History Keeps Roaring

The Kompas headline, “Netherlands Prime Minister Apologizes to Indonesia” (19/2/2022), has kept history “roaring” in Indonesia.

I borrowed the phrase from the poem by Sitor Situmorang, “To Clochard”, which was written in 1953. “In cold air”, Sitor writes in the poem, “history is roaring/Clear like ice hardening at heart”. He continues: “Between dusk and night/A deep wound stretches”.

The target of the apology offered by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is basically limited to the atrocities committed by that country’s military against tehe Indonesian people during the National Revolution of 1945-1949.

Meaning of ‘historical wound’

The National Revolution, as historian M.C. Ricklefs describes in his book, A History of Modern Indonesia (1983), is a powerful element in the Indonesian nation’s perception of itself. Goenawan Mohamad (GM), in his book Pembentuk Sejarah (Shaper of history, 2021), seems to give conceptual, imaginative support to Ricklefs’ statement through the phrase, “the collapse of a discourse”.

Why? It is because, writes GM, “Before 17 August 1945, it made thousands of people unable to identify themselves in a full tone, ‘We, the nation of Indonesia’. Not to mention, ‘We who can declare independence.’”

How can we derive some meaning from the views of Ricklefs and GM? Through them, we can state that the National Revolution of 1945-1949 was a great political innovation ever achieved by the Indonesian nation. With this achievement, the revolution induced the birth of an unprecedented le histoire du nouveau conscience (history of new awareness).

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This is very important to emphasize because of the fact that the “history of awareness” of the Indonesian people one or two decades earlier offered no hope. Dutch historian Henk Schulte Nordholt, in “Modernity and Cultural Citizenship in the Netherlands Indies: An Illustrated Hypothesis” (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), states that the perpetuation of the Dutch colonial system was only bolstered by the indigenous lower middle class.

This, he continues, explains why 60 million Indonesians in the 1930s could be controlled by 24,000 Caucasians, or just 0.4 percent of the population. Through the studies of Dutch anthropologist Jan van Baal and historian William O’ Malley, Nordholt refutes the assumption that the pre-independence Indonesian middle class was the breeding ground of the idea of nationalism. Historical fact has shown that the majority of the indigenous middle class saw the colonial state becoming their true habitat.

On this historical fact, Nordholt developed the hypothesis that the main interest of the indigenous middle class was to join modernity. “What they aimed at in the first place was not a nation, but a lifestyle.”

It is at this point that we can grasp Ricklefs’ “rumbling” above on the meaning of the National Revolution for the Indonesian nation. In a sense, we can go deeper into GM’s expression that “What collapsed was a discourse”.

This is because before the 17 August 1945 Proclamation, the prevailing discourse among the majority of the Indonesian middle class was the awareness of the glory of the colonial state in tendering modern life. The National Revolution of 1945-1949, therefore, was not just a direct reaction to the rotten mentality and structural mirage. It was rather a sacred calling to break the eternal shackles of contempt for a nation.

However, it was just this sacred calling that the Dutch wanted to destroy in 1945-1949. This followed the arrogance of Governor General de Yong, who said in the 1930s, “We have ruled here for 300 years with the whip and the club, and we shall still be doing it in another 300 years.”

This arrogant statement, quoted by Peter Hastings in “The Guide in Profile” (T.K. Tan, ed., Sukarno's Guided Indonesia, 1967), demonstrated the true Dutch colonial character. Whatever argument was invented later, it was de Yong’s arrogant character that formed the Dutch action to muzzle the Indonesian nation’s sacred calling during the 1945-49 revolution. In spite of already being in an anachronistic state, force was exerted to colonize Indonesia for another 300 years.

This was “part of” the historical wound created by the Dutch colonizers.

Long evolution of historical awareness

Yet the historical wound has been only partly revealed. Looking back in a random manner, we can find another wound through Bawadi, among others.

As Akira Nagazumi illumines in “The Pawnshop Strikes of 1922 and the Indonesian Political Parties” (Archipel, 1974), Bawadi was an employee of the Pawnshop Office in Ngupasan, Yogyakarta. Through the elementary education under the Ethics Policy that began in 1901, Bawadi’s social standing was slightly raised to become part of the priayi (aristocrat) group. Bawadi’s membership in the priayi group was not due to blood ties, but instead because Bawadi’s job was in the colonial bureaucracy.

Nagazumi noted that at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the meaning of priayi changed to become “the Javanese bureaucrat functioning within the framework of the colonial administration”.

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As his colleagues in the Pawnshop Office sensed, becoming priayi was a source of social pride for Bawadi. The problem was that the economic turmoil of the 1920s prompted Governor General D. Fock to economize. Especially for the Pawnshop Office, it meant that the laborers who transported pawned goods to auction venues had to be discharged. As a result, indigenous employees of the priayi class had to replace them.

Bawadi felt his social status plunge as a substitute for laborers and spontaneously refused to do it. Consequently, he was dismissed by his white superiors. His dismissal triggered widespread protests involving various labor unions and radical parties like Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union; SI), the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and even the “moderate” indigenous organizations Budi Utomo and Muhammadiyah. Apart from all this, we find a “historical wound” in Bawadi. This wound was fully understood by Indigenous Affairs Adviser R.A. Kern.

Here, Nagazumi quotes Kern’s report to the governor general that the incident could not be reduced merely to the “aristocrat-commoner” dichotomy, but rather that it revealed racial discrimination between European and native personnel. This racial discrimination was shown by the institutionalized difference between organizations for European and indigenous Pawnshop Office personnel, and at the same time indicated the dissimilar treatment of the two races. For this reason, Kern ruled out the legal aspects of Bawadi’s dismissal. Instead, what he stressed was “There is one Javanese suffering from the suppression of the ruler.”

