SETTING HISTORY STRAIGHT? INDONESIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE NEW ORDER

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Center for International Studies of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts

Sony Karsono August 2005

This thesis entitled SETTING HISTORY STRAIGHT? INDONESIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE NEW ORDER

by Sony Karsono

has been approved for the Department of Southeast Asian Studies and the Center for International Studies by

William H. Frederick Associate Professor of History

Josep Rota Director of International Studies

KARSONO, SONY. M.A. August 2005. International Studies Setting History Straight? Indonesian Historiography in the New Order (274 pp.) Director of Thesis: William H. Frederick

This thesis discusses one central problem: What happened to Indonesian historiography in the New Order (1966-98)? To analyze the problem, the author studies the connections between the major themes in his intellectual autobiography and those in the metahistory of the regime. Proceeding in chronological and thematic manner, the thesis comes in three parts. Part One presents the author’s intellectual autobiography, which illustrates how, as a member of the generation of people who grew up in the New Order, he came into contact with history. Part Two examines the genealogy of and the major issues at stake in the post-New Order controversy over the rectification of history. Part Three ends with several concluding observations. First, the historiographical engineering that the New Order committed was not effective. Second, the regime created the tools for people to criticize itself, which shows that it misunderstood its own society. Third, Indonesian contemporary culture is such that people abhor the idea that there is no single truth.

Approved: William H. Frederick Associate Professor of History

For Nurchayati, Kartini, and Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata

Acknowledgments Without the unstinting moral support of my mother Kartini and my wife Nurchayati, I would not have had the energies to complete this thesis. And it was my father, the late Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata, who, in 1987, awakened in me the desire to undertake a study overseas. It is to them that I dedicate this work. For the funding of my master’s study in the United States, 2003-2005, of which this thesis constituted the final part, I relied on three institutions. I am indebted to the Fulbright Exchange Program and Ohio University for their generous scholarships. And I wish to thank the University of Surabaya in Indonesia for allowing me to go on paid leave to undertake my study. I am grateful to many individuals in the United States and Indonesia who provided me with administrative assistance at critical stages of my study. I wish to thank Drew McDaniel, Karla Schneider, Joan Kraynanski, and Jill McKinney at Ohio University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. I also wish to thank Piet Hendrardjo at the AMINEF in Jakarta as well as Brenda Simmons and Christina Holdvogt at the IIE Midwest Regional Center in Chicago. The research I conducted from 2004 to 2005 for this work would not have been possible without the kind support from various individuals in the United States and Indonesia. While hunting for and amassing various sources for Part Two of this thesis, I received considerable help at Ohio University’s Southeast Asia Collection from Jeff Ferrier, Jeffrey Shane, Lucy Conn, Nurul Pratiwi, and Nurhaya Muchtar. And, while working on parts of the thesis which deal specifically with students’ encounters with

history in the New Order and with the post-New controversy over Indonesian historiography, I was able to benefit from the kindness of many people in Indonesia who were willing to share with me their ideas and experiences: Asvi Warman Adam in Jakarta, Bambang Purwanto in Yogyakarta, Zunafi in Kediri, and Evilina Sutrisno and Ahmad Faishal in Surabaya. I wish to thank my thesis director, William H. Frederick, for his wisdom, encouragement, and illuminating criticism. To say this, however, is an understatement. For in him, more than in anybody else, I find a teacher who has shaped my fundamental understanding of Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and history as a discipline. I am also grateful to the other members of my thesis committee for their instructive and constructive suggestions: Elizabeth F. Collins and Peter J. Brobst. All these people contributed a great deal to the writing of my thesis. Yet, it is only I who am responsible for any errors and misinterpretations that remain in it.

7 Table of Contents

Page Abstract ....................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments....................................................................................................... 5 List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................. 9 Introduction.................................................................................................................11 15 Part One. Encounter with History in the New Order: Audience’s Point of View 1. Origins, Absence, and Forgetfulness ..............................................................15 2. My Family, My Roots.....................................................................................20 3. Books and Libraries ........................................................................................27 4. School Books versus “Cool” Books ...............................................................34 5. Documents and History...................................................................................39 6. Love and the Destruction of Personal Archives .............................................41 7. Museums: Official versus Unofficial ..............................................................42 8. Flag Raising Ceremony and National Memory ..............................................57 9. The National Monument and Others...............................................................65 10. The Treason of G30S/PKI: A New Order “Historical” Movie .......................78 11. Mohammad Husni Thamrin on Television .....................................................90 12. Cemetery, “History,” and Personal Monument ..............................................93 13. My History Teachers.......................................................................................96 14. My Interest in History: Its Origins and Development ..................................103 Part Two. On the Rectification of Indonesian History: Major Themes 120 15. The Structure of This Part.............................................................................120 16. The Elite’s Perspective: Debating Indonesia’s Genesis, 1946-1990s...........124 17. Education That Went Awry: Students’ and Teachers’ Experience with History in the New Order .............................................................................174 18. The Plight of the Academic Historian in the New Order..............................191 a. The Politics of Representation: Chaos, “Pornography,” and Purification .................................................................................................................191 b. The Economics of Historical Studies: Poor Facilities, Poor Human Resources ................................................................................................201 19. After the Collapse of the New Order: Questions ..........................................207 20. On the Rectification of the History of 1965: Themes in a Controversy .......211 a. Asvi Warman Adam ...............................................................................211 b. Bambang Purwanto ................................................................................222 c. Taufik Abdullah ......................................................................................229

8 d. Comparison, Contrast, Critique ..............................................................237 21. The Problems of History Teachers in the Post-New Order Era....................242 22. Students’ Problems with History in Post-New Order Indonesia ..................246 23. Afterthoughts ................................................................................................250 Part Three. Concluding Remarks

253

Bibliography .............................................................................................................265

9 List of Abbreviations ASEAN BPUPKI BTI FAO G30S/PKI GDP Gerwani Golkar GPA HAM HIS HMI IKIP IMF KITLV KNIL Leknas Lekra LIPI Manipol MULO NRC OSIS P2E-LIPI PDI PDIN Permesta

: Association of Southeast Asian Nations : Investigatory Body for Preparatory Works for Indonesia’s Independence (Badan Penyelidik Usaha-usaha Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia) : Indonesian Peasant Front (Barisan Tani Indonesia) : Food and Agriculture Organization : September 30 Movement/Indonesian Communist Party (Gerakan 30 September/Partai Komunis Indonesia) : Gross Domestic Product : Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia) : Functional Groups (Golongan Karya) : Grade Point Average : Human Rights (Hak Asasi Manusia) : Dutch-language primary school for Indonesians (Hollandsch-Inlandsche School) : Islamic Students Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam) : Teachers Training College (Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu Pendidikan) : International Monetary Fund : Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde) : Royal Netherlands Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlandsch Indisch Leger) : National Institute for Economic and Social Research (Lembaga Ekonomi dan Kemasyarakatan Nasional) : People’s Cultural Association (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakjat) : Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia) : Political Manifesto (Manifesto Politik) : Dutch-language Junior High School (Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs) : National Research Center : Intra-School Student Organization (Organisasi Siswa Intra Sekolah) : Center for Economic Research-Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Pusat Penelitian Ekonomi-LIPI) : Indonesian Democracy Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia) : National Center for Scientific Documentation (Pusat Dokumentasi Ilmiah Nasional) : Universal Struggle Charter (Piagam Perjuangan Semesta Alam)

10 Pesindo : Indonesian Socialist Youth (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia) PETA : Defenders of the Fatherland (Pembela Tanah Air) PGRI Nonvaksentral : Leftwing Association of Indonesian Teachers (Persatuan Guru Republik Indonesia Vaksentral) PII : Indonesian Islamic Student Association (Pelajar Islam Indonesia) PKI : Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia) PNI : Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia) PPIA : Indonesia-America Friendship Association (Perhimpunan Persahabatan Indonesia-Amerika) PPKI : Committee for the Preparation for Indonesia’s Independence (Panitia Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia) PPP : Unity Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan) PRD : People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik) PRI : Youths of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemuda Republik Indonesia) PRRI : Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemerintahan Revolusioner Republik Indonesia) PSI : Indonesian Socialist Party (Partai Sosialis Indonesia) PSPB : History of the National Struggle (Pendidikan Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa) SDI : Islamic Traders’ Association (Sarekat Dagang Islamijah) SMA : Senior High School (Sekolah Menengah Atas) SMID : Student Solidarity for Democracy in Indonesia (Solidaritas Mahasiswa Indonesia untuk Demokrasi) SMP : Junior High School (Sekolah Menengah Pertama) SPG : Special High School for the Training of Primary School Teachers (Sekolah Pendidikan Guru) SSN : National History Seminar (Seminar Sejarah Nasional) TKR : People’s Security Force (Tentara Keamanan Rakjat) TVRI : Television of the Republic of Indonesia (Televisi Republik Indonesia) VCR : Video Cassette Recorder YMB : Foundation for Mutual Progress (Yayasan Maju Bersama)

11 INTRODUCTION The New Order’s unanticipated downfall in May 1998 opened up a broader space for political expression. As a result, people dared break certain political taboos. The print media and television stations began to circulate previously marginalized views of the nation’s past, for example the aborted coup in 1965. Politically stigmatized groups under the New Order such as the leftists, Islamists, and ethnonationalists ventured publicly to articulate their versions of some major historical events. A number of professional historians maintained that the Soeharto regime had cooked up, disseminated, and imposed its fabricated version of the nation’s history.1 They argued that straightening out Indonesia’s history should be one of the key items in her agenda of transition from authoritarianism to a more democratic regime.2 While the “battle of historiography” was raging in such arenas as books, newspapers, magazines, and television programs, its reverberations were heard in schools throughout the country. A hot debate emerged in the classrooms between

1

See, for example, Asvi Warman Adam, “Orde Baru Lakukan Banyak Rekayasa Penulisan Sejarah” [The New Order performed a lot of historiographical fabrication], Kompas, June 24, 1999. See also “Lebih Jauh dengan Anhar Gonggong,”[More about Anhar Gonggong], Kompas, October 15, 2000, where Anhar refers to the New Order as having produced “twisted” accounts of some historical events. Note that when the New Order was still in power, though Asvi and Anhar both worked for state institutions, they represented rather different political engagements with the regime. While Asvi was attached to the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Anhar was the protégé of Brigadier-General (titular) Nugroho Notosusanto, the army historian responsible for the production of the state-sanctioned national history. 2 Asvi, for instance, suggested that Indonesians should abandon what he called “the New Order’s standpoint in the understanding of facts from the past” and adopt instead “the perspective of reform,” which, he claimed, has become “the mainstream perspective among Indonesians nowadays.” See, Asvi Warman Adam, ibid.

12 senior high school students who armed themselves with quotations from the media’s “wild” versions of history, and teachers who remained bound by the imperatives of the state curriculum and had to stick to the official narratives in state-authorized textbooks. Accused by their students of telling lies, these teachers were worried that they might lose their credibility and, eventually, their job.3 For most of them, the multiplicity of historical versions signified cacophony that would spell chaos in the classroom. Those were some of the changes in the landscape of Indonesian history in the wake of the New Order’s collapse. They have led me to ask myself a question: What on earth happened to Indonesian history under the New Order (1966 to 1998)? I break the question down into three smaller questions: First, what kind of Indonesian history did my generation come into contact with and learn under the New Order? How and by what agents was it taught to us? How did we react to it? What kind of intellectual journey over time did the generation undergo? It is with a view to exploring these issues that, in Part One, I shall present and critically examine my intellectual biography and the biographical fragments of other people of my generation. Second, and by contrast, what are the major themes in the debate on the “straightening out” of Indonesian history which involves Indonesian professional historians in post-Soeharto Indonesia? It is to this question that I shall devote Part Two. My discussion will be focused on the debate concerning the incident of 1965. 3

See “Pengajaran Sejarah Sering Tidak Sesuai Fakta: Siswa Anggap Guru Bohong” [The teaching of history often contradicts the facts: pupils think their teachers tell lies], Kompas, March 15, 1999 and “Saya, Orang Paling Berdosa…” [I, a most guilty person], Kompas, September 6, 2003.

13 I deliberately compare the first and the second questions with each other. It was professional historians who maintained that the New Order had fabricated Indonesian history. They further claimed that students had been victims of this intentional distortion of history.4 But was it always the case? Were students always passive consumers of historical knowledge? Were they not able to say “no” to the New Order’s version of history? My third question: What is the core of the problem? Is it that Indonesian contemporary culture abhors the idea that there is no single truth? Is it that people do not understand what history is? Is it that people do not have enough historical evidence? Or is it that Indonesian historians are not courageous enough? Part Three will be devoted to the treatment of these issues. As I shall demonstrate in Part Two, the weakness of the distortion-oriented critics of the New Order history-writing is that they are preoccupied with the state’s role as producer of historical knowledge. They tend to overlook the possibility that

4

The political scientist Rizal Mallarangeng argues that two regional rebellions, the PRRI and the Permesta, led to the failure of parliamentary democracy after the election of 1955. In his critique Asvi Warman Adam considers Rizal’s argument as evidence of how “the New Order’s propaganda… deeply affected the younger generation who had learned history in school.” For Rizal’s point of view, see Rizal Mallarangeng, “Akankah Sejarah Berulang?” [Will history repeat itself?], Kompas, August, 16-17, 2000. For Asvi’s critique, see Asvi Warman Adam, “Demiliterisasi Sejarah Indonesia” [Demilitarizing Indonesian history], Kompas, September 2, 2000. In “Perlu Reinterpretasi Penulisan Sejarah Masa Orde Baru” [Re-interpretation of the New Order’s historiography is necessary], Kompas, September 4, 2004, Anhar Gonggong is quoted as saying that “history-writing under the New Order was dominated and tightly controlled by the government and the military. As a result, much of the history-writing was dishonest, lacked balanced data, and glorified … the military.” He argues that the historian who served the New Order in the writing of such “palace-centric” history “intentionally deceived the audience.”

14 citizens are capable of using state-produced historical objects, such as films, monuments, museums, and textbooks, in ways quite different from those intended by the New Order regime. Absent in their critiques is the realization that as consumers of historical knowledge, people change over time. The critics seem to forget that what people believe and disbelieve, their understanding of history, and the way they use history also change over time. To avoid making the same mistake that the distortion-oriented critics of the New Order history-writing have committed, I adopt a model of analysis that involves a three-way relationship among (1) the cultural objects for the teaching of history that include, among other things, textbooks, museums, and monuments, (2) the New Order’s ideological apparatuses, such as professional historians and school teachers, who produced and/or propagated the cultural objects, and (3) students as knowledge consumers who might have used such objects in ways quite different from what the New Order regime had intended.5 I situate the three-way relationship against the backdrop of two analytical axes: continuities and changes over time that affect Indonesian society at large, historical knowledge, professional historians, and their audience.

5

I borrow this approach to cultural analysis from Mark Gottdiener, “Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Semiotic Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 90, 5 (1985): 979.

15 PART ONE ENCOUNTER WITH HISTORY IN THE NEW ORDER: AUDIENCE’S POINT OF VIEW

1. Origins, Absence, and Forgetfulness The European historian used to have an idol. Marc Bloch called it “the obsession with origins.”6 I cannot say what the contemporary Indonesian historian’s idol was under the New Order. But at least as the anecdote below would show, Indonesia’s origin was an important theme in the sort of history that school children had to learn in Indonesia in the late 1970s. Thus in my first year in elementary school—it was in Malang, East Java, somewhere in 1977—my lady teacher imparted to me, by teaching us a song called “Independence Day,” that August 17, 1945 was “the birth date of the Indonesian nation.” The nation’s date of birth, so the lyric goes, coincides with its date of freedom: The seventeenth of August nineteen forty-five That’s our independence day: The freedom day of our homeland The birthday of the Indonesian nation.7 What she actually did was introduce me, a seven-year-old schoolboy, to the historian’s idol, along with the obligatory gesture of paying obeisance to it: that of asking the insistent question “Where do things come from? When did they first come

29.

6

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p.

7

The song, entitled “Hari Merdeka,” was written by H. Mutahar.

16 into being?” Indeed, at the time I was unaware of the metaphysical nature of her instruction in the classroom. (It was not until I was eighteen that I got acquainted with Heidegger’s idea that to inquire into the origin of something is to ask a metaphysical question about it.) All I knew was that learning to sing the song together with my classmates was real fun. We had no idea of what the song meant. My ears could not even tell where the lyric’s words began and where they ended, for they belonged to bahasa Indonesia—the school language. We had only just begun to learn this foreign, this national, tongue. At school, every morning from seven to ten, from Monday to Saturday, we tried to use it when we spoke to our teachers. Anywhere else—at home, at playgrounds, in dreams, and among ourselves—we kids spoke low Javanese (ngoko). Older than national history is Islam. It too is very keen about origins. Islam and national history first appeared in my life roughly at the same time. When my family lived in Malang from 1975 to 1978, every evening from six to eight, I used to spend my time in the neighborhood mosque with my buddies. Some were about my age; some were a couple of years older than me. Assisted now and then by his three grownup sons, a kyai (Islamic cleric) named Abdul Salam, a man in his late fifties who happened to be the mosque’s caretaker, taught us to perform prayers in congregation, proclaim the hours of the daily prayers, sing hymns in Arabic and Javanese, and recite the Koran. Aside from a few words like “Allah,” “Muhammad,” and “bismillah,”8 I knew no Arabic. True, my seniors had taught me to recite Arabic verses in the Koran.

8

The phrase means “in the name of God.”

17 But nobody in the mosque had taught us to speak Arabic. Ironically, the mere recitation of chapters from the holy book always filled my heart with joy and tranquility. Most importantly, it was in the mosque that I learned, from my teachers’ lectures, that the whole world too had its ultimate origin. It was God and He was called Allah. Once upon a time, He uttered that momentous sentence: “Be!” And He thus called heaven, hell, and the earth into being. To populate heaven, He also said, “Be!” and He thus created two sorts of strange beings: some, made of light, were called “angels” and they knew no evil; one, made of fire, was called “Iblis” (Satan) and he was a genius in the art of evil. But in the beginning both the angels and Iblis obeyed God. The celestial balance was upset when God created Adam, the first man, from clay. A humble substance indeed. Later God removed a piece of bone from Adam’s rib cage and turned it into the first woman. Called Hawa, she became Adam’s wife. It is to this ancient couple that mankind traces back its ultimate genealogy. God told the angels and Iblis to bow down to Adam. This unexpected move on Allah’s part outraged Iblis’ rigid and too keen a sense of hierarchy. Due to his fiery origin, so Iblis insisted, he belonged to a higher class than did the clay Adam. He chose to defend his dignity and defy God’s command. God decided to kick the arrogant Iblis out of heaven and into hell. In response to the latter’s request, however, He put off the punishment until doomsday. Iblis swore that in the meantime he would tempt Adam’s and Hawa’s

18 descendants away from the Path of Light. God said, “See if I care! If they follow you, I shall grill you all in hell.”9 It was, undoubtedly, a “cool” and concise history of all things. It goes without saying that as a five-year-old lad I had no idea of what the narrative was all about beneath its literal surface. This much I was able to conclude: To be a good boy was to fear Allah more than anything else. (No one knew, though, that what I did fear most of all was not Allah but a type of wandering ghost called pocong: a dead man wrapped in white shroud who woke up from his grave to scare the living. The dread of pocong had its origin in my shocking encounter in 1977 with his visual images in Setan Kuburan [Graveyard Ghost] a horror movie starring Benyamin Sueb.) One thing stands out in my memory of those brief learning years in the neighborhood mosque. The first time he saw me, the kyai mistook me for a Chinese kid. This he did on account of my “fair” face. It was in fact dark brown. But by comparison to his sun-scorched, sun-blackened complexion—for in the daylight he toiled at his paddy field—my visage might have looked in his eyes yellow enough for him to misrecognize me as a “Chinese” boy. As a little kid, I readily believed the stories about the origins of Indonesia and the world. (In fact, I would embrace as true almost any story that was enchanting.) I was in no position yet to be skeptical about the truth of those stories. For I was not there at 56 Pegangsaan Timur Street, when at 10:00 AM on August 17, 1945 Soekarno and Hatta declared Indonesia’s birth and independence. Nor was I there when, through

9

At nineteen I read Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Les litanies de Satan” [The litanies of Satan] and it occurred to me that Iblis was “cool,” that he was arrogant in a “cool” way, and that being a creature of fire he would no doubt feel at home in hell.

19 His performative utterances, God created the cosmos. To be sure, I was aware that my lady teacher and my kyai were not there either when the geneses of the nation and the cosmos took place. Yet since they had lived longer than I did, I supposed they were much more knowledgeable about a lot of things. For as a little child I knew I was lousy at establishing origins. I was unable, for instance, to give an eyewitness account of my own origin. Although I was there when my mother gave birth to me, it seemed to me that my memory of the event had vanished forever. Luckily, in my forgetfulness I could always rely on my mother for stories about the circumstances of my birth. Sometimes she let me take a look at my village-level birth certificate. It was a little, brittle, blue, oblong card that contained such details as where and when I was born, what my name officially was, and who my parents were. At the foot of the document was the village head’s signature. More concrete to me than Mother’s eyewitness accounts and the birth certificate were all those black-and-white snapshots that Father took of me when I was a baby. The infant looked bizarre in the pictures: When it cried it cried forever; when it slept it slept forever. Mother still kept—and sometimes showed me—the old diapers, shirts, gloves, and caps that she said I used to wear in my infancy. Were it not for the redeeming acts of my parents, all the eyewitness accounts of my origin would be lost forever in the black hole of oblivion. Yes, they are the

20 guardians of my origin.10 Their role is indispensable. For in my beginning oblivion was the master. When I was born, I was born into a nation-state and a religion. I was not there when they were born. In their beginnings was my absence. The ummah (community of believers) and the nation-state provided me with myths to remedy that absence and to enlighten me on their geneses.

2. My Family, My Roots On April 8, 1971, I was born in Prigen, Pasuruan, East Java, near Tretes, a tourist resort at the foot of Mount Arjuno. The tall, greenish-blue volcano always greeted me with a friendly “peek-a-boo!” every morning when my mother opened up my bedroom’s windows to expose me to the fresh air and warm sunlight. I was born into a strange alchemy of a family. My father, Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata, was a middle-ranking officer in the Military Police. He came from the ethnic Sundanese gentry. His class origin enabled him to attend Dutch schools, the HIS (HollandschInlandsche School, or Dutch-language primary school for Indonesians) and the MULO (Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs, or Junior High School), in West Java in the 1930s and early 1940s, when the territory now called Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. My mother, Kartini, comes from an ethnic Javanese, landless peasant family in Tulungagung, East Java. Due to extreme poverty, she stopped her education in the 10

In this respect, I am a lot luckier than my mother. Poverty had prevented her from enjoying photography’s power of preserving memories. When she was a baby, Grandfather and Grandmother took no picture of her. They did not even try to get her a birth certificate.

21 fourth grade of primary school. She later attempted to compensate for her own lack of education by insisting that all her children have at least a bachelor degree. My father lived in two different worlds: one was a Dutch world founded in his colonial education; the other was a Sundanese, Muslim, petty aristocratic world of his ancestors. He spoke Dutch to his brothers and sisters at home and to his friends at school. They called him “Henky,” a Dutch name he adopted at some point in his adolescence. He drank beer and danced to European music. It seems to me that he aspired to be a Dutchified young man. Yet people—Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, and Dutch alike—often mistook him for a Chinese.11 In his youth he acquired most of his knowledge about the contemporary world by reading books, magazines, and newspapers printed in Dutch. His parents, however, did not fail to provide him with instruction in Islam. It was for this purpose that they once sent him to a certain Islamic boarding school in Banten, West Java. Islam was a significant cultural element in his family. His paternal grandfather, for instance, worked for the colonial government as a hoofdpenghoeloe who was in charge of the religious affairs of Muslim natives. There was also an enigmatic aunt, a mystic who knew in advance the exact day of her death. When she passed away, my father inherited the essays she had written on Islamic

11

Thus during the revolution (1945-1949), he served the republican army as a spy: He infiltrated the Dutch-occupied territory in West Java in the guise of an itinerant, bike-riding, Chinese egg-dealer. The Dutch soon captured him. Knowing that he was a MULO student, they offered him a scholarship to continue his study in the Netherlands if only he was willing to co-operate. Though he always wanted to be a physician, he refused the offer. Thereupon, they incarcerated him in the notorious prison island of Nusakambangan for years. He was set free soon after the Dutch had recognized the United States of Indonesia as a free and sovereign country, in the Round Table Conference in The Hague on August 23 to November 2, 1949.

22 mysticism. His Dutch-school-mediated encounter with the Dutch colonial culture led my father to be a hybrid person. He grew into a creature of both Dutch and SundaneseMuslim cultures. At first he seems to have felt it more as a synthesis than as a conflict. His hybridity intensified when in 1950, at twenty-one, he married Yvonne Minks, a Protestant Dutch woman, who later gave him six children. In the household, my father, his wife, and their six Eurasian children lived in a mixed world resulting from the amalgamation of a Christian, Dutch culture and a Muslim, Sundanese culture. Two languages—Dutch and the Eurasian dialect of Indonesian—were spoken in the family. With regard to religion, my father remained a Muslim and his wife a Protestant, while the children were divided among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam. At the close of the first decade of his marriage, that is, when he turned forty, the sustained exposure to Christianity personified by his wife and some of his children led my father to go through a religious crisis. He started to ask himself such questions as “Who am I: a Muslim or a Christian? Shall I remain a Muslim? Why? Shall I convert to Christianity? Why?” To cope with the crisis, he embarked on a spiritual exploration. There were quite a few ways in which he pursued the exploration. He joined the local theosophical society in Surabaya, East Java. He attended its meetings and discussions, engaged in yoga meditation, and read the holy texts of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Javanese mysticism. He became the disciple and adopted son of a Javanese mystic in Pare, Kediri, East Java, whose power of suggestion was so great that he could make people fall ill only by declaring to them “You are going to fall ill.” The only way to cure the victims was

23 for them to drink the mystic’s urine. My father soon abandoned the mystic because he considered him too cruel and greedy to be a true spiritual teacher. At last, there was a night, when my father meditated under a huge banyan tree in the archeological site of the fifteenth-century Hindu kingdom of Majapahit in Trowulan, Mojokerto, East Java, he had a vision. He saw, inscribed on the dark after-midnight sky, a glowing calligraphy in Arabic that turned out to be the Muslim’s credo: “There is no god but God; Muhammad is God’s messenger.” Thereupon he decided to remain a Muslim. He was convinced that Islam was the best religion for him. He held that all religions were but different paths to the same truth. The revelation under the banyan tree—or was it a hallucination?—helped him achieve an unshakeable sense of religious identity. Father’s spiritual crisis took place in the early 1960s. It coincided with the time of protracted political turbulence under Soekarno’s Guided Democracy. The PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) and the Army were involved in a fierce struggle for power. The ailing President Soekarno appeared more and more to take sides with the PKI. At all levels of the society political antagonism intensified. From left to right, political parties were aggressively mobilizing villagers. Here and there people engaged in mass demonstrations, mutual intimidations, and street fights. Since 1955 no general elections had been held. So it was not clear to anyone if the overheated political struggle would ever come to a peaceful conclusion. The putrid smell of impending Bharatayudha12 filled the air. In 1990 Father and I had a memorable talk in which he

12

In the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, the Bharatayudha is the ultimate battle between two conflicting groups of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. In the

24 told me that a couple of months prior to the massacres of the communists in 1965-66 a number of old, eccentric, legendary masters of Javanese mysticism, who normally lived in seclusion somewhere at the slope of Mount Semeru, started to appear in Surabaya, the capital of East Java. Some of those ascetics made speeches before the crowd in the city square. On one such occasion, the great seer Eyang Semeru (Grandfather Semeru) pronounced a sinister prophecy. “Be prepared!” he called out. “Be prepared! Verily I say unto you: Chaos is at hand!” The military police arrested him on a charge of disturbing order. Holding him in great respect, however, they soon released him. They only objected to his revealing a political prophecy in public. In the late 1960s, it was Father’s marriage that underwent a crisis. It turned out that he was no longer happy having a Dutch wife. He felt she was kasar (crude, unrefined) and overbearing. She did a poor job of caring for the children and the house. Rather, she spent much time smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, and shooting the breeze with her friends. More importantly, she did not maintain her good looks. Nor did she treat him tenderly and lovingly as would a native wife. The Sundanese in him yearned for a native wife, one who would be modest and alus (smooth, refined), who would take care of his needs as a man, and who would treat him tenderly and affectionately. This was the big picture that I, much later, managed to piece together from those stories that I had overheard in my parents’ conversations. Strikingly missing in the picture, though, was my father’s sensitivity to his wife Yvonne’s needs and desires as a woman. A woman, that is, who had sacrificed a lot when in 1950, a 1960s many Javanese on the right likened themselves to the Pandavas, the good guys, while referring to members of the PKI as the Kauravas, the bad guys.

25 year after the transfer of Indonesia’s sovereignty from the Dutch to the Indonesian government, she chose to abandon her career in a Dutch shipping company and marry him, rather than return, with her parents and siblings, to the Netherlands and start there what would probably be a much happier life than she could aspire to as the wife of a native officer in Indonesia. Anyway, in 1970, without Yvonne’s knowledge or consent, he married Kartini, a nineteenth-year-old Javanese Muslim woman, who later gave him four children, of which I was the first-born. This marriage was problematic too. As an army officer, Father was subject to the military regulation that a soldier was forbidden to practice polygamy unless he had a written approval from both his first wife and his superior. It being impossible for him to get Yvonne’s permission to undertake the polygamy, he decided to marry Kartini secretly. The marriage was performed in accordance with Islamic law. In order not to break Yvonne’s heart and to keep his marriage to her intact, for about nineteen years my father kept his marriage to Kartini a secret. What my father did was manipulate his culture. He broke the mores of the army to which he belonged but he legitimized his second marriage by adhering to Islamic law. In 1990 my mother Kartini could no longer bear the burden of the secret. She disclosed it. The time-bomb exploded. It smashed Yvonne’s life-world into smithereens. It plunged my father into the dark abyss of unbearable guilt. It shattered my mother’s simple dream to pieces: that of growing old together with her husband. In November 1994, my father died of a heart attack.

26 Some months before Father died, I often called on him at the hospital. In a time of troubles and pains like that I guessed he needed me to be by his side. We did not do much talking, though. I massaged his arms and legs, spoon-fed him, combed his hair, kissed his forehead, and pushed his wheelchair when he needed to go to the bathroom. In those moments it often dawned on me how tragic his life had been. Here was a man who had to hide one chapter of his own history, one half of his present life, from the gaze of his loved ones and from that of the public. He caused his first family to live a lie because he thought his first wife would not be able to handle the truth. Had she known the truth right at the start, so Father thought, she would have sued for a divorce and the family would have broken into pieces. At any rate, he felt a gnawing sense of guilt, for he had promised her that he would never ever break her heart. My father’s tragedy showed me how complicated a man’s relation could be to his own past. It also taught me how a man had had to live a lie so that he could keep his life-world from disintegrating. My troubled relation with the past is by no means a unique experience. Imam Muhtarom, for instance, a young fiction writer, a friend of mine from my college years at Airlangga University in Surabaya, has uncles who, armed with machetes, hacked each other to death during the purge of the communists in Blitar, East Java, in 196566. This is a painful chapter, a still smarting wound, in his family history. Once he told me of how in family talks an allusion to the event was enough to make everybody hurt. He was comfortable working with non-autobiographical materials to write his surrealistic stories. But it seems to me he had troubles confronting the painful episodes

27 in his personal history. As a result, he was unable to use autobiographical materials to write realistic stories.

3. Books and Libraries From their marriage Sjarief and Kartini had four children: me, Eddy, Tri, and Rosmarin. My mother Kartini cared very much about her children’s education. She made sure we could get everything we needed: tuition and fees, school uniforms, textbooks, stationery, schoolbags, incidental costs, and so on. She always insisted on the importance of reading anything: books, magazines, newspaper, and comic books. Thanks to her, I grew to be a bibliophile. A huge irony, to be sure, that one’s love for something turns out to be derived from someone else’s insistence. It should be noted here that Mother’s insistence played its decisive role only at the start, that is, when I did not know yet what books had in store for me. But once I found out that I could “get high” on trips to text-mediated alternative worlds, nothing could stop me from becoming an incurable book addict. There were times in my childhood and adolescence in Jakarta (1979-1987) when life was so bleak and bitter that it broke my heart, for instance when Mother— who had to raise us all by herself almost all year round while Father was a long way away in Surabaya, living with his first wife and their kids—flew into a rage for things I did or failed to do, or simply because of her own misery. I began to know sorrow. In my sorrow I would pick up a book that could transport me into a world of fairy tales, of astronomy, or, much later, of Western philosophy: an alternative world, that is,

28 where I could heal my wounds, regain my sanity, and restore the courage to cope with the real world. When we lived in Malang during the years 1975 to 1977, Mother subscribed to the Jakarta-based weekly newspaper Buana Minggu (The World on Sunday). I read avidly almost everything in the newspaper, including the advertisements of fancy restaurants in Jakarta. No doubt I barely understood what I read. But that was not the point. I did not read for understanding; I read for pleasure. No one knew the ecstasy I derived from the mere act of staring at those sentences on the newspaper’s page. No one knew that such an act could trigger off, in my mind, flashes of bizarre thoughts, feelings, sounds, and images. I first discovered this magical trick when at about the age of five I realized that if I stared at a certain object long enough—more often than not it was a broken, discarded toy I found in my neighbor’s dumpster—I would go into a trance. When I entered literacy, junk of that sort gave way, gradually but ultimately, to texts. For they could best serve my purpose. Later, when I was seventeen, Mother began to give me pocket money. Now I was in a position to build my private collection of books in philosophy. So everyday I chose to have lunch at home rather than at the school cafeteria. In so doing I could save enough to buy a book by the end of the month. I became obsessed with books not only as texts but also as objects. I touched my books like a tender lover would touch his beloved. I dressed them all with plastic cover. Once a month I unloaded them from the bookcase to dust them off. When I read my book, I did not have the heart to mark

29 it. Folding, marking, underlining, and highlighting struck me as acts of vandalism. I came to treat books as fetishes and libraries as temples. From the age of thirteen to the age of sixteen, I started to explore alternative sources of authority and knowledge, outside the orbit of school curricula, the sermons of Muslim clerics, Mother’s advice, and the Pancasila. I began to be acutely aware of life’s mysteries. First, my body changed at a dizzying speed. Owing to the rapid maturation of my reproductive organs, I often found myself choking with passion for the opposite sex: a passion I could not explain. And there was this weird feeling inside that unless I was desired by the girl I desired, I would remain what T. S. Eliot calls “a hollow man, a stuffed man.” Unfortunately, I found banal and unpersuasive the “theories” that the clerics offered in their sermons to explain the human body and its desires. Second, my father’s long absences and my mother’s frequent fits of anger led me to think that mine was an “abnormal” household. I had the uncanny feeling that my father was already a ghost before he even died. And I could not understand why, despite their love for each other, people often hurt each other. It was at the age of thirteen that I began to ponder over what I saw as the bizarre circumstances of my family. Ponderings of this sort often led me to melancholia. The trouble was, in Mother’s advice, the Pancasila, and the clerics’ interpretation of Islam I found nothing that could help me understand both my family and my melancholia. Thus, I began to feel the need for more powerful systems of thought that could help me deal with the mysteries of life. It was after a year of random exploration that I discovered three alternative granaries of power and wisdom: the tiny library of my school (State Junior

30 High School 40), the three-storied library of the municipality of Central Jakarta, and the small private collection of books owned by my friend’s father who lived on Bendungan Hilir Street, Central Jakarta. During class breaks my friends had their snacks and drinks in the school cafeteria or flexed their muscles at the basketball court. In contrast, I killed the time by reading old books in the tiny, crowded room of the junior high school library. One fine afternoon, I hit upon an amazing book on paleontology. It dealt with the natural history of the mighty dinosaurs. The stories and pictures of the gigantic reptiles enthralled me. I was struck by the fact that natural history could get me in touch with formidable beasts and an enchanting world from an ancient era on earth that had long gone. A sort of textual ecstasy overwhelmed my whole body. In the library of the municipality of Central Jakarta I fell in love with Tintin, a series of comic books written by the Belgian Georges Remy. The pictorial images of various nations, countries, occupations, civilizations, and technology in Tintin’s adventures enabled me to imagine different realities beyond the narrow world that I inhabited as a Jakartan teenager. Thanks to Georges Remy’s comic books, I was able to imagine the Incas, the great pyramids in Egypt, the Tibetans landscape, expeditions to the moon, the customs of various European nations, and a great range of occupations: sailor, journalist, detective, guerilla fighter, international bandit, and scientist. It was the character of Professor Calculus that, once and for all, inspired me with the icon of a scientist who is a genius in his discipline but an idiot in other areas of life. The ridiculous Professor Calculus kindled in my teenage soul a desire to be a

31 great scientist one day in the future. Back then I had a dream of being a zoologist with a profound research interest in the life of the rhinoceroses in Ujung Kulon National Park, West Java. It was in the living room of my friend Syahrul Wahab’s house that I first came into contact with great books. Displayed in a glass case in the living room, his father’s fine small collection included complete sets of Encyclopædia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana as well as H. B. Jassin’s Indonesian translation of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar. It was in one of the encyclopedias that I first read about Napoleon Bonaparte. My English was so bad I hardly understood what I read. The encyclopedias told stories about things I cared about: the life of the Italian violinist N. Paganini, the history of the great Stradivarius violins, and the origin of the universe according to astronomy. I read Max Havelaar, but the novel’s convoluted structure prevented me from understanding what it was all about. So I gave up before I finished it. But I loved one episode in the novel very much: an episode that I took to be a tragic love story between Saidjah and Adinda. Eight years later, in Goenawan Mohamad’s essay in the weekly Tempo, I bumped into an amazing quotation from, I believe, Max Havelaar’s speech in Lebak: “Tell me: Are not the peasants poor? Do not the paddies often ripen and grow yellow to feed those who did not plant them?”13 In defense of the oppressed native masses,

13

The Indonesian version by H. B. Jassin is a lot more beautiful than my English translation can render: “Katakan kepada saja, bukankah sipetani miskin? Bukankah padi menguning seringkali untuk memberi makan orang jang tidak menanamnja?” See Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Atau Lelang

32 Havelaar, a romantic colonial civil servant, in his capacity as the Assistant-Resident of Lebak, West Java, delivered a scathing speech to the native chiefs in his jurisdiction, lecturing them on how to rule wisely and justly. In his view, the local aristocrats, who served the colonial government as bureaucrats, had abused their power and exploited the peasantry. The first time I read the quoted sentences, I did not understand them. I had not yet learned literary language. Not until I was a college student that I was able to appreciate the beauty. When, in my early twenties, I read, for the second time, the poem that Saidjah wrote for his beloved Adinda, I couldn’t help but weep in silence. As an illustration, let me quote the poem’s first and last stanza: I do not know where I shall die. I have seen the great sea on the South Coast, when I was there making salt with my father; If I die on the sea, and they throw my body into the deeper water, sharks will come. They will swim round about my corpse, and ask: “Which of us shall devour this body, descending through the water?” I shall not hear. […] I do not know where I shall die. I have seen many at Badur who had died. They were wrapped in a white garment, and were buried in the earth. If I die at Badur, and they bury me outside the village, eastward against the hill, where the grass is high, Then will Adinda pass that way, and the hem of her sarong will softly sweep the grass in passing… And I shall hear.14 Kopi Persekutuan Dagang Belanda [Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company], trans. H. B. Jassin (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1972), pp. 113-14. 14 Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards (Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982) pp. 263-64.

33 Now that I had known the joy of reading texts that had brain, heart, and soul, I could no longer stand the tedium that characterized most of our school textbooks. It was as though they had been written by zombies or robots instead of by living human beings. I was sixteen and study at school began to feel like a sort of necessary mental slavery. Except for mathematics and English, which happened to be taught by inspiring teachers, all subjects in junior high school had lost their intellectual appeal. The strongest reason why I did not quit school was because I loved my mother. I did not want to let her down. The success of her children at school was the sign of her accomplishment as a mother at home. This I had understood since I was ten. She was a true believer in the vision that modern secular education is an indispensable means for poor but talented individuals to achieve upward social mobility. “What school does,” she argued, “is to make it possible for you to grow up to be someone (supaya kamu jadi orang). Don’t end up like me. I didn’t even finish primary school. And don’t be like your illiterate grandpa, toiling all his life as a servant and a seasonal farm worker.” I did share my mother’s belief that with good schooling I would not have to grow up to be an industrial coolie in the future. I was also well aware that I loved good grades. Teachers always looked with approval on students with good grades. So I remained a hard-working student: I wrote copious notes, did all the homework assignments, and read all the textbooks. School was still tolerable also because it served me a number of latent functions. It was the special space where I could see my best friends every day to share thoughts and

34 feelings, joys and sorrows, silly hopes and crazy fears. It was the perfect setting where a good girl appeared whom I could admire from afar. It was the special institution where I met one or two good teachers whose loving kindness brought out what was good in the souls of the troubled teenagers that we were. Consider, for example, Pak Ali (Mr. Ali). We loved and respected this skinny, sad-looking, and exhausted sports teacher, not because he was a genius in sports science, but because when he taught, he taught with all his heart. I remember how I had to hold back my tears one day in the classroom as he pointed out that despite their love for their children parents were not always good at expressing it. “Life is often so brutal,” he said. “It hardens your Mom’s and Dad’s hearts. So rather than hug and kiss you or just be there for you, they ignore you, yell at you, or beat you. This is their tragedy. One day when you grow up and have a family of your own, you will understand. Then you will realize how much your parents have silently loved you all along. Then you will want to love them back. But you can’t. Because then you will have to take care of your own job, your own spouse, your own kids, your own life. This—this will be your tragedy.”

4. School Books versus “Cool” Books As a boy I was a reader with catholic tastes and interests. I even read trash. I remember how Mother used to look at me with disgust every time she caught me in the act of reading those damp, dirty, stinking newspaper scraps that the grocers used to wrap the items she bought from their shops in the market: things like red peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, tofu, anchovy, and salted tuna. “As if I had never bought you a

35 brand new newspaper!” she would say. She did not know that news of the world took on magical qualities once the medium that carried it had turned into garbage. In selfconscious manner, today’s newspapers supply you with bits of news as important as a cup of coffee and a plate of fried rice that constitute your breakfast. Yet it is the old newspapers—reduced to rubbish or reused as grocery-wrapping material or recycled into archives—that would reveal to you the world’s secret history. That is, if you approach the rubbish with the attitude of a child, an oracle, a poet, or a historian. Texts of all kinds were the opium of my childhood. During my adolescence they took on more functions: as fetishes, to be sure, but also as “scriptures.” When I was sixteen, my classmate Oktaviansyah—an excellent guitar player with whom I happened to share the bench and the desk in the third grade of junior high school— once made a revealing remark: “Man! Your life is haunted by books.” He intended the remark as a reproach but I took it as a compliment. He observed that every time I needed to defend my standpoint in our talks I would refer to books I had read. And they were never those textbooks that we students had to use in classroom study. One of the books that I liked to cite in my chit-chats with friends was Mahbub Djunaidi’s often amusing Indonesian translation of Michael H. Hart’s The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. I first read it in 1984 or 1985. I borrowed it from Andika Putranto, my classmate in the first grade of junior high school. At the time, due to my naivety as a thirteen-year-old boy, my sloppy reading of the book led me to think that Hitler was a cool guy: a mediocre postcard painter who turned into a great dictator. At twenty, however, I read Marianne Katoppo’s Indonesian translation of

36 Elie Wiesel’s The Night and understood for the first time the meaning of the Holocaust and the magnitude of Hitler’s wickedness in World War II. Little by little I began to classify what I read into two categories: cool books and school books. Increasingly I felt that in terms of prestige, authority, beauty of the prose, and the power of engaging the reader, those school books could not match the “cool” books that I read beyond the confines of the curriculum, such as encyclopedias, comic books, Indonesian translation of Time Life series on the natural sciences, and the monthly pocket magazine Intisari.15 The latter, modeled on The Reader’s Digest, often featured the biologist Slamet Soeseno’s witty, brilliant essays on the life of animals. His fresh sense of humor was already evident in the very titles that he chose for his essays: “Sex Scandal among Eels” or “Goldfish as Stargazers.” In addition, Oktaviansyah also observed how cool books had shaped the way I saw the world. For instance, I abandoned the Koranic theory of the origin of the world and embraced the big bang theory that I had read in a book on astronomy. And a certain book, whose title I have now forgotten, had converted me to the bizarre idea that true love did not involve sex. Soon after, it dawned on me that the girl I had a crush on was not an ordinary girl. She was, I thought, the incarnation of the Sublime, which, in my view, was even greater than the Holy. When my close friends asked me what the Sublime was, I said, “No one can describe it. But perhaps listening to a great cellist play Saint-Saens’ The Swan would give you some idea.” Too much reading, they thought, had driven me insane. 15

It should be noted that many of these texts had not been available in the Old Order. I am grateful for Dr. William H. Frederick for calling my attention to this fact.

