Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp.

277 292, 2008

Batjaan liar in the Dutch East Indies:

a colonial antipode
HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF
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In the historical literature of Indonesia, the formation of the nation is often

presented as the work of an elite intelligentsia educated in Dutch schools and
employed in the colonial government’s offices. Supposedly, it was these
officials, who had access to the cosmopolitan knowledge about nationalism in
the world and access to the industrial technology of printing presses, who had
the ability to articulate a critique of colonialism from within the very logic of
the colonial rulers’ own ideology (nationalism) while simultaneously inviting
mass participation into a newly imagined community of compatriots. They
issued the call ‘arise countrymen’ and magically the masses united
themselves into a nation and resisted the colonial rulers. Composed of the
elite intelligentsia itself, the nationalist elite that supposedly pioneered the
nation wrote themselves into the script in the starring role, systematically
ignoring the lower-class figures of the movement. Expunged from this elite
history were a large number of nationalist activists and prolific writers. The
struggle of these orang partikelir (private or independent persons) outside the
colonial bureaucracy, especially those connected with labor unions and
peasant associations, to publish and distribute their writings has been
ignored.1
In this elite version of the writing of national history, we can see the
meeting point between the thought of the colonial rulers and that of the post-
colonial elite. Both viewed the lower classes as children who could not move
on their own initiative. The colonial rulers regarded them as the ‘object of
nationalist agitation and propaganda’ while the nationalist leaders perceived
them as ‘the mass waiting for leadership’. This conjunction of colonial and
local elite narration of the national history was by no means unique to
Indonesia. Indeed, the critique and the need to go beyond or beneath this
narrative are among the initial motivations for the launching of Subaltern
Studies in India.2
This article aims to resurrect some of the voices expunged from the elite
national history of Indonesia. It focuses on the radical literature produced by
the nationalist movement of the early twentieth century which was
disparagingly dubbed by the colonial state as batjaan liar (wild publications);
there was perhaps an ironic expression of frustration on the part of the
colonial state because ‘wild’ clearly signifies that the colonial state was unable
to control the growth of this subaltern literature. It included a great variety
novels, poems, pamphlets, newspapers and journals and amounted to
ISSN 1368 8790 print/ISSN 1466 1888 online/08/030277 16 # 2008 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13688790802226694
 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

hundreds of titles, which mushroomed after 1914.3 In the mid-1920s the

production of batjaan liar reached its peak, as did the burgeoning anti-
colonial movement. After the suppression of the failed 1926 uprising of the
anti-colonial movement, the batjaan liar was also banned.4 Dutch colonial
scholars then systematically removed the traces of batjaan liar in the public
consciousness: the publications were forbidden to be studied in schools or to
be kept in libraries. Their efforts were renewed later by nationalist scholars,
such as H B Jassin, eager to distance the nationalist movement from such
low-class militancy.
The journalists and activists behind batjaan liar were usually affiliated with
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the left movement. Their efforts to publish were nothing short of heroic, given
the censorship of the colonial state and the risks of imprisonment, and
deserve a place in the history of the nationalist movement even if the nation
was not the central theme of their writings. Appropriately the language they
used was colloquial Low Malay, which was significantly different from the
colonial administration codified High Malay found in the texts now
considered to be the loci classici of nationalist thought, such as the letters
of R A Kartini and the writings of Soekarno and Hatta. Unlike writers and
activists from other colonial societies who wrote in the languages of their
colonizers to express their thoughts, these writers and activists from the
Netherlands East Indies turned one of the indigenous languages, Low Malay,
into a powerful tool of resistance, able to express what Marx called ‘the
language of real life’.5 These writers imagined Indonesia as a nation of toilers
struggling against exploiters, and many of those exploiters were putative
‘Indonesians’.

The production and distribution of batjaan liar

Writers on nationalism tend to emphasize the role of literacy (Gellner) and
‘print capitalism’ (Anderson) in the formation of nationalism. Print
capitalism according to Anderson eliminated the dominant influence of
Latin in Europe and ‘created unified fields of exchange and communication
below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars’ and helped to connect people
who ‘might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in
conversation’.6 In this version of nationalism’s history, capitalism appears as
a progressive force that breaks up an older consciousness of time and space
and provides the basis for the sense of national community.
However, what occurred in the colonies could perhaps be described as
‘print colonialism’ since all modern printing equipment, first introduced in
the 1600s, was almost entirely controlled by the colonial rulers. The Dutch
East India Company (VOC), which ruled parts of the Indies up to 1799,
strictly controlled the printing houses. Almost all publications, such as the
newspaper Bataviaasch Koloniale Courant, were issued from the government’s
own printing house. A law passed in 1856 partially opened up the printing
business by allowing people to publish magazines and newspapers, but even
those publications had to pass the censors first. The first indigenous
publication only emerged after a 1906 law repealed the old regulation that
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 A COLONIAL ANTIPODE

