The Precolonial Uplands

Prior to the tenth century the most important centers of state power on the island of Java were located around the rich wet-rice terrains of inland central Java. Much of the spectacular architecture of this region—at Buddhist Borobudur and Sivaite Prambanan, among other sites—dates from this period. In the tenth century, however, court power shifted eastward, first to the Kediri region, in the western portion of what is today the province of East Java, and, early in the thirteenth century, to Singosari, a town located at the western edge of the Tengger highlands. The shift east may have been owing to the growing importance of trade with eastern Indonesia's spice islands, for which the eastern Javanese authorities acted as brokers. As Schrieke (1957, 2:301) has speculated, the move may have also been the product of flight from Central Java by peasants seeking to escape the onerous burden of forced labor required for the construction of Central Java's monumental architecture.

Political rivalry among eastern Java's new principalities was intense. Kediri was conquered in 1222 by Singosari, a state founded by a commoner with no prior dynastic genealogy. Seventy years later, Kediri forces returned to avenge their defeat by capturing the Singosari court. Kediri's victory was itself short-lived, however, as Singosari armies returned quickly to rout the invaders. Consistent with Javanese tradition, Singosari's leaders were reluctant to reestablish their capital at a site once seized by their enemies. Hence a new court was built about ninety kilometers (as the crow flies) to the northwest, at a site known as Majapahit. Situated a small distance from the coast in the Brantas River valley, the location was ideally suited for control of the agrarian hinterland and for easy access to the important port of Surabaya at the river's mouth (Robson 1981, 262). The old Singosari court, meanwhile, appears to have remained in use; fourteenth-century chronicles, for example; report that King Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit stayed in its central compound at the end of his tour of the realm in 1359 (Pigeaud 1962, 4:104). For the next two centuries, Singosari-Majapahit was Java's most powerful kingdom; it would be remembered in modern times as the most glorious of the island's pre-Islamic states. It declined in the final decades of the fifteenth century, however, and its eventual conquest in the 1520s by Muslim principalities (Noorduyn 1978; Robson 1981) was an important watershed in premodern Javanese history.

Our knowledge of the Tengger highlands during this pre-Islamic period is fragmentary. Literary and epigraphic evidence indicates that the mountain region played an important role in state-supported religious cults. It was home, for example, to both Sivaite and Buddhist clerical communities, as well as to a smattering of freeholder villages involved in

the worship of mountain spirits (Pigeaud 1962, 4:443-44; Hefner 1985, 25). The most important of these spirits was that associated with the massive volcanic cauldron at the center of the Tengger massif, known as Mount Bromo. Rising some 300 meters from the desolate wastes of a rolling "sand sea" (segoro weds ), this Smoldering crater is itself located at the center of a larger, extinct crater, some ten kilometers in diameter and four hundred meters deep. Historical evidence indicates that in Majapahit times the Bromo complex was the focus of important ritual activity, as it is still today for the upperslope Hindus. Each year, non-Islamic highlanders come together on the slopes to throw offerings into the volcano and to remember the flight of their Hindu ancestors from Muslim armies (Hefner 1985, 46).

Religious texts from the pre-Islamic period make numerous references to this unusual mountain terrain, indicating that at least some of the local population were involved in state cults. Several texts, for example, link the sand sea around the Bromo caldera to sacred territories in classical Hindu cosmology. One text, for example, describes how the souls of the dead must pass through the sand sea's barren wastes on their way to the fiery hell of Bromo (Gonda 1952, 148). The same purgatorial image appears in prayers of ritual purification still used today by Hindu priests in the upperslope highlands (Hefner 1985, 176-82). An important work of the late Majapahit period, the Tantu Panggelaran (see Pigeaud 1924), also mentions this region, identifying Mount Bromo as the spot where the Indic god of fire, Brahma (from whom the volcano's name, Bromo or Brama, is derived), does his smithing.

The most intriguing references to the Tengger highlands, however, occur in the fourteenth-century Nagarakertagama , an account of a "progress" through the countryside by Hayam Wurukr uler of Majapahit at the height of its power (Pigeaud 1962). The king's journey skirted the Tengger highlands, and on several occasions he made forays into its mid-slope regions. For example, the royal procession visited a mandhala religious community in the district of Tongas, Probolinggo (on the northern slopes of the Tengger massif), performed water devotion at a nearby shrine, and received tribute from eleven Buddhist communities, including three located in or near present-day mountain communities.^[1] Although today all of these villages lie just below the territory inhabited by upperslope Hindus, ethnographic evidence suggests that several of them remained non-Islamic into the early nineteenth century.

