A short History of Indonesia

5. A Short History of Indonesia Of Rice, Drums and Beasts of Burden WC 3619 For most of us, our mental image of Indonesia is of endless padi fields cascading down mountain sides with women in conical straw hats planting the rice knee-­‐deep in mud . Actually, we are wrong to call it “padi” ⎯ padi is the baby rice and a padi field is the nursery plot where the new season’s rice is germinated and grown until ready to be transplanted into the irrigated field, the sawah, where it will grow to maturity and ripen ready for harvesting. Those cascading terraces we all love to photograph are, strictly speaking, sawah…. Woman planting padi, Salatiga, Central Java Sawah, West Java This is not just being pedantic: in a world where rice is the staple food, where to all intents and purposes, rice=life, what you call rice in its many manifestations and how you treat it are matters of deep cultural significance. For example, throughout the rice-­‐eating parts of East and Southeast Asia, rice is venerated in many mystical as well as practical ways: The Angkabau of Sumatra use special rice plants to denote the Rice Mother, Indoea Padi. The people of Indochina treat ripened rice in bloom like a pregnant woman, capturing its spirit in a basket. Rice growers of the Malay Peninsula often treat the wife of the cultivator as a pregnant woman for the first three days after storing the rice. Even the Sundanese of West Java, who consider themselves Muslims, believe rice is the personification of the rice goddess Dewi Sri. In Thailand, when you call the family to a meal you say, "Eat rice." In Japan, to goad children to eat all their rice, grains are called "little Buddhas," and girls are told every grain they leave on the plate will become a pock mark on the face of their 1
future husband. In China, the word for rice is the same as food. The Toradja tribes of Indonesia consider rice to be of heavenly origin. So hallowed was the grain, that it was taboo to plant any other crop in the rice fields.1 Granary door with Dewi Sri and kerbau horn motifs, Sulawesi (coll. BH). And when you order rice with your Indonesian meal, the word for cooked rice is nasi ⎯ nasi goreng is just fried rice…. The earliest evidence of the cultivation of grains in eastern Asia is of foxtail millet (Setaria italica). This was the staple of the Chinese Neolithic north of the Yangtze from about 6000BC and is still important in northern latitudes ⎯ for example, the Ainu of Japan depend heavily on foxtail millet. Rice (Oryza sativa)2, on the other hand, was grown on the lower Yangtze probably from about 5000 BC where warmer, wetter lowlands favoured its cultivation. This central coastal region of China also saw the revolutionary development of a host of new technologies, including… …pottery, carpentry, stone adzes, wooden and bone agricultural tools, boats, paddles, spindle whorls for weaving (of cotton?), matting and rope, together with the evidence of domesticated pigs, dogs, chicken and possibly for cattle and water buffalo3. Once established, rice cultivation spread rapidly, especially into new areas where wet and swampy ground favoured its cultivation. Planting rice in dry swiddens was not only less productive but also much harder work… Along with rice, other staples were grown in tropical regions of Southeast Asia. However, although crops such as rice, millet, sugar cane and the greater yam (Dioscorea alata) and taro did well in more northerly zones, in equatorial regions such as Indonesia and Malaysia, rice it seems had first to develop into strains more suited to those climes. Scientists suggest it took a thousand years to reach the stage where it could flourish in what now seems like its natural home. In the interim, staples such as bananas, sago, breadfruit, yams, taro and, of course, the coconut filled out the diet. 1
http://www.natashascafe.com/html/rice.html
India is said to be the home of rice (O. indica), first “discovered” there in about 10,000 BC
3
Bellwood, P: “Southeast Asia before History”, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 1999, p. 92
2
2
People in some parts of Indonesia still do not cultivate rice even today or, if they do, it is by the ladang, not sawah method. These are those parts, mostly east of the so-­‐called Wallace Line, where the climate is not suitable. Alfred Russel Wallace 1862 The Wallace Line is named after the man who almost beat Charles Darwin to announcing the evolution of species. Born in Wales, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913 ) is often called the “father of biogeography” because he became the foremost expert in his time on the distribution of species, first in Amazonia and later in Southeast Asia. It was while he was in Southeast Asia that he wrote to Darwin and in his friendly letter, exposed that he too was thinking along what would be called “evolutionary” lines. The Wallace Line The Wallace Line follows the deep-­‐
