Author Archives: Peter Carey

 

The royal visit of the Dutch King, Willem-Alexander, and Queen Máxima to Indonesia on 10-13 March 2020, was newsworthy for a number of reasons. The first was the Dutch monarch’s apology for the atrocities committed by Netherlands forces following the declaration of Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945. Another was the return of the heirloom kris, Kanjeng Kiai Nogo Siluman (His Highness the Invisible King of the Snakes), which had purportedly once belonged to Prince Diponegoro (1785-1855) but which had ended up in the Ethnographic Museum (Museum voor Volkenkunde) in Leiden after over 60 years in the royal curio collection (Koninklijk Kamer van Zeldzaamheden). This was handed back in person to President Joko Widodo and was on display at the state reception at Bogor presidential palace on 10 March. The return of this long sought-after heirloom weapon elicited a number of reactions from the Indonesian public, some of which are reflected in the current essay by Peter Carey which was first published in Indonesian by the Langgar.co website in Yogyakarta on 13 March 2020, and translated by his research assistant, Feureau Himawan Sutanto, in Bandung.

On Wednesday, 4 March 2020, almost exactly 190 years since Indonesia’s ‘William the Silent’, Prince Diponegoro (1785-1855) (Image 4), was treacherously arrested by General Hendrik Merkus de Kock in Magelang, Central Java (28 March 1830), the Museum Volkenkunde (Ethnographic Museum) in Leiden announced that the prince’s heirloom dagger (keris), Kangjeng Kiai Nogo Siluman (His Highness the Invisible King of the Snakes), had been found. It would be returned to Indonesia, the press release stated, just days before the royal visit of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima to Indonesia (11-13 March 2020).

The timing was impeccable. But this was not about righting past wrongs through heritage diplomacy. As the legal philosopher and specialist on art plunder, Jos van Beurden, stated,[1] if that was the purpose then the return comes “obscenely late (rijkelijk laat)”. The bottom line was trade. The massive Dutch trade delegation with ministers Sigrid Kaag (Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation), Cora van Nieuwenhuizen (Infrastructure and Water Management), and Bruno Bruins (Medical Care) sent to Holland’s former colony ahead of the royal couple’s visit underscored its true significance. As the former Dutch Prime Minister, Joop de Uyl (in office, 1973-77), once famously admitted in a glorious malapropism, ‘we are a nation of undertakers (begrafenisondernemers)!’ But, trade and politics aside, what is the significance of this event?

As the former Dutch Prime Minister, Joop de Uyl (in office, 1973-77), once famously admitted in a glorious malapropism, ‘we are a nation of undertakers (begrafenisondernemers)!’ But, trade and politics aside, what is the significance of this event?

Nogo Siluman[2] seems not have been one of Diponegoro’s most cherished heirloom weapons. He never mentioned it in his 1,100 folio-page autobiography, the Babad Diponegoro (1831-32). Nor was it listed amongst the prized heirloom pikes and daggers which were distributed to his family by the Dutch colonial authorities after his arrest. Nor yet was it referred to by General De Kock in his very detailed report on his interactions with the prince in that fateful month of March 1830.[3] How it came into the hands of the Antwerp-born Dutch field commander in eastern Bagelen (south-central Java), Colonel Jan-Baptist Cleerens (1785-1850) (Image 5), who presented it to King Willem I (r. 1813-40) on 11 January 1831, is a mystery. But one can make an informed guess. Given that Cleerens was the officer tasked with opening ‘peace negotiations’ with the prince in mid-February 1830 at Remokamal in Banyumas, and Diponegoro took him into his confidence—‘a man whose heart could be trusted (kang tyas pan langkung pitajengipun)’ as he notes in his autobiography[4]—it is highly likely that the heirloom dagger was given to seal the gentleman’s agreement given by Cleerens that the Dutch would negotiate in good faith.

Of course, this did not happen. And the consequences were disastrous—both for the Dutch and the Indonesians.

As the 16-year-old Prince Henry the Seafarer (Prins Hendrik de Zeevaarder, 1820-1872), youngest son of King Willem II (r. 1840-49) (Image 2), put it so powerfully in his diary (Image 3) after meeting Diponegoro in his place of detention in Fort Rotterdam, Makassar, on 7 March 1837:

“Everyone knows that Diponegoro rebelled against us, but his imprisonment will always be, according to my way of thinking, a blot on the Dutch escutcheon as men of honour. It is true he was a rebel, but he came to put an end to a war that had cost both us and his own people so many lives, and he came trusting in the Dutch promise to negotiate in good faith. Then he was arrested on the orders of General de Kock. I believe that this matter, which has served us so well (relative to our possession of the whole of Java), has done us the greatest harm in moral terms because if we unfortunately get into another war again in Java, one of the two of us will go under, either ourselves or the Javanese, because no local [Indonesian] chief will ever want to have anything to do with us again. And this won’t just happen in Java but everywhere [throughout the archipelago].”

[Iedereen weet dat Diepo Negoro [Diponegoro] in opstand tegen ons is geweest maar zijn gevangennemen zal altoos volgens mijne wijze van de zaak in te zien, een schandvlek aan de oude hollandsche trouw zijn. Het is waar hij was muiteling, maar hij kwam om een eind te maken aan eene oorlog die aan ons en aan hem zoo’n veel volk heeft gekost had en wat nog meer is hij kwam vertrouwende op de hollandsche trouw om te onderhandelen. Toen is hij gevat op order van de Generaal De Kock. Ik geloof dat deze zaak die ons het is waar zeer veel gedient heeft (betrekkelijk ons bezit van Geheel Java) ons het grootste kwaad gedaan heeft in het moreel want indien wij voor ons ongeluk weer oorlog op Java krijgen zal een der beiden ten onder gaan wij of de Javaan, want geen een Hoofd zal dan immer meer iets met ons te doen willen hebben. Dat zal niet alleen op Java gebeuren maar overal’.][5]

Prince Hendrik’s prophecy proved true. 112 years to the day (8 March 1830) after Diponegoro rode into Magelang with his 700 followers to meet with General De Kock, the Dutch themselves would go down to defeat at the hands of the Japanese (8 March 1942).[6] Most Indonesians applauded—‘no local [Indonesian] chief will ever want to have anything to do with us again [geen een (Indonesisch) Hoofd zal dan immer meer iets met ons te doen hebben]’! Schadenfreude rarely comes richer than this!

And what of His Highness the Invisible King of the Snakes in his 189-year exile in the Netherlands? There are many mysteries still to resolve. Condemned to a twilight existence in the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden (Royal Curio Collection) in The Hague (1831-83) and the dusty storerooms of the Rijks Ethnographisch Museum/Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (State Ethnographic Museum; post-2005, Museum Volkenkunde) in Leiden, the dagger’s lot was a tale of exile and forgetting. Out of sight out of mind. Similar, in fact, to his one-time owner, Prince Diponegoro, who passed the last third of his life (1833-55) in two ‘miserable hot rooms’—the words are Prins Hendrik’s—in Fort Rotterdam, Makassar, in the distant Celebes (Sulawesi).

This is strikingly different to the fate of another royal dagger—this time a real Nogosiluman type keris with thirteen curves on the blade (see fn.2)—which was taken by the British Lieutenant-Governor, Thomas Stamford Raffles (in office, 1811-16), from the second Sultan of Yogyakarta (r. 1792-1810/1811-12/1826-28) after the British had stormed his court in the early hours of Saturday, 20 June 1812 and had exiled him to Pinang (1812-15).

This fine heirloom weapon was presented in person by Raffles in May 1817 to the Prince Regent, later King George IV (r. 1820-30), a British monarch renowned for his fascination with weaponry and all things military despite having had no personal battlefield experience himself, has long been kept in the Royal Armoury Collection in Windsor Castle where it is available for inspection online (see Photo 1).[7] Whatever one may feel about the justice of keeping precious colonial artefacts in the public collections of the former colonial power, at least in this case the object is well curated and maintained. What a contrast to the Dutch indifference to Diponegoro’s own heirloom weapon consigned to a century and more of oblivion in their state collections! But maybe this is the moment where a new future awaits this Cheshire Cat keris–now you see him now you don’t—and it will have the last laugh on his master’s former captors as it speeds home borne aloft on the wings of a Garuda.

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Images

Image 1: Comparison of two krises: Top: Sultan Hamengkubuwono II of Yogyakarta’s personal Nogosiluman style keris with thirteen curves (eluk) in the blade now in the Royal Armoury Collection in Windsor Castle, UK; and Bottom: Diponegoro’s Nogososro style keris with eleven curves (eluk) styled Kangjeng Kiai Nogo Siluman, formerly in the Museum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden and now (post-March 2020) in the National Museum (Museum Nasional/MusNas), Jakarta. Photographs courtesy of the Royal Armoury Collection and Professor Sri Margana (Universitas Gajah Mada / Leiden University).

