Setting History Straight Indonesian Historiography in the new Order

SETTING HISTORY STRAIGHT?
INDONESIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE NEW ORDER




A thesis presented to
the faculty of
the Center for International Studies of Ohio University




In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Master of Arts




Sony Karsono
August 2005
This thesis entitled
SETTING HISTORY STRAIGHT?
INDONESIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE NEW ORDER


by
Sony Karsono

has been approved for
the Department of Southeast Asian Studies
and the Center for International Studies by



William H. Frederick
Associate Professor of History



Josep Rota
Director of International Studies
KARSONO, SONY. M.A. August 2005. International Studies
Setting History Straight? Indonesian Historiography in the New Order (274 pp.)

Director of Thesis: William H. Frederick

This thesis discusses one central problem: What happened to Indonesian
historiography in the New Order (1966-98)? To analyze the problem, the author
studies the connections between the major themes in his intellectual autobiography
and those in the metahistory of the regime. Proceeding in chronological and thematic
manner, the thesis comes in three parts. Part One presents the author’s intellectual
autobiography, which illustrates how, as a member of the generation of people who
grew up in the New Order, he came into contact with history. Part Two examines the
genealogy of and the major issues at stake in the post-New Order controversy over the
rectification of history. Part Three ends with several concluding observations. First,
the historiographical engineering that the New Order committed was not effective.
Second, the regime created the tools for people to criticize itself, which shows that it
misunderstood its own society. Third, Indonesian contemporary culture is such that

people abhor the idea that there is no single truth.

Approved:
William H. Frederick
Associate Professor of History





















For
Nurchayati, Kartini, and Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata
Acknowledgments

Without the unstinting moral support of my mother Kartini and my wife
Nurchayati, I would not have had the energies to complete this thesis. And it was my
father, the late Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata, who, in 1987, awakened in me the desire to
undertake a study overseas. It is to them that I dedicate this work.
For the funding of my master’s study in the United States, 2003-2005, of
which this thesis constituted the final part, I relied on three institutions. I am indebted
to the Fulbright Exchange Program and Ohio University for their generous
scholarships. And I wish to thank the University of Surabaya in Indonesia for allowing
me to go on paid leave to undertake my study.
I am grateful to many individuals in the United States and Indonesia who
provided me with administrative assistance at critical stages of my study. I wish to
thank Drew McDaniel, Karla Schneider, Joan Kraynanski, and Jill McKinney at Ohio
University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. I also wish to thank Piet Hendrardjo
at the AMINEF in Jakarta as well as Brenda Simmons and Christina Holdvogt at the
IIE Midwest Regional Center in Chicago.
The research I conducted from 2004 to 2005 for this work would not have been
possible without the kind support from various individuals in the United States and
Indonesia. While hunting for and amassing various sources for Part Two of this thesis,
I received considerable help at Ohio University’s Southeast Asia Collection from Jeff
Ferrier, Jeffrey Shane, Lucy Conn, Nurul Pratiwi, and Nurhaya Muchtar. And, while
working on parts of the thesis which deal specifically with students’ encounters with
history in the New Order and with the post-New controversy over Indonesian
historiography, I was able to benefit from the kindness of many people in Indonesia
who were willing to share with me their ideas and experiences: Asvi Warman Adam in
Jakarta, Bambang Purwanto in Yogyakarta, Zunafi in Kediri, and Evilina Sutrisno and
Ahmad Faishal in Surabaya.
I wish to thank my thesis director, William H. Frederick, for his wisdom,
encouragement, and illuminating criticism. To say this, however, is an understatement.
For in him, more than in anybody else, I find a teacher who has shaped my
fundamental understanding of Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and history as a discipline. I

am also grateful to the other members of my thesis committee for their instructive and
constructive suggestions: Elizabeth F. Collins and Peter J. Brobst. All these people
contributed a great deal to the writing of my thesis. Yet, it is only I who am
responsible for any errors and misinterpretations that remain in it.


