citizens of empire, some comparative observations on the evolution of creole nationalism in colonial...

Citizens of Empire: SomeComparative Observations on theEvolution of Creole Nationalism in Colonial IndonesiaULBE BOSMA

International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

An imaginary Berlin Wall stands between nationalist trajectories of the West-ern hemisphere and those of the East. While the nationalism of the West is gen-erally associated with Enlightenment, the Eastern version is usually referred toas dormant cultural or linguistic nationalism stirred up by Western education.1

It is an old academic canon that gained new respectability through Benedict An-derson’s Imagined Communities.2 But even if political realities in the post-colonial world apparently vindicated this academic canon, the same realitiesmight trap us into writing history retrospectively. A pertinent case in point is thenarrative of the emergence of the Indonesian nation in which the notion of aslumbering national identity has been central. A concomitant of that is the al-most complete isolation of Indonesian historiography from important discus-sions in other postcolonial societies.3 This article proposes a heterodox per-spective on the emergence of Indonesian nationalism, which is informed byliterature on Senegal and Bengal. This choice is not coincidental, as these lo-cations were the heartlands of the former French and English colonial empires.

In his writings on nationalism and the colonial world, the Indian historianPartha Chatterjee takes issue with what he considers to be the sociological de-terminism of the dominant discourse that is devoid of any historical interpreta-

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1 Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Geschiere, “The Forging of Nationhood: The Contest over Citi-zenship, Ethnicity and History,” in, Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Geschiere eds., The Forging ofNationhood: The Contest over Citizenship, Ethnicity and History (Delhi, 2002), p. 10. See HasanKayali’s critique of Hobsbawm in Arabs and the Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamismin the Ottoman Empire 1908–1918 (Berkeley, 1997), p. 11.

2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-alism (London, 1983).

3 Ariel Heryanto, “What Does Post-Modernism Do in Contemporary Indonesia?” Sojourn:Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 10, 1 (1995):33–44; Keith Foulcher, “In Search of thePostcolonial in the Indonesian Literature,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 10,2 (1995):147–71.

tion of the struggles and tensions that attended emerging nationalism.4 Aidedby an extensive historiography, Chatterjee points out that the spiritual founda-tions of modern Indian nationalism were part of the intellectual life of the nine-teenth-century comprador, or “middle classes.” His frame of reference is theearly nineteenth-century intellectual cultural renaissance of the bhadralok (theAnglicized higher castes) in Bengal.5 Chatterjee’s procedure might invite us torevisit other studies on the political life of these comprador classes, for exam-ple Wesley Johnson’s classic history of the emergence of African nationalismin Senegal, which he commences in the late eighteenth century. Johnson’s workhas set a standard for contemporary Senegalese historians, who tend to writetheir narratives on their nation in terms of plurality but never forget how its re-publican heart began to beat even before 1789.6 Returning to colonial Indone-sia, we should mention Takashi Shiraishi’s path-breaking study An Age in Mo-tion, in which he uncovers how creole journalists and politicians endowed theIndonesian nationalist movement with concepts like gathering, speech, strike,and unionism.7 Shiraishi offers a refreshing but not yet thoroughly pursuedbreak with the binary between colonial and indigenous, which he considers tobe primarily normative categories that gave structure and meaning to the de-colonization struggle.

What these three approaches to early nationalism in Bengal, Indonesia, andSenegal have in common is that they do not relegate comprador politicalthought to nationalist prehistory but place it right in the middle of the emerg-ing anti-colonial movements. By doing so, they question the assumption thatthe nationalist trajectories of these nations differ fundamentally from the na-tionalism of the European immigrants and their creole descendants in the Amer-icas. They also depart from the classical historicist approach, to which Hunting-ton, Hobsbawm, Gellner, and even Anderson are indebted and which considerscompeting national identities as the prime movers of history. A departure fromthat perspective might allow us to revisit anti-colonialism as something that isnot perforce about cultural or ethnic difference but essentially a critique of thepolitical economy of colonialism and its structures of discrimination.8 My con-tention is that this critique, which gives citizenship a central place, offers colo-nialism’s logical counterpoint rather than the question of cultural belonging.

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4 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (NewJersey, 1993), p. 5.

5 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Lon-don, 1986), pp. 20–21.

6 Mamadou Diouf, Histoire du Senegal: Le modèle islamo-wolof et ses périphéries (Paris,2001), p. 156; and “Représentations historiques et légitimités politiques au Sénégal (1960–1987),”Revue de la Bibliotheque Nationale 34 (Hiver 1989):14–23.

7 Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java 1912–1926 (Ithaca, 1990),p. 339.

8 This position also implies a revisiting of older works (including biographical and autobio-graphical) on early nationalists. See for example Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim: An Un-finished Autobiography [Netaji, Collected Works, Volume 1] (Delhi, 1997).

Struggles for citizenship might even call into crisis the formations of nationalidentity, as they entail a critique both of colonial and pre-colonial patriarchalstructures.9

Another point of critique pertains to the problem of anachronistic compar-isons. The binary between Eastern and Western nationalism is maintained bysuch an impossible comparison between the republican nationalism of SpanishAmerica and the devolution of the French, English, and Dutch colonial empiresin Africa and Asia. My main objection is that it gives a false impression of po-litical precociousness in the Western hemisphere. The centrality of citizenshipin the early nineteenth-century Latin American revolutions entailed, after all, avery partial project, which militated against the cultural rights of the indigenouspeople. Everywhere else, where creole elites were not politically dominant, par-ticularistic ideas about citizenship had an opportunity to mature into more sub-tle ideas about human rights. In many ways late nineteenth-century Asia andAfrica were less parochial than the societies that brought about the Latin Amer-ican and Caribbean revolutions more than a hundred years before.

The resistance of the “comprador classes” to colonialism was admittedly par-tial and conservative, yet we need to differentiate between the inevitable par-tiality, or conservatism, of their economic and social interests and the potentialuniversality of their claims about citizenship. The interests of the elite are bydefinition partial, and elite conflicts were part and parcel of any late colonialand postcolonial society’s polity. My focus is on how self-perceptions of thecolonial societies’ literati became revolutionized in the course of the nineteenthcentury and the early years of the twentieth century by various shades and com-binations of liberalism, Marxism, Islam, theosophy, and so on. These flows ofthought contradicted existing particularistic notions about ethnicity, caste, reli-gion, or class. I intend to explore how the intellectual leaders of the compradorclasses translated these contradictions into demands for a gradual extension ofcitizenship to colonial subjects and for responsible government. These were thecentral issues during the First World War, when the metropolitan governmentsbadly needed the loyalty and sacrifices of their colonial subjects. In the case ofcolonial Indonesia we will move our argument one step further. Although thehalcyon days of the notion of imperial citizen were over almost immediatelyafter the First World War, we will argue that by that time the creole political tra-dition had survived the repression of late colonial society and had positioneditself solidly in the emerging notion of Indonesia, when it was proclaimed bythe Sumpah Pemuda (the Pledge of the Indonesian Youth) in 1928.

an attempt to define creole nationalism

Creole nationalism, the central concept in our title, obviously deserves an ex-planation. The word creole has been deliberately chosen because it points not

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9 Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria andLebanon (New York, 2000).

just to European colonial descendants but also to a broader process of culturalcreolization, and reflects the liminal position of the comprador or middle class-es from whose ranks many of the early nationalist leaders came. I also use theword creole to give a name to a central idea in Benedict Anderson’s ImaginedCommunities. One of his most provocative arguments is that nationalism is nota European accomplishment but a peculiar blend of French and North Ameri-can thinking that was located in the Western hemisphere. This peculiar blendfits our understanding of creole. At the same time, I agree with Hastings thatAnderson, Gellner, and Hobsbawm belittle the older trajectories towards na-tionhood of the West European coastal states. But I would like to extend the im-plications of his critique to European overseas settlements, since we cannot ig-nore the existence and relevance of ‘vernacularized’ types of citizenship inancien régime colonial posts.10

The fact is that the southern part of the late eighteenth-century world mapwas littered with colonial enclaves, and some plantation societies, which en-closed a broad gamut of groups living in the orbit of colonial presence: freedslaves, descendants of European colonizers, local trading partners of the Euro-pean trading companies, and locally born planters and clerks. In these locali-ties embryonic notions of citizenship did exist prior to the emergence of thenineteenth-century “new” colonialism—which Cooper and Stoler define as in-spired by European bourgeois pretensions and values. If we accept, with Hast-ings, that these pre-nineteenth-century notions of citizenship are relevant in theage of “new” colonialism, we should ask how in Asia but also in Africa partic-ularistic notions of citizenship became inscribed by metropolitan liberal ide-ologies.11 In that respect, the situation in Africa and Asia was not entirely dif-ferent from the Caribbean and Latin American experience. What could beperceived as a revolutionary moment in the West, turning native subjects intoapprentices of liberal citizenship,12 became a more or less evolutionary trajec-tory in the East. It is important to acknowledge that in Africa and Asia this wasnot a unilinear process of middle classes absorbing the metropolitan ideologi-cal waves of the nineteenth century; it was part of a broader context of philo-sophical renewal of different world views: of Hinduism, Islam, and Confu-


10 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism(Cambridge, 1997), p. 10.

