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Concluding Remarks
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186 The variegated world of Indonesian crime The temptation to write a book that would focus on the sensational exploits of a few bandit chiefs was something I was determined to resist. Not because no such figures existed in the Dutch East Indies, but precisely because these striking figures have tended to produce a romanticized image of robbers’ lives. The banditry of the early twentieth century was a lucrative business that received plenty of attention in the press. The bandits’ success stemmed in part from two developments in the Dutch East Indies: the replacement of the feudal government of the archipelago by a rule-bound bureaucracy, and the growth of a money-based economy. The legendary image that grew up around them was to a large extent determined by the demographic changes made possible by the opening of the Suez Canal. All three factors played a key role in Batavia and the surrounding area. The phenomenon of rampok or armed robbery attracted growing public interest in the Dutch East Indies from 1900 onwards. The media — the indigenous and Chinese as well as the European press — started to project European ideas about robbers onto the perpetrators of rampok. These ideas derived in part from the literature of Italian hoodlums and the mafia. Social Darwinism, most notably Lombroso’s theory of the inferior physiological features that distinguished criminals, was also highly influential. Romanticization subsequently coloured theories of crime in Concluding Remarks 10 BWJ.indd 186 11/19/10 2:34:15 PM 187 Concluding Remarks the Dutch East Indies, by creating a certain distance to the historical reality. Nineteenth-century city-dwellers, in particular, harboured fears of the countryside that spawned a view of indigenous robbers as wild forces working against the modern age and undermining the colony’s emerging modernity. The bandits were seen as the embodiment of barbarous violence, primitive sexuality and superstition. After 1910, variations on this theme appeared. Anthropologists started taking an interest in rampok, as did the new police sciences, although the latter adopted a largely technological perspective. There was a change in tone from the fairly businesslike approach that had marked internal administration officials’ discussions of rampok. Researchers and police alike happily used local people and Indo administrative officials as informants. But it is debatable whether such sources produced a sounder understanding of the indigenous bandits’ world. One consequence, in any case, was a still more elaborate mythologization of these activities, revolving around the robbers’ supposed use of supernatural powers. It was these mythologized bandits who became the basis for influential studies by authors such as P.M. van Wulfften Palthe and D.H. Meijer. These articles served in turn as important sources for later historians and social scientists. From this point onwards, many researchers started using the term jago in studies of crime or violence in the archipelago. One disadvantage of the emphasis on jagos was that it produced an undifferentiated picture of crime in the Dutch East Indies. What is more, in its crude form, this approach was decidedly ahistorical. There is a tendency to regard violence as a constant factor in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial society of the archipelago. Thus in Gangsters and Revolutionaries (1991), Robert Cribb takes it for granted, in discussing the relationship between bersiap and banditry, that the men of violence in the revolutionary period had the same attitude to violence as the perpetrators of rampok. But this is highly questionable. After all, professional bandits have to control and channel the use of violence, since it is ‘merely’ a means to an end: violence in a robbery was designed to intimidate, to create chaos and to quell any thoughts of retaliation. The bandits’ world did not generally extend into political life, even after 1920, with the rise of Indonesian nationalism. The link that Robert Cribb posits between the Batavian underworld and the revolutionary Indonesian fighters simply did not apply to bandits. Although there may well have been bandits who threw themselves into the revolutionary cause, for whatever reason, I have not found any evidence of a more systematic 10 BWJ.indd 187 11/19/10 2:34:15 PM [35.175.121.135] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:11 GMT) 188 Banditry in West Java, 1869–1942 association. It is here that the flaws in Cribb’s undifferentiated picture of illegal activity in the colony become painfully apparent. His tendency to consider all members of the underworld under one common denominator obscures the...