37 Life in junior high school was tough. There was this struggle for peer recognition. Unless I could prove that I was excellent at something, I would not truly exist in the eyes of my peer group at school. I would be a socially invisible boy—a ghost. The struggle for recognition took place in a small number of peer-recognized arenas such as sports, intellect, bravado, and physical attractiveness. I was a flop in sports. Every time there was a practical examination, say, in volleyball, I became everybody’s laughing stock because I could not even serve a ball. I was not born with good looks to be a school idol. Nor did I have enough guts, charisma, and brutality to be a school bully. The only remaining field where I could hope to win peer recognition was scholastic achievement. That is to say, I had to be one of the school’s distinguished eggheads. With this goal in mind, I worked hard. I hit the books, the school textbooks, because reading them “religiously,” memorizing their contents, was instrumental in getting excellent grades. Blind diligence paid off: In the third grade of junior high school I managed to rank second in the state final examination, above all other students in my school. I did this for two purposes: to win peer recognition and to impress a girl. But my exploit was fruitless. It turned out that, like most girls, she was not very fond of eggheads. In girls’ view at the time, eggheads were very much like extraterrestrial beings. I learned a lot from my fiasco. Thus in senior high school I adopted quite a different strategy. I abandoned school textbooks. My grades dropped significantly but as long as they were not below school average I did not care. I started to take on a “macho” style of behavior: street fights against students of other schools;

38 smoking a clove cigarette in public, especially in front of girls; and drinking cheap, stomach-churning liquor with friends. In senior high school, the more I read “cool” books, the less I cared about school books. I relied on the former for insights into life’s mysteries and problems. The latter were no more than necessary tools for me to ensure my survival in quizzes and exams. In 1987 I started to read serious books on psychology, philosophy, and literature. These included Kees Bertens’ Indonesian translation of Sigmund Freud’s Über Psychanalyse: Fünf Vorlesungen (On Psychoanalysis: Five Lectures), Fuad Hassan’s Berkenalan dengan Eksistensialisme (Getting Acquainted with Existentialism), and Iwan Simatupang’s novel Ziarah (Pilgrimage). Reading those books forever changed the way I saw the world. So when I was sixteen, my world was not Teacher-Knows-Best anymore. I ceased to respect the authority of those who did not write intelligently and beautifully. I still respected my schoolteachers as persons as long as they showed wisdom in the way they handled youngsters. If they didn’t, I saw them merely as nasty adults whom I had to put up with during my years in an institution that people called “senior high school” but that I experienced, increasingly, as a sort of prison. I could not integrate the stuff I received at school with the stuff I learned in my independent exploration. I could not juxtapose the stupid school stuff and the brilliant non-school stuff. I did not know the scholarly reputation of the authors who wrote the Sejarah Nasional. All I knew was that it presented facts without integrating them in an intriguing interpretation. And the prose was awful. I could not help but compare the

39 authors of this textbook with, for instance, those dead great writers to whose masterpieces the Surabaya Goethe-Institut library had exposed me: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hermann Hesse. The failure on my part to reconcile school learning with independent intellectual adventure led to a state of chronic boredom, which often turned into juvenile resentment against the existing school system.

5. Documents and History “The historian works with documents,” write Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos in their famous Introduction to the Study of History. Documents are so central to historiography that they declare, “[T]here is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history.”16 It was my mother, though, not Langlois and Seignobos, who was the first to introduce me to the idea of documents and their importance for the preservation of memory. I was five and we lived in Prigen, Pasuruan, East Java. My father did not stay with us because he was stationed in Malang. Once a week he came to visit us in Prigen. Most of the time, only the three of us were at home: Mother, Eddy and I. One afternoon, Mother had to go shopping to the local market. She locked the door and asked me to watch over Eddy while she was away. Mother provided us with two little boxes of black-and-white photographs of our family to kill the time. We played with the pictures. I had not yet identified with my own images that I saw in the photographs. It occurred to me that the photographs were objects that were good to play with rather than good to contemplate. I got hold of a pair of scissors. I cut up all 16

Ch. V. Langlois and Ch. Seignobos Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G. G. Berry (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966), p. 17.

40 the photographs to pieces. It was fun. Eddy followed suit. When Mother got home and found out what had happened, she was angry. She scolded us. I came to learn that photographs are objects to be treasured. Later on, Mother began to develop our family albums. From time to time, she would ask her children to have a look at the albums. She would say, “Look! This was you as a baby. Look! This was me when I was a young girl, not yet married to your father.” I learned to take pleasure in contemplating the images of the past. But it was not until my adolescent years that I came to think of photographs as “documents.” The word “history” first appeared in my life when I was in primary school. In the fourth grade, schoolchildren began to receive instructions in the “social sciences.” These were actually an introduction to the concept of “society.” The subjects covered included the market, system of government, religious and ethnic diversity of the Indonesian nation, bits of national history, stages in Indonesia’s economic development plan, and the natural resources of Indonesia. Rote learning was emphasized. I remember that in the fifth grade we schoolchildren were assigned to read a book entitled A Collection of General Knowledge, which contained a wide variety of disjointed information. Those students who loved memorizing raw facts received good grades. Teachers considered them to be smart. Those who hated rote learning got bad grades. And people thought they were dumb. In retrospect, I think the way I learned at school conditioned me to look at the world as a huge mass of unrelated things. The more I progressed in this fragmentary learning, the harder it got for me to think synthetically. It was not until I fell madly in love that I learned

41 synthetic thinking on my own. I gathered bits of facts, evaluated them, and combined them to construct a profile of the girl I secretly admired. Each and every bit of discovery about the girl was to me like an epiphany.

6. Love and the Destruction of Personal Archives When people fall in love, there emerges the need to keep “sweet memories.” “I love you” seems to mean “I will not forget you.” So when I fell in love with Tjatursari, I felt this powerful need to keep a diary in which I took notes of everything precious about her. The very act of reminiscing about her led me to ecstasy. I started to make phone calls to her. The conversations I had with her on the telephone every Saturday evening often took half an hour or more. I kept the transcripts of these conversations in my diary. Sometimes I asked one of my buddies to take pictures of her on such school occasions as the farewell party. There was a time when I even stole her photo from the school archives. I cherished the memory of all our meetings and talks. I wrote down all the thoughts and feelings, all the joys and sorrows, I had about the girl. All the material I amassed about her constituted my love archives. It turned out that I was in love with her for four years. Throughout these years I never had the courage to tell her that I loved her. I was afraid of her rejection. In May 1988, I began to think that my infatuation with her was idiotic. This was the time when I started to read serious works in Indonesian literature. Based on my reading in Indonesian literature, I constructed the ideal image of a young intellectual. I worked hard to be like the ideal image. When I re-read my love archives, I found there a

42 ridiculous, pathetic image of myself. I started to have contempt for my own personal history. I hated my past. I hated my futile infatuation with the girl. I couldn’t stand my past any longer. So I decided to destroy all the traces of my past in so far as it was connected to the crush I had on her. I burned my diaries, her photographs, and the only letter she ever wrote to me. I thought this act of destroying the disagreeable part of my past would give me spiritual power to start my life anew. I do not remember from whom I learned this violence against personal history. This was in fact the second time I had destroyed personal historical documents. In 2000, when I worked as a lecturer at the University of Surabaya Psychology Department, I read the works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I came to know that the Army destroyed his documents and research archives. I thought it was a barbaric act. I was ashamed of myself when I realized that I had performed the same barbarism against my own archives.

7. Museums: Official versus Unofficial It was my mother who first introduced me to the alphabet and numerals.17 It was she, too, who first brought me to a museum: that strange institution in which people preserved and contemplated the traces of man’s past. I think I was only a seven-year-old boy when we—Mother, my brother Eddy, and I—paid an evening visit to the Brawijaya Armed Forces Museum in Malang, East Java. It was perhaps October

17

Although my mother did not finish primary school, she is literate. She loves reading newspapers (such as Buana Minggu, Pos Kota, Kompas, and Jawa Pos) and women magazines (such as Kartini and Femina).

43 5, the Indonesian Armed Forces Day. On that evening the town was drenched in multicolored lights. Of all the exhibits in the museum, only a cannon and a buggy remain in my adult memory. As a child I did not yet associate museums with the concept of history. In the summer of 1986, I was a second-year student in State Junior High School 40, Central Jakarta. I was fifteen and in love with Tjatursari Apriandhini, who was, I thought, the most beautiful girl in the world. More than anything else, more than Indonesian history, the very thought of her dominated my attention both in my dreams and in all my waking hours. I began, in fact, to connect almost everything in my world as a teenager with the image I had of her in my mind. Things had meaning only in so far as they were related to her. One day in that summer, my school organized a study tour to three sites in Jakarta: the Ragunan zoological garden, the Crocodile Hole Museum, and the Satria Mandala Armed Forces Museum. All we students had to do in the zoo was observe the animals and collect such data as their Latin names, their places in the zoological taxonomy, their natural habitats, their foods, and the ways in which they reproduce themselves. The following week we had to turn in a typed field report to our biology teacher. I do not remember, however, if we had to submit any report on our trips to the museums. I found out, very soon and on the spot, that the whole study tour was actually a rare and perfect pretext for me to observe the girl of my dreams. In the zoo, for instance, I stalked her from cage to cage. In the museums, I followed her from one

44 exhibit to another. I kept an ideal distance between her body and mine, close enough for me to have a good view of her person but far enough to keep her unaware of my presence. So what I was actually observing when we both stood before the tiger cage was not the tiger itself. I was admiring the girl’s beautiful face. And standing there before a window display in Satria Mandala Armed Forces Museum, I was not really interested in that old rifle or this artillery mortar. In fact I was wondering why the girl’s long, brownish black hair was so mesmerizing under the dim light of the exhibit room. The sight of her beauty hypnotized me. My heart beat wildly. I could hardly breathe. I thought I was stupid because I did not bring a camera with me. So I tried my best to use my own eyes and brain as a sort of a mental camera to capture her image. When I arrived at home, drawing on my memory, using a pencil and a drawing paper, I began to sketch a portrait of her. I kept the portrait with me wherever I went. When I slept, I kept it under my pillow. As far as education is concerned, the study tour in general was a failure. The Satria Mandala Armed Forces Museum, I think, was designed as a medium for the New Order state to teach its citizens its version of Indonesian history. However, in my idiosyncratic manner of using the museum, it actually played the role as a medium for me to study the girl of my dreams under the guise of studying Indonesian history. In the struggle between the museum and the girl for my interest, she got the upper hand. What was left in my mind from the visit to the Satria Mandala Armed Forces Museum was neither the birth of patriotism nor an enlightened sense of history. I do not know whether or not my friends took the visit to the museum seriously. As far as I can

45 recall, we did not much touch upon it in our chats a few days afterwards. All we did was showing one another the pictures we made at the museum. Those who did not bring a camera to the trip would be glad if they could borrow the negatives from those who did to develop some photographs as souvenirs. I still keep a snapshot in which we posed together, so young and so happy, with a broken bomber from the World War II standing behind us as the background. My buddies and I did not find the Satria Mandala Armed Forces museum to be a particularly exciting object of experience in itself. Had it been so, we would have talked our heads off about it, as we often did when it came to our favorite topics such as sex, love, jazz, the Beatles, and fancy hairstyles. This is not to say that for us the whole visit to the museum was nothing but a waste of time. On the contrary, as a school-organized outing it was great fun. And we understood that taking part in it was a necessary prerequisite to doing well in history. My informant Zunafi admitted, too, that as a junior high school student in the early nineties he did not have a genuinely intellectual interest in a history study tour. Somewhere in 1994, when he was in the second grade, his teachers in State Junior High School 1, Kediri organized a field trip to the Return to Yogya Monument in Yogyakarta. The monument was supposed to signify “the nation’s respect and gratitude to the heroes who fought against the Dutch [in order to] recapture Yogyakarta in [1949].”18 He told me, however, that the encounter with the monument had no effect upon him. “I had a good time, that’s all.” But he did believe in the 18

Sleman District Government, “Monuments,” n.d., (March 4, 2005).

46 historical message that the monument was supposed to convey. The reason was because “it was consistent with what I had read in the history textbook.”19 If the study tour had any personal meaning to him at all, it was that he had to join the tour in order to get a passing grade in history. As far as my own testimony is concerned, a qualification is needed. Some exhibits in the Crocodile Hole Museum in Jakarta, I must admit, were quite haunting. They inspired fear. One scary exhibit was the house where the communists are said to have detained the Seven Heroes of the Revolution and brutally and obscenely tortured four of them who were then still alive. The earth floor in the house had an ominous smell. Another sinister object was the well in which the bodies of the heroes were disposed of. I also saw a number of photographs depicting the rotten corpses of the heroes when they were retrieved from the death well. The most impressive exhibit for me was an army shirt supposedly worn by one of the victims when his dead body was found. There were blood blotches on it. There were also some bullet holes. At the time I did not look upon the objects as the signs of an episode in Indonesian history. I did associate them, however, with the idea of violent death. The exhibits, it is true, led me to fear the communists because they were portrayed as the assassins who butchered the Seven Heroes of the Revolution. But I was unable to resent them any more than I was able to adore their victims. I did not understand who communists were. Nor did I figure out what communism stands for. These things were not yet thinkable. In contrast, death itself seemed real for me. I was always afraid of things associated with

19

Telephone interview with author, January 9, 2005.

47 death: corpses, ghosts, graveyards, a house where a person committed suicide, and sites where deadly accidents occurred. As a child and teenager I never had a passion for official museums. It was mainly because I had no idea of how I was supposed to “read” objects other than written texts. I was too dull to read those artifacts which usually constituted the precolonial collection of Indonesian museums: beads, stone axes, pottery, statues, fossils, stone inscriptions, or bronze drums. When it concerned the exhibits that represented the armed struggle for Indonesia’s independence, I had not wit enough to decipher the meanings of this samurai sword over here, or that rusty cannon over there, or that dilapidated bomber displayed on the museum’s courtyard, or all those sepia photographs depicting the supposedly sacred events of the revolution. Not until I was in college did I become acquainted, somewhere in 1993, with the book entitled Mythologies, where its author, the French semiologist Roland Barthes, offered his interpretation of such cultural objects as the face of Greta Garbo, Einstein’s brain, children’s toys, and a new fancy Citroën car. It was this encounter with semiology, rather than archeology, which led me to realize that one could read not only texts but also things. In my interpretation at the time, this bizarre art of reading required that its practitioner take a fresh look at the world. Accordingly, I made up my mind that I must unshackle myself from the tyranny of familiarity. Familiarity, I believed, would breed numbness and banality. The more I got used to the city where I lived, for instance, the less motivated I was to observe it consciously and explore my thoughts or feelings about it. Thus in the way I relate to the objects that I got in touch with in

48 Surabaya, I had never felt the desire to go beyond mere appearances. I began to think, however, that to an enlightened person objects were much more than what they seemed to people whose hearts were hardened and whose minds were numbed. Still, breaking free from the “iron cage” of familiarity was easier said than done. None of my teachers at the Psychology Department of Airlangga University could teach me how to interpret the web of objects in the midst of which I led my often bitter life day by day in Surabaya. (One of them, it is true, taught us to read a person’s personality by analyzing the picture of a tree that he sketched on a piece of paper. But I saw this method of psychological testing, known as the Baum Test, as a rather dull implementation of the psychoanalytic idea that it is in the act of doing something not intended to be a self-disclosure that one inadvertently reveals one’s unconscious thoughts and feelings.) So I embarked on a mission to explore the techniques of blowing up the prison house of familiarity. In the end the exploration led me to three roads to illumination: alcohol, poetry, and melancholy. I found out that time was lighter, larger, and more profound when I was drunk. Clocks looked ridiculous. Money looked obscene. As alcohol softened my heart and loosened up my mind, I began to see dark beauty at the heart of my misery. Once again, the world looked as fantastic as it was in my childhood. The faces of my friends, who were also drunk, became exotic and lovable. All of a sudden, even the second-rate, maudlin dangdut songs from the transistor radio sounded like the musical rendering of a lofty philosophy of life. And I thought I saw truth in the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s declaration in his poem entitled “Correspondences”:

49

Nature is a temple whose living pillars Sometimes whisper a perplexing mixture of words; Man walks there through a forest of symbols That stares at him with its familiar glances.20 Alcohol had its shortcomings though. What I did was open up, by force, what Aldous Huxley calls the “doors of perception.” Only temporarily did it disable my rigid habit of perceiving the world. In those fleeting moments of chemical illumination, I got at least some idea of what the real world might look like. The trouble was, while I was high, the power I had of reading the “forest of symbols”— one through which I staggered at night in Surabaya, for example—did not get any stronger. When I regained my consciousness, I felt pain in my stomach and in the back of my head. Alcohol hurt my body. Poetry delivered to me what alcohol could not. In the poems by Afrizal Malna I encountered a delightfully unsettling use of the Indonesian language. I enjoyed pondering over the visual images in his poems: someone who was “busy” killing himself before a television set; a father who consumed body lotion, styling foam, and potency pills to rebuild himself; a person who sent a bathroom into the history [sic!] of other people; or a lady who had her leg hair shaved in a beauty salon.21 By exposing myself to these thought-provoking images, I taught myself intensely to read material

20

My rather free translation of the poem. See Afrizal Malna, Arsitektur Hujan [Architecture of rain] (Yogyakarta: Bentang, 1995), pp. 63, 6, 11, 24. These images are taken from the following poems in the anthology: “Channel 00,” “Kisah Cinta Tak Bersalah” [An innocent love story], “Kesibukan Membakar Sampah” [Busy burning trash], and “Migrasi dari Kamar Mandi” [Migration from a bathroom]. 21

50 objects in everyday urban life. I asked myself what a middle-aged, aphrodisiac-eating man would think about sex, women, and himself. I pressed myself to think of the possible ways in which the transfer of a bathroom from one person to another might have anything to do with history. And I wondered why for a middle-class woman hairless legs might signify beauty. It also amused me to find out that removing leg hair could be a lucrative industry. Afrizal’s poetry had a significant impact on my intellectual development in the early 1990s. It led me to think of the city of Surabaya—its people as well as its material objects, myths, economy, and history—as a sort of a great ancient book which seduced me to decipher its hitherto hidden meanings. To peruse such a “book” struck me a formidable task. It was years before I realized that to qualify for the task I must possess a good command of multiple disciplines: semiology and psychoanalysis, to be sure, but also anthropology and history. More soul-transforming than alcohol and poetry was the attack of quiet melancholia. It had its origin in one great loss in my life: the death of my father in November 1994. He was gone for good when I had just begun to grasp and accept the complexity of his life and character. It was as if I just started to figure out the meaning of the first chapter of the most important book in my life when, all of a sudden, a henchman snatched the book out of my hand and hurl it at a bonfire. My father shared with me the last heartbreaking hour of his life at the hospital. His dying moments taught me a lot more about life than any glass of beer, any anthology of fine poems, or any treatise on philosophy could ever do. His death was a thunderbolt which brought

51 home to me the transitoriness of man’s life on earth and the idea that life was but a chain of one brutal event after another while moments of true happiness were like tiny, flickering stars scattered in the vast expanse of the dark midnight sky. It dawned on me that I could interminably delay my father’s total death by keeping on remembering him. Only when everybody forgot him would he undergo a total death. Thus in the following two years, during which time I committed a sustained act of quiet mourning, I persuaded myself that the city of Surabaya was some kind a of subjective “outdoor museum” where all kinds of mementoes still existed which could remind me of my father: the Dr. Ramelan Naval Hospital on Gadung Street where he met his death; the Ngagel cemetery where his mortal remains were buried; the house on Setail Street where he used to live with his first wife and children; or the Bilka department store on Ngagel Jaya Selatan Street where he and Mother used to shop. The curious idea I had of Surabaya as a sentimental open air museum grew stronger when, between 1994 and 1995, I went out with Dewi Purnomowati: the first girlfriend in my life, who was then a dental student at Airlangga University. It was a bittersweet love triangle. She was still involved with another man when we met, had an intense chat, and fell in love head over heels. We saw each other behind her boyfriend’s back. We decided to let our love thrive and grow. In doing so, we deliberately broke the mores governing man-woman relationships in our community. But in its struggle against reason, passion emerged victorious. I tried on my part to convince myself that the love I had for her justified my moral transgression. Yet a mordant sense of guilt did not stop hounding me. Even in the midst of our most

52 beautiful moments I often thought to myself, “This illicit joy is not going to last long.” Already in the first months of the affair I began bitterly to anticipate our imminent breakup. When we first went to a movie together, I told her, “One day, in the distant future, I’ll get lost in this movie theater, alone. I’ll no longer know your address and your phone number. Suddenly, as if struck by a lightning, I’ll remember you. Some features of this place as we see it today will survive to conjure up in my mind the image of this young visage of yours. I know what I’ll do: I’ll be busy picking up bits of the memories of you and me.” No matter where we went to spend our stolen times together in the city, I carried around this sad, souvenir-capturing attitude with me. It was as if I was a perverted curator who conceived a self-centered vision of Surabaya in the future as a colossal outdoor museum that would keep and display—for the purpose of gratifying my desire for mawkish reminiscence—a number of sacred sites: the living room in her hostel where we had our first heart-baring talk ( I call it a “striptease of the heart”) which got us attracted to each other; the movie theater where we confessed to our mutual love; the house where we first kissed; or the sleazy zoo where we took a walk together one afternoon, hounded by the pesky ghost of our guilty feelings who enjoyed announcing that the end of our affair was at hand. Looking back, I may conclude that imagined, informal, open air “museums” have always been of greater emotional and intellectual importance to me than any real, official, public museums. I would like to close this section with an exposition of what I take to be a peculiar quality of official museums in general, namely, the omission of some unwanted facets of the national history. (By “official museums” I refer to those

53 whose designers, mostly the government, intended them to be read exactly as museums by the audience.) Here is the story. In 1999 the University of Surabaya, the institution where I had worked since November 1998, collaborated with the School of Management and Organization of the State University of Groningen, the Netherlands, in a program titled Working Group Matching. It involved a series of Indonesian-Dutch teams of junior researchers whose task it was to conduct a number of closely knit research projects in the fields of economy, management, and organization with a focus on the eventual construction of business interfaces between Indonesia and Western Europe. Owing to a miscommunication, the top decision-makers at the University of Surabaya got the wrong idea that the research project they were about to organize with the Dutch partner institution was on the social impact of the mass media. In their view the position of the Indonesian junior scholar in the joint research project would be best filled by a young lecturer with a background in one of the social sciences. Seeing that during my undergraduate years I wrote columns for the local newspapers, the president appointed me to represent the University of Surabaya as a junior scholar in the joint Dutch-Indonesian research team. I was then sent to do research in the State University of Groningen, the Netherlands, between April and May 1999. When I arrived in Groningen, I found out, to my sad surprise, that the project turned out to be a feasibility study on the digitalization of the library of the University of Surabaya. Once digitalized, our library would then be linked to that of the State University of Groningen, thereby enabling a swift exchange of e-texts, mutual access

54 to business databases, as well as the implementation of a distance-learning dual degree program in management involving the two institutions. The feasibility study belonged to the science of management, which I disdained because I regarded it as the powerful tool of the bourgeoisie to optimize the exploitation of the working class. (One of the affective outcomes of the study of political economy that I took up on my own all through 1998, when the economic crisis devastated the life of Indonesian workers, was my animosity towards the capitalist management science and the managerial class that applied it. ) I recall feeling I was trapped in an absurd situation. I thought there was no turning back. So I decided to grin and bear it. During my stay in Groningen, out of necessity I taught myself the fundamentals of library science as well as the repulsive subject of management benchmarking. Being a bibliophile, I got interested in the former. I could not, however, conceal my disgust at the latter. As a result, I remained the idiot that I was in the science of management. But I did manage to achieve something in the field of library science: I outlined the organizational structure of the library of my host institution, classified the types of its collection, and figured out the national network of libraries of which it was part. Yet being forced to do things I loathed, I could not avoid the feeling that I had turned into a zombie. To preserve my sanity, outside my working hours as a researcher, I did a couple of things in which I could find solace. I read the literary works of D. H. Lawrence, V. S. Naipaul, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I also observed city life in Groningen. It was nothing but the idiotic type of tourist observation. But to

55 my great delight I found out that the majority of the residents belonged to the middle class. If at last I did see a handful of poor people, their poverty did not seem to originate in the existing economic structure. “The poor are what they are because they are drug addicts,” one sympathetic hobo explained to me. In this regard Groningen was the antipode of Surabaya, a city torn apart by outrageous socioeconomic inequality. The residents of Groningen enjoyed cheap but high quality public transportation: trams, buses, and trains. The streets were smooth and clean. The bus terminals were safe, sanitary, and well organized. Wild birds enjoyed swimming around on unpolluted rivers. On second thought, however, I kept telling myself that the prosperity of the Netherlands had much to do historically with the fact that she had exploited the natural resources and the labor of the people in, among others, the East Indies. At the time I had already read somewhere, perhaps in one of Pramoedya’s novels or in John Ingleson’s In Search of Justice, that the sugar industry in Java was the backbone of the Dutch economy during the colonial heyday. The Dutch sugar tycoons reaped huge profits by exploiting the labor of the Javanese sugar workers. In addition they also robbed the most fertile lands from the people for establishing their sugarcane plantations throughout Java. In the last month of my stay in the Netherlands, I amused myself by seeing tourist objects. One day, with my Dutch and Indonesian colleagues, I went on a oneday tour in Amsterdam. One of the sights we saw was the State Museum (Rijksmuseum), which was said to be the largest museum of art and history in the Netherlands. Among one million objects of its collection, one could see not only the

56 works of the great Dutch painters (Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh) but also exhibits that told the stories about the Dutch history. I tried to look for any reference to the Dutch colonialism in the East Indies. I was curious to look upon the subject of colonialism from the Dutch perspective. Yet to my surprise my attempt was in vain. Then I asked myself, “Do the curators of the State Museum honestly believe that their ancestors never perpetrated such a barbarism as the exploitation of the natives in the colony? But how is such ignorance possible in a country with so excellent a system of education? Or am I dealing here with an instance of self-deception? But why do the Dutch not have the moral courage to acknowledge the dark sides of their national history?” As I was besieged by these questions, it dawned on me that the New Order, too, kept on denying the naked reality that it had been colonizing Timor Lorosa’e since 1976. The disappointing visit to the museum led me to conclude that deliberate historical denial was part of the pathology of nationalism. When one loved one’s nation, one would, more often than not, tend to turn a blind eye to the history of its barbarism. When I was a small kid of five, I was easily attracted to everything: stones, dragonflies, magnets, spiders, old clothes, pet fish, discarded toys, broken cars, or what have you. I observed them; I daydreamed about them. I started to “read” them. Certainly I did not engage in a geological analysis of, say, the pebbles which I had picked up from the bottom of a shallow creek in Dinoyo, Malang. It was simply that I read my own childish ideas into the stones, imagining that they somehow contained unknown magical powers. Mother strongly disapproved of my spending long hours in

57 the afternoon at the creek looking for pebbles. She had good reason, for one morning during the rainy season I slipped off a narrow, slippery log-bridge down into the deep spot underneath it, which suddenly had gotten deep thanks to the rain that fell heavily the previous day. I would have died by drowning if a man had not been there, seen what was happening, and swiftly come to my rescue. To make me stay away from the creek, Mother told me later that the brownish yellow pebbles that I was collecting were not really pebbles after all. “They are actually fragments of human bones,” she said. “You see, corpses were dumped into the creek in 1965.” Hearing this, I was horrified. I was afraid that ghosts would come and visit me at night, demanding that I give them back their bones. Thus out of fear I decided to abandon the project of building a private collection of pebbles from the creek.

8. Flag Raising Ceremony and National Memory It was in elementary school that I first took part in a flag raising ceremony. It was conducted in military style every Monday morning in the schoolyard. The flag raising ceremony was also conducted at national days such as Independence Day on August 17, Heroes’ Day on November 10, or National Awakening Day on May 20. Pupils and teachers stood in line. Pupils were arranged class by class while teachers formed a distinct group. Every Monday morning a group of pupils were appointed to carry out the flag hoisting ceremony. The group consisted of a master of ceremonies, field commander, three flag-raisers, a choir, a conductor, a reader of the Prologue to the Constitution of 1945, and a reader of the Pancasila (Five Principles). One of the

58 teachers, usually the principal or the vice principal, led the ceremony as its “inspector.” The ceremony began when the field commander gave the command to the troops to stand at attention. When the flag was being hoisted up the flagpole, everyone saluted while the choir sang the national anthem led by the conductor. Then a student stood before the troops reading aloud the Prologue to the Constitution of 1945. Then another student recited the Pancasila verse by verse, followed by everybody. Then the principal delivered a speech to the students. Usually the speech consisted of advice and announcements. When the flag ceremony was on a national day, the principal would ask the audience to observe a moment of silence to “commemorate the services rendered by the heroes who have died before us.” When I was in the sixth grade, I got fed up with the flag raising ceremony. I wondered why people were so serious about it. The ceremony began to look absurd. “What the heck am I doing here?” I asked myself. Then I began to play the fool in the flag raising ceremony. When the Preamble of the Constitution of 1945 was being read aloud, there I stood in my troop inserting my stupid comments. My friends chuckled. At first the principal ignored my misconduct. But one day, the teacher of social science acted as the inspector of the ceremony. Rather than ignore me, he addressed me in his speech and rebuked my disrespectful comments. He said, “Next Monday morning you will stand here and read the Preamble, Sony.” On that unforgettable Monday I felt doomed. My hands shook, my voice stammered, and my body quivered frantically while I read the Preamble in front of all the students in my elementary school. I was so ashamed of myself that I almost

59 sobbed. It was hell. It was a perfect punishment. After this disaster, I stopped making stupid comments during the flag raising ceremony. On this incident, for the first and last time in my life, the Preamble appeared as the most difficult text in the world to recite. I did not understand its meaning. The whole idea of the flag hoisting ceremony was incomprehensible too. What happened was that throughout my years in elementary school the flag raising ceremony taught me, in a consistent and insistent manner, to regard certain days in the calendar as much more important than the others. The flag raising ceremony combined these days, the Preamble, the Five Principles, the national anthem, the flag, the ghosts of national heroes, the teachers and the students into some sort of serious whole. I did not understand yet what this whole meant. All I knew was that I felt bored. I had no emotional or intellectual appetite for the whole event. In my junior high school years, 1984-87, the flag hoisting ceremony was one of those situations in which I felt an acute sense of alienation. I understood that the ceremony was intended to stir up nationalist sentiments among students. It was supposed to be a sacred event because it owed its very possibility to the heroes’ blood spilled during the revolution. “Being able to fly our national flag,” my principal said, “is the sign that as a nation we have our freedom.” But I often thought to myself, “If it is really about freedom, why do I feel—in the middle of this ceremony—as though I were a prisoner doing a forced labor?” No doubt I felt love for my country, my people. Still I had my own ways of enjoying and expressing the love. I felt an intense love for Indonesia when we students went hiking on the slope of a volcano in West Java. I

60 loved the nation most deeply when, taking a walk into the woods to see a beautiful waterfall, we met villagers along the way. The mere sight of these smiling and very polite peasants softened my hardened heart. I was in love with Indonesia every time I listened to the radio for the kacapi suling, a traditional Sundanese musical genre. The sounds of the bamboo flute and the kacapi, a plucked string instrument, led me to melancholy and to an intense longing for the beyond. But if I had a choice, the flag hoisting ceremony would be the last thing I wanted to do. Discipline and punishment was one theme in the flag raising ceremony that I disdained deeply. On Mondays and Saturdays, to attend the flag raising ceremony pupils were required to wear the special uniform. In junior high school it consisted of a dark blue cap with a white front; a white, short-sleeved shirt with a school identity sewn onto the right sleeve and with the OSIS22 badge attached on the left pocket on the chest; and a white skirt for girls or white shorts for boys. Failure to put on the correct and complete uniform for the flag raising ceremony would mean catastrophe. Unfortunately I lacked the capacity for an obsessive conformity to such a dress code. Due to negligence I often put on the regular dark blue shorts instead of the white ones. Or I forget to bring my cap. Or my shirt lacked the required OSIS badge or the school identity tag. As a result I was often subjected to a humiliating punishment. During the ceremony, all the disorderly and disobedient students were to form one distinct group separated from all the rest. There the group stood, in front of everybody on the school 22

OSIS stands for Organisasi Siswa Intra Sekolah (Intra-School Student Organization). By default, all students in junior and senior high schools were members of OSIS. Under the Old Order, the situation was quite different. Students could become members of a number of student organizations linked to political parties.

61 courtyard. There they were, put on the spotlight as the bad example, as students gone astray. Before the ceremony began, a teacher would examine and question all the transgressors one by one. Seeing I was not wearing my cap, my teacher Mr. Samsul Sis—his face swooping down on my face—stabbed his finger into my ribcage and shouted, “Aha! Where is your cap, son?” “I’m sorry, sir! But as I left home for school this morning, I forgot to bring my cap, sir!” “Did you also forget to bring your nose or your ears?” “No, sir. Of course not.” This unsympathetic treatment aroused in my soul a burning resentment for school as an institution. As a result, I hated flag raising ceremony even more. To be honest, at sixteen, when I was already a first-year student in senior high school, I studied and practiced the protocol for flag hoisting ceremonies in a school setting. It did not take me long to be able to perform as a field commander and a flagraiser in actual ceremonies at school. Yet I did this not because I had undergone an attitude change in favor of the ceremony in itself. I did it as part of yet another strategy to get Tjatursari to like me. The girl happened to be an excellent field commander. A year later, when I abandoned any hope of ever winning her love, I began to see what I really had been: a pathetic, idiotic, love-thirsty clown. Ironically, the ghost of the flag raising ceremony never ceased to haunt my life. In November 1998 I started working as a lecturer in the Psychology Department of the

62 University of Surabaya. Although it was a private university, it insisted that its academic and administrative staff should attend flag hoisting ceremonies held on Indonesia’s sacred dates. Believing that I had academic freedom, I decided not to attend the ceremony on Independence Day, August 17. I guess it was in 2000. As a result, I received a letter of warning from the university’s vice president the academic affairs. I did not reply the letter. Later on, acting on the vice president’s order, the head of the department, Mr. Heru Hariyanto, summoned me to see him at his office. He said “Pak Sony, I believe you owe us an explanation of why you did not attend the August 17 flag ceremony a few days ago. Did you happen to be ill?” “No, I didn’t. I was perfectly healthy at the time.” “Then perhaps you were performing some academic task that prevented you from taking part in the ceremony?” “No, I wasn’t. There was no such task at the time.” “So what happened then?” “I chose not to attend it. I did it on purpose.” “You did?” “There’s no reason for me to commemorate the Independence Day. In my view, what we Indonesians now have is independence only in the legal sense of the word. Politically, economically, we are not yet free (merdeka).” “What do you mean by that?”

63 “In terms of the state’s economic policy, for example, the Government of Indonesia has taken orders from the IMF at the expense of the economic interest of the people. The government has removed the subsidies for health, fuel, and education. Therefore, the poor can no longer afford good education, reliable health services, and cheap fuel for transportation and home uses. The government is privatizing stateowned companies and selling them to international private investors at dirt cheap prices. This will result in the loss of the people’s economic sovereignty. The government has nationalized the foreign debts of the private sector. This means it has sacrificed the interests of the majority of the people in order to save the careless economic elite. And the government has removed the protection of Indonesia’s domestic market, forcing the small peasants into bankruptcy. The government no longer regulates the prices of agricultural inputs such as pesticide, fertilizers, and seeds—letting it be determined now by the tyranny of the market forces. Taking all these things into our consideration, can we seriously consider Indonesia to be an economically free country?” “Are you suggesting that we who attended the ceremony were all in the wrong?” “No, I am not. I believe you all had your own healthy reasons for doing so. As far as I am concerned, however, my little study has led me to the conclusion that Indonesia is not yet free in the fullest sense of the word. Thus I see as my task to join in the ongoing struggle for Indonesia’s true independence. Until that is achieved, there’s no Independence Day for me to commemorate in a flag hoisting ceremony.”

64 “Pak Sony, I can accept your position. But I can’t understand your argument.” He let me off the hook. Not because he saw an element of truth in my argument but simply because we were not on the same page. At this point, it is important to note, however, that my response, both in childhood or in adulthood, to the flag raising ceremony was by no means typical. I must touch upon at least the experience of a friend of mine, Sally Dhewayani, who in all honesty took the ceremony seriously and solemnly. She was my classmate for a couple of weeks in July 1987 in State Senior High School 4, Central Jakarta. She moved with her family to Kediri, East Java, where she attended State Senior High School 2. We kept in touch with each other by mail. The correspondence took place even after I moved with my family to Surabaya in July 1988. Being one of the outstanding students in her school, she was appointed to be a member of the flag raising team in the ceremony to honor the Independence Day at the Grahadi, the governor of East Java’s mansion house, on Pemuda Street, Surabaya. In her letter she said that at first she felt nothing particularly touching about being a member of the team. But her training, which took place for a few weeks and was organized by military instructors, involved not only the mechanics of the protocol but also a character building (pembinaan mental) designed to transform her into an Indonesian youth worthy of the task. She did undergo a transformation. As she told me in her letter, in the last rehearsal on the day just before August 17, she felt an overwhelming overflow of patriotic feelings that shook her body, her heart, and her soul. Never before had she gone through such an emotional intensity. For the first time in her life

65 she realized the overpowering aura of sanctity that emanated from the flag raising ritual as a whole, from the military gestures that people made during the ritual, and from the very artifacts that people used to perform it: the national anthem, the Pancasila text, the Preamble of the Constitution of 1945, the segments of time approaching the sacred moment (10:00 AM, August 17), and most of all the national flag itself—the Red-and-White Heirloom. Oddly enough, although I did not share her brand of nationalist sentiment, I sympathized with what she felt. Needless to say, I liked her as a person. Not because she was physically attractive. She was not. I liked her because she played the acoustic guitar, had a neat handwriting, and thought intelligent thoughts. Last but not least, an exotic fragrance often oozed from the watercolored paper on which she wrote her letters to me. More often than not, as I read her letters, the perfume made my heart beat wildly. In 1990 she went to Bandung Institute of Technology to take up an undergraduate program in urban planning.

9. The National Monument and Others As a child I never paid close attention to monuments. They were ubiquitous but unattractive to me. When I saw one in the city where I happened to live, I never thought why people built and displayed it there. My family lived in Jakarta from 1980 to 1987, during which time we went and saw the National Monument a couple of times. The monument was surrounded by a large square. Early in the morning people were there jogging and exercising. Every Saturday evening they were there having a good time. The first time my family visited the monument, my father said, “Look at

66 the ‘flame’ at the summit of the monument! It is made of thirty-five kg of gold.” I said, “Wow!” And that’s all. I did not ask my father why the monument had the particular shape that it did. I did not ask him why people built it and what it signified. Not until I was a college student that I came to learn that the monument is actually a linga-yoni with a golden flame on its top. In Hindu iconography, linga, the phallus, is the sign of the god Shiva. It stands for male generative power. On the other hand, yoni, the female sexual organ, is the symbol of the goddess Shakti. It refers to female generative power. The union of yoni and linga—the latter standing erect on the former as its base—signifies the mystical fusion of the male and the female principles to constitute the oneness of being.23 As a nine-year old boy I did not know what linga and yoni were. Nor did I understand that the monument, as a whole, represents the struggle of Indonesians against the Dutch colonialism. And I did not know that Soekarno had been reported to regard the National Monument as the icon of his and the nation-state’s “inexhaustible virility.”24 Had I known this, I would surely have thought that it was quite an obscene monument. In my family it was taboo to mention the names of human genitals, let alone build their three-dimensional likenesses. Benedict Anderson once said, “Monuments are a type of speech.”25 Someone has them first constructed and then put on display at various spots in the city because

23

See, for example, Bosco, Steve, Lisa Braucher, and Beth Kessler, eds., “Linga” and “Yoni,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference [CD-ROM] (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2003 [cited March 4, 2005]). 24 Benedict Anderson, “Cartoons and Monuments: The Evolution of Political Communication under the New Order,” in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 175. 25 Ibid., p. 174.

67 they want to communicate important messages to the onlookers. Standing before a monument that addresses him, the spectator qua citizen is supposed to ruminate on a certain sacred event in his nation’s history. He may have played no part in the event; it may have occurred a few decades before he was born. Yet he is expected to inherit its essence, capture its “spirit,” and grasp its core message in order that he may understand the origin of the present community and be better able to contribute to its future development. I do not recall that in my childhood or adolescence I ever got excited about a single monument as a proper signifier of history. (The sort of history that oozed from all those monuments smelt like the one I had to learn at school: Both lacked charm). Nor do I recall feeling that I was addressed by any monument. At this point I am tempted to compare monuments with another “type of speech” that saturates the landscape of big cities such as Jakarta and Surabaya: roadside advertisements. They infest every point and every corner in the city’s network of streets. They far surpass monuments in their power to grab my attention. When I was a kid, I found it hard simply to ignore them. On his day-to-day bodily circulation in the network of streets and buildings in Jakarta and Surabaya—in search of money, meanings, power, pleasures, illusions, relationship, knowledge, etc—the urban man travels through, and is haunted by, a forest of billboards on which texts, images, and (at night) neon lights are juggled into a thousand and one messages, which, despite the specific forms or contents each of them may have, possess one single essence in common: It is the consumption-side capitalist relentless interpellation: “Hey you! You there! Look here: This is the commodity a

68 cool guy must buy!” I had this insight when I read Roland Barthes’ Mythologies in 1993. In the light of this insight I began to train myself to disregard all kinds of commercials, for I began to suspect that they had the effect of turning me into some kind of a consumerist Hamlet who grappled with a stupid question: “To consume or not to consume?” I think I did well in the self-training except for one thing: Even now I still cannot help but surrender to the seductions of book ads that appear in newspapers or magazines, masquerading as book reviews. Needless to say, when I was a kid of eight, however, I used to get excited when I saw the roadside billboards through the window of the bus on which my father, my little brothers, and I had a joy-ride around the city on Sundays. The spectacle so enthralled me that I became suggestible: I compulsively read aloud the brand names written on the billboards. As soon as I regained my self-consciousness, I got embarrassed. Such a compulsive act, I thought, was an instance of bad taste because part of being a good Javanese—my mother used to teach me in many ways—is never to reveal your true feelings to anybody outside the nuclear family. For example, when a good Javanese desires someone or something, or is amazed at something, he should make sure that others will not detect his amazement. To do otherwise is the sign that he does not know how to refine his emotion and therefore is not a good Javanese. When I, as a teenage schoolboy, took a bus trip around the city in Jakarta and Surabaya, monuments would often enter into my field of vision. Some were obelisks (like the National Monument in Jakarta or the Heroes’ Monument in Surabaya) but mostly were statues of various shapes and themes. In terms of ubiquity, charm, and

69 readability, they often paled in comparison to the outdoor advertisements. It was mostly because in the case of billboards at least I was able to read the often witty, engaging, and memorable slogans. In my juvenile ears they often sounded like profane mantras. Take, for instance, this catchphrase in a soap commercial: “Lifebuoy: the healthy way of taking a bath,” which I loved to twist into “Lifebuoy: the healthy way of dying.” By contrast, left to my own devices, I was unable to “read” paintings and musical compositions, let alone three-dimensional, non-verbal monuments. Owing to my sculptural illiteracy I always took it for granted that somebody—I never bothered to find out who—had designed monuments as a trick for the old generation (those who called themselves “freedom-fighters” in the national revolution) to teach us, the younger generation, all that holy but hollow patriotism of 1945. I was on guard every time I heard somebody preach the moral of the national revolution. I was no longer able to respond sympathetically to such a sermon ever since that day in the first half of 1987 when I hit upon a passage in Soe Hok Gie’s posthumous diary where he accuses the generation of 1945 of violating the very ideals of 1945 by their involvement in moral, economic, and political corruptions.26 I took his criticism to be true, for as a youngster I had begun to see that adults as a rule did the opposite of what they preached. When, for example, they said, “We made sacrifices to liberate the nation from the shackles of colonialism,” I took the claim to mean: “But now we sacrifice the nation in pursuit of our own self-interests.” I also had learned a bit from Freud to see that it was in their off-the-cuff remarks and gestures that people often unwittingly 26

Soe Hok Gie Catatan Seorang Demonstran [The Diary of a Demonstrator] (Jakarta: LP3ES, 1989).

