by Nigel Barley
It is impossible to know for sure what attracted Raffles to Freemasonry. As an endemic outsider, he may well have appreciated the opportunity to really ‘belong’ to the ruling clique of the Company. As a practical man, he may well have pined for some sort of ethical organization that would cross-cut national lines so the Dutch and British could be true ‘brothers’. From a religious point of view, Raffles occasionally gives sign of that moderate and functional eighteenth-century faith that left no room for enthusiasm. He tolerated his cousin as a ‘dissenter’. He opposed interfering with the faith of Muslims, which he regarded as a perfectly satisfactory religion whilst condemning its addiction to empty ritual. He seems at times to be reaching for some sort of non-denominational faith:
‘The great doctrine of the Koran is the Unity of God – to restore which point was the main point of Mahomed’s mission, and to be candid, I think Mahomed has done a good deal of good in the world. I amuse and instruct myself for hours together with the Mahometans here, who to a man all believe in the Scriptures. They believe Jesus Christ a prophet and respect him as such. Mahomed’s mission does not invalidate our Saviour’s. One has secured happiness to the Eastern and one to the Western world, and both deserve our veneration.’
Raffles had encountered other religions as a functioning part of the social order and found a need to come to terms with them. He could not condemn them out of hand as he might in England, though – like present Indonesian officialdom – he always assumed that those who were not Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or Muslim had ‘no religion’. For Raffles’ generation, the possession of religion was a mark of civilization; for the present generation of largely godless English, it is, of course, a mark of primitiveness. It may well be the nondenominational religiosity of Freemasonry that appealed to the tolerant and international mind of Raffles. For Freemasonry preaches a belief in God but does not clearly say which god. This too would link Sukarno and Raffles.
‘There, between the two huge pillars where once the Governor-General stood to officially open the Volksraad, I unwrapped my five precious pearls: Nationalism, Internationalism, Democracy, Social Justice, and Belief in One God … “Let us build merdeka [freedom] in awe of the One Supreme God”, but “Let every Indonesian believe in his own God. Let each worship as he chooses. Let us declare the fifth principle as the civilized way: Belief in one God with mutual respect for one another.”’
– C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography
* * *
The guide saw me to the gate of the Great Garden like a well-mannered escort of the age of Raffles seeing his dancing partner home. A statue crouched coyly by the lily-pond. Surely that was a copy of the mermaid of Copenhagen? A gravel path led out into the trees of the botanical garden towards the looming bulge of Olivia’s monument.
‘I used to work here in the garden,’ he said, peering round the gate. ‘There are no more guests at the palace today. I’ll take you round.’
The garden was full of birds and plump fruit-bats hung from the trees like Christmas decorations. On one side mousedeer, kijang, were grazing. They had been there in Raffles’ day, though Kijang now was a kind of locally made Toyota. A man sat by the side of the path sticking glass eyes on fruit stones so they could be adapted into novelty key-rings.
‘All this was started by Raffles,’ declared my palace – become my garden – guide.
‘But all the books say it was Van der Capelan.’
He swatted the objection away like an importunate mosquito. ‘That is when it was officially founded as a botanical garden. The man before Raffles sold off the land that went with the palace and stole the money.’ That had been Daendels, ‘the Dutch Napoleon’; grossly fat and corrupt, he had died of the piles in West Africa. Serves him right, too. ‘Raffles bought the land back and planted trees. That is how the garden started.’
A phantom graffitist had been at work in the English tongue, doubtless some frustrated student. On one of the trees was chalked, ‘Higher education is your ticket to instant unemployment.’ It was necessary to walk round the whole tree to read it. Raffles would not have agreed with that sentiment. Further along was, ‘Before you find your handsome prince, you will kiss a thousand toads.’
‘Is there a Rafflesia arnoldii here?’ – the huge parasitic plant discovered by Raffles in Bengkulu, the largest flower in the world. It can be more than a metre across and weigh twenty-five pounds.
