Banditry in West Java, 1869-1942

Introduction

1 For instance, last night at 9 p.m. another rampok was committed within the city limits. The victim was a Chinese shopkeeper in the Chinese camp near the bridge at Kampong Melajoe. Six rampokkers forced their way into his house and stole 160 guilders’ worth of jewellery and 140 guilders’ worth of other goods. As they retreated with their loot, they fired their revolvers to keep pursuers at a distance.1 This article comes from the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, one of the most influential newspapers in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. The leafy lanes of the city — which was also known as the Koningin van het Oosten (Queen of the East) — were shady and inviting by day but looked very different by night. The threat of the dark world that surrounded the European colonists is expressed in the novels The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus and Country of Origin by Edgar du Perron. The bands of robbers active around Batavia in the early twentieth century provided a solid basis for such fears. These robbers — or bandits; in this book, the two terms are used interchangeably — soon inspired all sorts of tales, some of which grew into legends. And they aroused not only fear, but also outrage. How could such things take place so close to the centre of colonial authority? Given the number of robberies, the fear and outrage appear to have been justified. At the height of this wave of banditry, or rampok2 — defined for the purposes of this book as theft involving violence or the threat of Introduction 00a BWJ.indd 1 11/11/10 9:29:27 AM 2 Banditry in West Java, 1869–1942 violence, perpetrated by more than one person3 — there were two or three incidents a week. Who were the bandits, and why did they keep cropping up in Batavia’s rural surroundings, the Ommelanden? The robbers captured the imagination of their contemporaries and won themselves a place in popular history. Since the publication of Eric Hobsbawm’s Bandits in 1969, scholars have also taken an interest in the relationship between banditry and state formation. The people of Batavia regarded the Ommelanden as a backward area, the antithesis of civilization. Nevertheless, starting around 1900, the Ommelanden became a focal point of numerous forms of modern development, such as agricultural production for the world market, infrastructural expansion, and the transition from feudalism to a modern property system. The question is whether the problem of banditry promoted the expansion of state authority into areas that had previously been seen as frontier, areas where the state’s growing influence led to friction. Batavia and the Ommelanden, 1869–1942 Batavia and the Ommelanden underwent modernization earlier than the remainder of the Malay Archipelago.4 The colonial capital was a melting pot in which all groups had economic opportunities and access to the burgeoning mass media. A highly diverse urban middle class took shape, which included Europeans, Chinese, indigenous people, and Eurasians (people of mixed European and Asian descent, also known as Indos). The emerging local press provided a forum in which Batavians could vent their frustrations about unsafe conditions in the Ommelanden around their city. This had an impact on the development of the state apparatus, an impact that was felt not just in the centre of the colony, but throughout the archipelago. Yet even though other parts of the colony (such as the Vorstenlanden of Central Java) were also plagued by bandits, Batavia was the only place where a variety of news outlets fuelled lively debate about the banditry issue. It was the place where the image of the bandit was formed and, in a sense, set in opposition to the image of modernity. The influence of this imagery is still visible in our present-day thinking about crime in the Dutch East Indies. This study thus addresses the relationship between popular images and historical reality. The Ommelanden around Batavia were unusual in several respects. For one, the area was subject to a special legal regime, one special feature of which was that Europeans were permitted to own large tracts of land. 00a BWJ.indd 2 11/11/10 9:29:27 AM Illus. 1 The western residencies on Java, based on the political and administrative organization in 1900. (Collection of the Royal Netherlands Geographical Society) 00a BWJ.indd 3 11/11/10 9:29:30 AM...