by Tim Hannigan
Wallace eventually headed home for England in late 1861. The fevers and the wounds and the endless rounds of bad food in strange places had taken their toll, but he had collected examples of some seven thousand insect species, many hundreds of them new to science. He reached Folkestone on 31 March 1862. While he had been gone, Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species and everyone already knew all about evolution…
The watchwords of the age of high imperialism in the Dutch East Indies were rust en orde—‘peace and order’. In the book that Alfred Russel Wallace eventually wrote about his journeys there—The Malay Archipelago, a masterpiece of sprightly travel writing and popular science—the impression he gave was of a pacific island world where a gentlemanly Dutch order sat lightly alongside domesticated local sultans from Sumatra to Aru. This was not, however, the whole story, as those warships moored off Makassar had suggested. Even at the end of the nineteenth century there were plenty of pockets of territory, whole islands even, where no treaty had been signed, and even when there were long-standing agreements—in southern Sulawesi, in Banjarmasin and elsewhere—many of the local chiefs had a habit of testing the mettle of their notional Dutch overlords from time to time. If a Dutch rust en orde was ever truly to be extended to every corner of the Archipelago, then a good deal of mopping up would be needed.
One particular irritant lay at the furthest extremity of Sumatra in Aceh, Mecca’s Verandah, that original point of contact with the western Islamic world. The sultanate there had always held itself aloof from the rest of the Archipelago. No tribute had ever been sent to the great Javanese courts from Aceh, and Indian and Arab modes, rather than the courtly culture of royal Java, had set the tone. More importantly still, the place had grown into a major trading power in its own right, and by the early decades of the nineteenth century more than half of the entire global supply of pepper was coming out of the plantations of Aceh. A crucial clause of that 1824 treaty by which the British and Dutch drew an arbitrary line down the Straits of Melaka guaranteed that Aceh would remain independent, assured against British political interference but also, uniquely in all Sumatra, inured against Dutch annexation. At first both European parties respected the arrangement, and merchant ships from Britain, France and America routinely stopped by in the northernmost Sumatran ports to fill their holds with peppercorns. Wealth caused the power of the Acehnese court to swell, and before long it developed modest imperial ambitions of its own, extending its sway south towards the middle reaches of Sumatra just as the Dutch were edging their way north. A clash was inevitable, and though the British initially protested, they quickly acquiesced.
In 1871, some six thousand miles from Aceh and with not a single representative of the Acehnese court in attendance, Britain and the Netherlands signed a new treaty. This was perhaps the apogee of haughty European imperialism in the Archipelago: the fate of huge swathes of distant territory inhabited by neither Hollanders nor Englishmen decided with a scratch of a pen nib in a wood-panelled chamber in The Hague. The British agreed to let the Dutch do as they pleased in Aceh, and in return the Dutch handed over the Gold Coast of Africa to the British. The immediate upshot was some four decades of violence in Aceh as the Dutch struggled to crush first the organised forces of the sultanate, and then a ferocious guerrilla resistance based in the hills—at the cost of some thirty-seven thousand military fatalities and an estimated sixty-thousand local lives.
There was another unconscionable pocket of indigenous sovereignty much closer to the heart of the empire—almost within hailing distance of Java. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, much of Bali was still doing its own thing—and doing it rather violently at that.
Alfred Russel Wallace had been impressed by Bali, as had Cornelis de Houtman. Thomas Stamford Raffles, too, had been rather taken with the place. But none of these fly-by-night visitors had spent more than a few days in the island, and their opinions stood in contrast to the general European attitude, which was that Bali was a violent place where they burnt widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres and sold serfs into bondage.
Bali had long been one of the foremost sources of slaves in the Archipelago. Local rulers shipped out some two thousand of their lowliest subjects every year in the eighteenth century, and around half of Batavia’s enormous population of bonded workers were Balinese. The women were particularly favoured by the Chinese as kitchen girls and concubines, for as non-Muslims they had no qualms about cooking pork. The men, however, had a slightly less positive reputation, and though their reported ferocity made them favoured candidates for soldier-slaves in the armies of both the VOC and indigenous courts, their alleged propensity for ‘running amok’ meant that the Dutch eventually banned their import as domestic staff. By the mid-nineteenth century, the standard Dutch view of Bali had it that ‘The Balinese are a fierce, savage, perfidious, and bellicose people, loath to do any work’. This point of view was at least three parts crude imperial racism, but the idea that the island was a rough sort of place was to some extent borne out by events on the ground.