11 Sometimes these notions of citizenship went back to the practices of local rulers who grant-ed extraterritoriality to attract merchants. See Niels Steengaard’s seminal article, “Consuls and Na-tions in the Levant from 1570 to 1650,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 15 (1967):13–55;Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1988–1993). For specific modes of citizenship in the colonial enclaves of Indonesia in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, see Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, De oude Indische wereld 1500–1920(Amsterdam, 2003), pp. 44–47, 49–51, 80–82, 165. See too Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Coop-er, “Between Metropole and Colony,” in, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions ofEmpire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), p. 2.

12 Michiel Baud, In de schaduw van de bosrand. Over de dekolonisatie van de Latijnsameri-kaanse geschiedenis (Leiden, 1997), pp. 8–9; Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Euro-centrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, 2 (2000):215–32.

cianism. Naturally, these processes of renewal were not necessarily locatedwithin the framework of Western European colonialism, as was the case in Cen-tral Asia, and they might have been part of a vigorous resistance to the colonialstate, as was the case in Aceh.13 What matters here, however, is that within theorbit of the colonial state, no single intellectual tradition could monopolize theminds of the “middle classes,” which might explain why “syncretist” philoso-phies played such a central role in pioneering nationalism in Asia and Africa.

Our argument is that the thematic of citizenship in the East was unavoidablypositioned in plural societies and syncretist in character. Whereas in LatinAmerica mestizaje, or miscegenation, became central in nation-building, thiswas never the case in, for example, British India, where comprador classes likethe Parsees and Banias of Bombay or the bhadralok of Bengal, with their strongsense of spiritual autonomy, played a central role in early nationalism. It wouldnonetheless be a fallacy to conclude from the absence of a mestizaje processthat creoles in the East lacked the cultural disposition to give voice to the na-tion. And yet this is the overriding tendency in the dominant historiography.Creole nationalists, like the Bengal early nineteenth-century father of the YoungBengal movement Henry Derozio or the Indo-European Ernest Douwes Dekkerin colonial Indonesia, are considered to be important inspirational figures, butoutsiders to early nationalism. Needless to say, such perceptions do not consti-tute any evidence for the claim that these creole nationalists would be alien toAfrica or Asia.

Colonial boundaries between Europeans and non-Europeans appear to be anambivalent mixture of nationality, religion, and professional class, which doesnot a priori give an exclusive position to white persons and their offspring orparticular “marginal minorities.” The question of who could be accorded met-ropolitan citizenship, the standards of eligibility for applicants for this citizen-ship, and the exclusion of those who definitely were not eligible, was, as Stol-er has extensively argued, a constant source of tension and contest about race,sexual morality, and cultural competence (which includes educational skills).14

Ethnic categorizations, and particular political and economic positions ascribedto these categories in colonial empires, are open to change and variation. Incolonial Indonesia, the creole population did play a crucial role in colonial ad-ministration, in the development of the nineteenth-century plantation economy,and in early nationalism. But it could have been very different, as has beendemonstrated by the example of British India, where the residents of mixed de-scent were rather marginalized.15

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13 See, for example, Sarfraz Khan, Muslim Reformist Political Thought: Revivalists, Modernistsand Free Will (London, 2003).

14 See, for example, Ann Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities andCultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and His-tory 34, 3 (1992):514–51.

15 For the Eurasians or Anglo-Indians of British India, see Noel P. Gist and Roy Dean Wright,

The hub of the matter is that from the beginning of the nineteenth centurycomprador classes from a variety of religious and racial backgrounds claimeda status equal to metropolitan citizenship, which included political representa-tion, equal access to offices, and freedom of trade. This is what I define as cre-ole nationalism. For lack of any alternative, we might call its agents the “com-prador classes.” “Spiritual domains” might be extremely diverse—particularlywithin colonial cities, which were melting pots by definition—but what mat-ters is the sense of belonging to an imperial citizenry, without giving up a senseof being different from metropolitan expatriates. The best-known example ofthis co-existence is Senegal’s Quatre Communes, where African/Islamic andcreole spiritual domains shared a single polity. The African constituents, theoriginaires, would claim French citizenship based on the fact that their nameswere included in the lists of electors of municipalities that had as “communesde plein exercise” the same status as their counterparts in metropolitanFrance.16 The Quatre Communes are the perfect extra-American case of creolenationalism.

conditional loyalty

Creole nationalism in the East did not stumble from revolution to revolution buttook a fundamentally reformist trajectory, negotiating with the colonial power.It remained within the imperial framework and was driven by an understand-ing of a quid pro quo. It is this very assumption of a contract between an indi-vidual and the sovereign that is central to the notion of citizenship. The mainsource of contestation was the nineteenth-century colonial centralizing bu-reaucracy, which on the one hand opened up new economic and educational op-portunities but encroached upon previously attained economic and political po-sitions of local citizenries on the other. An important, perhaps overriding,reason why these citizenries acquiesced in the continuation of colonial rule wasthat they became part of the structures of the colonial states when these ex-tended their domination over the surrounding territories of the ancien régimes’enclaves. These colonial wars became moments of further juxtaposition of sub-ject and citizen and of the repositioning of the local citizenries within theemerging colonial state.17

In general, the emergence of the nineteenth-century colonial state sharpenedthe comprador classes’ awareness that loyalty was something reciprocal. In


Marginality and Identity: Anglo-Indians as a Racially Mixed Minority in India (Leiden, 1973),p. 16; C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773–1833 (Richmond, 1996). For the role of creole families in agriculture see, for example, RogerKnight, “The Visible Hand in Tempo Doeloe: The Culture of Management and the Organization ofBusiness in Java’s Colonial Sugar Industry,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 30, 1 (1999):74–98.

16 G. Wesley Johnson Jr., The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Powerin the Four Communes (Stanford, 1971), pp. 19–37.

17 Diouf, “Représentations historiques.”

colonial Indonesia and British India they remained loyal during the Java war(1825–1830) and the Mutiny of 1857, respectively.18 It is, however, not theirloyalty itself that should interest us, but its implicit, and sometimes explicit,claim that this loyalty must be based upon just rule. Creole nationalism in thenineteenth-century colonies is precisely about procuring the just colonial ruleto which colonial citizenries or subjects of the imperial crown felt themselvesentitled. Astream of petitions for imperial reform reached the metropolitan gov-ernments from the onset of the nineteenth century: from Senegal, British India,and the Dutch East Indies. The colonial civil service, local government, andhigher education were the contested terrains between local comprador ambi-tions and metropolitan national interests.19 Fitting into this pattern were the cre-oles of the Dutch East Indies—and as a matter of fact their Dutch immigrantrelatives—who, as soon as they had received news of the European revolutionsof 1848, convened a large meeting in the colonial capital to put across theirclaim to be a constituent part of the empire. They demanded metropolitan citi-zen rights be extended to the creole population in the colonies, at least in theareas of education and access to the colonial civil service.20

This petitioning was indubitably particularistic, but that does not necessari-ly set colonial literate societies apart from their counterparts in the metropoles,or in the Western hemisphere for that matter. The petitioners shared with theelites of the new Latin American republics a profound lack of interest in theplight of the peasants or the natives. It has already been pointed out, for exam-ple, that the early reformers and petitioners in Calcutta belonged to the familynetwork of local entrepreneurs, if they were not bankers and indigo plantersthemselves.21 Likewise, the creoles of the Dutch East Indies were part of thecolonial administration and business. But gradually this particularism began todissolve. More than anything else, print capitalism in conjunction with theemerging debates on poverty and social inequality educated the compradorclasses about politics, economics, and society in the second half of the nine-teenth century.22 Though the vernacular press in the East Indies did not emerge

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18 See, for instance, Manju Chattopadhyay, Petition to Agitation: Bengal, 1857–1885 (Calcut-ta and New Delhi, 1985); J. A. Wilkens, Het inlandsche kind in Oost-Indië, en iets over den Javaan(Amsterdam, 1849).

19 A. F. Salhuddin Ahmed, Social ideas and Social Change in Bengal 1818–1835 (Leiden,1965). Henry Lushington, The Double Government, the Civil Service, and the India Reform Agi-tation (London, 1853), pp. 48–49. The Senegalese Quatre Communes, which had a deputy in theFrench parliament for the first time in 1848, succeeded in regaining political representation in 1871after it had been abolished by Napoleon III. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics inSenegal, pp. 106–8.