sea trenches which mark the edges of the Southeast Asian and the Australasian tectonic plates. Along this boundary, even when the LGM dropped sea levels so low that ⎯ as we have seen earlier ⎯ the present-­‐day islands of much of the Indonesian archipelago formed into Sundaland, waters were still so deep that many species could not cross. East of the Wallace line mammal species are mostly Australian4; west of the Line, mostly Asian. An area in between called Wallacea is a region where there was some exchange of species in both directions but which is also a biogeographical region in its own right with thousands of endemic species. Wallacea Although rapidly disappearing, there are small groups of people in various remote parts of Indonesia who are still semi-­‐nomadic hunter-­‐gathers and for whom agriculture is an under-­‐developed part of life. So, for example, like the Semang or Senoi in Malaysia, the Kubu and Sahkai of Sumatra and the Wana of Central Sulawesi appear to be a relict of the Pleistocene population. 4
I remember flying into Kupang airport in 1974 and realising with shock that we were now east of the Wallace
Line ⎯ the bush around the airport was Australia all over!
3
A Kubu family, Solok Selatan To take one example, the Kubu or ⎯ as they prefer to be called ⎯ Orang Rimba, “People of the Forest”, live on the foothills of Bukit Barisan, near Palembang and Jambi in Central Sumatra. When last counted twenty years ago there were fewer than 3,000 of these people living in their traditional nomadic, foraging lifestyle. They trap small animals and catch fish by stunning them by soaking the poisonous bark of a local rainforest tree in the streams. Socially, they live in small groups as one must when living a nomadic lifestyle, have few possessions, and appear to have little social stratification except that of age. For all their apparent “primitiveness”, the Orang Rimba are not isolated but trade extensively with neighbouring people, exchanging forest products (eg camphor, animal skins) for steel tools like machetes, cigarettes and cigarette lighters. That they venture into the local villages and towns can be seen in the above photo, a photo taken, incidentally, to advertise an “interactive tour” by a travel company5. How long they will maintain a separate identity is uncertain but it cannot be long because official government policy is integration into the mainstream of Indonesian life. The rice farmer’s tractor Along with rice is another icon of modern Southeast Asian life, the water buffalo or kerbau as it is called in Indonesia. In 2000 the UN FAO estimated that there were 158 million water buffalo but this figure included the swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis carabanesis) found in Southeast Asia, the river buffalo of Western Asia, Europe and Africa (Bubalus bubalis) and the common ancestor, the wild water buffalo, which is now officially endangered. It is the Swamp Buffalo or Kerbau which is a feral pest in northern Australia. Feral pests aside, the kerbau in domestic use is a gentle creature used not only as a draft animal but also valued for its meat and rich milk (Buffalo milk has the highest butter-­‐fat content of all milks). As a bonus, its dung is an excellent fertiliser and if needs be, fuel for cooking and heating. And, to add to 5
see http://www.west-sumatra.com/index.php?option=com_ybggal&Itemid=27&picid=781&catid=7
4
the kerbau’s gifts to its masters, this large animal can be ridden and indeed, is in many places the steed of choice for traditional racing. Buffalo race, Thailand6 Like rice, the buffalo has a venerated place in Indonesia and its characteristic horns have been integrated into the architecture of several ethnic groups as well as into decorative motifs common throughout the archipelago. As an example, my granary door already pictured above shows the stylised buffalo horns as well as the Dewi Sri figure. On a larger scale, the houses of the Minangkabau are perhaps the most famous to celebrate the buffalo in the roof style (the name of the people reflects this too – it means the winning buffalo, the name taken from a myth of origin). Traditional Minangkabau architecture -­ Rumah_Gadang Another elaborate celebration of the buffalo horns is among the Toraja of South Sulawesi. These people, of whom there is currently about three-­‐quarters of a million, traditionally practise elaborate funeral rites and represent the ancestors with life-­‐sized manikins called Tau-­‐Tau which are placed in alcoves high in the surrounding cliffs so they can keep an eye on all that happens among the living. Toraja village (note the ikat weaving on the buffalo’s back)7 Toraja Tau-­tau – the ancestors’ watchful eyes Although these days the majority of the Toraja are Christians, these extensive 6
