A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  Budi Utomo’s main aim was to lobby for more educational opportunities for Soedirohoesodo’s own elite class. It was eminently innocuous, and far from viewing the organisation with oppressive suspicion, the colonial authorities actually welcomed its existence. But Budi Utomo was one of the first manifestations of a craze for politics that was soon sweeping the Indies. By the time Frank Carpenter noted that the locals were ‘as happy as any people of their kind’ with the colonial status quo, there was a multitude of political organisations. They came in all shapes and stripes, and some of them were flirting very seriously with revolutionary nationalism.

  Some, like Budi Utomo itself, were more like educational organisations than proper political parties, and some were essentially ethnic lobby groups. For example, Paguyuban Pasundan, formed in 1914, was Budi Utomo’s Sundanese counterpart, seeking to better the lot of the West Java locals. Some groups were basically trade guilds, looking to provide a unified voice for a particular class of merchants, and still others found their drive from religion. In 1912 a batik trader from Yogyakarta named Ahmad Dahlan founded the Muhammadiyah. Dahlan was a returned Haj pilgrim, and his organisation belonged to a loose global movement of religious reform that had emerged from Saudi Arabia in the previous century. He and other returned pilgrims of his ilk worried that Islam in Java was not just encumbered with all manner of unconscionable heterodoxies; its community—the local sector of the universal Muslim community or Ummah—had also become hopelessly enervated. Muhammadiyah aimed to set that all straight through modern, Western-influenced education. Soon it had its own schools in Java and beyond. The success of the Muhammadiyah would eventually prompt those on the other side of the Muslim coin in Java, the traditionalist orthodoxy of the village seminaries, to found their own group, the Nahdlatul Ulama, as a counterpoint to all this internationalist reform.

  The biggest organisation of all, however, was neither ethnic nor religious in its inspiration. By the 1920s it was claiming a membership in the hundreds of thousands and it had true politics as its raison d’être (although it had both ‘trade’ and ‘Islam’ in its original name).

  A year before Ahmad Dahlan founded the Muhammadiyah, another cloth merchant and returned Haji named Samanhudi had started another group, in the old Mataram capital of Surakarta. Samanhudi meant his Sarekat Dagang Islam, the ‘Islamic Traders’ Union’, to be a means for local batik merchants to stand together against the inroads of Chinese businessmen in the rag trade. But within twelve months the part about ‘traders’ had been quietly dropped from the name, and Samanhudi himself had withdrawn as a new man took to the helm, a sharp-tongued former civil servant named Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto (sometimes also spelt Cokroaminoto).

  What the Sarekat Islam, or ‘SI’, actually stood for was never entirely clear, but it was certainly about much more than the batik business. By 1913 it was claiming 150,000 members, with branches in every major Javanese city and outposts in Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi, too. Despite the titular ‘Islam’, the SI was not a religious interest group like Muhammadiyah. What it seems to have represented above all else was a sudden desire, born of a changing epoch, to belong to something. And ‘Islam’ here seemed mainly to stand in for an idea that hadn’t yet crystallised: a sense of national identity, setting Archipelago natives apart from Dutchmen and Chinese. This, then, was an embryonic Indies nationalism, even if the feisty Tjokroaminoto himself declared at the 1913 SI conference that ‘we are satisfied under Dutch rule’.

  It was some measure of the naïve optimism of the Ethical Policy that the Dutch authorities cheerfully gave their seal of approval to all these organisations. The governor-general of the day was the mild-mannered Alexander Idenburg. Here, he felt, was the Policy coming good. If the inlanders were now so far advanced that they could form political organisations, then surely the Dutch were well on their way to paying off that eereschuld, that ‘debt of honour’. There were, however, some limits to the authorities’ tolerance…

  It would not be until the mid-1920s that the nationalist movement would truly find its feet and its voice. But as early as 1912, a trio of feisty firebrands had founded an organisation that really deserves much more credit for kick-starting a revolution than the innocuous Budi Utomo. While other groups were quietly concerning themselves with batik and education, the Indische Partij (‘Indies Party’), demanded nothing less than outright independence for the Archipelago in the shortest possible time.