70 revealed their true thoughts and desires. It was to this type of unintended behavior that I urged myself to pay close attention. I thought it safe to disregard the rest. And it would not hurt, I thought, to ignore all the sculptures and buildings that some big shots in the old generation had intended to be read by people as monuments. These were merely intended monuments. At the time, between the age of fifteen and nineteen, I was unable to see how the “reading” of this sort of monuments could be a legitimate and intellectually rewarding “scientific” study. As a child I did not “read” the National Monument as a text on Indonesian history. I saw it merely as a huge, strange object that was nice to see. Its golden flameshaped top shone beautifully under the burning sun in the Jakartan sky at noon. Surrounding the monument in four directions were parks with trees and lawns. I enjoyed playing, walking and running in the parks. Every Saturday evening, the parks were teeming with people who came there to have a good time with their family, friends, and lovers. There was a dancing fountain in one of the parks. I liked watching it. There were street vendors who sold fried tofu, balloons, puppets, and toys. These were things I enjoyed and cared about. The monument itself was nothing special, except for the thirty-five kg of gold that covered its top. Once I thought to myself that one would become very rich if only one could steal the gold and get away with it. In August 2003, already more than two decades after I first visited the National Monument in Jakarta, I came to learn a bit about the historical mode of “intending” a

71 monument.27 A few weeks prior to my departure to the United States to undertake a masters program at Ohio University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Mohamad Ihsan Alief, then a PhD student in the Contemporary History Institute, wrote me an email asking if I could assist his teacher, the historian William H. Frederick, by doing a little observation of two monuments in Surabaya: a small obelisk at the courtyard of the Balai Pemuda (Youth Hall) and the Bamboo Spears Monument on Sudirman Street. As Ihsan told me, Professor Frederick needed to know the contents of the inscriptions on both monuments, for he was writing an essay on violence in the early Indonesian revolution. So there I went. I paid a visit to those two points in the landscape of Surabaya: two “ordinary” spots that suddenly appeared in my eyes to be “truly” historic sites. With an acute enthusiasm, I copied out the inscriptions into my notebook. All of a sudden the mode of my interaction with the monuments underwent a shift from complete indifference to an antiquarian fascination. What brought about the transformation was my exposure to the interest of the other. I asked myself, “Why is it that this US-based historian of Southeast Asia—a foreigner, that is—gets so curious about what these lousy public monuments in Indonesia have to say? Could it be that these superfluous buildings are actually haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of Indonesia’s 27

In this context, I use the verb “to intend” as it is used in phenomenology. In phenomenological sense, “‘intending’ means the conscious relationship we have to an object.” There are many possible ways in which one may intend, for example, a Javanese traditional dagger—a kris. The act of consciousness that a connoisseur of Javanese arts adopts when she observes a kris on her desk is quite different from that which a superstitious man engages in when he meditates on his kris as a fetish that he believes would aid him to acquire wealth. For the phenomenological use of the concepts of intending and intentionality, see, for example, Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 8-9.

72 past: by those politically obscene or ideologically unwanted stories of the nation that the defenders of the existing Official History have always desired to banish into secrecy and oblivion?” These questions which popped up in my mind were symptoms of the rise of my interest in the monument as a legitimate object for historical reflection. I thought to myself again, “From now on, never take monuments for granted. Not even these Bamboo Spears. They may reveal the hidden faces of history.” At this point in time, as far as the history of Indonesia and pre-Indonesia was concerned, I had already developed a strong preference for the works by foreign scholars to those by mainstream Indonesian historians. To my great delight, I found out that reading the works of foreign scholars was really an exciting voyage of discovery. It was no less than a bold exploration of—as far as I was concerned—the hitherto uncharted regions in the history of the archipelago. It is by no means an overstatement if I call it a self-transforming intellectual encounter. The three-volume Indonesian translation of Denys Lombard’s Le Carrefour javanais: Essai d’histoire globale (The Javanese Crossroads: An Essay in Global History) opened my eyes to the enormous contribution of the Chinese to the Javanese culture. Before reading the French scholar’s books, it had never crossed my mind that it was from the Chinese that the Javanese adopted, for instance, the milling technology for processing sugarcane into brown sugar as well as the gastronomic predilection for tofu, tempe,28 soybean sauce, tauco,29 and all kinds of noodles. It also revealed to me, to my surprise,

28

Tempe is fermented soybean cake. Tauco is fermented bean paste, a condiment widely used among the Sundanese in West Java. 29

73 the Islamic roots of Indonesian modernity. It was from Islam, rather than from the Dutch, that the Javanese first adopted such modern concepts as the individual and the progressive, linear time. Likewise, by reference to the work of Robert Cribb, the American anthropologist James T. Siegel points out in his A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today that gangsters, too, played a not insignificant role in Jakarta during the revolution. One should not, therefore, deny the underworld’s contribution to the struggle for independence. What a bizarre but exciting finding! The history of the 1945-1949 revolution turned out to be much more complicated than the New Order’ version had always wanted me to believe. In addition, I had also read Hilmar Farid’s fine Indonesian translation of Takashi Shiraishi’s thought-provoking work on the Sarekat Islam (Association of Islam): An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926. Again, to my surprise, the Sarekat Islam turned out to be a modern, mass-based, native, popular organization under the banner of Islam that posed a dangerous challenge to the Dutch colonial regime as it existed in the first quarter of the 20th century. The modernity of Sarekat Islam as a popular movement, Shiraishi argues, consisted in its use of European-style organizing tools: newspapers, rallies, trade unions, and strikes.30 The portrait that Shiraishi painted of the origin of Indonesian nationalism stood in stark contrast to the New Order historiography according to which the founding of the Boedi Oetomo (Excellent Character) in May 1908 signified the awakening of the Indonesian nationalist movement. The book also challenged the New Order’s rigid binary opposition between Islamism and 30

See Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 19121926 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. xi.

74 communism by introducing me to the complicated relationship between the two ideologies in the person of the enigmatic Hadji Mohammad Misbach, a Surakartabased pious Islamic preacher who once wrote in an article published in the journal Medan Moeslimin (Forum for Muslims) that Satan’s “evil influence is apparent in this present age in … Capitalism.” And he further asserted that true Muslims would not reject communism while genuine communists would not seek to abolish Islam. Nothing was further from the New Order’s conception of Islam-communism relationship than Misbach’s argument.31 By and large, the works of these and other foreign scholars had encouraged me to think about Indonesian history critically. In addition, they aroused in me the passion for the study of history. I had never thought before that it could be so much fun! By contrast, when in my senior high school years I read the Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (National History of Indonesia), I was unable to avoid feeling that the authors addressed me from the superior position of a teacher of morality. They appeared to be obsessed with their egocentric desire that “the future generations could have the same perception of the development of their people from the prehistoric times up to the present.”32 I just could not put up with this type of generational arrogance. I thought to myself, “Just because you guys took part in the revolution doesn’t mean that you have the authority, moral or otherwise, to impose on us your particular view of the event. I, as a member of the young generation, reserve the right to differ from 31

Ibid., p. 285. The Editorial Board, “Foreword,” Sejarah Nasional Indonesia: Untuk SMA [The National History of Indonesia: For Senior High School], vol. 1, eds. Nugroho Notosusanto and Yusmar Basri (Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1985), no page. 32

75 you in the way I perceive the past. Indeed, I would be willing to compare and contrast my view with yours. But I don’t have any obligation whatsoever to adopt your perception.” To be quite honest about it, in my late teens I answered the old generation’s arrogance with my own type of adolescent arrogance.33 The uncompromising stance I took at the time vis-à-vis the old generation can be summed up as follows: “The young will respect the old if, and only if, the old too respect the young.” And as far as I was concerned, to show their respect for the young, people of the generation of 1945, if they happened to be historians, must not forget that writing was an art. It was really a “crime” for them to have written the school textbooks on the national history of Indonesia in such a bad and boring prose. In so doing they in fact had insulted history as a discipline, the national language, and the young generation. I

33

The reader may wonder, “Where did this boy’s attitude come from?” In response to this question, I must admit that my attitude arose from my encounter in 1987 with Jean-Paul Sartre’s contention that underlying man’s self-consciousness is his capacity for negation (néantisation). I was converted to this phenomenological thesis, which I read in Kees Bertens, Filsafat Barat Abad XX, vol. 2 (Jakarta: Gramedia, 1985). In my interpretation of Sartre’s argument at the time, to be conscious of myself meant that when I saw a TV set, a mango tree, a dog, my teacher, and a national leader, I must be able to assert that I was not that TV set, not that mango tree, not that dog, not my teacher, and not that national leader. In 1987 I began to take pride in saying “no” to what the figures of authority in my society had to say: teachers, clerics, bureaucrats, politicians, generals, and mediocre intellectuals. I also took pride in being able to differ from the crowd (the masses) in many issues. For example, in 1988, under a pseudonym I published, in the student magazine of the State Senior High School 4 in Jakarta a poem entitled “A Letter to God,” in which I advocated for Karl Jaspers’ Gnosticism. A devout Muslim, my teacher of mathematics found the poem “heretical” and tried to discover the author, but to no avail. All in all, I had to pay dearly for this negation-for-self-consciousness project. For example, my buddies in Jakarta, with whom I kept in touch through letters after I moved to Surabaya in mid-1988, concluded that I had transmogrified into such a creep that somewhere in 1989 or 1990 they held a meeting in Ciputat, Tangerang to discuss the possible ways in which they could bring me back “to the right path.”

76 do not recall finding, in the Senior High School standard history textbooks, one single passage that could stand in comparison with those in, for instance, the Indonesian translation of Shiraishi’s An Age in Motion in terms of literary grace and intellectual brilliance. Let me return now to the Bamboo Spears Monument and the Youth Hall Monument in Surabaya. My suddenly rising interest in them was actually triggered by my awareness of a foreign scholar’ interest in it. If no foreign expert had shown any curiosity about the monument, I would have retained my indifference. Both monuments turned out to be linked to the barbarism on the part of the freedom fighters during the revolution. One afternoon in Athens, Ohio, April 8, 2004, Dr. Frederick, under whose supervision I began to write the present thesis, let me read the draft version of his essay on the dark and violent side of the Indonesian Revolution (19451949). Based on his analysis of historical evidence, he reveals that on October 15, 1945, armed Indonesian young men linked to the PRI (Youth of the Indonesian Republic) captured about 1,500 people—mostly Dutch and Eurasians but also some Indonesians—and detained them at the Youth Hall, known at the time as the Simpang Club, where afterward, perhaps intoxicated by some kind of a fundamentalist nationalism, the Indonesian patriots participated in a bloody orgy of barbarity where they tortured and slaughtered their civilian prisoners, men and women alike. Between fifty and two hundred of the prisoners met their violent deaths in the hands of these blood-thirsty young freedom fighters whom, four decades later in our school history textbooks, my friends and I were supposed to imagine as impeccable, holy, noble, and

77 angelic national heroes.34 Strangely enough, the inscription on the monument which stood on the courtyard of the Youth Hall (Simpang Club) remains silent about the murders. What it does say is that, in the heyday of the Dutch colonialism, “natives and dogs” were forbidden to enter this Europeans-only club. It also says that, “in the fighting against the powerful combined Allied Forces,” the PRI occupied the club as its headquarters. Apparently, embittered by the Dutch colonial order of things, in which they had long been treated as equal to dogs, the PRI youths desired to avenge the insult by treating the Dutch and the half Dutch as dogs too. It is as though in response to the Dutch insult, “Natives and dogs are not allowed to enter this club,” the PRI youths had retorted, “In this now native-occupied club, Dutch and half Dutch dogs are not allowed to live.” Similarly, something barbaric was also connected to the Bamboo Spears Monument. On October 28, 1945, at the site where the monument now stands, the TKR and the PRI troops attacked a convoy of vehicles by which for safety reasons the British-Indian troops were relocating Dutch and Eurasian civilians from Gubeng to Darmo. In the incident 200 Dutch and Eurasian women and children faced violent deaths.35

34

William H. Frederick, “Blood Spilled in Darkness: Killings in the Early Indonesian Revolution (East Java, October 1945),” unpublished paper. 35 Ibid.

78 10. The Treason of G30S/PKI: A New Order “Historical” Movie It was in 1981, I believe, that I first viewed The Treason of G30S/PKI (TG), a motion picture that told the New Order’s version of the “coup” by a number of junior army officers said to be acting under the control of the PKI. A ten-year-old boy, I did not understand the film at all. The film, I think, is for adults. It represents the coup, which its leader, Lieutenant-Colonel Untung Samsuri, announced to be part of the September 30 Movement, from an adult perspective. My social horizon as a small boy did not include state-level politics. The scenes I remember most vividly from the film include the kidnapping of the top Army generals by soldiers from the Tjakrabirawa Palace Guard, the shooting to death of Major-General Achmad Yani, and the orgiastic torture of the generals at Crocodile Hole. Among the memorable bits of dialogue in the film is “Blood is red, General—like anger,” uttered by a PKI man who was torturing one of the generals. Another memorable line is “We have to move like ghosts,” uttered by a top PKI leader in a clandestine meeting where the coup is planned. At that moment, the camera reveals only his chin and his kretek-smoking mouth.36 There was also this exotic leftist term of address used among members of the PKI: kawan which means comrade. D. N. Aidit was addressed by his friends as “Kawan Aidit” (Comrade Aidit) rather than “Pak Aidit” (Mr. Aidit). As far as I can remember, when I first saw TG, I neither believed nor disbelieved it. I neither loved nor despised it. It frightened me, of course, but it failed to thrill me. It lacked the charm I often felt when I watched Jackie Chan’s kung fu 36

Later on these sentences became the favorite stuff for college student jokes in Airlangga University.

79 movies in Jakarta in the early 1980s. These Hong Kong movies were so fascinating that every time my friends and I watched them we would mimic Jackie Chan’s kung fu style at school during class breaks. Usually we watched the movies together in the afternoons after school at the home of our classmate Andy, whose parents were wellto-do enough to own a VCR and to rent movies from video stores. We boys loved to imagine ourselves to be Chinese kung fu fighters. The more realistically we could imitate the kung fu styles in the movies, the higher the prestige we could achieve in the eyes of the peer group. My friend Sidik Hidayatullah had his hair cut to resemble Jackie Chan’s hair style. We boys begged our parents to buy us what we called the sepatu bikbos (big boss shoes): the kind of shoes that Jackie Chan wore in his kung fu movies. Of all the characters that Jackie Chan had played at the time, my favorite was the rebellious youth Wong Fei-Hung in The Drunken Master.37 This is the movie’s crazy but amazing thesis: Drunkenness, rather than sober reason, was the path to excellence in the martial arts. It was not until I was twenty-three, though, that I was able to grasp the film’s thesis. As a ten-year-old boy all I knew was just that the movie offered the type of wisdom very different from that which we had to learn at school. The Drunken Master told the story of Wong Fei-Hung, whose parents had sent him to study martial arts under his impressive uncle: the great drunkard-beggar Su Hua-Chi. Subjected to a harsh training regime, Fei-Hung eventually mastered the “Eight Drunken Gods” style.

37

In the movie Drunken Master, released in 1978, Jackie Chan played Wong Fei-Hung and Simon Yuen played Su Hua-Chi. The movie was directed by Yuen Woo-Ping.

80 However, online and telephone interviews that I conducted with friends, who were required to watch TG in their childhood or adolescence, demonstrate that it elicited responses quite different from mine. One of the film’s themes was the antagonism between the Army as the good guys and the PKI as the bad guys. While he watched the movie as a teenager, Zunafi, now a twenty-six-year-old graduate of Brawijaya University, Malang, sympathized with the slaughtered Army generals. The sympathy fitted in with the school history textbooks that defined them as the “best sons of the nation” (putra terbaik bangsa). He admired these high-ranking officers who had died “to defend what they believed in and what they held in the highest regard.” But he went on to say, “I now understand, though, that what they stood for was something secular: the nation-state.”38 By contrast, as a young man, Zunafi placed his identity as a Muslim above his identity as a member of the nation-state. When I asked him why, he replied, “Will the nation-state take care of my spiritual welfare in the afterlife?” He comes from a Javanese, Muhammadiyah family in Kediri, East Java. For the sake of comparison, I present below Evilina Sutrisno’s account of her encounter with the movie. She was born on 18 July 1970, in Cepu, Blora, East Java, into an ethnic Chinese family. Although her parents were Confucian, they sent her to Catholic schools. Until her adolescent years she identified herself as a Catholic. Now she appears to be more of a theosophist. In 2002 she got her master’s degree in the University of Amsterdam International School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Under the supervision of Henk Schulte-Nordholt, she wrote her thesis on the racist

38

Telephone conversation with author, January 9, 2005.

81 violence against Chinese women in Surabaya in May 1998. Since 1996 she has been teaching clinical psychology at Psychology Department, University of Surabaya. I was in the second grade of senior high school when I first watched TG. It was around 1986 or 1987. From then on, we students were required to watch it every year. Every time I watched the movie, I was terrified. It was absurd and frightening because it portrayed what was beyond humanity’s common sense: dark lighting, clandestine meetings organized by Comrade Syam [Kamaruzaman], the generals’ death agony, the slow-motion scenes depicting the abductions of the generals, the scenes portraying their torture at Crocodile Hole, and fragments of a documentary film that showed the removal of their bodies from the death well at Crocodile Hole. I burst into tears and had goose bumps every time I saw the scene in which one of General Pandjaitan’s daughters smears her face with her father’s blood. I was impressed and touched when I saw the general pray before leaving his house. Perhaps my reaction at the time resulted from my religious sentiment because, as far as I know, Pandjaitan was the only general who was a Christian. In this way he was similar to me who was (then) a Catholic. I was greatly amazed seeing how the Gerwani39 women could become so sadistic. Angered and irritated, I thought to myself, “Why should the details of the torture be visually represented at all? Why are we students required to see them [the Gerwani women] sing, shout, joke and laugh while they were torturing the generals?”40 As far as Evilina’s testimony is concerned, the film did a successful job of representing a persuasive myth of the moral battle in which the PKI stood for the Evil whereas the Army was the embodiment of the Good. The PKI men were portrayed to work in the dark, talk with each other in the dark, and operate beyond the orbit of human reason. Originating from darkness, their acts were terrifyingly Satanic. It is as though the filmmaker had forgotten that the PKI was actually a legal political party.

39

Gerwani stands for Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (“Indonesian Women’s Movement”). The organization was associated with the PKI. 40 Email to author, January 16, 2005.

82 On the other hand, the Army, represented inter alia by General Pandjaitan, was with God. Pandjaitan was God’s man. In the face of an imminent violent death, he still found the time to commune with God. The PKI women, the Gerwani, symbolized a much more hideous monster: the Red Whore who harassed, assaulted, and castrated the top male bodies of the Army as the macho, moral, and sacred symbol of the nation-state. The Gerwani, so the film argued, raped the Army. By extension, they raped Indonesia. How is it that women could ever rape the best sons of the nationstate? It was because the whores derived their inhuman power from Satan’s religion: communism. But thanks to General Soeharto and the Army, the Pancasila won the moral battle against communism. The Army struck back. It defeated the PKI and crushed the Gerwani. The Pancasila re-affirmed its magical power. Here was the New Order. And all the citizens of Indonesia were supposed to be grateful for that. As a device for political propaganda TG did succeed in shaping the attitude of some of its viewers towards people associated with the PKI. In an online interview with me, Ahmad Faishal, a young researcher who received his BA degree in history from Airlangga University, Surabaya in January 2005, referred to the movie as “a spectacle that to some extent injured our historical imagination.”41 Faishal was born in Glagah, a village at the border between Lamongan and Gresik, East Java, on 22 November 1981. He spent his elementary school years in Glagah. In his early adolescent years he went to State Junior High School and the Falakhiyah Islamic Junior High School, both in Glagah. Later on he moved to Lamongan where he

41

Email to author, January 11, 2005.

83 attended senior high school. In an email interview, he told me that when he was a primary school pupil he used to mingle freely with his friends without any social partition between them. Things changed, though, after the kids were exposed to the movie. I do not know who first began it. But this much I know: after we had watched the movie, there emerged some kind of walls between us. Someone said, “Don’t mix too much with X. His grandpa used to be a PKI guy, you know.” I wondered, “Were the PKI people really that sadistic? What and who were they anyway?” From the time I was in the third grade in primary school until I was in junior high school, every time the film was shown to us, there appeared those images of the horror: the barbarism of the group called “the communists.” Fortunately, as he grew up, people emerged in his life who introduced him to other versions of Indonesia’s pre-New Order history. His maternal grandfather—who in 1960s was the head of the local branch of the Anshor (a Nahdlatul Ulama-linked youth organization)—told him that the G30S/PKI Affair was “nothing but a political conflict.” Some oral traditions in East Java have it that the Anshor youths took part in the mass executions of alleged members of the PKI. Yet the grandfather said, “Unless there was a clear reason to do so, being a religious person I was unable to kill or to order people to kill.” The stories his grandfather told him of the events in 1965-66 somehow neutralized the horrendous images he saw in TG. In Faishal’s view, his grandfather’s tales were “objective” in that despite his being an Anshor leader at the time he did not take pride, later on, in the massacre of the communists in his region. Still, all things being considered, as a primary schoolboy he did believe, among other things, that the Lekra (People’s Cultural Association), the BTI (Indonesian Peasant

84 Front), the Gerwani (Indonesian Women’s Movement), and the PGRI-Nonvaksentral (left wing Association of Indonesian Teachers) were all communist organizations. And despite his doubts about the number of the communists slaughtered in the 1965 and despite his awareness of the phobia, paranoia, and trauma that haunted his friends whose families were associated with the PKI, as primary schoolboy Faishal could strongly declared—in answer to one of the jury’s questions in a social sciences game show where he represented his school—that “the PKI was godless and that it butchered the Heroes of the Revolution.” A school kid who blurted out such a political denunciation would have won the approval of the New Order regime. Indeed TG seems to have been intended to teach children to make this very kind of response. One should not, however, overrate TG’s efficacy as one of the New Order’s implements for political socialization. At best it has had mixed results. In some cases it failed to convert the viewer to the New Order’s myth of origin. But in other cases it succeeded in doing so. It did not work when too young a viewer was left to his own devices to figure out what this long and serious movie is all about. For example, as a ten-year-old boy who preferred action and horror movies, I could tell the bad guys from the good ones when I watched a movie about the armed conflict between the colonizing Dutch and the colonized Indonesians. But TG is an entirely different movie. It tells the story of a coup d’état, something I did not yet understand at the time. TG worked when the young viewer was able to pay close attention to it, distinguish the heroes from the villains, and identify himself with the former. He was most likely to do so if, shortly after first watching TG, he had a talk with his parents

85 who corroborated the movie maker’s thesis. For young children tend to believe what their parents believe. TG’s success, however, did not always last long because people change, they grow, and information circulates. (It is important to note that in New Order Indonesia there was a lot of information available.) For example, in winter 1999, in the library of the Anthropology Department, University of Amsterdam—that is, twelve years since she first watched the movie—Evilina ran into an article by Benedict Anderson, in the Cornell University-based journal Indonesia, bearing the title of “How Did the Generals Die?” Based on the official report of the doctor who performed the autopsy, Anderson’s very different account of the causes of the generals’ death opened up her eyes. Contrary to the New Order’s version in TG, she found out that [T]here were bullet wounds in the chest or the back, wounds on the head produced by collision with a hard but blunt object (presumably with the walls of the death well), and triangular wounds caused by a sharp object (presumably bayonet stabs). Most confusing was the additional information that two of the seven generals were not circumcised, that is to say, their penises were intact or uncut. The fingernails and toenails were all intact, that is, there was no torture by forcibly removing the nails.42 After reading the article, Evilina came to realize that “all the terror that I had to endure every year by watching TG turned out to have been a bitter political farce.” This fact infuriated her. She felt she had been deceived. She felt dumb because there were so many things in Indonesia’s history that she did not know. Anderson’s was not the first alternative account of the history of 1965 that she had read in winter 1999. A

42

Email to author, January 16, 2005.

86 month before, she read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu (The Mute’s Soliloquy), which she borrowed from the KITLV (the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology) in Leiden. It was Pramoedya’s memoir of his miserable life on Buru Island where as a political prisoner of the New Order he had to do forced labor for fourteen years (1965-1979). As she read it, she was moved to tears, amazed at the cruelty with which the New Order had treated political prisoners. She was unable, however, completely to trust in Pramoedya’s testimony. “Pram was the defeated party,” she wrote. “I thought he might have exaggerated [things] to win people’s sympathy.” She admitted that when she read Pram’s memoir she did not believe yet that the New Order had committed historical deceptions. I still retained the residues of the history lessons that I received in the second grade of senior high school. The PKI, it was claimed, was a party gone astray; a godless party that had violated the Pancasila that upheld, definitely, the belief in one and supreme God; and a party that hungered for power because it desired to overthrow the Great Leader of the Revolution [President Soekarno]. Therefore, it deserved to be liquidated and exterminated. And its members deserved to captured and locked away on Buru Island. (My teacher made no mention at the time of the massacre and I didn’t ask him exactly how the PKI was eliminated.)43 It was Evilina’s reading of Benedict Anderson’s article that eventually set her free from the iron cage of the New Order’s historical deceptions. It took her no less than twelve years and one long journey—from Indonesia to the Netherlands, to the library of the Anthropology Department, University of Amsterdam, just to come across and read the mind-opening text. The irony was that in Surabaya, the city where she had lived and worked from 1996 to 1999, there was indeed a small library— 43

Ibid.

87 belonging to an English language institute called PPIA (Indonesia-America Friendship Association)—that possessed, in its collection, the issues of Indonesia from 1966 up until the 1980s. It is sometimes the case that the trouble with finding information for critical studies in Indonesia is not that the information is unavailable but that one has no idea where on earth to find it. In this regard, I feel I was lucky. Being a loner, I loved to explore all the libraries and all the good bookstores that I knew of in the city where I happened to live. True, I often did not get the books I wanted. Nonetheless I often stumbled upon really great books. For example, in the first half of the 1990s, as an undergraduate student I encountered the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital in the library of Airlangga University, Surabaya. In 1990 I came across Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, at the library of the Surabaya branch of the Goethe-Institut, the German cultural center where I took up German lessons. And in 1988, at Gramedia bookstore on Basuki Rahmat Street, Surabaya, I happened upon Kees Bertens’ Filsafat Barat Abad XX (Western Philosophy in the Twentieth Century), which turned out to be an intelligent introduction to the thoughts of German philosophers, such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as French master thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Thanks to the exposure to the ideas of these strong thinkers, I was no longer capable of believing in the New Order’s mythology. It is true that I was unable on my own to refute, say, the New Order’s interpretation of the Pancasila or its version of the history of 1965. Yet the dullness and primitiveness of

88 the New Order’s system of thought, as I perceived it in comparison to the German and French philosophies, were more than enough to turn me off once and for all. As to Ahmad Faishal, a few years later when he was already in junior high school, he discovered that his maternal great-grandfather was actually a politically complicated character. Having received his military training in Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL), he became a member of the Heihō, the auxiliary forces formed by the Japanese Military Occupation regime in 1942-1945, and joined the Ronggolawe Division of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) in East Java to fight against the Dutch during the revolution (1945-1949). When the revolution came to an end, promoted to the rank of captain he became the commander of a sub-district military headquarters. Somewhere between 1948 and 1955, after the reorganization of the armed forces following the PKI rebellion against Soekarno-Hatta government in September 1948 known as the “Madiun Affair,” the man left the army to become a teacher. Later on he became the head of the local branch of the PKI-linked teachers association (the PGRI-Nonvaksentral). As a result, he came into political conflict with the army. When in 1965-66 the New Order crushed the PKI, he was captured and, without trial, incarcerated for fifteen years in the prison island of Nusakambangan. Now that the complicated way in which his family found itself in the web of history had been revealed to him—on the one hand his grandfather was a militant Anshor youth who slew the alleged communists but, on the other, his greatgrandfather was a PKI-linked teacher—Ahmad Faishal underwent an intense psychological pressure that exploded the New Order’s historical construction that he

89 adopted during his years in primary school. He now ceased to believe in history as it was taught in school by history teachers and other “government agents” and as it was represented in Indonesian newspapers. “The whole thing,” he wrote to me, “is nothing but a big baloney.” Thus from this point in time until the demise of the New Order in 1998, so far as Indonesia’s past was concerned, he could only trust oral testimonies that he heard from historical actors, especially those in his own extended family. To return to the subject of TG, it should be noted that as a political tool it had unpredictable results. Sometimes it succeeded. Sometimes it simply did not. The reason, I think, is because children as audience do not watch movies the way a photocopy machine duplicates the documents that are fed to it. They are capable of reading a movie in many different ways. Sometimes, as Evilina’s testimony shows, they interpret it the way the adult filmmaker intends it to be interpreted. Sometimes, as illustrated by my own testimony, they do not give a damn about it at all, other movies being much more attractive. Yet, sometimes they use it in a way that undermines its very thesis, as evidenced below by Ariel Heryanto’s testimony about his son: In 1992 my 10-year-old son came home from school one afternoon, talking enthusiastically about what fun it had been to play the game of PKI with his schoolmates. “What did you say?” I could only halfbelieve what I heard. At school, he explained, children enacted the narrative they heard in history class or the televised film TG. “Everyone wanted to play the PKI, chasing after those who played the lousy generals who had to run and hide as far as the school toilet. We conquered them and scolded them. That was great fun.”44

44

Ariel Heryanto, “Where Communism Never Dies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 2 (1999): 162.

90 11. Mohammad Husni Thamrin on Television I was seventeen when I watched a beautiful historical play on TVRI, the stateowned television station. The play was about the late Mohammad Husni Thamrin, one of Indonesia’s major nationalist activists in Batavia from the 1910s to 1930s. The play was written by Asrul Sani (1927-2004). The actor Asrul Zulmi played Muhammad Husni Thamrin. Agus Melaz played Van der Brand. Thamrin worked as a member of the City Council (Gemeenteraad) from 1919 to 1941, and was a member of the People’s Council (Volksraad) from 1927 to 1941. After I watched the TV play, I got some idea of what the City Council and People’s Council were all about. I enjoyed the dialogues in the play, especially ones between Thamrin and Van der Brand. I came to see that speeches and politics in the City Council and People’s Council—not just guerilla warfare—played a strong role in the history of Indonesian nationalist awakening. I remember how Thamrin’s speeches in the City Council succeeded in moving the colonial government to build a flood-preventing canal that connected the Ciliwung and Krukut rivers. What Thamrin did in the City Council was to urge the government to improve the living conditions of the natives in Batavia. I had never thought before that speech could change social reality. There are bits of dialogue from the TV play that I still remember even now. For example, in a conversation with Van der Brand, Thamrin said, “Roads must be paved with asphalt. We must build a canal that will connect the Ciliwung River to the Krukut River!” “That’s a big job, Mr. Thamrin.”

91 “This country, Mr. Van der Brand, requires big jobs. Well, I’m sorry for talking like this.” “For a young man who speaks as you do, there’s no need to apologize. What would you say if you were appointed to be a member of the City Council?” Thamrin agreed to become member of the City Council. Eight years later he became a member of the People’s Council. He did his best so that the People’s Council would not end up being a “speech comedy.” I was so impressed by the TV play that I attached a tape recorder to my TV set in order to record it. I listened to the recording over and over again. I memorized many long beautiful, brilliant sentences from the play. It turned out that my buddy Handoyo Wicaksono had watched the play too. So we discussed it at school during the lunch break. We recited some fragments of dialogue from the play. We loved it. Unfortunately, I cannot remember what the play taught him about Indonesian history. In stark contrast to the film TG, which instilled fear in me, the TV play about Thamrin aroused a strange passion in my heart. I wanted to be a brilliant intellectual like Thamrin who used the power of words to fight for the rights of his people in the colonial world. There emerged in my mind an opposition between military struggle and rhetorical struggle. I grew sick and tired of the machismo of the armed struggle for independence invoked every August 17 (Independence Day). The images of civilian leaders such as Soekarno and Hatta were widely circulated in the city during the celebration of the Independence Day. But in my mental world as a teenager, Soekarno and Hatta had become a myth. They were no longer real human beings from

92 whom I could learn anything. By contrast, Thamrin in the TV play was so impressive because he appeared as both a real and an extraordinary person. The TV play about Thamrin was a job well done. It truly was an excellent work of art. And if it was, I think it was because the play was written by Asrul Sani, one of Indonesia’s greatest men of letters. Yet I did not always enjoy learning Indonesia’s history through theater. A great playwright composing a splendid historical play was a very rare cultural event. I recall this particularly horrible experience. I was ten years old and attended Karet Tengsin State Elementary School 13, Central Jakarta. One day our teacher, Mrs. Sawiyatini, assigned a group of boys to perform in front of the class the so-called sociodrama about the Rengasdengklok Affair. The story was about a band of radical, nationalist youths who, early in the morning of August 16, 1945, kidnapped Soekarno and M. Hatta to Rengasdengklok, a small town east of Jakarta, trying to force them to proclaim Indonesia’s independence immediately. I was to play Achmad Soebardjo, a nationalist of older generation who came to the town to bring Soekarno and Hatta back to Jakarta, assuring the youths that they would announce Indonesia’s independence the next day. The play was supposed to teach us history by somehow re-experiencing a key historical event. But I don’t think it worked. We ten-year-old kids did not understand the political event that the play portrayed. It did not provoke us into talking about it, the way watching American cartoon movies often did. As far as I can remember the play was totally awkward. We were all nervous to act in the classroom. We had only a couple of days to memorize the script. That was all we did to prepare for the play. No one taught us the ABC of

93 acting. Out of ignorance and nervousness, my friend Hasto Kusumo, for example, had a weird interpretation of the character of Soekarno: he stroked his chin endlessly throughout the play.

12. Cemetery, “History,” and Personal Monument This is a story my father told me when I was eighteen. I loved the story. It led me to think that cemeteries hold the key to history. In the late 1960s, on his visit to the archeological site of Majapahit, my father met an old man who took care of a small plot of a graveyard in which, people believed, the bodies of the Hindu Majapahit aristocrats were buried. But this is puzzling because as Hindus, they should have been cremated rather than buried. My father raised this question to which the grave keeper responded: “Sir, these graves are actually not graves. Just take a look at the number of the graves. How many do you think there are?” “There are fifteen of them. And they are divided into four groups. The first group has only one grave in it, while the second group is made up of two graves, and the third group consists of five graves, and the last group has seven graves in it.” “Thus, the configuration of the graves represents a series of numbers: 1-2-5-7. Does it suggest any meaning to you at all?” After struggling quite a while with the numbers, my father ventured a guess: “The series, I think, corresponds to different calendar systems. Seven refers to the Arabic calendar in which a week consists of seven days. Five refers to the

94 Javanese calendar in which a week has five days. These two different calendars, however, have one thing in common: their being based on the older, primitive calendar that recognizes only the difference between night and days. Thus, this primitive calendar has only two components. The architect of these graves seemed to propose the idea that all the three systems of calendar are but various manifestations of one and the same Time.” “If your argument is carried further,” the grave keeper said, “then the graveyard was built to convey this important message: Islam and Hindu and a much older local religion ultimately have one primal source. Therefore, there is no point in going to war just because your religion is different from those of your neighbors. We can live in peace although we have different religions. This message was important at the time when Islamic missionary drive under the Demak sultanate of Central Java was invading the Hindu kingdom of Majapahit of East Java roughly in the fourteenth century.” “Well this message of religious tolerance is very moving. But why didn’t people just write down the idea on a palm leaf manuscript or on a stone inscription?” “Please remember that the bulk of the people were illiterate. And besides, in times of war, people destroyed things that belonged to their enemies: the palace, the city walls, the barracks, and the manuscripts. But there is one thing that Javanese, Muslim or Hindu, would consider sacred and therefore leave intact even in times of war.”

95 “The grave!” “Exactly!”

I harbor a skeptical attitude towards the story the grave keeper told my father in terms of its historical accuracy. His story, however, may be culturally true. In the eyes of the grave keeper at least, the story conveys the sacred quality of the grave and unexpectedly its function as a special kind of inscription that conveys an important social message. I used to think that a Hindu temple—the remains of which are now found scattered in large numbers in Central and East Java—is a more sophisticated form of grave. Not only is it a place where bodily remains of a Hindu Javanese king or queen were kept, but with its architectural forms, its statues, its relief, and the amazing pictorial inscriptions on its stone walls, it also constitutes a great document of the Hindu Javanese civilization. The Javanese grave—whether in the form of a simple grave or a colossal temple such as the Prambanan complex near Yogyakarta—is a more permanent form of a social text in comparison to a palm leaf manuscript. When my father died in November 1994, I began to see his grave as a family monument. Every time I needed to re-establish my emotional ties to my father, I would pay a visit to his grave in Ngagel cemetery, Surabaya. One day in the first month after my father’s death, I took a handful of earth from his still fresh grave. I kept the earth in a glass. There it stood on my writing desk in my room for about forty days. I used to contemplate the relic when I was working late at night, writing a short story. In 1995 I wrote two short stories as literary memorials to my father. One was

96 published in Mode, a youth magazine. The other appeared in Kompas. One day my mother made an instructive comment. She said, “This little glass of earth does not actually belong to your father. When you took it from his grave, his body had not yet decomposed to such an extent that it could mingle with the earth around it. So the bit of earth you’re keeping now does not contain any part of your father’s body.” Persuaded by my mother, I got rid of it immediately. Five years passed after the death of my father. I visited his grave less and less. Every time I went there I was besieged by children from the adjacent neighborhood who begged for money by pretending to clean up my father’s grave. So even in a cemetery there was no privacy. I came to realize that a cemetery is a public space. I came to realize, too, that my father’s grave is a public monument. I couldn’t have an exclusive access to it. Sometimes I imagined what it would be like if I built a shrine in my own house, where I could keep my father’s skeleton in special cupboard.

13. My History Teachers When I asked him of the origin of his interest in history, the historian Asvi Warman Adam—he is well-known in Indonesian media nowadays as the key advocate of the straightening out of the country’s national history—replied to me by referring back to his childhood in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra in the early 1960s, when he began to have the desire to travel to distant countries in the world. It was in the subject of world history that Asvi found a virtual gratification of this desire. The desire intensified in the late 1960s when he encountered, in his junior high school principal

97 Pak Rusma, a senior teacher who could explain to his pupils, by means of enthralling storytelling, the significance of events, such as the huge impact that the opening of the Suez Canal had on world maritime transportation as well as on international politics, as evidenced, among other events, by the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Aside from world history, Pak Rusma, a product of the Dutch-language education before Independence, taught other subjects too, in an equally enchanting way.45 I was not that lucky. From primary school up to senior high school, I never met a single teacher who taught like Pak Rusma. None of my history teachers seemed passionately fond of the subject they taught. I am now under the impression that teaching history at school was just a job that they had to do to get their monthly salary. Owing to their lack of a good command of the discipline (beyond big shots, big dates, and big events), some turned up before the class as persuasive as zombies. If I remember it correctly, my history teachers in junior high were graduates of the SPG: a special senior high school designed for the training of junior high school instructors. My history teachers at senior high, by contrast, were graduates of the Teachers’ Training College (IKIP). A teacher with a genuine love for a field of study would do his best to keep on developing his knowledge in the field and polishing his instructional delivery skills. It is likely that the love he has for the subject would infect most of his students in the classroom. Sorry to say, my history teachers in junior and senior high did not infect me with a passion for history. Instead, my contact with them resulted in a learned indifference to, and ignorance of, history.

45

E-mail to the author, October 21, 2004.

98 By comparison, my biology teachers were quite successful in inspiring my respect for their discipline. For example, Ibu Samosir, my biology teacher at State Senior High School 4, Jakarta, managed to awaken my interest in the theory of the human animal’s evolution. So deep was her influence that, many years later, as a college student, I developed the personal ritual of going for a stroll—alone and daydreaming—at the zoo late in the afternoon. With wide-open eyes, I would stare solemnly into the eyes of a hippopotamus, a honey bear, and a chimpanzee. One day it so happened that after I had stared into a monkey’s melancholy face for about ten minutes, the face suddenly turned into some kind of a mirror in which I saw the reflection of my own face. It was quite an unsettling revelation. Today, whenever I contemplate the face of a monkey in captivity, I can’t help but think that men too—the cruelest and the most destructive of all types of monkey the world has known—are locked in a cage: but this is a gigantic, invisible cage that they have created for themselves. Where Asvi could boast of Pak Rusma, his able teacher of world history, I could only tell of Pak Abdul Mukti and Pak Thomas Subadi. Abdul Mukti was my first history teacher at State Junior High School 4, Jakarta. At the time when he taught us, I think he was not yet fully employed. He struck me as a dandy. He seemed to take great care of his looks. Even now I still remember the brand name of the trousers he often wore: The Executive 99. In my mind’s ears I can still hear how his shiny, black leather shoes went clickety-clack on the classroom floor. The one single text we used was the first volume of the Sejarah Nasional. Each of us had one copy of this

99 government-published text, which the school library lent us for the entire academic year. It strikes me now as a good idea that the government provided students with free textbooks. The policy made it possible for students coming from poor families to have access to sources of knowledge. Certainly, the textbooks cannot help but be biased toward the government’s perspective. Yet being biased is the fate of all books. More often than not, life is told from a rather limited number of perspectives. If used critically and in comparison with other texts, even a heavily biased text can still be a superb starting point for an illuminating study of history. (This mode of learning, I think, could only take place in a situation where people are comfortable enough to start from the basic presumption that truths are perspective-dependent and therefore debatable, without precluding the possibility of arriving at one or more encompassing, though temporary, syntheses.) Pak Abdul Mukti, alas, does not seem to have ever interrogated his textbook critically. His teaching method consisted in quoting, in a rather parrot-like manner, disparate facts from the Sejarah Nasional. As a result of this poor teaching style, I got bored. For there was no substantive difference between attending his lectures and just reading the book at home. He recited to us, for instance, the types and names of stone implements that prehistoric people used in the archipelago. But never did he try to acquaint us with the basics of the archeological imagination. He did not challenge us to think of what the stone tools might tell us about ancient peoples’ ways of life. Nor did he ever encourage us to wonder how and why the nomadic hunters and gatherers adopted an agriculture-based sedentary life. He never shared with us his own opinions

100 about such issues. Well, he may have had none. Despite his pedagogical shortcomings, I respected him as a person. And I still do. He was perhaps one of those people in Jakarta who had to make a living by taking up a job in a field that they did not really love. Anyway, his course had some merry moments of its own. It was when he brought up the exotic word pithecanthropus erectus, which refers to the early hominids whose fossils were found in 1891 at Trinil, Ngawi, East Java. No sooner had we boys known the word than we began to adopt it as a new “term of endearment.” We hailed one another: “Hey you! You pithecanthropus erectus!” Like Pak Abdul Mukti, Pak Thomas Subadi, my history teacher at Senior High School 4, Surabaya, was not the intellectual type of a teacher. A sturdy man in his early forties, he used to wear a bluish gray safari-style uniform and a pair of spectacles with oversized brown lenses. He did not introduce us to historical reasoning. Nor did he bring home to us the idea that history deals with change and continuity over time. There never was a talk about history as a reconstruction of the past based on the interpretation of existing evidence. In his lecture, events were seen from one viewpoint: that of the government. It is perhaps his viewpoint as well, for he showed striking enthusiasm for it. Anyway, from this viewpoint, communists and Muslim radicals were seen as traitors of the nation. No attempt was made to consider things from their viewpoints. One day he discussed the history of 1965. He did not attempt to explain to us why the PKI enjoyed massive popular support on Java in the 1960s. Nor did he attempt to describe the characteristics of Indonesian communism as opposed to its

101 Soviet and Chinese counterparts. He did not bother to give us some examples of how the rank and file members of the PKI in the villages had understood or misunderstood the tenets of communism. He simply reiterated the popular belief that communism consisted of atheism, the abolition of private property, and the euthanasia for the elderly, non-productive citizens. He quoted a slogan to describe the character of the society that the communists wanted: sama rasa sama rata, which means solidarity and equality. The abolition of private property, he told us, would lead to a social order where “Your possessions are everyone’s possessions too.” Praditia Danindra, a classmate who sat beside me, concluded that such a social order was actually a social disorder. He said, “It would mean that men are supposed to share everything— including wives!” I recalled Pak Subadi’s lecture on the PKI-linked Teachers Association, the PGRI Non-vaksentral. On the basis of a textbook—not the Sejarah Nasional but one issued by a local publisher—he talked about the leftist teachers as a bunch of people who had deviated from the true path of the Pancasila. They were bad guys. The good guys were those who joined the non-communist Teachers Association, the PGRI Vaksentral. The lecture shed no critical light on the bone of contention which split the Indonesian Teachers Association into these contending factions. Was it all about ideology? We students were left in the dark about the extent to which teachers in the leftist faction were more knowledgeable regarding Marxism than their colleagues in the rightist faction. In retrospect, I think we were taught to condemn not Marxism itself but its poor caricature. It seems to me that all the enemies of the New Order—

102 the communists, the Muslim radicals, the regional rebels—tended to be reduced to caricatures.46 Nowhere in the senior high school edition of the Sejarah Nasional can one find complete, accurate, and evenhanded representation of the perspectives of the New Order’s enemies. Things appear black and white, not in shades of gray. Pak Subadi taught in the deliberate style of a slapstick comedian. Sitting at his desk, he would call the roll, rapidly switching from one pitch to another. He often interrupted himself by teasingly sucking at his cigarette. Then, in a playful tone, he would scoff at the boys. “You guys are learning to smoke, right? You think you’re cool, do you? Well, in my view, you’re pathetic. You don’t even have the money to buy one whole pack of cigarettes!” On the brink of laughter, we boys could not help but nod in approval. Pak Subadi was a volatile public speaker. To highlight some points in his lectures, he would stand up in front of the class and make abrupt and vigorous gestures: throwing his hands up and down, or raising and lowering his head as nimbly as an ostrich. The way he spoke was hysterical. First, in a fine display of self-restraint, he spoke slowly, softly, and smoothly. Then, all of a sudden, he would break into a verbal explosion. Attracting the attention of his audience at the start and shocking them off their feet later on was his favorite tactic of getting in touch with his students. The tactic did work. It was damn hard for us to ignore him. He was the most hilarious teacher in our school. There is no doubt about it. Yet from him I learnt nothing significant. His crude approach to history turned me off. But his antics were an 46

I should add, however, that all these conflicting groups always had the tendency to reduce one another to caricatures.

103 entirely different matter. They worked like a painkiller, easing me of the agony that I had had to endure since I entered senior high school: the agony resulting from the feeling that going to school was a necessary mental slavery.