Photo: Daily Mail, 29 September 2009
7 Toraja village and Tau-­‐tau photo credit: http://www.weltrekordreise.ch/a_starte.html 5
rituals, including buffalo sacrifice, are still practised. To a large degree, the funeral rites of the Toraja, like those of Bali and some other places in Indonesia, take the form of a potlatch, a term anthropologists have borrowed from the North-­‐West Indians of America to refer to a ceremony of conspicuous consumption. In America, the principals of the potlatch gave away expensive blankets; in Bali elaborate ⎯ and expensive ⎯ coffins are burned with the Deceased’s bones; among the Toraja large numbers of buffalo bulls, their main wealth, are slaughtered to ensure the dead will have as good a life in the next as he or she did when alive. This is important because as throughout Indonesia, traditional belief is that the spirit remains near its former home. Some of the sacrificed buffalo have special functions in the after-­‐life, one for example, serving as the steed for the dead man to ride into Puya, the equivalent of Heaven. The most important of these bulls are tied to a large bamboo or palm tree, which represents the tree which the soul of the deceased must later climb to reach Puya and his place among the stars.8 How elaborate these funeral rituals are, the number and importance of the bulls sacrificed and so on depends on the social status of the Deceased. Toraja society is hierarchically structured so the more important the dead man or woman, the more bulls are slaughtered. The meat, of course, is not wasted but after the rituals are completed, a special priest divides it up among those taking part, some cockfights mark the end of the ceremonies and the Deceased’s remains and the Tau-­‐Tau removed from the village to the burial place in the cliffs nearby. Ceremonial pua showing male ancestors The Toraja houses and barns are richly adorned with intricate motifs including “crosses, stylised leaves, floral patterns, meanders”9 (which are also found on the pua10), also swastikas and a motif found throughout Indonesia called the tumapel (saw-­‐tooth). Others, including S-­‐shaped 8
See Ave, Dr JB: “The Dayak of Borneo: their view of life and death and their art”, in Art of the Archaic
Indonesians, DallasMuseum of Fine Arts, 1982, p. 78ff.
9
Ibid, p. 85
10
Ikat or patola cloths woven by the Dyaks
6
spirals and variations on a double spiral are clearly derived from the early bronze-­‐age culture known as the Dongson. It is to this rather mysterious culture we must now turn our attention if we are to understand the great age and depth of symbols and decorative motifs in Indonesia today. The Dongson and Other Bronze Cultures Temple containing the Bulan Bali, 196911 On my first visit to Bali my friends took me to see what they called the Bulan Bali, or “Moon of Bali”. Admittedly, whatever it was, it was a little difficult to see on its high perch in a small building within a temple complex at Pèjèng, near the famous water temple at Tempaksiring and the Goa Gadja. My friends explained that this was a Buddhist complex so the temples had only one roof, not the many tiered black thatched roofs of the Hindu period. They also said that since this was Buddhist, the Bulan Bali was very old because it pre-­‐dated the Hindus… As it happens, the huge bronze drum is very famous and much, much older than the Buddhist period in Indonesia. Until fairly recently this huge artefact was always quoted as an outstanding example of Dongson metal-­‐working technology in the Bac Do region of northern Vietnam. Although there was some early debate it might have been made locally, most authorities later suggested it was most probably imported into Bali a couple of thousand years ago as part of the extensive trade which existed in Southeast Asia at that time. However, in recent times, the Bulan Bali has been identified by archaeologists as an example of Pèjèng mastery of the bronze-­‐caster’s craft, a local industry capable of creating the world’s largest drum12 using the lost wax technique. This drum is 6’ 1½” (187cm) tall and 5’3” (160cm) in diameter and is now 11 Photos: The temple at Pèjèng 1969 and a closer view of the tympanum of the Bulan Bali as it was then known – BH 1969; b&w illustration from Wagner, F: Indonesia – The Art of an Island Archipelago, Methuen, 1959/62 p.31 12
Unlike the drums from Vietnam, the Bulan Pejeng was cast in two pieces, the tympanum and the drum.