Image 2: Prince Henry the Seafarer (1820-72), youngest son of King Willem II of the Netherlands (r. 1840-49), oil painting by Jan-Baptist van der Hulst (1790-1862) now in the palace ‘Het Loo’, showing him in the uniform a Dutch naval lieutenant second class before he sailed for Indonesia on 17 October 1836 on the frigate Bellona (Captain Pieter Arriëns). Photo courtesy of the Geschiedkundige Vereniging Oranje-Nassau.

Image 3: The page of Prince Henry the Seafarer’s diary where he describes his 7 March 1837 meeting with Diponegoro in Fort Rotterdam, Makassar, and includes a doodle or thumbnail sketch of the prince dressed in his Buginese Muslim headgear. Koninklijke Huis Archief (The Hague), GO54-309-01 (archief prins Hendrik), ‘Dagboek’, 7-03-1837. Photograph courtesy of the Koninklijke Huis Archief, The Hague.

Image 4: Pencil sketch of Diponegoro by Adrianus Johannes (Jan) Bik (1790-1872) made in the Stadhuis (Town Hall) of Batavia (post-1942, Jakarta) in late April 1830 before he sailed on the corvette-of-war Pollux into exile in Sulawesi (3/4 May 1830). It shows him dressed in the ‘priestly’ garments which he wore during the Java War, namely a turban, an open-necked kabaya (cotton shirt) and a jubah (loose outer robe). A sash hangs over his right shoulder and his pusaka kris (heirloom dagger), Kangjeng Kyai Bondoyudo (Sir Duelling Without Weapons), is stuck in his flowered silk waist band. The slightly sunken cheeks, which accentuate the prince’s high cheek bones, were the result of successive bouts of malaria from which he had been suffering since his wanderings in the jungles of Bagelen and Banyumas in the last four months of the war (11 November 1829-16 February 1830). Photograph by courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Image 5: The Arrest of Diponegoro by General de Kock on Sunday, 28 March 1830, oil om canvas painting by Raden Saleh (ca. 1811-80), 112 x 179 cms, completed in March 1857. Saleh has painted Colonel Jan-Baptist Cleerens (1785-1850) as a Judas Iscariot figure with his back to the left pillar of the Residency House and his eyes gazing balefully at the viewer. The Antwerp-born colonel was not in fact present at Diponegoro’s arrest, but Saleh has included him to underscore his act of treachery. The painting now hangs in the State Palace (Istana Negara) in Jakarta. Photograph courtesy of the Sekretariat Kepresidenan, Republik Indonesia.

 

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[1] Eric Brassem, “Nederland geeft ‘verloren’ kris terug aan Indonesië”, Trouw (4 maart 2020).

[2] The name of this keris is in fact confusing because it is not a Nogosiluman type, which has thirteen curves (ěluk) on the blade, but rather a Nogososro type which only has eleven curves (ěluk). Furthermore, according to the General Chairman of the Indonesian National Kris Secretariat (Sekretariat Nasional Perkerisan Indonesia-SNKI), Fadli Zon, it has not the dhapur [shape of the blade] of a Nogo Siluman (Naga Siluman) but instead the dhapur of Nogo Rojo (Naga Raja): ‘ ‘Naga Raja indeed looks like Naga Sasra, the only difference is on the crown,’ tweet, 12-03-20. According to another Kris expert, Mpu Nilo, ‘to know if the kris is a Naga Siluman or not, is quite simple: Naga Siluman kris has the dhapur of a naga with no body. This naga only appears from the neck up without a body extending to the end of the blade.’ The origins of this confusion may lie in part in the early descriptions of Diponegoro’s dagger by his youthful army commander, Ali Basah Sentot Prawirodirjo (ca. 1808-55), on 27 May 1830 (Susan Legêne, De Bagage van Blomhoff; Japan, Java, Tripoli in de negentiende eeuwse Nederlands cultuur van het imperialisme [Amsterdam: Museum voor de Tropen, 1998], pp.290-91), and by the equally youthful Arab-Javanese painter, Raden Saleh Syarif Bustaman (ca. 1811-80), in his clincher 17^th  January 1831 description of the weapon after it arrived at the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden (Royal Curio Collection) in mid-January 1831, when he referred to the remaining flecks of gold leaf at the tip of the blade, see Werner Kraus and Irina Vogelsang, Raden Saleh; The Beginning of Modern Indonesian Painting (Jakarta: Goethe Institut, 2012), pp.36-37.

[3] Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (UBL), KITLV H (=Hollands MS) 340, H.M. de Kock, Verslag van het voorgevallene met den Pangeran Dipo-Nagoro kort vóór, bij en na zijne overkomst [Report on what happened with Prince Diponegoro shortly before, during and after his coming over], 1 April 1830.

[4] Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy; Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785-1855 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), p.669 fn.55.

[5] Koninklijke Huis Archief (The Hague), GO54-309-01 (archief prins Hendrik), ‘Dagboek’, 7-03-1837, quoted in Katrientje Huyssen van Kattendijke-Frank (ed), Met prins Hendrik naar de Oost; De reis van W.J.C. Huyssen van Kattendijke naar Nederlands-Indië, 1836-1838 (Zutphen: Walburg, 2004), p. 121.

[6] This happened at the surrender negotiation at Kalijati near Subang, West Java when the Dutch commander of Allied Land Forces in Java, General Hein ter Poorten (1887-1968), surrendered unconditionally to Japanese General Hitoshi Imamura (1886-1968), commander of the Japanese Sixteenth Army. The ghost of Diponegoro must have quietly rejoiced as he contemplated this total Dutch defeat 112 years to the day after his entrance into Magelang for the ‘peace negotiations’ with General de Kock which ended with his treacherous arrest. When Ter Poorten  tried to argue the toss with Imamura about the unconditional nature of the Dutch/Allied surrender, he was told coldly that he could return under Japanese escort to his military headquarters in Bandung and continue his resistance, but that he was on notice that Japanese bombers would be taking off within the hour from Kalijati airfield and Bandung would be flattened if he did not immediately agree the surrender terms.

[7] https://www.rct.uk/collection/67495/kris-and-scabbard (Kris and scabbard, iron, gold, rubies, diamonds and wood, RCIN 67495).

This article is published with the original title; A Blot on the Dutch Escutcheon [Een Schandvlek op De Oud Hollands Trouw]: Reflections on the Return to Indonesia of Prince Diponegoro’s Heirloom Dagger, Kangjeng Kiai Nogo Siluman [His Highness The Invisible King of the Snakes]

 

 

(Year of the Protests: Cornell and the Vietnam War, 1969-70)

Cornell is an Ivy League university and so belongs to the elite of US private universities, along with Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia. But whereas all these latter four  are located in or near great metropolitan centres—Harvard near Boston, and Yale, Princeton and Columbia in or near New York City—Cornell was out on its own region of Upstate New York, two hundred miles north of New York City, with  the  city of Ithaca  (population 30,000) as its sole urban companion. For us aspiring scholars this isolation was something of a blessing because there wasn’t much for us to do other than get on with our research and get to know our fellow specialists on Indonesia. In those day Cornell was, outside the Netherlands, the foremost research university specialising in Indonesian politics and history. The then dominant figures at Cornell were the late Benedict Anderson (1933-2015) and George McTurnan Kahin (1918-2000), director of Cornell’s world-famous Modern Indonesia Project. I also had the historian of Thailand, David K. Wyatt (1937-2006), and Oliver Wolters (1915-2000), a specialist on Srivijaya (650-1183) and early Southeast Asian maritime history, as members of my doctoral committee.

For us aspiring scholars this isolation was something of a blessing because there wasn’t much for us to do other than get on with our research and get to know our fellow specialists on Indonesia. In those day Cornell was, outside the Netherlands, the foremost research university specialising in Indonesian politics and history.

These were all eminent, established figures, and they were each, in their own way, inspiring teachers. Kahin and Anderson, in particular, had great integrity and gave public addresses supporting the anti-war movement which reached a crescendo in the US in my year at Cornell (1969-70) with the 29 April-22 July 1970 US invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings (4 May 1970).[28]

Another hugely influential figure for us Cornell graduate students newly politicized by the anti-war movement was the American Jesuit priest, Father Daniel Berrigan SJ (1921-2016), then serving as assistant director of the Cornell University United Religious Work (CURW, in office 1966-70).[29] In my last full month at Cornell (April 1970), he went on the run from the FBI having been involved with his brother, the Josephite priest, Philip Berrigan, and seven other Catholic activists in the destruction by homemade napalm of 378 draft cards (Vietnam War call-up notifications) in the parking lot of Catonsville, Maryland (17 May 1968). After the incident, this group, which became known as the ‘Catonsville Nine’, had issued a statement confronting the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian bodies and the synagogues of America ‘with their silence and cowardice in the face of this country [the US’s] crimes’. On 9 April 1970, on the very day he was due to begin his prison term (he had been sentenced to three years for damaging US federal property) Berrigan left his Cornell Campus office, the University marking his temporarily successful absconding by a weekend long “America is Hard to Find” event at Barton Hall (17-19 April) complete with a guest appearance by the fugitive himself!

