Hilmar_Farid-Batjaan Liar in the Dutch East Indies

Batjaan liar in the Dutch East Indies:a colonial antipode

HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

In the historical literature of Indonesia, the formation of the nation is oftenpresented as the work of an elite intelligentsia educated in Dutch schools andemployed in the colonial government’s offices. Supposedly, it was theseofficials, who had access to the cosmopolitan knowledge about nationalism inthe world and access to the industrial technology of printing presses, who hadthe ability to articulate a critique of colonialism from within the very logic ofthe colonial rulers’ own ideology (nationalism) while simultaneously invitingmass participation into a newly imagined community of compatriots. Theyissued the call ‘arise countrymen’ and magically the masses unitedthemselves into a nation and resisted the colonial rulers. Composed of theelite intelligentsia itself, the nationalist elite that supposedly pioneered thenation wrote themselves into the script in the starring role, systematicallyignoring the lower-class figures of the movement. Expunged from this elitehistory were a large number of nationalist activists and prolific writers. Thestruggle of these orang partikelir (private or independent persons) outside thecolonial bureaucracy, especially those connected with labor unions andpeasant associations, to publish and distribute their writings has beenignored.1

In this elite version of the writing of national history, we can see themeeting point between the thought of the colonial rulers and that of the post-colonial elite. Both viewed the lower classes as children who could not moveon their own initiative. The colonial rulers regarded them as the ‘object ofnationalist agitation and propaganda’ while the nationalist leaders perceivedthem as ‘the mass waiting for leadership’. This conjunction of colonial andlocal elite narration of the national history was by no means unique toIndonesia. Indeed, the critique and the need to go beyond or beneath thisnarrative are among the initial motivations for the launching of SubalternStudies in India.2

This article aims to resurrect some of the voices expunged from the elitenational history of Indonesia. It focuses on the radical literature produced bythe nationalist movement of the early twentieth century which wasdisparagingly dubbed by the colonial state as batjaan liar (wild publications);there was perhaps an ironic expression of frustration on the part of thecolonial state because ‘wild’ clearly signifies that the colonial state was unableto control the growth of this subaltern literature. It included a great varietynovels, poems, pamphlets, newspapers and journals and amounted to

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hundreds of titles, which mushroomed after 1914.3 In the mid-1920s theproduction of batjaan liar reached its peak, as did the burgeoning anti-colonial movement. After the suppression of the failed 1926 uprising of theanti-colonial movement, the batjaan liar was also banned.4 Dutch colonialscholars then systematically removed the traces of batjaan liar in the publicconsciousness: the publications were forbidden to be studied in schools or tobe kept in libraries. Their efforts were renewed later by nationalist scholars,such as H B Jassin, eager to distance the nationalist movement from suchlow-class militancy.

The journalists and activists behind batjaan liar were usually affiliated withthe left movement. Their efforts to publish were nothing short of heroic, giventhe censorship of the colonial state and the risks of imprisonment, anddeserve a place in the history of the nationalist movement even if the nationwas not the central theme of their writings. Appropriately the language theyused was colloquial Low Malay, which was significantly different from thecolonial administration codified High Malay found in the texts nowconsidered to be the loci classici of nationalist thought, such as the lettersof R A Kartini and the writings of Soekarno and Hatta. Unlike writers andactivists from other colonial societies who wrote in the languages of theircolonizers to express their thoughts, these writers and activists from theNetherlands East Indies turned one of the indigenous languages, Low Malay,into a powerful tool of resistance, able to express what Marx called ‘thelanguage of real life’.5 These writers imagined Indonesia as a nation of toilersstruggling against exploiters, and many of those exploiters were putative‘Indonesians’.

The production and distribution of batjaan liar

Writers on nationalism tend to emphasize the role of literacy (Gellner) and‘print capitalism’ (Anderson) in the formation of nationalism. Printcapitalism according to Anderson eliminated the dominant influence ofLatin in Europe and ‘created unified fields of exchange and communicationbelow Latin and above the spoken vernaculars’ and helped to connect peoplewho ‘might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another inconversation’.6 In this version of nationalism’s history, capitalism appears asa progressive force that breaks up an older consciousness of time and spaceand provides the basis for the sense of national community.

However, what occurred in the colonies could perhaps be described as‘print colonialism’ since all modern printing equipment, first introduced inthe 1600s, was almost entirely controlled by the colonial rulers. The DutchEast India Company (VOC), which ruled parts of the Indies up to 1799,strictly controlled the printing houses. Almost all publications, such as thenewspaper Bataviaasch Koloniale Courant, were issued from the government’sown printing house. A law passed in 1856 partially opened up the printingbusiness by allowing people to publish magazines and newspapers, but eventhose publications had to pass the censors first. The first indigenouspublication only emerged after a 1906 law repealed the old regulation that

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allowed the colonial state pre-publication censorship. Thus, for 300 years allproduction of reading material in the Dutch East Indies by modern printingpresses was in the hands of the colonial officials and European privatebusinesses.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the government began usingMalay as a medium of communication with the colonized. Faced with aprofusion of different dialects of Malay, they chose one dialect, codified it,and called it High Malay. They standardized the High Malay language suchthat it could be used for official purposes. It was a somewhat artificiallanguage in the hands of the Dutch since they developed their own set of rulesfor it. The term ‘Melayu Rendah’ (Low Malay) was invented by the colonialstate to denigrate the colloquial Malay, the lingua franca of the archipelago.Until the end of the nineteenth century, most publications were for colonialgovernment officials, plantation owners and their staff, and a small number ofindigenous persons with Dutch education. They usually used Dutch or HighMalay and were full of stories about plantation revenues, state budgetproblems, and official ceremonies. Given their readership, these publicationsdid not criticize the colonial system.

