A Life Beyond Boundaries

  Though it had nothing to do with my thesis topic, I took lessons in elegant Javanese from the first great Western-trained Javanese scholar, Professor Poerbatjaraka. When I first went to see him in his simple little house, I noticed that one of the white plastered walls of his study was covered with bright red splashes, as if some terrible murder had just been committed there. Within a few minutes, I was enlightened. As he chatted kindly, I saw that his few remaining teeth were bright red, and moments later he spat a huge stream of red spittle against the wall. He was chewing the age-old Southeast Asian stimulant, betel-juice mixed with lime-dust.

  Soon I was taking private lessons in Javanese music from Poerbatjaraka’s younger brother, Pak Kodrat, one of the two most distinguished musicians of his generation. Unwittingly, Pak Kodrat introduced me, in real life rather than in books, to the complexity of Javanese culture and language. I used to speak to him in Indonesian, using the term of respect for an older man (Pak). But for a while he clearly didn’t know how to address me, because he was thinking in Javanese. Young Javanese did not address adults by their personal names. He was old enough to be my grandfather, so he could and should have called me anak or nak, meaning ‘child’, and I would have been very happy if he had done so, because I really revered him. But in his eyes I was ‘white’ and highly educated, and I was paying him for the lessons. The way out came when he saw how much I loved him, and he felt fond of me too, so he started calling me putro, which literally means ‘son’, but which in High (feudal) Javanese is the word used by lower-status old people to address the sons of aristocrats. I hated the word, but my old teacher would not budge.

  Beyond that, I spent a lot of time going to performances of Javanese music, shadow-plays, mask-dancing, spirit possession, and so on, crisscrossing Java over and over again. That I was able to do all this, as well as get on with my research, was the product of a (for me) piece of good fortune. To go to Indonesia, I was given a quite small grant, which was supposed to support me for a year and a half, a ridiculously short time to do any kind of important fieldwork, let alone master the local language. But in 1962, Indonesia was hit by a tide of inflation that seemed to accelerate month by month. Since the dollar was still a stable and respected currency, by using the black-market exchange rate, as all foreigners then did, I managed to stretch the money out for two and a half years. This extension made it possible to allay Kahin’s supportive concern about the progress of my research. I usually tried to inform him about current politics, while following my Javanese mania.

  A large part of my work on Indonesia turned on the relationship between politics and culture. For my generation this was something odd. My classmates and close friends were mainly interested in things like democracy, law, communism, constitutions, economic change, and so on. Most anthropologists, following Clifford Geertz, were interested in local cultures, but in an anthropological sense (social norms, traditions, etc.), and not much concerned with politics. My time in Indonesia attached me to the people in a direct and emotional way, but also laid the foundations for the ‘culturalist’ streak that would appear later in Imagined Communities.

  As for my dissertation itself, I divided my time and energy between the National Museum, which had a vast, worm-eaten collection of newspapers and magazines from the 1940s, and miscellaneous interviews. In the National Museum’s collection I discovered magazines from the late colonial period, the Japanese Occupation and the Revolution. One was called Djawa Baroe (New Java), the main organ of Sendenbu, the Japanese military government’s propaganda service. Naturally, given its nature, it was full of ridiculous lies. But how beautiful it was, perhaps the most beautiful magazine ever produced in Indonesia.

  Nothing like this had ever happened under Dutch rule. The odd thing about the magazine was the representation of the Japanese themselves. On one side there were romantic pictures of handsome young Japanese pilots with their airplanes, as well as images of Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms. On the other hand, there were eerie photos of unsmiling Japanese generals, including Tojo, wearing spectacles and funny moustaches, and dressed in ugly floppy hats and baggy army uniforms.