Inspired by Berrigan’s example, and the oratory of my two Cornell professors, Kahin and Anderson, I participated in the walk-out which followed the Kent State shootings, having tried, but failed, to persuade my professor, David Wyatt, to suspend his classes and lectures in solidarity. I also joined the 100,000-strong Kent State/Anti-Cambodia Incursion Protest in Washington DC on 9 May when police ringed the White House with buses to block demonstrators from getting too close to the executive mansion, and then President, Richard Nixon (in office, 1969-74), came out to meet some of the demonstrators early in the morning at the Lincoln Memorial before the march.

My presence as a foreign citizen on this march in Washington was apparently reported by the Washington DC police to the Dean of the Cornell Graduate School, W. Donald Cooke (in office, 1964-73). But a serendipitous incident, which happened immediately after the march was over, helped me to wipe my slate clean. It happened like this: as I was walking back from the downtown area of Washington and heading through the suburbs. I started passing along streets with shops, some of which had been looted. I am not sure how this happened, maybe someone called out for my help as I went past with my friends, but I turned into a jeweller’s shop which had had its windows and display cabinets smashed. I found the owner of the shop, a middle-aged lady, in a catatonic state, completely petrified and beside herself with agitation. She asked for my help, and I undertook to walk her out of the area and provide what protection I could so she could get public transport and return home safely. As we were walking together she either picked up on my English accent or possibly I told her that I was a foreign student on an English Speaking Union (ESU) scholarship at Cornell. This immediately rung a bell with her: “Ah!” she said, “after this is over, I am going to ring my good friend Dean Cooke at Cornell and tell him what you have done!” I couldn’t have scripted this! So this was how one good deed begat another, and I was able to leave Cornell later that month (May 1970) to sail to Indonesia on an Indonesian cargo ship of the Djakarta-Lloyd shipping line with my honour intact and still in good odour with the Cornell authorities![30]

I started passing along streets with shops, some of which had been looted. I am not sure how this happened, maybe someone called out for my help as I went past with my friends, but I turned into a jeweller’s shop which had had its windows and display cabinets smashed. I

My decision to sail to Indonesia involved gaining access to the Djakarta-Lloyd representative in New York, Mr Pamodjo, and securing passage on one of his company’s ships sailing from New York to Jakarta. Here my senior Cornell professor, George Kahin, played a critical role. It happened like this—in mid-February 1970, I had travelled to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras celebrations and had taken a Mississippi paddle steamer. As we pulled out of the wharf at New Orleans, I saw a huge sign on the dockside which read “DJAKARTA LLOYD”. Like a latter-day Lord Jim, I made a determination there and then that I would travel on a Djakarta Lloyd boat to Jakarta. With the help of Kahin, who knew Mr Pamodjo from Kahin’s days as a pro-Republican war correspondent in Yogyakarta in 1948-49 during the Second

Dutch ‘Police Action’ (19-20 December 1948), I was able to take passage on the M.V. Sam Ratulangie sailing from Staten Island to Jakarta on the night of 27/28 May 1970. It would prove a fateful voyage which very nearly cost me my life when my appendix burst on board. But that, as they say is another story!

Although my time at Cornell was overshadowed by Mardi Gras festivities, protest marches and the politics of the Vietnam War, I also benefitted hugely from the academic, teaching and library resources at Cornell. The Olin Library, in particular, had a wealth of original material on Southeast Asian history, with a strong focus on Indonesia, and this proved a great resource. Actually, I had gone to Cornell from Oxford with the idea of doing a doctoral thesis on Marshal Herman Willem Daendels (1762-1818), the Napoleonic governor-general (1808-11) who transformed the Dutch colonial administration of Java. This was a topic which had been suggested to me when I was taking my oral examination (viva) at Oxford by the head of the board of examiners, Professor Jack Gallagher (1919-1980), himself a celebrated historian of the British Empire. He recommended the topic because I said I was interested in studying the period of the French Revolution (1789-99). But fate determined otherwise. Indeed, the very first thing my Cornell professors recommended was that I should make a start on studying local Southeast Asian languages (in my case Indonesian and Javanese) so that I could see events through local eyes before deciding definitively on a thesis topic.

So, began my long journey as a student of Indonesian languages. Javanese was not taught at that time at Cornell, so I embarked initially on a study of Indonesian and Dutch, which I needed to gain access to the colonial archives. Here, I had wonderful tutors who were both native speakers—for Indonesian a sensitive Sundanese, Pak Cakra Tanuatmaja, from Bandung and for the second a humorous Flemish-speaking Belgian. I would trudge up through the snow from my student digs at my clapboard house in 15 Dryden Road to attend the Indonesian and Dutch classes which were held at 8 a.m. before the main academic lectures of the day. These language sessions provided a strong basis for my command of a reading knowledge of Dutch—vital for my researches in the Dutch archives—and my increasingly competent spoken Indonesian, later honed during my six weeks aboard the Djakarta-Lloyd cargo ship, Sam Ratulangi, sailing from Staten Island to Palembang (28 May-14 July 1970).

I am not sure exactly of the date, but I remember studying Dutch to achieve sufficient reading knowledge to tackle the Dutch-language secondary literature and ultimately archives. We were set readings from H.J. de Graaf’s classic textbook history of Indonesia[31] in order to improve our language skills. While reading through De Graaf’s chapter on the Java War, I came across a plate of Major F.V.H.A. Ridder de Stuers (1792-1881) famous sketch of Diponegoro entering the prepared encampment at Metésih, a small settlement on the banks of the Kali Progo just below the old Residency House at Magelang on the late afternoon of 8 March 1830.[32] This was where the prince and his followers were lodged during the twenty days (8-28 March 1830) which preceded his capture. The plate shows a sombre and slightly stooped figure on horseback clad in his signature white jubah (tabard) and turban, the holy war (prang sabil) garments which he wore during his five-year struggle against the Dutch known as the Java War (1825-30). I am not sure what attracted me to this particular sketch, but perhaps it was the mysterious nature of Diponegoro’s portrayal by De Stuers and the fact that one could not see his face. Whatever it was, it was a revelation. As the Chinese say – a glance says more than a thousand words! That was the precise moment when I knew that Diponegoro rather than Daendels would be the focus of my doctoral thesis.

The plate shows a sombre and slightly stooped figure on horseback clad in his signature white jubah (tabard) and turban, the holy war (prang sabil) garments which he wore during his five-year struggle against the Dutch known as the Java War (1825-30). I am not sure what attracted me to this particular sketch, but perhaps it was the mysterious nature of Diponegoro’s portrayal by De Stuers and the fact that one could not see his face. Whatever it was, it was a revelation.

So, these nine months at Cornell, drab though the small Upstate New York town of Ithaca was to live in after the riches of Oxford and Leiden, opened a door for me. And once I reached Indonesia, after many false starts due to my near-death experience on my arrival in Palembang (14 July 1970),[33] I was able to walk through it and enter a new world.

That said, however, my idea of doing a PhD thesis on Prince Diponegoro and the Java War (1825-30) met with little enthusiasm amongst my professors at Cornell. Wolters, in particular, who had served in the Malayan Civil Service (MCS, 1937-57) specialising in psy-war operations in the anti-Communist Emergency in Malaya (1948-60), did not take kindly to my choice of thesis topic. “What’s so appealing about the history of wars and conflict? Why not something more focussed on socio-economic or cultural history?”, he asked me. Wolters’ wartime imprisonment during the Japanese Occupation of Malaya (1942-45) and his bitter experience of the Emergency still lingered in his mind making such a choice of research area distinctly unappealing. In his mind, Dutch nineteenth-century colonial history was a pale shadow of Srivijaya. I should be doing something significant like studying epigraphy (deciphering stone inscriptions), learning fifth and sixth-century Pali texts like the Mahāvamsa (Great Chronicle) and Cūļavamsa (Lesser Chronicle) or tracing the lineaments of Indonesia’s pre-colonial maritime history as he had done with his famous works on Early Indonesian Commerce; A Study of the Origins of Srīvijaya (1962) and his Fall of Śrīvijaya in Malay History (1970).

As for my other professors like Ben Anderson, I actually got to know him better through his published work after leaving Cornell than during the brief nine months I spent on the Ithaca campus. He was not really a social animal like my bibulous and clubbable Oxford supervisor, Richard Cobb. ‘Om Ben’ as I came to know him through his writings in Indonesia was the soul of kindness,[34] but he was not the sort of person one could go for a pub crawl with or who would invite one over to his College rooms to talk French historiography over a bottle of wine during an extended lunch break. Like the poet, T.S. Eliot, he was not much given to small talk, and I gained the impression that, for him, life was too short and the problems at hand too deep and difficult to be frittered away on unnecessary distractions. But 10,000 miles away from Ithaca in the faded splendour of the Tejokusuman, I can remember the huge sense of intellectual delight and discovery which I experienced on reading his great essay on “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture” (1972), and his mesmeric, Java in a Time of Revolution, occupation and resistance, 1944-1946, which had grown out of his 1967 Cornell PhD thesis ‘Pemuda Revolution, Indonesian Politics 1945-46’, which appeared in the same year.[35]

Then I felt like some watcher of the skies,

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent upon a peak in Darien.