This situation began to change when some Indo-Chinese and Indo-Europeans established dozens of new printing houses towards the end ofthe nineteenth century. They ended the Dutch monopoly in the publishingindustry. These new publications carried stories about investigations intoscandals at the plantations, romances that offended colonial good taste, andnews about the Russian-Japanese war from the perspective of those insolidarity with a rising Asian power. From the printing presses of the Indo-Chinese and Indo-Europeans emerged a new literature in Low Malay:newspapers, novels, poems, advice books, and reports on events in the Indies.This new literature found a market in the people educated in the expandingcolonial school system of the late nineteenth century. By the beginning of thetwentieth century the number of ‘native’ students at government and privateschools had reached about 80,000. The emergence of a Low Malay presschanged the script in which that language had usually been written. The newpress adopted the Roman script already in use for High Malay. The Jawi andRumi scripts, which had been the standard scripts for Malay for centuries,were displaced. Few publications in Low Malay appeared in any script otherthan Roman after the early twentieth century.7 Trade unions and politicalorganizations were important centers of the production and distribution ofbatjaan liar. The railway workers union, VSTP (Vereeniging voor Spoor- enTramwegpersoneel), based in Semarang, bought their own printing press andpublished a newspaper Si Tetap [The Steady One]. Its circulation 15,000copies was remarkably large in a colonial society where the literacy rate ofthe native population in Java was as low as 6.4 percent.8

Unlike the Dutch printing houses which only employed ‘natives’ asunskilled workers, the Indo-Chinese and Indo-European private printingand publishing houses employed them as assistant editors and sometimesgave them the opportunity to write. Several important figures in theproduction of batjaan liar such as R M Tirtoadhisoerjo started their careers

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as interns at the publishing houses owned by the Indo-Chinese and Indo-Europeans. They learned, apart from writing and editing, how to manage apublishing house so that it could be self-sustaining and produce readingmaterial independently of the colonial power.9 Some of them ventured out tostart their own businesses in the early twentieth century. In 1907, Tirtoadhi-soerjo started a publishing firm called the Medan Prijaji and published anewspaper with the same name. In Solo, H M Misbach founded thepublishing house Insulinde which produced much of the radical literatureof the 1910s.

These radical literatures discussed concrete problems faced by politicalorganizations, conflicts with the colonial government, and inequalities andinjustices typically encountered by the readers. These journalists were verymuch aware that their position was entirely in conflict with the colonial rulers.Consider what Mas Marco wrote:

Indeed, it is hard for people to side with the weak ones. Look at the repeatedstrikes that have entered into the news reports of Sinar [a newspaper]. Here thereports reveal that there were dozens of victims in these strikes, and it certainlymakes sense that it was so [with so many people joining the strikes]. Challengingor resisting the owners of factories is the same as resisting an unjust government.Because of this, a war of voices, i.e. the side of the government and the side of thepeople, has emerged between newspapers. Was any newspaper established inthe Indies that was supported by the monied class so that it could challenge thepeople’s newspaper? There is! The readers can find the name of that newspaperby themselves. Other than that, we can only remind you, don’t read just anynewspaper. Pick one that genuinely sides with you and does not side with themonied class. Otherwise, it is foreseeable that we in the Indies will definitely fallinto a very humiliating hole of misery.10

Colonial rulers were conscious of the power of words and employed all sortsof strategies to suppress Mas Marco’s newspaper. Censorship and repressionagainst the press were often applied. Dozens of indigenous journalists as wellas the Dutch ones who sided with the movement were arrested and tried forviolating the press law. Colonial rulers also ordered printing houses owned bythe Dutch not to serve indigenous publishers of batjaan liar. The rulers alsoexpanded their own publication of Malay-language books, whose content andstyle of language were more agreeable to them.

As journalists, writers and publishers began to get involved in trade unionsand nationalist organizations, they strengthened the financial and institu-tional bases of their publishing houses. Members of the organizations wereusually obliged to buy newspapers and other printed matter produced bythese publishers. Likewise, the publications helped to expand the organiza-tion. This cooperation with organizations brought in quite a large income fora publisher, sometimes even more than that earned by the colonial publishers.Some of them were successful enough to parlay the capital earned into otherbusiness ventures, such as opening hotels and restaurants.

The wave of workers’ strikes from 1918 to 1923 was crucial for the activistsand their supporters. It helped them to better understand the colonial system.

