by Tim Hannigan
The end of the British interregnum in 1816 did not bring an end to the ridiculous game of musical chairs in Palembang. The incoming Dutch administration immediately began flexing its muscles and making hostile gestures at the court. Najamuddin found himself unseated and exiled to Batavia. Incredibly, the Dutch now put Badaruddin—the very man who had murdered their countrymen seven years earlier—back onto the cursed throne for the third time. And at this point Badaruddin decided he’d had altogether too much. He declared absolute, outright independence once again.
The sheer absurdity of the Dutch and British meddling in Palembang—where a mutually beneficial treaty between the VOC and a local court had held good for most of the previous century—shows just how much things had changed by the early decades of the nineteenth century. Europeans had long been entangled in the politics of Archipelago courts, but now they felt able—and, indeed, compelled—to arbitrarily change successions with little more than a snap of their fingers and with scant regard for local circumstances. The results in this instance were horrific, with years of fighting before the Dutch eventually toppled Badaruddin for the last time and shipped him off to exile in far-off Maluku, which would soon become a favoured dumping ground for unseated sultans.
This time, the Dutch thought the better of reinstating Najamuddin: they made his son king instead. For an uneasy couple of years they let him rule along the lines of the old treaties, before deciding that this would not do. In 1823 they evicted him from his palace and turned it into the official Dutch residency, giving him a pension and a ceremonial role by way of recompense. Najamuddin junior and his disgusted courtiers then attempted to poison the Dutch garrison, now encamped in a palace that had been strictly off-limits to all non-Muslims until a decade earlier. A final bout of fighting erupted, before this last sultan of Palembang, too, was shipped out to Maluku. In the thirteen years since Raffles’ first demand for a break with the Netherlands there had been no fewer than five changes at the head of the sultanate, every one of them decided by Europeans. Untold thousands of locals and Dutchmen had been killed in the process.
Palembang was not the only source of trouble for the Dutch in Sumatra. In the cool green highlands of Minangkabau they had become entangled in a local conflict between the traditional rulers and staunch Muslim reformists. These reformists were dour, turbaned men known as the Padris after Pedir, the Acehnese port from which pilgrim ships to Mecca traditionally sailed. Inspired by the Wahhabi fundamentalists who had conquered the holy city of Islam in 1803, the Padris had attempted to follow suit in Minangkabau, trying to stamp out gambling, cockfighting, and the matrilineal inheritance customs of the hills. In 1821 the old anti-Padri rulers had decided to hand the country—over which they no longer had control—to the Dutch, who thereby inherited a fiery civil war. It would take almost two decades for colonial troops to quash the zealous Padri armies and to capture their spiritual leader, Imam Bonjol, the Archipelago prototype for an Islamist insurgent.
Elsewhere in the Archipelago, the resurgent Dutch faced all manner of small wars. In south Sulawesi the Bugis princes refused to go quietly into vassaldom, and even in Maluku, oldest of all European toeholds in the Archipelago, there was significant unrest in the years following the British interregnum. But it was in Java, the great lodestone of the Archipelago, that the old order would make its most formidable final stand.
On a hot May day in 1824, a feisty thirty-eight-year-old prince from Yogyakarta had a vision. He was a slim man with high, broad cheekbones, and he had recently stopped attending the affairs of state in the kraton. Yogyakarta had long recovered from the violence and looting of the British interregnum, but, the prince felt, the dynasty had been overtaken by debauchery and corruption.
The vision came to him as he was meditating in a cool cave in the limestone hills near his home at Tegalreja, out in the rice fields to the south of the city. He was a staunch Muslim—unusually staunch in fact, by the standards of his courtly contemporaries—but he was not averse to dabbling in the more esoteric aspects of Javanese mysticism, and he had often received supernatural visitations. This, however, was something entirely out of the ordinary: the vision was of none other than the Ratu Adil, the messianic ‘Righteous Prince’ who had been haunting the imagination of Java since the days of King Joyoboyo in the twelfth century. In the story of the vision that the prince later shared with his followers, the Ratu Adil issued him with an ominous instruction: ‘The reason I have summoned you is for you to set my army fighting. Let Java be conquered immediately!’
