the analysis of such mechanisms on the Modjokuto scene, aside from those already suggested, would take us too far afield into an analysis of the political system, the proliferating system of private associations, clubs, unions, parties and the like, and, in general, into the hundreds of specific social behaviors by means of which the Modjokuto people actually get things done. But symbolic of both the strains towards integration and the sharpened conflicts of the emerging society are the ceremonies, practices, and beliefs focused around the increasingly important national holidays and those traditional holidays which are still of importance. The holidays mirror the religious, political, status, and other conflicts upon which I have touched, reflecting the sharpened antagonisms which arise in any society which is changing its form; but they indicate also, dimly and uncertainly, something of the new forms which may emerge, presenting an indistinct and misfocused image of the value choices with which abangan, santri, prijaji, all three, are for the moment faced. As such, a brief treatment of them forms a useful conclusion to this description of Modjokuto religious belief and behavior.
Since the Revolution, the number of holidays has greatly multiplied, at least in theory if not in actual practice. Nationalist holidays, traditional holidays, religious holidays all crowd one another until it sometimes seems that, indeed, in Indonesia every day is a holiday. For example, there are Hari Lagu Kebangsaan (Holiday for the National Anthem), Hari Ibu Kartini (Princess Kartini’s Day, Princess Kartini being a turn-of-the-century forerunner of the nationalist women’s movement), Hari Peladjar Intemasional (International Students Day), Hari Pelawan (Heroes Day, commemorating the victims of the Revolution), Hari Angkatan Perang (Armed Forces Day), Satu Mei (First of May; sometimes called Hari Buruh Intemasional, International Worker’s Day), Hari Gerakan Wanita (Women’s Movement Day), and Hari Kemerdekaan (Freedom Day, Indonesia’s “Fourth of July,” which, as it falls on August 17th is consequently commonly referred to as tudjuh-belas-Augustus)—all of them being more or less nationalist holidays, as is indicated both by the events they celebrate and by the fact that they have Indonesian names. Then there are special religious holidays which only part of the population celebrates: Idul Adha (Sacrifice Day, commemorating Abraham’s sacrifice), Mi’radj (the day on which Mohammed ascended to heaven to address God), Maulud (the Prophet’s birth- and death-day), etc. for the Moslems; Hari Natal (Christmas) and Hari Pentacostal (the Penta-cost) for the Christians; and the first of Sura, the actual Javanese New Year, for a few scattered adherents to mystical sects. But the big holiday is still the traditional end-of-fast celebration: Rijaja, the one holiday with an important significance to all Javanese.
with the exception of May First and August Seventeenth, almost all the national holidays are, so far as the mass of the people are concerned, empty formalities. Some of them, such as Princess Kartini’s Day or Armed Forces Day, occasion very little celebration of any sort in Modjokuto and are known there mainly from newspaper descriptions of celebrations in the larger cities. Others, such as International Students Day or Women’s Movement Day, are the concern only of that small minority of the population in the relevant special organizations, in this case of students or of “awakened” women. Even within such relatively homogeneous subgroups, however, all is not always harmonious. The Moslem student groups held aloof from Students Day because they regarded the main secularist student group—Ikatan Peladjar dan Pemuda Indonesia, or IPPI—as Communist dominated, and held their own celebration on a different day. The women managed to do better. A joint committee of representatives from all women’s groups—Moslem, nationalist, and left-wing—conducted the celebration, which consisted mainly of a mass meeting with speeches in the town hall. But the whole affair nearly came to grief over the polygamy problem, leaving embittered feelings and resolutions of “never again” on all sides.
On National Anthem Day, a corps of Chinese students dressed in white uniforms marched briskly into the District Officer’s yard. There was an (obligatory) competition in the singing of the anthem (which, as it is in Indonesian, is not within everyone’s power) by the village officials of the eighteen village-clusters, and there were speeches by several town leaders and the District Officer. But very few people came to watch the proceedings, and those who did were, most likely, merely reminded of their prejudices against the commercially prosperous Chinese.
In general, abcingans and santris tend to regard the less important national holidays as a largely prijaji concern and are “ashamed” or “embarrassed” to go to them.
