Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

Performing Power

Performing Power

Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

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Arnout van der Meer

Southeast Asia Program Publications

an imprint of Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

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Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University

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First published 2020 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Meer, Arnout van der, 1980– author.

Title: Performing power: cultural hegemony, identity, and resistance in colonial Indonesia / Arnout van der Meer.

Description: Ithaca, [New York]: Southeast Asia Program Publications, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020046264 (print) | LCCN 2020046265 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501758577 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501758584 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501758591 (epub) | ISBN 9781501758607 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Politics and culture—Indonesia—Java—History—19th century. | Politics and culture—Indonesia—Java—History—20th century. | Group identity—Indonesia—Java—History—19th century. | Group identity—Indonesia—Java—History—20th century. | Indonesia—Politics and government—1798–1942. | Java (Indonesia)—Social life and customs—19th century. | Java (Indonesia)—Social life and customs—20th century.

Classification: LCC DS625.M44 2020 (print) | LCC DS625 (ebook) | DDC 959.8/20223—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046264

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046265

Cover image: Resident P. Sijthoff of Semarang with his servant holding his gilded payung, 1904. Source: Leiden University Library, Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies 2603.

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For Amelie and Sofie

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Contents

Figures xi

Acknowledgments xiii

A Note on Spelling and Terms xvii

Introduction

The Performance of Power 1

Chapter 1

Setting the Stage:

The Javanization of Colonial Authority in the Nineteenth Century 19

Chapter 2

Sweet was the Dream, Bitter the Awakening:

The Contested Implementation of the Ethical Policy, 1901–1913 48

Chapter 3

Disrupting the Colonial Performance:

The Hormat Circular of 1913 and the National Awakening 77

Chapter 4

Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies:

From Ethnic Stereotypes to National Dress 111

Chapter 5

East Is East, and West Is West:

Forging Modern Identities 145

Chapter 6

Staging Colonial Modernity:

Hegemony, Fairs, and the Indonesian Middle Classes 175

Epilogue

Pawnshops as Stages of the Colonial Performance of Power 205

Notes 213

Bibliography 253

Figures

1. Map of Java 8

2. Meeting of the Native Court in Pati, Central Java, ca. 1865 45

3. Founding meeting of the Sarekat Islam in Blitar, 1914 88

4. Advertisement for a Sundanese language course 100

5. Opinion ballot on sembah djongkok 108

6. The past and the present! 133

7. Don’t forget where you come from! 162

8. The Modernized Javanese 176

9. Camel cigarettes at the Pasar Gambir, 1930 191

10. The Pawnshop Strike 206

Acknowledgments

The process of writing a first book is like a play. It consists of distinct acts, beginning with formulating a research topic and question in graduate school, conducting research in libraries and archives, working through challenges, and honing the narrative and arguments until it finally all comes together in published form. Unlike a play, however, the reader only sees the result of this laborious journey. I am therefore excited for the opportunity to recognize and thank the many people who have offered me instruction, support, friendship, and insightful feedback along the way. Without their help, this book simply could not have been written.

This book began at Rutgers University, where I was lucky to work with some of the most amazing scholars and teachers I know. I am especially grateful for the enduring guidance and friendship of Michael Adas, whose questions about photographs depicting Dutch colonial officials surrounded by Javanese status symbols prompted my interest in the interplay between culture and power many years ago. I treasure our conversations over coffee on cultural hegemony, agency, and material culture just as much as those on contemporary politics, baseball, and life. Bonnie Smith is among the most inspiring people I have ever met. She taught me numerous invaluable skills, but her most important lesson is one that I consistently convey to my own students: when writing, make sure it is interesting. I also profited tremendously from my conversations with Matt Matsuda about culture and power and am forever inspired by his exemplary energy in the classroom. To this day, I feel privileged to have had Eric Tagliacozzo as my outside reader, as he encouraged me to expand the scope of my project and always provided me with invaluable advice.

