I have started wondering whether Javanese is not more important than it now is because in fact it was never meant to be. Javanisation is not necessarily a direct process. My impression - though I am very ignorant here as usual - is that it works indirectly through example and persuasion. Maybe that is an inheritance from the colonial era. Maybe not. The postcolonial state made Prince Dipanegara a hero. To his royal peers of the time, however, he was not necessarily so. He rose agains the Dutch in 1825-1830 and ended his days in exile (in Makassar or nearby, I think). The Susuhuna in Solo who gave him support ended up in exile in Ambon, where he died. He is also a Pahlawan or national hero in the postcolonial canon. However, neither is necessarily revered in Javanese court and other traditions.
Whatever it may be, the current postcolonial predicament is one that allows for a reading European-style of local culture. In this sense, Javanese nationalist support for an Indonesian nation and an Indonesian language, strange as it may sound in strictly ethnic terms understood conventionally, it locally makes a good deal of sense. In this sense, my mind always goes back to Bambang's notion that Indonesia is a colonial creation, not the child of Majapahit or Mataram. Of course, he is not saying that Indonesia is a Dutch creation as such. I understand what he is saying when I have in mind Dewantara's work (the only work I know a little more than superficially in what concerns Indonesia). He was a colonial product in the sense that his thought issued from the colonial situation. This of course also included Javanese traditions. In fact, though these have naturally enough pre-colonial roots that go way back, those traditions as we now know them have been shaped by colonialism as well. In this sense, there is nothing innocent or even merely economically-motivated about teaching foreigners to dance, sing, and manipulate wayang puppets at the local courts. In fact, the Dutch were often besotted with Javanese tradition, as the courts well knew. We could venture, though this may sound paradoxical, that they became even more traditional as they modernized themselves.
This in fact turns out to be far from paradoxical. Dewantara is again a good example. He believed education in colonial Indonesia had to become national and therefore all-encompassing (that is, meant for the entire population and not only a colonial elite). He also believed that its national character had to be based on the different social and cultural conditions of the Netherlands Indies of his time. Those he saw as diverging as a matter of course from those of the Netherlands. Now his ideas sound matter of fact to us but in fact they were not at his time (he first seems to have aired them in the early 1910s and therefore a hundred years ago). They are also very European ideas: cultures are different to each other and therefore each to her own culture. I doubt in Javanese tradition up to that time things had ever been so clearcut. Dewantara was in fact as much Dutch - or perhaps rather Dutch colonial - as he was Javanese or a member of the Yogya nobility. His national education - based on the national language, namely, Bahasa Indonesia (we should bear in mind that he was talking about Malay as a national language well before the nationalists had taken up the issue in the late 1920s) - is in this way a thoroughly colonial idea. It has borne important fruits for the nation.
If the Javanese do not seem to mind to work on the national level at a further remove, so to speak, without imposing themselves or their culture as such, then the colonial project of Indonesia was quite successful. Of course, I am here doing a reading of history that is highly localized, as it leaves out other parts of Indonesia. I believe however that, vital as such later figures such as Sukarno and Sjahrir turned out to be (and in the field of Bahasa Indonesia Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, a Sumatran), the birth of the Indonesian nation chronologically and sociologically was prominent here first and foremost even though there may be other genealogies and other localities as well. Reading Indonesia therefore from the vantage point of Yogya (which is what Bambang in fact invites us to do), then it is indeed a colonial product issuing from a very specific set of circumstances obtaining in a particular place and time. It is therefore important to revisit that site of the birth of the nation (which is what Bambang's work also invites us to do, in my opinion). Here however I have a problem with revisiting that site. It is a funny problem. I am from Brasil. Brasil is a colonial construct, though it is of course one that differs considerably from Indonesia in all kinds of ways. However, as a colonial construct, the colonial archive and the colonial languages have also been extremely important over there. If Bahasa is in fact a colonial language - as I believe it is even though Malay (on which it is indirectly based) has a pre-colonial past -
then if I move from Brasil to Indonesia I will be still working under the same constraints I am used to back home. Namely, I will be working within the confines of colonial archives and colonial languages.