allowed the colonial state pre-publication censorship. Thus, for 300 years all
production of reading material in the Dutch East Indies by modern printing
presses was in the hands of the colonial officials and European private
businesses.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the government began using
Malay as a medium of communication with the colonized. Faced with a
profusion of different dialects of Malay, they chose one dialect, codified it,
and called it High Malay. They standardized the High Malay language such
that it could be used for official purposes. It was a somewhat artificial
language in the hands of the Dutch since they developed their own set of rules
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for it. The term ‘Melayu Rendah’ (Low Malay) was invented by the colonial
state to denigrate the colloquial Malay, the lingua franca of the archipelago.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, most publications were for colonial
government officials, plantation owners and their staff, and a small number of
indigenous persons with Dutch education. They usually used Dutch or High
Malay and were full of stories about plantation revenues, state budget
problems, and official ceremonies. Given their readership, these publications
did not criticize the colonial system.
This situation began to change when some Indo-Chinese and Indo-
Europeans established dozens of new printing houses towards the end of
the nineteenth century. They ended the Dutch monopoly in the publishing
industry. These new publications carried stories about investigations into
scandals at the plantations, romances that offended colonial good taste, and
news about the Russian-Japanese war from the perspective of those in
solidarity with a rising Asian power. From the printing presses of the Indo-
Chinese and Indo-Europeans emerged a new literature in Low Malay:
newspapers, novels, poems, advice books, and reports on events in the Indies.
This new literature found a market in the people educated in the expanding
colonial school system of the late nineteenth century. By the beginning of the
twentieth century the number of ‘native’ students at government and private
schools had reached about 80,000. The emergence of a Low Malay press
changed the script in which that language had usually been written. The new
press adopted the Roman script already in use for High Malay. The Jawi and
Rumi scripts, which had been the standard scripts for Malay for centuries,
were displaced. Few publications in Low Malay appeared in any script other
than Roman after the early twentieth century.7 Trade unions and political
organizations were important centers of the production and distribution of
batjaan liar. The railway workers union, VSTP (Vereeniging voor Spoor- en
Tramwegpersoneel), based in Semarang, bought their own printing press and
published a newspaper Si Tetap [The Steady One]. Its circulation 15,000
copies was remarkably large in a colonial society where the literacy rate of
the native population in Java was as low as 6.4 percent.8
Unlike the Dutch printing houses which only employed ‘natives’ as
unskilled workers, the Indo-Chinese and Indo-European private printing
and publishing houses employed them as assistant editors and sometimes
gave them the opportunity to write. Several important figures in the
production of batjaan liar such as R M Tirtoadhisoerjo started their careers
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 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

as interns at the publishing houses owned by the Indo-Chinese and Indo-

Europeans. They learned, apart from writing and editing, how to manage a
publishing house so that it could be self-sustaining and produce reading
material independently of the colonial power.9 Some of them ventured out to
start their own businesses in the early twentieth century. In 1907, Tirtoadhi-
soerjo started a publishing firm called the Medan Prijaji and published a
newspaper with the same name. In Solo, H M Misbach founded the
publishing house Insulinde which produced much of the radical literature
of the 1910s.
These radical literatures discussed concrete problems faced by political
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organizations, conflicts with the colonial government, and inequalities and

injustices typically encountered by the readers. These journalists were very
much aware that their position was entirely in conflict with the colonial rulers.
Consider what Mas Marco wrote:
Indeed, it is hard for people to side with the weak ones. Look at the repeated
strikes that have entered into the news reports of Sinar [a newspaper]. Here the
reports reveal that there were dozens of victims in these strikes, and it certainly
makes sense that it was so [with so many people joining the strikes]. Challenging
or resisting the owners of factories is the same as resisting an unjust government.
Because of this, a war of voices, i.e. the side of the government and the side of the
people, has emerged between newspapers. Was any newspaper established in
the Indies that was supported by the monied class so that it could challenge the
people’s newspaper? There is! The readers can find the name of that newspaper
by themselves. Other than that, we can only remind you, don’t read just any
newspaper. Pick one that genuinely sides with you and does not side with the
monied class. Otherwise, it is foreseeable that we in the Indies will definitely fall
into a very humiliating hole of misery.10

Colonial rulers were conscious of the power of words and employed all sorts
of strategies to suppress Mas Marco’s newspaper. Censorship and repression
against the press were often applied. Dozens of indigenous journalists as well
as the Dutch ones who sided with the movement were arrested and tried for
violating the press law. Colonial rulers also ordered printing houses owned by
the Dutch not to serve indigenous publishers of batjaan liar. The rulers also
expanded their own publication of Malay-language books, whose content and
style of language were more agreeable to them.
As journalists, writers and publishers began to get involved in trade unions
and nationalist organizations, they strengthened the financial and institu-
tional bases of their publishing houses. Members of the organizations were
usually obliged to buy newspapers and other printed matter produced by
these publishers. Likewise, the publications helped to expand the organiza-
tion. This cooperation with organizations brought in quite a large income for
a publisher, sometimes even more than that earned by the colonial publishers.
Some of them were successful enough to parlay the capital earned into other
business ventures, such as opening hotels and restaurants.
The wave of workers’ strikes from 1918 to 1923 was crucial for the activists
and their supporters. It helped them to better understand the colonial system.
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 A COLONIAL ANTIPODE

