Historiografi

I am trying to find Perspektif Baru, a volume with essays on Indonesian historiography by Henk, Bambang, and Sakti. It is very difficult. I have been all over town, to both Social Agency and the various Gramedia outlets, besides a bookshop that was recommended to me in yet another shopping centre near the university (Togama). The book is nowhere to be found. Also, Bambang's older book on Indonesian historiography is now out of print (as he himself has confirmed to me. In fact he gave me a copy of his book in South Africa a couple of years ago. I wanted then to translate it into Portuguese. My copy is now with my other books on the other side of the world). I have been spending a good deal of time - and money for taxis (the taxi fare is often more expensive than the price of a book) - hunting titles down. I like it because in the process I am becoming more and more acquainted with the city. It is of course much larger than I thought, and full of shopping malls as well (it is however a far cry from the urban hell of Bangkok, let alone São Paulo. It is still a pleasant place to live though it will not remain so for many more years).

I have already taken TransYogya more than once. I don't know the origin of this transport system, but I associate it with Curitiba. That is the southern Brazilian city that was hailed a couple of years ago as one of the best administrated cities in the world (sic). One of its hallmarks is exactly a TransYogya-style bus system that imitates an underground subway station (platforms and sliding doors included). It is staffed with gentle and very helpful staff that chant the destinations at every stop and help people change to other lines without having to get out of the mini-station or pay a higher fare. Just as in Curitiba, in Yogya too it works well (the buses are also air-conditioned). Only, in the evening the waiting times can be ridiculously long for a city of the size and wealth of Yogya. Of course, the buses also stop running comparatively early in the evening, which is unusual for Brasil (but not for Malaysia).When waiting times are long, people are often packed together just like sardines in the ludicrously small mini-stations. I remember in Curitiba the stations are of course larger. Compared to public transport in Melaka and other Malaysian cities of similar size, however, TransYogya is state of the art.

Maybe one day, who knows, I will be able to lay my hands on a copy of Perspektif Baru. However, all the same the feeling I have now is basically one of déjà vu. Not because I have been to this place before, nor because I am terribly knowledgeable about it. I certainly have a good deal to learn. However, this is about historiography of a kind I have seen before, even though the subject matter - namely, Jawa and the Dutch either separately or together - is somewhat outlandish. No matter how critical - and it is obviously critical - and notwithstanding its obviously high level, it is a historiographical discourse that is not much different from what I have become inured to in Brasil, for instance, not to mention South Africa. Namely, it is national historiography.

I wonder whether there is a point in joining it. I don't need a third national historiography in my life, be it Indonesian, Indo-Javanese, Dutch or a mixture of all these. I cannot therefore readily identify with the underlying premises here. Perspektif Baru Penulisan Sejarah Indonesia remains Penulisan Sejarah Indonesia at the end of the day, from a new perspective or not. We are still in the realm of the writing of national history.

I therefore cannot find myself in a project related to Indonesian history, whether colonial, pre-colonial or pascakolonial. Also, the heritage conference last week was an eye opener because what some of the presenters talked about in fact did not readily fit in national historiographies. Matthew's presentation for instance, on cinematic fantasies of an earlier age - related to either Jawa or Bali - is concerned with cultural products that are very much transnational in nature though their currency was mostly in (parts of) the West, not in Asia. Margana's Banyuwangi is part of Indonesia (it is in fact also part of Jawa) but its local history is something that neither necessarily feeds from nor easily fits into any national historiography. Heritage is perhaps inherently local rather than national. And when it is not local it is not necessarily national as such as the old films about Bali and Jawa indicate. I don't know how to situate myself in all this. Of course, the conference was stricly speaking not about Indonesian historiography as such but inevitably it has loomed very large. Susan has of course mentioned that we can tell new stories about the nation that will make allow us to look at it from a different perspective. She even specifically mentioned the case of the connections between Indonesian intellectuals and the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic in the first decades of the twentieth century. This last is the best idea I heard in the entire conference, though I am not sure how it can be implemented in concrete terms. Bambang has also opened up the possibility of a different reading of the national through his presentation and his comments. His perspective is certainly critical. I however remain highly skeptical after over two weeks here. It is not theoretically challenging enough as far as I am concerned. This is an archipelagic country of vast dimensions with a complex Indian Ocean history. Maritime connections therefore burst out of the seams of Indonesia's history at practically every corner. Yet local academia has chosen to do national history all the same. It is incredible how the power of the nation-state makes itself felt here just as in Brasil in spite of the many differences between both countries.

