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The initial events were dramatic enough, but, in the light of what was to come, relatively peaceful. In mid 1945 the war effort was at a point where Sukarno and Hatta found the Japanese more receptive to the idea of a declaration of independence for Indonesia. This was hammered out at a meeting in early August between the Indonesians and Field Marshal Count Terauchi at his headquarters in Dalat in Vietnam. On their return on 12 August, Sukarno and Hatta stopped in Malaya at Taiping airport. There the Malay radical Ibrahim Yaacob met them to try to persuade them to include Malaya within a greater Indonesia: an Indonesia raya. The provisional date for the declaration of independence was 7 September, and the first meeting of the planning committee was scheduled for 18 August. But events moved faster than this. The sudden surrender of Japan precipitated a crisis. Sukarno and Hatta well realized that the good will of the Allies was vital to the success of Indonesia’s freedom. But there were other, more radical voices, not least those associated with the socialist underground. On 17 August – in a dramatic foreshadowing of the shape of things to come – Sukarno was kidnapped by his own armed pemuda. They were determined that the new nation should not be seen as a Japanese puppet regime. Sukarno was compelled to seize back the initiative. In the courtyard of his house in Jakarta he read out the prosaic formula: ‘We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare Indonesia’s independence.’59 There was no mention of Malaya, or of Indonesiaraya, but in the minds of many Malays their destiny still was bound up with that of the new nation.

Such was the force behind this idea that spontaneous declarations for the new republican government, and of loyalty to President Sukarno, were made throughout the islands. But the new government was not universally embraced: many local administrators were suspicious; many local aristocrats feared its levelling rhetoric; others were simply bewildered by the pace of events and uncertain where their loyalties should lie. In many areas it was young partisans who seized the initiative in the republic’s name. In the face of this, Japanese troops as often as not withdrew into their secured perimeters, leaving the streets, key buildings and installations in the hands of the Indonesians. Soon the key royal houses, such as Yogyakarta, and local governors in Java and the outer islands declared for the republic. By September it possessed a relatively stable bureaucracy and, with the assistance of many sympathetic Japanese officers, the core of a well-equipped army. This was a massive shift in initiative, and one that was to reverberate throughout the Malay world. At the same time, however, the Indonesian revolution unleashed all the social frustration and political anger of decades of colonial rule and Japanese oppression. It was unclear how far this could be controlled by the new political elite in Jakarta.

This first phase of revolution reached a crescendo with a series of massive ‘ocean’ rallies in Indonesia’s major cities. On 19 September a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Ikeda Square in Jakarta under the watchful eyes of a cordon of Japanese troops. Many in the crowd were armed with sharpened bamboo staves. Sukarno, increasingly worried about provoking the Japanese or the Allied armies that were poised to take their place, had tried and failed to prevent the assembly but, in a moment of supreme political theatre, demonstrated his control over the crowd by taking the rostrum, persuading it to disperse peacably. Not everyone was impressed. A silent witness to this event was Tan Malaka. One of the first leaders of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, he had been in exile since 1922, living under a string of pseudonyms, working as an agent of the Comintern, avoiding the colonial police. It was a life that was lived, as the title of his memoirs has it, ‘from jail to jail’. He was perhaps the most travelled Indonesian of his age: a legend, like Lai Teck in Malaya, a figure for the cloak-and-dagger novels of the day, Patjar Merah,