7
Table of Contents


Page
Abstract 3

Acknowledgments 5

List of Abbreviations 9

Introduction 11

Part One. Encounter with History in the New Order: Audience’s Point of View
15

1. Origins, Absence, and Forgetfulness 15
2. My Family, My Roots 20
3. Books and Libraries 27
4. School Books versus “Cool” Books 34
5. Documents and History 39
6. Love and the Destruction of Personal Archives 41
7. Museums: Official
versus Unofficial 42

8. Flag Raising Ceremony and National Memory 57
9. The National Monument and Others 65
10. The Treason of G30S/PKI: A New Order “Historical” Movie 78
11. Mohammad Husni Thamrin on Television 90
12. Cemetery, “History,” and Personal Monument 93
13. My History Teachers 96
14. My Interest in History: Its Origins and Development 103

Part Two. On the Rectification of Indonesian History: Major Themes
120

15. The Structure of This Part 120
16. The Elite’s Perspective: Debating Indonesia’s Genesis, 1946-1990s 124
17. Education That Went Awry: Students’ and Teachers’ Experience with
History in the New Order 174
18. The Plight of the Academic Historian in the New Order 191
a. The Politics of Representation: Chaos, “Pornography,” and Purification
191
b. The Economics of Historical Studies: Poor Facilities, Poor Human
Resources 201
19. After the Collapse of the New Order: Questions 207
20. On the Rectification of the History of 1965: Themes in a Controversy 211
a. Asvi Warman Adam 211
b. Bambang Purwanto 222
c. Taufik Abdullah 229


8
d. Comparison, Contrast, Critique 237
21. The Problems of History Teachers in the Post-New Order Era 242

22. Students’ Problems with History in Post-New Order Indonesia 246
23. Afterthoughts 250

Part Three. Concluding Remarks 253


Bibliography 265


9
List of Abbreviations


ASEAN : Association of Southeast Asian Nations
BPUPKI : Investigatory Body for Preparatory Works for Indonesia’s
Independence (Badan Penyelidik Usaha-usaha Persiapan
Kemerdekaan Indonesia)
BTI : Indonesian Peasant Front (Barisan Tani Indonesia)
FAO : Food and Agriculture Organization
G30S/PKI : September 30 Movement/Indonesian Communist Party
(Gerakan 30 September/Partai Komunis Indonesia)
GDP : Gross Domestic Product
Gerwani : Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia)
Golkar : Functional Groups (Golongan Karya)
GPA : Grade Point Average
HAM : Human Rights (Hak Asasi Manusia)
HIS : Dutch-language primary school for Indonesians
(Hollandsch-Inlandsche School)
HMI : Islamic Students Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam)
IKIP : Teachers Training College (Institut Keguruan dan Ilmu

Pendidikan)
IMF : International Monetary Fund
KITLV : Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (Koninklijk
Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde)
KNIL : Royal Netherlands Indies Army (Koninklijk Nederlandsch
Indisch Leger)
Leknas : National Institute for Economic and Social Research
(Lembaga Ekonomi dan Kemasyarakatan Nasional)
Lekra : People’s Cultural Association (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakjat)
LIPI : Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan
Indonesia)
Manipol : Political Manifesto (Manifesto Politik)
MULO : Dutch-language Junior High School (Meer Uitgebreid Lager
Onderwijs)
NRC : National Research Center
OSIS : Intra-School Student Organization (Organisasi Siswa Intra
Sekolah)
P2E-LIPI : Center for Economic Research-Indonesian Institute of
Sciences (Pusat Penelitian Ekonomi-LIPI)
PDI : Indonesian Democracy Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia)
PDIN : National Center for Scientific Documentation (Pusat
Dokumentasi Ilmiah Nasional)
Permesta : Universal Struggle Charter (Piagam Perjuangan Semesta
Alam)


10
Pesindo : Indonesian Socialist Youth (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia)
PETA : Defenders of the Fatherland (Pembela Tanah Air)
PGRI Nonvaksentral : Leftwing Association of Indonesian Teachers (Persatuan Guru