Lubis's objection to my initial enthusiasm with local historiography also comes to mind here: he thinks Indonesian historiography is Jawa-centric. Of course, he is of Sumatran - in fact Mandailing - origin even though he was born in a village founded by Mandailing immigrants in Perak, Malaysia. I have tried to argue with him that Javanese historiography as such is not necessarily taken into consideration by national historians but he is very skeptical all the same (I said that because I don't think that the court archives for instance have been traditionally taken into consideration by national historiography. Also, there is of course no historiography nowadays in basa Jawa). All things considered, however, it must indeed look very different from the perspective of Sumatra, or rather the Straits: Jawa and the national state must then seem one and the same thing. Several of his friends find him a bit of a joke because he is very interested in the history and ethnography of the Mandailings, a comparatively neglected subject (even in Indonesia, let alone in Malaysia...). Some even think he is a kind of old fashioned ethnic nationalist (interestingly, this is a term that came up during the conference in discussions about Margana's presentation on Banyuwangi. It was used to describe the local history being written in Banyuwangi itself). Whatever the case, his looking at Indonesia via his diasporic experience as a Mandailing descendant on the west coast of West Malaysia is quite enlightening. His in-between position as it is allows him to see across the Straits of Melaka in both directions, and therefore he is very critical of both Indonesian and Malaysian historiographies.

For instance, he rightly points out that the current political division between postcolonial Malaysia and Indonesia originates in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 and is therefore historically a unique fact in local history. Namely, the Straits were never a border before - and even after - as much as they were a passageway. The old Melaka Sultanate was a prime example and in more recent times there were the many links between for instance Aceh and Penang. All this now of course gets lost in the national historiographies of both countries. Interestinlgy, something else that gets lost is that until the Padri Wars in Sumatra in the early nineteenth century (and therefore just before the colonial era proper), the Mandailings and their Batak neighbours were in fact linked to the Indian Ocean, and not so much to the Straits (Lubis objects very strongly to the Mandailings being put together under the Batak, though the historiography and ethnography of the region in fact distinguishes between at least five different Batak groups, one of which would be the Mandailings. Interestingly, the Mandailings and others must have also used Portuguese Melaka as a major corridor to enter the Peninsula. However, information on this is still apparently buried somewhere in Portuguese archives in Lisbon. Only the Dutch and British archives on Melaka have been more thoroughly researched so far, in spite of Luís Filipe Thomaz's pioneering - and still fundamental - work in the 1960s).