Throughout researching and writing the manuscript, I received vital support from friends I made in graduate school, especially Kris Alexanderson, Stephen Allen, Alejandro Gomez-del Moral, Annie Kinkel-De Vries, Kathryn Mahaney, Elizabeth Churchich, and Adam Zalma. During my research trips and conferences, I met many inspiring people who each in their own way helped me to develop my project, including Tom van den Berge, Marieke Bloembergen, Kees van Dijk, Liesbeth Ouwehand, Remco Raben, Pauline K. M. van Roosmalen, and Abdul Wahid. I benefited from the help and friendship of Hazel Hahn, whose invitation to participate in a project on cultural exchange between Southeast Asia and Europe and her insightful commentary on my writing positively shaped my project. Similarly, Henk Schulte Nordholt’s challenge to develop a collaborative study with Tom Hoogervorst and Dafna Ruppin significantly impacted my own understanding of my research. No less inspiring was my teamwork with Bart Luttikhuis, whose sharp mind and pen were a great help in articulating social change in colonial Indonesia. And finally, I’d like to thank my colleagues at Colby College, who made me feel right at home and were always supportive of my research agenda. I especially appreciate the support and feedback provided by Sarah Duff, Noa Gutow-Ellis, Elizabeth LaCouture, Mary Beth Mills, and John Turner.

Throughout my years of work on this project, I have received generous financial support that enabled research trips in Europe and Indonesia, language instruction, editing services, and much-needed time for writing. I am especially grateful for my Fulbright Fellowship from the Netherlands America Commission for Educational Exchange; the substantial support of the Department of History, School of Graduate Studies, and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University; various fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; an Affiliated Fellowship at the Royal Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV); and my Colby College Start-Up Funds as well as several Colby College Social Science Division Grants. Without a doubt, the help and guidance of librarians and archivists enhanced my research tremendously, especially at the former library and collections of the KITLV, Leiden University Library’s Special Collections, and the National Archives in The Hague.

My editor, Sarah Elizabeth Mary Grossman, has been supportive of—and patient with—my book project since I first pitched it at the Association for Asian Studies’ annual meeting in Toronto in 2017. I thank her for her encouragement and persistence in seeing this project come together. I am also very much obliged to the two anonymous readers whose thoughtful suggestions have undoubtedly improved this book. And I owe special thanks to Alix Genter, my fellow Rutgers graduate, whose assistance in editing my manuscript was essential in honing my writing and clarifying my thoughts. Finally, I am truly grateful for the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Sustainable History Monograph Pilot program, which greatly expands the reach of my scholarship.

My own understanding of this project developed as I sharpened my thoughts and approach through research fellowships, talks, conference presentations, and of course publications. All of these experiences come together in this book. Parts of chapters 2 and 3 originally appeared in Rituals and Power: Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Contestation of Colonial Hegemony in Indonesia, in Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia, edited by Hazel Hahn (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019), 75–103; and Igniting Change in Colonial Indonesia: Soemarsono’s Contestation of Colonial Hegemony in a Global Context, Journal of World History 30, no. 4 (2019): 501–32. Small portions of chapters 3 and 4 can be found in an article I wrote with Bart Luttikhuis: 1913 in Indonesian History: Demanding Equality, Changing Mentality, TRaNS: Trans-Regional and-National Studies of Southeast Asia 8, no. 2 (2020): 115–33. A version of chapter 6 was first published as Performing Colonial Modernity: Fairs, Consumerism, and the Emergence of the Indonesian Middle Classes, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde 173, no. 4 (2017): 503–38.

It was my mother’s fascination with colonial literature that introduced me to the history of Indonesia, although my parents always encouraged an interest in the past more broadly. Their greatest accomplishment is creating a warm and supportive family that allowed my sisters and me to chase our dreams, knowing that we could always count on one another. The fulfillment of this particular dream of mine is therefore also their achievement. Joke, my wife, has supported this project from the very beginning and is thrilled with its completion. Her kindness, courage in life, and ceaseless passion for academic work and our family inspire me every day. And finally, I thank our daughters, Amelie and Sofie. This project has been intertwined with their whole lives, and these last few months they have been increasingly asking if it is finally finished. To my great joy and relief, the next time they ask I can tell them that yes, it is done. This is for them.

