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Chapter 8. The Wartime Creation of "Gending Sriwijaya": From Banned Song to South Sumatran Symbol
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8 The Wartime Creation of "Gending Sriwijaya " From Banned Song to South Sumatran Symbol When I long for the glory of the past I sing a tune again, the Sriwijaya song In art I enjoy again that happy era I recreate from the womb of that great time Sriwijaya, with the great hermitages of the glorious masters. The words of Dharma Pala, Shakya Khirti, Dharma Khirti Resound from the summit of the holy Siguntang Hill Spreading the holy guidance of the sacred Gautama Buddha. “Gending Sriwijaya” The subject of this chapter is the history of a single song-dance, the text of which is translated above.1 Created in 1945 by a team of artists in wartime Palembang, the song “Gending Sriwijaya” was first performed with its accompanying dance “Tari Gending Sriwijaya” (“Sriwijaya Dance Piece”) as an ironic joke at the expense of the Japanese invaders, who had been led to believe that its nostalgic reference to the glory of the Sriwijaya-Palembang kingdom in the seventh to eleventh centuries c.e. (Manguin 1993) represented their support for the Japanese wartime ideology of “Asia for Asians,” as opposed to the idea of “Asia for the Dutch colonialists.”As secret supporters of the nationalist leader Sukarno, the team of artists actually intended the new song to serve the cause of the Indonesian independence movement, in the hope that independence would lead to a return of the prosperity of the glorious Sriwijaya past.2 The Wartime Politics behind the Premiere The first performance of “Tari Gending Sriwijaya” was presented at a function on 4 August 1945 as part of the Japanese propaganda effort to win over the hearts and minds of the people of Sumatra in general and Palembang in particular. After deciding in 1942 that the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi were to be governed from the Japanese naval base in Singapore, the Japanese invaders established their All-Sumatra Advisory Council (Chuo Sangi In) in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, planning thereby Kartomi_Text.indd 186 6/15/12 2:29 PM 8. The Wartime Creation of “Gending Sriwijaya” 187 to consolidate their control throughout the island. The Japanese required the council chairman—the educational reformer Mohammed Sjafei—and the head of the council’s secretariat, Adinegoro, to make “laudatory speeches” about the Japanese on their tours. On his tour to Palembang, they had to discuss “government questions about how best to further this war effort” with local functionaries, including Dr. A. K. Gani, the chairman of the Japanese-organized Palembang Council (Reid 1979, 139–47). The catch for the Japanese was that the team of artists was also secretly hatching plans for Indonesia’s independence and designed their new song-dance to further this purpose. On 26 July 1945, Sjafei and Adinegoro departed from Bukittinggi on their tour of Sumatra (Reid 1979, 140) and were scheduled to reach Palembang to conduct discussions with Gani in early August. Members of the Japanese wartime Propaganda Unit (Hodohan) in Palembang, which apparently included Palembang citizens as well as Japanese, asked Gani to commission a new artistic work to celebrate South Sumatra’s past glory and to promote the “Asia for Asians” ideology. The work’s premiere was intended to grace the special political event on 4 August at which Sjafei and Adinegoro would speak. So Gani asked his friend Nungtjik A. R. to set up a team to create and perform a new South Sumatran work that would seem to the Japanese to support their Asia for Asians concept while in fact rallying underground support for the cause of Indonesian independence (Hadji Wan Tjik, pers. comm., 1971). Born in Palembang in 1910, Nungtjik A. R. was employed as a journalist in the Japanese Department of Information, but he was also a radical socialist and active underground member of the Partai National Indonesia (PNI, “Nationalist Party of Indonesia”). In consultation with two friends—Salam Asterokusumo and M. J. Suud, who were members of the PNI and the Sarekat Islam Party respectively—he decided to write a poem, a translation of which heads this chapter, about the ancient kingdom of Sriwijaya for the occasion, and then to ask a composer, a choreographer, and a group of musicians to create a collaborative work for performance (Hadji Wan Tjik, pers. comm., 1971). The team did not choose the theme lightly. Like most South Sumatrans, they were extremely proud of their ancestors’ maritime kingdom of Sriwijaya. For around five centuries (seventh to eleventh century c.e.), Sriwijaya-Palembang had served as...