Betting on the Rajas (1930S)

CHAPTER FOUR

BETTING ON THE RAJAS (1930S)

In the self-ruling lands, justice is dispensed by a traditional council. Its pow- ers are unlimited and no appeal is possible. The raja sits at its head, and its members are district chiefs and the controleur. … No wonder the accused invariably feels unconvinced and dissatisfied. (Tjinta Kebenaran, 20 November 1935)

Insignificant among the cities of Asia, Kupang in the 1930s seemed like a metropolis in the quiet rurality of Timor. Its little newspapers sat in judg- ment on the rajas out there and opened a window on the world to its indigenous readers, most of them clerks. Like most colonial towns in the archipelago, Kupang was shaped by external forces rather than by a grad- ual elaboration of internal ones.1 It was a settler town with tenuous and ambiguous links to its hinterland. It exacerbated the exploitative authori- tarianism of the rajas, but it also offered the only available escape from those rajas. Unlike some sultans further west, whose palaces still conveyed splendid memories of a sovereign past, these rajas were more like very local ‘men of prowess’ (Wolters 1982:18). But the Dutch who ran Kupang did give them a lot of room to move in the interior. The Dutch were, as Wertheim (1964) once put it, ‘betting on the strong’ in the interior, prop- ping up forms of governance that Kupang’s journalists and international observers alike saw as archaic.2 However, the town itself was excised from the rajas’ domains. This set- ting allowed it to mediate between the soil of Timor and the larger world beyond. It would become a spring of new forms of associational power à la Hannah Arendt. In this chapter that spring is only just beginning to

1 Redfield (1954) called this type of town ‘heterogenetic,’ and the other ‘orthogenetic.’ 2 The American observer Rupert Emerson wrote in 1937 that persistence of the native states into the future ‘is not to be regarded as either probable or desirable in most instances inasmuch as they are too small for effective survival in the great society which is engulfing them, and in their institutions and aristocracies they represent an era which is rapidly passing, if it has not already passed… [F]or the British and the Dutch indirect rule has been so sharply associated with the maintenance of the prestige and the fiction of the power of the traditional chiefs and rulers that it is difficult to see how the new society can break

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bubble. To understand the passions that were to flow in the 1950s and 1960s we must begin with the disempowering rural situation in the last years before the Second World War. The problems to which the cross- class, urban-rural coalitions of the 1950s attempted to create answers were a result of the colonial practice of ‘betting on the strong.’ Describing them takes up the first half of the chapter. The second half reconstructs, as much as the slim historical pickings allow, the contrasting situation in the tiny town of Kupang. The beginnings of a civil society are becoming visi- ble amid the boredom of life in a small colonial settlement. The underly- ing assertion of this chapter is that Middle Indonesia lies truly in the middle. It is not one end of a bipolar centre-periphery relation, as is often thought, but the mediating centre between a remote metropolis and a hinterland that was geographically proximate but socially just as remote.

The Land

Timor lies in the driest region of Indonesia. No part receives more than 1500mm a year, less than half that which is normal elsewhere in the tropi- cal archipelago. Its dry season extends for six to seven months of the year, compared with less than three months in Sumatra and Kalimantan. Savanna (created by human burning over the centuries) is the most com- mon vegetation, and subsistence farming still dominates agriculture today. However, in some places the local climate is benevolent. Mount Mutin in the interior catches more rain than the plains, as does the hilly southern coast of the island. Whereas most areas permit just a single annual crop, the southern coast has two. On the flats of southern Belu district, near the eastern border with Portuguese Timor, irrigated rice fields are possible. The island nowhere supports a dense population. The old kingdoms of Amanuban, Amanatun, and Belu along the south coast (Figure 12) are the densest because of their good food supply. Tubers are the original subsistence staple, but beans are also old, and maize, rice, and sorghum arrived here in the seventeenth century. Rice was traditionally eaten only on festive occasions. Total dependency on a short growing season, combined with the difficulty of keeping food stores away from pests through the long dry season, ensured that even normal rainfall years had their weeks of ‘normal hunger’ (Ormeling 1956).

through the artificially petrified crust of the old traditions without violent conflict.’ (Emerson 1979 [1937]:464, 518–9).