A Note on Spelling and Terms

This book deals with a dynamic period in Indonesian history during which identities and languages were in constant flux. My decisions about language reflect my hope to assist in further research, to honor the ethnic and national identities of the indigenous peoples of colonial Indonesia, and to make the text as clear and comprehensible as possible.

To enable others to locate and identify people, associations, unions, and political parties in the historical record, these names appear in their original spelling as found in archives and publications. For instance, I use Soemarsono instead of Sumarsono and Boedi Oetomo instead of Budi Utomo. Place names, however, appear in their contemporary spelling to make it easier for readers to identify and locate these places on a map (see figure 1). Thus, I use Purwakarta instead of Poerwakarta. The exception to this rule is when a particular place had a Dutch name in the colonial era, like Batavia, which was renamed Jakarta following Indonesian independence. In addition, both historians and contemporaries have referred to the former Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian archipelago by a great diversity of names, the most common being the Dutch East Indies, Dutch Indies, Netherlands East Indies, and the Netherlands Indies. In this study I use Netherlands Indies and also employ the term colonial Indonesia to emphasize the colonial character of the state and identify it as the precursor to modern Indonesia.

Since the Dutch referred to themselves as both Dutch and European interchangeably in publications and official and private documents, I do the same. In addition, this book is primarily focused on Java, which is home to several large ethnic groups, the primary ones being the Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and Betawi (Malay). The term Javanese can refer to inhabitants of the island of Java as well as ethnic Javanese. Moreover, this volume documents a period during which people from throughout the archipelago developed a national consciousness and created a collective Indonesian identity. Through this process, often referred to as the national awakening, Javanese, Sundanese, Sumatrans, Balinese, and many others began to also consider themselves Indonesians. In other words, a person could be ethnically Sundanese, an inhabitant of Java (Javanese), and identify as Indonesian. I have tried to make these different designators as straightforward and context-dependent as possible.

Finally, I have included Indonesian terms in their modern spellings, especially those for which there is not a satisfactory translation; for example, hormat (customary ways of showing respect) and sembah (a gesture of respect in which a person brings their hands together in front of their face). Similarly, I have maintained modern spellings for Indonesian classifications and titles, i.e., bupati (regency head) instead of boepati. Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations from Indonesian and Dutch are my own.

Performing Power

Introduction

The Performance of Power

Following a successful period working in the colonial capital of Batavia (Jakarta), Prawiradinata, a young and ambitious clerk in the indigenous civil service, was transferred to a new post in Purwakarta, a small town in Java’s interior. His enthusiasm about his career advancement quickly evaporated when he discovered that beyond the capital, conservative attitudes pervaded the colonial administration. In December 1912, Prawiradinata was summoned by his Dutch superior, Assistant Subdistrict Administrator A. A. C. Linck, who, in a confrontational tone, accused the clerk of not submitting his paperwork on time. Startled by the rebuke, Prawiradinata responded in Dutch rather than Javanese—a signal that he was not only Western-educated but also unwilling to offer traditional deference to his supervisor. At the time, it was still customary for Javanese subordinates to adhere to a strict colonial language hierarchy, addressing superiors in high Javanese while they in turn answered in a lower form of the language. This deviation from bureaucratic practice infuriated Linck, who bellowed that he would not be lied to by a native. Declaring that everyone in the civil service complained about Prawiradinata’s sluggish work ethic, Linck clearly attempted to reassert his authority over an insolent colonial subject by invoking the trope of the lazy native. ¹ In the ensuing battle of wills, Prawiradinata persisted and vowed—still in Dutch—that he was neither lazy nor a liar. Linck dismissed Prawiradinata but immediately filed an official complaint with the local bupati, the Javanese district head. Tellingly, when Prawiradinata later appeared before the bupati, he was not questioned about the missing paperwork but rather about his alleged impolite and boorish behavior in addressing his superior.