‘Yes. This way.’ He led me down a dank path and pointed. There was what I can only describe as a small red flower on a stick.
‘That’s not a Rafflesia. A Rafflesia’s huge.’
‘It’s the same family.’ He pouted. ‘There used to be one, but someone stole it.’
‘Why would anyone steal a flower weighing twenty-five pounds and stinking of rotten carrion?’ He shrugged.
‘In Bogor, people will steal anything.’
My guide was snorting great breaths of fresh air through splayed nostrils, staring up smiling into the leaf canopy, feeling the grass luxuriously through his thin shoes. He looked absurdly revived, like a pit pony let up for air.
‘On holidays, many boys and girls come here. Half the people in Jakarta who end up getting married do their courting here. Behind those roots there …’ A lump came into his throat, choking off speech. Suddenly he rushed off, leapt halfway up a tree and grabbed a handful of loose bark, like a dog chasing a squirrel. ‘This bark makes a man very strong. Eat some of this and you can have ten women in one night.’ He cast it wildly away.
‘Does it really work?’
He looked briefly crestfallen, then grinned manically. ‘Whenever I wanted to test it, I could never find more than one woman. Look!’ He hurled a stone up into another tree bringing fruit and branches crashing down. ‘This tree produces fruit like the members of little black boys – very popular with schoolgirls. Look!’ He rushed laughing into the greenery and began swinging on a liana. ‘Every holiday many Tarzans come here looking for Janes.’
There was a clattering up in the top branches. ‘Flying foxes,’ he whispered, black eyes shining. ‘Good to eat but they make a man …’ He clenched his fist like the cannon in Jakarta and groaned.
We came to poor Olivia Raffles’ monument, rebuilt – as the inscription informed us – after being ‘destroyed by a great wind’. A tiny schoolboy was doing his homework in its shade, his face simultaneously puzzled and depressed. Above his head the graffitist had struck again, proclaiming ‘Raffles was here’, not the more idiomatic ‘woz ’ere’ of a home-grown scribbler. On the first attempt he had written, ‘has been here’, crossed it out and moved on to a tentative ‘was being here’. Only after mature reflection on the English preterite, or maybe the consultation of his grammar, had he arrived at the final version.
Noblesse Oblige
‘A great disregard for the little people is shewn throughout their [the Javanese] political history.’
– T. S. Raffles, History of Java
The native rulers of Indonesia saw the arrival of the British as a golden opportunity to regain their ancient liberties. The Dutch had been conveniently defeated for them by an unhoped-for outsider. After this windfall, they saw themselves as under no obligation to behave as spoils of war. The end of the Dutch administration negated all contracts. The British, somewhat legalistically, considered themselves as heirs to the Dutch and therefore heirs to all their agreements and treaties. Any attempt to break them would be an act of perfidy. So the two sides stared past each other in mutual misunderstanding.
Raffles was predisposed by long British habit to see native rulers as despots and to wish to reduce them to a ‘constitutional’ position. From the start he adopted a policy of stressing British supremacy, curtailing the independence of local monarchs and trying to make them salaried officials. It is curious that he has been regarded as an early exponent of the British art of indirect rule. The Dutch had left Java as commercial monopolists. They would return to find themselves unambiguously raised to the position of polit
ical masters.
Only a couple of months after the British conquest of Java, Raffles personally visited the royal courts of Solo and Yogyakarta (Yogya) to make friends and sign treaties with the two principal Javanese rulers. The Dutch had adopted the strategy of encouraging factions within the ruling houses, splitting them again and again. Raffles would ultimately adopt the same practice. Initially he had sent envoys. To Yogya, he had sent John Crawfurd. Raffles and Crawfurd did not get on. Between them was the rivalry of authors and researchers into the same topic, for Crawfurd prided himself on his Malay scholarship. He would write bad reviews of Raffles’ History of Java yet produce only pale pastiches of it in his own works. Crawfurd appalled the Sultan of Yogya with his arrogance.
