The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands

1. Borderland Formations

1 Borderland Formations The lights from the Singapore skyline are still visible in the background when Pak Padil takes me out in his motorboat at dawn. In his broad Malay dialect he begins a lament that he obviously has spoken before. “When I was young,” he tells me, “there were fish everywhere. It was easy to make a living. Now the water is polluted and the fish are gone.” Born in the early 1920s on a small island just off the coast of Batam, Pak Padil was a fisherman for a large part of his life, but these days he has become connected to the new economy, guiding weekend tourists from Singapore on boat trips along Batam’s coast. As a child he would sometimes take the three-hour boat trip to Singapore—even then a bustling cosmopolitan center of trade, a dramatic contrast to the quiet village life on Batam—to visit his father who worked there. In the years before World War II he moved there, running errands in a large store owned by a Chinese entrepreneur from Java, before returning to Batam when Japanese forces captured Singapore. After the war and Indonesian independence, Pak Padil worked for a few years at the Royal Dutch Shell oil refinery just off the coast of Batam but would frequently take the ferry to buy goods in Singapore’s markets. “There were no markets on Batam then. We depended on Singapore .” This changed, however, with the Konfrontasi, an armed conflict in 1963 between Indonesia and Malaysia (of which Singapore was a part) that initiated a period intensifying border regulation. “After that, I never returned to Singapore again.” Pak Awang Ali, another elderly Malay man who lives in one of the few remaining fishing villages on Batam, came with his parents from Singapore in the mid-1930s, leaving behind increasing land scarcity and competition among fishermen. At the time, he recalled, there were only a few villages and a Japanese rubber plantation along the coastal area where he lived. His father and other villagers would catch fish that they sold or bartered in borderland formations : 21 Singapore. They saw little point in living or working in Singapore; it was easier to survive on Batam. But things have changed. When I talked with Pak Padil, Pak Awang Ali, and other elderly Malay fishermen on Batam about their lives before World War II, most became nostalgic and remembered what they had lost, often pointing out their own marginalization in relation to the development of Batam. “Now,” Pak Awang Ali told me, even though I am Malay, and Singapore is part of the Malay World (Taman Melayu), I have to use a passport to travel to Singapore because they tell me that I am Indonesian. Even with a passport, it is not certain that the immigration authorities will let me across the border. Maybe they think that I want to work illegally: an old man like me! Who knows? And now, BIDA [Batam Industrial Development Authority] tells me that I live in a wild house (rumah liar) that has to be razed (digusur), even though it was built twenty years before they arrived! This chapter begins with Pak Awang Ali and Pak Padil, not in order to reproduce a nostalgic lament of an era that has passed, but rather to suggest an opening for considering the historical transformations that have shaped channels of human mobility in the “Malay world,” a region that View of the Singapore skyline from Batam. Photo by author. 22 : chapter 1 encompasses contemporary Malaysia, Singapore, and large parts of Indonesia . While the precolonial Malay world was characterized by powerful centers and unclear political boundaries, the Dutch and English colonial empires divided this world between them, forming the territorial basis for what after World War II became Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Each of these periods can be distinguished by different (overlapping) patterns of human mobility. In the precolonial era, migration was turbulent, as men easily shifted their allegiances between different hubs of power. In the colonial period, capitalist expansion led to the extensive import of pan-Asian coolies who labored in the tin mines and rubber plantations that fueled industrialization in Europe and the United States. In the postcolonial period, new regimes of citizenship and the regulation of borders within and between nation-states have made documents such as passports and identity cards critical instruments for most forms of human...