14. My Interest in History: Its Origin and Development A person’s system of thought, or his intellectual project, is not entirely cognitive. If we dig up the ground that surrounds it, the whole edifice turns out to stand on an affective foundation: the person’s struggle to cope with his intense emotional tensions, which may result from a crisis that upsets his family, or from economic and political changes in his society. The brief period between 1990 and 1991 saw one of the most painful upheavals in my life. In response to the demand of his first wife, who just found out that she had been deceived and cheated on by him for almost two decades, my father began to talk about divorcing my mother. My mother resisted the idea, insisting that as far as she and my father were concerned, there were no solid grounds for filing for divorce. My father agreed to my mother’s opinion. Yet, burdened by his unbearable sense of guilt vis-à-vis his first wife, he just could not turn down the latter’s demand. The situation was a total mess. If I were in my father’s position, I would perhaps end up killing myself in an act of self-punishment. My father had failed to keep his marriage vows to his first wife. The hell which eventually broke loose could ultimately be traced back to that failure.

104 To see my family on the verge of collapse was a devastating blow to my basic trust in the meaningfulness of life. I resolved to prepare for the ugliest scenario. I told my mother that if my father divorced her, I would disown him. And as her first-born child I would assume the responsibility for supporting the family financially. I was ready to make personal sacrifices. Without much ado, I gave up my dream of becoming a writer or a college professor. After completing senior high school in July 1990, I decided not to take the National Examination for Admission to State Universities. Instead, to boost up my competitiveness in the job market, I chose, on my father’s advice, to go to a secretarial college in Surabaya for a six-month course in clerical duties, which included filing, typing, bookkeeping, stenography, English, table manners, business correspondence, computer word-processing, and introduction to management. I found all these practical subjects quite intriguing. It turned out, however, that I wasn’t cut out to be a good clerk. I applied for clerical positions in various companies but all to no avail. I failed to convince all those job interviewers to hire me for their companies, armed as I was with a diploma from the secretarial college. These were their top reasons for rejecting me: First, I was a man and it was believed that men make lousy clerks. Second, they said I lacked job experience, which was true. But I discerned a circular logic in their argument. If they were unwilling to employ me, how was I supposed to ever have a formal job experience? I recall an ugly situation in a job interview. The interviewer asked me, “Why are you interested at all in working for us?” I replied, “I’d like to have a job

105 experience. I’d like to apply, in your company, the stuff I’ve learned at the secretarial college.” The man was indignant at my stupid response. I am not sure if it was a real or faked indignation. But he said: “What? Are you out of your mind? Our company is not a place for anybody to carry out their personal experiment!” This guy’s reaction is weird,” I thought to myself. I didn’t have the slightest intention to belittle his company. I quickly apologized to him for what I had said. Ashamed, I took off. I revised my strategy. I deferred my entry into the job market as a fully employed worker. I decided, somewhere in April 1991, to pursue a two-tracked individual career plan. I intended to attend Airlangga University, Surabaya, taking up English or psychology. And I planned to pay for the tuition and fees by doing odd jobs. Scheduled to take place in June 1991, the National Entrance Exam to State Universities was divided into two categories: one for study programs in the social sciences; the other for study programs in the natural sciences. It was the former that I was going to sit for. It consisted of such subjects as the Pancasila, Indonesian, mathematics, English, and the social sciences. Except for Indonesian and English, my command of the subjects was pretty weak. I was especially an idiot at all branches of mathematics. The exam was only three months away. Thus, for five hours a day I shut myself up in my room and taught myself trigonometry, algebra, calculus, and statistics, using secondhand textbooks I bought at a flea market near Pasar Turi railway station. My mother backed up my effort in her own way. In the dead of night she would wake up to pray to God for my success. She also fasted on Mondays and

106 Thursdays for seven weeks. Here was a tough woman whose only mission in life was to do everything she could to help her kids grow to be somebody, by making personal sacrifices if necessary. This woman was my hero. With a blessing from a mother like that, even a village thief would have the courage to fight a dragon or to assassinate a king. Things turned out less bitter than I had thought. My father had promised his first wife that he was never to see my mother again. Her anger subsided. So did her demand that my father divorce my mother. During this “ceasefire,” I served as a messenger who maintained the communication between my father and my mother. At first, I could only contact him by phone during his office hours. Later on, at the beginning of each month, we rendezvoused at a bookstore in the city, where I would update him on our family’s current situation: health, finance, school, problems. Before we parted, he would give me an envelope which contained some money. It was the stipend for my mother to help defray our family’s living costs. In May 1991, I took the state university entrance exam. I answered all the questions with self-confidence, except, of course, those in the math section. In August 1991, the exam results were published in local newspapers and I found out that I got admitted to the Psychology Study Program of Airlangga University. For my mother, who never completed primary school, this event was truly a personal triumph. She was overwhelmed with joy. I entered college with two high expectations. First, a big fan of Sigmund Freud since I was sixteen, I expected that the Psychology Study Program would be an

107 excellent place in which to study psychoanalysis. What I found so fascinating about psychoanalysis was its insistence that if the analyst is to uncover the causes and the meanings of the neurosis that ails the analysand, then he must reconstruct the analysand’s individual history, by going on a series of interpretive expeditions as far back to the past as the analysand’s early infancy. Also fascinating was its insistence that most of the contents and processes which govern one’s psychic life reside in the dark realm of the unconscious. Second, I looked forward to studying under the supervision of the Study Program’s expert professors. What I had in mind were a bunch of highly dedicated scholars who made the scientific inquiry into man’s psyche their life-project. What I had in mind as my college teachers were those scholars who—even if they were not cut out to be another Freud, or another Jung, or another Lacan—still had the guts to go beyond mediocrity, that is, to struggle for excellence. It was okay, I thought, for people to be stupid. (More often than not, I myself was a flaming idiot.) But it wasn’t okay, I insisted, for people to maintain their stupidity. To my great disappointment, I found out that the curriculum of the Psychology Study Program did not offer any course which dealt with psychoanalysis in an evenhanded and comprehensive manner. In some cases, for example in such courses as developmental psychology and psychology of personality, textbooks—mostly imported from the United States—were used which discussed psychoanalysis briefly as one of the major schools of psychology. Yet, upon closer reading, it turned out that what these textbooks discussed was not psychoanalysis itself but, rather, its travesty.

108 The authors often passed sweeping judgment on Freud’s psychoanalysis without bothering to read his whole oeuvre carefully. They overlooked, for instance, this simple but fundamental fact: that Freud’s thoughts underwent such substantial and substantive changes over time that it would be misguided to judge —as they did—that Freud was guilty of “pansexualism,” i.e., the belief that sex drive is the motor of people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It was a pity that my professors, who used such textbooks as required readings in their courses, did nothing to correct the error. They did not even realize that it was an error. Frustrating incidents of this type, which occurred quite frequently in the classroom, began to convince me that even my professors had not mastered the art of Socratic reading, that is, the type of reading in which the reader engages in a critical dialog with the text and the author—a dialog which involves self-respect on the part of the reader as well as his respect both for the author and the text. All too often, what seemed to be the case was that my professors blessed their books with authority, read their own crude ideas into the books, and got them back as truths of a high order. It was Walter Arnold Kaufmann who first called my attention to the dangers of this mode of reading, which he called “exegetical reading.”47 It dawned on me that exegetical reading was perhaps a common phenomenon in societies where the transition from orality to literacy was still underway. When the availability of books

47

See Walter Arnold Kaufmann, The Future of the Humanities: Teaching Art, Religion, Philosophy, Literature, and History (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995). See, in particular, Chapter 2: “The Art of Reading,” pp. 47-83.

109 on a mass basis was itself a recent phenomenon, it was to be expected that even teachers and students at college level would adopt exegetical reading. Anyway, in the hands of college professors—most of whom were advocates of behaviorism as the scientific research method in psychology—psychoanalysis was often reduced to a routine man-of-straw to be condemned as the perfect example of what a “science of behavior” is not and should never be. As far as I was concerned, psychoanalysis was not a “religion” and Freud not a “prophet.” It was all right and beneficial for people to critique things. Yet, as I understood it, the critical critic—as opposed to the frivolous critic—is he who understands what it is that he critiques. It is to be noted that behaviorism (as championed by the American psychologist B. F. Skinner) constituted the dominant trend among the faculty members at the Psychology Study Program. Most of them, however, diluted their thick behaviorism with a dash of psychoanalysis, existentialism, or phenomenology. To my further disappointment, I also found out, soon enough, that most of my tutors were just professionals; they were by no means scholars who were addicted to the social sciences. Aside from being teachers, they were also practicing psychologists who provided such services as psychological testing, counseling, and training. I did not have the slightest interest to be a practicing psychologist. Until perhaps 1995, together with other study programs such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and literature, the Psychology Study Program was under the administrative umbrella of the School of Social and Political Sciences. As a consequence, the curriculum of the Psychology Study Program showed a degree of

110 hybridity. It contained, for example, such courses as Criminology, Social Anthropology, Philosophy of Man, Communication Theories, and Industrial Psychology. This was rather remarkable, for in Indonesia at the time a university was often understood as no more than a collection of isolated departments. Thus, students of the School of Law, for instance, could not sign up for courses offered at the School of Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. Likewise, students of the Department of Economics were not allowed to take courses on Creative Writing or Sociolinguistics offered at the School of Social and Political Sciences. By contrast, the hybridity of my study program allowed me to take refuge in other fields within the social sciences whenever I got bored with psychology. It also provided me with a good opportunity to make friends with students from other study programs. For some of my friends in the Psychology Study Program, college came as a linguistic shock. Most professors used textbooks written in English as the required reading materials. Their English teachers in junior and senior high school had not taught them to use English for study purposes. Thus they now had to learn how to read English texts at medium to high levels of complexity. It was quite a challenge. On the other hand, this situation opened up a good business opportunity for a tiny number of students who could read English well. As a sophomore, I began to offer translation services for senior students who, in the course of doing their theses, were obliged to read one or two journal articles written in English. In 1992 I desired to learn how to write. At this point in time, I had not published anything. My writing was confined to diaries and personal letters. True, I

111 had written at least two short stories and sent them to some youth magazines. But the editors either did not respond to me at all or rejected my fictions on the grounds that they were “not appropriate for the youths” who constituted their audiences. If I remember correctly, one story was about a youth who committed suicide; the other about a young man who performed a striptease at a mall. One day, Retorika, the student magazine of the School of Social and Political Sciences, wanted to recruit and train new reporters. I applied for the position. I aced the interview, was offered the job, and began my training. It so happened that two members of the magazine’s board of editors—Landi K. Hadiswiryo and I Gusti Anom Astika—turned out to be some kind of student intellectuals. Both of these young men were students at the Communication Science Study Program. Landi just wrote a funky semiotic analysis of the song lyrics by Slank, a popular Jakarta-based rock band, while Anom was admired by his friends and envied by some of his professors for his quite sophisticated review of Benedict Anderson’s Language and Power in Prisma, then Indonesia’s most prestigious journal for the social sciences. It was cool to have a brilliant chat with them. It turned out that we had something in common: a passion for cultural studies. Our preferred approaches to the study of pop culture, however, were rather different. Landi was all in favor of applying Umberto Eco’s semiotics while Anom was an ardent champion of the Marxist analysis, being heavily influenced by Raymond Williams. I wanted to explore the prospects of mobilizing Freud’s psychoanalysis and de Saussure’s semiology in the interpretation of movies and youth fiction.

112 I began to contribute my writings to Retorika: an interview and a book review. I was idiotic enough to think that an interview consisted in first harassing the informant by asking him a torrent of impulsive and senseless questions and then transcribing the tape records of the “conversation.” I was also stupid enough to believe that all that a book reviewer had to do was skim through the book, paraphrase one passage, and offer no opinion at all with regard to such questions as (1) what the author tried to accomplish, (2) how good or how bad he did the task, (3) what his facts were and of what quality, and (4) how valid his conclusions were. The first victim of my interview was the feminist activist Myra Diarsi. And the first casualty of my book review was no less than Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. My encounter with Anom deserves elaboration. This was a youth in love with Marxist words. When he discussed any subjects of interest, he would fill his discourse with such concepts as “class struggle,” “contradiction,” “false consciousness,” “basis versus superstructure,” or “mode of production.” Characteristic of his talks about anything was that they would lead inevitably to the continual reference to “industry.” He was not, however, concerned merely with theory. He was also serious about studying Indonesia’s history. He read books by Anton Lucas, Audrey Kahin, and Heather Sutherland. He was also an avid reader of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novels. I recall seeing him reading Pramoedya’s Sang Pemula (The Pioneer) and writing some notes about the biography. In retrospect, I think he was trying to emulate Tirto Adi Suryo in many ways. Pram shows that Tirto, the founder of Muslim Traders Association (SDI), is to be considered as the precursor of Indonesia’s nationalism. The

113 founder and editor of Medan Prijaji (Forum for Priyayi), Tirto was also the forerunner of Indonesia’s native press. By comparison, Anom was obsessed with the importance of student press as medium to raise students’ critical awareness. Half a decade later, Anom was one of the founding members of the leftist Democratic People’s Party. Strangely enough, my friendship with Anom did not awaken my interest in history as a discipline. He had often attempted to call my attention to what he thought as brilliant passages in Pramoedya’s novels. I had tried to read them myself but, after several pages, I could not go on. Pramoedya’s use of the Indonesian language struck me as insipid and old-fashioned. It turned me off. Quite frankly, there was a tendency in me to ignore the very books that Anom recommended me to read. It was not so much the books themselves that I dislike as his annoying fanaticism apropos things Marxist. After all, how can one dislike books that one has not read yet? I was also under the impression that he so believed in the Marxist discovery of the inexorable law of history that anyone who refused to share his belief would appear in his view as idiotic. I found myself unable to subscribe to this historicism. On the other hand, I myself was in love with French philosophies: those of Foucault, Barthes, and Baudrillard. In my own way, I too was arrogant. I often thought to myself that anyone who did not read Foucault in the French original had no right to talk about his philosophy. It was as if, in my view, reading a work in translation was tantamount to cheating. I had nothing against Marx. In fact I enjoyed reading Tom Bottomore’s selection of Marx’s writings. In my attempt to understand Marx’s basic concepts, I

114 was hugely indebted to Raymond Aron’s concise and crystal-clear exposition. What I found most intriguing is Marx’s analysis of alienation and his philosophy of work. But his theory of history did not arouse my interest in thinking about history at all. It was perhaps because at the time I was obsessed with the trans-historical truths (“structures”) that French structuralism—e.g. in Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology— claimed to have discovered. So deep was I in a-historical structuralism that when I joined Anom in his visit to his leftist buddies in Jakarta in 1993 I was busy photocopying not Marxist but Foucauldian books. Anom’s leftist friends in Jakarta were students at the University of Indonesia, some majoring in history and some in other social sciences such as sociology, criminology, and library science. They formed a number of study groups devoted to the discussion of the theories of such thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, or Georg Lukacs. One of these study groups had developed into the Foundation for Mutual Progress (YMB), a labor NGO which provided industrial workers with intellectual support: teaching them political economy to raise the class consciousness and to help them establish and run a labor press. Interestingly, some of Anom’s friends were graduates of the History Study Programs of the University of Indonesia’s Department of Literature. For example, Razif and Hilmar Farid had written essays on Indonesia’s colonial history which appeared in Prisma. I read these essays, found them very interesting, but they failed to convert me to history.

115 Not long after this visit to Jakarta, Anom and I walked different paths. His aspirations and activities were getting more and more politically radical. He attracted some followers among younger students and set up a network of students association called Student Solidarity for Democracy in Indonesia (SMID). I heard that he and his friends organized a series of courses on political economy for SMID’s newly-recruited members. Very soon, I lost track of him. (I heard, somewhere in 1997, that he and his friends founded the PRD or People’s Democratic Party.) By contrast, I had my own concerns. My father’s health got worse. Owing to his heart troubles, he was often hospitalized. My family’s financial security was in jeopardy. I had to find ways to support my family in times of trouble. My head was filled with thoughts. I felt a compulsion to write. In September 3, 1993, my essay on children’s toys appeared in the local newspaper Surabaya Post. In 1994 my father died. I felt an even stronger compulsion to write. My essays and fiction appeared in local and national newspapers. Sometimes, the honoraria I received were substantial enough for me to help my mother support the family. In the period between 1994 and 1996 I did not care about my schooling. I wrote and wrote and did not attend classes. My GPA (Grade Point Average) plummeted. During this period, I joined a student theater troupe, which also functioned as a writing workshop, where we wrote and discussed our poems, essays, short stories, novels, and plays. Interestingly, our works were marked by the absence of history. They lacked historical depths. They were rather filled with surrealist images. We did not do it on purpose. It happened just like that.

116 In 1998 a devastating economic crisis hit Indonesia. It was one of the most terrible times in my life. My family, already poor after the death of my father, got even poorer. My father left no inheritance. We did not even have our own house. We rented it from someone. And the rent was going to be over. We were on the brink of starvation. My mother and I did something humiliating to feed our family. At four in the morning, twice a week, we would go to a market at Keputran, bringing a bicycle with us. There we picked up the bits and pieces of vegetables that fell off the trucks that were unloading their cargoes. We put all of these into a plastic bag and transported them home on our bicycle. In so doing, we could save our money, which was reduced to a seventh of its original value. We spent it only to buy rice and cooking oil. We saved our fuel too. We did not use kerosene. We scavenged for bits of wood that my neighbors discarded when they renovated their houses. We used it as fuel. Reduced to poverty, I ceased believing in men’s capacity to act rationally as collective economic actors. I did what I could to make money. In April I worked as a guide and interpreter for a Hong Kong-based Australian labor activist-cum-researcher who conducted a training workshop on independent trade unionism for workers in East Java. The collapse of the New Order opened up a political space for labor activism and for collaboration between Indonesian trade unions and other trade unions abroad. The Australian labor researcher, Gerard Greenfield, turned out to be a kind-hearted, humble, cheerful, and very intelligent Trotskyist. He had received his PhD with a dissertation on the history of labor activism in Vietnam. He was a mixed-blood: his

117 mother was Vietnamese and his father was American. We shared a deep interest in world literature. We became friends. In 1998, he visited East Java two or three times. I always worked for him as his guide and interpreter. He paid my wages in Australian dollars. I was almost ashamed to take his money but I had to. I had a family to feed. But Gerard was and is one of the best friends I have ever had in my life. I told him I wanted to understand the economic disaster that had destroyed the livelihood of millions of people in Indonesia, especially the workers and the urban poor. He sent me books and articles from Hong Kong on the political economy of the crisis. Some of the stuff provided historical analysis, evoking for example the Great Depression of 1930. I began to love one type of history: economic history. My work with Gerard brought me into contact with workers in Malang and Surabaya. In their interviews with Gerard, these workers narrated stories of their lives as workers: exploitation, oppression, poverty, gender discrimination between male and female workers, military intervention in labor disputes, and so on. I felt compassion for the working class. I began to despise psychologists who often worked for the management to control workers. The control was called “human resource management.” There emerged in me the longing to understand Indonesia’s working class. There emerged in me the desire to study labor history. Two months before I first met Gerard in April 1998, I completed my undergraduate study in psychology. It was difficult for me to get a permanent job during the crisis. Once I applied for a position as a human resource assistant in a Japanese copper-smelting company in Gresik. My application failed. Someone inside

118 the company thought that I lacked the self-confidence to work in the field of human resource management. I did not care. I thought I was lucky. If I had gotten the job, I would have ended up oppressing the workers. That is, I would have to go against my conscience, and my newly awakened sympathy for the working class. Meanwhile, my study of the books and articles on political economy resulted in a number of reflections on foreign debts, famine, and transnational corporations. I sent them to the local newspaper Surabaya Post. Some were published. The honoraria helped my family to go on living until Gerard came again to visit East Java and I could work for him as his guide and interpreter. In August 1998, I applied for a teaching position at the Psychology Department of the University of Surabaya. I passed the recruitment and selection tests. In November I started a career as a lecturer in social psychology. My economic situation dramatically improved. In January 1999, I married my girlfriend Nurchayati. As our economy improved I had the funds to pursue an independent study of Indonesia’s history. I bought and read the Indonesian translations of the works by Takashi Shiraishi, M. C. Ricklefs, Harry Poeze, and Denys Lombard. I also started to read the four Buru Island novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I disregard my initial aversion to his prose style and read on. I read from cover to cover. As I got deeper into the story, the characters, the conflicts, the themes, I began to think that these were the best Indonesian novels I had ever read. And these were not just novels: they were fine historical novels. Finally, I got hold of Idrus’ collection of short stories too. I was fascinated by his short story titled “Surabaya.” It gave me a strikingly different version

119 of what the youths in Surabaya did during the revolution in the late 1940s. It led me to question the tiresome nationalist myth that often surrounded the celebration of the Heroes’ Day (November 10). In June 2000 I did research into the impact of globalization on the life of sugar workers in East Java. I visited sugar mills in Lumajang, Pasuruan, Sidoarjo, and Kediri. In compliance with the IMF’s demands, the government of Indonesia removed the import tariff on sugar. The small, old mills cannot produce sugar at competitive prices against the imported sugar. So they were closed down. In my research trips, I encountered rickety machinery, decrepit locomotives, and old housing complexes for sugar workers. I don’t know why, but I fell in love with the history of sugar mills. They looked like industrial fossils that contained fascinating stories about East Java’s colonial past. Surabaya, too, became historically alluring: the Dutch names of the streets, the Chinese quarters, the old parts of the city, its legends and myths, its dark sides. Perhaps it is Surabaya itself which has changed so much that it comes to captivate me. I think it is I who have changed. Surabaya has begun to look like a book. And I want to know how to read it.

120 PART TWO ON THE RECTIFICATION OF INDONESIAN HISTORY: MAJOR THEMES IN A POST-NEW ORDER CONTROVERSY

15. The Structure of This Part What I wish to accomplish in this chapter is to interrogate critically the major themes in the post-New Order controversy over the rectification of Indonesian history. Such an undertaking, in my view, should begin with putting the controversy in a proper historical perspective. In order better to elucidate the state of the debate in the post-Soeharto era, I shall begin by analyzing its development from 1945 to the 1990s, for I wish to avoid making two mistakes. First is the error of thinking that this genre of debate was a monster without pedigree which suddenly appeared on the landscape in late 1998, amidst the ashes and ruins of the New Order. This thinking implied erroneously that the monster was the regime’s distinctive legacy. The second error consists in assuming that such a debate was a cyclical event whose substance remained the same despite enormous social changes that Indonesia had experienced. To contemplate the monster’s transformation with the passage of time, I shall devote the first part of this chapter to the period between the founding of Indonesia in 1945 and the collapse of the New Order in 1998. I shall try to demonstrate that this sort of controversy, which typically centers on the accusation that someone for some reason had tampered with the true image of Indonesia’s past, was nearly as old as the country itself. It is wrong to think that the campaign to set the record straight was

121 merely a response to the unique evils of the New Order. I shall also demonstrate that the circumstances under which debates of this sort occurred, the conflict of interest that gave rise to them, the names they adopted, the people who were involved in them, and the issues which constituted the bones of contention—all of these varied over time. In this historicizing effort, I shall focus on one major controversy: that concerning the birth of Indonesia on August 17, 1945, which took place intermittently at least from 1946 to the 1990s. All through these years major figures directly involved in the events surrounding the genesis of the nation-state struggled with one another in passionate debates on a number of burning issues such as (1) the ideal essence of Indonesia’s independence, (2) the differing political positions between senior nationalists and radical youth groups regarding the way in which independence was to be declared, and (3) the authenticity of the nation-state’s foundational documents (the text of the proclamation of independence and the text of Pancasila— the state ideology). Indonesian history belonged not only to the political elite but also to the other categories of citizenry. Thus I shall also discuss the ways in which history was experienced by academic historians, history teachers in primary and secondary schools, and pupils in the New Order. Knowing their experiences and how they responded to these experiences from the 1970s to the 1990s will provide us with a better interpretive context to understand the controversy over the rectification of history that emerged after the collapse of the New Order in 1998.

122 I am aware that there existed other burning controversies on Indonesia’s historiographical landscape from 1945 to 1998. One might suggest, for instance, that I examine as well the debate on the role that Muslims of Chinese descent played in the Islamization of Java in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the dispute on the justifiability of considering Kartini as the icon of Indonesian women’s struggle for emancipation. These two controversies would make excellent objects of study. Yet a focus on the struggle for the representation of Indonesia’s genesis, I think, is adequate for my purpose. In the second half of Part Two, I shall interrogate the major themes in what I consider to be the central debate on the rectification of history since the collapse of the New Order in 1998 until 2004. This debate orbited around the birth of the New Order in 1965-1966 out of the bloody and smoky debris of the Old Order and next to the carcass of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). People came to verbal blows over a cluster of issues. First, what was the true story behind the aborted coup on September 30, 1965? Second, what roles did the then major political powers play in and around the coup? Who was ultimately to blame? Third, where on earth was the New Order’s foundational text (the Executive Order of March 11, 1966)? Did it exist at all? The reader might object to my choice of focus. For example, he might insist that Indonesia since 1945 has been struggling with a number of major persistent problems: the clash of ideologies, inequality in power and money between the center and the periphery, the struggle between military and civilian supremacy, and the complicated relationship between nationhood and other identities (ethnicity, religion,

123 race, class, and gender). And then he might go on to ask, “Why don’t you study the controversy over the representation of the history of two outlying provinces: West Papua and East Timor? For right after the downfall of the New Order in 1998, people in West Papua and East Timor, who for decades had struggled for independence, began to call for the rectification of their histories, which, they claimed, were distorted by Indonesia’s ideological operators.” This objection, I think, is valid and the alternative research problems that he suggests do deserve to be studied. The scope of my present undertaking, however, does not allow me to deal with these problems. I have to select one of the major persistent problems confronting Indonesia since 1945 to be the focus of my present study on the controversy over the rectification of history. And I decided to concentrate on the debates on the rectification of the history concerning the origins of two regimes in contemporary Indonesia: the Republic of Indonesia in 1945 and the New Order in 1965. At stake in all these debates—both those occurring between 1945 and 1998 and those appearing after 1998—were more than just intellectual gymnastics. As I shall try to demonstrate, from 1945 to 2004 debates on the rectification of Indonesian history expressed the conflict of interest among individuals and groups in the national community. All the debaters seem to have believed that their individual and group interests (and even the nation’s interests) depended on whether or not they could win the struggle for the representation of history. Each party in the struggle claimed that its own version was the truthful portrayal of what had really happened. They accused one

124 another of passing around false accounts of key events in Indonesia’s past. Hence the recurring clamors to rectify history. In my analysis of these debates, I shall grapple with the following questions: “What do all these controversies mean?” and “What was at stake in the conflicting ways in which some Indonesians represented and understood the past?”48 I focus on these particular debates because they are symptoms of the modern problems/projects that keep on haunting Indonesia: nationalism, freedom, and the dream of building a “just and prosperous society.”

16. The Elite’s Perspective: Debating Indonesia’s Genesis, 1946-1990s By the 1970s there had been no less than a dozen accounts of the proclamation of independence, written not by professional historians but mostly by historical actors.49 There were a number of different motives which instigated the production of

48

That asking these questions is a productive analytical exercise when one deals with a battle over representation of history is something I learned from the life history that the anthropologist Steven Rubenstein wrote of an Ecuadorian shaman named Alejandro Tsakimp. See Steven Rubenstein, Alejandro Tsakimp: A Shuar Healer in the Margins of History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 18-20. 49 See, for example, Adam Malik, Riwayat Proklamasi Agustus 1945 [The story of the proclamation in August 1945], 7th ed. (Jakarta: Widjaya, 1982 [1950]); Muhammad Dimyati, Sedjarah Perdjuangan Indonesia [The history of Indonesian struggle] (Jakarta: Widjaya, 1951); Mohammad Hatta, “Legende dan Realiteit Sekitar Proklamasi 17 Agustus” [Legend and reality surrounding the proclamation of August 17], Mimbar Indonesia, August 17, 1951; Sidik Kertapati, Sekitar Proklamasi 17 Agustus 1945 [On the proclamation of August 17, 1945] (Jakarta: Jajasan Pembaruan, 1957); Abdul Gaffar Pringgodigdo, Sedjarah singkat berdirinja negara Republik Indonesia [A short history of the founding of the Republic of Indonesia] (Surabaya: Pustaka Nasional, 1958); Sajuti Melik, “Proklamasi Kemerdekaan seperti jang saja saksikan” [The proclamation of independence as I witnessed it], Berita Yudha, August

125 these texts about history. It is important, I think, for us to uncover the motives and subject them to critical scrutiny. Let us begin by asking why in 1951 the journalistcum-novelist Muhammad Dimyati published his book entitled Sedjarah Perdjuangan Indonesia, “A History of Indonesia’s Struggle.” Dimyati was born in Solo on June 14, 1913. He had no academic training in history; he did not even finish primary school. He compensated for his lack of formal education by undertaking independent study. By the early 1930s, this Javanese, Muslim, nationalist managed to transform himself into a professional journalist and a successful writer of pop novels. He made his debut in the pop literature business in 1935, when he launched three novels: Siti Noerdjanah, Noersini, and Student Soeleiman. Deaf and mute though he was, he wrote an intriguing novel entitled Dibalik Tabir Gelombang Radio, “Behind the Screen of the Radio Waves,” which first appeared in the late 1930s as a feuilleton in Abadi, a Surakarta-based weekly owned by the Muhammadiyah, an Islamic modernist organization. The novel tells the story of a youth who falls in love with a female radio singer. Under the Japanese Occupation (1942-1945), he lived in Yogyakarta and joined a network of youth nationalist activists cultivated by Djohan Sjahroezah to build the mass basis for what he thought as a long-term political struggle for independence.50 Dimyati died of a lung disease in

16, 1968; Mohammad Roem, “Pentjulikan dan Proklamasi” [The kidnapping and the proclamation], Abadi, August 16-20, 1969; Mohammad Hatta, Sekitar Proklamasi 17 Agustus 1945 [On the proclamation on August 17, 1945] (Jakarta: Tintamas, 1969); and Ahmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo, Kesadaran Nasional: Sebuah Otobiografi [National consciousness: An autobiography] (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1978). 50 Djohan Sjahroezah was the nephew of the prominent, anti-Japanese, senior nationalist leader Sutan Sjahrir. For brief information on Dimyati’s link to Sjahroezah,

126 Surakarta on December 8, 1958.51 By the 1990s, his contributions to Indonesian literature were almost completely forgotten. Indonesians had achieved two things by 1950: one hundred percent political independence and a unitary nation-state. Yet for many the year also marked the beginning of an era of disillusionment with the outcome of the national revolution (1945-1949). Dimyati, for example, was greatly disappointed with the existing social reality in 1949 and 1950. Much to his chagrin he observed that . . . the events which occurred between 1949 and 1950…were much more bitter, more terrible, and more horrifying than what happened before. For after we achieved the national independence and unitary state…that we had long dreamed of, society became more chaotic, general security was not guaranteed, and worsening demoralization and political infighting split up the national unity….52 What Dimyati said about Indonesia in 1949 and 1950 was not a hyperbole. His observation was shared by foreign scholars who studied Indonesia of the 1950s. In his 1951 essay, for example, George McTurnan Kahin talks about “leaders of some

see J. D. Legge, Intellectuals and Nationalism in Indonesia: A Study of the Following Recruited by Sutan Sjahrir in Occupation Jakarta, Cornell Modern Indonesia Project Monograph Series (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1988), pp. 63-64. 51 For a biographical sketch of Muhammad Dimyati, see Soebagijo I. N., Jagat Wartawan Indonesia [The world of Indonesian journalists] (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1981), pp. 32-39. See also Maman S. Mahayana, “Sastrawan Indonesia Tahun 1950an: Terbentuknya Citra Pengarang Indonesia” [Indonesian literati in the 1950s: The making of an image of the Indonesian writer], Jurnal Studi Indonesia 7, 2 (August 2, 1997): 112-14. For an interesting analysis of Dimyati’s novel Dibalik Tabir Gelombang Radio, see Rudolf Mrázek “Let Us Become Radio Mechanics,” chapter 5 in his Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 175-78. 52 Muhammad Dimyati, Sedjarah Perdjuangan Indonesia [The history of Indonesian struggle] (Jakarta: Widjaya, 1951), p. 220.

127 political parties” who showed “the tendency toward social irresponsibility” and an “obsession with the struggle for personal power for its own sake.”53 All of these occurred, he notes, amidst “the widespread expectation among the Indonesian people (who now number approximately 80 millions…) that political independence would mean an automatic rise in their level of living.”54 The great Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer also shared Dimyati’s perception of the disappointing aftermath of the revolution. In a story he finished in mid-1950, one finds a declaration of disenchantment: By the time sovereignty had been returned [on December 27, 1949] to our own nation and the Dutch had gone, the people were exhausted from their wartime experience, exhausted by the exploding grenades as well as the explosions that shook their hearts. For a while those who scrambled to get medals and high-ranking positions shouted at the people in order to raise their spirits, but not for long. Soon everything was as it had been. Everyone was left to contend with himself and to contend with the world as best he could alone.55 What did Dimyati do to help his society that was disorderly, dangerous, depressed, and divided? In his disillusionment with the present, he turned to the past; he wrote a book on a series of major political events in Indonesia from 1908 to 1949. He saw in these years the history of Indonesians struggling for freedom. What this history could do, he thought, was remind people in the early 1950s of the huge 53

George McTurnan Kahin “Indonesia’s Strengths and Weaknesses,” Far Eastern Survey 20, 16 (September 26, 1951): 162. 54 Ibid., p. 158. 55 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, “Acceptance,” in Reflections on Rebellion: Stories from the Indonesian Upheavals of 1948 and 1965, trans. and ed. William H. Frederick, Papers in International Studies, Southeast Asia No. 60 (Athens: Ohio University, Center for International Studies, 1983), p. 48.

128 sacrifices that the struggle had cost them. History as a remembering project, as Dimyati admits in the “Preface” to his book, might involve emotional consequences such as “bitterness” and “embarrassment.” Yet he insisted that On the whole, it is necessary for us to look back on the story of the national struggle so that we could reflect on what we have gone through. This retrospect would provide us with guidance and warning for the steps we shall take in the future.56 By “guidance” he meant “the values of the independence struggle,” which include unity, great effort, sacrifice, and privileging the interests of the nation over those of one’s self, group, and party.57 He hoped that if people lived out these values, if they remembered all the great sacrifices that they had made for independence, then they would be determined to serve their country sincerely, working hand in hand to build a better society, to fulfill the promises of the national revolution. The last thing that the chaotic Indonesia in 1951 needed, he added, was for the citizens to pass around “slogans” and “empty agitations.” Thus, in Dimyati’s reasoning, history is a nationalist allegory. What it does is to make people see the moral essences of the bitter and costly struggle in the past so they repent of all the misconduct they are doing. National repentance is what it takes to end today’s social ills. This, I argue, is an ideological view of history, according to which in times of chaos the intellectual must process images of the past to establish a

56 57

Dimyati, Sedjarah Perdjuangan, p. 220. Ibid.

129 system of ideal values which can serve his people as a moral fetish58 to exorcise the present of its problems. Adopting this mythic view of history, Dimyati failed to use knowledge of the past to analyze the present; he failed to see the combination of social forces (capital, class, market, ideology, technology, arms, ethnicity, and so forth) that had brought about the present chaotic social reality which he so deplored. Although the bulk of Dimyati’s two-hundred-and-thirty-three-page book deals with Indonesian political history from 1908 to 1950, it contains a brief but controversial account of the proclamation of independence, which led him to “come to blows” with Mohammad Hatta, the first vice president of Indonesia. While the Muslim nationalist Dimyati sought to use historiography as a means to inspire national repentance, the leftist journalist-cum-politician Adam Malik (191784) wrote history because he wanted to draw sharper lines between truth and fantasy in the representation of the past. He considered this as a necessary task because history for him was a yardstick for evaluating the nationalist credentials of members of the political elite. Malik belonged to a group of leftist, radical youths who in August 1945 played an important role in the events surrounding the proclamation. In 1950 he launched his book, entitled Riwayat Proklamasi Agustus 1945, “The Story of the Proclamation in August 1945,” to counteract the circulation since 1946 of “tales” and “essays” that he considered to be based on mere “fantasy” in the minds of those who

58

By “fetish” I mean an “object believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner.” See, for example, Bosco, Steve, Lisa Braucher, and Beth Kessler, eds., “Fetish,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Ready Reference [CD-ROM] (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2003 [cited August 19, 2005]).

130 manufactured them.59 He maintained that such tales and essays distorted what he believed to be the correct representation of the declaration of independence. In the “Foreword” to his book, he condemns as mendacious some accounts that glorified as the champions of the proclamation those very leaders who had “misgivings about and fears of the proclamation itself.”60 It turned out that by leaders with “misgivings” and “fears” Malik means no other than Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta, Indonesia’s first president and vice president.61 Malik intended his book as some kind of a historiographical broom to sweep away “all the lies and fabrication scattered over the houseyard of the narrative of the proclamation.”62 It was in the best interest of the younger generation, he maintains, that he performed this historiographical cleaning service. He wished to keep the young from being duped by fairy tales masquerading as history. This is what he says he did. But what he actually did, I think, was defending the leftist youth activism. In one chapter of the book, the one which deals specifically with the declaration of independence, Dimyati puts forward a number of controversial theses he adopted from Malik’s version of the event. Relying solely on the latter’s account, Dimyati relates that in the wake of Japan’s surrender to the Allied Forces (after the 59

In 1950 Adam Malik was a prominent member of the leftist Murba party, which he joined in 1948. A Tan Malakaist, he opposed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). He served the New Order as vice president from 1977 to 1982. For a brief biographical note on Adam Malik, see Robert Cribb, “Malik, Adam,” in Historical Dictionary of Indonesia, Asian Historical Dictionaries, No. 9 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), p. 282. 60 Adam Malik, Riwayat Proklamasi Agustus 1945 [The story of the proclamation in August 1945], 7th edition (Jakarta: Widjaya, 1982), p. 9. 61 Ibid., pp. 44-45. 62 Ibid., p. 9.

131 bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima), Indonesian senior nationalist leaders such as Soekarno and Hatta—who collaborated with the Japanese throughout the Occupation—preferred to sit back and wait for the Japanese authorities to grant Indonesia her independence. The young revolutionaries abhorred the idea of receiving independence as the colonizer’s gift. The only type of independence they could be proud of was one that Indonesians achieved on their own. Had the radical youths not forced them to do so, Dimyati implies, Soekarno and Hatta would not have declared Indonesia’s independence, as they did, on August 17, 1945.63 To explain Soekarno and Hatta’s “weakness” and “indecision” in the critical moments in mid-August 1945, Malik notes that during the Japanese Occupation they “enjoyed privileged positions.” The Occupation authorities spoiled them, “indulging them in glorification.” As a result, Malik concludes, Soekarno and Hatta became “estranged from their own people.”64 In his analysis, Malik argues that the collaborationist elite’s alienation from the suffering masses resulted from the privileged life they enjoyed under the Japanese Occupation. While the upper-class collaborators “led a comfortable life” and “received a generous salary,” the proletariat had to suffer from “coercion, dispossession of property, forced labor, poverty, and misery.”65 This is not, I think, an overstatement. Pierre van der Eng estimates, for example, that the Japanese Occupation resulted in the death of 2.4 million Indonesians

63

Dimyati, Sedjarah Perdjuangan, pp. 89-90. Malik, Riwayat Proklamasi, p. 45. 65 Ibid., pp. 20-21. 64

132 on account of starvation.66 And, according to Robert Cribb’s calculation, of 200,000500,000 Indonesians whom the Japanese Occupation government sent to forced labor from 1943 to 1945, only 70,000 survived.67 Malik himself did not belong to the proletariat. In fact, he was born into a wealthy family in Pematang Siantar, North Sumatra. His father was the only man in town who owned a Buick in the late 1920s.68 Yet, he chose to take sides with the toiling and suffering people while opposing the political elite. This was by no means exceptional. Many among the wealthy did what Malik did. It is important to bear in mind that, thanks to the passage of time and the unfolding of a long series of events, Malik underwent a drastic change in his evaluation of Soekarno and Hatta. In 1951 he denounced them as halfhearted, Japanized, senior nationalists. Yet in the early 1980s, when he, as Indonesia’s vice president during the New Order, looked back to his youth in the 1940s, Malik declared that the revolutionary Tan Malaka, the populist Soekarno, and the social democratic Hatta served as “guiding lights” in his development into a politician. These figures, he claimed, were the first Indonesians ever to “offer any theories of the struggle for independence.” He confessed that it was these “political thinkers” who enabled him

66

See Pierre van der Eng, “Bridging a Gap: A Reconstruction of Population Patterns in Indonesia, 1930-61,” Asian Studies Review 26, 4 (December 2002): 17. 67 Robert Cribb, “Rōmusha,” in Historical Dictionary, p. 408. 68 Hermawan Sulistyo, “Biografi Politik Adam Malik: Dari Kiri ke Kanan” [The biography of Adam Malik: From left to right], Prisma 20th Anniversary Special Edition 1971-1991 (1991): 82.

133 “quickly to grasp the fundamentals of Western political ideas.”69 And it is important to note that when the posthumous nationalist image of Soekarno was under attack in 1980 and 1981, Malik was one of the political big shots who went to his rescue. In his September 1980 article in the Jakarta daily Kompas, the senior journalist Rosihan Anwar revealed that Soekarno was not always so militant a nationalist as some people thought. Quoting the work of the Australian historian John Ingleson, The Road to Exile: The Indonesian Nationalist Movement, 1927-1934, he disclosed that in September 1933 in Sukamiskin prison, where the Dutch colonial government incarcerated him for his nationalist politicking, Soekarno so lost his courage that he wrote secret letters to the Attorney General in which he renounced his political beliefs, begged for release from prison, and promised to say goodbye to the nationalist movement.70 This revelation triggered a heated controversy. In defense of Soekarno, in February 1981, Malik, distrusting the truth of the story, made the following remarks to a reporter from the Jakarta daily Kompas: … Let us just forget his error, if indeed he ever did such an error.… …My judgment is the same as that of President Soeharto: All the things that Bung Karno did are already inscribed in history….

69

TEMPO, “Malik, Adam,” in Apa & Siapa: Sejumlah Orang Indonesia 19831984 [Who’s who: A number of Indonesians, 1983-1984] (Jakarta: Grafiti Pers, 1984), pp. 449-52. 70 Rosihan Anwar’s article, “Perbedaan Analisa Politik Antara Soekarno dengan Hatta” [The differences in political analysis between Soekarno and Hatta], originally appeared in Kompas, September 15, 1980. It was reprinted in William H. Frederick and Soeri Soeroto, eds., Pemahaman Sejarah Indonesia: Sebelum & Sesudah Revolusi [Understanding Indonesian history: Before and after revolution] (Jakarta: LP3ES, 1982), pp. 429-35.

134 …Opening up issues like that again today will do nothing but harm to the Indonesian nation; it will lead only to conflict. It will also discredit the leader whom we have held all along in high esteem.…71 Malik’s change of heart regarding Soekarno demonstrates that who we are, what we do, what position we occupy in the social hierarchy, and the social conditions we are in today greatly affect how we remember people and events in the past. While as a budding politician in his early thirties Malik of 1950 was interested in the problem of accuracy in the historical images of Soekarno, Malik of 1981—a man at his late sixties and at the apex of his political career, being vice president of the republic—was concerned not only with Soekarno as historical actor but also with Soekarno as one of the mythic figures in the national pantheon. In 1950, in the struggle between myth and history, Malik took sides with history, insisting that people should see the real, historical Soekarno: an imperfect nationalist. By contrast, in 1981 Malik was on myth’s side; he urged people to focus on Soekarno as the nation’s idol and to do so by jettisoning history. For it is in history that people encounter the human and therefore the imperfect Soekarno: Soekarno who, like everybody else, was capable of both noble deeds and scandalous acts. In Malik’s line of reasoning, the emergence of historical images of Soekarno would undermine the efficacy of the mythic images of him, images that the state used as symbolic devices for holding the nation together. In Malik’s view, exhuming the corpse of history would lead to conflict and controversy,

71

“Polemik tentang Bung Karno Dibahas Presiden: Adam Malik Tidak Yakin Soekarno Minta Ampun” [The president discussed the controversy over Brother Soekarno: Adam Malik does not believe that Soekarno begged for pardon], Kompas, February 20, 1981, p. 1.

135 that is, to the break-up of the nation. Malik, I think, should have thought about this too in 1945. Malik was not alone in the 1950s when he critiqued Hatta’s stance in the dispute over the timing and character of the proclamation. Sidik Kertapati released in 1957 a booklet about the events surrounding the declaration of independence. He wrote it from the standpoint of a young, radical, Marxist guerilla fighter who took part in those events. In the 1961 edition of his booklet, he presents the image of Hatta as a naïve politician who believed in Japan’s promise to give Indonesia her independence.72 He tells of an anecdote in which Hatta responded in a cynical, patronizing, father-knows-best way to the radical youths when they pressured him and Soekarno immediately to proclaim independence. Sidik quotes Hatta as saying I was once a young man too. My head was hot; my heart was hot. Now that I’ve grown older, though my heart is still hot, my head is cool. I am opposed to the idea of having our people declare independence […] before we hear the official announcement of Japan’s capitulation and before we hear what [they] think about the independence that they have promised us. […] And you just can’t push us to declare independence. But if you guys think you’re ready and able to declare it, then why don’t you try and do it! I am just curious to see what you guys are capable of….73 This anecdote may be an accurate reporting of what Hatta actually said at the time. For people who adopt the perspective of the pemuda (youths), the anecdote does not offer

72

Sidik Kertapati, Sekitar Proklamasi 17 Agustus 1945 [On the proclamation of August 17, 1945] (Jakarta: Pembaruan, 1961), p. 57. 73 Ibid., pp. 76-77.

