Nation Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories

4. Writing the History of Independent Indonesia

Writing the History of Independent Indonesia • 69 69 C H A P T E R F O U R Writing the History of Independent Indonesia Anthony Reid WRITING THE story of independent Indonesia has been a more than usually difficult enterprise, and particularly so for Indonesians. Very few have undertaken it, and most who did were either in the triumphalist semi-official school of Suharto’s New Order, or were foreign political scientists or journalists telling a generally disenchanted story of failure. Before Taufik Abdullah’s work, I know of no professional historian, Indonesian or foreign, who set out to tell the story of independent Indonesia as a totality, except as part of semi-official projects such as the national history or fiftieth anniversary celebrations. This chapter is designed to explain why it has been so difficult. A Rupture with the Past Revolutions have a way of breaking continuity with the past, as is indeed their intention. The normally fuzzy transition between the contemporary domain of the social scientists and the territory of the historian becomes a sharp break when marked by a revolution. While history is passionately important for revolutionaries, once in power they tend to make things difficult for historians of anything but ancient times. The past has to preserve a powerful myth, essential to the new way in which the revolutionary state sees itself. This is true even for the French, Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese 04 NationBldg Ch 4 16/6/05, 12:21 PM 69 70 • Anthony Reid revolutions, which explicitly sought a new beginning in which science and rationality would rule, in contrast with a discredited old order of oppression, hierarchy and privilege. Indonesian revolutionaries took the same view. Tan Malaka, the most cerebral of them, declared that “the true Indonesian nation does not yet have a history except one of slavery”, while the leading professional historian of the 1950s titled both his first books in a way that consigned Indonesia’s whole pre-independence past to a “feudal” category.1 Indonesia’s revolution however brought a further discontinuity even more profound than these other revolutions. The language of the revolution was romanized Malay, renamed Bahasa Indonesia, and from the time of its triumph virtually all education was in that language alone. The languages of Indonesia’s written past were Dutch (preeminently), and a range of vernaculars of which the most important were Javanese, Malay in Arabic script, Sundanese and Bugis, each written in a difficult script of its own, increasingly lost to the new educated generation. The first generation of nationalists who grappled with building a new past for a new country were all at home in Dutch, and could use a large body of Dutch historical writing for different purposes. Their students, however, lost contact with all the languages of their pasts extremely rapidly, and were put off history altogether by its arcane linguistic demands. In former colonies of the British, Americans, French or Spanish (and in a surprising throwback even the Portuguese in East Timor) the language of the colonizer remained useful and valued long after independence. But the dropping of Dutch as an internationally useless, even embarrassing, reminder of past subjection, was very sudden with the arrival in 1942 of the Japanese conquerors, who had absolutely no use for it. The new second language of the national education system after 1950 was English, and the overwhelming majority of Indonesian-educated students accessed international ideas in that language only. Bad to non-existent relations with the Netherlands in the 1950s and 1960s removed the possibility of maintaining continuities by pursuing higher education in the Netherlands. The minuteness of the remnant truly comfortable with Dutch after the passing of most of the first generation in the 1960s helps to explain their crucial importance in Indonesian history. This applies especially to Sartono Kartodirdjo (b. 1921) at Gadjah Mada University, the only Professor of History in the country until the 1980s and therefore the supervisor of all the 04 NationBldg Ch 4 16/6/05, 12:21 PM 70 Writing the History of Independent Indonesia • 71 second generation of historians who could not study abroad. Among these the Menadonese maritime historian A.B. Lapian (b. 1929), the Ambonese historian of eastern Indonesia R.Z. Leirissa (b. 1928), and the aristocratic Javanese intellectual historian Abdurrachman Surjomihardjo (1929–94) moved easily with the Dutch sources as members of the tiny minority raised in Dutch–speaking...