This radicalization of labor in turn increased the growth of batjaan liar. In the
second half of the 1910s, hundreds of books and dozens of newspapers
categorized as batjaan liar were published. In contrast to reading material in
Dutch and High Malay which taught the natives about law, regulations and
orders, the publications in Low Malay brought up a wider variety of themes.
Not all of them were related to politics or nationalism. There were stories
about criminals, romantic scandals, and lifestyles of the urban youth. The
same writers and publishers also produced propaganda and translations of
political books. Biting criticism and polemics were popular forms of writing,
especially in the movement’s newspapers. Even though the main target was
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the colonial bureaucracy, the movement’s activists bitterly argued amongst

themselves in the Low Malay press.
The term batjaan liar itself was actually used by colonial rulers to refer to
all books published by orang particulier, not just those published by radical
activists. From the beginning of the twentieth century, academics and colonial
bureaucrats, like Snouck Hurgronje, had paid attention to ‘reading materials
that are dangerous for indigenous people whose intelligence is low’. To
counter these publications, the government established a ‘commission for
popular reading’, or Balai Pustaka, in 1908, with the explicit goal to ensure
‘that the educated indigenous people have decent reading materials’.11 They
recruited several educated natives as editors, whose task was not only to bring
the use of Malay in accordance with the standards established by the colonial
government, but also to ensure that the content of the reading was, as we
might say today, ‘politically correct’. Books and magazines published by this
institution were intended to introduce the modern world to the readers. This
was a contradictory task because these reading materials wanted, simulta-
neously, to prevent the growth of modern ideas about individual rights and
freedom. The books were usually distributed to plantation companies,
government offices, government schools, and by mobile libraries in trucks
to reach the villages and backstreet urban neighborhoods. Additionally, the
Balai Pustaka also became a kind of clearing house for colonial scholar-
bureaucrats who monitored the political movements. Several ‘natives’ who
had been inside the movement switched their loyalty and worked with the
police and prosecutors to interpret secret letters intercepted by officials. D A
Rinkes, the first director of Balai Pustaka (1908 1917), was also the Advisor
for Internal Affairs (a department policing the politics of the ‘natives’) and a
key source of information for the colonial rulers about the ‘natives’.
Nonetheless, this combination of the power of swords and words could not
curb the growth of radical publications. Balai Pustaka provoked the activists
into publishing even more of their own literature. Starting in 1920, an open
‘war of voices’ (as Mas Marco called it) was launched. Radical political
organizations began to emerge at the district level with their own publications.
Various newspapers not only scrutinized the content of the books published
by Balai Pustaka, but also revealed the political interests behind them.
Semaoen, one of the trade union leaders, said ‘the oppressed have to read
their own books written by people from their own class; this is how the
oppressed class will be fundamentally aware of its fate’.12 Moesso, a leader of
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 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

the Communist Party in Surabaya, directly aimed his criticism at Balai

Pustaka:
Those people’s almanacs and peasant almanacs certainly have scientific things
(wetenschappenlijk) which apparently do not have anything to do with politics
but people who know just a little bit about politics can understand that those
books and almanacs were not primarily written or produced for educating the
people but for misleading people’s thoughts in a gentle and systematic way. The
fruit of thought from that other side (pihak sana) was implanted in the people’s
heads. It is time. And our duty is to fight the influence of Balai Pustaka. We have
to publish the necessary books, our own storybooks, so that the people will not
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be uprooted from the movement. People should not follow the stream of good
advice from books from the Volkslectuur [Balai Pustaka] because those reading
materials are not good for the colonized.13

Anti-colonial politics gained momentum and the influence of the left

movement became wider. In 1923, the Indonesian Communist Party
(PKI) the first organization using the term ‘Indonesia’ in the colony was
established. Propaganda, as could be expected, received great attention from
the party leaders. Learning from the experience of Iskra and Pravda in the
Soviet Union, PKI leaders established a special body whose task was to
publish socialist literature; it was named the Commission for Reading
Materials (Komisi Batjaan). Soekindar, an important official of the Commu-
nist Party, explained the need to publish reading materials that would serve as
the basis of a ‘scientific perspective’:
Therefore, it is necessary to highlight those difficult sayings with a katjamata
wetenschap [scientific perspective]. At the same time our movement should not
ignore their knowledge. But in the Indies, here, what is still disappointing is that
very little socialistisch literatuur exists which would be useful for our movement.
In our opinion, the wetenschapplijke literatuur [scientific literature] is like the
heart of mind of the movement so if they do not exist it would be difficult for the
knowledge of the movement to spread in the heart of the people. For all friends
in the movement, we call upon them to work hard to translate socialist texts into
Malay or to produce the original texts ourselves. We especially call upon the
hoofdbestuur [central committee] of the PKI to be willing to collect existing texts
in Dutch and attempt to produce Malay texts or original texts. Nowadays most
of the people are still filled with the spirit of capitalism, so that they who have
this new science can implant [the new science] in the heart of the people. And
believe me, the new world will be born soon.14
The PKI’s commission published, among other things, the first translation of
Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto in 1923. But there were also quite a
few original texts explaining Marxist theory and methods for forming
organizations. The dominant discourse, as might be expected, was about
progress, the prospects of a new socialist world, and the importance of
scientific knowledge in reaching socialism. Contrary to common belief that
communist propaganda was always shallow and uniform, the PKI’s early
literature displayed some creative thinking. Writers like H M Misbach tried to

