The battle of Ganter (1222)
Event Jawa Timur
Contested
Other and rejected name forms
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The defeat of Kertajaya of Kadiri by Ken Arok at Ganter, ending Kadiri's power in East Java and founding Tumapel or Singhasari — an event for which nearly all information comes from the Pararaton, a text compiled more than two centuries later.
What can be said
That Kadiri ended and Singhasari began in the early 1220s is supported by inscriptions and by the recorded sequence of rulers. That it happened through a single battle at Ganter, led by a man named Ken Arok who had been a servant and a robber, comes from the Pararaton alone.
The Pararaton relates that the Shaiva and Buddhist clergy took Ken Arok's side because Kertajaya demanded they worship him. The account explains something plausible — a shift of support by religious institutions — in a manner characteristic of chronicle: through one decisive insult. The first may well be true; the second is a form of telling.
Ken Arok and the Mpu Gandring kris
The Pararaton's life of Ken Arok is a chain of killings carried out with one commissioned kris taken before it was finished, and the maker's curse that it would kill seven kings. The chain is then fulfilled through his descendants.
This is the shape of a story, not of a record: an object carrying consequence down the generations is how a chronicle explains why a royal line ended in violence. That is why Ken Arok appears in this corpus with an explicit statement of the limits of knowledge, and why his existence as a person is disputed. The dispute is registered as claim CLM-0010.
Full entry 3 / 3
2 sections, 4 sources, one of them primary.
Full does not mean finished. It means this record clears the bar this encyclopedia sets before it will speak at length.