[John Keats (1795-1821) “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”)

 

What more can one say, these were all great men in their day whose name lives on in the hearts of their pupils!

Stet fortuna domus Winchester, Oxford, Cornell, Leiden and Yogyakarta, groves of academe, home of the immortals.

 

Peter Carey,

Serpong, 17 July 2020.

* Artikel To my teachers: A Reflection on 55 Years of Learning the Historian’s Craft (1964/65 – 2020) ini, bagian terakhir dari 5 seri yang akan dipublikasikan di Langgar.co setiap hari Senin.  Artikel ini juga diterbitkan di Tirto.id dalam versi bahasa Indonesia.

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[28] The Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of students protesting the US invasion of Cambodia and the widening of the Second Vietnam War (1964-73) at Kent State University on 4 May 1970, resulting in four deaths and nine injuries, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis. It marked the first time that a student had been slain in an anti-war gathering in United States history and it led to an immediate and massive outrage on campuses around the country. More than four million students participated in organized walkouts at hundreds of universities (including Cornell), colleges and high schools, the largest such strike in the history of the United States. There were further student deaths at Jackson State College (now University) in Jackson, Mississippi, on the night of 14/15 May 1970, when city and state police opened fire on a group of protesting students, killing two and injuring twelve.

[29] This was the umbrella organization for all religious groups on Cornell campus, including the Cornell Newman Club (later the Catholic Cornell Community), of which Berrigan later became the pastor.

[30] For a description of this voyage (28 May – 14 July 1970) including my shipboard diary, see “Sumatra Johnny: Personal Memories of a Sea Voyage to Palembang from Staten Island (Parts I and II), langgar.co; and Carey, “Menyusuri Jalan yang jarang dilalui’, in Hera (ed.), Urip iku Urub, pp.26-31.

[31] H.J. de Graaf, Geschiedenis van Indonesië (‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff & Bandung: Van Hoeve, 1949).

[32] F.V.H.A. de Stuers and published in his Mémoires sur la guerre de l’île de Java. Leiden: Luchtmans, 1833), Atlas, Plate 12.

[33] For a description of what happened when my appendix burst on my arrival in Palembang on 14 July 1970, see Carey, “Menyusuri Jalan yang jarang dilalui’, in Hera (ed.), Urip iku Urub, pp.28-31

[34] In the early 1980s, I can remember ‘Om Ben’ immediately responding to my request for help on reading up my new ‘Maritime Southeast Asia, 1830-1973’ Further Subject, by sending me a closely typed aerogramme letter listing all the essential recommended reading I would need to do before beginning my teaching at Oxford.

[35] Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture”, in Claire Holt (ed.), Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972). pp.1-89; and Id., Java in a time of revolution, occupation and resistance, 1944– 1946 (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1972).

My other two inspirational figures, also both Javanese, were my Javanese-language teacher, Drs Mudjanattistomo (Pak Tistomo, died 1979), a member of the Yogyakarta royal family and head of the Lembaga Bahasa Nasional Cabang II (National Language Institute, Branch II)  of the local DIY (Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta) Government (in office, 1969-75; 1977-78); and Professor Sartono Kartodirjo (1921-2007), the very archetype of the Javanese pryayi (gentleman bureaucrat) scholar, who held the chair of modern Indonesian history at Gajah Mada University (UGM) for 20 years from 1968 to 1986.

Pak Tistomo I knew for most of my time at the Tejokusuman, and he became my private Javanese language tutor and native informant on the Yogyakarta court manuscripts. Once or twice a week, usually in the early evening, I would make the journey on my motorbike from the Tejokusuman through the long demolished Jogoboyo gateway (Plengkung)  in the western wall of the keraton along Jalan Kadipaten, Jalan Polowijan and Jalan Ngasem—where all the tamarind trees had been shredded by British gunners during Raffles’ 19/20 June assault on the Yogyakarta court—to arrive at Pak Tistomo’s residence in the Rotowijayan. I had one fellow pupil, a German lexicographer and long-time resident of Yogyakarta, Nikolaus Girardet,[17] who like myself found our still youthful-looking teacher (he would die young in his mid-40s) quite the Prussian schoolmaster. We were drilled like schoolboys in Javanese grammar and aksara Jawa (Javanese script). But all these trials stood us in good stead. This was especially so when we entered the Widyo Budoyo keraton library armed with our teachers’ 1971 catalogue[18]  to read manuscripts sitting cross-legged on the tiled floor with our Javanese texts opened on low tables in front us. From time to time, when I turned up to interview Yogyakartan littérateurs (budayawan) of an older generation, I would be tested before the interview by having a page of an aksara Jawa manuscript put under my nose and told to read it to my interviewee before he would agree to let me speak with him—presumably to ensure I was not a time-wasting dilletante, who had turned up out of curiosity to sit at the feet of a Yogyakarta guru! It was here that Pak Tistomo’s sedulous drilling in Javanese grammar and Javanese characters came into its own.

We were drilled like schoolboys in Javanese grammar and aksara Jawa (Javanese script). But all these trials stood us in good stead.

Professor Dr Sartono Kartodirjo (1921-2007; in post as Professor of Modern Indonesian History, 1968-86), Indonesia’s greatest post-War historian and an intellectual giant who knew how to use modern sociological concepts to inform the history of peasant movements. Photograph courtesy of UGM, 1986.

My Javanese-language teacher’s weekly drills also had an unexpected consequence when I first went up to the UGM Bulak Sumur campus early in my stay in the Tejokusuman to pay my respects to Professor Sartono. The first time I called on the eminent professor he paid me a remarkable compliment. It went like this: I had arrived early and was ushered into the front room of his university bungalow (rumah dinas) by his maid. Two students were already seated in this reception area, and I engaged them in conversation using my recently acquired—and still far from perfect—krama or High Javanese. As I warmed to the light-hearted banter of our exchange, I could hear Professor Sartono in the inner room of his house talking away to his family. For what seemed like a good twenty minutes, he did not emerge and I was beginning to think that his maid, who had ushered me into his house, had forgot to tell him that he had another visitor besides the two previously arrived students. Eventually, he came out, full of apologies, explaining that my krama had been so good that he thought he merely had Javanese student callers on his front porch. That was why he had kept me waiting! What was Sartono thinking? Let’s face it my krama was not that brilliant—I had by then only had a few drilling sessions with my Prussian schoolteacher Javanese tutor, Pak Tistomo, in the Rotowijayan. Was he really under the impression that he had another Javanese visitor? Or was he—in typical Sartono fashion—setting me completely at my ease by pretending that I was already binnen (an insider) in his beloved Javanese world? Whatever his inner thoughts, our relationship had begun auspiciously.[19]

From that moment, we had many wonderful meetings and it was through Sartono that I received my first paid commission as a young historian. This involved preparing the English synopses of the two Indonesian-language translations of the Dutch colonial government’s Staatkundig Overzicht van Nederlandsch Indië (Political Overview of the Netherlands Indies) for 1837 and 1839-48, which were published under the auspices of the National Archives in Jakarta in 1971 and 1973 respectively.[19] When I first arrived in Yogyakarta in December 1971, Sartono had not been many years in post as Professor of Modern Indonesian History (1968-86). But I knew him to be an historian of high integrity whose recently published PhD thesis, The peasants’ revolt of Banten in 1888, its conditions, course and sequel; A case study of social movements in Indonesia (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1966) [KITLV, Verhandelingen 50] had earned him a cum laude accolade at his graduation at the University of Amsterdam in 1966. His subsequent publications on agrarian radicalism in Java, in which he advanced a sociological typology of such movements, were publications which I remember eagerly devouring as a graduate student when I returned to Oxford in June 1973.[20] One cannot imagine going today to Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford to order any new English-language publication by a leading Indonesian historian—the benchmark set by Sartono has proven almost too impossibly high.

One cannot imagine going today to Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford to order any new English-language publication by a leading Indonesian historian—the benchmark set by Sartono has proven almost too impossibly high.