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 A COLONIAL ANTIPODE

combine Communism and Islam at a time when the colonial state was
encouraging Muslim leaders to view communists as wholly alien and atheistic.
At the PKI congress in 1924, the leaders came to the conclusion that ‘the
era of agitation to unify the heart has passed and the party should as soon as
possible improve the quality of the cadre and the members’ knowledge’.15 On
the one hand, this decision could be interpreted as strengthening the
institutions producing batjaan liar. On the other hand, it could also
be interpreted as the beginning of a clear schism within the movement as
the party sought ideological purity. The party limited its themes related to the
party line, such as organizational discipline, internationalism, and proletar-
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ianism. The leaders of the party themselves often referred to decisions of the
Comintern and the need to fight for the ‘class line’ within the movement. This
kind of tension consistently marked the formation of discourse about
national identity during the colonial era. In the next sections, we will show
the dynamics of this tension.

Critique of colonialism
Almost all leaders and activists within the radical movement in the early
twentieth century came from the ranks of workers, lower officials, and petty
traders.16 Their life experiences were different from those of the priyayi (the
Javanese aristocracy) and of the students who joined organizations such as
Perhimpunan Indonesia (Indonesian Association) in the Netherlands, and of
the students who were involved in the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge) of
1928, resulting in different perspectives on colonialism. The priyayi usually
refrained from openly criticizing colonialism. Their ideas centered on
reforming the colonial system such that it would respect the indigenous
population more and pay attention to their conditions. They usually situated
themselves between ‘the people’ and the high Dutch officials. They spoke on
behalf of ‘the people’ to the colonial government in terminologies more
comprehensible to the colonial rulers than to the people they claimed to
represent. Working in the bureaucracy, they were more drawn to Javanese
feudal traditions (or rather, invented traditions) than to the modern ideas
emerging in the island’s bazaars and factories. It was from amongst the ranks
of the priyayi that the colonial rulers found many men willing to accept
appointments to sit in the Volksraad (a kind of parliament) established in
1918.
Dutch-educated Indonesian intellectuals were usually sharper in criticizing
colonial rulers than the priyayi. Some of the students who were part of
Perhimpunan Indonesia were very radical and willing to adopt socialist and
communist ideas they learned in Europe. They talked about principles of
freedom, national unity, and solidarity with the oppressed. Nevertheless, they
barely understood the concrete situation in the Indies. Instead, they thought
more in terms of a racial struggle between Asia and Europe which sometimes
overlapped with the socialist struggle against capitalism.17 Their reluctance or
inability to develop an analysis about class was probably a result of their
background as part of the traditional elite and their conviction that they
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 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

would become the new rulers if the Dutch were ever driven out of Indonesia.
Their nationalism, therefore, relied more on differences of skin color rather
than the economic inequality produced by colonialism. They spoke Dutch
fluently and the High Malay used among the educated, so that they often felt
more comfortable debating with colonial rulers who were their enemies rather
than talking with the people whose interests they were supposed to defend.
The writers of batjaan liar, by contrast, wrote in straightforward prose and
were not hesitant to satirize the powerful. They understood, or even
experienced, the suffering of plantation and industrial workers, and many
of them even had the experience of working in those sectors before joining the
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movement. They never felt the need to paternalistically represent other people
to the colonial rulers. The tone of their writings was also very clear, directed
towards the people and not to the colonial rulers. This was what made their
publications worrisome for the rulers who still believed in the possibility of
‘association’ between the rulers and the ‘natives’. These radical writers
dreamed of their own modern world, one inspired by the Russian Revolution,
Kemal Attaturk, and the concrete experience of the colonized. In contrast to
the educated priyayi who seemed hesitant to express their opinions, the
activists wrote in a style that was alternately intimate, witty, ironic and
sarcastic. By borrowing idioms from different languages impossible in
colonial Dutch or High Malay they could evoke a wide range of registers.
Theirs was a flexible heteroglossia. Consider the following quotation:
Poor those fellows who have that saying! Who the hell is he? The ass-licker
consists of two words: lick plus ass. Lick rub the tongue against something.
Ass je weet wel (well you know what). Yikes, disgusting, huh! [Brrrr,
afschuwelijk, he!] But there are many people who like to do it. For the Javanese,
the ones who do it most often: priyayi. Many people from other nations know
that many Javanese priyayi like likken. It is clear that many people do not
understand the value of hard work, or they do not trust their own strength. For
those who know would certainly feel ashamed to lick like that.18
Some of the activists used Low Malay consciously as an act of resistance to
the colonial system. There was a practical reason as well. Semaoen, chief
editor of the above-mentioned union-owned daily newspaper Si Tetap, for
example, said that Low Malay was used because it was understood by the
majority of the East Indies population, unlike High Malay or Dutch. Since
the number of Javanese who could read romanized characters was only 6.4
percent, those interested in the batjaan liar formed reading circles where the
literate ones would read aloud to those who were illiterate. This practice was
only possible in Low Malay which was more a transcription of daily
language.
Activists of the lower class in the nationalist movement always based
themselves on their concrete experience of injustice and composed journal-
istic reports that exposed the cruelty of colonial practices. It was the lower
class’s experience of oppression that grounded its conception of Indonesian
nationalism. The writers of the batjaan liar did not imagine themselves to be
in solidarity with every person in the Netherlands East Indies; they viewed
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the priyayi as part of the colonial state, not part of the Indonesian nation.
Their literature presented stories about the kidnapping of women to be
turned into plantation slaves and the hunger suffered by certain communities.
Such stories filled the pages of newspapers and inspired various pamphlets,
novels and poems. The descriptions were usually precise and included details
that reflected the writer’s knowledge of the situation. The two main targets of
criticism were the expropriation of land by plantation owners and tax
collectors. Once urban industry developed, the radical literature also
addressed injustices at the workplace. There were also critiques of the local
aristocracy in imposing feudal customs. One article, for instance, complained
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about the regulations requiring bank workers to squat and pay obeisance
(sembah jongkok) when their managers appeared.19 The language of class was
very striking and became the trademark of radical literature of the 1920s.
Critiques of colonialism did not stop at matters directly experienced by the
colonized. Activists realized that education was crucial for progress and for
the advancement of the anti-colonial movement. Education was needed to
undo the education promoted by the colonial state. Constructing a new
history of the Indies society thus became an important aim. Perhaps the most
ambitious project in this respect was Marco Kartodikromo’s rewriting of the
Babad Tanah Jawa, the classic Javanese-language text of the history of Java
first written by the court poet of King Pakubuwono III of Surakarta in 1788.
The text was written after the Surakarta court had already been defeated by
the Dutch and reflected the Javanese royalty’s compromise with colonialism.
Mas Marco’s version was published in serial form in the magazine Hidoep in
1924.20 The goal of the rewriting was to ‘take back the past of the Javanese
who have all along been in the hands of the Dutch’. Marco noted that
colonialism did not only create injustice in economic matters but also robbed
the consciousness of the colonized of their own past. He criticized the
collaboration between the colonial rulers and the indigenous literati
(pudjangga) to reshape the past:
Babad is a knowledge (wetenschap), but not a few composers of Babad faked
their writings. This problem turns out to be like what the Czechs would say:
‘Among those Babad composers, there are also some who fake the Babad they
write while Babad is supposed to be written truthfully like what actually
happened.’ The Turks have a saying as well, ‘the one who writes or composes
Babad is not an ink container’.21