Until the seventeenth century, Bali had come under the sway of a single kingdom, the old house of Gelgel which claimed, like so many other Archipelago courts, a pedigree from Majapahit. Gelgel had gone to pieces in 1651 and a gaggle of nine competing fiefdoms had risen from the ruins, each claiming a small tranche of the Balinese whole. Throughout the nineteenth century there was periodic internecine fighting in Bali, and from the 1840s the Dutch were increasingly involved as powerbrokers and kingmakers—just as they had been in Java in the previous century. By this stage Bali had been suffering from decades of ill-fortune. The slave trade had gone out of fashion with the Europeans and the island had lost its traditional source of income; a relay of plagues, famines and epidemics had scourged the land, and by the second half of the century many of the local courts were tottering. Meanwhile, in the 1890s the much-abused Sasaks of Lombok rose up against their Balinese overlords and made the naïve mistake of calling on the Dutch for help. In 1894 the Dutch invaded Lombok, razed the royal capital to the ground, and established sovereignty. The Sasaks found they had simply replaced one set of alien overlords with another, but the Balinese had lost their own empire on the other side of the Wallace Line.
As a new century opened, a new attitude had come into play in the colonial scene. The Cultivation System had been consigned to history, and for several decades the economic liberals had had the floor in the Dutch territories. But so much for ‘trickle down economics’: standards of living had actually fallen in Java. Wage packets for labourers shrank, and the cost of rice rose. Taking note of all of this, in 1899 a Dutch lawyer named Conrad Theodor van Deventer—a sad-eyed man with a magnificent moustache—had published a powerful article entitled ‘Een eereschuld’, ‘A debt of honour’. The Netherlands, he argued, had gotten so very much out of the East Indies for so very long, that it was time to return the favour. For even the most intransigent stick-in-the-muds it was a compelling argument, and from 1901 onwards a so-called Ethical Policy was supposed to underpin all Dutch actions in the Archipelago.
On the one hand the policy was manifest in efforts to improve education, healthcare and general standards of living in Java. But in places like Bali it took a rather different form. Not only did the Ethical Policy demand Dutch-built schools, roads and hospitals; it also required the final obliteration of any lingering ‘Asiatic barbarism’. Willem Rooseboom, the governor-general when the Ethical Policy came into play, declared that ‘wherever there is injustice [we shall] not be able to remain inactive in the protection of the weak and the oppressed’. This all provided the perfect excuse for tidying up messy corners of the Archipelago, and when Roose-boom’s successor, Johannes Benedictus van Heutsz, despatched a new resident to Bali in 1905 he allegedly waved his hand across a map of the southern half of the island with its patchwork of independent fiefdoms, and muttered, ‘All of this has to change’.
In May 1904 a trading schooner from Banjarmasin had bee
n blown onto the shallow slab of coral that lies off the beach at Sanur on the southeast coast of Bali. Today the beach is backed with a massed rank of hotels, and surfers make the most of the waves that surge onto the reef during the monsoon. A century ago it was a spot notorious for shipwrecks, particularly during the early months of the dry season, as the winds turn fickle and flip from west to east. The ship that drove onto the coral that May day was owned by a Chinese trader called Kwee Tek Tjiang, whose residence in Banjarmasin made him a Dutch subject. When the Sanur locals, subjects of the Balinese kingdom of Badung, looted the wreck, Kwee sent the colonial authorities a claim for compensation—the perfect excuse for a final annexation of Bali.
The Badung king, Cokorda Ngurah Made Pemecutan, refused to pay the compensation, and in September 1906 a Dutch force rowed ashore at Sanur. The Badung palace at Denpasar lay some three miles inland, and for four days the invaders sent shells shrieking towards it. Then, on the morning of 20 September, they advanced towards the capital. As the roofs of the palace hove into view the soldiers caught the acrid scent of burning wood and thatch. And then a strange procession appeared: hundreds of men and women, dressed in ceremonial white and with frangipani flowers tucked in their hair. At their head, borne aloft on a sedan chair, was the king himself. The procession advanced at a steady shuffle towards the Dutch.
