Jakarta’s Dark Birth

 

Every June 22nd, when the humid air hangs thick as molasses over the sprawling concrete arteries of Jakarta, something stirs in the collective memory of the city. It’s the kind of stirring that makes your skin crawl, like walking over a grave you didn’t know was there. The historians, those pale, bookish types who spend their days breathing dust and deciphering the whispers of the dead, they call it an anniversary. But anniversaries, well, they’re just pretty words we paste over the bloody truth of things.

Back in 1956—Christ, that was a lifetime ago, when Eisenhower was still playing golf and the world still had some innocence left to lose—the Temporary City Representative Council of Greater Jakarta made a decision that would echo through the decades like a scream in an empty house. February 23rd, to be exact. They listened to a professor named Sukanto, a man who had the kind of eyes that saw too much and slept too little.

Sukanto had a theory, and theories, as any small-town resident of Harlan, Kentucky or Elkins, West Virginia will tell you, are dangerous things. They’re like opening doors you’re better off leaving closed. His theory went like this: way back in February 1527, when the world was still flat in most people’s minds and monsters lived at the edges of maps, a man named Fatahillah—though some called him Paletehan or Wong Agung Pase, because even back then, nobody could agree on what to call the things that scared them—came to a place called Sunda Kalapa.

Now, Sunda Kalapa. Even the name sounds like something you’d whisper in the dark, doesn’t it? Like a curse word your grandmother would box your ears for saying. It was a port, busy as a nest of hornets, where Malay traders would anchor their ships in the wide mouth of the Ciliwung River. They came for pepper—Sundanese pepper, the kind that could make you weep with its heat and beauty.

But Fatahillah, he didn’t come for pepper. He came with ships and men and the kind of ambition that leaves blood on the deck. The Portuguese were there, white men with their pale skin and their hunger for gold, and Fatahillah and his coalition—Demak and Cirebon kingdoms, names that sound like the whispered prayers of the desperate—they drove those Portuguese out like smoke from a burning house.

And then came the name change. February to June. Sunda Kalapa to Jayakarta. Sukanto, that professor with his theory and his sleepless eyes, he figured Fatahillah waited. Waited until June 22nd, when the Sundanese calendar said it was time for harvest, time for new beginnings. There’s something poetic about that, something that makes the hair on your arms stand up. A conqueror who understood the rhythm of the land, who knew that timing is everything.

But here’s the thing about theories—they’re like old houses. Peer too closely, and you start to see the cracks in the foundation. Other historians, men named Husein Djajadiningrat and Slamet Muljana, they poked holes in Sukanto’s story big enough to drive a truck through. They saw the paradox lurking there like a spider in a web: How do you honor Sundanese tradition by celebrating the day that tradition died?

Because that’s what really happened, isn’t it? The birth of Jakarta was the death of something else. Sunda Kalapa didn’t just change its name—it lost its soul. The Sundanese heritage, rich as black earth and twice as deep, got buried under the weight of conquest and time.

The old texts, the ones written in ancient Sundanese script that looks like chicken scratches to modern eyes, they tell a different story. In the Carita Parahyangan, transcribed by scholars with the patience of archaeologists and the dedication of monks, the place is called simply “Kalapa.” No “Sunda” attached, like a man who’s forgotten his last name. The Ciela map from Garut, old as sin and twice as revealing, calls it “Nusa Kalapa.”

There was a prince once, a man named Bujangga Manik, though they also called him Ameng Layaran. He traveled these lands when they were young and wild, and he wrote about what he saw. His notes, preserved in a trilogy called Tiga Pesona Sunda Kuna, read like a fever dream of a world that’s been dead for centuries.

Bujangga Manik wrote about sailing from Pamalang to Kalapa, about landing and walking through a customs office near Ancol Tamiang. He wrote about leuweung langgong—vast forests that covered what we now call Central and South Jakarta. Imagine that: where millions now live and breathe and struggle and die, there was once just trees and silence and the kind of darkness that swallows sound.

The Port of Kalapa in those days was like something out of a dream. Tome Pires, a Portuguese who lived to tell about it, wrote that it was bustling with Malay traders from Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, Java and Bugis. They came for the pepper, that precious Sundanese pepper that was worth more than gold to the right buyer.

But dig deep enough in any soil, and you’ll find bones. Jakarta’s bones are Hindu statues, carved from stone and time and forgotten prayers. The earliest is the Kali Statue, found east of Tanjung Priok Port. Goddess Kali, consort of Shiva, depicted in her most terrifying form—matted hair, necklace of skulls, fangs that could tear through flesh and spirit alike. It’s the kind of artifact that makes you wonder what kind of people lived here, what kind of gods they prayed to in the dark.

There’s a Shiva statue too, found in the Ciliwung River area in Tanjung Barat. Smaller than the Kali statue but richer in detail—the god of destruction sitting on a lotus throne, shaded by an umbrella, like death taking a coffee break. And in Warung Buncit, Mampang, they found a Ganesha statue in 1990, the elephant-headed god who removes obstacles and grants new beginnings.

All of them connected to Shiva, the destroyer, the transformer. Makes you think, doesn’t it? About the people who carved these statues, who worshipped in temples that are now buried under concrete and steel and the weight of forgetting. They were Shaivites, followers of destruction and rebirth, and maybe—just maybe—followers of Tantrayana, the sect that danced with Kali in the darkness.

So here’s the truth that the anniversary celebration dances around like a guilty secret: Jakarta was born from violence, from the death of one thing and the birth of another. Every June 22nd, the city celebrates not just its beginning, but the ending of something older, deeper, more rooted in the soil and the souls of the people who lived here first.

The ghosts are still there, you know. In the statues buried in the earth, in the old names that echo in the wind, in the forests that once covered the land like a green blanket. They’re waiting, patient as stone, for someone to remember their names.

Because that’s what ghosts do. They wait.

And sometimes, on humid June nights when the air hangs heavy with memory and rain, they whisper their stories to anyone brave enough to listen.