Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies

Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies From Ethnic Stereotypes to National Dress , Raden Moehamad Enoch, a junior engineer at the Department of Public Works, patiently waited in line to purchase a I second-class train ticket at the Bandung railway station. Dressed in a Euro- pean suit, Enoch exemplied his generation of young Javanese who enjoyed a Western education, were uent in Dutch, and had roots in the lower aristoc- racy but worked in nontraditional professions. When it was his turn, Enoch approached the window and, in Dutch, kindly requested a train ticket to Madiun, his hometown. e European ticket o cer, clearly annoyed, replied to Enoch in Malay and told him to wait. When he then immediately accepted a European patron at his window, Enoch stepped up to another o cer at the counter for third-class tickets, only to be denied service once more. On Enoch’s inquiry as to why he was not served at either window, the ticket o cer yelled at him—this time in Dutch—and told him unmistakably to either shut up or su er the consequences. Enoch refused to back down, which provoked the ticket o cer into bellowing: “You are a native, and thus need to buy your ticket at the window for natives.” Instead, the proud Enoch demanded to speak to the station chief. When the chief arrived, he was forced to acknowledge Enoch’s right to purchase his ticket at any window he pleased—a right that was previously limited to Europeans. On the train to Madiun, Enoch described the episode in a letter to Advisor for Native A airs G. A. J. Hazeu. From their correspondence, it is evident that Enoch was particularly bothered by the fact that although he wore European attire and spoke Dutch, the ticket o cers still refused to treat him as an equal. He emphasized this point when recalling the moment the ticket o cer scolded him for his impudence, writing with palpable astonishment and disbelief, “[But] I was dressed in European style.” While Enoch believed that he could breach the divide between colonizer and colonized by dressing “up,” the European ticket o cers interpreted his actions as a transgression of the colonial order. How- ever, their attempt to humiliate and re-educate Enoch backred; he was well aware of his rights and unwilling to relinquish them. As a result of the Ethical Policy’s attempt to modernize the colonial relationship, recent government cir- culars explicitly allowed him to wear European attire, converse in Dutch, and be treated with respect. Not only was Enoch ultimately permitted to purchase a second-class train ticket, his correspondence with the advisor for native a airs also resulted in a reprimand for the European personnel of the Bandung railway station and an o cial apology from the head inspector of the Netherlands Indies State Railways. e incident at the Bandung railway station constituted a considerable chal- lenge to the predominant ethnic sartorial hierarchy of the nineteenth century. Before , strict sartorial regulations were a signicant component of Dutch attempts to legitimize their colonial authority by appropriating local etiquette. rough the Javanization of colonial power, the Dutch essentialized indigenous culture, in e ect codifying ethnic stereotypes in laws and decrees. Police regulations stipulated that everyone in the colony dress according to their ethnicity or position. As overseers of these regulations, the colonizers thus demanded the right to determine what constituted proper Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Malay, Arab, and Chinese costume. ese ethnic sartorial regulations were re- laxed and eventually abolished as part of the Ethical Policy; a modern colonial state could not limit the clothing choices of its population. But although this led many Javanese to cautiously experiment with composite dress by adding Euro- pean elements, it did not e ectively end the ethnic sartorial hierarchy. Moehamad Enoch’s experience in November was not an isolated incident. In late and early , the colonial and vernacular press published numerous accounts of young Javanese men discarding their sarong and kebaya for trousers, shirts, jackets, and ties. e timing of what e ectively constituted a sartorial revolution was certainly no coincidence. It followed in the wake of the hormat circular of August , which prohibited European o cials from demanding traditional forms of deference from the colonized. e vernacular press and Sarekat Islam rallies not only informed the public about the circular but also encouraged them to force European compliance, emphasizing that dressing “up” in European style was an important way to signal a refusal to par- ticipate in humiliating deference rituals. Clothing thus became an important site of the contestation of colonial hegemony. By changing their appearance, Javanese demanded to be treated with respect and to be considered civilized and modern. Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies e widespread sartorial transformation in colonial society was an expression of larger social and intellectual changes that characterize a signicant turning point in Indonesian history, yet this crucial connection has not been established in the elaborate scholarship on dress in colonial Indonesia. is sartorial shi was a profoundly visible political statement that took many by surprise, making dress and the social body increasingly contested sites in the colonial relationship. As anthropologist Emma Tarlo has argued, the key to unpacking these controversial moments is to focus on the question of “what to wear rather than a description of what is worn.” In this formulation, the human body is a social rather than a physical entity around which clothing serves as a marker of vari- ous identities. When the Javanese embraced European attire, Dutch colonizers were forced to change their appearance accordingly, as they could not continue to don seemingly indigenous dress that was widely discarded by the Javanese themselves, even in the semiprivate sphere. To reassert their dominance in colonial society, the Dutch increased their own sense of sartorial correctness by dressing “up” in the latest European fashions, while at the same time ridiculing identical Javanese attempts to appear modern. Even so, for the colonized, these experiences were empowering and inspired contemplation of what it meant to be modern and how clothes re ected one’s ethnic or national identity. Similarly, Europeans were challenged to rethink their own identity in the colonial world. Crucially, these experiments with dress were highly gendered, raising questions about how clothing re ected and, in some cases, challenged gender roles in society. is sartorial hegemonic struggle was thus a signicant factor in the emer- gence of new ethnic, national, and gender identities in colonial Indonesia. Colonial Hegemony and the Creation of Ethnic Stereotypes In nineteenth-century Dutch colonial Java, dress was a crucial social and racial marker that distinguished between colonizers and colonized. Due to a long history of racial mixing among Europeans and Javanese, as well as other groups in Java such as Chinese and Arabs, skin color alone did not set people apart. Many Eurasians appeared racially Javanese but held European status, and vice versa. is posed signicant challenges, as nineteenth-century colonial society was structured around a plural administrative and legal system. Dutch colonial law sorted the population into “Europeans,” “Natives,” and “Foreign Orientals” (mostly Chinese), and the con ation of race and legal status had far-reaching consequences. Europeans, Natives, and Foreign Orientals were governed by di erent civil service branches, prosecuted in di erent courts, and subject to di erent legal statutes that regulated work, travel, and more. It was therefore es- sential that the authorities be able to easily discern to which legal or racial group an individual belonged. Consequently, strict regulations required everyone in the colony to dress according to his or her ethnicity. e institution of dress regulations coincided with the formation of the Dutch colonial state in the nineteenth century. At rst, these regulations were issued locally, by city or district, but in they were all superseded by police regulations that applied to the entire colony. ese included stipulations regard- ing dress for Europeans and natives, specifying that “whoever appears in public, disguised in a di erent dress than the one corresponding with one’s ethnicity or position, with the exception of masked or costumed-parades” would be punished “with a ne between sixteen and twenty-ve guilders.” For the colonized, this was an especially exorbitant penalty. Moreover, these regulations empowered the colonizer to categorize colonial subjects, assign them xed ethnic costumes, and e ectively dene their cultural identities. is included specifying dress, language, traditions, and customs for Javanese, Sundanese, Malay, Madurese, Chinese, and Arabs, as well as Europeans. Considering the deep histories of cultural and racial exchange in the region, this was an overtly ambitious if not outright impossible task. e assumption that only the Dutch could make colonial society comprehensible testied to the arrogance of the colonial mindset and indicated a profound belief in the necessity of ethnic categorization for colonial rule. e institution of this ethnic sartorial hierarchy was an indispensable part of the nineteenth-century Javanization of colonial authority. In the multiracial and culturally hybrid colonial world, dress was a visual re ection of a person’s rank, position, gender, ethnicity, and legal status—all of which determined social and interpersonal etiquette. In the everyday experience of colonialism, external appearance at a glance made social interactions and relations legible. Who was required to show deference to whom? What honorics were appropriate? And in what language(s) would the conversation be conducted? Without dress as a visual marker, the proper etiquette for social interactions would have been impossible to ascertain. It is therefore no coincidence that dress regulations coincided with the Javanization of colonial authority—the Dutch appropriation and codication of Javanese cultural traditions.

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