Of course, the level of Bawadi’s awareness of social status was far below the standard of Sastrokadono (leader of the Pawnshop Office labor union), and cannot be compared with that of Abdul Muis, Semaun and Sutopo, respectively the leaders the of SI, PKI and Budi Utomo, who collectively resisted dismissals of a racist nature. So, in the cultural context, the quality of Bawadi’s awareness was referred to by Kern as an “Eastern” expression, which opposed public disgrace as his status was degraded from priayi to laborer.

Nevertheless, as described below, Bawadi’s attitude was one of “maximum” awareness. Why? It is because the quality and level of Bawadi’s self-awareness in the 1920s constituted the long evolutionary process of the “average” Javanese in the 19th century colonial era. “Average” here means that as long as a Javanese had no connection with ideas and centers of certain movements, like Islamic teachings at boarding schools, he or she had no conceptual resource to view the surrounding world.

Wasn’t it true that, by 1857 for instance, the “average” people of Tegalrejo, Yogyakarta, where Prince Diponegoro lived, no longer remembered the prince who had started the great War of Java in 1825-1830, as recounted by clergyman J.F.G. Brumund (1814-1863)? So, throughout pre-colonial history until the 1920s, the awareness of the “average” Javanese was not formed progressively. Here, the Forced Cultivation System (1830-1870) can serve as a guide.

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Unlike during the period of the VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) “administration” that officially ended in 1800, through the Forced Cultivation System, most Javanese people were directly and widely in touch with European power for the first time.

Here, there are two important notes to examine. First, through their performance in the Forced Cultivation System, innocent Javanese farmers became direct actors of producing materials for the emergence of the modern colonial state. This was a great contribution, because this led to an unprecedented change in the power structure in the history of Java. Second, Javanese farmers’ performance also created, in the words of Augustus J. Veenendal in “Building the Network of Railways and Tramlines” (2008), the cork on which the Dutch Principal State had almost drowned economically was again floating.

The issue is not whether Javanese farmers were aware of the “masterpiece” they had produced, but rather by what means the Dutch colonizers took advantage of the low awareness of Javanese farmers. A study by Robert Van Niel in Java Under the Cultivation System: Collected writings (1992) shows, in detail, the absence of awareness among farmers as common people over the process of the gigantic change.

With several minor exceptions, such as the protest lodged by Pasuruan farmers against the burden of sugarcane planting in 1833, Javanese farmers generally displayed stunning obedience to the rules of the Forced Cultivation System. This was not only limited to their readiness to provide one-fifth of their land for cultivating export crops for the European market, but also their compliance with the forced labor related to developing infrastructure for the Forced Cultivation System.

In a slightly more refined way, Van Niel in Java Under the Cultivation System describes the nature of the power imposed on farmers as autocratic arbitrariness with wide-ranging possibilities.

What really happened was that the Dutch colonizers systematically utilized the autocratic nature of traditional indigenous rulers who oppressed farmers to serve the colonial interest. Leaders of the modern colonial state realized, as Van Den Bosch stated in his performance report for 1830-1833, that farmers only obeyed the traditional indigenous elite. The latter’s task was merely to share the “right” over farmers’ forced labor that they previously monopolized with the organs of the Forced Cultivation System.

Here, the presence of the modern colonial state did not free farmers from the arbitrariness of the traditional elite, but instead benefited from the oppressive system that increased the farmers’ burden. All this was done for the sake of the budget surplus policy (positive trade balance), as introduced by Dick Hartoko and Bob Nieuwenhuys in Bianglala Sastra (Literary rainbow, 1985 [1979]). In order to preserve the profit balance, the low awareness of Javanese farmers must be maintained.

As long as this ethical question remains unanswered, the historical wounds will never disappear. And thus, history will only keep on roaring.

It means that education should remain absent among the Javanese people. So again, according to Dick and Niewwenhuys, the idea to promote knowledge was rejected by the Principal State, although a Banyumas assistant governor proposed in 1835 to allocate 30 guilders per month for the education of indigenous people.

From this, we can understand the context of Bawadi’s “maximum” awareness as mentioned above. From 1830, when the modern colonial state replaced the VOC, the Dutch rulers purposely neglected the people’s ignorance.

For almost 100 years from 1830 to the 1920s, the “call” of the white men’s burden of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was only an empty slogan. As proof, the “average” awareness of Javanese people during this period only reached the level demonstrated by Bawadi, who rejected his demotion to a laborer after he had become priayi. It was a very long evolution of awareness.

Ethical basis of power

It is from this perspective that we should look at the more fundamental context of the Dutch Prime Minister’s apology. On seeing this fact, that the actual actors developing the material basis of the modern colonial state and the cork on which the Netherlands floated were common farmers, we can ask on what ethical basis did the colonial rulers purposely maintain their ignorance for nearly 100 years? In another sense, the apology that was limited only to the colonial atrocities committed during the National Revolution of 1945-1949 fails to meet the true standard of ethics.

As long as this ethical question remains unanswered, the historical wounds will never disappear. And thus, history will only keep on roaring.

KOMPAS/JOHNNY TG

Fachry Ali

Fachry Ali, Cofounder, Institute for the Study and Advancement of Business Ethics (LSPEU Indonesia)

This article was translated by Aris Prawira.