So what has happened? It can be summed up in one word—integrity. Adherence to the highest standards of professional integrity is a sine qua non for any professional historian. This was Sartono’s ‘gold standard’, and it was strikingly evidenced in his principled stance on the last volume of the Indonesian National History commissioned in the early years of Suharto’s New Order (1966-98). When asked at the National History Conference at Udayana University in Bali in 1994 why this last volume had never appeared, “Sartono was very firm [in] saying that he refused to allow this final volume to be published because the military were trying to force their interpretations on him […] and he refused to produce a pro-New Order account of the 1965 coup.”[21]  Adrian Vickers, a leading Australian Indonesianist, witnessed Sartono making this statement as his co-panellists from the University of Indonesia sat on their hands, unwilling to venture any critical comments lest the New Order thought police report them to military intelligence. “It is thanks to [Sartono] that Gajah Mada University became the pre-eminent university for history writing”, Vickers continued, “while its main competitor, the University of Indonesia, remained under a cloud for being too pro-Suharto. […] [Indeed,] it is in writings such as Sartono’s that we find the continuation of democracy despite the decades of authoritarianism [under Suharto’s New Order].”[22]

I did not always see eye to eye with Sartono. I can remember a conversation with him on the historian’s craft in which he told me straight that, immediately after his inauguration as professor in 1968, he had stopped his students writing their theses on “babad, hikayat and historical poems (syair)”. “I stopped all that old-fashioned stuff because that’s not history but story telling” he told me with a smile. Instead, he urged his students to make use of the insights of sociology and anthropology, as well as cognate disciplines like demography and economics to make their history writing scientifically relevant. He also warned them not to be beguiled by the various histories of rulers and great men “because the common people (wong cilik)—farmers and labourers also have a crucial role on shaping history.”[23]  I could not fault him, but I felt uneasy because, even as I was listening to him speak, I had already begun to make a significant investment  in time and linguistic capital to try to access the rich corpus of babad literature on the mystic prince, Diponegoro (1785-1855). How could such a complex figure possibly be understood, I asked myself, without this vital Javanese dimension?[25]

~~~To Be Continued~~~

* Artikel To my teachers: A Reflection on 55 Years of Learning the Historian’s Craft (1964/65 – 2020) ini, bagian keempat dari 5 seri yang akan dipublikasikan di Langgar.co setiap hari Senin.  Artikel ini juga diterbitkan di Tirto.id dalam versi bahasa Indonesia.

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[17] Author (with Susan Piper) of Descriptive Catalogue of Javanese Manuscripts and Printed Books in the Main Libraries of Surakarta and Yogyakarta (Wiesbaden: Frans Steiner Verlag, 1983).

[18] Drs. Mudjanattistomo, Katalogus Manuskrip Kraton Jogjakarta (Yogyakarta: Departemen P & K, 1971).

[19] See Peter Carey, ‘Sartono Kartodirjo Remembered’, in M. Nursam, Baskara T. Wardaya SJ and Asvi Warman Adam (eds.), Sejarah yang Memihak; Mengenang Sartno Kartodirjo (Yogyakarta: Penerbit Ombak, 2008), pp.195-97.

[20] Sartono Kartodirjo (ed.) Laporan politik tahun 1837 (Staatkundig overzicht van Nederlandsch Indië, 1837). (Djakarta: Arsip Nasional, 1971); Id. , Ikhtisar keadaan politik Hindia-Blanda tahun 1839–1848 (Jakarta: Arsip Nasional, 1973).

[21] Sartono Kartodirjo, “Agrarian radicalism in Java”, in Claire Holt (ed.), Culture and politics in Indonesia, pp. 71–125 (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1972); Id., Protest Movements in Rural Java: A Study of Agrarian Unrest in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1973).

[22] Adrian Vickers, “Sartono Kartodirjo, 1921-2007”, Inside Indonesia, 15 December 2007.

[23] Vickers, “Sartono”.

[24] See Atiqoh Hasan, “Profil: Sartono Kartodirjo”, tttps://m.merdeka.com/profil/indonesia/s/sartono-kartodirjo/, diunduh 20 Februari 2017.

[25] Carey, Sisi Lain Diponegoro, pp.x-xi.

 

My principal saviour during my time as a graduate and research student at Oxford in the mid to late 1970s was Professor Merle Ricklefs (1943-2019), who was then teaching Southeast Asian history at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London (1969-79).[4] I had first met him in Yogyakarta in 1972-73 when I was still a callow graduate student working for my Oxford PhD on ‘Pangeran Dipanagara and the Making of the Java War, 1825-30’ and living in the dalem (princely residence) of Pangeran Tejokusumo (1893-1974) and learning Javanese. I doubt that I made a very good impression on him in that first meeting. I was intensely ambitious and woefully ill-equipped for serious scholarly research.[5] But our friendship took off after the publication of his magisterial study of Yogyakarta’s first Sultan, Mangkubumi (r. 1749-92) in May 1974.[6] I remember sitting in the garden of my mother’s house in Surrey, UK, over two memorable summer days in June of that year reading Merle’s book from cover-to-cover without a break. ‘This is totally amazing”, I thought to myself, “and exactly what I want to do for my Diponegoro study!” From that moment Merle became a beacon and a benchmark for me. He set the bar for historical scholarship, his painstaking historical narrative based on the Dutch colonial archives and Javanese chronicles (babad) constituting a ‘gold standard’ for Javanese studies. This is something that all historians of pre-colonial Java should aspire to but rarely achieve, particularly here in Indonesia where the debased currency of project-driven history (sejarah proyek-proyek) tends to take precedence over painstaking archival research.

So, the years passed, and a deep friendship and collegiality developed between us. Merle was always very much my senior in status and professional standing—he was my informal Oxford DPhil supervisor and examiner (November 1975), and our relationship mirrored that of Pangeran Mangkubumi to Raden Mas Said (Mangkunegoro I) during the Third Javanese War of Succession (1746-57). Thankfully, however, no rift ever developed between us akin to that which separated the first Yogyakarta ruler and his mercurial ally.[7] Instead, our friendship steadily deepened and we began to find a number of uncanny parallels between our lives. Both of us, for example, experienced the joys and sorrows of having younger children with multiple physical challenges, who predeceased us. We were also fated to build our professional careers as Southeast Asia historians at a time when interest and public funding for such studies were fast receding in the aftermath of Second Vietnam War (1964-73) when the United States withdrew its military forces from Indochina. Finally, we both entered the world of Javanese history through in-depth biographical studies of two of late pre-colonial Java’s greatest historical figures—Sultan Mangkubumi (1717-92; r. 1749-92) and Prince Diponegoro (1785-1855).

Two other seminal experiences for my training as an historian of Southeast Asia and Java in particular, were my brief year as a graduate student at Cornell University in 1969-70, and my subsequent two years in Java, where, after a three-month stint in the National Archives (October-December 1971), I came to live—for free (my landlady, Ibu Kusumobroto/Raden Ayu Sriningdyah, daughter-in-law of Gusti Tejokusumo,  never charged me any rent)—in the princely residence of the Tejokusuman in Yogyakarta (1971-73). I will deal briefly with this latter period first.

My years at the Tejokusuman, which also doubled as the location of the Krida Beksa Wirama dance, drama and music (karawitan) school (1918) founded by Gusti (Bendoro Pangeran Ario) Tejokusumo (1893-1974), son of Sultan Hamengkubuwono VII (r.1877-1921), truly immersed me in Javanese culture. Every day there were dance practices in the pendopo and the music of the gamelan flowed through the Ndalem (princely residence) like ‘moonlight and flowing water’ in the words of the French composer, Claude Debussy (1862-1918).[8] At weekends there would sometimes be full-scale dance performances which extended my understanding of Javanese traditional dance forms and drama. It also introduced me to the world of Javanese kebatinan (science of the inner) via my association with one of the Yogyakarta-based co-founders of the Paguyuban Sumarah kebatinan organisation, Pak Suhardo.[9] Since I have written about some of these experiences elsewhere in connection with my involuntary contact with the world of the Javanese ancestors (leluhur),[10] this is not the place to dwell on these non-academic influences on my intellectual formation as a Javanist. Whatever view one may hold about such contacts with the spirit world, I am sure that my former Oxford supervisor, Richard Cobb, would have heartily approved of this immersion, seeing these experiences as a necessary rite de passage for the development of my ‘second identity’ as an historian of modern Java!

Every day there were dance practices in the pendopo and the music of the gamelan flowed through the Ndalem (princely residence) like ‘moonlight and flowing water’ in the words of the French composer, Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

So, for present purposes, I will stick here with those from whom I benefitted directly in a more practical—academic, linguistic and research-related—sense. There were four such individuals in Indonesia during my time as a research/graduate student in 1971-73 and 1976-77. To this day I feel an abiding sense of gratitude to all of them. Two helped me materially with my archival and manuscript research. The first was Pak Sundoyo, a long-time assistant archivist at ANRI (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia), then situated in the magnificent old archive building—formerly the residence (buitenplaats/country estate) of the late-eighteenth-century Governor-General, Reynier de Klerck (1710-80;  in office, 1777-80)—at Jalan Gajahmada no.111. He had worked under the last Dutch landsarchivaris (state archivist), Dr Frans Rijndert Johan Verhoeven (1905-87; in office, 1937-42), and had an exceptional knowledge of the colonial archives. So much so that, although, when I was doing my archival research (1971, 1976-77), there were no available finding aids for the colonial and residency archives, and I had no access to the Dutch colonial era filing system (klapper), all I had to do was to give Pak Sundoyo the official (ie original colonial era) reference number of the document I was looking for and within what seemed like the blink of an eye, the document would be on my desk.[11] Indeed, Pak Sundoyo would often come back from the archival depot with other related documents which I had not asked for, but which he thought I might find interesting! This was highly personal and bespoke service. Obviously, I would not get that kind of service today and it was probably only possible then because I was—for most of the time I worked in the Indonesian State Archives (ANRI) (1971, 1976-77)—the only reader there!

My second ‘guardian angel’ was the retired bupati of Bantul, K.R.T. Pusponingrat (died 1985), to whom I dedicated the first volume of my Archive of Yogyakarta published texts in 1980.[12] He made a massive contribution to my research by romanising nearly 5,000 pages of Javanese manuscripts and letters. These included all the materials in the Yogyakarta archives looted by the British following the fall of the Yogyakarta court on 20 June 1812 and now in the British Library, as well as all the key Javanese babad (chronicles) relating to Diponegoro. These latter included the prince’s autobiography written in Manado (1831-32), the Buku Kedhung Kebo (Chronicle of the Buffaloes’ Watering Hole) written on the orders of Diponegoro’s adversary, Raden Adipati Cokronegoro I (1779-1862), the first post-Java War bupati of Purworejo (in office 1831-56),[13] and the court versions of Babad Diponegoro composed in Surakarta by the court poet (pujangga-Dalem), Sosrodipuro II (c.1780-1844),[14] and the three-volume Babad Ngayogyakarta which covers the whole period from 1812 to the 1860s by Diponegoro’s nephew, Pangeran Suryonegoro (1822-c.1886), and his former army commander in Banyumas, Basah Gondokusumo (1810-c.1885; post-1847, Raden Adipati Danurejo V of Yogyakarta, in office 1847-79).[15] The sheer volume of romanised Javanese materials which Pak Puspo prepared for me, all with indexes and short English-language introductions, which I wrote myself, proved an invaluable resource when it came to writing up my thesis. I also had three copies of each of these romanised babad carefully bound by the Percetakan Kanisius in Yogyakarta and distributed to libraries in Leiden and Australia so that they would be available for scholars worldwide.[16]

As with Pak Sundoyo at ANRI, to whom I gave one very modest present of a dress white shirt for the October 1976 Hari Raya Idulfitri, Pak Puspo helped me out of an abiding interest and love of Javanese history, not for pecuniary gain. So, although he was not left out of pocket and I paid for the typewriter and all the paper and other materials he used, financial reward was not the main motivation for his transliteration work. Indeed, the personal contribution of these two remarkable Javanese gentlemen gave me an abiding admiration for the quiet honour and decency of an older Javanese generation (now long departed) and their abiding inspiration drawn from the maxim, ‘sepi ing pamrih, ramé ing gawé, mengayu-ayuning buwono’ (‘someone who helps others sincerely without asking anything in return for the beautification of the world’).

 

