Sport, Modernity and Nation Building the Indonesian National Games of 1951 and 1953

COLIN BROWN Sport, modernity and nation building The Indonesian National Games of 1951 and 1953 Sport, modernity and the nation The study of sport – its social, political, cultural and economic aspects – is a well-established academic field, scholars widely acknowledging its signifi- cance in understanding how a society is organized and understood.1 As Per- kin (1992:211) puts it: The history of societies is reflected more vividly in the way they spend their leisure than in their politics or their work […] the history of sport gives a unique insight into the way a society changes and impacts on other societies it comes into contact with and, conversely, the way those societies react back to it. Sport has a particular resonance in considerations of the emergence of modern nation-states out of colonialism, given the connections between the diffusion of modern sports around the world and the colonial experience. Although virtually all societies played games of various kinds, competitive, rule-based sports are essentially modern, western phenomena, dating back no further than the nineteenth century. Their spread through the world coincided with, and in many respects was an inherent part of, the expansion of western colonialism. In the British Empire in particular, sport was seen as reflecting the essential values and characteristics of the British race which justified the ex- istence of colonialism. Wherever the British went, they took their sports with them, together with the social mores they represented.2 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in Wollongong, 26-29 June 2006. See http://coombs.anu.edu. au/SpecialProj/ASAA/biennial-conference/2006/Brown-Colin-ASAA2006.pdf. I thank Dr Tom van den Berge for his assistance in locating additional resources. I acknowledge the very helpful com- ments made on earlier drafts of this paper by Associate Professor Phil Moore (Curtin University of Technology) and by two anonymous reviewers. Needless to say, responsibility for remaining errors of fact and interpretation is mine. 2 ��Compare Stoddart 1988. Note that some sports moved in the reverse direction: from the Em- pire into Britain. Polo is probably the best example. COLIN BROWN is Professor of Asian Studies at the School of Social Sciences and Asian Language s, Curtin University of Technology, Perth. He holds a PhD from the University of Queensland. He is the author of Indonesia; The unlikely nation. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003, and ‘Playing the game; Ethnicity and politics in Indonesian badminton’, Indonesia 81, 2006, pp. 71-94. Professor Brown may be reached at [email protected]. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 164-4 (2008):431-449 © 2008 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 05:36:26AM via free access 432 Colin Brown For those struggling against colonialism, western sport posed something of a dilemma. The function of sport as a contributor to the development of nationalism and national identity has been widely studied.3 Cronin and Myall note that sport functions particularly well as a component of what Anderson (1983) terms the ‘imagined community’ which constitutes the nation. Sport, they say, has been used to symbolize the prowess and success of the nation, but it is a sym- bol of the nation which is benign. Sport cannot win territory or destroy an opposing ideology or religion which the nation seeks to demonize. It can only support the construction of a nation which has been imagined. (Cronin and Myall 1998:2.) But precisely how sport should be used in this construction of the nation was problematic. To some nationalists, participation in western sports was anathema, on the grounds that this would amount to acceptance of the cultural norms of the colonialists and thus of imperialism itself. If organized sporting activity was to be undertaken, it should be through indigenous sports. Hence the development of indigenous games, including the codification of their rules and creation of organizations responsible for their administration, was part of the nationalist resistance to colonialism in many colonial environments.4 Yet for other colonial subjects, participation in modern sports was seen not as conforming to imperial norms, but rather as opposing them. It was taking on the colonialists at their own game, literally as well as figuratively. Discussing the role of soccer in pre-independence India, Dimeo and Mills (2001:163) note: ‘The urge to reject British systems and the desire to take the colonizer on and beat him at his own game are contradictory responses that are nevertheless born of the same emotion to resist.’5 But organized competitive sports represented not just western cultural imperialism; in their structure and underlying philosophy they were also symbolic of the modernity which went with that imperialism. Their focus was on the individual – or sometimes the team – and their performance on the sporting field. At least ideally, status was based on the individual’s performance, not on ethnicity, family background, gender or some other inher- ited characteristic. This focus on the individual, as having rights and status independent of the social group to which they belong, De Wachter (2001:92) calls the ‘central feature of modernity’. And modern sport, he (De Wachter 2001:97) says, ‘is a mirror of modernity’. For modernizing nationalist leaders, western sport – like western educa- tion – represented an arena in which the values they wanted to emulate could 3 See for example Bairner 2001; Cronin and Myall 1998; Hong 2007; Majumdar and Hong 2007. 