Paz - Vrede

I decide to visit the benteng, the Dutch fort, before I go to the kraton. It has a very ironic and highly significant name: Vredeburg. Peace Borough, if I am allowed a creative though not inaccurate translation. It is a typical four-point star-shaped Dutch colonial fort in fairly good condition. It was built in the eighteenth century and rebuilt in the nineteenth after an earthquake. The exhibits inside are very badly managed: in one of the rooms there was no electricity, in another the lights of the diorama displays were not working. The exhibits of course are all about nationalist history. There is virtually nothing on the Dutch, and very little on the history of Yogya itself or precolonial history. There is for instance an exhibit on two military victims in Yogya of the 1965 massacre and a diorama display of the first meeting of the Senate of the University of Gajah Mada. The university - a royal initiative turned national - was then housed in the kraton. Bung Karno also appears talking to people - including at an international conference in Colombo - and Suharto is also there. Practically not a word in any language except Indonesian. To someone who knows nothing of recent Indonesian history the exhibits must be almost totally incomprehensible. No wonder the fort is not listed in my guidebook. For people who do know something the exhibits are fairly unenlightening and boring.

There is also an amazing relief map of Jawa - in a glass case casually placed in the verandah outside one of the buildings - showing the locations of Javanese settlements in the time of the renowned Sultan Agung. He lived in the first half of the seventeenth century in Mataram, the Islamic avatar of Majapahit and antecessor of Kartasura and therefore of both Yogya and Solo. Most of the settlements shown are thickly concentrated in central Java, near the south coast but not on it. There is hardly anything on the pasisir, the north coast, and only a lone settlement in East Java. West Java is presented almost as a wilderness. Schoolchildren crowd around it but I think they do so because I am also there. I don't think they are very interested in the exhibit. Besides, it comes with no explanations and the viewer is therefore supposed to know about the history he is viewing. I wonder whether the children really know who Sultan Agung was. The verandah is quite pleasant. There are windows with jalousies and behind them there is an office. I envy the colonial army officers. The verandah is spacious and cool. The fort is however surprisingly bare in what concerns trees and shrubs. The architecture also lacks embellishments. There is no colour anywhere. My impression of the whole place is of an austere space. I fancy that its inhabitants would lead somewhat spartan lives, though the coolness and cozyness of the verandah does not seem to give support to my imagination. 

Sultan Agung's time was well before Dutch prominence in the region, though the Dutch were already on the north coast. In fact, it took the Dutch, from what I see in yet another relief map display under a glass case (also casually placed out of the way), over two centuries to effectively conquer and occupy all of Java since they first took over what would become Batavia in 1619. Some people say for simplicity's sake - and postcolonial nationalist history is simple by definition - that the Dutch stayed in Indonesia for 350 years. Not at all. Bali for instance was only effectively conquered in the early 1900s and West Papua only in the early 1920s. The first settlement, Ambon in the Moluccas, a former Portuguese harbour (Amboína), was taken much earlier in 1605. Aceh at the northern tip of Sumatra was not subdued until the early twentieth century (after a war that took three decades and would in fact simmer on into the twentieth century). Today's border between what is Timor Leste and Indonesian Timor was also only settled in the twentieth century by Dutch and Portuguese, though both had been on the coast for a very long time before that. Just like any other kind of history, colonial history is therefore also complex and full of nuances.

Interestingly, however, the historical consciousness that is at the base of nationalist postcolonial history seems to be rooted in the late colonial era only. Unsurprinsingly, the idea of Indonesia as a nation comes up very strongly only in the 1920s. By then the whole territory that is now Indonesia had effectively become the Netherlands Indies, a colony the Japanese would swiftly destroy a couple of decades later. In its ashes rose the postcolonial state, whose first capital was exactly Yogya. So the colony of the 1920s is really the basis for the postcolonial state, and the awareness of belonging to its territory eventually became the basis for a national consciousness among the varied peoples of this vast archipelago. Two things stand out for me in all this history: first is its chronological shallowness (it was still unfolding when my father was born), and then its enormous grip on the imagination. You would say this history is not 350 years old; in fact, it is perhaps at least as old as the ancient Majapahit empire. Intriguingly, though Majapahit was not a modern nation-state in any way, and therefore had little notion of sole sovereignty over well-demarcated territory and a population with identification papers, unlike modern nation-states, it did more or less irradiate its power and prestige over the territory of a good deal of today's Indonesia. 