~~~To Be Continued~~~

* Artikel To my teachers: A Reflection on 55 Years of Learning the Historian’s Craft (1964/65 – 2020) ini, bagian ketiga dari 5 seri yang akan dipublikasikan di Langgar.co setiap hari Senin. Artikel ini juga diterbitkan di Tirto.id dalam versi bahasa Indonesia.

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[4] In December 1979, Merle moved to Australia where he remained for the rest of his professional academic career, teaching  first at Monash, 1980-93, then at the Australian National University (ANU),  and finally back to Melbourne, where he was respectively Director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (1993-98) and foundation Director of the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies (1998-2005). In October-December 1983 he came to Oxford for a three-month period as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College.

[5] For a brief insight into Merle’s first impressions of the present writer during his time in the Ndalem Tejokusuman in Yogyakarta (1971-73), see Hera (ed.), Urip iku Urub, pp.xii-xviii.

[6] Merle C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792; A history of the division of Java (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).

[7] Tentang hubungan yang tegang dan pada akhirnya retak antara Pangeran (pasca-1749, Sultan) Mangkubumi dan Raden Mas Said selama Perang Giyanti (1746-57), lihat Merle C. Ricklefs, Samber Nyawa: Kisah Perjuangan Seorang Pahlawan Nasional Indonesia, Pangeran Mangkunagara I (1726-1795) (Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2020), Bab 5.

[8] Debussy first heard Javanese gamelan music at the Paris Universal Exposition (Exposition Universelle) in 1889, and the scales, melodies, rhythms and ensemble textures appealed to him so much that echoes can be found in ‘Pagodes’ in his 1903 piano suite Estampes, a composition for Solo Piano, see Mervyn Cooke, “The East in the West: Evocations of the Gamelan in Western Music”, in Jonathan Bellman (ed.), The Exotic in Western Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp.258-60.

[9] For information on Pak Suhardo, the second of Sumarah’s founders, see Paul Stange, ‘The Logic of Rasa in Java’, Indonesia 38 (October 1984), pp.122-23, quoting interview with Pak Suhardo, July 1972; and Id., Kejawen Modern; Hakikat dalam Penghayatan Sumarah (Yogyakarta: LKiS, 2009), pp.17-18, where Stange  discusses Suhardo’s understanding of Hakiki (Truth), which is so central to the Sumarah practice, and is identical to the “guru sejati,” the true teacher, and the figure Dewaruci in Javanese mythology,

[10] Hera (ed.), Urip iku Urub, pp.31-38.

[11] These were often documents relating to the Besluiten van den Gouverneur-Generaal buiten / in rade     (Decisions of the Governor-General taken without or with the presence of the Council of the Indies or Raad van Indië), Kabinets brieven (letters from the royal cabinet /kabinet des konings in the Hague) or a Memorie van Overgave (Final Administrative Report). A list of most of the documents which Pak Sundoyo found for me during the 18 months I worked in ANRI in October-December 1971 and July 1976-June 1977 can be found in Peter Carey, “The Residency Archive of Jogjakarta”, Indonesia 25:115–50.

[12] P.B.R. Carey (ed.), The Archive of Yogyakarta. Vol. I: Documents relating to politics and internal court affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

[13] See Peter Carey, Sisi Lain Diponegoro; Babad Kedung Kebo dan Historiografi Perang Jawa (Edisi Kedua Jakarta: KPG, 2018)

[14] Peter Carey (ed. and trans.), Babad Dipanagara; A Surakarta Court Poet’s Account of the Outbreak of the Java War (1825-30). Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS) Monograph no.9 (Kuala Lumpur: MBRAS [Second revised edition of original 1981 publication], 2020).

[15] Babad Ngayogyakarta. Vol. I–III. Museum Sono Budoyo (Yogyakarta) MS A. 135, A. 136, A. 144. Salinan bertanggal 1833 J (1903 M), 1834 J (1904 M), 1836 J (1906 M). 407 hlm., 336 hlm., 460 hlm., 100 canto, 73 canto, 76 canto. Aslinya ditulis di Yogyakarta oleh Pangeran Suryonegoro dan Raden Adipati Danurejo V, dan diselesaikan pada 1805 J (1876 M).

[16] Three bound copies of each of these manuscripts were made and were distributed to the Australian National University (ANU) Library, the Koninklijk Instituut Library (now Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden/ UBL) in Leiden, and one complete bound set for myself. Pak Puspo kept one unbound copy for himself.

So who were my tutors at Oxford? My main tutor and supervisor at Oxford was Richard Cobb,[1] a celebrated historian of France who always spoke about the need for a successful historian to develop a ‘second identity’ in the country, society and era in which he or she was specialising. In Richard’s case this was France and the late eighteenth-century Revolutionary era (1780s-1820s) which was his speciality and on which he wrote extensively. For myself, Indonesia has become my second identity especially the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Javanese world which Diponegoro inhabited. That is what draws me back to Indonesia again and again. There is also the fact that here my work is appreciated and can ‘flower’, in the sense that it can inspire a whole range of creative endeavours such as Mas Landung Simatupang’s tuturan or pementasan dramatik ‘Aku Diponegoro’ in which he staged a dramatic reading of Diponegoro’s babad (autobiography) in four places closely associated with the prince: Magelang, where he was treacherously arrested on 28 March 1830 (26 November 2013), Tegalrejo just to the northwest of Yogyakarta where he grew to manhood (1793-1803) (8 January 2014), the Stadhuis (Town Hall) in Batavia (now Jakarta) where he was detained for nearly a month (8 April – 3 May 1830) awaiting his voyage into exile in Sulawesi (1830-55) (6 March 2014), and finally Fort Rotterdam, Makassar (5 June 2014) where he spent his last twenty-two years.

In Oxford, the way we taught history followed certain periods. The major divide was between ‘Ancient History’ and ‘Modern History’. The first, Ancient History, focussed on the ancient Greeks and Romans ending shortly after the reign of the Emperor Constantine (272-337 AD), the first Roman emperor to claim conversion to Christianity. The instability which followed his reign led to the fall of this Western Roman empire in the late fifth century (476), a process which began with the ‘Barbarian’ (Vandal, Goth, Visigoth) invasions of sildenafil pagamento in contanti alla consegna Rome. My long-time colleague during my nearly 30 years teaching at Trinity College, Bryan Ward-Perkins, was an historian of this period of the late Roman Empire and the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (400-700) which followed. Renowned for his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), he opened my eyes to the ways in which archaeology can inform history. A finer colleague on this earth one could not wish to have. He was in every way an inspiration.

My long-time colleague during my nearly 30 years teaching at Trinity College, Bryan Ward-Perkins, was an historian of this period of the late Roman Empire and the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (400-700) which followed.

