The Sunda Kingdom

The kingdom that lasted longest

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

The Indic kingdoms of Java went down within a few decades of each other. Majapahit was absorbed by Demak by 1527; the Hindu-Buddhist courts of the eastern salient fell to Trenggana's campaigns in the 1540s.

Sunda lasted until 1579.

It held the western third of the island — the Sundanese highlands and the coast on both the Java Sea and the Sunda strait — through the whole Islamisation of the rest of it. And it stood outside the dynastic chain that runs down the Brantas: Kediri, Singhasari, Majapahit, Demak, Pajang, Mataram, seven hundred years of kingdoms each replacing the last, all of them east of the Citarum river.

Sunda is the other Java.

Where it starts, and how firmly

669 is the date the Sundanese chronicle tradition gives for the transition from Tarumanagara, and it is worth saying plainly what that is worth.

It is a traditional date, not a documented one. Inscriptional attestation of Sunda's kings does not begin until the eleventh century, and the capital the kingdom is best known by is fifteenth-century. Anybody insisting on firm attestation would begin the kingdom around 1030 and lose three and a half centuries that the sources describe less firmly but do describe.

Both numbers mislead in different directions. 669 implies a continuity nobody can demonstrate; 1030 implies an absence nobody has evidence for. What the tradition here has going for it — and this is unusual in the archipelago — is that the Sundanese wrote their own past down, which the next chapter is about.

The oldest writing on Java

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

The earliest inscriptions on Java are not Javanese. They are from western Java, in Sanskrit, from the polity called Tarumanagara, some time around the fifth century — stone slabs by rivers recording a king named Purnawarman, one of them with a pair of footprints carved into it and an inscription declaring them the feet of the ruler, likened to Vishnu's.

Sunda is what came after Tarumanagara on the same ground, and 669 is roughly where the Sundanese chronicles put the transition.

The Sundanese written record

What Sunda produced afterwards is unusual for the archipelago in one specific way: a body of writing in the vernacular, on palm leaf, about the kingdom's own past and its own geography.

The Carita Parahyangan is a dynastic chronicle. Bujangga Manik is the account of a Sundanese ascetic's journeys across Java, and it names hundreds of places, roads and boundaries with enough precision that it functions as a fifteenth-century itinerary of the island. The Sanghyang Siksakandang Karesian, from 1518, is a manual of what an educated person ought to know.

The Old Sundanese script these were written in is a Kawi derivative, and Kawi descends in turn from a South Indian Brahmi. Sunda invented nothing; it inherited a writing system two removes down a chain that began in India, and then used it for something the rest of the archipelago mostly did not — writing about itself, in its own language, for its own readers.

Kediri, on the other half of the island, is in exactly the same position: a kingdom whose real bequest was a body of literature, and no way to weigh that against a conquest or a coastline.

What that makes possible here

One thing, and it is worth having.

Almost every polity in the archipelago is described from outside — by Chinese notices, Portuguese and Dutch reports, Arab geographers, or by a court chronicle written after the fact by whoever won. Melaka is known through a chronicle composed at Johor a century after the city fell. Ternate and Tidore are known largely through Iberian and Dutch paperwork.

Sunda has a fifteenth-century description of Java written by a Sundanese for Sundanese readers, in which Java is a place with roads rather than a coastline with ports. That is rare enough to be worth the whole chapter, and it is why the traditional dating deserves more patience here than it would elsewhere: the tradition has a written record of its own behind it.

Sri Baduga

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

Sri Baduga Maharaja reigned from about 1482 to 1521 at Pakuan Pajajaran, an inland capital in the hills behind what is now Bogor.

He is attested by a stone. The Batutulis inscription, set up by his son, records his consecration, his titles, and the works he ordered — an artificial lake, roads, a moat. It is a short text, and it is the firmest single piece of evidence this kingdom has for any of its rulers.

In Sundanese tradition he is somebody else entirely. He is Prabu Siliwangi: the great king of West Java, a founder of the world, a man who became a tiger, the ancestor to whom Sundanese genealogies run, the subject of a body of story that has almost nothing to do with the inscription.