136 the image of Hatta as a “perfect” patriot.74 Of course Hatta could not accept the ugly images that Malik and Sidik had made of him. When Sidik wrote his 1957 and 1961 booklets, where did he stand in Indonesia’s political landscape? As the publisher’s “Preface” to the 1957 edition of his book tells us, Sidik was a member of the Parliament, representing the Indonesian Communist Party.75 He also served in the National Council as a representative of the 1945 generation.76 And the relationship between vice president Hatta and the PKI—as the latter’s rebellion in 1948 (known as the Madiun Affair) demonstrates—was that of mutual hostility. It is important to note that in the aftermath of the Madiun Affair, Hatta engaged in a systematic destruction of the left. It was in 1950 and 1951 that the PKI recovered and rebuilt itself. And in 1961, the year Sidik released the second edition of his booklet, the PKI had grown into one of the strongest political powers in Indonesia. Sidik was on a visit to China when, in 1965-66, in the aftermath of an abortive coup by a number of junior army officers believed to have acted by order of the PKI, the military and Muslim groups destroyed the party and killed half a million suspected communists. To save his life, he was forced to live in exile for two decades, 74

For those who adopt the perspective of senior nationalists, however, Hatta was the better patriot than were the impulsive pemuda. 75 From 1945 to 1950 Sidik was a member of the Pesindo (Indonesian Socialist Youth). I am indebted to Dr. William H. Frederick for this information. Robert Cribb describes Pesindo as the “armed youth wing of the ruling Partai Sosialis…founded in November 1945…. In 1948 it joined the left-wing Front Demokrasi Rakyat (People’s Democracy Front) and was heavily involved in fighting during the Madiun Affair. In 1950 it became firmly affiliated to the PKI….” See Cribb, Historical Dictionary, pp. 364-65. 76 See Sidik Kertapati, “Pengantarkata” [Preface], in Sekitar Proklamasi 17 Agustus 1945 [On the proclamation of August 17, 1945] (Jakarta: Pembaruan, 1957), p. 5.

137 first in China and then in the Netherlands, separated from his wife, the novelist S. Rukiah Kertapati, and their six children.77 In response to Malik’s and Dimyati’s criticisms, in 1951 Hatta published an article entitled “Legend and Reality Surrounding the Proclamation of August 17,” which presents his version of the declaration of independence. In 1969 he expanded the article into a booklet entitled On the proclamation on August 17, 1945. He wanted to counteract the circulation of “false” versions of the great event. As Malik did in 1950, Hatta claimed that too much fantasy had contaminated the truth about the history of the declaration of independence. (But he is quick to add that it is Malik’s and Dimyati’s versions, not his own, which contain intolerable amounts of imagination.) Similarly, he also saw it as his task to “tell truth from fiction.”78 But unlike Malik, who wrote his 1950 book simply from the standpoint of one of the historical actors in the event, Hatta claimed to have written his 1969 text not only from a participant’s viewpoint but also as someone who had taught himself the rules of historical method. Indeed, he opens his booklet by saying that it was part of the fruits of a seven months’ research he did at the East-West Center in Honolulu in 1968.79 Hatta seeks to defend the realistic stance he took in the events preceding the proclamation against the ex-revolutionary youths’ versions of those events: versions as 77

For a glimpse of Sidik’s life, see Julie Shackford-Bradley, “Autobiographical Fictions: Indonesian Women’s Writing from the Nationalist Period” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000), pp. 40-44, 254, 25657. This dissertation discusses, among other things, the life and work of Sidik’s wife S. Rukiah Kertapati. 78 Mohammad Hatta, Sekitar Proklamasi 17 Agustus 1945 [On the proclamation on August 17, 1945] (Jakarta: Tintamas, 1969), pp. 1-2. 79 See Hatta, “Kata Pengantar” [Preface], idem, n.p.

138 promoted, for example, by Adam Malik, Muhammad Dimyati, and Sidik Kertapati; versions, that is, where he is put in the spotlight as the bad senior nationalist who would gladly collect the gift of independence from his Japanese masters rather than support the will of the radical youths (which was supposed to represent the will of the people) to proclaim independence in a revolutionary style. The youths’ preferred course of action, Hatta argues, did not fit in with the logic of the real political situation, resulting as it did from “a rebellious heart and a turbulent head.”80 In his view, since, in September 1944, the Japanese Occupation authorities had promised to give Indonesia her independence and set up, in the early 1945, a Committee to Prepare for Indonesia’s Independence, whose members represented all the social groups throughout Indonesia, there was no need for a revolutionary-style, self-proclaimed independence as the youths wanted. In Hatta’s view the question was not whether the independence was a pure product of the people’s struggle or whether it was Japan’s gift. For Hatta the question was whether or not the will of the Indonesian people as a whole was represented by the agency that was scheduled to declare independence. It would not matter, Hatta’s maintains, that this type of independence was the result of collaboration with the Japanese Occupation government. That was why, Hatta explains, he was opposed to the de-Japanized mode in which the youths wanted independence to be proclaimed. Hatta goes on to point out the logical fallacy in the thoughts and actions of the radical youths. If they wanted to have the kind of independence that was

80

Ibid., p. 11.

139 uncontaminated by any association with the fascist Japanese, Hatta asks, then why on earth did they insist that it be declared by such collaborators as Soekarno and Hatta?81 And he maintains that as far as the returning Dutch forces were concerned, they would not give a damn about the nature of Indonesia’s independence. They would crush it anyway, for they were determined to re-establish the colonial order in the archipelago. Thus Hatta dismissed as absurd the claim that “it was not until the youths compelled them to do so that Hatta and Soekarno were willing to proclaim Indonesia’s independence.”82 Hatta does not waste the opportunity to counterattack the left in his book. He tells the story of how, once upon a time in the Old Order (1957-1965), members of the PKI (the party to which Sidik belonged) and the Murba party (of which Malik was one of the leaders) were involved in a deliberate fabrication of history. A few days after the celebration of Independence Day, so Hatta tells us, they went on a picnic to the small town of Rengasdengklok, West Java, to perform a solemn commemoration of an event which never took place at all: a conference on August 16, 1945 where Soekarno, Hatta, and youth leaders were supposed to have produced the draft of the Proclamation of Independence. “In this picnic,” Hatta adds, “they also decided to send to a museum in Jakarta or Yogyakarta a table they claimed was used in the fictional conference.”83 The trouble with Hatta’s story is that neither primary nor secondary sources are

81

Ibid., pp. 9-10, 12. Ibid., pp. 4-5. 83 Hatta, Sekitar Proklamasi, p. 6. 82

140 offered to provide the evidence. But this is true of similar stories offered by Hatta’s opponents as well. The hostility between radical youths and senior nationalists in mid-1945 and in the early 1950s reverberated in the early years of the New Order. In 1969 Hatta, an old nationalist, attacked Malik, an ex-radical youth; in 1970 B. M. Diah, who was a nationalist journalist and the head of the daily Merdeka, attacked Sutan Sjahrir, a senior social-democratic nationalist leader hostile to the populist Soekarno. Diah complained about what he saw as deliberate attempts to “distort the history of the declaration of independence into an Arabian Nights-style fairy tale.”84 He attributed those acts of fabrication to “individuals who opposed the youths’ efforts to mobilize people to achieve independence.” One of these anti-youth senior politicians in 1945, he argued, was Sutan Sjahrir. According to Diah, somewhere in June 1945, Sjahrir scoffed at the youths’ determination to win independence by means of a national revolution.85 Sjahrir, who died in 1966, was of course unable to talk back to Diah. Interestingly, Diah did not criticize Soekarno and Hatta. Indeed from 1945 to 1964 he was a loyal supporter of Soekarno, who appointed him ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1959 and to the United Kingdom in 1962. And in the political antagonism between Soekarno and Sjahrir between 1945 and 1948, he took sides with the former. 86

84

B. M. Diah, “Rakjat harus hati-hati menilai darimana setiap tjeritera tentang ‘sedjarah’ Proklamasi” [People should examine carefully the origins of all stories about the ‘history’ of the proclamation], Merdeka, August 14, 1970. 85 Ibid. 86 Soebagijo, Jagat Wartawan, pp. 470-76.

141 I have discussed the contributions by Malik, Dimyati, Hatta, and Sidik to the body of literature about the history of the birth of Indonesia. I would like to introduce another contributor: Ahmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo (1896-1978). Subardjo departed for the Netherlands in 1919. He earned a master’s degree in law from Leiden University in 1933. He stayed in Tokyo from 1935 to 1936, working as a correspondent for the daily Mata Hari. During the Occupation, he chose to work for the Japanese. When the Japanese Navy offered him the post of chief of its research bureau, he accepted the offer. Starting in 1943, he worked for the Japanese Navy Liaison Office, serving as the chief of its Research Bureau on Political Affairs. Under the Navy’s sponsorship, he also organized a training center to prepare Indonesian youths to be nationalist cadres. In the critical events leading up to the declaration of independence, he acted as a mediator between Soekarno and Hatta on the one hand and the radical youths on the other. He served the newly born Indonesia as her first foreign minister. In the internal struggle from 1945 to 1946 he worked closely with the Marxist Tan Malaka in the Struggle Union, an alliance of radical nationalists who insisted on total independence and opposed any negotiations between the Republic of Indonesia and the Netherlands. In the 1950s and 1960s, he served as Indonesian ambassador to many European countries.87

87

For Subardjo’s biographical details, see Ahmad Subardjo, Kesadaran Nasional: Otobiografi [National consciousness: An Autobiography] (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1978). For a discussion of Subardjo’s political activism from 1942 to 1946, his relationship with Tan Malaka, and his involvement in the Union Struggle, see George McTurnan Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952), pp. 115-19, 148, 150, 189-91.

142 Despite his collaboration with the Japanese during the Occupation, many years later, in his 1965 article Subardjo displayed an allergic reaction to interpretations by foreign scholars which credited the Japanese with an important role in the proclamation of Indonesia’s independence. He took issue with H. F. de Graaf, former professor of history at the University of Indonesia, who, in his lecture titled “The Indonesian Declaration of Independence,” which he delivered in the monthly meeting of the Eastern Society in the Netherlands in April 1957, offered the following interpretation: …one cannot help [but] observ[e] the shortcomings of the actors in the drama of the declaration of…Indonesian independence. The one group, although of bright intellect, is lacking in initiative, the other, although attractive on account of [its] enthusiasm, misses understanding and insight. The only figure to act courageously, on the verge of ruin, is Maeda, who by founding the Indonesian Republic [emphasis added by Subardjo]…tried at the eleventh hour to render the service to his fallen native country. Among the few attractive Japanese from the period of occupation he is the only one of the most appealing.88 It was against this interpretation that Subardjo wrote: It is quite natural…that Dr. de Graaf who is a Dutch historian, consciously or unconsciously, treats the whole affair of the Proclamation or Indonesian Independence “du haut de sa grandeur” in conformation with the general trend of opinion in Holland, that Indonesia was a Japanese-made Republic. How could he otherwise come to the astonishing conclusion that the Japanese Admiral Maeda had founded the Indonesian Republic?89

88

Ahmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo, “Annotations on the Indonesian Declaration of Independence. 17th of August 1945,” Penelitian Sedjarah 9 (February 1965): 4-5. The original article is in English. 89 Ibid., p. 5.

143 Subardjo also disputed the claim in George Kahin’s book (Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia) that leftist high-ranking officers in the Japanese Navy had a major contribution to the declaration of Indonesia’s independence. He also refutes Kahin’s suggestion that he was some kind of a communist during his study in the Netherlands. He insists that the top-ranking Japanese naval officers with whom he collaborated during the Occupation were anything but communists. He also denies ever seeing the notorious Marxist Tan Malaka in Japan in the 1930s, as Kahin suggests in his book. 90 It is interesting to bear in mind, however, that in his 1978 autobiography Subardjo says he did associate with Malaka in the Netherlands in 1922. (Malaka, in his autobiography, says that “I had known … Subardjo well in the Netherlands in 1922, and I met him again in Jakarta on 25 August 1945.”91) Subardjo is quick to add that “during my association with Tan Malaka in the Netherlands, I never succumbed to his [Marxist-Leninist] influences.”92 But, interestingly, in both his 1969 memoir and 1978 autobiography Subardjo keeps silent about his political alliance with Malaka in the Struggle Union in 1945-46. The Government of the Republic of Indonesia accused the Struggle Union of kidnapping the Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir in Surakarta on

90

“Kemerdekaan Indonesia Berkat Djasa Perwira-perwira Angkatan Laut Djepang Pro-Komunis?” [Did the pro-communist Japanese navy officers contribute significantly to Indonesia’s independence?], Kompas, August 14, 1969, pp. 1, 3. 91 Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail, vol. 3, trans. Helen Jarvis, Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asia Series No. 83 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1991), p. 82. 92 Subardjo, Kesadaran Nasional, p. 359-362.

144 June 26, 1946. And Subardjo had to go on trial for his alleged involvement in the incident.93 It can be argued that there were at least two major goals that Subardjo tries to accomplish in his memoir and autobiography. First, he wants to purge his public image from any dangerous links to the figures of communism, by insisting on his immunity from the corrupting influences of Tan Malaka. Second, by insisting on the purity of Indonesia’s independence, he wishes to get rid of the stigma of being a collaborator with the Japanese. The first goal, I argue, was more urgent than the second. As far as the first goal is concerned, it is interesting to note that Subardjo released his memoir in 1969, just three years after the New Order came to power. This anti-communist regime seized power after its military and civilian supporters slaughtered about half a million communists in 1965-66. If one wanted to survive in the New Order, one was required to prove that one was free from “communist contamination.” In the New Order, being identified as a communist might lead to death sentence or exile to a penal colony. Children of PKI members were subjected to all kinds of political and economic discrimination. Subardjo, it is true, never joined any leftist party in independent Indonesia. But he did pay a visit to Soviet Union in 1927 to attend the tenth anniversary of the Revolution of 1917. It is likely that he was afraid lest people of today and of tomorrow should think that he was, once upon a time, a communist.

93

The State Police arrested Subardjo in Yogyakarta on July 1, 1946. See, for example, Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 392.

145 The Jakarta daily Kompas, one of the supporters of the New Order, was interested in Subardjo’s attempt in his memoir to straighten out the errors in Kahin’s interpretation of Indonesia’s declaration of independence. In its August 14, 1969 issue, in anticipation of Indonesia’s twenty-fourth anniversary, it presented, on the first page, a summary of Subardjo’s memoir. 94 Like Subardjo, Kompas also wanted to prevent the Indonesian readers of Kahin’s landmark work from arriving at the dangerous conclusion that the Japanese Occupation authorities and some Indonesian communists had contributed to Indonesia’s independence. Although Subardjo and Kompas wanted people to believe otherwise, Japan’s contribution to Indonesia’s independence was indeed substantial. Anthony Reid notes, for example, that it was the Japanese who lay the basis for Indonesian professional army, by establishing, during the Occupation, the PETA military training.95 It was the Japanese too who set up the strong links, for the first time in history, between nationalist leaders (Soekarno and Hatta) and the masses.96 But it was not until 1977, on the occasion of the death of Rear-Admiral Tadashi Maeda, that Adam Malik, in a letter to Nishijima Shigetada, recognizes Maeda’s “great help in the preparatory state of our independence.” He adds that Maeda’s “name will be written in the annals of

94

“Kemerdekaan Indonesia,” pp. 1, 3. PETA stands for Pembela Tanah Air or the Defenders of Fatherland. As Robert Cribb explains, it was a “military force formed by the Japanese [during the Occupation] on Java and Sumatra…to involve Indonesians in defense against the Allies.” See, Cribb, Historical Dictionary, p 362. 96 Anthony Reid, “Remembering and Forgetting War and Revolution,” in Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present, ed. Mary S. Zurbuchen (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), p. 187. 95

146 Indonesia with golden letters.”97 It took Malik thirty-two years to acknowledge the credit that Japan deserved. Anyway, worried about the cacophony of conflicting accounts, Mashuri, the minister of education and culture in the New Order government, suggested in 1969 that all participants in the proclamation of independence should get together and carry out some kind of a focus group discussion to work out a single, standardized account of the sacred event to bring the cacophony of history to an end.98 The state of the debate in the early years of the New Order (late 1960s and early 1970s) indicated that the 1945 generation began to feel the need to transmit the “revolutionary values” of the struggle for independence to the younger generation. There was a fear that the multiplicity of accounts of the origin of the nation-state might sabotage that process of value transmission. Indeed in the late 1960s there appeared a generation of Indonesian youths who were born after 1950 and therefore possessed no direct personal experience of the revolution. It was only through oral, textual, or visual mediums that the post-1950 young people could get in touch with the national revolution and the values it was supposed to represent. These mediums included oral traditions, memoirs, history books, poems, short stories, paintings, and monuments. Some members of the 1945 generation, for example people like Mashuri, believed that the successful transmission of the 1945 values required a single, standardized historical representation of Indonesia’s birth. 97

Ibid. See Sudiro, “Menanggapi buku Sekitar Proklamasi jang ditulis oleh Bung Hatta” [A rejoinder to Brother Hatta’s book entitled On the Proclamation], Kompas, June 10, 1970. 98

147 But why this interest in the younger generation’s comprehension of the national history? It turns out that already in the late 1960s some members of the 1945 generation had began to feel that the contemporary younger generation—those who were born after the revolution—were out of touch with the spirit of the independence struggle. It was Hatta, no less, who complained in 1969 about the “contemporary youths’ lack of appreciation of the freedom fighters.” He felt that the youths of the late 1960s showed less nationalism than did their counterparts in the 1940s. The reason, he said, was that “the youths [of the 1940s] faced a lot of hardship [while the young people] of today did not.” Hatta put forward his lack-of-nationalism thesis on the basis of the following observation: Thanks to their profound spirit of nationalism, even though they went abroad, most freedom-fighter youths did not marry foreigners. But when youths of today get the opportunity to go abroad, they then marry foreigners and even take up a permanent residence.99 To overcome this problem, Hatta argued that the post-revolutionary youths should “learn more about Indonesian history.” Sugarda Purbakawatja, born in 1899, shared Hatta’s complaints. In an interview with the daily Kompas in July 1969, he recalled that Indonesian youths in the first half of the twentieth century had to live under harsh colonial pressures. “We had to undergo self-discipline to achieve any progress in life. It was the desire to break free from pressures that had shaped us into strong human beings.” By contrast, he 99

“Pemuda-pemuda Sekarang Kurang Hargai Pedjuang-pedjuang Kemerdekaan,” [Young people of today had no respect for the freedom fighters], Kompas, August 18, 1969, p. 3.

148 observed that youths who grew up after 1949 tended to grumble easily when they were faced with difficulties. “They live more comfortably,” he explained, “they lack challenges.” He went on to complain that youths of the 1960s lacked “great ideas for nation-building,” discarded their own traditions, and stupidly adopted aspects of Western cultures, such as more open, carnal approach to sex. He accused them of merely “putting on modern airs.” 100 To better understand Hatta’s and Sugarda’s misgivings, we should keep in mind that in 1961 people who were born and grew up after the revolution constituted no less than thirty-three percent of Indonesia’s total population.101 And in 1971, that is, two years after Hatta’s and Sugarda’s complaints, this category of people grew to fifty-three percent.102 But what did the youths of the late 1960s think of Hatta’s and Sugarda’s criticism? Dian S. (b. 1949) insisted that she and her generation had joined the world. Let us listen, for example, to her “cultural manifesto”: Our culture nowadays is neither Indonesian nor Western, but a sort of an international culture. Anyone who opens his doors to it can enjoy and be proud of it. It has succeeded in uniting all young people in the world in ways that politics, wars, and the type of thinking that split this world into East and West never could.103 100

Sugarda Purbakawatja, “Apa yang Salah pada Generasi Muda Sekarang?” [What is wrong with young people of today?], Kompas, August 16, 1969, p. 5. 101 A. Hunter, “Notes on Indonesian Population,” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 4 (June 1966): 39. 102 Charles B. Nam, Gouranga Lal Dasvarma, and Sri Pamoedjo Rahardjo, “The Changing Age Distribution in Indonesia and Some Consequences,” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 27, 2 (August 1991): 127. 103 Dian S., “Musuh-musuh Besar?” [Great enemies?], Kompas, August 16, 1969, p. 5.

149 Dian also argued that just because the youths of the 1960s did not take part in the revolution did not mean that what was now left for them to do was sit back and enjoy the fruits of the struggle of their parents. “The older generation had one big common enemy,” she said. But youths of her own generation were faced with all kinds of “intangible problems.” The general public, she complained, just did not know how hard it was for the young to “define what to struggle for, what methods to use, and what objectives to achieve.” As for political independence, she argued that since the 1945 generation had worked hard to produce it, it was only natural for their descendants to consume it. As for physical approach to love, she considered love to be more than “just poetry and fantasy.” The urban youths of the late 1960s—who were exposed to contraceptives and news about John Lennon and the hippies—wanted to experience love as something concrete, something naked. Indonesian society had changed so much by 1969 that it displayed new features that people like Hatta and Sugarda found hard to understand and tolerate. They were too old now to sympathize with the cultural experimentation that their “grandchildren” were doing. They seem to have forgotten that in the 1920s, while they were still in their early twenties, people of their own generation too were involved in “wild” adventures: not only in politics and ideology but also in fashion and romance.104 Looking back in the late 1960s to their own youth, however, people like Hatta and Sugarda tended to emphasize self-discipline and struggle, while de104

For an interesting treatment of the Indonesian youths’ experimentation with fashion in the lasts decades of the Dutch colonial era, see, for example, Rudolf Mrázek, “Indonesian Dandy,” in Engineers of Happy Land, pp. 129-60.

150 emphasizing play and pleasure. They were not aware that young people of the late 1960s too had their own ways of combining work and play, study and pleasure. They do not seem to have noticed that some youths in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s organized their lives around “books, festivities, and love” or “books, politics, and love.”105 It did not occur to Hatta and Sugarda that just as some youths in the 1930s were so obsessed with nationalism that they defied their parents’ expectation by marrying people outside their ethnic groups, so some overseas Indonesian youths in the late 1960s, who might have begun to see themselves more as citizens of the world than of Indonesia, decided to marry foreigners instead of their compatriots. Indeed, in her article Dian told us, “Our culture today is neither Indonesian nor Western; it is rather an international culture.” And, she said, in English, “The times are achanging.”106

In any case, controversy over the proclamation of independence continued through the early 1970s. Nugroho Notosusanto (1931-1985), a lecturer in history at the University of Indonesia and the director of the Center for the Armed Forces History, intervened. In 1970 he insisted that what Indonesian society needed was an objective history. He defined “objective history” as one which contained all accepted facts “on

105

For a portrait of student life in the late 1960s in Jakarta, see Soe Hok Gie, Catatan Seorang Demonstran [Diary of a demonstrator] (Jakarta: LP3ES, 1983). 106 Dian S., “Musuh-musuh,” p. 5.

151 the basis of evidence from the accounts of [historical] actors.”107 However, the accounts by people such as Soekarno, Hatta, Adam Malik, Sidik Kertapati, Sajuti Melik, or Ahmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo—all of whom took part in the proclamation of independence—could not constitute an objective historical representation of that event. Told from the first-person point of view, Nugroho argued, their accounts of the event were bound to contradict one another. For example, the debate between Dimyati and Hatta over which text was the authentic version of the proclamation. And this was no petty debate. At stake was the very legal basis of the nation-state. For Nugroho considered the proclamation of independence to be “the source of all sources” of the Republic of Indonesia.108 I recall, too, that in 1984, my teacher of Pancasila Moral Education in primary school told me that the proclamation was “the ultimate source of all sources of law.” In the superior position of an objective historian, Nugroho argued in favor of Dimyati’s interpretation that the authentic text of the proclamation was the one typewritten by Sajuti and not the handwritten draft by Soekarno.109 As an academic historian Nugroho offered an objectivist interpretation in response to what he thought of as “the need on the part of the public at large for an objective history” of the events surrounding the birth of the nation-state. But was there really anyone in society who was really confused with the multiple representations of Indonesia’s birth and therefore required an “objective”

107

Nugroho Notosusanto, “Naskah Proklamasi Jang Otentik dan Rumusan Pantjasila Jang Otentik” [The authentic text of the proclamation and the authentic version of Pancasila], Kompas, October 13, 1970. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid.

152 history as the antidote? The answer, I think, is affirmative. In August 16, 1972, an article appeared in the Jakarta-based daily Kompas, where its author, the senior journalist Soebagijo I.N. (b. 1924) says that If one listened to the lecture by Mr. Haji Ahmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo at Menteng 31 Hall in Saturday evening, July 29, [1972], organized by the Institute for the Cultivation of the Spirit of ’45 that belongs to the National Council of the Generation of ’45, one could not avoid the impression that “the history of the proclamation of the Republic of Indonesia has become more and more chaotic.”110 Chaos, he writes, was to be expected. For, quoting Subardjo, he argues that, being participants in the event in question those people who had written the history of the proclamation failed to free themselves from “the elements of subjectivity.” In this kind of reasoning, subjectivity leads to chaos. The conflicting versions in circulation at the time lead him to think that the history of the proclamation requires rectification: On my way back home from Menteng 31 Hall—it was almost midnight on July 29, [1972]—I was thinking to myself that as far as the history of the proclamation is concerned, there is a whole lot of stuff that calls for clarification. [Things] are to be explained as clearly as possible and analyzed according to what really happened. There’s no need for understatements and exaggerations.111 As a way out of chaos, and in order to nip the fabrication of history in the bud, he suggests that people take care of the history of the proclamation, precisely because the participants in the momentous event were still alive. Strangely enough, he does not explain just how it is that people should take care of it. 110

Soebagijo I.N., “Kisah Sekitar Proklamasi Tambah Semrawut?” [Is the story of the proclamation getting more chaotic?], Kompas, August 16, 1972, p. 3. 111 Ibid., p. 3.

153 Ten days later, a letter to the editor appeared in the Jakarta daily Kompas, bearing the title of “To Keep Things from Getting More Chaotic.” The writer, a man in Yogyakarta named Bustami Rahman, conveys his total agreement with Soebagijo’s fuzzy suggestion. Echoing Subardjo, whom Soebagijo quotes in his article, Bustami could not agree more that the multiplicity of histories was attributable to subjectivity of those who wrote them. But more interesting is his argument that school pupils and college students would find it more efficient and more practical if they could learn the history of the proclamation from one book that is representative rather than from numerous books that differ from one another on many issues.112 And even more intriguing is his interpretation that Soebagijo’s article was “a reminder of how badly we need a uniformity of history, especially for the benefit of our posterity in the future.”113 In my view, this textual hunger on the part of the 1945 generation for one collective, objective, accurate, well-ordered, historical representation of the birth of Indonesia—a birth followed by wars against the Dutch during the revolution—was closely linked to the implacable desire on the part of many Indonesians, during the last seven decades of the Dutch colonial rule, for modernity, that is, for progress, Westernstyle education, material wealth, and industrialization. Indigenous intellectuals pinned their hopes on the colonial state that it would undertake rapid and large-scale modernization, which would benefit not only Europeans but also the indigenous 112

Bustami Rahman, “Supaya Jangan Semakin Semrawut” [To keep things from getting more chaotic], Kompas, August 26, 1972. Italics in the original. 113 Ibid., italics mine.

154 masses. It turned out, however, that the colonial state was not interested in modernizing the colony. (It was not until 1936 that the first light bulb factory was established in Java. And it belonged to a Japanese company not Dutch.114 ) As a result, many Indonesians began to believe that self-modernization was the only possible road to modernity. They also thought that it was not until they achieved political independence that they could embark on self-modernization. So obsessed were many Indonesian youths with political independence that during the national revolution they saw no other choices in life than either independence or death. No matter how sacred political independence might be for Indonesians, it was just a means to modernity. This idea appears in the Preamble to the 1945 constitution, which says that Indonesians established their independence because they wanted … to protect the people and the territory of Indonesia, and to promote general welfare, to educate the nation, and to participate in the keeping of the world order based on liberty, everlasting peace, and social justice…. The trouble was, as it turned out in the late 1960s, the almost twenty-year-old political independence—the armed struggle for which took the lives of 150,000 civilians and 100,000 combatants115—led not to modernity but to “a quarter of a century of tragedy [such as] rebellions, religious conflict, corruption, [and] increasing

114

H. W. Dick, Surabaya, City of Work: A Socioeconomic History, 1900-2000 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002), pp. 277-78. 115 Estimates by William H. Frederick in Adrian Vickers, “Thoughts on Indonesian historiography,” TMs [photocopy], p. 1.

155 class conflict.”116 An even greater tragedy would take place in the future, it was feared, if people forgot or simply did not know that the true goal and “content” of this very costly independence was to undertake self-modernization. This—for members of the 1945 generation such as Mashuri, Soebagijo, Subardjo, and Hatta—was to be the ultimate message that only one objective, accurate, neat, historical representation of the birth of Indonesia could convey to the younger generation. A multiplicity of conflicting accounts of the national genesis, it was feared, would lead to confusion on the part of the younger generation. And in confusion, they would miss the true message. Thus the younger generation was to be protected from confusion. For it was they, the young people, who would eventually carry out the second phase of the struggle for modernity: a continuing self-modernization, which in the New Order era (1966-1998) went by the name of “development.” Why this fear of confusion about history? This might be related to a tacit realization on the part of some members of the 1945 generation that even they, who were involved in the struggle for independence, had somehow deviated, for almost two decades (1950-1965), from the struggle’s original objectives and meanings. They seem to have thought that if they did not provide the post-revolutionary generation with the single true history of the declaration of independence, the latter would go astray both in the present and in the future. Consider, for example, the observation made in 1960 by Iwa Kusuma Sumantri (b. 1899), a nationalist lawyer-cum-labor

116

“Kontinuitas Proklamasi dan Pembangunan” proclamation to development], Kompas, August 13, 1970.

[Continuity:

from

156 activist from the late 1920s to the early 1940s who received a master’s degree in law from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands in 1925:117 Unfortunately, among our rakyat there are many who do not know the history and essence of the Proclamation, for certain groups are still engaged in a conscious or unconscious process whereby they cover up or misrepresent the event.118 And consider also what Ahmad Subardjo said in the “Preface” to his 1972 book on the birth of Indonesia: The present and the future generation alike must know and judge in a fair manner not only what really happened but also the forces and reasons which led to the events. Otherwise, they will fail to comprehend what is happening now and what will happen tomorrow.119 Now let us move to the last hot issue in the historiographical dispute over the birth of Indonesia, namely the controversy over the authenticity and the authorship of Indonesia’s foundational document, Pancasila. In a book published in 1981, which was the outcome of research he conducted in 1966, Nugroho presented a theory about the authorship and the birth date of the “true” Pancasila. He constructed the theory on the basis of Muhammad Yamin’s 1959 book which contains the drafts of the 1945 constitution. Why did he so believe in this

117

For Iwa Kusuma Sumantri’s biographical details, see Anderson, Java in a time of Revolution, pp. 422-23. 118 Iwa Kusuma Sumantri, “Analisa tentang peristiwa2 disekitar Proklamasi Kemerdekaan Indonesia” [An analysis of the events surrounding the proclamation of Indonesia’s independence], Penelitian Sedjarah 1 (September 1960): 3. 119 Ahmad Subardjo Djojoadisurjo, Lahirnja Republik Indonesia: Suatu Tindjauan dan Kisah Pengalaman [The birth of Indonesia: An observation and a story of experience] (Djakarta: PT Kinta, 1972), p. 3.

157 particular book that he used it as his one and only primary source? It was because, he insisted, President Soekarno himself endorsed Yamin’s book. The endorsement was expressed in the former’s “Preface” for the book.120 Nugroho’s thesis is that the authentic Pancasila, born in August 18, 1945, was the collective product of Soekarno, Soepomo, and Muhammad Yamin.121 “It is this Pancasila,” Nugroho argued, “that serves as the state’s foundation.” It is this Pancasila, he added, that Indonesians “will uphold forever.”122 His second thesis is that the Pancasila born on June 1, 1945 was not the authentic Pancasila; it is Soekarno’s own brainchild.123 This theory was like a grenade thrown into the midst of people who, even though they supported the New Order, still held Soekarno in great esteem. One of these people was Roeslan Abdulgani (1914-2005)—a Soekarno loyalist under Guided Democracy but also an advisor to President Soeharto in the New Order—who argued that the weakness of Nugroho’s theory is its use of Yamin’s book as the sole primary source. The book, which was never meant to be an official source, contains inaccuracies in many parts. The best primary source that Nugroho should have used, it was argued, were the proceedings of the meetings from May to July 1945 of the Investigatory Body for Preparatory Works for Indonesia’s Independence (BPUPKI). The problem was that no one in 1981 seems to have known the whereabouts of these documents. Not based on

120

Nugroho Notosusanto, Proses Perumusan Pancasila Dasar Negara [The formulation process of Pancasila as the foundation for the state] (Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1981), pp. 17-18. 121 Ibid., p. 24. 122 “Tulisan Tangan Bung Karno Jadi Landasan Saya” [I used as evidence Brother Karno’s own handwriting], Kompas, August 21, 1981, pp. 1, 5. 123 Notosusanto, Proses Perumusan, p. 27.

158 these primary sources, it was argued, Nugroho’s thesis was weak.124 In his methodological critique of Nugroho, Roeslan was joined by two academic historians, Kuntowijoyo and Abdurrachman Surjomihardjo. Abdurrachman went further by calling Nugroho’s book a “political pamphlet.”125 He also warned against the danger of “using [historical] interpretation as a logical justification for recommending a political decision.”126 To this torrent of criticism, Nugroho responded with the typical voice of the professional historian: If strong and verifiable evidence emerges which overrules the one I have used, I will not be ashamed to step back. In history there is no such thing as being ashamed to step back; in history what counts is evidence.127 No historians, I think, would object to this statement. But for Nugroho’s critics what was really at issue was not methodology but something else. They read between the lines of his theory. What they saw in it was not simply a scholastic project which the professional historian usually undertakes; what they saw in it was a thinly disguised political move to purge Pancasila (as the New Order’s ultimate ideological pusaka or fetish) from too strong an association with Soekarno as the symbol of the Guided Democracy. And in the person of Nugroho, Abdurrachman and Kuntowijoyo may have seen the historiographical legitimator of the New Order: an anti-communist

124

“Ke Mana Dokumen-dokumen Itu….” [Where have those documents gone…?], TEMPO, September 5, 1981, p. 12. 125 Ibid. 126 “Di Celah-celah Ingatan ‘45” [Gaps in the memory of 1945], TEMPO, August 29, 1981, p.12. 127 Ibid.

159 regime the core of which consisted of the Army’s top leaders engaged, under the Guided Democracy, in a bitter struggle for power with Soekarno and the PKI. Thus against the old and familiar thesis that Soekarno was the sole inventor of Pancasila, Nugroho put forwards the antithesis that Soekarno was just one of the three inventors of the ideology. (It was none other than Nugroho who in 1970 argued that the authentic text of the Proclamation was not the one which Soekarno wrote in longhand but the one which Sajuti Melik typed on the basis of the latter as a draft.) And it seemed, to Abdurrachman at least, that in his too strong political devotion to the New Order Nugroho had compromised his own integrity as a professional historian. Nugroho put up a methodological self-defense by insisting that his interpretation was always open to revision dictated by the emergence of contradictory evidence. And he was quick to add that his interpretation was not intended to treat the figure of Soekarno with less respect. What he wanted people to have was a complete and balanced view of Soekarno, which included not only the good Soekarno (the top leader of the nationalist movement in the 1930s until the mid-1940s as well as one of the proclaimers of independence in 1945) but also the bad Soekarno (who together with the PKI was responsible for the economic and political disasters from 1959 to 1965).128 Anyway, in the eyes of the some people, the damage had been done. The big fans of former president Soekarno were offended. On August 17, 1981, for example, at the Soekarno-Hatta Monument, Jakarta, a group of 17 people who called themselves

128

Notosusanto, Proses Perumusan, p. 16.

160 the Soekarno-Hatta Institute read out a declaration insisting that June 1, 1945 remained the birthday of the true Pancasila and that Soekarno was its true inventor.129 But why did Nugroho think it necessary to distinguish between the true Pancasila and the “false” Pancasila and then reduce the magnitude of Soekarno’s contributions to the genesis of the former? To answer this question, it is necessary that we read Nugroho’s book in tandem with two other “texts”: (1) the New Order’s interpretation of modern Indonesian history from 1945 to 1965, and (2) the foundational story that the New Order told itself and its subjects about how it came into being and why it should go on ruling the country. In his 1989 autobiography, President Soeharto, the father of the New Order, provides us with a good example of the way in which he interpreted Indonesian history from 1945 to 1965: Why was it that the G.30.S/PKI rebellion took place; that for the last 20 years after independence many rebellions occurred; that during those years there transpired a series of political crises; that after twenty years of independence people’s standard of living did not undergo any significant improvement?130 In Soeharto’s view, Indonesian history from 1945 to 1965 is the history of two chronic social problems: political instability and the absence of economic growth.

129

“Jelas, Bung Karno Penggali Pancasila pada 1 Juni 1945” [It is obvious that Brother Karno was the inventor of Pancasila on June 1, 1945], Kompas, August 14, 1981, pp. 1, 5. The group included such oppositional figures as H.R. Dharsono and Hugeng Imam Santoso. 130 Soeharto, Pikiran, Ucapan, dan Tindakan Saya: Otobiografi [My thoughts, words and deeds: An autobiography] (Jakarta: Citra Lamtoro Gung Persada, 1989), p. 232.

161 There was much merit, to be sure, in this observation. Under the Guided Democracy (1959-65) Indonesia suffered from one of the greatest economic disasters she had so far experienced. The regime relied on export of plantation commodities as the major source of foreign exchange incomes. Yet, income from the plantation sector sharply declined from US$ 442 million in 1958 to US$ 330 million in 1966. In 1961-62 inflation was 400 percent and the state budget deficit worsened from Rp 60.5 billion to Rp 2,514 billion. 131 In 1967, Indonesia’s per capita GDP was even lower than it was under the Dutch colonial regime in 1913 and even in the Great Depression of 1930.132 Economic catastrophe went together with political turmoil. In 1958, backed by intellectuals linked to the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI) and Muslim politicians linked to the Masjumi, a band of military officers in West Sumatra, who called themselves the Revolutionary Government of Republic Indonesia, launched an armed rebellion against the central government. 133 In 1965, a group of leftist middle-ranking army officers, who designated themselves as the September 30 Movement, kidnapped and killed six top army generals. They did this, they claimed, in order to prevent the generals from staging a coup against President Soekarno. But proponents of the New Order believed that the September 30 Movement itself was a coup orchestrated by the PKI to capture the state.

131

Nugroho Notosusanto and Yusmar Basri, eds., Sejarah Nasional Indonesia [National history of Indonesia ], vol. 3, for senior high school (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1981), pp. 153-55. 132 Pierre van der Eng, “The Real Domestic Product of Indonesia, 1880-1989,” Explorations in Economic History 29, 3 (July 1992), pp. 343-73. 133 Adam Schwartz, A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 18.

162 In his meditation on the economic and political disasters from 1945 to 1965, Soeharto came up with a rather simplistic diagnosis: The chain of events which made up the entire national crisis that had arisen prior to 1966 stemmed from the deviations from Pancasila and the 1945 constitution [italics mine], both in spirit and in practice. Secondly, all the regressions that we suffered during that period had their origins in the neglect of economic development. Thus the struggle of the New Order consists in straightening out the consistent practice of Pancasila and the 1945 constitution.134 Many proponents of the New Order arrived at pretty much the same diagnosis. Looking back to the years of Guided Democracy, Nugroho Notosusanto, for example, thought that Soekarno had committed a number of serious deviations from the true Pancasila and the 1945 constitution. First, in violation of the 1945 constitution, Soekarno developed himself into a dictator. Second, in violation of Pancasila, he oriented the country’ foreign policy toward the Left. Third, to ensure his political dominance, he established the Nasakom, a coalition of conflicting political forces which included nationalists, religious groups, and communists. This, Nugroho insisted, enabled the PKI quickly to expand itself into the strongest political party in Indonesia. The trouble was, Nugroho added, the PKI pursued a Janus-faced strategy. In public, it organized a huge network of party apparatuses in urban and rural Java. Clandestinely, however, it ran a Special Bureau to prepare for an armed rebellion. The PKI’s ultimate goal, in his view, was to seize the state and “substitute Marxism-

134

Soeharto, Pikiran, p. 232.

163 Leninism and a communist constitution for Pancasila and the 1945 constitution.”135 According to his theory, the PKI was the mastermind of the aborted coup in September 30, 1965. He blamed the coup on Soekarno. For, he argued, despite the fact that “communism is against Pancasila,” Soekarno allowed the PKI to thrive and grow.136 Thus, in his judgment, Soekarno was guilty: President Soekarno’s major political error lay in his failure to convert the PKI to Pancasila, which, in principle, was an impossible thing to do. In his attempt to embrace the PKI, he sacrificed the true believers of Pancasila and neglected the task of protecting Pancasila itself. The result of it all was the Crocodile Hole [the area at the outskirts of Jakarta where the operators of the September 30 Movement murdered six army generals and one officer].137 In Nugroho’s analysis, Soekarno’s political crimes consisted in the latter’s heretic exegesis and deviant practice of Pancasila. In his view, the New Order’s reading of Pancasila constituted the orthodoxy. A true believer of Pancasila was he who rejected Soekarno’s heretical reading and embraced the New Order’s orthodox interpretation. In contradistinction to any previous regimes since 1945, the New Order defined and justified itself in terms of its purist exegesis and practice of Pancasila and the 1945 constitution as well as its commitment to political stability and economic growth.138 It saw itself as the regime that saved the nation from total chaos in 1965 and

135

Notosusanto, Sejarah Nasional, p. 162-63. Nugroho Notosusanto, Ichtisar Sedjarah R.I. (1945-sekarang) [Outline of the history of the Republic of Indonesia from 1945] (Jakarta: Pusat Sejarah ABRI, 1971), quoted in William H. Frederick and Soeri Soeroto, eds., Pemahaman Sejarah, p. 397. 137 Ibid., p. 401. 138 Notosusanto and Basri, Sejarah Nasional, p. 173. 136

164 as the first regime ever to carry out the long overdue task of fulfilling the promises of the revolution. It is now clear why Nugroho—who since the late 1960s served the New Order as, among other things, the professional historian at the Center for the Armed Forces History—attempted in the 1970s to distance the figure of the late Soekarno from Pancasila, to divorce the heretical exegete from the “canonical scripture.” For Soekarno’s invalid reading of Pancasila during Guided Democracy led to “its being severely undermined by…Marxism-Leninism,” to the point that it was conflated with the evil ideology of Nasakom—a synthesis of nationalism, religion, and communism. Heresy such as this, Nugroho thought, was a “historical fact” well-known to “those who went through the period as adults.” Yet he worried about the generation of Indonesians who reached adulthood after 1965. He was afraid lest they should get the facts wrong about what happened to Pancasila, Soekarno, the PKI, and Indonesia under the accursed Guided Democracy. He insisted, therefore, that young people must “be informed about [our] historical experience so that they would not repeat the same mistakes simply because of ignorance.”139 It was for this purpose that he published in 1981 his book on the authentic ancestry of Pancasila. To accomplish his mission, Nugroho performed two moves in his 1981 book. First, he sought to show that next to one authentic Pancasila there had been a number of dangerous, illegitimate Pancasilas. Second, as far as what he called “the authentic Pancasila” was concerned, he tried to demonstrate that Soekarno was just

139

Notosusanto, Proses Perumusan, p. 13.

165 one of its three inventors. This two-pronged strategy was meant “scientifically” and “critically” to protect Pancasila from two dangers: confusion and leftist readings. Nugroho sought to help the New Order to win the younger generation’s heart and mind. He did so by establishing the claim that there was only one true Pancasila—the New Order’s Pancasila. And there was only one correct interpretation of Pancasila— the New Order’s interpretation. Indeed this point is emphasized in the “Preface” to Nugroho’s book, written by Darji Darmodiharjo, then the Director-General of Primary and Secondary Education: [F]or some of us, there still is some confusion about the formulation of Pancasila. These multiple formulations would lead to conflicting interpretations. A unanimous formulation is to be achieved so that our observations of Pancasila are founded on the same basic view.140 We have discussed so far what members of the intellectual and political elites thought of and did with history. It is important to note that when they were engaged in controversies about history, they often claimed that they were defending the interests of the ordinary people and the younger generation. But what did the controversies really look like from the viewpoint of the ordinary people? What did the ordinary person think, for example, about the debate in 1981 between Nugroho and its critics about Soekarno, Pancasila, and the letters from the Sukamiskin jail? To get a rough idea of what the answer to this question might be, let us listen to Indra Adil, a Jakarta resident whose letter to the editor appeared in the daily Kompas on September 1, 1981:

140

Darji Darmodiharjo, “Preface” to Notosusanto, Proses Perumusan, p. 7.

