For most scholars, their first experience of doing fieldwork is decisive. One never again has quite the same sense of shock, strangeness and excitement. Later in my career I spent years studying, and living in, Thailand and the Philippines, both of which fascinated me and both of which I loved. But Indonesia was my first love. I can speak and read Thai and Tagalog, but Indonesian is really my second language, and the only one in which I can also write fluently, and with the greatest pleasure. Sometimes, I still dream in it.
I arrived in Jakarta late in December 1961 and stayed till April 1964. When my plane landed, in the dark, the rainy season had begun, and I remember vividly the ride into town with all the taxi’s windows open. The first thing that hit me was the smell – of fresh trees and bushes, urine, incense, smoky oil lamps, garbage and, above all, food in the little stalls that lined most of the main streets.
My senior classmate Dan Lev, before returning to Ithaca, had arranged for me to lodge in the house of the welcoming and kindly widow of a Supreme Court judge. She lived in a large and comfortable house at the end of what was then a ‘high-class’ street named after the national hero Prince Diponegoro. Two of her grown children were still living with her, and her household included a cook, a maid and a young boy gardener and errand-runner.
The story of Prince Diponegoro goes back to the early nineteenth century. When Napoleon incorporated the Netherlands into France, London decided to seize the Dutch East Indies. Stamford Raffles, agent of the East India Company, ruled Java from 1811–16. When the Napoleonic wars finally ended, Britain returned Java at the price of Dutch holdings in the Cape and Ceylon. Ruined financially by the Continental System, the Dutch government was in a weak position to enforce its power in the Indies. Prince Diponegoro of the little Jogjakarta kingdom took advantage of this situation to rebel and raised a large army to fight the Dutch from 1825–30. But when he was defeated and exiled, he wrote that his aim was to ‘conquer Java’, a fact little known by present-day Javanese.
The day after my arrival in Jakarta, the late Ong Hok Ham, well known to all Indonesianists, dropped by to visit. He was then still a student in the University of Indonesia’s history department, but had worked for Skinner as a research assistant. He invited me to hang out with three of his Javanese student friends in a dormitory for boys at the University of Indonesia’s old campus in Rawamangun. Any illusion that I was good in Indonesian disappeared immediately. But since the friends knew little English we did our collective best to understand each other. Ong had explained to them that although I was studying in an American university I was Irish. This helped a lot since they knew that Ireland had had to fight for its independence, while, like most Indonesian nationalists at that time, they regarded Americans with suspicion.
They gave me a delicious, simple dinner, but intentionally did not warn me about tjabe rawit, the tiny green or red peppers that set fire to one’s tongue. They were impressed that I struggled to be brave and not spit the peppers out. Then the torrential rain started again. Ong said it was impossible to get to my lodgings, and there was no telephone handy, so we had better sleep with his friends. They handed me a small towel and a spare sarong, and showed me how to use the Indonesian-style bathroom. I took to the sarong like a duck to water, and in spite of swarms of mosquitoes, I slept like a log.
The next morning I returned ‘home’ and apologized effusively to my landlady for staying out on my second night in Indonesia and not informing her. But she brushed the apologies aside. The monsoon was like that, she said. You could get stuck anywhere, and boys will be boys. This was my first experience of ‘culture shock’. I felt that I had been rude by my European standards, but she did not at all feel the same way. Later I came to realize the huge difference between how unmarried men and women were treated in Indonesian society: the young men were free to do what they wanted, but the young women were watched, guarded and kept at home as much as possible.
The next shock was quite different, and wholly pleasant. Opposite the house there was a triangular, unused open space covered with weeds, grasses and mud. In the afternoons, a gang of little kampong boys, aged between eight and twelve, would gather there to play soccer. They would begin by tossing a coin, and the losing side would solemnly take off their shorts (they wore no underwear). That was how they told one side from another. Of course they had no goalposts. But they brought along four little brothers and sisters, still at the crawling rather than the running stage, and used them carefully as moving goalposts.
This was my introduction to two aspects of the lives of ordinary Indonesian children. The first was easy public nudity for boys until they reached puberty – something unimaginable in Ireland or the US. The second was the intimacy between siblings. From a very early age Indonesian children have to help the younger ones, and to respect and obey their elder brothers and sisters. My landlady explained the custom by saying: if you are older you have to give in to the young ones, give them what they want, love them and protect them; if you are younger you have to do what your older sisters or brothers tell you. This seemed contradictory, but it really worked. While in Indonesia I rarely saw the children in a family fighting with each other, exactly the opposite of my own experience. Rory and I fought constantly – to our mother’s annoyance – till we went off to Eton.
A third shock was my first contact with madness. I was walking past a crowded market one day when I noticed a strange figure surrounded by a swarm of giggling and screaming little boys. It was a completely naked young woman, unwashed, with very long tangled hair reaching to her behind. Mostly, the market people paid her no attention, or, if in a good mood, gave her little gifts of food. When I asked a vendor who the woman was, she said, ‘Poor thing! Some man broke her heart and she went mad. Her parents try to clothe her, but she always tears off any clothing.’ Later, I would come across mad men, also naked and dirty, and people would say the same kind of thing. I began to reflect that maybe these poor creatures, who did no one any harm, were better off than mad people in Europe and America, who, in those days, were shut away for years in isolated asylums. Here they could go where they pleased, and society casually fed them.