The prince had been born Raden Mas Mustahar, but he would be remembered forevermore by his official princely title: Pangeran Aria Diponegoro.
Diponegoro was born at dawn on 11 November 1785, the first son of the man destined to rule as Hamengkubuwono III, the puppet sultan appointed by Raffles after the sacking of Yogyakarta in 1812. His mother was a concubine rather than a queen, so he was never a serious contender for the throne. That should not have stopped him rising to a very senior position within the court, but there had always been something a little odd about Diponegoro, and the difference only deepened when at the age of seven he was plucked from the women’s quarters of the kraton and taken away to live with his great-grandmother, Ratu Ageng, in her rice-land retreat at Tegalreja. Ratu Ageng was a formidable woman who had headed the sultan’s corps of fearsome amazon fighters in her youth. Since her widowhood she had been playing at being a gentlewoman farmer in a mansion with a garden full of caged songbirds and old Hindu-Buddhist statues. Little Diponegoro was raised on her tales of the glory days of Mataram, and steeped in the traditional ways of royal Java.
But as well as learning what it meant to be royal, the young Diponegoro fraternised with the people of the countryside, learnt about cock-fighting and popular magic, and came into contact with both traditional mystics and those roguish young village men who would quickly turn rebellious during times of unrest. By his teens he had also developed contacts in the pesantren, the seminaries out amongst the palm trees where scholars taught a more orthodox Islam to the sons of farmers. These pious men, known as santri, had their own power and influence.
When Diponegoro returned to the Yogyakarta court as a young man he did not like what he saw. He had experienced the humiliations during Raffles’ rule at first hand, and things had not improved with the return of the Dutch in 1816. The incoming governor-general was a man with an admirable sense of decency. If Daendels and Raffles had been a few years ahead of their time with their proto-Victorian imperialism, then Godert Alexander Gerard Philip, the Baron van der Capellen—an upright man with blond hair and foxy sideburns—was the best part of a century early with his ethical concerns. He was frustrated from the very start by the cold capitalism of the reconstituted Dutch East Indies, and he once complained that ‘whenever I see that in the Netherlands people understand liberalism to mean the protection of European landowners at the cost of the native population, and that the latter, who are so dear to me, are completely lost from view in order that a few speculators and adventurers can succeed in their plans, then I must declare myself an ultra anti-liberal’.
Those speculators and adventurers had been doing rather well in Central Java. Both Daendels and Raffles had allowed tranches of private land in what had originally been sovereign Mataram territory to be leased out to European and Chinese investors. Diponegoro had refused to lease out his own Tegalreja estates—which he had inherited from his great-grandmother Ratu Ageng at the age of eighteen—but plenty of other local aristocrats had been more than willing to receive large cash sums in return for control of their traditional holdings. A considerable degree of debauchery had crept into the local high society, and the rent payments often went on fast living and imported European luxuries. Meanwhile, the local farmers, who had previously worked the land on their own terms, usually suffered once a foreigner with an eye for a quick cash crop profit moved in. They found themselves suddenly transformed from de facto landholders to disenfranchised labourers on commercia
l plantations where coffee and indigo had replaced rice. The system, in the words of one critical Dutchman, ‘deprived the Javanese peasant of his property rights and debased his status to that of a coolie’.
Worse still, the colonial authorities had given licenses to businessmen—almost invariably ethnic Chinese—to run tollgates along the highways of Java, where often exorbitant fees were extracted from every passing peasant. Unsurprisingly, then, the countryside was beginning to slide into a sort of low-level anarchy as desperate men gave themselves over to the marauding bands of jago, those petty gangsters who had been a part of the Javanese scene since before the days of Majapahit.
