Airlangga restores the kingdom of East Java

Airlangga, born about 1001, was the son of King Udayana of Bali and of Mahendradatta, a great-granddaughter of Mpu Sindok, and came to the court of East Java to be married to a daughter of its king. He was there in 1016 (older works and some encyclopedias give 1006; Coedès follows the date established by L.-C. Damais) during the catastrophe that the Javanese inscription calls the pralaya, ‘destruction’: a prince of Wurawari destroyed the capital and the king was killed. Coedès thought it most likely that Srivijaya took its revenge for the Javanese invasion of 992 by provoking or supporting the attack, though Wurawari may simply have been a local chief. Airlangga, then sixteen, took refuge with hermits on Mount Vanagiri; some years later notables and Brahmins asked him to accept the crown, and in 1019 he was crowned, although his authority reached no farther than the coast between Surabaya and Pasuruan.

About 1028/1029 he began the reconquest. He defeated a ruler named Bhishmaprabhava; in 1030 Vijaya, the prince of Wengker, who was finally seized by his own troops and died in 1035; in 1031 Adhamapanuda; and in 1032 a woman ‘endowed with a formidable power, similar to a rakshasi’. In 1037, ‘having placed his feet on the heads of his enemies’, he took his seat on the throne and made Kahuripan, a site not yet identified, his capital. A princess with a Sumatran name, Sangramavijaya Dharmaprasadottungadevi, prominent at his court from about 1030, was probably a daughter of the king of Srivijaya captured by the Cholas, and in 1035 Airlangga founded a monastery called Srivijayashrama — signs, for Coedès, of a reconciliation between the old rivals. His inscriptions name merchants from India, Sri Lanka, Champa and Cambodia in the ports of the Brantas delta, and the poet Mpu Kanwa composed the Arjunawiwaha at his court.

His story is told in the bilingual Sanskrit and Old Javanese Pucangan inscription of 1041, now in the Indian Museum in Kolkata and known as the Calcutta Stone. In his last years Airlangga, perhaps already living as an ascetic, divided the kingdom into Janggala and Panjalu (Kediri) — to avoid a war between his heirs, as Coedès guessed; he died in 1049 and was buried at Belahan on the slope of Mount Penanggungan.