The Sultan himself played to all the worst of Raffles’ fears. Having been deposed by the Dutch, he unilaterally resumed power and executed his own prime minister – the very model of ‘an Asiatic despot’.
Raffles, aware of the need not to unite the native rulers against him, stopped at Solo first and found the Sultan conciliatory. A treaty was signed. But equally important to Raffles was his meeting there with Dr Thomas Horsefield, an American naturalist. He would prove to be Raffles’ substitute for the dead Leyden as a formally trained scholar who could act as his academic partner. Henceforth, they would collaborate zestfully in the scientific investigation of ‘the other India’. Compared to that, the treaty must have seemed of rather transitory importance.
* * *
There is a sadness about Solo, or Surakarta to give it its formal name, a greyness that belies its heat. It is the oldest royal city of Central Java, locked in eternal rivalry with its parvenu neighbour Yogya. But whereas Yogya enthusiastically embraced the Indonesian Revolution against the Dutch and was, for a time, capital of the infant republic, Solo thought it would all blow over and one day the Europeans would come back. Things were much the same in Raffles’ day. The Sultan of Solo rapidly came to terms, whereas Yogya merely awaited its chance. So government money and preferment go to effervescent Yogya and Solo sinks in slow decline.
The bear-hug of Indonesian hospitality cannot be avoided. ‘Solo?’ they say. ‘We have relatives or friends or friends of relatives there. You must stay with them. If you didn’t everyone would be terribly offended.’ And so I end up staying in a Muslim high school, where going through a wrong door can plunge you into the midst of schoolgirls at their devotions.
At five in the morning the boys practise the call to prayer, the untutored voices somehow much more moving to an infidel than the slicker cadences of the professionals. Their straining chords mingle with those of the caged birds on the veranda, lending themselves too easily to glib moralistic musings concerning freedom and constraint.
At seven the girls appear, swathed in cloth from head to foot, and immediately go into a routine of physical jerks to disco music in front of the boys. Then the boys struggle into tight shorts and demonstrate their prowess to the girls. But, the master emphasized to me repeatedly, they never dance together.
Outside the school is a becak or trishaw rank. They sit there for hours playing chess, which here has none of the Western connotations of pretentious intellectuality. Becak-drivers have sharp tongues. They call the whole business of dancing and praying ‘Allah disco’.
A becak is perhaps the best way to see Indonesian towns. In many parts they take the children to school, the sick to hospital, the wives to their shopping. But they are gradually being banned from cities. They cause congestion, are unmodern – worse – colonial. I always seem to end up with very old becak-drivers pedalling me about. People stare, but are they thinking, ‘See that good white man who has hired that hopeless old driver though a young one would have been stronger and quicker’? Or are they thinking, ‘Look at that fat foreigner sitting there while that poor old man slaves away’? Becaks, for Westerners, are intimately associated with guilt.
Young drivers too can have their problems. In Solo, being caught in the first rainstorm of the year, I did what many others were doing and dived into a becak. I had just been to the royal palace, a run-down structure in the centre of town. A fire there a few years before had led people to recall legends that the destruction of the palace would lead inexorably to the destruction of all Java. In Java no one laughs at such legends, and suddenly government funding had become available for rebuilding. The principal curiosity of the palace was the collection of chastity belts. The guide, ever-eager to improve his English, wanted to know how he should designate the male version, a ticklish cylinder of gold covered with spikes, imposed by a jealous female ruler on her consort. Thinking of this, I hardly noticed the driver.
Becaks have a sort of plastic curtain at the front that can be let down as in a push-chair. The driver, of course, is outside in the storm and is reduced to a pair of glistening legs with muscles like giant pistons.
‘Where do you want to go?’ asked the legs.
‘Ivory Street.’ We haggled gently over the fare.
‘Whereabouts in Ivory Street?’ asked the legs.
‘Do you know the Muslim high school?’