  Nonetheless, the photos were genuinely artistic, reflecting the beauty of Indonesia and Indonesians: lovely photos of children playing, women working in rice-fields, Muslims praying and young Javanese men in thin shorts, practising how to handle the military use of bamboo spears. They reminded me of Japanese prints and made me realize the genuine elements of attraction between Indonesians and Japanese, despite all the everyday cruelties. On their experiences during the Japanese Occupation, people I talked to often told me that Japanese people were better than the Dutch, in that both were arrogant, but the Japanese could also be very polite. This duality clearly puzzled them, but I sensed that they themselves must have felt some affinity to the Japanese, irrespective of the usual assertion that they only endured the Occupation in order to achieve their own future independence. The contents of the magazine, written in both Indonesian and Japanese, were also food for thought: a weird mix of Japanese imperialist cynicism and a sincere Pan-Asian solidarity.

  The most enjoyable part of my fieldwork was doing interviews. In those days Jakarta was still a fairly small ex-colonial capital city, with distinct neighbourhoods, often divided by ethnic wards. There were not that many cars or buses, no flyovers and no tollways. Betjaks – three-wheeled rear-driven pedicabs that carry the passenger in front – were still used by everyone, even people in high positions (at least for short distances), and they were allowed even on the busiest streets. It was not until the early Suharto period that the dreadful Governor of Jakarta, Ali Sadikin, began banning them from more and more streets to make way for officials and the wealthy, car-owning middle-class. I had acquired a little Vespa, and soon got to know almost all parts of the capital. I thought of it as ‘my town’.

  There were very few foreigners around. It was also a pretty ‘democratic’ capital. One of the basic messages of the prewar nationalist movement had been equality among citizens, symbolized by the adoption of a simple lingua franca. Based on Malay and used as a cross-ethnic language of trade, it would become the future national language. The huge advantage of this choice was that the language was both egalitarian by nature and belonged to no single important ethno-linguistic group.

  The egalitarian impulse had been greatly strengthened in the process of the Revolution of 1945–49, which was a social leveller and represented an onslaught on feudal traditions. Bung (brother), a popular term of address during the Revolution, was still widely used as a term of address between men of the same age. There were few rich Indonesians, and those occupying the best houses in the Menteng neighbourhood were high officials who simply took them over when the Dutch were finally expelled in 1957.

  One sign of this egalitarianism could be seen in a street near where I lived; after dark, the sidewalks would suddenly fill with chess players. These people (always male) came from all strata of society. Businessmen played with clerks, high officials played with betjak drivers, and so on. I used to join them quite often, not so much for the chess itself as for the opportunity, while playing, to interview quite informally the people I was ‘challenging’. This egalitarianism disappeared under the Suharto regime, but while it lasted it was for me a revelation.

  My teenage years had largely been spent in the class-ridden, hierarchical society of the United Kingdom. You could immediately tell what class people belonged to simply by listening to their accents. Snobbery was pervasive, and the cultures of the aristocracy, the upper and lower middle classes, and the working class were quite distinct. Ireland was not so bad, but the class structure there was still a powerful influence on culture and everyday life. For this reason, Indonesia was for me a kind of social heaven. Without self-consciousness, I could talk happily with almost anyone – cabinet ministers, bus drivers, military officers, maids, businessmen, waitresses, schoolteachers, transvestite prostitutes, minor gangsters, and politicians. I quickly discovered that the frankest and
most interesting interviewees were ordinary people rather than the gradually emerging elite.

  The country had been under martial law from 1957 till May 1963. There were no elections, and the press was partly censored, yet there were only a handful of political prisoners, and they lived quite comfortably. But the country was very divided, and the atmosphere sometimes tense. At the same time, I could talk to people right across the political spectrum – communists, socialists, nationalists on both left and right, different types of Muslims including some just out of jail for armed rebellion, Chinese, policemen and soldiers, local royalty and elderly bureaucrats. I told them that I was studying the late Japanese period and the early Revolution, which were topics still fresh in the minds of almost everyone.

