The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the Second Edition This study of the social world that grew out of relationships between European men and Asian women in ports along the trade routes of the Dutch East Indies Company was first published in 1983 with the subtitle "European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia." In his review of the book, Michael Adas called for further research to broaden the social profile of colonial-era communities and their urban settings.! This second edition, now subtitled "Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia," introduces in an added chapter succeeding studies of that social world by another generation of scholars with new skills, approaches, and interests. Images stored in paint and photograph proved to be a turning point for me in understanding what visitors and insiders meant when they called people and habits "Indies" (Indische). I first encountered photographs of Indies peoples when the late John R. W Smail gave me his copy of Tempo Doeloe: Fotografische documenten uit het oude Indie, the photographic album assembled by Rob Nieuwenhuys under his pen name of E. Breton de Nijs. The photographs and accompanying text span the years 1870-1914. At the time I was making a close study of Raden Ajeng Kartini's letters. The Nieuwenhuys photographs encompassed Kartini's brief lifespan, 1879-1904. Looking at those photographs (and they included one of Kartini ), I was struck by the men and women with European features who were wearing variants of Javanese clothing and by the men and women with Indonesian features who wore variants of Western clothing. On the pages were officers of the colonial government, civil and military, Dutch and Indigenous; there were Javanese and Dutch families, servants, street sellers , craftsmen, entertainers, picnickers, club members, and amateur actors; there were descendants of Java's royal and aristocratic houses and their retainers. In short, here were the kinds of men, women, and children who peopled Kartini's world. Nieuwenhuys gave consecutive volumes of Tempo Doeloe the subtitle "een verzonken wereld," a world gone, swept away. Indeed, the title Tempo Doeloe is suggestive. It combines words from Dutch and Indonesian xvii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION vocabularies and can be translated as "Time Past" or "Bygone Days." Perhaps the late Rob Nieuwenhuys intended a subtle reference to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu; for him photograph, rather than madeleine cookie, was the key to his past. Nostalgia might also be induced in readers whose roots lie in the former colony of the Netherlands. The Tempo Doeloe collection made me ponder for the first time about the woman to whom Kartini wrote such long letters and whom she addressed as "darling Mama" and "my dear, sweet Angel." Dutch people who were the recipients of Kartini's letters preserved them. Perhaps they sensed that the writer was a remarkable personality, or Holland's long history of literate culture had engendered in them habits of storing the written word. On the other hand, their letters to Kartini do not seem to have been preserved by her descendants; at least, none has come to light in the century that scholars have been studying this ardent recorder of lava's emerging modernity. Nieuwenhuys's book prompted me not to indulge in elegiac musings on someone else's past but to ask who were the colonial Dutch and what was it in the women that elicited such outpourings from Kartini and inspired so many ideals and ideas. A passing inclination to find out about European women in official circles of the colony led me all the way back to 1610 and the arrival in Ambon of a party of thirty-four women (of a completely different social class) who had survived the ten-month sea journey from Holland. The Dutch directors of the United East Indies Company (VOC) had sponsored them to establish hearth and home and raise babies in the East. But by 1632 the Company's directors took a less sanguine view of Holland's female pioneers . There were too many reports of the failure of mothers and babies to thrive, of drunkenness, lewd behavior, the pursuit of riches, and the powerful pull of home. That was pretty much the end of sponsored female emigration from Holland. Now the directors and their delegates in the East turned to legislating that "immoral conduct" with Asian women should be made lawful, channeled into permanent unions, registered with civic authorities, blessed by the (one true) church and monitored by its synod. Could a history be written that...