On the Nature of Things | Forum

The Sundanese language is spoken today by about 36 million people in the western third of the island of Java, the world’s most populous island. Most of these Sundanese speakers live in the Indonesian province of West Java, which includes Bandung, the third biggest city in Indonesia, as well as most of the satellite towns of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia and the largest city in the southern hemisphere (with over 31 million inhabitants). These days, Sundanese is stereotyped to some extent as a language of the mountain people of West Java, having long since been replaced across most of the lowlands by Malay/Indonesian and Javanese.

Once upon a time, though, all of this part of Java, from the Brebes River right the way to the western tip of the island at Ujung Kulon (Hujung Barat in Old Sundanese), was ruled by a single kingdom (Figure 1). That kingdom was called Sunda. In more recent oral tradition, and in traditional Javanese historiography, the kingdom has been referred to as ‘Pajajaran’, but in old texts we find the name ‘Sunda’ instead — and this is the name used in Portuguese (çumda), Chinese (新拖國), and Arabic (ﺴﻨﺪﻩ) accounts as well (Figure 2). Sunda’s elites engaged in a range of ‘Hindu’ religious practices and worshipped Hindu deities; Buddhism does not appear to have been popular in the region after the early first millenium. It isn’t entirely clear what the religious practices of the commoners involved, as the texts that survive represent elite viewpoints, but there was almost certainly some Hindu influence at all levels of society.

Sunda appears by name in inscriptions beginning in the late first millennium CE, and it seems to have lasted as a largely independent polity for several hundred years — although whether it was a cohesive kingdom the entire time is doubtful. The account of the Chinese administrator Zhao Rukuo (c.1225) describes Sunda as a land of robbers, rarely visited by foreign merchants because of the anarchy that prevailed there. And in traditional Sundanese historiography, Sunda was only one component of the larger Sundanese-speaking culture region, with a rival kingdom based at Galuh to the east being of equal importance.

Anyway: The Sundanese capital was probably located at what is now the city of Bogor, one of the many satellites of Jakarta. In Old Sundanese this city was called Pakuan, and it had districts known as Pakañcilan and Pajajaran (whence the traditional name for the kingdom). Pakuan seems to have been referred to colloquially as Dayeh ‘(capital) city’ (modern Sundanese: dayeuh), and in the Portuguese accounts it tends to be called Dayo, a slight corruption of the Sundanese.

Jakarta, about forty kilometres north of Pakuan, was the preeminent Sundanese port-city. In Old Sundanese it was called Kalapa, and in Portuguese accounts of the early sixteenth century it appears as Calapa. (If you visit the old port of Jakarta they’ll tell you there that it was called ‘Sunda Kelapa’, but that’s actually based on a misreading of the captions on some sixteenth-century maps — Figure 3.) It was from ports like Kalapa and Banten that Sunda exported its principal commodities: black pepper and enslaved human beings.

Typhoon wrote: ↑Sat Aug 19, 2023 5:44 am People who cannot differentiate between Entomology and Etymology bug me in ways that I can't express.