  Amongst the Indies Party’s leading lights were a Central Java doctor called Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo (sometimes also spelt Cipto Mangunkusumo) and a minor Yogyakarta aristocrat and STOVIA drop-out by the name of Suwardi Suryaningrat. But its real driving force was a man with a name richly redolent of radicalism: Ernest François Eugène Douwes Dekker. He was the great-nephew of none other than the author of Max Havelaar, Multatuli himself, and as his name suggests, he was not, in the colonial scheme of things, an inlander. He was the son of a Dutch father and a German-Javanese mother, born in Pasuruan on the coast east of Surabaya. He was an Indo-European, part of the large mixed-race population colloquially known as ‘Indos’.

  Colonial society in the Dutch East Indies was classified into three legal layers. At the bottom was the biggest—and lowliest—sector, the inlanders, ‘the natives’. Above them, and with rather more by way of rights and status, came the ‘foreign orientals’, Chinese for the most part, but with Arabs and Indians amongst their number. Finally, at the top of the pile, came the Europeans. This last elite grouping was not strictly defined by race, and it included a number of individual Asians. These ‘honorary Europeans’ included a few Europhile local aristocrats and some particularly wealthy Chinese businessmen, as well as all Japanese expatriates, who had gained the status through official lobbying by the Nippon authorities. The majority of legal Europeans, however, were actually Indos.

  The Indos had existed in the Archipelago even before the Dutch arrived, in the form of the Portuguese creole population of the ports, and there was scarcely an old-established Dutch dynasty in the Indies that didn’t have a little Indo blood in its collective veins. But for all their elevated status, they often found themselves caught between worlds—viewed with suspicion by true indigenes, and subjected to patronising sneers from the European paternal side. In spite of this, they had traditionally found a footing as cultural go-betweens. They were railway clerks, post office chiefs and estate managers.

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, a larger and larger part of the colonial infrastructure was placed in the hands of fresh-faced professionals straight off the boat from the Netherlands. These were career men with every intention of going home at the end of their tenure, and they felt no need to avail themselves of a mixed-race, Malay-speaking wife—at least, not officially. Meanwhile, with the Suez Canal open and the journey from Europe to Batavia reduced to little more than a holiday cruise, more and more ‘pure’ Dutchwomen were turning up in the colony. The ladder was being swiftly pulled up and it was no longer easy for Indo girls to get an instant social upgrade through marriage. At the same time, just as the Indo community’s social stock was falling, the Ethical Policy was starting to turn out Dutch-speaking, Western-educated inlanders, and Indo men found that they were no longer the indispensable go-betweens they had once been.

  It was doubtless these factors that prompted some of the poorer Indos to sign up for the Indies Party cause—an independent East Indies as a homeland for anyone born within its borders, whatever their ethnic origins. It was an idealistic and ill-fated vision, and the Indos would ultimately be written out of the nationalist legend. That they made up more than three-quarters of the Indies Party’s seven-thousand-strong membership goes a long way to explain its strangely ambiguous status in the received version of history today.

  During its brief lifetime, however, the Indies Party certainly rattled the authorities. Its stated aim was ‘to awaken the patriotism of all the people of the Indies … and to prepare its people for independence’. Douwes Dekk
er had evidently taken a lesson in no-holds-barred rhetoric from his great-uncle, and he declared that ‘As we plan to put an end once and for all to the colonial situation, the Indies Party is definitely revolutionary…’

  Douwes Dekker’s collaborator Suwardi Suryaningrat, meanwhile, was flexing his own rhetorical muscles. As the Dutch community prepared to celebrate the 1913 centenary of Holland’s liberation from Napoleonic rule, he published an outrageously sarcastic Dutch-language pamphlet entitled ‘If I were a Netherlander’. It was deliberately inflammatory, and it packed a powerful punch:

  I can easily understand the feelings of Netherlands patriots of today who want to celebrate such an important date. After all, I am also a patriot, and in the same way as the genuine Netherlands nationalists love their fatherland, so do I love my own fatherland more than I can express in words … I wish for a moment that I could be a Netherlander, not a naturalised Netherlander, but a real pure son of the Greater Netherlands, completely free from foreign stains … How I would rejoice when I would see the Netherlands flag together with the Orange banner flutter in the wind. I would join in the singing until I was hoarse … but I would not wish the natives of this country to participate in this commemoration … I would even close off the area where the festivities took place so that no native could see our elation at the commemoration of our day of Independence.

