Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [101]
When my time comes
No one’s going to cry for me,
And you won’t, either
The hell with all those tears!
I’m a wild beast
Driven out of the herd
Bullets may pierce my skin
But I’ll keep coming,
Carrying forward my wounds and my pain
Attacking
Attacking
Until suffering disappears
And I won’t give a damn
I want to live another thousand years.55
Chairil Anwar lived fast and died young, in 1949, of tuberculosis. His influences were diverse, modern, and often European. In the words of the Generation of 1945’s ‘Testimony’: ‘we are heirs of world culture’. But Chairil Anwar also became an archetype of the kind of figures who gave the Indonesian revolution its distinctive character: they were known as pemuda, a word which translates as ‘youth’, but conveys much more than this: a spirit that challenged the poised bureaucratic finesse of the older elite generation. It was a claim to lead in troubled, dislocated times, to take responsibility when others had failed. These elements of pemuda identity had deep roots in Javanese culture.56 The permuda were not a party as such, nor a clear class. They were vague coteries of young, mostly single men who took upon themselves the responsibility for the Indonesian revolution. They were marked by their attire; their simple clothes and long hair, and a semi-military swagger; they chose to speak in a staccato, commanding Indonesian, or a low form of Javanese, ignoring affectations of status: all men were bung – brother – or saudara – comrade. At times the world of the pemuda would overlap with the criminal world of the towns, the social banditry of the countryside, and the anger of the ordinary folk. Their watchword was Merdeka! or Freedom! But again this word had deeper connotations: derived from the term for the free men of early colonial Java – the mardijkers – it evoked freedom from slavery and, after 1945, political independence. But it was also something to be lived: a freedom of the spirit, a freedom from fear of death. The cry Merdeka! would be answered with a raised fist and Bebas! – Unchained! In the dark days of 1945, it would be answered also by the shout of Mati! – Death! By the end of the Japanese occupation, the pemuda would drive forward events, goading on the more moderate nationalist leaders. As they were to acknowledge: ‘These long-haired youths, these armed fighters whose names were not known, were the strength of our Revolution.’57
As in India and elsewhere, the Japanese war had divided the older nationalists. Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir were brought out of exile. Back in Jakarta, they adopted complementary strategies. Hatta cooperated with the Japanese regime in the hope of ameliorating some of the effects of occupation. Sutan Sjahrir, a socialist internationalist, was to organize an underground. Sukarno himself saw the war as a contest between empires and was more open to exploiting its political opportunities. He did so by aligning himself with some of the Japanese initiatives and manipulating them for his own national purposes. With a formidable Japanese propaganda machine behind him, Sukarno honed his oratorical skills, and although he was not immune from criticism for his association with unpopular policies, he managed, by subtle shifts in message that were never really translatable to the Japanese, to project his claim to embody the nation. He played to the messianic mood: independence, he said, was a ‘golden bridge’ to a glorious future. Politics became a form of theatre, in which the main actors were the Indonesian auxiliary forces that the Japanese recruited and armed. These took multiple forms and, as in Burma and Malaya, a generation of young men became deeply militarized. By the last months of the war the Japanese were losing control of these forces; at the surrender they were dissolved into a host of local militias. When the Japanese surrendered, they unleashed revolution.58