Singhasari

A kris and a curse

Drafted from Robson, KITLV Verhandelingen 169 (1995)formation

Singhasari lasted seventy years and produced the dynasty that ruled Java for the next two centuries. Its founding story is a murder ballad.

The Pararaton, the Javanese chronicle that is the main narrative source for the dynasty, opens with Ken Arok, a man of obscure and possibly criminal origins in the service of the lord of Tumapel. He commissions a kris — a Javanese dagger — from a smith named Mpu Gandring, demands it before it is finished, and kills the smith with it when he refuses. The smith, dying, curses the blade: it will kill seven men, and the first will be Ken Arok himself.

It then does. Ken Arok uses it to kill his lord, takes his lord's wife and his lord's territory, declares himself king in 1222, and is murdered with the same weapon by a stepson avenging the man he killed. The stepson is killed by his own half-brother. The chronicle runs the pattern down four generations.

That is a sequence of outcomes rather than a constitution, and it is worth being careful about what kind of document is telling it.

The Pararaton was compiled long after the events, its early sections read as legend, and the dynasty it describes is the one the kings of Majapahit claimed descent from. So the chronicle of Singhasari's murders was preserved by the people with the strongest possible reason to make its last king a revered ancestor — which is either an argument for taking the killings seriously, since they are not flattering, or an argument that the whole cycle is a literary construction giving a dynasty a suitably terrible origin. Both readings are current.

Ganter

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)expansion

The dated event, as against the legend, is 1222 at Ganter, where Ken Arok defeated Kertajaya of Kediri. Kediri had been the dominant power in eastern Java for a hundred and eighty years. After Ganter it was not, and the centre of Javanese power moved to Tumapel, which the dynasty renamed Singhasari.

What changed is narrower than the political map suggests. Java in this period is a rice economy: the Brantas and Solo valleys are among the most productive wet-rice landscapes in the world. Kediri had that base and used it inland. Singhasari inherited it and turned outward.

That is why its armies look nothing like a strait polity's. Srivijaya and, later, Melaka fought with other people's ships — the orang laut, paid or bound to serve. Singhasari raised its own men: the cultivators of the royal domain owed service, and the army came up through the territorial lords rather than being bought.

A state with a granary and a state with a customs house are different objects, and Java's kingdoms are the first in these waters with the granary.

The Pamalayu

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)peak

In 1275 Kertanegara, the last king of Singhasari, sent an expedition across the Java Sea to Sumatra. The Javanese sources call it the Pamalayu — the campaign against Melayu, the polity based at Jambi that had been carrying Srivijaya's position on the strait since the Chola raids of 1025 broke Palembang.

Srivijaya's own power on that strait had been broken by the Chola raid of 1025, and what survived it was the position rather than the polity: the centre moved up the coast to Jambi-Melayu, and for two centuries somebody at Jambi collected what Palembang once had.

In 1275 a Javanese king took it.

That is the moment the archipelago's centre of gravity crosses the Java Sea. For six hundred years the straits had been run from Sumatra; after the Pamalayu they were not, and no Sumatran power held that position again until Aceh, three hundred years later and much further north.

What it was for

Kertanegara was not trying to govern Sumatra. There is no Javanese administration there afterwards, no tribute list, no garrison anybody records.

What he was doing is better read against what he did next: he refused Kublai Khan's envoys, and the Mongol fleet that came in response was already at sea when he died. A king who takes the far side of the Java Sea and then insults the largest empire on earth is a king making a case about where authority in the archipelago now sits.

He was killed by his own vassal a year before the fleet arrived.

The Mongol envoy

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)contraction

Kublai Khan sent envoys to Java demanding submission. Kertanegara, in the account that has come down, had the last of them branded on the face and sent back.

The Yuan expedition that followed — a thousand ships, in the Chinese accounts — arrived in 1293. By the time it reached Java the king it had been sent to punish was already a year dead.

The reasoning worth keeping is about what the sources are for. The Mongol invasion of Java is documented in Chinese court records with dates and numbers, and the events inside Java in the same years are documented in Javanese chronicles that are legendary in structure and were compiled generations later. The best-attested fact about the end of this polity is an expedition that arrived too late to cause it.

Jayakatwang

Drafted from Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (2011)end

In 1292 Jayakatwang, the ruler of Kediri and a vassal of Kertanegara, revolted and killed him. Kediri had been the power Singhasari displaced at Ganter seventy years earlier, and it ended Singhasari by the same route it had lost to it: one battle, one dead king.

It is a neat piece of symmetry and it should not be over-read. Jayakatwang was not restoring an old order out of sentiment; he was a subordinate who saw his overlord's army sail off to Sumatra and took his chance while the capital was empty.

What follows is the part everyone remembers. Raden Wijaya, Kertanegara's son-in-law, survived; met the Mongol fleet when it arrived the next year; persuaded it to help him against Jayakatwang; and then turned on it once Jayakatwang was dead. From that he founded Majapahit, had Kertanegara commemorated as the dynasty's founding ancestor, and claimed Singhasari as the house he was continuing.

So Singhasari's whole legacy is a claim made about it by somebody else. It conquered a strait it did not administer, insulted an empire it could not fight, and was ended by a vassal — and then its dead king was made the founding ancestor of the largest state Java ever produced, by a son-in-law who had survived in a forest. Seventy years, and the part that lasted was the ancestry.

Sivabuddha

Drafted from Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (1968)afterlife

Kertanegara was killed in his own palace in 1292 by a vassal. Afterwards he became a god.

He is known later under the name Sivabuddha, and there is a portrait-statue of him in the form of the Buddha Akshobhya which still stands at Surabaya. That is not a memorial in the ordinary sense. It is the king as a Buddha, made for a dynasty that needed him to be one.

Two chronicles, two men

The sources cannot agree about what he was like, and the disagreement is instructive.

The Nagarakertagama, composed at the Majapahit court that descended from him, presents him as a fine scholar. The Pararaton, the chronicle of the dagger and the four generations of revenge killings, presents him as a drunkard.

Both were written after the fact, in Java, about the same man. One is the account of the dynasty that needed him revered; the other belongs to a tradition that had been telling the story of this family as a sequence of murders since Ken Arok. A reader is not obliged to choose. What can be said with confidence is that he was a great king by the ordinary measures — he extended Javanese authority further than anyone before him — and that the two most important Javanese sources for his reign have opposite motives for describing his character.

What he actually believed

The part neither chronicle disputes is the religion, and it is stranger than either portrait.

Kertanegara's zeal was for the kalachakra form of Tantric Buddhism, which had developed in Bengal towards the end of the Pala dynasty and spread from there to Tibet, to Nepal and into the archipelago. In Java it reached its fullest expression by fusing with the worship of Siva Bhairava — and the resulting cult of Siva-Buddha concerned itself particularly with the redemption of the souls of the dead.

That is why it took. Ancestor worship was already the deep structure of religion in the islands, and a Tantric synthesis addressed to the fate of the dead found ground prepared for it.

So the king who was made into a Buddha after his death had spent his life promoting a doctrine about what happens to the dead — and the dynasty that deified him was descended from him, needed him, and had every reason to take the doctrine at its word.

Sivabuddha is the name of a theological position and a political necessity at the same time, and it is not obvious that anyone at the time would have thought those two things separable.