All I said to him was that in such difficult times as these any action taken against the educated Natives needed to be considered very carefully. As a government that conformed with European values, ours must always be able to justify its actions. We needed to have enough material to make sure any actions could be properly explained. Otherwise any action that was taken would be no different from that taken by the Native rajas of the past.
I knew he was offended by this lecture of an answer. He could have continued the argument if he wanted to defend his position. Except he didn’t know how.
So I continued to gather together more information about my target. At the very least it would be useful for my own studies.
In the next report I wrote, I set out the following information:
She was teaching in a Dutch-language Boedi Oetomo primary school. Once a week she took the students from the most senior class to the rice fields and farms where she finished teaching the Dutch-language class. This made the students even more enthusiastic about their Dutch lessons and also brought them closer to their teacher. She didn’t use the official textbooks, but used the natural surroundings all around her. She advised her students to study the textbook themselves at home.
The principal reprimanded her several times. And the principal was reprimanded in turn by the school inspector because the school was receiving a government subsidy.
Soon everyone in Pacitan was saying that Siti Soendari was being watched by the authorities because of her activities and that none of her students would ever be accepted for employment in government service.
The parents and guardians of the students started bringing their concerns to the principal. So in the end the inevitable took place—Siti Soendari departed. She took her leave in front of her class, watched by the principal. Everyone knew that she loved her students. Whether or not her students loved her—well, you can figure that out for yourself.
My very good children—she spoke gently as was her way when saying good-bye to students—it has never been my desire that you should imitate me. I have never taught or suggested to you to do anything other than study hard and well, have I? Today I will be leaving you all and this school. Outside school we will often meet and have the chance to chat and discuss. Perhaps some of you would like to come and visit me from time to time. You would all be very welcome.
Children, I often took you out into the open for classes. Why? For no other reason than that you should get to know the environment around you, in which you will live and grow. You must love the environment around you because it all belongs to you. I will be so happy if just one of you truly learns to love the world around you and understands that it belongs to all of you, and no one else.
Now I am going. I have never hurt even one of you, have I? In my heart, I am sure that I have never done anything to harm any of you. And I know too that none of you have ever done any wrong to me. And that is what is making this good-bye just a little easier. Yes, children, you must all study hard. Love your parents, your teachers, and the land and world of your own people.
She seemed to wipe away a tear as she walked down the steps at the school entrance. But she kept all of her poise. She said nothing to her students about having been dismissed by the school principal. She left her students behind without their ever learning what the real problem was.
Although the reports I received didn’t give me a complete picture of what happened, it was enough to move me greatly. For the umpteenth time, I once more acknowledged that she was fully emancipated, and in the European way. She was liberated. For me she was the most beautiful woman to emerge as a product of the beginning of the modern era in the Indies. And this is something I myself am witnessing!
But if she is destroyed because she is ahead of her time, it will be I who feel the greatest loss, even though, yes, even though it is obvious that this is what will happen. She is a historical guinea pig. She will try to drag her people forward with her, but they will only pull her back. And ultimately this will exhaust her. Perhaps they will tear off her hand as she tries to drag them forward. And when her energy is drained away, she will be pulled back and she will disappear again in the midst of her people. Or perhaps she will become bored with her fruitless efforts to drag her unwilling people forward. Then she will let go of them and travel forward by herself, like Nyai Ontosoroh in the story told in the manuscripts of the Modern Pitung.
Yes, alone, without friends, and then suddenly one day she would realize that she was alone, by herself, in silent solitude. There would be no one there to listen. There would be no extra hands to give aid to her fading strength. She would be swallowed up by that new jungle called the modern age. And the whole world around her would seem new and strange and different from how she imagined it, because every new advance brings forth other advances in other fields, and every new product of civilization brings with it new laws, laws that are more and more binding. And there will be loneliness in the midst of tumult, and joy in the solitude of an isolated soul. The modern person indeed stands alone in a lonely world, a world increasingly alien to everybody. But this is still a better fate to befall her than to be ruined by falling in among all the criminals.
It is a great pity that Raden Mas Minke’s manuscripts were written before she appeared on the scene. Perhaps if those criminals had not ransacked his home-in-exile so early on, I could have read what his views about her were. (Actually, I still considered that theft as contemptible and totally improper.)
And was there ever any relationship between Raden Mas Minke and Siti Soendari? Of course there was. Among the various reports to me that came in from around Java, there was one that wrote: In March 1912, Meneer Raden Mas Minke visited his old school friend, Siti Soendari’s father, in Pemalang.
It wouldn’t make very interesting reading to quote directly from all these reports, so I will just set out here some of the material, but in my own words, of course.
