BOOK REVIEW: Majapahit (Intrigue, Betrayal and War in Indonesia’s Greatest Empire)
By Herald van der Linde. Monsoon Books, London, Soft cover, 368 pp.
It has long been obvious that to the outside world, Indonesia has been little known or regarded relative to its size, its population, and its role in history. There are several reasons for this, including perhaps its name, a composite of “India” and “Islands” which came into use in the latter part of Dutch colonial rule. In that case, perhaps it might have been better for President Joko Widodo to have renamed the country Nusantara, not just the new capital he is seeking to raise in the wilds of Kalimantan.
Nusantara (roughly translated as Island Realm) was the concept of a Java-based maritime state encompassing Madura Sumatra, Bali, Kalimantan, and other islands of the archipelago which had been a reality under King Kertanagara in the 13th century and formalized in the chronicle Nagara-Kertagama of the Rakawi Prapbanca in the 14th when the power of the Majapahit empire was at its height under King Hayam Wuruk including viewing peninsula port states such as Temasek (Singapore) and Kedah.
The extent to which this great and culturally outstanding empire, open to all faiths, drawing traders from around the region, and where varying interpretations of Hindu and Buddhist flourished and which exploited the fertility of the region’s valley, has been generally ignored in modern times. That came home to this correspondent when writing a chapter about Majapahit for his book “Empire of the Winds” that he could discover no book in English entirely devoted to this history. But now there is…