ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the great Islamic revival of the 1980s, it is perhaps difficult to recall how different things looked a few years earlier to Indonesia's and, in particular, Java's fledgling Hindu community. The 1970s seemed a brightly optimistic period for Java's half-million Hindus. When I began my research in East Java in the late 1970s, I was struck by the millenarian euphoria widespread in Hindu circles. In private, some leaders spoke confidently of an impending wave of Hindu conversion. This event, they forecast, was about to restore Java's tiny Hindu community to the cultural greatness enjoyed centuries earlier under the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit. A few leaders even went so far as to predict the conversion of the majority of ethnic Javanese to Hinduism.