Republik Indonesia Vaksentral)
PII : Indonesian Islamic Student Association (Pelajar Islam
Indonesia)
PKI : Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia)
PNI : Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia)
PPIA : Indonesia-America Friendship Association (Perhimpunan
Persahabatan Indonesia-Amerika)
PPKI : Committee for the Preparation for Indonesia’s Independence
(Panitia Persiapan Kemerdekaan Indonesia)
PPP : Unity Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan)
PRD : People’s Democratic Party (Partai Rakyat Demokratik)
PRI : Youths of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemuda Republik
Indonesia)
PRRI : Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia
(Pemerintahan Revolusioner Republik Indonesia)
PSI : Indonesian Socialist Party (Partai Sosialis Indonesia)
PSPB : History of the National Struggle (Pendidikan Sejarah
Perjuangan Bangsa)
SDI : Islamic Traders’ Association (Sarekat Dagang Islamijah)
SMA : Senior High School (Sekolah Menengah Atas)
SMID : Student Solidarity for Democracy in Indonesia (Solidaritas
Mahasiswa Indonesia untuk Demokrasi)
SMP : Junior High School (Sekolah Menengah Pertama)
SPG : Special High School for the Training of Primary School
Teachers (Sekolah Pendidikan Guru)
SSN : National History Seminar (Seminar Sejarah Nasional)
TKR : People’s Security Force (Tentara Keamanan Rakjat)
TVRI : Television of the Republic of Indonesia (Televisi Republik
Indonesia)
VCR : Video Cassette Recorder

YMB : Foundation for Mutual Progress (Yayasan Maju Bersama)




11
INTRODUCTION

The New Order’s unanticipated downfall in May 1998 opened up a broader
space for political expression. As a result, people dared break certain political taboos.
The print media and television stations began to circulate previously marginalized
views of the nation’s past, for example the aborted coup in 1965. Politically
stigmatized groups under the New Order such as the leftists, Islamists, and ethno-
nationalists ventured publicly to articulate their versions of some major historical
events. A number of professional historians maintained that the Soeharto regime had
cooked up, disseminated, and imposed its fabricated version of the nation’s history.
1

They argued that straightening out Indonesia’s history should be one of the key items
in her agenda of transition from authoritarianism to a more democratic regime.
2

While the “battle of historiography” was raging in such arenas as books,
newspapers, magazines, and television programs, its reverberations were heard in
schools throughout the country. A hot debate emerged in the classrooms between


1
See, for example, Asvi Warman Adam, “Orde Baru Lakukan Banyak
Rekayasa Penulisan Sejarah” [The New Order performed a lot of historiographical

fabrication], Kompas, June 24, 1999. See also “Lebih Jauh dengan Anhar
Gonggong,”[More about Anhar Gonggong], Kompas, October 15, 2000, where Anhar
refers to the New Order as having produced “twisted” accounts of some historical
events. Note that when the New Order was still in power, though Asvi and Anhar both
worked for state institutions, they represented rather different political engagements
with the regime. While Asvi was attached to the Indonesian Institute of Sciences
(LIPI), Anhar was the protégé of Brigadier-General (titular) Nugroho Notosusanto, the
army historian responsible for the production of the state-sanctioned national history.
2
Asvi, for instance, suggested that Indonesians should abandon what he called
“the New Order’s standpoint in the understanding of facts from the past” and adopt
instead “the perspective of reform,” which, he claimed, has become “the mainstream
perspective among Indonesians nowadays.” See, Asvi Warman Adam, ibid.


12
senior high school students who armed themselves with quotations from the media’s
“wild” versions of history, and teachers who remained bound by the imperatives of the
state curriculum and had to stick to the official narratives in state-authorized
textbooks. Accused by their students of telling lies, these teachers were worried that
they might lose their credibility and, eventually, their job.
3
For most of them, the
multiplicity of historical versions signified cacophony that would spell chaos in the
classroom.
Those were some of the changes in the landscape of Indonesian history in the
wake of the New Order’s collapse. They have led me to ask myself a question: What
on earth happened to Indonesian history under the New Order (1966 to 1998)? I break
the question down into three smaller questions: First, what kind of Indonesian history
did my generation come into contact with and learn under the New Order? How and

by what agents was it taught to us? How did we react to it? What kind of intellectual
journey over time did the generation undergo? It is with a view to exploring these
issues that, in Part One, I shall present and critically examine my intellectual
biography and the biographical fragments of other people of my generation.
Second, and by contrast, what are the major themes in the debate on the
“straightening out” of Indonesian history which involves Indonesian professional
historians in post-Soeharto Indonesia? It is to this question that I shall devote Part
Two. My discussion will be focused on the debate concerning the incident of 1965.