This seemingly minor encounter illustrates the importance of the everyday staging and performance of power in colonial Indonesia and in colonial societies more broadly. The palpable anxiety surrounding Linck and Prawiradinata’s confrontation stemmed from competing assumptions about the proper social and cultural norms that structured all interactions between colonizer and colonized. The Dutch administrator expected to receive traditional Javanese deference as validation of his authority, whereas the Javanese clerk adopted Western etiquette to signify his education and modernity. Linck’s attitude and expectations of how the encounter and its aftermath would unfold reveal the manner in which colonial hegemony was communicated through language, manners, material status symbols, and even physical gestures and posture. Through this scripted performance of power, authorities sought to affirm, uphold, and strengthen colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender, which the Dutch overlords proclaimed were natural and enduring. But as Prawiradinata’s actions show, the colonized were not merely extras in the colonial play. By the early twentieth century, reliance on these nineteenth-century tropes was starting to give way, and many Javanese began to assert their agency through subversive responses to the script. Their actions enabled them to negotiate and contest colonial hegemony, which, as Prawiradinata and Linck’s confrontation reflects, resulted in mounting tensions between proponents of tradition and modernity in colonial society.

Encounters like the one between Prawiradinata and Linck are central to this book, which focuses on the changing history of colonial hegemony and its contestation through everyday interactions in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century colonial Indonesia. Though histories of economic exploitation and political movements provide essential context for studying systems of hegemonic control, my analysis focuses on culture, the performance of power, everyday experiences, and the steady development of Indonesian agency. The study of the performance of power in colonial Indonesia reveals a new understanding of the Indonesian national awakening, one rooted not in the founding of political movements and organizations but in the proliferation of everyday discursive acts that challenged colonial hegemony and strategies of domination.

Javanization, Hegemony, and Resistance

In the seventeenth century, the lucrative spice trade drew the Dutch to the Indonesian archipelago, where they established a colonial foothold on the island of Java that lasted until Indonesian independence in 1949.² By the nineteenth century, the Dutch had created a colonial state that oversaw the production of cash crops, labor exploitation, and resource extraction through a combination of ruthless subjugation and cunning diplomacy and trade. As with many colonizing powers, rather than relying solely on the right of conquest, the legitimacy of Dutch authority on Java depended on preserving the traditional indigenous elite—in this case, the priyayi, a class of Javanese nobles and aristo-bureaucrats. While the institution of indirect rule in colonial Indonesia, including Dutch colonizers’ essential collaboration with the priyayi, has been the subject of excellent historiographical studies, the actual exercise of colonial power has received scant scholarly attention.³ This is surprising because their collaboration required significant cultural accommodations, and the Dutch adopted Javanese deference etiquette, symbols of power, sartorial hierarchies, lifestyles, and architecture to legitimize their colonial authority. In historical scholarship, this process of acculturation is often treated as a byproduct of centuries of cultural and racial mixing due to the immigration and conjugal policies of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC).⁴ Benedict Anderson, for example, describes the Javanization of the Dutch as a cultural osmosis resulting from the influences exerted by Europeans’ Asian wives or concubines.⁵ Such an interpretation obfuscates the deliberate nature of Dutch institutions designed to maintain control over increasing numbers of colonial subjects. In this book, I employ the term Javanization to designate a conscious policy of cultural appropriation to legitimize colonial rule.

The Javanization of colonial power in the nineteenth century can be traced back to cultural practices and concepts of authority in the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist past. It was as part of the so-called Indianization of Southeast Asia that complex bureaucracies and increased social stratification first emerged in Java from the eighth century onward. These early precolonial states were characterized by low population-to-land ratios, weak administrative organization, and interelite rivalries. As a consequence, a powerful ruler was someone who could gather and retain the largest following, not the largest territory. To that end, rulers relied on devotional state cults inspired by Indic cosmology that emphasized their prowess and elaborate networks of patron-client relations to maintain social and political order. These vertical relationships, extending throughout social rankings from the court to the village, were expressed through appearance, etiquette, language, and status symbols.⁶ These outward forms of social communication developed in conjunction with a traditional Javanese political philosophy that emphasized, in Anderson’s words, the signs of Power’s concentration, not the demonstration of its exercise or use.⁷ Thus, Java’s precolonial states were prime examples of what Clifford Geertz famously dubbed theatre states, polities where displays of power—through spectacle, ceremonies, and rituals—were essential in upholding authority. According to Geertz, Power served pomp, not pomp power.⁸