The importance of the Tengger mountains for Majapahit religion raises the question as to the precise relation between this earlier tradition

[1] The three villages are Lumbang, Pancur, and Tenggilis; see Pigeaud 1962, 4:68; de Vries 1931, 1:17.

and that of today's upperslope non-Muslim "Tengger." This issue has long fascinated scholars, who have hoped that modem Tengger traditions might provide clues as to the nature of popular religion in Majapahit times. J. E. Jasper's (1926) influential work on modem Tengger, however, counseled pessimism in this regard. He argued that in earlier times the upperslope population was a tribal enclave that had held itself apart from the rest of Java. This people's conversion to Hinduism occurred so late in Majapahit's history, Jasper speculated, that they were only superficially Indicized. Hence their traditions tell us little about pre-Islamic religion as a whole.

In his brilliant work on fourteenth-century Java, Theodore Pigeaud relied heavily on Jasper's account to reach a similar conclusion. "In fact even in the pre-Islamic period," he wrote, "the Tengger highlanders · seem to have formed a separate community, worshipping the spirit of a volcano who (by outsiders, probably) had been given an Indian name, Brahma" (Pigeaud 1962, 4:244). The ritual texts preserved by Tengger priests, he concluded, are "apparently of relatively recent date," and thus are "disappointing to scholars seeking information on Old Javanese religion" (1967, 1:49). Rather than linking the present-day Tengger tradition to the Sivaite communities discussed in the Nagarakertagama or the Tantu Panggelaran , therefore, he thought it more likely that modem Tengger are related to the "spirit servants" (hulun hyang ) mentioned in the Walandhit charter discovered near Mount Bromo at the turn of the present century (1962, 4:443-44). These people, he speculated, were probably "simple worshippers of local Spirits or tutelary deities residing on mountains or in springs, not wholly identified with the great Indian gods, especially Shiwa" (1962, 4:486).

More recent research, however, refutes these arguments and indicates that the ancestors of today's upperslope Hindus were mountain Javanese whose priests in Majapahit times were members of a Sivaite clergy found throughout East Java and Bali.^[2] Even today, there are strong parallels in ritual performance and paraphernalia between Tengger and Bali. Indeed, some Tengger prayers show a word-for-word correspondence to those found in modern Bali, describing a richly detailed Sivaite cosmol-

[2] Jasper's (1926) historical reconstruction reached a different conclusion in part because he, like many scholars in colonial times, regarded the upperslope "Tengger" population as a cultural and racial survival of an earlier proto-Javanese population. Even in Jasper's time, however, there was strong evidence of earlier cultural ties between Tengger and Bali (Scholte 1921), suggesting that the isolation of the upperslope Hindus was the product of political conflict, not of putative racial distinctiveness (Rouffaer 1921; de Vries 1931). The Hindu population, one should note, are physically indistinguishable from people in other areas of East Java, and they certainly think of themselves as Javanese (Hefner 1985).

ogy.^[3] This and other evidence indicates that clerics in the Tengger mountains were once associated with a popular Sivaite order known as the resi pujangga , genealogically related to the non-Brahmanic resi bujangga of modern Bali.

For an understanding of politics and community in the premodern Tengger highlands, this apparently obscure information is of critical importance. It shows that from early on the people of the highlands and those of the plains had strong cultural ties. This is in striking contrast with many other areas of Southeast Asia where mountain peoples maintain ethnic and religious identities apart from those of the state-dominated lowlands (Leach 1954; Keyes 1977, 27). That this was not the case in the Tengger highlands testifies to the cultural cohesiveness of the early Javanese state. It also helps to explain why in Java, unlike neighboring areas of Southeast Asia, there was such a remarkable degree of ethnic homogeneity from an early period. Even in Majapahit times the lowland-based state exercised a dominating influence on upland affairs.

After reaching its zenith in the fourteenth century, Majapahit fell into decline just a hundred years later, in part as a result of the rise of Muslim mercantile states in the western and central regions of the Malay archipelago. The court itself was overrun in 1478, apparently by a rival Hindu principality. It was then recaptured by what was probably a legitimate dynastic line in 1486 (Noorduyn 1978, 255). Shortly after its reestablishment, the court was moved inland, away from the increasingly powerful Muslim principality of Surabaya at the mouth of the Brantas river (Robson 1981, 279). The mercantile economy of the now-Muslim coast was slowly becoming ascendant over the inward-looking, rice-growing, and largely feudal interior. Eventually, the alliance of Muslim merchants and potentates proved too strong. In the 1520s Majapahit fell to Muslim forces from north coast principalities, under the spiritual and political leadership of Demak (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974, 34-71). The process of Islamization that had followed insular trade routes through Northern Sumatra (converted in the late thirteenth century), northeastern Malaya and the southern Philippines (fourteenth century), and Malacca and the Malay peninsula (fifteenth century) had achieved its greatest prize yet.