My immediate difficulty was language. I quickly learned that the kind of formal Indonesian I had studied at Cornell was textbook stuff that people only used in formal situations. My new friends laughed at the way I tried to talk, and children didn’t understand a word I said. After about three months, I was really depressed, feeling that I was making no progress at all. Later I realized that it was like learning to ride a bicycle: when you start you fall off all the time, but then suddenly, one magic day, you get the feel of it, and even start cycling without using your hands. Suddenly, in the fourth month, I found I could speak fluently without any hesitation. I was so happy I could have cried. I could now conduct interviews in the language. I do not blush easily, but when an old lady I was interviewing said to me, ‘I see that you know how to use padahal [close to ‘even though’] perfectly, so you are thinking in Indonesian’, I went red in the face with pleasure. But the difficulties did not stop there.
Like many educated members of her generation, my landlady spoke to her children and her friends in Dutch. She also used it when she did not want me to understand what she was saying, just like my parents speaking in French when they did not want us to know what they were talking about. At Cornell, Dutch was not then regularly taught. So I taught myself the language, not to speak it, but to read and understand. It was not too hard, since I knew some German, which is like a more difficult version of Dutch. But I did it in a way that I repeated many years later when I decided to learn Spanish. I took a large, difficult and fascinating book, and stumbled through it line by line, almost word for word, with a big dictionary at my side.
The book I chose, and which influenced me more deeply than any other book about Indonesia, was Theodoor Pigeaud’s encyclopaedic Javaanse Volksvertoningen, or ‘Javanese Popular Performances’, published in the 1930s. Pigeaud was not a nice man; jealous of the prestige of Stutterheim, Claire Holt’s brilliant lover, he had tried to have her expelled from the colony on the grounds of ‘immoral behaviour’. But he was a great scholar. The book’s title did not do it justice, since its author included a huge amount of comparative material on the Javanese people’s closest neighbours, the Sundanese, Madurese and Balinese. It included an astonishing compilation of information on folktales, legends, masks and mask-dances, spirit possession, the puppet-theatre, and travelling troupes of actors and clowns. It was a revelation to me of the depth and complexity of traditional Javanese culture outside the royal courts. Even better, Pigeaud mapped all the local variations, peculiarities and specializations, district after district. Nothing I had learned at Cornell prepared me for this.
Through the book I fell in love a second time, this time with ‘Java’ rather than Indonesia. I have put the word in quotation marks, because ‘my’ Java was not even the whole thing. Officially, 90 per cent of Javanese were Muslims, meaning that they were circumcised (if boys), married and buried according to Muslim rites. But especially in the interior and the south of the island, the residues of a grand Hindu-Buddhist past, as well as enduring shamanism, animism and mysticism, were very strong. People would talk to me about ‘white’ (devout Muslims) and ‘red’ (nominally Muslim, but basically traditional) Javanese who were often very hostile to each other. Although I got to know a lot of serious Muslims, and loved going to traditional mosques, ‘my’ Java was definitely ‘red’. Later on, many scholars would rightly criticize me for this bias.
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 would 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.
In 1935 Britain had decided to separate Burma from the Raj, and enacted a special constitution. Dr Ba Maw, a skilled politician, became the country’s first (native) prime minister under the British Governor. After falling from power in 1939, thanks to a British-rigged election, he made contact with some Pan-Asianist military lobbyists. In January 1941, Japan’s Prime Minister Tojo announced in the Diet that ‘if the Burmese offer to co-operate with Japan in establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan would gladly grant independence to the Burmese’. The British were driven out of Burma a year later by the Japanese Army, accompanied by a Burma Independence Army mainly recruited from Burmans living in Siam. In July 1943, a treaty of alliance between Japan and Burma was signed in the emperor’s palace, and Dr Ba Maw became the head of state.
Something not too different happened in the Philippines at the same time. The US allowed Manuel Quezon to become the first elected president in 1935, and promised independence in 1946. But when the Japanese Occupation took place and Quezon fled to the US, along with most Americans, Senator José Laurel became president, with the same kind of status as Dr Ba Maw in Burma, and the promise of a speedy independence. Nothing like this happened in Indonesia. In late 1943 Prime Minister Koiso promised independence only ‘some time’, and there was never an Indonesian head of state. With the downfall of Hitler in April 1945, Tokyo realized that Japan was facing total defeat, and officers in Indonesia assumed that they should fight to the death for the sake of the emperor. But there were others, including Maeda Tadeshi, who believed they should fulfil the promise of independence as fast as they could, whatever the cost.
The end came when American atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki three days later. On August 15 the emperor announced on the radio his immediate surrender. On September 2, he ordered all armed personnel to lay down their weapons.
Maeda was among those who argued successfully that most of the Japanese armaments should be quietly passed to the Indonesian leaders of the PETA, trained from 1943 to fight with the Japanese if and when the Allies attacked (which did not happen). Without an army, the country would relapse into a Dutch colony. He also believed that the country had to have an effective head of state, in the person of Soekarno. But on August 16, a small group of young radicals kidnapped Soekarno and Mohammad Hatta, his respected no. 2. The youngsters believed that the pair had no courage, and would not announce a Republic of Indonesia. It was Maeda who connected with the radicals and persuaded them to release the victims, and further managed to arrange a compromise meeting between all parties in his house. But he retired to bed without interfering. Late on the morning of August 17, Soekarno and Hatta announced the birth of a free Indonesia. Maeda made sure that the army would not make any trouble.