20 W.R. van Hoëvell, “De demonstratie der ingezetenen van Batavia op den 22en Mei 1848” [8.De vertegenwoordiging der koloniën], Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië (1849):375–80. TheDutch government gave in to creole complaints about a lack of education opportunities in thecolony and established a training institute for civil servants in Batavia in 1867.

21 Ahmed, Social Ideas, p. 33.22 On the relationship between Benthamite discourse and the Indian radical Young Bengal

movement see, for example, Ahmed, Social Ideas, p. 27. And on the influence of metropolitan de-

until the 1880s, Dutch-language commercial newspapers began to circulate in1849. From its very beginning the press advertised itself as a defender of lib-eral values, which was partly in tune with the comprador classes’ struggleagainst colonial monopolies—though it also contradicted their (mostly do-mestic) slaveholding and use of corvée labor on their plantations. It is impor-tant to note that even if these newspapers were read only by the relatively well-to-do, in those days 85 per cent of Europeans in the Indies were Indies-born.Their social elite was much more creole than their British counterparts in In-dia.23

Like in India, in colonial Indonesia the sense of nationhood—or at least itsexpression—emerged with the first newspapers. Of particular importance wasa newspaper that appeared in the remote harbor town of Padang, Sumatra in the1870s. It published articles that warned that the Java War of 1825–1830 couldbe followed by a new bloody insurrection to avenge the colonial exploiters.24

In 1877 in Padang the creole journalist A. M. Voorneman used, for the first time,“Young Indies” as a title for a political program demanding justice for the In-dies and political representation.25 Though the philosophy of what soon cameto be known as the Padang Movement might sound utterly mundane comparedwith the sophistication of the Calcutta intellectual renaissance that played suchan important role in early Indian nationalism, we can perceive some importantparallel moments of “rediscovering one’s spiritual domain.” Padang breathedthe unmistakably republican spirit of an old and virtuous community, where lo-cal identity, progressive critique of colonialism, and consciousness of com-plexion became fused. Voorneman and his colleagues took up the dark creoles’nickname sinjo (derived from the Portuguese word for gentleman) as a term ofdistinction. This was more than simply adopting a name though; it was also aretreat into an extra-Dutch domain of “native Europeans.” Meanwhile, the Pa-dang Movement identified the unbecoming habits of the colonists and theundisciplined lifestyle of the newcomers, their heavy drinking in particular. Themockeries of these unbecoming habits echo the bhadralok literature of Cal-cutta.26

The Padang advocates of Young Indies spoke about their “fatherland” andfelt no restraint in speaking for the indigenous population too. Having embracedthe idea of a “fatherland,” they drew the line at the sojourning Europeans. Thisalso appears from the first creole movement, the Indische Bond (Indies


bates on poverty on the Indian intellectuals see Asoka Kumar Sen, The Popular Uprising and theIntelligentsia: Bengal between 1855–1873 (Calcutta, 1992), pp. 34–35.

23 P. J. Marshall, “British Immigration into India in the Nineteenth Century,” in, P. C. Emmerand M. Mörner, eds., European Expansion and Migration: Essays on the International Migrationfrom Africa, Asia and Europe (New York and Oxford, 1992), pp. 179–96.

24 Nieuw Padangsch Handelsblad, 22 Apr. 1883.25 Gerard Termorshuizen, Journalisten en heethoofden; Een geschiedenis van de Indisch-Ned-

erlandse dagbladpers 1744–1905 (Amsterdam and Leiden), pp. 175–78.26 Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Amsterdam and Dakar, 1997).

League), established by the creole journalist G. A. Andriesse in 1898. His slo-gan was “Indië for the Indiërs” [Indies for the Indiers], emphatically excludingcolonial nabobs in the Dutch parliament, regardless of whether they were bornin the Indies.27 Complaints about discrimination and colonial drainage fusedwith critique of lavish “remittances” for retired civil servants and planters.

It is not difficult to place the Indies journalists Voorneman and Andriesse ina broader comprador context. Their discourse was imbued by the spirit of theage and merged specific class interests with an emerging progressive denunci-ation of metropolitan rapacity and discrimination as unjust colonial rule.28 Acomparison with the writings of the Bombay businessman, intellectual, jour-nalist, and “father of the drainage theory” Naoroji might be appropriate. Naoro-ji compiled his numerous speeches and reports on the bleeding of India and thediscrimination against native Indians when government positions were beingallocated in a 675-page volume entitled Poverty and un-British rule in India.In a compilation of Voorneman’s newspaper articles, published in 1884, theHollanders figured as “loot-landers” (rooflanders). Other pieces in this volumecondemned the colonial war in Aceh and demanded political representation.Notwithstanding the bitterness of their tone, both Voorneman and Naoroji ex-pected to be able to join forces with progressive minds in the metropole. Naoro-ji, after all, consciously used the word “Un-British” to characterize existingcolonial rule.29 In fact, Naoroji’s and Voorneman’s arguments were quintes-sentially the same as those of metropolitan progressive liberals and socialists,who began to put the immorality of colonial exploitation on the political agen-da. Their positions were even close to the concerns of late nineteenth-centuryprogressive imperialists, who began to discover the subject of poverty andjoined the cause of colonial reform.

The comprador classes had gradually broadened their sense of belongingfrom a local class to a fatherland. It was a widening, not a change, of perspec-tive as the critique of metropolitan selfishness was intertwined with oppositionto the discriminating practices of colonial rule. The agenda was still reformist,since both with regard to political empowerment and equal opportunities thepoint of reference was the liberal promise of empire. Racial barriers had alwaysexisted in colonial settlements, but from the mid-nineteenth century onwardsthey were no longer in tune with the newly emerging principles. The time-hon-ored practice of appointment through protection was giving way to the princi-ple of competence, and as consequence the new word for racial barrier was dis-crimination.30 Discrimination was not a formal element of empire; indeed, the

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27 De Telefoon, 26 Nov., 5 Dec. 1895, and 18 Jan. 1896.28 See Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London, 1901), p. 125.29 Naoroji, Poverty; A. M. Voorneman, Het Jonge Indië; Verspreide stukken van A. M. Voorne-

man en wijlen F. K. Voorneman. Bijeengezameld, herzien en uitgegeven door A. M. Voorneman(Surabaya, 1884). Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908 (New Delhi,1973), p. 37.

30 Bernard S. Cohn, “Recruitment and Training of British Civil Servants in India, 1600–1860,”

application of the criterion of professional qualifications theoretically openedthe door for all colonial subjects. Neither the Dutch nor the British governmentbothered to formally close the colonial civil service for the very few Indone-sian or Indian candidates who successfully completed their education in theNetherlands or Great Britain.31

An education in the metropole was an important step towards equality with-in the colonial hierarchy with the white Europeans. In the Indies, as well as inSenegal, creole elites had always been part of this colonial migration circuit andthey continued to dominate this circuit well into the twentieth century. The sit-uation became markedly different in British India, where hundreds of Indianstudents, mostly from a comprador and notably Parsee background, went to En-gland from the late nineteenth century onwards.32 Whether creole or Parsee,Brahmin, or African, their experiences were essentially identical. It was re-freshing to be in a relatively liberal society in which darker complexion did notmake one constantly prey to discrimination, though metropolitan society wasnot free of prejudice either, of course.33 And after returning home, there mighthave been a difference in intensity of feeling, but the mechanism of not beingaccepted by white colonial society in spite of excellent intellectual credentialswas basically the same.

Education in the metropole increased the sense of belonging to a dominatednation, whereas at the same time it strengthened the old comprador tradition ofreformist opposition with the concrete, and personal, experience that the moth-er country, and its democratic institutions, was more enlightened than the colo-nial state. Naoroji, the father of the drainage theory, is the most notable exam-ple of an early nationalist who tried to use these institutes as a platform to arguefor colonial reform. As a former businessman in London, he was one of the threeParsees from Bombay who made it into the British parliament in the nineteenthcentury.34 Another example is that of the Senegalese Blaise Diagne, who en-tered, as the first African deputy, the French parliament in 1914, notwithstand-ing the fact that his French citizenship was sharply contested. Even Gandhi,


in, Ralph Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition(Durham, 1966), pp. 106, 111.

31 A handful of Indonesian candidates passed their examination in the Netherlands, only to findtheir careers subsequently blocked. Only 2 percent, or thirty-two, of the Indian candidates passedthe examinations in Britain over the period 1856–1897. Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity 1880–1930 (London, 2000), p. 9; C. J. Dewey, “The Educa-tion of a Ruling Caste: The Indian Civil Service in the Era of Competitive Examination,” The En-glish Historical Review 88 (1973):275. Hugh Tinker, “Structure of the British Imperial Heritage,”in, Ralph Braibanti, ed., Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition(Durham, 1966), p. 58.

32 Lahiri, Indians in Britain, pp. 6–7; Harry A. Poeze, Indonesiërs in Nederland 1600–1950:In het land van de overheerscher, vol. 1 (Dordrecht, 1986), p. 142; Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouve-ments Negres en France 1919–1939 (Paris, 1985), p. 25.