While writing his own babad Marco studied the writings of colonial scholars
such as Sir Thomas Raffles (1781 1826) and Pieter Johannes Veth (1814
1895) about Java and expressed his criticism toward both their facts and
interpretations. Marco divided his book into six parts, covering the origins of
the name Java, the arrival of Hinduism, and the arrival of the Portuguese and
Dutch. For Marco, the existing Babad Tanah Jawa basically reflected the
defeat of Javanese culture. Therefore, he felt the need to provide a scientific
grounding to understand why the Javanese had been defeated and what they
had to do to overcome the weakness. Unlike the poets who failed to
acknowledge the defeat of the Javanese kingdom and culture, Marco
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 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

highlighted the intellectual and moral weaknesses of Javanese kings

themselves as the main cause of the defeat. Since the coming of Hinduism,
he contended, Javanese kings had never waged any resistance.22 For Marco,
the Babad was a rewriting of history in a way that would be useful for the
anti-colonial movement. Other activists of his generation shared his views
even though none wrote at such length about history.
One crucial theme in the production of batjaan liar was race. From the end
of the nineteenth century, the colonial rulers imposed a system of segregation
by dividing the society into three strata: (1) the Dutch and other Europeans,
(2) Foreign Orientals, such as the Chinese and Arab, and (3) the natives. The
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radical writers sometimes combined their analysis of capitalism under

colonialism with their criticism of the Chinese, as reflected by the term
‘babah kapitalisten’.23 This tendency often provoked debates between the
Chinese and the native writers. When Marco published Mata Gelap [In a
Rage], a novel about colonial society which, among other things, portrayed
the Chinese traders as rentiers, a newspaper owned by a Chinese criticized his
use of the rather pejorative labels Cina and bah:
Today we received a story book which is entitled Mata Gelap, written by M.
Marco, editor of Doenia Bergerak in Solo. Actually the book has such a low
quality that initially we didn’t really want to talk about its content in this
newspaper. But since the writer there expressed his condescending attitude
towards the Chinese, we feel forced to write this review, with a request that Mr.
Marco in the future if he writes another book, doesn’t insult the Chinese like
what he does now, which is shown in the sentence: ‘Bah! I want stroopijs [cold
syrup]’ Remember, the Chinese are also of humankind. The Chinese feel and
acknowledge that in this colony they are like guests and indeed want to live
cordially and peacefully with the Bumiputra. But the Bumiputra, as hosts, also
have to show respect and humility towards the Chinese. As polite people, hosts
naturally have to show to their guests.24
Marco then responded:
That term [Cina] has been commonly used to refer to the Chinese . . . if we
interact with the Chinese, we always use that term, and well, nobody rejects it.
Haven’t the Javanese given enough respect to their guests? Haven’t the Javanese
showed enough cordiality to their guests? If we say Babah or Bah or say Cina for
the Chinese, does it mean a humiliation to the Chinese? Actually we don’t quite
understand. Why, on the map, it’s still written China, is it not? If you guests
really don’t want any dispute with the hosts, we expect you not to prolong this
matter. Remember, this time, this is not a good time around the world . . . . It’s
another problem if you guests want to look for problems with the hosts. If the
guests can not live genially with the hosts, it should be the hosts who carry out
what’s just.25
Problems of race and ethnicity interacted with the batjaan liar writers’
concern for class and anti-colonialism. The colonial state tried its best to keep
the different groups of the Indies society antagonistic to one another.
Officials, for instance, would approach leaders of the Sino-Indonesian
community and inform them that the radical movement was deeply
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anti-Chinese and that they should support the repression of the movement.
But the racial antagonisms that were fairly prominent in the early years of the
twentieth century abated during the movement’s peak from 1918 to 1923,
when the radical activists proved by their deeds that they were not targeting
the Sino-Indonesians and were not motivated by racism. The activists showed
they were only concerned with class. The colonial state’s rumor-mongering
proved ineffective.