The Dutch adoption of Javanese deference rituals and symbols alongside the construction of the colonial state did not, however, result in a theatre state. On the contrary, I argue that the colonial Javanese state illustrates some of the limitations of this concept, especially for the colonial period. While appealing, the idea of a theatre state is rather static and ahistorical, and does not satisfactorily allow for change over time. By prioritizing cultural and symbolic power over domination by force, the theory disregards rulers’ need for political and economic authority to orchestrate, shape, and direct the theatrical staging of power. Similarly, there is little room for agency, as one is left to assume that all play their assigned roles without contestation or mediation. Consequently, the framework of the theatre state does not explain historical transitions and social transformations.⁹ For instance, the Dutch adoption of Javanese symbols of power and etiquette during the first decades of the nineteenth century did not result in widespread acquiescence to their rule. On the contrary, coercive measures were necessary to meet the challenges of large-scale revolts, everyday avoidance protest, and messianic movements.¹⁰ These forms of resistance underscore the fact that theatre states require political and coercive power in order to be imposed and maintained.

John Pemberton similarly argues that power in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia was not simply enforced from above but was a pervasive cultural effect produced through the performance of tradition. Crucially, he shows that while the Dutch assumed Javanese culture was static and enduring, it was precisely through the colonial encounter that the Javanese elite articulated a traditional identity, expressed through language, dress, and etiquette, in contradistinction to the Dutch. In this way, the colonial encounter itself produced a more fixed construction of Javanese culture. The Dutch attempt to legitimize power through cultural appropriation and the crystallization of Javanese cultural identity demonstrates that power and tradition are fluid and malleable concepts.¹¹ Thus, a more expansive analysis beyond the theatre state is essential to understand the relationship between culture and power in colonial Indonesia.

The concept of cultural hegemony offers a more dynamic and historical perspective that, significantly, emphasizes agency as a key component of the interplay between culture and power. Although formulated by the Italian Marxist and activist Antonio Gramsci to explain and contest the rise of fascism in early-twentieth-century Italy, cultural hegemony offers scholars valuable insights into the relationship between culture and power in colonial societies as well. Cultural hegemony refers to the continuous process through which a dominant group—in this case, the colonizer—tries to attain and maintain the consent of the great majority of the people it rules—here, the colonized. This was accomplished through the manipulation of cultural values, norms, beliefs, and traditions in an attempt to validate the ruling group’s worldview and make it appear favorable to all. In this way, the hegemonic discourse of the ruling group rationalized the social, racial, political, and economic inequalities of colonial society and sought to inculcate a sense that those inequalities were enduring and inevitable. In theory, a successful ruling group could rely less on domination by force and the coercive apparatus of the state and more on the majority of the population’s passive resignation. But hegemony is never static or absolute. It is inherently contested, thus enabling subordinate groups to negotiate and sometimes defy the terms of hegemonic discourse. Managing such negotiations and counterhegemonic challenges requires that the dominant group constantly renew and adjust its approach. In other words, hegemony involves continual cultural struggle, as ruling groups seek to legitimize their authority while inevitably leaving openings for subordinate groups to contest it.¹²