Maeda was quite frank that the war had been a stupid disaster (this was in line with the Japanese Navy view of the folly of the Japanese Army), and that he had seen his role as head of the Kaigun Bukanfu (naval liaison office) in Jakarta as helping Indonesia to become independent, in line with the early idea that Japan should promote the liberation of Asia, not its conquest and insertion into the Japanese Empire.
The best thing about the interviews Maeda gave me was that he spoke in detail about what he had tried to do, failed to do and managed to do, under very difficult circumstances. He was modest about his role in the complicated process whereby Indonesia was able to declare its independence on 17 August 1945. What he did feel proud of was simply that he had intervened to convince the army leaders to let the Indonesians make their own decisions. He had deliberately absented himself from the final discussions about the independence declaration among the Indonesians. Later, when I interviewed Indonesians who had worked with Maeda and the Kaigun Bukanfu, including the soft-hearted communist and independence leader Wikana, I learned that they had great respect for him, even if they hated the Occupation regime.
My talks with Maeda were pivotal for three different reasons. In the first place, he made me start to think about Japan in a more complicated way than before. Kahin had done his best to help the unfortunate Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, but he had been trained to fight against Japan, while I was still a child during the Second World War. This generational and cultural difference showed up in my first academic essay, ‘Japan, the Light of Asia’, which described the cruelty and exploitation of the Occupation regime, but also showed why the Indonesian Revolution was incomprehensible without acknowledgement of the Japanese contribution. In the second place, Maeda made me think, for the first time, about the roles of individuals. Third, and most important of all, he made me gradually change my thesis topic.
Originally I had planned to treat the Japanese Occupation simply as a short self-standing epoch in the series of Late Dutch Colonialism, Japanese Occupation, Revolution, Constitutional Democracy, Guided Democracy. But the more I looked at the evidence, the more I started to rebel against the neat sequences of events, and eventually resolved to break the mould. I had to think about the connections between the Japanese Occupation and the Revolution. This was why my dissertation deliberately bridged the two, looking closely at 1944–46. In those days, when scholarly attention was focused on high-level elites, it was understandable why the Revolution and the Occupation were seen as opposites. But below the elites? It was out of this puzzle that my thesis of the ‘Pemuda Revolution’ (Revolution of the Youth) emerged, which argued, rightly or wrongly, that the tidal force behind the Revolution was neither the nationalist political elite nor a social class, but a generation, formed by its complex experiences under Japanese imperialist rule.
It is a great tribute to Kahin’s affection for his students, his modesty and his intellectual broadmindedness, that he not only strongly supported a student whose dissertation argued against some of his own theses in Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, but also helped to ensure its speedy publication. In fact, both of us were partly wrong because we did not understand Japanese, and had no access to many Japanese documents. Almost half a century later, David Jenkins, a great friend of mine and the leading historian of the Indonesian military, has shown, using countless documents and personal interviews in Japan, that it was high-ranking Japanese officers in Java who made the Revolution actual.
In the course of the Potsdam Conference between July 17 and early August 1945, the zone of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command was abruptly turned over to Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command (including Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and Indochina). Mountbatten, however, did not have the soldiers, transportation, weaponry or effective knowledge of local political movements necessary to exercise control over the region. Thus it was not until September 15 that some of his officers arrived in Java. In the month between the Indonesian Declaration of Independence and this landfall, the top Japanese commanders had the time to provide secretly to the Indonesian revolutionaries 72,000 light arms, more than a million rounds of ammunition, many mortars and field artillery. Jenkins rightly observes that, without this help, the Revolution would not have been possible, and Mountbatten would not have given up on the idea of occupying all Java and returning the island to the Dutch.
My fieldwork came to an end in April 1964, and I spent the summer in Holland studying the Dutch documents on the Japanese Occupation and the Revolution that finished off colonialism in Indonesia. It happened that just that summer the leftist Provo Movement broke out in Amsterdam. It was the precursor of the militant 1960s movements in Germany, France, America, Japan, the UK and many other countries. The Provos included left intellectuals, students, bohemians, anarchists, the homeless and a few bombers, and they were famous for mocking the government, the monarchy, the police and the big capitalists. For example, they sent a big helium balloon, marked with insults to the powerful, to the top of the vast central railway station. The police had only two options: either climb awkwardly up high firemen’s ladders or shoot the balloon. Either way the crowds coming to work would laugh their heads off. When not doing research, I followed the activities and manifestos of the Provos with interest.
I returned to Cornell in August, just as President Johnson was exploiting the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse for a massive assault on Vietnam in February 1965. From then on, the anti-war movement spread throughout the universities. At Cornell, Kahin himself was a powerful critic of Johnson’s foreign policy, and most of his graduate students followed his path.