My own focus, however, was solidly on ‘Modern history’, which, for the purposes of the Oxford were deemed to start with the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ in Europe. In this one and half millennia (1,500 years) our Oxford History School concentrated on four principal periods: (1) ‘early medieval’, which went from the Dark Ages to around 1250, concentrating particularly on the so-called ‘High Middle Ages’ which saw a rapidly increasing population in Europe, urbanization and the 12^th-century ‘Renaissance’. This was followed by (2) the later Middle Ages (1250-1500), a period which saw rapid depopulation (40-60 percent), economic contraction, civil strife and peasant revolts as the Eurasian landmass was wracked by calamities such as the Black Death (bubonic plague) (1346-53) and wars (eg the ‘Hundred Years War’ between England and France, 1337-1543; and the Wars of the Roses between the Lancastrian and Yorkist contenders for the English throne, 1455-85). In England, Henry Tudor’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), and his subsequent reign as Henry VII (1485-1509) ushered in what we in Oxford understood as the third or ‘Early Modern’ (1485-1688) period, which lasted until the Dutch king, William of Orange (William III’s, r. 1689-1702) successful ‘descent on England’ (invasion of 1688). Then came the fourth and final period of ‘Modern History’ proper, focussing on Britain’s rise, decline and fall from great power status. This ended, when I started teaching in Oxford in 1979, with the Second World War (1939-45).

It was this very ‘English’ periodization of history (Ireland and Scotland hardly got a look in!) with which I had to engage as a young history tutor at Trinity College, Oxford. I was thrown in the deep end! From the start, I was required to give tutorials on a great range of different subjects. I was required to teach all the subjects listed below to Oxford undergraduates during my career and reading them up so I was one step ahead of the often very bright undergraduates was very time consuming. This period ‘before the mast’ as a tutorial fellow lasted nearly thirty years, beginning in October 1979, when I took up my post as Laithwaite Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Trinity, ending in October 2008, when I resigned my Fellowship to come to settle permanently in Indonesia. The papers I taught included the latter part of the early modern period of English history, namely the reign of James I & VI of England & Scotland [1603-25] through to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the constitutional reforms which established the political primacy of the British parliament following William of Orange’s invasion. I also taught the ‘long eighteenth century’ from 1688 through to the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the first major reform of the British Parliament. In addition, I was required to read up on political theory and give tutorials on key political philosophers (Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx), economic theorists and sociologists (Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber),  historians like Edward Gibbon (1737-94) (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-88/89), Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59, ‘not only the greatest but the most representative Englishman then living’, in Lord Acton’s words) and the works of the French Annales School (Fernand Braudel, Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie).

The papers I taught included the latter part of the early modern period of English history, namely the reign of James I & VI of England & Scotland [1603-25] through to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the constitutional reforms which established the political primacy of the British parliament following William of Orange’s invasion

As if this was not enough, I was also required to teach European and non-European history from 1714 (the Peace of Utrecht which ended the Spanish Succession War, 1701-14) to 1856 (The Crimean War, 1853-56), and French literature (Proust, Flaubert, De Maupassant), art (Impressionists and post-impressionists) and politics during  the early Third Republic in France (1871-1940). The only course I taught which focussed on my own area of expert was one which I largely developed myself. This was an optional subject in non-European history (known in Oxford as a ‘Further Subject’) on ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’, where I developed an option entitled ‘The Making of the Modern States of Maritime Southeast Asia (ie Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia), 1870-1973’. Only a handful of undergraduates chose this in any one year. At the most, I would get half a dozen takers. But interestingly some of these were Southeast Asians, including Singaporeans, Thai, Malaysians and Filipinos—never Indonesians. Many of these Southeast Asian students became firm friends, with whom I remain in contact to this day. A few went on to become professional academic historians in their own countries. One of these was Dr Pingjin (P.J.) Thum, who wrote his PhD thesis on ‘Chinese-language political mobilisation in Singapore, 1953-63’ (March 2011) and went on to found the ‘New Naratif’ movement for democracy, freedom of information and freedom of expression in Southeast Asia.

I am sure that teaching such a broad sweep of different subjects in British and European history was all ‘good for the soul’ and gave me a breadth of view of history which I would not have gained if I had taught in a more specialist department of Southeast Asian history, like the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London. But during my nearly thirty years as a tutor in Oxford my research work on Java was almost entirely ignored. There was no institutional place for things Indonesian or Javanese in the Oxford curriculum. Since Java had not become a British Crown Colony at the end of British occupation (1811-16) at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), as Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826; Lieutenant-Governor of Java, 1811-16) had hoped, there was no wider popular awareness of Indonesia in British society. The only exceptions were from Church groups like CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development) and Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) like Tapol (1973-present), who both had an interest in the ongoing Indonesian military occupation of East Timor, 1975-99; and the barely comprehended horror of the 30 September 1965 coup and its bloody aftermath.