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This radicalization of labor in turn increased the growth of batjaan liar. In thesecond half of the 1910s, hundreds of books and dozens of newspaperscategorized as batjaan liar were published. In contrast to reading material inDutch and High Malay which taught the natives about law, regulations andorders, the publications in Low Malay brought up a wider variety of themes.Not all of them were related to politics or nationalism. There were storiesabout criminals, romantic scandals, and lifestyles of the urban youth. Thesame writers and publishers also produced propaganda and translations ofpolitical books. Biting criticism and polemics were popular forms of writing,especially in the movement’s newspapers. Even though the main target wasthe colonial bureaucracy, the movement’s activists bitterly argued amongstthemselves in the Low Malay press.

The term batjaan liar itself was actually used by colonial rulers to refer toall books published by orang particulier, not just those published by radicalactivists. From the beginning of the twentieth century, academics and colonialbureaucrats, like Snouck Hurgronje, had paid attention to ‘reading materialsthat are dangerous for indigenous people whose intelligence is low’. Tocounter these publications, the government established a ‘commission forpopular reading’, or Balai Pustaka, in 1908, with the explicit goal to ensure‘that the educated indigenous people have decent reading materials’.11 Theyrecruited several educated natives as editors, whose task was not only to bringthe use of Malay in accordance with the standards established by the colonialgovernment, but also to ensure that the content of the reading was, as wemight say today, ‘politically correct’. Books and magazines published by thisinstitution were intended to introduce the modern world to the readers. Thiswas a contradictory task because these reading materials wanted, simulta-neously, to prevent the growth of modern ideas about individual rights andfreedom. The books were usually distributed to plantation companies,government offices, government schools, and by mobile libraries in trucksto reach the villages and backstreet urban neighborhoods. Additionally, theBalai Pustaka also became a kind of clearing house for colonial scholar-bureaucrats who monitored the political movements. Several ‘natives’ whohad been inside the movement switched their loyalty and worked with thepolice and prosecutors to interpret secret letters intercepted by officials. D ARinkes, the first director of Balai Pustaka (1908 1917), was also the Advisorfor Internal Affairs (a department policing the politics of the ‘natives’) and akey source of information for the colonial rulers about the ‘natives’.

Nonetheless, this combination of the power of swords and words could notcurb the growth of radical publications. Balai Pustaka provoked the activistsinto publishing even more of their own literature. Starting in 1920, an open‘war of voices’ (as Mas Marco called it) was launched. Radical politicalorganizations began to emerge at the district level with their own publications.Various newspapers not only scrutinized the content of the books publishedby Balai Pustaka, but also revealed the political interests behind them.Semaoen, one of the trade union leaders, said ‘the oppressed have to readtheir own books written by people from their own class; this is how theoppressed class will be fundamentally aware of its fate’.12 Moesso, a leader of

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the Communist Party in Surabaya, directly aimed his criticism at BalaiPustaka:

Those people’s almanacs and peasant almanacs certainly have scientific things(wetenschappenlijk) which apparently do not have anything to do with politicsbut people who know just a little bit about politics can understand that thosebooks and almanacs were not primarily written or produced for educating thepeople but for misleading people’s thoughts in a gentle and systematic way. Thefruit of thought from that other side (pihak sana) was implanted in the people’sheads. It is time. And our duty is to fight the influence of Balai Pustaka. We haveto publish the necessary books, our own storybooks, so that the people will notbe uprooted from the movement. People should not follow the stream of goodadvice from books from the Volkslectuur [Balai Pustaka] because those readingmaterials are not good for the colonized.13

Anti-colonial politics gained momentum and the influence of the leftmovement became wider. In 1923, the Indonesian Communist Party(PKI) the first organization using the term ‘Indonesia’ in the colony wasestablished. Propaganda, as could be expected, received great attention fromthe party leaders. Learning from the experience of Iskra and Pravda in theSoviet Union, PKI leaders established a special body whose task was topublish socialist literature; it was named the Commission for ReadingMaterials (Komisi Batjaan). Soekindar, an important official of the Commu-nist Party, explained the need to publish reading materials that would serve asthe basis of a ‘scientific perspective’:

Therefore, it is necessary to highlight those difficult sayings with a katjamatawetenschap [scientific perspective]. At the same time our movement should notignore their knowledge. But in the Indies, here, what is still disappointing is thatvery little socialistisch literatuur exists which would be useful for our movement.In our opinion, the wetenschapplijke literatuur [scientific literature] is like theheart of mind of the movement so if they do not exist it would be difficult for theknowledge of the movement to spread in the heart of the people. For all friendsin the movement, we call upon them to work hard to translate socialist texts intoMalay or to produce the original texts ourselves. We especially call upon thehoofdbestuur [central committee] of the PKI to be willing to collect existing textsin Dutch and attempt to produce Malay texts or original texts. Nowadays mostof the people are still filled with the spirit of capitalism, so that they who havethis new science can implant [the new science] in the heart of the people. Andbelieve me, the new world will be born soon.14

The PKI’s commission published, among other things, the first translation ofMarx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto in 1923. But there were also quite afew original texts explaining Marxist theory and methods for formingorganizations. The dominant discourse, as might be expected, was aboutprogress, the prospects of a new socialist world, and the importance ofscientific knowledge in reaching socialism. Contrary to common belief thatcommunist propaganda was always shallow and uniform, the PKI’s earlyliterature displayed some creative thinking. Writers like H M Misbach tried to

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combine Communism and Islam at a time when the colonial state wasencouraging Muslim leaders to view communists as wholly alien and atheistic.