What happened next was so utterly horrific and so utterly inexplicable that it is little wonder if the accounts are somewhat confused. In some versions the ghostly procession came to a halt three hundred feet short of the nervous Dutch column. The king stepped down from his chair, gave a signal, and was immediately stabbed to death with a ceremonial kris by his attendant priest. The rest of the courtly entourage then turned their weapons on themselves in a grotesque mass suicide. At this point a stray gunshot startled the Dutch soldiers into action…
In other accounts, the white-clad column simply walked on towards the colonial troops, paying no heed to the increasingly frantic orders to halt. In still other versions, when that three-hundred-foot point was reached they broke into a frenzied headlong charge, the king wielding his sacred Singapraga kris at their head. What is not disputed, however, is that, in the words of the senior Dutch commander, ‘the artillery opened fire, with horrible consequences for the packed crowd’.
There is a grainy black-and-white photograph of the aftermath. In the background a pair of low thatched roofs rise beneath a canopy of trees, and to the left the Dutch troops are standing in the khakis of a modern army. Their arms hang limp at their sides and their hats are in their hands as they try to make sense of what they have just done. In the foreground is a mass of jumbled white forms. They look like boulders on the bed of a dried-out river, until you peer closely and pick out the curve of a hip or the outline of a head. To the right stands a gilded royal sedan chair, empty.
What happened at Denpasar on 20 September 1906 is remembered in Bali as a puputan, a ritual ‘finishing’. The interpretations are as conflicted as the accounts, however, and whether it really was a meticulously planned suicide ritual, a desperate kamikaze attack, or simply a fearsome final stand, will never really be known. It was, however, the end of an old order. Two years later the last Balinese kingdom to resist Dutch control, Klungkung, succumbed in exactly the same way. The king had tried to resist Dutch attempts to establish a colonial monopoly on opium sales in its territory. The court was bombarded from the sea, and on 28 April 1908 a Dutch force marched inland to be greeted with a ghastly reprise of the earlier events in Badung. Some four hundred white-clad courtiers went down in a welter of gunfire.
The Bali puputans were, to all intents and purposes, the last acts in an Archipelago-wide process that had begun in earnest under Daendels and Raffles a century earlier, but that had in some ways started way back in 1596 when Cornelis de Houtman and his crew had opened fire on the court of Banten. The old order had truly been overturned, and some sort of Pax Neerlandica had finally been achieved.
But at the very moment at which the Dutch attained true supremacy in the Archipelago, those with a sharp eye might have noticed that their empire was already set to unravel.
Twenty-two days after the last round of gunfire splattered against the palace walls of Klungkung, a meeting took place in far-off Batavia. The men in attendance were students of a medical college developed under the educating ideals of the Ethical Policy. This college was open, in theory, to any ‘native’. In practice, of course, virtually the only people with sufficient schooling to get into the college came from the old ranks of the aristocracy, and the vast majority of them were Javanese. Indeed, the name of the organisation which they founded during that meeting on 20 May 1908 was itself Javanese—Budi Utomo, ‘the Beautiful Endeavour’—and foremost amongst its rather vague initial aims was the idea of reinvigorating a decayed Javanese society by means of Western-style education.
But though most of the members of this rather modest group had been born into old privilege, they belonged to an entirely new sort of elite. They were educated; they were literate in Dutch and Malay; they were ready to engage with modern ideas in science, literature and politics; and before long, they would begin to think of themselves as ‘Indonesians’.
THE HOLY MOUNTAIN The temples on the slopes of the volcano Gunung Lawu—such as Candi Sukuh, pictured here—belong to the final years of Hindu-Buddhist rule in Java, when the refined formality of earlier temple architecture was giving way to an earthier style.