3
See “Pengajaran Sejarah Sering Tidak Sesuai Fakta: Siswa Anggap Guru
Bohong” [The teaching of history often contradicts the facts: pupils think their
teachers tell lies], Kompas, March 15, 1999 and “Saya, Orang Paling Berdosa…” [I, a
most guilty person], Kompas, September 6, 2003.


13
I deliberately compare the first and the second questions with each other. It
was professional historians who maintained that the New Order had fabricated
Indonesian history. They further claimed that students had been victims of this
intentional distortion of history.
4
But was it always the case? Were students always
passive consumers of historical knowledge? Were they not able to say “no” to the
New Order’s version of history?
My third question: What is the core of the problem? Is it that Indonesian
contemporary culture abhors the idea that there is no single truth? Is it that people do
not understand what history is? Is it that people do not have enough historical
evidence? Or is it that Indonesian historians are not courageous enough? Part Three

will be devoted to the treatment of these issues.
As I shall demonstrate in Part Two, the weakness of the distortion-oriented
critics of the New Order history-writing is that they are preoccupied with the state’s
role as producer of historical knowledge. They tend to overlook the possibility that


4
The political scientist Rizal Mallarangeng argues that two regional rebellions,
the PRRI and the Permesta, led to the failure of parliamentary democracy after the
election of 1955. In his critique Asvi Warman Adam considers Rizal’s argument as
evidence of how “the New Order’s propaganda… deeply affected the younger
generation who had learned history in school.” For Rizal’s point of view, see Rizal
Mallarangeng, “Akankah Sejarah Berulang?” [Will history repeat itself?], Kompas,
August, 16-17, 2000. For Asvi’s critique, see Asvi Warman Adam, “Demiliterisasi
Sejarah Indonesia” [Demilitarizing Indonesian history], Kompas, September 2, 2000.
In “Perlu Reinterpretasi Penulisan Sejarah Masa Orde Baru” [Re-interpretation of the
New Order’s historiography is necessary], Kompas, September 4, 2004, Anhar
Gonggong is quoted as saying that “history-writing under the New Order was
dominated and tightly controlled by the government and the military. As a result,
much of the history-writing was dishonest, lacked balanced data, and glorified … the
military.” He argues that the historian who served the New Order in the writing of
such “palace-centric” history “intentionally deceived the audience.”


14
citizens are capable of using state-produced historical objects, such as films,
monuments, museums, and textbooks, in ways quite different from those intended by
the New Order regime. Absent in their critiques is the realization that as consumers of
historical knowledge, people change over time. The critics seem to forget that what
people believe and disbelieve, their understanding of history, and the way they use

history also change over time.
To avoid making the same mistake that the distortion-oriented critics of the
New Order history-writing have committed, I adopt a model of analysis that involves a
three-way relationship among (1) the cultural objects for the teaching of history that
include, among other things, textbooks, museums, and monuments, (2) the New
Order’s ideological apparatuses, such as professional historians and school teachers,
who produced and/or propagated the cultural objects, and (3) students as knowledge
consumers who might have used such objects in ways quite different from what the
New Order regime had intended.
5
I situate the three-way relationship against the
backdrop of two analytical axes: continuities and changes over time that affect
Indonesian society at large, historical knowledge, professional historians, and their
audience.


5
I borrow this approach to cultural analysis from Mark Gottdiener,
“Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Semiotic Approach,” American Journal of Sociology
90, 5 (1985): 979.


15
PART ONE
ENCOUNTER WITH HISTORY IN THE NEW ORDER:
AUDIENCE’S POINT OF VIEW

1. Origins, Absence, and Forgetfulness
The European historian used to have an idol. Marc Bloch called it “the
obsession with origins.”