  It would seem to me somewhat impolite, coarse and improper, if we—I am still imagining that I am a Netherlander—let the natives join … because we would be commemorating our independence here in their country which we keep in subjugation … [but] I am not a Netherlander. I am only a brown-coloured son of this tropical land…

  The pamphlet roused the conservative Dutch-language press to a storm of vitriol, and it was too much even for gentle governor-general Idenburg. He had all three Indies Party chiefs evicted from their putative fatherland on the grounds of ‘journalistic excess’ and exiled to the Netherlands, where he felt they would do less damage. The party quickly collapsed in their absence.

  Douwes Dekker, Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo and Suwardi Suryaningrat were the first true radicals, and their party had espoused a secular nationalism a decade before a similar ideology became the driving force of the independence movement. They had also become the first political exiles of the coming struggle, but they would by no means be the last, for by this time a strand of radical Marxism was emerging from the broad church of the Sarekat Islam. From amongst the chains and girders of the railway sheds of Surabaya and Semarang modern trade unions were rising, and before long a communist faction had coalesced from the burgeoning membership of the SI under the leadership of a feisty young man named Semaun. In 1921, he was made the first chair of the Perserikatan Komunis di Hindia, the ‘Communist Association of the Indies’, or PKH, and was soon clamouring for revolution. His efforts to start mass strikes were quickly crushed by the authorities, however, and Semaun was shipped off to exile in the Netherlands.

  Frank Carpenter’s tranquil, timeless 1920s East Indies was in fact a place humming with intellectual and ideological ferment. The business of discussing Marxism, Islamic reform and political structures was clearly the preserve of a tiny elite, but they were not the only ones starting to stir. By the early twentieth century, the major cash crop in Java was sugarcane. Vast reaches of the stuff stretched across the flatlands of the Brantas delta where Majapahit princes had once paraded in cloth-of-gold, and the workers were pushed exceptionally hard when it came to producing the stuff. In response, a devastatingly simple form of resistance had emerged: cane fields developed a peculiar tendency to go up in flames during the hours of darkness, just as they were being readied for harvest.

  Outside of Java, conflict between labourers and landowners was often more violent. In the eastern levels of Sumatra—onetime heartland of Buddhist empires and Muslim sultanates—a frontier-zone agricultural industry had developed. Swathes of virgin jungle were leased to speculating pioneers, who would strip the forest and plant vast acreages of tobacco. In an area largely devoid of local population, the workforce had to be shipped in from elsewhere—be it the crowded spaces of Java or southern China. These Chinese and Javanese coolie labourers were often retained on appalling terms of indenture, and Sumatra was home to what was often little short of a slave economy. For desperate men, resistance itself tended to be more desperate than mere arson: there were sporadic outbursts of bloody violence against European planters by renegade coolies. These were generally dealt with brutally, and usually hushed up by the local authorities, but they brought a permanent atmosphere of mutual hostility to some estates. On one plantation in Asahan, south of Medan, the assistant manager ‘never went around to inspect the work of the Chinese coolies because he was afraid of their violence if he criticised their work’. He never went anywhere ‘without very visibly bearing a revolver’.

