantled much of it in 1832.
In 1546, Hasanuddin took part in a military expedition by the Sultan of Demak against Pasuran and when the Sultan was killed in the battle,
took the opportunity to free his city from its vassalage to the older sultanate. From this time on, Banten enjoyed great prosperity, principally from its pepper trade which both Sunan Gunungjati and Hasanuddin had been at pains
to secure. Where Demak’s expedition had failed, Hasnuddin was now able to take over the old capital of Pasuran-‐Pajajaran, located where the modern city of Bogor now stands, with little trouble. A tourist-eye view of Banten
From this time on, Banten ruled the whole of West Java with the exception of the Sultanate
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of Cirebon, as well as much of southern Sumatra, the source of its pepper wealth. It was in this prosperous harbour that the Dutch first dropped anchor in 1596 and, although their expedition was not as profitable as it might have been, the merchants back in Holland were enthusiastic enough to send several more expeditions immediately and, on 28th March 1602, to found a chartered company dedicated to seeking
profit in the Indonesian archipelago. Known in English as the Dutch East Indies Company ⎯ in Dutch, Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie ⎯ this company is best-‐known by its initials, the VOC. The States-‐General of the Netherlands granted the VOC a 21-‐year monopoly on commercial activities in
Asia and legislated to allow it to wage war, build forts, maintain armies, negotiate treaties, coin money and establish colonies and last but not least, to to account financially for its activities only once every decade. This was an innovative step, the VOC being the first multinational company in the world and the first company to issue stock. A VOC “duit” minted in 1735. The basic unit was the “penning” and a duit was worth 2 penning. There were 160 duit to the “gulden”. In Bahasa Indonesia “duit: = “money” or “coin”.
For all the Dutch enthusiasm to set up this mega-‐corporation,
the English actually were a jump ahead, setting up the East India Company (commonly called “John Company”) in 1600. Of course this led to conflict, starting with the arrival in the Moluccas in 1604 of an East Indies Company (John Company) expedition intending to trade there for spices. Despite Dutch hostility, the English continued to establish trading posts throughout the archipelago from 1611 to 1617, including in Kalimantan, Makassar, Aceh, and in Java, in Jayakarta and Jepara. In 1623 this conflict led to the Amboyna
massacre in which 20 men, ten of whom were Englishmen employed by the East India Company, were arrested by the Dutch, tortured, tried and beheaded for conspiracy against the Dutch government. Interestingly, the preferred method of torture for the VOC was waterboarding! The Dutch and English enclaves at Amboyna (top) and Banda-Neira (bottom). 1655 engraving.
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The Amboyna Massacre was to play an important role for much of the century, mostly as propaganda, in the lead-‐up to the First12, Second13 and Third14 Anglo-‐Dutch Wars and was even used as an argument vindicating the British annexation of New Amsterdam ⎯ now New York! Even John Dryden wrote a play called Amboyna or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English
Merchants which played its part in instigating the Third Anglo Dutch War. Batavia in the 17th Century (the area is now North Jakarta).
The first permanent VOC trading post was established in Banten in 1603 and two years later, an admiral of the VOC fleet, Steven van der Hagen, captured the Portuguese fort on Ambon and tried to seize control of the spice trade from
there. In 1610 the post of Governor-‐General of the VOC was created along with the Raad van Indië ⎯ Council of the Indies ⎯ with headquarters in Ambon. The first three Governors-‐General were stationed there but the site was strategically unsuitable being so far off the main sea lanes. On 30 May 1619 the fourth Governor-‐General of the VOC, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, with a fleet of 19 ships, stormed Jayakarta, drove out the Bantenese and established a new capital for the VOC which was re-‐named Batavia.
Nutmeg and mace15
Jan Pieterszoon Coen was ruthless. Because he found it impossible to restrict the spice trade to Dutch factors, Coen decided to set up plantations run by Dutch colonists on Banda. Now Banda is a group of very small islands,
the vestiges of an ancient volcano, which was the only place in the world where the nutmeg tree grew. This tree provided not only nutmeg, which is the kernel of the nut, but also mace, its outer fleshy sheath. So Coen deported the entire indigenous population or massacred those who refused to leave and then used slave labour to run the plantations. His plan to involve colonists to over-‐see these plantations was thwarted by the Heeren XVII16, the board of the VOC, who were not willing to risk such uncertain financial commitments.
12 1652–1654 13 1665-1667 14 1672-1674 15 Mace is sold in dried form but in Indonesia is often eaten fresh as a tasty mouth freshener. 16 Heeren Zeventien, “The Lords Seventeen”.
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The Third Anglo-‐Dutch War of 1672-‐74 temporarily cut off the VOC’s trade with Europe and seizing the moment, the East Indies Company flooded the market with cheaper pepper from their sources in India. As it happened, this rebounded on the English company, forcing it close to bankruptcy, but by then France and Denmark began to compete for some of the VOC’s pepper trade on the Coromandel Coast of India and in what had been the open port of Banten in Java. In 1684 the VOC obtained a treaty from the Sultan closing Banten to all but its own ships. Replicas of two VOC ships, one from the 17th Century, the other from the 18th. The first is the replica of the Batavia, built in Amsterdam in 1628 but wrecked on her maiden voyage at the Abrolhos Islands on 4 June 1629. She is moored at Lelystad, the Netherlands. The second (right) is a modern reconstruction of the 18th century VOC Amsterdam. The original was beached off the south coast of England when her rudder snapped in a storm in 1749. The replica was completed in 1991.
The 18th Century eventually saw the decline of the VOC. The Company was gradually squeezed out of many of its earlier Asian bases of operation as patterns of inter-‐Asian trade changed with the years. Having its headquarters in Batavia, although helpful in the earlier phase, later meant everything had to be shipped there and then transhipped, a costly waste of effort. The venality of the Company also was a major player in its demise. It was not a good employer so bribery and other corruption became entrenched. Although forbidden officially, private trading by employees at the cost of the VOC was rife. Like other European companies trading in Asia, mortality and illness seriously undermined morale and efficiency. And, as time went by, the business-‐savvy merchants who had invested were gradually replaced by an aristocracy who had little experience of trade. These and other factors too many to mention here meant that by the end of the Fourth Anglo-‐Dutch War (1780–1784) the VOC was a financial wreck which was nationalised on 1 March 1796 and finally allowed to expire on 31 December 1800. DGE Hall points out that for all the years the English and the Dutch were competing for trade in the Moluccas
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…the East India Company was able to pay higher dividends than the V.O.C. The reason was that the Dutch had to devote too much of their profit to the expense of building forts, maintaining large garrisons and equipping fighting squadrons. They were firmly convinced that the spice monopoly was a matter of vital national importance, and so, in the words of an acute critic,17 ’applied their greatest effort of empire–building to an object that was only temporarily worth attaining.’ For with the expansion of world trade the spice trade became less and less important, and the misapplications of Dutch energy in the East had its effect upon the decline of their national power in the second half of the seventeenth century.18
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17 Hall quotes JA Williamson, The Ocean in British History, p. 103 18 Op. cit. p 311