At the PKI congress in 1924, the leaders came to the conclusion that ‘theera of agitation to unify the heart has passed and the party should as soon aspossible improve the quality of the cadre and the members’ knowledge’.15 Onthe one hand, this decision could be interpreted as strengthening theinstitutions producing batjaan liar. On the other hand, it could alsobe interpreted as the beginning of a clear schism within the movement asthe party sought ideological purity. The party limited its themes related to theparty line, such as organizational discipline, internationalism, and proletar-ianism. The leaders of the party themselves often referred to decisions of theComintern and the need to fight for the ‘class line’ within the movement. Thiskind of tension consistently marked the formation of discourse aboutnational identity during the colonial era. In the next sections, we will showthe dynamics of this tension.

Critique of colonialism

Almost all leaders and activists within the radical movement in the earlytwentieth century came from the ranks of workers, lower officials, and pettytraders.16 Their life experiences were different from those of the priyayi (theJavanese aristocracy) and of the students who joined organizations such asPerhimpunan Indonesia (Indonesian Association) in the Netherlands, and ofthe students who were involved in the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge) of1928, resulting in different perspectives on colonialism. The priyayi usuallyrefrained from openly criticizing colonialism. Their ideas centered onreforming the colonial system such that it would respect the indigenouspopulation more and pay attention to their conditions. They usually situatedthemselves between ‘the people’ and the high Dutch officials. They spoke onbehalf of ‘the people’ to the colonial government in terminologies morecomprehensible to the colonial rulers than to the people they claimed torepresent. Working in the bureaucracy, they were more drawn to Javanesefeudal traditions (or rather, invented traditions) than to the modern ideasemerging in the island’s bazaars and factories. It was from amongst the ranksof the priyayi that the colonial rulers found many men willing to acceptappointments to sit in the Volksraad (a kind of parliament) established in1918.

Dutch-educated Indonesian intellectuals were usually sharper in criticizingcolonial rulers than the priyayi. Some of the students who were part ofPerhimpunan Indonesia were very radical and willing to adopt socialist andcommunist ideas they learned in Europe. They talked about principles offreedom, national unity, and solidarity with the oppressed. Nevertheless, theybarely understood the concrete situation in the Indies. Instead, they thoughtmore in terms of a racial struggle between Asia and Europe which sometimesoverlapped with the socialist struggle against capitalism.17 Their reluctance orinability to develop an analysis about class was probably a result of theirbackground as part of the traditional elite and their conviction that they

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would become the new rulers if the Dutch were ever driven out of Indonesia.Their nationalism, therefore, relied more on differences of skin color ratherthan the economic inequality produced by colonialism. They spoke Dutchfluently and the High Malay used among the educated, so that they often feltmore comfortable debating with colonial rulers who were their enemies ratherthan talking with the people whose interests they were supposed to defend.

The writers of batjaan liar, by contrast, wrote in straightforward prose andwere not hesitant to satirize the powerful. They understood, or evenexperienced, the suffering of plantation and industrial workers, and manyof them even had the experience of working in those sectors before joining themovement. They never felt the need to paternalistically represent other peopleto the colonial rulers. The tone of their writings was also very clear, directedtowards the people and not to the colonial rulers. This was what made theirpublications worrisome for the rulers who still believed in the possibility of‘association’ between the rulers and the ‘natives’. These radical writersdreamed of their own modern world, one inspired by the Russian Revolution,Kemal Attaturk, and the concrete experience of the colonized. In contrast tothe educated priyayi who seemed hesitant to express their opinions, theactivists wrote in a style that was alternately intimate, witty, ironic andsarcastic. By borrowing idioms from different languages impossible incolonial Dutch or High Malay they could evoke a wide range of registers.Theirs was a flexible heteroglossia. Consider the following quotation:

Poor those fellows who have that saying! Who the hell is he? The ass-lickerconsists of two words: lick plus ass. Lick�rub the tongue against something.Ass�je weet wel (well you know what). Yikes, disgusting, huh! [Brrrr,afschuwelijk, he!] But there are many people who like to do it. For the Javanese,the ones who do it most often: priyayi. Many people from other nations knowthat many Javanese priyayi like likken. It is clear that many people do notunderstand the value of hard work, or they do not trust their own strength. Forthose who know would certainly feel ashamed to lick like that.18

Some of the activists used Low Malay consciously as an act of resistance tothe colonial system. There was a practical reason as well. Semaoen, chiefeditor of the above-mentioned union-owned daily newspaper Si Tetap, forexample, said that Low Malay was used because it was understood by themajority of the East Indies population, unlike High Malay or Dutch. Sincethe number of Javanese who could read romanized characters was only 6.4percent, those interested in the batjaan liar formed reading circles where theliterate ones would read aloud to those who were illiterate. This practice wasonly possible in Low Malay which was more a transcription of dailylanguage.

