Below the Winds

 

They say history is written by the winners. Well, maybe. But what they don’t tell you is that history is buried too—buried deep in the soil of forgotten places where the past doesn’t just lie dormant, it festers.

I’ve always thought there was something about ancient civilizations that gets under your skin. Not the Hollywood version with the fancy costumes and marble columns, but the real stuff—the kind where you can almost smell the terror of ordinary folks when the king’s men came collecting taxes or slaves or whatever the hell they wanted that day.

Southeast Asia in those early centuries—Christ, what a place it must have been. A thousand years of empires rising and falling like fever dreams, each one leaving its mark on the people who’d still be there long after the fancy palaces crumbled to dust.

George Cœdès called it “Indianization” or “Sanskritization” in his book. Scholarly words, neat and tidy. But there wasn’t anything neat about it, I bet. What he’s really talking about is power—how it shifts, how it corrupts, how it transforms. Sanskrit wasn’t just some dusty old language. It was the way the big boys wrote their names in blood across the map. The locals called this part of the world “Lands Below the Winds,” which sounds poetic until you realize it probably felt like living beneath the boot heel of gods.

The kings of the Nusantara—that’s what they called the Indonesian archipelago back then—they weren’t playing small ball. They carved their declarations into stone, for Christ’s sake. The Yūpa inscriptions in East Kalimantan. The Tarumanagara inscriptions in West Java. Set in stone. Meant to last forever. Ain’t that just like a tyrant? Always thinking about forever when the poor bastards they rule are just trying to make it through another day without starving.

Arlo Griffiths—another academic type with his book on “Early Indic Inscriptions”—points out that these stone brags showed up around the same time as the big shots in Cambodia and South Vietnam were flexing their muscles. That’s no coincidence. Power recognizes power across the water. These kings, they were playing the same game, using the same rulebook.

And then there was Tarumanagara. Jesus.

The academics—from old J.L. Moens back in 1940 to Hariani Santiko sixty years later—they’ve been obsessed with how Hinduism first crept into Java through Tarumanagara. They found these inscriptions in Bogor and Pandeglang mentioning Hindu gods: Vishnu, Surya, Indra. Names that would have sounded strange and terrible to the local folks at first, I imagine. Names with power.

At the center of it all was King Purnawarman. Now there’s a piece of work. The kind of fella who’d tell you his armor was just like the god Surya’s, or that his elephant was a twin to Indra’s magical mount Airavata. Hell, he even claimed his footprints were identical to those of Vishnu himself. The guy had an ego the size of Maine in July.

But why? Why all the divine comparisons?

The answer’s in the Jambu inscription they found near the Citarum River Basin. According to Vogel, the stone says Purnawarman beat the living hell out of his enemies. Reading between the lines, those enemies were probably the local chiefs up in the mountains of West Java—folks who hadn’t bought into this Hindu-Buddhist business yet.

Before Sanskrit and stone inscriptions and kings claiming to be walking gods, the Nusantara had its own way of picking leaders. Agus Aris Munandar calls it ancestral ideology. The big man in the village—the guy with the most pigs or the best rice fields or whatever counted for wealth back then—he was primus inter pares, first among equals. When he died, the locals figured he became something like a god, watching over them from whatever came after.

A Chinese monk named Faxian saw this firsthand when he got shipwrecked in Taruma back in the 5th century. He wrote about Hindus and Buddhists living there, sure, but they were outnumbered by locals practicing what he snootily called “dirty religions”—ancestor worship, most likely. Old ways die hard, especially when they’re tangled up in who your grandpappy was.

So what we had here was a goddamn ideological war. Purnawarman and his fancy Hindu gods versus the mountain chiefs with their ancestor spirits. Winner takes all—and “all” meant controlling the natural resources and the people in the Pasundan highlands.

Those mountain resources weren’t just pretty rocks and trees. They were the engine of Tarumanagara’s economy—the fuel for Purnawarman’s whole operation.

After he crushed the competition in the mountains, Purnawarman had to figure out how to move all that valuable stuff. That’s where the Tugu inscription found in North Jakarta comes in. Noorduyn and Verstappen say it records the creation of artificial waterways called Candrabhaga and Gomati. One of these man-made rivers ran from Bekasi all the way to what’s now Tanjung Priok in North Jakarta.

Think about that. The sonofabitch redirected rivers. Changed the course of nature itself. Tanjung Priok was worthless swampland before Purnawarman’s engineers carved out the Cakung River. Afterward? Prime real estate for a port city.

The remains of that ancient harbor are probably buried under the modern Tanjung Priok Port they built during colonial times. Layers upon layers of history, like the strata in a nightmare.

Kenneth Hall figured Purnawarman had two aims with this massive waterworks project. First, to grow more rice in the Jakarta lowlands to feed all the people crowding into his port city. Second, to connect the mountains to the coast via the Citarum River—a superhighway for goods flowing from the interior to the waiting ships.

It was all about the port, you see. As the Funan Kingdom up in mainland Southeast Asia lost its grip on the Kra Isthmus, trade routes shifted to the Malacca Strait. Purnawarman wasn’t just some local hotshot—he was playing a global game, positioning his kingdom to catch the wave of international commerce.

History books make it sound neat, orderly. But I can’t help thinking about the blood and sweat that went into digging those canals. The conscripted laborers dragging stones to build temples for gods they barely understood. The mountain people watching their ancestral ways slowly disappear, replaced by Sanskrit chants and strange new rituals.

Sometimes I wonder if the ghosts of those forgotten people still haunt the rivers of Jakarta when the moon is right and the tide comes in. If you listen close enough on a quiet night, maybe you can still hear them—whispering names of gods older than Vishnu, older than Buddha, gods whose names were worn smooth by countless generations before being buried under the concrete and steel of progress.

History isn’t just written by the winners. It’s buried by them too. But nothing stays buried forever.

Not in this world.