6
I cannot say what the contemporary Indonesian historian’s
idol was under the New Order. But at least as the anecdote below would show,
Indonesia’s origin was an important theme in the sort of history that school children
had to learn in Indonesia in the late 1970s. Thus in my first year in elementary
school—it was in Malang, East Java, somewhere in 1977—my lady teacher imparted
to me, by teaching us a song called “Independence Day,” that August 17, 1945 was
“the birth date of the Indonesian nation.” The nation’s date of birth, so the lyric goes,
coincides with its date of freedom:
The seventeenth of August nineteen forty-five
That’s our independence day:
The freedom day of our homeland
The birthday of the Indonesian nation.
7


What she actually did was introduce me, a seven-year-old schoolboy, to the
historian’s idol, along with the obligatory gesture of paying obeisance to it: that of
asking the insistent question “Where do things come from? When did they first come


6
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p.
29.
7
The song, entitled “Hari Merdeka,” was written by H. Mutahar.


16
into being?” Indeed, at the time I was unaware of the metaphysical nature of her

instruction in the classroom. (It was not until I was eighteen that I got acquainted with
Heidegger’s idea that to inquire into the origin of something is to ask a metaphysical
question about it.) All I knew was that learning to sing the song together with my
classmates was real fun. We had no idea of what the song meant. My ears could not
even tell where the lyric’s words began and where they ended, for they belonged to
bahasa Indonesia—the school language. We had only just begun to learn this foreign,
this national, tongue. At school, every morning from seven to ten, from Monday to
Saturday, we tried to use it when we spoke to our teachers. Anywhere else—at home,
at playgrounds, in dreams, and among ourselves—we kids spoke low Javanese
(ngoko).
Older than national history is Islam. It too is very keen about origins. Islam and
national history first appeared in my life roughly at the same time. When my family
lived in Malang from 1975 to 1978, every evening from six to eight, I used to spend
my time in the neighborhood mosque with my buddies. Some were about my age;
some were a couple of years older than me. Assisted now and then by his three
grownup sons, a kyai (Islamic cleric) named Abdul Salam, a man in his late fifties who
happened to be the mosque’s caretaker, taught us to perform prayers in congregation,
proclaim the hours of the daily prayers, sing hymns in Arabic and Javanese, and recite
the Koran. Aside from a few words like “Allah,” “Muhammad,” and “bismillah,”
8
I
knew no Arabic. True, my seniors had taught me to recite Arabic verses in the Koran.


8
The phrase means “in the name of God.”


17
But nobody in the mosque had taught us to speak Arabic. Ironically, the mere

recitation of chapters from the holy book always filled my heart with joy and
tranquility.
Most importantly, it was in the mosque that I learned, from my teachers’
lectures, that the whole world too had its ultimate origin. It was God and He was
called Allah. Once upon a time, He uttered that momentous sentence: “Be!” And He
thus called heaven, hell, and the earth into being. To populate heaven, He also said,
“Be!” and He thus created two sorts of strange beings: some, made of light, were
called “angels” and they knew no evil; one, made of fire, was called “Iblis” (Satan)
and he was a genius in the art of evil. But in the beginning both the angels and Iblis
obeyed God. The celestial balance was upset when God created Adam, the first man,
from clay. A humble substance indeed. Later God removed a piece of bone from
Adam’s rib cage and turned it into the first woman. Called Hawa, she became Adam’s
wife. It is to this ancient couple that mankind traces back its ultimate genealogy. God
told the angels and Iblis to bow down to Adam. This unexpected move on Allah’s part
outraged Iblis’ rigid and too keen a sense of hierarchy. Due to his fiery origin, so Iblis
insisted, he belonged to a higher class than did the clay Adam. He chose to defend his
dignity and defy God’s command. God decided to kick the arrogant Iblis out of heaven
and into hell. In response to the latter’s request, however, He put off the punishment
until doomsday. Iblis swore that in the meantime he would tempt Adam’s and Hawa’s


18
descendants away from the Path of Light. God said, “See if I care! If they follow you,
I shall grill you all in hell.”
9