At Bu Ardjo’s credit society meeting (Bu Ardjo was our landlady, an abangan), Bu Merto announced, as a representative of PERWARI (Persatuan Wanita Republik Indonesia, an entirely prijaji women’s club), that there was going to be a ceremony of flower strewing on the graves of the heroes of the Revolution on October 5, the Armed Forces Day, at 4 p.m. Bu Ardjo said on the way home that she was going. ... On the morning of the fifth we went to the market to buy the flowers, but in the afternoon Bu Ardjo said she wasn’t going, that just Supiah (her granddaughter, aged 12) would go as her representative. I asked why, and she said that women without underpants could not go in a graveyard; and I said I didn’t believe it. She then said that she would have to sing, and that she doesn’t know the songs. Later I asked Supiah what it was, and she gave the same reasons, but added that there were going to be a lot of prijajis there. When it came time to go, Bu Ardjo said that the affair was at five; so we waited until 4:30 to go. We found when we (Supiah and I) got there that it was all over, having happened at 4:00. . . . This not going to the ceremony which was run by PERWARI shows up the class position of PERWARI. When Sulastri (a prijaji girl from Djokja) was visiting us she asked Bu Ardjo if she belonged to women’s clubs and Bu Ardjo said no, she couldn’t write.
May First is rather more of an occasion. The labor unions—by-and-large “Communist dominated,” parade around town carrying banners demanding the death of imperialism, the cessation of corruption, the cession of Western New Guinea to Indonesia, and so on. They end up at the town square, where a large rally is held under some huge pictures of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and national Communist heroes and leaders (recently, the displaying of portraits of foreign leaders has been forbidden). Partly because during the field period the Communist party was supporting the Government, partly because the Government, afraid of violence, laid down rather strict rules about what could be said and done on May 1st and enforced them by the presence of a goodly number of well-armed policemen, the rallies and celebrations tended to be rather mild.
Although the influence of this holiday in the villages is undoubtedly less than it is in the town, it is not wholly absent, especially since the unions are very strong in those villages near or within the former Dutch plantation areas. Santris, of course, hold aloof (as do some of the more anti-Communist prijajis) and in fact unsuccessfully attempted to establish a new holiday—Hari Kabungan Nasional (Day of National Mourning)—to “celebrate” (on May 1st) the attempted Communist revolt against the Republic at Madiun in 1948.
In the large cities, May 1st celebrations are very large indeed and, along with the unions and such religious groups as PERMAI, form another mechanism by means of which cibcmgcins can be attached to left-wing causes, which in the absence of any important radical non-Communist political movements of importance means, ultimately, the Communist party. (In the large cities separate Socialist rallies are usually held on May 1st, but there are no Socialists in Modjokuto, and even in the large cities the movement seems to be crumbling.)
The largest of the nationalist holidays is undoubtedly August Seventeenth, Freedom Day, the day on which (in 1945) President Sukarno and Vice President Mhd. Hatta issued their declaration of independence from Dutch rule and so inaugurated the Revolution. The symbols in terms of which the Seventeenth of August is celebrated are, for the most part, not those of Islam nor of traditional abangan religion nor of mysticism, but those of modem nationalism, of intelligentsia culture. There is a parade of school children, complete with drum corps; there is a laying of wreaths on the graves of victims of the Revolution (there is a special cemetery for the war dead next to the District Office); there is a flower-arrangement contest for women, for which the prize is a set of dishes; there are various sports contests—badminton, volley-ball, one-o-cat, soccer—for which trophies are awarded to the winning teams; there is a baby-show at which winners are selected for health and beauty; there is a profusion of Indonesian national flags; there is a banquet and formal reception for town leaders of all groups at the District Office; and, at the climax, there is the President of the Republic’s speech broadcast from Djakarta and sent out over loudspeakers to crowds of people gathered in the public square. Some more traditional symbols persist. People decorate their houses with young coconut palm leaves as for any celebration; Nahdatul Ulama holds a terbangan in the mosque; and there are Javanese dances, popular dramas, wajangs and so forth, both at the District Officer’s and at the railroad union hall. But, in general, the holiday takes the forms of its expression from the vocabulary of modern nationalism.
The degree of participation, if only passive participation in the sense of mere observation of the events or displaying of a flag, of the mass of the people in the August 17th celebrations is surprisingly great, particularly, of course, in the town, but also outside of it. August Seventeenth is a genuine “new” holiday symbolizing the new forms of social and cultural integration being proposed for Indonesian society by an urbanized and educated elite; and its remarkably great importance in the minds of the people generally, many of whom have but little understanding of the political changes through which they, are passing, is evidence that nationalism’s hold on the average Javanese is already very extensive and gaining in strength. August Seventeenth is the “new Indonesia,” with all its strength and weaknesses. It is an urban sponsored advertisement for a way of life which though still unclearly formulated is of increasing attractiveness to more and more Indonesians.
