Shadows of Sunda

 

The kingdom fell like a man having a heart attack at a family picnic—sudden and messy and leaving everyone standing around wondering what the hell to do next.

By the time the 17th century rolled around, the Sunda Kingdom was nothing but bones picked clean by crows, and the vultures were circling what was left. The land—Christ, the land was torn to pieces like an old photograph, scattered to the wind and trampled underfoot by new powers rising up like weeds through a cracked sidewalk. Coastal strongholds, mountain retreats—everyone wanted their piece of the corpse.

Cirebon and Banten? They came out on top in that bloody game of musical chairs, but here’s the thing about winners—sometimes they don’t know what to do with the prize once they’ve got it. Neither of them managed to stitch back together what their ancestors had built in those ancient days. Meanwhile, little old Sumedang—and no one would’ve put money on them in Vegas—somehow pulled its shit together in the rugged Sundanese mountains when no one was looking.

But you know how it goes when you think you’ve found a quiet place to hide. The world has a way of finding you.

From east and west, the winds of change swept in like a nor’easter, the kind that peels the paint right off your house and makes you wonder if the roof’s gonna hold. The Dutch VOC showed up, making the Portuguese look like kids playing in a sandbox, while over in Java proper, the Mataram boys were busy cleaning house, mopping up the political rabble left over from the Demak days.

Reiza Dienaputra—he wrote a book called Sunda: History, Culture, and Politics back in 2011—he said something that’ll make your skin crawl if you think about it long enough. He said this mess brought the Sundanese face-to-face with globalization, not for the first time, but maybe the worst time. These folks had been trading across the Indian Ocean since the 5th century, wheeling and dealing with anyone who dropped anchor. But this time? This time was different. This time, something broke inside them.

The Sundanese had reached what Dienaputra called a “saturation point.” Picture a sponge that can’t hold another goddamn drop. That’s what happened after their kingdom collapsed. They pulled back, turned inward, said “no thanks” to the global party going on around them. Dienaputra blamed Javanese Islam and those white men from across the sea, but who really knows what makes a whole people just... give up?

In 1614, the Mataram Sultanate rolled in like the boogeyman and snatched up the inland territories that used to belong to Sunda-Galuh. After that, things went south in a hurry. You know how it is—new boss comes in with big plans, puts his people in charge, and then those people go and disappoint him. The Sundanese bureaucrats that Sultan Agung appointed kept fucking up. Or maybe they weren’t fucking up at all. Maybe they were just not being the good little puppets the Sultan wanted them to be.

Mumuh Muhsin Z. wrote about this in his book on the Kingdom of Sumedang Larang. The former kings got demoted to bupati wedana—glorified coordinators, really—and then replaced by some guy called Dipati Ukur from Bandung.

But here’s where the story takes a turn that’d make any horror writer smile. According to an old manuscript called Sajarah Sukapura, this Dipati Ukur fella ended up rebelling against Sultan Agung. The Sultan thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that Ukur had jumped ship during Mataram’s push to Batavia. Big mistake. Huge. The kind that keeps you up at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling fan.

Sultan Agung sent his man Tumenggung Bahureksa to round up Dipati Ukur and his boys. When he realized he’d stepped in it, the Sultan didn’t waste time with apologies. Hell no. He had Dipati Ukur executed, along with anyone else in Priangan who wasn’t singing the Mataram tune.

Then came the turning point, the moment when everything changed and couldn’t ever go back. Sultan Agung issued what they called a piyagem—a metal inscription, solid and cold as a grave marker. What it said altered Sundanese history forever, like one of those decisions you make at midnight that haunts you for the rest of your days.

The Sultan appointed three new bupatis in Priangan who answered directly to him: Tumenggung Wira Angun-angun in Bandung, Tumenggung Tanubaya in Parakanmuncang, and Tumenggung Wiradadaha in Sukapura. And he didn’t just give them titles, no sir. He gave them Javanese regalia—the keris dagger, fancy parasols, special dodot garments, and servants imported straight from Mataram like exotic pets.

The message couldn’t have been clearer if it was written in neon lights: To rule here, you gotta be like us. You gotta walk Javanese, talk Javanese, dream Javanese. Your Sundanese ways? They ain’t worth shit anymore.

But the Sultan’s grand plan didn’t last. Death came for him in 1645, as it comes for all of us, kings and beggars alike. And waiting in the wings, patient as a spider, was the VOC. They’d been watching Priangan from their stronghold in Batavia, biding their time, calculating. About twenty years after the Sultan kicked the bucket, they started moving in, piece by piece, pulling strings in Cirebon and Banten, making deals with Amangkurat I back in Mataram.

By the time the 18th century rolled around, according to Muhsin Z., the entire Priangan region from Cianjur to Ciamis had fallen into Batavia’s lap like a ripe fruit. But here’s the difference that’ll make your blood run cold: Sultan Agung had religious and cultural reasons for wanting to unify Java—twisted as they might have been. The Company? They just wanted Priangan’s fertile soil for their damn coffee plantations. Cold, hard cash. Nothing more.

Under VOC control, Priangan transformed into something unrecognizable, like a familiar face distorted in a funhouse mirror. The mountains filled with commodity plantations that made the landowners and bupatis rich beyond their wildest dreams—or nightmares.

And from this unholy marriage of politics and greed emerged something called “menak culture.” Nina Herlina Lubis wrote about it—a feudal system that, to this day, is what most people think of when they hear “Sundanese culture.” It’s like thinking Dracula is Romanian culture. It’s part of the story, sure, but it ain’t the whole tale.

This menak culture spread from the pendopos—those open pavilions where the bupatis held court—to every corner of Sunda like a slow-moving virus. The language itself became infected, splitting into levels—undak-usuk basa—that separated the nobles from the commoners as surely as a concrete wall. You had your coarse talk, your familiar talk, and your polite talk, and God help you if you used the wrong one with the wrong person.

The Sundanese language soaked up Javanese words like a body taking in poison, until it became something new and strange—a twisted reflection of what it had been. The old Sundanese language had been egalitarian, everyone on the same level, looking each other in the eye. This new creature? It was a step backward into darkness.

But the worst was yet to come. As coffee money flowed and the feudal system tightened its grip, something ugly grew in the shadows. G.A. Jaelani wrote about it in 2020—how Sundanese society during colonial times developed a tolerance for prostitution that’ll make your skin crawl.

Women’s bodies became commodities, traded like coffee beans or spices. And the truly horrifying part? It became a status symbol, a twisted badge of honor. The common folk saw the priyayi—the landowner class—collecting women like stamps, keeping them in regencies and official residences like pretty birds in gilded cages. So they figured, hell, if that’s what rich folks do, it must be the thing to do.

And that’s how Sundanese women ended up with a stigma that clung to them like tar—vain women, they called them. Easy women. All because the powerful decided that women were things to be collected, not people to be respected.

Some shadows, once they fall across a land, never quite go away. They linger in the collective memory, in the words people choose, in the ways they treat each other. And the people of Sunda? They’re still walking in those shadows, whether they know it or not.

But that’s how history works. It doesn’t die. It just waits in the dark, patient as cancer, ready to remind you that the past is never really past. It’s right there under your feet, and sometimes—when you least expect it—the ground opens up and swallows you whole.