33 See, for example, Bose, An Indian Pilgrim.34 The three Parsees were the only Indians to secure a seat in the British Parliament. See Ecke-

hard Kulke, The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change (Munich, 1974), p. 216.

who in South Africa had become sharply aware of the fact that the very exis-tence of the colonial state relegated Indians to second-rate subjects of the em-pire, still considered empire to be a potentially progressive entity which couldset standards against racial prejudice and economic exploitation.35 With thebenefit of hindsight, such an attachment to this type of polity might soundquaint, but we have to take into account that in those years empires were stillthe dominant type of polities. It was believed that they still had a future ahead,with an increasing interdependence between their constituent parts. Consistentwith that, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands adopted laws that drasti-cally improved access to metropolitan citizenship for imperial subjects duringthe First World War, when the loyalty of colonial subjects was a precious as-set.36

the young ones and the new age

According to Benedict Anderson, one should distinguish between the European“Young” movements of the nineteenth century, like Young Italy or Young Ire-land, and the twentieth-century Young movements like Young Java or YoungSumatra. The latter he considers to be a response to newly introduced Europeaneducation and way of life at the turn of the century.37 However, raising this bi-nary would immediately throw up the question of in what basket to put thePadang “Young” we discussed earlier. If we decided that the Padang Movementwas nineteenth-century European, there would be no reason to treat the YoungBengal movement of the 1830s differently. But such historiographical amputa-tions of the Indian nationalist trajectory have already been refuted by Chatter-jee. I would argue therefore that the Padang Movement of the 1870s belongs toIndonesian history as it directly impinged upon the emergence of the vernacu-lar press. A straight line runs from here via the father of Indonesian journalismTirtoadisoerjo—immortalized by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his novels—to Is-lamic debates about the right political order. Though I subscribe to the view thatYoung Java is part of what Anderson calls a “tradition of Javanese non-con-formism,” I do not understand why it should be isolated from the nineteenth-century creole political tradition.38 On the contrary, precisely because of theiriconoclastic attitude towards colonial authority and indigenous tradition,“Young” movements crossed belief systems and colonial ethnic boundaries andwere part of improved global communications.39

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35 Hugh Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth1920–1950 (London, 1976), pp. 22–23.

36 Tinker, Separate and Unequal, pp. 37, 74. Dutch subjects from Indonesia could apply forDutch citizenship after having resided in the Netherlands for at least eighteen months. Cees Fasseur,De weg naar het paradijs (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 156; Dewitte, Les Mouvements Negres, p. 20.

37 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 109.38 Benedict R.O.G. Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia

(Ithaca and London, 1990), p. 12.39 The first manifestation of Indonesian national consciousness, the Kaum Muda (the movement

Instead of assuming that the emerging “Young” movements simply replacednineteenth-century comprador anti-imperialism, I would suggest consideringcreole nationalism—that is, the struggle for citizens’ rights by a motley as-sembly of comprador classes—as a continuously broadening movement. Letme repeat that the scheme of two types of nationalism (creole and cultural) hasbeen contested by Partha Chatterjee through a well-documented narrative thatlinks the Bengal intellectual renaissance to late nineteenth-century and twenti-eth-century anti-imperialism. In the case of colonial Java, I want to explore howcreole anti-imperialist discourses opened up to become emerging nationalism.To illuminate the crucial moments in this process I will draw upon some com-parisons with Senegal.

The entry point is that Java offers an outstanding example of how the di-chotomy between colonial modernity and indigenous tradition was construct-ed, and maintained, by the colonial state with almost incredible care.40 In thefirst decade of the twentieth century, both spheres were permeated, and boundtogether, by the same political economy of the world’s second-largest produc-er of cane sugar.41 To read traditional as pre-capitalist and self-sufficient wouldbe a gross understatement of Java’s involvement in the world market, its ensu-ing monetization, and the popular protests which sought to negotiate with thecolonial state. The semi-independent rulers of Central Java, usually referred toas the icons of Java’s cultural identity, were deeply involved in the sugar in-dustrial complex of Java. The plantation economy had enabled them to resur-rect their courts, which were all but ruined in the beginning of the nineteenthcentury. Rituals in which colonial officers, creole estate owners, and Javanesenobles all played their role helped to shore up the courts’ prestige over a heav-ily exploited population.42 The pomp and ceremony that was invented to dis-play the modern and traditional spheres was to demonstrate the legitimacy ofthe political economy of sugar production. On the other hand, the absorption inthe world sugar market ensured the Javanese rulers their degree of indepen-dence within the colonial empire. It is neither coincidental nor ironical that the


or community of the young), was established in the Netherlands by the Sumatran medical doctorAbdul Rivai. Its members called themselves Indiërs, a word used until then only by creole jour-nalists. Poeze, Indonesiërs in Nederland 1600–1950, pp. 34, 63–64, and Harry A. Poeze, “Early In-donesian Emancipation: Abdul Rivai, Van Heutsz and the Bintang Hindia,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-,Land-, en Volkenkunde 145 (1989):87–106. For colonial Indonesia the arrival of the steamshipmeant a drastic rise in the number of pilgrims making the haj, which in turn was a source of inspi-ration for the “Young” movement. See Anthony Reid, ed., The Making of an Islamic Political Dis-course in Southeast Asia (Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, No. 27) (Victoria, 1990), p. 9.

40 Anderson writes on this: “For the first time [around 1980], I began to see that Javanese tra-dition, as I had so long hypostasized it, was largely a twentieth-century invention, and that the oldculture was tense with inner contradictions and antagonistic elements” (Language and Power,p. 12).

41 Alan Dye, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics ofthe Sugar Central 1899–1929 (Stanford, 1998), p. 27.

42 T. Halbertsma and Engelbert van Bevervoorde, “Eigenaardigheden en bezienswaardighedenvan Jogjakarta en Omstreken,” manuscript (1903) held in the KITLV Library, Leiden.

Sultan’s court of Yogyakarta, which had benefited most from the colonial sug-ar economy, became the place where some of the most important early nation-alists came from.

The word “tradition” suggests an unconquered territory, whereas this Ja-vanese space had actually already been encapsulated in—if not created by andbeing an active part of—the colonial economy. It would be naïve to considercultural conservatism as just an “authentic” force and not as part of the planta-tion economy that had been established in the nineteenth century. Moreover, thelink between “cultural authenticity” and colonial interests continued to be close.In the early twentieth century the colonial authorities, with their scholarlytrained specialists in the front lines, fostered “Javaneseness” and “Chinese-ness,” which was even adopted by the cultural elites themselves.43 In addition,colonial authorities accepted, and in the case of the Dutch East Indies even en-couraged, the emergence of a cultural, and thus “authentic,” national awarenessas part of their colonial mission. They were, however, determined to combat thecreole political discourse, which they considered to be an alien element in thehistory of the people whom they had colonized.44

It is in this light that we should read the early nationalist words on the “regen-eration of traditional cultures through Western knowledge.” The word “regen-eration” apparently accommodated the colonial policy, though in fact it con-tained a political request to bring down the fences of colonial dualism, dividing(European) citizens and (native) subjects. It entailed a hidden threat as every-one knew that this sleeping Asian beauty, usually portrayed as the slender aris-tocratic Raden Adjeng Kartini, the female symbol of early Javanese national-ism, represented the masses of Asia: what would happen if she woke up angrily!As a matter of fact, the simultaneously emerging neo-Confucianist movementof the Indo-Chinese, or peranakan, elite reveals this threat even better than theJavanese case does. While China made its presence felt in the Indies from1907onwards, sending its gunboats to Java’s harbors, the peranakan boasted aboutthe sovereignty of their Chinese homeland and conjured up their Chineseness.But in spite of that the neo-Confucianist movement in colonial Indonesia wasunmistakably directed at the confines of colonial dualism. The peranakanmovement’s immediate point of reference was the Japanese, who had alreadybecome equals to the Europeans before the law in 1898.45

In sum, these cultural and/or religious renaissance movements emerged in aheavily syncretized environment and were struggling against colonial dualism,

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43 Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony,” p. 9.44 Ulbe Bosma, Karel Zaalberg; Journalist en strijder voor de Indo (Leiden, 1997), pp. 168–69.45 Charles Coppel, “The Origins of Confucianism as Organized Religion in Java, 1900–1930,”

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, 1 (1981):179–96. Interesting recent work on the aspirationsof the Chinese community in early twentieth-century colonial Indonesia are Ming Tien Nio Gov-aars-Tjia, Hollands onderwijs in een koloniale samenleving; De Chinese ervaring in Indonesië(Leiden, 1999), and Oei Hong Kian, Kind van het land; Peranakan-Chinezen in drie culturen (Rot-terdam, 1998).