  Sometimes, rural resistance would coalesce into an earthy political movement. In the countryside around Blora in East Java, visiting officials found villagers responding to their demands with peculiar passive-aggression and cryptic sexual innuendos. They were the followers of a man called Surantika Samin, who had turned resentment of government interference in the local teak industry into a mystic movement. Meanwhile, in villages all over Java recruiters for the Sarekat Islam were passing off membership cards as magic amulets, and doing nothing to discourage the notion that Tjokroaminoto might just be the latest incarnation of the Ratu Adil…

  What was lacking, however, was a unifying drive for all this ferment. Neither Islam nor socialism was a sufficiently inclusive banner for a pan-Archipelago movement against colonial rule. But by the start of the 1920s a whole new generation of educated young men—and they were still all men—was emerging, men born since the turn of the century. Many of the sharpest graduates were now travelling to the Netherlands to continue their studies. Amongst their number were the Minangkabau intellectuals Sutan Sjahrir and Mohammad Hatta, and the future prime ministers Ali Sastroamidjojo (sometimes also spelt Sastroamijoyo) and Sukiman Wirjosandjojo (sometimes also spelt Wiryosanjoyo). In draughty boarding houses these students heard the inspiring words of older exiles, Douwes Dekker and Semaun amongst them.

  Back in the Indies, meanwhile, other young thinkers were able to continue their own studies closer to home, particularly at the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng, the Bandung Institute of Technology. As Frank Carpenter strolled the civilised streets of Bandung in blissful ignorance in 1923, admiring the Dutch bungalows and declaring the place ‘a veritable botanical garden’, he might have brushed unwittingly past a slim young man who was studying for an engineering degree by day, but who by night was already delving deep into a new sort of nationalist politics. Sukarno had arrived on the scene.

  Sukarno is one of those behemoths that thunder through the narratives of many a new or reinvented nation, standing alongside the likes of Gandhi, Mao and Atatürk. His enormous stature overshadows any number of other significant figures, but there are no two ways about it: he was enormously important in the independence movement and in the new nation that it eventually produced. His ideas may not always have been well-considered or original; he may have been propped up by men of greater intellect; but like a sultan of old, he made for a magnificent figurehead.

  Sukarno was born in Surabaya in 1901. His origins are a little murky, and the facts are further obscured by both his own later myth-making and the scurrilous rumours spread by his detractors. Claims that he was a direct descendent of the royal house of Surakarta are probably as ill-founded as the stories that he was the bastard son of a Dutch tea planter. His real father seems to have been a schoolteacher from the lower ranks of the old Javanese elite; his mother was a Balinese Hindu from Buleleng. Like Airlangga, nine centuries earlier, he had an ancestry spanning the narrow strait between Java and its eastern neighbour. And like Diponegoro, he was very clearly in possession of that peculiar thing known in the Archipelago as karisma—a potent and almost supernatural personal presence that goes far beyond
its direct English translation, ‘charisma’. He had an ego fit for a king and a libido to match; when he joined an organisation it flourished, and when he left it withered. He was, in short, a force of nature.

  Sukarno had served his political apprenticeship as a lodging schoolboy in the Surabaya house of Tjokroaminoto of the Sarekat Islam, and by 1923, even as a baby-faced undergraduate in Band-ung, he was already honing his twin talents for speechifying and philandering. At the start of the year he had caused a stir at a political rally with an oration so militant that the police had to step in. Meanwhile, he had also succeeded in seducing his landlord’s wife—a Sundanese woman thirteen years his senior—and ditching his own child-bride in her favour.

  The Sarekat Islam was still the biggest political beast of the day, but the failure of either Islam or Marxism to truly ignite the nationalist cause, and the tensions between these divergent streams within the organisation, meant that its day was rapidly passing. Sukarno and his contemporaries, meanwhile, were rapidly forging a new and more mature sort of nationalism, one that was pragmatic for all its radicalism. This was the loosely secular ideology that would dominate throughout the coming decades—one in which Islam was sometimes paid lip-service but was for the most part ignored, and in which full-blown Marxism was exchanged for a milder sort of socialism.

  This new generation of nationalists had a new vocabulary with which to articulate their cause, and by the start of the 1920s one word had gradually risen to the top of the boiling cauldron of ideas. A decade earlier, Douwes Dekker and Suryaningrat had demanded liberation for the Indies; Sukarno and his fellow travellers would be calling for an independent Indonesia.