But the appeal of August Seventeenth as a truly national holiday, a general ritual form acceptable to all subgroups within the society, is still severely limited by several factors. In the first place, although participation in the holiday is certainly far more extensive than in any of the other new nationalist holidays, it is still predominantly a prijaji affair so far as active organization and direction of it is concerned. Baby-shows, flower-arrangement competitions, and banquets at the District Officer’s are not likely to prove very meaningful even to the least tradition-bound peasant; and the centering of all planning effort on ceremonies in the town leaves the countryside with little but a passive, mass-audience role to play. As for the scuitris, although they cooperate to a degree, they do so hesitantly and passively, for they are still not entirely convinced of prijaji sincerity in making the holiday genuinely non-partisan in respect to religion. “We don’t mind serving on the sub-committees (planning the program), say sports or something,” one santri leader admitted uneasily, “but we don’t like to get involved in the main committee. We just sort of hang back because there are so many prijaji involved.” At a Muhammadijah regional conference, a Muhammadijah leader deplored this attitude and urged Muhammadijah people to participate more in such national holidays and accept more responsibility for them, not just stick to Moslem holidays such as Maulud, so that these new holidays will be truly national and people won’t say santris aren’t in favor of progress.
Another limiting August Seventeenth as an effective integration ritual is the fact that any event which brings together rather antagonistic groups naturally emphasizes not only their willingness to cooperate but also their differences. Thus a government sponsored Seventeenth of August meeting at which leaders of all groups spoke was notable for the suppressed tension and for the sly digs the speakers took at one another. “They didn’t say much,” a teacher said to me afterward, “but you could certainly feel them jabbing one another.” This phenomenon of a supposedly integrative ritual symbolizing divisive elements as well as those making for harmony does not mean that the division is more genuine than the harmony, but merely that any ritual which really reflects the values of a society will reflect not only how they fit with one another but also how they don’t fit. This is even more apparent in the case of what is easily Java’s most important general holiday: Rijaja.
in Rijaja almost every theme we have discussed in this report finds its place. The holiday, coming as a gala climax of the Fast month, manages to hold within itself the whole range of religious belief and practice characteristic of present-day Modjokuto. Abangan, santri, and prijciji; ardent nationalist and subdued traditionalist; peasant, trader, and clerk; townsman and villager— all can find somewhere in this most syncretic of public festivals the sort of symbol congenial to them. This syncretism, this easy tolerance of religious and ideological diversity is, as I have repeatedly stressed, a fundamental characteristic of Javanese culture, the recent intensification of inter-group conflict to the contrary notwithstanding. But, recent or not, that conflict, too, finds its expression in Rijaja. In a sense, Rijaja is a kind of master symbol for Javanese culture, as perhaps Christmas is for ours; and, if one really understood everything one observed on Rijaja—a simple impossibility—one could say one understood the Javanese.
The central ritual act of Rijaja is a personal, individual begging of forgiveness patterned in terms of status differences. The child asks forgiveness of his parents, the young of the old, the worker of his boss, the tenant farmer of his landlord, the politician of his party chief, the former pondok student of his kijaji, the cured patient of his diikun, the mystical student of his guru. Each of these (relatively) lower status people goes to the home of the higher status one, where he is received, usually with tea and snacks, where he formally begs the pardon of the host.* The meaning of this act is that the petitioner wishes the host to forgive from the depths of his heart any injuries, intended or unintended, which the latter has done to him in the past year, so as to lighten the weight of his sins. Having theoretically expiated his sins in the Fast, he now asks those against whom they were committed to forgive him for them. Santris sometimes say that this pattern is mildly heterodox, for only God can forgive sins; but it is probably the most universally practiced ritual in Modjokuto today. Even many Christians do it even though, strictly speaking, the holiday is Moslem.
Because of the inherent relativity of status, the celebration usually must spread over several days; and in any case higher status people tend to remain at home so as to receive petitioners until toward the end of the period, when they journey out to the few people who outrank them. Very high individuals, such as the doctors or the District Officer, may make very few if any visits; the village chief in the semi-urban village in which I lived spent three wearying days receiving guests in his home without going out at all.
Despite the nominally religious aspect of the forgiveness ritual, the visiting around is for most people a gala, quite unserious business. Everyone almost inevitably buys new clothes for Rijaja as we do for Easter, and prepares the best food he can for his guests. The visiting pattern is, thus, as much an opportunity to display one’s clothes and one’s fancy food as it is
* The most common phrase—in high Javanese—is nuwun pangestunipun sedaja kale-patan kula, lair batin: I request your pardon for my faults, inside and outside (i.e., your genuine, undissembled, pardon). This is often shortened to lair batin.
a sacred ritual, and the day is both holy day and holiday. The people move in colorful throngs through the streets and roadways, passing from house to house, stopping at each for only fifteen or twenty minutes, so covering a dozen or so in the day, sometimes even two dozen.
