Demokrasi Read online

  In practice, the hold of the ruler was much more tenuous than the legend suggests. The entire population of the archipelago would have been fewer than 5 million people, with most living in isolated clusters separated by seas and mountains. Even in Java, aside from the northern coastal plains that faced a placid sea, many communities could be reached only by long journeys on foot over rugged terrain. The historian M. C. Ricklefs notes that kingship would have involved the delegation of authority to regional overlords in Java and to tributary rulers in the outer islands. He concludes: “There was, therefore, constant tension within large states between regional and central interests, and all such states were fragile entities.”

  The techniques of maintaining power were centered on the apportionment of “rent farms,” the right to levy gate tolls and other taxes on trade. Intermarriage was used to keep potential usurpers on familial terms, while a network of spies also operated. The kings imbued themselves with mystical powers as incarnations of Hindu gods. Ultimately, they had military power if all else failed. “A successful ruler stayed on top of this precarious system,” observes Ricklefs, “by balancing and manipulating the interests of those below him, by demonstrating superior martial skills and by appearing to have the support of the supernatural.”

  In an influential essay, Cornell University’s Benedict Anderson also saw that power, in Javanese tradition, was increased by the accumulation of prestige. Successful usurpers prepared themselves by withdrawing from worldly affairs and by undertaking regimes of self-discipline. A ruler would gather around himself the pusaka (relics) of other powerful figures, such as their weapons or regalia; he would also bring conflicting groups into agreement, demonstrate his sexual prowess by having many wives and offspring, invoke magic with invocatory words and ceremonies, and show his ease with the supernatural by bringing into his retinue “extraordinary human beings such as albinos, clowns, dwarves and fortune tellers.” He demonstrated his power through his quietness, as befit someone of the utmost halus (refined) quality.

  If this indicated that power was a simple sum of elements to be accumulated by the skillful statesman, rather than by any moral force, Onghokham pointed out that wahyu, or divine legitimacy, could shift at any time. Civil disorder, famine, disease, inflation, the dwindling of gold savings, or the eruption of a volcano could all be signs of a ruler losing his grip, and a new ratu adil (just prince) might then emerge and seize power.

  While Majapahit was being built, trade was bringing in a new religion from the west. Islam became a permanent presence on the archipelago as Arab and Indian merchants took local wives and conversions grew. It came surprisingly late, some five or six centuries after the faith was founded, but it was noted as the prevailing religion in many centers along the Malacca Strait by travelers, such as Marco Polo (1292) and Ibn Battuta (1345–6). By the early fifteenth century, the religion was spreading throughout Java and into court circles. Hayam Waruk’s successors were showing themselves to be clumsy in statecraft, and Majapahit’s power was eclipsed by the rise of three Islamic sultanates on Java.

  After less than a century under Islam, though, a new kingdom of the classic Javanese model arose. A new ratu adil, Senopati, emerged after building up his wahyu through fasting and meditation, and after communing with the vengeful goddess of the seas, Nyai Lara Kidul. In 1584 he established a new sultanate, Mataram, with its capital near present-day Yogyakarta. A successor, Sultan Agung, who reigned between 1613 and 1646, expanded the domain across central and eastern Java, with tribute exacted from rulers across the Java Sea. As well as an Islamic identity, Mataram’s practices displayed many threads of Hinduism, Indian political theory, and native Javanese spiritualism. It was a blend to be evidenced in the style of Indonesia’s first two presidents.

  By this time the rulers and peoples of the archipelago had a new and even more disruptive influence to deal with. In the last years of the fifteenth century, Portuguese explorers found their way around the Cape of Good Hope to India. In 1510 the expedition of Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa, on the west coast of India, and a year later the biggest trading sultanate on the route between India and China, Malacca.