In 1821 the harvest failed and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a global cholera pandemic hit Java and the rest of the Archipelago towards the end of the same year. Then, twelve months later the Gunung Merapi volcano blew its top and devastated the surrounding countryside. By this stage apocalyptic prophecies and millenarian visions were doing the rounds in the villages and markets, and many people were beginning to suggest that it was time for the Ratu Adil to show his face in Java. The court of Yogyakarta, meanwhile, was in a state of perpetual crisis.
If there was a fair degree of debauchery going on in aristocratic circles, it was more than matched by the senior Dutch staff at the residency in Yogyakarta. Besides the usual drinking, they seemed to particularly enjoy all manner of sexual shenanigans, with one resident declaring of his deputy that ‘in general his conduct with numerous Javanese women and girls was not only extremely improper but sometimes even attended by insults’ (though the resident in question also conceded that his own sexual misconduct ‘had excelled over his predecessors and contemporaries’).
The disgusted Diponegoro would later declare of this period that ‘Dutchmen had trotted into our kraton as though it was a stable and had shouted and called as though it had become a market’. By the time of his visitation from the Ratu Adil he had broken from the court and gone home to Tegalreja, where he was quietly nursing his sense of outrage, keeping up his contacts with the santri, the mystics and the jago, and planning an almighty rebellion.
The final spark came at the start of the dry season in 1825. Diponegoro’s own retainers clashed with a column of workmen sent out on the orders of the Dutch resident to repair a road that skirted his Tegalreja lands. What started as a petty argument quickly turned into an armed stand-off, and when on 20 July Dutch officials sent a party of soldiers to arrest the recalcitrant prince, they instead precipitated a war. As the Dutch troopers set fire to Tegalreja, the prince escaped with his men. He was last glimpsed by the Europeans fleeing through the rice fields on a beautiful black horse: ‘He was clad entirely in white in the Arab style. The end of his turban flapped in the wind as he made his horse prance… dancing in the midst of his lance-bearing bodyguard’.
Central Java descended into carnage.
Diponegoro’s Java War would last for five bloody years. Fully half of the princes of Yogyakarta went over with him into rebellion, and forty-one of the eighty-eight senior courtiers followed suit. This was in no small part down to a recent ill-considered attempt by the well-meaning van der Capellen to tackle the deep-seated social problems in the region: he had outlawed the leasing of land to foreigners in the court territories, thus depriving many of the dissipated aristocratic landlords of their cash and priming them for rebellion in the process.
The Dutch and their notional ally, the Yogyakarta sultan, lost control of the countryside almost at once, and the city was besieged. Diponegoro had taken not just princes and courtiers with him into insurgency; he had also taken the white-turbaned minions of the pesantrens and the gangster bands of the rural jago. His rebel forces were an unholy alliance of zealots, traditionalists and criminals, and they rallied remarkably to the task of guerrilla warfare. Tollgates were burnt to the ground; Dutch and kraton outposts were ambushed; and a semblance of alternative authority through taxation and market management was even set up. Dutch tactics, meanwhile, were singularly ineffective. A third of their forces were dead by 1827.
It has never been entirely clear what Diponegoro himself expected to gain from his rebellion. He had become the embodiment of all manner of divergent traditions and aspirations—Islamic, Javanese, anti-foreigner, millenarian and more—but at times he struggled to maintain a balance between these contrasting forces. At the outset, his rebellion was principally an uprising against the decayed and debauched Yogyakarta court; later Diponegoro would talk of evicting all the Europeans from Java. At other times he cleaved closely to Islam as a standard and talked of establishing some kind of kingdom of the faith. In his more pragmatic moments, however, he seemed mainly to want simply to reassert the old circumstances of the eighteenth century, with the VOC camped out on the north coast, free to trade there as they pleased, while the Javanese continued undisturbed in the heartlands according to time-honoured tradition. But Diponegoro did not realise that the eighteenth century had passed; Daendels and Raffles had been no aberration, and the world no longer ended on the marches of Java.
