Java, Asia's sixth largest island is a cigar-shaped island which sits on the Sunda oceanic shelf along with its neighbors: Sumatra(2), just to the northwest and Borneo(3), north of the Java Sea. There are 115 volcanos, 15 of which are active, running the length of the island and mostly nearer to its southern shores. The rain forest has been cleared from the lowland river valleys and coastal plains, and their fertile and swamp-free soil is intensely farmed and densely settled. Near the eastern end of the island, and narrowly separated from being a peninsula, is Madura.
About a hundred thirty million crowd the island's lower elevations. The center and east of the island speak Javanese--almost three quarters of the island's population--and the western third Sundanese. On Madura and near the Selat(4) Madura people speak Madurese. Many learn a dialect of Indonesian, the old lingua franca for markets and now the language of government and the nation's capital(5). The island is uniformly Sunni Moslem--more than 19 in 20, but divided between the majority 'abangan'(6), who are loosely observant and maintain cultural continuity with the pre-Islamic past, and the 'santri'(7) or orthodox, who often dominate the leadership.
The four largest cities represent the four languages. The largest is Jakarta, the capital, on a small bay and river mouth in the island's northwest. In the center of the west is Bandung, the cultural center of the Sundanese. At the north coast's center is Semarang and at the railroad bridge to Madura is Surabaya. For a fuller list see Javanese cities.
People arrived here long ago, though perhaps significantly later than mainland Asia; in any case other humanoids persisted on Java when they were extinct in continental Asia. The ancestors of the island's four linguistic groups arrived at the Greater Sunda Islands(8) thousands of years ago via the Philippines. By the seventh century Old Malay became the language of rule and commerce, but ancestral forms of the other three languages may have already developed.
Buddhism(9) probably arrived in the second or third century; in any case Sanskrit inscriptions date from the fourth. Shaivist Hinduism replaced Buddhism beginning in the ninth century. The new religions incorporated indiginous beliefs such as the Goddess of the "Southern"(10) Ocean. In the 15th century Islam arrived, initially by conversion, and later through the successful wars of local Islamic states. The 'abangan' (looesly observant) tradition was the norm(11) until reformist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries established its rival.
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(1) Jawa is the local name.
(2) Sumatera is the local name.
(3) Called Kalimantan by Indonesia.
(4) Selat is usually translated as channel or strait, but here it is more of a bay.
(5) Indonesian is the Indonesian name since about 1930 for the Malay language. The urban dialect is sometimes called Batawi.
(6) Means red or brown people.
(7) Means religious students.
(8) Java, Borneo, Sumatra and the Celebes
(9) Traders from southern India brought Theravada Buddhism.
(10) The Indian Ocean.
(11) Though the earliest preserved teaching texts are orthodox.