Meantime the political and economic situation in Indonesia was rapidly degenerating. The generals controlled the big companies and plantations, and were organizing all the anti-communist groups. The Communist Party was strong, but since 1950 it had been committed to electoral politics and had no armed capacity. Soekarno continued to protect the party, but he was getting weaker. In the early hours of October 1, believing that a coup d’état against Soekarno was near, soldiers led by angry officers killed five top generals, denouncing the top brass as corrupt, sexually immoral and ignorant of the life of ordinary soldiers.
General Suharto took charge of the army and crushed the rebels late the same day. The next day all newspapers and television channels were shut down except those controlled by the military. On October 3, Suharto announced that the killings were the work of the communists. There followed massacres of anyone who was a party member or a suspected sympathizer. The killings went on for three months, carried out by the military but also by thousands of armed Muslims. At least 500,000 leftists died, and many others were tortured and sent to Suharto’s gulags, which covered the whole country.
Three of us Cornellians decided to work together to analyze what had happened. Ruth McVey had been an expert on the Soviet Union before turning to study the history of the Indonesian Communist Party, the oldest in Asia. She had known many communists while doing field-work in Indonesia. Fred Bunnell and I were still graduate students. We were lucky in that Cornell’s library had a mass of Indonesian newspapers and magazines published right up to September 30. We dropped everything else for three months to work on a confidential ‘Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia’, and completed it in the first week of 1966.
Since our analysis provisionally argued that the cause of the ‘attempted coup’ could be traced to internal conflicts in the Indonesian military – and not, as Suharto and his cohorts insisted, the Communist Party – we tried to keep the document secret, except for a few scholars whom we trusted, for fear that Indonesian Cornell graduates or known Indonesian friends of ours would be arrested, tortured, even killed – despite the fact that none of these people knew what we were doing. But the ‘Preliminary Analysis’ leaked out after two months, and both Suharto’s men and the US State Department (who were actively supporting Suharto and delighted by the destruction of the communists) were furious.
It so happened that in the summer of 1965, Ruth, Fred and I had had the idea of creating of a biannual journal about Indonesia. Kahin was very supportive of the project. We used the first issue (April 1966) to publish a long series of documents from all kinds of groups. We did not expect a long life for the journal, but it has lasted for fifty years.
In 1972 I knew the Indonesian Embassy in Washington would never give me a visa, so while on a visit to London I asked for an interview with the ambassador there, General Adjie. After a nice chat about his role in the Revolution, he politely offered to help. When I mentioned the visa he immediately arranged it. Thus I was able to return to Indonesia, although, as it turned out, only very briefly. While there I came across a copy of the Intelligence Agency’s newspaper which denounced four enemies of the country. To my amazement and laughter, they were identified as the Wall Street Journal (which had exposed massive military corruption), Moscow’s TASS, Peking’s Renmin Ribao and Cornell. It took the authorities more than two weeks to find out that I had arrived in Jakarta. When they finally did, I was kicked out, and remained banned from the country for the next twenty-seven years, until the fall of the Suharto dictatorship.
Once expelled, I knew it would be a very long time before I would be let back in the country, so I had to think about what to do next. I seriously considered moving to Sri Lanka, which had caught my imagination from childhood. But then, in 1973, came news from Siam of the fall of the Sarit-Thanom-Praphat military dictatorship, which had lasted since 1958. A civilian government headed by the former rector of Thammasat University, Professor Sanya Thammasak, was installed, which ended censorship, granted trade unions, peasant unions and student associations the right to organise, and set about creating a democratic constitution.
It was a very exciting time, not only for Thais, but for someone who had just been punished by the Indonesian military dictatorship. I had many Thai friends who had studied at or near Cornell, especially Charnvit Kasetsiri, who eventually became, for a short time, the rector of Thammasat. A year’s leave was coming up (the 1974–75 academic year), so I decided to go to Siam to learn the language and start some research.
It was an utterly different experience from being in Indonesia in 1962–64. I was now almost forty years old, and a very busy professor rather than a carefree student. I knew not a word of Thai, and my acquaintance with the history and culture of Siam was quite thin. But it was good to be back learning, not teaching. Every morning I would motorcycle to the American University Alumni (AUA) in downtown Bangkok to take my language lessons with a small group of other foreigners, Japanese, Americans, English and so on. As always, the women learned much faster than the men, because they were said to be much less embarrassed by making mistakes.
In the process, I became very conscious of something that I had barely noticed before: how Americans organized the teaching of Southeast Asian languages. The lessons were entirely focused on useful everyday speech. ‘Where is the post office?’ ‘How much is a haircut?’ ‘Your little son is very cute.’ Learning to read Thai was for later, and optional. You could soon see why. With the exception of a middle-aged Japanese businessman, none of my classmates had ever learned to use a non-Roman writing system, and so Thai orthography seemed exceptionally hard.
The school had no interest whatever in Thai literature, or indeed anything ‘beautiful’ about the Thai language. The contrast with European language-teaching could not have been greater. Classical Latin and Greek were ‘dead’ languages, no longer spoken, so we youngsters at Eton were focused entirely on reading works of very high literary quality. French, German and Russian were taught in the same spirit. I could read and write French very well, but could speak it only in the most primitive way.
I learned a lot at the AUA but always felt deprived. In the end I had to teach myself to read, with the help of friends. I was lucky to be able to stay with (now Professor) Charnvit, his sister, his brother-in-law and his nieces, and they usually tried to help me practise. I think their influence is one reason why, when I came to write In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (1985), my first book on Thailand, it was mainly about contemporary Thai fiction and how it was changing in response to deep social and economic changes, current political conflicts, and the influence of the United States.
