Kahuripan

It lasted twenty-three years and left no great monuments of the kind Mataram built. Its importance is different: it restored Javanese statehood after catastrophe, it created the port system that later kingdoms lived on, it produced one of the great Old Javanese poems, and its division into Janggala and Kediri set the political geography of eastern Java for the next two centuries.

At a glance

What was Kahuripan?

The state Airlangga founded after the destruction of Mataram. Its core was the Brantas river valley in eastern Java — the delta around modern Surabaya, the rice plains of Sidoarjo, and the uplands around Malang — and its wealth came from irrigated rice and from the river ports that connected the interior to the Java Sea.

It was a smaller and more commercial state than Mataram had been. Its capital has never been located with certainty; its charters record dams and ports rather than temple-mountains; and its king ended his reign by dividing it, which is an unusual thing for a successful ruler to do and the reason Kahuripan is remembered.

Who was Airlangga?

A prince of mixed parentage: his father was a Balinese king of the Warmadewa line, his mother a Javanese princess of the Mataram line, and he was born around 990. When the Mataram capital was destroyed in 1016, he escaped with a small party — the inscription names a companion, Narottama — and spent three years in the forests of the interior with a handful of followers.

In 1019 he was consecrated king by the "eminent men of the Buddhists, Shaivites and Brahmins", according to the Pucangan inscription, which he had carved in 1041 to tell his own story. That triple consecration is the founding act of Kahuripan, and it is also a statement of policy: a kingdom whose legitimacy rested on both religions at once, in a region where both were established.

How did he rebuild the kingdom?

Slowly, and by war. The Pucangan inscription records a series of campaigns between 1029 and 1037 against local lords and rival centres, and the picture it gives is of a king rebuilding a state from the fragments of the old one: defeating a lord here, taking a district there, and confirming the priests and villages in their lands as he went.

The instrument was the charter. Airlangga's inscriptions are grants of sima — tax-free land given to temples and villages — and confirmations of local rights, and they show a king buying loyalty with revenue rather than conquering territory. That is how a state the size of Kahuripan could be reassembled in a decade: not by an army, but by a thousand small legal acts.

What did the charters record?

Dams, mostly, and the taxes they made possible. The Kamalagyan charter of 11 November 1037 records the building of a dam and irrigation works on the Waringin Sapta, and the grant of land to the people who maintained them; it is one of the earliest detailed records of Javanese water management, and it shows the state's interest in the infrastructure that produced its rice.

The charters also record ports. Hujung Galuh, at the mouth of the Brantas, was the river port through which the interior's rice reached the sea; Kambang Putih, near modern Tuban, was the international port where Javanese ships met traders from Sumatra, China and India. A third place, Kambang Sri, is often described as a port but was in fact a village with a sanctuary, granted by charter in 1042 — a distinction worth making, because it shows how the kingdom's geography is still being reconstructed from its documents.

What was the relationship with Bali?

Family, and cultural colonisation in both directions. Airlangga's father was a Balinese king of the Warmadewa line, and his mother a Javanese princess; his brother Marakata ruled in Bali while he ruled in Java. The connection was not a union of the two islands but a dynastic alliance, and it explains why Javanese religious and literary culture took root in Bali so deeply in this period that Bali became its principal heir.

After Airlangga's death the link weakened, and Bali went its own way under its own kings. But the Javanese titles, the Shivaite-Buddhist synthesis, the Old Javanese language and the court rituals that Bali preserved into the modern era all date from this connection — which is why Balinese literature is written in a language that was already archaic in Java.

What was the economy?

Rice and trade, in that order. The Brantas delta was one of the most productive rice regions in Indonesia, and the kingdom's revenue came from taxing it; the ports exported the surplus and imported the things the court wanted — Chinese ceramics, Indian textiles, spices from the Moluccas. Javanese ships carried rice to Sumatra and beyond, and the Straits of Malacca was the great market.

The state's role was to keep the river navigable, the dams in repair and the ports loyal. That is what the charters are about, and it is why Kahuripan's history is a history of infrastructure as much as of kings.

What was the port system?

Two ports, two functions. Hujung Galuh, at the mouth of the Brantas, was the river port: rice, timber and inland produce came down the river to be transhipped, and the king's officials collected the duties. Kambang Putih, near modern Tuban, was the international port: Chinese, Sumatran, Indian and Arab ships called there, and the trade was in ceramics, textiles, spices and metals.

The two together made Kahuripan a trading state as well as a rice state, and that is the structural change from Mataram. The old kingdom's wealth had been the land; the new kingdom's wealth was the land plus the sea, and the ports were what the later kingdoms of Java fought over.

