PoP’s textual historian Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan studies the pseudo-history of the Majapahit kingdom, and what it can tell us about history-making in Indonesia today.

Indonesians love a good conspiracy. Just check out the sales table on any mainstream bookstore like Gramedia, or the display racks of used-book street stalls. You’ll find hidden truths and uncovered secrets of all kinds: the worldwide ones involving the Protocols of the Elders of  Zion, the Illuminati, and the Rothschild banking family, as well as more Indonesia-specific ones about the puppetmaster behind the 30 September 1965 intrigue, Indonesia as the true location of Atlantis, and how Borobudur was built by King Solomon. In some cases, conspiracy theories can play a major role in how Indonesians interpret and respond to unfolding crises, such as during the witch-hunts that occurred in 1998 in far-east Java.

I argue that conspiracy is a paradigm through which some Indonesians view their past; for want of a more imaginative term, we might call it conspiracy history. This is not something unique to Indonesia; see, for instance, Liam Hogan’s work on debunking the Irish slaves conspiracy history. But in Indonesia’s case, it has a lot to do with how Suharto’s dictatorship (1966 – 1998) attempted to control history, and with the post-1998 efforts to revise and rectify the historical narrative.

Conspiracy history results both from the impoverishment of critical historical skills that is a legacy of the education system under the Suharto regime, and also from a genuine desire to overturn the orthodox historical perspectives imposed by that regime. This ambiguity makes conspiracy history a valuable topic of study, because it shows us what happens when people yearn for new perspectives on the past, but don’t have the resources or skills to mount a valid historiographical challenge to the status quo.

Gaj Ahmada and the Sultanate of Majapahit

My case study is a conspiracy that is noisily making the rounds on social media at the moment: the claim that the East Javanese kingdom of Majapahit (1294 – 1486) was a Muslim sultanate and that its most famous prime minister, Gajah Mada, was a Muslim called Gaj Ahmada. According to this conspiracy, the mainstream view that Majapahit was ruled by Shaiva Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist monarchs is a lie. The conspiracy historians claim that the main textual source for this orthodox Majapahit history, the Serat Pararaton (“Book of Kings”), is actually a forgery written in 1896 by the Dutch scholar JLA Brandes.

Both the Dutch colonial government and the Indonesian national government, so the conspiracy historians say, perpetuated the falsehood that Majapahit was a Hindu-Buddhist state in which Muslims were a small minority, mostly occupied as traders and courtiers, but not in charge. Why would the governments lie about this? The conspiracy historians say these governments tried to hide the true Islamic nature of the Majapahit kingdom in order to marginalise the Islamic political movements of their own time.

Needless to say, this conspiracy history has no evidence to support it. All of the Majapahit-era inscriptions, which date from 1294 to 1486 and deal directly in religious matters, indicate that the royal court patronised both Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as a network of rural ascetics called resi, but definitely not Islam. Communities of Muslims did exist in the capital and in the large trading cities on the north coast, as demonstrated by Muslim gravestones and by the contemporary reports of visiting Chinese Muslims, but they never controlled the kingdom. The authenticity of the Serat Pararaton, which describes the Hindu and Buddhist character of the Majapahit kingdom in depth, is well-attested by the dozens of manuscript copies of the text found throughout Bali.

Majapahit as Proto-Indonesia

So why is Majapahit, a kingdom that disappeared 500 years ago, the topic of a major Internet conspiracy? The primary reason is the role of Majapahit in the development of Indonesian nationalism. The generation of politicians who led the country’s independence movements were concerned to find a historical basis for a united Indonesian nation. Faced with the diversity of languages, customs and religions in the archipelago, one of these leaders, Muhammad Yamin, turned to the premodern past to find powerful states that he could claim to be precursors of modern Indonesia. Yamin chose Majapahit, the region’s most powerful state in the 14th century, as one of these precursors.

Since then national history textbooks have emphasised, based on shaky evidence, how closely the territorial extent of the Majapahit empire matched Indonesia’s modern borders. Yasmin, and most Indonesian historians since, have claimed that unification of the archipelago was a fundamental political goal of prime minister Gajah Mada, just as it is of the Indonesian state. Gajah Mada’s mysticism and militant imperialism provided a personal role model for Suharto himself. The identification of Majapahit and Indonesia went so far that a quotation from a Majapahit-era poem called Sutasoma was picked as the national motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (usually translated “Unity in diversity”, but more accurately “They are separate, they are one”).