In the more urbanized circles one often finds a replacement of the individual visiting pattern by a land of secular party—one high prijaji actually held one at which beer was served—called a halal bihalal (Arabic for a mutual begging of pardon), which both simplifies the ritual almost to the point of disappearance and strongly emphasizes its festive aspects. Perhaps the final stage in this secularization process is the increasingly popular custom, more so in larger towns than in Modjokuto, where it is confined to the highest status levels, of not actually making the pardon-begging visit but merely sending a small card, rather like a Christmas card, with the pardon request printed on it in Indonesian.
There are, of course, other more explicitly religious rituals. As I have already mentioned, mass prayers are held at dawn in the town square and in the mosque; santri organizations give out the zakat-fitrah religious tax to the poor; there is a special slametcin on Rijaja (as well as one five days after). Also, simply because it is such a universal holiday, one in which absolutely everybody participates (it is the one day in the year when the market closes down), Rijaja reflects the religious strains, conflicts, and readjustments I have been discussing. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the fact that one cannot properly speak, in Modjokuto at least, of one single Rijaja day, for the various groups do not agree on the proper date. In 1954 some people celebrated the Rijaja on Wednesday, some on Thursday, and some on Friday, each holding that the other people were incorrect.
The immediate cause of this conflict is the different modes of calculating the day. We have already seen that there is a conflict over the proper mode of calculating the date between modernist and conservative santris: the modernists calculate ahead of time by means of astronomical data; the conservatives wait, with true caution, to see the moon appear. But they both agree that the proper day is the day the moon appears, and in 1954 this was Wednesday, June 2. Abangans and prijaji, however, use the so-called abogé system of calculation, which is, in essence, but another pétimgan numerological system like those described in the abangan chapter above.* The lunar year drifts,
* In the abogé system, the “a" stands for Alip, one of the eight years in the windu cycle (i.e., eight years, each with a different name, make up one windu), “bo” stands for Rebo, one of the days of the week (Wednesday), and “gé” stands for Wage, one of the five market week days. This means that the year Alip always starts on Rebo Wage, and knowing this, one can figure the day on which Rijaja falls in any year merely by extended, though simple, calculation. A shorter method is to take the day on which the year began and apply the waldjiro formula to calculate Rijaja. “Wal” is Sawal, the month; “dji” is sidji, “one”, “ro” is loro, “two.” This means that Rijaja (which falls on the first of Sawal) is calculated by counting one from the week day and two from the market day on which the year began. For example, if the name of the year is Éhé, it must have begun (i.e., the first of Sura) on Ngahad Pon. The first of Sawal, or Rijaja, then falls on Ngahad Wage eight cycles (of thirty-five days each; seven times five) and 22 days later, because Wagé follows Pon in the five day cycle and you count: “Ngahad-one”; “Pon-one, Wagé-two.” of course, in relation to this rigid mathematical calendar; so in 1954 this day came out to Friday, June 4 (actually, Djumaat Wage). Now Djumaat Wagé, it just so happens, is an unlucky day generally, so that many abangans made their beg-pardon calls on Thursday, while many prijaji, regarding the unlucky notion as mere ignorant superstition, did their visiting on Friday, the proper day. The result was that the santris held Rija ja on Wednesday, the abangans (and a few prijaji) on Thursday, the prijaji (and a few abangans) on Friday, a phenomenon which gave rise to a tremendous amount of discussion and a sharp highlighting of some of the religious strains in contemporary Modjokuto life.
Despite all the disharmonies it reveals, Rijaja, simply because it is the most catholic, the most festive, and the most genuinely collective of their ceremonies, reveals even more clearly, though less explicitly, the underlying unity of the Javanese people, and, beyond them, of the Indonesian people as a whole. With the exception of Hindu Bali and a few Christian and pagan areas, it is everywhere a major holiday. In a broad, diffuse, and very general way it stresses the commonalities among all Indonesians, stresses tolerance concerning their differences, stresses their oneness as a nation. It is, in fact, the most truly nationalist of their rituals, and, as such, it indicates the reality and the attainability of what is now the explicit ideal of all Indonesians—cultural unity and continuing social progress.