Cultural hegemony thus offers an insightful approach to the study of Dutch dominance in Indonesia and its contestation at the subaltern level. This is especially apt given the importance and pervasiveness of ritual display and highly refined rules for social interaction in Javanese society, particularly in political intercourse. Although there are numerous studies on the ways in which cultural hegemony has been applied to the colonial context in South Asia in particular, the concept is conspicuously absent from studies on colonial Indonesia.¹³ In part this can be explained by the association of colonialism with violence and oppression, which is reflected in numerous studies on moments of upheaval, revolt, and organized political movements. As Jan Breman has shown, this has too often resulted in the problematic assumption that between moments of outright confrontation, the endemic oppression and exploitation of colonialism were passively endured in everyday life.¹⁴ This is where the explanatory value of cultural hegemony lies; maintaining hegemony requires a balance of coercion and consent, with domination by force at one end of the spectrum and consensus and negotiation at the other.¹⁵ Although cultural hegemony was never fully attained in the colonial context—Ranajit Guha fittingly described colonial rule as dominance without hegemony—the concept enables historians to explore the myriad ways in which power was continuously communicated and contested in colonial systems of dominance.¹⁶ This approach also illuminates why, when, and how colonial power could be made to seem natural and legitimate rather than alien and oppressive.

As historical methodology, cultural hegemony offers a way to understand how the Dutch, and colonizers in general, were able to impose an exploitative socioeconomic and repressive political order that most officials could justify as a civilizing enterprise. Their alliances with, and ability to incorporate the interests of, indigenous elites and bureaucrats were an essential prerequisite to sustained control.¹⁷ The Dutch partnership with the priyayi, for instance, was based on a notion of parallel elites: Dutch officials and Javanese priyayi were supposedly equal in administering their own constituencies. In return for their allegiance to the Dutch, the priyayi were rewarded with hereditary rights, economic incentives, and the retention of their pomp and ceremony.¹⁸ In a similar vein, the Dutch granted far-reaching economic, legal, and political privileges to Chinese merchants, shopkeepers, and moneylenders, who were indispensable as middlemen in the colonial economy.¹⁹ And last but not least, indigenous mercenary soldiers filled the ranks of the colonial army, which was essential to the coercive apparatus of the state.²⁰

Because a large majority of the population consisted of illiterate peasants, conveying hegemonic ideas and ideology posed a significant challenge for Dutch colonizers. Their strategies made it imperative that my research move beyond the realm of official reports, legal proceedings, ordinances, popular periodicals, and other written forms of communication that scholars deploying Gramsci’s approach to cultural hegemony generally analyze. Thus, in addition to these standard textual sources, I emphasize the ways in which the hegemonic discourse was communicated through a complex array of social performances and material culture. In what I will refer to throughout this book as the performance of power, the Dutch announced their hegemonic discourse through etiquette, material symbols, language, clothing, architecture, urban planning, and lifestyle. These sociocultural practices created an experiential reality in which colonizers and colonized actively performed power and status during everyday encounters. These encounters took place within the civil service, on plantations, in the streets, and in households, trains, stores, and offices.²¹ It was through these prescribed interactions that the Dutch and their Javanese allies sought to normalize colonial hierarchies and instill a sense of compliance throughout the colonized populace. When effective, these modes of imposing hegemony bolstered acceptance of foreign domination through the manipulation of indigenous culture and rendered it more difficult—but not impossible—to reject or resist the colonizers’ demands. The deliberate Javanization of colonial authority is the topic of the first chapter.

The performance of colonial power was, however, like hegemony itself, not a one-way imposition of public and social behavior but an interactive encounter between colonizer and colonized. Although performance was instrumental in expressing the hegemonic discourse, a degree of defiance was always possible. Focusing on this tension, James Scott describes interactions between colonizer and colonized as reflecting a public transcript—the hegemonic discourse. He cautions against overestimating the acquiescence of the colonized and argues that they critiqued the colonial relationship offstage, a practice he characterizes as fashioning hidden transcripts.²² According to Scott, it is through these hidden transcripts that we can explore the everyday struggles of subordinate groups. In this book, however, I focus on encounters and instances in which this everyday resistance manifests onstage, in the face of power. Acts of symbolic defiance took various forms, from feigned ignorance to outright insubordination, such as Prawiradinata’s refusal to offer traditional deference to his superior. This approach draws attention to Indonesian agency in everyday colonial encounters, as opposed to limiting active resistance to direct political opposition or rebellion. By tracing the development and evolution of the performance of power, a dynamic and engaging history emerges that reveals the modes and sites of Indonesian defiance as well as the ways in which the Dutch continually worked to legitimize their authority.