  Through an advantage in military technique, the Portuguese now had one of the key staging points in what Ricklefs calls “the greatest trading system in the world at this time.” But they had no clue how to take commercial advantage. Malacca had no hinterland or resources: it was a pure entrepôt, reliant on trust and acceptable fees among the merchants who used it. With the Portuguese squeezing this commerce too hard, traders bypassed Malacca for ports such as Johor. The interest of the Portuguese moved to Japan and Macau and to the eastern spice-producing islands of the archipelago. After efforts to set up bases in Ternate and Tidore, in alliance with the local rulers, they concentrated on Ambon, where a strong Christian community developed, encouraged by a visit by the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier in 1546–47.

  The Portuguese were joined at the end of the sixteenth century by the Dutch. The first Dutch expedition, in 1595–97, was a disaster in terms of men and shipping lost but still turned enough of a profit from its cargo of pepper to set off a scramble by other adventurers. In 1602 the Dutch parliament forced the competing traders to form a single chartered enterprise, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, United East Indies Company), which had quasisovereign powers. It seized Ambon in 1605 but by 1619 had moved its headquarters to Jayakarta, a port on the north coast of West Java that gave it a more central position in the archipelago. It was renamed Batavia, after an ancient term for the tribes of the Netherlands.

  For nearly two centuries, the VOC manipulated, often clumsily, the power of the Mataram rulers and of their internal rivals and external challengers, offering the limited military power of its few European troops (there were only 869 such soldiers on Java in 1702) and local recruits in land campaigns, and using its much more effective naval power to control and tax trade. The company gradually extended its power to the eastern islands, forcing the English out of the nearby port of Banten. But the profitability of its trading posts declined, especially after the French stole clove seedlings and set up rival plantations in their Indian Ocean colonies. VOC officials became renowned for corruption and debauchery; “Our nation must drink or die,” declared the early VOC governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen. And die they did, if not from excess, then from the many diseases of swampy Batavia.

  A low point that almost lost Java for the Dutch came in 1740, when those in Batavia panicked about being murdered in their beds by a native and Chinese uprising. A crackdown turned into a pogrom in which 10,000 Chinese were slaughtered. Survivors fled to Central Java and laid siege to VOC forts, with help from Mataram. The uprising was narrowly overcome, and Mataram was eventually subdivided into three royal houses with less and less effective power. In 1795 Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies conquered Holland and installed a friendly regime in Batavia. It dissolved the bankrupt and scandal-shrouded VOC in 1800.

  The administration continued, but the East Indies were now under direct rule from The Hague. In 1808 it sent out a new governor-general, Herman Willem Daendels, who was imbued with the French revolutionary spirit. He showed no delicacy with the Javanese rulers, equating them with the ousted French aristocracy. The Indies, meanwhile, were caught up in global conflict. A new governor-general, Jan Willem Janssens, had in 1811 just installed himself after being expelled from Cape Town by the British when a massive British fleet arrived off Batavia. Janssens and his forces were pursued to defeat at Salatiga.

  The new British lieutenant governor of Java, Thomas Stamford Raffles, was just as short with the Javanese royalty as Daendels had been. An encounter with one of the Mataram sultans, Hamengkubuwono II, almost turned into a fight on the spot. The discovery of plotting gave Raffles the excuse to send his British and Indian troops to sack Hamengkubuwono’s lavish kraton (palace) and install a friendly prince from a junior royal house, the Pakualaman, across town in Yogy
akarta.

  The British handed back the Indies to the restored Dutch kingdom in 1816, as part of the settlement of Europe after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. Along with a romantic legend, Raffles left traces of his influence: the name of Yogyakarta’s main street, Malioboro (from “Marlborough”), the botanical gardens next to the old governor-general’s palace in Bogor, a two-volume history of Java, and his name on a giant, foul-smelling flower of the Southeast Asian jungles. Except in Indonesia, he is better known as the founder of Singapore in 1819, the entrepôt and naval base that established British preeminence in Southeast Asia for more than a century.

  Ricklefs credits Raffles with introducing, at least in theory, the notion that “native welfare” should be a concern of government and the beginnings of a land rent system for state finances. He and Daendels also tightened the administrative authority of government, making Javanese officials part of its bureaucracy, whether they liked it or not.

