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5 The Nationalists’ Enlightenment Since the 1840s, generations of apostles of enlightenment in Indonesia have dreamed of using science as a way to provide knowledge that would help the land and its people. In the nineteenth century these apostles of enlightenment were all Europeans. In the twentieth century, Western education for native inhabitants created a small group of intellectuals who came to believe that science was not only useful but also had the power to allow natives to catch up with the West. At the same time, as part of the ethical policy, new professional careers opened up for these native apostles of enlightenment, initially as colonial officials but increasingly as entrepreneurial and political independent intellectuals . For the children of the native elites, no longer was a position in the native bureaucracy the only professional career option. Starting with a cohort of students who attended the medical college in Batavia in the first decade of the twentieth century, student apostles of enlightenment received scientific training and took up careers as doctors, teachers, and engineers. Even when political differences emerged after World War I, these intellectuals shared a common history in their systematic commitment to promoting science as a means of progress. Graduates of the medical college, including Soewardi Soerjaningrat , Tjipto Mangoenkoesomo, and G. S. S. J. Ratoe Langie, believed before and after the war that expanding Enlightenment methods and knowledge would lead to progress for the Indonesian people. This progress would in turn strengthen their position vis-à-vis the Dutch. In fact the apostles of enlightenment failed to lead Indonesia to independence, which was achieved in 1949 after a military power contest between Indonesians and the Dutch. Nonetheless , the dream of Indonesian professional science originated in this prewar movement and remained significant for the organization of science under the independent Indonesian Republic. 96 Until 1918 there was an expectation among the emerging native professional class that the Dutch colonial state would aid them in expanding scientific education to more Indonesians and hence broaden the authority and meaning of Western scientific knowledge. By the end of World War I, however, the extent to which the colonial government had manipulated and exploited Westerneducated native elites became widely apparent to the native apostles of enlightenment . The naïveté they had held about their seeming benefactors, the colonial state, dissolved. They saw that their goal of leadership and enlightenment for the people must inevitably be a contest for power. At this low point of demoralization for the apostles of enlightenment, they lost momentum in their quest to foment Enlightenment knowledge. The political initiative passed to the social revolutionaries, including those influenced by communist and Marxist ideas, whose ranks had been growing over the previous years.1 Still, even as the nationalists who saw the conflict with the Dutch as a contest of power became the voice of Indonesian nationalism, by the mid-1920s the apostles of enlightenment had regrouped as professionals who had lost their naïveté about colonial power but remained wedded to an enduring idealism. Enlightenment as a means of empowerment now would need to be achieved without government support. Professionals turned to teaching and publishing about science as a way to spread Enlightenment knowledge to the Indonesian masses. The achievements in the 1920s and 1930s in spreading Enlightenment thought were modest. Two generations after native intellectuals began spreading their Enlightenment dreams, science was still an elite pursuit with professional science holding little more authority among the Indonesian population than it had at the beginning of the twentieth century. I will show in this chapter that while many of the educated and professional apostles of enlightenment believed science was important to the Indonesian people, they never successfully changed the identity of science as an elite pursuit. Consequently, whether as traditional authorities or colonial officials, the apostles failed to spark a popular Enlightenment. Moreover, in order to survive in this corner of colonial society, outside of radicalism yet also outside the goals of the state itself, the Indonesian science advocates stripped themselves of all politicalization. But removing the political goals from their program caused the overall meaning of and authority for scientific knowledge to become vague. The Indonesian nationalist movements that opposed the Dutch during the 1930s and 1940s, whatever their inspiration, all had clearly defined political agendas that led to complete independence from colonialism. As a result apostles of enlightenment played only a small role in the decolonization of Indonesia. Science and...

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