Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [100]
By the 1930s a more secular nationalism had taken centre stage. Parties were formed and were dissolved in fierce disputes as to how Dutch rule, and its insipid efforts to reform itself, might best be challenged. The dominant personality was Sukarno, a Dutch-trained engineer who sought to build on the legacy of the pergerakan by synthesizing the different ideological currents and movements in the name of national unity: his 1926 credo was entitled Nationalism, Islam and Communism. His oratorical style, which appealed to Javanese mythology and to the symbolic language of the shadow-play theatre, was utterly beguiling to an Indonesian audience, and incomprehensible to most Europeans. In 1945 Sukarno would emerge as the charismatic centre of the nation. Yet in the relative calm before the storm of the Japanese conquest of Indonesia, the Dutch seemed to have neutralized the threats of nationalism, Islamism and communism, and that of Sukarno himself. He was arrested for sedition in 1933, exiled to Flores and then Bengkulu in south Sumatra, where he disappeared entirely from public view. The other leaders of national stature, the Sumatran-born intellectuals Muhammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, were sent to the malarial jungle fastness of Boven Digul. Given that they were the most educated Indonesians of their day, this was a damning testimony to the failure of Dutch rule. The PKI remained underground; its leaders spread their influence in a self-imposed exile in British Malaya and Singapore, where many of the Malays were recent migrants from other parts of the archipelago. Through these links, the vision of a vast, free Indonesia was kindled.
When the Dutch fled the islands in 1942, few Indonesian leaders held any illusion that co-operation with the colonial power was possible. All the pent-up ideological ferment and popular frustration found expression in a world and a time out of joint. To this, the Japanese invasion brought a sense of millennial expectation: in Java it seemed to herald the fulfilment of the prophecy of the twelfth-century King Joyoboyo that the rule of the white man would end with the coming of the dwarfish yellow men who would reign as long as ‘a maize seed took to flower’.52 There was genuine popular enthusiasm for the Japanese in many parts of Indonesia, and the impact of Japanese social policy was very marked. But the promise of Japanese rule was not sustained and it soon generated deep resentments, as the state trespassed into areas of neighbourhood and family life which the Europeans had wisely steered clear of. The moment the Japanese ordered people to bend in prayer to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was, as the Sumatran writer Hamka termed it: ‘the day of the severest trial for Muslims’.53 The great crimes of the Japanese occupation were perhaps committed most freely in Indonesia: romusha forced labourers were sent to projects in the outer islands, and further afield in Singapore, Burma and Thailand, and women were enslaved for the ‘comfort houses’. These and other policies, such as food requisitioning, discredited many of the traditional authority figures, who were associated with them as Japanese underlings. By 1945 the situation was explosive: the people of Indonesia were living in conditions of dire poverty and nursing bitter resentments against authority of all kinds.
But a vital and enduring legacy of Japanese rule was what one historian has termed its ‘ideological, fanatical romanticism’.54 This created a new sense of the possible for many young Indonesians. In particular, the Japanese led an assault on the Dutch language and in the war years Malay, or more strictly bahasa Indonesia, gained credence as a ‘national’ language. By the end of the war a self-proclaimed ‘Generation of 1945’ spearheaded a literary revolution in the service of national struggle. The iconic figure of the time was Chairil Anwar, the Medan-born poet.