Of course, Yogya is the most prestigious candidate to the heritage of Majapahit, though it has had to share that heritage with at least three other royal houses, namely, the Paku Alam junior royal house on its own turf, and the two royal houses in neighbouring Solo (or Surakarta), also divided between a senior and a junior house. This unyieldy arrangement came out of internicine wars in the eighteenth century in which the Dutch were more than complicitous. After the wars the two new capitals were built, and the Dutch moved in. However, differently to the coast, in the principalities (as the two territories were called) colonial society was demographically more modest and its power not always so overt. The continuous existence of the courts also posed a problem to the Dutch, as they could not ever be entirely placed under their thumb. A major colonial rebellion - that of Prince Diponegoro between 1825 and 1830 - was in fact concocted right in their midst. Last but not least, Yogya became a nationalist haven and its ruler the highly successful supporter of an independent nation. As a reward, he also became hereditary governor of an autonomous region. The current susuhunan's father's grave in the royal graveyard of Imogiri is still the most visited grave there.

Alain has sent me the syllabus for his course on the construction of the nation-state in South Africa. I am very glad he is teaching it, and on top of it in Brasil. To me, however, he gets the history of Dutch South Africa - and Southern African history in general before the second half of the nineteenth century and the discovery of gold and diamonds - wrong. To him it is a continuous history of dispossession and colonial oppression from day one (that is 1652, when another Dutch benteng that is also still there was built at the Cape of Good Hope. Incidentally, just two years later, namely in 1654, the Dutch were finally defeated and kicked out of Pernambuco, Brasil, by the Portuguese. And 1656 is the year when the Portuguese garrison in Colombo had to surrender to the Dutch forces, ending about a century and a half of Portuguese history in Ceylon). It is a history of oppression by whites against blacks. Never mind that before the nineteenth century 'race' is not a category commonly found in Cape colonial society, or that the Khoisan were not exactly black nor the colonists necessarily white. He also has trouble tracing all the complex movements of colonists into the interior and the various conflicts with the indigenous peoples through the centuries. The stereotype of the colonists as staunch Calvinist Bible-carrying religious and racist zealots also shows its head. He is a good sociologist and historian. Alain is Senegalese and his thought comes from one of the more articulate Francophone intellectual discourses against Eurocentrism, colonialism, and racism. I have had some very enlightening conversations with him about West African history, Pan-Africanist thought, and Antillean intellectual history in Haiti. Besides, I must admit South Africa is a very tough ground for anyone dealing with history, let alone someone who is not a specialist.

Maybe it is best to do as the Vredeburg exhibits do, namely, delete colonial history altogether. Moreover, differently to South Africa, in Yogya the descendants of the Dutch are almost certainly not around to protest (the Dutch however are; they keep coming to Yogya as visiting researchers, cooperation agents, tourists and so forth. Just as in Brasil and Malaysia, you can never get rid of former colonizers. Unsurprisingly, I am occasionally addressed in Dutch by men on the streets. Orang Belanda still means to many people simply Westerner, not specifically a Dutch person). 

Some times I have no idea why I ever learned colonial history in the first place. Maybe it is because I grew up in Brasil, and the country's intellectual class is clearly fascinated by Brasil's long and complex colonial history. Brazilian historiography is one long-winded exercise of trying to extricate the various threads of that history in all their tiny details. But then our colonial historiography has long ceased to be white history. Also, about half of us descend at least in part from people who had something to do with that history. Or at least we think that we descend from them. My mother's family for instance only arrived in the country in the late nineteenth century and therefore long after the colonial era had ended. In terms of Majapahit, Mataram, Kartasura, and Yogyakarta and Solo, therefore, the difference between Alain and me is almost ridiculous in historical terms...Add Borobudur and we are both just off the boat.

More colonial history. Across the street there is a palace that is clearly a colonial Dutch palace. It is funny to put it in this way, but it used to be the Resident's residence. The Resident (the title is in Dutch) was the official representative of the Dutch colonial government to the Susuhunan's court. After all, Yogya was formally a principality (vorstenland) until the end of the colonial era, and therefore not officially exactly colonial territory. Therefore, the Resident was a kind of colonial ambassador. The place is now one of the central government's palaces. Yogya was the capital between 1946 and 1949, during the Indonesian Revolution (Revolusi Kemerdekaan), which the Dutch still insist in calling the time of the politionele acties (police actions: namely, a local equivalent of the Malayan Emergency, and just as euphemistic. It was in fact an all-out war against the Indonesian Republic. Of course, the British were victorious in Malaya whereas in Indonesia the Dutch ultimately lost. And as history is written by the victors...). Sukarno and his family used to live there before the Dutch finally stormed and took over the old-young Republican capital. The palace seems to be in excellent shape (no wonder as it is one of the president's residences) but it is not possible to go in. 

