Malay kingdom of Srivijaya Palembang 3

The maritime influence.

Special circumstances affecting Shrivijaya-Palembang toward the end of the 7th century are consistent with this conclusion. In the centuries before the Chinese undertook long voyages overseas, they relied on foreign shipping for their imports, and foreign merchants, trading with China, required a safe base in Indonesia before sailing on to China. This seaborne trade, regarded in China as "tributary" trade with the "emperors' barbarian vassals," had developed during the 5th and 6th centuries but languished in the second half of the 6th century as a result of the civil war in China that preceded the rise of the Sui and T'ang dynasties. Chinese records for the first half of the 7th century mention several small harbour kingdoms in the region, especially in northeastern Sumatra, that were pretending to be Chinese vassals. The rulers of Palembang, hoping for a revival of trade under the new T'ang dynasty, must have been anxious to monopolize the China trade and eliminate their rivals. They succeeded in doing this. Before I-ching left Southeast Asia in 695, Shrivijaya was in control of the Strait of Malacca; the ruler's determination to control all harbours in the region that might compete in the China trade explains his militancy, as shown in the Old Malay inscriptions.

The subsequent power of the maharajas of Shrivijaya depended on their alliance with those who possessed warships. The fact that Arab accounts make no mention of piracy in the islands at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca suggests that the seafaring inhabitants of these islands identified their interests with those of the maharajas, refraining from molesting merchant ships and cooperating in controlling Shrivijaya's potential competitors in northern Sumatra. The maharajas offered their loyal subjects wealth, posts of honour, and--according to the inscriptions--supernatural rewards. But the grouping of maritime Malays in this geographically fragmented region survived only as long as the Palembang entrepôt was prosperous and its ruler offered enough largess to hold the elements together. His bounty, however, depended on the survival of the Chinese tributary trading system, which needed a great entrepôt in western Indonesia. Early Malay history is, to an important extent, the history of a Sino-Malay alliance. The maharajas benefited from the China trade, while the emperors could permit themselves the conceit that the maharajas were reliable imperial agents.

The Palembang rulers' exact span of territorial influence is unknown. The Banka Strait and the offshore islands at the southern entrance of the Strait of Malacca would have been essential to their maritime power. According to the 7th-century inscriptions, the rulers also had influence in southern Sumatra on the Sunda Strait. Elsewhere in the hinterland, including what became known as Malayu in the Hari River basin, their authority would have been exercised by alliances with local chiefs or by force and always with decreasing effect the further these areas were from Palembang.

Malay unity under the leadership of the maharajas was inevitably undermined when, as early as the 10th century, Chinese private ships began to sail to centres of production in the archipelago, with the result that the Chinese market no longer depended on a single Indonesian entrepôt. Toward the end of the 11th century, Shrivijaya-Palembang ceased to be the chief estuary kingdom in Sumatra. Hegemony had passed, for unknown reasons, to the neighbouring estuary town of Jambi, which was probably controlled by the great Minangkabau country of Malayu in the interior. With the decline of the tributary trade with China, a number of harbours in the region became centres of international trade. Malayu-Jambi never had the opportunity to build up naval resources as Shrivijaya-Palembang had done, and in the 13th century a Javanese prince took advantage of the power vacuum.

Earliest Historical Records.

The Indonesian archipelago stretches for more than 3,000 miles east to west and is the largest island complex in the world. The sea has inevitably influenced Indonesian history. Not surprisingly, the boat became a pervasive metaphor in literary and oral tradition and in the arts in Indonesia. Monsoon winds, blowing north and south of the equator, have facilitated communication within the archipelago and with the rest of maritime Asia; the warm rainfall has nourished rich vegetation. In early times the timber and spices of Java and the eastern islands were known afar, as were also the resins from the exceptionally wet equatorial jungle in the western islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Not long after the beginning of the Christian era, goods were already being shipped overseas, and navigable rivers brought the Indonesian hinterland into touch with distant markets.

Easy overseas communication did not, however, result in the formation of territorially large kingdoms. The many estuaries of Sumatra and Borneo, facing the inland seas, possessed an abundance of nutritious seafood that made possible a settled mode of life, and the contacts between the people of one estuary and their neighbours were more important to them than those they could make with overseas lands. Indonesian maritime history is the story of the efforts of local groups, endowed with more or less comparable resources, to protect their separate identities. The same local interests prevailed on the island of Java, where the lava-enriched soil, watered by gently flowing rivers, encouraged wet-rice production and a patchwork pattern of settled areas in the river valleys separated by mountains and jungle. Long before records begin, many of these coastal and riverine groups were evolving an elementary form of hierarchy, accompanied by the craftsmen's tokens of rank. No single group was large enough to overrun and occupy neighbouring territories; its energies were absorbed rather by an ever more intensive exploitation of its own natural resources. Those living on or close to the sea knew that geographic isolation was out of the question but regarded their maritime environment as a means of enhancing their well-being through imports or new skills. Looking outward, far from inculcating a sense of belonging to larger communities, encouraged the pursuit of local interests. Thus, the structure of Indonesian written and oral sources suggests to historians that the origins of kingdoms on the coasts of the Java Sea were associated with the success of local heroes in turning the arrival of foreign trading treasure to their advantage.

Indonesian place-names have frequently remained unchanged since the beginning of documented history. In these often nearby places, each leader saw himself at the centre of the world that mattered to him, which was not, until later, the archipelago or even a single island but his own strip of coast or river valley. Some centres achieved local hegemony but never to the extent of extinguishing permanently the pretensions of rival centres. Thus, the early history of Indonesia is compounded of many regional histories that only gradually impinge on each other.

The historical fragmentation of the archipelago, sustained by its rich climate and accentuated rather than offset by easy access to the outside world, is reflected in its languages. Scholars have debated the location of the areas outside Indonesia from which the speakers of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages originally came: the Asian mainland and the Pacific islands have been proposed.

What is significant for the historian, however, is that the speakers of these languages almost certainly drifted into the region in small groups over long periods of time and did not suddenly assume a common identity when they reached the coasts and rivers of the archipelago. On the contrary, they remained scattered groups, sometimes coexisting with descendants of earlier Pleistocene populations, who, in their turn, had also learned to make economic use of their environment over an immense span of cultural time. The perhaps 200 languages within the Western, or Indonesian, branch of the Austronesian family are an index of the manner in which the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago submitted to the realities of their landscape.

The historian, examining stone or metal inscriptions, which, together with surviving copies of early religious texts, are the important sources of documentary information, must remember that the evidence is always concerned with specific places. Comprehensive narrative histories of extensive areas cannot be written. The reality behind interregional relationships must often remain a riddle. The historian's task is the study of cultural history in widely scattered groups of society rather than narrative accounts of still very indistinct kingdoms; it is the investigation of beliefs shared by the ruling classes and the peasantry and of the points of contact between them. The ideas of men of rank were articulated in architecture and literature, reflecting varying degrees of exposure to influences outside the archipelago, but all groups of the population subscribed to basic assumptions concerning dependence of people on the goodwill of the gods.

from:http://users.skynet.be/network.indonesia/