broadening their horizon and not just in the “Western” direction. The universalmessage of Eastern spirituality, which we know so well from RabindranathTagore, was advanced as a two-sided struggle: against the cultural arrogance ofthe West and against the dead weight of tradition. In India, but particularly incolonial Indonesia, theosophy became a rallying point for those who sought ahigher consciousness. The colonial rulers’ sense of mission was considered tobe a materialistic and vulgarized interpretation of Christianity and it was partof early nationalist discourse to “take Jesus back for the East”—a direct re-sponse to claims of Western moral superiority. Since the interaction betweennineteenth-century European metaphysics and reappraisals of Hindu and Bud-dhist tradition has been detailed elsewhere, it will suffice to mention that cre-ole and Javanese intellectuals were fully aware of these debates and some ofthem had read their Max Müller.46

What strikes us in this early nationalist discourse is its frantic search for a su-perior holistic intellectual position, which could relegate the grammar of colo-nial domination to lower intellectual echelons. However, these attempts to“provincialize” had direct political relevance, since they were an answer to theconservative swing in colonial policies of the major colonial powers GreatBritain, the Netherlands, and France in the first years of the twentieth century.The French government in Senegal and the Dutch in the Indies had embarkedupon a project of indigenizing equality and tried to undo “accidental” citizen-ship in the name of equity. The “middle classes” had become suspiciously priv-ileged in the eyes of the colonial authorities. The partition of Bengal in 1905 byLord Curzon had more or less the same effect as it came on top of a rejectionof modest requests for more education and aggravated political frustrationabout racial injustice.47 Modern colonial policies basically wanted to undo theadvanced position in the empire of the comprador classes, an attempt that wascloaked in terms of metropolitan responsibility for the nations under their tute-lage. Thus the “new age” spirit helped to expose Western parochialism, and itsevolutionist view on history which supported its colonial hegemony. The lastyears before the First World War were marked by an unbridled optimism thatthe brotherhood of man could be attained, if racial prejudice and economic ex-ploitation by metropolitan interest groups could be overcome.48 In the DutchEast Indies this resulted in a political consensus among progressive imperial-ists, creoles, and educated Javanese that colonial dualism, or the classical bi-nary between citizen and subject, was untenable.


46 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 41; Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 78;[E.F.E.] D[ouwes] D[ekker], “Ardjoena en Parsifal,” Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 9 Aug. 1911.

47 J. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal (Berkeley,1968), p. 316; Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, p. 25.

48 News about the Universal Races Congress, organized in London in 1911, induced the splin-tered creole groups in colonial Indonesia to cooperate with Javanese and Chinese organizations.See Bosma, Karel Zaalberg, pp. 194–95.

the creole nexus

I have argued that in intellectual terms the nineteenth-century political tradi-tions of the colonial comprador or “middle classes” and the “Young” movementare inseparable. But as for colonial Indonesia, it is equally impossible to claima rupture in terms of agency. Creole newspapers extended their readership tolower-class creoles, or Indo-Europeans (Indos) as they were called by that time,and took the lead in attacking colonial dualism. The Indo classes’ anti-imperi-alism was a strange mixture of patriotism (“Indië voor de Indiërs”), class con-sciousness, and of populist resistance to the political economy. Like other com-prador classes, the Indos felt deeply grieved by the discriminatory practices ofcolonial rule, and their grievances were astutely worded by their press.

Creole journalists played a crucial role in forging an alliance between the“Young Javanese” and the lower-class creoles. And Java was not a singularcase, as a similar process had been taking place in Senegal, and with rather spec-tacular success. The creole politician François Carpot had been able to enlistthe support of the originaires, the African citizens of the Quatre Communes, towrestle from the Bordeaux commercial interest group the deputyship in theFrench parliament in 1902. In subsequent years, the newspapers’ hot-headedstyle of ridiculing the ways in which metropolitan interests were favored cul-minated in the audacity of the Young Senegalese and their creole journalist al-lies to deride even the emblem of colonial authority, the governor-general.49

Their creole counterparts in the Indies likewise acted as selling points for cre-ole political traditions. Particularly in colonial Batavia, the press provided thelink between the creole political tradition and early Indonesian nationalists, ashas been admirably narrated by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his novels on the In-donesian journalist Tirtoadisoerjo. Batavia’s popular creole press not only ex-pressed its solidarity with the Young Javanese but also offered Tirtoadisoerjohis formative years as a journalist.50

Eventually, in 1912, this “creole-young” nexus became embodied in the fa-mous triumvirate of Ernest Douwes Dekker, Cipto Mangunkusumo, andSuwardi Surya Ningrat, who created their Indies Party after the example of theIndian National Congress and Bengali resistance to the partition.51 The creolejournalist Douwes Dekker personalized the relationship between the nine-teenth-century creole tradition and a new generation of Indonesian leaders ashe became close friends with Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president, and HusniThamrin, the key figure of cooperative Indonesian nationalism in the lastdecade before Japanese occupation. Douwes Dekker began his remarkable na-

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49 Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, p. 152; Bosma, Karel Zaal-berg, p. 163.

50 Ulbe Bosma, “Indo Class and Indies Citizenship,” in, Joost Coté and Loes Westerbeek, eds.,Recalling the Indies (Amsterdam, 2004).

51 Ibid.

tionalist curriculum a few years after he was released from Sri Lanka, where hehad been detained as a prisoner of war by the British. He had been capturedwhile fighting with the Boers against British jingoism. In 1908 he was alreadya man of “ill repute” for publicly washing the dirty colonial laundry of the Acehwar in the journal of the German Socialist Party.52 In the next two years his rep-utation as an uncompromising opponent of colonial domination, and friend—and mentor—of the Young Javanese, was established when he acted as editorof the Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, the largest Dutch-language newspaper at thetime. In 1909 he succeeded in rallying Javanese, Chinese, Eurasian, and pro-gressive colonial bureaucrats in a movement for a university in the Indies. Oneyear later he left for a Grand Tour, which gave him the opportunity to interviewthe Bengali nationalist and staunch Spencerian Shyamaji Krishnavarma, whocalled for an absolutely free and independent form of national government andwho taught his followers that there was no way in which colonial rule couldstand the passive resistance of their colonial subjects.53 The Bengali extremistlectures on boycotts, strikes—and if necessary violence—completed DouwesDekker’s anti-imperialist education.54

Like his contemporaries in Senegal, Douwes Dekker tried to forge an alliancebetween the educated indigenous population and the lower-class creoles. Histask was, however, far more complicated than Carpot’s, who had enjoyed theluxury of a pre-defined political community. Carpot could work along existingpatterns and promised to fight for the Africanization of the civil service and theaddition of eight new “communes” to the four that already existed.55 In fact,his task was eventually accomplished by Blaise Diagne, who aptly used Car-pot’s alliance of originaires (the African citizens of the Quatre Communes) and“petit colons” to become the first African to secure a seat in the French parlia-ment in 1914. But when Douwes Dekker founded the Indies Party in 1912, hehad to define a new political community, one that would wash away the com-mon references to race, ethnicity, social category, language, and culture. Hefaced the daunting task of crossing the border that had become more or less fos-silized since the implementation of civil registration for Christians and Jews in1828. He cleverly addressed this problem by giving a sharp political edge to olddebates about access to the Indies civil service and liberal professions and bystating that his movement’s quest for universities in the Indies was to enable itspeople to take over the reigns from their colonizer.56 In addition, Douwes


52 See, for example, E.F.E. Douwes Dekker, “Die Holländischen Pizarros in Atjeh,” Das FreiesWort 7 (1907–1908):891–97.

53 E.F.E. Douwes Dekker, “Politieke beginselen der Indische extremisten,” De Beweging 6, 4(1910):122–44.

54 Ibid.55 Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, p. 113. In Bengal the bhadralok

tried to reach out to the masses during the Swadeshi years of 1905–1912, but according to Sarkarwith only limited success. See Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, p. 509.

56 “Een vergadering der ‘Indische Partij,’” Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad, 19 Sept. 1912.

Dekker and his friends Cipto Mangunkusumo and Suwardi Surya Ningrat skill-fully twisted the Dutch colonial discourse on economic autonomy and self-reliance to a discourse on freedom, culminating in the first public claim of anindependent existence for the Indies people.57 Almost forty years later, Sukarnowould honor his friend Douwes Dekker as one of the fathers of Indonesian na-tionalism. But drawing on the Senegalese comparison one might arrive at themore sober interpretation that in 1912 Douwes Dekker’s radical nationaliststance was predicated on his political ambition to cross the fossilized colonialethnic boundaries.