Majapahit's collapse marked the beginning of a long and uneven process of Islamization in Java's eastern territories, one that would not be

[3] The content of the old prayers says nothing about either priestly or popular understanding of their meaning. Historical evidence shows that this non-Islamic population experienced considerable cultural disorientation as it carne under the influence of its Muslim neighbors (Hefner 1983a). The relationship between the Tengger and Balinese prayers is discussed in greater detail in Smith-Hefner 1983 and Hefner 1985, 163-88. The corresponding liturgy of the Balinese resi bujangga is found in Hooykaas 1974. Other information on these resi is found in Hooykaas 1964 and Pigeaud 1924, 248-49.

completed for another 250 years. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the north coast principality of Demak took the lead in coordinating the campaign against the few remaining Hindu-Buddhist principalities on the island, relying on a shifting alliance of Muslims from Java's north coast. The port of Pasuruan fell to Demak's forces in 1535 (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974, 180). The victors quickly appointed a Muslim administrator for the region, and in 1546 Pasuruan, now Islamized, played a leading role in the Muslim campaign against the still heathen court of Panarukan, just to the east. Despite these advances, large interior areas to the east and south of Pasuruan remained non-Islamic. The most important center of resistance was the small principality of Blambangan at the far eastern tip of Java. The last of Java's Hindu-Buddhist courts, Blambangan was attacked in the 1540s, 1580s, 1590s, and early 1600s. The population of the Tengger mountains appear to have been drawn repeatedly into this contest. They had the unfortunate distinction of lying smack dab in the middle of the no-man's-land separating Muslim Central Java from Hindu Blambangan to the east (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974, 193).^[4]

The turmoil in this eastern region was soon complicated by a changing balance of power in Muslim Central Java. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the inland agricultural state of Mataram rose to power, ultimately dominating the trading ports of the north coast. While Mataram was nominally Islamic, and even used Islam as a rallying cry against its Dutch enemies, it greatly restricted the political influence of the once-powerful Muslim clergy. Court literati also revived some of the aesthetic styles of the pre-Islamic period (Ricklefs 1974) and created many of the distinctive ritual forms still associated with "Javanist" Islam.

Like its north-coast predecessors, Mataram looked east after consolidating its power in Central Java. It conquered Pasuruan in 1616, Madura in 1624, and Surabaya, its most powerful coastal rival, in 1625. Still non-Islamic, Blambangan was repeatedly attacked between 1635 and 1640, when Mataram forces finally managed to occupy its court. Like earlier Muslim powers, however, Mataram failed to develop administrative control of the eastern territory, and, with the help of forces from Hindu

[4] Even in the nineteenth century, legends collected in the countryside spoke of the violence of former times and the role of Tengger priests in resisting Islamic armies (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974, 179; Hefner 1985, 53-57; Rouffaer 1921, 300). Few of these tales are remembered today. Interestingly, the image of Islamization that emerges from these accounts is quite different from the relatively gentle process described in some Central Javanese myths (Geertz 1968, 29). Here in the eastern salient, or Oosthoek, Islam's advance was anything but a quiet process of personal conversion.

southern Bali, the wily Blambangan court eventually resurfaced and again challenged Mataram's authority (Ricklefs 1981, 44).

As a non-Islamic population, the Tengger highlanders were fair game for enslavement by Muslims. Between 1617 and 1650 Mataram forces made repeated forays into the mountain territories around Mount Bromo and nearby Mount Kawi to seize slaves. The prisoners were among the famous gajah mati ("dead elephant") population taken from eastern Java to Central Java to work as royal footmen and forest workers (Rouffaer 1921, 300).

While it could periodically devastate the region, however, Mataram was unable to establish a stable administration, and eastern Java's mountains provided shelter for anti-Mataram rebels. In the 1670s, for example, a Madurese prince by the name of Trunajaya mounted a powerful challenge to the Mataram court. It was suppressed only after the Dutch East Indies Company—which in 1619 had established a fort at the western end of the island—came to the aid of imperiled Mataram (Ricklefs 1981, 75). Once defeated, Trunajaya's forces took refuge in the Tengger mountains, where they were pursued by Dutch forces. This was the first European intervention in the highland area.

