Ritual and Reflexes of Lost Sovereignty in Sikka, a Regency of Flores in Eastern Indonesia

E.D. LEWIS Ritual and reflexes of lost sovereignty in Sikka, a regency of Flores in eastern Indonesia In 1993 some among the Sikkanese population of the town of Maumere on the north coast of Flores in eastern Indonesia attended a ritual to reconcile the members of two branches of the family of the rajas of Sikka, a dynasty that had once ruled the district.1 The two branches had fallen out over differences in opinion about the last succession to the office of raja a few years before the end of the rajadom in the late 1950s. A description of the ritual, which was conducted in an urban rather than a village setting, and an analysis of the performance demonstrate much about the persistence of elements of the old Sikkanese religion in modern Sikkanese society. The contemporary Sikkanese are Christians and the regency of Sikka is part of the modern Indonesian nation-state. Thus the performance of a ritual of the old Sikkanese religion in urban Maumere is sufficiently interesting to merit attention. But when seen in relation to events that unfolded during the final years of the rajadom of Sikka, the ritual reveals the continuing importance of ideas about Sikka’s past sovereignty in contemporary Sikkanese affairs and suggests that conceptions of polity, rulership, and the idea of Sikkanese sovereignty are still in force two generations after the era of Sikkanese political sovereignty ended. 1 This essay was conceived while I was a visitor at the Institutt for Sosialantropologi of the University of Bergen, Norway, from 15 January to 15 July 2004, and was completed in draft during a season of fieldwork on Flores in January–February 2005. During my visit to Bergen, Professor Bruce Kapferer and his colleagues were launching an ongoing anthropological study of the state. Their work led me to precipitate a long interest in the transition of Sikka from a semi-autonomous rajadom to a district in modern Indonesia and to the realization that the questions of the origin and conception of local sovereignty are significant problems in eastern Indonesian ethnology. My thanks also to Professor Edvard Hviding, Dr Olaf Smedal, and the research students of the Ber- gen department, all of whom helped ensure that my visit was productive and anthropologically stimulating. On Flores, Mr Oscar P. Mandalangi helped clarify some points about the accession of Raja Sentis, and Dr John M. Prior SVD read and suggested emendations to the draft. E.D. LEWIS is a senior lecturer in Anthropology at The University of Melbourne and obtained his PhD from The Australian National University. Specializing in the ethnology of eastern Indonesia he is the author of People of the source; The social and ceremonial order of Tana Wai Brama on Flores, Leiden: KITLV Press, 1988. Dr Lewis may be contacted at [email protected]. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 162-2/3 (2006):306-335 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:05:17PM © 2006 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde via free access Ritual and reflexes of lost sovereignty in Sikka 307 The historical precursors of an event Until 1954, kerajaan Sikka – the rajadom of Sikka – on the island of Flores was one of a number of local states in what is now the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) in the southeastern archipelago of the Republic of Indonesia (RI).2 The people of the rajadom trace eighteen rajas who ruled Sikka through sixteen generations. Records of the colonial government of the Netherlands East Indies and the government of the rajadom provide some historical documentation of the last three rajas and the last seventy years of their rule. In addition to these scant historical documents, the mythic history of the Sikkanese ruling house preserved a memory not only of Sikka’s eighteen rajas but of a succession of sixteen generations of lawgivers and big men who were genealogical ascendants of the first raja. The origin myth of the ruling house thus establishes a time depth of some 34 generations and recounts the rajadom’s origin at an undated time much earlier than 1513, the beginning of the Portuguese era in eastern Indonesia. The story of Sikka’s rulers began, according to the myth, when people from South Asia were shipwrecked on the island’s south coast near the present-day village of Sikka. When they found they could not repair their ship, these strangers intermarried with the autochthonous people of the region and eventually established Lepo Geté (SS3 the Great House). In time, the descendants of the marriages between newcomers and autochthons became Lepo Geté and the region’s rulers.4 On 18 May 1954, Don Josephus Thomas Ximenes da Silva,5 a late son of Lepo Geté and the penultimate ruler of the rajadom of Sikka, died at the age of 59 while on a visit to the town of Ende on the south-central coast of Flores. Raja Don Thomas, as he was known, was the eighteenth6 in the line of rulers of the rajadom of Sikka. His death complicated the transition of the rajadom from semi-autonomous state in the Netherlands East Indies to its status as a kabupat- en (regency; the next level below the administrative level of the province) of the new Indonesian province of NTT. Raja Thomas’s unexpected death came 2 NTT includes the Lesser Sunda Islands of Sumba, Savu, Roti (Rote), Adonara, Solor, Lembata (Lomblen), Pantar, Flores, and the western half of the island of Timor. 