The Indies Party was quickly suppressed, condemned by the colonial gov-ernment as a political organization that did not represent the interests of the Ja-vanese people. Like Benedict Anderson, the Indies government suggested thatwith his creole nationalism Douwes Dekker would never be able to relate to In-donesians’ true self.58 The colonial government’s real motives, however, wereto prevent the Indies Party inculcating itself into the rapidly emerging massmovement Sarekat Islam. Support for the political agenda of the Indies Partywas widespread among Young Javanese. This was demonstrated when Suwar-di continued to campaign and published his famous pamphlet “If I were aDutchman. . . .” It appeared in August 1913, on the occasion of the centennialcelebrations of the Dutch liberation from Napoleon, and asked for the parlia-mentary institutions that the Dutch had already acquired. It received such awarm welcome among Javanese intellectuals that the colonial government de-cided to ban the Indies Party triumvirate. Anderson has cited this pamphlet toargue that the nationalist intellectual Suwardi, writing in Dutch, turned Dutchhistory against the colonizer, and to visualize the contradictory aspects of whatStoler and Cooper later on would term the “embourgeoisement of imperial-ism.”59 Suwardi did not, however, ask the Dutch to leave, at least not immedi-ately, but to first introduce their democratic institutions in the Indies. In 1940the same Suwardi urged the Indonesian nationalist leader Husni Thamrin tobury his controversies with the colonial government and to side with democra-cy against fascism.60

To date, historians have had a problem giving the Indies Party its proper placein Indonesian national history. Shiraishi is one notable exception; another—though not a historian—was Sukarno, who, again, honored Douwes Dekker asone of the fathers of Indonesian nationalism in 1949. For a balanced perspec-tive it is important, however, to acknowledge that in 1912 the Indies Party tri-

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57 “De Indische Partij; Constitutie-vergadering,” De Locomotief, 30 Dec. 1912; Shiraishi, An Agein Motion, p. 62.

58 Bosma, Karel Zaalberg, p. 244.59 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 108; Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and

Colony,” p. 31.60 Bob Hering, Mohammad Hoesni Thamrin and His Quest for Indonesian Nationhood 1917–

1941 (Jakarta, 1996), p. 271.

umvirate still believed that the empire was an institution open to progressivereform, and therefore a relevant political entity in their struggle. DouwesDekker himself was a player of the imperial arena, rather unconcerned aboutthe banning of his political movement and the extradition of himself and histwo Indonesian political associates. He had procured the help of the Dutch so-cial democrats, who were expected to become part of a new left-wing govern-ment at the next election. Though this did not happen, the elections brought amore progressive government to power, which induced the Indies governmentto reconsider the constitutional binary between indigenous and European sub-jects and to consider the idea of popular representation in the colonial institu-tions. Douwes Dekker had played his imperial card shrewdly and achieved aresounding victory.

Neither the Dutch government nor Douwes Dekker and his friends serious-ly contemplated voting rights for the subaltern and uneducated masses of In-donesians; instead they continued the nineteenth-century discourse of a grad-ual extension of citizenship, which would, according to the Indies Party, createa new multi-ethnic “middle class.”61 In that respect, and in contrast to LatinAmerica, creole nationalism in Indonesia never became revolutionary, but it didbecome very conscious of the gap between elites and masses. Whereas in LatinAmerican countries formal democracy co-existed, and co-exists, with enor-mous social inequality, the fathers of Indonesian nationalism were sharplyaware of the fact that political emancipation needs a social and economic ba-sis.

the great war and the empire

The War revolutionized, and thus problematized, the idea of a gradually widen-ing citizenship. It also gave the imperial political structure a central role in shap-ing the early nationalist trajectories. The “levée en masse” or general conscrip-tion came on top of the colonial political agendas. Until then, the nexus betweenmilitia and citizenship had existed only in the local setting of the colonial bor-oughs and plantation societies. Colonial state and general conscription weresimply incommensurable concepts. Imperial considerations, however, forcedcolonial governments to grudgingly accept, at least in theory, the idea of na-tional defense. In India, West Africa, and colonial Indonesia the discourse fol-lowed the same republican principle that those who shed their blood should begiven the status of citizen.62 And this equation worked both ways, as was made


61 J.H.F.A. Later, “Van boven af?,” De Locomotief, 1 July 1912, p. 1; R.M.S. Soeriokoesoemoet al., Javaansch of Indisch Nationalisme (Semarang, 1918).

62 This principle had also played a prominent role in the emancipation of the black populationof Cuba, because of their role during the Cuban war of independence of 1895–1898. See RebeccaJ. Scott, “Race, Labor and Citizenship in Cuba: A View from the Sugar District of Cienfuegos,1886–1909,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78, 4 (1998):687–728. Of course, as scholarsof Cuban history have pointed out, this did not solve the tension between the racist and antiracisttendencies within Cuban nationalist discourse. See Rebecca J. Scott, “The Provincial Archive as a

clear by Gandhi, who emphasized that his claim to be a citizen of the empirealso entailed participation in its defense. He not only supported mobilization,“to give Empire every available man for its defence,” he even offered his ownservices, as he had done twelve years before when he had been at the sameSouth African battlefield as Douwes Dekker, though on the other side.63 Whilelarge numbers of Indian troops were deployed in Europe, the nationalists backhome could rightfully claim that it was unacceptable to be comrades in armsand helots in politics.64 Meanwhile, to achieve his objective of French citizen-ship for the Africans of West Africa Diagne personally organized the recruit-ment of 60,000 African soldiers for the French army. It brought him immensepersonal prestige as the French government conferred on him the title of Com-missioner-General, a rank as high as Governor-General. But even more impor-tant was that it established the principle among his fellow West Africans thatthose “who paid the blood tax” should not be denied their citizen rights.65

The particular importance of this claim lies in the fact that it transcends theindividual “quid pro quo” and transfers the rights stemming from the individ-ually paid “blood tax” to a nation in the making. The Dutch East Indies provideanother case in point. Though the Netherlands was neutral and stayed out of thewar, it was felt that Japan was developing into an imminent danger for the In-dies. Moreover, the Indies Party had already made conscription part of its anti-imperialist agenda by propagating a people’s militia as an alternative to the government’s maritime defense policies: “no dreadnoughts but a people’s mili-tia.”66 At the 1916 mass meetings rallying around the theme of “Indië Weer-baar” [the Indies ready and able], militia and citizenship were openly espoused.The Indonesian mass movement Sarekat Islam seized the opportunity to whee-dle recognition as a political party from the colonial government, which hadhitherto accepted this movement only as an expression of cultural nationalismand social solidarity.67 Now, the vice-chairman of Sarekat Islam and memberof the “Indië Weerbaar” delegation to the Dutch parliament, Abdul Muis, couldopenly declare that his objective was to prepare for an autonomous existenceof the Indies people.68

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Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the CubanWar of Independence (1895–1898),” New West Indian Guide 76, 3/4 (2002):191–210, 195.

63 Bharatan Kumarappa, Gandhiji’s Autobiography; Abridged by Bharatan Kumarappa (Ahme-dabad, 1952), p. 127; Tinker, Separate and Unequal, p. 31.

64 Here reference was made to the fact that outside India and within the Empire, and particu-larly in South Africa, the Indians were indeed helots, whereas 1.2 million Indian soldiers servedoverseas. Leon Polak, The Indians of South Africa: Helots within the Empire and How They areTreated (Madras, 1909).

65 Myron J. Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa,1857–1960 (London, 1991), pp. 45–46; Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Sene-gal, pp. 191–95.

66 E.F.E. Douwes Dekker, “Geen Dreadnoughts Maar Volkswapening,” De Goentoer, 22 Nov.1914.

67 A.P.E. Korver, Sarekat Islam 1912–1916; Opkomst, bloei en structuur van Indonesië’s eerstemassabeweging (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 29.

68 See Poeze, Indonesiërs in Nederland 1600–1950, p. 114; F. Tichelman, Socialisme in In-

It had been the creole political tradition that had shaped the syncretist plat-form against colonial conservatism and had now brought colonial subjects intoimperial politics. The imperiled empires offered the floor to syncretist politicalleaders like Blaise Diagne, who, as a matter of fact, was a Catholic, freemason,and married to a French woman. In colonial Indonesia it was the secretary ofthe East Indies branch of the Theosophical Society D. J. van Hinloopen Lab-berton who introduced his Javanese friends into the militia debate, while hisboss Annie Besant presided at the Indian National Congress in 1917.

Simultaneous theosophical victories were followed by simultaneous defeats.Van Hinloopen Labberton soon became ostracized by European public opinionand Besant was jailed shortly after her finest political moment. Their downfallmarked the end of the remarkable last two years of the World War in which em-pire and home rule were in balance. The Dutch East Indies experienced a uniqueinterlude between the announcement of the establishment of the People’s Coun-cil in 1916 and the so-called “November promises” of 1918. In the revolution-ary days of late 1918 governor-general J. P. Count van Limburg Stirum put hiscolonial administration on a trajectory towards self-government for the Indies.As a career diplomat he was more attuned to international developments thanto metropolitan feelings. His promise was almost literally copied from Mon-tagu’s declaration that he would steer toward a “progressive realization of re-sponsible government in India as an integral part of the British empire.”69

nationalist pathology or broken promises?