Then there is the church right next to it, also clearly Dutch colonial. I go in. There is a function going on - actually, it has just finished but some people still linger on. Everybody is local but they dress very formally and in what is to me a very European way, except the women. There are sayings in Dutch on the walls - religious sayings. I wonder whether there are people who can still read them. The language is biblical Dutch. I can read them all. It is a somewhat bare church as is to be expected from a Calvinist colonial church. The kraton is barely a kilometre away. I wonder whether it is in the very same place where the previous kraton that I was destroyed by colonial fire two hundred years ago used to stand. There are bank buildings nearby and they all look Dutch - and modernist. The place however has clearly been taken over by postcolonial society, not to mention the postcolonial state. 

Nonetheless, the colonial character of the buildings stand out all the same. At least to me. Many of the shop houses are also clearly Dutch colonial. But maybe I am reading far too much into architecture. Or at least I am reading from the point of view of a visual history that is not significantly shared by people around me. A thought occurs to me - perhaps the postcolonial nationalist history displayed inside the fort is well-known, but not shared either. I muse that as it has been grafted onto the colonial building, it must be just as external as the history of that building itself. Intriguingly, the architecture that I glimpse through the crowd and the thousands of stalls and the people and the warung are actually not incongruous. Historiography and the social sciences say that I should read them separately or at least ironically - for instance, as a postcolonial takeover of a colonial architectural and urban project. In fact I cannot. All the elements in the cityscape before my eyes somehow belong together. There is no reason why they shouldn't. If you go to the centre of Rio, for instance, that is exactly what you are going to find: a very European-looking fin-de-siècle architecture with some much older colonial churches and other buildings thrown in, and lots and lots of people and newspaper stands and street vendors. It would normally not occur to me that the centre of Rio is a very European space. When I used to work there it felt just right. In fact, it would be an Indonesian - Mohamad Goenawan - who would call my attention to the European-ness of the architecture of the historic centre of Salvador. We were walking around it - it is impressive - when he mentioned it was all very European. I remember being surprised when I heard that. To me as a paulista, namely, someone from São Paulo, Salvador is a very black city.

It does occur to me that the shop buildings have some times details that I find appealing - for instance, a frontspiece, a scroll-like design, a couple of Javanese-looking stylized flowers. It is all often half-hidden by the many stalls selling food, clothes and almost everything under the sun. This is heritage in a way that Penang, for instance, or even Melaka, has not had for many years: namely, heritage among the crowds of the people who must have been there all along. Heritage in a people's city. Badly kept, perhaps, but all the same there. My feeling is that heritage conservation in Yogya along the lines of either Penang or Melaka will almost certainly mean, in case it is successful, keeping the crowds at arm's length. Penang and Melaka seem in that way comparatively rarefied environments in relation to Yogya. Here is the real challenge: crowds, little money, and lots of buildings.

There is an event this evening. Dances on the crossroads.  A poetry reading. I can understand the poem because it is in Indonesian, not Javanese. I understand it is about Panggeran Paku Alam, the prince who heads the junior royal house in town. His palace has a very impressive library. It is very impressive not only on account of the size of its holdings but also because it is not a colonial archive: instead, it is a rare, substantial non-colonial repository. In Javanese.

This is not exactly colonial history, nor is it postcolonial nationalist history. Instead, it is local history. It is difficult to avoid the impression - somewhat false and a-historical as it is - that Majapahit and Mataram somehow live on.

I then recollect all my conversations with Alain about the old Mali empire. He was born and grew up just at the very fringe or just outside of what used to be historically its Western-most frontier, namely, Casamance. Intriguingly, the empire collapsed more or less at the time of Sultan Agung, whose constant and often successful skirmishes with the Dutch on the north coast were famous. The Mali empire indirectly collapsed perhaps due to pressure from the presence of Europeans on the West African coast.

I wonder whether Jawa and Mali can ever come together in one history.

In the evening the street next to the tracks near the Tugu train station are full of mostly young people squatting down on matts and having drinks, food, and smoking. Some play the guitar, others play cards. There are couples, groups of women only, and older people as well. The food stalls line the opposite side of the street. Lots of appetising food. A patrol car cruises up and down the road. I like this easy-going street sociability. It is unthreatening and welcoming. I have the impression that if I hang around long enough I may be invited to sit down with some group. Various vendors beckon me to taste their food as I walk by. Then there is the club at the main hotel. Empty. I catch a glimpse of a singer on stage. She sings badly. To my satisfaction the 24-hour MacDonald's in the shopping mall almost next door looks lonely and forlorn.

This city has a life of its own. It is less affluent than Penang and Melaka, and feels more crowded than either, but is more lively than both.