I cannot say that in that first year in Siam I did any serious or focused research. My Thai was still too primitive, and the language lessons took up most of my days and energies. What I did manage to do was to read thoroughly almost all the English-language scholarship on Siam (in those days there was still not very much), and to follow and clip the newspapers for the future writing of political science articles.
As mentioned earlier, the country’s politics from late 1973 to early 1975 were exhilarating. The repression imposed by almost continuous right-wing military regimes since 1947 was gone for the time being. Many important left-wing books banned by the dictators were now republished and widely greeted. Political parties mushroomed, and two or three of them were, to varying degrees, left of centre. When the first free elections in almost three decades were held, it was still possible for a very young and poor teacher, who campaigned on his bicycle, to get elected. This never happened again. Some of my former Cornell classmates had begun to come to prominence as politicians and, I am glad to say, joined one or other of the progressive parties, including the sociologist Dr Boonsanong Punyodyana. Students were extremely active politically, again in a leftward direction. These were the years when a new kind of popular music was created, the Songs for Life, which we quickly learned to sing.
But there were two dark clouds in the otherwise bright political sky. Far the darkest was the impending American defeat in the Vietnam War. In Bangkok, the CIA station chief was spreading the word that if the Indochina states fell to communism, the next ‘domino’ would be Thailand, where a local communist guerrilla force had been gaining strength from the end of the 1960s. All this created a growing panic among right-wing groups, including the royals, who by the middle of 1975 started to go on the offensive with increasingly violent means.
The second cloud was the huge American presence in the country: almost 50,000 military personnel, stationed at dozens of military bases, set up mainly for the purpose of bombing communist-controlled areas in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and supporting the right-wing groups in those countries. The social consequences of this presence quickly became very obvious: the novel spread of heroin addiction, unwanted mixed-race children, organized prostitution on an unprecedented scale, the Americanization of popular culture, and so on. Japan’s close (if competitive) association with the US also led to boycott campaigns against Japanese businesses, and against Japanese investment in what was becoming known as ‘sex tourism’, with its ‘industrial-scale’ massage parlours.
Out of this came a new kind of anxious nationalism which was confined neither to the left nor the right. The pressure was so great that Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj, a moderate conservative, arranged for the withdrawal of all American troops and opened diplomatic relations with ‘Red’ China.
After I had left for home, assassinations of leaders of progressive worker and peasant organizations, leftist students and even mildly left politicians became increasingly frequent. Cornell’s Dr Boonsanong, secretary-general of the moderate Socialist Party of Thailand, was gunned down outside his suburban home in the spring of 1976. The denouement came on October 6 the same year, when plain-clothed border police under royal patronage, together with a mob of right-wing thugs, attacked Thammasat University and murdered, in broad daylight, dozens of youngsters. The military toppled the existing moderate civilian government, and an extremist regime, led by a senior judge very close to the royal family, took over. Hundreds of people were arrested and thousands fled to the countryside, where they found shelter with the communist guerrillas.
When I tried to get American Thai specialists to join me in signing a strong letter of protest to be sent to the New York Times, not a single one consented. Aside from myself, the only co-signers were my revered teacher Kahin, Dan Lev, my fellow Indonesianist, Jim Scott of Yale, starting his magnificent series of comparative studies of peasant resistance in Southeast Asia, and the China specialist Jerome A. Cohen. I am sure most of the specialists were horrified by the murders, but they lived in fear of not being allowed back into their beloved Siam if they opened their mouths. I learned the same lesson only a few years later, after Suharto’s bloody attempt to annex the ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor. The number of Indonesianists in America who published anything critical could be found on one hand – and for the same reason. I was ‘lucky’ enough to be banned from Indonesia, so it was not hard for me to write and lobby for the East Timorese.
But history always has its surprises. I had fully expected to be banned from Siam, especially after I published a long and bitter analysis of what had happened, entitled ‘Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6, 1976 Coup’.* Yet this did not happen.
In 1977, the extremist government of Judge Thanin Kraivixian was overthrown by a moderate group of generals led by Kriangsak Chomanan, who quickly opened diplomatic relations with victorious Hanoi, invited Deng Xiaoping to visit Bangkok, released political prisoners, and offered complete amnesty to all guerrillas who agreed to lay down their arms. Bangkok, and surely the Palace, was stunned when the newspapers printed a photograph of Kriangsak personally cooking a good home lunch for the ‘Bangkok 18’, a group of young political prisoners arrested after the Thammasat massacre. They had organized a play about two workers hanged by right-wing thugs, who claimed that the workers’ faces had been made to resemble that of the Crown Prince.
Meantime the solidarity and confidence of the guerrillas were severely damaged by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the destruction of the Pol Pot regime, and Peking’s futile and conscienceless attempted invasion of northern Vietnam. Most of the former students who had taken refuge with the guerrillas accepted Kriangsak’s offer of amnesty. Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program benefited from this, since several of the most intellectually outstanding of these ‘returnees’ came to study there in the early 1980s. About that time, the Thai Communist Party collapsed, leaving the country in moderate conservative hands. Since then there has not been a single leftist party in Siam.