166 I am an admirer of Soekarno, Hatta, Sjahrir, Agus Salim, and even Tan Malaka, who was labeled as a “communist.” I admire them all because I read history. I don’t know any one of them personally. If history is not written on the basis of “facts,” what would become of me? So let us help Mister Nugroho Notosusanto [by giving him] the “data we have,” not “the historical opinions we want.” If we have no written historical data, let us give him information on “historic events” (which we experienced), as objectively as possible, without any opinion whatsoever. And without adding that “according to Mr. So-and-so, Mr. What’s-his-name had such-and-such personality traits.”141 As this letter reveals, one popular use of history is as a pantheon of national idols. The professional historian is the architect who erects the temple and fashions the idols from a type of precious building material called “fact.” Indra seems to have thought that the search for crude facts and the exhibition thereof are all the historian should do in his task of reconstructing and making sense of the past. In this cult of facts, objectivity is a cardinal virtue which consists in the abolition of all opinions. The historian is supposed to be able to obtain his facts without subjecting the source materials to a critical analysis and to develop a coherent picture of the past without arranging his facts into a plausible synthesis. And the good historian is supposed to turn a deaf ear to what people have to say about the historical figure he happens to be studying. This is because people identify themselves with their idols. Thus when a book says something nasty about the idols, they would feel that the writer insults not only the idols but also their own persons.

141

Indra Adil, “Diperlukan Data Sejarah” [Historical data is needed], Kompas, September 1, 1981, p. 4.

167 In response to Nugroho, Dradjat Suhardjo, an engineer in Yogyakarta born in the late 1940s, insisted, in his letter to the editor which appeared in Kompas on November 20, 1981, that the ultimate authority to decide the true heroic stature of historical figures resided in history itself, not in the hands of just a single historian like Nugroho, who was trapped in the biases of the New Order era in which he worked. Dradjat objected to Nugroho’s project on Pancasila and regarded it as an attempt to diminish Soekarno’s stature as a national hero. Speaking on behalf of his own generation, Dradjat claimed that [A hero] is a person whose entire life and struggle can serve as a model and a source of motivation for the younger generation of a nation in their life struggle in the service of their country, their nation, and their religion.142 It is clear that Soekarno was the hero whom Dradjat had in mind. What Dradjat attempted to convey to Nugroho was this message: Don’t mess around with my Soekarno! To the dismay of the New Order, the posthumous image of Soekarno remained the top dog in the popular pantheon of nationalist idols. His portraits, for example, continue to circulate in rural East Java in the late 1970s, decorating the living rooms of villagers who used to be members of the Indonesian Nationalist Party in the 1950s and 1960s. As late as 1979, a distant uncle of mine, for example—an abangan Javanese farmer, then in his late forties, who lived in a village in the district of Blitar, East

142

Ir. Dradjat Suhardjo, “Nilai Pahlawan” [The importance of heroes], Kompas, November 20, 1981, p. 4.

168 Java—used to go on a pilgrimage to Soekarno’s tomb in the town of Blitar. He traveled on foot, covering the distance of twenty kilometers. So much smoke got in the eyes of quite a few fans of Soekarno that they just could not see the whole man, that is, both as the greatest nationalist of the 1930s and early 1940s and as the terrible dictator in the 1950s and the 1960s. In the campaign period of the 1987 elections, tens of thousands of youths joined the rallies of the Indonesian Democracy Party (PDI), roaming about in procession through the city streets, wearing red T-shirts and headbands, flying red flags, brandishing the images of Soekarno.143 What these New Order kids had in mind was Soekarno as a myth. They lacked the first-hand experience with, and the complex understanding of, the political and economic disasters in the Guided Democracy. The specter of Soekarno may have meant completely other things to them than it did to members of the older generation who opposed the president in the 1960s. These young urban fans of Soekarno may have been fed up with social conditions under the New Order in the late 1980s. Indeed, if they were born after 1967 and therefore lacked firsthand experience with the economy under the Guided Democracy, then they would tend mistakenly to see the economic crisis in 1986, which resulted from the collapse of the world oil prices, as the worst crisis that Indonesia had ever experienced in her biography. They were not yet born when Indonesia had to suffer, in the early 1960s, from her most devastating economic catastrophe in the twentieth century, excluding of 143

See, for example, “Menabur Angin Menuai Badai” [Sowing the wind, reaping the storm], TEMPO, September 17, 1988. See also R. William Liddle, “Indonesia in 1987: The New Order at the Height of Its Power,” Asian Survey 28, 2 (February 1988): 186-87.

169 course the years of the revolution (1945-1950), for which economic statistics are not available. Looking back to their own childhood, what they found as a point of comparison was the great mid-1970s, the Oil Boom era in which Indonesia enjoyed a spectacular economic growth. It’s small wonder, therefore, that the 1986 crisis came to them as a terrible shock. They were disappointed in Soeharto, the existing “father of the development.” In their disappointment, they needed a myth which could serve both as the ideal national father-figure and as a symbol of social protest. Thus, during the 1987 elections, they turned to the mythic image of Soekarno and gave their votes to PDI, the partial incarnation of Soekarno’s party from the pre-New Order era, the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), which was the biggest vote earner in the 1955 elections.144 The political outcome of it all was that in the 1987 elections the PDI gained a 10.9 % vote total, a 38 % improvement over its accomplishment in the 1982 elections.145 This, of course, was no match for the performance of Golkar, the regime’s political party, which managed to obtain 73% of the total votes (a 9% increase over its achievement in 1982).146 Reading ominous meanings into this event, however, supporters of the New Order sniffed danger. They feared, for instance, that the Indonesian Communist Party 144

It should be pointed out, however, that the Sukarno revival started in the late 1970s. It started, Pierre Labrousse observes, on January 24, 1978, when Soeharto, “both personally and in his capacity as President of the Republic, has decided to renovate Bung Karno’s tomb.” This “sparked a surge of commemorative items: articles, popular books sold on the sidewalk, posters, stickers… which quickly forced the government to take authoritarian measures of containment, denouncing commercialization of the affair.” See Pierre Labrousse, “The Second Life of Bung Karno: Analysis of the Myth (1978-1981),” Indonesia 57 (1993): 176-77. 145 Liddle, “Indonesia in 1987,” ibid. 146 Ibid., p. 180.

170 (PKI) was about to rise from the dead. The sight of the city streets “turned all red” by the large crowds of the PDI youths parading the portraits of Soekarno could not help but remind Soegiarso Soerojo, for example, of “the PKI’s rebellion in Madiun in 1948.”147 This retired Army intelligence officer-turned-journalist seems to have taken an overly state-centric look at the youths’ behavior, interpreting it in political rather than in sociological terms. He ended up with a somewhat patronizing conclusion: It was all about Johnny-come-lately who did not know about how the insidious PKI stabbed the nation in the back in 1965. It was all about young people who were lost in the dark because they just did not get their facts right. Soegiarso may have been right in his conclusion. But did it get to the beating heart of the matter? Anyway, as a solution to what he thought was the problem, he sought to undertake to get the historical record straight: It’s high time to straighten out our national history, to write it objectively so that it may serve as a mirror for the future national leaders, and for the younger generation who still have not known their true national history.148 To contribute to this crusade for the rectification of history, in May 1988, he published, at his own expense, Siapa Menabur Angin Akan Menuai Badai, or “He Who Sows the Wind Will Reap the Storm,” a book which puts forward the central

147

“Menabur Angin,” ibid. Soegiarso Soerojo, Siapa Menabur Angin Akan Menuai Badai [He who sows the wind will reap the storm] (Jakarta: By the author, 1988), p. 396. 148

171 thesis that Soekarno, a consistent Marxist, was guilty of a conspiracy with the PKI in the September 30 Movement to turn Indonesia into a communist country.149 Interestingly, President Soeharto, too, was alarmed at the sudden rise of the PDI’s popularity and the cult of Soekarno among urban youths in 1987. Like Soegiarso, he felt that the specter of the PKI was haunting the country. His regime took a number of measures to exorcise the specter. It banned the use of Soekarno’s visual images in the campaign for the 1992 elections.150 In 1987, the mayor of Surakarta forbade people to parade Soekarno’s posters in the celebration of Independence Day unless they were displayed in tandem with Hatta’s images.151 And in Central Java in 1990, the police sought to stop the circulation of the PKI’s symbol and old money bills of the 1960s bearing the images of Soekarno.152 More interestingly, in an instance of political impulsiveness, Soeharto, right after the end of the 1987 elections, ordered a new set of school history books, for students in secondary schools and colleges, which would deal with the 1950s and 1960s, with a particular emphasis on the origins of the September 30 Movement in 1965. Speaking on behalf of Soeharto, the Minister of Social Welfare Alamsjah Ratu Perwiranegara explained that this attempt at “equal distribution of national history” was intended to

149

Ibid., pp. 371-98. Karen Brooks, “The Rustle of Ghosts: Bung Karno in the New Order,” Indonesia 60 (October 1995): 85. 151 “Boleh BK Asal dengan Bung Hatta” [Bung Karno is OK, as long as he is together with Bung Hatta], TEMPO, August 22, 1987, p. 40. 152 Ariel Heryanto, “Where Communism never dies: Violence, trauma and narration in the last Cold War capitalist authoritarian state,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, 2: 161. 150

172 “prevent people from celebrating the villain and condemning the hero.”153 All these reactions stood in stark contrast to the fact that in the 1970s Soeharto did a number of things to rehabilitate the image of Soekarno. In 1978, in honor of Soekarno’s role in the creation of Pancasila, the New Order declared June 1 as Pancasila Day. It also refurbished Soekarno’s humble tomb in Blitar into a grand mausoleum.154 In 1979, Soeharto ordered the building of Soekarno’s and Hatta’s statues in Jakarta to celebrate them as the proclaimers of independence.155 In 1980, after banning for ten years Soekarno’s collection of essays Dibawah Bendera Revolusi (“Under the Banner of the Revolution”), the Attorney General revoked the ban.156 Limited by his top-down, state-centric frame of mind, Soeharto seems to have adopted this three-step reasoning: (1) youths’ passion for the PDI and the image of Soekarno resulted from (2) their lack of historical knowledge, which in turn stemmed from (3) the failure of schools to teach them history. This reasoning reveals Soeharto’s instrumental view of history, that is, history as an ideological tool for serving the dayto-day political needs of the state. This instance of impetuosity on the part of Soeharto reflected the sense of insecurity he may have suffered since the outbreak of the 1986 economic crisis. The insecurity was so intense that the “ghost” of Soekarno was strong 153

“Menurut Alamsjah: Presiden Minta Penyusunan Buku Baru Sejarah 19501965” [According to Alamsjah: The president ordered new history books on the period from 1950 to 1965], Kompas, May 4, 1987, p. 1. 154 “Rehabilitasi Bung Karno” [Rehabilitating Brother Karno], Kompas, May 25, 1978, p. 4. See also Pierre Labrousse, “The Second Life,” ibid.: 175, 177. 155 Brooks, “The Rustle of Ghosts,” p. 67. On August 17, 1980 Soeharto inaugurated the statues on Pegangsaan Timur Street. See Labrousse, “The Second Life,” ibid., 177. 156 “Buku Di Bawah Bendera Revolusi Boleh Beredar Kembali” [Under the Banner of the Revolution is allowed to circulate again], Kompas, June 6, 1980, p. 3.

173 enough to frighten him. In less than a week, though, he came to his senses. He seems to have realized that his fears were groundless. After all, had not the state done more than enough to produce, disseminate, and utilize a set of educational tools for championing the New Order’s version of contemporary history? Indeed, in 1975, the Ministry of Education and Culture released a six-volume standard series on Indonesian national history. In 1977, the six-volume abridged edition of that series was published by the ministry for mandatory use in secondary schools throughout the country.157 And in 1984, by Soeharto’s order, Nugroho Notosusanto, then the minister of education and culture, introduced, into the nationwide school curricula, from kindergarten to senior high school, a new compulsory course titled the History of the National Struggle (PSPB).158 Having regained his composure, Soeharto revised his order. Speaking on his behalf, the Minister of Education and Culture Fuad Hassan informed the press that what the president ordered was not the writing of new history textbooks on the period of 1950-65 but that “contemporary history be introduced to our young generation in the best way possible.”159

157

Team Penyusun, “Prakata” [Preface], Sejarah-SMA, p. 5. Office of the Public Relations, Ministry of Education and Culture, “PSPB, Bidang Studi Baru” [PSPB, a new course], Kompas, August 5, 1983, p. 4. 159 “Bukan Penulisannya, tetapi Bagaimana Memperkenalkan Isinya” [What matters is not writing new books; what matters, rather, is how to present the contents of the existing books], Kompas, May 8, 1987, p. 1. 158

174 17. Education That Went Awry: Students’ and Teachers’ Experience with History in the New Order In mid-1982 Soeharto was alarmed at what he saw as the erosion of patriotism and the misunderstanding of history on the part of the younger generation, who were supposed to continue the nation’s struggle.160 Soeharto’s anxiety was a reaction to a number of symptoms which appeared in the late 1970s. There were reports in the print media on school kids who knew next to nothing of the national heroes, people whom the New Order celebrated as the personification of the 1945 patriotic values. In November 1978, in a talk with the daily Kompas, a couple of Jakarta senior high school students made confessions such as this: We don’t know much about [national] heroes. The history course we take in school about them is not interesting at all. It is delivered in a dull way. Few story books on [national] heroes are engaging. And even these can hardly compete with pop novels about love. If pop novels continue to inundate [the market] like they do nowadays, it would be hard for me to read stories of the [national] heroes.161 Ironically, this confession appeared in Kompas on November 10—the Heroes’ Day. In the competition for the hearts and minds of the younger generation, pop novels triumphed over school history books. This may have come as a shock to Soeharto, then a 57-year-old president who, standing on top of the political hierarchy, took a bird-eye look at the rapidly changing landscape of Indonesian society. 160

See G. Moedjanto, “PSPB, Bidang Studi Baru” [PSPB, a new course], Kompas, July 25, 1983, p. 4. 161 “Tidak Tahu Banyak tentang Para Pahlawan” [Don’t know much about the heroes], Kompas, November 10, 1978, p. 1.

175 Estranged from his own children since his ascension to full presidency in 1968,162 he had become out touch with the generation of young people whom his own regime had created in a decade of unprecedented economic growth. The more inscrutable the youths appeared in his eyes, the more paranoid he became in his interpretation of their thoughts, words, and deeds. On the other hand, what did it feel like for Jakarta youths in the late 1970s when they “devoured” the existing school books about national heroes? Here is what one of them told us: Actually, I do love stories about courage and sacrifice. But unfortunately, very few of the available books on [national] heroes present well-rounded portrayals of their characters. Most of the existing books about them contain nothing but a bunch of biographical details or curricula vitae. So don’t be surprised that I know little about [national] heroes.163 In their late teens, these urban youths had already developed some idea of what a good memoir, biography, or autobiography should look like. As an observation by Kompas on the library of a Jakarta senior high school showed, they seem to have preferred the Indonesian translations of O. G. Roeder’s The Smiling General: President Soeharto of Indonesia or K’tut Tantri’s Revolt in Paradise to poorly written books such as The Spirit of Struggle, an anthology of brief biographical essays on prominent Indonesians in pharmacy, shipping, sports, and the military. And one schoolgirl talked about how she relished Adam Malik’s autobiography, Serving the 162

R. E. Elson, Suharto: A Political Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 249. 163 “Tidak Tahu Banyak,” ibid, p. 1.

176 Republic, because it entertained her with engaging accounts of Malik’s personal transformation from childhood to adulthood. 164 Ironically, although decent memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies were available in the libraries of some senior high schools in Jakarta, no students reported that their teachers had used such texts in the classroom to make the study of history a thought-provoking educational experience. (It was wrong to think, however, that libraries of some senior high schools in the capital reflected the situation of their counterparts in the entire country. In fact, as late as 1989, the dearth of even the required school textbooks remained a persistent problem countrywide. In urban schools, one book had to serve five to eight students while in rural schools a single book had to be shared by twelve students.165) In any case, in the actual making of the state policies concerning national education, the aspirations of school children carried very little weight. In the everyday classroom interaction, it was never up to students to decide which books to read for the history course and for any course for that matter. Life taught them in the end that the school never belonged to them. Experience taught them that the secrets to doing well in school were for the “conformists” to play the game by the teacher’s rules and for the “anarchists” to get away with cheating. In 1978, one senior high school student in Yogyakarta reported to TEMPO that cheating had become the art of doing well in exams.166

164

Ibid. “Kurikulum Baru Tanpa PSPB” [A new curriculum without PSPB], TEMPO, August 10, 1991, p. 37. 166 M. S. B. Baron, “Sistim Pendidikan: Suara Siswa SMA” [Education system: The voice of a junior high school student], TEMPO, July 29, 1978, p. 30. 165

177 Thus, as far as the official teaching of history at school was concerned, our Jakarta students’ enchanted encounter in 1978 with good memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies, for instance, was simply irrelevant. For the point was that history in school was reduced to a great national epic. In the classroom, all kids and youths were obliged solemnly to listen as the history teacher orated, telling them the legends of the national struggle, according to a script called the 1975 curriculum. This project was meant to be the medium for the transmission of patriotic principles from the 1945 generation of warriors to the younger generation. Yet, due to its disregard of the aesthetic and rhetorical aspects of historiography, the project went awry. It turned out that kids and youths did not use history as a goblet from which to drink the elixir of patriotism. They often used it simply as a means to do well in exams. Since the exams consisted mostly of objective question formats (multiple-choice, matching, true-orfalse, and sentence completion), they knew that, in addition to cheating, memorizing dates, places, names, events, and the reigns of sovereigns was all they needed to do in order to win good grades. So they ended up being “pragmatists.” As soon as exams were over, it was time for them to flush history out of the system. As one student bluntly remarked: Don’t ask me about history courses. We learn history just to prepare for exams. We know for example when [Sultan] Hassanuddin was born and when he ruled. But that’s all. We know nothing about his attitudes and character. I bet our teachers don’t know about this stuff either.167

167

“Tidak Tahu Banyak,” ibid., p. 1.

178 Soeharto’s vision of history as a tool for the promotion of patriotism and for legitimizing the New Order was one thing; the actual “translation” of his vision into the day-to-day triadic interaction among teachers, textbooks, and students in the classroom was quite another. Much to his chagrin, so much was “lost in translation” that Soeharto’s intervention to order the character the younger generation wound up in disorder. This “mistranslation” was the unintended effect of the structural resistance of the school system to external intervention by Soeharto. For, as I shall demonstrate below, the school system in the New Order, if it was to work and survive at all, was obliged to satisfy its own internal demands. In the end, the disorder that emerged in the school system reflected the clash (and the inevitable compromise) between Soeharto’s desires and the school system’s internal requirements. The school system turned out to be a tough nut for Soeharto to crack. And contrary to the image of Soeharto as a dictator capable of controlling everything, the image that some critics of the New Order want us to believe, it turned out that even in the heyday of the regime the general failed to conquer the school system. Criticism by Western-educated, university-based historians notwithstanding, the actual praxis in the teaching of history in the New Order continued to revolve around the virtues of rote learning. Reduced to the rigid routine of memorization and repetition, history became one of the most mind-numbing subjects in the eyes of many students.168 This situation, in turn, undermined Soeharto’s project. In June 1982, for example, some students of several junior high schools in Jakarta concurred that history 168

“Menghidupkan Sejarah dalam Kelas” [To breath life into history in the classroom], TEMPO, September 10, 1983, p. 64.

179 was a dull subject. Asked if history should be abolished, they differed from one another. Insisting that history had introduced them to the origins of Indonesia as an idea and a political entity, some said, “No.” Yet, some, in boredom, simply said that it “had better be eliminated.”169 The teaching of history in the New Order was also characterized by the incompatibility between course contents and stages of students’ cognitive development. Indeed, it was neither themes nor levels of complexity which distinguished the standard history books for junior high school with those for senior high. The former were simply the abbreviated version of the latter—as if a thirteenyear old girl was just a miniature of her seventeen-year-old sister. It is small wonder, therefore, that in 1982 a junior high school student in Yogyakarta wrestled with a puzzle: Why was it that Ken Angrok, an adventurer, ended up being the king of Singhasāri after he, in quite a deceitful manner, killed Tunggul Ametung. Sure, it was a cinch for her to memorize dates and names. But it was quite beyond her to grasp the logics that governed these political events. It was rather bizarre, in the first place, that a fifteen-year-old kid must study state-level politics in East Java of the thirteenth century. Yet, the instructional objective was that she should be able to pass moral judgment on Ken Angrok’s exploits. As it turned out, not even her history teacher was

169

“Guru dan Siswa SMP Bicara Soal Pelajaran Sejarah Nasional” [Junior high school teachers and students discussed the course on national history], Kompas, June 3, 1982, p. 6.

180 able to solve the puzzle.170 Owing to the teacher’s frequent failure to respond intelligently to such puzzles, she developed apathy towards history. In the campaign period for the 1982 elections, Kompas asked a group of teenagers in Jakarta why they supported the Indonesian Democracy Party (PDI). One of them, an eighteen-year-old youth named Ganda explained that he saw the party as the contemporary incarnation of the late president Soekarno’s aspirations for bringing welfare to the “poor little people” (marhaen). He was barely six when the president died in 1970. But after a couple of books he hit upon, after a bunch of engaging tales his mom and dad told him, Ganda became a big fan of Soekarno.171 Yet this youngster’s ahistorical association of people’s desire for welfare with the romantic image of Soekarno might have offended Soeharto, whose self-pride and political legitimacy rested on the claim that he was the first ruler ever to bring economic development to Indonesia. (Indeed, in 1984, he received from the People’s Consultative Assembly the title of “Father of Development.” In November 1985, as the token of its appreciation for Indonesia’s success in attaining rice self-sufficiency the year before, the FAO invited Soeharto to deliver a speech in its 40th anniversary celebration in Rome.172) It is important to add that the attraction of some youths to the PDI was also a side effect of Soeharto’s success in mobilizing the Golkar Party to win him electoral legitimacy. It was mandatory for civil servants to give their votes to

170

“Dalam Sejarah Tanpa Kisah” [In history without story], TEMPO, June 12, 1982, p. 68. 171 “PDI Mengakhiri Masa Kampanye di Ibukota” [PDI ended its campaign period in the capital], Kompas, April 29, 1982, p. 12. 172 Elson, Suharto, p. 235.

181 Golkar in the elections. And government officials were mobilized as vote-getters during the campaign period. Thus, already in the 1978 elections, some youths had begun to see Golkar as the political party for the old folks. As one senior high school student in Yogyakarta noted, it was “embarrassing” for young people to vote for Golkar. That was why during the campaign period these age-conscious youths flocked to attend the PDI rallies or those of the Development Unity Party (PPP) or even both.173 Incidents such as these led Soeharto to conclude in 1982 that things were going wrong in the teaching of contemporary Indonesian history to the younger generation in schools. The 1975 curriculum, he believed, put too much emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge at the expense of the internalization of patriotic values. Yet he also believed that, in spite of that emphasis, young people were still ignorant of the history of the national struggle. He was afraid that this untoward situation would divert the nation away from its true future—“the just and prosperous society on the basis of Pancasila and the 1945 constitution.” In 1983, seeking to solve this problem, he ordered the Ministry of Education and Culture to design a new course called the History of the National Struggle (PSPB) and to include it as a mandatory component in the nationwide school curricula, from kindergarten up to senior high school. PSPB was intended to promote patriotism and nationalism and to ensure the smooth transfer of Pancasila and the 1945 values. To achieve all these goals, PSPB was employed in tandem with two other compulsory courses—Pancasila Morals and Indonesian

173

Baron, “Sistim Pendidikan,” p. 31.

182 National History. While Pancasila Morals was intended to operate in the “moral domain” and Indonesian National History in the “cognitive domain,” PSPB was designed specifically to address the “affective domain.”174 This knee-jerk tinkering with the teaching of history backfired. Between Soeharto up at the Bina Graha and millions of students at schools all over the country there were at least two layers of operators responsible for the design and implementation of PSPB. Immediately below Soeharto was a team of bureaucrats from the Ministry of Education and Culture and from the University of Indonesia. Before long, two major members of the team were engaged in a battle for interpretation and implementation of Soeharto’s vision. In his capacity as Minister of Education and Culture, Nugroho Notosusanto insisted that PSPB should begin from the 1945 declaration of independence. But Nugroho’s main assistant in the PSPB project, the UI sociologist Harsja W. Bachtiar contended that PSPB’s starting point should be the Srivijaya Empire of the 7th to 13th century. In addition to the question of periodization, they also differed from each other on what should be the core of PSPB. Harsja insisted on history while Nugroho argued for Pancasila. Yet, before working out a consensus, each began to carry out his own PSPB training program for school teachers throughout the country. Still worse, the Harsja-Nugroho debate found its enactment in a battle of books. Commercial publishers on Java churned out school textbooks on the basis of Harsja’s interpretation of PSPB. But Nugroho banned these books after they were in use for while in many schools in Yogyakarta. In their place, 174

For explication of the logics behind PSPB, see, for example, G. Moedjanto, “PSPB, Bidang Studi Baru,” p. 4.

183 Nugroho prescribed a set of books that represented his version of PSPB. Yet, these books were problematic as well. One was available in a deluxe edition and too costly for most teachers and students to buy. The other was actually the third volume of the junior high school series of standard textbooks on the national history. It contained a controversial passage regarding Soekarno, which itself provoked a fiery debate in the media. 175 It was indeed an irony that Soeharto’s will to order in 1982 ended up in a pedagogical disorder in 1983-1985. In the end, disorder was what students and history teachers had to suffer, after two high officials came to blows, after two training programs cancelled each other, and after two sets of textbooks collided. Did the teaching of history get any better? Not at all. Students and teachers complained about senseless reiteration and replication of history courses, which resulted in a waste of time, energy, money, and opportunity. Indeed, PSPB, Pancasila Morals, and National History had so many contents in common that students and teachers just could not see why they were not merged into one single course.176 In the New Order, school teachers in general had to wrestle with a legion of problems, most of which, in my view, were symptoms of the fact that Indonesia had not yet achieved full-blown modernity. Many Indonesians agreed that modernity consisted of three core ingredients: national independence, social justice, and economic prosperity. The members of the political elite differed, though, in what

175

St. Sularto and S. E. Darsono, “Kasus PSPB, Contoh Utama Improvisasi Kebijaksanaan Pendidikan,” [The case of PSPB: A major instance of improvisation in educational policy], Kompas, September 30, 1985, pp. 4-5. 176 “Menempatkan Sejarah dalam Kelas” [Placing history in the classroom], TEMPO, September 28, 1985, p. 71.

184 should be the ideological grand design for modernity. S. K. Kartosuwiryo and Muhammad Natsir insisted on Islam. Tan Malaka and D. N. Aidit dreamt of modern Indonesia in Marxist or Leninist terms. Soekarno offered a volatile mix of nationalism, Marxism, and Islam. Soeharto engaged in a crusade for Pancasila and the 1945 constitution. Thus, though Indonesia secured her sovereignty in 1949, it was not until late 1969, under the diktats of the New Order, that she embarked on a systematic project of economic development. It would be more instructive, I think, for us to bear this context in mind as we consider a range of problems confronting history teachers, in particular, and school teachers, in general, in the New Order Indonesia. A poignant letter-to-the editor, entitled “Djeritan Seorang Guru” (The Cry of a Teacher) appeared in the daily Kompas on August 29, 1968, that is, eight months after Soeharto secured the full presidency. Its author, Fintosih S. B. was the principal of a state primary school in Central Jakarta. A teacher since 1950, he told the audience that … even today [1968] school teachers still can’t live a decent life. In 1957, for instance, some teachers were even forced to earn extra income by working in the evening as pedicab drivers. Later, following a trend in society, some teachers began to generate extra income by exploiting their own pupils. Yet, the proceeds of such an undertaking were meager, just enough to save them from starvation.177 In the late 1960s, the press often reported on parents who accused teachers of corrupt practices, that is, of levying extra money from their pupils—other than the authorized fees—not for education-related projects but for supplementing their

177

Fintosih F. B., “Djeritan Seorang Guru” [The cry of a teacher], Kompas, August 29, 1968, p. 2.

185 monthly wages. In defense of the profession, Fintosih wrote his letter to the editor of Kompas, pleading with journalists, parents, and the general public to consider the situation not only from the parent’s point of view but also from that of the teacher. Indeed, the objective financial situation of teachers was really miserable. In 1970-71, the economist Ruth Daroesman estimated that the average monthly salaries were Rp 5,500 for primary, Rp 8,250 for junior high, and Rp 10,083 for senior high school teachers.178 (In 1971 US$ 1 was equivalent to Rp 374). The New Order saw education as a major instrument for human development as well as economic growth. The economist Anne Booth, for instance, notes that the regime “had substantial success in making…basic education widely available.” In 1988, therefore, it began to shift the emphasis to secondary education. To support her claim, she calls our attention to statistical data such as: In 1968 merely 41.4 percent of the children aged between seven and twelve were in primary school. By 1993 proeducation policies and parents’ rising ambitions for their children had more than doubled this rate—to 93.5 percent. 179 In spite of this success story, the kind of problem confronting teachers in the 1950s and 1960s continued to pester their successors in the 1980s. A survey conducted by TEMPO in 1984 of 701 teachers on Java, North Sumatra, and other provinces revealed disappointing findings. Most of the respondents (80.5%) confessed that to 178

Ruth Daroesman, “Finance of Education: Part II,” Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 8, 1 (March 1972): 43. 179 Anne Booth, “Development: Achievement and Weakness,” in Indonesia Beyond Suharto: Polity, Economy, Society, Transition, ed. Donald K. Emmerson (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 124.

186 make ends meet they had to do odd jobs. Some, for example, provided their pupils with extracurricular tutorials at a cost. And others, in the absence of standard PSPB textbooks, seized the opportunity: they scribbled their own junk texts, made stenciled copies, and then sold them to their students. Due to this and other kinds of moonlighting, teachers did not have enough time to read at all, never mind prepare systematic lesson plans.180 In 1982, some history teachers complained that owing to poverty they could not afford supplementary books for any given course they taught, let alone a personal library. Thus, they had to content themselves with relying on a single low-priced textbook. It was simply beyond their means, for example, to purchase the deluxe PSPB standard textbook, Thirty Years of Indonesian Independence, which cost, at the time, tens of thousands of rupiahs.181 (In 1982 US$ 1 was equivalent to Rp 666.) Anne Booth remarks that chronic poverty among state-employed teachers could not have been solved simply by increasing their salaries. By 1994, for example, teachers “account for nearly half of all four million civil servants in Indonesia.” Thus, it would have been politically foolish for the New Order simply to raise teachers’ salaries without also raising those of the rest of the civil servants.182 Inadequate compensation for teachers was not the only institutional problem confronting the education system in the New Order. In TEMPO's 1984 survey, half the 180

“Dari Diktat Gombal Sampai…” [From bullshit mimeographed lecture notes to…], TEMPO, May 5, 1984, p. 48. 181 “Guru dan Siswa SMP,” ibid., p. 1; “Sejarah Setelah Pemilu” [History after elections], TEMPO, May 16, 1987; “Kebingungan Para Guru dan Murid” [Teachers’ and students’ perplexity], Kompas, August 19, 1993, p. 10. 182 Booth, “Development,” ibid., p. 127.

187 teachers reported that the existing curricula contained too many courses for the pupils to eat, digest, and then regurgitate in the examination. Most teachers (76 %) complained about large classes and unbalanced teacher-student ratios. To make matters worse, the government modified its policy on education frequently. Many teachers were too poorly qualified to function as effective educators. To begin with, C. E. Beeby observed in 1979 that teacher training institutions did not “attract the brightest students.”183 The last thing that intellectually gifted students dreamed of was working as primary or secondary teachers. If they loved teaching at all, they would wish to be university lecturers. Most, however, desired to be prestigious and well-paid professionals: engineers, physicians, dentists, military officers, or economists. Furthermore, as TEMPO’s survey in 1984 indicated, 40 percent of the respondents confessed that to be a teacher was not their original career goal after all. Teaching was a job they wound up doing after they failed to get their dream jobs. 184 And reports also appeared in the press every now and then about teachers who understood neither the field of study nor the art of teaching. An anecdote was told, for example, of a junior high school teacher of history who tried on his own to develop some degree of expertise in the field by devouring all kinds of reading material: newspapers, magazines, and monographs. Indeed, he did not forget to read the multi-volume standard work on Indonesian history, focusing on the 20th century, skimming through the rest. Yet, when TEMPO asked for his comment on the work, he

183

C. E. Beeby, Assessment of Indonesian Education: A Guide in Planning (Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research, 1979), p. 87. 184 “Dari Diktat Gombal,” ibid.

188 just said, “Gee! It’s pretty heavy.”185 This terse remark reflected two things: It was not just that the work itself was written in a hurry186—as one of its authors, the historian Taufik Abdullah, admitted—but also that the teacher himself may have lacked the literary skills to manage tough texts: texts that possess intricate structures and difficult contents. Still worse, some teachers seem to have thought that fancy teaching methods were all they needed to make up for their inadequate command of the subject matter. Thus, they tried to go beyond monologues and rote learning and began to experiment with new pedagogical tricks such as group discussion, “student-centered learning,” psychodrama, field trip to historic sites, newspaper clippings, humorous storytelling and so forth. But all to no avail. The techniques did not work the way they were supposed to work. As one teacher complained, during a typical field trip, students did not use monuments as media to study history. All they did was take pictures of one another, using the monuments as some kind of exotic backgrounds.187 And when storytelling failed to attract pupils’ attention in the classroom, a teacher simply explained: “I just can’t beat the charms of imported cartoon movies.”188 Exceptions, of course, existed. But this occurred when the teacher was able to combine wisdom with technique. In 1981, in the sixteenth year of his career, La Hamisu—a forty-six-year-old history teacher of the State Senior High School 3 in 185

“Sejarah Setelah Pemilu,” ibid. Ibid. and see also Katharine E. McGregor, “Nugroho Notosusanto: The Legacy of a Historian in the Service of an Authoritarian Regime,” in Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present, ed. Mary S. Zurbuchen (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), p. 221. 187 “Kebingungan Para Guru,” ibid. 188 “Guru dan Siswa SMP,” ibid.; “Sejarah Setelah Pemilu,” ibid.; and “Kebingungan Para Guru,” ibid. 186

189 Jakarta—hit upon a bright idea to make learning history an exciting enterprise for his teenage students. Dividing the students in his class into several teams of researchers, he sent them on a mission to study the life and work of Soekarno. These groups of “teenage historians” then left the classroom for “the field”: they scrutinized newspaper clippings, perused monographs, and even interviewed Soekarno’s contemporaries such as General Nasution and Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX. By the end of the semester, the junior historians were required to share the fruits of their research projects in a seminar, in which they learned to compare Soekarno with Napoleon. With La Hamisu as the moderator, a lively exchange of knowledge and opinions took place among these “junior scholars.” In May 1983, the government of Indonesia decorated La Hamisu with the Medal of Honor for his imaginative approach to the teaching of history.189 It is important to keep in mind that it took him 16 years to come up with the successful breakthrough. And this, I think, was not the story about the triumph of the New Order system of education. This was the triumph of a teacher who—left to his own devices—made it, in the end, to rise above personal as well as institutional constraints. One element in La Hamisu’s innovation was “anarchy.” He had the nerve to break the state-imposed rules that regulated the measurement of students’ academic performance. He was aware, I think, that what he did was train his students to be “mini-historians.” And this rendered irrelevant the usual recognize-and-recall-type of examination. Thus, he discarded this evaluation method. Instead, he graded his pupils

189

“Menghidupkan Sejarah,” ibid.

190 on the basis of how well they did the component tasks in the mini research project: reading secondary sources, collecting primary sources, and interviewing informants.190 There was a limit, of course, to how far Hamisu-style anarchy could go. The state final exam always consisted mostly of “objective” questions. Yet, the experience with advanced cognitive tasks in their projects may have enabled the pupils to do well in the less challenging state final exam. Other teachers, however, were just afraid to take a risk. And they just did not want to do the extra work that any innovation would require of them. It was no wonder, therefore, that 46 percent of teachers in TEMPO’s 1984 survey decided to stick to rote learning because it entailed a much more convenient technique for evaluating students’ progress: the multiple-choice examination.191 Indeed, most teachers thought that their success as educators was defined by the passing rates of their students on state-managed final examination. Ironically, in a situation where the actual praxis of education was devoted more to doing well in state exams than to intellectual transformation, many teachers still expected their students’ to display enthusiasm and participation in the classrooms. In the midst of this educational disorder, a bright senior high school student in Yogya could not help but wonder in 1978: [I]s this the system of education that is supposed to breed technocrats, entrepreneurs, and national leaders? Is this supposed to be the way to train [the young] to deal with national problems in the future: to manage the nation’s economy, government, and education?192

190

Ibid. “Dari Diktat Gombal,” ibid. 192 Baron, “Sistim Pendidikan,”ibid. 191

191

18. The Plight of the Academic Historian in the New Order a. The Politics of Representation: Chaos, “Pornography,” and Purification The academic historian and the high-ranking mandarin in the New Order had one characteristic in common: both were anxious that controversies over historical events and figures would provoke social unrest. Underlying this anxiety was their distrust in ordinary people’s capacity to handle the differences they had in remembering and representing aspect of the national past. To some extent, the anxiety had its roots in 1965, when ideological differences among political parties were “solved” in a frenzy of killings. That is, when rhetoric and verbal violence led to physical violence. People who remembered the 1965 matanza were nervous when they saw passionate public debates rage in the press in the following decades. In the late 1970s and mid-1980s, some academic historians engaged in meditations on the controversy in the early 1970s over the birth of Indonesia. They thought to themselves, “What went wrong? What is to be done?” The themes in their meditations exposed the dilemma that confronted the academic historian in New Order Indonesia. In 1979, Abdurrachman Surjomihardjo, a historian at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, argued that controversies resulted from confusion and “impurities” in the works of amateur historians. Confusion and “impurities,” he went on, occurred for two reasons. First, amateur historians did not know how to deal with source materials in a critical manner. And the trouble was that of all social sciences, history was “the most

192 vulnerable to amateurism.”193 Second, a writer’s social position and political interests affect the texts he writes. Amateur historians had smuggled their political beliefs into their texts, especially if these texts dealt with contemporary history.194 Similarly, another academic historian at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Taufik Abdullah, regarded amateur historiography with misgivings. He saw that common sense resided at the core of historical reasoning. Just about everybody, therefore, could dabble in history. And there were people who fancied that a lot of reading, a gift for memorizing, and a bit of writing skill were all they needed to write history. This false belief led to the proliferation of history books marred by anachronism, disregard for context, and reductionism. On the other hand, Taufik insisted that history remain “public property.” Participation in public discussions about history would provide people with the chance to acquire historical consciousness that would help them prepare for the future. To minimize errors in amateur historiography, he suggested that the principles of ethical, critical, and analytical history be disseminated to the public.195 Yet he did not specify the ways in which such dissemination should be carried out. As I mentioned above, in 1980-81 a fiery debate raged in the press over some letters that Soekarno purportedly wrote in 1933 to the Dutch in which he begged them not to exile him, promising to them that he would quit nationalist politics. Members of 193

Abdurrachman Surjomihardjo, Pembinaan Bangsa dan Masalah Historiografi [Nation building and problems in historiography] (Jakarta: Yayasan Idayu, 1979), p. 109. 194 Ibid. 195 Taufik Abdullah, “Kata Pengantar” [Preface] in Surjomihardjo, Pembinaan Bangsa, p. 4.

193 the political and intellectual elite were divided into two warring camps: one defending the sacred image of Soekarno, the other debunking it. Watching this partisan controversy from the periphery, professional historians were worried that chaos would tear society asunder. They were still in fear of the specter of chaos when they convened the third National History Seminar in Jakarta, November 10-13, 1981. Except for the opening and closing ceremonies, all the sessions in the seminar were closed to the public. When the press questioned the point of all this secrecy, Haryati Soebadio, the Director-General of Culture, explained, “Some research projects [discussed in the seminar] were still unfinished. If they were open to the public, confusion would follow.”196 Nine years passed since the third National History Seminar in Jakarta but the specter of chaos continued to persecute the community of academic historians. Thus, in the opening address to the fifth National History Seminar in Semarang, August 2730, 1990, the Minister of Education and Culture Fuad Hassan remarked: It is advisable that the discussions in this seminar be conducted in a free and thorough manner. Yet, things that are still uncertain and therefore require further study are to be kept within the confines of the conference room. If they are leaked to the public, they may bring about social unrest.197 196

“Seminar Sejarah Nasional III Ditutup: Diharapkan SSN Diadakan Empat Tahun Sekali” [The third national history seminar was closed: It should be held every four year], Kompas, November 14, 1981, pp. 1, 9. See also “Seminar Sejarah Nasional III Berlangsung Tertutup” [The third national history seminar was closed to the public], Kompas, November 6, 1981, p. 6. 197 Fuad Hassan, “Sambutan Menteri Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan” [Opening lecture] in Seminar Sejarah Nasional V: Subtema Sejarah Perjuangan [The fifth national history seminar: Sub-theme history of struggle], ed. Anhar Gonggong (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1990), p. xx.

194

Why this association between uncertainty and social disorder? Fuad Hassan saw history as a tool for “reinforcing Indonesia’s unity and integrity” and for “stimulating the zest for development.”198 The implication was that uncertainty among ordinary citizens about national history was supposed to give rise to a state of political “cognitive dissonance.” This situation would lead to political instability which in turn would sabotage economic development. Indeed, in the New Order everything was made subservient to economic development. The mantras of development permeated many aspects of everyday life. Even academic historians could not avoid using the mantras. Consider, for example, the guiding theme for the fifth National History Seminar. It ran something like this: “The Contribution of History to Nation-Building in Anticipation of the Take-Off Stage.” “Take-off stage” was a term borrowed from W. W. Rostow’s theory of the stages of economic growth. What did Indonesian youths in the New Order think about this culture of secrecy among professional historians? An intriguing trend emerged in some major cities in the late 1980s: Some college students—who wished to see themselves as young intellectuals and not as just another bunch of would-be cogs and wheels in the grand development machine—set up informal study groups where “alternative books” were photocopied, circulated, perused, and passionately discussed, and in which they also engaged in critical debates on major issues in their contemporary society, and in which they learned to write essays and get them published in local as well national

198

Ibid., p. xix.

195 newspapers. 199 In 1989, one study group activist named Taufiek Rahzen, a chemical engineering student at the Gadjah Mada University in Yogya made a cynical comment on the culture of secrecy on the part of the government and academic historians: …it is as if young people were astonished at the historical controversy over He Who Sows the Wind Will Reap the Storm. They are under the impression that history is some kind of pornography. That is, some parts of it are left visible while the others are half-covered and still others are just forbidden to look at.200 Taufiek might have been interested in Soegiarso Soerojo’s declaration that he wrote the book He Who Shows the Wind Will Reap the Storm because he wanted to “straighten out national history” and “expose those aspects of Soekarno’s personality that have hitherto been covered up.”201 Seeing himself as a legitimate stakeholder in the nation, the Taufiek must have been offended by what he saw as the secretive gestures on the part of the established intelligentsia and the political elite. So vexed was he at these patronizing gestures that he likened it to the typical attitudes of parents toward pornography. There is evidence that underlying the act of secrecy was the belief on the part of the government and the intelligentsia that people (the rakyat) were still ignorant (masih bodoh). By way of example, in an interview with the journal Prisma in 1994, the doyen of Indonesia’s historians Sartono Kartodirdjo argued:

199

These included the works of the Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati, the British Marxist scholar Raymond Williams, or the Brazilian critical pedagogue Paulo Freire. 200 “Sejarah tapi porno” [It’s history; but it’s porn], Kompas, February 7, 1989, p. 1. 201 Soerojo, Siapa Menabur, p. 396.

196 If we look at the [Indonesian] constitution, there exists of course the freedom of speech, expression, and assembly. The way this freedom is to be implemented [in Indonesia], however, should be different from that in the UK or Australia…[where people]…are equally educated…able to filter what they read and to tell fact from fiction. The levels of education among Indonesians vary considerably. There still exists too wide a gap between holders of PhDs and the illiterate. […] If Indonesians were all university graduates, then freedom could perhaps be fully exercised. […] The poorly educated are incapable of filtering the information [to which they are exposed]. Uncritical consumption of information will lead to social instability.202 Now, let us compare Sartono’s judgment with that of a senior cabinet official in 1991 and look at the striking similarity: Our people can’t handle “openness” yet…. Most Indonesians are still lowly [poorly] educated and they are not able to filter information properly. If we allow “openness,” people opposed to Pancasila, like Islamic fundamentalists, will cause trouble by distorting information.203 In all its frankness, this judgment went a step further than that of Sartono. It implies the paranoid idea that the rakyat were dangerous, not merely because they were too ignorant to be left to their own devices in the information age but also because some of them were fanatics capable of manufacturing what Paul Virilio calls “information bombs.” In 1985, the constant fear of chaos compelled the Directorate of History and Traditional Values and a group of professional historians to collaborate in a joint project which culminated in an anthology of essays concerning a proposed crusade 202

Sartono Kartodirdjo, “Ilmuwan Jangan Seperti Pohon Pisang” [A scientist should not be like a banana tree], an interview, Prisma 10 (October 1994): 73-74. 203 Adam Schwartz, A Nation in Waiting: Indonesia’s Search for Stability (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 240.