Why did Airlangga divide the kingdom?

Nobody knows for certain, and the sources disagree. The Pucangan inscription and the charters show the kingdom intact until 1042; in that year, or thereabouts, Airlangga divided it into two — Janggala in the north and Kediri in the south — and abdicated to become a hermit. The date itself is disputed: 1041, 1042, 1044 and 1052 all have their proponents, and the last dated charter is 1043.

The Javanese tradition, recorded centuries later in the Serat Calon Arang, explains the division symbolically: the king, told that his two sons would fight, divided the kingdom to prevent a war, and a holy man split a mountain to mark the boundary. Modern historians have offered more mundane explanations — a succession dispute, a division of administrative convenience, a division between coast and interior — and none is proven.

What is certain is the consequence. Janggala and Kediri were the two halves of eastern Java for the next century, and Kediri absorbed Janggala and became the dominant state. Airlangga's division created the political map that Singhasari and Majapahit inherited.

How was the kingdom administered?

Through the same machinery as Mataram, adapted to a smaller and more commercial state. The king ruled with a council of officials — the rakryan, the samget, the tanda — and through a hierarchy of local lords and village assemblies; the charters record the boundaries of the lands granted, the officials who witnessed the grant and the dues that were remitted. The state's reach was short: a day's ride from the capital, and beyond that the authority of local lords who accepted the king's supremacy when it suited them.

What held it together was the redistribution of revenue. The king granted sima status to land, which exempted it from royal tax and gave its income to the grantee; in return the grantee owed service, prayers and loyalty. The system was cheap, flexible and fragile: it worked as long as the king had land to give and the grantees valued his favour.

What does the Arjunawiwaha say?

It tells how the Pandava prince Arjuna retreats to a mountain to meditate, is tested by the gods, defeats the demon-king Niwatakawaca with a divine weapon, and is rewarded with heavenly maidens — and it is, at the same time, a poem about kingship. The hermit's discipline, the testing, the victory over disorder and the restoration of cosmic order are the king's duties written as myth, and the poem's patron is meant to see himself in Arjuna.

Mpu Kanwa wrote it around 1030, in a court dialect of Old Javanese of great refinement, using the Sanskrit kakawin metres adapted to the Javanese ear. It is the earliest securely dated work of Javanese literature, and it set the model for the court poetry of Kediri and Majapahit — a literature that reads as much as political theory as it does as art.

What did he leave?

A poem, a portrait and two kingdoms. The Arjunawiwaha, composed by the poet Kanwa around 1030, is one of the earliest and finest Old Javanese kakawin: the story of Arjuna's penance and his combat with the demon Niwatakawaca, written for a king who saw himself in the hero. It is a court poem about a king's duty, and it is the oldest work of Javanese literature that can be dated with confidence.

His portrait survives at Belahan, on the western slope of Mount Penanggungan: a statue of Vishnu riding the eagle Garuda, flanked by two goddesses, probably representing the king and his two queens. The site is a bathing place and a memorial, and the statue is one of the finest sculptures of the period. The tradition that his ashes were divided between the two kingdoms is not supported by the evidence, and this entry does not repeat it.

Why is the capital unknown?

Because it was built of perishable materials and its name was reused. The inscriptions name Kahuripan as the royal residence, and the charters place it in the lower Brantas; no stone foundations have been identified as its court, and no later source describes its site. Javanese courts of this period were built of timber, brick and thatch, and a capital that was not a temple complex could vanish into the rice fields.

That is a general problem for early Javanese history: the state's monuments were religious and its palaces were ephemeral, so the archaeology of the kingdom is the archaeology of its temples, and the political centre is inferred from inscriptions. Kahuripan is a state known through its paperwork.

What happened to the two kingdoms?

Janggala and Kediri coexisted, uneasily. Kediri, the southern and larger half, absorbed Janggala within a century and became the dominant state of eastern Java, patron of literature and of the kakawin tradition. Its kings ruled until 1222, when a low-born adventurer called Ken Arok overthrew the last of them and founded Singhasari.

The division therefore did not prevent the war Airlangga hoped to avoid: it postponed it, and created two rival states that fought over the Brantas delta for a hundred years. Airlangga's solution to a family problem became a structural problem for eastern Java, and the reunification of the two halves under Singhasari was the achievement that made Majapahit possible.

Common myths about Kahuripan

Timeline of Kahuripan

What the map shows next

At 1019 on the map Kahuripan has just been founded, and the Mataram Kingdom is a ruin.

At 1042 on the map the kingdom divides, and the Kingdom of Janggala and Kediri begin.