  I had many strange experiences in the process, none stranger than my interviews with two brothers, the elder of whom was a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo, while the younger was head of Army Intelligence. (It was hard to imagine anything like this in ‘the West’.) Engineer Sakirman, a very short, round little man, had led a popular left-wing armed militia in Central Java during the Revolution. At first he was a little suspicious of me, but as soon as he realized that I was genuinely interested in his political youth, he warmed up and told me a lot. The younger brother, General Parman, looked much like his sibling, but was quite different in outlook. When I went to his house to ask for an appointment, I was astonished to find him in his garage, happily playing with an expensive electric toy train system, as if he were ten years old. He told me he would pick me up that night.

  He arrived in an old Volkswagen with tinted windows and escorted me to what I later realized was an intelligence safe-house in the Tanah Abang neighbourhood. From the outside it looked like a run-down storage building. As soon as we started talking, I realized that he thought I was from the CIA, since he boasted that he had such good spies inside the Communist Party that he learned within hours of the Politburo’s decisions. It took him quite a while to realize that I was just a student, not a spy. But then he talked intelligently about his early military experience in the Heiho, an adjunct of the Japanese Occupation Army, sometimes used for fighting in the Pacific, but more often for manual labour in defence construction. It seemed he quite enjoyed it.

  Later, some of my most instructive interviews were with Indonesian soldiers who had been trained by the Japanese military as either regular troops, guerrillas (in case the Allies arrived) or intelligence operatives. All had great respect for their Japanese trainers, while being thoroughly against the Occupation itself for obvious nationalist reasons. Years later I read a very funny memoir by a general, who claimed that the only thing he disliked about his training was the communal toilet, which was fed by a down-flowing mountain stream. The Japanese insisted on defecating upstream, so that what he called their stinking sosis (sausages) floated past the Indonesians defecating farther down.

  There was only one thing that bothered me from the start: the question of race. I had never thought of myself as ‘white’, but in a society only recently liberated from colonialism, I found myself too often addressed as Tuan (Master), as the Dutch colonialists had insisted on being called, and some people were embarrassingly deferential to an unimportant foreign student simply because of the colour of my skin. Quite soon, this led to my making a small but lasting contribution to the Indonesian language. Looking at my skin, which was not white but pink-grey, I realized that it was close to the skin colour of albino animals (water buffaloes, cows, elephants, and so on), for which Indonesians used the casual term bulai or bulé. So I told my young friends that I and people who looked like me should be called bulé, not putih (white). They loved the idea and passed it around among other students they knew. Gradually it spread to the newspapers and magazines until it became part of everyday Indonesian language.

  I was very amused, more than ten years later, when a ‘white’ colleague from Australia wrote me an innocent letter complaining how racist Indonesians were, and how he hated being called a bulé. So I asked him to take a look at his own skin in the mirror, and see if he really wanted to be called Tuan. I also told him I had invented the new meaning of the term in 1962 or 1963. When he refused to believe me, I said: ‘You are an experienced historian of Indonesia. I bet you $100 that you cannot find bulé, in the sense of “white” people, in any document before 1963.’ He didn’t take the bet.

  Interviewing people outside Jakarta was even more fun. Most of these conversations took place in Java, though I went to Bali several times, and once, for two weeks, to North Sumatra. Travelling outside Java (except to Bali) was then very difficult. Ships were few, and dangerously old and overloaded. There was only one airline, owned by the state, and seats were hard to get since so many were taken by military personnel and busy officials. The regional rebellion that broke out in the spring of 1958 had not been entirely suppressed. In fact, even in Java, the radical Muslim Darul Islam rebellion, already more than ten years old, was still very strong in highland West Java. I was always told how dangerous it was to go to the city of Bandung, especially by night – I would surely be murdered by the DI. In fact, it was not dangerous at all, and I went many times. An unspoken agreement between the DI and the military gave the latter control over the main roads by day, while the DI took over at nightfall.