By the end of the War the creole nationalist promise of a gradual extension ofcitizenship to all colonial subjects seemed to be more realistic than ever. But soimminent as its victory appeared during the First World War, so quickly did itsprospect vanish in the decade to come. The imbalances of the world economyforeclosed a continuing equilibrium between autonomy and empire, betweenuniversalism and patriotism. The philosophical contradiction of rewardingcolonial subjects for their imperial loyalty by granting them responsible gov-ernments became a real threat to the future of the imperial idea. The atmospheresoon turned sour and became filled with genuine disappointment about the ex-pectations raised during the War.

The role of the syncretist mediators was over, but it would be imprecise toclaim that they were squeezed by a “clash of civilizations” between religiousor ethnically inspired mass nationalism and colonial domination. The Indiescreole population admittedly retreated to a position of “white” supremacy, butnot because of anxiety about Islam as a social force.70 Islamic movements had


donesië; De Indische Sociaal-Democratische Vereeniging 1897–1917, vol. 1 (Dordrecht and Cin-naminson, 1985), p. 548.

69 John Hindle Broomsfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society (Berkeley, 1968), p. 98; ElsbethLocher-Scholten, Ethiek in fragmenten; Vijf studies over koloniaal denken en doen van Nederlan-ders in de Indonesische archipel 1877–1942 (Utrecht, 1981), pp. 77, 123.

70 They acted like the Parsees in British India, who left the Indian National Congress when it

already been active in nineteenth-century Java, and allegedly played a role inthe many rebellions in the countryside. In that respect the early twentieth cen-tury showed a marked contrast in that Sarekat Islam had maintained a fairly cor-dial relationship with the Indies government during its first years of existence.Relations between Sarekat Islam and the colonial government rapidly deterio-rated after the War—not because of a process of “othering,” but as a result ofa fierce economic struggle. It was not a time for politics of identity, but of anti-colonialism in which one could be communist and Muslim at the same time.71

Islam in Indonesia did not retreat into patriarchal fundamentalism, as happenedfor instance in Syria and Lebanon.72

The political repression in the Dutch East Indies after the War had its ownspecific harshness because of the colony’s political economy. From the 1880sto the late 1920s the sugar industry was the most powerful actor in colonial In-donesia.73 By the end of the First World War, the Java sugar industry had be-come a tightly intertwined group of about 180 factories and metropolitan fi-nancial interests, and its joint economic muscle was brought together in anorganization with the ominous name of Sugar Syndicate. Its organizational dis-cipline allowed the sugar industry to buy any newspaper it wanted, establish acounter-Sarekat Islam, and to smother any voice that doubted the blessings ofits presence.74 The aggressive sugar interests played a crucial role in wieldingtogether the concepts of anti-capitalism and nationalism, and relating them toIslamic concepts of social justice, as has been demonstrated by Shiraishi.75 Hispainstaking analysis of how the popular and radical Javanese leader Hadji Mis-bach placed colonial capitalism under the scrutiny of Allah and Marx in his se-ries of newspaper articles in 1924 shows how Islam was invoked as a moralstandard to denounce colonial capitalism. The rejection of this “sinful capital-ism” should obviously not be conflated with a struggle of Islam against theWest.76

No doubt, the fierce struggle between the powerful sugar industry and na-tionalism sets the Indonesian anti-imperialist trajectory apart from those ofBritish India and Senegal. Whereas the emerging police state was a general fea-

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became more and more infused by a Hindu identity, or like the Bengal bhadralok, who became in-creasingly defensive when Ghandian non-cooperation began to stir the low caste and Muslim mass-es of Bengal. T. M. Luhrmann, The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial So-ciety (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

71 In this respect the Dutch East Indies were not unique, since, for example in India, one couldsupport both the Muslim League and Congress. Francis G. Hutchins, India’s Revolution: Gandhiand the Quit India Movement (Harvard, 1973), p. 236.

72 See Thompson, Colonial Citizens.73 Alec Gordon, “The Agrarian Question in Colonial Java: Coercion and Colonial Capitalist

Sugar Plantation 1870–1914,” Journal of Peasant Studies 27, 1 (1999):1–35. 74 Bosma, Karel Zaalberg, ch. 7.75 W. A. Oates, “The Afdeeling B: An Indonesian Case Study,” Journal of Southeast Asian His-

tory 9 (1968):107–17.76 Bosma, Karel Zaalberg, pp. 357–60; Shiraishi, An Age in Motion, pp. 258–59.

ture of late colonial societies, in colonial Indonesia it was part and parcel of thesugar economy. Its first victim was Douwes Dekker’s reincarnated Indies Par-ty of 1913, which had adopted the name of the National Indies Party (NIP), orSarekat Hindia. This party could boast a consolidated class base in Batavia, Se-marang, and Ambon, when in May 1919 it became embroiled in local strugglesin the countryside of the principalities in Central Java as the result of its popu-lar local leader Hadji Misbach. Rather accidentally, the central leadership hadfound itself in a position mediating between plantation managers and peasantresistance to forced labor. Later on, in 1919, Suwardi succeeded in merging theNational Indies Party, Sarekat Islam, and the Indonesian sugar labor union in aunified front. Resistance in the principalities became massive, and the poorSunan (ruler) of Surakarta was ridiculed by the NIP leadership as the pitifulpuppet of colonial exploitation, a disgrace to his ancestors, the glorious em-perors of Java.77 This was too much for the Indies government, which clampeddown on the leaders of the National Indies Party, and forced them to disentan-gle themselves from social radicalism.

Since Robert van Niel’s classic The Emergence of the Modern IndonesianElite it has been accepted as a fact that the “hybrid” National Indies Party wasprone to disintegration in an age of mass nationalism.78 I would argue the op-posite, namely that the NIP became the first victim of government repressionfor the very reason that it so successfully bridged the gap between elites andmasses. This argument gets some additional weight from the fact that the In-dies Party became a mass movement in the most heavily syncretized areas ofcolonial Indonesia, namely the principalities of Java, the Moluccas, and lateron in the mining regions of West Sumatra. Historians like Van Niel have ap-parently followed the opinions of white and creole society. These contempo-raries found their beliefs in a cognitive distance between elites and masses vin-dicated, as they, wrongly, concluded that populists could incite the ignorantmasses for whatever cause.79 But this was the sugar factories’ propaganda, inwhich the colonial authorities eventually began to believe in these years of thereturn of the white-man’s-burden discourse. To counter the “individualist andelitist” citizens’ rights claims, the colonial powers resumed their indigenist dis-course. They could thus legitimate their jailing of “Westernized and populistleaders” to stop them “misleading the masses.” Our present knowledge aboutthe heavy handed sugar interests throws a new light on the general assumptionthat creole political mobilization was a partial and inherently conservative, tran-sitional moment to nationalism.


77 George D. Larson, Prelude to Revolution: Palaces and Politics in Surakarta, 1900–1942(Dordrecht and Providence, 1987).

78 R. van Niel, The Emergence of the Modern Indonesian Elite (The Hague and Bandoeng,1960), pp. 162–63, 237.

79 John Ingleson, In Search of Justice: Workers and Unions in Colonial Java, 1908–1926 (Ox-ford, 1986).

No doubt, there were partial and conservative tendencies in late colonialcomprador politics, which were a consequence of elite competition for scarcejobs, resources, and education facilities. The Dutch East Indies were not uniquein this respect as more or less the same dynamics were in play in Bengal in thesame years.80 Here, the local elites, the bhadralok, became wary of the Britishcolonial government’s overtures to the Bengal Muslim majority for fear of los-ing their entitlements to education and jobs.81 Likewise, elite competition forscarce resources induced Douwes Dekker’s former rank and file to becomecolonial conservatives. Every step towards granting passive or active votingrights led to an increase in the power of Indonesians at the expense of the cre-oles. This mechanism explains the rise, and particularly the moment of ascen-dancy, of the so-called Eurasian League that was founded in Batavia in 1919.82

The creole population rallied to it in 1921, when declining sugar prices andheavy pressure from colonial enterprise forced the Indies government to im-plement severe cuts in education spending and government salaries.