It was, undoubtedly, a “cool” and concise history of all things. It goes without
saying that as a five-year-old lad I had no idea of what the narrative was all about
beneath its literal surface. This much I was able to conclude: To be a good boy was to
fear Allah more than anything else. (No one knew, though, that what I did fear most of

all was not Allah but a type of wandering ghost called pocong: a dead man wrapped in
white shroud who woke up from his grave to scare the living. The dread of pocong had
its origin in my shocking encounter in 1977 with his visual images in Setan Kuburan
[Graveyard Ghost] a horror movie starring Benyamin Sueb.) One thing stands out in
my memory of those brief learning years in the neighborhood mosque. The first time
he saw me, the kyai mistook me for a Chinese kid. This he did on account of my “fair”
face. It was in fact dark brown. But by comparison to his sun-scorched, sun-blackened
complexion—for in the daylight he toiled at his paddy field—my visage might have
looked in his eyes yellow enough for him to misrecognize me as a “Chinese” boy.
As a little kid, I readily believed the stories about the origins of Indonesia and
the world. (In fact, I would embrace as true almost any story that was enchanting.) I
was in no position yet to be skeptical about the truth of those stories. For I was not
there at 56 Pegangsaan Timur Street, when at 10:00 AM on August 17, 1945 Soekarno
and Hatta declared Indonesia’s birth and independence. Nor was I there when, through


9
At nineteen I read Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Les litanies de Satan” [The
litanies of Satan] and it occurred to me that Iblis was “cool,” that he was arrogant in a
“cool” way, and that being a creature of fire he would no doubt feel at home in hell.


19
His performative utterances, God created the cosmos. To be sure, I was aware that my
lady teacher and my kyai were not there either when the geneses of the nation and the
cosmos took place. Yet since they had lived longer than I did, I supposed they were
much more knowledgeable about a lot of things. For as a little child I knew I was
lousy at establishing origins. I was unable, for instance, to give an eyewitness account
of my own origin. Although I was there when my mother gave birth to me, it seemed
to me that my memory of the event had vanished forever. Luckily, in my forgetfulness

I could always rely on my mother for stories about the circumstances of my birth.
Sometimes she let me take a look at my village-level birth certificate. It was a little,
brittle, blue, oblong card that contained such details as where and when I was born,
what my name officially was, and who my parents were. At the foot of the document
was the village head’s signature. More concrete to me than Mother’s eyewitness
accounts and the birth certificate were all those black-and-white snapshots that Father
took of me when I was a baby. The infant looked bizarre in the pictures: When it cried
it cried forever; when it slept it slept forever. Mother still kept—and sometimes
showed me—the old diapers, shirts, gloves, and caps that she said I used to wear in my
infancy.
Were it not for the redeeming acts of my parents, all the eyewitness accounts
of my origin would be lost forever in the black hole of oblivion. Yes, they are the


20
guardians of my origin.
10
Their role is indispensable. For in my beginning oblivion
was the master.
When I was born, I was born into a nation-state and a religion. I was not there
when they were born. In their beginnings was my absence. The ummah (community of
believers) and the nation-state provided me with myths to remedy that absence and to
enlighten me on their geneses.

2. My Family, My Roots
On April 8, 1971, I was born in Prigen, Pasuruan, East Java, near Tretes, a
tourist resort at the foot of Mount Arjuno. The tall, greenish-blue volcano always
greeted me with a friendly “peek-a-boo!” every morning when my mother opened up
my bedroom’s windows to expose me to the fresh air and warm sunlight. I was born
into a strange alchemy of a family. My father, Henky Sjarief Soeriadinata, was a

middle-ranking officer in the Military Police. He came from the ethnic Sundanese
gentry. His class origin enabled him to attend Dutch schools, the HIS (Hollandsch-
Inlandsche School, or Dutch-language primary school for Indonesians) and the MULO
(Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs, or Junior High School), in West Java in the 1930s
and early 1940s, when the territory now called Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. My
mother, Kartini, comes from an ethnic Javanese, landless peasant family in
Tulungagung, East Java. Due to extreme poverty, she stopped her education in the


10
In this respect, I am a lot luckier than my mother. Poverty had prevented her
from enjoying photography’s power of preserving memories. When she was a baby,
Grandfather and Grandmother took no picture of her. They did not even try to get her
a birth certificate.