At the end of the 1820s the Dutch changed tactics. They set up small, fortified outposts all over the rebellion-wracked countryside, sturdy cubes of stone that could act as springboards for columns as fast-moving and sure-footed as those of the rebels—and better armed to boot. There were more than two hundred of these outposts by the end of the decade, and around each a small pocket of security grew, to the relief of a peasantry exhausted by the years of war. Diponegoro’s rebel army, meanwhile, had slowly gone to pieces, the santris falling out with the traditionalists, and an increasing number of princes and aristocrats sneaking away as they sniffed the way the wind was blowing. Diponegoro ended up almost alone, a ragged, righteous prince traversing the mountain trails and shivering through bouts of malaria in village huts. At the end of Ramadan in early 1830, he came in to the small upland town of Magelang to negotiate with the Dutch.
Diponegoro himself—not to mention later patriotic Indonesians—would subsequently claim that the actions of the Dutch commander, General De Kock, were a betrayal, and that the prince had met in good faith for discussions on equal terms. But he must surely have known that his demand to be made the chief of all Islam in Java would never be accepted. On 28 March 1830, he was arrested in the Dutch residency at Magelang, bundled into a coach, and shipped off into exile, muttering, it was reported, ‘How did I come to this?’ He lived out the rest of his days across the water in Sulawesi, dying at the age of sixty-nine in the Dutch fortress at Makassar.
Diponegoro’s war was the biggest and bloodiest of the myriad small reactions to the resurgent Dutch in the decades following the British interregnum. Some eight thousand Europeans had died, along with as many as quarter of a million Javanese, and the countryside of what had once been Mataram had been ravaged. But all of these rebellions—from Palembang to Ambon and from Java to Minangkabau—ultimately failed. They were hopelessly one-sided—and not just in terms of military technology. On the local side there were men who were still fighting based on ancient ideas of identity—as Javanese, Minangkabaus, Bugis or Palembang Malays. If they had any notion of an Archipelago-spanning Nusantara, it would have been abstract in the extreme, and even Islam had proved to be the shakiest of unifying standards. The Dutch, meanwhile, were fighting for something bigger. By the time the Java War was over, the Dutch East Indies was much more than an idea: it was a veritable entity. And what was more, with enormous war debts to recoup, it was time for it to start paying its way…
CHAPTER 6
RUST EN ORDE:
THE DUTCH EAST
INDIES
The road unspooled ahead across soft, green countryside. It was the wettest part of the year—the late months of 1834—and the air was clean and cool. Skeins of cloud hung over the landscape, and the interlocking ridges floated on a cushion of haze. This was the heart of the Priangan highlands, the hulk of up-thrown country that forms the hinterland of West Java. In earlier centuries, this had been the stomping ground of th
e old Sundanese kingdoms, and the name of the place—a contraction of para-hyang-an—contained that same ageless Austronesian idea as the Dieng Plateau, further west along the same mountain chain: hyang, expressing the concept of deity. This was an abode of ancient gods. But for all its misty mysticism, and for all its apparent fertility, the man making his way along the road could see that something was amiss.
The man’s name was Louis Vitalis. He had been born in France into a merchant family of Greek descent, and had come out to Java in the service of the Dutch. He was an inspector employed to tour the countryside and to take notes of the conditions. He had been sent here to investigate concerns raised by Otto Carel Holmberg de Beckfelt, the Dutch resident in overall charge of Priangan, that the system of land management so recently introduced to the Dutch East Indies was leading to horrific suffering up here in the hills.
The resident’s concerns had been well founded. Many of the locals Vitalis passed at the wayside were in a pitiable state. Here and there he spotted a corpse in the long grass beside the road. But there was no epidemic, and there ought to have been no hunger. The calamity that was killing people here was, as far as Vitalis was concerned, entirely man-made. Large tracts of the land on either side of the road had been given over to growing indigo, a spindly shrub producing a blue dye that would, later in the century, give the classic blue tint to the newly invented denim jeans. The emaciated men were labourers on these indigo plantations, and they had, quite simply, been worked to death.