Having been ‘forced’ to go to Siam, I was also ‘forced’ to start thinking comparatively. Everything I noticed in Siam led me to ask new questions about Indonesia. Siam had never been legally colonized, and its political culture was Buddhist, monarchical, and, for the most part, politically conservative; Indonesia was an Old Colony, mainly Muslim, republican, and, until 1965, generally to the left of centre. It had a proud popular nationalist tradition that was almost completely absent in Siam. How to compare them, and within what framework? It was out of these two ‘field-work’ experiences that in 1983, at the age of forty-seven, I came to publish the first edition of Imagined Communities.
I had not been much interested in the Philippines until after my return to Cornell from Indonesia in 1964. About the time I became a professor (in 1967), Joel Rocamora arrived at Cornell with a very unusual project in mind. In those days it was virtually unheard of for any Southeast Asian student to study any country other than his own. But Joel was a young Filipino nationalist who had not only been impressed by Soekarno and the long Indonesian nationalist movement, but had even visited the country before his hero fell. As Kahin already had far too many advisees, he asked me to be Rocamora’s chief mentor. We were close to the same age, so we soon became very good friends, often speaking in Indonesian to each other. In the ‘wild’ late 1960s, we also went to many parties together, and Joel introduced me to marijuana, which, unfortunately, had no effect upon me. The parties did however convince me that I could dance – a major cultural breakthrough. Thanks to him, I began to get to know the other Filipino students and to engage with Philippine history and politics. I was very proud to supervise his brilliant study of the Indonesian Nationalist Party.
Looking back, I think the beginning of my fieldwork on the Philippines began during the two weeks I spent there in the spring of 1972, on my way to Indonesia. The atmosphere was quite tense, as Ferdinand Marcos was nearing the end of his last constitutional term as president and most people were sure that he would soon install himself indefinitely as dictator (which indeed happened the following September). Rocamora took me to meet his cousin Francisco Nemenzo (who had met my brother, Rory, while studying in England). Nemenzo was then head of the youth arm of the still legal Old Communist Party (from which José Maria Sison, a professor at the University of the Philippines, had broken away to form a Maoist underground party and a significant guerrilla force). Nemenzo suggested that I spend two nights in Cabiao, Pampanga, where the Old Party was still strong, and which during the Japanese Occupation and after had been an important base for the anti-Japanese, left-wing Hukbalahap guerrillas. ‘You will have the chance to meet some terrific revolutionary veterans there, and they will expect you to make a speech to the cadres’, he said, as he assigned two sweet teenage boys to take me there. For ‘security’, we travelled north by night.
My first night in a Filipino village was a memorable one. The veterans were very welcoming, liquor was passed around, and we chatted till after midnight. They spoke some English, and the two boys, well educated, did a lot of translation. It was mostly a matter of reminiscences, but I noticed a lot of words that sounded like Indonesian or Javanese. When I asked what these words meant, they almost always turned out to have the same sense as their ‘Indonesian’ counterparts. This astonished us all and made us even more cheerful. The next day I had to give my speech, and I was a bundle of nerves. I spoke about Suharto’s massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party, and had the diplomatic sense to say that Marcos seemed to be heading in the same direction. Filipinos on the left should be prepared! It seemed to go down well, and in the evening there was more jollity, until the boys and I quietly slipped back to Manila. Some years later, I discovered to my horror that when Nemenzo broke with the Old Party, those same two sweet boys were murdered by the veterans on party orders.
So long as Marcos was in power, I had no intention of returning to the Philippines. Rocamora, however, was arrested there in September 1972. After spending some time in prison he was grudgingly released thanks to the lobbying of his rich American-Jewish father-in-law, a personal friend of the chairman of the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He went back to America and spent many years there organizing on behalf of Sison’s Maoist New Communist Party, of which he eventually became, for a while, a senior member. We were thus able to stay in touch, and he kept me well-informed about what was going on.
By the mid-1980s, many of my best new students, expecting the fall of Marcos, were studying the Philippines. When he fell in February 1986, they hurried to Manila. By that time, Siam had become very quiet politically, and I did not, for the time being, feel like writing about the country. So I stopped off for a short second visit to the Philippines, mainly to see old friends and keep an eye on the students starting out on their fieldwork. But I became sufficiently excited to start thinking about doing some serious research on the country.
There was, however, also a theoretical motivation on my part. Though the country had strong linguistic affinities with Indonesia, was republican, and had a long nationalist and revolutionary tradition, it was strikingly different in two central respects. The first of these was religion. The Roman Catholic sect of Christianity had, over four centuries, established deep roots in most parts of the country. Here there was a certain attraction and repulsion, since I had grown up in Roman Catholic Ireland. Neither of my parents was Catholic, but a very conservative form of Catholicism completely dominated the country. If it was familiar to me for this reason, I did not find it in the least attractive, despite the snuff box from Pope Pius IX in our house. My Irish (mostly literary) heroes were either Protestants or atheists. But how interesting it would be to see what a Southeast Asian ‘cousin’ of Ireland was like!
The second difference was that the Philippines had been colonized twice, and by two completely different empires: one Catholic and Spanish, which was the only European empire to collapse in the nineteenth century; the other a Protestant and American world-hegemon. Since I lived in the US, should I not try to study the American form of imperialism and its consequences?