3 I use SS to mean Sara Sikka, the language of Sikka, and BI to mean Bahasa Indonesia. 4 The mythic history of Lepo Geté, the Sikkanese ruling house, was preserved by oral trans- mission well into the twentieth century. While it is no longer known as a corpus of orally trans- mitted myth among contemporary Sikkanese, two closely congruent versions of the myth were written down in the first half of the twentieth century by two men who were among the first literate generation of Sikkanese. See Lewis (forthcoming) for a detailed account of the mythic histories of the rulers of Sikka. 5 Born 13 July 1895. The people of the village of Sikka, from which the district takes its name, acquired Portuguese names during the early years of the Portuguese period in eastern Indone- sia. 6 Or fifteenth or seventeenth, depending on how they are counted; there are a small number of different versions of the genealogy of the rajas of Sikka. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 09:05:17PM via free access 308 E.D. Lewis before the resolution of twelve years of turmoil in Indonesia and Sikka, and before the civil administration of the new nation was fully in place in the north coastal town of Maumere, the seat of government of the rajadom of Sikka. The Japanese army occupied Flores in 1942 and interned the Dutch civil administrators and European priests and missionaries of the Catholic church they captured on the island. When the Japanese arrived in Flores, they preserved the existing patchwork of the island’s rajadoms, with themselves replac- ing the Dutch as colonial rulers. Thus it was that the rule of Raja Don Thomas da Silva, whose reign in Sikka had begun in 1920 under the Dutch, continued under the Japanese and then well into the first decade of the post-war years. For eighty years before the momentous arrival of the Japanese in Maumere, Sikka was one of many local states in what the Dutch called the Groote Oost, the ‘Great East’. These states were governed by ruling houses whose sovereignty the Dutch recognized by treaties under their policy of zelfbestuur, or self-rule. In the Lesser Sunda Islands, many of these treaties confirmed the sovereignty of ruling houses that predated the Dutch acquisition of the islands by treaty with Portugal in 1859. The rajadom of Sikka, which had been ruled from its beginning by the dynasty of the Da Silva family, who made up Lepo Geté, was one such semi-autonomous state. The Dutch did not return to Flores after the war and, in 1945, profound events began unfolding in Java, far to the west of Flores. On 17 August 1945, after the capitulation of the Japanese army in Indonesia and building on a decades-long history of Muslim, nationalist, and Communist agitation against the Dutch, Sukarno and Indonesian nationalists proclaimed the independence of Indonesia as a nation.7 British troops arriving in Java from South Asia after the Japanese surrender found that island in chaos, but with a strong nationalist movement ready to take power and construct a government. However, the Dutch, who had lost their East Indies when the Japanese invaded in 1942, expected they would return to Indonesia and resume as the archipelago’s colonial overlords. While negotiating with the Indonesian nationalists for the formation of a United States of Indonesia (USI), the Dutch launched a series of military operations in Java and Sumatra aimed, if not at regaining their lost colony, then at weakening the nationalists’ hold on the population, thereby helping to ensure that the new USI would be a partner in a new Netherlands–Indonesia union, with the queen of the Netherlands at its head. This, the Dutch thought, would preserve as much Dutch influ- ence in Indonesia as possible and would ensure that the Netherlands ben- efited as much as possible from a close association with the populous and resource-rich archipelago. 7 As they departed from Indonesia in defeat, the Japanese had granted Indonesia its independence, a declaration which the Dutch and the Allies and, indeed, the Javanese nationalists, ignored.

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