197 against chaos which they called the “purification of history.” The idea of this crusade occurred to the Directorate after it received complaints from other government agencies that “some things are still ‘muddy,’ still confusing, in people’s knowledge and imagery about history.”204 Of the seven authors who contributed their contemplations to the anthology, two historians, Adrian Bernard Lapian and Richard Zakarias Leirissa, deserve close reading. Lapian offered the diagnosis that some cases of muddiness in popular historiography stemmed from errors, ignorance, lack of data, and oversimplification. An example of ignorance-based error was the popular belief that Srivijaya was a maritime while Majapahit was an agrarian kingdom.205 Muddiness, he added, also stemmed from calculated efforts to impose myths on society.206 As a nation, Indonesia required myths “to fertilize integrity and solidarity.” 207 In this case, she was not at all unique. Myth-making for nation-building, he observed, was a common practice the world over. An example of nationalist myth-making in Indonesian history is Soekarno’s contention that the Dutch colonized the East Indies for 350 years. Anyway, the costs of muddiness in the existing Indonesian historiography exceed its benefits. Lapian argued that systematic purification was badly needed: “It is essential

204

A. B. Lapian, “Penjernihan Sejarah: Apa, Mengapa, Bagaimana” [Purifying history: What, why, and how], Pemikiran tentang Penjernihan Sejarah [Thoughts on the purification of history], ed. Anhar Gonggong (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Direktorat Sejarah dan Nilai Tradisional, Proyek Pembinaan Kesadaran dan Penjernihan Sejarah, 1985), p. 8. 205 Ibid., p. 9. 206 Ibid., p. 8. 207 Ibid., p. 10

198 to examine all history books currently in use and in circulation, both scientific textbooks and popular ones.”208 Historical purification, according to Lapian, should cover more ground than the typical historical research. He was not worried about scholarly books because they were subject to critical scrutiny by the scientific community with its own internal mechanism for revisions and improvements. But this was not the case with popular and school history books. Filled with anachronism and fantasy, they required systematic purification. Interestingly, Lapian nodded to the specter of chaos when he insisted that school history books should be purged of controversial issue such as interregional, interethnic, and class conflicts. The history of such conflicts should be taught only to pupils who are mature enough to deal with the sophisticated character of social reality. And the teaching should be carried out in an impartial, evidencebased manner. It is evident that Lapian was aware that people go through stages of cognitive development throughout the lifespan. The more advanced they are in their intellectual journey, the readier they are to come to terms with historical complexity. Lapian confessed that he did not know the average age at which people are mature enough to begin to question some accepted truths about history.209 Lapian added that the purification of history should involve self-criticism on the part of Indonesian historians: in their own works, they should get rid of chauvinistic portrayals of international conflicts such as Indonesia’s colonial encounter with the Netherlands and Japan as well as her confrontation in the 1960s 208 209

Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 11, 14.

199 with Malaysia. On the other hand, Indonesian academic historians should also question Western-centric biases in the works on Indonesian history by foreign scholars.210 Like Lapian, Leirissa argued that what separates the professional from the amateur historian is the way the former deals with errors and debates. The community of professional historians has an established internal mechanism to deal with errors. If he finds errors in the work of a colleague, if he wants to challenge the latter’s theses, the professional historian will declare his critique and antitheses in a journal article, a monograph, or a dissertation. Thus, there is no need for the purification of history within the community of academic historians. Historical purification is a special medicine for the masses with their self-styled, amateurish historians.211 Leirissa put forward a theory of the origins of historical controversies in Indonesia. He pointed out that after 1950 Indonesian historiography unfolded in a culture that celebrated patriotism. Advocates of patriotic historiography included professional and amateur historians. “Empathy” was the smoke that got in the eyes of the patriotic non-professional historian. He contemplated his source materials through a glass darkly, through a windowpane steamed up by his love for the nation and his desire to shape its destiny.212 Trapped in communal loyalty, the patriotic, amateur

210

Ibid., p. 13. See R. Z. Leirissa, “Penjernihan Sejarah Sebagai Sarana Peningkatan Kesadaran Sejarah” [The purification of history as a means to increasing historical awareness], in Anhar Gonggong, ed., Pemikiran tentang Penjernihan Sejarah (Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Direktorat Sejarah dan Nilai Tradisional, Proyek Pembinaan Kesadaran dan Penjernihan Sejarah, 1985), pp. 21-31. 212 Ibid., pp. 24-25. 211

200 historian produces a book so rich in empathy and jingoism that it provoked a fierce controversy with his audience.213 Very much like Lapian, Leirissa was worried lest the controversy so provoked should lead to a state of chaos and confusion, in which people would lose their belief in the significance of history.214 While the specter of chaos was hanging over the masses, Leirissa wrestled with a dilemma. On the one hand, he believed that history was not an exclusive property of the academia. The scholar, he maintained, had no right to be a “historical traffic policeman.” It was okay for everybody to write history. On the other hand, he saw that the errors and misunderstandings in popular historiography might keep people from developing “historical consciousness,” which consisted of a number of skills such as getting the facts right, constructing plausible interpretation, and engaging in an ongoing triadic dialog among the writer, the sources, and the reader. It was historical consciousness, he maintained, that would prevent controversies over history from degenerating into “eternal conflicts.” Strangely enough, he did not elaborate on how people could achieve historical consciousness. Yet he went on to say that once people achieved it, the professional historian could begin to remove errors from the existing popular history books.215 And the media, in turn, should provide the forums for the professional historian to announce the results of the purification project and to discuss them with the amateur authors whose works had been purified. 213

One example of such controversy involves a letter-to-the editor in one issue of the daily Sinar Harapan where the writer questions the fact that Pakubuwono VI has been declared as a hero. The trouble, the writer argues, is that the king in question once helped the Dutch to fight against his own nation (sic). See Leirissa, ibid., p. 26. 214 Ibid., p. 27. 215 Ibid., pp. 28-30.

201

b. The Economics of Historical Studies: Poor Facilities, Poor Human Resources The ongoing battle for historical representation of the nation’s past was by no means the only problem that confronted professional historians in New Order Indonesia. They were also forced to deal with the problems of poor support system and poor human resources. In 1970, Luwarsih Pringgoadisurjo, a US-trained professional librarian and assistant director of the National Center for Scientific Documentation (PDIN), observed that “the government” did not take care of “its own archives and publications.” She lamented the fact that “Indonesian publications are easier to find in overseas libraries” than in those at home. She also regretted that fact that “government documents are easier to get at flea markets than at government offices.”216 One was left in the dark as to which public library was designated as depository for government documents. These problems of availability of and access to source materials had frustrated many researchers. The New Order, she accused, prioritized those “domains of development that involved huge funds [and] foreign aid.”217 In 1981, for example, the government injected a very small amount of funds into the budget of the National Center for Scientific Documentation: Rp 240 million. The center’s collection consisted only of 100,000 items, about half of which were books. The National Archives suffered from an embarrassing lack of source materials regarding the Japanese

216

Luwarsih Pringgoadisurjo, “Arsip dan Penerbitan [Government archives and publications], Kompas, March 4, 1970, p. 3. 217 Ibid., p. 6.

Pemerintah”

202 Occupation.218 Another problem was that the New Order’s foundational document, the Executive Order of March 11, 1966, was still missing. The typewritten text of the proclamation of independence was lost for twenty years before it appeared again in the early 1960s.219 The New Order did not realize the importance of building and preserving the national documentary heritage. She called attention to the fact that the drafting of the Legal Deposit Act, which began in 1963, was still incomplete. The same problems continued. Echoing Luwarsih in 1970, historian A. B. Lapian deplored in 1985 the continuing lack of a legal deposit act in Indonesia. Again, historians failed to find the primary resources they needed for their research.220 This state of affairs was particularly paralyzing for those historians who subscribed to the dictum, “No documents, no history.” Indeed, it was not until 1990 that the government of Indonesia passed its first Legal Deposit Act.221 The law states that No later than three months after the date any printed work is first delivered out of the press, any Indonesian publisher which produced that printed work is required to deposit two copies thereof with the National Library and one copy with the Provincial Library in the capital of the province where the publisher is located.222

218

“Ke Mana Dokumen-dokumen Itu?” ibid., p. 12. “Dalam Penulisan Sejarah Indonesia Pemikiran-pemikiran Politik Lebih Menonjol” [In Indonesian historiography, political ideas are more dominant], Kompas, August 12, 1969, p. 2. 220 Ibid., 14. 221 See, for example, Timor Lorosa’e Ministry of Planning and Finance, “Undang-undang 4/1990, Serah-Simpan Karya Cetak dan Karya Rekam” [Legal deposit act no. 4, 1990 on printed matters and recordings], n.d., (July 27, 2005). 222 Ibid. 219

203 Indeed, the law was too long overdue. In comparison, Thailand enacted such a law in 1941 and Malaysia in 1986.223 But Singapore did not do so until 1995.224 It is also widely known that members of the middle-class in Indonesia do not realize the cultural values of archives and documents. The patriotic historian Muhammad Yamin owned an enormous collection of documents. Following his death, his son, the fashion designer Rahadian, destroyed part of the collection. This he did because he saw the documents as “trash.” At least this was what sociologist Harsja Bachtiar, who was Rahadian’s nephew, told TEMPO in September 1981. Harsja went on to say that in 1970 Rahadian sold the remaining 23,000 documents to the state oil company Pertamina. TEMPO reported that in 1981 this collection was in a miserable condition.225 Harsja speculated that the proceedings of BPUPKI’s meetings in JulyAugust 1945, in which major nationalist leaders such as Soekarno, Soepomo, and Yamin discussed the drafts of the Pancasila, were among those archives that Rahadian destroyed.226 When debates raged in the early 1980s on the authorship of Pancasila, professional historians found it very difficult to solve the puzzle.227

223

Arellano Law Foundation, “Presidential Decree No. 812 October 16, 1975. Decree on Legal and Cultural Deposit,” n.d., < http://www.lawphil.net/statutes/presdecs/pd1975/pd_812_1975.html> (July 28, 2005). 224 Caslon Analytics, “profiles: legal deposit,” n.d., (July 28, 2005). 225 “Ke Mana Dokumen-dokumen Itu….,” TEMPO, September 5, 1981, p. 12. 226 Ibid. 227 It is important to keep in mind that it was not until 1989 that two sets of original proceedings of the BPUPKI’s meetings from May to July 1945 were rediscovered. One set is Pringgodigdo’s collection, which the Dutch confiscated when they occupied Yogyakarta on December 19, 1948. They then shipped Priggodigdo’s collection to the Netherlands. Later on, probably in the late 1980s, the Dutch government returned the archives to the government of Indonesia. The other set of

204 Another important problem in the New Order was that even professional researchers suffered from serious economic problems. They were unable to feed their families if they relied only on full-time job as researchers. In 1969 Doedi Soemawidjaja, the secretary of the National Research Center (NRC), reported that “the government is deeply aware that research is very important.” The problem was that the agency was still “unable to provide researchers with good salaries.” By 1968 the NRC employed 41 Indonesian scholars, some of whom received their tertiary education overseas. The problem was also that NRC did not possess the fund to sponsor the publications of its scholars. Owing to their poor salaries, the scholars could not concentrate on their job research jobs. “Scholars with degrees from abroad were frustrated when they came back home.” As a consequence, they tried to make ends meet by doing applied research projects for foreign corporations operating in Indonesia. These foreign companies gave them handsome salaries. The NRC was operating under the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). Established in 1965, NRC was responsible for coordinating research projects in chemistry, physics, electronics, metallurgy, and instrumentation. A non-departmental agency directly responsible to

archives is Muhammad Yamin’s collection. The officials of the National Archives rediscovered Yamin’s collection at the library of Mangkunegaran Royal House in Surakarta. It turned out that Yamin’s son, Rahadian, who were married to the daughter of Mangkunegara VIII, deposited his father’s archives in the royal library. See Saafroedin Bahar, Nannie Hudawati, and Ananda B. Kusuma, eds., “Penjelasan Tim Penyunting untuk Edisi Ketiga” [The editors’ notes on the third edition], Risalah Sidang Badan Penyelidik Usaha-usaha Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia (BPUPKI)—Panitia Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia [Proceedings of the meetings of the Investigatory Body for Preparatory Works for Indonesia’s Independence (BPUPKI) and the Committee for the Preparation for Indonesia’s Independence (PPKI)] (Jakarta: Sekretariat Negara Republik Indonesia, 1995), p. xv.

205 the president, the LIPI was supposed “to guide the development of science and technology so that they can be utilized for the welfare of…Indonesians.”228 In 1969, Abdurrachman argued that “politicization of history” triumphed over historical study of politics. This was his judgment on the state of Indonesian historiography about Indonesian independence at the time. His diagnosis of this problem was that members of the political elite wrote history without doing research and without adequately using primary sources. What they wrote were just personal documents. They were no more than primary sources. In 1970, Mohammad Ali complained about the inability of Indonesian doctoral students to formulate research questions. Thus when they visited the National Archives, they did not know what sources to look for.229 And Kompas noted in 1968 that in some “history departments in Teachers Training Colleges and universities…obsolete books were still used, translated, and summarized.” The dearth of reliable reference materials led to the circulation of “fairy tales masquerading as history” and to “the politicization of history.”230 Problems of this type continued even in the early 1980s. Indonesian professional historians were faced with tight state funding. Historian Sartono Kartodirdjo noted in 1981 that the Ministry of Education and Culture made available a

228

“Pusat Research Nasional dari Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia di Bandung” [The National Research Center of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences], Kompas, August 20, 1969, p. 6. 229 “Peladjaran Antropologi dan Sejarah di SLA Beku” [The teaching of anthropology and history in senior high schools are frozed], Kompas, July 8, 1970, p. 3. 230 Ibid., p. 5.

206 grant of Rp 1 million (US$ 1,570) per annum per person for “serious historians” to conduct individual research projects.231 The grant may have been sufficient to finance one short-term, medium-sized research project but while doing such a project the academic historian was also required to make money to support his dependents as well. Thus, rather than do such a scholarly research, he would prefer to undertake business-oriented, applied research projects. But this tendency jeopardized the progress of historical study by Indonesian academic historians. Indeed, Sartono observed in 1981: There is a real danger at the moment that young people want to participate in so many projects of consequence that it ends up in too much routine, and they have not much time left to do their own study, to learn a foreign language. Without knowing a foreign language you cannot be sent abroad. To be sent abroad usually is the avenue to do further studies. These youngsters are the creators of a new scientific tradition; if they don’t know what the pattern is in other countries with established sciences, then they will inevitably go the wrong way.232 He also observed the poor quality of his students at Gadjah Mada University Department of History: I don’t think that the best students we have right now in Yogya possess a strong enough conceptual framework to deal with sources. Where to look for, how to arrange, and so on. We should help them in framing… their thoughts and concepts.233

231

Sartono Kartodirdjo, “Interview,” interview by Leonard Blussé, Itinerario 5, 1 (1981):20. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid., p. 16.

207 In the third National History Seminar in 1981, the community of Indonesian professional historians admitted that there existed one major internal problem: “the quality gap between senior and junior historians.” The problem was attributed to the “lack of communication” between the two generations. The younger historians lacked “the ability to master sources” both in foreign and in regional languages. Except for those who enjoyed postgraduate study overseas, the younger historians “lacked the determination to do research.”234

19. After the Collapse of the New Order: Questions In 1991, a joint essay appeared in the Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs concerning history and politics in the New Order. Its authors, Jean van de Kok, Robert Cribb, and M. Heins, observed that the regime realized “the crucial importance of controlling the past in dominating the present.” They ended the essay with an intriguing prognosis: When Suharto’s New Order eventually comes to be reformed or dismantled, one of the clearest signs may be in the reinterpretation of history, especially of events such as the massacres of 1965-66, Suharto’s rise to power and the invasion of East Timor. 235 They are right to highlight the intimate interplay between history as a discipline and political infightings under the New Order. As their essay and my 234

“Permasalahan Sejarah” [Problems in history], Kompas, November 20, 1981. See also “Seminar Sejarah Nasional III Ditutup,” ibid., p. 1. 235 Jean van de Kok, Robert Cribb, and M. Heins, “1965 and All That: History in the Politics of the New Order,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 25, 2 (Summer 1991): 93.

208 investigation in the first half of Part Two demonstrate, the relationship was that of inequality. In the New Order, politics was the master; the study of history was the slave. To say so is not to exaggerate. In the hands of various political groups in the state and the civil society historiography were transmogrified into a textual weapon in the battle for power. For one thing, most indigenous scholars remained lacking in intellectual and institutional capacity to contribute first-rate historical studies on Indonesia’s politics. I must quickly add, though, that this was also the case under Guided Democracy (1959-65). In 2002, looking back to the intellectual culture under the Guided Democracy, historian Taufik Abdullah testified that History was—and still is—a matter of choice. What questions to be asked to the bulk of the potential historical sources? What approach should be used? With the [advent] of the Guided Democracy these questions, like most of other scholarly questions, could not be properly discussed and answered. The regime…was…the ruler of the greedy state… a state that could not satisfy itself by having law-abiding citizens nor by dominating political and economic patronage system. [I]t also wanted to control people’s consciousness and to hold the mastery of the nation’s collective memories. The regime was already here to offer whatever ideologically correct answers one might need. In [a] time when the revolution “has been discovered,” as Sukarno kept reminding his nation, one should never “abandon history.” One should always keep “the flame of history” burning in one’s heart. In this ideological and intellectual sphere professional historian had practically lost his proper place.236 To return to Van de Kok, Cribb, and Heins, their prognosis was fulfilled in 1998 but in a reversed order. First, the New Order collapsed. Then, the collapse was 236

Taufik Abdullah, “Neither ‘Out There’ Nor ‘The Other,’” in Dari Samudera Pasai ke Yogyakarta: Persembahan kepada Teuku Ibrahim Alfian [From Samudra Pasai to Yogyakarta: A tribute to Teuku Ibrahim Alfian], ed. Sunaryo Purwo Sumitro (Jakarta: Yayasan Masyarakat Sejarawan Indonesia, 2002), p. 10.

209 followed by a battle for the historical representation of big political events in the 1960s and 1970s: the massacres of the communists in 1965-66, Soeharto’s accession to presidency, the annexation of East Timor in 1976, and the incorporation of West Papua in 1963. After about ten months of economic crisis, the New Order collapsed on May 21, 1998. The regime’s sudden death opened up a broader space for political expression. People broke political taboos. The media began to circulate marginalized views of the nation’s past. Politically stigmatized groups under the New Order (the leftists, the Islamists, and the ethno-nationalists) ventured publicly to articulate their versions of some major historical events. Some professional historians accused the Soeharto regime of having invented, disseminated, and imposed its made-up version of the nation’s history.237 They argued that straightening out Indonesia’s history should be one of the key items in her agenda of transition from authoritarianism to a more democratic regime.238 In the following pages, I shall interrogate the themes in one post-New Order controversy over the straightening out of history: the one over the events surrounding the birth of the New Order in 1965-66. I chose to focus on this particular controversy

237

See, for example, Asvi Warman Adam, “Orde Baru Lakukan Banyak Rekayasa Penulisan Sejarah” [The New Order performed a lot of historiographical fabrication], Kompas, June 24, 1999. See also “Lebih Jauh dengan Anhar Gonggong,”[More about Anhar Gonggong], Kompas, October 15, 2000. 238 Asvi, for instance, suggested that Indonesians should abandon what he called “the New Order’s standpoint in the understanding of facts from the past” and adopt instead “the perspective of reform,” which, he claimed, has become “the mainstream perspective among Indonesians nowadays.” See, Adam, “Orde Baru Lakukan,” ibid.

210 because it was the most hotly contested and because time and space do not permit me to address the other controversies, such as those over East Timor and West Papua. My interrogation will revolve around three Indonesian academic historians who were the major protagonists in this controversy over the birth of the New Order. They are Asvi Warman Adam, Bambang Purwanto, and Taufik Abdullah. My selection was made on the basis of two criteria. First, more than their colleagues, they all have made significant contributions to the debate which included lectures, interviews, opinion pieces, journal articles, or books in the period from 1999 to 2004. Second, they nicely represent differing positions on the major issues around which the scholarly debates on the rectification of the history of 1965 revolved. The key issues included the following topics: First, is it useful for the professional historian to set history straight? Second, if the project is deemed useful, then what subjects in the history of 1965 call for straightening out? Third, if setting history straight is considered a misguided mission, then what are the alternatives? Four, to what extent does the professional historian’s generational position affect the way he or she judges “historical engineering” under the New Order? Finally, how did professional historians in Indonesia deal with the dilemma of integrity versus survival in the face of conflicting forces (power, money, and knowledge)?

211 20. On the Rectification of the History of 1965: Themes in a Controversy a. Asvi Warman Adam In the beginning was an encounter. One day in 1998, when thousands of college students in major cities took to the streets in waves of demonstrations demanding Soeharto to step down, Asvi was invited to address a meeting in a hotel on Kebon Sirih Street, Jakarta, whose audience consisted of old folks who used to be members of leftwing organizations in the 1950s and early 1960s. They were survivors of the New Order’s destruction of the PKI and the entire Indonesian Left in 1965-66. Later on, Asvi recalled how the old folks appeared to him on that momentous occasion: [M]ost of them looked very simple. Their old visages were wizened and they looked shabby. Their attire looked shabby. The colors of their clothes had faded away.239 They were so unlike the Left’s political images in the New Order’s official political mythology: the images of the ungodly, immoral, cruel monsters. There and then, sitting before Asvi, listening to his lecture, were no monsters. They were just a group of frail, threadbare, and miserable old people. It is difficult not to see in such people the image of one’s own future self or the image of one’s own parents. Another poignant moment unfolded. Here they were: old men and women whose last decades of life the New Order had crushed. Yet these people still had the 239

Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia, “Dr. Asvi Warman Adam: Korban Pelanggaran HAM Bukan Sekadar Angka” [Dr. Asvi Warman Adam: Victims of human rights violations are not just statistics], n.d., (September 22, 2004).

212 capacity to feel and express gratitude to people who treated them as human beings. As a symbol of their appreciation of Asvi’s lecture, they collected what little money they had with them and handed it over to him. It was nothing: “only Rp 50,000 [about US$ 7].” But the gesture touched Asvi’s heart. This encounter in 1998 marked a turning point in Asvi’s career as a professional historian. It marked the beginning of his sympathy with survivors of the New Order’s bloody liquidation of the Left and the beginning of his crusade for the rectification of the history of 1965 (the birth of the New Order). In 1990, upon completion of his study at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, where he obtained a PhD in history with a dissertation on the relationship between the Dutch East Indies and Indochina, 1870-1914, which he wrote under Denys Lombard’s supervision, Asvi returned to Indonesia and began to work at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) as a researcher specializing on Vietnam and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). At first, his research topics included the social history of everyday things such as apparel, food, blood, tombstones, and movies. These were part of his greater project to apply in Indonesian soil the tenets of the Annales school of historiography established by the French historian Fernand Braudel. But after his encounter in 1998 with survivors of the New Order’s destruction of the Left, Asvi concluded that the regime had manipulated Indonesia’s contemporary history. He saw it as his task to straighten out the twisted history. Thus, he decided to postpone his initial project and began to appear in the

213 press as the major champion in the crusade for the rectification of history.240 In 2003 he joined the Team for the Investigation of Soeharto’s Severe Human Rights Violations.241 Asvi insists that he does not romanticize the survivors of the New Order’s destruction of the Left in the mid-1960s. He knows well that they are not completely innocent. In an interview, he said the following: I do not deny the brutal deeds that the PKI and its mass organizations perpetrated prior to 1965. The communists’ unilateral actions in their campaign for the implementation of land reform had brought about social conflict in rural areas. In the world of arts and culture, [they]…repressed the freedom of those who did not support [Soekarno’s] Manipol,242 such as the poet Taufiq Ismail and his colleagues. In addition, they insulted the activists of the Islamic organization PII [Indonesian Islamic Students] (as in the Kanigoro

240

Asvi divides his work into two categories: normal-track and fast-track projects. The former includes the medium-term and long-term project of practicing Braudel-style “total history.” The latter includes the urgent, short-term project of setting historical straight in the age of reform. See Asvi Warman Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah Indonesia [Straightening out Indonesian history] (Yogyakarta: TriDE, 2004), p. x. 241 For biographical details of Asvi Warman Adam, see Vedi R. Hadiz and Daniel Dhakidae, eds., Social Science and Power in Indonesia (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2005), p. ix; Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah, pp. 314-15; and Asvi Warman Adam, “Re: pelurusan sejarah” [Re: setting history straight], October 21, 2004, personal email, (October 21, 2004). 242 Robert Cribb explains that Manipol is “[t]he ideology of Guided Democracy…as set out in Sukarno’s Independence Day speech on 17 August 1959. […] In it Sukarno called for social justice, a return to the spirit of the Revolution…and a ‘retooling’ of state organs. […] The precise meaning of each of these terms remained vague, but MANIPOL soon became associated as a slogan with the left in Indonesian politics….” See Robert Cribb, “Manifesto Politik” [Political manifesto], in Historical Dictionary of Indonesia, Asian Historical Dictionaries, No. 9 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), pp. 284-85.

214 incident) and demanded the liquidation the Islamic Students Association (HMI).243 On the other hand, Asvi urges people to keep in mind that after 1965 it was the communists—no less than half a million of them—who became victims of mass killings. He criticizes both Muslims and ex-communists for their tendency to remember their political clash in the 1960s in a selective manner. Muslims emphasize the communists’ political aggressiveness prior to 1965-66 but downplay the ensuing mass killings of the communists in which some of them participated. Former PKI members, by contrast, tend to deemphasize the PKI’s implementation of aggressive revolutionary strategy since 1963 and focus their narratives of 1965 on the severe human rights violations inflicted on them by Muslims and the military. Asvi is quick to deny having any family ties with communists. This negation is meant to nip in the bud any accusation that his crusade has arisen from a personal need to vindicate. Asvi was born in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, on October 8, 1954 into a Muslim household. A member of the modernist Muslim organization Muhammadiyah, Asvi’s father believed in the importance of modern education and felt comfortable with cultural diversity. He sent Asvi to Catholic schools, from kindergarten up to senior high school. In the evening, young Asvi went to the neighborhood mosque to

243

Asvi Warman Adam, “Betulkah PKI Terlibat G30S?” [Is it true that the PKI was involved in the September 30 Movement?], n.d., (September 22, 2004).

215 listen to Islamic sermons and learn to recite the Koran. “I lived in two worlds,” he reported in his email to me, defining his childhood and adolescence.244 Asvi justifies his crusade for the rectification of history on the basis of two premises. The first premise is that the problem with the New Order’s historiography was not methodological in nature.245 What befell historiography under this regime was an “abnormal process,” a deliberate political engineering. The regime, he argues, mobilized historiography as a tool for pursuing its own political ends.246 It imposed its version of the history of 1965 on the entire society and did not allow alternative versions to circulate. In so doing, the regime monopolized the truth about the history of 1965.247 Further, the regime deliberately used its version of history to justify its destruction and oppression of the Left. On the basis of its theory that the PKI was the one and only mastermind of the September 30 Movement, the regime wiped the Left from Indonesia’s political landscape. Later on, the New Order inserted its version of the history of 1965 into the official history textbooks which it distributed to and imposed on all secondary schools all over country.248 Asvi accuses the New Order of seeking to achieve its cultural hegemony by brainwashing the entire younger generation: [The] crimes that the state committed included the brainwashing it carried out during the reign of the New Order. Abusing school 244

Adam, “Re: pelurusan sejarah.” Asvi Warman Adam, “Demiliterisasi Sejarah Indonesia” [Demilitarizing Indonesian history], Kompas, September 2, 2000. 246 Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah, p. 3. 247 Ibid., p. 4. 248 Ibid., xiv. 245

216 education or upgrading courses, [the regime] sought to install the version of history that portrayed the PKI as the one and only mastermind of the 1965 coup, which took the lives of six generals. Never did it present alternative accounts of the September 30 Movement. It described communists as people who upheld the principle that “the end justifies the means.” But the fact was that the New Order was itself the true believer in this principle.249 Asvi also argues that The efforts have been going on for decades to ram the New Order’s version of history down the throats of people, including pupils in schools. It takes time to tidy up things that have been muddled for a long time.250 Asvi points out that the New Order’s version of Indonesia’s contemporary history revolved around the black-and-white central theme that Soeharto and the army were the true heroes who had saved Indonesia from calamities and brought it to peace and prosperity and that Soekarno and the PKI were the bad guys who perverted and betrayed their own country. In Asvi’s judgment, the engineering of historiography by the New Order was an “abnormal process.” For it was intended to “serve the regime’s…political interests.”251 Asvi grants that the ruling regime in Japan also engineered its national history, especially the part dealing with Japan’s imperial exploits in Asia during World War II. But Asvi argues that the historiographical engineering by the New Order was

249

Ibid., p. 236. Asvi Warman Adam, “Kontrol Sejarah Semasa Pemerintahan Soeharto” [The control over history during the rule of Soeharto], Sejarah, Pemikiran, Persepsi 10 (2001): 17. 251 Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah, p. 3. 250

217 self-serving while that by the ruling regime in Japan was carried out “in the interests of the nation (and state).”252 This argument, I think, is problematic at least for three reasons. First, it wrongly implies that unlike Indonesia, or any other country for that matter, Japan is such a homogenous society that she is free from any conflict of interest between the ruling regime and its subjects, between the upper and the lower class, between the Right and the Left, and so forth. Asvi imagines contemporary Japan to be so homogenous that the interests of its ruling regime, unlike Indonesia’s New Order (1967-1998), appears in his eyes as representing those of the Japanese nationstate as a whole. Second, Asvi’s argument also implies that ruling regimes are profane, while nation-states are sacred, and that it is evil, therefore, for a ruling regime to perpetrate historical fabrication at the expense of its domestic political adversary but it is all right for the former to engineer history at the expense of its former international enemies. Third, Asvi seems to forget that it is common for regimes to justify their rules by reference to “national” interests. Nonetheless, Asvi is convinced that New Order’s historical engineering was so abnormal it was beyond repair. The damage could not be repaired through the routine work of revision that the professional historian normally performs when he stumbles upon new sources or when he employs a new theory or method to handle old sources.253 But he reiterates and reemphasizes the argument that [W]hat happened in the New Order was the systematic control over history by the state in order to legitimize the regime. The [resulting] 252 253

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 3. See also, Adam, “Demiliterisasi Sejarah.”

218 collective memories were reinforced by compulsory upgrading courses imposed on society. In other words, the minds of the people were dominated by the state [and] the hegemony of meanings was in the hands of the ruler.254 Asvi’s second premise is that Indonesia’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy calls for the rectification of history. Indeed, for Asvi, the rectification of history is to be understood as the “democratization” of history: What is intended by the straightening out of history is that historical uniformity under the New Order should be transformed into historical diversity in the age of reform. People should be free to express their views from their own perspective, bound by the rules of the science of history.255 And more specifically, Asvi explains what he means by the rectification of history of 1965: “[W]hile in the past there used to be one single version of the September 30 Movement, today a number of other versions have been revealed.”256 But what is the use for Indonesians to have multiple versions of the September 30 Movement all at once? Does Asvi mean that all these versions are equally true? No, he does not. Quoting the French historian Paul Veyne, Asvi explains that history, as a narration of something that occurred in the past, is always “incomplete” and touches only the “surface” of the event.257 Thus, the task of the “reformist” professional historian who studies the September 30 Movement is to collect many one-sided, fractional accounts 254

Asvi Warman Adam, “Pengantar Redaksi” [The editor’s preface], Sejarah: Pemikiran Rekonstruksi, Persepsi 10 (2001): vi. 255 Adam, “Pelurusan Sejarah 1965” [Straightening out the history of 1965], Kompas, January 15, 2004. 256 Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah, p. 19. 257 Ibid., p. 20.

219 of what happened and distill from them a number of accepted facts, which he then puts together to arrive at a synthetic, more holistic reconstruction of the event—one which exposes a more comprehensive causality, including not only the antecedents of the aborted coup but also its drastic and wide-ranging consequences.258 This reconstruction should be disseminated in society to restructure people’s collective memories of 1965.259 Having justified his crusade for setting history straight, Asvi elaborates on its agenda. Asvi insists that the Soeharto regime was guilty of militarizing history. For example, it defined the regional turmoil in the outer islands in 1956-57 as “rebellions.”260 The army also occupied top and central positions in the political hierarchy. The state chief historian, Nugroho Notosusanto, was himself a titular general. Military perspective, therefore, had dominated the official interpretation of Indonesia’s contemporary history. The military kept on imposing on the rest of society what it saw as the ultimate lesson of Indonesian history: the sanctity of national unity.261 Thus, to remedy this problem, Asvi argues that the first item in the agenda for historical rectification should be the demilitarization of Indonesian history. That is, the post-Soeharto Indonesian historiography should abandon the military perspective.262 The second item in Asvi’s agenda for setting history straight is revisiting the history of 1965. The year of 1965, in his view, was the historical watershed. Changes

258

Ibid., pp. 20-21. Ibid., pp. 23-24. 260 Adam, “Demiliterisasi Sejarah.” 261 Ibid. 262 Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah, p. 14. 259

220 of major proportion occurred after the event. First, there was a dramatic shift in Indonesia’s foreign policy from the high-profile anti-US and anti-UK stance to a subordinate position under the US domination. Second, the Left was denied the right legally to participate in the national politics and had to suffer all kinds of discrimination in social life. Third, Soeharto and the army rose to power and brought an end to civilian supremacy. Fourth, Western-style economic development replaced Soekarno-style “independent economy.”263 The watershed character of the 1965 notwithstanding, the New Order’s dominant version of the history of 1965 was monolithic. It includes only the version of the armed forces. This is the version that portrays the PKI as the sole architect of the September 30 Movement. Next on the list is reforming the teaching of history in schools which should involve revising school history textbooks. As far as the bloody 1965 is concerned, he adds, setting history straight means that multiple versions of the event should be presented in the classrooms. What has been taught in schools for decades is only the New Order’s version while there are at least five existing different versions about who orchestrated the coup. If Indonesia is to develop into a civil society, that is, a democratic and pluralist community, then she requires a multi-version national history. The fourth item in the agenda deals with the sympathetic incorporation of local histories into national history. This should involve the re-interpretation of the power dynamics between the central government and the local governments. In this light,

263

Adam, “Pelurusan Sejarah.”

221 armed rebellions in 1956-57 in the outer islands can be re-interpreted as the antecedents to the emergence of regional autonomy after the collapse of the New Order.264 The fifth item in the agenda consists of exposing the buried histories of severe human rights violations in the national past besides the massacres of the 1965-66. 265 Asvi suggests that historical studies be carried out on the cases of political violence in Aceh, West Papua, East Timor, or Lampung.266 Asvi acknowledges that elements in society are also capable of manipulating history. But he is of the opinion that [I]n…many countries, the role of the state seems to have been dominant. In Indonesia’s case, the role of the military was prominent;

264

Adam, Pelurusan Sejarah, p. 15. Ibid., p. 27. 266 Finally, in addition to setting history straight, Asvi also highlighted the importance of “clarifying” long-standing historical controversies that had gone on for about a century. The controversies revolved around three problems concerning facts and their interpretations: (1) inaccuracy, (2) incompleteness, and (3) obscurity. Type 1 of the problem included the statement that Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch for 350 years; the statement that Soekarno willingly gave Soeharto the Executive Order of March 11, 1966; the statement that the PKI was the mastermind of the 30 September coup. Examples of Type 2 included the representation of regional turbulence in the 1950s as “rebellions” without presenting the complete explanation about their causes, such as the political and economic inequality of the center and the regions as well as the discontent of the people from the Outer Islands; the representation of national heroes such as Kartini and Soekarno as if they were immaculate persons. Problems of Type 3 included the mystery surrounding the Executive Order of March 11, 1966, the January 15 Affair, the race riots in May 1998 in Jakarta. See, for example, Asvi Warman Adam, “Seabad Kontroversi Sejarah” [A century of historical controversies], Kompas, January 17, 2000. 265

222 they were the “kitchen” where official history was printed and [from which] it was [sent] to be taught in schools.267 Asvi’s statement is problematic in at least two respects. First, it wrongly implies too strong a dichotomy between state and society, assuming that, more often than not, the two stand in contradiction to each other. As if the state’s attitudes toward historiography, for example, are completely different from those of the society to which it belongs. And, as if the ruling regime’s historiographical ideas and practices did not reflect those of the society it has come from. Second, Asvi seems to overlook the fact the in everyday life people manipulate the histories of themselves, their families, their ethnic groups, their companies, their political parties, their religious communities, and so forth. It should have come as no surprise to Asvi that from such people there arises an elite that controls the state and manipulates the history of the nation-state.

b. Bambang Purwanto Bambang Purwanto is a professor of history at the Gadjah Mada University. He was born in Sungailiat, Bangka, September 17, 1961. He received his PhD in history from the SOAS in 1992. He wrote his dissertation under the supervision of I.G.

267

Asvi Warman Adam, “Kontrol Sejarah Semasa Pemerintahan Soeharto” [The control over history during the rule of Soeharto], Sejarah, Pemikiran, Persepsi 10 (2001): 21.

223 Brown. His research topics include historiography and economic history of Indonesia and Southeast Asia.268 In Bambang’s view, to use the phrase “to straighten out history” is itself already a mistake that any professional historian should be ashamed to make. For history, in the “scientific” sense of the word, straightens itself. Without being told to do so by her boss, her neighbors, the police, or victims of human rights violations, the professional historian should rewrite history when she encounters new facts or when she reinterprets the existing facts using a new method and a new scientific paradigm.269 In Bambang’s interpretation, the fact that after the downfall of Soeharto some professional historians launched the crusade for setting history straight was a symptom that something wrong was going on. Bambang maintains that the community of Indonesian professional historians is suffering from “historiographical disorientation,” stemming from a chronic intellectual inertia. For example, since 1957 there has been no debate in Indonesia on the philosophy of history. And since the 1960s, when Sartono Kartodirdjo began to promote the multidisciplinary approach to the study of history, no one has stepped forward to advocate any new methodology. In general, Indonesian professional historians lack the theoretical and methodological capacity to write monographs. Trapped in intellectual mediocrity and in oral culture, instead of

268

Bambang Purwanto, “Sejarawan Akademik dan Disorientasi Historiografi: Sebuah Otokritik” [The academic historian and historiographical disorientation: A self-critique], Paper presented in his inauguration as a professor in history at the Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, September 24, 2004. 269 Ibid., p. 135.

224 writing monographs, they are engaged in talk shows and popular seminars. 270 Bambang argues that Indonesian professional historians are in a state of quality crisis. They are blind to the neighboring sciences and unable to respond intelligently to contemporary social problems.271 They fail to provide a standard education in history both for would-be historians and for students in primary and secondary schools.272 As a result, Indonesians grow into a people without a critical sense of history. This is the seed of catastrophe. Ignorance leads to confusion which leads to controversies. And controversies, in turn, threaten to spell chaos. Now that competing versions of the nation’s recent past circulate in the media, school teachers, long forced to work in the absence of first-rate reference materials, have begun to receive a storm of critical inquiries from their students. Bambang condemns the academic historians for their failure to assist school teachers in managing the bewildering multiplicity of historical versions. This failure, he points out, stems from their inability to write monographs. If they had produced a good number of complete and reliable monographs, they could have helped people navigate the baffling multiplicity of histories. Professional historians are unable to illuminate the masses. For they themselves are in the dark.273 This, for Bambang, is a disgrace to the profession. Indeed, he observes that contemporary Indonesian professional historians suffer from “disorderly historical

270

Ibid., p. 137. Ibid. 272 Ibid. 273 Ibid. 271

225 reasoning” which manifests itself in such basic errors as “anachronism, [sweeping] generalization, semantic distortion, and substantive confusion.”274 Bambang’s analysis is debatable. The problem, I think, is not that there are multiple versions of Indonesia’s recent past. The problem, I argue, is that most people, who lack the comprehension of the fundamentals of history as a discipline, do not know how to decide which version is more valid than the other. No amount of brilliant monographs by academic historians could help people make such a decision. Indeed, as long as people are still ignorant of the principles of historical research and writing, the circulation of scholarly monographs would even exacerbate their confusion. Asvi is correct, however, in suggesting that reforming the teaching of history in the institutions of the primary, secondary, and higher education may enable people, in the long run, to deal with historiographical perplexity on their own. In an instance of bad faith, some professional historians resorted to a cowardly tactic to save their faces. They attacked a scapegoat. They blamed their own mediocrity and their professional failure on Soeharto’s three decades of authoritarian rule. 275 They condemned the New Order for what they call “historical engineering,” and denounced the intrusion of Soeharto’s political mission into the community of professional historians. This defense mechanism, which consisted of deliberate projection of one’s own faults onto other people, was the essence of the crusade for the rectification of history in which some academic historians participated. The 274

Ibid. Bambang Purwanto, “Sejarah Lisan dan Upaya Mencari Format Baru Historiografi Indonesiasentris” [Oral history and the attempt to find the new format for Indonesiacentric historiography], in Dari Samudera Pasai, p. 137. 275

226 banality of this crusade, in Bambang’s view, was evident from the fact that what the crusaders sought to do was simply undo what Soeharto and the New Order had done to Indonesian historiography. In this way, it was just an idiotic repetition of “deSoekarnoization” or “deOldOrderization” of history after the death of Guided Democracy in 1966.276 This political game contributed nothing to the development of what he called “objective, scientific, critical historiography.” Bambang points out that people such as Asvi Warman Adam fail to see the simple fact that historiographical engineering is not a crime committed only by the New Order. Indeed, Guided Democracy, too, performed historical engineering. So focused is Asvi on the history of 1965 that he overlooks a long-standing problem within the community of academic historians: the evil influences of fanatic nationalism on the writing of Indonesian history. For the sake of nation-building, academic historians have sacrificed “critical history, historical truth, objectivity, and methodology.”277 Bambang also highlights the fact that historical engineering is performed not only be ruling regimes; it is also done by other “influential and dominant groups in society” in their efforts to “use the past to legitimize their own interests.”278 Thus, the PKI did it too. It would be wrong to conclude that Bambang disregards the intrusion of the state’s political powers and interests into the practice of academic historiography. What Bambang wants is for the community of professional historians to undertake a

276

Ibid. Ibid., p. 137. 278 Purwanto, “Sejarawan Akademik.” 277

227 self-critique and look for the internal factors that have led to the historiographical disorientation that they are suffering from. Self-introspection and self-critique, Bambang maintains, will be much more productive for reforming and revitalizing the historical profession than is the act of blaming their professional failure on Soeharto and the New Order. In this context, Bambang quotes the famous Malay proverb, “If you are a poor dancer, don’t blame it on the floor.”279 In addition to critiquing the professional historians for their mediocrity, inertia, dysfunction, and cowardice, Bambang also criticizes what he calls “alternative historians.” In the absence of first-rate monographs by professional historians, after the collapse of the New Order a number of human rights activists wrote alternative histories of the 1965-66 from the perspective of victims and survivors. (This is the perspective that Asvi promotes). Bambang condemns these activists-turned-historians for being “too ready to believe in the data ... [which they received from] communists or alleged communists who are victims of the New Order.”280 He charges that alternative historians are unable to distinguish between actual events in the past and [survivors’] historical perception of those event, a [perception] that is already contaminated by [their] tragic experience in the wake of the September 30 Movement.281 In cases where the ordinary people carried out a campaign for the rectification of history, Bambang observes that the campaign was just an emotional reaction on the 279

Ibid. Ibid. 281 Ibid. 280

228 part of leftwing survivors of the New Order. In some other cases, the campaign, he argues, was just an ideological maneuver that some political entrepreneurs launched to seize power in the midst of a regime change.282 Even the rakyat (the people) in general have to face Bambang’s scathing critique. He condemns them for being hypocritical in their attitudes toward historiographical controversies. On the one hand, when faced with controversies, they claim they no longer trust history, complaining that existing history books are fraught with lies. On the other hand, they are eager to turn history into mythology when they seek to bring their political leader to power. For example, members of the Indonesian Democracy Party (PDI) reduced the image of the historical Soekarno to a myth and employed it as a political fetish or jimat to rally mass support for his daughter Megawati in the 1997 elections. What Bambang sees in the brouhaha about the rectification of history after 1998 was just a political event, the outward expression of one underlying process: the political struggle among groups in Indonesia. He does not think that the warring camps are really interested at all in “the academic and scientific pursuit of the truth about history.” The campaign for the rectification of history, in his final analysis, is all about “revenge, hatred, egotism, [and] excessive love.” It all will end up, he is pretty sure, in the emergence of new myths resulting from the reversal of old myths. 283 This

282 283

Ibid., p. 136. Ibid.