The primary geographic focus of this book lies on Java (see figure 1), but the histories it explores more broadly illustrate how the performance of power shaped emergent Indonesian cultural narratives and identities. After establishing Batavia in 1619 (present-day Jakarta), the island of Java was at the center of the Dutch colonial project in Asia. Following the bankruptcy of the VOC at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Dutch transformed the trade empire’s dispersed possessions into a Java-centered colonial state known as the Netherlands Indies. Through a series of brutal wars—such as the infamous Aceh War (1873–1904)—and diplomatic coercion, the vast Indonesian archipelago was effectively consolidated under Dutch control by the twentieth century. Java remained the administrative, political, and economic bedrock of this modern colonial state, and the island’s major cities became meeting grounds where people from throughout the archipelago discovered, discussed, and contested their shared colonial subjecthood. Java was home to the majority of Western-style schools, institutions of higher education, political and cultural associations, and vernacular newspapers and periodicals. As Robert Elson asserts, the cities of Java were the fulcrum of intellectual life where the idea of Indonesia was not only embraced but also began to flourish during the final decades of colonial rule.²³ Analyzing the performance of power in these locations, this book offers an original perspective on the transition from a Javanese identity to an Indonesian one.

Tracing how Indonesians viewed and experienced this cultural hegemonic struggle is quite a challenge for historians. The task is complicated by the nature of the colonial archives, which reflect and confirm the Dutch colonizer’s hegemonic worldview. There are limited sources that shed light on the Indonesian perspective in the nineteenth century, in particular.²⁴ It is possible to read the archival record against the grain and decipher modes of hegemonic protest in the form of foot-dragging, flight, vandalism, and millenarianism.²⁵ There is also linguistic evidence of such everyday resistance, eternalized, for instance, in the nineteenth-century Dutch proverb that someone is East Indian deaf, referring to situations in which a person pretends not to hear a question or a command. Rooted in the colonial trope of the lazy native, the saying is associated with indolence to this day but also with colonial officials who were indifferent to the concerns of the colonized.²⁶ However, from the late nineteenth century onward, the Indonesian experience comes more sharply into focus through the increasing availability of sources penned by the colonized themselves, such as vernacular newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets, correspondence, novels, and biographies. By drawing extensively on these sources, I reconstruct and analyze the interactive hegemonic struggle between colonizer and colonized.

Figure 1. Java, ca. 1900–1942

The private correspondence of Indonesian national heroine Raden Adjeng Kartini, an early advocate for women’s rights and education, offers an instructive example of how Indonesians perceived the colonial performance of power. In a letter to a Dutch friend, Stella Zeehandelaar, in January 1900, Kartini wrote that she detested offering traditional Javanese deference to Europeans. She confided that she could not suppress a smile and had to bite her lips to prevent herself from laughing outright at the manner in which Dutch officials emphasized their prestige over the Javanese. Obviously, Kartini did not buy into the ridiculous spectacle that Dutch colonizers maintained was crucial to legitimizing their authority to the Javanese population. She even went so far as to call Dutch prestige imaginary, in essence undermining the cultural grounds on which colonial rule was constructed. Significantly, Kartini also suggested that she was not alone in her views. For instance, she described how humble crowds respectfully retreated before an assistant resident under the shade of his gilded payung—a Javanese ceremonial parasol—only to burst out laughing once he turned his back.²⁷ Although Kartini’s letters do not constitute evidence of direct hegemonic contestation, they do shed light on the Indonesian mentality in the colonial encounter. Due to her privileged position as a woman of noble birth, Kartini was able to critique the Dutch as long as her views did not spread too widely throughout the population—yet. Although Kartini was ahead of her time, her letters indicate that the times were changing. Only a few years later, the colonized would increasingly declare and perform such private sentiments of resistance directly to Dutch officials.

The turn of the twentieth century was a tumultuous period of social and cultural change in colonial Indonesia and the world more broadly.²⁸ Characterized by rapid technological innovation, demographic growth, and urbanization,