4 For how this process worked in the case of kabaddi, an indigenous Indian sport, see Alter 2000. 5 But see also Appadurai 1996:89-113, where he develops the theme that one of the explana- tions for the strength of cricket in India is that it was thoroughly localized, serving Indian needs and interests. ‘If cricket did not exist in India, something like it would certainly have been invent- ed for the conduct of public experiments with the means of modernity’ (Appadurai 1996:113). Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 05:36:26AM via free access Sport, modernity and nation building 433 be sought and demonstrated. In this sense, participation in western sports was symbolic of the breaking of ties with traditional society, and adopting the individualistic, egalitarian norms of the modernizing world: it was in many respects a quasi-revolutionary act. Nor were the impacts of participation in western sports limited to the domestic national environment. In the global arena, for newly-emerging or aspirant nations participation in international competitions such as the Olympic Games was a mark of international acceptance almost as much as formal diplomatic recognition. Morgan (2002:497) asserts that nations are dependent upon the international sports world to confirm that national stature [...] The establishment of an international athletic presence is not, therefore, a gratuitous matter for nations, but rather the path they must follow if they expect to be recognized and treated as a nation. Despite the considerable volume of literature on the issue of sport and nationalism, though, scholars of Indonesia, and of Indonesian nationalism in particular, have largely ignored this aspect of the nation’s history.6 Yet organized sport has been a significant element in Indonesian history since at least the early twentieth century. As far back as the 1930s, the first overtly nationalist sporting associations were established in Indonesia, associations for football, tennis and korfball. The organization which was to become the Indonesian Olympic Committee was founded just weeks after the proclamation of independence in 1945. And the country’s first National Games were staged, in Solo in Central Java, in September 1948, when Indonesia was in the middle of its struggle for independence from the Dutch. In this paper I seek to examine the role of sport in contributing to the consolidation of Indonesian national identity in the immediate post-revolutionary period, when the old nationalist imperative of anti-colonialism had been removed, at least formally. I will be looking specifically at the second and third National Games (Pekan Olahraga Nasional, PON), one held in 1951 in Jakarta and the other in 1953 in Medan.7 The primary materials used in this study are the memorial books pro- duced for each of these Games by their organizers, recording the main activi- ties associated with them.8 These memorial books were of course not meant to be non-partisan or scholarly publications. They were certainly not going 6 The only significant exceptions are Pauker 1965; Sie 1978; Colombijn 2000; Lutan 2005; Lutan and Hong 2005; Brown 2006. Sejarah olahraga 2003 is written for a popular audience, and marred by errors of various kinds. 7 The first PON was held in Solo in 1948; it is only discussed in passing here, the political con- text in which it was held being rather different from PON II and PON III which are the focus of this paper. 8 Kenang-kenangan Pekan Olahraga Nasional ke II, edited by Gadio Atmosantoso, undated but probably published in 1951 and Laporan resmi Pekan Olahraga Nasional ke III, 20-27 September 1953, Medan, undated but probably published in 1954. Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 05:36:26AM via free access 434 Colin Brown to chronicle any of the failures of the Games. But they do record valuable insights into the state of Indonesian society and politics at the beginning of the 1950s, as the country was working out ways of giving substance to the national independence recently won from the Dutch. Introductions: Soekarno and Hatta The books each open in the same way: with introductory statements by Presi- dent Soekarno and Vice President Hatta.

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