Imagining the nation

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The radical writers called themselves orang terperentah [the ruled people], a
term that tended to overlap with the terms ‘Javanese people’ and ‘Indies
people’. The distinctions were sometimes not strictly drawn. But they did
distinguish between those Javanese who collaborated with the Dutch and
those who resisted. Thus, they attacked the ‘Javanese people’ who ‘sold
themselves’ to the colonial officials and plantation owners. Everyone in the
Indies faced the three-tiered racial classification system imposed by the
Dutch. The question for those classified at the bottom as ‘natives’ was how
to respond. A popular demand among the Chinese and Arab communities
was for an elevation of their status from Foreign Oriental to European, in
the same way that the small Japanese community in the Indies had been
elevated after Japan’s victory in its war with Russia in 1905. Some ‘natives’
also thought that their status should be raised. But in the batjaan liar
literature, the demand was much more radical: it was to remove the system
that produced social inequality in the first place. Marco, in his serialized
novel Matahariah in the late 1910s, used the term anak-anak Hindia
(children of the Indies) to refer to everyone in the Indies who was not
European:
Even now [we] have already built a consensus to establish an association we
call Kromo Bergerak [People on the Move], meaning an association with the
efforts of our people, the anak-anak Hindia [children of the Indies], to be at
peace with each other towards one heart, so that we will not continue to be
exploited by the cruel nations. Moreover, we children of the Indies can be at
peace if we are one; that’s the time we can eliminate arbitrary actions. Now we
already have orang particulier who certainly will try very hard for the children
of the Indies to gain higher rank like the European in our land. You know it
yourselves, that we children of the Indies were always disgraced by the
European people who also live here.26
Some of the writers ignored the racial categorization altogether, preferring
instead to see only two classes in the Indies. Consider the following statement
by Darsono:
Now in the Indies emerged two groups of people, i.e. one group owns factories,
railway companies, stores, etc.; and the second group is the workers of different
nations or people who work for the enterprises of the first group. This group of
workers comes from peasants, batik makers, weavers, petty traders of all nations

287
 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

etc. They sell their labor because they’re cornered by factories or machines and
big commerce.27

Marco envisioned a social movement consisting of the ‘kromo’, the

commoners, all of those who were not from the elite (the priyayi). This
attitude prompted harsh reaction from the moderates who considered class
discourse to be an obstacle in the process of much-needed formation of
national unity; the priyayi, they thought, needed to be included. There were
also those, especially communists, who put forward the principle of
internationalism. In the 1930s, Tan Malaka, one of the prominent PKI
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leaders, proposed the idea of establishing a socialist confederation of Asia

Australia. He had traveled around Asia. While he had never been to
Australia, he had heard about the strength of the workers’ movement there.
As the wide range of activists debated what kind of nationalism and
internationalism they should adopt, the radical movement made sure that
the problem of class inequality among the natives themselves was included
in every discussion about ‘Indonesia’. This emphasis on class became more
pronounced in the late 1910s with the wave of strikes by industrial and
plantation workers throughout Java.
The idea of socialism became especially significant with the news of the
Russian revolution of 1917. That revolution played an influential role in
the construction of a discourse about the nation. Those who praised the
revolution were immediately accused by their political opponents and the
Dutch colonial officials as Comintern agents who brought foreign political
agendas to the colony, although many of the socialist ideas being discussed
in the Indies after 1917 displayed a real concern to make them meaningful
for the particular context of the Indies. The Literature Commission of the
PKI condemned ideas which distracted people’s attention from the problem
of class, and emphasized the importance of advancing socialism in the
national liberation struggle. However, there was no clear idea about the
nation itself. The proposal of several priyayis for creating a Javanese
nationalism in 1917 1918 was rejected because the ‘nation’ had to be
broader and include everyone in the Indies. For many of the writers, the
struggle for national independence was identical with the struggle against
injustice. Whoever was part of the movement against colonialism was part
of the ‘nation’. One’s attachment within a nation was not determined by
one’s birth identity but by active involvement in the struggle against
colonialism. There were many other imaginations about the nation. A more
comprehensive study about diversity of views on the nation still needs to be
conducted.
The writers of batjaan liar were resolute modernists opposed to tradition.
Anything of tradition that hindered the movement towards equality had to
be jettisoned. An example can be found in the discussion on the position
of women in the movement written by Rangsang in the novel Kaoem
Merah:
According to the situation of the world at this time, we women should help the
work of the men, that is, the work for public needs. For centuries we women can
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 A COLONIAL ANTIPODE