Naturally, here those archives and languages are two or three instead of basically one, as in the case of Brazil (material in other languages notwithstanding). Even Javanese in fact could be considered the language of the colonial archive. Margana is working with the court archives in both Yogya and Solo (respectively at the Mangkunegara and Pakualaman puro's). The holdings in the Pakualaman library in fact have benefitted from a grant from the Toyota Foundation. I checked the terms of that grant when I lived in Macau: it is a grant for the preservation of indigenous records and archives (and therefore Macau's holdings are not covered by it). However, if Dewantara in the twentieth century (when his voice began to be heard beyond family circles) is not exactly an indigenous voice but a colonial one, then what exactly is the nature of those archives? Calling them indigenous because of the language in which they are written - mostly (though not only) Javanese in aksara Jawa or traditional script - and the place where they find themselves (namely, Javanese courts of traditional origin) is both correct and not quite so. I remember my amazement when I visited the Solo kraton with Margana and his colleague from the local university. It is a grand old palace from the mid-eighteenth century. It is of course full of Javanese elements: a pendopo, for instance (in this case, one where outsiders cannot enter, differently to the Mangkunegara pendopo). There is also a watch tower (that is what I call it - in fact the guide tells us the Susuhunan - the local equivalent of the sultan in Yogya - meditates on its upper floor once a year, which in Jawa is a very kingly and very traditional thing to do). The guide says it is in the form of a Chinese pagoda. It could be. It also looks very much like an eighteenth century Luso-Brazilian colonial building. Unsurprisingly, so do the remaining buildings where we are ushered in by the guide. The ceiling is very high, the walls very thick and the feeling is of architecture I have first met in my life in various parts of Brasil, for instance, in the old buildings of the centre of Rio de Janeiro. That is not surprising because the Susuhunan's palace in fact dates from about the same time as some of those buildings.
In one of the buildings there is a carriage - carruagem - used by the Susuhunan. It is a VOC - Dutch East Indies Company - carriage from Europe. It is therefore an eighteenth century vehicle in Solo. In fact, Solo, just as Yogya next door, came up after agreements between various Javanese factions and the VOC just after 1750 and some wars and confrontations. In about 1812 the fourth court, the Pakualaman in Yogya, would be born thanks to mediations made by the British in Jawa at the time. All four courts are closely related to each other not only by historical ties, but also by family ones: they are relatives and they all issued from the same original family (they still often marry among themselves too). Therefore, the VOC carriage is no accident. Mataram - the kingdom that immediately preceded the four current courts - may have been a pre-colonial kingdom, but its successor states were not exactly pre-colonial any more. It is of course also hard to call them pure and simply colonial. In fact, the principalities in Central Jawa would maintain a separate status - both politically and administratively - until the very end of the colonial era. Yogya still enjoys a somewhat special status within the Indonesian Republic that is directly linked to her colonial privileges.
The indigenous records that Margana is skifully exploring in a pioneering way are therefore as indigenous as they are colonial. None of them is, as far as I know, a pre-1750 record. I am not here trying to undermine the indigeneity of the courts, let alone their records. I am only trying to point out how enormously complex the situation which eventually spawned Ki Hadjar Dewantara (a scion of the Pakualaman court) in the twentieth century is historically speaking. I also remember Margana telling me as we drove through Klaten (his home town that historically has often stood between Solo and Yogya in terms of their conflicts) that the Kartasuro kraton there had been burned down by a Javanese prince and then a Chinese rebel. That happened in the seventeenth century, I think. Therefore, the history of the Central Javanese principalities was already quite complex a long time ago, and closely related to developments on the north coast where the Dutch were acquiring ever more territories and influence before moving steadily inland (as they were in fact doing also in Ceylon at the same time, pushing the Kandyan kingdom into a situation of vassalage). Angola also comes to mind as a place where colonial influence was steadily seeping into further regions into the interior (the famous kingdom of Kongo in fact collapsed once and for all in 1665, just before its Kartasuro counterpart in Jawa). In Brasil, my father almost certainly descends from people who moved into the far interior of São Paulo in the eighteenth century, where they were confronted by indigenous groups. In South Africa, the trekboeren would come up against the Xhosa polities in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in what would turn out to be one of the most momentous points in South African colonial history.
Of course, people who look like colonials are long gone from Jawa, though not from either Brasil or South Africa (a few still hang around in Angola too, and Sri Lanka still has its Burgher population of Portuguese-Dutch-English origin). However, though Jawa looks very indigenous today - and is perhaps more indigenous than, say, the current Malaysian sultanates - it is nonetheless a complex colonial product. It may even be at bottom less traditional than many similar places in Malaysia. It certainly is more cosmopolitan than cities in Malaysia bar Kuala Lumpur and Penang (Melaka for instance, for all its international connections, feels somewhat provincial by comparison, and Ipoh even more so).
My love of aksara Jawa is partly linked to a book Ratna Sakti showed me at the Pakualaman library. The book however is from the mid-nineteenth century, and was written because of a royal commission from a court first established by the British in the second decade of the same century. The book of course looks very un-European. It is also incredibly beautiful, as Sakti knows as she shows it to me page by page. She however points out to me that she would very much like to go to Europe one day so that she could study iluminasi in a comparative way - namely, compare the iluminasi in the Javanese books she studies with those in old European books and see in what way techniques, symbolism, and so on may differ from each other.
It is a great idea. Besides, Bambang, Sakti and Henk from Leiden have published a book together - in Bahasa - about new trends in Indonesian historiography.
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