Sumatra however is a whole different territory here, especially the part of Sumatra where the Bataks have lived. It is also larger and more complex in a way than Jawa.  There are sources in local languages, but these are less extensive than in the case of Jawa. The languages of the Batak - Mandailing included - have their own writing system (again ultimately derived from Brahmi), but it has been mostly used in divination, and not in anything we would normally call a historiographical source. Interestingly, there is a link to Brasil here too, if only a very indirect one. One of the greatest authorities on Mandailing and other Batak languages is unsurprisingly a German philologist (also unsurprisingly another authority happens to be a Batak based in Germany. The link goes way back to the times of the missionaries in the nineteenth century. Of course, Christianisation goes hand in hand with philology as learning the local languages is essential in conversion). He has written a book on the Batak languages and their script - and documents in them - in Bahasa. I have come across his name - Uli - in São Paulo. Banco Santos, before it floundered a couple of years ago, decided to open a museum. They therefore hired historians, a couple of which I knew, to organise a very large exhibit about writing and scripts through the ages. A large volume was published featuring items from their collections and giving an idea of the history of writing through the ages. There is a piece of Batak writing in the Santos collection - there is a photograph of it in the book - and therefore one of my colleagues contacted Uli (who was then apparently in Hawaii) for information on it. Now Banco Santos is gone, and the museum's collections have been sequestered. There is one small detail, however. The museum's storage space was right next to one of the rivers in São Paulo. There was a flood and part of the collections were apparently irreparably damaged, perhaps the Batak material included. As other, supposedly more valuable items had been sent previously to local state museums (who in Brasil are under a legal obligation to store and maintain art sequestered by the State) they are now safe.

My problem with Batak philology is the same I have with Javanese philology. Namely, I don't master it. Also, I find it ominous that Batak philology is for all practical purposes a German preserve. The Germans have been historically the most important philological necrophiliacs in the history of the world. The whole history of Bantu linguistics, for instance, has been shaped by them. They therefore have been exceedingly important in the construction of linguistics, and not only in Africa and the Sumatran highlands. Historical phonology to this day - a domain that allows us to see connections between languages (and, if we are very lucky, also people) in the absence of any historical records - is a field whose pioneers were virtually all German, beginning with Grimm two hundred years ago. I am very attracted to languages - I have already perused Uli's book on Batak script and writings (there are several closely related systems, one of them Mandailing). I bought it at Social Agency. I don't want to become a specialist in Batak philology, however. I find the philological mode of dealing with languages complex and off-putting. I also strongly suspect it is complicitous in the subalternisation of the languages it studies as it creates a highly specialized preserve that then very few people are qualified to inhabit. I wonder whether people like Sakti at Universitas Gajah Mada actually have many students. She is the inhouse Javanese philologist, and has published on Indonesian historiography together with Henk and Bambang. She is also Dewantara's granddaughter. Perspekti Baru is therefore the work of a Dutch historian in Leiden with a family history strongly rooted in Indonesia (he is a specialist on Bali), a member of the Pakualaman princely court here, and a man of Javanese origin from one of the Outer Islands with very close ties to Dutch academia (again, Leiden, historically the Dutch university with the closest ties to colonial Indonesia. They used to house an academy that trained future colonial civil servants). A combination such as this says a good deal about Yogya's historically prominent place in the birth of the Indonesian nation many decades ago.

Philology apart (or perhaps philology included, as it is difficult now to think about most languages without bringing up old and often prestigious philological models), I believe however that languages do contain clues that are important for historiography, whether or not there are historiographical sources as such written in them. Just as material culture and archaeological remains, they may retain more than a few links to a past that is not connected exclusively to Batak ethnology or even Sumatran history as such. I have said elsewhere that the widespread use of kapal for instance in both Malay and Javanese, a word of South Indian Dravidian origin meaning ship, speaks bookloads about ancient maritime connections between Nusantara and the Indian subcontinet. That Brahmi - and Pallava - should be at the root of every Nusantara script in use through the centuries and until today, Javanese and Batak included, is also a very important link to the past.

That said, however, philology and historiography do not necessarily go together for a variety of complex reasons. At UGM, unsurprisingly, only Margana is studying Javanese records from a historical point of view as he has the tools to do so (i.e. knowledge of Javanese and aksara Jawa, the script). Virtually everybody else is a philologist or a literary specialist (or both). I doubt this situation will change any time soon. In fact, the link to the Netherlands and therefore what is originally colonial knowledge remains strong in this case too. Margana is a Leiden product, and he started working on the court archives following a suggestion from one of his Dutch supervisors. Therefore, if I try to learn either Javanese or Batak script beyond the basics, I will certainly be venturing into territory that is historically highly charged politically as languages are not only scientific objects of study but also importantly human constructs full of history and cultural meanings.