be said to have been fast asleep. We never saw the light of the sun. Because, since
the earliest time until now, we women were perceived as the household’s
decoration and head chef. But this rule should be changed now. For we women
who have household responsibilities, the men can do that work as well, but for
women who do not have that responsibility, they should indeed help the work of
the men for public need. WE know that there are many women who choose to sit
around and take it easy although they are educated; they like to do that thing.
Now we think it’s time for us women to participate, move together with our
brothers. We also know that the conservatives would smirk at this statement.
Alright, we can ignore those who disagree with us.28
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The women figures portrayed in batjaan liar were generally different from the
images drawn by the colonial rulers or the Javanese priyayi. Batjaan liar
usually described a woman activist with a strong character, broad knowledge,
able to pass judgment and sometimes conduct debates with men. One will not
find such characters in Balai Pustaka novels. The position of the nyai
(mistress) in the batjaan liar was also described differently compared with the
other literary works of the era. The nyai was portrayed as a woman with
strong character and willpower even though her fate was very much in the
hands of the plantation owners.
By the mid-1920s, the colonial rulers began to realize that the radical
movement could not be effectively countered with books from Balai
Pustaka or a new representative council (the Volksraad). The state started
to use violence to destroy the movement. Several leaders of the movement
such as H M Misbach and Dr. Tjipto Mangunkusumo were arrested and
exiled to places outside of Java. Differences within the movement
sharpened. The tension was not only between lower-class activists and
the priyayi or the educated ones, but also among the lower-class activists
themselves. The propagandists of the PKI stated that the struggle against
colonialism was a class struggle, like the workers’ struggle to topple the
Tsar in Russia in 1917. Several PKI leaders visited the Soviet Union to
talk with the leaders of the Comintern. They subsequently proposed that
the party sharpen the perspective on classes in the colony.29 On the other
hand, figures like Mas Marco, Darsono and leaders of the Sarekat
Rakyat disagreed with this rigid approach to class. At the PKI conference
in Kota Gede in December 1924, one of the party theoreticians, Ali
Archam, suggested that Sarekat Rakyat, the political organization of the
radical ‘petty bourgeoisie’, be dissolved and that full concentration should
be directed towards organizing workers into revolutionary trade unions.
This suggestion was rejected by Darsono and Mas Marco who
emphasized the importance of unity among all people challenging
colonial power.30
These differences in views kept intensifying along with the escalating
colonial repression. Discussions about class, religion and ethnicity as the
composition of the nation were replaced with differentiations based on brave
vs. cowardly, militant vs. moderate. By 1926, texts of the movement generally
talked about the importance of militancy, discipline and firmness. Indepen-
dence for them was rebellion against colonial rule, and the Indonesian nation
289
 HILMAR FARID AND RAZIF

consisted of those who supported the rebellion. Despite the ideal of total
unity of the colonized, there were repeated splits and divisions within the
radical movement. In this kind of uncertainty and crisis, the PKI and Sarekat
Rakyat, under immense pressure from their own cadres, decided to launch a
rebellion in November 1926. The colonial rulers responded with extreme
repression. Thousands of people were arrested, and 1,308 people were exiled
to Boven Digul in the middle of the Papuan forest. One episode of the
pergerakan (movement) came to an end.
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The decline
The failure of the rebellion had several consequences. First, the writer-
activists from lower classes who formed the dominant bloc in the social
movement of the 1920s were eliminated. They were exiled to Boven Digul
and did not return until the arrival of Japanese troops in 1942. Some of
them, like Marco Kartodikromo and Ali Archam, died in exile. Other
figures, such as Darsono and Semaoen, left for Moscow, worked for the
Comintern, and never had any influence in the movement in the
subsequent years. Secondly, the networks of publishers, distributors,
readers and organizations that had supported batjaan liar production for
at least fifteen years were destroyed. Printing houses owned by trade
unions, the Communist Party, and orang particulier, who supported the
movement, were closed down or confiscated. The colonial government, in
turn, established more rigid controls and regulations on the production
and distribution of printed matter. It restored the power of ‘print
colonialism’. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the colonized became
increasingly wary of writing anything straightforward about their own
problems and demands. One example of this tendency can be seen in
Hatta’s explanation of the program of Perhimpunan Indonesia in front of
the Dutch court in 1928.31 His explanation falsified the organization’s 1923
program, which was fairly radical, and did not even affirm that its
intention was to gain national independence. The colonial rulers were
successful in establishing a time of order and peace, often referred to as
zaman normal.
The nationalist leaders of the 1930s were generally students who studied
inside and outside the colony, government officials, and political activists
who escaped colonial repression. None of them had any experience in
developing a movement from below and vividly expressing injustice in
writing. They usually spoke and wrote in Dutch, not even in High Malay.
Even if they spoke in Malay, all the spontaneity, irony and wittiness which
characterized the language of the batjaan liar was missing. The tone of
speech was more paternalistic, even arrogant, making a show of authority
and pretending to be sagacious. They usually positioned themselves as
candidates for the leaders of a modern, advanced and educated nation, who
had little or no connection with the coolies in the plantations and workers
in the factories. The failure of the communist rebellion of 1926 1927
became the foundation for a new type of nationalism that disregarded the
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 A COLONIAL ANTIPODE

central preoccupation of the earlier popular movement: class inequality. The

imagination of the nation became redefined and purged of its radical
content.