In 1987, aged fifty-one, I started learning the difficult Tagalog language under the excellent teachers at Cornell. Learning a new language in one’s fifties is hard, and I have to say that, even today, I do not read Tagalog easily, and my spoken language is pretty basic. But it was fun. The following year, after five years without a break as director of Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, I got permission to take eighteen months off to do my first real research on the Philippines. By that time, however, I realized that I could not bear to write about American colonialism and imperialism. Almost all the ‘American-language’ scholarship focused on the American period and its aftermath. US scholars preferred to do this for linguistic reasons, as well as, perhaps with mixed feelings, nationalist ones – on the premise that, although the US colonized the Philippines, its colonialism was more benevolent than that of other colonizing powers. Filipino scholars focused on the period for some of the same reasons, but in their case in response to a growing anti-American nationalist sentiment. Otherwise there were only a few Japanese scholars, mostly writing in a language I could not read. And there were practically no Spanish scholars interested at all.
Ever since my 1957 arrest by Franco’s Guardia Civil locals for indecent behaviour on Spain’s north coast, I had always enjoyed reading about Spain, and wished I knew the language. From my earliest days teaching on Southeast Asia, I had always got my students to read English translations of José Rizal’s brilliant, late-nineteenth-century Spanish-language novels. Now appeared an opportunity to make up for lost time. I would teach myself to read (if not speak) Spanish by arming myself with dictionaries and reading, line by line, Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, in the way I had used Javaanse Volksvertoningen two decades earlier to learn Dutch. The task turned out to be fairly easy thanks to my knowledge of Latin and French.
My Filipino fieldwork was basically historical, and I spent a lot of time in Manila’s libraries. I wanted above all to get into the minds and hearts of the great generation of Spanish-speaking intellectuals and activists who were behind Asia’s first militant nationalist movement. But despite this historical focus I had not lost my passion for exploration and adventure. I was very lucky to find a superb mentor in Ambeth Ocampo, who for me was a living encyclopaedia on the nineteenth-century Philippines. We made countless trips together to well-known and, better still, little-known historical sites in Luzon, putting landscape back into history. Ocampo was, and still is, catholic in his interests: architecture, painting, poetry, folk culture, food, old customs, forgeries, religion, murders, as well as politics. He was (and is) also completely fluent in Spanish. Later on I travelled all over the country with my great friend Henry Navoa, a very bright man with little formal education who trained me in understanding everyday life among ordinary people.
I began to realize something fundamental about field-work: that it is useless to concentrate exclusively on one’s ‘research project’. One has to be endlessly curious about everything, sharpen one’s eyes and ears, and take notes about anything. This is the great blessing of this kind of work. The experience of strangeness makes all your senses much more sensitive than normal, and your attachment to comparison grows deeper. This is why fieldwork is also so useful when you return home. You will have developed habits of observation and comparison that encourage or force you to start noticing that your own culture is just as strange – provided you look carefully, ceaselessly compare, and keep your anthropological distance. In my case, I began to get interested in America, everyday America, for the first time.
Most scholars, myself included, manage to go back, regularly or irregularly, to the country, if not the region, city or village, where they did their original fieldwork. This revisiting encourages a widening and deepening of their knowledge and the opening up of new perspectives. When people ask me what happens if one cannot follow up on youthful fieldwork, I reply that one can always turn to the study of nearby countries, in my case Siam and the Philippines. When I am asked how I maintained my ties with Indonesia, I like to say it was possible only because of the help of five people.
The first of them is Ben Abel, a Ngadju Dayak from Central Kalimantan (Borneo), who is still to this day my dearest friend. Ben came to Cornell under unusual and unhappy circumstances. He had been a student at the department of economics in his local university, and at the same time served as an assistant to its rector because he was good at speech writing. He was then assigned (more or less) by the rector to help, as translator and research assistant, one of our anthropology students who wanted to do her dissertation on the Ngadju. In due course, she married him and brought him back to the US. He worked for a while as a gas station attendant, but unfortunately the marriage broke down, leaving Ben in a deep depression. In an effort to help, I managed to get him a job in the grand Echols Collection on Southeast Asia in the Cornell graduate library. He took to the work like a duck to water, but also used it as an opportunity to read a great deal of the Indonesian materials that poured in. Because he is interested in almost every aspect of his country, he has developed a vast network of personal contacts and sources, both inside and outside Indonesia. Today, I am sure he is the best-known Southeast Asian librarian in the world.
Ben got married again, this time very happily. He and his wife, Eveline Ferretti, an ecologist with Indonesian ties, moved into the house next to mine, where they raised two lovably naughty German-Indonesian-American boys. He has constantly kept me abreast of developments in Indonesia, put Kalimantan on my radar, and given me countless ideas and leads. Thanks to the generosity and broadmindedness of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, he was able to spend six months in Japan, continuing his own research and getting to know many interested Japanese scholars and students.
Second and third were two young brothers, Benny and Yudi, whom I brought to America as adopted sons and put through late high-school and college education. They are sons of an old friend from my student days. For a long time, before their English was fluent, we always spoke in Indonesian at home, so that my command of bahasa Indonesia did not deteriorate. They gave me many glimpses of the experiences and thinking of youngsters from small towns who grew up under the Suharto regime, to which I would never otherwise have had access. We had many years of happiness together, and through them my old affection for Indonesia remained strong.