Activists of the lower class in the nationalist movement always basedthemselves on their concrete experience of injustice and composed journal-istic reports that exposed the cruelty of colonial practices. It was the lowerclass’s experience of oppression that grounded its conception of Indonesiannationalism. The writers of the batjaan liar did not imagine themselves to bein solidarity with every person in the Netherlands East Indies; they viewed

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the priyayi as part of the colonial state, not part of the Indonesian nation.Their literature presented stories about the kidnapping of women to beturned into plantation slaves and the hunger suffered by certain communities.Such stories filled the pages of newspapers and inspired various pamphlets,novels and poems. The descriptions were usually precise and included detailsthat reflected the writer’s knowledge of the situation. The two main targets ofcriticism were the expropriation of land by plantation owners and taxcollectors. Once urban industry developed, the radical literature alsoaddressed injustices at the workplace. There were also critiques of the localaristocracy in imposing feudal customs. One article, for instance, complainedabout the regulations requiring bank workers to squat and pay obeisance(sembah jongkok) when their managers appeared.19 The language of class wasvery striking and became the trademark of radical literature of the 1920s.

Critiques of colonialism did not stop at matters directly experienced by thecolonized. Activists realized that education was crucial for progress and forthe advancement of the anti-colonial movement. Education was needed toundo the education promoted by the colonial state. Constructing a newhistory of the Indies society thus became an important aim. Perhaps the mostambitious project in this respect was Marco Kartodikromo’s rewriting of theBabad Tanah Jawa, the classic Javanese-language text of the history of Javafirst written by the court poet of King Pakubuwono III of Surakarta in 1788.The text was written after the Surakarta court had already been defeated bythe Dutch and reflected the Javanese royalty’s compromise with colonialism.Mas Marco’s version was published in serial form in the magazine Hidoep in1924.20 The goal of the rewriting was to ‘take back the past of the Javanesewho have all along been in the hands of the Dutch’. Marco noted thatcolonialism did not only create injustice in economic matters but also robbedthe consciousness of the colonized of their own past. He criticized thecollaboration between the colonial rulers and the indigenous literati(pudjangga) to reshape the past:

Babad is a knowledge (wetenschap), but not a few composers of Babad fakedtheir writings. This problem turns out to be like what the Czechs would say:‘Among those Babad composers, there are also some who fake the Babad theywrite while Babad is supposed to be written truthfully like what actuallyhappened.’ The Turks have a saying as well, ‘the one who writes or composesBabad is not an ink container’.21

While writing his own babad Marco studied the writings of colonial scholarssuch as Sir Thomas Raffles (1781 1826) and Pieter Johannes Veth (18141895) about Java and expressed his criticism toward both their facts andinterpretations. Marco divided his book into six parts, covering the origins ofthe name Java, the arrival of Hinduism, and the arrival of the Portuguese andDutch. For Marco, the existing Babad Tanah Jawa basically reflected thedefeat of Javanese culture. Therefore, he felt the need to provide a scientificgrounding to understand why the Javanese had been defeated and what theyhad to do to overcome the weakness. Unlike the poets who failed toacknowledge the defeat of the Javanese kingdom and culture, Marco

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highlighted the intellectual and moral weaknesses of Javanese kingsthemselves as the main cause of the defeat. Since the coming of Hinduism,he contended, Javanese kings had never waged any resistance.22 For Marco,the Babad was a rewriting of history in a way that would be useful for theanti-colonial movement. Other activists of his generation shared his viewseven though none wrote at such length about history.

One crucial theme in the production of batjaan liar was race. From the endof the nineteenth century, the colonial rulers imposed a system of segregationby dividing the society into three strata: (1) the Dutch and other Europeans,(2) Foreign Orientals, such as the Chinese and Arab, and (3) the natives. Theradical writers sometimes combined their analysis of capitalism undercolonialism with their criticism of the Chinese, as reflected by the term‘babah kapitalisten’.23 This tendency often provoked debates between theChinese and the native writers. When Marco published Mata Gelap [In aRage], a novel about colonial society which, among other things, portrayedthe Chinese traders as rentiers, a newspaper owned by a Chinese criticized hisuse of the rather pejorative labels Cina and bah:

Today we received a story book which is entitled Mata Gelap, written by M.Marco, editor of Doenia Bergerak in Solo. Actually the book has such a lowquality that initially we didn’t really want to talk about its content in thisnewspaper. But since the writer there expressed his condescending attitudetowards the Chinese, we feel forced to write this review, with a request that Mr.Marco in the future if he writes another book, doesn’t insult the Chinese likewhat he does now, which is shown in the sentence: ‘Bah! I want stroopijs [coldsyrup]’ Remember, the Chinese are also of humankind. The Chinese feel andacknowledge that in this colony they are like guests and indeed want to livecordially and peacefully with the Bumiputra. But the Bumiputra, as hosts, alsohave to show respect and humility towards the Chinese. As polite people, hostsnaturally have to show to their guests.24

Marco then responded:

That term [Cina] has been commonly used to refer to the Chinese . . . if weinteract with the Chinese, we always use that term, and well, nobody rejects it.Haven’t the Javanese given enough respect to their guests? Haven’t the Javaneseshowed enough cordiality to their guests? If we say Babah or Bah or say Cina forthe Chinese, does it mean a humiliation to the Chinese? Actually we don’t quiteunderstand. Why, on the map, it’s still written China, is it not? If you guestsreally don’t want any dispute with the hosts, we expect you not to prolong thismatter. Remember, this time, this is not a good time around the world . . . . It’sanother problem if you guests want to look for problems with the hosts. If theguests can not live genially with the hosts, it should be the hosts who carry outwhat’s just.25