  Travelling in rural Java required some toughness and ingenuity. There was a great variety of means of transportation beyond the railways: buses, trucks, horse and buggies, ponies, oxcarts and canoes. In the highest elevations, there were only ponies. Raised in horse-mad Ireland, riding was easy for me. But my favourite form of transportation was always the truck. At Cornell, I had become used to hitch-hiking over long distances, to Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Drivers happily gave rides to young people, and hitch-hikers never feared they would be killed by those who picked them up. In Java, in those distant days, hitch-hiking (ngompreng) was commonplace, and I suspect that the truck drivers were amused to see a young bulé sticking out his thumb by the side of the road. If the driver was alone, you could sit next to him for hours and enjoy fantastic conversations about ghosts, bad spirits, football, politics, evil police, girls, shamans, underground lotteries, astrology, and so on. Otherwise, you climbed up into the open space at the back, especially good after sunset when you could stand with the cool wind blowing in your face.

  One night a kind truck driver dropped me and some friends at a point about two miles from the Borobudur, a magnificent Buddhist stupa built in the tenth century AD and regarded as the largest in the world. We walked the rest of the way by the light of the full moon and slept till dawn on the great stupa’s highest terrace, next to the Enlightened Ones. No guards, no hotels, no loud music, no vendors, no tickets. Blissfully serene, like it might have been a thousand years earlier. On another occasion, I and some other student friends were picked up by a truck which appeared to be loaded with foul-smelling manure. The driver brought out some mats so we could sit or sleep without getting filthy. We were stopped many times at checkpoints, but as soon as the police smelled the stink, and saw a young bulé dozing on top of the filth, they let the driver through. Only when we got off at the outskirts of Malang city did the amused driver thank us for our help. Under about a foot of manure, there was a huge stack of illegal raw rubber. Thus I started to learn about smuggling.

  It might be a good idea, at this point, to say something more specific about interviewing in those days. First of all, language. Indonesian was the universal language, used for almost all my interviews. Dutch-educated interviewees would often break into Dutch or use Dutch words to show off their higher status. Sometimes it was tricky to decide whether to pretend not to know any Dutch, or to know more Dutch than I really did. With my many Javanese interviewees, it often helped if I dropped in some Javanese words or expressions. The best way to use these languages was for jokes. Most Indonesians have a strong comic sense, and cross-language jokes always melt any social ice.

  I had expected to find that it w
ould be harder to interview women than men, until I discovered how socially important women were, and why. As in most parts of Southeast Asia, Javanese descent is bilateral, so that the mother’s family is just as important as the father’s, and the mother’s family ‘buys’ the son-in-law, who usually goes to live with his wife’s parents. (Divorce was also very easy.) In some places, children almost always had their own names, sometimes only one, and, except in some aristocratic circles, these names had no connection with those of their parents. Teknonymy was a normal practice, such that if a child was given the name Samin, the parents would be addressed socially not by their own names, but as Father or Mother of Samin. Women usually had their own incomes, and controlled them. Hence women were easy to interview, and were specially good on the subjects of political marriages and family trees.

  In those days there were no laptops or even electric typewriters; tape recorders, though they existed, were deadly for any frankness or social ease. (I never used them.) One therefore had to either memorize all interviews and immediately rush back ‘home’ to type them up on a manual typewriter, or use longhand. My own method of memorization was to think in terms of topics, and perhaps scribble them down unobtrusively during the interview: Dutch habits, good Japanese, money, weapons, radio, corruption, and so on. It was terrific training for the ears and the memory.

  In retrospect, perhaps for me the most important interviews I conducted were two long talks in April 1962 with former Rear Admiral Maeda Tadeshi, in the old-fashioned, mosquito-ridden, colonial-era Hotel des Indes. Before the war he had been stationed in England, so knew some English. He had also learned some Indonesian while stationed in Jakarta during the war. So we talked in a mix of languages. He was almost the first Japanese I had ever spoken to, and I could not have been more lucky. He was impressively dignified (even in only his underwear, because it was the hottest part of the hot season), a real gentleman, modest, frank and charming. (God knows what he thought of the young bulé.) From books on modern Japan I had learned that from the late nineteenth century there had been two different perspectives on the country’s rapid military expansion in Asia. One believed in conquests in order to build an empire as vast those of the Europeans. The other, dubbed Pan-Asianism, believed in Japan’s mission to liberate Asia from the West.