I don't know what to do with all this. Coming from Brasil, it is impossible for me to have the necessarily philological tools. I also lack some of the historigraphical ones. A natural position for me here would be to try and study Portuguese records. But this natural position is actually complex, as I am not Portuguese as such nor are the records mostly to be found in Asia (they are in reality more often than not in Lisbon). That turf in fact belongs to a whole different national historiography. Also, differently to colonial history in Brasil, Portuguese Asia has been a domain mostly in the hands of the Portuguese themselves plus a couple of specialists in other countries. Except for Sanjay Subrahmanyam (who speaks Portuguese perfectly as I discovered when I first met him at Universidade de São Paulo a couple of years ago), who is a South Indian from north India (sic), and a couple of other people, those people are also usually not Asian, much less of Asian Portuguese origin. Portuguese Asia is therefore a whole different territory to Portuguese America or even Portuguese Africa. In a way, it is almost as strange as Dutch historiography is though of course it is more than marginally familiar to me because of my origins. At any rate, I am not in the domain of Batak-German or Dutch-Javanese philology here.

Languages are therefore interesting because they come with complex social histories. These cannot really be made good through mere philological or linguistic discourses no matter how sophisticated these may be. Interestingly, they cannot be encompassed in national historiographies either, as kapal above shows. This is because languages are at bottom open systems and they are in this way porous by nature. Therefore, there is always a lurking danger that even something as solid as Batak-German philology can slip out of Batak-German hands when specialists least expect.

Needless to say, this is all very new to me. It can be all very confusing too. I am an outsider but insiders cannot always enlighten me as they often inevitably live inside turfs historically staked out long ago. I always find what they have to say quite fascinating, especially as it often brings up new data and information, and therefore I listen to them carefully, but that does not mean I can readily find myself in what they state with so much assurance. Intriguingly, one of the reasons I feel very critical of all I hear and read is because at bottom I am very ignorant too. The mass of details and information that has entered my head in the past two weeks in Yogya has been so overwhelming that I have become more than slightly fluey under the pressure of novelty.

My stay in Yogya has also shown me that almost certainly Ki Hadjar Dewantara is as far as I am concerned a cold research trail. Bambang thinks his ideas were shaped by the circumstances of the late colonial era and that they would now need to be rethought and reshaped. I find that highly optimistic. Dewantara was a major nationalist figure, and as many other such figures he was full of seams, contradictions and conflicts as well as amazing fusions and convergences. He lived in a very cosmopolitan moment, and was a very cosmpolitan intellectual himself as well as one rooted in his own home turf in Central Jawa. His heritage however has lived on inside a mostly authoritarian and inner-looking postcolonial dispensation that even in the post-Suharto era is clearly not over (things are changing however, and quite fast. Even a largely ignorant outsider like myself can see this country is poised to take a leap very soon. It is a very exciting moment to be in Indonesia). In this way, Dewantara's thinking and political and educational practice are removed from us not only through the passage of time but also through at least two successive long postcolonial administrations that have shaped the country into what it now is. They will soon also be further removed from us by major social changes being hatched right now. He cannot therefore be successfully retrieved for a re-reading of the nation in the late postcolonial era, at least not by me. Only, he can be brought up and remembered as part of the local heritage made national by the quirks of history.

I will have to find my own way of connecting to this society and its past - in case a connection will continue to develop, that is. It is funny to say this but, even though this is my very first visit to Jawa (and my first visit to Indonesia as well), I already have a history in and with Jawa.







Henk Schulte Nordholt, Bambang Purwanto dan Ratna Sakti Mulya. “Memikir Ulang Historiografi Indonesia” dalam Henk Schulte Nordholt, ed. (2008), Perspektif Baru Penulisan Sejarah Indonesia, Jakarta, KITLV.