Notes
1
In the 1960s several left historians and writers criticized the elitist bias in the nationalist historiography.
See Bakri Siregar, Sedjarah Sastra Modern Indonesia, Jakarta: Jajasan Pembaruan, 1964; Pramoedya
Ananta Toer, Sedjarah Modern Indonesia: Babak Perintis, Jakarta, 1965. After being released from
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prison, Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed a biography of R M Tirtoadhisoerjo, a pioneer in the press
world who had been neglected in the writing of Indonesian history. See Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Sang
Pemula, Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1985.
2
Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1,
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp 1 8.
3
For a relatively complete list, see G F Ockeloen, Catalogus dari boekoe boekoe dan madjallah madjallah
jang diterbitkan di Hindia Belanda dari tahoen 1870 1937, Batavia: Kolff, 1939.
4
The arrested leaders of the movement were exiled to the furthest eastern edge of the colony, a malarial
forest on the island of Papua.
5
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publisher, 1968.
6
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,
London: Verso, 1991, p 44.
7
For a comprehensive account of the Indonesian nationalist press in its early days, see Ahmat B Adam,
The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian Consciousness, 1855 1913, Ithaca:
Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1995.
8
Semaoen, ‘An Early Account of the Independence Movement’, Indonesia 1, April 1966, pp 46 75.
9
R M Tirtoadhisoerjo was the initiator of the press affiliated to a social movement. Pramoedya Ananta
Toer called him ‘the pioneer’ because of his role in developing an independent press. Toer, Sang Pemula.
Tirtoadhisoerjo is also the inspiration for the main character in Toer’s most celebrated work, the Buru
tetralogy.
10
Marco, ‘Djangan Takoet’, Sinar Djawa, 11 April 1918.
11
Hilmar Farid, ‘Kolonialisme dan Budaya: Balai Poestaka di Hindia Belanda’, Prisma 10, October 1991.
12
Semaoen, ‘Menentang Literatuur Menjesatkan’, Keras Hati 7, February 1920.
13
Moesso, ‘Kita Haroes Mendirikan Bibliotheek Sendiri’, Api, 25 July 1925.
14
Soekindar, ‘Socialistische Literatuur di Hindia’, Sinar Hindia, 17 December 1921.
15
Overzichten van de Inlandsche en Maleisch Chineesche Pers, 25, 1924, pp 568 569.
16
The priyayi and doctors who joined Budi Utomo are known as the ‘pioneers of the nationalist
movement’ in the writing of modern Indonesian history. Indeed, they opened the way by establishing a
modern organization and some room for bargaining with the colonial state, but by the end of the 1910s
they no longer played a major political role. Some of them, such as R M Soejopranoto, Cipto
Mangoensoekomo and Soewardi Soerjaningrat, chose to join the popular movement and become more
radical. See Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java 1912 26, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990.
17
John Ingleson, Perhimpunan Indonesia and the Indonesian Nationalist Movement 1923 1928, Melbourne:
Monash University, 1975.
18
‘Tjis, tra’ maloe!’ Doenia Bergerak 2, 1914.
19
M A, ‘Sembah djongkok’, Sinar Hindia, 15 June 1918.
20
Marco also published an anthology of verses entitled Sjair Rempah Rempah (Verses of Spices) dan Sjair
Sama Rata Sama Rasa, which described the Dutch as ‘badjak laoet’ (pirates) who deceived the peoples
of the archipelago and then dominated the whole territory.
21
Marco, ‘Pendahoeloean untuk Babad Tanah Djawa’, Hidoep, 1 June 1924. It is unclear what Czech and
Turk sayings Marco was referring to in this passage. Most likely, he mentioned these names of other
nationalities only to create the impression that he was modern, cosmopolitan, and erudite.
22
In his novel Matahariah Marco satirized the power relation between colonial government and Javanese
kings.
23
In Low Malay, babah is a derogatory term for Chinese.
24
Tjhoen Tjhioe 84, 1914, pp 2 3.

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25
Marco, ‘Mata Gelap: Boleh djadi lantaran seboeah boekoe bisa djadi perselisihan jang berat’, Doenia
Bergerak 28, 1914.
26
The novel, a rare love story between people of different races, was published as a serial in Sinar Hindia,
in 1918 and 1919. The term ‘children of the Indies’ was meant to include Sino-Indonesians and Indo-
Europeans, albeit only those among these communities who supported the movement. Ernest Douwes
Dekker (18791950), an Indo-European, established the Indische Partij (Party of the Indies) in 1913,
which had a major impact on the radical movement that followed.
27
Darsono, ‘Giftige Waarheidspijlen’, Sinar Hindia, 13 May 1918.
28
Rangsang, ‘Kaoem Merah’, Hidoep, 1 October 1924. This novel was clear communist propaganda: it
was essentially the complete Communist Party program with a few dialogues and narratives added.
29
Semaoen, ‘An Early Account of the Independence Movement’, pp 4675.
30
Persatoean Ra’jat, 12 February 1926.
31
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See Ingleson, Perhimpunan Indonesia.

292