Problems of race and ethnicity interacted with the batjaan liar writers’concern for class and anti-colonialism. The colonial state tried its best to keepthe different groups of the Indies society antagonistic to one another.Officials, for instance, would approach leaders of the Sino-Indonesiancommunity and inform them that the radical movement was deeply

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anti-Chinese and that they should support the repression of the movement.But the racial antagonisms that were fairly prominent in the early years of thetwentieth century abated during the movement’s peak from 1918 to 1923,when the radical activists proved by their deeds that they were not targetingthe Sino-Indonesians and were not motivated by racism. The activists showedthey were only concerned with class. The colonial state’s rumor-mongeringproved ineffective.

Imagining the nation

The radical writers called themselves orang terperentah [the ruled people], aterm that tended to overlap with the terms ‘Javanese people’ and ‘Indiespeople’. The distinctions were sometimes not strictly drawn. But they diddistinguish between those Javanese who collaborated with the Dutch andthose who resisted. Thus, they attacked the ‘Javanese people’ who ‘soldthemselves’ to the colonial officials and plantation owners. Everyone in theIndies faced the three-tiered racial classification system imposed by theDutch. The question for those classified at the bottom as ‘natives’ was howto respond. A popular demand among the Chinese and Arab communitieswas for an elevation of their status from Foreign Oriental to European, inthe same way that the small Japanese community in the Indies had beenelevated after Japan’s victory in its war with Russia in 1905. Some ‘natives’also thought that their status should be raised. But in the batjaan liarliterature, the demand was much more radical: it was to remove the systemthat produced social inequality in the first place. Marco, in his serializednovel Matahariah in the late 1910s, used the term anak-anak Hindia(children of the Indies) to refer to everyone in the Indies who was notEuropean:

Even now [we] have already built a consensus to establish an association wecall Kromo Bergerak [People on the Move], meaning an association with theefforts of our people, the anak-anak Hindia [children of the Indies], to be atpeace with each other towards one heart, so that we will not continue to beexploited by the cruel nations. Moreover, we children of the Indies can be atpeace if we are one; that’s the time we can eliminate arbitrary actions. Now wealready have orang particulier who certainly will try very hard for the childrenof the Indies to gain higher rank like the European in our land. You know ityourselves, that we children of the Indies were always disgraced by theEuropean people who also live here.26

Some of the writers ignored the racial categorization altogether, preferringinstead to see only two classes in the Indies. Consider the following statementby Darsono:

Now in the Indies emerged two groups of people, i.e. one group owns factories,railway companies, stores, etc.; and the second group is the workers of differentnations or people who work for the enterprises of the first group. This group ofworkers comes from peasants, batik makers, weavers, petty traders of all nations

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etc. They sell their labor because they’re cornered by factories or machines andbig commerce.27

Marco envisioned a social movement consisting of the ‘kromo’, thecommoners, all of those who were not from the elite (the priyayi). Thisattitude prompted harsh reaction from the moderates who considered classdiscourse to be an obstacle in the process of much-needed formation ofnational unity; the priyayi, they thought, needed to be included. There werealso those, especially communists, who put forward the principle ofinternationalism. In the 1930s, Tan Malaka, one of the prominent PKIleaders, proposed the idea of establishing a socialist confederation of AsiaAustralia. He had traveled around Asia. While he had never been toAustralia, he had heard about the strength of the workers’ movement there.As the wide range of activists debated what kind of nationalism andinternationalism they should adopt, the radical movement made sure thatthe problem of class inequality among the natives themselves was includedin every discussion about ‘Indonesia’. This emphasis on class became morepronounced in the late 1910s with the wave of strikes by industrial andplantation workers throughout Java.

The idea of socialism became especially significant with the news of theRussian revolution of 1917. That revolution played an influential role inthe construction of a discourse about the nation. Those who praised therevolution were immediately accused by their political opponents and theDutch colonial officials as Comintern agents who brought foreign politicalagendas to the colony, although many of the socialist ideas being discussedin the Indies after 1917 displayed a real concern to make them meaningfulfor the particular context of the Indies. The Literature Commission of thePKI condemned ideas which distracted people’s attention from the problemof class, and emphasized the importance of advancing socialism in thenational liberation struggle. However, there was no clear idea about thenation itself. The proposal of several priyayis for creating a Javanesenationalism in 1917 1918 was rejected because the ‘nation’ had to bebroader and include everyone in the Indies. For many of the writers, thestruggle for national independence was identical with the struggle againstinjustice. Whoever was part of the movement against colonialism was partof the ‘nation’. One’s attachment within a nation was not determined byone’s birth identity but by active involvement in the struggle againstcolonialism. There were many other imaginations about the nation. A morecomprehensive study about diversity of views on the nation still needs to beconducted.