21
fourth grade of primary school. She later attempted to compensate for her own lack of
education by insisting that all her children have at least a bachelor degree.
My father lived in two different worlds: one was a Dutch world founded in his
colonial education; the other was a Sundanese, Muslim, petty aristocratic world of his
ancestors. He spoke Dutch to his brothers and sisters at home and to his friends at
school. They called him “Henky,” a Dutch name he adopted at some point in his
adolescence. He drank beer and danced to European music. It seems to me that he
aspired to be a Dutchified young man. Yet people—Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese,
and Dutch alike—often mistook him for a Chinese.
11
In his youth he acquired most of
his knowledge about the contemporary world by reading books, magazines, and
newspapers printed in Dutch. His parents, however, did not fail to provide him with

instruction in Islam. It was for this purpose that they once sent him to a certain Islamic
boarding school in Banten, West Java. Islam was a significant cultural element in his
family. His paternal grandfather, for instance, worked for the colonial government as a
hoofdpenghoeloe who was in charge of the religious affairs of Muslim natives. There
was also an enigmatic aunt, a mystic who knew in advance the exact day of her death.
When she passed away, my father inherited the essays she had written on Islamic


11
Thus during the revolution (1945-1949), he served the republican army as a
spy: He infiltrated the Dutch-occupied territory in West Java in the guise of an
itinerant, bike-riding, Chinese egg-dealer. The Dutch soon captured him. Knowing
that he was a MULO student, they offered him a scholarship to continue his study in
the Netherlands if only he was willing to co-operate. Though he always wanted to be a
physician, he refused the offer. Thereupon, they incarcerated him in the notorious
prison island of Nusakambangan for years. He was set free soon after the Dutch had
recognized the United States of Indonesia as a free and sovereign country, in the
Round Table Conference in The Hague on August 23 to November 2, 1949.


22
mysticism. His Dutch-school-mediated encounter with the Dutch colonial culture led
my father to be a hybrid person. He grew into a creature of both Dutch and Sundanese-
Muslim cultures. At first he seems to have felt it more as a synthesis than as a conflict.
His hybridity intensified when in 1950, at twenty-one, he married Yvonne Minks, a
Protestant Dutch woman, who later gave him six children. In the household, my father,
his wife, and their six Eurasian children lived in a mixed world resulting from the
amalgamation of a Christian, Dutch culture and a Muslim, Sundanese culture. Two
languages—Dutch and the Eurasian dialect of Indonesian—were spoken in the family.
With regard to religion, my father remained a Muslim and his wife a Protestant, while

the children were divided among Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam.
At the close of the first decade of his marriage, that is, when he turned forty,
the sustained exposure to Christianity personified by his wife and some of his children
led my father to go through a religious crisis. He started to ask himself such questions
as “Who am I: a Muslim or a Christian? Shall I remain a Muslim? Why? Shall I
convert to Christianity? Why?” To cope with the crisis, he embarked on a spiritual
exploration. There were quite a few ways in which he pursued the exploration. He
joined the local theosophical society in Surabaya, East Java. He attended its meetings
and discussions, engaged in yoga meditation, and read the holy texts of Islam,
Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Javanese mysticism.
He became the disciple and adopted son of a Javanese mystic in Pare, Kediri, East
Java, whose power of suggestion was so great that he could make people fall ill only
by declaring to them “You are going to fall ill.” The only way to cure the victims was


23
for them to drink the mystic’s urine. My father soon abandoned the mystic because he
considered him too cruel and greedy to be a true spiritual teacher. At last, there was a
night, when my father meditated under a huge banyan tree in the archeological site of
the fifteenth-century Hindu kingdom of Majapahit in Trowulan, Mojokerto, East Java,
he had a vision. He saw, inscribed on the dark after-midnight sky, a glowing
calligraphy in Arabic that turned out to be the Muslim’s credo: “There is no god but
God; Muhammad is God’s messenger.” Thereupon he decided to remain a Muslim. He
was convinced that Islam was the best religion for him. He held that all religions were
but different paths to the same truth. The revelation under the banyan tree—or was it a
hallucination?—helped him achieve an unshakeable sense of religious identity.
Father’s spiritual crisis took place in the early 1960s. It coincided with the time
of protracted political turbulence under Soekarno’s Guided Democracy. The PKI
(Indonesian Communist Party) and the Army were involved in a fierce struggle for
power. The ailing President Soekarno appeared more and more to take sides with the