All over the Archipelago, volcanoes have been regarded as homes of ancestral spirits, and in Java and Sumatra these ancient indigenous ideas often blended with Hindu-Buddhist notions about mountains as the homes of the gods. Of all the sacred mountains few have a deeper spiritual character than Gunung Lawu, a dormant hulk 10,680 feet (3,256 metres) tall that straddles the border of Central and East Java. In Javanese traditions this mountain is the realm of the powerful Sunan Lawu, who appears to be a sort of wind god, predating Islam—and probably predating Hindu-Buddhism too.
The slopes of the mountain were the scene for a final flurry of Hindu-Buddhist temple building in the late fifteenth century as Java was increasingly converting to Islam. These temples—most notably Sukuh and Cetho—are packed with images of frightening ogres and with realistic phalluses replacing the abstract lingams of old.
THE WIDOW History and myth are often spectacularly intertwined in Indonesia, and nowhere more so than in the story of Rangda, the nightmarish witch-queen of Balinese folklore.
Rangda—which simply means ‘widow’—has her origins in a real-life Javanese queen. In the late tenth century the ruler of Bali was a king called Udayana. He was married to a Javanese woman called Mahendradatta, whom he eventually banished, possibly for her domineering tendencies. After his death she became embroiled in some sort of succession dispute with their son.
Balinese legends have it that Mahendradatta was exiled to the forests for practicing witchcraft. In exile she became the demonic Rangda, leading legions of witches into battle and raining pestilence on the Balinese population before she was defeated by a holy man.
Today Rangda is a key figure in Balinese dance-dramas. Her demonic nature shows a link with the Hindu goddess Kali, the fierce aspect of Durga. The real-life Mahendradatta was reputedly involved in developing worship of Durga in Bali.
THE GODDESS OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN Of all the mythical forces that stretch their influence into the realms of real history in the Archipelago, none is more potent than Java’s Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the ‘Goddess of the Southern Ocean’. She was, it is sometimes said, a princess of the Hindu-Buddhist Pajajaran kingdom in West Java. She was banished after refusing her father’s choice of suitor, and retreated to the stormy southern coast of Java to become the Goddess. Kanjeng Ratu Kidul is particularly closely associated with the Mataram, the Muslim kingdom that emerged in Central Java in the seventeenth century. Mataram’s founder, Senopati, pictured here with the Goddess, is said to have caught her attention while meditating atop a holy rock close to Paran
gtritis, south of modern Yogyakarta. She agreed to lend him her supernatural support in the founding of his new kingdom, and, legend has it, all the subsequent kings of Mataram consorted with her. She is still a potent figure today; the Yogyakarta court still makes annual offerings to her, and it is rumoured that even modern Central Java royals still consort with her.
THE MOUNTAIN OF STONE Borobudur is Indonesia’s best known ancient monument. Built by the Sailendra Dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries, it is still one of the biggest Buddhist monuments on earth. Today it is visited by thousands of domestic and foreign tourists every day, but it wasn’t always so well known. Borobudur probably fell out of use when the major centre of royal power shifted to the Brantas delta near modern Surabaya in the tenth century. The earliest known European reference comes from Frederick Coyett, who headed a VOC mission to Mataram in 1733 and who had some statues from Borobudur taken away to decorate his house in Batavia. In 1814, Thomas Stamford Raffles (who is often wrongly credited with ‘discovering’ Borobudur) ordered Hermanus Christian Cornelius, a young Dutch surveyor who had already worked on the Prambanan temple, to produce a preliminary survey of the ruin. This illustration is based on his sketch. By the 1980s, over a thousand years after the Sailendras first built the thing, restoration work had returned Borobudur to something like its original glory.
THE LOST TEMPLES OF MUARA JAMBI On the Batang Hari River, downstream from the modern city of Jambi, is the largest expanse of archaeological remains in Sumatra. The Muara Jambi temple complex sprawls across some 1,500 hectares (15 square kilometres) of low-lying, forested land. These are not lavishly decorated stone temples in the style of Java: here in this swampy river basin there was little natural stone, and so the temples were of man-made brick. The structures at the centre of the complex have been restored, but there are dozens of others, unexamined by archaeologists, sometimes just a mound of broken bricks covered with leaf mould.