Java is a five hundred-mile-long connecting link in an archipelago of nearly fourteen thousand islands that constitutes Indonesia—the world's fourth largest nation, with the world's largest Muslim population. About the size of Alabama, Java has an east-west mountain range flanked by limestone ridges and lowlands, with rivers that are navigable only in the wet season. Thirty-five of its one hundred twelve volcanoes are active. With nearly two thousand people per square mile, it is the world's most densely populated island. The great majority of Java's 120 million people live in rural villages, their lives governed by the rhythmic cycles of their crops—rice, corn, sweet potatoes, and tobacco. Because of the fierce overpopulation, most exist at a subsistence level.
By tradition and history, Java is divided into three sections: west, central, and east. To the west lie the Sunda Strait and the cities of Jakarta (formerly Batavia), Bandung, Garut, and Tasikmalaya. This area was once the empire of the Sunda, and people there still call themselves Sundanese. Central Java, with its rich farmlands, is dominated by the cities of Yogyakarta and Surakarta—and features the great temples of Borobudur and Prambanan. To the east is the great port of Surabaya and the island of Madura. Stretching the length of Java lies the island's north coast with its mixed and vibrant heritage.
For two thousand years, Java's north coast was a lucrative trade area, luring sailors and merchants from all parts of the world. Situated in the calm and tranquil Java Sea, beyond the belt of typhoons and angry oceans, the island was on a spur of the trade route between Cairo and Nagasaki, Lisbon and Macao, London and the Moluccas, Amsterdam and Macassar. In Java, cloves and nutmeg from the Spice Islands to the east were traded for tea, silks, porcelains, and opium from China; for brightly patterned cloth from southern India; for cinnamon from Ceylon; camphor from Siam; and a cornucopia of goods from Europe, Africa, and Japan. It was via the north coast of Java that Greeks, Malays, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch, British—as well as numerous pirates—sailed from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and thence to farther ports,
THE LURE OF JAVA
As long ago as the first century A.D., Syrian and Macedonian navigators discovered that seasonal monsoon winds enabled them to sail across the Indian Ocean without hugging the coastline. In about A.D. 150, Ptolemy wrote about Java in his Geography, and in the fourth century the Chinese Buddhist monk Fa-Hsien wrote that he had reached Java ". . . where heresies and Brahmanism were flourishing, while the faith of Buddha was in a very unsatisfactory condition." Within another two hundred years, the silk routes—both overland and by sea—were well established, and the Strait of Malacca, between the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, became increasingly busy.
West and north of Java, on the island of Sumatra, the city of Palembang was a center of commerce for Southeast Asia in the fifth and sixth centuries. It was from here that the powerful Malay kingdom, Srivijaya-Palembang, came to dominate coastal Sumatra as well as the Strait of Malacca.
The main sea route from India via the Strait of Malacca and north toward China and Japan, To reach the Spice Islands ships skirted northern Java.
Three Religions
First Buddhism, then Hinduism, then Islam came to Java, and each profoundly affected its sacred and secular life as well as the development of its batik. Both Buddhism and Hinduism emphasized the "liberation of the soul from mortal ties as the ultimate purpose of life." But typically, the Javanese would adopt particular aspects of each religion that they found appealing and would mingle them with the others. Buddha and the Hindu god Siva (Shiva), for example, were both looked upon as manifestations of the same being, and powerful rulers built monuments to each. The Sailendra family, of the princely courts in central Java, erected Borobudur in the ninth century. Its galleries and terraces and images of Buddha celebrated the spirit of Buddhism and the kinship between the secular leader and his god. Fifty miles away and about one hundred years later at Prambanan, another sacred monument called Lara Jonggrang was built; there the kings were united after death with the Hindu god Siva. Design elements used in batik are found in both Buddhist and Hindu temples—the lotus, for example, in the reliefs of Borobudur; and the interlocking and intersecting circular designs—known in batik work as kawung—in the later Hindu temples of east Java.
With the spread of Hindu influence, a caste system was introduced: "No one dares stand in the presence of a superior . . . from the common laborer upward." The Javanese language developed different vocabularies and forms of salutation, depending on the age and position of the person being addressed. In the economic realm, the Hindus introduced such powerful innovations as wet-rice cultivation, wheeled vehicles, and draft animals, each in its own way contributing to the trading strength of the Indies. But for every grain of rice grown, tribute was extracted in a feudal system that was to endure for more than twelve hundred years.
By the thirteenth century, the Hindu-oriented kingdom of Majapahit claimed most of Java. It was a golden age, with Majapahit rulers spreading the idea of the divine right of kings, secure in the knowledge that royal divinity would flood the world and thereby cleanse it. On the political front, Majapahit rulers succeeded in defeating Kublai Khan's invading envoy on the northern coast of Java. But internal feuding and lack of access to overseas trade eventually eroded Majapahit power, and within two hundred fifty years the mighty kingdom had been reduced to the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta.
In the meantime, Java's north coast was becoming commercially active. Small harbor states, usually founded by rulers of obscure ethnic origin, began to appear. These states—Cirebon, Gresik, Japara, Demak, and Tuban among them—prospered because of their strategic location on the coast. They were on the sea route to the spice-producing Banda and Molucca islands farther east.
For thousands of years spices were valued by faraway people as medicines, aphrodisiacs, preservatives, and flavorings. Roman, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and European traders fought for centuries for the highly lucrative spice monopoly. Spices were light and compact and far easier to transport than bulky goods such as timber, porcelain, or even cloth. Great quantities of spices could be packed into the hold of a single small ship.
Malacca, about two hundred miles north of Singapore on the southwestern coast of Malaysia, is a sleepy town today, and it is hard to realize that it was once the greatest commercial center in Southeast Asia. Geographic position accounted for Malacca's importance: at a time when deep-water ports were not necessary, it dominated the Strait of Malacca through which nearly all shipping passed, east and west. Malacca was also a trading post for religious ideas, and it was in this realm of the mind and the spirit, as much as in the marketplace, that Malacca's influence on Javanese batik would make itself felt.
Although Muslim communities had existed in Java as early as the twelfth century, it was from Malacca and Sumatra that the major drive for Javanese conversion came. The port became the meeting place for Chinese merchants from the east and for Muslims—Arabs and Indians—from the west. Traders from Java carried rice from Demak and Japara, nutmeg and cloves from Gresik and Tuban. If Javanese merchants were to win Arab support, they would have to open their doors to Islam.
The commercial and political advantages that attended religious conversion gave merchants real incentives to adopt Islam. Commercially, the Muslims were the world's leading traders, with connections throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa: association with them meant new routes and more riches. Politically, a community benefited when a former Hindu kingdom became Muslim because to some degree the caste system was eroded. A Muslim was judged by his fervor, not his rank. All believers were equal. By the end of the fifteenth century, there were twenty Muslim kingdoms on the north coast of Java, and Javanese traders