Around this same time a Balinese ex-slave by the name of Surapati was involved in several attacks on the Dutch, first in West Java and then in Central Java (Kumar 1976; Ricklefs 1981, 80). After the latter incident, he too fled east, and in 1686 he established a court near the port of Pasuruan at the northern foot of the Tengger mountains. Surapati's Pasuruan quickly became a political force in its own right, providing the organizational momentum for an anti-Mataram alliance linking Pasuruan, Tengger, Blambangan, and the Balinese. This brazen challenge to Mataram's authority could not long go unanswered. In 1706-7 the inland court forged an alliance with the Dutch East Indies Company, and some 60,000 VOC (Vereenighde Oostindische Compagnie), Mataram, and Madurese troops attacked Surapati's stronghold near Pasuruan (de Vries 1931, 1:20). Surapati was killed in the first weeks of battle and the powerful garrison overcome. Pasuruan was seized and turned into a Dutch fort— the first in East Java and just twenty kilometers from the Tengger mountain range. For years Surapati's descendants continued to put up resistance from hideouts in the Tengger mountains and Blambangan. The last rebel leader in Tengger was captured by Dutch forces only in 1764 (Jasper 1926, 11). When Blambangan fell in 1771 (Ricklefs 1981, 96), there followed one of the most peculiar events of Javanese history. So as to split the long-rebellious Blambangan court from its south Balinese allies, the Dutch took the unusual step of encouraging the Islamization of Blambangan's royal family. Although some villages are reported to have remained Hindu into the nineteenth century, this marked the effective

end of Hinduism in the Blambangan area (Pigeaud 1932). Henceforth Javanese Hinduism was restricted to the small peasant population of the Tengger highlands.

Dutch cooperation with Mataram, first against the Trunajaya rebels and then against Surapati, exacted a high price. In November 1743, in the aftermath of the Surapati campaign, the Dutch were granted full sovereignty over most of Java's north coast and all of the eastern salient (Ricklefs 1981, 89). The era of eastern Java's political autonomy thus finally came to an end. Even prior to the capture of the last Tengger rebels, the Dutch established a small presence in the upperslope village of Tosari. From 1743 to 1751 they laid out vegetable gardens there to provide food supplies for the Pasuruan garrison (de Vries 1931, 1:133). In the late 1760s native farmers in the region were given vegetable seeds and instructions for their cultivation, and between 1772 and 1790 a German worked as an agricultural extension agent in the village. Although its influence was at first only modest, European power had nonetheless penetrated the mountains, ending the long middle ages that had begun with Majapahit's fall. This also signaled the beginning of a new era in relations between upland society and the lowland state.

Several facts relevant to our understanding of the modem uplands stand out from this overview of precolonial history. Some 250 years of political violence, first of all, help to explain the unusual distribution of population in the Tengger mountains on the eve of colonial rule. Although the religious communities of the Majapahit era had been located in the more temperate midslope highlands, by the end of the eighteenth century these territories had been depopulated. The surviving mountain population took refuge in the less temperate—but militarily defensible— upperslope regions. Village settlement patterns were also influenced by this troubled history. Early visitors to the region consistently report that native settlements were located on steep ridges, high above cultivated valley floors, and often inconveniently remote from the springs on which villagers depended for water (Domis 1832, 327). Houses were built on terraces (gampengan ), clustered tightly together, without the home gardens characteristic of lowland settlements (van Lerwerden 1844, 82; Raffles 1965, 1:329). These hilltop hamlets provided protection from the predatory attacks that plagued this region well into the nineteenth century.

This same history explains certain cultural anomalies of the eastern salient as a whole. Many of the distinctive features of language, etiquette, politics, and art today identified as classically "Javanese" really developed only recently, in the course of the cultural renaissance that occurred at Central Java's courts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Pigeaud 1967, 1:7; Moedjanto 1986). The later diffusion of these styles to other areas of the island helped to reverse the trend toward cultural re-

gionalization evident in the early post-Majapahit period. Since it was never under effective Central Javanese control and was ceded to the Dutch in 1743, the eastern salient at first escaped many of these standardizing influences. It remained a stronghold of nonstandard dialects, the last bastion of popular Hinduism, and a region in which such quintessentially Central Javanese art forms as wayang puppetry and wayang wong theater were less popular than bawdier local arts (Pigeaud 1932; Hefner 1987b).

There was, however, a price to be paid for such cultural independence. The warfare that plagued the eastern territory for much of the post-Majapahit period effectively depopulated large areas of the countryside. We know something of the cultural traditions of Tengger and Blambangan because in these regions a critical mass of people and institutions survived. It is probable that indigenous eastern Javanese populations remained in other areas too at the end of the eighteenth century. Their ranks were so depleted, however, that they would soon be overwhelmed by the Madurese and Javanese who migrated to the area beginning in the late eighteenth century. In these regions a frontier culture emerged that incorporated Madurese, Malay, and Javanese traditions, obscuring what remained of eastern Javanese customs. In a region where Muslim religious schools (pesantren ) provided one of the few popular organizations capable of cutting across ethnic and communal lines, Islam would become the most influential of these post-traditional forces. Although its mountain regions remained non- or only nominally Muslim, lowland Pasuruan became one of the strongest centers of Muslim traditionalism in all Java.