The writers of batjaan liar were resolute modernists opposed to tradition.Anything of tradition that hindered the movement towards equality had tobe jettisoned. An example can be found in the discussion on the positionof women in the movement written by Rangsang in the novel KaoemMerah:

According to the situation of the world at this time, we women should help thework of the men, that is, the work for public needs. For centuries we women can

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be said to have been fast asleep. We never saw the light of the sun. Because, sincethe earliest time until now, we women were perceived as the household’sdecoration and head chef. But this rule should be changed now. For we womenwho have household responsibilities, the men can do that work as well, but forwomen who do not have that responsibility, they should indeed help the work ofthe men for public need. WE know that there are many women who choose to sitaround and take it easy although they are educated; they like to do that thing.Now we think it’s time for us women to participate, move together with ourbrothers. We also know that the conservatives would smirk at this statement.Alright, we can ignore those who disagree with us.28

The women figures portrayed in batjaan liar were generally different from theimages drawn by the colonial rulers or the Javanese priyayi. Batjaan liarusually described a woman activist with a strong character, broad knowledge,able to pass judgment and sometimes conduct debates with men. One will notfind such characters in Balai Pustaka novels. The position of the nyai(mistress) in the batjaan liar was also described differently compared with theother literary works of the era. The nyai was portrayed as a woman withstrong character and willpower even though her fate was very much in thehands of the plantation owners.

By the mid-1920s, the colonial rulers began to realize that the radicalmovement could not be effectively countered with books from BalaiPustaka or a new representative council (the Volksraad). The state startedto use violence to destroy the movement. Several leaders of the movementsuch as H M Misbach and Dr. Tjipto Mangunkusumo were arrested andexiled to places outside of Java. Differences within the movementsharpened. The tension was not only between lower-class activists andthe priyayi or the educated ones, but also among the lower-class activiststhemselves. The propagandists of the PKI stated that the struggle againstcolonialism was a class struggle, like the workers’ struggle to topple theTsar in Russia in 1917. Several PKI leaders visited the Soviet Union totalk with the leaders of the Comintern. They subsequently proposed thatthe party sharpen the perspective on classes in the colony.29 On the otherhand, figures like Mas Marco, Darsono and leaders of the SarekatRakyat disagreed with this rigid approach to class. At the PKI conferencein Kota Gede in December 1924, one of the party theoreticians, AliArcham, suggested that Sarekat Rakyat, the political organization of theradical ‘petty bourgeoisie’, be dissolved and that full concentration shouldbe directed towards organizing workers into revolutionary trade unions.This suggestion was rejected by Darsono and Mas Marco whoemphasized the importance of unity among all people challengingcolonial power.30

These differences in views kept intensifying along with the escalatingcolonial repression. Discussions about class, religion and ethnicity as thecomposition of the nation were replaced with differentiations based on bravevs. cowardly, militant vs. moderate. By 1926, texts of the movement generallytalked about the importance of militancy, discipline and firmness. Indepen-dence for them was rebellion against colonial rule, and the Indonesian nation

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consisted of those who supported the rebellion. Despite the ideal of totalunity of the colonized, there were repeated splits and divisions within theradical movement. In this kind of uncertainty and crisis, the PKI and SarekatRakyat, under immense pressure from their own cadres, decided to launch arebellion in November 1926. The colonial rulers responded with extremerepression. Thousands of people were arrested, and 1,308 people were exiledto Boven Digul in the middle of the Papuan forest. One episode of thepergerakan (movement) came to an end.

The decline

The failure of the rebellion had several consequences. First, the writer-activists from lower classes who formed the dominant bloc in the socialmovement of the 1920s were eliminated. They were exiled to Boven Diguland did not return until the arrival of Japanese troops in 1942. Some ofthem, like Marco Kartodikromo and Ali Archam, died in exile. Otherfigures, such as Darsono and Semaoen, left for Moscow, worked for theComintern, and never had any influence in the movement in thesubsequent years. Secondly, the networks of publishers, distributors,readers and organizations that had supported batjaan liar production forat least fifteen years were destroyed. Printing houses owned by tradeunions, the Communist Party, and orang particulier, who supported themovement, were closed down or confiscated. The colonial government, inturn, established more rigid controls and regulations on the productionand distribution of printed matter. It restored the power of ‘printcolonialism’. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the colonized becameincreasingly wary of writing anything straightforward about their ownproblems and demands. One example of this tendency can be seen inHatta’s explanation of the program of Perhimpunan Indonesia in front ofthe Dutch court in 1928.31 His explanation falsified the organization’s 1923program, which was fairly radical, and did not even affirm that itsintention was to gain national independence. The colonial rulers weresuccessful in establishing a time of order and peace, often referred to aszaman normal.

The nationalist leaders of the 1930s were generally students who studiedinside and outside the colony, government officials, and political activistswho escaped colonial repression. None of them had any experience indeveloping a movement from below and vividly expressing injustice inwriting. They usually spoke and wrote in Dutch, not even in High Malay.Even if they spoke in Malay, all the spontaneity, irony and wittiness whichcharacterized the language of the batjaan liar was missing. The tone ofspeech was more paternalistic, even arrogant, making a show of authorityand pretending to be sagacious. They usually positioned themselves ascandidates for the leaders of a modern, advanced and educated nation, whohad little or no connection with the coolies in the plantations and workersin the factories. The failure of the communist rebellion of 1926 1927became the foundation for a new type of nationalism that disregarded the

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central preoccupation of the earlier popular movement: class inequality. Theimagination of the nation became redefined and purged of its radicalcontent.