It was in July 1912 that Raden Mas Minke finished his tour of Java, explaining to all the Sarekat branches his plans for it to expand beyond the shores of the Indies. He propagandized for unity between all the Malay-speaking peoples of Singapore, Malaya, Borneo, Siam, the Philippines, and, if possible, also in Ceylon and South Africa. With his six years of experience in Java it was quite possible he would have succeeded had not the government sent him into exile. And had he succeeded, it was clear that he would have created disturbances in all the colonies—Dutch, English, and French.
It is true he didn’t always note down what his ultimate intentions were. But it was impossible for him to fool someone like me. I knew that in his own way he wanted to show that colonialism was not simply a local problem but an international one, and he wanted to respond to that by building international solidarity among the Malay-speaking people.
But he always forgot his own weakness—he was never a good judge of people. He looked on everyone who was close to him, who knew him well, as having the same abilities as he, the same sincere intentions, the same honesty and goodness. He truly thought of them all as being much like himself. Each time he had to choose somebody to undertake a task, he inevitably made a mistake.
It was possible that in the future people would laugh at him for taking an initiative that did not stem from a Congress decision. But that’s how the Native organization operated during that time.
The last place he stopped during his tour was Pemalang. He had often stopped and stayed overnight at the house of his old friend, Siti Soendari’s father.
At the time of his last visit there, Siti Soendari was at home on vacation. Her older brother was no longer in the Indies. He had gone to Holland to continue his education. This time she used the opportunity to talk with her father’s friend about many things, as a student before her teacher, as a child before her father.
I don’t know for sure what it was that they discussed. I am trying to get more complete reports. I will try to get more material, even though the agents there will wonder why I need such person
al information.
The main thing is that there was contact between Siti Soendari and Minke. Did they correspond? I don’t know. No doubt I will find out about that one day too.
As the war in Europe intensified, the Indies began to experience strange things, as if it was becoming cut off from the kingdom. What was impossible a few years ago now occurred as a daily event—workers began to ignore the orders of the plantation administrators and office staff and even began to challenge them. These officials no longer felt so much at ease and secure under the protection of colonial law but began to carry sidearms with them everywhere.
The situation was becoming more and more interesting. The decline in the country’s income, the drop in employment, the increase in food prices, especially with the failure of many rice crops and the import of old, stale rice from Siam, all helped produce a great wave of dissatisfaction in the towns. In Kediri, workers would have burned down a sugar mill if the authorities hadn’t intervened in the nick of time. The Europeans no longer felt safe among their own workers.
And Siti Soendari’s star rose too with the floodtide of dissatisfaction.
The government was lucky that all this took place only in Java. Only Palembang, in southeast Sumatra, seemed to be experiencing the same turmoil. I had originally thought that the contract laborers on the east coast plantations would use the current situation to rise up and seek revenge for all the suffering they had undergone. But no, nothing happened. It seemed the English administrators had succeeded in domesticating them by bringing in gambling, tayub, and prostitutes.
The strength of the police and army was not increased. They had to work even harder as payment in kind in return for not having their wages decreased like everyone else.
There were more and more ethnic organisations—the Sons of Bagelan, Rencong Aceh, Rukun Minahasa, Mufakat Minang, and the Banjar Association. The organization epidemic was spreading ever more virulently. And all of this was just because of the appearance of one player on the Indies chessboard—Raden Mas Minke in 1906.
The colonial government had good reason to be concerned. The government in the Netherlands was even more worried. If the situation continued like this with the colony teetering on the edge of collapse and the world war didn’t soon end, the island of Java could explode into volcanic ash. Just look, here in Betawi there was now even a Drivers’ Sarekat that had unilaterally raised fares for Europeans.
For me, these were all signs that the Natives were at last lifting up their heads to look in the eyes of those who were their teachers, masters, and oppressors all at once. Teacher, master, oppressor . . . how did the Javanese call them? Yes, Duma. Some little-known writer from somewhere or other had first used that name. Yes, yes, a new age, a new way of living with new demands, new concepts, and new names. These are the signs that things are coming to life, moving forward.
I was completely fascinated by all these developments. Not as an enemy to these changes, like the white and chocolate colonial masters. I studied all these things purely as social phenomena in which I had no personal stake at all. It was true indeed that there was no reduction in the amount of work that came to me. It was always possible that my boss would bring me another plan to crush some other organization. But I always refused to sign my name as the official expert. Indeed, I usually laughed in his face, telling him that these useless plans could not turn back the tide.
“But you agreed with and signed the plan to take action against the Indische Partij?”
“Then there were only one or two organizations. Now there are tens, scores of them. If you try to force the situation now, you will only produce the opposite results to those you desire. The organizations will continue to survive, but they will be cleverer and more cunning and the government will therefore have to spend much more money in order to control them.”