  The uprising led by Prince Diponegoro, of the Hamengkubuwono royal house, in 1825–30 was a classic case of a ratu adil figure responding to widespread popular discontent. Diponegoro repudiated the decadence of court life, spent time in religious schools, and pursued meditation, and fought against the heavy squeeze by tax “farmers” (merchants given rights to levy road tolls and land rent on behalf of the rulers) and the leasing of land by court officials to European and Chinese planters of sugar, indigo, coffee, and other cash crops. But the Dutch wore his rebel forces down in a long campaign that cost the lives of 15,000 government soldiers and 200,000 Javanese. Ultimately, Diponegoro surrendered and was exiled to Sulawesi, where he died in 1855.

  The Dutch now settled down to run Java as an extractive system. The cultuurstelsel (cultivation system), introduced in 1830, replaced the cash paid by villages as land rent with crops grown for export on a piece of village land set aside for this purpose. This was meant to ease the demand of turning rice into cash in order to pay the tax; in effect, it meant villagers were growing huge volumes of indigo, sugar, coffee, and so on at a set price, which the government’s trading company could then export and sell from Amsterdam at a vast profit.

  The population of Java, meanwhile, began growing—a result of the peace and some public health improvements—rising from about 7 million in 1830 to nearly four times that number by the end of the century. This made greater and greater demands on the rice-growing capacity of the island. The effects on the Javanese were uneven, but overall they were being squeezed. Remittances to the Dutch treasury from the Indies rose to around a third of all state revenues in the 1850s and 1860s, effectively financing the construction of railways and other infrastructure of the industrial age in Holland.

  By this time, an awakening liberalism in Holland was leading to doubts about the humanity of the cultuurstelsel, roused in part by a novel whose effect is often likened to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the antislavery mood in the United States. Max Havelaar, written by Edward Douwes Dekker under the pseudonym Multatuli, described the life of an eponymous young official who had been assigned as assistant resident in a district of West Java. There, the hereditary local ruler, the bupati, mercilessly oppressed the population to extract coffee at ever lower prices and to obtain free labor, while Havelaar’s boss, the Dutch resident, continued to provide sunny reports to the governor-general.

  The book’s publication in 1860 caused uproar, and the gradual abolition of the compulsory growing of government crops and the official adoption of a Liberaal Politiek (Liberal Policy) followed. Whether the lives of Java’s villagers were greatly improved is unclear. One effect was the opening of Java to private agrarian ventures, with foreigners able to lease land. The number of European residents jumped sharply, and more and more Javanese found themselves working for European or Chinese masters. The liberal policy did lead to an extension of schooling for the people of the Indies, creating cadres of teachers, medical officers, clerks, and officials in telegraphy, the railways, and other services.

  After the European accord, the Dutch moved in fits and starts to regularize their territorial control, with a treaty in 1824 giving them sway over Sumatra, in return for their acknowledgement of Britain’s control over Malaya. A seventeen-year uprising in the West Sumatran homeland of the Minangkabau, influenced by the puritanical Wahhabi school of Islam (which had been encountered by pilgrims to Mecca and brought back), was finally put down in 1838; its leader, Imam Bonjol, was exiled to North Sulawesi. Campaigns continued, bringing to heel any truculent sultans or rajas around the archipelago, with the costly Aceh wars being the last great expenditure of Dutch blood, although the Acehnese were never really subdued and random suicidal attacks by individuals against passing Dutchmen continued—these were the so-called Aceh moort (Aceh murders). At the other end of the Indies, Dutch officials took up station in New Guinea.