7
referred to as the Moon of Pèjèng. Wikipedia tells the story as the Balinese explain it: According to Balinese legend, the Pejeng Moon was a wheel of the chariot that pulled the real moon through the night sky. One night, as the chariot was passing over Pejeng, the wheel detached and fell to earth, landing in a tree, where it glowed nearly as brightly as the real moon. This light disturbed a thief who, annoyed, climbed the tree and urinated on it; the thief paid for his sacrilege with his life. The moon eventually cooled and has been preserved as a sacred relic by the local villagers. Bronze Age sites and Dongson Drum finds Although the Balinese industry probably dates from the early centuries of the Christian Era, the origins of bronze and iron working go back much further in the north of Vietnam and Thailand from where the technology spread to the south, most probably via trade links. As is the general rule in Southeast Asia, the transfer of technologies ⎯ whether agriculture, pottery, bronze or iron working ⎯ which evolved in the north are found much later in the south of the region, for example in Java, Bali, or the other islands of the archipelago. Two things happen in this transfer: first, local or indigenous variations creep in, especially in decoration where appropriate; and second, aspects which developed in the north at distinct and separate times often coalesce by the time they reach the south ⎯ for example, while bronze and iron working evolved at considerable distance in time from each other in the north, they appear to have arrived more or less simultaneously in the archipelago. So, in a sense, Indonesia has no Bronze or Iron Ages as we expect from European archaeology, but a Metal phase. The most famous of the Dongson drums is one discovered by accident in 1893 in Ha Nam Province, southeast of Hanoi in the delta of the Red River. Known as the Ngọc Lũ drum, it is remarkably well-­‐preserved and among its many decorations, shows a scene in which such drums were being used in a ceremony. It also shows a variety of musical instruments as well as scenes of rice growing and harvesting.
8
While these ancient craftsmen left clues as to how these drums were made, we are left with very little understanding of the purpose or function of these magnificent objects in the lives of the times. Drum model with four frogs, Dongson culture, 300 bc–
200 ad, Vietnam Bronze H. 4 in. (10.2 cm)13
The function of these drums, often found in burials, remains unclear: they may have been used in warfare or as part of funerary or other ceremonial rites. According to his biography in the Hou Han Shu (History of the Later Han), Ma Yuan (14 B.C.–49 A.D.), the Chinese general who subdued a Vietnamese uprising in 40–43 A.D., confiscated and destroyed the bronze drums of the local chieftains who were his adversaries, attesting to their political significance. Models of the drums, produced in bronze or clay, were made to be included in burials. This small bronze example [the model above] has the rounded top, curved middle, and splayed base often found in drums from Vietnam. The central loop and the four small frogs on the tympanum are characteristic features of examples produced from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. It seems fairly certain that these kettle-­‐drums were some kind of status symbol and, no matter what other uses they might have had, they were probably associated with warfare. At Batu Balai in Tegur Wangi, about 6 km from Pagaralam in Sumatra, there is a relief stone carving depicting a warrior with a drum strapped to his back. This district is famous for its megaliths dating from the early centuries of the Christian Era. Most are stone carvings, troughs and graves: Ono Limbu, Nias Island: small stone statues honour the dead. Others are on a truly “mega” scale.14 13 Photo and text, Metropolitan Museum of Art, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/05/sse/ho_2000.284.57.htm 14 THE LAST MEGALITHIC CULTURE -­‐ Nias, Indonesia; Photo: Bob McKerrow at http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hO_GaOhh0IA/SquS2mdnydI/AAAAAAAAEPg/lsFENBR72Kw/s1600-­‐
h/Megalitic+012.jpg 9