And of course, predictably, a great debate ensued. But I remained firm. He could say whatever he wanted, but I would not sign my name to his proposals.
“No matter what you say, you still have to do something, Meneer,” he finally said.
So I devised two classifications of organization. The first were the Indies-oriented organizations. The second were the ethnic-based ones. And instructions went out that government officials should use all available means to support the ethnic organizations and to encourage them to compete against each other. And that way things would be made more difficult for the first kind of organization. In the end, Indies nationalism was much more dangerous than ethnic nationalism. The first kind of nationalism united people; the second set people against each other.
My boss was almost ecstatic when he received my proposals with my signature at the bottom.
“So it is your opinion, Meneer, that the more ethnic organizations there are, the more opportunity there will be for people to organize, and the better things will be for the Indies, because eventually European democratic ways will find their place in the Native world and thereby change the Natives’ feudal ways?”
“At the very least they will study how to decide things collectively. And so these organizations will also be open and above ground and we will be able to peep in through their doors or windows whenever we like.”
This was the most substantial and wide-ranging submission I had ever written, perhaps my best piece of work—without having to use any of the material or ideas from my private studies.
So it was clear that these new developments did not threaten me at all. These were natural and reasonable developments, even though they were occurring with more enthusiasm and energy than had occurred in Europe. If there was an exception to this in Europe, it was in France just prior to the Revolution.
And the social transformations taking place in Java were no less interesting. The higher nobility, whose status today was based on their high position in the colonial state, obtained those positions purely because of their aristocratic rank. Now the lower ranks of the aristocracy, desperate for any position in the colonial hierarchy, were eagerly studying all sorts of subjects as long as it finally led to a job in the colonial service. They entered all the vocational schools, which were avoided by the younger generation of the higher aristocracy.
At the same time, once forced labor ended in the villages, young village people started flooding into the towns looking for work, and there they found all kinds of new and different experiences—a thousand times more varied and new than the experiences of their ancestors a century and a half before.
They became acquainted with all sorts of machines and learned to study the laws that governed the operation of these machines. As workers, they became familiar with all those new elements in modern life—electricity, steam power, petrol—and many became first-class motor mechanics, achieving levels of skill far greater than the children of aristocrats ever achieved in their areas of work, aristocrats before whom they used to bow and scrape.
They worked on building steel bridges, put up telegraph cables, drove motorcars and steam engines. They built cement dams. They constructed small and large factories. Then, using all this experience, they started to open their own workshops. And there were among them those who achieved considerable wealth, either because of their skills or because of their enterprise or both. They became far wealthier than the nobles and aristocrats who for centuries had ruled over their ancestors.
It was obvious from the huge rush of the children of lower nobility into the vocational schools that it would be they who would emerge as the leaders of their people. The agricultural, medical, trade, teacher, and veterinarian schools were all taken over by these children. And as well, when that phase ended, it was also clear that the farmers’ children who were being transformed into skilled tradesmen and merchants would also have the chance to lead society in the future. They would eventually leave behind the aristocracy, high and low, in life’s race. And in the end, being a member of the nobility would no longer mean anything. And then the government, which had based its rule all this time on working through the
nobility, would also have to change its ways, would have to accommodate to the new social situation. If it did not do this, it would collapse along with the aristocracy itself.
In my eyes, any educated person who was not interested and not impressed by all these changes was not a truly educated person at all. It was also because of these developments that I watched over Siti Soendari—also a child of a lower aristocrat. What would happen to this maiden? If she were a man, I am sure she would agree with everything I am writing down now. But a woman? I didn’t know what would happen to her.
But then Marco, the son of a peasant, should have emerged only after Siti Soendari disappeared from the scene. He contradicted my theory. And the problem was that he emerged earlier than Siti Soendari simply because he was older. Perhaps he represented a phenomenon that was before its time. He was at least fifteen years too early.
This theory also contradicted the Hindu caste system. It should have been the children of the merchants who emerged once the nobility had fallen. But generally speaking, most of the merchants’ children never really fully matured, in the way that they did in Europe. The Native merchants gave birth to children who didn’t seem to have any real will to achieve anything in life except to be merchants like their parents. They didn’t have the energy to reach out for anything more than that or to step out into new arenas of activity.
The way Siti Soendari and Marco each dealt with the question of noble titles seemed to confirm my theories. Soendari, like Wardi before her, dropped her titles, perhaps in recognition of the coming demise of the aristocracy. Marco, on the other hand, who previously had no title at all, adopted the title of mas, the lowest rank in the Javanese nobility. Perhaps this was a sign that he felt he had jumped over a necessary phase and because of that enlisted himself among the lower ranks of the nobility.
Perhaps these are all the thoughts of a crazy man, but these are what I think.
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