So a conspiracy about the state religion of Majapahit strikes at the question of the religious identity of the modern Indonesian state. One significant view on this issue is that the Indonesian state is not Islamic enough. Ever since the first official deliberations on the Indonesian constitution and state philosophy in 1945, a significant minority of political leaders have advocated for a greater role for Islamic principles in the nation’s public life. This religiously-oriented faction has never really prevailed in the political arena, where quasi-secular nationalism has long been the dominant force.

Since Majapahit is widely seen as a prototype for Indonesia, the revelation that Majapahit was actually an Islamic sultanate would give a boost to those who would see Indonesia take on a more Muslim character. Earlier this year, a political campaign against the recently-defeated governor of Jakarta, a Chinese Christian, made the claim that a Qur’anic verse forbids Muslims to accept a non-Muslim ruler. So if it turns out that the Muslim communities living in Majapahit were ruled not by Hindus and Buddhists but by fellow Muslims, then the 14th-century history of Majapahit can be made to support a political agenda in 21st-century Indonesia.

Revision or Conspiracy?

To push this agenda, the conspiracy historians have to attack the credibility of the mainstream historical account. Many Indonesians are already highly skeptical of the versions of history they are taught in school, because of the way the Suharto government grossly manipulated history education. This is fertile ground for conspiracy history, because the Indonesian government really did try to cover up truths about the past, and in some cases, it still does. The line between genuine revisionist history and conspiracy history becomes blurred, because the conspiracy historians imitate the language of revisionism: ‘Straightening Out the History of Majapahit’, ‘Surprising Facts! Majapahit, A Muslim Kingdom’.

It is difficult for general readers to distinguish between an informed alternative view and a conspiracy history. This is because of the way history is taught in schools: it is presented primarily as a set of true facts about the past, while the study of primary sources and historical method is treated as supplementary. Students are encouraged to comment on the information provided by the textbook, rather than being trained to develop their own arguments based on historical evidence.

This means public debates about history are often reduced to a conflict between different accounts, each claiming to be the most accurate version. Since their school textbooks do not familiarise them with the primary sources of Majapahit history, non-expert readers are in a quandary when those textbook interpretations come under attack. The credibility of the historian, rather than the strength of their argument, becomes the criterion for the reading public to decide who to believe. This need for credibility is why the conspiracy historians copy the rhetoric of genuine anti-mainstream revisionism, despite the fact that their works meet none of the professional standards of historical research.

From Conspiracy History to Public History

The conspiracy historians who say that Majapahit was a Muslim sultanate are wrong, but  they are not crackpots. The readers who believe and share their work are wrong, but they are not stupid. Both are products of the particular conditions for history-making in Indonesia today: skepticism towards official versions of history coupled with a reluctance to give up on the nationalist paradigm, a history education system that is still content-focussed rather than skills-focussed, and a widespread impulse to ground contemporary political issues in historical precedent.

Despite all this, I think there’s some cause for hope. Skepticism is a good basis for critical thinking in general. The Gaj Ahmada conspiracy history has not gone unchallenged, but provoked strong rebuttals from experts that are being shared widely. The online debate has put issues of historical evidence and method at the front of the public’s mind, and several large Facebook groups have hosted serious, informed discussions about Majapahit history. An optimist might imagine that as Indonesians become used to seeing conspiracy histories get publicly debunked, they will pick up the critical historical skills that their school education does not offer. The result could be a genuinely public history to displace the state-controlled national history of the past, and the groundless conspiracy histories of the present.

PoP’s textual historian Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan, a student of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, looks in the mirror of Australian Studies at the University of Indonesia.

Here at PoP, we welcome fresh and challenging perspectives on Southeast Asian pasts. But we mustn’t forget that as Australia-based researchers of Southeast Asia, we are accustomed to visiting, studying and knowing about Southeast Asian people from the high towers of a Western institution. So what happens when the scholarly gaze is turned back towards Australia? How does our own culture appear under the scrutiny of Southeast Asian researchers?

We were compelled to think about this when Dr. Wardiningsih Soerjohardjo (“Dien”) of the University of Indonesia visited Sydney last month. Dr. Dien spoke to PoP about her leadership of the Australian Studies research program at the University of Indonesia, as well as her recently-republished book on Gundagai, a small but historically-prominent township in southern New South Wales. Both the book and the program made us rethink Australia as a culture and as an object of study.

The Book

Gundagai in Mid-Nineteenth Century Australia: A Historical Examination (2013; 2017) happily reverses the Western scholarly gaze. The book provides a meticulous examination of the social history of the town in the 1850s. The disastrous flood of 1852 is Dr. Dien’s point of departure for a deep exploration of the cultural character of the Gundagai community, which at this time was ambitious, egalitarian and litigious.