PKI. At all levels of the society political antagonism intensified. From left to right,
political parties were aggressively mobilizing villagers. Here and there people engaged
in mass demonstrations, mutual intimidations, and street fights. Since 1955 no general
elections had been held. So it was not clear to anyone if the overheated political
struggle would ever come to a peaceful conclusion. The putrid smell of impending
Bharatayudha
12
filled the air. In 1990 Father and I had a memorable talk in which he


12
In the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, the Bharatayudha is the ultimate battle
between two conflicting groups of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. In the


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told me that a couple of months prior to the massacres of the communists in 1965-66 a
number of old, eccentric, legendary masters of Javanese mysticism, who normally
lived in seclusion somewhere at the slope of Mount Semeru, started to appear in
Surabaya, the capital of East Java. Some of those ascetics made speeches before the
crowd in the city square. On one such occasion, the great seer Eyang Semeru
(Grandfather Semeru) pronounced a sinister prophecy. “Be prepared!” he called out.
“Be prepared! Verily I say unto you: Chaos is at hand!” The military police arrested
him on a charge of disturbing order. Holding him in great respect, however, they soon
released him. They only objected to his revealing a political prophecy in public.
In the late 1960s, it was Father’s marriage that underwent a crisis. It turned out
that he was no longer happy having a Dutch wife. He felt she was kasar (crude,
unrefined) and overbearing. She did a poor job of caring for the children and the
house. Rather, she spent much time smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, and shooting
the breeze with her friends. More importantly, she did not maintain her good looks.

Nor did she treat him tenderly and lovingly as would a native wife. The Sundanese in
him yearned for a native wife, one who would be modest and alus (smooth, refined),
who would take care of his needs as a man, and who would treat him tenderly and
affectionately. This was the big picture that I, much later, managed to piece together
from those stories that I had overheard in my parents’ conversations. Strikingly
missing in the picture, though, was my father’s sensitivity to his wife Yvonne’s needs
and desires as a woman. A woman, that is, who had sacrificed a lot when in 1950, a


1960s many Javanese on the right likened themselves to the Pandavas, the good guys,
while referring to members of the PKI as the Kauravas, the bad guys.


25
year after the transfer of Indonesia’s sovereignty from the Dutch to the Indonesian
government, she chose to abandon her career in a Dutch shipping company and marry
him, rather than return, with her parents and siblings, to the Netherlands and start there
what would probably be a much happier life than she could aspire to as the wife of a
native officer in Indonesia.
Anyway, in 1970, without Yvonne’s knowledge or consent, he married Kartini,
a nineteenth-year-old Javanese Muslim woman, who later gave him four children, of
which I was the first-born. This marriage was problematic too. As an army officer,
Father was subject to the military regulation that a soldier was forbidden to practice
polygamy unless he had a written approval from both his first wife and his superior. It
being impossible for him to get Yvonne’s permission to undertake the polygamy, he
decided to marry Kartini secretly. The marriage was performed in accordance with
Islamic law. In order not to break Yvonne’s heart and to keep his marriage to her
intact, for about nineteen years my father kept his marriage to Kartini a secret. What
my father did was manipulate his culture. He broke the mores of the army to which he
belonged but he legitimized his second marriage by adhering to Islamic law. In 1990

my mother Kartini could no longer bear the burden of the secret. She disclosed it. The
time-bomb exploded. It smashed Yvonne’s life-world into smithereens. It plunged my
father into the dark abyss of unbearable guilt. It shattered my mother’s simple dream
to pieces: that of growing old together with her husband. In November 1994, my
father died of a heart attack.