What's special about June 22, 1527?

By K. Basri

JAKARTA (JP): Jakartans celebrate the city's anniversary today as they have done for decades.

Authorities, businessmen and residents spend billions of rupiah every year for the event. The activities include a special fair, a series of exhibitions and a variety of competition.

As part of the festive mood, neon signs and colorful banners adorn many major roads in the city.

It seems that everybody in this city has agreed to accept June 22 as the authentic birthday of this city, now home to some 10 million population. But why June 22? It seems that not many know the history behind the date.

A few groups, in particular historians, have objected to the chosen date of June 22, 1527, which has been declared by the authorities as the early history of Jakarta.

The controversy arises due to uncertainty, mainly due to the few extant records on the founding of the city.

Even historians themselves cannot agree on an exact date.

Indonesian and Dutch historians still are sharply divided. Indonesian nationalists like to dwell on the long antecedents of the present city, tracing it back through Muslim and Hindu Javanese kingdoms until prehistoric times. The Dutch, writing about "their" Batavia, start with the conquest by Dutch East India Company forces and the building of a Dutch fort in 1619.

The difference of viewpoint is easy to understand, said Susan Abeyasekere, author of Jakarta A History.

Indonesians are naturally eager to see the capital of their independent republic as the direct descendant of great centers from pre-colonial times, making Batavia just a brief aberration of foreign domination amid centuries of Indonesian control, she said.

"To the Dutch, however, the previously existing towns near the site of Batavia were historically irrelevant: not only was the last of those Indonesian ports wiped off the map forever by Dutch arms, but moreover Batavia was a completely new species of city, having nothing in common with Indonesian towns which might have happened to pre-exist there. Batavia to the Dutch was a European creation, built by them out of nothing from entirely new materials."

According to official data, the date was dubbed as the of victory day of the combined Moslem troops from the Sultanate of Demak in eastern Java and of nearby Banten, led by commander Fatahillah.

After conquering the Sundanese-Hindu Pajajaran army, Fatahillah and his troops also defeated the Portuguese fleet at the Sunda Kalapa Bay.

Fatahillah, also known as Fadhillah Khan or to the Portugueseas Tagaril or Falatehan, then turned Sunda Kalapa into a vassal state of Banten and named the port Jayakarta, which means the perfect victory -- the origin of the present name of Jakarta.

According to historian Prof. Soekanto, the event happened on June 22, 1527.

But the historical foundations of this hypothesis have been doubted by some parties.

Professor Slamet Muljana of the University of Indonesia said the town received its new name from its third Moslem ruler, Prince Jayawikarta of Wijayakarta.

While the year has been well acknowledged by most historians due to the valid documents available both in Indonesia's and European archives, the date is still doubted.

A special research team set up few years ago to trace down the background of choosing June 22 learned later that it was based on "unscientific" reasons.

The team found that the date was chosen based on the tradition at that time that the attack of Fatahillah and troops should be carried out after the harvest season (April - May) and during the waning of the moonlight when the earth was totally dark.

Of course, many historians are not satisfied with the findings.

The dearth of historical documents is filled with a legend, said Adolf Heuken SJ, an author and observer of Jakarta's history, in his article in the June edition of Intisari magazine.

"Should people of this 20th century satisfy with a myth or they want a truth?," he wrote. "Jakarta, which is going to celebrate its 470th anniversary, should have a scientific and realistic history."

Based on its history, this capital is a young city compared to Beijing (about 300 BC), Hanoi (7th century) or Kyoto (794), but compared to other capitals in this region it has a respectable history. Bangkok, (1769), Sydney (1788), Singapore (1819) and Kuala Lumpur (early 19th century) were all founded later.

It entered history under different names and for the longest part of its existence was known by yet another name. The oldest part of Jakarta is known as Kota, a Sanskrit word that means fortified place. This area of the old city once was the busy harbor town of Sunda Kalapa that functioned since the 14th century as the entrepot for the Kingdom of Sunda (14th - 16th century). When Fatahillah troops conquered Sunda Kalapa in 1527, the place changed its name to Jayakarta. But a century later Jayakarta was destroyed by Dutch invaders and Batavia rose in its place in 1619.

The town was known by this name for nearly three and a half centuries until the Japanese occupation (1942-1945), when Jakarta was revived.