Dr. Dien’s methodology fuses anthropology and cultural history. She is an unashamed fan of thick description, but she applies this ethnographic tool to a body of archival documents rather than to a living community. Her approach draws inspiration from Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s descriptions of Indonesian villages, Tony Milner’s studies of the traditional Malay worldview, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s work on fourteenth-century France. All manner of sources come within her purview, including church records, local poetry and popular songs about the town.

Dr. Dien’s book has little space for anecdotes about dogs and tuckerboxes, or the convict-to-riches biographies that fill many coffee-table books of rural history. Instead, its preface offers a provocative mission statement:

Westerners who have studied my country have found it helpful to delineate certain cultural values which characterize social life in Indonesia and help to explain events occurring there. In this book, which examines one small community in nineteenth-century Australia, I attempt to analyze some aspects of the culture of a European community.

How does Australian culture look, as encapsulated in a typical (though not necessarily representative) example of a nineteenth-century town? This is where Dr. Dien’s identity as a foreign researcher matters. In justifying her descriptive approach, she argues that a foreign perspective can be more aware of historical distance than a local one. She gives a subtle warning to those who might claim privileged understanding based on their insider identity in contemporary Australia: “As scholars continue to explore the social values and cultural categories of nineteenth century Australia, they may well become increasingly cautious about basing judgements about the nineteenth century on their experience of modern Australia”.

In the copious archival material that Dr. Dien examined, she detected several recurring themes:

• a class hierarchy mitigated by a democratic ethos, in which solemn agreement was a paramount value
• the considerable accessibility of the justice system to marginalised groups such as women and the poor
• a preoccupation with moral policing of public drunkenness and obscenity
• a general skepticism towards church-going religiosity

Not content to paint this portrait of Gundagai in its uniqueness, Dr. Dien’s work also offers new approaches to Australian history across the board. “This Gundagai study”, she argues, “has uncovered themes which have been given little emphasis elsewhere, and it is my hope that it will encourage local history specialists to investigate, for instance, attitudes to language or to the concept of ‘agreement’ when they examine the documentation for their own regions of colonial Australia.”

These new approaches emerge out of the investigator’s identity as an outsider, which makes Dr. Dien sensitive to certain aspects of Australian culture that might be more transparent or less noteworthy to Australians themselves. This is where the real value of cross-cultural scholarship is. It offers a strong argument against ‘home scholarship’, interpreted in the narrow sense of scholars restricting their research interests to the nations they come from.

The Program

Dr. Dien’s own work is far from the only example of Indonesian scholars’ examination of Australian history. Under her leadership, dozens of postgraduate students at the University of Indonesia have completed in-depth theses and dissertations on various topics in Australian history. Thanks to her visit, we came to know of a whole body of scholarship on Australia that is generally inaccessible to Australian historians, because it is written in Indonesian and is held by a foreign university library.

The majority of these theses are at the Indonesian S1 level (equivalent to an Australian Honours thesis), covering a gamut of topics: Australian organised labour’s support for Indonesian independence, Australian perceptions of West Papua and Timor-Leste, native title and the Mabo case, the Myall Creek massacre of 1838, the Ashmore reef border, race relations at the Lambing Flat goldfields, the Wave Hill strike , the Queensland Native Police, and many more. Topics being studied at S2 level (Masters) include a history of the White Australia policy, Australian diplomatic policy concerning the 1957–59 Permesta rebellions in Indonesia, and the ANZUS Treaty.

But a final revelation was in store when we asked Dr. Dien how she funded her students to visit Australia for field research. She explained that where funding is short, students are able to access a very significant proportion of their primary sources through the National Library of Australia’s online portal Trove.

The front page of Trove, accessed 02/06/2017.

The comprehensiveness of this digital archive and search engine, which provides immediate access to government records, newspaper scans, maps, Australian library collections, archival photographs and very much more, has had a transformative effect on scholars’ approaches to Australian history. Given the recent funding threats to this invaluable public service, Trove’s importance to Indonesian scholars of Australia, and thereby its contribution to the knowledge base of the bilateral relationship, are of urgent relevance.

PoP is most grateful to have had the opportunity to meet Dr. Dien, who has shown us some aspects of our country that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I hope that these reflections will cause us to challenge ourselves in our research, and to actively support and protect institutions like Trove, which are of such value to Australia.

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