Prambanan and Sewu temples — one night wonders
Prambanan (derived from Parabrahman, or the highest God in Sanskrit) is a noted UNESCO heritage site in Yogyakarta. It houses grand temples to the Hindu Trimurti (three main gods) — Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma, and has temples of their vahanas (mounts) facing these — Nandi the bull, Garuda the eagle and a swan — respectively.
Prambanan was originally called Shivagraha as it was built as a Shiva temple, but was later expanded to include more Gods. The complex also houses a huge set of Buddhist temples called Sewu (meaning thousands) temples.
Prambanan shares a similar historical arc to Borobudur. It was first built in the 9th century, probably by Hindu kinds who wanted to rival the Buddhist patronage to Borobudur. As the empire declined and moved Eastward, Prambanan was neglected. A huge earthquake in the 11th century damaged it, and it soon fell into ruin.
Though the local population did not forget it, it was ‘rediscovered’ in the 19th century. Some of the temple complex has been restored. Reconstruction activity is still on, hampered by the fact that a lot of the original masonry was scavenged to construct houses in the intervening centuries.
Prambanan has its own set of rich myths. The popular one is that the daughter of a local king — Rara Jonggrang — was pressured to accepting the marriage proposal of his killer — Prince Bandung. She put up an impossible condition for him to win her hand. She wanted him to build a thousand temples, overnight.
But the prince was a master of occult arts. As night fell, he invoked a demon army who began work. Dawn approached, and a worried princess decided to thwart his plans. She called her handmaidens to wake the roosters and to light a huge fire nearby. The demons, thinking dawn had already broken, disappeared into the earth, leaving behind 999 temples. The prince was so wild with the princess that he cursed her to become a statue of Durga.
Legend apart, Prambanan is estimated to have housed 240 temples at its apex. However, earthquakes and theft over the centuries reduced the temple to mostly rubble. It was only in the 1930s that a concerted effort began to reconstruct the temples. The effort was halted during the world war, and picked up pace only after Indonesia’s independence.
Today, you can spy towering temples to the three main Hindu Gods and their mounts, but the complex also has a lot of stones that archeologists are piecing together to reconstruct others.
The main temples have stories from the Ramayana carved on the walls. In addition to the main Gods, there are also temples to the Hindu God Ganesha, and to the saint Agastya. As per myth, Agastya is credited to bringing Hinduism south of the Vindhya mountain range, so it’s likely that his statue shows the influence of trade with Southern India.
Unlike regular Shiva temples, the main Shiva temple houses a statue of Shiva with four arms. There are theories that the statue is modelled after the first king who began construction of Prambanan, likely as a way to immortalise himself.
While the nearby Sewu temples were first in a separate area, they now lie in the same compound as the government merged the land of these and a village in between to create a single large space.
The Sewu temples are of Buddhist vintage. The largest is the Manjusri temple, likely built as a place for the local king to worship. They were also mythically built by demons as part of the prince’s answer to Rara’s challenge. This, and the fact that many of the stones were covered in volcanic ash, protected them, as locals did not flick stones from there. However, there was much plunder in the recent centuries, especially during the Dutch rule. It is estimated that a number of statues were decapitated and their heads carried away for museums abroad.
Today, the main Manjusri temple has been rebuilt, but others are still under reconstruction.