229 type of debate would amount to nothing because the participants were simply ignorant of “the principles of the critical historical method.”284

c. Taufik Abdullah Taufik Abdullah was born in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, on January 3, 1936. He received his BA in history from the Gadjah Mada University in 1961, and obtained his PhD in history from Cornel University in 1970 with a dissertation on Islamic reform in Minangkabau, West Sumatra. The dissertation gave rise to a book titled Schools and Politics: The Kaum Muda Movement in West Sumatra, 1927-1933. From 1963 to 1986, Taufik worked as a researcher for the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (Leknas), 285 one of the several research centers in the Division of Social Sciences of Humanities at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. From 1974 to 1978, he directed the Leknas, whose research projects focused on “economic problems relating to Indonesia’s development,” and which functioned as “the reference resource for input into national economic and development policy.”286 In 1986 the Leknas was

284

Ibid. H.A.J. Klooster, Indonesïer schrijven hun geschiedenis: De ontwikkeling van de Indonesische geschiedbeoefening in theorie en praktijk, 1900-1980 [Indonesians write their history: The development of Indonesian study of history in theory and practice, 1900-1980] (Dordrecht: Foris Publication, 1985), pp. 116-17. 286 National Institute for Research Advancement, NIRA’s World Directory of Think Tanks 2002, May 2002, (August 18, 2005), Center for Economic Research-Indonesian Institute of Sciences (P2E-LIPI). 285

230 transformed into the Center for Economic Research-Indonesian Institute of Sciences (P2E-LIPI).287 From 2000 to 2002 he was head of the LIPI.288 On October 1, 2003, the minister of education and culture established the Team for the Rectification of National History and appointed Taufik as the director. The team, which consisted of seventy scholars and academic historians, was entrusted with the task of “rewriting” Indonesian history from the prehistoric period down to the early twenty-first century. The team’s name notwithstanding, Taufik insisted that they were not going to “set history straight.” What they were going to do was rewrite the national history so that it would include “multiple versions and all the available facts.” Within two years, the team was expected to produce a new eight-volume series on Indonesian national history that would be “most thorough and comprehensive.”289 Armed with first-hand, adult life experience under both Guided Democracy and the New Order, Taufik Abdullah is very much unlike the younger generation of Indonesian professional historians who did not turn twenty-five until the advent of the New Order. Taufik has an unusual capacity for a more nuanced, balanced, and complex judgment of the goods and evils of both regimes. In his late twenties, Taufik was exposed to the ideological engineering, the repression of dissent, and the resultant intellectual asphyxia under Guided Democracy. With the collapse of Guided Democracy in 1966, Taufik pinned his hopes for 287

Ibid. Yayasan Obor Indonesia, “Taufik Abdullah,” n.d. (August 22, 2005). 289 Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, “Langkah Mencuci Daki Sejarah” [A measure to clean up the dirt of history], October 3, 2003. (August 2, 2005). 288

231 democracy and a free intellectual culture on the New Order. In 2002, he recalled what he felt in the late 1960s when the transition from Guided Democracy to the New Order was taking place: After almost ten years under the [rule] of Guided Democracy, through a traumatic change of regime—the change that until today remains to haunt the national conscience—a new regime was born. And a hope for a better and more democratically inclined future was born. Looking back one might say that the period from the late 1960s to the middle of 1970s was an “Indian summer of Indonesian democracy.” It was a period that was soon to be followed by a long winter of authoritarian rule of another “greedy state.” Whatever the case, the period was crucial, as if a new and wiser Indonesia had finally emerged. […] By that time Indonesian political discourse had dramatically been changed—“revolution” had been replaced by “development,” “ideology” by “program,” etc. The “world of conflict” had been replaced by “the world of consensus.” Scholars and intellectuals were expected to become the new technocrats, who could offer something to the society at large.290 Taufik’s testimony reveals that the urban middleclass intelligentsia supported and celebrated the New Order’s rise to power. They saw the new regime as a political redeemer. The latter-day, one-sided critics of the New Order, I think, should bear this phenomenon in mind. Look, for example, at the revealing metaphors Taufik uses to describe the birth of the New Order: First there was the “trauma” (in the wake of a bloodbath) but then followed an “Indian summer of democracy.” A decade later, though, Taufik’s dream about democracy and intellectual progress was smashed to pieces. Much to his chagrin, he was faced with the return of dictatorship and ideological engineering:

290

Abdullah, “Neither ‘Out There’ Nor ‘The Other,’” pp. 10-11.

232 By the beginning of 1980s the optimistic mood of early 1970s was beginning to exhaust itself.… Soeharto had emerged as an unchallenged ruler. Gradually…the Republic of Indonesia had transformed itself into a pseudo-modern “Mataram sultanate,” where, as Heine Geldern’s classic essay on Southeast Asian political tradition shows, “the king was the center of the universe.” The official slogan of “unity in diversity” had practically been changed into “unity and uniformity” to [the] extent that village administrations and social organizations…were transformed into one uniform system. Soeharto, who had been re-elected several times, not unlike Sukarno, but with [a] more efficient and powerful state apparatus, practically made himself…the “High Priest of Pancasila,” without bothering himself, unlike Sukarno, with the title.291 Taufik is also interesting for his capacity for self-criticism. As he admitted in 2002, he was naïve enough in the early 1970s to believe that as a scholar he could contribute to Indonesia’s economic development and preserve his intellectual integrity by working for the state-sponsored research institute Leknas. Indeed, historian Anhar Gonggong, for example, reports that in defense of his integrity Taufik was willing to forego the chance to hold a high-ranking post in the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.292 For example, in 1978, Taufik had to lose his position as head of the Leknas after he—together with people such as the poet W. S. Rendra, the lawyer A. B. Nasution, the journalist Mochtar Loebis, and the economist Thee Kian Wie—signed the “Statement of Indonesian Intellectuals and Men of the Arts” to protest against the New Order’s authoritarian response to dissent (the repression of student activism and

291 292

Ibid., p. 13. “Lebih Jauh dengan Anhar Gonggong,” Kompas, October 15, 2000.

233 the banning of Jakarta newspapers).293 And it turned out that keeping science and politics apart was much more difficult than Taufik had thought. In 2002, looking back to his career development, he confessed a degree of failure: It was in this optimist[ic] intellectual sphere [that] I began to embark on my academic career, as a research fellow of a state-sponsored research institute. Perhaps my training and study could contribute something to the development efforts.…Without my knowing I was already involved in the politics and the discourse of the so-called “development,” without joining, at least not voluntarily, any political grouping.294 Indeed no scholar works in a social vacuum. Scholars and their endeavors are always exposed to the influences of the political economy of the production of knowledge. There are conflicting interests that they must find ways to reconcile. This was also the case with other scholars who worked in the New Order, whether for the state or for private institutions. Taufik, too, was faced with his own dilemma in the early 1980s: In time [the early 1980s], when the political paradigm had been challenged by the course of event[s], scholars found themselves in [a] 293

The statement was launched on January 24, 1978. Besides Taufik, other signatories of the statement also suffered the New Order’s punitive response: Mochtar Loebis saw his newspaper Indonesia Raya liquidated; W. S. Rendra went to jail; and Thee Kian Wie faced demotion from his current position in the LIPI. See, for example, New Internationalist, “Voices against the New Order,” October 1982 (August 18, 2005). Indonesia: International Solidarity. In January 1978, there was a wave of demonstrations by college students in Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya to protest what they saw as rampant corruption, economic inequality, and the failure of the development. Infuriated, the New Order responded by arresting student activists and banned four national dailies that reported on their demonstrations. See, for example, Elson, Suharto, pp. 220-23. 294 Abdullah, “Neither ‘Out There’ Nor ‘The Other,’ ” p. 11.

234 dilemma. How could they oppose the increasingly dominant and reactionary regime, if it also offered economic opportunities? But yet how could they tolerate or even support it, if at the same time they also saw [that] the state had abandoned the once shared idealism? The situation became more pressing since the state had also emerged as the holder of the hegemony of meaning.295 In the end, Taufik was led to the bitter realization that in the collaboration in the New Order between the ruler and the intelligentsia, the ultimate power remained in the hands of the former. Scholars might offer Soeharto all kinds of “scientific” designs for the better future of Indonesia. Yet no matter how great their expertise may have been, it is well known that Soeharto saw himself as ultimately much wiser than any of his advisers, whether spiritual, political, military, economic, or scientific. Soeharto had the final say. He reserved the right simply to ignore them and go ahead with what he wanted to do. After all, he was the president: [Soeharto’s concept] of “identity of the nation”…to support the statesponsored new type of radical nationalism seemed also to have forfeited the right of…scholars and…intellectuals to offer new ways [of] looking at realities and to formulate a new vision of the future. They might still continue to offer their services in the hope that somebody up there would look at their proposals and give [them] some thought…. If the expectation…proved…unfounded, they could simply console themselves with the idea that they…tried their best. The biggest personal tragedy, however, really took place when their …warning[s] [were ignored and]…danger[s]…became…reality. The tragedy became greater [when] the course of event[s] proved to be far more devastating [than] they ever dared…imagine.296

295 296

Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 14.

235 To return to the crusade for the rectification of history, it is important to note that Taufik criticizes the critics of the New Order’s historiography of 1965, whom he sees as too focused on the political dimension of regime change. That is, they are too focused on questions such as whether or not Soeharto’s rise to power was legitimate and who the real mastermind of the September 30 Movement was. Yet they ignore other equally important problems that the events in 1965-66 pose to people who take seriously the scholarly study of Indonesian history. The critics of the New Order’s historiography, Taufik observes, do not bother to study the sociological problems that led to regime change in 1965-66, for example the desire on the part of the urban, middleclass intellectuals for cultural freedom and economic growth as well as the collaboration between college students and leaders of the army against the alliance between Soekarno and the PKI.297 Asvi champions the historiography of 1965 from the perspective of the New Order’s victims. He tries to mobilize this type of historiography to challenge the New Order’s historiography, which interprets the 1965 regime change and the ensuing bloodbath from the victor’s perspective. In his critique of Asvi’s undertaking, Taufik insists that both perspectives have their weaknesses. It is true that the New Order’s historical narratives were intended to legitimize the regime. But it is also true that the victims’ narratives of the 1965 tend to be “subjective, selective, self-centered” and

297

Taufik Abdullah, “Perdebatan Sejarah dan Tragedy 1965” [Debate on history and tragedy of 1965], Sejarah: Pemikiran, Rekonstruksi, Persepsi 9 (2000): 3.

236 shaped by the persecution, torture, imprisonment, and discrimination that they were forced to experience after 1965.298 Taufik understands why under the New Order both the state and several groups in civil society engaged in historical engineering. It was because society as a whole was itself a sort of a battlefield for power in politics, economy, and knowledge. To ensure its continued dominance, the New Order sought to impose its version of the national history, but not without resistance from various segments within civil society.299 The community of academic historians, he observes, had their own established criteria for accepting or rejecting truth claims. Artists, on their part, created all kinds of art forms that were insolent, humorous, and critical. What Taufik worries about are the effects of the New Order’s project to impose its version of history on the younger generation. The regime decreed that pupils in all schools throughout Indonesia should use for classroom study its standard history textbooks which contained “academically unverified,” “engineered knowledge.”300 It is evident that Taufik does not pay close attention to the many ways in which children in the New Order coped with the state’s political intrusion into schools. And he seems to have forgotten the many reports in the press on how the New Order project to order the

298

Ibid. But resistance was not always there. Practicing Muslims, for example, supported the New Order’s version of the history of 1965 in which the PKI is portrayed as the architect of the September 30 Movement. Supporters of the Masjumi, a Muslim party banned by President Soekarno in 1960, shared Nugroho Notosusanto’s historical interpretation that Soekarno was guilty of providing the PKI with plenty political opportunities to thrive and grow. 300 Abdullah, “Perdebatan Sejarah,” p. 3. 299

237 hearts and minds of the younger generation in schools wound up, ironically, in disorder.

d. Comparison, Contrast, Critique First, let us compare the three scholars on how they respond to this question: “Is the rectification of history a worthwhile undertaking or a misguided endeavor?” Asvi insists that the answer is affirmative because he sees the project as a necessary ingredient in the transition to democratization. But what he means by the rectification of history is a completely different thing from what ordinary people usually have in mind when they utter the term. It should be emphasized that Asvi does not demand that the New Order’s historiography of 1965 be outlawed. He simply wants to see the proliferation of other versions to challenge that of the New Order. Yet, I strongly object to Asvi’s suggestion that historical fabrication in defense of the nation-state (as in Japan’s case regarding the Nanjing Massacre in 1937-38) is a lesser crime than that carried out in defense of a ruling regime (as in the New Order’s case regarding the massacres of the communists in 1965-66). Asvi is persistently critical of a military regime gone astray (the New Order) but waxes naïve vis-à-vis nationalism (Indonesian and, especially, Japanese). It is as if nationalism does not have its own diabolic side. Asvi is unaware, I think, that the fundamentalist love for the nation-state led patriotic Indonesian youths to torture and butcher hundreds of civilian Dutch and Eurasians in Surabaya in October 1945. I also object to Asvi’s emphasis on the New Order’s imagined political omnipotence in its conflict with civil society. Unlike Taufik, Asvi

238 ignores the various ways in which groups within civil society were capable of challenging the repression and indoctrination inflicted on them by the New Order. Asvi should examine the cultural critiques of the New Order as represented by, among others, the poet W. S. Rendra, the pop singer Iwan Fals, the novelists Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Yudhistira A. N. M. Massardi, and the Yogyakarta theater group Teater Gandrik, and so forth. I maintain, therefore, that in his passionate critique of the New Order’s repression and hegemony, Asvi unwittingly makes it appear to be a much more effective political machine than it actually was. One may be tempted to think that what Asvi actually critiques is not the New Order as it actually was but, rather, his own caricature of it. Against Asvi, Bambang insists that scientific history is, by definition, “selfrectifying.” Popular debates on history, in his view, are the by-product of the professional historians’ pathetic failure to transcend their own mediocrity. Yet this insistence shows that Bambang misses Asvi’s point. Asvi, it is true, uses the term “setting history straight.” But the evidence shows that by this term Asvi does not mean that people should ban the New Order’s version of the history of September 30 Movement. As Asvi has declared over and over in the media, he simply means that in the age of reform, in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, Indonesians should promote the plurality of histories of their national past. That’s all. (What Asvi seems to have overlooked, however, are the many signs, even in the post-New Order Indonesia, that most Indonesians do not like the idea of plural histories. Teachers, for example, are allergic to the multiplicity of historical versions. ) In any case, Bambang

239 hit the nail right on the head when he disclosed and castigated the chronic and widespread mediocrity on the part of Indonesian academic historians. Bambang’s message, I think, can be summed up as follows: “We are second-rate professional historians. Yet, just because we have lived and worked under an authoritarian regime doesn’t mean that we have the right to remain second-rate historians.” Indonesian academic historians, I think, should thank Bambang for this slam-bang criticism intended to wake them up from their slumber. Like Bambang, Taufik is opposed to the idea that Indonesian history needs to be straightened out. Therefore, Taufik too may have missed the core of Asvi’s argument. Or, perhaps, he did not want people to get the wrong idea that the rewriting of Indonesian national history that his team was carrying out was meant simply to restate in a reversed way what the New Order’s historians had written in the statesponsored standard work. Let us now move on to the next point of comparison. Belonging to different generations of Indonesian academic historians, Asvi, Bambang, and Taufik represent different kinds of experience with the New Order as a life-world. When Guided Democracy was established in 1959, Asvi was five years old and Bambang was not even born yet. When Guided Democracy collapsed in 1966, Asvi was only twelve and Bambang five. Thus, what links both of them to the world of Guided Democracy are mere childhood recollections. By contrast, the New Order’s world as they know it was a world they experienced as adults. This biographical fact has different effects on Asvi and Bambang. For Asvi, it makes it difficult for him to make a balanced diachronic

240 comparison between the two, Guided Democracy and the New Order. He can be highly critical of the evils of the New Order but a bit ignorant, or not critical enough, of what went wrong in Guided Democracy. To some extent, Bambang is able to overcome the tendency to demonize the New Order. He is able to see that historical engineering was perpetrated by the New Order, Guided Democracy, and all the preceding regimes. Thus, he is able to discern that historical engineering was a point of continuity that linked all these regimes. Yet, he does not discuss the ways in which historical engineering differed from regime to regime. There is no denying, for instance, that society had changed a lot in the New Order. And this fact alone means that the New Order’s historical engineering operated in a very different social context from that in which the Guided Democracy’s historical engineering took place. Bambang, I think, is not sensitive enough to this particular issue. In contrast to both Asvi and Bambang, Taufik has first-hand experience of both regimes as an adult and therefore is capable not only of comparing the two regimes in a more nuanced, more complex way but also of being self-critical. (His comparative analysis of intellectual control in Guided Democracy and the New Order as I quoted above is not very penetrating. This problem, I think, deserves to be studied in a monograph.) But, in a very vivid manner, his testimony reveals something illuminating: As the regime changed, so did the professional historian. And just as the new regime rose, grew, and declined, so the scholar’s relationship to the regime underwent significant changes from time to time. In the beginning, from 1966 to 1974, was the honeymoon between the elite US-trained scholar and the military regime

241 which was committed to political stability and economic growth. Taufik calls these years “the creative-productive period for intellectuals.”301 In the middle period of the relationship, 1974-78, signs of estrangement began to appear. The regime saw its intellectuals in pragmatic terms. What it appreciated, Taufik feels, were not their ideas but the applicability thereof.302 In 1978, the regime, already well established, began to feel self-confident and adopt a superior and arrogant attitude towards its expert advisers. Feeling ignored and expendable, Taufik began to see the naiveté of his previous hopes. And in 1990, in an interview with Adam Schwartz, he remarked, “Soeharto has closed the door to the nation’s intellectuals.”303 But owing to his dependence on the New Order for, among other things, economic survival, he decided to remain in the service of the regime. Taufik’s testimony reveals to us the different modes of engagement with the regime that scholars adopted under the New Order. The spectrum of the engagement was much broader than just either for the New Order or against it, either to be like Nugroho Notosusanto or to “work outside the system.” (But was it possible at all for Indonesians to work outside the system?) Finally, Asvi, Bambang, and Taufik represent the different ways in which Indonesian intellectuals in the New Order dealt with the tensions among politics, history, and economy. One of them, Asvi, seems to believe that he can reconcile human rights politics with professional historiography. Another, Bambang, insists that

301

Pusat Data dan Analisa TEMPO, “Taufik Abdullah,” n.d., (August 18, 2004), Apa & Siapa. 302 Ibid. 303 Schwartz, A Nation in Waiting, p. 235.

242 in order to protect scientific objectivity and autonomy the professional historian should transcend political struggle. Thus, in his view, the best way for the professional historian to render a service to society is for him to practice his discipline really well. The good historian, for Bambang, is the master of advanced theory and methodology who is capable of writing first-rate monographs. Finally, Taufik is the most selfcritical in this context. In a gesture of self-irony, he confessed in 2002 that in his attempt to stay away from crude politics in the New Order he wound up in another form of politics: the politics of development. And he was frank enough to admit that working for the New Order served at least two purposes: to shape the state policies and to achieve the type of economic security which could support the urban middleclass lifestyle.

21. The Problems of History Teachers in the Post-New Order Era Some teachers confessed that they felt helpless when their students raised controversial issues in the classroom. In part, this feeling of helplessness arose from the lack of adequate resources: the lack of reference materials and the poor quality of the existing government-produced textbooks. They reported that the textbooks suffered from some defects. First, they ignored geographical and sociological contexts. Second, intended by the regime as a political tool, the books tended to be one-

243 dimensional in their treatment of historical events and actors. Third, the books were written in bad prose.304 In my view, teachers’ feeling of helplessness results from their lack of understanding of history as a discipline. Some teachers do not think that controversies provide a good situation for learning history. The controversies involve the conflict between the standard version contained in the official school textbooks and the alternative versions available in newspapers and on television. In the classroom, students appeal to those versions they learn from television and newspapers, while teachers still conform to their textbooks. Owing to their lack of adequate training in historical theories and methods, they become confused when faced with the clash of historical versions. More often than not, they turn to the government for the final say about which version is the true one. This, I think, is a symptom of epistemological alienation on the part of teachers. They see the government as the legitimate site of the production of history and themselves as its distributors. It does not occur to them that they too have the right to produce original historical knowledge. They seem to lack the desire to learn the theoretical and methodical skills necessary for the production of historical writings. When the state’s monopoly in the production of history is challenged by the privately owned media, teachers feel confused. Some hope that the new government will eventually launch an updated version of its history. Until such an update appears, they remain silent apropos certain controversial issues. But such a

304

“Pengajaran Sejarah Sering Tidak Sesuai Fakta: Siswa Anggap Guru Bohong” [The teaching of history often contradicts the facts: pupils think their teachers tell lies], Kompas, March 15, 1999.

244 silence and other avoidance tactics on the part of the teachers erode their credibility in the eyes of their students.305 Erosion of credibility and the boredom resulting from rote learning undermine students’ interest in history. They do poorly in exams which consist in the measurement of how well they memorize the standard facts and interpretations of history. School principals take the students’ poor grades to mean that the teachers failed to do their job. This could be an excellent reason for the liquidation of the subject of history from the curriculum and the dismissal of history teachers. Teachers want “objective history,” which they believe the government can provide. Ironically, they also think that the government, that is, the New Order government, was to some extent guilty of subjective history. Their fears and confusion in the face of controversies suggest that they see controversy as some kind of plague that should be cured once and for all. One senior high school teacher in Jakarta, for instance, thought that the New Order’s version of history contained an element of mendacity. She felt guilty of having taught lies to her students. Nevertheless, she believed that she had had no choice but to stick to the one and only standard textbook produced by the New Order regime.306 How can we explain this intriguing finding? In my interpretation, teachers realize that even if there are diverse perspectives, they cannot be all equally true. Yet, owing to the lack of good command of history as a discipline, they are simply unable to decide on their own which perspective has the most valid truth claim. Thus, as civil 305

“Ketika Sejarah Membingungkan Guru” [When history perplexes teachers], Kompas, April 29, 2000. 306 “Guru Tak Sekadar Fasilitator” [Teachers are not just facilitators], Kompas, April 13, 2000.

245 servants, they turn to their master (the government) for help, believing that it has the resources that it can use not only to engineer history, as it did under the New Order, but also to clean up the mess that such engineering has caused. I also argue that even if some people are able to tell the true version from the untrue ones, they are not always free to prioritize the true one. As individuals, school teachers in the New Order could adopt what they saw as the true version of the September 30 Movement even if this differed from the regime’s version. As employees of the Ministry of Education and Culture, however, they were required to conform to the New Order’s version when they carried out the state-managed national exams in their schools. In a way, they lived in two worlds: one was the personal world in which they could believe anything they wanted; the other was the official world in which they had to pretend to support the New Order’s version completely, including those parts in it that they did not believe. On the other hand, and from a political viewpoint, teachers, schools, and textbooks are indeed the apparatuses that the state employs in its efforts to propagate its version of history. As this case indicates, some teachers wound up seeing themselves as tools of the state and adjusted their behavior accordingly to the point of jettisoning their autonomy. Such teachers, I think, had fetishized the state. Symptomatic of dependence on the state was teachers’ dependence on the history supplement issued by the government to help them deal with multiplicity of versions in classroom teaching. In fear of controversies, the Jakarta teacher in question said that she would rather teach world history than national history. It was not because world

246 history was free from controversies. But it was because her students and the public nowadays were debating national history rather than world history.307 In 2000, the government issued a special guide for history teachers on how to deal with controversial topics in the national history as well as on how they should evaluate students’ performance. The daily Kompas pointed out a contradiction in the guide. On the one hand, it required teachers to provide their students with the opportunity to express their own facts and interpretations. The teachers were also asked to discuss the students’ versions. Yet, when it came to evaluation, tests were used to measure how well students could memorize the standard facts and interpretations.308 The guide covers a number of topics that history teachers found highly controversial: the September 30 Movement, the birth of Pancasila, the Executive Order of March 11, 1966, the general attack on March 1, 1949, and the “integration” of East Timor into Indonesia in 1976.309

22. Students’ Problems with History in Post-New Order Indonesia In May 1999, almost a year after the collapse of the New Order, students of some senior high schools in Jakarta reported their confusion in the midst of discrepancies between what school history textbooks said and how the contemporary reality unfolded before their eyes, as mediated, or course, by newspapers and television. School history textbooks had presented them with a series of historical 307

Ibid. Ibid. 309 “Suplemen Pelajaran Sejarah Luruskan Fakta Sejarah” [The history teacher’s guide straightens out historical facts], Kompas, April 7, 2000. 308

247 events and actors. But something important was missing: There were no convincing and comprehensible explanations of why these big events took place as they did, and how they were logically connected to the subsequent historical events. For example, the daily Kompas reported on the perplexity confronting one senior high school student: The history of the integration of East Timor [into Indonesia] was one of the histories that perplexed [senior high school students]. “In the book that we read, it is said that East Timor joined Indonesia voluntarily. What bewilders me is this question: “Why do they want to separate themselves from Indonesia?” 310 The most puzzling and most hotly debated historical event in Indonesia’s contemporary history for these Jakarta youths was the September 30 Movement. A student reported that the school textbook did describe what happened and who did what. But then again, it did not discuss why the aborted coup took place and what it really meant to Indonesia. Another student wondered: If the communists were really as dangerous as they were described in the textbook then why on earth did the government eventually release them from prisons? Still another student regretted the fact that the textbook did not report on the way in which the army arrested the leaders of the PKI and on how their trials went on. Finally, one student raised the issue concerning the whereabouts of the Executive Order of March 11, 1966. He had been taught that it was the document that legitimized the transition from the Guided

310

“Murid pun Menggugat Sejarah” [Students, too, interrogate history], Kompas, May 1, 1999.

248 Democracy to the New Order. He could not understand why the foundational text was lost.311 Over and over again students complained of having to memorize the contents of the textbooks. They were not encouraged to think about the complex relationship between historical events and their subsequent representations. Nor were they encouraged to grapple with the questions of causality and meanings behind historical events. In the classroom, students were reduced to some kind of a recording machine. An emphasis was given on the skill to memorize chronology: the what, who, where, and when. It was as if history were no different from a chronicle. However, this is also the case in other countries in the world, for example in Japan,312 Greece, 313 and South Korea.314

311

Ibid. Japanese Embassy in Denmark, “Education: Foundation for Growth and Prosperity,” n.d., (August 22, 2005), The Challenge of Reform. It is reported in the article that “there is a growing belief…that there is too great a focus on conformity and rote memorization in education. Some people feel this focus makes it difficult for students to develop as creative and unique individuals.” 313 Kathy Tzilivakis. “Historical Ignorance among Youth.” Athens News. January 28, 2005. (August 22, 2005). Tzilivakis reports that “one of the major observations made by academics today is that the public school education in Greece is too exam-oriented. Students are forced into rote-learning and memorizing just to pass tests and make good grades. This leaves little time for creativity and critical analysis.” As result, “three quarters of the 700 students participating in study…by Katsikas and Therianos [in 2004] did not know that the October 28 national holiday…marks the date Greece entered World War Two in 1940.” 314 As a professor at the Academy of Korean studies observes, “neighboring nations of Korea are able to misrepresent Korean history because of Korea’s own lack of awareness of the importance of its history. The main method of studying history in Korea has been rote memorization to attain a high score on the college entrance exam. See Lee Gil-sang, “To Win the War on History,” June 21, 2004 312

249 Yet, sometimes students found the rare opportunities of learning history in a really enlightening way. For example, some time in October 2003, a history teacher at a Jakarta private junior high school sent five of her students to attend an open discussion forum in the city where professional historians (Robert Cribb, Asvi Warman Adam, and Budiawan Purwadi) and NGO activists talked about the Indonesian translation of Cribb’s book The Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966: Studies from Java and Bali. The teenagers reported that Our teacher told us about this discussion. She said that this discussion is important and it was advisable that somebody listen to it... […] Many things have led me to wonder after I watched the movie about the G30S/PKI. Were the PKI [members] that cruel? […] Here [in this discussion] I just realized that what I so far believed to be the truth is not the complete truth. […] The history book we read never reveals the massacres of the PKI people after the event called G30S/PKI. I am grateful that our teacher encouraged us to discover things that are unrecorded in history books. Unfortunately, not all history teachers are like our teacher.315 In 1999, some senior high school students began to think that history textbooks might contain lies. They express the need for alternative textbooks that were accurate, thought-provoking, and responsive to their curiosity. They also complained that their teachers did not have a good command of their subject matter and therefore were unable to teach history in a sufficiently profound and inspiring way. History remained confusing. Students wound up apathetic as their teachers did not know how to handle (August 22, 2005). 315 “Membaca Sejarah yang Membebaskan” [To read history that liberates], Kompas, October 27, 2003.

250 controversies professionally. In the face of controversies, these teachers chose to be neutral, let the matter float, or just change the subject.316 Bad experiences of this sort led many students to the erroneous belief that history was just a waste of time. Some students insisted that history did nothing to prepare them for their future career. It was just “irrelevant for the world of work.”317 As one senior high school student in Semarang remarked in September 2002: “What is the use in studying history? History earns us nothing. The crude fact is that people need something to eat.”318

23. Afterthoughts It turns out that the post-New Order debate about the straightening out of history has itself a long history, dating back to the first five years after the declaration of Indonesia’s independence in 1945. Indeed, some topics in the post-New Order debate had already emerged in the New Order, for example the role of Soekarno in the September 30 Movement and the question of who orchestrated the abortive coup. Moreover, it has now become evident that this genre of debate is not the unique legacy of the New Order. For the collapse of the colonial order in 1945 and that of Guided Democracy in 1966 also left in their wakes a number of intense controversies over the rectification of history.

316

“Murid pun Menggugat,” ibid. Sri Syamsiar Issom and M. Fakhruddin, “Permasalahan Sekitar Pembelajaran Sejarah di Sekolah” [Problems surrounding the learning of history in schools], Sejarah, Pemikiran, Rekonstruksi Persepsi 10 (2001): 25. 318 “Belajar Sejarah” [To learn history], Kompas, September 16, 2002. 317

251 It also turns out that there exist a number of similarities between the historiographical debates that occurred from 1945 to 1998 (Period 1) and those that took place after 1998 (Period 2). First, debates in both periods centered on the typical accusation that in the pursuit of certain political goals somebody had distorted Indonesian history. Second, controversies in both periods dealt with regime genesis: the origins of the first national regime (born in August 17, 1945) in Period 1 and the origins of the New Order in both Period 1 and 2. Third, the debates in both periods can be said to be the products of regime changes that brought about large-scale social changes in Indonesia. In 1945, it was the transition from colonial order to a politically independent nation-state. In 1965, it was the transition from an authoritarian society that was ruled by a civilian regime and characterized by political instability, economic failure, and the clash of ideologies, to another authoritarian society that was ruled by a military regime which provided it with political stability and dramatic economic growth but eliminated the Left from the political equation. There are differences as well. First, in the post-New Order era the debate about the rectification of history revolved around the wrong direction that the nation-state adopted in Guided Democracy and the New Order. By contrast, from 1945 to 1998, the debate dealt with both this issue and the origins of the nation-state. Second, as far as the post-New Order debate about the history of 1965 is concerned, one side of the debate included a group of people (the Left) who had lost their right to participate in the Indonesian politics. By contrast, people engaged in the pre-New Order controversies over the origins of Indonesia represented all the major ideological

252 streams and most were allowed to participate in the national politics. Third, in the post-New Order era, the debate took place in the age of advanced information and technology where people were exposed to a dazzling amount of information that circulated in a dizzying speed. To a lower extent, this was also the case in the New Order, where a lot of money and advanced technology (fax and photocopy machines, cell phones and e-mails, school textbooks and all kinds of popular literature) were already available. But things were quite different under Guided Democracy, where most people had neither enough wealth nor advanced information and communication infrastructure to engage in a full-scale battle for the representation of history. Standard work on the national history of Indonesia and school history textbooks did not even exist.

253 PART THREE CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the beginning was this riddle: What happened to Indonesian history under the New Order? In my struggle with the riddle, I have interrogated the post-New Order debate upon the rectification of Indonesian history and put it in a long historical perspective. I also have examined my intellectual autobiography together with the experience of people of my generation. I am at the end of my journey now. On the basis of some reflections on the connections between my intellectual autobiography and the history of the history of the New Order, I would like to try and answer the central riddle by offering the reader a few concluding observations. In the wake of the New Order’s downfall, some professional historians argued that the regime had manipulated Indonesian historiography. They claimed that students were victims of indoctrination. Both my intellectual autobiography and the experience of “the New Order generation,” however, show that the indoctrination often did not work. There are a number of reasons for this failure. First, as consumers of historical artifacts, my friends and I often used them in ways that were quite different from what the regime had intended. For example, in the early 1990s, my friends and I used bits of dialogue from The Treason of the G30S/PKI (TG) as favorite stuff for college student jokes at Airlangga University in Surabaya. Teachers complained that in field trips to historical sites, their pupils did not use monuments as media to study history. All they did was take pictures of one another, with the

254 monuments as some kind of exotic backgrounds. This was also what I did when I, as a junior high school student, went on such a study tour. At the age of sixteen, I had become too arrogant to read the senior high school edition of the National History of Indonesia (NHI). Comparing it with the excellent Indonesian translation of one of Freud’s works, I saw the former as trash. Second, even if the New Order’s misrepresentation of history worked once, it failed later on. For students changed; they grew. As a senior high school student, my friend Evilina Sutrisno believed in TG’s story of the leftist women who mutilated the genitals of the kidnapped generals. Many years later, as a graduate student, she disbelieved the story, after she read a different account of the event in an article by Benedict Anderson. Third, and this is what the critics of the New Order’s historiography tend to overlook, my study demonstrates that the regime did two sets of things that contradicted each other. On the one hand, it sought to impose its interpretation of Indonesian history on the rest of society by deploying courses, textbooks, monuments, museums, and movies. (It also sought to control cultural expression by installing censorship.) On the other hand, the regime accomplished a feat that undermined its own historiographical engineering. Owing to the New Order’s success in bringing about spectacular economic growth, Indonesia underwent a great social transformation. In the Oil Boom period (1974-80), people enjoyed a huge income growth. Indonesia saw the emergence of a new middle class with its need for information and entertainment. A great deal of money trickled down from the high

255 income-parents to their children. As their wallets got fatter, the middle-class youths and their needs began to constitute a burgeoning market for all kinds of cultural commodities. My intellectual autobiography and the experiences of other New Order youths show how our world in the 1970s-1990s was filled with a throng of cultural commodities: not only those that belonged to the pop culture (Tintin comic books, the Beatles music, Hong Kong kung fu movies, romance novels, American cartoon movies, and Playboy) but also those that belonged to the highbrow culture (Encyclopædia Britannica, Indonesian version of the Time Life series, Indonesian translations of Freud’s works, the English translations of the oeuvres of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Gramsci, Luxemburg, and Lukacs). In the midst of these information and entertainment commodities, it was damn hard for me and other youths to develop a genuine and long-term interest in the historical objects that the New Order manufactured to promote its version of history. Those who loved pop culture only found the regime’s historical objects tedious. I belonged, by contrast, to a minority of eccentrics who loved both pop culture and highbrow culture. As a college student I thought I saw greater wisdom in Jackie Chan’s The Drunken Master than in the New Order’s TG. As a senior high school student, rather than peruse the New Order’s NHI, I read Kees Bertens’ introduction to the twentieth-century French philosophy. And if, as an undergraduate student, I cited a New Order’s jargons in a final paper or in a chat with friends, I did so to criticize or make fun of them. In conclusion, students in the New Order were not mere victims. They were capable of intended and unintended

256 resistance. And the irony was that the regime provided people with the conditions and materials to criticize itself.

In addition, my investigation of the genealogy of the post-New Order debate on the rectification of history reveals an intriguing phenomenon: In the New Order Soeharto was not the only one who insisted on the singularity of truth and tried to impose it on the rest of society: Many elements in the civil society abhorred and feared the idea that there was no single truth. Secondary school students and their teachers suffered from painful confusion when, in the wake of the New Order’s death in 1998, they were exposed to the discrepancies between school history books and historical accounts in the electronic and printed media. In the early 1970s, some ordinary citizens so despised the conflicting accounts of the proclamation of independence that they desired a “uniformity of history” of that sacred event. Many people believed that multiplicity of versions of sacred national events would lead only to confusion and chaos. Professional historians and political bureaucrats alike were convinced that Indonesians could not handle historiographical multiplicity. The third National History Seminar in Jakarta in 1981 and some topics in the fifth National History Seminar in Semarang in 1990 were closed to the public. In my view, the abhorrence of multiple truths and the accompanying fear of chaos had a lot to do with the traumatic political experience under Guided Democracy in which the clash of multiple worldviews led to actual bloodbath in 1965-66. They also perhaps had a lot to do with the bad experience under parliamentary democracy in which the clash of multiple ideologies led to

257 political instability and to the neglect of economic development. If my interpretation is accurate, then in the New Order Soeharto and his subjects had quite a lot in common. They all shared the obsession with one single truth and the belief that multiple truths would lead to chaos. The entirety of this phenomenon, I argue, represents one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary Indonesian culture. Non-cultural explanations, however, are also worth-considering. First, it can be argued that people’s insistence on the singularity of truth and their desire to impose it on society arise from the fact that people do not know what history is. One may insist that except for a small minority of professional historians and intellectuals, the average Indonesian does not grasp the nature and scope of history as a discipline. Indeed, my study (Part Two) has led me to reports by students, teachers, and academic historians on the poor quality of history education not only in primary and secondary schools but also in college-level history departments.319 Yet, I object to this explanation by referring to the case of the professional historian Nugroho Notosusanto, whose strong belief in his patriotic interpretation of Indonesian history from 1945 to 1965 led him to cooperate with the New Order to impose it on the entire Indonesian citizenry. Further investigation, I think, needs to be done into the following question: Is such an attitude unique to Nugroho? Or is it shared by other Indonesian professional historians?

319

On the poor grasp among history students of the fundamentals of history as a discipline, see, for example, Sartono Kartodirdjo, “Interview,” interview by Leonard Blussé, Itinerario 5, 1 (1981):16; Bambang Purwanto, “Sejarawan Akademik dan Disorientasi Historiografi: Sebuah Otokritik” [The academic historian and historiographical disorientation: A self-critique], Paper presented in his inauguration as a professor in history at the Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, September 24, 2004.

258 Second, one may argue that the phenomenon stems from the lack of historical evidence. As my study shows, it is true that the New Order did not invest enough money in the accumulation and maintenance of archives. Yet, the availability of sources is one thing and the ability to carry out source criticism and reconstruct the past on the basis of accepted facts is quite another. Just because one has all the sources one needs does not mean that one also has the analytic and synthetic skills of the professional historian. As long as people do not master the fundamentals of such skills, I think, they will not be able to navigate the multiplicity of conflicting historical perspectives. Third, one may also argue that in the New Order the professional historian’s lack of courage to write critical studies led to historiographical controversies in which people insisted on the singularity of truth and sought to impose it on the rest of society. Evidence shows, however, that the opposite is true. It was scholarly courage that provoked controversy. In 1968 the historian Slamet Muljana published a book entitled The Fall of the Hindu-Javanese Kingdoms and the Rise of the Islamic States in the Archipelago which contains, among other things, a controversial interpretation that some apostles who converted Java to Islam in the fifteenth century were of Chinese descent.320 Owing to this controversial interpretation, in 1971 the government banned

320

Slamet Muljana, Runtuhnja keradjaan Hindu-Djawa dan timbulnja negara2 Islam di Nusantara [The fall of Hindu-Javanese kingdoms and the rise of Islamic states in the archipelago] (Djakarta: Bhratara, 1968).

259 the book on the grounds that it “disturbed the law and public order in Indonesia.”321 And Muljana had to flee to Malaysia.

Thanks to my study, I am now in a better position to decide where I myself stand on the post-New Order debate about the rectification of history. There is no need, I argue, for the professional historian to engage in a crusade for setting history straight, for as Bambang Purwanto has it, history as a discipline has its own mechanism for self-rectification. The professional historian rewrites history when he encounters new facts or when he reinterprets the existing facts using new methods and new theories. It is true, as Asvi Warman observes, that in the New Order people of my generation were exposed to historical engineering. Yet one should not exaggerate its malignant effects. It just did not work. For, ironically, the New Order itself provided the antidote, available in abundance in the market of ideas. I myself survived. And so did others. It should be pointed out that there was nothing extraordinary in what the New Order did to history. Historiographical engineering occurred everywhere: not only in Indonesia but also in contemporary Japan and Germany; not only in the New Order but also in Guided Democracy; not only performed by the state but also by elements in the civil society, for indeed both have more in common than some people want us to believe.

321

Mohammad Ali, “Konsekwensi Pelarangan Karja Prof. Slamet Muljana” [The consequences of the ban on Prof. Muljana’s work], Kompas, August 3, 1971.

260 Since the New Order’s engineering of history was itself not extraordinary, there is no need, I think, for Asvi or any professional historian to undertake an extraordinary crusade to undo the effects of that engineering. Asvi, we recall, defines his crusade as the shift from “historical uniformity under the New Order” to “historical diversity in the age of reform.” Yet, my study shows that historical diversity did exist already in the New Order. Asvi overlooks this fact because in his critique of the New Order’s historiography he is too focused on what was done by the state actors such as Soeharto and Nugroho Notosusanto, while ignoring the carnival of expression that took place in the market of ideas in the heyday of the regime. Censorship was at work. But, ironically, it did a good job of promoting the sales of the banned work! Consider, for example, the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer. There is no denying that he is Indonesia’s greatest living author. But the New Order’s ban on his Buru Quartet, I think, contributed a lot to the tremendous popularity that the work enjoyed in the market of ideas. In short, dissent was not dead in the New Order. The really dangerous disease that the professional historian should resist is the temptation to reconstruct and interpret Indonesia’s past in the nationalist terms. Nationalism, it is true, was a powerful weapon in the struggle for political independence. But the intrusion of this ideology into the historiography of Indonesia has a number of bad consequences. For example, it leads the professional historian to turn the history of the national revolution into a myth for nation-building, that is, a moral tool. It also leads the professional historian to endorse historical engineering as long as it is performed in the interest of the nation-state.

261

In retrospect, it turns out that my encounter with history in the New Order was rather unusual. My experience does not represent that of the typical member of my generation. Unlike most of my friends, between the age of thirteen and sixteen, I had begun to explore alternative sources of authority and knowledge. This I did for a number of reasons. First, I needed to comprehend the origins of the miserable circumstances of my family. Second, I also needed sophisticated explanations of life’s other mysteries: the rapid growth of my body, the awakening of desires for the opposite sex, and the bizarre interplay in me between shyness, loneliness, and serenity. Third, I felt that the usual sources of authority and knowledge (teachers, clerics, and elders) were rather crude, clichéd, and boring. In my exploration I stumbled upon splendid books, which provided me with both solace and illumination, for they introduced me to master thinkers who put forward awesome ideas and intriguing problems in beautiful prose. Thus, unlike most of my friends, I turned away from teachers and school curricula toward master thinkers and their great books. I could not help but compare my teachers with master thinkers, school subjects with the great systems of thought in “cool” books. I ended up being a fanatic, eccentric bibliophile. Be that as it may, I must admit that in my transformation into an eccentric bibliophile I owed the New Order a lot of things that made such a transformation possible: economic growth, libraries with surprisingly diverse collections, and a market of information which offered almost all kinds of things: youth magazines,

262 European comics, American cartoon movies, Hong Kong kung fu movies, government-sponsored textbooks, good TV plays, dissent pop music, encyclopedias, photocopy machines, and so forth. However, although I was an eccentric, I also had a lot in common with the typical member of my generation. We both loved pop culture. We were fed up with history courses in school, for we compared them with the attractive products of pop culture. We studied history simply because we needed to get the passing grade in the subject. In conclusion, it turns out that “normal” youths (like most of my friends) and eccentrics (such as me) were all the products of the New Order.

Finally, my study has led me to the striking finding that the leaders of the New Order misunderstood its own society. They simply did not realize that the success of the economic development that the regime presided over had transformed Indonesia into a new complex society that was no longer amenable to a crude ideological engineering designed to shape it into a certain model. For example, Soeharto did not understand that there had emerged, on Indonesia’s sociological landscape, new social forces that would militate against his ideological engineering: the burgeoning market of ideas and the expanding pedagogical bureaucracy, each with its own internal requirements. The New Order’s misunderstanding of its own society is evident, for example, in 1983, when Soeharto, in a paranoid response to the rising popular cult of Soekarno

263 among youths, ordered the Ministry of Education and Culture to invent a new course called the History of the National Struggle (PSPB) and to incorporate it as a compulsory component in the entire national school curricula. Intended as a tool for the transfer of Pancasila and the 1945 patriotic values, the PSPB turned out to be a fiasco. Before long, two experts, Nugroho Notosusanto and Harsja W. Bachtiar, were engaged in a battle for interpretation and implementation of Soeharto’s vision. In the absence of a consensus, each carried out his own nationwide PSPB training program for history teachers. Worse still, the Harsja-Nugroho debate led to a battle of textbooks.322 It was an irony that Soeharto’s will to order in 1983 wound up in a pedagogical disorder in 1983-1985. In the end, disorder was what students and history teachers had to suffer, after two high officials came to blows, after two training programs cancelled each other, and after two sets of textbooks collided. The teaching of history itself did not get any better. Students and teachers complained about mindless reiteration and duplication of history courses, which resulted in a waste of time, energy, money, and opportunity.323 Soeharto’s response to the cult of Soekarno among youths in the early 1980s represented the New Order’s misunderstanding of the interplay between the ephemeral need on the part of the teenagers for idols and the pop culture industry that catered for that need. Rather than invent the PSPB in response to such a cult, Soeharto should

322

St. Sularto and S. E. Darsono, “Kasus PSPB, Contoh Utama Improvisasi Kebijaksanaan Pendidikan,” [The case of PSPB: A major instance of improvisation in educational policy], Kompas, September 30, 1985, pp. 4-5. 323 “Menempatkan Sejarah dalam Kelas” [Placing history in the classroom], TEMPO, September 28, 1985, p. 71.

264 have undertaken a further modernization of the Indonesian system of education. Didn’t he know, for example, that school teachers needed further training in their subject matter and in teaching skills? Didn’t he know that many teachers were poor? And if he really cared about history education, he should have modernized the management of the National Archives, which remained in miserable conditions in the midst of energetic economic development.

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