  It was in Bali that a final grim tableau of Dutch imperialism played out. Bali had long offended European sensibilities—its multiple kingdoms were constantly at war, a major source of its income well into the nineteenth century was the export of slaves, and its upper classes practiced a form of Hindu suttee, or widow burning—but it had been left alone as it produced little of exportable value. The ransacking of ships that had run aground and the burning of a widow in 1903 finally motivated the Dutch to intervene. In 1906 the royal families of the Badung kingdom, including women and children, faced the Dutch army. Dressed in ritual white and armed only with traditional weapons, they advanced on the lines of soldiers at Denpasar and Pamecutan and were mown down with rifle and machine-gun fire. Another of these puputan (final battles) occurred at Klungkung in 1908.

  The colonial spell that had enabled small European nations to subdue vast numbers of peoples across the world was a mixture of brutal force and deliberate demoralization. Before the American invasion of the Philippines, only about 5,000 Spaniards, of whom 4,000 were priests, had controlled the entire island system. Ricklefs points out that in 1905 the Dutch were able to hold down, if not minutely control, the 37 million people in the Indies with a relatively tiny armed force of fewer than 16,000 Europeans and 26,000 local soldiers (of whom, despite the later ill feeling, only 21 percent were Ambonese, while 68 percent were Javanese). The Dutch didn’t have to divide the populace in order to rule it. A national consciousness had not yet awoken. But that was about to change.

  The industrial age arrived in the Indies. A new steamship line linked the islands. Railways connected the main cities of Java, while electric trams trundled their streets. The telegraph quickly brought news from around the world. Rotary printing presses churned out newspapers for a mass readership. In 1898 a Dutch company found oil in North Sumatra and, in 1907, merged with a British company active in Borneo to form Royal Dutch Shell. The motor age set off investment in vast rubber plantations. Coal mines in Sumatra and Borneo fueled the electricity grids of the cities and towns. This aggressive enterprise, much of it in the outer islands, radiated out from the great urban centers of Singapore, Batavia, and Surabaya.

  This intensified exploitation was accompanied by another turn in the official Dutch policy toward the Indies. The Liberal Policy was replaced by the Ethische Politiek (Ethical Policy) in 1901, reflecting the feeling in a review ordered by the young Queen Wilhelmina (who reigned between 1890 and 1948): that it was time for the Dutch to recognize a “debt of honour” and give back a measure of the benefits taken from the Indies to its peoples. The pillars of the Ethical Policy were education and a combination of investment in agriculture and migration to ameliorate the population pressure that was being experienced in Java.

  With the population already expanding explosively, the latter part of the policy came too late. The promise of educational opportunity coincided with a growing consciousness among local peoples, expressed in the letters of a young woman of the Javanese aristocratic (priyayi) class, Raden Ajeng Kartini, which were published by a sympathetic Dutch official after her death in 1904, aged just t
wenty-five. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, higher levels of education were opened to students of all races, with the first tertiary college (the forerunner of the Bandung Institute of Technology) opening in 1920.

  By this time, a few of the brighter sons of wealthy families were graduating from universities in the Netherlands. But the government school system was reaching only a small fraction of school-age children by the final years of Dutch rule, with adult literacy under 10 percent. Like its predecessor, the Ethical Policy in practice had its limits. A truly universal education system would have required actual financial sacrifice by the Dutch.

  Political development was even more token, with the formation of an advisory body to the governor-general, the Volksraad (People’s Council), whose European, Chinese, and Inlander (or native) representatives were elected by a narrow college of substantial citizens.

  By the 1920s, however, the cities of Batavia, Bandung, and Surabaya were in ferment. The first graduates from higher schools emerged, and pamphlets and Malay-language newspapers appeared. Dutch radicals introduced militant socialist ideas, similar to those sweeping Russia and Germany. Ideas of self-government had begun stirring earlier but had not yet formed into a broad nationalism. Several hundred young Javanese priyayi formed the cultural revival association Budi Utomo (Highest Endeavor) in 1908. It drew inspiration from the Javanese empires of the past, and some members regarded Islam as an influence that had held the Javanese back. The more devout, both in Java and in the outer islands, joined the Sarekat Islam (Islamic Union), formed over 1911–12, which had a more ethnically universal base but also looked to the worldwide ummat (community of believers).