At the ideological level, however, creole nationalism outlived the pioneeringrole of creole or comprador classes in nationalism. To write that the creoles re-treated into their own ethnic isolation and Indonesian nationalist leaders fol-lowed their counterparts in India on the road to non-cooperation is to tell onlypart of the story, perhaps even the least interesting part. The early 1920s wit-nessed a general shift in Indonesia from mass movements first to parliamentaryand subsequently educational concerns. The leaders of the National Indies Par-ty switched from social radicalism back to parliamentarism in 1920. The Ban-dung All Indies Congress of June 1922, organized by Douwes Dekker, markedthe shift from political action to the education of the masses in democratic cit-izenship. Suwardi Surya Ningrat began to build his Taman Siswo school pro-gram, which was based upon theosophical principles and became a model forthe so-called “Wild Schools” teaching Dutch to thousands of young Indone-sians. I will return to this presently.83 The Wild Schools stepped into the spacethat the austerity policies of the colonial government had left and took up theDutch curriculum. Indeed, though the nationalist leaders professed their pref-erence for Malay as the national language for Indonesia in 1928, the peopleasked for Dutch because it was still the most prestigious language. Howeverpolitically correct the vernaculars might have been, they were of academic in-terest to the immediate future of the nationalist movement.84

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80 Broomsfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society, p. 189.81 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge,

1994), p. 20.82 Vijaysingh Ramesharrao Gaikwad, The Anglo-Indians: A Study in the Problems and Process-

es Involved in Emotional and Cultural Integration (London and Bangalore, 1967), p. 39.83 Kees Groeneboer, Gateway to the West. The Dutch Language in Colonial Indonesia 1600–

1950. A History of Language Policy (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 233.84 Ibid., pp. 233–36. The ambivalence of the nationalist movement towards the language issue

was not unique for the Dutch East Indies. See Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet:

creole nationalism retreated but not defeated

Nationalist movements had to cope with the new political configuration of post-war colonialism, which had effectively blocked the reformist agenda of ex-tending citizenship within the imperial framework. The complete failure of elitecooperation in colonial Indonesia has been printed in bold since Furnivall’s fa-mous work on the plural society of Netherlands India.85 After the First WorldWar the Indies government imposed a pacification scheme by allowing the po-litical representation of Chinese, Ambonese, Javanese, Sumatrans, civil service,labor unions—and last but not least private enterprise—in municipal councilsand the People’s Council. From the above, it may be clear that this only exac-erbated confrontation. However, I have also argued that in the aftermath of theFirst World War political developments did not trivialize creole nationalism butforced it to return to its educational concerns.

Furnivall’s theory of plural society is the way in which colonial authoritieswanted to perceive reality, as neatly categorized ethnicities each represented incompliance with its particular stage of evolution in the imperial political struc-ture. But in spite of the increasing geographical segregation of white suburbsin colonial cities and an increasing number of colonial enclaves with expatri-ate specialists and their wives, the percentage of marriages between Europeansand Indonesian and Chinese women had been steadily rising since the nine-teenth century, to peak at 27.5 percent in 1925. These facts oblige us to differ-entiate between economic and political polarization on the one hand and aprocess of cultural and social convergence on the other. The mastering of Dutchbecame the emblem of the nationalist school movement and spread so rapidlythat by 1930 about 4 percent of urban populations had some command ofDutch—with peaks of 13 percent in the Christian areas of Ambon and Mina-hasa—a percentage that would increase considerably in the decade to come.86

According to estimates by Kees Groeneboer, in 1942 about 1.3 million people(2 percent of the entire population) spoke Dutch (excluding the expatriateDutch), while an additional 1 percent had some knowledge of the language. Theposition of Dutch in the East Indies was thus exactly the same as English inBritish India, and we cannot rule out the possibility that Dutch spread morerapidly, since in 1941 about 230,000 pupils were learning Dutch at WildSchools.87 It was not until the Japanese conquest that the expansion of theDutch language was brought to an end.

In fact, the oxymoron of simultaneous polarization and convergence was


Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore 1915–1941 [compiled and edited with an Intro-duction by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya] (New Delhi, 1997), pp. 44–45.

85 J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge and New York,1944).

86 Groeneboer, Gateway to the West, p. 246.87 Groeneboer, Gateway to the West, pp. 8, 244.

such that it has led to a debate on whether the Netherlands Indies were a plur-al society, according to Furnivall, or surprisingly tolerant regarding matters ofrace, according to Kennedy.88 We have to bear in mind that during the interwaryears about 65–70 percent of the 240,000 Europeans in the colony had beenborn in the Indies. In the 1920s they had been unable to express their sense ofbelonging in the way they could in the late nineteenth century and in the daysof Douwes Dekker’s Indies Party, since newspapers, and public opinion, werecontrolled by colonial business interests. However, the economic crisis of the1930s weakened precisely the position of these very interests that had beenblocking the institutional reform that could have done justice to the social re-alities of the emerging Indonesian nation.

One could say that in the course of the 1930s the veracity of Kennedy’s viewbecame more apparent than Furnivall’s. In this climate the idea of a multi-eth-nic citizenry could resurface. In 1937 the creole physician Dr. W.C.A. Doeve,a prominent Eurasian League member, argued that Dutch colonial governmentwas blind to socially and culturally converging patterns: “I believe it is hightime that the intellectual non-Dutch and Dutch who consider the Indies as theirfatherland were united in a single Netherlands-Indies citizenry.”89 Though am-biguous about the nationality of this citizenry, he was firm about the desirabil-ity of merging assimilated indigenous subjects and patriotic creoles into a sin-gle citizenry. Interestingly enough, he supported his argument for an “IndiesCitizenship” project by alluding to Javanese children from the humblest socialsegments chatting in Dutch in the streets.90 The generally unquestioned cogni-tive distance between elites and masses was ridiculed in 1939 by V.W.Ch Ploeg-man, another prominent member of the Eurasian League. He took the daringstep of entitling one of his public speeches “Because East and West Meet.” Henegated the wisdom of an entire army of colonial specialists, including J. H.Boeke (the father of the concept of economic dualism), with the simple truismthat all societies change and thus can homogenize or grow apart.91 These voicesin the Eurasian League by the late 1930s demonstrate how much the articula-tion of ideas of belonging and citizenship was predicated upon the colonial po-litical economy. The voice of the creoles of Indonesia had been subdued in the1920s, but their belief in a gradual extension of imperial citizenship had neverdied.

680 ulbe bosma

88 Raymond Kennedy, Races and Peoples of the Indies (Berkeley, 1943); Charles A. Coppel,“Revisiting Furnivall’s ‘Plural Society’; Colonial Java as a Mestizo Society?” Ethnic and RacialStudies 20, 3 (1997):562–79.

89 W.C.A. Doeve, Een Indisch-Burgerschap. Voordracht gehouden voor de Afdeeling MeesterCornelis van het Indo-Europeesch Verbond op 19 Januari 1937 (n.p., 1939), p. 14.

90 Ibid., p. 11.91 V.W.Ch. Ploegman, “Omdat Oost en West elkaar ontmoeten” [Speech given on 11 Mar. 1939

to the Afdeeling Loemadjang of the I.E.V.], (Soerabaja, 1939), p. 35.

conclusion

Our rejection of the analytical distinction between creole and cultural or lin-guistic nationalism brought us into the fuzzy territory of historically contextu-alized narratives on anti-imperialist movements. But under the surface of manysmaller and greater struggles, we can perceive a striking resilience of an old re-publican tradition, which became philosophically deepened and ethnicallywidened as it absorbed the discourses from Bengal, of the pan-Islamic move-ment and of Marxism. Around 1900, resistance to the emerging colonial statedid not reciprocate the jingoist discourse of the metropole, but found the high-er ground of a universal position. Likewise, the increasing repression of the in-terwar years did not lead to an indigenist reaction. On the contrary, the rapidspread of the colonizers’ language by the nationalist movement proved the re-silience of creole nationalism as it lived on in the Indonesian nationalist edu-cation project.

What remains is the question why so little of this history has stamped its markupon modern Indonesia. The first part of the answer lies in the fact that historywriting is not something done by detached historians, but begins immediatelywhen contesting parties begin to interpret the course of events in their own way.The second is that more than 90 percent of the creoles and Dutch expatriatesleft the country after 1945. There was fierce resistance from Minahasa and Am-bon, the most Dutchified parts of the archipelago, to the postcolonial state.92

The traumatic events from the Japanese occupation onwards to the communistwitch-hunt of 1965 have victimized exactly those segments that were closest tocreole nationalism. Just a few months before this repression, Ruth McVey, inher classic monograph, claimed the Indonesian Communist Party was thelargest communist movement outside the Soviet-Sino bloc.93 The year 1965was not only an immense human tragedy, it also destroyed a sense of historic-ity and the intellectual repository from which postcolonial reflections couldtake place. These events amply explain the tendency to give undue weight tothe fact that the new Republic of Indonesia did not inherit Dutch as an officiallanguage. This language would have disappeared from Indonesia in the newAnglophone world anyway. The hub of the matter is that the proliferation ofDutch in the final years of colonial Indonesia was not part of a colonial project,but a marker of the Indonesian struggle for citizenship and a demonstration ofthe historical continuity of a nationalist trajectory rooted far back in the nine-teenth century.


92 M.J.C. Schouten, Leadership and Social Mobility in a Southeast Asian Society: Minahassa,1677–1983 (Leiden, 1998), pp. 215–19, and R. Chauvel, Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists:The Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to Revolt 1880–1950 (Leiden, 1990).

93 Ruth McVey, The Rise of Indonesian Communism (New York, 1965), p. xi.

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