My modern Indonesian speciality was so marginal in Oxford that I can remember the then Professor of Latin American History (1972-89), Christopher Platt (1934-89), in the mid-1980s, when I was still a young Oxford don, inviting me to give a talk to the Oxford History Faculty on the ‘British in Indonesia’ and no-one turning up—I mean no-one! Maybe they thought I would talk about the Amboyna massacre of 1623 or something equally remote! In fact, I wanted to talk about Raffles. But no matter, all my time at Oxford I lived a marginal existence in terms of my speciality and my scholarship was tolerated but not considered important: as the late Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), our Regius Professor (1957-80) in my first year as an Oxford History don (tutor), put it Java ‘had no history’ because ‘beyond the Hellespont (Dardanelles), there was just the whirling of Dervish tribes’. These were lands with no history. But here in Indonesia what I study and write on is deeply appreciated and I have regularly addressed gatherings of more than 700-800 people all interested in the history of Diponegoro. One would never get such a turn-out in the UK!

 ~~~To Be Continued~~~

 

* Artikel To my teachers: A Reflection on 55 Years of Learning the Historian’s Craft (1964/65 – 2020) ini, bagian kedua dari 4 seri yang akan dipublikasikan di Langgar.co setiap hari Senin. Baca artikel sebelumnya

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[3] Richard Cobb (1917-1996), yang pernah menjadi supervisor saya, mengambil perspektif wong cilik yang dikembangkannya dalam disertasinya—kemudian diterbitkan pertama kali dalam Bahasa Prancis (1961) dan diterjemahkan dalam Bahasa Inggris oleh Marianne Elliot (Oxford 1987), The People’s Armies (The Armées Revolutionnaires: Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal Year II)—dan bukunya yang lain seperti The Police and the People; French Popular Protest, 1789-1820 (Oxford 1970). Pandangan Cobb yang sangat individual terhadap penulisan sejarah dan kesimpulan yang idiosinkratik tentang Revolusi mirip dengan kejeniusan sejarawan Indonesia seperti Ong Hok Ham (1933-2007), yang senang mengungkapkan paradoks dalam tulisan sejarah.Cobb dan Ong sama-sama mengagumi orang-orang kecil dan sikap mereka. Sebagai sejarawan, mereka tidak tertarik pada gerakan massa atau cakrawala besar sejarah nasional. Kendati demikian, walaupun keduanya seolah menolak sejarah sosiologis, teori Historiografi, dan sejarah berbasis statistik, mereka tahu menggunakan statistik dan teknik sosiologis dengan sangat jeli dan efektif. Di tangan mereka, kejadian geografis, asal-usul sosial, usia, perkerjaan, dan berbagai kedekatan dengan wong durjana (bandit), ronggeng/pelacur, gadis yang bekerja, bunuh diri, dan tentara pembelot, menjadi hidup. Itu tampak sekali pada skripsi S1 Ong tentang pergerakan Samin (1905-1907), komunitas di areal Blora yang membangkang terhadap Pemerintah Hindia Belanda dengan menolak membayar pajak dan melakukan kewajiban kerja rodi, yang ia selesaikan pada 1964.Sebenarnya, sejarah akar rumput adalah basis buku-buku Cobb dan artikel Ong. Dalam kisah Revolusi Prancis dan dunia priayi Madiun abad ke-19, Cobb dan Ong berbicara untuk rakyat. Bukan untuk aktivis militan, orator yang menyatakan cita-cita, birokrat yang mengatur represi dan kemenangan, atau sukarelawan heroik yang mengabdi pada tentara Republik di perbatasan. Pahlawan, bagi Cobb dan Ong, adalah rakyat biasa yang berharap dapat makan dan minum dan bercinta, tidak ada hubungannya dengan journées (aksi politik), gerakan revolusioner, atau perang melawan tentara sekutu tatanan lama monarkis. Dua sejarawan nyentrik itu lebih suka pemuda yang membelot dari kewajiban militer dan yang menjadi bagian dari “gerakan populer secara default”. Ong sendiri mempunyai pedoman yang sangat menarik bagi sejarawan Indonesia. Pedoman ini dikutip TP Danang dalam tesis S2-nya (Danang 2016:77) dari penulis biografi Ong, David Reeve: “Ambil tokoh yang sedang mengalami stres berat. Ikuti apa yang terjadi dengan dia (melalui sumber/arsip) (dan tulis kajianmu). Itulah sejarah yang benar!”

 

 

Background

My young friend and colleague, Akhlis Syamsal Qomar (Madiun), asked me to reflect on how I had learnt my craft as an historian and who were the main influences on my intellectual development in the service of Clio. This is actually a big ask and I can only make a modest beginning. First let me start with a bit of background because my interest in history and things historical started a long way back—almost as soon as I started reading historical novels when I was at my Preparatory School (SD)—Temple Grove, near Uckfield in East Sussex (1955-61).

I was always interested in history. I have a very vivid imagination and devoured the historical novels about the Crusades by the French novelist and first woman ever elected as one of the French literary ‘immortals’ to the Académie française,  Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87). I also have a very pictorial imagination—it is almost as though I can see things in 3-D, like a film-script unrolling before my eyes. I believe the past never dies but is a submerged presence in all our lives. Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 1913) is a touchstone for me here with its ability to resurrect complete worlds with their sounds, smells and feel. Proust wrote that everyone who lives has an appel or a ‘calling’—mine was certainly history. I could have also been a filmmaker or a novelist, but I prefer real-life memoirs rather than novels because for me life is stranger than fiction. I also firmly believe in William Faulkner’s (1897-1962) famous phrase that ‘the past isn’t dead—it isn’t even past!’

My first training as an historian – Winchester College (1961-65)

My ‘baptism of fire’ as a budding historian was really at the age of 15-16 when I was at my High School—one of the UK’s so-called ‘public schools’, Winchester College—where I had a very remarkable history teacher. His name was Mark Stephenson—and I dedicated my 1992 book the British in Java, 1811-1816; A Javanese Account (Oxford: OUP) to him (‘For Mark Stephenson, my history master at Winchester, who first inspired me with an interest in chronicles’). He did this by teaching us to write essays on the ‘Time of Troubles’ or civil war  (1139-54) during the reign of the English King, Stephen (r.1135-54), known as the ‘Anarchy’, by using contemporary Latin chronicles: namely (1) the Gesta Regis Stephani, a mid-12^th century Latin chronicle by an anonymous author (certainly a cleric, probably the Bishop of Bath), who was very pro-Stephen; and (2) the Historia Novella by William of Malmesbury (1095-1143), the greatest English historian of the 12^th century, who was very critical of the king and in favour of his main opponent.

My ‘baptism of fire’ as a budding historian was really at the age of 15-16 when I was at my High School—one of the UK’s so-called ‘public schools’, Winchester College—where I had a very remarkable history teacher.

Obviously, we were not required to read the chronicles in the original Latin (that would have been impossible for me because my knowledge of Latin was poor), but we were expected to read the English translations carefully and come to our own conclusions citing the original texts. We were not allowed to sneak away and consult the key secondary texts like Dom David Knowles (1896-1974), Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (1954-63), magisterial history of the English church (The Monastic Order in England, 943-1216 [1949]), which had just been republished (1963) when I was studying at Winchester. If we did that, our essays would be torn up and thrown in the wastepaper basket. Actually, tutorial sessions with Mark were quite forbidding. For a start he looked like a version of Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s famous 1847 novel, played by Laurence Olivier, with a great shock of black hair and piercing eyes:

Laurence Olivier (post-1947, Sir Laurence, 1907-89) as Heathcliff in the 1939 Samuel Goldwyn Hollywood film of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights. Photo: Wikipedia.

But his tutorials were also very invigorating. This was a one-on-one tutorial. We went to his study in ‘College’—the oldest (14^th century) part of the school in a medieval building to talk about medieval history (!)—and he would usually have a tray laid for his dinner. If one did well and produced an essay based on one’s own reading of the original Latin texts (in English translation) with sensible conclusions one would be invited to share a part of his meal. If one tried to cheat by using secondary published works, then your essay was destined for the wastepaper basket! For a 15-year-old, this was a real ‘baptism of fire’, and it prepared me really well for dealing with Javanese chronicles relating to the Java War and the equally forbidding—Javanese Heathcliff—figure of Prince Diponegoro (1785-1855).

Studying medieval English history and the era when the throne of England was contested between an inept king, Stephen, and the Empress Matilda, daughter of the previous ruler, Henry I (r. 1100-35), was also a very good preparation for understanding the murderous intricacies of Javanese history and events like the First Javanese Succession War (1704-08) during which Amangkurat III’s bloody rule (1703-1708) was contested by his uncle (paklik) Pakubuwono I (r. 1704-19); or the bloody events in the Yogyakarta court when Diponegoro was coming to manhood (1808-1812) and the court was torn between the factions around the Kerajan (Raja Putra Narendra – future HB III) and the Kasepuhan (Sultan Sepuh/HB II) split in the Yogyakarta court during the reign of the Second Sultan (1792-1810/1811-12/1826-28).

So, this was what I took away from my Win. Coll. (Winchester College) education, which in many other respects was a purgatory for me because there was a great deal of violence (institutionalised bullying) and I was a shy and retiring lad. But for my evolution as an historian it was really massive—a foundation for my later training and career a Javanese historian as it really awakened me to the importance of respecting and using primary sources. Nothing I came across subsequent to that in Oxford, Leiden, Cornell or Yogyakarta really matched that.

But for my evolution as an historian it was really massive—a foundation for my later training and career a Javanese historian as it really awakened me to the importance of respecting and using primary sources.

Growing up in post-colonial Burma

I certainly think my upbringing in Burma counted for much in prompting my academic interest in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. My mother and father’s families both had a long association with Asia. My mother, Wendy (1915-2006), was born in Shanghai and grew up in China between 1915 and 1935. My father, Thomas Brian Carey (1910-70), meanwhile, although born in Liverpool, hailed from a family with a famous ancestor, William Carey (1761-1834), who was a Baptist missionary for 40 years in Kolkata/West Bengal and oversaw the translation of the Bible into 27 different Indian languages and dialects.

When we eventually returned to the ‘old country’ (UK) in 1955-56, all our close family friends had that shared experience in Asia, indeed they were nearly all old ‘Burma hands’. I grew up in a late colonial setting. I was also very lucky to win an English-Speaking Union (ESU) scholarship to undertake graduate studies at Cornell which then had a simply superb Southeast Asia program with plenty of opportunities to study SE Asian languages, Indonesian in particular. It was there in Ithaca in Upper State New York that I began my study of Malay/Bahasa there with native speakers. That year was also the start of my specific focus on Indonesia and I have written about this at length elsewhere.[2]

The Invisible Man – Oxford, Man and Boy (1966-2008)

Actually I was in Oxford—man and boy—for 42 years from 1966-2008, first as an undergraduate reading for an Honours Degree in Modern History at Trinity College (1966-69), then as a graduate student (1973-75) (after two years in Indonesia living in Jakarta and the Tejokusuman, 1971-73); then as a Research Fellow at Magdalen College (1974-79), when I finished my PhD thesis on ‘Pangeran Dipanagara and the Making of the Java War, 1825-30’ (supervised [1974-75] and examined by Merle Ricklefs, November 1975), and then as Fellow and Tutor at my old college Trinity, for the best part of 30 years (1979-2008). I eventually retired from Oxford in October 2008, after teaching there for 35 years, to settle permanently in Indonesia. This was also seminal for my development as an historian. We had well over 100 historians on the books of the History Faculty – amongst which were 90 permanent academic staff (of whom I was one), and fifteen statutory professors and readers (Assistant Professor). It was very impressive. Obviously the downside was that there was almost zero interest in Southeast Asian (still less Indonesian) history and I never had an Indonesian student who came to study for a PhD in history, but this was made up for in part by wonderful colleagues whom I found really impressive in their own fields. I just could not imagine what it would be like—as at present in one well known university here in Indonesia—to be in a Faculty full of plagiarists and sejarawan proyek-proyek! I would not want to continue as an historian in that situation, certainly not in an academic career—I would be a high school (SMA) history teacher!

 ~~~To Be Continued~~~

 

* Artikel To my teachers: A Reflection on 55 Years of Learning the Historian’s Craft (1964/65 – 2020) ini, bagian pertama dari 4 seri yang akan dipublikasikan di Langgar.co setiap hari Senin.

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[1] Whatsapp Mas Akhlis Syamsal Qomar, 12 June 2020, reads: ‘Sugeng enjing Prof. Semoga Prof Peter dan keluarga senantiasa diberikan kesehatan di tengah pandemic sekarang.Jika boleh sharing terkait perjalanan panjang sebagai seorang sejarawan dan intelektual publik yang diakui dedikasinya, kiranya siapa yang banyak membentuk dan mempengaruhi karier akademik Panjenengan sampai sekarang?'[‘Good morning, Professor, Here’s hoping that Prof. Peter and his family will always be given good health in the midst of the current pandemic. If you are agreeable, could you share something about your long journey as an historian and public intellectual whose dedication is recognised. So who exactly has shaped and influenced your academic career to date?’].

[2] See Peter Carey, “Menyusuri Jalan yang Jarang Dilalui, Sebuah Otobiografi Singkat”, in FX Domini BB Hera (ed.), Urip iku Urub; Untaian Persembahan 70 Tahun Profesor Peter Carey (Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2019), pp.21-26.