Notes1 In the 1960s several left historians and writers criticized the elitist bias in the nationalist historiography.

See Bakri Siregar, Sedjarah Sastra Modern Indonesia, Jakarta: Jajasan Pembaruan, 1964; PramoedyaAnanta Toer, Sedjarah Modern Indonesia: Babak Perintis, Jakarta, 1965. After being released fromprison, Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed a biography of R M Tirtoadhisoerjo, a pioneer in the pressworld who had been neglected in the writing of Indonesian history. See Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Sang

Pemula, Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1985.2 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1,

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp 1 8.3 For a relatively complete list, see G F Ockeloen, Catalogus dari boekoe boekoe dan madjallah madjallah

jang diterbitkan di Hindia Belanda dari tahoen 1870 1937, Batavia: Kolff, 1939.4 The arrested leaders of the movement were exiled to the furthest eastern edge of the colony, a malarial

forest on the island of Papua.5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1968.6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,

London: Verso, 1991, p 44.7 For a comprehensive account of the Indonesian nationalist press in its early days, see Ahmat B Adam,

The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian Consciousness, 1855 1913, Ithaca:

Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1995.8 Semaoen, ‘An Early Account of the Independence Movement’, Indonesia 1, April 1966, pp 46 75.9 R M Tirtoadhisoerjo was the initiator of the press affiliated to a social movement. Pramoedya Ananta

Toer called him ‘the pioneer’ because of his role in developing an independent press. Toer, Sang Pemula.Tirtoadhisoerjo is also the inspiration for the main character in Toer’s most celebrated work, the Burutetralogy.

10 Marco, ‘Djangan Takoet’, Sinar Djawa, 11 April 1918.11 Hilmar Farid, ‘Kolonialisme dan Budaya: Balai Poestaka di Hindia Belanda’, Prisma 10, October 1991.12 Semaoen, ‘Menentang Literatuur Menjesatkan’, Keras Hati 7, February 1920.13 Moesso, ‘Kita Haroes Mendirikan Bibliotheek Sendiri’, Api, 25 July 1925.14 Soekindar, ‘Socialistische Literatuur di Hindia’, Sinar Hindia, 17 December 1921.15 Overzichten van de Inlandsche en Maleisch Chineesche Pers, 25, 1924, pp 568 569.16 The priyayi and doctors who joined Budi Utomo are known as the ‘pioneers of the nationalist

movement’ in the writing of modern Indonesian history. Indeed, they opened the way by establishing amodern organization and some room for bargaining with the colonial state, but by the end of the 1910sthey no longer played a major political role. Some of them, such as R M Soejopranoto, Cipto

Mangoensoekomo and Soewardi Soerjaningrat, chose to join the popular movement and become moreradical. See Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java 1912 26, Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1990.

17 John Ingleson, Perhimpunan Indonesia and the Indonesian Nationalist Movement 1923 1928, Melbourne:Monash University, 1975.

18 ‘Tjis, tra’ maloe!’ Doenia Bergerak 2, 1914.19 M A, ‘Sembah djongkok’, Sinar Hindia, 15 June 1918.20 Marco also published an anthology of verses entitled Sjair Rempah Rempah (Verses of Spices) dan Sjair

Sama Rata Sama Rasa, which described the Dutch as ‘badjak laoet’ (pirates) who deceived the peoples

of the archipelago and then dominated the whole territory.21 Marco, ‘Pendahoeloean untuk Babad Tanah Djawa’, Hidoep, 1 June 1924. It is unclear what Czech and

Turk sayings Marco was referring to in this passage. Most likely, he mentioned these names of othernationalities only to create the impression that he was modern, cosmopolitan, and erudite.

22 In his novel Matahariah Marco satirized the power relation between colonial government and Javanesekings.

23 In Low Malay, babah is a derogatory term for Chinese.24 Tjhoen Tjhioe 84, 1914, pp 2 3.

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25 Marco, ‘Mata Gelap: Boleh djadi lantaran seboeah boekoe bisa djadi perselisihan jang berat’, Doenia

Bergerak 28, 1914.26 The novel, a rare love story between people of different races, was published as a serial in Sinar Hindia,

in 1918 and 1919. The term ‘children of the Indies’ was meant to include Sino-Indonesians and Indo-Europeans, albeit only those among these communities who supported the movement. Ernest DouwesDekker (1879�1950), an Indo-European, established the Indische Partij (Party of the Indies) in 1913,which had a major impact on the radical movement that followed.

27 Darsono, ‘Giftige Waarheidspijlen’, Sinar Hindia, 13 May 1918.28 Rangsang, ‘Kaoem Merah’, Hidoep, 1 October 1924. This novel was clear communist propaganda: it

was essentially the complete Communist Party program with a few dialogues and narratives added.29 Semaoen, ‘An Early Account of the Independence Movement’, pp 46�75.30 Persatoean Ra’jat, 12 February 1926.31 See Ingleson, Perhimpunan Indonesia.

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Documents

Hilmar_Farid-Batjaan Liar in the Dutch East Indies