Two people with one name

The historical Sri Baduga reigned for thirty-nine years and lost nothing. That is all anyone can responsibly say about him, and it comes from one carved stone.

The legendary one is the consequential figure. Siliwangi is why the Sundanese remember having had a kingdom at all. He is on the currency of a province, in the name of an army division, in the name of a university, in the names of streets and hotels and football clubs. A stone gives us thirty-nine years and a moat; the story gives a people its past.

Both are worth having, and they should not be blended. A tradition that turns a king into a tiger is not a corrupted historical account, it is a different kind of thing — and the temptation to reconcile the two, to find the "real" Siliwangi behind the legend, tends to produce a figure who is neither.

The forty years after him

The sequence after the inscription is fast.

In 1522 his successor signed the treaty with the Portuguese. In 1527 the port went. In 1579 the capital went. Fifty-eight years from the stone to the end of the last Indic kingdom on Java.

Nobody knows who was in Pakuan when Banten arrived. As at Pasai, the last ruler of a kingdom with a documented end and a named besieger goes unnamed — the people writing at the time were interested in the harbour, the treaty and the campaign, and not in the man they were taking the country from.

Two bad bargains

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)end

Sunda's two most consequential decisions were both attempts to deal with a stronger neighbour, and both made things worse.

Bubat, 1357

A Sundanese king brought his daughter to Java for a marriage to Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit. Gajah Mada, Majapahit's chief minister, received the party as tribute-bearers rather than as guests. The Sundanese refused the terms and were killed on the field at Bubat, the princess with them.

The memory of it kept Sunda and Java apart for centuries, and it is still live in West Java. The tradition of not naming a street after Gajah Mada, and of not marrying Sundanese women to Javanese men, is something people will tell you about in connection with a fourteenth-century diplomatic incident.

The padrão, 1522

Two centuries later, with the Muslim ports of the north coast expanding and Demak taking everything east of it, Sunda signed a treaty with the Portuguese at Melaka: a fort at Sunda Kelapa, in exchange for protection. A stone pillar went up to mark it.

It is the only case in the archipelago of a polity inviting the Portuguese in as protection against its neighbours, and the calculation was not stupid. What it produced was the opposite of what it was for: a Demak expedition took the port in 1527 before the Portuguese could occupy it, and renamed it Jayakarta.

That name is the one it still has. The Dutch company took the place in 1619 and called it Batavia for three hundred years, and when the name went back it went back to the one given by the force that arrived in 1527 to stop this kingdom selling the harbour.

1579

Banten — the sultanate that grew out of that same 1527 expedition — destroyed Pakuan Pajajaran, the inland capital.

Fifty-two years after Majapahit and at the other end of the island, the last Indic kingdom on Java ended, and the Sundanese highlands were Muslim within a generation.

What is remembered

Drafted from Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200 (2008)afterlife

Sunda ended in 1579 and the Sundanese did not.

They are the second largest ethnic group in Indonesia, something like forty million people, with their own language, their own literature, their own gamelan tuning and their own account of what happened to them. That account is organised around two things, and neither of them is the fall of the capital.

Bubat

There is no street named for Gajah Mada in Bandung.

That is the fourteenth century still being argued about. Sundanese and Javanese accounts of what happened at Bubat in 1357 differ about who was at fault in ways that map exactly onto which side is telling it, and the tradition against Sundanese women marrying Javanese men — variously observed, variously denied, and much discussed — is attributed by the people who observe it to the same event.

Six and a half centuries is a long time to stay angry about a wedding that did not happen.

Siliwangi

The other is Siliwangi: the king who is said not to have died but to have withdrawn, with his people, into the forest, and to be there still.

A kingdom whose end nobody can date precisely, whose last ruler nobody can name, and whose people were converted by the polity that destroyed it produced a story in which the king refused to convert and refused to die, and left.

That is not evidence about 1579. It is evidence about what being conquered by your neighbours does to what you tell your children afterwards — and it is the part of Sunda that outlasted the kingdom by four hundred years and forty million people.