The legs laughed and a hand reached in and held out a plastic identity card. My driver’s name was Joko. He was a pupil at the school.
‘There are two shifts of pupils,’ he explained. ‘I get up at five and go to the school till noon. Then I take out my becak till seven. Then I do my homework and help my family till midnight. Then I go to sleep again.’
The becak cost forty pence a day to hire. Sometimes he did not earn that much and made a loss. He had seven brothers and sisters and his father had no work. He was seventeen years old.
When we got to Ivory Street, he stopped, put on a coolie hat, a pair of broken sunglasses and a mac that covered him from head to foot. This was curious as it had by now stopped raining. He looked like Greta Garbo on a shopping trip.
‘It is the Chinese boys,’ he explained, reluctantly. ‘They go to the same school as me and their fathers own the shops along this street. If they recognize me they’ll call out insults and jeer.’
This was too much guilt for one becak ride. One corner of the street had been curtained off and was being used as a milk-stall. ‘Your custom,’ said a sign sadly, ‘is our only hope of advancement.’ In the hills, I knew, there were grassy meadows, contented cows, Indonesian milkmaids with plaits and dirndl dresses.
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘milk. You will know, of course, that all Europeans are mad about drinking milk. Let us go there and drink milk.’ Once inside, I could invent some European obsession with walking, pay him off and spare him the embarrassment of the Chinese boys.
Behind the curtain was another young man. They seemed to know each other.
‘Do you go to school too?’ I asked warily.
‘No,’ said the young man, ‘Joko is lucky compared to me. I am too poor to go to school but I love to learn English. At night, if there are no customers, I learn from the Australian radio. You can send off for a free book.’ He waved a copy at me. ‘Tell us about English schools.’
We sat and drank tepid milk. I told them of a place where education was free, where the government even gave students money to study. They found it hard to believe, mere travellers’ tales. Such a thing could not really be possible. It was like stories of cities with pavements of gold.
‘Would you,’ asked the young man, ‘have time to talk to us in English? They charge a pound an hour for English conversation at the colleges.’
The rain started up again and thundered wetly on the canvas roof. There was no escape. We spoke of irregular verbs. The more I tried to explain them, the more I realized I didn’t understand them myself. But an hour of my time and a walk home in the pouring rain did not seem too much to atone for the guilt of even one becak ride.
* * *
Raffles’ visit to Yogya was sheer ‘Boys’ Own’ bravado. He arrived with a force of 900 light cavalry. He was treading a fine line, anxious to make it clear he was not here on a mission of conquest but not wanting t
o seem a mere mendicant. The policy was that he had come simply to confirm existing arrangements. There was a business with the carriages, Raffles taking the first and not the second, which had been intended for him. The Sultan tried to impose the reverse arrangement. Raffles knew that within the kraton (palace), precedence was the same as power. Minute regulations governed the smallest matters of dress and behaviour. To this day, the contents of the palace library have an obsessive concern with sumptuary rules – who has the right to wear combs and jewellery, to carry fans.
They entered the audience hall. Raffles and his small party being temporarily cut off from their escort by the press of excited, armed Javanese. Next there was a fussing about the precedence implied by the arrangement of the chairs – fighting with furniture. Swords were drawn on both sides. It looked as if there would be a massacre. At the last moment the Sultan backed down. The chairs were moved so that Raffles’ buttocks had priority, or at least equality. They sat. An agreement was signed.
‘The Sultan was accompanied by several thousands of armed followers, who expressed in their behaviour an infuriated spirit of insolence … Though at that time no act of treacherous hostility took place, the crafty and sanguinary Sultan drew from the circumstances he observed, a confidence in his own strength.’
– Lady Raffles, Memoir
‘… The Sultan had yet to learn with whom he had to deal. Raffles, it is true, lacked those few extra inches that can give a man the assistance of a commanding physical presence, but he lacked nothing in moral stature, and there was clearly something about him that compelled respect.’