Some are solitary, others stand in groups, and they depict humans and animals; although most are seriously eroded, they’re still strangely evocative. The local belief is that an angry magician called Lidah Pahit (“Bitter Tongue”) was responsible for the statues: anyone who displeased him was turned into stone. Menhirs symbolize the male while flat stones are usually female. Vertical standing stones and imposing stone statues are set up to achieve and maintain the honor, prestige and popularity of a leader. A large number of kerbau (water buffaloes) are sacrificed as hundreds of people come from other places to actively participate in the ceremony.15 Megaliths are found in Indonesia most famously in Northern Sumatra among the Bataks of Lake Toba, on Nias Island and in Nusa Tenggara where they occur in Sumba, Flores and Timor. Some are also found in Sulawesi and Kalimantan. Peter Bellwood16 suggests that the tradition of such megaliths goes back “deeply into the Austronesian past in both Southeast Asia and in the Pacific islands”, a theme we will take up in more detail when we deal with the languages of the region and with the linguistic theories which try to explain the manner in which both Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific were populated. Of all the megalithic sites, it is the one at Pagaralam in Sumatra mentioned earlier which is the most famous. This is found on the Pasemah Plateau in Southern Sumatra which, surrounded by mountains and possessing very fertile, deep soil, must have been a good safe place to live and farm two thousand years ago. Here, details of daily life and dress are recorded (there are two more Dongson drums represented at Airpurah and Batugaja) and significantly, fragments of both bronze and iron. A few glass beads were also found ⎯ these are generally agreed by archaeologists to have come from India but one presumes, not necessarily directly… 15 Backshall, S: The Rough Guide to Indonesia, Pearson
16
PLC, p. 497 10
Op. cit. p132
In 1967 ⎯ so it is said ⎯ a clumsy American student fell off a road near the town of Ban Chiang in Udon Thani province in Thailand and discovered a Bronze Age village and cemetery which covers 20 acres (8 hectares) in size and dates from 3,600 BC to about 200 AD. What the ⎯ perhaps apocryphal ⎯ student stumbled upon was a mass of what now are the famous Ban Chiang pots. Later, archaeologists discovered a fully developed Bronze Age metallurgy among the remains of the ancient settlement. Claims that this pre-­‐
dated bronze working in China have since been discounted but Ban Chiang bronze technology was most probably very close to contemporaneous with that of the northern neighbours. This discovery re-­‐wrote the history of Southeast Asia which, until the excavations at Ban Chiang, was considered very much a backwater in the use of metals. A most interesting feature of Ban Chiang metal working was that no weapons of war have been discovered, unlike Bronze Age findings elsewhere in the world. Ban Chiang Pottery Ban Chiang Burial 59 Pot-­A-­2318a, Penn Museum Earlier I showed a photo of a pot in my personal collection which was identified as Ban Chiang. This was given to me in pieces but I managed to join the shards together to make an almost complete pot (one piece is missing). Searching the Web I found a very similar pot in the collection of Penn Museum17, University of Pennsylvania, which further identifies mine as a burial jar. Unfortunately I have not been able to establish a date for the piece. These rather plain pots are not what spring to mind when one mentions “Ban Chiang”, but rather the ceramics spectacularly decorated with swirls and patterns in red iron oxide which these days are the prize exhibits of museums around the world. A couple of examples will have to suffice here, but many more can be seen at various web sites, including the Penn Museum already mentioned. 17
http://www.penn.museum/research-asian-section/504-banchiang.html
11
Two Ban Chiang pots with characteristic red ochre decoration. The Question of ‘Ages’ in Southeast Asia Excavation at Ban Chiang Although I have here been talking about Bronze Age and Neolithic and so on, it is important to note that these terms are not as precise in this context as they are in European pre-­‐history. In Southeast Asia, there seems to have been no “copper age” as in Europe and bronze and iron working often seem to occur at about the same time. Further, as technologies spread, so they tended to come together, agriculture, domestication of certain animals, the invention of pottery and metallurgy all arriving sometimes in some places at much the same time! 12