Fourth and fifth were Pipit Rochijat Kartawidjaja and I Gusti Njoman Aryana (aka ‘Komang’), two ‘eternal students’ in Berlin. I first met them in the mid-1980s in Amsterdam, when, after a long journey by car, they arrived to join the audience for a talk I was giving on the fatal ‘coup’ of October 1965 and its consequences. Their appearance immediately caught my eye. Pipit was dressed entirely in black and had the wicked smile of an experienced troublemaker. The Balinese-handsome ‘Komang’ (which means ‘third child’ in Balinese), with his long bushy black hair, beard and moustache, looked like a late-nineteenth-century anarchist or an early-twentieth-century Bolshevik (later we took to calling him ‘Aryanovich’). They asked me to come to Berlin to give a similar talk, and it was there that I got to know them well.
In those days, before the fall of Soviet and East European communism and the reunification of Germany, Berlin was an odd place, still divided by the Wall, and an island of fun surrounded by a decaying East Germany. Because it was so far from West Germany, and its future uncertain, the West German political and business elite shunned it, and it became largely a student half-city. Whole floors of prewar mansions could be rented cheaply, and Komang in particular had a gorgeous multi-room apartment, shared with his German wife, which became a meeting place for disaffected Indonesian students. The Suharto dictatorship was represented only by a small, corrupt consulate, effectively headed by an agent of Bakin, the state intelligence apparatus.
Supported by Komang, Pipit created and led the only aggressively successful defiance of the Suharto regime anywhere. When the consulate tried to put pressure on recalcitrant students by endlessly delaying the renewal of their passports, Pipit borrowed a small baby from one of his married friends, made sure it was not fed, and took it to the consulate. A gentle pinch of the infant’s behind produced screams of hunger and rage which so alarmed the bureaucrats that they hurriedly renewed the passports simply to get some peace and quiet. When Pipit became the target of menacing anonymous midnight telephone calls, he hit back by phoning, separately, the Bakin agent and his wife in the small hours to inform each of them of the adulteries their spouses were committing. The anonymous calls then stopped.
The two youngsters and their friends also produced a torrent of scabrous mimeographed bulletins, full of scandalous news and sarcastic articles about the Suharto clique. These they first sent to the lower consulate staff (who enjoyed them very much), and only later to the Consul himself. Pipit was and is an amazingly gifted and fearless satirical writer. He believes that ‘everything can be said’ and is brave enough to carry it out. His articles, written in a mixture of formal Indonesian, Jakarta slang and Low Javanese, exploited Javanese wayang-lore, Sino-Indonesian kung-fu comic books, scatology and brazenly sexual jokes to make his friends laugh their heads off and his consular enemies shake with impotent rage.
The most important of his articles was one I later translated as ‘Am I PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] or non-PKI?’ In this searing personal text, Pipit described, with plenty of black humour, his brush with the massacres of the left in 1965. His kindly Muslim father had been the manager of a large state-owned sugar estate in East Java and was harassed by the local communist-controlled sugar workers’ union. As a teenager very loyal to his father, Pipit was furious with the PKI and also with some of his high school friends who ended up as executioners in the autumn of 1965.
But the horror haunted him. In his article he described how regular customers at the local brothel stopped going there when they saw the genitals of communists nailed to the door, and he recalled rafts piled high with mutilated corpses which floated down the Brantas river through the town of Kediri, where he lived. He had come to Germany to study electrical engineering, but influenced by radical German students he soon abandoned his studies for a career as a vocal enemy of the Suharto tyranny. Later he was able to use his friendships with people in the Socialist Party to help block moves by the consulate to punish Indonesian students who stepped out of line.
Meeting Pipit, Komang and their friends was for me very exhilarating. We became very close and have remained so till today. I learned a lot from them both about how to write engagingly in Indonesian, and began to write in the same sardonic mixed-language style they used. We agreed that, under the political circumstances, we would write about everything political in sexual terms, and everything sexual in political language. For example, General Benny Moerdani, commander-in-chief of the Indonesian National Army in the mid-1980s, ‘got erections’ from imagining he might be made vice president of Indonesia. One result was that I worked briefly as a satirical columnist for an Indonesian weekly before military intelligence clamped down on the publication.
In 1967 Sudisman, the last secretary-general of the PKI, was finally arrested and sentenced to execution by a high military court. I attended the trial every day, and was very impressed by Sudisman’s courage and dignity, and by his last defence speech. I got a copy of the speech, translated it into English, and had it published quickly in Australia. In one acid passage the secretary-general spoke of the many colonels who never became generals, whom he nicknamed ‘Moss Colonels’.
These five men and boys gave me friendship, ‘fathership’ and political solidarity, as well as teaching me a great deal. Thanks to them, I was able to continue some kind of useful Indonesian fieldwork over the twenty-seven years of my banishment. In the process, I came to realize that nothing is better for a scholar than being blessed with such deep and enduring attachments, which are often so much more valuable than lonely library research.
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* Published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 9:3 (July–September 1977), pp. 13–30. A belated follow-up was my only book on Siam, In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (Bangkok: Duang Kamon, 1985).